Transhumanism is potentially unique in that adherents are more frequently portrayed in fiction as blood-sucking vampires, mad scientists, dangerous dictators or grotesque monstrosities rather than the reality — a bunch of sci-fi nerds typically on the internet or in labs.

With the rise of this new state religion of California which — yes, does advocate radical life extension, human augmentation and pursuit of a friendly artificial general intelligence — mainstream anxieties about technologically-driven economic and social inequality have never been higher. Thus sets the scene for otherwise reasonable leftist or progressive individuals to score points characterising transhumanism as some kind of oligarchical plot for world domination.

The Misguided Idiot’s Quest for Immortality

I was surprised when my sometimes associate Alex Pearlman had her ‘The Misguided Idiot’s Quest for Immortality’ featured as a part of medium.com’s ‘Future Human’ featured series. Full disclosure — I am of course annoyed that this blog pirate.london which is hosted on medium.com and hpluspedia.org were not featured in this series :(

Pearlman, a qualified bioethicist and journalist familiar with the transhumanist movement both internationally and in the UK, none the less makes a number of errors in her article, to the point of building a full straw transhumanist at times.

For people familiar with the loosely defined transhumanist ‘leadership’, it will come as no surprise that these small group of people ( Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey and others ) are nearly all signed up to cryonics. Indeed, the quite large and growing transhumanist movement is often deliberately conflated with relatively tiny cryonics phenomenon.

There is simply no logical reason to invest money into being frozen. It doesn’t work now, it likely won’t ever work, and by the time it ever does work, no one who was frozen now will be able to be successfully resurrected.

I’m possibly the largest critic of cryonics from within the movement itself, and the 99% of transhumanists who have no interest in cryonics should show how little it matters at an macro-economic scale. None the less, Perlman presents cryonics as a face of transhumanism that is expensive, riddled with scientific flaws and a waste of money. Money is theme that will recur.

The next straw man to attack is mind uploading. Rather than engaging with the possibilities that are offered by latest breakthroughs in brain-computer interfaces or synthetic telepathy, Perlman focuses on the disconcerting Bina48 robot and that piece of trash film that was Transcendence.

This is a fun pastime for people who can afford it, no doubt.

It’s worth point out at this point that literally everyone with a Facebook account can preserve their memories in this way by memorialising their account. Presumably it’s weird when you do it in a robot but okay if transhumanist Mark Zukerberg markets it in a friendlier fashion?

Istvan, like so many other life extension advocates and Transhumanists, is a supporter of the concept of “morphological freedom,” or the idea that anyone has the right to do what they will with their own body. I also believe in morphological freedom, and I feel privileged to have it.

Morphological freedom is not an inherent part of longevity advocacy. You can want to live forever and feel squeamish about getting a tattoo, you can want to turn yourself into your real fursona and be happy to die age 60. Perlman suggests full intersectionality here when this isn’t the case.

Until every American has the freedom to live without fear of the state impeding their natural lifespans, I don’t want to hear about funding brain uploading initiatives.

Perlman suggests a zero-sum game whereby the tiny amount of investment into radical life extension technologies directly subtracts from the (admittedly dire) heathcare system in the US. This of course ignores the fact that the majority of such funding comes from the private sector. To do the same in the UK under the national health service would create a more relevant set of either-or funding decisions, but I don’t believe this day has yet come over here.

In the U.S. in 2016, 3.2 million children did not have access to health insurance. In Zoltan Istvan’s home state, California, that number was 268,000. I don’t see longevity supporters rallying for these causes

It is true that in the movement in the US is significantly libertarian, but this selectively ignores notable leftist US transhumanists such as James Hughes or B.J. Murphy.

‘Othering’ the transhumanists is an increasingly popular past time, along with posting ‘Zuckerburg is a robot’ memes, ‘Thiel is a vampire’ memes and ironically worshipping the Church of Google.

With US politics more polarised than ever, let’s not drag the mostly benevolent international, techno-optimistic, geeky, intellectual movement further into that shit-show.

The future can be awesome, you can care about progressive issues. This is not an either/or statement.

This article was written after briefly chatting with Alex Perlman over Facebook to confirm key points ahead of time

[ Edit — Grindhouse Wetwear also cited this post in a similar rebuttal ]