I wonder if some stuff published on transhumanist sites is like Mills & Boon novels. You read articles about the Borg[1] and their depiction in films as if they were already real, and you are told that it is sexist to call them Borg while the world out there is rather racist and sexist and unforgiving as austerity and poverty, injustice and fundamentalist ideologies bring out our worst characteristics. You are told that you are suicidal if you do not want to live forever; you are called a deathist and vitaphobic[2]. You are labelled and used as ideological canon fodder. You are immersed in your futurist films and scenarios like past generations were in Westerns and Romance. Like them you mistake movies for the real thing. So, you watch the chick flicks, the soaps about vampires, the schmaltzy love stories, the robotic hero epics and somehow you believe that they are true. You model your life on them. While you are making money by doing nearly everything to pay the bills, in your home you are the king or the queen of a world that has been constructed for you. There is no free will, only the choice between many products and ideologies. You become the hero in your own life, detached from the embodiments of others but connected to them in a disembodied manner; and you fight your battles on computers while in real life you run away from conflicts, do not help neighbours in need and become apolitical as your life takes place in a concept of a future that lets you forget the (painful) now. You are ensnared in a sweetish trap, but you see it as liberating. Virtual space has enveloped your actuality that feeds off dreams and virtual stuff. While you immerse in cyberspace the ruling 1% make their money producing the machinery that keeps you happy, and the ones who dream away become members of the 1% who control the world by building new machines that keep you dependent on your quasi-narcotic dreams of a better future where you are invincible=immortal. You become the resilient hero who cannot be destroyed, and you make us believe that all of this happens by choice. So you have the choice to pay $100000 to preserve your head for future immortality if you have the money and if you are a believer. The choice is limited. The mantra of choice is used to sell you the new products of immortality, the apparatus, the mambo jumbo. There is science sprinkled in between and there is the promise of some new knowledge, but overall these are the ingredients for a new cult. If you query the motives and methods you might become a new heretic. You have your new Soma, another drug for the powerless who can feel happy and powerful for moments. Their friends are stabbed in bad neighbourhoods, while they fight monsters and battles in computer games. There is mass evasion and mass escapism. The world around us changes, hypercapitalist structures have moved to China and India, and the West feels more powerless than ever. All of you are still leading wars for economic reasons; some of you believe that immortality is the solution (for what?). An immortal consumer of goods made in China, this is my dream. Give me a plastic sword anytime. I want to fight my battles too. I am going to cut the umbilical cord to the computational world. It is time to grow up.
Music: Gorgeous Nightmare. Escape the Fate. 2011. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YgHcPSUGFA [Accessed 21 February 2012].
[1] Bossart T., 2013. “Borg” is Derogatory – transhumanists need to avoid this association. In: Transhumanity. Available from: http://transhumanity.net/articles/entry/borg-is-derogatory-transhumanists-need-to-avoid-this-association [Accessed 21 February 2013].
[2] Pellissier H., 2013. Are Transhumanists “Thanatophobic”? No – What’s True is – Deathists are “Vitaphobic”. In: Transhumanity. Available from: http://transhumanity.net/articles/entry/are-transhumanists-thanatophobic-no-whats-true-is-deathists-are-vitaphobic [Accessed 21 February 2013].
Arctificiality 