by Mark Dery
The Extropians, who maintain an avid interest in space colonization (the L-5 Society cofounder Keith Henson is a member of Extropy’s editorial committee), are similarly unburdened by a social conscience. Even as they extract the self from the human, renouncing humanism’s allegiance to the species and its wariness of autonomous technology, Extropians uncouple the individual from the social. Freedom is defined not in terms of civil liberties but in “behavioral, morphological, neurological, and genetic” terms-a politics of self-directed personal evolution that links the group to Stelarc, who argues,
In this age of information overload, what is significant is no longer freedom of ideas but rather freedom of form-freedom to modify, freedom to mutate your body. The question is not whether a society will allow [the] freedom to express yourself, but whether the human species will allow you to break the bonds of your genetic parameters-the fundamental freedom to determine your own DNA destiny.238
In the libertarian futurism of Extropy, society is a dynamical system of ever-evolving egos; government is a decentralized “social coordination mechanism” whose only real purpose is to provide “the context required for us to sustain truly long-term personal progress, to provide energy, space, and the framework for the diversity implicit in individual self-transformation.”239 Few would argue in favor of an intrusive government that restricts “individual self-transformation,” mandating self-sacrifice to a greater, common good. But there is an absence in Extropian philosophy of anything resembling a sense of community and an obliviousness to the fact that a passionate engagement with the social or the political, through altruism or activism, can be a catalyst for profound “self-transformation.” It is these vacancies that account for the hollow noise this philosophy makes when its depths are sounded. As Andrew Kimbrell argues, in a Harper’s forum on “The Value of Life,”
this secular myth-that we live as autonomous individuals, as islands unto ourselves, without rights balanced by duties-is absurd. Every decision you may make, whether it be to sell yourself into slavery or to sell yourself into prostitution, adds to and creates the telos-the purpose-of community you inhabit. You do not exist as an island.240
Kimbrell’s worldview reverses that of the Extropians, who have inherited Ayn Rand’s vituperative condemnation of “Society, with all its boggled chaos of selflessness, compromise, servility, and lies.”241 With charity toward none, Extropian transhumanism makes no provision for the economically disenfranchised, the socially marginalized, or the “psychologically weak.”242
Happily, “NEGs” (negative types lacking in the Extropian virtue of “Dynamic Optimism”) will disappear altogether when science comes to “understand the basis of depression and lack of enthusiasm, allowing us to choose to maintain ourselves in a perpetually high energy condition.”243 Technological developments may result in “chemical-releasing implants, controlled by a computer interfaced with our brains, that [will] allow us to rapidly alter our state of mind” for the better.244 (Any resemblance to the brain-stimulating “mood organ” in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? whose dial can be set for the Dynamically Optimistic “Awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future,” is entirely coincidental.)
Near the end of his essay “Technological Self-Transformation: Expanding Personal Extropy,” More attempts to counterbalance his neo-Nietzschean rhetoric with a vision of a kinder, gentler Übermensch. “Contrary to popular interpretation, the Übermensch [is] not the Blond Beast, the conqueror and plunderer,” he writes. “The developed, self-chosen self will exude benevolence, emanating its excess of health and self-confidence.”245 He ends by reminding his fellow Extropians that they “need not be isolated, totally self-sustaining achievers. Support and encouragement by fellow extropic-minded persons is enormously valuable.”246
Still, Extropian transhumanism emerges, in Extropy, as a vaguely cultish movement, replete with invented monikers and futuristic jargon, committed to an ingrown, all-consuming self-improvement program in which social responsibility ends at the boundaries of the individual ego. Indeed, there is a fundamentalism to this supposedly rationalist movement’s uncritical faith in technology, its unswerving devotion to unchecked expansion, and its rejection of ecological concerns as “the false doom-mongering of the apocalyptic environmentalists” at a time when all but the most myopic concede the need to balance economic exigencies with environmental imperatives.247 Then, too, there is something inescapably American about this philosophy of Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order, and Dynamic Optimism, reconciling as it does the mechanist reductivism of artificial intelligence theory with the evangelical zeal and relentlessly peppy can-do of the human potential movement.
Some of Extropian transhumanism’s headier rhetoric sounds as if it were written by Seth Brundle, the scientist in David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) who demolecularizes his body and teleports it from one computer-controlled “telepod” to another. “I’m beginning to think that the sheer process of being taken apart atom by atom and put back together again [is] somehow . . . purifying,” the fist-thumping, coffee-gulping Brundle tells his somewhat alarmed girlfriend Ronnie. “I think it’s going to allow me to realize the personal potential I’ve been neglecting all these years. . . . I will say now, however subjectively, that human teleportation-molecular decimation, breakdown and reformation—is inherently purging. It makes a man a king! All I’ve done is say to the world, ‘Let’s go! Move! Catch me if you can!’” Later, he attempts to muscle Ronnie into the telepod, telling her that after she’s been disintegrated and reconstituted-purged, in Nietzschean terms, of her “all too human” qualities-they’ll be “the perfect couple, the dynamic duo.” She wriggles free, shrieking, “Don’t give me that born-again teleportation rap!”
As detailed in chapter 1, minimanifestos very like “that born-again teleportation rap” were a fixture in early issues of Mondo 2000. In an early editorial, Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius proclaim that “Eco-fundamentalism is out”; so, too, are “finite possibilities.” Noting that “we are living at a very special juncture in the evolution of the species,” the authors close with the Nietzsche-meets-The Revenge of the Nerds assertion that the masses must place their destiny in the hands of “a whole new generation of sharpies, mutants and superbrights” not unlike More’s Extropian vanguard (“the leading wave of evolutionary progress”). Like the Extropians, the Mondo editors celebrate “human/technological interactive mutational forms” and “[b]rain-boosting technologies” and look forward to “[b]ecoming the Bionic Angel.” This, they declare, is the “dawn of a new humanism.”248
To Andrew Ross, who refuses to be dazzled by cyberbole, Mu and Sirius’s new dawn looks like the same old, hallowed humanism that has historically concealed its Western, white, increasingly technocratic interests behind high-minded rhetoric about what is best for “mankind.” Humanism laid the philosophical groundwork, Ross contends, for European civilization’s shameful dealings with the natural environment and the animal kingdom. Needless to say, true species-centrism would be compelled, entirely by self-interest, to protect the natural environment on which humankind is so demonstrably dependent. Thus, we are drawn to the inescapable conclusion that much of what passes for posthumanism is in fact egoism leavened with a dash of technocratic elitism, whether it is Mondo 2000’s dictatorship of the neurotariat-the “sharpies, mutants and superbrights” in whom we must place our “faith” and “power”—or the Extropian triumph of the overman. The Mondo editorial and Extropy manifestos reverberate with what Ross calls “a voice that appears to speak the language of unfettered development, heedless of any concern for those who cannot keep up or who are subordinated as a result of the logic of underdevelopment.”249
The Theology of the Ejector Seat
Since these philosophies owe so much to Hans Moravec, it seems only appropriate that a critique of them be laid at his feet. In a 1993 interview with the roboticist, I attempted to make politic
al and socioeconomic sense of ideas that had always floated, like the “laissez-faire libertarian” Utopias described by Spinrad, “airily unconcerned above a Third World favela called Earth”:250
MARK DERY: One of the things that troubled me while reading your book Mind Children is that your vision of human evolution is yoked to quantum leaps in technology and seems not to take into account the socioeconomic landscape of your future. I suspect you would argue that such issues are irrelevant to your thinking, since you think in terms of hypothetical technologies, but I can’t help wondering about the fate of those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder in your world of transmigrant minds and “superintelligent robot bushes.”
HANS MORAVEC: Well, I think what you would call the socioeconomic implications of the developments I imagine are-unless you’re looking at the interactions of the machines themselves-largely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what people do because they’re going to be left behind, like the second stage of a rocket. Unhappy lives, horrible deaths, and failed projects have been part of the history of life on Earth ever since there was life; what really matters in the long run is what’s left over. Does it really matter to you today that the tyrannosaur line of that species failed?
MD: Well, I wouldn’t create a homology between failed reptilian strains and those on the lowermost rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.
HM: But I would. You see, many cultures are gone; the Maori of New Zealand are gone, as are most of our ancestors or near relatives- Australopithecus, Homo erectus, Neanderthal man.
MD: Your position seems rather Olympian.
HM: “Olympian?” I take that as a compliment, in many ways, because I think you can wallow in compassion and really screw up the bigger things, an example being the current U.S. welfare system, which I think had much too much compassion for individual cases and in so doing totally wrecked the inner city family by creating the wrong incentives. My own politics are basically libertarian because I like to see as much happen as possible, and giving people maximum freedom to try things without having to have the approval of everybody else is the most fruitful way to get the most results in the shortest time.
MD: But in the larger sense your politics are less libertarian than Darwinian; the individual ego is of far less consequence to you than it was to Ayn Rand.
HM: Well, individuals (as they exist today) only have a very short lifetime and consequently only have a very small part to play in the big story; if some individual dies—if I die-it’s not going to affect the whole story very much. I think the view taken by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene—that we’re Rube Goldberg contraptions which our genes have managed to assemble, whose primary purpose is to make more genes-is a very useful way to look at the nature of humanity.
Of course, the notion of an “I” with motivations and future plans could be abstracted from the living form initially [cobbled] together by its genes and installed in some other machine without the genes having any part in it anymore. And then there’s the concept of abstracting the overall biological and cultural evolution of a population, which is yet another level of abstraction that goes beyond the pains and tragedies and joys of individual people and has a story of its own. That, too, has a dynamic that can be tinkered with and that’s the biggest story that I can comfortably encompass at the moment. To me, it’s the most important one, because if the survival of the overall process is jeopardized, then you’ve lost all the little parts of the story. In time, the really interesting things about humanity will be carried on in a new medium.
Obviously, the discourse of posthumanism that Moravec, the Extropians, and the Mondo essayists take literally is bathed in political and philosophical associations. Moreover, its popular appeal suggests that what began as scientific speculation is well on its way to becoming secular myth; the imaginary technologies that would make “downloading” possible are in theory made out of microchips, but for many they function as metaphors and speak to mythic needs.
End-of-the-millennium science fictions about disembodiment through “downloading” and re-embodiment in the “shiny new body of the style, color, and material of your choice” (one of Moravec’s factory options) are daydreams that began as nightmares. David Skal theorizes that the space invaders who terrorized earthlings in fifties creature features gave shape to the information anxiety beginning to nibble at the American subconscious. Bug-eyed and bulbous-headed,
they present an image of intense and unbearable visual-mental overload, a description that may have more relevance to the unprecedented level of media bombardment (mainly by television) in the ’50s, than to any possible physiology of extraterrestrial beings. . . . [T]hese new creatures anticipated not the violent rending of the body but its withering and atrophy. The future was about watching images and processing information; the eyes and brain were the only useful parts of the human form left.251
Earlier, in 1948, Norbert Wiener had drawn parallels between organisms and machines. Both, he said, used on-off switches in their information processing (neural in one case, electromechanical in the other) and both used “feedback loops”—circular processes beginning in the nervous system, emerging as output through muscular activity, and cycling back into the nervous system through sensory input-to interact with their environments. By the late sixties, the cybernetic society’s definition of humans as information-processing systems had given rise to the creeping fear that computer culture would ultimately reduce human beings to brains floating in nutrients, wired for sensation. The villains in the 1968 Star Trek episode “The Gamesters of Triskelion” were brains under glass, sustained by machines; only by titillating and tormenting captive humans could such effete, bodiless creatures vicariously experience long-lost emotions and bodily sensations.
In recent years, the image of the brain without a body-or, better yet, a “downloaded” mind without a brain-has been appropriated by posthumanists, for whom it is a symbol of godlike immortality and power rather than an embodiment of humanist anxiety.
Vinge argues that the infinite, everlasting superminds who inhabit his “post-Singularity world” would be Gods by the physicist Freeman Dyson’s definition: “God,” argues Dyson, “is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.”252 Moravec imagines the subsumption of “downloaded” cyberbeings into a “community mind,” omniscient and omnivorous, which spreads “outwards from the solar system, converting non-life into mind” through some form of data conversion.253 This process, suggests Moravec, “might convert the entire universe into an extended thinking entity.”254 In Nerdvana, all is cerebration; the dominant term of the body/mind dualism has vanquished its detested opposite forever.
For many of posthumanism’s critics, such images are fatal seductions, glossing over the fact that issues of power are anchored in the physical bodies of the governed, at least for the forseeable future; the abstract calculus of commerce and politics, together with the ethical issues raised by advanced technologies, become personal and palpable when they intersect with bodies, especially our own. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, the director of the Advanced Communications Technology Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, argues,
There’s a kind of rapt, mindless fascination with these disembodying or ability-augmenting technologies. I think of it as a kind of cyborg envy. . . . The deep, childlike desire to go beyond one’s body. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Certainly, for the handicapped, it can be very liberating. For others, who have the desire without the need, there can be problems. Political power still exists inside the body and being out of one’s body or extending one’s body through technology doesn’t change that.255
In her essay “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures,” Stone asserts, “No matter how virtual the subject may become, there is always a body attached,” reaffirming the importance of “keeping the discussion grounded in individual bodies.”256
Vivian Sobchack, a cultural critic and feminist film theorist,
needs no convincing on that point. In “Baudrillard’s Obscenity,” her smart, tough response to the French postmodernist’s essay on Crash, she brings us jokingly back from the disembodied rhetoric of posthumanism to her own, intensely personal here and now, where she is convalescing after major cancer surgery. Sobchack calls Baudrillard to account for his “naively celebratory” rhapsodies about the penetration of bodies by technology in Ballard’s novel, which Baudrillard reads as a cyborg future beyond good and evil in which wounds and other artificial orifices take their place alongside natural ones as possible sites of sexual pleasure and where sex, in turn, is only one of many conceivable uses for such interfaces.257 Forcing her reader to confront the painful reality of the twelve-inch scar on her left thigh, a memento of the surgery that removed a cancerous tumor, Sobchack notes,
There’s nothing like a little pain to bring us (back) to our senses. . . . Baudrillard’s techno-body is a body that is thought always as an object, and never lived as a subject. . . . [H]e’s into the transcendent sexiness of “wounds,” “artificial orifices”. . . . But sitting here living that orifice, I can attest to the scandal of metaphor. . . . Even at its most objectified and technologically caressed, I live this thigh-not abstractly on “the” body, but concretely as “my” body.258
Sobchack bridles at Baudrillard’s celebration of the end of what he calls the “moral gaze-the critical judgmentalism that is still a part of the old world’s functionality” and the advent of an affectless, postmodern sensibility for which the “incisions, excisions, scar tissue, gaping body holes” left by violent collisions with technology are little more than erogenous zones for cyborgs.259 “The man is really dangerous,” she observes, tartly wishing him “a car crash or two”:
