Category Archives: Posthuman

Posthuman

Posthumanity was the term used to describe the human race after the destruction of Earth by the Sun in the far future. Deprived of their common cultural reference point, humans formed a loose political structure composed of many groups and subspecies known as the posthuman hegemony. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Their territory existed at the Time Lords' frontier in time. (PROSE: Frontios, The Book of the War) With their time travel technology, posthumans were a significant faction in the War in Heaven. (PROSE: The Book of the War, Cobweb and Ivory, et al.)

Due to the availability of time travel in the posthuman era, many posthumans influenced their species' past. (PROSE: The Book of the War, Work in Progress) Due to the actions of the Pilots' Coterie, le Pouvoir, the 17th century French secret service, briefly acquired "mirrors" which showed them potential timelines of posthumanity. (PROSE: Newtons Sleep)

27th century human academics were familiar with the term "Posthuman". (PROSE: Work in Progress)

Transhumanity was the evolutionary stage between humanity and posthumanity. (PROSE: Stranger Tales of the City linking material)

The pre-posthuman era was home to a group of emotionless militant cyborgs who forcibly converted other humans and were in turn reviled by humanity, (PROSE: The Book of the War) known by some as the Inanem Magnanime Milites. (PROSE: Weapons Grade Snake Oil) Members of this cyborg race, such as Litany Chromehurst, were the forebears of technosapience (PROSE: Happily Ever After Is a High-Risk Strategy) and eventually became regarded as simply another posthuman subspecies, some of them forming the Silversmiths' Coterie. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Earth is swallowed by Sol in the 57th Segment of Time. (TV: The Ark)

The posthuman era began with the loss of Earth, which The Book of the War and The Human Species: A Spotter's Guide indicated was circa the year 10,000,000. (PROSE: The Book of the War, Of the City of the Saved...) Another account similarly showed that the Sun swallowed Earth about ten million years after the 1st Segment of Time. (TV: The Ark) However, Compassion believed that most posthuman historians dated the destruction of Earth to 12,000,000, (PROSE: The Brakespeare Voyage) and several other accounts placed Earth's end in 5,000,000,000. (TV: New Earth, The End of the World, et al)

The period immediately after Earth's destruction, the 58th Segment of Time, (PROSE: The Well-Mannered War) was at the edge of Gallifrey's noosphere, (PROSE: The Well-Mannered War, Frontios) the frontier in time. (PROSE: The Book of the War) Early Time Lords forbid within Gallifreyan civilisation any knowledge of history beyond this point, and the Fourth Doctor regarded it as the end of the Humanian Era. (PROSE: The Well-Mannered War) Finally beyond the Ghost Point (PROSE: The Book of the War) and starting to mirror the Great Houses in several new ways, (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...) posthuman history began with a Diaspora Era (PROSE: The Silent Stars Go By) just as the Houses' history did. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Some human colonists of Frontios were augmented into non-humanoid, cyborg forms, (TV: Frontios) as would later become popuar among technosapiens. (PROSE: Weapons Grade Snake Oil)

Direct human survivors of Earth's destruction included the Guardians, who took a 700 years voyage on the Ark to Refusis II; (TV: The Ark, PROSE: The Book of the War) Revere's ship of refugees, thought by the Fifth Doctor to be one of the last surviving groups of Mankind, who colonised Frontios; (TV: Frontios) and the Morphans, who colonised Hereafter and very slowly terraformed it into a replacement Earth while the elite transhumans of pre-destruction Earth waited in hibernation. (PROSE: The Silent Stars Go By)

Two distinct political viewpoints arose in humanity from the loss of their original homeworld. One, the Arcadians, considered themselves the preservers of the old Earth's ways. They recreated Earth on 28,000 Earth-like displays, many of which were called New Earth. (PROSE: The Book of the War) One notable New Earth was founded by the "big revival movement" within 23 years of Earth's destruction. (TV: New Earth) The Arcadians were isolationist and eventually almost completely vanished, (PROSE: The Book of the War) with one group secretly surviving in suspended animation beneath the acid seas of Endpoint until near the end of the universe. (PROSE: Hope)

Mrs Foyle of the Remonstration Bureau. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

The other viewpoint which defined the early posthuman era was one of decadence. Mrs Foyle was a notable early era decadent who ran the House of the Rising Sun and the Remonstration Bureau. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Beginning with the early posthuman era, humans were able to procreate with basically every other species capable of breeding; a rare trait shared with advanced factions such as the Great Houses. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...) With the commonality of hybridisation, some posthumans genetically modified themselves to be able to speak the language of their alien partners, as Marinthe did for Rynu. (PROSE: Farewell to a World) The Eighth Doctor once encountered a race of time-travelling Cybermen who turned to the 21st century because in their native era after Earth's destruction, humanity was scattered through the cosmos and "genetically diluted," proving unfit for cyber-conversion. (COMIC: The Flood)

No species can last forever without evolving into something new. Sooner or later the distance from Earth, from the environment humanity evolved to live in, genetic engineering and eventual interminglings of the gene pool with other species these were bound to have the inevitable, cumulative effect of turning humanity into a completely different species.Eighth Doctor [src]

A chain of posthuman worlds became the breeding-grounds of the Remote. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Some posthuman subspecies had physical aspects of other animals originating from Earth, including dolphins and tigers. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...)

The Immaculata Formosii was a posthuman War Goddess who allied with many sides of the War in Heaven, including the Enemy and Faction Paradox. (PROSE: The Book of the War, Against Nature)

The posthuman (PROSE: A Hundred Words from a Civil War) Malkuthites killed the native population of Yesod, including the Yesodi, and adapted themselves into the Yesodites, who were once visited by the Eighth Doctor, Samson, and Gemma. (PROSE: The Long Midwinter, AUDIO: The Wake)

The Quire were a group of posthuman scholars who once sent six of their people to the Braxiatel Collection in the 2600s. (PROSE: Work in Progress, Tribal Reservations, Quire as Folk, Intermissions, Future Relations)

The giant Bribori Zadig with a city on his shoulder. (PROSE: Furthest Tales of the City)

There existed posthuman giants for whom a planet was comparable in scale to a mountain to a normal-sized human. (PROSE: Unification Theory) The largest giant was Bribori Zadig, who constituted his own class of posthuman and was suspected by some to have been engineered as a piece of living art. (PROSE: Sleeping Giants)

Many posthumans became became parts of hive minds, such as the Saqqaf Hive (PROSE: Saqqaf) and Angstrom Hive. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...) The shoal-people spread their individual minds among many fish, each person their own hive mind. (PROSE: Just Passing Through)

Akroates came from an isolated society of posthuman shepherds who resembled cyclopses. (PROSE: Akroates)

A fabled clan of long-limbed posthumans lived on Trapezium. (PROSE: The Baker Street Dozen)

The Entrustine Horde were an obscure posthuman barbarian guild. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...)

The colonists of the ocean world Widowseed diverged into the Seaborn and Airborne, who brutally warred for control of the gigawrack, each denying the others' humanity. (PROSE: Salutation)

A-Ph-Aa came from a cuboid race of posthumans with a rich history who were made to never exist once history changed so that humans never colonised their homeplanet. (PROSE: Mourning the Story)

In the 11th billennium, several posthuman types were created along eugenic principles, including the Neotonic Clade. (PROSE: Unification Theory)

Two of the Pilots' Coterie manifest at Salomon's House in 1671 with the use of praxis. (PROSE: Newtons Sleep)

About two million years after Earth's demise, circa 12,000,000, the posthuman era entered its height as empires began emerging from the decadant movement. (PROSE: The Book of the War) The most notable of these were the aristocratic Blood Coteries based in Siloportem. (PROSE: The Book of the War, AUDIO: Movers) The Blood Coteries included the Pilots of Civitas Solis, (PROSE: The Book of the War, Newtons Sleep) the Weavers, and the Silversmiths. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

The miniscule Plume Coteries were librarians who lived in the distant reaches of dead space. (PROSE: Cobweb and Ivory)

Gargil Krymtorpor, who lived from 12,023,711 to 12,023,967, was a posthuman interstellar pirate who renegaded from Siloportem and became indentured to the Celestis. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

At the time of the last humanoid Arcadians of the Milky Way, posthumans led by Linemica resurrected Cernunnos using delicate craftmanship and illegal time travel. Dignitaries from countless posthuman cultures attended Cernunnos' unveiling on Terra Primagenia. (PROSE: Cobweb and Ivory)

A Drashig striking. (TV: Carnival of Monsters)

A splinter Coterie became lost on a million-year mission across the cosmos, during which radiation affected their evolution by activating "a few forgotten DNA pathways". Little Brother Intrepid of Faction Paradox transported some of their eggs backwards through time to a prehistoric swamp, where they evolved into Drashigs (PROSE: Daring Initiation)

Marko Marz was a transhuman Plutocrat from an openly mercantile posthuman period. Despite time travel being taboo among the Coteries, Marz publicised his interest in it (PROSE: Subjective Interlock) and had his book Retroeconomics and Timeschism for Dummies published in the past, 4973. In the book, Marz mentioned that the Dealers in Yellow operated in his era. (PROSE: Pre-narrative Briefing L)

Megropolis One on Pluto. (TV: The Sun Makers)

The Chance Coteries were a wealthy cymbiont civilisation who, during the reign of Scacia De Rein circa 19,531,250,000,007,031, manipulated public perception of technosapiens across the posthuman hegemony. De Rein secretly supported the revolution on Pluto against the Company which led to the foundation of the Plutonic Republic of Technosapien Enhanced Cultures. The revolution led to increased sympathy and understanding for technosapiens. PROTEC's president, Sojourner Hooper-Agog, later teamed with Faction Paradox Bankside to cause the fall of the Chance Coteries. (PROSE: Weapons Grade Snake Oil)

The Technosapien Interstellar Cooperative spanned many worlds, including the AutoFolk's homeworld Mechanique II. (PROSE: Happily Ever After Is a High-Risk Strategy)

The Million-Star Alliance did not actually span a million stars, but it did include the mining planet Isoptal, where posthumans survived by turning themselves into artificial intelligences known as the Isoptaline. (PROSE: Weighty Questions, Salutation)

By 6,000,000,000, the posthumans previously living on Pluto had modified themselves into homo solarians and colonised the expanding Sun. They died when the Sun was swallowed by Grandfather's Maw. Compassion considered this to be the ultimate fate of humanity, with all the posthuman groups outside the solar system being mere off-shoots of the core continuity. (PROSE: The Brakespeare Voyage)

The Lasthumans were widely considered the final posthuman civilisation. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...) Their God-King was Het Linc. (PROSE: The Book of the War) They created the Universal Machine in their last millennia before being massacred by House Mirraflex in 334,961,147,104. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved..., The Book of the War)

The Toclafane. (TV: The Sound of Drums)

While the psychics of the Lasthumans had scoured the universe and found no other human minds, there also existed strands of humanity posthumously termed the "revolved" who evolved into mindless beings then "revolved" back into conscious creatures. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...) The Tenth Doctor encountered a group of humans on Malcassairo in 100,000,000,000,000 whose ancestors had spent millions of years evolving into gas and another million as downloads. The Master hid from the Last Great Time War among these humans (TV: Utopia) and caused their evolution into the Toclafane. (TV: Last of the Time Lords)

Near the end of the universe, when the universe was ruled from the Needle by the Imperial Family, the planet Endpoint was home to the human-descended Endpointers as well as a secret faction of "genetically pure" humans (PROSE: Hope) of the Arcadian viewpoint (PROSE: The Book of the War) in suspended animation. The Eighth Doctor, Fitz Kreiner, and Anji Kapoor came to Endpoint, got caught up in the reawakening of the humans, and ensured peace between the Endpointers and the humans. (PROSE: Hope)

Posthumanity's final creation, the Universal Machine, was one of the Secret Architects of the City of the Saved. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...) All of posthumanity was resurrected in the City. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

During the City of the Saved Civil War, the most sophisticated posthuman factions fought in ways incomprehensible to common humans. Five Districts warred entirely with music and representatives of two cultures went into combat in Flautencil's Plaza which appeared to consist only of smelling orchids and exchanging meaningful glances. (PROSE: A Hundred Words from a Civil War)

The rest is here:

Posthuman | Tardis | Fandom

President Calvin Coolidge on October 22, 1924(Library of Congress)

In Impromptus today, I begin with patriot games. The Chinese dictatorship has decreed that only patriots may serve in the Hong Kong government. By patriots, they mean loyal servants to the Chinese Communist Party. We Americans sometimes play patriot games ourselves.

I further discuss Afghanistan, Magnitsky acts, George W. Bush, an engineering feat, an NBA coach, an anniversary, etc.

What about the anniversary? This month, oddly enough, marks the 20th anniversary of my column, Impromptus. So, happy anniversary to all who celebrate. Seriously, great thanks to my readers and correspondents, with whom it has been a privilege to share some of life, or a lot of it.

Speaking of correspondents, lets have some mail. In an Impromptus two days ago, I quoted Calvin Coolidge, at length. I was talking about the new and popular phrase post-liberal. In my judgment, liberalism has no post- (and were talking about classical liberalism, the outlook of our Founding). It has friends and enemies a relative handful of the former and multitudes of the latter.

A person can be no more post-liberal than he can be post-freedom, post-democracy, or posthuman rights. You either are or you arent. Youre fer or agin.

On the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in July 1926 President Coolidge gave a whale of a speech. About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful, he said. You want more? Heres a lot more:

It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

In my column, I wrote, Well said, Cal. They called him silent, but when he spoke it was worth it.

I received a note from a reader in the beautifully named town of Vestavia Hills, Alabama.

Jay,

When reading the passage from Calvin Coolidge in todays Impromptus, I couldnt help but think of Ecclesiastes 1:9-10.

In the King James Version, those verses go,

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

Our reader comments,

Yes, they all want to regress and when doing so call it progress.

A young friend of mine from Seattle writes,

Jay,

I enjoyed your appreciation for President Coolidge in your latest Impromptus! I was actually thinking of that speech in the lead-up to your quoting it....

Yesterday, in a Clubhouse room centered on Teddy Roosevelt, I quoted the paragraph just before the one you focused on. Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments....The people have to bear their own responsibilities.

Too many people want to use the government to create social change, and they miss this crucial fact. Theyre going about it completely the wrong way.

A phrase I used above, fer or agin, I used in my Wednesday column. A reader from Piedmont, S.D., writes,

Jay,

...I noticed your use of Youre fer or agin. That was awesome and somehow reminded me of Git er done, by Larry the Cable Guy. One of my favorite colloquialisms is from the Coen Brothers movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? (a movie that always gets a laugh out of me): Is you is, or is you aint, my constituency? I just love how that sounds . . .

Me too. I am further reminded of something that Andr Acimans uncle (I believe) often said. You will find it in Acimans classic memoir I am declaring it a classic Out of Egypt. The uncle would say, Siamo o non siamo? Are we or arent we? What are we made of? Are we mice or men? That sort of thing.

Again, todays Impromptus is here. Thanks to all yall.

Continued here:

Are We or Arent We? - National Review

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What happens when you put a science fiction writer, a venture capitalist, and a game journalist together? That was the premise behind our latest conversation on Oculus Venues and Zoom in a session dubbed Science Fiction, tech, and games.

I moderated the hour-long session with computer scientist and accomplished science fiction writer Ramez Naam and Tim Chang, partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Mayfield Fund. Chang first told me a few years ago about a virtuous cycle between the fields, where science fiction can inspire technology. Lots of firms, for instance, are trying to create Tricorder medical devices from Star Trek, and Chang himself has told entrepreneurs that if they can make the voice-driven operating system from the film Her that he would fund it.

I got the idea for the session because so much science fiction is becoming science fact. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has often said that were living in science fiction. Our events have harped on this theme for a few years, as things that we once thought were science fiction, like AI, have become so real in the past few years. (Well have another event, GamesBeat Summit 2021 on April 28 and April 29, to hold some similar sessions).

Before Naam started writing his Nexus trilogy (2012 to 2015) of novels, he spent 13 years at Microsoft, leading teams working on machine learning, neural networks, information retrieval, and internet-scale systems. That unique background positions him as a bridge between science fiction and technology, helping him create visions of the future tied to what is technologically possible now.

And his ideas are more relevant than ever, given the advances in AI and other digital technologies that have the potential to push us closer to a post-human future. Naam can speak to that future, as well as the possible risks that companies driving toward it may not see.

The Nexus trilogy, set in 2040, is also striking in how it foresees the political ramifications of technology. In the series, a mind-altering drug called Nexus immerses users in an augmented version of reality. The creator of Nexus is a brain-hacking civil libertarian who believes that it will free humanity and allow people to move on to a post-human future, where their minds can live on independently of their bodies.

But the U.S. government sees Nexus as an illegal drug, something that can drive a wedge between humans and enhanced humans. It wants to stamp it out and crush terrorists who plan to use it to disrupt society. Chinese researchers conduct frightening experiments that use Nexus to blend humanity and AI. Freedom-minded hackers are caught in the middle.

In addition to the Nexus series, hes written two non-fiction books: The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, and More than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. Naams books have earned the Prometheus, the Endeavour, the Philip K. Dick awards, been listed as an NPR Best Book of the Year, and have been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke prize.

Chang heard about Naam and welcomed him on a visit to Silicon Valley in a dinner with his tech and sci-fi friends. Chang, who has twice named to the Forbes Midas List of Top Tech Investors, wanted to find startups that fit into a vision that could create a brighter outlook for humanity.

Above: Tim Chang (upper left), Ramez Naam, and Dean Takahashi.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: How did you two meet?

Ramez Naam: Tim reached out to me on Facebook one day and said, I like your books, do you want to have dinner sometime here in the bay area? I said yes, and he set up an awesome dinner with a number of very cool people. I brought a couple of other friends as guests, some other great science fiction authors, and we hit it off immediately. Weve stayed in touch ever since.

Tim Chang: I had a hidden agenda. I was testing out this idea. I wanted to bring scientists and founders and some of my favorite science fiction authors together to see what kind of brainstorming and magic would ensue. It was fantastic. It ended up being three or four different science fiction authors, some pretty interesting folks in the science community. It was pretty inspiring to me.

Naam: People who worked in games, in neuroscience, and meditation. It was pretty good.

GamesBeat: Where did that instinct come from, Tim? Ramezs works are near-future science fiction. In that sense it seems like it makes a lot of sense that you could tap someone like that for ideas about what to fund. But what else drove that instinct?

Chang: I grew up influenced by science fiction. Its what got me into engineering, programming, and even VC. But theres a tight link between inspiration we get from science fictiontheres classic tales of many entrepreneurs who walked into VC offices back in the day with Neal Stephensons Cryptonomicon, slapping the book down and saying, I want to build this. Fund me. There are many of those inspirations.

A lot of our investment thesis ideas are fueled by near term speculative fiction, whether its Black Mirror, or my favorite, the movie Her. Ive been looking for someone to build adaptive, personalized, linear, hearable OS for years. Theres a tight virtuous cycle between science fiction, how it influences founders, scientists, the research they do, and how technology innovations and research influence authors and what they write.

And when I read Nexus, I had a suspicion this guy knows business. He knows Burning Man. He knows spirituality. He knows technology and social sciences. I was spot on. Weve been great friends ever since.

Above: Tim Chang is also friends with sci-fi writerEliot Peper. They spoke at our 2017 GamesBeat event.

Image Credit: Michael O'Donnell/VentureBeat

GamesBeat: It was clear he knew programming as well, right? Ramez, can you talk more about your background?

Naam: My first love was philosophy, but I realized there was no career to be had there. I liked physics, but I didnt want to have to be in a white lab coat my entire life. But somebody had given the school I was at, my elementary school, a Commodore VIC-20. I fell in love with programming. Its an infinite canvas. You can do whatever the heck you want.

I went to school and got a CS degree. Out of school I was lucky enough to get hired at Microsoft. I spent 13 seminal years there. I got to see and do some amazing stuff. Also, I became a burner early on. I was fascinated by what happens inside my mind. I started reading up on neuroscience. I had some friends that were neuroscientists. I would ask them, Why does this happen? And at first theyd answer questions, but after a while theyd get tired of it. Read this paper. Read this textbook.

And so to me, the whole universetheres a book called The Three Pound Universe. Everything we experience, everything we desire, all of human ingenuity, is in this little mass here. My first book, a non-fiction book, was about human augmentation, which I was massively into. Science and Nature, those journals, were my bathroom reading. I was fascinated by the things I saw going on, like rats that had electrodes that could use those in their motor cortex to control a robot arm and feed themselves. I wrote about that.

But honestly, nobody bought that book. It was well-reviewed, but it was a non-fiction pop science book. For quite a while I thought about fiction. When I finally did it, its a whole different way to reach people. You reach them on an emotional level, and you can get so much more traction to get stuff across into their minds. Thats what got me there.

GamesBeat: Tim, this whole thing he mentioned turned into the nootropic, brain enhancement or body enhancement movement. I think youve seen some of that in the VC world.

Chang: Oh yeah, yeah. It interweaves quite a bit with wearable technologies. First we had things tracking basic heart rate signals. Then it advanced to reading EEG. The first generation was reading things. Were now well into the writing aspect. You have neurostim and other things that dont just read signals, but augment them and send signals back into the body, biofeedback.

GamesBeat: Lets talk more about the Nexus trilogy. Can you summarize it quickly for us? I know that might be hard to do, but what are some of the issues that come?

Naam: Its the near future, set in 2040. The technology that people are most fixated ontheres a lot of biotech and AI and so on. But its this thing called Nexus, which is solely marketed as a party drug. Burners and ravers and whatever do it. But really its nanobots that go into your brain and attach to your neurons and broadcast and receive what theyre doing. If two of us take it and were in close proximity, our brains can start to sync up. We become telepathic.

The protagonists are San Francisco bay area grad students that are working on making it permanent, building an app layer and APIs on top of, proxying it across cell phones and the internet. You can telepathically communicate from anywhere. The real moral issue in the book is who gets control of this technology. Its all in the form of a thriller. Its a thriller with a cold war between the U.S. and China and so on. A friend of mine called it Tom Clancy meets Burning Man. I think theres more to it than that, but if you want some shorthand thats not a bad place to go.

GamesBeat: Tim, what occurred to you when you read this?

Chang: It struck me as a spiritual successor to the Matrix trilogy. I thought someone needed to pick it up and make a long form TV series out of it. Ive been bugging Ramez about this for years. Hes explained the red tape and the bureaucracy in getting fiction optioned for TV.

Naam: I explained it to Tim in venture terms. The option is the seed round. The TV show is the IPO, the big exit. Of course, to use another analogy, Netflix and Amazon and Apple TV are now adding the stack layer, easier ways to get out there. Maybe itll happen. There are people working on it right now, shopping it around in Hollywood, so someday, perhaps.

Above: Ramez Naam, science fiction writer and author of the Nexus series.

Image Credit: Ramez Naam

GamesBeat: I liked how the books spelled out the consequences of this magical invention, this brain-enhancing drug, and the relationship to AI. The politics of how different people or different countries react to the creation of thisthe U.S. has this faction that views it as an illegal drug, that the creators are terrorists who have to be stamped out, while the Chinese think its a great way to extend a single point of view or single consciousness across of the country in order to control everyone. Yet they also fear the possibility of a posthuman AI. And in the middle of all this are these hacktivists who are being hunted down and have to move underground. The politics are an interesting, more realistic part of this science fiction.

Naam: On the politics, when I started writing it, I was quite irritated about the war on drugs and the war on terror. I was writing about a technology I liked and some spiritual aspects, things like Buddhism and meditation and how technology can amplify or help us access some things in those spheres. But that political viewpoint, the question of whether government can control it or not, was on my mind as well. That led to the exercise of thinking about what will be the big geopolitical conflicts in 2040? A cold war between the U.S. and China seemed not out of the question. That became a natural tension to set up.

Hopefully things go way better in the real world compared to the politics I wrote about in the novels. The period of the last four years, the Trump presidency, was stranger and more extreme than most things Ive written about. Truth is often stranger than fiction.

GamesBeat: The other thing that happened that nobody expected was, about eight years ago, AI started working, with deep learning neural networks. The acceleration of the AI tech that, for so long, everyone had criticized as just fantasy. Thats accelerated the pace of technological change, and now it makes some of these books seem not so silly anymore, some of this science fiction.

Chang: My favorite phrase these days is, you cant make this stuff up. Its truly challenging. Fiction is feeling almost like it cant keep up with reality and some of the scenarios were running into now. Ill give an example. Black Mirror, I think it was episode one in season three, Downward Spiral, where one social reputation score affects access to rights, the ability to buy tickets. I think two months after that aired, China declared its citizen score, the black box algorithm based on loyalty to the Communist Party determining access to things like loans or buying train tickets or things like that. Youre seeing reality mirror fiction in ways that are really creepy. Reality is outpacing what weve even thought about in these ways.

The point I want to make is that Ramez does a masterful job of weaving in things like spiritual, political, cultural considerations into science fiction, which often has been a genre that doesnt do that. Id argue that its these aspects, as well as the financial and business model aspects, that are even more pertinent and important to especially near term speculative fiction and science fiction.

Naam: Important to the actual tech we develop and fund, too.

Above: Nexus is about brain enhancement. Will you take the red pill?

Image Credit: Ramez Naam

GamesBeat: You worked in machine learning for a long time. Were you surprised to see the acceleration of AI technology?

Naam: I would not say I was surprised to see that acceleration of the effectiveness of deep learning. If you look at a variety of tasks, precision and recall on a variety of things getting better over timeI didnt predict that deep learning in particular would take off. If you asked me at the time I left Microsoft, we were using two layer, three layer neural nets at the time. Boosted decision trees were still in the running. SVMs were still in the running.

Now deep neural nets have blown up in terms of their effectiveness, in part because of the incredible computational power we have, and elastic clouds where you have the luxury of being able to throw a thousand servers at something for a short period of time. And the explosion of data. Its becoming a world wheretheres been a lot of sci-fi written about inequality, but one of the big inequalities between businesses now is inequality of data. Whoever has the most and best data can train the best AI. We see this data advantage, the data virtuous cycles. Nobodys written about that, but there might be a good sci-fi concept in that.

Chang: When we were brainstorming before we were joking about, imagine the next Star Wars trilogy is about data. What would the data Death Star look like? What would data-poor rebels look like versus a data-rich empire? You could take well-known tropes from before and apply them in a new context where data, algorithms, AI, the people who understand these things are the new players in those wars.

GamesBeat: How did you feel about the fact that science fiction usually depicts AI as something that can replicate humanity, and its evil?

Naam: Honestly, in my daily life, I dont worry about sentient AI. Its a category error. The stuff were talking about as AI, machine learning, its a good categorizer. I dont know that were any closer at all to Her in a real sense, or HAL from 2001 becoming real. That said, and we can get into why if you want to, I do get annoyed with the depictions of AI in media. Not always, but usually theyre more negative. Her is a great example of a counter to that. Its also very rare for a science fiction story to be a romance. But most of the time, most depictions of AI in science fiction books, and even in moviesits going to get you. Heres a thing thats super powerful and smarter than humans and its going to eradicate us.

To start, why would it care enough to eradicate us? Maybe theres a different story, which is humans being abusive to their creations that they distrust. You saw me pivot a bit in that direction in the third book, Apex, where I posited AI as a very dangerous entity, but also showed its more human side, if you will. That was intentional.

GamesBeat: I think about some of the predictions in the books. In a lot of ways it predicted difficult political discourse that weve seen over the last four years. You had white supremacists creating a virus that they hoped would wipe out the other peoples of the world, and a crackdown or reaction to that from governments against that, and the reaction to the Nexus drug technology that followed. Im curious about the things that you think you got right, and some things that also surprised you.

Naam: I dont think reality is going to go the way of the Nexus novels necessarily. A lot of new technology that augments people, that makes us smarter, longer-lived, healthier in old age will be accepted. But the plot structure I used to motivate the world I wanted, where there was a hidden conflict, was one where this technology is heavily misused, and that causes fear. While I thinkwe dont have this tech, so its not really an issue, but I do see a huge role played by fear in politics today.

The election of Donald Trump, whats happened politically since hes been out of office, the filter bubbles are self-sorting into, fear of the other is a massively negative force in American society, and globally as well. Im curious if Tim has thoughts on that. I know youre a spiritual guy, that you care about this stuff, about creating a better world. What do we do to build different business models and different technologies that reduce fear of the other and get people to empathize and come together in some way?

Chang: Sometimes Id like to see science fiction explore more is the unintended consequences of business models and powerful technologies. Id argue weve built the real life Matrix now in our social media platforms. Not from some evil AI overlord that wants to enslave us, but because we happened to pick a business model of free ad-based revenues. Often in those cases, when its algorithmically driven and feed-based, the only conclusion is that you have to engineer a product that addicts its users. Theres no way around it.

And so even for me, as a venture capitalist, when I realized thatI told my partners, Im not going to look at business plans for social, digital media products that have free ad-based revenue models. I dont think its an ethical model. Not with the way we have to scale and grow these things. Id love to see more science fiction that explores the unintended consequences of these business models mixed with exponential technologies. Its a great way to map out what can go wrong with it.

GamesBeat: Sadly, it seems like youre going against the grain there in terms of what is popular to fund, and what turns out to be successful.

Chang: Capital seeks superior returns. Thats not always whats best aligned for the planet or for people. News, as a matter of factif it bleeds, it leads. We have to explore business models and how they form the way we wield technologies. Ive always said that tech isnt good or bad. Its a tool. What is your intention? What is the model? What is the business you wield it with?

GamesBeat: In your role at Singularity University youre focusing more on climate change and issues related to that. Is that a pivot for you as far as your interests, or did that come out of your interest in science fiction?

Naam: Within the last 10 yearsactually, the second time I quit Microsoft, my goal was to write a book about saving the world, innovating around climate and energy and so on. My agent just didnt love the book. I got stalled and didnt know what to do. I decided to write the science fiction novel. But for the last decade, parallel to the Nexus books, Ive been a forecaster, a public speaker, and sometimes an investor in clean tech, in companies trying to address climate change and other global challenges, mostly in bioenergy.

There are some similarities. Theres a science fiction aspect to looking into the future and understanding where technology can go. But mostly its just that I see it as an enormously important problem. Im not a proper VC the way Tim is, but I get people pitching me on deals all the time where I think, This could make a lot of money, but I dont see how the world would be any better. For me, it has to be addressing a real, pressing problem for humanity, aside from having the potential to be a good investment.

Climate is a hard thing. Its a very big challenge. Its a challenge that is here. Its a present danger, and it gets worse over generations. Its hard to frame it even in science fiction. A lot of science fiction talks about climate change, but you dont have a silver bullet. You cant end the story with the good guys beating the bad guys or making a discovery. Whatever it is we do, its going to be a wide portfolio or panoply of different approaches we take to de-carbonize cars, buildings, ships, planes, whatever. Itll take decades to deploy.

When I think about climate change, I think about it as a personal thing that I work on, trying to educate people and motivate people, motivate business people about where to put their money and why. But from a fiction perspective, I see it more as a backdrop to science fiction stories, rather than the core conflict or Macguffin if you will.

GamesBeat: When I think of what science fiction has become really popular in tech circles, its almost unavoidable to talk about the metaverse. Neal Stephenson coined that term way back in 1992 or so with Snow Crash. Nexus has a lot of roots in that. I wonder what you think about whether well create something like a metaverse.

Chang: Already happening. Ive seen dozens of pitches. We have successors to Second Life, which was in some ways a successor to the Well. Weve had virtual worlds for decades now. But now the headsets, the browsers, the devices are catching up to it such that we can have some pretty compelling experiences. These will continue to take off.

Again, though, you have the question. Whats your business model? Lets say your business model maximizes or incentivizes session lengths. Itll be in your interest to build a more appealing world in VR or the metaverse than the real world. Next thing you know, well have VR addiction clinics. A lot of people recently got turned on to this by Ready Player One, but that wasnt actually, to me, very future-looking. That was a love song ode to retro 80s geeks like us who grew up with those things. It was like a mixtape of past-looking greatest hits as opposed to something truly future-looking.

Naam: Theres interesting stuff in both AR and VR. As the hardware gets smaller, lighter, cheaper, longer battery life, were going to be able to do all kinds of incredible stuff. I do wondertoday its VR thats taken off more than AR. But I wonder if, as these worlds get more robust, are they going to face the same challenges that social media has? When I pull out my Oculus and put it on, a lot of whats being pitched at me is social experiences. Online, you can find a group where theyre going to amplify your opinions, whatever they are. People self-select for that, for things that amplify their existing political beliefs especially.

VR and AR have the power to be a much more emotionally impactful medium than the ones we have today. Am I going to have the Benghazi experience? An experience where Im inside the Capitol being stormed? Are those pushed to different audiences? Is that going to tear us apart even more? How do we avoid that problem? I may be overthinking it. Maybe its all going to be about exploring under the sea or going to Mars and whatnot. But I do have to wonder, given the experience of the last few years, how VR will get used and whether it will bring us together and pull us apart.

GamesBeat: I just watched a film that debuted at Sundance, A Glitch in the Matrix, from the line in the movie about how thats the only way you can tell that were living inside a computer simulation. It goes back to a 1977 speech by Philip K. Dick, another science fiction writer, about how you would be able to tell whether or not were in a simulation. The film is interesting because they found people who believe this, and theyre living their lives as if, when they walk out of a room, the simulation goes off in order to save energy. The people who were in the room talking to them, they just disappear. It feels like the logical extension of the technologies everyone is trying to create to make a believable universe. I didnt think wed see the consequences, people really believing this is true.

Naam: I dont know if its a major consequence, that people believe this is true. I think about more prosaic things, though. One of the first VR experiences I had was something called the Nantucket Project. They had VR headsets built around a stack of iPhones, and something like Google Cardboard. It wasnt the highest-end system. But it was an experience of being in a Syrian refugee camp. All you could do is turn. You were on a mostly guided tour. You couldnt walk around on your own. But you had a kid as your guide walking you through and explaining how things were, using real footage taken from this camp. It was hugely emotionally impactful. It was probably still the most emotionally impactful thing Ive done in VR.

Maybe there is room for empathy. I think it has the chance to help people see other people as real human beings. Will it get used in other ways, though? Will it get used to create hatred or sow dissent? Hopefully empathy and love willI do believe, despite the experience of the last four years, that overall more communication and higher bandwidth communication does create more connection and understanding. But thats on net. There are subsets of that communication that go the other way. Were still trying to figure out how to maximize the good.

Chang: Personally, the Planck constant is an interesting one to noodle on when it comes to the processing power of the computer simulation behind all this. But the framework I wanted to sharewe tend to, whenever theres a new platform, port things. We adapt things we knew from before to the newer platforms. Whats typically a hit, though, are things that are native to the new platform.

When the iPhone came out we ported platform games and shooters to it, but it was Angry Birds that was the first bonafide hit. It used the unique aspects of the touch interface. In VR, the first collection of content was first-person shooters and other things wed seen before. Theres a couple funny phrases Ive heard in tech. New forms of content on platforms are always the three Gs. It appeals to the most basic instincts: gambling, girls, and guns. Business models are similar. They appeal to base instincts. We say that something goes widely viral if it helps users get paid, made, or laid.

To Ramezs point, could you have other models? Thats why I led an investment in a company called Tripp. I wrote a few years ago that the most obvious thing is to go launch shooter games and Netflix 360 VR. But I wanted to see not Netflix, but net trips. Could you induce more self-discovery, more connection and empathy with others, with the self, with nature? Arguably Tripp is building one of the first digital psychedelics, a technodelic if you will, designed to shift and expand consciousness. Thats a totally different use case than what a typical game youd port to VR would focus on.

These are new categories. Theyre still in the works. But for me, there has to be a way of making ourselves better through these things.

Naam: I think its a great effort, a great thing to fund, to try to use this technology to help people modulate their emotional state, find more peace, find more tranquility, find more access to spirituality. What better use for technology is there?

GamesBeat: We have some audience questions. One of them is, how do you pop these bubbles, where people are deluding themselves? But also, how do you pop these business models that encourage them?

Naam: The question of how you pop the bubble is easier than how you pop the business model. If you look at Facebook, the feed optimizes for engagement. It optimizes for how many likes and responses a post gets. It brings you back to people who you engage with. That ends up reinforcing either positive engagements, people you mostly agree with, or sometimes it reinforces negative engagements. If I wanted to pop those filter bubbles in Facebook, Id start finding a way for the feed to surface some of the content that is not quite on your side. Maybe its not all the way on the other side. But its the best written, most reasonable, most accessible, most from people you trust, to try to spread some of that sharing of ideas.

Theres good data that social networks, whether its our personal friendships or othersthe weak connections are some of the most important ones. Theyre the ones that link one clustered network with another clustered network and bridge them together. I worry that people are just entrenching inside those clustered networks. Now, would that make Facebook more money? Maybe not in the first quarter its out there. But if I were Facebook or Twitter, Id be worried. Theyre doing well, but the platforms have become toxic enough that people are fleeing from them. Doing something to create more constructive and positive engagement below the surface, across divides, might be something that turns that around.

Chang: I totally agree with Ramez on that. A couple of vectors Ive been consideringone, back to business model. What if its not just free and ad-based? What if its tiered subscription? What if it isnt free to make a comment? What if it cost you a penny? Would it get rid of trolls immediately? This inspires the question of, do we need to redefine what free speech is in the digital era? My conclusion is theres freedom of speech in what you say, but were in an era where theres no cost or accountability to speech, especially when you can have pseudonyms or create fake accounts. Thats when you can hijack platforms and when things get dangerous. Maybe we can alleviate those with design of algorithms, feeds, feedback mechanisms, getting rid of vanity metrics like likes and retweets. But also business model choices.

The other way we could pop these bubbles, I do think the ultimate thing people want to pay for is meaning, purpose, and self-expression. If youre helping people bet on themselves, helping them be their aspirational selves, thats more like a self-improvement model, and I do think that has value. This is a silly example, but back in the day, MP3s were worth nothing, while ringtones were worth something, because ringtones were a self-expression, branding moment. That was the difference between content versus self-expression. Self-help has always proven that people want to bet on themselves, making themselves better, upgraded versions of themselves, versus downgraded, addicted versions of themselves. Thats what our current feeds and business models are designed for.

GamesBeat: We promised a bit of talk about games. I may be supposed to be bringing that in more than anyone here. Its interesting to see games drive toward increasingly realistic depictions of humans. If you think about the progress weve made with AI as well, there seems to be a lot of similar moral implications for the designers of these things. Weve talked about how social networks require some more responsible guidance or leadership. On the games side as well, were eventually going to have questions arise about whether these artificial beings were creating inside virtual worlds are ours, as property. Are they slaves? If theyre so real that they have their own consciousness, how wrong is that? I wonder what your own guidance might be in that realm as far as how designers should think about consequences.

Naam: Im not all that worried about it. Theres a world of difference between what it takes to create something that has a great facade of intelligence than something that is sentient and aware. I go back to Eliza. That was the text-based psychotherapist made in the 1970s. All Eliza was, it was a Perl script. Youd say, Im worried about my mother, and it would read those keywords and say, Tell me more about your mother. My mother is sick with diabetes. How do you feel about your mothers diabetes? Thats all it took to anthropomorphize it through a keyboard.

Even an incredible simulacrum, and theres a demand for that in gamesobviously we want great NPCs to interact with and strong storylines. Wed all love to have the digital personal assistant that organizes our lives. Doing that does not require you to solve the problem of creating consciousness. Its much easier, and it doesnt raise any ethical issues.

Chang: I get excited a lot about this topic. I wish I could do a poll of how many in the audience ever developed genuine emotions or feelings for an NPC character. I say this because I just finished about 100 hours in Cyberpunk 2077, and I noticed genuine affection for some of the love interest characters. This made me think about, could games be a vehicle for developing communications and relationship skills with others?

Imagine dialogue trees mixed with relationship coaching skills and responsive dialogue. Were going to have semantic processing that can do that. You could improve your relationship with your family or your wife someday, potentially, through these kinds of thing. It goes back to the Her analogy, from the movie, where you full-on fall in love with the operating system because it knows you better than anyone else, but it could be a possibility.

My other challenge for game designers, the ultimate opportunity is, what if you replace all the end bosses in video games with deeply spiritual reflections? The game learns you, and it turns out the big boss at the end is your own shadow side, your core wounds, your unresolved traumas. If you saw the movie Soul, from Pixar, those lost souls were just you, wrapped in the shadows of your projections and traumas and limitations. Imagine a game as a spiritual experience, or self-transformation vehicle. Thats what Id love to see.

Naam: A friend of mine is at a startup that makes software for kids with autism. They do have gamified experiences that help them understand things like, how do you read emotions? What is this person doing? Whats the right response in this situation? It seems quite effective. But the idea of just using it for ordinary adults or teenagers or whoever, anyone who wants to learn socialization skills and so on, is a good one.

Chang: Independent game developers in the art world have been doing this for a while. You have games like Papers, Please that teach you empathy for someone like a customs agent. Theyre more fringe. But you could imagine these learnings and mechanics making their way into triple-A games.

GamesBeat: I read Ready Player Two, and one of the more interesting things I thought he got right in there was that streamers will be the ones that will post their experiences of what its like to do something in a hyper-realistic virtual reality. Theyll publish these things on the equivalent of a YouTube channel, and you just step into these files and go live somebody elses experience. You could completely understand what its like to be them, whether its a transgender person or somebody living in a country far away. That was a bit of a hopeful message in that these technologies can be so immersive as to communicate to you what its like to be someone else, and that could increase empathy in the world, because its so immersive.

Chang: Do you remember a 1995 movie called Strange Days? Ralph Fiennes had this SQUID device that recorded emotional experiences. It was the ultimate spectate mode, because you could feel the emotions and sensations. Even Cyberpunk 2077 had the notion of braindance, which built on that as well. Its back to the notion of VR as an empathy engine. There will be good and there will be bad. You can imagine snuff videos and other horrifying things, but there could be beautiful things, like witnessing the birth of your baby, or falling in love. The whole range could be possible.

Naam: Maybe some of that has to do with education as well. People, when they are selecting what theyre going to go watchof course theres a lot of people who watch amazing documentaries and educate themselves and so on, but a lot more go to see action, adventure, comedy, romance, escapism. In schooling, maybe one of the things we need to have is, live a day in someone elses shoes. I think thats an amazing tool for VR or AR to help people learn. Whats it like to be of a different race, a different gender? Whats it like to live in Sri Lanka or Myanmar? To build that degree of empathy. You can combine that with things like real time speech translation and other things like that. I can imagine situations where you really increase the level of empathy.

But Im no longer quite as sure that it will all happen by itself. We have to make the intentional choice to use technology in these ways and help drive that.

Chang: Somebody told me that TikTok is kind of doing that. I have a lot of problems with TikTok and its algorithmic content, but you get authentic slices of life, five to 30 seconds at a time, from all over the world. A kid in the streets in Myanmar, something like that. That possibly is happening in these lower-res formats, which is something I hadnt expected.

GamesBeat: Theres a question for Ramez. Whats the distinction between psychedelics or drugs and technologies like virtual reality? Nexus is a drug, but it has the effect of something like taking AR glasses and putting them inside your head.

Naam: Tim should answer this one too. But theyre complementary technologies. Some thinking about psychedelic experiencethe value of putting anything in your brain whatsoever, whether its the right media that youre consuming, whether its a book, whether its Sam Delanys book Dhalgren, whos a master of science fictionthat was like a 1200 page psychedelic trip. It really was. Or its the right experience in nature or whatnot. Now, when you have AR and VR, they can do some amazing things, including psychedelic experiences. But they can probably be amplified or further amplify things that can be done with substances or meditation or other practices as well.

Theres no bright line, but there are some things that are easier to do in different ways. Its easier to give someone a very specific visual experience than a screen than it is with any drug youre going to put in your brain. Its probably easier to induce other things with something, whether its brain stimulus or molecules that interact with your brain as well. The two together might be one plus one equals three.

Chang: You could start to play with peoples perception and feed back to different senses. You could start to mix them together, simulating things like synaesthesia in virtual domains. Could you start to simulate what death is like, as you start to lose your senses? I saw one art project in VR that was used to give people a sense of what its like to be paranoid schizophrenic, by playing with the senses, overlays of things, phantom voices. You can image the empathy that can create for different neural states.

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Connections and inspirations between science fiction, tech, and games - VentureBeat

In a damning sign of the times, one of the most profound things anyone has recently told me was intended as a joke.

We were discussing philosopher Nick Bostroms paper Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? Bostrom argues that one of three propositions must be true: either (1) most posthuman civilisations go extinct; or (2) most posthuman civilisations are not interested in running computer simulations of their ancestral history; or (3) we are living in a computer simulation.

Despite popular interpretations of his argument, it is worthwhile noting that Bostrom does not argue that (3) is the case. Actually, Bostrom explicitly states that given the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion ones credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3). In other words, there is about a one-third chance that we are living in a computer simulation.

An implicit assumption in Bostroms paper is that the only kind of evidence that would justify a reapportionment of probabilities is what our own civilisation ends up doing. For instance, if we end up developing technology so dangerous that a slight slip-up might cause our extinction, it seems sensible to add credence to the extinction scenario. Bostroms probability distribution accordingly relies on the assumption that we are, in fact, stuck in a dark forest of ignorance; that there is currently no evidence to suggest that one or the other eventuality is any more probable than any other.

Which gets me back to the joke. Its profundity lay in the observation that we already have evidence that suggests one eventuality over the other: the 2016 election of Donald Trump. According to my interlocutor, it provides compelling evidence that option (3) must be the case.

The implied argument, as I understood it, was a kind of reductio ad absurdum: for suppose that we are actually living in base reality. If so, then a man who has appeared as a wrestler on WWE and has joked about grabbing women by their genitals could never be elected to the highest office of the most powerful country on Earth (nor would someone who did a cameo on Gossip Girl be tasked with brokering peace in the Middle East). Such plot twists are the preserve of badly written soap operas.

As a minimal definitional requirement, the real world should be written well. In base reality, there is a real risk that a mistake at the highest levels of government say,accidental nuclear war or a failure to take climate change seriously could result inhuman extinction. It seems a reasonable expectation, therefore, that the world wont write itself into a corner. (If this is right, incidentally, then Bostrom was wrong to assume that the extinction scenario and the simulation scenario are statistically independent: an increase in the probability of extinction leads to an increase in our credence of simulation).

But Trump was elected to the Presidency of the United States, and Jared Kushner was tasked with brokering peace in the Middle East. The former star of The Apprentice becomes President of the United States: a plot twist worthy of M Night Shyamalan.

When I first heard this quip, I did not take it to be a serious argument. But events have a way of catching up to perceptions. In June 2016 the United Kingdom, against all expert advice, voted to leave the European Union. And the same argument that has been applied to the election of Trump can be applied mutatis mutandis to Brexit: if we were living in base reality, then people would not vote to leave the most prosperous single market on Earth. Prudent conservatism would win out, and the people would listen to what the experts told them. But then, on 23 June 2016, Britons did vote to do just that.

And then, of course, the world went ahead and well and truly jumped the shark. Covid-19 is manifestly a badly written piece of plot contrivance. Who could believe that a virus, less than a single micron in diameter, could thwart all the ingenuity of humankind, thereby collapsing the global economic system? If anything is, then Covid-19 is evidence that God, the great computer scientist in the sky, grew tired of their simulation and, like the gamer who, bored of the way the game is meant to be played, started experimenting with the physics engine and discovered that it is utterly broken.

Trump, Brexit, Covid-19: what unites all these is that they would not have happened had the world been a rational (read: physical) place. A cinema-goer, watching all of this, might be expected to walk out in protest: yes, Mx Screenwriter, Trump being elected once was a good gag you really got me good but very nearly twice!? Your fictional world has lost all plausibility.

There is another interpretation of these events, though I leave it to the reader to decide whether it is a better one. They have happened not because the world is not real, but because we treat it as if it isnt. Humans are deeply and dangerously nonchalant. We decide who or what to vote for not as expressions of deep political ideals, nor even of naked and rational self-interest, but often of irate contempt. What else can explain the 2016 election of Trump but hatred of elites, of Hillary Clinton, of liberals, Mexicans, Chinese, of most insidiously of all expertise itself?

The same is true, of course, of Brexit: Britons were not motivated by economic self-interest (for, if they were, they would surely have listened to the experts who near-unanimously agreed that it would leave them poorer off), but by disdain of European bureaucrats, Polish immigrants, and, again, of elites.

It would be folly, of course, to ascribe exactly the same psychological factors to Covid-19. But there is nonetheless a psychological explanation for our failure to deal with it: we think that the world conforms to our perceptions of it. In the modern world, this is more or less an acceptable form of belief: our ontology has expanded to include stock markets, the economy, and the limited liability corporation. The problem is that humans are not discerning, and we assume that the rules that apply to non-physical entities apply to physical ones as well. Covid-19, to our surprise, cannot be defeated by just not thinking about it.

The election of Joe Biden, then, should be celebrated for one simple reason: reality feels real again. DM

Quentin du Plessis holds degrees in Social Science and Law from the University of Cape Town and is currently working as a teaching and research assistant in the departments of private law and philosophy at UCT. In 2018, he was one of the winners of the South African Law Reform Commissions legal essay writing competition.

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Has 2020 really been real? Or are we all living in a computer simulation? - Daily Maverick

Futureshock Herbie Hancock

Columbia

August 1983

"Rockit" by Herbie Hancock, an unlikely sound track in 1983, arrived as a completely tangential entry into the world of pop. But besides reaching the Billboard #1 dance hit that summer, it broke a number of other thresholds as well. Hancock's single was the first by a black artist to be aired on MTVaside, that is from Michael Jackson. Jackson occupied a very different space in the Hall of American pop along with a personal narrative of race and body arising from a rare medical condition.

Hancock's "'Rockit" on MTV, on the other hand, was a calculated use of pop to reconfigure the racialised body in the music industry's designations.

"Rockit"'s significance lies in the convergence of new intersectionalities of the body that arose in the eighties. This writing draws them together so that masculinity from black subculture and radical feminist theory from academia entwine in a new body politics that goes beyond the human. That is, the futureshock of the body that awaits us (to paraphrase the 1983 album Futureshock that "Rockit" is a part of).

Robot Pipe by Thor_Deichmann (Pixabay License / Pixabay)

An expansive narration of the making of the "Rockit" sound track comes from journalist, musician, and filmmaker S.h. Fernando Jr., in his article, "How Herbie Hancock Crafted a Hip-Hop Classic". We get to know the circumstance and serendipity that takes Hancock and his jazz mingling with blues and funk into a recording session with turntable artist Grandmixer D.ST, bass guitarist and producer Bill Laswell, and synth/drum machine programmer Michael Beinhorn. Out of this session, an hour and a half at El Dorado Studios at Hollywood, the track emerges.

It personifies Laswell's concept of "collision music", whereby artists from different genres come together to try it on; and it meshed well with Hancock's rejection of anything predictable, to be willing to work blind, to avoid what he calls the "butter notes" as his mentor Miles Davis advised. Yet this could be read in many ways. On that recording session at El Dorado, Fernando Jr. writes, "Dave [Jerden, the sound engineer] told me Herbie came up to him and was like, 'This is cool, isn't it?' 'Cause he just had no idea at all. To me, it felt like a case of when you got nothin', you got nothin' to lose."

Fernando Jr. further recounts how the song got its first public airing: "As soon as the song was mixed, they left for the airport with a reference copy on cassette. "We had some time to kill," Laswell recalls, "so I said let's stop at this speaker store. And we went inside and wanted to hear some different speakers. The guy in the store was going to play some bullshit rock stuff, so I said, 'Here, play this. I want to hear how this sounds.' And it was 'Rockit.'" Laswell cranked up the volume. "When we played it," he says, "there were all these kids from the neighborhood, and they gathered around us, and they're like, 'What the fuck is this?!' I looked at D, and I was like, 'That's a hit record.'"

This is how one hit single came to present the new soloist of the pop world: the scratch artist with only the turntable as an instrument. Hancock had stumbled upon hip-hop and scratching barely a year before, through Malcolm Mclaren's 1982 song, "Buffalo gals". The Sex Pistols producer took the hip-hop scratch out of the Black "hood" and subculture into the white mainstream. The transition has a story from its producer Trevor Horn. Given Mclaren's compulsion to produce a cover of "Buffalo Gals" from Piute Pete's 1940s-era Square Dances album, Horn asked him, "Why don't we do a rapping scratching version of 'Buffalo Gals'?" So they flew over the hip-hop crew The World's Famous Supreme Team from the Bronx to London, whose response was, "Nah, we can't do that that's Ku Klux Klan shit. That's what the Ku Klux Klan dance to."

But then we learn how music, race, politics, and aesthetics came to be churned around in the hip-hop mill. And that in time led to Hancock's "Rockit" to open up a new age of the body in pop. Key to this was the "Rockit" video without which the sound track may never have found the airtime. Fernando Jr quotes Bill Laswell saying, "I don't think Sony/Columbia would have released it if not for the video. They totally didn't get it."

MTV did not show work by Black artists at the time, so Hancock went for self-erasure. "I don't want it to look like a 'black guy' video", he recounts saying in his autobiography Possibilities. So indeed in the "Rockit" video, Hancock was to be seen, dowsed in blue filter, in very brief snippets on a portable TV screen with his synthesizer. The voice, meanwhile, is overridden by a vocoder to synthesize it. Hancock had exorcised the black association of the body. In its place were macabre white mannequins, droids jerking their way through the scratch mix.

A classically trained jazz pianist who spent five years as part of Miles Davis Quintet (196368), Hancock is also a practising Buddhist who chants "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo" for an hour each day. Ideas about transcending the body could be as much a consideration as the erasure of the body in the "Rockit" video. Such ideas connect the strands of Eastern karmic philosophy of freeing the body from the wheel of life and representation to a Western civilizational thread of the body as taboo--from the Garden of Eden to Plato's "the body is the tomb of the soul".

Yet between erasure and transcendence lay contemporary re-workings of who are we and what we are between man and machine, race and gender. And therein lies the significance of "Rockit" that takes us to the way the whole terrain of body politics was changing in the mid-'80s. Body politics allows us to intersect hip-hop and its black male gang-culture with radicalizing white feminist discourse coming out of academia. Through these we understand how pop came to enter a brand new age, its cyborg age.

Cyborg is a '60s term for a hybrid being, a hybrid of machine and organism. Donna Haraway, a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at UCL declared in 1985 that we are now all cyborgs. Her Cyborg Manifesto first published in The Socialist Review writes, "By the late 20th century, our time, a mythic time, we are all . fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs."

For Haraway our ontology, our politics now belongs to the cyborg. The cyborg anthropologist Amber Case helps explain why this requires a new understanding of ourselves with the way we are now tooled up, clicking on screens and obsessively pressing buttons, etc.. The political space this comes to beget between biological essentialism and the cyborg hybrid is what we are left grappling with.

In Haraway's manifesto, the cyborg is to free us from the pre-determined male authored world. The cyborg, she writes, "is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code." For this undertaking she suggests, "we must never again connect as parts to wholes, as marked beings incorporated into unmarked ones, as unitary and complementary subjects. We must have agency or agencies - without defended subjects." By the latter, Haraway of course meant the "man, that is, the author of a cosmos called history".

Yet this where the world of hip-hop with its techno-synthesis, its scratchy beats, its bodily rawness of rap and b-breaking enters the age of new intersectionalism, ironically, by its essentialism. An essentialism rooted in the only way hip-hop could come to be--all black all male. There are no shortage of accounts on how hip-hop started in south Bronx house parties in the late '70s as narrated in New York Public Radio. Others pin it down to a specific party on a specific date. Aaron Millar in National Geographic writes it as such:

"On 11 August 1973, at a house party on 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in the Bronx, hip hop was born. DJ Kool Herc threw a party for his sister, Cindy, in the rec room of their apartment block. It was the first time all the elements of hip hop culture came together: breakdancing, graffiti artists, DJs and an MC."

It took a few years before the hip-hop house party came downtown to Manhattan. Grandmaster Flash with 'The Message' (1982) gave us the defining anthem. The house party was how the American shadow self also took the licence using hip-hop to intervene in the public domain in new ways.

How the tenor of street culture changed is storyboarded in films like Stan Lathan's Beat Street (1984). The underground everywhere from Paris to Palestine had a new voice through rap. But the further hip-hop sound went, the further it loosened from its transgressions (of the body and sound).

The real explosion was hip-hop's appropriation into pop consumerism with the different elements of hip-hop freely scattered into global space. We see that clearly in an alt-hip hop sample like M|A|R|R|S's "Pump up the Volume" (1987) from the East London acid house scene. The homage to its roots is clear, Yo all you homeboys out in 'Bronx, this one's for you but it's a male techno-capitalist cyborg, Rhythmatic, systematic world control extrapolating out into the entire universe.

In the passage of a hip-hop decade before the days of the internet we came to see how the narrative of the body fused with the meta-narratives of capitalism and individualism through technology. It's a process that popular culture, in particular music, embodies transparently, if to also remind us how the body remains as the battlefield; the battlefield that we fight over as much as we run from. How the escapist dimensions of a cyborg body by which we are liberated from the gendered racialised biological body in turn creates a counter politics through another body.

This came through Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry's "Zombie Manifesto" of 2008 as a direct critique of Haraway's manifesto. The zombie originates from Haitian folklore, the dead slave body that comes alive to haunt its master. But it also reminds us of the slave master who then used the zombie to dissuade the slave in the plantation from suicide (so as to escape the treadmill of its slavery). The double bind here is that it applies as much to the enslaved as the free. The zombie manifesto transposes this onto the American dream and the treadmill of modern everyday consumerism. This is why the zombie cut so deep into the common psyche with films like George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) followed by Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead (1985) that invoke the underlying repressions of the American dream.

The zombie manifesto refers us to Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), which suggests that the individual, the hallowed subject of modern life, is a fiction. A fiction conjured by an economic structure to ensure greater domination. "What Horkheimer and Adorno and others illustrate is that the illusory separation of subject and object, the fata morgana [sublime mirage] of individualism, keeps happy the camp of zombiesthe slaves to capitalism who are merely deluded into thinking that they are free." In this delusion of free subjecthood and consumption as the means of fulfilment only the commodity fetish animates (subjectivises) life. At the same time, it objectifies the human subject. What remains is the living dead, the zombie who renders irrelevant the difference between the subject and object. The zombie thus counters Haraway's cyborg, its claims to transcend the subject/object divide.

Screengrab from "Rockit" video

This conflict of the body as cyborg or as zombie comes to act out in a sublime way in "Rockit". The video depends largely on the work of the English conceptual artist, Jim Whiting - a nomadic outsider with little time either for the art world or for state patronage. With the documentary series, South of Watford (1986), Nigel Miller delves into Whiting's working language: the recycled assemblages from scrapyards as the dead matter of consumer culture that comes to find a second life. We see convulsing legs, wanking men, insecure pervs all writhing in agitated clothing, each one cobbled out of salvaged objects brought back to life from the scrapheap.

A decade later Whiting went on to set up Bimbotown a varit club in Leipzigk which the critic Julian Spalding describes: "the extraordinary creation of one extraordinary mind, human beings hunt and are hunted, drink and devour, fuck and get fucked, kick and get their kicks, all amid bucketfuls of laughter." Whiting's creations tell us how the discarded re-patched conveys who we are and what we are. He suffered from rickets as a child; thus it is not surprising that Whiting's creations use frailties and weaknesses to make us all the more human.

Whiting shows us the dissonance between how we shape technology and how technology shapes us. His figures in "Rockit" use the sound track to open up the conflicts of the body in the road to come. They signal battles of the body yet to be framed. Between the cyborg transhumanists who believe science and technology will alter the human condition (for the better) transforming us into the "post-human" and the zombie, the living dead who warns that "we can get posthuman only at the death of the subject", is not a new subject. The zombie is the post(mortem) human who returns. It returns us to our biological body the body that in its everyday dies an untold number of deaths in its own denial forced by the modern configurations of gendered and racialised society.

This is what hip-hop in its raw essence released from the ghetto party only to be appropriated, co-opted by capital. The double fate of its subversion now tells us that we are bodies in a chain gang. That we are programmed, propelled by the need to perpetually consume. Never mind the PR images of cyber fantasies, Elon Musk's Space X and so forth--they are only for our consumption. We do not go to the future; we are taken to it.

Yet if we can learn from seeing "Rockit" anew, it is in how Herbie Hancock slipped the body through the race filters with a naivet that comes from his belief in chance. As he says in Possibilities, "We all have the natural human tendency to take the safe route--to do the thing we know will work rather than taking a chance." The video returns us to the ambition of Haraway's manifesto to re-hash all of the permutations of our future body politics: "self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man...".

Who decides how these permutations will intersect to create our future selves? In a future that opens as a game of chance, we may yet not be ordained as cyborgs to become zombies bound to the wheel of capital turned by the same old hand of Enlightenment white and patriarchal technology. But by the agency of chance, we can escape the clutches of that grip, to smuggle ourselves out piece by piece. Where to and how we get there is the futureshock of the body that awaits us.

Works Cited

Case, Amber. "We Are All Cyborgs Now". TED Talk. January 2011.

Fernando Jr., S.h. "How Herbie Hancock Crafted a Hip-Hop Classic". Medium. 21 April 2015.

Hancock, Herbie. "Hancock on Music Theory". YouTube. 27 July 2019.

Hancock, Herbie. Herbie Hancock: Possibilities. Viking. August 2005.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century". Socialist Review. 1985.

Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Wikipedia.

Horn, Trevor. "Key Tracks: Trevor Horn on 'Buffalo Gals'". RedBullMusicAdademy.com. 31 January 2013.

Lauro, Sarah Juliet, and Embry, Karen. "A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism". Boundry 2. Volume 35, Issue 1. Spring 2008. Duke University Press.

Millar, Aaron. "New York: the birthplace of hip hop". National Geographic. 19 May 2018.

Piute, Pete. "Buffalo Gals". Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

Swanson, Abbie Fentress. "The South Bronx: Where Hip-Hop Was Born". WNYC News. 1 August 2010

Vogel, Joseph. "Black and White: how Dangerous kicked off Michael Jackson's race paradox". The Guardian. 17 March 2018.

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Futureshock: Herbie Hancock and the Body Politics of Pop - PopMatters

Bring Me The Horizons Oli Sykes has hailed Yungblud as a new breed of rockstar following their recent collaboration, Obey.

Released yesterday (September 2), the team-up serves as the third single to be lifted from BMTHs upcoming Posthuman project, following on from previous cuts Ludens and Parasite Eve.

Explaining the bands decision to recruit Yungblud (real name Dominic Harrison), Sykes told Loudwire: There was an energy to [Obey] where it felt heavy but then had some slight Britpop influences, which I hear in Yungbluds music.

With our last record [amo], we kind of looked outside the scene for people to collaborate with and bring something new to the table, and with this record we wanted to have people that reflect the scene at the moment and still not choose obvious people that you would expect us to work with.

Sykes continued: I really like what Yungbluds doing. I love his energy and I think hes reflective of a new breed of rock star. Were honoured, to be honest.

Meanwhile, Yungblud has been added to the line-up for next years Reading & Leeds festivals, which will be headlined by Stormzy,Catfish And The Bottlemen, Post Malone,Disclosure, Liam GallagherandQueens Of The Stone Age.

Harrison recently revealed that his second album will be coming out this fall, and has so far shared the tracks Lemonade, Strawberry Lipstick and Weird.

It legitimately explores the ideas of identity, of sexuality, of equality, of depression, of anxiety, of life, of love, of heartbreak, of everything, Yungblud said of the LP. Me and my fan base, were coming of age together. I want to do it side by side.

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Bring Me The Horizons Oli Sykes: Yungblud is a new breed of rockstar - NME.com

July 20, 2020 Caitlin Cherry on digital abstraction and Black femininity

Caitlin Cherry has always been interested in the weaponized circulation of images. At the Brooklyn Museum in 2013, she mounted her paintings on wooden catapults modeled after martial designs by Leonardo, as if they were about to be fired into the air. More recently, she has produced prismatic paintings from photos of Black femmes (including models, exotic dancers, porn actresses, rappers, and influencers) culled from social media. Inspired by the promotional posts of a Brooklyn cabaret, her newest works feature its servers and dancers in suggestive poses, flattened by delirious patterns and alphanumeric codes onto canvases with widescreen dimensions. Here, the slipperiness of digital images comes up against the slickness of oil paint, which she manipulates into a kind of filter that both obscures and refracts representations of Black femininity. A virtual presentation of Cherrys new paintings and digital collages, entitled Corps Sonore, is currently viewable in the online viewing room of Los Angeless Luis De Jesus Gallery through August.

THE NEW PAINTINGS include an aurora pattern that was originally inspired by iridescence. I guess its not really a direct representation of iridescence, but more like how a 4-D rendering program registers iridescence. It looks a bit like a rainbow; it can also resemble chrome. I was interested in thinking about iridescence as something you see within the cabaret industry: Im painting exotic dancers and bartenders who wear these outfits that are made of glittering, radiant materials. (They also wear a lot of fishnets; its really evil to paint fishnets, but they echo the aurora pattern, which similarly curves around the women.) But I also was interested in the aurora as a representation of what it feels like to fetishize a screenwhen you touch a screen and the color starts separating and swirls around like colorful wood grain.

I am always trying to figure out how to reposition a viewer in relationship to the Black women that my work represents. With natural iridescence, in order to see the change of color, you have to move around, or the light has to change. I try to create a similar experience with my paintings, where theres a different experience whether youre up close or far away, almost as if Im trying to figure out a way to disperse or reorient our societys relationship to Black femininityand a very specific type of Black femininity that is both underrepresented and a part of everyday aesthetics, to the point that it is almost never associated with high culture.

The paintings also mimic moir patterns, which happen when two pattern systems cant quite register on top of each other. I take the photographs I find and digitally over- and underexpose them; painting from these edits creates a little bit of an optical illusion that interrupts the pictorial space. Im making images of women who are incredibly sexy and who work in an industry where they present their bodies to be commodified, so I always feel like I have to refuse that by obscuring or interrupting your viewing of the painting. (I tend to select heavily tattooed women to paint; the patterns end up getting confused, turning into a kind of camouflage, or another interruption.) The moir pattern also represents the simultaneous over- and underexposure of these women. Theyre systematically devalued in our society, but their aesthetics have filtered into popular beauty culture.

The new works all have this additional layer of large codes made of numbers and characters that are overlaid on top of everything else. My source materials have a lot of watermarks from photographers, but I also was thinking of captchas, which websites use to identify you as a human. In our society, Black women particularly have to authenticate themselves, to prove themselves. I want to deal with the tension between the figure of the partially human or subhumanwhich Black femininity has always had to contend withand the superhuman or posthuman, represented by the bodies of these Black women who modify themselves to participate in this industry.

These codes dont just obscure; they also foreground the value of paintings as commodities that must be protected. (Because of their source images, the paintings often show women holding expensive liquor or stacks of cash, which is another way they point to the idea of value.) With their codes, these paintings can authenticate themselves; theyre already prepared for circulation. Hopefully, Ill be able to do an installation where they can be shown not just on the walls, but on storage racks in vaults that are unlocked by their codes. I have always tried to figure out how to protect my art; I think the vaults are a little bit about me wanting to control the conditions under which my art is shown, seen, and stored.

As told to Tina Rivers Ryan

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Caitlin Cherry on digital abstraction and Black femininity - Artforum

Cousins Richard Bevan and Joshu Doherty. Based in East London & Glasgow respectively, UK

Spearheads of the UK acid house scene, Posthuman's output has evolved over the years, encompassing many genres & styles from their early electronica releases, through techno and electro to acid house.

Their debut release in 2000 was a series of hand made CDs simply called "Posthuman" (though better known by the colour of the card inserts - grey, black, blue and brown). The duo then went on to host a number of parties in an abandoned underground train station in London between 2001 and 2004, and founded their own label Seed Records (2) with which they released 3 albums and several other releases of their own and other artists material. They also were the first act on Manchester based imprint Skam's SMAK sublabel.

Doherty left Seed Records to help relaunch UK techno imprint B12 Records in 2006, and started a new label Balkan Vinyl in 2010.

In 2007, Doherty founded acid-focused clubnight "I Love Acid" along with Luke Vibert who's track it was named after, where Posthuman are resident DJs. It won "Best Club Event" in DJ Magazine's Best of British awards 2019. In 2014 the clubnight launched a vinyl-only label also named I Love Acid. He also performs as one half of Altern 8's live shows since 2015.

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Posthuman | Discography | Discogs

File:Trans-post-human2.jpg

A posthuman or post-human is, according to the transhumanist thinkers, a hypothetical future being "whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards."[1]

The difference between the posthuman and other hypothetical sophisticated non-humans is that a posthuman was once a human, either in its lifetime or in the lifetimes of some or all of its direct ancestors. As such, a prerequisite for a posthuman is a transhuman, the point at which the human being begins surpassing his or her own limitations, but is still recognisable as a human person or similar.[1]

Many science fiction writers, such as Greg Egan, Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear, Charles Stross and Ken MacLeod, have written works set in posthuman futures.

Posthumans could be a symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence, or uploaded consciousnesses, or the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound technological augmentations to a biological human, i.e. a cyborg. Some examples of the latter are redesigning the human organism using advanced nanotechnology or radical enhancement using some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, life extension therapies, neural interfaces, advanced information management tools, memory enhancing drugs, wearable or implanted computers, and cognitive techniques.[1]

At what point does a human become posthuman? Steven Pinker, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of How the Mind Works, poses the following hypothetical, which is an example of the Ship of Theseus paradox:

In this sense, the transition between human and posthuman may be viewed as a continuum rather than an all-or-nothing event.

A variation on the posthuman theme is the notion of the "Posthuman God"; the idea that posthumans, being no longer confined to the parameters of "humanness", might grow physically and mentally so powerful as to appear possibly god-like by human standards. This notion should not be interpreted as being related to the idea portrayed in some soft science fiction that a sufficiently advanced species may "ascend" to a superior plane of existence - rather, it merely means that some posthuman being may become so exceedingly intelligent and technologically sophisticated that its behaviour would not possibly be comprehensible to modern humans, purely by reason of their limited intelligence and imagination. The difference here is that the latter stays within the bounds of the laws of the material universe, while the former exceeds them by going beyond it.

As used in this article, "posthuman" does not necessarily refer to a conjectured future where humans are extinct or otherwise absent from the Earth. As with other species who speciate from one another, both humans and posthumans could continue to exist. However, the apocalyptic scenario appears to be a viewpoint shared among a minority of transhumanists such as Marvin Minsky and Hans Moravec, who could be considered misanthropes, at least in regards to humanity in its current state. Alternatively, others such as Kevin Warwick argue for the likelihood that both humans and posthumans will continue to exist but the latter will predominate in society over the former because of their abilities.[3]

fr:post-humainja: ()pl:postczowiekru:

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Posthuman | Transhumanism Wiki | Fandom

The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the first appearance of the term post-human as Maurice Parmelees 1916 Poverty and Social Progress. In a section entitled Eugenic Measures and the Prevention of Poverty, Parmelee, a sociologist, wrote:

But even though it is not possible, at present at any rate, to do much to improve the quality of the human stock by eugenic means, it is interesting and profitable to consider what would be the result if socially undesirable types could be eliminated entirely or in large part . . . . [But] it is evident, in the first place, that it is inconceivable that human nature could be changed to the extent that is contemplated by [the] theory of perfectibility. Such changes would bring into being an animal no longer human, or for that matter mammalian, in its character, for it would involve the elimination of such fundamental human and mammalian instincts and emotions as anger, jealousy, fear, etc. But even if such a post-human animal did come into existence, it is difficult to believe that it could carry on the necessary economic activities without using a certain amount of formal organization, compulsion, etc.[i]

Parmelees passage identifies several important issues that run throughout the lexicographical history of the term post-human into the present day. In answering What is the post-human? a corollary set of questions arise: Are we already post-human or is post-humanism permanently stuck in the future? At what point does a human stop being a human? What is the relationship between humans and animals? Does scientific advancement necessarily improve the human condition, or ought we limit it? If our social configurations (states, laws, families) are predicated on human nature, what happens to that order when we alter our nature? These inquiries stretch across disciplines from physics to anthropology, but they coalesce over the figure of the post-human. I would like to outline how three major thinkersN. Katherine Hayles, Jean-Franois Lyotard, and Jrgen Habermashave contributed to our understanding of the post-human. Speaking from different backgrounds and fields of study, Hayles, Lyotard, and Habermas each provide a unique perspective of the post-human, establishing multiple points of consensus and disagreement.

I: Hayles

We can infer much from the title of N. Katherine Hayles seminal book How We Became Posthuman: taken literally, the past-tense became connotes that the transformation from human to post-human has already occurred. But Hayles notes the multiple ironies of her title, since her thesis is more complex than That was then, this is now.[ii] Her argument is that human subjectivity is always historically specific: the changes [from human to post-human] were never complete transformations or sharp breaks; without exception, they reinscribed traditional ideas and assumptions even as they articulated something new.[iii] In other words, an element of or precondition for the post-human has always been among us (or more accurately, in us)hence, her title. People become posthuman because they think they are posthuman, not simply because they use dishwashers, the internet, or genetic engineering.[iv]

But Hayles does not deny that a real shift is taking place. Hayles impetus for her research was the 20th centurys articulation, by science fiction authors and cyberneticists like Norbert Weiner, that a great new epoch could be reached with the arrival of conscious computers, cyborgs, robots, and other variations of post-human beings which could finally separate mind from matter. She opens her essay Visualizing the Posthuman with the claim that, no longer a cloud on the horizon, the posthuman is rapidly becoming an everyday reality through physical prostheses, genetic engineering, and digital and artificial environments, all of which are necessary, but not sufficient, elements of post-humanity. [v] It is not that such technologies create the post-human object; rather, they allow for the possibility of a post-human subject. Thus, [o]ne cannot ask whether information technologies should continue to be developed. Given market forces already at work, it is virtually certain that we will increasingly live, work, and play in environments that construct as embodied virtualities.[vi]

Hayles elaborates her thesis by examining the practices of reading and writing within the digital media environment. For Hayles, the computer and digital technology have created the conditions for new conceptions of identity and subjectivity that demarcate the post-human era. In contrast to the pre-modern oral subject (fluid, changing, situational, dispersed) and the modern written subject (fixed, coherent, stable, self-identical), the postmodern virtual subject can be described as post-human because its subjectivity is formed through dynamical interfaces with computers:

The physics of virtual writing illustrates how our perceptions change when we work with computers on a daily basis. We do not need to have software sockets inserted into our heads to become cyborgs. We already are cyborgs in the sense that we experience, through the integration of our bodily perceptions and motions with computer architectures and topologies, a changed sense of subjectivity.[vii]

For Hayles the central issue in post-humanism is whether the body is superfluous: Should the body be seen as evolutionary baggage that we are about to toss out as we vault into the brave new world of the posthuman? she asks.[viii] In its philosophy and practice, the modern age sought to separate mind from body. It is only on that premise, Hayles argues, that we could conceive of discarding the body while keeping the mind, as many utopian/dystopian fictions describe, in scenarios predicting the downloading of brain matter. Instead, Hayles says our minds are bound up with our bodies, irrevocably: there is an inextricable intertwining of body with mind . . . . We are the medium, and the medium is us.[ix]

Thus, Hayles conception of the post-human is marked by two characteristics: it is not a sharp or radical break, but is a historically specific conception of subjectivity, just as Enlightenment humanism was. Because of this, the full-blown post-humanism of science fiction is necessarily incomplete: we can never completely isolate the mind and discard the body. Hence, the future is not pre-determined, neither as a positivist utopia with minimal labor, or as apocalyptic dystopia of human oppression: Technologies do not develop on their own. People develop them, and people can be guided to better or worse decisions through deliberation and politics.[x] Hayles goal is not to recuperate the liberal subject.[xi] Such a fantasy, she notes, was a conception that may have applied at best to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth power and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through agency and choice.[xii] The post-human is, for better or worse, here: but it does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human.[xiii]

II: Lyotard

Perhaps most poignant image of the post-human emerges from a thought experiment conducted by Jean-Franois Lyotard in his text The Inhumane. There, Lyotard asks, what happens when the sun explodes, as scientists tell us it will, in 4.5 billion years? It will surely mean the destruction of the planet. For Lyotard, this scenario is the prerequisite for post-humanity, and consequently, the only one worth philosophizing about as the sole serious question to face humanity today.[xiv] Even a world destroyed by nuclear weaponry does not suffice to create the post-human:

[A] human warleave[s] behind it a devastated human world, dehumanized, but with nonetheless at least a single survivor, someone to tell the story of whats left, to write it down . . . . But in what remains after the solar explosion, there wont be any humanness, there wont be living creatures, there wont be intelligent, sensitive, sentient earthlings to bear witness to it, since they and their earthly horizon will have been consumed.[xv]

Lyotards post-human is thus grounded not in the transcendence of certain human capabilities or features, like Parmelees emotions or Hayles digital subjectivity, but on a fundamental altering of the world as we have ever known it. For Lyotard, such a universe cannot even be thought ofbecause to grasp it in our minds still taints it with the trace of humanity. The universal apocalypse must remain unthought: if theres [total] death, then theres no thought. Negation without remainder. No self to make sense of it. Pure event. Disaster.[xvi]

But this does not mean we must take the attitude of Epicurus, referenced by Lyotard to stand for those who preach to only augment ones own worldly happiness. In a tone of urgency, Lyotard suggests that we must make way for the coming of the post-human. What is at stake in every field from genetics to particle physics is how to make thought without a body possible . . . . That clearly means finding for the body a nutrient that owes nothing to the bio-chemical components synthesized on the surface of the earth through the use of solar energy. Or: learning to effect these syntheses in other places than on earth.[xvii] Lyotard expresses nostalgia about this inevitability, concluding that we must say to ourselves . . . we shall go on.[xviii] This serves as the impetus for his exegeses on aesthetics and art, whose etchings and engravings capture the last vestiges of humanity, as he affirms: let us at least bear witness, and again, and for no-one.[xix] The possibility of a witness implies the possibility of a human. Thus, Lyotard presents a radicalized vision of the post-human as an essentially alien thing, even suggesting that the post-human condition is beyond the scope of our imaginations. The post-human is not a half-man, half-robot: he has no attachment to the earth whatsoever.

III: Habermas

A staunch defender of the unfinished modern project of human freedom, liberal philosopher Jrgen Habermas The Future of Human Nature speaks directly to the concerns raised by Parmelee on improving the stock of man. Habermas starting point is 1973, when the human genome was cracked. This scientific advance has allowed for embryo research and a liberal eugenics of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, which can manipulate an embryos eventual gender among other capabilities.[xx] Habermas believes developments of biology call into question our natural idea of the human being, and consequently, our laws, societal organization, nuclear families, and even philosophies. Mankind has hitherto taken birth (roughly) as a given fact of the world, meaning we make the assumption that the genetic endowment of the newborn infant, and thus the initial organic conditions for its future life history, lay beyond any programming and deliberate manipulation on the part of other persons.[xxi] However, modern technology is obliterating the boundary between persons and things because the embryo becomes subject to design, like any other object or commodity. [xxii] For the first time, the human species can take its biological evolution into its own hands. The post-human corresponds to the reversal of Jean Paul Sartres humanism, whose sloganexistence precedes essenceis now definitively called into question: now, a decision on existence or nonexistence is taken in view of the potential essence.[xxiii]

Because new technologies are regulated by supply and demand[xxiv] they leave the goals of gene-modifying interventions to the individual preferences of market participants.[xxv] But Habermas thinks merely intervening in the market through legislation cannot resolve the underlying conflict: Legislative interventions restricting the freedom of biological research and banning the advances of genetic engineering seem but a vain attempt to set oneself against the dominant tendency.[xxvi] Genetic technologies have obvious upsides that justify their application, like the eradication of debilitating genetic disorders. But the question is whether the instrumentalization of human nature changes the ethical self-understanding of the species in such a way that we may no longer see ourselves as ethically free and morally equal beings guided by norms and reasons.[xxvii] The strange science fiction accounts of humans being improved by chip implants is for Habermas only an exaggeration of an already present reality.[xxviii] Because genetic modification occurs before the moment of consciousness, subjects have no way of knowing that their characteristics were, to some degree, designed for them. In other words, the salient point for Habermas is the anti-democratic nature of the post-human: there is no choice of a red or blue pill, to use the famous scene from The Matrix.

Thus, in the post-human, Habermas sees the fate of the enlightenment project of freedom. While he does not clearly mark the threshold between human and object, his conception of the post-human is one where humans are not free to create themselves, connecting the human with the philosophy of humanism. In the mold of the Enlightenment philosophers, Habermas views humans as self-governing beings with the capacity for reason; new technologies, especially embryonic ones, undermine that modern view, ushering in the post-human.

[i] Parmelee, p. 350.

[ii] Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p.6

[iii] Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 6.

[iv] Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 6.

[v] Hayles, Visualizing the Posthuman, p. 50.

[vi] Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 48.

[vii] Hayles, Condition of Virtuality, p. 12.

[viii] Hayles, Visualizing the Posthuman, p. 50.

[ix] Hayles, Visualizing the Posthuman, p. 54.

[x] Hayles, Condition of Virtuality, p. 14.

[xi] Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 5.

[xii] Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 286.

[xiii] Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 286.

[xiv] Lyotard, The Inhumane, p. 8.

[xv] Lyotard, The Inhumane, p. 10.

[xvi] Lyotard, The Inhumane, p. 11.

[xvii] Lyotard, The Inhumane, p. 14.

[xviii] Lyotard, The Inhumane, p. 105.

[xix] Lyotard, The Inhumane, p. 203.

[xx] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 43.

[xxi] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 13.

[xxii] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 13,

[xxiii] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 50.

[xxiv] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 30.

[xxv] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 19.

[xxvi] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 25.

[xxvii] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 40.

[xxviii] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 41.

WORKS CITED

Habermas, Jrgen. The Future of Human Nature. London: Blackwell, 2003.

Hayles, Katherine N. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1999.

-Visualizing the Posthuman

-The Condition of Virtuality.

Lyotard, The Inhumane: Reflections on Time. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Parmelee, Maurice. Poverty and Social Progess. New York: Macmillan, 1916.

Link:

posthuman | The Chicago School of Media Theory