Andrew Pilsch
Pennsylvania State University
4.14.6
I write this text between spurts of browsing the internet, listening to music files that have emerged from this great web of data, while waiting for messages to arrive from the net into my inbox. As others have suggested, the network may be the overwhelming metaphor of our age. In Connected, a paranoid riff on the potentially fraught act of plugging in, Steve Shaviro worries about how we can get off the network. The simple fact is, though, we are on the network and we have always been on the network. With the publication of James Lovelock’s theory of Gaia, we simply became aware that we lived in a biological network. As with Donna Haraway’s cyborg, we see in the network an opportunity for new resistance and an intensification of control. Shaviro suggests, in Connected, that we should ignore these new possibilities and focus on getting off the network, back into our larval, pre-internet state (as though this were even possible). Ultimately, Shaviro’s is a failure to fully invest in network existence.
Networks open up whole spaces of exploration, cognitively and physically (this is true in all cases, not merely the computer network). As Eugene Thacker sees in his discussion of “mutations in the body politic” and his new lexicon for describing politic action by collectivities, we see that the three titular objects (“networks, swarms, and multitudes”) signal “a set of viable alternatives to the traditions of modern sovereignty, while still expressing a coherence which can critically and radically weave together technology, politics, and –˜life itself’” (Thacker pt. 1). This is the true power of our digital collectivity: as Thacker rightly suggests, these new mutations have ambiguous politics, but the change exists and these new mutants offer new means of resistance and new means of existence (Thacker pt. 1).
Much of the rhetoric of connecting is steeped in the language and tropes of ecstasy, from the Greek ekstasis or to be beside oneself. In connecting to the network, our cognitive forces lose their fleshy limitations: “information losing its body” as Katherine Hayles puts it in How We Became Posthuman. To move on a network is to move in a sea that extends beyond the body. In many ways, the technological ecstasy of the internet is similar to the ecstasy of the psychonaut or the shaman. Chemically enhanced, the psychonaut is able to browse a web of consciousness in many of the same ways we browse the internet. If we look to the literature of psychedelics, we see images of networks, just as we find images of psychedelics pulsing within the literature of the network. How can these chemical adjuncts offer a means of better understanding the network in ways that think outside of the paranoid, capitalist nightmares we find in a theorist like Shaviro or Hayles?
In networks, we see two important, emergent phenomena: network effect and network affect (Thacker pt.1). For Thacker, the effect is the possible actions the network can perform and is linked to network topology. Similarly, network affect is the range of possible emotional stances embodied by the network as it unfolds in time. We see, therefore, a distinction made in the way we think about the trope of the network: topologically and temporally. In exploring these figures of effect and affect, as well, we can see how the psychonaut (and, possibly, the cyberpunk) can become plugged into a network of information (both effective and affective) that affords new stances, new existences, and ultimately new life.
Lawrence Lessig uses the term “commons” to explain the nature of the ultimate network of networks that absorbs so much of contemporary thought. For Lessig, a commons is a space that all members of a community may access freely and make use of without one member of the community being granted exclusive rights to determine access (22). Lessig situates his discussion of the commons on the internet: the technology that makes possible this connectivity is fundamentally suited to producing free and public spaces. As Lessig is correct to point out, however, this same spirit of sharing and innovation is in danger of being extinguished by overzealous copyright protectors and the legal interventions of the state.
A key aspect of an entheogenic compound is its ability to open up just such a commons. By producing a cognitive area of shared information, a thoughtspace, these compounds allow for the creation of a commons, not unlike Lessig’s vision of the internet. Where John Lilly, in Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, was interested in exploring how certain chemical adjuncts could yield the production of new knowledges, new programs, I am more interested in exploring aspects of common space, shared information, that underscore the ecstatic experience.
The human biocomputer, in Lilly’s formulation, is a marvelously complex computation engine:\n
The numbers of neurons in the human brain are variously estimated at 13 billions (1.3 times ten to the tenth) with approximately five times that many glial cells. This computer operates continuously throughout all of its parts and does literally millions of computations in parallel simultaneously. It has approximately two million visual inputs and one hundred thousand acoustic inputs. It is hard to compare the operations of such a magnificent computer to any artificial ones existing today because of its very advanced and sophisticated construction (Lilly 7).
Through the application of compounds such as LSD-25 to this complicated computation machine, the human biocomputer can be configured into different states of processing, in Lilly’s formulation. As Lilly goes on to state, the common experience of encountering God while programmed by LSD-25 is merely a product of the white noise produced by the chemical’s ability to dial the ego to zero. As he states, “one projects one’s expectations of God onto the white noise as if the noise were signals; one bears the voice of God in the Noise” (Lilly 77). The white noise of ego-death is similar in Lilly’s formulation to the raw bits of a computer network. Similarly to the limitless possibilities for thought and creativity inherent in Lessig’s digital commons, “one can program almost anything into the noise within one’s cognitive limits” while involved with a dose of an entheogen (Lilly 77).
The limitless possibility for new cognitive activity is at the heart of both the commons and the psychedelic experience. Despite this similarity, to conflate the digital commons with entheogenic biocomputer programming does not directly establishing the network characteristics of entheogens. For that, we must turn to Timothy Leary’s book Chaos & Cyber Culture, in which he shows the ways in which his old mantra of “turn on, tune in, drop out” is reconfigured into “turn on, tune in, boot up” with the dawn of the information age and the wide availability of the digital computer. For Leary, the psychonaut and the cyberpunk—an “individual as reality pilot” as he describes it—are analogous in that they both offer possibilities of choice (62). Leary continually invokes the communal nature of the psychedelic throughout the book, claiming at one point that “the rare cases of solitary ingestion are considered eccentric and alienated” (112). These shared, ritualistic substances create networked commons between different biocomputers, similarly to Lessig’s vision of the internet. Through the ability of both computers and psychedelics to produce such commons, the human biocomputer is both reprogrammed and networked.
With Leary’s reclamation of the term cybernetics to refer to “freedom” instead of “control” (based on a Greek reading of the word “pilot” versus a Roman reading), Leary begins to connect the entheogen and the computer as technologies that are both capable of bootstrapping a possible next stage of human evolution (Leary 66). Similar to the larval beings described in Neuro Logic?, Leary sees early-internet humanity as amphibians, swimming in “an ocean of electronic data” (3). Similarly to how Leary saw psychedelics moving people beyond the larval stage in earlier works, the personal computer (and other cybernetic devices) can lead to a new stage in the evolution of humanity, specifically due to the shared trope of the commons. This relationship between computation and psychedelics is something that was also being explored in the science fiction literature of the early-internet period, cyberpunk.
Continuing Leary’s connections between the psychedelic experience and the personal reality pilot birthed by the PC, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age contains a description of a “wet Net” parallel, distributed computation system that, while also drawing on aspects of contemporary supercomputer ideology, is intimately connected to the imagery often associated with the ritualistic ingestion of entheogens (495). In the connection between computers and psychedelics fashioned by Stephenson, the possibility to manipulate system effect within the network-manifesting properties of certain chemical adjuncts is drawn out in interesting ways. Further the depiction of this wet Net in The Diamond Age quite directly illustrates the power of the networked human biocomputer in the manufacture of change.
In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson is offering an in-depth exploration of postdemocratic politics and nanotechnology. In both cases, distributed, de-centered network-phenomena are key to the technological wonders Stephenson describes. In the case of the political, he depicts a world in which governments are no longer centralized, geographic entities but are instead franchised, with enclaves throughout the world (often next to each other in an interesting parody of suburban strips of chain restaurants). In this decentralized political climate, individuals are free to choose to which government they wish to belong. This model of politics allows for people to surf the political climate, in much the same ways we surf the internet, trying different political systems until they find one that fits. In The Diamond Age, the character Bud, fleeing from the Ashanti tribe, spends several pages discussing the various advantages of the different kinds of “phyles” he can join to gain protection from his pursuers. He eventually settles for the Senderistas, because these Communists “will take anyone, no questions asked,” after rejecting various religious, ethnic, and synthetic phyles (Stephenson 30). This ability to browse the topology of political space is similar to the postdemocratic politics described by Leary in Chaos & Cyber Culture. Leary sees, along with the rise of the digital computer and the inundation of digital media, an marked increase in an “individual-freedom movement” that lacks historical precedence (74). Through the ecstasy afforded by digital technologies, this culture of individual browsing affords whole new ranges of possibility.
The same is true in Stephenson’s treatment of nanotechnology. While at times approaching the convenience of magic in many fantasy novels (in that it serves as a crutch for dealing with impossible narrative situations), one specific example from the novel best articulates the ability of psychedelics to explain the ecstasy experienced by internet surfers. The Drummers are the wet Net described above. They are a phyle of individuals living in floating, industrial tunnels buried under the waves (249). When we first encounter them in the novel, the character Hackworth is being led into the tunnels by a “stark naked” woman who is “covered in constantly shifting mediatronic tattoos” (Stephenson 247). Hackworth is to live amongst the drummers as a repayment of a debt owed to the mysterious Dr. X. While there, he gets to experience their unique brand of tribal life.
Towards the end of the novel, it is revealed that each member of the drummers phyle is carrying a large number of nano-sites in their bloodstream that contains “a rod logic system … and a tape drive containing some few gigabytes of data. The data [is] divided into discrete chunks, each one of which [is] separately encrypted” (Stephenson 495). These nano-sites form the basis for a form of pornographic grid computing practiced by the drummers. Grid computing is a new computational paradigm that uses “the resources of many separate computers connected by a network (usually the Internet) to solve large-scale computation problems” (“Grid Computing). Similar to the network of parallel computers that forms a more powerful grid, the drummers use their data-processing nano-sites to form a high-powered, computational, ecstatic network of human bio-computers:
The devices lived in the blood of the human race like viruses and passed from one person to the next during sex or any other exchange of bodily fluids; they were smart packets of data, just like the ones traversing the media network, and by mating with one another in the blood, they formed a vast system of communication, parallel to and probably linked with the dry Net of optical lines and copper wires (Stephenson 495).
This global, transhuman computer is constantly growing, thanks to the bordellos that the drummers run in several cities, where “they came into conflict with the established bordellos because they were hardly charging any money at all for their services” (Stephenson 340). By spreading out through the world, the drummers seem to be continually acquiring more data and more computational power in an effort to map the entire space of the world in The Diamond Age. The most interesting aspects of this networked biocomputer is the massive compilation rituals that periodically occur within the collective.
It is in Stephenson’s description of some sort of drummer ceremony that the most curious and exciting connection between computer networks and entheogenic networks occur. As Hackworth first enters the drummers’ compound, he begins to have a psychedelic experience: “he suspected that the walls of the tunnel had mediatronic properties as he kept seeing things from the corner of his eye that were no longer there when he snapped his head around” (Stephenson 249). Later, though, after the nano-sites have been flushed from his blood, he does not experience this sensation. As he moves closer to the center of the compound, his hands start to glow, as the tiny machines in his blood begin to detect more and more of their peers around them. At first, Hackworth is terrified by this, but then realizes that he is merely witnessing the effects of the nano-sites. While caused by machines, and not chemical compounds, both these symptoms are classic aspects of many hallucinatory, psychedelic experiences. It is interesting to note that the chemical adjunct here is a nano-computer that has been injected in Hackworth’s blood. As Stephenson points out repeatedly in the book, these nano-machines are assembled on a molecular level, one molecule at a time, and would seem to blur any distinction that might be made between machine and chemical. With the blending of entheogens and digital technologies in both the figure of the psychedelic compound and the manifestation of networks, Stephenson seems to point towards the convergance of computing and chemistry in the human biocomputer.
Upon arriving in the main chamber of the drummers’ compound, Hackworth witnesses a ritual performed by the drummers that strikingly resembles many traditional, shamanic rites in several aspects. A woman enters the main chamber wearing “a crown of leafy branches” (Stephenson 255). She is covered from head to toe in tattoos. As Hackworth watches, the constant drumming present in the compound slowly speeds up as a circle of men form around the woman while the rest of the drummers watch. The men in the circle then each begin to have sex with the woman. As the last man finishes, the woman begins to catch fire from the inside and quickly burns down to a pile of ash. This ash is then added to “some kind of liquid” in a drum and each of the other drummers is given a drink (Stephenson 257). After this, all of the drummers return to their normal business.
As we learn later, the nano-sites the drummers use to form their transhuman biocomputer are exchanged via body fluid and throw off waste heat during computation (Stephenson 495). It can therefore be assumed that the ritual is some sort of massive compilation with the rest of the community consuming the ash tea in order to gain the resulting knowledge. While the sacrificial, destructive aspects of the ritual appear discomforting to the reader (and to Hackworth), the death of the ego is a key aspect of a shamanic ritual and this is similarly the case with the destruction of the girl in the drummers’ ritual. In the case of The Diamond Age, we see the death of an individual to better serve the expansion of the collective intelligence versus the death of an aspect of an individual’s psyche in order to facilitate different mental states with the human biocomputer. Further, some small sacrifice, a giving over to the chemical compound, is expected of an individual in order to have an ecstatic experience while ingesting a chemical compound. Some sacrifice on the part of the collective clearly must occur for new knowledge to be compiled.
The ritualistic approach to ecstatic biocomputer networking taken by the drummers suggests the necessity to explain the radically new state of transhuman existence through a more commonly understood lens. At the same time, the usage of entheogenic characteristics to describe the ecstasy of the drummers exploration of the possibilities of effect opened by their massively parallel, biological grid computing also seems to suggest a convergence of the biological and machinic that seems to underscore the figure of the network in society. We see this throughout the book, but it is interesting to see the moment when Hackworth, the character who spends ten years of his life in the dreamlike trance of a drummer, realizes this convergence. After leaving the collective, he walks out of the surf, sees a stand of trees, and has a rather singular vision:
His mind’s eye again seemed to seize control of his visual cortex; he could not see the firs anymore, just axons and dendrites hanging in black three-dimensional space (Stephenson 358).
In this moment, instead of seeing trees, Hackworth sees the network that contains the trees, the larger world-system. It is in this convergence of machine and nature that I would like to conclude this section. In the next section, connecting to this natural network that Hackworth sees after having his ecstatic experience amongst the drummers will become central to the discussion of the role of entheogens, networks, and affect.
If in an exploration of the spatial/effective and entheogenic network access reveals the possibility for transhuman, collaborative biocomputing, what can we learn from an exploration into the temporal/affective characteristic of a networked ecstatic experience? These temporal/affective aspects seem to reflect more on affective relationships that function beyond the limits of the human: human language, human body, human species, etc. Through an in-depth exploration of the navigations along affective networks afforded by the ingestion of certain chemical adjuncts, we can begin to understand another crucial aspect of the transhuman condition: love.
In order to better understand the implications of surfing an affective world-network, I would like to discuss Invisible Landscape by Terence and Dennis McKenna and its relationship to the manifestation of networks in the entheogenic experience. While in the Amazon, after consuming the DMT-containing plant adjunct, ayahuasca, the McKennas conducted an experiment to manifest “the totality of information … available to consciousness” that they theorized as being stored within DNA chains (McKenna and McKenna 107). Their experiment is based around their theory that DMT is responsible for causing harmonic modulations within a subject’s RNA and DNA. The authors then propose an experiment in which they will attempt, after ingesting ayahuasca, to modulate their voices at the same frequency to see if it is possible to amplify the space-time travel afforded by the compound.
Through this process of amplification, the McKennas notice an interesting series of phenomenon. Describing what occurred while conducting the experiment (and in the period following), they write:
We could feel the presence of some invisible hyperspatial entity, an ally, which seemed to be observing and sometimes exerting influence on the situation to keep us moving gently toward an experimental resolution of the ideas we were generating (McKenna and McKenna 109).
This entity is described as being highly “alien, insectile, and futuristic” (McKenna and McKenna 109). The presence of this “alien third entity” is signaled to the pair by “a deeper harmonic buzz” discerned from the regular “insect trill of the Amazon jungle at midday” (McKenna and McKenna 110). It seems that this experience of an entity, this deeper harmonic buzz, is akin to the experience of Hackworth and the stand of fir trees that concluded the previous section. In both cases, in a moment of ecstasy, the apparent interconnected nature of the world manifests itself. The interesting aspect of the McKennas’ experience is the mechanics of how this manifestation (and interaction, I will suggest later) came about.
In addition to merely ingesting a DMT-containing chemical, the McKenna’s vibrating chants allow them to experience a new relationship with the world around them. They become aware of some sort of insectile intelligence, observing and guiding them from within the densely packed vegetation of the forest. This entity leads the McKennas “to speculate that the role of the presence was somehow like that of an anthropologist, come to give humanity the key to galactarian citizenship” (McKenna and McKenna 110). It appears that, in a way, the pair is not only receiving information from this hyperspatial entity but sharing information. The suggestion of communication in the McKennas’ account of the events in the Amazon is interesting, because it is a form of communication not occurring within the realm of a spoken/written language. Instead, the McKenna’s are mimicking the vibration of their DNA brought about by the chemicals in the ayahuasca. In turn, this hyperspatial entity they experience is similarly using a buzzing sound to impart knowledge to the McKennas. By using the vibrations of their DNA as a vector for communication (a language that is outside verbal/written notions of communication), the McKennas are able to contact what appears to be an intelligence that is decidedly non-human and possibly a system product of the interactions of all life on Earth.
They are able to do this because of the holographic properties of the molecule. With a hologram, an interference pattern resulting from the collision of physical waves and an object are recorded on a storage plate (McKenna and McKenna 47). The interesting thing about holography, for the McKennas, is that the hologram can be subdivided into smaller and smaller fragments without losing the original hologram due to the interference pattern being distributed evenly across the plate (44). The McKennas argue that the brain stores information in a similar manner. Further, they suggest that DNA is also holographic in its ability to store information. Drawing on Jungian psychoanalysis, they then suggest that archetypal human information may be contained in each person’s DNA, suggesting that each person may potentially contain, in DNA, the entire spectrum of possibility for human existence (51). In addition to offering up the entirety of human existences, it would seem that DMT-DNA resonance would serve as a good protocol for navigating Gaia due to the commonality of DNA within all elements of the system. DNA, then, may be the protocol for this much older worldwide web precisely because it is a common language.
This is what is meant by talking to DNA: the McKennas’ experiment seems to suggest that our DNA may be able to serve as communication protocol for accessing a vast network of affective possibility that has, in the past, been called Gaia. The idea of the Earth as a network is not exceptionally new, but the McKenna’s idea that we may be able to access this network in a manner similar to accessing a computer network (where all you need is a terminal and the right protocols) is staggering. With ayahuasca as the terminal and the DMT-DNA modulations as the protocol, the Mc Kennas? are able to surf this network in ways that appear similar to browsing the internet in Leary’s construction of the transhuman future in Chaos & Cyber Culture from Part One. If that is the case, then why the Second part ? What different things can we learn from discussing the natural network? The answer would seem to lie in William S. Burroughs.
Browsing this natural-DNA network is central to the plot of William S. Burroughs novel, Ghost of Chance. In Burroughs’s tale of human apocalypse we see many of the aspects of the Gaia network the McKennas discuss in Invisible Landscape. The novel centers around the character of Captain Mission, an agent of Panic. Panic, as Burroughs writes, is “the sudden, intolerable knowing that everything is alive” (3). Normal humans, we are told, are afraid of this knowing because it reveals “the truth of our|? origins,” presumably that we are all animals too (Burroughs 3). In Ghost of Chance, the reason Burroughs seems to insist that humanity need to learn this fact is the massive ecological damage being done to the planet. In order to survive as a species, we must begin to work with nature instead of attempting to conquer it and replace its variety with “more devalued human stock, with less and less wild spark” (Burroughs 19).
We must get onto the natural network: as Michel Serres writes in The Natural Contract:
We’ve even walled up the windows in order to hear one another better or argue more easily. We communicate more easily. We busy ourselves only with our own networks (Serres 29).
For Serres, man has spent the better part of his existence struggling against nature in order to survive. In recent times (at some point since the Industrial Revolution), humanity’s technological advancements have turned this struggle into a victory. Like in so many other victories, though, “the vanquished acquires a dignity that the victor loses” (Serres 18). Serres warns that, like many conquered ethnic groups, nature may begin to behave in our worldview like a terrorist or a guerilla fighter. Our society is so brittle, Serres argues, that we have opened ourselves to the objective violence of the natural act: giant hurricanes, massive famines, calamitous plagues. If we are involved in a guerilla war against a vengeful nature, Serres states that to sign a “natural contract” is the only option for structured relationships. It is a truism amongst military historians that in a guerilla war, the side with helicopters always loses.
The plagues that ultimately wipe humanity from the face of the Earth in Ghost of Chance, can be thought of as part of the campaign of objective violence Serres sees in nature following globalization. Ghost of Chance, first documents Captain Mission’s attempt to create a new possibility in a community on the coast of Madagascar: “He threatened to demonstrate for all to see that three hundred souls can coexist in relative harmony with each other, with their neighbors, and with the ecosphere of flora and fauna” (Burroughs 8). Additionally, Mission is able to forge a meaningful, non-linguistic relationship with the lemurs that live in the jungle beyond the village. He specifically befriends the lemur he calls Ghost. Both acts transgress the boundaries of acceptable human behavior in the age following Christ’s arrival on Earth and his establishment of “a monopoly on the medium of wonder” (Burroughs 26). Further still, Mission’s relationship with Ghost is not based on language, their love is the product of a physical closeness and a deep appreciation of what Donna Haraway calls “significant otherness” (49). In Haraway, the significant other is about “communication across irreducible differences” through respect, often without the benefits of a language (49). This is the relationship Burroughs creates between Mission and Ghost. It is not a relationship that is easily explicable in human terms. At the same time, Mission clearly gets similar feelings of love and respect from his contact with the lemur. Across this irreducible divide between lemur and human, a relationship is still possible. This is why Burroughs finds it so important to plug into the larger non-linguistic network that the McKenna’s experienced while in the Amazon: it allows humans to see animals as more than just food (Burroughs 18).
It is not until uncovering Ghost dead amongst the ruins of the settlement that Mission realizes that the special chance he had, “only once in a hundred sixty million years,” is truly lost (Burroughs 21). The loss of the settlement is a set-back for Mission, but the loss of the relationship he had with Ghost is gone forever. Ghost’s death to Mission is the loss of a single chance, one relationship, but Burroughs seems to suggest an analogy between Ghost’s death and the extinction of an entire species. With the continual return to the Gallery of Lost Species, which existed below Mission’s jungle retreat, Burroughs seems to suggest that each species destroyed by humanity represents the loss of another potential chance, which only comes along once in a hundred sixty million years. In addition to the Gallery of Lost Species, the museum is also continually referred to as the Garden of Lost Chances, as a reference to the species that had a chance and did not survive. That said, it also would seem that the chances lost have been humanity’s.
This would appear to be the importance of an ecstatic entheogenic network in terms of affect. As Burroughs mentions repeatedly in Ghost of Chance, the human is the only animal on Earth that exists in time, as time is a byproduct of the ability of language to pass information on beyond their lives and their immediate zones of contact (48). As we have already seen in Thacker, the affective character of a network is linked to the way in which it unfolds, reconfigures, and changes in time, but Burroughs suggests that, instead, the key insight from affective network surfing would be to escape from time itself (and, therefore, from language). While the destruction of humanity that occurs at the novel’s conclusion is one such escape, Burroughs is also suggesting that attempting to relate across species bounds in ways that are not exploitative and economic may be the only way for humanity to survive. Of course, the only way to realize these affective, interspecies relationships, for Burroughs, is through the Panic that comes with an ecstatic experience.
As we have shown here, the possibilities for new modes of affect and effect are inherent in accessing a network (both digital and entheogenic). This comes about as a result of the spirit of the commons that lies at the heart of the network. In a commons, the free flow of information and creativity is capable of producing new and exciting possibilities, but it is also able of intensify old forms of repression. This is why access to a commons is a promise, not a right. In both the case of the drug-war and the unnamed new war being fought against copyright violators on the internet, the prohibitions of the central state surveillance apparatus is foreclosing on this promise: deleting the commons from memory. These actions by the police state seek to deny access to the networks that surround us and increasingly permeate our understanding of our lives and the life of the planet. As we push into the future, this new mode of network awareness is dangerous for a number of reasons: both to the police state and the individual.
For all the excitement of Ray Kurzweil about the singularity, and the subsequent explosion in transhuman technologies and immortality, the problem with his work and the work of Steve Shaviro, as we have previously shown, is that both ultimately see these transhuman technologies as an intensification of capitalism: an access to better and longer-lasting entertainment. This is fundamentally missing the point of transhumanism. Instead, the possibility of transhumanism is that which Leary has seen in both psychedelics and computers. Getting on the network (or realizing that we have always been there, as the case may be) offers the possibility of getting outside of television dictatorships (as Leary calls them), off the couch, and into a new stage of existence that is actually new (and not merely an intensification of the past). This is a possibility only in the successful manipulation of network affect and network effect. Only through the exploration of different possible communal stances between humans and beyond limited species boundaries can the true potential of transhumanism be understood.
This is what it means to live in the network society. We cannot say that we should unplug from the network. In fact, as we have seen from Michel Serres, the natural network that has been called Gaia has to become an increasingly important factor in our planning if we are to survive as a species on Earth. In this light, I do not think it is just to claim that transhumanism—the expansion of consciousness that results from fully interfacing with a network—is inevitable, at least not in the way Raymond Kurzweil attempts to claim in The Singularity Is Near. Living forever is meaningless, if it is not accompanied by the similar expansion of human horizons. We have to learn to think beyond our current, capitalist world-view, even perhaps beyond economics itself in order to better fully embrace the hope for a better humanity promised by transhumanism.
I would like to conclude with an image from Charles Stross’s novel, Singularity Sky. The novel documents a galactic civilization following a transhuman singularity. In a technologically isolationist portion of the galaxy, a remote world come in contact with a transhuman information society called Festival. Following the reintroduction of transhuman technologies, the human biocomputers of the isolated world end up going a little crazy and producing an interesting parody of early Communist Russia. At one point in the novel, Burya Rubenstein, a high-ranking member of an extropian soviet, is attacked by a machine gun wielding cybernetic bunny rabbit. As an explanation for the erratic and violent behavior of the bunny rabbit, Stross writes:
Many of the former revolutionaries had gone overboard on the personal augmentations offered by Festival, without realizing that it was necessary to modify the central nervous system in order to run them. This led to a certain degree of confusion (Stross 252-3).
This confusion is the reason we see Shaviro writing against the network. This is why I have attempted to articulate transhumanism as a hope, not a destiny. Without the proper upgrades to our abilities to think through the implications of living as transhuman on the network, we can only hope to react with confusion, becoming trapped in quagmires of outmoded existences from which we can no longer escape.
WORKS CITED
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Lilly, John. Programming & Metaprogramming In the Human Biocomputer. Future Hi. 3 May 2006. <http:/>.
McKenna, Terence & Dennis McKenna. The Invisible Landscape. San Francisco: Harper, 1991.
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