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

Sunday, August 09, 2009

The Derangement of Technodevelopmental Discourse

Given the scope, intensity, and dynamics of technodevelopment in an era in which states justify their rule so conspicuously through the language of general welfare and effective social administration, and given the way technoscientific change can scramble the available political, cultural, and social terrain in ways that incessantly provide otherwise unexpected occasions for the renegotiation of authority and position it should be no surprise that discourses promising technical foresight and successfully articulating developmental policy have come into the foreground of the properly political imagination as never before.

The question whether this is for good or ill for those of us who love democracy is beside the point -- it is a fact with which we must probably come to terms for now, like it or not.

I just want to stress here that the idealized projections of technodevelopmental outcomes suffusing the discourse of superlative futurology profoundly undermine our capacity to think sensibly about technodevelopmental problems and possibilities as they actually play out in the world -- quite apart from questions whether this should be the criterion against which political discourse is judged in the first place or not.

Despite the charges of luddism and scientific ignorance that get lobbed in my direction from Robot Cultists who don't like to hear a muzzy poetical fashionably-nonsensical humanities scholar declare them failures in terms of the science they themselves claim their province while denying it to the likes of me, the simple truth of the matter is that I am the first person to grant and even insist upon the salience of actually-emerging non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medical techniques, actually-emerging malware and network security threats, actually-emerging problems and possibilities arising out of the nanoscale from labs (many involving my own brilliant students at Berkeley, after all!) working on synthetic and molecular biology and biochemistry.

I am completely invested personally in the politics of copyfight and a2k (access-to-knowledge) and net neutrality and grasping the significance of emerging p2p-formations for political education, agitation, and organization -- all themes that crop up with regularity in my courses.

But I find it frankly implausible in the extreme that the actual politics of emerging and ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle (let alone progressive-democratic versions of these politics such as my own) are helped along in any way at all at any time at all by the diversion of attention from ongoing and emerging problems and possibilities into discussions of non-existing non-proximate not-exactly coherent handwaving about "radical longevity medicine," non-existing non-proximate not-exactly coherent handwaving about "digital mind-uploading," non-existing non-proximate not-exactly coherent handwaving about "superintelligent artificial intelligence," or non-existing non-proximate not-exactly coherent handwaving about "programmable multipurpose nanofactories," and so on.

These futurological idealizations divert attention from real problems that are already difficult to explain to laypeople into abstractions that activate hyperbolic fears and fantasies, encourage sensationalist media narratives, often complement hyperbolic verging on fraudulent advertising and marketing of consumer goods, play into collective anxieties about disruptive change in an era of neoliberal/neoconservative (ie: corporatist-militarist) precariousness and environmental threat, all to no good purpose but the usual bread and circuses that keep incumbents in power and in the money while the vulnerable suffer and their talents and intelligences are lost to history in a pointless struggle for survival in a world where everybody could flourish to the benefit of all.

But worse than distraction from actually-emerging problems and possibilities, I want to add that in my view if anything even remotely like "radical longevity medicine," "nonbiological elaborated intelligence," or "generally-available multi-purpose programmable nanofactories" were ever eventually to arrive on the scene I am absolutely certain that the substance of their technical development as well as the substance of the politics out of which their emancipatory and problematic worldly institutionalization would certainly arise would have taken place in the series of piecemeal struggles on day to day technoscience questions among the actual stakeholders to those struggles, not one of which will ever be clarified by futurologists squabbling in the abstract and years in advance about which future is the most "likely" one to emerge or having "political" fights in the abstract and years in advance about whether these future developments will "likely" be more democratic or more authoritarian.

It's bad enough that anything remotely like a marginally more effective therapy for Parkinson's Disease will have to slog its way through a swamp of know-nothings who will want to freak out hysterically about "Death Panels" euthanizing their grandma and Clone Armies rioting in the streets, but to have superlative futurologists going off the deep end in precisely the opposite direction, pronouncing the deeper significance of any medical advance to be that it is yet another stepping stone along the Royal Road consummating in the inevitable arrival of techno-immortal sooper-geniuses with comic book muscles living out their lives in tech-heaven is just as deranged and deranging.

That is to say, quite apart from the fact that futurological idealizations distract from actually-urgent technodevelopmental politics (not to mention deranging their terms by infusing them with hyperbole and pathology), they don't even contribute to the politics through which anything like the remote outcomes they prefer to reality would actually play out were they to arrive in anything like a recognizable form to those who indulge them here and now to the expense of sensible politics here and now.

Never have we more urgently needed to talk sense about technoscience, and never have our available discourses -- from prevailing neoliberal/neoconservative global development discourses to the clarifying extremities of superlative futurology -- been more thoroughly dedicated to the derangement of that possibility.

2 comments:

jimf said...

> I just want to stress here that the idealized projections
> of technodevelopmental outcomes suffusing the discourse
> of superlative futurology profoundly undermine our capacity
> to think sensibly about technodevelopmental problems and
> possibilities as they actually play out in the world -- quite
> apart from questions whether this should be the criterion against
> which political discourse is judged in the first place or not.

Example (from memory) of what passed for political discussion on
the Extropians' mailing list back in 2000, on the eve of Bush II.

Singularitarian Guru: Given that getting to the Singularity
is **the** most important thing in the world right now, the **only**
criterion for making such a mundane choice as between a
Republican or Democratic candidate for President should be:
which one will conduce to bringing about the Singularity soonest?
In my opinion, the free flow of capital will lubricate the
technical innovation needed for the Singularity; therefore,
the Republican candidate is the obvious choice. Choosing
on **any** other basis would be immoral -- every second
the Singularity is delayed will cost X number of human lives
(and yadda yadda yadda. . .).

-----------------------------
IBM Songbook, No. 74 (to the tune of Jingle Bells)

IBM, happy men, smiling all the way,
oh what fun it is to sell our products night and day.
IBM, Watson men, partners of TJ,
In his service to mankind - that's why we are so gay.


Quoted at
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~tpp/G5AHOC/TOTNpart2.html

jimf said...

> [G]etting to the Singularity is **the** most important thing
> in the world right now. . .

Which is, of course, different from the following -- how, exactly? [*]

"Bill Moyers reminds us that fundamentalist theology began affecting
U.S. policy, domestic and foreign, with the Reagan administration.
Moyers recalls that 'James G. Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting
natural resources was unimportant in the light of the imminent return
of Jesus Christ.' Watt, Reagan's Secretary of the Interior and a
fundamentalist Christian, claimed that there is no need to support
treaties, protocols, and agreement intended to protect the air, the
seas, wildlife, and forest preserves because 'we don't know how much
time we have before Jesus returns.' In public testimony he said,
'After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.'[**]"

-- Mel White, _Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right_,
Chapter 7, "Fascism: The Politics of Fundamentalism", p. 218
http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Gone-Bad-Dangers-Christian/dp/1585425311

[**] Bill Moyers, "Armageddon & the Environment," published December 6, 2004
by CommonDreams.org

[*] I suppose a Singularitarian would say it's different because
one is false and the other is true. YMMV, of course.