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.