Confessions of a Lapsed Transhumanist

There was a point in time, in my early-mid teens, when I considered myself a transhumanist. Those days were largely forgotten until I picked up Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, “Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom,” which takes place in a decidedly posthuman/transhuman/extropian future. The basic idea of the transhuman/extropian philosophy is that we should embrace technology to (quickly) evolve our bodies, cultures, and societies towards utopian ends. Transhumanism puts the unending faith of a born-again Christian into technology; code will save us all.

For a geeky teenager already bored with the angry young white male intellectual staples of Marx and Nietzche, this philosophy had great pull. It says that where Marx failed, where Christianity fails, is putting the burden of building utopia on everyday people, and that’s pretty cool when you’re angry at everyone. Transhumanism’s utopia relies not on the right socioeconomic breeding grounds, nor goodwill and human kindness, but on technology defeating suffering. To those not cuddled up to serious technological dependence already, this seems very creepy. To those who don’t see technology as an extension of human labor, instead seeing some vast faceless hive-mind that is capital-T Technology, it seems very very creepy. Utopia just comes to you? Like a Windows Service Pack or something?

Of course that’s not how, in theory, it all works, nor is it all quite that creepy. But it says something that the majority of the attendees at the DC Transhumanists meetings I attended were lonely, kinda sad older guys. Smart, but with that air of people ill at ease with their present, people who wish they’d been born into an episode of Star Trek. Over the table in the crappy chain Italian restaurant where we met there was lots of science fiction, lots of intellectual posturing, and a dotcom era-friendly underlying assumption that there was nothing technology couldn’t fix. The digital divide, getting all this tech to people who can’t afford clean water? Oh, there’s tech for that, too. Someday.

I outgrew it. It was all talk, and no matter how seductive a future transhumanism paints it remains the dreams of people desperately invested in tomorrow not being like today. The appeal of the future in Doctorow’s book is that, even in the absence of death, disease, and most suffering, humans still have the capacity to be both incredibly kind and total fuckups. Even when paradigms in human society shift, we’re still human. Even with cybernetic brains, gengineered bodies, dial-a-feeling chemical emotions, and backed up consciousnesses that never die. We’re still human.