This scenario, Vinge explains, is plausible since human agency vis-à-vis technology is increasingly receding, leaving technology ever more autonomous to follow its own course, or to assume full agency: “I think technology is close enough to being out of control that human intervention has become a weaker and weaker constraint.” He concludes with a statement that puts together most of the technologistic assumptions regarding technology being autonomous and having its own history and teleology, a history and teleology that is linked with nature much more than with (human) culture: “It’s important to regard technology in the long sweep of history as being one with history. In fact, it’s one with biology, one with the rise of multicellular life forms, and it’s headed someplace—probably. But it’s not alien to the sweep of development and beauty and order in the universe” (Kelly 1995).
In such a techno-centric history the status of humans is revisited. They are no longer seen as the crown of creation nor the pinnacle of the natural world but are reevaluated vis-à-vis technology. In such framing they are portrayed as a dumbed-down version of computers. But this is not just a reevaluation of capabilities and performance or an acknowledgment of the limited computational capabilities of humans; it is rather a break with the core philosophical underpinning of humanism. This techno-centrism means that humans are no longer seen in the light of Kantian humanism as ends in and of themselves but in a new light, which might be termed superhumanism, or cyberhumanism (which should be distinguished from posthumanism), where human evolution is seen as a stage on the way to a higher end where more advanced levels of technological (and civilizational) developments are achieved. Humans are seen as a subdigital species in need of assimilating into a new species, which is increasingly more technological and less humane.
I must remind the reader that my task is not to engage with the argument philosophically or present moral or ontological critiques. Rather, I want to point out the cultural meaning of such a stance and its social and political ramifications in the context of contemporary capitalism. Set within this framework, such a narrative should be understood as depoliticizing technology, indeed deculturalizing technology, by reification and naturalization and by decentering the role of individuals and society in the creation of the conditions under which humans live.
Network Cosmology and the Exhaustion of Criti<sub>q</sub>ue
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