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The long year

Or a little bit more than a year

It’s been a year for me, one in with a lot of stuff happened, some good but a lot of bad and harsh. I’ve been recovering from a burnout since February 2018, and I’m now finally back at work at La Quadrature, where a lot of changes are underway.

During this time, I spent more than six month experimenting different prescriptive drugs, trying to find a balance that would finally enables me to feel normal emotions, not the huge exhaustive and destructive tsunamis of rage, or the infinite pain of just being in pain.

Experimenting with your brain homeostasis is kind of a weird process. It changes the way you think, the way you perceive the world, the way you define yourself. It questions your free will, it questions your world, It questions who you are. And, in the end, am I just more than the serotonin neuroreceptor inhibitor drug that I take daily, or am I something different ?

The fiction I’m reading again has always at its core this notion of identity. It’s the basis of all the CyberPunk movement, and it should be at the center of Transhumanism too. Yes, queer politics are also about identity, as well as all politics in the end. And my identity has been fucked up by depression and traumas. I’ve built myself around a seed of anger, buried under layers after layers of insensibility, sarcasm and individualism. That’s how I survived until ten years ago. Got no choice, my socialization as a teenager has been adversarial and I had to weaponize it.

This seed of rage turned into a full blown sinister tree of depression, deploying its root in each aspect of my life and the way I relate to other, burying me under big black rotting leaves of melancholia and existential crisis, ornamenting the abysmal depth of despair with beautiful flower of exhausting emotional burst, lots of them were rage. Some others were dried by suicidal thought and morbidity. Other were flower of pure joy, turning despair in seconds, because it made me see the darkness I’m leaving in.

So yeah. Depression sucks. ADD make things worse. But back to the pills. What they do, basically, is giving me future and prospective. It’s helping me to get out of the fight or flight mode I’ve been in for years. It’s giving me the ability to plan for the future. Or the next two days, which is a huge improvement.

And yes, it is an emotional prosthetic. I see it that way. There’s a non zero chance I’ll take them until the day I’ll kill myself, or that a car decided that I should have stopped my bike in time and rode over my disarticulated body. It is part of me. The depression tree has been tamed a little bit : I still have those emotional burst where I have to fight myself to not jump on someone and turn his face in a bloody pulp with my bare hands. But they’re manageable, I can channel them a bit now. It’s still exhausting, and I’ll have fucked up night after that, despite the pills who are supposed to help me rest when I sleep, but at least it only last a few minutes, not hours or days as it used to.

You have to understand that those pills, are the only things that can help me to get some stable ground. Maybe after years of therapy I won’t need them, but for the foreseeable future, they’re part of me. And they allow me to shift my identity away from the rotten tree of despair to somewhere else. To a place where I can enjoy being with friends and lovers without blaming myself after that. To one where I can manage some social stress, even if being in a room with more than ten people is still tough for me. To a place where I can dance the stress and anxiety away. Where being sober among drunk and high friends is not stressful. Where I can admit that shit might hit the fan and that there’s probably nothing I can do to avoid that. The thing you call getting over stuff I think.

I’m still bad at it. I never learned to manage my feelings, and to accept them as not being alien, implanted in me by a fucked up chemistry, pushing me in the backseat of myself. But I think I’ll get there. At least I’m getting a little less shy about it.

But depression is always there to sucker punch you the second you stop paying attention. I can’t forgot the pills. If I forgot them for twelve or more hours, I’m getting suicidal. Fast. I need to be sure that I have them with me in case I’m not sleeping home. Getting arrested at a protest, even only for twenty four hour, is dangerous.I have to think about it every day, all day and it doesn’t help to see my progress.

So, I started to log my feelings. A small app, that will pops some time in my day asking me how I’m doing and what I’m doing. Something proactive, which will interrupt my train of thought and forces me to think about how I feel. Even for only ten seconds. It’s not like keeping a journal, which would require me to take an action, to think about logging and, being ADD, forgetting about it two seconds after thinking that I should do it, postponing it forever.

And yes, maybe this free apps is riddled with advertisement (I could pay to get rid of parts of it) and is built on GAFAM tech. But, as a lot of assistive tech, it needs to exists to make my life a bit easier, to rely a bit less on others, to stop feeling like I’m a burden to others. But this software, those data, are part of who I am. They record my past, and gives me agency. I can look at it and see that yesterday I was quite happy, and that all things considered it’s getting better. The same way the molecules I ingest daily patch my homeostasis, those assistive apps patch my moods.

It doesn’t tells me how I could be more productive. It just tells me how I am outside of now. But then, I’m hearing people, allies or friends, telling me that assistive apps are bad, that they’re only used to gather data about me, profile me in order to deliver targetted ads. Yes that’s true. The same way pharmacological companies tries (and succeed) to profit of every pills they make.

But rejecting this, rejecting the assistive tech part is the same as refusing people with diabetes to monitor their glucose level and to adapt their insulin intake, giving them autonomy. Or refusing access to glasses or hearing aids. Or prosthesis of any kind.

I have the right to help myself with external apparels, and to alter my self using anything available. And I have this right either because it’s a necessity to adapt to this crazy and destructive world we live in, or because it’s fun. Or both. The issue is that we’re monetizing the data about us, about our lives, not that the data exists. Those data are parts of me, they helps me understand myself. They helps you understand me. They helps me understand you, and the world we share.

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It’s been a while. I mean, my last posts are translations of things I wrote on LQDN website. Since the last post, there’s been some changes (for instance, I finally installed something a little cleaner for people to read here without having too much to do on my side (yes, it means it’s an extremely basic wordpress).

Also I did burn out. And I do not think those word does even starts to explain what it’s been like. It’s not my first burn out. In fact I’ve got one at each places I worked, whether it’s a public administration, a big company, a startup or an association. It’s a constant in my life. I get a new job, and then I burn out.

It’s not sane *insert sarcasm and captain obvious related meme here*. But still, it happened to me at each job I took. Even if it’s for an association. I could say that it’s inherently linked to my professional specialization, but I’ve been working anywhere between an RJ45 cable and a chair. I’ve done architectural systems, Level 1 to 3 helpdesk, tutoring, devops, writing software, writing about technology and society, talked to a lot of different people abut technology, tailored databases, modeled applications. So, either it’s an issue with a whole industry (there’s some issue yeah, nut they’re systemic and related to capitalism), or it’s an issue with me.

Which brings me to this. I’m not sure I want to write more about the way hackers tends to think of themselves as  a Turing machine, but we’re not. Turing machine allows for extremely fast computations and near instant and perfect recall function, while our brains suck at it, but allow us to have insights. But I’ll keep this for another day.

I want to talk about transhumanism. And depression. For two reasons. First, is that I’m sick. I’ve got a severe depression disorder, among other mental health issues – and there’s a 7% probability that this sickness will kill me. Probably a bit more, because my others conditions will raise this (I’ve  been diagnosed with ADD and HQI, and I suspect I’m also borderline but it’s hard to diagnose while depressed so I’ll probably never know).

What transhumanism have to do with depression ? Science. Transhumanism is looking for ways to go beyond our humanities. Nietzche developed the Übermensch figures for it, but basically it’s the same. It’s a concept that transcend morality, as a tool used to divide the self into a good and a bad part (vices and vertues), and opposes nihilism, which states that this life – this world – is useless, since the only important thing is what’s after, becoming a Saint or mythological Hero.

Depression, and a lot of others mental illness, is tied to our experience with society (but this alone is not the only reason for depression, it seems there’s biologic and environmental factors too), it’s tied to stress, which is – basically – failures at communicating something to others or too understand what’s happening. We all faces stress, in different amount, and we probably all have ways to cope with it.

The thing with depression is that your train of thought is hijacked by existential crisis. It’s being in a perpetual state of fight or flight. It’s being unable to handle even the smallest emotion. People says that I’ve got a bad impulse control. It might be true. I’ve always got burst of rage which led me to, for instance, throw a desk at someone in elementary school. Because they cheated at a game. But now I have a way better impulse control. I’ll clamp my fists and probably get outside to walk and hit a wall until physical pain kills the anger. Yes, it explains some scars on my hand.

It requires all my energy, which does not allow me to build happiness. Every single day I wake up, doesn’t recognize me in a mirror, and go through the day while thinking about killing myself. Those are the good days. The worst one is me having daydream, with an excellent precision, of me hitting someone skull repeatedly with a metal bar or whatever I can get my hands on until my rage leaves me. I’ll usually manage to walk away (and yes, it happens regularly, to a point I’m now good at anticipating that and living a place before I end up stuck in a bar fight), pushing those impulse down inside until I can let go without putting anyone at risk. It’s not the impulse control which sucks, it’s the mood systems which are fucked up. And it scares me.

I’ve spend most of my life with this depression. It took me a while, and a lot of drugs, to be able to remember a chronology of episodes. For a while, I’ve pinned it down to my father incarceration, but I think it started before that.  But I know that at least since August ’97 I’ve got depression episodes of different magnitude. We’re in 2018now, so it’s been 21 years. And I’m not 42 years old yet. So yes, it means that most of my existence as an adult have been lived through depression, and hiding it to everyone because you cannot understand what it is.

It’s also, since not a lot of people want to talks about that – especially due to some extremely toxic tropes such as “Boys don’t cry” – you can spend a lot of time wondering if you’re alone, or if everyone feels the existential dread and collapse you feel everyday. You don’t know who, likes you, have to wear a social mask to hide their pain.

Add that to a total absence of bisexuals positives representation in the mainstream medias, especially during the 90’s, or positive gay representation, then you’re quickly lost, wondering if everyone is in pain, or if it’s only you. And if it’s you, why do you feel like that? Where does it come from?

The end of the 90’s, and of the century, was also when I learned that your friends will turn on you for no reason, except the fact that they wanted to have fun at your expense. That’s what boy-scouts taught me. You can spend weekends and a lot of time in a small social cell, supposedly trying to work together, in solidarity, but as soon as the other member of your cell will see a crack in you, they’ll rush into it, blow it open and will left you out to dry.

I’ve been evacuated from a camp, in tears, in 1997. Something like 6 month after my father had been incarcerated (it doesn’t helps when the joke is about family). And probably five days after some boy kissed me for the first time. Not out of love I think, but to check if I was drunk.

It cost me a lot. I’ve always been quite introvert, I’ve basically stopped trying to be friend with people. I’ll do like anyone else, tag along and, as soon as I can, I’ll crush them to get on top of them, since this is how I’m supposed to behave, I’ll become that.

It’s also at this time that I dig a little more into Science Fiction, and especially the Cyberpunk movement. And role playing games (first game of Shadowrun was in 01). Those books, especially the neuromancer, probably helped me a lot and saved me of all the incels tropes. I was in boys only classes, not because it was a non mixity school, but because I was interested in industrial machinery and computers and society teaches us that it’s not what women should do.

The fundamental thing in the CyberPunk movement is two fold. First, there’s a globalized society which provides instantaneous access to all informations, and such information is used by global construct to force humanity in its own view. Then, the stories in CyberPunk are not about heroes, but about marginalized people, ostracized person because they did not fit into the globalized capitalist society, and about how they dwell in society, how they use their environment to augment themselves and to reach capacities beyond their reach.

CyberPunk taught me that, the way our bodies and our mind are seen, generally through the spectrum of vices and virtues, is fundamentally obtrusive of collective freedom and reinforces individualism, you need to be more virtuous and less of a sinner – the vice and virtues being the 10 commandments, the amount of things you own, or what you share on social medias doesn’t really matters. Using vices and virtues to qualify people is flawed in about all the way we can imagine.

For once, because there’s a lot of people who either don’t understand those rules, or can’t abide to them. And then because they drive people to measure themselves on a moral scale, which is neither related to their personal capacities nor to their expectations of life or their experiences.

CyberPunk movement is about existing outside of the society, outside of the narrow definition of what is human. It is questioning what’s defining us and what’s human. In those universe, there’s always people who have been augmented. Either because they needed it – an amputee can get a leg back for instance – or because they wanted it.

Most of them are stigmatized for this. They’re considered as freaks or outlaws and they’re merely tolerated because they can do jobs that no one want to do. They can do that mostly because a lot of them lives at the margin of society, out of this globalized society tightly bound by a social contract (has Hobbes defined it for instance).

And the best part is that most – if not all – of the CyberPunk stories are about the collaboration of different kinds of freak. One CyberPunk character alone can’t survive. They survive because there’s other people at the margin of society, because they have developed the skills which allows them to use what they have to do what they need. It’s the kind of thinking hackers are supposed to have, It’s the ind of thinking that makes you see a bomb in a phone battery, which can be easily detonated which a phone.

It is the kind of thinking which leads you to question identities – individual or collective ones – and to accept people as they are. CyberPunk is not about fiber optics hair or glow in the dark eyes. It’s about the questions raised by those.

What’s a mind?, what’s a body? Can one exists without the other one? Are they tied to the social contract of society? Or does the existence of a free person is enough to destroy this social contract? All those questions are what you need to find in CyberPunk movement. It’s not really about the technology, a lot of this shared information storage has been depicted in a lot of ways (cultural hallucinations, loas who possess bodies, whatever abstraction one can find), it’s about how the technology shape the society and how free individuals can go beyond the morals of the society.

Which is what leads to transhumanism. How do we transcend our humanities to coexists together on this shared amount of resources that’s our environment. Transhumanism question the notion of identity or self. It is a movement which allow us to think beyond our currents mindset and body. It allows for people who can’t communicate with other to find ways to do it which does not involve pain. It allows for people who have a broken body to go around into another one. It allows for you leaving a lot of experiences at the same time, and then integrating them back into one self.

And the thing is, to do what I just described, a lot of people thinks we need some magic nanite stuff. We don’t need that, because we already have them – at least partly. The meds I take to put my mind in a less painfull state are just that. I’m eating carefully crafted proteins made of only 4 elements (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrate) which are shaped in a way that would allow my brain to get out of this fight or flight state he’s in, allowing me to have a wider range of emotions and to be able to enjoy things and explores my memories without rewriting them as painful one.

And doing that changes a lot of things. I’m not used to it, I’ve never really learned how to feel or express those feelings, but now, by using a daily dose of this synthetic pharmaceutical assembly of elements, I can at least have a possibility at that, at understanding where the pain is coming from and to address it.

I’m patching a flawed consciousness processor with what it needs. I’m altering the biofeedback loop which my conscious then use to helps me makes non random choices. And this feedback loop which helps us to not walks blindly in a complex and fragile environment, this feedback loop is what makes a system a cybernetic one.

We’re not Turing machine. We’re something else. Going further implies using cognitive science- which intersect in an elegant ways with mathematics and philosophy.  There is a theory (Information Integration Theory) which defines what a conscious is, and then tries to create a system that could be support consciousness. Just dig up wikipedia or the intertubes if you need more info. But we’re far away of a sentient artificial systems, since the computation complexity required by such a daunting task is crazy. I’m not even sure that we can grasp our own mind around such a concept. Which is kind of fun in some ways.

I’m patching my thought train the same way drug users messed up with their cortical systems. In fact some effect of drug use can emulate temporarily state of depression. Some of the MDMA withdrawal do looks like a depression state. Those of you who experienced it can probably start to grasp what it means to be depressed, but you’re lucky, it stops when your organism find its balance again. MDMA have even been used in therapy before it lands in our raves party, and researcher are still trying to find out if it could helps in treating PTSD.

We’re already augmenting our minds. Either to be more productive (Ohai caffein users) because we have to, or because it’s fun and some of us wants to go beyond their normal thought systems. And those two examples illustrates perfectly the main issues which people see in transhumanism.

When you talk about transhumanism, they think of ElonMusk, Lary Page, Jeff Besos or Eric Schmidt. Multibillionaires who are killing the world trying to make an escape pods for themselves only. It’s true that a lot of the Transhumanism movement is presented as coming from Silicon Valley multi-billionaires liberals, as they wish – like old Egypt Pharaoh’s – to live for eternity, finally overcoming death, allowing them to isolate themselves in gilded sarcophagus, their agents continuing to pillage resources for the sake of (hyper)capitalism, while hopping to be buried next to their god-like masters, or to be elevated to their level.

But this is not about transhumanism. It’s a god complex, born out of the virtues/vices dichotomy which leads most of the humanity to a harsh and violent life in a cybernetics world which only uses wealth (and then promotes greed) as a feedback loop. It’s not transhumanism, it’s dehumanism. It is turning human into simple machine that will maximize the output of the system, granting the immortal hypercapitalist pharaoh more and more power upon our lives

Humans are individual. Society usually tries to bend those humans into a more abstract concept, which can be monitored and acted upon. It allows – and promotes – some variations,  but only to a certain point. The dream of an internet who would – in the end – gives individuals more information about their environment to helps them find a place in the world that would allow them to be freed from pain, has been violently destroyed by the cultural globalization promoted by western capitalists.

And refusing to fut in makes you a freak, a marginal, a danger to society. And now we have to find answers to existential questions, the same way CyberPunk characters have to. We cannot fit in this world, we can only survive at its fringe. And destroy the foundation of it from where we are. This is transhumanism, and the übermensh as theorized by Nietzsche (not the totalitarian eugenic nightmare of the nazis). It is about doing with what you have, it is about taking pleasures in our life, not feel guilt for it. It is about cooperation of different individual for them to go further in the exploration of consciousness and the unknown, not about conforming to a hierarchical caste system as all the singularitionist from the silicon valley dream of.  It is finding strength into the difference, not into uniformity.

And this is why I so much love Queer politics. Because Queer politics is about getting rid of identity, stopping using where we were born and what society forces us to be, to defines us. Or, has FM-2030 said it : “Conventional names define a person’s past: ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, religion. I am not who I was ten years ago and certainly not who I will be in twenty years.”

It is embracing individuals as they are, with what we see as flaws, and give them the capacity to experiment with themselves, to explore what it means to go beyond society and beyond identity. It is about having a space where you can take risk knowing that, in the worst case, there will be harm reduction made. It’s accepting the fact that people need a prosthetic mood system, or leg, or want to have a tail, or the tongue of a snake. Or fork their consciousness to drift into the data flowing all around us.

Transhumanism isn’t about eugenics. It is about life, about making it enjoyable. It is, at its core, anticapitalists. It is queer. Don’t let the neo-liberals uses it against you.

I think I’m done. I just hope it made sense. Kinda. It’s thing that were on my mind since a while now, now it’s there. Hope you have questions and/or comments (hey there is a comment system now :p). Have fun. Go transhumanist.