From: Terry W. Colvin (fortean1@mindspring.com)
Date: Wed Jul 02 2003 - 14:50:56 MDT
The Tomorrow People
(keyed in from a poor fax of the March 26, [1995] UK Observer cover story.
Inferred text is in brackets. - RM)
Max More and the Extropians say it is time to stop fretting about the
future. Forget eco-panic, limits to growth, even death. Extropians want to
be immortal and travel through space and time. They are also libertarians
who want to privatise the oceans and the air.
- Jim McClellan on a boundlessly optimistic Californian cult -
Just another LA Sunday at the end of the millenium. Outside, it's pouring
down. It's been like this for the past two days. Upstate, things are
getting bad: floods, mud slides, deaths, million of dollar's worth of
property damage. I'm sitting in a comfy suburban apartment talking to a
charming young man called Jay Prime Positive about the sort of body he
wants to inhabit after he "uploads" his consciousness to a computer. "I'd
probably want to spend most of my time in dataspace, but I do want to
interact with the real stuff some of the time," says Jay. "But really, I
imagine having multiple bodies and multiple copies of myself. I have
problems with gender identification, so I'd definitely have a female body
in there somewhere." As I said, just another LA Sunday at the end of the
millenium.
You may not feel in great physical shape, but you've perhaps never
thought of ditching your body altogether and uploading your consciousness
to a computer. Or making multiple copies of yourself so that when the
inevitable Big Systems Crash happens, you can re-boot another and you can
start again. You perhaps never pondered the benefits of setting loose
molecule-sized robots in your body to clean your arteries. Or thought about
how the principles of quantum mechanics could be used to knock up a
parallel universe in your garden shed. Or sat down and planned the creation
of a whole new country, a floating free state banged together out of old
oil tankers, a place where freedom and unbounded intellect could reign and
you could finally get the damn government - and the taxman - off your back.
You may perhaps have dreamed of living forever, but have you signed up to
put your brain on ice when you die?
Extropians like Jay and the other people crammed into the Culver
City apartment have given these matters a lot of thought. A loose
association, a science faction, if you like, of computer programmers,
philosophy graduates, [rese]archers, scientists, and libertarians, they're
devoted to [figh]ting entropy and all that doomy stuff about finite
[reso]urces and the inevitable heat death of the universe. [Inst]ead
they're dedicated to promoting the forces of [extr]opy (the opposite of
entropy). They celebrate possi[bilities,]
freedom and boundless growth, the appliance of sci[ence] and sexy,
high-powered technology. They want [to go] beyond the limits of nature and
biology and move on [to] the stars. Though mainly made up of Americans, the
[prim]e mover behind the Extropian Institute, one Max [Mor]e, is a
pony-tailed 30-year-old born and brought up in [Bris]tol, England.
[M]ax and his fellow Extropians feel it is time to stop feel[ing]
bad about the future. Forget eco panic, limits to growth, death even. The
hole in the ozone layer? Don't [wor]ry. We'll fix it. A New Age of Reason
is about to dawn in [whi]ch the sky's the limit. Space travel, immortality,
huge [pector]al muscles, and and end to the evils of big government [and]
cellulite. "No mysteries are sacrosanct, no limits [unq]uestionable. The
unknown will yield to the ingenious [min]d," says Max.
[E]xtropianism may seem to have its face set firmly to [the] future but
actually its roots are in ideas and fads from [the p]ast three decades. It
mixes the "every day in every way [I'm] getting better and better" pop
therapies of the 1970's,[s]elf-help neo-conservative economic individualism
and [work]-out culture of the 1980's, and the neo-biological opti[mis]m of
the digital 1990's with a belief that computers have [jump]-started a new
stage in human evolution.
[A]lso in the theoretical mix are the libertarian ideas and [econ]om
ics of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek, complexity [and] chaos theory,
Nietszche, comic books and science [ficti]on, digitial technology,
cryonics, nanotechnology, and [vari]ed weird sciences.
[Ex]tropianism isn't just a philosophical programme, [how]ever. It
is also a kind of lifestyle futurism. There are [Extr]opian T-shirts,
greetings ("Upward and Outward!") and [han]dshakes (a cross between a high
five and something [out] of Star Trek in which you sort of link hands and
reach on [up t]ogether). There's a whole mini-dictionary of new [Extr]opian
words (smart-faced,
cryocrastination, extropia). [The]re are Extropian names. An upbeat new
name, after all, [is th]e the first step towards self-transformation. Max
More was [born] Max O'Connor. Other notable Extropians include [Mar]k Plus
and Simon! D Levy - a name, you suspect, which [nee]ds a little more
boundless optimism.
[Ex]tropianism seems more American than America itself, [al]most a
parody of the American Dream - so it shouldn't [com]e as a surprise that
Max is English, someone who's left [the] old world behind and reinvented
himself on the edge of the Pacific. "A late accident" as far as his builder
father and [???] mother were concerned, Max grew up discon[nect]ed from his
older brothers, who are fundamentalist [Chr]istians, much to Max's bemused
horror.
[As] a child, Max read comic books. "My favourites were [the] X
Men, perhaps because I felt like a bit of a mutant [mys]elf. I didn't fit
in. I used to sketch rocket boots when I [was] a kid. I just loved the idea
of having supernormal abili[ties]. I used to invent my own. I had a whole
book of them."
[Aft]er dabbling briefly in the occult in his early teens, Max [disc]overed
science fiction, anarchy, libertarianism, right-[win]g economics, and life
extension.
["]They seemed to share a common theme of overcoming [limi]ts and
increasing freedom - individual freedom, [free]dom from gravity, freedom
from death. Just what [was] needed in gloomy 1970's Britain, which was when
he [?] started to think about going to the United States. [It] was a
miserable decade. Everyone thought the world [was] going to end, the
economy was in a terrible state and [no] one was thinking about the future.
I couldn't seem to [talk] to people about the things I wanted to. They
thought I [was] too weird."
Things didn't change when Max went to Oxford to study [phil]osophy,
politics, and economics in the mid-1980s. [Wh]ile doing his degree, Max
became the first person in [Eur]ope to sign up for cryonic suspension with
the US firm [Alc]or. Later Max headed off to do a philosophy PhD (on
personal identity) at Los Angeles University. It was there he [hook?]ed up
with Tom Morrow and the pair began to develop [the]ir Extropian ideas,
incorporating new technologies like [virt]ual reality, on-line communities,
and smart drugs.
Max may be a long way from his old home, but he plans on going a
lot further than America. Extropianism is a "rational transhumanism", he
explains. There may not be any supernatural force in the universe, but
pretty soon, suggests More, once we get our brain implants and robot bodies
working, we will be as gods. In short, it's time to evolve beyond "the
merely human".
Making this kind of fantastic voyage will entail considering some
pretty radical ideas. For example, privatising the air, Max's answer to
worries about the environment advanced by eco-activists (great enemies of
the Extropian struggle who, he says, often deliberately exaggerate visions
of doom for their own purposes). "We do need to be concerned about
environmental issues. Especially as Extropians, because we plan on living a
long time, and though we will go off into space, we plan on coming back
here, so we need to preserve this place. It's not our children and
grandchildren we're worried about. It's ourselves." Things might be helped,
he adds, if resources were privately owned. "The oceans and the air -
anybody can pollute them without having to pay for it. Turn those commons
into privately-owned resources and there'd be more rational economic use of
them."
Privatising the air is a typically Extropian solution to ecological
damage. They believe in a free-market future. In fact, Max tells me, his
economic ideas - currently enjoying a revival in the on-line world - are in
some ways being underwritten by new discoveries about self-organizing
systems and spontaneous order being made by researchers into complexity
theory. "It all suggests that we need a dynamic system that can keep
reconfiguring itself, asystem without people in the middle telling
everybody else what prices to set or how to allocate resources or com[ing]
up with a national medical plan."
It's these sort of ideas that crop up in the Extropian magazine,
which covers things like the physics of immortality, time travel, and
"traversable wormholes and interstellar travel". Chief among the thinkers
is Robin Hanson. Flicking through Robin's thoughts on speeding up the
development of human thought by borrowing tricks from the stock market and
creating an ideas futures market[, or] reading his theories on what would
happen if uploading human consciousness became a reality, you start to feel
the ground shifting beneath you. But Extropians like Robin never look down.
Down isn't an Extropian direction. Down isn't in their dictionary, or if it
is, it's probably been turned into something more Extropian, like
"anti-up", just as death tends to be talked of as "de-animation".
This is why Extropians are most at home in the gravity-free world
of cyberspace, where it sometimes appears that the only limit to your
imagination is the size of your hard disk. But, argues Max:"Everything I
publish in Extropy has to seem to me that it is within the bounds of
scientific possibility. I think the problem is that people don't
distinguish different kinds of far-outedness. In some senses, we're not
very far out at all. Our ideas don't require any new physics to work. We're
not far out in that sense. It's just that we follow chains of thinking much
further along than most people are prepared to go."
Although there is an Extropian Institute, actually an office
upstairs at Max More's Marina Del Rey apartment, the real Extropian meeting
place is the on-line mailing list, where the most committed of the
movement's [me]mbers upload vast transhumanist tracts on a nightly [basis].
It's a sign of the times. In the past, avant-garde [grou]ps met up to
exchange philosophical theories and var[ious] resentments in pubs and
cafes. They toiled in isolation on [pa]mphlets and novels. Now they hook up
in cyberspace, [where] people of like minds from all round the world can
join [the p]arty, which means before you know where you have [a
mini-]movement.
[Th]at's the theory, anyway. With Extropians, the stress would be on
"mini". There are about 360 paid-up mem[bers], with another 500 checking
the mailing list. The [Extro]pian Institute is just scraping by, Max
admits. What to [do ab]out this is the subject up for discussion at a
meeting [of] LA Extropians, the reason why Jay Prime Positive, [Max] More,
Max's girlfriend Nancie Clark and others are [whi]ling a wet Sunday
afternoon crammed into Tim [Free]man's Culver City apartment.
[Ch]at with an Extropian regular, Regina Pancake, whose [j]ob actually
involves building the future, or rather [ic]ons of the future. She works
for a company that makes [props?] for SF movies and TV, things like Star
Trek. Regina got involved in Extropianism about four years ago. [Like a]
lot of movement members, she came via cryonics, [which] she was drawn to
after a car crash. Shaken up, she [signe]d up to be frozen. "With that,"
she explains, "you're directly hands-on with the attitude to incorporate
the [futur]e directly into your life."
[Th]e Extropians talk up plans for an Extropian book, [class]es in Future
Studies run by the Extropian Institute, an Extropian cable news programme,
which would [limit] the "disasturbation" of regular news and tell it like
it [is,] emphasise the advances in knowledge, recount [n]ew genes we
discovered since last week, or the new [???]-powered computer chip just
developed. It all sounds [strang]ely familiar, like a techno-obsessed
version of the [???] production reports once so popular in the Soviet
[Unio]n. But everyone seems so up, I don't want to rain on their parade.
[???] wants to bid goodbye to everyone with his own [versio]n of the
Extropian handshake, which ends with a [reach?] to the stars.
Unfortunately, the low ceiling in Tim's [???]e gets in the way. I go back
to Max and Nancie's [apart]ment, which is dominated by his sizable
collection of science-fiction paperbacks - which runs from Robert
[Hein]lein, the high-flying libertarian of Golden Age SF, to [Willi]am
Gibson, who max doesn't like much (too down - too many lowlifes in his
books) - and her vast paint[ings]. One wall is taken up with a
primary-colored vision of [Na]ncie and her best friend kitted out in
leotards, hair [fan]ning out in best shampoo-ad style, doing what seem[s]
to be zero-gravity aerobics just south of the rings of Saturn. [Na]ncie
talks me through another work upstairs which [featur]es a satellite, photos
of herself crawling along with [??]air, two friends making love in zero g,
and the Moon. ["It's ] an allegory about evolution and communication,
[with?] humanity crawling up out of the mud," she explains. [Nanc]ie's
pictures are big but she hankers after something [on a] grander scale. She
wants to boundlessly expand her [art. L]et's face it - paint and canvas
aren't very Extropian. [What] she has in mind is a sort of astral
performance art, [erec]ting things on the face of the moon, deep space
[???]. "Wouldn't that be incredible," she murmurs, as she [and M]ax embrace
and beam at the wonderment of it all.
[The] morning after the Extropian meeting, I visit [Max's] office. I
confess that I have a few problems with [Extro]py and Max calmly does his
best to help me work [throu]gh them. It may seem, he explains, that
Extropians [have] too much faith in the power of technology, that they've
[flown?] way too high on the freedoms and the possibilities you find [on
th]e Net, but all they're doing is trying out ideas, testing [theori]es.
They're aware that there may be problems. Max [in]sists that they aren't
really elitists, that they're open to [anyb]ody and that the future they
imagine won't just [sui]t the rich few in the West. Instead, over the long
run, [in the] Thatcherite tradition, it will trickle down to everyone.
[Th]e funny thing about Max is that while his ideas are [???], he argues
them so calmly and rationally you find [yours]elf being drawn in. Cryonics
is not irrational, he tells [me, t]he objections to it are. He recalls how
his American [philo]sophy teacher dismissed it as ghastly but had to admit
[in the] end that she had no rational arguments against it. ["Cryo]nics
just seems so rational to me. Which seems more ghastly? You're kept in
pristine condition, in a nice clean container, or you're thrown into the
ground where you decompose and the worms eat you. Or you're put into a big
burner and you're heated up until the pressure builds up in your skull and
your brain explodes."
Max disagrees that the Extropian obsession with uploading
reveals a
hatred of the body - a trend that seems rife within techno-culture in
general. "Well, I like my body a great deal," he says. "I don't have any
problems with it. I'm not looking forward to getting rid of it. But
uploading isn't about getting rid of your body. People are going to want
new bodies. They'll just want their brains replaced with something more
effective."
Effective is a word you could use to describe Romana Machado. When her name
comes up, Max says he'd rather I didn't interview her, that she's more into
self-promotion than Extropy. "I think she thinks she's the Madonna of
Extropianism."
Romana laughs at this suggestion. "How about the Camille Paglia of
Extropy? I like that too. Maybe I'm a cross between Ayn Rand and Betty
Page." Though her name sounds distinctly Extropian, it predates her
interest in Max's theories. She changed her original a while back, taking
her new name from a sidekick of Doctor Who. "On the Extropian mailing list
I'm called Mistress Romana, but only because of my rather dominant attitude
in argument."
Romana works at Apple, ironing out the bugs in the Newton PDA, but also
subsidizes her Extropian lifestyle with a spot of glamour modeling -
lingerie catalogues, adverts for fetish clothing stores. She's just set up
The Exclave, an Extropian base camp in Sunnyvale, California, where she and
two Extropian partners, Dave Krieger and Geoff Dale, have decided to shack
up together in order to "increase each other's productivity." Max had told
me that experimenting with your lifestyle - trying smart drugs,
visualization techniques, on-line identity play, non-traditional modes of
living - was a very Extropian thing to do. The posse at the Exclave are
taking him at his word. Romana especially.
"I'm non-monogamous, but that doesn't mean I'm promiscuous," she tells
me.
"I'm bisexual, but that doesn't mean I'm promiscuous either. What it means
is that I have the relationships I want with the people I want without
being stuck in this one form of sanctioned relationship, which in this
culture is marriage,serial monogamy, whatever.
There's more than one person that I'm serious about at any one given time
and I'm happy with that. It really works for me."
Romana is best described as a hands-on Extropian. Along with her
housemates, she's a regular guest on a local talk radio station. The group
are also working on a book about Extropy, titled _Frequently Questioned
Answers_. Romana also released Stego, a free encryption programme which
works by hiding your information in the lower bits of seemingly
insignificant information. A very Extropian thing to do. "To me the basic
activity is practically living according to my ideas," she says, directing
me to an essay on her World Wide Web page - "Five Things You Can Do To
Fight Entropy Now". "It's my action plan for what you can do in your life
right now in order to limit the incursions of entropy in your life, since
we can all have to deal with that. The five are: care for your mind, your
body, have a plan for your financial future, learn to defend yourself, and
get a cryonics contract."
So how is the fight against entropy going? How post human is she? "I'm
not
even thinking about being post human at this point. I'm just thinking about
being transhuman or pursuing my potential as a human. When we get to
posthuman, what that means is we'll have technically transcended the meat
bodies we have now and we'll be able to have the godlike powers and a
post-scarcity economy and any one of a number of things a[nd] powers.
That's not where I'm at now." So where does she think she'll be in the
future? "I want to be the world's most beautiful 83-year-old woman," sh[e]
laughs. "Actually, I hope that I've preserved myself so we[ll] that I'm a
testament to my own ideas."
Back on Planet Earth, it may be hard not to dismiss the Extropians as
techno-nuts, as fanboys who have confuse[d] science fiction for science
fact, as cyberspace cadet[s] who've got way carried away in the digital
playpen of the Internet. They, in turn, would argue that they're too
avant-garde for the conservative mind-set. I'm not so sure. Han[g] out in
respectable American research labs and you hear scientists batting around
the same ideas. In fact, the[ir] extremism actually functions as a
revealing mirror to modern American techno-culture.
And the future More dreams about - post-human transcendence, visiting
other galaxies, meeting copies of yourself - sounds like more fun than the
500-channel multi-media SuperHypeWay on offer from Bill Gates. Maybe the
Extropian's wildly rational speculations a[re] a challenge to corporate
America to live up to its digit[al] hype. Maybe.
Perhaps if you never do look down, gravity and reality never take hold.
Perhaps you just keep on going, upwards and outwards. And if you keep on
going, who knows where you might end up? Somewhere, perhaps, like the Far
Edge [P]arty, which Jay Prime Positive tells me about. When [we have]
figured out how to travel the galaxies and live fo[rever, ] Extropians will
set out to explore the universe. The plan [is] to meet up on the far edge
of the universe and swap traveller's tales, show slides, and the like.
"That's kind of why I'm involved in Extropianism," Jay says. "I think
they'll throw the best parties in the future."
.........................................................................
Romana Machado
machado@newton.apple.com
*NEW WWW URL. PLEASE UPDATE LINKS!*: http://www.best.com/~fqa/romana
..........................................................................
Give your "10" vote to my contestant, Memorie Paige, in the VirtualVegas
Ms. Metaverse Pageant: http://199.107.109.2/mm/memorie/memorie.html
..........................................................................
Respect is *earned*.
-- Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@mindspring.com > Alternate: < fortean1@msn.com > Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html > Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB * U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program ------------ Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org >[Vietnam veterans, Allies, CIA/NSA, and "steenkeen" contractors are welcome.]
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