Extropianism

Extropianism is the first organized transhumanist movement, formulated in California in the late 1980s around a set of principles favouring perpetual self-improvement, rational optimism, decentralized order, and the deliberate use of technology to overcome biological limits. Its institutional life was short — the Extropy Institute closed in 2006 — but its mailing list functioned as an incubator for a set of ideas and people that went on to shape AI risk research, cryptocurrency, and the modern longevity industry.

§The name

"Extropy" was coined as an informal antonym of entropy: a measure of a system's intelligence, functional order, vitality, and capacity for improvement. Its authors were explicit that it is not a physical quantity and not measurable, and warned against treating it as one.¹ The term functioned as a banner rather than a concept, signalling that the movement's orientation was toward growth and organization in a universe that tends the other way.

§Origins

Max More, then a philosophy graduate student who had changed his name from Max O'Connor, and Tom Bell, writing as T. O. Morrow, launched Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought in 1988. Its early issues collected material on Cryonics, nanotechnology as Eric Drexler had described it, Nootropics, space settlement, artificial intelligence, and libertarian political economy — a combination that had existed as scattered enthusiasms and had not previously been given a name and a coherent philosophy.

More's 1990 essay "Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy" articulated the position as a philosophy of life rather than a technology forecast, and set out the first version of the principles.² The Extropy Institute was incorporated in 1992 as a nonprofit to run conferences and publish the journal. Its meetings, held through the 1990s, were among the first venues where cryonicists, AI researchers, nanotechnology advocates, and life-extension proponents met as a single community. Ed Regis's 1994 Wired profile brought the group to a general readership, and fixed a public image — chosen names, self-experimentation, and a taste for the ninety-ninth percentile of technological optimism — that the movement never entirely shed.³

1. 1988
   Journal launched
   Max More and Tom Bell publish the first issue of Extropy, giving a scattered set of technophilic enthusiasms a shared name.
2. 1990
   The philosophy stated
   More's 'Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy' sets out extropy as a stance rather than a forecast, and drafts the principles.
3. 1991
   The extropians mailing list
   An email list is established that becomes the movement's real centre of gravity for the next decade.
4. 1992
   Extropy Institute founded
   A California nonprofit is incorporated to publish the journal and run conferences.
5. 1994
   Mainstream attention
   Ed Regis's Wired feature 'Meet the Extropians' introduces the movement to a wide audience, in a tone that is affectionate and skeptical in roughly equal measure.
6. 1998
   A rival institution
   Nick Bostrom and David Pearce found the World Transhumanist Association, positioning transhumanism as academically respectable and politically non-aligned.
7. 2004
   The proactionary principle
   More drafts an explicit counterweight to the precautionary principle at an Extropy Institute summit.
8. 2006
   Institute closes
   The board announces the organization's mission is complete, arguing that its ideas have dispersed into the wider culture and no longer need a dedicated body.

§The principles

The Principles of Extropy went through several revisions between 1990 and 2003. The final version listed seven: perpetual progress, self-transformation, practical optimism, intelligent technology, open society (information and democracy), self-direction, and rational thinking.⁴ Earlier versions included "boundless expansion", "dynamic optimism" and "spontaneous order", the last drawn directly from Friedrich Hayek.

The principles were framed as an attitude to be adopted rather than propositions to be verified, and the documents said so. Several are worth distinguishing because they became points of divergence within transhumanism:

• Self-transformation holds that a person may legitimately redesign their own body, mind and character, and is the ancestor of the Morphological freedom argument.
• Practical optimism was explicitly distinguished from faith or blind hope; it asserts that optimism is instrumentally useful because pessimism suppresses effort, not that good outcomes are likely.
• Spontaneous order, and the open-society principle that replaced it, encoded a preference for decentralized coordination over central planning that made early extropianism politically libertarian in a way that later transhumanist organizations deliberately were not.

More's proactionary principle, drafted in 2004, extended this into risk policy: it asks decision-makers to weigh the costs of restricting a technology, including the lives lost to its absence, against the costs of permitting it, rather than treating inaction as the default safe option.

Terminology

Extropianism is not a synonym for transhumanism. It is one movement within it, distinguished by an explicit libertarian politics and a stated attitude of optimism. Later transhumanist organizations such as Humanity+ were founded partly to separate the broader philosophical position from these commitments.

§The mailing list

The extropians email list, running from 1991, mattered more than the institute. It was a small, high-volume forum with an unusual concentration of people who later became consequential in separate fields.

Participants included Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg, who carried the Existential risk and Whole brain emulation research programmes into academia; Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose arguments about AI risk grew out of and then against the list's optimism; the economist Robin Hanson; Ray Kurzweil and Drexler as occasional presences; and the cryptographers Hal Finney, Nick Szabo and Wei Dai. Szabo's bit gold and Dai's b-money proposals, both direct antecedents of Bitcoin, were circulated in this milieu, and Finney received the first Bitcoin transaction and was later cryopreserved at Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

This concentration is the strongest claim extropianism has on historical attention. A list with a few hundred subscribers produced, within twenty years, the intellectual seeds of contemporary AI safety research, of cryptocurrency, and of a substantial part of the life-extension funding ecosystem.

§Dissolution and afterlife

The Extropy Institute closed in 2006. Its board's stated reason was that the mission had succeeded: the ideas no longer needed an advocacy organization because they had entered general circulation. A less generous reading is that the institute had been overtaken. The World Transhumanist Association, founded in 1998 by Bostrom and David Pearce and later renamed Humanity+, offered an academically credentialed and politically neutral version of the same programme, and drew both members and legitimacy away from a body with an explicit libertarian identity.

More went on to lead Alcor for most of the 2010s. Natasha Vita-More, who had developed a parallel strand of transhumanist art and body design and who married More, took leadership roles in Humanity+ and edited the movement's principal anthology.⁵

The ideas dispersed rather than died. Contemporary Effective accelerationism restates practical optimism and the proactionary principle in the vocabulary of thermodynamics and startup culture, largely without acknowledging the lineage. Grinder subculture inherited self-transformation as a physical practice. Singularitarianism took the technology forecast and dropped the politics. The posthuman end-state that extropian writing described is now discussed mainly in bioethics, where it is treated as a claim to be evaluated rather than a goal to be pursued.

§Criticism

Three lines of criticism have held up.

The first is that the movement's optimism was a stance rather than a conclusion, and that stating this openly does not immunize it. Deciding in advance to expect good outcomes is a poor procedure for estimating probabilities, and the extropian forecast record — nanomedicine, Mind uploading, and radical life extension all expected within decades — reflects it.

The second is political. Bioconservative critics and left-leaning transhumanists agreed, from opposite directions, that a movement combining private enhancement with hostility to regulation had no account of who would be left behind. The Access and inequality problem was visible in extropian writing mainly as an objection to be rebutted. James Hughes's argument for a democratic transhumanism was written explicitly against this tendency.

The third is that "extropy" itself never did any work. Presented as the movement's organizing concept, it turned out to be a mood rather than a measure, and the documents defining it conceded the point.

§Legacy

Extropianism's significance is as a social formation rather than a body of theory. It assembled, named, and networked a set of positions that had previously been separate hobbies, and it did so early enough that the people it assembled were still young. Judged by its own principles it failed: the technologies it anticipated arrived slowly or not at all, and the institution dissolved. Judged by the second-order question of which conversations it started, its influence on AI risk, digital currency and longevity funding is out of all proportion to its size — which raises the harder question of whether the small, self-selected online community remains an efficient way to originate ideas, or whether that was a feature of a particular decade of the internet.

§See also

• Transhumanism
• Max More
• Natasha Vita-More
• Humanity+
• Singularitarianism
• Effective accelerationism
• Morphological freedom
• Precautionary principle

§References