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e-flux conversations

Closing editorial

Humanity has always been a design problem. A problem of whose future is sculpted by design. Of the shape of its user. Its actual interface.

The human is this question of arranging physical, chemical, electromagnetic, and genetic apparatus in time and space. How long a finger is needed to reach the trigger, or stroke another animal? How far must it extend in space? Elevated from humble materiality to a metaphysical program, the collective constellation of these design extensions is the humanist project. But what happens when that program is itself extended beyond its own limits?

Superhumanity emerged from this crack. It names the fetishes of humanism when costumed in the inherited clothes of an older body politic. Clothes that don’t fit, can’t fit, and when we voice our discomfort in protest, the response is our total destruction. The political environment boiling over makes it necessary to materialize not only the human, but the superhuman.

History proceeds by its bad side. The battle for the design of the 21st century has begun. Freedoms, institutions and alliances are under assault by populism, nationalism and fascism, with no sign of deceleration in the near future. The machine currently in power can learn—it has proven itself capable of that—but it cannot think for itself. Its thought is driven by feedback. It is caught in a loop, yet not one of the type that draws circles over itself, but spirals out of control.

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