Disclaimer: I am an unabashed fan of Mary Harrington's. Something about her perspective just knocks me out. So, apologies in advance for gushing yet again about her latest piece. But it's a stunner!

Too many angles to easily summarize, but special note to @dofaresol bc HRH Harrington touches on how our current culture is, in some ways, a direct result of society's attempt to stay away, far away, from the A bomb. That our current fetish for re-inventing what a human being is (from social engineering to literally surgically altering our bodies) is a result of turning engineering "inward," away from the "splitting the atom" direction. (There are hints of Lewsis's Tao here, as well as the earlier article posted by @Sephira about the aspiration toward human-centered tech.)

Some random samples (the piece is a speech she recently gave at a family formation event in Budapest):

"...the Pill was the first mass-market transhumanist technology. It said: we are entitled to break normative health in the name of human desire. A great deal has followed downstream of the Pill that is germane to this conference, including family formation, gender ideology, hostility between the sexes, epidemic loneliness and the second-order political consequences of demographic decline. ...

"What if our turn away from the world of atoms, to the world of bits, was a civilisation recoiling in terror from the cataclysmic achievements of these truth-seeking engineers? My hypothesis is that in response, we turned our technical skills inward and set about re-engineering ourselves. ...

"The collapse in family formation; the bleeding away of rightly ordered sexuality into hedonism or apathy; the inability to grasp why mass migration is widely unpopular and highly volatile at scale; the disintegration of religious faith. All of these are downstream of an anthropology that rejects human meaning and human purpose, for one that sees only cause, and effect, and materiality to be engineered. ...

"...even the Pill fails to make us completely interchangeable. And in practice every application of nominalism to ourselves ends up as a power-grab by admininstrators. Because when something isn’t true, you need state power and social pressure to make up the shortfall. What happened to James Damore is a case in point: he spoke the truth about the fact that sex differences, while small, are persistent. So he had to be punished, pour encourager les autres.

"The quintessential character of the long, post-Hiroshima twentieth century has been the application of nominalist science to ourselves, while multiplying institutional power and managerial bureaucracies to cover the resulting concatenating falsehoods. The kind of people who succeed in this managerial culture are those that prioritise social consensus over truth.

"But “No truth, only power” is not just a cultural, moral, and metaphysical dead end. It’s also a technological dead end. And at this point it has turned itself on the truth-seekers - which means it has begun to destroy the technological achievements upon which its bureaucracies depend.

"Think of the HR edict: “Bring your whole self to work”. Anyone who thinks about this for a moment will realise that it isn’t actually an invitation to bring your whole self to work. It’s a trap for truth-seekers.

"Most people have enough sense not even to bring their whole self to Christmas dinner with the family, let alone work. The edict is designed, consciously or not, to surface people like James Damore, so they can be offloaded in favour of people who are better at calibrating for social consensus... ...

"I expect us to have to learn the hard way, across the board, that our own nature can’t be abolished. The endpoint of experiments in areas such as surrogacy will be much the same: realising that we are the way we are for a reason. I’ll go as far as to predict that failing to create AGI, or upgrade our own “wetware”, will be what finally forces the metaphysical question on what consciousness is, and this will be what finally breaks the nominalist consensus. And my bet is that it’ll be the truth-seekers who get there first. ...

"...we should turn our inventiveness outwards again. And we should order our technologies to the picture of human nature so clearly revealed by the failure of our efforts to re-engineer ourselves."

https://www.maryharrington.co.uk/p/truth-seeking-is-not-a-disorder