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| Image via transumanity.net. |
It's transhuman activist David F. Brooks with a new opus in his beloved there-are-two-kinds-of-people genre, "Upswingers and Downswingers", which looks on its face as if it might be drawing its inspiration from boxing, or maybe wife-swapping—Upswingers are couples who like to swap with couples of higher social status, while Downswingers descend to their inferiors, and in politics it's sort of similar:
Both right and left are dividing into upswinger and downswinger camps. Among Republicans the upswingers embrace capitalist dynamism, global engagement and the open movement of people and ideas. The downswingers embrace ethnic and national cohesion and closed borders.
On the left it’s between those who believe the only realistic path is to reform existing structures and those who think they are so broken we need to start over.
But no, it turns out that it's based on a kind of typo inside Brooks's memory, projected onto the science fiction writer and futurology professor born as F.M. Esfandiary (1930-2000), and his 1973 Up-Wingers: A Futurist Manifesto, which