New Reptoid Illuminati Plot: The Transhumanism Council

Author: Amon Twyman

Foreword: Sorry to disappoint after such a blatant click-bait title, but you will find no alien lizard people seeking to rule the world here. What you will find is news of regular people who believe that society and the human condition can be improved through technology, cooperating to help each other and spread our ideas. Of course, if you’re the kind of person who believes in New World Order conspiracies then you know that I * would* say that, wouldn’t I? 😉

I am pleased to announce the launch of a new organization, the Transhumanism (H+) Council, which has formed to facilitate cooperation and good relations between a number of Transhumanist groups and notable individuals who maintain presences on Facebook.

Across its current ten organizational affiliates, the Council represents approximately 25,000 Transhumanists. Groups currently affiliated with the Council include Animal Cognition, Carboncopies, The Future Getting There From Here, The Hedonistic Imperative, Rational Transhumanism, the Ray Kurzweil group, Singularity Network, The Stanford Transhumanist Association, Transhumanismo, & WAVE / Zero State.

The Council came together to maintain standards and minimise the unfortunate effects of internet trolls in our groups, but we have now taken the time to establish fair and formal joint decision making procedures, and will be working toward effective cross-promotion and raising awareness of Transhumanist ideas. We’re still at a very early stage, and will be putting up a website with more information shortly.

So much for the official announcement. Now, I’d like to add a few words of my own for Wave Chronicle readers, to give a little behind-the-scenes insight and thoughts from a WAVE perspective. No, no lizard people in this part either, sorry.

To start with insight, I can say that this development has been in the pipeline for a few months now. Transhumanist and Singularitarian ideas are booming in popularity across Facebook, with a lot of people investigating after seeing relevant magazine articles, Hollywood blockbusters and TV shows. It’s hard to gauge how much overlap there is between the different groups, but we know for sure that these groups are not simply copies of each other. Instead they’re more like neighbourhoods in a city, with underlying similarities but local variations in cultural flavour and emphasis. Certain ideas will be welcome in some groups, while their mere mention could get you banned from other groups. Add some colourful and opinionated characters to the mix (myself included), and an interesting picture of a new subculture starts to form.

The initial impetus for the Council was to calm things down where a few personal differences were creating an unfortunate level of public friction, but now things have evolved into a more generally positive and constructive phase. Similarly, right now the focus is on Facebook groups, but I personally believe that the Council should be open to including other types of Transhumanist organizations.

In the few days since the public launch announcement, inevitably a lot of people have had opinions to offer. That’s a good thing and we encourage it, but unfortunately the sheer logistics of replying to all these comments are simply unworkable. That’s why the Council has adopted an approach which will be familiar to WAVE & Zero State members; Decentralization, and an emphasis on encouraging people to take personal initiative. If someone thinks the Council should be doing things a certain way, then they should work to convince the administrators of an affiliated group, or even better to create and develop a new group pursuing these ideas (whatever they are) and seek affiliation with the Council. Don’t wait for anyone’s permission to demonstrate the value of your ideas – just get your wagon rolling, and we’ll meet you at the pass! After all, the idea is not to “own” Transhumanism or tell anyone what to do, but rather to simply provide a forum through which already-vibrant sections of the Transhumanist community can communicate and cooperate.

Finally, it is no accident that the way the Council operates is naturally in line with WAVE’s organizational model. I am proud of my contributions to the Council’s decision-making procedures, which formalise fairness and decentralization in exactly the way WAVE is intended to work. We have even adopted a variant of the Council’s “Cooperative Network Protocol” into the WAVE Principles (see http://wavism.net for details), meaning that the two organizations are effectively singing from the same hymn sheet. One does not need to be a Transhumanist to be a WAVE member, but Transhumanist ideas are central to WAVE, Zero State, & Social Futurism, so I expect this new relationship with the H+ Council to be a rewarding one for all involved.

If you want to offer any thoughts or suggest events or causes that our groups could jointly promote through their affiliation with the H+ Council, then please do let the admins of one or more affiliated groups know (so they can pass word along), or just leave a comment below. Stay tuned, and feel free to get involved!

P.S. Congratulations on your perseverance, Illuminati-watcher! To join our secretive reptilian ranks, read the secret message in the article above, encoded into the third letter in every word.

Guest Author

All Guest Author Posts are submitted or additional content Wave Chronicle has added to the website. To be a Guest Author please visit our "Post Your Article" page.

More Posts - Website