Re: Image of extropianism and transhumanism

Bryan Moss (bryan.moss@dial.pipex.com)
Fri, 7 Aug 1998 16:38:42 +0100

Natasha Vita More wrote:

> > In the wonderful rag that circulates in the
> > city of Bahston there was a story portraying
> > cryonicists and probably extropians and
> > transhumanists as geeks with no sex lives.
>
> The author of the article received a flurry of
> letters and e-mail from cryonicsts, although I
> have yet to receive a response!

A while back in a Wired article on wearable computing ("Dress Code", Issue 6.04, Page 186) Extropians were described as the "dark side". I think it may have been mentioned on this list at the time, did anyone contact the author, Thomas A. Bass (tbass@hamilton.edu), and get a response?

"Attending the Media Lab event are a handful of borgs who would love to hop into faster-that-light space transport and dive straight into the Clynesian future. They drift around the edge of the party, wearing Japanese laptops strapped to their chests and homemade keypads attached to their wrists. When I try to chat with them, the conversation keeps slipping into well-worn grooves. They tell me they are Extropians, like Hans Moravec and Timothy Leary, who are getting ready to upload their psyches, jettison our exhausted planet, and blast off for the
intergalactic frontier. They combine Buck Rogers naiveté with a wide streak of paranoia. They are hungry for prostetics and yearning for time travel. They shadow the party like doppelgangers, reminding us that this technology has its dark side. But no one at the symposium cares to look under this particular rock or pay them much heed."

BM