5th Metahuman Futures Forum – Lesvos – 2025

Decelerating Extinction:

Pathways to Liveable & Flourishing Metahuman Futures

A Meta-academic Metahumanities Encounter.

24th-25th May 2025, in Mytilene, Lesvos, Greece

University of the Aegean. Department of Cultural Tecnology and Communication, Geography Building.

Part of the TRASH-HUMAN & METAHUMAN STUDIES programme.

Part of the Metahuman Futures Forum Series,

Part of the BODYNET-KHORÓS  project: BODYNET-KHORÓS LAB 18

Organising Committee: Jaime del Val (Reverso/Metabody), Aleksandra Lukaszewicz (Polish Society for Aesthetics, Poland), Joaquín Fernández Mateo (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid).

Local Organising Committee and Hosting: Evi Sampanikou, Nikolitsa Gourgouli, and the Mytilene Bodynet-Khorós Project Team,  University of the Aegean.

DEADLINE: 21st March (see below for conference information)

https://metabody.eu/5th-metahuman-futures-forum/

Presentation

In the words of United Nations Secretary-General AntónioGuterres on Monday, 7th November 2022 at COP27,“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator. […] Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish.” In times when all of humanity would be expected to be desperately working together to avoid collapse what we have is instead a generalised denial: people in universities keep working on abstract topics, governments of all signs keep fanatically promoting the “progress” that is paving our wayto extinction, and even environmental organisations ignore and silence the core issues: shift to plant-based diets, deep degrowth and addressing overpopulation as the unavoidable but ignored problems.

On the one hand, we have the radical dystopia of Trump-Musk supremacist fascism accelerating our way to collapse dramatically; on the other, we have a global left, including activists and intellectuals, that represent just amilder version of the same fanatic human supremacism and belief in human progress and expansion.How can we exit this loop? Or are we to merely assume our imminent extinction, once we disavow false trash-human beliefs in digital inmortality and cosmic flight?

What are the mechanisms, besides disinformationpromoted by the super-rich, leading to this fanatical denialism? How can we address the hidden humansupremacism in all of us, starting with academia, critical intellectuals, activists, and artists from the global north, who pertain to the 10% of the global privileged population and don’t want to lose their privileges? And how can we extend our networks of cooperation beyond these circles, encompassing more and more different others, from different cultures of the Global South, different social strata, and other species?

Already in 2003, the documentary The Corporation was exposing how current societies have an intrinsically psychopathic profile. In the new Trump-Musk Era, this seems to rise to new unimaginable heights, while Silicon Valley shows the intrinsic neofascism it always had, disguised till now behind fallacies of liberation and emancipation, as in all techno-optimisms. Is there a way out of that psychopathy, other than a quick extinction? What are the deep roots of this situation? Could they be in millennia of sensorimotor aliennation in sedentary societies, that have resulted in an egocentric, self-obsessed individual?

This forum aims at addressing the radical crisis of the present without palliatives, putting at the centre the elephant in the room: the denialism going on in supposedly critical milieus of the global north. Exposing the dead ends and fallacies of a hidden supremacism philosophy, the forum aims to break through the global wall of silence and denialism for an eventual deceleration on the Highway to Extinction.

The Metahuman lens will be once more the field proposed for addressing both a deeper self-critique than is mostly present in critical posthumanism, ontologically hacking the hidden supremacism in us, and a broader vision for potential transformations beyond the cultures of dominion that, since 10,000 years approx. have unleashed the quickest mass extinction on Earth. Outlining a potential metahuman mutation implies undoing the dead ends and fallacies of false criticality and supremacist denialism.

Topics

  • The Algoricene or Trash-human Age of Extinctions and Algorithms
    • Human Supremacism and denialism
    • Transhumanism and TESCREAL as Trash-humanism? Trash-human unhancement, hyperhumanism and the real faces of transhumanist culture
      • Is AI a technofascist dystopia without a future, given its intrinsic environmental and social unsustainability and its unlikely continuation in the upcoming climate chaos?
      • New technofascisms and how to respond to disinformation. What are the millennia-old roots of disinformation culture, as based on media that separate us, immobilise us, and homogenise perception, such aslinear perspective?
      • Which are the radical challenges of current algorithmic culture, such as the ontological opacity of current Big data and Large Langue Models?
    • The Extinction Crisis
      • Extinction and collapse studies.
      • Biodiversity, Climate change, Planetary Boundaries.
      • The Planetary Holocaust, Speciesism:
        • non human animals and other life forms: farm animals, wildlife, plants, ecosystems and all life forms,
        • the Planetary Holocaust of Animal Exploitation Food Industries, as not only largest killing machine, but the most polluting and devastating one.
      • Human occupation of the Earth and the excesses of sedentary civilization.
      • Human multiplication and the problematic nature of heteronormative regimes of reproduction.
      • Exponentiality and imminence of the crises.
  • The Metahuman alternative for liveable & flourishing futures
    • Symbiotic/Relational Ethics and other novel axiologies
      • Metahuman justice, freedom, rights, life and wellbeing
      • Towards new metahuman politics.
    • Metahumanist philosophy, aesthetics and politics as opposing transhumanism, and taking further critical posthumanism.
      • Metahuman metaformance aesthetics.
    • The unacknowledged METAHUMAN revolutions:
    • Learning from gatherer cultures: the anthropological revolution of the Original Affluent Society
    • Anarchoprimitivisms and the VegAnarQueerproposal
    • The 1 million population revolution: all estimations show that for 99% of its existence, till around 10,000 years ago, the Sapiens for under 1 million population, a time during which, as said in previous point, quality of life was generally better
      • Voluntary antinanalism, liberation from oppressive reproduction norms, promoting Queer and trans-species kinships.
    • Alternative forms of embodied thinking as movement, and practices to mobilize it.
      • Choral dances as central to human and nonhuman societies
    • Radical Embodied Cognition revolutions.Proprioceprion and BI (Body Intelligence) as shared by all life forms.
    • Learning from nonhumans: their ethical and kinaesthetic superiority – animals as their movement and the crime to immobilise and enslave them
      • learning architecture from animals
    • Evolution as primarily symbiosis and mutual aid, not as struggle. (Kropotkin,Margulis, Haraway). Dismantling the capitalistic fallacies of Neo-Darwinism.
    • The biosphere as mixture and flow, and how our devastating occupation of the earth blocks it.
    • The physics and cosmology revolution. the dynamism of matter.
    • The other revolutions of (mainly) Industrialised (WEIRD) humans:
      • antispeciesist
      • radical ecology
      • Queer, non binary, transfeminism, poliamory, etc.
      • neurodiverse and crip movements
      • indigenous and decolonial movements
    • Metahuman Precursors
      • From Presocratics and Lucretius through Nietzsche to post-Deleuzians and beyond.

…

Readings:

We will again do a convivial-experiential METAHUMAN LAB in Eressos, and workshops with the refugee community, more info soon.

  • including on movement, building/dwelling and gathering
    • Learning from gatherer cultures and from non-human: architecture and dance
    • choral practices and the dance of life.

It will be a fully “holocaust-free”, VEGAN event.

 

Conference Information

Hybrid format online + on site

Proposals for papers, workshops, performances/metaformances, exhibition proposals, and book presentations are welcome.

Abstract Submissions: till 21st March 2025 (no extension will be given). Acceptances by 1st April.

Please send to: metabody@metabody.eu

Proposals for workshops and performances/metaformances are welcome.

———-

Forum fees (with discount due European Project framework)

  • 40 euro (early bird – till 20th April)
  • 60 euro (later – after 20th April)

ONLINE speakers: 30 euros

Bank Information: account for transfer forthcoming, please write to metabody@metabody.eu