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

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Superlative Boo Hoo

To those superlative and sub(cult)ural technocentrics who have been reduced at this point to pouting about my "negativity," confusing my critique for "defamation," dismissing me as a "troll," or whining that I am focusing on the "wrong enemies" (as if "naïve" techno-utopian corporate-militarists are really less dangerous than idiotic bioconservatives at this particular historical moment) and so on, a few words:

One can devote plenty of time to constructive, practical, promising, programmatic discussion concerning technodevelopmental change without feeling the least bit compelled to take marginal cult-like pronouncements and hyperbolic salesman’s pitches about nanotech superabundance, artificial superintelligence, or imminent medical superlongevity particularly seriously. And I do.

In some circumstances the most constructive thing to do is to expose obfuscation, confusion, and falsehood where one finds it by one’s lights, even if that will appear “negative” to those who affirm the notions so exposed. And I do.

Finally for those who feel (or claim to feel) disrespected by the force of my critique -- my occasional recourse to snark is another matter, one either enjoys it or at least "gets it" or one doesn't -- in my opinion it is the profoundest sign of respect that one will direct arguments to the better judgment of even people who seem to one to be spouting the most foolish imaginable sorts of nonsense. And I do.

46 comments:

VDT said...

Well, as you know, I obviously don't have a problem with your so-called "negativity" or "disrespect" since I am accused of same thing for same reason by some of the same naïve techno-utopians.

However, I do feel that you have (eloquently and comprehensively) made your point abundantly clear. Some of the people who agree with you are getting bored while most people who disagree with you are obviously getting annoyed.

Since naïve techno-utopians, while always remaining marginal, actually thrive on both good and bad publicity, there comes a time when a technoprogressive cultural critic must ask himself whether or not he should move on in light of fact that idiotic yet *influential* bioconservatives do deserve his focus at this particular historical moment...

Dale Carrico said...

I do feel that you have eloquently and comprehensively made your point abundantly clear.

This isn't a matter of making a single point, but of engaging in an ongoing discourse. I'll never stop critiquing Superlativity, because Superlative Technology Discourse matters to me mostly as an especially clear, if extreme, and symptomatic expression of prevailing Technology Discourse in an era of corporate-militarist ascendancy.

I am directing my arguments primarily to the emerging technoprogressive mainstream (whose attention I have not yet really gotten in my reckoning), seeking to ensure that we all understand the vulnerability of all technocentrism to superlativity, and understand the actual demands of a proper democratization of technoscientific change.

Some of the people who agree are getting bored while most people who disagree with you are getting annoyed.

Everybody gets bored. Those who agree with me but feel that they no longer benefit from my reiteration of these points should direct their attention elsewhere until I raise some issue they like better or until they find the topic resonates with them again. Everybody needs to change the channel from time to time, that's not something that concerns me. Those who disagree with me and who are now also beginning to get annoyed can go screw themselves.

And you can be assured that the potential audience of people who will agree or disagree with me on these questions, or of people who should think through these issues whether or not they eventually come to agree with me or not, is vastly, incomprehensibly larger than the audience that has so far directed itself to this blog.

Amor Mundi has a small but loyal community of readers who seem to me neither bored nor particularly annoyed by my preoccupations, and I appreciate every one of them. I actively relish and delight in many of them.

But it is also true that my eyes remain on the prize of the new reader, the person unfamiliar with these issues, the allies, friends, collaborators, and teachers I haven't stumbled upon yet. They haven't had a chance yet to be bored or annoyed by my critique. I can't stop being boring and annoying now and risk missing that chance.

*influential* bioconservatives do deserve his focus at this particular historical moment...

We honestly disagree about this. I disagree that bioconservative discourse is more influential than facile technophilic/technocratic discourse. I agree that bioconservative formulations have influence and a pernicious impact, and of course I do regularly critique them for just this reason.

But naive technophilia/technodevelopmental elitism constitutes the default assumptions of global corporate- militarist Development discourse. Superlativity is a symptom and especially clear expression of that default discourse, making it a fine lens through which to puncture the dangerous pretension of the prevailing discourse.

Don't get distracted by tribalist characterizations of the technodevelopmental terrain in which one might falsely come to imagine that the membership numbers and budgets of a few bioconservative organizations compared to a few superlative organizations like SIAI and WTA gives one any kind of relevant view of the actual forces and distributions in play. Questions of "publicity" garnered by a few quacks and cranks are neither here nor there in my estimation.

The most important technoprogressive organization at the moment in my opinion is probably the Center for American Progress and the most technoprogressive force in play is almost certainly the Progressive Netroots. Bioconservatism is one ugly flailing tentacle of Movement Conservatism in the crisis and culmination moment of the neoliberal/neoconservative Washington Consensus. Technodevelopmental social struggle is not about marginal cult-like organizations, and neither is serious organizing. Keep your eye on the ball.

jimf said...

Dale wrote:

> One can devote plenty of time to. . . discussion concerning technodevelopmental
> change without. . . [taking] marginal cult-like pronouncements and hyperbolic
> salesman’s pitches about nanotech superabundance, artificial superintelligence,
> or imminent medical superlongevity particularly seriously. . .
>
> In some circumstances the most constructive thing to do is to expose obfuscation,
> confusion, and falsehood where one finds it by one’s lights, even if that will
> appear “negative” to those who affirm the notions so exposed. . .
>
> [I]t is the profoundest sign of respect that one will direct arguments to the
> better judgment of even people who seem to one to be spouting the most foolish
> imaginable sorts of nonsense. . .

You know, I continue to be appalled by the absolute inaccessibility of the
"better judgment" of the hard-core >Hists. I call them "cultists" but
against all reason I continue to be shocked when they show such clear
signs that they **are**, in fact, cultists.

I guess it's just an artifact of my own personal history.

It would never occur to me to attempt an uncensored conversation with
a Scientologist, or a fundamentalist Christian. When I walk past the
Bible-wavers threatening me with hellfire, on 42nd St. on the way to
the bus terminal, I avert my eyes -- I'd certainly never attempt
to **debate** one of them.

But I once considered myself, however briefly, intellectual kin to
the >Hists (though there was always something in the back of my
head whispering that there might be a little too much "California"
there for my taste ;-> ). So I'm still shocked, beyond all common sense
at this point, to see the gulf that separates me from these people,
a gulf that seems unbridgeable by what I would consider "rational" considerations
(despite the claims of so many >Hists to superior rationality).

Keith Henson, a man who went to jail for vociferously debating the
Scientologists, posted a couple of days ago on the Extropians' mailing
list
( http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2007-November/038433.html ):

"It is worth keeping in mind why people do anything. . .

High on the list [is] gaining higher social status. . .

[P]eople have been shaped to be rewarded by activities they find
gains them attention. Cults take vicious advantage of this human
psychological feature.

It's what motivates people to post, here, on kuro5hin and to take
stands that gain them a lot of response. A substantial fraction of
people can't distinguish between sense and nonsense or between
positive and negative attention especially in an all text medi[um]."

I am flabbegasted by the irony of this post. Would Mr. Henson
claim that **his** jail time on behalf of the Scientologists
was the result of no more than his own grandstanding for attention?
Or would he agree with Dale that "In some circumstances the most
constructive thing to do is to expose obfuscation,
confusion, and falsehood where one finds it by one’s lights"?
Furthermore, how can Mr. Henson be so incensed by the irrationality
of the Scientologists (and why the Scientologists so particularly,
for that matter, when there are so many other, similar groups), when the
evidence of a similarly sealed-off self-perpetuating bubble
of irrationality is right in front of his nose?

A follow-up to Henson's post asserts:

"[T]he problem in human affairs is that if the silent majority don't
make their disapproval known, then the lie goes by default.
Politicians rely on their publicity machine outgunning the inertia of
most people, so that their propaganda becomes the assumed worldview.

Lies and injustice have to be opposed."

Yes, they do, don't they?

ZARZUELAZEN said...

jim,

Be careful not to tar all transhumanists with the same brunch.. It's basically only a few of the 'Singularitarians' that are actually pathological. Unfortunaetly you've got one pathological guru, who's ego has come to dominate all the lists by intimidation, manipulation and bullying.

Go to the 'Future of Humanity Insitute' blog and you'll find more and more people starting to get fed up with E.Yudkowsky and switching off.

Here he is engaging in defamation against Stephen J Gould:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/beware-of-gould.html


---

To be fair to the Singularitarians, there wouldn't be a problem if they just kept their views to themselves... hey nothing to stop one working on that AI in the basement and rocketing off into the great beyond silently ;)

---

Hell I'm making a run at 'Robot Godhood' myself but I have the good sense not to talk about my ideas any more. Suffice it to say that SIAI and co are looking at the problem on the wrong level of abstraction. Switch to the right level of abstraction.... and I'm seeing stars :D But hey, like I said, I have the good sense to keep my own run at Robot Goodhood a private eccentricity.

jimf said...

Marc Geddes wrote:

> Be careful not to tar all transhumanists with the same brunch..

Well, I hope they don't **all** skip breakfast!

> It's basically only a few of the 'Singularitarians' that are actually
> pathological. Unfortunaetly you've got one pathological guru,
> who[se] ego has come to dominate all the lists by intimidation,
> manipulation and bullying.

Yes, there's certainly a guru-wannabe piper playing the tune
for the Singularitarians. But look -- no offense, but there **is**
more going on here than just **your** having publicly lost a pissing match
with (or my having misjudged, for that matter) one single
snotmeister.

It's not, in fact, "just" the Singularitarians who are "actually
pathological." They're the most extreme sect of the >Hist faith,
that's all.

Mike Federowicz ("Mike Darwin"), Richard Barbrook, and Paulina Borsook
did not have Eliezer Yudkowsky in mind when they wrote their
critiques of the cryonicists and the cyber-libertopians, respectively.

Heck, maybe it's the SF community itself. I've only ever been
to one "con" -- 30 years ago (and I have yet to read Sharyn McCrumb's
_Bimbos of the Death Sun_), so maybe my taste of the on-line
>Hists was my first chance to interact socially with a significantly
concentrated group of such people.

I had advance warning, though. A bit of personal history. I was
"accompanied" from 1st grade through 12th grade by a girl who fancied
herself as being one of the smarter people in the world (she
continues to this day as a muckety-muck in Mensa) -- and she **was**
smart enough, but probably not as smart as she imagined. She was
(as I would say these days) an insufferable narcissist. She once
made a strange little apology to me, when we were on the verge of
being grown up, that she knew she'd been pretty nasty at times,
but that she now blamed all that on her hypoglycemia (that was
the 70s). Her father was a chemical engineer (he can be found on the
Web, if you know where to look), and the family had intellectual interests
(not to say "pretensions") beyond those typical of the community in
which I grew up -- they subscribed to _Der Spiegel_ (in German) instead of
(or perhaps in addition to) _Time_ magazine, and the girl had all the most
"advanced" toys -- I remember she had a Digicomp I "computer" to
play with. Anyway, once upon a time, when I was in 7th or 8th
grade, she brought me over to her house and showed me, in a spare
room, shelves just **packed** with her father's paperback SF
collection -- D-series Ace "doubles" at 35 cents a piece, and
similar 50s-era literature. I was mightily impressed! She actually
lent me a couple of these volumes (I only remember one title --
"Lest We Forget Thee, Earth" (hmm, by Robert Silverberg,
not too shabby http://www.majipoor.com/pub.php?id=11 ), which
I read and dutifully returned. However, when I asked her if
I could borrow additional volumes, she (or maybe it was her mother)
said that her father had absolutely **forbidden** her to lend
me any more of his SF paperbacks, and added that she had been
out-of-line to do so without permission in the first place.

It was understandable, perhaps, but the "pettiness" has stuck
with me to this day. **My** books -- **mine**!! Despite the fact
that they were mouldering away (literally) in that damp utility
closet and were **probably** never read by the owner again.

Oh, and need I add that she was also a great fan of Ayn Rand?
She also, when I attempted to share my discovery of J. R. R. Tolkien
with her in 8th grade (also via an Ace paperback of _The Fellowship
of the Ring_) -- OK, I had a crush on the girl by that point ;-> --
told me that her older sister knew "all about" Tolkien and had already
advised her that he was "nothing much".

Ah well, chacun a son gout.

Dale Carrico said...

Be careful not to tar all transhumanists with the same brunch...

This is a fair point, but I can't say I agree with you in claiming only Singularitarians exhibit the hyperbole and creepy cultishness that worries me. I use the term Superlativity precisely to emphasize that possibly not all transhumanists but (far more important to me) certainly not only transhumanists exhibit Superlativity. Partisans of Strong AI, imminent Drextech or medical immortality, certainly the conceptual confusion of "uploading," immersive VR, and some others seem wedded to Superlativity. This is not for me a vendetta against a small coterie of Singularitarian crackpots. You aren't grasping the force of the critique if you fail to see that the critique of extreme expressions of Superlativity functions to direct our attention to vulnerabilities to reductionism, hyperbole, exceptionalism, elitism and so on in prevailing neoliberal corporate- militarist Development discourse.

To be fair to the Singularitarians, there wouldn't be a problem if they just kept their views to themselves... hey nothing to stop one working on that AI in the basement and rocketing off into the great beyond silently.

Apart from the fact that science really truly doesn't work that way outside of bad sf novels, apart from the fact that private, corporate, or military decisions to work on such a program without absolute transparency, accountability, and oversight is anti-democratic and absolutely destined for disaster.

I'm making a run at 'Robot Godhood' myself but I have the good sense not to talk about my ideas any more.

You do realize that this is visible to the public don't you?

I have the good sense to keep my own run at Robot Goodhood a private eccentricity.

If only it were so!

VDT said...

This isn't a matter of making a single point, but of engaging in an ongoing discourse. I'll never stop critiquing Superlativity, because Superlative Technology Discourse matters to me mostly as an especially clear, if extreme, and symptomatic expression of prevailing Technology Discourse in an era of corporate-militarist ascendancy. I am directing my arguments primarily to the emerging technoprogressive mainstream (whose attention I have not yet really gotten in my reckoning), seeking to ensure that we all understand the vulnerability of all technocentrism to superlativity, and understand the actual demands of a proper democratization of technoscientific change.

I think you misunderstand me. I am not suggesting you should stop critiquing superlativity. What I am suggesting is that you know that you don't necessarily need to single out one marginal superlative technocentric subculure to do that.

But it is also true that my eyes remain on the prize of the new reader, the person unfamiliar with these issues, the allies, friends, collaborators, and teachers I haven't stumbled upon yet. They haven't had a chance yet to be bored or annoyed by my critique. I can't stop being boring and annoying now and risk missing that chance.

Of course. I'm simply suggesting that your critique may simply need broadening.

We honestly disagree about this. I disagree that bioconservative discourse is more influential than facile technophilic/technocratic discourse. I agree that bioconservative formulations have influence and a pernicious impact, and of course I do regularly critique them for just this reason. But naive technophilia/technodevelopmental elitism constitutes the default assumptions of global corporate- militarist Development discourse.

I actually agree with you.

Superlativity is a symptom and especially clear expression of that default discourse, making it a fine lens through which to puncture the dangerous pretension of the prevailing discourse.

Perhaps but I think superlative technocentric subcultures may also too much of an easy or lazy target for someone of your intellectual might who could and should be focusing on deconstructing the complexities of the "global corporate-militarist development discourse" for a wider audience...

Don't get distracted by tribalist characterizations of the technodevelopmental terrain in which one might falsely come to imagine that the membership numbers and budgets of a few bioconservative organizations compared to a few superlative organizations like SIAI and WTA gives one any kind of relevant view of the actual forces and distributions in play. Questions of "publicity" garnered by a few quacks and cranks are neither here nor there in my estimation.

uh, why would you think I would be distracted by this when you know I am as critical of it as you are???

The most important technoprogressive organization at the moment in my opinion is probably the Center for American Progress and the most technoprogressive force in play is almost certainly the Progressive Netroots. Bioconservatism is one ugly flailing tentacle of Movement Conservatism in the crisis and culmination moment of the neoliberal/neoconservative Washington Consensus. Technodevelopmental social struggle is not about marginal cult-like organizations, and neither is serious organizing. Keep your eye on the ball.

Isn't that exactly my point? Why are we focusing on these marginal cult-like organizations?

brian wang said...

You do not "resort to snark". You choose to be snarky. As you know I have no problem returning the snark. It is not productive other than pissing contest.

The equivalent of the absurd robot god caricture is that you, Dale, are waiting for the second coming of Stalin.

also, for you clowns who say that those who support Superlative technology are "riding on focus from Dale's articles". It is the other way around. Dale's website was ranked less popular then the top 2 million websites until he leached onto the Superlative stuff. He is gaining some traffic because the "superlative technology" sites are more popular.

Accelerating future is fairly regularly in the top 100,000 sites. It has 20 to 40 times the traffic of Dale's snark rants. My site advancednano has more traffic than Dale's and triple the technorati authority.

I am slumming by talking to you more marginal people.

jimf said...

Brian Wang, Mr. Fact Guy and "Big Thinker" wrote:

> Dale's website was ranked less popular then the
> top 2 million websites until he leached onto the
> Superlative stuff.

You mean "leeched", presumably.
http://www.dkimages.com/discover/Home/Animals/Invertebrates/Segmented-Worms/Leech/Leech-7.html

> He is gaining some traffic because the "superlative technology"
> sites are more popular.

Well and good.

> Accelerating future is fairly regularly in the top 100,000 sites.
> It has 20 to 40 times the traffic of Dale's snark rants. My site
> advancednano has more traffic than Dale's and triple the technorati
> authority.
>
> I am slumming by talking to you more marginal people.

Too bad your intellectual sophistication doesn't track
your Nielsen and Arbitron ratings.

Really, you pay attention to numbers like that?
You getting paid by the click, or something?

Come to think, John Bruce had something to say about
blog-traffic popularity contests and cross-linking:
http://mthollywood.blogspot.com/2006/04/payback-from-mr.html

jimf said...

The importance of being important:

"I said that if humans are the only intelligent species
in our corner of space, the difference between a Milky Way
full of happy people and a dead Milky Way could depend
on the decisions we make in the next few decades."

-- Michael Anissimov
Foresight Vision Weekend 2007 Review
Monday, Nov 5 2007
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/

brian wang said...

I pay attention to reality. As noted I am the fact guy.

The positions and views on this site are more marginal. Yours is a smaller cult. Yours is a cult that ignores facts and does not believe enough in your positions to put them at risk with a falsifiable bet.

You want it both ways. You want to mock the more fringe elements and those with less popular positions while lamenting the mainstream and dominant trends. When I proved that my position was more popular, you started to flip to the attack the more popular mode.

Meanwhile you have stated motivations like jfehlinger, where he hates those like the grade school girl who dissed him. Yes, very emotionally mature.

jimf said...

The talk of filling up the Milky Way with happy people reminds me
inevitably of a scene of high comedy near the end of C. S. Lewis's
_Out of the Silent Planet_:

http://www.mylibrarybook.com/books/670/C.S-Lewis/Out-of-the-Silent-Planet-5.html
-------------------------------------------------
The voice of Oyarsa [Archangel of the planet Mars, or "Malacandra"]
spoke for the first time to the two men.

"Why have you killed my hnau [sentient native of Malacandra]?" it said.

Weston [an Earth physicist who invented a spaceship that flew
him and two other men -- one of whom (Ransom) was kidnapped -- to Mars]
and Devine looked anxiously about them to identify the speaker.

"God!" exclaimed Devine in English. "Don't tell me they've got
a loudspeaker."

"Ventriloquism," replied Weston in a husky whisper. "Quite common
among savages. The witch-doctor or medicine-man pretends to go into
a trance and he does it. The thing to do is to identify the medicine-man
and address your remarks to him wherever the voice seems to come from;
it shatters his nerve and shows you've seen through him. Do you see
any of the brutes in a trance? By Jove - I've spotted him."

Due credit must be given to Weston for his powers of observation:
he had picked out the only creature in the assembly which was not
standing in an attitude of reverence and attention. This was an elderly
hross close beside him. It was squatting; and its eyes were shut.
Taking a step towards it, he struck a defiant attitude and exclaimed
in a loud voice (his knowledge of the language was elementary):

"Why you take our puff-bangs away? We very angry with you. We not
afraid."

On Weston's hypothesis his action ought to have been impressive.
Unfortunately for him, no one else shared his theory of the elderly
hross's behaviour. The hross -- who was well known to all of them,
including Ransom - had not come with the funeral procession. It had
been in its place since dawn. Doubtless it intended no disrespect
to Oyarsa; but it must be confessed that it had yielded, at a much
earlier stage in the proceedings, to an infirmity which attacks
elderly hnau of all species, and was by this time enjoying a profound
and refreshing slumber. One of its whiskers twitched a little as Weston
shouted in its face, but its eyes remained shut.

The voice of Oyarsa spoke again. "Why do you speak to him?" it said.
"It is I who ask you, Why have you killed my hnau?"

"'You let us go, then we talkee-talkee," bellowed Weston at the sleeping
hross. "You think we no power, think you do all you like. You no can.
Great big headman in sky he send us. You no do what I say, he come,
blow you all up - Pouff! Bang!"

"I do not know what bang means," said the voice. "But why have you killed
my hnau?"

"Say it was an accident," muttered Devine to Weston in English.

"I've told you before," replied Weston in the same language. "You don't
understand how to deal with natives. One sign of yielding and they'll be
at our throats. The only thing is to intimidate them."

"All right! Do your stuff, then," growled Devine. He was obviously losing
faith in his partner.

Weston cleared his throat and again rounded on the elderly hross.

"We kill him," he shouted. "Show what we can do. Every one who no do all
we say -- pouff! bang! -- kill him same as that one. You do all we say and
we give you much pretty things. See! See!" To Ransom's intense discomfort,
Weston at this point whipped out of his pocket a brightly coloured necklace
of beads, the undoubted work of Mr Woolworth, and began dangling it in front
of the faces of his guards, turning slowly round and round and repeating,
"Pretty, pretty! See! See!"

The result of this manoeuvre was more striking than Weston himself had
anticipated. Such a roar of sounds as human ears had never heard before --
baying of hrossa, piping of pfifltriggi, booming of sorns -- burst out and
rent the silence of that august place, waking echoes from the distant mountain
walls. Even in the air above them there was a faint ringing of the eldil voices.
It is greatly to Weston's credit that though he paled at this he did not lose
his nerve.

"You no rear at me," he thundered. "No try make me afraid. Me no afraid of you."

"You must forgive my people," said the voice of Oyarsa - and even it was
subtly changed -" but they are not roaring at you. They are only laughing."

But Weston did not know the Malacandrian word for laugh: indeed, it was not
a word he understood very well in any language. He looked about him with a
puzzled expression. Ransom, biting his lips with mortification, almost prayed
that one experiment with the beads would satisfy the scientist; but that was
because he did not know Weston. The latter saw that the clamour had subsided.
He knew that he was following the most orthodox rules for frightening and then
conciliating primitive races; and he was not the man to be deterred by one
or two failures. The roar that went up from the throats of all spectators as
he again began revolving like a slow motion picture of a humming-top, occasionally
mopping his brow with his left hand and conscientiously jerking the necklace
up and down with his right, completely drowned anything he might be attempting
to say; but Ransom saw his lips moving and had little doubt that he was working
away at "Pretty, pretty!" Then suddenly the sound of laughter almost redoubled
its volume. The stars in their courses were fighting against Weston. Some hazy
memory of efforts made long since to entertain an infant niece had begun to
penetrate his highly trained mind. He was bobbing up and down from the knees
and holding his head on one side; he was almost dancing; and he was by now
very hot indeed. For all Ransom knew he was saying "Diddle, diddle, diddle."

It was sheer exhaustion which ended the great physicist's performance -- the
most successful of its kind ever given on Malacandra -- and with it the sonorous
raptures of his audience. As silence returned Ransom heard Devine's voice
in English:

"For God's sake stop making a buffoon of yourself, Weston," it said.
"Can't you see it won't work?"

"It doesn't seem to be working," admitted Weston, "and I'm inclined to think
they have even less intelligence than we supposed. Do you think, perhaps, if
I tried it just once again - or would you like to try this time?"

"Oh, Hell!" said Devine, and, turning his back on his partner, sat down abruptly
on the ground, produced his cigarette case and began to smoke.

"I'll give it to the witch-doctor," said Weston during the moment of silence which
Devine's action had produced among the mystified spectators; and before anyone
could stop him he took a step forward and attempted to drop the string of beads
round the elderly hross's neck. The hross's head was, however, too large for
this operation and the necklace merely settled on its forehead like a crown,
slightly over one eye. It shifted its head a little, like a dog worried with flies,
snorted gently, and resumed its sleep.

Oyarsa's voice now addressed Ransom. "Are your fellow-creatures hurt in their
brains, Ransom of Thulcandra [Earth]?", it said. "Or are they too much afraid
to answer my questions?"

"I think, Oyarsa," said Ransom, "that they do not believe you are there.
And they believe that all these hnau are -- are like very young cubs.
The thicker hmân [human] is trying to frighten them and then to
please them with gifts."

At the sound of Ransom's voice the two prisoners turned sharply around.
Weston was about to speak when Ransom interrupted him hastily in English:

"Listen, Weston. It is not a trick. There really is a creature there
in the middle -- there where you can see a kind of light, or a kind of
something, if you look hard. And it is at least as intelligent as
a man -- they seem to live an enormous time. Stop treating it like a
child and answer its questions. And if you take my advice, you'll
speak the truth and not bluster."

"The brutes seem to have intelligence enough to take you in, anyway,"
growled Weston; but it was in a somewhat modified voice that he turned
once more to the sleeping hross -- the desire to wake up the supposed
witchdoctor was becoming an obsession -- and addressed it.

"We sorry we kill him," he said, pointing to Hyoi. "No go to kill him.
Sorns tell us bring man, give him your big head. We got away back into sky.
He come" (here he indicated Ransom) "with us. He very bent man, run away,
no do what sorns say like us. We run after him, get him back for sorns,
want to do what we say and sorns tell us, see? He not let us. Run away,
run, run. We run after. See a big black one, think he kill us, we kill
him - pouff! bang! All for bent man. He no run away, he be good,
we no run after, no kill big black one, see? You have bent man -- bent man
make all trouble -- you plenty keep him, let us go. He afraid of you,
we no afraid. Listen --"

At this moment Weston's continual bellowing in the face of the hross at
last produced the effect he had striven for so long. The creature opened
its eyes and stared mildly at him in some perplexity. Then, gradually realizing
the impropriety of which it had been guilty, it rose slowly to its standing
position, bowed respectfully to Oyarsa, and finally waddled out of the assembly
still carrying the necklace draped over its right ear and eye. Weston, his
mouth still open, followed the retreating figure with his gaze till it vanished
among the stems of the grove.

It was Oyarsa who broke the silence. "We have had mirth enough," he said,
"and it is time to hear true answers to our questions. Something is wrong in
your head, hnau from Thulcandra. There is too much blood in it.
Is Firikitekila here?"

"Here, Oyarsa," said a pfifltrigg.

"Have you in your cisterns water that has been made cold?"

"Yes, Oyarsa."

"Then let this thick hnau be taken to the guest-house and let them bathe
his head in cold water. Much water and many times. Then bring him again.
Meanwhile I will provide for my killed hrossa."

Weston did not clearly understand what the voice said -- indeed, he was still
too busy trying to find out where it came from -- but terror smote him as he
found himself wrapped in the strong arms of the surrounding hrossa and forced
away from his place. Ransom would gladly have shouted out some reassurance,
but Weston himself was shouting too loud to hear him. He was mixing English and
Malacandrian now, and the last that was heard was a rising scream of
"Pay for this -- pouff! bang! -- Ransom, for God's sake -- Ransom! Ransom!"

"And now," said Oyarsa, when silence was restored, "let us honour my dead hnau."

. . .

[Then] everyone's attention was diverted by the return of the unhappy Weston
among his guards.

Chapter XX

THE hross who headed this procession was a conscientious creature and began
at once explaining itself in a rather troubled voice.

"I hope we have done right, Oyarsa," it said. "But we do not know. We dipped his
head in the cold water seven times, but the seventh time something fell off it.
We had thought it was the top of his head, but now we saw it was a covering
made of the skin of some other creature. Then some said we had done your will
with the seven dips, and others said not. In the end we dipped it seven times
more. We hope that was right. The creature talked a lot between the dips, and
most between the second seven, but we could not understand it."

"You have done very well, Hnoo," said Oyarsa. "Stand away that I may see it,
for now I will speak to it."

The guards fell away on each side. Weston's usually pale face, under the bracing
influence of the cold water, had assumed the colour of a ripe tomato, and his hair,
which had naturally not been cut since he reached Malacandra, was plastered in
straight, lank masses across his forehead. A good deal of water was still
dripping over his nose and ears. His expression -- unfortunately wasted on an
audience ignorant of terrestrial physiognomy -- was that of a brave man suffering
in a great cause, and rather eager than reluctant to face the worst or even to
provoke it. In explanation of his conduct it is only fair to remember that he
had already that morning endured all the terrors of an expected martyrdom and
all the anticlimax of fourteen compulsory cold douches. Devine, who knew his man,
shouted out to Weston in English.

"Steady, Weston. These devils can split the atom or something pretty like it.
Be careful what you say to them and don't let's have any of your bloody nonsense."

"Huh !" said Weston. "So you've gone native too?"

"Be silent," said the voice of Oyarsa. "You, thick one, have told me nothing of
yourself, so I will tell it to you. In your own world you have attained great wisdom
concerning bodies and by this you have been able to make a ship that can cross the
heaven; but in all other things you have the mind of an animal. When first you came
here, I sent for you, meaning you nothing but honour. The darkness in your mind
filled you with fear. Because you thought I meant evil to you, you went as a
beast goes against a beast of some other kind, and snared this Ransom. You
would give him up to the evil you feared. Today, seeing him here, to save your
own life, you would have given him to me a second time, still thinking I meant
him hurt. These are your dealings with your own kind. And what you intend to my people,
I know. Already you have killed some. And you have come here to kill them all. To you
it is nothing whether a creature is hnau or not. At first I thought this was because
you cared only whether a creature had a body like your own; but Ransom has that
and you would kill him as lightly as any of my hnau. I did not know that the
Bent One had done so much in your world and still I do not understand it. If
you were mine, I would unbody you even now. Do not think follies; by my hand Maleldil
does greater things than this, and I can unmake you even on the borders of your
own world's air. But I do not yet resolve to do this. It is for you to speak.
Let me see if there is anything in your mind besides fear and death and desire."

Weston turned to Ransom. "I see," he said, "that you have chosen the most momentous
crisis in the history of the human race to betray it." Then he turned in the direction
of the voice.

"I know you kill us," he said. "Me not afraid. Others come, make it our world --"

But Devine had jumped to his feet, and interrupted him.

"No, no, Oyarsa," he shouted. "You no listen him. He very foolish man, he have
dreams. We little people, only want pretty sun-bloods. You give us plenty sun-bloods,
we go back into sky, you never see us no more. All done, see?"

"Silence," said Oyarsa. There was an almost imperceptible change in the light,
if it could be called light, out of which the voice came, and Devine crumpled up
and fell back on the ground. When he resumed his sitting position he was white and panting.

"Speak on," said Oyarsa to Weston.

"Me no ... no ..." began Weston in Malacandrian and then broke off. "I can't say
what I want in their accursed language," he said in English.

"Speak to Ransom and he shall turn it into our speech," said Oyarsa.

Weston accepted the arrangement at once. He believed that the hour of his death
was come and he was determined to utter the thing -- almost the only thing outside
his own science - which he had to say. He cleared his throat, almost he struck a gesture,
and began:

"To you I may seem a vulgar robber, but I bear on my shoulders the destiny of the human
race. Your tribal life with its stone-age weapons and beehive huts, its primitive coracles and
elementary social structure, has nothing to compare with our civilization - with our science,
medicine and law, our armies, our architecture, our commerce, and our transport system which
is rapidly annihilating space and time. Our right to supersede you is the right of the higher over
the lower. Life --"

"Half a moment," said Ransom in English. "That's about as much as I can manage at one go."
Then, turning to Oyarsa, he began translating as well as he could. The process was difficult
and the result -- which he felt to be rather unsatisfactory -- was something like this:

"Among us, Oyarsa, there is a kind of hnau who will take other hnaus' food and -- and things,
when they are not looking. He says he is not an ordinary one of that kind. He says what he
does now will make very different things happen to those of our people who are not yet born.
He says that, among you, hnau of one kindred all live together and the hrossa have spears
like those we used a very long time ago and your huts are small and round and your boats
small and light and like our old ones, and you have one ruler. He says it is different
with us. He says we know much. There is a thing happens in our world when the body of a
living creature feels pains and becomes weak, and he says we sometimes know how to stop it.
He says we have many bent people and we kill them or shut them in huts and that we have
people for settling quarrels between the bent hnau about their huts and mates and things.
He says we have many ways for the hnau of one land to kill those of another and some
are trained to do it. He says we build very big and strong huts of stones and other
things -- like the pfifltriggi. And he says we exchange many things among ourselves
and can carry heavy weights very quickly a long way.

Because of all this, he says it would not be the act of a bent hnau if our people killed all
your people."

As soon as Ransom had finished, Weston continued.

"Life is greater than any system of morality; her claims are absolute. It is not by
tribal taboos and copy-book maxims that she has pursued her relentless march from the amoeba
to man and from man to civilization."

"He says," began Ransom, "that living creatures are stronger than the question whether an
act is bent or good -- no, that cannot be right -- he says it is better to be alive and bent
than to be dead -- no -- he says, he says -- I cannot say what he says, Oyarsa, in your language.
But he goes on to say that the only good thing is that there should be very many creatures
alive. He says there were many other animals before the first men and the later ones were
better than the earlier ones; but he says the animals were not born because of what is said
to the young about bent and good action by their elders. And he says these animals did not
feel any pity."

"She --" began Weston.

"I'm sorry," interrupted Ransom, "but I've forgotten who She is."

"Life, of course," snapped Weston. "She has ruthlessly broken down all obstacles and
liquidated all failures and today in her highest form - civilized man - and in me as his
representative, she presses forward to that interplanetary leap which will, perhaps,
place her for ever beyond the reach of death."

"He says," resumed Ransom, "that these animals learned to do many difficult things,
except those who could not; and those ones died and the other animals did not pity them.
And he says the best animal now is the kind of man who makes the big huts and carries
the heavy weights and does all the other things I told you about; and he is one of these
and he says that if the others all knew what he was doing they would be pleased. He says
that if he could kill you all and bring our people to live in Malacandra, then they might
be able to go on living here after something had gone wrong with our world. And then if
something went wrong with Malacandra they might go and kill all the hnau in another world.
And then another -- and so they would never die out."

"It is in her right," said Weston, "the right, or, if you will, the might of Life herself,
that I am prepared without flinching to plant the flag of man on the soil of Malacandra:
to march on, step by step, superseding, where necessary, the lower forms of life that we
find, claiming planet after planet, system after system, till our posterity -- whatever
strange form and yet unguessed mentality they have assumed -- dwell in the universe wherever
the universe is habitable."

"He says," translated Ransom, "that because of this it would not be a bent action -- or else,
he says, it would be a possible action -- for him to kill you all and bring us here. He says
he would feel no pity. He is saying again that perhaps they would be able to keep moving from
one world to another and wherever they came they would kill everyone. I think he is now talking
about worlds that go round other suns. He wants the creatures born from us to be in as many
places as they can. He says he does not know what kind of creatures they will be."

"I may fall," said Weston. "But while I live I will not, with such a key in my hand, consent
to close the gates of the future on my race. What lies in that future, beyond our present ken,
passes imagination to conceive: it is enough for me that there is a Beyond."

"He is saying," Ransom translated, "that he will not stop trying to do all this unless you
kill him. And he says that though he doesn't know what will happen to the creatures sprung from
us, he wants it to happen very much."

Weston, who had now finished his statement, looked round instinctively for a chair to sink into.
On Earth he usually sank into a chair as the applause began. Finding none -- he was not the
kind of man to sit on the ground like Devine -- he folded his arms and stared with a certain
dignity about him.

"It is well that I have heard you," said Oyarsa. "For though your mind is feebler, your will
is less bent than I thought. It is not for yourself that you would do all this."

"No," said Weston proudly in Malacandrian. "Me die. Man live."

"Yet you know that these creatures would have to be made quite unlike you before they lived on
other worlds."

"Yes, yes. All new. No one know yet. Strange! Big!"

"Then it is not the shape of body that you love?"

"No. Me no care how they shaped."

"One would think, then, that it is for the mind you care. But that cannot be, or you would
love hnau wherever you met it."

"No care for hnau. Care for man."

"But if it is neither man's mind, which is as the mind of all other hnau - is not Maleldil maker
of them all? - nor his body, which will change - if you care for neither of these, what do you
mean by man?"

This had to be translated to Weston. When he understood it, he replied:

"Me care for man - care for our race -- what man begets --" He had to ask Ransom the words
for race and beget.

"Strange!" said Oyarsa. "You do not love any one of your race -- you would have let me kill
Ransom. You do not love the mind of your race, nor the body. Any kind of creature will please you
if only it is begotten by your kin as they now are. It seems to me, Thick One, that what you really
love is no completed creature but the very seed itself: for that is all that is left."

"Tell him," said Weston when he had been made to understand this, "that I don't pretend to
be a metaphysician. I have not come here to chop logic. If he cannot understand -- as apparently
you can't either -- anything so fundamental as a man's loyalty to humanity, I can't make him
understand it."

But Ransom was unable to translate this and the voice of Oyarsa continued:

"I see now how the lord of the silent world has bent you. There are laws that all hnau know,
of pity and straight dealing and shame and the like, and one of these is the love of kindred.
He has taught you to break all of them except this one, which is not one of the greatest laws;
this one he has bent till it becomes folly and has set it up, thus bent, to be a little,
blind Oyarsa in your brain. And now you can do nothing but obey it, though if we ask you
why it is a law you can give no other reason for it than for all the other and greater laws
which it drives you to disobey. Do you know why he has done this?"

"Me think no such person - me wise, new man - no believe all that old talk."

"I will tell you. He has left you this one because a bent hnau can do more evil than a
broken one. He has only bent you; but this Thin One who sits on the ground he has broken,
for he has left him nothing but greed. He is now only a talking animal and in my world he
could do no more evil than an animal. If he were mine I would unmake his body, for the hnau
in it is already dead. But if you were mine I would try to cure you. Tell me, Thick One,
why did you come here?"

"Me tell you. Make man live all the time."

"But are your wise men so ignorant as not to know that Malacandra is older than your
own world and nearer its death? Most of it is dead already. My people live only in the
handramits; the heat and the water have been more and will be less. Soon now, very soon,
I will end my world and give back my people to Maleldil."

"Me know all that plenty. This only first try. Soon they go on another world."

"But do you not know that all worlds will die?"

"Men go jump off each before it deads - on and on, see?"

"And when all are dead?"

Weston was silent. After a time Oyarsa spoke again.

"Do you not ask why my people, whose world is old, have not rather come to yours and taken
it long ago."

"Ho! Ho!" said Weston. "You not know how."

"You are wrong," said Oyarsa. "Many thousands of thousand years before this, when nothing yet
lived on your world, the cold death was coming on my harandra. Then I was in deep trouble,
not chiefly for the death of my hnau -- Maleldil does not make them long-livers -- but for the
things which the lord of your world, who was not yet bound, put into their minds.
He would have made them as your people are now -- wise enough to see the death of their kind
approaching but not wise enough to endure it. Bent counsels would soon have risen among
them. They were well able to have made sky-ships. By me Maleldil stopped them. Some I
cured, some I unbodied --"

"And see what come!" interrupted Weston. "You now very few -- shut up in handramits -- soon
all die."

"Yes," said Oyarsa, "but one thing we left behind us on the harandra: fear. And with fear,
murder and rebellion. The weakest of my people does not fear death. It is the Bent One,
the lord of your world, who wastes your lives and befouls them with flying from what you
know will overtake you in the end. If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace."

Weston writhed in the exasperation born of his desire to speak and his ignorance of
the language.

"Trash! Defeatist trash!" he shouted at Oyarsa in English; then, drawing himself up to
his full height, he added in Malacandrian, "You say your Maleldil let all go dead. Other one,
Bent One, he fight, jump, live -- not all talkee-talkee. Me no care Maleldil. Like Bent One
better: me on his side."

"But do you not see that he never will nor can," began Oyarsa, and then broke off, as if
recollecting himself. "But I must learn more of your world from Ransom, and for that I need
till night. I will not kill you, not even the thin one, for you are out of my world.
Tomorrow you shall go hence again in your ship."

jimf said...

Weston ended his speech:

"I may fall," said Weston. "But while I live I will not, with such a key in my hand, consent
to close the gates of the future on my race. What lies in that future, beyond our present ken,
passes imagination to conceive: it is enough for me that there is a Beyond."

Also an echo of Lilith's speech in G. B. Shaw's _Back to Methuselah_.
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Finger ,
"Possible Sources of Inspiration").

Interesting.

VDT said...

Jeff,

Although I find everything you post quite interesting and we seem to agree on many issues, you really need learn some blog and comment posting etiquette.

Quoting a small, pertinent and relevant passage from a text or providing link to this text is fine but replying to someone by quoting an extremely long passage from this text is not...

"It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what other men say in whole books - what other men do not say in whole books." ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

jimf said...

Justice de Thezier wrote:

> Jeff,
>
> [Y]ou really need learn some
> blog and comment posting etiquette.

My name isn't Jeff, but I assume this comment was directed at me.

My response is -- this isn't your blog, so it isn't your place
to instruct me on the finer points of "blog and comment posting
etiquette."

In other words, fuck you.

> [R]eplying to someone by quoting an extremely long passage
> from [a] text is not [fine]...

Hey, then don't read 'em pal.

VDT said...

My name isn't Jeff,

Noted. What is your name?

My response is -- this isn't your blog, so it isn't your place to instruct me on the finer points of "blog and comment posting etiquette."

Keepoing in mind cause let's not forget that you banned from a mailing list partly for this reason, this does NOT need to be my blog to "instruct" you on anything. It's friendly advice I would and do give to anyone anywhere.

In other words, fuck you.

Was that really necessary? How old are you?

Hey, then don't read 'em pal.

I don't and that's my point cause I wish I did.

jimf said...

> let's not forget that you banned from a mailing list partly
> for this reason. . .

Banned from **two** mailing lists, warned off a third list and
warned off a blog. But hey, who's counting?

> It's friendly advice. . .

I don't really care what the intent was.

> Was that really necessary? How old are you?

Older than Dale, and just as capable of using
that sort of language when the circumstances seem
appropriate.

VDT said...

Banned from **two** mailing lists, warned off a third list and warned off a blog. But hey, who's counting?

And doesn't that you well something? I know some it's-my-way-or-the-highway egomaniacs thrive on being needlessly confrontational and view being banned from a group as a badge of honor but if your goal is to inform and educate as many people as possible such behavior is obviously counter-productive to say the least.

I don't really care what the intent was.

You should since it would probably help you avoid turning good acquaintances into "enemies".

Older than Dale, and just as capable of using that sort of language when the circumstances seem appropriate.

Well, it should be obvious to someone as "mature" as you that it wasn't appropriate.

jimf said...

> . . .but if your goal is to inform and educate as many
> people as possible. . .

Just go back up and try to read the Lewis. It's much more
edifying than this exchange.

VDT said...

Just go back up and try to read the Lewis. It's much more
edifying than this exchange.


Well, that's my first point. I'm more interested in reading and knowing your opinion rather than Lewis'. When I am more interested in reading his opinion than yours, I'll just pick up one of his books rather some decontextualized excerpt in some blog comment. ;)

jimf said...

> When I am. . . interested in reading. . . [Lewis], I'll just pick up
> one of his books rather some decontextualized excerpt in some blog
> comment.

Not "decontextualized". **Recontextualized**.

Maybe that's a concept too difficult for some people to grasp.
In any case, as I indicated, you're free to skip over it
(and the blog owner is free to tell me to knock it off,
if he so desires).

In the meantime -- yes, you'll have to use the scroll bar, or
mouse wheel. Horrors!

ZARZUELAZEN said...

>Yes, there's certainly a guru-wannabe piper playing the tune
for the Singularitarians. But look -- no offense, but there **is**
more going on here than just **your** having publicly lost a pissing match
with (or my having misjudged, for that matter) one single
snotmeister.

The way I see it I was pretty ignorant of IT stuff at the time, and Eliezer took advantage to bully me to pump up his own ego.

Now of course I've been studying full-time for a year and a half so
I'm really, really starting to 'wind up' intellectually with a big big finish. Like I said, I'm 'seeing stars'. Eliezer has lost the game. He just doesn't realize it yet ;)

Watch the video of this horse race at the link below. Eliezer is 'Purple Moon'. But I'm 'Efficient' :D

Horse Race:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opeT0_ol-tw

(Melbourne Cup is the greatest horse race in the world by the way .. I've had some spectacular winning punts on that race).



>Heck, maybe it's the SF community itself. I've only ever been
to one "con" -- 30 years ago (and I have yet to read Sharyn McCrumb's
_Bimbos of the Death Sun_), so maybe my taste of the on-line
>Hists was my first chance to interact socially with a significantly
concentrated group of such people.

No, I can tell you that the sf community is in general nothing like the >H community (thank goodness). The sf guys are a million times more fun. If I was in a really bad cynical mood, I'd say that many >H guys are basically wanna-be, failed sf-writers who made the mistake of taking themselves too seriously.

Art has nothing to do with science. I think sf guys 'go strange' and fall into >H when they make the mistake of mixing the two domains.

See:
http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2007/11/two-disappointi.html#comments

ZARZUELAZEN said...

>This is not for me a vendetta against a small coterie of Singularitarian crackpots. You aren't grasping the force of the critique if you fail to see that the critique of extreme expressions of Superlativity functions to direct our attention to vulnerabilities to reductionism, hyperbole, exceptionalism, elitism and so on in prevailing neoliberal corporate- militarist Development discourse.

Well I think I understand what you're getting at Dale. But I can only go by personal experience. I never got the impression that those pushing Superlative ideas in general were nutty. Only when on the Singularitarian lists did I have a strong impression that the people I were talking to were genuinely barking mad ;)


>Apart from the fact that science really truly doesn't work that way outside of bad sf novels, apart from the fact that private, corporate, or military decisions to work on such a program without absolute transparency, accountability, and oversight is anti-democratic and absolutely destined for disaster.

Actually DARPA and the military do work that way because with the Internet and easy public access to research papers and journals they operate on 'one-way flow of information' - every -one else's ideas come in, no ideas go out.

It's only a disaster when you have some group that in effect wants to boss every-one else around

Eliezer Quote: 'Your rationality is my business':
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/04/your_rationalit.html


>You do realize that this is visible to the public don't you?

Hey I don't want to be a robot, I don't want to be a God, and I certainly don't think that anyone else's rationality is my business.

That makes me different from those SIAI folks on at least three counts ;)

VDT said...

Not "decontextualized". **Recontextualized**. Maybe that's a concept too difficult for some people to grasp.

I grasp the concept perfectly but as I explained it's besides the point.

In any case, as I indicated, you're free to skip over it
(and the blog owner is free to tell me to knock it off,
if he so desires). In the meantime -- yes, you'll have to use the scroll bar, or
mouse wheel. Horrors!


It's not a horror but imagine you were talking to someone face to face and everytime you made a statement this individual takes out a book and reads an entire chapter to you. Wouldn't you find it annoying?

jimf said...

> [I]magine you were talking to someone face to face and
> everytime you made a statement this individual takes out
> a book and reads an entire chapter to you. Wouldn't you
> find it annoying?

Yes, I would. In fact, the second time it happened I'd probably
turn around and walk away.

So what?

You are not constrained, out of physical propinquity, or out
of social convention or politeness to me or the blog owner or
your English teacher, to read anything that's posted here.

If you're annoyed or embarrassed that something might be going
over your head -- well, that's tough.

If you are obsessively compelled to read every word -- yes,
that's a problem. It might be a symptom of OCD. See a shrink --
there's medication for that.

If you think it's up to you to enforce standards of editorial
propriety on somebody else's blog -- well, it isn't. Give it up.
If you **want** to be in such a position of authority, go to work for
a publishing company, or a magazine or newspaper.

jimf said...

C. S. Lewis, BTW, was well aware that what is now called
"transhumanism", and which he called "Wellsianity"
(as in H. G. Wells) or "Life-Force Worship", is an
alternative faith.

This makes him interesting to read on the subject even
if you are not (as I am not) a Christian.

-------------------------------------------------
[A]lmost all our modern philosophies have been
devised to convince us that the good of man is
to be found on this earth. And yet it is a
remarkable thing that such philosophies of
Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear
reluctant witness to the truth that our real
goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince
you that earth is your home, notice how they
set about it. They begin by trying to persuade
you that earth can be made into heaven, thus
giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth
as it is. Next, they tell you that this
fortunate event is still a good way off in
the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge
that the fatherland is not here and now.
Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal
should awake and spoil the whole affair, they
use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep
out of your mind the recollection that even
if all the happiness they promised could come
to man on earth, yet still each generation would
lose it by death, including the last generation
of all, and the whole story would be nothing,
not even a story, for ever and ever. Hence
all the nonsense that Mr. Shaw puts into the
final speech of Lilith, and Bergson's remark
that the elan vital is capable of surmounting
all obstacles, perhaps even death -- as if
we could believe that any social of biological
development on this planet will delay the
senility of the sun or reverse the second law
of thermodynamics. . .

-- C. S. Lewis, _The Weight of Glory_
pp. 29 - 32

VDT said...

If you think it's up to you to enforce standards of editorial
propriety on somebody else's blog -- well, it isn't. Give it up.


When will you get through your thick head that I am not and cannot *enforce* anything. I am giving you advice about standards of editorial propriety (which is an act of free speech which I can be expressed here regardless of whether or not it is my blog) in light of that fact that you often get warned and even banned from blogs and forums for doing something that you know is annoying. It's only advice. Take it or leave it but stop whinning that I can't give it to you.

jimf said...

Thickhead to numbskull,

You wrote:

> I am giving you advice about standards of editorial propriety. . .
> in light of that fact that you often get warned and even banned
> from blogs and forums for doing something that you know is annoying.

Funny thing about that. Back in the days when I was posting to
the Extropians' ('99 - '01), my posting style was much the same as it
is now. Lots of quotes, a few lollapalooza messages, including a
6-parter on Edelman, and a big and whimsical post on "blinkenlights"
computers in the movies and in real life. I always **feared** I'd
get booted for that, but it never happened. In fact, I got a lot
of complimentary backchannel, and even a message from one list worthy
who said that ordinarily he would be irritated by a lot of quoted
material, but that my selections seemed to have been chosen with
such **taste** that he enjoyed them instead. I was quite flattered!

That was then. Now that I've more or less "come out" as a critic
of transhumanism (or an Enemy of the Singularity, or whatever),
suddenly my posting style is an excuse for people to tell me to
shut up and go away.

This leads me to believe that it isn't so much (or at least not
**purely**) a matter of style as it is of content, or at any rate
the combination of the two.

Given the fact that you've been pleading with Dale (more politely,
to be sure, but that's to be expected) to "drop it" or "give it a rest"
with respect to the >Hism critique, I believe I am somewhat justified
in suspecting a similar motive in your case.

> It's only advice. Take it or leave it. . .

I leave it. In fact, I think I've made it pretty clear what you
can do with it.

> . . .but stop whinning that I can't give it to you.

Sweetheart, you can write letters to Dear Abby about it if you
want.

VDT said...

Now that I've more or less "come out" as a critic of transhumanism (or an Enemy of the Singularity, or whatever), suddenly my posting style is an excuse for people to tell me to shut up and go away. This leads me to believe that it isn't so much (or at least not **purely**) a matter of style as it is of content, or at any rate
the combination of the two.


That may be partly true but, as I (and James Hughes) have told you, I actually enjoy the content and ackwonledge that your selections seemed to have been chosen with taste. *However*, that doesn't prevent me from complaining about your posting style.

Given the fact that you've been pleading with Dale (more politely, to be sure, but that's to be expected) to "drop it" or "give it a rest" with respect to the >Hism critique, I believe I am somewhat justified in suspecting a similar motive in your case.

LOL. You don't know what you are talking about! Have you read my exchanges with Guilio?!? I am one of the people who, in the past, strongly encouraged Dale to robustly critique transhumanism and other superlative technocentric subcultures. However, now I am concerned that he doing this at the expense of doing more intellectually challeging and important work. Whether or not I am right about this, it has nothing to do with your advice about your posting style which I am well aware that you don't care. I'm simply explaining to you the reasons that you have chosen to dismiss them are not valid...

Dale Carrico said...

Hello, everybody. Yesterday was my long teaching day (I teach in the City in the morning, and at UCB in the late afternoon with office hours in between), so Thursdays I really have little chance to contribute much to blogging. What a shock to see all the back and forth that has gone on without me! I hope nobody mistook my silence for indifference.

I must say I find it curious that a tossed off "negative" post generated thirty comments, while the well considered "positive" post just before it produced little at all in the way of comment -- despite the fact that I'm constantly being entreated to "raise the tone" for the sake of my readers! Weird!

Anyway, here's an in depth response to a comment from Vladimir a while back in the thread, followed by a couple of general comments on issues others have brought up here and there since I last looked in on the Moot.

I wrote:

Superlative Technology Discourse matters to me mostly as an especially clear, if extreme, and symptomatic expression of prevailing Technology Discourse in an era of corporate-militarist ascendancy. I am directing my arguments primarily to the emerging technoprogressive mainstream (whose attention I have not yet really gotten in my reckoning), seeking to ensure that we all understand the vulnerability of all technocentrism to superlativity, and understand the actual demands of a proper democratization of technoscientific change.

Vladimir responded:

I think you misunderstand me. I am not suggesting you should stop critiquing superlativity. What I am suggesting is that you know that you don't necessarily need to single out one marginal superlative technocentric subculure to do that.

Since I have critiqued extropians in particular, transhumanists in general, Technological Immortalists, Nanosantalogists, cybernetic totalists, Dynamists, Cypherpunks, libertechians, corporate-militarist retro-futurists, eugenicists (including so-called liberal eugenicists), Brights, Randroids, technocrats, industrial apologists, and neoliberal wonks as well as Singularitarians, I think it is fair to say I agree with you that it would be wrong to confine my critique to Singularitarians however evocatively vivid and deliciously vulnerable a target they represent, given the larger aims of my critique.

I wrote:

I disagree that bioconservative discourse is more influential than facile technophilic/technocratic discourse. I agree that bioconservative formulations have influence and a pernicious impact, and of course I do regularly critique them for just this reason. But naive technophilia/ technodevelopmental elitism constitutes the default assumptions of global corporate- militarist Development discourse.

Vladimir answered:

I actually agree with you.

Excellent. This is a crucial point and one that needs much more emphasis than it gets.

What little traction bioconservative discourse actually gets (since almost everybody actually champions healthcare in the service of longer healthier lives, and since most people who live in secular multicultures prefer them to poliice states) derives from its appeal to people's very sensible anti-corporatist and anti-militarist attitudes.

Bioconservatives commandeer what should be a technoprogressive critique in the service of their own actual socioculturally reactionary aspirations. Superlative technocentrics typically respond by misframing this as a battle between science and religion, in which they are the "champions" of a reductively and monolithically misconstrued science" and all their foes are "representatives" of a fundamentalist religiosity misconstrued as a matter of epistemology when it is more usually and more cricually a matter of politics -- all of which has the misfortune of being both mostly wrong and also completely stupid.

What makes it ugly as well is that this religion/science framing of technodevelopmental politics really plays out as a sectarian squabble between competing faiths, one of them actually patriarchy in the guise of an elitist institutionalization of Christianity and the other industrial capitalism in the guise of a elitist institutionalization of "science" (in fact scientism).

The focus of my critique is exactly where it should be and urgently needs to be, and it is one of the manifold derangements produced by an identity politics model of technodevelopmental social struggle that transhumanists and others idiotically think they are a good (pro-technology) army locked in a duel to the death with an evil (anti-technology) army. None of this has any reality, and the actual urgency of some of the quandaries of actually existing ongoing, emerging, and proximately upcoming technoscientific change is ridiculously ill-served by these cartoonish and self-congratulatory mis-mappings of the terrain.

Vladimir wrote:

I think superlative technocentric subcultures may also too much of an easy or lazy target for someone of your intellectual might who could and should be focusing on deconstructing the complexities of the "global corporate-militarist development discourse" for a wider audience...

This objection doesn't make sense to me. I don't believe in something called "intellectual might," certainly not as something I possess more than anybody else, although I recognize this was meant as a compliment and I thank you for it. As for easy targers and lazy critiques, I am just trying to critique something that seems to me enormously pernicious and potentially quite literally dangerous (for which questions of the ease of critique are irrelevant), and I happen to be very interested in the particular ways these attitudes are wrong.

I wrote:

Bioconservatism is one ugly flailing tentacle of Movement Conservatism in the crisis and culmination moment of the neoliberal/neoconservative Washington Consensus. Technodevelopmental social struggle is not about marginal cult-like organizations, and neither is serious organizing. Keep your eye on the ball.

Vladimir answered:

Isn't that exactly my point? Why are we focusing on these marginal cult-like organizations?

Because they have a disproportionate influence on public technodevelopmental discourse, because they attract (and are likely to attract ever more) attention and money from incumbent and anti-democratic interests, because they especially clearly symptomize connections at work in prevailing "technology" discourses (reductionism, elitism, hyperbole, transcendentalism, etc.), and because they are just publicly crazy enough to be nicely vulnerable targets for exposure and humiliation that should undermine the damage they are doing, deranging technoscientific deliberation, skewing budgetary priorities, framing fundamental debates in anti-democratizing ways, and so on. That's why.

And now, a couple of points from other ongoing conversations:

I get it that Jim's posting style is idiosyncratic. But why does it generate such universal hostility? I'll admit (and have admitted to Jim himself in conversation) that sometimes I scroll past some of his larger posts when I don't have the time to read or re-read all the quoted material. But it doesn't really seem that difficult to grasp the usefulness of this way of commenting on posted material. Rather than post little bumper stickers, he posts long passages that people have to dwell in for a time. There is absolutely no question to me that people are more likely to change their minds on a fundamental question as a consequence of living with an alternative understanding of that question rather than through some shattering encounter with an alternate proposition. All the handwaving about etiquette and basic decorum looks strange to me, perhaps its a vestige of past concerns from discussion fora in which long posts expensively squandered online resources.

Benefit from Jim's different way of putting the points that matter to him if you will or just skip past it. What's the big deal?

I'll put this plainly. I think Jim is a wonderful contributor to the community of Amor Mundi, I am glad he is hear and contributes in the way he does. I feel exactly the same about Vladimir's contribution to our fledgling technoprogressive community here, even though he and Jim are sparring on this particular question.

As for Brian Wang...

VDT said...

This objection doesn't make sense to me ... As for easy targers and lazy critiques, I am just trying to critique something that seems to me enormously pernicious and potentially quite literally dangerous (for which questions of the ease of critique are irrelevant), and I happen to be very interested in the particular ways these attitudes are wrong.

Although I agree that supelative technocentricity is not only both pernicious and dangerous but should be regulary denounced. However, I think you are overestimating how pernicious or dangerous the specific superlative technocentric individuals and subcultures you focus on in light of how marginal they are and probably will remain.

Because they have a disproportionate influence on public technodevelopmental discourse, because they attract (and are likely to attract ever more) attention and money from incumbent and anti-democratic interests, because they especially clearly symptomize connections at work in prevailing "technology" discourses (reductionism, elitism, hyperbole, transcendentalism, etc.), and because they are just publicly crazy enough to be nicely vulnerable targets for exposure and humiliation that should undermine the damage they are doing, deranging technoscientific deliberation, skewing budgetary priorities, framing fundamental debates in anti-democratizing ways, and so on. That's why.

Although I agree with you that superlative technocentric subcultures they symptomize connections at work in prevailing "technology" discourses, they are an extreme and marginal symptom that does NOT disproportionatelty influence on public technodevelopmental discourse, attract attention and money from incumbent and anti-democratic interests, deranging technoscientific deliberation, skewing budgetary priorities, framing fundamental debates in anti-democratizing ways to the extent you claim it does. If it did, not would they not spend their time complaining about the powerlessness but far more leading intellectuals would take the time to criticize them, which they obviously don't.

In other words, we should be far more concerned about the extent to which oil corporations are funding climate-change-denying scientists and truly deranging public and policy discourse than a bunch of naive techno-utopians who struggle to organized scarcely-attended conferences...

I get it that Jim's posting style is idiosyncratic. But why does it generate such universal hostility? I'll admit (and have admitted to Jim himself in conversation) that sometimes I scroll past some of his larger posts when I don't have the time to read or re-read all the quoted material. But it doesn't really seem that difficult to grasp the usefulness of this way of commenting on posted material. Rather than post little bumper stickers, he posts long passages that people have to dwell in for a time. There is absolutely no question to me that people are more likely to change their minds on a fundamental question as a consequence of living with an alternative understanding of that question rather than through some shattering encounter with an alternate proposition. All the handwaving about etiquette and basic decorum looks strange to me, perhaps its a vestige of past concerns from discussion fora in which long posts expensively squandered online resources. Benefit from Jim's different way of putting the points that matter to him if you will or just skip past it. What's the big deal?

*sigh* It's not a big deal. My point was simply he would be get more people to read rather than skip his posts if he posted a link to a relevant text or a shorter excerpt. Oh well.

Dale Carrico said...

My point was simply he would be get more people to read rather
than skip his posts if he posted a link to a relevant text or a shorter
excerpt. Oh well.


Please don't feel ganged up on or anything -- I just think Jim's posting style is an aesthetic matter, it's very personal. I think he's more interested in making the acquaintance of the minority of people who get what he is doing than influencing the majority of people who don't like what he is doing. I work so much with artists and art students that this sort of choice is instantly legible to me. The truth is I enjoy many of his posts and the little nuances, the campy complexities he brings to light in his arias. So much online discourse is a bulldozer (mine included), while his is like a rainshower. I like providing a forum for it. I don't mean in saying this to seem to discount the contributions people make in more conventional modes like yours and, probably, mine. OK?

Dale Carrico said...

Vladimir wrote:

Although I agree with you that superlative technocentric subcultures... symptomize connections at work in prevailing "technology" discourses, they are an extreme and marginal symptom that does NOT disproportionatelty influence on public technodevelopmental discourse, attract attention and money from incumbent and anti-democratic interests, deranging technoscientific deliberation, skewing budgetary priorities, framing fundamental debates in anti-democratizing ways to the extent you claim it does.

Well, okay. I just completely disagree with you on this one. That's cool.

If it did, [they] would... not spend their time complaining about the[ir] powerlessness but far more leading intellectuals would take the time to criticize them, which they obviously don't.

First: Plenty of intellectuals have criticized what I am calling Superlativity in their own epochs, even if few have managed to direct their critique yet to all of the particular figures I do. That will come, just a matter of time.

Second: Movement Conservatives were complaining about their powerlessness even when they ran every branch of government, owned the media, and were subsidized by welfare for the rich in the name of "Defense." Christians whine about a non-existing War on Christmas. Dumbass straight white guys whine that they don't get a "Gay Pride Parade" even though they benefit from Patriarchy every day of their lives. That's just the way conservatives act in a world that actually moves through time, that's just the way authoritarians act in a world they have to share with diverse others.

In other words, we should be far more concerned about the extent to which oil corporations are funding climate-change-denying scientists and truly deranging public and policy discourse than a bunch of naive techno-utopians who struggle to organized scarcely-attended conferences...

Make this move and you just become a member of the progressive blogosphere and you will discover you have millions of incredibly informed engaged people to keep you company already. The Netroots don't lack for technoscientifically literate, technoprogressive voices. Most of the blogs I read, most of the work I teach is legible already in such terms. Cast Superlativity aside and the emerging technoprogressive mainstream comes into view.

From a technoprogressive mainstream vantage making fun of Superlativity is as perfectly legible, useful, and enjoyable as skewering Glenn Reynolds or the John Birch Society can be. I guess I'm still not sure I quite understand what you are worried about.

VDT said...

Please don't feel ganged up on or anything

Not at all.

I just think Jim's posting style is an aesthetic matter, it's very personal. I think he's more interested in making the acquaintance of the minority of people who get what he is doing than influencing the majority of people who don't like what he is doing. I work so much with artists and art students that this sort of choice is instantly legible to me.

I don't really buy that since I was guilty of doing *exactly* the same thing I was first started posting on online forums many years ago. However, for many reasons, I stopped doing that.

The truth is I enjoy many of his posts and the little nuances, the campy complexities he brings to light in his arias. So much online discourse is a bulldozer (mine included), while his is like a rainshower. I like providing a forum for it. I don't mean in saying this to seem to discount the contributions people make in more conventional modes like yours and, probably, mine. OK?

Like I told him myself, I enjoy many of his posts as well. However, it is undeniable that some would benefit from trimming.

That being said, if you don't have a problem with it, I can't argue with that. However, I was simply offering him free advice which could be useful to him in light of the high probability that he will comment on other blogs where the owners are not so appreciative as you are. He is free to ignore it which he has said many times that he will. The end.

VDT said...

Well, okay. I just completely disagree with you on this one. That's cool.

OK. Please give me clear examples of how explicitly self-identified transhumanists, singulatarians and technology immortalists having disproportionate influence on public technodevelopmental discourse, attracting attention and money from incumbent and anti-democratic interests, deranging technoscientific deliberation or skewing budgetary priorities to an extent that merits being viewed as not only significant but dangerous?

First: Plenty of intellectuals have criticized what I am calling Superlativity in their own epochs,

Yes but did they focus on marginal symptoms or dominant ones?

even if few have managed to direct their critique yet to all of the particular figures I do. That will come, just a matter of time.

Actually, some already have such as Francis Fukuyama (regardless of his bioconservative/neoconservative bias). However, few of them feel that a sustained and extensive critique is necessary since they are the first ones to point out how marginal these superlative technocentric subcultures are.

Second: Movement Conservatives were complaining about their powerlessness even when they ran every branch of government, owned the media, and were subsidized by welfare for the rich in the name of "Defense." Christians whine about a non-existing War on Christmas. Dumbass straight white guys whine that they don't get a "Gay Pride Parade" even though they benefit from Patriarchy every day of their lives. That's just the way conservatives act in a world that actually moves through time, that's just the way authoritarians act in a world they have to share with diverse others.

I don't think that's a good example because the difference is that superlative technocentric subcultures truly have no power or influence regardless of whether or not they symptomize connections at work in prevailing "technology" discourses. Despite the fact that you acknowledge their marginality, you seem to ascribe them a power and influence that they simply do not have like someone attacking a marginal yet vocal group of neo-nazi skinheads rather than examples of institutionalized racism.

Make this move and you just become a member of the progressive blogosphere and you will discover you have millions of incredibly informed engaged people to keep you company already. The Netroots don't lack for technoscientifically literate, technoprogressive voices. Most of the blogs I read, most of the work I teach is legible already in such terms. Cast Superlativity aside and the emerging technoprogressive mainstream comes into view.

Oh... So is this, partly, about finding a niche? If it is, I can respect that.

From a technoprogressive mainstream vantage making fun of Superlativity is as perfectly legible, useful, and enjoyable as skewering Glenn Reynolds or the John Birch Society can be.

It is... in moderation.

I guess I'm still not sure I quite understand what you are worried about.

I'm simply worried that we may be giving superlative technocentric individuals and subcultures far more attention then they deserve but also to such an extent that we may become unfairly viewed as the guys-who-spend-their-time-attacking-naive-techno-utopians rather than intellectuals exploring a wide range of proposals and models for radical social change, based on the idea combining serious normative discussions of the underlying principles and rationales for different emancipatory visions with the analysis of pragmatic problems of institutional design.

jimf said...

Justice de Thezier wrote:

> I don't really buy that since I was guilty of doing *exactly*
> the same thing I was first started posting on online forums
> many years ago. However, for many reasons, I stopped doing that.

OK -- this is a pure power play. You're framing me in terms
of someone who is either inexperienced or a slow learner and
who needs "tutelage" from a more experienced online participant
(you) who used to make the same "mistakes" but "stopped
doing that."

[Supply your favorite rude interjection here.]

> I was simply offering him free advice. . .

Worth exactly what he paid for it.

> . . .which could be useful to him in light of the high probability
> that he will comment on other blogs where the owners are not
> so appreciative as you are.

Very low probability, in fact, but those putative blog owners can take
care of themselves.

BTW, the one blog I got warned off was Jamais Cascio's
"Open the Future" blog, and that had nothing to do with the
length of my posts -- I was accused of slinging "ad hominem"
(at Michael Anissimov, IIRC).

In completely other universes -- discussion threads in forums
about, oh, mainframe emulators or stereo equipment -- these
"problems" do not arise at all. I wonder why that is. ;->

The other mailing list I was banned from (besides
WTA-talk) was Russell Whitaker's "Classic" Extropians
list -- a hot-bed of libertarianism that I really had no
business being on in the first place. I was invited to join
that invitation-only list by Eugen Leitl, and I accepted
his invitation because I appreciated that it was a friendly
gesture on his part. I lurked without posting for a long time,
but got banned in short order once I started actively participating.
One person complained about the length of my posts and
the quotes. Other people replied that they had no
problem with my posts. The list owner agreed with the
initial complaint, but I didn't get banned (the first
time) until I was asked to state my political principles
to justify being allowed to remain there, and slagged
Ayn Rand in the process. I was banned the **second**
time, a day later (from the same list) because I rejected
an **order** (from the list owner) to stop using emoticons ;-> ;-> .

The third forum I was warned off (not banned, but I
unsubscribed to save everybody trouble) was none other
than Dale's own Technoliberation group on Yahoo. Dale's
complaint back then (a year and a half ago) was the
same as Hughes' -- that I was "flooding" the list with long posts
(i.e., too much in both length and frequency). He was also concerned
about "directly anti-transhumanist button-pushing" -- i.e., keeping
the (fragile) peace with the >Hists. He seems less concerned
about that now, on his own blog, and he no longer seems
(as) irritated with my posting style.

I'm happy to stick around as long as I'm welcome (as
far as Dale is concerned; the rest of you can stick your
heads in the toilet); if that changes, I'll stop
commenting.

It is true, though, that if you, and "Utilitarian", and Anne
Corwin, and Michael Anissimov, and others who have
complained about my "Mrs. Who like quote-fests" keep
complaining, to the extent that a significant fraction of the
bandwidth on Amor Mundi (as has already occurred with a
significant fraction of this thread) ends up being occupied
with the question of whether jfehlinger has any business
commenting here (at least in his current persona), then Dale will
indeed **probably**, eventually, more-or-less reluctantly,
give in and backchannel me something along the lines of
"Sorry, Jim. I just can't afford the distraction. Why don't
you start your own blog, or just give it up?"

So keep it up -- you may get your way at last.
After all, that's politics! ;->

Anne Corwin said...

Jim, I've never complained about your posting style, nor does it bother me personally.

I've taken issue with some of the content (as I occasionally do with the content of everyone whose writing I read, seeing as I never agree with anyone 100% of the time), but honestly, I don't mind the quoting. It isn't an insult to be compared to Mrs. Who. Additionally, I've tended to (especially verbally) communicate in quotes and snippets of things I've heard/read; as a child I used to often speak in Star Wars dialogue to make points (much to the annoyance of those around me). Your quoting is similar conceptually to autistic echolalia, and coming from me, that isn't an insult either.

If I have any issue with you at all, it's that you sometimes seem to be a bit quick to jump to conclusions about other people's motivations, and then compare them to $cientologists if they don't immediately see your logic, or if their responses are confused/clumsy owing not to lack of insight into themselves, but to garden-variety difficulty knowing how your points relate to them personally.

But I have gotten some useful points out of what you've written; I think that some of the stuff you've quoted about narcissism, for example, relates not necessarily to intrinsic individual pathologies, but to tendencies of thought and behavior that certain subcultures seem to encourage/perpetuate (sometimes unbeknownst to those involved). It looks to me like you're mainly trying to warn people, which I can see the logic of, even if some of your pithier commentaries (quoted or not) edge vaguely in the direction of gaslighting (getting people to doubt their entire sense of reality) over and above encouraging self-examination. I realize it's important to point out that people can be self-deluded, but it's also important to understand that knowing how to recognize certain psychological patterns doesn't mean you know everyone better than they know themselves.

What I find distracting is not your style, or anything Dale writes, but some of the constant back-and-forth, "No, you don't really think that, you think this!" that everyone in this recent "debate" thing has engaged in at one point or another.

I think there needs to be a balance in each person of being able to know when someone is giving you good advice about your own tendencies toward pernicious attitudes, and to know when to trust what you've learned of yourself as well. This is a very difficult balance to achieve and I don't know if anyone can ever really know if they've achieved it; I'm guessing it's sort of a lifelong thing. But I'm sensitive to both sides of it because I've both known people who were obviously deluded/narcissistic, and been psychologically abused in a manner that attempted to second-guess any insight I ever displayed into my own behavior. It really can be a fine line sometimes.

(and I promise, the next thing I write, here or in my own blog, will be in reference to some of Dale's points regarding the false framing of technodevelopmental discourse as a battle between Smart Science and Silly Religion, etc. I just wanted to clear up the misconception that I'd complained about your posting style, because as far as I know, I haven't.)

Dale Carrico said...

Please give me clear examples of how explicitly self-identified transhumanists, singulatarians and technology immortalists having disproportionate influence on public technodevelopmental discourse

I'm going to have limited patience for this, because I believe you know exactly what I'm talking about from our own friendly conversations on this topic in the past. In fact, given those conversations I still have this strange feeling I'm not getting your actual point or something.

Suffice it to say that transhumanist organizations that have never managed to acquire more than a few thousand members in over two decades' time have nonetheless figured in enormously popular magazines, bestselling futurist and popsci books, to shape the tropes of influential speculative fiction, have figured in reports by government officials, and have had conferences devoted to their formulations in academic institutions around the world. You know all that as well as I do.

These are discursive frames: "Accelerating Change," "Relativist Humanities," "Inevitability," "Post-Biological AI," "Enhancement Medicine," "Optimal Health." These have acquired the status of key terms and turns in contemporary Development discourse and are either indebted to and/or inter-implicated with transhumanist formulations that also attract popular and institutional attention.

Transhumanists are constantly saying this or that technocentric author is a "closeted transhumanist." This is total cult nonsense in my view, but it does derive from the sense transhumanists have themselves and of their role in prevailing discourses and their frustration that their own "extremity" or "consistency" or whatever causes that role to be disavowed.

When I say that transhumanism has a disproportionate influence I am stating the obvious, it seems to me. Demanding I rehearse the long history of such influence, logical, tropological, and so on, demanding "clear examples," and so on feels like a tactical effort to circumvent my critique at the level I'm actually pitching it and where it is actually most effective and illuminating in my opinion, and inaugurating instead highly internalized nit-picky he said-she said micro-debates at the level of detail (who influence whom? is she or isn't she a real transhumanist? is this a definitive point or a marginal point for the "philosophy"? and so on) where the critique loses much of its primary force.

attracting attention and money from incumbent and anti-democratic interests

You know exactly what I am talking about. We've talked about this. Some of these people are litigious, as I know from personal experience. Why ask me to go there?

deranging technoscientific deliberation

Any formulation that facilitates elitist circumvention of democratic technodevelopmental deliberation and an emphasis on consensual prostheticized lifeways (flogging technocratic intuitions, technological determinist intuitions, autonomous technology intuitions, hyperbolizing technological sublime intuitions, naturalizing neoliberal intuitions through a foregrounding of "innovation" or "competitiveness" or North Atlantic exceptionalist rhetoric, and so on) will skew deliberation in the way I mean -- And any discourse that attracts attention deserves critique when it facilitates these anti-democratizing ends. I thought we agreed on this? Am I still not getting at your real concern here?

or skewing budgetary priorities

Advocating big techno-utopian boondoggles that direct money away from urgent and proximate problems in the service of idealized ends that just so happen to demand vast capital expenditures that go to incumbent interests and produce centralized industrialized works owned and maintained by the same interests skews budgetary priorities in my book. There are exceptions and complexities here but the general connections seem to me pretty clear.

to an extent that merits being viewed as not only significant but dangerous?

Hope I've answered your question to your satisfaction now...? I have a sinking suspicion we're talking past each other on this topic for some reason.

Me: Plenty of intellectuals have criticized what I am calling Superlativity in their own epochs,

You: Yes but did they focus on marginal symptoms or dominant ones?


What do you mean? You're not asking me to start splitting hairs about just which aspects of Sub(cult)ural Superlativity are definitive and which marginally less so and which marginally more reasonable and so on, are you? It's hard for me to see how such an enterprise would be anything but fruitless or joyless from my perspective! (That is a friendly not a hostile comment -- insert requisite smiley if necessary.) But once again I'm probably just completely misreading your question actually!

[F]ew have managed to direct their critique yet to all of the particular figures I do. That will come, just a matter of time.

You: Actually, some already have such as Francis Fukuyama (regardless of his bioconservative/neoconservative bias).


True enough. And of course there are others. At the height of extropianism much of that coterie received enormous critical attention from Hayles, Lanier, Borsook, Dery, etc. Since many of those same folks are still hanging around (superlativity tending to yield a curious stasis as "futurisms" go, after all) the old critiques are still around as well.

Few of them feel that a sustained and extensive critique is necessary since they are the first ones to point out how marginal these superlative technocentric subcultures are.

Well, I keep pointing out that a sociologically marginal organization can articulate formulations that exercise real force in their clarity, or provide special insight into prevailing ideas by symptomizing them in especially extreme forms -- I think this point of mine isn't as persuasive for you as it is for me.

superlative technocentric subcultures truly have no power or influence regardless of whether or not they symptomize connections at work in prevailing "technology" discourses. Despite the fact that you acknowledge their marginality, you seem to ascribe them a power and influence that they simply do not have like someone attacking a marginal yet vocal group of neo-nazi skinheads rather than examples of institutionalized racism.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has the very good sense to track neonazi hate groups, because they understand quite well the racist damage marginal groups can do, but they also understand how developments within such movements are sociocultural indicators helping us grasp larger historical currents (many expect the rather quiescent recent epoch of hate-organizing to resurge into view if Dems recapture the White House, for example, and hate crimes directed at and ongoing awful persecution of the Jena 6 may be an early indicator of this very phenomenon).

Yes, I do think transhumanists have a disproportionate discursive influence despite their marginality. True, they don't have shiny offices or big salaried executives as yet (but you know as well as I do that some are working in that direction), but that is irrelevant to the point of their cultural impact.

But more to the point it is irrelevant to the fact that so many of the things they are saying are wrongheaded in my view and even dangerously wrong and, not only that, but really interest me personally in the ways they are dangerously wrong and, as far as I can tell, seem to interest plenty of others who I enjoy talking with them about these things. That seems enough to justify what I'm doing in my book, though it doesn't mean critiquing is all or has been all or will be all of what I do -- in fact, quite the contrary!

Me: Make this move and you just become a member of the progressive blogosphere and you will discover you have millions of incredibly informed engaged people to keep you company already. The Netroots don't lack for technoscientifically literate, technoprogressive voices. Most of the blogs I read, most of the work I teach is legible already in such terms. Cast Superlativity aside and the emerging technoprogressive mainstream comes into view.

You: Oh... So is this, partly, about finding a niche? If it is, I can respect that.


I'm far too much of a nonconformist to aspire after a niche, to be frank with you. Actually this seems like a misinterpretation of my point. Everybody is always socioculturally positioned, everybody is differently situated and differently legible as a result. I'm just pointing out where you will be situated, whatever your hopes in the matter, if you drain transhumanism of its superlativity but remain technocentric and technoprogressive. I have been talking about an emerging technoprogressive mainstream that was neither Superlative nor Sub(cult)ural in its politics for years. I thought this was something we agreed about.

Me: From a technoprogressive mainstream vantage making fun of Superlativity is as perfectly legible, useful, and enjoyable as skewering Glenn Reynolds or the John Birch Society can be.

You: It is... in moderation.


Uh, okay. And I hereby declare that my parodic interventions are exactly properly proportioned vis-a-vis my more programmatic or more formally analytic ones! Obviously, YMMV.

I'm simply worried that we may be giving superlative technocentric individuals and subcultures far more attention then they deserve but also to such an extent that we may become unfairly viewed as the guys-who-spend-their-time-attacking-naive-techno-utopians rather than intellectuals exploring a wide range of proposals and models for radical social change, based on the idea combining serious normative discussions of the underlying principles and rationales for different emancipatory visions with the analysis of pragmatic problems of institutional design.

I don't think that is a problem at all. At least not for me. The vast bulk of my own work is happening in classrooms and conversations elsewhere, and superlative exemplars rarely come up as a topic at all. I talk about p2p, Netroots, permaculture strategies, consensual prosthetic and queer lifeways, and basic income more than anything else if I look at my own work synoptically. The only ones claiming I'm too negative are crybabies I've exposed here for their coziness with cultists, it seems to me. It doesn't matter what you say or do, you'll be tarred by cultists as negative and emotional and fascist/socialist or whatever if you critique them. It makes no sense at all to spend time worrying about them, although it can be enjoyable -- if your tastes run that way -- to snark about them.

jimf said...

Anne Corwin wrote:

> If I have any issue with you at all, it's that you sometimes
> seem to be a bit quick to jump to conclusions about other people's
> motivations. . .

**Really**? That's funny -- I don't think of myself as somebody
who spends a lot of time worrying about other people's motivations at
all.

It took me a long time, for example, to stumble my way to the
literature on gurus, and narcissism, from the initial uneasiness I felt
about some of the on-line >Hists. Or even to realize that Ayn Rand,
for chrissakes, had anything in particular to do with looking
forward to the prospect of AI (why in hell should **she** have
anything to do with it?, I would have asked in 1997. It's not like
I actually bothered to check out the Extropian's recommended reading
list, or anything. ;-> ).

There's a movie, a pretty scary (but nevertheless uneasily
serious) 1956 black-and-white movie called _The Bad Seed_
http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Seed-Nancy-Kelly/dp/B00027JYNK
about a psychopathic 8-year-old, one of the ironies of which is
that the busybody landlady played by Evelyn Varden is devoted
to Freudian psychoanalysis. The silly woman "analyzes" everybody
in sight, but she still can't see what's in front of her nose.

I've never **thought** of myself as being like that (though I
might have gotten a bit carried away when I found out about the Myers-Briggs
personality typology in 1988, or the Enneagram in 2001 ;-> ).

> . . .and then compare them to $cientologists if they don't
> immediately see your logic, or if their responses are confused/clumsy
> owing not to lack of insight into themselves, but to garden-variety
> difficulty knowing how your points relate to them personally.

It is true that I see a lot of the uncritical >Hist "boosters" as either
gurus (the few) or True Believers (the many) these days.

The Scientologists are just one (highly visible) example of a
"bubble universe" belief system. There are many others.
(Christian Science. Amway. est. the list goes on and on).

> It looks to me like you're mainly trying to warn people,
> which I can see the logic of. . .

Yes, I would like to think that **some** folks, after their
initial defensiveness has worn off, might realize there's more
going on than they initially thought, and might (in the long
run) benefit from that realization.

> . . .even if some of your pithier commentaries (quoted or not)
> edge vaguely in the direction of gaslighting (getting people to
> doubt their entire sense of reality) over and above encouraging
> self-examination. . .

Golly, I hope I'm not **that** much of an evil nihilist! ;->
I mean, I'm not above contemplating that I **might** have such
sadistic motives lurking in the deep dark recesses of my
subconscious, but I also realize that I'm not a genius able
to spin such "webs of darkness" (like Shelob, you know ;-> )
out of whole cloth.

Still, I guess I **don't** often stop to think what it might
feel like to have one's "entire sense of reality" shaken to
its foundation. I guess it can be pretty unpleasant (I mean,
maybe even to the point of suicidality for some people).

So who am I to force people's gaze into the palantir?
(or the Mirror of Galadriel -- pick your favorite Tolkien metaphor. ;->)
I dunno. I guess I just have some kind of stubborn faith in the truth.
(How's **that** for a "postmodern" sentiment? ;-> ).

Dale Carrico said...

Jim: [Another] forum I was warned off (not banned, but I
unsubscribed to save everybody trouble) was none other
than Dale's own Technoliberation group on Yahoo. Dale's
complaint back then (a year and a half ago) was the
same as Hughes' -- that I was "flooding" the list with long posts
(i.e., too much in both length and frequency). He was also concerned
about "directly anti-transhumanist button-pushing" -- i.e., keeping
the (fragile) peace with the >Hists. He seems less concerned
about that now, on his own blog, and he no longer seems
(as) irritated with my posting style.


Oh, now I feel bad! As I understand these things, there are people who access international lists in ways that very long posts impose undue costs, and that introduces reasons for regulation of such things, and also there is a sense that healthy online communities police S/N in ways that do not necessarily accord with my own highly civil libertarian intuitions in such matters. I'll admit that I don't really know if these reasons are more pretext for ugly policing than real concerns at this technodevelopmental stage, but I've been told them in no uncertain terms by people I tend to trust and I trusted them and that's why I warned you that there were grumblings. Still, I feel bad.

And, yes, you are right that I am less interested in detent these days with bruised transhumanist egos (even the ones with whom I sympathize otherwise) than I once was. The emerging technoprogressive mainstream in the p2p Netroots, consensual lifeway and healthcare advocacy movements and technoliterate Green movements is a far more suitable place for my temperament and aspirations (and it's also capacious enough to accommodate my own contradictory impulses).

And yes you are very welcome here. I love the wee emerging MundiMoot community of Amorous Mudyites!

jimf said...

Dale wrote:

> Oh, now I feel bad!

Sorry, I probably shouldn't have brought that up.

> As I understand these things, there are people who access
> international lists in ways that very long posts impose undue
> costs, and that introduces reasons for regulation of such things. . .

Yes, I keep forgetting that there are still people who access
the Web via dial-up (or Morse code, or smoke signals, or
something). Still, given the fact that that doesn't seem
to have stopped the Web from becoming a graphics-rich medium,
one would hardly think that an occasional few kbytes of
text -- well, unless those people are using a painful pure-text
interface like Lynx, instead of the usual sort of Web browser --
but they aren't, of course; they're using Explorer, like everybody else).

OK, so maybe I should re-read Hal Draper's _Ms Fnd in a Lbry_
and figure out how to nudge my quanta closer together.

> I don't really know if these reasons are more pretext for
> ugly policing than real concerns at this technodevelopmental
> stage. . .

It's certainly closer to "pretext" now than it was back in
Usenet's heyday in the 80s. I well remember how some
people used to complain about other people's "waste of
bandwidth" back in those days.

More than anything else, though, it takes the joy and
spontaneity out of contributing to have that kind of policing
pushed in one's face. It's like being relegated to the
role of a caller on a talk radio show who gets interrupted
in mid-rant (whether deservedly or not, from the listener's
point of view -- and I **never** listen to shows like
that, I just land on them from time to time ;-> ) by the
host's brusque cut-off -- "Yes, thanks a lot Floyd, that's
all we have time for. Next caller!"

More than that -- I get an overwhelming sense, from time to
time, that my "proper" role in this consumer society is
simply to punch in, punch out, shut up, and shop.
"You weren't put on this Earth to think, and nobody
expects you to have anything to say. Just **shut up and
shop**!"

;->

> And yes you are very welcome here.

Well thanks. I'll settle down now, untwist my knickers,
lower my hackles, and go back to dreaming up long and
obscure posts.

VDT said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
VDT said...

Ooops! The previous post was far from finished.

jimf said...

Oh, and BTW -- one more technical aside:

It is true that Yahoo groups, WTA-talk, and for
that matter the Extropians' mailing list are more
"traditional" computer forums in that it is possible interact
with them strictly via e-mail, without using a Web
interface. (I tend to forget that because I do the
reverse -- I shut off the e-mail, if it's necessary
to do so, and use the Web interface exclusively.)

As far as I know, comments on a blog break the old
"mailing list" model and **must** be accessed via a
Web browser. If that's so, then anybody reading
Amor Mundi using a 300 baud satellite uplink from the
middle of the Amazon jungle has far worse problems
than I could ever create.

So yes -- **on this blog**, any complaints about **text**
using up "bandwidth" would be pure pretext. Now if
I were posting **movies** -- that's another story.

Oh, and not to lower the tone of the discussion, but I
assume everybody is aware that many observers have
credited the commercial success of home computers and the
Web in no small part to the availability of pornography?
That may have started out as text back in Usenet days
(let's all salute Elf Sternberg), but the bandwidth consumed
by pictures and movies these days must be **vast**.

Michael Anissimov said...

How could H+ have lots of influence just by symptomizing societal extremes? Any influence therein would go from the mainstream to the margin, not vice versa.

Transhumanists are at an interesting point. We're somewhere on the edge of being marginal and being significant. I think we are moving towards greater significance, with Aubrey in the Post and Natasha in the Times. Executive salaries? Hah, never -- we care too much about our causes to spend money on toys. What are today's products when we are developing radical life extension therapies, molecular manufacturing, and AGI? ;)

De Thiezer is right that the constant attacks make you look bad, and Brian is right that this blog had barely any traffic before Dale got me to link it because I felt like my tribal affiliation was being attacked. But hey, I find the criticism somewhat interesting and inspiring, although a fair portion of it is repeating the same things over and over again.

Jim appears to be very rude to de Thezier here. In fact, he seems rude to just about everyone. Not to be trite, but: rudeness is annoying.

Nanotech superabundance, artificial superintelligence, and medical superlongevity would all be totally awesome, by the way. If we are successful with any of these things, we'll definitely have a place in the history books, that's for sure. I can see it now: History of the 21st Century, Chapter 4: The Transumanists. :)

How can Keith Henson know so much about Scientology and yet be a part of transhumanism? Because Scientology is a cult and transhumanism isn't, mayhap? For one, we don't break people down. That isn't necessary: Nature herself breaks us down with limitations, death, and disease. And of course we want to fight it.

Dale's insights capture what many think about transhumanism, but don't say. They should be required reading by every transhumanist, IMO.

Dale Carrico said...

How could H+ have lots of influence just by symptomizing societal extremes?

By providing specific rhetorical frames that shape the general discourse it symptomizes in the present.

Transhumanists... We're somewhere on the edge of being marginal and being significant.

The attitudes that condense in transhumism -- the hyperbole, engineering as secular sublime, reductionism, technocratic elitism, and so on -- are enormously influential, and even constitute something like the default discourse of American era global Development and popular domestic technoscience. As for the influence of the arhipelago of transhumanist organizations, the best you can ever hope to be is Scientology and who in their right mind wants to be Scientology?

Nanotech superabundance, artificial superintelligence, and medical superlongevity would all be totally awesome, by the way.

For me this is like saying an omni-predicated creator God would be "awesome" if it existed. It's like saying a perpetual motion machine or squaring the circle would be "awesome."