[ExI] The very first question the press should ask Trump

[Darin Sunley]

When I watch or read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I always listen very
closely to the "Wave" speech. If you're familiar with the work, you know
what I'm talking about. It's a poignant meditation by a man who had devoted
his entire identity to a movement, a movement that was going to change the
world, and then watched it all fade away.

When I think back to the Extropian and transhumanism movements as they were
in the 90's, when I joined this list, and think about what's happened since
then, It almost fills me with joy.

Because we won! Mostly anyways. The weirdo out-there ideas we used to throw
around are now pretty much most people's every day. Millions of people
today used voice recognition on the pocket computers they carry everywhere
to ask a huge network of data centers to query terabyte databases to tell
them where would be a good place to go to lunch. Said database company,
btw, just made an AI that plays Go better than any human. Cryptocurrency is
a significant concern to the financial elites of the world. Billionarire
entreprenuers [who incidentally are pursuing reasonably credible plans to
singlehandedly colonize Mars] speak casually of the world being a computer
simulation, and not only do their stock prices not crash, it makes no
ripple at all! People just say "Yep, may be."

Ok, so diamond-phase nanotechnology could be a bit further ahead, and true
morphological freedom (as opposed to extremely effective medical protheses)
may not be on most people's ethical radars yet, but we're definitely
getting there.

I was the techy weirdo because, in 2001, I was the only person in the
building with cellular internet in 1999. Now I'm the weirdo because I'm
almost the only person in my workplace's building /without/ a smartphone.

Transhumanism and Extropianism didn't fade away, or burn out. They turned
into everyone's background normal. The future we saw has begun to arrive,
and it is still coming.

On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 7:12 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Is this the group that used to discuss transhumanism, libertarianism,
> extropy?
>
> Just burned out, are you?  It seems that side issues are taking over the
> chats. Politics can certain be related to the issues above, but we are not
> doing that, are we?  If we are it's too subtle for me.
>
> bill w
>
> On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 7:52 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Nov 11, 2016 5:44 PM, "John Clark" <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > ​The question isn't who will be the Democratic Party's nominee in 2020,
>> I want to know if Trump will allow the Democratic Party to even have a
>> nominee in 2020. It is not at all obvious to me that he will. And that goes
>> for the Libertarian Party and Green Party too.
>>
>> There is such a psychological block about voting third party that, even
>> if the GOP were to jail the Dems, I could see them allowing the Libs and
>> the Greens to give the illusion of democracy.
>>
>> But I suspect Trump knows he needs the Dems, to save him from the worst
>> of the GOP for being less than they hoped for.  He has already had a civil
>> conversation with Obama, which has sent some of them howling in protest for
>> Trump's head.
>>
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>>
>
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