Punks vs Profiteers: A Framework for Engaging Transhumanisms Today

With augmentation and AI technologies undergoing accelerated development and coming to market, we must ensure that the cosmovisioning around such technologies is not monopolised by a single “transhumanist” movement. Jacob Boss contrasts “punk” transhumanists with “profiteers” – punk is oriented toward the aesthetic and to the “world-renewing” destruction of norms, while the profiteers look to commodify enhancement through incorporating it into the mainstream. This roundtable session will explore the productivity of Boss’ punks/profiteers distinction for contemporary transhumanism scholarship, considering both the contentious classification of transhumanism movements and some of the overlooked strands of transhumanism. The panel will offer a critique of contemporary narratives of transhumanism that focus exclusively on elite academic and/or commercial iterations. Boss’ scholarly intervention into the underlying commitments that drive divergent transhumanist communities of practice points to alternative futures with these technologies, foregrounding the expansion of sensory capacities, reproductive choice, kinship and other social forms.