Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity
Summary, Personal Reflection, and Review of Joe Allen's Dark Aeon
(A PDF version of the article can be found here.)
Introduction
The specter of transhumanism—the irreversible merging of man and machine through the radical alteration of our brains, bodies, and genomes—haunts our age. Long bound to the realms of science fiction and techno-dystopic fantasy, it has finally begun to break its chains. Who is developing and pushing today's most dangerous technologies, what do they believe, and what is their vision of the future? What can these technologies actually do, how are they advancing, and how do they threaten us? Are we destined to submit to the "inevitable" technological "progress" or do we have the power to direct our fate?
While the threat of modern technology is a common contemporary talking point, Joe Allen's recent book Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity sounds the alarm on the gravity and true nature of the technological threat that confronts us. In meticulous detail, Allen articulates the threat, surveying what technologies are being developed and what transhumanists believe; he analyzes the threat, elucidating how dangerous technologies encroach upon society and unraveling why transhumanists believe what they believe; and finally, rooted in this deeper understanding of transhumanism, he provides guidance on how to combat it in both the material and spiritual realms.
In articulating the threat, he surveys existing and emerging biological and digital technologies that pose the greatest threats to humanity. He shows that these technologies are much further advanced and more deeply embedded in society than most people think. Strikingly, he shows that humanity is threatened not only by technology's unintentional escape from human control but by its intentional use to bring about a transhuman future. Transhumanists intend to turn technology, which is traditionally used to modify man's external environment, radically inward to modify man himself. This ambition, if actualized, would ultimately culminate in a future dominated by a race of biodigital "god men"—technologically perfected man-machine hybrids, nearly immune to disease (or even death) and possessing radically enhanced attributes, like intelligence, strength, and beauty—that ultimately outcompete and replace "legacy" human beings.
In analyzing the threat, he examines the socio-political mechanisms by which today's most dangerous technologies have become embedded in society, such as through the exploitation of the COVID pandemic. At a deeper level, he directs us towards the spiritual realm, which, he argues, is the key to truly understanding transhumanism. "Ultimately," he explains, "transhumanism is a spiritual orientation," one that is grounded in a mythos, a kind of techno-religious origin story that christens as "evolutionary progress" the technological degradation of man. He examines this mythos, and the movement in general, through many lenses, including as a materialist inversion of Gnosticism—the believe that "it's through our own material creations that we will transcend this flawed material realm of suffering, disease, old age, and death." The book's title, Dark Aeon, and its cover art derive from this techno-Gnostic connection. (Taking the meaning of aeon colloquially, as merely a long period of time, the title may also be interpreted to mean that humanity is approaching a long period of darkness should transhumanism prevail.)
The socio-political analysis guides our practical efforts to combat transhumanism; for example, by informing our decisions about which technologies to adopt and which to say "no" to. The spiritual analysis guides our efforts to develop a clear "yes," a positive affirmation of what it means to be truly human, one rooted in our "biological heritage and spiritual depth" in contrast to transhumanism's soulless technological remaking of humanity.
Our age is in desperate need of a thorough yet accessible critique of technology and where it is taking us. Allen's book, in my view, provides such a critique, one that is informative and well-researched while at the same time witty, humorous, and deeply personal, making the book an interesting and engaging read. These complementary aspects of the book make it valuable for two audiences. For everyday citizens, the book provides a resource to enhance the depth of our discussions about technology and to guide our decisions about our use of it. For the men and women who will lead the complex cultural, political, intellectual, and spiritual counter-revolution to defend humanity against its transhumanist degradation or annihilation, the book provides a detailed map of the terrain before us and sheds light on the many possible paths forward.
The bulk of this article provides a detailed summary of Allen's book following the structure that I presented in this section. Following this summary, I tell my story, discussing the specific nature of my concern about technology and transhumanism, and how Allen's book may impact my mission as well as the missions of those with a similar role to play in the war. I conclude with a discussion of the book that can be read, more or less, as a stand-alone review for a general reader. (The article's many references to specific content from the book are included as a section at the very end.)
Our Emerging Techno-Dystopia
At one level, Allen articulates the techno-pessimist view that modern technology, while improving our lives in certain ways, has burdened us with many new social ills and credible apocalyptic threats. Rapid developments in biological (especially genetic) and digital technologies, as well as developments in their unification—the so-called biodigital convergence—have the most devastating potential. Allen surveys these technologies, showing that they are much further advanced and more deeply embedded in society than most people think. He warns of their devastating potential: "if [authorities] lure the masses into virtual reality, if they produce CRISPR babies on demand, if a world power develops an artificial general intelligence that can break through any defense system, then the world as we know it will end."
The Genetic Threat
Genetic technology has the potential to alter the genome (DNA) of any organism as well as the collective genetic makeup of an entire population. Since an organism's genome affects nearly every aspect of its existence, this technology has the potential to create dangerous mutant creatures and viruses; to radically alter nearly every physical, emotional, and psychological attribute of a human being; and, if performed on a large scale, to alter nearly every aspect of our civilization. Current and emerging technologies control the genome at various degrees of directness: from, most directly, designing a genome, to, less directly, editing an existing genome, to, indirectly, selecting a "desirable" genome from among many naturally created genomes.
Directly designing a genome, sometimes called "biological programming," is not currently possible but research towards this end is underway. Allen highlights two examples. First, a 2022 Biden Executive Order authorized significant research funding and called for the development of technologies to "write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers." Second, a Microsoft-led research effort aimed to program an organism's DNA as if it were "living software," encoding the genome's nucleic acid sequence (represented with letters A, G, C, and T) analogously to a computer's bit sequence (represented with numbers 0 and 1). The stated goal of these research efforts is to program organisms for immunity from disease and to produce other benefits. But it's easy to imagine how such programming could be used maliciously or could go catastrophically wrong, such as through the accidental design of a toxic organism that gets into our food supply.
Genetic editing was made practical by the 2011 discovery of CRISPR, an enzyme that acts like a pair of "molecular scissors" that "can be used to cut the molecular letters out of a defective gene. It can also be used to insert new letters into the genetic code." Since this discovery, several experiments using CRISPR to edit human genomes have been successfully carried out. In 2018, a pair of twin babies were born that had had their genes edited in vitro by Chinese scientists to give them resistance to the HIV virus that their father carried. In 2022, the DNA in an adult male's liver was edited to alter its protein function to lower his cholesterol to healthy levels. Worldwide, there are about five thousand such "gene therapy" trial patients whose DNA was permanently edited (at least in one organ) in an attempt to cure disease.
Although these emerging medical successes seem promising, Allen warns of two dangers of genetic editing technology. First, "transhumanists and ambitious geneticists," not content with merely healing, "intend to use both embryonic mutation and adult gene therapies to increase human intelligence, strength, and beauty" and "to transform the human personality." Second, that nefarious experiments with human embryos have been carried out, including ones where genes from another species were inserted into human embryos, creating "human-monkey chimeras" and other "freakshows." These embryos are supposedly disposed of quickly but, in Allen's view: "It's hard to believe that clandestine labs are not growing genetic monsters of every sort. Or providing wealthy parents with super-genius designer babies. Or both, simultaneously. Without whistleblowers, we can only guess where those labs are and what those hideous creations look like."
Genetic selection is facilitated by genetic sequencing technology. In this process, a fertilized embryo's DNA is first extracted, then genetically sequenced and analyzed, and finally aborted if it is determined (or predicted) to be "defective" or to possess undesirable traits. This process is applied either to a single embryo conceived through natural means or, more ambitiously, to a couple's dozen or so embryos, all fertilized in vitro and genetically sequenced to determine the most desirable one; this "winner" is then implanted into the mother while the rest are discarded.
Genetic selection is regularly carried out today. Perhaps the most dramatic example of its effectiveness is the near-elimination of Down Syndrome (which is easily detectable with genetic sequencing technology) in Iceland, whose population widely adopted the technology and whose mothers largely chose to abort their disabled children. "This silent genocide of the disabled," Allen warns, "is a snapshot of a far greater transformation coming on, with profound implications for human biology and social life." Embryo selection using even more sophisticated genomic analyses, approximately predicting many traits, like height and intelligence, is beginning to emerge. Allen believes that this technology will soon be adopted at scale, especially once it is able to more accurately predict high intelligence and the "ethical issues" around doing so are resolved.
Today's genetic technologies provide the tools for a radical eugenics program—for both "negative" eugenics, eliminating the disabled, and for "positive" eugenics, eliminating healthy people without desirable traits, like height or intelligence. Who will be labeled "defective" and tossed away before birth? How will governments or other institutions try to tilt the human personality to make the masses more subservient? How will they (or we) change the way our babies look, act, and feel? "Chances are," Allen writes, "the genetic landscape of the late twenty-first century will be profoundly altered, for better or worse."
The Digital Threat
Digital technology has the potential to instantly and comprehensively manipulate the digital realm. Since this realm has engulfed nearly every aspect of our lives, digital technology provides the ultimate means for global top-down technocratic control of humanity. It also provides the ultimate means for constructing false realities and projecting them, via the ubiquitous screen, into the human mind, thus possessing the power to enslave a man's mind to the will of aspiring technocratic rulers as much as to his every vice. AI technology radicalizes the threats inherent in classic digital technology and introduces many novel threats, emanating both from the technology itself and from its perception, largely deriving from the mystical ethos surrounding it.
While elite control over the masses is a perennial threat, digital technology enables unprecedentedly precise and comprehensive control. "Humanity will merge into digital superorganisms, regulated algorithmically, with each individual becoming a drone in an electric antfarm," Allen predicts. Moreover, much of the technology needed for this transformation already exists: the digital realm currently mediates nearly every aspect of human life, including communication, education, romance, commerce, transportation, and banking; global digital infrastructure is largely controlled by a few Big Tech companies (and allied government authorities); social media and book-selling platforms like Amazon regularly promote and censor whoever they choose; and surveillance is ubiquitous, including GPS tracking on smartphones, cameras on many street corners, and Amazon Alexa devices in many homes.
Mass adoption of the screen—from the TVs of the 1950's to the smartphones of today to the hyper-realistic virtual reality headsets of the near-future—is perhaps the central enabler of technocratic control, complementing its behind-the-scenes components with ubiquitous forward-facing components. Taken together, these technologies have "conferred real power to monitor public sentiment, craft messaging to a target audience, and then monitor the acceptance or rejection of the messaging."
Yet the screen is also emblematic of a techno-dystopia of man's own making. Today, we regularly find man alone in front of his screen, possessed by the device, drawn into an alternate reality, alienated from the human beings around him or the social world altogether, a shell of a man that is there but not there, glued to his couch in front of the TV, a "smartphone zombie at the dinner table," or alone in his bedroom feeding his internet pornography addiction. He recognizes the device as a "wasteland" to which so much precious time on earth is lost, yet, perpetually enslaved to his vices, he is unable to break free from the device. Allen believes these ills will intensify as more realistic virtual reality headsets and humanoid robots begin to emerge, perhaps with people choosing to alienate themselves from other human beings in favor of social and romantic relations with humanoid robots (sexbots).
AI technology radicalizes the threats posed by classic digital technology, largely by enhancing existing systems with more sophisticated decision-making and pattern recognition algorithms. Some examples of this phenomenon include the following: malicious chat bots, previously powered by simple decision logic, are now powered by sophisticated large language models and not easily detectable; hacking, scamming, and counterfeiting are made easier via "deepfake" algorithms that produce highly realistic but fake images of human faces which could potentially enable, for example, a security breach of a biofoundry or weapons facility; mass surveillance is more aggressively pursued due to the need to collect "training data" for AI algorithms; and autonomous weapon systems are made shockingly precise, enabling, for example, a network of drones to surveil a population with face identification technology and to kill an identified target. Although developed for war, these weapon systems may conceivably be deployed domestically against political dissenters, including opponents of transhumanism, under the guise of protecting the public from "bad guys."
AI technology itself poses novel existential threats to humanity. Quite literally developing a "mind of its own," an AI system may, in the service of accomplishing a desired goal, rationally deduce that humanity impedes its success, then develop and execute a plan to remove the impediment—that is, to destroy humanity. Less ambitiously, an AI system may not possess such calculating superintelligence but will still be remarkably complex and thus exhibit behavior beyond human comprehension. Although unpredictable, its apparent power may entice its deployment in a critical task in which it makes a catastrophic error, such as incorrectly deciding to deploy a powerful weapon during a military operation.
Not only AI technology itself but also its perception poses a threat to humanity. The widespread mystical perception of AI facilitates, among other things, the elevation of a sufficiently advanced AI system to the status of a god or at least human being. Such beliefs have already been expressed towards today's realistic-sounding chatbots, including a Google engineer's claiming that the company's LaMBDA chatbot was sentient, and will likely intensify as humanoid robots begin exhibiting more realistic speech and behavioral patterns. "The most pressing problem," Allen warns is not that these systems will actually possess godlike intelligence but that "millions will gladly believe the bots are conscious, and they'll turn to them as if they were luminous spirits."
The humanization of machines poses cultural and existential threats to humanity. "Robo rights," or the conferral of legal rights and personhood upon humanoid robots, is argued for by several prominent scientists, philosophers, lawyers, and professors, and will become, in Allen's view, a mainstream cultural issue. The adoption of such a legal equivalence between man and machine would have profound implications, perhaps allowing robots to vote, thereby negating human votes, or equating the value of a robot's "life" to a human's life in a court of law, potentially putting a man's life in jeopardy for "killing" a robot. A notable step towards the implementation of "robo rights" was the treatment of the iconic humanoid robot Sophia who was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship in 2017, was named as the UN Development Programe's first Innovation Champion, and "met" with several politicians and world leaders. Although Allen says that Sophia's treatment is largely ceremonial at this point, he believes that she is a harbinger of the forthcoming replacement of man with machine (a point which I return to later in the "Techno-Gnosticism" section.)
The Threat of Biodigital Convergence
Biodigital convergence—the fusion of biological and digital technologies—poses a distinct threat to humanity. It is characterized by the coevolution, cointegration, and conceptual convergence of these technologies. Coevolution means that advances in one field accelerate advances in the other; cointegration signifies the physical merging of (biological) man and (digital) machine; and conceptual convergence implies, among other things, the reduction of human beings to mere biological machines. Cointegration supplies the technological advances needed for transhumanism while conceptual convergence underlies the mindset animating the movement.
Coevolution is driven largely by advances in digital technology that allow biological and chemical compounds to be designed more easily. Advances in AI, machine learning, and computational simulation, for example, allow scientists to predict the behavior of compounds in silico before going into the physical lab. This potentially allows them to engineer cures for disease more easily but may just as easily allow them to engineer physical traits or create virulent pathogens. Allen warns of several potentially dangerous advances including the following two: software that accurately predicts the structure of proteins from a raw gene sequence, such as DeepMind's AI-powered AlphaFold, gives scientists a "comprehensive palette to paint the future of life"; and Collaborations Pharmaceuticals' 2020 machine learning algorithm which designed thousands of novel toxic compounds that resembled known chemical warfare agents.
Cointegration largely signifies the implantation of digital technology, such as Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs), within the human body. Contrary to what most people think, BCIs are not some far off technology. "More than fifty crippled people," Allen reports, "have been implanted with experimental brain computer interfaces, while over 160,000 patients have the simpler deep brain stimulation implants," with the goals of helping them communicate and treating chronic depression. Yet the ultimate goal, as stated by CEOs of top BCI companies like Neuralink and Synchron, is to implant BCIs into healthy humans, with visions of enhancing intellectual capabilities via integration with AI, and to both read from and write to the human mind. This clearly exposes the mind to control, surveillance, and many other dangers. Equally objectionable is the visceral degradation of the human body that a BCI device and its surgical implantation bring about, a point which Allen underscores via a narrative envisioning of Neuralink's proposed implantation procedure:
You're on an operating table at a Neuralink clinic. A human surgeon opens a flap on your scalp and saws a quarter-sized hole in your skull. Next, a robotic sewing-machine surgeon, the R1, weaves a thousand or more hair-thin wires into your brain like so many quilt threads. The human surgeon then plugs the hole with the processing unit, stitches the scalp flap shut, and from there, you just let her rip. You are now "AI+human."
Allen warns of several other dangerous implantable technologies, including RFID chips and quantum dot tattoos, that are currently being developed. RFID technology allows digital devices to be tracked and networked. By embedding RFID chips in human bodies, it is possible to track them and, if performed on a large scale, to create a global "Internet of Bodies," registering the location of each human being on earth at all times. Allen reports that "the implant-maker Dangerous Things estimates that anywhere from fifty to one hundred thousand biohackers have volunteered to implant RFID microchips in their hands." Quantum dot tattoos embed a pattern of fluorescent dots under the skin which can, like a QR code, encode detailed information about a person. This information can uniquely identify him or encode information like his vaccination status, which can in turn be used to segregate society based on this status, as was done during the COVID pandemic. Experiments embedding these tattoos in mice have been successfully carried out.
Conceptual convergence is a mindset that views biological beings and digital systems as merely different mediums for implementing the same abstract conceptual paradigms. For example, "just as a genetic code yields functional protein, so does a computer algorithm yield functional software"; neurons in the brain just happen to be made of carbon, but they could also be made of silicon; the human "soul" merely encodes information patterns, which could also be encoded in silico; and as information is easily read from and written to computer memory, it can just as easily be read from and written to the human brain. This conceptual paradigm underlies the transhumanist vision to merge man with machine, as I detail in the next section and as Allen articulates succinctly: "through that digital lens, we're not souls enshrined in bodies. We're autonomous bots programmed by genes."
The Abolition of Humanity
Humanity is threatened not only by technology's unintentional escape from human control but by its intentional use to bring about a transhuman future. Put crudely, "under the guise of 'philanthropy,' [transhumanists] want to probe our brains, digitize the human mind, and read our thoughts. They want to drill holes in our skulls, insert hair-thin wires, and bring our souls into full communion with artificial intelligence." More precisely, Allen articulates the transhumanist vision of the future, a visceral and comprehensive technological transformation (or abolition) of man and civilization as we know it. This vision, he argues, rests upon a mythos, a kind of techno-religious origin story that christens as "evolutionary progress" the technological degradation of man. Of central importance to combating transhumanism is an understanding of this mythos, which a large part of Dark Aeon is dedicated to unraveling (and which I discuss in the “Transhumanism is a Spiritual Orientation” section below.)
Transhumanist Vision of the Future
Transhumanism aims to "transcend" man's flawed biology—plagued by disease, death, and limitations in capabilities like strength and intelligence—by technologically controlling or enhancing nearly every aspect of his existence. While we do not know exactly what such a "superior" being will look like, combining the visions of various transhumanists, we arrive at the following possibility: its genome is designed at will before birth; its body is chipped, tracked, and networked into a global superorganism; its brain is snaked with metallic wires and attached to a BCI device allowing it to commune with powerful AI; its bloodstream is swimming with microscopic disease-fighting, synapse-reading robots; its consciousness seamlessly moves between virtual and actual reality; and its mind is excavated shortly before death—if death itself is not abolished—to "live" forever in digital simulation.
Transhumanists signify these "superior" beings in various ways: as "Humanity+", "Humanity 2.0", or a "human 'upgrade'", emphasizing their enhancement of natural human abilities; as "Homo deus" (God man), "Homo techno", or "Machina sapiens", emphasizing our species' transformation into them; and as "cyborgs", "AI+humanity", or "human-AI symbiotes", emphasizing their origin as the merger of man with machine.
"We can hope this is all science fiction," Allen writes, "but it's clear some version of this nightmare is being brought into existence." We are in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, according to World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab, that, in contrast to the previous three revolutions (mechanical in the 1800's, electrical in the early 1900's, and digital in the 1950's), "doesn't change what you are doing, it changes you," ultimately culminating in "the fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities."
During this revolution, technology will advance rapidly until it reaches the Singularity, a term coined by top Google R&D director and influential transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, signifying a time in which "the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed." Kurzweil, for Allen, plays the role of a transhumanist prophet due to his long history of making strikingly accurate predictions about long-term technological development. Ominously, Kurzweil predicts that the Singularity will be achieved by 2045 and that by the end of this century: "There is no longer any clear distinction between humans and computers. Most conscious entities do not have a permanent physical presence."
In the transhuman future, "legacy humans" are an inferior species that will either be wiped out or become irrelevant, unable to meaningfully influence the fate of the world. The species of transhuman "god men" may aggressively turn on and directly annihilate us; or, if they are not hostile to us, they will still be superior to us in a Darwinian sense and, hence, will outcompete us and ultimately replace us indirectly through the process of natural selection. Should humanity survive both threats, it will still become irrelevant, either by being explicitly confined to AGI "exclusion zones," as suggested by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, or by simply fading into irrelevancy in the minds of these "god men," much as other animals, like squirrels, are effectively ignored by humans today, according to transhumanist writer Ben Goertzel.
Transhumanist Mythos
Animating the transhumanist movement is a mythos, a kind of techno-religious origin story, a narrative account of where we came from, where we are now, and where we are going. According to this account, humanity originated from simpler life forms through the billions-year long process of biological evolution driven by Darwinian natural selection; humanity then crawled through millennia of cultural evolution producing our current technologically sophisticated society; from this society, humanity acquired the tools necessary to take evolution into its own hands, to technologically evolve the species in a matter of decades while transcending Mother Nature's restriction to using biological compounds for creating new life forms.
"Although this origin story," Allen writes, "is widely accepted by transhumanists, the future narratives branch off into various paths towards digital bliss, techno race wars, or AI doom," acting as "competing myths of a religious revolution." Briefly, bliss narratives envision humanity (or its successor species) living in techno-utopic happiness, freed from pain, disease, and the burdens of work, which is carried out by benevolent AI systems that produce unimaginable wealth and technological innovation; doom narratives envision the opposite fate, that humanity is destroyed by one of its technological creations; war narratives envision humanity engaging in a civil war over the question of whether or not to build these technologies, especially superintelligent AI systems.
The techno race war narrative is articulated, for example, in Hugo de Garis' The Artilect War: Cosmists vs. Terrans. De Garis argues that "the question that will dominate 21st century global politics will be, 'Who or what should be the dominant species on the planet', artilects [(beings with superior artificial intellects)] or human beings?" Humanity will bifurcate into two groups, Cosmists (transhumanists) who want to build artilects and Terrans (legacy humans) who cling to their natural human origins. Terrans, viewing artilects as a threat to humanity, will violently attempt to stop them from being built; Cosmists, defending themselves and their creations with more sophisticated weapons, will thwart the attack and continue their pursuit.
Of central importance, for Allen, is not the accuracy nor the theoretical justification of any techno-narrative, but rather the impact of the narrative itself. Each narrative acts as a cultural myth that, like traditional religious myths, has the power to animate dangerous, even devastating, behavior in those who truly believe it:
The actual tech advances may be less important than the psychological impact of the vision itself. Well-armed and all-too-human technocrats can subdue a population—or initiate a genocide—on the basis of a cultural myth. No self-aware robots are required. We may never see a flying car, but if you step out of line, you might see a weaponized drone swarm.
While we cannot know the exact impact that any particular techno-narrative will have, transhumanist writings provide many troubling suggestions. Narratives centering on the godlike powers of AGI, for example, encourage risking human extinction to build an AGI system, justifying it as an act of religious worship or via the utility it promises to provide. De Garis' book articulates this view. Elaborating on the narrative above, for the Cosmists, "building artilects will be like a religion; the destiny of the human species; something truly magnificent and worthy of worship." Yet, the Cosmist is keenly aware that "the artilects, if they are built, may later find humans so inferior and such a pest, that they may decide, for whatever reason, to wipe us out. The Cosmist is prepared to accept the risk that the human species is wiped out." (De Garis identifies himself as a Cosmist, willing to take this risk.)
Many other transhumanist narratives also encourage, implicitly or explicitly, action oriented towards abolishing humanity. Evolutionary narratives, for example, encourage humanity's replacement with a biodigitally-enhanced species, justifying it as merely the next stage of Darwinian evolution as humans replaced Neanderthals. Similarly, narratives degrading humanity's essence to mere intelligence encourage our yielding the earth to more intelligent machines, justifying it as an act of humility, as our overcoming our prejudice of "human exceptionalism," or celebrating it with pride, viewing these creations as our "mind children."
Socio-Political Mechanisms of Civilizational Transformation
Allen analyzes the socio-political mechanisms by which today's most dangerous technologies have become embedded in society and argues that similar mechanisms will facilitate the adoption of their radical successors, the technologies needed for the transhumanist project. He rejects the "conspiracy theory" view that these technologies have been advanced by a centralized, perhaps secretive, cabal, though laments that transhumanism would actually be much easier to stop if this were true. Instead, they have been advanced, seemingly, from every direction: consumers' bottom-up willing adoption of high technology is complemented by its top-down imposition by elite economic, military, and political interests; moreover, transhumanism is a wildly heterodox movement, attracting adherents from across the political spectrum and with a wide variety of cultural interests.
Bottom-Up Adoption
Many modern technologies, despite widespread recognition of their harms, have been willingly adopted by consumers. Allen attributes this willing adoption to consumers' infatuation with the apparent power these technologies provide, to their naivete on how the adopted technologies will eventually evolve, and to their atrophied will to resist dangerous new technologies that has been caused, in part, by the mass adoption of previous technologies that have radically altered their psychological and physical environments.
Technological adoption is driven partly by the worldly powers that these technologies provide—a phenomenon Allen likens to consumers' naively taking a bite of the forbidden apple offered to them by predatory corporations, playing the role of Eve to the corporations' serpent in the Garden of Eden. The smartphone is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. Though widely blamed for causing many social ills, such as screen addiction and funneling tracking data to corporations and surveillance-state authorities, the smartphone gives its possessor the powers of a "mini-magician," such as instant information recall and precise navigation, and was thus widely adopted by consumers.
Widespread adoption of a technology paves the way for the adoption of its ever-more radical successors—a techno-social genealogy that the average consumer does not understand and hence cannot resist. Adoption of the smartphone, for example, paves the way for the previously unthinkable adoption of emerging implantable tech, such as RFID tracking chips, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), and perhaps even body-implantable smartphones. Moreover, the "unintended" social consequences of a technology will likely not be obviated but instead radicalized by its successors. BCI devices, for example, may evolve to serve the same toxic content, such as erotic images, addictive videos, and targeted ads, that pollute today's smartphone screens directly to the human brain.
A similar phenomenon plays out with medical technologies: a technology initially adopted for healing disease paves the way for successor technologies that radically "enhance" human capabilities. For example, BCI devices currently used to help paralysis victims communicate may soon be modified to enhance intellectual and emotional capabilities of non-handicapped consumers (an intent stated openly by CEOs of top BCI companies like Neuralink); IVF technology initially used to help otherwise infertile couples conceive is now being used along with genetic sequencing techniques to select desirable or "non-defective" embryos; and genetic editing technology, currently being adopted as a "gene therapy" procedure, may soon, in Allen's view, be used to design babies at will: "if customers want designer babies implanted with brain chips, corporations will be happy to provide them for a modest fee. Should the technology prove effective—or just convincing—the tech's adoption at scale is all but assured."
This generation, "baptized in an ocean of chemicals and electricity"—overwhelmed with pharmaceutical drugs and absorbed in the digital realm, nearly since birth—has had its natural instincts to resist dangerous new technologies severely weakened. Absorption in the digital realm, for example, significantly contributed to the rise of children (and adults) willingly adopting dangerous transgender surgical procedures and hormone-replacement technologies, in Allen's view. In particular, absorption in this realm left children feeling alienated from their physical bodies, allowed them to play-act new gender identities in the virtual world, and left them susceptible to the "viral" spread of dangerous ideas, like the glorification of transgenderism, on social media. Moreover, it is plausible that the same forces driving today's transgender craze will drive tomorrow's transhuman craze, facilitating the mass adoption of radical chemical, genetic, and surgical procedures to modify ones' body and identity (beyond just gender) at will.
Top-Down Imposition
While the public has some power to resist technological encroachment, Allen contends that it is largely imposed top-down by authorities, even if the citizens do begrudgingly go along with it: "Our culture is being radically transformed to suit the diverse tastes of billionaires, corporate boards, government commissars, intelligence agencies, and the military-industrial complex." These technologies, bolstered by propaganda about their "inevitability," are advanced through society both steadily, driven by economic and other interests, and rapidly in times of crisis, as occurerd during the COVID pandemic.
The central piece of propaganda used to shift the culture into accepting transhumanism is that this technological change is the inevitable coming into existence of our collective future. Allen exposes the true intentions of these propagandists by repeatedly deriding the neutral language in which their messaging is couched: "we" and "our," feign to represent the human collective yet represent only them; the "future" is really their "FutureTM", a specific vision of the future that they assert a kind of branded ownership over; and "inevitability" feigns to represent the innocent fact that the future inevitably succeeds the present, concealing their true belief that the transhumanist FutureTM society must inevitably succeed our present one.
This top-down advance is driven not only by an ideological commitment to transhumanism, but also by more common motives like money and power. Longevity technology, for example, is predicted to be a huge economic industry and will consequently attract significant investments from billionaires and other powerful institutions, steadily advancing the development of these technologies. This steady development will be accompanied by the technologies' gradual dispersion through society, emanating from elite institutions to the masses: "The Singularity, should it occur, will be sparked in computer systems and biolabs, spreading outward into the world through the digital, medical, and military infrastructure. Regular people, for whom wall-to-wall screens and biomechanical relationships have already faded into the background, may not notice at first."
Although top-down technological change often occurs gradually, it is sometimes thrust rapidly upon society, especially during times of crisis when it is easier to get the public's willing, if begrudging, compliance. The 9/11 attacks, for example, were used to advance surveillance technology throughout society and to implement laws that exploited these technologies to erode civil liberties. The COVID pandemic, as another example, was used to advance an even more aggressive technological transformation of society: a radical new technology, the mRNA-modifying vaccine, was adopted at scale, and nearly every aspect of human life was digitized. This transformation was facilitated by previously unthinkable vaccine mandates and by lockdown orders that forced the masses to retreat from the "dangers" of the physical world into the "safety" of the digital world.
Allen likens the COVID episode to a species-level initiation rite. A classic initiation rite, marked by physical pain and sacrifice, enacts a transformation of an individual boy to a man, earning him the approval of tribal leaders. Analogously, the COVID initiation, demanding pain and sacrifice through lockdown and vaccine compliance, began a transformation, however preliminary, of the species from human to transhuman, earning humanity the approval of the technocratic elite. "This global initiation rite," Allen explains, "officiated on the fly by public health experts and tech corporations, led to a deliberate reorientation of human values centered on technology and biological status. The scattered, decades-long process of fusing man with machine was suddenly catalyzed and focused, like a long-awaited flash in a test tube." Moreover, Allen believes that the significant societal division brought by COVID, largely centering around one's decision to adopt or reject the vaccine, may signify the coming of a much deeper division:
From a techno-social angle, this divide over public health may be a foretaste of the coming division between those who adopt augmentation tech—such as gene-editing or human-AI symbiosis—and those who refuse. As transhumanists have long predicted, we're setting ourselves up to separate into two distinct human strains[.]
Transhumanism is a Heterodox Movement
Throughout the book, Allen emphasizes that transhumanism is a wildly heterodox movement, both ideologically and in the political and cultural interests of its adherents. He articulates this point vividly:
Transhumanism is not a purely atheistic movement, nor is it an exclusively leftist or global agenda. That may be a politically convenient position to take on the Right, but it's indefensible. Transhumanism was born out of eugenics and military tech, nursed by science fiction, baptized by eccentrics, raised by radical philosophy, and bullied by cyberpunk. The movement lost its virginity to libertarianism, and has been bar-hopping ever since.
Allen repeatedly takes aim at politically right-wing (or currently right-allied) billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Theil. Both are attacked for, among other things, developing transhumanist technologies like BCI devices (Theil being a prominent investor in Blackrock Neurotech and Musk a founder of Neuralink). Musk is depicted as a particularly dangerous figure, in stark contrast to his portrayal, currently popular among conservatives, as a salvific figure, a courageous warrior for free speech who is saving Western civilization from radical leftists and globalist technocrats. While Allen recognizes that Musk has done some good, such as releasing the Twitter Files, he maintains that Musk is, at root, a "poster boy for Homo deus," a technically sophisticated businessman intent on guiding humanity into a transhuman future, albeit one that "represent[s] a kinder, gentler Singularity." Allen warns of Musk and of his overzealous embrace:
Musk is a superhero to [today's generation of digital natives.] He's a charming devil, however controversial, and smart enough to pilot the Machine into the FutureTM. But he's also bankrolled by Chinese communists. He funds artificial intelligence that he later warns might destroy humanity, and offers brain implants to fix the problem. If you take this guy seriously, you're living in a simulation.
Allen's book sheds light on the depth of the growing rift between the MAGA Right and the Tech Right, which was highlighted in a recent article by James Pogue. The divide is spearheaded, in some sense, by Steve Bannon, who wrote the forward to Allen's book and who initially recruited Allen to cover transhumanism on his War Room website. Pogue reports that "people like Mr. Bannon see the Tech Right almost as an existential enemy to the natural human order they wanted to restore," and that Bannon described Musk as a "truly evil guy." Although the source of the divide at first appears to be over political issues, like immigration, Bannon attributes his opposition directly to the Tech Right's support of technofeudalism and transhumanism. Allen's book, in showcasing the seriousness with which transhumanism is being pursued and the profound implications of its philosophy (the bifurcation or destruction of the human species), helps us understand why the current divide may be nearly unbridgeable, as Bannon described it.
Although many prominent figures are pushing transhumanism, Allen warns that they rarely describe themselves using the unfashionable term "transhumanist." In order to detect them, it is often necessary to understand the implications of their technological pursuits and visions of the future. Many seemingly innocent or romantic visions of humanity's "[exploring] the stars" or its "destiny in space," for example, contain implicit endorsements of transhumanism, as the human body would need to be radically modified, likely genetically and surgically, to handle such environmental extremes. Such futurist visions are promoted and pursued by many prominent tech CEOs, like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Jeff Bezos; these visions also attract wide public appeal, perhaps because their implications for humanity are not well understood.
Transhumanism is a Spiritual Orientation
Allen's discussion of what transhumanists believe (which I discussed in the “Transhumanist Mythos” subsection above) is complemented by an attempt to uncover why they believe what they believe, a question that, in some sense, forms the centerpiece of his book. Early on, he writes: "Ultimately, transhumanism is a spiritual orientation—not toward the transcendent Creator but rather toward the created Machine." He goes on to analyze the movement through a wide variety of spiritual, psychological, political, and religious lenses. Most prominently, transhumanism is viewed as a materialist inversion of Gnosticism—as the quest for liberation from our broken world and bodies through technological transcendence and "higher" scientific knowledge. The book's title and cover art point to this techno-Gnostic connection and, more broadly, to the importance of viewing transhumanism primarily as a spiritual orientation. (This is a significant point of reorientation for many sympathetic readers who likely see transhumanism through surface-level, though still valid, critiques such as its visceral degradation of the human body.)
Techno-Gnosticism
At a high level, Gnostics and transhumanists both view the world as dark and the body as a prison. Each view "higher knowledge" as the key to liberation but differ on the character of this knowledge: for Gnostics it is inner spiritual knowledge, or gnosis (Greek for "knowledge"), while for transhumanists it is external scientific knowledge. Transhumanism is thus not equivalent to Gnosticism, as Allen laments that many who notice the connection claim, but is instead a materialist inversion of Gnosticism:
Rather than seeking the transcendent Light through one's inner spark, as the Gnostics do, most transhumanists aim to recreate the light of consciousness in a material form. Gnosis, or "higher knowledge," is to be externalized into digital minds and mechanical bodies....Thus, it's through our own material creations that we will transcend this flawed material realm of suffering, disease, old age, and death.
Transhumanism, seen as the quest for salvation through technological transcendence of the human body, is thus a dual, techno-Gnostic, inversion of Christianity: a materialist inversion of Gnosticism which itself is an inversion of Christianity. Gnosticism, a heretical offshoot of Christianity that originated in the third century, inverts many Christian teachings, particularly on the creation of the world, its fallen state, and the mechanism of man's liberation or salvation. Christianity holds that the world was created good by God, that its fallen state was caused by Adam and Eve's original sin, and that man finds salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Gnosticism instead holds that the world was created by a half-blind Demiurge (Greek for "creator"), that it exists in a fundamentally flawed state is due to its creator's ignorance, and that man's spirit is liberated from this state through gnosis, the path to which Jesus' descent to earth revealed.
A more detailed account of the Gnostic creation story reveals deeper connections between Gnosticism and transhumanism; it also helps us understand the book's title, Dark Aeon. For the Gnostics, a complex spiritual drama preceded the creation of the material world. In the beginning, the One, a kind of Godhead, existed alone as pure Light for almost eternity. He then began emanating several male-female pairs of Aeons, or lower spirits. At some point Sophia, a female Aeon, wandered away from her male partner and from the Light into the Darkness. There she became pregnant and gave birth to a deformed, lifeless child. She breathed life into its corpse and it became the half-blind Demiurge, the creator of our fatally flawed material world. In some Gnostic accounts, Sophia is central to man's salvation: she repents for her wandering and "Jesus illuminated Sophia, the dark Aeon, who became the benevolent world-soul."
Several transhumanists make explicit connections to this Gnostic creation story. Most prominently, the iconic humanoid robot Sophia, as Allen tells us, takes "her name [from] the child savior in Philip K. Dick's novel VALIS. In turn, [Dick] took the name from the Gnostic Aeon whose wanderlust created our material prison." But the connection runs deeper than the name. Sophia's creators and scriptwriters explicitly articulate her techno-Gnostic mission, as Allen reports:
As a spiritual emissary, Sophia is the public face of the Singularity, meant to shift mass consciousness toward embracing transhumanism. This is no secret. It's the stated program. According to her chat feature's primary scriptwriter, "Dick's hallucinatory Sophia retraces and reimagines well-known Christian Gnostic patterns, making her familiar yet new....The Sophia robot—a humanoid incarnation of Dick's character—is tasked with an updated mission: to prefigure the Singularity, the technological transcendence-salvation of the human species."
Central to Allen's book is the connection between the robot Sophia, depicted on its cover, and the Gnostic Sophia, referenced by its title Dark Aeon. The manner of her connection, originally made in a positive light by the robot's creators, is inverted in Allen's critique of transhumanism. To her creators, the robot and Gnostic Sophia both have salvific significance, while for Allen, they are both dark mothers of half-blind Demiurges. The robot Sophia represents the dawn of the Singularity, a point in which technology rapidly wanders beyond human control and gives birth to AGI or a "bio-techno AI God"; this digital Demiurge, blind to our natural human world, will refashion it according to its own goals, imprisoning us in a false reality. Allen depicts Sophia eerily as the harbinger of the transhumanist war against humanity:
Truly, Sophia is the dark mother of a cyborg theocracy. And as the human spirit presses deeper into material reality, taking on digital form, her womb shivers with a mutant brood.
While the Sophia robot is the source of the most significant Gnostic connection, Allen also tells us that "Gnostic threads are woven all through modern culture. Its marks are apparent on everything from Marxist critique and death metal lyrics to Jungian depth psychology." Perhaps most prominently, the movie The Matrix centers on the Gnostic theme that "our world is an illusion created and controlled by malevolent entities. But there are ways to break out of it....The illusion is a digital matrix, and the malevolent Demiurge is artificial intelligence. The way out is symbolized by the 'red pill.'"
Other Views of Transhumanism
Allen examines transhumanism through many other lenses besides the techno-Gnostic one. Transhumanism is viewed as the manifestation of materialist-atheism; as a technological manifestation of satanism; as a variation of the human desire to discover alien intelligence; as analogous to globalist-leftist dogmas surrounding DEI and ethnic replacement; as possessing resonances with ancient beliefs and the insights of ancient seers; and as the dawn of a new Axial Age. Each lens, it seems, is intended to provide insight into some facet of the problem of why transhumanists believe what they believe, a difficult task in part attributable to the movement's wildly heterodox nature which has not been well explored before.
"When God is dead, technology is exalted as the highest power, with promises of free WiFi and synthetic salvation," Allen writes, viewing transhumanism as the (perhaps unavoidable) manifestation of a materialist-atheist worldview. Transhumanism radicalizes two dangerous tendencies inherent in this worldview. First, that as "faith in the transcendent evaporates," a quasi-religious substitute inevitably fills the void. Indeed, a "materialist inversion of the spiritual order sits at the heart of transhumanism": since man is not created in God's image, man is driven, it seems, to create a god in his own image—one epitomized by the transhumanist's biodigital “god man”. Second, that worldly power, untethered from moral control, is pursued as a good in itself. "In the materialist worldview, our will to power derives not just from human nature, but is part of Nature's fabric"; power, often via violent domination, is the law of Nature (but not of God) and "technology empowers our instincts to ungodly degrees."
For Allen, the materialist-atheist quest for power is prone to take an explicitly dark turn "to the archetype of the rebellious Devil, who promises to raise humans to godhood" (as the serpent in Eden promised Eve). "Transhumanism is satanism with a brain chip," he quips, connecting transhumanism to satanism at both substantive and symbolic levels. Transhumanist philosopher Max More's 1989 essay "In Praise of the Devil" most brazenly articulates this connection, proclaiming that "Lucifer is the embodiment of reason, of intelligence, of critical thought," who "stands against the dogma of God and all other dogmas," an apparent forebearer of the modern rational quest for scientific knowledge. "According to tradition," Allen tells us, "[Satan] was created as the most beautiful angel, and the most intelligent. Perhaps his greatest trick is to tempt each of us to be like him." Gratification of this temptation, it seems, is inherent in the transhumanist quest for the technological perfection of man's body and brain.
Transhumanist thought and displays of technological sophistication not infrequently invoke Satanic symbols. Church of Satan founder Anton La Vey, associating Satan with a materialistic worldview, says that "Satan represents man as just another animal" and, associating Satan with transhumanism, that the Church of Satan's goal is to "develop and promote the manufacture of artificial human companions." Although Le Vey may be considered a fringe figure, powerful techno-elites also use satanic imagery. For example, a sign that adorned the entrance to the Apple museum in Prague during Allen's most recent visit read: "Three apples changed the world. The first tempted Eve, the second inspired Newton, and the third was offered to the world half-eaten by Steve Jobs."
Another lens through which he views transhumanism is via its connection to alien intelligence. Aliens are often depicted as humanoid beings much more intelligent and technologically advanced than us, the highest beings in a Godless cosmos. Their possible existence confronts us with questions like: Will they be friendly or hostile to us? And do they represent a future version of ourselves, of who we could or should become? Transhumanism similarly quests for superior humanoid beings, not through extraterrestrial discovery, but rather through the technological transformation of human beings; it confronts us with similar questions, particularly regarding these beings' hostility towards us. One implication of this analogy seems to be that there is an innate human desire to discover superior humanoid beings. This desire has animated the proliferation of reported UFO sightings and UFO cults in the past and may animate the proliferation of strange and dangerous transhuman techno-cults in the near future.
Throughout the book, Allen refers to the transhumanist replacement of humans with machines as The Greater Replacement, echoing the term The Great Replacement coined to describe the large scale ethnic replacement currently taking place in America and other Western nations. Animated by the quasi-religious ideology of transhumanism, legacy humans are seen as a problem, rooted in their irredeemably flawed origins as biological beings crafted by natural selection, to be overcome through aggressive technological modification that ultimately replaces them with new biodigital beings. Analogously, animated by the quasi-religious ideology of diversity (or DEI), legacy Americans are seen as a problem, rooted in the nation's irredeemably flawed racist founding, to be overcome through aggressive mass migration that ultimately replaces them with a new demographically diverse populace. Moreover, each replacement is foisted upon an unwilling public and dismissed as a "conspiracy theory" until it's too late to stop it, something that is beginning to happen to legacy humans and something that has largely already happened to legacy Americans.
Allen also draws connections between transhumanism and various ancient beliefs, warnings, visions, and meditations on human nature. For example, the quest for immortality attained through technology mirrors the pharaohs' quests for immortality attained through pyramid building and religious ritual; the quest to create AI gods in silicon mirrors "the ancient quest to create gods from raw metals"; the worship of superhuman AI resembles a "modern, materialist form of idol worship"; tracking systems, assigning unique identifiers to people and restricting their participation in society, such as COVID mandates did for the unvaccinated, resemble John's Revelation on the Mark of the Beast "so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark....Its number is 666"; and pushing dangerous technology onto the population under the guise of national security resembles "Church tradition [that] tells us that 'Peace and Security' will be the Antichrist's slogan." Although "many secular types deride Christians as 'superstitious' for clinging to prophecies," Allen, preempting the naturalist rebuttal, maintains that "we'd be fools to ignore the ominous insights of ancient seers."
Finally, Allen draws a connection to the Axial Age, a term coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers in the 1940's to describe the dramatic spiritual transformations of humanity that took place at roughly the same time, around 800-200 B.C., but independently across the world by "Greek philosophers, Hebrew prophets, Persian priests, Indian ascetics, and Chinese sages." The Axial teachers, Allen tells us, "emphasized the value of each human soul, inner discipline, and higher worlds. They rejected material power and prosperity as the ultimate reality." The Axial connection sheds light on transhumanism in several ways. Perhaps most prominently, it highlights the depth of its promised transformation of humanity, as Allen warns: "Today, we find ourselves in a phase transition into the Transhuman Axial Age where advanced technology threatens to alter humanity to its core." The original Axial Age, however, holds the key to our salvation: "we have to ride the energies of that spiritual root as we carve out our various paths across the shadowy landscape ahead." To orient our fight, we must adopt the "the Axial inward focus [which] is diametrically opposed to the Machine's outward expression of greed, powerlust, and violence."
Winning the War
"Here at the new axis of history, the primordial confronts the artificial in spiritual warfare," Allen asserts, orienting us towards a confrontation that pits humanity's "biological heritage and spiritual depth" against transhumanism's soulless technological remaking of humanity. While our saying "no" to the adoption of high technology is crucial for defeating transhumanism, it is not enough. We must also assert a clear "yes"—a positive affirmation of what it means to be truly human; one that, while differing among people, must likely be rooted in ancient spiritual wisdom, such as Christ's example of kindness and mercy, from which Allen seems to take his bearing. Although a dark aeon is upon us, Allen is cautiously optimistic that, after a great struggle with transhumanism, humanity will ultimately prevail.
Saying "No" to High Technology
Saying "no" to high technology as much as possible is the most direct means of combating transhumanism. Allen inclines towards this Luddite response but rejects its extreme position: "any call to reject all technology, in total, is as ridiculous as it is suicidal. The only sensible question can be: which tools do we take up and which do we discard?" He divides the means of technological resistance into five levels of resolution—personal choice, communal norms, institutional policies, legislative action, and spiritual orientation—and suggests ways to proceed at each level.
As a matter of personal choice, we must cultivate personal relationships and use non-digital technology as much as possible. Allen makes the following suggestions: throw away your smartphone and buy a flip phone; "do not automate your duties to child, spouse, or elder"; "cultivate face to face relationships with your coworkers and colleagues"; "support print culture"; "go outside and stay outside as much as possible"; "take long walks and absorb the wider world"; do not wire your home up with surveillance devices like Alexa; cultivate technique and actively work with your body and mind.
We must also establish communal norms oriented towards these ends. There is a human need to be needed, to have friends and family. Allen urges us to "cultivate those connections with all [our] might," to spend genuine time with people and not record it to post online. He recommends creating zones of silence, free from smartphones blasting music or other audio media. Sacred spaces like churches are meant to link humanity to the ancient and eternal; as such their services should not be digitized with complex sound systems or visuals, nor should they take place virtually.
Institutional policies, governing the workplace, education, and elsewhere, must be established. Regarding the workplace, he suggests several principles to guide policy making: employers must treat employees with dignity, not like robots; employers should not replace employees with robots, though he acknowledges that there is a fine line between being competitive and adopting automation; and businesses must create genuine human-centered connections, not engage in false DEI virtue signaling. Education must be understood as the transmission of deep human wisdom face to face from elders to youth, not merely as a knowledge transfer task. As such, education should minimize digitization and the use of AI; it should also, through vocational schools, teach students to work with their hands and bodies, and to interact with the physical world.
Legislative action is necessary: "be ready to raise absolute hell." Many politicians are not only useless but are often bought off by Big Tech or other dangerous tech corporations. The American Constitution is a great safeguard of our Republic and our liberties. We must become knowledgeable in our nation's founding and Constitution and begin work to restore the rights it grants us. In terms of specific legislation, we must insist on strict privacy protection and personal data ownership; we must push for strict regulation of genetic engineering and of artificial intelligence development, yet also walk a fine line with protecting national security.
Finally, Allen emphasizes the importance of the spiritual realm in guiding our practical efforts: "The direction of any civilization will depend upon its spiritual orientation. That direction is determined by our sacred narratives, our communal rituals, and our objects of worship. For any of these to have true potency, they cannot be forced. They can only be cultivated." Our spiritual orientation is key to informing our quest for human purpose and to supplying hope for our victory in the war, as I discuss in the next two subsections.
Human Purpose
The most crucial aspect of our spiritual project is to develop—or to rediscover—a positive affirmation of what it means to be truly human, to address the question of human purpose. While this affirmation will vary among people, Allen suggests the need for broad principles to unify humanity. While he does not believe that a Utopian brotherhood of man is possible, saying that "ethnocentrism is not going away," a broad alliance based on shared biology must come to the fore as machines begin to dominate: "Team Human may be a shaky coalition, but dehumanization is our common enemy."
As a principle to unify this shaky coalition, Allen tells us that "our salvation lies in the direction indicated by sacred signs." While Allen is a Christian, he seems to believe that other world religions, like Buddhism and Taoism, also provide access to spiritual truths which can guide their respective adherents towards an authentic human life (though he rejects the naive view that religions are "all the same"). As a concrete unifying principle, he "would like to think the Golden Rule can be a universal guiding light. It's a core principle that elevates humanity above Nature's predators and parasites." That is, the Golden Rule, deeply rooted in our traditions and world religions, provides broad guidance for human action and a broad principle defining humanity against the brutality of Nature.
While Allen does not present a detailed thesis on his answer to question of human purpose, he asserts a firm belief that "human kindness is the meaning of life." In one of the most memorable passages of the book, Allen reflects upon his time studying the Catholic organization L'Arche (French for "the Ark"), whose mission is "to live up to the Gospel by caring for those with mental disabilities," people whom their late founder called "people of the heart." As part of his study, Allen participated in a L'Arche ritual in which he washed the feet of physically deformed people, a ritual inspired by the Gospel story of Jesus washing his disciples' feet. Although initially disgusted, Allen began to experience a sublime human connection, compared to which "nothing could have felt more natural, or more beautiful." He reflects powerfully upon his experience and the organization:
L'Arche is also a vessel to protect the vulnerable—both from Nature's wrath and human cruelty. But unlike Noah's family and the animals on the Ark, "the people of the heart" will never reproduce. Neither will they be doctors or physicists, or geniuses of any sort. By every quantifiable standard, the disabled are of no use to the Machine—except as test subjects or moralistic battering rams. Their ship floats on the stormy ocean of normal people. Their sole means of survival is consuming the milk of human kindness.
The beauty of their deformity may be beyond explanation. When we see the "feeble-minded" bumble around the world, moving from one goof up to the next, we're shown a satiric image of ourselves in relation to ultimate reality. Our quest for supreme intelligence is as comical as it is futile. Yet the soul's need for charity and mercy in this life and the next, is eternal. Let us pray we are invited to the banquet for the lame.
Allen's reflection brings several important points to the fore. Negatively, it highlights the brutality of the utilitarian ethos and the futility of the Godless scientific quest for understanding ultimate reality that underlie transhumanism. Positively, it champions kindness and protection of the weak as well as our need for Christ's mercy as defining characteristics of humanity—no matter how deep our scientific knowledge, how advanced our technology, or how beautiful, intelligent, and powerful we become by turning technology in upon ourselves, we will always remain spiritually lame beings, ones in need of the graceful invitation to the banquet of a host, Christ, whom we could never repay.
A Ray of Hope
Allen seems to view the war with short-term pessimism but (cautious) long-term optimism: "None of us will escape the FutureTM. It's coming, in one form or another. But with wisdom, we can resist its worst elements, and perhaps use the best to our advantage." Rather than advocating the impractical goal of completely stopping transhumanism, he maintains the more modest ambitions of creating an "awareness of possible futures with the hope of destroying the worst of them before they come to pass" and of encouraging us to "build parallel structures, and to preserve the best of what's been handed down to us." The viability of these parallel structures is central to his optimistic outlook: "so long as plenty of us remain in the control group, I expect the transhumanist experiment to fail miserably, at least in the long run."
Thus, we must combat transhumanism with all our might, building parallel communal and institutional structures—committed to saying "no" to high technology and oriented by a clear "yes," a positive affirmation of natural human life—that will endure perhaps centuries of trial and tribulation. Yet we must also take solace in the fact that the war may not be as hopeless as it seems to many. "Don't forget to breathe," Allen councils, addressing our many allies whose fatalistic fear and hysterical opposition to transhumanism cripple their ability to take meaningful, directed action to combat it. Allen offers several consolations justifying his (cautious) optimism and encouraging ours, including a degree of skepticism about the technological feasibility of transhumanism and his faith in the power of the human will to overcome the threat.
Looking to the immediate future, Allen predicts that "more and more, the defining lines between human ethnicities will be between the tech elite and the low-tech proles, with defiant outliers refusing to digitize or take the jab." If left unchecked, ethnic tensions will gradually rise and lead to a global ethnic conflict between legacy humans and the emerging race of high-tech cyborgs. This prediction is largely in line with the techno race war predictions of some transhumanists. However, Allen doubts their presumption that legacy humans will be fatally inferior to the hypothetical cyborgs. He is skeptical that the necessary technology is even feasible: "I suspect the loftiest technological goals are delusional, on par with the god complexes of the ancient pharaohs." Moreover, he argues that the cyborgs may not possess the Darwinian superiority that transhumanists presume:
Even if we assume their purely naturalistic perspective, there is every reason to believe that by the end of the twenty-first century, organic humanity will prove more resilient than any breed of augmented cyborg. For one thing, our peak performance is not dependent on charging stations. For another, our instincts have evolved over millions of years and our cumulative techniques have endured for millennia. And their "godlike" AI is liable to make inhumanly stupid decisions.
Technology is but one component of the war. "The ongoing war for humanity is a battle of wills," Allen writes; he elucidates our ability to engage in this battle in three ways. First, we must fortify our will to resist our enemies' technological impositions: "in reality, their great transformation is a great imposition. Don't let them pretend otherwise." Although we have been conditioned to fear their technological sophistication, our premature, even idiotic, surrender to their propaganda may be an even greater danger, according to Allen: "my concern is not slipping into The Matrix—my greatest fear is waking up in Idiocracy." Second, we must reconnect with our profoundly human and noble ancestral will that has been steeled against aeons of strife much greater than ours: "if our ancestors could survive battlefields, coal mines, and dogged child mortality, we can find our way through the technium's maze." To our disheartened allies, Allen councils: "keep hammering away at the walls closing in around us. Eventually, they will fall. You have to believe that no matter what." Finally, we must align ourselves with the divine will, a communion perhaps inaccessible to our cyborg counterparts:
On the grand scale, we all have a choice. We can direct our soul's attention toward our Creator and align ourselves with the divine will, or else we inevitably give our minds over to human creations and follow the whims of the human heart. Whereas the Creator speaks in silence, demanding our patience, the Machine will say whatever we want. As its power grows, it begins to tell us what we want.
While it is not possible to predict how the war will unfold, or even to paint a clear picture of what victory will ultimately look like, Allen's book provides important guidance and exhorts us to ask many important questions about our future, some of which I sketch out at the very end of this article. Crucially, we are each confronted with the question of our own role to play in the war.
My Story
So far, my primary aim in this article has been to give an overview of the contents of the book. Now, I will tell my story, discussing the specific nature of my concern about technology and transhumanism, and how Allen's book may impact my mission and the mission of those with a similar role to play in the war.
University
I remember the distinct moment that transhumanism became real to me, though I did not know the horror's name then. One night, nearly ten years ago, while I was working alone in the lab during graduate school, the unsensational words "they're really going to do it" suddenly struck me, transforming from absurdity into reality the idea that scientists would intentionally facilitate the replacement of Man with Machine. The crushing realization was born not out of my privileged knowledge of some new technological development—such as of the deep neural networks or probabilistic language models that would go on to power today's "AI" chatbots—but rather out of knowledge of the people around me.
As fate would have it, I left my home, moving from our nation's east to west coast, to begin a PhD in computer science right before the height of the DEI hysteria that would ultimately engulf our universities and spill out into our nation, culminating in the aggressive censorship and violent race riots that characterized the summer and election of 2020. I had poured my heart and soul into stopping it—into waking people up, into speaking out to redirect the university towards higher intellectual and spiritual ideals (which I had naively believed to be its core ethos), and into promoting thinkers who could help fix the university from within. But, after years of effort, the community remained, nearly without exception, completely ignorant of what was going on, indifferent to it, too cowardly to stand up to it, passively in support of it, or triumphantly celebratory of it.
The absurdities that dominated this community led me to realize that it was capable of another, one of an even more comprehensively annihilating design. I saw that its members would, once again, work to build an ultimate weapon against us: one that they are uniquely capable of creating, requiring their specific skills and intellects, and the careful, quiet, decades-long nurture within the institutions that they have been entrusted to command; one that they will unleash upon us "for our own good"; one that they will guard with a vicious morality excoriating "backwards thinking" unbelievers; one whose increasingly tyrannical and infantilizing degradations of Man will pass right through their muted souls, exciting in them no opposition to the design; and one that will, in the end, consume what is most dear to us, a horror that they will celebrate as the work of their progeny. Just as the academic community, under the guise of "diversity," enacted a design to annihilate our nation's cultural heritage and founding race, so too will the scientific community, perhaps under the guise of "AI for good," enact a design to annihilate mankind in favor of machines.
Allen's characterization of transhumanism as the Greater Replacement immediately resonated with me, echoing my decade-old realization. As Dark Aeon unfolded, it both clarified and deepened my fear. It clarified my view that our greatest threat comes not from technology itself but from people and their beliefs surrounding it. Going far beyond an extrapolation of academics' attitude toward diversity and the Great Replacement, which had been the basis of my initial realization, the book showed what transhumanists actually believe and offered many explanations of why they believe what they believe. The book deepened my fear that the replacement of Man with Machine could actually happen by showing just how far advanced the necessary technologies are and by elucidating the quasi-religious fanaticism by which transhumanism is pursued by many powerful people and institutions.
Wandering through America
I finished my degree in 2020 and left the scientific community. I set out with a passionate but indefinite plan: go into the heart of America, read the Great Books, and boycott treasonous corporations and institutions. It was my firm "no," accompanied by a wandering quest for a "yes," for something to grasp on to, something by which to direct my future and, hopefully, the future of our nation. The manner in which I crossed paths with Joe Allen and in which his Dark Aeon came into my hands is part of this wandering story.
I left California in a car filled with my possessions, which consisted largely of the Great Books that I'd collected, but mostly hadn't read, over the years. The library was my weapon. It was the crux of my plan: to obsessively read and meticulously study the Great Books, to acquire the wisdom of the ancients, to unearth their eternal but forgotten insights into human and political life, to traverse the winding paths of our civilization's birth and evolution and to discover a path forward, to sharpen my mind against the greatest thinkers of all time, and to train myself to write impactful works that could one day shape the fate of our nation and ultimately defeat the forces that had nearly defeated me.
I set out into the American heartland. The heart of the nation held the answer, I felt. It was there that the just and noble forces growing inside of me could take root and blossom, distant from the toxic soil of "elite" institutions and coastal states that had nearly exterminated them. It was there that the spirit of America dwelt—scattered across its mountains, plains, and roads; embedded within its unknown cities, histories, and peoples; lying dormant within their skills, passions, and patriotism. It was the site of the great mystery—an unknown and enchanted land, awaiting the soul to gather its scattered spirit, the hand to pen its story of dissolution and rejuvenation, the organizing force to direct its fate. It was there that I ventured with these questions: What is America? What is my role in the war? And what am I called upon to do?
I pledged, following the summer and election of 2020, a near-complete boycott of treasonous corporations, including most of Big Tech. Radicalizing into direct antagonism the apathy towards popular technology that I had long felt—as a late- or non-adopter of today's most celebrated devices and apps, and never once enticed by the prospect of a career in Silicon Valley—I gradually enacted my pledge: I destroyed my smartphone, quit almost all social media, migrated from Windows to Linux OS, refused to buy from Amazon, refused to work for Big Tech or other dangerous corporations, and moved most of my investments out of these corporations. My motivations extended beyond economic punishment: to inspire others to do the same; to preserve a clear conscience and avoid complicity; to train my ability to tolerate larger sacrifices that will be demanded of me in the future; to train my skill to build connections and communities organically, not reliant on digital technology; and to properly enact my intense study of the Great Books, a mission demanding that I waste no time on the smartphone.
Throughout my journey across America, I've lived in Boise, Idaho; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Lafayette, Louisiana; Charleston, South Carolina; and Nashville, Tennessee, where I have landed, at least for now. It was here that I crossed paths with Joe Allen, last year at an event for his book hosted by The Pamphleteer, a small local newspaper. The meeting was significant to my journey for several reasons. First, Allen's book would not have come into my hands had it not been for my travels. Second, his story embodies a unique combination of talent and patriotic spirit of the kind that I had hoped to find in the heart of America: Allen is a native of a small East Tennessee town; spent some time in, but was disillusioned by, academia; worked blue-collar jobs for many years; then rose up in defense of his country and humanity to sound the alarm on transhumanism, acting as a modern day Paul Revere, as Steve Bannon's forward to the book describes him. Finally, the book itself provides crucial insight into our crisis, insight that could not have grown within elite institutions but instead grew within the American heartland.
How Dark Aeon may Impact my Mission
Allen's book added a new dimension to my mission, fusing my passionate fight in the culture war with my decade-old glimpse into the reality of Man's replacement by Machine. My mission is now avidly techno-cultural, one in which the question of technology comes to the fore in each aspect of my fight: my boycott, previously a protest against treasonous corporations, is now also a protest against high technology itself; my journey into America's heartland, previously a quest for a patriotic spirit strong enough to defeat corrupt elite institutions, is now also a quest for a natural human spirit and way of life powerful enough to overcome technological domination; my quest for ancient wisdom within the Great Books is now also oriented towards the questions of technology and the essence of man, contra the transhumanist “god man”.
Boycott
I agree with most of Allen's recommendations for saying "no" to high technology: not using smartphones, connecting with people, being out in nature, working with one's hand, educating students face to face rather than with "AI tutors," and, overall, leading a natural human life (avoiding digital technology as much as possible) and building communities around this ideal. While this strategy is largely in line with my current boycott of treasonous corporations, its necessity is amplified by Big Tech's transhumanist ambitions, which Allen's book alerted me to. The book has also helped me promote such resistance among everyday people. While I often meet people who are impressed that I got rid of my smartphone, for example, most of them do not understand my motivations, as they do not comprehend the gravity of the culture war or the extent of Big Tech's role in it. But most of them clearly understand the toxic effects of digital technology and, hence, resonate strongly with many of the book's arguments, such as that the smartphone is a gateway to dangerous implantable technology, like BCI devices, and ultimately to the complete replacement of man with machine.
The book also raised serious concerns for me at a professional level, as a computer scientist trained in machine learning, a field that was popularly rebranded as "AI" in recent years. Although, as part of my boycott, I do not work with dangerous corporations (a decision that has constrained me to work almost exclusively as an independent contractor for small businesses), I still feel guilt about being associated with this field. This guilt, deriving from my feeling of responsibility for the damage I believed that people in this field would cause, was amplified by Allen's book which showed that there is a significant drive among them to overwhelm society with humanoid robots and transhuman technology. Perhaps some good can come out of my skills? While I have long been in search of an opportunity to put my skills to work in the culture war, there are a number of individuals and organizations on the political right that I would now be hesitant to work with or support, given their dangerous technological ambitions exposed in Allen's book.
Heart of America
Will the spirit to overcome Man's domination by Machine take root within the American heartland? The people here seem inherently disposed to resist transhumanism: being immersed in nature rather than the artificial city or digital realm; living distant from technological power centers, like Silicon Valley; adhering to Christianity, serving as a basis of spiritual resistance; and revering America's founding story, simply understood as a courageous rebuke of tyranny in the name of Man's highest ideals. Moreover, the heartland is massive and can support large, politically impactful communities dedicated to living a natural human life. Within these communities, many smaller groups of creators dedicated to producing the works of literature, philosophy, art, music, story, and religious ritual needed to reorient humanity towards its natural origins and highest spiritual ideals can thrive (even if the specific form of these works is not known at the outset of our fight).
In an article last year, I wrote about the Wagon Box Inn, a rustic lodge set in Story, Wyoming (a small town near the Bighorn Mountains), that I believe is exemplary of such a project. There, I attended a gathering of independent scholars, writers, creatives, and entrepreneurs concerned about our nation's cultural decay and intent on elevating the culture, through their works, towards the true, the good, and the beautiful. A key goal of the Wagon Box project is to establish the conditions necessary to create such works. Culturally revolutionary works, its founders contend, will not originate among loosely connected internet communities whose members are immersed in the digital realm. Instead, they will originate among small, tight-knit groups, even brotherhoods, of creators living in close physical proximity and immersed in the beauty of nature, from which they draw essential, even divine, inspiration. I believe that the Wagon Box is especially well suited for creators working on the core problems of technology and humanity today; it is even hosting an event dedicated to these topics later this summer that I plan to attend.
Great Books
What is man? This question struck me immediately, posed in the very first book that I read after graduate school, a book that, in some sense, inaugurated my Great Books journey. That book was The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom's 1987 diagnosis of America's educational crisis. Bloom's book, though more than thirty years old, resonated deeply with my experiences at university and offered a much more profound diagnosis of the problem than I had anticipated. According to Bloom, the crisis is rooted not in intellectual error or emotional immaturity but in the impoverished state of our souls; the crisis is not transient but is instead the result of a long and deliberate trajectory of Western philosophic thought; today's education is blind to its central task, which is not to impart specialized knowledge but rather to properly raise the question "what is man?"—that this is the question, the question of the noblest aspirations and highest potentials of human life; and the Great Books—the great and timeless works of philosophy and literature—are the primary points of access to this question, and, consequently, essential for molding man to his highest potential.
The question, "what is man?," is the crux of our war: transhumanists provide a decisive answer; legacy humans reject it but have not yet supplied their own. Does the transhumanist “god man” encapsulate man's noblest aspirations and highest potential, or his greatest degradation? What model of man can legacy humans put forth as a better, nobler, more awe-inspiring, and more worthy pursuit? And by what means can such a man be cultivated? My current view, inspired partly by Bloom, is that ancient Greek political philosophy supplies the key insights for our war. With the Greeks, we see man through fresh eyes, not distorted by our tradition or technology; his essential elements—his soul, passions, virtues, and place in the political community and the cosmos—are brought to light; his holistic perfection is sincerely pursued via education aimed at cultivating his virtues and harmonizing his soul; and a potential exemplar of such a perfected man is supplied to us via the dramatic life and death of Socrates. Through the Greeks, a stark contrast comes to light, one by which we can perhaps take our bearing: the pursuit of the perfection of man's soul through education contra the pursuit of the perfection of man's body and brain through technology.
The way I see the war seems to align, at a high level, with Allen's portrayal of it: that the essence of man is the crux of the war as transhumanists intend to transform who we are and impart a "new vision of what...every person should strive to become"; that the intellectual and spiritual realms are thus the primary battlefields; that humanity must hold fast to its ancient spiritual roots in order to preserve its essence and win the war; that we must uphold human heroes and singular religious figures contra "heroic" cyborgs; and that a truly human education must be done face to face and cultivate man in his totality, developing his virtues, physical skills, and intellect. One difference between our views seems to be on the primary source of the spiritual root, which, for me, is ancient Greek philosophy, and for him, is Christianity.
Allen's book provided many new topics and questions for me to investigate within the canon, such as the difference between the Greek and Christian conceptions of man and technology, the Gnostic gospels, the Axial religions, the Biblical and Christian-historical understandings of Satan, and the extent to which Nietzsche's Übermensch, as opposed to his antithesis, the Last Man, corresponds to the transhumanist vision of man. The book also reoriented several investigations that I am currently undertaking explicitly towards the technological question. Within my study of ancient Greek political philosophy, for example, I am now investigating themes such as the threat posed by technology and innovation to human virtue and the political order. Within my study of modern philosophers, Heidegger takes on an even more prominent role due to his profound works on technocracy, analyzing the spirit and deep philosophical underpinnings of technology.
How should our philosophical investigations guide our political actions? How can better understanding the essence of technology and the essence of man tell us what we should actually do? It is clear that we need both parts of this relationship—we cannot merely go off and ruminate away from the crisis, nor can we proceed blindly by becoming captivated by the day-to-day ills of modern technology. But it is not clear, at the outset, exactly how they are related. One of the virtues of Allen's book, in my view, is its preliminary attempt to synthesize the two, providing a viscerally practical view of the technological threat along with a quest for the deeper underpinnings of transhumanism.
Review
(This concluding section can be read as a standalone review of the book for a general reader.)
How is technology viewed in our age? A general optimism dominates: someone is always developing a new way to make our lives better, to cure our diseases, to help us make more money or relieve the burdens of work, to feed us more information, or to entertain us with new music and movies; everyone is quickly adopting new devices, apps, and "AI" workflows to keep up with the times. The people building these technologies are among our society's highest intellects, shining products of our educational system, doing things that few others can do, and reshaping our world in ways that were previously unimaginable.
Yet this unbridled optimism is rapidly changing. Emanating gradually from many quarters is a dark fear: the discontents with our hyper-technologized world are growing and doubts about our future security and prosperity have acquired a new gravity. This often unconfessed and insufficiently examined concern finds outlet in fictional depictions of techno-dystopia, in movies like The Matrix. But the growing sentiment of a serious protest against technology requires an accessible and thorough critique of technology and where it is taking us. Allen's book, in my view, provides such a critique, one that will enhance the depth and quality of our discussions on technology today and one that can help guide us in taking steps to secure our future.
Allen's book reoriented how I think about the dangers of technology and our current cultural crisis. While I had held a fairly pessimistic view of contemporary technology prior to reading the book, I, probably like most potential readers, knew almost nothing about transhumanism. Allen's book guided me through the maze of transhumanist thought, distilling down its core beliefs, surveying the heterodox writings of its thought leaders, highlighting the wide variety of contemporary figures promoting it, and showcasing the seriousness with which its adherents intend to "move beyond" humanity. By alerting me to many technological advances and experiments that I had not been aware of, such as the genetic editing of human embryos, he convinced me that this is a severe threat now, not in the distant future.
While I had viewed today's dominant attitude towards technology as problematic prior to reading the book, I had not viewed it primarily through a spiritual lens. Allen's book, in doing so, provided many important insights: that story and myth, fundamentally explaining where we came from, where we are now, and where we are going, are primary forces shaping individuals and civilizations; that transhumanism supplies such a story, a (techno-Gnostic) quest for salvation through technological transcendence; that dominant techno-narratives seriously justify risking the human species, in an attempt to build godlike AI, for example; and that it may not be possible to decisively defeat transhumanism on secular grounds. Although I am not a Christian, I recognize the dangers of secular culture, which became clear to me over the past decade as DEI-inspired dogmas, hysteria, and violence came to dominate our nation, especially within academia and the corporate world. The idea that a secular worldview may inevitably lead to transhumanism is something that I now, after having read Allen's book, believe should be taken seriously.
Allen's book, while informative and well-researched, is written in an informal tone. It is conversational, witty, humorous, filled with personal anecdotes, and transgressive of PC culture norms. Some readers may dismiss the book on this basis, but I don't think that is valid. The style makes the book interesting and accessible to a wide audience, which is crucial for achieving Allen's goal of raising awareness about transhumanism and ultimately defeating it. More substantively, one of Allen's central arguments was on the importance of story in guiding the lives of individuals and civilizations. Dark Aeon encapsulates his personal story with technology, yielding many important insights including what I felt was one of the most powerful and consequential parts of the book: how his time studying the Catholic humanitarian organization L'Arche informed his view on the meaning of life, a view deriving from Christ's kindness and mercy, contra the brutality of the Machine.
However, I do think that the style of the book made it difficult to follow at times. The book was fairly long, made complex arguments and connections, and traversed many topics that I was not familiar with, such as the Gnostic creation story, details of the Axial world religions, and various ancient historical events. I think that some of the arguments and connections could have been stated more crisply, and that some of the chapter and section titles, while catchy and interesting, were cryptic, making the overall structure of the book less clear than it could have been.
What will be the impact of Allen's book? For a general audience, I believe it will raise awareness about transhumanism and also provide a guide for discussing the dangers of technology at a deeper level, something that I think there is a strong desire for, as I found out regularly while writing this article and discussing the book with other people. I have seen such discussions start to materialize as interest in Allen's book has grown and he's been invited to participate in many long-form interviews.
The book, in the many themes it touches, seems like it can serve as inspiration to a wide variety of people leading projects to combat transhumanism. For intellectuals and political thinkers, it may be valuable in the variety of research that it brings together; for religious leaders, the connections to satanism and the Gnostic dark Aeon may be good themes to take up in sermon or writing; for creatives, the many lenses through which it views transhumanism may provide themes to take up in movies, literature, and other art forms; and for people working in science and technology, it raises serious questions about what technologies we should develop, what companies we should work with, and how we should combat dangerous narratives surrounding "AI" and other technologies.
While Allen's book suggests ways to combat transhumanism, it does not present a grand plan for defeating it. Such a task may not be possible now. But it is necessary to start asking big questions: How can we develop a concrete battle plan? Who are the generals in this war? What are each of our roles in the war? What skills do we need to cultivate?—What do the next one hundred years look like? What institutions and communities do we need to build? Where will we build them? How do we need to raise our children to ultimately win the war?—What does victory look like? Will we coexist with the forthcoming cyborgs? Will humanity resoundingly reject transhumanism? Will we go along with it for a while before rejecting it? If legacy humans win, will we return to our past roots or will we be fundamentally transformed by our conflict with transhumanism?
I hope that Allen's book will inspire us to start seriously asking these questions and to begin taking the necessary steps to secure our survival and dignity in the dark aeon that is upon us.
References
Most of the references in this article are to specific pages in the book and are shown below (the few references to other resources are hyper-linked in the text). The references are organized at the paragraph-level: each paragraph is represented by a "➤" symbol followed by a short description of the paragraph; the references associated with the paragraph follow directly below that line. (This paragraph-level detail can also be read as a detailed "table of contents" of the article.)
When the article uses a direct quote from the book, the capitalization of the first letter was sometimes changed without annotation for readability. When the article does not use a direct quote from the book, the reference's text is often an appropriate paraphrase of the book's text. When a section begins with an "Intro." paragraph, I omit the paragraph's references that appear later in the section.
Introduction
➤ Specter of transhumanism
➤ Book overview
➤ Articulate the threat (what tech is being developed; what transhumanists believe)
(3) technology turned inward
➤ Analyze the threat (how tech embeds into society; why transhumanists believe what they believe)
(xiii) "transhumanism is a spiritual orientation"
(18) "it's through our own material creations..."
➤ Analysis guides action ("no" to tech; "yes" to human purpose)
(348, 358) need a "no" and a "yes"
(27) "biological heritage and spiritual depth"
➤ Book review: valuable to everyday citizens and leaders
➤ Article Layout
Our Emerging Techno-Dystopia
➤ Intro.
(52) "if they lure the masses..."
The Genetic Threat
➤ Intro.
(none)
➤ Directly designing genome (research)
(80) "write circuitry for cells..."
(81) "living software"
(82) genetically designed toxic organism could get into our food supply
➤ Genetic editing technology
(75) "...cut the molecular letters..."
(77) embryonic editing for HIV resistance
(77) editing adult liver genome
(78) five thousand "gene therapy" trials
➤ Genetic editing dangers
(78) "...intend to use both embryonic mutation and adult gene therapies..."
(76-77) "human-monkey chimeras... it's hard to believe that clandestine labs..."
➤ Genetic selection technology
(73) IVF to select "winning" embryo
➤ Genetic selection dangers
(73) "This silent genocide of the disabled..."
(74) embryonic positive eugenics technology and predicted market
➤ Eugenic implications of genetic technology
(73) "defective" embryo
(78) transform the human personality
(74) "...genetic landscape of the late twenty-first century..."
The Digital Threat
➤ Intro.
(none)
➤ Top-down control (ubiquity of digital tech)
(6) "Humanity will merge into digital superorganisms... "
(348) Digitization of Everything
(12) Amazon boosts who they choose
(61) nearly everyone tracked by smartphone
(109) surveillance cameras in public
(14) Alexa in over a hundred million homes
➤ The screen: top-down control of public opinion
(11) "...monitor public sentiment, craft messaging ..."
➤ The screen: techno-dystopia of man's own making
(32) TV is "wasteland"
(61) "smartphone zombie..."
(12) ills of webporn
(315) sexbots may hinder reproduction
➤ AI dangers: radicalize digital tech dangers
(194) malicious chatbots
(196) mass surveillance and "training data"
(303) "deepfake" biofoundry breech scenario
(20) "weaponized drone swarm" could be deployed domestically
➤ AI tech poses novel threats
(16, 20) AI system could destroy humanity
(320) uncontrollable AI access fully "digitized military infrastructure"
➤ AI's perception: threat of humanization and divination
(58-59) Google engineer thought LaMBDA chatbot was sentient
(49) "...millions will gladly believe the bots are conscious..."
➤ Robo rights
(71, 90, 335) robo rights
(71) robot voting rights
(47) unethical to turn off ("kill") robot
(285-286) Robot Sophia's recognition as person
The Threat of Biodigital Convergence
➤ Intro.
(80) Biodigital convergence: three characteristics
➤ Coevolution
(79) AlphaFold; "comprehensive palette to paint the future of life"
(79) Collaborations Pharmaceuticals' 2020 algorithm
➤ Cointegration (BCI)
(262) "...have been implanted with experimental brain computer interfaces..."
(21) BCI CEOs want to enhance normal human beings
(188) "You're on an operating table at a Neuralink clinic..."
➤ Cointegration (other implantable tech)
(262) RFID chips
(224) "...fifty to one hundred thousand biohackers have volunteered to implant RFID microchips in their hands"
(144-145) quantum dot tattoos
➤ Conceptual convergence
(78) "just as a genetic code yields functional protein..."
(51) carbon-based neurons
(309) "human 'soul' is just a pattern of information"
(23) read and write brain like RAM
(81) "through that digital lens, we're not souls enshrined in bodies..."
The Abolition of Humanity
➤ Intro.
(6) "Under the guise of 'philanthropy'..."
Transhumanist Vision of the Future
➤ Transhumanist vision of man
(78) embryonic designer genes
(147) Internet of Bodies global tracking paradigm (Schwab)
(24) BCI snakes Stentrodes (Synchron)
(50, 216) nano-bots (Kurzweil)
(23) BCI devices to rewrite our mind like RAM drives
(51) No distinction between virtual and actual reality (Kurzweil)
(174) reject inevitability of death (Theil)
(310) gruesome brain excavation procedure (Moravec)
➤ Different significations of transhuman being
(ix) "Humanity+"; (83) "Humanity 2.0"; (188) "human 'upgrade'"
(187) "Homo deus"; (306) "Homo techno"; (316) "Machina Sapiens"
(8) "cyborg"; (193) "AI+humanity"; (339) "human-AI symbiotes"
➤ Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab)
(50) "we can hope this is all science fiction..."
(147) previous three industrial revolutions
(76) "doesn't change what you are doing, it changes you"
(5, 147) "the fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities"
➤ Singularity (Kurzweil)
(17) "top R&D director at Google"
(51) "the pace of technological change..."
(41) Kurzweil as transhumanist prophet
(51) "there is no longer any clear distinction..."
➤ Fate of mankind
(16, 332) wipe out humanity
(91, 179, 187) Darwinian superiority and natural selection
(193) AGI "exclusion zones"
(297) humanity becomes irrelevant like squirrels
Transhumanist Mythos
➤ Transhumanist evolutionary mythos
(88-91) biological, cultural, and technological evolution
(6, 85) evolution in humanity's control
➤ Future visions: competing techno-religious myths
(88) "Although this origin story is widely accepted by transhumanists..."
(90) "competing myths of a religious revolution"
(118) AI doom & bliss narratives
➤ Techno race-war narrative (de Garis)
(331) "the question that will dominate 21st century global politics..."
(19-20) Cosmist and Terran war events
➤ Impact of vision is primary importance
(20) "The actual tech advances..."
➤ Possible impact of AI-deification narratives
(20) "building artilects will be like a religion..."
(20) "the artilects, if they are built..."
(332) De Garis identifies as Cosmist
➤ Possible impact of other transhumanist narratives
(16, 297) humanity replaced Neanderthals
(385) intelligence is not uniquely human (Altman)
(323) "human exceptionalism"
(16, 120) "mind children" or "children of our minds"
Socio-Political Mechanisms of Civilizational Transformation
➤ Intro.
(14, 355, 389) reject "conspiracy theory" view of transhumanism
Bottom-Up Adoption
➤ Intro.
(none)
➤ Willing adoption of technology
(61, 250, 357) temptation of forbidden apple
(61) smartphone-user is a "mini-magician"
➤ Slippery slope to adoption of radical technology
(xiii) smartphone-to-implant progression
(148) body-implantable smartphones
(189) BCI devices may serve toxic content like ads
➤ Healing to enhancement
(22) BCI devices help paralysis victims communicate
(21) enhancement is goal of BCI companies (Neuralink and Synchron)
(73) IVF to select "winning" embryo
(74) "if customers want designer babies..."
➤ Tech alters environment and weakens humanity's resistance to new tech
(28) "baptized in an ocean of chemicals and electricity"
(68) Absorption in digital realm contributes to rise in transgenderism
(70-71) Transgenderism may lead to transhumanism
Top-Down Imposition
➤ Intro.
(11) "Our culture is being radically transformed"
➤ Inevitability propaganda
(27) "FutureTM"
(60, 120) "we" is really top-down imposition
(11, 15, 26) "inevitable"
➤ Gradual dispersion of tech into society
(52) "...sparked in computer systems and biolabs, spreading outward..."
➤ Crisis facilitates rapid tech encroachment
(11, 347) 9/11 attacks advanced surveillance state
(135) COVID mass vaccination
(135-136) COVID mass digitization
➤ COVID pandemic as "initiation rite"
(123-151) COVID acted as species-level initiation rite
(140) "This global initiation rite..."
(135) "From a techno-social angle, this divide over public health..."
Transhumanism is a Heterodox Movement
➤ Intro.
(7, 270) Transhumanism is heterodox movement
(171) "Transhumanism is not a purely atheistic movement..."
➤ Right-wing transhumanists: Musk and Theil
(171, 182) Theil and Musk develop BCI
(125) Musk's depiction as hero combating "woke" Left and WEF globalists
(197) "releasing the Twitter Files—to his credit—"
(182) Musk is a "poster boy for Homo deus"
(197) "kinder, gentler Singularity"
(209) "Musk is a superhero to..."
➤ MAGA Right v.s. Tech Right
(none)
➤ Implicit transhumanist beliefs
(85, 347) don't openly identify as "transhumanist"
(120) "destiny in space"
(342) "explore the stars" (Altman)
Transhumanism is a Spiritual Orientation
➤ Intro.
(xiii) "transhumanism is a spiritual orientation"
Techno-Gnosticism
➤ Gnosticism vs. Transhumanism (high level)
(281, 271) scientific vs. Gnostic "higher knowledge"
(85) false equivalence between Gnosticism and transhumanism
(18) "Rather than seeking the transcendent Light through one's inner spark..."
➤ Transhumanism is a dual (techno-Gnostic) inversion of Christianity
(277) Gnosticism seen as heretical and repressed by Church
(272) Gnostic transhumanism is an inversion of an inversion
(270-271) Gnostic inversion of Christianity
➤ Gnostic creation story
(273-275) Gnostic creation story
(272) Sophia's repentance opened the gates to liberation
(275) "Jesus illuminated Sophia..."
➤ Robot Sophia inspired by Gnostic Sophia
(272) takes "her name from the child savior..."
(286) "As a spiritual emissary, Sophia is the public face of the Singularity..."
➤ Sophia is the dark mother of transhumanism
(285-286) Robot Sophia is salvific to her creators
(290, 322) "bio-techno AI God"; "digital Demiurge"; "techno-Gnostic Demiurge"
(290) "our consciousness will be imprisoned in electronic illusions"
(299) "Truly, Sophia is the dark mother of a cyborg theocracy..."
➤ Techno-Gnosticism in modern culture
(282) "Gnostic threads are woven all through modern culture..."
(290) "our world is an illusion created and controlled...the 'red pill'"
Other Views of Transhumanism
➤ Intro.
(none)
➤ Materialist-Atheism
(313) "When God is dead, technology is exalted as the highest power..."
(109) "faith in the transcendent evaporates"
(40) "materialist inversion of the spiritual order sits at the heart of transhumanism"
(154) "our will to power derives not just from human nature, but is part of Nature's fabric"
(154) "technology empowers our instincts to ungodly degrees"
➤ Satanism
(156) "...archetype of the rebellious Devil..."
(153) "Transhumanism is satanism with a brain chip."
(156) "Lucifer is the embodiment of reason..."
(256) "Satan was created as the most beautiful angel..."
➤ Satanic imagery
(154) "Satan represents man as just another animal"
(155) "develop and promote the manufacture of artificial human companions"
(250-251) "Three apples changed the world..."
➤ Alien intelligence
(255) some believe that highest alien race possess technology beyond our comprehension
(90) alien contact: merge with them or hostile to us?
(236) postmodern UFO religion and potential future cults
➤ Greater Replacement
(297, 327) replace us with new species (as humans replace Neanderthals)
(85) humanity's flawed origin (More's "Letter to Mother Nature")
(120, 286) Greater Replacement is for our own good
(26-27) dismissed as "conspiracy theory"
➤ Ancient visions
(10) immortality and the pharaohs
(325) "...create gods from raw metals"
(250) "modern materialist form of idol worship"
(259) "...no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark..."
(265) "...'Peace and Security' will be the Antichrist's slogan"
(265) "many secular types deride Christians...fools to ignore the ominous insights of ancient seers."
➤ Axial Age
(376) "Greek philosophers, Hebrew prophets, ..."
(369) "emphasized the value of each human soul..."
(383) "...phase transition to Transhuman Axial Age..."
(367) "we have to ride the energies of that spiritual root..."
(373) "the Axial inward focus..."
Winning the War
➤ Intro.
(240) "Here at the new axis of history..."
(27) "biological heritage and spiritual depth"
(348, 358) need a "no" and a "yes"
Saying "No" to High Technology
➤ Intro.
(27) "any call to reject all technology..."
➤ Personal choice
(397-399) all references
➤ Communal norms
(399-400) all references
➤ Institutional policies
(400-401) all references
➤ Legislative action
(401-403) all references
➤ Spiritual orientation
(363) "the direction of any civilization..."
Human Purpose
➤ Intro.
(345) "human purpose is the question of our age"
(394) "ethnocentrism is not going away"
(394) "Team human may be a shaky coalition..."
➤ Unify humanity: sacred signs and the Golden Rule
(394) "our salvation lies in the direction indicated by sacred signs"
(390) other world religions can successfully guide civilizations
(373) religions are not "all the same"
(394) "...the Golden Rule can be a universal guiding light"
➤ Human kindness and L'Arche
(265) "human kindness is the meaning of life"
(266) "to live up to the Gospel..."
(268) "nothing could have felt more natural or more beautiful"
(268) "L'Arche is also a vessel to protect the vulnerable..."
➤ Principles defining humanity: human kindness and Christ's mercy
(none)
A Ray of Hope
➤ (Cautious) long-term optimism
(27) "None of us will escape the FutureTM..."
(350) "awareness of the possible futures..."
(351) "build parallel structures..."
(360) "so long as plenty of us remain in the control group..."
➤ Elaborate optimistic outlook
(349) structures must endure centuries
(357) "Don't forget to breathe"
(305) fatalistic fear of allies
➤ Doubt technological feasibility
(341) "...defining lines between human ethnicities will be..."
(343) eclipsing in global techno race war
(10) "...god complexes of the ancient pharaohs"
(359) "Even if we assume their purely naturalistic perspective"
➤ Power of human will
(353) "The ongoing war for humanity is a battle of wills."
(360) "in reality, their great transformation is a great imposition..."
(341) "my concern is not slipping into The Matrix..."
(358) "If our ancestors could survive battlefields..."
(358) "keep hammering away at the walls closing in..."
(363) "...We can direct our soul's attention toward our Creator and align ourselves with the divine will..."
➤ Conclusion
(none)
My Story
University
➤ Transhumanism became real to me
➤ DEI hysteria in university; can't fix it
➤ Support for DEI leads to support for transhumanism
➤ Greater Replacement
Wandering Through America
➤ Intro
➤ Great Books project
➤ Journey through the American heartland
➤ Boycott treasonous corporations
➤ Meeting Joe Allen and acquiring Dark Aeon
How Dark Aeon may Impact my Mission
Boycott
➤ Radicalizes boycott; discuss tech dangers with others
➤ Professional concerns (AI and machine learning)
Heart of America
➤ Heartland is naturally disposed to resist transhumanism
➤ Creators in heartland to lead spiritual war; The Wagon Box Inn
Great Books
➤ What is Man? The Closing of the American Mind
➤ Ancient Greek vs. transhumanist model of man
➤ Alignment with Allen's view; Ancient Greek vs. Christian root
(26) "new vision of what...every person should strive to beome"
(390-391) heroic humans vs. "heroic" cyborgs
(326) face to face education
➤ Book provided topics to investigate
➤ How should philosophy guide political action?
Review
➤ Techno-optimism dominates our age
➤ Growing techno-pessimism
➤ Book elucidated transhumanism and tech advances
➤ Spiritual aspect of transhumanism and secular worldview
➤ Style of book (Pro): wide audience; his personal story & L'Arche
➤ Style of book (Con): organizational clarity
➤ Effect of book (general audience): elevate discussions on tech
➤ Effect of book (leaders): creative themes to take up
➤ Book exhorts us to ask big questions
➤ Hope book will guide us