Hannu Rajaniemi: Jean le Flambeur
What is life in a digital, transhumanist world?
Full Worlds is an ethnography podcast where we meet the worlds of its creators. In this episode, we dive deep into Hannu Rajaniemi’s world in The Jean le Flambeur series, a series with so many concepts that each would have been worthy of an episode.
We discuss transhumanism and mind-uploading with its consequences of multiple minds inhabiting a single body (a form of prostitution on the planet of Sirr) and single (uploaded minds) having many clones and bodies.
The thing that scares me the most, is the strong instrumentalization of human minds as tools, with almost the accidental consequence of creating immense amounts of suffering. I’m not sure if that is the path on we are on that path with AI, but if we take ideas such as mind uploading seriously we should recognize that they can be copied, treated like software and tools, and at enormous scale and from inside these could experience enormous amounts of suffering.
We discuss the fractions of power; the Zoku which are can be viewed as gamified clans, the Sobornost who are clones of the seven mind-uploaded founders, the Sirr with their hidden treasures of code executed by telling stories, the mystic Oortians, and the belle epoque styled artists of The Oubliette. We, of course, discuss privacy, as it is a central tenant of the book.
The question of privacy and measure our personal data is a big one. (…) We need to regain control of what we share and data we generate that we have no visibility or control of what we share with third parties. That will become increasingly important with biomedical information, genome sequencing, wearable data, and health data.
We discuss the different economies in the post-scarcity world, legends, arts, and great tasks in a world where purpose can be questionable.
Do we need some kind of artificial scarcity? How do we find meaning? Can gamification of life be helpful, even if we set up seemingly arbitrary but collectively and individually and acceptable goals?
But, there are things we can learn from the book. There is a silver lining.
Recognizing that we are capable of change. We can decide to be someone else and be that person. If you are unhappy with your current situation, there is hope. There are cognitive hacks, systems, and frameworks.
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