Fear and Loathing in Transhumanism Written May 2014 There is a sense of paranoia seething in some areas of “traditional” Transhumanism. There is the smell of change in the air and some people do not like it one little bit. So, what is the change and why is it causing problems? To illustrate, let’s go back almost exactly twenty years to the early days of the Net. Back then very few people outside of the technical elite even knew that the “Internet” existed, let alone what it was. That self selected elite had their own culture, their own in-jokes and their own sense of idealism and freedom in what they saw as uncorrupted cyberspace, along with a utopian vision of how things ought to be in a new world. The vision of people like William Gibson in his seminal novel Neuromancer which appeared around a decade earlier was on one hand an inspiration and on the other an ignored warning of where it would be going, with its domination by mega-corporations, governments and the military. After...
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