<nettime> Next Nature Network: Letter to Humanity

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

http://lettertohumanity.org/english <http://lettertohumanity.org/english>

On the occasion of the Earth Day 2017, globally celebrated on April 22, philosopher Koert van Mensvoort wrote his Letter to Humanity. In the letter he urges humans not to be slaves or victims of their own technology, but instead to use technology to enhance humanity. His hope is to encourage a new perspective on the role of man on Earth.
The Letter to Humanity is addressed to all 7 billion people on Earth and it has already been sent out around the world in twenty‐five languages. Is your language missing? Add a translation. You can also write your own letter to humanity and share it using the hashtag 
#lettertohumanity.

-------------------------


Dear Humanity,

It feels strange writing you a letter, I admit. Letters are generally
addressed to an individual or a limited group of people. It’s
unusual to write to humanity as a whole. You don’t even have a
postal address, and I doubt you get much correspondence. Still, I
thought it was time I wrote. Obviously, I realise I can’t possibly
reach you completely – if only because humanity not only consists of
every person who’s alive right now but also of everyone who’s ever
lived. That’s an estimated 107 billion people. And then there are
all the others who haven’t been born yet – hopefully there will be
a great many of them. I’ll return to that later, but before we talk
about the future, I’d like to look back. We’ve come a long way,
dear humanity.

No other animal has shaped its surroundings as thoroughly as you have.
It started sometime around 200,000 years ago. Back then, there was
no Nobel Prize for coming up with the brilliant idea of using animal
skins to keep warm, or controlling fire, or inventing the spear or the
shoe. All those were exceptionally clever inventions that not only
enabled you to survive in your unruly original natural habitat but
allowed you to shape it to your will and to dominate it.

Human beings weren’t always so powerful. For long time, you were a
marginal, unremarkable species located somewhere in the middle of the
food chain, with no more control over your environment than gorillas,
butterflies or jellyfish. You stayed alive mainly by gathering plants,
catching insects, stalking small animals and eating carcasses left
behind by much stronger predators, of which you lived in constant
fear. Did you know there’s more genetic variation in the average
chimpanzee troop than there is among the 7 billion people living on
earth today? Researchers believe this is because human beings once
nearly became extinct and today’s entire global population descends
from a few survivors. This fact compels us to be modest. Actually,
it’s a miracle we’re here at all.

#lettertohumanity

Physically, compared to many animals, human beings are surprisingly
fragile creatures. What other animal enters the world naked, screaming
and relatively helpless, easy prey for any predator that comes along?
A newborn lamb can walk within a few hours; it takes a human child
about a year to stand on its own two feet. Other animals have specific
senses, organs and reflexes that enable them to survive in specific
environments, but you aren’t naturally equipped for any habitat
in particular. Yet this apparent weakness has also proved to be a
strength, enabling you to spread from the savannah to the North Pole,
the ocean floor and the moon! That’s a unique achievement.

Some people even think you should go beyond the earth and populate the
universe. In itself, that’s a fine idea, if only to prevent your
being wiped out someday when a massive meteorite hits the planet. That
would be a shame. To be honest, though, I think it’s a bit early for
you to seek refuge on other worlds. First, let’s try to sort out
some issues on our home planet. Because it has to be said that your
presence on earth has caused problems: global warming, deforestation,
plastic in the oceans, ionising radiation, declining biodiversity.
It’s enough to make a person depressed. It sometimes seems as if you
do more harm than good!

I often encounter people who believe the planet would be better off if
you weren’t here at all. I hope I won’t offend you by saying this,
dear humanity, but I feel obliged to tell you that there are those
among us who mistrust you, look down on you with scorn, or simply
dislike you because they think you’re ruining the planet. I hasten
to add that I’m not one of them myself. I’ve always had trouble
understanding such misanthropy, because ultimately it’s a form of
self-hatred.

Where does this mistrust of humanity come from? On further
investigation, I discovered that those infected with it have a
particular image of humanity that is, to my mind, completely
incorrect: they see it as an anti-natural species that doesn’t truly
belong in romantic, beautiful, harmonic nature. I believe this is a
naive prejudice that won’t help us to move forward, and we should
get rid of it as soon as possible. To understand this idea, we need to
start at the beginning.

#lettertohumanity

The earth came into being more than 4.5 billion years ago. At first,
it was no more than a lonely rock in space, and it took more than a
billion years before the planet’s biosphere began to form. After
that, it took about 2 billion more years for the first multicellular
plants to evolve. Another billion years later, during the Cambrian
explosion, an entirely new kind of life form appeared on the planet:
animals. The first animals emerged on the scene 500 million years
ago. We don’t know how plants, which had been around for a billion
years already, felt about animals showing up. As you know, plants
like to be left in peace; they don’t move much and draw sustenance
from the sun and soil. Now, I don’t know what plants think, since
I can’t talk to them, but it doesn’t seem impossible that they
found it hectic and uncomfortable having to put up with animals all
around them. Perhaps they even saw animals as unethical, not just
because they were fundamentally rootless and lived at an unimaginably
fast pace but more because they did something that in those days was
completely new, unheard-of and abominable: animals ate plants.

All things considered, the arrival of animals couldn’t have been
much fun for plants. Evolution goes on, though, and while an earth
populated solely by plants was fine as far as it went, it was also a
bit dull, or at least less exciting than one that contained animals
too (I’ll spare you a description of what it was like back when
earth had no plants, only rocks, which was even more boring). So, back
to the role of humanity. Just as the emergence of animals shook up the
plant world, your arrival, too, has duly caused trouble. Remember, you
only just got here. Animals have been around more than 2,000 times as
long as humans, and simple plant life more than 7,000 times as long.
But I’m not saying that to compel you to modesty, because I think
you’re amazing. Although you are fundamentally a species of animal,
there’s something entirely unique about you, which has less to do
with your physical human build – which, as I said, is less than
impressive – and more with your #lettertohumanity inherent tendency
to use technology. While other industrious animal species transform
their surroundings – think of beaver lodges and termite mounds –
none of them does it as radically as you do. I’m using the word
“technology” in the broadest sense: by “technology”, I mean
all the ways human thinking has an impact on the world around us –
clothing, tools and cars but also roads, cities, the alphabet, digital
networks, and even multinational corporations and the financial
system.

Ever since you came into being, you’ve been building technological
systems to liberate yourself from the wilful forces of nature. It
started with a roof over your head that protected you from a storm
and has proceeded all the way to modern medicine for treating deadly
diseases. You are technological by nature. But like the fish that
doesn’t know it’s wet, you tend to underestimate how intimately
your life is intertwined with technology and how much it’s done for
you. Look at life expectancy, for example. At the beginning of your
existence, the average human couldn’t expect to live much beyond the
age of 30. Partly because of high child mortality rates, you could
count yourself lucky if you stuck around long enough to reproduce.
From Mother Nature’s perspective, this is entirely normal. If you
see a pair of ducks with a dozen ducklings swimming behind them in
springtime, you shouldn’t be surprised if there are only two, or
with luck maybe three, left by the end of summer. Technology is
part of us, in the same way as bees and flowers have evolved to
be interdependent. As bees collect nectar, they help flowers to
reproduce by spreading their pollen. Human beings are dependent on
technology, and vice versa. Technology needs us in order to spread
out and reproduce. And humanity, what a huge help you’ve been on
that score! Technology has become so omnipresent on our planet that it
has ushered in a new environment, a new setting, that is transforming
all life on earth. A technosphere – an ecology of interacting
technologies that evolved after your arrival – has developed on top
of the existing biosphere. Its impact on life on earth can hardly be
underestimated and is comparable to, and perhaps even greater than,
that of the emergence of animals 500 million years ago.

#lettertohumanity

From an evolutionary perspective, all this is business as usual.
Nature always builds on existing levels of complexity: biology builds
upon chemistry, cognition builds upon biology, calculation builds
upon cognition. But from your point of view, it’s exceptional.
I can’t think of another species whose presence has sparked an
entirely new evolutionary phase, breaking free of a DNA-, gene-
and carbon-compound-based evolution billions of years old. Just
as DNA evolved from RNA, your actions have made possible a leap
to non-genetic evolution in new materials, such as silicon chips.
Although this wasn’t a conscious act, the consequences are no
lesser for it. Your presence has transformed the face of the earth so
fundamentally that the impact will still be visible millions of years
from now. This is your doing, but as yet, you barely seem to realise
that, much less have you been able to take a clear position toward it.
Now, I understand that this is far from a simple task, if only because
you, humanity, are not a single thinking being but a teeming mishmash
of billions of individuals, all with their own thoughts, needs and
desires, who aren’t really biologically equipped to think on a
large-scale planetary level. Nevertheless, it seems to me to be the
most pressing issue of the moment. You are standing at a crossroads.
And that’s why I’m writing to you.

With respect to the future, I see two possible paths along which you
might develop a co-evolutionary relationship with technology: the
dream path and the nightmare one. Let’s start with the nightmare.
Every co- evolutionary relationship – whether it’s between bees
and flowers or between humans and technology – runs the risk of
becoming parasitic. Parasitic relationships, in contrast to symbiotic
ones, lack reciprocity. A leech, tapeworm or cuckoo gives nothing
back to its host; it only takes. Could the tension we feel around
technology have something to do with this? In spite of the fact that
we’ve been using technology since time immemorial, because it serves
us and extends our capabilities, human beings are in danger of ending
up being the ones who serve technology, of becoming a means instead
of an end, of becoming technology’s hosts. An example can be seen
in the pharmaceutical sphere. Medication is undoubtedly a life-saving
technology, but when pharmaceutical companies try to maximise their
own growth figures by convincing #lettertohumanity everyone who
deviates from the statistical average in any way that he or she has
a disorder and needs the appropriate drug, we have to ask whether
they’re truly serving humanity or just satisfying the needs of the
industry and its shareholders.

Where exactly is the boundary between technologies that facilitate our
humanity and ones that box us in and rob us of our human potential?
The ultimate spectre is that you, humanity, ultimately become nothing
more than the sex organ a larger technological organism requires
in order to reproduce and spread. Life forms encapsulated within
larger ones can be found elsewhere in nature: for instance, think of
the intestinal flora that perform various useful tasks inside our
bodies. Will we soon be no more than microbes in the belly of the
technological beast? At that point, humanity will no longer be an end
but a means. And I don’t see that as desirable, because I’m a
person, and I’m playing for team human. Now for the dream.

The dream is that you wake up and realise being human isn’t an
endpoint but a process. Technology not only alters our environment, it
ultimately alters us. The changes to come will allow you to be more
human than ever before. What if we used technology to magnify our best
human qualities and support us in our weaknesses?

We could call such technology humane, for lack of a better word.
Humane technology takes human needs as its starting point. It would
play to our strengths rather than rendering us superfluous. It would
expand our senses rather than blunting them. It would be attuned to
our instincts; it would feel natural. Humane technology would not only
serve individuals but, first of all, humanity as a whole. And last but
not least, it would realise the dreams we humans have about ourselves.

So what do you dream of? Flying like a bird? Living on the moon?
Swimming like a dolphin? Communicating by sonar? Telepathy with loved
ones? Equality between the sexes and races? Empathy as a sixth sense?
A house that would grow with your family? Do you want to live longer?
Maybe you could live forever. #lettertohumanity

Listen, humanity: you were once a relatively insignificant species,
but your childhood days are over. Thanks to your inventiveness
and creativity, you have raised yourself up out of the mud of
the savannah. You have become an evolutionary catalyst that’s
transforming the face of the earth. This process is not complete.
You are a hinge between the biosphere from which you sprang and the
technosphere that arose after your arrival. Your behaviour affects
not only your own future but the planet as a whole and all the other
species who live on it. That’s no small responsibility. If you
don’t think you’re equipped for this, you should have stayed in
your cave. But that’s not your style. You have been technological
since the day you were born. The desire to get back to nature is as
understandable as it is impossible. It would not only be cowardly
in the face of the unknown, it would deny your humanity. We cannot
imagine the future of humanity without thinking about the future of
technology. You must move forward – even though you only just got
here. You’re a teenager, but it’s time to grow up. Technology
is humanity’s self-portrait. It’s the materialisation of human
ingenuity in the physical world. Let’s make it an artwork we can be
proud of. Let’s use technology to build a more natural world and
map out a path to the future that works not only for humanity but for
all the other species, the planet and ultimately the universe as a
whole. In closing, I’d like to ask you to do something. I’d like
to invite every one of you – living and not yet born, on earth and
elsewhere – to ask one simple question of every technological change
that appears in your life: does this increase my humanity?

The answer usually won’t be black or white, yes or no. More often,
it will be something like 60 percent yes, 40 percent no. And you’ll
sometimes disagree with other people and have to debate the matter
before you can come to an agreement. But that’s good. If all of us
consistently opt for technology that increases our humanity, I know
you’ll be OK. How? That remains to be seen. No one knows what human
beings will be like in a million years, or whether there will even
be human beings, and if so, whether I would recognise them as human.
Will we accept implants? Reprogramme our DNA? Double the size of our
brains? Communicate #lettertohumanity telepathically? Sprout wings? I
don’t and can’t know. But my hope is that in a million years there
will still be such a thing as humanity. Because as long as there’s
humanity, there will be human beings. From the core of my humble,
imperfect humanity, I wish you happiness, love and a long, exciting
journey. In the anticipation that you will bring forth trillions more
people, all the best,

Koert van Mensvoort
Founder Next Nature Network

PS Note to the individual reader: After you read this letter, please
pass it along to one of your fellow humans. If you’d like to do
more, you can also copy, translate, reprint and further distribute it.
Humanity is all of us.



#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: