Unmonastery

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Ben Vickers is spokesperson for Unmonastery. Unmonastery are hacker activists working with community development projects as artwork, with a strong interest in hijacking or critiquing ‘strange things’ and emerging new futuristic telepathic devices such as DARPA’s Cortical Modem and Facebook telepathy. Unmonastery also casually invite people to RSVP for dinner via telepathy online, which serves to jokingly undercut or perhaps point to online facilitated telepathy futurism: http://discourse.unmonastery.org/t/berlin-open-dinner-and-session/112

Vickers discusses telepathy further in a Flash Art interview: “I think it is particularly interesting to consider it in this moment because if we look to Silicon Valley think of the activities of companies such as Google/Alphabet. They don’t actually say that they have a space programme but they probably do. They openly have Calico, which is a life extension company. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook recently came out and said that the future of Facebook is telepathy. It’s interesting that for the most part those technologies, startups, and businesses, are devoid of any philosophy, and are positioned as agnostic. But if you look at it in terms of the things that are driving, then there is a strong parallel with ideas about evolution, immortality, resurrection and so on. Listening to this conversation and learning from you both, I’m terrified by the idea that these kinds of philosophies link up in this moment, when those companies are rising to increasing power.”