The Anti-Democratizing Politics of Superlativity

I maintain that Superlative Technology Discourses tend to disdain actually progressive engagement in technodevelopmental social struggle for an aspiration after technoconstituted super-predicated capacities.

Such superlative aspirations will often have a politics of their own, to be sure.

But these politics are almost always sub(cult)ural. This is not surprising, inasmuch as Superlative aspirations require the initial substitution of this-worldly concern, with its open futurity, for "other-worldly" investment in forcefully imagined and desired technodevelopmental outcomes -- typically designated as "the future."

This substitution solicits faithful True Belief and sub(cult)ural identification with the fellow-faithful who substantiate in their shared professions of True Belief the plausibility of beliefs that are not substantiated by experience otherwise. Probably needless to say, this is all quite familiar from conventional fundamentalist politicizations of religiosity, as well as in the politics of marginal cults, defensive subcultures, and ideological pan-movements.

Within the organizational life of Superlative Technocentric sub(cult)ural formations the politics will tend to be enormously defensive. This is especially the case so long as these organizations remain numerically marginal and conspicuously unconventional, as are the "transhumanists," the "singularitarians," and the "techno-immortalists" whose exemplary texts and figures are the most frequent focus of my critiques here. Sometimes the defensiveness of marginal Superlative sub(cult)ural politics will inspire a strategy of outreach and public relations to cultivate mainstream respectability and wider membership but one that requires a self-conscious course in stealth at best and deception at worse about the beliefs that are at once most definitive and most marginalizing in the outlook they would "promote." Sometimes this defensiveness will inspire instead a more stringently separatist and authoritarian organizational culture, providing for a marginalized but more monolithic membership the false bolstering confidence of obedience to the utterances of a priestly elite.

Neither the cynicism of the first tendency nor the authoritarianism of the second are particularly conducive, to say the least, to democratizing attitudes, strategies, or effects, and this is notwithstanding the fact that at least some who engage in these actually anti-democratizing politics may earnestly affirm democratic values as their own (of which they might simply have an inadequate or simply too glib and hence vacuous an understanding, or which they might subordinate to what they consider more "pragmatic" organizational considerations in the present, or what have you).

I have also repeatedly described a host of more concrete anti-democratizing tendencies in Superlative Technology discourses (of which there are sure to be many more than just these, but these will do for a start) that deserve scrutiny and even vigilance:

First, that in their hyperbolic foregrounding of "existential risk" and "accelerating change" they too readily provide rationales for the circumvention of democratic politics (and, no, this is not the same thing as a claim that there are no risks, nor that real risks like climate change, resource and energy descent, arms and weapons proliferation and so on are unimportant).

Second, that in their focus on security, software, and robotics, for example, they provide a handy justification for ever-increasing skewed investment in military research and development in particular.

Third, that in their constant reiteration of security concerns, existential risks, and apocalyptic imagery they seem to make recourse to now all-too-familiar, tried and true strategies of reactionary and authoritarian fearmongering.

Fourth, that in their sanctimonious assumption of a need for "us" to "save the world" they seem to appeal too eagerly to familiar exceptionalist and imperialist intuitions about the special Destiny of the "Civilized" World that reframes as a Burden its assumption of unearned privileges and authorities.

Fifth, that in their constant dismissal of majority input and opinion as definitively more ignorant or more irrational than their own, and in their consequent insistence (sometimes, oh so reluctant) on the need for technocratic decision-making they appeal to perfectly conventional intuitions of conservative and incumbent interests as to the indispensability of (self-appointed) elite and priestly Gatekeepers of "True Knowledge" and "The Way."

And sixth, that in making incessant recourse to notions of "innovation," "competitiveness," "investment," "modernization," "early adoption," "diffusion," "spontaneous order," "market exchange," "underdeveloped regions," among other comparable terms of art in particular highly prejudicial construals treated as though they were "politically neutral" as a way to describe planetary technodevelopmental struggles they privilege and so consolidate neoliberal and neoconservative narratives that serve incumbent interests above all, and conjure up in the name of "the future" an endless prolongation and intensification of the status quo, a foreclosure of open futures in the service of a parochial fantasy of "the future" that is always, in essence, retro-futurist.

As a curious complement to this last concern, it is also true that Superlative technocentrisms inspire in some of their adherents a kind of quiescent "apoliticism" or what they will even insist is an active "anti-politicism," but one that functions primarily to endorse key social and cultural assumptions of the status quo. This result is, of course, doubly ironic, since this is politics figured as anti-politics, but also because this essentially conservative attitude tends to frame itself precisely to the contrary as a radically transformational and forward-looking viewpoint, hence, once again, my designation of such discourses as retro-futurist.

Whatever these practical anti-democratizing effects, we also do well to bear in mind the basic incompatibility between a commitment to democratic politics and any exclusive or even primary commitment to sub(cult)ural or identity politics in the first place (a point not confined to the identity politics of sub(cult)ural futurisms). Politics is the ongoing contingent reconciliation of the aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders with whom one shares the world, and democratic politics struggles to provide nonviolent alternatives to duressed resolution of disputes by ensuring that ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.

Democracy then, the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, is not a project to implement some ideal order the form of which is known to some in advance of its actual realization, but is instead an ongoing and in fact interminable project of democratization, an opportunistic, collaborative, agonistic, improvisatory, experimentalist, never-ending struggle in which people have a say in shaping developments that affect them and work to implement architectures to facilitate ever more people having ever more of a say in shaping such developments.

Sub(cult)ural identification relies for its force on dis-identification with those who are cast as outside the bounds of that culture, and sub(cult)ural politics consists of policing those bounds, ensuring the continence of the culture of identification by ensuring its homogeneity (where it matters) within the boundary, defending the boundary itself from impurity and intrusion, and usually by seeking to expand the boundary through conversion and conquest beyond it.

Where politics seeks the reconciliation of differences (and many political variations are content to effect such reconciliation by violent means), sub(cult)ural politics always seeks to prevail over differences, to sweep the world, to implement its sub(cult)ural vision as a totality. Strictly speaking, then, sub(cult)ural politics are not politics at all, but the substitution of moralizing for politics.

Even political modalities that are more embracing of violence than I am as a properly democratically-minded person will still register the ineradicable fact of pluralism in the provision they make for resistance and revolt. Moralizing, on the contrary, in seeking to universalize the continence and homogeneity of moral-identification is always an anti-politics seeking to overturn the political as such. Techno-utopian discourses, especially in their Superlative and sub(cult)ural modalities are just an urgent contemporary illustration of a familiar and general tendency. It is in that light that we should understand the too-eager Superlative embrace of "the future" that obliterates open futurity, as well as the too-eager Superlative identification with a post-human species at the cost of dis-identification with the humanity with whom we actually share the world and actually share the work of collaboration and contestation in the present that opens onto futurity.