Watch out for cyborgs (Cyb-ernetic Org-anisms)!
“‘Come,’ I said, ‘my friends! Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic Ideal have been surpassed. We shall witness the birth of the Centaur and, soon, we’ll see the first Angels fly! We must shake the gates of life to test the hinges and the locks! …Let us go!(…)We approached the three snuffling machines to stroke their breasts. I stretched out on mine like a corpse in my coffin(…)And yet we had no ideal Mistress high as the clouds, no cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into Byzantine rings! Nothing to die for besides the desire to rid ourselves of our too weighty courage!(…)I cup off sharply and, in disgust, I pitched — bang! — into a ditch….Ah! motherly ditch, half full of muddy water! Factory ditch! I tasted by mouthfuls your bracing slime that recalls the saintly black breast of my Sudanese nurse!(…)A crowd of fishermen and gouty naturalists had gathered in terror around the prodigy [the ditched car]. Patient and meddlesome, they raised high above great iron casting nets to fish out my car that lay like a great mired shark. It emerged slowly, leaving behind in the ditch like scales, its heavy body of common sense, and its padding of comfort. They thought my good shark dead, but I awoke it with a single caress on its all-powerful rump and there it was, revived, running full speech ahead upon its fins…” –The Joy of Mechanical Force (F. T. Marinetti)
Watch out for cyborgs! They are both in the name and in the flesh an incarnate portmanteau of machinic skin and the eyes of an animal; a chimera seemed by metal stitches, sown out of the meats of beasts, souls, and machines. The danger to humanity remains to be the human, but, will Hiroshima burn at the hands of the pilot, or will the hellfires come from those of Elona Gay; will the technological singularity happen if it is not a human that decides it? For a while now, we have been divine hermaphrodites that have let the organic world have intercourse with us, and we have in turn ejaculated the artificial universes of our imaginations into matter to manufacture cities bored in natural landscapes, carved wood into spoons and tools. We are both angel and beast, yet, won’t we become even more animal by harnessing all of our latent spiritual capacities through a prosthetic enhancement to our brains? –We will indubitably become more non-human relative to what we believe humanity, now, to be. How can we prepare for a human ecosystem with business-men walking around with an electromagnetic liberty, optimal affect ratios, and perfect bodies? Cyborgs will have flesh-and-bone bodies that will act as perfect conduits for their respective free-wills! and the only layers of facticity that the existentialist shall accommodate is between the cyborgs’ exertion of cybernetic control and the new limits of their beast-machine bodies. Won’t the event of “a Neuralink” approximate us to humanity’s most complete form? To its most liberated manifestation in all of history; to a perfect libertarianism? Isn’t human psychology’s entelechy to achieve its maximal potential, which, by definition is the virtual liberty of the spirit/Mind/Sartrean imagination in-itself? And, for a moment, will we ever weep over having abandoned the utopic tribal anarchies of primeval Africa; once we have gone past the event horizon of the technological project, will we be content with having lost the possible social necromancy of conjuring an archaic revival of sorts? Why do we have to be Futuristics and indulge in their morbid techno-incest instead of orgiastically raving with each other, or for now, remaining conformed Fukoyamaists? Why this beauty of speed!? Why this lustful entropy, that salivates for Death; this jouissance for the tool? It’s clear that “it’s moving faster and faster and faster,” as McKenna would say, but where exactly is it taking us to, and how do we immigrate en masse to get there? Nevertheless, we can forget social organization because a Judge will descend from the firmaments to scold the cyborgs out of their lukewarmth. The coming of the cyborgs will also arrive with an inevitable tyranny of the majority, that is to say, that only a minority of the cyborgs will be virtuous and consciously adapt their techno-mutations in relation to their population while recognizing themselves as superior beings (the shaman is a keystone-race in human ecosystems, but what if there is an excess of them, what happens then?) –unless of course the optimist alternative results to be, in which cyborg-hood is a panacea that redeems all who enters it from their human flaws and renders him Jungianly indivituated, eudamonious, self-conscious, allows for his reason and conscious-awareness to pull on the rines of the entirety of his brain-body interface, enlightened even, rather than these individuals being transmogrified, “neuralinked”, into ego-ma(chi)niacals; because the mind’s boundaries are, in form, the body’s limitations, and in content the imagination in itself –hence, cyberspace shall be composed out of the form of the human imagination…
[which is logically the body or the facticity of the natural world; and hence, in potency will be virtually infinite, but in actuality not: cyberspace and the imagination essentially prove the many possible worlds theory, at least virtually, in their respective onto-syntactical registers. But, we must remember, that the body doesn’t seem to –although, it is likely that cyborg-hood, like yogi-hood, will make us conscious of all the dim-lit corners within our minds –at the risk of a return of the repressed (and potentially many more psychical risks from neuralinking yourself)– as well as irradiating the blind surfaces of our organs]
…but not exactly out of the content of our imaginations –cyberspace will imagine (hyper-)realities for us, in the same way that one’s popular-culture or conventional media creates one’s perspective on culture… unless we reverse it and grab an unclenching hold of it! Isn’t the Übermensch, that has transcended their vain humanity and has achieved a complete askesis, already the cyborg and the gentle apex predator?! The fundamental question here then, just as in tackling the onto-axiology of the will to power, is that of the imminence of extinction; what strategy will we choose?:
- will we join the overwhelming majority of biological species that have roamed the earth; hold such a progressive standpoint that its identity is complexity and that it advocates for the widest horizons of change to envelop and conquer us; in other words, shall we let the human imagination unfold itself onto matter for it to fold back onto us, enveloping our minds with teeth of screeching metal, swallowing our bodies whole for us to swim naked within the informational saliva of cyberspace –shall we give up our dear ‘humanity’?
- or shall we preserve the population so that it is intact from technological mutation as we raise our anthropocentric stakes?
- or is it too late for that –have we already discovered the Americas– and shall we territorialize cyberspace for ourselves at the everpresent risk of a technological singularity lead by technocentric traitors? And how will the conquest be lead if the majority is always tyrannical and culturally poor?
I think the trilemma is clear. Perhaps humanity lacks the courage to let itself be the breeding grounds for sentient robots; to be the platform from which artificial-general-superintelligence can bootstrap off; to be a rotten log lifelessly waiting to be devoured so that wildlife can prosper after it decomposes –yet, the optimist exclaims: might we be able to join this new dimension of reality, which we have created, that will hold the same creative vivacity as nature? Can we join the wildest vistas of nature by going into the cyber-esplanades that we have sublimated out the tips of our fingers? And will we grasp this aetheric dimension of language in cybernetic handfuls and in baskets of consciousness? Or will there be no more Memory? Our intimation with the real possibility of cyberspace is a life-giving project for technology and we have not been vigilant; now, if Nature is our mother, then, we, as the progenitors of technology, are Saturn in anticipation to eat his offspring before one of them starts to feed off one of our gangrenous limbs. Technology is the inevitable product of our being Nature’s incestuous hands; we had intercourse with Her rather than having simply laid in being. Prometheus stole the fire for us in the good-will that we would have only used it to sustain ourselves! Oh, what a mess! We now have to deal with either a reified false humanity in the bodies of lifeless parasitic robots or with the threat of a hyper-organized animal-machine human race. Because, this is moving faster, and faster, and faster. We must stay firm, survive, and strive into the future however we can. But, what if that may mean that we have to digitalize our consciousnesses to thrive cyberspatially? –this seems like the only compromise, and it is seemingly unfavorable for the human. The boundaries of our facticity, and the very dynamic of our history, might end up lingering in the cybernetic syntax of technology’s speaking mouth instead of in the brea(d)th of our voices; and, for the naïve, as long as the status quo can be maintained, even if it’s in the reifications of cyber-hyperreality, in zombifying simulacra, everything will be just fine. But what about for those who want to join the fronts? and are virtuous and charitable enough to want to take everyone with them into our new digital dwelling. Is this hope the same void desire of wanting to take you all with me to wherever I go whenever I die? It might seem that I am a dyed-in-the-wool Luddite, or a fervent anthropocentric, although all I’m describing here is the plausibility of whether our offspring could be our tragic end; of whether we have an Oedipal fate as the kings of our dear Thebes, humanity.
