Left or right? Up!
He believed that when 2030 came, he would wake from the ice to celebrate his 100th birthday. He was convinced that by then we would have reached the heavens and settled other planets. That we would have put our petty squabbles behind us and, lifted on the wings of technology, would be marching onward in human evolution.
Was FM-2030 right? Could the sharp-shooting basketball player still surprise us with a three-pointer of a prediction?
If so, in just seven years we will be able to discuss the details with the man himself. If he really is revived, the forgotten creator of transhumanism, who picked a name like a radio station's, will surely have a lot to tell us… If not, he will become just another dreamer who overestimated humanity and ran ahead of his time.
Fereidoun and the Magic Lamp
It's 2023, and many people write that it feels like the '90s. There is some truth to that: we keep splitting along yet another fault line of the day's outrage, as a nation and as a civilization. Locked inside our bubbles, we find it ever easier, and ever fiercer, to draw the next dividing line through a monument, a currency or a vaccine.
Could the world have been different? No wars, all of us discussing progress in space, huge breakthroughs in medicine, society's agenda devoted to how we use technology and how we grow as individuals, as persons, as a species…
That is how today's hero posed the big question half a century ago. Born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, a name straight out of One Thousand and One Nights, he went down in history under his fourth and final name, one that would suit an heir of Musk better: FM-2030.
Transhumanism: the strand of futurism that believes it is time for humans to carry their evolution further. That technological progress is here not only to help us fight over Facebook and nuclear bombs, but also to let us touch new worlds. To fly between planets, not as part of state policy or propaganda, but as the natural, evolutionary development of human beings who create the next steps of their own evolution…
Check with a Pawn
What kind of name is FM-2030? The first part is the initials of his birth name (and more besides); the second is the year in which he believed he would be woken from the ice where his (officially) dead body ended up.
But long before reaching that moment, Fereidoun was born in 1930 in Brussels, into a family of Iranian diplomats. His life set off on a cosmopolitan course, which surely shaped his later views. By the time he turned 11, he had already lived in 17 countries. He spent a good deal of time in India; they say he spoke English with an accent all his life.
He went to primary schools in England and Iran and graduated from a Jesuit college in Jerusalem. At 18 he was already fluent in four foreign languages: English, Hebrew, French and Arabic.
He began his studies at Berkeley and finished them at the University of California. He coped well with his studies, but his great passion as a kid was sport. It took him to the first Olympic Games after World War II. At just 18, he was part of Iran's national basketball team. According to some, he also competed in Olympic wrestling, but on this point the archives contradict each other.
Toward a Radiant Future
The Persian team never made it out of the group stage, and that turned out to be the end of the futurist's professional sporting career.
At the time, his country was the arena of fierce battles between rival factions, backed by the states that had just plunged into the Cold War. One more clue as to why Fereidoun would become such a cosmopolitan figure, loathing both the limits of states and civilizations and war itself.
Done with sport, he turned to philosophy. Little by little he established himself as a scholar, teaching at universities in New York, Los Angeles and Florida. He also ventured into the thickets of fiction, publishing three novels that became quite popular and earned him a decent income.
In the '50s he worked for the UN, following the diplomatic path his parents had trodden before him. Thanks to his wide-ranging knowledge, from 1952 he sat on the commission tasked with resolving the Palestinian question.
In 1957 the New York Times ran an interview with him on mental illness in Asia and Africa. He described himself as “an Iranian now living in the United States” and “a freelance writer specializing in the study of social problems in underdeveloped societies.” Oh, how quickly that description was about to change…
FM+
To this day the Palestinian question remains unresolved, and so does the big question to which he devoted his life: our future as a species. Which brings us to the late '70s, when Fereidoun became world-famous for his predictions and his worldview.
He predicted the imminent arrival of in vitro technology, something that still looked like science fiction. He described a future in which conferences and events would be held over a network, with no need for people to be in the same place. He talked about the coming of remote shopping and telemedicine.
The peak of his fame came in 1989, when he published his best-known book, Are You a Transhumanist?: Monitoring and Stimulating Your Personal Rate of Growth in a Rapidly Changing World.
By then he had long ceased to be Fereidoun; FM-2030 had taken the stage as early as 1972.
He officially changed his passport in 1988, because “conventional names carry too much cultural baggage, such as nationality, religion and social background,” and in his view they no longer suited the present day. He said the letters were not necessarily tied to his initials but also stood for “Future Man,” “Future Modular” and “Future Marvel.”
Rather modest, wouldn't you say? A futurist Chuck Norris…
As Simple and Logical as That
“I am not the person I was ten years ago, and I certainly won't be in 20 years. The name reflects my conviction that the years around 2030 will be a magical time. We will no longer age, and everyone will have the chance to live forever. 2030 is a dream and a goal.”
And really, Shakespeare notwithstanding, isn't a name very often what defines us? What places us in context, makes us part of our surroundings or outsiders to them?
Of course, FM was above all a provocateur; at the root of his ideas lay the obvious utopia of a world in which technology has developed along the most optimistic scenario. That “technological progress will allow people to become synthetic, post-biological organisms with eternal life.”
Fu-Turist
However much we talk about transhumanism with fear, as a modernized version of eugenics, in the 20th century especially it was an optimistic movement. One that, among other things, turned out to be right in quite a few directions. Yes, by the strict rules of biology we humans are still the same species as those of millennia ago… and yet the change in our daily lives, and through it in everything else, is undeniable.
The dramatically longer human lifespan, advanced medicine, the incredible leap in communications and in how we store and manage our data. Even spaceflight, however much its achievements today lack the magical aura of the '60s.
So, although we belong to the same biological species, we are already different. Because of the way we get our information, because of the way events unfold. Because of speed. Because of memory. Because of our inability to concentrate…
Then shouldn't we pay attention to forecasting, especially when it comes from someone with a serious résumé who managed to predict real discoveries and phenomena in so many fields?
Icy Silence
It's a fact that in many places the former Fereidoun misses the mark. He writes, for instance, that “in 2010 the world will reach a new stage in its history. The family will have given way to universal life. People will come together and part according to their needs, free of kinship and possessions. Life expectancy will be infinite, and disease practically eliminated. Death will be rare, accidental and not forever….”
Well, death is still here, what with pandemics and wars in the heart of the supposedly most civilized world… clearly the interesting part lies not in the extremes but, as usual, in the nuances.
“Genetic engineering to enhance the brain. Implants for a direct brain interface. Implants for direct monitoring of all bodily functions. By 2010 the human brain should already be a supercomputer, independent of the animal body, which can be freely replaced…,” the futurist sketches. He obviously got the year wrong, but as for everything else, isn't it really just around the corner?
He also says: “No civilization of the past was great. All were primitive and persecuting, built on mass submission and mass murder.” It was he who said that “there are no illegal immigrants, only obsolete borders.”
And I wonder… have his words lost all meaning for our supposedly advanced civilizations today?
Nostalgia for the Future
He was a vegetarian all his life, saying he couldn't eat anything that had had a mother.
He defined his views not as left or right but as “up”: toward progress, as opposed to the quick fixes of the day within what he considered an outdated framework. He published three manifestos, the best known being that of the “Upwingers” (by analogy with left-wingers and right-wingers) from 1973. That, he believed, was our important battle: progress against the retrograde, advancement against stagnation, flight to other worlds against staying here on Earth.
In his view it was time to abandon all the ideologies we had used so far, because they were unfit for the new age: communism as well as capitalism. Nationalism, totalitarianism, nihilism. The moment had come to keep only two of them: optimism and universalism.
Re-Contra-Utopia
“We need to develop a bold new philosophy of the future,” says FM. “A hopeful outlook that will encourage people to want to face the future. To want to plan it. I am an optimist, and what I have to share runs against all the pessimism around us.”
When asked about his nationality or his age, he wouldn't answer, because those questions were irrelevant and he was a “global person.” “I am a 21st-century person who happened to be born in the 20th. I have a deep nostalgia for the future.” Oh, if only he had guessed that, with almost a quarter of this century gone, we would not be all that far along, at least when it comes to civilizational choices…
As his rich photo archive shows, in his later years he lived quite well, traveling on yachts and touring the world's resorts. And he took photos, and more photos, including a sizable collection of erotic shots. Although all his life he preached that the idea of the family was obsolete, from 1960 until his death he remained “in friendship” with Flora Schnall, a lawyer and Harvard lecturer.
Death Is a Lonely Business
What's more interesting isn't even how strongly he believed in such an idea in times when not even the internet had been invented. It's that he held on to it afterward, right up to the end of the millennium; optimism never left him. But life did… at least temporarily.
In the year 2000, FM-2030 died and became one of the first people to be deep-frozen in the hope of one day being woken by future humans who have developed technology advanced enough not only to thaw him out but also to cure him of all disease.
Of course, all of this becomes even more interesting in the realm of faith. Because the hero with the alternative name built his ideas on atheism and distrust of all ideologies. Yet he set against them another faith, in technology. That it really would develop so far as to pull us forward as a species… or the other way around?
And then, here is a movement that denies reincarnation… yet believes that one day it will prove itself right precisely through a resurrection?!
According to FM-2030, the human lifespan would become unlimited thanks to the artificial organs we would be able to create. Shortly before his death, he described the pancreas as a “stupid, dumb, wretched organ.”
Well, it was deadly cancer of that very “wretched” organ that took him. And so he became the first person not merely frozen but cryonically preserved, placed at temperatures so low that flesh comes to resemble glass.
Guests from the Future
Even for his time he was too extreme; The New York Times described his predictions as a “Santa Claus machine.” Today, too, his words sound rather naive, given an optimism that time has not borne out. And yet it is astonishing how accurate he turned out to be about the directions he foresaw: the internet and genetic modification, bionics and 3D printing, online shopping and remote meetings.
So was he a dreamer, a visionary or a naïf? Sometimes a person can be all three at once. Look at Musk, who was supposedly so driven toward Mars, and today is looking for a spectacular way to fight (or pretend to fight) with his little buddies.
“I will be so happy when I come back,” he said in an interview shortly before he passed away. 2030 is close. Even in transhumanism, blessed are the believers. And the incurable optimists…
Did Fereidoun have grounds for this prediction? We only have to wait seven more years to find out. Will we harness ourselves to our progress as a species, will we defeat death? Let's hope he turns out to be right after all…
Special thanks to Mario Mishev for helping create this Digital Story!
