Devastated from a cycle of working twenty-hour days for months, all of that time spent at the computer — like some freakish latter-day Jeremy Bentham — I was unable to properly climb the stairs without getting completely winded. I’d spent almost eight months unable to get out of bed. You know how it is: You feel like your mind is a machine made for shifting the building blocks of matter around with the power of the Internets and you get to it to the exclusion of all else. Unfortunately, the price is steep.

And so I decided to embrace my antithesis. To meld with the Other. To transcend high school Manicheanism and unify all opposites.

I decided to become a Bro. I decided to join the gym and get jacked. It had to be done. And, so entering upon the Path of the Bro, through that door that had been locked and barred for me all my life by my own blind prejudice and delusive belief in a mind/body split, I found it to be not only well-lit and maintained by all manner of helpful and cheery Bros but also to be a path of human development more demanding, more continually life-affirming and potentially even more satisfying than many of the higher consciousness change techniques I had immersed myself in while in my twenties.

Enough with the endless RSS feeds, the “I just had Red Bull to eat today,” the Assangemode… Here was my new grimoire: Bodybuilding.com! Here was my new god: Zyzz! (More on this later.)

Cracking the Bro Code

To enter the path, I began with a few months of severing my bad habits. I switched to only pure unprocessed food and cut the chemicals out of my diet. Then I humbled myself before the Pylons of Brodom. I joined the gym, signed up for about thirty personal training sessions, and got the basics down. For the first three weeks, I couldn’t even do the simplest exercises without having to sit down about three times a session feeling like I was going to pass out. It was totally weak. There I sat, with a girl who weighed about a hundred pounds smirking at my out-of-shape ass. I did about a month of this, interspersed with daily hour-long cardio sessions to shock my system back into realizing it existed and that I would be needing it. Soon I wasn’t near-fainting or feeling like a scarecrow. I felt… damn… I felt fucking excellent.

From there I shifted into bodybuilding. I calculated how many calories I was burning a day, and then maxed out my macronutrients to the point where I was consuming more than I was burning — in my case about 3,500 calories a day. Daunting, especially as a vegetarian—but with a few trips to Costco and Trader Joe’s, I actually found that my new diet could be cheaper and easier than what I’d been getting before. A cup of Trader Joe’s instant steel-cut oats with two tablespoons of honey? Costs about forty to fifty cents and gives you 800 calories of slow-burning carbs and protein with no fat, and cuts out your heart disease risk to boot. A can of kidney beans from Costco when bought in bulk? About a dollar, and another 850 calories of carbs, protein and no fat. Dig it. Throw in a good low-fat protein powder, some veggies and fruit, and eight glasses of water a day and you’re good to go, and don’t even have to cook your meals or deal with looking around for places to eat every day. Hacked!

Then I hit the weights. After four months of working out four to five times a week for an hour each, favoring compound exercises and free weights, I’d put on twenty pounds, in a good way. Now, I felt, I could see the path for the first time. I’d only taken a few steps on it. I was still just barely past the starting line. But I was on the path.

There I was, an out-of-place geek in the place I’d been trying to avoid with all my willpower since I talked my junior high school into letting me out of gym class so that I could sit in the library reading H. P. Lovecraft and Frank Herbert. A latecomer to the party, but a sincere one.

And there, all around me, were all the freaky people. Bros, juicers and lugheads of all ages. Beast-women who looked like they could savage you in three seconds and take your carotid artery as a prize. Ungodly Hot Girls and their professional killer boyfriends. Friendly personal trainers. New Year’s resolution cardio warriors. And they were all kind of cool, I realized as soon as I got over my initial disorientation. They were all there to push their personal limits in a supportive environment, one big congregation in the Flesh Temple. What could be better?

After my initial four months, the Bros signaled that their conscious hive mind had noticed my continual presence, dedication and growth with a simple gesture: While doing concentration curls one day while that show The Big Bang played silently on the gym TVs, a huge powerlifter on my right said, simply, “Only nerds like this show, huh?”

Wait, I realized. Waaaaiit… he just said that like he was talking about people who aren’t me.

It was like the proverbial Diamond Bullet to the Forehead.

Some Considerations on Bro Transhumanism

Once you start really getting into this stuff, you find yourself in a maze of data that you’d need a Master’s in exercise physiology and the chemistry knowledge of the average Pfizer grunt to comprehend. What to eat. When to eat. How to manipulate anabolic and catabolic states. Bulking and cutting. Endless supplements to sort through. Sleep habits. And then we get into the realm of Bro Science, a mix of legitimate physiology knowledge and superstition that produces dubious body hacks like:

“Drink a ton of dextrose with your post-workout protein and creatine shake to spike your insulin and help your muscles absorb it.”

“If you do tons of squats and deadlifts it will release extra testosterone that will help your arms grow.”

Or even oddities like the infamous GOMAD diet—GOMAD standing for Gallon of Milk a Day, which has you doing heavy compound lifting while carrying around crates of whole milk to chug all day long.

How much of it is real and how much isn’t? It’s anybody’s guess. To find out, you’re going to have to do your own testing, and you’re going to have to machete through the overgrown thicket of online bodybuilder sites populated largely by teenagers looking to turn themselves into Hulk Hogan by prom.

After researching supplements for a while, I settled on the basics: high quality whey protein with a dextrose chaser, slow-burning casein protein to drink before bed to absorb while sleeping, a weightlifter-oriented multivitamin, DHA and EPA-inclusive flax oil, and creatine (a nitrogenous organic acid which naturally occurs in muscle and which you get from eating meat; if you supplement with it, it tends to put on muscle mass pretty quick by adding water weight. Opinions are divided on it, but I decided to cycle it since I’m a vegetarian and not getting it in my diet).

There’s all kinds of crazy gear beyond that: BCAAs (branch-chain amino acids) to boost muscle growth (if your protein’s good it’ll have enough BCAAs anyway); L-Glutamine to aid recovery (should also be in your protein if it’s good); ZMA (Zinc Magnesium Aspartate) to aid sleep and recovery; pre-workout Nitric Oxide boosters; Beta Alanine; HMA; thermogenics; various weird creatine modifications; waxy maize, glycomaize, maltrodextrin and other instant carbs; and on and on. Most of this stuff is overpriced and dubious. (Pro-tip: Never go to GNC to buy supplements. Those guys make commission and will run sales game on you to try to get you to buy obscenely priced placebo supplements full of fake-sounding chemicals that might as well be powdered unicorn horn. For my money, the best deals on supplements are all on Amazon. I mostly buy the stuff put out by Optimum Nutrition; they make top-reviewed, reliable gear.)

Beyond that, of course, there’s steroids and human growth hormone. That stuff fucks you up and you can spot the dudes on it pretty easily. Example: Changing in the locker room, I watched a jacked guy with bloodshot eyes and a beady-sweaty forehead maniacally staring at himself in the mirror while slowly and precisely pulling every hair out of his chin with a pair of tweezers. An hour later, after my workout, he was still at it. Hmmm… in retrospect, that might have been crystal. But you get the idea.

The more I found my way into the strange world of bodybuilding, the more I was exposed to the online bodybuilding subculture, a dedicated pod of transhumanists if I’ve ever seen one, who devote daily physical and mental effort to pushing the limits of the human form, consistently obsessing over how they can overcome the barriers of time, genetics and aging to reach a physical perfection that they may have been told was impossible for them to aspire to every day of their lives until they decided to ignore all that and go for it.

The Bros have been at this for a long time, steadily working out the physical hacks it takes to turn a normal Joe into one of those guys from 300. These guys, and girls, obsessively pursue the transcendence of the flesh through the flesh, like the reverse of Indian fakirs. It is a religion, a path through and beyond the confines of human, a path to an inhuman pinnacle of godly aesthetic glory that will look really good with a spray tan.

And if bodybuilding is a religion, it has a god: Zyzz, a personality so prominent and crucial that he deserves his own section.

How Do I Unlock Zyzzmode Brah?

Aziz Sergeyevich Shavershian, or Zyzz to his countless fans, was an aesthetically-oriented Australian Russian bodybuilder who went from a stick-bundle teenager to a shredded orange perfection of the male form in the short space of four years, and then proceeded to go shirtless to a lot of clubs and Australian music festivals with his Aesthetics Crew bros and pick up girls in quantities that mere mortals can only dream of, becoming a national celebrity in the process. Along with his brother Said Shavershian (a.k.a. Chestbrah), he also spent a lot of time on 4chan’s /fit/ forum, where he was revered as the aspirational archetype by every single weightlifter on that board. Last August, at the age of 22, shortly after Chestbrah was arrested for possession of anabolic steroids, Zyzz collapsed and died in a sauna in Bangkok. His death has been attributed to an undiagnosed congenital heart defect.

Already a hero of the subculture, Zyzz has now ascended to the status of a minor god, a benevolent force that looks down over the striving /fit/izens and encourages them to push out just one more rep, so that the girls will be ‘mirin and the other bros will be jelly, his trademarked spiked hair and mirrored aviator sunglasses surrounding a glowing, magnanimous smile.

For the younger generation, Zyzz is a symbol of human aspiration; for concerned parents and sundry authority figures, he is a symbol of the growing dangers of steroid abuse and of social pressure on teenage boys to meet appearance standards that can be just as unrealistic and damaging as the expectations on teenage girls, often leading to eating disorders (manorexia) and body dysmorphic disorder. But the revelation that Zyzz was “bicycling” (Zyzz and Chestbrah’s slang for cycling anabolic steroids) has seemingly done little to tarnish his posthumous reputation. (One poster I just saw on /fit/ has this to say about Zyzz: “R.I.P. Bro you died for our sins. Every scoop of whey is in your name.”)

He is, perhaps, an evolutionary marker, one of those oft-cited “outliers” who point a way forward for self-willed human change.

Eat Right, Sleep Well, Train Hard

Am I an inhuman jacked monster yet? No, I’m just a mere beginner, still figuring it all out. But in a few months I’ve deeply shifted my personality profile, listening to hard dance music (?!?) instead of the same old eighties post-punk records, and rearranged my mental outlook from seeing life as something that is happening to me and instead into something I’m aggressively surmounting through self-discipline, a mindset that has spilled over into and improved every other area of my life, even if I hit the bed so tired I’m almost unable to move every night. In a world of vagueness and open-ended tasks, racking steel at the gym gives me the satisfaction of a win every day, something that I can say I did right and did for myself.

Tripping hard and straight into the dense matter of the physical world is a weird ride, brah. But it’s a great one.

And I know that maybe, just maybe, somewhere up there… Zyzz is smiling on me.

I recently began a series of experiments with the sensory deprivation tank as developed by John C. Lilly, M.D., a device that most have heard of but few have tried. (Yes, that’s the one from the 1980 movie Altered States.) It took me a decade and a half of self-directed experimentation on consciousness to finally get around to using one. Luckily, when I was ready, I found that there was a facility five minutes from my workplace. I booked the time. I got in.

The sensory deprivation tank is exactly that — a large, soundproof, lightproof tank filled with shallow, warm, buoyant water, all designed to completely shut off all sensory input.

The tank itself is heated to exactly 93.0º, a temperature that feels warm without being intrusive, so that your body quickly tunes it out. The water — just shallow enough to lie in — is saturated with Epsom salt, which means that you float effortlessly on the surface. It also means any cuts or scratches that you may have gotten before going in will start viciously burning; for this Vaseline is recommended to cover over them and keep out the salt.

The inside of the tank is remarkably spacious — big enough to sit up in, even stand up while crouching. (The model I used was the Samadhi, the original developed by Lilly. There are other versions; tanks in Europe, apparently, are often much smaller and pod-like, offering very little room to move about in, limiting the size and weight of the occupant.) The inside of the tank is about three and a half feet wide; consequently, I spent a lot of time sliding from one side to the next until I figured out how to stabilize myself. (Hint: Stick your arms out and hold the sides until the water calms down, then hold yourself completely still and breathe slow and deep enough that you don’t disturb the water. Breathing slow, of course, will also help stabilize your body and mind faster.)

One’s experience in the tank, as I was told, is highly susceptible to suggestion. For this reason, the owners of the venue I visited told me they’re very careful about not telling people anything but the basics when they get in, in order not to pre-load their trip.

I found I had some of my own pre-loading to get rid of after getting into the comforting darkness of the tank. Foremost in my mind were the experiences of the tank’s founder himself, Dr. John Lilly: born in 1915, Lilly was raised on a rigid scientific track, developing the tank in the early 1950s while studying neurophysiology for the US Public Health Service Commissioned Officers Corps—work allegedly connected with the CIA MK-ULTRA program, though he broke with the US government almost immediately thereafter. His own experiences were nothing short of revelatory. He later went on to do research trying to communicate with dolphins while on LSD, became involved in SETI, and continued using the tank until his death a few weeks after 9/11.

Lilly reported some mind-stretching tank visions in his books. At one point he believed he had come into contact with extraterrestrials, or “Earth Coincidence Control Organization (ECCO),” as he called them. He also spoke forebodingly of a potential period in the future where “Solid State Intelligence (SSI),” an entity that he believed was composed of the entirety of electronics on earth, would take over and dispense with human life. (Facebook anyone?) But then again, Lilly wasn’t just going in cold: he extensively experimented first with using LSD in the tank, then with Ketamine, both substances he had easy access to as a member of the medical establishment.

These are the images I had swirling in my mind as I climbed into the tank; not surprisingly, nothing happened as long as I continued expecting fireworks on-demand. It wasn’t until I consciously let go and decided to see what the tank had to offer on its own terms that I started to get something. And at least for me, what I experienced wasn’t “psychedelic” at all—far from a mental experience, what I discovered was a drop into a deeply physical, embodied state; once this had happened, the boundaries of the body, tank and space itself just seemed to fall away. Thereafter I seemed to enter into a primal infinity, from which perspective I could comfortably see not just my rational mind but the entire mental bandwidth of Western culture as a tiny, almost inconsequential pinprick in a vast field of mystery. Not “the light,” not “the void” or other shorthands for the unthinkable… simply an endless mystery.

I’ve tried innumerable meditation techniques over the last decade and a half: I’ve learned to sit inhumanly still for hours, slow my breath down to one inhale/exhale per minute, learned the original kundalini yoga of the Himalayan adepts up at 13,000 feet in India, studied a bit of Zen and Tibetan forms of meditation like Samatha or “calm abiding.” But no matter how you twist, prime or calm yourself, the same problem always remains: the body just won’t go away. Even if you’ve “mastered” your awareness of the physical and can sit like a rock with little to no breath, you’re still going to have awareness of the body, and it will continually remind you it exists. Which gives you two options: suppress it as much as you can, or work with it.

But with the tank, the body is just so free of external sensation, and so contented with its literally womb-like surroundings, that it just kind of blips out.

Well, let me rephrase that. First, it fidgets insufferably. Adjusting to the tank can be so initially frustrating that the center I visited gives the first hour for free. Once you “get it,” though, your body remembers the right position and will enter that state rapidly every time you get into the tank from then on.

After the initial learning curve I ended up in place more relaxed, more contented, more free, more expanded than I have after years of meditation — in a few minutes. So much of the discipline of yoga and classic meditation manuals like the Hatha Yoga Pradpika is concerned with “turning the body off” with proper physical postures; a sensory deprivation tank does it almost immediately. The classic instructions for yoga all seem to continue to apply to the tank experience — stilling the body and breath, offering the in-breath into the out-breath, and so on — but one is immediately put into an ideal state physical state, the kind it presumably takes years of yoga practice to get to, if it is even reachable at all without the tank.

For that alone, I’m a new convert. Take away all the spiritual woo, the promises of inner experiences, and at the very base level you have a tool for relaxing more deeply than perhaps previously thought possible, identifying and then releasing muscle tension you weren’t even aware was there. You feel it. And then you let it go, bit by bit. And then you float. The applications for health alone, when so many physical problems are caused by chronically holding tension, are obvious. Of course, as the physical tension goes, so does the mental tension. I found myself getting insights into, and letting go, of long-standing mental cramps, deep unsolved indecisions or confusions, that I’d forgotten were even there, as they had been embedded into the background noise of the mind for so long.

Of course, that was just the beginning. Beyond the relaxation of the body, I observed a secondary effect: the body enters what I can describe only as an orgasmic field. Here we enter into the domain of Wilhelm Reich’s orgonomy or even of mysticism but, put simply, the message was that nearly all mental and physical tension is the individual attempting to suppress its natural orgasmic state. By orgasmic I don’t specifically mean orgasmic release through sexual contact — I mean that when the body’s energy becomes unlocked it, itself, becomes all-over orgasmic. One releases into infinite “bliss,” the body-as-orgasm melting into the universe-as-orgasm.

Lilly experienced something similar, writing in his autobiography The Scientist (in third person) that “The tank experiences gave him new access to bodily pleasure which he found difficult to integrate with his rather… Calvinistic conscience. His conflicts with sexual expression, sexual transactions, took up a good deal of his time. The resting body accumulated positive energies that were expressible sexually to an almost intolerable level. He began to recognize the intrinsic nature of sexual drives. His parallel studies in neurophysiology revealed the sources of the sexual energy within the central nervous system. He began to see that these sources existed in himself, in his own brain.”

The next level was the seeming heightening of “psychic” phenomena such as telepathic communication (with people who could be dozens of miles away) and the intrusion of “energies” or imagery from the collective unconscious, or simply the individual unconscious depending on how much one gives credence to the idea of transpersonal mind. As these phenomena are entirely subjective, unverifiable and largely deeply individualized to those who experience them, I here pass over details of any specific content, leaving this to individual experience.

The usual tank session is an hour. One returns to “normal” consciousness immediately and seamlessly after exiting the tank. There is no hangover or disorientation. I found rush hour traffic while leaving the facility slightly more aggravating after the peaceful tank experience, but beyond that there were no noticeable side effects. More importantly, one feels as if one has just awoken from a deeply satisfying and relaxing sleep, even if one didn’t sleep in the tank, and even, as I experienced, if floating after a long and hectic working day.

It seems that, when separated from outside stimulus and given free reign, the bodymind knows exactly what it needs to do to restore health and equilibrium to itself, and goes about doing it, quickly and precisely.

For these reasons — and more I’m sure I’ve yet to discover — I recommend the tank to all.

It’s a technology that has largely fallen by the wayside, though it’s recently been making a comeback thanks in part to the highly enthusiastic publicity the comedian Joe Rogan has given it. I suspect that it probably has more to offer us now than it did when Lilly invented it. Silence is a rare commodity in our overstimulated world.

We owe it to ourselves to give ourselves back to ourselves.

Find a place near you to float here: http://www.floatation.com/wheretofloat.html

What are the critical disciplines by which 21st century humanity will initiate itself? How will those who wish to move from reality’s spectator seats to the middle of the ring do so?

How has humanity done so in the past?

The ancients represented the hall of initiation into the Mysteries as being flanked by two columns — one black, the other white. The tradition survives in Freemasonry, ceremonial magick and the High Priestess card of the Tarot, where Isis as initiatrix into the Mysteries sits between the pillars, reconciling them.

For the ancients, the black pillar represented, among other things, the path of ego calcination; the white, the path of ego dissolution. These more abstract principles. or “ways to do life,” if you will, have ended up in the common parlance as “white and black magic” and have become divorced from their original meaning and taken on new and largely inappropriate baggage.

Restored to their original symbolic association, however, the Pillars of the Temple of Solomon can offer critical suggestions about the modes of transcendence that 21st century humanity is beginning to explore.

For the young psychonaut, I draw clear the lines:

The Left-Hand Path: The Transhuman

Transhumanism is the augmentation, and therefore reinforcement, of the self. It is the current edge of the “project of Western civilization” that is concerned, and always has been concerned, with the extension of the individual will into physical, manifest reality. It is the directed use of technology to amplify the human experience — and technology can easily mean nonphysical means or techniques as well.

Here I place the increasing inseparability of humans and advanced communication technology; actual augmentation of the body with wetware, body modification, nanotech, etc., but also body change techniques like hatha yoga, martial arts, plastic surgery; the work of Wilhelm Reich; energy medicine, EFT/EMDR; the contributions of the Human Potential Movement and the increasingly clever and byzantine supplement industry. We can add modern and ancient brain-change techniques like NeuroLinguistic Programming, the Leary/Wilson Eight Circuit Model, Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, radionics, tantra, chaos magick and the rest of the never-ending occult and New Age corpus. All of these and more can be used to change, warp, clean out, amp up, empower, manicure and otherwise “make cooler” the thing you call “I.”

Access to these technologies is increasingly wide-spread and I believe their use and refinement will likely produce some admirable customizations of the human experience as well as increasingly grotesque ego distortions as once-normal human beings mutate themselves into what might only be described as “creatures” comprised of a multiplicity of shattered and exaggerated ego shards rather than anything resembling a healthy, grounded, integrated identity.

The Right-Hand Path: The Transpersonal

If transhumanity can be seen as a continuing quest for dominance over the physical body and physical world, the transpersonal offers a much more direct (if perhaps even more dangerous) path — that of breaking down the barriers which separate the small-s self from the wider world itself. This is what might more vaguely be called the “spiritual path” — the path of the dissolution of the ego by uniting it with something larger than itself.

Under the heading of transpersonal we must place the many branches of mysticism: Gnosticism, Sufism, Qabalah, Advaita Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, the higher Yogas, true Tantra, shamanism, depth psychology and the activities that stem from the accelerated empathy that these practices can produce: namely activism, human rights work, ecology work, directed work on the problems of the human race and other such forms of “doing the world’s dishes.”

Leaving questions of actual higher spiritual perception or “cosmic consciousness” aside for the moment, and grounding the spiritual directly into the material world, I believe we can find the highest expression of the transpersonal path in the growing field of ecopsychology: a psychological model which proposes, broadly, that individual problems are in fact manifestations of the problems of the world itself, and that it becomes impossible to talk about healing a patient without healing the world they live in. Self and world are ultimately indistinguishable. There was never a separation to begin with.

Between the Gates

It’s easy to see how these two paths may overlap and blur at their higher reaches. Push the self to the limits of its expansion, for instance, and you may well break it in the process, allowing the “greater reality” to flood in. Similarly, the depth insights that arise from transpersonal work can and should become more greatly actualized in the physical world through the strengthening and empowerment of the “individual” who experiences them — there comes a time when you may have to lift your scarecrow-like, malnourished body from the meditation mat, do some pushups, put on a suit and start communicating what you’ve learned within the marketplace.

You can also see how these two paths can be intensely antagonistic.

Have no illusions about it: transhumanism arises from the same dominator impulse that gave us empires, Satanic mills, nuclear and biological warfare, technological slavery, the rape and degradation of the physical world, and so on. To the expanded awareness of the transpersonal, the products of Western culture and the calcified, soulless ego-worship of the transhumanists can feel as comfortable as splinters under fingernails.

Alternately, it’s questionable how much effect the insights of mystics actually produce — whether their “higher visions” are actually accurate new views into the human equation or just so much hallucinatory navel gazing. The most lasting contributions of the walkers of the transpersonal way are inner insights that, once expressed, can produce massive shifts in how cultures think — but these insights get turned into bureaucratic dominator religions overnight as soon as the original mystic is (all too often) conveniently disposed of… Godfather-style.

What Are We Left With?

Two paths. The black: Change the self as something separate from the world. The white: Delete the self and erase all separation from the world. Both provide a “beyond human” experience.

Followed exclusively, the transpersonal results in ineffectuality; take the transhuman alone, and end up a soulless machine in a world of soulless machines.

Or step between the pillars, and find something new — with no promises — for those who pass through these pillars step through and onto a yet-unlit road where only few have passed before, and where none has yet seen the destination.

Step mindfully.

Imagine! The metropolis of tomorrow!

Awaken to see the perfect blue sky from the glass window of your downtown condominium as your personal robot assistant brings you breakfast and your clothes for the day! Survey the glory of your castle and keep, all perfectly temperature-controlled and kept spotless by the newest innovations in household robots, big and small! The dishes cleaned, bathroom scrubbed, carpet shampooed and fluffed daily, all dusted, clothes freshly pressed and folded—all thanks to the wonder of AI-equipped bipedal labor saving devices!

John was born in Queens. His mother was a teacher’s assistant and his father sold shirts in a store in Grand Central Station. When he was tiny he could see light around people and things, different colors. Then he forgot how. He crawled in the endless empire of his parent’s one bedroom apartment. He learned to talk. He formed words. Sometimes he could stand up. Sometimes he could form a sentence. He put on his first pair of shoes. He learned to tie his own laces. He walked in the streets holding his father’s hand. He learned how to turn symbols into sounds. He read a word. A sentence. He could read. He could write his own name. He could write. His eyes were wide. The world was great and wide.

Slide into your car and feel the microfiber perfectly conform to your skin as you wrap your hands around the wheel and sit straight and tall as if you were in your throne, for truly you are with the latest series of Lexus Entelech sedans. Let the onboard AI greet you with your schedule for the day along with positive thoughts and empowering, feel-good mantras specifically chosen for your mood profile and schedule for the day, all expertly planned to keep you at the very top of your game. Wave good day to Alan, the garage attendant robot who so faithfully does his duty in keeping the public garage of your building clean and safe that you could almost swear he was a real human being and not a product of flawless engineering. Goodbye Alan! Now you’re flying free on the highway, kept flowing by robot traffic attendants, wardens and instant crash-removal and medical care specialist teams who ensure you experience not a single bump on the road to work—or the road of life!

He attended the school where his mother worked as an assistant but there was little she could do to shield the impact of initiation into society. His first day in school he hid in the bathroom and cried. He could feel his chest and hips seizing up with terror as he was exposed to the sudden shock of having to deal with others without his parents there. His body froze and he forgot to breathe. The tension stayed. He forgot it was there. He met the others. He met his teacher. Soon he found that the rules from home no longer applied. That he could no longer do what felt natural in the moment. There were activities. Assignments. Times to do things. Times to play and times to work. Time became a solid thing. Rigid. They sat him down in a desk. It was a plastic chair with a piece of polished wood attached. His body became rigid as they shouted at him to sit up straight. He put his pencil box at the top and wrote his name on a label oh-so-carefully in marker. His mind became rigid as they shouted at him to pay attention. Outside of class they beat him and threw rocks and bloodied his nose and soon he learned to hit back. He began to walk with stiff, terrified motions, always looking around for who might be coming at him next, always afraid, breath shallow. At the edge of the playground sometimes he felt he could almost see another world through the gray metallic-tasting fog of the morning. Then the bell rang.

You park at the foot of the office, and are ushered through the lobby and up the elevator by robot attendants just as friendly and professional as Alan, though you must confess you hold a special place in your heart for your garage attendant, even if you know that they’re all the same when you get down to it. You sit down at your desk in your corner office, your robot secretary bringing you the daily news and coffee with just an ever-so-seductive sashay of the hip. Throughout the day she will keep you abreast of your schedule while carefully monitoring your nutrition levels, bringing you the right food and vitamins at exactly the right times to keep your energy and mood high. She listens to your frustrations with your wife. She offers wisdom and solutions. She knows you so well.

His first girlfriend wanted him to make a move but he couldn’t. He was too scared of what would happen or that he would do something wrong. They had been going out for two weeks before the dance. In the back of the car by the lake he put his arm around her but his whole body started shivering and locking up. At the dance she started laughing at one of Steve Bunning’s jokes and then another and they danced the rest of the night. She was laughing and sweating. He stood in the dark under the streamers with his shoulders around his ears, looking down at his feet. There was a girl there named Elizabeth Wilson who kept her chubbiness hidden beneath a brown sweater and her blue eyes behind glasses and who had notebooks full of secret thoughts with John’s name written again and again in them. She asked him like a mouse if he wanted to dance. “No!” he almost shouted. “Why would I want to go with you?” On the floor they came in close for the slow dance. It was dark outside. Cold.

In the meeting room your team leader shows you the day’s numbers. Robot productivity is up. Shares in robot manufacture are up. Business is good. Every hand in the room is smooth and uncalloused. From the windows of the conference room you see a world of robots. Robots tilling the fields. Robots driving trucks. Robot police. Robot garbagemen. Robot construction workers. Robot clerks. Robot waiters. All serving humans. Happy humans. Humans with their every whim and need catered to. A perfect society. Mechanized. Business is good.

He learned to keep his head down. Never say the wrong thing. Never show anger or displeasure at a decision of a superior. He sat in his cubicle in the call center and clocked his hours. Clocked his lunch. Clocked his bathroom breaks. Held it in. He didn’t want this. In the break room he learned to tell jokes and be cheery but never get too personal. Never get too attached to somebody, because they could be gone the next day. Turnover was high. He kept quiet. He made his calls. His shoulders and back hurt like hell. He transferred to another center. He breathed shallow and was tired all the time. The years went on. It wasn’t real. It was happening to somebody else. The girl at the sandwich shop smiled at him. His hair was falling out. He ran out of options. He married her. He had sex with her. He shivered. His shoulders hurt. He made his calls. The years went on. She wouldn’t look away from the TV. He made his calls.

The robot caddy brings you the precision nine-iron you bought last Saturday on his recommendation and you have that special zen moment the books all talk about as it connects the ball with perfect speed and angle, and you watch it sail with grace and ease to its destination. The boss has his eye on you. He’s invited you to the green.

“We’ve been making robots for so long,” he tells you, “I almost think we take them for granted. We’ve gotten so good at making them, perfected the science so well. Now we’ve got a whole world of robots, a whole damn world kept running and clean and efficient and shining by the things. Sometimes I think we forget how much better the world is now, how savage it was before we invented them. When we had to do everything by hand. Can you imagine? Your entire life being wasted on meaningless, menial tasks?”

“I’d rather not, sir,” you say. He chuckles.

“I thank my lucky stars our company’s been so productive in their manufacture. Maybe too productive. Pretty soon we’ll probably have too many of ‘em. And you young bucks are coming up with new and better designs so fast that the old ones’ll be obsolete within months.”

“Yes, sir,” you say, taking the opportunity. “I’m glad you brought that up. Actually, you might want to see my proposal for mass AI recall. My team finished it and e-mailed it to you just before I made it out.”

“Recall? You mean rounding the old ones up and scrapping them?”

“Yes, sir. Our team has a very solid recycling plan worked up.”

He looks into the distance, towards the 18th hole.

“Recycling. Yes, you’re probably right. Just… well, thank God they can’t feel anything, eh?”

He strikes the ball.

He breaks the TV. She leaves. They take the kids. They operate on his back. They give him drugs. Every day’s a struggle. He keeps working. Cubicle seems smaller every day. He sits by the cracked window in his home and stares out into the gray. Leaves the tap on and listens to the water running. He can’t feel anything. He cuts himself with a razor. Can’t feel. It’s not him. It’s not happening to him. He can’t breathe. He can’t move. In the mirror he sees himself as a child. As a boy. As a man. Bound and ligatured. Strings connected to hidden hands, all his life. Armored. Muscles cramped. Muscles traumatized. Steel plating. Body plated in steel. Eyes hollow. Programmed. All his life. Lock step. Forward. Like all the others. A whole world of them. A robot. A robot. A robot.

Imagine! The metropolis of tomorrow!

New York has some strange neighborhoods. There’s the Upper West Side, the Lower East Side and… the Other Side. That’s where the Sidhe live-a race of mythological creatures that have dwelled just under mankind’s nose for millennia, created and kept alive by the dream energy of humans. There’s good ones (Seelie) and bad ones (Unseelie), and they get along fine just as long as they stay hidden from mankind. It’s a peaceful situation that has lasted since the days of the foundation of America. That peaceful situation is about to be broken. When a young designer stumbles into the Other Side, she becomes implicated in a secret war to merge the human and Sidhe worlds… and falls in love with a Changeling cop who seems to be everything she wants in a man. If the warring worlds let them be together, that is.

Here’s what people are saying about Jason Louv’s first novel:

“…a top tier talent who can really tell a story. A unique fusion of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.”

– Brendan McCarthy, acclaimed artist of Rogan Gosh, Skin, and Spider-Man: Fever

“Like Alice in Wonderland if Lewis Carroll had overdosed on the opposite of Prozac. A twisted, dark, comical take on the origins of our hopes, dreams and nightmares.”

– Marty Beckerman, author of The Heming Way

“A producer and director of text… a bloody f***ing genius.”

– Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle

See what alt-culture blog Dangerous Minds is saying about the book.

And check out this interview with me about the book from R. U. Sirius’ ACCELER8OR magazine:

Jason Louv’s new novel Queen Valentine is a hallucinatory trip through the supernatural underbelly of New York City… as one reviewer put it, “Like Alice in Wonderland if Lewis Carroll had overdosed on the opposite of Prozac. A twisted, dark, comical take on the origins of our hopes, dreams and nightmares.”

Louv is best known for his three previously published anthologies on consciousness studies, Generation Hex (which Grant Morrison called “Your invitation to the party that might just bring the house down”), Ultraculture and Thee Psychick Bible with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and although the new book is a foray into fiction, it continues his themes of consciousness expansion, posthumanity, magic and the hidden occult side of the world. I caught up with him briefly by e-mail to discuss the new book.

RAY TESLA: So what is Queen Valentine?

JASON LOUV: It’s a novel exposing the supernatural underworld beneath New York, as seen through the eyes of a young woman who’s lost her soul working in advertising, and ends up stumbling into the world beneath. It’s a bit like Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race mashed up with “Mad Men.”

RT: Can you say more?

JL: Well, the premise is essentially this. In the middle ages, the people of Europe took it for granted that non-human beings — often called the Sidhe or the faery folk — were as real as humans, and regularly trafficked with the human world. Just like “modern” people sometimes claim to see UFOs or to have been abducted by aliens, in the middle ages people often claimed to have happened upon secret Sidhe kingdoms, to have been abducted to faerie land, or to have had their children swapped for faerie babies. That’s where we get a lot of European mythology from. And then we stop hearing about them as soon as the Inquisition and then the Age of Reason come in.

So the question is, what happened to those beings? And the answer in the book is, well, they did what lots of displaced people do. They emigrated to New York, or the settlement that became New York. And they’ve been living in secret catacombs and warrens underneath the city ever since, in their own shadow version of the city and shadow economy — along with their evil half, the Unseelie, who are like creatures created by pure nightmare energy. And after four hundred years, the Unseelie are tired of hiding, and they want to make a bid to subjugate the human side of the city.

RT: You’ve previously written about consciousness expansion and magic (Generation Hex, Ultraculture, Thee Psychick Bible) and about the transforming effects of technology on the soul. Do you see this as a continuation or a departure from those topics? Why the switch to fiction?

JL: Definitely a continuation. There’s only so much truth you can express about the hidden corners of reality in non-fiction or essay form before people start wondering if you’re making it up. The threshold is very low. With fiction, hopefully I can put it all in there and instead of that nagging voice in your head while you’re reading it being “I wonder if he made this up,” it might be “I wonder if any of this is actually true?”

RT: So are you saying there’s actually coded occult information in Queen Valentine?

JL: No. Certainly not.

RT: You’ve also written about transhumanism and posthumanity. Does that tie in with the book?

JL: In a way. The book is in many ways a critique of transhumanism from the perspective of the original guardians of the earth, the nature spirits who’ve had to adapt to our technological progress and find a way to live in the cracks like any diaspora culture. A lot of the tension in the book revolves around the different responses from different factions of the Sidhe to the direction humanity is going. There’s also a lot of satire of the Faustian need for physical augmentation. I don’t want to give too much away, but the crux of what’s being discussed is whether humanity will be allowed to manifest the kind of nightmare future that it seems to be hellbent on creating.

RT: Does that mean you have an essentially pessimistic view of the future?

JL: Not really. I’m a great believer in posthumanity. But there’s certainly a dark road that I see people heading down that I think they shouldn’t. I think if we keep pushing on things like genetically modified crops and voluntary surveillance social media there’s a good chance we could end up living in a real shit of a situation. I’m disturbed on a daily basis by the fact that we’ve essentially allowed things like Facebook to turn our interpersonal space into a strip mall. And I see one tendency of humanity to become more and more soulless, more and more surrendered to mechanization and regimentation. But luckily we still have things like science fiction to create and advertise better futures. By any imaginary means necessary!

RT: What’s next for you?

JL: I’m done plotting the next book and on into writing it. I’d really like to get into wider media to educate more young minds. That’s what it’s about! I’d like to write some comics if they’ll let me at them.

2. There is a future in which the machine severs the human soul; another in which it serves the human soul.

3. In the first, you live in the same way that corporate-farmed animals currently live. In the second, you live the way you like. The deciding point between these two realities is the direct action of the human soul.

4. Soul is not in the body; the body is in soul. Imagination is the gateway to the soul and the vector of freedom.

5. In order for the time machine to sever soul, it need only lock the gate: imagination. This is why, though we live in an age of the greatest information proliferation in recorded history, we are slowly losing the ability to imagine. Information is not imagination; the most advanced content delivery systems in the world are useless if their very existence means the end of real content.

6. The desertification of imagination is a problem just as real on its own plane as deforestation is on the physical one. The fragmentation and destabilization of concentration keeps human consciousness crippled. Though it may be deliberate, this is a mistake.

7. Question: All around you you see systems put in place to suppress, depress, confuse and distract the soul. WHY has so much effort been put into this? And WHY does it never quite seem to be successful? What can we deduce from this?

8. Answer: The soul must be perceived as a threat, and must also be stronger than any known attempt to suppress it.

9. In brief:

10. Magic is imagination and will (repetition).

11. The imagination is the human organ used for direct perception of reality. The will is the human organ used, over time, to change that reality and crystalize it into matter.

12. Sex is the rocket fuel of both imagination and will—use it.

13. The image of the “self-destructive artist” is a culturally implanted kill switch. Ignore it. Imagination is a weapon; you have been indoctrinated with these images so that if you discover the weapon, you will use it on yourself and save them the trouble.

14. Do not permit the colonization and strip-malling of imaginary and interpersonal space. Man should be staring through telescopes, not into computer kaleidoscopes.

15. The old world is burning, and will soon be burnt down. Imagine better.

16. Trade in Our Failed State for the Right to Hallucinate.

Jason Louv’s first novel, Queen Valentine, is out now.

(Written for my friend Gea’s Bollywood zine before her collaborator jumped ship. Image above borrowed from Leif Jones, one of my favorite illustrators ever—check him here.)

1.

Consider the fall of America as a Bollywood routine.

Egos tip like dominoes. Blood money runs out. Methamphetamine zombies wander the wastes in packs, huddle up from the cold in vacated mini-malls, coils of copper wire clutched under their shredded coats. Middle America weeps in the streets as the foreclosure sign is pasted to the door. Great gothic vistas of abandoned auto plants. The innocent lamb-like smiles of the new politicians, promising imminent genocide.

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,” the West says, its edifice crumbling into the sands. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

And the ancient East smiles and carries on warming its meager dinner in a firepit dug in the alley of a city filled with broken monuments that have lain there since before the invention of writing. Statue upon statue. A forest of them, endless.

The first time your ambitions come to nothing, it feels like it’s the end of the world, as if you’re the only person in the history of the race to have failed. The second time, it feels the same, but you know you’ll get through it. The third, you hardly notice it. This is the wisdom of breakdown. And now America cries in the wilderness, and the old cultures look on as if at a child that has skinned its knee.

Held up next to the great epics of India, the decline and fall of Yankee civilization is like a single DVD outtake in a fully-stocked Best Buy. Orientalism? No, my dear sahib, realism.

2.

What’s the problem? After all, America looked up at the sky and prayed to be liberated. And so it is. India saw off the Raj before giving England the Beatles and now it’s your turn, dears.

While you were looking the other way, watching the airport security lines, India seduced your women, brought them into the Temples of Yoga which suddenly sprouted up on every corner like Starbucks, offered them promises of pampering and superfoods. Honestly give a woman a chance to act and be treated like a Goddess just once and it’s all over. Soon the men will be dragged in by their hair whether they like it or not. The smartest of your children worship winos, tramps, beatniks and bums; this art India perfected millennia past. India soon becomes the new cultural ideal. In the same way that a few brilliant and completely amoral spooks with a paperback copy of The Golden Bough could have engineered the entire 1960s, imagine an America reverse-engineered to the Vedas…

Grim St. Augustine, Imperator of the Barbed Church, finds himself preaching to an empty room, long since having deserted when the flock finally figured out that treating sex one way leads to institutionalized child abuse and treating it the other leads to institutionalized not-knowing-where-to-look-next-when-everybody’s-doing-downward-facing-dog.

And the Gods are alive still over the broken slums of America. Dancing in their aeonic finery over the Black Hole of Detroit just as they did over the Black Hole of Calcutta. Skies lit up with fury as they crawl over the projects and crumbled skyscrapers. Blue-skinned and burning.

Watch them there in that place behind the wall of mind. The great confusion of gods, an overcrowded shopping mall full of every variety and cultural form of divinity, enough to fill all of our imaginations. Where Mount Olympus lies spitball distance from Mount Meru, and the Flames of the Pentecost warm the freezing fingers of the Jotün come in from the cold. Here, encroaching upon the Imaginationland of the Gods, comes Ganesh dispensing sweets and chai lattes, slowly winning the crowd over by saccharine promise, the ever-hovering hint of Kali’s sword in the darkness behind him. Durga on tigerback slaughtering centuries of accumulated demons. (Bye, Asmodeus; bye, John Wayne Gacy; bye, Adam Smith…) Shiva, Destroyer, watches on red-eyed from a haze of potsmoke, laying on the grassy knoll with the Rastas while Babylon Falls.

A Divine Invasion. Hindu gods rush in where angels and devils both fear to tread.

3.

Feeling like a nobody, just walking this world.

Sadhu sits in hazy orange glow by a fire on a hill on the empty frontier. They come crawling to sit by him, while he slowly stirs the fire with his tongs and pays them no mind. “I’m a pharmaceutical lawyer,” one says; “I’m a media planner,” says the other.

“You were,” the sadhu says, “you were.” And pays them No Mind.

Soon we will all sit with the sadhu next to his fire, with nothing to call our own but a few scraps of clothing and the infinite, careening expanse of stars above us. Blessed are they who have none.

From my spot high here on the wall

I watch them rise and watch them fall

And it doesn’t mean a thing

It doesn’t mean a thing.

Hymn to Shiva

It’s good to have a point
To reference yourself by

It’s good to have a light
To see yourself by

It’s good to have an infinity
To be finite by

It’s good to have a friend
To get outstoned by

It’s good to have a lover
To be outloved by

It’s good to have a Lord
To be outdone by

And it’s good to have a fire
To throw yourself in & burn yourself to a crisp until there’s nothing left of you but the little bits of bone they dig from the ashes and throw in the river to be washed away in the shit.

She (To Nuit at the Expense of Lilith)

As long as your happiness is predicated on hers
You shall be miserable.
As long as your purity is predicated on hers
You shall be abased.
As long as she is the mark of your success
You shall fail.
As long as your aim is her
You shall miss.
Oh man born of woman
Your lot is misery
But your home is the stars
In the endless acceptance
Of Her embrace.

The Voyeur (For Mark Zuckerberg)

What must it feel like?
Most your age accumulate pornography
If they have not yet learned of love
But you had to stash the world under your bed
You had to know our secret thoughts
And read our every desire
And sell them to the highest bidder
A new kind of pervert for a new world
The voyeur of cultures
Hunched masturbating to lives you will never live
And emotions you will never feel
How hollow must a man be
To have to fill himself with the lives of others
Not one or two but the stalker of millions.
It’s such a shame though
They’re on the other side of the glass
And you’re outside looking in
Still.

Bloody Knuckles

Now I know
Why the Magus wore that look
Decades of standing in the cold
And pounding at the door
Of the burning house
Never answered.
Now I know
Because I’m starting to get the same goddamn stare.

Hungry Ghosts
(Originally published in VOMIT IN THE MAINSTREAM, London, 2006)

Hungry Ghosts
Burn in the hell
Created by their lust of power
And their need for control.
By seeing others as tools
They renounce their souls
And burn in their own attachments.

In the world they see a mirror
And seek to ensnare it
Entangle it in words
Cut it down to size
And only make themselves smaller
Burning in the fire of their own fear.

All fear is fear of death
And death will take no offering
There is no power
There is no control
And those ghosts who seek such imaginary things
Will be hungry forever.

All text on this blog is © 2011 Jason Louv and cannot be used or quoted without express written permission from the author.

Peter Weller as Robocop, 1987.

Some movies ought to be left alone. Not because they’re no longer relevant — but because they’re too relevant. José Padiliha’s planned 2013 reboot of Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 masterwork Robocop is one such transgression of cinematic and historical decency. In 1987, Robocop was science fiction; now, it’s the nightly news. One wonders what a Robocop reboot would have to say about a world that’s now a lot closer to the original movie than we might like to admit.

Robocop was a profoundly humanist film. It was Dutch director Paul Verhoeven’s satire of American corporate culture, as he would later parody American imperialism with Starship Troopers — though the point of both movies was largely lost on American audiences easily distracted by the tongue-in-cheek hyperviolence. It was about Detroit as a microcosm of America. It was about American industry — both blue and white collar — becoming outmoded. It was about an Alvin Toffler Third Wave world in which cops, criminals and governments alike are just branches of corporations; corporations that fuel inner city chaos and wars of imperial expansion in order to keep the bottom line up. Robocop was about a world only slightly less commodified than our own — as tagged by the film’s running catch phrase, “I’d buy that for a dollar!”

Set in an exaggerated version of the Reagan/Thatcher era, much of the film’s narrative fascination came from observing a corporate, cybernetic police state, considered to be a science fiction parody of the then-current political climate, but science fiction nonetheless. A quarter century and two Bushes later, this is no longer the case.

Now, to some extent, we’re all Part Man, Part Machine, All Cop. Though we may not be physically grafted to machines (yet), we are welded to them in every other possible way, fused to them in consciousness, dependent on them not only to support or enhance almost every part of our existences but also to uphold an increasingly restrictive social order. We live in a corporate military state in which wars are conducted by robotics, in which Predator drones patrol our far-off imperial holdings and we patrol ourselves through the voluntary surveillance system called Facebook.

Omnicorp's overlord Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) poses with his ED209 military robot.

We are enmeshed and interwoven completely with technology, both as consumer and producer — reduced to being subjects of the narrative of “high tech,” in which there is no longer a split between human and machine, but rather a split between “human machine” and “machine machine,” like the split between Robocop and his nemesis, the ED209 walking tank. Now humanity is not something that maintains opposition to “machine,” but something that is performed within the context of “machine.” Some machines are considered human (for instance, Apple products) and some are not (Microsoft products), and we are only ever as human as the electronic experiences we choose to consume. Our social identities are subsets of these machines — a carefully cultivated Google trail; a mask worn within the mainframe.

Now, the corporatized police of Robocop seem accurately prophetic — quaint, even. In a recent TED talk, the Brookings Institution’s P. W. Singer revealed that there are 5,300 unmanned air drones and 12,000 unmanned ground systems currently deployed in the Middle East by the United States military. These numbers are projected to skyrocket in coming years — by 2015, more than half of the army will be robotic. And that’s only the U.S. — 43 countries are currently working on military robots.

The soldier of the near future will look a lot like Robocop — consider DARPA and Raytheon’s combat exoskeleton prototypes. The ED209 isn’t that different from U.S. military robots currently in development or deployment — take the BigDog rough-terrain robot, much publicized on the Internet, as well as lesser-known tank or pack robots like the ACER, MATILDA, TALON, MARV and MAUD, and many others. Or Japanese company Sakakibara Kikai’s Landwalker, which looks pretty much exactly like ED209. ED209’s short-circuit from the beginning of the film, when it accidentally kills a corporate lackey, is now a reality, too — in his TED talk, Singer describes a South African anti-aircraft cannon that had a “software glitch” and killed nine soldiers. Singer calls this “unmanned slaughter,” conducted by machines that are unable to comprehend the idea of “war crime.” Even ED209 squeals like a recognizable form of life when vanquished — Predator and Reaper drones are completely silent, providing no warning before they strike.

We have robots in the air — unmanned drones; the newly completed Anubis assassination micro-drone. We have robots in space — the recently launched, classified X-37B plane. And we have a whole host of other current or projected future weapons seemingly culled from 1980s science fiction films — spiderweb armor, liquid armor, invisibility cloaks, drones made to look like insects.

Projected technology for future ground soliders (click to enlarge).

These are not merely weapons of efficient, emotionless killing. They are also instruments of psychological terror. They are the new face of the Panopticon — as Jeremy Bentham once examined (to the great detriment of everybody ever since, as it has become the model that our culture is to some extent based on), those who are made to think they are being watched are just as controlled as those that actually are being watched.

“We have them thinking that we can track them anywhere,” a former top CIA operations official recently told the Washington Post, referring to the psychological tactic of leading Taliban to believe that tracking devices for Predator drones could be everywhere and in anything. “That we’ve got devices in their cars, their houses, everywhere. They’re so afraid to stay in their houses at night they’re digging foxholes to sleep in.”

These machines are the implements of casual genocide. They are antithetical to human life, a betrayal of humanity, as they are a way to further remove the act of killing from anything that might be able to find remorse in doing so — or be able to find any meaning at all, even flat-out hatred, which would still be a human emotional response. Robotic war will be war conducted by spreadsheets. And, ultimately, such machines will hold no allegiance to any country, as they will be quickly copied by or even sold to any high bidder.

This is where questions must be raised about the responsibility and power not only of arms manufacturers and their comrades, but also of science fiction writers and directors. Over the preceding decades, we have fetishized the machine. Art has concerned itself with the shock of new technology, with the process of becoming cybernetic; artists have become spectators at the surgery, providing running commentary as we wait to see whether our culture will accept or reject its implants. Yet artists are more than just observers, reporters, and commentators — they are also creators. The narrative of robotic war, begun in science fiction and made real by defense contracts, might be seen, from a certain angle, as the progression of a single thing manifesting over time. Though art may be the play-acting of an idea, it can also, to some extent, be the testing of an idea ­— and if successful in its simulation of reality, can all too easily become reality.

On the other hand, counter-narratives to that of “technological progress” prove just as appalling, in a way: the complete rejection of technology and science represented by the Sarah Palins of the world at least strikes me as an almost inconceivably brutal dehumanization — a complete subjugation to a reactionary, patriarchal, anti-woman, anti-human “god” (so-called) just as frightening as the narrative of cyborg hypercapitalism. This is not an apologia for the crimes of corporate science: merely a description of the playing field we find ourselves in.

“From one perspective,” feminist theorist Donna Haraway wrote in A Cyborg Manifesto (1991), “a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war… From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.”

Donna Haraway: "I'd rather be a Cyborg than a Goddess"

What would the real cybernetic shock be now? The grafting of more machine parts into our lives, or the grafting of more human parts? Our existences are almost unthinkable without Internet connections or the oil brought home for us by the machines of war. To withdraw from either would seem a far more potentially fatal shock to the system than the implantation of actual wetware cybernetics. An augmented reality optical chip, for instance, would only help facilitate our current condition, and would likely become socially enforced within certain economic brackets, just as smart phones were.

Can we create a non-alienated cybernetic world? Can we even begin to conceive of what that would look like? We can’t undo the past, but we can change the script of the future before it is acted out. Perhaps the challenge lies is finding new narratives that, instead of reacting against high technology, effectively reorient it towards serving human life — and humane values — instead of destroying them.

The Luddite back-to-the-land ethos of the early environmental movement has given way in recent decades to a vision of a more integrated future. Our most viable version of a livable future is a green cyborg one, in which technology and humanity meet halfway in caretaking instead of dominating the Earth’s natural resources. This should be framed not as a return to neolithic, matriarchal values but as a forward synthesis of industrial technology and holistic thinking. This requires a simple shift in perspective from observing the world as a jumble of disconnected parts to observing it as an integrated system in which each part affects every other. It is a shift from seeing the world as parts in competition with each other to seeing it as parts striving for an emergent state of co-operative efficiency.

A liveable future lies not in a wholesale rejection of the cyborg process of becoming welded to high technology, but in remembering that we are already cyborgs — that we are already inseparably connected not only to each other, but to everything on the planet, including even the worst parts of postindustrial society and its byproducts and side-effects.

The challenges of this century will be cyborg ones. They will be challenges of synthesis — of discovering how to achieve balance within systems. We will work to establish an ever-evolving cybernetic balance within a frontierless, privacy-free, boundary-free, pluralistic world. This is not a New Age band-aid, in which the easy answer is to simply realize that we are all one. Realizing that we are all parts of a single system is only the first step in effectively coping with and implementing that realization — work that may require more time than we have, yet which we must accomplish nonetheless. It is nothing less than the firm establishment and protection of our humanity and humane-ity against all affronts to it; nothing less than remembering that we must use our tools properly lest we be used by them.

Robocop can’t be remade because it’s no longer the story of one comic book hero — it’s the story of all of us, left scratching our heads after the operation, struggling to integrate, hoping to one day remember what life was once like, left with the daily task of making sense and meaning of a mechanized world from which the only escape is that which we build from the scrapheap.