Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, October 12, 2009

Those Curious Cryonaughts

"JimF" posted the Moot to yesterday's Cryonics post:
It is morbidly interesting to imagine the kind of world that would exist if the sorts of people who sign up for cryonics today became the immortal elite of tomorrow. I doubt if the plot would be much like that of Damien Broderick's Transcension.

An interesting quote:
"In my 20 years of watching cryonics, I've never seen a more narcissistic
self-destructive bunch of people than cryonicists. Mike Darwin was right
when he once said cryonicists don't deserve cryonics."

http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=24702

Jim: I'm sure the cryonicists themselves, like most Robot Cultists, will decry your overgeneralization and then declare any generally observable anti-social tendencies in their subculture always only to be unrepresentative -- whereupon your observation of a worrisome general sociopathy will then trigger a facile-clever debate-club point-scoring accusation that you are the sociopath (rather like a dumb wingnut thinking it's the world's most brilliant move to decry as racist the one who exposes a racist sentiment or outcome).

Be all that as it may, one may discern that cryonicists as a cohort are not just different from the larger population only in their choice of cryonics over burial/cremation upon death (and, yes, they are dead dead dead, like everyone on earth has and will die), but are rather atypical and monolithic in other ways as well.

Given that even on their own terms they are relying on social organizations that would presumably devote themselves continuously over long time-scales to their mission it has always seemed to me that this self-marginalization was rather counter-productive, inasmuch as it would surely only be through mainstreaming themselves -- and taking on the considerable diversity of the mainstream -- could they hope to secure the organizational resilience to provide for their own care and maintenance in an ever-changing world.

Of course, the pseudo-scientificity on which their claims are based, coupled with the irrationality that drives most people into their futurological sub(cult)ure in the first place ensures that they cannot achieve such mainstream success, hence that's not a going option for them. Just as the Singularitarian Robot Cultists can never hope to be more than, say, something like the neocons (who despite the damage they did, were ultimately defeated by their own palpable irrationality), and just as the transhumanist Robot Cultists can never hope to be more than, say, something like Scientologists (who despite their considerable resources remain absurd figures in the wider world), so too cryonicists and even more so the other techno-immortalist branches of the Robot Cult (like the bio-denialist "uploaders") are doomed to perpetual marginality.

For me, these sub(cult)ures and their discourses and practices are most interesting as clarifying extremes illustrating the sorts of reductionisms, denialisms, elitisms to be found as well in more prevailing (post-enlightenment, especially neoliberal) global techno-developmental discourses.

Of course, they are also interesting on their own terms as they are taken up by the contemporary mass-media terrain, since superlative futurological formulations attract undue attention in their drama and in the way they tap into certain conspicuous pathologies in a precarious era of disruptive technoscientific change such as our own. And so I think these interesting but absurd extreme futurological views impact in terribly negative ways on public deliberation, rendering it more confused in its actual scientific claims and more irrational in the fearful and greedy passions it excites than should be the case.

Also, I do concede that Robot Cult organizations and personalities deserve at least some scrutiny on their own terms, whatever their marginality, just because -- to return to my earlier examples of the coterie of neocons or the Church of Scientology -- foolish extreme social/cultural formations can occasionally do great mischief in the world for a time -- especially when they provide ready rationales for incumbent interests -- and so need watching.

9 comments:

jimf said...

> [I]t has always seemed to me that this self-marginalization
> was rather counter-productive, inasmuch as it would surely only
> be through mainstreaming themselves -- and taking on the
> considerable diversity of the mainstream -- could they hope to
> secure the organizational resilience to provide for their own
> care and maintenance in an ever-changing world.

Yes, it terms of "mainstreaming", it's been downhill for
the cryonicists ever since Woody Allen's 1973 _Sleeper_,
has it not?

I've never seen a cryonicist refer affectionately to _Sleeper_,
which is rather a shame, since that's probably the closest
the mainstream will ever get to referring affectionately
to **them**.

-----------------------
Luna: "Do you believe in God?"

Miles: "Do I believe in God? I'm what you would call a
teleological existential atheist. I believe that there's an
intelligence to the universe, with the exception of certain
parts of New Jersey."

Luna: "Why is it I never understand what you're saying?"

Miles: "Why? Do you believe in God?"

Luna: "Well, I believe that there's somebody out there who
watches over us."

Miles: "Unfortunately, it's the government."
-----------------------
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0017107/quotes

jimf said...

FWIW, there's a long thread on the Rick Ross "Cult Education
Forum" that was started by Larry Johnson (co-author of _Frozen_)
back in January.
http://forum.rickross.com/read.php?12,64749,page=1

The Rick Ross site (its full name is "The Ross Institute
Internet Archives for the Study of Destructive Cults,
Controversial Groups and Movements")
http://www.rickross.com/
can be an entertaining place to browse. It's based
in, uh, New Jersey. ;->

jimf said...

Dale,

For the next time a >Hist accuses you of being wordy:

"There should be standardized forms, for cryonics case reporting.
Aschwin de Wolf and I tried to establish this, at SA, and we
caught no small amount of hell, for doing so, from a man who has
probably billed cryonics organizations for quite a number of his
hours for writing rambling, subjective case reports that contain
more "padding" than any professor teaching freshman
"Comp and Rhetoric" courses probably sees, in an entire year.

In heart surgery, (something much more complex than a cryonics
washout procedure), the reports are in a standard form, and produced
immediately after the procedure, by the medical personnel involved
in the case, (not three months later, by a science fiction writer
who wasn't even present for the case)."

From
http://cryomedical.blogspot.com/2009/09/warts-and-all-cryonics-case-reports.html

by Melody Maxim, a former employee of another cryonics
outfit who became disillusioned with the whole business
and quit. Her bio:
http://www.blogger.com/profile/01352014895064762853

She now blogs about recent events in cryonics (including the
revelations in _Frozen_) on the blog "Cryonics Meets Medicine"
http://cryomedical.blogspot.com/ ).

jimf said...

Dale wrote:

> Also, I do concede that Robot Cult organizations and personalities
> deserve at least some scrutiny on their own terms, whatever their
> marginality, just because -- to return to my earlier examples of
> the coterie of neocons or the Church of Scientology -- foolish
> extreme social/cultural formations can occasionally do great
> mischief in the world for a time -- especially when they provide
> ready rationales for incumbent interests -- and so need watching.

**Occasionally**?!!

Well, to take one of these examples of "occasional" great mischief,
I'll provide a link to something I put in the comments section
of this blog two years ago. I'll spare you repeating the
full text.

From _Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed,
and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend_ by Barbara Oakley
Chapter 9, "The Perfect 'Borderpath': Chairman Mao"
pp. 216 et seq.
http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2007/10/todays-random-wilde.html
(see comment #8)

Dale Carrico said...

I daresay most social/cultural formations as marginal extreme and foolish as the various sects of Robot Cultism evaporate before they do much mischief. Not every coterie of white boys with toys who fancy themselves the smartest guys in the room actually manage to cause as much murder and mayhem as the Neocons did, for example. I doubt the Singularitarians will either. For one thing the seed money they get from irrationally exuberant tech-bazillionaires who fancy themselves superior beings rather than lucky fraudsters will probably run out before they manage anything like sustainable pseudo-respectability for their "think tanks" and suchlike. I could be wrong, which is why, as I say, they bear watching despite their idiocy and marginality.

jimf said...

> I daresay most social/cultural formations as marginal
> extreme and foolish as the various sects of Robot Cultism
> evaporate before they do much mischief.

Yes, of course, you're right that very few proto-cults
go on to "win the lottery" and gain influence over
large swaths of population, geography and time. Just
as very few computer start-ups became Microsoft.

What I meant is that huge chunks of recent history
(just looking at the 20th century) have been dominated
by "successful" extreme social/cultural formations
and their guru/God leaders.

Apropos of which, there's someone here at work whose
family is Ukrainian (by way of South America), and who
has heard stories from family members of what it was
like to starve under Stalin. It must be pretty hard for
people who have first-hand knowledge of such horrors
to know that while their family and friends were suffering
there were, at the exact same time, influential and articulate
(and well-fed) people in comparatively safe parts of the world smugly
denying that anything of the like could possibly
be happening. E.g., Walter Duranty, of the _New York
Times_, as mentioned in
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/scalliwag/200908/why-most-journalists-are-democrats-view-the-soviet-socialist-trenches

Of course, knowledge of what went on in Nazi Germany
was received (and continues to be received, in some
circles) the same way.

It is probably startling for anybody brought up in one
of the traditional religions (Judaism, say, or Christianity)
to discover the paucity of evidence for the iconic legends
of their faiths in the archeological record. The Egyptians,
for instance, as documented on their obelisks and stelae,
don't seem to have noticed the Exodus. And their is no
historical evidence, outside of the religious tradition
itself, for the existence of Jesus. On the other hand,
in ancient Rome (just as today), self-styled messiahs
were thick in the streets.

Sam Vaknin has written a deliberately provocative essay
analyzing some of the New Testament reports about
Jesus in light of the modern-day criteria of Narcissistic
Personality Disorder.
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/40983

The Mormons seem to have a particularly tough time keeping their
smarter believers in the fold after they've been exposed
to too much of the history of their church. You
can hear Lyndon Lamborn (excommunicated Mormon and
Boeing engineer) talk about this on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc0uzYXb998

Lincoln Cannon said...

Actually, my understanding is that statistics show the opposite. There is a positive correlation between increased education and higher probability of retention among Mormons.

Dale Carrico said...

Got links to the studies that yielded this understanding, or is this a self-consolatory intuition on the part of an educated Mormon? I do think, by the way, that your own efforts to synthesize the Mormon UFO-cult with the transhumanist robot-cult makes perfect sense in its own deep down wacky way.

Lincoln Cannon said...

Here's a link to a related study:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3511041

. . . would be interested in your perspective.