The Observer

March 26, 1995, Sunday
THE OBSERVER LIFE PAGE; Pg. 10

THE TOMORROW PEOPLE

by Jim Mcclellan

HIGHLIGHT:
Max More and the Extropians say it is time to stop fretting about the 
future. Forget eco-panic, limits to growth, even death. Extropians want to 
be immortal, and travel through space and time. They are also libertarians 
who want to privatisethe oceans and the air.

BODY:
Just another LA Sunday at the end of the millennium. Outside, it's pouring 
down. It's been like this for the past two days. Upstate things are getting 
bad: floods, mud slides, deaths, millions of dollars' worth of property 
damage. I'm sitting in a comfy suburban apartment talking to a charming 
young man called Jay Prime Positive about the sort of body he wants to 
inhabit after he 'uploads' his consciousness to a computer. 'I'd probably 
want to spend most of my time in dataspace, but I do want to interact with 
real stuff some of the time,' says Jay. 'But really, I imagine having 
multiple bodies and multiple copies of myself. I have problems with gender 
identification, so I'd definitely have a female body in there somewhere.' As 
I said, just another LA Sunday at the end of the millennium.

You may not feel in great physical shape, but you've perhaps never thought 
of ditching your body altogether and uploading your consciousness to a 
computer. Or making multiple copies of yourself so that when that inevitable 
Big Systems Crash happens, you can re-boot another you and start again. You 
perhaps never pondered the benefits of setting loose molecule-sized robots 
in your body to clean out your arteries. Or thought about how the principles 
of quantum mechanics could be used to knock up a parallel universe in your 
garden shed. Or sat down and planned the creation of a whole new country, a 
floating free state banged together out of old oil tankers, a place where 
freedom and unbounded intellect could reign and you could finally get the 
damn government " and the taxman " off your back. You may perhaps have 
dreamed of living forever, but have you signed up to put your brain on ice 
when you die? Extropians like Jay and the other people crammed into the 
Culver City apartment have given these matters a lot of thought. A loose 
association, a science faction, if you like, of computer programmers, 
philosophy graduates, researchers, scientists and libertarians, they're 
devoted to fighting entropy and all that doomy stuff about finite resources 
and the inevitable heat death of the universe. Instead they're dedicated to 
promoting the forces of Extropy (the opposite of entropy). They celebrate 
possibility, freedom and boundless growth, the appliance of science and 
sexy, high-powered high technology. They want to go beyond the limits of 
nature and biology and move on up to the stars. Though mainly made up of 
Americans, the prime mover behind the Extropian Institute, one Max More, is 
a pony-tailed 30-year-old born and brought up in Bristol, England.

Max and his fellow Extropians feel it is time to stop feeling bad about the 
future. Forget eco-panic, limits to growth, death even. The hole in the 
ozone layer? Don't worry. We'll fix it. A New Age of Reason is about to dawn 
in which the sky's the limit. Space travel, immortality, huge pectoral 
muscles and an end to the evils of big government and cellulite. 'No 
mysteries are sacrosanct, no limits unquestionable. The unknown will yield 
to the ingenious mind,' says Max.

Extropianism may seem to have its face set firmly to the future but actually 
its roots are in ideas and fads from the past three decades. It mixes the 
'every day in every way I'm getting better and better' pop therapies of the 
1970s, the self-help neo-conservative economic individualism and work-out 
culture of the 1980s, and the neo-biological optimism of the digital 1990s 
with a belief that computers have kick-started a new stage in human evolution.

Also in the theoretical mix are the libertarian ideas and economics of Ayn 
Rand and Friedrich Hayek, complexity and chaos theory, Nietszche, comic 
books and science fiction, digital technology, cryonics, nanotechnology and 
assorted weird sciences. Extropianism isn't just a philosophical programme, 
however. It is also a kind of lifestyle futurism. There are Extropian 
T-shirts, greetings ('Upward and Outward!') and handshakes (a cross between 
a high five and something out of Star Trek in which you sort of link hands 
and reach on up together). There's a whole mini -dictionary of new Extropian 
words (smart-faced, cryocrastination, extropia). There are Extropian names. 
An upbeat new name, after all, is the first step towards 
self-transformation. Max More was born Max O'Connor. Other notable 
Extropians include Mark Plus and Simon! D Levy " a name, you suspect, which 
needs a little more boundless optimism.

Extropianism seems more American than America itself " almost a parody of 
the American Dream " so it shouldn't come as a surprise that Max is English, 
someone who's left the old world behind and reinvented himself on the edge 
of the Pacific. 'A late accident' as far as his builder father and secretary 
mother were concerned, Max grew up disconnected from his older brothers, who 
are fundamentalist Christians, much to Max's bemused horror.

As a child Max read comic books. 'My favourites were The X Men, perhaps 
because I felt like a bit of a mutant myself. I didn't fit in. I used to 
sketch rocket boots when I was a kid. I just loved the idea of having 
supernormal abilities. I used to invent my own. I had a whole book of them.' 
After dabbling briefly in the occult in his early teens, Max discovered 
science fiction, anarchy, libertarianism, right- wing economics and life 
extension.

'They seemed to share a common theme of overcoming limits and increasing 
freedom " individual freedom, freedom from gravity, freedom from death.' 
Just what he needed in gloomy 1970s Britain, which was when he first started 
to think about going to the United States.

'It was a miserable decade. Everyone thought the world was going to end, the 
economy was in a terrible state and no one was thinking about the future. I 
couldn't seem to talk to people about the things I wanted to. They thought I 
was too weird.' Things didn't change when Max went to Oxford to study 
philosophy, politics and economics in the mid-1980s. While doing his degree, 
Max became the first person in Europe to sign up for cryonic suspension with 
US firm Alcor. Later Max headed off to do a philosophy PhD (on personal 
identity) at Los Angeles University. It was there he hooked up with Tom 
Morrow and the pair began to develop their Extropian ideas, incorporating 
new technologies like virtual reality, on-line communities and smart drugs.

Max may be a long way from his old home, but he plans on going a lot further 
than America. Extropianism is a 'rational transhumanism', he explains. There 
may not be any supernatural forces in the universe, but pretty soon, 
suggests More, once we get our brain implants and robot bodies working, we 
will be as gods. In short, it's time to evolve beyond 'the merely human'.

Making this kind of fantastic voyage will entail considering some pretty 
radical ideas. For example, privatising the air, Max's answer to worries 
about the environment advanced by eco-activists (great enemies of the 
Extropian struggle who, he says, often deliberately exaggerate visions of 
doom for their own purposes). 'We do need to be concerned about 
environmental issues. Especially as Extropians, because we plan on living a 
long time, and though we will go off into space, we plan on coming back 
here, so we need to preserve this place. It's not our children and 
grandchildren Extropians are worried about. It's ourselves.' Things might be 
helped, he adds, if resources were privately owned. 'The oceans and the air 
" anybody can pollute them without having to pay for it. Turn those commons 
into privately -owned resources and there'd be more rational economic use of 
them.' Privatising the air is a typically Extropian solution to ecological 
damage. They believe in a free-market future. In fact, Max tells me, his 
economic ideas " currently enjoying a revival in the on-line world " are in 
some ways being underwritten by new discoveries about self-organising 
systems and spontaneous order being made by researchers into complexity 
theory. 'It all suggests that we need a dynamic system that can keep 
reconfiguring itself, a system without people in the middle telling 
everybody else what prices to set or how to allocate resources or coming up 
with a national medical plan.' It's these sort of ideas that crop up in the 
Extropian magazine, which covers things like the physics of immortality, 
time travel and 'transversable wormholes and interstellar travel'. Chief 
among the thinkers is Robin Hanson. Flicking through Robin's thoughts on 
speeding up the development of human thought by borrowing tricks from the 
stock market and creating an ideas futures market, reading his theories on 
what would happen if uploading human consciousness became a reality, you 
start to feel the ground shifting beneath you. But Extropians like Robin 
never look down. Down isn't an Extropian direction. Down isn't in their 
dictionary, or if it is, it's probably been turned into something more 
Extropian, like 'anti-up', just as death tends to be talked of as 
'de-animation'.

This is why Extropians are most at home in the gravity-free world of 
cyberspace, where it sometimes appears that the only limit to your 
imagination is the size of your hard disk. But, argues Max: 'Everything I 
publish in Extropy has to seem to me that it is within the bounds of 
scientific possibility. I think the problem is that people don't distinguish 
different kinds of far-outedness. In some senses we're not very far out at 
all. Our ideas don't require any new physics to work. We're not that far out 
in that sense. It's just that we follow chains of thinking much further 
along than most people are prepared to go.'

Although there is an Extropian Institute, actually an office upstairs at Max 
More's Marina Del Rey apartment, the real Extropian meeting place is the 
on-line mailing list, where the most committed of the movement's members 
upload vast transhumanist tracts on a nightly basis. It's a sign of the 
times. In the past, avant-garde groups met up to exchange philosophical 
theories and various resentments in pubs and cafes. They toiled in isolation 
on pamphlets and novels. Now they hook up in cyberspace, and people of like 
minds from all round the world can join the party, which means before you 
know where you have a mini-movement.

That's the theory anyway. With the Extropians the stress should be on 
'mini'. There are around 360 paid-up members, with another 500 checking the 
mailing list. The Extropian Institute is just scraping by, Max admits. What 
to do about this is the subject up for discussion at a meeting of the LA 
Extropians, the reason why Jay Prime Positive, Max More, Max's girlfriend 
Nancie Clark and others are spending a wet Sunday afternoon crammed into Tim 
Freeman's Culver City apartment.

I chat with an Extropian regular, Regina Pancake, whose day job actually 
involves building the future, or rather versions of the future. She works 
for a company that makes props for SF movies and TV, things like Star Trek. 
Regina first got involved in Extropianism around four years ago. Like a lot 
of movement members, she came via cryonics, which she was drawn to after a 
car crash. Shaken up, she signed up to be frozen. 'With that,' she explains, 
'you're immediately hands-on with the attitude to incorporate the future 
directly into your life.' The Extropians talk up plans for an Extropian 
book, courses in Future Studies run by the Extropian Institute, even an 
Extropian cable news programme, which would forget the 'disasturbation' of 
regular news and tell it like it really is, emphasise the advances in 
knowledge, recount the new genes we discovered since last week, or the new 
super-powered computer chip just developed. It all sounds vaguely familiar, 
like a techno-obsessed version of the tractor production reports once so 
popular in the Soviet Union. But everyone seems so up, I don't want to rain 
on their parade.

Jay wants to bid goodbye to everyone with his own version of the Extropian 
handshake, which ends with a leap to the stars. Unfortunately, the low 
ceiling in Tim's lounge gets in the way. I go back to Max and Nancie's 
apartment, which is dominated by his sizable collection of science-fiction 
paperbacks " which runs from Robert Heinlein, the high-flying libertarian of 
Golden Age SF, to William Gibson, who Max doesn't like much (too downbeat, 
too many lowlifes in his books) " and her vast paintings. One wall is taken 
up with a primary-coloured vision of Nancie and her best friend kitted out 
in leotards, hair streaming out in best shampoo-ad style, doing what seem to 
be zero-gravity aerobics just south of the rings of Saturn.

Nancie talks me through another work upstairs which features a satellite, 
photos of herself crawling along with wet hair, two friends making love in 
zero g, and the Moon. 'It's an allegory about evolution and communication, 
about humanity crawling up out of the mud,' she explains. Nancie's pictures 
are big but she hankers after something on a grander scale. She wants 
boundlessly to expand her art. Let's face it " paint and canvas aren't very 
Extropian. What she has in mind is a sort of astral performance art, 
projecting things on the face of the moon, deep space ballet. 'Wouldn't that 
be incredible,' she murmurs, as she and Max embrace and beam at the 
wonderment of it all.

The morning after the Extropian meeting, I visit Max's office. I confess 
that I have a few problems with Extropy and Max calmly does his best to help 
me work through them. It may seem, he explains, that Extropians place too 
much faith in the power of technology, that they've got way too high on the 
freedoms and possibilities you find on the Net, but all they're doing is 
trying out ideas, testing theories. They're aware that there may be 
problems. Max also insists that they aren't really elitists, that they're 
open to everybody and that the future they imagine won't just benefit the 
rich few in the West. Instead, over the long run, in the Thatcherite 
tradition, it will trickle down to everyone.

The funny thing about Max is that while his ideas are wild, he argues them 
so calmly and rationally you find yourself being drawn in. Cryonics is not 
irrational, he tells me. The objections to it are. He recalls how his 
American philosophy teacher dismissed it as ghastly but had to admit in the 
end that she had no rational arguments against it. 'Cryonics just seems so 
rational to me. Which seems more ghastly? You're kept in pristine condition, 
in a nice clean container, or you're thrown into the ground where you 
decompose and worms eat you. Or you're put into a big burner and you're 
heated up until the pressure builds up in your skull and your brain 
explodes.' Max disagrees that the Extropian obsession with uploading reveals 
a hatred of the body " a trend that seems rife within techno-culture in 
general. 'Well, I like my body a great deal,' he says. 'I don't have any 
problems with it. I'm not looking forward to getting rid of it. But 
uploading isn't about getting rid of your body. People are going to want new 
bodies. They'll just want their brains to be replaced by something more 
effective.'

Effective is a word you could use to describe Romana Machado. When her name 
comes up, Max says he'd rather I didn't interview her, that she's more into 
self-promotion than Extropy. 'I think she thinks she's the Madonna of 
Extropianism.' Romana laughs at this suggestion. 'How about the Camille 
Paglia of Extropy? I like that too. Maybe I'm a cross between Ayn Rand and 
Betty Page.' Though her name sounds distinctly Extropian, it predates her 
interest in Max's theories. She changed her original a while back, taking 
her new name from a sidekick of Doctor Who. 'On the Extropian mailing list 
I'm called Mistress Romana, but only because of my rather dominant attitude 
in argument.' Romana works at Apple, ironing out bugs in the Newton PDA, but 
also subsidises her Extropian lifestyle with a spot of glamour modelling " 
lingerie catalogues, adverts for fetish clothing stores. She's just set up 
The Exclave, a Extropian base camp in Sunnyvale, California, where she and 
two Extropian partners, Dave Krieger and Geoff Dale, have decided to shack 
up together in order to 'increase each other's productivity'. Max had told 
me that experimenting with your lifestyle " trying smart drugs, 
visualisation techniques, on-line identity play, non-traditional modes of 
living " was a very Extropian thing to do. The posse at the Exclave are 
taking him at his word, Romana especially.

'I'm non-monogamous, but that doesn't mean I'm promiscuous,' she tells me. 
'I'm bisexual, but that doesn't mean I'm promiscuous either. What it means 
is that I have the relationships I want with the people I want without being 
stuck in this one form of sanctioned relationship, which in this culture is 
marriage, serial monogamy, whatever. There's more than one person that I'm 
serious about at any one given time and I'm happy with that. It really works 
for me.' Romana is best described as a hands-on Extropian. Along with her 
housemates, she's a regular guest on a local talk radio station. The group 
are also working on a book about Extropy, titled Frequently Questioned 
Answers. Romana also released Stego, an free ecryption programme which works 
by hiding your information in the lower bits of apparently insignificant 
information. A very Extropian thing to do. 'To me the basic activity is 
practically living according to my ideas,' she says, directing me to an 
essay on her World Wide Web page " 'Five Things You Can Do To Fight Entropy 
Now'. 'It's my action plan for what you can do in your life right now in 
order to limit the incursions of entropy in your life, since we can all have 
to deal with that. The five are: care for your mind, your body, have a plan 
for your financial future, learn to defend yourself and get a cryonics 
contract.' So how is the fight against entropy going? How post-human is she? 
'I'm not even thinking about being post-human at this point. I'm just 
thinking about being transhuman or pursuing my potential as a human. When we 
get to posthuman, what that means is we'll have technically transcended the 
meat bodies we have now and we'll be able to have the godlike powers and a 
post-scarcity economy and any one of a number of wonderful things and 
powers. That's not where I'm at now.' So where does she think she'll be at 
in the future? Say in 50 years' time? 'I want to be the world's most 
beautiful 83-year-old woman,' she laughs. 'Actually I hope that I've 
preserved myself so well that I'm a testament to my own ideas.'

Back on Planet Earth it may be hard not to dismiss the Extropians as techno 
-nuts, as fanboys who have confused science fiction for science fact, as 
cyberspace cadets who've got way carried away in the digital playpen of the 
Internet. They, in tu rn, would argue that they're too avant-garde for the 
conservative mind-set. I'm not so sure. Hang out in respectable American 
research labs and you hear scientists batting around the same ideas. In 
fact, their extremism actually functions as a revealing mirror for modern 
American techno-culture.

And the future More dreams about " post-human transcendence, visiting other 
galaxies, meeting copies of yourself " sounds like more fun than the 500- 
channel, multi-media SuperHypeWay on offer from Bill Gates. Maybe the 
Extropians' wildly rational speculations are a challenge to corporate 
America to live up to its digital hype. Maybe.

Perhaps if you never do look down, gravity and reality never take hold. 
Perhaps you just keep on going, upwards and outwards. And if you keep going 
who knows where you might end up? Somewhere, perhaps, like the Far Edge 
party, which Jay Prime Positive tells me about. When we've figured out how 
to travel the galaxies and live forever, Extropians will set out to explore 
the universe. The plan is to meet up on the far edge of the universe and 
swap travellers' tales, show slides and the like. 'That's kind of why I'm 
involved in Extropianism,' Jay says. 'I think they'll throw the best parties 
in the future'.

A lextropicon:

Various Extropian neologisms of use (and amusement) for the future

Aeonomics (from aeon and economics) The study of the economic problems of 
immortal existence.

Amortalist A person who opposes death.

Chrononauts Those who travel through time, either by cryonic suspension or 
through possible loopholes in physical laws as currently understood.

Cryocrastinate To put off making arrangements for cryonic suspension.

Deathism The set of beliefs which glorifies or accepts death and rejects 
immortality.

De-flesh To replace flesh with non-flesh.

Disasturbation Idly fantasising about possible catastrophes without 
considering their likelihood or possible solutions or preventions.

Dividuals Copies of a personality surviving in more than one body.

Extropia Communities on the Net or in real life which try to realise 
Extropian ideas.

Extropiate Any drug that has Extropic effects.

Futique Stylishly futuristic.

Inactivate Non-living but not dead (ie on ice or on disc).

Neg Someone who moans and whines and practises the opposite of dynamic 
optimism.

Smart-faced The condition resulting from the use of smart drugs " the 
opposite of shit-faced.

For more information about Extropy (and how to subscribe to the Extropian 
mailing list), send E-mail to more@extropy.org or exi-info@extropy.org, or 
write to The Extropy Institute, 13428 Maxella Avenue, 273, Marina Del Rey, 
CA 90292. Alternatively, look at the Extropian World Wide Web home page at 
http: /www.c2.org/arkuat/extropy.html.

Romana Machado's home page is at http: /www-bprc.mps.ohio-state.edu/cgi 
-bin/hpp?romanaHQ.html

LOAD-DATE: March 28, 1995