Posthuman Blues

Today in UFO UpDates Colin Bennett ("Politics of the Imagination") likened my postmodern slant on forteana to the working philosophies of Paul Devereaux and Jacques Vallee: quite a compliment.

Rereading yesterday's comment about "asexual techno-nerds," I realize this sounds like I'm making fun of the Extropians and others like them. Not so. (If you doubt it, see my transhumanism page.) But the fact remains that extropian concepts appeal to both intellectually vigorous and shallow escapist mind-sets. There's even a large zone of overlap.

I've had online run-ins with members of the self-proclaimed transhumanist elite: embarrassingly shallow, thick-skulled collectivists who have simply substituted "cyberspace" for the archaic notion of "heaven." The vocabulary has changed, but the Will to Believe persists, evolving as certainly as demons and fairy-folk morph into extraterrestrial visitors to camouflage themselves among our expectations.