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Comment by waterlesscloud | Hacker News Reader

Man, I wish I'd kept my Extropy magazines. I ditched them in a move about 15 years ago.

I haven't really thought about it, but it's likely I've taken to bitcoin so easily because it's an idea I encountered so long ago. Just sort of inevitable that it would come along, or so it's seemed.

Extropy, Transhumans, Cypherpunks, all those early 90s fringe technocultures. Crazy, out there ideas that still had concrete directions to explore.

It feels to me like there's a sort of throughline from the late 60s computer/counter culture mix, to the 70s/80s personal computer folks, to the 90s extropy people. But I'm not sure where it went after that. Surely there's a current generation.

Cryptocurrency has some of it, especially in the more ambitious fringes, but I've lost track of whatever group is on the broader picture of extreme technological ambition.

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> Man, I wish I'd kept my Extropy magazines. I ditched them in a move about 15 years ago.

Well, for what it's worth, here's the archives I have been collecting. I also have other extropians-related files, but this is somewhat of a "I don't know what I have" issue, so it will just take some more poking and prodding for me to categorize and upload the rest.

extropians: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/extropians/

cypherpunks: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/cypherpunks/cypherpunks-199209-1...

> but I've lost track of whatever group is on the broader picture of extreme technological ambition.

Mostly it's the same groups, except not where you first found them. For example, the cypherpunks and cryptography mailing lists haven't degraded as terribly as extropy-chat/extropians.

There is a transhumanism/biohacking channel on irc.freenode.net ##hplusroadmap which has logs here http://gnusha.org/logs/ since 2008. (Disclaimer, I am the resident optroll.)

... and there's a bitcoin/cryptography wizardry channel on the same server in #bitcoin-wizards (but also #bitcoin is reasonable), logs can be found here: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizards/ In general, I would recommend #bitcoin for most messages.

As for the rest of the cryptocurrency world, that's a little more difficult to explain and keep track of...

You know, the weird thing is that looking back on the extropians, they weren't really all that ambitious. Sure, they would talk about DNA or something, but did any of them ever bother to spend a few hours in a molecular biology lab? And what about software, how many of them (who didn't already code) bother to pick up code slinging to advance their interests? That's not to say that they were unskilled-- many of them were extremely skilled, but they sort of showed up like that, and didn't move the needle. Oh well, different times.

Fair point about not accomplishing a whole lot (outside of Finney). Ambitious, maybe, but not so effective.

Also reminded me there's a DIY Bio mailing list, with lots of interesting bio-hacking sorts of things going on.

completely forgot about extropians and cypherpunks which I used to frequent.

It didn't go away. It just dropped the trappings of a counterculture because counterculture itself has lost relevance in a world where there is no real mainstream to be counter to.

A lot of the people I remember from the mailing list have gone on to do interesting things. Hanson is still getting people to try predictions markets, Yudkowsky has been pretty successful with MIRI (and his agitprop), Bostrom's book made the New York Times bestseller list, Broderick is up to 50 published books, etc.

re "Surely there's a current generation" - there are many current generations, with different flavors, distributed all over the political spectrum, ranging from militant atheism to new cosmic religions... the gravity center that holds this galaxy together is the idea that radically changing the human condition via advanced technology is both doable and good, other ideas can differ wildly among different groups.

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