IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2017 - 40

"tranhumanists" as an identified group of followers
or practitioners:
The applied sciences involved include dramatic
advancements in the neurosciences, genomics,
robotics, nanotechnology, computers and artificial intelligence. In some combination of the
above bioengineering, transhumanists imagine
the possibilities in the near future of dramatically
enhancing human mental and physical capacities,
slowing and reversing the aging process and controlling our emotional and mental states. The
imagined future is a new age in which people will
be freed from mental disease and physical
decrepitude, able to consciously choose their
"natures" and those of their children. At first
glimpse, it all seems like a wonderful thing, life
lived more abundantly, but Francis Fukuyama
calls this transhumanist vision "the most dangerous idea in the world" [4].
While there are transhumanist movements [26], we
argue that transhumanist beliefs are also present in
mainstream multimodal discourses that are persuasive
due to everyday cultural practices.
We assert that transhumanism reveals four predominant and often sensationalized themes used to promote
human technological advancement as a seemingly obvious future in the mainstream. These themes or combinations of them are persuasive and we show how they
work through the model below by applying them to representations of exoskeletons. We use rhetorical studies
based on the tradition of Kenneth Burke [27] to explain
how these themes may serve to change people's attitudes
toward this kind of technology. Rhetoric functions
through humans' use of language (including visual language) "to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents" [27]. In this regard, we see transhumanism

Figure 2. Circa 1966: Hardiman I Prototype for Machine
Augmentation of Human Strength and Endurance (Public
Domain).

Table 1. Themes associated with Transhumanist Rhetoric.
Theme 1
Legitimate Science
■

■

Legitimization of
technological progress
through science,
engineering, technology
and math fields and
practices.
Collaboration between
military industrial
complex and university
research hubs.

Theme 2
Human Agency
■

■

Rejection of human
biological limitations to justify
technological progress, e.g.,
humans should be stronger,
should fly, overcome disease,
should live forever, etc.
Collaboration between
medical and military industrial
complex research.

Theme 3
Superheroism
■

■

Theme 4
Vulnerability

Celebration of superheroism
or allusion to fictional
superheroes, and identity
tactics used to frame the
subject in relation to heroes.
Collaboration between
Hollywood and military
industrial complex goals.
Cinematic franchises
accommodate military goals.

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■

Reaction to a shared sense
of vulnerability, militarism,
and fear of the future,
abstracted future outcomes
rather than specific ones.
Identity tactics used to make
fear personal. Post 9/11
contextualization and militarism.

march 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2017