[extropy-chat] Politics: Transhumanist Social System

[Emlyn]

On 19/08/05, nvitamore at austin.rr.com <nvitamore at austin.rr.com> wrote:
> A transhumanist society needs to be decentralized, with a networked
> economy, and promotion of new social/cultural systems.*
> 
> (This would mean a lack centralized control of a forced choice between, for
> example, Twentieth Century free market, capitalist democracy, and state
> capitalism and state socialism.)

Now *this* is where I'd love to see transhumanism go. There simply are
political implications to an agenda of enhancing ourselves, using
technology to improve on the human condition as each individual sees
fit. The old politics do not fit this, they were framed in a time
where "government" (ie: having someone running the commons) was doomed
to be ham fisted due to low tech, so your choices were to have various
levels of dictatorship (benevolent you hope, but no good guarantees)
and some kind of cared for commons, or no dictator but the commons
goes to ruin (ie: the free market). We've got options now, diverse
ones, some pretty weird. I think the world has barely begun to explore
what the global internet and related communications technologies mean
when you stop mapping pre-internet ideas onto them and start
reinventing with the 'net as a base assumption.

But we've struggled for years in adopting a social (political?) system
for transhumanism, I think because none of them actually fit; we need
something new for these new ideas.

> 
> *While a transhumanism is a type of community, is not merely a collection
> of individuals, nor is it static. It is comprised of a changing set of
> relationships, attitudes and behavior of its members. It has many
> dimensions which may vary, they are all interconnected. Like the physical
> dimensions of length and time, if any one dimension of social system of
> transhumanism is missing, by definition, the system is incomplete.
> 
> Bottom line:
> 
> Back to Square One:  We need a political agenda and not one that is
> alienating the core views of transhumanism, and not one that is watering
> transhumanism down.
> 

Indeed, there is no reason to water transhumanism down, because
transhumanism is inherently political. I don't think you inspire the
kind of venom coming from Fukuyama if you are apolitical!


Well, here are a couple of suggestions...

I posit that representative democracy is a bit embarrassing in the
21st century to transhumanists. It's a system of government which was
fabulous in times when communication technology was rudimentary or non
existent and travelling was hard, but that's no longer true.
Democracy's great achievement is the carefully balanced institutions
which share power, thus preventing autocracy, but its great
embarrasment is the professional politician. A 21st century democracy
should really be direct, with each citizen having his/her say on
issues as they care to. Note that this does not mean minimal
government necessarily, it could be larger or smaller than now. What
it does mean is no more voting on representatives. Rather, actual
citizens directly debate and exercise power in areas that concern
them, relying completely I think on the internet, and probably on
technologies like sms voting pioneered by reality tv!

Another place to try to expand transhumanism is, imo, the corporation.
The great majority of corporations out there appear to still be
designed along strongly hierarchical military lines. Surely there are
better ways to organise corporations, which would more strongly
reflect the democratic/free ideals we take for granted in public life?

Another one - I posted here recently on the idea of a system of
distributed artistic patronage, where many small time donors could
contribute (and have quite a bit of control over their contributions)
to artists or other creative people who ultimately publish their work
for free. The idea was that not only is it hard to enforce payment for
copies when works become purely digital, but that there are entire new
artforms possible which can only really work as freely available
online resources (eg: Orion's Arm) which at the moment can only be
brought about by voluntary effort and the PayPal begging bowl.

If a culture of patronage of creators could be fostered, if the meme
could be nurtured and grown into something mainstream, the whole
question of how to enforce intellectual property rights might be side
stepped, being replaced by a general acceptance of the need for each
individual to give a little to the commons of artistic creativity, in
balance with one's use of the output.

If you follow that idea far enough, you could an evolution of the
Free/Open Source movement where access to the "free" creations
provided by an organising body, membership of which becomes very high
status, and regular contribution to which is also high status. Does
that starts to look like a voluntary polity with taxation, if you
squint hard enough?

Maybe it can work by memetic success building a convention of payment
strong enough to support it, or maybe you need to require payment, I
don't know (that's a hard question and probably a political one). But
it's not government, and it's not for profit corporate kind of
behaviour either. It's something else, very much like the open source
movement, a kind of enlightened self organisation by people in
recognition of their common interest, not requiring coercion or strong
centralised control or the profit motive.

That's the kind of thing that your post brings to mind for me. Is that
what you mean?

> Forward 2 Steps: To create this we need a multi-disciplinary,
> non-partisian, writing team.
> 

Sounds fun.

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *