We are an organisation dedicated to bringing about personal human freedom by opposing the restrictions and order that we believe are being imposed by technology upon us as individuals, and society as a whole.

We believe it is an intrinsic, basic right of every human to have a level of privacy that does not simply mean information security, as well as the right of every biological human being to not be discriminated against because they refuse to take part in cyberization or implantation, or because they simply can’t afford it.

Furthermore, we are wholly opposed to technological progress simply for the sake of profit, which benefits a wealthy few and increases the digital divide, but rather support technological progress for the benefit of mankind, rich or poor.

Since it is the existence of technology itself that is important, and not how it is used, we believe that all scientific research should not be done under the auspices of the military-industrial complex, nor under private, corporate direction, but rather through open source and transparent mechanisms that are wholly owned by the public, because we fund a large part of this research through taxes already. In other words, we believe in a democratic form of scientific research.

Critics allege that you are nothing more than modern day Luddites, or neo-Luddites. How do you respond to that?

It is easy to pigeon-hole us with a historical term that carries connotations and baggage that have little to do with who we are, or what we represent. Those who call us Luddites are, generally speaking, similar to those who wish to stifle dissent by calling someone a conspiracy theorist, or anti-American, or an anti-Semite, not because they are those things, but because it is always easier to attack the messenger than the message.

It is not that there are no conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites, anti-Americans, or Luddites in this world; it’s just too often terms like these are clubs wielded to silence anyone that opposes the mainstream view of the world. If you can give it a label, it becomes easier to ignore.

The recent attack on Louis von Ahn has been widely criticized as an act of terrorism perpetrated by your organisation. A member of your group was found guilty of the attack, and has subsequently undergone reincarnation. Do you consider yourself a terrorist organisation? Will you continue to pursue acts of violence to spread your message?

Unfortunately, the acts of a few individuals who have no real connection to us have been used by the world’s business media as a propaganda coup in order to obscure our real goals. We are not a terrorist organisation, and we oppose the use of violence, unless in self-defence.

I would also like to point out that the police involved were also found guilty of provocation, and using unnecessary force against peaceful protesters, not to mention fabricating evidence to provide a pretext for intervention. That has not been widely reported.

So you don’t consider yourself a terrorist, or a Luddite. What would you label yourself as?

A human being.

As opposed to what?

A machine.

Can you elaborate on that?

Ernst Otto Fischer once said that “As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.” It is our view that we are removing this greatness, and slowly but surely transforming ourselves into perfect machines.

Like all perfect machines, we are increasingly functioning and operating smoother than ever before, but within ever narrower and narrower constraints. We are, in other words, imprisoning ourselves within a very narrow definition of what it is to be human, a definition that is being imposed upon us by both authority and technology itself.

Some would argue that Transhumanism is ultimately liberating, and is geared towards the freedom and evolution of the human race from things like disease, and death, and also helps facilitate the spread of democracy.

That is the general view, yes. However, far from giving us freedom as most believe, this transformation – not evolution – is restricting our choices and actions in a way that can be described as an extension of Foucault’s biopower.

For example, Biotech machines and nanomedicine now operate within our minds to monitor and sustain our moods according to what is considered to be “normal” and “healthy”. Others help us live longer, stronger, and healthier lives. The iBrain network has enhanced intelligence and knowledge.

On the surface, these are wonderful achievements. Yet, if we look deeper, it is geared towards one goal: to fit us into the machinery of production and make us, essentially, the perfect worker: always happy, never sick, and always functioning. As we have seen with the computational algorithms discovered operating covertly, it is quite clear that the goal is to ensure we’re put to good use even when asleep. The goal is to use “wasted” human resources; in other words, all the time we don’t spend working.

The flip-side is, of course, to also help make us perfect consumers by ensuring continued dependence on purchasing and upgrading our bio-systems, both because of social pressures and worker insecurity. We are also constantly bombarded by advertising and business propaganda to such an extent that even our dreams are considered as fair game. Privacy has become a luxury that only the rich can afford. For everyone else, we live in the greatest panopticon that has ever existed.

This is without even mentioning the social impact of the information revolution throughout the United Allied Nations. The wealth gap within so-called technologized nations has grown ever wider, and inequality is greater today than ever before. The top one percent of the UAN now holds such a disproportionate share of wealth that they are the not simply employers, they are owners. The continuing riots that plague Britain, America, and other UAN nations are symptoms of this.

All of this has been implicitly understood by elites for over sixty years. For example, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in the 1970′s that our scientific and technological era “involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society”, and that it would be “dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values”. As he pointed out, “the capacity to assert social and political control over the individual” would “vastly increase”, and so it has.

Ultimately, if you don’t conform or continually upgrade yourself, you risk being shunned by society as being obsolete. Our understanding of what it is to be “normal” in society is no longer based on you as a biological human being, but it is now based on your technological extensions of self. Whereas before we celebrated our differences and uniqueness, today these are liabilities and risks, and we prefer to promote uniformity as admirable.

Is is for these reasons that I and many others of the remaining middle class are determined to mobilise the masses against this slavery of mankind.

But surely you still have a choice? You are free to accept enhancements, or reject them.

As Marx pointed out, we make our own history, but not within the circumstances of our choosing. Choice as we understand it here is a false one, because you cannot choose to not be affected by the existence of the technology in the first place.

The real choices are extremely binary and are based on the effect of a technology’s existence, not on how it’s used. The ultimate choice being presented to most individuals is: “Do you choose to live?”, and this is not something many people will say no to, although interestingly some have willingly died – without major comment in the media – in order to escape from this technological slavery, another symptom of the world within which we live.

As an example, someone who is religious can die from starvation because they refused to proceed along a course of cyberization or enhancement, or they can be sent into a correctional facility to have their minds reprogrammed, all because for them it was a matter of faith. The media and society routinely describes such an individual as being lunatics or fundamentalist fanatics, yet it is our view that the fundamentalist fanatics are those who do not allow such a person – a human being – to exist in society.

And those who simply cannot afford to upgrade themselves beyond a certain level are doomed to an existence that is determined not by their abilities, but by their wealth.

You once said that corporations have now moved from owning public space to an attempt to own private space. What did you mean by that?

With biology and a host of other sciences now information technologies, the data and information of all living things, including humans, is falling under ownership. This is what we mean by the war on personal space; perhaps a better way of labelling it is to call it the inner space or, simply, life.

An example of this has been the pharmaceutical industry. Since they introduced a similar idea of an end-user license agreement for nano and cellular medicine, essential, basic functions of the human body have now been replaced by patented biological machines. In essence, we are loosing the most basic right of all: ownership of our bodies.

A recent case highlights the problem: it was discovered that a patented, modified cellular organism that helps boost the body’s bio-defences can be passed between a mother and her new born child. The company who owned the patent sued, saying that the parents had to begin payments for the child, because the enhancements were owned by them, and given under licensed use. The court upheld the decision, meaning that, from birth, individuals are already subservient to the corporate system, and have to pay for the right to live.

But surely people have benefited greatly from these advances, and others, because they now live longer, healthier lives? Most people are more than happy to pay for that opportunity.

I would argue, for example, that slavery and Stalinism both brought about some form of improvement for the slaves or the people, but it can hardly be argued by anyone to justify and reinstate these mechanisms on that basis.

Likewise, the main problem we face is that our technological progress and the so-called “good” has arisen from and been driven primarily by war, profit, power, and control, whether that is a war on terrorism, a war on drugs, or a war against insurrection. Any benefits are a subset of this loop: there must always be war to support our progress, there must always be an enemy, even if that enemy becomes our very own selves.

The fact is that despite all these impressive advances in technology, health and medicine, more than half the world’s population are still suffering from illnesses and diseases that could surely be treated, but the reason nothing is done is because they exist in markets that are simply not profitable.

A manager at Nestle once remarked many years ago that “As soon as people step out of poverty, they become potential Nestle customers”. It is this type of thinking that has helped create the world I am describing. Any evaluation of society should be done so on the basis of how it treats all human beings across a whole spectrum of basic human rights, not just a few selected criteria that conveniently justify the elite position.

Jacobs Langdon: A couple of places. When I was a kid, there was this show on TV called Lost, and I wouldn’t miss a single episode. It was incredible. Great storyline, engrossing; it had a tremendous influence on my later ideas. I really loved the idea of a group of people facing the unknown, facing adversity, and trying to cope as best they could. Of course, at the same time, the War on Terror was only a few years old, and Guantanamo was still routinely in the headlines so I guess you can see some of that in there, too. There were a few other things, like the Stanford Prison Experiment that was later used to make the German film Das Experiment, old sci-fi films like The Running Man, uh, even 24. Yeah, there were loads of these little influences I could mention, but if I had to pick out one thing that really inspired me to do The Camp, it would have to be an old Japanese game show from the late nineties called Denpa Shonen.

MG: Never heard of it.

JL: [laughs] I’d be surprised if you did! It wasn’t really known outside of Japan. I only found out about it watching some re-run of an old “Top 10 Reality Shows” programme or something that I stumbled across during a data sediment dive. I started digging around for more info, and the more I learnt, the more I was just completely stunned.

What the makers did was they had an audition for a bunch of people on the pretext of being picked for some show-biz related job. The guy who got picked, Nasubi, was a small-time comedian, and they promptly blindfolded him, basically kidnapped him, and locked him up in what was effectively solitary confinement for over a year. He was forced to strip naked and remained that way for pretty much the whole show. In the beginning, he had no food, toilet paper, nothing. The only way he could get food and other items was to enter postcards into contests and win; in order to free himself, he had to win around one million Yen in prizes.

Over the duration of the show, his nails grew several inches, his hair and beard grew, and at one point he was forced to eat dog food because that was all he had. The incredible thing was that he became a celebrity in Japan by enduring all the hardships. In fact, I found out later that the show itself is still listed as a comedy in Japan, despite the mental strain he’d gone through, the starvation, the suffering.

Anyway, that’s when I started thinking about the ideas that eventually became The Camp.

MG: Some people have suggested that your main ideas came from the cult Japanese film Battle Royale.

JL: Yeah, to an extent. I was about thirteen or so when I first saw it, a friend of mine from school had this pirated DVD copy of it. He told me I just had to watch it. It really blew my mind [laughs]. It certainly freaked out my mom. I’d forgotten about it and had left it in the player. She came home and started watching it while I was in my room doing homework or writing or something. She was a bit freaked out for a few days, thinking I was going to suddenly start plugging the kids at school.

MG: [laughs] Did you?

JL: [laughs] No, no. I sometimes wish I could have, though.

MG: Okay, so you’ve got these ideas going around in your head. What happened next?

JL: Well, since the days of YouTube, the barriers to entry for video have been really insignificant. I mean, getting a digital HD camcorder, video editing software, distribution across social nets – it costs virtually nothing. The real issue I faced was purely legal. Could we get away with the show’s format? I mean, having Nasubi kidnapped paled into comparison with the idea of placing contestants against their will in a gulag, claiming they’re enemy combatants, and putting them under immense physical and mental stress to see what they would do, see if they will escape, whatever. It was a huge risk.

MG: I remember reading somewhere that at first you wanted to use only convicts?

JL: Yeah, that’s right. I figured it’d be really easy to get them signed up since they’d effectively given up their rights. But then I realised that it wouldn’t work; very few people would connect with hardened criminals. Most people would want them dead anyway, and probably just wouldn’t care. What we really needed were people that the audience would immediately be attracted to.

MG: How did you come up with the idea of using teenagers?

JL: There was this article I read about private rehab centres for teenagers that exist all over the world. The Chinese are particularly notorious for it, even for things like Internet addiction, but they are also prolific in the Allied nations, particularly the US where a whole private industry thrives from it even though the science is there to help them. A lot of parents, many from more religious backgrounds, didn’t want their kids’ addictions solved through mind or body hacking, so they would sign them into these rehab schools. The thing that immediately struck me were the overlaps in their methods of mental reprogramming and those used by the military for interrogation.

Anyway, quite a few of these places could get away with it because the parents had signed over consent. In most cases, the kid didn’t have a clue they were being sent in until they walked through the door and had it locked behind them. This was the perfect way for us to get participants on the show without them knowing what was really happening.

MG: Did the parents of the children fully understand what was going on?

JL: Absolutely, and they were 100% behind it otherwise they wouldn’t have put their children no the show. Some of them told me they saw it as a more modern version of Hell Houses used by evangelicals to instil fear in children about abortion, sex before marriage, homosexuality. Obviously, some parents were in it for the money, royalties from book deals, that sort of thing, but for the most part they thought it could help their children.

MG: It really struck a chord with the viewers. The first season was the most downloaded, talked and complained about in Double Vision’s history, and is rated in the top ten most controversial internet shows ever.

JL: [laughs] Well, yeah, but it’s easy to understand that. Any television show aims to get the audience involved, and controversy is never a bad thing. Look at Big Brother Village in Germany, for example. There was a massive outcry following the murder of that guy, uh, Daniel, or David – I forget – but their viewing figures went through the roof for months afterwards. It was the same with Nasubi in the nineties: even those who hated the idea of the show couldn’t help but laugh and watch. It’s been that way since the Romans had gladiators killing themselves for fun. The crowds loved it, and wanted to take part in it. That’s entertainment at its most basic level.

MG: Which leads me on to my next question: in a way, you removed Big Brother and replaced him with the actual audience. Where did you get the idea from?

JL: I remembered reading about an experiment – the Milgram experiment if I remember right – that showed people would quite often carry out orders even when they knew they were causing harm to someone else. A group of people were ordered by an authority figure to administer electric shocks to another group who were actually actors. The actors pretended to be electrocuted, and each time the first group were ordered to increase the strength of the shocks, most of them would do it despite the apparent pain of the actor.

So, I started to wonder: would it be possible to get the audience to administer punishments through votes and so on under the direction of authority figures that we would present on the show? The answer, of course, was yes. I mean, in the first episode we did, the viewers immediately followed the advice we gave to apply sensory deprivation for two days on one of our participants to induce a state of psychosis, all because our expert said it would be an easier way to control and, ultimately, help him. The audience response was so overwhelming, in fact, that I think only about five percent of all votes voted no.

MG: You took this same approach a step further in the second season.

JL: Yeah, I mean, the first season was just really raw. Like I said, it hardly cost us a cent to film and distribute, which was good because most of our money went into the sets – well, most of it went to the lawyers [laughs], but after that it was the sets – and we couldn’t afford to go really high tech. But after the first season, money just flooded in, sponsorships, donations, book deals, you name it, and then Dream came along and said, “Well, we’re keen to fund the show.”

So with all this cash coming in, that’s when I could really push the limits, so I figured it would be a great idea if we could actually automate a lot of the stuff that happens on the set, you know, robotic sentries, cameras, some active denial systems, that sort of thing, and give control of that over to the audience. I knew it could work because of the success of the Border Patrol Network -

MG: And in the UK they’ve been using similar ideas for some time in high crime areas -

JL: Yeah, exactly, so I knew it could work, Dream were happy with the idea and gave the go ahead. The audience response so far for season two has been brilliant.

MG: We’re almost out of time, but I just wanted to ask one last question. Some have hailed you as the greatest TV entertainer for a decade, others claim you’ve helped destroy America’s moral and cultural values … how do you see yourself?

JL: [laughs] See myself? Well, that’s what I would ask the audience. I’m just a mirror of them, really. If they think I’m a destroyer of American culture or values or whatever, that’s because I’m a reflection of them. In fact, most of the key figures in mass entertainment also faced the same criticisms and praise. Look at the history of reality television. I mean, Chuck Barris could probably be said to be the birthplace for what later became reality TV, but he was often accused of destroying American society, culture, morals, of polluting the airwaves. He gave people themselves, and then they blamed him for it. I expect that, so I don’t really worry so much about the criticism, or the praise, for that matter. I’m just an entertainer. Being told that someone enjoyed the show is good enough for me.

What hits you at first is the smell. It was like a morgue, clinically clean, yet not even the strongest detergent seemed to remove the smell of decay and death lingering in the background. My eyes were naturally drawn towards the centre of the room where its only feature lay: a hospital gurney, surrounded by plastic pouches of food solution and bodily waste.

And there lay the withering Randal Perkins, dying.

Some people have called him the greatest artist that has ever lived; others consider him to be dangerous, crazy and just another suicidal. There are rumours that an almost religious-like cult has grown up around him viewing him as a modern day messiah, while others praise him as a prophet for the Transhumanist movement. He himself would say, “I’m just me.” Whatever the truth, The Exhibit of Randal Perkins is the most extreme art exhibit ever staged at the New Tate Modern, because while Randal Perkins’ body is clearly dying, he is very much alive, in what he sees as the real world: a virtual game.

Next to his bed is a small plastic chair for each viewer to sit (the gallery only allow one visitor at a time, closely monitored, they say, via hidden cameras). Sitting there, it’s hard not to feel your stomach wrenched by the sight of his muscle-wasted body. His face is hidden by a Skinner, the black goggles cutting off his vision. He has not removed them in over two years. In fact, he has not moved his body once either, not since the Tate agreed to his exhibit and he was strapped down to the bed for the first time. The restraints are purely for show however, since he’s the physical equivalent of brain dead: he can no longer use his body at all, not because of the wasting, but because the necessary motor-neuron functions were largely disabled under Randal’s direction, as well as most of his pain receptors.

Under the agreement formed with Tate, they have to keep his physical body alive for as long as possible with the help of a team of specialist doctors and nurses that visit him each day. The catch, of course, is that while they keep the body functioning with food and water, they must allow the body to continue to decay. He may live, I am told, for at least a few more years, but he’ll probably resemble something like the sloth from classic cult film, Seven.

People have watched him 24/7 via live cams, contact and neural networks, and a special, dedicated channel on Dream, showing both the exhibit room and his virtual world in which he now lives. It has all earned him the nickname of the “True Man” in dedication to the classic film The Truman Show from the late 1990′s. In that film the whole world watched Truman, a baby who from birth was placed in a huge film studio and filmed as a TV show until he becomes aware and breaks free into the real world. In this exhibit however, Randal is working backwards: he wants to live only in the virtual studio.

He has been the subject of endless debates as to his motives, interviewed countless times, and so I had decided I wanted to meet him in person, experience the exhibit itself, and hear what he had to say. To do so meant going into his world: not only can he no longer move, but his vocal cords were severed. He cannot hear anything in this world, either.

A similar Skinner headset hangs from a thin metal hook on the side of the bed, and I put it on. The room is suddenly full of digital people. There’s a party going on: a DJ in the corner spinning decks, lights flashing, a bar running down one corner of the wall buzzing with the talk and movement of people, and Randal is dancing with what appears to be three girls in bikinis. There is life, noise and smell. A virtual brunette avatar bumps into me as she walks past.

Welcome to the world of Next Life.

Similar in concept to the retro Second Life and its successor, Life 2.0, Next Life has caught on around the world as the most popular TARG, or Tran-spatial Alternate Reality Game that converts the Internet of Things into a real, digital world. Every real world person who has agreed to take part adds their arphid data, from both their own personal tags as well as any possessions they want to allow, to the Next Life network, creating an alternate reality that maps itself out spatially according to the real world.

It’s hard to describe what it’s like to someone who’s never taken part, except that it is like experiencing the whisper or ghost of reality: there, but not. You can feel, smell, hear and even taste everything here, but it’s simply brain stimulus with no physical interaction at all. And it’s here that Randal has chosen to live.

He sees me, excuses himself from the group of ladies, and walks over. The blonde-haired and blue-eyed, muscular man coming towards me is a far cry from the wasted figure on the bed; that, and the fact that digital imaging has still not achieved the same sort of realness as we’re accustomed to in the real world.

“Follow me,” he says.

He leads me to the wall next to the DJ booth, opens a seemingly invisible door and we step through into a small, quiet room consisting of two chairs and a table with a small black ashtray on top. We sit down, and it’s only then that I notice the visitor badge on my own digital avatar, guessing that was how he knew who I was. He smiles and reaches out his hand.

“Good to meet you,” he says, as we introduce each other and shake hands. “We’ll have a few minutes to talk in private before you’re disconnected and I can go back to the party. This is the one place I’m not filmed constantly as per my agreement with Tate, so I’ll answer whatever questions you have as truthfully as possible.”

I watch him intently for a few seconds, wondering how I should ask. His smile widens slightly. “I guess the first question you want to ask is ‘Why?’ right?”

I give him a small laugh and nod. “Bet you get that a lot, but yeah.”

“Well, it really is like you’ve probably read. I got sick of that world. Life meant more to me here than out there. The people I met here, the things I could do, how I felt: I was alive here.” He lights up a cigarette and grins. “Plus, these things don’t kill you here. Well, not yet anyway.”

“Some people have said that you’re doing this as a protest. Are you?”

“In a way, but I wouldn’t say I’m protesting. I have my own views, but whether I like or dislike what’s happening doesn’t really matter. I prefer ‘teaching’.”

“Teaching what, exactly?”

He looks thoughtful for a second, as he breathes out some smoke.

“I am showing people the consequences of globalization, mass consumerism, materialism, technologization; take your pick. What’s happening to my physical body is already happening to theirs, to the world, thanks to the latest in consumer tech. The only thing is that it’s happening so slowly that they don’t notice.”

“And what’s that?”

“We’re staring at our digital reflections so long that our physical bodies are dying, along with what we long considered to be reality.”

“You’re talking about McLuhan, aren’t you?”

He smiled, pleasantly surprised.

“You know his work. Yes, the narcissus effect. The medium,” he waves his hands around, directing towards the surroundings, “will consume not just us as people, but everyday objects, animals, everything, even time. In this place, I can move backwards in time; everything has history here. Remember the Way-Back machine? It’s like that, but the archive is an image world of what you think of as the real world. I suspect one day we’ll move forwards in time, too. Archive is the wrong word though. The fact is that when Reggio spoke so many years ago about technology being our nature, the natural progression for that was for it to become our existence, our reality. The other world is in fact becoming a poorer copy of this one.”

“Do you see yourself as the modern day version of someone pouring petrol on themselves and setting it alight to draw attention to this?”

“Maybe some people see me as that. I prefer to think of myself as just giving people a glimpse of tomorrow.”

“But you’re not truly in this world, are you? I mean, your body is still out there, and when it dies, you’ll die here, too, right?”

He leans forward across the desk, the same grin appearing on his boyish face, like he knows something I don’t.

“Are you so sure of that?”

He sees my hesitation and carries on: “If I can download and save my entire brain into this avatar, which is growing increasingly likely, would I not be me?”

“Are you saying you’re a brain?”

He shakes his head and laughs. “The Minds I. Very good. No, what I’m saying is that’s what we’re becoming: logical, rational, structured and ordered. There is no place for irrationality in this world.”

“You said you have your own views. What do you mean by that?”

For once, I seem to have stumped him, as if he doesn’t want to say any more. He’s looking at me curiously, as if weighing up the pros and cons. He puts out the cigarette in the ashtray, leans back in the chair and closes his eyes.

“I don’t consider my own views to be that important since they only really matter to me. We’re largely responsible only for our own actions, after all. I just want people to be aware of where we’re headed. I guess my only hope is that people would pursue goals based on future consequences that are grounded in reality, rather than future hopes grounded in wishful thinking.” He opened his eyes again, staring at me intently: “In my experience, utopia is simply dystopia with good PR.”

Suddenly, there was darkness. Transmission terminated, my time was up. I took off the Skinner and hung the goggles back on their hook. After adjusting my eyes I stood up, looking at the emaciated body for one last time, and left.

As I headed back down through the tunnel, I couldn’t help but feel I was descending from Randal Perkins’ heaven back into one of Dante’s hells. Yet there was increasingly less difference between the two, except perhaps one crucial point: I still have a brain. But, I wondered, how long would it be before we are one?

Written by Steven Eduard, published by Re-Wired magazine, 2032.