From: Gregory Houston (vertigo@triberian.com)
Date: Fri Mar 28 1997 - 12:45:17 MST
GeoffCobb@aol.com wrote:
> [BTW - Re: Godlike Uberpeople- I liked 'descrete individual' but think that
> semantically, God and Uber(over) are misleading because they conjure up
> images of cults and political memage of the past...and would prefer new memes
> to express improving humans that do not suggest (by proxy) "RULING" over
> inferior classes, but rather a progession of personal posthumanity. I like
> that creative Extropians are always coining new phrases, and making new
> paradigms! Anyone take the bait?]
It think you are going to have trouble finding a satisfactory term.
Posthuman is commonly used, but as has been so recently illustrated,
that can mean anything. Cyborg might have been good, but Star Trek, via
the Borg, showed how that can be easily interpretted religously, bent to
mean some sort of assimilation and displacement of identity with the
"greater" whole.
Even the "trans" in transhuman, refering to transcendental, is teaming
with contradicting religous and political connotations. Extropian is a
great term, but we can refer to ourselves as extropian today, its not a
goal for the future. Extrodinaire (rather than extrAordinaire) might be
a good adjective, e.g., posthuman extrodinaire, but is too wordy. Good
luck.
On an aside, I thought of a derogatory term for perversions of extropian
memes which do not clearly require dynamic optimism: extropiates. An
example extropiate might be: "technology will make everything better",
or "technology will improve existence". Unqualified memes like that can
lead to passive waiting for technology to save us, when there are things
we can do right now to improve the conditions of our existence, e.g.,
educational reform, political reform, and anything else that might
involve a more effective use of what we already have. Paraphrasing
someone from an earlier post, if we cannot use what we have now
effectively, whats to make us think we will use the technology of the
future effectively.
Cheers!
--
Gregory Houston Triberian Institute of Emotive Education
vertigo@triberian.com http://www.triberian.com
phone: 816.561.1524 info@triberian.com
cellular: 816.807.6660 snail: PO Box 32046 Kansas City MO 64171
"Empowered, impassioned, we have a lust for life insatiable!"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:44:19 MST