Its all preformace enhancement, (markets and freedom?)

So I know we were supposed to pick just two posters, but I have been thinking about what all of the poster presentations from this past Tuesday had in common. Preformance enhancing drugs, designer babies, birth control and animal testing - and then something that was brought up at the tail end of class, when Ben asked something to the effect of, "is this really freedom". I find this concept extremely intriguing and frustrating.

So, we are 'free' to compete for jobs as truckers, and in doing so, we are 'free' to use performance enhancing drugs like caffeine. This same trucker is 'free' to reject birth control, designer babies, and animal testing - but not 'free' to abstain from living in a world where these things are unavoidable. Not 'free' to avoid using products that were tested on animals (a moral trap, perhaps). Not 'free' of a world in which birth control is mainstream, nor of a world where designer babies and the potential for creating super-humans is the future.

What struck me about this project, these poster presentations, is that we are a people at the edge of a tentatively legitimated future. In order to legitimate the use of Birth Control, it was advertised as "population control". In order to legitimate animal testing, we enforce regulations to prevent unnecessary suffering and death. We improve technology like computer modeling so that we can feel as though we are on the precipice of an 'alternative' to the suffering, a way to look back at this present circumstance as barbaric. Designer babies begin as people with the 'bad genes' taken out - how can you argue with the removal of Huntington's, especially if you've been keeping up with the latest medical television drama like House MD? Performance enhancing drugs seem to encompass everything - birth control could be considered a performance enhancing drug in Women's athletics.

What wraps this all together, for me, is that we are distinctly not free to reject this world. A la Donna H and my beloved Cyborg Future, the technology isn't just going to go away, and one can imagine given our present world of conflict, that 20.. 30 years down the line, the kind of poster presentations a class like ours will be doing would blow. our. minds. Some people romanticize a sort of anarchy as a result of nuclear holocaust but short of that, we're on a trajectory here that in my mind encompasses the whole human history - technological advancement, the rise and fall of world powers, greater and greater industry and integration.

And, in general, everything we discussed on Tuesday is about performance enhancement - all of it rendering us more capable of producing, of working, of competing to produce and work more, the perpetuation of markets and of world powers. Women don't have to produce children. Truckers don't have to sleep. Animals are of less value than humans according to our $$$. And here were are, in an academic institution, educated competitively with competitive concepts like grading and performance evaluations, we're already at the "top" of some hierarchy and we're competing to be the top of the top, we're the ones who get to decadently sip our coffee and discuss through a lens of wealth and privilege whether we are really "free enough", and we're the ones who are most likely to invent, produce and consume the technologies in question, these things which don't even pertain to the vast majority of the worlds inhabitants yet.

Think about how many of these technologies we have already accepted, bought, internalized. What does it mean to be more or less 'free' than we are now? Here we are. What do we do with it, within reason - how do we work *within* our current paradigm without romanticizing some unrealistic technophobia ...