Notes from a class on posthumanism
I've always thought of posthumanism as this thing with cyborgs and genetic engineering. In fact, the majority of the class' discussions centred around those two topics. Then the last class, combined with my own research, kind of shook me when a realization fell into place.
We are living in an increasingly posthuman world, because corporations have legal personhood and chimpanzees and other higher-functioning animals WOMEN, in many parts of the world where these corporations operate (for fuck's sake, women, how dare I forget about you) do not.
There is, in effect, a greater desire and capability now to turn humanity into one single, giant machine. That's what the WTO is all about. Simplifying, streamlining, removing snags so that the world can follow a neoliberal capitalist agenda. I mean, I'm always skeptical of theories that depend on a certain degree of paranoia, that there's thing that THEY don't want you to know about, but in this case I have a feeling that there's not much incentive to say "Hold on, we're going into foreign countries and completely displacing the populations and subsuming local traditions, this is a form of colonialism! Look at all the garbage and pollution we're creating and natural habitats we're destroying! Look how many people have died because of our machines!"
When you look at it on one hand, you have the corporate machine, which is the legal equivalent of a computer program. On the other hand, you have millions of people in economic and laborious servitude, sometimes living in squalor, for a product that will ultimately end up in a landfill after a year. Why does this system outweigh the needs and desires of the people who maintain it? The worst thing is... if you want to rise up and protest it, who do you fight? Who is Monsanto? Can you punch Monsanto in the face? Will you go to jail for it?
I'm no luddite, but man. The robots won the war and I didn't even realize they existed.
We are living in an increasingly posthuman world, because corporations have legal personhood and chimpanzees and other higher-functioning animals WOMEN, in many parts of the world where these corporations operate (for fuck's sake, women, how dare I forget about you) do not.
There is, in effect, a greater desire and capability now to turn humanity into one single, giant machine. That's what the WTO is all about. Simplifying, streamlining, removing snags so that the world can follow a neoliberal capitalist agenda. I mean, I'm always skeptical of theories that depend on a certain degree of paranoia, that there's thing that THEY don't want you to know about, but in this case I have a feeling that there's not much incentive to say "Hold on, we're going into foreign countries and completely displacing the populations and subsuming local traditions, this is a form of colonialism! Look at all the garbage and pollution we're creating and natural habitats we're destroying! Look how many people have died because of our machines!"
When you look at it on one hand, you have the corporate machine, which is the legal equivalent of a computer program. On the other hand, you have millions of people in economic and laborious servitude, sometimes living in squalor, for a product that will ultimately end up in a landfill after a year. Why does this system outweigh the needs and desires of the people who maintain it? The worst thing is... if you want to rise up and protest it, who do you fight? Who is Monsanto? Can you punch Monsanto in the face? Will you go to jail for it?
I'm no luddite, but man. The robots won the war and I didn't even realize they existed.