What happened to the Extropians
A follow-up to the “Chains of community” post on the Long Term World Improvement list, in reply to a question from William Eden (a friend in the Bay Area rationality / EA scene) about why so few of the Extropy Institute — the late-1980s and 1990s transhumanist organization founded by Max More that prefigured today’s rationalist and effective altruist communities — seem to be active today. The post-mortem on Humanity+ at the end is Alyssa’s; she ran the World Transhumanist Association (later renamed Humanity+) as executive director in 2011.
The Extropy Institute website is stored on archive.org ( extropy.org snapshots ), so one can look back and see who now was around then.
I think part of it, unfortunately, is just that people got old. The Extropy Institute was founded almost thirty years ago, as of this year. Marvin Minsky died last year at age 88, and Hal Finney died of ALS. Ray Kurzweil is almost 70. Natasha Vita-More is in her late 60s. Amara Angelica is, I think, in her 80s by now. Keith Henson is in his 70s. Even Merkle, Drexler, and Freitas turned 60 a few years ago.
Other people are very much still around. Eliezer, Anders Sandberg, Aubrey de Grey, Christine Peterson, and Nick Bostrom are, of course. Max More is the CEO of Alcor, which is obviously an important role for many of us. Nick Szabo is, famously, a leading candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto. Cynthia Kenyon is still doing anti-aging research.
And part of it is that WTA/Humanity+, which to some extent was a competitor/successor to Extropy, blew itself up through a terrible organizational structure and petty intransigence. Since I was nominally running it for part of that time, I wrote up a summary for LTWI Facebook back in April. I’ll paste it here, in case anyone didn’t see it back then: “I was executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, now Humanity+, back in 2011. Although Humanity+ technically still exists, it has few active members, and does very little. I haven’t discussed what happened in a while, so I thought I’d write a post-mortem to help inform other futurist projects. In my view, here’s what went wrong: 1) The organization was run by a Board of Directors, who were elected by the membership. Each director was elected individually. The membership was not a well-defined group, but varied widely from year to year, since anyone could join by paying a small fee. Therefore, the organization had very little unity and coherence of purpose. The directors didn’t have to agree on anything, and were constantly fighting. The extremely broad mission statement made this problem worse — at one point, several directors fought to make the org’s main mission repealing the American embargo of Cuba (seriously, that wasn’t a joke). Some directors essentially did nothing, while others continuously caused trouble, and ‘firing’ a bad director was almost impossible.
2) There was almost no connection between Humanity+, and the people building the technologies we ostensibly focused on. The original goal of transhumanism was the enhancement of human bodies and human minds through technology. But that requires knowledge of certain fields, notably biology, which basically none of us had (including me). Even information-wise, most of us heard very little about advances in biology as they were announced. I made some attempt to fix this, by connecting with the DIY Bio crowd, but I got very little support and the effort flopped.
3) The organization was very inwardly-focused. The most common topics of conversation were things like who should be in charge of what, who was rude to whom and needed to apologize, what the website design should be, who was running in the next election, who was a dirty rapscallion who shouldn’t be trusted, what chapter should get official status, how the student guide should be worded, and so forth. Not much attention was given to our real goals, whatever those were (see point #1).
4) Except for people we already knew well, there was little real engagement between us and our members. I religiously kept records of how many people joined each quarter, and what percentage of readers opened each monthly newsletter, but the lists of names might as well have been warehouse inventories. At one point, I did try to connect everyone with other transhumanists near them, but us and the members remained two distinct groups rather than a unified whole.”