Last week I responded to a piece written by "democratic transhumanist" James Hughes published at the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives, a piece following soon after (but not by any means a direct response to) a piece of my own had been published there.
In that earlier piece of mine I had outlined some of the reasons why I discern strong structural tendencies in "movement transhumanism" -- which I also sometimes describe as Robot Cultism -- to anti-democratic and authoritarian politics, whatever the professed politics of its advocates.
These anti-democratic tendencies arise, in my view, out of transhumanism's general tendencies to reductionism, to technological determinism, to technocratic elitism, to eugenicism, and to industrial-mode corporate-militarist responses to planetary problems it tends to frame in terms of existential risk.
One of the commenters on my later piece, Michael Anissimov, was a relative latecomer to the conversational thread it provoked and so I will respond to him on the front page rather than in the Moot, the better to ensure people who have moved on have a chance to actually follow the discussion. To read Michael's actual comment directly, scroll down the comments for the piece I mentioned. In any case, I will quote his comment liberally and will certainly try not to misrepresent him in my reply.
I am often accused of generating posts of unreadable enormity when I am trying to respond to criticisms in depth, and so this time around I will attempt to break my response into separate parts, roughly distinguishable by theme. We'll see how it goes.
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