Fear and Loathing (but Mostly Loathing) in Wawa Country
Fear and Loathing (but Mostly Loathing) in Wawa Country "People get the government they deserve" — and they get it good and hard Joe Allen On my last night in Montana, I gave a talk on transhumanism to a right-wing organization. This was the third meeting I’d attended, held in the basement of an old Eagles Lodge. It really was a great honor. There were about forty people in the audience, I’d say, and about twenty holstered pistols. You don’t say the wrong thing to a crowd like that. Any more, I open my talks on transhumanism by noting that what we’re talking about is mostly fantasy. Genetic engineering on demand, sentient artificial superintelligence, commercial brain-computer interfaces—these are all disturbing ideas that exist, by and large, as propaganda. It’s alarming that the tech is rapidly catching up to these projections, but they’re still just fantasies and propaganda. For now. Really, the worst elements of the transhumanist dream already exist in banal forms. Smartp...