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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   42375 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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@Magusoflight you said that the main thread right now is "wildly boring"; please let me know where this post ranks on the boring/exciting spectrum, and if it's not up to snuff, I'll try to incorporate your feedback into future posts.

The Tyranny of Transhumanism (paywall'd, but it's short, and I'll quote the relevant bits):

When Vladimir Putin joined Xi Jinping last week for a massive military parade in Beijing, the geopolitical message wasn’t exactly subtle. Ostensibly, the parade was a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Allied victory in World War II. But Xi’s decision to invite the leaders of Russia, North Korea, and Iran, while snubbing the United States, Britain, and France, made clear that he is thinking more about future alliances than historic ones.

As is often the case with carefully stage-managed propaganda events, the most revealing moment happened by accident. Chinese TV cameras picked up a conversation between Xi and Putin as they walked to the reviewing stand, in which they talked about the prospect of technology making human beings immortal. “There’ll be constant transplants of human organs, and maybe even people will grow younger as they age—even achieving immortality,” said Putin, 72, through a translator. “It could be that in this century humans might be able to live to 150 years old,” replied Xi, also 72.

Coming from Silicon Valley billionaires, such an exchange would be unremarkable. The idea that technology will soon be able to abolish death has been mainstream in technofuturist circles for decades. Still, there is something clarifying about hearing aging tyrants talk about the allure of immortality.

From the tech world’s perspective, the abolition of death looks like the apotheosis of progress: After conquering so many forms of suffering, science and technology will now do away with mortality itself. But if Xi and Putin were able to achieve immortality—or even just live until 150—no one could call it progress. On the contrary, it would mean historical arrest. The tyrant’s dream is to stop things from changing, since for him any change can only be for the worse—in the same way that, for a man atop a pyramid, moving in any direction means going downward. When a country settles into this kind of malign stasis—as in today’s Russia and China, where it is quite inconceivable that the ruler will ever leave office voluntarily—the only consolation is the knowledge that even the tyrant is less powerful than death.

It should be clarified that, as a matter of empirical fact, there is no such thing as true "immortality" or "stasis". Entropy comes for us all in the end, and the expansion of the sun in approximately eight billion years will, at minimum, force a change of environs for whomever remains on Earth at that time.

Nonetheless, in contradistinction to the majority of transhumanist aspirations which are of a fundamentally childish nature, there is in fact something to be said for the image thus outlined: the immortal Xi, who stands as the silent and watchful observer, a grim reminder of eternity. (I have specifically chosen Xi's name here as the metonymic signifier of dictatorial immortality rather than Putin's as a token of good faith, and to demonstrate that I'm concerned with structure here rather than content; I have publicly expressed my own harshly critical views of China in the past.)

Of course, in order for the narrative to work, in order to establish the appropriate mise en scène, it can only be Xi who is immortal, and not any of his subjects. He precedes you, and he will outlast you. You will not live to see your great-grandchildren grow to maturity; but Xi will. He measures the seasons of his life by the empires he has seen rise and fall; for you, the turning of the leaves and the thaw of Spring are all that is needed. He stands as the lone pillar that structures a great many ever-changing forces and events, an isolated outpost of stability, made all the more enigmatic by his remoteness from ordinary affairs such as "birth" and "death". You'll never get to find out how the story ends. But he will.

This would, at least, be the portent of a new drama; this would at least give the poets "something to sing about". If nothing else, it represents a vision, instead of the horror of and the recoil from vision. To have a vision is to make a choice, to accept the structural role of sacrifice, to say "yes, that is mine" but also "no, that is foreclosed"; it cannot be otherwise. I am not in any way opposed to the pursuit of immortality. But I am opposed to stasis, to the leveling of difference, and to the "end of history".

The formula of an authentic anti-egalitarian politics is: "if not me, then somebody". We might go one step further and say that, just as the communists have their "heroes of the revolution", so too the anti-egalitarian hero is the one who brings about the state of inequality. The Übermensch, far from being a victorious conqueror, may indeed be the man who, upon noticing that everyone has finally become equal, takes it upon himself to make the sacrifice, to abase himself, to accept a lower station, in order to restore the distinction of rank between man and man.

On the contrary, it would mean historical arrest. The tyrant’s dream is to stop things from changing, since for him any change can only be for the worse—in the same way that, for a man atop a pyramid, moving in any direction means going downward. When a country settles into this kind of malign stasis—as in today’s Russia and China, where it is quite inconceivable that the ruler will ever leave office voluntarily—the only consolation is the knowledge that even the tyrant is less powerful than death.

This is storytelling from Compact Mag, it doesn't have anything to do with reality. Xi's dream is not to 'stop things from changing'. His dream is to make change, to reunite Taiwan into China and make it the most powerful country in the world, reshape the world system.

contradistinction to the majority of transhumanist aspirations which are of a fundamentally childish nature

There's too much mysticism and obscurantism in discourse about transhumanism, I think at least in part because people are pattern-matching mystic, obscurantist religious dogma to transhumanism since both promise immortality and transcendent power. It's story-reasoning, not real reasoning. 'Tyrants don't want change'. Depends on the change! 'Xi Xinping wants to be immortal, as some eternal guardian of Chinese stasis'. That's fiction. Xi is a normal kind of leader. He wants more power. He wants advantageous change but not instability. The whole Marxist dialectic that Xi studies is in large part about systemic change due to technological and social development. He accepts the need to adapt.

The ideas behind transhumanism are actually based on something, it's not schizobabble. They're based on understanding of the human mind as an information system, not a soul or something forever tied to an organic body.

If you can render one person immortal, you can render many immortal. Xi Xinping is very unlikely to be so powerful that he can restrain the rest of the politburo from living together, not to mention business leaders pursuing immortality in secret. Whatever technology that allows for immortality will probably have many other economic and social effects that will likely destabilize the system and bring about new leadership dynamics. If he is so powerful as to suppress human greed for longevity, technological diffusion and economic-military-social transformations of the world, then transhumanism is secondary to whatever his personal hegemony is derived from, that's the interesting thing in this scenario.

He stands as the lone pillar that structures a great many ever-changing forces and events, an isolated outpost of stability, made all the more enigmatic by his remoteness from ordinary affairs

This is a story idea. It's super abstract. I just don't see how you can call other, rooted-in-reality discussion of transhumanism childish and then write this.

By "childish" I meant: the abdication of all responsibility, the demolition of any barriers between you and the immediate satisfaction of your desires. Turning the cosmos into an eternal playroom. Traditional Christian "folk" conceptions of Heaven are childish for the same reasons.

Undoubtedly I chose the word for its normative connotations, but I certainly don't think that being childish is a bad thing in every instance. I think that traditional notions of "being an adult", "being a man", etc, are essentially scams, and I take a childish attitude regarding them, and I frequently encourage others to do the same.

This is a story idea. It's super abstract.

There's nothing childish about stories, insofar as it's a story that structures a vision and a mode of life. Stories are how meaning is revealed.

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