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Friday, June 08, 2012

Dreams of the Robot Cultists

As a kind of last-ditch defense of their pseudo-scientific nonsense, their pop-tech fandom misconstrued as a political movement, their embarrassing gurus-and-True Believers sub(cult)ure, and their complicity -- always witless and sometimes unwitting -- with reactionary eugenic-petrochemical-corporate-militarism Robot Cultists will sometimes declare that they are really just dreamy dreamers filling the world with dreamers filling the world with dreams, which is pretty much like saying a commercial promising that drinking a chocolate yogurt milkshake will melt away the pounds or buying a new car will make you free and sexy and unique is filling the world with dreamy dreamers dreaming dreamy dreams, that is to say, it is to confuse dreaming with telling really stupid shitty lies.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A lot of transhumanists will justify idle nonsense under the pretense that it might inspire someone to get it done.

It's rather funny, seeing people who have been preaching the same things for over 25 years and never got anywhere beyond pure talk.

Dale Carrico said...

To this I would add: First, that much of what Robot Cultists declare to be "predictions" are really more like symptomatic expressions of their anxieties and alienation about the present; And second, that when you really come down to it, the actual fantasized furniture of the imagined "future" of the futurologists is less interesting for usually being so wrong and implausible than for actually being rather embarrassingly infantile and awful, more or less just variations on the same gold, guns, and girls C.S. Lewis witheringly summarized as the magickal mindset of the techno-transcendentalists decades and decades ago.