Apr 16
A Transhuman World of Tomorrow
In many types of media, major technological and exploration advances–typically in regard to space–heavily influence depictions of the future. A World of Tomorrow by Don Hertzfeldt is no different, but the mini animation series has a way of criticizing our futuristic ideas in a way that lets us as the audience develop a better appreciation for our humanity– if we so choose to look further into the content of the films.
The series is split into 3 episodes, the first one having been released in 2015, and it follows a little girl, about the age of four, named Emily (later referred to as Emily Prime). Emily receives a message from herself from the future. She introduces herself as “3rd generation Emily” and explains that Emily Prime will grow up and be impregnated with a clone of herself who, when the time comes, will receive her memories, and continue living her life for her until the process is repeated in order to achieve some form of immortality. This is a perfect example of transhumanism, albeit not as utopic as one would gather if going by the definition offered by Cary Wolfe in his 2009 book What is Posthumanism, where Wolfe quotes Joel Garreau, stating that transhumanism is “a movement that is dedicated… to ‘the enhancement of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capabilities, the elimination of disease and unnecessary suffering, and the dramatic extension of life span’” (pg. 8). In A World of Tomorrow, we definitely see this dramatic extension of the human life span in the cloning process, however this process isn’t readily available for all people and even comes with some side-effects. Third generation Emily informs tells Emily Prime all about alternate options for extending someone’s life, such as a full digital transfer of consciousness into a simple cube, the procedure Emily’s Grandfather chose to undergo (Third Generation Emily reads a letter from their grandfather from his first hour in the cube, the equivalence of 4 years for him, which contained the simple phrase “Oh God” repeated over and over in different variations. Totally not concerning). The procedures offered to the lower classes are even more… interesting. Their option is to take the face of the deceased off and put it on a robot. It’s like taxidermy pets, except it’s your grandparents. Not really a method of life extension, and it sounds a little more terrifying than meaningful to me, but at least it’s something, right?
While the cloning process seems like the best option amongst the three Third Generation Emily gave us, there are still some negative effects that result from the process. For example, still within the first episode of A World of Tomorrow, Third Generation Emily mentions how she supervised robots on the moon as her first job, and that while doing so she ended up falling in love with a rock… and then a fuel pump… and then an alien named Simon… until finally she falls in love with another clone. Unfortunately, this clone (named David) dies suddenly while with Third Generation Emily (We find out later in the third episode he was actually murdered by his own clone), and she tells Emily Prime that she only felt “quietly bad” about it. She watches his memories repeatedly, so she most likely experience some sort of longing and nostalgia, but she definitely doesn’t understand those emotions even if she were to feel them.
The concept of complex emotions is lost on her, most likely because of the deterioration seen in the clones after each generation. But even so, she still clearly feels somethings because she tells Emily Prime that she is “proud of [her] sadness because it makes [her] feel alive” and she takes a memory of her mother (their mother?) before she leaves Emily Prime. That quote, although maybe minor, stands out to me as very deep and meaningful and something we as the audience can definitely take away. Society treats sadness like it is a bad thing, and perhaps it is. It is usually brought on by some sad event in one’s life, or a mental illness which definitely isn’t good, but is it something we should seek to eliminate altogether? The enhancement of emotional capabilities is included in the definition of transhumanism, which would mean eliminating the negative aspects if you consider the very definition of enhancing, to improve and make better, but if we eliminate sadness and other negative emotions completely, what are we left with? You can’t have good without bad, otherwise there is nothing to compare the good to that would make it good. It would just… be. Not good, not bad, just an experience, make sense? So, in terms of how transhuman we should be, while there are benefits in improving the state of our bodies and us as people, we shouldn’t seek to completely erase our humanity in the process, and I think that’s something that Hertzfeldt wants us to gather from A World of Tomorrow.
Additionally, part of what makes us so human is our personality and consciousness, how we’re all unique in the way that our difference experiences in life shaped who we are. In the cloning process, however, this uniqueness is eliminated because it is not just the body being cloned, but the consciousness. In the second episode of A World of Tomorrow Hertzfeldt puts more focus on the past and how memories work in this universe. A young Emily Prime is visited once again by a clone of hers, this time Emily 6 who is one of the two back-up copies made of Third Generation Emily. She is significantly more defected than Third Generation Emily, however, and we learn she is there with the intentions of getting a copy of Emily Prime’s consciousness. They end up going into Emily 6’s mind where the animation is very dreary, dark, and empty. Through their interactions the whole episode, the audience can pick up on the fact that Emily 6 does not have her own experiences– everything she knows she got from previous Emily’s, and she can’t seem to be able to separate her memories from theirs, as seen when she claims to be a good piano player but then does not know how to play one. We see the difference between a mind with a conscious and a mind without when Emily Prime moves them into her own, a much happier looking place with more activity and imaginative properties, more personality. That’s the downside that I think about when it comes to clones, how fair is it to them to not allow them the chance of gaining their own personality and experiences. Why do they have to live vicariously through MY memories? What is the ethical solution here? Maybe accept the cards handed to us and stop trying to seek out immortality (which, by the way, why would we want that? Death is scary yeah, but I also don’t want to be here for literal eternity). Living life being told who you are and not getting a chance to become your own person sounds so sad and unfulfilling to me, as does the thought of becoming technology. Is that even living anymore?
In the third episode the focus is taken off of Emily Prime and actually placed on David Prime and his clones (Emily is still very much involved, however) and we see how technology has embedded itself in the universe Hertzfeldt created. One of Emily’s clones (We’re on number 9 at this point) visits David when he is a baby to implant a memory for David to receive in his adult years. He is floating in space in a small capsule, clicking through this screen thing that isn’t really a screen, and buying full little gadgets and updates to apply to himself. He gets an alert of this memory from his memory archive and watches the message Emily 9 gives him and locates another compressed memory that she had given him. In order to unpack the memory though, he has to go in and literally make up space like he is a computer by deleting skillsets. He follows the instructions in this memory, part of the reason the file was so large was because she wouldn’t shut up about the littlest of things, and he ends up going through all these severely traumatic events, even losing his tongue and thus the ability to speak and has to delete so many of his functions that he literally could no longer walk by the end. Thankfully once he reached the end, he was able to redownload all functionalities, minus speech because he still had no tongue, but Hertzfeldt demonstrated through that just how involved technology is in this universe, to the point where the people themselves were programmed like actual computers (David was even receiving pop-up ads while trying the view the messages). I’m not technologically intelligent enough to be able to tell you how this would even be possible in real life, but if I had to guess based on how powerful I know computers can be, it could potentially take something as minuscule as a chip in your brain to digitalize your entire being. Elon Musk is already getting ideas, such as his Neuralink company that’s already developed a brain chip if you want to give that a google search. Freaky, in my opinion, but as is just about everything else that has to do with AI and supercomputers.
Carey Wolfe believes transhumanism doesn’t have to be this movement that eliminates humanity, a strictly “post” humanistic experience, but something that takes from the foundations of humanism and the developmental dreams society has. When seeking improvement, we mustn’t let it go beyond benefiting The Whole and into the realms of individual betterment. Making a profit isn’t worth diminishing the wellbeing of human beings, risking humanity for the sake of technological advancement just is not ethical to me. Just because we can do something does not mean we should. Hertzfeldt used his creative thought to create this little film series to warn us what a significantly advanced technological world could look like if they choose to see it beyond the fun colors and cuteness of little Emily Prime.
“It comes both before and after humanism: before in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world… and all of which comes before that historically specific thing called ‘the human’… But it comes after in the sense that posthumanism names a historical… development that points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms…” (Wolfe pg. 15)
