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

Monday, December 10, 2012

The Relentless Negativity of Futurological "Positivity"

Even a few sympathetic readers have wondered why I have been so terribly hard on transhumanoid Robot Cultist George Dvorsky in particular since he arrived at his io9 perch. The short answer is because he makes it so very easy. Eric and I were talking about io9 and what it is that bugs us about Dvorsky's columns there last night. We are both fans of the site, even though we also have both worried that Dvorsky's arrival and writing there was a symptom of a vulnerability to its seriously jumping the shark. Anyway, I think our conversation meandered its way to a longer, more useful answer.

Eric was saying that he can always tell a Dvorsky post even before noticing his byline on it first because of a certain tone one always encounters in them. He pointed out that Dvorsky isn't the only one at io9 who fudges science he doesn't really know from time to time, or extrapolates ad absurdum to provide a bit of eye-ball attracting zazz to his futurological blueskying. Even the writers we tend to like best at io9 like Annalee Newitz do this sort of thing occasionally. One is never exactly thrilled about it, and as I have said many times Eric and I are like the grumpy muppets Statler and Waldorf, hanging out in the balcony, always ready to enjoy reading an article for filth for this or that error of fact or judgment or lapse in taste. But as queergeeks with more than our share of inner fanboy who have been reading pop sci-tech for decades (I subscribed faithfully to OMNI magazine way back in junior high for heaven's sake, I used to get solicitations from the Robot Cult Pre-Show entertainment that was the L5 Society and Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw!), one knows that some of this is more or less just part of the furniture of technoscience commentary.

So, what is it that is different in a Dvorsky column's futurological lapses? The way Eric put it last night was to say that there was a curious "negativity" in Dvorsky's posts. This pricked up my ears, because Eric and I are always being criticized for our own negativity, and I knew he was having trouble putting his finger right where the irritant was. He elaborated his point: While many io9 columnists will seize on a technoscientific detail, and often in ways that betray an insufficient grasp of the scientific or developmental details involved in it, and then in their enthusiasm amplify the implications of that detail beyond all sense, Eric said that there is for him a difference between the quality of the enthusiasm of these posts and a kind of desperation he discerns in a Dvorsky post. Rather than connecting the reader to the pleasure of a world rendered marvelously weirder by a scientific result (possibly only because the result is misread) or a humanity revealed marvelously queerer by a speculative leap or literary conceit, in Dvorsky the detail he is seizing is offered up as the candidate for a savior: the 3D-printer app that will save us from historical struggle, the bioengineered amoeba that will save us from ocean acidification, the pharma press release that will save us from mortality, the crank cold fusion fancier who will save us from fossil fuels, the crank AI dead ender who is coding the internet sooper-brain that will save us from our errors, the fleet of aerosol-spritzing airships that will save us from catastrophic climate change, the rocketship that will save us from the "death trap" of the planet we are responsible to and evolved to flourish in, and so on.

Then I knew exactly what Eric meant. Futurologists are never, in my view, primarily interested in a scientific result for its actual place in the scientific consensus, are never interested in a technical development in its actual stakes to the diversity of its stakeholders, but are always most interested instead in the way the result or development can be slotted into the narrative of their futurological faith: they are most interested in the result or development re-conceived as a stepping stone along the road to "The Future." No scientific discovery and technique exists for itself, but is always before all else a kind of techno-transcendentalizing Whirlwind or Burning Bush through which the Voice of the Robot God reassures the Faithful that "The Future" really is Imminent and really is Theirs.

I have named "futurity" the quality of openness in the present that arises out of the ineradicable diversity of the stakeholders who share and make the world, and I have said that futurological discourse always demands a kind of reactionary foreclosing of that openness -- in all its threatening and promising contingency -- through the amplification or projection of the fear and greed and limited knowledge of some parochial present prevailing through a faithful-presence renamed "The Future." What Eric was discerning as a stubborn negativity in Dvorsky's futurological brand of blue skying is, I believe, the desperate dis-identification of a Robot Cultist with the futurity in the present that is the price he pays for the fervency of his identification with his vision of "The Future."

Part of what is so extraordinary about the superlative futurology of the Robot Cultists is their insistence that theirs is a stunningly optimistic vision, an antidote to negativity. It has always seemed to me instead that in the transhumanoids and singularitarians and techno-immortalists one hears the callous "can-do!" "no limits!" stridency of con-artists on the make or of privileged people who refuse to renounce their unearned privileges, who fancy things will always inevitably go their way, who believe that there will always be other people to clean up their messes for them, and who experience the disruptions that devastate the lives of the precarious as a thrill ride.

I do not personally agree that there is anything particularly "positive" about insensitivity, opportunism, or denialism.

I think that "techno-immortal" death-denialists who crow about living forever are expressing horror and hostility to life as it is actually lived. I don't think there are many people who revel in the prospect of illness or agony, or who are always thrilled at the demands of our immersion within a contingent universe or within a history of contending stakeholders, but nobody joins a Robot Cult to affirm the value of healthcare, education, scientific research, or the democratic process. I see little joy in life in those who so loath their aging and vulnerable bodies that they give themselves over to fantasies of becoming bodiless data-spirits in an immaterial cyber-heaven, who are seized with such panic contemplating their proneness to error and humiliation in a still-wonderful because somewhat-mysterious universe shared with an unpredictable diversity of peers that they give themselves over to fantasies of coding sooper-parental Robot Gods who will know all the answers and end History.

I simply do not agree that these futurological formulations represent positive, optimistic, or progressive viewpoints.

In their curious inversion of the terms of what positivity and progressivity seem to me substantially to mean, the superlative futurologists are indulging in one of a series of rhetorical reversals: I have already mentioned that the futurological faith in "The Future" demands the denigration of the open futurity in the present, peer-to-peer, and this is of a piece with the re-framing of the insistent negativity of their denialism as a mode of "positivity." Notice also that Robot Cultists diverge from scientific consensus in field after field after field, and then re-frame this pseudo-scientific marginality as "championing science" or even as "scientific literacy"! Notice how "uploading" enthusiasts will claim that it is a "materialist" thesis to declare the actual material incarnation of consciousness is irrelevant to its existence, and then seriously accuse those who express skepticism about the very idea of a "migration" without loss of a materialized intelligence from one material substrate to another of being "mystics"! Notice, more generally, how often futurologists will proclaim that those who express skepticism about their extraordinary technodevelopmental expectations are pretending "to know" the future, when of course reasonable people know that is it precisely the burden of the extraordinary claim that it requires extraordinary support, when of course reasonable people know that one believes things for good reasons not just because there are not conclusive reasons (which are hard to come by, especially when we are talking about technodevelopmental capacities so distant from practical realization, connected to technoscientific knowledges in fields where we know far too little to say anything for sure) to deny them with certainty, when of course reasonable people know to be skeptical especially of those claims which seem to arise most of all from irrational passions, like the fears of impotence and dreams of omnipotence that forever freight loose talk of "technology."

Again, I simply do not agree that these futurological formulations represent reasonable, scientific, or serious viewpoints.

I think the mistake io9 made in providing a forum for a transhumanoid superlative futurologist like Dvorsky is not primarily that he fudges so much science or indulges in so much nonsensical hyperbole, but that they do not quite grasp -- and in making this error they are far from alone among folks who are otherwise technoscientifically literate and technodevelopmentally concerned -- the difference between science fiction fandoms and geek subcultures, on the one hand, and futurological fandom sub(cult)ures of the Robot Cult varieties, on the other hand, in which faith in "The Future" demands the reactionary foreclosure of open futurity, in which denialism is celebrated as optimism, in which pseudo-science is peddled as science, and in which wish-fulfillment fantasizing is affirmed as Reason (usually to the profitable consolation of incumbent elites).

8 comments:

jimf said...

> [I]n Dvorsky the detail he is seizing is offered up as the
> candidate for a savior: the 3D-printer app that will save
> us from historical struggle, the bioengineered amoeba that
> will save us from ocean acidification, the pharma press release
> that will save us from mortality, the crank cold fusion fancier
> who will save us from fossil fuels, the crank AI dead ender
> who is coding the internet sooper-brain that will save us from
> our errors, the fleet of aerosol-spritzing airships that will
> save us from catastrophic climate change, the rocketship that
> will save us from the "death trap" of the planet we are responsible
> to and evolved to flourish in, and so on.

Yes, this has been for almost a decade and a half the message
of the "Singularitarians" (Yudkowsky and his cheerleader Anissimov, et al.)
and the "Existential Threat" brigade (Bostrom et al.).

TAKE US SERIOUSLY, or else, or else -- BILLIONS and BILLIONS of
people will die who otherwise wouldn't.

And don't try to figure any of this out on your own, or second
guess us -- JUST SEND MONEY!

It's sort of like their version of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth".
Except, you know, most >Hists seem not to take the climate
change thing too seriously -- that's just hippy propaganda, you know.
But unfriendly AI, now, that's a serious threat! (Just ask Bill
Joy. Wonder what he's up to these days.)

Well, it gives a dark frisson, and an edge of cosmic seriousness,
to a "movement" which might otherwise have all the gravitas
of an SF con, or comic con.

jimf said...

> I have said many times Eric and I are like the grumpy muppets
> Statler and Waldorf. . .

http://jezebel.com/5967244/are-you-unhappy-with-your-life-try-being-more-crabby

Dale Carrico said...

it gives a dark frisson, and an edge of cosmic seriousness,
to a "movement" which might otherwise have all the gravitas
of an SF con, or comic con


Or, you know, just a con.

PS: I appreciate your gift of that gimme! Happy festivus, chum!

joe said...

This kind of reminds me of a back and forth I had with a guy over on the Nextbigfuture blog.

The crazies always seem to come out over there when a "redical life extension" ect story is posted up by Brian Wang.

Anyhow there was one of those posts and I made what I thought was a decent enough point that most (I believe it's over 75%) of all medical research/medical area work ends up either not working as well as hoped, not working at all or indeed turns out to be actively harmful to humans even after animal trials.


Never mind the faking or hiding of data from pharma companies.


So we went at it and this guy was all sooooper positive that all this would work out.
Then I made a point about how, if this stuff worked what we'd most likely end up with will be a caste system of a small tier of long lived hyper wealthy people and then everyone else basically going in a descending order down to a caste of people (probably hundreds of millions strong) who's lives would be like mayflies to the higher ups.

Not even worthy of thought, since who values the lives of insects....

Then this guy came back with !well everyone will be able to afford it when the market pentration rate brings the price down"....


I didn't know what to say...beyond, their are millions upon millions of people right now in the second decade of the 21st century who don't even have clean water and the absolute basic level of medical care and he's on about them having access to longevity treatments?

I couldn't get him to budge, he just kept saying it...these people will have it too..


It's was almost like he was brainwashed to believe it.


Anyway sorry for the off topic Dale, you just reminded me of it.

Dale Carrico said...

I think you might enjoy a little flash from the Amor Mundi past called I Am Fact Guy. Cheers!

joe said...

Well that was insane, thanks Dale.

I've had words with him before but have never seen the.....what's the words I'm looking for.....loopy side?, shown here.

I ignore him anyway and just read the interestig stuff while filtering out his nonsense.

jimf said...

> > This kind of reminds me of a back and forth I had with
> > a guy over on the Nextbigfuture blog. . .
>
> I think you might enjoy a little flash from the Amor Mundi
> past called I Am Fact Guy.

Oh, don't try to argue with Fact Guy! After all, he's got
all the facts.



My mother told me good
My mother told me strong.
She said "be true to yourself
And you can't go wrong.
But there's just one thing
that you must understand:
You can fool with your brother -
But don't mess with a missionary man."

Don't mess with a missionary man.
Don't mess with a missionary man.

Well the missionary man
He's got God on his side.
He's got the saints and apostles
Backin' up from behind.
Black eyed looks from those Bible books.
He's a man with a mission
Got a serious mind.
There was a woman in the jungle
And a monkey on a tree.
The missionary man he was followin' me.
He said "Stop what you're doing.
Get down upon your knees.
I've got a message for you that you better believe."

...believe...believe...believe...believe...

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/sy-25142343/eurythmics_missionary_man_official_music_video/

jimf said...

> Yes, this has been for almost a decade and a half the message
> of the "Singularitarians" (Yudkowsky and his cheerleader Anissimov, et al.)
> and the "Existential Threat" brigade (Bostrom et al.).

http://www.snorgtees.com/t-shirts/zombies-robots-and-aliens-venn-diagram