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

Saturday, August 07, 2010

This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report

This morning only three of the faces of featured authors at the website of the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, so-called, are not those of white guys.

Nevertheless, it remains just as true as ever, as I have been pointing out every single week for months now, that only a minority of people in the world are white guys, only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys, only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys, only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.

For me, it is just one rather obvious symptom of their marginality that the motley assortment of Robot Cultists -- the transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, greenwashing geo-engineers, cybernetic totalists, Postrelian "Dynamists" and Ayn Raelian "extropians" -- corralled together at IEET remain so strangely and stubbornly non-representative of the diversity of the world and "The Future" of which they fancy themselves to be spokesmodels.

But it is worth noting that even if they were ever to engineer for a few weeks' time (as they have not yet managed to do nor do I really expect will) the superficial appearance of an actual diversity of featured contributors to their site it would certainly do nothing to alter what one would still discover in taking a longer look at the proportion of white guys who remain identified with their sub(cult)ural "movement" for a years' time or more, or whose works are typically recommended to the attention of their members, or who contributes money to their organizations, or who function as their public spokespeople, or who remain in positions of actual leadership in their organizations.

Likewise, were they ever actually able to bamboozle a more diverse crowd into falling for their faith-based futurological schtick they would remain in my view an essentially deranged and deranging sub(cult)ure peddling an infantile wish-fulfillment fantasy of transcendence via "technology" (in a facile misconstrual as some generalized autonomous suprahistorical "force") of the actually inescapable contingency and finitude of the human condition -- actually little more than a pathologically more hyperbolic variation of the already delusive and fraudulent hyperbole suffusing the advertising, promotional, justificatory public discourses of contemporary unsustainable incumbent-elitist corporate-militarist developmentalism.

For more on these larger and in fact decisive problems with the white guys of "The Future" I recommend this Condensed Critique of Transhumanism, and the other pieces archived in my Superlative Summary.

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