ABSTRACT
The transhumanist vision has become essential to the development of neoliberalism as political and economic ideology: it configures a future in which the ‘natural’ constraints of race and gender have been overcome, and the relationship between technology and capitalization is such that the latter constantly increases the general level of transhumanist adaptation to the demands of the global economy. From this perspective, our only realistic choice as a species is to accelerate the processes of capitalization and innovation through which this future is to be attained. The complicating factor, however, is that ‘capitalism’ tends to be a more inertial system than the transhumanists would allow: biopolitical designations of race and gender still play a hugely important part in the logic of capitalization, and so the exploitation of women and non-whites cannot be considered simply as a vestigial effect that will disappear with the emergence of the technological singularity. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to show how the neoliberal vision of the future as a transhuman Utopia is implicated in the domination of Western economies, intensified levels of exploitation in Second and Third World states, and the systemic degradation of the biosphere.
