The Unbearable Stasis of "Accelerating Change"

Also posted at the World Future Society.

Eric and I got haircuts yesterday afternoon, and while I was waiting I flipped through magazines. Peter Diamandis (who is clearly shaping up as this decade's go-to Kurzweil) had an article in Popular Science about garage inventors "going viral." It seemed to me pretty indistinguishable from stuff Cory Doctorow and Alex Steffen were writing a decade ago -- remember the "Tech Bloom"?

This is something that has struck me time and time again: The transhumanoids and singularitarians and online futurists love to congratulate themselves over their unflappability at the prospects of shatteringly onrushing changed futures. They literally have a whole "shock level" calculator, which is kinda sorta like a Cosmo sex quiz for pasty futurological males who think diddling themselves over cartoons of space elevators or descriptions of traversable wormholes demonstrates the awesomeness of their humanity-plus brains as compared to mehum (mere human) sheeple types.

But what always strikes me most forcefully about these ecstatic pronouncements is their abject staleness. There is simply not much to distinguish Ed Regis' depiction of the superlative futurologists in Great Mambo Chicken from Brian Alexander's in Rapture from breathless blog profiles of today, decade after decade after decade. Stiegler's "Gentle Seduction" from the 1980s is precisely standard transhumanoid boilerplate, techno-transcendence via shopping, loose-talking SENS-style longevity meds and "enhancement" pills and prostheses, Drexlerian nano-cornucopias, singularity (the literal term, already attributed to Vinge, not just the notion), Moravecian uploading, hive mind, market fundamentalism -- every single detail is already there.

Frankly, many of the ideas are already there decades earlier, in Turing, Shannon, Weiner, Bush. Heck, Anne Lindbergh was already surfing the "Wave of the Future" (and it was already fascist) even before a victorious post-war America managed through the inflation of the petrochemical bubble and the imposition of the mass-mediated Culture Industry to "invent" The Future Gernsback and Madison Avenue and all our Presidents would peddle the planet long before Toffler and company would stumble on the obvious and re-invent the wheel as a profitable pseudo-discipline for the seventies, then Brand and company would do it again for the eighties, then WIRED and company would do it again for the nineties, then the various p2p and Web 2.0 enthusiasts would do it again for the lost Bush decade, over and over and over again, the same hopes, the same tropes, the same dopes on and on and on from WW2 to Star Wars to whatever (probably bombed out cities or a pointless polluted moonscape).

I have proposed that the "accelerating change" crowed about for the last two decades by futurologists in pop religious cadences and by more mainstream and academic New Media commentators in pop psychology and pop sociology cadences has never had any substantial reference apart from the increasing precarity produced by neoliberal looting and destabilization of domestic welfare and global economies -- often facilitated, it is true, by the exploitation of digital trading, marketing, and surveillance networks -- a precarity usually seen and experienced from the vantage of privileged people who either benefit from neoliberal destabilization or who (rightly or wrongly) identify with the beneficiaries of that destabilization.

The pseudo-transcendentalizing narratives futurologists attach to this sleight of hand, this heartbreak and anxiety transubstantiated into a rocketship to omniscience and omnipotence, whether proposed in the familiar and profitable imperial triumphalist way (like the Long Boom nonsense and libertopian digirati handwaving and various tech bubbles every few years or so, digital, biological, faux-green, often ultimately military, like greenwashing "geo-engineering" schemes) or in the more enjoyably bonkers quasi-religious way (involving plastic or nuclear or nano magic superabundance fantasies or virtual heavens with virtual sex fantasies or various loosely conceived techno-immortality fantasies), all really just provide the furniture for aspirational/distracted futurological conceits to hang out in while these rebels without a cause or a clue indulge their wish-fulfillment ids and forget to vote and purchase their handhelds and pass the collection plate.

Maybe it was the confrontation of this futurological re-run proposed as fresh insight in the form of glossy pages in a magazine instead of the usual twittering wave of pieties one clicks through online that struck me so forcefully yesterday afternoon at Supercuts. I always chuckle at the covers of men's fitness magazine, at the thought that people actually subscribe to these things, even though it is clear from the covers that every single issue is obsessed with exactly the same things (flabby middle, flagging sex drive), and proposes exactly the same advice (stick to it, more muscle mass will eat more calories, be careful to stretch so you don't injure yourself, there are pills for that), and provides exactly the same -- or at any rate indistinguishable -- trilobite torsoed toothy grinned bland midwestern model on the cover. Eric laughed when I told him about Diamandis's tired re-tread of futurological chestnuts and offered up my analogy to men's fitness magazines. He reminded me that, unlike the fraudulent futurists, those men's fitness magazines at least actually provide the indispensable service of plausibly deniable masturbation material for kids who haven't yet come out of the closet. But of course, it isn't only closeted kids who are treating these magazines as masturbation material. There is a real sense in which that is their sole substantial function, for their whole target audience, gay and straight young and old alike. Like futurologists soaking in the same old soup of progressive transcendent "predictions" that never fail even when they fail, guys scooping up these fitness magazines aren't really looking for information, they aren't really looking for anything new, they are getting another imaginary refueling from the pump, another dose of the daydream they indulge as they defer the real workout, another hit of phony identification with an unrealistic ego-ideal straining in shorts purchased at the cost of dis-identification with the man in the mirror -- all in the name of health, health, health, darling!

When I lampoon "movement" futurology as a Robot Cult it isn't only the defensive groupthink and guru worship and annual conventions of True Believers that lend plausibility to the attribution of "cult" to what amounts to a lame pop-tech journalism fandom with delusions of grandeur (and, I should add, actually existing "membership" organizations peddling "-isms" to the rubes). And when I declare that the more assertively "techno-transcendental" varieties of futurological discourse (like the transhumanists, the singularitarians, the techno-immortalists, the nano-cornucopians, the digital-utopians) are simply extreme and hyperbolic variations of mainstream neoliberal global developmental policy discourse and mainstream marketing, advertising, and PR forms, this latter claim shouldn't be seen as undermining the first. Because there is an unmistakably faith-mobilizing pseudo-transcendentalizing strain to be discerned in this very PR marketing imaginary, deranging us from our present distress into a yearning toward consumer techno-futures bathed in pastels and robots and cars and DNA helices and chocolate and glossy hair and youthful skin and golden sex.

Advertizing and online profiling practices are the opiate of the masses in the age of digitally-networked corporate-militarism (the present stage of capitalism), as Debord insisted in the sixties and Barthes in the fifties and Adorno in the forties and Benjamin in the thirties, a mass mediated Opium War (and often literal war) distracts the masses from awareness that we have already long since arrived at the techno-scientific level to provide security and equity and hence universal emancipation for all, distracting us endlessly instead into internecine struggles over pseudo-needs and pseudo-strivings that leave the obsolete bloodsoaked hierarchies enjoyed by elite incumbents in place, and so seduces us into ongoing collaboration with the terms of our own exploitation. The deceptive and hyperbolic advertising and marketing forms that utterly suffuse our public life amount to a reservoir of fervent reactionary religiosity, a religiosity that achieves one of its more incandescent expressions in the static ec-static intensities of superlative techno-transcendentalizing futurology, and of the Robot Cultists who sing its praises unto death.