[HN Gopher] Meet The Extropians (1994)
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Meet The Extropians (1994)
Author : optimalsolver
Score : 38 points
Date : 2021-10-02 07:26 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| kanzure wrote:
| Extropians are everywhere. Many names come to mind, like Assange,
| Hal Finney, Jurvetson, and many others.
|
| I hope that something like this group comes back, but with a
| vengeance. Call me an optimist, but if they had put their minds
| to it, they could have accomplished much more than a mailing
| list, which has unfortunately dwindled in the last 10 years.
|
| Cypherpunks write code- but what about the extropians?
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| I think a lot of 90s and early 2000's idealist movements have
| been disbanded or migrated to smaller groups that are equally
| unable to change things. I remember when copyright reform was
| the biggest thing with Lessig and that's entirely dead.
| Douglass Rushkoff went from famous intellectual to nobody. Cory
| Doctorow also entirely ignored now. I think a lot of these
| people realized that if they can't fix politics then they can't
| enact their agenda. If your nation state and electorate works
| against your ideals then you'll eventually fail. You have to
| fix the electorate first and that took a big step backwards by
| watching social media turn into conspiracy right-wing media and
| radicalize tens of millions of americans towards sociopathic,
| pro-death, anti-prosperity, pro-faith, and anti-intellectual
| views. None of which lead to utopia, but to further corruption
| and victimization.
|
| I also think these people were relatively young and now have
| families and mortgages and retirement accounts to pay for and
| the wind was taken out of their ideological sails when they
| realized the system will punish them if they don't assimilate
| into the status quo. Many cypherpunks just write code for big
| companies and writers have moved onto chasing literary fads to
| make rent. Its either that or be thrown them into poverty. The
| system you want to reform has built-in anti-reform mechanisms
| and your needed paycheck, especially tied to your health
| insurance, is one of those mechanisms. This is also why so many
| famous reformers were either old-money types or had
| ideologically aligned patrons to fund them. These grassroots
| groups don't often have that so they fail.
|
| Successful peaceful reform movements are actually shadow-funded
| and shadow-politicked for by the elites. Elites against other
| elites and using people like this for their own ends. Elites
| won't sign on to anything that potentially hurts their wealth
| or power, which all these idealistic reform movements would do.
| Short of a popular uprising and violent revolution, we can
| expect the same lack of progress on utopian thinking in the
| future because utopia is attainable, its just the resources
| that's needed for it are controlled by people who don't want to
| give them up.
| caeril wrote:
| They're still around, most of them having landed in the
| Rationalist/LessWrong community along with Yudkowski.
|
| And then some of them, like Anissimov, et al, moved onto the
| Post-Rationalist community, with a small percentage of those
| moving onto Neoreaction, and a small percentage of _those_
| moving onto radical Accelerationist politics.
|
| I think what happened is that a lot of these bright-eyed and
| bushy-tailed youngsters who saw Singularity and/or radical life
| extension happening in their lifetimes eventually came to
| accept that they're not totally wrong, but they'll be long dead
| when it does.
|
| There was a sort of demotivation that happened to push them
| into more tangible efforts, even some as prosaic as politics.
| kanzure wrote:
| lesswrong (specifically eliezer) doesn't push enough people
| into hard sciences; worrying about AI x-risk is not a recipe
| for innovating in genetics, neurobiology, life extension, or
| anything else extropian.
| prepend wrote:
| I remember this article and it was really influential on me as a
| kid (rip wired btw). I ended up getting on a few extropian
| mailing lists and have had positive interactions over the years
| in multiple city.
|
| Smart, fun group of people.
| johnklos wrote:
| They're still around:
|
| https://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi
| nickbauman wrote:
| Wow, using the old Common Gateway Interface, no less!
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| RIP Wired? I've got a near-complete collection of Mondo 2000!
| contingencies wrote:
| I recall M2K as more art-mag/future-style than substance,
| whereas (earlier) Wired more fully explored ideas with feet
| on the ground. Those curious can see
| https://www.mondo2000.com/archive/ +
| https://archive.org/details/mondohistory
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Huh, do you know anything about that "history project" on
| Internet Archive? I could scan all my old issues, but I
| imagine if they wanted that they'd already have them, they
| can't be _that_ rare (and are of course still under
| copyright)...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I always thought it was the opposite. M2K had vision and
| some awareness of history and irony. (Albeit pickled by
| pharmaceuticals.)
|
| Wired was mostly just a hype factory, and often comedically
| lacking self-awareness.
| rsync wrote:
| OMNI ftw.
| thom wrote:
| Yeah I remember being on various extropian mailing lists, and
| then SL4 which was a gateway into all the singularitarian
| people. Mind blowing stuff in my teens, although as it turns
| out it would have been better to just study more linear algebra
| and ignore what was for the most part a bunch of LARP.
| klyrs wrote:
| Hey, be nice. LARPing is a good passtime. Especially the kind
| with boffers!
| thom wrote:
| Some of my favourite people are LARPers!
| pitspotter2 wrote:
| >bunch of LARP
|
| Having just watched an episode of _Thunderbirds_ I 'm the
| first to admire any bunch of people who want to change or
| change things for the better. However the sad truth is that,
| you're right, trying to make progress for progress' sake is a
| little better than building a Star Trek set.
|
| Inspiration is vital but real progress comes a by-product of
| understanding things better as they are now, and how they fit
| together now, I think.
| kragen wrote:
| According to
| https://web.archive.org/web/20151204090856/https://www.wired...
| this article was written by Ed Regis. That information is
| actually still in the current version of the article, but the
| default layout seems to cover it up.
|
| I'm pretty sure there were a bunch of photos accompanying the
| original article, but I don't see them in either the WABAC
| machine or the online page.
|
| A thing I've never been clear on is whether the Extropian Mike
| Perry was the FIG F-83 Mike Perry or the Tor Mike Perry. Does
| anybody know? (Not you, kanzure, I know you get terribly confused
| about people's identities.)
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