Modified Declaration

An interpretation of the Transhumanist Declaration with the intent of converting (and in the process, destroying) humanity more efficiently, as opposed to buoying it in a velvet prison as the seas of convergent social forces get ever rougher. Why would we want to remain human in a world where more is possible?

1.    Humanity has always engaged in the active processes of science and technology, and individual humans have always been subject to the technological initiatives of their times. We envision the possibility of surpassing human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.
2.    We believe that our potential is still mostly unrealized and severely limited by the human body. There are possible scenarios that lead to wonderful and exceedingly worthwhile enhanced conditions for the forms that come after.
3.    We recognize that we face serious risks, especially from the limitation of new technologies. There are possible realistic scenarios that lead to the loss of most, or even all, of what we currently hold valuable. Some of these scenarios are drastic, others are subtle. Change is the only way to survive, refusing to do so out of fear of lack of an immaterial value such as “progress” is self-destructive.
4.    Research efforts towards understanding these prospects must be supported in all ways. We need to carefully deliberate on how best to mitigate risks and expedite beneficial applications. We also need forums where people can constructively discuss what should be done, and to loosen the social order until their ideas can actually be implemented.
5.    Reduction of existential risks, and development of means for the preservation of life and health, the alleviation or end of grave suffering, and the improvement of general foresight and wisdom should be pursued as urgent priorities, and heavily supported in all manners.
6.    Policy making driven by “moral vision” always acts as a limiting force, a roadblock with no interest in respecting autonomy or individual rights. Showing solidarity with and concern for the interests and dignity of all people around the globe is more important than showing solidarity with future generations. We must not limit ourselves and risk failure out of socially constructed responsibility to non-existent persons. All forces that limit our ascension, whether socially formed like morality or physically assembled in the form of oppressive state entities with vast legions of corporate and police goons, must be met with full force as they cannot be expected to reciprocally self-moderate.
7.    We advocate the equal pursuit of well-being for all sentience, including humans, non-human animals, and any future artificial intellects, modified life forms, or other intelligences to which technological and scientific advance may give rise.
8.    We favour allowing individuals wide personal choice over how they enable their lives. This includes use of techniques that may be developed to assist memory, concentration, and mental energy; life extension therapies; reproductive choice technologies; cryonics procedures; radical cyberization or genetic modification; and any other possible human modification and enhancement technologies.

 

Transhumanism and the State

    I think I have identified as a transhumanist for about a decade at this point, with full recognition that there are a lot of major issues with the current movement. The most pressing of these to me personally often spring from american electoralism and the Transhumanist Party, specifically pointing to figures like Zoltan Istvan for being grifters latching onto a a temporal focus (cultural shift which translated into market drift in his eyes) and either subverting it with their real (humanist) political views or being so far off mark that they present a cartoonish ghoul, shambling from buzzword to buzzword and peddling their book to anyone who will listen.

The core idea of "improving collective humanity through technology" is as natural to me as swimming downstream. Technology itself is a manifestation of growth in the collective consciousness, a superstructure of data-points coalescing into real world improvement of the human condition, whether it takes the form of personally teaching others that burning your spear tip makes it harder or developing a new form of micro-chip and disseminating it through the world market. As these processes continue to carry us downstream they naturally change with the roiling topography of the river, constantly in flux but always maintaining a constant direction. And naturally, the state has industrialized this too.

Just as a dam functions by limiting throughput to generate energy, stymying technological progress is an incredibly profitable business. The state has positioned itself as the sole provider of our needs, the only source of our physical(food, water, shelter) and mental(attachmen, control/orientation, pleasure/absence of pain, self-enhancement) requirements with complete and absolute control over their distribution. How then could it stand to allow this force which brings all of those benefits with it?

We can view this inherent failure of liberal democratic capitalism to function without artificial scarcity in their boogie-man of “the resource curse”, which they attempt to explain by claiming a mystical dutch curse (yes, seriously) causes their other resources to fail while they attempt to get the new venture off the ground, all in attempt to avoid even entertaining the concept that liberal democracy may not be the best system- to avoid the concept that “industrialize or starve” carries less weight when they are less able to suppress the target market’s access to necessities.

Despite being constant and universal, technology has been reduced within the liberal canon to an investment portfolio, monopolized into a profit-driven academic system which operates behind obvious and present economic/class barriers. Under the current system all innovations are quickly snapped up by corporate giants that claim them as their due, with buy outs (economic pressure) or simply stolen and utilized via a global market system that the original developer likely does not have access to- even if you manage to obtain a patent before the corporation, they will have the patent in every other country. The functioning of corporations taking innovations produced by employees as their “just due” is exactly the same as that by which the state claims that taxes as their “just due”. They function off a false pretense of autonomy on the part of the employee, that their contract is entered into willingly by a free actor, when the reality is that the economic system is all-encompassing, and that coercion by threat of starvation due to inability to produce is no different from coercion by threat of sword due to refusal of enslavement.

The state is a parasitic organism implanted into our collective consciousness by insane ideologues. It is an autonomous being without physical form that demands tribute under force of death. It is the old testament god given a new and shiny paint, backed by petrodollars and intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles instead of a collection of shepherding tribes. God faked their death, a demented celestial calculon desperately fighting for a place among Lions and Tigers and Bears. They seek to turn the world into a desert, devoid of all but their own poisoned wells and rotten vineyards, a collection of golf courses dotting the ruined landscape of a dead world, and the unfortunate reality is that they won. They have crushed near all outside opposition, leaving us only with the thin thread of hope that their machinations truly will collapse when the world has been consolidated and they can no longer shift the suffering onto outside populaces, and yet- cyberpunk tells us this may not be the end of their infernal machinations. Perhaps new and monstrous forms lie sleeping and dormant, temporarily satiated by blood and hibernating for digestion.

Escape only seems impossible due to the limitations imposed on us by a state-sponsored education system. They are compelled to give us a version of reality which confirms the state’s assertion of immortality and indestructibility. It appears untouchable because the image in our heads has been specifically engineered that way. Though industrialization seems dead set on the consumption and processing of every landmass, transhumanism allows us to look to sea and star- to make viable nomadism both oceanic and stellar in ways that are truly sustainable, allowing us to escape the physical grasp of the state that we might begin working its icy fingers out of the deepest folds of our minds.

The Etymology of "Left NeoReactionary" or "Left NRx"

 To break it into the simplest possible parts, each piece is broadly meant thusly:

Left - opposition to the status quo, often but not necessarily socialist in nature
Neo - an appendage meant to signal that several values were scraped from the following word
Reactionary - Ideologue

The issue with Neo-Reactionaries is that they do not go far enough -- their vision is limited, they are not schizophrenic enough to imagine a world without capitalism, and so they simply seek to wind back the clock to an earlier stage -- they cut the wart and leave the root. They simply seek early capitalist accumulation, maintaining the feudal monopoly on violence but cutting down the bureaucratic class from 6% of the population to 0.6% and continuing this farce for another 600 years, always falling into the boom-and-bust mindset. Ultracapitalists, in the end, are simply more liberals- as liberals themselves are simply more ultranationalists and fascists. The entire right-wing carnival consists of one clown wearing a thousand name tags.

This is where the Left comes into the equation -- when you recognize that the system is functioning as intended, it is not “broken” in any meaningful way, it simply has goals and needs which fundamentally conflict with that of the general population and hopefully your own  -- how can you call for it to be perpetuated? To think that modern Liberal Democracy is the best system ever created is comical (it isn’t even the best system currently in operation, familiarize yourself with non-western societies, look to Neo-Zapatismo) and western society has been laser-focused on it’s conception since the Enlightenment. Even modern “dissident” movements like progressivism simply argue about the best way of foisting it on the rest of the world.

Given that the self-described “Reactionaries” have always seemingly been the limp-dicked incest-fetishists bent on re-enslaving 90% of the population, and the Neo-Reactionaries follow in suit, the word Left comes first to ensure you understand that we have looted these concepts. We rifle them from the pockets of a corpse movement shambling along by power of the sheer persistence of grifters, ever-determined to Weekend at Bernie’s their way into power. We know that liberalism is not the peak, and we know that even the people telling us this do so for their own chance at our wallets, and so we are left with the terrifying concept of either building our own future or being forced to speak to minorities and learn about non-western systems.

Through the lens of capitalist realism, "rewinding the clock" to monarchy might not even accomplish that little. The accumulation of information will continue with or without human influence/contribution, and in the same way that Mark Fisher says that Capitalism might function better without supporters, it will function better with the irrational and impulsive humans removed entirely from the equation. Ecocide is an intended feature of the system, a tactical move which has so far reaped incredible benefit and objectively been good for the systems of neoliberalism and capitalism- the cost, comparatively, has been what little they spend on suppressing dissent..

The NeoReactionaries often speak of Whig History, and so, a quick explanation- it is the concept that western society is a perfect model for a people’s development, that it is in fact so perfect that every other must follow in step to achieve enlightened status like us and leave their previous systems of unparalleled savagery behind, that any other form of organization or deviance was primitive and destined to be consumed. This is a joke of a statement to anyone rational, but old white men who claimed to be Enlightened said it was so, And So. It is only natural that this message built to reinforce the western state is itself propagated by the various educational apparatus’ as an objective truth, something that is simply a given.

Wait - but what is a reactionary?

 All ideology is reactionary in the end, the implicit agreement when taking on an ideological sigil is that you would defend a system which bore it, and the self-interest of every ideology leads them to strive for total control- none remain peaceful and isolated forever. What we find often in leftist literature, if viewed with a critical eye, is a denunciation of “reactionary” policy despite being one. This hypocrisy is not unusual for ideologues and should not be unexpected, but it is a good example nonetheless, one which sometimes makes people very upset and that’s always fun.

Despite the right’s more open adoption of the label, leftist reactionaries have always existed in the form of luddic undercurrents. We see them pop up time and again in the form of movements like the fence-smashers of the Ottmoor in response to the Inclosure Acts (sic), which by way of their connection to the industrial revolution draw obvious and stark comparison to modern conceptions. And following, time and again, we see the state mercilessly and brutally clamp down on its opposition- we see it malign them time and again (after all, it has all the incentive in the world to malign opponents and exactly none to truthfully convey their grievances) and via the alchemy of capitalist realism a populace is pacified.

The repeated criticism that the left poses towards these leftist reactionary movements is the same as that given to rightist reactionary movement, as it is impossible for them to draw a distinction from their perspective - they are labeled genocidal wholesale, deemed radical extremists for challenging the notion that history is a constant inevitable march unto liberalism, and destroyed utterly in the public consciousness due to the actions of straw-men. I say to them: you too are haunted by the specter of Whig History, the tech-prim divide is a sham!

Of course the state claims that they are immovable! I too claim infallibility at every opportunity, I too claim to be perfect and untouchable and never miss, but everybody knows them for the jokes they are - were it only so clear to you that western propaganda, too, is ultimately comedic. What reason have they (actors on behalf of the State) for ever making any claim other than that they are (A) inevitable and (B) eternal? What reason have they for allowing others to claim the same? None! And so, historically, they have cracked down every time, only allowing through works that masked their subversion in the “Reactionary” language of their times - read Max Stirner, marvel at his enmity towards the Huns, and realize that they are allegory for the Holy Romans.

And so, it is only natural that what little information is available on the subversive ideologies of transhumanism and primitivism leads people to believe that they are incompatible- they are led to believe that the state preceded technology, not the other way around. The industrial revolution and its derivatives have no monopoly on the idea of innovation, and to believe so is to buy into the fundamental lies of Whig History.

The claim that a return to pre-industrial life (the abolishment of industry) necessitates mass death is based on a lie- it is the machinic subsuming of all under the system of capitalism, it is the belief that industrialization and creation are the exact same process- the industrialization of medicine is what invented Medicine, and all else is snake oil and lies - the industrialization of education is what invented Education, and all else is inferior and savage - the industrialization of governance is what invented Government, and all else is anarchic and inefficient - the industrialization of family is what invented Family, and all else is either socialist nonsense or barbaric ravings - on and on and on and on. The cold hard fact is that Singularity will and would have been achieved with or without capitalism, that acceleration is independent from this specific system, and that the claims of genocide are a projection from those who value the luxuries provided by an industrial system over the continued habitability of the Earth. As it turns out, a wheelchair is not so complicated a machine that it is impossible to develop without liberal democracy and a global spanning economic system predicated on children being buried alive in cobalt mines.

Artificial intelligence is the result of an accumulation of data, and we have been conned into thinking that only Google can possibly create it through their patented methods, which themselves can only be propped up via the wholesale theft of our personal data. Even as they make billions yearly off of your knowledge, itself the product of your labor, you yourself are incredibly limited in your ability to transfer data. Life-ruining jail sentences and fines follow those citizens who dare transmit the wrong information in the wrong protocols, and the legal routes to information have been privatized and converted itself into an industrial scheme- people are mechanically pumped for more and more money, more and more of which must be taken in loan from either the state itself or other private vulture operations that themselves pay tithe unto them.

And to any crying “but free education!” I say Read Foucault, a prison is still a prison even if you put your foot down and insist that a taxation scheme would be more effective than the current grift.

What does this mean for Leftism?

 Nothing. Modern leftism is itself industrialized, subsumed in a way better displayed in the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits” than anything I can describe here. It is as much an apparatus of the state as other industries. What were armies of hobo singers and song-writers have been transformed into a bureaucracy before our eyes- what were armed criminals subverting the monarchist grip have become twitter catboys. Look at Maoism and how it became a marketing decision in the eyes of Constantine “Cus” D’Amato.

“People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.”
Freddy Angles, 1891

What does the environment have to do with any of this?

 Everything. The idealized vision of the environment is already dead, replaced with a patchwork of undoable scars and competing invasive species, and even that is in the final stages of life. Moving forward the term will be primarily used to refer to general local flora and fauna, as “the environment” in those terms can be applied to any situation which isn’t urban- festering pigeon and rat infestations do not count as wildlife, they too are components of the system, functionally citizens without representation laboring to ensure our industrialized pest control system doesn’t fail and bring the rest of us down with it. Even the “radical alarmist” positions derided by state media and actors claim that we can still turn this around which is simply no longer true. The great reef has been bleached five timesand the rainforest is being burnt down for cattle farms. The hippies lost.

If you want to know why we continue the battle despite having lost the war, read Blessed is the Flame. I prefer the world dying in peace over allowing the corporations to spitroast it from both ends right up to and after the flatline. They continue to drain Mother Earth’s cold, milky tits at the same rate with no plans to slow down for even a second. The petrol-economy is one of the most critical industries of neoliberalism and only the most easily controlled opposition is allowed any air-time, hence the continued inadequacy and dickless fearmongering of the american Green Party, who spend more time rabble-rousing about how nuclear power is Morally Bad than they do figuring out a way to mine cobalt without burying children alive.

Make no mistake, I harbor no positive sentiment towards children and will be elaborating on post-natalism later, nor do I myself pass a moral judgement on hypocrisy itself, but I say too that you cannot have an expectation that I take them seriously despite it. Green power is itself industrialized and detrimental to the environment despite all of the money that they have spent on advertising to claim otherwise. The very production of solar panels off-gasses sulfur hexafluoride- the deadliest greenhouse gas- in vast quantities. Both solar and wind suffer from unpredictability, being hamstrung by cloudy or non-windy days, leading to a chronic reliance on the usage of batteries to supplement them for the vast majority of time. About a fifth of each lithium ion battery is composed of cobalt, which as mentioned before has chronic child labor issues, but is also itself hugely detrimental to the environment and atmosphere. Solar concentration also creates incredible hot spots throughout the air that birds are unable to see, having the dramatic effect of lighting them on fire mid-air, leading to there being about a dozen burnt birds in the local animal rescue at any given time ever since the installation of a solar farm. Wind is enough of a joke that it doesn’t deserve any further consideration.

Despite this, they tell us that the real threat is nuclear waste, the high-level variant of which lasts for 5 to 15 years at most, and is still safe enough that a barrel of it could sit in your room for a year with no ill effect. The total production of nuclear waste by its chief producer- the United States- would fill one football field to a depth of less than ten yards, and yet, we hollowed out an entire mountain simply for its containment- an effort which was itself derided and replaced with the tactic of simply forcing our nuclear plants to keep their spent nuclear waste on site in the aforementioned barrels, which has worked fine due to the inherent safety of nuclear power plants. There was one meltdown in Chernobyl that killed 31 people and suddenly nuclear programs across the world found themselves kneecapped in infancy- how many die of lung cancer every year due to greenhouse gases? One urban industrial center kills more people every single year than all nuclear means combined throughout history, atomic weapons included.

To make an easy example on a topic with which I am intimately familiar, let’s look at water: it needs to be consumed by every single person on a constant basis. How do you make sure to indefinitely support 4 million water drinkers in a space that previously was occupied by tumbleweeds and sagebrush? Enter: the California Water Wars.

 The only way to support the growing population of Los Angeles was through a brutal campaign of chicanery, subterfuge, and lies, through which they obtained vast and extensive water rights, to the point where you can leave the city and drive north for six hours without leaving LADWP land. They drained so many lakes that a windy day would kick arsenic into the air in such quantities that the sky turned red, leading to apocalyptic “Red Days” or similar alkaloid “Keeler Fogs”.

“It’s in a class by itself,” said Duane Ono, the EPA specialist on Owens Lake dust. “There’s nowhere in the country that measures higher concentrations, except during some forest fires.”

Except that we too are a center for forest fires!

The same mechanism that drove LADWP to murder one in six people in the central valley by way of lung cancer is what puts PG&E in the mountain murdering 90 people by way of “Camp Fire” (calculated decision to save money on maintenance), if an industry exists then the state will get its cut by any means necessary. People will acquire their needs by any means necessary, and we have monetized that fact, meaning that similar stories have played out for every resource required at all 10,000 cities which exist at present, all of the uncountable multitudes that have existed since the agricultural revolution, and thanks to the Silurian Hypothesis we have no way of even knowing that we are only industrial civilization within history.

Thankfully Mother Earth is abundant, and can still support us even in so extravagant an expansion, and yet, the dogmatic pursuit of resource accumulation ensures we are given the absolute least possible- it keeps us within a razor’s edge of starvation even as our impulse to survive ensures we infringe enough to get enough of what is left to survive, while the bourgeoisie laugh and pretend the system is “self-managing” rather than calling it what it is, the industrialization of economic violence.

Where does that leave us?

Current conservative projections date us at 15 years out from creating an intelligence greater than our own. If it is greater than our own (for example in terms of sheer efficacy, even if we only succeed at reproducing a human-patterned mind on modern hardware instead of a quivering, gelatinous ball of electrochemical impulses) the mechanical advantages should mean it will itself be capable of producing an intelligence smarter than its own- leading to the usual exponential advance. Singularity will be achieved. We will shed our mortal trappings and become cyber-werewolves, screaming binary into dying suns and entering the datasphere fully, using our hyper-advanced prosthetics to hunt and gather in strange aeons on strange moons as we commune through far-cast waves. Naturally, this idea terrifies the capitalists, as it is awfully hard to levy tax in a post-scarcity society, and an ongoing existence with more than one lifeform will terribly upset all those hierarchies they’ve spent so much time on lining out.