Transhumanism

[John Bailey]

PS Jerky, I'm pretty sure the opening shot of TechnoCalyps is lifted
from a Scientology recruitment video I was once forced to sit through
as they tried to work their ways on me. If so, that's a pretty
hilarious piece of Grand Theft Video on the part of the doco maker.

On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 9:30 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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