Re: *ThiGMOO* & Marxist extropian revolution

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
19 Nov 1999 16:38:15 +0100

Damien Broderick <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au> writes:

> >>> Maybe there should be various factions (like the extropians)
> >>> under the transhumanist banner (maybe we need "social posthumans"
>
> I've just read, with an increasing smile on my face, *ThiGMOO,* by Eugene
> Byrne (London: Earthlight, 1999).
>
> A global `Marxist extropian' revolution is fomented by several hundred
> `erams' - `Electronic Replication of a Mind-set', also Latin for `I was'.
> Built in a British university Museum of Mind, but evicted from there, the
> sims take over a secret corporate mega-computer in Islamic revolutionary
> desert nation Dilmun, renaming their nano-AI LENIN (Limitless Engine of
> Nanotechnological INtelligence'.

Sounds a bit like Ken Macleod's _The Star Fraction_, which I recently read together with the sequel _The Stone Canal_ (now trying to borrow the final novel from a friend). It is in many ways the novel to read together with Virginia Postrel's _The Future and its Enemies_; the good guys are the dynamist libertarian/trotskyist/space movement, fighting against the conservative green/luddite/religious "barb" and the technocratic stasists of the US/UN.

Free market communism? Why not? :-)

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y