Upgraded and adapted from the Comments.
James Fehlinger notes: Cult true believers are never interested in "genuine understanding". In public "dialogue", they are simply interested in PR and spin control. (E.g., the Scientologists who post on alt.religion.scientology.)
This is true and an immensely important point to keep in mind. It is just one more reason to be troubled by the (apparently well-nigh irresistible) tendency of online technocentric discourses to take up sub(cult)ural forms; that is to say, to take on the special energies and obfuscatory defensiveness of marginal identity movements. And I say this as a person whose own preoccupations incline very much to technocentricity, but one hopes in its reality-based rather than faith-based tonalities.
When we're talking about singularitarians, technological immortalists, extropians, cybernetic totalists, enhancement perfectionists, and the other very recent, very voluble technocentric sub(cult)ural formations it pays to remember that the True Belief arises in these cases in response to the worldly catnip promises of immortality, comic book superpowers, soopergenius brains, endless delights, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, on the one hand, as well, on the other, to the psychic and existential uncertainties of rapid, sweeping, intensive global technodevelopmental change, the specter of insanely destructive devices, the technoconstituted skewing of force in the direction of indifferent elite organizations, and so on.
Technocentric discourses of transcendence, in other words, are activating powerful unconscious drives and generic archetypes. Of course, the promises and threats of ongoing and proximately upcoming technoscientific change are indeed incomparable.
That is the whole point.
Never has the need for reasonableness been more urgent, rarely have the prompts for irrationality been more numerous or more insistent.
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