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

Saturday, August 14, 2010

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

This morning only two 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.

In spite of this, 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.

This curious relentless non-representativeness I keep documenting is, for me, just one rather obvious symptom among many others of the marginality of the motley assortment of Robot Cultists -- transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, greenwashing geo-engineers, cybernetic totalists, Postrelian "Dynamists" and Ayn Raelian "extropians" -- corralled together at IEET. It is cause for mordant appreciation that this group remains at once so strangely and stubbornly non-representative of the diversity of the world in which we live and any futures in which we are collaborating here in the present, peer to peer, while they fancy themselves, nonetheless, the avant-garde representatives and spokesmodels of "The Future," nonetheless.

But it is worth noting that even if this brigade of White Guys of "The Future" were 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" (a facile misconstrual in which "technology" stands for 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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