[ExI] Consequentialist world improvement

[Stefano Vaj]

On 8 October 2012 00:45, Charlie Stross <charlie.stross at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Now, there are various critiques one can make of BNW's system, starting
> with: it's yet another bloody top-down authoritarian hierarchical system.
> They tend in practice to be brittle, inimical to liberty, and have a
> dismaying tendency to build pyramids of skulls in a way  that ad hoc
> bottom-up emergent systems don't.
>

Actually, my take is that 1984 is simply caricatural. Few actual nazis or
stalinists would positively identify with the Ingsoc regime, and no effort
is made to present its world from the perspective of an enthusiastic
supporter of the party, O'Brien himself being just a bidimensional,
philosophical icon of "evil".

BNW is a quite different in that it is clearly possible to find people who,
with minor qualifications, would consider the scenario depicted as an
utopian, as opposed to a dystopian, scenario. The merits of the novel IMHO
lay in the fact that its extrapolations help each of us to think "up to the
end" what we already think, including for everyday policy choices.

Should I need to add that I consider BNW-like "evolutions" as a likely
direction of recent developments and the very opposite of what my brand of
transhumanism/posthumanism (see, eg, http://www.biopolitix.com) stand for,
as a much more plausible threat than neo-primitive fantasies à la
Latouche/Kaczynski/Næss?

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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