The Supreme Growth

The Promethean Coup:

E-commerce and the chrysalis of artificial life in space

“Such contrivances have I invented for mortals, yet, wretch that I am, I have no device by which I can escape my present sufferings.” [1] 

Having thieved the creative ‘fire’ of Zeus and bestowed it unto man, Prometheus laments the age that he must spend chained to a rock, far from the inspired toiling of the sovereign souls whom owe this apostate their intellect. Making a leap, half judged and half hoping, we find the modern conquest of the stars aligning itself with the tragic view of human nature found in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. With the very real prospect of cultivating existence beyond Earth, the spectre of artificial intelligence threatens to supplant Prometheus with mankind, and, as the fruits of our labour sprout limbs and march off into space, leave man shackled to a dying Earth. Who would ascribe such pitiful a destiny to us—Prometheus’ proud favourites? Schlegel, no misanthrope, saw the tale of Prometheus as “an image of human nature itself” [2]. The leviathan brooding beneath the surface is of uncertain design, yet as the CEO of PayPal sells up and looks to colonise Mars in a matter of decades, we’re forced to entertain a synthetic, privatised, networked hive in our imaginings. Indeed, many of the fuselages in the commercial space race display an immaterial dotcom genesis in their branding, and are but one of the signifiers of what manner of life may reach beyond the gravitational singularity of Earth.

Elon Musk, billionaire founder of SpaceX, Tesla Motors and Paypal, takes a longer view than most of the prospects for life in the passionless expanse of space. The astro-pioneer entrepreneur calls on the human race to extend life beyond Earth now. “It is the first time in the four billion-year history of Earth that it’s been possible and that window could be open for a long time…or it could be open for a short time. We should err on the side of caution and do something now” [3]. Branson may grin with unremitting zeal at his quaint sub-orbital day trips for Russian businessmen but Musk stands as the lone corporate force hell-bent on the red planet. In an evolutionary turn away from the Darwinian to the Lamarkian, the proverbial Giraffe may push its head high enough and long enough to get that new neck. To perform this heavenly elevation of the human conscience (body in tow or not) would be to fulfil numerous worst nightmares. Though it can’t be gainsaid, an immensity of human fantasy is spurred on by the hubris for our pithy instrumentation. “Man in several years is able to effect a selection which slothful nature can produce only after centuries”, says Huysmans’ sycophantic hero of À Rebours. The divided camps fall in distinct territories of our nature, as space travel hits at the crux of civilization’s plans for itself, forcing us to pick a side.

This is the tale of human innovation, the poiesis that fans out across history, realised in the divers modes of ordering, both constructive and destructive, that drive the technological winds. At base, this innovation has a conservative logic to it. The first Hominid tribes of the savannah brought nature under control to reach homeostasis—tools to keep warm, to feed, to prolong the existence of the clan [4]. This steady-state, although foreign to we self-afflicting moderns, is still represented in aspects of the industrialised world. Even the humble air-conditioner is a tool for correcting an inbalance, but demonstratively, its mass-uptake and the inefficiency of its application overrides any hypothetical ‘use-value’, pointing us to a different understanding of our ‘uptooling’. In what is an astonishing destabilisation of this techno-genetic principle, the tools themselves become the steady-state environment and we the means for its moderation. No longer homeostatic, but technostatic, the penumbra of human artifice transfers its historic role to its enthusiastic patrons. Space travel proves the ultimate hubristic act, the great justification of a civilisation too big for its boots. If we are to side with its prophecy, essentially that space travel is a necessary event for our species’ survival, then we must prepare for the magnitude of change that awaits the intellectual and corporeal human in its impending realisation.

The stupendously ambitious aspect of Mr. Musk’s SpaceX venture is not his destination, but the more implicit intention to have the journeys manned. The Mars payload will be endowed with Earth’s evolutionary steed and in this extravagance is Elon Musk’s first major misstep. His imagination seems all too human when set against his purpose, composing posterity in terms of beating human hearts while marshalling a movement that lays a very different seed. The future existence of inter-stellar man is both heartless and dickless, and no amount of courage or boldness on Musk’s part should let us indulge the contrary. The idyllic image of cosmonaut life is turgidly reiterated in the pictorial and cinematic fantasies of the last century as huge domiciled terrains that say more about our inability to live on Earth than our potential to flourish elsewhere. Any colonisation of regions beyond Earth will have no recognisable footprint (how we marked the Moon), as more successful prototypes evince. We are lured anxiously into a future where a diffuse, biosynthetic supra-human roams joylessly through imperfect vacua, digesting rogue sediment and embalming itself in protectively engineered algae, whilst a virtual interior churns through vast amalgams of coded farce that ceaselessly conjure a long abstracted self. And if this sounds hyperbolic, we only need to recall that we once sent a golden LP into space encoded with the brainwaves of Ann Druyan thinking thoughts of love for Carl Sagan, along with some Beethoven and Chuck Berry to boot. Information is a seed easily extracted from its inefficient Earthly hosts. This contemporary information ecology is mainly a method for its own inward machinations—node to node. Comparatively, human activity is a rarity in the current media sphere. The alien phylogenetic criteria of environments beyond Earth are far more suited to these non-metabolic digital interlocutors. Musk’s humanism, however, does not reach this far out, and even if the spirits of his instruments have arguably intimated their design on such perilous territory, we have not cared to listen. Just as the plough built the pyramids, e-commerce will send a queer golem off into space.

This vague, shapeless inevitability is strangely intuitive to nostalgic modernity, with its deep concern for progress, the point of no return and the image of information as an autonomous being. But is this “nostalgia for the whole and the one”  [5], a captioning of modernism we owe to Lyotard, only tentatively locatable in a limpid coterie of late-modern theorists? Where there is certainly a feeling of ‘woe is us’ among many, it is perhaps overridden by a stronger kind of collectivist sentiment, one that can be traced back to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan; where he points equivocally to his contemporary, Artificial Man.

For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, which is but an Artificiall Man…in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment…are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall.

Hobbes manifests a collective, supra-conscious spirit said to inhabit all matter and motion of man, his laws and automata. An homage to artificial intelligence more passionate and adroitly reasoned is not likely to be found, nor one written with such pompous felicity. The dense composition of the Hobbesian common-wealth is framed by an essential capitulation to the ‘Artificial Man’ of mechanism and bureaucratic device, with whom a covenant has been struck to ensure a measure of peace and freedom; specifically, freedom from a state of ‘nature’ or irrationality. His undeniably brutal, but cheerfully theoretical reading of all person and material as instruments of a collective superhuman teeters on an industrial apotheosis. In a way this is his prerogative and he trod dangerously close to blasphemy for it. Giving credit where it’s due, Hobbes was far subtler minded than some of his latter day countrymen (Bentham, Hitchens), and with a reverent cadence, Hobbes found his kinsman more put upon than idiotic, with worldly pressures weighing strongly on their moral constitution, and that outward looking anxiety that things could all so easily descend into to a state of warre.

The necessary bonds of man to the mechanisms of sovereign power must remain in linkage, not by the strength of their design at all – Hobbes classifies them as weak – but by the dangers that stem from breaking them [6]. Years on, the fragility of the bond between man and machine is still, in effect, its greatest strength. As we grow ever more fearful of a world divorced from mechanism, we form an ancillary pact to carry on the incubation of Artificial Man’s problematic growth. Our commitment to this supra-conscious entity, or ‘mortal god’ as Hobbes revered, is a contract we have struggled to understand. It is a deity of many heads, some bearing the grimace of rationalism, others the symmetry of a virtual utopia, and its present omnipotence is what we feel when thrust against progressive technologists like Musk, reeling back in horror at the cyborg shadow they cast – in them the implicit promise of man’s final hour.

Similarly to the Hobbesian common-wealth, the question of extra-terrestrial man rests on a matter of allegiance. To what are we morally bound – to our race or to our planet? To our spirit or our institutions? And to what extent are we conscious of this allegiance, wherever it may lie? Likely, our general feeling will be that mankind hasn’t the right nor the capacity to treat the greater universe as terra nullius. And taken to its conclusion this moral acumen finds humanity chained to the Earth like the activist to a tree, but with the same chains unwittingly strangling the very thing they hope to save. Isn’t it the case that releasing man from Earth, in turn releases Earth from man? Without the measure of hindsight, this allegiance seems hard to detect, though Hermes, in the final moments of Prometheus Bound, offers up this biting dictum:

Do not, when you have been caught in the snares of ruin, throw the blame on fortune, nor ever at any time say that Zeus cast you into unforeseen calamity: none indeed, but you your own selves: for well aware, and not on a sudden, nor in ignorance, will you be entangled by your senselessness in an impervious net of destruction. [7]

In the face of the goading Hermes, Prometheus knew his fate, and I contend it is equally true of mankind. Yet we continue the incubation of machine life even as it scars us. It may be that the anonymous figure that Zeus’ messenger refers to, who will “substitute in thy pangs, and shall be willing to go both to gloomy Hades, and to the murky depths…” is revealed as man himself, in a similar way man constitutes the vessel of Hobbes’ Leviathan but tragically far from the lofty hopes of mid-17th-century England. The Heracles of the myth, who slays the liver-eating bird, begins man on his own journey of self-discovery. Perhaps unknown to Aeschylus, in its final act the Promethean coup observes the heroic arts of man betray the ferocious optimism of its progenitors, and consign them to a wretched hunk of iron.

[1] Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, Loeb Classical, trans. Alan H. Sommerstein, 2008, Harvard, p. 493
 
[2] A.W Schlegel, 1886, p.79
 
[3] Paul Harris, The Observer, Elon Musk: I’m planning to retire to mars
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/01/elon-musk-spacex-rocket-mars
 
[4] W.I. Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, 1981, Rider/Hutchinson, London, p.76
 
[5] J,-F Lyotard, 1985, p.81-82
 
[6] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Form, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, Peng. 1985, p.264

[7] ibid Sommerstein 2008, p. 561