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this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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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
(Geordi LaForge holding up a hand in a "stop" gesture) transhumanism
(Geordi LaForge pointing as if to say "now there's an idea) trans humanism
(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
I haven’t spent a lot of time sneering at transhumanism, but it always sounded like thinly veiled ableism to me.
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!
considering how hard even the "good" ones are on eugenics, it's not veiled