The English critical theorist turned far-right cult thinker Nick Land is usefully representative of this intellectual tendency. Although he has never identified as a transhumanist, his ideas are infused with the movement’s delirious faith in the coming merger of humans and machines. His current political vision, which he has given the flamboyantly portentous title the Dark Enlightenment, is one in which the programmer elite and their ingenious technologies rule the world. “Increasingly,” he wrote in 2014, “there are only two basic human types populating this planet. There are autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy, and there is everybody else.” Many transhumanists would be inclined to reject the political implications of Land’s futurism, but his vision is only really a darker, more explicitly fascistic rendering of the kind of thinking you find in the work of the futurist Ray Kurzweil, or for that matter Wired founder Kevin Kelly, who believes that we humans are “the reproductive organs of technology”.
For Dark Transhumanists, as for the neo-reactionaries from whom they take their cues, egalitarianism is inherently incompatible with any posthuman future. Take Peter Thiel, the Facebook investor who in a 2009 essay for the libertarian journal Cato Unbound announced, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Asked in a 2011 New Yorker profile whether the kinds of life extension technologies he was investing in might exacerbate already grotesque levels of social inequality, Thiel’s response offered a glimpse into the ethical simple-mindedness of his techno-libertarianism: “Probably the most extreme form of inequality,” he said, “is between people who are alive and people who are dead.”
Or there’s Michael Anissimov, a former media director at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute — a think tank in Berkeley devoted to preventing superhuman AI from destroying humanity — who has in recent years basically cornered the white-supremacy–Singularity crossover market.
Anissimov, with his weird synthesis of 19th-century racist pseudoscience and fantastical futurism, is a Dark Transhumanist par excellence. In a 2013 interview, he outlined how the cultural ingraining of the notion that we’re all created equal left us unprepared for “a future of technologically enhanced beings.” There are, he insists, already significant disparities in intelligence between existing races. Transhuman technologies, he says, would mean situations in which “people could be lording over one another in a way that was never possible before in history.” It’s pretty clear that Anissimov sees nothing to fear in such a future, confident as he is that it will be people like him doing the lording. Despite being approvingly quoted in Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, Anissimov is these days something of a pariah from the transhumanist movement. But it is worth asking whether his specific mutation of transhumanist thinking is troubling not just because of its extremist right-wing implications, but because it magnifies illiberal, radically elitist tendencies that are inherent in transhumanism itself. Although its intellectual and spiritual roots can be traced back as far as the gnostics, transhumanism is a fever dream of contemporary technocapitalism, and it is naïve to suppose that the technological enhancements it conjures would do anything but exacerbate already existing social inequalities.
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