Separating the Tears from the Rain
Hi, thanks for taking the time to pop in and read this. I want to keep this brief and I want to sing praises, so I'll take the middle path.
Mac Tonnies was a Writer, Photographer, Artist, Ufologist, Futurist, Romantic, and Skeptic who died in his sleep October 18, 2009 from a congenital heart defect. Not knowing what was going to happen to his blog Posthuman Blues if he didn't log into his account within a certain amount of time, we, his friends, quickly downloaded the entire site in one fell swoop for eventual return to the web.
Why? Eventually information will atrophy. For various reasons, the hosting account here will one day be shut off, or the original site over at BlogSpot will be deleted (spam comments and all), those of us who came together to meet and become friends, will drift apart. I know we'll all eventually die and there will be no one left to remember Mac Tonnies. Who remembers the names of their Great-great Grandparents? I don't. So why take the time and effort to resurrect the site?
Whether he knew it or not, Mac influenced a great many people across many different disciplines, and simply put, we want a memorial for our friend who died way too soon. This version of Posthuman Blues is frozen in time right up to Mac's last post, and the comment thread which details the discovery of his death and aside from his books, it's the closest anyone can come to knowing the essence of Mac Tonnies, a man who was certainly worth knowing. In general, I really dislike saying, "What Mac would have wanted..." type statements, but I was under the impression that he really would have wanted to upload his consciousness into a computer. How awesomely Posthuman is that? Alas, instead of talking with Macbot we have to satisfy ourselves with the salient data points he was willing to share.
So here it is, Posthuman Blues, the world as seen through the eyes of our friend Mac Tonnies. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as we all had taking part of it.
Mark Plattner (CapnMarrrrk), The Internet, July, 2012
Illustration by Mike C
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Postscript
There are two Mac Tonnies tribute sites that continue to publish posts Mac would have found entertaining and thought provoking. They are Post-Mac Blues and Macbots. Though as of this writing in July 2012, a lot of the people who appeared in the comments and the blogroll, made the jump to twitter. If you want to meet the people who influenced and were influenced by Mac, check out his Twitter follow list.
