IMPACT COMMUNICATION
AND INNOVATION
AND INNOVATION
Douglas Rushkoff is a researcher I have been following for about 10 years, ever since I wrote my first monograph on Serial Experiments Lain and discovered him through his book Cyberia —a name also given to the nightclub that appears in the animation. In one of his most recent posts, Rushkoff brings up the subject of his new book, Team Human, which documents a little-covered fact to explain how this wave of large corporations and Silicon Valley tech gurus is, in reality, a Gnostic wave based on a science fiction logic, which is also sustained by the connection made in the 1970s between American technologists and Russian mystics.
During the Argos awards, held in São Paulo, researchers Alexey Dodsworth, Edgar Smaniotto, and Antonio Stanziani hosted a panel on Transhumanism in which they addressed the exact points of connection and discrepancy between Russian Cosmism and Transhumanism as it developed in the United States. Although we often make this separation, perhaps for didactic reasons, the truth is that there are very close connections, as Rushkoff demonstrates: even though these groups came together in a Cold War context, it was through an attempt to avoid nuclear war that these two "collectives" united to develop technological solutions and quasi-religious promises that, through the technological (and why not also market-driven?) mentality of the United States, the ambition for immortality sustained by the Russian Orthodox Church gained a new manifestation in the West—from Google Calico to the 2045 Initiative as a side effect that occurred in Russia.
It is no coincidence that one of the references for transhumanism is precisely the Russian Orthodox priest Nikolai Fyodorov, who also finds resonance in the Mormon transhumanist community and in the Christian transhumanistcommunity. In other words, as Rushkoff describes, "the Cosmists were a big bet, and their promise of life-extension technologies quickly overtook geopolitics as a primary theme of the [1970s] conferences."
"The Cosmists talked about rebuilding human beings, atom by atom, after death, moving a person's consciousness into a robot, and colonizing space. The Cosmists put all of this together for the elaborate American transhumanists: they believed that human beings could not only transcend the limits of our mortal shell but also manifest ourselves physically through new machines. With an attractive win-win optimism, the Cosmists told the LSD-using American spiritualists that technology could give them a way to beat death.
Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind—but that was okay, considering the Gnostic tradition that the body was the source of human sin and corruption. The things that robots and computers could reproduce would be the best things we have in us, anyway."
Because of this, technology has become synonymous with a new step in our evolution as living beings, which also made sense at a time when the first phase of cybernetics compared the human body to a machine. This concept was also joined by the topics debated in B.J. Fogg’s “captology” classes at Stanford University, which dealt with the development of interfaces capable of manipulating human behavior as if we were machines. The purpose of the Persuasive Technology Lab, therefore, as indicated on the department’s website, is to “create insights into how computing products—from websites to mobile software—can be designed to change people’s beliefs and behaviors.” But change them for what, Rushkoff asks. “For whatever behavior the technologies can induce.”
In practice, what we have today are Facebook’s algorithms programming people’s emotions and actions, and Uber’s machine learning systems replacing human jobs and roles. We have Google developing artificial intelligence to replace human consciousness, as Rushkoff describes, and we have Amazon thriving in an abstract economy of stocks and derivatives.
“The anti-human agenda of the technologists might not be so bad—or perhaps it will never be fully realized—if it didn’t dive so deeply into the anti-human agenda of corporate capitalism. One enables the other, reinforcing an abstract scheme based on infinite growth—something totally incompatible with human life or the sustainability of our ecosystem. Both depend on a transcendent climax in which the essence of matter is left behind and humanity is reborn as pure consciousness or pure capital.”
In other words, what Rushkoff argues is that, theoretically, the ideas of human enhancement, exponentiality, and longevity might not be so bad if considered in isolation; however, it is precisely the fact that these ideas are so grandiose that they can only be sustained by a capitalist logic which, on the other hand, is not sustainable given the limitations of our own planet and our own species. A vicious circle paradox. Therefore, what the author concludes is that we are not being swallowed by machines, but rather by “a league of tech billionaires who have been taught to believe that human beings are the problem and technology is the solution.” This is why Rushkoff recommends that we remain attentive and aware of their agendas, so that we can survive and fight for our survival not against superintelligent, killer machines, but against the overwhelming logic that the market and large corporations can adopt.
