Transhumanist Fantasylands – Way Out There on the Political Horizon
The progressive news and opinion portal Alternet has always kept an eye on libertarians and their animus toward social justice and the public interest. Lately it's amped up its coverage of the libertarian transhumanists, a whacky fringe on the techno-utopian landscape.
An Alternet article posted last week focuses on Ray Kurzweil of singularity notoriety, and on the libertarian underpinnings of the ambition shared by Kurzweil and many other transhumanists to become "immortal cyborgs." Writer Brad Reed explains that this ilk sees "their future robot bodies as the best chance to escape statist control once and for all." As he says in the title of his piece, it's "The Ultimate Escape: The Bizarre Libertarian Plan of Uploading Brains into Robots to Escape Society."
Immortal cyborgs are just one of the bizarre libertarian plans hatched by transhumanists. Another (described by Reed in an earlier Alternet post) is "seasteading," a scheme to gather the libertarian elite on an ocean platform where they "can build new city-states to experiment with new institutions." The Seasteading Institute - yes, there's an organization devoted to this - is directed by the grandson of free-marketeer Milton Friedman, whose manifesto is published on Cato Unbound, the website of the libertarian Cato Institute.
With the recent revelations about the behind-the-curtain funders of the Tea Party in mind, just who is financing the libertarian transhumanists?
Both The Seasteading Institute and a number of groups whose missions include working toward immortality have been generously funded by one Peter Thiel, the co-founder and former CEO of PayPal who now runs a $2 billion hedge fund. According to a recent article in The Futurist, Thiel has "invested more than $4 million of his own money in groups working toward immortality" and "regularly speaks at trans-humanist gatherings." Thiel's anti-democracy rants can also be found at Cato Unbound.
Previously on Biopolitical Times: