METAHUMAN FUTURES MANIFESTO

/ LIVEABLE FUTURES MANIFESTO

Lesvos Assembly Final Version – Nov. 2022

After DRAFT VERSION 2 – Revised following the first draft discussed at the

LESVOS METAHUMAN FUTURES ASSEMBLY-CHORUS 2022

by the assembly of philosophers and critical theorists of the Metahuman Futures Forum.

All of “Humanity” (everyone believing in the questionable concept of the human as distinct, superior, and singular species) needs to face the fact that its multiplication over the past millennia and its devastating occupation of the Earth, enslavement and extermination of other life forms, and oppression over itself, are creating a full scale mass extinction and self-extinction cycle with a potentially imminent eco-social collapse. This primordial fact is ignored, censored, or avoided, by nearly all institutions and people, including the most critical ones, in today’s world, so that a serious debate on these issues is crucially missing, due to the prevailing Human Supremacism. We cannot any longer negate the urgency and the exponential dynamics of the process of planetary disruption in the increase of the causes (domination and control), the effects (climate change, pandemics, etc.), and the alienation of “humans” in their increasingly fanatic supremacism pedestal, as we see nowadays with the hard return of fascisms and totalitarianisms all over the world which in turn reinforce the processes underlying the extinction crises.
This process has arisen mainly over the past 10,000 years, since around the origins of agriculture and farming, accelerating exponentially, therefore in a evolutionary blink of an eye, while it is a fact that the Sapiens lived before that for around 300,000 years as gatherers-hunters with around one million population, without creating a mass extinction and, according to numerous anthropologists and historians, with a much better quality of life than what came with agriculture till today. The process is therefore not an evolutionary teleology, rather it is an accidental geologic anomaly. “Civilization” therefore is neither inevitable, nor necessarily desirable, nor superior (“civilization” understood as the totality of forms of built environment, expansive occupation of the Earth, and exploitation of its life forms for the purpose of accumulation, long before and beyond capitalism, emerging with agriculture, farming, and cities, expanding with industrialisation and now with digitisation: every form of homogenous, reductive aggregation that imposes itself). Instead the narratives that present it as inevitable, desirable and superior are precisely the ones of Human Supremacy that, as we now see, create an extinction cycle and a Planetary Holocaust or Holocide, of 100 billion animals in concentration camps per year, with 50% of the terrestrial surface devastatingly occupied with urbanisation and monocrops, industries and extractivism, and with an all-encompassing pollution that is fatally destabilising the terrestrial ecosystem and its climate: how can anyone claim the superiority of such a civilization, that creates a mass extinction in the blink of an eye? Almost every human gesture, habit or action in current industrialised societies actively contributes to a mass extinction cycle, an already imminent eco-social collapse that is also a species suicide, while the reply is mostly, in the best of cases through cosmetic measures and palliative patches.
The source of this black hole emerging in an evolutionary blink of an eye is perhaps in a strange bodily atrophy emerging in certain hominids since the outset of bipedalism: the more we have externalised ourselves in technical systems that collapse the planet the more we become atrophied and incapable of living without those systems, the more fearful, narrowminded and fanatic. Therefore one of the necessary replies is in regaining and reinventing the moving body away from all dominant ontologies of the age of algorithmic reduction. We propose a Metahuman turn: a radical movement philosophy and pragmatics that accounts for the endless modes of life-fostering intelligence in non-humans and non-dominant humans, of life as symbiosis and variation based on quantum fluctuation; pointing to a non-rational, non-verbal, BI (Body Intelligence) R/evolution, a metahuman mutation of the atrophied dominant species; in order to relearn to move with the world and not against it; embracing indeterminacy, mutual aid, empathy, and care, which are far more important that struggle in evolution (as Kropotkin, Margulis, or Haraway have claimed since over 120 years); again as one of the 8,7 million species of the biosphere, contributing to biodiversity and the regeneration of the Earth: not going back but towards new evolutionary variations.
But first we send out a challenge: Till when are the critical intellectuals of the world going to continue finding a thousand excuses to reaffirm human supremacy in a more or less covert way, to not questioning their way of life, censoring the discussion and preventing the emergence of a collective, powerful and serious voice that puts on the table without palliatives the greatest taboos of supremacism: overpopulation and the way of life based on the devastating occupation of the earth, the abuse and extermination of other forms of life? Not to mention the mob of conservative fanatics of all types, nationalists, fascists, religious and others, including transhumanists, who will do anything to prevent us from starting a serious debate… Can we start a proactive discussion about how to face these challenges instead of how to avoid them? Can we stop looking for excuses of all kinds to avoid facing the amendment to the totality of domination ideologies and systems that is proposed here?
We need a serious discussion around the problem of human overpopulation and its relation to a poor quality of living for humans, to oppression, and to planetary devastation of ecosystems that has arisen over the past millennia, inseparable from the colonisation of the earth and exploitation and extermination of its life forms, unleashing a mass extinction and self-extinction process. We have gone from barely above one million 10,000 years ago, to 8 billion today, growing inseparably with the increasing planetary toxicity of the way of living, its oppressiveness, its devastating occupation of the earth, and exploitation of its life forms. We need a discussion that exposes the complexity of the problem and of the possible necessary responses to it, including the debate around stopping to promote the obligatory and oppressive multiplication of the species through traditional families, as this leads us and the planet to a potentially imminent extinction, a discussion that allows people to free themselves from the oppression of traditions and the pressure to reproduce, including the oppressive segregation/apartheid of women and of lgtbiq+, and oppressive binary categorisations and traditions in relation to the body, gender, sexuality, and kinship. A discussion that may allow instead promoting a voluntary suspension of human multiplication, a voluntary antinatalist politics, without censoring the debate with Human Supremacy excuses, exposing the need to change the human programme of multiplication to one of care for each other and the Earth, and promoting new modes of kinship, including queer and transspecies kinships. What is proposed is a gradual voluntary reduction, as necessary to avoid extinction.
Every mode of diversity needs to be claimed and mobilised, human and non-human, against the oppressive homogenisation of the past millennia, while understanding the modes of living that impose themselves systemically: not every way of living is acceptable. Just like we assume the ethical read line of not killing other humans, a new red line and table of values needs to be created that has human rights as part of a far broader planetary rights that defends the 8,7 billion species of the biosphere. We need to understand how many of the rights and privileges defended under “human rights” imply an extermination of other life forms and a destruction of the terrestrial ecosystem.
We also need to understand how often we assume oppressive norms as if they were choice and freedom: from family norms to desire engineering in markets. We need to understand the limits of individual autonomy and claim a non-paternalistic relational ethics: the openness of the ecosystem is the measure of freedom. But we need to distinguish the “real” openness that does not impose itself from the false openness of, for instance current digital ecologies that conceal a fascist desert of the real based on ultimate control deliriums, hypercolonialism and hypercapitalist exploitation.
We need a serious discussion about the need for a deep change in ways of living, away from the devastating occupation of the Earth with urbanisation, transportation and other technologies of domination, slavery and extermination that impoverish our embodied experience while collapsing the planet. We need to stop the Planetary Holocaust of non-humans (as well as humans). mainly happening in farming, criminalising it without palliatives or excuses based on human privileges, and assuming that non-vegan options today imply mass exterminations of unprecedented scale and kind in the history of the earth. Farming is not only the biggest killing machine, it is also the most polluting industry in the world, the one that contributes most to climate change, as well as through deforestation, 75-80% of global agriculture being related to farming, and that affects human health by polluting water, and air, and use of pharamaceuticals, with devastating impact on human and non-human health. We need a new framework of Planetary rights, justice, and health, of which human rights, justice, and health should be part, and not the reverse. As Nietzsche denounced 140 years ago, there is no worse crime today than crime against the Earth.It is about redefining all politics from the perspective of planetary health (of the planet, its forms of life, its flows and cycles) as a priority, considering the minimum essential conditions to stop the current process of mass extinction that drags the planet and its forms of life, including humans, to an unprecedented extinction cycle, and stop looking away with complacent palliative patches. All life forms need to be liberated from slavery, exploitation, and extermination. But it is also about developing an evolutionary creativity never seen before. And doing it now: we have but a few decades before the collapse, and the disalignment takes time, it is a gradual process.
We need to understand that all forms of human, non-human and terrestrial oppression stem from the homogenising modes of expansion on the surface of the Earth and multiplication of certain branches of the sapiens emerging over the past millennia: the reply cannot be limited to assimilating oneself in these regimes, but to look beyond, reinventing our ways of living. The origin of all inequalities, non-human and human, is in the dominant way of living, multiplication, occupation and exploitation of the earth and its life forms, whose foundational assumptions (of desirability and inevitability) we need to question. We need to stop being the Plague that destroys that terrestrial ecosystem (the only species known to ever have done that in the history of the Earth): and invent new symbiotic ways of living, perhaps as renewal of gatherer cultures, learning from all non-humans and their architectures, moving with the flows of the Earth and not against them.
We need strategies for an unprecedented transformation, a general disalignment, a planetary regeneration, and also an unprecedented fight, as we face the deeply rooted supremacy beliefs in almost everyone calling herself “human”: a sect of 8.000 billion fanatics, with different levels of implication across a spectrum: from leading actors of the extinction cycle in corporations, nation states and criminal gangs to the complicitness of general population, poor and rich, across the planet: everyone believing in the special status of the human. We need to understand how much we are stuck in palliative cosmetic patches, claiming for a sustainability of the dominant way of living, how high our threshold of tolerance for Human Supremacy is, how far what many critics see as goal is perhaps just the first step for a Great Disalignment. We need to activate systemic resistances against all systemic reduction in all manner and scale, including intervention in institutional and traditional politics as well as new experiential politics of movement. This transformation needs to come through a politics of openness and joy, not of fear and control, a Dionysian politics of affirmation of life as indeterminate variation: the joys of sensing oneself as moving body, moving with others and the world, entangled, in relational variation.

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Draft 1 – Sept. 2022 – by Jaime del Val for discussion in the

LESVOS METAHUMAN FUTURES ASSEMBLY-CHORUS 2022

All of “Humanity” needs to face the fact that its multiplication over the past millennia and its devastating occupation of the Earth, enslavement and extermination of other life forms, and oppression over itself, are creating a full scale mass extinction and self-extinction cycle with a potentially imminent eco-social collapse. This primordial fact is ignored, censored, or avoided, by nearly all institutions and people, including the most critical ones, in today’s world, so that a serious debate on these issues is crucially missing, due to the prevailing Human Supremacy.
This process has arisen mainly over the past 10,000 years, since around the origins of agriculture and farming, accelerating exponentially, therefore in a evolutionary blink of an eye, while it is a fact that the Sapiens lived before that for around 300,000 years as gatherers-hunters with around one million population, without creating a mass extinction and, according to numerous anthropologists and historians, with a much better quality of life than what came with agriculture till today.
Civilization therefore is neither inevitable nor desirable nor superior. Instead the narratives that present it as inevitable, desirable and superior are precisely the ones of Human Supremacy that, as we now see, create an extinction cycle and a Planetary Holocaust or Holocide, of 100 billion animals in concentration camps per year, with 50% of the terrestrial surface devastatingly occupied with urbanisation and monocrops, industries and extractivism, and with an all-encompassing pollution that is fatally destabilising the terrestrial ecosystem and its climate: how can anyone claim the superiority of such a civilization, that creates a mass extinction in the blink of an eye? Almost every human gesture in current industrialised societies actively contributes to a mass extinction cycle, an already imminent eco-social collapse that is also a species suicide, while the reply is mostly, in the best of cases through cosmetic measures and palliative patches.
The source of this black hole emerging in an evolutionary blink of an eye is perhaps in a strange bodily atrophy emerging in certain hominids since the outset of bipedalism: the more we have externalised ourselves in technical systems that collapse the planet the more we become atrophied and incapable of living without those systems, the more fearful, narrowminded and fanatic.
The reply therefore is in regaining and reinventing the moving body away from all dominant ontologies of the age of algorithmic reduction. We propose a Metahuman turn: a radical movement philosophy and pragmatics that accounts for the endless modes of intelligence in Nature as neverending symbiotic variation based on quantum fluctuation; pointing to a non-rational, non-verbal, BI (Body Intelligence) R/evolution, a metahuman mutation of the atrophied dominant species in order to relearn to move with the world and not against it, embracing indeterminacy, again as one of the 8,7 million species of the biosphere, contributing to biodiversity and the regeneration of the Earth, towards unheralded evolutionary variations.
But first we send out a challenge to all critical intellectuals: Till when are the critical intellectuals of the world going to continue finding a thousand excuses to reaffirm human supremacy in a more or less covert way, to not questioning their way of life, censoring the discussion and preventing the emergence of a collective, powerful and serious voice that puts on the table without palliatives the greatest taboos of supremacism (overpopulation and the way of life based on the devastating occupation of the earth, the abuse and extermination of other forms of life)? Not to mention the mob of conservative fanatics of all types, nationalists, fascists, religious and others, including transhumanists, who will do anything to prevent us from starting a serious debate… Can we start a proactive discussion about how to face these challenges instead of how to avoid them? Can we stop looking for excuses of all kinds to avoid facing the amendment to the totality that is proposed here?
We need a serious discussion around the problem of human overpopulation, one that exposes the complexity of promoting voluntarily suspension of human reproduction, voluntary anatinatalist politics, without censoring the debate with Human Supremacy excuses, exposing the need to change the human programme of multiplication to one of care for each other and the Earth, towards metasexual cultures where sex is about mutation, not reproduction.
We need a serious discussion about the need for a deep change in ways of living, away from the devastating occupation of the Earth with urbanisation, transportation and other technologies of domination, slavery and extermination that impoverish our embodied experience while collapsing the planet. We need to stop the Planetary Holocaust of animals and non-humans at large. We need to stop being the Plague: and invent new symbiotic ways of living perhaps as renewal of disperse, naked, vegan gatherer cultures, learning from all non-humans and their architectures.
It is about redefining all politics from the perspective of planetary health (of the planet, its forms of life, its flows and cycles) as a priority, considering the minimum essential conditions to stop the current process of mass extinction that drags the planet and its forms of life, including humans, to an unprecedented extinction cycle, and stop looking away with complacent palliative patches. But it is also about developing an evolutionary creativity never seen before. And doing it now: we have but a few decades before the collapse, and the disalignment takes time, it is a gradual process.
We need strategies for an unprecedented transformation, a general disalignment, a planetary regeneration, and also an unprecedented fight, as we face a sect of 8.000 billion fanatics of Human Supremacy: from corporations, nation states and criminal gangs to general population, poor and rich, across the planet: everyone believing in the special status of the human. We need to activate systemic resistances, networks of ontohackers, indeterminators, disaligned bodies, against all systemic reduction in all manner and scale, including intervention in institutional and traditional politics as well as new experiential micropolitics and metapolitics of movement. This transformation needs to come through a politics of joy, not of fear, a Dionysian politics of affirmation of life as variation: the joys of sensing oneself as moving body, moving with others and the world, entangled, in symbiotic mutation.

ON MISUNDERSTANDINGS ABOUT THE METAHUMAN PROPOSAL

REPLY TO FASCISTS, NATIONALISTS, OTHER CONSERVATIVES (INCLUDING CATHOLIC TRANSHUMANISTS) AS WELL AS TO MANY “CRITICAL INTELLECTUALS”

by Jaime del Val

It is becoming common ground to get certain attacks to the proposals of the Metahuman Futures Forum. Interestingly the arguments and tactics of Greek nationalist orthodox xenophobes-homophobes and of Polish catholic transhumanists are surprisingly similar: we are the chosen ones of global corporations promoting human extinction, we are pessimistic misanthropist who have lost faith and truth, or (from the same catholic transhumanist the day after) optimistic anthropocentrists.

The xenophobic, homophobic, ultra-religious nationalism of the attacks is the type of fuel needed for the current resurgence of the Praetorians of fascism around the world, always based on fake news, instrumentalisation, insults, and deffamation. Not by chance some of the webs that echoing attacks are radically Neo-Nazi.

What we criticise precisely are the nationalist-fascist, religious, transhumumanistic, hyperhumanistic and global-corporate practices that are creating an extinction crisis and the underlying human supremacism and dangerous devastating fanatism of which nationalist-fascists-homophobes are a most rampant expression, for which they actually get a lot of money and power, while promoting every possible practice leading us to extinction.

The claim that we support the wish of corporations to extinguish humanity opposes the evidence that what global corporations obviously need is a growing population, as crucial part of growth economy: the overall proposal we do cannot be more against global corporate economy and capitalism, besides the fact that we don’t promote extinction but propose to prevent it by challenging the practices promoting it.

The confusion between transhumanism, posthumanism and metahumanism is another typical source of manipulations and confusions. Metahumanism is a radical attack against transhumanistic dystopias, their global corporate power and their agenda of human “enhancement”.

But many critical intellectuals who could be close to the proposals also seem to rise on their feet when they hear us, with loads of guts reactions, protesting against anything that deeply challenges human supremacy.

But metahumanism is not simply an anti-tech movement, things are more complicated and interesting. We are not simply proposing to “go back to the caves” as many scholars including close one seem to think: we promote an unprecedented mutation but in the opposite direction of Transhumanism. We are also not black and white in our proposals, we embrace complexity, but what we also want to avoid is that neutralising arguments are used to have human supremacy remain unacknowledged or reaffirmed, as often happens in many critical circles.

As or fascist attacks, pathetic as they are, should be ignored, were it not for the fact that they express a global tendency, the reply to which however is not to reply to their insults, but to create alternative discourses and practices and not allowing such intruders to boicott the very possibility of starting serious debates and experiments for alternative ways of living, for liveable futures on this planet.

These fanatics, whether nationalists-fascists or catholic transhumanists, are the ones who invite the young population to commit suicide with the hideous politics of fear, while dangerously paving the way to generalised extinction by ignoring the toxicity of their own dominant way of living, not only the one promoted by corporations, but of Nation States and monotheistic religions as well, and by farming, agriculture, urbanization, industrialization and digitization.

They say, against all recent evidence: “oh, agriculture and civilization solved all problems and allowed us to multiply forever and conquer the world”… and they smile in complacent, suicidal, selfindulgent satisfaction, unaware that their human supremacy pedestal is so full of cracks that its complete falling apart is just a question of how and how soon: maybe just decades, but unfortunately dragging 8,7 million species behind the criminal cosmic idiocy of this one… unless we can start counteracting the disaster with serious discussions and proposals for a joyful mutation.