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

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Futurological Cock and Bull

I made a throwaway observation last night about the futurologists at the presumably planetary Robot Cult think-tank IEET that it was weird just how many white guys were in evidence given how comparatively few there are in the actual planet to which and for which they seem to want to be promulgating their futurological faith. It seemed to me a patently obvious sort of comment to make.

In the Moot, one "JHDjr" commented:
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..


I must say that I don't quite get what "JHDjr" is trying to say here.

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 I would say that "progress" is a word that denotes collective struggles toward some shared 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, and to the extent that, equity in diversity flourishes legibly in a relatively consensual, accountable, democratic order one can usually count on a reasonably progressive distribution via stakeholder contestation, peer to peer, of the risks, costs, and benefits of technodevelopmental change, and then, and only then, can one also properly 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, the grammar was a bit perplexing -- 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.

1 comment:

jollyspaniard said...

I imagine the demographics at this event would be roughly identical to what you'd find at a Science Fiction convention in the same area.

On a completely unrelated note I've just visited your blog after an absense of a few months (I can't remember I'm a sporadic visitor) and I really don't like your new layout. Green text on a yellowy beigey background makes for yucky reading for those of us with tired eyes. I liked your old layout much better.

Blog on.