Life and love on the edge of human existence
Welcome to Sex and the Cyborg
Five years ago, I made an abrupt exit from technology journalism, never to return—or, so I thought.
I’d spent eight years working my way up from weekend blogger to Editor-in-Chief of one of the world’s most frequented tech publications. My web series, Computer Love, was generating record traffic, and I was on the tail end of a not-yet-failed campaign to sell my first book, Robophilia.
It might have looked like I was thriving, but I was burnt out. I’d become increasingly disaffected by what I witnessed in both corporate journalism and big tech. Both industries were hurtling forward on the promise of infinite growth, but at whose expense? I’d seen, far too often, the tendency to value data over lived experience, to put machines before people. I was too in the weeds to really see things for what they were—or, at least, what I believe them to be today—but I knew I wanted out.
So I left—not entirely of my own volition—and with time, distance, and some hallucinogenic breakthroughs, my disaffection faded. Then, in the summer of 2021, I found my mind wandering back. I was commissioned to write a piece for Gossamer about the psychedelic origins of tip-controlled vibrators. The history of teledildonics (aka networked sex toys) is a trip, but it seemed tame in comparison to what I discovered while researching it.
As I had countless times before, I returned to Howard Rheingold’s essay, Teledildonics and Beyond, a sort of crystal ball of technologically enabled pleasure. This time around, though, something new struck me. Rheingold referenced Sex and Death among the Disembodied, an essay by Allucquére Rosanne Stone, who likened the work of phone sex operators to a form of data compression. That essay led me to the book that changed the way I see human existence.
The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, which Stone wrote in 1995, opened my eyes to the possibility that we are all on a predetermined path to a post-human future. I’d always seen technology as something apart from us, but Stone laid bare the flimsiness of the boundaries between human and machine.
She wrote The War of Desire at the dawn of the commercial internet–before the iPhone and TikTok and ChatGPT–but it feels just as relevant a quarter-century later. Even in the mid-90s, Stone saw the signs of our cyborg future in everything from the internet to contact lenses and antidepressants. She referred to these and other life-altering technologies as prostheses–extensions of our will.
The mental image of my phone, or a laptop, or even a contact lens as an actual appendage, completely shifted my worldview. I began to see technology’s presence in almost everything and everyone I encountered.
Want to know what a Pong-playing monkey and Barbara Streisand’s cloned Coton de Tulear puppies have in common?
My curiosity about the origins of Stone’s thinking led to a series of unsettling revelations, chief among them that the future is far from uncertain. A group of the most influential people on Earth are actively working toward a future rooted in science fiction, utopianism, and, most frighteningly, eugenics. They're delivering their vision in our cellphones, search engines, and video games, and we’re all eating it up.
Transhumanism, longtermism, effective altruism—whatever you want to call it—this outlandish set of philosophies has amassed a list of adherents that reads like a who’s who of Silicon Valley’s baddest and brightest. Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, and a host of less recognizable, but no less influential, figures are shaping a bizarre future in which genetically optimized people meld with superhuman machines, abandon earth, and “live forever” in servers scattered across the universe. Ever heard of the singularity? This is it. Or, rather, we are it. Or, will be?
There’s been plenty written about the potential effects of superhuman AI. Technologists, politicians, and philosophers have speculated on its capacity to upend labor, commerce, creativity, science, and medicine. But what about us? What about humans? Not as economic or creative contributors, but as emotional beings?
I’ve spent the past couple of years quietly considering what a post-human future means for love, reproduction, and pleasure and I’ve come away with more questions than answers, which is why I’m here. I want to better understand the implications of taking the human out of human existence. What happens when you decouple sex and reproduction? What becomes of desire when we all know literally everything? Can an artificial life form feel love? Will monogamy survive eternity? Is a future built on institutionalized inequality actually what’s best for humanity?
Sex and the Cyborg is my best attempt to answer those questions and more. For the foreseeable future, I’ll be here unpacking this cultish collection of beliefs and how it’s driving not just technological but also cultural change across the globe. I hope you’ll join me.
Forever Yours,
Christopher
A note on format: I’ve struggled with how to tell this story for almost two years. In addition to sometimes crippling bouts of imposter syndrome, I also suffer from format indecision. Anyway, I’ve decided that I’m not deciding. Sex and The Cyborg will take many forms. At least for now, I’m committing to twice-monthly newsletters featuring essays and brief musings on anti-aging technology, superhuman AI, cyborg celebrities, frozen lovers, virtual orgies, and a slew of other bizarrely connected subjects.
I’ll also release monthly episodes of the SATC podcast, a heartbreaking, explicit, and wild chronicle of life and love on the edge of human existence. And if you’re lucky, I might throw in some bonus content, like the first chapter of my failed first book, or the occasional expert interview.