• Michael Honey@assemblag.es
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    11 months ago

    @froztbyte kinda, but with a different emphasis. The author talks about specific ideas and their origins, and asks that try to build a positive left futurism, and not cede the field to a subset of 2020s Silicon Valley interpretations of those ideas. If eg transhumanism was interesting and worth exploring before Peter Thiel turned up, it can still be so afterwards.

    • self@awful.systemsM
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      11 months ago

      but transhumanism wasn’t interesting before Thiel showed up. it started as an Italian proto-fascist movement and to this day it hasn’t shaken its association with fascism and white supremacy

      if there’s any deeper leftism in the post you linked, you’d best quote it — cause all I’m seeing from my skim through is dollar store Marx and literally a paragraph of poorly-cited Eco used to somehow justify the idea that opposition to TESCREAL ideas is due to a conspiratorial mindset and membership in a cult. I’m seeing a bunch of shit flung at folks like Timnit who’ve put more apparent thought into TESCREAL than anything I’m seeing in that post

      so show me the good part

      • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
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        11 months ago

        @self No, transhumanism goes back before Italian proto-fascists like Marinetti–it arrived in the west via translations of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky but he learned it from his teacher, the Russian Orthodox theologian and inventor of Cosmism, Nikolai Fyodorovitch Fyodorov.

        It’s 19th century Russian Orthodox theological heresy. Transhumanism is just Christianity in god-free, jesus-free, drag.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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      11 months ago

      no, at best it’s the more benign and fluffy end of the Californian Ideology, it’s still extremely much the same thing