"We Killed God! Yay! Let's Become Evil Robots!" - Thoughts on Transhumanism, iThings, and Why You Don't Care About Anything I Write

Picture this – It’s the year 2099 and you’re still alive. No, not as a 114-year-old wrinkled crone hooked up to dozens of life-support tubes, dependent on nursing home aides and your great-great grandchildren for liquid feeding, sponge baths, and as an audience to your frequent diatribes about how they don’t make jackasses like Kanye West anymore. Not even close. You feel healthier than you’ve ever been. You are ready to “do anything, or be anything, you want or need.” How is this possible and how are you going to accomplish this? Simple. First, you shed all biological matter, not just the wrinkles but everything, in order to upload your brain into a dynamic, conscious sub-entity within a larger, singular entity, all within a machine. In short, you are fusing with the artificial intelligence of the Terminator. You are taking over a robotic body, but the distinction between you and the robot, and all other robots, is minimal, negligent even. This is because all other modified humans and robots communicate in a virtual world, taking robotic forms whenever they wish. Actually having two people meet in the physical world is rare. The term “self-identity” has no meaning. Since knowledge and skills can be instantly downloaded and comprehended by most intelligent beings, the process of learning is compressed into an instantaneous affair instead of the years-long struggle “normal” humans experience. Speaking of “normal” humans, or those who choose to remain organic and unmodified – they exist on a different plane of consciousness and cannot fully communicate with uploaded humans and their robot pals. Money and death have become irrelevant. There is no such thing as gender.

Sound scary? Enticing? Insane? According to futurist Ray Kurzweil in his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines", none of what I have described is science fiction. They are accurate predictions he’s made based on current developments in medicine (human genome project, stem cell research) and science (nanotechnology, artificial intelligence). Many of his predictions stem from the fact that technological evolution is occurring at a highly exponential rate (consider that for 99 percent of our species’ existence we were hopping around caves and flinging poo at each other), a rate so fast that by 2045 we will have reached a technological singularity, an intelligence explosion that would render the human mind obsolete.

While some haters have described Kurzweil as a pseudo-scientist quack, a surprising number of the world’s brightest minds not only agree with him, but are working hard to make his dreams a reality. These are the transhumanists, men and women who regard certain aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death as unnecessary and undesirable. They strive towards transforming themselves into what they call posthumans, similar to Nietzsche’s “Ubermensch”, self-actualized beings of extraordinary skills and abilities. Demi-gods, if you will. According to many members of the scientific community, the transhumanists will achieve many of their goals sooner rather than later. The vast majority of Kurzweil’s predictions for the 21st century have become a reality so far, meaning that some time in the next 50 years (barring a nuclear war or a super badass mutant swine flu outbreak), those of us who are still alive will have to make a choice. Do we continue to live as we have for countless thousands of years? Or do we deny our own biology, hook up to the machine and become post-human immortals?

You may be saying to yourself (if you’re one of those creeps who talks to yourself), “What’s wrong with living forever? Becoming a robot doesn’t sound so bad. Actually it sounds pretty freakin’ sweet!” After all, humans have been trying to transcend their natural state for as long as we’ve been around. It’s no accident that we live three times as long as people 10,000 years ago despite little or no change to our biological chemistry. Countless advances in medicine, science, technology, and nutrition have been made to ensure that we live longer, live healthier, and are able to exercise near-complete control over our environment and the natural world in general.

Conservatives and Christian fundamentalists would be quick to point out that the quest for immortality represents the ultimate hubris, that to attempt to become “God” is the ultimate transgression. I would argue that modern science (see: Evolution) has already done a quite thorough job in dismantling the classic Western conception of a monarchical white-bearded deity shooting lightning bolts down from the heavens. We have effectively killed Him. There is also a big difference between playing God (i.e. bombing the shit out of innocent people because their beliefs don’t conform to what you perceive is the ultimate ‘good’ morality) and realizing that we are all gods, albeit the "bankrupt gods" of Jean-Paul Sartre, condemned to be free in a world in which we are only able to exercise a finite (yet growing) amount of control. Most intelligent people understand that there is no Guiding Hand. Reality is us and we are reality. All we have is now.

OK, so archaic and foolish belief systems are not a good excuse to halt our quest for immortality. In fact, many transhumanists look at their ideals as a kind of New Age spirituality, the ultimate salvation. But what about Science? Isn’t it also a form of fundamentalism, just as susceptible to mindlessness as religion? The scientist who is unable to look beyond the absolute sacredness of his numbers, facts and theories is like a quarterback who doesn’t understand that the plays which have called for him by his coach are not set in stone. His blindness to what’s happening outside the pocket is what leads to interceptions, fumbles, failure and loss (Not like my boy Eli!!!). The intangible and creative aspects of humanity (love, joy, community, art, music) are quickly dismissed as secondary to the cold, hard “truth” preached by modern scientists.

Religion and Science aside, my biggest problem with the whole idea is not so much the idea itself, but the people I see around me on the streets of Manhattan every day (see above photo), the people who make up my own generation. I would venture to say that as a whole, people in their twenties are more individualistic than any group in the history of civilization, even more so than our parents, those ex-free-lovers and unforgiving yuppies who spawned the "Me" generation. Our technology starkly reflects our individualism. Cell phones, computers, iPods, DVRs, and those ubiquitous social networks that have made many of us virtually useless in genuine face-to-face conversation. The simplest act of communication, like asking for driving directions, is almost unheard-of. We have been allowed to withdraw completely into a digital fantasyland, causing our reality to suffer horrendously. It’s no surprise to me that relationships and marriages are failing at an unprecedented rate, that there are four times as many prescriptions for depression and ADD issued than ten years ago. Technology’s promise of “Harder, better, faster, stronger” has destroyed our attention spans, and along with them, any desire to continue in the moment, to find any lasting satisfaction in who we are NOW, who we’re with NOW. Fantasyland kills “the [real] moment” every time. I find it hilarious when someone gets pissed, no, genuinely furious when I take more than an hour to respond to a trivial text message that they could have called me about and gotten over with in less than fifteen seconds. I'm sorry, but if you're that insecure and starved for attention, don't bother texting me anymore. When we allow technology to seep into the fabric of who we are, when we allow the digital comfort blanket to dictate our relationships, our ability to feel pleasure and sadness, and our very identity, we are reduced to little more than Andy Hargreaves' "people with mobile-phone headset attachments...talking aloud and alone, like paranoid schizophrenics, oblivious to their immediate surroundings. Introspection [for them] is a disappearing act." Even on crowded streets brimming with humanity they "scan their mobile phone messages for shreds of evidence that someone, somewhere, may need or want them."

Just as life implies death, death (i.e. emptiness) implies the meaningfulness our lives are capable of achieving. When one of the female vampires in the HBO series True Blood is asked why she prefers her human companion to members of her own (immortal) species, she replies that (I’m paraphrasing here) because their existence is so short, they feel things so much stronger, more passionately, and with a much greater sense of urgency. Only in their mortality are they able to find true purpose. And conversely, in the words of Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun – “Immortality is always nihilistic.” Why live forever if you’re just going to be a lonely robot with no purpose, endlessly searching the stars for shreds of evidence that someone, somewhere may need or want you?

In short, if we are to transcend the limits of our biological mortality, we must transcend our current societal system. The coldhearted, digitized and capitalistic waste-land that we know now, a flimsy diaspora of haves and have-nots, cannot be prolonged forever in its current state. The future has become something which we fear, not cherish. Before we can fully embrace transhumanism, we (i.e. Generation Y) must become humanists. Because a dystopia composed of a selfish, self-absorbed class of nihilistic immortals, and an equally selfish, and therefore jealous, class of "normal" humans without the money or resources to make the necessary adaptations is a recipe for an unhappy and bloody extinction, a fate worse than the slow, natural death we know today. Only a fully integrated community with the same desires for knowledge, happiness, and self-betterment would make an eternity meaningful. If you can picture that, let me know, because the way things are going right now, I can’t.

The Question of Form in Peter Markus' "The Singing Fish"

The Singing Fish, Peter Markus’ 88-page collection of evocatively strange, beautiful and brutal flash fictions involving two brothers living by the banks of a muddy, magical river, quickly discards conventional form and narrative structure, creates a mythical landscape built by mud and hammers, and employs a language that is superficially sparse and recurrent yet melodiously deep.

The repetition of phrases, events, and even plotlines in Markus’ book endows the stories with a relentless rhythm, a musicality usually found in a verse or prose poem format. The short and often sharply punctuated sentences drive the reader on a staccato march towards the same muddy river, the same brothers, the same Girl, and the same brutal domestic revelations at the end of many of the stories. The child-like simplicity and recurrent nature of the prose create many instances that are at once sonically pleasing and melodically infectious. In “Guts,” for example, the simple act of fishing becomes an almost painfully deliberate ritual performed in a minor key that is at once primordial and catchy:

“We take turns reeling in.
We take turns baiting the hook.
We take turns setting the hook.
One by one, the fish come in.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.”

This obsessive and oftentimes neurotic style is exactly what draws the reader into the text. The words flow like incantations, like pop songs whose choruses and verses blur together to form a mesmerizing hum with no defined beginning or end. In “The Fish That Walked on Water,” the language is almost onomatopoeic, as the reader is presented with the gritty sights and smells of a filthy river: “We were both of us brothers ripping off hunks from the moon with the muddy-clawed hammers that were our fists.”

The timeless and cyclical nature of the stories recalls the oral tradition of storytelling prevalent throughout much of human history, in which the storyteller would create an experience, in a lyrical and repetitive manner, with the audience, in turn, grasping the message and creating personal mental images from the words heard and the gestures seen. The sounds pounded the ears of listeners until, their psyches penetrated, they became, in effect, co-framers of the melodic spoken art. This effect may not be as salient in Markus’ book, but the prose still beckons the reader towards the mud, to become baptized in the river, to become privy to some small part of the ulterior knowledge that the brothers seem to possess. Although the stories are presumably told by one of the brothers in the first person, the abundant use of the words and phrases “we” and “us brothers” and the fact that the narrator virtually never refers to himself in the singular, seems to allude to the idea of a collective conscience, not an interior monologue, evoking the notion that all the major characters, especially the two brothers, are necessary, not just to each story’s plot, but also to its telling.

The Singing Fish not only opens the debate for which facets of a collection (the narrative, the characters, the style of prose) make its stories well-written, enjoyable, and intellectually engaging, but it also opens the debate for what exactly constitutes a work of fiction. Markus’ stories have been widely published in recent years, and sections of his two larger collections (The Singing Fish; Good, Brother) have appeared in a wide array of electronic and print publications, some devoted exclusively to short fiction and others devoted exclusively to prose poetics.

The inside cover of the book refers to these tales as “fictions,” yet the rhythmic writing style creates a stream of consciousness that seems more in line with many contemporary prose poems. All but three of the sixteen stories appear in block format, without paragraph breaks or breaks for dialogue; this structure also contributes to the rapid, sensory-oriented imagery scattered throughout the text, another common characteristic of prose poems. At first glance, the paragraph divisions in “Guts” and “Boy: Revisited” even look and read like poetic line breaks.

However, in order to classify a work of literature, to determine whether that work succeeds in the context of its form, it seems important to look beyond mere aesthetics. In his theory of narratology, or the study of narrative structure in fiction, the Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov states that, in addition to other literary elements, a short story or novel must contain a set of coherent actions that work towards achieving some artistic or emotional effect, an effect, for Todorov, not as important in the context of a poem or film. Each individual story in The Singing Fish follows a clear narrative path, with the same juvenile narrator relating events that follow a logical progression (allowing for some suspension of disbelief) from beginning to end, with few dissociative leaps in syntax. Little, if any, plot development occurs from story to story, though, and each story’s order in the text is interchangable. The actions of the brothers may differ slightly in each vignette, but the images of the river, fish, mud, Girl, and a sinister father figure are constant and make reading the collection in its entirety a bit tedious at times.

Nearly half of the stories end with one of the brothers or their father hammering a nail into one of the brothers’ hands, then some form of the phrase, “I lined up that rusted nail.” The overall plot does not develop beyond this recurring event (the first and last story in the collection end with the same aforementioned line), and, in my opinion, the cyclical nature of the book does not allow for any profound emotional effect at the conclusion.

What sets Markus’ work apart from that of contemporary writers is not its repetitive nature or its genre-bending tendencies, but how its bizarre yet gratifying language sucks the reader into his riverine world to showcase an unconventional landscape that at first feels strange, but quickly feels appropriate in the context of the fables: “This fish was the biggest of the big-lipped fishes that us brothers ever fished from out of this fishy river that runs through this fishy river town.” Ultimately, each story’s success lies in the sounds emanating from Markus’ unique verbal instrument.