John Bruce doesn’t see the value of online banking?

When our membership (and fronting folks) is composed primarily of ordinary people like this, cryonics membership will number in the million(s). But before we can attract people like this, cryonics has to be seen as ordinary, and in line with the norms of american culture. But look at the people who are now attracted to cryonics–far from ordinary. Why?

Why why why?

On the one hand, the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame has just inducted him, which puts into the company of inventors like Ray Kurzweil and Dean Kamen:

http://www.invent.org/2011induction/1_3_11_induction_merkle.asp

On the other hand, what has he really accomplished to deserve the honor? For a skeptical view of his career, refer to:

http://mthollywood.blogspot.com/2006/04/who-is-ralph-merkle-i-ralph-merkle-is.html

http://mthollywood.blogspot.com/2006/04/who-is-ralph-merkle-ii-although-merkle.html

http://mthollywood.blogspot.com/2006/04/who-is-ralph-merkle-iii-steve-edwards.html

We need people who go to church and fix cars and work as accountants and mechanics and who live in flyover country and the suburbs. When we get people like THESE on tv talking up cryonics, we will be on our way. But when we get people like we currently have as spokespeople, that is when we get only 12oo signups after 40+ years.

I’m very tired right now, and heading to bed. So all I’ll say about your remarks re “getting control of the culture” for now, is this. If you mean am I proposing some top down Comintern kind of rule, imposing things in some “planned” way, the answer is no; it won’t work, not yet anyway, because it simply isn’t possible to get the required information (and process it centrally) to allow for good decision making. The example you should think on is the American Revolution (which the British, to this day, refuse to call that – and consider nothing more than a political-economic squabble). In fact, it was a true revolution; while it built on the Magna Carta, it also fundamentally altered the culture. You might say it was the final realization of the schism between church and state – something that has not yet happened in the Islamic world. Christianity was every bit as nasty as Islam BEFORE Martin Luther and the American Revolution. All you need to do is to read Tom Paine, Jefferson, Adams and the Federalist Papers, to understand that a VERY SMALL group of men got control of the whole damn apparatus of power, and overthrew the existing political culture. That revolution has made the monarchies of the West vestigial things. The Royal Family in the UK is like the Disney franchise, with the added benefit that the Queen makes no decisions, and yet she IS Britain’s public face. Thus she can be a goodwill ambassador, whilst the government takes a dump on the people she’s visiting and glad handing. Very clever, really, and the money that flows in from tourism is phenomenal.

So, think of it in those terms. Nazism, Maoism and Leninism are negative examples, up to a point. Mao, the worst monster of the lot, in terms of the number killed, was arguably good for China at the time, given their other problems. It’s complicated, and you are quite right to point out that if I, or anyone else, thinks we can specify where all the bubbles will be in the cake, or even what flavor it be, let alone how it will be iced, all before we bake it – well, that would be crazy. All we can hope for is that we get a cake, instead a of a tub of cyanide-laced KoolAid. There’s no getting around the weirdness and explosive and unpredictable nature of recursive systems.

One last point. We are entering new territory. Jefferson, Adams, and all the other were MOTRAL – they died. And the transmission of their values has been greatly diluted and corrupted by generational turns over. Practical immortality will alter that arc of affairs. Similarly, the speed at which the culture can now be revamped is nothing short of staggering; LOOK at that Michel, et al., article carefully. It’s a whole new ballgame, and I intend that we be amongst the first, if not the first to understand and exploit those changes in how the game can be played. — MD

http://www.imedicalapps.com/2011/03/ipad-beat-android-tablets-hospital-medical-use/

As for, “our objective is to overthrow the culture, taker control of it, and in the process cryonics will become the norm,” no doubt you would know of “Hayekian” arguments against that sort of ambition: Societies develop in organic ways, resist efforts at social engineering, change in a “drunkard’s walk” fashion because “progress” towards a more rational state doesn’t exist despite the wishful thinking of the Enlightenment, etc. Would you care to address these objections?

Having said that, success comes in phases, and it also has perquisites. For now, forget about the “phases” part of the previous sentence and focus on the “perquisites” part. The iPad is widely regarded as a success, as is Coca Cola. Both of these products require that the public know and understand what they have to offer. This may seem so obvious as to hardly merit attention. In fact, it requires a lot of attention, so much so that in the case of Coca Cola, which is a well established and unique product, they still spend tens of millions of dollars on advertising. Despite its success, the iPad is still a niche market device when considered in the context of the overall market for that kind of device. To get the full benefit of the market, Apple will have to much better educate people about the iPad, and use emotion-based marketing (“I HAVE to have that”) to sell more iPads; and that will cost a lot of money. The relevance of these examples is that despite the fact that these are both mature and developed products that work right now, which people fully understand the purpose of, and which few would argue are “evil” or “dangerous,” these companies still have to work very hard to market them, and to sustain their market position. And, these products are proven to make money, so it is easy to get capital to market them.

Yes, cryonics has failed. But has it failed completely? The answer there is demonstrably, “not quite, and not yet” That is very important, because it tells us a number of things:

1) While the culture did not embrace cryonics, it did not react as you describe – far from it. If the culture had violently rejected cryonics like an invading organism, cryonics would be long gone. The proof of that is not just that cryonics exists in some places, but also that it has been banned by law in some other places, most notably British Columbia in Canada, and France. That is rejection – and under no circumstances should that be mistaken for indifference, or mild irritation.

2) In most of the West and Russia, cryonics has been ignored. This has happened for many reasons, which I’m not going to go into now. For this, we should be very grateful, given the danger that cryonics represents to this culture. They don’t “get it” and that is a laudable state of affairs compared to their “getting it,” and squashing it like a bug.

3) What cryonics and cryonics organizations have succeeded in doing is really quite remarkable, in a way. They have manged to achieve absolutely enormous cultural penetration of the idea with essentially no money, and without (so far) provoking an “immune response” of any consequence. In fact, it gets better, because most people in the culture 30 or under, are no longer willing to dismiss cryonics out of hand: few would say it is impossible. That is a sea change from 1964, or even 1984, and it is due to technological advance in the life sciences making the ideas underpinning cryonics seem more reasonable, as well as due to efforts on the part of cryonics organizations.

4) There can be no success in marketing anything without awareness of in the marketplace that the product exists, what it is useful for, and how it works. In the case of a dissonant and disturbing idea, the longer it is around and it is understood how it works without it causing harm or upset, the better (to a point). A truly fantastic amount of dollar value has been achieved at very little cost in terms of educating the public about the “basics” of cryonics: it exists, what it is supposed to do, and how it works.” When you see a cartoon with a caption that says “push 50,000 units of heparin and start CPR,” well that’s education of the culture to an extent that Apple would pay millions for – and in fact does.

5) Finally, and most importantly, we do not want the culture to embrace us, rather we want to subsume the culture. Part of “The von Braun Error,” was to get the culture to embrace space travel as a technology, rather than as value-driven philosophy. Look where it got him, and more importantly where it got the philosophy of universal human diaspora and space travel. The vicious cretins running the culture took von Braun’s rockets, tipped them thermonuclear weapons, spent a significant fraction of the West’s and the Near East’s GDP on it for decades, and has damned near killed us all in the process – and may kill us still!

The take home message: Only a fool gives children or psychopaths (1) firearms or matches to play with. Our mission is not just to “sell” cryonics to the culture. That would be a very foolish exercise, indeed. It is also unlikely to work (in part, because it hasn’t worked so far!). Rather, our objective is to overthrow the culture, taker control of it, and in the process cryonics will become the norm. Ambitious? Of course, but such revolutions are accomplished with frequency in human history, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. — Mike Darwin

1) Unless they are legal residents of the state of Arizona in the US.

The culture has defended itself against cryonics, and very successfully.

Your culture references here only show that cryonics is known to the public, and that even so, they have rejected it. You try to pass off a failure as a success!

Hell yes, get busy! — Mike