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Title: Transhumanism Implies Anarchism
Author: William Gillis
Date: May 16th, 2016
Language: en
Topics: anarcho-transhumanism
Source: https://c4ss.org/content/44993
Notes: Transcript of a talk given at IEET's Future Of Politics conference in 2015

William Gillis

Transhumanism Implies Anarchism

The more means by which people can act the easier attack becomes and the

harder defense becomes.

It’s a simple matter of complexity. The attacker only needs to choose

one line of attack, the defender needs to secure against all of them.

This isn’t just true of small thermal exhaust ports, it’s true in our

software ecosystems today and any other system with many dimensions of

movement. Complexity — more degrees of freedom within a system — allows

for greater attack surface. When they can come not just from all points

on the compass but from above and below as well.

The arc of human history is an arc bent by our creativity and inquiry

towards more options, more ways of existing and acting. Towards greater

freedom. Every human invention expands in the immediate the number of

means we have to act.

And intertwined with such freedom has of course come greater destructive

capacity. From the eon when only an elite could be warriors, when attack

was the purview of a select few, to an era when anybody could carry a

spear or sword and kill maybe one other person before dying, to the era

of the musket and the automatic weapon. Today each and every one of us

carries small grenades around in our pockets and bags. An incidental

byproduct of storing charge for our phones and laptops. Tomorrow the

hobbyist with an RNA printer in her garage in Seattle will be able to

download or tweak together an EbolaSARSdeathpox of such apocalyptic

virulence that it would never evolve naturally. This is not a danger

posed by a single technology, it is inherent to the very arc of

technological development itself. As our tools expand our physical

freedom they force changes to our social freedom.

As we’ve progressed through our accelerating technological development —

as the knowledge we discover and the tools we invent have inexorably

expanded our capacity for attack — our social systems have evolved too.

They have had to. From honor systems to deal with a few great warriors

to early majoritarian democracies where counting heads was roughly as

good as determining how a battle between sides would play out.

But as our technologies expand our capabilities, the protection of

minorities and of the lowest of the low has become increasingly

important. From muskets in the woods that enabled a minority of

insurrectionaries to break from the British Empire, to sticks of

“dynamite” — the great leveler, as it became known to the working class

in the struggles of the progressive era.

Our social systems, our political institutions, our civic morals, have

grudgingly adapted to this changing context. But they have not adapted

fast enough.

When we talk about the stunning advancements and changes that have been

unleashed by the feedbacking effects of technological development

there’s an understandable desperation in our language. Guys guys guys

this is so important. This is going to be a thing. There are risks to

this. We’d better do it right. But too often people respond to

incredibly important questions with “we’ll use democracy” — with no

analysis of what that actually means. “Democracy” in this context is a

cognitive-stop, it’s a slogan we use to terminate considerations. To pat

ourselves on the back.

The notion that social democracy and transhumanism are reconcilable is

absurd. Democracy in the sense of majoritarian decision making is

primeval. It stems from a context where ‘how many people’ you had

determined a battle. But even constitutional democracy, minarchism,

enlightened socialism, or technocracy — whatever the system of

government — requires control in a way fundamentally irreconcilable with

technological empowerment.

Control is like defense. To function it requires a pruning away of

complexities, of options, of dimensions. To attempt centralized control

over technology is ultimately to initiate a war that can only be won by

totally destroying almost every meaningful aspect of our technologies.

David Cameron, Jeb Bush and numerous other politicians, government

functionaries and chiefs of police in the supposedly enlightened west

have independently called for the outlawing of cryptography. We laugh at

them, we shake our heads and say not here.

But I’m here to tell you what every expert knows, although we

desperately try to hide it. Backdoor systems could totally be made to

work. Or at least work for the interests of the state. Not for us, of

course. But we don’t matter when the goal becomes control. When we can’t

imagine any alternative to control. When our visions have narrowed so

dramatically that we can’t even fathom other ways to collaborate or

resolve conflicts.

The internet could very easily become a whitelisted affair, where every

packet is signed by government controlled server infrastructure, point

to point to point. Devices could be back-doored from factory to

consumer. No production allowed outside the state’s view. We are not yet

at the point where fabrication is distributed enough to make suppression

or draconian regulation impossible. The abolition of general purpose

computing is a real threat. As are calls for the abolition of the

internet. When it comes to the internet, to information technologies, to

the dissolution of intellectual property, we often say that the math is

on the side of freedom. But while it often makes authoritarian control

somewhat more challenging those challenges can still be overcome with

sufficient force, with sufficient infrastructural rigidity, and with

sufficient public support.

The most virulent force in the crypto wars, in the copyright wars, and

every other battle over technology in the last three decades has been

narrative.

We are on many fronts, in many demographics, losing that battle.

The aristocracy has historically been anti-tech. And much of the mid

twentieth century explosion of continental philosophers writing screeds

against technology and science were from a tradition that knew perfectly

well that they had to decrease the technological means people had access

to in order to stay relevant. They crafted Orwellian visions of

“freedom” that were about retreating to some kind of confined and

protected static state of life or “human” existence. Their rejection of

technology amounted to a rejection of positive freedom, the freedom to.

What they encouraged instead was: Freedom from knowledge, freedom from

choice, freedom from growth, freedom from creativity and inquiry.

This reactionary current seeps throughout our society. It is immensely

influential. It’s not to be underestimated.

Freedom-to is disruptive and complex. It expands options. And when truly

decentralized — spread to individuals — it makes it impossible for power

to function. For any actor, individual or institution, to control the

vast unfathomable diversity and complexity of the world. Impossible to

impose edicts, even “democratic” ones.

When liberal or social democrat transhumanists declare that what we need

is technology “under the control of The People”, what is never included

in that is how exactly that kind of control is supposed to work.

What does a world look like in which we have the capacity to stop people

from printing AR-15s? Forget the fuzzy-wuzzy associations of

“democracy”, even “direct democracy”. Ask yourself what actually needs

to be done to control gene therapy? Single facilities of government

overseen use of high technologies? Massive backdoors in everyone’s

devices that aggressively monitor and limit use? Totalitarian control of

every communication on the planet? Aggressive raids against all hackers

and tinkerers? Systematic accounting of every fabrication machinery in

existence? Constant surveillance of anyone with knowledge of how these

things work? Complete control of all resource allocation on the planet?

This is the only outcome for the logic of “social democracy” when

applied to transhuman aspirations.

We cannot control advanced technology without an authoritarianism so

complete it would make Hitler and Stalin salivate in their graves.

So what can we do?

At a prior conference here there was a talk on the superhero narrative

and I brought up a line from the third X-Men movie in which the

president states: “What hope does democracy have when people can move

cities with their minds?”

The quick consensus response across the room was: “Well we need an

ethical awakening, a singularity of empathy that clarifies and refines

our values.”

Absolutely.

What what does that look like? How do you get there? And what are the

mechanisms by which such a world can function? How are disagreements

settled?

Thankfully we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. There’s a longstanding

movement that has been tackling these social and ethical issues, and

developing answers and analysis in depth for the last two centuries.

“Anarchism” as a term was launched by the French journalist

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon — a wildly popular reporter and columnist

comparable to our Glenn Greenwald today. It was adopted as a way of

highlighting and ripping apart the Orwellian use of “anarchy” to signify

both maximal freedom — the absence of rulership or of power relations —

and to also simultaneously mean chaotic violence, the presences of

competing would-be rulers and fractious power relations. This double use

in which the term “without rulership” or “anarchia” is used to instead

signify competing or fractured power relations has historically been

used to shut down any and all movements focused on liberty, most

famously against the peasants in the English Civil war. You want

freedom? We all know that freedom is chaotic violent oppression.

In this definition as promoted by the elites of the middle ages the very

idea of not controlling each other, not domineering each other, not

exploiting, thieving, or doing violence to each other, is written out of

our language itself. It is made impossible in some real sense to even

think.

Proudhon attacked that by returning the term to its etymological roots

and this helped set off two centuries of consistent diligent resistance

to power.

Anarchists have never taken power. We have resisted authoritarianism and

oppression in every arena. From calling out Marxism long before its

draconian aspirations became public record, to fighting and dying to

resist Fascism, fighting Franco until he couldn’t afford to join Hitler

and Mussolini and leading the resistance against the Nazis across

Europe. We’ve fought the robber barons, the czars, the oligarchs, and

the soviet bureaucrats.

And we’ve been extraordinarily popular in different regions at different

points in history, although we have not yet had sufficient critical mass

to completely transform the world. In every instance where anarchism

surged to localized popularity with a few million adherents, as in Spain

but also Ukraine and Manchuria, every surrounding power immediately put

their wars on hold to collaborate in snuffing out the examples we

provided of a better world, of better ways of interacting and settling

disputes with one another, that do not turn to control but build a

tolerable consensus for all parties when agreement is needed.

We’ve been at the forefront not just of technology like cryptocurrencies

and the tor project, but we’ve also been at the forefront of struggles

against patriarchy, racism, homophobia, ageism, ableism, etc, etc. Since

long before there were popular coalitions like “feminism”. We smuggled

guns to slaves and ran abolitionist journals. We’ve coursed through the

veins of our existing society, pioneering myriad social technologies

like credit unions and cooperatives. We’ve consistently served as the

radical edge of the world’s conscience, and played a critical role in

expanding what is possible while developing and field testing new

insights and tools.

Anarchism — as many commentators have noted — has served as the

laboratory of the left, of social justice and resistance movements

around the world. Even where we remain marginal, the tools we invent

eventually become mainstream.

You do not need to wonder how people would resolve conflicts if every

super-empowered individual was carrying the equivalent of a nuclear veto

in their pocket. We’ve been testing and developing social forms,

advanced game theoretic strategies that treat people that way for

ethical reasons alone.

We already represent the ethical framework most at home in navigating a

transhuman world of individual superempowerment. For all our ostensible

marginalization to the jungles of Chiapas or the streets of Athens,

we’ve been preemptively churning out the politics of the future for the

last two centuries.

But what this experience has also brought is an appreciation for the

function of power systems, their boring mechanical dynamics. The

sociopathic cancer of our power structures will not go quietly into the

night. There will not be some kind of awakening that makes our rulers

suddenly okay with surrendering their control over us. Allowing new

technologies to make them irrelevant. They will not passively sit back

and allow alternate infrastructures and cultures, new worlds to develop

in the shell of their old one. They have always fought any attempt at

this. And they will need to be fought for the future to win.

Anarchism brings a steely-eyed clarity to the landscape on which we

struggle.

It says that while state power can sometimes secure some changes, the

more you use it the harder it will be to dissolve that power itself.

Marxists pretended as though their end goal was a classless, stateless

utopia of maximal freedom, but the means they chose were incoherent with

this goal. You can’t gulag people into being free. And you can’t

regulate the tools people build while maintaining a commitment to

expanding their options in life, to making us “more than human.”

Ends and means are not precisely 1:1, but they are deeply

interconnected. And if anarchism — and our toolbox of respectful

autonomy and consent — is the only survivable, the only functional way

of handling the ultraviolet limit of expanded technological capacity,

then we cannot afford to move in opposing directions today. We must move

in ways that do not trade away the future for short-sighted

ameliorations.

We can’t afford, in short, to take steps backward, towards greater state

power, greater power even in the hands of corporate giants like Google,

in hopes that these monsters we feed to make our tasks easier today will

somehow “wither away” on their own accord. Somehow comply meekly as

technology impedes and resists the power they’ve grown accustomed to. We

must take the seemingly more difficult path forward, but one that

remains consistent.

But thankfully one of the other things anarchism makes clear is that we

do not have to raise huge legions of people to our side to win. A tiny

tiny minority can make a huge difference, can make it impossible for

control to function — can disrupt the rigidity and overextension

inherent to systems that attempt to control us.

When I was thirteen I put on a raincoat and trucked up the pacific coast

to streets of Seattle the last weekend in November, 1999. That day has

since become infamous. Our “victory” over the WTO ministerial has become

mythologized to a dangerous degree, but it’s worth conveying the

desperation we felt beforehand. In the 90s as it grew dramatically in

legal and economic strength unopposed, no one knew the WTO even existed.

The neoliberal vision it served was right out of 80s cyberpunk, one of

monopolistic corporate control, where capital could freely cross borders

to feedback in strength but people were left imprisoned in de facto

slave camps like Bangladesh and Eritrea. Of course this remains the

case. And today we have the TPP and many bilateral versions. But every

observer agrees the momentum of this process was severely stopped that

cold November day. Because a few hundred people fought in the streets,

raising such a ruckus that silent processes were derailed significantly.

The spectacle of street protest is of course, not a panacea, just a

tactic useful within only a limited context and timeframe. But it

reflects a broader reality, that we have many tools at our disposal that

utilize weak points in the overextended and rigid commitments that are

inherent to any system of control. And their inability to manage the

churning chaos of young students on the streets reflects how

computational complexity remain absolutely critical to political issues.

The information age has led to increasing complexity on many fronts

through feedbacking effects. The speed that information technology

provides to our memetic and cultural mutations has dramatically

increased the complexity of any number of things. Take humor for

example. Consider what was funny in the 1800s, the 1950s, the 1990s, and

what’s funny today. Hell let’s not forget that in the 1700s we thought

setting cats on fire was supreme entertainment.

The complexity of our culture, our identities, our narratives, our

relationships, and our politics have only accelerated. And with such

complexity comes the hope of a reduced capacity for control. It becomes

much harder for politicians or advertisers to sell simple universally

potent narratives. They already see increasingly diminishing returns and

lessened traction.

What this process of accelerating complexity represents is a social

singularity.

If the technological singularity is the point past which we can’t make

predictions or maintain control because the complexity of technological

developments exceeds our grasp then the social singularity is similarly

the point past which we can’t make predictions or maintain control

because the complexity of our culture, ideas, and relations will have

grown to rich, diverse, complex, organic, and meta.

Sure we might be able to unleash AI, but the greatest amount of

computational power on this planet is presently locked up in slums,

favelas, shantytowns, townships. We don’t have to wait on the

possibility of some hard takeoff in a decade or more. We just have to

unleash and better network the existing power of our minds.

Anarchism comprises a rich ecosystem of theoretical work that it would

be laughable to try and address briefly.

If you’re interested in game theory and collective action problems I

suggest reading Michael Taylor and Elinor Ostrom. If you’re interested

in the vast array of diseconomies of scale suppressed by the historical

subsidy of violence and the tendency of freed markets towards

egalitarian ends, I advise reading Kevin Carson. For polycentric legal

systems, David Friedman and Robert Murphy. We also have a stunningly

broad and deep discourse on methodologies and strategies when it comes

to the path or paths forward. Peter Gelderloos and David Graeber have

found some renown in this regard.

But at core anarchism is an ethical philosophy that seeks to expand

freedom. Its most famous commitments are political — the abolition of

the state, the abolition of centralized concentrations of coercive power

— but it extends further to, for example, critiques of control in

interpersonal relations as well as critiques of ideological rigidity. In

this respect transhumanism represents yet another arm of anarchism: a

focus on expanding freedom in physical terms and a critique of timid

retreat to some stultifying “human nature.”