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Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Tim O'Reilly on "The Golden Age"

Also published at the World Future Society.

Claiming he has "lived with the shadow of the fall of Rome, [and] the failure of its intellectual culture," Tim O'Reilly fears that too many today "lack the will and the foresight to face the world's problems squarely, but will instead retreat from them into superstition and ignorance." More specifically, he warns that "conservative, backward-looking movements often arise under conditions of economic stress" and worries that when "conservative elements in American religion and politics refuse to accept scientific knowledge, deride their opponents for being 'reality based,'" this is evidence of dangerous reactionary forces that may pose in our own day the sort of threat that overcame Rome. "[T]he so-called dark ages," he writes, "were not something imposed from without, a breakdown of civilization due to barbarian invasions, but a choice, a turning away from knowledge and discovery into a kind of religious fundamentalism."

Quibbles over details aside (monocausal accounts of the Fall of Rome are never really the best idea), I find a lot to sympathize with in the thrust of O'Reilly's point so far. Definitely I agree that the threat of reactionaries denying the separation of church and state, denying catastrophic anthropocentric climate change, denying evolutionary biology, denying the benefits of sex-education, denying the promise of investment in medical and renewable energy research and development, denying the efficacy of harm-reduction policy models, denying Keynes-Hicks macroeconomics and so much more are indeed very real threats, especially since so many of the shared problems that only sound, sensible, scientifically warranted approaches would address are so urgent in their dangers to us all, here and now.

What worries me about O'Reilly's worry, however, is that it seems to me in his righteous jeremiad against "anti-science" "anti-problem solving" "anti-intellectualism" he is actually buoying up one of the most relentlessly reactionary, pseudo-scientific, anti-intellectual cohorts of wish-fulfillment fantasists imaginable: mainstream and superlative futurologists. "Yes," O'Reilly enthuses, "we may find technological solutions that propel us into a new golden age of robots, collective intelligence, and an economy built around 'the creative class.' But it's at least as probable that as we fail to find those solutions quickly enough, the world falls into apathy, disbelief in science and progress, and after a melancholy decline, a new dark age."

Let just take a minute to be very clear about this, shall we?

First: Any "golden age of robots" will require more than the solution of technical problems, but political organization to ensure that the productivity gains of automation are distributed to all the stakeholders to production else they will yield -- as they have done throughout the "golden age" of corporate think-tanks and futurological discourse -- ever greater wealth concentration among the richest members of society while the security and satisfaction of the overwhelming majority of people who work for a living grows ever more precarious.

Second: Any "collective intelligence" facilitated by peer-to-peer networked media formations that is not supported and subsidized by a considerable collective investment financially supporting the contributors to that intelligent expressivity, enthusiasm, problem-solving, and criticism amounts to an apologia for outsourcing, crowdsourcing, archive looting, deregulatory trolling, IP-imperialism, misinformational fraud, yielding ever greater wealth-capture by the richest members of society from the precarious majority.

Third: Any identification of a "creative class" that does not testify to the primary contribution to actual creation, to actual productivity, to actual discovery and development of the majority of people who work for a living doing the research and implementing its results always amounts to a self-congratulatory celebration of financial fraudsters and PR flacks, attesting to their indispensability as a way of rationalizing, for themselves and to the world, their indulgence in endless highly profitable but scarcely productive skimming and scamming off of the toil and genius of the precarious majority.

O'Reilly writes that "[f]or so many in the techno-elite, even those who don't entirely subscribe to the unlimited optimism of the Singularity, the notion of perpetual progress and economic growth is somehow taken for granted." Again, this is a little tricky to parse. Ecological insights give the lie to fantasies of perpetual progress through economic growth, certainly, and it is indeed dangerously anti-intellectual and anti-scientific to deny the lesson of these insights. By the way, it is worth mentioning that re-orienting our economic policy to facilitate investment in the satisfaction of real needs and the solution of real problems instead of facile fantasies of perpetual growth in a finite world is indeed quite possible, further that there is no reason why we cannot struggle to ensure that our societies are at once more equitable and more celebratory of their diversity as well, and so there is no reason at all to give up the struggle for substantial progress, properly construed.

I would like to think this is something like the lesson O'Reilly means for us to take from his piece, but I fear that his warning is intended to rouse futurologists from a complacent expectation that their views will inevitably prevail against faith-based anti-intellectualism, rather than a warning that their views constitute one of many variations of that faith-based anti-intellectualism, and one to which his particular readership has demonstrated itself to be especially prone.

In offering up warm words for Robot Cultists like the Singularitarians, O'Reilly is not so much attacking religious fundamentalism the better to defend secular multicultural democratic pragmatism (which is a worthy endeavor, indeed, I agree), as taking sides in a non-adjudicable clash of religious fundamentalisms between Robot Cultists and America's reactionary Christianists. If you wonder what I mean by "warm words" let me put it this way: I do not agree that there is anything either "optimistic" or "elite" about an article of faith that serially failed AI dead-enders are coding a history-shattering Robot God who is going to solve all our problems for us any day now.

O'Reilly declares "it's wise to imagine widely divergent futures," and it may seem hard to take issue with that. Of course, every actually legibly constituted disciplinary discourse or professional practice has a foresight dimension. Part of what it means to know something is to be able to provide advice from the limited but real perspective of that knowledge that helps us make better plans. When policy-makers offer up proposals to guide public deliberation about public investments of attention and effort and money over which of our shared problems are the most urgent ones, which of our investments will benefit the most people at the least cost, they rightly consult the warranted verdicts of relevant experts who provide just this kind of foresight.

Now, I have quipped that "Futurologists keep confusing making bets with having thoughts" and that "Whenever I hear the word 'trend' I reach for my brain." But there are real, serious questions whether the acts of imaginative futurological scenario building so beloved in boardroom PowerPoints and by TED Talk tech-crowds, coming from corporate-military think-tanks and suffusing corporate-military advertising imagery, are really providing resources of disciplinary foresight for representatives, activists, policy-makers, concerned citizens at all, or whether they really are little more than broad-brush abstractions, fun-house mirrors reflecting and amplifying the parochial preoccupations of elite-incumbent interests from the present back to the present promising ever more present in the name of "accelerating change" or "progressive futures." What if speculating on "imaginary futures" actually functions as a distraction away from "finding solutions" (as O'Reilly claims to want most of all, and rightly so) or even functions to disavow altogether the reality of the problems for which we need to find solutions in the first place? Religious fundamentalists may deny God will allow climate change to destroy the human world, but futurological geo-engineering fantasists allow Exxon-Mobil's CEO to claim an easy techno-fix is around the corner, resulting in the very same supernatural denialism and parochially profitable complacency.

By way of conclusion let me turn my attention briefly to another aspect of the argument. O'Reilly's sketch of the reasons for the fall of Rome (which didn't so much fall, after all, really, as shift geographically into the Byzantine Empire, and then the Holy Roman Empire, and then, look, it's the Treaty of Westphalia and early modern Europe) is just that, a sketch, and so I'm sure he would provide a more complex account involving both interior and exterior dynamics if he was really pushed on the question. There is good reason to think that climate-change was a part of the story then as it is again now, for example. But as far as obviously oversimplifying monocausal explanations go, the rise of anti-intellectual Christianity isn't half bad as a candidate for the primary reason for the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as punchy numbers on the theme by Edward Gibbon and Gore Vidal, say, amply attest. Given space limitations, then, I can't fault O'Reilly's Roman sketch, but given the same limitations it is worth pondering why he chose to frame his case through the lens of such an oversimplified conjuration of Roman decline in the first place. In this connection, I will note that the trope of an American decline prophetically announced by Roman decline -- but this time brought about by the demands of the unworthy poor, useless eaters, takers over makers, barbarians shepherded to the gates by misguided do-gooder idealists or menacingly feminist and relativist intellectuals of the effete elite aesthete varieties -- is used BY reactionaries quite as often as it is used AGAINST them.

While I am quite as worried about the dangers of politically organized formations of religious fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism, and pseudo-science as Tim O'Reilly claims to be, I would be rather more confident about being on his side if I didn't think he might think Singularitarian Robot Cultists like guru-wannabe Ray Kurzweil are "optimists" and among the "techno elite." While I am quite as worried about the dangers of politically organized formations of reaction and neo-feudalism as Tim O'Reilly claims to be, I would be rather more confident about being on his side if I didn't think he might think celebrity tech CEOs and corporate-military PR think tanks constitute the "creative class" that is the protagonist of real progressive history.

3 comments:

jimf said...

> But as far as obviously oversimplifying monocausal explanations
> go, the rise of anti-intellectual Christianity isn't half bad
> as a candidate for the primary reason for the Decline and Fall
> of the Roman Empire. . .

BERTRAND RUSSELL: I think that at this
present day, uh, religion -- as embodied
in the churches -- . . . gives importance to things that
are **not** very important. Its sense of importance
seems to me quite wrong. Now, when the Roman Empire
was falling, the Fathers of the Church didn't bother
much with the fall of the Roman Empire. What they
bothered with was how to preserve virginity -- that
was what they thought important. Well now, when...

WOODROW WYATT: What did they do about that, sir?

RUSSELL: Well, they exhorted people. And, uh, didn't
bother about seeing that the armies held the frontiers
or anything like that, or that the taxation system
was reformed. They were occupied in founding monasteries
and nunneries and so forth, and thought that far
more important than preserving the Empire. Well, so, in
the present day, when the human race is falling, I find
that, uh, eminent divines think that it's much more
important to prevent artificial insemination than it is
to prevent the kind of world war that will exterminate
the whole lot of us. And that seems to me to show
a lack of sense of proportion

(Interview, 1959)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2FjvXgAen8

jimf said...

> What worries me about O'Reilly's worry. . . [is that]
> he is actually buoying up one of the most relentlessly reactionary,
> pseudo-scientific, anti-intellectual cohorts of wish-fulfillment
> fantasists imaginable: mainstream and superlative futurologists. . .
> [, providing] an apologia for outsourcing, crowdsourcing,
> archive looting, deregulatory trolling, IP-imperialism,
> misinformational fraud, yielding ever greater wealth-capture
> by the richest members of society from the precarious majority. . .
> amount[ing] to a self-congratulatory celebration of financial
> fraudsters and PR flacks, attesting to their indispensability
> as a way of rationalizing, for themselves and to the world,
> their indulgence in endless highly profitable but scarcely
> productive skimming and scamming off of the toil and genius
> of the precarious majority. . .
>
> I fear that his warning is intended to rouse futurologists
> from a complacent expectation that their views will inevitably
> prevail against faith-based anti-intellectualism, rather than
> a warning that their views constitute one of many variations
> of that faith-based anti-intellectualism. . . taking sides
> in a non-adjudicable clash of religious fundamentalisms
> between Robot Cultists and America's reactionary Christianists. . .
>
> While I am quite as worried about the dangers of politically
> organized formations of religious fundamentalism,
> anti-intellectualism, and pseudo-science as Tim O'Reilly
> claims to be, I would be rather more confident about being
> on his side if I didn't think he might think Singularitarian
> Robot Cultists like guru-wannabe Ray Kurzweil are "optimists"
> and among the "techno elite."

skeptic (FSVO "skeptic") Michael Shermer takes the same naive
line (as O'Reilly), unfortunately.

Narcissist's Accomplices
(Sam Vaknin)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpnlEfNHxpk

jollyspaniard said...

The rise of fundamentalism could have been an effect of decline instead of a cause. His next paragraph even suggests as much. When societies get stressed a lot of people go a bit nuts, there's plenty of examples in history as well as in the news.

The roman empire analogy does have some small merit. While the empire relocated to a certain extent the complexity of political organisation, technology and long distance trade for the large majority of people living within the confines of the old empire plumetted. A modern collary would be the unwinding of globalisation which is already underway.

In our case it isn't barbarians hammering at the gate but the laws of physics. O'Reilly completely misses the point by pointing a finger at fundamentalism. In essence he's crafted a scapegoat to explain away a disparity between what he thought would happen and what is actually happening. Yes fundamentalist nutters are bad, but they aren't the reason why the singularity isn't happening. Those nutters are consuming away buying the latest gadgets, that's all that's required of them to propel us down singularity highway.

In the singularity timeline we're supposed to be experiencing ever increasing prosperity, that clearly isn't happening. And it's getting hard to imagine that it's going to happen any time soon. I'd give ORielly more credit if he took this as an oppurtunity for revaluation rather than scapegoating ignorant rubes.