Escape Velocity (45 page)

The concept of "downloading" has proven popular among exponents of postevolution, foremost among them the Los Angeles-based Extro-pians. Writing in the movement's organ, Extropy (which claims a circulation of thirty-five hundred), the Extropian David Ross speculates that, since "[bjrain structure at every level determines the functioning of the mind," every neuron and synapse in a given brain must be re-created in a computer program if an individual consciousness is to be transferred from its organic body into digital memory.^" Since in Ross's bio-cybernetic theory of mind the "wiring is the program," we need not understand human consciousness to perform such an operation; a comprehensive knowledge of the synaptic connections of the brain would suffice, since individual consciousness is presumed to be one with the unique neural map of each brain.

Ross illustrates his theories with a flight of Moravecian whimsy in which a man discards his body, uploading his mind into "the world-wide Cyberspace Web"; nanomachines perform invasive brain surgery, "systematically replacing each neuron with a functionally equivalent artificial structure" in computer memory:

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Gradually, each synapse in his brain is absorbed into the program structure of the emulation program, its functionality retained but its physical structure gone. . . . After a while . . . [t]he doctor hands him a switch which he knows will turn off his old body. . . . All nerve and muscle connections are severed at once and the body dies instantly. He feels less emotion than he thought he would. He knows that if he doesn't like it here in Cyberspace, he can always have another physical body constructed, grown from his original DNA, if he wishes.^^"^

As cyberculture's most vocal proponents of consigning the body to the scrap heap of the twentieth century, the Extropians merit close scrutiny. Ross, executive director Max More, and the rest of the movement's membership rally around the banner of "transhumanism." Transhumanism is the human potential movement on steroids—an up-with-technology, business-friendly, hell-for-leather humanism bent on self- and species-transformation by any means necessary: downloading (Extropians prefer the more upbeat "uploading" or the even zingier "transbiomorphosis"); "nanomedicine" ("the use of molecular-scale devices to repair damage and boost the immune system"); nanocomputer implants ("molecular computer[s] integrated with the brain, providing additional memory, processing power, and running decision-making programs"); genetic engineering; smart drugs; cryonics; and "self-transformative psychology" in the Anthony Robbins mold.^^^

As theorized in Extropy, Extropian transhumanism is a marriage of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche-specifically, Rand's conviction that statism and collectivism are the roots of all evil and Nietzsche's complementary concepts of the end of morality, the "will to power," and the Ubermensch, or "overman." The "optimal" Extropian persona, writes More in issue ten of Extropy, "is Nietzsche's Ubermensch, the higher being existing within us as potential waiting to be realized." Extropian writings champion laissez-faire capitalism ("Are you attracted to innovative, market-oriented solutions to social problems?" reads a flyer) and exude a buoyant technophilia.

Extropian transhumanism speaks to the collective yearnings that took shape in the L-5 Society's vision of an off-world Utopia. According to Norman Spinrad, the L-5 colony had mythic resonance for "science fiction

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writers of a laissez-faire libertarian bent," whose novels transplanted the space station envisioned by the society from Earth orbit to the Asteroid Belt.^^^ "Out there in the Belt, with its limitless mineral resources, its low gravity, and its wide-open spaces, was the future of the species," notes Spinrad, "and as for poor old polluted, overpopulated, screwed-up Earth, well, tough shit."^^^

The Extropians, who maintain an avid interest in space colonization (the L-5 Society cofounder Keith Henson is a member of Extrop/s editorial committee), are similarly unburdened by a social conscience. Even as they extract the self from the human, renouncing humanism's allegiance to the species and its wariness of autonomous technology, Extropians uncouple the individual from the social. Freedom is defined not in terms of civil liberties but in "behavioral, morphological, neurological, and genetic" terms-a politics of self-directed personal evolution that links the group to Stelarc, who argues.

In this age of information overload, what is significant is no longer freedom of ideas but rather freedom of form-freedom to modify, freedom to mutate your body. The question is not whether a society will allow [the] freedom to express yourself, but whether the human species will allow you to break the bonds of your genetic parameters-the fundamental freedom to determine your own DNA destiny^^^

In the libertarian futurism of Extropy, society is a dynamical system of ever-evolving egos; government is a decentralized "social coordination mechanism" whose only real purpose is to provide "the context required for us to sustain truly long-term personal progress, to provide energy, space, and the framework for the diversity implicit in individual self-transformation."^^^ Few would argue in favor of an intrusive government that restricts "individual self-transformation," mandating self-sacrifice to a greater, common good. But there is an absence in Extropian philosophy of anything resembling a sense of community and an obliviousness to the fact that a passionate engagement with the social or the political, through altruism or activism, can be a catalyst for profound "self-transformation." It is these vacancies that account for the hollow noise this philosophy makes

when its depths are sounded. As Andrew Kimbrell argues, in a Harper's forum on "The Value of Life,"

this secular myth-that we live as autonomous individuals, as islands unto ourselves, without rights balanced by duties-is absurd. Every decision you may make, whether it be to sell yourself into slavery or to sell yourself into prostitution, adds to and creates the te/os-the purpose—of community you inhabit. You do not exist as an island.^"^^

Kimbrell's worldview reverses that of the Extropians, who have inherited Ayn Rand's vituperative condemnation of ''Society, with all its boggled chaos of selflessness, compromise, servility, and lies."^"*' With charity toward none, Extropian transhumanism makes no provision for the economically disenfranchised, the socially marginalized, or the "psychologically weak."^"*^

Happily, "NEGs" (negative types lacking in the Extropian virtue of "Dynamic Optimism") will disappear altogether when science comes to "understand the basis of depression and lack of enthusiasm, allowing us to choose to maintain ourselves in a perpetually high energy condition."^"*^ Technological developments may result in "chemical-releasing implants, controlled by a computer interfaced wdth our brains, that [will] allow us to rapidly alter our state of mind" for the better.^'*'* (^^ly resemblance to the brain-stimulating "mood organ" in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream oj Electric Sheep? whose dial can be set for the Dynamically Optimistic "Awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future," is entirely coincidental.)

Near the end of his essay "Technological Self-Transformation: Expanding Personal Extropy," More attempts to counterbalance his neo-Nietzschean rhetoric with a vision of a kinder, gentler Ubermensch. "Contrary to popular interpretation, the Ubermensch [is] not the Blond Beast, the conqueror and plunderer," he writes. "The developed, self-chosen self will exude benevolence, emanating its excess of health and self-confidence."^"*^ He ends by reminding his fellow Extropians that they "need not be isolated, totally self-sustaining achievers. Support and encouragement by fellow extropic-minded persons is enormously valuable."^"*^

Still, Extropian transhumanism emerges, in Extropy, as a vaguely cultish movement, replete with invented monikers and futuristic jargon.

committed to an ingrown, cdl-consuming self-improvement program in which social responsibility ends at the boundaries of the individual ego. Indeed, there is a fundamentalism to this supposedly rationalist movement's uncritical faith in technology, its unswerving devotion to unchecked expansion, and its rejection of ecological concerns as "the false doom-mongering of the apocalyptic environmentalists" at a time when all but the most myopic concede the need to balance economic exigencies with environmental imperatives.^'*^ Then, too, there is something inescapably American about this philosophy of Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order, and Dynamic Optimism, reconciling as it does the mechanist reductivism of artificial intelligence theory with the evangelical zeal and relentlessly peppy can-do of the human potential movement.

Some of Extropian transhumanism's headier rhetoric sounds as if it were written by Seth Brundle, the scientist in David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) who demolecularizes his body and teleports it from one computer-controlled "telepod" to another. "I'm beginning to think that the sheer process of being taken apart atom by atom and put back together again [is] somehow . . . purifying," the fist-thumping, coffee-gulping Brundle tells his somewhat alarmed girlfriend Ronnie. "I think it's going to allow me to realize the personal potential I've been neglecting all these years. ... I wall say now, however subjectively, that human teleportation-molecular decimation, breakdown and reformation-is inherently purging. It makes a man a king! All I've done is say to the world, 'Let's go! Move! Catch me if you can!'" Later, he attempts to muscle Ronnie into the telepod, telling her that after she's been disintegrated and reconstituted-purged, in Nietzschean terms, of her "all too human" qualities-they'U be "the perfect couple, the dynamic duo." She wriggles free, shrieking, "Don't give me that born-again teleportation rap!"

As detailed in chapter 1, minimanifestos very like "that born-again teleportation rap" were a fixture in early issues o( Mondo 2000. In an early editorial. Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius proclaim that "Eco-fundamentalism is out"; so, too, are "finite possibilities." Noting that "we are living at a very special juncture in the evolution of the species," the authors close with the Nietzsche-meets-r/je Revenge of the Nerds assertion that the masses must place their destiny in the hands of "a whole new generation of sharpies, mutants and superbrights" not unlike More's Extropian vanguard ("the leading wave of evolutionary progress"). Like the Extropians, the Mondo

editors celebrate "human/technological interactive mutational forms" and "[b]rain-boosting technologies" and look forward to "[bjecoming the Bionic Angel." This, they declare, is the "dawn of a new humanism."^"*^

To Andrew Ross, who refuses to be dazzled by cyberbole, Mu and Sirius's new dawn looks like the same old, hallowed humanism that has historically concealed its Western, white, increasingly technocratic interests behind high-minded rhetoric about what is best for "mankind." Humanism laid the philosophical groundwork, Ross contends, for European civilization's shameful dealings with the natural environment and the animal kingdom. Needless to say, true species-centrism would be compelled, entirely by self-interest, to protect the natural environment on which humankind is so demonstrably dependent. Thus, we are drawn to the inescapable conclusion that much of what passes for posthumanism is in fact egoism leavened with a dash of technocratic elitism, whether it is Mondo 2000*8 dictatorship of the neurotariat-the "sharpies, mutants and superbrights" in whom we must place our "faith" and "power"-or the Extropian triumph of the overman. The Mondo editorial and Extropy manifestos reverberate with what Ross calls "a voice that appears to speak the language of unfettered development, heedless of any concern for those who cannot keep up or who are subordinated as a result of the logic of underdevelopment."^"*^

The Theology of the Ejector Sect

Since these philosophies owe so much to Hans Moravec, it seems only appropriate that a critique of them be laid at his feet. In a 1993 interview vsdth the roboticist, I attempted to make political and socioeconomic sense of ideas that had always floated, like the "laissez-faire libertarian" Utopias described by Spinrad, "airily unconcerned above a Third World favela called Earth":^^^

MARK dery: One of the things that troubled me while reading your book Mind Children is that your vision of human evolution is yoked to quantum leaps in technology and seems not to take into account the socioeconomic landscape of your future. I suspect you would argue that such issues are irrelevant to your thinking, since you

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think in terms of hypothetical technologies, but I can't help wondering about the fate of those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder in your world of transmigrant minds and "superintelligent robot bushes."

HANS MORAVEc: Well, I think what you would call the socioeconomic implications of the developments I imagine are-unless you're looking at the interactions of the machines themselves-largely irrelevant. It doesn't matter what people do because they're going to be left behind, like the second stage of a rocket. Unhappy lives, horrible deaths, and failed projects have been part of the history of life on Earth ever since there was life; what really matters in the long run is what's left over. Does it really matter to you today that the tyrannosaur line of that species failed?

md: Well, I wouldn't create a homology between failed reptilian strains and those on the lowermost rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.

hm: But I would. You see, many cultures are gone; the Maori of New Zealand are gone, as are most of our ancestors or near relatiyes-Australopithecus, Homo erectus, Neanderthal man.

md: Your position seems rather Olympian.

hm: "Olympian?" I take that as a cornpliment, in many ways, because I think you can wallow in compassion and really screw up the bigger things, an example being the current U.S. welfare system, which I think had much too much compassion for individual cases and in so doing totally wrecked the inner city family by creating the wrong incentives. My own politics are basically libertarian because I like to see as much happen as possible, and giving people maximum freedom to try things without having to have the approval of everybody else is the most fruitful way to get the most results in the shortest time.