A Moratorium on New -Isms In the Name of an Open Futurity

I've mentioned before that the term "technoprogressivism" is one with which I have become associated (not to be pedantic, but actually I used to refer to "tech-progressive" outlooks, and it was the advice of Ryan McReynolds that I shift to the more euphonious "technoprogressive" term he had already been using; meanwhile, my friend and colleague, the socialist-feminist bioethicist James Hughes has pointed out that the term had a few precursor uses as well), but, anyway, I've written a lot about technoprogressive politics, and it's a term that has acquired some small currency and entailments -- not all of which I approve of, actually -- and so occasionally I get asked for formulations and clarifications about what technoprogressive politics means. Since I have a strong temperamental aversion to formulations that "block the road of inquiry" I understand that those who want to appropriate the technoprogressive term in the service of some specific "movement" or other can be frustrated by what looks to them like my perverse obscurantism and refusal to proffer up "final formulations" in the name of political expediency.

A good and well-meaning friend has recently made the following request of me:

Without it being or becoming a (religious) creed, what do you think are
the principles of techno-progressivism?

1. Metaphysics:
2. Epistemology:
3. Ethics:
4. Politics:
5. Esthetics:

This is how I answered them (somewhat revised):

When such a question occurs to you, the sensible thing is not to seek an
answer but to seek to understand from what initial confusion the question has arisen.

It seems to me that the formulation of the question in terms of an "-ism" probably already sets one on a path of religiosity that no amount of subsequent care and qualification will protect them from.

"Technoprogressive Principles" (so-called) are nothing more nor less than progressive principles focused on technodevelopmental social struggle. As there are of course many, conflicting, open-ended examples of progressive principles, so too there are and will be many, conflicting, and open-ended examples of technoprogressive principles.

Technoprogressive = progressive first + technodevelopmentally focused in particular.

You know, Democracy against Oligarchy is an old, old story. And technodevelopmental social struggle happens to look to be the most vital, promising, and threatening arena in which that story is playing out at the moment and probably for the forseeable future. Hence, technoprogressive campaigns and analyses will contribute uniquely relevant resources to progressive politics in this era. It really is that simple for me.

Look, lots of people are scared, scarred, and confused, and so too lots of people are itching for some quick "score" (for reasons of revenge and defensiveness directly connected to the first three things I mentioned in that laundry list). Radical technodevelopmental churn, simply put, is a fertile ground for fundamentalisms and cults and mass panics, as for authoritarian politics of all descriptions.

I'm sorry to say that I have come to think almost every "futurist" seems in some special way, some more than the usual way, to risk nudging into an authoritarian mindset -- and usually with easy-to-read fundamentalist religious paraphernalia conspicuously in play, however counterintuitive that may seem given the insistent materialism of the self-appointed futurological congress. (Old School "Extropians" and quite a few so-called "Singularitarians" are undeniably cultists, to provide the obvious examples of this, as are many, though not all, transhuman"ist"-identified persons). It's just that so many of these people are silly sociopaths that we fail to credit the near-ubiquity of the form among "futurists" nor do we take its implications particularly seriously.

The connection of "commitment" among the futurologically-inclined to nostalgia among oligarchs is very palpable, and helps explain the susceptibility of "the future" as a discourse to the damning characterization that it is always already "retro-futural." That is to say, to the extent that they "commit" to their various imaginary scenarios rather than simply working (through scenario building among other tools) to contribute primarily to fairer, more diverse, more democratic technodevelopmental social struggle, they are often engaging in conspicuously defensive and potentially oligarchic subcultural politics rather than in progressive politics.

So many "futurist"-types online seem already to be circling the wagons to "preserve" some idiosyncratic perspective they have assumed or even, somehow, what they have come to think of as a "way of life" from the inevitably unpredictable tides of history as it is made by free people, even when that "way of life" has not yet come into existence... just as so many conservative types struggle to "preserve" what amount to utterly fanciful "ways of life" retroactively constructed to "describe" some never realized Golden Age or other. The gesture is in both cases deeply anti-democratic.

The impulse to formulate easy-to-understand principles that constitute "a worldview" with which to identify arises from this larger political failing (as seen from a progressive point of view). I understand the demand to be clearer in one's thinking and writing in the service of properly democratic politics, but I disagree that party platforms and sloganeering philosophical "system-building" and the manic delusive identificatory energies they mobilize have anything to do, finally, with "clarity" -- however often they are proposed in its name.

Progress happens when we struggle to encourage diversity and equity in the world, when we work to implement more democratic societies and to democratize technodevelopmental social struggle.

Don't cater to the hucksters, the bootlickers, the True Believers, the cultists. There will always be plenty of dumbasses around to do that whatever we do. We can only endlessly expose them for sad sociopathic clowns and potential frauds, while doing our modest best to support democracy all the while.

I'll add, in conclusion, that the terminally awful Ayn Rand -- in my view among the very most catastrophically damaging American public intellectuals of the twentieth century -- once claimed to be able to delineate her philosophy while standing on one foot. Ayn Rand was of course revealed in that boast (among so many others) to be a huckster rather than a philosopher. The various libertopians, singularitaritarians, extropians, corporate futurists endlessly and eagerly leap to embrace the Randroidal format, some hoping to reproduce for just long enough the correlated cash cow, some hoping, embarrassingly enough, to "sweep the world" with their elite soopergenius master plan, some hoping to revenge themselves on a world that has mostly disdained them -- but all of them too silly, too sad, too dumb for words.

Don't try to understand technoprogressive politics through the lens of the Randroidal form, else you'll just end up crafting some new idiotic online manifesto or Institute or -ism to bore the world with. Democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle to facilitate greater progress, greater diversity, greater equity isn't like starting a band, or a kewl kidz club, or a sub(cult)ure. The democratic politics of open futures needs to disdain the online cottage industry of new -isms for the time being and focus on struggle.