By Rodrigo de Benito Sanz (February 8, 2009) (Week 3 Technovelgy Response)

Crimestop – no dangerous thoughts (from 1984 by George Orwell)

Crimestop is a discipline of mental auto-control to keep a state of false enthusiasm and abort any attempt of action against the regime. It is a tool that any authoritarian system uses to control member of a community. Is not science-fiction. It’s real, and it’s proven to be very effective.

Crimestop is analog to the sacrament of confession in catholic religion. Through education, individuals learn a series of ethical rules that define their actions. They learn what’s accepted, the good, and what’s against the rules, off limits, the bad. Values like guilt and relief complement the potential of confession in modifying behaviors. It is a very sophisticated process, starting with the experience of fear to a guardian, the priest, who heals the wounds and offers advice. Further stages of this process lead to the development of strong guilt as a main tool for auto-control – the guardian lives in the minds of the individuals and the judgement becomes more fearful.

Odorophonics – scent player (from The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury).

Odorophonics is a machine that stimulates the nervous system to recreate the sensations produced by scents. Because of the power that smells have on memory, this machine has a lot of potentialities in the fields of persuasion. At the same time, smell sensing can be strongly influenced by suggestion. This fact gives the odorophonics, or working with smells, a lot of potential in the field of persuasion: smells can define if how individuals perceive an object, a room or another person. They play a main role in processes of attraction / rejection and they are more abstract and emotional than rational what makes them in several cases hard to categorize. Although smells haven’t been explored enough, there’s a growing interest in their use as valuable tools to modify behaviors.

Bio-Fabric – living cloth (from Say Goodbye to the Wind by J.G. Ballard).

The Bio-Fabric are a special kind of tissues that react to the wearer’s personality, contours, or even perspiration to change the color, size, pattern and texture of the cloth. Everything related to appearance can become very persuasive: People have plastic surgery done despite of those intervention’s risks and the fashion business is constantly flourishing. Clothes, whether they are made of bio-fabrics or not, always give some hints of the wearer’s personality and mood. However, the relation cause / effect is usually not obvious, and for this reason the outfit doesn’t become an important motive of behavioral change (rather is its effect). Evident transformations on the fabric would require an effort from the wearer to keep a specific mood or modify some aspects of the personality to achieve specifics effects that would be reflected externally and directly perceived by everyone else.