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

Monday, September 30, 2013

You Can Thank the Robot Cultists for Ted Cruz

Gawker is reporting that Tea Party zealot and Congressional troll Ted Cruz (you know, the guy who indulges in phony filibusters on the Senate floor and who has appointed himself de facto Speaker of the House from there, all so that he can raise more money from rubes for his phony 2016 Presidential run slash audition for the next Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck-style tinpot media fiefdom) is being bankrolled by Peter Thiel. This is no surprise to those of us who remember that Peter Thiel also bankrolled anti-ACORN doconmantarian James O'Keefe. Those who have been following his curious right-wingularity activism for years know that in describing Peter Thiel as a "Gay Billionaire Pothead" the Gawker article actually manages to make Thiel seem huggably mainstream, even if the formulation has the benefit of tweaking the GOP's so-called "values voters" with Thiel's gayness. Of course Thiel is a notorious misogynist anti-multicultalist bigot, an anti-education activist, an anti-tax greedhead crybaby who wants to eat civilization and have it too, and one of too many horrible rich white gay men who seem to think homophobia is nothing but a matter of their personal exclusion from white patriarchal plutocratic entitlements, what I have described as the Gaybagger Wave. But the point I personally want to emphasize here is that Peter Thiel is also a Superlative Futurist bankrolling the Singularitarian Robot Cult sect's dream of coding a history-ending sooper-intelligent Robot God as well as the techno-immortalist transhumanoid Robot Cult sect's sooper-boner pill/anti-aging skin kreme longevity Vegas roadshow, SENS and all that nonsense. Indeed, I have accused Peter Thiel and Elon Musk of being the Koch Brothers of Reactionary Futurism.

As I wrote in a piece describing Thiel as a somewhat sad wannabe Doctor Evil:
Peter Thiel made billions of dollars by investing other dollars he already had in PayPal and Facebook and other digi-wizbangs coded by folks many of whom didn't make so many dollars as Peter Thiel did. Now Peter Thiel is investing in plots to build an offshore libertopian pirate utopia on an oil platform or cruise ship (right off the shore of socialist hell-hole San Francisco, so he and his rich friends can, you know, still have their foodie feasts in restaurants where basic hygiene is secured by government regulations and real hospitals are within easy helipad reach, natch) and investing in a klatch of self-declared sooper-geniuses who think they are coding a sooper-intelligent Robot God that will end human history by solving all our problems for us (or by converting us all to computronium feedstock, depending on whether you prefer your Singularitarian Robot Cultists to be of the hype-notized or the disasturbatory variety).
Although there are some futurologists and Robot Cultists who declare themselves socialist, liberal, or civil libertarian there is simply no question that the technological determinism of the view conduces to complacency as its techno-fetishism conduces to hyper-consumption, setting aside the suave circumventions of deliberation via technocratic elitism or super-intelligent AI parent-substitutes or Ayn Raelian market fundamentalists and eugenic evo-psycho douchebags who throng the discourses and subcultures of transhumanism and other futurological and technobooster precincts. The essence of democracy is an opening up, mostly through the securing of equity-in-diversity, of the futurity within the plural public present while the essence of the futurological is the projection and extrapolation and amplification of a present parochialism as "The Future" to foreclose futurity. At their best, futurologists are proposing progressivisms in reactionary terms, at their worst futurologists are full throated reactionary bigots shilling for the plutocrats. Thiel is more than a bad apple or sordid outlier, but a symptom of the reaction inhering in all futurology.

3 comments:

jimf said...

> But the point I personally want to emphasize is that Peter Thiel
> is a Robot Cultist bankrolling the Singularitarian Robot Cult
> sect's dream of coding a history-ending sooper-intelligent
> Robot God as well as techno-immortalist transhumanoid Aubrey De Grey's
> sooper-boner pill/anti-aging skin kreme longevity Vegas roadshow, SENS.
>
> . . .a somewhat sad wannabe Doctor Evil:

'I'm Nate Caplan. . . My IQ is one hundred and sixty. I'm
in perfect physical and mental health. And I can pay you half
a million dollars right now. . . I know I look skinny. . .
but I have no lipid deficiencies. . . And I'm willing to give
up the caloric restriction. . . You'll get the money, and it
will be untraceable. All I want from you in return is a
guarantee that when the time comes, I'll be the one.'

Nasim didn't know where to start. . . '**If** the Human
Connectome Project goes ahead. . .'

'. . .I don't want the superintelligence to come
into existence before I'm uploaded. It's very important to me that I'm the
first transcendent being in this stellar system. I can't risk having to compete
with another resource-hungry entity: I have personal plans that require at
least one Jovian mass of computronium.'

'Really? I have "personal plans" that require Naveen Andrews and a bottle of
coconut oil, but I don't expect they're going to happen either.'

Caplan was bemused. 'Why are you so hostile?'

'I don't know,' Nasim confessed. 'Maybe it's because I've had enough experience
of deluded fundamentalists to last a lifetime.'

-- Greg Egan, _Zendegi_

;->

jimf said...

> . . .as well as the techno-immortalist transhumanoid Robot Cult
> sect's sooper-boner pill/anti-aging skin kreme longevity
> Vegas roadshow, SENS and all that nonsense.

Hey, the roadshow's just picked up a new act:

http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/10/01/google-vs-death-transhumanist-responses/
------------------
In a recent post on G+, Google CEO Larry Page said:
“Art and I are excited about tackling aging and illness.
These issues affect us all—from the decreased mobility
and mental agility that comes with age, to life-threatening
diseases that exact a terrible physical and emotional
toll on individuals and families. . .

Google today announced Calico, a new company that will
focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge
of aging and associated diseases. Arthur D. Levinson,
Chairman and former CEO of Genentech and Chairman of Apple,
will be Chief Executive Officer and a founding investor.” . . .
Tim Cook, Chief Executive Officer of Apple, said:
“For too many of our friends and family, life has been
cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking.
Art is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn’t have
to be this way. There is no one better suited to lead this
mission and I am excited to see the results.”
====

Dale Carrico said...

“For too many of our friends and family, life has been
cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking.
Art is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn’t have
to be this way."

It's called medicine. Nobody on earth thinks its crazy to invest in medical research and better administration of care on harm reduction models. Nobody on earth. But to pretend that you are going to live a thousand years in a model hot gengineered or nanoboticized bod or shiny robot body or forever as a cyberangel in Holodeck Heaven is indeed pseudo-scientific craziness peddled by faith-based techno-transcendentalists too scared of death to live life on its actual terms or eager to con the rubes making phony promises. Every dollar of money and every second of attention diverted from real healthcare research and administration into death-denialist techno-transcendentalist nonsense is lost to the collective effort to actually cure real diseases and ease real suffering and provide real health security to everybody.