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

Thursday, August 09, 2012

It's Time For Romney to Come Clean on His Taxes

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hope you don't mind if I ask this OT question here: Could you direct me to some (to use your own nomenclature) 'Robot Cult' defense against your criticism of their ideas? It's been fairly difficult for me to come across anything concrete so far. Thanks and good job with the blog.

Dale Carrico said...

Of course, part of the problem is that I don't have just one but many criticisms of futurology, both in its more mainstream and more extreme subcultutal (Robot Cult) forms. I criticize the pseudo-science of many of its articles of faith -- and not only that, but while cryonics, uploading, SENS, desktop nanofactories, artificial intelligence, and so on are all quite marginal to the consensus science in the relevant fields, they are marginal to different degrees and in different ways, in ways that actually make a difference).

I also criticize the anti-democratic politics to which their beliefs ultimately conduce, sometimes in ways they do not fully grasp themselves -- and, once again, this takes different forms that matter, transhumanist eugenicism is reactionary in a different way than greenwashing "geo-engineering" is or the way fantasies about a Robot God makes people complacent about urgent problems is reactionary or the way techno-immortalist daydreams for bourgeois Boomer distracting attention from neglected treatable diseases in overexploited regions of the world or healthcare reform or more public funding for actually promising medical research is reactionary or the way techno-enthusiasm translates in real time to celebrity CEO worship and hyper gizmo consumerism is reactionary and so on.

I criticize the subcultural dynamics in futurological precincts of True Believers and guru wannabes and pseudo-expertise and think-tank pseudo-intellectualism having negative impacts on individual lives or intellectual standards. I expose rhetorical tropes and frames in futurological discourse that connect to theological, mythological, scientistic, marketing and promotional forms some of which I abhor others of which simply interest me but most of which most futurologists seem uncomfortable with. I criticize specific organizational ties of transhumanists and other futurologists with Movement Conservatives, market fundamentalist libertarians, neoliberals, Bell Curve and evo-psycho bigots, and cyber-hippy corporate sell outs, and phony vitamin supplement- TED-talk life-coach con-artists and bullshit artists, and so on -- sometimes just exposing the fraud as a skeptic, sometimes connecting dots among secretive bazillionaires, sometimes worrying about the way dumb pseudo-intellectuals loons sucking up to rich people while telling dramatic lies to a befuddled public can have an impact wildly disproportionate to the one you would think kooks could ever manage (as witness the Neocons).

I also talk about the way in which futurological discourses are a kind of clarifying reductio ad absurdum of actually prevailing assumptions, attitudes, and aspirations in an unsustainable, narcissistic, anti-intellectual, hyper-consumerist, techno-fetishistic, market-oriented, corporate-militarist culture such as our own.

I think there are many people who have argued against the separate pieces of my critique -- often they do so in the comments sections of the posts in which I propose these critiques, often they do so in essays and articles in their own spaces, sometimes explicitly in response to me. I don't think anybody has ever responded to my critique in toto, and to be fair, neither have I really made the whole case in a single place. It's easy enough to infer from the Condensed Critique of Transhumanism and the Futurology Against Ecology pieces anthologized over on the sidebar, but most of the critique and the response to it (and the cases made by futurologists to which the critiques are themselves often proximately responding), is a more conversational affair.

I fear this won't be a very satisfying answer. By all means, feel free to ask more and I might have more specific responses to questions you have in mind.