More Fun With the T-Term

Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov writes: "[H]ow the heck am I supposed to get views outside of the transhumanist community when the authors of [technocentric] blogs turn into transhumanists within a few months of my subscription? ... Any other transhumanist economists out there? You can come out of the closet now."

Now, I realize I've been belaboring this point rather a lot lately, and I know full well that Michael is making a mild funny here, but I do think his comment symptomizes an interesting mindset.

It is unclear to me to what extent a person "in the closet" can properly be called a person "inside the community" she is closeted from. (This is a conversation very familiar, of course, in the queer identity politics from which Anissimov is drawing his analogy here.) And, seriously, I do think "transhumanist"-identified people tend to be altogether too promiscuous in their attribution of "honorary membership" in their tribe. That's their business, and probably it is harmless as far as it goes (although not everybody, let me tell you, is exactly thrilled to be feted by folks viewed as an Ayn Raelian robot cult in some professional quarters), but I do think it likely distorts their own sense of the distribution and entailments of mainstream attitudes on matters presumably of real concern to them.

Sometimes, t-types seem to want to describe as "transhumanist closet-cases" pretty much anybody who is a secular-minded scientifically-literate person geeky enough to be interested in the promise of emerging technologies. Thankfully, I think there are loads and loads of people who fit such a description (yours truly included, needless to say), although it is altogether unclear to me why one would need a special new word to describe such people. This is especially so, considering how incredibly different they are likely to be apart from their shared awareness of and interest in emerging NBIC techs -- likely far too diverse to generate some characteristic subcultural profile at this level of intellectual affinity.

Certainly one can hardly count on people describable under this broadly technocentric heading to be likely to sign up for vitrification, to think mind-uploading is likely to be workable or desirable any time soon, if ever, to spend much time contemplating the near-term arrival of a technodevelopmental singularity (on any construal, certainly one framed in the language of transcendence), to think money is better spent on SENS than on neglected diseases in the developing world, to worry more about gray goo than suitcase nukes, and so on. And don't get me started on the lingering prevalence among actual avowed subcultural t-types (but altogether marginal elsewhere) of libertopians, "Dynamists," scientistic reductionists, so-called "Brights," and so on.

These latter viewpoints seem to me incomparably better indicators of membership in subcultural "transhumanism" (which, as a formal "-ism" candidate is actually delineated in certain canonical FAQs, declarations, manifestos, some associated with actually-existing organizations boasting literal memberships -- few of which are known to or likely to appeal to the overabundant majority of folks liable nevertheless to be treated as "closeted" fellow-travelers from within the actually-existing community), than the rather mainstream enthusiasm for science and well regulated technodevelopment among citizens in relatively secular relatively democratic North Atlantic societies.

It isn't the least bit hard to get technoscientifically literate views outside the actual and avowed "transhumanist" community, as it happen. If it seems otherwise to you, then probably either you are applying the t-term overenthusiastically in a way that is likely to mislead you about some of the actual attitudes, positions, and entailments associated with many of the people so characterized, or you are engaging the world from a subcultural cul-de-sac and would benefit from acquaintance with a wider diversity of perspectives (even if you fail to find them particularly persuasive).

Update: The discussion over at Michael's blog on this topic has been edifying. This blog post itself is adapted from my own initial contribution to that conversation. I would encourage folks to comment there rather than here if they have the inclination.