as it turns out, a mountain of health woo and transfusing your teenage son’s blood into yourself is no match for long covid

So there that is what I can recall and have glanced about the anti-aging stuff, now for the H+ magazine gossip (CW: reference of transphobia, of course). H+mag used to be a blog/magazine which regularly posted articles about all kinds of transhumanist subjects, from robotics to anti-aging to a bit 'woo' articles about greater humanity (don't get me wrong those articles were fine, I thought the 'woo' articles (and that is my phrasing, it wasn't as bad as I make it out to be, but it was a bit woo for a transhumanist magazine) were interesting and it fitted with the idea of H+ to be a humanist transhumanist organization. After all, we should all benefit from technological advances, and people should not be left behind. And then suddenly the constant trickle of H+ articles in my rss reader stopped. That confused me, esp as the last article (in my rss reader) was a imho pretty normal post from the (iirc) main guy behind the magazine/blog who said that we should make sure that everybody benefits from transhumanism and that we should be careful with rightwing people in the movement who don't want that. This article no longer exists (well the whole blog no longer exists, and the url is dead), it was deleted so quickly that the normal cache things like google or the wayback machine didn't index it, and the only reason I had seen it was because my rss reader had kept a local copy. After this the blog/mag basically was dead, there were a couple more articles posted but the amount went from several a week to one a month. I have no idea who pulled the plug, but it is pretty worrying, as apparently some of the C-suite of H+ are not that onboard with everybody sharing in the transhumanist future. (That Natasha Vita-More (ex-director) wrote an transphobic 'you cannot change gender/sex' thing somewhere 2018 (how can you be into transhumanism and think this? How can you want to live forever in such a way that you refuse to give your age, but be so weird about trans people. I'm not mad, I'm disappointed) is worrying. Ben Goertzel, who used to be big into robotics and AI latest book (in 2018 according to wikipedia) was about PSI (I'm sure he will be back to AI soon now that that is popular). So this is all pretty weird. Vita-More also follows a few d/acc accounts (which is one of those techno optimist offshoots from concurrency people) and various libertarian causes things. So what I think is what happened with h+ mag is that the right libertarians and the left humanist/socialist/etc in the transhumanist movement got into an early clash re the upcoming culture wars (iirc this was before the start of the online culture wars of 2014) and this split large parts of the movement apart and caused a more inward focus vs the broader popularization and optimism of the early 2010s. This idea is also slightly matched by the history timeline of transhumanism kept by the H+ people. (also note im not saying the H+ people are far right (while doing a quick skim I even saw Vita-More had spoken against the far right (on the subject of AI but still, being against the far right good (that she did it by platforming a steve bannon goon is bad however)), I'd think most of them are just californian ideologians/libertarians who don't want to be really bothered by the culture wars because they just want to live forever). But it is interesting how weird it all got, and how the hypewave of the 2010s seems to have died down re-anti aging. (Of course what is more likely is just that my sources into reading this all disappeared and I see that as the hype wave drying up, anyway talked about the H+mag blog stuff on reddit before but don't think I have ever talked about it here, so here is my long rambling post (I also did a lookup on what some of the visible people, most of it was silent after 2018, but it seems various things (like the H+mag facebook page (yes very retro)) are starting up again this year guess the hype is back!).