The evolution of "Post-humanism"

The reading path here is stranger than it looks. In 1968, Dubos warns that technology will change us whether we choose it or not — but his "us" is biological, mammalian, a creature with "inexorable limitations." He's defending the animal. By 2000, Rifkin has already conceded the animal: the self is protean, fluid, a story "continually being updated and re-edited," and the real question is whether this shapeshifting consciousness gets commodified or liberated. Then Srnicek and Williams (2015) perform a remarkable inversion — they take the posthumanist dissolution of the subject and try to weaponize it politically, arguing that there is no authentic human essence to recover, only new modes of being to construct, and that capitalism is what's actually *preventing* us from becoming posthuman by trapping mutation inside the profit motive. Meanwhile the transhumanists (Bostrom, Bohan, as traced by Eagleman and Brockman) are doing something the others would find almost quaint: they're treating the individual as so real, so precious, that it must be preserved forever — uploaded, copied, frozen. The supposedly radical futurists are the most conservative about selfhood. The deepest tension in this reading path isn't human vs. posthuman. It's that the thinkers most eager to transcend biology cling hardest to the Enlightenment individual, while the theorists who keep the body are the ones willing to let the self dissolve.