[extropy-chat] No Joy in Mudville

[Emlyn]

Hasn't this been predicted in sci-fi many times before? This is a
mainstream backlash against the pace of development. Free society is
becoming scary now, not safe like the good ole days; jobs are
insecure, social attitudes and norms storm and flow, the surface layer
is the same as it's been for a while (phones, cars, houses, buildings)
but underneath it's unrecognisable, and the unrecognisable is ever
more bubbling to the top.

So, leap back flock-style to the good times of old. Of course they
weren't that good, and we rejected the stuff for a reason, but it's
hard to remember as the world explodes around you. Even good change is
change, and mostly people really only like change when it happens to
other people.

The kicker though, the irony, the punchline, is that the outraged
masses react against the change, and against the surface elements of
the technology that underpins it, but no way no day are they going to
give up the gains they've grabbed on to. What they miss is that those
gains are a side effect of a dynamic system in motion. The only way to
stop it is to stop the whole system; back lash must be crack down and
repress, all long beards and beheadings, or it's doomed.

As transhumanists, a useful job would be one of reassurance; lots of
head patting and comforting... "there there, it's ok, look out the
window can you see it's a beautiful day? The world your children and
your grandchildren are inheriting and creating may be weird and fast,
but it is really good, better than you might have dreamed."

Emlyn

On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 09:23:09 -0600, Damien Broderick
<thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> At 07:00 AM 11/4/2004 -0800, the Spikester wrote:
> 
> >Isn't it shocking?  Religion Incorporated seems
> >to be making a raging comeback in our modern world.
> 
> In all sorts of brands and guises. It's bitterly ironic (to me, anyway)
> that avowedly hi-tech widely educated societies such as the USA and Russia
> have so many citizens reaching for the god pill, while their antagonists
> are swigging madly from the god bottle, all factions boiling away with
> contrived and almost arbitrary iconologies of bigotry. It starts to look as
> if people really *do* find secular scientific cultures too `cold' and
> `impersonal' and even `inhaman' to sustain the glow of life. True, there
> are parts of Europe and Australasia where Religion Incorporated has been
> sidelined for a few generations, but I'll bet it comes ripping back in the
> clutches. Time for humanism and transhumanism to start thinking seriously
> once again (as Bertrand Russell and Wells and others did nearly a century
> ago, without getting anywhere) about some sort of secular equivalent of
> worship (ugh; whatever) and mutually supportive emotionally enriched
> fellowship. But I don't imagine it will emerge from any bunch of INTJs like
> this list...
> 
> Damien Broderick
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat
> 


-- 
Emlyn

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