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

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Are You Sure? Really? (Response to MA Part Four)

In a surprise move, Anissimov writes: "I totally agree with your whole paragraph about technology."

Here is the paragraph in question:
It is actually a difficult thing to grasp just what movement transhumanism is coherently imagined to consist of when Hughes himself goes on to celebrate a "big tent" in which liberals, conservatives, anarchists, minarchists, anarcho-capitalists, greens, technocrats, and so on all presumably contribute their measure to the "unique transhumanist vision." To the extent that transhumanism, whatever else it is supposed to be, is surely something to do with "technology" and the historical play of "technoscientific" change, it seems to me to matter enormously that the sorts of things that are going to be called "technology" in the first place, the sorts of uses to which these "technologies" are properly to be put, the ways in which one will seek to facilitate the emergence and articulate the circulation of "technoscientific" realities in the actual world will differ quite radically in their actual substance according to whether one is speaking from a liberal, conservative, anarchist, minarchist, anarcho-capitalist, green, or technocratic vantage. I have often reiterated that the word "technology" functions to conceal more than it reveals, that there is really no such thing as "technology in general" especially if one means to attribute to this "technology" certain monolithic or inevitable developmental outcomes, aspirations, tendencies. What passes for technology, what constitutes its substance, what articulates its developmental play in the world are all definitively determined by political, social, cultural, discursive factors. To propose that one can "advocate" a technology politics indifferent to the definitive differences actual political differences imbue into the constitution of technologies as such is worse than completely misunderstanding the very phenomenon under discussion (although that is a pretty fatal problem for those who are presumably defined foremost by that very phenomenon they are so disastrously misconstruing), it is actually to participate in a disavowed politics of technoscientific development that tends to conduce especially to the benefit of very familiar authoritarian right-wing political values and strategies. This is the point of the piece of mine that Bauwens posted in the first place, to which I already linked above.


I find it very difficult to square Anissimov's reported agreement with my conviction that "there is really no such thing as 'technology in general' especially if one means to attribute to this 'technology' certain monolithic or inevitable developmental outcomes, aspirations, tendencies," with what Anissimov talk about when he is talking about "technology."

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