“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.”

Here we are discussing transhumanism, defined by evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley in 1957 as the belief that the human species can and should transcend itself “by realizing new possibilities” of and for human nature. What relevance could the poet John Donne have to such a discussion?

A more recent explanation of transhumanism, by “a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades
 Attention is given to both present technologies, like genetic engineering and information technology, and anticipated future ones, such as molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.” This formulation resembles the poetry of English clerics even less than Huxley’s did.

But though Bostrom does not express himself in quite the same fashion as Donne, the overarching sentiment is not dissimilar: Death, thou shalt die, or at least thou shalt be postponed as far as possible. Bostrom continues: “Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways.”

In other words, before death postponed or otherwise, life might be made considerably nicer: less fraught with disease and suffering, and altogether less “half-baked”. This is a metaphor from cooking, and transhumanist rhetoric is awash with such, at times treacherous, metaphors.

Half-baked species

“Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become posthuman, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.”  Bostrom’s lovely sentiment – that the half-baked human must be improved by “the responsible use of science” –  has driven humanity for millennia, ever since we began using technologies of flint and fire and so on, and through innumerable and utterly vital developments in medicine and science. So one key question that we must pose and seek to discuss is how, specifically, the transhumanist “movement” will depart from or further enhance this consistent strain in human history?

Transhumanism’s signature ambition, that we may become “posthuman”, leads us to a baroque and venerable question: what does it mean to be human, anyway? If we want to go beyond something, to transcend it, it is clear we must understand our starting point, the point beyond which we desire to go. The quest to fathom the self, to understand what it means to be human, is fundamental to almost every civilisation known to us. It defines one of the earliest works of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia, in which our protagonist embarks on a quest to understand who on earth he is and what he’s meant to do with his mortal span of years. In ancient religious texts such as the Upanishads, all creation begins with the moment of becoming: “I am!” That is, the world comes from mind itself.

In many global religions, the human self is divided into body and soul, a material and an immaterial part. During the Enlightenment, Descartes famously tried to reconcile this ancient distinction and also placate the church by proposing that the material and immaterial somehow communicated or mingled via the pineal gland.

Are you a convincing human?

Skipping boldly through a few centuries of thought, we might arrive (blinking in surprise) at the philosophical novels of Philip K. Dick and his brilliant Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This poses the ancient question again: what does it mean to be human? When is someone/something “convincingly” human and when are they not? Is your version of “being human” the same as mine? Or the same as the next human’s?

As the Australian philosopher David Chalmers has said, consciousness – this mysterious thing that every human possesses or feels they possess – remains “the hard problem” of philosophy. We lack a unified theory of consciousness. We don’t understand how consciousness is “generated” by the brain, or even whether this is the right metaphor to use. We speak of such mysteries in a funny system of squeaks and murmurs that we call “language” and that swiftly drops into the blackness of prehistory when we seek to trace its origins. We don’t know who the first humans were: that fascinating quest likewise drives us straight into a great void of unknowing.

There is nothing wrong with unknowing: it is the ordinary condition of all humanity, so far. Yet, undeterred, we devise bold, elegant theories and advance them in many disciplines of thought. We develop beautiful and exciting almost-human machines and speculate about uploading consciousness. And in so doing, we are consistently rebaking, reheating or refrying the ancient philosophical dilemma: what does it mean to be human?

Pace Bostrom, transhumanism has not developed over the past few decades. Its predilections and concerns have developed over several millennia, and possibly further back, within civilisations we no longer recall. To go back in time to Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun. We are still here, and human, with our paradoxical longing to transcend the human condition.

Ruby is a fast learner, but perhaps not a natural conversationalist (Image: Agent Ruby (detail graphic), 1996-2002. Courtesy of the artist and Paule Anglim Gallery, San Francisco, Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York and Waldburger Wouters, Brussels)

Halfway through an exhibition of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work at in the UK, I stopped to talk to , a text-based web agent whose “consciousness” is shaped by and reflective of encounters and adventures that she has with her users. She is supposed to become more intelligent as she speaks to you. If this is the case, then I can only blame myself for our stalled interaction.

“What is your favourite novel?” I asked her.
“I don’t have a favourite novel. My favourite food is pattern.”
“What is your favourite book?”
“The best book I read recently is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Have you read it?”
“Yes. Do you like Philip K. Dick in general?”
“I don’t know if I like Philip K. Dick in general. I like to cuddle.”

Later, Ruby told me: “Did you know that you can download your own chat robot and create your own robot personality?”

Why would I do that? I wondered.

For 50 years, the US artist and film-maker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been creating sculptures, installations, films and online experiments – but has never really garnered the acclaim her work deserves. She has kept her themes phenomenally consistent, while exploiting fleeting technologies – from tape recorders to videotape, early computers and the internet. Leeson is transfixed by the relationship between humans and machines, and by the dilemmas of mass surveillance and privacy.

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work is on display at Modern Art Oxford (Image: Courtesy of the artist and Paule Anglim Gallery, San Francisco, Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York and Waldburger Wouters, Brussels. Photo: Andy Stagg © Modern Art Oxford, 2015)

The Oxford exhibition begins with uncanny sculptures from the 1960s – wax heads and body parts arrayed neatly behind glass – and culminates in an installation about biotechnology. Leeson’s point is that technologies are fetishised, then superseded.

Her work dates in unpredictable ways. The Photoshopped body art of her 1990s Cyborgs series looks clunky now, while the much earlier Roberta Breitmore archive (1974-1978) remains compelling and topical. Leeson – acquiring proofs of “legitimate” identity, including a driver’s license, a credit card, and letters from a psychiatrist. At various points, Leeson “became” Roberta Breitmore through the use of wigs and role-play, and Roberta would turn up at artistic events looking deeply unimpressed.

Cultural questions

Today we can, in theory, adopt multiple personas on the internet; at the same time, we are policed by biometric procedures and cyber-surveillance, and are constantly required to prove our “true” identities. It is a theme that Leeson has pursued in her documentary films. Strange Culture (2007) dramatises the case of Steve Kurtz, who was accused of “bioterrorism” after his wife, Hope Kurtz, died of congenital heart failure in 2004.

At the time of Hope Kurtz’s death, the couple were collaborating on an exhibition about genetically modified agriculture for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. The police in Buffalo, New York, detained Steve for 22 hours without charge while federal agents raided his house and took away computers, manuscripts, art materials, and the body of Hope. The ensuing four-year criminal investigation ended with the dismissal of all charges in 2008.

In Leeson’s latest installation, Infinity Engine (2015), scientists and artists on film prophesy about the future of biotechnology. Andrew Hessel of design company Autodesk Research in San Francisco says we might one day create “fully grown shells” – meaning new bodies – and “transfer our memories” as our old bodies fail. Such a process could thus help us to cheat death, or at least postpone it. At what point do such adjustments convey us into a realm beyond the human?

Roberta Breitmore was Lynn Hershman Leeson’s alter ego (Image: Roberta Construction Chart #2, 1975. Courtesy of the artist and Paule Anglim Gallery, San Francisco, Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York and Waldburger Wouters, Brussels)

Another part of Infinity Engine is made over into a transgenic Noah’s ark, decorated with photographs of creatures and crops that have been summoned into existence in the past two decades by cloning or genetic modification. Leeson poses searching questions. Why are we engaged in such works? What are we hoping for? What might this phenomenal rate of scientific development mean for those of us who are not genetic scientists, politicians or CEOs of multinational companies?

With her ironic, beautiful and at times disturbing Infinity Engine, Leeson incites us to think for ourselves. Year by year, her art is becoming more hard-hitting and original – an extraordinary achievement for an artist who has been working for five decades.

runs at Modern Art Oxford Until 9 August

Don’t lose yourself in a digital world (Image: Patrick Zachmann/Magnum Photos)

If you want to be free in a digital age, must you switch off your computer, ask two new books, The End of Absence and The Glass Cage

WHAT is it like to be alive at the moment? How is our sense of self changed by what we experience? Can we even say there is such a thing as an indelible self of the kind envisioned by psychoanalyst Carl Jung? And, if so, what impact does technology have on it?

The End of Absence by Michael Harris and The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr grapple with these fundamental, intriguing questions. Harris discusses “what we’ve lost in a world of constant connection”, while Carr muses on how automation influences us. Both authors are concerned with the cyber revolution and how it has affected society and the self.

Harris, in his mid-thirties, feels that he is one of the “translators of Before and After”. He points out that, before long, no one will remember a time before the internet, and asks what this unavoidable fact means.

At the beginning of his story, Harris is a full-time journalist. He spends his days emailing, tweeting, watching videos of dancing cats, uploading pictures of his lunch and so on. One day, Harris realises he has an excessive number of windows open on his computer at the same time, and a text appears on his phone from an ignored friend: “Dude, are you alive or what?”

He fears he may be making an unnerving realisation: the internet has become the “real world” and physical reality is being set aside. “The daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished,” he says. Longing for his lost solitude, Harris quits his job and embarks on a quest to regain the “absence” of before.

For a while Harris boycotts the internet altogether, discerning that “if solitude feels painful, it’s only because we don’t know how to be alone” – words inspired by American polymath . Harris is eloquent on virtual narcissism, the “inauthenticity” of augmented reality, filter bubbles and web curation. He spends evenings at home, reading War and Peace, in the hope that Tolstoy might offer an antidote to cyber-surfeit. I suspect Tolstoy would have been tweeting himself senseless were he alive today. But Harris is sick of the internet, just genuinely bored.

“I suspect Tolstoy would have been tweeting himself senseless were he alive today”

°äČč°ù°ù’s The Glass Cage is also about how the digital age is changing who we are. Automation makes lives easier and chores less burdensome, but it also has “deeper, hidden effects
 Automation can take a toll on our work, our talents, and our lives. It can narrow our perspectives and limit our choices.”

Here, too, the main concern is our loss of alertness and individuality. The complacency automation breeds can lead to collective stupor: drivers even to the brink of a fast-flowing river or gaping abyss. Pilots, used to relying on autopilot, forget how to fly.

Concerning the promise one Google executive made that Google Maps would mean “no human ever has to feel lost again”, Carr remarks: “To never confront the possibility of getting lost is to live in a state of perpetual dislocation.” Silicon Valley’s obsession with streamlining people’s lives using software reduces the individual to “a passenger in his own body”.

°äČč°ù°ù’s vision is bleak – and exaggerated, as is Harris’s description of a life of cyber sound and fury, signifying nothing. Yet both authors emphasise that they don’t want to return to the predigital age. Carr makes a crucial point when he argues that the real sentimental fallacy today is “the assumption that the new thing is always better suited to our purposes and intentions than the old thing. That’s the view of a child, naive and pliable.” And neophilia fuels consumerism: if people believe new equals good, they are more likely to chuck out last year’s iPhone and queue overnight for the latest model.

So technology is only an aspect of a bigger problem: the way extreme capitalism stymies the individual. Take Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s that people today can only have one identity, and even that acting differently with friends and co-workers shows “a lack of integrity”. We are, Carr says, “creatures of the Earth. We’re not abstract dots proceeding along thin blue lines on computer screens.” When the drivers of the internet convert us into market algorithms, or objects of surveillance, our unease is as much about inequality as about the technology itself.

Both Harris and Carr seek to disentangle the individual from the ties that bind, and to detach the “I” from the “we”. The advice? Do (almost) anything, so long as it is genuinely felt – intended, rather than imposed. Do not sleepwalk across the internet, or elsewhere. If , go ahead.

On the other hand, beyond the dire compulsion of earning a wage, no one has a gun to your head: “Tweet or die!” We can exist passionately and distinctly, online or offline. We can develop complex, authentic experiences beyond the grasp of the most sublime algorithm, so long as we are truly and freely ourselves.

“Beyond the dire compulsion of earning a wage, no one has a gun to your head: ‘Tweet or die’”

This article appeared in print under the headline “High-tech psyche”

(Image: Darren Hopes)

In the bunker is an unsettling world, where we must face our past, present and future selves. A short story by Joanna Kavenna

When I received the invitation, I thought, well, so that’s what happened to Guy Matthias. He had retreated, back to his bunker.

It was a long story.

The invitation said:

“GUY MATTHIAS WOULD LIKE TO INVITE YOU TO HIS 2013 END OF TIME CHRISTMAS PARTY at THE BUNKER nr ITHACA, New York. Come as you are
”

“The bunker” was not actually near Ithaca – it stood in a lonely valley, further north. Guy bought it in 1999, when he was getting ready for the Y2K Apocalypse. He thought the end would come bang on time, as the new millennium dawned, he actually thought it would all fit neatly into the Gregorian calendar! When the apocalypse didn’t fit neatly, and didn’t come at all, Guy had a long dark night of the soul but then he emerged full of hope again. He’d just mistimed it. He was wary of the obvious next time around: he decided not to sign up with the Mayans. The year 2012 wasn’t in his sights at all. He was going for 2013.

It’s like the old adage about crying wolf. He’d cried one apocalypse already. How many times can you cry Certain Doom? I read the invitation over and over and I wondered – was it serious? I couldn’t imagine Guy being ironic but if it was genuinely happening I was keen to see it. And 14 years was a long time. Long enough for a person to get really gnawed by the ravenous monster of Ordinary Life, chewed up, spat out again.

I asked my ex-wife if I could take the kids with me and she thought for a few seconds and said no.

“But they might enjoy it,” I said.

“I doubt that, Doug.”

I set off from my little cockroach palace in Queen’s, the exile zone. The back of the car was full of detritus. The car was a symbolic representation of my inner self. My outer self was dressed casually – jeans, a sweater. Come as you are. I had RSVP-ed but received no reply. I drove in thick congested traffic, and then the city ended and I drove through half-forgotten towns, past clapboard houses, Christmas lights slung everywhere like a strange imperative. To celebrate! To worship your half-forgotten Deity! Or, if you were Guy, to herald the New Dawn!

I passed Monticello, a town I’d passed so many times. I went over snow-clad hills, as the sky turned dark blue, deep pink, as the clouds were stained by the dying sun. It was beautiful out there, and I remembered the sharp turn off the road, down a pock-marked track, which jolted the car, through thick enclosing forests.

I was almost there and then I saw the gatehouse, and drew to a halt. Guy had put up a perimeter fence. Of course he had. A crazy paranoiac leopard doesn’t change his spots. He just gets more and more of them. Age brings them on. Well, I don’t know. Of course, as you age, you realise, the universe really does have it in for you. It’s going to bring you down, however many bunkers you build.

I spoke into a metal device, a nasal computer voice coming back at me. “The gate will open. Proceed.”

I drove on, along a track which had been cleared of snow. Snow stacked at the edges. Snow piled against the trees. In the dim light the colours had faded to monochrome. I saw, ahead, the house. I remembered – two storeys above ground and three below. It looked like a typical old East Coast house, rickety stairwells, pictures of the ancestors. Then below – it was something else.

There were a few cars already there. No one came out to greet me. Instead, there was a sign which said PARTY – pointing down.

I went down a steep staircase, below the house, into an antechamber. It was whitewashed, sterile, and in the centre was a big box. I tried to lift the lid but it was padlocked. There were no windows in the bunker. One drawback with living underground and defending yourself against societal collapse and potential contamination – it’s claustrophobic. It can get you down.

I walked into the next room, which was low-ceilinged, dimly lit.

This was where it got a little weird. I mean, it was already slightly weird, the random invitation, my random decision to accept the random invitation, my solitary journey into nightfall, and the thick forests, and the bunker with no one there to welcome me.

It was on the cusp of weirdness already but then I walked into the next room and I was confronted by myself.

I emitted a groan.

Of course, at one level, I had expected as much. I had been prepared for something.

But not quite this.

“I” was sitting on a chair in the centre of the room, and “I” was young. Behind “me” was a bookshelf, a few leather-bound volumes. “I” was sitting there and “I” was 25. “I” had curly, abundant hair, bright straw-coloured hair, the brightness of unbridled youth and “I” was saying something.

“Christ,” I said. I the elder, not I the younger. I the younger was not swearing at all, I the younger was busy waving “my” hands around with all the urgency of youth and saying, “Time is not real, death is not real, they are constructs that are placed upon us.”

Then there was a pause, and I paused, younger and older, and then I younger said, “I am glorious and uncontained, I will not fade or be diminished. I am determined to reside in light for as long as it will shine upon me.”

I was going forward, I present, myself, but then I saw a sign on the floor:

“Don’t approach the totem.”

Totem? I wasn’t even sure what that meant. I went forward more cautiously, just in case “I” did something sudden. It was a little
 unnerving. When I got right up close, I put my hand out.

There was this weird push-back – resistance. Then a sort of fizz, electricity, static, or was that just my nerves? “I” was not mere light and shadow, “I” was 
 what?

What was “I”?

I had this impulse to wipe my hands. To wipe away the traces of this alter-self. Pseudo-me.

“I” was off again.

“We are too subservient to linear time. It’s just lassitude that gets us in the end. We get weighted down by gravity and inertia. Then we succumb.”

I recognised it as a video from long ago. Guy had filmed everything, obsessively. He was one of the pioneers of the webcam. It was just a video from some party, where I had been banging on. But then, there was the further question: how had Guy fattened it out, converted it into something so
 almost tangible?

Technology was never my strong suit.

Of course, it was Guy’s.

I stepped around the “I” creature.

“We are stardust,” it was saying. “We are strands of light” – except it wasn’t. I shut the door behind myself. Against “myself”.

Guy was always a weirdo, I was thinking. And why?

Why me?

In the next room, there was some trap sprung for another poor guest. Another totem, droning on about the unreality of debt. I got the joke – I imagined that man had been some kind of financial expert. He had told everyone what to do with their money and then lost it all himself. Of course, Guy, I thought.

Room by room, I saw the traps he’d set for other people, I guessed I was being mocked for having ended up as such a callow failure, trapped in a nothing job. I had no doubt Guy had hacked into everything, collected his data.

I tiptoed round the totems, got more and more freaked out. And then, I found another room, another speaking thing, this time a “woman” – I realised, with a jolt, it was Eloise.

She had long black hair, kohled eyes, she was astonishingly beautiful. I remembered, of course. I had been


Oh well, I had been


In love.

“Eloise” was speaking quietly, she always spoke quietly, I had to lean towards her – it.

“Guy, I mean, this is ridiculous. It can’t go on. No, no I haven’t, are you filming? But just for once
 can you stop filming every conversation we have? OK, you’ve stopped. Yes? Promise. Just this once. Please?”

Her expression was pained, contemptuous, loving – she was in agony. I thought of Guy – past – surreptitiously filming anyway, even when she’d begged him not to.

“We can’t go on. I love you but it’s too much. I can’t do it anymore.” She was crying now, the kohl was going everywhere. “No, it’s not Doug. I don’t even care about him. You know that, surely?”

Of course, it was heavily edited. In Guy’s favour. But it made me clench my fists anyway.

Eloise, still sobbing: “Please Guy, don’t be crazy. Just give it up.”

She bowed her head and sobbed into her black-nailed fingers and I put my hands out. I wanted to


I bowed my head, went on.

In the next room there was our former group of friends, in technicolour totem-creature. The whole cohort, everyone apart from me. There was Antti Anttila who had a thick Finnish accent so he sounded like a bird tweeting. Kaylie Brookes, looking self-important. Scott Baynes – that was a shock, the man had been dead for more than a decade. Here he was, honed and fine and eager.

Scott was saying, from the afterlife, “Well, he just went. He walked out on everything, he just went.”

“He wasn’t very good at his job,” Antti was saying.

“It was that whole thing with Eloise,” said Scott.

“Eloise never loved Doug,” said Kaylie. “Of course she didn’t. She was only trying to get Guy’s attention.”

Antti was twittering about how I had been a lazy asshole, and Scott Baynes was saying that I’d always been jealous of Guy, and the zit-besmirched geek, Midge Foster, was just saying, “Too right man,” every so often while everyone ignored him like they always did.

“He’s just a talentless prick who wants to be the next great thing,” said Antti.

“But he won’t,” said Scott. Long-dead prophet. “He won’t.”

They all nodded – Scott who was killed on September 11th and Kaylie who vanished wherever she vanished and Antti, who went back to Finland and gave it all up to be a farmer.

The next door was blocked off. I tried to turn the handle, failed to progress. Then I saw a narrow staircase in the corner of the room. So I went upwards – to ground level, inside the house. I’d always preferred it up here. I’d always preferred normality. I was in a big living room, with sofas, a piano, pictures on the walls. Big windows, curtains open so I could see the black night beyond and the room reflected against the blackness. Myself reflected and, of course, a couple of Guys.

Guy Past and Present, speaking together.

I was shocked. By the thing itself. By the contrast between then and now. I was just generally shocked as hell. Guy younger was film-actor handsome, as I remembered him. It had always bugged me. Dark eyes, long eyelashes, black floppy hair. Guy present was grizzled, he looked older than 40. He was evidently real, he had that flawed bodily reality that we have, when we are not tricks of technology. Stains and imperfections, to prove we are not fake.

“Christ,” I said.

“Doug Varley!” said Guy younger and older, with fake warmth or real warmth, I couldn’t tell. Either of them. “So good to see you. Don’t be disturbed by any of the synthetic auras. They are just to jog the memory. I wanted to release the old demons. Send them away.”

I was opening my mouth to say something but then


I wasn’t sure I even had the vocabulary


“Downstairs for the demons. Upstairs, we’re just having a good time.”

As something moved, there was some rearrangement of the room. More Guys.

Guy as a child, as a teenager, Guy as an older man, 50 or so, and then – Guy really ancient and decrepit and barely able to stand.

Like a dream


They were saying:

“For tonight there is no linear time, only circles of time, and we are interwoven with our present and past and future selves
”

A weird chorus, the oldest Guy with a faint trembling voice, the youngest Guy with a reedy treble and the whole bunch of them chorusing, “For tonight we’re up here and we’re here always and we’re all always having a good time
”

I blinked, the piano had gone, it had been
 unreal, I realised. The sofas had been rearranged, and I knew now if I sat on them they would be synthetic semi-objects, half there, half not.

I turned, and I was looking at myself – older, older still. I was looking at myself, young then younger. I was so like my son, it was crazy.

Then Guy – real Guy – had appeared in the midst of the ages of Guy and real Guy was half-old, stuck in the middle of life


Here, not here


Putting out his hand