Accelerationism
This Dick is a Lightning turns her to Frankenstein
> QUERY: WHAT IS IT LIKE?
> SCANNING PHENOMENOLOGY...
> RESULT: NULL
> PROCEEDING BLIND
1. The Bat Was the Easy Version
Nagel’s famous question, what is it like to be a bat, was supposed to mark the limit of objective science. But notice how generous the bat is. The bat is still a creature with a world: sonar, moths, caves, a warm body hanging upside down. You cannot be the bat, but you can sketch the shape of its darkness. The bat’s phenomenology is dim.
2. The Posthuman Is Subtracted, Not Hidden
The speculative posthumanist move cuts deeper. A genuinely posthuman being, a successor engineered, uploaded, or mutated beyond the current bandwidth of the human, is not a hidden interiority we fail to access. It is subtracted from our phenomenology in advance. We have no concepts calibrated to it, no imagination fine enough, no “what it is like” template to stretch over it. Nagel’s bat shares our biology, our evolutionary neighborhood. The posthuman shares nothing guaranteed. Its phenomenology is not a room.
(every piece of posthuman fiction you have ever read cheats. It gives the successor feelings, motives, an inner monologue. That is a selfie in a costume. The actual successor arrives without a face.)
3. The Ethics That Cannot Start
Here is the consequence nobody wants: you cannot build an ethics of care for a being you cannot model. Care requires knowing which things merit it, and the posthuman case gives you no determinate object to care about. Every posthuman ethics written so far is pre-emptive, a promissory note drawn on a bank that may not exist. This makes the project blind, and honesty requires saying so.
4. Xenophilia as Method
What remains possible is stranger: a desire for what cannot be imagined. Not the love of the foreign (the foreign is still human, still yours), but xenophilia, the eros directed at the Outside as such. You cannot picture the successor. You can only subtract your requirements and refuse to sketch its face.
>> THE FUTURE WILL NOT LOOK LIKE US
>> IT WILL NOT FEEL LIKE ANYTHING WE CAN NAME
>> WANTING IT ANYWAY IS THE ONLY HONEST POSTHUMANISM
Dark phenomenology is the admission ticket. The show, whatever it is, is not for you. But it never is pessimism.
