Transcendent Conformity: The Question of Agency for Postdigital Humans

The dynamic co-evolution of humans and technology is increasingly undermining stable and long-held notions of the human condition and the conceptual boundaries which have demarcated human beings as individuals. The disintegration of ontological boundaries brought about by digital, genetic, and cybernetic developments require an ongoing normative investigation into the structures, interests, and consequences of this process. Two competing schools of thought that engage with the loss of essentialism and stability of the human are transhumanism and posthumanism. Posthumanism provokes profound critical and ethical consideration of the implications of the unmooring, whereas transhumanism tends to claim a clear and advantageous direction of travel. This chapter will draw upon these movements as a means to illuminate its central question concerning human agency in the postdigital age. The chapter argues that awareness of the growing influence of a technical rationality directing the co-evolution of humans and technology is vital. Every step of the development of radical technologies demands an equivalent ethical co-evolution of our social world. Human embeddedness in a wider complex ecology of techno-capitalist relations undermines simplistic notions of individual self-determination and demands ongoing normative re-evaluations of the human.