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

Monday, April 30, 2012

Futurologists Fail Upward! Onward! Into the Future!

A little cat scratch adapted and upgraded from the Moot...
Quite apart from the jarring anti-democratizing views that pop up among them with such alarming regularity -- even the ones who declare their notional devotion to democracy in between genuflections to authoritarian technocracy, neoliberal eugenicism, and anarcho-capitalism via digital utopianism -- I must say that Futurenauts (as in: inhabiting always in imagination their hyperbolically marketed future -- not!) like Minsky (still doing his low-rent Asimov drag king schtick for the pop-tech rubes, I see) also rather remind one of right-wingnuts in the way they fail upward... I ruefully note, for example, that the recent flagrant duhson-spheroid idiocies of George Dvorsky seem to be winning him a comparatively cozy berth in the transhumanoid equivalent of the wingnut welfare archipelago: chats with NASA scenario-spinners, a guest-spot on io9 (has our Annalee developed a taste for extropian trash?), and now he's soliciting pay for HumanityPlus!tron seminars just like an Objectivist in their cultic heyday (from Ayn Randroids to Ayn Raelians in one hop, skip, and a jump). One needn't be a futurologist to predict a whole lot of crap sandwiches are about to be served up to the marks on some stale ill-nourishing white bread.

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