The United States Pirate Party and the United States Transhumanist Party are exploring potential areas of overlap for future coalition-building, following a series of collaborative discussions organized by the two groups earlier this month.
In early December, the Pirate Party announced that the two political organization would collaborate over one weekend on a series of discussions. As part of this effort, the Pirate Party hosted representatives from the Transhumanist Party for an episode of Talk the Plank, the Pirate Party’s ongoing pilot podcast. Additionally, members of the Transhumanist Party attended the Pirate National Committee’s scheduled December meeting, including Transhumanist Chair Gennady Stolyarov II.
In turn, the Pirate Party sent representatives to participate in an episode of the Transhumanist Party’s Virtual Entertainment Salon, an online discussion series exploring transhumanism’s impact on science, technology, and society. These joint efforts were described as part of an initiative to build stronger ties and explore areas of mutual interest between the two parties, with the Pirate Party alluding to the potential for further collaboration.
Throughout the weekend, members of both groups touched on various topics, including data privacy and surveillance reform, advancing the adoption of ranked-choice voting, working together on civil liberties initiatives, and addressing technology policy aimed at fostering innovation and expanding access to emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and automation.
Readers interested in exploring these conversations further can do so through the following links:
- The Pirate National Committee meeting: Available through the Pirate Party’s YouTube channel
- Talk the Plank episode: Available through the Pirate Party’s YouTube channel
- Virtual Entertainment Salon episode: Available through Gennady Stolyarov II’s YouTube channel
Let’s face it… the two parties could hold a national convention in a phone booth if they could find one.
“This is a partnership that makes sense.”
Does it though? In theory, pirate politics is not that far from libertarianism, save for major disagreements about property rights and ownership of derivative profit. Whereas transhumanism is fixated on “transcendending” the “restrictions/limitations” of the human form.
Now if we pretend for convenience that the parties actually reflect their names, then the Pirate Party wouldn’t need to involve itself with transhumanism in order to push for emerging technologies to respect privacy, not get monopolized, etc. And conversely, it is not in the interest of the Transhumanist Party to restrict technological progress to, for example, free and open source licenses. It’s not so much that their interests are aligned or opposed, as that they are largely tangential.
An anarchy of “feature-enhanced” people, makes a great (and classical) setting for science fiction – typically a dystopian one. But does working towards it make sense in the real world, especially as the world is currently?
I get the impression that a lot of negative technological developments in contemporary society are a result of using sci-fi as a blueprint for the future we work towards, instead of as a mere subset of myriad possibilities – or perhaps, on the opposite end, even as a warning about what to avoid.
As such, I find this particular collaboration to be more horrifying than making sense.
Thank God. We need third parties partnering up and I don’t trust the Libertarians and Greens to get along with each other. This is a partnership that makes sense.
Collaboration between third parties isn’t just strategic—it’s a bold step toward breaking the cycle of polarized politics and giving the American people more meaningful choices.
The most important conversations about the most important policies will increasingly be in the areas neglected by the corrupted and cultish red/blue duopoly.
“The United States Pirate Party and the United States Transhumanist Party are exploring potential areas of overlap for future coalition-building […] aimed at fostering innovation and expanding access to emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and automation.”
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