Tech Escapism
For a brief, unpleasant moment, let's go back to when I was 13. Physical dysphoria was beginning to brim up within me at the hands of male puberty, but I lacked the knowledge to identify it as such. Instead, my computer science self-studies at the time led me into a fixation with the division of Silicon Valley devoted to escapism:
- Escaping your body with VR, or brain transplants into android bodies or simulations.
- Escaping your basic human need to eat, and all the intricacies, the communal and cultural significance, that the art form of cooking entails, with meal replacement stuff like Soylent.
- Escaping our collapsing society, our dirtied planet they had a hand in polluting, with colonies on Mars and always beyond.
- And of course, escaping death with cryonics, as if they didn't already come across as possibly a bit too terrified of their life's end.
I got into all this sort of thing as a sort of entry-level cope for the beginnings of my on-and-off struggles with dysphoria-related DPDR, a hope for salvation from masculinization. Eventually, I left after growing disillusioned with the techbros who were supposed to usher all this in, and the root of my problem revealed itself clearly soon after.
Now I can't help but observe the detachment from the physical realm, and from humanity itself, inherent in basically everything these types are currently "cooking". While I'm absolutely not saying they're all trans women waiting to happen (save for the inevitable minority like me), I do suspect that their ability to even want any of this for themselves, when most average joes would immediately find it repulsive and dystopian, stems from deeper issues with how they are currently experiencing being alive as a physical human being in this shitty 21st century, in conjuction with Silicon Valley's culture of "life as machinery to be optimized", and the lack of familiarity with the humanities that permeates these spaces also.