GLOSSARY OF COGNITIVE ACTIVISM

by Warren Neidich

Archive Press, Berlin (September 2019)

Book launch, video screening and discussion between Warren Neidich and Colin Lang

In the GLOSSARY OF COGNITIVE ACTIVISM, (For a Not So Distant Future) published by Archive Books, artist/theorist Warren Neidich suggests that we are moving from an information and knowledge based economy which, as every one already knows from our last election cycle, has dire consequences for individual freedom and democracy, towards a neural based one that introduces its own unique possibilities for control and subject shaping. Neidich is proposing that new neural technologies already in research and development and on the horizon such as Brain Computer Interfaces, Artificial intelligence and Optogenetics have tremendous potential for good but also may add powerful new apparatuses with which sovereignty may be able to shape in ways never before possible our extended and embodied minds and brain. Underlying this effort is a desire to create a new lexicon of 285 terms joining words originating from political philosophy like immaterial labor, dialectic materialism, machinic intelligence, the common, to those emanating from new meida studies such as click bait, attention economy, memes, meme magic, google bubbles and effects finally entangling them with a dictionary sourced from neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience such as synapse, cognit, cognitariat, connectome, neural plasticity and epigeneis. Neidich deams this complex repertorie as necessary to understand, confront and resist this new impending reality of the statisticon and singularity where the brain and mind are the central hub in the Internet of Everything and machine intelligence eclipses human intelligence.