Biography

If I start by saying “I’m not a transhumanist”, I immediately get cought in a debate on what it means to be a transhumanist. Well how does this sound then: I am and I am not a transhumanist. Over the years it seems to me this is the focal question people get tangled in. I do research on the “transhumanist movement”, so it is very natural that people assume me to have a connecion with the movement. I dont’t find this difficult as such. I have nothing that serious against transhumanism. But, making this assumption people can easily make other assumptions about me that are out of my control.

The problem is with transhumanism itself. It is a powerful worldview and in some aspects a new phenomenon on earth. The theme of human enhancement is certainly not new. What is new however is the fact that some of the transhuman things are theoretically possible now or in the near future. This means, that transhumanism is a concrete philosophy that does have consequences in real life. And in a way, transhumanism creates new social relations. This is a theme I will come back to in the blog since it is an assumption in my research.

I, the writer of this blog/project, first heard about transhumanism in a TV Documentary in 2001. I was not that facinated since there were a lot of topics and ideas I myself had been thinking about. Still, the word “transhuman” stayed with me and even became a part of my vocabulary for some time. At the time I was studying sociology at Helsinki University and even had thoughts about writing my masters thesis on the subject.

At then, the Internet was not really that amazing. There was a lot of information about transhumanism but there were not so many blogs that discussed the phenomenon. It was not even clear what the movement would be and how it would function in the real world. The problem then and the problem now is that transhumanism is much discussed using consepts and ideas from popular science fiction.

So, I wrote my thesis on sausages. It even ended up as a popular publication in Finland much later. After graduating 2006 I really stepped on thin air and began to support my life as a freelance journalist. That was a cold trail but it taught me a lot.

In 2008 I was living in Tartu/Estonia with my wife who was there doing some research on her Finnish literature PhD. I started thinking about transhumanism anew and things began to click. I decided to write something about it but soon I realized that it really had to be a PhD. There are a lot of good publications out there about transhumanism that are not based on a PhD or other research work, but for me this was an critical question.

I ended up applying to the University of Turku because there was a professor specialized in bioethics. I figured that would be a good starting point. What comes to starting points, it was good. However, about a year in with that focus I abandoned the approach. I was a sociologist, not a philosopher. The direction bioethics was taking me was philosophically interesting but in terms of sociology I was gravitating away form the sociological framework.

So, I started to focus on the question “What kind of a social movement is transhumanism”. Not exactly the right question but it got me started.

And as soon as all this had happened, there was a baby on the way. I thought it would be some months I would have to take off from my research but it ended up being almost a two year brake.

And that was great! Not only for me and my family but also for the research project. I returned to my notebooks late in 2010 and began a serious re-evaluation process.

It was hard since the research problem was difficult to make out and also the research data was scatteder around the Internet and in occasional publication – most not available in Finland. I realized there were great difficulties ahead but that didn’t really stop me.

The project got going when I was assigned a new adviser after my first retired. I was now introduced to the theories of Alain Touraine, who is best known for his works on social movements. I read Touraine and it made a huge impact on me as a person and as a sociologist.

The research question started to emerge and my confidence as a researcher grew.

I have done my work without any funding. That is the way we here in Finland finance our research. If you don’t get funding, you have to work part time on your research. Now, if I had done my thesis (the sausage thing) well had not had all the problems I had at the time, perhaps my voyage to the academia would have been easier. Difficult to say, since grants are far and few between anyway.

Currently I work in a think tank (The Kalevi Sorsa foundation) as a research coordinator. Also, I occasionally write to some magazines on varied topics. My main journalistic work is currently a monthly column for the Finnish Meat Trade Association magazine (Lihalehti). To top all that I am also an entrepeneuer and I won the Be a Chance -social entrepeneuership business idea compettion on 2011.