Being Transhuman In a Post-Human Age
Alexander Bard (SWE)
Cyberphilosopher, Music Producer, Speaker
Alexander Bard is a Swedish cyberphilosopher, songwriter, record producer, TV personality and religious and political activist. He is co-author of The Futurica Trilogy and Syntheism: Creating God in the Internet Age. Alexander Bard has given lectures on the philosophical, sociological and economic implications of the internet revolution since the late 1990s. Throughout his career, he has been a fundamental force in creating the Swedish music export sensation – making Sweden the world’s biggest per capita music exporter – and promoting a deeper understanding of the full dramatic effects of the information technology revolution. He specializes in helping people around the world optimize their lifestyle, mindset, productivity, and brain performance.
Aron Flam (SWE)
Comedian, Podcaster, Actor, Screenwriter, Author
Aron Flam is a Swedish comedian. He runs the Dekonstruktiv Kritik (Deconstructive criticism) podcast. At Biohacker Summit he is performing with Alexander Bard.
Audio Player
This talk critically re-examines transhumanism, tracing its
Everything in your life has meaning precisely because there is an end to things. If you seriously consider that you would never die, everything would become absolutely meaningless. It is better to have a life right here and now.
Summary
- Nietzsche’s Ubermensch represents a shift toward holistic global understanding and the "full picture" rather than mere technological superiority or physical enhancement. - Meaning in life is derived from its finitude; achieving literal immortality would render existence meaningless by removing the urgency and purpose provided by death. - The 17th-century concept of the autonomous individual is collapsing, replaced by "the swarm," a collaborative, tribal structure facilitated by global internet connectivity. - Society is splitting into a tech-savvy "netocracy" and a resentful, redundant underclass, shifting conflict from wealth-based divisions to those of attention and online presence. - The future will be defined by the tension between intelligent, creative "swarms" that embrace network complexity and destructive, infantilized "mobs" fueled by resentment.
Article
Beyond The Individual: Nietzsche, The Netocratic Swarm, And The Future Of Transhumanism
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm, Alexander Bard Recast Transhumanism As A Struggle Over Meaning, Belonging, And Power
There was something almost mischievous about the way Alexander Bard approached the stage at Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm. Here was a gathering devoted to optimisation, longevity and the engineered future, and Bard, the Swedish cyberphilosopher and music producer, arrived not to flatter the faith of the room but to unsettle it. Alongside the comedian and podcaster Aron Flam, he turned a conversation titled *Being Transhuman In a Post-Human Age* into something larger and more abrasive: a philosophical challenge to the very mythology of transhumanism.
What emerged in Stockholm on 19 May 2017 was not a hymn to gadgets, implants or immortality. It was a critique of the lonely, self-improving individual and an argument that the human future would belong not to isolated supermen, but to intelligent swarms.
Nietzsche, Not Silicon Valley, At The Root Of The Debate
Bard’s first move was to drag transhumanism away from Californian futurism and back toward Friedrich Nietzsche. The term, he insisted, had been flattened by a culture eager to confuse enhancement with wisdom, power with comprehension.
“To be transhuman in the original sense is to be beyond, in the sense that you are all over the place and you get the full picture,” Bard said. “It is about having a wide understanding of the world and truly getting what is going on.”
In that reframing, Nietzsche’s Übermensch was not a comic-book superior specimen, nor a biologically upgraded machine-human, but a figure of expanded perspective. The transhuman, in Bard’s telling, was not the person with the best supplements, the newest hardware or the longest projected lifespan. It was the person capable of grasping complexity.
This mattered because Bard saw much of mainstream transhumanism as intellectually thin, seduced by technological theatre while neglecting older questions of mortality, purpose and civilisation. The room may have come prepared to discuss enhancement, but Bard wanted to speak about consciousness, history and the collapse of a worldview.
The Fantasy Of Immortality And The Poverty Of Endless Life
One of Bard’s sharpest provocations concerned immortality, that recurring dream of the techno-utopian imagination. He did not reject longer life outright. Survival, health and increased vitality were, in his account, legitimate ambitions. But literal immortality, he argued, was another matter entirely.
Meaning, he suggested, depends on finitude. Death is not simply an engineering defect to be solved but a condition that gives urgency to love, work and becoming. Remove the end point and existence begins to dissolve into monotony. A life without limit risks becoming a life without shape.
In this sense, Bard’s critique cut against one of the central emotional engines of transhumanist culture. The promise of endless life often appears as liberation. In Stockholm, Bard framed it instead as a misunderstanding of what makes a life worth having in the first place.
The Death Of The Autonomous Individual
If Bard’s account of transhumanism was broader than the usual technophile script, his diagnosis of modern identity was blunter still. The great fiction now breaking apart, he argued, was the 17th-century idea of the autonomous individual.
What began with Descartes and the philosophical primacy of the self, Bard suggested, had become the governing religion of modernity. Politics, economics and liberal self-understanding were built around the image of the human being as a discrete unit, self-contained and fundamentally separate.
That image, he argued, no longer matched the world being built by digital networks.
The internet had not strengthened individuality so much as exposed its fragility. Online, people were not behaving as sovereign thinkers serenely exercising private judgment. They were clustering, mimicking, signalling, amplifying and colliding. The real social unit of the age was no longer the individual but the swarm.
To function in such a world required a different self-conception. Not the old individual, but what Bard described as a dividual: a person distributed across relationships, platforms, identities and networks. The self was becoming modular, social and permanently interactive.
The Return Of The Tribe
For Bard, this was not a futuristic anomaly but an ancient return. Human beings, he argued, were biologically programmed less for solitary independence than for tribal belonging. The internet, for all its novelty, had begun to reactivate something primal.
“The Internet is exposing a return to the original tribe, which is what we are biologically programmed for,” Bard said. “The original tribe was all about the beauty of collaboration, and we are now seeing that return through participatory culture.”
That was the paradox at the heart of his talk. The most advanced technological environment in history was not producing a cleaner break from humanity’s past. It was reviving older social logics of affiliation, hierarchy and collective emotion.
But Bard was no romantic about tribal life. Tribes could create meaning, loyalty and purpose. They could also create exclusion, hysteria and violence. The networked age, in his account, would be defined by the battle between those two possibilities.
Netocracy, Mobs, And The New Class Divide
Bard’s language for this emerging order was stark. The world, he said, was splitting into a netocracy and a redundant underclass. The decisive divide was shifting away from older industrial categories of capital and labour and toward command over attention, networks and digital fluency.
Those who could build platforms, organise information and coordinate participation would flourish. Those who could not would increasingly find themselves not merely poor, but socially superfluous, visible only as noise or resentment.
“Order in chaos is always the most valuable thing you could possibly do,” Bard said. “Guiding people through chaos is a primitive form of intelligence and the first step toward creating order in a network dynamical society.”
This was where his argument became most politically combustible. The internet, in his telling, was producing both highly intelligent swarms and destructive mobs. One side collaborated, created and navigated complexity. The other stewed in humiliation, infantilised by consumer culture and radicalised by redundancy.
The future, then, was not simply digital. It was agonistic. It would be shaped by a struggle between creative participation and resentful collapse.
Finding A Place Inside The Swarm
If all this sounded severe, Bard did offer a form of instruction. The task was not to retreat from the network but to locate one’s role inside it.
“Study the original tribe and find what kind of archetype you represent,” he said. “Discover how you can contribute to the overall swarm and what the contemporary equivalent of that is. Finding your purpose within the tribe is how you find your place.”
And then, with the bluntness that gave the session much of its charge, he reduced the lesson further: “Instead of working on your own as an isolated individual, find your swarm. Make that swarm more intelligent and enjoy being inside of it. Use intelligence to your advantage and you will be safe within the network.”
It was an appeal not to self-erasure but to re-situation. Flourishing in a post-human age would require abandoning the fantasy of total autonomy and accepting that identity is formed in relation, not in isolation.
A Post-Human Warning, Not A Celebration
There was a temptation, listening to Bard at Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm, to hear only the provocation: the jokes, the contempt for techno-naivety, the delight in puncturing sacred beliefs. But beneath the performance lay a serious argument about the shape of the century.
Transhumanism, he suggested, had been too easily reduced to engineering ambitions and consumer desires. The real transformation underway was social and metaphysical. It concerned how human beings understood themselves, how power was organised, and how meaning survived in an age of permanent connectivity.
Bard did not present the post-human era as a clean ascent. He described it as a dangerous threshold. The individual was dissolving. The tribe was returning. Networks were generating both intelligence and fury. And the question was no longer whether humanity would be transformed, but whether it could become wise enough to endure the transformation.
In Stockholm, the future was not sold as salvation. It was posed as a test.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm