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ziq_TNG OP wrote (edited )

Primitivists and Transhumanists have largely incompatible ideas about what qualifies as liberation.

This is true, but I've never understood why they're so threatened by each other. I even get attacked by antranshumanists for being postciv.

People that are critical of civilization aren't going to put scientists into cages and burn books. We're not going to cause the collapse, we just know it's inevitable and are preparing for it.

They act like we are going to take away their lifestyles, but we're just warning them that their lifestyles have an expiration date.

And anticivs shouldn't be threatened by transhumanists because we know the cybernated ultra industrialized world they pine for won't be achievable before collapse comes. If civilization is on the verge of annihilation with current tech, it would get pushed over the edge in no time if everyone in the world became an immortal.

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tnstaec wrote

we know the cybernated ultra industrialized world they pine for won't be achievable before collapse comes

Not really. I'm very confident that this civilization will collapse as have all those that preceded it. But what that collapse will look like and when it will happen are far from certain. For all we know, three generations from now the mass of remaining humanity will be farmers, as they were before fossil fuels. Only this time their performance and vital data closely monitored by neo-feudal overlords via body-heat-powered implants and solar-powered drones. We very well could end up with the worst of both worlds. Many works of dystopian fiction are based in universes where technological development has continued and is available only to a small elite, while the masses live in extreme deprivation. The movie Elysium is one example.

I've never understood why they're so threatened by each other.

Maybe the concern is about how much damage could be done before either groups' supposed utopia. Techno-pessimists see our autonomy and ecosystems being continuously degraded and extrapolate from there. Techno-optimists worry about ITS-style terrorists killing brilliant scientists whose work would hasten the Singularity.

I think both sides tend to gloss over the "anarcho" part of "anarcho-primitivism", @prims because they think it's implied already in their theoretical output, anti-@prims because they see that it's not explicitly spelled out.

We're not going to cause the collapse, we just know it's inevitable and are preparing for it.

This distinction goes over a lot of people's heads. Good old 'shoot the messenger' effect

If civilization is on the verge of annihilation with current tech, it would get pushed over the edge in no time if everyone in the world became an immortal.

Maybe the people are still poo-pooing carrying capacity at 7.5 billion will finally figure it out

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