"Our Posthuman Future: On the Small Screen"

I have a piece in this week’s Weekly Standard on The 4400, an interesting sci-fi program on USA Network. Here’s an excerpt:

The 4400 began as a run-of-the-mill diversion about how the world reacts to 4,400 people, abducted by aliens, who return (apparently) from the future, each possessing a unique ability. Unexpectedly, at the end of last season, the show took a sharp turn for the better through a clever plot device: Jordan Collier, the villain (or hero), learns how to distill a substance called Promicin from the blood of the 4,400. Collier and fellow “revolutionaries” decide to change the world by distributing the stuff to anyone willing to risk a 50 percent chance of death to experience transcendence in a syringe. The program has ever since been exploring some of the most important cultural cross-currents of our time.

Take, for example, the malaise many apparently feel because they live ordinary lives. The 4400 writers understand this, and thus many of the characters risk taking Promicin rather than live one more day of quiet desperation. Better yet, the characters’ lives are transformed without their having to work for it. For example, one Promicin-taker goes from pathetic loser to well-paid and respected FBI interrogator after Promicin gives her the ability to force people to tell the truth.

In real life many people do yearn for extraordinariness to be handed to them on a silver platter. We see this propensity throughout the culture; from the explosive growth of cosmetic surgery, to the increased use of ster-oids, to the desperate craving to touch the lives and thus share in the glamour of celebrities, to the popularity of reality television programs that offer average people the chance to become stars just by playing themselves. The 4400 producers understand well the seductive nature of their premise: They even have a spot on the program’s website dedicated to a “fan of the week” who gains the honor by explaining which super-ability he or she would want, and for what purpose...

It’s hard to watch the show and not be reminded of the sad “transhumanists”—real life wannabe 4,400s—who are so frustrated by normalcy that they invest all their hopes and dreams in somehow managing to transcend human limitations through the miracles of modern technology. And so they spend their days sharing visions of uploaded minds dwelling immortally in computer software “platforms” while they earnestly wait for “the singularity,” a pending technological tipping point of such seismic power that transhumanists believe it will lead—literally—to the creation of a posthuman race. (See my June 26, 2006, WEEKLY STANDARD article, “The Catman Cometh.”)

If you haven’t seen the program, check it out. It’s fun and there is grist for the gray matter.

Okay, now I am off to Italy.