Transhumanism

[John Bailey]

Thanks Mark, definitely an article with more than enough to interest
P-list readers (and it's not long at all!). I found it here but I'm
not sure if there's another, longer version:
http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/04/the-techno-libertarians-praying-for-dystopia.html

I used to have more sympathy for transhumanism, the way a young,
white, straight, middle class, educated male from a first world
country might not see problems with ideologies that amplify
inequalities he doesn't yet know exist. When your greatest fear isn't
death by poverty or domestic violence or hate crime or being the wrong
colour (has anyone seen Get Out yet? Amazing film) but death by
literally just getting so old that you die, then maybe you will devote
a great deal of energy betting on technology and against nature. If
you go far enough down that rabbit hole, though, you might end up like
Peter Thiel, prominent in that article, who not long ago told an
interviewer that he's interested in injecting the blood of young
people so as to prolong his life indefinitely. Technovampires, who
woulda thought they'd become a real thing?
On the other hand, there is a strain of transhumanism (used to be
called posthumanism) that's more interested in abolishing the
distinctions between nature-human-technology and seeing them all meld.
That seems more fruitful as it isn't anti-organic, excuse the pun.

On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 3:19 AM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:
> I bet there aren't too many members of this list who wouldn't find a
> lot to admire in the three episode documentary series TechnoCalyps,
> which is available for free on Youtube.
>
> TechnoCalyps Part 1 - TransHumanism
> https://youtu.be/7MXQSbjBL7Q?
>
> TechnoCalyps Part 2 - Preparing for the Singularity
> https://youtu.be/u1n0QSnWyAA?
>
> Technocalypse Part 3 - Digital Messiah
> https://youtu.be/EvWuF_KXuDk?
>
> I found it thought provoking and occasionally challenging. I'd love to
> hear what P-Listers have to say about it.
>
> Jerky
>
> On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 12:53 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Transcending Death via whatever technologies are available or imaginable is
>> nothing new.  Those technologies include AI (as in transference of personal
>> consciousness to an artificial brain), cryogenics, genetic engineering, etc,
>> as Pynchon noted in that essay (which was it?).
>>
>> David Morris
>>
>> On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 10:59 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Part of a longer article which will look long so many will not even start
>>> reading it.
>>>
>>> If this doesn't remind you of the dismantling of V, tell me why?
>>>
>>> "Transhumanists view the human body as a system in need of technological
>>> disruption and ultimate transcendence, and neo-reaction views the state, the
>>> body politic, in much the same manner."
>>>
>>>
>>> Part of longer article:
>>>
>>> There is, in transhumanism itself, a strain of old-timey historical
>>> romanticism: a sense of history as an inexorable progress toward a
>>> teleological vanishing point, where all human meaning is subsumed and
>>> obliterated by a godlike technology. This belief that flesh is a dead
>>> format, and that our future — or that, at least, of a technological elect —
>>> involves a final merger with machines is one that interlocks in sinister
>>> ways with the view of democracy as a failed and outmoded institution.
>>> Transhumanists view the human body as a system in need of technological
>>> disruption and ultimate transcendence, and neo-reaction views the state, the
>>> body politic, in much the same manner. Seen in a certain way, this is a
>>> mind-set — a reductionist understanding of the world as a hackable system —
>>> inherent in the culture of computer science. The flesh is weak, and
>>> democracy is entropic; both are subject to forces of decay, to human
>>> inefficiencies and failings. As eccentric and fringe a phenomenon as Dark
>>> Transhumanism may be, it’s usefully viewed in this sense as an extrapolation
>>> of tendencies inherent in the mainstream techno-capitalism of Silicon
>>> Valley.
>>>
>>> *A version of this article appears in the May 1, 2017, issue of New
>>> YorkMagazine.
>>
>>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l