Futurological Brickbats

Here is an anthology of all my occasional "Futurological Brickbats" posts, arranged and updated roughly chronologically. Further elaboration of many of the ideas in these more aphoristic assertions are archived under the topic headings Futurology Against Ecology and The Superlative Summary, and some of these aphorisms were culled from these longer pieces as well.

I. The words "technology" and "democracy" are much more like verbs than the nouns they appear to be. They are words that denote ongoing collective struggles, and collective in a sense that contains both collaborations and contestations. And these struggles, these verbs we stabilize for a time sometimes into nouns, become in those moments of relative stability like hand-holds across the sheer cliff face of social struggle in history. I say that "technology" is simply the ongoing collective prosthetic re-elaboration of inter-personal agency, while "democracy" is simply the ongoing collective implementation of the idea that ever more people should have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.

II. For nearly a century by now we have lived in an epoch for which the seductive, disruptive, devastating intensity and ubiquity of our technique is such that whatever we mean by "democracy" now or next -- unless it truly understands, actively takes up, responds through, and manages to direct the energies released by that technique -- will surely fail in its emancipatory aspirations, will fail utterly in the face of technocratic tyranny or the mad insensitivity of reductive idealism. And at the same time, and for the same reasons, whatever we mean by "technology" now or next -- unless the distribution of its costs, its risks, its benefits, and its promises are made to express the aspirations of the actual diversity of stakeholders to its impacts -- will surely destroy the world.

III. Expressing one another, befuddling one another, enabling one another, inter-implicated in one another, technology and democracy are now caught up in the circuit of interminable technodevelopmental social struggle, and now constitute the ongoing conversation in which humanity continually redetermines the meanings and the movements available to it, and rededicates itself to that futurity the opening of which is itself the space in which humanity knows itself becoming itself.

IV. A peer is not an equal -- for there are no equals in a world of differences -- the peer is the one who appears in the public square, and by virtue of the public square, be it the polis of the streets or of the nets, and who appears as one who contributes, contests, collaborates, has a stake in the shared and made world precisely in her difference from others who also appear and associate in company. The ethos of politics, peer-to-peer, which is one and the same as the ethos of democratization, is always the interminable dynamic of equity-in-diversity.

V. Futurity is a register of freedom, "The Future" another prison-house built to confine it. Futurity is the openness in the present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of calculating, contending, and collaborative stakeholders who struggle to make and remake the shared world, peer to peer. Futurity cannot be delineated but only lived, in serial presents attesting always unpredictably to struggle and to expression. "The Future," to the contrary, brandishing the shackle of its definite article, is always described from a parochial present and is always a funhouse mirror reflecting a parochial present back to itself, amplifying its desires and fears, confirming its prejudices, reassuring its Believers that the Key to History is in their hands.

VI. All progress is always progress toward an end, but there can be no progress in the formation, expression, and evaluation of ends themselves, only either their circumscription or proliferation. To treat progress as an end-in-itself is to relinquish the meaningfulness without which any notion of progress at all is finally unintelligible.

VII. The discourses of futurology are in the business (and it is always a business) of investing the vicissitudes of ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle with the auras of novelty, nostalgia, or inevitability and then peddling these evocations of mood as "truths" or "trends." Never once has a futurologist made a contribution to actual sense or to the solution of actually shared problems by means of this odd operation, but what a business it is.

VIII. Futurologists really have only four stories to tell with which they account for any real or imagined device, technique, or developmental moment: Genesis, Resurrection, Ascension, and Apocalypse. As any evangelist will tell you, that's more than enough to fleece a flock with.

IX. Futurism is not Foresight -- and it is farther still from wisdom -- in the same ways that, and for the same reasons that speculation is not investment… marketing is not deliberation… hyperbole is not critique… a syllogism is not a plan… a scenario is not a story… a calculation is not a judgment…

X. An arrow can open a wound but it cannot open the clearing we fill with our freedom, peer-to-peer. And it does not matter how much you amplify the arrow's force -- be it to the force of a bullet or an intercontinental missile or an interstellar probe... And it does not matter how much you elaborate the arrow's trajectory -- be it to the charting of the fleet fluctuation of an electron or to a computer modeling a galaxy's career through billions of years... No arrow will ever provide the way to the substance of freedom. Freedom is lived in fragile, palpable presents, peer-to-peer, in the presence of such equity-in-diversity as is opening in eruption, moment to moment, as appears in interruption, peer to peer.

XI. The one who sells you force for freedom, the one who sells you the fraud of "The Future" for futurity is one who deals in death and death-in-life, and you will find he has little but money in his mouth.

XII. To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms.

XIII. All culture is prosthetic, all prostheses are culture.

XIV. Discourses of "Medical Enhancement" always presume that certain incumbent interests or self-appointed biomoralist elites are authorized to designate what constitutes an "enhanced" human capacity, morphology, or lifeway -- whatever informed, nonduressed consenting persons might say to the contrary -- and hence all such discourses express a factual or aspirational eugenic outlook. Anyone who would claim or aspire to engineer an "optimal," idealized, postulated homo superior with which they presently identify, always at the cost of a dis-identification with the lifeway diversity of humanity with whom they actually share the world, are advocating a de facto eugenicist politics, whatever their claims or desires to the contrary.

Discourses of "Medical Preservationism" always presume that certain incumbent interests or self-appointed biomoralist elites are authorized to designate what constitutes a "normal" or "natural" human capacity, morphology, or lifeway that must be protected and insulated from change -- whatever informed, nonduressed consenting persons might say to the contrary -- and hence all such discourses constitute a factual or aspirational eugenic outlook as well. Anyone who would ban reasonably safe, actually wanted, but non-normalizing medical interventions in an effort to "preserve" a static, idealized, postulated homo naturalis with which they presently identify, always at the cost of a dis-identification with the lifeway diversity of humanity with whom they actually share the world, are likewise advocating a de facto eugenicist politics, whatever their claims or desires to the contrary.

XV. Iconoclasts should always smash their mirrors first.

XVI. To care most about things that are merely not impossible is simply not sensible.

XVII. It is curious the number of twenty-first century futurologists whose notions of political economy remain firmly in the eighteenth century.

XVIII. To be marketable is not the same thing as to be insightful.

XIX. Every priestly peddler of immortality has died. Every one. And this is most certainly true as well of the priests of faithly medicine and reductionist scientism. To deny death out of a fear of it is to court a death in life worse by far than the death that is surely coming for you, for while immortality is not possible for you, it is indeed possible, and good, to live.

XX. If you would find a conformist, look first to those who declare their faith in Progress.

XXI. To profess the dream of making an intelligent robot is always to confess the nightmare that one imagines oneself already merely a mineral.

XXII. The answer to the Fermi Paradox may simply be that we aren't invited to the party because so many humans are boring assholes. As one small evidence in this matter it is noteworthy that so many humans would appear to be so flabbergastingly immodest and immature as to think it a "paradoxical" result to discover the Universe is not an infinitely faceted mirror reflecting back at us on its every face our own incarnations and exhibitions of intelligence.

XXIII. Whenever a software coder fancies that his trade renders him a philosopher, an economist, a poet, or, bless his heart, a biologist you can expect no end of foolishness and mischief from him.

XXIV. It is always magical thinking to declare an outcome need only be profitable for it to be possible.

XXV. Our foolish futurologists are peddling their wishful wares unaware that our world is the ruin of the futurological foolishness of their fathers.

XXVI. Those who dream of making themselves gods through technology are lying to themselves not least because god is already a dream we made ourselves through the technology of lying.

XVII. In their obsession with speed -- with their fancy of an "acceleration of acceleration" -- and with a metalization of the body -- with their fancy of cyborgic-ecstasies and "techno-immortalization" -- among so many other conceits the Italian Futurists anticipate quite a lot of the quirks of "transhumanist" superlative futurological handwaving. Like the transhuman-types, the Italian Futurists were mostly just alienated white boys barking and banging into one another, flirting with fascism -- all "optimizing" humans with science, stainless steel technocracy, hostility to "degenerate" humanities, soft-porn and advertising imagery mistaken for art, disasterbatory Götterdämmerung fantasies of bad god AIs and nano-goo... But unlike our Robot Cultists today, many of the Italian Futurists at least could write reasonably well -- no doubt due to their dabbling with avant-garde art movements. Most of the techno-utopian writing and faith-based initiatives coming from the various transhumanist sects, extropians, nano-cornucopiasts, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, geo-engineers, and digital utopians, sounds something like a pastiche of Ayn Rand potboilers, an instruction manual for assembling a lawn mower, a right-wing ideologue's broadcast, and garbage-disposal-loud commercials hawking teeth whitening and boner-pills after midnight.

XXVIII. If I cannot dance I want no part in your reductive interpretations of evolution.

XXIX. We can use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house, indeed we must do so, because in taking up the master's tools and turning them to unheard of tasks we make the tools our own.

XXX. There is nothing more pathetic than boys who strive to sound prophetic.

XXXI. Computer science in its theological guise aims less at the ultimate creation of artificial intelligence than in the ubiquitous imposition of artificial imbecillence.

XXXII. The technological, properly so-called, is finally more stylish than it is truthful.

XXXIII. There's a sucker born every minute, and every futurologist you will ever meet is either one of them or hoping like hell you are.

XXXIV. The prefix "bio," when appended to the word "ethics," tends to have the curious effect of draining all the life out of ethics.

XXXV. The breathlessly ramifying "techno-ethical" pseudo-disciplines -- bio-ethics, neuro-ethics, net-ethics, nano-ethics, robo-ethics, and so on -- should all be regarded as essentially public relations and marketing subdisciplines, very much in the spirit of the "business ethics" out of which all these latest not-ethics by way of hyphenated-ethics have sprung.

XXXVI. Institutional "ethicians" are not educators so much as they are salesmen. And they should be treated as such: that is to say, in the expectation of attack or fraud.

XXXVII. The speculative fictions and scenarios and games of the futurologists are "speculative" less in the sense of critical thought than in the sense of financial speculation, just as their "futures" are far closer to the ones that get traded on stock exchanges as bundled-risk pseudo-commodities than to the substantial futurity that names the openness in every present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of its stakeholders, peer to peer.

XXXVIII. Your wishes are not insights, although they may provide insights for your therapist.

XXXIX. Futurological "optimism" is always a crassly opportunistic affair. Whenever a pop technologist puts his "Can Do" face on, you can be sure he fancies he sees a mark. Futurological declarations that there are No Limits! always ultimately translate to the customary conviction of very pampered and irresponsible people that there will always be other folks on hand to clean up their messes for them.

XL. From digitization to financialization to logo-ization to strategies of labor outsourcing and crowdsourcing, profit via cost-externalization, reckless loans bundled into phony solidities, promotional re-packaging of the status quo as "novelty" and "progress": Time and time again neoliberalism indulges in fraudulent schemes in which insubstantial wishes, notions, promises are peddled through deceptions and misdirections of attention as if they were substantial products, or, precisely to the contrary, misdirects attention away from substantial costs and risks onto comparatively insubstantial geographical or futurological distances, where devastating labor conditions and environmental impacts and the tragic personal dislocations of market volatility vanish from our substantial concern.

XLI. The devastating delusion of neoliberal immaterialism ultimately plays out in its fervent disavowals, first, of the very material bodies and lifeways of the planetary Precariat that are obliterated in the supposedly frictionless flows of informal-informational capital, second, of very material bombs and bullets of neoconservative militarism that indispensably compel and enforce the adherence of the planetary Precariat to the supposedly "free trade" of disinformed, duressed, vacuous-voluntary libertarianism, and third of the very material metabolic limits and geophysical conditions of a precarious Planet wounded, potentially beyond healing, by human enterprises driven by fantasies of infinite growth, infinite profit, infinite resources, infinite exploitation, infinite waste, infinite gratification, infinite willfulness.

XLII. It is bad enough that countless people are too ignorant or too complacent or simply too distracted by the demands of survival in the world of neoliberal-neoconservative corporate-military precarity to grasp the relevance of climate change and resource descent on their own prospects for survival and flourishing in their lifetimes and the lifetimes of their children and neighbors and fellow earthlings, peer to peer. But futurologists are actually directing their cheerful vacuities to audiences who do manage to know enough and care enough to grasp that there are real problems that confront us all, but then work to redirect their concerns away from actual agitation, education, and organizing into patterns of complacent consumption and passive wish-fulfillment fantasies in the service of the ongoing profit-taking of incumbent interests, corporate, military, and industrial-statist. Can you imagine a more irresponsible or outrageous occupation for actually thoughtful and articulate people to indulge? How about engaging in such acts of deception and distraction and de-politicization and then trying to peddle the enterprise as a kind of "environmentalism"!

XLIV. The futurological conceit prevails in the conjuration of "Green Cities" as a mirage behind which vanishes our grasp of unsustainable, ecosystem-disruptive, toxic, polluted, badly planned, scarcely governed, overcrowded actual cities and the politics churning and stratifying the ongoing life and change of these actual cities for their actual inhabitants, deranging it into a glib generalization of advocacy for efficiencies of density and design and digitality rarely in evidence, and mostly from the mouths of and to the benefit of elite-incumbents who prefer that the status quo remain immune from real contestation.

XLV. The futurological conceit prevails in the conjuration of "Geo-engineering" as a mirage behind which vanishes our grasp that in this Anthropocene Epoch, human-caused climate change imperils the dynamism of feedback-mechanisms that constitutes the actually-frail biosphere, deranging it into a glib generalization that corporate-military-industrial incumbents will solve the crisis of pollution for us by means that persistently resist coherent conceptual, actual consensus scientific, or legible public policy specification.

XLVI. The futurological conceit prevails in the conjuration of "Nanotechnology" (or "nanofactories" or "utility fog") as a mirage behind which vanishes our grasp of pragmatic and regulatory and ethical concerns about the useful or toxic or costly properties of nanoscale biochemical interventions and processes and materials, deranging these into a glib generalization that "science" and "innovation" will "solve the crisis" of poverty or scarcity or even aging and disease by means of a Superabundance that persistently resists coherent conceptual, actual consensus scientific, or legible public policy specification. And futurological "nanotechnology" is just one of delirious series of delusions and frauds of superabundance, from the redemptive promise in the aftermath of Hiroshima of nuclear energy too cheap to meter but in reality too costly and too lethal to bear, to the plastic fantastic promising luxuries to the masses but in reality cheapening and poisoning everyday life, to computers and the next new media promising everyone a voice but without providing anyone a responsive ear and promising a liberation from space but in reality enabling our bosses to invade our privacy with disciplinary eyes and incessant demands, to digital utopians who promised an immersion in better-than-real dreams and provided instead our immersion in the nightmare of life-indifferent global flows of digital capital.

XLVII. The futurological conceit prevails in the conjuration of "AI" or "friendly superintelligence" and its arrival in a "Singularity" as a mirage behind which vanishes our grasp of pragmatic and regulatory concerns about network security and the brittleness of legacy software or the user friendliness of expert systems, deranging these into a glib generalization about the proximate arrival of a history-ending post-biological super-intelligence or post-parental Robot God that persistently resists coherent conceptual, actual consensus scientific, or legible public policy specification.

XLVIII. The futurological conceit prevails in the conjuration of "enhancement" and "longevity" as a mirage behind which vanishes our grasp of the quandaries of emerging non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive interventions, and for those seeking to provide reliable access to knowledge of medical costs, risks, and benefits to facilitate informed consent and equitable policy in the face of proliferating wanted and viable therapeutic and lifeway possibilities, deranging all this into a glib generalization about "optimality," "enhancement" (as though there were any actual or possible consensus as to what constitutes an enhancement or optimality to everyone, everywhere, in respect to all possible ends whatever the expense to others, and as though there were a special longevity medicine apart from the health conferred always already by any successful therapeutic intervention into disease) or, even worse, into a glib generalization about the arrival of a postulated dreamed-of or dreaded "Post-Human" species, super-human, techno-immortalized, Homo Superior, all of which resists coherent conceptual, actual consensus scientific, or legible public policy specification.

XLIX. In every instance the futurological conceit evacuates substance -- some of it urgent -- and replaces it with faith-based initiatives and wish-fulfillment fantasies mostly to the benefit of incumbent interests and mostly in the service of prevalent authorities. And this remains true even for those futurologists who are superficially or even earnestly devoted to progressive and radical left politics, since the reactionary effects of futurist, always functionally retro-futurist, ideologies and movement-formations are structural even when they are not intentional -- though, it must be added, for plenty of self-identified futurologists the reactionary elite-incumbent, corporate-militarist, extractive-industrial, racist-bioreductionist politics are plenty intentional as well.

L. To declare oneself a partisan in a politics that is defined by a terrain that is simply "for" or "against" technology -- where technology is treated as an abstraction indifferent to the actually politically indispensable endlessly different ways techniques are historically and positionally deployed and understood -- is to engage in a politics that takes as its point of departure a de-politicizing evacuation of all the actual political substance at hand.

LI. To declare oneself a partisan in an abstract political movement "for" or "against" any of the primary preoccupations of the customary futurologist, "AI," "Enhancement," "Geo-Engineering," "Green Cities," "Longevity," "Nanotechnology," "Robot Bodies," "Robot Slaves," "Singularity," "Ubiquitous Computation," "Virtual Reality," is always to evacuate of substance the actual stakeholder politics through which every detail and development of every relevant "technique" or "device" or "outcome" even remotely associated with the topic at hand is researched, tested, published, elaborated, understood, taught, regulated, priced, marketed, implemented, distributed, taken up, re-purposed, poeticized, narrativized in history, in struggle, in the world.

LII. The futurologist is engaged in an anti-political politics of de-politicization, abjuring the field of technodevelopmental social struggle, the actual field of diverse stakeholder struggle over the distribution of costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change, for an indulgence in wish-fulfillment fantasies and moody evocations of dread and desire, for a passive almost anesthetized consumption of a generalized spectacle of development on terms provided by incumbent interests whose stakes can never be assumed to be shared by the rest of us.

LIII. Superlative futurological movements and sub(cult)ures like the transhumanists, extropians, singularitarians, and techno-immortalists are actually organized formations of faith-based wish-fulfillment fantasy translating familiar religious aspirations for "transcendence" into superficially techno-scientific terms, denying the this-worldly present for an imaginary mutually-reinforcing sub(cult)ural inhabitation of "The Future" shared by the faithful, and disdaining the lifeway diversity of the peers with whom they share the present world for an identification with an idealized post-human species (usually either enhanced, cyborgic, robotic, or an altogether alien AI-Godhead).

LIV. Futurological discourse in the more prevailing and mainstream forms that suffuse neoliberal and neoconservative corporate-military global development discourse may not exhibit the titillating photogenic weirdness of the superlative and sub(cult)ural futurologists, but it is to be noted that they too tend to indulge in market fundamentalist and techno-determinist pieties comparably immune to critical scrutiny and to thrive on the denial of worldly material reality, much preferring to enthuse about financial instruments and leveraged buyouts over substantial investments, brands and logos and attention economies over substantial goods, marketing and promotion and services over substantial production, frictionless digital networks and currency exchanges and informational flows over substantial human needs and substantial environmental limits.

LV. While Ayn Raelian Robot Cultists like the so-called "Extropian Transhumanists" of the irrationally exuberant dot.bomb epoch of the 1990s were honest enough, or foolish enough, actually to declare outright that they imagined themselves members of a "movement" that would somehow surely end both death and taxes -- and I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether through this declaration they announced most clearly their infantilism, their stupidity, or their insanity -- it is crucial to grasp that a deep and damaging denialism about existential limits and personal vulnerabilities drives more prevailing futurological developmental discourses in much the same way -- and may indeed suffuse the whole of our public discourse by now, shaped as it is most conspicuously by the genres of promotion, self-promotion, salesmanship, hyperbole, denialism, and fraud.

LVI. Futurologists keep confusing making bets with having thoughts.

LVII. Whenever I hear the word "trend," I reach for my brain.

LVIII. Futurological predictions are just prescriptions without the courage of convictions.

LIX. Evolution is not a design process, and no implemented design is more natural than any other. Futurologists attributing to their preferred designs the inspiration or force of the natural are always either peddling parochialisms with deceptive analogies or foolishly mistaking ornaments for instruments.

LX. The future, as it arrives, always kicks you in the crystal ball.

LXI. It is only a magical universe that can be a tragical one. The scientific imaginary cranks out nothing but consumers and coincidences. "Coincidence" is so much the spell that dispels magic it is easy to confuse its charm with the magic it displaces. And while it is true that science's toypile can never connect consumers with Heaven, Job's dungheap never managed that trick for sinners either.

LXII. Separating people from their money promising they can get rich investing in the Next Big Thing or reassuring tragic gizmo-fetishes they are truly on the Bleeding Edge doesn't make you any kind of intellectual. It almost certainly does make you a scam artist, whether you are actually in on the scam yourself or not.

LXIII. All Your Gene Are Belong to Us

LXIV. The Futurological Future: Same As It Ever Was.

LXV. The McKinley Administration + Robots. Sure, it sounds like feudalism, only... it's The Future!

LXVI. Far from endowing our artifacts with intelligence, we are mistaking for such endowment the process by which we are becoming ever more superficial and uncritical through our mediation and consumption of unintelligent artifacts.

LXVII. In coming to terms with the present, especially in grasping the meaning of what has taken us by surprise, we understand and, better still, become understanding. In predicting the future, especially in proposing coinages that would work as spells to dispel being taken by surprise, we become ever more susceptible to fraud and, worse still, become frauds. Where thinking is concerned, this is a variation on the difference between investment and speculation.