Authors: Jamie Bartlett
In the 2014 movie
Transcendence
, Johnny Depp plays a brilliant transhumanist scientist called Dr Caster – an Anders Sandberg type –
who is building a hyperintelligent machine, in pursuit of Vernor Vinge’s Singularity moment. After a TED Talk (of course), Dr Caster is shot by a member of a radical anti-technology terrorist group called Revolutionary Independence From Technology (RIFT). RIFT are sabotaging the work of artificial intelligence laboratories all over the world. Shooting Dr Caster is part of the plan to disrupt what they see as the frightening march of technology.
John Zerzan thinks if the transhumanists continue on their current course, we will see the story of
Transcendence
played out on the news, rather than in cinemas. ‘If we keep getting closer to this so-called Singularity moment, then I think it’s
highly
likely we’ll be seeing anti-technology terrorists like RIFT,’ he tells me.
Zerzan should know. He’s probably the world’s most famous anarcho-primitivist, and the author of several books on why technology – from the internet all the way back to subsistence farming – is at the root of many, if not all, of today’s social problems. He wants to get rid of it: Facebook, computers, telephones, electricity, steam-powered engines – the lot. Anarcho-primitivism is a branch of anarchist philosophy, which believes in stateless, non-hierarchical and voluntary forms of human organisation, based on simple, pre-civilisation collective living. The most infamous neo-Luddite of modern times was the American Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent sixteen bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring twenty-three. In his 30,000-word essay ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’, Kaczynski argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom brought about by modern technologies requiring large-scale
organisation. During his trial in 1997–8, John Zerzan became a confidant to Kaczynski, offering support for his ideas, but, he is quick to make clear, condemning his actions.
Kaczynski wasn’t the first. In the 1980s, the French movement Clodo (Committee for Liquidation and Subversion of Computers) firebombed a number of computer company warehouses. The Earth Liberation Front – a movement of autonomous groups dedicated to economic sabotage and guerrilla warfare to save the planet – was classified by the FBI in summer 2001 as the top domestic terrorist threat facing the country. In fact, explains Zerzan, there are already new Unabombers out there. In 2011 a New Mexico group called the Individualists Tending Toward the Wild was founded with the objective ‘to injure or kill scientists and researchers (by the means of whatever violent act) who ensure the Technoindustrial System continues its course’. That year they detonated a bomb at a prominent nanotechnology research centre in Monterrey. ‘We’ll be seeing plenty more groups like this in the coming years if technology keeps getting faster, smarter, more intrusive,’ says Zerzan. ‘Violence against the person is not acceptable, but property destruction and genuine resistance against technological progress? Yes, this is necessary to get people’s attention.’
I found Zerzan via his website, the existence of which seemed a little paradoxical. ‘Yes, I agree,’ he tells me over the phone. ‘And I’m confronted with that dilemma every day. But ultimately, my work is about ideas. You need to use every tool at your disposal to spread those ideas, even if you dislike them.’ And Zerzan dislikes technology an awful lot. He recalls when he heard about the Arpanet in the 1970s, and it got him thinking about why the student protests in the 1960s hadn’t achieved as much as he’d hoped. As a radical
militant student at the time, he was mostly worried about civil rights and class structure. Most of Zerzan’s peers thought computers were on their side.
Instead of looking forward to imagine the future, Zerzan looked back to the past, studying the early Luddite movements, and trade-union groups like the Tolpuddle Martyrs. He didn’t like what he saw. ‘It suddenly dawned on me,’ he explains. ‘The introduction of industrial mechanisation in the nineteenth century wasn’t just an economic move. It was also a
disciplinary
move! It was a way to make sure that autonomous people could be controlled by capitalists.’ Like many techno-pessimists, Zerzan thinks technology tends to work most effectively for those who already have power, because it maintains and strengthens their grip on society’s levers: more ways to watch us, control us, make us replaceable automatons just like in a nineteenth-century British factory. ‘The idea that technology is neutral, just a tool, is plain wrong,’ insists Zerzan. ‘That’s never been the case. It embodies basic choices and values of any society.’
Worse still, thinks Zerzan, we have become too dependent on technology for our everyday needs – communication, banking, shopping, etc. – and our sense of autonomy, self-reliance and, ultimately, our freedom has been eroded as a result: ‘If you rely on a machine for everything, you slowly stop being a free person in any meaningful sense.’ For Zerzan, modern computing and the internet are the worst of all. ‘The internet sums up the sad cultural result of this reliance on technology we have today.’ Computers, he says, make you feel like you’re connected with other people, but you’re not. It’s superficial, flighty and distracted. By losing authentic, face-to-face communication, Zerzan thinks the internet encourages
thoughtlessness, cruelty, a lack of reflection and short attention spans. He has a point. A growing number of writers have pointed to possible long-term detrimental health effects of online stimulation, such as technostress, data asphyxiation, information fatigue syndrome, cognitive overload and time famine.
The only answer, he says, is to leave technology behind and return to a non-civilised way of life through large-scale deindus-trialisation and what he calls ‘rewilding’. If sci-fi writers like William Gibson inspire the transhumanists, the anarcho-primitivists prefer the writings of Henry David Thoreau: back to nature. I ask Zerzan how far back he’s willing to go in pursuit of a natural state of existence. Should we also rid ourselves of dialysis machines? Sewage plants? Bows and arrows? He won’t commit precisely on what he’d like to get rid of: he prefers to see it as a direction of travel. ‘We all need to start relying far less on technology. At the moment we’re heading in the wrong direction, and we need to reverse it.’ But his ultimate vision is for us to return to what we once were, thousands of years ago: roaming groups of hunter-gatherers. ‘I accept, of course,’ says Zerzan, ‘this is going to be rather difficult to achieve.’
Zerzan’s solutions are pretty extreme. But it’s not just anarcho-primitivists who are worried by a transhumanist future of boundless possibilities. Francis Fukuyama, the prominent economist who coined the expression ‘the end of history’ to pronounce the victory of the capitalist system, has declared transhumanism the ‘most dangerous idea of the twenty-first century’. That’s probably a little unfair. One of the stated aims of Humanity+ is to think through the ethical, legal and social implications of dramatic technological
change. But the sort of rapid technological advances we’re living through certainly raise several difficult questions. Scientists in Sweden are already connecting robotic limbs to the human nervous system of amputees. Panasonic will be releasing an exoskeleton suit shortly. Then there is nanotechnology, synthetic biology, the Internet of Things, algorithmic-controlled financial services, general artificial intelligence. Some of the problems this raises are existential: if Zoltan became a data file, saved on multiple servers all over the world, is he even still Zoltan? Is he still a human, deserving the same rights we accord to our species? But many of the problems are prosaic: how long should a jail sentence be if we lived to 500? Or what would be the retirement age? Who would decide who receives new technology first, and how might it be regulated?
On the face of it, the transhumanists and anarcho-primitivists are radically different in their views of technology. (When I asked Zerzan and Anders to debate the issue of technology via email, it collapsed after two messages.)
fn2
But although they offer radically different
solutions, both Zoltan and Zerzan describe very similar problems. Both believe that we are destroying our planet, that far too much of today’s suffering and hardship is preventable, and that something drastic needs to be done. They are both profoundly disappointed by what we humans have managed so far in terms of our relationship with technology, and they are both worried about the future. Ironically, one of Zoltan’s biggest fears is also from the very technology that he embraces so tightly. ‘My only fear is that we could make machines so smart that they decide there is no use for us, and decide to wipe us out.’ That would rather interfere with your plan for immortality, I offer. ‘Yes, it would. I hope we’re smart enough to control it.’ It is fundamentally the same fear that keeps Zerzan awake at night: what if we lose control? What if technology doesn’t only shape us, but starts to control us? Zoltan would like an upgrade to ensure that we stay in charge. Zerzan would prefer to pull the plug.
It’s their views about human freedom rather than technology that constitute the real dividing line between the techno-optimists and techno-pessimists. For the transhumanists, there is no ‘natural’ state of man. Freedom is the ability to do anything, to be anything, to go
as far as our imagination can take us. We’re always changing and adapting, and embracing technology is simply the next step along the evolutionary cycle. Nothing is fixed. ‘Ultimately,’ says Anders, ‘I believe that humans are acorns that are unafraid of destroying themselves in order to become oak trees.’ We’ve been
Homo sapiens
for only 200,000 years or so, just a flash in the history of the earth. In a ‘Letter to Mother Nature’, strategic futurist Max More thanks her for the bountiful endowments, but informs her that ‘we have decided that it is the time to amend the human constitution’. Human freedom should extend to changing ourselves if we so desire. Communication via computers isn’t natural or unnatural, it just is. We’ll adapt to it. Zoltan accepts that there will always be people who use technology for ill – all transhumanists accept that fairly mundane point – but sees that as an unfortunate, but inevitable, part of progress. ‘Overall,’ he concludes, ‘the internet has brought out the best in humanity.’
For the anarcho-primitivists, technology tends to distract and detract from our natural state, pushing us ever further away from what it really is to be free humans. It’s freedom in a radically different sense: a freedom to be self-reliant, a freedom to be human without relying on technology. Zerzan thinks humans have already achieved the status of a mighty oak, which the transhumanists are trying to chop down and replace with a virtual simulacrum. ‘It’s a false kind of freedom,’ he explains. The further from our natural state we are, the more unhappy we become. Because this freedom and power is unnatural, it’s inevitable that we’ll misuse it, says Zerzan. As an anarchist, he has to be optimistic about what humans can achieve when left to their own devices, but he thinks that technology has an alienating property that prevents and interrupts the natural order of things.
Technology is often described as ‘neutral’. But it could be more accurately described as power and freedom. For the transhumanists, technology provides the ability to stride across the universe, to live for ever. For the anarcho-primitivists, it is a tool used to oppress and control others, to become less than human.
The dark net is a world of power and freedom: of expression, of creativity, of information, of ideas. Power and freedom endow our creative and our destructive faculties. The dark net magnifies both, making it easier to explore every desire, to act on every dark impulse, to indulge every neurosis. I came to realise that the unspoken truth about the dark net – whether it’s closed groups with password barriers, or Tor Hidden Services with its drugs markets and child pornography – is that everything is close to the surface. Hidden encrypted websites and mysterious underground drugs markets sound like they exist far below the world of Google and Facebook. But cyberspace doesn’t have depth. If you know where to look, everything is as accessible as everything else. In the dark net, we can simply find more, do more and see more. And in the dark net we have to be careful, cautious and responsible.
The dark net fosters breathtaking creativity. The majority of the sites I visited were astonishingly adaptive and innovative. Outsiders, radicals and pariahs are often the first to find and use technology in shrewd ways, and the rest of us have much to learn from them. At a time when most political parties are failing to capture the attention of a disenchanted electorate, a group of angry young men from Luton managed to create an international movement
in a few short months at almost no cost. Self-harm and suicide forums are filling a gap in health provision: somewhere for people with mental health problems to come together and share their experiences whenever and however they like, from the comfort of their own homes. Silk Road 2.0 is one of the most resilient, dynamic and consumer-friendly marketplaces I’ve ever seen. Vex is a motivated, self-starting entrepreneur, who has found a clever way to create a successful business in the UK at a time when one in five people her age are unemployed. The Assassination Market, for all its shock value, can be seen as an ingenious and intelligent system of anonymously measuring citizen attitudes and incentivising collective action. Their focus might be wrong or misguided, but people in the dark net use the internet in extraordinary ways. Rather than spend our energy on trying to censor, regulate and close these sites, we would do better to learn from them, and work out how we might use the technology they have ruthlessly exploited for good.
Each individual responds differently to the power and freedom that any technology creates. It might make it easier to do bad things, but it’s still a choice. Did it give succour to
my
darker side? Not really. It didn’t make me want to self-harm, watch illegal pornography, or bully someone anonymously. I like to think that I am a well-balanced, sensible person who embarked on this experiment with my eyes open. But I did become accustomed and habituated to horrible and troubling things. I saw how quickly and easily people can get sucked into very dark and destructive places. If I had a propensity towards any of these behaviours, perhaps it would have encouraged me. For some people – for the young, the vulnerable or the inexperienced – freedom in the dark net comes
at a price. People have to be prepared for what they might encounter there.