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

Saturday, January 04, 2014

Somebody Needs To Come Up With A Wearable Computer In The Form Of A Noose

I keed! I keed! Of course, this now notorious slogan is no more an exhortation to murder than the famous "Die Yuppie Scum!" of which it is a variation inspired yuppie genocide (if only). What is registered in both slogans instead is a doubly ironic recognition that yuppies -- and the techbros they have now become -- in their miserable competitiveness and possessiveness are in a sense already dead, as well as that in their corporate-militarist gizmo-fetishizing assumptions and aspirations they are also absolutely murderous themselves.

2 comments:

Impertinent Weasel said...

It's been a while since I've followed the transhumanists or your blog Dale... I was wondering what's happened with the famous transhumanist eminence Michael Anissimov? It seems he's joined another ill-advised group of wackos calling himself a neo-reactionary monarchist of all things now. And doesn't seem to have anything to do with his last ill-advised group of wackos the Singularity Institute which it appears is now calling itself the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, because being associated with the Singularity is too crazy presumably. Anyway, not that you are chronicling the comings and goings of these people but I couldn't get the blog's search function to work and thought you might have something interesting to say about it.

Dale Carrico said...

Yes, it's true, Michael Anissimov has gone from whining that I was indulging in hate speech whenever I pointed to the many reactionary assumptions and impacts of his futurological positions to actively championing now a neo-reactionary politics literally by name, futurologically inflected with evopsycho eugenic techno-hype, natch.

The Singularity Institute name change was fairly hilarious fallout from corporatist "IP-rationalization" as far as I can tell -- many of the long-suffering guru-wannabes and loyal troops in the singularitarian sect of the Robot Cult discovered themselves to be shrimps and got scooped to give more room and spin-control to Kurzweil, Thiel, and other big money fish now swimming in the singularity pond.

I personally suspect the MIRI moniker is an unconscious admission that the reality of AI is "Merely SIRI" (rimshot), that is to say unintelligent crap. They are quite as nutty as ever, of course. Amusing though it is to chronicle their flabbergasting futurological contortions, however, I still think the transhumanoids, siongularitarians, techno-immortalists, nanocornucopiasts, and geoengineers are most interesting when seen as clarifying extremities exposing the catastrophic exploitation, unsustainability, and mass misery of more prevailing corporate-militarist developmentalist/financialist techno-fixation, mass consumption, eugenicism, digi-utopianism, and mass-mediated pseudo-science in North Atlantic societies for which the Robot Cultists represent the zany iceberg tip.