The Fandom Menace

To clarify my last post --

There's nothing wrong with fandoms. I'm a big sf geek, Eric and I collect comics and toy spaceships, my Planet of the Apes DVD set is lodged in a near life-sized Ceasar Bust with combable hair presently wearing a Devo energy dome, so suck it.

I also have graduate degrees in both philosophy and rhetoric, and have been teaching these subjects in university settings for fifteen years. Fandoms are not philosophies: whatever they do they don't do the things that philosophies, properly so called, do.

Talking about science fiction or indulging in futurolgical blue-skying (especially since a futurist is just a science fiction writer who lacks the talent to write science fiction with characterization, plotting, integrated themes, organic social settings -- and believe me, sf isn't exactly the literary genre with the highest bar in these areas) is not philosophizing, it is not doing science, it is not policy analysis, it is not political activism.

I'm not saying it can't be edifying.

I'm not saying it's not worth doing.

I'm saying that none of the things the transhumanists say they are up to when they want to justify their faith that they are a "movement" that is sweeping the world or "serious thinkers" addressing actual problems are things they are actually doing.

Look: It is important that policy-makers address the inequitable and unsustainable distribution of costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change to the diversity of stakeholders to that change. It is important that scientists are educated, funded, supported, regulated to address shared problems. It is important that human beings be taught and encouraged to subject their prejudices to scrutiny, to think what they are doing, and to make sense of their circumstances by means of philosophy, poetry, therapy, religion or what have you. It is important that citizens educate, agitate, and organize to make the world more democratic, more equitable, more consensual, more diverse.

These are all too important to mistake them for things they are not.

Transhumanists have fixated on a handful of imaginary gadgets (and a few real gadgets they care about not so much because of what they are or what they do but because they see them as premonitory stepping stones bolstering their faith in the inevitable and proximate arrival of the imaginary gadgets they are actually fixated on) about which they gather together online and in conferences to handwave and to cheerlead and to enthuse.

Transhumanism is a fandom.

As a general rule, I am rather charmed by fandoms. I am not charmed by frauds, charlatans, advertising, pop psychology, pseudo-science, or know-nothings who fancy themselves avatars of Enlightenment.

On a separate note, however, and by way of conclusion, I will add that not only is transhumanism a fandom and nothing else (well, it is also a fraud because it insists it is something else, and a dangerous fraud because it sometimes succeeds in its bamboozlement to the cost and confusion of the important work of the things it actually isn't but sells itself as), but as fandoms go I have to admit that the transhumanists and singularitarians seem one of the most relentlessly humorless unoriginal tedious fandoms I know of, consisting of even more over-compensating white guys than is already usual among sf-fandoms, and so even as a fandom they kinda sorta, you know, suck.