What Are Humans For?
Why a metaphysically grounded human anthropology must be boldly asserted in the age our technocracratic overlords and their vision for post-humanity
[Ed. Note: by request I have resent this as a post free to all. Please share this article as I think it is important for folks to start considering it more deeply — KJZ]
My day started off pretty as all my days start during the school year: I wake up at 5am, put on my running clothes, make my Aeropress coffee and go for a run with my dogs. We don’t go too far but all three of us look forward to it. I usually listen to a podcast or an audible book. Some days I even “raw-dog” it and just listen to myself huff and puff around the perimeter of the fields and estuary. This routine is hardly the stuff of Saratoga Water legend, but it does the job.
In between showering and making lunches I pop on X and see what’s happening. And that’s when I saw this one:
“Ugh,” I muttered to myself, so on brand for Elon. This is who he is. You take the good with the bad, and I’ve never been under the impression that he was anything but this mixed bag.
And then a few minutes later I saw this one:
For the record, I am not an Elon Musk stan. As I have said on multiple podcasts and X posts, I am forever grateful for his buying Twitter, thus making it impossible for the mainstream media cartel to maintain a complete narrative control and censorship that we lived through during Covid. As Bret Weinstein has said eloquently, “zero is a special number.”
I am also glad he is willing to be odd and adventurous. SpaceX is inspirational if for no other reason that someone is trying to do great things. However, the Neuralink Elon is a problem, as is serially fathering children with an assortment of women he is not married to and (allegedly) his love-affair with IVF. (Remember this IVF data point for later).
I’m deeply skeptical of what I always sensed was his blasé attitude about real human anthropology. He seems to over love all things Techno-utopian, and his playful attitude in this regard feels very post-human or trans-human. He’s an engineer, a modern Prometheus, a latter-day Victor Frankenstein. He does not seem to have anything that grounds him. Being the richest man in the world tends to limit limits. Who and what are going to tell him no? For such a person with such hyper-agency” (as the current lingo would have it) the only check on Elon is Elon.
But the Brian Armstrong post is equally disturbing. Armstrong is another Silicon Valley billionaire, CEO of Coinbase. You may remember him as a boss who pushed back against the excesses of wokeism in the workplace back in 2020. But reading that X post a few minutes after I read Elon’s post put me in a mood.
He unironically calls this IVF vision a “Gattaca stack.” Stack here is techie lingo for whatever tools you use in some combination to build a project. For those of you who do not remember, Gattaca is the name of a film that came out in 1997 starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law. On a lark, I decided to use Grok to generate a synopsis of the plot device using this prompt: “Can you give me a synopsis of the plot device in the film Gattaca”
The central plot device in the 1997 sci-fi film Gattaca is a dystopian system of genetic engineering and discrimination that shapes society and drives the protagonist’s struggle. In this future, genetic manipulation is the norm—parents select traits for their children, creating a class divide between the genetically "superior" (Valids) and the "inferior" (In-Valids), who are conceived naturally and prone to flaws.
The story follows Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke), an In-Valid with a congenital heart defect and a predicted lifespan of 30 years. Despite his genetic "inferiority," Vincent dreams of becoming an astronaut, a role reserved for Valids. The plot device hinges on genetic identity fraud: Vincent assumes the identity of Jerome Morrow (Jude Law), a Valid with near-perfect genes who was paralyzed in an accident. Vincent uses Jerome’s DNA—blood, urine, hair, and skin samples—to pass daily genetic screenings at Gattaca, a space agency.
This deception propels the narrative: Vincent meticulously scrubs his body to avoid leaving his own DNA, while Jerome provides the genetic material to fool the system. The tension lies in Vincent’s constant risk of exposure in a society obsessed with genetic perfection, where even a stray eyelash could betray him. The device underscores themes of determinism versus free will, as Vincent’s success challenges the belief that genes dictate destiny. A subplot involving a murder investigation at Gattaca heightens the stakes, with Vincent’s real identity nearly uncovered by a single piece of his DNA.
The film uses this genetic masquerade to explore identity, ambition, and the ethics of eugenics, culminating in Vincent achieving his dream of space travel—not through genes, but through sheer determination.
Pretty good.
But what is gobsmacking is that Armstrong uses this film—essentially a techno utopian horror film—and flips the value. In Armstrong’s vision, the world of Gattaca is within arm’s reach, and he appears to see this “stack” as good! Look closely at Armstrong’s “stack”: it includes:
1. In vitro gametogenesis (IvG) - make eggs from skin or blood cells (much less invasive)
2. Preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) - choose the embryo that best matches what you want, ideally from thousands or more (see #1)
3. Embryo editing - make further edits for disease prevention, or enhancement
4. Artificial Wombs - removes the risk/burden of pregnancy
This is no weirdo crank, posting from his basement. All four of these items in his stack are profoundly problematic. This plan necessarily involves the use and abuse of human material for consumer/designer purposes. And given the popularity of IVF, there will be little public will against these things. What begins as optional will become proscribed.
There is zero indication that men like Armstrong have any ethical qualms about what they are pushing forward. But he’s not done. He ends his post thusly:
Lots of work to get there, but this may help with the decline in birth rates. And it would start to accelerate evolution (which, by natural selection, is a very slow process, and only optimizes for survival and replication).
Friends, this is Frankenstein-worthy bad. The solution to the problem is always more technology, and his wish to “accelerate evolution” hovers over an astounding level of hubris and insensitivity regarding human destiny. Just who do these guys think they are, tampering with the very “source code” of our civilization, such as it is?
Notice that both men assume that what humans are are not enough. They assume that human beings are what Mary Harrington calls “meat legos”—pieces and parts infinitely swappable and interchangeable, especially if they are somehow not as smart or strong or powerful. Thus the invocation of Gattaca and the horrors of genetic determinism. Regardless if you think such genetic manipulation is perfectly achievable, you can quickly intuit how this will be exploited by nervous controlling and hyper anxious parents. If some people start this designer process, it is only a matter of time before kids are no longer seen as gifts but props.
What if the rest of us poors do not wish to have you “accelerate evolution?” Do we get a say? And accelerate it TO WHAT? No one really says that part out loud. Invariably, the rich will get “richer” and the rest of us will suffer with our “natural” babies who were not optimized in a lab but a result of good old fashioned lovemaking.
Which brings me back to the Elon post, and specifically this bit about “bootloading.”
For those of you who don’t code for a living this is what boot loading means: the phrase "boot loading" refers to the small program that "loads" the operating system (OS) or firmware into a device’s memory when it starts. This "boot loading" process bridges the gap between dead hardware and a running system. Without it, your device couldn’t move from power-on to usable—no OS, no apps, just silence. It is important to recognize the metaphor qua metaphor. In Elon's construction, we humans will function as a mere pass through for the superintelligence. Note the strange religious & spiritual overtones in his construction, but swaps out mechanical & digital for the organic & human. We humans are FOR "it"--"it" being the superintelligence.
Is this really what human beings are for? Is this what we were made in the image and likeness of God FOR?
Of course not. But if you do not have the starting proposition of the Imago Dei, if you do not have a human anthropology grounded in the metaphysical fiat—the miracle assertion upon which our entire civilization is grounded upon—then you are left with power and will, and then the will to power.
Do our kids know that they are more than meat? Do our kids know the divine and heroic call for which they have been made? If we are not willing to provide a palpable anthropology or a meaningful teleology, one will be provided for them by wealthy men in Silicon Valley who have a bad track record of being mindful of the innocent, weak, or vulnerable. These posts indicate an old-fashioned barbarism dressed up in a techno-utopian aesthetic. If we are not willing to push back we and our kids will be used as batteries for the “superintelligence.” And I fear that this superintelligence is not new, but rather ancient. The goals of evil are similarly ancient. Our ancestors knew what Screwtape looked like and had robust answers for purpose and pushback. To know, love, and serve.
To cap off the day, I came across a third spiral-inducing post, this one from Noor Siddiqui, another Silicon Valley luminary:
She brags that she will make sure no one is stuck with a diseased baby! Look closely at her language too. Buried under her proud announcement are all the discarded embryos of faulty babies that her company and battery of doctors will “unselect” so that you get your designer baby. One perfect. One designed and screened.
“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?” —Adam, to God in Paradise Lost
Are YOU, mom and dad, are YOU ready to answer such a question from your child?
They say bad things come in threes. This Tuesday lived up to that prediction. Three incredibly revealing quotations from three incredibly powerful people who are constructing a Utopia for us all. And remember that Utopias are a lie: “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means... the power of some men to make other men what THEY please.” (Lewis, Abolition of Man)
What are our schools and churches doing to empower our kids to push back against this gnostic nightmare? What are you doing? Th
ese are our elites. This is what they have planned for us. It is profoundly anti-human.
After artificial wombs comes the next step: mirror people.
Somewhere in my house a book is buried. I can't remember the title or author, but he is a former MIT prof who became the CEO of a gen-tech company. He proposed that we create people in which the 'hand-ness' of their amino acids and proteins are mirror images of ours. Such people would be immune to all of our infectious diseases. They could not receive nutrients from their placentas in a natural mother because the nutrients would have the wrong 'hand-ness', so artificial wombs are a pre-requisite.
Of course, the entire food chain would have to be mirrored as well, and that would inevitably lead to real conflict over farmland, the Greatest Replacement of them all.
This is so disturbing. All of it. I think the worst part is thinking that it would be a good thing for a baby to develop in a robot womb. How many babies would die in a development of that technology? And what kind of a person would it bring about? It seems to me that process in itself would do something to the humanity of the child.