Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Futurological Caucasian Cock on Parade
Awfully white, IEET guys. Not totally, but quite shockingly, flabbergastingly, overabundantly, weirdly white and male and Anglo-European. Just so you know, the present doesn't look like you. And neither does any future that makes any kind of sense. Not that one reads transhumanists looking for sense.
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3 comments:
Take a deep breathe.. I once tried to follow this blog believing that it provided an essential counter balance.... I am not sure anymore.. We, who believe in progress, simply have to accept that we will never satisfy those who object to the belief that progress is an existential impossibility..... We must do what we believe to be correct and accept the judgment of history..
Appropriately, I click through and at the top of the page is:
We’re all alone and no one knows why.
by Mike Treder
Mar 2, 2010 • (2) Comments • Permalink
I must say that I don't quite get what "JHDjr" is trying to say.
To what presumably unique group of people is the phrase "[w]e, who believe in progress" supposed to refer exactly, and of what exactly does that "belief" in progress presumably consist? What does it mean to "believe" in progress -- to believe that many people have historically accomplished desirable things and are likely to continue to do so? Honestly, who on earth doesn't "believe" that? What use is such a belief supposed to have? Is this one of those annoying "turn that smile upside down" admonitions that hucksters are so fond of insinuating into their barking sales pitches to the rubes?
Strictly speaking progress is a word that denotes collective struggle toward some end, at least in the sense that seems relevant here. We tend to speak of a political "progressive" as one of many people engaging in collective struggles to enable ever more people to have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them -- usually by defending equity and celebrating diversity and struggling to implement a legible scene of informed nonduressed consent through the insistence on human rights, no taxation without representation, extension of the franchise and access to office-seeking, and by means of the provision of socioeconomic security, basic income, healthcare, lifelong education, and access to reliable information. So long as equity in diversity flourishes legibly in a relatively consensual, accountable, democratic order one can usually count on a reasonably progressive distribution of the risks, costs, and benefits of technodevelopmental social struggle, and then, and only then, can one also begin to speak of "technoscientific progress."
I for one would object to anyone who "claimed to believe that progress of any kind is an existential impossibility," since progress toward better, more capacitating techniques, more equitable, diverse, democratizing public formations have indeed occurred historically and continue to do so -- though hardly to the extent I would prefer and not without countervailing anti-democratizing forces and outcomes in abundance as well.
I suspect that "JHDjr" actually means to suggest -- ungrammatically -- that something about my observation of how hilariously nonrepresentative transhumanist and futurological subcultures seem to be in respect to the actual world and "its future" for which they fancy themselves to be indispensable spokespersons, that this observation renders me "an Enemy of Progress" to be disdained by the Futurological Faithful in the Robot Cult who have appointed themselves "Champions of Progress."
Needless to say, such a belief, if I am right that such is the claim at hand, would be as palpably idiotic as finding oneself in a presumably global organization in which the overabundant majority of public figures are always privileged English-speaking white guys should surely seem, to anybody with sense, palpably weird.
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