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alqm wrote (edited )

I think you're not picturing transhumanism outside of the capitalist spectrum. If I build something to make my body stronger, my only obligation would be to publish everything I learned, so anyone interested could try and improve. I'm not going to stop studying the subject I have curiosity for because someone wants to put limits on how much we can know. That's crazy.

In the world most of us envision, you wouldn't see ads telling people they should have this immediately 'because it's cool and we ship it ready to use'. No one is selling products. All I did was to make the 'raw' data public, and I wrote a wiki to get them started. No companies would exist, perhaps only independent media organized by volunteers in many areas of the world to broadcast information. They wouldn't promote anything. There's no money to buy them. There's no leader to persuade them. No products to have desire for.

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BabyCroc OP wrote (edited )

No, I don't think I'm doing that. Publishing the data doesn't stop it from being a hierarchy, the hierarchy is created by people with access to the resources to build the technologies gaining advantages over those without access to the resources for whatever reason.

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[deleted] wrote

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BabyCroc OP wrote

Oppose it all you want, it won't change the fact that the resources are scarce and extracting them exploits the environment and the people living there.

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[deleted] wrote

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ziq_TNG wrote

The point (for green anarchists) is to reject lifestyles that increase hierarchy and exploitation. Resuse and repurpose rather than extracting more resources to attain a disnonnected and fleeting luxury at the expense of life.

Building an ideology around perpetual technological advancement is ground that's been well travelled under capitalism. Maintaining any kind of anarchy under a system based on industrial advancenent would be an uphill battle to say the least.

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[deleted] wrote

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ziq_TNG wrote (edited )

I would sincerely hope that any anarchist would be attentive to how their conceptualization of anarchism interacts with the world beyond society.

However much anarcho-transhumanists want these things to be non exploitative, words are meaningless when you realize industrialism was, is, and will be oppressing, starving and killing billions of people worldwide.

What does anarcho-transhumanism offer in way of action? How will your small group; that for all intents and purposes only exists on obscure internet forums, stand up to capitalist industrialism as it continues to lead the way to apocalypse?

What use is it advocating for egalitarian reform when all the science shows us we've gone far past the point of no return and no amount of reform is going to save us now? If we don't abolish industrialism, our children won't have a planet left. Reforming industrialism at this point is like trying to reform capitalism. It's too late. Mass-scale industry is a brutal dead end. Most of the technologies anarcho-transhumanists envision require mass-scale industry.

Not necessarily essential to transhumanism, nor is any 'perpetual' ground well-travelled. The rhetoric of capitalism may try to conflate perpetual increases in returns on investment with technoprogressivism, but that doesn't quite make it so.

I honestly don't understand this. I've read a lot of antranshumanist lit and it's very apparent that the goal is to evolve humanity through technology. That means the technology needs to keep advacing. I don't like when people use such vague definitions of their ideologies so that discussion about goals becomes impossible. Praxis is all that matters. Words are cheap.

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Pop wrote

I think that's a bit outside the scope of conversation.

For (green) anarchists, this is the conversation (among other things), so to assume that it isn't is to ignore the critique being made in the first place

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