[extropy-chat] Brian Alexander shooting fish in a barrel

[Damien Broderick]

I was somewhat baffled by Natasha's enthusiasm for Brian Alexander's book.
Here's some of what he says about extropes:

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There is some debate within Extropianism and
transhumanism about just how libertarian the movements are but
they believe in the Heinleinian concept of glorifying brain power. They
think that only a few people are smart enough and daring enough to
accept the Extropian challenge and they will be the ones who are
saved. The uninitiated, the retrograde Volk trapped by religious
superstition
and fear of the new, well, they will be left behind.

The Extropians were fully aware that some people found them
and their agenda funny, sometimes even scary, but Extropians
believed that, as the ultimate early adopters, they could help lead the
enlightened world into the bright sunshine of the future. Big declarations
about that future attracted some minor media interest to the
Extropians, partly because they made for an easy story. Writing
about them was like shooting fish in a barrel-the smart-alecky jokes
practically wrote themselves. Sexy Natasha, whose art had a sensual
bent, often displayed her form on web pages and in photographs.
Both she and Max believed in the ongoing perfectibility of the body
and, like many transhumanists, both were cryonicists. So journalists
played up the looniness of their ideas-Ha Ha-or the element of
narcissism in Max and Natasha's body building, supplement ingesting,
antiaging routines. Fittingly based out of their Marina del Rey
apartment in California, the Mecca of reinvention, they became the
very image of a southern California couple living just one block from
the sharpened edge of the continent, hanging on by their fingernails
to the last bit of transcendent American dream. But in person, as
long as you weren't talking about becoming posthuman, Max and
Natasha came off as a smart, fun, slightly bohemian couple with
unusual enthusiasms.

Other Extropians were a mixed bag. In general they had a tendency
to overestimate their intellectual prowess. A few could be
insufferable, regarding any challenge to their wildly optimistic
claims for technology as the result of childlike ignorance.

[...]

Extropians were constantly trying to create new memes.
They wanted the language of immortality, human transformation,
and extreme self-determination to become ingrained values around
the world, but the Extropians did not make their job any easier with
that name and its space-cadet ring, and their insistence on saying
things that made other people uncomfortable, Nietzschean-sounding
pronouncements about metabrains and ultra humans and the
ascendance of the intelligent. It sometimes sounded as if they were
plotting a future world in which they could take revenge on every
jock who ever made fun of the smart kids.

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Damien Broderick