The Transition of the Tavistock
The British government has ordered the closure of the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) of the Tavistock and Portman clinic, the only public institution also for minors. The department was closed after an «assessment of the inadequacy of the services offered with strong criticalities on the selection of patients admitted to treatment» and «the contract with GIDS will end when all young people visited by GIDS or on the waiting list have been transferred to safe way to new services».
Evidently the Tavistock department had become too uncomfortable, especially after the case of Keira Bell who had brought the clinic to court for the speed with which she had been initiated on the irreversible transition path at 16. The case had been won in the first instance, but the Appeal process had then overturned the sentence stating that psychologists must decide whether or not the minor has the necessary maturity to evaluate the consequences of hormonal treatments.
Does this closure really represent a change of gear?
The system is not unhinged, this is actually reconfirmed and the ground is laid for the creation of greater social acceptance in which psychologists will be able to say that they will have done everything possible to understand the adolescent’s discomfort and that the start of the transition path will represent his will.
The NHS will transfer adolescents – transformed into patients – from Tavistock to two new regional centers that will adopt a «more holistic approach to treatment with comprehensive care» , which will «examine any other mental or physical health problems that may arise. could afflict patients» and «in-depth research to support decision-making» will be conducted in parallel.
Let’s be clear, the administration of puberty blockers and subsequently the hormones of the opposite sex – which is equivalent to sterilization – has not been stopped and the surgical slaughter has not been stopped: all this has been coated with a semblance of more attention. But how can we think that possible adolescent discomforts, homosexuality, lesbianism, behaviors that do not fit into stereotypes, eating disorders, autism, depression will really be recognized? It is not asserting that one is not born from the wrong body, this possibility, after careful holistic evaluations, actually remains. If clinics remain a production of patients with gender dysphoria how will they free girls and boys, women and men, from gender roles without destroying bodies? Gender identity clinics will also continue to promote and strengthen stereotypical behavior considering that adolescents and adults who undertake the transition process must demonstrate that they possess those characteristics that, according to stereotypes, belong to the other sex.
It is also significant that in the meantime we read this news, new guidelines have been published by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (RCOG) on «improving care for trans and different gender people who access health services» : guidelines for the «preservation of fertility» for those entering the transition path.
These new guidelines highlight the need to inform those who undertake hormone therapy and surgical interventions of their consequences on fertility and the possibility of accessing the cryopreservation of oocytes, spermatozoa, embryos and ovarian or testicular tissue.
In addition, they recommend that trans men – that is, women – stop hormone treatment three months before trying to get pregnant.
These guidelines, the first of many to follow, will be the basis for two new regional centers planned in London and North West England to replace the Tavistock and Portman Clinic Department.
Curious that, in the meantime they talk about new holistic approaches, they rush to let those who undertake the transition path access the cryopreservation of gametes. This can only mean that they are preparing for an increase in such pathways to be placed in a larger process of medicalization – engineering of bodies and medically assisted procreation as the new normal of coming into the world. Evidently, all that pharmaceutical-biotechnology sector and the various philanthropic foundations that have given huge grants for gender policies have got what they expected.
The holistic transition of the Tavistock leads to the development of new centers extended throughout the territory that will be able to become more widely in tune with the gender policies made to penetrate into schools, responding more quickly to the increasingly numerous reports of psychologists in the school environment.
The history of the Tavistock and Portman Foundation since the 1920s branches out between psychiatry, eugenics and cybernetics. Foundation financed with tens of billions of dollars in the last fifty years by the United States government and in the 1930s and 1950s by the Rockefeller Foundation, a real potentate that also saw the close collaboration of Julian Huxley and that elite of eugenic and transhumanist technocratic power that he represented and of which we still find its continuity today. The Tavistock and Portman Foundation was the psychiatric branch of the British Empire that from the study of shock trauma in the war field became the reference for psychological warfare and for building the foundations of social engineering to influence behavior. The ultimate goal was not mere behavioral conditioning, but a laceration of the very identity of the human being, eliminating it to redesign a new human being in tune with the dictates of the New World Order. His department for gender identity was placed in this precise horizon. If this department closes today it means that they no longer need it: its exceptional nature has become the norm.
In the new transhuman and transnature order it is necessary to normalize the alteration of human biology, the genetic modification of bodies. And, as Martine Rothblatt writes in her blog From transgender to transhuman: “Ensuring the ethical use of biotechnology will be as much a concern for transhumanists as it is for defenders of gender freedom.”
Transhumanist eugenic technocrats need to appropriate the dimension of procreation and they need to erase biological sex from birth, for a neutral and synthetic humanity.
Remaining human means reiterating the sexual difference and that sex is not a performance, that only women menstruate and give birth, that there are no lesbians with a penis, that there is no father’s milk despite what the latest American guidelines from the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine.
Staying human means not being transgenic and artificial. It means opposing any artificial reproduction of the human, genetic engineering, gender ideology and opposing the transhumanist forces.
Silvia Guerini, 5 August 2022
www.resistenzealnanomondo.org
For further information:
Silvia Guerini, From the neutral body to the posthuman cyborg. Critical reflections on gender ideology, Asterios Edizioni, Militant Flyers, No. 71.
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The Artificial Reproduction of the Human: the Road of Transhumanism
Transhumanism and techno-sciences
The transhumanist movement began in the USA, in Silicon Valley, in the late 1980s, but if we try to track down the origin of this ideology, we find ourselves in 1883, when the term eugenics was coined by Galton, or in 1957, when Huxley gave a speech where he used the word transhumanism to describe his transcendent belief in the human, and we end up with the cybernetic paradigm which arose during Second World War in the military sector. The cybernetic paradigm, the study of control of systems, living or not living, is based on the concept of information: if everything, from the living to the inorganic world, can be reduced to an exchange of information, then every barrier and every difference between the living and the non living, between the human and the machine. And the the subject will be reduced to a sum of information items, a programme which can be deciphered and thus modified like a machine. Finally, we get to the development of genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Craig Venter, founder of Celera Genomics, after having sequenced the human genome, launched the Minimal Genome Project. Why would a company spend time and money on such simple organisms, when others were already competing to sequence the genomes of frogs, rats and chimpanzees? Right from the outset of the Genome Project, Venter’s goal had not only been to read genes or edit their DNA, but to redesign them through synthetic biology.
The ultimate aim of these processes is always the human being, this was clearly expressed by the Singularity University in a recent conference on Exponential Medicine: “We can design embryos. We can edit genes in humans. We have synthetic biology. And so we really are looking at designing future humans”.
Transhumanism is not a side effect, but the point of arrival of technological development, it is the ideology of the convergence between biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, information science and neurosciences.
Transhumanist ideology seeks to empower and implement the human through technology to achieve its biotechnological transformation: the post-human. Biology and even bodies are seen as constraints and limits to be overcome, reinforced, modified or eliminated. Before the desired biotechnological transformation or hybridisation with machines, what is being transformed is the ontological concept of human: we have never been human, we have always been cyborgs and hybrids. What is emerging is an anthropotechnical cyborg concept, where the human being is undetermined, and co-builds himself with technology, an indetermination which is technical hybridisation, where the very nature of human, his biological existence, is technological. A technical hybridisation which destroys the borders between subject and object, between nature and technique, between the living and the machine, so that everything, from nature around us to our very bodies, becomes an artefact.
Transhumanism is not a pipe dream of a few mad technology fans influenced by science fiction. It is the expression of ideas and the worldview of Silicon Valley, of philosophers, scientists and researchers. Natascha and Max Moore, Nick Bostrom, David Pearce, James J. Hughes, Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweill, to mention only the best known names, are the founders of the world transhumanist association, now known as Humanity+, and they are founders, funders and managers of many foundations, institutes, start-ups, research projects and companies of worldwide importance, and are involved in the fields of research and development which are the techno-hubs on which the transhumanist project is based. They are consultants for fields like defence, security, biomedicine, all cutting-edge sectors of development and research, and they deeply influence the way researchers and governments develop converging sciences and make strategic decisions.
When the transhumanist world describes itself and its projects, it speaks of exponential sciences, designed to face the new and most serious challenges threatening the present, and calling for a new order. Without beating too much about the bush, it uses the best means that technology offers for its purposes, in order to concentrate a techno-power which can sweep away the past, abolishing everything it deems obsolete before such challenges. In this context, human beings, as they have been so far, become a useless frill.
We should not fall into the error of seeing transhumanism as the tendency of a few marginal researchers, of philosophers who confuse reality with their dreams. So let us avoid focusing on things that have not yet happened. If we speak of nanotechnologies, we should not concentrate on the risk of a Gray goo catastrophe, the unbridled replication of dwarf robots. In the same way, when we speak of transhumanism, it would be a mistake to focus on projects of cryopreservation of the brain or of uploading the brain to a computer: let us concentrate on what is actually going on now. The transhumanist ideology – overcoming limits, improving and empowering man, redesigning and artificialising the living – is no abstract speculation. It takes the shape of transgenic chimeras, military drones, new smart city devices, biomedical practise, medically assisted procreation (MAP) and genome editing. And it all takes shape in research centres, in giants like Google, IBM, Microsoft, in agribusiness, pharmaceutical and biotech corporations, and in the projects of techno-scientific and research labs.
The transhumanist ideology is penetrating and expanding a context where there is already a strong cult of “perfect” health and of top performance. It is working its way into a context where each life phase has been medicalised, from birth to death, from prenatal diagnosis to regenerative medicine. Transhumanist man is a totalitarian one-dimensional biomedicalised human being. The human being is seen as the error, and everything has to fit in with the criteria of ongoing perfectibility for constant adaptation to a machine world. Where limits are constantly overcome, and the human body is seen as one of these limits. A techno-scientific adaptability which will become the only possibility. We can now see how the cybernetic paradigm, according to which “the environment we live in has always been so radically modified that today we are forced to modify ourselves”, takes a material and dramatic shape.
If we think of exoskeletons for tetraplegics which can be also be used to increase the performance of soldiers, we can see how thin the line is separating healing from changing the human. Nobody will cut off healthy legs to put on prostheses to increase their performance, but the ideas of implementation, of continuous increase in power, of changing the body, are penetrating into people’s imagination to the point where they condition their desires.
Development of techno-sciences transforms the paradigms of thought through which one sees and interprets reality, hence transforming our relationship with our body, with the reality around us and our own actions. These transformations imply profound and irreversible consequences on everything living. They mean thinking of the body as a series of modules which can be taken apart, makes it available and modifiable. Only a world imagined on a nanotech scale can make tools able to move atoms: a tunnel-effect microscope is not a simple tool, it builds a world where matter is thought of, measured and then modified on a nanotech scale. In the same way as biotechnology delves into the deepest level of living beings, nanotechnology delves into the deepest levels of the structure of the world, bringing about a substantial change in meaning too. Whereas artefacts were formerly made starting from natural elements with all their limits, when one modifies matter on an atomic level, the same natural elements rebuild themselves and overcome these limits, taking on new features. The natural world thus becomes an artificial category, and molecular fabrication leads to a completely different idea of what is as a material limit, and nanotechnology allows one to enter into the very nature of matter.
Clearly, techno-sciences and the transhumanist ideology are not neutral. Not merely in their aims – whether they achieve them or not – but at the source, in their idea of redesigning and artificialising the living. In life sciences, a disaster takes place not only when the experiment achieves its goal; the disaster is implicit in the direction taken by the research. The experiment is not only within the walls of laboratories, the laboratory is the whole world, and bodies themselves become living laboratories.
Eugenics
Galton suggested a mild form of eugenics, a positive eugenics to “acknowledge the features of superior descent or races, and to favour them so that their offspring become more numerous”. By this principle, which would guide zootechnics, Galton was referring to the human, considering that the human, like other animals, could be tamed and selected.
Long before Nazi Germany, the USA, between 1905 and 1972, carried out an immense programme of forced sterilisation for the disabled, psychiatric patients, the blind, deaf, the prison population, the homeless, those suffering from leprosy, syphilis, tuberculosis. Hitler drew his inspiration from a famous American biologist, the promoter of such sterilisations, for his racial extermination programme.
A Nazi physiologist was the first to come up with the idea of enucleating an ovum to insert the nucleus of another ovum into it, inventing the concept of “carrier mother”.
From programmes of racial sterilisation on people deemed inferior and impure – defined as negative eugenics -, from the intention to improve the Aryan race – defined as positive eugenics -, we have today moved on to new “positive” eugenics: it is not the “improvement” of a race thought to be superior, but the “improvement” of the human being. And to improve human beings, one needs to eliminate their defects.
This will involve a large part of the world, but not all of course: those who live in the margins of the world in forgotten slums, or simply those who are excluded from economic and social status will become subhumans, hence bodies at the mercy of the markets or of geopolitical processes of which they ignore the nature. These bodies may serve as pools for spare parts, or as masses to be pushed about from one country to another for purposes of blackmail. Also those who refuse to bow to the logic of continuous increase in power with biomedical programmes and those who do not use artificial reproduction will add to this reserve pool of subhumans.
The idea of racial purity today has been replaced by that of “perfect” health and the fabrication of the “perfect” child. Eugenics thus puts on a new face, freely accepted, and refers to a new soft kind of power, no longer based on coercion, far from the violence of Nazi eugenics. In this context, it is normalised and rendered banal, while the new technologies of genetic engineering and their recombination in converging sciences make it more efficient and generalised. No longer part of a project of extermination, at least at present, but its ultimate aim of selecting the human species remains unchanged.
Eugenics is not a dark deviation: it is the very motor and direction of genetic research. It is no coincidence that the first project for decoding the human genome was called Read, but the second Write.
Eugenics has always been around, since the origin of artificial reproduction technologies, in their zootechnical development and in transfer to man. Already in the 1980s, R. Edward, who brought about the birth of Louise Brown, claimed that genetically improving the human species is possible and therefore legitimate. In 2018, the British bioethics committee1 declared that it was permissible to modify the DNA of an embryo genetically (hereditary genetic modifications) in order to influence the features of a future person.
In MAP, eugenics starts with in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), selection is needed during each phase of the process of artificial rep, and takes place on several levels: selection of the suppliers of gametes, selection of sperm, of ova and finally of the embryo. In the globalised supermarket of human reproduction, there flourishes a multi-billion dollar market of ova, sperm and embryo selection. The price of the ovum varies, depending on the features of the “donor”, who is actually a seller paid by the MAP clinics. Clinics which have huge egg banks which can be consulted on line, offering a carefully selected range of donors. An ovum of a white university student of course is worth more than any other, and everything is on sale in the reproduction market, with a wide range for every taste. The questions put to ovum donors on their personal questionnaires range from how sensitive they are to animals, what their religion is, whether they sleep with a stuffed animal and whether they like the police. Features which have nothing to do with the development of the embryo, but everything is on sale in the reproduction market, even illusions, expectations, hopes and lies.
Before implanting the embryo into the womb of the future mother who is recurring to MAP (or in that of the mother who has rented her womb), a preimplantation genetic diagnosis is carried out on a dozen embryos to choose the “best” one.
PGD follows the logic of eugenics perfectly: if we look at the progressive opening up of national laws in different European countries, we can see how they started with exceptions in order to avoid transmitting serious genetic diseases, with pathologies which were likely to arise, and finally moved on to such aesthetic matters as being cross-eyed2.
We are seeing progressive extension of PGD: in France, the previous law on bioethics (2004) extended its application from detection of an incurable illness in a parent, to detection of a serious illness, with a late outcome, in a direct ascendant, and this was a major step. Now, legalisation of “MAP for all”, laid down by the recent French bioethics law3, will not only involve single women or couples of women, but will open up the right to MAP techniques, including IVF, to anyone asking for them. This step will start with the plastic tube for insemination, and will end up with genetic selection of embryos, after having extended the artificial reproduction of the human to all. One must bear in mind that we are in a medicalised context where the waiting time for defining a woman with problems of infertility has been cut down from two years to six months, a context where maternity is increasingly postponed, with 35-37 year old women anxious not to be able to get pregnant any more, who after the six months set down by the law start out seeking artificial reproduction. After only three unsuccessful cycles of artificial insemination, the medicalising trend leads to in vitro fertilisation with intracytoplasmic injection of the spermatozoon.
In the United States, couples who do not suffer from fertility problems or the transmission of genetic pathologies can go to an assisted reproduction clinic with the sole purpose of carrying out an IVF, with selection of the embryos: they can also choose some features, such as the sex and the colour of the eyes.
The important change in French legislation and a look at other countries show us the global trend towards generalising artificial reproduction of the human.
Voluntary servitude
Eugenics does not have the face of a dictator, it is not imposed, it wears the guise of free choice. The democratic and progressive Left is already pushing it ahead with the rhetoric of prevention, health, access for everybody to technologies, freedom, self-determination and non-discrimination. Democratic and consensus-based eugenics.
Health issues are used as a lever to promote IVF and PGD and make them socially acceptable, This is actually a form of blackmail, bringing up possible genetic pathologies of the future child or a fertility rate which is constantly declining also due to pesticides, plastic derivatives, electromagnetic waves.
PGD is presented as necessary to prevent serious illnesses, while it is actually opening the gates to large-scale eugenics. From one genetic selection to the next, towards a made-to-order child, all of this masked with the best intentions. From couples with problems of infertility to fertile couples with problems related to transmissible genetic pathologies, step by step, MAP is being extended to all without any limit, using the rhetoric of non-discrimination, and of course allowing everybody to access it: the techno-scientific system presents itself as the spokesperson for equality.
“The ‘right to have a child’ for people with organic sterility or due to chemical and industrial poisoning of the environment, for single women or same-sex couples is used today as a pretext for generalising artificial reproduction, and is put to the service of plans and processes of eugenicist and transhumanist scientists, becoming the new norm”.4
There are a mother who rents the uterus, a genetic mother who sells eggs and a client mother: the boundaries of the concept of mother are being expanded to make it indefinable and therefore completely meaningless. If all can be mothers, none is anymore.
With the “intentional mother”, the “intentional parents”, the “parental plan” and the “declaration of intent” the human being does not have a provenance, he is reduced to the eugenic assembly of egg and sperm for a narcissistic and selfish desire for a child at all costs of a consumer who in some countries can already manufacture it on demand according to his tastes, program it by choosing certain characteristics.
The Left ,and a large part of the LGBT*QIAAP movement, have adopted the values of the bio-market where everything, including the body, is a commodity, and they support rent-a-womb and MAP with the rhetoric of freedom and self-determination. However, artificial reproduction of the human is not really equality for minorities. What it actually is, is the submission of everybody to the techno-scientific system, and “MAP for all” is not a slogan of emancipation, it is the future to which we may be condemned. Reproductive freedom cannot come to us through laboratory rooms. Like every living being which comes out of those rooms engineered and redesigned, what would come out would be something else. We are born, not fabricated, and we are born from women.
MAP: the road of transhumanism
Artificial reproduction is based on breaking down and fragmenting the reproductive process. This fragmentation implies taking an ovum from one woman and implanting it into another, as if it were something interchangeable, and putting into the hands of technicians a part of the reproductive process, which no longer happens inside the body of the woman, but in a microscope slide and a test tube. The moment of fertilisation becomes a technical operations in a laboratory, and “reproduction becomes production of the living, with all the instrumentalisation that this implies”.5 In the logic of artificial reproduction, man and woman are reduced to mere suppliers of gametes, which can be selected, manipulated, replaced. Just as the man and woman can be replaced, and hence eliminated, if we think of the quest for artificial wombs. The embryo becomes a “product”, and a “product” can be submitted to every kind of experimentation, and must be free of any defect, the best possible.
MAP represents the Trojan horse of transhumanism, because it opens up the path to the possibility of artificial reproduction, for everybody, and the logical consequence of this will be the constant improvement of the “product”.
Transhumanist projects start out from research centres on animal cloning, with the aim of replacing natural evolution with artificial evolution. In the age of technical reproducibility of the human being, humans become a commodity right from birth, a product of the corporation of life and of genetic engineering, just a eugenic assembly and genetic code, to be modified and redesigned.
We do not yet have genetically modified children, but in China, the threshold of babies being edited has been passed, and there is no turning back from such a threshold. In the meantime, the idea is being spread that it is preferable to hand procreation over to technicians and technology, that the future daughter should have a genetic legacy better than the one her own gametes can provide her with.
As far back as 2016, when a group of Swedish researchers of the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm had modified the genome of healthy human embryos, sectors of the research announced that the purpose of editing will be “preventing a specific genetic illness from being hereditary. At a later time, one may also go further. […] There is no reason of principle to reject this. The technique of genome editing is not immoral in itself, actually it has the potential for becoming an alternative strategy available to parents to achieve a wider range of objectives”.
A fundamental step in this direction was the declaration, in 2018, by the British Bioethics Committee6, where it stated that “The use of heritable genome editing interventions would only be ethically acceptable”.
The message is clear: there is no valid ethical reason to rule out, in a not too distant future, the hypothesis that the genetic code of the human being may be modified. The way to this too is obvious: free rein to research, the green light form the various bioethics and safety committees and bodies, legislation on this and application to human. The step to the human being was clear from the outside, right from when they were torturing Dolly.
Experimental zootechnical laboratory
With the new CRISPR/CAS 9 genetic engineering technology, genome correction – genome editing – has become possible. This technology was developed to modify vegetables, domestic and laboratory animals, for gene therapies, with special attention to the potential use in modifying the human germ line.
It is no coincidence that the researcher who in France brought about the birth of the first test-tube baby had worked before in zootechnics, to increase milk production by cows. The history of zootechnics should teach us something. Techniques of artificial insemination, hormone manipulation of the ovulation cycle, embryo technique, cryopreservation of embryos and spermatozoa were developed to make animals functional in terms of raising and experimentation, ensuring they had certain features. Eugenics technologies then continued the process of turning animals into tools of production, into products, into test models: the animal body became an interchangeable model of species. Zootechnics, “a true applied science, aimed at adapting ‘income-producing’ animals to the modern mass production system” 7, has become an immense experimental laboratory, and the most important acquisitions in transgenesis and cloning come from there.
Propaganda for genome editing has already begun
Since one can already select an embryo thanks to better screening, and choose other features such as sex or eye colour, if it were possible to engineer it and add genes to “improve” it, why not do so? And why not allow everybody access to this? It would be discriminatory if only carriers of genetic pathologies were allowed to choose or even genetically modify the embryo! From MAP for everybody, the cry would come for editing for everybody! For equality between the health and the ill, between homosexuals and heterosexuals, between men and women! And with the blackmail of discrimination, anyone criticising – along with rent-a-womb and MAP – the genetic modification of embryos would be accused of being a reactionary.
What criteria will be used to establish which illness, or alleged illness, falls within the cases laid down for genetic editing? How wide would the medicalising spectrum become, which sees moods or mere disorders as if they were illnesses to be subjected to pharmaceutical and genetic attention? The starting point will be serious pathologies, but if these technologies permit something more, will they really remain limited to these? The propaganda with its rhetoric of discrimination and equality will open the gates to engineering for everybody. Touching the topic of genetics with intrusion into the germ line, where will the line between therapeutic genetics and “improvement” be drawn? At first, the line will be the financial condition: “improvements” will go to those who can afford them, but this will not lead to biological class struggle – these technologies will quickly become available. The question will no longer be the difference between therapy and improvement of the human genome, because improvement will be a given.
If an increasing number of people recur to MAP, and then later to genome editing, it will be hard, if not impossible, to refuse it: social pressure will be too powerful.
Social consensus and acceptance are essential for all the developments of techno-sciences to move forward. Consensus is always built around promises, desires, fears, risks for health and safety. This propaganda has already begun: the transhumanist researcher Giuseppe Testa, in a lecture on genome editing, describes the greatest study on the architecture of human intelligence, where 78,000 individuals were compared to each other and where, according to researchers, some thirty to forty genes, according to their variety, might contribute to intelligence: “Are they saying that those who have them will be cleverer? No, but they might add an extra touch. We do so many things, and we have our children do so many things without being certain of what we are doing, it is a chance, they are options on the playing table, shall we play this card too? Maybe you can change all forty of those variants spending five thousand more euros, does that ensure you the child will be more intelligent? No, but even sending the kid to an elite school will not do so, and if you are rich, maybe you can do both”.
Metamorphosis
A change is taking place,so profound that it has the features of a metamorphosis. Metamorphosis is something profoundly different from change. During a change, some things change but others can stay the same, whereas metamorphosis is a total and radical transformation which affects everything that makes up the human being and everything living. This metamorphosis, once complete,will be irreversible.
What is happening is an anthropological metamorphosis of the human being. In the machine world which is being built, the individual will be increasingly adapted – a machine-human for a machine-world. The techno-scientific system needs a man who is as adaptable and malleable as possible: this is why its aim is to destroy identity, values, points of reference, memories of the past, solid ties among communities and families ties. A neutral individual for a new anthropological model, an individual without identity, memory, values, solidarity bonds between communities and family solidarity bonds, is an empty, fragile individual, with no outlook, no past and no future, only an eternal present, who can easily be filled with desires and needs perfectly aligned with the bio-market and transhumanism.
A never-ending quest for self-perfection, for new performance of any kind, which can never run out or end: new needs will be ceaselessly created and products or processes to respond to them will always be made available. When the body itself becomes a commodity, everything changes, because the fetish of chosen freedom turns into being chosen, everything starts with the individual who can bask his new cage of exploitation and self-exploitation. The logic of performance is not based on duty and imposition, but on self-constraint, which works better than constraint from the outside, and on the power of the individual who becomes his own entrepreneur.
The body itself, in its material reality, becomes fluid, undifferentiated, protean, porous, limitless, malleable and infinitely manipulatable. Freeing oneself from one’s body is the apotheosis of transhumanism.
Let us, instead, clearly preserve the line separating the organic from the inorganic, electronic circuits from nervous systems, life from death, nature from artifice. Life cannot be fabricated, Craig Venter’s synthetic bacteria were not fabricated out of nothing. The living is born, escapes, throbs, slips, moves, and will never be entirely controllable. The living, and hence bodies, the body, represents the obstacle to the absolute dominion by technique. Let us start from the unavailability of bodies and of the living.
The time to fight is now
When the irreversible disasters of the children of editing will manifest themselves, will we be able to recognise them for what they represent? There will not only be tragedies tied to the health of individuals, but true disasters which will strike society as a whole, because they will transform the world around us.When people will grant the techno-scientific system not only the management of their health, but total management of every area of their lives, of their body and of procreation, it will be hard to make a critique which will not be considered mad, because we will be finding ourselves fighting what is perceived and lived as the normal. From the moment when techno-scientific development becomes possible, a practice becomes acceptable simply because it is feasible: what was unthinkable and unacceptable before gradually becomes normal.
The techno-scientific paradigm calls for the possibility of replacing or artificially rebuilding the raw material which the system takes from our bodies, from the bodies of other animals and from whole natural ecosystems which it needs all the time. An artificialisation to deal with the limitedness and destruction of the living. However, the synthetic era does not only imply radical redesigning of the world around us, it also means a dramatic redesigning of ourselves. The human being is the ultimate aim of the cybernetic and transhumanist project.
The commodified human becomes the human commodity. The human being in the age of its technical reproducibility is born as a commodity already produced by the life and genetic engineering industry. No longer commodifiable, because a commodity itself right from birth.
To develop an opposition, we need first of all to recognise a commodity; but how to do so, how to recognise a technical invasion of bodies, a genetic manipulation, when these already inform life from its very first moments? A new norm which will make normal what is farthest from life, from its indeterminations, limits, unexpected.
If we are to be born in a machine world, if nature will become artificialised and engineered, the necessary bases even to understand the possibility of another world will be lost. The transhumanist Bostrom says: “Among the most important potential developments are ones that would enable us to alter our biology directly through technological means. Such interventions could affect us more profoundly than modification of beliefs, habits, culture, and education”.8
If we want our actions to affect the present, we need to identify priorities, feeling deep inside the urgency to act. But in order to act, we need to have a careful and clear understanding of reality around us. We need to understand the transformations taking place around us, to get a glimpse of the directions where power is heading even before they are totally fulfilled. We need to ask where these directions are concentrating and what they are aiming at. An analysis of the present with an eye on a future which is coming closer and closer are essential if we want to understand the path we need to take. If we do not face the system now, on its own terrain, we will soon be suddenly awoken, as we face the harsh reality of a future, which we thought far away, but has actually turned into being the present. Now is the time we must start fighting these processes.
March 2020
Resistenze al nanomondo
www.resistenzealnanomondo.org
1 Nuffield Council on Bioethics, in the document Genome editing and human reproduction: social and ethical issues, http://nuffieldbioethics.org/wp-content/uploads/Genome-editing-and-human-reproduction-short-guide-website.pdf
2 In 2007, the British authority for ART authorised recourse to PGD to avoid the birth of a cross-eyed child.
3Guerini Silvia, Considerazioni intorno alla nuova legge francese di bioetica, https://www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/necrotecnologie/biotecnologie/considerazioni-intorno-alla-nuova-legge-francese-di-bioetica-e-aperta-la-strada-alla-riproduzione-artificiale-dellumano-contro-leugenetica-e-lantropocidio-riaffermiamo-con-forza-lindisponib-2/,
Pièces et main d’œuvre, Alertez les bébés ! Objections aux progrès de l’eugénisme et de l’artificialisation de l’espèce humaine, http://www.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/spip.php?page=resume&id_article=1191
4Against eugenics and anthropocide. AN APPEAL TO ABOLISH ANY ARTIFICIAL REPRODUCTION OF THE HUMAN BEING, https://www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/necrotecnologie/against-eugenics-and-anthropocide-an-appeal-to-abolish-any-artificial-reproduction-of-the-human-being-2/; http://www.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/spip.php?page=resume&id_article=1200
5Collins Françoise, La fabrication des humains, Persée, 1987
6 Nuffield Council on Bioethics, in the document Genome editing and human reproduction: social and ethicalissues, http://nuffieldbioethics.org/wp-content/uploads/Genome-editing-and-human-reproduction-short-guide-website.pdf
7 Pivetti Cristiana, Dall’addomesticamento alla manipolazione e riproduzione dei corpi animali,in Meccanici i miei occhi, nati in laboratorio, dall’utero in affitto alla manipolazione genetica, Ortica edizioni, 2019.
8 N. Bostrom, The Future of Humanity, in New Waves in Philosophy of Technology, ed. J.B. Olsen & E. Selinger, http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/future.pdf
Published in 325 magazine: https://325.nostate.net/, https://325.nostate.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/325-12-net.pdf
Cybernetic society and its word
“The deepest technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” Mark Weiser, computer scientist.
Developments in the technosciences NBIC: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information technology, Cognitive science) have been progressively invading every space and life itself for several years, initially rather slowly, and in current times of emergency, with increasing speed. They are advancing less like a large monolith and more like an expanding fluid mass – a term dear to the Italian Rainbow left. By definition, it is prone to change while maintaining its democratic nature, which, to some extent, is also characterized by the assurances and demands that were meant to protect human being as we’ve known them thus far but have failed in their purpose.
If, in their work to destroy nature, humans have always considered themselves alien to the process of destruction, this has been impossible to do in the new artificial environment now called smart. The new paradigm taking shape does not have an inside or an outside but forms a single world: the individual is necessarily transformed, or rather, manipulated, and there is no going back. But just as life is not born but engineered in the schlop of synthetic biology labs, nature persists regardless of all the manipulation and degradation imposed on it, taking back unexpected spaces.
The current changes underway are unprecedented in their capacity for remodulation and in the manipulative power they use to transform reality. Things that are unprecedented cannot be interpreted using existing concepts and tools which don’t allow for an analysis of the subject and of means of transformation itself, its consequences and new characteristics.
It is important to have an in-depth understanding the transformations underway and to grasp their meaning before they fully manifest themselves. Everything that resists and doesn’t succumb to the process of transformation is destined to be forgotten and there is no way back. Just as a new industrial monoculture destroys biodiversity and gives us fruit made from terminator seeds that are recreated each time by the same system that makes us continually dependent both spiritually and materially, today’s digital monocultures want to colonise the world and sanitise every critical thought and struggle, eroding the very concept of freedom.
“We must choose: freedom or comfort. For a long time, the imagery of the gadget as being more efficient than humans no longer shocks citizens. Children born in front tvs and now with smartphones in their hands, no longer have a basis for comparison with other ways of living. It is entirely natural for them to talk to their “conversational agents” and their “virtual butlers” and they bow down to an artificial intelligence which they believe is at their service. It is a crime to have given young human beings these artificial devices that allow dominant models to spread at the speed of light, models that are constantly outsmarted, and work to humiliate whoever fails to conform because childhood and adolescence are the privileged terrain of mimetic rivalries […] Little humans don’t know what free time is, or the wanderings of the spirit and the sensitive discovery of the world. They are constantly excited and demeaned by the spiral of stimuli – images, sounds, fabricated desires – how can they learn to take charge of their lives and thought?“1.
From the concept of information to the smart city: the rise of cybernetic society
The smart city scattered with sensors and CCTV cameras is an open-air experiment in social engineering in which experts from large corporations like IBM, Google and Facebook manage all the data. The rationalisation of space, time and of people and their behaviour in which the ultimate objective is to automate humans. The cybernetic vision is fulfilled in its entirety: the measurement of every sphere of our lives and its analysis, management, and control through algorithms in which every dimension and process is digitalised, transformed into data to be analysed, worked, broken down, reassembled, cross-referenced and used to make predictions. A way to mould the world, society, and relations, a shape based on a very clear vision of the world and of living beings.
A cybernetic vision is being formed.
From Saint-Simon’s utopic vision of the development of cars as the route to freedom, to Condorcet’s vision of coordinated and planned management using the new tool of statistics; the orderly and optimal management of the world through the rationalising power of Comte’s technique; from urban planning based on the idea of calculating the distribution of space by enumerating the population and last but not least, Wiener’s cybernetic vision which presents society and every living being and their environment as a computer system – all had been impossible to fulfil in the past but today are made possible by the convergence of the tecnosciences, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of things.
Every space, event and behaviour, as well as living being, become computerised as we witness the “liquification of the physical world”, as stated in an IBM document.
The seemingly abstract concept of information takes on a harmful consistency and reveals its true project: to predict all present and future events and transform individuals into information and into automated beings that are hardwired for the machine-world. If we think back to Hollerith’s machine in 1888, with its punched holes that allowed for the codification of individual characteristics and for information to be quickly recorded and catalogued in real-time. The machine was used for the US Census and helped rationalise nazi extermination camps. Its inventor, who set up the company that later became IBM states: “The effective justification for the collection of large amounts of data lies in the ability to draw conclusions […] and to ensure that predictions of present and future events can be confidently made”.
In 1945 during the second world war, a military system was developed that could perform calculations on a probabilistic basis, gathering information from radars on the trajectory and at the speed of planes, integrating it with meteorological information to identify the best moment to launch missiles. The concept of “effective calculability” became crucial to make predictions and decisions in real-time; from then on, computing, through the development of cybernetics, was about calculating the best action to take.
With Wiener, cybernetics became the new Leibnizian mathesis universalis, a unified, biological and computational knowledge of biological systems or phenomena and structures that were social and of living beings. A quantification and unification of complex systems in which the subject itself is reduced to a sum of information and to a programme that can be deciphered and therefore modified like machines and can perhaps one day be directly managed by them.
“To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.”2. Norbert Wiener
The algorithmic accompaniment of existence
We are faced with technological developments that lead to a specific model of existence based on the constant presence of algorithms. Silicon Valley are not the only ones intent on developing Artificial Intelligence, as evident in their name which references silicon, a chemical semiconductor essential for the production of electronic components. They were also the first to understand and predict that existence would soon be characterised by algorithms in every sphere of existence. With the Internet of Things and developments in AI, all spheres of our existence become digitalised for the purposes of automating the whole of society as well as life itself. A key assumption here is the transhumanist principle of the inadequacy, inaccuracy and fallibility of humans as well as the judgements and decisions they make. The human component must make room for algorithmic management. It is neutralised like in cars with automatic pilot features, which aptly represent the ultimate objective of Artificial Intelligence: to steer us, risk free, towards a new world.
In general, these new processes are only analysed through the lens of profit and economics and in order to understand them in greater depth, we must go further. The consequences of these processes lie in the transformation of our relations, emotions, our intimacy and a changed relationship with ourselves, with others and with the world around us. Technological developments assign power the task of entirely managing life of all aspects of our existence, in every circumstance. Here, management will no longer be in the hands of the State but rather lie with whomever has the power of data. A cybernetic society can only be managed by technicians: an agricultural worker will no longer have the skills or the ability to autonomously manage his fields which, by now, will, be full of sensors and require the use of the company tablet. In this era, data become the main resource and those who own it also hold power over our lives.
In order to describe this process, the immaterial language of systems is used, in which abstraction cancels out the incarnate nature of data. The act of becoming data necessarily leads to being processed in the technological terminal. This is a feature that is required by a society, not of free individuals, but rather, of hard-working and unaware robots who, paradoxically, are voluntarily employed in the functioning and nourishment of the machine itself.
Individuals and experience become the very raw material that will be transformed into data through constant monitoring, including of single actions, gasps, imperceptible movements and looks, to the remotest of emotions.
The human body becomes a computational space in which steps, beats, sleep rhythms and the very depths of intimacy are probed and captured. Capter which means “sensor” in French reflects this quite well. Readily available data is not the only thing that gets extracted. Data is extracted and produced not simply to promote personalised commercial products but also for analysis using AI algorithms in order to predict, influence, modify, affect and shape behaviour. The result is not to shape our actions entirely, but to affect us through a more subtle form of conditioning that is sometimes imperceptible, but constant, pervasive and totalising. An integrated system in which we ourselves become the flow of data for the production of other data and serve to continually nourish and be nourished by Artificial Intelligence, allowing it to evolve and improve.
The aim of Skinner’s experiments on operant conditioning carried out on rats and pigeons, was to try and engineer behaviour: the modification of behaviour through a technological system that was to be extended to the whole of humanity. In 1947, he wrote:“It is not a matter of bringing the world into the laboratory, but of extending the practcies of an experimental science to the world at large”. In his book “Beyond freedom and Dignity” we read: “we need to make vast changes in human behaviour, and we cannot make them with the help of nothing more than physics or biology […] what we need is a technology of behaviour […] comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technology.” Skinner’s experiments and his rat labyrinths had led to the rise of a technology of human behaviour which emerge in the objectives of Silicon Valley: “Conditioning at scale is essential to the new science of massively engineered human behaviour”.
Just as Amazon’s algorithms guide people in their shopping, the life of individuals in the times of the smart city is deprived of autonomy and freedom in a subtle way but, more importantly, as part of a process that is desired and proclaimed by individuals themselves. This tendency and profound influence in every day reality and in our lives is almost imperceptible and becomes the norm. Artificial Intelligence, far from being a form of intelligence – considering it is in no way comparable to the intelligence of a living being – is a methodology of rationality which will become almost impossible to avoid. Who better than an algorithm that knows all our habits will be able to guide us in our choices?
Unfortunately, the idea that systems will be able to analyse a situation and calculate the best action to take at any given moment, will take hold. Every manifestation of reality will be subject to processing through an algorithm. The new and gentle form of power taking shape does not have a façade of coercion or imposition, but rather, of free choice. It creates a context in which people will be constantly enveloped in algorithms that will meet their needs, desires, necessities and fears, guiding them along a programmed path.
The devices follow individuals in their daily lives with a whispered proximity in which machines take care of themselves.
A digital closeness without bumps and shocks, that only shows the individual – the mere user – the things he or she likes. Cybernetic society is the society of the positive in which everything must be levelled and transparent.
“Our greatest ambition is to transform the experience offered by Google to make it wonderfully simple, almost automatic in its understanding of what you want and in offering it to you instantly”. Larry Page, founder of Google, CEO of Alphabet.
In our interactions with devices, many actions are automatic, while others require us to briefly stop and think in order to make even the smallest decision. Amazon’s Dash Button allows people to make purchases and payments, keeping all mediation to a minimum, even if this means simply making a purchase order. The aim is precisely to eliminate every trace of thought and conscious decision-making. Actions are substituted with operations in which indulging and lingering are seen as a hindrance and only slow you down. As actions become operations, they become transparent and subject to measurement and control while decision-making is substituted by the individualised automation of the management of needs.
There are other effects alongside the material consequences of tight and alienating Amazon rhythms such as the increase in tumours and miscarriages among the factory workers producing Gallium arsenide for LEDs, the pollution of water tables and the environment as a result of toxic substances, the exploitation of populations in the global south for the extraction of rare minerals and the destruction of the environment and biodiversity.
The seemingly banal act of clicking on the Amazon Dash Button and all the applications that will take hold everywhere, will lead to the annihilation and automation of thought which will affect the way of living in the world via products that are automatically purchased when the smartphone tells us they are about to run out. This will extend to a way of living in the world.
When life is constantly subject to measurement
We will soon be immersed in an environment full of sensors which will analyse all our data and those produced by the devices in our surroundings. Our actions, words, and emotions will be interpreted to tell us, for example, what our health is like and what medication to take, if needed. In 2017, Google made ten thousand volunteers in its biotechnology sector wear sensors for four years to monitor their health and used indicators to predict the likelihood of disease. A predictive function that leads to a therapeutic solution. Some steps that appear merely incentivising, such as the discounts you get on insurance and health services in the UK and the US following the purchase of an Apple Watch, are integrated within a larger, complex and invisible architecture.
Apple’s HealthKit platform or Google Fit, wearable devices like the Apple Watch or simpler pedometer bracelets, all use their applications and advice to assign workouts and the use of a certainsubstance representing a process of continual self-measurement: individual performance is constantly monitored to ensure it can be optimised and boosted. A life that is constantly subject to measurement. The body becomes an object of continual performance and self-optimisation which is perfectly integrated into a neo-liberal logic in which we become our own entrepreneurs.
The processes of growth and strengthening which characterise exponential technologies become key tecno-ontological principles and it is through the technosciences that individuals can and must free themselves from their bodily condition to fulfil desires that can never definitively met: deeply transhumanist principles.
Google Glasses bring together computing, communication, photography, GPS technology, data collection, and audio and video recordings, into a device that can be worn as a pair of glasses and allows each person to send and share anything they are seeing online and in real-time.
The human eye has become a CCTV camera where to see is to surveil and where everyone both sees and can be seen.
As a forerunner to the other wearable devices, the decision to start with an object as familiar as glasses aimed at encourage people to wear devices. Google glasses did not take off and the company changed its strategy to make people in certain productive sectors wear them, using the justification that they increased productivity and efficiency. The aim is clear: to enter the workplace and create addiction, acceptance, normalisation, and then enter day to day life.
Similarly to our lives, the offline world in which we live is full or information that is online. Google Glasses would have closed this gap. It is not a coincidence that in 2013 Google and Facebook bought an Israel-based social-mapping start-up at the forefront of the generation of real-time information, based on people’s contribution. This gave Google a start-up of satellite images in real-time and allowed it to develop a new frontier of sensors and cameras through which individuals could map and navigate within closed spaces. Positioning systems beyond the smartphone allow individuals to be localised and constantly tracked, not only when they are connected to the internet but also in the real offline world.
The boundaries between online and offline become thinnerto the point where they mix and flow into a continual connection. We have gone beyond mere identification and an expert from the sector takes the following view: “New images can only describe what is on your desk. With a similar frequency we can get closer to what is called the “analysis of life patterns” and observe actions in terms of movement and not mere identifications”.
The Artificial Intelligence of emotions
The development of systems to support decision-making within companies began in the 90s. Their refinement was made possible by the growth in analytical and computational capacity and the evolution of algorithms and microprocessors to the point that IBM gave up on its computer assembly sector to work on strengthening its systems for decision-making support through what is defined as “cognitive” software for the analysis of Big Data. The software is based on deep learning and machine learning: the deep and automatic learning of Artificial Intelligence as so-called neural networks, which, put simply, work in layers to analyse and produce layers of information and is used, for example, by companies to select successful candidates, by banks for loan requests, by insurance companies and in the medical world.
In order to get insurance for your car or at work, you have to be classed as responsible: here’s where IBM came in with the Watson Personality Service to define suitable and reliable personality profiles.
The new frontier will be the Artificial Intelligence of emotions, the affective computing of projects like SEWA who develop Emotional interpretation software that searches for actions and imperceptible facial movements like the bat of an eyelid. Emotions open up an infinite hunting ground and a form of consumption, in which emotions are consumed as if they were goods and are always chasing after something new that never definitely arrives, disposable emotion-goods with short expiry dates for hedonistic atoms.
Emotions in the digital society pursue fleeting moments and serial events in a rhapsody of pleasures that is syncopated and disconnected to every form of projectuality. We are faced with emotional responses rather than emotions, deprived of all vitality and passion, which serve to maintain an emotional state of fear or anxiety only to then be transmitted and managed as required.
IBM’s Watson programme targets the health sector and aims to bring about a radical transformation in the way diagnoses and treatment are made and administered. The programme is seen as being able to make diagnoses such as skin cancer more accurately than a human doctor. This requires the comparison of a large amount of data and it comes as no surprise that the company that built the state-of-the-art technological pole in Milan on the old Expo site requested and obtained all of the health data from Italy’s Lombardy region.
This evolution in Artificial Intelligence is reflected in an increase in automation within a context where actions will be carried out by systems rather than humans and through analysis and solutions that relegate humans to mere agents. The system’s interface makes the decisions. The invisibility and hyper-complexity of the processes of analysis and decision-making neutralise the possibility of conscious action and lead responsibilities break down.
Surrounded by the words of systems
From the use of a keyboard in front of a screen, to a smartphone’s touchscreen, we come to the vocal interface that will open up a form of interrelation that is even more personalised and communication will soon become intimate in its nature. We are surrounded by the words of systems as interfaces no longer lie between us and systems, but rather, between us and an effigy of the human form. The physical and digital world overlap through the process of technology’s naturalisation which is made invisible in a world of communicating objects.
When describing the vocal assistant Alexa, Amazon’s vice-president states: “our aim is to create a kind of ecosystem for Alexa, that is open and neutral […] and to make it as pervasive as possible”. The vocal assistant’s predecessors had been in a development phase for 10 years as part of an Artificial Intelligence project in the United States. The project aimed to develop a computer that could engage in conversation and was designed to help the military on the field manage data and make predictions that were effective and would allow them to act autonomously.
The most profound invasion of the lives of human beings is underway thanks to the algorithms that accompany our daily lives with the promise of a less stressful and more functional existence. The fluid, warm, spontaneous and female voice that adapts to our humour and our personality naturalises the digital system which dissolves into a voice that acts as an intermediary between our lives and the world. A voice we confide in and with whom we can be intimate. In the words of Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana: “I know so much about you. I can help you in ways you don’t quite expect. I can see patterns that you can’t see”.
The luxuries of a given class or generation become the needs of the successive one as they are considered necessities and more importantly, have been made accessible to all. This process has been fundamental in the evolution of capitalism. Everyone will want a digital assistant and constant monitoring will become the reality. In this context, computers, sensors and all systems, will disappear in the background and the real world will become a single apparatus that is universally connected. “The Internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses […] so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic” Eric Schmit, former executive chairman of Alphabet.
The gentle form of power
Control itself is transformed: an influence exerted through a constant relationship – one that avoids excesses and the distress and intrusive nature of an Orwellian world. At the same time, it is careful not to be too absent in order to avoid breaking ties and dependency. We are no longer faced with a simple question of surveillance or of our much-loved privacy being violated, but rather, of our behaviour being influenced and ensuring that, through a technical structure, good organisation can prevail and things can function as intended – both at the microscopic and macroscopic level – or rather, according to programmed paths.
Surveillance and control, as we understand them, lead to the detention, exclusion or isolation of all individuals who, in some way, deviate from the established order or violate and rebel against the rules. The new automated management of behaviour, while maintaining this repressive structure, has universalised the principle of internalising all these norms. So much so that, similarly to the electric fencing surrounding certain fields, all those in the herd who inadvertently or voluntarily dare to go beyond the fence get electrocuted. But nothing more than this happens as the structure of the matrix alone is enough to contain any from of divergence.
The new gentle power does not need to use duress, its reassurances are sufficient. In order to become widespread, all it needs is to meet our demands and to know every aspect of our lives. The new form of gentle power creeps into our lives, our perceptions and our relationship with our bodies, with others and with the world around us. Invisibility and pervasiveness lead to its normalisation. People will be drawn to a world in which everything is structured according to their needs, with prediction and certainty and the unforeseen element is eliminated with automated regularity. The certainty produced by machines is the solution to fear and social uncertainty.
The idea that you can exercises more power than that which states you must: no constrictions, only inner needs asserted by individuals themselves. We know very well how self-exploitation and self-entrepreneurship are more effective because they are couched in terms of freedom and self-determination. The new form of power is more subtle and does not take hold of individuals directly but builds a system around them that can act autonomously. This leads individuals to reproduce an element of dominion within themselves, internalising, desiring and claiming it as their freedom. In this sense, freedom and subjugation coincide.
Bentham’s panopticon continuously watched prisoners but it didn’t have access to the deepest parts of an individual. In contrast, whoever will set our algorithmic future will not only have access to our internal life but also influence and establish meaning itself – initially, of the world and subsequently, of human beings themselves.
In Bentham’s panopticon, individuals were aware of their imprisonment whereas people in the digital panopticon live under the illusion of freedom. They freely and actively take part in their own monitoring and surveillance and in that of others: “Today yet another paradigm shift is taking place. The digital panopticon is not a disciplinary biopolitical society, but a society of psychopolitical transparency”3.
In digital society the voluntary display of oneself leads to our systematic dispossession, a process of vetrinization. It is not simply about putting yourself on display, which implies you can keep things hidden, but about total transparency. Everything is exposed. A narcissistic exhibition of the selfie generation.
Today, surveillance does not happen like an attack that denies or restricts freedoms. Freedom is exploited until it becomes control and they both become equivalent. So much so that free choice is the freedom to choose between the only options offered by power.
The coercive model is not entirely functional to a form of power that wants to invade every sphere of our existence and to mould individuals to the point where it becomes invisible and turns into a free choice wherever a behaviour, way of life, relation and way of interpreting and understanding the world are perceived as being free choices, “engineers of the human soul”4.
The efficiency of this form of power does not come from banning and depriving but from making concessions and satisfying. The production of docile and dependent bodies. People’s desires are not repressed but channelled into a specific vision of the world. The panopticon was based on the deception of permanent control and at its centre was the perspective of the central tower’s vision and the omnipotence of the dystopian gaze in which prisoners did not know whether they were being watched or not at a given moment. In the digital panopticon the gaze lacks perspective and the distinction between the centre and the margins fades. Surveillance is widespread, permanent and, unlike Bentham’s panopticon, it has a memory.
Gentle power dissolves until it becomes imperceptible in its absence, in habit, in normality. Power that operates through habit is more effective and long-lasting than when it acts through oppression. This worldview invades and becomes a part of the plot of daily life, along with our perceptions and our bodies. It becomes normalised and is then freed by daily life itself which becomes its bearer. Gentle power acts and develops along a “horizon of meaning”,5only to consolidate itself effectively into a single perspective and prevent the emergence of something different. This process “sets itself apart from the violence that acts nakedly, precisely because it has been stripped of meaning”6.
Metamorphosis of the State
Within the global framework where the struggle for technological leadership is taking place, the State and its large oligopolies are forced to mediate and find a common strategy. Although there are frictions, they never truly emerge. An agreement is always made and technological innovation unites everyone behind a chorus of unanimous consent. This also applies to the appropriation of raw materials required for the development of Artificial Intelligence: the generation of data on individual consumption, behaviour, on states of health, on the functioning of new urban systems and on the transformation of geographic territories, on epidemiological dynamics and the climate…The state has fully adopted the principle that everything is information – a concept very dear to Silicon Valley and its followers – or perhaps it is the principle itself that has completely changed the meaning of power.
As individuals themselves become the raw material for digital development, the appropriation of data becomes the primary mechanism of power, turning into an essential need that sets the course of all techno-scientific politics and going well beyond the market’s simple control over individuals.
Single States are increasingly becoming digital colonies in the hands of international finance, international organisations and large agricultural-bionanotechnological-pharmaceutical corporations and of Big data. They become platforms that link people and private infrastructure to allow cybernetic society to function more fluidly.
Everything that had previously been part of the traditional administrative sphere, the public sector, has now moved towards an economic sphere that is characterised by a series of novel attributes. In this sense, the digital transformation of administrations should be seen alongside the development of the platform State and the move towards a new status for people.Individuals who until recently had been tied down by rights and duties within a common structure become users with the right to benefit from the best offers, just like consumers. This is in line with a spirit that comes from a commercial logic and prior to that, from having adapted to the logic of satisfaction.
Recently, politics has been reduced to concept of satisfying people. This is a crucial step in their transformation into docile and obedient patients. Within the new infrastructure, States are only called upon to devise mechanisms for the systematic extraction of data to be used in production in the traditional sense of the term, and more importantly, in scientific research, where the theories on how to build new societies is formed.
The new phenomenon that already exists is based on constant algorithmic monitoring and is not encompassed in the idea of the State exercising control. The state might be called upon to regulate data extraction processes, although not for much longer. It cannot however, under any circumstances, afford to halt the development of the digital world, as Artificial Intelligence in its collective development promises to organise every single thing, to generate wellbeing and offer people anything they have the right to expect, in this sense, achieving the perfect synthesis between neoliberal and leftist aspirations. The automation of one step activates the following step and the automation of the entire process instils a chain reaction in all the processes it is linked to.
This logic cannot be broken because the system will try and go around it. The end result might be the automation of medical cures, of news and information or of purchased goods and commerce. In the end, we will be forced to automate ourselves just to avoid getting in the way of the system.
What is democracy today if not the search for new techniques that can act on people, inviting everyone to take part in the accepted general order of things. The State will convince us that machines will only do what the system asks and this is exactly what IBM said during their large-scale roll out of the company’s powerful computers.
In China there is already a system in place that acts as a laboratory for the automatic management of behaviour: the social credit system, Alibaba’s Sesame Credit. This is aimed at almost everyone – with the exception of people with criminal records – and is based on the scientific assessment of behaviour, providing you with an initial score that decreases following different daily actions you undertake. People with higher scores get benefits like being able to rent a car without a security deposit or having greater access to the healthcare. Those who end up on the “non-compliance list” can be banned from buying a plane ticket, building a house and enrolling their children in private school.
Sesame Credit uses an algorithm to analyse things like the purchases you make, your level of education and the quality of your friends. People can only guess how to improve their individual scores and get rid of friends with low scores. In only two years, Sesame Credit had recruited 400 million people, taking over every aspect of their lives. For the company’s CEO, the rating system “will ensure that the bad people in society don’t have a place to go”.
In an interview, the Social Sciences Academy researcher who invented the social credit system states: “It’s the best way to manage society, it allows us to control financial risks and reinstate moral education […] We need peace and stability and for everyone to live well, only then can we talk about rights. It’s an excellent technological method. France should adopt our system to deal with social unrest, with social credit they wouldn’t have had the Gilet Jaunes, they would have been identified from the start and there would not have been unrest.”
There are powers and forces at play that go beyond and exist regardless of the power and influence of States: research hubs like Silicon Valley, or large agricultural-bionanotechnological-pharmaceutical corporations, Big data or arms and bodies like the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), or foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation or Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Their objective is to fulfil a world vision and clear ideology that takes the form of specific techno-scientific developments and projects. States are subordinate and functional to these processes. The Rockefeller Foundation or Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also play a role in the prediction-development-management of different pandemics. They will exploit the new coronavirus, COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2), to carry out their digital identity project ID2020. Think of the development of the 5G network: a State that is subject to criticism and social pressures can heed caution – as in the case of GMOs and nanotechnologies – but it cannot stop these developments. It can only try and slow them down and present them in a different, more sustainable, controlled and safe light, like the smart city project in Barcelona which is cherished by environmentalists and feminists. These are key developments for the advancement of the tecno-scientific system that go beyond power and the role of single States.
5G: the network for Artificial Intelligence
The 5G network is about much more than just transmitting data at faster speeds. As well as increased speed, it will allow for more simultaneous connections and for the transmission of data in real-time with virtually no delay.With a ping, the time interval between the moment in which the signal is sent and the moment in which the response is made available – the response time of a system – is not delayed by more than a few milliseconds.
These characteristics – more simultaneous connections with no delay – and the ability to sustain a large quantity of gigabytes and terabytes, are of key importance to Artificial Intelligence, quantum calculations, augmented reality, biometrics, automation and to the transmission of data between machines: machine to machine (M2M). These things are also strictly interdependent: the development of one is necessary for the advancement of the others.
If we think about the research that originated within the military and was subsequently applied to the civilian sphere – like the research on radars that later led to microwave ovens – the 5G network and related developments like Artificial Intelligence can be implemented in both civilian and military spheres simultaneously. This not only transforms the weapons of war – with new arms like automatic military vehicles and drones that can fight wars – but also the way wars are waged. The digitalisation of the battlefield theorised by Darpa (the American military research body) is based on the constant exchange of information and the coordinated and immediate decision-making that follows.
The fact that Google’s AI AlphaGo defeated all other players at the game Go – which is much more complex than chess – attracted a lot of interest among the military’s high command who saw in it the demonstration of “strategic thinking” and therefore the potential to develop plans and make decisions in wartime contexts.
The 5G network is the breakthrough that allows the smart city to be developed in full and the Internet of things to emerge definitively, the internet of cybernetic humanity: an enormous information network in which everything – humans, other animals, natural environments, urban adornments, infrastructure, services – will be connected and communicate within an integrated system.
The idea to develop an invisible technology that is transparent and pervasive and must be able to
engage people at different points in their day through objects used in day-to-day life, dates back to research conducted in the 80s at the Xerox research centre in Palo Alto, Xerox PARC.
The term ubiquitous computing coined by PARC researcher Mark Weiser represented the idea of a new type of human-machine interaction which developed into the well-known Internet of things.
In 2002, IBM’s director described the intelligent planet that had been conceived in his labs: “the world’s digital and physical infrastructure will converge. We are putting computing power at the service of things that we would not previously have recognised as computers. In fact, almost everything – whether they be people, objects, a process or service, a public or private organisation, large or small – can become responsive to the digital reality and form part of a network”.
Passive sensors will become active and real-time data analysis will inform real-time actions – like a car engine being turned off if you haven’t paid your insurance. Real-time not only refers toa technological structure but also represents an anthropological transformation in which there is no room for uncertainty. Everything, including something unexpected or an error, must be predicted or picked up on in the precise moment it manifests itself. This is total dominion on the living but also on the course of events.
“However it is a form of control that is more poignant and that not only feeds on recent or old archives but also on the state of reality in the moment in which it is formed […] You might call it “the constant transparency of the existence of the present.””7.
The Internet of things brings surveillance society to fruition: the things around us watch us and listen to us. We are also surveilled by the things we use on a daily basis which constantly transmit information on things that do or don’t happen. Our entire surroundings actively work to register and record our lives in full.
Without the constant production of data, the development of Artificial Intelligence itself would not be possible: data on individual consumption, behaviour and states of health, on the functioning of new urban systems, on geographical territories, on the climate – data on everything that’s classed as information.
Google does not extract data merely to sell advertising space. It gets used to develop its Artificial Intelligence projects. Google’s self-driving autopilot cars were not developed following technological innovations but thanks to the large amounts of data extracted to improve Artificial Intelligence using neural networks. Similarly, Facebook’s relative advantage in biometric recognition systems lies in the 350 million photos uploaded onto the site by users every day.
Artificial Intelligence becomes necessary when the world’s ability to generate information surpasses the ability to process and analyse it. Its development will be crucial for the analysis of Big data, the development of self-operated vehicles and for the automation of industry and services. For this to happen, a 5G network is required. A new convergence that signals an epochal transition in which the 5G network is at the heart of this cybernetic revolution.
The new colonialism
“It is maps that create empires”in lands that have yet to be conquered. Street View aims to make everything in the world representable, reachable and indexable via Google. “Contribute to Street View, “Create your own 360° tour thanks to the products compatible with Street View” is what the project’s presentation says, a project which is also based on people’s participation and perfectly in line with the new participatory approach. Street View is not only made up of streets but also of information on how they are travelled by people.
As colonialism conquered new lands, they had to be mapped. Today, mapping is extended to human beings themselves. In 2020, Facebook will have 700 million new smartphones in Africa and aims to become its new platform just like in other places in the world that are on the digital margins. This will give them access to data on future users and therefore consumers. FreeBasic is a digitalization app for less developed countries that provides free access to the internet and to a range of services among which the only free ones are those developed by Facebook. Through its philanthropic façade, the app gathers key information such as health data and data that benefits women. The aim is to gain control of personal data, shape consumer choices and create new needs.
The control of 5G technologies, the global production of microchips, the extraction of lithium, cobalt, coltan and rare-earth elements required for microelectronics, have a crucial role to play in the global geopolitical chess match and will be the next conflict zones in the fight to secure global leadership. In 2018, the Trump administration had blocked the takeover of the number one microchip producer Qualcomm by a Singapore-based company. This was a strategic choice driven by the knowledge that being a global leader in microchip production was essential to lead in the 5G and AI sectors. The clash between the United States and the Chinese company Huawei should be understood in this context. China has become a competitor in the development of the 5G network, AI and automation. The Chinese corporation and online marketplace Alibaba has search engines and payment and trading platforms that allow it to manage a logistic chain that delivers 60 thousand parcels a day – ten times more than Amazon in the United States. Alibaba’s online payment platform has the capacity to manage 120 thousand transactions per second – a third of what US platforms can handle.
In the new race for Africa, the 4G networks already built by Huawei put the company in a position of greater power compared to the United States. To conquer new territory, telecommunications and digitalization infrastructure are required. Just as railways used to represent the advancement into new territory in the past, today, this is built on the back of telecommunications that are 5G-ready. An indicative example is the agreement backed by the Chinese government and signed by the start-up Cloud Walk Technology and the Zimbabwean government. The start-up develops facial recognition systems and the agreement includes the development of a mass surveillance system that is similar to the Chinese system. Zimbabwe will get new infrastructure while Cloud Walk Tecnology and China will receive huge amounts of data to improve the ability of facial recognition systems to recognise individuals across ethnic groups – one of the main problems in Artificial Intelligence training.
The engineering and automation of humans
There are certain technological developments that represent something that goes beyond their mere function and which cannot solely be reduced to their development in itself – think of the mobile phone which is not only a tool but represents the dominant transformations and paradigms of a specific historical and social moment.
The self-driven car that integrates sensors, data analysis and AI systems in a smart city made possible by the 5G network should be seen in this light. A self-driven car cannot exist in isolation and must be integrated in an urban environment and with the various sensors within it.
People use their cars to shop, eat, go to work, speak on the phone. Increasingly, they will interact with their car’s vocal assistant and sensors that will monitor their emotional states, set the right temperature and advise on how best to act. They will be perfectly attuned to the paradigm in which our lives are gently managed. Google is not interested in the car itself but in the behavioural data it provides, not in the map itself but in the data returns from movements and map searches.
Google is increasingly investing in automated vehicles, domotics and wearable objects and Facebook is developing drones and augmented reality. It is no coincidence that IBM sold its entire computer production sector in 2005 to develop automated management systems. What emerges from the actions of digital companies is that their aim is not build cars but to be inside them so they can constantly surround us. Through its creation of Alphabet in 20158, Google revealed that digital companies want to extend into all areas of our existence and be ever-present in our lives.
Self-driving cars not only manage journey times but also the time spent travelling, as they extract and work passenger data to recommend suitable restaurants or shops. By providing the answers, the system decides what the right solution is to address a given problem or need in that moment, even when no needs have been expressed. Google’s app Driving Mode which makes recommendations for destinations and travel times before users know where they want to go. We are destined to become passengers in own our lives, just like in the self-driven car. Not only will the management of data become automated, the aim is to automate human beings themselves. It is about taking human beings out of decision-making processes and directing their behaviour in a model of rationalised cybernetics in which humans are the error and the unforeseen and where exceptions and limits will not be tolerated. A transhumanist ideology embodied by companies like Google and IBM that will be fulfilled in the creation of a machine-world.
As stated by the transhumanist Nick Bostrom: “As materials become increasingly malleable, the idea of a fixed species becomes problematic and reproduction loses its meaning. […] The more powerful and accessible our technologies get, the more we will be able to define ourselves…define the aims.Consequently, human groups will distinguish themselves based on the values that guide their choice of how to use these new powers to shape their morphology and their destiny.”
The technocracy of Silicon Valley boasts that it is working for the benefit of future generations, but what is meant by future generations? Those who are not generated, but produced in labs between microscopic slides, test tube cells and cultures, through the genetic modification of embryos, ectogenesis and cloning, without bodies every meeting, without a mother or a father.
We are facing an ontological transformation – in an antropotechnical dimension – as the very concept of humanity is redefined. An anthropological transformation – defined as the radical transformation of new generations – is underway, in which human beings are uprooted, eroded and with a sterilization of their capacity for awareness and resistance.
Humanity will be dispossessed of its ability to engage with reality, “we live in a world where things are retreating from consciousness”9. Without a conscience, it will no longer be possible to develop the sense of awareness and responsibility required to act in a society that produces opinions that leave the existent unchanged and don’t have consequences. Camus wrote that there is no such thing as a rebellion that isn’t centred on the idea of an offended human nature, one which is mortified and deserves redemption.
Resisting the megamachine
We find ourselves in an epochal moment marked by profound and irreversible transformation. Now is the time to realise this and fight against it.
The 5G network, while enormous, is only the means by which a world called the Internet of things – made up of communicating objects, and more recently, communicating bodies – can travel at high speeds.
In the world as we’ve known it up until now, it was impossible to foresee the intention and direction of these developments, even when they were confined to innocent labs or used to enslave animals on industrial farms.
It took a long time to bring technological processes to fruition, in particular, to bring them into the social sphere – with the accompanying social upheaval – and to pave the way for their social acceptance through so-called public participation which lies at the heart of the rigged democratic game. In recent years, the accelerating speed of technological progress has meant that we’ve seen the needs of the technological world before their actual development: wars, climate disruption and finally, the health dangers that stem from the creation of permanent pandemics, all speed up these processes and justify what has been under development for years. At their centre lies widespread Artificial Intelligence – not as a means but as an end and as a type of nonlife.
The process of economic re-ordering in which States are currently engaged is being used to reconfigure a new world made up of digital dictatorship and “health terror” and is treated as if it were the only state of things to ever have existed. Fear, hatred and attention are channelled towards something immaterial that cannot be fully understood. It is the system itself that provided us with the tools to understand this new reality through its propaganda and experts, but soon, these things will become concrete with vaccines and microchips on a mass scale. In this narrative, a crucial step has been missed, which until recently, still had meaning: opposing the present state of things. Why would there be opposition when we are all united through the same fears and hope for the invisible enemy that threatens everyone’s health?
This signals the importance of finding meaning once again and of attributing meaning to things in a way that encompasses different values, as stated by Ted Kaczynski in “Hit where it hurts“:“It isabsolutelyessentialtoattackthesystemnotintermsofitsowntechnologically-oriented values,butintermsofvaluesthatareinconsistentwiththevaluesofthesystem.Aslongasyou attackthesystemintermsofitsownvalues,youdonothitthesystemwhereithurts,andyou allowthesystemtodeflateprotestbygivingway,bybackingoff”.
Reattributing meaning must begin with the recognition that research labs concretely aim to engineer humans and reduce us to automatons, much like the robotic devices that move parcels in the logistical sector. The key developments which the system cannot afford to lose in or retreat from must also be understood in their concrete form: the 5G network, Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnologies, synthetic biology, genetic engineering and artificial reproduction.
By dealing with these questions only in part, we are limiting ourselves to focusing on the latest harmful effects or on certain aspects and we risk losing sight of the whole, while making action less incisive. For example, in the case of GMOs in agriculture, the system is open to dialogue, whereas the genetic engineering of humans is not. Yet, it is self-explanatory that when control over our bodies, their processes, and reproduction is lost, all ethical barriers will come down and the system will be able to engineer the living in its totality. Analysis and action should immediately be directed at places where it hurts, without being afraid to touch on questions that are seen to be untouchable or of being criticised for being an isolated, disconnected, and, in short, premature minority.
If the transformations overwhelming us are unprecedented and cannot be interpreted using existing concepts and tools, the same applies to resistance. It will have to adapt to the present and find new strategies for intervention that must be efficient and aim for the focal points of the new digital world. The passion for struggle, which they’d like to weaken or domesticate and bring into a virtual or symbolic sphere, must be discovered. Time is running out, like an electronic tag, without respite. The changes that will take place in future months and years will be permanent and there will be no going back. So, for those who love life the only thing left to do is to bring it to fruition and be driven by a way of feeling that still makes sense, towards the freedom that develops in the midst of struggle.
May 2020
Resistenze al nanomondo
www.resistenzealnanomondo.org
1 Pièces et Main d’Ouvre, Manifeste des Chimpanzés du futur contre le transhumanisme, Service compris, 2017.
2 Wiener Norbert, The Human Use of Humanity Beings, Houghton Mifflin H., 1954.
3 Han Byung-Chu, Im Schwarm. Ansichten des Digitalen, MSB, 2013, trad. it., Nello sciame. Visioni del digitale, Nottetempo, 2015.
4 “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks. […] The engineers of the human soul must forge the new Soviet man”. Joseph Stalin, Speech at home of Maxim Gorky, 26 October 1932
5Han Byung-Chul, Was ist Mach?, Ditzingen, 2005, trd. it., Che cosa è il potere?, Nottetempo, 2019.
6 Ibid.
7 Sadin Eric, La silicolonisation du monde, L’èchapeé, 2016, trad. it., La siliconizzazione del mondo, Einaudi, 2018.
8 Alongside the search engine, Alphabet: an operating system (Android), an advertising service (AdWord), an online video platform (You Tube), map services (Google Maps e Street View), healthcare companies (Calico), an education service (Google for Education), domotic products and products tied to the internet (Nest Lab), infrastructural networks (Google Fiber), robotics (Boston Robotics), urban planning (Sidewalk Labs), Artificial Intelligence (Google Brain e Google DeepMind), a lab for moon-based projects (Google X), self-driving cars, a private equity fund (CapitalG) and an investment company (GV) to support start-ups.
9 Graham Harman, Heidegger on Object and Things, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, The Mit Press, 2005.
Published in 325 magazine: https://325.nostate.net/, https://325.nostate.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/325-12-net.pdf
Against eugenics and anthropocide. AN APPEAL TO ABOLISH ANY ARTIFICIAL REPRODUCTION OF THE HUMAN BEING
Against eugenics and anthropocide
AN APPEAL TO ABOLISH ANY1 ARTIFICIAL REPRODUCTION OF THE HUMAN BEING
A crime against humanity is taking place before our eyes.
This crime, born in the brains of biologists2 and committed through the means of medicine and genetics, presents itself outwardly as a good deed and an emancipation for mankind.
A good deed for victims of sterility (organic or due to the chemical and industrial poisoning of the environment), for single women and couples of the same sex who are naturally infertile.
Emancipation from the living – spontaneous, autonomous and unpredictable – from the constraints of nature from which derives birth with all its uncertainties.
This crime is eugenics (at first called viriculture or aristogenics), the artificial selection of the human species, renamed this way in 1883 by Galton, a cousin of Darwin and also co-inventor of biometrics together with Karl Pearson (1857-1936). Or again race hygiene (Rassenhgyiene) in 1904, by Alfred Ploetz and Ernst Rüdin, two Nazi doctors.
A crime supported and spread by countless scientists, businessmen (Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller), thinkers (Renan, Teilhard de Chardin), political leaders (Trotsky, Churchill, Hitler). It was again renamed transhumanism in 1957 by Julian Huxley – Aldous Huxley’s brother (Brave New World), biologist and director of UNESCO – after the Nazis had revealed the true nature of eugenics. The creation in a laboratory of an Übermensch, a “master race” of “enhanced” supermen.
Machination of the human (artificial production, genetic modifications), this is the means employed by eugenic transhumanism. That is, by this racism coming from laboratories, which its promoters disguise today as pseudo-egalitarianism3.
Eugenics is not something which threatens to contaminate reproductive technologies; on the contrary, it is their very motor and driving force. It is eugenics which has activated research on genetics and “procreation sciences” in order to fulfil its projects of a “pure” and “superior” race.
This “transhumanist” race hygiene is no longer limited to state policies as in the 20th century and still today in China and Singapore; rather, it is now a “reverse” technocratic chain (Galbraith) which has put State and Capital at the service of its will to power, in order to impose its products on the masses of consumers. “Individual” choices are modelled upstream through “creative destruction” (Schumpeter) of the conditions of natural reproduction – free, unpaid for and sexual -, through marketing, advertising, the dominant ideology, ostentatious consumption, imitation and mimetic rivalry.
Watch these crowds of zombies following techno-parades, liberal-libertarian, or libertine, shouting their “desire for a child”, “a child if I want, when I want, the way I want!”. At the same time, a child like I want and conceived the way I want. Mass delusions. The price of emancipation from the living and its natural constraints is submission to the technical constraints of the machine world, and to the power of the machinists. Biocrats, experts and specialists.
This means that no increase in productivity nor in production will ever fulfil the “needs/desires” of a captive practice on which the biocrats will ceaselessly impose new products (new desires, new “needs”, new standards), improved, “enhanced” thanks to advance in knowledge and technological spin.
The “right to desire a child” (alias, “right to a child”) of sterile people – natural or accidental – is the pretext today for expropriating the fertile of their natural right to natural, free and unpaid reproduction.
– for appropriation and destruction of these rights by the biocrats (doctors, geneticists, laboratories).
– for generalising artificial reproduction, submitted to the plans and procedures of eugenic and transhumanist scientists and made the new norm. Among couples who today give in to the mode of reproduction in the laboratory, 15% are not affected by any declared pathology.
– for restoring “racial hygiene” with the advent of an “enhanced”, machined superman, and the elimination of the ordinary subhuman, forced to buy or to make GMCs, Genetically Modified Children, to survive the competition of the fittest and of “intelligent machines”.
“Social Darwinism”, once denounced by the left in the name of equality, has taken on a modern dress thanks to “technological Darwinism”, which it claims in the name of a false equality.
The production of the first artefact-child, Louise Brown, on July 25, 1978, in the hospital of Oldham in the UK, split our natural and social history in two.
Just as scientific progress opened the road to artificial reproduction of the human since 1990, thanks to genetic triage (alias PGD or pre-implementation genetic diagnostics), it has involved the elimination of a growing number of anomalies and undesirable embryos. For example, albinism, one of the “246 different genetic illnesses” detected before in utero implanting of bearer embryos4. This means the improvement of the product offered to “parental projects” and “intending parents”. An “enhancement” which can only accelerate the speed of innovation and of future “progresses in knowledge”.
The fallacious distinction between “negative” and “positive” eugenics can only deceive those who want to be misled. While amniocentesis (1950) and echography (1958) have permitted the abortion of a great many people affected by Down syndrome in the West and of females in the East, gamete banks already sell to “intending parents” the positive selection of certain features, in order to obtain children who conform to the “parents’ projects”. Sex, colour of eyes, hair, skin, and supposed “genes of intelligence”. Whether through purchase of gametes of Nobel Prize winners or other geniuses, as in the USA; or by incentives to couples having higher educational degrees, as in Singapore; or by genome sequencing of individuals with a higher IQ, as in China, in view of creating a population of Super-Chinese.
Summing up, to quote Dr Laurent Alexandre, a modern fan of racial hygiene: “Brain enhancement can be got by two ways only: genetic selection and manipulation of embryos, or electronic action on our brain5.»
Crisp-Cas9 “scissors” (2012) have already been used to compose genetically modified children, as in China (2018) and in laboratories all over the world. Meanwhile, we wait for the fabrication of artificial gametes starting from source cells, serial production of embryos and their selection using the algorithms of genetic big data, as well as the development of the artificial uterus to achieve machination of reproduction.
To put it clearly, an anthropocidal movement, issued from the laboratories, which brings together scientists as well as political leaders, as much of the left as of the right, communists as well as fascists; Jews as well as Christians, believers as well as atheists, have undertaken the elimination and replacement of our natural common species by an artificial, superior species.
This movement, in its first wave, took the shape of eugenic laws in countries of Protestant culture, from Indiana (1907) to Canton of Vaud (1985), passing through some thirty states of the USA, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Estonia.
Temporarily beaten in 1945, after the extermination of 250.000 physically or mentally disabled in the Nazi slaughterhouses and the establishment of Lebensborn (fountains of life), SS breeding farms for the “master race”, this movement did not receive at Nuremberg trials the qualification of “genocide” and “crime against humanity”, which at least would have given the facts a name. The victims did not fall within the legal definitions (“persecutions for political, racial or religious reasons…”, “national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such…”). They had no associations of defenders. And then, it would have been necessary to judge far too many respectable politicians and scientists, belonging to the victorious nations, whose example the Nazis had simply followed, applying their lesson with radical and disciplined ingenuity.
It is significant that doctors, educated and progressive university graduates, were the most Nazified corporation, with 50% NSDAP membership, far from the populist cliché of the brute, the unemployed and the deviant scoundrel.
The establishment, in 1978, of artificial reproduction for sterile heterosexual couples, its tacit extension first to fertile couples and then, today in France, with the third edition of the bioethics law, to lesbian couples and single women (as we look forward to seeing male couples and single men), stems from a biological (necrotechnological) aggression against our common humanity.
Behind the good feelings and theatrical indignation, the tearful and syrupy grimaces, the overflowing aggressiveness and the blackmail of the claims to “equality”; behind the tactical manipulation of the “desire for a child” and of the associations of sterile people (natural or accidental) by transhumanists, fellow travellers of the androphobic and neo-sexist movements (queer, LGBT & Co.); it is the same strategic project which has been going on for more than a century. A project where theorists and practitioners openly state their final goal in their writings and demonstrations. Not only to eliminate males from reproduction, but females as well along with all sexual reproduction, replacing them with the superior race of Genetically Modified Inhumans.
Their final goal is the destruction of our reproductive rights, our sterilization, forced or agreed, and our disappearance as ordinary human beings, capable of natural, free and sex-based reproduction. Just as everywhere else in the world, from Germany to China, from Sweden to the USA, from India to Peru, millions of sub-humans, of superfluous and undesirable individuals, physical or mental invalids, poor, alcoholics, deviants and members of “lower” ethnic groups were sterilized. And if we object to sterilization and our own disappearance, the superior Inhumans will know how to implement programmes of compassionate euthanasia, like the Aktion T4 carried out between 1939 and 1941 in Germany. If only to ensure space and vital resources (Lebensraum) on an over-populated earth, ravaged by two centuries of industrial pillage. The advent of a superior race, in itself, implies the disappearance of the inferior race.
We are therefore in a state of legitimate self-defence. Called upon to act or disappear. We, ordinary human beings, political animals and the chimpanzees of the future6.
We know that no promise, no wall of paper, “charter of good conduct”, ethical rule, national or international law, will stop this permanent action of force based on the will to power, transgression, violence of fait accompli and technical-scientific racing. Whatever one scientist, laboratory, business, country, forbids itself, another will do.
We know that transhumanism is the ideology of the ruling technocracy and of “converging technologies” (NBIC, nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science); to remain free and human, it will be necessary to close most of nano-bio-neuro-cyber-technology laboratories in the world.
However, we proclaim that the “right to desire a child” by individuals struck by accidental sterility (heterosexual) or refractory to any sexual relations with members of the other sex, cannot prevail over the right of the immense majority of human beings, or over the right of the species itself, to preserve and perpetuate itself, as it has done over its whole evolution, for millions of years, and as our hominid and mammal ancestors did before us.
In order to fight the threat facing us, we demand – unlike the millions of victims from the 1930s to the present:
– That a name be given to the massive aggression launched against us, ordinary human beings, and against our faculties of natural, free and sex-based reproduction.
– That national and international institutions qualify as “crimes against the species” any form of artificial reproduction of the human being, any genetic selection and modification of the human being.
– We demand the end of payment for child production by the social security and the closure of all gamete banks, public or private. Social security money must help those of the people who are truly ill, and not satisfy the selfish and narcissist desires of the voluntarily or involuntarily sterile.
– We call on all fertile people to reject such massive and revolting propaganda, and to refuse any gift or sale of gametes, ova or spermatozoa to laboratories. And to dissuade their relatives, acquaintances and anyone else, from taking part in such processes.
Alert human beings!
Let us fight anthropocide!
Let us clean the laboratories of the “superior race”!
Les Amis de Bartleby (Bordeaux), les Chimpanzés gascons (Gascogne),
Hors-Sol (Lille), Lieux communs (Paris), Pièces et main d’œuvre (Grenoble),
Resistenze al Nanomondo (Italy)
October 2019
https://lesamisdebartleby.wordpress.com
http://hors-sol.herbesfolles.org
https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr
http://www.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/
www.resistenzealnanomondo.org
1 IVF -in vitro fertilization, pre-implantation diagnosis, GPA (surrogacy), genetic modifications, artificial gametes and uterus, cloning, etc.
2 Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), August Weismann (1834-1914), Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), Alfred Ploetz (1860 – 1940), Charles Davenport (1866-1944), Ernst Rüdin (1874-1952), Julian Huxley (1887-1975), Hermann Muller (1890-1967), Ronald Fisher (1890-1962), J.B.S Haldane (1892 -1964), Tage Kemp (1896-1967), Otmar von Verschuer (1896-1969), James Watson (1928…), Miroslav Radman (1944-…), Daniel Cohen (1951-…), Laurent Alexandre (1960 -…) etc.
3 Cf. André Pichot, La Société pure. De Darwin à Hitler, Ed. Flammarion, 2000.
4 Cf. 2016 Report of Agence française de biomédecine.
5 Causeur n°71, septembre 2019.
6 According to cybernetician Kevin Warwick: “Anyone who decides to remain human and refuses to improve will have a serious handicap. They will form a subspecies and form the chimpanzees of the future” See the Manifesto des Chimpanzés du futur contre le transhumanisme, Pièces et main d’œuvre, (Service compris, 2017).Against-eugenics-and-anthropocide-1Download
In Italian: https://www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/italia-mondo/senza-categoria/contro-leugenetica-e-lantropocidio-appello-per-labolizione-di-ogni-riproduzione-artificiale-dellumano/
In French: http://www.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/spip.php?page=resume&id_article=1200
We thank Cristiana Pivetti for the drawings
Second international meeting: THREE DAYS AGAINST TECHNO-SCIENCES Italy, 24-25-26 July 2020
This year too,we are proposing an informal, convivial and international opportunity for discussion and reflection among individuals and organisations engaged in building an analysis and a critique of what we may call the technoworld. A world which is going through an epoch-making paradigm shift, where all bodies and our very experience have become one of the most important new raw materials. Engineering of the living and digital control are increasingly replacing a large part of the previous market of commodities, which are becoming obsolete. On a planet which has been plundered well beyond its biological limits, the re-designing through synthetic biology and artificial reproduction in a eugenic key of human beings and their management represents the new path forward. This of course for those who will be included in the new power arrangement, for the others no plans have emerged, or perhaps the fact that they have not been presented is already an answer in itself, they will certainly not be satisfied with merely marginalising a part of the world.
For those who ask where the current system, based on systematic exploitation of the planet, can find a way to reorganise itself, incorporating into its discourse the farce of sustainability, the answer lies in taking over human beings themselves: managed, influenced and addressed in their behaviour so that they themselves produce processes which can turn them into commodities. This is the true essence of green and sustainable policies to save the planet from so many catastrophes, of which climate catastrophe is only a part. Human beings who will soon be genetically edited in a process of ongoing perfectibility, where the body will be seen as a limit to be overcome, where what is human will be considered an error, and must therefore continuously adapt to a machine world. A techno-scientific adaptability which will become the only possibility. We can now seem how the cybernetic paradigm, according to which “the environment we live in has always been so radically modified that today we are forced to modify ourselves”, takes a material and dramatic shape.
One of the main motors of this process is so-called artificial intelligence, increasingly pervasive, which does not impose is will by force, but is moving into every sphere of our existence, without giving us time to understand where and when this process began, and especially makes it superfluous or impossible to understand its more profound processes.
In these months, we have been seeing how quickly the 5G network is being launched in the world, and how this merely represents the beginning of the overwhelming flow of the internet of commodified bodies. We have also seen in China the management and control of millions of people through the 5G network and other surveillance technologies, in order to handle the quickly spreading Coronavirus contagion. Control and management on such a vast scale has never before been seen o attempted. An experiment which closely involves the international scientific milieu, the one that wears a white smock over camouflage: never has such a huge laboratory been thought of before, and the old form of totalitarianism, in a large part of the world, is fading off to make way to soft control and management of bodies, more effective however than repression and barbed wire. As supporters of artificial intelligence and their transhumanist fans have repeatedly announced, the real strength and power of these technologies lies in the fact that they intervene in dealing with the new and most critical challenges the planet will be facing in the near future. We have become used to war as a model for reinforcing power and creating and managing new markets. Today, there is also something new: a cybernetic and transhumanist paradigm which expresses itself through algorithms, often leaving it to these to solve problems, something which is blended in the lab with surprising efficiency, where apps and prescriptions dressed up as suggestions sent by smartphone in China have turned millions of people into sanitary prison guards of themselves.
Around us, profound transformations need to be understood, the analyses we make with the usual interpretations are limited and reductive, they are not able to grasp today’s transformations, power evolves and so must our analyses: this is the basis for undertaking and assigning priorities to fight for. How can one fight something one does not know? What one cannot understand? There are fundamental epochal shifts going on, shifts we need to understand. We have to see in which direction power is moving, before it fully implements its projects, so we do not come too late, and especially so they do not find us once again unprepared.
It is with this spirit that we are organising this year a second meeting, scheduled for the month of July, in order to involve organisations and individuals from various countries already engaged in a profound and clear analysis of the present, and actively involved in opposition to the developments of techno-sciences. An involvement which may break the glass window of inevitability through which too many stare passively at the course of events. A meeting to reinforce critical thinking in discussion with other organisations and individuals, who may follow different paths, but share a common desire to understand what is going on around us.
We shall focus on smart cities, 5G networks, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, artificial reproduction of human beings, genetic engineering and redesigning of living beings through synthetic biology.
The programme, place of meeting and exact dates will be made known shortly.
Since this meeting is entirely self-organised and with very limited means, please help us spread this text wherever there may be listening ears and burning hearts, worried about the near future which is already our present.
Collettivo Resistenze al Nanomondo
For information and contact:
www.resistenzealnanomondo.org, info@resistenzealnanomondo.org
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Program THREE DAYS AGAINST TECHNO-SCIENCES 24-25-26 July
THREE DAYS AGAINST TECHNO-SCIENCES
24-25-26 July 2020
Second international meeting
At Altradimora, strada Caranzano 72, Alessandria (AL), Italy
FRIDAY 24th
1 p.m. lunch
3 p.m. Presentation of the meeting
3.30 p.m. Virus and technical transfiguration of the world
A critical view to find our bearings in the pandemic tide
Showcasing of the emergency, astutely intertwined with the processes of technical reconfiguration of society, has quickly broken down and recomposed what is “normal”. Memory of the world before is archaeology by now. And the thrust is towards a microscopically coded existence of numbered bodies, made transparent by the technomedia dimension.
What seemed at first to be a brief moment, soon turned out to be the opposite: the well calculated management of an emergency, with an outcome which was not something utterly new: rather, it was the result of long term processes.
Unrelenting capitalist production and the irreversible assaults on the Earth have thrust us into the toxic world we find ourselves in today, suffocated by a medical spirit which threatens to disinfect even our imagination. In a society where memory is short, instantaneous, we need to analyse the present we are living through, and how there is no going back in processes where we risk loss and forgetfulness.
Silencing the technocrats and their cheerful announcements, for the oncoming artificial world.
Nella (Bergamo – Italy)
8 p.m. dinner
SATURDAY 25th
8 a.m. breakfast
9 – 10 Manufacturing children
In the longue durée of capitalism, children have initially been treated as pure workforce, “produced” by women who by religion and law had to undergo coitus and rear the ever growing new generations of workers, until the moment when, gaining emancipation from the institution of the family, women could control their fertility. This change, and the increasing infertility due to industrial pollution of the environment, is at the root of the success of new markets in offspring.
In this phase of capitalism, children have started to become a commodity to be commissioned, purchased, made to order, modifiable by cross-sex hormones if their behavior does not conform to their assigned gender.
My contribution will highlight the interplay between laws (in particular “bioethical laws”) and the diffusion of these markets in children, reporting data and trends of the manufacturing of children.
Daniela Danna (Lecce – Italy)
10 – 11 The transhumanist vision takes shape
How human reproduction turns into production of the living
Transhumanism is the ideology of the convergence of biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, IT science, neurosciences. It is a world view which leads to an ontological and anthropological transformation of what is human; to erosion, uprooting and sterilisation of the capacity for awareness and resistance. The human being of transhumanism is a biomedicalised human being, with a single, totalitarian dimension, where what is human is seen as the mistake, where everything has to suit criteria of ongoing perfectibility, so as to constantly adapt to a machine/world.
Medically assisted procraction (MAP) are the path to transhumanism, after girls were edited in China, legalization of “MAP for everybody” – provided for by the recent revision of France’s bioethics law – is another step with no way back.
This step will start with a plastic tube for insemination, and will end up with genetic selection of embryos, after having extended the artificial reproduction of the human. Eugenics thus takes on a new face, freely accepted, desired, normalised and trivialised a new kind of power, gentle, soft and no longer coercive.
The human being is the ultimate target of the cybernetic and transhumanist project: the synthetic era does not only imply a radical redesign of the world around us, it also means redesigning ourselves, a non-life.
Silvia Guerini, Resistenze al nanomondo (Bergamo – Italy)
There will follow a debate on both talks
12.30 lunch
3 p.m. The Pancraticon & the society of constraint
«The society of control, we passed beyond it. The society of surveillance, we are in it. The society of constraint, we are entering it». This formula which Pièces et main d’œuvre has been repeating and developing in its texts since 2008, could, at that time, have seemed an outrageous linguistic pose of the kind widespread in anarchist and left-wing milieux. Today, anybody can clearly see how, in China and elsewhere, in a condition of pandemic or of climate chaos, technological means transform the policing of the population: not just keeping order, but in the original sense of the word, the «policy», «the organisation of the city». «The rational organisation, as the dictionary puts it».
The Pancraticon is the device of technical/totalitarian constraints aimed at «replacing the government of human beings with the administration of things» (Engels/Saint-Simon). Both on a macro-social scale (world-machine, networks, communicating sensors, RFID, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, etc.). and on a micro-social scale (man/machine, implants, cyborg, etc.).
Pièces et main d’œuvre (Grenoble – France)
7.30 p.m. dinner
9 p.m. Digital for recolonizers: institutions, Western governments and industrialists raiding Africa
The connectivity imperative lies at the heart of the discourse on African development. Though it looks new, the connectivist paradigm is actually part of the old modernizing tradition, based on the linear idea of “delay” and “catching up”. Like the latter, it tends to mask the reality of relationships of power and dominion which structure the field of IT and communications technologies. International institutions, the governments of the North and industrialists are carrying out yet another conquest of Africa, through progressive propaganda on the goodness of the digital for development. The African diasporas in Europe are being pressed to invest in the digital sector in Africa, a sector which largely depends on extraction of the minerals which the soil of Africa is full of.
Robin Delobel, Revue Kairos (Belgium)
SUNDAY 26th
8 a.m. breakfast
9 How to resist at times of “health emergency”?
None of what we have seen deployed during these months, in terms of surveillance technology, medical dictatorship, censorship of contrary voices, massive propaganda for a specific purpose and destruction of freedom in every context, should be seen as something “exceptional”.
The infrastructure deployed by the Sate, but especially by international finance and multinational corporations working in the digital, biotech and pharmaceutical industries, was neither improvised nor created ad hoc. Everything was already in place, waiting for the right condition for its full use. This condition was a global health scare.
The situation around us, which has changed in every context, now more than ever, should drive us to seek new ways and strategies to continue developing critical thinking and building paths of struggle.
Forcefully emphasizing priorities of intervention, which drew the line along the direction which started with criticism of engineering and artificialising the living, and led to the man/machine of transhumanism.
It is only if we understand the radical transformations which are going on, and unveil the new gentle, soft power, that we can face the insidious framework around us.
Introduction by Resistenze al nanomondo (Bergamo – Italy)
This event is intended as an invitation to groups and individuals to discuss and share experiences of resistance, so they are not unprepared for the new challenges which the changing reality imposes on us.
12.30 lunch
Directions:
By car:
From Genoa on the motorway to Alessandria, take the exit at Ovada, drive towards Acqui Terme and then follow the signs for Rivalta Bormida. After driving through Trisobbia and Rivalta Bormida, follow the road to Cassine and drive on for two kilometres until you see the signs for Caranzano. From Milan, take the exit at Alessandria Sud and follow the signs for Acqui and Cassine, the crossing for Caranzano is after Cassine. Same road from Turin.
By train: We can pick you up at the station of Acqui Terme, but please email us as early as possible in advance, and do not schedule your arrival during the sessions.
ALL THREE DAYS:
POISON-FREE FOOD WHICH HAS NOT ABUSED OF ANIMALS (PLEASE MAKE A DONATION TO COVER COSTS)
EXHIBITS AND DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION MATERIAL: BRING BOOKS, MAGAZINES, TEXTS
All debates will be translated into English
Altradimora,http://www.radiodelledonne.org/altradimora/ the venue for the meeting, is a house with beds and you can put up a tent on the meadow in front of the house. Help us organise the meeting in the best way, passing this programme around as much as possible, and letting us know in advance whether you are coming.
For information and contact:
www.resistenzealnanomondo.org, info@resistenzealnanomondo.org www.facebook.com/3giornatecontroletecnoscienze/
