Metatechnological Musings on the Street

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”
-- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

You could say that those of us who live on the west coast are a little quirky. We try and test behaviours that can raise an eyebrow or two on other parts of the country. In some ways, this side of the coast is a weather vane for cultural shifts that will happen in the future.

In this photograph, you see a rider with a helmet designed to look like a bunny's head (or a hare for a speedy metaphor). Zoomorphism, as an archeologist might call it. This is the idea of humans adopting animal qualities and vice versa through a process of psychochemical transformation. The notion is common across cultures. The Olmecs and Maya, for example, believed that they could transform into jaguars to obtain the creatures' qualities. They created depictions of this transformed state as were-jaguar figurines. Our modern popular culture in North America is steeped in similar lore, exemplified by the infamous werewolf. In the photograph, the rider has transformed himself into a rabbit or hare whose qualities include speed.

Perhaps the rider's rabbit helmet, along with zoomorphism in general, is a collective biotechnological vision of a future time when humans will be able to genetically engineer ourselves and have animal parts embedded in our bodies, I mused after seeing the riders. Aside from the technological limitations, is there any reason why I should not genetically engineer myself to look like a bunny?

Tongue firmly planted in cheek, I’m asking the question because I think that given the pace of biotech development, it will need an answer in the not too distant future.

Oh, and the bunny rider had a friend, who was also a bunny. 🐰

X	InLeo	Instagram	NFT Showroom