From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Aug 19 2002 - 21:34:04 MDT
At 03:09 PM 8/19/02 -0400, Natasha wrote:
>From: Anders Sandberg
>>In order to actually become a serious contender we need to
>>write and publish more; it is not just about reaching out, but also
>>defining ourselves.
>The problem is that many transhumanists have not read FM-2030's writings on
>politics.
I gather they're not on the web. Can you arrange to have them put them up?
More worryingly: people living part-time in this pocket universe of ours
seem to lose touch terribly easily with the, ahem, Real World(TM). What's
the likely response of middle-of-the-road people researching a topic like
this, for a newspaper or magazine article or TV soundbite, who find
themselves directed in the first instance to the deep thoughts of someone
who called himself FutureMan2030? (Or Avatar Polymorph, or T0Morrow, or R.
U. Sirius for that matter, or even, cough cough, sorry, the rather flushed
Romanticism of `Natasha Vita-More'?) These are insignia instantly (mis)read
as the mark of the crank, the cyber-crazy, the ignorable or mockable.
Sorry, that's just how it is. Obviously people who select these new names
do so for all kinds of defensible reasons, but mass media PR ain't one of
them.
I directed Walter Truett Anderson to www.thespike.us, by the way, and
commented: `It's a crying shame that James Hughes mentioned Nazis in his
list, since that loathsome doctrine is in fact about as far from `Extropian
Transhumanism' as one could conceive, but the misleading association will
doubtless stick. (A few creeps with Nazi-like or racist views have popped
up on the extropy list in the six or so years I've been monitoring and
participating in it; they are quickly seen off with reasoned argument and
scathing ridicule.)'
Damien Broderick
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