[ExI] MAKE THE LIST (AND THE WORLD) GREAT AGAIN !!!

Adrian Tymes atymes at gmail.com
Fri Jun 23 20:15:48 UTC 2017


On Jun 22, 2017 11:30 PM, "Giulio Prisco" <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:

spike: "ExI was a big wild fun party where you could post pretty much
anything."

Yes. Specialty groups are needed to work out the details, but the big
wild fun party is where you develop the ideas to be elaborated upon.
Please don't tell me that we don't need big ideas. I agree with Thiel
and Stephenson, we seem to have lost the ability interest to think and
do big things.

I changed the title to emphasize that.

I suspect mailing lists just don't cut these days. Yes, Max said that
this list must not become a Facebook group or something like that, and
of course here Max is right by definition, but I wonder if some new
format would help. Something with a very fast and easy interface, a
dedicated phone app (a must these days)...

Thoughts?


Email with a publicly accessible archive, for all its vaunted unhipness,
remains publicly accessible and discoverable like few other formats.  Most
of the alternatives are private walled gardens, content generally
inaccessible to outsiders.  I am on at least one list with a peak volume
over the past year of over 100 posts per day.  If the concern is getting
active posters, the solution is advertising to bring in fresh blood - and
then cooling it with the repeated celebrations of the group in the '90s,
which suggest (unintentionally, but they do) that anyone who wasn't here
back then doesn't belong here now.  Instead bring up topics of current
interest.

For example, what are good tactics for the Transhumanist Party in light of
current political situations - and will it ever truly be more than Zoltan's
bid for the US Presidency?  Can it gather and succesfully run candidates in
districts getting screwed by their current Republican representatives,
which districts see the Democratic party as even worse: hopelessly corrupt
and out of touch with those districts' interests?  (How can a transhumanist
viewpoint help an out of work coal miner who needs a new income source,
preferably a new job, ASAP?  There are ways, but they must be communicated.)

As for thinking big, there are so many big projects all around us that we
stop noticing, and because we stop noticing we think maybe they aren't
there.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_megaprojects - and if
those don't strike you as "big", consider whether you're just moving the
goalposts to justify complaining.  Can you honestly call any one of the
things on that long list "small" relative to our day to day experience?
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