That's enough transhumanism for me, thanks

I hope everyone reading this has had the experience of tasting a homegrown tomato. Bonus points if someone grew an overabundance of them and left the heap in a bowl on the break room desk.

Most of us would easily tell the difference between homegrown and store-bought in a blind taste test. The store-bought is weaker. Waterier. Salt doesn't enhance it the way salt should. Though it was once a living thing, there is no evidence that it lived. No essence of where it lived.

As an Appalachian girl raised on generations of backyard gardening, the homegrown tomato is sacred. It's a yearly ritual that, if skipped, deteriorates the beauty and completeness of an ideal summer. Anyone who has had one - especially salted, paired with garden basil and fresh mozzarella, or even more Appalachian a pairing: squeezed between two toasted pieces of white bread and a thin smear of mayonnaise - knows that nothing in the world can compare.

Elon Musk has never had a homegrown tomato. He made this much clear in a recent interview with The Economist, where head editor Zanny Minton Beddoes grilled him on various points in his career, from political involvement to rampant racism on his social media platform. Many commentators have reposted clips from this interview where he claims money won't matter in ten years, or that we're all destined to be AI's pets in the near future (and to him, that's not such a bad thing - "Labradors are pretty happy creatures," he assures her). But the part I find myself most hung up on is the part where he said humans doing work in this predicted future is comparable to gardening today.

"You don't have to garden," he says. "You can go to the store and there are pristine vegetables...or you can grow vegetables in your garden and they will be less perfect. They'll look a little artisanal. If you go to a friend's house and they make dinner with vegetables from their garden, it's a nice touch [but not necessary]. This is what work is going to be like."

Musk demonstrates a line of thinking that the vast majority of common folk either vehemently disagree with, or at the very least, don't understand and are not ready for. It is one where humanity and our flaws disappear from production in any sense, because to advance as a society means to optimize and perfect tasks. In fact, anything unoptimized or deviated from a set standard is inferior. Efficiency is valued much, much higher than originality; anything created imperfectly is a problem. Effort is laughable (I fear for chronic AI users, this is already true). This is transhumanism, though that term can be applied in many different ways. When I refer to it, I'm not speaking about sci-fi-esque body modification or immortalization attempts of the likes of Bryan Johnson. I'm not talking about inhabiting Mars or becoming a multi-planetary species. I'm talking about the philosophical position shown perfectly here - that human limitation is a fundamental error.

To some - namely, the tech billionaires with far too much time on their hands and not nearly enough understanding of how the common person lives day-to-day - this is an ideal future. This is how the world should operate and how humanity would leave our legacy on the planet, simply paving the way for machines to get the jobs done better. But to most, this means the end of us. It's no argument that humans have caused a great deal of harm and damage in our errors over the millennia, but if we were to optimize away all traces of human effort, what, exactly, would we be left with?

This is also not exactly a matter of future-tense - we are watching it take shape right now, and what's worse is that many of our friends and neighbors are taking part in it. AI slop is genuinely hysterical to young people. Restaurants across the nation are utilizing AI to create event posters that all. Look. The. Fucking. Same. Post-limelight pop stars are generating albums full of computerized junk that they had no part in other than the prompt and their choice of which chat bot to use. And with this formulaic, infinitely recycled method of creation, it seems obvious that the outcomes are, in fact, much worse in quality than what a human could create with a little bit of time. But that is exactly the problem: when anyone who is pro-AI talks about optimization, they're not referring to the product itself. They don't care about quality. They care about convenience. They care about time "saved."

A recent scandal in the world of dating apps revealed a dark connection to the dead internet theory, and ties in remarkably well to the transhumanist logic we're discussing here. In June of this year, ex-BeReal employee David Aliagas launched an "anti-algorithm" dating app for gay men called Goose. In its release, gay models and influencers were recruited for the purpose of rolling out the app, making it look enticing and approachable to their target audience. On the day of its launch, Aliagas made an Instagram post detailing all the reasons why he created a gay dating app; in the comments were hundreds of supportive, but similar comments from endless hot, gay men. But here's the twist: tap on any one of their profiles, and they all used the same formula. Elite-sounding college names, job titles and places of work, their current location, and eerily alike profile pictures. They were all private profiles with a few hundred followers and three to six posts.

Matt Bernstein of A Bit Fruity investigated this further. He followed some of the mysterious men - Will Torrance, Florentin Hart, Emil Michelsenn, Rafael Dunmorr, Corey Bateson and Leon Stanhope (the latter two having almost identical profile pictures) - trying to see just how far the rabbit hole would go. All of these accounts followed each other, but allowed seemingly anyone outside of their circle to do the same. When Bernstein messaged Florentin Hart, he received a full-on, realistic conversation, even a "photo" of Hart when he asked for it. Of course, upon review of the image, the AI-trained eye would be able to pick up on the fact that his shirt said "Matie in Italy" backward in his elevator mirror selfie. Within a few weeks, journalists began to out Aliagas and Goose for using a substantial and complex network of bots to promote the app across social media platforms. Many of the profiles on Goose itself were also not real. But perhaps the saddest part, at least to me, is that all of these "men" and hundreds more are still commenting on all of Aliagas's posts and interacting with other users who likely don't know that they are bots.

This is not just about dead internet theory anymore, and it's not only tech billionaires playing around and seeing what they can get away with. This is in everyone's hands. This is a parable about what happens when we collectively let efficiency logic into the most human spaces we have.

Okay, sure, Instagram may not be the "most human space," but it used to at least be a place to keep up with what our real friends (*cough* real people) were up to. I've never been active on any dating app, but I think I speak for just about everyone when I say I'd prefer to meet an actual living person through using one. These places are meant to be extensions of humanity - a place to share and discuss our lives and our interests. But in creating online spaces intended for that purpose, we have accidentally opened a labyrinth that grows upon itself, that has evolved into something we can't keep up with. A human error. A very, very messy one.

And real community is sometimes just as messy. We have to smooth things over with friends when they get angry with us. We storm out of our parents' house in tears over a dinner-turned-political-explosion. We play nice with the coworker we can't stand. Attend grandma's funeral. Plant trees against the neighborhood fence. Go to the birthday party with a raging headache. Show up when we really, really don't want to. It's a cliché at this point to say that community is inconvenient, but I believe it's a statement worth repeating until people actually start to get it - because while some of us can't make phone calls or order at a fast-casual restaurant or take risks in our own art or trust the slow process of organic growth and promotion to sell our apps, we clearly haven't gotten it.

I stumbled across a Substack essay recently that described this well: "North Americans have depressing relationships." I found within it a line that hits particularly hard for the kind of "community" we seem to widely accept these days:

"She messages three friends. One is overwhelmed with work. Another has plans with her partner. The third is protecting her energy after a difficult week. Every person responds compassionately. Every person has a reasonable boundary.

Nobody comes."

If we optimize away all evidence of human effort, including our boundaries that, though well-intentioned, often isolate us, what are we left with? Pristine lives with no essence of where they came from, and no connection between them. To build and sustain community takes work, and there is no way around that work. It's like gardening. It must be done over and over again. Even (especially) on days that are too hot, where we don't feel like leaving our air-conditioned living rooms. We have to water the plants. We have to make sure the soil is healthy. We have to protect them when storms come. If we don't, we don't get the reward of the most delicious tomato we've ever had.