Refounding Legitimacy Toward Aethogenesis

The fusion of humans and technology takes us into an unknown world, described by some authors as populated by quasi-living species that would relegate us —ordinary humans — to the rank of alienated agents, emptied of our identity and consciousness. I argue instead that our world is woven of simple, though invisible, perspectives, which —if we become aware of them— may renew our ability for making judgments and enhance our autonomy. I became aware of these invisible perspectives by observing and practicing a real-time collective net art experiment called the Poietic Generator. As the perspectives unveiled by this experiment are invisible, I have called them anoptical perspectives (i.e., non-optical), by analogy with the optical perspective of the Renaissance. Later, I have come to realize that these perspectives obtain their cognitive structure from the political origins of our language. Accordingly, it is possible to define certain cognitive criteria for assessing the legitimacy of the anoptical perspectives, just like some artists and architects of the Renaissance defined the geometrical criteria that established the legitimacy of the optical one. Finally, I argue that if we were to apply those criteria to the technological artifacts that pretend to autonomy or tend to invade our bodies and minds we could move from the status of selected to the role of selectors in a reverse process of selection that would be no longer natural but artificial. Therefore, we could emulate a kind of global immune system that would prevent the takeover by some illegitimate bodies. Toward which direction? Nothing less than a new singularity, which would augur an era where the systemic predation of our species against itself and its environment would have vanished. I propose to call this era: Aethogenesis.