Category Archives: Transhuman

It is 1950 and a group of scientists are walking to lunch against the majestic backdrop of the Rocky Mountains. They are about to have a conversation that will become scientific legend. The scientists are at Los Alamos Ranch School, the site of the Manhattan Project, where each recently played their part in developing the atomic bomb.

They are laughing about a recent cartoon in The New Yorker offering an unlikely explanation for a slew of missing public bins across New York City. The cartoon had depicted little green men (complete with antenna and guileless smiles) having stolen the bins, assiduously unloading them from their flying saucer.

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By the time the party of nuclear scientists sits down to lunch, within the mess hall of a grand log cabin, one of their number turns the conversation to matters more serious. Where, then, is everybody?he asks. They all know that he is talking sincerely about extraterrestrials.

The question, which was posed by Enrico Fermi and is now known as Fermis paradox, has chilling implications.

The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 provoked the first popular fictional depictions of human extinction

Bin-stealing UFOs notwithstanding, humanity still hasnt found any evidence of intelligent activity among the stars. Not a single feat of astro-engineering, no visible superstructures, not one space-faring empire, not even a radio transmission. It has been argued that the eerie silence from the sky above may well tell us something ominous about the future course of our own civilisation.

Such fears are ramping up. Last year, the astrophysicist Adam Frank implored an audience at Google that we see climate change and the newly baptised geological age of the Anthropocene against this cosmological backdrop.

The Anthropocene refers to the effects of humanitys energy-intensive activities upon Earth. Could it be that we do not see evidence of space-faring galactic civilisations because, due to resource exhaustion and subsequent climate collapse, none of them ever get that far? If so, why should we be any different?

A few months after Franks talk, in October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes update on global warming caused a stir. It predicted a sombre future if we do not decarbonise. And in May, amid Extinction Rebellions protests, a new climate report upped the ante, warning: Human life on earth may be on the way to extinction.

Meanwhile, NASA has been publishing press releases about an asteroid set to hit New York within a month. This is, of course, a dress rehearsal: part of a stress test designed to simulate responses to such a catastrophe. NASA is obviously fairly worried by the prospect of such a disaster event such simulations are costly.

Space-tech billionaireElon Musk has also been relaying his fears about artificial intelligence to YouTube audiences of tens of millions. He and others worry that the ability of AI systems to rewrite and self-improve themselves may trigger a sudden runaway process, or intelligence explosion, that will leave us far behind. Artificial superintelligence need not even be intentionally malicious in order to accidentally wipe us out.

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The crater of Mount Tambora, which last erupted in 1967

In 2015, Musk donated to the University of Oxfords Future of Humanity Institute, headed up by transhumanist Nick Bostrom. Nestled within the universitys medieval spires, Bostroms institute scrutinises the long-term fate of humanity and the perils we face at a truly cosmic scale, examining the risks of things such as climate change, asteroids and AI. It also looks into less well-publicised issues. Universe-destroying physics experiments, gamma-ray bursts, planet-consuming nanotechnology and exploding supernovae have all come under its gaze.

So it would seem that humanity is becoming more and more concerned with portents of human extinction. As a global community, we are increasingly conversant with increasingly severe futures. Something is in the air.

But this tendency is not actually exclusive to the post-atomic age: our growing concern about extinction has a history. We have been becoming more and more worried for our future for quite some time now. My PhD research tells the story of how this began. No one has yet told this story, yet I feel it is an important one for our present moment.

I wanted to find out how current projects, such as the Future of Humanity Institute, emerge as offshoots and continuations of an ongoing project of enlightenment that we first set ourselves over two centuries ago. Recalling how we first came to care for our future helps reaffirm why we should continue to care today.

Extinction, 200 years ago

In 1816, something was also in the air. It was a 100-megatonnesulphate aerosol layer. Girdling the planet, it was made up of material thrown into the stratosphere by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesiathe previous year. It was one of the biggest volcanic eruptions since civilisation emerged.

Almost blotting out the sun, Tamboras fallout caused a global cascade of harvest collapses, mass famine, cholera outbreaks and geopolitical instability. And it also provoked the first popular fictional depictions of human extinction. These came from a troupe of writers including Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley.

The group had been holidaying together in Switzerland when titanic thunderstorms, caused by Tamboras climate perturbations, trapped them inside their villa. Here they discussed humanitys long-term prospects.

Clearly inspired by these conversations and by 1816s hellish weather, Byron immediately set to work on a poem entitled Darkness. It imagines what would happen if our sun died:

I had a dream, which was not all a dreamThe bright sun was extinguishd, and the starsDid wander darkling in the eternal spaceRayless, and pathless, and the icy earthSwung blind and blackening in the moonless air

Detailing the ensuing sterilisation of our biosphere, it caused a stir. And almost 150 years later, against the backdrop of escalating Cold War tensions, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists again called upon Byrons poem to illustrate the severity of nuclear winter.

Two years later, Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (perhaps the first book on synthetic biology) refers to the potential for the lab-born monster to outbreed and exterminate Homo sapiens as a competing species. By 1826, Mary went on to publish The Last Man. This was the first full-length novel on human extinction, depicted here at the hands of a pandemic pathogen.

The countless adaptations of Frankenstein are a testament to the appeal of its subject matter

Beyond these speculative fictions, other writers and thinkers had already discussed such threats. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1811, daydreamed in his private notebooks about our planet being scorched by a close comet and still rolling on cities men-less, channels riverless, five mile deep. In 1798, Mary Shelleys father, the political thinker William Godwin, queried whether our species would continue forever?

Just a few years earlier, Immanuel Kant had pessimistically proclaimed that global peace may be achieved only in the vast graveyard of the human race. He would, soon after, worry about a descendent offshoot of humanity becoming more intelligent and pushing us aside.

Earlier still, in 1754, philosopher David Hume had declared that man, equally with every animal and vegetable, will partake in extinction. Godwin noted that some of the profoundest enquirers had lately become concerned with the extinction of our species.

In 1816, against the backdrop of Tamboras glowering skies, a newspaper article drew attention to this growing murmur. It listed numerous extinction threats. From global refrigeration to rising oceans to planetary conflagration, it spotlighted the new scientific concern for human extinction. The probability of such a disaster is daily increasing, the article glibly noted. Not without chagrin, it closed by stating: Here, then, is a very rational end of the world!

Before this, we thought the universe was busy

So if people first started worrying about human extinction in the 18th century, where was the notion beforehand? There is enough apocalypse in scripture to last until judgement day, surely. But extinction has nothing to do with apocalypse. The two ideas are utterly different, even contradictory.

For a start, apocalyptic prophecies are designed to reveal the ultimate moral meaning of things. Its in the name: apocalypse means revelation. Extinction, by direct contrast, reveals precisely nothing, and this is because it instead predicts the end of meaning and morality itself if there are no humans, there is nothing humanly meaningful left.

And this is precisely why extinction matters. Judgement day allows us to feel comfortable knowing that, in the end, the universe is ultimately in tune with what we call justice. Nothing was ever truly at stake. On the other hand, extinction alerts us to the fact that everything we hold dear has always been in jeopardy. In other words, everything is at stake.

Extinction was not much discussed before 1700 due to a background assumption, widespread prior to the Enlightenment, that it is the nature of the cosmos to be as full of moral value and worth as is possible. This, in turn, led people to assume that all other planets are populated with living and thinking beings exactly like us.

Although it only became a truly widely accepted fact after Copernicus and Kepler in the 16th and 17th centuries, the idea of plural worlds certainly dates back to antiquity, with intellectuals from Epicurus to Nicholas of Cusa proposing them to be inhabited with lifeforms similar to our own. And, in a cosmos that is infinitely populated with humanoid beings, such beings and their values can never fully go extinct.

In the 1660s, Galileo confidently declared that an entirely uninhabited or unpopulated world is naturally impossible on account of it being morally unjustifiable. Gottfried Leibniz later pronounced that there simply cannot be anything entirely fallow, sterile, or dead in the universe.

Galileos theory on the population of planets ultimately proved to be wrong

Along the same lines, the trailblazing scientist Edmond Halley (after whom the famous comet is named) reasoned in 1753 that the interior of our planet must likewise be inhabited. It would be unjust for any part of nature to be left unoccupied by moral beings, he argued.

Around the same time, Halley provided the first theory on a mass extinction event. He speculated that comets had previously wiped out entire worlds of species. Nonetheless, he also maintained thatafter each previous cataclysm human civilisation had reliably re-emerged. And it would do so again. Only this, he said, could make such an event morally justifiable.

Later, in the 1760s, the philosopher Denis Diderot was attending a dinner party when he was asked whether humans would go extinct. He answered yes, but immediately qualified this by saying that after several millions of years the biped animal who carries the name man would inevitably re-evolve.

This is what the contemporary planetary scientist Charles Lineweaver identifies as the Planet of the Apes hypothesis. This refers to the misguided presumption that human-like intelligence is a recurrent feature of cosmic evolution: that alien biospheres will reliably produce beings like us. This is what is behind the wrong-headed assumption that, should we be wiped out today, something like us will inevitably return tomorrow.

Back in Diderots time, this assumption was pretty much the only game in town. It was why one British astronomer wrote, in 1750, that the destruction of our planet would matter as little as Birth-Days or Mortalities do on Earth.

This was typical thinking at the time. Within the prevailing worldview of eternally returning humanoids throughout an infinitely populated universe, there was simply no pressure or need to care for the future. Human extinction simply couldnt matter. It was trivialised to the point of being unthinkable.

Early drawings of Orions nebula by R S Newall, 1884

For the same reasons, the idea of the future was also missing. People simply didnt care about it in the way we do now. Without the urgency of a future riddled with risk, there was no motivation to be interested in it, let alone attempt to predict and preempt it.

It was the dismantling of such dogmas, beginning in the 1700s and ramping up in the 1800s, that set the stage for the enunciation of Fermis paradox in the 1900s and which led to our growing appreciation of our cosmic precariousness today.

But then we realised the skies are silent

In order to truly care about our mutable position down here, we first had to notice that the cosmic skies above us are crushingly silent. Slowly at first, though soon after gaining momentum, this realisation began to take hold around the same time that Diderot had his dinner party.

One of the first examples of a different mode of thinking Ive found is from 1750, when the French polymath Claude-Nicholas Le Cat wrote a history of Earth. Like Halley, he posited the now familiar cycles of ruin and renovation. Unlike Halley, he was conspicuously unclear as to whether humans would return after the next cataclysm.

A shocked reviewer picked up on this, demanding to know whether Earth shall be re-peopled with new inhabitants. In reply, the author facetiously asserted that our fossil remains would gratify the curiosity of the new inhabitants of the new world, if there be any. The cycle of eternally returning humanoids was unwinding.

In line with this, the French encyclopedist Baron dHolbach ridiculed the conjecture that other planets, like our own, are inhabited by beings resembling ourselves. He noted that precisely this dogma and the related belief that the cosmos is inherently full of moral value had long obstructed appreciation that the human species could permanently disappear from existence. By 1830, the German philosopher F W J Schelling declared it utterly naive to go on presuming that humanoid beings are found everywhere and are the ultimate end.

The moon is proof that parts of the universe are unoccupied by life

And so, where Galileo had once spurned the idea of a dead world, the German astronomer Wilhelm Olbers proposed in 1802 that the Mars-Jupiter asteroid belt in fact constitutes the ruins of a shattered planet. Troubled by this, Godwin noted that this would mean that the creator had allowed part of his creation to become irremediably unoccupied.

But scientists were soon computing the precise explosive force needed to crack a planet assigning cold numbers where moral intuitions once prevailed. Olbers calculated a precise timeframe within which to expect such an event befalling Earth. Poets began writing of bursten worlds.

The cosmic fragility of life was becoming undeniable. If Earth happened to drift away from the sun, one 1780s Parisian diarist imagined that interstellar coldness would annihilate the human race, and the earth rambling in the void space, would exhibit a barren, depopulated aspect. Soon after, the Italian pessimist Giacomo Leopardi envisioned the same scenario. He said that, shorn of the suns radiance, humanity would all die in the dark, frozen like pieces of rock crystal.

Galileos inorganic world was now a chilling possibility. Life, finally, had become cosmically delicate. Ironically, this appreciation came not from scouring the skies above but from probing the ground below. Early geologists, during the later 1700s, realised that Earth has its own history and that organic life has not always been part of it.

Fossils show that specific lifeforms can become extinct

Biology hasnt even been a permanent fixture here on Earth why should it be one elsewhere? Coupled with growing scientific proof that many species had previously become extinct, this slowly transformed our view of the cosmological position of life as the 19th century dawned.

Seeing death in the stars

And so, where people like Diderot looked up into the cosmos in the 1750s and saw a teeming Petri dish of humanoids, writers such as Thomas De Quincey were, by 1854, gazing upon the Orion nebula and reporting that they saw only a gigantic inorganic skull and its lightyear-long rictus grin.

The astronomer William Herschel had, already in 1814, realised that when looking out into the galaxy one is looking into a kind of chronometer. Fermi would spell it out a century after De Quincey, but people were already intuiting the basic notion: looking out into dead space, we may just be looking into our own future.

People were becoming aware that the appearance of intelligent activity on Earth should not be taken for granted. They began to see that it is something distinct something that stands out against the silent depths of space.

The hypothesis that human-like intelligence will inevitably evolve where possible is now thought to be false

Only by realising that what we consider valuable is not the cosmological baseline did we come to grasp that such values are not necessarily part of the natural world. Realising this was also realising that they are entirely our own responsibility. And this, in turn, summoned us to the modern projects of prediction, preemption and strategising. It is how we came to care about our future.

As soon as people first started discussing human extinction, possible preventative measures were suggested. Bostrom now refers to this as macrostrategy. However, as early as the 1720s, the French diplomat Benoit de Maillet was suggesting gigantic feats of geoengineering that could be leveraged to buffer against climate collapse

Will technology save us?

It wasnt long before authors began conjuring up highly technologically advanced futures aimed at protecting against existential threat. The eccentric Russian futurologist Vladimir Odoevsky, writing in the 1830s and 1840s, imagined humanity engineering the global climate and installing gigantic machines to repulse comets and other threats, for example.

Yet Odoevskywas also keenly aware that with self-responsibility comes risk: the risk of abortive failure. Accordingly, he was also the very first author to propose the possibility that humanity might destroy itself with its own technology.

Acknowledgement of this plausibility, however, is not necessarily an invitation to despair. And it remains so. It simply demonstrates appreciation of the fact that, ever since we realised that the universe is not teeming with humans, we have come to appreciate that the fate of humanity lies in our hands.

We may yet prove unfit for this task, but then as now we cannot rest assured believing that humans, or something like us, will inevitably reappear here or elsewhere.

Beginning in the late 1700s, appreciation of this has snowballed into our ongoing tendency to be swept up by concern for the deep future. Current initiatives, such as Bostroms Future of Humanity Institute, can be seen as emerging from this broad and edifying historical sweep.

From ongoing demands for climate justice to dreams of space colonisation, all are continuations and offshoots of a tenacious task that we first began to set for ourselves two centuries ago during the Enlightenment, when we first realised that, in an otherwise silent universe, we are responsible for the entire fate of human value.

It may be solemn, but becoming concerned for humanitys extinction is nothing other than realising ones obligation to strive for unceasing self-betterment. Indeed, ever since the Enlightenment, we have progressively realised that we must think and act ever better because, should we not, we may never think or act again. And that seems to me at least like a very rational end of the world.

Thomas Moynihanrecently completed his PhD attheUniversity of Oxford. This article was first published on The Conversation

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How much longer do we have left on Earth? - The Independent

Lets go back to 1989, said Christopher DeMuth, a former official in the Reagan administration, as he introduced Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the guest of honor at the National Conservatism conference held in Rome on Feb. 3-4 before the coronavirus ravaged Italy. It was a way to invite Orban to recount his remarkable political career, but it could have been the subtitle of the whole conference, underlining the official title: God, Honor, Country: President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and the Freedom of Nations. Never mind that the guest of honor has been rolling back the freedom of Hungarians in recent yearsand since the conference has secured the authority to rule by decree.

The two-day summitwhich gathered some of the most prominent conservative intellectuals and political leaders of the nationalist persuasionwas replete with nostalgia. Heartfelt appeals for the restoration of a supposedly golden age before the end of the Cold War rang out in the baroquely frescoed hotel hall, where speakers alternated on stage to articulate their slightly diverging brands of conservatism.

The era they were evoking predated the most aggressive phase of globalization: George H.W. Bushs new world order, the European Unions Maastricht Treaty, NATOs expansion into Eastern Europe, the introduction of the euro, and other elements of a 30-year process of rapid globalization that the nationalists loathe.

Social conservatives and traditionalists were represented by speakers like Rod Dreher, a writer for the American Conservative, and the Italian historian Roberto de Mattei, a traditionalist Catholic. De Mattei spoke about the dictatorship of relativism, a phrase made famous by Pope Benedict XVI before being elected to the papacy that is described as a system that doesnt recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of ones own ego and desires.

National conservatives gravitate around these types of moral absolutes. Even the French politician Marion Marchal could be included in that loosely defined category. The 30-year-old distanced herself at the conference from her aunt Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French far-right party National Rally, striving to represent a smarter, more intellectually inclined branch of conservatism, one that chastises transhumanism while hailing integral ecology as a quintessentially conservative cause. The notion of integral ecology claims that climate change and unfair economic and social practicessocietal problems more often associated with the leftare seen not as distinct problems but as a dimension of a single crisis affecting our age.

DeMuth, the former Reagan speechwriter Clarke Judge, the former U.S. diplomat G. Philip Hughes, and John OSullivan, currently the head of the Danube Institute in Budapesta think tank with ties to Orbans governmentwere the Cold War warriors representing the old Reagan consensus. Leaders of far-right parties from across Europe such as Spains Vox, Alternative for Germany, the Netherlandss Forum for Democracy, Polands Law and Justice, the Sweden Democrats, and Brothers of Italy expressed the European right-wing element.

The presence of younger speakers of the generation, such as Marchal, the Dutch politician Thierry Baudet, and the British author Douglas Murray, could hardly overcome the sense that the leaders convened were mostly envisioning the future by looking in the rearview mirror.

The United Kingdoms formal departure from the European Union in January was widely hailed as the latest step toward the resurrection of a pre-1990s world order organized around the principle of national sovereignty and rooted in the loyalty of local communities. The first step was the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, and although some of the speakers would be uncomfortable wearing Make America Great Again hats in public, the implicit belief they share is that Trump is the long-awaited dismantler of the liberal internationalist orthodoxy and embodies the resurgence of what they call national conservatism.

The national conservative crowd gathered for the first time in the summer of 2019 in Washington, D.C., in a conference organized by the Israeli philosopher and political theorist Yoram Hazony, whose widely criticized book The Virtue of Nationalism became the manifesto of the national conservative movement. Fox News host Tucker Carlson and then-U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton were among the main speakers at that event.

The Rome conference was the second step in Hazonys effort to mobilize the somewheres against the anywheres, to use the British journalist David Goodharts terminology, referring to the perception that nationalists are rooted in a single homeland (somewhere), whereas the elite are more cosmopolitan with no spatial allegiances (anywhere). This is indicative of the movements wider effort to shift conservatism away from its internationalist tilt and to recentralize the importance of the nation-state.

To accomplish this, the movement aims to redefine an older brand of conservatism that was ostensibly corrupted by the rules-based liberal order in the 1970s and steered away from its original purpose of preserving a traditional version of national sovereignty. That change in direction produced, among other things, a U.S. expansionist foreign policy, increasing reliance on international organizations, cultural homogeneity, misplaced faith in the free market ideology, and an aggressively individualistic outlook captured in Margaret Thatchers famous adage There is no such thing as society. National conservatives, in contrast, want to return to a world order in which nation-states are the primary actors and based on the belief that human beings are mutually dependent on national communities that are ultimately bound by shared values, culture, and history.

But this broad set of objectives makes it difficult to understand why the Rome conference was themed around former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and St. John Paul II, two late Cold War-era leaders who generally articulated the kinds of universalistic, global visions that nationalists wish to break from.

Indeed, Reagan spoke throughout his entire political life of the United States as the shining city upon a hill, a beacon of freedom for all mankind whose values could and should be exported globally. He reinvigorated the tradition of American exceptionalism, described the struggle against the Soviet Union in moralistic terms, praised international institutions like the United Nations as forces for good, and emphasized individualism and free market capitalism. No one doubts that Reagan was a nationalist, but his version of nationalism was colored with a decidedly internationalist outlook.

John Paul is a source of pride in Polish nationalist circles due in part to the close association between Catholicism and Polish national identity but also because of the lead role he played in helping the country regain a more genuine form of independence in the 1980s. But the institution John Paul led was defined by its international scope and universal valuesthe Catholic Churchs institutions disregard national borders, and the values it champions are thought to apply to every community, nation, society, and culture. After all, the kingdom of God has no national borders, and historically the Catholic Church mostly expressed its earthly power politically in the form of empire. The relatively few attempts to marry Catholicism and nationalism often resulted in heresies, violence, or some combination of the two.

The democratic government in Poland that John Pauls activities helped establish spent little time in nationalist isolation at the end of the Cold War, and it moved almost immediately into the U.S.-dominated liberal internationalist order. It began pushing to join the European Union as early as February 1991, and it expressed interest in joining NATO shortly thereafter.

This nostalgic impulse hardly fits in with the nationalist vision, though Hazony tries to justify the behavior of the 1980s generation of nationalists by arguing that their forays into internationalism were always brief and undertaken purely for practical reasons. The only military operation Reagan ordered during his presidency was the invasion of Grenada, which lasted for less than a week, Hazony told Foreign Policy, adding that he considered Reagan the last U.S. president for whom a world organized around nation-states was the default setting. In his view, it was Bushs new world order that changed the game for nationalists.

But Hazony conceded that Reagans vision contained a lot of Aynrandism, a nod to the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who argued that individuals were heroic beings solely preoccupied with their own happiness and with reason as the only absolute. That claim got harsh treatment on a stage filled with critics of free market excesses and neoliberal atomization. On John Paul, Hazony brushed it off, conceding that hes not an expert on popes.

The political alliance that Reagan cobbled together consisted of a fusion of social conservative, traditionalist, and a variety of libertarian inclinations. Of course, Reagan and his generation of nationalists serve only as a base for national conservatives. Hazonys goal is to develop a more modern fusionism that would remove the excesses of purist libertarianism while retaining the elements of the Reagan alliance that promote national sovereignty; at the same time, it would build alliances with populist European forces specialized in lambasting the EU and demonizing immigrants from Muslim-majority countries while standing in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race. Thus, in addition to formulating their political theses around ideas of nationality and values, the national conservatives also include ideas about race, culture, and religion to define their outlooks.

During last years conference in Washington, nods to white supremacism sparked furious reactions. Notably, the University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax said the United States is better off if we are dominated numerically by people from the First World, from the West, than by people who are from less advanced countries. Among Europeans, the connections of at least some of the political partners with the darker chapters of far-right history have generated heavy criticism.

Certainly some of those who were present are from parties which have far-Right pasts and other new parties who may well be a cause for concern in the present, Murray, the British author, wrote after speaking at the most recent conference.

Murray singled out some outright neo-fascist groups like Jobbik in Hungary, Golden Dawn in Greece, and CasaPound in Italy, which are not necessarily part of the national conservatism network but whose presence still poses a larger question: Where is the threshold between acceptable nationalist parties and post-fascist groups?

Brothers of Italy, for instance, is the heir of the post-fascist party Italian Social Movement, which emerged after World War II. Although todays party is the result of several waves of reform and rebrandingand is now a significant challenge to Matteo Salvinis control of the populist voting basesome of its darker features sometimes become public. Last year, the party circulated a poster criticizing George Soros, who made a donation to a liberal, pro-EU party in Italy. It said, Keep the money of the usurers, a reference to an old anti-Semitic trope.

I am very glad this initiative is led by an Orthodox Jew, as I hope this would preserve its focus and keep away the unsavory people who may be attracted to it, one of the speakers at the Rome conference told Foreign Policy, referring to Hazony and asking not to be named to speak freely.

Although national conservatism isnt inherently xenophobic, it offers a useful paradigm for far-right groups who define their conception of the nation-state based on race, religion, and identity. As conservatives begin to reincorporate a strong nationalist element into their own political philosophies, this gives space to far-right groups to project their identitarian tendencies to a broader and more receptive audience. Because those groups tend to be more rigid and uncompromising, an authoritarian tendency seeps into the broader national conservative framework.

Critics, however, see no difference between the far-right and national conservatism, considering the latter to be a thin scholarly veneer of respectability to a fundamentally xenophobic, bigoted, and fascist reactionary movementan intellectual facade that claims Reagan and John Paul but appeals to leaders like Orban and Trump. According to this line of critique, national conservatism is not just disingenuous; its little more than an attempt to connect and organize right-wing populists across the West, similar to what former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon tried to do with his populist group, the Movement, in Europe.

Liberals and nationalists believe they are trapped in mirroring dystopias. For liberals, this new generation of nationalists is working toward a closed, authoritarian society akin to that which exists in George Orwells 1984; nationalists are convinced that liberals have already created Aldous Huxleys Brave New World. But for national conservatives, gaining legitimacy is the next crucial step in their quest to reshape contemporary conservatism.

In theory, national conservatism could offer a framework that appeals to the disparate network of right-wing elements that are disenchanted with the liberal world order that has come into being since the 1960s. As has happened in many parts of the world, the resulting groupings could eventually form well-organized political units that threaten liberal democracy from the inside. But if all this new vision has to offer is what was displayed in Romea vague sense of nostalgia, dubious affiliations, ideological confusion, Corinthian columnsthen its future prospects are poor.

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Nationalists Claim They Want to Redefine Conservatism, but They're Not Sure What It Is - Foreign Policy

Author Mark OConnell talks about his uncannily topical new book, Notes from an Apocalypse

The ironies are so uncomfortable we can hardly bear to acknowledge them. Mark OConnell and I meet to talk about his second book, Notes From An Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back, the day after the Government has issued a directive to shut down all public gatherings of more than 100 people in order to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

Its mid-March, a Friday the 13th in Dublin city centre, but Grafton Street already looks like a Sunday in 1990.

OConnell is that rare breed of Irish writer, a committed essayist and nonfiction adherent who circumnavigated all domestic routes to make a name for himself as a contributor to the New York Times magazine, The Millions and the Guardian. His preoccupations tend toward classic late Gen X: technology, future shock, pop culture riffs, a quirky sense of the domestic.

Born in Kilkenny and now 41, he is by anybodys barometer something of a local literary star, but youd never know it: many people are shocked to find hes a Dublin resident. OConnells first book, To Be A Machine, a journey into the strange new worlds of AI and transhumanist evangelists, further segregated him from the pack in terms of subject matter and scope. As well as scoring a blurb from Margaret Atwood, it won him the Rooney Prize and the Wellcome Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.

The author has just concluded a meeting with his editor about how to reframe the press angle on the new book. Notes from an Apocalypse is a book about survivalists and end-times obsessives, a global tour of doomsday hotspots and hideouts, from the Black Hills of South Dakota and the pasturelands of New Zealand to the wind-blown desolation of the Scottish Highlands and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

OConnell is, understandably, queasy about making capital out of a scary situation. We live in a time when speculative and dystopian fictions are overtaken by news reports in the lag between draft and publication. Since Brexit and Trump, since Black Mirror and Hypernormalisation, since the inception of non-linear warfare and the corrosion of the notion of objective truth, the future has become not just too dark, but too real to mention. Even as we speak, were still adjusting to the protocol of what will soon be termed social distancing, the eschewing of the handshake for the nod or salute, the polite but measured distance we keep between us as we chat.

But and its a big but despite the new books eschatological obsessions, despite its cast of would-be Martian land-grabbers and bunker monkeys, its a very personal work as well as a very timely one.

I could stand for it to be slightly less topical, to be honest, OConnell admits with a near-grimace. Id take 50 per cent less. Or 100 per cent, actually. Obviously its coming out at an interesting time, but I dont even know that Id want to read a book about apocalyptic anxiety right now. I was talking to my neighbour across the street, cause Id given him a copy of the book, and he was like, I cant read your book, I cant even look at the cover, Ive turned it over on the table. But people are different: some want to read into a situation and some people want to read out of it.

I put it to the author that its actually a book about the anxiety of new fatherhood masquerading as a tract about end-times preppers.

Thats exactly it, he replies. I mean, its not that its masquerading, but the apocalypse cannot be the subject for a book, because its not a thing, its an idea. This book is kind of a way for me to organise my obsessions, a sense of the fragility of everything, and a questioning as to how youre supposed to live with a sense of meaning and purpose at a time when everything seems so uncertain, and the climate that weve brought these children into, were murdering it. Thats a hard thing to face when youve already had kids.

So yeah, I was already thinking about these things, and I wanted to write about these anxieties, but I didnt have an organising principle. Then I started to read about people preparing for the end of the world, preppers and super-rich people buying land in New Zealand. Both my books are about capitalism, and that was a way for me to mediate those themes, through this central idea the Freudian thing of sublimating your terrors or anxieties or desires into a work.

I dont know that I would have gone headlong into it if I wasnt a writer, he continues. My unhealthy obsessions are the same thing as my work. There was a long period, before I knew I was writing a book about this, where I was spending a lot of time watching YouTube videos about preppers, I must have watched Children of Men I dont know how many times, I think it is the most prophetic film, it puts its finger on so many things that were already visible back then, but have become so current.

Not that it was like a therapeutic exercise, just this sense that Im already obsessed with this stuff, and its not healthy, but Im stuck with this particular source of anxiety. People are talking about the apocalypse now a lot, but what does the apocalypse mean? It just means our way of life, in our fairly privileged case, is under threat.

And apokalypsos, translated from the Greek, also means to uncover or reveal. Where theres catastrophic change theres also accelerated growth.

Whats happening at the moment is like a blacklight or something that reveals stuff that is not ordinarily visible, it absolutely shows up the fault lines in our society, but it shows up some of the good things as well. Like, people are talking more, because everyone is going through the same thing. The thing I find really extraordinary about what is happening right now is that everyone in the world is experiencing this thing in different ways, everyones life is falling apart to some greater or lesser degree.

Notes from an Apocalypse is a swift and accessible read, but despite OConnells inherent gift for the comedy of the incongruous, it is often angry. Reading about people such as Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, obscenely rich men sinking bunkers in Auckland, or making plans to colonise Mars, one thinks of privileged slobs who have trashed their own homes and now want to move, leaving the serfs to clean up their mess. The kind of men who would rather face unimaginably hostile alien territory than invest in saving their own polluted planet.

Among other things, Notes From An Apocalypse highlights the infantile aspects of the American frontier mindset, the Last Man survivalist pose. Several times while reading I was reminded of Martin Amiss 1987 essay Thinkability from Einsteins Monsters, the fear he experienced as a new parent in the midst of Cold War nuclear paranoia. Would OConnell characterise the anxiety that fuelled his new book as a sort of male equivalent of post-natal depression?

Hmm. Yes, but I dont know if its explicitly male. One question that is unresolved for me is, how much of this anxiety would I have experienced if I wasnt writing a book about the topic? Theres an emotional trajectory to the book, where at the end theres a sense of, not stoic acceptance, but tentative optimism. And thats true, thats real, I did go through that to some extent.

It was such a hard book to write, and so many of the interludes of, I wont say depression, because its not a clinical thing, but just feeling shit about things that went on for a long time. The writing of it was difficult because the topic was so heavy, but I did come through it, that note of optimism at the end was real, it wasnt something that I had to force.

The key line in the book for me is towards the end: my son is looking at the sunset and he says, Its interesting. Thats the first time I heard him say that. Its not what the book is about, but it is what drove me in a way, because as anxious as I was about the stuff that was happening, its interesting. Its very cold and arguably psychopathic to think in that way, but the fundamental human connection is there. I think if youre a writer you cant stop finding things interesting. The whole psychological dynamic of the book was wanting to be reassured or to have some belief, because when youre parenting really young kids, the big thing is to inculcate the sense in them that the world is beautiful, a good place, and its an interesting place, its not a dark and threatening place. And to hear him say that was really powerful.

As with To Be A Machine, theres a wry humour at the heart of the new book. The tone is somewhere between Louis Theroux or Jon Ronson and Dr Strangelove. This is largely because OConnell is not afraid of looking like an idiot if it means asking the reader-proxy questions.

I dont know how long I spent as a journalist for want of a better term being afraid of coming across as stupid, he says, and I learned eventually that the most valuable thing you can do as a reporter is ask a stupid question. The one thing that youre afraid of asking, because it makes you seem like a f***ing moron, thats the most important question you can ask.

Definitely with To Be A Machine, when I started writing it, I was so fascinated by the topic, I knew I had a good thing, I knew I had this milieu that was fascinating and full of crazy ideas and really eccentric people dealing with things that were of philosophical importance or whatever, but I went through a long period of feeling inadequate to the task, and I did spend time trying to get to grips with the complexity of these ideas, and reading serious books that were in various ways beyond my grasp. And I eventually realised that the stupid ignoramus position not in a comic playing-it-for-laughs way, but a person who knows nothing is actually a better point from which to grasp whats important about a topic, and a better point from which to communicate with people. As a reader I value experts in a broader sense, in the political sense or whatever, but I wouldnt want to read a book about transhumanism by a person who is an expert.

But talking about humour, certainly in my books, I hope theyre funny, but its very unknowable to me what is funny in what I write and what isnt, because for me humour in writing is just like being... accurate. A lot of situations are inherently humorous, so its just about faithfully describing things a lot of the time. I actually think if a writer isnt funny at times, doesnt use humour, or evoke it, I kind of feel like theyre not fully serious. Theres something un-serious about someone whos not funny.

Notes From An Apocalypse is published by Granta

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'Everyone in the worlds life is falling apart to some greater or lesser degree' - The Irish Times

Mark O'Connell's new book about the end of the world is not called Notes from the Apocalypse, but rather Notes From an Apocalypse a gesture of articular modesty that points to a larger truth: Despite the climate crisis, despite a global pandemic, it has always been "the end of the world for someone, somewhere."

W.H. Auden wrote in his poem "Muse des Beaux Arts" that even the most epic suffering happens "while someone else is eating or opening a window..." and the dogs are going on "with their doggy life." But the apocalypse promises to synchronize our private doomsdays into one grand event.

O'Connell has a self-diagnosed "tendency toward the eschatological": the end of the world is too much with him. In a chain of charming, anxious, and tender essays, O'Connell examines his own apocalyptic frame of mind by taking "a series of perverse pilgrimages" to subcultures devoted to preparing for the end of the world.

Apocalypse comes from the Greek word for revelation: In religious contexts, it means the uncovering of sacred truth. The Christian apocalypse promises to distinguish the virtuous from the vicious. O'Connell's book shows how any of our likely earthly apocalypses fire, famine, flood will distinguish, instead, the rich from the poor.

In South Dakota, he visits a complex of luxury survivalists' bunkers that will boast armed security guards, "a logical extension of the gated community" and "a logical extension of capitalism itself." In Los Angeles, O'Connell attends a conference on the colonization of Mars; in New Zealand, a favorite destination for billionaires looking to build mansions for the end times, he hikes to PayPal founder Peter Thiel's apocalypse house and drinks from his lake. He also goes on a grimly funny group tour of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and embeds with the Dark Mountain group in the Scottish highlands.

Each of these apocalyptic scenarios holds its own revelation: the segregating power of wealth; the anxieties of masculinity; the loneliness of feeling alienated from nature. For O'Connell personally, the apocalypse is a way of thinking of the terrifying tenderness of having children, his fear of death, and also his odd longing for it.

Because one advantage of the apocalypse is that when it happens, you can finally stop thinking about it: "The apocalyptic sensibility, the apocalyptic style, is seductive because...it vaults us over the epistemological chasm of the future, clear into a final destination, the end of all things. Out of the murk of time emerges the clear shape of a vision, a revelation, and you can see at last where the whole mess is headed. All of it history, politics, struggle, life is near to an end, and the relief is palpable."

O'Connell is interested in the feeling of apocalypse, not its precise mechanics. He rarely bothers with perfunctory explanatory glosses, the whowhatwhenwhere writers usually have to do before the more interesting why. His chapter on visiting Chernobyl, hilariously, never stops to explain what exactly happened there (nuclear catastrophe, Soviet Ukraine, 1986). He also does not attempt to explain the science behind climate change. (Actually, he does in one instance ask an expert, "Are we f***ed?" The expert confirms: Yes, we're f***ed).

O'Connell takes for granted that we feel as he does, that apocalypse is just in the air. When his therapist asks what he thinks of Steven Pinker, a psychologist who argues that, in fact, there has never been a better time to be alive, O'Connell does not even consider this proposition. Instead, he begins to mentally spiral. Does Pinker's spectacular hair, a "mane of silver ringlets," constitute "great hair or terrible hair" he wonders, before ultimately deciding for the latter.

As his therapist waits, O'Connell continues: "It struck me then..how odd it was that so many of the great pessimistic thinkers had, by contrast, terrific hair. I thought of Samuel Beckett, with his incomparable steely crest and his pitiless vision of a meaningless existence...And then there was Kafka himself, with his great partitioned dome of jet-black hair, established above his high forehead like an auxiliary brain. It was interesting, I thought, how these men managed to maintain both punctiliously styled hair and unremittingly bleak views of human existence."

"What's coming up for you?" asked his therapist. "Nothing much," he replies.

This is, of course, a winning and unabashed way of getting out of engaging with Pinker's ideas; but it's also O'Connell's way of showing us that he is as interested in apocalypse-mind scattered, guilty, and anxious, making meaning out of meaningless things as he is in the reality or un-reality of the apocalypse itself.

In fact, O'Connell is frantic with meaning-making, like one of those medieval Christian mystics who saw the rapture portended in every pebble, every bird. In this state of paranoid pareidolia, everything is a sign, not only Steven Pinker's hair, but planes, deer, birds, the conveyor belt at the Heathrow outpost of Yo! Sushi. "I couldn't sneeze without thinking it was a portent of end times," he writes.

But when visions of sword, famine, plague, etc. threaten to overwhelm him, O'Connell's wife reminds him that he is "not John of Patmos, and this was not some cave of island exile: this was a house, and people were trying to live in it."

Here, O'Connell is being characteristically self-deflating, but he is also drawing an important distinction between the realm of the cave or bunker, or Mars habitat, or island mansion and the realm of the house, the small one in Dublin full of people he loves.

O'Connell has two children; before they were born, he agonized over whether it was ethical to bring more children onto this warming planet. Once the children arrive, the question seems ridiculous. They are here, incontrovertible, inarguable. He is rapt watching their joy and curiosity, not tracking "the pitter-patter of tiny carbon footprints." Of course, no one will live forever (this is, in fact, the subject of his previous book, on transhumanism). Apocalypses have come before, and will come again. We are all obviously f***ed in the scheme of things; Notes from An Apocalypse is just a reminder to ask what else we can be and for whom in the meantime.

Link:
In 'Notes From An Apocalypse,' The End Of The World Is A State Of Mind - NPR

Transhumanism rides roughshod over the dignity of the human person in its quest for the technologically created superman.

The sordid life of Jeffrey Epstein serves to highlight the decadence of the deplorable epoch in which we find ourselves, as do the suspicious circumstances surrounding his death. The web of vice and viciousness that he had spun was widespread, serving to entrap not only underage girls but also the rich and famous who preyed upon them. Using the allure of underage sex to lure his wealthy associates into his web, Epstein secretly filmed them in the act of sexually abusing minors, thereby turning his associates into his blackmail victims.

Epstein seems to have believed that the powerful people whom hed entrapped in his insurance policy would have a vested interest in keeping him safe from the law, a strategy which worked for a while. In 2008, Epstein was convicted in Florida of sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl, receiving a scandalously light sentence, but due to a plea deal he was not charged with sexually abusing 35 other girls whom federal officials identified as having been abused by him.

After a further 10 years in which Epstein masterminded the trafficking of young girls to satisfy the pornographic and pedophilic appetites of his powerful network of friends, he was finally charged in July of last year with the sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York. A month later, he was found dead in his jail cell. Although the medical examiner originally recorded the death as being a case of suicide, there are so many anomalies and mysteries surrounding the circumstances of Epsteins death that many people agree with Epsteins lawyers that the death could not have been suicide. One thing that is certain is that Epsteins death removed the possibility of pursuing criminal charges. There would be no trial, and therefore no exposing of Epsteins powerful associates by their victims in a court of law. Seen in this light, or in the shadow of this possible cover-up, it is tempting to see Epsteins insurance policy as his death warrant. He was too dangerous to be allowed to live when the lives of so many others depended on his timely death. It is no wonder that Epstein didnt kill himself has become a hugely popular meme, nor that HBO, Sony TV and Lifetime are planning to produce dramatic portrayals of Epsteins life and death.

One aspect of Epsteins life which is unlikely to be the focus of any TV drama is his obsession with transhumanism. For those who know little about this relatively recent phenomenon, transhumanism is usually defined as the movement in philosophy which advocates the transformation of humanity through the development of technologies which will re-shape humans intellectually and physiologically so that they transcend or supersede what is now considered human. At the prideful heart of this movement is a disdain for all that is authentically human and a sordid desire to replace human frailty with superhuman or transhuman strength.

Transhumanism rides roughshod over the dignity of the human person in its quest for the technologically created superman. Its spirit was encapsulated by David Bowie in the lyrics of one of his songs: Homo sapiens have outgrown their use Gotta make way for the homo superior.

Most of Epsteins so-called philanthropy was directed to the financing and promotion of transhumanism. The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation pledged $30 million to Harvard University to establish the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and also bankrolled the OpenCog project which develops software designed to give rise to human-equivalent artificial general intelligence. Apart from his support for the cybernetic approach to transhumanism, Epstein was also fascinated with the possibility of creating the superman via the path of eugenics. He hoped to help in a practical way with plans to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating up to 20 women at a time at a proposed baby ranch at his compound in New Mexico. He also supported the pseudo-science of cryonics which freezes human corpses and severed heads in the hope that technological advances will eventually make it possible to resurrect the dead. He had planned to have his own head and penis preserved in this way.

In addition to his bizarre association with the wilder fringes of technological atheism, Epstein also co-organized a conference with his friend, the militant atheist Al Seckel, who is known, amongst other things, for his creation of the so-called Darwin Fish symbol, seen on bumper stickers and elsewhere, which depicts Darwins superior evolutionary fish eating the ichthys symbol or Jesus fish of the Christians. Seckel fled California after his life of deception and fraud began to catch up with him and he was found at the foot of a cliff in France having apparently fallen to his death. Nobody seems to know whether he slipped, jumped or was pushed.

Apart from his unhealthy interest in atheistic scientism, Jeffrey Epstein was also a major figure amongst the globalist elite. According to his lawyer, Gerald B. Lefcourt, he was part of the original group that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative which works to force the poor countries of the world to conform to the values of the culture of death. Even more ominously, Epstein was a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, two of the key institutions responsible for fostering and engineering the globalist grip on the worlds resources.

As we ponder the sordid and squalid world of Jeffrey Epstein and his associates, we cant help but see his life as a cautionary tale, the moral of which is all too obvious. It shows that pride precedes a fall and that it preys on the weak and the innocent. It shows that those who think they are better than their neighbors become worse than their neighbors. It shows how Nietzsches Untermensch morphs into Hitlers Master Race and thence to the Transhuman Monster. It shows that those who admire the Superman become subhuman. It also shows that the subhuman is not bestial but demonic. It shows that those who believe that they are beyond good and evil become the most evil monsters of all.

Those of us who have been nurtured on cautionary tales such as Mary Shelleys Frankenstein or C. S. Lewiss That Hideous Strength will know that fiction often prefigures reality. We will see that the real-life figure of Jeffrey Epstein is a latter-day Viktor Frankenstein, reaping destruction with his contempt for his fellow man and his faith in the power of scientism to deliver immortality to those who serve it. We will also see that the transhumanism which Epstein financed is a mirror image of the demonic scientism of the secretive National Institute of Coordinated Experiments in Lewis prophetic novel. We will also be grimly amused by the fact that the leader of the demonic scientistic forces in Lewis tale is a severed head which has apparently been brought back to life.

And there is one final lesson that the pathetic life of Jeffrey Epstein teaches us. It shows us that the adage that the devil looks after his own is not true. It is in fact a lie told by the devil himself. The devil hates his disciples as much as he hates the disciples of Christ; once he has had his way with them, he disposes of them with callous and casual indifference, much as Jeffrey Epstein disposed of those whom he sexually abused.

This essay first appeared in Crisis Magazine and is republished with permission.

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Jeffrey Epstein and the Hideous Strength of Transhumanism - National Catholic Register

From pale blue androids to facial recognition hackers and nature enthusiasts, future trend forecaster Geraldine Wharry predicts the beauty subcultures that will reign in the near future

As part of ourSelfridges x Dazed Beauty Space, an online and physical pop-up experience a space of resistance, imagination, and new identities we have been looking ahead to the next 100 years of beauty.

An exciting component of our research into the future of cosmetics was working with fashion futuristic and trend forecaster Geraldine Wharryto predict six beauty subcultures from the future. Based on Geraldines forecast, we will be dropping Instagram face filters centred on each subculture every week and well be exploring and building on her trends through live make-up, hair, and nail tutorials in the Dazed Beauty Space at Selfridges. Sign uphere for a chance to be involved.

For now, read and discover Geraldines out of the world predictions for what might happen next for beauty, make-up, hair, surgery, filters, and self-expression.

Thetranshuman philosophy that we should merge with machines to extend our intelligence and life expectancy has become highly coveted with the rise of an ageing global population. Emboldened by the exponential growth of neurotech, biotech, and the appearance of the first cyborgs in the 2010s, we are redefining the bounds of the human body and chasing the fountain of youth. Meanwhile, the first baby androids are in development, in an effort to make us more than human. In 2017 we were already able to grow a premature lamb in a synthetic womb and brain-computer interfaces known as the brainternet. It was only a matter of time until we developed baby android mass-manufacturing.

To ease acceptance into todays society, we introduce androids as babies and match them with human families who raise them with dreams and dysfunctions. The tribe is part robot, with exposed metal or clear silicone body parts. Their eyes and hands offload and upload data for upgrades, information exchange as well as sense checking. As a form of reassurance, we take qualities, physical traits from loved ones, even those who have passed away, and upload them into our android children as a way to cheat death and dabble with resurrection.

This tribe is in a birthplace stage, mutating. A creature is being spawned. The Pale Baby Androids represent a new life form in its cellular stages. Their skin textures vary from wet and translucent to powdery and matte, with colour gradations mimicking mushrooms or lichen. Therefore the colours are blanched, textures are filmy, cellophane-like, slimy even, inspired by pearlescent spores, bacteria, bubbles, eggs,petri dishes, and fungi as the very primary life form. The baby android manufactures saliva which mutates and has psychotropic or fertilizing qualities and if taken in excess can be toxic. Underpinning this is the idea of duplication, twins, the multiplying of cells, as well as creatures feeding off of each other. Inspired by Vore fetish, this tribe sees life, death, and rebirth as part of the same thing.

We have been on a continual quest to hack the human condition and technology made us grapple hard with being human in the 2020s, when institutions started trying to put a moratorium onfacial recognition technology and we realised how hard it would be to protect privacy.

But it was too late, our digital footprint had already become the sexiest thing on earth. We were so seduced with creating highly precise services powered by our intimate data, that we failed to control hyper surveillance. We had spawned a trail of data we could never ever escape, even in the afterlife. Social ranking as a form of access to government services was already underway in the late 2010s and spread like wildfire around the globe in the years to come, as governments acquired unprecedented power to track and rate citizens.

A few decades later and our value as citizens is now intricately linked with our data. As omniviolence terrorism increases, the Privacy Hack tribe becomes the symbol of the resistance, fighting for humanitys freedom and Artificial Intelligence exclusively used for the greater good of the people and the planet. They rose up during 2019ssocial uprisings around the world, and from this was born a movement of facial recognition hackers. They joined forces with hackers who garbled social media captions as a form of art and a bid to confuse algorithms, successfully derailing internet surveillance by turning words into a mess of illegible code.

The Privacy Hack tribe has subverted all of the traditionally known data-tracking tools to create a beauty standard where our faces are adorned with data designed and garbled to confuse others, and only understood by a few. Their masks act as algorithmic signal scramblers and make members unrecognisable, equipped with ashape-shifting face filter, distorted layers of glitches and images. Freedom is being reclaimed by virtually hacking faces with code, illegible messages, fragments of faces. They are rebels hunted down by governments, living off the grid. Their ranks are joined by the LGBTQ+ community that have fought so hard for claiming their freedom to choose, the right to fluidity and a free identity.

Inspired by a feudal structure of society chronicled in the Aristocratic Decade (2038-2048) Dazed Beauty predicted in 2018, the Baroque Dystopians seek to escape from the anxieties of climate change and offset them with the exuberance of radical hope. They tap into the 1700s French Aristocracy and the Baroque era for hairstyle inspiration. In times of socio-political instability when visionary thinking is much needed, beauty trends lean on the eccentric types, reflecting a need to escape and indulge. Think the twenties post-War era with its glitter, luxury, and decadence. By 2038, we will experience tense separatism between the haves and the have nots, and it will manifest in nostalgic over the top beauty trends.

The Baroque Dystopians thrive in raves and underground social spaces. They are street wanderers with unsurpassed exuberance, adorned with eccentric hair braiding, exaggerated bouffant volumes decorated with pearls and golden roping, brightly hued and boldly curled hair, dental braces and face jewellery worn as their crown.

They use found jewels and stones, metal wires, industrial metal scraps reworked and moulded into vine shapes and alluring face gear. They represent the dichotomies between classes and blend the superior airs of royalty with the edge of life on the streets. This tribe also harnesses cross-cultural style references, inspired by the opulence of Middle Eastern clothing and jewellery. They navigate cultures and races, with a DNA so mixed it is unclassified, only known as the worlds new diaspora tribe, untethered to anything but their community, their street savviness and exuberant self-expression.

We have reached technological singularity and the year is 2045. In the era of the integrated circuit according, our technology year 2020 was doubling every 14 months. Today it has reached endless processing power. Us humans cant keep up. Nonetheless, we see opportunities in renewing our identities by applying the same principles of recycling and the circular economy to the principles of owning the legal rights your face, a need that emerged in the 2010s due to the rise of deep fakes.

The concept of face recycling gains momentum as people agree to swap faces. They can opt to do this in the digital realm or in real life through transplants and plastic surgery. In the digital realm, a popular filter is inspired by surrealist collages, juxtapositions of different faces. Another trend for face swapping and recycling uses simple solid colour overlays. These hues connect to personal data and can change shades with changing moods, biometrics, or even weather patterns. And for extra cash, our augmented skin includes advertising for the next e-sports world championship.

For those who cannot afford a new face IRL or a fancy augmented filter, the growing practice of using recycled materials to mask your face or adorn it with found objects creates a surprising space for what is considered new precious jewellery. Adornments are created from yesterdays relics: microchips, concert ticket stubs, an old barcode, even an old kitchen utensil, wonderful memories now used to proclaim and celebrate our post-consumer history.

Humans have evolved into elongated fairy-like creatures both ethereal and lethal. 90 years earlier a small group of biotech companies and scientists had developed age-reversing technologies. And the end of the second millennium allowed us to reconnect with our primordial animal instincts of hunting and feeding on only what we need, as we ran short of natural resources and needed to create new ways of getting our nutrients.

At the beginning of the 2100s, scientists and bioengineers have now developed skin cells able to harvest essential vitamins and if lucky, flowers. This has enabled us to become closer to nature and has given society an opportunity to reflect and long for what we once had and took for granted. Flowers lost their perfume but fortunately,scientists were able to engineer tattoos that release a floral scent. As the lines blur between the natural, virtual and the human, we use bio-sensitive smart tattoo inks that change colours and come to life through augmented reality, visually mimicking orchid petals and dragonfly wings.

Humans have become avatars of flowers and produce nutrients to mimic pollination. From this, we have created unlikely bonds with insects that appreciate our skins nourishment, especially ladybugs and iridescent worms. Our bodies have been engineered to be a part of the earths geology, as we are now able to produce face crystals mimicking natures wildest patterns. The adornments are packed with nutrients, allowing us to recharge just for a night or even minutes as part of our wellness routine. With the power to design our ideal future self, we are presented with a menu: from a floral creature to a fairy, feathered eyelashes to crystallised skin, the choice is ours.

The planet has drastically changed due to global warming. We have grown used to living in the dark due to heat reaching dangerous heights during the daytime. Pollution levels and microparticles in the air have darkened the light. Besides, the world is now overpopulated, and we cannot all work at the same time, therefore society works in split day or night time shifts, with global time zones now dictated by heat and density of population.

To navigate this world, we have developed ways to see in the dark and become accustomed to heat mapping cameras and infrared vision. We glow in the dark through our tattoos, contact lenses and makeup. But much like a cheetah or a lioness, we understand the importance of camouflage, being stealth. Therefore our tattoos can move and switch to nothing, powered by swarms of nanobots running through our veins. This tribe wears soft robotic body parts as masks or nose extensions, a clever development after the invention of soft computer parts such as the octobot in the 2010s.

Neon green prevails, with other hues inspired by tropical fish and coral accustomed to limited light in the depths of the ocean. Our perceptions evolve, natural evolution makes us reconnect with our animal instincts in a move to mimic the intelligence of wild animals with feather or fish inspired brows, pointed earpieces and increased senses such as hearing or smell. Piercings increase our spatial awareness and protrude, mimicking the spikes of hedgehogs for protection, in the form of metal insertions that help us navigate the dark and sense our surroundings. We can also opt for the less aggressive and equally alluring markings of jungle beetles. These adornments double as a symbol of status and tribal ranking, varying from solid silver to bright tropical hues.

Dazed Beauty Spaceruns from March 9 to April 19. For the full programme clickhere.Selfridges, Beauty Workshop, Ground Floor Level, 400 Oxford Street, W1A 1AB.

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Which future beauty tribe will you be part of over the next 100 years? - Dazed