# Max More ## Overview Max More is the living connective tissue between the 1990s transhumanist scene and the present-day [[TESCREAL]] ecosystem. Born **Max T. O'Connor** in Bristol, England, in 1964, he legally renamed himself "Max More" in 1990 as a deliberate statement of his personal and philosophical commitment to **extropianism** — the doctrine he would spend the next three decades formalizing, institutionalizing, and operationalizing. More co-founded the **Extropy Institute** in 1988 (with Tom Bell, who adopted the name "T.O. Morrow"), led it until 2007, and served as president/CEO of the **Alcor Life Extension Foundation** from 2011 to 2020 — the world's largest cryonics organization. For the Right-Wing KB's purposes, More is the person most responsible for converting 1980s Californian techno-libertarianism into a transmissible ideology with mailing lists, institutions, conferences, and a recognizable intellectual identity. The Extropy Institute's online presence was the petri dish from which many of the figures who later populated MIRI, FHI, LessWrong, and the EA movement first found each other. ## Background More received a BA in philosophy, politics and economics from St Anne's College, Oxford, and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Southern California (dissertation on personal identity and the possibility of continuing through technological transformation — foundational for the later "substrate independence" argument used by transhumanists and longtermists alike). He co-founded the Extropy Institute in 1988 while still a graduate student and began publishing *Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought*, the movement's first serious in-house publication. In 1990, he published **"Transhumanism: Towards a Futurist Philosophy,"** which introduced the term "transhumanism" in its modern sense — distinct from Julian Huxley's 1957 coinage by its explicit technological and libertarian orientation. More is married to **Natasha Vita-More** (born Nancie Clark), herself one of the most prominent transhumanist theorists; she was the first person to publicly defend human enhancement in a formal artistic/philosophical manifesto (*Transhumanist Arts Statement*, 1983/1998). The two represent the closest thing transhumanism has to a founding couple. ## The Extropy Institute and the Extropian Principles The **Extropy Institute** operated as the central clearinghouse of the transhumanist movement from 1988 to its formal dissolution in 2006. Its core doctrines, as formalized by More in **"The Extropian Principles" (1990, revised several times)**, included: 1. **Perpetual Progress** — no upper limit on improvement 2. **Self-Transformation** — individual responsibility for cognitive and biological upgrade 3. **Practical Optimism** — optimism as a methodology, not a sentiment 4. **Intelligent Technology** — technology as the primary lever for transformation 5. **Open Society** — anti-authoritarian, libertarian-leaning governance 6. **Self-Direction** — personal autonomy as a non-negotiable value 7. **Rational Thinking** — the commitment to reason that would later reappear as LessWrong's "Sequences" The word **extropy** — coined by More as the opposite of entropy — named the movement and set its metaphysical mood: systems moving away from disorder, toward complexity and intelligence. The Extropy Institute's mailing list (1991–2006) was one of the most important social infrastructure pieces of pre-Y-Combinator Silicon Valley techno-intellectual culture. Its participants and regular correspondents included [[Nick Bostrom]], [[Anders Sandberg]], [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]], [[Ray Kurzweil]], Hans Moravec, [[Eric Drexler]], Robin Hanson, and many others who would go on to populate the [[TESCREAL]] institutions. The list was where transhumanism developed its distinctive vocabulary, its shared citation base, and the social bonds that made the later coalescence of MIRI, FHI, and the longtermist movement possible. The Extropy Institute was wound down in 2006 with the explicit rationale that its work was "done" — transhumanism had entered mainstream discourse, and the institutional form was no longer needed. In practice, the torch passed to the **World Transhumanist Association** (co-founded by [[Nick Bostrom]] and David Pearce in 1998; renamed Humanity+ in 2008) and to the emerging constellation of rationalist and EA organizations. ## Alcor Life Extension Foundation (2011–2020) In January 2011, More was named **President and CEO** of the **Alcor Life Extension Foundation**, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based cryonics organization that is the world's largest and most prominent provider of low-temperature biostasis services. Alcor has historically held the bodies (or neurocryopreserved heads) of several hundred "patients," including baseball player Ted Williams, FM-2030, and a number of technologists and transhumanists. More's Alcor tenure (2011–2020) was significant in three ways: 1. **Institutional normalization**: More brought a philosophical and organizational sophistication to Alcor that the organization had previously lacked. Under his leadership, Alcor pursued financial stabilization, improved procedures, and more robust legal structures. 2. **Membership growth**: Alcor's membership grew during his tenure, aided by rising interest from Silicon Valley figures and a generally warming climate toward radical life extension. 3. **Public-facing advocacy**: More became Alcor's public voice, giving interviews, writing articles, and presenting at conferences — reframing cryonics from a countercultural oddity to a rational application of TESCREAL premises. More transitioned to **Ambassador and President Emeritus** in 2020 (succeeded by Patrick Harris as CEO, who was subsequently succeeded by James Arrowood) and stepped down from that role in January 2023. ## Biostasis Technologies (2023–present) Since 2023, More has served as **Director of Communications at Biostasis Technologies** and has continued writing at **The Biostasis Standard** Substack. His current work focuses on the broader "biostasis" framing — which encompasses both traditional cryonics and newer chemical-preservation (aldehyde-stabilized) approaches — in an effort to mainstream the underlying science independent of Alcor's specific organizational history. ## TESCREAL Alignment More is the canonical extropian — literally the person who coined the word — and the most direct bridge between the 1990s transhumanist movement and contemporary [[TESCREAL]] institutions. His ideological fingerprints are visible in: - **Extropianism (E)**: He *is* extropianism; the Extropy Institute was the movement's institutional core - **Transhumanism (T)**: Co-founder of modern transhumanist philosophy; now in biostasis/cryonics, the applied technological endpoint of T - Adjacency to **[[Rationalism]] (R)** (Extropy list was a proto-LessWrong social graph) and **[[Longtermism]] (L)** (More's time horizon is explicitly civilizational) See the [[TESCREAL]] matrix for More's position in the bundle. ## Ideological Positioning More's work is explicitly libertarian in a way that connects extropianism to the broader techno-libertarian current in Silicon Valley politics. He has argued against the "precautionary principle" in favor of what he called the **"proactionary principle"** (2004) — a framework that places the burden of proof on those who would restrict technological development rather than on developers. The proactionary principle has subsequently been embraced by [[Marc Andreessen]] in the [[Techno-Optimist Manifesto]] and by [[Effective Accelerationism]] partisans as intellectual cover for a thoroughgoing anti-regulatory politics. More's public positioning has been consistently anti-authoritarian in framing, but the *operational effect* of his politics — as documented by [[Émile Torres]] and others — has been to legitimize a posture of deregulatory technological acceleration that concentrates power in the hands of those who can afford to play the long game. ## Key Relationships - **Natasha Vita-More** — Wife and philosophical collaborator; co-movement-builder - **[[Ray Kurzweil]]** — Contemporaneous Extropy-era ally; different emphasis (Kurzweil is the singularitarian evangelist; More the extropian institution-builder) but overlapping concerns - **[[Nick Bostrom]]** — Early Extropy-list participant; later institutional successor at WTA/FHI - **[[Anders Sandberg]]** — Fellow Extropian-to-longtermist transition figure - **[[Eliezer Yudkowsky]]** — Early Extropy-list participant as a teenager; the Extropy list was part of Yudkowsky's intellectual formation - **FM-2030 (Fereidoun M. Esfandiary)** — Transhumanist predecessor and Alcor patient - **[[Peter Thiel]]** — Alcor member and broader funder of the life-extension ecosystem; not a direct collaborator but an aligned patron ## See Also - [[TESCREAL]] - [[Extropianism]] — The ideology More founded - [[Transhumanism]] - [[Techno-Optimist Manifesto]] — Downstream of the proactionary principle - [[Ray Kurzweil]] - [[Nick Bostrom]] - [[Anders Sandberg]] - [[Bryan Johnson]] — Contemporary applied-longevity practitioner in the extropian lineage