Charles Eisenstein Puts His Lens on Transhumanism and the Metaverse

Things are moving quickly, but we still have some choices to make.

Charles Eisenstein, author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, examines where technology is taking us and helps us explore our options.

Those of us who feel we’re more than “sacks of mean with a brain inside” may want to consider his perspective.

From his article, Transhumanism and the Metaverse:

Transhumanism is nothing new. It continues a prehistoric trend toward increasing dependency on, and integration with, technology. When we became dependent on fire, our jaw muscles shrank and our digestive enzymes changed. The subsequent development, hundreds of thousands of years later, of representational language transformed our very brains. The material technologies of domestication, pottery, metallurgy, and finally industry created a society wholly dependent on them. Visions of silicon-brain hybrids operating digital control centers, served physically in all respects by robots, living wholly in an artificial reality, represent merely the culmination of a trend, not any change in direction. Already and for a long time, humans have to some degree lived in a virtual reality—the reality of their concepts, stories, and labels. The Metaverse immerses us in it still further.

Since transhumanism represents progress, it is no wonder that progressives tend to support it. A key tenet of progressivism is to bring the benefits of progress to all, to distribute them more fairly and universally. Progressivism does not question its own foundations. Development is its religion. That is why the Gates Foundation devotes so much of its resources to bringing industrial agriculture, vaccines, and computers to the Third World. That’s progress. It is also progress to move life online (work, meetings, entertainment, education, dating, etc.) Perhaps that’s why Covid lockdown policies met so little resistance from progressives. By the same token, ready acceptance of vaccines makes sense if they too represent progress: the integration of technology into the body, the engineering of the immune system to improve upon nature.

What leftists seem not to notice is that these versions of progress also enable the encroachment of capitalism into more and more intimate territories. Do you think the immersive AR/VR experience of the Metaverse will be free of advertising, perhaps so subtly targeted as to be invisible? The closer our integration with technology in all aspects of life, the more life can become a consumer product.

So what can we do?

Any alternative to the transhuman future must draw from a different mythology. But the mythology, at least the part of it comprising narrative and belief, is secondary. The alternative to transhumanism and transcendentalism generally is to fall back in love with matter. It is to accept our place as participants with the rest of life in an inconceivable process of creation. Instead of seeking to transcend our humanity, we seek to be more fully human. We longer seek to escape matter—not through the digital means of the Metaverse, nor through its spiritualized version.

Transhumanism and the Metaverse

I highly recommend reading the entire article… and then ALL of Eisenstein’s articles. We need to get to the business of creating The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.

It’s a long read, so if you’re more of a podcast person, the audio version is available here.