From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Tue Jun 05 2001 - 23:57:14 MDT
On 6/5/01 6:10 PM, "Ben Goertzel" <ben@goertzel.org> wrote:
>
> Remember when Wired Magazine was sorta cool? Before Conde Nast acquired it
> and turned it into a peculiar, occasionally interesting but rarely
> provocative product catalog?
>
> Remember how exquisitely well Mondo 2000 expressed a certain moment in
> cultural history?
Both of these magazines left a rather big impression on me when they first
came out. Very seductive. In some ways, it seems that those magazines were
so successful that they created the circumstances of their own obsolescence.
They catalyzed the coalescing of a subculture, that once it materialized, no
longer had use for an outlet that had essentially become contemporaneous to
it. I think that media creations like Wired and Mondo 2000 are by nature
fleeting if effective.
> Right now would be a great time to launch a new future tech magazine. We
> have the brainpower and literary talent among us to pull off the needed
> writing in our spare time, that's for sure. We could launch it as a website
> first, and then launch the print version once we had a readership (if indeed
> this seemed a wise move at the time).
I live entirely in the online world in many ways, and this biases my view,
as it does yours. Online sites are good, but you may very well be missing
much of the audience that needs to read you most; we aren't really trying to
reach the average slashdotter in my opinion (many of whom have at least
heard of extropians). Most people aren't the Wired types who would
gravitate to something like this online. This poses an interesting problem,
but it goes back to identifying who your target audience actually is.
> No party line. Socialists as well as libertarians allowed. Just
> interesting subversive thought, with a focus on the future of technology,
> mind & society. Profiles of successful business or hot new products will be
> much rarer than explanations of fascinating new technologies, or serious
> debates of moral dilemmas to do with future tech.
You can easily get buried in academia and the slow road to anything if you
aren't selling a sexy platform. What you are describing here sounds exactly
like what dozens of other organizations are attempting to do. You would be
competing with dozens of specialized forums online that already do a fair
job of covering these things in their areas of concern.
In other words, you don't want to be another news source, even and
editorialized one, as there are plenty of those already. You would be doing
nothing more than preaching to people that don't really need the exposure.
> Is it possible to bring deep futuristic thinking to the masses, as Wired has
> brought glitzy techno-commercialism to the masses? Who knows? But success
> would do wonders for the image of extropians and related animals.
I think it could be done (and I am intrigued by the idea), but it would
require careful consideration as to who the target audience is and what you
are actually trying to sell them. It can't be explicitly about deep
futurism, even if that is what you are selling, or the masses would take on
that "deer in the headlights" look that they do now. So in short, it would
have to be grossly manipulative fare, not the idle academic chatter that we
normally engage in.
The way Wired and Mondo 2000 did it was they simply fabricated a culture
that looked so wickedly cool and sexy that a fraction of masses felt
compelled to try and become a part of that "culture", and the rest is
history. With media penetration being what it is these days, you see a fair
number of examples of this type of culture creation. The vampire subculture
is another intriguing, if very different, example of this. It is an
engineered phenomenon whether intentional or not.
So my take on this is that if you want to start recruiting the masses, you
need to invent a new Future Culture that is sexy, compelling, relevant to
people today, and most importantly, attainable. By attainable, I mean that
the average joe feels as though they can become an accepted member of The
Culture. If you make it obviously obtainable to the extent that the average
person feels as though they could "live it", you will have people who will
expend the effort to change their lives to try and meet this constructed
ideal. This is really all just primer for the real work; you have to change
their frame of mind first.
What does this have to do with basic extropian principles? Not much, but it
gives you the opportunity to create an audience from a part of the masses
that would otherwise be impervious to most extropian concepts. Most people
need to be heavily pre-conditioned before you can seriously hit them with
deep futurism and have something useful come out of it. It is surreptitious
framework building; what you do with it is up to you. There are far too few
people who were "already Extropians/Transhumanists before I had a name for
my philosophies", so you'll have to make them.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:07:59 MST