[Image of Solar Eclipse] [Extropia: An E-Zine for the 20th
     Centrury Cyborg]
[Table of Contents]
[Criticisms] [Criticisms] [Criticisms] [War] [Gaia] [The End of History] [Sounds] [Privacy] [Intellectual Property] [Cyborgs] [Control] [Memes] [Offsite Resources] [Guestbook]
to the WIRED Extropian...
i have heard those criticisms too. If they're not demonizing us as child molesting, bomb fabricating, malicious, hacker, anarchists, they're calling us de-humanized mouse potatoes insulated from the "real world" like self-cocooning social invalids.

and i appreciate what you say - that experience tells us another story, one of "supplementing" rather than "replacing" our physicality with our digitality.

not only, you say, are people able to experience (even if only to a limited degree) the vast expanse of gaia as never before (click);

not only can we now, on a regular basis, hold communion with eight friends in eight countries at one time;

not only can we socialize our children in a playground free of race, sex, athletic, or appearance-based ostracism,

but digitality re-expresses our long-repressed nomadic heritage as technology frees us from the workplace (the true dehumanizer) allowing us to actually go visit all eight of our new friends. Yes, digitality is to be anywhere and anyone, not nowhere and noone. Virtuality breathes hyper-sensuality, freeing the senses from the restraints of form.

but. In coddling those second.wave.pseudo.luddites, you fail to appreciate the profundity of being digital. "You can't meet someone," she said to me in the steamy intestines which are the New York subway, "unless you can smell their pheremones, see their pupil dilations, hear their inflections. There is no "meeting" someone online...at best you're correspondents."

you have not addressed the real concern. You were accidentally talking to me and Alvin and Marshall. Here's the concern...What is reality? Is reality the sensual? I'll believe it when I see it. And what is it to be human, to be human in a post-sensorium. IMO, Sensuality is the leash around our necks, tied to the wrist of random evolution...

Virtuality is what you meant to talk about. Virtuality drowns sapiens in the afterbirth of the cyborg..and yes...their fear is well founded, because they are quickly becoming older versions of the software of life. And all they know and all they are, will dissolve. Sensuality is a characteristic of sapiens, not of reality. So re-think your response, because you and I, and they, are already lost and what we all deserve is a respectful eulogy, not info-utopian patronization.

this e-zine is devoted to exploring extropianism and life in cyberia whether or not it makes us feel good. A new article will be published each month.