Political compass for the21st century

[Captain Genet]

(03-02-2021, 04:09 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: AH, so you are Bill the Piper. I see the connections. Down with hedonism! Tech forever! Welcome back.

Here again you oversimplify my positions. It took me some time to think how I should respond to it.

"Down with hedonism" - I do disagree with hedonism as a philosophical position that pleasure is the supreme good. It's great to enjoy wine, women and song, but a civilized person puts other, more complex goals first. But societies and movements opposed to all pleasure often end up stagnant and opposed to most innovation, like the Amish or Orthodox Jews. This is certainly not my ideal.

"Tech forever" - I hope that modern tech never gets lost. But today overuse of digital technologies, cutting people away from own bodies and emotions and from other people, is a bigger threat than technological regress. I have criticized Millennials for that, but you choose to overlook this part of my message. Extropianism, as defined by Max More in 1988, values above all "intelligence, functional order, vitality, energy, life, experience, and capacity and drive for improvement and growth". Yes, this includes tech and in my previous incarnation I have advocated perhaps too much for biotechnological solutions. But living things have more extropy than computers. Social organization is certainly extropy. Art is extropy too.