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Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Newt’s Loony Lunar Promise

Presumably, Newt Gingrich’s futurological declaration today about a Moon Base within a decade was not meant as an admission of his eagerness to frak and drill and deforest the earth into a dead moonscape dotted with military bases, but was just a symptom of his usual grandiosity as he became momentarily distracted with daydreams of a Glorious Gingrichian Golden Age within his grasp at last, at last! This becomes even clearer when we discover that Gingrich offered up a number of other futurological promises in the speech which remain as yet under-reported, among them a promise to migrate the White House into an L5 torus from which asteroids would be tossed to smite his enemies, a promise to end the recession by unleashing programmed nanobotic swarms that will transform America’s Blue States at a molecular level into self-regenerating multi-ton layer cake archipelagos that can be had and eaten, too, and a promise that all who believe in him will have everlasting life once he uploads what he described as their "data-souls" into cyberspace (which he also promised would be heaven and not hell despite bugs, crashes, surveillance, and spam).

3 comments:

jollyspaniard said...

He's a bit of an enigma. He's only very recently joined the denialist camp, he's been on both sides of every issue. Who knows what he really believes. From what I can tell he seems like a throwback to the Nixon era, which is kind of suprising I thought that was a discontinued model.

jimf said...

> Gingrich offered up a number of other futurological promises. . .
> among them a promise to migrate the White House into an L5 torus. . .,
> a promise to end the recession by unleashing programmed
> nanobotic swarms that will transform America’s Blue States
> at a molecular level into self-regenerating multi-ton layer cake
> archipelagos that can be had and eaten, too, and a promise
> that all who believe in him will have everlasting life once
> he uploads what he described as their "data-souls" into cyberspace. . .

So are the Transhumanists, Extropians, and Singularitarians
campaigning for a Newt-onian universe? To tell you the truth,
I can't be bothered to look. (But ya know they are. . .
probably including Bay Area native and self-styled "progressive",
our old pal Michael Anissimov. ;-> )

Dale Carrico said...

For example, Politico on Newt Skywalker. Of course, like most of the futurologically inclined, Newt likes to extrapolate from present hypotheticals to future hypotheticals that depend on a translation of the present hypotheticals into factoids, repeating the procedure as many times as it takes to sell whatever Brooklyn Bridge serves his purpose at the moment among the rubes -- also he like to speak (as all the futurologists do) of "technology" as a generality abstracted from the actually existing constellation of artifacts and developmental trajectories on offer in all their variety and with all their variety of differential impacts on all the variety of their stakeholders and, once evacuated of specificity imbue this phantasm with agency, often an agency figured in the tonalities of a benefactor, parent, or god, again all the better to peddle whatever grift he's on about at the moment. While I am sure that some transhumanist-types do indeed approve of Newt, no doubt even more disapprove -- but none will admit the more damning kinship, the assumptions, aspirations, idioms, and arguments that bring both Newt's futurological fraud and their own into such currency as it has.