Abstract
This chapter presents a detailed account of the various objectives and strategies for action which were found associated with technological human enhancement. I split the presentation of these findings between, on the one hand, those technical visions which I found centred on the prospect of THE, versus on the other, the social-cultural-politically based ambitions which I found assigned to THEA. It reflects on how advocates were engaged in efforts to formally capture and systematise the technical and social activities emerging in the space opening up around human enhancement advocacy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these efforts often centred around the use of information and communication-based apparatus such as new wiki-media, and other social media type online-based platforms. The chapter closes with a discussion of how apparently European Enlightenment-inspired teleological-assumptions—especially those around the supposedly transcendent status of applied human reason—guide the mobilisation of projects associated with THEA.
“Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? The time has come for man to set himself a goal. The time has come to plant the seed to his highest hope.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885)
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MacFarlane, J.M. (2020). Mobilisations. In: Transhumanism as a New Social Movement. Palgrave Studies in the Future of Humanity and its Successors. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40090-3_5
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