The Singularity? The turning point for justice, when all people bend toward an asymptotic embrace of humanism and love, the pernicious evils of impoverishment and exploitation are rejected, the ecology of the planet is restored to health, and a permaculture of compassionate realism emerges from the whole human race? ... What's that? Oh, you mean cooler toys and longer lives for the rich? Never mind then.

I love kids,

VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It’s a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We’re not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster strikes humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters.
We don’t carry on about how the human race has shown itself to be a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet. That type of negativity offers no solution to the inexorable horrors which human activity is causing.
Rather, The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth’s ecology.
As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens... us.
Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom.
When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth’s biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Nature’s “experiments” have done throughout the eons.
It’s going to take all of us going.

The 30-second spot has become largely irrelevant; ‘Addressable TV’, which let advertisers target specific households with TV ads (Johnston, 2011 (6) ), was nothing more than Henry Ford’s ‘faster horse’, the solution advertisers thought they wanted. As the skipping and blipping of ads became increasingly commonplace it was proven in 2018 that a campaign of 800 TVRs wasn’t actually seen by anybody…

Instead, the commercial support of advertisers is woven into the very fabric of the shows themselves. Whilst in one programme, the heroine wears Adidas, drinks Pepsi and cracks the Pentagon’s network with her Apple iWatch. In the other programme she’s clad in Nike, sated with Coca-Cola and performs her death-defying feats of silicon daredevilry with the ‘Intel Inside’ chip in her wrist.

The version of the show you see is tweaked, scene-by-scene, just for you. It pulls together the data on who you are, who you know, where you’ve been, what you’ve bought and what you’ve yet to buy, and creates the show for you in real time.

This happens across every show, every surface, every channel and every interface. Ads still exist of course, but they’re put together from a million possible options, each based on a different part of your data.

* Space colonization

* Automotive technology

* Things that go fast and explode (rockets, military aircraft)

* Alternative energy (from solar through wind/wave to nuclear)

* Libertarianism (and everything is worse with libertarians)

24:

These are all areas of interest to someone interested in the future.

Why?

Why are they intrinsically more interesting than, say, the politics of gender/ethnic emancipation? Or the design of better kitchen appliances? Items which directly affect a near- or outright majority of the population every day?

Your focus on these fetish items -- indeed, the focus exhibited by many commenters here -- seems to me to betray a certain narrowness and lack of depth to their interest in the future.

In urban design, exclusion zones are becoming commonplace in relation to sponsorship of sporting events. The Brand Exclusion Zone is the newest form of urban demarcation, and can be used not only to affect signage and advertising, but also restrict personal freedom of choice. Within this context, the London 2012 Olympics represents one of the most radical restructuring of the rights of the city in London. The 'canvas' of London will belong exclusively to the Olympic marquee brands.

The most carefully policed Brand Exclusion Zone will be around the Olympic Park, and extend up to 1km beyond its perimeter, for up to 35 days. Within this area, officially called an Advertising and Street Trade Restrictions venue restriction zone, no advertising for brands designated as competing with those of the official Olympic sponsors will be allowed. (Originally, as detailed here, only official sponsors were allowed to advertise, but leftover sites are now available). This will be supported by preventing spectators from wearing clothing prominently displaying competing brands, or from entering the exclusion zone with unofficial snack and beverage choices. Within the Zone, the world's biggest McDonald's will be the only branded food outlet, and Visa will be the only payment card accepted.

If we actually manage to get people to Mars and they survive the trip, that means we'll have solved "a heck of a lot of problems" that could make the world a better place in general, says Zurbuchen. We'll have figured out the answers to a lot of major questions, and probably increased the living standards of people on Earth in the process.

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.

Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.

Taking a page from cyberpunk, traditional West African Juju priests adapted their services to the needs of the information age and started leading down-on-their-luck internet scammers through strange and costly rituals designed to increase their powers of persuasion and make their emails irresistible to greedy Americans. And so “Sakawa” was born...

...Sakawa has its own tunes, clothing brands, Sakawasploitation flicks, and even a metastatic backlash from Christian preachers and the press. When we were in Accra over the summer it was impossible to walk more than ten feet without seeing the word Sakawa in blood-red Misfits letters on a poster or tabloid, often accompanied by bone-chilling horrors of the photoshopped variety.