Welcome to mactonnies.com.
"And if you have five seconds to spare, then I'll tell you the story of my life."
--The Smiths, "Half A Person"
Welcome to mactonnies.com.
"And if you have five seconds to spare, then I'll tell you the story of my life."
--The Smiths, "Half A Person"
Biographical sketch:
I'm a Kansas City, Missouri-based author and essayist with an abiding appreciation for thought-provoking literature, weird and/or subversive ideas, and bleeding-edge art and science. I blog daily at Posthuman Blues. In addition, I write for SETI.com and contribute a regular column to Futurismic. My latest book is After the Martian Apocalypse (Paraview Pocket Books, 2004), a speculative and generally well-received examination of extraterrestrial intelligence on the Red Planet. Illumined Black, a collection of naively "Blade Runner"-ish science fiction short-stories, was published in 1995 by a small press and can still be found in used-book stores and on Amazon.com.I've been a guest panelist at ConQuest, Kansas City's premiere science fiction convention. More recently, I've lectured in the United States and Canada on subjects ranging from exoarchaeology to transhuman evolution and have appeared on programs such as Strange Days . . . Indeed, 21st Century Radio, The Paracast, Binnall of America, and Radio Misterioso. In late 2007 my first play, produced and directed by Paul Kimball, debuted in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
I spend an inordinately large portion of my time pursuing unpopular ideas and esoteric theories with what I sincerely hope is balanced skepticism. I'm a member of the Society for Planetary SETI Research, a group that seeks to use scientific methodology to explore the possibility of extraterrestrial artifacts in our solar system. I read voraciously; preoccupations include cosmology, nonhuman intelligence, UFOs, consciousness studies, and futurism. Writers I admire include William Gibson, Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs.
This is a Flickr badge showing public photos and videos from Mac Tonnies. Make your own badge here.I can regularly be found haunting the Country Club Plaza, reading cyberpunk novels and marinating my synapses in espresso. And I'm a voracious doodler; I've put some representative (if dated) drawings in my Sketch Gallery. (For artwork and graphics sent to me by colleagues and friends, please see the Art Gallery.) For up-to-the-minute commentary, see my daily blog, Posthuman Blues, where I post personal experiences, speculative essays, intriguing science news items, and everything in between.
I tend to think in the future-tense. I'm a skeptic, agnostic and existentialist; I perceive reality as a kind of consensual hallucination that forces us to define our sense of identity without recourse to faith or superstition. I have a deep affinity for 80s pop music; some of my favorite bands are The Cure, R.E.M., Portishead, Talking Heads, and The Smiths. Favorite film-makers include David Cronenberg and David Lynch. For more information (including links to archived radio appearances), see the Mac FAQ.
Statement:
Consciousness is a potential technology; we are exquisite machines, nothing less than sentient patterns. As such, there's no convincing technical reason we can't eventually upload ourselves into matrices of our design and choosing. It's likely the phenomenon we casually call "intelligence" will cease to be strictly biological as we begin to merge with our machines more meaningfully and intimately. (Philip K. Dick once wrote that "living and nonliving things are exchanging properties." I suspect that in a few hundred years, barring disaster, separating the animate from the inanimate will probably be an exercise in futility.) Ultimately, we have two options: self-mutate by venturing off-planet in minds and bodies of our own design, or succumb to extinction.
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