After 17 years of existence, the once-flagship transhumanist non-profit, Extropy Institute, has closed. Unanimous vote by the Board of Directors. This is partially symbolic as the Extropy Institute as a coordinated whole has not engaged in any projects since 2001 except for the online VP Summit, a follow-up, and a site redesign. But a lot of really smart and creative people identify with it, calling themselves “extropians”, a metaphorical title meaning “against entropy”. The general consensus among extropians is that this closure marks the end of an era.
The Extropy Institute seemed to hit its peak of activity and fame in the mid-90s, when it was holding lively gatherings in Silicon Valley, getting profiled in the likes of Wired magazine, and just generally bathing in the optimism and futurism of the dot com boom. They held a conference as recently as 2001, but since then the primary footprint of the Extropy Institute has been its active mailing list, which of course will continue despite the shutdown. It is still the most active transhumanist mailing list around.
Anyone who has been involved with the Extropians will recall the acronym BEST DO IT SO, standing for the extropian principles of Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology and Spontaneous Order. Here is a poem. In recent times the principles have been modified to be more politically neutral and so on.
This is something that has kinda plagued the Extropy Institute in the past few years - it started off as a right-leaning, primarily libertarian organization, then attempted to become more politically neutral and all-encompassing in the new century. It never really shook the libertarian connection, though. The World Transhumanist Organization (WTA), now the unchallenged org for general-purpose transhumanism, was created as politically neutral from the get-go, making it more suitable as an umbrella group. Even though the WTA’s executive director Dr. J is a huge advocate of democratic socialism, he does a good job of using his Cyborg Democracy blog/movement as an outlet rather than compromising the political neutrality of the organization he runs. On the WTA mailing lists, socialists and libertarians argue a bit, but the intelligent ones are able to play nice.
Natasha’s announcement on Extropy Institute’s close says that the Board of Directors believe that the Extropy Institute has accomplished its mission. Like the straight-talking Samantha Atkins on the extropy list, I have to disagree. Please - don’t pretend that the Institute is shutting down because the mission is accomplished. We will know when the transhumanist project is achieved, and it could take years, decades, or even centuries. Indicators for a transhumanist “Mission Accomplished” include manifest absence of non-voluntary death, disease, aging, ignorance, hunger, violence, etc. On the list, Natasha responds to Samantha’s sentiment by saying the mission has been “essentially completed” rather than “totally completed”, but again, this just isn’t true… sorry. It undermines the grandiosity of transhumanism to say that transhumanist goals are “essentially completed” as of 2006.
If anything has been accomplished, the Extropy Institute has played a big role in expanding the discussion of transhumanist ideas of radical space travel, life extension, cryonics, molecular manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and so on. These ideas were considered crazy about two decades ago, unpolite in conversation a decade ago, but are becoming almost acceptable nowadays. Hal Finney observes: “…the world has changed enormously since the 1980s when Max and Tom invented the idea of Extropy, and even since the early 1990s when this mailing list was born in its earlier incarnation. Ideas which at that time were considered too outlandish even for science fiction are now debated regularly in the corridors of power and on the front pages of major newspapers and other opinion leaders.” Indeed.
Regarding the ExI shutdown, long-time extropian Spike Jones remarks, “Many of us have one period of formative years in our lives, when we form the memetic framework, the philosophical basis of our entire lives. Usually these are in our youth.” He then goes on to say that he was fortunate to have two formative periods, the latter being his exposure to extropy in middle age.
Myself, I discovered transhumanism online via Extropy.org in 2001. I called myself an extropian then and still do today, just that the more general “transhumanist” is a label that seems to make more sense. Extropians were transhumanists before the word “transhumanist” was really known.
Not entirely ceasing collective activity, the Strategic Plan 2006 and the Proactionary Principle are cited as the foundation of future moves. Extropy Institute founder Max More is coming out with a book of that name (Proactionary Principle), hopefully soon. And of course the mailing list remains a source of some of the most intelligent chatter on myriad topics to be found on the Internet.
Future Imperative suggests that the members decided they had more to gain by pursuing their own projects independently rather than under the aegis of a political lightning rod.
Justin Corwin shares how finding the Extropy Institute was a turning point in his life, and that there are more extropian thinkers today than ever before.
If you run across other eulogies, post them in the ol’ comments section. Of course there will be a lag for comment approval, as each day there are about 10 spam comments. (Will install a filter for this.) Goodbye ExI, and I wish everyone luck on their independent projects. I’m sure that Max and Natasha will continue to be leaders in the transhumanist community.
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