Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Stackslobber posts evidence that transhumanism is a literal cult, HN crowd is not having it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43459990
In my head transhumanism is this cool idea where I’d get to have a zoom function in my eye
But of course none of that could exist in our capitalist hellscape because of just all the reasons the ruling class would use it to opress the working class.
And then you find out what transhumanists actually advocate for and it’s just eugenics. Like without even a tiny bit of plausible deniability. They’re proud it’s eugenics.
@[email protected] yeah quite a few people have seen only the very top surface of transhumanism, and then sun it off with their own ideas and world building without engaging on a deeper level sometimes intentionally sometimes not
I, like many trans people I’d suspect just wanted out of this unsatisfying body and didn’t engage beyond that to any meaningful level
@V0ldek those transhumanist guys really think that it won’t be them to be weeded out by applied eugenics …
@V0ldek @gerikson you’ll have the zoom function, but 80% of your field of view will be covered in ads.
@V0ldek @gerikson after reading a book written in Cyberpunk 2077 universe, I had bitter though about why the hell we couldn’t have cool body modifications if we already have to live in cyberpunk world. But cyberpunk things we could have are surveillance and powerful corporations.
@madargon @V0ldek @gerikson @techtakes Obviously you read the wrong cyberpunk. (Go root out Bruce Sterling’s short story “20 Evocations”, collected in Schismatrix Plus, and you’ll see an assassin having his arms and legs repossessed because he can’t kill enough people to keep up with the loan repayment schedule …)
@madargon @V0ldek @gerikson
Because Cyberpunk isn’t about buying and having. It’s about making. The violence and greed is the reason cyberpunks exist: as a counterforce, not as enforcers.
Play IRL in Hackaday instead.
@V0ldek @gerikson This is why we need a different term for those of us who want arbitrary augmentation to be available for everybody, without any corporate/fascist/TESCREAL pollution.
@KatS @V0ldek @gerikson “Wanted: helper. Gig/1099 only. Must have Zoom Eye v3 or later implanted with active subscription to apply. $7.25/hour”
@timjclevenger @V0ldek @gerikson Exactly the kind of pollution I’m talking about not wanting.
@V0ldek @gerikson transhumanism has nothing to do with eugenics lmao
it’s extremely established that it does
@froztbyte how to tell me you dont know anything about transhumanism without telling me you dont know anything about transhumanism:
@froztbyte I think @d4rkness is eliding a few steps that look clear to them, but they’re basically right: eugenics is about all transhumanists can do *today*, a lot of transhumanism is warmed-over Technocracy (the Musk family’s ideological wellspring), Technocracy was *def* on board with eugenics (and apartheid), so here we are: they aspire to more but eugenics is what they can do today so they’re doing it.
(I’ve been studying transhumanism since roughly 1990 and that’s my considered opinion.)
I’d agree there, and it might be that that’s what they meant, but as you say it still doesn’t leave the two things disconnected. didn’t see them heading in the direction of amusing debate, however!
(I’d wondered from your past writings how long you’d been looking into this shit, TIL the year!)
sorry, all the mental pretzels were taken up by the other poster a few days ago, you’ll have to contort your nonsense yourself. best avoid the history books though, they’ll make it really hard for you to achieve what you want
I used to think transhumanism was very cool because escaping the misery of physical existence would be great. for one thing, I’m trans, and my experience with my body as such has always been that it is my torturer and I am its victim. transhumanism to my understanding promised the liberation of hundreds of millions from actual oppression.
then I found out there was literally no reason to expect mind uploading or any variation thereof to be possible. and when you think about what else transhumanism is, there’s nothing to get excited about. these people don’t have any ideas or cogent analysis, just a powerful desire to evade limitations. it’s inevitable that to the extent they cohere they’re a cult: they’re a variety of sovereign citizen
I haven’t spent a lot of time sneering at transhumanism, but it always sounded like thinly veiled ableism to me.
considering how hard even the “good” ones are on eugenics, it’s not veiled
Only as a subset of the broader problem. What if, instead of creating societies in which everyone can live and prosper, we created people who can live and prosper in the late capitalist hell we’ve already created! And what if we embraced the obvious feedback loop that results and call the trillions of disposable wireheaded drones that we’ve created a utopia because of how high they’ll be able to push various meaningless numbers!
(side note, gender affirming care resolved this. in my case HRT didn’t really help by itself, but facial feminization surgery immediately cured my dysphoria. also for some reason it cured my lower back pain)
(of course it wasn’t covered in any way, which represents exactly the sort of hostility to bodily agency transhumanists would prioritize over ten foot long electric current sensing dongs or whatever, if they were serious thinkers)
Wanting to escape the fact that we are beings of the flesh seems to be behind so much of the rationalist-reactionary impulse – a desire to one-up our mortal shells by eugenics, weird diets, ‘brain uploading’ and something like vampirism with the Bryan Johnson guy. It’s wonderful you found a way to embrace and express yourself instead! Yes, in a healthier relationship with our bodies – which is what we are – such changes would be considered part of general healthcare. It sometimes appears particularly extreme in the US from here from Europe at least, maybe a heritage of puritanical norms.
also cryonics and “enhanced games” as non-FDA testing ground. i’ve never seen anyone in more potent denial of their own mortality than Peter Thiel. behind the bastards four-parter on him dissects this
Here’s the link, so you can read Stack’s teardown without giving orange site traffic:
https://ewanmorrison.substack.com/p/the-tranhumanist-cult-test
Note I am not endorsing their writing - in fact I believe the vehemence of the reaction on HN is due to the author being seen as one of them.
I read through a couple of his fiction pieces and I think we can safely disregard him. Whatever insights he may have into technology and authoritarianism appear to be pretty badly corrupted by a predictable strain of antiwokism. It’s not offensive in anything I read - he’s not out here whining about not being allowed to use slurs - but he seems sufficiently invested in how authoritarians might use the concerns of marginalized people as a cudgel that he completely misses how in reality marginalized people are more useful to authoritarian structures as a target than a weapon.