METAHUMAN R/EVOLUTION

The Metahuman Turn & Alternative (to extinction)

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Aquí versión en Español.

Why we need a metahuman alternative and turn:

We run straight to a mass extinction and self extinction propelled by relentless humanistic and hyperhumanistic suprematism. Transhumanism promotes a hyperfascist hyperhumanist trash-humanist dystopia that is not an option. Critical Posthumanism tends to have too low a criticality and too much complicitness and complacency with many human privileges that are also taking us, the other 8 million species and the planet to extinction. We need both a far more radical critique and a far more visionary counterproposal.

The Metahuman alternative redefines the human as part of planetary and cosmic fields of symbiosis and mutation. It proposes a radical movement philosophy approach, (as developed by Jaime del Val since 2002 and in the 2010 Metahumanist Manifesto [1]) claiming the core role of indeterminacy in movement for evolution as diversification. It implies a radical anticolonial, antiableist, antihumanist, more-than-queer claim for indeterminable variation as prerequisite for life and evolution. A relational ontology of the open.

The Metahuman alternative states that human flourishing can no longer be based on a devastating colonisation that erases biodiversity. There is no human flourishing without a flourishing biodiversity. Individual freedoms cannot be considered any longer without planetary health as frame of reference. Most individual freedoms as conceived today tend to work against planetary health. The entire civilizatory process emerging over the past 10,000 years needs to be acknowledged as an evolutionary failure causing a mass extinction: the worst possible cosmic crime.

Planetary health means conditions for biodiversity to flourish, and this is inseparable from the planet’s flows that have made it possible, as different from other planets that lack the complexity of flows in the Earth and have not been able to host complex life and a complex atmosphere. These conditions rely upon endless cosmic and geological fluctuations affording or not a complex balance of consistency and openness, of dynamism and stability.

Beyond the dead ends of critical posthumanism (while opposing transhumanism)

The metahuman turn is not only opposing transhumanism and its suicidal Trash-Human Supremacism, while defying any attempt to create a “unified” posthumanist apprach bringing together post- trans- and metahumanis currents, some of which are incompatible and at war; the metahuman turn actually proposes to overcome the core contradictions of critical posthumanism: that by focusing on a discourse-centric culture-centric bios and critique it confines politics to the agency of rational human individuals thus affirming the loop of human supremacy and ultimately neglecting the very possibility of going beyond into a politics that is truly non-anthropocentric. The latter is what movement politics and philosophy in metahumanism propose, building upon the genealogical critiques of critical posthumanism, deepening them through movement approaches, and taking them beyond, since movement include the analysis of discourse but offers also a broader frame both for analysis and for more than human agency. The narrowing of sensibility is the problem.

This goes along the reluctance of most critical posthumanists to look beyond dominant human civilizations, which are assumed as inevitable condition and evolutionary telos, which implies the reluctance to give away the false comforts of human supremacy. Instead Metahumanism and its Trash-human critique propose to see it as cosmic-geological anomaly hiding an extinction telos, resonating with the revolutionary anthropological theories from the 60 of the Original Affluent Society that is being revived today by James Suzman amongst others, which affirm that gatherer cultures have and had a better quality of living than what came with “civilization” and its devastating occupation of the earth and enslaving of its life forms, precisely because they move with the flows of the earth and not against them; linked to the important fact that this was the existence of the sapiens for 99% of its history of 300,000 years where it was always under 1 million population approx.

Here Metahumanism also breaks away with the problematic Darwinian resonances in Nietzsche and digresses from the idea that the human is between the animal and the overhuman. The dominant human (as there have been many humanities, most of the exterminated by the dominant ones) is a counter-evolutionary anomaly of extinction that needs to be overcome towards a renewal of symbiotic mutant nature. This is so because of the reductive movements it has imposed on earth (the stasis of being, ontology and metaphysics) eventually stemming from its own strange bipedal atrophy and fear, with far roots since hominids found themselves in the savannah 2,75 million years ago. This furthermore implies that systemic dominion is counter-evolutionary and that rationality as deductive and dominant intelligence is an inferior kind. Symbiotic intelligences need to be mobilised. Critical posthumanism fails to do this by encapsulating itself in post-Foucauldian notions of the inescapability of discursive and power matrixes, thus perpetuating human supremacy, its modes of living-moving, and its extinction telos.

Symbiotic mutant politics of life as variation

The Metahuman alternative is a Dionysian politics of life as symbiotic, ecstatic, bodily mutation.

The Metahuman alternative is the reversal of Meta’s, Facebook’s and the Metaverse’s fascist dystopia.

Note: the Metahuman alternative is radically anti-ableist. A radical movement philosophy approach is never about amount of movement. The paradox of disabilites and utramobility: the reduction of bodies’ variations creates a world of accelerated trajectories which in turn is an ableist society of alignments that impose themselves. Metahumanism is an antirationalist, radical neurodiverse proposal where movement and thinking are one and the same: there are endless modes and their openness is key. Neurotypical reductive rationalism is core to the extinction crisis.

The Metahuman alternative implies multiple r/evolutions:

proprioceptive/metaceptive – BI – nonverbal————– creating a new (and regaining an old) sensibility
metasexual – microsexual – orgiastic – postqueer ———— lowering human population
symbiotic – metaspecies – ultravegan ————- transforming ways of living

Just like humanism implies criminalisaing the killing and enslaving of humans, metahumanism implies the criminalisation of the killing and enslaving of all life forms, all ecosystems, and their related geological and cosmic flows.

This actually means criminalising:

all farms, all animal slavery, animal products and animal food;
agriculture, urbanisation, land (ab)use, and their related extractivisms;
the massive human reproduction that goes along the above and all its binary sexual categories and apartheids;
all reductive media and all movements that impose themselves, all algorithms;
mechanistic reductions, engines and mechanical transportation; and much more….

But far from being prohibitionist, Metahumanism is about regaining a lost richness of kinetic-bodily-sensory experience, a radical movement freedom, which is not of an autonomous individual, rather it is about plastic relational openness, a new (and old) sensibility for symbiotic mutation.

The metahuman turn implies that there is no “human Nature“. It is an anomalous-but-dominant, highly recent, and failed evolution within broader metaspecies variations that needs to get challenged and overcome, by regaining the capacity to vary: symbiosis and mutation. Movement is the question. Reinventing what movement is, and with it bodies-worlds and thought-perception is the task of Radical Movement Philosophy.

The Metahuman R/evolution is a turn towards a Metacene: beyond the current/recent Holocene/Anthropocene/Algoricene towards a renewed symbiotic, mutant earth.

Metahuman Futures Decalogue

Quit Facebook, go vegan, become homosexual … and dance every day! … This would be the very summarised formula, but the proposal is more complex and interesting. Also, take this decalogue [2] with a grain of salt, as very serious as well as ironic reversal of all dogmatisms.

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… What do we need to activate ten years from now?

Discover proprioception, the sense of the body in motion and develop BI, the capacity for minimal sustained variation. Avoid sedentary lifestyle and false comfort. Develop non-categorising and non-formalising, neurodiverse intelligences, enhance non-verbal communication, co-sensing instead of verbal and rational consent.
Don’t reproduce! Neither sexually nor in the laboratory. Develop metasexual modes: redefining sex as mutation, undoing every concept inherited form the historical confusion of sex and reproduction, orgy techniques, polyamorous and trans-species kinships, contribute to the radical reduction of the human population, become microsexual agents, pollinators of epigenetic variation and miscegenation.[3] The human as dominant colonial species is the species that multiplies relentlessly for the sake of domination.
Become a radical vegan, stop the animal Holocuast, not consuming products of animal origin or human and land exploitation, or delocalised origin. Do not consume!… nor create garbage: produce and recycle! … Towards a renewal of gatherer cultures.
Disalign from Facebook and other antisocial networks, from any interface that reduces you to fixed points of vision, that turns you into a calculable body, that absorbs you in the addiction to toxic media, that turns you into a repetition node of contagious gestures and homogeneous perceptions. The excuse that “you can make good use of technology” or of usefulness is not valid in face of the Planetary Holocaust. Nor is it enough to be a hacker and “make critical use of technology.” The provisional use of such media to spread the message in view of a gradual disalignment is more of an option.
Move as little as possible in quantity, avoiding mechanical means and their systemic violence, enriching your experience with the most immediate, starting with the body itself, which is itself a microcosm of sensations and movement, favouring slowness and qualitative variations. Buildings, engines/motors and algorithms are all faces of our cosmic crime and evolutionary failure – all aspects of the civilizatory progress are implicitly or explicitly those that create the mass extinction and self extinction.
Develop symbiotic ways of living, of relational and dynamic architecture, avoiding intensive urbanisation. Don’t build, nor buy newly built houses! Urbanisation is a planetary crime. Disalign from the hygienism that separates and immunises us. Promote nudism, the body as a sensor. We need to learn from non humans and their architectures and ways of living-moving-evolving with the earth’s flows and not against them, biotechnically evolving with ecosystems and flows. We need to develop completely new culture of non-building, non-cities. Dominant human cultures have grown gainst flows: a cosmic crime unleashing an extinction.
Develop choral practices, of the common body, of the metabody: of improvisation, memory, sociality, and education, of work and the economy of variation, against utilitarianism and teleology: planetary choruses for a Dionysian politics. Freedom needs to be redefined beyond the narrow conceptions of individual autonomy which is mostly implying the privileges of an elite and the enslaving and devastation of the planet and its 8 million species, including humans.
Heal through movement, in relation to all physical, mental or emotional discomfort, and not through drug addiction or toxic media escapism (of sensory and affective drugs). We need to question the sources of many our illnesses in the toxic way of atrophied living we have created. We also need to accept illness as part of our openness, and develop new modes of radical symbiotic care through proprioception technologies, healing by moving with each other. We need to question the privileges of palliative health care systems as always involving an elite and implying a systemic killing machine and an eugenics.
Accept death as part of the evolutionary mutation, and suffering (pathos) as part of symbiotic becoming: not the suffering of the slave, not the systemic killing, but the Dionysian affirmation of everything that happens, and the active capacity to integrate it in a cosmic variation, the capacity for openness: sensibility.
Activate systemic resistances, networks of ontohackers, indeterminators, microsex-workers, 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.

#DontChooseExtinction

#FreeUkraine

#Putin=Extinction

#Imperialism=Extinction

#TrumPutinJinping+MuskBezosZucker=Extinction

#Trash-Humanism=Extinction

#ClimateChange=Extinction

#IPCC —- Climate Report 2022: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/

#Urbanisaton=extinction

#Civilization=extinction

#StoppingToBeHuman

#MetahumanFutures

#BI R/evolution

#AI-is-Fascism

#FuckMeta

#FacebookIsFascism

[1] See https://metabody.eu/jaimedelval-publications/ and www.metahumanism.net.

[2] from this source: https://journals.tplondon.com/jp/article/view/1876

[3] This is a radicalised version of some existing and recent proposals in feminism such as Donna Haraway’s call to “Make kin, not babies!” (Haraway 2016, 103), hir proposal of sympoiesis as making-with and becoming-with, and hir fabulations of “Communities of Compost” that regenerate the planet with new modes of symbiotic kinship and low reproduction. Ursula K. LeGuin is a pioneer in fabulating such alternative worlds, as in The Left Hand of Darkness or in Always Coming Home. But Haraway’s idea of reaching a population of around 3 billion over several hundred years I find excessively soft: 3 billion humans was a number achieved after 1950, already associated to a very unsustainable relation to the planet! For a more sustainable relation one needs to look at populations well before industrialisation. Way of living and population are related. In this sense, numerous posthumanist, queer, decolonial, neurodiverse and other theorists still manifest humanist biases by assuming an essential separation between Bios and Zoe, between a discursive politics and something that is its “outside”: Metahumanism seeks to overcome this limitation through a Radical Movement Philosophy approach.

There is also a wide arrange of movements and philosophical positions that count as antinatalist, some of them perhaps too soft in the reductions proposed, such as “Populations Matters”, others perhaps too radical and negative in claiming an extinction and a suicide of the species without considering alternatives for a mutation, such as “Voluntary Human Extinction movement” and the “Church of Euthanasia”. Antinatalist positions of different kinds include those of Schopenhauer and Malthus, but also Spanish anarchist Luis Bulffi who wrote the “Belly Stryke” manifesto in 1906. “Earth First” ecologism, queer and posthuman kinships or “no children by choice” movements also resonate with my proposal, though generally an alternative and affirmative proposal for the species’ mutation is missing.

There are also many connections between Metahumanism and Patricia MacCormack’s proposal in the Ahuman Manifesto (2020), but one important difference is that MacCormack, like other abolitionists and antinatalists, perhaps including Claire Colebrook, consider that there exists a “human being” defined by a certain way of thinking, perceiving and communicating, (which perhaps implies an echo of human essentialism, also to be found in Haraway, Braidotti, etc.), and that it must become extinct for the planet to flourish again. Instead metahumanism implies that the dominant human is both a construction and an anomalous techno-epi-phylogenetic mutation that has been based on a millennia old reduction of perception, a radical atrophy, an evolutionary stasis, and that what is needed is to recover the capacity to mutate in symbiosis, reinventing the body-movement-thought, against the millennia old predominance of distant vision and abstract semiotics. Here would be the difference between an ahumanism and a metahumanism. It is in the question of the movement and in radical movement philosophy where the difference lies.

Metahumanism’s proposal for animal liberation is along the lines of “abolitionist” veganism that opposes all animal use and abuse, and denounces the anthropocentrism of “animal rights” movements, but metahumanism does not recognize any essentialist distinction between a human species and other non-humans. What we have to do is stop being “human” and becoming symbiotic and mutating metahumans by recovering and reinventing BI (Body Intelligence). This does imply stopping reproduction and embracing radical veganism but not towards a sheer self-extinction, rather it implies a deep mutation, by which we acknowledge our place as just one of the 8 million species in a symbiotic world. My antinatalist proposal acknowledges the anomaly of human overpopulation over the past 10,000 years as linked to a particular civilizatory process that causes the current mass extinction, an anomaly within a broader geological framework.

Metahumanism moves away from transhumanists like David Pearce who proposes to “genetically reprogram the biosphere” to eliminate the imperative to reproduce and to eliminate meat eating predators including non-human animals. Pearce does not understand that the insane human multiplication, which is unparalleled in nature, is linked to an insane way of life, also unparalleled, and that this is the problem that creates a mass extinction. Evolution is indeterminate variation and any attempt to program it only perpetuates the colonial and Eurowhite fantasies of domination that lead us to extinction. Although Metahumanism does not defend animal predation, it cannot be put on the same level as human superpredation, not even remotely. It is the habits of the dominant human that have to be changed towards a deeper epi-phylogenetic mutation by which we stop imposing ourselves with our excessive self-awareness that is the result of a millennia long vital atrophy.

The metahuman proposal resonates with some aspects of anarcho-primitivism or neo-Luddism, such as the denunciation of the civilizing process, the challenge of industrialization and the vindication of ways of life that are not dependent on it. However, it differs in that the metahumanist proposal does not recognize a human nature, all nature is only indeterminate variation, that the civilizing process has wanted to suspend, reduce, paralyze, creating mass extinction and suicide as a species in the blink of an eye. Metahumanism inverts the original inversion of life values that emerged with agriculture (rooted in bipedalism), makes an unmitigated critique and challenges of the civilizing process and of all human suprematism, and looks beyond, towards new mutations of life. It is not about going “against technology” which would be falling into the usual mistake of confusing symptoms with causes: it is the type of movement that counts. If we eliminate technology and do not profoundly change sensitivity and movement, and with it the modes of relationship, we will not undo the core of what leads humans to destructive domination, we must undo an entire techno-epi-philo-genetic evolution with new vital technes: vival and convivial technes of experience (in addition to survival techniques).

For example, in relation to Ted Kacinsky (“Unabomber”), the terrorist and anti-technology intellectual who sent 16 bombs between 1978 and 1995 to universities and airlines, metahumanism does not support terrorism with bombs, although it denounces the hypocrisy and horror practiced by human suprematism murdering and enslaving 100,000 million sensitive beings every year, although we doubt that terrorism with bombs is the appropriate way to denounce the aberrant situation. It is to be admired instead that an exceptionally gifted university student turned his back on the system with visionary clarity, denounced the role of universities in the process of destruction, and retired to a cottage without water or electricity in the forest learning survival techniques to be self-sufficient without dependence on industrialized society. His manifesto “The Industrial Society and its Future” has correct ideas, in some cases resonant with metahumanism, and others that still show many humanist overtones, beliefs in a human nature, challenging technology without addressing the underlying problem, negativity, etc. In Kacinscky there is however an all too human echo of human suprematism and male domination not exempt of homo and trans-phobia and despise for all minorities, whom he accuses, together with all leftist movements of conservative political correctness, as embodying antinatural norms, and attacking this with a negativity and insistence that seems to mirror the same attitudes he critizises in the left. But his unmitigated analysis is correct in stating that the good and bad effects of a technology cannot be separated.