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810The Rhetoric of Chaos MagicSocietas Magica Newsletter. 2025.Magic is, in at least some modes, rhetorical. Practitioners may demand effects, sure, by coercing elemental spirits, lurking ghosts, or vain gods to do some task. But often magic is persuasive, making arguments to spirits, praising a god, or even convincing the magician’s own subconscious to ferry an intention-packed sigil into the cosmic noise in such a way that reality rewrites itself to offer up a desired change with just the right synchronicity. Chaos magic uses any, and all, of the above.
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1154Why they won't save us: political dispositions in the conflicts of superheroesTransformative Works and Cultures 17. 2014.Comic book superheroes tend to be conservative and their opponents progressive. Here I explore the reasons for heroic conservatism, review recent disruptions to the trend, and consider what superhuman politics can tell us about our own transhuman and science fictional conditions.
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734Swarms Are Hell: Warfare as an Anti-Transhuman ChoiceJournal of Evolution and Technology 23 (1): 56-60. 2013.The use of advanced technologies, even of so-called transhuman technology, does not make militaries transhuman. Transhumanism includes dimensions of ethics that are themselves in direct conflict with many transhuman capabilities of soldiers in warfare. The use of advanced weapons of mass destruction represents an anti-humanism that undermines the modern, open, and high-tech nation state.
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1280If You See a Cyborg in the Road, Kill the Buddha: Against Transcendental TranshumanismJournal of Evolution and Technology 24 (2): 92-97. 2014.A stream in transhumanism argues that the aims of Buddhism and transhumanists are akin. It is the case that transhumanism contains religious tropes, and its parallels to Christianity are readily apparent. It does not share much, however, with Buddhism’s Zen tradition. Zen tends to focus its practitioners on becoming fully present and human, not on becoming transcendent, super-powered, or posthuman. This paper explores some of the tensions between transhumanism and Buddhism through the lens of Ze…Read more
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1191Singularity warfare: A bibliometric survey of militarized transhumanismJournal of Evolution and Technology 16 (1): 161-65. 2007.This paper examines the responses to advanced and transformative technologies in military literature, attenuates the conclusions of earlier work suggesting that there is an “ignorance of transhumanism” in the military, and updates the current layout of transhuman concerns in military thought. The military is not ignorant of transhuman issues and implications, though there was evidence for this in the past; militaries and non-state actors increasingly use disruptive technologies with what we may …Read more
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1035Animism as an Approach to ArdaIJALEL 4 (8): 116-119. 2019.Here we examine qualities of what would be thought of as inanimate beings that lend evidence to the position that J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional universe is animistic. Arda is full of life, and natural things in it, such as mountains and rivers, are often alive or conscious. A close look at the qualities of the stars in particular yields further evidence in favor of animism as a foundational ontology of Arda.
