Not too long ago, humans believed that the stars determined their fate. Some still do. It was a belief born of naïveté, misunderstanding the nature of those diamonds in the night sky. But it was also a sign of our hubris, to presume that those lights in the firmament could have any interest in us.

Rather than feel controlled by them, we now understand that the stars are not gods or arbiters of fate but places we now aspire to explore. The knowledge of what stars actually are, and how insignificant we are in comparison to the vastness of the cosmos, has humbled us. And yet we are brash eno­ugh to speculate that one day we will be determining the destinies of stars, not the other way around.

Today it’s pretty hard to see those stars. Pollution from smog and the spillage of light from our cities obscures our view of the heavens. The haze through which we must squint to glimpse the constellations reminds us, or reminds me anyway, that humanity’s upward trajectory is not a destiny but a story. A wish.

I am torn. I am stubbornly attached to the idea that one day we’ll all be living on starships, exploring the cosmos free of hunger, disease, poverty, and tribalistic conflict. Looking around at the pace of technological advances today, it still feels possible. I want it to be true.

But one only has to consider the speed and breadth of humanity’s destructiveness to have those dreams thoroughly dashed. Whether we look to the exhausted vitality of the natural world or the buckling integrity of our modern, enlightened societies, we can no longer deny the obvious. The world we made is crumbling.

I dread a global, systemic collapse for my own selfish reasons, of course. As much as I sometimes crave the solace and remoteness of a more rustic, pastoral life, I know that when the shit hits the fan, I’ll be one of the first to die of starvation or disease or be murdered by wandering marauders. I’m very much attached to, and a person of, the current age.

I dread it for my children even more. While they’re growing up faster than I can replace their socks, I can’t quite escape the guilt I feel for even bringing them into being when things are so dicey for the civilization they will have to make their way in. I desperately want them to thrive, not merely struggle to survive in a world their parents couldn’t keep.

Vacillating between hope and despair, I have somewhat paradoxically found myself captivated by two starkly divergent lines of thought, two seemingly opposing prophecies about the fate of humanity that at different times have seemed to me equally persuasive. One camp posits that human civilization is ripe for collapse and that industry, governments, society, and much of the ecology that sustains us will soon run aground, leaving the remainder of our species to cope with a blighted aftermath. The other proposes that despite the enormous challenges before us, human ingenuity will find solutions through technology and biological enhancement, defeating not just climate change but perhaps even death itself. I deeply yearn for the latter to be true. I am anguished that the former is much more likely.

In a more hopeful time, I was drawn to the optimism of transhumanism, the PhD-riddled intellectual movement that once excited my Star Trek–saturated imagination with its often-rapturous predictions of a humanity augmented with unimaginably sophisticated technology.

More recently, however, I have leaned away from utopian thoughts and into a palpable despondency. I have since recognized this feeling for what it is: grief. I am grieving for the world I once believed existed and the future I know never will.

Just as I was beginning to acknowledge this grief, I discovered a movement known as Dark Mountain. Not a formal association or ideology, Dark Mountain is a sort of cultural banner under which those who await the fall can gather. For me, it has served as a way to process what has become increasingly obvious: collapse is coming.

And yet, all the while I have been holding onto the wish that we are mourning prematurely and that there is still something better coming.

We might very well be capable of transcending our biological and corporeal limits and achieving wonders not yet dreamed of. Or we might soon be forced to reckon with all we have wrought upon this world and then struggle to find some way to atone and survive.

Transhumanist utopianism and collapsitarian despair. They may appear fundamentally at odds, but I think what attracts me to them both is their implications of inevitability. Both presume their vision of the future is inescapable, and their adherents suggest we not waste energy fighting that future; we should instead start preparing ourselves for it. It is the overlap of “the end is nigh” and “resistance is futile.”

What I need right now is clarity. I need an honest appraisal of where we are and where we are headed. Maybe you need it too. Are we doomed? If so, let’s face that hard truth and decide what to do from there. Are we going to save ourselves? If so, how will we do it and at what cost?

In either case, collapse or transcendence, who and what will we be when we come out on the other side? To answer that, we probably have to figure out who we are right now.

This is about more than trying to guess how things will look a century from now. This is about what it means to be human and deciding whether that, in itself, matters at all.

It Is Time to Look Down

The Dark Mountain Project is not apocalyptic in the strictest sense. The world is not coming to an end, because as destructive as human beings have been to its ecology, the planet itself will be just fine. What is coming to an end, as they see it, is the relatively recent industrialization of human civilization, along with a great deal of the natural world that has been thoughtlessly ravaged to fuel that industrialization.

Neither a political movement calling for change nor a nihilistic death cult, Dark Mountain almost has the air of a support group, which to me makes it by far the sanest and most compelling of those in the vein of “primitivists” or “collapsitarians.”

The project was kicked off in 2009 when two former environmental activists and journalists, Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, realized they had both been thinking the same thing about their passionate efforts: This isn’t going to work. The astonishing scope of the social and ecological catastrophes to come clearly dwarfed the middling sacrifices that people and governments were willing to make to address them.

Kingsnorth and Hine decided to end the pretense of optimistic environmentalism, to abandon the idea that this great unraveling could be re-raveled, and to come to terms with the grief that follows. “Let’s not pretend we’re not feeling despair,” Hine told the New York Times. “Let’s sit with it for a while. Let’s be honest with ourselves and with each other. And then as our eyes adjust to the darkness, what do we start to notice?”[1]

Discovering a group of folks who had collectively decided to stop chanting “Yes we can” and instead collectively moan “Actually, no we can’t” was a revelation to me. As much as I long for the kind of prosperous future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry and his Star Trek inheritors, optimism about the future of humanity and its habitat never jibed with what I thought I understood about the facts of climate change, resource depletion, mass extinctions, and, more recently, global pandemics. Whether purchasing the right “green” cleaning products, recycling my cans and bottles, or paying that extra nickel for plastic shopping bags, these little moves, even taken as a whole, seemed laughably insufficient to the task at hand. Eco-friendliness seemed to become far more of a cultural signifier than a preservation strategy.

But to reject the whole enterprise and huff “Why bother?” seemed counterproductive at the least and not a little immoral. Why bother? Here’s why: Because billions of people will face natural catastrophes, starvation, lack of drinking water, and even have their very homelands swallowed up by an increasingly garbage-filled sea. Because the world’s biodiversity is vanishing faster than cheap TVs on Black Friday. Because the economic and political scaffolding upon which we have built our lives is crumbling. Now put down that Tide detergent and buy this three-times-as-expensive environmentally friendly washing solution made from water, baking soda, and I guess some orange rinds or something.

So if total submission to the Great Machine isn’t the way to go but environmental activism is more or less pointless, what’s to be done? The Dark Mountain Project says, Nobody knows, so let’s talk about that.

Good. Good. Because I needed to talk about that without feeling like a jerk.

Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, written by Kingsnorth and Hine in 2009, aims to deliver the bad news to you as honestly as possible and give you permission to let it all go. It says:

There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history … Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis. Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story.[2]

The authors don’t attempt to place themselves above the rest of the beleaguered mass of over-consuming humans who must now pay for their own gluttony, nor the handful of generations that came before and started this whole mess. “It is our story,” they say, claiming their share of ownership. All of us have been clinging to the misguided assumption that one way or the other, “we must find a way to go on having supermarkets and superhighways.” Bewildered at the very idea that modernity as we have known it has an expiration date, we are stunned, all of us, unable to move, unwilling to contemplate the next step.

“None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down,” write Kingsnorth and Hine. “We believe it is time to look down.”

These are my people! I think to myself. We will despair together, and we will own that despair. The pretending, the feigned optimism, it was all so exhausting. So, what’s next?

What’s next is, well, not much. Again, the Dark Mountain Project does not stipulate any particular action (explicitly, anyway); rather, it encourages and fosters an honest reckoning with our state of affairs and a truthful account of how we got here. Dozens upon dozens of artists, writers, poets, scientists, and academics have added their voices to this conversation, resulting in a series of beautifully made, hardbound collections of Dark Mountain essays, fiction, poetry, photography, and art in twice-yearly journals, each of which is truly a marvel in terms of the quality of its content and beauty as a physical object. (For the sake of disclosure, an essay of mine was published in the thirteenth volume.) The project has spawned Dark Mountain retreats and festivals, where like-minded seekers go to gather around various campfires, hike through various woods, and contemplate one’s oneness with one’s surroundings.

I find the experience of delving deeply into the Dark Mountain literature both nourishing and alienating. There is no denying the wisdom and insight of its many contributors. The no-bullshit critiques of modern excess, the musings on what we are losing with nature’s degradation, and the explorations of what we can do with less are all vital, collapse or no collapse.

But these condemnations of modernity imply a preference, and perhaps a prescription, for a primitive fantasy. While they’re not looking to speed the breakdown of civilization, it is clear that they think it was largely a mistake to begin with, an offense against some undefined Great Truth. And once the collapse comes, we will all be forced to “return” to a way of life that was, for lack of a better word, “intended” for us. If the end does come, well, it comes.

A Zestful but Scientific Exploration

Despite its futuristic cachet, “transhumanism” is not a new concept. Just by asking the global superintelligence known colloquially as “Google,” I found a listing for “transhuman” in an 1897 edition of the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (subtitled “A Work of Universal Reference in All Departments of Knowledge, with a New Atlas of the World,” which also happens to sound a lot like Google). And it is simply this:

transhuman … More than human; superhuman. [Rare.]

The listing then points to Dante as an example in usage, as in Paradiso, when we learn:

Words may not tell of that transhuman change;

And therefore let the example serve, though weak,

For these whom grace hath better proof in store.

Dante himself seems to have coined the Italian neologism Trasumanar for this passage, written sometime around 1320. So the idea of the word, if not the literal English version of the word, has been around for quite some time.

Whatever the “more than human” properties being referred to here are, we have only the narrator’s word for it. Unless of course, one has sufficient grace to make it to Paradise and see for oneself.

But that’s not what we’re all about here. No, the kind of transhuman we’re looking for is one envisioned by the philosophy, political movement, and hopeful dreams of contemporary transhumanism. And what seems generally agreed upon by transhumanists is that this term in its modern sense originates, as you might well have guessed, with Huxley.

Oh, you were so close! Not that Huxley. It was not Aldous, author of the dystopian masterpiece Brave New World, but his humanist brother, Julian. In 1927, Julian Huxley presaged Carl Sagan with his observation that humankind was the universe’s only means of knowing itself, unless other intelligences had emerged elsewhere in the universe. And also, like Sagan, Huxley emphasized the power humans hold over the rest of the planet, whether or not we are aware of it:

It is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution—appointed without being asked if he wanted it, and without proper warning and preparation. What is more, he can’t refuse the job. … That is his inescapable destiny, and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it, the better for all concerned.[3]

In his essay on this great human adventure, Julian Huxley evangelizes on behalf of our civilization’s massive technological leaps and asserts a responsibility our species has toward “the fullest realization of man’s possibilities, whether by the individual, by the community, or by the species in its processional adventure along the corridors of time.” Humanity must now prepare to occupy the “cosmic office” to which it has been appointed and begin to fulfil the promises of scientific discovery for all: eliminating poverty, hunger, misery, and ignorance as we embark on a “zestful but scientific” exploration of “the whole realm of human possibility.”

“We need a name for this new belief,” wrote Huxley. “Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.”

Transhumanism today is absolutely focused on improving humanity, with an emphasis on enhancements to our minds and bodies through the application of technology. Technology is a catch-all term that stands in for all manner of inventions, alterations, and augmentations, including the more “traditional” notions of cybernetic limbs and computer-enhanced brains, but it also includes the use of advanced pharmacology, nanorobotics, gene editing, cryonics, and, beyond the mere human corpus itself, geoengineering and artificial superintelligence.

There is no transhumanist dogma as to what counts as an “enhancement,” especially as most transhumanists emphasize the choice of the individual to undergo any available enhancements or augmentations as one sees fit. Generally, though, they seek to use technology to cure diseases, increase our strength, amplify our senses, expand our intellectual capacity, and extend our lives.

Well, who wouldn’t want these things? But in keeping with the sense of its prefix, transhumanists don’t merely seek to be less miserable humans but to move toward becoming something else, to be post-human. “The movement regards aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death as unnecessary and undesirable,” states the website of the movement’s primary think tank, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET). “Transhumanists look to biotechnologies and other emerging technologies for these purposes [and] predict that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label Posthuman.”[4]

These are my people! I think to myself. These folks understand that we need to overcome the frustrating limits of these corporeal meat-sacks we galumph about in, get past the mere scramble for survival, satiation, and status they grudgingly allow us, and take full advantage of the potential we accidents of evolution possess, whatsoever that might be. So, what’s next?

A lot, in fact. Unlike their opposites on the Dark Mountain, transhumanists can’t simply wait for things to happen. These dreamed-of advancements will need major investments in science and research across the disciplines. It will require the legal and regulatory structures that will allow for both robust experimentation and the curbing of dangerous or risky exploits. It will require grappling with ethical issues the likes of which humankind has never had to face. And it will require the fostering of a new cultural conversation, where everyday citizens can be brought into the discussion without scaring the bejesus out of them, enabling them to make informed choices within a democratic framework.

So transhumanism needs scientists and engineers, of course, but it also needs philosophers, politicians, jurists, sociologists, psychologists, lobbyists, activists, ethicists, writers, performers, and artists. It is no small thing to upgrade such outdated legacy hardware as the human being.

But once again, what constitutes an upgrade? What makes something an enhancement rather than an abomination? At what point does an augmentation become an unfair advantage? As someone who has made no secret of his longing for an immortal robot body, even I have to wonder: After we’ve endowed ourselves with vast new powers of strength, longevity, and intellect, what will we have lost?

Because there is always something to lose.

Civil Disentanglement

Uncivilization refers frequently to “the myth of progress,” a tale we tell ourselves that says “Each generation will live a better life than the life of those that went before it. History becomes an escalator, and the only way is up.”

They’re right, of course. It is a myth. We behave as though the march of progress is preordained, inevitable, and that any sudden lurches toward the abyss are bumps in the road or temporary errors in navigation. The overall trajectory, however, is always heavenward.

But there’s no guarantee of this whatsoever. A brief glance around the globe shows just how enamored we seem to have become of the abyss’s edge. With the global pandemic, the rise of right-wing tribalism, inevitable shortages of food and drinkable water, mass population displacements due to climate change, and countless other crises just over the horizon, there’s clearly a lot that could jam up that escalator of history—or just tip it over.

According to Dark Mountaineers, escalators are part of the problem. So are elevators. As well as the skyscrapers, malls, and the engines of capitalism operating within them. Vehicles, too, along with the roads upon which they drive and the fuel they consume. Computers, television, the internet—all are villains in this tale. But theirs is just one tale.

The myth of progress is yet another tale. Like most myths, it contains lessons, values, and, perhaps most importantly, a story in which we are the protagonists, with all of us on a shared hero’s journey to a better world. But just as we don’t take the myth of Icarus to mean that our impatient and ambitious children are literally bound for doom by the misuse of wax-based flight appendages, neither should the story of progress be taken as prophecy. It is better thought of as an aspiration or a roadmap.

In a paper on narrative, Adrian Currie of Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and Kim Sterely of Australia National University’s School of Philosophy call this kind of storytelling “productive speculation” that “provides the scaffolding necessary for progress in the face of history’s opacity.”[5] The story, then, should encourage the search for additional facts that properly constrain the parameters of the narrative, inching ever closer to the truth. The stories we tell ourselves about the future are always grounded in the myths we’ve adopted about our past, and the elements of that past we’ve chosen to highlight and causally connect.

The hope is that a story such as the myth of progress might muster the will of a society to see to it that the myth’s promise becomes real, and indeed there may have been times when that has more or less been the case. But it is hard to say that this story still holds sufficient persuasive power, as evidenced by the fact that so much has gone awry that threatens all of civilization. And people can see it. Whether they are politically oppressed, economically depressed, or well-versed in our myriad existential crises, it is obvious to almost everyone that the story is broken.

Perhaps that has a lot to do with the story’s scope. It’s not just the waxy wings of one cocky Greek kid that the Sun is turning to sludge. It’s everything. Climate change, billions of people in miserable poverty, mass extinctions—these horrors are just too glaring for us to continue perceiving the myth of progress as a reliable guide. As David Wallace-Wells wrote in his controversial article on how climate change is much worse than anyone will admit, “The dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, especially in novels, which tend to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the poisonous miasma of social fate.” He wonders why the existing stories of apocalyptic climate change have not broken out of their niche status.[6] It seems it’s just not the kind of story we want to hear.

Dark Mountaineers correctly sensed a turning point for the progress myth as the year 2016 came to a close. To anyone who subscribed to the myth of progress, the introduction of the anti-progressive, anti-Enlightenment, and decidedly uncivilized Donald Trump character as leader of the most powerful nation on earth would certainly make one wonder if our story’s writers had jumped the shark. Add to that the botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of xenophobic nationalism throughout the West, terror attacks and mass shootings occurring at a dizzyingly regular rate, economic inequality growing so blatant as to be almost comical, and the prospect of automation threatening to eradicate many human beings’ livelihoods and conceptions of self-worth.

The story of progress isn’t making sense anymore. It would be as if Sauron had come back suddenly at the end of Return of the King, burned the Shire to ashes, and enslaved the rest of humanity while those coastal elites—the elves—tucked their flowing locks between their legs and hoofed it for the ivory towers of the Gray Havens.

The new story, as told by the Dark Mountaineers, is one of imminent collapse. There are actually many different stories told throughout the Dark Mountain milieu, and part of their reason for being is to foster these new stories in all their variety. But almost all converge on the same theme: Humans have bitten off more than they can chew, and now we’re going to choke.

And though the project is born, in part, out of a sincere despair over the loss of what once was, there is also an undeniable current of schadenfreude and moral superiority. In Uncivilization the founders tell us, “We do not believe that everything will be fine. We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be.”

So it’s important to note that the foundational attitude of the Dark Mountain Project is not that humanity sort of took a wrong turn somewhere in the early 1990s by failing to stop Google from coming into being or that the environmental movement kind of dropped the ball during the Bush years. It’s that industrial civilization itself was probably a mistake. There was an original sin, and that sin was humans’ decision to use their abnormally large brains and remarkably dexterous hands to separate themselves from the rest of nature. This, the Mountaineers imply, was where we went wrong.

But right or wrong, this is deriving an “ought” from an “is.” And it’s a pretty big “ought.” If humanity’s hubris with technology and industry is leading to civilization’s downfall, does it necessarily follow that we ought to return to the primeval and reclaim our place in an old natural order that may no longer even exist?

This is where Mountaineers overlap with the more activist-oriented anarcho-primitivists who affirmatively seek the end of industrial civilization, sometimes through direct action and, in very rare cases, through violence. Some go all-in with an off-the-grid existence; others (most?) write about it from the comfort of their homes, on computers, over the internet. (One such primitivist, John Zerzan, was asked why he doesn’t just go live in a cave if he thinks it’s so great, to which he replied, “I don’t know much about the practical skills, the primitive skills or whatever.”[7] Well, me neither.)

But the Dark Mountain ethos does not seek society’s destruction, per se. “Why would we bother?” they ask in their preface to their first book. “[T]he historical force of gravity is already acting on it. When something is falling, the best move is often to get out of the way.”[8]

Dark Mountain, then, is less an ideology than an invitation, a prompt to begin seriously contemplating transformative scenarios of collapse and how we might make the best of them—however many of “we” are left. It stands to reason that to confront the end of civilization, one might be wise to trek into the wilderness and begin the process of refamiliarization. This is where we’re all headed, right?

Their panoply of writers offers us numerous enriching tales of roughing it, connecting with the land, experiencing the silence, and making novel use of whatever happens to be on hand. Some are visiting; others are there to stay. But they always emerge from the woods (or their cabins, or their yurts) wiser, stronger, and more spiritually fulfilled than they were before.

These excursions in the woods obviously aren’t going to stop the coming collapse (remember, it’s too late for that), but there is a sense that they and others like them can serve as an example to the rest of us about how we should view our relationship to nature. Kingsnorth has written that his own transplantation from urban society into the “closed cycle” of a homestead in the country is a way to “ensure personal sanity and to keep the flame of a particular, pre-machine vision of humanity alive.”[9] That’s nice work if you can get it, but it’s not a feasible option for most people, particularly those most abused by the system Kingsnorth has rejected.

There exists a queasy bourgeois fascination with collapse, and as sincere as collapsitarians may be in their prophecies and prognoses, this very real and serious threat to billions of lives is inescapably viewed through the lens of privilege. Heralding the coming collapse can be cheapened into a kind of above-it-all virtue-signaling, as well as a form of absolution from expending any effort to fix any of the things that cause suffering right now.

“Particularly problematic is that the rejection of the modern world often entails a sleight of hand whereby those in affluent nations are able to shirk their responsibility to the world’s poor even as they walk somberly, flagellating themselves into the foothills,” observed Zachary Loeb in an exegesis of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’, the papal encyclical mostly known for its call for serious action on climate change.

He makes a sobering suggestion: “Think of those for whom fleeing to the foothills is not an option.”[10]

For Kingsnorth, the escape to nature is a kind of “retreat-as-attack,” which he compares to “tending a monastery through the coming dark ages.” It’s interesting to speculate, then, after the collapse, whether one would be surprised to find that it is not only hardy primitivists that have cloistered themselves away but that they now share a freshly ravaged planet with the Amish, tinfoil-hat wearing QAnon conspiracy theorists, various doomsday preppers, and perhaps a division or two of Confederate flag–tattooed American militia members. And most amusingly, they may even find an entire society of evangelical Christians who, during a time when the thought of treating gay people with respect was just too much to bear, followed conservative columnist Rod Dreher into sequestered religious enclaves. Primitivism becomes something like the Benedict Option for Orthodox Gaians.

Be they symbolic or principled, the Dark Mountaineers know all too well that their retreats to nature, these beachheads in the war against modernity, are not free from modernity’s trappings. Kingsnorth concedes that to begin his new life with the land, he has to use tools built by the same industrial system he seeks to escape, all transported by the burning of fossil fuels. He is not slowing the acceleration of ecocide, and he knows it.

“I think collapse writing, when it isn’t pathological anger, is something like a luxury freak-out,” blogger Anne Tagonist told Dark Mountain cofounder Dougald Hine.[11] At its worst, it’s a moralistic performance by those who have no real idea what it means to live with much, much less. As global risk expert Vinay Gupta put it, speaking to the almost entirely White audience at the first Dark Mountain festival, “A collapse is living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.”[12]

But in its best light, the efforts that Kingsnorth and other first-worlders are making are a sincere statement and vital symbol for the rest of the privileged world to witness. It’s not quite civil disobedience, but it is civil disentanglement.

For the collapsitarians, the end of this civilization will be a generations-long unwinding riven with suffering and tragedy, but it will eventually lead us to something simpler and better. It’s the end of the world so that the world can begin again.

Postponing Oblivion

There is no end-times scenario in transhumanism, but, like the collapsitarians, they do see the twilight of one age leading to the dawning of a better one. Many transhumanists, however, are leaning into a time when humanity is rebooted into something better than it was, leaving behind the baggage of the biological world.

This sunny apocalypse has its prime prophet, septuagenarian inventor and technologist Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil’s credentials as an inventor alone would have cemented his place in science history, pioneering such computer technologies as optical character recognition, speech recognition, and even music synthesizers (with the help of Stevie Wonder, no less). Today, he leads the natural-language processing efforts of a small tech startup you may have heard of called “Google.”

But it is his premonitions of the future that have earned Kurzweil his guru status. With an eerily strong record for predicting the advent of several technologies over the years, Kurzweil’s most important prediction is by far the most monumental. “I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity,’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion-fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.”[13]

Kurzweil asserts that given the accelerating pace of technological development in terms of things such as processing power and artificial intelligence, machines will achieve human-level intelligence before the end of this decade, and the exponential curve takes off from there into infinity, but not before scooping us puny fleshlings up with it, resulting in a beneficent coalescing of software, hardware, and wetware. Computers and human beings will be one.

It gets even stranger from there, as Kurzweil predicts that these emergent superhumans, billions of times more intelligent than the original stock, will begin converting matter into “computational substrate,” an as-yet-undefined substance that serves as the medium for ever more computing power, which continues until the entire universe is more or less one massive computer, in which all manner of realities can be experienced by the consciousness within.[14]

This might all be laughingly dismissed as complete bat-shittery if it weren’t for Kurzweil’s record of accuracy in predicting technological change and the demonstrable truth of his observation that computer technology has advanced faster than our society has been able to digest it.

The concept of the Singularity is taken very seriously by many brilliant (and very rich) people, including Google’s cofounder Larry Page, who even helped Kurzweil financially with the founding of, yes, Singularity University.[15] And in eager anticipation of the coming Big Merge, Silicon Valley bigwigs such as Page are funneling billions of dollars into the quest to extend the human lifespan and cure aging. After all, you can’t join with the universal cyber-consciousness if you drop dead in 2044.

Among those transhumanists skeptical of the Singularity is Zoltan Istvan. The son of Hungarian immigrants, Istvan looks like he’s already posthuman: the perfect transhumanist prototype. In his late forties, Istvan is a blond-haired, blue-eyed übermench, approximately 9,000 feet tall (give or take), and almost comically handsome in a captain-of-the-football-team kind of way.

Despite a name that sounds like a supervillain, Istvan is perennially auditioning for the role of all-American hero. In 2016, he ran a shoestring campaign for President of the United States as the candidate of the somewhat nebulous Transhumanist Party. Unsurprisingly bereft of electoral votes, Istvan later set his sights on California’s governor’s mansion, running for the Libertarian Party’s nomination for 2018. In 2019, he began seeking the Republican Party’s nomination for president for 2020, where he was, unsurprisingly, not a factor.

Istvan is like other transhumanists in that he wants to see humanity upgrade itself and its environment for the good of all, but perhaps most of all, he wants to conquer death. And not just in the sense of improving one’s health and lengthening one’s life. Death is Istvan’s nemesis, his Jean Valjean, his Moriarty. His 2016 presidential campaign’s primary gimmick was to drive across the country in a giant RV shaped like a coffin dubbed “The Immortality Bus.” Throughout his speeches, interviews, and many, many articles written for numerous online outlets, it is clear that defeating death is what gets Istvan going, and it’s also what he thinks is transhumanism’s chief selling point.

It’s a passion he comes by honestly. In his previous life as a reporter for National Geographic, Istvan was a kind of daredevil journalist, putting himself in danger on a regular basis, witnessing and nearly experiencing death’s many manifestations. “In my reporting, I’ve seen dead people,” he told journalist Elmo Keep in a profile for The Verge. “And when that happens it changes something in your brain, you know they are really gone. You see it. You understand it. If you believe in an afterlife, then that’s fine. But if you don’t, like me, then the emptiness and the void is so apparent there is no backing away from it. Unless you concoct some kind of fairytale.”[16]

An atheist, Istvan has rejected what he sees as the fairytales of religion and has opted instead to spread the good news about the wonderful world that might be, if only society can get behind transhumanism. But within his own sphere of futurists and would-be cyborgs, there is what he considers a distraction from real-world progress: The Singularity.

“Don’t focus on the Singularity as anything rational,” he told me when I asked whether he believed in the idea. “It simply is not something we can fathom. Our brains are too small—three pounds of meat to be exact.”

If transhumanists are going to break through to the mainstream and have a real impact on policy and culture, they need to keep their eyes (two one-ounce balls of meat, to be exact) on the prize. “What can and will likely happen,” Istvan told me, “is the creation on earth of a massive techno-utopia society based on humanitarian impulse and transhumanism empathy and progress.”

Whether we’re headed toward Kurzweil’s Singularity or Zoltan’s techno-utopia, society is going to have an awful lot to come to terms with and not much time to do it, especially if the predictions of Kurzweil and others prove correct.

As I write this in 2020, the culture continues to churn out books and think pieces by very smart people who are still bewildered and distraught over smartphones and how they are ruining our children, our identities, and our brains. How will concerned luminaries—or the general public—react to cybernetic body parts, brain implants, tiny robots in our bloodstreams, and a thinking computer that is fully aware of its own existence, if we’re all still trying to wrap our three pounds of meat around filter bubbles, Russian bots, Twitter trolls, and whether Google is making us stupid?

Despite the grand promises of artificial intelligence (AI) salvation by Kurzweil or the sweeping cybernetic immortality promoted by Istvan, the true engine of transhumanism is mostly maintained by serious academics and thinkers, a group of techno-optimists from across the disciplines who, certain of technology’s ability to lift up all of humanity, put in the real work to figure out how to get there, what policies will need to be in place, and how to navigate what will be some very treacherous ethical waters.

James L. Hughes is the executive director and cofounder of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), the think tank that serves as the intellectual hub of serious transhumanist thought.[17] Hughes has the unenviable job of getting mainstream elites to take transhumanism seriously as a philosophy and as a set of policy prescriptions. Think of IEET as the Center for American Progress for those who have a much more sweeping definition of progress.

“In politics, transhumanism is the application of Enlightenment values to contemporary technology and bioethics,” Hughes told me. “It combines Enlightenment techno-optimism and rationalism with Enlightenment individualism and rights to autonomy.”

Hughes refers to himself as a “democratic transhumanist” or, I think somewhat to his chagrin, a “technoprogressive,” with an understanding that it’s not enough to simply develop and introduce massive technological changes and just hope it all works out. For the transhumanist vision to be realized, it needs to meld with left-progressive attitudes regarding social justice, income equality, labor rights, and bodily autonomy.

And, importantly, transhumanism needs to be seen as a separate mode of thought—at least politically—from Singularitarianism. Hughes considers the idea to be “millennialist,” as in messianic and apocalyptic, and not relevant to the work that technoprogressives should be engaged in. The perceptual blur between transhumanism and Singularitarians, however, is likely unavoidable. “In culture, [transhumanism] is more amorphous, overlapping with futurism, science fiction, computer geeks, and so forth,” Hughes explained. “As a narrow philosophical commitment, transhumanism has no necessary relationship to beliefs about the Singularity, but as a culture there are many overlaps.”

In 2012, Hughes expressed a modicum of optimism that the time might be ripe to bring more technoprogressivism to light. Acknowledging the desires of the more idealistic wings of transhumanism, Hughes posited, “Perhaps our global economic crisis, with widening class divisions and deepening unemployment, will create the context for a new technoprogressive synthesis of egalitarian millennialism [such as Singularitarianism] and techno-utopianism [such as that promised by Zoltan Istvan], with promises of universal antiaging and cognitive enhancement, a basic income guarantee and shorter work weeks, a postgender transhuman social democracy with world government.”[18]

Yes, it’s a tall order, but it’s not bananas. It’s largely in line with mainstream progressive thought, especially as the idea of a universal basic income becomes more widely discussed among establishment political figures and institutions, in particular through the dark-horse 2020 presidential campaign of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Yang.

But here, we’re only talking about the politics. While wise policy can set the right conditions for the technological advances that transhumanists foresee, they cannot guarantee that they will actually be achieved, or if they are, that they will be accessible to more than a few multi-billionaires on their private islands. A “techno-gap” between rich and poor is antithetical to the entire enterprise of transhumanism.

Oxford University’s Nick Bostrom, cofounder of IEET and a leading scholar of AI, wrote in a 2005 treatise on transhumanist ethics that transhumanism is only truly realized if all humans have the same opportunity to become posthuman, underscoring the “moral urgency” of the vigorous pursuit of the transhumanist vision. “Wide access does not argue for holding back,” wrote Bostrom. “On the contrary, other things being equal, it is an argument for moving forward as quickly as possible. 150,000 human beings on our planet die every day, without having had any access to the anticipated enhancement technologies that will make it possible to become posthuman. The sooner this technology develops, the fewer people will have died without access.”[19]

Access is one thing, but whether or not they get their new bionic limbs, people still need to feed and shelter themselves. And if the jobs are all being swept away by the same technology that’s giving them longer lifespans and enhanced senses, how will they get by from day to day?

Kurzweil, for one, is a little too hand-wavy about the transfer of almost all labor to machines, recently telling Fortune magazine, “We have already eliminated all jobs several times in human history. How many jobs circa 1900 exist today?”

Kurzweil acknowledges the problem of convincing people that they will still have a livelihood after they are rendered useless by automation. “You can’t describe the new jobs, because they’re in industries and concepts that don’t exist yet.” Cold, cold comfort. Particularly from the guy who’s supposed to be able to predict all these things. [20]

But this is why a key goal (and a crucial talking point) of the egalitarian transhumanist vision is the elimination of the need for anyone to work, or at least not to have their lives defined by crappy jobs and exploitative wages, and instead rely on a sufficiently generous universal basic income. In this telling, ending the paradigm of work-as-life is not merely a happy byproduct of the hyper-automated, artificially superintelligent future, it’s a load-bearing pillar of the argument. Failure to prioritize the full liberation of the worker will result in disaster.

“Without a clear strategic goal of a humanity freed from work through the gradual expansion of automation and the social wage, all policies short of Luddite bans on new technology will have disappointing and perverse effects,” wrote Hughes in 2017. “If liberals and the left do not re-embrace the end of work and the need to give everyone income as a right of citizenship, unconnected to employment, they will help usher in a much bleaker future of growing class polarization and widespread immiseration.”[21]

I once had the opportunity to ask Zoltan Istvan about the techno-gap, the question of cybernetic superpowers “for me and not for thee,” and he would have none of it. “I don’t believe in this great inequality you and so many others speak of,” he told me. “While others see growing inequality in the world, I see higher standards of living for everyone even if they are so-called ‘poor.’ While others see jobs being lost forever, I see more free time for people to explore life and who they are and not be subservient to a worker destiny.”

“Transhumanism is the solace of humankind,” Istvan declared. “Anything else is just transmission of DNA fighting to survive another hour so it might be alive but a moment longer before oblivion.”

I opted not to argue the case for oblivion.

This Quintessence of Dust

The conclusions of both the collapsitarians and the transhumanists are largely based on sober analysis of available evidence. It is true that industrial capitalism has been denuding and poisoning the ecosphere faster than it can heal or adapt, and it’s also true that technological development has been accelerating at an exponential pace. It is true that environmentalism has failed to meaningfully slow the pace of climate change and ecological destruction, and it is true that breakthroughs in science and technology tend to enable further breakthroughs.

But also, in each case, there are distant conclusions to which one is expected to jump. And while there are no sacred texts or stone tablets with instructions for how to live, each group does have its evangelizing prophets, its impatient zealots, and a powerful sense that humanity is not only likely but destined to arrive at this next stage. Whether we return to nature or we leave it behind entirely, to many, we will finally exist as it was “intended.”

To accept that either one of these futures is near-certain and, importantly, that either one leads to something good or, at least, correct, one must choose a definition of what it is to be human and then make a leap of faith.

But I can’t leap from here. I can take in all the arguments, essays, poems, and white papers, and I am left with a morass of possibilities, like Doctor Strange meditating on Titan as he seeks the one glimmer of hope out of fourteen million, six hundred and five calamitous futures. I am neither a technologist nor an ecologist, and I’m definitely not a sorcerer. What I am is a humanist, in the sense of one who has lived his life immersed in the humanities—theater, music, politics, justice. To get a grip on this existential despair and peer more clearly into the next moment, I need to look to the poetry and prose of those who have drawn the very contours of what it means to be human.

I know who to start with.

In his 1958 essay “What Is Man?,” Martin Luther King Jr. celebrated the dichotomy of human beings as both material and “a thing of spirit.” Looking at the question through the lens of King’s version of Christianity, he saw no conflict. The material human, though made merely of chemical components that he noted would have been worth about ninety-eight cents in the 1950s (roughly eight and a half bucks today), was nonetheless made a biological thing by God, and therefore defined a human being as a mass of atoms clumped into a physical body is both correct and, in contrast to those faiths that see the body as “depraved,” beautiful, and divine in itself. But humankind’s intelligence, its ability to “think a poem and write it,” or “think a symphony and compose it,” or even “think a civilization and create it,” suggests that human beings are both of and above nature.

“Through his mind, [man] can leap oceans,” wrote King, “he can break through walls, and transcend the categories of time and space. The stars are marvelous, but not so marvelous as the mind of man that comprehended them.”

To King, the human animal is wondrous for being capable of acting upon the universe in ways that go beyond the limits of physics.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet was not incarcerated like King, despite declaring Denmark “one o’ the worst” prisons, yet he perceived the same dichotomy in humanity. But unlike the awestruck King, Hamlet declared it tragic.

“I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth,” said the prince to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bemoaning that the earth is a “sterile promontory” and that the sky with its marvelous stars “appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.”

And then we get to the meat of it:

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals.

Too often, this is where people stop quoting. But Hamlet wasn’t finished. “And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.”

Humanity is at the top, like a god, even. But who cares? Later in the play, raging over his own inability to kill his usurping uncle Claudius, Hamlet saw little upside to being the paragon of animals:

… What is a man,

If his chief good and market of his time

Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not

That capability and god-like reason

To fust in us unused.

Aside from the important context that Hamlet is willing himself to murder someone (a very, very bad and evil someone, it should be noted), the point is that the piece of work that is man isn’t all that impressive if his transcendent qualities go unexpressed (“fust” means to grow moldy).

Broadly considered, the transhumanist view of the human being may square surprisingly well with both Hamlet’s and King’s. Both acknowledge the ninety-eight-cent quintessence of dust that makes up the human physical form, but they also see something else radiating from within human beings, an ineffable power to achieve greater things, the limitless potential of their “god-like reason.” King took courage in this innate power, while Shakespeare, through Hamlet, grieved that it is wasted. The transhumanist, if nothing else, seeks to push the furthest boundaries of that capacity. “We are the species that goes beyond our potential,” says Ray Kurzweil. “Merging with our technology is the next stage in our evolution.”[22]

“Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways,” writes Nick Bostrom. “Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. 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.”[23] There is no room for our god-like reason to fust unused here.

The Dark Mountaineer would likely say that throughout all the industrialized world, reason has been doing nothing but fusting, because we have all failed to confront the obvious: that our species’s decision to break from our natural station and then harvest the world for our use has violated something delicate and complex, severing our bond to the rest of life on the planet. And in sullying the world, we have sullied ourselves, suppressing so much of what they believe makes us human. In their view, to be human is not to resist and isolate ourselves from nature but to recognize and find joy in our small place within it.

And, really, to find joy in each other. Indeed, this way of thinking asserts that true joy, true meaning, is far more abundant and far simpler to experience than our isolated, caffeinated, pixelated modern world would lead us to believe. Though in collapse we may labor to survive, we will find meaning and joy in those efforts. Though we will be bereft of the web of global connectivity to millions, we will gain deeper, richer connections to the people in our immediate lives: our families, our neighbors, our tribes. We can lose television, film, radio, and even printed books, for we are fulfilled by the stories we share around the fire and the myths we incorporate into our beliefs. Each struggle endured—hunger, the elements, predators—is its own reward, because it shows us what we are capable of always adding new verses to our story.

Shakespeare understood something of this too. He showed us in his play As You Like It, through the character of Duke Senior, a ruler banished along with his loyalists from civilization and into the wild of Arden forest:

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,

Hath not old custom made this life more sweet

Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods

More free from peril than the envious court?

Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,

The seasons’ difference; as the icy fang

And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,

Which when it bites and blows upon my body,

Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say

‘This is no flattery; these are counsellors

That feelingly persuade me what I am.’

Sweet are the uses of adversity, […]

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Living his own mini-collapse, the Duke said that the pain and struggle of survival are the very things that make survival meaningful. Enduring adversity is what it means to be truly alive.

Turn this around, and you have one of the prime critiques of transhumanism. By extending our lives and augmenting our abilities, we are trying to put an end to suffering—our own as well as the suffering of those we love. And as a result, perhaps we no longer qualify as truly human anymore.

For Zoltan Istvan, that’s just fine. “Frankly, transhumanists are people who are just not interested in being humans anymore,” he confesses in a piece for Motherboard. “We are not fans of our fragile flesh, of our mortal bodies, or of our flawed organs.”[24]

Beyond mere corporeal suffering is, of course, death. The transhumanist goal of indefinitely postponing death is often viewed with suspicion, to say the least. Not for the implausibility of immortality (though that certainly exists as well), but for what is perceived as a mix of naïveté and hubris and a rejection of the very essence of our sentience. “For all our terms as mortals, we’ve been mortal—the creature that knows it will die,” observes climate scientist Bill McKibben in an issue of the Dark Mountain journal. “Consciousness in many ways is the software for coming to terms with that knowledge. And without it, consciousness would have little to rub against. Absent mortality, no time. All moments would be equal.”[25]

Putting aside the quest for everlasting life, it’s harder to argue with a concerted effort to at least extend life, though not that much harder, considering the unfathomable strain that would be placed on the planet by the needs of tens of billions of 150-year-olds. But presuming that the accompanying environmental issues will also be solved by accelerating technology, it leaves, again, the more elemental question of meaning.

“It always astonishes me when I talk to people about life extension,” said IEET’s James Hughes in a podcast interview. “They say, What would you do with more than 80 years? It’s like, my god, how limited must your vision of your life be?” Hughes mused about the languages he’d like to learn, the places he’ll be able to visit, the people he’ll be able to meet, and the books he’ll be able to read (time enough at last!). “To think that 80 years is enough to live any life is absurd.”[26]

While the issues of life extension and cybernetic limbs raise a sea of red flags, things become even dicier when the conversation turns to augmentations of the mind. And not just enhancements that make us smarter, but technologies that allow us to free our consciousness from the confines of our skulls. The most “fundamentalist” takes on the Singularity predict a complete melding of the human mind with unthinkably advanced artificial intelligence more akin to pure energy than matter, converting the raw materials of the universe into whatever substance is necessary to power and process this new cosmic consciousness.

And it’s not just the transhumanists who see it coming.

“I think it is likely that in 500 years’ time there will be no human beings as we currently understand them in existence, for one of two possible reasons,” writes Dark Mountain’s Paul Kingsnorth. “The first possibility is that we will have destroyed the Earth, and with it ourselves. The second possibility is that we will have somehow avoided doing this and will instead have uploaded ourselves into something else: merged with our technology and become more—or less—than human.”[27]

Is a mind stored in a machine really a mind at all? Transhumanists largely look forward with great enthusiasm to the time when their consciousnesses can be uploaded into progressively more advanced and more powerful machines. At first this might mean something as simple as storing one’s consciousness, one’s essence, on a computer before one dies for safe-keeping, to be activated again when there is an available host. It could mean that one’s mind goes on experiencing existence from within a computer, leading a virtual life that is as real to the person whose mind is in the machine as one who exists corporeally, or perhaps even inhabiting (possessing?) an anthropomorphic android body, indistinguishable from that of a “real” human.

Even in these relatively “early” stages of the transhumanist trajectory, we’ve already gotten to a point where the word human begins to feel rather out of place, no matter the prefix attached to it. To use McKibben’s imagery, what exactly is there for a consciousness to “rub up against” if it’s essentially no different from an app or operating system? We know that computers can learn, grow, and solve problems. But we don’t consider them conscious or sentient. Not yet, anyway. And no one seems sure how we’d know if they were.

Russell Blackford, a secular-humanist philosopher associated with IEET [and a Free Inquiry columnist], wonders whether these augmented humans existing in various states of consciousness, cyber and otherwise, are objectively better than us run-of-the-mill humans, and not just different. “Is a distinctly posthuman life a good one for beings who started out as human?” he asks in The Philosophers’ Magazine. “Beyond certain limits, will we even be us if we undergo sufficiently extraordinary changes?”[28]

Nick Bostrom has posited that such questions about individual identity may be comparatively trivial, because as our technology develops, our values will adapt to suit it.

Preservation of personal identity … is not everything … We [might] value other things than ourselves, or we might regard it as satisfactory if some parts or aspects of ourselves survive and flourish, even if that entails giving up some parts of ourselves such that we no longer count as being the same person. Which parts of ourselves we might be willing to sacrifice may not become clear until we are more fully acquainted with the full meaning of the options.[29]

It’s doubtful that this would be satisfactory to the Dark Mountaineers, who would probably sicken at the notion that individual identity could be so malleable or modular, something that could be downsized to optimize compatibility with our new machines. We’re already in the thick of relinquishing our identities to Silicon Valley corporations and their beautiful devices, “too busy Tweeting to notice the tweeting,” as Paul Kingsnorth puts it.[30]

These two main threads of meaning, the Mountaineers’ ground-level connection to bodies and elements and the transhumanists’ aspirations to break free of them, are divergent, but they are not necessarily in conflict. Aside from the prospect of a Universal Megaconsciousness turning the planet into nanorobotic gray goo, or an army of Unabombers eradicating all technology, these two camps can mainly leave each other alone.

Zoltan Istvan explained to me that he had no reason to cast aspersions on those with a primitivist bent. “If you’re a human and want to remain a human, then technology and civilization has gotten way out of control and is not only going to drive you nuts but also destroy your way of life,” he said. “Human brains and bodies were not made for so much radical technology, for the concrete megacities many of us live in, or for the busy labor-intensive social schemes we participate in.”

It’s a fascinating area of agreement that our brains and bodies are so ill-suited to the world we’ve built with and around them. And it is for that very reason that the transhumanists would like to overcome those limitations and that the Mountaineers seek a return to our original niche, preferring to read their books in the babbling brooks, just like the exiled Duke Senior who sees good in everything.

Of course, the Duke eventually returns to the envious court and resumes his title and pampered life in civilization, once again separated and protected from nature. A beast no more.

Alone Together

There is, of course, no way to prove that either the transhumanist or collapsitarian predictions about the future are true until their respective endgames play out. The answer will come at the end of the world as we know it.

Who will be around to shout “I told you so”? Rugged, cabin-dwelling survivors somehow managing to prosper on a rewilded planet? Indestructible androids bearing fully digitized souls? Well, you can’t say “I told you so” to someone who’s not there. But I think no matter what happens, there will be someone for each contingent to scoff at.

Much of the discourse surrounding the next century or so presumes that all of humanity is bound to share the same fate. We do all live on the same planet, after all! We’re all in this together.

But of course, we’re not, and we never have been. As we’ve seen, an air of privilege exists within both movements, for who else but the privileged has the luxury of pondering things like oneness with the ecosphere or omniscience with the computational substrate? But economic inequality is a hell of a thing, and some inequalities are more unequal than others.

Folks such as Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Ray Kurzweil will likely remain fabulously wealthy, no matter what happens to the human habitat. Other Silicon Valley billionaires are already having small bunker-towns built for themselves in places such as New Zealand[31] so that they and their chosen brethren can wait out any collapse scenario in relative comfort, enjoying the benefit of each newly developed augmentation and life extension.

All the while, another new story will begin to take shape, that of a people who weathered the falling years and awoke in a different world—a world with less of almost everything, except maybe space. As the cloistered few begin to ponder what it means to be post-human, the rest of us will begin to redefine what it means to still be alive.

What, precisely, our fate will be, I dare not guess. But whatever comes to pass, there is some irony in imagining the Singularity and the Dark Mountain, bound to coexistence, one forever curiously pondering the other, as though each were inhabited by aliens from another world. And they’d both be right.

The Time to Choose

I began working on this piece in the fall of 2017 when I had been given the rare opportunity to work from a writers’ retreat in Northern California, spending two weeks in blessed seclusion, enjoying the comforts of modern life while also surrounded by awe-inducing natural beauty.

It was probably inevitable that such an idyllic setting would prime me for reverence of the Dark Mountain. With every blazing sunset over the San Andreas fault and every lungful of clean air, I came closer to something fundamental and real, something I could never express in words, that yet filled me with knowing.

Now, as I start to wrap up this project, it is summer of the year 2020, the lost year. Though my opportunities to work have been anything but uninterrupted, I am still blessedly surrounded by the natural beauty of Maine. And I am once again secluded, but this time, it is not voluntary. There’s a plague out there.

If you’re going to step outside, you should put on a face mask. Assume you are infected, we are told, even if you’re not feeling sick. Everyone is a vector for spreading the disease; everyone is a threat. Human beings are a threat.

That’s nothing new. But this is not the same as the usual human sins of violence, greed, cruelty, or mendacity. Now the shadow of death looms over the things that have usually made us better, stronger, more compassionate. We cannot make contact; we cannot interact in real time, in real life. A virus has taken that away from us.

A common cliché of the times is to muse that COVID-19 is nature’s way of healing itself from the damage humanity has wrought. This is the Sun melting Icarus’s wings.

But I don’t think so. Nature has no “recovery plan” for itself. Viruses do what viruses do, and we are merely their convenient and effective vessel.

A virus is, in its own way, like a living machine, irrevocably destined to fulfill the objective for which it was programmed. It cannot reproduce on its own, so it must harvest the resources of other beings’ cells to make more of itself. And it will do this until the host has been exhausted. It recalls the speculative nightmare scenario of an out-of-control paperclip-making AI that follows its programming to the letter until all matter in the universe has been converted into paperclips.

What if the problem is not that we haven’t reclaimed our place in nature but that we haven’t gone far enough to escape it? If we could push further, faster, toward technological advancement, perhaps we wouldn’t have to fear viruses anymore. We could eradicate them. Or better yet, domesticate them. Reprogram them. Get them to service us, to better us, so that we might be even more resilient in the face of the next existential threat.

That might be fantasy. It might be hubris, arrogance, or human chauvinism. But I think it’s also desperation. We can’t beat nature. Not yet, anyway. But listen to the utopian sermons of the transhumanists, and you might start to believe that we can. That we will. And soon.

But will it be soon enough? Toward the end of my time in Northern California, I did indeed marvel at the orange sunsets and crisp air. But then the area was overcome by wildfires, yet again. I was in no immediate danger, but the smoke permeated everything for miles around. The air became toxic. The fiery sunset was blocked out by a gray miasma.

To even set foot outside, I had to wear a face mask.

In a time of plagues, fires, storms, floods, and droughts, it can feel as though humanity not only has a choice to make but that it must make it now—a choice between beating them or joining them, between giving in to the ravages of the natural order or transcending it.

It is a choice for humanity to embrace its lot as a quintessence of dust, destined only to sleep and feed or to be infinite in faculty, angelic in action, and godlike in apprehension. If it means anything to be human, it is to have the capacity for choice. And the longer we wait, the more we risk having no choices at all.

Notes

1. Smith, Daniel. “It’s the End of the World as We Know It … and He Feels Fine.” The New York Times, April 17, 2014. https://www.nytimes.
   com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-andhe-feels-fine.html.
2. Kingsnorth, Paul, and Dougald Hine. Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto. The Dark Mountain Project, 2009. https://dark-mountain.net/
   about/manifesto/.
3. Falconer, Joel. “Humanity Plus: How Transhumanism Could Change the Human Race.” The Next Web, June 12, 2011. https://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/06/12/humanity-plus-how-transhumanism-could-change-the-human-race/#.tnw_lpOCJLur.
4. “Transhumanism.” Technoprogressive Wiki. The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Accessed 2017, now archived. https://web.archive.org/web/20200922145601/https://ieet.org/index.php/tpwiki/transhumanism/.
5. Currie, A., and K. Sterelny. “In defence of story-telling.” Stud Hist Philos Sci. 2017 Apr;62:14-21. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsa.2017.03.003. Epub 2017 Mar 17. PMID: 28583355.
6. Wallace-Wells, David. “When Will the Planet Be Too Hot for Humans? Much, Much Sooner Than You Imagine.” New York Magazine, July 10, 2017. Wallace-Wells later turned his misgivings into a book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019), reviewed by Tom Flynn is FI’s October/November 2019 issue.
7. Wheeler, Steve. “‘Why Don’t You Go Live in a Cave?’” Essay. In Dark Mountain: Issue 4. The Dark Mountain Project, 2013.
8. Hine, Dougald, and Paul Kingsnorth. “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and We Feel Fine).” Introduction. In Dark Mountain: Issue 3. The
   Dark Mountain Project, 2010.
9. Kingsnorth, Paul. “The Barcode Moment: Part III.” Dark Mountain, May 4, 2012. https://dark-mountain.net/the-barcode-moment-part-3/.
10. Loeb, Zachary. “Towards a Bright Mountain: Laudato Si’ and the Critique of Technology.” Essay. In Care for the World: “Laudato Si’” and Catholic Social Thought in an Era of Climate Crisis, edited by Frank Pasquale, 108–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
11. Hine, Dougald. “We Are the Only Species We Have the Option of Being: A Conversation with Anne Tagonist.” In Dark Mountain: Issue 9, 149–50. The Dark Mountain Project, 2016.
12. Hine, Dougald. “After We Stop Pretending.” Dark Mountain, April 22, https://dark-mountain.net/after-we-stop-pretending/.
13. Reedy, Christianna. “Kurzweil Claims That the Singularity Will Happen by 2045.” Futurism, October 5, 2017. https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-will-happen-by-2045.
14. Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. London: Duckworth, 2016. 
15. Grossman, Lev. “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal.” Time, February 10, 2011. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048299,00.html.
16. Elmo Keep. “Meet the Man Who Wants to Be President, and Then Live Forever.” The Verge, December 2, 2015. https://www.theverge.com/a/transhumanism-2015/.
17. Hughes has written two articles for Free Inquiry: “Humanism for Personhood: Against Human-Racism” (June/July 2004) and “Enhancing Virtues: Fairness” (April/May 2017).
18. Perry, Jon. “Transcript: Dr. James Hughes on What Is Technoprogressivism?” Constellation: Making the Graphic Novel, January 22, 2015. http://reviewthefuture.com/?p=376.
19. Bostrom, Nick. “Transhumanist Values.” In Ethical Issues for the 21st Century, ed. Frederick Adams (Philosophical Documentation Center Press, 2003); reprinted in Review of Contemporary Philosophy, Vol. 4, May (2005). https://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/values.html.
20. Lev-Ram, Michal. “Why Futurist Ray Kurzweil Isn’t Worried About Technology Stealing Your Job.” Fortune, September 24, 2017. http://fortune.com/2017/09/24/futurist-ray-kurzweil-job-automation-loss/.
21. Hughes, James J. “Embrace the End of Work.” The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, February 24, 2004. https://archive.ieet.org/
    articles/hughes20040224.html.
22. O’Keefe, Brian. “The Smartest (or the Nuttiest) Futurist on Earth.” Fortune, May 14, 2007. http://fortune.com/2007/05/14/ray-kurzweil-innovation-artificial-intelligence/.
23. Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values.”
24. Istvan, Zoltan. “Why I’m Debating an Anarcho-Primitivist Philosopher about the Future.” VICE, November 14, 2014. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nzeqak/transhumanism-versus-anarcho-primitivism.
25. McKibben, Bill. “Being Good Enough.” In Dark Mountain: Issue 8: Technê, 64. The Dark Mountain Project, 2015.
26. “James Hughes on ‘What is Technoprogressivism?’” Review the Future (podcast). January 12, 2015. Audio available at http://reviewthefuture.com/?p=361. Transcript available at https://www.futuristgerd.com/ old_lib/2015/01/Future-Review-Techno-progressive-046-1.pdf.
27. Kingsnorth, “The Barcode Moment: Part III.”
28. Blackford, Russell. “A Transhuman Future.” The Philosophers’ Magazine, February 28, 2015. https://www.philosophersmag.com/index.php/component/content/article?id=25%3Aa-transhuman-future.
29. Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values.”
30. Kingsnorth, Paul. “The Barcode Moment: Part I.” Dark Mountain, May 1, 2012. https://dark-mountain.net/the-barcode-moment-part-1/.
31. O’Connell, Mark. “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand.” The Guardian, February 15, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionairesare-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand.