Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Political Elitism Or Subcultural Coping Among the Superlative Technocentrics

Updated and adapted from Comments,
My friend Anne Corwin directed my attention to the social and psychological dynamics of "nerd cliques" and the communication styles that arise from them, and wondered whether I am misidentifying as political "elitism" what is often in fact just marginal subcultural coping. I think this is a worthy worry, and in a way my response to William Saletin's review of IEET's HETHR Conference a little over a year ago was a comparable defense of nerds against what I perceived as the repressive and ungenerous social conservatism at the heart of a bioconservative reaction to that conference.

Early on in yesterday's piece I cheerfully admit that "[t]o the extent that transhumanism is simply a kind of literary salon culture of enthusiasts for science fiction and futurological blue-skying, I suppose many of these are relatively harmless and amiable folks with considerable geek-to-geek allure for the likes of me." Part of the reason I included this statement in my rather critical review is to remind everybody that I'm certainly awfully nerdish too, after all. Indeed it is because I see the world rather nerdly that I can see some of the things that trouble me in Superlativity in the first place.

Unfortunately, the elitism I am talking about in yesterday's piece doesn't really just amount to a kind of glib slam against insular geeks caught up in a lexical gravity-well of idiosyncratic jargon.

Let me sketch the outlines here -- and I have gone to great lengths to delineate this case in endless posts elsewhere -- of what I am worrying about under the heading of elitism. I mean, very specifically:

[ONE] An immensely widespread attitude that would substitute technocratic decision-making from self-appointed experts over democratic deliberation on technodevelopmental decisions that affect diverse stakeholders;

[TWO] A customary rhetoric/analytic that preferentially benefits incumbent elite interests, mostly corporate-militarist formations, sometimes because particular technocentrics identify with these elite interests but often -- and this is terribly important -- despite the fact that they do not so identify;

[THREE] A separate critique of the hierarchical/fundamentalist social formations that arise out of the identity politics of sub(cult)ural futurisms like transhumanism, and which become especially pronounced at the edges of sub(cult)ural technocentricity, in places where identity politics gives way to something much more explicitly cult-like.

And, yes, to answer your question, I do mean quite literally that some transhumanist-types look to me like people caught up in a cult, I do mean to point out that there are among them "charismatic" figures invested with and driven by the dangerous need for guru status, I do mean to insist that in these formations the wholesome political drive for emancipation becomes instead a project of transcendence which, unmoored from the proper aesthetic location of such projects of personal/private perfection, go on to motor profoundly and pernicious "anti-political" politics.

To really put my cards on the table, I'll admit that I think Singularitarianism is the mode of Superlative Technocentrism that seems, for now, most freighted with the trappings of cultism, priestly authoritarianism, True Belief, and the rest. There are, to be sure, sub(cult)ural pockets of Technological Immortalism that are just as bad. The discourses and organizations in which these two technocentrisms connect up are often especially troubling politically, it seems to me.

None of this is to deny that there are surely bright, sensible, progressive people drawn for a time to these discourses and formations. Nor is it to deny that interesting work emerges sometimes from these cultural locations. Provocative work very often arises out of precisely such extremes of experience, esoteric mysticisms, lives devoted to poetry, sexual promiscuity, drug cultures, stubborn quests for unpopular knowledges, intentional utopian communities, and so on, after all. But it matters to distinguish good poetry from bad science, projects of private perfection from projects of progressive public policy-making, totalitarian pan-movements from democratic movements of social struggle, the implementation of idealized futures from the facilitation of open futurity, ecstasy from deliberation, hype from sense, and so on.

1 comment:

ZARZUELAZEN said...

Another 'kick arse' essay, this one on 'Why Nerds Are Unpopular'. Very entertaining. Link:

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html