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Title: Anarchy and Transhumanism Author: William Gillis Date: 2021 Language: en Topics: transhumanism Source: The Routledge Handbook of Anarchy and Anarchist Thought
The term “anarcho-transhumanism” is a relatively recently one, barely
mentioned in the 1980s, publicly adopted in the early 2000s 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 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.
Anarcho-transhumanists see their position as the logical extension or
deepening of anarchism’s
existing commitment to maximizing freedom. And the term “morphological
freedom” is widely
used by transhumanists of many varieties as a label for the positive
freedom to alter one’s body or
material conditions.
Transhumanism is often shallowly characterized in the media in terms of
the desire to live for-
ever, the desire to upload one’s mind to a computer, or a fantasy in
which a self-improving arti-
ficial intelligence (AI) suddenly arrives and transforms the world into
a paradise. And, of course,
some people are attracted to these goals. But the only defining precept
of transhumanism is that
we should have more freedom to change ourselves and our environment.
Transhumanism thus challenges essentialist definitions of the “human”
and is sometimes
framed as part of a wider discourse in feminist and queer theory
concerned with 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, transgender issues have been at the core of
transhumanism from the
start. 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 the
surrounding world. A number of anarcho-transhumanists work on
immediately practical projects
that give people more control over their bodies—the operation of
abortion clinics, the distribu-
tion of naloxone, or the 3D printing of open-source prosthetics for
children. But transhumanists
also ask radical questions like: Why is it not only the case that our
society is okay with the involuntary
decay and death of the elderly but also that it moralizes in support of
their perpetual extermination?
The struggle for life extension is certainly not the entirety of
transhumanism, but it is an
important example of the kind of campaign transhumanists initiated and
continue, shockingly, to
fight largely alone. The notion that an objectively “good life” extends
to seventy or a hundred
years but no further is clearly arbitrary, and yet the opinion that it
does is both nearly universally
held and violently defended. Many early transhumanists were shocked by
this response, but it
illustrates how people can easily become staunch defenders of existing
catastrophes 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—and rational responses are
easy to formulate:
more meaningful than
death at five years old or at two hundred 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 prefer to see her murdered?
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 are already 100 million recorded songs in the world. There are
thousands of languages
with their own conceptual ecosystems and their own poetry. There are
hundreds of fields of
inquiry, rich and fascinating, in which to immerse yourself. There are
vast arrays of
experiences and novel kinds of relationships to explore. Surely we can
do with a few more
centuries at least.
absurd and horrifying to
instinctively appeal to genocide as the best means to solve the problem
of the rigidity of
people’ perspectives or identities. Over a hundred billion humans have
died since the arrival
of Homo sapiens on the scene. 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’s being
burned to the ground. We’ve already lost 100 billion libraries! 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 were
universally ideal.
Life extension is an illustrative example that gets to the heart of what
transhumanism offers as
a continuation of anarchism’s radicalism: the capacity to demand that
unexamined norms or
conventions justify themselves, to challenge things otherwise accepted.
Anarcho-transhumanism breaks down many other common operating
assumptions about the
world, just as it seeks to expand and explore the scope of what is
possible. Radicalism is all about
pressing assumptions and models into alien contexts and seeing what
breaks down in order to
better clarify what dynamics are more fundamentally rooted.
Anarcho-transhumanism seeks to
advance anarchism through this kind of clarification—to get it into
better fighting shape so it can
deal more effectively with the future, to make it capable of fighting in
all situations, not just
those specific to particular contexts.
It’s easy to say “all this talk of distant science fiction possibilities
is an irrelevant distraction.” Anarcho-
transhumanists certainly don’t advocate abandoning the day-to-day of
anarchist struggles and
infrastructure-building. But it is forward thinking that has often won
anarchism its biggest
advances. Indeed, it’s arguable that a great deal of anarchism’s potency
has historically derived
from its correct predictions. And this is a widespread pattern. While
the Internet is obviously the site of major conflicts today, many of the
freedoms still provided by it were won decades ago by
radicals who were tracing out the ramifications and importance of social
phenomena and institu-
tions 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
new developments. Anarch-
ists have adapted very slowly to changing conditions. It’s frequently
taken a decade or more for
anarchists to try out various approaches, settle on the good ones, and
proceed to popularize
them. Today, radical leftists have an increasing tendency to dismiss
futurism and instead just
shrug and say, “We’ll solve that problem through praxis.” But what that
dismissal often 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.”
Theorists and activists are finally coming around in large numbers to
the realization that the
simplicity of radicals’ responses and their slow adaptation times have
often left them predictable
to those in power, their instinctual responses already integrated into
rulers’ and bosses’ plans,
with the result that their struggles effectively serve as pressure
valves for society—inadvertently
helping to sustain existing institutions and practices rather than
undermining or transforming
them.
It might seem bizarre and disconnected to try to determine exactly what
anarchists really
means by “freedom” in a technological context in which “selves” and
“individuals” are not
clearly defined and conventional appeals to autonomy fall short. One
might seek to dismiss the
relevance of various contemporary phenomena to the project of rethinking
the nature of human-
ness and human connection—of twins conjoined at the brain who use
pronouns unconventionally. It might seem easy to treat multicameral
minds as “irrelevant” or “marginal” or to treat the
possibility of brain-to-brain empathic technologies as too remote to be
worth even considering
(never mind the couples who’ve already utilized limited prototypes). But
dismissing anything
beyond one’s present, particular experience serves to confine anarchism
to a parochial context,
leaving it a superficial and soon-to-be-antiquated historical
tendency—incapable of speaking
more broadly or claiming any depth or rootedness in our ethical
positions.
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—of laying out a blueprint and
demanding that the world
comply. Rather, they advocate the enabling of a multiplicity of futures.
William Godwin is frequently identified as the first prominent anarchist
in modern times,
although Pierre-Joseph Proudhon would later be the first person to use
the term “anarchist.”
Godwin was a prominent utilitarian philosopher and novelist, but was
eclipsed by his partner
Mary Wollstonecraft (often identified as the first modern feminist), and
their daughter Mary Shel-
ley (often identified as the first science fiction novelist). Godwin
called for the abolition of the
state, capitalism, and many other forms of oppression, but also linked
his emancipatory agenda
with farseeing calls for the radical extension of technological
capacity, considering possibilities
including life extension and the defeat of death.
Godwin was just one of 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 god’s power to enjoy and to suffer.” [1] And talk of the gradual
transformation of both
humanity and our environment has been common throughout anarchist ranks
historically.
One of the most prominent popularizers of anarchism, Errico Malatesta,
framed anarchism as a never-ending march towards greater freedom: What
matters, he declared, “is not whether
we accomplish Anarchism today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but
that we walk
towards Anarchism today, tomorrow, and always.” [2]
Anarchists as early as Joseph DĂ©jacque dabbled in wild science fiction,
describing future worlds
with machines that automated doing the laundry, washing the dishes,
etc., and many pressed further
still. In particular, Russian anarchists and socialists just prior to
the Bolshevik revolution embraced
a wide variety of avant-garde movements with extreme technoscientific
aspirations. Most striking
among these was the Cosmist movement. Cosmist thinkers advocated radical
life extension, the
merging of human and machine, and the spread of consciousness beyond
Earth. While many Cos-
mists were socialists rather than anarchists and were eventually
consumed by the USSR, influencing
both the space race and Soviet culture, their slogans like “Storm the
Heavens and Conquer Death”
have been widely adopted by anarcho-transhumanists today.
Though the sweeping term “cybernetics” is less used today by scientists,
a self-conscious
“cybernetics” movement attracted considerable attention and intellectual
energy from the 1950s
through to the 1970s. This movement was often seen as split between the
military-industrial
complex camp and the radical socialist or anti-authoritarian camp. But
the political divide was in
practice more messy. For instance, the anarchist Walter Pitts, a
homeless runaway who raised
money for the fight against Franco, became one of the founders of
cognitive science. Many of
the themes of cybernetics, like feedback and self-organizing complex
systems, were obviously
directly in line with anarchist thinking and have been cited and
referenced by anarchists within
the more mainstream activist milieu.
Those in the open-source and free-software movements have often derived
transhumanist
implications from their ideals. What if the kind of freedom exemplified
by free software were
applied to everything? What if our bodies and environmental conditions
were made as open-
source and reconfigurable as we’d like our computers to be? Many
anarcho-transhumanists today
see their transhumanism as simply an extension of the values of openness
and user agency that
drive the free-software (and free-hardware) movement.
There are of course a number of broad transhumanist themes in the
broader society that have
influenced different lineages of anarcho-transhumanists. They range from
common notions of
“Prometheanism” to interpretations of Nietzsche to Afrofuturism to
countless sub-currents of
feminist and queer thought.
The majority of anarchists around the world are activists who work in
immediate struggles from
feeding the homeless to resisting immigration-restriction regimes. It is
unsurprising, then, that
their foci are primarily practical. The most common objection made by
many anarchist activists
to anarcho-transhumanism is that focusing on the future takes away from
transformative practice
in the present. This is often bundled with critiques common on the
modern left of the “abstract”
and calls to center political practice and theory on “everyday life.”
Yet it’s worth considering the ultimate conclusion of such an
orientation. 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 proactively to think a few steps ahead—to avoid
rolling immediately down
the steepest slope like a rock, but instead to grasp our context, the
landscape of our choices and
possible paths, and sometimes to choose ones that don’t immediately
satiate.
There is always the danger of becoming ungrounded; but futurism in no
way obliges
a disconnect with the struggles of the present. It does, however, 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, an attitude which they use to justify
short-sighted actions like
ecological devastation and granting the state ever more power over our
lives. There’s a sense in
which we sometimes need to improve our lot in the short term just to
keep fighting, but we
must always be aware of what we’re trading away.
A democratic socialist utopia might immediately improve most people’s
lives. And perhaps we
might be able to realize such a utopia if we all really worked hard to
achieve it. But there’s
a limit on the improvements a state-based solution could achieve. And,
once such a putative
utopia was in place, its authoritarian tendencies might deepen, with the
result that it becomes
even harder for future generations to overthrow.
In addition to illuminating challenges on the road ahead,
anarcho-transhumanism offers direct
insights into our daily struggles and our continuing resistance against
the state.
If fascism is so powerful, why hasn’t it totally triumphed? Our world
could be so much worse
than it is. Despite all the sources of contemporary elites’ power—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. Anti-authoritarians—despite myriad shortcomings and
imperfections—have won time and
time again. The host of those in fealty to absolute power, to mindless
surrender and violent sim-
plicity, are legion. And yet grassroots activists 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.
Free people are better inventors, better strategists, better hackers,
and better scientists,
exhibiting the very tendencies transhumanism embraces—tendencies of
abstraction, reflection,
and churn. The ideology of power fails because of its necessary weakness
at leveraging com-
plexity. Philosophies of control innately seek to constrain the
possible; freedom is about
unleashing it.
Having more tools means having more ways to approach a problem. The
“choices” some
tools provide can be superficial and can exert limited impact. Choosing
certain tools can shrink
the range of available choices in other ways. But, at the end of the
day, it’s not possible to maxi-
mize freedom without also continuously expanding one’s toolset.
Expanded degrees of freedom in technics typically empower attackers over
defenders. When
there are more avenues by which to attack and defend, the attackers only
need to choose one,
while the defenders need to defend all, with the result that the defense
of rigid, extended institu-
tions and infrastructure proves 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 positive feedback loops and
increase sociocultural
complexity. While early, crude information technologies, like radio and
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” has empowered
people to resist this tendency and promoted an increasing complexity 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. Anarcho-transhumanists
have argued that this feedbacking sociocultural complexity constitutes
a Social Singularity, a reflection of the Technological Singularity—a
process in virtue of which
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, on the whole, advertisers are exerting less and less impact. All
that remains marginally effect-
ive with the younger generations are more individually-targeted outreach
campaigns—think
businesses trying to get in the meme game or paying popular Instagram
teens to reference their
products. But these approaches are clearly yielding diminishing returns.
When a hypercomplex
teen fashion subculture comprises thirty people it’s no longer worth the
energy for corporations
to try to target them.
Those anarchists skeptical of prediction and strategy, who instead focus
on “everyday life” and
the immediate, often frame their hostility to abstractions as part of a
wider rejection of
“mediation.” Yet it’s worth emphasizing that all causal interactions are
“mediated.” The air
mediates the sounds of our voices. The electromagnetic field and any
intervening material
mediate our capacity to see. Culture and language mediate the concepts
we seek to express. This
may seem like a trivial point, but it’s a deep one. It’s hard to provide
an objective metric of just
what counts as “more” or “less” mediation, and it’s harder still to try
and claim that 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 transformed by neural columns in our
visual cortices into ever
more abstract signals. Artifacts from this processing can be found in
optical illusions and pat-
terned 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.
One can certainly try to distinguish between “human created” mediation
and other varieties,
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 Wi-Fi 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 an anarcho-primitivist like John
Zerzan wears eye glasses
to improve his overall capacity to visually experience and engage with
the world around him. In
this respect he’s a transhumanist. In many ways modern technologies can
be used to expand the
depth and richness of our engagement with nature and each other.
For the most part, anarcho-transhumanism emerged as an explicit response
to anarcho-
primitivism; many anarcho-transhumanists in the early aughts were former
primitivists. As
a result, unlike the broader transhumanist movement, which tends to
engage minimally or not at
all with primitivist critiques, anarcho-transhumanism was founded in
many ways as a response to
primitivist concerns.
Anarcho-transhumanism emphasizes that transhumanism isn’t a claim that
all tools and appli-
cations 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.
Transhumanists hardly imagine
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 on
everyone. Rather, transhumanists merely argue that people should have
more agency and
choices with regard to the ways in which they engage with the world.
Being more informed and having a wider array of tools to choose from is
critical. In the
broadest sense, “technology” is just any means of doing things, and
freedom is the availability of
more options or means.
While they recognize there will inevitably be a lot of contextual
complications in practice, at
the end of the day transhumanists want more options in life and in the
universe, In much the
same way that anarchists have argued for the availability of as many
different tactics 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 in which
technologies are sup-
pressed until all we are allowed is a single technological monoculture,
often with some very
sharp biases. On the one hand, more simple or primitive technologies are
suppressed or
erased. On the other, technological development is viciously slowed or
curtailed 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 lines of research
are pursued.
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 instance: There are many ways to make photovoltaic solar panels, but
when the People’s
Republic of China reportedly uses slave labor and eminent domain to
seize, strip, and poison
vast swathes of land, such actions could lower the cost of certain rare
earth minerals—and thus
steer more money more towards research focused on photovoltaic
approaches that use these arti-
ficially cheap minerals rather than towards alternative viable research
branches that use more
common materials. Military forces in the Congo allegedly allow for the
replacement of Canadian
coltan miners with slaves working in horrific conditions. Or consider
another example: two cen-
turies ago, employing 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 effect-
ively enslave large populations and put them to work in coal extraction,
thus dramatically driving
down coal prices.
It is a simple fact that institutional violence frequently alters the
immediate profitability of cer-
tain lines of research.
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
such that everything is dependent upon everything else, ignoring the
often enormous latitude
and diversity of options along the way and failing to investigate the
vast potential for
reconfiguration.
Any discussion of “civilization,” for example, is necessarily going to
involve 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 rela-
tions, and our material infrastructures. But if in using the term
“civilization” we mean 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, domination is not inherent in the structures of such
societies.
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 traces of hierarchy or violence. More egalitarian and
anarchistic urban societies didn’t
waste energy building giant monuments or waging wars, and thus are thus
less prominent in the
historical records 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 be con-
quered—and victors often intentionally destroy the records of those they
subjugate. Similarly,
non-anarchist historians have leapt to assume that the presence of any
social coordination or
technological invention in egalitarian and peaceful city cultures like
Harappa proves the presence
of some state-like authority—even when there’s zero sign of any such
authority and there are,
indeed, strong indications to the contrary.
Urban concentrations arose in a number of places prior to agriculture.
Indeed, in many places
around the globe where the land could not support permanent cities,
people nevertheless strug-
gled to come together in greater numbers whenever and for however long
they could manage to
do so. Frequently, the members of early societies would be both
temporary 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—of urban life as a cancerous mistake. If the establishment of
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 tribes of one hundred or two hundred
people, while perhaps
enjoying opportunities to interact with the members of limited numbers
of nearby tribes, people
living in cities can form affinities not limited by the happenstance of
birth, to organically form
their own distinct networks by choice. Better than tribes, they can shed
the limiting insularity of
closed social clusters entirely. There’s no good reason your friends
should all be forced to be
friends with each other as well. Cities enable individuals to form vast
panoplies of relationships
linking them with 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
far richer cultural and cognitive ecosystems than would otherwise be
possible to flourish. If there
is any single defining characteristic “culture of cities” (otherwise
known as “civilization”), it is
thus one of wild anarchy, of unleashed complexity and possibility.
And, of course, large-scale cooperation enables technological
developments that expand the
possible scope of our material conditions.
What we want is a world with the teeming connectedness of
cosmopolitanism, but without the
centralization and sedentary characteristics of many “civilizations.” We
want to fulfill the promise
and radical potential of cities that have led humans to form them
voluntarily again and again
throughout history. This may not be in keeping with our biology as Stone
Age creatures, whose
physical evolution has been incapable of keeping up with our cultural
evolution, but so what?
Of course, many primitivists may well enjoy and acknowledge the benefits
offered by the
fruits of civilization. They may even feel an affinity for the
aspirations of anarcho-transhumanism,
but nevertheless believe that transhumanist aspirations are pointless
because a permanent civiliza-
tional collapse is inevitable.
It’s true that our present infrastructure and economy are incredibly
brittle, destructive, and
unsustainable—in many ways serving and intertwined with oppressive
social systems. But so many other forms remain possible. Our global
civilization is not some magical whole, but a vast
and complex battlefield of 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, because cheap
energy means more cost-effective metals recycling, and the availability
of 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 that successful asteroid mining could crash the
metals markets and shutter
nearly every mine on Earth.
And let’s note that it is highly unlikely that a civilizational collapse
would return us to an idyllic
Eden. Many centers of power would likely survive, almost no society
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 ethical obligation to struggle, to have some agency with respect to
our future and our envir-
onment, and to take some responsibility for our destiny. Only with
science and technology will
we be able to repair ancient disasters like the desertification of the
Sahara, manage the decommis-
sioning of horrors, and rewild most of the Earth.
One of the most common concerns with transhumanism derives from a
misunderstanding of the
distinction between “physically doable but not yet engineered” and “who
knows.”
Much of this stems from ignorance of the relevant fields. Most people
wouldn’t have to argue
over whether or not an “upside down treehouse” would be possible to
build; it would just
require a bit of work.
While some ideas are highly speculative, many of the things
transhumanists talk about fall very
far to the doable side of the spectrum—there’s no chance they’re ruled
out by physics, mathem-
atics, chemistry, or the like; they don’t require the existence or use
of wormholes, for example.
The problems that stand in the way of our reaching these transhumanist
goals are merely engineering problems, albeit challenging ones—problems
on which plenty of experts are working, prob-
lems that the established consensus is confident we can solve. Asteroid
mining, for example, is no
more unimaginable or impossible today than placing satellites in Earth
orbit was in the 1940s.
We know we can do it; we know it will pay off; we just have to complete
the mounds of fuck-
ing busywork in our way first. CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced
short palindromic
repeats) was an amazing advance in gene therapy but it was amazing only
in virtue of the sud-
denness of the breakthrough; gene editing had never seemed strictly
infeasible.
Estimates of how long it will be until a given technological development
occurs are naturally
subjective. But it requires conspiratorial science-denialism to pretend
that creating and using
mining robots to mine will somehow prove impossibly hard—or require so
much human labor
that their arrival on the scene won’t represent any sort of efficiency
gain.
It’s very common in radical leftist circles to hear that green
technologies are mythical. This is
deeply inaccurate, but it’s understandable given all the corporate
greenwashing and media misrepre-
sentation of technologies. It’s thus easy to do a little critical
research and assume that scientists have
systemically overlooked things like life-cycle analyses. In fact,
however, reductions in footprint by a factor of one hundred times or one
thousand times would constitute a monumental difference,
not some trivial reform—and such reductions are in some cases highly
probable.
Humans have always had an effect on their environment, and the Earth’s
ecosystems have
never been static. Our goal should not be some unchanging and sharply
constrained lifestyle with
literally zero footprint; instead, we should seek to enable our
ingenuity and exploration in ways
that don’t bulldoze the Earth.
If we put a small fraction of the energy unlocked by hydrocarbons into
solar energy technolo-
gies, we’ll have enough power to render hydrocarbon energy obsolete.
While hydrocarbons were
unquestionably a world-changing source of dense energy, it’s possible to
get incredibly high power
returns from solar technologies using even 1800s technology of mirrors
and steam pipes. There are
a great many condensed battery options, and more are being developed—for
instance, in high-
density biochemical storage. Meanwhile, photovoltaic cell technology has
leapt past every supposed
barrier; and the materials needed to make effective use of this
technology have been dramatically
diversified. Options now on the table include quite simple approaches
featuring tiny ecological
footprints. The energy return on solar is close to 12 times and is
rocketing upward. The efficiency
of solar technology has reached the point at which governments like
Spain have required solar
power users to pay steep taxes to keep fossil fuels and centralized
grids competitive.
While nuclear energy still carries many extremely negative associations
among the 1980s eco-
punk set, many of these concerns are only valid in the context of Cold
War-style reactors—ones
built to be highly centralized, to be state-run, and to work only with
material capable of produ-
cing weaponizable byproducts. On the other hand, many liquid fluoride
thorium reactor designs
have literally no capacity to melt down, run on a radioactive material
already naturally in poison-
ous abundance on the Earth’s surface, and leave remains with relatively
low half-lives.
Similarly, while some specious reporting about “cold fusion” and
overenthusiastic claims
about normal fusion in the 1980s turned fusion into a laughing stock 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 achieved and benchmarks transcended.
While all these may provide cheap energy, the only safe way to reverse
global warming at this
point is with carbon-negative technologies that leave behind solid
carbon as a byproduct. Proven
technologies that do just this—from ancient gassification technologies
to an array of algae-
farming approaches—are already available.
That none of these have been widely adopted is a matter of politics, not
science. State vio-
lence subsidizes our incredibly inefficient infrastructure because the
maintenance of this infra-
structure is beneficial to centralized, large-scale economic entities.
Similarly, much of our energy
consumption presently goes towards war and frivolities, supply and
demand are aggressively dis-
torted, and the environmental costs have been systematically shifted
away from certain companies
and industries.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Technological development innately
expands options, so it
should come as no surprise that technological innovation isn’t
underwriting massive, centralized,
ham-fisted structures but is instead encouraging organic, decentralized,
and reconfigurable
approaches along the lines of 3D-printing and open-source technologies.
Transhumanism is a quite simple position, and so there’s a wide array of
people who’ve been
attracted to it and a variety of ways people have spun off from it.
Inevitably some of them are
short-sighted or reactionary, and in many people’s minds “transhumanism”
conjures up images of
far-right ideologues in Silicon Valley.
Fortunately, many reactionaries abandoned transhumanism when they
recognized its liberatory
implications regarding gender, race, and class, instead embracing a
fascism-for-nerds movement
called “neoreaction”—an early predecessor and eventual component of the
alt-right. In an amus-
ing reversal, a number now hope for and advocate the collapse of
civilization. They expect that
this will lead to a post-apocalyptic landscape in which their notions of
biological essentialism
reign supreme—in which “Real Alpha Men” rule as warlords and the rest of
us are used for
raping, slaving, or hunting. Or in which we are forced back to
tribal-scale relations, better enab-
ling (small-scale) nationalistic identity, social hierarchy, and
traditionalism. Others envision small
corporate fiefdoms and some kind of AI god that will help them maintain
their desired authority
structures by stopping oppressed groups from gaining, understanding, or
developing technology.
Anarcho-transhumanists are glad such currents have departed the broader
transhumanist move-
ment. At the same time, it must be admitted that a majority of
transhumanists still presently iden-
tify with liberalism, state socialism, social democracy, and similar
technocratic cults of power.
Non-anarchist transhumanists are politically naive at best and dangerous
at worst; transhuman-
ism without anarchism is totally untenable.
A world in which everyone has increased physical agency is a world in
which individuals are
super-empowered 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 to try somehow to restrict from
the top down what
they can do with those tools or what they can invent is impossible
absent an extreme authoritar-
ian system that suppresses almost all the functions of those tools.
Consider the struggle to impose
and enforce “intellectual property” on the Internet, or the war against
general-purpose comput-
ing. In this sense, all statist transhumanists fall short of
transhumanist ideals because of their lin-
gering fear of liberty and super-empowered proletarians.
On a philosophical level, it’s impossible to reconcile transhumanism’s
embrace of greater
agency in our bodies and environment with simultaneous advocacy of
oppressive social institu-
tions that broadly constrain our agency.
This difference of values is manifested in a number of ways.
Anarcho-transhumanists are obvi-
ously a lot less sanguine than statist transhumanists about letting
states and capitalists monopolize
the control or development of new technologies. They support serious
resistance efforts—efforts
intended both to attack oppressors’ centralized infrastructure and to
liberate their research and
tools for everyone.
Further to the left, the legacy of Cosmism has continued in state
socialist and state communist
circles. There is a distinct tradition of Left Accelerationism and more
diffuse but widely popular
political positions often referred to collectively as Fully Automated
Luxury Communism. These
traditions are broadly Marxist rather than anarchist, and don’t always
identify as transhumanist,
but they have been in close dialogue with anarcho-transhumanists. And
traditions like Xenofe-
minism are in many ways situated at the intersection of pro-technology
Marxist and anarchist
currents.
It’s certainly true that there’s much overlap between the political and
economic aspirations of
anarcho-transhumanists and those Marxist traditions likewise set on
radically expanding the
wealth available to everyone. Many have commented on the convergence of
anarchism and
Marxism when the “means of production” shrink from large-scale
mechanisms necessarily oper-
ated and overseen by large groups to techniques and devices controllable
by individuals (as when
factories are replaced by 3D printers). Yet significant differences
remain.
The divide between Marxism and anarchism has been often referred to as a
divide between
political philosophy and ethical philosophy. Anarchists focus on
tackling domination and con-
straint on every level, not just the macroscopic or institutional. And
anarchists want more than
a merely classless society: they want a world without power relations,
and thus their ethical analysis necessarily extends to challenging
interpersonal dynamics of power, including more complex, subtle,
informal, or even mutual relationships of domination and constraint.
While anarchists share their aspirations for a world in which the
efficiencies of technologies
lead to a world of abundance and liberate people from the drudgery of
work it’s impossible as
anarchists to accept the Left Accelerationists’ prescription of
“verticalism”—their embrace of
organizational hierarchies. Left accelerationists like Nick Srnicek and
Alex Williams have cri-
tiqued the mainstream left for an embrace of short-sighted immediatism,
[3] but anarchists still find
in the details of their “strategy” many of the same old Marxist
penchants for the establishment of
an elite whose members 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
actively suppressing scientific and technological development.
More broadly, Marxism shares a troubling tendency with its ideological
offshoot primitivism
to speak in highly abstract and macroscopic terms like “capitalism” or
“civilization.” In Marxist
analyses, these entities are imbued with a kind of agency or
purposefulness and all their elements
are seen as constituent dynamics serving a greater whole, rather than as
conflicting and capable of
being rearranged. Marxists and primitivists are thus both frequently
blinded to the aspects of
better world now growing within the shell of the old, as well as
opportunities for meaningful
resistance and positive change that aren’t necessarily cataclysmic total
breaks.
Vegans have been among the strongest partisans of anarcho-transhumanism,
knowing very well that
what is “natural” may not be ethical. Biohackers have worked on projects
like getting yeast to
produce the critical milk enzymes in normal cheese. [4] (To do this,
just put yeast in a warm vat with
sugar and let it fall out!) Others have, for example, worked on custom
algae production that yields
useful protein and carbs from sunlight much more efficiently than
conventional agriculture—while
raising the possibility of dramatically reducing or even entirely
eliminating the death toll from
tractor operation.
A small fraction of environmentalists have played with ideas of a more
ethically engaged stew-
ardship, positing a future in which, after rewilding the majority of the
planet and restoring its ecol-
ogy, we might make tweaks that reduce net suffering among non-human
species. Animal
liberationists have long criticized the slavery of animal “ownership”
and the injustice of breeding
certain animals to serve us. But what would assisting animals in their
own self-improvement look
like? This is a so-far speculative field called “uplifting,” and the
anarchist take on it is as always to
center the subject’s perspectives, to try to find ways of communicating
and bridging the cultural
and phenomenological gap with conscious persons (e.g. cetaceans,
elephants, octopi, primates).
The animal-liberationist tendencies at the heart of modern anarchism
also come to expression
in our responses to the possibility of artificial general intelligence.
There’s a noteworthy current
in non-anarchist transhumanist circles that focuses on the development
of AI, with the goal of
solving the problem of how to control a mind smarter than your own. Many
transhumanists are
convinced that AI will unleash an explosion of feedbacking intelligence
that can remake the
world. [5] To anarchists, this focus is silly given the billions of
minds already on this planet and
criminally underutilized. 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 our planet.
Transhumanism has historically distinguished itself from other
celebratory approaches to high
technology precisely in its focus on self-alteration. If you want
something done, you should do it
yourself. If you’re worried about what values an alien mind ripped into
existence from scratch might develop, you should instead start with
humans interested in expanding their own capacities. And while we might
reasonably anticipate rapid improvements in our individual cognitive
speed and memory, it is how we communicate and collaborate with one
another that has served
as a real bottleneck on advancement. Instead of a race to create an
artificial generalized intelli-
gence, many anarcho-transhumanists have argued that we should instead
focus on the benefits of
technologies that improve or deepen our connection with one another, so
that collectively we
can race ahead of any AI.
It’s rather terrifying that the default question about AI has largely
been: “How can we most
effectively control/enslave it?” As anarchists our position is obvious:
If we are to develop such
minds, they deserve compassion and liberty. All too often, those in
AI-focused communities that
have spun off from transhumanist circles abandon the ethical dimension
of their research. This
paradigm is profoundly un-transhumanist because it privileges some kind
of static humanity with
static values and desires, and then enslaves non-human minds to serve
those ends. The entire
point of transhumanism is to embrace the fluidity and transitory nature
of the “human,” not to
cling to humanness in its current form.
As you would expect when it comes to non-neurotypicals and differently
abled people already
alive, the transhumanist and anarcho-transhumanist position is to let a
billion physical and cogni-
tive architectures bloom! It’s important 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, it’s also important to provide people with the tools to exercise
control over their bodies,
minds, and life conditions. It should be up to all people individually
to determine what factors
might constitute oppressive impairments in their own lives, and which
factors are elements of
their identities and unique life experiences.
Ultimately transhumanism is a queering of the distinction between
“impairment” and “aug-
mentation” as well as between “want” and “need.” No “baseline” should be
oppressively nor-
malized. Instead, individuals should be free to grow in whatever
directions they see fit.
for a Stateless Society.
.
Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. New York: Verso.
/.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.