Technology and Post-Humanism

The 20th century caused classical liberal ideals to be seen as, in many ways, the chimera. The structuralist movement of the mid to late 20th century had found itself in quite the quandary. As Foucauldian and Derridean schemas systematically attacked our fundamental tautological assumptions, the question that remained was this: what is, exactly, the locus of power described? In “The History of Sexuality”, Foucault proposed in the late 1976 that we as developed societies are under a “Victorian” regime of truth: a dominant, repressive, and coercively cosignatory process. Today, a similar regime dominates us today, and the ways in which we are dominated by discourse is more apparent now than ever before. The Foucauldian project, regardless of the historicity and the norms propounded within the domain of public discourse, seeks to intellectually liberate in the negative, or categorizing by “absence” rather than the “presence” of distinguishing features. This negative interpretation of power relations is a powerful methodology to systematically analyze institutions, social structures, and even scientific disciplines. In The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Foucault proposes a particular idea called the episteme. This concept most specifically is that of how ordering and taxonomy create influential power structures. Foucault writes: “Creating the fundamental codes of a culture— those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of practices.” In other words, the structures that organize and classify knowledge are limited by our own conceptual and intellectual purview. How do you think we ensure in the future that our representations of knowledge are as true to reality as possible? How may we best direct our collective energy and labor as a society in order to fundamentally transform society in radical ways? How can we best move scientific progress forward if we do not question our fundamental assumptions?

Today, the modern assumption in consumerist society is that financial freedom is, in fact, actually a type of freedom. But what if this freedom was not a type of freedom at all? What if the act of participating in the market-economy to become financially liberated, in fact, fetters one with iron shackles? As an introduction to my thought I will explain the following:, during my university studies, I have understood the realm of ideas in order to come to be able create new meaning or change our current institutional hegemonies at a fundamental level. Initially, I had been swayed by the persuasive power of literature. I had delved into Nabokov, Faulkner, Hemingway, Mishima, and a slew of other artists whose works were instrumental in introducing me to the realm of ideas and possibilities. I had picked the authors I wanted to read precisely in terms of their difficulty; how else would I gain mastery over an art? “Absalom, Absalom!”, for example, is known for having the longest sentence in all of literature and is even more well known for being the most difficult book of the Nobel Laureate’s oeuvre. Within the work, an enigmatic stranger named Thomas Sutpen erected a mansion in Jefferson, Mississippi. The power dynamics of the book were apparent; it was not greed that drove Sutpen but envy. His thirst for envy never absconded— and it has not left our world either, however, which is the substance of what continues to drive my intellectual project. Envy of wealth, status, privilege of possessions even, are all functions of status-seeking behavior. As I constructed my own stories, I steadily became more adept at the craft. As I troughed through notoriously dense literature, I sharpened my mind and my mental faculties. This, however, was not enough. I began to realize that the multiplicity of possible interpretations of a text greatly depends on one particular purview. One can have fundamentally violent reactions to the contents of literature depending on their social, cultural, religious, and philosophical purviews. I began to posit that the system that governs and organizes individuals ultimately depends upon those who formed the ideas that created society.

I delved into philosophy for the first time. I read from Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke. I had dissected passages from the tomes of Augustine, Plato, and Aristotle. I became acquainted with the existentialists (Nietzsche, Camus) the sociological structuralists (Sassure, Levi-Strauss), and the post-structuralists (Foucault, Butler, Derrida, Deleuze). After these years of academic productivity, I then sought the philosophies of the east, and I had been exposed to Buddhism and Islam. Rumi, Dogen Zenji, Nagarjuna, Zhaozhou Congshen, had taught me about nonduality and insight. I then studied the markets and the organization of people within the scope of their labor and productivity. Whilst this had been happening, I then returned to society, social structures, and institutions as my primary focus of study. I used the teachings of the ancients and those who have come before me to analytically dismantle the dualistic and dualistic dialectical processes of Hegelianism, Marxism and Christianity. Something “beyond good and evil” as Nietzsche poignantly proposed. These hopes and ambitions were still underway, however during the stunning upset in the 2016 United States’ presidential election I had seemingly lost all hope. Were the emotions of the masses (which had been historically warranted up to that point, regardless) truly what was swaying voters? Why was demagoguery still so effective in the 21st century? If evolution rather than revolution is the future fate of political systems, how can we transform capitalism into a system that possesses and reflects our Humanistic ideals? I then logically went to study economics, attempting to learn to find a solution to these problems.

There were many ideas in the study of economics that was useful for me to understand— as any truly serious thinker does; however, the one truly important answer that I found was that technologies were at the forefront of what is economically and socially attainable in the material world. The substance that shifts paradigms and causes revolutions, then, became indisputably to many as technological advancement. At this point, I was nearing my own graduation of my undergraduate studies and I could not afford to change my studies to the hard sciences. That being said, I learned the fundamental concepts on my own. By the time I graduated with my Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Economics, I had been an autodidact of Computer Science for roughly a year and one of Mathematics for 2. In that year, I covered the mathematical topics of Calculus, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations and Discrete Mathematics during my own time. On the CS end, I studied python to an intermediate level, learned software engineering principles, as well as understanding algorithms, data structures, databases, and networks. I had self-educated by watching countless videos, read multiple textbooks and copious amounts of secondary literature to fully round out my understanding. Now entering a master’s degree in computer science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, I am at the stage in in which I am realizing that as a serious thinker, the way in which my questions are asked fundamentally shape the possibility of answers I may receive. Refining the philosophical and scientific method, understanding the realm of ideas, and appreciating the immense nuance of navigating the domain of the human and natural sciences will only further embolden our biggest questions; what is the nature of our universe? What are the substrates that foundationally form conscious experience? Is language truly biologically innate? Are morals truly relative? Is artificial general intelligence possible? Are nanoscale robotics truly feasible?

The true freedom in the 21st century, will not be that of attaining wealth or realizing universal utopian illusions. The political Left and Right are in disarray. It is within this space of openness I believe will lead us to a new Era of Enlightenment in the Information Age. With the decline in our faith in the perfectibility of institutions, our political and economic discourses have been dismantled. Our assumptions of the world and the taxonomies in which we organize fields and disciplines of knowledge remain bare. Our grand metanarratives of history have been washed away. Many of the seemingly invisible power relations throughout history have been brought to fruition in the public discourse. With seemingly limitless information and billions of data points to systematically analyze, the question in the 21st century is not “What will we build?” but “Why?”. Why should we build it, and what will be its consequences, both materially and metaphysically? How can we feel more human in a world of rationally explained mechanistic systems? What is beyond our deterministic subjectification of ourselves? What are our new ethics for the 21st century, in a world artificial intelligences and gene editing exist? Why have our technologies and systems of knowledge have extended so far beyond the more nuanced concerns of daily reality?

We have been thrusted into the throes of posthumanism without even realizing it. The current coronavirus pandemic has massively accelerated the control structures of the elite technology corporations. This new era of the Information Age, then, is the death of the individual: of both man and woman. Not as a species or rational being. Neither of the man as an object or a thing of nature, but precisely man of a purely academic and intellectual sense. A man of a purely liberal sense— perhaps more specifically, the classical liberal sense of the modality of intellectualism. Roughly 75% of all academic professorships at non-profit and for-profit universities in the United States, for example, are currently not tenure track— a distinction that enables academics to talk more freely about their thoughts and interests without fear of prosecution or instability. In the 21st century our dilapidating university institutions— these same ones that maximize on the profits rather than embracing intellectualism— are the very places where ideas go to die. Our arts our entertainment and the Zizekian ideologies behind them of which are mostly diffused upon computer screens, have suffered. Many among us would look upon these devices more than spend a night’s inn with an ancient tome of wisdom.

Historically, as we go through intellectual history, thinkers such as Foucault revealed to us the way our societies discipline us and attempt to create a hegemony of culture; thinkers like Chomsky have laid points to how our consent is ultimately manufactured . The great right-libertarian theories have ended the argument of what a rational agent in the economy should look like be. Advancements by Peter Thaler and Nudge Theory have greatly challenged the use case of the rational agent in analytical ends. Now, as we— currently living in a Deleuzian “control society” — we may finally understand there is no way out other than radical revolution if one were to want to be free from the fetters of the information age and its tenets that are doubly propounded by financial, government, and technology institutions.. This is the end, as the poststructuralists naturally assumed; the death of the individual, in the sense that the culprits of the control structures around us now are ourselves. It is the flaws of human nature, the flaws of the things that we design, the inherent inequalities among the order of things. The data we produce on a daily basis, over the years of our life are all reduced to numbers in a computerized system: our social security’s, our bank accounts, and the number of zeros on the balances of our mortgages. One’s first reaction, however, is to initially engage in a Mersaultian revolt. But how can revolt against technologies that are not only useful, but necessary in these dangerous times? In the times of the Coronavirus, technology seems like more of an asset than a hindrance. But one may inquire about when will computers own us. The truth is the computers are already part of us in so many ways. It is this abstract symbiosis between man and machine, where one stares for hours into the abysses of its screen and haunts the very fabric of our being. And it frightens us— not because it controls us, or because we realize we are too attached to them. The fear is a mirror; if one stares into the abyss, one sees their reflection. The computer is us, in a very metaphysical sense, and it is haunting.

1. The Order of Things by Michel Foucault

2 https://theconversation.com/more-than-70-of-academics-at-some-universities-are-casuals-theyre-losing-work-and-are-cut-out-of-jobkeeper-137778

3 The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek

4 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; Michel Foucault

5 Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky

6 Capitalism and Freedom: Milton Friedman

7. Postscript on Societies of Control, Giles Deleuze; https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828?seq=1

8. The Stranger, Albert Camus