Hacktivist/Philosopher Xabier Barandiaran on “What is (it like) to be a Hard Problem?

 Here is a bio from 2006:

 Xabier Barandiaran is a PhD student and researcher on Cybernetics, Neurophilosophy and Artificial Life at the University of the Basque Country (Europe), member of the autonomous server SinDominio.Net, the hacktivist laboratory Metabolik BioHacklab (located at the social squat center Undondo Gaztetxea), the spanish and european HackLabs.Org network and the recent copyleft activist campaing “CompartirEsBueno.Net” (SharingIsGood: a spanish network of hacktivists and media-activists against intelectual property regimes and the media-culture industry). He has also been involved on other grassroots movement such as alternative education, social desobedience, anti-war movements and squatting. Xabier has also co-organized and activelly participated on a number of HackMeetings (self-managed technopolitical meetings that take place in squatted social centers in europe), Copyleft Conferences and other parallel events, workshops and seminars. His work has been devoted to development and promotion of free-software tools for social movements, direct action and coordination of autonomous technopolitical networks as research on free technologies & culture, community based digital self-management and hacktivism.

Raymond Williams

    

 

Raymond Williams

Utopia and Science Fiction*

 

 

 

There are many close and evident connections between science fiction and utopian fiction, yet neither, in deeper examination, is a simple mode, and the relationships between them are exceptionally complex.** Thus if we analyse the fictions that have been grouped as utopian we can distinguish four types: (a) the paradise, in which a happier life is described as simply existing elsewhere; (b) the externally altered world, in which a new kind of life has been made possible by an unlooked-for natural event; (c) the willed transformation, in which a new kind of life has been achieved by human effort; (d) the technological transformation, in which a new kind of life has been made possible by a technical discovery.