21st Century Man: A Short Biography of FM-2030
Fereidoun M. Esfandiary was born October 15, 1930, in Brussels. Just shy of 70 years later, in July 2000, a man named FM-2030 died in New York City. Most people would say that it was still Fereidoun who died that day, that he had simply changed his name. One cannot know what Fereidoun would have thought about the matter, but FM-2030’s opinion is clear.
“I am not who I was ten years ago,” FM-2030 once said, “and certainly not who I will be in twenty years.”
The name FM-2030, which became his legal name in 1988, came from Fereidoun’s intense optimism.
“2030 is a magical number,” he wrote in a one of his notebooks, “because 2030 will be a magical time.” He believed this wholeheartedly, just as he believed that he would be around to see his 100th birthday that year.
FM-2030 was the son of an Iranian diplomat. That he was born away from his homeland does not seem to have caused him any of the distress that is usually associated with such displacement, nor does the fact that by age 11, he had lived in embassies and consulates in 17 countries, including Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Israel.
Instead, Fereidoun’s childhood was by all accounts a happy one. FM-2030 consistently expressed that moving frequently during childhood is an excellent way for a person to gain a sense of his or her relation to the world. At 18, Fereidoun would travel to England to represent Iran as a member of its 1948 Olympic basketball and wrestling teams.
The longing for a homeland would have been unthinkable to FM-2030; the notion of his being Iranian or Belgian would have struck him as outdated and provincial. FM-2030 was one of not too many people who can accurately be called cosmopolitan, a true citizen of the world, at home anywhere, and this designation, though remarkable, was one of the least interesting things about him.
FM-2030 is primarily remembered for being a writer. He is the author of three works of fiction and four works of nonfiction, the latter of which all clarify and expand on what may be called his social philosophy. This was not an easy task. FM-2030’s philosophy reached across time and through space. Its aims were ephemeral and revolutionary, but its precepts were surprisingly simple.
To define him widely, one can call FM-2030 a futurist. To narrow it down a bit more, he was a transhumanist. Not just “a” transhumanist, though; FM-2030 was the first transhumanist. He created the term to mean “transitional human”, the transition being to posthumanity, a vague future state where the descendents of modern human beings have bumped themselves up to the next rung of the evolutionary ladder by force of will and technological modification, making death and all human suffering obsolete.
But while many of today’s transhumanists get caught up in talking about fringe science and speculate endlessly on the machines that the immortal posthumans will make for and of themselves, FM-2030 was concerned with social change. To him immortality was not the goal, it was the first step.
“The most basic urgent problem facing us is death,” FM-2030 wrote. “All other human constraints are derivative. Death casts a pall over all of life. So long as we are terminal we cannot enhance the basic quality of life. So long as there is death no one is free.”
What may sound like rhetoric to the average reader was written in absolute sincerity. FM-2030 described mortal life as “a biological accident trapped in a very small speck in Time and Space… A momentary flash of consciousness.” As long as people lived their whole lives knowing that they would die, he argued, no political nor spiritual solution could ever bring about a real change.
FM-2030 had a unique writing style. He liked to append the prefixes trans- and tele- to signify movement or distance. To “translive” meant to live in many places. Teleducation was to learn from a remote school.
At the beginning of his book “Are You Transhuman?” he lays out some words which he thinks are anachronistic and unsuited for modernity.
Instead of “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”, he liked the term “lover”, or even better just “friend.” The former he thought sounded juvenile, and he saw no reason to separate people with such a distinction. Rather than relationships, people would have “linkups” as this did not presume a high level of exclusivity, or as he saw it, ownership.
Instead of “promiscuous”, he liked the word “open” or “fluid” as promiscuity implied something negative, where he saw open relationships as the best kind for the future.
He also disliked courtesy titles, from “sir” or “madame” even to “doctor”.
“Do you address people as Excellency or Eminence or Highness?” he wrote. “Why do we need titles at all? Why not address people by their names? This certainly moves us toward greater equality.”
He opposed terms such as “free world” or “third world” as they set up a hierarchy, and “foreigner” or “alien” as they presumed an “us vs. them” mentality. Similarly, he saw terms like “Middle East” or “Far East” as holdovers from European colonialism, and as being demeaning to the people from those regions.
Finally, FM-2030 did not use the word “man” to refer neutrally to the human race. The word “humankind” encompasses everyone.
His use of punctuation was also quirky. He never used commas in his nonfiction, and was enamored of em-dashes, which could make his writing come off as rushed or even clumsy. But that perception, he thought, was a product of outdated 20th-Century values.
Like many others, he saw that attention spans were dwindling. By shifting focus from forms such as literature and theater to radio and television, he noticed that the average person was being adapted to expect more information and more entertainment in increasingly compressed amounts of time. Unlike most observers, FM-2030 did not see this as a problem. It was the inevitable product of social progress. He went so far as to say that this compression was a good thing.
“People interviewed on television often express frustration at not having ‘enough time to explain’”, he noted. “The problem is not with television. We have to learn to compress our thoughts more effectively. Electronic media such as TV and telephone demand a cohesion and organization of thoughts that print seldom does.”
He noted that early callers to radio and television talk shows took a long time to get their points across, but that they were, on average, speeding up as radio and television became commonplace.
“Radio and TV helped listeners organize their thoughts and streamline their delivery,” FM-2030 said. “The result is that today’s callers are far more succinct.”
He called this “speech compression” and said that it was a boon to us, not the menace that it is usually seen as. One advantage, said FM-2030, was that people would soon be using voice-activated machines on a daily basis, and that speaking as succinctly as possible would be a necessary skill for their operation.
Even in the present, people who communicate more quickly simply have more time and can receive more information than those who communicate slowly.
As unpopular as it has remained, this view may not be far off. From an evolutionary standpoint, people who can adapt to suit their environment are in an advantageous position, even when it does not appear so at first glance.
Recently a study revealed that in humans, intelligence is generally correlated with how late an individual goes to bed. That is, those who stayed up latest tend to be more intelligent than their early-bird counterparts. The data was surprising. Night owls are generally at a disadvantage, as they have a harder time adapting to modern work schedules, but scientists theorize that night owls were actually adapted to a much earlier condition: the ability to stay up late came with the advent of the city, when people could control light sources after dark.
Despite its evident drawbacks, FM-2030’s view on attention span may not be so far off after all. The true force at work here, he wrote, is “the ability to shift contexts at will.”
Not just literature but all art was undergoing a change, FM-2030 wrote. He thought that “old culture”, things like opera, theater, ballet, symphonies, and paintings, belonged to a different time. He turned instead to new forms, IMAX and big screen cinema, computer-generated images, electronic synthesizers, which he said better suited the values of his time. But to him, art was not confined to the museum or the concert.
“Once you have awakened to the esthetics of a helicopter gyrating in the air or a supersonic aircraft gliding across the sky,” he said, “it is perhaps easier to see that today’s sculptures are everywhere around us—out of the confinement of museums and galleries.”
FM-2030 saw the transhumanist way of life as essentially a method of increasing human freedom. He wanted to “overcome the more basic tyrannies of nature—the arbitrariness of evolution—the limitations of the human body—the confinements of Time and Space.”
Talk of freedom fills his works, especially “Up-Wingers”, the most political book he wrote. But it is not freedom as we are used to defining it. FM-2030 wanted freedom from nature, which he saw as being unequal to the task of deciding the course of human lives. Choice was everything to FM-2030, and that simply was not an option if we let evolution take its natural course.
“How free am I,” he asked, “if I cannot choose my own body my own brain my own gender the color of my skin my biological rhythms? How free am I trapped in a predetermined biological strait-jacket in whose selection I have had absolutely nothing to say?”
To remedy these problems, he advocated the wide-spread use of prosthetics and other implants. He saw especially great potential for implants that would affect the function of the brain. In addition to remedial treatments, such as those that would fix mood and personality disorders, FM-2030 called for “upgrades” to the brain, which could increase intelligence and cognitive ability.
More radically, he hoped to see transceivers implanted in the brain that would allow instantaneous communication between individuals and the ability to search databases from anywhere on the planet.
It was not as if these predictions had no precursors. Mundane as they were in comparison, FM-2030 himself had a replacement hip and a false tooth. When asked how old he was, FM-2030 was known to respond that the question was meaningless, since not all parts of him were the same age. After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (there was and still is no surgical treatment for the disease), he called the pancreas “a stupid, dumb, wretched organ.”
Despite the unfamiliarity of the methods he proscribed, FM-2030 dismissed any arguments based on the opinion that what he was proposing was “unnatural” or “artificial.”
“The fact is that anything that unfolds in this world is part of nature and cannot be artificial,” he wrote in “Are You Transhuman?” “Prosthetic replacement parts made of silicone and Dacron and oxygen are just as natural as organic parts made of calcium and proteins and iron.”
FM-2030 was also an advocate of genetic treatments which he believed would be capable of altering any part of the human body. He was in favor of in vitro fertilization and selective modification of genes before birth. Still controversial today, these ideas were radically upsetting during the 1970s and 80s when FM-2030 was writing. In 1978 after the first baby was born to in vitro fertilization, the Catholic church immediately objected on the ground that it separated procreation from marriage.
Such as separation, however, was exactly what FM-2030 wanted. Like many thinkers who were formulating their ideas during the 1960s, FM-2030 both witnessed and desired the breakdown of traditional societal roles and mores. He was not advocating “Free Love”, though, and he abhorred the mysticism of many of his contemporaries. Instead, he saw institutions such as marriage and family as belonging to the old world. He argued that these traditions were not only repressive and outdated, but actually harmful to psychological well-being.
FM-2030 called family a relic of “our tribal past,” and he hated tribalism. The idea that a child should be brought up to perceive some people as belonging to his or her group and others as outsiders was anathema to his vision of a free future. Instead, he advocated that children should be raised by large groups of adults along with many other children, viewing everyone as part of his or her family.
This ability to view everyone as important and as friendly was key to FM-2030’s future. There was no place in it for religious, national, ethnic, or regional feuds. By raising children in large groups with many “parents”, he thought that children would grow up without the us versus them mentality.
Romantic relationships would change, too. In a talk that he gave at UCLA which was later condensed into an article called “Intimacy in a Fluid World”, FM-2030 laid out some of the forms that new relationships would take, and the rationale for the change. The bulk of the talk was devoted to setting out four guidelines for new relationships.
“First,” he said, “we must begin by acknowledging the obvious inevitable fact that the context has changed. Trying desperately to fit yesterday’s patterns into today’s world won’t work.”
The idea of changing context would figure prominently in FM-2030’s work. He saw many of the lifestyle changes that he was proposing not as breaks with the norm, but as adjustments to the way things had become.
“Second, under no circumstances should we set up our parents as models; our parents were wonderful, but their values and their worlds are not ours.”
Judging current relationships by the standards of the pasts was a main cause of anxiety, according to FM-2030. Assuming that a successful relationship should look the same way that it did in the last generation would only lead to self-blame when relationships did not conform to old standards.
“Third, we need to break out of the cultural imperative of an addictive type of bonding or attachment that we can call imprinting.”
FM-2030 thought that one should avoid becoming too attached to a partner. People were going through many more relationships, and thus many more breakups, than ever before. If one were to become too attached to each of the people he or she dated, it would be unhealthy to go through so many breakups. By becoming attached to a single person, one would also be robbed of experiencing a diverse range of people and activities with FM-2030 thought was essential to the new world.
He suggested that friendships could take the place that marriages or long-term relationships used to. This way, one could have a wide variety of romantic partners while still having deep, lasting relationships with friends.
“Fourth, the duration of linkups [his word for this new type of relationship] is no longer a gauge of their success or failure. We live in a discontinuous world. The quality, the success and the profundity of our involvements no longer depend on their permanency or duration.” If one were to experience as much as possible, he or she would have to adapt to shorter relationships. Especially if our lifespans were to increase as FM-2030 believed they would, staying with one person for an entire lifetime would become more and more problematic.
He also saw having shorter relationships as a way to avoid the jealousy and possessiveness which he saw as harmful effects of long-term relationships.
One may find his predictions far-fetched or his suggestions unseemly, but FM-2030 cannot be called insincere. As much as possible, FM-2030 lived the life that he advocated for others.
Though his ideas about the future are well-recorded, much less is known about FM-2030’s present. One of the few sources of information about FM-2030’s later life is Flora Schnall. Schnall met FM-2030 at a party in the 1960s. He had just completed his last work of fiction, “Identity Card”, and he was still going by the name he was given at birth. After meeting a few times through mutual friends, Schnall and FM-2030 grew close.
“We became very close friends,” Schnall once told a reporter, “and our lives together were interlocked even though we lived in different cities, and did not have an exclusive relation.”
Schnall said that she found his ideas very exciting. Accordingly, neither she nor FM-2030 ever married or had children.
“We did have a very close, intimate relationship,” Schnall said, “sharing ideas and goals. He was one of the kindest men I’ve ever met and people all around the world constantly sought him out for advice and guidance.”
Schnall still runs a Web site, fm2030.com, which collects interviews with FM-2030, as well as articles written for and about him. Schnall also collaborated with members of FM-2030’s family (his brother and two sisters) to collect his papers for archival at the New York Public Library.
FM-2030 also remained faithful to his view that no one should stay with one profession for their entire lives, another suggestion that would become increasingly important as human lifespans were stretched toward infinity.
“Not all change presumes growth,” he wrote in “Are You Transhuman?”. “Some people go through the mimings of change but change very little. Changes reflect fluidity [a trait which he thought essential to a happy life] when there is a corresponding inner change and growth.”
FM-2030 was referring specifically to the common practice of advancing in position in the same career for one’s entire life, even if the work was unappealing. He found no reason not to try out as many jobs as one liked in a lifetime. The only drawback to such a strategy was that it would be less financially rewarding. FM-2030 put no importance on wealth, writing that the point of life should be enjoyment and leisure.
The coming years, he said, would bring enough abundance that the capitalistic system would give way to a money-less, post-scarcity economy. FM-2030 predicted that the post-scarcity economy would be precipitated by machines capable of constructing products on demand. While they are not as versatile as the ones that he foresaw, such machines are appearing today. Known as 3D printers, these machines can manufacture a 3-dimensional object by “printing” successive layers of the object. This method is fairly widespread, and some 3D printers are even available to consumers.
More impressively, similar technology exists to “print” using living cells, thus enabling doctors to create replacement organs as needed. So far, no one has produced a functional organ, but the machines have been used to create working arteries.
FM-2030 himself followed the principle of fluidity. After graduating from college, Esfandiary followed his father into diplomacy, serving on the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine at age 22. After two years, however, he would grow tired of politics. He spent most of his life as a professor, teaching at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, the University of California in Los Angeles, and Florida International University in Miami. While teaching he was also developing his career as a writer, publishing three novels from 1959 to 1966, then writing four nonfiction books between 1970 and 1989. During this time, and up until his death, he also wrote for the New York Times, the Nation, the Saturday Review, and the Village Voice.
When FM-2030 moved from New York to Los Angeles, his brother, Austin, came to help him pack his belongings. But instead of loading them onto a U-Haul or shipping them to his new residence in LA, FM-2030 and his brother took his possessions, all of them, and gave them away.
“He said that he had been in New York long enough,” Austin remembered, “it was time for a change. He never wanted to get stale.”
In his fiction, FM-2030 wrote of the hopelessness of optimism in the face of social systems which focus on suffering and punishment. In his final novel, “Identity Card”, an Iranian man attempts to acquire an ID card so that he can leave the country. The original manuscript was intercepted at a post office in Tehran. FM-2030 had to write the whole thing over again, and two American friends of his helped to smuggle it back home.
The book was recently translated into German. Its translator, Ilija Trojanow, says that the book is about “the search for a new identity of one’s own; one, however, that no longer fits the given identity patterns of one’s home country.”
As he points out, and as FM-2030 predicted, “the number of migrants is increasing all over the world; people are increasingly living, studying or working outside of their countries of origin.” The migrants are living in a transitional period; they are able to embrace FM-2030’s ideas of global rather than national identity, while the rest of the world still insists on labeling them as members of their former countries.
Future-obsessed though he was, FM-2030’s early life, his Fereidoun days, had a clear effect on his views later in life. When, in numerous books and articles, FM-2030 forsakes national identity he is free to do so because the child Fereidoun was raised across the globe. He completed elementary school in Iran and England, then attended a Jesuit high school in Jerusalem. After moving back to England to compete in the 1948 Olympic games, Fereidoun came to America and graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1952. He often spoke fondly of these nomadic days, and recommended the same lifestyle to others.
When he wrote that family is part of “our tribal past” and that it ought to give way to groups of people raising children as group, he is not doing so out of anger toward his own family.
In the preface to “Are You Transhuman?”, the last nonfiction book he finished before his death, FM-2030 wrote, “I wish to express particular appreciation to… my mother and father who gave me one of the loveliest gifts parents can offer their children—the opportunity to grow up all over the planet.”
When he wrote wrote that “competition saps everyone’s energy” and proposed that all competitive sports be given up in favor of cooperative, creative pursuits, it was not out of any kind of spite or fear of incompetence. He had competed in the Olympics, and saw there how much energy was being spent on proving who was the best at any given sport, something which he thought was a waste of time.
Missing entirely from FM-2030’s past is what a shrewd psychoanalyst may be keeping an eye out for: any hint of trauma or tragedy that would propel FM-2030 into his denial of death. Neither of these things inspired him. One of his criticisms with conventional philosophical and political views was that they were too focused on despair and pain, and not enough on potential.
“The entire Right/Left establishment is still death-oriented,” FM-2030 wrote in his 1973 book “Up-Wingers”. The title is a reference to his proposal of a new ideology to transcend the right-wing/left-wing dynamic. He called his new orientation, somewhat awkwardly, up-wing. “Up-wingers are resigned to nothing. We accept no human predicament as permanent no tragedy as irreversible no goal as unattainable.”
FM-2030 saw optimism as not only a philosophical position, but a political one. Optimism was essential to the creation of the world which he thought would bring prosperity to all.
“There can be no commitment,” he wrote, “if there is no will no self-esteem no hope.”
Optimism was not a matter of hoping against reason for FM-2030. It was the natural mode of the times. In “Up-Wingers” he pointed out four reasons why now (his now, 1973 at the time of writing) was the first time in history that optimism became not a choice but a rational conclusion.
“Until a few years ago,” he wrote, “children the world over grew up in destitution or in repressive overprotective environments. The orientation to failure began early in life.”
Destitution, caused by scarcity, trained people from their youth not to expect anything good out of life.
“Until recent times people—particularly in Western cultures—were brought up with the conviction that they were wicked and did not deserve happiness or success.”
Trapped by both religion (which taught that humans were born sinful) and capitalistic culture (which interpreted leisure as laziness) people grew up thinking that there was something incurably wrong with them for wanting to enjoy themselves.
“Until recently people did not have opportunities to see first-hand different cultures at varying levels of historical development.”
Traveling not only fostered a sense of world-wide community, it allowed people to see that things do change, that poverty and suffering are not always inherent in life.
“Throughout the ages people were conditioned by theologies and philosophies of submission—resignation—fatalism—nihilism—despair—nothingness.”
The predominant thinkers of the last thousand years had taught not only that humankind deserved to suffer, but that it was all that could be expected. FM-2030’s ideal of optimism was not a minor shift in philosophy, it was a whole different direction. Not since the ancient Greeks had any thought that happiness was a noble goal on its own. But even their hedonism was limited by death. FM-2030 saw that as humans took control of their own evolution, an entirely new kind of optimism would have to emerge. With it would come the end of tyranny and the end of suffering.
The corrupting force he saw in politics, as in all areas of life, was power. This was a simple observation for anyone to make, but for FM-2030 it was backed up by the fact that he saw his home country go through stages of modernization, only to be stifled by despotic rulers who took the country by force.
FM-2030 declared his distaste for “saviors and almighties”, power-oriented professions, national leaders, heroes and idols, hierarchy, and the use of force. However, he thought that the era of leaders and followers was coming to an end.
“As information decentralizes the relative power of governments decline,” he wrote. He pointed out that movements such as civil rights, women’s rights, the environmental movement, and sexual liberation all started with the actions of citizens, not the government.
History continues to validate the idea. Free access to information had a large part to play in this year’s Arab Spring movements. Citizens of many Arab nations learned of savage acts of violence initiated by their government, and were able to learn of new developments in ongoing protests, such as one man’s self-immolation to protest corruption in Tunisia. Thanks to the Internet and mobile phones, protesters were able to organize much more efficiently than ever before. Even once the governments of these countries blocked access the Internet, people found ways around the blockades. The exchange of information about how to protect oneself from the police and the ability to broadcast a message to the world helped to keep protesters safe, and to keep governments from retaliating too harshly.
Even today, updates from the Occupy movement are posted to the Internet daily, allowing people to see the violence with which police are reacting to such movements even when professional reporters have been prohibited from telling the story.
When FM-2030 wrote that he wanted to see a government not based on some people having power over others, he was not envisioning anarchy. Instead, he saw a form of democracy which could only be realized in his version of the future, backed by technology and abundance.
Much like the English monarchy, FM-2030 predicted that the American presidency would fall to a figurehead position.
“Thanks to national television,” he wrote, “presidential elections will probably grow more glitzy—but they will have less and less substance.”
Real political power would instead by exercised by the people, via a system of referendums. In his vision of a post-scarcity world, everyone could have a transceiver implant, basically a modern smart phone hooked up directly to their brain. Using this system, citizens could vote on referendums as often as needed to determine the laws of their country.
The idea is no less startling today than it was when he wrote about it. The thought of having a universal brain implant instantly conjures images resembling the dystopian futures of the likes of Warren Ellis and Philip K. Dick.
To FM-2030, though, this kind of path would be almost impossible to take. In his mind, a near-utopian state followed quite naturally from the starting points of longevity and abundance. Without fear of death, and without fear of poverty, competition would naturally give way to cooperation, he said. There would simply be no reason to seek success at your fellow humans’ expense, because their gain would not mean your loss.
Belief alone will not sustain a life. Despite all his hope and optimism, FM-2030 was living in a world where his dreams existed only in writing. It must have felt less like the present and more like the pre-future.
Twenty years before his death, before he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, FM-2030 signed a contract with the Alcor Life Extenstion Foundation. Alcor practices cryonics, “a speculative life support technology that seeks to preserve human life in a state that will be viable and treatable by future medicine.” Cryonics has always been controversial and not taken entirely seriously. Cryonics usually brings to mind “freezing”, which was the original version of the practice.
On July 8, 2000 FM-2030 died in New York City and was transported to the Alcor facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was the first human being to undergo vitrification, a more advanced process which transforms (in FM-2030’s case) the brain into a glass-like state, which avoids the damage caused by ice crystals which are formed by traditional cryonics. The process was shown to be reversible by a company called Twenty-First Century Medicine, which vitrified and then restored a rabbit kidney, implanted it in a rabbit, and saw that the rabbit was completely viable afterward. To date, the process has not been effective on the nervous system.
Despite the lack of evidence supporting vitrification, FM-2030 was of course optimistic. Flora Schnall carries his optimism with her, asking, “when [not if] he is revived, will he remember who he was?”
FM-2030 said, “I am a 21st century person who was accidentally launched into the 20th. I have a deep nostalgia for the future.” No doubt as he died, knowing that he was soon to be vitrified, he saw it not as the final end, but as a way of getting home.
“I am not who I was ten years ago,” FM-2030 once said, “and certainly not who I will be in twenty years.”
The name FM-2030, which became his legal name in 1988, came from Fereidoun’s intense optimism.
“2030 is a magical number,” he wrote in a one of his notebooks, “because 2030 will be a magical time.” He believed this wholeheartedly, just as he believed that he would be around to see his 100th birthday that year.
FM-2030 was the son of an Iranian diplomat. That he was born away from his homeland does not seem to have caused him any of the distress that is usually associated with such displacement, nor does the fact that by age 11, he had lived in embassies and consulates in 17 countries, including Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Israel.
Instead, Fereidoun’s childhood was by all accounts a happy one. FM-2030 consistently expressed that moving frequently during childhood is an excellent way for a person to gain a sense of his or her relation to the world. At 18, Fereidoun would travel to England to represent Iran as a member of its 1948 Olympic basketball and wrestling teams.
The longing for a homeland would have been unthinkable to FM-2030; the notion of his being Iranian or Belgian would have struck him as outdated and provincial. FM-2030 was one of not too many people who can accurately be called cosmopolitan, a true citizen of the world, at home anywhere, and this designation, though remarkable, was one of the least interesting things about him.
FM-2030 is primarily remembered for being a writer. He is the author of three works of fiction and four works of nonfiction, the latter of which all clarify and expand on what may be called his social philosophy. This was not an easy task. FM-2030’s philosophy reached across time and through space. Its aims were ephemeral and revolutionary, but its precepts were surprisingly simple.
To define him widely, one can call FM-2030 a futurist. To narrow it down a bit more, he was a transhumanist. Not just “a” transhumanist, though; FM-2030 was the first transhumanist. He created the term to mean “transitional human”, the transition being to posthumanity, a vague future state where the descendents of modern human beings have bumped themselves up to the next rung of the evolutionary ladder by force of will and technological modification, making death and all human suffering obsolete.
But while many of today’s transhumanists get caught up in talking about fringe science and speculate endlessly on the machines that the immortal posthumans will make for and of themselves, FM-2030 was concerned with social change. To him immortality was not the goal, it was the first step.
“The most basic urgent problem facing us is death,” FM-2030 wrote. “All other human constraints are derivative. Death casts a pall over all of life. So long as we are terminal we cannot enhance the basic quality of life. So long as there is death no one is free.”
What may sound like rhetoric to the average reader was written in absolute sincerity. FM-2030 described mortal life as “a biological accident trapped in a very small speck in Time and Space… A momentary flash of consciousness.” As long as people lived their whole lives knowing that they would die, he argued, no political nor spiritual solution could ever bring about a real change.
FM-2030 had a unique writing style. He liked to append the prefixes trans- and tele- to signify movement or distance. To “translive” meant to live in many places. Teleducation was to learn from a remote school.
At the beginning of his book “Are You Transhuman?” he lays out some words which he thinks are anachronistic and unsuited for modernity.
Instead of “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”, he liked the term “lover”, or even better just “friend.” The former he thought sounded juvenile, and he saw no reason to separate people with such a distinction. Rather than relationships, people would have “linkups” as this did not presume a high level of exclusivity, or as he saw it, ownership.
Instead of “promiscuous”, he liked the word “open” or “fluid” as promiscuity implied something negative, where he saw open relationships as the best kind for the future.
He also disliked courtesy titles, from “sir” or “madame” even to “doctor”.
“Do you address people as Excellency or Eminence or Highness?” he wrote. “Why do we need titles at all? Why not address people by their names? This certainly moves us toward greater equality.”
He opposed terms such as “free world” or “third world” as they set up a hierarchy, and “foreigner” or “alien” as they presumed an “us vs. them” mentality. Similarly, he saw terms like “Middle East” or “Far East” as holdovers from European colonialism, and as being demeaning to the people from those regions.
Finally, FM-2030 did not use the word “man” to refer neutrally to the human race. The word “humankind” encompasses everyone.
His use of punctuation was also quirky. He never used commas in his nonfiction, and was enamored of em-dashes, which could make his writing come off as rushed or even clumsy. But that perception, he thought, was a product of outdated 20th-Century values.
Like many others, he saw that attention spans were dwindling. By shifting focus from forms such as literature and theater to radio and television, he noticed that the average person was being adapted to expect more information and more entertainment in increasingly compressed amounts of time. Unlike most observers, FM-2030 did not see this as a problem. It was the inevitable product of social progress. He went so far as to say that this compression was a good thing.
“People interviewed on television often express frustration at not having ‘enough time to explain’”, he noted. “The problem is not with television. We have to learn to compress our thoughts more effectively. Electronic media such as TV and telephone demand a cohesion and organization of thoughts that print seldom does.”
He noted that early callers to radio and television talk shows took a long time to get their points across, but that they were, on average, speeding up as radio and television became commonplace.
“Radio and TV helped listeners organize their thoughts and streamline their delivery,” FM-2030 said. “The result is that today’s callers are far more succinct.”
He called this “speech compression” and said that it was a boon to us, not the menace that it is usually seen as. One advantage, said FM-2030, was that people would soon be using voice-activated machines on a daily basis, and that speaking as succinctly as possible would be a necessary skill for their operation.
Even in the present, people who communicate more quickly simply have more time and can receive more information than those who communicate slowly.
As unpopular as it has remained, this view may not be far off. From an evolutionary standpoint, people who can adapt to suit their environment are in an advantageous position, even when it does not appear so at first glance.
Recently a study revealed that in humans, intelligence is generally correlated with how late an individual goes to bed. That is, those who stayed up latest tend to be more intelligent than their early-bird counterparts. The data was surprising. Night owls are generally at a disadvantage, as they have a harder time adapting to modern work schedules, but scientists theorize that night owls were actually adapted to a much earlier condition: the ability to stay up late came with the advent of the city, when people could control light sources after dark.
Despite its evident drawbacks, FM-2030’s view on attention span may not be so far off after all. The true force at work here, he wrote, is “the ability to shift contexts at will.”
Not just literature but all art was undergoing a change, FM-2030 wrote. He thought that “old culture”, things like opera, theater, ballet, symphonies, and paintings, belonged to a different time. He turned instead to new forms, IMAX and big screen cinema, computer-generated images, electronic synthesizers, which he said better suited the values of his time. But to him, art was not confined to the museum or the concert.
“Once you have awakened to the esthetics of a helicopter gyrating in the air or a supersonic aircraft gliding across the sky,” he said, “it is perhaps easier to see that today’s sculptures are everywhere around us—out of the confinement of museums and galleries.”
FM-2030 saw the transhumanist way of life as essentially a method of increasing human freedom. He wanted to “overcome the more basic tyrannies of nature—the arbitrariness of evolution—the limitations of the human body—the confinements of Time and Space.”
Talk of freedom fills his works, especially “Up-Wingers”, the most political book he wrote. But it is not freedom as we are used to defining it. FM-2030 wanted freedom from nature, which he saw as being unequal to the task of deciding the course of human lives. Choice was everything to FM-2030, and that simply was not an option if we let evolution take its natural course.
“How free am I,” he asked, “if I cannot choose my own body my own brain my own gender the color of my skin my biological rhythms? How free am I trapped in a predetermined biological strait-jacket in whose selection I have had absolutely nothing to say?”
To remedy these problems, he advocated the wide-spread use of prosthetics and other implants. He saw especially great potential for implants that would affect the function of the brain. In addition to remedial treatments, such as those that would fix mood and personality disorders, FM-2030 called for “upgrades” to the brain, which could increase intelligence and cognitive ability.
More radically, he hoped to see transceivers implanted in the brain that would allow instantaneous communication between individuals and the ability to search databases from anywhere on the planet.
It was not as if these predictions had no precursors. Mundane as they were in comparison, FM-2030 himself had a replacement hip and a false tooth. When asked how old he was, FM-2030 was known to respond that the question was meaningless, since not all parts of him were the same age. After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (there was and still is no surgical treatment for the disease), he called the pancreas “a stupid, dumb, wretched organ.”
Despite the unfamiliarity of the methods he proscribed, FM-2030 dismissed any arguments based on the opinion that what he was proposing was “unnatural” or “artificial.”
“The fact is that anything that unfolds in this world is part of nature and cannot be artificial,” he wrote in “Are You Transhuman?” “Prosthetic replacement parts made of silicone and Dacron and oxygen are just as natural as organic parts made of calcium and proteins and iron.”
FM-2030 was also an advocate of genetic treatments which he believed would be capable of altering any part of the human body. He was in favor of in vitro fertilization and selective modification of genes before birth. Still controversial today, these ideas were radically upsetting during the 1970s and 80s when FM-2030 was writing. In 1978 after the first baby was born to in vitro fertilization, the Catholic church immediately objected on the ground that it separated procreation from marriage.
Such as separation, however, was exactly what FM-2030 wanted. Like many thinkers who were formulating their ideas during the 1960s, FM-2030 both witnessed and desired the breakdown of traditional societal roles and mores. He was not advocating “Free Love”, though, and he abhorred the mysticism of many of his contemporaries. Instead, he saw institutions such as marriage and family as belonging to the old world. He argued that these traditions were not only repressive and outdated, but actually harmful to psychological well-being.
FM-2030 called family a relic of “our tribal past,” and he hated tribalism. The idea that a child should be brought up to perceive some people as belonging to his or her group and others as outsiders was anathema to his vision of a free future. Instead, he advocated that children should be raised by large groups of adults along with many other children, viewing everyone as part of his or her family.
This ability to view everyone as important and as friendly was key to FM-2030’s future. There was no place in it for religious, national, ethnic, or regional feuds. By raising children in large groups with many “parents”, he thought that children would grow up without the us versus them mentality.
Romantic relationships would change, too. In a talk that he gave at UCLA which was later condensed into an article called “Intimacy in a Fluid World”, FM-2030 laid out some of the forms that new relationships would take, and the rationale for the change. The bulk of the talk was devoted to setting out four guidelines for new relationships.
“First,” he said, “we must begin by acknowledging the obvious inevitable fact that the context has changed. Trying desperately to fit yesterday’s patterns into today’s world won’t work.”
The idea of changing context would figure prominently in FM-2030’s work. He saw many of the lifestyle changes that he was proposing not as breaks with the norm, but as adjustments to the way things had become.
“Second, under no circumstances should we set up our parents as models; our parents were wonderful, but their values and their worlds are not ours.”
Judging current relationships by the standards of the pasts was a main cause of anxiety, according to FM-2030. Assuming that a successful relationship should look the same way that it did in the last generation would only lead to self-blame when relationships did not conform to old standards.
“Third, we need to break out of the cultural imperative of an addictive type of bonding or attachment that we can call imprinting.”
FM-2030 thought that one should avoid becoming too attached to a partner. People were going through many more relationships, and thus many more breakups, than ever before. If one were to become too attached to each of the people he or she dated, it would be unhealthy to go through so many breakups. By becoming attached to a single person, one would also be robbed of experiencing a diverse range of people and activities with FM-2030 thought was essential to the new world.
He suggested that friendships could take the place that marriages or long-term relationships used to. This way, one could have a wide variety of romantic partners while still having deep, lasting relationships with friends.
“Fourth, the duration of linkups [his word for this new type of relationship] is no longer a gauge of their success or failure. We live in a discontinuous world. The quality, the success and the profundity of our involvements no longer depend on their permanency or duration.” If one were to experience as much as possible, he or she would have to adapt to shorter relationships. Especially if our lifespans were to increase as FM-2030 believed they would, staying with one person for an entire lifetime would become more and more problematic.
He also saw having shorter relationships as a way to avoid the jealousy and possessiveness which he saw as harmful effects of long-term relationships.
One may find his predictions far-fetched or his suggestions unseemly, but FM-2030 cannot be called insincere. As much as possible, FM-2030 lived the life that he advocated for others.
Though his ideas about the future are well-recorded, much less is known about FM-2030’s present. One of the few sources of information about FM-2030’s later life is Flora Schnall. Schnall met FM-2030 at a party in the 1960s. He had just completed his last work of fiction, “Identity Card”, and he was still going by the name he was given at birth. After meeting a few times through mutual friends, Schnall and FM-2030 grew close.
“We became very close friends,” Schnall once told a reporter, “and our lives together were interlocked even though we lived in different cities, and did not have an exclusive relation.”
Schnall said that she found his ideas very exciting. Accordingly, neither she nor FM-2030 ever married or had children.
“We did have a very close, intimate relationship,” Schnall said, “sharing ideas and goals. He was one of the kindest men I’ve ever met and people all around the world constantly sought him out for advice and guidance.”
Schnall still runs a Web site, fm2030.com, which collects interviews with FM-2030, as well as articles written for and about him. Schnall also collaborated with members of FM-2030’s family (his brother and two sisters) to collect his papers for archival at the New York Public Library.
FM-2030 also remained faithful to his view that no one should stay with one profession for their entire lives, another suggestion that would become increasingly important as human lifespans were stretched toward infinity.
“Not all change presumes growth,” he wrote in “Are You Transhuman?”. “Some people go through the mimings of change but change very little. Changes reflect fluidity [a trait which he thought essential to a happy life] when there is a corresponding inner change and growth.”
FM-2030 was referring specifically to the common practice of advancing in position in the same career for one’s entire life, even if the work was unappealing. He found no reason not to try out as many jobs as one liked in a lifetime. The only drawback to such a strategy was that it would be less financially rewarding. FM-2030 put no importance on wealth, writing that the point of life should be enjoyment and leisure.
The coming years, he said, would bring enough abundance that the capitalistic system would give way to a money-less, post-scarcity economy. FM-2030 predicted that the post-scarcity economy would be precipitated by machines capable of constructing products on demand. While they are not as versatile as the ones that he foresaw, such machines are appearing today. Known as 3D printers, these machines can manufacture a 3-dimensional object by “printing” successive layers of the object. This method is fairly widespread, and some 3D printers are even available to consumers.
More impressively, similar technology exists to “print” using living cells, thus enabling doctors to create replacement organs as needed. So far, no one has produced a functional organ, but the machines have been used to create working arteries.
FM-2030 himself followed the principle of fluidity. After graduating from college, Esfandiary followed his father into diplomacy, serving on the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine at age 22. After two years, however, he would grow tired of politics. He spent most of his life as a professor, teaching at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, the University of California in Los Angeles, and Florida International University in Miami. While teaching he was also developing his career as a writer, publishing three novels from 1959 to 1966, then writing four nonfiction books between 1970 and 1989. During this time, and up until his death, he also wrote for the New York Times, the Nation, the Saturday Review, and the Village Voice.
When FM-2030 moved from New York to Los Angeles, his brother, Austin, came to help him pack his belongings. But instead of loading them onto a U-Haul or shipping them to his new residence in LA, FM-2030 and his brother took his possessions, all of them, and gave them away.
“He said that he had been in New York long enough,” Austin remembered, “it was time for a change. He never wanted to get stale.”
In his fiction, FM-2030 wrote of the hopelessness of optimism in the face of social systems which focus on suffering and punishment. In his final novel, “Identity Card”, an Iranian man attempts to acquire an ID card so that he can leave the country. The original manuscript was intercepted at a post office in Tehran. FM-2030 had to write the whole thing over again, and two American friends of his helped to smuggle it back home.
The book was recently translated into German. Its translator, Ilija Trojanow, says that the book is about “the search for a new identity of one’s own; one, however, that no longer fits the given identity patterns of one’s home country.”
As he points out, and as FM-2030 predicted, “the number of migrants is increasing all over the world; people are increasingly living, studying or working outside of their countries of origin.” The migrants are living in a transitional period; they are able to embrace FM-2030’s ideas of global rather than national identity, while the rest of the world still insists on labeling them as members of their former countries.
Future-obsessed though he was, FM-2030’s early life, his Fereidoun days, had a clear effect on his views later in life. When, in numerous books and articles, FM-2030 forsakes national identity he is free to do so because the child Fereidoun was raised across the globe. He completed elementary school in Iran and England, then attended a Jesuit high school in Jerusalem. After moving back to England to compete in the 1948 Olympic games, Fereidoun came to America and graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1952. He often spoke fondly of these nomadic days, and recommended the same lifestyle to others.
When he wrote that family is part of “our tribal past” and that it ought to give way to groups of people raising children as group, he is not doing so out of anger toward his own family.
In the preface to “Are You Transhuman?”, the last nonfiction book he finished before his death, FM-2030 wrote, “I wish to express particular appreciation to… my mother and father who gave me one of the loveliest gifts parents can offer their children—the opportunity to grow up all over the planet.”
When he wrote wrote that “competition saps everyone’s energy” and proposed that all competitive sports be given up in favor of cooperative, creative pursuits, it was not out of any kind of spite or fear of incompetence. He had competed in the Olympics, and saw there how much energy was being spent on proving who was the best at any given sport, something which he thought was a waste of time.
Missing entirely from FM-2030’s past is what a shrewd psychoanalyst may be keeping an eye out for: any hint of trauma or tragedy that would propel FM-2030 into his denial of death. Neither of these things inspired him. One of his criticisms with conventional philosophical and political views was that they were too focused on despair and pain, and not enough on potential.
“The entire Right/Left establishment is still death-oriented,” FM-2030 wrote in his 1973 book “Up-Wingers”. The title is a reference to his proposal of a new ideology to transcend the right-wing/left-wing dynamic. He called his new orientation, somewhat awkwardly, up-wing. “Up-wingers are resigned to nothing. We accept no human predicament as permanent no tragedy as irreversible no goal as unattainable.”
FM-2030 saw optimism as not only a philosophical position, but a political one. Optimism was essential to the creation of the world which he thought would bring prosperity to all.
“There can be no commitment,” he wrote, “if there is no will no self-esteem no hope.”
Optimism was not a matter of hoping against reason for FM-2030. It was the natural mode of the times. In “Up-Wingers” he pointed out four reasons why now (his now, 1973 at the time of writing) was the first time in history that optimism became not a choice but a rational conclusion.
“Until a few years ago,” he wrote, “children the world over grew up in destitution or in repressive overprotective environments. The orientation to failure began early in life.”
Destitution, caused by scarcity, trained people from their youth not to expect anything good out of life.
“Until recent times people—particularly in Western cultures—were brought up with the conviction that they were wicked and did not deserve happiness or success.”
Trapped by both religion (which taught that humans were born sinful) and capitalistic culture (which interpreted leisure as laziness) people grew up thinking that there was something incurably wrong with them for wanting to enjoy themselves.
“Until recently people did not have opportunities to see first-hand different cultures at varying levels of historical development.”
Traveling not only fostered a sense of world-wide community, it allowed people to see that things do change, that poverty and suffering are not always inherent in life.
“Throughout the ages people were conditioned by theologies and philosophies of submission—resignation—fatalism—nihilism—despair—nothingness.”
The predominant thinkers of the last thousand years had taught not only that humankind deserved to suffer, but that it was all that could be expected. FM-2030’s ideal of optimism was not a minor shift in philosophy, it was a whole different direction. Not since the ancient Greeks had any thought that happiness was a noble goal on its own. But even their hedonism was limited by death. FM-2030 saw that as humans took control of their own evolution, an entirely new kind of optimism would have to emerge. With it would come the end of tyranny and the end of suffering.
The corrupting force he saw in politics, as in all areas of life, was power. This was a simple observation for anyone to make, but for FM-2030 it was backed up by the fact that he saw his home country go through stages of modernization, only to be stifled by despotic rulers who took the country by force.
FM-2030 declared his distaste for “saviors and almighties”, power-oriented professions, national leaders, heroes and idols, hierarchy, and the use of force. However, he thought that the era of leaders and followers was coming to an end.
“As information decentralizes the relative power of governments decline,” he wrote. He pointed out that movements such as civil rights, women’s rights, the environmental movement, and sexual liberation all started with the actions of citizens, not the government.
History continues to validate the idea. Free access to information had a large part to play in this year’s Arab Spring movements. Citizens of many Arab nations learned of savage acts of violence initiated by their government, and were able to learn of new developments in ongoing protests, such as one man’s self-immolation to protest corruption in Tunisia. Thanks to the Internet and mobile phones, protesters were able to organize much more efficiently than ever before. Even once the governments of these countries blocked access the Internet, people found ways around the blockades. The exchange of information about how to protect oneself from the police and the ability to broadcast a message to the world helped to keep protesters safe, and to keep governments from retaliating too harshly.
Even today, updates from the Occupy movement are posted to the Internet daily, allowing people to see the violence with which police are reacting to such movements even when professional reporters have been prohibited from telling the story.
When FM-2030 wrote that he wanted to see a government not based on some people having power over others, he was not envisioning anarchy. Instead, he saw a form of democracy which could only be realized in his version of the future, backed by technology and abundance.
Much like the English monarchy, FM-2030 predicted that the American presidency would fall to a figurehead position.
“Thanks to national television,” he wrote, “presidential elections will probably grow more glitzy—but they will have less and less substance.”
Real political power would instead by exercised by the people, via a system of referendums. In his vision of a post-scarcity world, everyone could have a transceiver implant, basically a modern smart phone hooked up directly to their brain. Using this system, citizens could vote on referendums as often as needed to determine the laws of their country.
The idea is no less startling today than it was when he wrote about it. The thought of having a universal brain implant instantly conjures images resembling the dystopian futures of the likes of Warren Ellis and Philip K. Dick.
To FM-2030, though, this kind of path would be almost impossible to take. In his mind, a near-utopian state followed quite naturally from the starting points of longevity and abundance. Without fear of death, and without fear of poverty, competition would naturally give way to cooperation, he said. There would simply be no reason to seek success at your fellow humans’ expense, because their gain would not mean your loss.
Belief alone will not sustain a life. Despite all his hope and optimism, FM-2030 was living in a world where his dreams existed only in writing. It must have felt less like the present and more like the pre-future.
Twenty years before his death, before he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, FM-2030 signed a contract with the Alcor Life Extenstion Foundation. Alcor practices cryonics, “a speculative life support technology that seeks to preserve human life in a state that will be viable and treatable by future medicine.” Cryonics has always been controversial and not taken entirely seriously. Cryonics usually brings to mind “freezing”, which was the original version of the practice.
On July 8, 2000 FM-2030 died in New York City and was transported to the Alcor facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was the first human being to undergo vitrification, a more advanced process which transforms (in FM-2030’s case) the brain into a glass-like state, which avoids the damage caused by ice crystals which are formed by traditional cryonics. The process was shown to be reversible by a company called Twenty-First Century Medicine, which vitrified and then restored a rabbit kidney, implanted it in a rabbit, and saw that the rabbit was completely viable afterward. To date, the process has not been effective on the nervous system.
Despite the lack of evidence supporting vitrification, FM-2030 was of course optimistic. Flora Schnall carries his optimism with her, asking, “when [not if] he is revived, will he remember who he was?”
FM-2030 said, “I am a 21st century person who was accidentally launched into the 20th. I have a deep nostalgia for the future.” No doubt as he died, knowing that he was soon to be vitrified, he saw it not as the final end, but as a way of getting home.
