Goals

We need super-exponential growth in membership. We need to plan, organise and execute the spreading of ideas. We have a lot of non-monetary resources available (even though our coffins are empty) and we need to use them.

General strategy ideas

WTA is not doing being effective in spreading transhumanist memes.

1. Admittedly, there is not enough (almost no) organisational activities going on. WTA is not coordinating the (small, but existing) resources that we have and the movement doesn't use the potential as a result.
2. It's said that WTA "advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities". This is not a mission of a pro-active result-orient (pardon the buzzwords) organisation. This is not just a poor choice of words, it's a lack of right vision/understanding/focus, which is somewhat acknowledge by many of us.
3. Not enough emphasis is put on right activities. At http://transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/getinvolved/ the No 3 and No 7 are the most important, but they aren't emphasised enough in the activities of WTA.
4. We usually go on the path of the least resistance and doing things that we are comfortable with. IN a sense, we allow those of us with experience of public speaking to speak publicly about +H, but we do not train a thousand of +H speakers to unleash them on the public. :)

We (WTA) remain a loose association of individuals with our own agendas and no common vision/strategy/goals. This was ok for 1990s, but in 2000s that strategy is outdated. We need to focus and make "it" happen. BTW, the view that transhumanists are somehow above being organised (and subordinated) together is wrong. Simply put, we aren't superhumans (most of us), we just know about nanotech and AI.

Speaking of other organisations, I would say that I feel Immortality Institute is slighty better, but they still approach the task from a wrong direction, only they are somewhat more efficient at that. In other words, no, no other H+ organization is close to being effective.

To promote H+ appropriately we need to do the following:

1. We must realise that we need a strong organisation with a common shared strategy focused on achieving specific results. In other words, we must change from a mob into an army.
2. We must realise that our first and foremost goal is to make the majority of people learn about and accept our vision of the future. For that we either need to
1. "get control" over mass media (or powerful public figures) and have it retransmit our message, or
2. turn the transhumanist idea into a Idea virus that will be spread by almost everyone who is exposed to it, so that the message spreads by itself.

And to achieve (2), we need (1). To use a historical example (without discussing the politics of it), we need to learn from the spreading of the communist idea and the emergence of the Bolshevik party (of course, it's best not to piss off the establishment as much).

Some unstructured notes, ideas and copy/pasted fragments are available at

http://futures.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.cgi/TeachingManual

Making a usable tool out of it is on my current to do list. It also seems that wta-talk is a good place for unsorted ideas and experiences that can be systematized.

Purple Cow

Purple Cow is a book and a concept by Seth Godin that only remarkable things can become successful. Not all principles apply to us, because we already know what we want to "sell", but some do.

Focus

With each action or project aimed at promoting transhumanism we must be focused and understand clearly what group we are "courting". From that it should follow which approach we should use.

Low-hanging fruits

Some people don't need to be persuaded, they just need to stumble upon a link to WTA FAQ. We need to seed/pollute the Web with links in relevant places.

Most people would not have even heard of transhumanism were it not for the Internet. The most immediate example of transhumanist-early-goals is obviously communications. In fact, the transmission of knowledge/ideas/whatever is what makes technology exponential.

Execution

Every strategy needs to have methods, actions, results and people defined.

The Art of the Start

Below are some ideas that came to my mind while listening to The Art of the Start online presentation (some items may look cryptic if you haven't seen the presentation):

1. Make meaning

We shoud very clearly see what is that good thing we are trying to achieve. That motivates us, that makes others sympathetic, etc. Examples:

• Increase the quality of life (freedom, happiness, exploration), i.e. "Make a better place:
• Right a wrong (artificial limbs), i.e. fix something
• Prevent the end of something good (immortality)

3. Get going

We should be very clear that our goals are grand. We don't want just to "do something" - we want to Change the world!

We don't have to be afraid to polarize people (i.e. make some hate and some love us). It's much better than having an idea that nobody cares about.

4. Our action model

• We should be specific (not a vague vision, but an extremely specific description of how we plan to work). We should define very specific Target audiences - Who exactly is going to listen to our idea and why, and how they will change their behaviour after that.

9. Lower the barriers to adoption

• People will never jump through the hoops. Make it extremely simple, absolutely flatten the learning curve (think of all the fads that people adopt online - 5 steps to that, 10 things to do that, etc.).
• make people enjoy the process. Getting to know transhumanism and adopting it as a worldview should be fun and pleasant.
• we should recruit evangelists (people who believe that H+ idea will make world a better place), then take them and use them!!! There absolutely are people who are willing to work to promote transhumanism. Why are we so interested in boring WTA members, who consider them intellectually superior for having read and thought about H+, but aren't doing anything? Get the fans, drop everyone else.

Structuring the content for TH propaganda

The real goal of transhumanism promotion - make TH (by TH I mean here realistic predictions of changes and positive attitude towards those changes) the dominant worldview in the world/country.

We should define the target groups and work with some of them. It makes sense to start with the most receptive (students, IT specialists) and the most influencial (businessmen, politicians, academicians).

We should have custom-made messages for each shock levels and each target group. Here I concentrate on the shock level targeting.

We should (must) have the custom messages in distinct (separate) website sections. These would have different facts, explanations, style (the higher the FSL, the closer to the "truth").

Before doing that we should have a few "internal-use" global overview docs:

• overview of the tech. fields
• transhumanist timeline
• general description of the Great Transition (incl. Singularity), i.e. main things that are going to happen.
• a dictionary

Then we make an argument map (such as this argument map about cryonics) justifying the timeline and the general description. We structure it so that parts of it fit the FSL profile of the audience so that you can understand what you tell to each FSL group.

The result:

for each FSL we have part of the timeline, part of the Transition description and the argument map supporting that.

Then we test it (ideally in a controlled environment, so that we understand the results very well) on real subjects, fix the problems (that is people disagreeing aggressively, since aggression is part of the future shock symptoms). Then format that into a series of booklets/videos/lectures/site sections/book chapters and encourage people to start with the first one (or have a automatic test in the beginning).