Back in 1983, while I was working in Sri Lanka, the German Greens were first elected to the Bundestag. As a post-Marxist social theorist, interested in ecological thinking, and someone looking for a way to connect spirituality, new social movements and the traditional Left, I began following Green politics closely. When I got to graduate school the US Green Party had organized, and I started the short-lived EcoSocialist Review (1988–1994) to discuss the overlaps and tensions between Green and social justice politics, around themes like environmental racism and how to build labor support for climate policies. …

As a teenage Buddhist socialist I wrote essays about how I planned to work on enlightenment while trying to change the world. The connection between moral enhancement and political change has been on my mind every since. Once I started writing about the ways we can implement moral enhancement in liberal democratic societies, however, I began thinking about the fact that all societies, including liberal ones, have moral parameters, and use forms of moral enhancement to encourage compliance. …

In Citizen Cyborg I argued that the political landscape around technopolitics would soon reflect the complicated intellectual landscape of Bush-era bioethics. In the 2000s there were right-wingers and left-wingers who were (and still are) on both the pro and anti sides of myriad technology debates. I argued then that while 20th century politics in the West had been shaped by the struggle for the Enlightenment in the cultural sphere, and by struggles between different Enlightenment values in economics, these two axes would soon be joined by a third technopolitical axis. …