The Web is a jungle, filled with information, misinformation and plain garbage. It is growing in all directions, like a cambrian explosion of species.
We who try to create up-to-date subwebs on our favourite subjects have a hard time catching up with all new developments. Links move, pages change, old files are deleted and new things constantly appear on the web, resulting in a state of constant infoglut and nowshock for all maintainers with broad interests. To maintain a page about transhumanism in general is almost impossible, the subject is too broad.
The solution is of course to narrow ourselves down, to specialise our pages so we just have to deal with a small part of the infosphere at a time when maintaining them. If each page was specialised, it would be easy to find information in a specific area, e.g. cryonics, uploading or transhumanist philosophy, and the maintainer could concentrate on the area to a much greater extent. On the other hand, we certainly don't want to loose the breadth that has developed over the years on the many pages; sometimes two different web-maintainers link to the same information but organises the links in different ways, revealing different perspectives.
Hence the idea of the Alliance: to distribute the work of maintaining transhumanist resources between people. Instead of one person maintaining a page about lots of things, several people now maintain one page with a specialised subject, and these pages are in turn linked together into a whole. .
Tools and methods for this kind of cooperative work has to evolve or be developed, of course, but hopefully this is a first step towards a more usable way of accessing information. By providing some organisation, it will also make it easier to introduce new technologies (like backlinks) when they appear.
Up to the Alliance Page
Anders Sandberg / asa@nada.kth.se