Introduction

eugenics

Eugenics here is, at this very moment in our rhizome, purely rhetorical. This is not to evoke images of the Third Reich, or to provoke melodramatic, unfocused, and irrational discourse. What we are focusing on is a shift towards a ‘new type of human’cultivated and engendered by the incision of the digital into the natural world. What traits are auspicious for integration into this emerging new world (for which I believe there is no ambiguity toward our inevitable destination), and who is permitted entry? Are the youth being moulded by forces outside of the usual worldly institutions (such as schools and parents) in an unprecedentedly auxiliary manner? What are the governing forces (concealed or not) in the digital world? We are clearly on a tangent from the ideals of John Perry Barlow, who envisioned cyberspace as that which is free of government, control, and all forms of regulation, allowing a vacuum for the world brain to proliferate (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83udLWOpugI and https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence). Barlow could not have legislated for the giant technological corporations that are so prevalent in our world, and which are viciously competing for dominance, when he framed this utopia. Is this a true realisation of eugenicist Huxley’s ‘transhuman’?