Really appreciate and resonate with the spirit of this post. Something that’s always intrigued me is the distance between the EA-flavored futurism that permeates the current longtermism community, and Afrofuturism. Both communities craft visions of the future, including utopias and dystopias, and consider themselves ‘out of the norm.’
I suspect it’s in part because the EA community generally does not talk much/explicitly about race and racial justice.
I’m not an expert on Afrofuturism (just took one class on it) but, for example, see my amateurish attempt to critically evaluate transhumanism through an Afrofuturist lens. I think my point is less that Afrofuturism clearly overlaps with longtermism and more that these are both movements that paint pictures of the future, but with very different focuses. Afrofuturism focuses on racial liberation, particularly for the African diaspora. For example,
The most popular Afrofuturist authors write deftly at this margin, where they are just as future-obsessed as their peers, but with different takes on questions about who gets to play which roles in these futures. For example, Jemisin’s Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010) is a story about empire and slavery that plays out in a supernatural realm of deities and monsters. Butler’s 1979 classic Kindred famously features an African-American writer who travels between modern Los Angeles and a Maryland plantation during the antebellum period. [...] Futurists ask what tomorrow’s hoverboards and flying cars are made of. Afrofuturists ask who will build them? And does their commercial use fall out of their utility in military or law enforcement? Futurists labor over questions about the nature of Android consciousness and empathy. Afrofuturists ask how race might be wired into Android consciousness, whether the android world might be as divided as ours is. (source)
I think EA, currently, doesn’t do much of that questioning around who is building what and for whom. Or, perhaps more accurately, much of EA operates at the universal or species-level (‘humanity’), which I worry could overlook inequities that make our imagined futures look different from what we expect.
Really appreciate and resonate with the spirit of this post. Something that’s always intrigued me is the distance between the EA-flavored futurism that permeates the current longtermism community, and Afrofuturism. Both communities craft visions of the future, including utopias and dystopias, and consider themselves ‘out of the norm.’
I suspect it’s in part because the EA community generally does not talk much/explicitly about race and racial justice.
I don’t suppose you could clarify this any further, perhaps even providing some pointers to Afrofuturist writings relevant to longtermism?
I’m not an expert on Afrofuturism (just took one class on it) but, for example, see my amateurish attempt to critically evaluate transhumanism through an Afrofuturist lens. I think my point is less that Afrofuturism clearly overlaps with longtermism and more that these are both movements that paint pictures of the future, but with very different focuses. Afrofuturism focuses on racial liberation, particularly for the African diaspora. For example,
I think EA, currently, doesn’t do much of that questioning around who is building what and for whom. Or, perhaps more accurately, much of EA operates at the universal or species-level (‘humanity’), which I worry could overlook inequities that make our imagined futures look different from what we expect.