“Technoradical”: Rebels Without a Cue?

A friend and colleague of mine has taken to using and even promoting the term “techno-radicalism” to describe what he is up to politically. This is a friend who shares a number of my own idiosyncratic political commitments and who, in consequence of this, has also sometimes described his perspective as a “technoprogressive” one. Of course, I sometimes use that latter term as a shorthand way of describing myself -– since for me (and this doesn’t seem to be true for everybody) the term “technoprogressive” designates nothing more mysterious than being a progressive who is especially interested in questions of technoscientific development, pretty much exactly as it sounds like it designates. Anyway, this friend was rather perplexed to find that the term “techno-radical” makes me really uncomfortable. Given my published arguments on questions of technology, ecology, and democracy, he had probably come to think of me as something of a “techno-radical” like himself. That’s fair enough as far as it goes, but my discomfort has a point and I think it pays to dwell on it a bit.

Even if there is an appealing etymological connection between a concern with fundamentals and consequent normative commitments inhering in the term “radical,” it's still true that the pretty common usage for "radical" indicates simply "intensity of conviction" or even "extremism." Far worse to my mind, this is an intensity without any suggestion of its actual political location (left, right, democratic, theocratic, Royalist, whatever). And so, of course, as a practical matter it seems to me always a good idea for goodly radicals to indicate the street where their radicalism lives -- if indeed radicalism is what is wanted -- lest they find themselves hobnobbing with uncongenial radicals (neocons and theocons are radicals, after all).

My point is that a notion of the "techno-radical" is ambiguous without an immediate specification of its intellgible political location. Annalee Newitz is techno-radical. I'll blow her my kisses. Glenn Reynolds is techno-radical. I'll dance on his grave in a red dress. As it were. What I am saying is that the term "techno-radical" (or even worse "techno-radicalism," oy) unhelpfully invites ambiguity because it imagines itself content-indicative despite the fact that the term itself doesn't specify the actual politics that will inevitably define everything that really matters about its "radicality."

If I am belaboring this obvious point a bit it is because I think this ambiguity in radicalism is especially pronounced and especially pernicious when talk turns to “technology.”

The priority of the political (and indeed in a fairly conventional left-right construal, however much many “technology radicals” may seem to wish otherwise) to the promotion of technoscientific progress simply has to remain palpably and insistently in view at all times for technoprogressive folks, else structural tendencies will almost inevitably skew technodevelopment to the right politically , whatever the radicals’ intentions may be.

These structural tendencies include the facts that

[1] science is regularly imagined to be or at any rate treated as if it were (effectively) a politically autonomous or neutral descriptive practice, and as such this provides an irresistible occasion to invest parochial normative assumptions with the appearance of necessity;

[2] the scientific end of achieving consensus differs so conspicuously with the political end of managing dissensus that the cultural ethos of advocacy for scientific culture regularly lends itself to discomfort, dismissal, or even hostility to the ethos of democratic culture, and hence is regularly accompanied by reductionist attitudes that seek (a) to invalidate the normative plurality of stakeholder politics by redescribing them as bias or irrationality or passion or (b) to circumvent the contingency and compromise of practical stakeholder politics with a technocratic or scientistic redescription of politics as a set of engineering problems;

[3] futurist discourse -- as opposed to, say, utopian literary discourse -- arises conspicuously out of the investment and managerial literature of North Atlantic corporate culture, and retains many of its conservative proprietary, elitist, instrumentalizing assumptions; and

[4] parochial patriotic and profit motives define the established terms of contemporary neoliberal global corporate-military technodevelopment in ways that conspicuously preferentially benefit elites to the catastrophic cost of majorities.

Given these structural tendencies all technology discourse, however “radical” it may be, even when it arises out of democratic conviction, seems to me especially susceptible to appropriation by anti-democratic forces in the actual world we live in. And given this special vulnerability it seems to me the special responsibility of democratic technology discourse constantly and insistently to reassert the priority of the political to any promotion of technoscientific progress. It’s that simple.