#might make some biology notes that go over the new mutations that Peter now deals with

[itsybitsybatsyspider]

the Spider Peter designs i worked on for my AU

thanks again @3-inch-sam for your input! Appreciate you bud!!

[readyaiminquire]

Part 1 - Homo Liberaretur

This is the first complete post in my series on human augmentation from the perspective of microchips. You can read the introductory post here, and the follow-up post will (eventually) be linked here as well. This particular post deals with discussions around the human body, what it is, and how this particular view can be problematised. Enjoy!

Note: All names are pseudonyms.

I was in Lund, a city revolving around its university. It is very near to where I grew up, so it seemed an appropriate place to find myself early on in my research. I was here to meet Harrison, grabbing a fika, or meeting socially for over a coffee - something unmistakably Swedish, and a good way to get to know someone new. Harrison was a self-avowed transhumanist, openly, vocally, and proudly. He held a deeply rooted moral conviction that not only does technology inherently lead to progress but if there emerged any technology with the capability of improving the human body or experience - the human condition, in short - there exist a moral obligation to use it. It later became clear that Harrison’s idea of ‘improvement’ was mainly rooted to the concept of extending the capability of the human body: seeing more wavelengths, hearing higher pitches, lifting heavier boxes, living longer. Adding technology, even replacing otherwise functional parts of our bodies was, according to my interlocutor, not only the next (and seemingly obvious) step in human evolution, but our fundamental raison d'etre. After all, he told me putting down a now empty cup, “we have always improved ourselves. Clothes, therapeutic tattoos, eye-glasses; and now wearables. Why stop outside the body? The human body is weak, fallible, and even though nature did an amazing job getting us this far, this obviously can’t be it. This can’t be the endpoint. Why should we be confined to this meat bag [sv: köttpåse] forever?

'Meat bag’ is a particularly jarring phrase. It certainly makes me wince every time I read it, if just internally. There’s something deeply undignified, rudimentary, and substandard with the phrase, made doubly uncomfortable by it describing the human body - my body. My knee-jerk was to reject the idea outright. The human body isn’t so thoughtlessly thrown together, so messy and disorganised, decaying and dysfunctional, and it most certainly isn’t something as disgusting and tragic as a sack of meat. It later became clear that Harrison wasn’t the only one to describe the body in these terms, these exact terms in some cases. The whole sentiment, it seemed was that the body we had today wasn’t the body we ought to have; it’s not 'even our final form’. During the same meeting, Harrison flatly told me that we are not what we have always been, evolution is a fact of life, of existence even, and we therefore shouldn’t be so attached to our current bodies. "Just as something has come before us,” Harrison said, sipping a second cappuccino, “monkeys and all that, something must come after us. There must necessarily be something post-human”. Though the statement, such as it is, holds up, there was something refined about it, something overly-thought-through, especially in the way he mixed English and Swedish as if to make the statement quotable. “Why not let evolution do its job?” I asked, naively. Based on what I had read previously, and what Harrison had told me, this was nothing short of a ridiculous suggestion. The answer was what I had, in many ways, expected: “Because evolution doesn’t know what it’s doing. It happens, random mutations, and it happens slowly. We have no control over it, we don’t know what’s going to happen, where things will go. It’s just not worth that risk.”

He seemed excited I had brought up this particular question, and quickly produced his phone, “Have you read or heard of Max More?” he asked while frantically poking around on the screen, before finding what he wanted, handing it to me, “read this”. I must admit that I only really skimmed it at the time, and only really read it in detail a few days later. The piece, A letter to Mother Nature, is one of the deeply influential texts in the transhumanist movement. It is clear why. It reads like a declaration of independence from biology itself. “We will no longer tolerate the tyranny of ageing” it pontificates, further demanding that “we will no longer be a slave to our genes”. Though More does somewhat thank this anthropomorphic Mother Nature for getting us this far, he makes it clear it is better if she retires (or else).

Max More, in his piece, makes it extremely clear that this sense of human empowerment, emancipation even, will stem from science and technology. This is how we will take control of our futures, of our collective destiny. When I found myself up in Stockholm a short time later, I had the opportunity to meet with Peter, a friend and colleague of Harrison. He without a doubt had bought into More’s argument, “You drank the Koolaid” I said, jokingly, “Yes”, Peter replied, “and this time the only danger is that not enough people will!”. We sat in a shared working space in the centre of Stockholm. It was a high-tech building, organised as a top of the line office for technology and innovation start-ups, and the hope was to bring together entrepreneurs from all facets to create a community out of which technological innovation can emerge. He showed me around, while we were looking for a free meeting room. The vast open space, interspersed with fish-tank meeting rooms made the space feel like a slice of Silicon Valley in the heart of Stockholm. Peter was a marketing man, and he had only really bought into transhumanism once he had met Harrison, but he was by now convert, in everything but name: “I wouldn’t go as far as to call myself a transhumanist. Why? I mean, I’m a bit older, I’m out of the loop in many ways, but I try to keep up. The point is, I don’t dare to call myself a transhumanist, because I wouldn’t have the balls to lead the charge into these new things. I’m a follower, I’m convinced without a doubt, but I won’t take that final plunge”. The proverbial plunge being human augmentation. In the most quotable way, Peter told me that technology is the future simply because “technology is clean, and biology is messy”. Besides, I was assured, we are already engaging in these forms of augmentation: specifically within the medical sphere. Pacemakers, hip replacements, cochlear implants, just to name a few. These were are all being done already, are major surgeries, and all carry out a form of “magic, but through science! Now all we need to figure out is how to take it to the next step.”

When questioned about bringing things to the “next step”, especially bringing up the discomfort around discussions of 'human improvement’ given its historical implications ranging from eugenics to concentration camps, the answer more often than not take a stance on the perfect opposite end of that spectrum. In other words, not to reconcile, but to outright dismiss. I was back in Lund now, meeting with a student at the university: Ethan. He was heavily involved with DIY science, and had a love from human augmentation after first being exposed to it through popular media, “in particular Deus Ex, the video game”. We sat at a cafe on a side-street, one of the first properly sunny days of the year, and despite the wind, the narrow medieval streets of Lund made it feel like high summer. Over a beer, our conversation went on. “There is this thing in the game that the characters to communicate telepathically, and I always thought that was so cool,” Ethan said, with a glimmer in his eye, “I always wanted to replicate that”, which it turns out he is attempting. This seemed outrageous to me, after all, he was 'just’ a physics undergraduate. He agreed but continued “it’s not really about completely doing it now, but someone’s got to start. I read a paper that showed that when you’re reading your throat muscles are producing micro twitches as if you were speaking. I’m trying to build electrodes that are sensitive enough to pick up the twitches, and then software to translate that to, like, a Word document or something”. Simply starting the process, making the first breakthrough was good enough.

“But aren’t you concerned when it comes to evening adding or taking things away from people, from humans?” I asked him. It was clear it was a question he had gotten a hundred times before, “I don’t think it’s reasonable to throw out an option completely just because it can be used for bad ends. I don’t think anyone reasonable wants to force people to get these augmentations, it’s more about giving people options. To expand what you can and cannot do, and to allow people to really be what they want to be”. The ideal sought after at the end of the day is what many within the movement call morphological freedom: the freedom to take on any form of existence you would like. On this note, a few months after my meeting with Ethan, I had the opportunity to see Max More speak at a conference in London. In his talk, he outlined morphological freedom as a fundamental human right that had been ignored for too long. If you exist, you have an inalienable right to take on any form you wish, he insisted. Simply abiding by the limitations - completely arbitrary ones, he added - nature has set for us doesn’t have any innate value or reason. It is, therefore, our responsibility to find a way to overcome them, the next step in our evolution. Evolution has brought us to the brink of being able to take control, so taking this control must now be humanity’s collective raison d'etre.

At this stage, it might seem a bit confusing as to how this at all has anything to do with microchipping - these high-minded ideals, talk of techno-utopianism, liberation from the 'shackles of nature’, or morphological freedom. Going back to my fika with Hannes, I asked him just this question. After all, his involvement with popularising micro-implants was why we had met to begin with, and the meeting immediately took a turn for the utopian. “These?” he said, pointing at his left hand as if there was something these, “oh, they’re just toys, neither here nor there. They’re just the beginning of something, the first steps, nothing to flaunt [sv. Ingenting att hänga i julgranen]”. Harrison, however, was very careful to point out to me that it wasn’t very long ago that wearable technologies were just as rudimentary, and though we now have smartwatches and fitness trackers, they are still in their infancy, however, “not even these would have gotten very far if people hadn’t used them”. It appears, then, that much of the high-minded idealism aims to convince people of the same future my interlocutors like to imagine.

The recurring image is of the techno-utopian future as inevitable, but that it is also being held back by people either not believing, or not realising its inevitability. When speaking to people outside of the movement, the reactions to something as minimally intrusive as a microchip in your hand (bearing in mind that it is injected into your hand through a syringe, and the procedure doesn’t take much longer than 15 seconds) the reactions are either neutral or steeped in horror. During a conversation with my sister and brother-in-law about my implant, my sister was made so uncomfortable by the very idea of it all, she refused to touch my hand where the chip was implanted. A bit melodramatic, perhaps, but by no means unique. If not met with cute visceral discomfort it is often understood to be unnecessary. It highlights the main tension that the movement is up against: that between therapy and enhancement. While the medical field is often highlighted as simply doing 'what we’re doing’ when it comes to medical implants, as outlined above, the difference is not only in context but also intent. A pacemaker, for example, might equate to an artificial heart, but it is nonetheless only administered when a 'regular’ heart isn’t working. In other words, it is therapeutic, and therapy inherently means to bring bodily functions in line with a normative socio-cultural view of what the human body is, and thereby what it ought to be able to do (have a beating heart, walk, breathe, see, hear, and so on). Enhancement exists to bring the capabilities of the human body above this normative view, thereby causing a 'break’ between how we view medical intervention compared to 'frivolous’ improvement.

Harrison, Peter, or Ethan and many more, are up against more than just technological limitations, they’re up against wider social and cultural forces. As they see it, they are working towards a solution to a problem that society at large doesn’t recognise. STS professor Steven Hilgartner have called these types of movements 'socio-technical vanguards’, or people who formulate and act to realise particular visions of the future, specifically visions that have not yet been accepted by wider society. However, the ideas being floated within these communities aren’t as radical as you might first believe. Though it is traditionally espoused that the Western view of the body and self is squarely rooted in the so-called Cartesian split (i.e. that the body and mind are two different 'entities’, and the mind controls the body), researchers have not only begun questioning this but have even started noticing a very clear shift towards 'datafied’ understanding of the body. The theory goes that everything about the body can be quantified, down to cell structures and DNA, even your mind is not different. In other words, you’re simply made up of code.

This shift has some clear implications for the typical transhumanist view of the body. It creates a more 'level’ playing field in communicating this particular version of the body. Arguing that we’re not much different than computers, whereby our bodies are hardware that’s running particular software becomes more grounded in the pop-sci understanding of the latest research. What follows is an understanding of the body being exchangeable as a matter-of-course. It is, after all, not much than a (granted, rather long) extension of the currently dominant discourse. But is it that simple?

Scholar and thinker Donna Haraway reminds us that it’s not only our current worldviews that matter, but also what worldviews lead their development. As she puts it, it matters what “worlds word worlds”. With the growth of wearables, social media, and other algorithms, there has been an inevitable shift in how engineers and developers understand the body, one that necessitated quantification. As this later spread to other communities (Quantified Self springs to mind as a very clear example), it became a more and more ingrained. However, there are some problems with this, given that this particular understanding is grounded in particular views of enlightenment philosophy and the scientific revolution, meaning that - in short - this particular view is far from as neutral as it might appear. As yet others have argued, this limiting scope of the body also helps to reproduce its views. More specifically through an example, the choices made as to what metrics to track in a fitness tracker invariably comes with an assumption that this aspect needs to be improved - steps taken, heart rate, sleeping patterns, and so on. Simultaneously, any such decisions will discount other 'metrics’, and by extension make (perhaps implicit) decisions as to what it means to be human.

It is through this process that speaking of a 'technologically improved human’ becomes problematic, as we are never asked to ponder the question: Whose human? Whose improvement? Whose technology? It does indeed matter what “worlds world worlds”, and what this shows more than anything is that these movements, organisations, and people do not operate after an objective understanding of anything, but rather operate under a very specific ideology.

An ideology of techno-utopianism.

Selected references

CERQUI, D. 2002. The future of humankind in the era of human and computer hybridization: An anthropological analysis. Ethics and Information Technology.

DELFANTI, A. 2013. Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science, 130–140. Pluto Press.

HARAWAY, D. 2014. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble. Anthropocene:http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/, accessed 05/09/19).

HILGARTNER, S. 2015. Capturing the imaginary: Vanguards, visions and the synthetic biology revolution. In Science and democracy: Making knowledge and making power in the biosciences and beyond (eds) S. Hilgartner & C. Miller, 33–55. New York: Rob Hagendijk Routledge.

MORE, M. 2013. A Letter to Mother Nature. The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future 449–450.

TAMMINEN, S. & E. HOLMGREN 2016. The Anthropology of Wearables: The Self, The Social, and the Autobiographical. Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2016, 154–174.