The anti-self-improvement arguments usually devolve into weird strawman arguments and non sequiturs. In this case, the author is trying to portray modern technology and companies as the enemy because he wrote a series of books on the subject.
> It’s that we humans should be making active choices about what it is we want to do to ourselves, rather than letting the machines, or the markets propelling them, decide for us.
Self-improvement isn't synonymous with buying products or following companies. In fact, two of the most common self-improvement goals are to reduce the amount of time spent in front of screens and to spend more time with friends and family.
This article reads more like an anti-technology or anti-corporate piece disguised as a criticism of self-improvement.
Ironically, the author of this post would like to sell you his thinly-veiled self help books such as "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age" and "Get Back in the Box: How Being Great at What You Do Is Great for Business". This blog post is marketing material for his specific brand of self-improvement.
Rushkoff has been a digerati pundit for a very long time. He is definitely NOT a self-help guru. He's a legit academic at CUNY/Queens who has written quite a few books, writes articles, has a podcast, and gets paid to give talks when invited.
Yes, he can get preachy sometimes, but he's not part of what I call "the self-help-industrial-complex". He doesn't use ponzi-like levels of ever more expensive training seminars, that garbage people like Tony Robbins and all their ilk on youtube use to make money.
Rushkoff makes compelling and sincere arguments, he admits it when he's wrong (eg like the "Program or be Programmed" book) and, yes, he's certainly a lefist. He puts himself out there and isn't afraid to break consistency with his previous views. I admire all of that.
This particular article makes some good points. I don't agree with all of it, but it's a solid point of view and not disingenuous marketing.
There are so many ideological knowledge and mindset cults out there competing for attention. I could probably come up with one and make millions just from looking for drifters after the first several failed for them.
There are a lot of leaps of logic here - somehow he jumps from the fact that wristbands that count our heartbeats and footsteps are trying to improve health to the idea that our humanity is reducible to a bunch of data points.
Then somehow we've jumped to digital implants that don't exist yet and some extremely theoretical ideas of how they might be terrible for society.
Just a whole lot of doom and gloom with no real substance behind it.
Lol let your value feed you when you run out of money with that line of thinking. Once you are wealthy, then sure; but not till then do humans have value in these systems were born into.
On the specific mechanism of self improvement. Cycles of Intense focus, activity, followed by deep rest. Checkout Andre Huberman's podcast
"a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine"
I think anyone who has trained to a relatively high level in a sport can relate with that. I've often come back after a long break playing better than before. Also sometimes you just get a click a-ha moment and you've suddenly gotten past a plateau that had been plaguing you for ages.
We are objects. Our humanity comes from how we're used and for whom. One of the purposes of meditation is to separate the ego from the self and be able to look upon ourselves dispassionately and objectively, for the purposes of improving both, the spirit and its current vehicle.
I played Gris recently. An absolutely artistic, captivating platformer. But it was still deterministic along several dimensions. I feel that it is a counterexample to the all-encompassing claims made by the article. Why can't parts of self improvement be like a software upgrade?
Transhumanism would result in the opposite. The very idea of a gender binary should be called into question when you reach the level of augmenting and transcending the limits of your flesh.
The author seems to have a very narrow understanding of Transhumanism.
in a sense it's really hard to create a being that is superior in all scenarios rather than superior in specific scenarios.
For example, roughly speaking, being a tall and very muscular person can be a disadvantage in a famine. Or being much much smarter than your peers can be a disadvantage in certain social scenarios that get you expelled for non-conformity...
I imagine we will see a similar issue with transhumanism, where the resultant products are better in some scenarios, but also worse in others.
Off-topic but medium has almost turned into a paywall these days, it won't allow you to read more than 5 articles without subscribing to their paid service. Should HN and Google be promoting such a walled garden, especially when creative commons content is found aplenty on the interwebs?
They kept bugging me to log in. When I did, they started throwing things about limits around. So I deleted data related to the site and never log in. Since then I get to read as much as I want.
> Self-improvement of the transhumanist sort requires that we adopt an entirely functional understanding of who and what we are: All of our abilities can be improved upon and all of our parts are replaceable. Upgradable.
Yeah right, but we're so far away from creating even a single "upgrade" that's comparable with the human body. For example, even the best cameras would never even be in the same competing arena as the human eye. No sensors come close to our sense of touch.
The transhumanist ideology is nothing else but some kind of perverted ideology that we somehow would be upgraded with a usb port sticking out from the skin.
Even the very best tools we have today to save lives and help our bodies sucks in comparison with the biological counterpart. Sure there may be a future that we would "upgrade" ourselves, but when that time is here (which would be very, very far into the future) everyone will instantly do it because it will be so much better. There wouldn't be some kind of discussion about it since the result is so obvious.
For it to happen, whatever we replace something with will have to have all the features that we currently enjoy + a lot more.
> even the best cameras would never even be in the same competing arena as the human eye
All it takes is looking at photos from space telescopes, or electron microscopes... It should be obvious that technology can make better cameras than human eyes. Or slow motion video cameras... Infrared cameras...
The only thing about human eyes that is superior is that they come connected to the brain.
For now, technological augmentation is "air-gapped". It's incorrect to ignore air-gapped augmentations. Hell, even glasses could be considered the first step, and have existed for hundreds of years.
Using glasses is essentially the "no brainer" conclusion that you are looking for. People already accept that it's ok to try to do better than nature provided for you.
Just being able to see something is just a small part of an eye.
You have "instant" focus, muscles that can turn the eye in almost every direction except where the skull is. We have self repairment to some degree if you get hurt. Automatic cleaning.
Sure other cameras that humans have built could be a good extension to the body if we somehow could send it wireless to our brains. Because all ways we have to date when it comes with integrating with biological matter is the part that is hard.
If we could have a chip inserted into our brains that accepted wireless communication, then sure it would be very useful. The issue is we have nothing that even comes close to that today afaik. Using glasses could also be a useful tool, but that isn't really "upgrading" the human body or being a transhuman in the sense that the article brings up.
My point is sure we have tools that could potentially upgrade our bodies but they aren't good and it seems it is a long way before anyone would operate some cables into their brain in order to accept infrared video.
Think about insulin pumps, cataract surgery, LASIK/PRK, or any type of surgical augmentation for disability (limb replacement or hip replacements) - we are definitely improving and upgradeable, it's only a matter of degree.
Transhumanism is just a poor copy of christianity where deliverance is an npm module hosted on GitHub, accepting pull requests from the enlightened priesthood and deployed to the cloud. If you don't have at least a wireless transceiver implanted, downloading timely updates, then you're a heretic. After all, you also have to upload yourself so you can live on in purity after you cast off your biological remnants, for as long as the subscription fees are payed. Christianity has invented all this much earlier, and it was dubious then already.
> It’s that we humans should be making active choices about what it is we want to do to ourselves, rather than letting the machines, or the markets propelling them, decide for us.
Self-improvement isn't synonymous with buying products or following companies. In fact, two of the most common self-improvement goals are to reduce the amount of time spent in front of screens and to spend more time with friends and family.
This article reads more like an anti-technology or anti-corporate piece disguised as a criticism of self-improvement.
Ironically, the author of this post would like to sell you his thinly-veiled self help books such as "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age" and "Get Back in the Box: How Being Great at What You Do Is Great for Business". This blog post is marketing material for his specific brand of self-improvement.