Serious As A Heart Attack

Upgraded from Comments, my squabble with silly Singularitarianism, it would seem, continues...

From a comment this morning, a complaint which curiously echoes others:

[F]or one who does not take weird robot cults seriously, you certainly write about them a lot.

I'm hearing this complaint quite a bit from Superlative Technology partisans and sub(cult)ural futurists lately. It's hard to know if this is really a difficult phenomenon for you all to grasp or if you're just trying rather desperately to change the subject here.

Just in case your perplexity is real: Of course I take Extropians, Singularitarians, transhumanists, and all the rest seriously.

As seriously as a heart attack.

I've been critiquing sub(cult)ural, transcendentalizing, Superlative, bioconservative, retro-futurist, reductionist, technocratic, and other anti-democratizing or irrationalist modes of technodevelopmental discourse and practice for a decade and a half.

I take very seriously the damage I think they can do, the false and obfuscatory frames they can popularize, the skewed priorities they can inspire, the fearful and hateful passions they can indulge in the face of radical technoscientific change, the rationales they offer up to incumbents eager to rationalize their unearned privileges, the anti-democratizing attitudes and practices they can inspire.

I take very seriously the way they derange technodevelopmental discourse at the very moment when technoscience must be democratized else it destroys the open world, or living world altogether.

Against these attitudes, distortions, indulgences and so on I have also tried to delineate positive, hopeful technoprogressive alternatives. I don't mind at all that some transhumanists (especially the more sensible democratic transhumanists, so-called) have discerned a measure of sense and derived a measure of pleasure from some of my technoprogressive writing.

I hope that at least some True Believers, self-appointed techno-elites, sub(cult)ural technophiliacs, techno-transcendentalists, silly boys-with-their-toys, Priestly as opposed to pragmatist champions of science, and technocentric opponents ("reluctant" or otherwise) of democracy will be nudged through their engagement with my writing into the incomparably more useful peer-to-peer planetary technodevelopmental struggle to democratize technoscientific change, to distribute the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change more fairly, to celebrate planetary p2p-multiculture, and to universalize the scene of informed nonduressed consent to prosthetic self-determination.

Nobody needs to join a robot cult to participate in the great shared but diverse work of democratic, social, and technoscientific progress. And those robot cultists who do participate in that work will, at the very least, need to estheticize and privatize their religiosity like everybody else does in a secular multicultural planetary society. This means they really should stop confusing their marginality for indispensability, their quirky sub(cult)ural attitudes for "unbiased" science, and their idiosyncratic indulgences and rituals (which I do not doubt are perfectly edifying for them personally, and which I am quite happy to celebrate as part of humanity's rich existential tapestry as far as that goes, even when these particular edifications don't particularly appeal to me personally) for Serious pragmatic policy discourse.