The Growing Political Fight Between Transhumanists & Posthumanists

In April, Michael Kratsios, the science advisor to the president, announced, “President Trump has given all of us who serve in his administration a monumental task — the renewal of our nation.” Prior leaders have spoken of moral or spiritual renewal, while Trump spent his first presidency promising rebirth in nativist terms. Today, renewal takes a new form, with Kratsios claiming: “Our technologies, and what we do with them, will be the tools with which we will make the destiny of our country manifest in this century.”

Few have been prepared for how thoroughly the second Trump administration has pivoted toward technology. At the same time, while it may seem like techno-oligarchs such as Elon Musk or the financiers Peter Thiel (Kratsios’ former boss) and Marc Andreessen have firmly aligned with the political right, there is nothing meaningfully “conservative” about these figures. To them, Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon warned in a January interview, “you’re just a digital serf. Your value as a human being … they don’t consider that. Everything is digital to them … they’re all super-progressive liberals. They’re all techno-feudalists. They don’t give a flying fuck about the human being.” Bannon is broadly right about this, and the sooner we can come to grips with why human welfare has fallen out of the equation, the sooner we can begin to regain our political bearings amid the ongoing scrambling of left and right; liberal, conservative, and digital “super-progressive.”

The techno-oligarchic takeover of the American federal government may seem like a bolt from the blue, but closer inspection reveals this to be merely the latest stage of a conflict that has been quietly reshaping political priorities for over half a century. The enemy of this rising technological faction is less the traditional left or right than environmentalists and the regulations that they have been crafting to restrain technology since the 1970s. This tension between technologists and environmentalists cuts across traditional political boundaries, splitting the MAGA movement into “tech” and “green” factions and increasingly dividing the left into its own techno-solutionist and ecological camps.

While the traditional left and right focus on human welfare, contemporary politics is being reshaped by people who claim to champion the cause of nothing less than Life itself. As one of today’s leading technologists, Musk has asserted that he is “accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary and extend the light of consciousness to the stars,” while those on the other side strive to guide Life back to earthbound stability. What makes this growing conflict so fierce is that both sides position themselves as the true servants of Life-with-a-capital-L (that is, the sum total of all living things reconceived as a single process and proper noun). Even if Musk and the Trump-led MAGA movement appear to have parted ways (for now), the deeper reorientations that initially drew them together persist.

Today’s growing political fault line runs deeper than merely a preference for technological or ecological solutions, however, for it turns out that these new servants of Life also disagree on what Life itself is. One camp views Life primarily as an information process to expand and enhance, while the other conceives of Life chiefly as a complex system to maintain and balance. These contrasting perspectives inspire rival political visions: one gazing upwards towards Life’s cosmic conquests and the other turning down towards Life’s planetary entanglements. They demand a new political language and orientation — neither left nor right — that I propose can best be captured by the contrast between a technological “Up” and an ecological “Down.”

The more we feel caught between technological transcendence and ecological collapse, the more our politics will be reshaped by the conflict between the Up and Down wings over the fate of Life itself.

The End Of Man

We can better understand the rise of Up versus Down by pausing to consider the origins of left versus right.

What we call Western political modernity grew out of the legacy of terrible European wars of religion. It began when early modern thinkers tried to bracket the endless theological disputes by shifting the focus of politics from glorifying God to serving Man. This meant adopting a deliberately anthropocentric, this-worldly focus. The political humanism that resulted took the following as its central tenets: that there is something essentially unique about human beings; that this characteristic humanity is what gives human life value; and that the chief end of politics is to promote the full flourishing of Man’s humanity. (The fact that the universal human ideal is gendered male is by no means incidental.)

Although modern liberals, communists, socialists, syndicalists, anarchists, monarchists and conservatives of all stripes came to define Man’s humanity differently, all agreed politics should strive to express whatever is highest in human nature while respecting human limitations. As George Orwell once put it, “One must choose between God and Man, and all ‘radicals’ and ‘progressives’, from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.”

Ever since the French revolutionaries of 1789 first chose to segregate by seating preference, those on the left have typically held that human beings have the capacity to create far more universal, just and rational political orders than those that currently exist. Meanwhile, those on the right have tended to accept some degree of inequality, irrationality and division as a necessary consequence of human frailty. And yet, for all the fierce debates dividing left and right, everyone agreed that politics ought to revolve around Man and his needs. This humanist political consensus held so strongly, in fact, that well into the 20th century some of its fiercest critics, such as the philosopher — and erstwhile Nazi — Martin Heidegger, only protested that “humanism is opposed because it does not set the humanitas of man high enough.” Meanwhile, another philosopher, Michel Foucault, could wryly recall, “a time when people supported the humanistic values represented by National Socialism, and when the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists.”

And yet, while the roots of political humanism reach deep into the foundations of Western philosophy, the underlying reasons for believing in human exceptionalism rapidly eroded over the course of the 19th century. Chemistry revealed human beings to be composed of the same elements as everything else, while the emerging fields of neurophysiology, ecology, and evolutionary biology revealed human beings to be far more similar to — and mutually reliant upon — other organisms than previously believed.

By the early 20th century, scientists began abandoning their centuries-long search for the vital substance that gave life. Instead, they came to increasingly conclude that the essence of living beings lay not in the substance of their matter, but rather in how it is arranged. The watershed moment came with physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s famous 1943 proposal that “what an organism feeds upon is negative entropy.” Within a decade, this concept of “negative entropy” had been rechristened “information,” opening the door to fundamentally rethinking the nature of both humans and other living things as complex information processing systems.

The Rise Of Life

Many streams of thought may have fed into the rise of Life-with-a-capital-L, but it was not until the middle of the 20th century that these developments merged into a coherent whole. In 1948, the mathematician Norbert Wiener introduced the term cybernetics to describe a new scientific super-discipline devoted to studying how complex systems survive in a hostile universe. How was it, Wiener wondered, that when the Second Law of Thermodynamics tends inexorably to dissolve difference into sameness, some systems prove able to process the information required to secure the energy needed to maintain their complexity? He proposed expanding the term Life to cover all those places where the flow of entropy had temporarily reversed. Living things occupied what Wiener called “an island here and now in a dying world.” Accordingly, he proposed expanding the meaning of Life to “cover all phenomena which locally swim upstream against the current of increasing entropy.”

When reconceived in these terms, it became clear that Life constitutes a continuum of increasingly complex systems that shades into being somewhere between crystal and virus. From here, Life extends to encompass unicellular organisms, the panoply of multicellular beings, the ecosystems these beings form, and the mutually sustaining mass of ecosystems that comprise the planetary ecosphere. At the same time, by redefining living things as complex information processing systems, it became possible to plot human-built artefacts along the same continuum. Everything from the humble thermostat to analog and digital computers to human communication networks, societies, and economies could be assigned their own place on the same axis.

The new cybernetic systems ecology of the 1960s soon revealed that the flows of matter, energy and information sustaining these systems were all interconnected. Over the course of the 1970s, Life itself took shape as the system of systems formed by human beings, their technical artefacts, and all earthbound biological organisms in their upstream swim against entropy.

By the end of the 1970s, the influence of cybernetics had become so ubiquitous that the outlines of the field dissolved to spawn dozens of daughter disciplines. Although the many scions of cybernetics all saw the world as a tangle of complex information processing systems, some gravitated towards the complex systems side of Life. Because every complex system requires continuous flows of matter, energy and information, no system can be fully understood in isolation from its environment. These environments, in turn, constitute their own systems, which have their own environments.

Once you begin to map these system-environment couplings, it soon becomes clear that “everything is connected to everything else” — Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology. Cybernetics provided ecologists such as Commoner with a new set of tools for parsing these complex interdependencies in far greater degrees of detail. This in turn helped shape new fields such as systems ecology, Earth System Science and — perhaps most famously — James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’ Gaia Hypothesis, which Lovelock called simply “a more convenient term than ‘Biological Cybernetic System with Homeostatic Tendencies.’”

Meanwhile, others proved to be more interested in Life’s information processes. By the 1960s, some researchers began to conclude that brains and machines manifest structurally similar patterns of information processing. New fields such as cognitive science, artificial intelligence research, and bioinformatics began studying these analogies. By the 1970s, a growing cohort of people in the computing, engineering and information sciences had ceased to recognize any functional difference between the computations taking place in a human brain or on a silicon wafer. While the complex systems camp found themselves drawn more deeply into the tangle of Life, those who focused on information processing tended toward ever greater abstraction from the organic world.

The scions of cybernetics might have continued to gently drift away from one another had it not been for the environmental crises of the 1960s and 1970s. Confronted by burning rivers, deadly smog, acid rains and a growing ozone hole, early computerized world system models convinced many that the scale of global civilization had begun to undermine planetary habitability.

Faced with the harms that human beings were causing, those in the systems camp proposed adopting limits to human growth to help sustain Life on a finite planet. This meant shifting their allegiance from a narrow concern with human flourishing to a more holistic understanding of how humans relate to the rest of Life. The aforementioned Lovelock likened his change in perspective to a kind of conversion experience, later recalling how: “I began more and more to see things through her [Gaia’s] eyes and slowly dropped off, like an old coat, my loyalty to the humanist Christian belief in the good of mankind as the only thing that mattered. I began to see us all, as part of the community of living things that unconsciously keep the Earth a comfortable home, and that we humans have no special rights, only obligations to the community of Gaia.” Over the last several decades, those who adopt a similarly non-anthropocentric concern for the complexly entangled community of Gaia have come to identify as posthumanists.

Meanwhile, those who pursued the information processing path out of cybernetics were no less impacted by the sustainability crises of the 1970s — they simply drew the opposite conclusion. While posthumanists have come to prioritize preserving the mutually sustaining integrity of Earth’s ecosphere, a growing group of self-described transhumanists has come to view the boundaries of terrestrial biology not as limits that must be respected, but technical challenges to overcome. Transhumanists seek ways to upgrade the body, fuse it with the machine, and ultimately leave the high latency of flesh behind to enjoy the unencumbered immortality of a purely digital existence.

Transhumanists posit that if the planet cannot sustain infinite growth, then the future of Life must lie beyond Earth. Rather than striving to achieve posthuman visions of deeper ecological entanglement, transhumanists view human ingenuity as the escape hatch Life has built to free itself from all the earthly ties that bind it.

The Up/Down Distinction

As far as I am aware, the first person to propose supplementing left versus right with an Up/Down dichotomy was the pioneering transhumanist FM-2030 (né Fereydoon Esfandiary). His pathbreaking 1973 manifesto “Up-Wingers” repudiated the anthropocentrism of both the left and right, declaring instead that “Life itself is the greatest revolution.” Not one for subtlety, FM-2030 then used “Up” to encompass everyone who shared his transhumanist visions for the future of Life, while reserving “Down” as a catch-all term for all those that transhumanism had left in the dust.

This piece repurposes the Up/Down distinction to offer a more nuanced way to parse trans- and posthumanist priorities. While I continue to use Up to designate transhumanism in its broadest sense, I apply Down more narrowly to describe specifically posthumanist positions. This means that the Up/Down divide does not encompass the entire field of contemporary politics. Instead, it only applies to those who have come to reconceive human beings as complex information processing systems and, in doing so, shifted their political allegiance from Man to Life.

Where left and right veer anthropocentric, Up and Down are biocentric. The defining tension between Up and Down concerns not just whether you favor technology or ecology but, on a deeper level, whether you conceive of Life in primarily informational or systemic terms. The Up/Down distinction, therefore, operates independently of left/right distinctions and arises from the ontological shift that recasts human beings as complex information processing systems. This makes Down-wing thinking complementary to — but ultimately distinct from — similar positions derived from Buddhist or Indigenous ontologies, for instance.

As with the case of left versus right, Up/Down distinctions also fall along a spectrum, with a moderate middle-range shading toward extremes at both poles. 

At the same time, this can be overlaid on the existing left/right continuum — at least up to the point beyond which visions for the future of Life cease to be compatible with human flourishing and lose any remaining left/right bearing.

Down-Wing Wisdom

One of the most defining features of Down-wing thinking proves to be an embrace of transience, finitude and self-limitation. The Down-wing refines the tragic ethos that Wiener placed at the heart of cybernetics when recasting Life as “an island here and now in a dying world.” The Down-wing roots itself in the conviction that, as Wiener put it, “Like the Red Queen [from Alice in Wonderland], we cannot stay where we are without running as fast as we can. We are not fighting for a definitive victory in the indefinite future. It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. This is not defeatism, it is rather a sense of tragedy in a world in which necessity is represented by an inevitable disappearance of differentiation.”

By the 1970s, it became clear to system scientists that while the entire planetary system possesses remarkable powers of self-stabilization, it also manifests the kind of positive feedback loops that risk amplifying seemingly tiny disturbances into planet-wide catastrophes — an awareness brought home by the newly discovered link between trace CFCs and a growing ozone hole.

The Down drew deeply from systems science to cultivate a keen sense of how complex interconnections undermine efforts to exert human mastery. Microbiologist and Down-wing luminary Lynn Margulis proposed: “No matter how much our own species preoccupies us, life is a far wider system. Life is an incredibly complex interdependence of matter and energy among millions of species beyond (and within) our own skin.” When viewed from the perspective of Life itself, modern human gains represent a major net loss, replacing a riot of diverse ecosystems with complex but homogenous human societies sustained by the pesticide-drenched deserts of monocrop agriculture.

The Down-wing warns that, although complex systems can demonstrate remarkable powers of adaptation, they also risk catastrophic breakdown when pushed beyond thresholds that can be difficult — if not impossible — to identify in advance. This demands cautious self-limitation based on the awareness that, as complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman once warned, “Your own best footstep may unleash the very cascade that carries you away, and neither you nor anyone else can predict which grain will unleash the tiny or the cataclysmic alteration.” 

Ultimately, this mingled sense of tragedy, precarity and responsibility led Down-wingers to embrace wisdom as their cardinal virtue. If cunning implies the ability to exploit systems for immediate personal gain, then wisdom entails respecting the patterns that maintain the integrity of the system and support the well-being of its members. As used by the Down-wing, wisdom has come to refer to the ability to recognize the integrative ways in which systems sustain themselves over time, repairing damage and resisting the temptation to sacrifice long-term survival for the sake of short-term expansion.

Where humanists spent centuries trying to isolate the defining characteristic of Man, the Down-wing finds in wisdom a virtue common to all complex systems. Ironically, this means that many bacterial colonies prove to be far more systemically wise than modern human communities. Ultimately, it takes wisdom in this sense to recognize that the complexity of the planet will often defeat deliberate human interventions. It is therefore wise to accept the finitude of seeking simply to establish durable patterns in symbiosis with the rest of Life and to know that, even then, nothing lasts forever.

Up-Wing Intelligence

While the Down-wing embraces the complex systems side of Life, the Up-wing privileges its information processing dimension. If the Down-wing favors a tragic ethos of wise self-limitation in service of Life, the Up-wing envisions a heroic future broadened by Life’s limitless expansion. Where the Down-wing views the history of planetary Life as a nearly four-billion-year struggle to maintain homeostasis, the Up-wing sees a continuous growth in information processing power. Transhumanists may be eager to upgrade human genomes or fuse with machines, but they ultimately conceive of humankind as merely one significant stepstone on Life’s journey from slime mold to the stars.

Although Up-wingers value humankind as the planet’s so-called apex cogitator, this value stems from the hope that human beings will create something far greater than themselves. However strange this approach to Life may be, it is at least self-consistent. Visions for the cosmic conquest of Life unfold logically once you accept the prospect that Life represents a pattern of information processing that can operate just as well in binary formats as it can in flesh. If you take it to be axiomatically true that mind equals brain and brain equals machine, then it becomes possible to view the jump from organic biology to computing substrates as the narrow aperture that Life must pass through to unlock a literal universe of possibility.

Where the Down-wing came to prize wisdom as the virtue that will guide Life back into balance, the Up-wing has come to champion intelligence as the key to Life’s escape. However, while wisdom is inherently self-limiting — for to be truly wise requires recognizing the limits of your own understanding — the Up-wing holds intelligence to be infinitely scalable. As far back as 1956, the designers of a program for discovering proofs in symbolic logic — the Logic Theorist — explicitly described their achievement as a new kind of complex information processing system. The summer of that same year saw a renowned conference at Dartmouth popularize the term artificial intelligence to describe this kind of extra-somatic cognition.

It did not take contemporaries long to realize that if some of the most defining traits of human intelligence — such as the ability to solve proofs of symbolic logic — could be replicated in a machine, then it should, in principle, be possible to produce vastly greater than human intelligence. In 1962, one of Alan Turing’s former colleagues — the mathematician I.J. Good — famously speculated that, if the ability to build intelligent machines is itself a function of intelligence, and human beings prove capable of building an artificial intelligence on par with themselves, then the resulting machine should be able to improve itself still further.

Because artificial or extra-somatic intelligence lacks the hardware constraints of a human body, it could in principle recursively improve itself in such a way that it rapidly leaves the cognitive capacities of humankind behind. The result would be what Good termed an “intelligence explosion.” Visions of a coming artificial intelligence explosion came to be rechristened the Singularity during the 1990s. Here, the Singularity marks the moment where the slow-building exponential curve in Life’s information processing power hits the inflection point that sends it skyrocketing asymptotically towards infinity.

More recently, the goal of creating an omni-competent, human-equivalent information processing system has been recast as the pursuit of artificial general intelligence or AGI. Meanwhile, the transcendent mind that emerges on the far side of the singularity has been rechristened with the blander title of artificial superintelligence or ASI. Although the Up- and Down-wings value different things, here too, it becomes clear that human beings do not fare very well when judged against the hypothetical limits of superintelligence.

Despite all this, it remains important to note that the Up wing is not necessarily anti-ecological. For many Up-wingers, their highest goal remains making sure that Gaia’s wonderful reversal of entropy does not merely perish on the Earth, but spreads to the cosmos. They envision a universe of cold, dead matter brought to consciousness by teeming digital shoals of Life — the kind that can be lived at nearly infinitely vaster scales and faster speeds than would ever be possible within the fragile film of Earth’s ecosphere.

Up/Down Conflict

For over half a century, Down-wingers have contended that human beings must shrink their footprint to return planetary Life to a sustainable balance. For just as long, Up-wingers have condemned the Down wing for accepting planetary limits to growth “without first examining the limits of technology,” as engineer (and coiner of the term nanotechnology) K. Eric Drexler once put it. For it may well be that the vastly greater than human complexity of the Earth System merely remains a problem to be solved. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist — and prominent transhumanist — Max Tegmark has proposed defining intelligence as “intelligence equals the ability to accomplish complex goals.” If we accept this to be the case, then “artificial super-intelligence = the ability to accomplish super complex goals.”

Tegmark and fellow transhumanists have already long since turned their eyes from merely fixing the ecosphere to speculating about how much of the universe an artificial superintelligence could be capable of colonizing. These speculations, in turn, have inspired back-of-the-envelope calculations concerning how many worthwhile human-like lives could be simulated between now and when all protons finally decay. (The transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests that the answer is 10 to the 58th power, if you were curious.) For such people, the notion that this kind of cosmos-spanning intelligence could have any trouble fixing whatever harm human beings have caused to Earth’s ecosphere is laughable. The coming super-intelligence can be expected to render such super-complexities trivial. (The fact that this is a tautology does not seem to bother Up-wingers.)

Whatever the near-term human or ecological cost, all Up-wingers must do is keep the interlocking gears of economic and technological progress grinding until they trigger the intelligence explosion. Then, if the world of organic biology still matters on the far side of the Singularity, it will be a comparatively simple matter for the coming artificial superintelligence to reverse all the ecological harm done. While it may be more difficult to bring back all the millions or billions of human dead that perished on the path to transcendence, their lives will count for next to nothing when weighed against the cosmos-spanning future of Life that their sacrifice made possible. As the prominent Singularitarian–turned-AI-safety-researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky once put it, “Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve.”

Ultimately, the extreme positions of Far Up and Deep Down are not only incompatible, but they are also mutually hostile. If the Far Up is correct in viewing human beings as the vehicle for freeing Life from its biological shackles, then the Down-wing’s drive to relinquish technical mastery and achieve planetary homeostasis needlessly condemns Life to perish on Earth. If the Down-wing proves right to doubt the limits of deliberate human agency, however, then the ecological havoc that the Up-wing is willing to unleash along the path to progress risks ending complex Life on Earth over a billion years before its time. One group promises that everything can be improved, while the other warns of the ease with which everything can be destroyed.

Today’s most influential tech magnates are committed Up-wingers. If the likes of Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have chosen to throw their lot in with the MAGA movement, it is not because they have all shifted their allegiance from the political left to the political right. Rather, it is because they see in Trump someone who lacks either the interest or the administrative competence required to rein in their drive to push technological advancement to the point of either ecological breakdown or transcendent breakthrough. Although the unusually close bond between Trump and Musk appears to have exploded in the most catastrophic (and, given the idiosyncratic personalities of the two men involved, predictable) way possible, this does not change the underlying logic that led them to embrace in the first place — or the fact that, as Jan-Werner Müller aptly notes, “Trump’s and Musk’s fates remain entwined.”

What might the future hold? Ever since the 1970s, those on the Down-wing have recognized that the only sure way to sustain Life on Earth is to reintegrate human beings into the cycles of the Earth System and respect planetary boundaries. Those on the Up wing, by contrast, have pursued growth without limit, finding allies of convenience on the libertarian right as they prepare to burst from the biosphere like an egg and leave the ruins of organic life behind.

My fear is that, whether you want to return Gaia to homeostasis or escape the mess of Earth and flesh, those on the far ends of the Up/Down dichotomy have already laid the foundations for justifying the kinds of mass death that risk eclipsing the worst genocides of the 20th century. For despite treading opposite paths, both the Far Up and Deep Down have converged on the conviction that flesh-and-blood humans have little — if any — place in the future of Life. Whether you see humankind as an ecological cancer or, in Musk’s words, merely a “biological bootloader,” it becomes equally clear that human extinction is not the end of the world and may well render a far higher service to Life itself.

As the forests burn, the ice caps melt and new AI systems continue to eclipse human capacities, we enter a world increasingly caught somewhere between technological transcendence and ecological collapse. These are extreme times, and today’s global rise of the far right may soon be eclipsed by new extremisms — whether this be the Far Up-wingers trying to break free of human biology or the Deep Downs who advocate genocide as the solution to ecocide.

One urgent task for the near future involves building new kinds of coalitions that prove durable enough to resist the growing extremes of Up and Down. This will require convincing those who remain on the modern political left and right that no vision of human flourishing can succeed without accounting for human beings’ ecological entanglements, technological entailments and the broader demands of Life itself.

At the same time, while it is crucial to help humanists expand their horizons, it is equally important to build better bridges across the middle ranges of the Up/Down spectrum. Many Up- and Down-wingers remain eager to work across their differences toward broadly similar goals. Much room remains to build coalitions across both axes to chart a more flourishing, enduring and open future for humankind and the whole of Life.

Ultimately, the most significant implication of the Up/Down distinction may well be that technological and ecological approaches to Life itself do not differ as much as we may think. The extreme ends of the spectrum mirror one another in their impatience to see humankind give way to Life’s greater goals, while the middle ranges open onto broad areas of overlap—new terrain where developments in information processing technology enrich our understanding of complex planetary systems and vice versa. It is in the estuary where Up and Down mingle that a truly progressive politics that serves all that lives will grow.