From: Max More (maxmore@primenet.com)
Date: Fri Jun 20 1997 - 11:02:44 MDT
At 11:06 AM 6/16/97 +0200, you wrote:
>This weekend we had a media-planning meeting in Aleph, and we
>discussed what image we wanted our association to have. It might be
>interesting to hear if Extropy Institute has made any similar work.
>
>To sum up, we decided that the ideal image for Aleph (given our
>knowledge of Swedish media, politics and culture) would be to be
>known as responsible, serious, forward thinking, international,
>tolerant and with a hint of "staying at the cutting edge". We decided
>to tone down things like the use of smart drugs, ultra-advanced
>technology and grandiose visions of a pothuman future when dealing
>with non-transhumanists in order to avoid scaring people away and
>causing misunderstandings, and at the same time show that
>transhumanism is about living a practical, forward-thinking life.
How will you implement this policy? You can present the milder aspects of
these ideas to non-transhumanists but then, when they look at your web
sites or literature, they will see all those wild ideas. How do you plan to
segment the market? Will you set up different web sites and print different
literature for the different audiences? If so, how do you prevent
crossover? (A quick web search and the non-transhumanists will find the
explicitly transhumanist sites.)
The public image and presentation issue is tremendously important for the
future of our ideas. Apart from Anders' comments on the above questions, I
encourage everyone else to offer suggestions. How do we find the optimal
path between being boring/blending in with other ideas, and standing
out/looking scary.
I'm facing this issue very clearly now as I write my book The Augmented
Animal. I don't want to tone it down yet I'm trying to make the ideas
appealing and reasonable to the average reasonably intelligent reader who
hasn't heard of many of these ideas before. (A tough and smart editor helps
with this!)
Onward!
Max
Max More, Ph.D.
more@extropy.org
http://www.primenet.com/~maxmore
President, Extropy Institute: exi-info@extropy.org, http://www.extropy.org
EXTRO 3 CONFERENCE on the future: http://www.extropy.org/extro3.htm
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