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

Saturday, January 22, 2011

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I haven't felt as though I had much to say lately worthy of a hearing in the world, even in the odd-ball sense of a public hearing afforded in the new blogipelogic twitterversal pseudo-public realm of panoptic "participation" and "zero comments."

If Amor Mundi has anything like a useful niche in this burgeoning blogipelago, I expect it is as the place of my ongoing critique of both mainstream and superlative futurological discourses and formations. Lately, however, I must admit that the greenwashers and liberal eugenicists and even the Robot Cultists have seemed to me in the main too tired and dumb and simply lame to be worthy of serious critique or even mined for humorous critique, and attending to them has felt more demoralizing than provocative.

This happens sometimes, and usually, eventually, I snap out of it. I'm teaching a graduate seminar this term on design discourse that engages these themes in a differently rewarding sort of setting (the blog for that course is here), and it remains to be seen if this teaching will re-invigorate my anti-futurological blogging or function as a sufficiently satisfying intellectual alternative to make my blogging feel even more redundant.

I do occasionally vent my frustrations or express opinions about current events here, of course, and no doubt that will continue to happen as much from habit as anything, but I have always known that there are lots of people out there who share much of my perspective and express it more forcefully and pithily than I manage to do in my pedantic meandering sort of way here, and I really wouldn't want Amor Mundi to degenerate into that sort of enterprise.

Anyway, we'll see how things unfold, I just wanted to say a word about where I'm at for those readers who do still stop by regularly.

1 comment:

jollyspaniard said...

The newest Futurism is Collapseatarianism. It's a bit menacing to me, it's seems concerned the economy, energy and the environment and it often is. However it's often a thinly veiled front for some very ugly paranoid scape goating aimed at foreigners (muslims, chinese, europeans, americans, rednecks, mexicans you name it). This stuff is catching on in a big way and not necessarily in a good way.

We may be headed for environmental catastrophe but a lot of people are headed for Glen Beck themed paranoid racist exits.

However this isn't new, these kinds of things have always been around. They're becoming more popular now, nowhere near 1936 levels yet and hopefuly we'll never get there but it's still troubling.

The average man on the street couldn't tell you what the singularity is supposed to be but he's probably heard of a few of these collapse scenarios.