HUMANS, AS A SPECIES, have finally managed to combine all the worst tropes of cyberpunk novels with all the best scenes from disaster blockbusters: our identities are willingly outsourced to social media platforms; the largest nation-state on the planet uses a social credit system; digisexuality is a concept discussed in newspapers of record; teenagers in Eastern Europe may or may not have determined the election for the leader of the global empire; and AI robots are predicted to take our jobs in the next decade, around the same time that most of the planet is either underwater or on fire.
In other words, we live in a posthuman world.
As the terrain of political, social, economic, technological, and environmental reality shifts from under us, it's clear that the old ways of assessing our place in the world simply won't do anymore. Unfortunately, the theories of the posthuman with the most reach belong primarily to Silicon Valley–style techno-utopians. In the visions of Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, or Tim Cook, the expansion of the human via cybernetic technology, space exploration, and bio-engineering acts as a stand-in for the expansion of capitalism and the unbridled colonization of every part of human existence by the free market.
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