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Friday, October 22, 2010

Fun 'n Games With Robot Cultism

Upgraaded and Adapted from the Moot:

Contra my critic "Luke," superlative futurological discourses are not just "fun" "scary" kinda sorta "weird" idle speculation.

Else, transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, and the rest would admit the obvious, as they never do, that they are in fact simply a science fiction fandom consisting mostly of North Atlantic white guys fixated on that lamest and least demanding genre of science fiction, pop technoscience/futurology, rather than peddling themselves as engaged in techno-transcendentalizing variations of serious science or serious developmental policy discourse.

Superlative Futurology is, of course, an ideological formation with an undeniably theological coloration, an extreme form of the prevailing, blandly fraudulent futurological marketing/promotional discourse that suffuses neoloberal-neoconservative global developmentalism.

It is in its sub(cult)ural organization as a defensive marginal "identity-movement" with tendencies to underqualified pseudo-scientific enthusiasms often peddled to True Believer types by guru wannabes that the superlative futurologists are vulnerable around the edges (to be generous) to derisive charges of cultishness.

My "Condensed Critique of Transhumanism" is here if you want reminding of it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fun/scary/weird tends to make people skew their probability estimates -- whether positively or negatively depends on psychology and prejudice, I shouldn't wonder.

I, for one, never claimed transhumanism was idle speculation. It clearly represents a call to action, as far as funding research in given directions and cryopreserving the clinically dead.

Dale Carrico said...

Nobody ever joined a Robot Cult to advocate legitimate scientific research. But, yes, do tell us more about your "calls to action" involving cryonics scams, sooper-geniuses coding history-ending Robot Gods, big talk about migrating your "soul" into eternal cyberspace, and blather about building desktop genies-in-a-bottle corralling poly-purpose programmable room-temperature nanobots into treasure on the cheap.

Calls to "action," indeed! "Science," indeed!