All Futurisms Tend to Be Functionally Retro-Futuristic in Their Political Substance (Part Three of Three)

Want to Start at the Beginning?

I want to return by way of conclusion to the last point in the preceding analysis. I maintained that Stewart Brand's glib futurological declaration that "cities are greener than countryside" when actually-existing cities almost never straightforwardly are so is functionally correlated argumentatively to another of his futurological declarations, namely, that "genetically modified crops," treated as a monolith indifferent to the endlessly many variations that such modification has and can take, are "necessary to feed the world's growing population."

I want to talk a little more about the politics of such generic claims, and of the retro-futurist politics I would say are exemplified by Brand's typically futurological gesture in making them.

To say that "Cities" (offered up as some broad decontextualized and in fact non-contextualizable and even insistently anti-contextualizating mode of abstraction) are "greener than the countryside" when of course the overabundant majority of actually-existing cities absolutely are not anything of the kind, and to say so just because one can imagine cities in the abstract that could in principle manage such a feat is to indulge in a kind of hyperbole fairly typical of salesmanship, and yet it is in fact to tell a kind of lie, it is to engage in an act of deception.

This needs to be faced for what it is.

To say "cities are greener than the countryside" even though there is no reason to think any actual cities are anything like even being on the developmental road to incarnating such principles, all the while offering up nothing that translates to realizable concrete policy prescriptions through which actually-existing cities might actually arrive at such a state in a time frame relevant to the lives of the living people to whom one is making one's celebratory appeal, is worse than to lie, it is to participate in a kind of scam.

This too needs to be faced for what it is.

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 we need to face the fact that futurologists are actually directing their own cheerful vacuities to precisely the 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"!

Another disturbing fact for us all to mull over.

I believe that the futurological gesture illustrated through the conjuration of "Green Cities" as a mirage behind which actual cities vanish, and in which advocacy for the resulting futurological mirage becomes a second-order mirage behind which the actual politics stratifying the ongoing life and change of actual cities for their actual inhabitants is likewise made to vanish (mostly to the benefit of those who prefer that the status quo remain immune to real contestation) is precisely replicated by the same gesture in one futurological domain after another:

It prevails in those futurological discourses which would misdirect the grasp that in our 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 might "solve the crisis" of pollution through some non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "Geo-engineering" that resists actual consensus scientific or legible public policy specification.

It prevails in those futurological discourses which would misdirect pragmatic and regulatory concerns about the useful or toxic or costly properties of nanoscale biochemical interventions and processes and materials, deranging it into a glib generalization that "science" and "innovation" might "solve the crisis" of poverty or scarcity or even aging through some non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "Nanotechnology" (or "nanofactories" or "utility fog") that resists actual consensus scientific or legible public policy specification.

It prevails in those futurological discourses which would misdirect pragmatic and regulatory concerns about network security and the brittleness of legacy software or the user friendliness of expert systems, deranging it into a glib generalization about the proximate arrival of some non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "AI" or "postbiological superintelligence" or a post-historical "Singularity" that resists actual consensus scientific or legible public policy specification.

It prevails in those futurological discourses which would misdirect attention from the quandaries of non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive interventions, and their confusions for policy makers seeking to provide reliable knowledge to facilitate informed consent and equitable policy in the face of proliferating viable lifeway possibilities, deranging all this into a glib generalization about a non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "enhancement" (as though there were any actual or possible consensus as to what constitutes an enhancement to everyone everywhere in the service of all possible ends whatever the expense to others) or, even worse, into a glib generalization about the arrival of a postulated dreamed-of or dreaded "Post-Human" Species, Homo Superior, all of which, again, resists actual consensus scientific or legible public policy specification.

Not to put too fine a point on it, in every case the futurologists evacuate substance -- some of it urgent -- and replace it with faith-based initiatives and wish-fulfillment fantasies the circulation of redound to the benefit of incumbent interests mostly in the service of prevalent authorities (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 for plenty of self-identified futurologists the reactionary elite-incumbent, corporate-militarist, racist-bioreductionist politics are plenty intentional as well).

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.

To declare oneself a partisan in an abstract political movement "for" or "against" any of the primary topical preoccupations of the common or garden variety futurologist, "Cities," "Nanotechnology," "AI," "Longevity," "Singularity," "Enhancement," "Geo-Engineering" is always to evacuate of substance the actual stakeholder politics through which every detail and development of every relevant "technique" or "device" or "outcome" is researched, tested, published, elaborated, understood, taught, regulated, priced, marketed, implemented, distributed, taken up, re-purposed, poeticized, narrativized.

The futurologist is engaged in an anti-political politics of de-politicization, abjuring the field of technodevelopmental social struggle, the actual field of technoscience politics, 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.

I have pointed out at length that extreme sub(cult)ures of superlative futurology like the transhumanists, and extropians, and 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 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).

Futurological discourse in the more prevailing and mainstream forms that suffuse neoliberal and neoconservative corporate-military public 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 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.

While the Extropian Transhumanists, say, were honest, or foolish, enough to actually declare outright that they imagined themselves, somehow, to be members of a "movement" to end both death and taxes -- 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 -- I think 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.