No Limits! (And Other Foolishness)

I always cringe whenever some "inspirational" business huckster barks into the mic or at the dinner table about how "innovation," "production," "enterprise" or whatever slogan the Amway mindset has latched onto at the moment has "no limits, man!" so, you know, we should all presumably become dot-eyed marauding maniacs and "go for it!" and "take no prisoners!" or what have you.

Such attitudes seem to me always to depend on, or even simply straightforwardly to translate to, the ugly awful fervently held faith that there will always be someone else around to clean up our messes for us.

This expressed disdain for the very idea of limits always amounts to and sometimes baldly testifies to a disdain for the actually-existing living plurality of people who are superfluous to or at odds with the streamlined trajectory at which our stubbornly insensitive, er, "motivated," go-getter imagines he is getting himself to.

Nowhere is this disdain more conspicuous to me than among Superlative Technocentrics, nearly all of them caught up in a frenzy of self-promotion, self-selection, and delusive mutual reinforcement as they handwave from the palpable and urgent reality of ongoing and emerging disruptive technoscientific change to what is instead an essentially irrational and certainly pseudoscientific transcendentalizing talk of omni-predicated technologies delivering post-bodily "immortality," post-embodied "consciousness," post-economic "abundance," post-historical "singularity," and so on.

While I am quite conscious of the ways in which the overwhelming inputs from planetary networked media, the biomedical intervention into customary understandings about when lives can properly be said to begin and end and with what expectations about capacities and changing function we might properly invest them, the intervention of instrumental rationality into production at incomparably small and large scales, the unprecedented appearance on the scene of weapons of massive and insane destructiveness and so on, are all deranging our collective sense of the limits that hitherto have been taken to define the human condition. That this sudden, intensive, and extensive transformative technodevelopmental storm-surge has been treated by some as a portent of an upcoming overcoming of human finitude as such, as the looming confrontation with a techno-transcendentalizing overcoming of the very idea of limits altogether has always seemed to me a curious confusion. And given the frequent coloration of such claims by fairly conventional theological notions of omni-potence, omni-science, and omni-benevolence this curious confusion seems to me all the more curiously conventionally religious, especially considering the barking militant anti-religiosity of so many who seem to indulge in this sort of handwaving technology-talk in the first place. To me, it has always seemed more sensible to say that the technodevelopmental derangement of customary limits is experienced quite as much as the emergence of a new limit -- the loss of our ability to claim with the sort of confidence we've sometimes depended on just what our definitive limits actually will consist of in matters of political and ethical concern that perplex us -- as it is the more emancipatory overcoming of certain old limits.

Be that as it may, I'll admit that it is easiest to focus one's critical attentions on the flabbergasting practical naivete of Superlative technodevelopmental accounts that rely on loose analogies (there are, to be blunt, differences that make a difference between human brains and computers, biological organisms and nanofactories, aging bodies and well-maintained mansions, stakeholder deliberation and the unilateral implementation of optimal outcomes deduced from ideal formulations), accounts that overestimate the state of our knowledge of the relevant technoscience, accounts that overemphasize the smooth function of technology in general, accounts that underestimate the role of social, cultural, and political factors on the vicissitudes of technoscientific change and its impacts, and accounts that treat complex dynamisms as linear processes and complex phenomena as simple monoliths.

It is also easy to focus on the, shall we say, symptomatic dimensions of Superlative Technology discourses, with their bevy of boastful boys, with their curiously conspicuous comic book iconography, with their eager self-marginalizing subcultural politics (hence the incessant vulnerability to and defensiveness about charges of weird Robot Cultism), with their non-negligible exhibition of body-loathing (from their occasional expressions of old-school Cyberpunk disdain of the "meat-body" to their widespread ongoing incomprehension of disability activists who quite righteously insist, "nothing about us without us"), with their ongoing difficulty in nudging their demographic much beyond its conspicuous -- tho' admittedly not exclusive -- white maleness in a world in which whites and males are minorities otherwise, with the lingering presence of "market fundamentalist" intellectuals among them and being taken seriously by them as they are almost nowhere else (after all, the neoliberal and neoconservative policies which gave "anarcho-capitalist" and "free-market" abstractions the only actual life they ever had or will ever have were undertaken by incumbent interests with the cynical understanding that these "ideas" provide ideal cover for confiscatory wealth concentration, but there are few actually intelligent people who still believe in these market fundamentalist pieties on their face, if anybody ever did, apart perhaps from a few awkward earnest Randians, poor things).

But the actual focus of my own critique of Superlative Technology discourses (even if I'll admit I have often directed my jeremiads against these more conspicuously vulnerable dimensions of Superlativity) is on their pernicious anti-politicizing and, more specifically, their almost always anti-democratizing force. Needless to say, I do indeed think the highly fetishized, irrationally hyperbolized, faithfully transcendentalized, falsely monolithicized, obsessively singularized technodevelopmental outcomes that preoccupy Superlative Technocentrics are the farthest thing from plausible in their specific Superlative formulations. But even if I were to grant them more than the negligible plausibility of logical possibility (which is quite enough for most Superlative Technocentrics, and I'll let the reader puzzle through the implications of that low bar given the force of True Belief it seems so often to underwrite), the fact remains that I still do not agree that Superlativity provides the best discursive lens through which we would best cope with the extraordinarily sweeping implications typically attributed to these outcomes by the Superlative Technocentrics themselves.

(A side note: Exactly in analogy to the "New Normal" of contemporary terror-alerts, the attribution of such sweeping implications to what amount at best to thought-experiments and at worst to science-fictional vignettes -- only without the accompanying pleasure of narrative or characterization -- is precisely what functions to make the Superlative demand for a substitution of a focus on proximate for projected and idealized outcomes the hallmark of "seriousness" by their lights, contrary to all sense and in fact in a way that is immune to the interventions of common-sense, strictly speaking.)

If the Superlative Technocentrics were actually right to imagine that billions of people now living will find themselves all too soon living in a future transformed by Friendly or Unfriendly post-biological intelligences, nanotechnological superabundance, biomedical immortality, or the like (and I do think they are far more likely to be wrong than right and I think this matters enormously), even granting them this, I think they are profoundly wrong to imagine that our best way to facilitate the best, least violent, most fair (or whatever) versions of these Superlative outcomes is to contemplate and prepare for the Superlative outcomes themselves, in the abstract, as these outcomes suggest themselves to us in our own impoverished vantage (an impoverishment exacerbated all the more by marginal and anti-democratic modes of Superlative deliberation). Such contemplation and preparation circumvents the ongoing and plural stakeholder contestation that will certainly articulate the unpredictable developmental forces and the dynamic developmental pathways along which such outcomes would actually "arrive" (were they to do so), ignores the practical, scientific, technical, pedagogical, regulatory, cultural knowledges arising out of our collective day to day responsiveness, competition, and collaboration in the plural presents from which no less plural futures will present themselves, that will not only shape but actively constitute our foresight and provide the living archive to which future generations or the communities in which we will ourselves later belong will make our collective recourse as we struggle to cope with these outcomes and their alternatives.

To be sure, this is not the denigration of foresight as such that Superlative Technocentrics will be sure to accuse it of being, but simply an insistence that foresight properly emerges from the ongoing contestation and deliberation of the plurality of actually-existing stakeholders to the emerging technodevelopmental terrain rather than from an idealized projection of Superlative outcomes onto the future by the impoverished perspective of a marginal minority and from the impoverished position of that future's past. This means that serious futurists (Jamais Cascio provides a well-respected example here) would always propose multiple technodevelopmental outcomes in their proposals, no one of which solicits identification but all of which, taken together, capture the texture of an upcoming technodevelopmental terrain in its dense plurality. And so, too, serious futurists would always stress the contingency, non-autonomy, and diversity of the impacts of technodevelopmental outcomes from the perspective of the plurality of their stakeholders. Serious futurists, finally, should always understand and emphasize that the rationality of foresight is more inductive than deductive; and, to the extent that such futurism would be democratizing rather than merely profitable for incumbent interests (and, hence, strictly speaking, better described as retro-futurism), futurists must grasp that the pragmatic point that deliberative foresight foregrounds induction over deduction translates in political terms to a foregrounding of openness over optimality.

(Regular readers may be surprised to see me talk about the very possibility of a "serious futurological practice" given all the abuse I tend to heap on self-identified futurists here... but the simple truth is that it seems to me there are good reasons to think that futurism, so-called, might very well manage for another generation or so -- as psychoanalysis managed to do for well over half the twentieth century -- to remain one of the few places where something like actual philosophical thinking might take place in a way that will be taken seriously even by anti-intellectual Americans. That is more than enough to get me to pay serious attention to it.)

Again, the simple truth is that I think that the preoccupations of no small amount of Superlative Technology Discourse is symptomatic rather than serious. As often as not, it symptomizes (as does so much literary sf, much more provocatively) the fears and fantasies of people caught up in disruptive technoscientific change, it symptomizes (as does so much neoliberal discourse, which remains complementary and often still explicitly correlated to technocratic discourses generally and Superlative Technology discourses particularly) the social, subcultural, and political marginality of many of the personalities drawn to these discourses.

But if the outcomes the Superlative Technocentrics have battened on to really were to come about in some form, the facilitation of best, safest, fairest, most democratic versions of these outcomes will arrive from ongoing plural stakeholder discourse rather than from the unilateral implementations of elite and abstract discourse. That is why my own technoprogressive politics (which is no less technocentric than that of the Superlative Technology discourses when all is said and done) would direct its energies to securing, subsidizing, and celebrating peer-to-peer formations of technoscientific practice, education, regulation, funding, and of p2p education, agitation, and organizing for radical democracy (including the democratization of the planetary economy) in general as a more practical technodevelopmental politics -- more practical even in the event that technodevelopmental outcomes come to assume anything like the contours that preoccupy the imaginations of Superlative Technocentrics.

If Singularitarians, so-called, really are as worried about scary Robot Gods as they seem to be, then it seems to me a far more practical focus for their attention and action would be to participate in contemporary anti-militarist and anti-globalization movements to diminish the role of the secretive and hierarchical command formations in the midst of our democratic society and to overturn the legal fiction of corporate personhood with all its pernicious antisocial and antienvironmental implications -- which are the locations in society out of which anything remotely resembling the Superlative fears and fantasies of these Singularitarians are likeliest to emerge. Otherwise, the ongoing regulation and monitoring of already existing and actually emerging malware seems to me incomparably more likely to provide the practical resources to which we would make collective recourse were we eventually confronted with recursively self-improving software, whether rightly taken to be intelligent or entitative or not, rather than whatever our own abstract fancies might now offer up to those -- including, as likely as not, some of us -- who inhabit days to come (between now and which there would be, after all, many intervening days filled with people quite as intelligent as we are, but incomparably better informed, and directing themselves to these actually urgent problems according to the terms in which they actually occur, likewise coping with ongoing and emerging malware and so on, peer-to-peer).

If Nanosantalogists really want nanofactories to incubate a high-tech gift society without reducing the planet to goo, then it seems to me a far more practical focus for their attention would be to participate in the contemporary copyfight and access-to-knowledge movements that would keep the nanofactory instructions out of the hands of incumbent elites, and to participate (as it seems to me my friends at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology already often do, at least when they are at their best) in movements to empower planetary regulation and oversight of pandemics, tsunamis, climate change, weapons proliferation, the manufacture and trafficking in toxic substances, and so on, since it will be the experiences and insights we acquire in these fraught and urgent already ongoing efforts that will provide the real archive on which we would really, truly depend were we to find ourselves confronting the Superlative fears and fantasies of these Nanosantalogists.

If Technological Immortalists, so-called, really want to inspire and fund and implement a SENS program to overcome the suffering and pathologies we customarily associate with human aging, then it seems to me a far more practical focus for their attention would be to embrace the rhetoric of the Longevity Dividend, to refigure what deGrey describes as the Seven Deadly Things (or whatever number this eventually amounts to, a habit of qualification and caveat being a welcome thing from especially speculative scientists) as seven separate medical conditions among countless others likewise demanding elaborate foundations and diverse research teams, and, above all else, to refrain altogether from idiotic talk of "living forever" or "immortality" in the first place (given the admission by most Technological Immortalists that theirs is not a program that would elude disease, violent, or accidental death even if it managed to achieve its already implausibly Superlative ends, it is curious -- that is to say, importantly symptomatic -- that they should be so reluctant to eschew these essentially faithful rather than factual discourses). But more to the point, it seems to me that enthusiasts for longevity and rejuvenation medicine should be devoting considerable efforts to movements to secure universal healthcare, to address neglected diseases among the planetary precariat, to provide clean drinking water and basic healthcare to everybody on earth, to defend the informed nonduressed consensual recourse to wanted therapies (whether normalizing or not) and protection from unwanted therapies (whether normalizing or not) in the context of contemporary modification medicine, to end the so-called war on (some) drugs (together with the fraudulent marketing and mandated use of other drugs) wherever its racist anti-democratizing tentacles reach, and so on.

Superlative Technocentrics are likely to recoil from suggestions like these, dismissing them as stealthy, well-nigh "closeted" half measures, but the truth, I'm afraid, is that their own monological fixations and hyperbolic derangements of these sensible -- even urgent -- recommendations bespeak either a profound misunderstanding of the complex, dynamic, ineradicably politicized technodevelopmental terrain as it actually exists, or a derangement that symptomizes their own irrational passions, born of social marginalization, short-sighted greed or hostility, neurotic fears of contemporary change and lack of personal control, straightforward narcissistic personality disorder, or the like.

It is well known (that is to say, known among the few odd people like me who keep up with this sort of thing at all) that I advocate what I describe as a technoprogressive political viewpoint which regards ongoing and emerging technoscientific change as at once the most dangerous and most promising field of contemporary democratic-left and emancipatory politics. For me, "progress" has come to be a matter of technodevelopmental social struggle first of all, the contestation of a plurality of stakeholders to the ongoing articulation and distribution of technoscientific costs, risks, and benefits. It is from this perspective in particular that I understand the urgent struggles against neoliberal corporate-militarism, environmentalist movements, planetary human rights and social justice movements, and so on.

While this perspective is no less technocentric than that of the Superlative Technocentrics I so regularly critique our differences could not be more stark otherwise (but this one point of continuity is enough to keep me on my toes lest my own technoprogressivity drift here and there into a problematic Superlativity quite in spite of myself). Not only do I think that the best, most democratizing, most emancipatory technodevelopmental outcomes can be facilitated by politics that are perfectly intelligible to the democratic-left progressive mainstream imagination (as Superlative Technocentricity very definitely is not), but I also think that there is an emerging technoprogressive mainstream on the American political scene and elsewhere around the world that is conjoining the forces of the left blogosphere and Netroots and other emerging p2p democratic formations, the defense of consensus science, copyfight, free press and open media, access to knowledge (a2k) movements, commitments to a politics of choice that encompasses both abortion and ARTs and consensual drug policy, growing demands for renewable energy and sustainable production, and other strands of the contemporary technoscientific tapestry, from the ground up, peer-to-peer, all around us, right here, right now.

Why Superlative Technocentrics would prefer their far-flung and hyperbolized futures over these actually-existing popular technoprogressive energies is entirely beyond me. No doubt only their therapists (or possibly, for a few of them at least, their financial advisers) know for sure.