The Transhumanist Party Wants the White House, Would Settle for a Wikipedia Page
Wikipedians don't find the futurists all that notable
The Transhumanist Party is the only political group in history to stake out its founding agenda in the intellectual bedrock that is the Huffington Post. According to founder and 2016 U.S. presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan, the party includes “futurists, life extensionists, biohackers, technologists, singularitarians, cryonicists, techno-optimists, and many other scientific-minded people.”
What his party does not include, however, is Wikipedia influencer (Wikipundits? Member of the Mainstream Pedia?).
That's not to say the Free Encyclopedia shuns transhumanism — there's plenty of futuristic representation. (For the uninitiated, transhumanism is the philosophy that, on the path from squishy mammal to technologically-infused posthumans, we're going to have a bit of an awkward phase — we might live to 140, but we also stop speaking to each other thanks to telepathic electroencephalography.) Istvan has his own page, as do the 230 members of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. Wikipedia's plain blue-and-white exterior, however, hides an editorial smackdown over the political group's legitimacy.
A particularly impassioned discussion flared up in November, with exhortations like user Mikegeraton’s PLEASE DON'T DELETE THE TRANSHUMANIST PARTY PAGE, who added “that it’s sure to grow quickly.” That it will take place in the future is problematic for hard-line Wikipedians – the site is a chronicler of the past and present, “not a crystal ball." (For the record, Istvan is aiming for half a million members by 2024. Hopefully he can recruit more than five volunteers between now and then.) The discussion devolved into whether or not the Transhumanist Party was more or less noteworthy than then Twitter-sensation Alex from Target. Wikipedia, crushed under the weight of tween affection, gave Alex the thumbs up. The Transhumanists, not managing to achieve Alex's floppy-haired virality, had to reach an accord with the Wikipedians: a page for “Transhuman_politics,” with a subsection for the Party.
More recently, a few editors attempted to spin the subsection into its own page. Both submissions, in early March and late April, were rejected. You don’t have to be a techno-pessimist to note this does not bode well for Istvan’s presidential run. There is, however, always the future.
