Atwood’s Dystopian Imagination and McLuhan’s Media Theories. Rethinking Transhumanism through Fictional Narratives

Resumen

This article attempts to reconcile the utopian visions of the future of digital media by transhumanists and techno-capitalists with the dystopian imaginations of such technologies in fiction. While the first quarter of the 21st century has experienced an explosion in possibilities and users of digital media, it has also started to show the shortcomings of these new technologies and their potential for misuse. Privacy breaches, mass surveillance, social pressure, and the spread of misinformation are only some of the issues that have come up in recent years when critically examining the history and trajectory of contemporary digital mass media and communication technologies. 

Nonetheless, transhumanists, in their quest to upgrade the human condition via technological means, posit that technologies like virtual and enhanced realities, simulations, digital spaces, and social media are important tools to reach the next step in evolution. On the other hand, creators of fiction have taken notice of the dark underbelly of such developments and imagined worlds where they are used to keep a large swath of society oppressed and content. By surveying two specific works of fiction, the TV anthology Black Mirror and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, this article contextualizes real-life transhumanism with fictional transhumanism in an effort to complement our understanding of the development of modern media and communication technologies. 

Furthermore, Marshall McLuhan’s theories on media as extension of man will be applied to establish media technologies not just as a second-order implementation of transhumanism, but as a vital component, and emphasize their transformative potential. Additionally, a post-Marxist critique of the capitalization of digital spaces, most recently the newest iteration of a metaverse, will be applied to highlight fiction’s potential as “cultural manifestations which either operate apart from or undermine pragmatic, one-dimensional and conventionalized discourses of ‘innovation’ and ‘development’.” (Braunecker and Löschnigg 2020, 3)