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Chrome Plated Jackboots

What are the political threats of the 21st century going to be?

Politics changes over time, so it's fair to say they're going to be different from those of the past. However, history has a habit of being self-similar, so to start with I'm going to take a look back at the past century.

The big political change of the 20th century was the triumph of democracy. At the start of that period, the overwhelming majority of nations were ruled by hereditary monarchies, where your eligibility for a position of power was dictated by an accident of birth (and the loyalty of the army and secret police). Most of the monarchies were totalitarian, and lest you think of them as somehow glamorous, I'd like to remind you that we have another name for absolute monarchism these days: hereditary dictatorship (and the poster child for that system is currently North Korea, where a third Kim appears likely to ascend to the throne chair of the central committee in the next few months). Nevertheless, we've somehow fumbled our way through to a world where in an outright majority of nations, your birth is not a barrier to holding high office, and even more importantly, the high officers of state are in principle directly accountable to the public.

This change was not inevitable. The collapse of the western monarchies between 1917 and 1919 was largely a consequence of a war that need not have happened. And it left a power vacuum, and warring modernist ideologies sought to occupy the vacuum. One of these, Communism in its Leninist form, was initially idealist and utopian — but made the fatal twin mistakes of adopting an elitist, authoritarian leadership structure, and of hewing to ideology over pragmatic reality when the piles of skulls began building up. (The road to hell, good intentions, you know the drill.) The other big contender, Fascism, made no bones about its purpose: it was going to replace the tired, old hereditary dictatorship monarchy with a thrusting, dynamic, air-minded new dictatorship wearing shiny jackboots and reinvigorating the national spirit, which had grown tired and decadent in the fifty-something years since Italy was reuinted. Nazism stole Fascism's uniform and took it to a logical, horrible conclusion, and today Nazism is so thoroughly discredited that nobody takes its politics seriously (only its xenophobia and hatred): but Fascism in the broader sense is worth understanding, because it's still out there (especially in Italy). If you haven't read it already, Umberto Eco's essay Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt is absolutely vital to understanding the Fascist mind-set. (Obligatory troll-bait: John Scalzi was absolutely correct when he gave Jonah Goldberg a wedgie for trying to redefine the author of the Fascist Manifesto as a Socialist. If your ideological reality tunnel is so narrow that you don't get that Mussolini was a Fascist and that Aneurin Bevan was not a Fascist, you're not going to get much out of the rest of this essay.)

But enough about the 20th century. We know what happened to the two big modernist contenders for the power vacuum left behind after the fall of the monarchies (although many books have been filled scratching the surface of their history). We even know about the also-ran contenders that never quite reached take-off speed: Technocracy, Libertarianism, and so on.

And now, the future ...

There are many ways of looking at the politics of the 21st century, and I'm no political scientist; so this is an informal brain dump of what I'm thinking about right now — a pragmatic tour of some issues. Firstly, it's not going to be about the environment. That war is over — what's currently going on is basically the mopping-up operation, the equivalent of rooting out the last hereditary absolute monarchies to cling on into the 1930s. What opposition there is, consists of the aristocrats sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "I can't hear you!" as they sit in the tumbrils queuing up at the foot of the guillotine. Quibbling about hockey-stick curves won't get you very far when the oceans are being overrun by toxic jellyfish and anoxic zones, when parts of Australia are peaking at 37 degrees (just shy of human body temperature) in winter, and Vanuatu is being evacuated ahead of the rising tides. Secondly, it's not going to be about privacy and intellectual property. Or rather, it's going to be about privacy and intellectual property the way that the 20th century was about steam locomotives and iron foundries. These were vital 19th century technologies that provided a platform for 20th century industries to evolve on top of, but triple-condensing steam engines tell us nothing about semiconductor fab lines: they lie too far down the stack of incremental technologies. By the time we reach 2050, the microprocessor and software industries will be about as innovative and interesting as steam locomotives were in 1950; and the big questions about privacy and IP will have been answered (hint: ubiquitous polycentric surveillance, some sort of abstraction layer to encapsulate and insulate the public against the crisis of copyright, and a generation for whom the concept of "blackmail" makes less sense than bleeding with leeches as a cure for a surfeit of billious humours). Thirdly, it's not going to be about biotechnology any more than the 20th century was about powered heavier-than-air flight. Yes, flight was and is important, but not in the way the Italian modernists of the first three decades imagined, with their manifestos about "air-mindedness" and Douhet's insane, apocalyptic visions of air power — that led to such atrocities as the British Empire's policing with bombers (dropping poison gas!) in the 1920s, and strategic bombing raids against civilian populations during subsequent wars. For the most part, military aviation falls into two categories (better artillery, and better logistics); it doesn't really change warfare, it just makes the whole barbaric affair more efficient (which is to say, more destructive). Biotechnology is going to be an efficiency enabler for a whole lot of things, and have immense second-order effects (just like cheap air travel), but it's not going to fundamentally change us (unless some lunatic repeats the mousepox/interleukin-4 experiment with weaponized smallpox, in which case we are probably all dead). So what should we be looking at? Astute readers might just have noticed by now that I have an interest in transhumanism and extropianism. (I've even written a novel that takes some of these themes seriously: Accelerando.) There's a loose cluster of memes floating around which, like the earlier modernist ideologies, postulate that the human condition is a variable not a constant. (Conservativism, in contrast, assumes that human nature is unchanging: a notion which I refute by inviting its proponents to show me around their caves and give me a tutorial in knapping flints.) Unlike earlier Enlightenment ideologies that looked to the perfectability of humanity in terms of training and education (from the Scottish Kirk to the Soviet Communists), transhumanism focusses on minimizing human constraints by applying new technologies: genetic engineering and tissue engineering, smart drugs, brain implants, mind uploading, life prolongation, artificial intelligence, and so on. I should nail my colours to the mast at this point and say that, as a child of the enlightenment myself, I'm all in favour of abolishing pain, disability, death, stupidity, and other existential taxes (although I suspect this laundry list is incomplete without the inclusion of sparkly ponies, or at least a chicken in every pot). Maximizing individual freedom to the extent that it doesn't infringe on our neighbours' freedom is hard to argue with — at least until you start arguing about what freedom is: what about freedom to starve, freedom to abuse your kids, or freedom from having your pocket picked to pay for the influenza vaccine for the deadbeat next door who will otherwise incubate, infect, and kill you? Individual freedom versus community interests is a knotty problem, and we don't have a definitive answer to it because we all have different expectations (and evaluations of our perceived needs). But. To get to the money shot: transhumanism is going to influence the next century because, unless we are very unlucky indeed, the biotechnology, nanotechnology, and telecommunications industries are going to deliver goods that combine to fundamentally change the human condition. We've seen the tip of the iceberg so far: news stories like this would have been fodder for an SF story twenty or thirty years ago, and this video (playing pong! Using transcranial brain interfaces!) probably still is. But don't be deceived: we're entering strange territory. And what particularly exercises me is the possibility that if we can alter the parameters of the human condition, we can arbitrarily define some people as being better than others — and can make them so. Not all transhumanists have good intentions. Earlier I went on for a while about Italy, home of the Modernist movement in art and birthplace of Fascism. Italy's currently in the grip of a wave of racism and neofascist vigilantism, presided over by an allegedly racist media mogul with a near-monopoly on broadcast media in that country. So it's probably not surprising that Italy is the source of a new political meme that I hadn't heard of before this week: overhumanism: Italian overhumanism is heavily influenced by the "Nouvelle Droite", a fringe political movement that emerged from the French neofascist microcosm in the late '70s/early '80s, and which attempted to bring far-right ideas into the mainstream by discarding the trappings of historical Fascism in order to convey a similar message in a less unpalatable form. In common with the Nouvelle Droite, it borrows heavily from the extreme left (anti-americanism, anti-clericalism, opposition to globalisation), and has adopted neopaganism as a religious stance. While affirming the importance of science in modern life, this hybrid offspring of neofascism also maintains more traditional far-right positions such as elitism, antiegalitarianism and an interest in ethnic identity that crosses into differentialist racism. Did you get that? The fascists have noticed transhumanism, and decided that they like it. To continue to quote Giancarlo Stile's warning about the overhumanists: Nobody doubts that the overhumanists accept what could be called the Central Meme of Transhumanism (CMT), the affirmation that it is ethical and desirable to employ technoscientific means to fundamentally improve the human condition. However, this is only the lowest common denominator of transhumanism and can be adopted, and adapted to their own needs, by most political ideologies, bioconservative and neoluddite ones excluded. That obviously leaves enough room for manoeuvre for some far-right and far-left extremists. It could be argued that this is a strong point of transhumanism, but the other side of the coin is what we have witnessed with the emergence of overhumanism. The founders of modern transhumanism, conscious of these risks, attempted to anchor the CMT to concepts such as the respect of the individual, freedom, tolerance and democracy, underlining how transhumanism's roots are in the Enlightenment, in humanism and liberalism. [8] Extropians have gone further, trying to anchor the CMT to concepts such as spontaneous order at first, and open society later, [9] but it would seem that the overhumanists are more than capable of the ideological contortionism necessary to describe themselves as transhumanists, while maintaning their critique of human rights, their ethno-identitarian obessions, their "Eurasian" fantasies, the fixation with indoeuropean ethnicity, etc. Did you get that? The fascists have noticed transhumanism, and decided that they like it. To continue to quote Giancarlo Stile's warning about the overhumanists: To be fair, Overhumanism isn't the whole story about transhumanism in Italy. Bruce Sterling picked it up first: there are two different transhumanist organizations, only one of which is wearing the chrome-plated jackboots. Nevertheless, the emergence of this ideology is giving me the cold shudders, because I suspect it's a sign of things to come that will have momentous effects down the line, late in the 21st century. Why does it matter? The whole of our constructed weltanschaung of modernity and enlightenment values and democracy rests on the fundamental axiom that existing human lives are of equivalent value. Back in the bad old days, under the monarchies, in the era of chattel slavery, that wasn't so: some people were worth more than others. Update the vision: if your king (or your slave owner) needs a new kidney (or heart), then you'd better hope you're not a histocompatible donor. But as long as we're only dealing with Humanity 1.0, it's hard to argue on empirical grounds that one human is intrinsically worth more than another. If we run into alien intelligences, or create artificial ones, we will be dealing with beings that may force us to reevaluate that basic axiom of the enlightenment project. But otherwise we've got nothing to fear ... except possibly the products of a political ideology that explicitly rejects the assumption of equality of opportunity. We saw such ideologies at play before: indeed, one of them warped the middle of the 20th century in a ghastly, unforgettable manner. And now there's a new one that might, if it flourishes, evolve into the 21st century equivalent of Nazism. I think a while back I wrote an SF novel about that, too, and it's not a good feeling to discover a bunch of folks who evidently see bits of it as a road map: "Hello. We're from the ReMastered race, and we're here to help you." UPDATE: See comments #64 and #65 from some folks who are considerably closer to the Italian extropian scene than the rest of us.

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