{"id":25875,"date":"2016-05-19T08:47:24","date_gmt":"2016-05-19T15:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/the-future-is-now-for-the-transhumanist-party"},"modified":"2017-06-04T19:59:11","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T02:59:11","slug":"the-future-is-now-for-the-transhumanist-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/the-future-is-now-for-the-transhumanist-party","title":{"rendered":"The Future Is Now for the Transhumanist Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

This new SF Weekly story is one of the best long features on transhumanism I\u2019ve ever read. It covers a myriad of futurist subjects. It\u2019s out in print today too.<\/p>\n

\n

When John Lennon released \u201cImagine\u201d in 1971, his lyrics about a brotherhood of man living life in peace struck many people as a simple, even anodyne, response to the Vietnam War. Although politically liberal, Lennon was no doctrinal Marxist \u2014 only three years earlier, his song \u201cRevolution\u201d had shrugged off people who \u201cgo carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.\u201d But the song struck many evangelical Christians as ghoulish, and for some, \u201cImagine\u201d eventually came to be a sort of national anthem for the repressively secular, globalist state that was thought to be emerging: the anti-Christian New World Order that later became talk-radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones\u2019 fever dream.<\/p>\n

Left Behind<\/i>, a series of 16 books written between 1995 and 2007 that details a possible end-of-the-world scenario, starting from when all good Christians go to heaven in an instant (the Rapture) until the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, specifically calls out \u201cImagine\u201d as a weapon in Satan\u2019s arsenal of seductive propaganda. The Antichrist in Left Behind<\/i> is a suave, cosmopolitan Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia \u2014 the product of the fused sperm of two gay atheist academics, as it happens \u2014 who uses the global confusion in the aftermath of the Rapture to become Secretary General of the U.N. and eventually dictator of a world government that tattoos its citizens with the Mark of the Beast, damning them for eternity.<\/p>\n

However clumsily written, Left Behind<\/i> was for a time the best-selling adult fiction in the United States (partly because megachurches bought copies in bulk to distribute among their congregations) and a major cultural artifact whose high-water mark coincided with the 2004 election. Muscular, evangelical-inflected Republicanism has declined somewhat, as libertarians and later xenophobic populists gained ground in the party, but the anxieties that Left Behind<\/i> played off of are very real: secularization, cultural dissolution, and the loss of something innately human to encroaching technology.<\/p>\n

Zoltan Istvan of the Transhumanist Party is the closest thing to the Antichrist \u2014 as imagined in Left Behind<\/i>, anyway \u2014 whom I\u2019ve ever met. Telegenic, articulate, and blond, the 43-year-old Marin technologist who formerly worked in real estate cheerfully advocates for a post-capitalist future of artificial intelligence, DIY genetic modification, and the eventual demise of death itself. To put science and technology to the fore of the national agenda, he\u2019s running for president.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This new SF Weekly story is one of the best long features on transhumanism I\u2019ve ever read. It covers a myriad of futurist subjects. It\u2019s out in print today too. When John Lennon released \u201cImagine\u201d in 1971, his lyrics about a brotherhood of man living life in peace struck many people as a simple, even [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":267,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[412,5,6,1501],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetics","category-geopolitics","category-robotics-ai","category-transhumanism-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/267"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25875"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67467,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25875\/revisions\/67467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}