Exit Planet Transhuman?

Perhaps some of the readers here have heard of the death of John Perry Barlow. If the name doesn't ring a bell, he wrote something called "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", the Libertarian manifesto that lead to the currents in modern day Silicon Valley of "disruption" and "move fast and break things". You know, stuff that "disrupted" people's privacy and "broke" civil discourse.

One of the most incredible things about this man though is that he believed in the techno-libertarian dream to the end of his life, even as it ravaged the very medium he had fawned over.

A recent Verge article quoted the Electronic Frontier Foundation staff member Cindy Cohn: "Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter.”

"Focus on the latter", think about that prase. It's a rather vague phrase but I get the feeling from it that Barlow had decided to shut out the very thought that the web could be used for evil, or at the very least stubbornly refused to rethink his ideology as it came crashing down upon the world.

There's a word for that: willful ignorance. And it seems that some of the big-hitters of the transhumanist movement continue that legacy of willful ignorance.

An older article by Vice gives a look into the thought processes of a well known transhumanist named Zoltan Istvan. A member of a group of transhumanists floated the possibility of inequality persisting into the future.

Most of the members of the group agreed with her, but Zoltan's response was: 'The good news is that we don't have the robber barons of the 20th century ... We don't have child labor and stuff like that in America anymore, we have a lot of better rules, and I know it's not perfect but it's very hard for the Bill Gates or the Mark Zuckerberg to do anything that is so against the people ... There's no question that within the next three to five years something like the Transhumanist Bill of Rights is going to enter into the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights," he said. He did not think that government or corporations would play a role'.

There's a major bit of handwaving here: "He did not think that government or corporations would play a role". It doesn't seem to occur to him that the lack of modern robber barons and child labor (in the U.S. at least) resulted from government action, not in spite of it.

In fact he seems to ignore the fact that "the government" is employed by groups of individual people in representative democracies. Yes, there are loopholes and wealth inequality itself that small groups can take advantage of to sway democratic governments, but the heart of the idea is still sound (as evidenced -again- by the lack of robber barons and child laborers in the modern U.S.). No man is an island.

But this thought that "if we just throw more technology at everything and ignore pesky things like politics and social sciences then everything will be okay!" strikes me as a big damn problem in the transhumanist movement.

So maybe it's time to leave transhumanism behind.

It was an interesting prototype, but it's time to make something that factors in a broader view of the world and people (big hint: nobody -and this applies to Libertarians too- are ultra-rational in unregulated capitalism).

We can't stay in this cradle called transhumanism forever.