Meet The Extropians (1994)
wired.com
wired.com
These days, it’s a little sad to look at where those dreams went. Around the time this article was written, people thought they were making significant headway into making molecular nanotechnology a thing. And brain preservation is even more niche than it was then.
A few years ago, I got really interested in nanotech and took a bunch of notes about what happened to the field and where it is now. I should write a post about that sometime...
I'm pretty sure there were a bunch of photos accompanying the original article, but I don't see them in either the WABAC machine or the online page.
A thing I've never been clear on is whether the Extropian Mike Perry was the FIG F-83 Mike Perry or the Tor Mike Perry. Does anybody know? (Not you, kanzure, I know you get terribly confused about people's identities.)
Neither, he's the Alcor Mike Perry:
https://www.alcor.org/library/alcor-member-profiles/michael-...
Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency
by Finn Brunton
Smart, fun group of people.
Having just watched an episode of Thunderbirds I'm the first to admire any bunch of people who want to change or change things for the better. However the sad truth is that, you're right, trying to make progress for progress' sake is little better than building a Star Trek set.
Inspiration is vital but real progress comes a byproduct of understanding things better as they are now, and how they fit together now, I think.
Wired was mostly just a hype factory, and often comedically lacking self-awareness.
I hope that something like this group comes back, but with a vengeance. Call me an optimist, but if they had put their minds to it, they could have accomplished much more than a mailing list, which has unfortunately dwindled in the last 10 years.
Cypherpunks write code- but what about the extropians?
And then some of them, like Anissimov, et al, moved onto the Post-Rationalist community, with a small percentage of those moving onto Neoreaction, and a small percentage of those moving onto radical Accelerationist politics.
I think what happened is that a lot of these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed youngsters who saw Singularity and/or radical life extension happening in their lifetimes eventually came to accept that they're not totally wrong, but they'll be long dead when it does.
There was a sort of demotivation that happened to push them into more tangible efforts, even some as prosaic as politics.
I also think these people were relatively young and now have families and mortgages and retirement accounts to pay for and the wind was taken out of their ideological sails when they realized the system will punish them if they don't assimilate into the status quo. Many cypherpunks just write code for big companies and writers have moved onto chasing literary fads to make rent. Its either that or be thrown them into poverty. The system you want to reform has built-in anti-reform mechanisms and your needed paycheck, especially tied to your health insurance, is one of those mechanisms. This is also why so many famous reformers were either old-money types or had ideologically aligned patrons to fund them. These grassroots groups don't often have that so they fail.
Successful peaceful reform movements are actually shadow-funded and shadow-politicked for by the elites. Elites against other elites and using people like this for their own ends. Elites won't sign on to anything that potentially hurts their wealth or power, which all these idealistic reform movements would do. Short of a popular uprising and violent revolution, we can expect the same lack of progress on utopian thinking in the future because utopia is attainable, its just the resources that's needed for it are controlled by people who don't want to give them up.
The problem I have with this perspective is not that it's necessarily wrong, but it's not falsifiable.
There have been many attempts at "start over" utopian societies, sometimes involving a violent popular upsrising and some through peaceful means. Some big and some small in scale.
They never produce the desired outcome. That by itself isn't so bad -- experimentation could theoretically be good, even if many lives are lost in the process.
But what's really bad is we don't seem to be learning from the failures at all, so it's basically repeating the same experiment again and again with a few tweaks in philosophy that has little bearing on the practical implementation.
Progress seems to come when people are willing to take incremental steps that have positive short term results for a significant fraction of people. Then building on that.
These people usually have zero knowledge outside of a very narrow area. They may know physics-based nanotech but they know nothing about biological system. They may know the latter but nothing of the fromer.
It's a religious cult more than science or engineering fact-based knowledge.
They are going to die with everyone else. They will make grotesque mistakes trying to achieve their aims and likely live far shorter than average lives. It will be exactly like every millennial religious cult that predicts the 2nd coming of Jesus - it's exactly the SAME thing in terms of how it arises, why the group dynamics are and how it ends. It's merely the newest incarnation of religion mediated HOPIUM.