Paper short abstract:

Human augmentation technologies are understood as a means of repairing an essentially broken human form. Such repairs are seen to lead to a posthuman form which opens a space for radical new futures. Practices of repair in the present become the lens through which new, hopeful futures are imagined.

Paper long abstract:

As time flows, the human form breaks down: we age, get ill, and become frail. From the perspective of contemporary techno-optimistic groups, -- such as transhumanists, biohackers, and self-trackers -- this highlights how the human form is fundamentally broken. It is not uncommon to hear the human body being referred to as a "meat sack", with all the unpleasant implications tied to the metaphor. This paper takes a novel approach to repair as a temporal practice by considering how conceptions of repairing the fundamentally "broken" human form allow for the emergence of radically new futures. In present-day late capitalism, as Franco Berardi (2011) and Mark Fisher (2014) argue, the "future has been cancelled". Neo-liberal logics stagnate cultural growth, optimise all innovations to serve a profit motive, and repackage radically reimagined future as products. Futuristic loses its temporal meaning and is instead reduced to genre and aesthetic. Throughout my fieldwork in Sweden, proponents of human augmentation technologies engage with these practices as the primary means to create and maintain conceptions of new, hopeful futures, often centred on visions of posthuman emergence. By conceptualising the human body in mechanical terms, repair is seen as a matter of engineering, and the invention and application of emergent technologies to the human form opens possibilities for futures through continuous repairing practices. They re-focus the utopian hopefulness away from the end-goal and towards a space of action. Ideas around repairing the human body become a forward-looking process that both requires, and strengthens, hope in the future.