10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4891


Il transumanismo sostiene l’incremento delle attuali capacità umane attraverso le nuove tecnologie, alla ricerca del miglioramento e del perfezionamento umani, quindi crea opportunità di marketing redditizie. In questo saggio facciamo ricoroso al concetto più ampio di postumanismo, che include il transumanismo ma anche tutti gli altri modi in cui gli umani possono essere perfezionati dai non umani. Tuttavia, il saggio non riguarda il postumanismo in sé, ma il modo in cui una critica postumanista può far avanzare le nostre analisi e diagnosi. Consideriamo non solo la tecnologia, ma anche altre specie come il nostro microbioma, nel tentativo di esaminare criticamente il marketing transumanista e sviluppare strumenti analitici per comprenderlo meglio. I suoi limiti sono evidenziati attraverso l’esempio del marketing delle informazioni sanitarie in risposta alla pandemia da Covid-19. Il marketing transumanista può essere distinto tra "fini" – vale a dire la promozione di prodotti – e "mezzi", intesi come modi per facilitare il marketing. Il saggio propone una tipologia delle motivazioni che inducono al consumo di beni e servizi transumanisti.


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Josephine Smart
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Posthumanist perspectives on transhumanist marketing: More than human genes, more than market promotion
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Josephine Smart
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Posthumanist perspectives on transhumanist marketing: More than human genes, more than market promotion
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                                          2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 187-209




                                                                                    SAGGI

Posthumanist perspectives on transhumanist marketing
More than human genes, more than market promotion
Alan SMART
University of Calgary

Josephine SMART
University of Calgary




ABSTRACT: Transhumanism advocates enhancement of current human capacities with
new technologies, in pursuit of human improvement and perfection, and thereby
creates lucrative marketing opportunities. We use the broader concept of
posthumanism, which includes this, but also all the other ways in which humans are
enhanced by non-humans. However, our study is not about posthumanism, but about
how a posthumanist critique can enhance our analyses and diagnoses. We consider not
just technology, but also other species such as our microbiome, in an effort to critically
examine transhumanist marketing, and develop analytic tools to better understand it.
The limitations are highlighted with an extended example of the marketing of health
information in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Transhumanist marketing is
distinguished between “ends”, promoting products, and “means”, as ways to facilitate
marketing. We offer a typology of motivations for consumption of transhumanist goods
and services.

KEYWORDS: TRANSHUMANISM; POSTHUMANISM; SOCIAL MEDIA; PUBLIC HEALTH PROMOTION; COVID-19.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Alan Smart, Josephine Smart
Posthumanist perspectives on transhumanist marketing: More than human genes, more than market
promotion
2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 187-209.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4891
188                                                    ALAN SMART, JOSEPHINE SMART




Introduction
   In concrete terms, transhumanism is usually seen as the enhancement of
current human capacities with new technologies, including genetic
technologies such as gene editing, in the pursuit of human improvement,
perhaps perfection. This is part of posthumanism, but only the
anthropocentric side of it. More than 90% of the self-replicating nucleic
acids in the human body are not human, including not only various kinds of
DNA, but also the RNA of viruses. While transhumanists adopt and hope for
technology to help perfect the consumer, posthumanists emphasize all the
ways in which humans are enhanced, or more generally affected, by non-
humans, not just machinery and other things, but also other species. The
porous container of our human body is home to many commensal (eating
together) microbes; “messmates”, as Donna Haraway (2008) refers to them.
Some of these are parasitic, some potentially deadly, while others contribute
to our bodily functions, such as efficient digestion of essential minerals and
vitamins. Bacteria in our microbiome “provided vitamin K where it was once
scarce, but just as importantly, they allowed us to extract extra calories from
our food, up to 30% extra” (Dunn 2011: 81). Microbial companions co-evolve
with our immune systems. Manipulation of our microbiome is emerging as a
very large sector of research, investment, and treatments.
   Transhumanist marketing goes beyond the private sector. The importance
of government and other non-profits becomes clear when we use a
posthumanist lens to include a wider range of the ways in which we may
benefit or experience risk from our entanglement with non-humans. The
mechanical technology bias of transhumanism obscures other important
areas of enhanced capacities, such as use of sniffer dogs to identify cancer
and Covid-19, growing transplant organs in pigs, or fecal transplants to help
our microbiome solve serious health problems. One of the fastest growing
sectors of the economy is the vaccine market which grew six-fold over the
two decades to 2019, worth over $35bn then, but clearly accelerating further
in 2020. When we analyze the pandemic in posthuman terms, to follow non-
humans through their influence, the flood of public health marketing around
Covid-19 becomes apparent. The Covid-19 pandemic provides an extended
example for this article.
   The term “transhumanist marketing” is ambiguous. The first meaning is
marketing of transhumanist technologies, products, and services:
“transhumanism as ends”, our main focus. Equally important is the use of


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transhumanist technologies to enhance marketing capacities, such as
gamification (Leclercq et al. 2020) and the use of social media to promote
peer influences among consumers: “transhumanism as means”. The two
meanings distinguish between what is marketed, and how marketing is
undertaken. The latter, as means, has even wider significance for marketing
management than the former.
   The next section clarifies these issues. The third section narrows to only
one scale, the microbial and viral realm of nanometres. We considered using
an organizing framework that reveals the relevance of transhumanism/
posthumanism at all scales, from nano/micro through the body to locality,
nation and globe, but that was clearly too ambitious for a single paper. Our
procedure herein was to scan the relevant literatures within and beyond
marketing research. The fourth section constructs a typology for
conceptualizing the diversity of motivations for adoption of transhumanist
products and services. Finally, we offer brief concluding comments.

Transhumanism, posthumanism and marketing
   Transhumanism and posthumanism are both concerned with
enhancement of current human capacities through new technologies.
Posthumanism, though, is a broader concept that includes transhumanism
as simply one, future-oriented, facet of the total phenomenon of human
capabilities being enhanced by material and living non-humans throughout
our history and prehistory. Usage of these terms varies. Katharine Hayles
(1999) refers to posthumanism in ways more usefully described as
transhumanist. We distinguish the two terms, with posthumanism
concerned with all the ways in which we are entangled with non-humans,
including but not restricted to those which expand our contemporary
capacities (transhumanism). Rather than a feature of a future only now
emerging, we have always been posthuman; the mastery of fire, cooking,
language and other technologies made us humans in the first place
(Wrangham 2009; Smart, Smart 2017). Posthumanism rejects and transcends
the inadequacies of humanism, transhumanism and anthropocentrism. Our
conceptualization of posthumanism is less about “posthuman-ism”, the
study of people who use new technology to go beyond species typical human
lifeways (although this is included), and more about “post-humanism”, a
rejection of anthropocentrism and the development of a worldview and
methodology that acknowledge our reliance on and co-evolution with a
diversity of non-human agencies that enable and constrain our actions.



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190                                                           ALAN SMART, JOSEPHINE SMART


   Posthumanism explores the long history of reliance on non-human forms
of aid, within and beyond our body. These have come to be known as
prostheses, extending the usual meaning of a device to replace or augment
an impaired part of the body to include all devices that extend our human
capabilities. A hammer is a prosthetic extension of our force, a megaphone
an extension of the volume of our voice. For Cary Wolfe (2010: xxv), a
human is a “prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of
technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘not-human’ and yet have
nevertheless made the human what it is”. In addition, posthumanism
recognizes our fundamental reliance on our microbiome and other species
(Smart, Smart 2017).
   Transhumanism, by contrast, is future-oriented and particularly relevant
for marketers concerned with encouraging consumption of new products and
services. It concerns things becoming possible, that excite the imagination
or stir deep fears about the consequences for ourselves, cultures and
societies, and thereby help to open pocketbooks. Enlightenment ideas of
progress asserted the perfectibility of individuals and society.
Transhumanism is humanist, rather than posthumanist, in this sense
(Bostrom 2005; Wolfe 2010). Those who identify as transhumanist are
among those most confident in, and desirous of, individual improvability. In
high tech marketing, these features are clear:
      Whether the buzz is around IoT and big data or deep learning and AI, part of
      the marketing model for information technology and consumer technology has
      always been to spread the belief that the next big advancement is just around
      the corner – and that whatever it is, we humans will be supercharged by it,
      becoming vastly more productive as a result. Aside from the objections of
      Luddites and conspiracy theorists, we seem to have an unwavering faith in
      relentless technological advancement. If we want to make our businesses
      better, our economies stronger, and our youth more competitive, we need
      sleeker, smarter tech – and more of it (Madsbjerg 2019).

   Even failures of technological advancement spur the faith that the next
generation of educational software, for example, will overcome current
failures, as Edward Tenner (2018) argues. Digital innovation is often
ineffective without blending it with analog intuition, skill, and experience,
but in practice these are often displaced.
   The transhumanist movement has utopian goals, including immortality
either through body repairing nanotechnology, or through uploading
consciousness to computers. For Ray Kurzweil (2005: 9), a pioneer of the
movement, within a few decades a Singularity will be produced by
exponential speeding up of technological change, resulting in “the merger of


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our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a
world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will
be no distinction, post-Singularity, between humans and machine or
between physical and virtual reality”. Robert Frodeman (2019: ix) says
dominant social and economic policy is itself implicitly transhumanist,
assuming “not only that technological development must continue, but that
it must continually speed up”; the “architecture of modern culture is
implicitly transhumanist in orientation” (ibidem: 1).
   Posthumanists are more likely to recognize the dangers of faith in
technological progress in an Anthropocene era widely thought to be
undergoing substantial destabilization through continued economic growth
(Collins 2018). Transhumanists trust technology’s abilities to solve problems
that humans cause, perhaps through nanotechnology for pollution control,
or geoengineering our way out of climate change. The other main difference
is that transhumanism tends to be Western or Eurocentric in emphasis, with
those involved with the movement from non-Western countries adopting
similar discourses of faith in technology (Smart, Smart 2017). Posthumanist
perspectives vary much more significantly from one culture to another, with
many being traditionally much less anthropocentric (Ingold 2000; Descola
2013; Kohn 2013). Posthumanism offers a powerful lens for studying
transhumanism and uncovering a wider variety of more than human
influences on the changing human condition. What is most interesting to
marketers is the present and emerging future. So, in this article we follow
transhumanism’s future orientation, concentrating on what is new,
emerging and presented as possible in the near to medium terms, while
using posthumanism to critique the approach and expand the scope of
innovations that are considered beyond the mechanical.
   There are two forms of transhumanist marketing: including explicit
reference to transhuman, transhumanist or more than human, or marketing
that implicitly signals transhumanist products and concerns without using
the term itself. There is relatively little explicit transhumanist marketing as
yet, but implicit examples are proliferating. In this article, we define
marketing as the “activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating,
communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for
customers, clients, partners, and society at large”1. This broad definition
includes selling products and services, but also governmental and NGO
promotion of policies and desired behaviors such as energy conservation or
handwashing.

1. Cfr. Defintions of marketing, American Marketing Association, https://www.ama.org/the-
definition-of-marketing-what-is-marketing/, accessed on 21/06/2020.

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192                                                            ALAN SMART, JOSEPHINE SMART



  While the algorithms at the heart of technology giants like Google,
Amazon and Facebook are deploying AI in ways that raise intense concerns
about discrimination, data privacy and the autonomy of the consumer
(Noble 2018), some algorithms have managed to convince consumers to
entrust companies with some surprising practices, such as renting out their
homes to strangers through AirBnB. Rachel Botsman (2017: 4) says
      We are already putting our faith in algorithms over humans in our daily lives,
      whether it’s trusting Amazon’s recommendations on what to read or Netflix’s
      suggestions on what to watch.

   The “real disruption happening is not technology itself, but the massive
trust shift it creates”. Distributed trust “can widen the circle of trust,
unlocking the potential to collaborate and connect with unfamiliar
strangers, but it can also erect and harden boundaries between us” (ibidem:
8). Trust in fake news has become rampant on social media. Covid-19 has
fueled a “surge of numerous rumors, hoaxes, and misinformation, regarding
the etiology, outcomes, prevention, and cure of the disease […] promoting
erroneous practices that increase the spread of the virus”, hindering the
adoption of healthy practices (Tasnim et al. 2020: 171).
   Consumers are being changed through contemporary technological
developments. First, through social media data mining and analysis, data is
increasingly the raw material for innovations which can be more widely
marketed. Second, intense connectivity means that adopted technologies are
subtly changing what it means to be human: for example, reliance on GPS
navigation has been shown to alter the brain. In a whole range of fields,
gamification is being used not only to hook customers on online games, but
also to improve educational and managerial outcomes (Leclercq et al. 2020).
Institutions are now widely exploring nudging technologies to promote, for
example, more environmentally sustainable behaviour. In China, initiatives
such as the Social Credit System are drawing on cultural emphases on shame
and reciprocity to influence behavior (Curran, Smart 2020).
   In the next section, we explore the physically small pole of the scalar
spectrum of transhumanist marketing. But the implications of projects at
this scale go far beyond the nano, affecting global political economies. The
section illustrates just some of the stakes involved in the decisions we make
on transhumanism, but similar questions arise in relation to macroscale
issues like self-driving vehicles (Pink et al. 2020) and drone deliveries.




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Marketing transhumanism at microbial and viral scales
   This section considers the nanoscale. It describes the importance and
characteristics of the field, and serves to set the stage for the typology
introduced in the next section. We were tempted to do a thinner scan of the
whole scalar spectrum, from nano to globe, but it seemed more useful to
examine one portion of the spectrum of transhumanism more deeply.
   Rather than stretching our view, we narrow it to the scale below one
micrometer (1000 nanometres), focusing on issues and entities most
relevant to transhumanist aspirations. Nanotechnology normally refers to
objects 1 to 100 nanometers (one billionth of a meter). The nanotechnology
market was first quantified by the National Science Foundation in a 2001
report, which estimated a 1.5 trillion dollar market by 2015. The problem
with these forecasts is that they are based on a highly inflationary data
collection and compilation methodology, such as including the price tag of
$100 for an entire drug dose, rather than its actual 10 cents worth of
nanomaterial ingredient. Such estimates are better considered as the
nanotechnology-enabled market rather than the market itself2. Despite the
hype, scientists are excited by the unusual properties of materials that
emerge at very small scale3. Nanotechnology is of particular interest to
transhumanists because it promises the potential of radically extending
human life without having to upload our consciousness, by having
nanomachines injected into our body to continually provide maintenance,
destroy cancerous cells, and undertake repairs. It could also contribute to
the enhancement of abilities in a wide variety of ways. The fears related to
the technology can also be intense, particularly around the prospect of self-
replicating nanobots that could eventually turn the biosphere into nothing
but “grey goo” (Giles 2004).
   Most commercial attention in the nanoscale so far has been paid to DNA
and biotechnology based upon its manipulation. The size of DNA is
somewhat complex, with each diploid cell containing about two metres of
DNA when unfolded, but which is normally folded into about 30 nanometres.
Biotechnology has also had its periods of hype, particularly after the launch
of the Human Genome Project without much in the way of commercial
products. The political struggles over genetically modified organisms in
agriculture are well known. Genetic therapy is even more contentious but is

2. Cfr. Debunking the trillion dollar nanotechnology market size hype, Nanowerk, Apr 19,
2007, https://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=1792.php, accessed on 27/06/2020.
3. Cfr. The BS and the science of nanotechnology, The Conversation, May 29, 2018,
https://theconversation.com/the-bs-and-the-science-of-nanotechnology-97317, accessed
on 27/06/2020.

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now moving forward rapidly. In 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
approved three gene therapy products, two for cancer and another for an
inherited disease. The Transhumanist FAQ at Humanity Plus suggests that
“The potential scope of genetic medicine is vast: virtually all disease and all
human traits – intelligence, extroversion, conscientiousness, physical
appearance, etc. – involve genetic predispositions”4.
   The ability to manipulate genes took a large step forward with the
development of a generalized tool for gene editing, CRISPR, for which a 2020
Nobel Prize was awarded. Genes have been edited for decades, but techniques
were specific to a particular species or gene, while CRISPR, derived from a
bacterium, is a generic tool. One major risk is the ability to create organisms
that incorporate CRISPR into their own genome so that they can edit their
own genes and spread through a population. Such modifications could have
benefits, such as making mosquito vectors of malaria unable to carry the
disease, but the dangers are also ominous.
   The editing of human germline (sperm and egg cells) genomes which
could be passed to the next generation, necessary for transmissible
transhumanist improvements, is particularly controversial but has potential
to end genetically inherited diseases such as Huntington’s. Genetic
modification for enhancement rather than preventing genetic flaws is even
more contentious. Many scientists are calling for a moratorium on all
germline modification experimentation: research on human germlines is
currently banned in 40 countries. An international summit in Washington
organized in December 2015 by the national academies of the US, UK and
China failed to agree on a ban on gene-editing. While about 30 nations have
passed rules to prevent germline editing, there is as yet no wider
moratorium.
   Genetic engineering, along with many other cutting-edge medical
technologies, is based on a “political economy of hope” that leads sufferers
“to pursue experimental therapies” and encourages “nations to invest
billions” (Song 2017: 5). It represents a promissory horizon for patients as
well as a commercial one for corporations. Priscilla Song’s (2017) work on
experimental stem and fetal stem cell therapies in China is relevant here.
Hopes for a cure, and restrictions on the therapies in the West, enabled
Chinese clinics to attract patients, unwilling or unable to wait, from around
the world, due to transnational regulatory variations. Critics have attacked
“stem cell tourism” as an “off-shore hazard” to good science “marketed by
‘rogue’ clinicians” who exploit desperate patients (ibidem: 7-8).
4. Cfr. The Transhumanist FAQ, Humanity+, https://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-
faq/, accessed on 28/06/2020.


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   As well as hope, there are challenges and fears. New “technosocial
practices have troubled boundaries between nature and culture, matter and
spirit, love and money, life and death, and individual and collective”
(Roberts 2012: xxii). Gene editing will extend these boundary disputes,
threatening a future of competition, among individuals and between
nations, through designed babies.
   So far, our discussion has focused on human efforts at scientific progress,
but posthumanism also points us towards non-humans with their own
“agendas”, often damaging to us, and posing immense risks. Viruses fit
within the nano scale, varying from 20 to 400 nanometres, while the smallest
bacteria are about 400 nanometres. Both have had massive consequences
throughout history, including the Columbian exchange of diseases between
New and Old Worlds which brought devastation to populations without
immunities. It has been estimated that upwards of 80–95% of the Native
American population was decimated as a result of introduced diseases,
exacerbated by other mistreatments that heightened their vulnerability,
within the first 150 years after 1492 (Nunn, Qian 2010).
   Viruses, bacteria and other microscopic organisms also take us beyond the
realm of science and private marketing. In the 19th century, their material
nature was unknown, as were antibiotics, so that most interventions were in
the realm of public health initiatives, such as quarantine and sanitary
infrastructure. In addition, affective public health promotion has long been
crucial for the success of struggles against the less desirable varieties of our
tiny companions. Durbach’s (2004) history of the anti-vaccination
movement in England from 1853 to 1907 demonstrates the crucial
importance of the use of media in public health promotions, and as with
Covid-19 now, they were deployed on both sides, with mutual accusations of
falsities. As digital technology allows for the “inexpensive dissemination of
true information, it also does the same for lies, misrepresentations,
propaganda, fake news and sheer nonsense” (Hofacker, Corsaro, 2020: 412-
13). There is growing evidence that on public health issues, “the fabulists
seem to be winning”5. A study of clusters on Facebook found that anti-
vaccination clusters are “highly entangled with undecided clusters in the
main online network, whereas pro-vaccination clusters are more peripheral”.
On current trends they predict anti-vaccination views will “dominate in a
decade” (Johnson et al. 2020: 230). Anti-vaccination clusters showed the
highest growth during the measles outbreak of 2019, whereas pro-
vaccination clusters showed the lowest growth. Part of the explanation given

5. Return of the paranoid style, The Economist, June 2020, 6: 49-50.

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was that “anti-vaccination clusters offer a wide range of potentially
attractive narratives that blend topics such as safety concerns, conspiracy
theories and alternative health and medicine, and also now the cause and
cure of the Covid-19 virus” (ibidem: 431).
   A growing number of studies suggest that on social media fake news
propagators on contentious and emotional issues are more successful than
proponents of scientific rigor. In the USA, exposure to social media is
associated with higher probability of “believing that the government created
the virus or that officials exaggerate its seriousness”6. We encountered
similar scepticism in our BSE research in Alberta (2006-2010). There was
scepticism about the prion as cause of BSE among a number of farmers that
we talked to. One prefaced his agreement to be interviewed about the impact
of BSE by warning us that he and his wife don’t believe in BSE. Instead, they
were proponents of the alternative theory popularized by Mark Purdey, a
British farmer, who argued that the cause was the use of the chemical
phosmet to treat warbler fly infection. Alternative hypotheses about BSE
“reflect anxieties about the environment, industry, the government, and the
intrusion of outsiders” (Lindenbaum 2001: 379).
   One problem is that health promotion efforts at behavior change have
traditionally focused on non-communicable diseases, with major
contributions in areas like tobacco and obesity prevention. Yet, with the
exceptions of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases, “application of
health promotion principles and methods to tackle infectious diseases has
been largely neglected. As a result, public health professionals who deal with
communicable diseases are often unaware of the approaches used by health
promoters … although there is a good reason to assume that these can be
usefully adapted and applied to preventing infectious diseases as well” (Van
den Broucke 2020: 4). Health promotion should contribute to addressing
Covid-19 “at the downstream level focusing on individual behaviour change
and disease management, at the midstream level through interventions
affecting organizations and communities and at the upstream level through
informing policies affecting the population” (ibidem: 1).
   One important shift in promoting vaccination, responding to the
resurgence of an anti-vaccination movement after a discredited 1998 study
attributing autism to the shot for mumps, measles, and rubella, was to
emphasize vaccination as protecting others, not just yourself or your
children (Nicholson, Leask, 2012). When a Covid-19 vaccine becomes
available, emphasizing vaccination as a duty or a civic contribution will

6. Return of the paranoid style, The Economist, June 2020, 6: 49-50.


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likely be crucial in encouraging rapid uptake in countries where levels of
distrust of government is high; already polls are suggesting as many as 40%
of Americans will refuse being vaccinated.
   Digital connections have become ever more central during the lockdowns
and physical distancing of the pandemic (Low, Smart 2020), and this applies
to dissemination of health (dis)information as well. Public health has been
particularly crucial because of the distinctive nature of this virus: its
propensity to be transmitted by non-symptomatic individuals, making
traditional forms of quarantine ineffective, and intensifying the contagion
effect of global connections. This shows that the influence of a disease is
mediated by its material qualities, or rather of the material outcomes of its
entanglement with its host.
   Some less traditional forms of health promotion have emerged out of the
Covid-19 pandemic, most notable perhaps being the handwashing video.
Dettol, for example, launched a TikTok challenge aimed at getting more
people in India to wash their hands, getting 8.7bn views in four days. Dettol
launched the campaign with several India-based TikTok influencers who
have millions of followers on the platform (Liffreing 2020). Other
handwashing videos from Vietnam, Thailand, UNICEF and elsewhere also
went viral, resulting in millions of views, and hopefully more handwashing
as well.
   The most effective Covid-19 campaigns have gone beyond simply good
advertising. Instead, they have often relied on long-established public health
systems rooted in neighborhoods and villages, as in Kerala state in India and
Vietnam. Unfortunately, in many other places, neoliberal reforms have
undermined grassroots public health systems. India’s Prime Minister Modi
highlighted the Gujarat model of economic growth in his electoral success.
But Gujarat state under Modi cut its health spending sharply, to less than 1%
of state GDP from 4.4% in 1999, and has just 0.33 hospital beds for 1,000
people, compared to the national average of 0.55, the second highest rate of
Covid-19 in India, and a case-mortality ratio more than double the
nationwide figure (Sridharan 2020). In Chinese cities, lockdowns were more
than just telling people to stay at home, backed up by fines. Rather they
“involved deploying armies of people to act as guards, health monitors,
helpers for the infirm and procurers of supplies. Central to these efforts were
[…] residents’ committees and neighbourhood party committees”
established in the Mao era7 .


7. On every street, The Economist, June 2020, 13: 31-32.

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   Many issues raised by Covid-19 for transhumanist marketing remain
undecided. Which public health strategies are best? Does authoritarian
overriding of personal privacy have sufficiently better outcomes to justify
the costs to civil liberties? How much effect does pre-existing trust in states
and institutions, as in Sweden, have in managing the pandemic without
mandatory lockdowns? How can public health institutions overcome the
suspicion about contact tracing apps, even in Singapore? How permanent
will the new controls and surveillance systems be after the pandemic has
(presumably) receded after the most rapid development of a vaccine in
history? Since Covid-19 is not yet the “Big One”, a new strain of influenza
with high mortality rates, predicted by epidemiologists, will we be better
prepared to respond and to manage public health information the next time?
How well do governments and their institutions learn from crisis, and how
long does the learning last (Smart, Smart 2009)?
   Public health has not easily adopted posthumanist ideas, because the
field’s intellectual and moral commitments “are driven by the fundamental
aim of studying and improving human health” (Cohn, Lynch 2018: 3). By
contrast, posthumanism attempts to demote human centrality by
recognizing that relationships are dispersed and distributed, leading to a
conceptualization of health as a diffuse quality across diverse entities (ivi).
Bibliometric analysis demonstrated almost no reference to posthumanism
within public health despite rapidly growing attention to interspecies
interactions and zoonoses. One reason is that the One Health paradigm,
which stresses the relationships between human and veterinary medicine
and the risks to human health caused by neglect of these entanglements, has
occupied this central ground (Friese, Nuyts 2018). Health promotion has
“never paid much attention to zoonotic causes of human health, but the
current crisis suggests that maybe it should. A good starting point would be
to embrace the concept of ‘One Health’, which recognizes the
interconnection between people, animals, plants and their shared
environment, with the goal to achieve optimal health outcomes” (Van den
Broucke 2020: 4). The vast majority of infectious diseases are derived
originally from non-human species, including SARS and Covid-19 (Rock
2018).

A typology of transhumanist motivations
   The previous sections worked through some of the characteristics of
transhumanist goods and services. We will be concerned in this section with
transhumanist marketing in terms of “ends”, not “means”. While we draw


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upon our scan of transhumanism at the nanoscale, this typology is broader,
including things and processes at larger scales that explain our points more
effectively. Thus, it is intended to be a typology with broader applicability.
Clearly, motivations are immensely diverse, and often specific to particular
goods or services. However, our intention is to generate a list as short as
possible of very basic kinds of motivations relevant to transhumanist
consumption motives.

   Ideology
   The first type concerns those who explicitly adopt products due to an
affiliation with transhumanism as an “ideology” or identity, wanting to
become transhumanist or join with others in the project. Affiliation to the
extent of joining one of the transhumanist associations is still very
uncommon, with the largest group, Humanity+, formerly the World
Transhumanist Association, having over 6000 members8. It “advocates the
ethical use of technology, such as artificial intelligence, to expand human
capacities. In other words, we want people to be better than well”9. Clearly
the number of people who would be attracted to such an identity or ideology
is greater than those who join transhumanist associations, but we have been
unable to find any surveys that could give us better numbers. Numbers aside,
the motivations for aspiring transhumans are well articulated in work by Ray
Kurzweil (2005) and other proponents.
   If the transhumanist market were restricted only to those who self-
identify as transhumanists, it would be a small niche, although perhaps
lucrative given the attractions of life extension for those with large amounts
of money. However, the implicit transhumanist market is much larger than
the explicit one for those who are self-identifying. If we accept the claim by
Robert Frodeman (2019) that neoliberal cultures and institutions are
essentially transhumanist, the transhumanist market is the totality of goods
and services that expand human capabilities beyond current standards, and
at a minimum encompasses all sufficiently innovative new technologies, or
those that promise such innovations. Our remaining five types all concern
implicit transhumanism through consuming products that fit the definition
even if the term itself is absent from either the marketing or the consumers’
aspirations and decisions.


8. Cfr. https://singularityhub.com/2011/05/09/humanity-uniting-transhumanists-worldwide/-
#:~:text=Humanity%2B%20is%20an%20%E2%80%9Cinternational%20nonprofit,a%20%E2%8-
0%9Clegitimate%20subject%20of%20scientific, accessed on 01/07/2020.
9. Cfr. Humanity+, https://humanityplus.org/, accessed on 01/07/ 2020.

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200                                                     ALAN SMART, JOSEPHINE SMART


   Hope
   Transhuman products offer hope, most of all for a cure. While hope is
found in many types (e.g. hope to be rich or famous), we consider it to be
most characteristic of situations where people are suffering from some
ailment or other condition that reduces their abilities or prospects (e.g. for at
least an average life expectancy) below the species typical state. This kind of
hope for a cure is commonly discussed in the literature on medical tourism
or in the desire to try unproven medical treatments when standard medicine
has nothing left to offer but pain management or palliative care.
   A community of diabetes hackers has emerged recently. They began from
the medical devices that had helped to improve the daily lives of diabetes
sufferers, the insulin pumps that deliver a programmable stream of
medication and allow them to go without regular injections, and the
continuous glucose monitors, under the skin sensors that send messages to
the users’ phone. The hackers realized that linking the two with a computer
could produce the equivalent of an artificial pancreas, automating the
process, but with individual user oversight. Medical device manufacturers
have been very slow in filling this need, so the community produced an open
source iPhone app called Loop that allows individuals to do it themselves,
with support and instructions available in a Facebook group (with 15,000
members in 2020). Device manufacturers are now working to move this
process beyond its current legal grey zone. Jonathan Garfinkel, a lifelong
diabetic, finished his article on this (2020: 48) with the words “I’ve become a
man verging on cyborg, made up of skin and muscle, tubes and gadgets, all
held together by an incomprehensible language. “What is this body?” I ask
myself now. “And what could it be?”

   Desire
   We desire more than we have, or can do, at present. After ideology/
identity, this is probably the most characteristically transhumanist
motivation, because it involves wanting to surpass human normality, to go
beyond, to pursue personal improvement or perfection.While hope for a cure
is a recovery, desire to be able to do more than was possible in the past is the
expansion of human capacities. It is worth noting that cures, prosthetics or
treatments can sometimes go beyond recovery to typical level and provide
more than human capabilities. For example, Oscar Pistorius was initially
ruled ineligible to compete in the 2008 Olympics. His blade-enhanced legs
use 25% less energy than able-bodied athletes to run at the same speed. In
2008, Time magazine selected him as one of the 100 most influential people,


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‘‘on the cusp of a paradigm shift in which disability becomes ability,
disadvantage becomes advantage’’ (quoted in Camporesi 2008: 639). Design
rules have been put in place that attempt to prevent the possibility of
runners using blades breaking world records. As the controversy over the
banning of the entire Russian track and field team from the 2016 Olympics
for chemical doping demonstrates, athletic performance is a realm in which
the boundaries of nature are policed, even though in the pursuit of “almost”
(but not quite) superhuman achievements.

  Profit
   Clearly most of the profit from transhumanist goods and services go to
the producers, not the consumers. Four out of five of the richest Americans
in June 2020 are in high tech, and are 26% richer than before Covid-19. Yet,
some new consumer products, such as 3D printers, open source software and
influencer as a career aspiration, are putting the means of production back
into the hands of consumers with modest means. China’s vibrant makers
movement, identified with do it yourself production, open source hardware,
tinkering and repair, sees itself as a key center to democratize technology
production. For those working in China’s first hackerspace, Xinchejian,
founded in Shanghai in 2010, creativity requires openness, and openness
meant to work outside rigid state institutions or large corporations.
However, while globally hackerspaces and the makers movement tend to
promote a do-it-yourself culture emphasizing peer production and
commitment to open source principles, China’s version tends to be neither
“countercultural nor pro-system” (Lindtner 2014: 149). Particularly in
Shenzhen, makerspaces stress ways to mediate between the sophisticated
manufacturing ecosystem and the need for makers with commercial
intentions to scale up from tinkering and low volume 3D printing methods,
and work with government sponsorship.
   One contemporary use of transhuman products and services to generate
monetary advantage for their consumers is enhancement of cognitive and
other abilities in a competitive labour market and increasing competition for
the elite educational training needed to compete in those labour markets. In
his penetrating critique of the ideal of meritocracy, Daniel Markovits (2019)
argues that hyper-competition now more nearly stifles than fosters social
mobility. Elite schools, even at the kindergarten level, run admissions
competitions that very few students from middle class backgrounds can win,
while the labor market favors the super-educated graduates that elite
universities produce. While meritocratic exclusion disadvantages the none-
elite, the children of the elite are exposed to intense, competitive training,

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leaving them tense and exhausted. An edge is worth accepting serious risks,
such as the endemic cheating that online services facilitate, or the use of
illicit cognitive enhancement products such as black market prescription
drugs. The nonmedical use of substances such as Adderall and Ritalin to
increase memory or concentration is known as pharmacological cognitive
enhancement (PCE). It rose between 2015 and 2017 in all 15 nations
included in a survey. In 2017, nearly 30% of US respondents said they had
used drugs for PCE at least once in the preceding 12 months, up from 20% in
2015. The largest increases were in Europe: use in France rose from 3% in
2015 to 16% in 2017; and from 5% to 23% in the United Kingdom (Frood
2018).

   Influence and reputation
   One of the driving forces for social media is the desire to acquire likes,
followers and a good reputation. The latter is significant enough to generate
widespread discussion of the reputation economy, in which personal
reputation “functions […] as a new form of currency and, more generally,
value” (Hearn 2010: 421). Online reputation has become significant enough
in itself to create a new career option as an “influencer”, receiving payments
for promoting commercial products (Martínez-López et al. 2020). The rapid
dissemination of information about what is currently hot, such as touristic
sites that need to be ticked off on one’s Instagram feed, has resulted in the
acronym FOMO, a fear of missing out, a feeling of anxiety or insecurity over
the possibility of missing out on something, a special event or opportunity.
   A good example of a widespread formal system of reputation is China’s
developing social credit system (Curran, Smart 2020). Its initial concern was
primarily with companies, in response to major food safety scandals and
debt defaults, and inadequate data for conventional credit scoring. When
launched nationally in 2014 (with an announced, but not yet accomplished,
2020 completion date), its goals had expanded: to assess the trustworthiness
of Chinese citizens and companies in complying with legal rules, moral
norms, and professional and ethical standards. In some localities, people
who haven’t complied with court orders have their ring tone replaced: callers
receive a recorded message telling them the person is on a blacklist. Given
the strength of shame as a social motivator in China, such shaming messages
can be very effective. Even the government is suggesting that when people
can access social credit scores, it will affect dating and marriage patterns.
The Shanghai government suggested in 2016 that filial piety be entered into
the scoring system (Chen, Cheung 2017).



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   Peers, networks and social capital
   Many an older person resistant to using computers or the internet has been
drawn in by the urge to be included in the information and photos shared by
their children or other relatives on Facebook. If plans for Saturday night are
being updated on the go by your friends in Facebook, not being connected
means being left out. Peer pressure combined with network effects (the more
users there are on a network the more useful it becomes and the more
difficult it becomes for rivals to compete) make Facebook (or WeChat in
China) almost unavoidable. The “strong network effects are a prime asset
that Facebook has defended vigorously: it has spent vast sums on buying
firms it considers likely future competitors, such as Instagram, acquired in
2012 for $1bn, and WhatsApp, for which it paid $19bn in 2014”10.
   Ant Forest is the first “known attempt to gamify sustainability” (Wu 2018).
Ant Financial is a financial tech spin-off from Chinese tech giant Alibaba
which is expected to be the largest ever IPO within weeks of our writing this.
Its product, Ant Forest, encourages users to “grow” virtual trees by activities
such as buying transit tickets online with Alipay, its payment system, or
walking to work (measurable by smartphone GPS). When the tree is fully
grown, it is planted in the real world by enterprises who gain carbon credits.
This application, which “taps into the addictive urge we feel when playing
games on our digital devices, had attracted an astonishing 200 million users
by January this year – in part because people invited their friends to compete
with them to see who was greener”. Two hundred million people, three percent
of the world’s population, “are greening their lives because they are getting
immediate information about the environmental impact of their choices in a
fun and competitive way”, according to the head of UN Environment (UN
Environment Programme 2017). Ant Forest users can interact with their
social networks through the ability to water their friends’ tree, where green
energy points can be transferred to friends up to three times a day to
cultivate their virtual tree, drawing on the prominence of gift giving and
reciprocity within Chinese culture.
   In a comparable way, academics have been drawn into making considerable
efforts on academic social networking sites. Such sites are increasingly being
used as an indicator of an academic’s reputation and are often considered
during recruitment and promotion processes. Usage is self-reinforcing; those
who are highly cited receive additional attention and interest, increasing
their citations further. D’Alessandro et al. (2020: 410) conclude that self-
promotion through academic networking sites “is not a substitute for quality
research, nor being a competent teacher, but […] do offer scholars a platform
to market their research and themselves”.
10. A tale of two networks, The Economist, June 2020, 6: 54-55.

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204                                                    ALAN SMART, JOSEPHINE SMART



Concluding comments
   Transhumanists are optimists, expecting improvement from emerging
science and technology, and those who market products to them see their
desire for enhancement as an opportunity. Posthumanists are more likely to
see the risks involved in such anthropocentric wish fulfillment, risks to
ourselves, but also to our co-inhabitants of the world. In the midst of the
pandemic, it seems that it would have been desirable to pay more attention
to the risks and not just the opportunities for new tools and new sources of
profit. The Economist magazine devoted its June 27, 2020 cover to “The next
catastrophe (and how to survive it)”. The lead article addresses the issue of
existential risk: “one that threatens the premature extinction of Earth-
originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its
potential for desirable future development” (Bostrom 2013: 15). In the list of
such threats, pandemics are one of the less threatening possibilities, because
they can be prepared for with early warning systems and proactive efforts to
avoid disrupting the habitats where future zoonoses may lurk. Some
transhumanist projects such as AI, nanotechnology and synthetic biology
present much less predictable existential risks.
   In the pre-industrial past, catastrophic risks, such as being hit by an
asteroid or a new ice age, were outside human control. Now, in the Anthropocene,
when humans have developed the capabilities to become the dominant force
reshaping the world itself, we need to become less anthropocentric, even if
only for our own interests. If we do not become more aware of the non-
humans with which we share the world both inside and outside our skins,
saving the world, ours and theirs, will be much more difficult. But even with
awareness and good intentions, change is difficult. Marketing will be of great
importance in convincing people that change is needed, even desirable. The
Covid-19 pandemic adds to worries that our abilities to accomplish this are
very limited, and that some transhumanist innovations like social media may
so far be more of a problem than a solution in facilitating cooperation when
dealing with major crises.
   The Covid-19 pandemic is not the “Big One” that epidemiologists have
been warning is inevitable: that will likely be a new influenza of zoonotic
origin with a much higher mortality rate. A UN Environment Programme
(2020) report on preventing the next pandemic notes that 75% of all
emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, so that protection has to begin
with an understanding of the conditions that lead to such risks. situation.



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This
       includes developing and maintaining a global mapping of encroachment,
       illegal trade, wet markets, etc. that are pathways for future pathogen
       transmission and thus potential future zoonoses identified. It will also
       mean supporting efforts to arrest ecosystem encroachments and harmful
       practices, restore degraded ecosystems, close down illegal trade and illegal
       wet markets, while protecting communities that depend on these for their
       food supply and livelihoods (UN Environment Programme 2020: 9).

  This is an immense agenda, and every item on it requires convincing
people to cooperate, often against their own interests, and marketing with a
posthumanist agenda and sensibility will be crucial for this.




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206                                                         ALAN SMART, JOSEPHINE SMART


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 Alan SMART, Professor Emeritus, University of Calgary, has conducted research on
 urban issues, housing, foreign investment, social change, food safety, zoonotic
 diseases, informality, smart cities and agriculture in Hong Kong, China, and
 Canada. He is author of Making Room: Squatter Clearance in Hong Kong (Hong Kong
 University Press, 1992) Petty capitalists and globalization (co-edited with Josephine
 Smart, SUNY Press, 2005), The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, fires and colonial rule
 in Hong Kong, 1950-1963 (Hong Kong University Press, 2006), Posthumanism:
 Anthropological Insights (co-authored with Josephine Smart, University of Toronto
 Press, 2017) and numerous articles in journals and edited volumes.
 asmart@ucalgary.ca

 Josephine SMART is a Professor Emerita in the Dept. of Anthropology & Archeology
 at the University of Calgary. Her research and teaching interests are economic an-
 thropology, food production and zoonotic diseases, social and economic develop-
 ment in post-1978 China, Chinese international migration, immigrant entrepren-
 eurs, and the international mobility of capital and labour. Co-author of Posthu-
 manism (2017), author of The Politic Economy of Street Hawking in Hong Kong
 (1989), co-editor of Petty Capitalists and Globalization (2005) and Plural Globalities
 in Multiple Localities: New World Borders (2001).
 smart@ucalgary.ca




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Alan Smart, Josephine Smart
Posthumanist perspectives on transhumanist marketing: More than human genes, more than market
promotion
2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 187-209.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4891
