The Necessity of Anarchistic Transhumanism

Considering possible futures for humanity through the lens of science fiction

Casey Aimer holds master’s degrees in both poetry and publishing. He works for a non-profit in D.C. publishing science research articles and is co-founder of Radon Journal, an anarchist science fiction semiprozine. His work has been featured in Apparition Lit, Star*Line, Worlds of IF, and nominated for both the Rhysling Award and Pushcart Prize. An SFPA and SFWA member, find him on Bluesky @caseyaimer.bsky.social.

This essay is the winner of Soft Star’s Frontier Essay Contest, held in Spring of 2024.

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Technological progress moves largely in a linear progression on our pale blue dot. Since the Industrial Revolution, the accelerating pace of technology has outstripped comparable social and cultural changes¹. Each advancement brings questions regarding the intersection of technology and society, while the policies of lawmakers and societal attitudes toward new technology lag decades behind. Within the science fiction (SF) field, these social concerns routinely mix alongside the fantastical exploration of future innovations. The cyberpunk subgenre specifically highlights dystopian worlds featuring late-stage capitalism combined with advanced technology. Yet, science fiction is also rife with utopian tales that utilize technology to successfully free individuals and societies from their wants and vices. 

The concept of transhumanism, or augmenting the human body with technology to exceed our natural limitations, is neither inherently utopian nor dystopian. It is, at surface level, apolitical. Yet a melding of human and technology with a focus on individual betterment places transhumanism firmly within a set of left and right political crossroads. To determine if human society will be able to manage (if not survive) the profound changes that transhumanism entails, we can utilize the SF genre. This literary exploration allows us to discover if our current economic and social practices are congruent with the ability of a species growing equally in its capacity for altruism as well as destruction. While transhumanism offers a way toward physical freedom for humankind, if it is not coupled with anarchist ideals of non-hierarchical egalitarianism, organization, and collectivism, it risks devolving into merely another tool of repression similar to cyberpunk dystopias.

Transhumanist Science Fiction

Cixin Liu’s novel, The Three-Body Problem, suggests that “a society with [. . .] advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards”². If a species wishes to escape from its home planet, then it must first become a space-faring civilization without destroying itself. This requires the society to be socially advanced enough to maintain a level of planet-wide cooperation. If technology can be seen by optimists as a freeing force for individual physicality, it then must logically be coupled with a social ethos toward increasing freedom. Before letting science change our state of being, we must first change our human tendencies in order to better utilize technology in a non-destructive manner. 

Cyberpunk as a genre displays the ethos of uncontained neo-liberal capitalism in blunt negativity. Richard Morgan’s cyberpunk novel, Altered Carbon, provides a bursting lexicon of images to extract a dystopian view of modern economic policy taken to its logical end. In the Altered Carbon universe, human consciousness is stored on cortical stacks, disks placed within each person’s neck when they are one year old. This entails that death of the human body (called a “sleeve”) is not permanent, and humankind is effectively immortal. The only method to kill a human being is to irrevocably damage their stack. This technology is also referred to as DHF (Digital Human Freight), which directly equates one’s essence to freight cargo. 

In Altered Carbon, it is reasoned that one’s body does not represent all of who a person is. Throughout history, there has been a steady shift in the perception of where a person’s essence, or soul, is located. In ancient times, Aristotle claimed the essence of mankind originated within the heart³. Later, the concept of the incorporeal “soul” gained traction and was said to house our spirit. Its location has been described both as a part of the body as well as separate, regarded as a sort of cosmic data backup that goes through the universe’s computer exit node upon death, eventually dumping us into the afterlife. In the modern day, we hold a person’s essence to be within the brain, our unique neural pathways and connections the signifiers of our singular existence. This allows the SF trope of an uploading/downloading consciousness to open avenues of exploration. Due to hyper-capitalist profit-seeking, cortical stacks in Altered Carbon are effectively owned by corporations, making human beings once again the legal property of others. The aristocracy (named “meths” after the long-living biblical character Methuselah) are the only ones who may realistically obtain this everlasting life. New sleeves carry a high cost and a large risk of personality fragmentation if the individual places their stack inside a body genetically different from their original. Because of this, only meths can afford to clone a continuous series of their natural bodies to cast their consciousness into. In addition, meths can back up their stack in real time so that if they are destroyed, they can resume living without interruption. The common people are left with one or two body rejuvenations before they can no longer afford it, often shelling out their life savings for a new sleeve. Many poor are unable to choose the body they place their consciousness into and find themselves within the bodies of children. Weary from experiencing the aging process again, “Not many [people] had the stamina to do it more than twice”⁴. They resort to suicide or permanently placing their stacks in storage, allowing their families to continue living without them.

The meths live in the cloud tops above Earth, taking themselves out of sight of commoners. This is because they understand that “the masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed”⁵. With each new technological development under a profit-driven capitalist system, the first to receive and implement new tech is the upper class, who possesses the wealth to purchase items before they are mass-produced. In order for us to prevent societal research and development from producing goods that go increasingly to the top, it is important to invert the social structure before it has time to solidify in an exponential direction and create an uncrossable gap between the haves and have-nots.

The Ethics of Transhumanism

It is often believed that the digital future is largely isolated from the profit motive or the regressive belief that human beings should not augment their bodies. Yet the “contention is that underneath the façade of liberalism that protects a large part of the projects of humanistic research dealing with the digital culture, we find theoretical roots clearly in favour, not just of capitalism, but of a revived Puritanism with respect to the body”⁶. Within the United States there is a deeply ingrained religious-conservative mindset that focuses on profit, individualism, and sanctitude. The cultural currents of the modern day do not currently work towards a structure that allows for a non-exploitative mode of technological implementation.

During the title sequence of the original Ghost in the Shell (1995), we see a combination of mind-uploading and avatarist technology taking place. The "ghost" is the consciousness, and the "shell" refers to the physical cybernetic body. There are brain augmentations and head implants for instant communication, with a large part of the series focusing on simulated memories. Yet, this example of transhumanism is not investigated as the main source of conflict within the story. Instead, it serves as a mechanism to bring to the center questions of identity. Namely, at what point does a human stop being human? Science fiction author Philip K. Dick “has himself acknowledged, the main theme in all his works is the search for a definition of the human: ‘My grand theme—who is human and who only appears (masquerades) as human?’”⁷. With transhumanism, the question becomes: when do we stop being merely transmuted humans and turn into new beings entirely, becoming posthuman?

In Blade Runner (1982), transhumanist technology takes on a negative force as the humanoid robots, or replicants, are feared by natural humans. They are examples of bio-augmentation, cloning, simulated consciousness, and implanted memories. All these advancements are wrapped up in the cyberpunk corporation Tyrell, which intentionally limits the lifespan of its replicants. However, their first model possessed an infinite lifeline, creating the need for the protagonist to hunt them down to deliver death. Questions regarding morality and human existence within a robotic world are also raised within the film. Ancient themes of human hubris climb through the story, asking the viewer if augmenting either biological or artificial lifeforms is against standard morality. If religion is disregarded as a human folly and the conservative mindset regarded as counterintuitive to human evolution, suddenly the avenue for human advancement opens as a gulf. The previous effort humans had placed into worshiping false idols and wayward visions of the past instead move toward progressing technological innovation.

Anarchistic Alternatives

Within the same universe as the capitalist cyberpunk of Altered Carbon, there exists its counterpart in the form of the Quellcrist Falconer and the Envoys. Quell is an anarchist revolutionary and the envoys a part of her autonomous collective who engage in militant actions through casting their consciousness to other worlds and being combat-ready within moments. Takeshi Kovacs is the series’ anti-hero, an envoy and follower of Quell who enjoys a spectrum of transhuman implants including military-grade neurachem (enhanced reflexes) and combat muscle memory augmentation. Quellcrist is the main progenitor of “Quellism” which advocates for a revolutionary high-tech social democracy incorporating elements of communist anarchism. She critiques both the elitist corruption of the right and the self-absorption and extreme purity of the left, turning Quellism into a post-revolutionary critique of both whilst utilizing a realistic understanding of human vices and social systems. Quell writes a number of books within the series, one of which is titled “Things I Should Have Learned by Now.” In it she muses: 

The personal, as everyone's so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. [. . .] If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. [. . .] And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life, and that it's nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.⁸

Quell and her collective are fighting against hierarchical power structures, the meths’ wealth, and the mortality of the common person. They accomplish this by instigating a militant rebellion. This occurs in contrast to the modern neo-liberal belief that peaceful revolution is the preferred ideal. Throughout history, positive change has been won not by mere resistance through nonviolence, but by the addition of militant violence. In both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi’s fights for civil rights, each campaign utilized both nonviolence and the threat of violence to achieve victory⁹. Witnessing the danger of the militants alongside massive nonviolent resistance, those in power sat down with those they viewed as the more moderate faction and proceeded to pass legislation with their assistance. From a transhuman perspective, the Quellists are utilizing transhuman modes of physicality to leverage their fight for social change to complement the cultural changes via technology.

In Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, an anarchist society on the planet Anarres is given center stage. Within the tale, a galactically famous scientist named Shevek is working on a theory for faster-than-light travel, an idea which eventually manifests itself as the ansible. This stands as a fictional counterpoint to the often-repeated claim attempting to link technological stagnation to anarchist and socialist societies. Yet, humankind did not rise out of the muck driven by profit. People created and invented long before money and will likely do so eons after. Rather than being limited in a non-capitalistic environment, the individual freed from wage slavery and the requirements of profit can innovate along new axes. Despite Anarres not being a post-scarcity society due to the sanctions placed upon them by their sister planet Urras, its anarchist society allocates according to need and allows members ample free time due to time-saving technologies. 

Shevek is met with many hardships adapting to the planet Urras, which is capitalistic as well as gendered and patriarchal in its structure. The upper class within the nation-state A-Io on Urras wishes to utilize Shevek’s scientific theory for their own ends. But Shevek remarks in a fiery address that “you cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere”¹⁰. For him, “Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution”¹¹. Here, Shevek is not utilizing technology to accomplish the revolution, but instead going outside of technological modes of thought and addressing human follies. Ideas carry weight like a proton — minute, yet perceptible. We must first change our minds and how we view the world around us. 

It is also important to note that the ambiguous utopia depicted by Le Guin utilizes only a single anarchist method of organizing: anarcho-syndicalism. This ideology is noted for its use of worker unions and decentralized councils as the basis for societal organization and decision-making. Anarchism is less a stringent prescription and more of a blueprint for a better society, with each community able to take any of its many ideologies and apply them as they see fit. In The Dispossessed, it is remarked that “‘the law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social’”¹². Collectivism, despite being a dirty word in the hyper-individualist Western world, is a default human trait that should be lauded as a continued goal.

Additionally, the nation-state named Thu on Urras represents a nationalistic and authoritarian take on a failed revolution. Thu’s rulers claim to govern in the proletariat’s stead but have instead co-opted the language of equality for the gains of power, their society serving as a substitute in all but name for the USSR. A character from Thu remarks to the brilliant anarchist scientist Shevek that he “is being exploited by his hosts in A-Io, and invites him to Thu — after all, he says, they are both ‘products of the same great revolutionary movement’”¹³. To this, Shevek points out that their state is even more powerful than A-Io, and that the government of Thu fears the anarchist colony of Anarres because ‘we might bring back the revolution, the old one, the real one, the revolution for justice which you began and then stopped halfway’”¹⁴. Political repression and state-controlled propaganda allow these dystopian countries to serve as a counterbalance to the supposed inherent utopian position of an increasing technological future. They, through their depicted opposition to freedom through their use of technology, inadvertently give credence to a future vision in which transhumanism cannot help but be a part of revolutionary and anarchistic battles.

Technoromanticism

When it comes to humans, we are prone to brute-forced, over-zealous natures, especially when theorizing future societies and cultures. In The Three-Body Problem, we are given a visceral look at the dangers of blindly trusting our humanist zeal: “Imagining that an ideal world would be born tomorrow from the ardor and zeal coursing through her blood. [. . .] She was intoxicated by her brilliant, crimson dream until a bullet pierced her chest”¹⁵. We are prone to biases and psychological manipulation. Oftentimes what occurs is that the baseline idealization natural to all humans is enhanced through computerization until it becomes technoromanticism: idealizing technology as the new divinity or savior of humans and creating a sort of utopia. This contrasts with cybergothic dystopianism which attempts to highlight and demonize technology that is utilized in the incorrect manner.

Technoromanticism, according to Maria Goicoechea, “expresses a desire to liberate the mind from the body, but its release is dreamt in profoundly materialistic terms, the soul being replaced by the mind and the transcendental quest for unity supplanted by a mental immersion in a seamless information fabric made of zeros and ones”¹⁶. Consequently, it may be a contradiction to express Marxist ideals against materialism while also subscribing to transhumanism, an ideology grounded within both the physical and cybernetic worlds. However, that much of transhumanism resides within the digital rather than physical realm is mere semantics. As the electronic world increasingly becomes a larger and more real aspect of our lives, this means that the philosophy of transhumanism offers no resistance to a Marxist dialectical materialist view, or the belief that the world we inhabit and the decisions we make stem from the physical things that create and connect our world. Taking the idea that transhumanism is intimately connected to our larger reality, we can focus on its utopian ideal, which according to Fredric Jameson is almost always:

organized around the abolition of money, desire, non-alienated labor, the liberation of women, etc. Not only were all these themes the result of a negation of the existing order, rather than the construction of a new one, they do not seem to entertain any privileged relationship to the structure of the Utopian text.¹⁷

However, this very focused dissolution of the existing “liberates the imagination to conceive of alternatives to normative identity that are not bound by the dichotomies of old/new, male/female, or human/posthuman.”¹⁸ In the removal of existing dichotomies, new avenues open for the creation of social structures and organization that we may not imagine now.

Theory vs Practice

Transhumanism, along with any other idea or process, “carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic”¹⁹. Science fiction cannot be merely extrapolative, envisioning the future, as we can never truly know it. We are limited by the sights of our own time and the best we can do is take current human issues and overlay them onto the future to study. It is likely our current vision of the future will be as laughable as the stories and postcards created in 1900 of the year 2000. Therefore, rather than forecasting with our stories the sentiment “somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life” we should aim to create science fiction which showcases a positive use of technology²⁰. Transhumanism will undoubtedly be initially in the middle, and people themselves will utilize it in whichever method they deem appropriate.

Another assertion, raised throughout The Three-Body Problem, is that humanity cannot fix itself²¹. In other words, we are ultimately morally lacking and horrendous by nature, thus we need something or some being from outside to correct us. Sometimes in SF this is represented by literal aliens, and sometimes it is technology that reduces us to the quintessential other. As Carl Malmgren posits, “the confrontation between terran representative and alien actant is the kind of encounter which keeps ‘the subject at the center,’ exploring not only who we are (in the classic, liberal sense) but also what we might become in a future certain to be different from the present”²². Therefore, if one takes the alien actant to be not an extraterrestrial but a non-body consciousness, then transhuman consciousness transfers such as in Altered Carbon take on a new light. It opens the avenue that Ghost in the Shell begins to explore, namely: if our bodies are augmented to such a degree that it becomes a majority non-original, how does this affect how we view ourselves? Does it manifest in personality fragmentation with each new body iteration and change, like in Altered Carbon, or are we forced to create a new posthuman concept of humanity that extends beyond the mere continuation of brain and memory? Going further, if memory implantation exists, as in Blade Runner, then we go down the existential rabbit hole of what mandates an authentic existence. If we assume that we are statistically likely to be a part of a simulation and that our reality is determined solely by our minds, perhaps the nature of what constitutes life is arbitrary and not a pressing issue. We simply assume it to be imperative because as primitive biological lifeforms we are preoccupied with defining ourselves in relation to death. If we remove the fear of oblivion and the concept of death, the question no longer holds its original weight. 

At the end of the day, however, these “posthuman terminal identities of SF are less important as blueprints for the future than as indicators of dissatisfaction with the present”²³. If we attempt to unpack our disdain for the present day, we will be able to better understand the problems plaguing society and so better prepare the future lakebed for the coming posthumans. If transhumanism can be said to invite an analysis of ourselves from an outside perspective by making ourselves the “other,” then it serves as another point of valor. Specifically, toward the assertion that change is needed within human culture to ensure we are not destroyed through the continuation of human vices and unrestrained technological power.

Ursula Le Guin mused and answered “what is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.”²⁴ This is the same choice that transhumanists are forced to make: the decision of whether to augment their biological shell, and the repercussions that ripple from it. This puts anarchism and transhumanism on a collision course from which there can be no escape, a seeming black hole singularity of conflating ideas. In The Three-Body Problem, the character Pan Han introduces his thoughts on reducing technology levels across Earth as a response to technological advances in a sort of diluted primitivism:

He believed that technological progress was a disease in human society. The explosive development of technology was analogous to the growth of cancer cells, and the results would be identical: the exhaustion of all sources of nourishment, the destruction of organs, and the final death of the host body. He advocated abolishing crude technologies such as fossil fuels and nuclear energy and keeping gentler technologies such as solar power and small-scale hydroelectric power. He believed in the gradual de-urbanization of modern metropolis by distributing the population more evenly in self-sufficient small towns and villages. Relying on the gentler technologies, he would build a new agricultural society.²⁵

Pan advocates for a primitivistic ideal, the opposite of transhumanism, though he stops short of being a proponent of anti-civilization ideas or of regressing past the agricultural era back to hunter-gatherer. This brings the fundamental question of whether humanity is better off in the agricultural age, the industrial age, or the space-faring age. The blurry-eyed nostalgia for an agricultural society may be a mistake, missing the realization that humans remain Homo sapiens no matter which age they reside within. Our tendencies, limits, emotional reactions, and base desires remain the same. The only difference that exists between eras is the capacity humans possess to enact their wishes upon the material world around them. So it is true that if we regress to a time before the Industrial Revolution, we may be able to avert ecological collapse. But humanity metaphorically cutting off its own arms to stop itself from destroying Earth is not a sufficiently nuanced answer to current problems.

Transhumanism offers not to cut our arms off, but to provide us the choice of an infinite number of arms to do with as we choose. It is in this free-flowing decision-making tree that the outcomes of our choices hide. We must choose whether we wish to adapt ourselves toward societal betterment and utilize advanced technology for a more equal and free society. Otherwise, we will overlay new technologies onto our old forms of societal organization and face the consequences.

1. Aspray, William, and Philip Doty. “Does technology really outpace policy, and does it matter? A primer for technical experts and others.” The Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, vol. 74, no. 8, August 2023, pp. 885-905, ASIS&T, doi:10.1002/asi.24762.

2. Liu, Cixin. The Three-Body Problem. Tor Books, 2016, p. 345.

3. Tracy, Theodore S.J. "Heart and Soul in Aristotle." The Society for Ancient Greek, p. 11.

4. Morgan, Richard K. Altered Carbon. Del Rey-Random House, 2002, p. 54.

5. Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. Project Gutenberg, 2002, p. 171.

6. Goicoechea, María. “The Posthuman Ethos in Cyberpunk Science Fiction.” Comparative Literature and Culture, edited by Asunción López-Varela, vol. 10.4, 2008, p. 3.

7. Goicoechea p. 7.

8. Morgan p. 131.

9. Nimtz, August H. “Violence and/or Nonviolence in the Success of the Civil Rights Movement: The Malcolm X–Martin Luther King, Jr. Nexus.” New Political Science, vol. 38, no. 1, 2016, p. 1.

10. Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. Harper Voyager-HarperCollins, 2011, p. 393.

11. Le Guin, p. 469.

12. Le Guin, p. 288.

13. Le Guin, p. 136.

14. Le Guin, p. 138.

15. Liu, p. 10.

16. Goicoechea, p. 3.

17. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso, 2005, p. 72.

18. Gomel, Elana. “Gods like Men: Soviet Science Fiction and the Utopian Self.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 2004, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4241283, p. 374.

19. Le Guin, p. xiv.

20. Le Guin, p. xiii.

21. Liu, p. 229.

22. Malmgren, Carl D. “Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 1993, p. 15. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4240211.

23. Gomel, p. 374.

24. Le Guin, p. 1.

25. Liu, p. 84.