The Future: evolution from humans into cyber-humans, transhumanism

I came across some interesting ideas on the future of mankind in a book about the supermodel Kate Moss, by Christian Salmon,* which featured this picture of her:

Salmon says:  "In this image knocked together on the Internet, the visible body is fused with the written body.  The technique of morphing has created a written and coded cyborg-body.  The cyborg's stock of images expresses the ideal of limitless individual mutability beyond distinctions of gender, character, and species.”  

He also writes:  “Fashion is experimenting with new relationships to the body, gender, and race. Google establishes the hierarchy of deities on the Web and draws their navigation maps.  Kate Moss is one of Google's unquestioned goddesses, a Calypso with mysterious powers to captivate or a modern Daphne who is able to metamorphose so as to escape her media hounds.  The Kate Moss myth defies time through metamorphosis.

"The individual who brought the ideal of morphing to its highest degree of perfection and absurdity was Michael Jackson.  The singer used all the available bodily technologies - from costumes to plastic surgery to video clips to computer generated transformations - to remodel himself, modifying his age, gender, and "race" markers in the process.  Michael Jackson was the emblem of the identity hybridization now presented as the ideal of the new global world.”

Salmon goes on to quote feminist author Ramona Fernandez Haraway:  "(Michael Jackson’s) transmuting body enacts and re-enacts the multiple problematics of race, generation and gender," adding that Jackson metamorphosed into a creature that was "neither white nor black, male nor female, man nor woman, old nor young, human nor animal, historical person nor mythological figure, homosexual nor heterosexual."

In other words, Salmon and Haraway are saying:  identity markers are bad; unacceptable, outdated, soon to become obsolete.  Not only is to identify someone by their race bad, but so is to identify yourself with any one race.  Age is bad and to age is bad.  A single sexual orientation is bad.  Gender is bad.  Identifying yourself as only male or only female is bad.  All these identity markers are problems.  The solution:  We become none of them!  We become a Michael Jackson-like hybrid ideal!

Now, I think none of us are in any doubt that Michael Jackson was a secure, confident, whole, sound, well-adjusted, content and happy human being, at peace with who he was.  Wasn’t he every woman’s dream man?  Wasn’t he revered by women and men alike for his handsome good looks, his wisdom and sensibility, his astuteness?

Of course not.

Michael Jackson is admired for his musical talent and success, not for his sagacity.  Nor is he remembered for his sexual attractiveness - rather, he’ll always be remembered as looking like a monster after years of surgery to deliberately destroy his face.  We all know he was a very sad and lost person with an identity crisis, a person who didn’t know who he was.  His morphing was evidence of his insecurity and internal anguish.  How could anyone think it was an ideal?  It’s the idea of the moment:  identity markers are all erroneous cultural constructs which we must do away with.  As we evolve into cyborg-humans, we can achieve perfection by getting rid of age, race and gender.

This is a lie of colossal dimensions, a lie Satan wants the world to believe, because he’s lord of chaos.

Race, generation, heterosexual orientation and gender are not problems; they are all important parts of who we are, aspects of ourselves we should embrace.  A confident, secure person at peace with themselves is a person content with their age and not afraid of growing older; a person content with their race, not accusing or blaming another race for making them feel inferior and not choosing to be the victim of another race; a person content with their gender and enjoying their masculinity or femininity, enjoying being different to the opposite gender.

*Kate Moss:  The Making of an Icon.  by Christian Salmon