Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the 
Redesigned Human of the Future
by James Hughes  

p.169-170

The extropians have also cultivated important allies in libertarian 
politics such as Virginia Postrel and Ron Bailey, sympathizers with 
their militant defense of personal liberty and hostility to regulation 
and environmentalism.   In 1999, Postrel, author of the 
technolibertarian manifesto The Future and Its Enemies and the editor 
of the libertarian magazine Reason, assigned Reason's science 
correspondent Ron bailey to focs on the defense of genetics against 
the Luddites.  Bailey had written ECOSCAM: The False Prophets of 
Ecological Apocalypse in 1993, which argued that whatever ecological 
problems might have existed in the past were all being repaired now.  
Since focusing on biopolitics Bailey's weekly columns for Reason have 
been some of the best and most insightful critiques of the emerging 
Kass-Rifkin bioLuddite axis.  Bailey is publishing his own 
technolibertarian maifesto this year, Liberation Biology.  Postrel has 
now organized Bailey and other technolibertarians, such as Tech 
Central Station's editor James Glassman and prolific InstaPundit.com 
writer Glenn Reynolds, into The Franklin Society.  The first project 
of the Society has been to campaign against attempts to ban embryonic 
stem cell research.

Universal Immiseration Extropian-Style

In 2003, one member of the new Franklin Society, extropian economist 
Robin Hanson, a professor at George Mason University, achieved his 
full fifteen minutes of fame.   Hanson was the author of the abortive 
experiment by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 
aggregating intelligence information in a Middle East future trading 
market, the so-called "TerrorDAQ."  The political brouhaha around 
TerrorDAQ led to the cancellation of the program and the resignation 
of DARPA director John Poindexter.  

Reporters were incredulous at Hanson and his colleagues' inability to 
predict how the experiment would be perceived and dmagogued.  While I 
think the experiment had merit and would not have encouraged 
terrorism, the episode does illustrate some of the moral and political 
blindness that the unreformed extropian anarcho-capitalist perspective 
lends itself to.  

Ten years before the media lambased Hanson for TerrorDAQ he published 
a now often-cited essay "If Uplaods Come First - the Crack of a Future 
Dawn" in Extropy magazine.   The article attempts to extrapolate the 
economic consequences of a breakthrough in the technology of copying 
human personalities into machines.   He argues that the capabilities 
of machine-based person would be so much greater than those of organic 
humans that most non-uploaded people would become unemployed.  Among 
the uploads there would be rapid population growth and severe job 
competition.  Eventually the enormous population of uploads would be 
forced to work at very low subsistence wages - the cost of their 
electricity and disk space - ruled over by a very few of the most 
successful of the uploads.  

Hanson basically recapitulates Marx's vision of universal 
immeseration, but this time in the Matrix.   In the section of the 
essay titled "Upload Politics" Hanson dismisses the idea that 
governments could impose redistribution on uploads since there would 
be large economic benefits of an unfettered transition to Matrix life. 
 The average quality of life of the subsistence upload and the 
unemployed human would allegedly be higher than before.  So the best 
we future residents of an uploaded society can do is become as 
versatile as possible to maximize our chances of ending up as one of 
the lucky rule or employed classes.   Hanson dismisses the idea that 
people will fight the division of society into a mass of well-fed 
plebes and a superpowerful elite since the growth in the gross 
domestic produce is the sole measure of his utopia, and the 
elimination of the weak will select for "capable people willing to 
wokr for low wages, who value life even when life is hard."  

With a dismal, elitist utopia like this who needs a Luddites's 
dystopia?  Russell Jacoby has this to say of Hanson-style 
libertopianism:  "The most imaginative futurists foresee a utopia with 
war, money, violence, and inequality.  Their future looks very much 
like the affluent enclaves of today, only more pleasant and 
commodious.   They paint a picture not very different from 
contemporary luxury suburbs, grassy subdivisions with homes and 
computer and workstations set off from a larger terrain of violence 
and injustice.  The futurists are utopians in an anti-utopian age."