Today my guest on Singularity 1 on 1 is digital culture and cyberpunk icon R.U. Sirius. (As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full.)
During our conversation we discuss issues such as: R.U.’s early life and Yippie years; his multiple identities and personal motivation; his views on cyberpunk, counter-culture, psychedelic drugs, transhumanism and the technological singularity; the importance of questioning everything, and especially The Authority of Your Brain.
Who is R.U. Sirius?
R.U. Sirius (born Ken Goffman) is a writer, editor and digital culture iconoclast. He was Editor-in-chief of Mondo 2000, the popular and influential cyberpunk magazine of the early 1990s. More recently, he was Editor-in-chief of the transhumanist magazine H+. In addition, R.U. Sirius is the author or coauthor of numerous books including A User’s Guide to the New Edge, True Mutations, Counterculture Through the Ages, and Design for Dying with Dr. Timothy Leary. Sirius has written for Wired, Time magazine, Esquire, Rolling Stone and Boing Boing among many other periodicals. He’s been a musician, audio podcast host, lecturer and minor irritant. He is soon launching a new website tentatively titled Accelerator and he’s writing most of an open source history of Mondo 2000 magazine.
Sirius’ final comments especially got my attention. We tend to 100% trust our human senses and our human brains, and not take our fallibilities into consideration. We tend to gloss over the fact that the scope of human understanding is not the definition of ultimate intelligence. We don’t even understand how our own brains work. And now we’re RACING to build something we fathom even less. What fools we are. Merry pranksters, indeed!