{"id":71396,"date":"2017-07-31T08:31:52","date_gmt":"2017-07-31T15:31:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/07\/rethinking-radical-thoughts-how-transhumanists-can-fix-democracy"},"modified":"2017-08-02T21:01:38","modified_gmt":"2017-08-03T04:01:38","slug":"rethinking-radical-thoughts-how-transhumanists-can-fix-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/07\/rethinking-radical-thoughts-how-transhumanists-can-fix-democracy","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking Radical Thoughts: How Transhumanists Can Fix Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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O n a recent evening at a start-up hub in Spitalfields, London, journalist and author Jamie Bartlett spoke to a small group of mostly under 40, mainly techie or creative professionals about his book Radicals: Outsiders Changing the World<\/a><\/em>. The book, which Bartlett started to research in 2014, before Brexit and Trump, chronicles his time with a series of different radical groups, from the Psychedelic Society \u2014 who advocate the \u201ccareful use of psychedelics as a tool for awakening to the unity and interconnectedness of all things\u201d \u2014 to Tommy Robinson, co-founder of the unabashedly far-right English Defence League, to the founder of Liberland, a libertarian nation on unclaimed land on the Serbian\/Croatian border, to Zoltan Istvan, who ran as US transhumanist presidential candidate on a platform of putting an end to death. He campaigned by racing around America in a superannuated RV which he\u2019d modified to look like a giant coffin, dubbed \u201cthe Immortality Bus.\u201d His efforts were in vain, and illegal, as it turned out: his campaign was in breach of the US\u2019 Federal Electoral Commission rules.<\/p>\n

Bartlett\u2019s book has been damned with faint praise \u2014 he has been called \u201csurprisingly naive about politics<\/a>,\u201d and defining \u2018radical\u2019 so broadly as to make the term \u201cmeaningless<\/a>.\u201d The general consensus goes that Bartlett\u2019s journey through the farthest-flung fringes of politics and society is entertaining and impressively dispassionate, but not altogether successful in making a clear or convincing case for radicals or radicalism. But at the talk that night Bartlett challenged what he sees as the complacent acceptance and defense of our current political and governmental systems, institutions and ideas, of the kind of technocratic centrism that prevailed throughout the global North until very recently. Perhaps they need some radical rethinking. Many of the radicals Bartlett spent time with may be flawed, crazy or wrong \u2014 literally, legally and morally \u2014 but they can also hold up mirrors and magnifying glasses to political and social trends. And sometimes, they can prophesize them\u2026<\/p>\n

Bartlett began the evening by saying, \u201cIf democracy were a business, it would be bankrupt.\u201d A provocative statement, but one that he backs up. He pointed to research<\/a> showing that only 30% of those born after 1980 believe that it is essential to live in a democracy. That rate drops steadily with age. A closer look at the research around peoples\u2019 attitudes reveals widespread skepticism towards liberal institutions and a growing disaffection with political parties. Freedom House<\/a>\u2019s annual report for 2016 shows that as faith in democracy has declined so too have global freedoms \u2014 2016 marks the \u201c11th consecutive year of decline in global freedom.\u201d While a lot of attention has been given to violent polarization, populism and nationalism rising out of anger at demographic and economic changes, Bartlett suggests that perhaps comfort and complacency are culprits too, and he is not the only one: only last week<\/a> Financial Times<\/em> columnist Janan Ganesh took up a similar theme.<\/p>\n

What are the fringe ideas of today that might become ideas of the future? We cannot, of course, say, but Bartlett\u2019s point is we should be paying much closer attention to the crazed hinterlands of human thought. In 2015 transhumanist Zoltan Istvan was talking about using technology to fundamentally change what it is to be human \u2014 to augment our fleshy bodies with steel and silicon. One of Istvan\u2019s favored refrains is the transformative effect of artificial intelligence on the way that we work, and the way that we live. In the past six months, it has become near-impossible to read a newspaper or a magazine without stumbling across a take on how AI is set to change our economy. Istvan\u2019s other hobby-horse is immortality, and using technology to drastically expand the human lifespan \u2014 ultimately to the point where it increases so fast that time can\u2019t catch up with us and we reach a kind of \u201cescape velocity.<\/p>\n

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O n a recent evening at a start-up hub in Spitalfields, London, journalist and author Jamie Bartlett spoke to a small group of mostly under 40, mainly techie or creative professionals about his book Radicals: Outsiders Changing the World. The book, which Bartlett started to research in 2014, before Brexit and Trump, chronicles his time [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":267,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,39,5,269,6,1501],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-economics","category-geopolitics","category-life-extension","category-robotics-ai","category-transhumanism-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71396","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=71396"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71588,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71396\/revisions\/71588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}