[ExI] A Transhumanist Terrorist Manifesto

John Grigg desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com
Sun May 13 14:06:12 UTC 2007


I just want to state how much I agree with Samantha's wise words.  Back in the day she would have made a good "Founding Mother" for the American colonies. : )  Regarding the manifesto, I will say there is definitely a certain anarchic "devil may care, machismo charm" about it.  As I read I thought it sounded like something straight out of a Bruce Sterling or Walter Jon Williams novel.  And if it's not it sure should be! lol  Either of those authors could take this manifesto and build around it a terrific science fiction novel of wonder, intensity, terror and suspense.   

  What worries me is that I could see foolishly impressionable people down the road (a single year or maybe a whole century from now...) taking these words to heart and really raising hell in a way remincient of the Italian Red Brigade.  Now that these words are on the net and "out there" we may in time have to deal with the consequences.  And of course the other worry is that the mass media will grab hold of it and claim this represents the "real" Transhumanist movement.  I spent the last two days at LepreCon 33 and I'm probably just letting my overly primed imagination (I went to lots of writers panels) get away from me.
   
  Best,
   
  John Grigg
  
Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
  Many of us preach freedom to choose the future that we want, freedom to 
implement it, to augment ourselves and so on. Some teach that the Way 
is to sell transhumanism to the masses and have them demand it of the 
State or simply have the State be ultimate all controlling elite that 
mandates it "for our own good". Others, like myself, believe that only 
in preserving sufficient freedom from the ever-increasing control of the 
State can the elite, the fore-runners possibly have room to succeed. 
But this view does not require blowing sh*t up nor does it require an 
attitude of contempt to humanity at large. It may require some level of 
violence sometime to fight the loss of freedom. But not violence for 
the hell of it as this piece seems to advocate. Violence is the last 
resort when all other means to preserve freedom to live and pursue one's 
goals have been exhausted. Much can and should be done imho at the 
level if you will of cyber-anarchy, using technology to step beyond the 
control of the State to the degree possible and foreseeably necessary. 
The day may come where the dark nets and underground economies are all 
that stands between us and the oblivion of total subservience to the 
State and collapse of much we take for granted. 

- samantha


kevin.osborne wrote:
> Sick of the brain-curdling slowness of socio-technological progress?
> Think existential risk is just a plain lack of cojones?
> Like blowing shit up?
>
> Then the Transhumanist Terrorist Manifesto is for you.
>
> 1. Fuck the state. Fuck the leadership. Fuck 'consensus'. It's our
> future they are micromanaging to death with their overcautiousness,
> and it's time to start shrugging off their anachronistic control
> mechanisms and seizing our destiny before it dies by committee.
> Nation-states and the current socio-economic model are toast after the
> nano-revolution anyway; lets start acting like the hyperbeings we will
> one day be. The Singularity will confer unheralded power to those who
> have the will to grasp it - are you ready to dump the baggage?
>
> 2. Screw the sheep. Chances are you're smarter than everyone else
> already. If you're reading a transhumanist feed, you're already kind
> of special. Soon enough though, you can be more. Much more. The
> simpering idiots and halfwits who dominate the zeitgeist of our
> society are only going to get yet more stupid as we get smarter. If we
> want to be H+, we will be. Our soon-to-be subhuman cohorts are smug
> and self satisfied, thinking they are wonderful human beings while
> they lay waste to our potential with their bovine lack of horizon,
> paucity of ideas and lack of bloodymindedness.
>
> 3. Eat the future. Get hungry. Take it, it's yours. Want to
> gene-splice yourself? Go ahead. Want to engineer a nano-horde? Go
> ahead. Embryonic stem cells? Eat the goddamn fetus with bacon on
> toast. Harvest a botnet. Sequence a meta-virus. Synthesize a
> nootropic. Chip yourself, augment yourself, mainline yourself,
> digitize yourself, clone yourself.
>
> 4. Unfriendly AI? You fricken bet. Bring on the arms race. If we can't
> live forever, maybe our nasty little friend here can. Metasploit the
> net. All your megahurtz will belong to us. Borg-in' ain't easy.
>
> 5. Screw DDoS, how about we just pwn your servers with AK47's and
> glycerin. Send big brother dark. Take down the camera network. Go
> wireless, go ad-hoc, steal every channel you can OFDM. Root DNS? No
> way. Route via P2P. Swarm, baby, swarm. Self-organise. Latch on,
> leech, and suck like a parasite.
>
> 6. Slavery didn't die without a whimper. The French Revolution didn't
> happen without the guillotine. Occupying powers generally need to be
> fed bullets until they leave. Burn flags. Bomb monuments. Assassinate.
>
> 7. This ain't the 'Wiggles' manifesto here. If you want change, make
> it happen. Go nasty, go early and go often. Punch 'em square in the
> face, dare them to retaliate. Outgunned? throw the first punch, below
> the belt, while their back is turned. Dominate the weak. Take what you
> want. Expand voraciously. Eat your young. You've heard the
> transhumanist leaders and their oh-so-softly approach. They can have
> their patronage, consideration and kindness. We are under no such
> obligations. We do not have to play by their rules. They can take
> their toys and go home. We are here, in the dark, growing and
> yearning. It is our future too. We will not be controlled. We will not
> be instructed. We will learn, we will siphon, we will steal. We will
> transcend. Try and stop us at your peril.
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