[extropy-chat] Wired: Response re "Transhumanist Nut-Jobs"

[nvitamore at austin.rr.com]

This is the first of ExI's responses to Bijal Trivedi's article.  The
following is from ExI Vice President, Greg Burch (still current until we
complete ExI's closing paperwork).  I will forward letters from Max and
myself in the next few days.  ExI's approach to this issue is to reflect on
Wired's historical relationship to reporting on technology and the future,
and especially speculative technologies, in which Wired obtained much of
its information from ExI (by Wired’s journalists and editors calling ExI
first hand) and which information gave articles a certain credibility to
Wired; and it current method of reporting.

Natasha

____________________________________________

To Wired Editor:

I was very disappointed when I read Bijal Trivedi's article about work on
low- temperature suspension of trauma subjects. 

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/posts.html?pg=4 

In what looks like a throw-away line, he wrote: "Long the domain of
transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away
from clinical trials on humans ..." 

During the early years of WIRED’s existence, the magazine took a
consistently visionary and optimistic approach to science and technology.
This made WIRED a natural ally to those who called themselves
"transhumanists:" Both transhumanists and WIRED expressed a clear view that
human progress was a good thing and that reason and science should be the
arbiter of how that progress should proceed. WIRED had a great new style in
those years, and also published many important articles of real substance.
But something has happened to WIRED: The style has come to be brittle and
the substance seems thinner and thinner. 

In allowing this phrase "transhumanist nut-jobs" to slip through the
editorial filter, WIRED has crossed a line of betrayal: Betrayal of its
roots in cutting-edge journalism about cutting edge science, technology and
ideas; and betrayal of one of the main sources of the ideas that gave it a
meaningful identity in its early years. The transhumanist strand in WIRED's
early editorial fabric gave its reporting on new technologies and the
social impact of those technologies some real meaning. Abandoning that
thread means abandoning a distinct place in the marketplace of ideas.
Without it, WIRED is just a glossy advertising catalog. 

Please take a moment to look back at those early issues of WIRED to see the
fresh and optimistic attitude the magazine had. Consider that a phrase like
"transhumanist nut-job" serves the magazine and your audience very poorly. 

Greg Burch 
http://www.gregburch.net 
attorney, transhumanist 

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