Transformation Not Transcendence

Don’t Know Much About Utopia, Don’t Know Much About Dystopia

Human lives have always been defined both by their limits and by the strategies we use to cope with and overcome them. Many people who are coming now to be ever more fascinated (or appalled) by the spectacle of emerging, disruptive technological developments have begun to voice the hope (or the worry) that human beings are on the verge of a series of profound technological transformations of what have long been deeply definitive human limits.

Is that really true? How could anyone confidently claim to know such a thing? How would we sensibly assess our circumstances in the midst of such technodevelopmental churn? Do we have the critical and ethical vocabularies on hand to cope with such transformations?

Many are coming to see in contemporary genetic, prosthetic, and neuroceutical medicine the fledgling arrival of tools that might come to radically transform accustomed human capacities, to eliminate diseases and renegotiate lifespans, perhaps even to render traits of basic morphology and temperament more or less discretionary. Many are coming to see in genetic science and biotechnology the fledgling arrival of tools that might come to radically reinvent agriculture to feed burgeoning global populations or to engineer microorganisms to help reverse the damage of extractive industries and the petrochemical era on the planet's ecosystem. Many are coming to see in emerging techniques for engineering at the nanoscale the fledgling arrival of techniques that might introduce incomparably cheaper, more robust, more individualized, more sustainably-produced consumer goods of almost every description. Many are coming to see in new digital networked information and communication technologies the fledgling arrival of peer-to-peer practices that might come to radically democratize our cultures and economies, to facilitate creative collaboration and deliberative governance, to proliferate intelligence, encourage invention, consolidate accountability, nurture criticism, personalize and localize commerce, overcome invidious borders, universalize the reach of legitimate law and rights culture, consolidate consent, reinvent personal privacy, and destroy elite secrecy.

As a technoprogressive I am not just among the many who are “coming to see” the promises of these particular technodevelopmental outcomes.

Much more to the point, I am here to demand them.

And this demand is scarcely diminished by the fact that from this same technoprogressive vantage I am appalled at the altogether too likely prospect that these technodevelopmental outcomes will meet with absolute frustration or, worse, misdirection toward violent, unjust, unsustainable, or otherwise antidemocratic ends.

What I mean to say is that my technoprogressive perspective on the shifting instrumental, political, cultural, social, ethical, moral terrain of technodevelopmental politics is hardly a facile or uncritically technophiliac one, however hopeful it may be. To be frank, I will even admit I believe that so long as technological development is driven and shaped so conspicuously as it is today by the specific urgencies of national military advantage and multinational corporate advantage, it is hard to imagine that things are the least bit likely to shape up in the image of my hopes. Nevertheless, I feel especially compelled both by the technoconstituted promises and the threats of this fraught historical moment to strive to facilitate progressive technodevelopmental outcomes as best I can through criticism, advocacy, organization, and political action.

Sensawunda and Superlative States

I have written elsewhere about my concern that technodevelopmental rhetoric seems too often to drift unhelpfully into either uncritically technophilic or uncritically technophobic discursive cul-de-sacs when what is wanted, surely, is an insistently critical technocentric discourse, a technocriticism equally alive to technodevelopmental promises and dangers and which testifies to the lived specificities of technology at the level of actual human practices of invention, use, and meaning-making. Here, I want to focus instead more specifically on another worrying tendency, one that may facilitate this unhelpful drift into uncritical desire or fear. What I want to register is my worry that so many political and cultural discussions of emerging, disruptive technological change seem to drift ineluctably into discussions of curiously transcendentalizing technological outcomes.

According to these transcendentalizing discourses, technology is nudging humanity into some kind of unprecedented “posthuman” condition. Whether this outcome is dreaded or desired by whomever has taken to the transcendental track, these technodevelopmental rhetorics tend in my view perniciously to disavow the extent to which technological change is always a matter of social struggle, how politics and culture are always prior to the technologies themselves when what is wanted is to grasp the significance of technodevelopmental outcomes, that normative vocabularies always articulate the trajectories of technological developments as well as the distribution of their costs, risks, and benefits.

There is a term, "sensawunda," with which sf fans try to convey the breathtaking, spine-tingling thrills that are uniquely available in the spectacles of Stapledonian time-scales or Vingean galaxy-spanning Powers or in the flowing phantasmagoria that follows the gasp, "My God, it's full of stars!" And so too, many people are initially inspired (or horrified) by the sweeping conjurations by radical technophiles of what I call Superlative State Technology: replicative nanoscale machinery nudging us into a post-scarcity gift society, genetic and prosthetic medicine delivering physical immortality, a hedonistic imperative that engineers every sentience into a neverending neuroceutical bliss, a universe-wide diaspora via traversible wormholes, sprawling consensual (or not?) hive-minded communities, quasi-theological "Omega Point" apotheoses, abrupt totalizing developmental discontinuities in history like the Vingean or Kurzweilian "Singularity" (either in its common parlance "acceleration-of-acceleration" variant, or in the more rarefied "arrival of more-than-normatively-human post-biological intelligence" variant), replicative upload and/or AI arms races (what I call "boomergoo" scenarios), and on and on and on.

Of course, what makes these heady confections especially breathtaking is that the technophiles who propound them are no longer content to confine their projections to comfortably far-flung futures we could scarcely reach ourselves, but often confidently insist (they have charts with arrows on them rocketing up, up, up!) that many millions now living will live themselves through the sweeping transformations they are delineating now.

I'll admit that in my time I've enjoyed the same delighted and deranging rush at these speculations as most technocentric-types have. However, I think that there is in fact little we can say now from our "pre-Superlative" locations that could clarify beyond a certain awfully basic point the special quandaries that would arrive with such "Superlative States." Honestly, once you "get" the fact that technological development will likely make lots of things quite unexpectedly different quite unexpectedly soon, it is not clear to me there's much benefit beyond the pure exhilarating entertainment value in dwelling on the Superlative.

More to the point, Superlative States, whatever they may be, would inevitably arrive at the end of developmental trajectories consisting of multiple stages, each one of which would involve their own quandaries and debates and difficult problem-solving. I think it will almost never be the case that these "intermediary" problems and issues would be much eased or clarified or even tangentially addressed by contemplating projected Superlative developmental end-points.

In fact, I would expect that too keen a focus on Superlative States would tend, on the contrary, (one) to distract technology advocates from the urgent complexities of these intermediary stages and their problems, would inspire too many advocates and critics (two) to trivialize the many crucial intermediary stages in their "modesty" compared to the Superlative States, and (three) would tend to make technology advocates impatient and incomparably more vulnerable to hype, careless in the face of the delicate and necessary efforts at negotiating the contending claims of multiple stakeholders at every stage, and disastrously less critical in general.

It is too easy to confuse projected Superlative States with teleological end-points that will then be read as expressing the deeper essence or ultimate "meaning" of particular trajectories of technological development. Bioconservatives hostile to the ongoing emergence of genetic medicine and techno-immortalists who champion genetic medicine in fact share a distressing tendency to act as though the actual meaning of finding a cure to Parkinson's Disease through genetic medicine would somehow be that this marvellous achievement would be a milestone along a developmental road eventuating in either (depending on your ideological positioning) an incomparably triumphant or disastrous technoconstituted human "immortality".

But, really, truly, how on earth are we better able to assess the promises and costs of remediating particular diseases by bringing into the discussion the abstract fears and fantasies associated with the idea of eternal life, whatever that's supposed to mean? What would it clarify exactly about the historical impact of the printing press to say of its invention and use that it was a step along a developmental path that eventuated in the Internet, or might one day eventuate in the Holodeck?

My own expectation has come to be that whatever the special quandaries of Superlative State technological capacities, like extreme longevity or morphological freedom or uncontrollable replication, we will more likely address these difficulties with the very problem-solving resources we will have acquired along the developmental path (even if it proceeds lightning-quick) of stages that lead up to them, rather than turning our attention here and now to abstract speculations on what we take to be plausible projected "Superlativities" when these developmental forces are just now legibly setting in motion.

It seems to me that altogether too many technophiles, in their zeal to embrace the prospect of the technological transformation of some customary human limits, seem to have been seduced as well by a dream of the outright transcendence of all limits. Glib expressions of a faith that technology is sure to put literally every limit up for grabs are actually so commonplace in the literature of corporate-futurism and especially market libertarian technophilia -- not to mention its California cousins in the technophiliac-modes of the libertarian New Age -- that it's hard not to get caught up a bit in the marvelous enthusiasm and momentum of it all.

But it is important to remember that transformation is not transcendence.

Ineradicable Finitude and Kicking the Transcendental Temptation

It doesn't diminish the sense or significance of the transformative impact of technological development to realize that even as we hurdle over our present limits we will find ourselves defined by new limits just the same. Even the almost infinitely powerful would still need managers of some kind to help negotiate compromises among their contending ends in a universe of finite resources. (Yes, they would still need government.) So too, the complex historical legacies of upbringing and association ensure that even the almost infinitely knowledgeable would still need therapists of some kind to help negotiate the contending values in their own souls. (Yes, they would still need culture.)

It pays to recall that theologians never have been able comfortably to manage the reconciliation of the so-called omnipredicates of an infinite God. Just when they got a handle on the notion of omnipotence, they would find it impinging on omniscience. If nothing else, the capacity to do anything would seem to preclude the knowledge of everything in advance. And of course omnibenevolence never played well with the other predicates. How to reconcile the awful with the knowledge of it and the power to make things otherwise is far from an easy thing, after all. Quite apart from troubling the sleep of the faithful, though, I think there are lessons for transcendental technophilia in these moldy meditations.

Or, to put the point in more pragmatic terms: “Permitted in principle by the laws of physics” is a larger set of propositions than “stuff that can be plausibly engineered” is a larger set of propositions than “stuff people actually want” is a larger set of propositions than “stuff people are willing to pay for” is a larger set of propositions than “things people still want in the longer-term that they wanted enough to pay for in the shorter-term.”

Glib corporate-futurists and other hype-notized technophiliacs are of course notoriously quick to pronounce outcomes “immanent” and “inevitable” (genetically-engineered immortality! nanotech abundance! uploading consciousness! superintelligent AI! bigger penises!), just because a survey of science at the moment implies to them that an outcome they especially desire or dread is “permitted in principle by the laws of physics.” But nested within that set like concentric rings on a tree-trunk are ever more restricted and more plausible sets, of which the target set at the center is the set of things people tend to still want enough over the longer-term that they are satisfied to pay (or have paid) for them.

I think it is a good exercise, and sometimes a good penance, for technocentrics to take special care around their use of the word "inevitable" to describe outcomes that are radically different from states of affairs that obtain today.

My suspicion is that this is a word technophiles actually use more to signal the usual attitude of the faithful; namely, "I'm not interested in arguing with you anymore." Too often, “inevitable” is a word that signals an inability to chart an intelligible sequence of developmental stages that could plausibly delineate a path from where we are to whatever Superlative State is imagined to be likely and attractive. And by plausible, I mean both technically and politically plausible.

After all, do technophiles spend enough time reconciling their own hopes to do more, to know more and to do good?

As with God, so too with a humanity become Godlike. Any “posthuman” conditions we should find ourselves in will certainly be, no less than the human ones we find ourselves in now, defined by their finitude.

This matters, if for no other reason, because it reminds us that we will never transcend our need of one another.

Alienation and the Technophiliac Sublime

Transcendental technophiles know that many people still deny the radical scope of their projections for near-term technological change, but I think that they are mostly right to chalk this up to failures of imagination and failures of nerve on the part of their critics. These same technophiles also know that many bioconservative critics deny the value of the technological interventions that they advocate for. But, again, I think they are mostly right to expose the flaws in arguments that want to claim there is a special dignity in avoidable suffering or needless death just so long as these personal catastrophes are championed in the name of "nature."

But the transcendental technophiles participate, I fear, in their own brands of denial where technological transformation is concerned, and this seems to me easily as damaging to their more reasonable hopes as any roadblocks their technophobic critics might place in their way.

It can be quite a surprise to realize just how suffused with transcendental language and images and hopes technophiliac cultures like the dynamists, extropians, futurists, singularitarians, upwingers and such really can be — especially considering how many self-identified crusty atheistic personalities (of whom I'll cheerfully admit I am one) tend to throng in them. The various "transhumanist" communities, in particular, are stamped by the secular spirit of the humanism from which they developed as technocentric offshoots -- not to mention the way they are stamped by the sometimes relentlessly reductive instrumentalism of so many of the coders and engineers who seem most conspicuously and persistently to be drawn to the outlook.

The transcendental temptation for technophilia, then, seems to have little to do with mysticism in fact. It bespeaks, rather, what looks to me more like a kind of melancholy alienation from contemporary social life, a unique pining to transcend the contingent world of politics and culture.

Certainly, the general tone of techophiliac culture is distressingly libertarian. In technophiliac fora to this day you will hear the last vestigial echoes of long boom irrational exuberance declaiming disdainfully that taxation is theft, or that all regulation amounts to a kind of slavery. Even among technophiles who have the sense to deny that they ever took Ayn Rand seriously it is still extraordinarily commonplace to hear expressions of disdain for legitimate political processes (and not just their current Bush-era debasements, but the very idea of such processes), or expressions of a disdainful faith that progressive technodevelopmental outcomes will be best obtained when developments outpace and so bypass public deliberation altogether. And then there is the persistent, astonishing upwelling of breathtaking sociopathic imagery, of dreams of escape into Free States and Galty Gulches or uploading into the cyberspatial sprawl itself, of super-geniuses striving alone in basement labs, or barge-kingdoms, or secreted away in the asteroid belt, of new political parties or newfangled identity movements arriving out of a digital headquarters to sweep the world.

Don’t Disdain the World, Change the World

Teilhard de Chardin once wrote that, "The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope." But it takes more than the promise of new tools and new powers to inspire this kind of hope. It takes the sense that powers will be shared, and that the costs of attaining these powers (and there are always costs) will likewise be shared to inspire people. And I worry that it is here that so many technophiliac visions have seemed to falter too often.

As a technoprogressive I definitely sympathize with the idea that genetic, prosthetic and cognitive modification is emerging as a new frontier in the ongoing battle to preserve and expand individual human freedom. And I know that the dangers we rightly fear from technologies such as these are less fearsome the more people are collaborating to oversee the risks, troubleshoot for errors and ensure that costs are widely and responsibly distributed. I know that innovation will arrive more quickly the more people are inspired to take on the project of bringing it about. And I know that those benefits are richest that are as widely and as fairly shared as possible.

"The future," writes science fiction author Bruce Sterling, "isn't an alien world, it is this very world." It's the kind of insight that you never knew you needed to hear, until you actually hear it said. The future will be here, not elsewhere. And it will be shared. "The future is a process," Sterling goes on to say. That process, whatever our wishes in the matter, will never amount simply to a process of scientific discovery or of engineers solving problems. Progress is not a wave for you to ride on or a Truth for you to die for, but a project that needs many collaborators to succeed.

I want to change the world, not to leave it. I want transformation, not transcendence.

An earlier, rather different, version of this piece first appeared as a column published at BetterHumans, December 1, 2003. This version also incorporates revised material from a couple of old blog-posts, "The Politics of Progressive Technology Development: Arguments From Stage Management Versus Arguments From Superlative States," which first appeared here on Saturday, June 12, 2004, and also "Set Theory for Futurists," which appeared Wednesday, May 19, 2004.