For those of you who have asked me to say more about the dissertation I am currently finishing up (apparently, mostly in my downtime from what sometimes seems my rather more rewarding but unremunerative efforts at blogging), here is a section from the Introduction to the dissertation in which I outline the argument of its three main chapters. Comments, criticisms, questions are, as always, welcome.
I’ll start with a war story. It is a story about a battle written from the perspective of its recent aftermath. And as often happens with wars, many of its warriors still nurse the wounds they acquired in its skirmishes and betrayals, many still mouth the platitudes that drove its reckless energies, and some still pine for and fervently anticipate its resumption. While it is commonplace for a certain perplexity and even absurdity to attach to the actual details in retrospective accounts of war, it seems to me especially surreal to survey the scene of the conflict that preoccupies me here, a conflict which for all its noise and heat now seems in a way best captioned by that wistful old anti-war slogan: “What If They Gave a War and Nobody Came”?
In the first and second chapters of this dissertation, I will tell you the story of what Paulina Barsook has called “The Crypto Wars.” It is the story of what amounts to roughly a decade of skirmishes in policy, in law, in code, in mainstream op-eds, and in the incandescent online manifestoes of a few inspired technology alarmists and enthusiasts, all moved by the development and proliferation of then-new and now-ubiquitous digital networked tools designed either to keep or to expose people’s secrets.
The application of encryption techniques to transactions undertaken over digital networks, for example, has especially exercised the imaginations of the writer and activist Tim May and the coterie of “Cypherpunks” (the name of an anarchic collection of coders and cryptography enthusiasts, and of the influential, sometimes notorious, online mailing-list where they gather to discuss these topics) for whom he was a founder and a spokesman and something of a folk-hero. Encryption is simply the process of enciphering or transforming information so that it is unintelligible to anyone but an intended recipient.
In Chapter One, “Markets From Math,” I will discuss a series of rather exhilarated arguments, initially widely circulated online in the mid-1990s, in which Tim May and Eric Hughes, among others, predicted that more and more social and economic transactions would come to take place behind a veil of impenetrable encryption. The ultimate consequence of this emerging state of affairs for May and Hughes and the other Cypherpunks was no less than that conventional national governments would soon be rendered obsolete and contemporary societies across the globe swiftly transformed beyond recognition. All this would take place because states presumably would no longer be able to police routinely encrypted social interactions, levy sufficient tax revenues on ubiquitously encrypted economic transactions to fund their traditional functions, nor even maintain geographical borders in a meaningful way for citizens devoted primarily to their participation in globe-girding digital networks.
In Chapter Two, “Markets With Eyes,” I will focus on work by David Brin, a popular science fiction author and essayist, who countered this “cypherpunk” perspective soon thereafter in a number of comparably influential articles, many of which also first circulated online, and then in a book, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? There Brin argued, contrary to the Cypherpunks, that whatever security and obscurity might be afforded by encryption techniques would soon enough be bypassed by the overwhelming multiplication of powerful surveillance technologies of other kinds -- for instance, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology inexpensively imbedded into, potentially at any rate, nearly all discrete objects on earth, the ongoing “realtime” tracking of individuals via the biometric profiles they cast in their commerce with the world (traces of skin, hair, blood, as well as finger, iris, and voice prints, for example), and the proliferation of vanishingly small, exceptionally cheap digital cameras, even, imagine, long rolls of paper-thin adhesive-sticker “penny-cams,” all of them archiving or downloading content continuously onto public and private networks. Rather notoriously, Brin went on to celebrate what initially seems the somewhat chilling prospect of an emerging ubiquitous surveillance society as generating in his terms a kind of radical “transparency” that would, he insisted, encourage more critical dialogue, more honorable conduct, and more accountable authorities.
Ultimately, Brin’s vision of a “transparent society” presumes a technological transformation of society no less sweeping and unprecedented in its scope than the “crypto-anarchy” championed by the Cypherpunks with whom he often differed so contentiously. But more intriguing than their differences, I notice that May and Brin share certain unexpected affinities and key assumptions in making their separate cases. Of these, what strikes me most forcefully (apart from the fact that adherents of both viewpoints seem to consider the outcomes they dread or desire as equally inevitably eventuating from the technological developments that preoccupy their notice) is that both May and Brin affirm at the base of their conceptions of social life a rather specific kind of individual subject. Whether uniquely imperiled or encouraged by surveillance, it is in each case a subject characterized essentially by the capacity to make promises and enter into reliable contractual obligations. It is at root a subject on the market. And true to this shared point of departure, both May and Brin sketch what amount to similarly utopian portraits of a society constituted in its totality by promises and contracts, attained either through or secured against the emergence of ubiquitous surveillance technologies.
I will read these shared assumptions in Chapter Three, “Markets Without Materiality,” through the lens of Michel Foucault’s use, in his book on the emergence of the modern prison, Discipline and Punish, of the figure of the Benthamite Panopticon (an ideal institutional architecture proposed to impose upon prisoners a presumably “beneficial” regime of absolute and total surveillance) to describe how the conscientious liberal subject of industrial capitalism has been constituted through discourses and practices of surveillance, broadly construed. What is intriguing to me is the extent to which May’s own “pancryptic” project reproduces rather than eludes the central features of the panopticon Brin would seem, on the contrary, to embrace. And central to the normative ideals of both crypto-anarchy and total transparency I observe a shared and definitive recourse to a discourse of privacy, treated either as indispensable to human freedom and dignity (in May and Hughes) or instead urgently to be dispensed with in pursuit of the same (in Brin), and for which privacy is taken to be above all else a matter primarily of secrecy.
This leads me, finally, to the work of N. Katherine Hayles. For Hayles, the history and preoccupations of information theory, from its inauguration in the Turing Test for personhood as a matter of adequacy in ideally mediated, disembodied conversation through to the contemporary vision of roboticist Hans Moravec to “upload” consciousness into imperishable data, has continually reiterated the gesture of an erasure of the body, and continually makes recourse to reductive accounts of communication as information flows or a play of patterns which disavow the definitive embodiment of these experiences. I propose that both the pancryptic and the panoptic utopias/dystopias of cypherpunks like Tim May and transparency advocates like David Brin, relying as they do on the technological facilitation of market norms either through the unprecedented consolidation or obliteration of the circulation of public information, represent a second, conspicuously political face of this dematerializing tendency in information theory. Market libertarian technophiles, often explicitly inspired by these information models, offer up accounts of political life and publish strident manifestoes demanding political transformation. Many of these accounts insistently denigrate and deny the reality of legitimate social and public experiences, while many more of them seem curiously oblivious likewise to the actual material complexities of the terrain to which they would address even their legitimate grievances. And few of these accounts seem even remotely prepared to grasp the significance of what seems to me a conspicuous contemporary rematerialization of new media networks, on which are flowing more and more palpably and significantly these days not so much any presumably disembodied digital information strongly susceptible to secrecy, but bodily secretions susceptible instead to biometric surveillance and to ownership by others as patentable sequences of information.
Monday, December 27, 2004
Sunday, December 26, 2004
Against Fundamentalism and Cruelty: Russell’s “A Liberal Decalogue”
I just stumbled upon a lovely piece by Bertrand Russell, called “A Liberal Decalogue,” with which others may be well familiar but which I had never seen myself. It appears in his Autobiography, but apparently originated in an article for the New York Times in 1951, called “The Best Answer to Fanaticism – Liberalism.” It seems that liberalism has indeed long desired and deserved the self-image of a "reality-based community."
It is intriguing to set this alongside Judith Shklar’s definition of a liberal, made famous especially by Richard Rorty who took it up in his most important book so far, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Shklar has said that a liberal is “one for whom cruelty is the worst thing we do.” I append Shklar’s definition here to emphasise that while Russell’s piece may seem preoccupied with epistemology it is easy to discern a warm moralism in his ironical "Commandments."
Of course, even if you don’t want to pursue that particular line it is easy to see the relevance and usefulness of Russell’s skepticism in the service of truthfulness in an era boiling with Fundamentalists who, whether in priestly robes or lab-coats, imagine themselves conduits through which Truths greater and more sure than themselves flow and at the “promptings” of which too often too much blood is sure to flow, too.
Here, then, is Russell’s Decalogue, “not intended,” he writes, “to replace the old one but to supplement it.” This, he proposes, is his best effort to pithily sum up “the essence of the Liberal outlook.”
It is intriguing to set this alongside Judith Shklar’s definition of a liberal, made famous especially by Richard Rorty who took it up in his most important book so far, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Shklar has said that a liberal is “one for whom cruelty is the worst thing we do.” I append Shklar’s definition here to emphasise that while Russell’s piece may seem preoccupied with epistemology it is easy to discern a warm moralism in his ironical "Commandments."
Of course, even if you don’t want to pursue that particular line it is easy to see the relevance and usefulness of Russell’s skepticism in the service of truthfulness in an era boiling with Fundamentalists who, whether in priestly robes or lab-coats, imagine themselves conduits through which Truths greater and more sure than themselves flow and at the “promptings” of which too often too much blood is sure to flow, too.
Here, then, is Russell’s Decalogue, “not intended,” he writes, “to replace the old one but to supplement it.” This, he proposes, is his best effort to pithily sum up “the essence of the Liberal outlook.”
The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:
1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
Saturday, December 25, 2004
Snowball’s Chance in Hell (Holiday Cackles from the Balcony)
It has become something of an NPR tradition at Christmas time to replay David Sedaris’ "Santaland Diaries," a mildly funny, genial, utterly inoffensive trifle with about as much subversive bite as an episode of The Golden Girls.
Of course, the tradition-loving conservatives have always been notably selective about the “traditions” they are most eager to show their love. And for the rest? The shove.
While the conservatives seem conspicuously keen to conserve those traditions in which gays remain closeted, women and negroes remain servile, “religious” proprieties like public modesty and a relentlessly unwavering work ethic remain in force for the working poor and shrivelling middle-classes, and plenty of whores and cigars remain available for fat-assed fat-cat dullards and bullies to enjoy as they stoically contemplate whatever passes this year for the bottom-line, they exhibit indifference and even hostility to any number of traditions that manage to exceed the ambit of their rather dim, unadventurous imaginations.
As it happens, I often encourage Sedaris fans to direct their attention to the comedic genius of David’s sister Amy, and especially her radioactively incandescent series Strangers With Candy if they are looking for some for-real subversive comedy to noodle around with. And for those who act as though David’s NPR naughtiness is transformed by his bland homosexuality into some kind of sweeping critique of contemporary American hypocrisies a la Williams Burroughs, I encourage everyone to read instead (or at any rate additionally) the brilliant novels of Gary Indiana, whose sublime omnivorous queerness scalpels everything it touches, including himself, in a bloodbath that leaves you howling and a little shaky. (Resentment and Horse Crazy are his best novels, in my opinion.)
Anyway, this year NPR has seen fit to expurgate from the already vanilla-mild Santaland broadcast a potentially “offensive” minor bit involving flirtation among males. Here’s the passage (which I clipped from the ever-invaluable Atrios):
As Eric pointed out to me, it’s rather flabbergasting that NPR’s robotic executives haven’t “done the math” (isn’t that, you know, “at the end of the day,” what these executive types are supposed to be good at?) and thought through the possibility that the fifty million Americans who voted for Kerry are likely to throng among the dwindling listener base of NPR, and that, more to the point, any hayseed dumbass benighted enough to find the passage in question “offensive” in the first place, whether they had the sense to vote for Kerry or not, certainly wouldn’t be among NPR’s listeners?
I am not among the progressives who are demanding the boycott or dismantlement of NPR because of their recent timidity and tremulousness -– funny how well-meaning liberal types can always be counted upon to do the bidding of Repugnican barking dogs and attack first the very sites in culture in which their own supporters, however insipid scared and compromised they may be, are most likely to reside -– but I do think NPR should be badgered and humiliated forthwith into doing the right thing.
Clearly they are scared of their own shadows, and if they can be bullied by brainless death-mongering pre-moderns of the Repugnican persuasion from covering war atrocities in the newsroom or diversity in their cultural programming, then they can be bullied by the likes of us into doing the right thing just as easily.
Of course, the tradition-loving conservatives have always been notably selective about the “traditions” they are most eager to show their love. And for the rest? The shove.
While the conservatives seem conspicuously keen to conserve those traditions in which gays remain closeted, women and negroes remain servile, “religious” proprieties like public modesty and a relentlessly unwavering work ethic remain in force for the working poor and shrivelling middle-classes, and plenty of whores and cigars remain available for fat-assed fat-cat dullards and bullies to enjoy as they stoically contemplate whatever passes this year for the bottom-line, they exhibit indifference and even hostility to any number of traditions that manage to exceed the ambit of their rather dim, unadventurous imaginations.
As it happens, I often encourage Sedaris fans to direct their attention to the comedic genius of David’s sister Amy, and especially her radioactively incandescent series Strangers With Candy if they are looking for some for-real subversive comedy to noodle around with. And for those who act as though David’s NPR naughtiness is transformed by his bland homosexuality into some kind of sweeping critique of contemporary American hypocrisies a la Williams Burroughs, I encourage everyone to read instead (or at any rate additionally) the brilliant novels of Gary Indiana, whose sublime omnivorous queerness scalpels everything it touches, including himself, in a bloodbath that leaves you howling and a little shaky. (Resentment and Horse Crazy are his best novels, in my opinion.)
Anyway, this year NPR has seen fit to expurgate from the already vanilla-mild Santaland broadcast a potentially “offensive” minor bit involving flirtation among males. Here’s the passage (which I clipped from the ever-invaluable Atrios):
The overall cutest elf is a fellow from Queens named Snowball. Snowball tends to ham it up with the children, sometime literally tumbling down the path to Santa's house. I tend to frown on that sort of behavior but Snowball is hands down adorable -- you want to put him in your pocket. Yesterday we worked together as Santa Elves and I became excited when he started saying things like, "I'd follow you to Santa's house any day, Crumpet!"
It made me dizzy, this flirtation.
By mid-afternoon I was running into walls. At the end of our shift we were in the bathroom, changing clothes, when suddenly we were surrounded by three Santas and five other elves -- all of them were guys that Snowball was flirting with.
Snowball just leads elves on, elves and Santas. He is playing a dangerous game.
As Eric pointed out to me, it’s rather flabbergasting that NPR’s robotic executives haven’t “done the math” (isn’t that, you know, “at the end of the day,” what these executive types are supposed to be good at?) and thought through the possibility that the fifty million Americans who voted for Kerry are likely to throng among the dwindling listener base of NPR, and that, more to the point, any hayseed dumbass benighted enough to find the passage in question “offensive” in the first place, whether they had the sense to vote for Kerry or not, certainly wouldn’t be among NPR’s listeners?
I am not among the progressives who are demanding the boycott or dismantlement of NPR because of their recent timidity and tremulousness -– funny how well-meaning liberal types can always be counted upon to do the bidding of Repugnican barking dogs and attack first the very sites in culture in which their own supporters, however insipid scared and compromised they may be, are most likely to reside -– but I do think NPR should be badgered and humiliated forthwith into doing the right thing.
Clearly they are scared of their own shadows, and if they can be bullied by brainless death-mongering pre-moderns of the Repugnican persuasion from covering war atrocities in the newsroom or diversity in their cultural programming, then they can be bullied by the likes of us into doing the right thing just as easily.
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Democratic Supraintelligence
Technophiles who drift uncomfortably in the direction of the megalomaniacal end of the temperamental spectrum often wax enthusiastic about the near term arrival of post-biological superintelligence. Undaunted by the relentless deferment of the "inevitable" arrival of even the modest artificial intelligence we've been promised interminably by enthusiasts for decades, they warn of and (let's be frank) pine for the near-term and inevitable arrival of greater-than-human artificial intelligence to this day in the same urgent, sometimes hushed, tones.
Not to delve too deep into my skepticism about this way of thinking, I will simply suggest that these starry-eyed projections (1) tend to overestimate our theoretical grasp of intelligence in general, (2) tend to underestimate the extreme bumpiness we should expect along the developmental pathways from which the relevant technologies could arrive, (3) tend to assume that these technologies, upon arrival, would function more smoothly than technologies almost ever do, and (4) tend to exhibit a rather stark obliviousness about the extent to which what we call technological development is articulated in fact not just by the accumulation of technical accomplishments but by social, cultural, and political factors as well, in consequence of which they simply rarely take these adequately into account at all.
I will leave as an exercise for their various psychotherapists the exposition of the perplexing particulars that drive these enthusiasts to ignore so much that is palpable when they declaim their pornographically implausible apocalyptic and transcendentalizing techno-transformative scenarios as inevitabilities. More interesting to me is the more modest suggestion that technologically mediated forms of intelligence, deliberation, collaboration, as well as prosthetic and neuroceutical amplifications of our capacities for concentration, memory, and other cognitive processes may soon put us in a better position to solve for once some of the deep and dangerous problems that confront us all -- many of these problems exacerbated for now beyond our reckoning by ongoing technological developments themselves.
Rather than figuring these hopes and fears for intelligence through what amounts to a rather embarrassingly adolescent-boy imaginary populated conspicuously by scary monsters, mecha metal, and bulging superheros (superintelligence: a mode of superlatively private, autonomous individual agencies), I prefer to figure them instead through the frame of technologically invigorated processes of democratic collaboration, contestation, and responsibility (supraintelligence: a mode of superlatively public, interdependent individual agencies).
Against the usually sociopathic fantasies of the curiously many techno-enthuisiasts who appear to want to craft and code pristine superintelligences with which to endow their robot armies, I dream instead of air-dropping billions of networked computers across the world, to weave more and more perspectives, desires, and intelligences into the global web.
(It's one good dream among many, of course -- and not one I hold in exclusion or preference to the ones that impel work to bring adequate food and medicine and shelter and transparent authorities to everybody as well -- there are many good and important dreams to choose from, after all.)
Anyway, I just noticed, via my favorite blog WorldChanging, that a company called SolarPC has announced the availability of a $100 personal computer called the SolarLite. It burns just 10 watts, has an aluminium case with a 20 year warranty, a lead free motherboard, is loaded up with free software, and the company is ready to fill orders of 100,000 units or more right about now. There are questions about the energy requirements of the computer, its monitor, and other things, so clearly this isn't an end-all and be-all they're talking about here, but the technological facilitation of democratic supraintelligence sometimes feels so near you can just taste it, can't you? So much better than dwelling a single day more on the dreary debacle of November 2!
Not to delve too deep into my skepticism about this way of thinking, I will simply suggest that these starry-eyed projections (1) tend to overestimate our theoretical grasp of intelligence in general, (2) tend to underestimate the extreme bumpiness we should expect along the developmental pathways from which the relevant technologies could arrive, (3) tend to assume that these technologies, upon arrival, would function more smoothly than technologies almost ever do, and (4) tend to exhibit a rather stark obliviousness about the extent to which what we call technological development is articulated in fact not just by the accumulation of technical accomplishments but by social, cultural, and political factors as well, in consequence of which they simply rarely take these adequately into account at all.
I will leave as an exercise for their various psychotherapists the exposition of the perplexing particulars that drive these enthusiasts to ignore so much that is palpable when they declaim their pornographically implausible apocalyptic and transcendentalizing techno-transformative scenarios as inevitabilities. More interesting to me is the more modest suggestion that technologically mediated forms of intelligence, deliberation, collaboration, as well as prosthetic and neuroceutical amplifications of our capacities for concentration, memory, and other cognitive processes may soon put us in a better position to solve for once some of the deep and dangerous problems that confront us all -- many of these problems exacerbated for now beyond our reckoning by ongoing technological developments themselves.
Rather than figuring these hopes and fears for intelligence through what amounts to a rather embarrassingly adolescent-boy imaginary populated conspicuously by scary monsters, mecha metal, and bulging superheros (superintelligence: a mode of superlatively private, autonomous individual agencies), I prefer to figure them instead through the frame of technologically invigorated processes of democratic collaboration, contestation, and responsibility (supraintelligence: a mode of superlatively public, interdependent individual agencies).
Against the usually sociopathic fantasies of the curiously many techno-enthuisiasts who appear to want to craft and code pristine superintelligences with which to endow their robot armies, I dream instead of air-dropping billions of networked computers across the world, to weave more and more perspectives, desires, and intelligences into the global web.
(It's one good dream among many, of course -- and not one I hold in exclusion or preference to the ones that impel work to bring adequate food and medicine and shelter and transparent authorities to everybody as well -- there are many good and important dreams to choose from, after all.)
Anyway, I just noticed, via my favorite blog WorldChanging, that a company called SolarPC has announced the availability of a $100 personal computer called the SolarLite. It burns just 10 watts, has an aluminium case with a 20 year warranty, a lead free motherboard, is loaded up with free software, and the company is ready to fill orders of 100,000 units or more right about now. There are questions about the energy requirements of the computer, its monitor, and other things, so clearly this isn't an end-all and be-all they're talking about here, but the technological facilitation of democratic supraintelligence sometimes feels so near you can just taste it, can't you? So much better than dwelling a single day more on the dreary debacle of November 2!
Friday, November 05, 2004
Godless, Gunless, and Gay
As a queer atheist for gun control, I want to send a shout out to all my fellow American citizens on the genocidal evangelical Right and the panic-stricken scapegoating Left: I'm not the problem, I'm not going away, and you all suck.
Thursday, November 04, 2004
Real Americans
Oh, and another thing! Progressives must defend and champion urban Americans in the so-called “Red States.”
We should distinguish sparsely populated rural conservatives from densely populated diverse urban progressives. The millions upon millions of city dwelling progressives across America are real Americans, and progressives do not live only on the coasts.
Every time demographic dimensions of political discourse are contemplated or figured through the broad-strokes of “Red and Blue States” or the “Heartland” versus the “Coasts” progressives must simply ignore that framing (we shouldn’t even respond to those terms) and we must always counter with a framing that insists on benighted poor sparsely populated rural conservative expanses dotted throughout with densely populated progressive cultural centers, thriving progressive centers of learning and industry, and diverse productive progressive cities and capitals.
Progressives need to get it through their skulls that, actually, come what may, we are Americans.
I realize that this is actually a common but by no means universal ritual of progressive maturation, still... When many of us left home for college or the cities and emerged into progressive consciousness, first confronted religious diversity, first grasped the reality and extent of social injustice, came out as gay, rebelled against the strictures of our upbringing, whatever form this development took, it is too easy to imagine that in becoming progressive we took a measure of distance from "America" as it is embodied in the impoverished lives we left behind.
But this is the path the majority of Americans have taken in some form or other over a century of tumult and trial. We did not leave America behind when we grew up and became progressives. Much of America grew up with us, much of America came with us, this is what much of America is now, this is the way most of us do things around here now.
Social conservativism is a sad, scared echo of America’s past reverberating into its present, but progressives are truly Americans in America as it actually exists in the present. Progressives need to stop acting like renters in America and realize we already own the place.
We should distinguish sparsely populated rural conservatives from densely populated diverse urban progressives. The millions upon millions of city dwelling progressives across America are real Americans, and progressives do not live only on the coasts.
Every time demographic dimensions of political discourse are contemplated or figured through the broad-strokes of “Red and Blue States” or the “Heartland” versus the “Coasts” progressives must simply ignore that framing (we shouldn’t even respond to those terms) and we must always counter with a framing that insists on benighted poor sparsely populated rural conservative expanses dotted throughout with densely populated progressive cultural centers, thriving progressive centers of learning and industry, and diverse productive progressive cities and capitals.
Progressives need to get it through their skulls that, actually, come what may, we are Americans.
I realize that this is actually a common but by no means universal ritual of progressive maturation, still... When many of us left home for college or the cities and emerged into progressive consciousness, first confronted religious diversity, first grasped the reality and extent of social injustice, came out as gay, rebelled against the strictures of our upbringing, whatever form this development took, it is too easy to imagine that in becoming progressive we took a measure of distance from "America" as it is embodied in the impoverished lives we left behind.
But this is the path the majority of Americans have taken in some form or other over a century of tumult and trial. We did not leave America behind when we grew up and became progressives. Much of America grew up with us, much of America came with us, this is what much of America is now, this is the way most of us do things around here now.
Social conservativism is a sad, scared echo of America’s past reverberating into its present, but progressives are truly Americans in America as it actually exists in the present. Progressives need to stop acting like renters in America and realize we already own the place.
Saturday, September 11, 2004
Ten Theses on Surveillance
As often happens among technology enthusiasts, there has been a flare-up of discussion about the politics of surveillance on one of the talk-fora I participate on regularly.First of all, be careful about treating the sentence "People will pay for x" as a synonym for "x is voluntary." Freedom is more than selecting options provided by the powerful for the delight and edification of the rest of us. (This is probably not what you meant, but it is a problem these formulations are prey to.) It is more likely that the techniques of surveillance that become customary in the next few years, for good or ill, will in fact define much of what comes to be taken and experienced and defended as "voluntary" in the first place.
The terms of this discussion seem to me to drift into pretty well-worn grooves these days, defined roughly by the positions of "cypherpunks" like Tim May on one end, and advocates for "transparency" like David Brin on the other.
Maybe this says more about the salons I hang out in than about the actual issues at hand, but it seems to me that most of the positions taken up within the discursive universe defined by these poles make assumptions (a certain level of technological determinism, for example, as well as a reductive understanding of politics inspired by market libertartianism) that undermine the capacity of the participants to really get at many of the stakes and problems in play in the emerging politics of surveillance.
Anyway, somebody made the comment: "In the future, suveillance will be voluntary. People will pay to watch and pay to be watched." And, true to form, I took this innocuous comment as the prompt for a sprawling and probably misdirected response of my own. My only defense is that this is the topic of my dissertation, and I am a bit preoccupied with these issues at the moment, and so I hope I can be forgiven for going off occasionally somewhat half-cocked.
But, come what may, it seemed to me the ten theses inspired by that comment might have a more general interest and so I figured they might as well find their way to the blog:
Second, "surveillance" is too sweeping and complex in its impacts and development to ever deserve the straightforward whole-cloth application of a label like "voluntary" or "coercive." Some applications of surveillance techniques will facilitate domination, some will express consent.
Third, it is key to shift the discussion of surveillance away from technological determinist frameworks where we pretend that there is something inherent in the technologies themselves from which either inevitably dangerous or inevitably promising outcomes will unfold. It is not technology but prosthetic practices that are liberating or coercive, here as always.
Fourth, what we call "privacy" has always been unstable in its characteristics, and deeply responsive to technological development. (Warren and Brandeis's canonical "Right to Privacy" was a response to networked journalism and high-speed photography, and the category of privacy has been primary in the legal and cultural discourse through which democracies have grappled with the ongoing development of reproductive technologies, and now digital/biometric surveillance, for example.) Technology is not threatening privacy, so much as changing it. This is not new. This has always been the story of privacy. Still, it is also always right to worry whether particular changes afoot are welcome or not.
Fifth, the problem is not that we are exposed to greater and more exhaustive scrutiny, but that we are vulnerable to the uses to which such information can be put. It is not the availability of personal information that is threatening, but the capacity of power to impose definitive interpretations of information on us to facilitate our exploitation and domination.
Sixth, at the heart of David Brin's notion of "transparency" would seem to be the idea that there is a single stable truth of the matter to be exposed by ubiquitous surveillance which will protect the innocent from the depredations of the powerful. I believe that the world is susceptible to multiple pragmatically powerful descriptions, and that when surveillance power is asymmetrical (as it is now, conspicuously, and shows no signs at all of shifting away from) those descriptions will prevail primarily which maintain and consolidate established concentrations of power, whatever suffering this causes or justifies otherwise.
Seventh, these worries should not inspire us to repudiate new technologies but to insist on uses of technology that will be emancipatory. This means we must shift the focus of surveillance techniques onto authority itself, rather than acquiescing to the ongoing intensification of surveillance by authorities over the relatively less powerful.
Eighth, my libertarian friends -- whether of the market, socialist, green, or civil varieties -- who are still hypnotized by eighteenth century characterizations of power best embodied by absolutist sovereigns, would do well to study Michel Foucault as soon as possible. Foucault proposed, among other things, that the "coercive" application of power has become more diffuse, institutionally multi-lateral, and involves multiple micro-intense interventions into conduct to produce desired outcomes in a way that is at once more efficient as well as experienced by its objects (subjects) as less onerous. Dazzled by fantasies of Big Brother, too many lovers of freedom are distracted away from the actual workings of power, and the actual institutional locations from which domination is exercised, to the real cost of freedom. Foucault's word for these diffuse coercive mechanisms? "Surveillance."
Ninth, the focus of privacy activism, then, must be (1) to strengthen civil liberties which would protect us from the pernicious misuse of information gathered and deployed by the powerful to dominate others (for example, if gay people were not earmarked for special discrimination in most societies it would matter considerably less that information about homosexual conduct can be ever more easily exposed and published to the world), and (2) to challenge (within reason!) the veils of official secrecy through which powerful institutions maintain their asymmetrical power to impose interpretations over information (primarily through the logic of "security" and the "reason of state" -- or the corporate logic of intellectual property and proprietary information).
Tenth, we must at all costs resist the usual disavowal of politics through a focus on technical questions. This means we must reject out of hand the technophobic response of those whose fears about the dangerous misuse of technology will prompt them to repudiate the technologies themselves. Such a response will squander the energies of dedicated defenders of freedom on a hopeless cause. Technologies cannot be disinvented, and so activism must ensure instead that through reasonable regulation their uses and distribution are progressive. But we must reject with equal fervor the technophilic response of those who expect or desire that technological development will hurdle us past intractable political quandaries, rather than simply express them in new forms. Radical and progressive technology advocates cannot afford to make the mistakes of irrational exuberance that characterized the technophilia of "cyberspace," "cypherpunk," or "virtuality" enthusiasms of recent memory. Technology expresses political interests, it does not bypass them. Technological development is a space of social struggle, not the steady accumulation of objects in a toy-pile. When Aristotle defined human beings as "political animals" this was the first recognition that humanity is definitively cyborg. Technology will never deliver us from the contestatory, collaborative, conversational field of politics. Politics is who we are.
Now, get to it.
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Cognitive Modification and Consent
Emerging pharmacological interventions into mood, memory, and perception are growing more sophisticated and ubiquitous. These developments are taking place in the context of the disastrous racist and puritanical War on (some but not other) Drugs (by means of yet other Drugs), which perniciously distorts nearly every effort to think clearly about the issues involved.
My first impulse (as your typical "Pro-Choice" liberal feminist queer) is to say that of course people should always be able to do what they want with their own bodies and brains, so long as they do not endanger the health, safety, or wellbeing of others to whom they are responsible. But come to think of it, we will not be able to rely on a naïve voluntarism to govern decisions about the kind of radical cognitive modifications that are arriving soon, and of which contemporary pharmacological interventions are the first premonition. This is because the whole point of too much cognitive modification will be to intervene in the capacities and effects on the basis of which we judge something to be voluntary in the first place.
It is easy to imagine intelligence enhancements for which the case could be made that only someone who has undergone the enhancement itself is in a position to be considered fully informed about it. Is it easy to imagine cognitive modifications that would induce hyper-efficacious kinds of monomania or enable forms of exhilaration or special sensitivities that simply could not be judged "rational" or "sane" by the standards of normative conduct that underlie these judgments now.
What if a person seeks to erase significant stretches of painful memory or to efface what have been characteristic but are now unwanted elements of personality? (Or, to speculate in a wilder-eyed way for the longer term, what if a person chooses to immerse themselves via, say, a neural interface into a distributed network in a way that seems to subordinate their individuality to something more like a collective mind?) What of the claims of loved ones that such modifications will constitute a kind of suicide, or more strongly are signs of incompetence justifying custodial protection?
What is wanted in general for now is policy that simultaneously: one, encourages the development of useful neuroceuticals and increased research into their effects; two, liberalizes their availability to those who want to use them; three, restricts the circumstances in which their use would be imposed by authorities; and four, increases education into effects to ensure that individual choices are informed ones. But I fear this center will not hold for long.
Eventually, it may be that the contemporary association of "consent" with privacy will be displaced by a state of affairs in which the maintenance of consent will rely very conspicuously on public monitoring, reversibility of modification, and maintaining mediated pathways to intersubjective intelligibility even where there can be no assurance that political peers will be able to communicate with one another even in principle their individual stakes in the world they share.
My first impulse (as your typical "Pro-Choice" liberal feminist queer) is to say that of course people should always be able to do what they want with their own bodies and brains, so long as they do not endanger the health, safety, or wellbeing of others to whom they are responsible. But come to think of it, we will not be able to rely on a naïve voluntarism to govern decisions about the kind of radical cognitive modifications that are arriving soon, and of which contemporary pharmacological interventions are the first premonition. This is because the whole point of too much cognitive modification will be to intervene in the capacities and effects on the basis of which we judge something to be voluntary in the first place.
It is easy to imagine intelligence enhancements for which the case could be made that only someone who has undergone the enhancement itself is in a position to be considered fully informed about it. Is it easy to imagine cognitive modifications that would induce hyper-efficacious kinds of monomania or enable forms of exhilaration or special sensitivities that simply could not be judged "rational" or "sane" by the standards of normative conduct that underlie these judgments now.
What if a person seeks to erase significant stretches of painful memory or to efface what have been characteristic but are now unwanted elements of personality? (Or, to speculate in a wilder-eyed way for the longer term, what if a person chooses to immerse themselves via, say, a neural interface into a distributed network in a way that seems to subordinate their individuality to something more like a collective mind?) What of the claims of loved ones that such modifications will constitute a kind of suicide, or more strongly are signs of incompetence justifying custodial protection?
What is wanted in general for now is policy that simultaneously: one, encourages the development of useful neuroceuticals and increased research into their effects; two, liberalizes their availability to those who want to use them; three, restricts the circumstances in which their use would be imposed by authorities; and four, increases education into effects to ensure that individual choices are informed ones. But I fear this center will not hold for long.
Eventually, it may be that the contemporary association of "consent" with privacy will be displaced by a state of affairs in which the maintenance of consent will rely very conspicuously on public monitoring, reversibility of modification, and maintaining mediated pathways to intersubjective intelligibility even where there can be no assurance that political peers will be able to communicate with one another even in principle their individual stakes in the world they share.
Friday, June 25, 2004
TV04 Talk: Vulgar Biocentrism Among the Technophiles
I'll be giving a talk, "Vulgar Biocentrism Among the Technophiles," Saturday, August 7, at the University of Toronto as part of a Conference, "Art and Life in the Posthuman Era."
In the talk I discuss the figurative content of biological science and technology, and the argumentative work these figures commonly do in the imagination and advocacy of radical technophiles.
Here's a longer description of what I'm up to in the talk:
"The first half of the twenty-first century is likely to be shaped most conspicuously by scientific interventions into biological processes, from ever more powerful genetic medical therapies and enhancements, bio-informatics, and bioengineered and superorganic foodstuffs, to the emergence of molecular manufacturing.
"The sweep and scope of biotechnological intervention already reverberates into the language and culture of the societies that are witness to them.
"Biology has a second life beyond its scientific content and technological applications. It is a rich field of metaphors and tropes to which thinkers and advocates and critics in diverse fields make separate recourse in their efforts to make sense of the world and anticipate and shape its futures.
"I argue that it is important for progressive technology advocates and critics to be conscious of our occasional reliance on this figurative dimension of biology, from our use of 'existence proofs' from biology to justify our faith in particular technological outcomes (for example, projected versions of molecular nanotechnologies the specific details of which would often be in fact different in key ways from existing biology) or the way we understand public life (for example, understanding culture through the problematic metaphor of the 'meme') or the way we justify or champion particular organizations of society or the economy (for example, the selective embrace of biology in the market naturalist formulations of 'bionomics').
"It is not my view that the embrace of a biological imaginary across culture is a negative or distortive development, and in fact I consider it practically inevitable and embrace aspects of it myself.
"But I recommend special care about the selective deployment of congenial aspects of biology to underwrite as objectively preferable what ultimately amount to subjective judgments of value. To the extent that 'transhumanism' is suspicious of the normative and ideological force of the 'natural' as a category, one would expect transhumanist discourse and criticism to resist the use of 'naturalizing' metaphors drawn from biology to underwrite its own judgments."
In the talk I discuss the figurative content of biological science and technology, and the argumentative work these figures commonly do in the imagination and advocacy of radical technophiles.
Here's a longer description of what I'm up to in the talk:
"The first half of the twenty-first century is likely to be shaped most conspicuously by scientific interventions into biological processes, from ever more powerful genetic medical therapies and enhancements, bio-informatics, and bioengineered and superorganic foodstuffs, to the emergence of molecular manufacturing.
"The sweep and scope of biotechnological intervention already reverberates into the language and culture of the societies that are witness to them.
"Biology has a second life beyond its scientific content and technological applications. It is a rich field of metaphors and tropes to which thinkers and advocates and critics in diverse fields make separate recourse in their efforts to make sense of the world and anticipate and shape its futures.
"I argue that it is important for progressive technology advocates and critics to be conscious of our occasional reliance on this figurative dimension of biology, from our use of 'existence proofs' from biology to justify our faith in particular technological outcomes (for example, projected versions of molecular nanotechnologies the specific details of which would often be in fact different in key ways from existing biology) or the way we understand public life (for example, understanding culture through the problematic metaphor of the 'meme') or the way we justify or champion particular organizations of society or the economy (for example, the selective embrace of biology in the market naturalist formulations of 'bionomics').
"It is not my view that the embrace of a biological imaginary across culture is a negative or distortive development, and in fact I consider it practically inevitable and embrace aspects of it myself.
"But I recommend special care about the selective deployment of congenial aspects of biology to underwrite as objectively preferable what ultimately amount to subjective judgments of value. To the extent that 'transhumanism' is suspicious of the normative and ideological force of the 'natural' as a category, one would expect transhumanist discourse and criticism to resist the use of 'naturalizing' metaphors drawn from biology to underwrite its own judgments."
Saturday, June 19, 2004
Must We Put the Self on the Shelf?
My friend and fellow progressive technology advocate, the socialist-feminist bioethicist James Hughes wrote an interesting column in BetterHumans a while back, expressing his skepticism about much of the rhetoric of “extreme life extension.” I re-read the article, entitled “The Illusiveness of Immortality,” just this morning and it still has me thinking.
Hughes’s skepticism emerges from a somewhat unexpected direction. Like me, he has little doubt at all that medical knowledge and pharmacological, genetic, and prosthetic techniques may well soon overcome many of the diseases and conditions that afflict human organisms, especially the diseases of aging that afflict our normatively “later” stages of life, as well as ameliorating or intervening altogether in the more fundamental biological processes that constitute what we somewhat superstitiously call “aging” in the first place.
“No,” he writes “my problem with immortality is simply that I don't exist." He continues on: "You don't either. Our so-called personalities are just roiling masses of evolving impulses, memories, thoughts and sensations. There is no central chip, no core thought, no essential memory, that makes you you.”
Too often the rhetoric of "life-extension" seems to imply an hysterical dedication to a monolithic or stable personal selfhood, but one that is simply indefinitely extended or rendered in its supposed invulnerability to the infirmities of decline somehow a more perfectly self-sufficient self. William Burroughs savages this sensibility in his hilarious incandescent rant-poem “Immortality,” when he writes: “The tiresome concept of personal immortality is predicated on the illusion of some unchangeable precious essence: greedy old MEEEEEEEE forever. But as the Buddhists say, there is no MEEEEEEEE, no unchanging ego.”
Of course, it is hard to imagine how selves so construed could survive indefinite extension “intact” any more than they could the more brutal truncation of mortality they currently face. And as Hughes goes on to suggest, the same medicine that will preserve and enhance the healthy lifespan and so would inspire such fancies of stable prolongation will likely provide opportunities for radical modifications and augmentations of human organisms in the service of their unimaginably proliferating projects of personal perfection, any number of which would scramble beyond recognition the current narrative organization we denote as the “self.”
What worries me is that we can recognize a radical dynamism of the self, we can recognize the naivete that would affirm the “self” as some kind of unchanging substance – and yet still recognize the viability of “selfhood” as a way of organizing personal experience and intentions.
Hughes proposes a future with “more life, less selfishness” and I applaud the sentiment wholeheartedly. But we should take care to remember that neither is “life” an abstract substance that deserves to be produced and augmented monomaniacally as an end in itself, in the way of an impersonal utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number,” as Hughes puts it later in his article. The life that interests me is still lived in lives, and lives are lived in the real but insubstantial selves that incarnate them.
When I propose that selves are real but insubstantial, I do not mean to imply that selves inhere in spirits or souls, but in stories. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has said of the self that it is a “center of narrative gravity.” He proposes the intriguing hypothesis that the Platonic dialogue of the “I and the me” that constitutes the uniquely human way of having selves, arose from a habit of subvocalizing -- in the interests of strategically useful secrecy -- the human organism's linguistic exploration of her ongoing options. Whatever one wants to make of that, what remains for me is the compelling figure of the self as a kind of narrative organization of experience, memory, and desire. Such a self may be, as Richard Rorty would insist, absolutely contingent, but nonetheless profoundly worthy of respect, and indeed still the source of the very notion of respect.
Life, it seems to me, is no more to be respected in the abstract than any other process. It is when we find in life our likeness that we find it respectable. Selves are the flavors that “life” takes on, and we affirm them in their kinship and yet their unrepeatability, their irreplaceability, and in the incomparable riches and lessons they hold for us. Hughes writes that "[a]t best, we need to pretend there is a continuous discrete self so that we can have an orderly society and an orderly life.” He is right that there is much that is damaging and pathological in the insistence on perfect continuity, independence, and self-evidence in the ideology of selfhood, but I think he is wrong to consequently dismiss the self as a “pretense.”
However long our lives, however enriched our capacities, we will most of us still need selves and all of us an abiding respect for them, although likely much more capacious ones, to make sense of the proliferating and diverging demands of beings who are transformed by technology and yet share a world as peers. However transformed by technological development, a culture of rights must long remain a culture of selves. Perhaps what Hughes highlights in his provocative article is less that the self is an illusion, so much as that the self largely amounts in the end to a public goods problem.
Hughes’s skepticism emerges from a somewhat unexpected direction. Like me, he has little doubt at all that medical knowledge and pharmacological, genetic, and prosthetic techniques may well soon overcome many of the diseases and conditions that afflict human organisms, especially the diseases of aging that afflict our normatively “later” stages of life, as well as ameliorating or intervening altogether in the more fundamental biological processes that constitute what we somewhat superstitiously call “aging” in the first place.
“No,” he writes “my problem with immortality is simply that I don't exist." He continues on: "You don't either. Our so-called personalities are just roiling masses of evolving impulses, memories, thoughts and sensations. There is no central chip, no core thought, no essential memory, that makes you you.”
Too often the rhetoric of "life-extension" seems to imply an hysterical dedication to a monolithic or stable personal selfhood, but one that is simply indefinitely extended or rendered in its supposed invulnerability to the infirmities of decline somehow a more perfectly self-sufficient self. William Burroughs savages this sensibility in his hilarious incandescent rant-poem “Immortality,” when he writes: “The tiresome concept of personal immortality is predicated on the illusion of some unchangeable precious essence: greedy old MEEEEEEEE forever. But as the Buddhists say, there is no MEEEEEEEE, no unchanging ego.”
Of course, it is hard to imagine how selves so construed could survive indefinite extension “intact” any more than they could the more brutal truncation of mortality they currently face. And as Hughes goes on to suggest, the same medicine that will preserve and enhance the healthy lifespan and so would inspire such fancies of stable prolongation will likely provide opportunities for radical modifications and augmentations of human organisms in the service of their unimaginably proliferating projects of personal perfection, any number of which would scramble beyond recognition the current narrative organization we denote as the “self.”
What worries me is that we can recognize a radical dynamism of the self, we can recognize the naivete that would affirm the “self” as some kind of unchanging substance – and yet still recognize the viability of “selfhood” as a way of organizing personal experience and intentions.
Hughes proposes a future with “more life, less selfishness” and I applaud the sentiment wholeheartedly. But we should take care to remember that neither is “life” an abstract substance that deserves to be produced and augmented monomaniacally as an end in itself, in the way of an impersonal utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number,” as Hughes puts it later in his article. The life that interests me is still lived in lives, and lives are lived in the real but insubstantial selves that incarnate them.
When I propose that selves are real but insubstantial, I do not mean to imply that selves inhere in spirits or souls, but in stories. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has said of the self that it is a “center of narrative gravity.” He proposes the intriguing hypothesis that the Platonic dialogue of the “I and the me” that constitutes the uniquely human way of having selves, arose from a habit of subvocalizing -- in the interests of strategically useful secrecy -- the human organism's linguistic exploration of her ongoing options. Whatever one wants to make of that, what remains for me is the compelling figure of the self as a kind of narrative organization of experience, memory, and desire. Such a self may be, as Richard Rorty would insist, absolutely contingent, but nonetheless profoundly worthy of respect, and indeed still the source of the very notion of respect.
Life, it seems to me, is no more to be respected in the abstract than any other process. It is when we find in life our likeness that we find it respectable. Selves are the flavors that “life” takes on, and we affirm them in their kinship and yet their unrepeatability, their irreplaceability, and in the incomparable riches and lessons they hold for us. Hughes writes that "[a]t best, we need to pretend there is a continuous discrete self so that we can have an orderly society and an orderly life.” He is right that there is much that is damaging and pathological in the insistence on perfect continuity, independence, and self-evidence in the ideology of selfhood, but I think he is wrong to consequently dismiss the self as a “pretense.”
However long our lives, however enriched our capacities, we will most of us still need selves and all of us an abiding respect for them, although likely much more capacious ones, to make sense of the proliferating and diverging demands of beings who are transformed by technology and yet share a world as peers. However transformed by technological development, a culture of rights must long remain a culture of selves. Perhaps what Hughes highlights in his provocative article is less that the self is an illusion, so much as that the self largely amounts in the end to a public goods problem.
Saturday, June 12, 2004
The Politics of Progressive Technology Development: Arguments From Stage Management Versus Arguments From Superlative States
Many people are initially inspired (or appalled) by the sensawunda conjurations by radical technophiles of what I call Superlative State Technology: replicative nanoscale machinery nudging us into a post-scarcity gift society, genetic and prosthetic medicine delivering physical immortality, a hedonistic imperative that eradicates any unpleasant sensation for the sentients who could suffer one, a universe-wide diaspora via traversible wormholes, sprawling consensual (or not) hive-minded communities, quasi-transcendental "Omega Point" apotheoses, abrupt totalizing developmental discontinuities in history like the Vingean "Singularity" (either in its common acceleration of acceleration variant, or in the more rarefied arrival of more-than-normatively-human post-biological intelligence variant), replicative upload and/or AI arms races (what I call "boomergoo" scenarios), etc.
Of course, what makes these heady confections especially breathtaking is that the technophiles who propound them are no longer content to confine their projections to far-flung Stapledonian-scaled futures we could scarcely reach ourselves, but often confidently insist (they have pie charts) that millions now living will live themselves through the sweeping transformations they delineate.
I'll admit that in my time I've enjoyed the same delighted and deranging rush at these speculations as most technophiles have. However, I think that there is in fact little we can say now from our pre-Superlative locations to clarify beyond a certain basic point the special quandaries that would arrive with such Superlative States.
Once you "get" the fact that technological development will likely make things quite unexpectedly different quite unexpectedly soon, it is not clear to me there's much benefit beyond the pure exhilarating entertainment value in dwelling on such Superlative States.
More to the point, Superlative States would inevitably arrive at the end of developmental trajectories consisting of multiple stages, each one of which will involve their own quandaries and debates and difficult problem-solving.
I think it will almost never be the case that these "intermediary" problems and issues would be much eased or clarified or even tangentially addressed by contemplating projected Superlative developmental end-points.
In fact, I would expect that too keen a focus on Superlative States would tend, on the contrary, (one) to distract technology advocates from the urgent complexities of these intermediary stages and their problems, would inspire too many advocates and critics (two) to trivialize the intermediary stages in their "modesty" compared to the Superlative States, and (three) would tend to make technology advocates impatient and incomparably more vulnerable to hype, careless in the face of the delicate and necessary efforts at negotiating the contending claims of multiple stakeholders at every stage, and disastrously less critical in general.
It is too easy to confuse projected Superlative States with teleological end-points that will then be read as expressing the deeper essence or ultimate "meaning" of particular trajectories of technological development. Bioconservatives hostile to the ongoing emergence of genetic medicine and techno-immortalists who champion genetic medicine in fact share a distressing tendency to act as though the actual meaning of finding a cure to Parkinson's Disease through genetic medicine would somehow be that this marvellous achievement would be a milestone along a developmental road eventuating in either (depending on your ideological positioning) an incomparably triumphant or disastrous technoconstituted human "immortality".
But, honestly, how on earth are we better able to assess the promises and costs of remediating particular diseases by bringing into the discussion the abstract fears and fantasies associated with the idea of eternal life, whatever that's supposed to mean? What would it clarify exactly about the historical impact of the printing press to say of its invention and use that it was a step along a developmental path that eventuated in the Internet, or might one day eventuate in the Holodeck?
My own expectation has come to be that whatever the special quandaries of Superlative State technological capacities, like extreme longevity or morphological freedom or uncontrollable replication, we will more likely address these with the very problem-solving resources we will have acquired through and in consequence of the developmental stages that lead up to their emergence themselves, rather than turning our attention to abstract speculations that took place when these forces first were set in motion.
Now, I have to say I don't think it is exactly fair to characterize this emphasis of mine as "conservative," "stealthy," or somehow "dishonest" -- though other progressive technology advocates have accused me occasionally of all of this.
Definitely I think that there are a host of obvious pragmatic considerations that suggest anyone interested in an effective progressive politics of developmental technology advocacy is better served by focusing on the proximate before the distant, the intermediate problem before the end-state problem. If this has the secondary effect of making radical technology advocacy more moderate and hence less threatening and hence easier to make common cause with as advocates marshall the forces they need organizationally to struggle for the outcomes they claim to desire, well, I mean, obviously, so much the better -- surely?
Of course, what makes these heady confections especially breathtaking is that the technophiles who propound them are no longer content to confine their projections to far-flung Stapledonian-scaled futures we could scarcely reach ourselves, but often confidently insist (they have pie charts) that millions now living will live themselves through the sweeping transformations they delineate.
I'll admit that in my time I've enjoyed the same delighted and deranging rush at these speculations as most technophiles have. However, I think that there is in fact little we can say now from our pre-Superlative locations to clarify beyond a certain basic point the special quandaries that would arrive with such Superlative States.
Once you "get" the fact that technological development will likely make things quite unexpectedly different quite unexpectedly soon, it is not clear to me there's much benefit beyond the pure exhilarating entertainment value in dwelling on such Superlative States.
More to the point, Superlative States would inevitably arrive at the end of developmental trajectories consisting of multiple stages, each one of which will involve their own quandaries and debates and difficult problem-solving.
I think it will almost never be the case that these "intermediary" problems and issues would be much eased or clarified or even tangentially addressed by contemplating projected Superlative developmental end-points.
In fact, I would expect that too keen a focus on Superlative States would tend, on the contrary, (one) to distract technology advocates from the urgent complexities of these intermediary stages and their problems, would inspire too many advocates and critics (two) to trivialize the intermediary stages in their "modesty" compared to the Superlative States, and (three) would tend to make technology advocates impatient and incomparably more vulnerable to hype, careless in the face of the delicate and necessary efforts at negotiating the contending claims of multiple stakeholders at every stage, and disastrously less critical in general.
It is too easy to confuse projected Superlative States with teleological end-points that will then be read as expressing the deeper essence or ultimate "meaning" of particular trajectories of technological development. Bioconservatives hostile to the ongoing emergence of genetic medicine and techno-immortalists who champion genetic medicine in fact share a distressing tendency to act as though the actual meaning of finding a cure to Parkinson's Disease through genetic medicine would somehow be that this marvellous achievement would be a milestone along a developmental road eventuating in either (depending on your ideological positioning) an incomparably triumphant or disastrous technoconstituted human "immortality".
But, honestly, how on earth are we better able to assess the promises and costs of remediating particular diseases by bringing into the discussion the abstract fears and fantasies associated with the idea of eternal life, whatever that's supposed to mean? What would it clarify exactly about the historical impact of the printing press to say of its invention and use that it was a step along a developmental path that eventuated in the Internet, or might one day eventuate in the Holodeck?
My own expectation has come to be that whatever the special quandaries of Superlative State technological capacities, like extreme longevity or morphological freedom or uncontrollable replication, we will more likely address these with the very problem-solving resources we will have acquired through and in consequence of the developmental stages that lead up to their emergence themselves, rather than turning our attention to abstract speculations that took place when these forces first were set in motion.
Now, I have to say I don't think it is exactly fair to characterize this emphasis of mine as "conservative," "stealthy," or somehow "dishonest" -- though other progressive technology advocates have accused me occasionally of all of this.
Definitely I think that there are a host of obvious pragmatic considerations that suggest anyone interested in an effective progressive politics of developmental technology advocacy is better served by focusing on the proximate before the distant, the intermediate problem before the end-state problem. If this has the secondary effect of making radical technology advocacy more moderate and hence less threatening and hence easier to make common cause with as advocates marshall the forces they need organizationally to struggle for the outcomes they claim to desire, well, I mean, obviously, so much the better -- surely?
Friday, June 04, 2004
Meless'Ambaren
My friend James Fehlinger just offered me his translation into Quenya (for me the most beautiful of J.R.R. Tokein's realized languages of the Middle Earth universe), of my blog's name Amor Mundi. Everything is prettier in Quenya, it really is. Screw Esperanto, I think we would have world peace in no time at all if we all just switched to Quenya (although the actual content of the stories in the Middle Earth universe gives me pause in making that prediction, come to think of it).
This reminds me of the story that Professor Tolkein claimed to believe that the prettiest phrase one would ever find in the English language was "cellar door," which one has to admit has an elvish air about it. Interestingly enough, Gertrude Stein was once asked what the most beautiful word in the English language was and, if my memory serves me correctly, she proposed her own very elven candidate: "celery." Namarie...
This reminds me of the story that Professor Tolkein claimed to believe that the prettiest phrase one would ever find in the English language was "cellar door," which one has to admit has an elvish air about it. Interestingly enough, Gertrude Stein was once asked what the most beautiful word in the English language was and, if my memory serves me correctly, she proposed her own very elven candidate: "celery." Namarie...
Ghosts of Futures Past: Arcosanti
Alex Steffen over at WorldChanging shared a passage snipped away from his upcoming book which he’s now pruning and polishing. If something this beautiful hits the cutting room floor, I can only imagine how stunning the book that remains will be. I’ll admit to prejudice, though. Arcosanti has been a focus of wistful imagination for me since I was a little kid, like Paris is for some people. I still mean one day to see it, and despite the sadness of Steffen’s piece there’s quite a lot in what he says that renews my eagerness to check it out myself. Here are a few tastes of the larger piece:
“Arcosanti… is now funded almost entirely through the sale of bells. It is essentially one big crafts guild. Which is a fine thing to be. Indeed, sitting there in the evening light, with birds chirping, and [a] young potter smiling my way, I can see the appeal: fuck it, let's all throw aside our worries and make bells. It'll be a good life. But it's not the City of the Future. [Actually, this seems to me among the pleasanter plausible futures I can think of, this side of the goo bestiary.]....
“We continue our walk. We pass a couple apartment buildings. The buildings themselves are a bit weathered and, well, not my architectural preference (very 70's, very blobject, very Planet of the Apes), but they are well-designed (they all employ passive solar, many have "sky theaters" built into the roof for sitting out and viewing the stars at night). The public space is great. There's an amphitheater with a waterfall running down the middle of the seats.... Sometimes the entire community gathers at night on the roofs of buildings overlooking the canyon, and lights are shone against the cliffs of the other side, and dancers perform in front of them, sending huge shadows writhing on the basalt walls....
“Arcosanti's half life is long over, and it is headed for it's own tiny heat-death. Sure, it's still growing, but the vision and the reality have too long diverged, and my sense was that the True Believers needed desperately to convince themselves that the dream was still alive. Maybe it is. Who am I, really, to say otherwise? Let them build their utopia in the desert, if they can pull it off.
“But Arcosanti isn't the future anymore. It smells too much of museum dust. It's the embalmed husk of a future, and a future that's older than I am, at that. I get in my car, and drive back down the rutted road, and wonder if I'll find some fresher dream ahead.”
A lovely piece, thanks to Alex Steffen for sharing it!
“Arcosanti… is now funded almost entirely through the sale of bells. It is essentially one big crafts guild. Which is a fine thing to be. Indeed, sitting there in the evening light, with birds chirping, and [a] young potter smiling my way, I can see the appeal: fuck it, let's all throw aside our worries and make bells. It'll be a good life. But it's not the City of the Future. [Actually, this seems to me among the pleasanter plausible futures I can think of, this side of the goo bestiary.]....
“We continue our walk. We pass a couple apartment buildings. The buildings themselves are a bit weathered and, well, not my architectural preference (very 70's, very blobject, very Planet of the Apes), but they are well-designed (they all employ passive solar, many have "sky theaters" built into the roof for sitting out and viewing the stars at night). The public space is great. There's an amphitheater with a waterfall running down the middle of the seats.... Sometimes the entire community gathers at night on the roofs of buildings overlooking the canyon, and lights are shone against the cliffs of the other side, and dancers perform in front of them, sending huge shadows writhing on the basalt walls....
“Arcosanti's half life is long over, and it is headed for it's own tiny heat-death. Sure, it's still growing, but the vision and the reality have too long diverged, and my sense was that the True Believers needed desperately to convince themselves that the dream was still alive. Maybe it is. Who am I, really, to say otherwise? Let them build their utopia in the desert, if they can pull it off.
“But Arcosanti isn't the future anymore. It smells too much of museum dust. It's the embalmed husk of a future, and a future that's older than I am, at that. I get in my car, and drive back down the rutted road, and wonder if I'll find some fresher dream ahead.”
A lovely piece, thanks to Alex Steffen for sharing it!
Monday, May 24, 2004
Trouble in Libertopia
Spontaneous Order on the Right
Well-meaning and reasonable persons wandering for the first time into electronic discursive spaces where radical technological developments like molecular nanotechnology or genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification medicine are seriously contemplated and debated, need to be prepared for repeated and unexpected encounters with belligerent young American males (mostly) who will berate them from a perspective they describe as "libertarianism."
There has been a welcome diminishment of this sort of thing since the height of the “irrational exuberance” of the so-called “dot.com era” of American technology enthusiasm in the 1990s, when stubbornly insistent delusions of an indefinitely prolonged “Long Boom” filled the pages of WIRED magazine and California “Extropians” declared war on both death and taxes -– the one via superlative digital and biomedical technologies, the other via the “spontaneous order” of market triumphalism.
But the dream remains alive more stubbornly and with altogether more self-assurance than one might otherwise expect, from eager online salons of “dynamists” who espouse via neologism the familiar combination of free-market politics and unregulated technological development championed by Virginia Postrel (the editor from 1989 to 2000 of the American market libertarian Reason magazine) in her book The Future and Its Enemies, to the popular online technology magazine Tech Central Station which publishes under the banner, “Where Free Markets Meet Technology.”
Libertarianism in this idiosyncratic, “anarcho-capitalist” denotation tends to have three primary characteristics:
First, these curious market-fundamentalist libertarians take an appealing commonsense Millian (or, I suppose, even more broadly, “Golden-Rulian”) commitment to a general Non-Initiation of Force as if it represented a kind of axiom, and then treat that axiom as the foundation from which one might then exhaustively characterize a just, stable, and prosperous social order.
Because the non-initiation principle delineates an essentially negative concept of liberty, I routinely describe these figures as “negative libertarians.” One could usefully distinguish, for example, purely negative libertarians from civil libertarians for whom a “positive” conception of liberty is necessary to affirm what is valuable in a human rights culture, or in the support of civic institutions like a separation of church and state, an independent press, vibrant and widely accessible education and so on. (My use of the terms “negative” and “positive” here is derived from the canonical formulation by Isaiah Berlin.)
Second, negative libertarians will thereupon tend to reduce all conceivable political and public relations to contractual relations (as against acts of force or fraud which they will identify as criminal and so anti-political, or acts of love, familial obligation, or generosity which they will tend to privatize and domesticate as intimate or charitable and "hence" pre-political, or simply not-political).
Third, negative libertarians will tend to identify the outcome of whatever they apprehend as a proper market exchange as always both the most optimally efficient and optimally fair or just, or at any rate the most practical and defensible, outcome on offer. Of course, what actually counts in the world as a “market” outcome is in fact profoundly contingent historically and territorially, and depends on a context of agreements, protocols, implicit and explicit norms, and so on. But technophiliac market libertarians very widely seem to conceive of market orders as spontaneous and universal upwellings out of what is deeply and immutably calculating and acquisitive in human nature as they conceive of it, or as if emerging from the sloppily sloshing tidal forces of supply and demand treated as deeply and immutably analogous to physical principles like the Laws of Thermodynamics.
Because of their stubbornly provincial misreading of contingent generalizations from the market conditions that prevail in their own neighborhoods as if they delineated eternal principles, I will sometimes describe these negative libertarians likewise as “market naturalists.” It is among the many ironies of the apparently irresistible allure of market naturalism among negative libertarian technophiles, that many of these ideologues otherwise cultivate a profound suspicion of deployments of the idea of “nature” to justify customs, institutions, or norms -- especially whenever the deployment of such customary putatively “natural” intuitions would inhibit an embrace of or access to emerging technologies.
Now, against the purported spontaneity and inevitability of “market” relations, so-called, market libertarians typically array what they take to be the countervailing and always-only coercive machineries of national states. All governance, and all the conduct of government representatives, is reduced to its “essence” as an expression of Weberian state coercion and so the market libertarians tend to discern in governing nothing but monotonously reiterated acts of violence and repression. From there, they then declare, practically as a matter of fiat, that “market outcomes” (and typically market behavior will be treated as synechdochic with corporate conduct) are always-only non-coercive.
Never mind that extraordinarily many real-world corporations, of course, routinely use physical threats and engage in exploitation and deliver harm in the effort to improve their bottom lines. And never mind that legitimate governments, of course, whatever their flaws, routinely enagage in social administration that is the farthest imaginable thing from physical threat. Once one puts the negative libertarian blinders on every nice social worker and dedicated public servant suddenly becomes a jack-booted thug and every corporate titan, even if he is little better than a mafia don, suddenly becomes a Randian Archetype of boundless dynamism and benevolent creative energy.
Minarchists and neo-classical liberals will for the most part affirm all three of these three planks as their own worldview, but for whatever reasons, will compromise their applications in certain key areas, usually on utilitarian or strategic political grounds. Typically these compromises are experienced as exceptions that prove the rule rather than deep challenges to the overall correctness of the negative libertarian viewpoint.
While the coterie of technology enthusiasts who espouse market fundamentalism in an undiluted form remains in fact a vanishingly small one (though unbelievably noisy for its scale), it is key to recognize the extent to which the more “mainstream” neo-liberal and neo-conservative practical and institutional universe, with its incessant drumbeat for deregulation without end, its lust for “market discipline” for the poor and military-industrial welfare entitlements for the rich remains importantly (and unfortunately) continuous in its assumptions, in its sense of the problems at hand, and in many of its aims with an extreme “market fundamentalist” negative libertarian world-view this mainstream would presumably and properly explicitly disdain in practice.
Of course, quite a few people will affirm the appeal of a non-aggression pact in some form or other, but I think few would go on to affirm its adequacy as a self-evident axiom on the basis of which one might erect an adequate social order. “Non-initiation of force” is a purely negative conception that will rely for its intelligibility and force on all sorts of implicit (some of them likely disavowed) positive conceptions of what constitutes initiation in the first place, what counts as force, what is and isn't violation, and a whole host of assumptions about what all of this is good for. Hence, for many people, defenses of individual autonomy and deep suspicions of authoritarian concentrations of power will be complemented by equally foundational defenses of a need for fairness, say.
Most people are likewise sensitive to the ways in which many so-called “market-exchange” outcomes in particular will often seem profoundly improper in fact, that they can occur under conditions of duress that the beneficiaries of an exchange can readily rationalize away while the losers have relatively little room to protest the outcome. And in any case, few would claim it is even possible to characterize actual contract-making and contract-adhering behavior exclusively in contractual terms, let alone adequately capture all of the complex, unpredictable, often unconscious political relations in which they are enmeshed through the figure of explicit contractual agreement.
If it really is true that the debate between markets and central planning was concluded in the twentieth century, it seems to me that something uninspiring like “regulated markets” were the verdict of that debate. And since there has never been, nor could there ever be a “pure” market against which one properly arrays an alien and antithetical force of regulation, it seems the time has come to describe the principle of market regulation itself as the norm rather than always as a compromise of a market ideal that does not exist and hence cannot function as a norm.
The modern “liberal” state, whatever its deficiencies and whatever occasional pretensions to the contrary are voiced by those it most empowers, is simply not a straightforward sovereign state in that its powers are not exercised unilaterally. Regulation is always already multilateral in the modern state, contested through a rough-and-tumble separation of powers at the state level and further diffused through the competing demands of diverse civic, cultural, media, business, and consumer interests. To a significant extent broadly liberal, imperfectly democratic hegemony seems to recuperate and so tolerate resistances. Given these complexities, the market libertarians seem to me to be enraptured by models of power, authority, consent, autonomy, and exchange that were already hopelessly simplistic by the nineteenth century, let alone the twenty-first. No doubt this accounts for an important measure of their allure.
We can all easily agree that coercion is wrong. We can all agree that many of the sources of coercion and exploitation inhere in human nature, such as it is, and probably we can agree that conspicuous asymmetries will invite exploitation and abuse. The liberal state seeks to diffuse the ineradicable violence and risk of coercive governance through competing state apparatuses and the multilateral institutions of civic society. Negative libertarians simply define coercion out of existence by declaring "market" outcomes as non-coercive by fiat. Liberals recognize the abuses of our system as is, but seek to ameliorate coercion through reform, while market naturalists seem stubbornly wedded to their word-magic and pie-charts.
To what can we attribute the ongoing allure of the sadly sociopathic libertarian imaginary, especially to American technophiles? Perhaps it is a matter of technical-minded people who prefer the clarity of reproducible results to the ongoing and unpredictable reconciliation of contending ends among the multiple stakeholders to social problems. Perhaps it is a matter of the elitism of the highly educated or the early adopters, or the more straightforward elitism of people who believe that they are innately superior and hence will always be among the winners in any outcome where there are winners and losers. Perhaps it is simply the commonplace disavowal by the privileged of the extent to which individual accomplishment inevitably depends on the maintenance of social norms, enforced laws and material infrastructure beyond itself.
Lately, I have begun to suspect that at the temperamental core of the strange enthusiasm of many technophiles for so-called "anarcho-capitalist" dreams of re-inventing the social order, is not finally so much a craving for liberty but for a fantasy, quite to the contrary, of total exhaustive control.
This helps account for the fact that negative libertarian technophiles seem less interested in discussing the proximate problems of nanoscale manufacturing and the finite and problematic benefits they will likely confer, but prefer to barrel ahead to paeans to the "total control over matter."
They salivate over the title of the book From Chance to Choice (in fact, a fine and nuanced bioethical accounting of benefits and quandaries of genetic medicine), as if biotechnology is about to eliminate chance from our lives and substitute the full determination of morphology -- when it is much more likely that genetic interventions will expand the chances we take along with the choices we make.
Behind all their talk of efficiency and non-violence there lurks this weird micromanagerial fantasy of sitting down and actually contracting explicitly the terms of every public interaction in the hopes of controlling it, getting it right, dictating the details. As if the public life of freedom can be compassed in a prenuptual agreement, as if communication would proceed more ideally were we first to re-invent language ab initio (ask these liber-techians how they feel about Esperanto or Loglan and you will see that this analogy, often enough, is not idle).
But with true freedom one has to accept an ineradicable vulnerability and a real measure of uncertainty. We live in societies with peers, boys. Give up the dreams of total invulnerability, total control, total specification. Take a chance, live a little. Fairness is actually possible. Justice is in our reach. Radical technological development regulated to ensure that costs, risks, and benefits are all fairly shared can emancipate the world. Liberty is so much less than freedom.
II. Spontaneous Order on the Left
“The Internet is antithetical to commerce.”
With this declaration, science fiction novelist and technology writer Cory Doctorow began an editorial essay for the O’Reilly Network (the online home of the key publisher of technical computer books and manuals as well as an organizer of important conferences on media and technology issues) in December, 2001. His next sentence was an epic exhalation of pent up frustration and nervousness: “There, I said it.”
I can well understand his exasperation, as well as his palpable relief at finally pronouncing his verdict.
Contemporary especially American technocultural, technofuturist, technophiliac rhetorics sometimes seem fantastically fixated with markets. I have already described an anarcho-capitalist libertarian viewpoint for which market relations are imagined to be uniquely expressive of a competitive, acquisitively maximizing "human nature," for which the sum of these relations is imagined to constitute the space of freedom figured as a "spontaneous order," and for which the principal emancipatory demand that compels the just is for the elimination of state regulations that are uniquely imagined to restrain this order from its otherwise inevitable crystallization. This deregulatory demand is typically figured as a radical privatization of the institutions of civic life hitherto associated with the public sphere.
The key contribution of technophiliac free-marketeers to this libertarian discourse would appear to be the regularly reiterated proposal that some particularly disruptive emerging technology or other –- it might be digital networks, or encryption technologies, or surveillance devices, or virtual reality systems, or intelligence-enhancing or virtue-enhancing neuroceuticals, or molecular manufacturing tirelessly replicating cheap goods at the nanoscale, or space elevators, you name it –- is about to arrive on the scene, whereupon the sudden ubiquity of this disruptive superlative technology will either unleash of its own accord the creative energies that will constitute the emergence there and then of the spontaneous market order the libertarians crave, or will at any rate introduce a profound destabilization that will break the crust of convention, bypass the intractable knot of pluralist stakeholder politics, overcome the regulatory impasse and thereby facilitate the emergence of this market order in due course.
In 1996, in an essay that has been widely (but possibly not exactly rightly) taken as an example of such libertarian technophilia, John Perry Barlow notoriously addressed himself in one of the founding political documents of internet technoculture to the “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel.” To them he declared, “I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
The proximate inspiration for Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” was in fact the sudden and overbearing intrusion of government "decency" censors and opportunistic regulators into a vibrant online culture about which they had taken no time to gain any sense of its customs, institutions, values, or technical capacities. “You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation... You do not know our culture, our ethics... Our world is different.”
In Cory Doctorow’s essay, “The Carpterbaggers Go Home,” a comparable claim is directed from a self-appointed (there is of course no other kind as yet) representative of a network technoculture to an unwelcome interloper. But where Barlow addresses his attention to representatives of the State, Doctorow addresses himself instead to representatives of Business. Arriving after a decade of network-hype conjoined to fervent market enthusiasm, such a shift in itself felt in reading it for the first time rather like a watershed.
For Barlow, “Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.” This apparent disavowal of the material basis for digital media and the ongoing imbrication of digital technocultures and their prosthetic practices in bodily life and material culture provoked for a time, and naturally enough, a whole cottage industry of criticism of Barlow’s piece.
Doctorow’s internet, in contrast, is swarming with bodies doing stuff on the streets where they live. “The spare-time economy” he writes of mobs of underemployed techies and geeks unleashed onto the world by the sudden collapse of the 90s internet boom, “has yielded a bountiful harvest of weblogs, Photoshop tennis matches, homebrew Web services and dangerously Seattlean levels of garage-band activity.” He goes on to vividly evoke “untethered forced-leisure gangs… committing random acts of senseless wirelessness, armed with cheap-like-borscht 802.11b cards and antennae made from washers, hot glue, and Pringles cans.”
But in a precisely analogous move to Barlow’s own, Doctorow ascribes to this swarming mess of shifting practices, protocols, and devices an essential nature that he contends is deeply antithetical to a particular kind of practice he disdains. While Barlow proposes that digitality conceived as a kind of ineffable spirit is invulnerable to the material coercions of worldly States, Doctorow proposes that internet practices are inherently improvisatory and unreliable in ways that will only rarely provide sustainable occasions for commercial profitabiltity.
“The Internet is loose and wobbly from the bottom up,” writes Doctorow. “TCP/IP is all about non-deterministic routing: Packet A and Packet A-prime may take completely different routes (over transports as varied as twisted pair, co-ax, fiber, sat, and RF) to reach the same destination... Internet… traffic… is positively Brownian, fuzzy and random and bunchy and uncoordinated as a swarm of ants randomwalking through your kitchen.” Here, Doctorow fatally reads the end-to-end principle through the discourse of negative liberty (a move that will return later in the term "Net Neutrality" among other places) and then treats this negative libertarian formulation as an ethos that defines the cyberspatial sprawl across its many layers: “Fuzzy at the bottom: TCP/IP. Fuzzy in the middle: message-passing protocols. Fuzzy on top: services.”
According to Doctorow this indeterminacy of the internet is deeply “antithetical to all our traditional notions about success in branding and business.” This is because “[b]usiness is built around reliability, offering a predictable quality of service from transaction to transaction. Even the messiest, one-off businesses are based on reliability; for example, estate auctioneers are predictable -- indeed, they provide the only touchstone of predictability in one-off sales, through the authorship of dependably consistent auction catalogs.”
But despite this presumed antitheticality, Doctorow ends up talking an inordinate amount about commerce after all: “[I]t's time to leave behind the idea of traditional reliability as value-proposition. The technical reality of the Internet doesn't care about the successful business strategies of yesteryear. The businesses that succeed in the unreliable world will find new ways of providing reliability.” And: “The businesses that succeed [will]... exploit the new reality rather than denying it.”
Given this mild collapse into corporate futurological speak, it comes as a more than mildly incongruous surprise when Doctorow stirringly concludes in the tonalities of a manifesto: “The close-enough-for-rock-n-roll revolution is a-comin' -- to the streets, comrades!”
The problem is that although his language mobilizes (even if I don’t doubt that Doctorow’s tongue was firmly planted in his cheek when he penned his revolutionary coda) the discursive paraphernalia and emotional excitement of radical political emancipation here, the piece is really one with no sense of the political in it in the least. One has to assume that the marvelous experimental, collaborative, playful prosthetic practices Doctorow highlights in his piece are valuable enough to protect and defend rather than simply to celebrate as they are unfolding. But to the extent that this is true, then it offers little comfort or protective cover to suggest that conventional commerce cannot finally profit from digital networks (a claim I wouldn’t bet the mortgage on in any case, let alone my life) if it happens that in their quixotic pursuit of such profits conventionally commercial interests are moved nonetheless to exploit, oppress, or undermine these practices he celebrates.
When Doctorow chuckles at the strategy of corporations to commercialize the Internet by “carv[ing] out pockets of sanity in the anarchy” there is an ominous sense in which “anarchy” is being treated as substantial here in a way that would presumably generate some kind of automatically and inherently efficacious resistance to onerous intervention. This is a very familiar trope for technocentric libertarians indifferent to or disdainful of the political as such, and to the demands of democratic politics in particular, except to the extent that one can find a trace of democracy in the duressed contracts, exchanges, and elite-orchestrated consumption practices available under market-fundamentlist construals of capitalism.
In an editorial entitled “Tech Bloom in Full Flower,” written nearly two years later for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in November 2003, Alex Steffen offered up an argument that reproduces the contours of Doctorow’s case, in ways that inspired the very same enthusiasm as well as the very same worries for me. Together with Jamais Cascio, Steffen is the creator and primary producer of the highly influential and simply incomparable WorldChanging Blog, which conjoins discussions of digital networked information and communication technologies with discussions of environmental sustainability, social justice and global development issues, and the provision of practical suggestions for the collaborative address of social problems.
“The conventional wisdom, during the Tech Boom, was that what drove innovation was the lure of giant piles of cash,” writes Steffen, framing his argument with the familiar trauma of the high-tech crash that ended the century. But “[t]hat idea now rubs shoulders with the Berlin Wall.” (Notice, once again, that the language here has mobilized the imagery of political emancipation.) “What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends and caffeine. Freed from the pursuit of paper millions, geeks are doing what geeks, by nature, really want to be doing: making cool stuff.” Against the drear banality of bourgeois profitability, Steffen reminds us that creativity is driven as often as not by the pursuit of pleasure and, as you will remember Clay Shirky pointing out already in a related context, a desire for attention.
And so: “In basements, garages and the empty warehouses that once held the Next Big Thing, tech-savvy folks are huddled over their laptops, working together online to give away the future. The result? We're seeing a surge of technological creativity that easily trumps anything we dreamed of with the dot-com PR guys crooning in our ears.”
Steffen then surveys a scene with which the reader will now be quite familiar, and provides a useful summary of the varieties of social software to which I devote no small amount of my own hopeful attentions:
Taken together, Steffen describes these prosthetic practices as “The Tech Bloom” (in contrast to the commercial “Tech Boom” of the 1990s), an overabundant proliferation of free creative expression, collaboration, and quite a lot of making-do.
While I find it nearly as difficult to restrain my enthusiasm for the practices that exercise the imaginations of Doctorow and Steffen as I find it to restrain my distaste for the practices that exercise the imaginations of some market libertarians, what I want to register here, yet again, is my worry that there is a disavowal of the substance of the political in this discourse even while it depends on a figural conjuration of the political to express its ambitions and communicate its joys. In this it is the possible continuities rather than the conspicuous differences that I would want to highlight between the market libertarians and these, call them, "progressive experimentalists" here.
Steffen concludes his piece with a vivid tableau that would concretize the distinction between the two: “If the Tech Boom had a graven image, it was the bull on Wall Street. The Tech Bloom is more likely to be found dancing around the desert at Burning Man, the annual festival where money is taboo, everything's a gift and creative participation is synonymous with cool.”
But the trouble with “The Tech Bloom” is that it can too easily degenerate as a discourse into another variation on “spontaneous order,” say, Spontaneous Order with a Human Face.
Steffen’s ambitions, like Doctorow’s, seem to me to be profoundly worldly ones, but the problem is that it is only politics and its interminable reconciliation of contending aspirations that gives you a world.
Burning Man isn’t the world, it’s a festival.
And festivals don’t scale globally.
This is not an expression of curmudgeonly hostility for the festive as such, nor is it an expression of resignation that should mobilize the can-do spirit of various technophilianarchic troopers of the temperamental left or the temperamental right.
Festivals are festivals to an important extent precisely because they are not the world. It is not a matter of indifference to me that whenever they hanker after the status of polis festivals soon enough will decline into sewers (and this tends to be true literally as well as figuratively).
Festivals want a world, even as they take their momentary measure of distance from the world on which they depend. It is never only those who join up or join in to public practices who constitute the stakeholders in those practices. It is never true that even the best most beneficent efforts fail to exact their costs and impose their risks. It does not denigrate pleasure to note that pleasure is not the same thing as political legitimacy and that political legitimacy is indispensable to freedom. It does not denigrate voluntary participation to note that voluntary participation is not the same thing as democracy and that democracy has come to be indispensable to freedom. It does not denigrate collaboration to note that neither is collaboration yet the same thing as sharing the world with peers who differ ineradicably from us in their capacities, their knowledges, and their ends.
Collaboration, contestation, consent are public scenes that depend on a ritual artifice invigorated, consolidated, and transformed through our own recourse to it, articulated through moral and ethical norms, laws backed by legitimate force, contingent protocols for the exchange of information, services, and goods, and any number of architectural constraints. There is nothing "natural" or "spontaneous" about politics, and certainly not democratic politics. Technology will not deliver us a more perfect union: For democracies, the formation, ordination, and establishment of that more perfect unoin is a lot that falls inescapably and interminably to "we the people," ourselves.
Well-meaning and reasonable persons wandering for the first time into electronic discursive spaces where radical technological developments like molecular nanotechnology or genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification medicine are seriously contemplated and debated, need to be prepared for repeated and unexpected encounters with belligerent young American males (mostly) who will berate them from a perspective they describe as "libertarianism."
There has been a welcome diminishment of this sort of thing since the height of the “irrational exuberance” of the so-called “dot.com era” of American technology enthusiasm in the 1990s, when stubbornly insistent delusions of an indefinitely prolonged “Long Boom” filled the pages of WIRED magazine and California “Extropians” declared war on both death and taxes -– the one via superlative digital and biomedical technologies, the other via the “spontaneous order” of market triumphalism.
But the dream remains alive more stubbornly and with altogether more self-assurance than one might otherwise expect, from eager online salons of “dynamists” who espouse via neologism the familiar combination of free-market politics and unregulated technological development championed by Virginia Postrel (the editor from 1989 to 2000 of the American market libertarian Reason magazine) in her book The Future and Its Enemies, to the popular online technology magazine Tech Central Station which publishes under the banner, “Where Free Markets Meet Technology.”
Libertarianism in this idiosyncratic, “anarcho-capitalist” denotation tends to have three primary characteristics:
First, these curious market-fundamentalist libertarians take an appealing commonsense Millian (or, I suppose, even more broadly, “Golden-Rulian”) commitment to a general Non-Initiation of Force as if it represented a kind of axiom, and then treat that axiom as the foundation from which one might then exhaustively characterize a just, stable, and prosperous social order.
Because the non-initiation principle delineates an essentially negative concept of liberty, I routinely describe these figures as “negative libertarians.” One could usefully distinguish, for example, purely negative libertarians from civil libertarians for whom a “positive” conception of liberty is necessary to affirm what is valuable in a human rights culture, or in the support of civic institutions like a separation of church and state, an independent press, vibrant and widely accessible education and so on. (My use of the terms “negative” and “positive” here is derived from the canonical formulation by Isaiah Berlin.)
Second, negative libertarians will thereupon tend to reduce all conceivable political and public relations to contractual relations (as against acts of force or fraud which they will identify as criminal and so anti-political, or acts of love, familial obligation, or generosity which they will tend to privatize and domesticate as intimate or charitable and "hence" pre-political, or simply not-political).
Third, negative libertarians will tend to identify the outcome of whatever they apprehend as a proper market exchange as always both the most optimally efficient and optimally fair or just, or at any rate the most practical and defensible, outcome on offer. Of course, what actually counts in the world as a “market” outcome is in fact profoundly contingent historically and territorially, and depends on a context of agreements, protocols, implicit and explicit norms, and so on. But technophiliac market libertarians very widely seem to conceive of market orders as spontaneous and universal upwellings out of what is deeply and immutably calculating and acquisitive in human nature as they conceive of it, or as if emerging from the sloppily sloshing tidal forces of supply and demand treated as deeply and immutably analogous to physical principles like the Laws of Thermodynamics.
Because of their stubbornly provincial misreading of contingent generalizations from the market conditions that prevail in their own neighborhoods as if they delineated eternal principles, I will sometimes describe these negative libertarians likewise as “market naturalists.” It is among the many ironies of the apparently irresistible allure of market naturalism among negative libertarian technophiles, that many of these ideologues otherwise cultivate a profound suspicion of deployments of the idea of “nature” to justify customs, institutions, or norms -- especially whenever the deployment of such customary putatively “natural” intuitions would inhibit an embrace of or access to emerging technologies.
Now, against the purported spontaneity and inevitability of “market” relations, so-called, market libertarians typically array what they take to be the countervailing and always-only coercive machineries of national states. All governance, and all the conduct of government representatives, is reduced to its “essence” as an expression of Weberian state coercion and so the market libertarians tend to discern in governing nothing but monotonously reiterated acts of violence and repression. From there, they then declare, practically as a matter of fiat, that “market outcomes” (and typically market behavior will be treated as synechdochic with corporate conduct) are always-only non-coercive.
Never mind that extraordinarily many real-world corporations, of course, routinely use physical threats and engage in exploitation and deliver harm in the effort to improve their bottom lines. And never mind that legitimate governments, of course, whatever their flaws, routinely enagage in social administration that is the farthest imaginable thing from physical threat. Once one puts the negative libertarian blinders on every nice social worker and dedicated public servant suddenly becomes a jack-booted thug and every corporate titan, even if he is little better than a mafia don, suddenly becomes a Randian Archetype of boundless dynamism and benevolent creative energy.
Minarchists and neo-classical liberals will for the most part affirm all three of these three planks as their own worldview, but for whatever reasons, will compromise their applications in certain key areas, usually on utilitarian or strategic political grounds. Typically these compromises are experienced as exceptions that prove the rule rather than deep challenges to the overall correctness of the negative libertarian viewpoint.
While the coterie of technology enthusiasts who espouse market fundamentalism in an undiluted form remains in fact a vanishingly small one (though unbelievably noisy for its scale), it is key to recognize the extent to which the more “mainstream” neo-liberal and neo-conservative practical and institutional universe, with its incessant drumbeat for deregulation without end, its lust for “market discipline” for the poor and military-industrial welfare entitlements for the rich remains importantly (and unfortunately) continuous in its assumptions, in its sense of the problems at hand, and in many of its aims with an extreme “market fundamentalist” negative libertarian world-view this mainstream would presumably and properly explicitly disdain in practice.
Of course, quite a few people will affirm the appeal of a non-aggression pact in some form or other, but I think few would go on to affirm its adequacy as a self-evident axiom on the basis of which one might erect an adequate social order. “Non-initiation of force” is a purely negative conception that will rely for its intelligibility and force on all sorts of implicit (some of them likely disavowed) positive conceptions of what constitutes initiation in the first place, what counts as force, what is and isn't violation, and a whole host of assumptions about what all of this is good for. Hence, for many people, defenses of individual autonomy and deep suspicions of authoritarian concentrations of power will be complemented by equally foundational defenses of a need for fairness, say.
Most people are likewise sensitive to the ways in which many so-called “market-exchange” outcomes in particular will often seem profoundly improper in fact, that they can occur under conditions of duress that the beneficiaries of an exchange can readily rationalize away while the losers have relatively little room to protest the outcome. And in any case, few would claim it is even possible to characterize actual contract-making and contract-adhering behavior exclusively in contractual terms, let alone adequately capture all of the complex, unpredictable, often unconscious political relations in which they are enmeshed through the figure of explicit contractual agreement.
If it really is true that the debate between markets and central planning was concluded in the twentieth century, it seems to me that something uninspiring like “regulated markets” were the verdict of that debate. And since there has never been, nor could there ever be a “pure” market against which one properly arrays an alien and antithetical force of regulation, it seems the time has come to describe the principle of market regulation itself as the norm rather than always as a compromise of a market ideal that does not exist and hence cannot function as a norm.
The modern “liberal” state, whatever its deficiencies and whatever occasional pretensions to the contrary are voiced by those it most empowers, is simply not a straightforward sovereign state in that its powers are not exercised unilaterally. Regulation is always already multilateral in the modern state, contested through a rough-and-tumble separation of powers at the state level and further diffused through the competing demands of diverse civic, cultural, media, business, and consumer interests. To a significant extent broadly liberal, imperfectly democratic hegemony seems to recuperate and so tolerate resistances. Given these complexities, the market libertarians seem to me to be enraptured by models of power, authority, consent, autonomy, and exchange that were already hopelessly simplistic by the nineteenth century, let alone the twenty-first. No doubt this accounts for an important measure of their allure.
We can all easily agree that coercion is wrong. We can all agree that many of the sources of coercion and exploitation inhere in human nature, such as it is, and probably we can agree that conspicuous asymmetries will invite exploitation and abuse. The liberal state seeks to diffuse the ineradicable violence and risk of coercive governance through competing state apparatuses and the multilateral institutions of civic society. Negative libertarians simply define coercion out of existence by declaring "market" outcomes as non-coercive by fiat. Liberals recognize the abuses of our system as is, but seek to ameliorate coercion through reform, while market naturalists seem stubbornly wedded to their word-magic and pie-charts.
To what can we attribute the ongoing allure of the sadly sociopathic libertarian imaginary, especially to American technophiles? Perhaps it is a matter of technical-minded people who prefer the clarity of reproducible results to the ongoing and unpredictable reconciliation of contending ends among the multiple stakeholders to social problems. Perhaps it is a matter of the elitism of the highly educated or the early adopters, or the more straightforward elitism of people who believe that they are innately superior and hence will always be among the winners in any outcome where there are winners and losers. Perhaps it is simply the commonplace disavowal by the privileged of the extent to which individual accomplishment inevitably depends on the maintenance of social norms, enforced laws and material infrastructure beyond itself.
Lately, I have begun to suspect that at the temperamental core of the strange enthusiasm of many technophiles for so-called "anarcho-capitalist" dreams of re-inventing the social order, is not finally so much a craving for liberty but for a fantasy, quite to the contrary, of total exhaustive control.
This helps account for the fact that negative libertarian technophiles seem less interested in discussing the proximate problems of nanoscale manufacturing and the finite and problematic benefits they will likely confer, but prefer to barrel ahead to paeans to the "total control over matter."
They salivate over the title of the book From Chance to Choice (in fact, a fine and nuanced bioethical accounting of benefits and quandaries of genetic medicine), as if biotechnology is about to eliminate chance from our lives and substitute the full determination of morphology -- when it is much more likely that genetic interventions will expand the chances we take along with the choices we make.
Behind all their talk of efficiency and non-violence there lurks this weird micromanagerial fantasy of sitting down and actually contracting explicitly the terms of every public interaction in the hopes of controlling it, getting it right, dictating the details. As if the public life of freedom can be compassed in a prenuptual agreement, as if communication would proceed more ideally were we first to re-invent language ab initio (ask these liber-techians how they feel about Esperanto or Loglan and you will see that this analogy, often enough, is not idle).
But with true freedom one has to accept an ineradicable vulnerability and a real measure of uncertainty. We live in societies with peers, boys. Give up the dreams of total invulnerability, total control, total specification. Take a chance, live a little. Fairness is actually possible. Justice is in our reach. Radical technological development regulated to ensure that costs, risks, and benefits are all fairly shared can emancipate the world. Liberty is so much less than freedom.
II. Spontaneous Order on the Left
“The Internet is antithetical to commerce.”
With this declaration, science fiction novelist and technology writer Cory Doctorow began an editorial essay for the O’Reilly Network (the online home of the key publisher of technical computer books and manuals as well as an organizer of important conferences on media and technology issues) in December, 2001. His next sentence was an epic exhalation of pent up frustration and nervousness: “There, I said it.”
I can well understand his exasperation, as well as his palpable relief at finally pronouncing his verdict.
Contemporary especially American technocultural, technofuturist, technophiliac rhetorics sometimes seem fantastically fixated with markets. I have already described an anarcho-capitalist libertarian viewpoint for which market relations are imagined to be uniquely expressive of a competitive, acquisitively maximizing "human nature," for which the sum of these relations is imagined to constitute the space of freedom figured as a "spontaneous order," and for which the principal emancipatory demand that compels the just is for the elimination of state regulations that are uniquely imagined to restrain this order from its otherwise inevitable crystallization. This deregulatory demand is typically figured as a radical privatization of the institutions of civic life hitherto associated with the public sphere.
The key contribution of technophiliac free-marketeers to this libertarian discourse would appear to be the regularly reiterated proposal that some particularly disruptive emerging technology or other –- it might be digital networks, or encryption technologies, or surveillance devices, or virtual reality systems, or intelligence-enhancing or virtue-enhancing neuroceuticals, or molecular manufacturing tirelessly replicating cheap goods at the nanoscale, or space elevators, you name it –- is about to arrive on the scene, whereupon the sudden ubiquity of this disruptive superlative technology will either unleash of its own accord the creative energies that will constitute the emergence there and then of the spontaneous market order the libertarians crave, or will at any rate introduce a profound destabilization that will break the crust of convention, bypass the intractable knot of pluralist stakeholder politics, overcome the regulatory impasse and thereby facilitate the emergence of this market order in due course.
In 1996, in an essay that has been widely (but possibly not exactly rightly) taken as an example of such libertarian technophilia, John Perry Barlow notoriously addressed himself in one of the founding political documents of internet technoculture to the “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel.” To them he declared, “I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
The proximate inspiration for Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” was in fact the sudden and overbearing intrusion of government "decency" censors and opportunistic regulators into a vibrant online culture about which they had taken no time to gain any sense of its customs, institutions, values, or technical capacities. “You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation... You do not know our culture, our ethics... Our world is different.”
In Cory Doctorow’s essay, “The Carpterbaggers Go Home,” a comparable claim is directed from a self-appointed (there is of course no other kind as yet) representative of a network technoculture to an unwelcome interloper. But where Barlow addresses his attention to representatives of the State, Doctorow addresses himself instead to representatives of Business. Arriving after a decade of network-hype conjoined to fervent market enthusiasm, such a shift in itself felt in reading it for the first time rather like a watershed.
For Barlow, “Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.” This apparent disavowal of the material basis for digital media and the ongoing imbrication of digital technocultures and their prosthetic practices in bodily life and material culture provoked for a time, and naturally enough, a whole cottage industry of criticism of Barlow’s piece.
Doctorow’s internet, in contrast, is swarming with bodies doing stuff on the streets where they live. “The spare-time economy” he writes of mobs of underemployed techies and geeks unleashed onto the world by the sudden collapse of the 90s internet boom, “has yielded a bountiful harvest of weblogs, Photoshop tennis matches, homebrew Web services and dangerously Seattlean levels of garage-band activity.” He goes on to vividly evoke “untethered forced-leisure gangs… committing random acts of senseless wirelessness, armed with cheap-like-borscht 802.11b cards and antennae made from washers, hot glue, and Pringles cans.”
But in a precisely analogous move to Barlow’s own, Doctorow ascribes to this swarming mess of shifting practices, protocols, and devices an essential nature that he contends is deeply antithetical to a particular kind of practice he disdains. While Barlow proposes that digitality conceived as a kind of ineffable spirit is invulnerable to the material coercions of worldly States, Doctorow proposes that internet practices are inherently improvisatory and unreliable in ways that will only rarely provide sustainable occasions for commercial profitabiltity.
“The Internet is loose and wobbly from the bottom up,” writes Doctorow. “TCP/IP is all about non-deterministic routing: Packet A and Packet A-prime may take completely different routes (over transports as varied as twisted pair, co-ax, fiber, sat, and RF) to reach the same destination... Internet… traffic… is positively Brownian, fuzzy and random and bunchy and uncoordinated as a swarm of ants randomwalking through your kitchen.” Here, Doctorow fatally reads the end-to-end principle through the discourse of negative liberty (a move that will return later in the term "Net Neutrality" among other places) and then treats this negative libertarian formulation as an ethos that defines the cyberspatial sprawl across its many layers: “Fuzzy at the bottom: TCP/IP. Fuzzy in the middle: message-passing protocols. Fuzzy on top: services.”
According to Doctorow this indeterminacy of the internet is deeply “antithetical to all our traditional notions about success in branding and business.” This is because “[b]usiness is built around reliability, offering a predictable quality of service from transaction to transaction. Even the messiest, one-off businesses are based on reliability; for example, estate auctioneers are predictable -- indeed, they provide the only touchstone of predictability in one-off sales, through the authorship of dependably consistent auction catalogs.”
But despite this presumed antitheticality, Doctorow ends up talking an inordinate amount about commerce after all: “[I]t's time to leave behind the idea of traditional reliability as value-proposition. The technical reality of the Internet doesn't care about the successful business strategies of yesteryear. The businesses that succeed in the unreliable world will find new ways of providing reliability.” And: “The businesses that succeed [will]... exploit the new reality rather than denying it.”
Given this mild collapse into corporate futurological speak, it comes as a more than mildly incongruous surprise when Doctorow stirringly concludes in the tonalities of a manifesto: “The close-enough-for-rock-n-roll revolution is a-comin' -- to the streets, comrades!”
The problem is that although his language mobilizes (even if I don’t doubt that Doctorow’s tongue was firmly planted in his cheek when he penned his revolutionary coda) the discursive paraphernalia and emotional excitement of radical political emancipation here, the piece is really one with no sense of the political in it in the least. One has to assume that the marvelous experimental, collaborative, playful prosthetic practices Doctorow highlights in his piece are valuable enough to protect and defend rather than simply to celebrate as they are unfolding. But to the extent that this is true, then it offers little comfort or protective cover to suggest that conventional commerce cannot finally profit from digital networks (a claim I wouldn’t bet the mortgage on in any case, let alone my life) if it happens that in their quixotic pursuit of such profits conventionally commercial interests are moved nonetheless to exploit, oppress, or undermine these practices he celebrates.
When Doctorow chuckles at the strategy of corporations to commercialize the Internet by “carv[ing] out pockets of sanity in the anarchy” there is an ominous sense in which “anarchy” is being treated as substantial here in a way that would presumably generate some kind of automatically and inherently efficacious resistance to onerous intervention. This is a very familiar trope for technocentric libertarians indifferent to or disdainful of the political as such, and to the demands of democratic politics in particular, except to the extent that one can find a trace of democracy in the duressed contracts, exchanges, and elite-orchestrated consumption practices available under market-fundamentlist construals of capitalism.
In an editorial entitled “Tech Bloom in Full Flower,” written nearly two years later for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in November 2003, Alex Steffen offered up an argument that reproduces the contours of Doctorow’s case, in ways that inspired the very same enthusiasm as well as the very same worries for me. Together with Jamais Cascio, Steffen is the creator and primary producer of the highly influential and simply incomparable WorldChanging Blog, which conjoins discussions of digital networked information and communication technologies with discussions of environmental sustainability, social justice and global development issues, and the provision of practical suggestions for the collaborative address of social problems.
“The conventional wisdom, during the Tech Boom, was that what drove innovation was the lure of giant piles of cash,” writes Steffen, framing his argument with the familiar trauma of the high-tech crash that ended the century. But “[t]hat idea now rubs shoulders with the Berlin Wall.” (Notice, once again, that the language here has mobilized the imagery of political emancipation.) “What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends and caffeine. Freed from the pursuit of paper millions, geeks are doing what geeks, by nature, really want to be doing: making cool stuff.” Against the drear banality of bourgeois profitability, Steffen reminds us that creativity is driven as often as not by the pursuit of pleasure and, as you will remember Clay Shirky pointing out already in a related context, a desire for attention.
And so: “In basements, garages and the empty warehouses that once held the Next Big Thing, tech-savvy folks are huddled over their laptops, working together online to give away the future. The result? We're seeing a surge of technological creativity that easily trumps anything we dreamed of with the dot-com PR guys crooning in our ears.”
Steffen then surveys a scene with which the reader will now be quite familiar, and provides a useful summary of the varieties of social software to which I devote no small amount of my own hopeful attentions:
There's the software, such as Linux, where teams of coders are working collaboratively in every corner of the globe to perfect what's rapidly becoming the world's most important operating system. "Peer-to-peer" programs, Napster's cousins, are busily creating networks of millions of users all giving each other software, movies, music, books -- nearly anything that can be digitized, whether they own it or not. "Distributed computing" projects use the idle power of volunteers' home PCs to tackle massive tasks such as mapping genes and scanning the stars for intelligent life.
There's the hardware. "WiFi" aficionados are manically building free, ubiquitous, high-speed wireless Internet coverage for entire cities. GeekCorps is off wiring the world's poor. Others are hacking together "Freekboxes" from free software and recycled parts and shipping them to developing world human rights activists.
There's even the content. Slashdot, spinning the planet's best "news for nerds" out of little more than the enthusiasm of its users, and Wikipedia, compiling the world's first collaboratively built encyclopedia. Or the countless Web logs, travel guides, online libraries and college classes (like MIT's OpenCourseWare). Or Craigslist and Tribe.Net and the thousand other new free ways to find a date, a roommate or an honest mechanic. There's even a new form of copyright, the Creative Commons license, to help you give stuff away while protecting it from theft -- a legal system for sharing, a "copyleft."
Taken together, Steffen describes these prosthetic practices as “The Tech Bloom” (in contrast to the commercial “Tech Boom” of the 1990s), an overabundant proliferation of free creative expression, collaboration, and quite a lot of making-do.
While I find it nearly as difficult to restrain my enthusiasm for the practices that exercise the imaginations of Doctorow and Steffen as I find it to restrain my distaste for the practices that exercise the imaginations of some market libertarians, what I want to register here, yet again, is my worry that there is a disavowal of the substance of the political in this discourse even while it depends on a figural conjuration of the political to express its ambitions and communicate its joys. In this it is the possible continuities rather than the conspicuous differences that I would want to highlight between the market libertarians and these, call them, "progressive experimentalists" here.
Steffen concludes his piece with a vivid tableau that would concretize the distinction between the two: “If the Tech Boom had a graven image, it was the bull on Wall Street. The Tech Bloom is more likely to be found dancing around the desert at Burning Man, the annual festival where money is taboo, everything's a gift and creative participation is synonymous with cool.”
But the trouble with “The Tech Bloom” is that it can too easily degenerate as a discourse into another variation on “spontaneous order,” say, Spontaneous Order with a Human Face.
Steffen’s ambitions, like Doctorow’s, seem to me to be profoundly worldly ones, but the problem is that it is only politics and its interminable reconciliation of contending aspirations that gives you a world.
Burning Man isn’t the world, it’s a festival.
And festivals don’t scale globally.
This is not an expression of curmudgeonly hostility for the festive as such, nor is it an expression of resignation that should mobilize the can-do spirit of various technophilianarchic troopers of the temperamental left or the temperamental right.
Festivals are festivals to an important extent precisely because they are not the world. It is not a matter of indifference to me that whenever they hanker after the status of polis festivals soon enough will decline into sewers (and this tends to be true literally as well as figuratively).
Festivals want a world, even as they take their momentary measure of distance from the world on which they depend. It is never only those who join up or join in to public practices who constitute the stakeholders in those practices. It is never true that even the best most beneficent efforts fail to exact their costs and impose their risks. It does not denigrate pleasure to note that pleasure is not the same thing as political legitimacy and that political legitimacy is indispensable to freedom. It does not denigrate voluntary participation to note that voluntary participation is not the same thing as democracy and that democracy has come to be indispensable to freedom. It does not denigrate collaboration to note that neither is collaboration yet the same thing as sharing the world with peers who differ ineradicably from us in their capacities, their knowledges, and their ends.
Collaboration, contestation, consent are public scenes that depend on a ritual artifice invigorated, consolidated, and transformed through our own recourse to it, articulated through moral and ethical norms, laws backed by legitimate force, contingent protocols for the exchange of information, services, and goods, and any number of architectural constraints. There is nothing "natural" or "spontaneous" about politics, and certainly not democratic politics. Technology will not deliver us a more perfect union: For democracies, the formation, ordination, and establishment of that more perfect unoin is a lot that falls inescapably and interminably to "we the people," ourselves.
Sunday, May 23, 2004
Is Aging A Natural Kind?
There is a saying that nothing is inevitable but death and taxes, but it is beginning to look, strangely enough, as if taxes will end up being the more inevitable of the two. In fact, reading the reports of gerontologists these days (for highly readable accounts of what I am talking about here and here are pieces by Aubrey de Grey) sometimes suggests that if we just put our tax dollars to work in the right places we might have the whole death thing licked in no time at all.
Once upon a time, aging meant a shrivelling of features, a creeping infirmity of frame, a diminution of countless capacities, the loss of libido and of memory, a disastrously rising susceptibility to disease. Already, pharmacological interventions are changing much of what it has meant to embark on the profound metabolic processes we customarily associate with aging. It is such a commonplace to cynically observe that face lifts and Viagra have not in fact conferred immortality upon the "foolish" and "superficial" Boomer Generation that I think we sometimes overlook just how profound a transformation these interventions have introduced into our sense of what we can properly hope for and expect from a human life.
With each passing year, indeed with each passing month, medical science offers up to swelling ranks of gerontocrats in the "developed" world genetic, prosthetic, pharmacological interventions into what have been called the “diseases of aging.” Although it is foolish to leap off the deep end and start talking in an alarmist or ecstatic fashion about the immanent arrival of human “immortality,” one has to wonder just how proximate is the date of the arrival of the longevity singularity, the threshold date when average life expectancy begins to increase one year per year in a sustained and sustainable fashion.
As our assumptions and expectations about what it must mean for a human body to age fall one by one in the face of medical intervention, I begin to wonder if there really is such a thing as "aging" in the first place. Is "aging" a word that will soon outlive its usefulness?
Maybe "aging" is a word like "instinct": Just as when we propose to explain a behavior in the natural world by positing an instinct as its source we are admitting our ignorance about its actual causes while following the forms of an explanation of causes, maybe the word "aging" is also one we have used to pretend mastery in the face of deep perplexity.
What remains of "aging" when "its" underlying processes and outward forms explode into a rich tableau of multiple and competing descriptions, each one of which then, in turn, becomes a field for intervention rather than a "natural" limit to contemplate?
Scientists are beginning to speak not just of "diseases of aging," now, but of "aging as a disease." And inspired by this new confidence, some technophiles are beginning to call for a "War on Aging." But is it really right to think of "aging" as a singular enemy we soon hope to be equal to, or is it that we are discovering that "aging" is another artifact of ignorance, a shorthand label for complex realities we never before could get a handle on? Won't it remain true, for example, that the post-senescent healthcare provision of actually living human beings will involve significantly different sorts of treatments and concerns than did their pre-senescent healthcare, just as pre-adolescent and post-adolescent healthcare differ in some significant respects? To render much or even all (surely a dubious hope for quite some time to come) the damage hitherto associated with statistically typical experiences of senescent processes negligible through medicine is not the same thing as eliminating senescence as such through medicine, is it?
Treating "aging" as a natural monolithic thing too easily misleads us into imagining that our interventions into its many forms amount to a comparable intervention into the other mysterious monoliths with which "aging" has been associated historically –- mortality, finitude, and so on. Quite apart from questions about whether or not any kind of narrative coherence for a legible "self" could be prolonged to the timescales celebrated by some enthusiasts of longevity and rejuvination medicine, there is nothing to suggest that increasing healthy post-senescent longevity would confer even bodily "immortality" on beings still prone at all to disease, mischief, or mischance. Nor should we imagine that tweaking our biology will confer on us some kind of godhood.
If anything one hopes the promise of the ongoing therapeutic amelioration of the processes and effects we have historically associated with "aging" will mean that we will cease to freight these pernicious processes with this enormous metaphysical baggage in the first place. Since even modest increases in average life expectancy, however healthy, will introduce unprecedented problems and promises for global stability, social justice, welfare provision, environmental sustainability among other things it seems best not to get too distracted from these urgent inevitabilities by dwelling on what looks to me like little more than confused vestigial theological meditations on eternity.
As we learn that there is not just one way that "aging" threatens to claim our lives, we set out upon the road along which ever more of our lives are our own to claim. Perhaps the point will not be so much to defeat "aging" as to proliferate its forms and so replace it simply with the story of our lives.
Once upon a time, aging meant a shrivelling of features, a creeping infirmity of frame, a diminution of countless capacities, the loss of libido and of memory, a disastrously rising susceptibility to disease. Already, pharmacological interventions are changing much of what it has meant to embark on the profound metabolic processes we customarily associate with aging. It is such a commonplace to cynically observe that face lifts and Viagra have not in fact conferred immortality upon the "foolish" and "superficial" Boomer Generation that I think we sometimes overlook just how profound a transformation these interventions have introduced into our sense of what we can properly hope for and expect from a human life.
With each passing year, indeed with each passing month, medical science offers up to swelling ranks of gerontocrats in the "developed" world genetic, prosthetic, pharmacological interventions into what have been called the “diseases of aging.” Although it is foolish to leap off the deep end and start talking in an alarmist or ecstatic fashion about the immanent arrival of human “immortality,” one has to wonder just how proximate is the date of the arrival of the longevity singularity, the threshold date when average life expectancy begins to increase one year per year in a sustained and sustainable fashion.
As our assumptions and expectations about what it must mean for a human body to age fall one by one in the face of medical intervention, I begin to wonder if there really is such a thing as "aging" in the first place. Is "aging" a word that will soon outlive its usefulness?
Maybe "aging" is a word like "instinct": Just as when we propose to explain a behavior in the natural world by positing an instinct as its source we are admitting our ignorance about its actual causes while following the forms of an explanation of causes, maybe the word "aging" is also one we have used to pretend mastery in the face of deep perplexity.
What remains of "aging" when "its" underlying processes and outward forms explode into a rich tableau of multiple and competing descriptions, each one of which then, in turn, becomes a field for intervention rather than a "natural" limit to contemplate?
Scientists are beginning to speak not just of "diseases of aging," now, but of "aging as a disease." And inspired by this new confidence, some technophiles are beginning to call for a "War on Aging." But is it really right to think of "aging" as a singular enemy we soon hope to be equal to, or is it that we are discovering that "aging" is another artifact of ignorance, a shorthand label for complex realities we never before could get a handle on? Won't it remain true, for example, that the post-senescent healthcare provision of actually living human beings will involve significantly different sorts of treatments and concerns than did their pre-senescent healthcare, just as pre-adolescent and post-adolescent healthcare differ in some significant respects? To render much or even all (surely a dubious hope for quite some time to come) the damage hitherto associated with statistically typical experiences of senescent processes negligible through medicine is not the same thing as eliminating senescence as such through medicine, is it?
Treating "aging" as a natural monolithic thing too easily misleads us into imagining that our interventions into its many forms amount to a comparable intervention into the other mysterious monoliths with which "aging" has been associated historically –- mortality, finitude, and so on. Quite apart from questions about whether or not any kind of narrative coherence for a legible "self" could be prolonged to the timescales celebrated by some enthusiasts of longevity and rejuvination medicine, there is nothing to suggest that increasing healthy post-senescent longevity would confer even bodily "immortality" on beings still prone at all to disease, mischief, or mischance. Nor should we imagine that tweaking our biology will confer on us some kind of godhood.
If anything one hopes the promise of the ongoing therapeutic amelioration of the processes and effects we have historically associated with "aging" will mean that we will cease to freight these pernicious processes with this enormous metaphysical baggage in the first place. Since even modest increases in average life expectancy, however healthy, will introduce unprecedented problems and promises for global stability, social justice, welfare provision, environmental sustainability among other things it seems best not to get too distracted from these urgent inevitabilities by dwelling on what looks to me like little more than confused vestigial theological meditations on eternity.
As we learn that there is not just one way that "aging" threatens to claim our lives, we set out upon the road along which ever more of our lives are our own to claim. Perhaps the point will not be so much to defeat "aging" as to proliferate its forms and so replace it simply with the story of our lives.
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Set Theory for Futurists
“Permitted in principle by the laws of physics” is a larger set of propositions than “stuff that can be plausibly engineered” is a larger set of propositions than “stuff people actually want” is a larger set of propositions than “stuff people are willing to pay for” is a larger set of propositions than “things people still want in the longer-term that they wanted enough to pay for in the shorter-term.”
Glib futurist types are of course notoriously quick to pronounce outcomes “immanent” and “inevitable” (genetically-engineered immortality! nanotech abundance! uploading consciousness! superintelligent AI! bigger penises!), just because a survey of science implies to them that an outcome they especially desire or dread is “permitted in principle by the laws of physics.” But nested within that set like concentric rings on a tree-trunk are ever more restricted and more plausible sets, of which the target set at the center is the set of things people tend to still want enough over the longer-term that they are satisfied to pay (or have paid) for them.
I think it is a good exercise, and sometimes a good penance, for futurists to take special care around their use of the word "inevitable" to describe outcomes that are radically different from states of affairs that obtain today. My suspicion is that this is a word technophiles actually use more to signal the attitude, "okay, I'm not interested in arguing with you anymore if you don't accept the plausibility of the whatever wild-eyed future outcome I find especially appealing or appalling myself." Too often, “inevitable” is a word that signals an inability to chart an intelligible sequence of developmental stages that could plausibly delineate a path from where we are to whatever superlative state is imagined to be likely and attractive. And by plausible, I mean both technically and politically plausible.
Glib futurist types are of course notoriously quick to pronounce outcomes “immanent” and “inevitable” (genetically-engineered immortality! nanotech abundance! uploading consciousness! superintelligent AI! bigger penises!), just because a survey of science implies to them that an outcome they especially desire or dread is “permitted in principle by the laws of physics.” But nested within that set like concentric rings on a tree-trunk are ever more restricted and more plausible sets, of which the target set at the center is the set of things people tend to still want enough over the longer-term that they are satisfied to pay (or have paid) for them.
I think it is a good exercise, and sometimes a good penance, for futurists to take special care around their use of the word "inevitable" to describe outcomes that are radically different from states of affairs that obtain today. My suspicion is that this is a word technophiles actually use more to signal the attitude, "okay, I'm not interested in arguing with you anymore if you don't accept the plausibility of the whatever wild-eyed future outcome I find especially appealing or appalling myself." Too often, “inevitable” is a word that signals an inability to chart an intelligible sequence of developmental stages that could plausibly delineate a path from where we are to whatever superlative state is imagined to be likely and attractive. And by plausible, I mean both technically and politically plausible.
Saturday, May 15, 2004
Stop Congratulating Yourselves, Digirati, and Get Back to Work
I agree with the many people who are claiming now that the wide circulation of damning digital images and documents from Iraq and elsewhere might begin to contribute -- now that people are finally talking about these things in sufficient numbers -- to a turning of the tide that will culminate in the toppling of the current inept and immoral U.S. Administration.
But the sudden avalanche of articles about how digital dissemination will always topple tyrants looks to me like just so much hype-edged hysteria. Militarism, social justice, and democracy are actually topics too important to be reduced to yet one more occasion for pampered North American early-adopting web-enthusiasts to indulge in another interminable and very-public self-congratulatory circle-jerk about their splendid toy-pile.
One wonders how this latest Net Bubble squares its heady joys with the reality that the same digital networks and cameras existed to document the largest anti-war protests in the history of the planet, protests in which informed and respected voices routinely claimed that there were no weapons of mass destruction to find in Iraq, that there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaida, that real democratic liberation is never imposed at gunpoint, that oil-money should not be valued more than human beings.
One would imagine that with so many millions of people on the side of truths so palpable (and now proved), the digital tools that existed then as now should have made a better showing at frustrating the drumbeat for these hideously pointless and destructive neocon war adventures.
But they didn't.
And that must also be part of a balanced accounting of the political impact of digital networks.
The same digital tools that can provide a check on tyrants can be deployed opportunistically by tyrants to secure the appearance of justification and consent for their crimes.
Digital media can generate wonderfully consolidating echo-chambers for spin, they can facilitate distraction from reasonable objections, they can be machineries for the swift character assassination of critics, they can whomp up environments of uncritical mania in which reasonable voices however loud and clear are as good as silent, they can bury truths in spam and scandal, they can exacerbate information asymmetries to harass the weak, and often enough they can veil the wrongdoing of the powerful for just long enough.
Sure, new tools change things. With luck and good will and hard work they change things for the better. But anybody who wants to tell you that new tools will change everything wants to sell you something. Sometimes they want to sell you something while they sell themselves the same thing, which is worse.
Here's your assignment, democratic digirati: Prove to me your triumphalist theses about the digital networked communication and information technologies are righteous by shining your digital spotlight on prison abuses in the United States right this minute, and on the problem of rape in the United States military right now. Let's see if the domestic analogues to the current scandals provoke comparable outrage and prompt comparable and needed demands for change.
Use your cool tools, my Netizen friends and comrades. I assure you the images, the texts, the exhibitions, the testimony, the broken promises and broken lives are all there. Show me how the new emergent democracy of many to many digitality can speak truth to power and make the world a better place.
It's not that I think you can't do it. It's that I think only you can do it. Your tools are waiting for you to make good use of them. They don't give a damn about the uses to which you or the tyrants you decry will put them. It's you who wants to be free. Information doesn't want anything.
But the sudden avalanche of articles about how digital dissemination will always topple tyrants looks to me like just so much hype-edged hysteria. Militarism, social justice, and democracy are actually topics too important to be reduced to yet one more occasion for pampered North American early-adopting web-enthusiasts to indulge in another interminable and very-public self-congratulatory circle-jerk about their splendid toy-pile.
One wonders how this latest Net Bubble squares its heady joys with the reality that the same digital networks and cameras existed to document the largest anti-war protests in the history of the planet, protests in which informed and respected voices routinely claimed that there were no weapons of mass destruction to find in Iraq, that there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaida, that real democratic liberation is never imposed at gunpoint, that oil-money should not be valued more than human beings.
One would imagine that with so many millions of people on the side of truths so palpable (and now proved), the digital tools that existed then as now should have made a better showing at frustrating the drumbeat for these hideously pointless and destructive neocon war adventures.
But they didn't.
And that must also be part of a balanced accounting of the political impact of digital networks.
The same digital tools that can provide a check on tyrants can be deployed opportunistically by tyrants to secure the appearance of justification and consent for their crimes.
Digital media can generate wonderfully consolidating echo-chambers for spin, they can facilitate distraction from reasonable objections, they can be machineries for the swift character assassination of critics, they can whomp up environments of uncritical mania in which reasonable voices however loud and clear are as good as silent, they can bury truths in spam and scandal, they can exacerbate information asymmetries to harass the weak, and often enough they can veil the wrongdoing of the powerful for just long enough.
Sure, new tools change things. With luck and good will and hard work they change things for the better. But anybody who wants to tell you that new tools will change everything wants to sell you something. Sometimes they want to sell you something while they sell themselves the same thing, which is worse.
Here's your assignment, democratic digirati: Prove to me your triumphalist theses about the digital networked communication and information technologies are righteous by shining your digital spotlight on prison abuses in the United States right this minute, and on the problem of rape in the United States military right now. Let's see if the domestic analogues to the current scandals provoke comparable outrage and prompt comparable and needed demands for change.
Use your cool tools, my Netizen friends and comrades. I assure you the images, the texts, the exhibitions, the testimony, the broken promises and broken lives are all there. Show me how the new emergent democracy of many to many digitality can speak truth to power and make the world a better place.
It's not that I think you can't do it. It's that I think only you can do it. Your tools are waiting for you to make good use of them. They don't give a damn about the uses to which you or the tyrants you decry will put them. It's you who wants to be free. Information doesn't want anything.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Working Hard, or Hardly Working?
My very good friends and colleagues and comrades-at-arms at Betterhumans have posted a link to this humble blog (thanks guys!) by way of registering the suspicion that this is my latest of many attempts "to avoid the demanding editorial rigors of [my duties at] Betterhumans." Unsurprisingly, members of my dissertation Committee have voiced the same suspicion.
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