My post from the day before yesterday was reposted in a transhumanist channel, where they also posted a couple of remarks:
1. Transhumanism is closely linked to scientific and technological progress, and that requires huge financial injections; even states have problems with this, as sufficient funds for science are often not found, and under ancap, where everything will be decentralized, it could become even worse (I may be wrong, I am not as familiar with ancap ideas as the ancaps themselves), even corporations might lack funds, especially considering their drive to maximize profit. Building things like the LHC could be impossible under ancap, given the required funds and, essentially, the lack of profitability. And there wouldn’t be enough philanthropists for such scales. However, considering that under ancap, capitalists will gain access to the resources previously owned by states, this should give them more opportunities, although it’s still not a fact that it will be enough.
Here I want, firstly, to refer to my old post about funding fundamental science under ancap, and secondly, to point out that transhumanism does not need things like the LHC: research in biotechnology, bioinformatics, and other transhumanist agendas does not require a super-concentration of resources on a single mega-project, which means that funding can be decentralized, gradual, and quickly transition from the fundamental science stage to the applied stage, with rapid implementation of results in business. As far as I know, the most expensive research in this field was the sequencing of the human genome; it was carried out worldwide for many years by numerous laboratories without disrupting current scientific activities, and this is still much simpler than building some unimaginably complex installation in one place.
2. Regarding cyberpunk, that is incorrect. Cyberpunk is not tied to the fact of the existence of states; moreover, cyberpunk often depicts states as having either disappeared or lost all power, with corporations taking their place. And it is under ancap that a cyberpunk scenario of the world being governed by corporations is more than likely. One could even say that cyberpunk often captures precisely the world of anarcho-capitalism.
I am proceeding from Oppenheimer’s definition of the state, that is, an organization that uses systematic, regular, legalized, and continuously applied “political methods” to extract wealth from the producing society. Cyberpunk corporations differ from corporations in current reality in that they are states in the Oppenheimer sense, they are simply extraterritorial. This system differs from anarcho-capitalism precisely by the legality of political methods, whereas under ancap they are marginal.
