The Ottawa Citizen

April 1, 1995

Pg. B4

HEADLINE: Up, up and away

JIM MCCLELLAN

THE TOMORROW TAMERS:

Max More and his fellow Extropians herald freedom, space travel and an end 
to cellulite in the new millennium. Their wagons may be hitched to the 
stars, but they insist they're not cyberspace cadets. Earth calling Max.

Just another L.A. Sunday at the end of the millennium. Outside, it's pouring 
down. Upstate things are getting bad: floods, mud slides, deaths, millions 
of dollars of property damage.

I'm sitting in a comfy suburban apartment talking to 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," he says. "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 L.A. 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 and uploading your consciousness to a computer. Or 
making copies of yourself so that after the inevitable Big Systems Crash, 
you can reboot another you and start again.

You perhaps never pondered the benefits of setting loose molecule-sized 
robots in your body to clean 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 free 
state 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 such as 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 
application of science and sexy, high-powered high technology. They want to 
go beyond the limits of nature and biology and move 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 More and his fellow Extropians feel it is time to forget eco-panic, 
limits to growth, death even. 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," says Max. "The unknown will yield to 
the ingenious mind."

Extropianism may seem to have its face set firmly to the future but 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 philosophy. It is also a kind of lifestyle 
futurism. There are Extropian T-shirts, greetings ('Upward and Outward!') 
and handshakes. There are Extropian words (smart-faced, cryocrastination, 
extropia) and Extropian names. Max More was born Max O'Connor. Other notable 
Extropians include Mark Plus and Simon! D Levy -- a name that 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. "A late accident" as far as parents were concerned, Max grew up 
disconnected from his older brothers, who are fundamentalist Christians, 
much to Max's bemused horror.

Feeling 'like a bit of a mutant'

As a child Max read comic books. "My favorites were the X Men, perhaps 
because I felt like a bit of a mutant myself. I didn't fit in." After 
dabbling briefly in the occult in his early teens, he 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," he says. "Everyone thought the world was going 
to end, the economy was terrible 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 attended Oxford in the mid-1980s. He became 
the first person in Europe to sign up for cryonic suspension with U.S. firm 
Alcor. Later, he headed to do a philosophy Ph.D. at Los Angeles University. 
There, he hooked up with Tom Morrow and the pair began to develop their 
Extropian ideas, incorporating new technologies such as 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 
farther. Extropianism is a 'rational transhumanism,' he explains. Once we 
get our brain implants and robot bodies working, he says, we will be as 
gods. In short, it's time to evolve beyond 'the merely human.'

This fantastic voyage will involve some radical ideas. For example, 
privatizing the air is Max's answer to worries about the environment 
advanced by eco-activists, who he says 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. 
Privatizing 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 are being underwritten by new discoveries about self-organizing 
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."

These ideas 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. Reading his theories on what would 
happen if uploading human consciousness became a reality, you feel the 
ground shift beneath you. But Extropians don't look down -- it isn't an 
Extropian direction. Down isn't in their dictionary, or if it is, it's 
probably been turned into something more Extropian, such as 'anti-up.'

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. "Everything I publish has to seem 
to me that it is within the bounds of scientific possibility," argues Max. 
"I think the problem is that people don't distinguish different kinds of 
far-outedness.

A cyberspace movement

In the past, avant-garde groups met in pubs and cafes, now people from all 
over the world hook up in cyberspace. And, before you know it, there's a 
mini-movement.

That's the theory anyway. With the Extropians the stress should be on 
'mini.' There are around 360 paid members, with another 500 checking the 
mailing list. The Extropian Institute is scraping by, Max admits. This is 
why why Jay Prime Positive and others are spending a wet Sunday afternoon 
crammed into Tim Freeman's L.A. apartment.

They talk up plans for an Extropian book and courses in Future Studies. They 
discuss starting a cable news program that would forget the 'disasturbation' 
of news and tell it like it really is, emphasizing advances in knowledge.

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.

The next morning, I visit Max's office to discuss a few problems I have with 
Extropy. It may seem, Max explains, that Extropians place too much faith in 
technology, that they're much too high on the freedoms and possibilities you 
find on the Net, but all they're doing is trying out ideas.

They're aware there may be problems. Max insists they aren't really 
elitists. He says the future they imagine will trickle down to everyone.

The funny thing about Max is that he argues his ideas 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. "I like my body a great deal," he says. "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," she says.

Though her name sounds distinctly Extropian (taken from a sidekick of Doctor 
Who), it predates her interest in Max's theories. Romana works at Apple, but 
subsidizes her Extropian lifestyle by modelling for lingerie catalogues and 
fetish clothing stores.

She's just set up an Extropian base camp in Sunnyvale, California, where she 
and two partners, Dave Krieger and Geoff Dale, have decided to shack up in 
order to "increase each other's productivity."

"I'm non-monogamous, but that doesn't mean I'm promiscuous," she says. '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."

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 is also 
working on a book.

"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. "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."

How goes the fight against entropy? 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 in 50 years? "I want to be the world's 
most beautiful 83-year-old woman," she laughs.

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 turn, would argue they're too avant-garde for the conservative 
mindset. I'm not so sure. Scientists in respectable research labs bat around 
the same ideas.

And the future More dreams of sounds like more fun than the 500-channel, 
multimedia SuperHypeWay on offer from Bill Gates. Maybe Extropian 
speculations are a challenge to corporate America to live up to its digital 
hype. Maybe.

Perhaps if you never look down, gravity and reality never take hold. Perhaps 
you just keep going. And if you keep going, who knows where you might end up?

"When we've figured out how to travel the galaxies and live forever, 
Extropians will set out to explore the universe," Jay says. "The plan is to 
meet 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."