The Cryonics Community Renaissance

A presentation from Biostasis Week at Vitalist Bay

In the summer of 2020, I set out to embrace my identity as a 'Cryonicist' (having signed up in 2016) and connect with fellow travelers online (it was the height of the pandemic, after all). Unfortunately, the online cryonics community of 2020 had attracted some colorful characters who were driving away many folks like me who dared to look too closely into online spaces (I’ll share some of these colorful examples in the video below). The community was made up of a subreddit, an old online BBS forum, a tiny neglected Discord server, and numerous fractured local groups that rarely connected with each other. There were no podcasts on cryonics, and the few people making cryonics content on YouTube… well, let’s just say they weren’t presenting cryonics (or themselves) in a very positive light. (Note: The only exception to this sad situation was Chris Corte’s fantastic Sunday zoom hangouts, which he’s been dutifully running every week since dinosaurs roamed the earth.)

All in all, I was having a great deal of trouble finding anyone in the online cryonics space that I felt proud to identify with, and I found this deeply troubling. Just how many smart and interesting people had looked into these communities when researching cryonics and had decided “nope, this is definitely not for me” when witnessing the sad and unhinged vitriol that passed for content at the time?

But I had decided this was important, so I wasn’t going to be dismayed by a few very loud and obnoxious bad apples in the space. The people who have signed up with legitimate cryonics providers (or had been considering it) should feel proud to call themselves Cryonicists. So, rather than finding some other hobby, I set out to create (and clean up) the online cryonics community. Along the way, I found a few excellent co-conspirators who had as much free time and interest as I had - and together we’ve dedicated a great deal of our free time and effort into making “Cryonicist” a label we can all be proud of. Today, the Cryosphere Discord Server is booming, the r/cryonics subreddit is a fascinating place full of lively discussion, there are now numerous podcasts on cryonics (not all our doing, but I’d like to think we kicked off the wave), and industry-wide conferences are becoming a regular occurrence.

In sum, I’m proud of the success my team at the Cryosphere has achieved in making “Cryonicist” a label we can all be proud to wear, and an online community we can be proud to participate in.

To see exactly how colorful the community had been before my compatriots and I cleaned it up, check out a video presentation I made at Vitalist Bay for Biostasis week back in May.