#human hive

[cumberworld44]

SCP-439: body horror at it’s best/worst.

[stochasticplanet]

Human Hive, Planet, Alpha Centauri system Mission Year 2101 photo by Firaxis Games — "Learn to overcome the crass demands of flesh and bone, for they warp the matrix through which we perceive the world. Extend your awareness outward, beyond the self of body, to embrace the self of group and the self of humanity. The goals of the group and the greater race are transcendent, and to embrace them is to achieve enlightenment." —Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter

[light4chiron]

Human Hive Diplomacy Pictures

The images from the hive.flc file.

[blaclark]

Integral City Reflective Organ September 2016: Celebrating City Renewal

Via city evolutionist Marilyn Hamilton, @integralcity

Renewal in the city depends on many of the capacities people have developed for adaptiveness to their environment. Renewal becomes possible because adaptiveness in the city emerges from massive redundancy in the bio-psycho-cultural-social spheres. For its survival and success, the city does not depend on one ruler or superhero (compared to a castle or feudal manor that did). Instead the city depends on the relationships amongst key roles that have evolved out of a species’ groupmind and its ability to shift and flex depending on the life conditions. Renewal emerges because a city, like all living systems, develops cyclical habits that enable the accumulation, exploitation, distribution and redeployment of resources. Holling (and his colleagues), Bloom, Eoyang, Adizes and Graves all recognize that living systems have natural stages through which they cycle and sequences of super-cycles that result in the evolution of complexity over time. They have identified those stages at different levels of scale: for ecologies,species, systems, organizations and individuals respectively.

Hamilton, M. (2008). Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive. Gabriola Island BC: New Society Publishers.

It’s September – Renew Your City-Celebration Vows!!

It does not seem surprising to me that so many people hold a deep affection for their city as the Place that holds much of what they call dear. But, for that very reason I do find it surprising that cities do not have days to celebrate themselves as special places that support the lives of all who live there and contribute to the support of lives in other cities where trade flows back and forth.

Several years ago I nominated September as the month for cities to celebrate themselves. (See the blogs links under Free Resources below for some of my ideas on how to do so.) That suggestion seems especially poignant in 2016 as we acknowledge the 15th anniversary of 9/11 and how the terrorist attack impacted New York. As we know through the many stories from victims' families, survivors, first responders, city officials, other cities and nations, 9/11 in NYC has become an archetype of the dark threats that terrorize the city-habitats where our daily lives and very existence play out.

As the ripple of copycat-9/11 threats to cities has spread around the world, the city, as our most complex human system yet created, gains implicit as well as explicit value in our esteem. Each city’s way of manifesting history, geography, voices, intelligences and governance adds up to its unique sense of place. What I imagined cities celebrating, surrounds us in the present and is firmly rooted in the past.

But what happens when the future intrudes into our sensibilities of the city? What happens when we build the structures and infrastructures of the city for a future population and hold them like an inventory or warehouse of buildings? Are these cities without people (dubbed Zombie Cites) lacking the life that emerges when cities grow organically with the people who will populate them? This is what China has done and continues to do. (See Free Resources blog links below on China’s new cities.) Strangely enough, while I can admire the technical feat of this accomplishment, the images of these cities without people lack the spark of life that is the essence of what we are inspired to celebrate in cities.

At the same time the idea of neo-cities – offered by futurists who want to create the ideal city for an elite group of highly educated and productive people (see Free Resources blog links below) - seem to be cousins of China’s new cities. While the neo-city designers imagine a technologically advanced and even environmentally smart city, they seem to overlook the fabric that consciousness and culture of a whole ecology of people who contribute to the vibrancy of city life, their multiple generations, perspectives, genetic differences, creative variations, tensions and intentions.

Recently I have heard Yuval Harari postulate that humankind is on the verge of overcoming death. He suggests that as homo deus we have (theoretically ,with much evidence indicating the positive trends) overcome famine, plague and war. In the interview I heard, Harari suggested that the artificially intelligent creations (aka robots) that humans are now testing may be more intelligent than homo sapiens within the next decade. If that proposition comes to pass, I imagine that they will be located (by human choice?) in the elite neo-cities removed from the organic, emergent and messy lives that I am inspired to celebrate in our cities of today.

As a city evolutionist I have argued that cities are social holons demonstrating the characteristics of living systems: surviving, connecting to their environments and regenerating. But the city I celebrate will transcend and INCLUDE the people, cultures, behaviours and systems that have brought us to today, and will propel us into the future, rather than EXCLUDE them - as the new-neo-deitic imaginations seem to suggest. The ecological reality of the city’s vibrant inclusiveness is what impresses the minds and hearts of astronauts with an “overview effect”  when they have viewed our amazing blue Earth with all its city reflections from space. IMO,the evolution of this city-social holon into the hive-mind of collective consciousness is the most likely way for the evolution of cities is likely to produce vibrant, intelligence for a resilient future.

And that vibrant, living and life-giving quality of cities – with all its emergent messiness - is what I renew with my celebration vow for the city this September.

I hope you will join me and the city-celebrants we share in this newsletter from Victoria, St. Petersburg, Findhorn and online, as we celebrate ways our city futures are evolving together.  

[shitredditrocks]

Anterior - Human Hive

"Human Hive" by Anterior

posted in r/metalcore

[stjim]

Genetic modification

Why shouldn't we modify humans to adapt to more environments, our world is only going to get harder to live in and it gives us superhumans and the ability to live in space before we have to.

[stjim]

I vote that euathinasia be made legal and for society to decide on a minimum level of benefit to the human hive in regards to old and disabled vegetables. As a ratio of contribution to society vs human energy expended , as so much needless human resource is spent on human vegetables. In a world where the baby boomers are hitting retirement and there will be less people to do the work.

[magicalmistermorgo]

I've gone from a place where, as a teenager, I would have seen Chairman Sheng-ji Yang as a cool role model to now feeling chilled, revolted and angered by him - as much because his every deed is abhorent as because I can still see the twisted reasoning and logic that would have made him so persuasive to me in the past.