Condensed Critique of Transhumanism

The number of essays accumulating in my anti-futurological archive are growing rather daunting and sprawling, and so I have chosen the following six pieces as providing a condensed critique of "movement transhumanism," which is the aspect of my general anti-futurological critique which seems most interesting to most folks (for better or worse).

While transhumanism is just one of the sects in the superlative futurological Robot Cult archipelago (others include the Extropians, Singularitarians, cryonicists and techno-immortalists, cybernetic totalists and GOFAI dead-enders, greenwashing geo-engineers and technofixers, nano-cornucopiasts, and so on) it does overlap considerably with most of the others and exhibits a certain representativeness.

To begin, I regard mainstream futurology as the quintessential discourse of neoliberal global developmentalism, market-mediation, and fraudulent financialization. There is a certain strain of delusive utopianism that drives neoliberalism's callous immaterialism and hyperbolic salesmanship through and through, but what I describe as superlative futurological discourses represent a kind of clarifying -- and enjoyably bonkers -- extremity of this utopianism.

While there is plenty that is deranging and dangerous about superlative futurological discourses and the organizations and public figures devoted to these discourses, what seems to me most useful about paying attention to these extreme and marginal formations is the way they illuminate underlying pathologies of more prevailing mainstream futurological discourses.

Among these shared pathologies are their appeals to irrational passions -- fears of impotence and fantasies of omnipotence -- their tendencies to deranging reductionism, determinism, and triumphalism about technoscientific change, their paradoxical retro-futurist reassurances to incumbent interests that "progress" or "accelerating change" will ultimately amount to a dreary amplification of the familiar furniture of the present world or of parochially preferred present values, their disturbing indifference or even hostility to the material bodies and historical struggles in which lives, intelligences, lifeways are actually incarnated in their flourishing diversity, and so on.

An easy way to think of the relation I propose between these two modes of futurology is to say that mainstream futurology suffuses prevalent hyperbolic corporate-military PR/advertising discourse, while superlative futurology amplifies this advertising and promotional hyperbole into an outright delusive promise of personal transcendence (superintelligence, superlongevity, superabundance) of human finitude and this fraudulent speculation and public relations into outright organized sub(cult)ural religiosity.

The first four pieces below subsume transhumanism within the terms of my critique of superlative futurology, the next one focuses on the structural (and sometimes assertive) eugenicism of transhumanist "enhancement" discourse, and the final piece tries to provide a sense of the more positive perspective out of which my critique is coming.

A Superlative Schema

The Superlative Imagination

Understanding Superlative Futurology

Transhumanism Without Superlativity Is Nothing

Eugenics and the Denigration of Consent

Amor Mundi and Technoprogressive Advocacy

For those who are interested the always controversial but not really very deep issue of the "cultishness" or not of the various superlative futurological sub(cult)ures, and just how facetious I am being when I refer to these futurological formations as "Robot Cults," I recommend this fairly representative post dealing with those questions (which do pop up fairly regularly). Perhaps more serious, I also recommend this more muckraking piece documenting and exploring key figures and institutional nodes in the Robot Cult archipelago, devoted not only to promoting their "worldview" (which I critique as reactionary in its assumptions and aspirations) but also making connections and doing organizational work that often exposes far more patent ties to reactionary causes and politics.

A more recent piece, Ten Reasons to Take Seriously the Transhumanists, Singularitarians, Techno-Immortalists, Nano-Cornucopiasts and Other Assorted Robot Cultists and White Guys of "The Future" may also be of some interest as a more or less pithy summary of the many facets of the critique. Of course, if pithy is what is really wanted, my mostly aphoristic Futurological Brickbats anthology is possibly worth a look.