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Title: An Anarcho-Transhumanist FAQ Author: Blueshifted Date: 2016 Language: en Topics: transhumanism; FAQ; future; the future Source: Retrieved on November 6, 2022 from http://blueshifted.net/faq/
The term “anarcho-transhumanism” is a relatively recently one, barely
mentioned in the 80s, publicly adopted in the early oughts and only
really popularized in the last decade. But it represents a current of
thought that has been present in anarchist circles and theory since
William Godwin[1], who tied the drive to perpetually improve and perfect
our social relations with the drive to perpetually improve and perfect
ourselves, our material conditions and our bodies.
The idea behind anarcho-transhumanism is a simple one:
We should seek to expand our physical freedom just as we seek to expand
our social freedom.
In this we see ourselves as the logical extension or deepening of
anarchism’s existing commitment to maximizing freedom.
“Transhumanism” is often shallowly characterized in the media merely in
terms of wanting to live literally forever, or wanting to upload one’s
mind to a computer, or fantasies of an self-improving AI suddenly
arriving and transforming the world to a paradise. And there are a
number of individuals attracted to these things. But the only defining
precept of transhumanism is that we should have more freedom to change
ourselves.
In this transhumanism opens up an attack on fixed essentialisms and is
part of a wider discourse in feminist and queer theory around cyborg
identities and “inhumanisms.” Transhumanism can be seen as either an
aggressive critique of humanism, or alternatively as an extension of
specific humanist values beyond the arbitrary species category of
“human.” Transhumanism demands that we interrogate our desires and
values beyond the happenstance of What Is, accepting neither the
authority of arbitrary social constructs like gender nor a blind fealty
to how our bodies presently function.
As one would expect, trans issues have been core to transhumanism from
the 1983 “Transhuman Manifesto” on. But transhumanism radically expands
on trans liberation to situate it as part of a much wider array of
struggles for freedom in the construction and operation of our bodies
and surrounding world. Anarcho-transhumanists work on immediately
practical projects that give people more control over their bodies like
abortion clinics, distributing naloxone, or 3D printing open source
prosthetics for children. But we also ask radical questions like why our
society is not only okay with the involuntary decay and death of the
elderly but moralizes for their perpetual extermination.
Life-extension is certainly not the entirety of transhumanism, but it is
an important example of a struggle that we’ve opened and shockingly
largely fight alone. The notion that an objectively “good life” extends
to seventy or a hundred years but no further is clearly arbitrary, and
yet such an opinion is both nearly universally held and violently
defended. Many early transhumanists were shocked by the bizarreness and
brazenness of this response, but it illustrates how people will become
staunch proponents of existing injustices for fear of otherwise having
to reconsider standing assumptions in their own lives. In the same way
that people will defend mandatory military service or murdering animals
for food, the arguments for death are clearly defensive
rationalizations:
“Death gives life its meaning.”
How is death at 70-years-old more meaningful than death at 5-years-old
or at 200-years-old? If an eighty-year-old woman gets to live and work
on her poetry for another five decades, does that really undermine your
capacity to find meaning so badly that you’d have her murdered?
“We would get bored.”
So let’s build a world that isn’t boring! Never mind the wild
possibilities embedded in both anarchism and transhumanism, it would
take almost three hundred thousand years to read every book in existence
today. There’s already 100 million recorded songs in the world.
Thousands of languages with their own ecosystems of conceptual
associations and poetry. Hundreds of fields to study on rich and
fascinating subjects. Vast arrays of experiences and novel relationships
to try. Surely we can do with a few more centuries at least.
“Old static perspectives would clog up the world.”
It’s a pretty absurd and horrifying to instinctively appeal to genocide
as the best means to solve the problem of people not being plastic in
their perspectives or identities. Over a hundred billion humans have
died since the dawn of homo sapiens. At best they were only able to
convey the tiniest sliver of their subjective experiences, their
insights and dreams, before everything else inside them was abruptly
snuffed out. People say that every time an elder dies it’s like a
library being burned to the ground. Well we’ve lost literally a 100
billion libraries over the course of homo sapiens. There are no doubt
infinite myriad ways we might live and change, but it would be strange
indeed if the sharp binary of sudden, massive and irreversible loss that
is currently standard was universally ideal.
This is an illustrative example in that it gets to the heart of what
transhumanism offers as an extension of anarchism’s radicalism: the
capacity to demand unexamined norms or conventions justify themselves,
to challenge things otherwise accepted.
Anarcho-Transhumanism breaks down many more of our operating assumptions
about the world, just as it seeks to expand and explore the scope of
what is possible. Radicalism is all about pressing our assumptions and
models into alien contexts and seeing what breaks down in order to
better clarify what dynamics are more fundamentally rooted and
anarcho-transhumanism seeks to advance anarchism through this kind of
clarification—to get it into a better fighting shape to deal with the
future. To make it capable of fighting in any situation, not just ones
highly specific to a given context.
It’s easy to say “all this talk of distant science fiction possibilities
is an irrelevant distraction while we have present struggles” and we
certainly don’t advocate abandoning the day-to-day of anarchist
resistance and infrastructure building, but it is forward thinking that
has often won us our biggest advances. Indeed it’s arguable that a great
deal of anarchism’s potency has historically derived from our correct
predictions. And this is a widespread pattern. While the internet is
obviously the site of major conflict today, many of the freedoms still
provided by it were won by radicals decades ago who were tracing out the
ramifications and importance of things long before the state and
capitalism caught up or grasped the ramifications of certain battles.
On the other hand, if there’s one takeaway from the last two centuries
of struggle it should be that it often takes radicals a really long time
to field responses to things. We’ve adapted very slowly to changing
conditions and at best it’s taken us a decade to try out various
approaches, settle on the good ones, and then popularize them. We have
an increasing tendency to dismiss futurism and instead just shrug and
say “we’ll solve that problem through praxis” but what that dismissal
really boils down to is: “we’ll figure it out through trial and error
when the shit hits the fan and we don’t really have time for years of
error and stumbling.”
A lot of folks are finally coming around to the realization that the
simplicity of our responses and our slow adaptation times have often
left us predictable to those in power, our instinctual short-sighted
responses already integrated into their plans, and thus our struggles
effectively start functioning like a pressure valve for society.
It might seem bizarre and disconnected to try and interrogate exactly
what anarchists really means by “freedom” when considering a context
where “selves” and “individuals” are not clearly defined and
conventional appeals to autonomy fall short. One might seek to dismiss
the present-day existence of twins conjoined at the brain who use
pronouns weirdly or people who experience multicameral minds as
“irrelevant” or “marginal” and dismiss brain-to-brain empathic
technologies as too distant to be worth even speaking of (never mind the
couples who’ve already utilized limited prototypes). But what dismissal
of anything beyond one’s present particular experience ends up doing is
confining anarchism to a parochial context, leaving it a superficial and
soon-to-be-antiquated historical tendency like Jacobism—incapable of
speaking more broadly or claiming any depth or rootedness to our ethical
positions.
If we get a hundred years down the line and anarchism becomes one of
those cobwebbed ideologies or religions that clings to old theoretical
frameworks and refuses to update itself to changes in what’s
technologically possible, the world will be losing a lot.
It’s important to be clear however: Proactive consideration of the
possible is not the same thing as small-minded prefiguration.
Anarcho-transhumanists are not making the mistake of demanding a single
specific future—laying out a blueprint and demanding that the world
comply. Rather what we advocate is the enabling of a multiplicity of
futures.
If we lived directly in the present with no reflection we wouldn’t be
self-aware. Mental recursion—modeling ourselves, others and our world—is
central to consciousness itself. What defines a mind as a mind is its
capacity to preemptively think a few steps ahead. To not just roll
immediately down the steepest slope like a rock, but to grasp our
context, the landscape of our choices and possible paths and sometimes
choose ones that don’t immediately satiate.
Sure, yes, there’s dangers of becoming ungrounded but there’s dangers to
everything if you do it stupidly. Futurism in no way obliges a
disconnect with the struggles of the present, but it does have
implications for what we prioritize in the present. For example,
refusing to accept a reform that might improve our lot in the short term
but seriously impede our capacity to struggle in the future. Liberals
are famous for their dismissal of the future,“In the long run we’re all
dead,” goes Keynes’ famous quote, an attitude which they use to justify
shortsighted actions like ecological devastation and granting the state
ever more power over our lives. There’s a sense in which sometimes we
have to improve our lot in the short term just to keep fighting, but we
must always be aware of what we’re trading away. Otherwise you get
anarchists supporting socialist politicians.
It’s not that there’s absolutely no chance we couldn’t get some kind of
democratic socialist utopia if we all really put our minds and bodies to
it that might immediately improve our lives, it’s that there’s a limit
on those improvements. And, once achieved, its authoritarian tendencies
might deepen and become even harder for future generations to overthrow.
Similarly a permanent collapse of civilization might improve the lives
of (a very few) survivors, but it would forever constrain our options
and aspirations to some scant freedoms.
If fascism is so powerful why hasn’t it totally triumphed? Our world
could be so much worse than it is. Despite all the things our enemies
have going for them—all the vast wealth and coercive force they’ve
accumulated, all the ideological and infrastructural control, all the
systemic planning and surveillance, all the ways humans are by default
inclined to cognitive fallacies, cruelty, and tribalism—they have
clearly been massively impeded on every front. And those societies or
movements that have sought to embrace the strengths of authoritarianism
more directly have failed. We—despite our own myriad shortcomings and
imperfections—have time and time again, won. The host of those in fealty
to absolute power, to mindless surrender and violent simplicity, are
legion. And yet we have crippled their ambitions, outflanked their
worldviews, bogged down their campaigns, sabotaged their projects,
creatively struck back, preempted them and changed the landscape out
from under their feet.
We are winning because free people are better inventors, better
strategists, better hackers, and better scientists. Where the
ideology—or rather infectious psychosis—of power fails is in its
necessary weakness at leveraging complexity. Power innately seeks to
constrain the possible, freedom is about unleashing it.
Having more tools available gives us more possible ways to approach a
problem. While the “choice” some tools provide is can be superficial and
of little causal depth or impact and choosing certain tools can shrink
choice in other regards, at the end of the day you can’t continuously
maximize freedom without also continuously expanding one’s toolset.
Expanded degrees of freedom from such tools empowers attackers over
defenders. When there are more avenues by which to attack and defend,
the attackers only need to choose one, the defenders need to defend all,
making the defense of rigid extended institutions and infrastructure
harder and harder.
Thus in the broadest lens technological development ultimately bends
towards empowering minorities to resist domination and makes cultural
habits of consensus and autonomy increasingly necessary—because in some
sense everyone gets a veto.
Similarly, information technologies unleash a positive feedback in
sociocultural complexity. While early crude information technologies
like radio or television were seized and controlled by the state and
capital to form a monopolistic infrastructure promoting monolithic
culture, the wild array of technologies we’ve blurred together as “the
internet” have come so fast as to resist this tendency and instead
promote an increasing hypercomplexity of fluid discourses and
subcultures.
This provides an amazing source of resistance because it makes
mass-control harder and harder. What is hip moves so fast and is so
diverse and contingent that politicians and businesses stumble more and
more when trying to exploit it.
Our feedbacking sociocultural complexity constitutes a Social
Singularity, a reflection of the Technological Singularity—a process
where collaboratively feedbacking technological insights and inventions
grow too fast to be predicted or controlled.
Silicon Valley is desperately trying to avoid the reality that the net
profitability of the entire advertising industry is in decline. Since
the advent of the internet people have begun wising up and advertisers
are having less and less impact on the whole. All that remains
marginally effective with the younger generations are more
individually-targeted outreach campaigns – think businesses trying to
get in the meme game or paying popular instragram teens to reference
their products. But these are clearly suffering diminishing returns.
When a hypercomplex teen fashion subculture constitutes 30 people it’s
no longer worth the energy for Doritos to try to target them.
primitivism’s?
Transhumanism isn’t a claim that all tools and applications of them
are—in all contexts—totally wonderful and without problematic aspects to
be considered, navigated, rejected, challenged, or changed. Nor is
transhumanism an embrace of all the infrastructure or norms of tool use
that currently exist. We do not argue that all technologies are positive
in every specific situation, that tools never have biases or
inclinations, or that some arbitrary specific set of “higher”
technologies should be imposed. Rather we merely argue that people
should have more agency and choices in how they engage with the world.
Being more informed and having a wider array of tools to choose from is
critical to this. Because in the most broad scope of things,
“technology” is just any means of doing things, and the definition of
freedom is having more options or means available to you.
Our realization is that—while there will inevitably be a lot of
contextual complications in practice—at the end of the day we want more
options in life and in the universe. In much the same way that
anarchists have argued for having as many different tactics available to
us as possible. Sometimes one tactic or tool will be better for a job,
sometimes not. But expanding freedom ultimately necessitates expanding
technological options.
What’s deplorable about our current condition is the way that
technologies are suppressed until all we are allowed is a single
technological monoculture, often with some very sharp biases. On the one
hand this comes through the suppression and erasure of more simple or
primitive technologies but on the other hand it comes through the
vicious slowing or curtailment of technological development thanks to
Intellectual Property laws and myriad other injustices. Similarly the
conditions of capitalism and imperialism distort what technologies are
more profitable and thus what research is poured into.
That does not mean that technological inventions under capitalism are
innately corrupted or useless. And it certainly doesn’t mean that we
should start entirely from fresh cloth, ignoring all discoveries and
knowledge accumulated along our trajectory.
But many of the industries and commodity forms that are standardized in
our existing society would be unsustainable and undesirable in a
liberated world.
For example: There are hundreds of ways to make photovoltaic solar
panels, but when the People’s Republic of China uses slave labor and
eminent domain to seize, strip and poison vast swathes of land they end
up lowering the cost of certain rare earth minerals—and thus making
money flow more towards research in photovoltaic approaches that use
such artificially cheap rare earths than towards alternative viable
research branches using more common materials. Similarly, two centuries
ago—using not much more than simple mirrors—Augustin Mouchot
demonstrated a fully functional and (at the time) cost-efficient solar
steam engine at the world’s fair. It would have gone into mass
production had the British not won battles in India enabling them to
enslave large populations in coal extraction and dramatically drive down
coal prices.
These are not crackpot claims but historical facts. Institutional
violence frequently alters the immediate profitability of certain lines
of research versus others. Canadian miners are replaced by Congolese
slaves working in horrific open pit coltan mines.
Primitivism oversimplifies the situation, saying that what exists must
necessarily be the only way to enable certain technologies. It also
frequently implies a single linear arc of development where everything
is dependent upon everything else, ignoring the often great latitude and
diversity of options along the way and failing to investigate the vast
potential for reconfiguration.
Any discussion of “civilization” is necessarily going to involve a
sweeping and over-simplistic narratives. Our actual history is far more
rich and complicated than any tale of simple historical forces can
account for. Systems of power have been with us for a long time and are
deeply enmeshed in almost every aspect of our society, our culture, our
interpersonal relations, and our material infrastructure. But if we’re
to speak of some kind of characteristic or fundamental “culture of
cities” it’s begging the question to write domination in from the start.
There have always been constraining power dynamics in every human
society from hunter-gatherers on up. While larger scale societies have
naturally made possible more showy expressions of domination, such is
not inherent.
Throughout the historical record cities have been quite diverse in their
degrees of internal hierarchy and relations with surrounding societies
and environments. A number of city cultures left no trace of hierarchy
or violence. What should be remembered is that by definition more
egalitarian and anarchistic city societies didn’t waste energy building
giant monuments or waging wars, and thus are naturally going to be less
prominent in the historical record available to us. Further, because we
currently live under an oppressive global regime, it goes without saying
that at some point any more libertarian societies had to have been
conquered and we know that victors often intentionally destroy all
records. Similarly, non-anarchist historians have leaped to assume that
the presence of any social coordination or technological invention in
egalitarian and peaceful city-cultures like Harrappa proves the presence
of some state-like authority—even when there’s zero sign of it and
strong indications to the contrary.
Urban concentrations arose in some places like the British Isles prior
to agriculture. Indeed in many places around the globe where the land
could not support permanent cities people nevertheless struggled to come
together in greater numbers whenever and for however long they could
manage it. Frequently early societies would be both hunter-gatherers and
temporary city dwellers, transitioning back and forth with the seasons.
This does not remotely fit an account of cities as solely runaway
concentrations of wealth and power—a single cancerous mistake. If cities
were such a bad idea why do people with other options keep voluntarily
choosing them?
The answer of course is that living in large numbers increases the
social options available to individuals, opening up a much greater
diversity of possible relationships to choose from.
Instead of being confined to a tribe of a hundred or two hundred
people—and maybe a nearby tribe or two—living in a city enables people
to form affinities with those beyond their happenstance of birth, to
organically form their own tribes by choice. Or better still shed off
the limiting insularity of closed social clusters. There’s no good
reason your friends should all be forced to be friends with each other
as well. Cities enable individuals to form a vast panoply of relations
extending off in far larger and richer networks.
Such cosmopolitanism enables and encourages the empathy necessary to
transcend tribal or national othering. It expands our horizons, enabling
mutual aid on incredible scales, and helping flourish far richer
cultural and cognitive ecosystems than ever possible before. If there is
any single defining characteristic “culture of cities” or “civilization”
it is thus one of wild anarchy, of unleashed complexity and possibility.
What we want is a world with the teeming connectedness of
cosmopolitanism, but without the centralization and sedentary
characteristics of many “civilizations” so far. We want to fulfill the
promise and radical potential of cities that led humans to voluntarily
form them again and again throughout history.
It’s true that our present infrastructure and economy is incredibly
brittle, destructive and unsustainable—in many ways serving and
intertwined with oppressive social systems. But there are so many other
forms yet possible. Our global civilization is not some magical whole,
but a vast and complex battlefield of many competing forces and
tendencies.
The “inevitability” of the supposedly coming collapse is in fact itself
quite brittle. Any number of single developments could massively derail
it. An abundance of cheap clean energy for example, or an abundance of
cheap rare metals. Each would lead to the other as cheap energy means
more cost effective metals recycling and cheap metals means cheaper
batteries and expanded access to energy sources like wind. The earth is
not a closed system and for example several major corporations are now
racing to seize nearby asteroids so rich in rare metals they would crash
the metals markets and shutter nearly every mine on the planet.
And let’s note that it is highly unlikely such a collapse would return
us to an idyllic eden. Many centers of power would likely survive,
almost nowhere would fall below iron-age technology, billions would die
horrifically, and the sudden burst of ecological destruction would be
incredible. It even turns out that the spread of forests in northern
latitudes would perversely end up making global warming worse because
trees are ultimately poor carbon sinks and changes to the Earth’s albedo
(from darker forests) cause it to absorb more energy from the sun.
No matter the odds we must fight against the unfathomable holocaust of a
collapse. We have an obligation to struggle, to have some agency in our
future and our environment, and to take some responsibility for it. Only
with science and technology will we be able to repair ancient disasters
like the Sahara, manage the decommissioning of horrors, and rewild most
of the Earth.
This is just wrong. If you read in any depth on green technologies the
actual scientists working on them aren’t somehow myopic idiots that have
systemically overlooked life-cycle analyses. They do consider things
like concrete, transportation costs, and energy storage density.
Capitalists love to greenwash absurdities in shallow press releases, but
the actual scientific discourse on green energy covers dramatic changes
in orders of magnitude. Highly plausible reductions in footprint by a
factor of 100x or 1000x would constitute a monumental difference, not
some trivial reform. Humans have always had an effect on our environment
and the Earth’s ecosystems have never beens static. Our goal should not
be some unchanging and sharply constrained lifestyle with literally zero
footprint but to enable our ingenuity and exploration in ways that don’t
bulldoze the Earth.
If we put a small fraction of the current hydrocarbon energy into solar
we’ll have enough power to replace it. It’s possible to get incredibly
high power from solar using even 1800s technology of mirrors and steam
pipes. There are a great many condensed battery options and more being
developed, things like high-density biochemical storage, etc. Meanwhile
photovoltaic has leaped past every supposed barrier and diversified the
materials necessary, including quite simple approaches with tiny
ecological footprints. The energy return on solar is close to 12x and is
rocketing upward. It’s gotten to the point where governments like Spain
have outlawed private use of solar without paying a steep tax to keep
fossil fuels and centralized grids competitive—they’ve even started
conducting fully armed swat raids of houses with solar panels.
While nuclear still caries many extremely negative associations among
the 80s ecopunk set, many of these concerns are only valid in the
context of cold-war-style reactors. Specifically reactors that were
built to be highly centralized, state-run and only work with material
that would produce weaponizable byproducts. On the other hand many
liquid fluoride thorium reactor designs have literally no capacity to
meltdown, run on a radioactive material already naturally in poisonous
abundance on the earth’s surface and leave remains with relatively quite
low half-lifes.
Similarly, while some specious reporting on “cold fusion” and
overenthusiastic claims about normal fusion in the 80s turned fusion
into a laughingstock on late night television, it remains a reasonable
and known source of incredible clean energy only limited by engineering
challenges rather than any issues of basic science. And recent history
has been littered with a chain of incremental successes and benchmarks
passed.
While all these may provide cheap energy, the only way we’ll reverse
global warming at this point is with carbon negative technologies that
leave behind solid carbon as a byproduct. There are many already proven
means of doing this from ancient gassification technologies to an array
of algae farming approaches.
That none of these have been widely adopted is political. State violence
subsidizes our incredibly inefficient infrastructure because such props
up centralized large-scale economic entities. Similarly, much of our
energy consumption presently goes toward war and frivolities, supply and
demand are aggressively distorted, and the environmental costs have been
systematically shifted away from certain companies and industries.
It does not have to be this way. Technological development innately
expands options and so it should come as no surprise that our recent
technological innovation has moved away from massive centralized
hamfisted infrastructural structures and towards organic, decentralized
and reconfigurable approaches along the lines of 3D-printing and open
source.
currently do not exist?
There’s a profound and all-important distinction between “physically
doable but not yet engineered” and “who knows.”
Let’s say that no one has ever yet built an upside-down treehouse. No
one has even designed an upside-down treehouse. Yet you immediately
recognize that such a thing is doable. One would have to draft a design,
figure out a good way to deal with some challenges (the base or “floor”
of the structure that faces upward will obviously have to be lined with
some water-resistant material) and then build it. And maybe it’d be
quirky all upside-down looking and your kids would get a kick out of it.
But the point is this: we don’t have to argue over whether or not it
might be “impossible” to build. The problems, such as they are, are
engineering/building/doing-the-math problems, they’re problems that
might take shorter or longer than we forecast to accomplish, but they
can be done.
Most of the things we’ve been talking about fall very far to the doable
side of the spectrum—there’s no chance they’re prevented by physics,
mathematics, chemistry or the like—we’re not talking about wormholes,
for example. They’re merely engineering problems, albeit challenging
ones. That plenty of experts are cranking away at and that the
established consensus is confident about. Asteroid mining for example is
like satellites in the 50s were. We know we can do it, we know it will
pay off, we just have to fucking do the mounds of busywork in our way
first.
None of this is “magic”, what we’ve been talking about is very simple,
very conservative sorts of “well this will obviously be possible” kind
of stuff. Estimates of how long until naturally get subjective, but it
requires conspiratorial science-denialism to pretend that engineering
robots to mine will somehow be impossibly hard or require equivalent
amounts of human labor.
direct lives?
All causal interactions are “mediated.” The air mediates the sound of
our voices. The electromagnetic field and any intervening material
mediates our capacity to see. Culture and language mediates what
concepts can be expressed with clarity.
You may think this a “trivial” point but it’s a deep one. It’s hard to
provide an objective metric of just what counts as “more mediation” and
it’s harder still to try and claim such a metric means something.
There is no such thing as “direct experience.” To see anything requires
an immense amount of processing as raw signals are processed by neural
columns in our visual cortex into ever more abstract signals. Artifacts
from this processing can be found in optical illusions and patterned
hallucinations. And in turn our experiences shape what pattern
recognition circuits form with what strengths. To experience “directly”
without mediation would be to not experience or think at all.
Sure one can try to distinguish between “human created” mediation and
not, but such a distinction has no fundamental correlation with how
viscerally or accurately we experience things. While there’s a different
flavor of danger to someone tapping or censoring your community mesh
wifi network, such interference or sabotage applies in various ways to
all our means of communication, including cultural and linguistic
constructs.
It’s nonsensical to talk of “more” mediation rather than different
flavors with different contextual benefits and drawbacks. Even John
Zerzan wears eye glasses to better his overall capacity to visually
experience and engage with the world around him. In many ways modern
technologies can be used to expand the depth and richness of our
engagement with nature and each other.
Transhumanism is a quite simple position and so there’s a wide array
people who’ve been attracted to it. Inevitably some of them are
obnoxious, shortsighted, naive, or reactionary.
Thankfully a good chunk of the reactionary contingent abandoned
transhumanism when they finally realized how inextricable the liberatory
components were. “The death of the gender binary? That’s not what I
signed up for!” Many of these idiots have gone onto form a
fascism-for-nerds cult/fandom called “neoreaction” as part of the
alt-right. In a particularly revealing reversal many now hope for and
advocate the collapse of civilization. They expect this will lead to a
post apocalyptic landscape where their absurd notions of biological
essentialism reign supreme—where “Real Alpha Men” rule as warlords and
the rest of us are used for raping, slaving, or hunting. Or where we are
forced back to tribal-scale relations, better enabling (small scale)
nationalistic identity, interpersonal hierarchies and traditionalism.
Others envision small corporate fiefdoms and some kind of AI god that
will help them maintain their desired hierarchies by stopping oppressed
groups from gaining, understanding, or developing technology.
Obviously these fascists can go die in a fire. We’re glad they’ve left
transhumanism and hope to make any remaining ilk of theirs follow.
Sadly while the outright reactionaries have left, a majority of
transhumanists still presently identify with liberalism, state
socialism, social democracy, and similar technocratic cults of power.
The most infamous instance is Zoltan Istvan who simultaneously ran for
president and biggest embarrassment in transhumanism.
Obviously we find non-anarchist transhumanists to be politically naive
at best and dangerous as hell at worst, but we also think that
transhumanism without anarchism is a totally untenable position.
A world where everyone has increased physical agency is a world where
individuals are superempowered and are thus obliged to solve
disagreements through consensus as though everyone has a veto rather
than through the coercion of majoritarian democracy.
To provide people with tools but also somehow also try to top-down
restrict or control what they can do with those tools or what else they
can invent is basically impossible without implementing an absurdly
extreme authoritarian system that suppresses almost all function of
those tools. This can be seen in the struggle to impose and enforce
“intellectual property” on the internet, or the war against general
purpose computing. In this sense all statist transhumanists fall short
of transhumanist ideals due to their lingering fear of liberty and
superempowered proles.
On a philosophical level it’s impossible to reconcile transhumanism’s
embrace of greater agency in our bodies and environment with
simultaneously advocating for oppressive social institutions that
broadly constrain our agency.
This difference of values crops up in a number of differences. We’re
obviously a lot less sanguine about letting states and capitalists
monopolize control or development of new technologies and we support
serious resistance to both attack their centralized infrastructure and
liberate their research and tools for everyone. Killing Google is of
paramount importance.
Lastly there’s a quite disappointing current in non-anarchist
transhumanist circles that focuses on the development of artificial
intelligence rather than the liberation and empowerment of the billions
of minds already on this planet. If we want an explosion of intelligence
then the surer and quicker path would be to liberate and empower all the
potential Einsteins currently trapped in slums, favelas, open mines and
fields around the world. Further, it’s rather terrifying that the
default approach to AI has largely been “how can we most effectively
control/enslave it?” If we are to have such children they deserve
compassion and liberty.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism?
We’re not Marxists but anarchists and thus our analysis goes deeper than
mere political economy. Anarchists focus on tackling domination and
constraint on every level, not just the macroscopic or institutional.
And as anarchists we want more than a merely classless society, we want
a world without power relations—our ethical analysis extends to
challenging interpersonal dynamics of power including more complex,
subtle, informal, or even mutual relationships of domination and
constraint.
While we share their aspirations for a world where the efficiencies of
technologies lead to a world of abundance and liberated from the
drudgery of work it’s impossible as anarchists to accept their
prescription of “verticalism.” We likewise oppose short-sighted
immediatism but find in the details of their “strategy” many of the the
same old Marxist reflexes looking to establish an elite who will run the
revolution/society.
This allegiance leads them to sympathize with and misidentify aspects of
our world, suggesting that certain corporate and state structures
reflect necessary hierarchies rather than wasteful cancers propped up by
systemic violence and actually actively suppressing science and
technological development.
More broadly Marxism shares a troubling tendency with its ideological
offshoot Primitivism to speak in mystical terms of macroscopic
abstractions like “capitalism” or “civilization.” In their analysis
these entities are imbued a kind of agency or intentionality and
everything within them is seen as constituent dynamics serving a greater
whole, rather than as conflicting and rearrangeable. This often blinds
both ideologies to the aspects of better world now growing in the shell
of the old, as well as opportunities for meaningful resistance and
positive change that aren’t exclusively cataclysmic total breaks.
Very strongly! Anarchist biohackers have worked on projects like getting
yeast to produce the critical milk enzymes in normal cheese—just put
yeast in a warm vat with sugar and let it fall out! Others have for
example worked on custom algae production that provides many times more
efficient ways to produce useful protein and carbs from sunlight than
conventional agriculture, removing even the death toll from tractor
operation.
Even further out, in the long run after rewilding the majority of the
planet, a more aware stewardship of our ecosystems might enable us to
make tweaks that reduce net suffering. Or even find out how to talk to
Dolphins and persuade them not to be such murderous rapist dicks.
differently abled and non-neurotypical?
As you would expect the transhumanist and anarcho-transhumanist position
is to let a billion physical and cognitive architectures bloom! We want
to radically attack and remove stigmas and constraining social norms so
that a great diversity of experiences can be lived without oppression.
At the same time we also want to provide people with the tools to
exercise control over their bodies, minds and life conditions. It should
be up to everyone individually to determine what might constitute an
oppressive impairment in their own lives… or something that’s a part of
their identity and unique life experience.
Ultimately we seek to queer the distinction between “impairment” and
“augmentation” as well as between “want” and “need.” No “baseline”
should be oppressively normalized.
Blue has a long history as a symbol of the future. Blue is the color of
the sky and the seas, distant horizons to be explored. Blue pigment is
very rare in nature, with blue roses and blue flowers more generally
signifying the artificial, the futuristic, the hopeful, and the
infinite. Blue is overwhelmingly the characteristic color used in
science fiction.
Blue also widely connotes acceleration and speed more generally, with
all other colors “blue shifting” when an observer accelerates towards an
object.
Of course most simply and obviously we choose blue a decade and a half
ago because on the color wheel of anarchist schools it was the last
major color unclaimed. We wanted to establish and defend our ideas and
aspirations in a way that didn’t follow the traditional 90s-era red v
green arguments. It was important to differentiate ourselves from more
conventional currents of syndicalism and communism, without trying to
negate or dominate the existing representations of those. Many of us are
enthusiastic about very classic aspirations shared by Kropotkin and
Bookchin, others are post-leftists intensely critical of
organizationalism and ideological rigidity, others come from more
market-oriented traditions like mutualism. But many of those differences
are orthogonal to our shared focus on physical conditions and
technological means.
The most interesting debate is ultimately not over nineteenth century
economic systems but over how we want to live in the universe and what
our values should be with respect to it. In the green v blue debate we
feel it’s pleasingly apropo that the the primitivists take the color of
the earth and us the color of the sky.
Of course it must be noted that in many other contexts color symbolism
can vary and in a number of countries – with some quite notable
exceptions – where political parties express their orientation in color,
blue is often claimed by conservatives. But so too in statist political
spectacle are other colors claimed by deplorable bastards. Black by
fascism. Red by tankies and nazis. Pink by social democrats. We don’t
feel any need to care about the internal color schemes of our enemies
any more than they care about the internal color schemes of anarchists.
Our politics are obviously the exact opposite of conservatism.
[1] Godwin is frequently cited as the first prominent anarchist in
modern times — although PJ Proudhon would later be the first to
explicitly use the term. Godwin was a prominent philosopher and
utilitarian, but was eclipsed by his partner and lover Mary
Wollstonecraft (often cited as the first modern feminist), and their
daughter Mary Shelley (often cited as the first science fiction author).
Godwin called for the abolition of the state, capitalism, and many other
forms of oppression, but also bundled these in with calls for the
radical extension of technological capacity, including many farseeing
possibilities like life-extension and the defeat of death. Godwin was
just one of a great many historical anarchists who spoke in sharply
transhumanist terms. Voltairine de Cleyre for instance praised the
development of greater technological freedoms and saw the end goal as
“an ideal life, in which men and women will be as gods, with a gods
power to enjoy and to suffer.”