Transhumanism

[Mark Kohut]

Part of a longer article which will look long so many will not even start
reading it.

If this doesn't remind you of the dismantling of V, tell me why?

"Transhumanists view the human body as a system in need of technological
disruption and ultimate transcendence, and neo-reaction views the state,
the body politic, in much the same manner."


Part of longer article:

There is, in transhumanism itself, a strain of old-timey historical
romanticism: a sense of history as an inexorable progress toward a
teleological vanishing point, where all human meaning is subsumed and
obliterated by a godlike technology. This belief that flesh is a dead
format, and that our future — or that, at least, of a technological elect —
involves a final merger with machines is one that interlocks in sinister
ways with the view of democracy as a failed and outmoded institution.
Transhumanists view the human body as a system in need of technological
disruption and ultimate transcendence, and neo-reaction views the state,
the body politic, in much the same manner. Seen in a certain way, this is a
mind-set — a reductionist understanding of the world as a hackable system —
inherent in the culture of computer science. The flesh is weak, and
democracy is entropic; both are subject to forces of decay, to human
inefficiencies and failings. As eccentric and fringe a phenomenon as Dark
Transhumanism may be, it’s usefully viewed in this sense as an
extrapolation of tendencies inherent in the mainstream techno-capitalism of
Silicon Valley.

**A version of this article appears in the May 1, 2017, issue of *New York
*Magazine.*
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