Category Archives: Transhumanist

Humankinds thirst for infinite existence has taken a new turn with ideas springing from theoretical assumptions that future tech can turn practical to real-life experiments, with mice that is.

Transhumanism

A movement called transhumanism is now devoted to using science and technology to augment our bodies and our minds, and toallow humans to merge with machines, eradicating old age as a cause of death.

Mind uploading describes a hypothetical process of separating a persons consciousness (which involves their emotions, thought processes, and experiences), then converting it into a digital format, and finally transferring the digital consciousness into a different substrate, like a machine.

The process would conceivably incorporate different steps, like mind copying, mind transfer, mind preservation, and whole brain emulation (WBE).

Overview of how mind uploading can actually work

Step 1: Getting theinformationfrom the brain

The human brain regularly performs complex processes with the help of its86 billion neuronsthat function simultaneously in a large neural network. There aremore than 125 trillion synapsesjust in the cerebral cortex alone. That is a lot of information and storage capacity.

Mind uploadingadvocates claimthat noninvasive brain scans can provide sufficient resolution for copying the brain. The information stored in our brain would then be used tocreate aconnectome, a complete map of the neural connections in the brain, created using incredibly precise scanning of the neurons, and the synapses.

However, to date, we only have a complete connectome for a 1.5-millimeter roundworm calledCaenorhabditis elegans, which has just 302 neurons and about seven thousand synaptic connections.In 2014, theOpenWorm projectwhich mapped the brain replicated it as software and installed it in a Lego robot which was capable of the same sensory and motor actions as the biological model.

Building a human connectome is clearly a much more complicated process needing huge amounts of time and resources forthe identificationof about 86 billion neurons, determination of their precise location, and tracing and cataloging of their projections on one another. This is inconceivable using existing technologies.

Another proposed method of getting information from the brain is through a brain-computer interface (BCI). There are already existing implanted devicesthat can translate some types of neuronal information into commands, and arecapable of controllingexternal software or hardware, such as a robotic arm.However, modern BCIs are only very slightly related to the theoretical BCIs which would be needed to allow us to transfer our brain states into a digital medium.

Some suggest that downloading consciousness would require technology capable of scanning human brains at a quantum particle level.

Elon Musks Neuralink is one company working on aspects of mind-uploading. They are designing a neural implant that would work like a Fitbit in your skull. But it is not close to the technology needed to upload an entire brain.

Meeting the challenges of step 1: Preserving the brain

Some wealthy individuals whowish to live foreverare opting to preserve their brains and sometimes bodies through cryopreservation. In theory, in the future when human connectome technology is fully developed, their consciousness could then be retrieved and uploaded. An American cryonics company Alcor Life Extension Foundationalready stores around180 cryopreserved human bodies.

However, some experts also claim that such cryonic techniquesmaydamagethe brain beyond repair.

Recently, an MIT graduate Robert McIntyre, rekindled the brain preservation hype when heannounced his Y-Combinatorbacked startup Nectome is building some next-generation tools to preserve brains in the microscopic detail needed to map the connectome.

Step 2: Reconstruction of the artificial brain

Once all the neural activity is mapped out and the connectome is ready, the next step would be to digitize it. According toa rough estimatepublished inScientific American, the memory storage capacity of the human brain could be around 2.5 Petabytes (2,500 TB).

Apart from the storage, we will require a computer architecture on which the brain can be reconstructed in the form of computable code. And there is the issue of power for that architecture.Today, a computer with the same memory and processing power as the human brain would require around 1 gigawatt of power, or basically a whole nuclear power station to run one computer that does what our computer does with 20 watts,according to Tom Bartol, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute.

Step 3: Emulation in an external substrate

Once all the requirements are fulfilled and the artificial brain is ready, the mind can now be uploaded into a simulation, such as a virtual world,like the metaverse. Another transhumanist idea suggests that the mind can also be uploaded on ahumanoid robot.Uploading into a physical robot would require robots that are a lot more functional than any that currently exist.

However, if the consciousness is uploaded as a substrate-independent mind (SIM), and if the SIM is deemed to be conscious, then it will also need toexist in a place and be able to interact with things. This will require virtual reality that is identical to how humans experience actual reality. All of this will require yet more storage capacity, signal bandwidth, and power.

Senescent cells

Nowresearchers in Japan saythey may have taken a step toward boosting human longevity with successful trials of a vaccine against the cells that contribute to the ageing process.

In laboratory trials, a drug targeting a protein contained in senescent cells those which have naturally stopped reproducing themselves slowed the progression of frailty in older mice.

The vaccine also successfully targeted the senescent cells in fatty tissue and blood vessels.

We can expect that (the vaccine) will be applied to the treatment of arterial stiffening, diabetes and other aging-related diseases, Juntendo professor Toru Minamino told Japans Jiji news agency.

Cells become senescent when they stop duplicating themselves, often in response to naturally-occurring damage to their DNA.

In laboratory tests, preventing the build-up of senescent cells extended the lifespan of mice by 15%, Euronews reported. But researchers still dont know how much a living creatures lifespan can be extended.

Some believe there is a limit for the human lifespan of around 130 years as a current estimate.

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Immortality is showing life as a concept but also in the lab - AMEinfo

U.S. Transhumanist Party Putting Science, Health, and Technology at the Forefront of American Politics

The U.S. Transhumanist Party was founded on October 7, 2014, and has since grown to over 3,600 members.

Learn about future technology and trends that will affect the lives of everyone you care about.

Join us weekly at the Virtual Enlightenment Salon to learn from other Transhumanists.

Join our party. Membership is free and open to everyone worldwide.

Find out the Values of the U.S. Transhumanist Party and read our extensive, member-generated Platform.

Read our Constitution and the Transhumanist Bill of Rights.

For an overview of what the U.S. Transhumanist Party stands for, watch Chairman Gennady Stolyarov IIs address at RAADfest 2017, The U.S. Transhumanist Party: Pursuing a Peaceful Political Revolution for Longevity.

Read Chairman Stolyarovs 60-page essay, The United States Transhumanist Party and the Politics of Abundance, published as Chapter 5 ofThe Transhumanism Handbook, a major compilation of transhumanist thought edited by Newton Lee.

Official USTP Merchandise Support Our Cause!

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U.S. Transhumanist Party Official Website U.S ...

While lockdowns were supposed to be temporary initially just a couple of weeks to flatten the curve nearly two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, theres no end in sight. Thanksgiving was once again canceled in many parts of the U.S., and many government leaders again urged residents to cancel their Christmas celebrations too. The latest Omicron mutation has given bureaucrats additional reasons to unleash their power and raise panic.

What many still dont realize is that the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic has little to do with the spread of an actual virus, and everything to do with the planned global takeover and implementation of a technocratic agenda known as The Great Reset.

Universal mask mandates, social distancing, business shutdowns, online working and learning, and quarantining of asymptomatic individuals are all forms of soft indoctrination to get us used to an entirely new, and unfathomably inhumane, way of life devoid of our usual rights and freedoms.

Klaus Schwab is the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. Schwab announced the World Economic Forums Great Reset Agenda in June 2020,1 which includes stripping people of their privately owned assets.

In addition to being a poster boy for technocracy, Schwab also has a strong transhumanist bend, and wrote the book on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a hallmark of which is the merger of man and machine, biology and digital technology.2

According to Winter Oak a British nonprofit social justice organization Schwab and his globalist accomplices are using the COVID-19 pandemic to bypass democratic accountability, to override opposition, to accelerate their agenda and to impose it on the rest of humankind against our will.

While the Great Reset plan is being sold as a way to make life fair and equitable for all, the required sacrifices do not apply to the technocrats running the system.

On the contrary, as noted by Patrick Wood in an interview with James Delingpole, the wealth distribution and circular economies promoted by the technocratic elite will never benefit the people, because what theyre really referring to is the redistribution of wealth from the people, to themselves.

Evidence of this can be seen in the decision to allow big box stores to remain open during the pandemic while forcing small businesses to close, no matter how small the infection risk.

Theres really no rhyme or reason for such a decision, other than to shift wealth away from small, private business owners to multinational corporations. More than half of all small business owners fear their businesses wont survive.3

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the collective wealth of 651 billionaires in the U.S. rose by more than $1 trillion (36%).4 To put their current wealth in perspective, not only did the number of billionaires in America swell to 745 during the pandemic, but their assets grew by $2.1 trillion.5

According to the online newsletter Inequality, The $5 trillion in wealth now held by 745 billionaires is two-thirds more than the $3 trillion in wealth held by the bottom 50 percent of U.S. households estimated by the Federal Reserve Board.

As noted by Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, Never before has America seen such an accumulation of wealth in so few hands.6

Thats technocratic wealth redistribution for you. Ultimately, The Great Reset will result in two tiers or people: the technocratic elite, who have all the power and rule over all assets, and the rest of humanity, who have no power, no assets and no voice.

That the COVID-19 pandemic is a form of class war is also evident in the way rules are enforced. While citizens are threatened with fines and arrest if they dont do as theyre told, those who lay down the rules repeatedly break them without repercussions.

If you need more evidence that were in the middle of a technocratic takeover, look no further than the mass vaccination agenda and the promotion of fake, lab-grown meat. Bill Gates, another frontline technocrat, has repeatedly stated that we have no choice but to vaccinate everyone against COVID-19.

Naturally, hes heavily invested in said vaccine and stands to gain handsomely from a global mass vaccination campaign. Technocrats are nothing if not self-serving, all while pretending to be do-gooders much like COVID Claus in our little video.

Eventually, your personal identification, medical records, finances and who knows what else will all be tied together and embedded somewhere on or in your body. Every possible aspect of your biology and life activities will be trackable 24/7. You will also be digitally tied into the internet of things, which eventually will include smart cities.

All the different parts of this giant population control grid fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The global vaccination agenda ties into the biometric identity agenda, which ties into the cashless society agenda, which ties into the social credit system agenda, which ties into the social engineering agenda and so on.

When you follow this experiment to its ultimate conclusion, you find all of humanity enslaved within a digitized prison with no way out. Those who rebel will simply have their digital-everything restricted or shut down.

The rise of fake, lab-grown meat is a puzzle piece of The Great Reset agenda too. According to the World Economic Forum, lab-grown, cultured meat is a more sustainable alternative to conventional livestock, and in the future, well all be eating a lot less meat. As noted on its website:7

As the world looks to reset its economy, along with food systems, in a cleaner way post-pandemic, one more sustainable solution coming to fruition is cultured meat Cultured meat takes much less time to grow, uses fewer of the planets resources, and no animals are slaughtered.

But dont think for a second that this has anything to do with environmental protection. No, its about controlling the food supply and preventing food independence.

Already, multinational corporations have taken over a majority of the global food supply with their patented genetically engineered seeds. Patented cultured meats and seafood will allow private companies to control the food supply in its entirety, and by controlling the food supply, they will control countries and entire populations.

Public health will undoubtedly suffer from this dietary switch, as canola and safflower oil8 are primary sources of fat in these fake meat concoctions. Vegetable oils are loaded with linoleic acid (LA), an omega-6 fat that, in excess, acts as a metabolic poison, causing severe mitochondrial dysfunction, insulin resistance, decreased NAD+ levels, obesity and a radical decrease in your ability to generate cellular energy.

Our LA consumption 150 years ago was between 2 and 3 grams per day. Today it is 10 to 20 times higher. If fake meat becomes a staple, the average LA intake is bound to increase even further.

The Great Reset is well underway, but its not yet too late to stop it. Enough people have to see it and understand it, though. And then they must act. If we want to prevent The Great Reset from destroying life as we know it, we must view civil disobedience as a duty. We must resist it from every angle.

We must reclaim our sovereignty, our right to live free, to open our businesses and move about freely. We must communicate with our elected leaders and demand they not infringe on our constitutional rights. We have to engage in political processes and help educate our local sheriffs of their role as defenders of the constitution. We may also need to support legal challenges.

A small step in the right direction that you can take right now would be to celebrate Christmas like you normally would this week, and not allow the Klaus Schwabs and Bill Gateses of the world rob you of valuable time with family and friends.

There are no guarantees in this life, and for many, this will be their last Christmas. So, spend it well. Cherish life by actually living it and spending it with those you love. Refusing to give up our humanity is how we resist The Great Reset.

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Another Year Without A Family Christmas? - newsconcerns

The Transhumanist agenda is more than just Artificial Intelligence (AI), or robots taking over American jobs, or transgender restrooms at public facilities to accommodate an ever growing push for uniformity among the masses.

Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter

Transhumanism is Posthumanism. It is humanism with the optimism taken out, a movement that advocates for the transformation and the advancement of humanity through technology that runs the gamut from nanotechnology to AI. This paradigm is not limited to gadgets and medicine but also molds social, economic, cultural, institutional design, language, and the psyche.

To be clear, Transhumanism is a manufactured endpoint to human evolution

Transhumanism began taking shape in the 1930s under Social Engineers like Edward Bernays whose book Propaganda revealed the method of mind control for anyone curious enough to pay attention:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of personswho understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.~ Edward L. Bernays, Master Propagandist

Old retro movie projector with smoke and light beam

These messages and themes are blatant for anyone to see, if the eyes are open. They represent a form of consent, which individuals must give for the agenda to be carried out. Social engineers have informed us through fiction, non-fiction, film, media, the educational system, politics, religion, sports, Hollywood celebrities, and rigged elections throughout the centuries. And each time we have consented with our silence and inaction. This is implied consent. There is no longer true informed consent which would mean both parties can choose tonotconsent.

Aldous Huxleys novel Brave New World informed us of a world of bio and social engineering in black and white. He described a future that had already begun to take shape under his pen. To grasp the Huxleyesque nature of current culture we only need to look at one of his personal quotes:

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution ~Aldous Huxley

Crowd of robots. 3D illustration

Transhumanism is mind control to shift perception to a hybrid society. As perception shifts, the individual is homogenized into an amorphous public persona. The term Public Health is, itself a public relations term, created in 1913 when the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research (RIMR) to convince individuals to give up their power to an outside, unseen authority.

Public health dilutes the power of individuals. An individual is real. A public is a concept. Therefore, Public Opinion, Public Safety, Public Body, and Public Perception are myths used to justify a transfer of power to a higher authority. There is no power in the group. As each human is born an individual, there is only individual perception, individual opinion, individual bodies, and individual safety.

Once you are convinced to do things for the good of the public, such as implanting tracking chips to keep your job, or merging yourself to a machine to enhance your memory, or taking nano-chipped pharmaceutical drugs to ensure compliance, or agreeing to public checkpoints, you lose individual identity. You are part of the blob. And how do you measure the success of the public? Has the nation become stronger as a result of handing over individual power to an outside authority?

We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy. ~ Chris Hedges

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

Transhumanism is Inversion Reality to create order out of chaos, where up is down, black is white, sickness is health, male is female, abnormal is normal, and uniformity is unity. It is a reality of a perfect controllable race. The Transhumanist movement is not new or out-of-the-box. It has been playing out before our eyes under the deception of politics and Hollywood make-up and glamour for more than a century.

Transgendered actors are now coming out to be recognized as separate from male or female; non-gendered. Like Caitlyn Jenner, anyone has a right to reshape themselves and choose a different identify. However, what happens when true identity is concealed and used for deception? How many Hollywood actors, mainstream news anchors, super models, politicians, are disguisedbehind wigs, false eyelashes, or beards to create the Great Deception? What deeper meaning rests behind celebrity worship, the golden idols actors give themselves, or the pentagrams they bow down to on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?

Have people been measuring themselves against a standard of beauty and worth based in illusion? Do New Age teachings go back to the Freemasons? Back to Babylon and the Gnostic teachings?

With more questions than answers, is it time to look behind the curtain of the Media Industrial Complex?

The Transhumanist-Posthuman agenda is not about the equality of the sexes since the sexes are meant to merge int0 an androgynous blob. Under the Trans Agenda, an era of social and ecologic inequities are the new standard where nature is unnecessary and human relationships are replaced by sexbots that cook, clean, converse (or not), and provide for physical needs.

What if the deeper agenda is to weakenthe male energy as protector and defender, subvert the female essence, and neutralize the divine through technologies such as CRISPR? CRISPR genetically modifies DNA to redesign gender at the level of the human embryo to create an androgyne that cannot reproduce.

The Transhumanist agenda offers a radical upgrade of humanity to something smarter, bigger, better. It suggests we are entering a virtual reality without a discussion of morals or spiritual matters, where we can transcend our biological limitations with implants and injections. Is this the wet dream of a robot or the musings of a madman? Do we extend life, prevent death, or bring the dead back to life even if life is no longer worth living? As TV and films try to convince us that vampires are sexy, do we leave the light behind because the darkness brings a different type of eternity? Do we accept that the Transgender agenda has infiltrated the classroom to indoctrinate children fromKindergarten?

In agreeing to the Trans Agenda, we need to know the consequences of our actions instead of rushing headlong over a cliff. What are the risks? Were the risks knowable when corporations introduced new technology that promised to feed the world with genetically-modified foods or connect the world through electro-magnetic frequencies? Now that GMO foods are not enough to feed the world, the message has shifted to taking a shot in the arm to feed the world: For every flu shot given at our Pharmacy or The Little Clinic, well donate a meal to Feeding America.

Are the negative health effects of these previous untested technologies the real reason humanity needs to preserve itself in new ways? Or are GMO foods and vaccines just part of the agenda to bioengineer humans to prevent procreation? Will babies be made-to-order to maintain order?

The Transhumanist Agenda will declare that humanity will go extinct or permanently destroy itself unless transhumanistic technologies are realized. Are we repeating an extinction that happened once before in Atlantis? Shouldnt we be asking ourselves if there is meaning to living an imperfect life or dying a natural death because nature and God are part of the equation?

While youll feel compelled to charge forward its often a gentle step back that will reveal to you where you and what you truly seek. ~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

Image from Pixabay

From the Rocky Horror Picture Show to the Truman Show, the message is clear. The Great Divide of humanity is purposeful in the Transhumanist Agenda. But are the risks of Transhumanism clear? Does the original personality remain the same? Does the soul remain intact? Can a posthuman being with increased life expectancy, intelligence, health, memory cease to exist on a higher level? Are we sacrificing divinity to agree to cloning and to worship androgyny and the god of AI? Is policy guidance written by a hidden government enough to forge ahead to a Brave New World? What happens to peace, love, caring, and cooperation?

Those who believe in the Trans religion have a right, as long as it does not infringe upon anothers Rights. And those who choose not to? Their Rights must be preserved too. Informed-consent means no deception from the inside-out. Freedom for humanity to evolve depends on the voices who speak up against the infiltration by dark forces. Are you ready?

Rosanne Lindsay is a writer andNaturopath.Sheis a health freedom advocate and the author of two books, The Nature of Healing: Heal the Body, Heal the Planet, and her latest book based on her own story of thyroid disease reversal:Free Your Voice, Heal Your Thyroid, Reverse Thyroid Disease Naturally.Find her on Facebook atRosanne LindsayandNatureofhealing.Consult with her (Skype or Zoom consults available) atnatureofhealing.org. Subscribe to her blog athttp://www.natureofhealing.org/blog/.

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The Transhumanist Agenda and The Future of Humanity ...

The U.S. Transhumanist Party is focused onpolicyrather thanpoliticsas conventionally defined. We value initiatives and reforms that will improve the human condition for as many people as possible, with as much beneficial impact as possible and without regard for scoring political points or defeating the other side. We seek to achieve the next, greatest era of our civilization, which will require constructive solutions to the problems of our current era. All of these problems can be solved if we look away from the political trench warfare of today and up toward a far brighter future.

Ideal 1.The Transhumanist Party supports significant life extension achieved through the progress of science and technology.

Ideal 2.The Transhumanist Party supports a cultural, societal, and political atmosphere informed and animated by reason, science, and secular values.

Ideal 3.The Transhumanist Party supports efforts to use science, technology, and rational discourse to reduce and eliminate various existential risks to the human species.

Find the U.S. Transhumanist Party Platform as Article VI of our Constitution or in this standalone presentation. Below is just a selection of some of our key values and goals, as determined by votes of our members, but we have many other ideas as well, and we also frame the ideas below with a great deal of thought and detail.

Individual privacy and liberty over how to apply technology to ones personal life. [Article VI, Section I]

Tolerance and inclusivity of all individuals of all races, genders, classes, religions, creeds, national origins, and other characteristics.[Article VI, Section II]

Support of most technologies but opposition to certain detrimental technologies (e.g., weapons of mass destruction, privacy-infringing technologies, engineering of new pathogens).[Article VI, Section III]

Opposition to nuclear weapons, support of complete nuclear disarmament, even if unilateral.[Article VI, Section IV]

Support of research on eradicating disease.[Article VI, Section V]

Morphological freedom.[Article VI, Section VI]

Support of all values and efforts toward cultivation of science, technology, reason.[Article VI, Section VII]

Support of all emerging technologies that improve the human condition, including:

Autonomous vehicles

Electric vehicles

Economical solar power

Safe nuclear power

Hydroelectricity

Geothermal power

Applications for the sharing of durable goods

Artificial intelligence

Biotechnology

Nanotechnology

Robotics

Rapid transit

3D printing

Vertical farming

Electronic devices to detect and respond to trauma

Beneficial genetic modification of plants, animals, and human beings[Article VI, Section IX]

Ending the drug war.[Article VI, Section XIV]

Reforming the prison system to reduce the incarcerated population.[Article VI, Section XV]

Universal Basic Income (UBI) not conditional on life circumstances, occupations, other income, or wealth.[Article VI, Section XVI]

Reasonable measures to fund space travel.[Article VI, Section XVII]

Using science and technology to eliminate disabilities.[Article VI, Section XVIII]

Ending the two-party duopoly.[Article VI, Section XIX]

Life extension / anti-aging.[Article VI, Sections V, VIII, IX]

Removal of barriers to medical research and deployment of treatments.[Article VI, Sections LXXIX, LXXX, LXXXI, LXXXII]

Reducing the national debt.[Article VI, Section XXXV]

Alternative sources of energy and their technological implementations. [Article VI, Section XXXVIII]

Increasing the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).[Article VI, SectionLXXVII]

Support for political, economic, and cultural experimentation e.g., seasteads and micronations.[Article VI, SectionXXII]

Childrens rights proportional to their rational faculties. [Article VI, Sections XXIII, LXII]

Animal welfare (but not animal liberation). [Article VI, Section XXIV]

Opposition to intolerant, rights-violating, anti-technological, and compulsion-imposing doctrines, be they religious or secular.[Article VI, Sections XXV, XL, LXIII]

Excerpt from:

Values of the U.S. Transhumanist Party U.S ...

Life and society worldwide have been transformed by digital technology, including the fabrics of emotional relationships. Many believed the internet would be the largest ungoverned space in the world with unlimited emancipatory potential, and trusted Big Tech to make the world a better place. Yet power and capitalism filled that space with surveillance systems, the production of private capital, the monetization of data, and the control of human lives. Social media now shape daily life and many have lost faith in the possibility of a shared consensus reality. We are living in a scenario similar to one imagined by Black Mirror: our belief in digital communication and social media creates narcissistic personalities, selves dissociated and dislocated from their reflections online. Digital communication offers an opaque mirror that delivers egos without bodies, eliding alterity.

The collapse of reality, however, is not an unintended consequence of advancements in, for instance, artificial intelligence: it was the long-term objective of many technologists, who sought to create machines capable of transforming human consciousness (like drugs do). Communication has become a site for the extraction of surplus value, and images operate as both commodities and dispositives for this extraction. Moreover, data mediates our cognition, that is to say, the way in which we exist and perceive the world and others. The imageand the unlimited communication promised by constant imageryhave ceased to have emancipatory potential. Images place a veil over a world in which the isolated living dead, thirsty for stimulation and dopamine, give and collect likes on social media. Platform users exist according to the Silicon Valley utopian ideal of lifes complete virtualization.

The internet, moreover, has radically changed the political communications game and must be considered a complex propaganda apparatus. Although a single Tweet can destroy someones career, and fake news can start a real news cycle, meaning is subordinate to the circulation of vacuous content. The capitalist capture of data for profit does not rely on policing content; the production of capital only relies on the constant exchange and circulation of information. We dont yet know the full extent of the manipulation of companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon in the last two elections in the US or in other elections around the world. But it is undeniable that digital platforms are actively censoring content in the interests of particular political actors. For instance: in October 2020, Zoom canceled a meeting hosting Palestinian human rights activist Leila Khaled; a month before, Facebook and Twitter censored information detrimental to Joseph Bidens presidential campaign. The same two companies intervened and shut down pro-Trump accounts in 2020, even Donald Trumps own Facebook and Twitter accounts.

After the attempted coup at the US capitol on January 6, 2020, Facebooks recently instituted oversight board ruled that Trump had created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible. In this light, it seems likely that he will continue to be banned from the platform. According to journalist Shoshana Zuboff, however, this is insufficient, given that the oversight boards decision (whose work is supported by a $130 million endowment from Facebook) follows years of inaction by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who indulged and appeased Trump while entrenching what Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. A liberal might think that shutting up Trump and helping Biden is not bad, as they are actions that seemingly advance the interests of the Democratic Party. What is at stake here, however, is not whether the platforms take a good or bad stance on a particular issue; the problem is that they have immense unchecked power and can act as they please. Platforms are allowed to secretly extract behavioral data from users, whether or not users are aware, transforming the information into targeted ads, destroying privacy, changing human experience into data, altering elections, and reshaping human civilization. This structure can be termed the cybernetic episteme, and the new form of control, which goes beyond the previous regime of biopower, can be termed neuropower.

According to its Greek etymology, an episteme is a system of understanding. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault uses the term pistem to mean the nontemporal or a priori knowledge that grounds what is taken as truth in a given moment. Several epistemes coexist at a given time, as they constitute parts of various systems of power and knowledge. The cybernetic episteme, as defined by the collective Tiqqun some twenty years ago, describes our relationship to technology and machines (which are inseparable from the workings of capitalism). The cybernetic episteme is based on the modern tenet of progress and human-led transcendence achieved through science and technology.

Under neuropower, the sensible gives way to cognitive pathologies. These pathologies depend on the consumption of content rather than the sharing of meaning. As Thomas Metzinger explains, the internet has become an integral part of how we model ourselves, as we use it for external memory storage, as a cognitive prosthesis, and for emotional self-regulation. This has radically changed the structure of conscious experience, creating a new form of waking consciousness that resembles a mixture of dreaming, dementia, intoxication, and infantilization. Other effects of neuropower are humans growing invisibility to each other and a paroxysmal racism that infiltrates power, technology, culture, language, and work. For Franco Bifo Berardi, racism has become a virus that exacerbates fearabove all, the fear of extinction, which seems to have become one of the motors behind white supremacy in the world. Dissociated from our environment, alienated from each other, we are oblivious to the challenges that are being posed to humanity by the Capitalocene.

1.

Under lockdown, internet-based technology became embedded in everyday life more than ever before. Zoom and other platforms became the matrix of a production model that exacerbates the power of technology over society. A new lockdown economy has emerged in this disembodied communication space, where knowledge is subsumed under the rules of capital accumulation. The pandemic has led to extreme alienation, to the point that privilege is defined as depending on invisible laborers to sustain forms of life. This means that a new virtual working class has emerged that can take basics like food, water, and electricity for granted, knowing that they do not have to risk their bodies to have these comforts.

Until 2016, digital technology promised access to all human knowledge, unlimited exchange, self-expression, democratization, participation, opportunities to make money, the acceleration of bureaucratic processes, and the means for grassroots and popular power to challenge governments and corporations. The peak of this alluring cyber-utopia came around 201011, when social media played a crucial role in the Occupy and Arab Spring movements. But in 2016, when Cambridge Analytica was revealed to have intervened in the US elections that brought Donald Trump to power, the publics belief in such technologies to change power structures began to shift. We witnessed the worldwide rise of right-wing governments and populist movements supported by wealth. Maurizzio Ferraris has called this the era of post-truth, when the deconstruction of a stable truth became an important political tool. In online public space, discourse has been shattered, truth has become indiscernible, and relativism has become the norm. The public spherethe bastion of established and emerging democracies, bolstered by mass mediabegan to shatter.

Leaders such as Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador, Jair Bolsonaro, and Narendra Modi have used digital communications to construct charismatic identities and disseminate populist messages, causing deep social and political polarization. Politics has profoundly mutated: while minorities and people at the margins have found ways to validate their speech by expressing their perspectives, individualized propaganda has become the order of the day. Algorithms feed users the information they search for, resulting in personalized information bubbles designed to engage preexisting biases. Much of the news media now functions by monetizing user engagement through this type of targeting, which has led to new forms of intensified racism and other types of prejudice. Author Andrey Mir has termed this postjournalism. He explains that, since mass media outlets have lost publicity revenue, they need to monetize engagement on the internet and do so by generating anger and hatred, usually directed at some specific group of people. For many, the news is the way to access the world, and rage has become currency: platforms drive and monetize anger as a mode of engagement.

A complex form of authoritarianism is emerging, linked to digital platforms owned by the powerful CEOs who make up the notorious Silicon Six. Under the new authoritarianism, populations are no longer commanded: they are asked to participate, and in this simulation of involvement, the ideology of connection replaces the idea of social relations, neutralizing democratic demands from users to have control over their own lives, rights, and data. In this way, people are made passive. Cdric Durand explains the difference between the original conception of the World Wide Web and the subsequent development of closed platforms. The WWW began as a decentralized architecture in which a generic transaction protocol (http) and a uniform identification format (URI/URL) generated a space of flat content. In this space, human and nonhuman agents could have access to information without any third-party mediation. In contrast, closed platforms use application programming interfaces, or APIs, to mediate interaction, giving way to data loops in which interactions are more dense. The technical object that sustains this hierarchical architecture is the API, each of which is owned by a platform. On the one hand, big platforms, by way of APIs, offer apps that incorporate basic and indispensable data for users. On the other, platforms have access to the additional information generated by the API, such as user activity and buying habits. As the ecosystem grows in complexity, the platform is able to accumulate more and more data. We become more densely connected with each other and with the platforms every day, as our lives get more and more tied to the cloud. Our dependency on platforms provides the ground for technofeudalism. Historically, feudalism was characterized by a fundamental inequality that enabled the direct exploitation of peasants by lords. The lord was both the manager and master not only of the process of production, but of the entire process of social life. In todays technofeudalism, platform owners are the digital lords and users are the serfs. Rather than commodity production, these platforms are geared towards accumulation through rent, debt, and the privatization of the basic infrastructure that sustains our lives. What is at stake is no longer true or fake information but the cybernetic episteme upon which our lives and subjectivities have been built.

The cybernetic episteme is premised upon modernitys enclosure of experience. In modern epistemology, which is the precondition of the cybernetic episteme, the self is externalized and experienced at a remove from the body. Perception is centered on the brain and eyes instead of the whole body, separating sensation from reason. The selfs relationship with the world is mediated through mirrors, camera lenses, the canvas, the microscope, and mathematical models. The cybernetic episteme, moreover, is inextricable from colonialism, which entails dispossession, dislocation, dissociation, and appropriation. Ariella Azoulay has called the logic underpinning these processes the shutter; this logic is materialized in photographic technology that separates humans from objects, self from the world, and people from their lands. The shutter is the principle of imperialism by which campaigns of plunder have left people both worldless and objectless. For Azoulay, the logic of the shutter was invented centuries before photography gave it a technological apparatus, and it enabled the dispossession of non-Western peoples in tandem with the accumulation of visual and material wealth in archives and museums in the West.

The cybernetic episteme is likewise conceptually constituted by this shutter, since it relies on capturing, naming, moving, and archiving subjectsas does imperialism. In this regard, the cybernetic episteme naturalizes the mediation of the self; it creates not only the condition of detachment from the world, but allows the appropriation of the cultures of others, as well as the dissolution of collective being. The shutter is akin to Heideggers Gestell or representation, which goes hand in hand with Eurocentrism and Anthropocentrism. The Gestell and the shutter both imply that the world and experience have become representation, through an aesthetic order in which what is produced as artifice becomes the reality of experience.

In a 2017 Facebook promo video for a new virtual reality technology, Mark Zuckerberg and his colleague Rachel Frank tele-transported themselves to Puerto Rico after a devastating flood. They intended to showcase the potential of the new technology, but instead revealed its inherent violence. The ability to transport oneself to faraway places as if ones body were present gives the illusion that one we can make a difference in the world through technology. Another example, in a different register of colonial modernity is that way Western museums allow visitors to "transport" themselves by observing objects looted from elsewhere, like the Pergamon Museum in Berlin where museumgoers can roam around the Ishtar Gate, which has been on display in the museum since 1930. In a section of Ariella Azoulays video Undocumented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2020), she films actual visitors to the Pergamon while noting that dislocation is the essence of (imperial) modernity. The VR museum visitor is at the center of a world, but they are not really there (an effect similar to the dispositive of perspective in painting). For globalized Western culture, the ground for vision, enlightenment, culture, and even social change is the dislocation and disappearance of bodies.

Disembodiment and dislocation are also fundamental epistemological premises of transhumanist Silicon Valley ideology. In this ideology, the teleology of secular modern individualism culminates in the uploading of a persons mind to a new biological, artificial, or biological-artificial body. The utopian goal of expanding and preserving human consciousness is physically and spiritually achieved. Transhumanism is the dream of enhancing the human body through technology, and ultimately escaping human suffering by transcending the errors of death and aging.

Posthumanism takes things a step further: its goal is to immortalize consciousness by uploading it to a robotic or synthetic body. Posthumanism does away with the biological dimension of the self, fundamentally altering what it means to be human. In both trans- and posthumanism, technology promises to give us the divine attributes of omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, making humans into pure consciousness, achieving a kind of individual and secular transcendence. In the first episode of the British TV series Years and Years (2019), Bethany, an adolescent whose face is hidden behind a 3D emoji mask, announces to her parents that she is transhuman. She declares: I dont want to be flesh. I want to escape this thing and become digital, I want to live forever as information. Eventually Bethany becomes a hero with transhuman superpowers: her mechanized eyes and brain, which are connected to all the data in the world, allow her to make visible the horrors that the British government have perpetrated in a refugee camp. This techno-utopian narrative implies a democratic ideology, insofar as one political goal of democracy is to make visible the ordeals of oppressed minoritiesin this case through virtual disembodiment.

In contrast to this techno-utopian narrative, science fictionespecially cyberpunk literature generally portrays transhumanism as a nightmarish apocalyptic scenario of social control and individual subjection. Several episodes of Black Mirror do this, for example. But what Black Mirror and Years and Years have in common is that technological advances and the increasing symbiosis between humans and machines are associated with political, economic, and social instability. In reality, mind uploading has attracted millions of dollars of investment from the billionaires of Silicon Valley and beyond. In a mixture of engineering and enlightenment, consciousness is now being hacked through biofeedback techniques, meditation practices, and microdosing drugs. Many critics have observed that the utopian ideology of transhumanism underpins the Valleys culture of move fast, break things, and make as much money as possible. Technologies aiming to expand human consciousness are rooted in purely extractivist, capitalist values. In this sense, cybernetics is a political project on a planetary scale. As described by Tiqqun, cybernetics is a gigantic abstract machine made up of binary machines deployed by empire, and a form of political sovereignty that has merged with the capitalist extractivist project.

2.

In the pre-cybernetic erathat is to say, before the 1940smachines were intended to emulate humans; their actions resembled human behavior, but ostensibly without intent or emotions. This is why Donna Haraway describes pre-cybernetic machines as haunted. They seemed animated by ghosts, reminiscent of Walter Benjamins automaton that was inhabited by a hunchbacked dwarf. Machines were not self-moving, self-designing, or autonomous. They could not achieve human dreams, only mock them. In turn, humans related to machines by using or acting upon them: switching them on or off, using them as tools to achieve an end. Today, the relationship between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication in a feedback loop. Early machines were led; today, machines lead us. This does not mean that machines have simply become humanized through the proliferation of androids. Rather, humans have surrendered consciousness to AI, becoming obedient and predictable. In the twenty-first century, machines have blurred the distinction between the artificial and human mind, not only because machines can imitate human functions, but because humans have become increasingly passive, since we are now subject to neuropower.

Within the cybernetic episteme, it is no longer enough to talk about a control society; we must talk instead about a composite of interlinked forms of oppression (exploitation, alienation, and domination), in tandem with extreme securitarianism. Another way to see the cybernetic episteme is as the reconceptualization of social worlds into information-processing systems. Practices of computation are used to produce new organizational and infrastructural apparatuses, which in turn create value and profit by exploiting and disposing of human life. Social worlds are subsumed into technologies through techniques such as statistical forecasting and data modeling.

The cybernetic episteme stems from a world brought into being by Europeans; this world began with the discovery of the new world and the creation of empires and colonies (which coincided with the scientific revolution). In this sense, the cybernetic episteme is inseparable from the Western civilizing project for the whole world, which connected disparate places through technologies like the telegraph and steam shipping, often powered by the extraction of fossil fuels like coal. This project has culminated in globalization as the deregulation and financialization of world economies.

The Western civilization project, based on Enlightenment values including equality, peaceful public life, access to modern science, the rule of law, democracy, and technological progress, involved the creation of infrastructure to unify nations and the world. We can call this infrastructure the technosphere. The technosphere comprises not only digital technology but all machines, factories, computers, cars, buildings, railways, and mobility infrastructure, as well as systems of food production, resource extraction, and energy distribution. Today, the infrastructure of the worldthe technosphereis shaped by information, which means that the world we inhabit is designed by data.

The technosphere is a supplement humans have created to help overcome the limits of human nature insofar as humans cannot live independently from structures geared towards sustaining life. The technosphere has promised to enable us to increase production and reproduction with less human effort. Moreover, the technosphere is also regarded as the main tool humans have to fight decay, entropy, and death, since it comprises all the structures humans have built to keep themselves alive on the planet. The total mass of the technosphere amounts to fifty kilos for every square meter of earths surfacea total of thirty trillion tons, which coexists with the diminishing hydrosphere (water, the frozen polar regions) and the biosphere (all of earths living organisms). The ultimate price of the technosphere is global warming and environmental devastation. Like humans, the technosphere needs external energy input, which is not sustainable as long as it comes from fossil fuels that will eventually be depleted.

From this standpoint, the cybernetic episteme represents the gradual merging of human activity into the activity of what we have built and surrounded ourselves with. Much of this built environment is invisible. Infrastructure and data are partially occult because we are alienated from them, even as we are produced and managed by them. The invisible infrastructure that sustains our lives is what matters politically right now. And insofar as the technosphere is cybernetic, it is inextricable from capitalism and politics.

3.

Human communication is at the center of the cybernetic global order. The neural system of globalized networked society is digital communication. In a 1975 film called Comment a va?, Anne-Marie Miville and Jean-Luc Godard discuss the illness of information. They begin with an image of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, published in the leftist newspaper Libration. At the time, photojournalistic images had begun to proliferate as a form of information, and Godard and Miville critique Libration (the most left-wing newspaper in Europe in those days) for failing to include the reader in the creation and dissemination of information. They ask: How is it that things enter and exit the machine? (Comment a va de lentre la sortie de la machine?). This question is about how ideas, words, discourses, human interaction, and images become information and then reach readers and viewers.

In Comment a va?, mass media represents an illness that has killed communication and language. Last year, Godard updated his critique of the media in an interview posted to Instagram. He stated: Platos cave has been fixed on paper/screen. For Godard, the consequence of the becoming-information of communication and language is the loss of ambiguity in communication. Digital technology has infiltrated every aspect of existence, and the margin of error between the transmission and the reception of a message has been eliminated by mediatization and digitization. For Godard, digital communication denies the force of the image or the word because it eliminates redundancy, misunderstanding, the possibility of reading between the lines, and the possibility of alterity.

In a more recent film of hisAdieu au language from 2014Godard suggests that digital media have destroyed face-to-face communication. He asks: What kind of self could emerge in a time when objects and bodies are disfigurable and refigurable through virtual manipulation? Godard posits that the origins of todays totalitarianism can be traced to the interruption of interior experience by the spectacle. In the film, Godard features a lengthy quote from Philippe Sollers explaining that the spectacle cuts off the subject from its interior lifea process that is, paradoxically, highly seductive. Furthermore, for Godard digital communication creates a new form of isolated solitude where people lack ties to others. In this light, technology has not become an extension of man, as Marshall McLuhan predicted, but has instead attained autonomy from man, since digital media can communicate amongst themselves without human mediation. For Godard, this means that the face-to-face encountera basic form of human relation that is the foundation of ethicsis no longer possible.

Sherry Turkle, a clinical psychologist and sociologist, comes to similar conclusions: daily conversations no longer involve eye contact, and face-to-face discussion has been replaced by words on a screen. According to Turkle, texts, tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram messages, and Snapchats split our attention and diminish our capacity for empathy. They have created new codes of etiquette; no longer do we feel restrained from reaching for our phones in the presence of other people. This new etiquette entrenches a culture of individualism and isolation from each other. This isolation cultivates the perfect ground for fascism.

The digitization of communication not only has political and communal consequences. It also affects the neuroplastic potential of the living brain. The cybernetic episteme reshapes our working memory by rearranging its contents. As Warren Neidich writes, the new focus of power is not only the false reproduction of the past (the manipulation of the archive), but the manipulation of our working memorythe type of memory that influences our decision-making. Authoritarian neuropower wants nothing less than to shape our future memory, argues Neidich.

If the nervous system of cybernetics is digital communication, at the center of digital communication is desire. Mark Fisher devoted his last lectures at Goldsmiths in 2017 to this subject. During one lecture, he played for his students a famous Apple TV commercial from 1984, directed by Ridley Scott and originally broadcast during the Superbowl. In an overt reference to George Orwells novel 1984, the commercial depicts a dreary, repressive control society. This society is seemingly liberated when a buxom blonde woman tosses a sledgehammer at a large screen broadcasting the image of an authoritarian figure, causing the screen to explode. The commercial ends with these lines crawling across the screen: On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And youll see why 1984 wont be like 1984. Fisher observes that the video counterposes top-down bureaucratic control to upstart entrepreneurialism. The dreary control society depicted in the commercial is an allusion to not only the Soviet Union, but also IBM, the dominant computer maker at the time. Apple posits itself as the dynamic, colorful new company that will liberate society from dreary IBM, ushering in a new, more vibrant world order. This new world order will fulfill our (capitalist) desires in a way that the communist world cannot. As Fisher suggests, we now live in that world of libidinal capitalism.

Elsewhere Fisher writes that what drives the circulation of information is the users desire to make one more connection, to leave one more reply, to keep on clicking. Capitalism persists because cyberspace is already under our skin, writes Fisher; to retreat from it would be like trying to retreat into some nonexistent precapitalist imaginary. In his view, we believe we have as much a chance of escaping capitalism as we do of crawling back inside our mothers womb.

5.

By means of the cybernetic episteme, Silicon Valley has shaped the world we all live in. As we are poisoned equally by microplastics and fake news, losing our grasp of a shared reality, the Silicon Sixas Sacha Baron Cohen called the titans of Silicon Valley in a 2019 speechpropagate algorithm-fueled fear, propaganda, lies, and hate in the name of profit. As Baron Cohen pointed out, the major online platforms largely avoid the kind of regulation and accountability that other media companies are subject to. This is ideological imperialism, he said. Six unelected individuals in Silicon Valley impos[e] their vision on the rest of the world, unaccountable to any government, and acting as if they are above the law. He called digital platforms the greatest propaganda machine in history.

Democratic institutions have failed to reign in the information chaos and the destruction of the public sphere. As Shoshana Zuboff argues, we inhabit a communications sphere that is no longer a public sphere. She describes this situation as an epistemic coup that has taken place in four stages: First, by way of companies gathering personal data about us and then claiming it as their own private property. Second, through data inequality, which means that companies know more than we do. Third, through the epistemic chaos created by algorithms. And fourth, through the institutionalization of this new episteme and the erosion of democratic governance.

Baron Cohen observes that people can take a stand against platforms by recognizing our power to boycott them. (One example is the mass defection from WhatsApp to Telegram when the former announced that would share its user data with Facebook.) But we also need to defend the existence of facts and a shared reality, understanding the world not as something we see but as something we inhabittreating life not as something we have, but as something we live. Anti-platform strategies might be accused of Luddism, but they are not necessarily opposed to technologyonly to certain uses of technology.

It is also crucial that we regard the cybernetic episteme as inextricable from a broader malaise: humanitys relationship to life and the planet is a toxic one. The very technologies that supposedly enable us to read, think, flourish, and desire are destroying the world we inhabit.

People continue to yearn for commonality, mutuality, and something to share. But the culture we currently share is largely mediated by repressive, profit-driven digital platforms. This is why we need to flee from the invasion of images, to distinguish between image and reality, and to affirm the opacity of the world and the ambiguity of language. We need to resist platform monopoly through presence, embodiment, immediacy, and human memory. We need to find ways to create life as opposed to turning it into data, combine emotional and intellectual knowledge, and regard visceral gut feelings as a form of human consciousness. We need to learn to exist in symbiosis with others and with the environment, not dislocated, uprooted, and detached.

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Authoritarianism and the Cybernetic Episteme, or the Progressive Disappearance of Everything on Earth - Journal #122 November 2021 - E-Flux