Are you sick, in short, of time-burglaring gender-essentialists?

Then Anarcho-Transhumanism might be right for you!

[…] magine the situation. Bro-dude #1,459,005,410 has constructed some meticulous and elaborate set of bullshit anecdotes, his own evolutionary psychology fanfic and dozens of “social science” references. […]

[…] Transhumanists obviously don’t have to put up with that shit. In fact we can slide directly into terms of “abolishing gender” from the get-go to directly negate MRA-era contortions around “equality” without even having to slog through a lengthy education process about distinctions between gender and sex. When they confuse the two we can be all, “yeah, that too.” (And then feast on their googely-eyes of horror.)

In short it’s well past time to reverse the feeling of vertigo. Basic notions of common humanity and equality are mainstream and they know it. Reactionary patriarchy-defenders have gone on the defensive with a whiney legalistic search for loop-holes and equivocations. Rejecting the entire notion of human nature or compromise with biology drops the ground out from underneath them.

[…] Even if your ridiculous totally unsuported claims about the best form of relations between two specific ‘types’ of people, those types of people don’t exist anymore […] This is the future. We’re all becoming cyborgs and queers and entirely new ways and forms of existing. We’re self-altering, self-determining. […]

If our demands are currently less than fully actualizable then that’s all the more reason to demand them, to pressure society into developing and accepting the tools to realize them.

"… Fuck you, I'm a floating metal sphere" […] and then just pummel them with future-shock and uncompromising radicalism until they’re in a fetal position.

The "Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation" manifesto outlines a technologically-driven, accelerationist feminist agenda, instead of one that accepts naturalism, essentialism, the split between "masculine" and "feminine" versions of reason, and all of the gendered thinking tools that patriarchy itself invented and assigned-feminine which too many feminists employ and embrace.

0x00 Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity. XF constructs a feminism adapted to these realities: a feminism of unprecedented cunning, scale, and vision; a future in which the realization of gender justice and feminist emancipation contribute to a universalist politics assembled from the needs of every human, cutting across race, ability, economic standing, and geographical position. No more futureless repetition on the treadmill of capital, no more submission to the drudgery of labour, productive and reproductive alike, no more reification of the given masked as critique. Our future requires depetrification. XF is not a bid for revolution, but a wager on the long game of history, demanding imagination, dexterity and persistence.

One should really read the full article — it is prose poetry, and in places actual poetry, the likes of which I very rarely see, utterly beautifully written and expressed, something you can sink into and feel. But, for the purposes of philosophy, here is the crucial excerpt:

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith…

My dormant being had no idea of God or immortality, no fear of death.

I remember, also through touch, that I had a power of association… After repeatedly smelling rain and feeling the discomfort of wetness, I acted like those about me: I ran to shut the window. But that was not thought in any sense. It was the same kind of association that makes animals take shelter from the rain. From the same instinct of aping others, I folded the clothes that came from the laundry, and put mine away, fed the turkeys, sewed bead-eyes on my doll's face, and did many other things of which I have the tactual remembrance. When I wanted anything I liked,—ice-cream, for instance, of which I was very fond,—I had a delicious taste on my tongue (which, by the way, I never have now), and in my hand I felt the turning of the freezer. I made the sign, and my mother knew I wanted ice-cream. I "thought" and desired in my fingers…

Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another. So I was not conscious of any change or process going on in my brain when my teacher began to instruct me. I merely felt keen delight in obtaining more easily what I wanted by means of the finger motions she taught me. I thought only of objects, and only objects I wanted. It was the turning of the freezer on a larger scale. When I learned the meaning of "I" and "me" and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me. Thus it was not the sense of touch that brought me knowledge. It was the awakening of my soul that first rendered my senses their value, their cognizance of objects, names, qualities, and properties. Thought made me conscious of love, joy, and all the emotions. I was eager to know, then to understand, afterward to reflect on what I knew and understood, and the blind impetus, which had before driven me hither and thither at the dictates of my sensations, vanished forever.

I've long believed that consciousness, choice, rationality, all the things we think make us human, are in fact invented technologies, passed down by human culture, through the means of that greater technology of linguistic reference and abstraction. This is an example of what I mean, and an anecdotal proof of it

This took me about a week to recursively wget at a rate that was respectful of their server's resources (no more than one request every two seconds, and a maximum bandwidth of 10kb/s, with hour long breaks occasionally). Nevertheless, I'm glad I got it! There are about 5 final files that failed to download, but they were complete works (not parts of ones, so there should be no surprise dissapointments) and to be honest I don't feel the need to get the last of them.

This is more than just religious texts, too! Of course, it has an incredible depth and variety of primary, secondary, and philosophical texts on various world religions spanning everything from Christianity to Xhosa folklore, but it also has things that are deeply interesting to me, such as world-historical utopian writings to the age of reason, to the first 1000 lines of human DNA, to the core texts of the Lovecraft mythos and those who blurred the distinction between fiction and reality with it, to the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the poems of Sappho, and more I could scarcely begin to name.

Even better, it's all meticulously organized, indexed, summarized, grouped, described, and most importantly, all converted to pristine plain HTML. It's truly incredible.

I intend to read this book in full, alongside all of Nietzsche's other major works, but this one paragraph I'm especially familiar with, because it speaks to my own illness:

Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time — on which we are burned, as it were, with green wood — compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put aside all trust, everything good-natured, everything that would interpose a veil, that is mild, that is medium — things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us "better"; but I know that it makes us more profound.

A really interesting text. Although I've only read about as far as section 100, it deeply changed the way I think about language, especially by introducing me to the concept of family resemblance. I really need to finish it someday.

I dunno man, Bataille seems really interesting.

The field of complexity science seems very interesting, especially coming from the perspective of someone deeply influenced by Proudhonian thinking, which is very big on the emergence of new systems on larger scales from complex and chaotic systems on lower scales; it almost seems like a more scientific and developed verson of Proudhon's Philosophy of Progress. This short introduction (110 pages in print) seems like a good place to get a taste.

Who is the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced? The answer "Charles S. Peirce" is uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating. [He was] mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short story writer; phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician and metaphysician. — Max H. Fisch in Sebeok, The Play of Musement