Conference Program

This paper reflect on Enhanced Games and their ambition to bring about value and cultural transformation, which includes the idea of developing an underlying pedagogy for humanity and its relationship with technical and scientific development. The contribution is based on a thematic analysis (Topic Modeling) and discursive analysis of the journalistic representation of this sports movement, given an acquired knowledge domain based on the deepening of official documents about the phenomenon.

Enhanced Games are a mega-sporting event in which athletes are invited to achieve the best performance ever recorded in three specific areas – swimming, track & field, and weightlifting – with the possibility of taking substances considered doping in official competitions, if this is declared and under the supervision of medical teams.

From a political and cultural view, the Enhanced Games organization aims to challenge and redefine various canonical principles of sport, while openly positioning itself within its commercialized and spectacularized dimension.

Behind this proposal to redefine the sporting canon lies a broader political and cultural challenge. Enhanced Games occupy a liminal area where the boundaries between different conceptual and social categories are called into question: natural and artificial, morality and dishonesty, health and disease, performance and amateur sport, legality and illegality, individual and system, right and obligation, freedom and coercion, innovation and conservation, honor and dishonor. While the project aims to highlight the social and conventional nature of these categories, it also seems to reveal a specific political and ideological orientation, with political-economic implications.

Thus, “The First Declaration on Human Enhancement” emphasizes individual freedom and full sovereignty over one’s own body, autonomy from coercion, and the right to take calculated risks, in compliance with national laws and health protection. It also emphasizes the need to promote technical and scientific innovation and to support the continuous development of human potential, while maintaining transparency and fairness in sports competition. These positions seem to reflect the influence of currents of thought that are not neutral from a cultural, economic, political, and social perspective.

In its current plans, the organization of the Games – presenting itself as a pioneering group in human development – proposes socialization based on a new set of values and renewed human criteria, indirectly promoting an unstoppable change in the reinvention of society. Against a cultural backdrop based on innovation, technical-scientific solutionism, and libertarianism, it proposes – through the field of sport – a cultural reform of the relationship between technology and personal and social development, suggesting a metamorphosis of social, legal, institutional, political, regulatory, and relational practices, primarily in the sporting context, but fundamentally useful for a cultural pedagogy with a broader social impact. That is to say, a value system – representative of certain political and economic elites – celebrating technical rationality, trust in ingenuity and technical-scientific innovations to solve humanity’s challenges, growth without constraints, individual liberation, the consecration of criteria of effectiveness and productivity, indirectly redesigning the framework of civil and citizenship rights and duties, as well as the relationship with technology and its risks.