The Excitement-Disillusionment-Reorientation cycle of online transhumanism
Cross-posted to xuenay.
A colleague's posting on the Finnish Transhumanist Association's mailing list made me think about a phenomenon I've observed both in myself and several others, but never thought about so explicitly. I call it the Excitement-Disillusionment-Reorientation cycle of online transhumanism.
The excitement phase is when you first stumble across concepts such as transhumanism, radical life extension, and superintelligent AI. This is when you subscribe to transhumanist mailing lists, join your local WTA/H+ chapter, and start trying to spread the word to everybody you know. You'll probably spend hundreds of hours reading different kinds of transhumanist materials. This phase typically lasts for several years.
In the disillusionment phase, you start to realize that while you still agree with the fundamental transhumanist philosophy, most of what you are doing is rather pointless. You can have all the discussions you want, but by themselves, those discussions aren't going to bring all those amazing technologies here. You learn to ignore the "but an upload of you is just a copy" debate when it shows up the twentieth time, with the same names rehearsing the same arguments and thought experiments for the fifteenth time. Having gotten over your initial future shock, you may start to wonder why having a specific name like transhumanism is necessary in the first place - people have been taking advantage of new technologies for several thousands of years. After all, you don't have a specific "cellphonist" label for people using cell phones, either. You'll slowly start losing interest in activities that are specifically termed as transhumanist.
In the reorientation cycle you have two alternatives. Some people renounce transhumanism entirely, finding the label pointless and mostly a magnet for people with a tendency towards future hype and techno-optimism. Others (like me) simply realize that bringing forth the movement's goals requires a very different kind of effort than debating other transhumanists on closed mailing lists. An effort like engaging with the large audience in a more effective manner, or getting an education in a technology-related field and becoming involved in the actual research yourself. In either case, you're likely to unsubscribe the mailing lists or at least start paying them much less attention than before. If you still identify as a transhumanist, your interest in the online communities wanes because you're too busy actually working for the cause. (Alternatively, you've realized how much work this would be and have stopped even trying.)
This shouldn't be taken to mean that I'm saying the online h+ community is unnecessary, and that people ought to just skip to the last phase. The first step of the cycle is a very useful ingredient for giving one a strong motivation to keep working for the cause in one's later life, even when they're no longer following the lists.
One might think that this cycle isn't really specific to transhumanism, and that a more general form of it ought to apply to all communities. While I have no doubt that it probably does apply to other communities as well, I find that the transhumanist cause is somewhat rare in that it is so technology-dependant. Hobby communities are built around a certain interest, and for those you don't need much more than the community - having gathered a bunch of RPG or BDSM enthusiasts, you can then go enjoy the activity in question together with them. For purely political movements, you can make progress with a mainly online presence, debating the pros and cons of your cause and recruiting more people under its banner. But while transhumanism is certainly a political cause as well, the vast majority of people aren't really going to care about the social implications of a technology before they can be convinced that the technology in question is actually going to become real soon. And even if everybody did agree that radical life extension, say, is a good thing, that wouldn't really matter for as long as you didn't have life extension available. You'd need to actually get involved with things that actually brought life extension forward, instead of just twiddling your thumbs in the general transhumanist community. This makes the transhumanist community very different from most other kinds of communities.
A colleague's posting on the Finnish Transhumanist Association's mailing list made me think about a phenomenon I've observed both in myself and several others, but never thought about so explicitly. I call it the Excitement-Disillusionment-Reorientation cycle of online transhumanism.
The excitement phase is when you first stumble across concepts such as transhumanism, radical life extension, and superintelligent AI. This is when you subscribe to transhumanist mailing lists, join your local WTA/H+ chapter, and start trying to spread the word to everybody you know. You'll probably spend hundreds of hours reading different kinds of transhumanist materials. This phase typically lasts for several years.
In the disillusionment phase, you start to realize that while you still agree with the fundamental transhumanist philosophy, most of what you are doing is rather pointless. You can have all the discussions you want, but by themselves, those discussions aren't going to bring all those amazing technologies here. You learn to ignore the "but an upload of you is just a copy" debate when it shows up the twentieth time, with the same names rehearsing the same arguments and thought experiments for the fifteenth time. Having gotten over your initial future shock, you may start to wonder why having a specific name like transhumanism is necessary in the first place - people have been taking advantage of new technologies for several thousands of years. After all, you don't have a specific "cellphonist" label for people using cell phones, either. You'll slowly start losing interest in activities that are specifically termed as transhumanist.
In the reorientation cycle you have two alternatives. Some people renounce transhumanism entirely, finding the label pointless and mostly a magnet for people with a tendency towards future hype and techno-optimism. Others (like me) simply realize that bringing forth the movement's goals requires a very different kind of effort than debating other transhumanists on closed mailing lists. An effort like engaging with the large audience in a more effective manner, or getting an education in a technology-related field and becoming involved in the actual research yourself. In either case, you're likely to unsubscribe the mailing lists or at least start paying them much less attention than before. If you still identify as a transhumanist, your interest in the online communities wanes because you're too busy actually working for the cause. (Alternatively, you've realized how much work this would be and have stopped even trying.)
This shouldn't be taken to mean that I'm saying the online h+ community is unnecessary, and that people ought to just skip to the last phase. The first step of the cycle is a very useful ingredient for giving one a strong motivation to keep working for the cause in one's later life, even when they're no longer following the lists.
One might think that this cycle isn't really specific to transhumanism, and that a more general form of it ought to apply to all communities. While I have no doubt that it probably does apply to other communities as well, I find that the transhumanist cause is somewhat rare in that it is so technology-dependant. Hobby communities are built around a certain interest, and for those you don't need much more than the community - having gathered a bunch of RPG or BDSM enthusiasts, you can then go enjoy the activity in question together with them. For purely political movements, you can make progress with a mainly online presence, debating the pros and cons of your cause and recruiting more people under its banner. But while transhumanism is certainly a political cause as well, the vast majority of people aren't really going to care about the social implications of a technology before they can be convinced that the technology in question is actually going to become real soon. And even if everybody did agree that radical life extension, say, is a good thing, that wouldn't really matter for as long as you didn't have life extension available. You'd need to actually get involved with things that actually brought life extension forward, instead of just twiddling your thumbs in the general transhumanist community. This makes the transhumanist community very different from most other kinds of communities.