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

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Transhumanists Are Not Just Wrong, They Are Revealingly Dishonest

In a recent piece transhumanist James Hughes writes:
I want to seriously examine… how the failure of techno-utopian hype has sometimes produced an anti-scientific backlash. I want to take seriously the idea that “superlative technocentricity” performs an anti-democratic ideological function, that promising techno-fixes for social problems can be used to distract from immediate social needs and injustices. More darkly yet, I want to discuss how the techno-utopians’ association with eugenics and totalitarianism set back both democratic and scientific progress in the 20th century.
These are all good things to take seriously. That's why I write about these very topics so often on Amor Mundi.

But let me say three things about the fact that James Hughes is saying these things now and in this way:

First, nobody has to join a Robot Cult to assume a more critical perspective on technoscience issues or upon the historical vicissitudes of technodevelopmental struggles (and please remember that criticism isn't just "code" for uncritical "Luddism," negativity, pessimism, or cynicism -- and by the way, the historical Luddites were engaged in an urgent labor dispute not a blanket anti-technology technology crusade anyway). Nobody has to join a Robot Cult to become a scientist or an engineer or a doctor or a science scholar or a technodevelopmental policy wonk. Indeed, if you want to have a progressive impact on the distribution of technodevelopmental risks, costs, and benefits and support a more secular, equitable, diverse, technnoscientifically literate culture and public policy I daresay one of the first things you would want to do is get as far away as possible from the Robot Cult Caucus of futurology. You would do far better to just get training in the relevant field that interests you (by the way, if you are a coder that doesn't make you a scientist, especially not any kind of biologist, and if you are a gamer that doesn't make you a coder let alone a scientist), and to the extent that you want a theoretical or organizational analysis to contextualize technodevelopmental issues and your place among them I propose that you would do well to engage in and with works arising out of STS (the acronym stands either for Science and Technology Studies or sometimes describes the imbrication of Science-Technology-Society), or become acquainted with Environmental Justice analysis or Permaculture practices. Although one has to take care to avoid corporatist hype and digital-utopianism here and there, New Media theories ("digital humanities" is a term that seems to be displacing New Media, by the way) and a2k and p2p analyses can also be good places to explore to these issues -- one needs to be attuned to tendencies in all of these discursive fields, however, to advertorial gizmo promotion and glib market talk and de-historicizing essentialisms (turning monolithicized "technologies" into progressive agencies apart from their contested stakeholders). Bioethics is even more of a minefield, frankly, saturated as it is with scarcely stealthed, eugenic, hyperbolic bioconservative and transhumanist tropes and science fictional distractions and too often beholden to neoliberal imperatives, and I am hesitant to recommend it as a particularly useful location in any general kind of way for critical intervention or purchase (I regret that, and blame transhumanists as one of many causes of this problem).

Second, if a very, very small few Robot Cultists say comparatively more reasonable things on some technocultural and technodevelopmental topics than most of their fellows do, isn't there a point at which these objections and qualifications begin to function more as public relations efforts to make what is unreasonable seem more palatable and reasonable to "outsiders" than efforts to make what is unreasonable more reasonable among "insiders"? James Hughes in particular has devoted enormous energies to peddling his "transhumanist" sub(cult)ure as a socially democratic movement despite its explicitly reactionary origins in the irrationally exuberant anti-governmentality and techno-utopianism of the Extropians and incredibly persistent market libertarian and right-authoritarian viewpoints suffuse its organizational and rhetorical culture to an extraordinary extent to this day. What do I mean? I mean patriarchal and racist eugenics and social Darwinisms, corporatist technocracy and "geo-engineering" technofix apologetics, militarist existential threat porn, unsustainable hyper-consumer fetishism, all to the benefit of reactionary elite-incumbency whatever the earnest and avowed sentiments of the handful of notionally left-leaning transhumanoids. Hughes might protest this (just as market libertarians protest the proper identification of their politics as right wing rather than buying their preposterous line that they are "beyond left and right" when their ideas and slogan have no life in the world apart their use in deployment by conservative politicians for reactionary ends), but he is clearly aware enough of the problem to try to paper it over with misleading surveys in which a whole constellation of weird right-wing ideologies that like to pretend they are not right-wing (Postrelian Dynamists, upwingers, libertopians and the like) dis-aggregate the transhumanist right cohort as against a monolithically construed left to create a false impression of a left-leaning culture more generally. His recent efforts to thread a needle between claims that his sub(cult)ure uniquely champions Reason and "The Enlightenment Project" against irrationalists like those effete elite aesthetes in Literature Departments (historians of enlightenment discourses will be intrigued to be taught by the Robot Cultists that there is just one Enlightenment Project in the first place, let alone that a handful of boys-with-their-toys calling themselves "transhumanists" are The One True Enlightenment's anointed Priests) while at once trying to soft-peddle this hard line by offering up conciliatory gestures here and there to communities of faith that accept the separation of Church and State and to those critics on the left who have long forcefully exposed the pretensions and authoritarian vulnerabilities of reductionist and purely positivist accounts of reason. To the extent that Hughes wants to pretend his more nuanced characterizations of rationality, such as they are, manage to be representative of transhumanist-identified people more generally he is indulging yet again in public relations spin doctoring as he has long done in rationalizing the ineradicable rightward-skew of transhumanist political discourse. I have to say Hughes is on especially thin ice in this area, inasmuch as he has had what can at best be described as, shall we say, an ambivalent attitude toward many critiques of reductionist and objectivist understandings of reason, and has been quite cheerful to jump on know-nothing bandwagons excoriating the "relativist menace" of pomo humanities scholarship, a bugbear better suited to the fulminating Culture Warriors of the right eight times out of ten (although Hughes is far from the only person of the left to make this particular error in casting about for a villain to account for a generation of ineffectual left politics in the US). Quite apart from all that, I have to circle back to an earlier point again here, namely, that nobody has to join a Robot Cult to assume a more pragmatic or constructivist vantage on enlightenment discourses, or to appreciate the value of, say, the Frankfurt School to the analysis of bureaucratic administration or mass-mediation in our technoscientific society. Indeed, the Robot Cult Caucus is close to the last place anybody in their right mind would turn for such a perspective (I doubt one in a hundred Robot Cultists ever read Foucault or Adorno in the first place). The question remains why Hughes' selective appreciation of political, historical, epistemological nuances few of his fellow transhumanists have the wit or concern or patience to share with him leads him to rewrite transhumanism in the image of his unrepresentative view for public consumption rather than leading him to question whether or not these deranged Robot Cultists are his proper fellows in the first place? Can the pay and media attention of being a comparatively sane fish in a pond of crazies really be satisfying enough to make that calculation a sensible one?

Third, you will have noticed that the idea of "superlative technocentricity" is quoted in Hughes' formulation. What is not indicated in his piece is that I am personally the one he is quoting in that phrase. "Superlative technocentricity" is not just some general notion floating around that is generally interesting to science and technology scholars that he snatched up from the ethereal zeitgeist, it is a central term in a fully elaborated critique of transhumanists, extropians, digital-utopians, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, and nano-cornucopiasts involving countless thousands of words written over a half decade by yours truly and nobody else. Just as you will find transhumanists soft-peddling their membership organizations as "technoprogressive think tanks" using terms and even extended formulations skimmed directly from writings of mine, I presume they will now offer up criticisms of the "superlativity" exhibited by members of rival Robot Cult sects with which they happen at the moment to be squabbling in an effort to demonstrate their own comparative "reasonableness." The level of dishonesty exhibited in these passive-aggressive non-engaged engagements not to mention opportunistic appropriations of my writing are truly pathetic. You can be sure that I do not protest the fact that I am not being properly credited by the transhumanists when they make their selective uses of my terms, formulations, and analyses in an effort to sanewash their sub(cult)ural Program for the benefit of better educated or more mainstream progressive audiences or in their inter-sectarian skirmishes for dominance within the tinpot fiefdom of their marginal movement. No, I don't think it does me particular credit to be taken seriously by Robot Cultists in the first place and so it is not such "credit" I seek from them. I just think it is a symptom of the bankruptcy of their discourse that they resort to these clumsy circumlocutions and shabby appropriations. It is especially dishonest that while transhumanists, oh, I mean "technoprogressives" scoop up congenial formulations from my writing, they never apply themselves to the questions and problems I address directly to them in the very pieces of mine they mine for their selling points.

The title of this post accuses that "Transhumanists Are Not Just Wrong, They Are Revealingly Dishonest." I have made it clear why I think at least some high profile transhumanist-identified figures are revealingly dishonest. As to why I say they are wrong, may I recommend once again my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism, or, if you are a real glutton for punishment, the sprawling archive of posts (it's now up to sixty two entries) corralled together in The Superlative Summary?

6 comments:

jimf said...

> [I]f a very few Robot Cultists say comparatively more
> reasonable things. . . than most of their fellows do,
> isn't there a point at which these objections and
> qualifications begin to function more as public relations
> efforts to make what is unreasonable seem more palatably
> reasonable to "outsiders"? . . . To the extent that Hughes
> wants to pretend his more nuanced characterizations of
> rationality. . . [are] representative of transhumanist-identified
> people more generally he is indulging yet again in
> public relations spin doctoring as he has long done in
> rationalizing the ineradicable rightward-skew of transhumanist
> political discourse. I have to say Hughes is on especially
> thin ice in this area, inasmuch as he has had what can at
> best be described as, shall we say, an ambivalent attitude
> toward many critiques of reductionist and objectivist
> understandings of reason, and has been quite cheerful
> to jump on know-nothing bandwagons excoriating the
> "relativist menace" of pomo humanities scholarship. . .

I find this calculated (in a PR sense) soul-searching all
the more ironic in that it has been characteristic of Hughes
(and other cheerleaders and "anti-defamation" watchdogs among
the >Hists) to characterize any on-line critics of >Hism
(I'm thinking in particular of the John Bruce incident from
a few years ago) as requiring "education". What fatuousness!

jimf said...

A bit of history:

In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood
John Bruce's Observations on Education, Epistemology,
Writing, Work, and Religion
http://mthollywood.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_mthollywood_archive.html
---------------------------------------------------------
Friday, March 24, 2006
I Really Hate To See The Same Dumb Mistakes

The one thing nobody else is pointing out is that
[Glenn] Reynolds is what [one] might characterize as a
“libertarian evangelist”.

We do great damage to our society when we allow religious
and philosophical tinhorns to dominate middlebrow discussion
without adequate counter-argument. We’re still suffering
from the likes of Alan Watts. Generations of bright kids
have been wasting some or all of their time, energy, and
youth on the idealized, highly selective, and heavily
sanitized versions of mysticism that he and others began
to promulgate in the 1950s.
---------------------------------------------------------


http://mthollywood.blogspot.com/2006_05_01_mthollywood_archive.html
---------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, May 10, 2006

. . .

Narcissism As A Motivator For Cryonics

It occurred to me after I put up the post on narcissism
and transhumanism just below that cryonics might in fact
be the perfect mode of interment for narcissists, irrespective
of whether they can be pulled out of the dewar, connected
to some new or transplant body, and revivified at some future
date. The narcissist has a static, idealized self-image that's
exactly the opposite of the memento mori skull. What better
way to preserve it than freezing?

. . .

My own feeling is that science fiction – not actual technological
advance – drives transhumanism. The appeal transhumanism has to
narcissists is the potential for refusing to acknowledge the
passage of time, as well as a static, immortal, grandiose self-image.
The humorlessness comes with the territory.

Transhumanism seems to have a particular appeal to the wealthy –
look at the Silicon Valley millionaires on the board of the
Foresight Nanotech Institute, for instance – and I think this
follows. A narcissistic rich person can control a great many things,
but there’s one threat that won’t go away: you’re going to die,
no matter how rich you are. Get rid of that one fly in the ointment,
and you’ve got it made: a static, timeless self-image of a rich guy.
(Failing that, freezing your head comes in as a valid second choice.)
---------------------------------------------------------

jimf said...

and especially

http://mthollywood.blogspot.com/2006/04/e-mail-to-wall-street-journal-i-sent.html
---------------------------------------------------------
Monday, April 03, 2006
E-Mail To The Wall Street Journal

I sent the following e-mail to the Letters editor of OpinionJournal,
with a copy to the features editor:

I've become concerned that you intend regularly to publish pieces
by Glenn Reynolds in your Opinion Journal Federation. I've begun
to notice that in his blog posts, as well as in his freelance pieces
and in his book, Reynolds is making thinly disguised pitches for a
cult-like belief system called "transhumanism". In fact, Reynolds
identifies himself as a "transhumanist", but he doesn't make it
plain that this involves bizarre beliefs. I don't think the
Wall Street Journal should be providing a respectable platform for
such opinions without investigation. There are several blogs that
have been looking into "transhumanism" and trying to sound alarms,
including that of Andrew Keen at
http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction/2006/03/technology_and_.html
(Keen wrote one of the very rare unfavorable reviews of Reynolds's
book at The Weekly Standard) and mine at
http://mthollywood.blogspot.com

In particular, Reynolds and Raymond Kurzweil share many aspects of
this bizarre belief system. Reynolds gave a highly favorable review
of Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near in the WSJ on October 1, 2005.
However, I don't believe Reynolds acknowledged the extent to which he
and Kurzweil share the bizarre, cult-like "transhumanist" belief system,
and as a result, I believe Reynolds may have had a conflict of interest.

With many other transhumanists, Reynolds and Kurzweil believe in a
"Singularity", which is an apocalyptic event predicted within the
next 30-40 years in which computers become super-efficient and the
human race merges with machines. This will allow the human-machine
combine to do things like cure diseases and death via "nanotechnology".
In this view, human beings, once they merge with computers, will
become immortal robot-like beings (within 30-40 years). A web search
should show you that transhumanists typically misuse the term
"nanotechnology" to refer to the ability of hypothetical future
atomic-size robots to repair disease and reverse any problem that
may cause death. This is not the scientific use of the term.

That some may believe in a merged, immortal computer-human life form
and nanobots is only part of the problem. Some cultists go so far
as to have their brains or whole bodies frozen when they die in
anticipation that after the Singularity, the nanobots will be able
to fix whatever led to their deaths and bring them back to life.
I don't believe Reynolds has expressed a public opinion on this,
but Kurzweil is on record as saying he will have his brain frozen
when he dies, and by his public example he advocates the practice.
Mainstream medical practitioners make it clear there is no scientific
support for this practice, and some refer to it as quackery.

However, some believers have gone far enough to request assisted
suicide in the belief that if they kill themselves now and have their
brains or bodies frozen, they can be brought back after the Singularity
and cured without the need to suffer from degenerative diseases.
There is at least one case on record of an individual "suicided"
with an overdose of barbiturates before having her brain frozen.
I'm concerned that the WSJ may, by publishing its favorable review
of Kurzweil and by providing Reynolds with a respectable platform,
be helping to further these views.

jimf said...

In his review of Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, Reynolds said

"Naturally, Mr. Kurzweil has little time for techno-skeptics like
the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Richard Smalley, who in September 2001
published a notorious piece in Scientific American debunking the
claims of nanotechnologists, in particular the possibility of
nano-robots (nanobots) capable of assembling molecules and substances
to order. Mr. Kurzweil's arguments countering Dr. Smalley and his
allies are a pleasure to read -- Mr. Kurzweil clearly thinks that
nanobots are possible -- but in truth he is fighting a battle that
is already won."

I've read the Smalley piece Reynolds refers to, and this is simply
an attempt by a mainstream scientist to debunk the transhumanist
cult-like view that atom-size robots can cure all disease, as well
as aging and death. The tendency to dismiss mainstream scientific
views is, of course, characteristic of cults and quackery. Kurzweil,
who is an inventor and self-promoter with no background in chemistry,
is portrayed as out-arguing a Nobelist.

If the Wall Street Journal's editors knew that one Scientologist
was going to review (very favorably) another Scientologist's book,
and the book was a highly slanted apology for Scientology, I don't
believe the WSJ would print such a thing. But this is what Reynolds
did with Kurzweil. I'm concerned that Reynolds often includes not
fully ingenuous pitches for transhumanism, in his blog, in his book,
and in his other freelance writing.

I urge the WSJ's editors to review this problem and make a decision
as to whether Reynolds should continue to have a respectable platform
to advocate cult-like thinking.
---------------------------------------------------------

jimf said...

to which the >Hist watchdogs' characteristic response was:

http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2006/04/john-bruce-describes-transhumanism-as.html
---------------------------------------------------------
I [George Dvorsky, of the "Sentient Developments" blog]
received an email from J Hughes today informing me about how
blogger John Bruce has blasted Glenn Harlan Reynolds for
promoting transhumanism. Here's the letter [from Hughes]:

> The blogger John Bruce recently read Glenn Harlan Reynolds'
> Army of Davids, which promotes transhumanism, and has decided
> to launch a campaign to have newspapers drop Reynolds on the
> grounds that he promotes the "transhumanist cult."
> I exchanged some email with Mr. Bruce trying to bring him
> up-to-speed [!], but it had no effect. It seems clear that
> he is motivated by some personal and partisan agenda I don't
> full[y] understand. He writes for The Dartmouth Review and
> The New Partisan, and appears to want Reynolds to blog and
> link back to launch an "Instalanche" of traffic to Bruce's blog.
>
> This is his letter to the WSJ trying to alert them to Reynolds "cultism."
>
> [as above]

jimf said...

So, there you have it. After reading this, I [George Dvorsky] decided
to write a letter to John Bruce:

Mr Bruce,

It is extremely regrettable that you have chosen to characterize
transhumanism as a cult and to compare it to a known cult like Scientology.
With these comments you have not only perpetuated a falsehood about
transhumanism, you have trivialized an actual cult that actively goes
about its business of ruining lives.

Transhumanism is at most a philosophy of science and broad-based
social movement with no fixed political or religious agenda.
Futurists, scientists, and philosophers who make conjectures about
a possible transhuman future most certainly do not go about creating
mindless drones, nor are they engaging in any kind of pseudoscientific
or quasi-religious endeavor. As an idea it has been around for
centuries, spawned by the Enlightment and a cousin of secular humanism.
It has only recently crystallized as an academic discipline and as
a social movement that is both concerned and hopeful of various
pending technologies.

Some of the world's most distinguished scientists are currently
thinking very hard about humanity's future, many of whom agree that
a potential Singularity or some kind of 'existential paradigm shift'
awaits us in the not too distant future. The idea of a transhuman
future is hardly the monopoly of Ray Kurzweil. A short list of highly
respected scientists who agree that a posthuman future awaits us
include Steven Hawking, Sir Martin Rees, Michio Kaku, Nick Bostrom,
Hans Moravec, Marvin Minsky, and James Watson. And there are many,
many others; I urge you take a look at the citations in Kurzweil's
Singularity book to see how broadly these ideas have disseminated
throughout academia and research labs around the world.

You may not agree with any of these thinkers' conclusions, but
disagreement hardly justifies the claim that transhumanism is a cult.

Moreover, there are a number of thinkers who have been in opposition
to transhumanism who agree that these are plausible projections,
particularly the potential for radical life extension. Francis Fukuyama
and Leon Kass immediately come to mind. At no time have these individuals
described transhumanism as a cult or as pseudoscientific, and I
challenge you to prove me otherwise.

Consequently, I am formally asking you to retract your irresponsible
and false mischaracterization of transhumanism as a cult.

Regards,
George Dvorsky
Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
Board Director

[btw, if you'd like to give Mr Bruce your 2 cents: j.bruce@gte.net]
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