As cyberculture’s most vocal proponents of consigning the body to the scrap heap of the twentieth century, the Extropians merit close scrutiny. Ross, executive director Max More, and the rest of the movement’s membership rally around the banner of “transhumanism.” Transhumanism is the human potential movement on steroids: an up-with-technology, business-friendly, hell-for-leather humanism bent on self- and species-transformation by any means necessary: downloading (which consists of emptying the brain of all information and storing it on a computer, thereby consigning the human body to history once and for all); “nanomedicine” (the use of molecular scale devices to repair damage and boost the immune system); nanocomputer implants (“molecular computer[s] integrated with the brain, providing additional memory, processing power, and running decision-making programmes”); genetic engineering; smart drugs; cryonics; and “self-transformative psychology” in the Anthony Robbins mold.
As theorized in Extropy, transhumanism is a marriage of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche—specifically, Rand’s conviction that statism and collectivism are the roots of all evil and Nietzsche’s complementary concepts of the end of morality, the “will to power” and the Übermensch, or “overman.”
MARK DERY