At the end of Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk is able to argue that futurists (like Toffler and McLuhan, his references but also like today's Kurzweil), are dependent upon an earlier generation of thinkers, not even cold war, 50's and 60's thinkers and certainly not 70's thinkers like Vinge) but pre-World War II & WW I thinkers, like Friedrich Dessauer, but also Walter Rathaus, and Adrien Turel in an uncanny context that was the crucible for the particular fascism that grew out of the Weimar Republic on Sloterdijk’s account. 

Indeed, some will find it hard not to think of Kurzweil’s (or should one not say, at least to respect the interest of copyright, Vinge’s?) “technological singularity” or what I above have already opted to name, via Star Trek, the machine-human mind-meld, when Sloterdijk reflects upon his Rules for the Human Zoo noting that 

its strong epistemological linkage between concepts like ‘Dionysian materialism’ and ‘vitalism, a linkage made even more interesting by the fact that the life sciences and life technics have just passed into a new phase of their development. 

Here it should be noted that such references to the life sciences also point to the coming age of terror: in the name of transhumanism, in the hunt to jimmy the body with new replacement parts, there is an age of vivisection undreamt of --- and the university's biological sciences and psych buildings already drip red with the blood of their victims, almost as incarnadine as a medical or veterinary school.  A student learns one thing, the pain of the animal, the pain, always call it discomfort of the patient, only gets in the way.

Transhumanism is about using animals and the earth more thoroughly, more completely for human purposes.

 

One says there is no nature, because for one's purposes there is not. There is human need, greed, caprice.


And this is true of the new theory, same as the old theory.

Beyond the debate internal to the politics of German public intellectuals, the theme for Sloterdijk is anthropotechnics: the technique of the manufacture of humanity, and it is not a German but a global concern:

 As Sloterdijk puts it:

Nietzsche and Plato have invited themselves to the ‘symposium’ to comment on the ideas of Heidegger, to put forward their opinions on the drama played out in the clearing. The title of this drama? Anthropotechnics or: How human beings produce themselves. And suddenly everyone wants to be invited, everyone — dramatically — wants to be part of the debate, to take part in it.

Sloterdijk’s point is increasingly relevant and the message of Kurzweil’s vision of the ‘technological singularity’ as it has been embraced by (at least some elements of) popular culture, when it is not the message of the genome project or stem cells, is indeed anthropotechnics, which is all about not becoming the one you are but, and to be sure becoming the one you wish you were, the one you ‘should have’ been all along.  

Call this the Harry Potter effect, or everyone is a boy wizard, quidditch player, best in sports, all secret greatness and unfair discrimination, at least, in the germ, at least until after the singularity.  

Just as we have been transhuman all the time that we have, in Bruno Latour’s words “never been modern,” it can and has repeatedly been claimed that everything will be perfect after the revolution. For Marx, this was the revolution he famously failed to locate rightly, not in his industrial England or even in his Germany but and however disastrously and unsustainably where it did change the world in Russia and (still ongoing) in a China that is today increasingly indistinguishable from a capitalist regime, just ask the international financier Maurice Strong, or for the same answer from a different source, ask Žižek. 

Apart from Marx, and closer to home, the “revolution” that was promised to change everything, at least when I was eleven going on twelve, was a socio-cultural, leftist revolution, that was the revolution of the 1968 generation as it played itself into nothing but the idols of the market, lots of music, drugs, distractions of sex and the need to announce one’s erotic orientation to the world. So we ask, which revolution?  The technological one, of course. And who announces this but those who market the same? The technological singularity is suspiciously not unlike a Coke commercial.  

We are the world.