[extropy-chat] FWD (IUFO) The Next Digital Divide How biopolitics could reshape our understanding of left and right

[Terry W. Colvin]

—By Alyssa Ford, Utne.com 

January 2005 Issue 

Didn't think it was possible for the left to be anymore splintered? Welcome to
the world of biopolitics, a fledgling political movement that promises to make
mortal enemies out of one-time allies -- such as back-to-nature
environmentalists and technophile lefties -- and close friends of traditional
foes, such as anti-GMO activists and evangelicals. 

Biopolitics, a term coined by Trinity College professor James Hughes, places
pro-technology transhumanists on one pole and people who are suspicious of
technology on the other. According to Hughes <
http://www.changesurfer.com/Acad/DemocraticTranshumanism.htm >, transhumanists
are members of "an emergent philosophical movement which says that humans can
and should become more than human through technological enhancements." The term
transhuman is shorthand for transitional human -- people who are in the process
of becoming "posthuman" or "cyborgs." 

It may sound like a movement founded by people who argue over Star Trek minutia
on the Internet, but transhumanists are far more complex and organized than one
might imagine. They got their start in the early 1980s as a small band of
libertarian technophiles who advocated for any advancement that could extend
human life indefinitely or eliminate disease and disability. Their members were
some of the first to sign up to be cryogenically frozen, for example. 

As biotech and bioethics issues such as cloning and stem cell research gained
importance on the international agenda, the transhumanist philosophy grew in
popularity and became more diverse. For instance, several neo-nazi groups who
saw technological advancement as the way to achieve eugenics embraced the
transhumanist label. Transhumanism pierced the popular culture when the
Coalition of Artists and Life Forms (CALF) formed in the 1990s. This small band
of artists and writers has a shared excitement for technology and a distrust of
the corporations that mishandle it. 

In 1997, a group of American and European leftist-transhumanists (including Dr.
Hughes) formed the World Transhumanist Association <
http://transhumanism.org/index.php/th/ > to advocate for technology not only as
a means to improve the human race and increase longevity, but as a tool for
social justice. Unlike their libertarian forebearers, these "democratic
transhumanists" advocate for moderate safeguards on new technology, such as drug
trials. In an exhaustive article about various factions under the transhuman
label < http://www.changesurfer.com/Acad/TranshumPolitics.htm >, Hughes
identifies 11 subgroups, including "disability transhumanists" who argue for
their right to technology and "gay transhumanists" who want children conceived
outside of the opposite-sex paradigm (i.e., cloning). 

More-
< http://www.utne.com/web_special/web_specials_2005-01/articles/11539-1.html >


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