--- alias: - Extropians - Extropy category: Ideology created: 2026-06-19 location: California summary: Extropianism is the libertarian transhumanist movement founded by Max More in the late 1980s around the Extropy Institute and its 1990s mailing list, the seedbed from which Nick Bostrom's longtermism, the rationalist community, and parts of the cypherpunk and cryptocurrency worlds emerged. tags: - Concept - Extropianism - Transhumanism - Libertarianism - ArtificialIntelligence - Cryonics - Rationalism updated: 2026-06-19 --- Extropianism is the libertarian strand of [transhumanism](/concepts/transhumanism/) founded by the British philosopher [Max More](/people/max-more/) in the late 1980s, organized around the Extropy Institute and its influential 1990s email list. It held that human beings should overcome their biological limits through technology, and it combined life extension, cryonics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, mind uploading, and space settlement with an anarcho-capitalist and libertarian politics. The Extropians mailing list was the seedbed from which [Nick Bostrom](/people/nick-bostrom/)'s academic longtermism, the [Rationalist Community](/concepts/rationalist-community/), and parts of the cypherpunk and cryptocurrency worlds emerged.[^1][^2] ### Origins and the Extropy Institute More, born Max O'Connor in England, coined the term "extropy" in 1988 as the opposite of entropy, denoting a measure of a system's intelligence, vitality, and capacity for growth. With the lawyer Tom W. Bell (who wrote as "Tom Morrow") he launched *Extropy* magazine, subtitled "The Journal of Transhumanist Thought," in 1988, and the two incorporated the Extropy Institute in California in 1990 to 1992. The institute published essays, held conferences, and ran one of the first major email lists devoted to transhumanist ideas. Its "Principles of Extropy," including perpetual progress, self-transformation, and the "proactionary principle" (a pro-technology answer to the precautionary principle), set out a creed of optimistic, individualist technological self-overcoming.[^1][^3] The institute ran a series of EXTRO conferences that gathered the movement and adjacent researchers: EXTRO 1 in Sunnyvale in 1994, keynoted by the robotics theorist Hans Moravec on "The Age of Robots"; EXTRO 2 in Santa Monica in 1995; EXTRO 3 in San Jose in 1997; and EXTRO 4 at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999. More changed his own surname from O'Connor to "More" to express his commitment to "becoming better at everything," and the institute's documents framed aging and death as engineering problems to be solved rather than conditions to be accepted. The American futurist FM-2030, born Fereidoun Esfandiary, was an influence and fellow traveler of the early movement.[^3][^8] ### The Mailing List as Seedbed The Extropians list in the 1990s drew an unusually consequential set of participants, among them the nanotechnology theorist Eric Drexler, the economist Robin Hanson, the cryptographers [Hal Finney](/people/hal-finney/) and [Nick Szabo](/people/nick-szabo/) who later figured in the prehistory of Bitcoin, and a young [Eliezer Yudkowsky](/people/eliezer-yudkowsky/). Nick Bostrom participated, and the racist email he later admitted to and apologized for in 2023 was sent to the Extropians list in 1996. The list functioned as the connective tissue linking the libertarian-transhumanist subculture to the AI-risk, rationalist, and crypto-libertarian movements that followed.[^2][^4] Hanson's later work on prediction markets, the "Great Filter," and the economics of brain emulation grew out of debates on the list, and his early-2000s blog Overcoming Bias became the platform on which Yudkowsky first published the essays that founded the rationalist community. The continuity of personnel is direct: the same individuals who argued on the Extropians list about cryonics, uploading, and machine intelligence in the 1990s reappear as the founders and funders of the 2000s institutions, with Bostrom building the academic [Future of Humanity Institute](/organizations/future-of-humanity-institute/) and Yudkowsky the [Machine Intelligence Research Institute](/organizations/machine-intelligence-research-institute/), both pursuing the extropian agenda in more institutional and, in the AI-risk case, more pessimistic forms.[^2] ### The Cypherpunk and Bitcoin Pipeline The Extropians list seeded the cryptography-and-privacy movement that later produced cryptocurrency. The engineer [Timothy May](/people/timothy-may/), himself an extropian, recruited Bay Area cryptographers and privacy activists and in 1992 cofounded the [Cypherpunks](/concepts/cypherpunks/) mailing list with John Gilmore and Eric Hughes, drawing heavily on the extropian membership; his "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" envisioned encryption as a tool to dissolve state control over money and information. Several extropian cypherpunks designed the digital-cash schemes that directly preceded Bitcoin: Nick Szabo's "bit gold," Hal Finney's reusable proof-of-work, and [Wei Dai](/people/wei-dai/)'s "b-money," the last two of which the pseudonymous [Satoshi Nakamoto](/concepts/satoshi-nakamoto/) cited in the 2008 Bitcoin paper. The libertarian-transhumanist drive to escape the nation-state that animated the extropians runs directly into the cryptocurrency politics later embraced across the [Peter Thiel](/people/peter-thiel/) network and the [sovereign-individual](/concepts/the-sovereign-individual/) thesis.[^6] Hal Finney was the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction, sent by Satoshi Nakamoto in January 2009, and ran one of the earliest nodes; diagnosed with ALS, he died in 2014 and was cryopreserved at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the cryonics company then run by Max More, closing the loop between the extropian commitment to defeating death and the financial technology the movement helped invent. The extropian wager that markets and encryption could route around the state, articulated on the list in the 1990s, supplied much of the ideological scaffolding for the crypto industry that emerged after 2009 and for its overlap with the effective-altruism and AI-risk funders, including the FTX collapse that later discredited part of that network.[^6] ### Offshoots In 1998 Bostrom and the philosopher David Pearce founded the World Transhumanist Association (later Humanity+) as a more academic and technoprogressive vehicle, broadening transhumanism beyond the extropians' libertarianism. The Extropy Institute closed in 2006, with More stating that its core ideas had entered the mainstream. The extropian preoccupations, radical life extension, cryonics, mind uploading, AI, and escape from biological and political constraint, recur across the Thiel network's funding of longevity research, the [Seasteading Institute](/organizations/seasteading-institute/), and the AI-risk institutions, and supplied the intellectual vocabulary later inherited by the [Effective Altruism](/concepts/effective-altruism/) movement. The critics Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru later grouped extropianism with transhumanism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism under the acronym "TESCREAL," arguing the bundle forms a single ideology of technological salvation favored by the tech elite.[^1][^5][^7] The World Transhumanist Association represented a political fork within the movement: where the extropians fused transhumanism with anarcho-capitalism, the WTA's founding documents, the Transhumanist Declaration and the Transhumanist FAQ, framed enhancement technologies in terms of rights, access, and democratic governance, and a "technoprogressive" wing led by the bioethicist James Hughes later split further from the libertarian strand. More's "proactionary principle" continued to circulate in policy debates as a counter to precaution-based regulation, and it resurfaced in the 2020s "effective accelerationist" current that opposed AI-safety restriction. The movement's own internal division between optimists who wanted to build superintelligence and the AI-risk camp who feared it, both descended from the same 1990s list, reproduced itself in Thiel's 2025 denunciation of Yudkowsky and Bostrom as figures who had turned "from transhumanism to Luddite."[^1][^7] [^1]: "Transhumanism," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* on Max More, the Extropy Institute, the extropian movement, and the 1998 founding of the World Transhumanist Association. https://www.britannica.com/topic/transhumanism [^2]: Evans, Jules. "How did transhumanism become the religion of the super-rich?" on the Extropians list and its participants. https://julesevans.medium.com/how-did-transhumanism-become-the-religion-of-the-super-rich-d670a410b01a [^3]: More, Max. "The Principles of Extropy" and "The Proactionary Principle," Extropy Institute, 1990s. [^4]: "Prominent AI Philosopher and 'Father' of Longtermism Sent Very Racist Email to a 90s Philosophy Listserv," *Vice,* January 2023, on Bostrom's 1996 email to the Extropians list. https://www.vice.com/en/article/prominent-ai-philosopher-and-father-of-longtermism-sent-very-racist-email-to-a-90s-philosophy-listserv/ [^5]: More, Max, statement on the closure of the Extropy Institute, 2006. [^6]: "How The Extropian Quest For Digital Cash Secured Our Trips To The Stars," *Bitcoin Magazine,* on Timothy May, the cypherpunks, and the extropian origins of bit gold, RPOW, and b-money. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/how-extropian-quest-for-digital-cash-secured-our-trips-to-the-stars [^7]: Torres, Émile P., and Timnit Gebru, on the "TESCREAL" bundle (transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, longtermism); see the *First Monday* and *Truthdig* treatments, 2023 onward. [^8]: "Extropy Institute Resources," extropy.org events page, on the EXTRO conference series: EXTRO 1 (Sunnyvale, 1994, keynote Hans Moravec), EXTRO 2 (Santa Monica, 1995), EXTRO 3 (San Jose, 1997), and EXTRO 4 (UC Berkeley, 1999). https://www.extropy.org/events.htm