We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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Cloning Myself?
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Would you clone yourself if you have the opportunity to do so? I sometimes think it would be strange to clone myself (the scifi kind of cloning, where clones are literal, full-grown copies). What kind of strange conversations would we have? Would we each develop differently over time so that the only resemblance between us was physical?
Science fiction writers have asked these questions for decades. Why? I don’t know. Maybe we’re secretly narcissists? Or maybe there’s just something fascinating about the idea that humanity is duplicable. After all, if science fiction is, as many suggest, a genre deeply concerned with the human condition, then cloning is merely a “new” avenue through which we can interrogate what it is
that makes us human. Cloning rests alongside intelligent robots, aliens, androids, and all manner of intelligent non-humans to remind us that whatever it is that makes us human and unique is hard to pinpoint. If our minds and bodies can be duplicated, then what makes you “you” and me “me”?
This is why I find narratives about cloning, androids, aliens, and so on compelling. Dawn by Octavia Butler, for example, considers whether humanity still exists when its genetics have been tampered with by an alien race (even for its own good). Butler’s narrative is rife with deep questions about human existence: Is there something inherently wrong with humanity on a genetic level? Do we cease to be human if we fix those genetic errors and mix ourselves with other species? Does humanity deserve to exist if its genetics lead it toward self-destruction?
Or there are books like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, Marseguro by Edward Willett, or Tobias Buckell’s Xenowealth Saga. Each interrogates the human condition in unique and vibrant ways, from questioning our compulsion towards enslavement and extermination (Dick) to the place of genetic modification in the human spectrum (Willett) to the integration of humans with machines and computers (Buckell). Science fiction loves these sorts of questions. It thrives on them, more so now than ever before — because we’re already asking ourselves these questions in real life. If you clone a person or modify their genetics, are they still human? Why or why not? When we create artificial lifeforms with free will, do we have to rethink our legal framework? If so, how do we change it? If we’re not already asking ourselves these questions today, we will have to sooner or later. Humanity will have to change as we “play God.”
And so I have to ask myself what I’d think if I met a clone of myself. Would I react with violence, as so many humans in SF narratives have done, or would I react with philosophical confusion and curiosity? I don’t know. What about you?
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We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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