Mike Darwin's "Manifesto v2"

I had intended to take a break from blogging for awhile. But Mike Darwin has asked cryonicists to promote his current writing on some problems with cryonics' public image. So I'll oblige him:

Manifesto v2

Mike's remarks support my sense that the cryonics idea doesn't communicate as well as it did formerly - not that it communicated spectacularly well in the first place, considering that it seems to require a level of abstract thinking the hominin brain doesn't do adequately in its default state. I'd like to propose the use of an open innovation model and inducement prizes to get cryonics back on track by tapping into the world of dispersed and tacit knowledge outside of cryonics' insular community, including a prize for the party which writes the best new book to explain cryonics and to serve as a replacement for previous efforts.

I mean, seriously, Robert Ettinger wrote The Prospect of Immortality 50 years ago, and published it in 1964. Don Draper on Mad Men could have had a copy on his bookshelf. We should also set aside Cryonics: Reaching for Tomorrow, written in the 1990's futurist fugue-state caused by prophecies of an imminent "assembler breakthrough," because it has become increasingly obvious to me that we can't take these four-flushing "nanotechnologists" seriously after 30 years: They can't deliver the goods, no matter how many volumes of unreadable nano-something titled books they publish.