An excerpt from my most recent article for Truthdig:
… But the modern GOP does not have a monopoly on weird in American life. In Silicon Valley, a bizarre techno-utopian movement that supersedes the political spectrum is arguably the weirdest current in society. Together with Timnit Gebru, I have christened this movement “TESCREALism.” It is an admittedly clunky acronym for the following “-isms,” all of them very weird: transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism.
I am intimately familiar with the weirdness of this movement, because I used to be a part of it. In 2017, before I realized that the eugenic fantasies at the heart of TESCREAL utopianism are irredeemably flawed, I was invited to present my work at a two-month-long workshop in Sweden. A number of noted TESCREALists were there, including Anders Sandberg, Robin Hanson and James Miller. One day, I noticed that Sandberg was wearing a dog tag. I asked him why, and he explained that it’s because he signed up with a cryonics company called Alcor, which cryogenically freezes dead bodies so that they can be resurrected at some future date, when the necessary technology becomes available. Asking around, I discovered that Sandberg wasn’t the only one: Hanson and Miller had also signed up (and later I found out that other leading figures like Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky have also signed up with cryonics companies to have themselves frozen if they die).
Jokingly, I asked one of them, “If you wear a bike helmet when you’re on your bicycle, why wouldn’t you wear it when you’re, say, walking through the city? After all, resurrection depends on your brain not being damaged, so it seems odd that you’d protect yourself in one situation but not the other!” I meant this to be facetious. But my interlocutor replied that, in fact, they do wear a bike helmet in all such situations — not only when they’re walking through the city, or hiking through the woods, but when they’re driving their car.
To read the entire article (there is no paywall), go here: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/go-west-weird-man/
