FM-2030 promotions

A newly updated website, and a new YouTube channel, keep FM-2030's memory alive. They make for an interesting contrast with the current unknowability of FM's revival from cryostasis in Future World. (As I've started to articulate, we need more efficient mechanisms to overcome the Hayekian ignorance we face; we need to to find that dispersed and tacit knowledge to get cryonics moving in the right direction.)

FM probably still impresses many people as a kook and a charlatan. But as near as I can tell, he had to sell his books and services as a "futurist" in a competitive market, and corporations apparently paid him honoraria for his consultancy and speeches when they didn't have to. FM might have also had sources of income from wealth as a member of Iran's ruling class under the last Shah, though I imagine his family had to liquidate and move whatever assets it could rescue to safer havens because of the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Nonetheless, FM lived as a kind of entrepreneur which has only recently become possible in wealthy societies. Contrast him with some "transhumanist" cult figures these days who apparently live as clients of future-oriented billionaires.

Of course, billionaires also put other people on their payroll, like, say, attorneys, accountants and auto mechanics. But unlike clients, these people have skills with market value; they could get jobs elsewhere, and a billionaire has to pay competitive wages to keep their services. He also expects these people to do useful work, like oversee his legal affairs, prepare his tax returns and maintain his vehicles; and he expects timely results for his money.

Clients, by contrast, don't necessarily have the ability to make a living doing what they want to do, apart from patronage and insulation from market discipline. The market has no demand that I know of for men without training or experience who want to do ill-defined and probably infeasible things like create ethical AI's or build libertarian seasteads. If these guys had to take the kinds of jobs offered by the current economy, for example, you might see them gathering shopping carts in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart.

So, laugh at FM's paleofuturism if you want; but he did manage to support himself and do his own thing because many others found value in his message and engaged in voluntary transactions with him to hear what he had to say.

This video, apparently from the late 1980's, shows that FM had an entree to the world of high finance: