Any child of two can indulge in wish fulfillment fantasizing. It's not a philosophy. It's not a movement. And the way you Robot Cultists do it makes you a kind of techno-transcendental New Age cult too hype-notized to notice you are functioning as a crowdsourced cheerleading squad for celebrity CEOs and ramped up gizmo consumerism at a time when the world is literally perishing from extractive- industrial- petrochemical- consumer- indebted- corporate- militarism.
The digital revolution is a lie. Cyberspace isn't a spirit realm. It belches coal smoke. It is accessed on landfill-destined toxic devices made by wretched wage slaves. It abetted financial fraud and theft at every level of society around the world. Its "openness" and its "freedom" turned out to be targeted marketing harassment, panoptic surveillance, and zero comments.
Rather than grasp this catastrophic fraud, you embrace it more ferociously, you hyperbolize cyberspatial deceptions into a more delusive fantasy still, fancying it will be home to a history shattering perfectly parental God-AI delivering you into the digital garden where your "spirit self" can live forever and "be" anything and "have" everything and "know" it all forever.
Your Robot Cult -- whether in its eugenicist transhumanoid sects, or in its dead-ender AI (artificial imbecillence) Singularitarian nerd-rapture sects, or in its vitamin supplement replacement parts shiny robot body soul-migration techno-immortalist sects, or in its nano-santa nano-genies-in-a-bottle nano-cornucopiast sects, or in its greenwashing hyper-denialist "geo-engineering" sects -- your Robot Cult, I say, takes all the lies of crass commercialism -- it takes all its infomercial boner pills and anti-aging kremes and endless promises of consumer ecstasy -- and then sets the volume dial on eleven, turning what was just ugly stupid embarrassing commonplace circus-barker deception and crack-pottery into full on fulminating faith.
Drawing on deeply disseminated figures and conceits of mythology and theology (eden, prometheus, golem, invincible armor, the philosopher's stone, rapture, love potion, sorcerer's apprentice, excalibur, the fountain of youth, frankenstein, onmipotence- omnibenevolence- omniscience-) whose historically-weighted intuitive force reassures you, together with the fervency of the never-changing professions of your fellow-faithful, you keep telling yourselves and telling us -- in a tune that never really changes year after year after year even while you congratulate yourselves on your unflappable embrace of "accelerating change" -- that there is some substance in your faith-based initiative, that your roseate "The Future" is real and that in it you can be young and rich and invulnerable and right and cared for forever.
As I said, any child of two already knows where you are coming from. As adults, though, what matters more is that you are going nowhere, you are riding on the road to nowhere, weighting down and speeding up the cart that is taking us all down.
We have serious problems in this world and we need serious people to help solve them. You might be enjoying the haze you're in, like any techno-fetishizing bourgeois consumer dupe, but you are part of the problem.
You could have been something better, you could have done something else, but you didn't. It's not too late to wake up and help out.
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3 comments:
Perhaps your faith in the perspicuity of the child of two is slightly misplaced, but the central idea of the talk of the digital revolution being a lie is spot on.
More needs to be said, though, to clarify the extent to which it is not so much the technology that is the problem, but rather the way it is being mythologised and the way it is being sold.
I think you will find much on the topic of techno-mythologization here. For now, I will merely make the preliminary and obvious point that there is no such thing as "technology" in general, just a constellation of artifacts and techniques, some useful to some, some not so useful to others, some not yet put to the uses that might make them useful, some so familiar they no longer seem to be artifacts at all. If mythology is, as Barthes taught us, "de-politicized speech," that is to say, our speaking of a world that could be otherwise that is instead a natural world that is as it must be, then there is no more forceful mythology than that which naturalized our sense of what counts as technology, what technology is good for, what progress it can be counted on to bring the faithful. The task of progressives, in my view, must be to re-politicize the field of artifice and technique in the service of sustainable equity-in-diversity.
Scathing refutation of this dark techno-shamnistic trend. Thank you :)
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