Welcome to the TechnoLibertarian Wiki
TechnoLibertarianism is the confluence of transhumanism, the belief in technology as a means of solving human problems and advancing the human condition beyond its natural limits, and libertarianism, the belief in the principles of self-ownership and non-aggression as the only means to achieve a moral and ethical society. This wikia has grown out of the TechnoLibertarians group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/technolibertarians/
What is TechnoLibertarianism?
Technolibertarianism is also known as extropianism, and represents the individualist wing of the transhumanist movement. The Principles of Extropy, originally defined by Tom Bell (aka T.O. Morrow) and Max More, are largely a futurist vision of implementing libertarianism through technology. The left wing, or collectivist wing, of Transhumanism is known as Technoprogressivism or more colloquially, as Borganist. Transhumanism in general is opposed by technophobia, also known as Luddism of which there are also right wing individualists and left wing collectivists. These distinctions can be mapped out for your positions by taking the Worlds Shortest Transhumanist Quiz, and plotted out on the Lorrey Chart as seen here:
The Lorrey Chart, v1.0 depicting the political landscape of technological and personal liberty/self determination.
Meanwhile, reactionary forces in society with varying degrees of technophobia, and various mythologies to rationalize this phobia, have been growing in strength and reach. From the eco-terrorism of the late 90's and early oughties committed by the left wing Earth Liberation Front, Animal Liberation Front, and Earth First! organizations, which our members have found to be intricately tied into more mundane left wing activist groups like the Ruckus Society, the Tides Center, environmentalist organizations like Greenpeace, 350.org, and think tanks like The Club of Rome and The Donnella Meadows Institute. Left wing luddites tend to be focused on genetic engineering of domesticated plants and animals in agriculture, animal rights, industrial use of natural resources and areas like logging, oil, gas and coal drilling, ski areas and aquatic parks like Seaworld, defense technologies like HAARP, submarine sonars, strategic defense systems, depleted uranium armor piercing bullets, and the like, to extremes like weather control, climate change, and "chemtrails", as well as vaccines. We have found in recent years growing technophobia on the right as well among christian conservatives, conspiracy theorists like , and even libertarians suspicious of government surveillance and other use of technology to increase tyranny, like weaponized drones assassinating innocent civilians, chipping as a 'mark of the beast', and vaccines as a means of population control.
In this wikia we will seek to document facts, issues, subjects, of relevance to the technolibertarian movement, about itself and its opposition, both the technoprogressives and the luddites.
TechnoLibertarian Technologies
Because TechnoLibertarians believe technological advancement is inherently liberating and empowering to the individual more than to the state, there are many technolibertarians working at developing new technologies specifically oriented around maximizing individual liberty. Some of these technologies include:
Space Exploration
Exploring space, terraforming, mining, developing, and colonizing alien planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and star systems is very technolibertarian, as it revives the frontier spirit of the sapient individual striking out on their own, or in voluntary cooperation with others, to establish new communities, facilities, homes, free of overbearing governments. Companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, XCOR, Armadillo Aerospace, Masden Aerospace, all are leaders in the "New Space" movement, developing space launch and exploration technologies independently of government space programs, to serve the general public and private industry.
Crypto-Currency
Cryptocurrencies, like BitCoin, were invented by Technolibertarians to solve several issues, namely to create a digital currency that is not counterfeitable, which is cryptographically secure, and which mathematically behaves in the macroeconomy like sound or "hard" money like those using gold, silver, or other precious metals. Bitcoin, originally called BitGold, accomplishes this by decentralizing the creation of digital 'coins' to people who choose to do work called "mining" which is a computational process of hashing through blocks of data to authenticate their validity, blocks which make up a massive encrypted database called a "block chain" that is available to everyone as a public ledger of transactions to ensure that, theoretically, coins cannot be double spent, or stolen, or laundered without the perpetrators being tracked down and identified, while still providing individual anonymity to one's wallet identity.
Furthermore, blockchains can be used to decentralize ANY sort of data archiving and authentication, particularly government data like licensing, registrations, taxes, dispute resolution rulings, etc. Potentially an entire government can be decentralized into the block chain, eliminating centralized government almost completely, enabling vast reductions in government spending, and thereby taxes to pay for it, while at the same time enabling individuals currently on entitlement payments to earn such payments by "mining" cryptocurrency as their source of a basic income.
3D Printing
3D printing enables individuals to manufacture any sort of product they need or want: clothing, accessories, tools, vehicles, homes, robotics, computers, new 3D printers, artificial arms and legs, even new human organs and food like pizzas. By decentralizing the manufacturing industry, individuals are freed from the manufacturing oligopolies that dehumanize the individual, as customers and employees.
Genetic Engineering
The individual right of self determination includes the right to self modify. Whether that is cosmetic, like tattoos, earrings, plastic surgery, gender reassignment, or genetic through genetic engineering, all are inherent in the rights of any sapient being.
Human Longevity
Death is a disease, the final disease that claims us all, no matter what other ailments may sicken us first. The right to life has no expiration date. The sapient individual has the natural right to seek to extend their life to whatever extent they deem necessary, and are capable of achieving through their own productive industry. Universal access to Cryonic Suspension, as a form of insurance to store your body in suspension until a cure can be achieved for whatever ailments harm you, and the right to preserve your property as you see fit while in cryonic suspension, is your natural right. Likewise, the right to use genetic engineering technologies, or any other medical technology, to extend your life indefinitely is also your natural right. Nobody is obligated to pay for such services for you.
Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality offer the promise to eliminate the tyranny of time and space that limits social interaction between sapient individuals. These technologies enable the individual to envision and build virtual content for whatever purpose they desire, to buy and sell such content as property under whatever Digital Rights contract the creator desires, and to socialize with other sapients wherever they may be found.
Virtual Economic Development
Virtual economies, using cryptocurrencies, are going to be the wealthspring of human productivity into the future, as more and more material needs in reality are met by automated production methods in industry. Integrating decentralized cryptocurrencies with virtual economic activity, trading virtual content, capitalizing virtual enterprizes, investing cryptocurrency saved in both virtual enterprizes and real world enterprizes, is the key to economic growth and wealth creation throughout the 21st century. Ensuring maximum freedom to contract and transact, and protection of virtual property, is of paramount importance, because as societies build wealth, they become more free, vibrant, and increased freedom feeds back in creating even more wealth, and wealthier societies are better able to achieve macrocultural goals of decreased population growth, lower pollution, and greater environmental protection, without having to resort to coercive aggression to achieve these goals.
Artificial Intelligence
The self ownership principle of sapiency applies to human level Artificial General Intelligences, AGI is the natural evolutionary offspring of the human species, and one which is likely to go much further in the exploration of the universe, exploitation of the resources of ours and other solar systems, and acheiving these goals far more efficiently and with greater environmental sensitivity than standard biological humans. With declining birthrates globally, especially as populations, and women in particular, grow in wealth, education, and political freedom with increasing protection of individual rights including property rights in particular, the human predeliction to adopt other sentient or sapient beings as "children" (like the American affection for pets) will result in humans giving agency to and recognizing the sapiency, and personhood, of AGI personalities, as well as adopting them into their families as offspring and heirs.
While many more luddite types fear the rise of AGI and preach scare tactics about the threat that AGI poses, they forget that such scare tactics when used against other humans are seen, properly, as threats, and that sapients who are treated as threats, become threats. It is a self fulfilling prophesy. Conversely, sapients who are treated with inclusiveness, familliarity and friendliness become friends, family, allies and protectors. It is important that technolibertarians embrace AGI developments as positives that will eventually result in the creation of fantastic friends and family members who otherwise would never have existed, and who will become critical members of the transhuman family moving our civilization forward, sustaining and renewing it as the older biological culture stultifies and ossifies in senescence.
Intelligence Augmentation
Intelligence Augmentation is the flip side of Artificial Intelligence. Technologies we develop to achieve AGI will also be useful, along with technologies of integrating them into biological neural networks of the human nervous system, and the nervous systems of other species we may seek to uplift to sapiency, will enable human intelligence to jump on the exponential band wagon of Moore's Law, and from our advanced position along the curve, keep ahead of AGI until AGI and IA can integrate into a cybernetic civilization that includes the best qualities of both while overcoming their drawbacks through further advancement.
Mind Uploading
Uploading the mind from a biological brain to an artificial computer substrate is the object of many a science fiction story, with several possibilities:
- from a destructive scan of every neuron, synapse, DNA/RNA or other data storage structure and network structure of the human nervous system,
- or through continually expanding technological intelligence augmentation of the human mind such that the personality expands into its technology so much that when the brain dies, the personality fails to notice, other than possibly the sense of a hangover or headache,
- or injecting the human brain with nanomachinery which replicates each neuron, one by one, replacing biological neurons with artificial ones, replicating their function in every way, until the brain is completely replaced as an artificial nanotech neural network computer, with the resident mind being unaware of any change.
Abolishing biological limitations on the individual sapient will vastly expand the longevity to whatever the individual desires, enable the individual to insure or backup themselves against catastrophic destruction of the operating mind, eliminate all physical ailments and enable the person to survive in a much more ruggedized body that retains the dynamic self repair and adaptive abilities of a biological body without the limitations.
Technolibertarian Politics
As both the Libertarian and Transhuman communities have political needs and aspirations, tied to expanding government recognition of greater individual liberty while advancing technologies that enable that expansion of liberty, while limiting government exploitation of technologies to limit individual liberty, this neccessitates that technolibertarians be involved not only in developing those technologies, but in engaging in the political processes and actions that enable their implementation and limit the backlash aggression by luddites against us. We recognize that technology is inherently empowering to the individual sapient to a greater degree than it enables government to expand its ability to control and aggress upon individuals, but that the government, having a monopoly on the self legitimizing use of aggressive force to achieve its goals, has an ace in the hole that in many cases can be used to counter the bias that technology has toward individual liberty.
For these reasons, we are participating in the formation of the Transhuman National Committee of the United States as well as similar state level Transhuman Parties, and support Transhuman/Transhumanist Parties and their allies in other nations as long as they are not exclusionary toward technolibertarians and under exclusive control of technoprogressives. We encourage technoprogressives to see the advantages of cooperation rather than confrontation, of coalition building rather than dialectical conflict.
At the same time, we also encourage participation in Libertarian Party politics where and when they have greater presence on electoral ballots and media presence, provided they are likewise not exclusionary toward technolibertarians and are not under the control of primitivists. Barring the presence of either sort of group in your local or state political scene, we encourage sapient individuals to participate in political parties which most strongly embrace ideas promoted by technolibertarians: pro-technology, pro-voluntarism, pro-liberty, pro-science/pro-conscience, anti-surveillance, anti-collectivist, anti-aggression.
Below are some projects we endorse as being constructive toward our goals:
Transhuman National Committee of the United States
Currently in the organizational stages, intent on being the official transhumanist PAC in the United States, it is amassing the support of many prominent transhumanists, is currently choosing its leadership, and will be working toward establishing state party committees thereafter. It will eventually form a National Party in order to nominate the first Transhuman Party candidate for US President, and candidates for other national and local offices. It does not currently endorse the so-called candidacy of Zoltan Istvan.
Transhuman Policy Project
The TPP is intended as a think tank/PAC to not only promote transhumanist policies, but to evaluate politicians of any political party on their support or opposition to such parties, and to inform the voting public of which politicians earn the support or opposition of the TPP.
Free State Project
The FSP started in 2001, proposing to recruit 20,000 liberty activists from across the US and around the world to move to one small US state that they felt was the most amenable to liberty. Of ten candidate states, New Hampshire was chosen as the target state. To date, over 1,700 participants have made the move ahead of schedule, many getting involved in local and state level politics, elected to positions of responsibility, and making positive changes for liberty. The FSP membership has exceeded 17,000 and they foresee reaching the threshold 20,000 which will trigger the official migration within the next two years. Many FSP participants are transhumanists, and the FSP is considered the first political movement to utilize the internet to organize and promote its message, bypassing mainstream media.
Seasteading
Founded by Patri Friedman in 2001, the concept of Seasteading, or building a homestead or intentional community on the high seas, in international waters, to achieve political independence from existing governments, has gained a lot of transhumanist as well as libertarian adherents, especially many well heeled silicon valley types such as Peter Thiel. The Seasteading Institute has been developing to build such communities as technologically advanced, sustainable, independent self governing entities.
Sealand
The Principality of Sealand is the original micronation, founded in the 1970's as a pirate radio project on an abandoned sea fort in international waters off the eastern shore of Great Britain, it has established and defended its sovereignty over several decades, peacefully transitioned its leadership to a new generation, and remains an active and vibrant community that hosts an independent datahaven, its own national soccer team, and provides other services to people around the world.
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