Velcro City Tourist Board

Tag: Transhumanism

  • we live our lives within the poetry of our own demise

    While I am under no illusions that they would ever count it as a valid rejoinder, this from Nick Cave pretty much nails the pre-philosophical (which is to say poetic, I suppose) objection I’ve had to the immortalist dreams of the transhumanoids. Someone in the mailbag asks whether, were it possible, he would want to…

  • a defiant assertion of the individual against its own impermanence

    Doug Rushkoff knows the score: Ironically, transhumanism is less about embracing the future than fixing the human experience as it is today. Medical and life extension interventions seek only to preserve the person who is alive right now. Cryonics seeks to freeze the human form in its current state in order to be reanimated in…

  • a duplicitous priesthood’s superior knowledge of the technology of light and shadow

    Insightful piece on superhero narratives, magic and transhumanism by Iwan Rhys Morus over at Aeon a few weeks back; collides a bunch of my own long-running obsessions in exciting ways. For instance, technology’s deliberate appropriation of the mask of (stage) magic: During the 19th century, the relationship between technology and divinity took a new turn.…

  • the shell-game of morphological freedom (retro essay reissue)

    As the first step in what will presumably be a long, stop-start sort of project, I have retrieved one of my more obscurely-published and less-read essays and republished it here on VCTB*. This piece — a double review of two ostensibly non-fiction titles on transhumanism — never got a proper title, as it was written…

  • Competition demands exponentiality

    We hold, first, that the “religion of the Singularity” is not new—it must be understood as a symptom of neoliberal rationality in the Information Age. Second, we argue that the same neoliberal logic is exemplified by recent developments in the urban process, its value flows, and its associated forms of governance. Finally, we conclude that…