Futurological Self-Marginalization, Futurological Dissemination

If, like me, you spend time reading pieces from across the more left-leaning reality-based technoscience blogs collected together at Seed's Science Blogs (like Pharyngula), and the stuff by Mooney and others at Science Progress (under the auspices of the Center for American Progress), and the more pop-cultural stuff at places like io9, you'll know that there is an already varied and vigorous progressive-democratic broadly-secularist technoscience-literate conversation out there, a space that contains many thousands and thousands of people who

a, disagree with one another amicably on scores of issues while remaining broadly secularist and democratic and fact-based and proudly geeky,

b, who geek-out on futurological themes like Cylon uploading and artist renderings of space elevators without ever losing track of the difference between science and science fiction,

c, who already agree as a matter of course that libertopian schemes to dismantle civilization in the name of "spontaneous" market forces that don't exist except as a shorthand for incumbent interests always only leads to waste and disaster,

d, who accept the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is non-negligible and draw the sensible conclusion that this urgently demands human remediation at the level of policy and law,

e, who know that "race-science" is overwhelmingly a matter of pseudo-science functioning as a scarcely-stealthed proxy for ugly racist attitudes and inspires and "justifies" policy decisions with inequitable and deeply damaging impacts to fellow citizens,

f, who know full-well that Creation-science is not science but, at best, an aesthetic viewpoint often functioning as a signal of moralistic Christianist identification against secularism, and so on.

As I say, there are thousands upon thousands of secular-democratic folks out there already arguing for consensus science against creationist nonsense and for more research money for safe effective genetic therapies and for the implementation of renewable energy technologies and who are taking up p2p-tools to facilitate democratizing education, agitation, and organization here and now.

You can be sure that these thousands upon thousands of mainstream democratically-minded technoscientifically-literate multiculturally-celebratory folks are a force incomparably more rich, diverse, progressive, and relevant than the cohort of card-carrying members of futurological Robot Cults, transhumanists, extropians, techno-immortalists, cybernetic-totalists, singularitarians, nano-cornucopiasts could ever convene, past, present, and -- I certainly sincerely and strongly hope -- in presents to come.

There is simply no sensible, progressive reason on earth one would join a Robot Cult or take up their superlative futurological frames -- and those who do so should be exposed and marginalized whenever they seek to peddle their positions as either scientific (despite their distance from the consensus of practicing scientists on question after question after question) or democratizing (despite their distance from the language, alliances, campaigns, and concerns of secular-democratic education, agitation, and organizing on issue after issue after issue) as a result.

Beyond this, I do think that we should devote serious attention to the ways in which the figures, frames, and formulations of Robot Cultists provide insights in their very clarifying extremity of comparable arguments and assumptions in more prevailing mainstream neoliberal/neoconservative (ie: corporatist-militarist) global developmental discourse -- with its technocratic elitism, its commitments to "competition" and "innovation" in terms that always only benefit incumbent interests, its triumphal reductionist scientism and addiction to industrial technofixes, its treatment of parochial lifeway preferences as prior to political contestation, and so on.

These attitudes and formulations, consummated in the superlative extremity of the anxious or ecstatic wish-fulfillment fantasies and faith-based initiatives of the Robot Cultists, are playing out in the real world of technodevelopmental social struggle at the level of public discourse, policy deliberation, international law, advertising imagery and the popular imagination, here and now, often to devastating effect, the mainstream technocrats and superlative futurologists offering up a funhouse mirror quite as much as a constrast to one another.