By http://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=5371490960, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41668112
Diaspora is a 1997 science-fiction novel from Greg Egan that imagines what a post-human (and post-biological) future would look like. It is a dense read that will be rewarding for geeks, who will appreciate the level of detail and innovation in the world-building that sits behind the narrative. Today’s essay will look at one concept Egan developed for the book; and what it means for the contemporary world.
To begin with, let me set the scene a little, using italics for the next two paragraphs for new terms. The novel is set in the far future when humanity has split into three main groups. The fleshers evolved in a direct line from contemporary humans. Some are statics, who maintain our naturally evolved factory settings, while there are also a wide range of exuberants, who have modified their genes in one way or another.
The second group are gleisner robots, which are software-based intelligences housed inside flesher-shaped physical bodies. The third group are citizens, or disembodied software programmes running in simulated-reality communities known as polises. Many of the citizens are derived from human intelligences that transmuted into computer systems during an event called the Introdus. Some of the citizens can inhabit gleisner robots in order to interact with fleshers.
Are you still with me? Please come back! I promise the rest of the essay will be a little less geeky than the previous two paragraphs. There are also a group of bridgers within the exuberant fleshers. What exactly is a bridger? We will let Liana, from the bridger colony of Atlanta, explain the concept to two citizens, who have taken over gleisner bodies in order to interact with fleshers.
When the founders came here from Turin, three centuries ago, they had a very specific plan. You know there’ve been thousands of artificial genetic changes in different flesher population since the Indrodus?… Different exuberants have made modifications of all kinds of characteristics. Some have been simple, pragmatic adaptions for new diets of habitats: digestive, metabolic, respiratory, muscular-skeletal…
Often, habitat changes have also demanded neural modifications to provide appropriate new instincts; no one can thrive in the ocean, for example, without the right hardwired reflexes…
Some neural changes have gone beyond new instincts, though. There are species of exuberants who’ve changed aspects of language, perception, and cognition.
One of the citizens in a gleisner body asks if the “dream apes” - former humans who wanted to be at one with nature - are an example of this.
At one extreme. Their ancestors stripped back the language centres to the level of higher primates. They still have a stronger general intelligence than any other primate, but their material culture has been reduced dramatically - and they can no longer modify themselves, even if they want to. I doubt they even understand their own origins any more.
The dream apes are an exception, though - a deliberate renunciation of possibilities. Most exuberants have tried more constructive changes: developing new ways of mapping the physical world into their minds: and adding specialised neural structures to handle new categories. There are exuberants who can manipulate the most sophisticated, abstract concepts in genetics, meteorology, biochemistry or ecology as intuitively as any static can think about a rock or a plant or an animal with the “common sense” about those things which comes from a few million years of evolution. And there are others who’ve simply modified ancestral neural structures to find out how that changes their thinking - who’ve headed out in search of new possibilities, with no specific goals in mind…
The only trouble with all this exploration is… some species of exuberants have changed so much that they can’t communicate with anyone else any more. Different groups have rushed off in their own directions, trying out new kinds of minds - and now they can barely make sense of each other, even with software intermediaries. It’s not just the question of language - or at least, not the simple question that language was for the statics, when everyone had basically identical brains. Once different communities start carving up the world into different categories, and caring about wildly different things, it becomes impossible to have a global culture in anything like the pre-Introdus sense. We’re fragmenting. We’re losing each other.
One of the characters asks how the bridgers are trying to solve the problem. Someone says they are “trying to plug the gaps” before Liana continues.
Taking the ancestral neural structures as a starting point, we’ve been introducing small changes with every generation. But instead of modifying everyone in the same direction, our children are not only different from their parents, they’re increasingly different from each other. Each generation is more diverse than the one before…
Instead of whole populations jumping en masse to opposite ends of the spectrum for some neural trait - giving rise to two distinct groups with no common ground - we’ve always scattered evenly across the whole range. That way, nobody is cut off, no one is alienated, because any given person’s “circle” - the group of people with whom they can easily communicate - always overlaps with someone else’s, someone outside the first circle… whose own circle also overlaps with someone else again… until one way or another, everyone is covered.
You could easily find two people here who can barely understand each other - because they’re as different as exuberants from two wildly divergent lines - but here, there’ll always be a chain of living relatives who can bridge the gap. With a few intermediaries - right now, four at the most - any bridger can communicate with any other.
To conclude the explanation, another character said that setting up a chain to reach the most remote exuberants could take some time, adding that the process is “not a party trick we can turn on at a moment’s notice.”
The idea of bridgers - people who can link up different groups when lines of communication are fraying - is a powerful metaphor for these times of fierce culture war and low asabiya (unity in the face of a common enemy). People who split off from one tribal grouping and find common cause with another side, despite disagreeing on other basic points, are doing important work. We should support them, rather than yelling at them or accusing them of treachery.
I can think of several contemporary examples. Free-trade conservatives, who rightfully point out that making imports more expensive through tariffs will inevitably mean that prices will go up generally (inflation), deserve our support during Donald Trump’s second term in the US. It is worth giving a shout-out to right-leaning commentators with “late-onset Trump dementia syndrome”.
We also need to give a hat-tip to the old-school feminists, who pushed back against frictionless gender self-identification - a cause that was popular on the progressive side of the fence before Trump’s second victory in November 2024. We should be particularly grateful to those feminists who refused to “misgender” individual trans people while criticising the likely unintended consequences of self-ID if it became the law of the land.
The Catalan Socialists, who accept some aspects of Catalan-nationalist narratives without arguing for the creation of a new state, also deserve a little sympathy. They tend to be shot by both sides. Supporters of independence see them as traitors to the cause, while constitutionalists see them as being wishy washy sellouts. Of course, this uncomfortable middle-ground positioning makes the party the most-voted force in this corner of Spain. The party’s regional leader, Salvador Illa, a technocrat with a philosophy degree and training in management, remains ahead in the polls. He is about to turn 59; and has the potential to govern for at least a decade to come.
We can think of many different examples, from socially progressive people who still go to church to socially conservative people who ask lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) friends or relatives what they can do to help. We need a lot more of all of this!
Supporting the misfits who bridge two different communities without buying a wholesale worldview resonates hard with me because of my own position. I am a socially progressive and secular philosophy graduate. Many people like me tend to be critical of capitalism. However, my long years in the trenches as a financial journalist have taught me that market-based solutions really do work. People are often bewildered by my worldview: I have been called both a “rojo” and a “facha” by Spanish culture warriors on social media!
The comments are closed, as always when I offer a little reality-based feedback to the Catalan independence movement. If you subscribe, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a chance. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Culture war (part one and part two)
Catalan Socialists (part one and part two)
Further Reading
Diaspora by Greg Egan
This essay is released with a CC BY-NY-ND license. Please link to sharpenyouraxe.substack.com if you re-use this material.
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If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the fourth-anniversary post. You can also find an ultra-cheap Kindle book here. If you want to read the book on your phone, tablet or computer, you can download the Kindle software for Android, Apple or Windows for free.
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