A máquina no trono da divindade: o pós-humanismo representado na rede

Abstract

Inside the field of cyberculture, we can state that there are a series of subcultures with their singularities: ideas, lifestyles, views, rituals, etc. All of them contribute to the formation of a cybercultural imaginary. The concept of posthumanism is one of them. Broadcasted in many websites that deal with this theme, we realize that inside the universe of cyberculture exists an imaginary full of representations which resemble the archaic myth-religious discourses. We depart from the hypothesis that this imaginary, as we will try to demonstrate, is based on the idea of a religious or almost magical power of technology as an instrument for human transcendence and which sees the posthuman as a new human being, much better than the present one, capable of using technology to transcend its limitations. To be more accurate, we believe that this kind of discourse used by the transhumanist organizations (which spread the posthumanism ideas on the internet) is permeated by discursive tropes and metaphors that take back to the myth-religious discourses. For this task, two websites will be analyzed: The World Transhumanist Association and The Extropy Institute.