I really liked this image so I fucked around with it for a while and came up with this. It's a greasy dream sort of thing.
Have you ever experienced these kinds of visual effects whilst tripping balls on Psilocybe? There were two different pathways for me- blindly i.e passing/experiencing the sensory stuff through my skin and flesh, and letting myself fall into the drift through my eyes, if you know what I mean. The radiant way, sometimes full of offset detail and weirdly coherent colour shifts that relate to all those other forms of occult logic.
Everyone's all about the mushrooms these days but I wouldn't have the guts to do them now, frankly. While I used to love their utter unpredictability, my brain's just seen too many rough miles. It's like that seething, fleshy stump monster in Flash Gordon in that the best I could hope for while tripping is not being painfully envenomed by some lurking dissociated scenario. I am disappoint. Mushrooms were the only hallucinogen I actually enjoyed from a purely recreational perspective. That's another problem with being middle-aged; you're only halfway through the tedious process of fully getting over yourself.
We should reject most forms of genetic modification for a hundred different speculative- precautionary reasons. Genetic expression and regulation are bewilderingly polyvalent, to an extent beyond our current collective understanding (not just my understanding). Modded genomes will contribute to wild and domestic biomes to unknown effect. Unknown effect. I'm not down. But there is another compelling reason to reject this technology, one that has nothing to do with the materia, and that is its underlying imperatives.
The proposed modifications to farmed organisms are just doubling down on the greedy, mindless MO that has gotten us into this collective shit in the first place. The expectation of an endless free lunch, of infinite extraction via intensive agriculture has already despoiled the entire planet. How will plants tweaked to fruit all year be anything other than corporate-garrisoned vampires on our insolvent resources? The unprecedented and aseasonal amplification of production will not feed a billion more humans*; it will devolve into jet fuel for a garbage-fire market system in which greed, exclusion and profligacy are utterly intrinsic.
Capitalism as it stands is the enemy of equitable provision. GE tech will make no net contribution to managing our finite inputs. There will be no more water or fertiliser left to lavish on apple trees that never stop fruiting or wheat that triples the currently achievable tonnage, and that production will be squandered anyway. Intensive farming interests in New Zealand have already wrought utterly perverse and irreversible damage under the aegis of a sociopathic corporate entity. The result? A huge chunk of New Zealanders can no longer afford dairy products or drink and swim in what remains of our cowshit-poisoned waterways. Fonterra has already demonstrated both its ruthlessness and its impunity. In a GE near future, when their modified cows need more resources to deliver more profit, who will restrain them? Nobody.
I don't want to consume GE organisms, for both private and extrinsic reasons. Corporate interests are attempting to force them into the food chain. I think we've already established just how much altruism and integrity figures in their reckoning. If that isn't the most compelling of all arguments to say fuck no to the thin edge of this toxic wedge, I don't know what else to tell you.
* Fertility rates are falling around the world to an unprecedented extent: it's not just you who doesn't want to fuck or procreate. Yay herd stress!