> Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 02:23:27 -0400
> From: "Stephan Vladimir Bugaj" <stephan@bugaj.com>
> Subject: RE: Posthuman Politics
>
> majority of an entire country's population. Strategies that require a
> majority of a population to participate have been known to succeed. The
> American Revolution succeeded. Martin Luther King succeeded. But
> anything on that massive a scale takes billions of dollars, a core group
> of activists willing to devote their entire lives to the problem, and even
> then it still takes a generation to set up the initial conditions if they
> haven't been set up already.
Yes, unless the small group gets lucky because events go
their way (Bolsheviks &c). I have a twin track aim anyway of
education and social change, and am very aware that some
processes will take much longer than others. But even accepting
your point in full, still better to start sooner rather than later. It
shows confidence if you can argue your political/ philosophical
position in public against rival viewpoints ... this reason by
itself justifies the political engagement of POSTHUMANs with
the legacy political systems from the human-been era that we all
have to currently exist with. We should want a SAY in the future.
> Maybe I'm just boring and uninspired, but I'm all for a sensible plan
> with short, mid, and long-term components... I just don't see "radically
> altering the nature of the human body and spacetime itself through
> nanotechnology and AI" as part of a five-year plan, unless (and this is
> still a big maybe, not that it matters since it's not going to happen)
> every single global resource that wasn't going towards maintaining the
> basic human and technical infrastructure to support a society capable of
> such a project were put on the project itself. (Or someone gets really,
> really "lucky".)
Agree. This is just one possible outcome. I think it more urgent to
change the archaic mind-set that humans operate on, and think that
the solution of the mind-body problem (MVT) offers a new range of
applications and experience-expansion possibilities that are towards
a fuller, more correct understanding of our own natures as E-1 mammals.
We should utilise natural resources and abilities that we already have
in better ways before leaping into unknown radical
technological changes that are IRREVERSIBLE and which may
ultimately turn out to be undesirable. We don't want to scare
Joe Public by being too gung ho and incautious, nor present
ourselves as sci-fi anoraks and laughable trekkies.
>
> LL+P,
> Stephan
ADVANCE! Steve Nichols
Posthuman Organisation www.Extropia.net
www.steve-nichols.com
>
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