Or maybe ‘thede’ means something like ‘imagined community that has a biological/racial basis.” It’s the intersection of the two primary sources of identity, the biological one and the imagined/chosen one. I kinda get the sense that this is how NRxers use the term. I think that may be how theden.tv uses the term.

Theden’s (originally-intended, but implying a project too difficult to really be undertaken yet) sense is more along the lines of (multiple, because empire) nationalism.

See also: Usonian Futurism.

This is called a “deme”.

“By this definition, a thede is basically the same thing as Steve Sailer’s ‘race’–a partially inbred population–but without the baggage.”

Sailer’s races are not demes. They are bred, not breeding, populations. This confusion illustrates why we are fond of the (informationally) loaded term “race”. It’s cladistically informative e.g., “race de noble”. It reminds us that we are discussing ancestry, not (necessarily) descendancy — or at least it calls to mind the distinction.

But what’s a thede? The compression of “thede” into “deme” involves too much dimensional loss. New York city is a deme, strictly understood. Is it, therefore, a thede? (No.)

For example: thedes are an excellent tool to explain gamergate, with things like ideological nepotism and why gamers have never been the intended audience of Sarkeesian.

The Kurds fighting ISIS are seeking to build a system of “libertarian municipalism”, basically a patchwork (albeit a somewhat socialistic one).

A couple of notes.

Will try to explain more clearly what I mean later.

I hate you NRx people. You exponentially increase the amount of reading I want to do.

Unrelated, but I’m also fond of this idea of ‘direct neural interface’.

…With that said, I believe that the penultimate question shall always be: Shall I truly modify my child? The ultimate question would then be: Shall I endeavor to make it more or better than human? If both questions have been answered in the affirmative, I believe that there are certain universal or nearly-universal values — or, rather, enhancements — which people of diverse biological backgrounds shall attempt to impart to their children. Two of the most obvious are increases in health and in intelligence.

Health is strongly associated with longevity, so let’s suppose that a normal parent wants to impart to his or her child an enhanced, weakly superhuman lifespan. This should be trivially possible: We already know of dozens of genes that are implicated in aging and the regulation of longevity, such as the FOXO group, MTOR, LMNA and the associated SIRTs, TERT, etc. In theory, one would want to dampen expression of MTOR and its downstream products, and amplify the expression of FOXO, the sirtuins, etc. (Perhaps the easiest way to do this would be to silence the negative regulators of these ‘positive’ genes.) This sort of genetic modification is emphatically not a problem — and it’s very plausible that if you fire on all cylinders, modifying all lifespan-related genetic targets, radical life-extension shall result.

The interesting thing is that the lifespan genes also have an awful lot to do with metabolism, and this sort of genetic modification will necessarily result in tremendous metabolic consequences. Lifespan-engineered humans will be far shorter and slighter than average, leaner than average, their muscles will be of a predominantly oxidative/slow-twitch phenotype, they’ll have markedly improved insulin sensitivity, it’s very likely that their PPAR genes will not function normally, and so forth. Lifespan-engineered humans will be very different from their parents; they’ll be very different from what they would have been had they simply inherited their genes; they may constitute a unique biological thede if there are enough of them. (Especially as they enter their ninth or tenth decade of life, rather spryly!)

And this is among the simplest possible examples: We’re looking at optimizing one, and only one, outcome. Even in this simple case, the modified persons will be recognizably different from baseline humans. It’s more than likely that real-world cases of genetic enhancement shall eventually become much more extreme — especially given the potentially recursive nature of intelligence enhancement. (To say nothing of the fact that we cannot know how entities of greater-than-human intelligence will view their cultural inheritance.)

…Ah, in any case, I’d wager that we’re all going to look like Charlie Stross’s Vile Offspring sooner or later. In other words, divorced utterly from our biology.