If the enthusiastic advocates of Superlative Technology Discourses were to admit (and not just when critics like me force them momentarily against the wall, but in a way that played out in their discourse generally) that their curiously transcendentalizing refigurations of the palpable quandaries of the actually-emerging and proximately-upcoming technodevelopmental terrain were really idealizations soliciting and expressing cultural and political identification rather than engineering blueprints soliciting scientific testing, if they were to grasp that nanosanta, techno-immortality, and robot gods really function as figurative short-hand for sub(cult)ural ideals, collective expressions of dread and of wish-fulfilment here and now, and so on then I certainly would be far less exercised about them than I am, especially considering their relative marginality.
But let me go out on a limb here. Actually talking to many Superlative and Sub(cult)ural Technocentrics, listening to many of their responses to and dismissals of my worries and perplexities with them, I have to admit that what I think many of them really think is that their Superlative projections and preoccupations are actually the emblem of their superior scientificity. I think that many of them think they are trotting out predictive calculations like an engineer contemplating a gorge to be spanned when they scribble away at their Superlative Technological sketches. I think that many of them think that the social, cultural, and political factors I'm spotlighting in my critiques are really some kind of quasi-poetic or quasi-mystical empty-talk that won't make any kind of contact with the hard realities they and their friends talk about. I think that many of them think that all this stuff about "discourse" is what people talk about who just aren't smart enough to number crunch the Robot God-Odds with the likes of them.
This isn't exactly a stunning new development, of course. It's just highly predictable scientism, reductionism, and technocratic elitist self-congratulation of a kind we've all seen a million times before by now. It's the usual crashing bore, all too familiar in its smug complacency, its anti-intellectual parochialism, and in the joyless "I know you are but what am I" spectacle its clever boys inevitably make of themselves in the face of the exposure of their pretensions.
But one would be wrong to imagine that one captures the full topsy-turvicality of Superlative Technocentricity in just grasping its familiar facile scientism.
Perhaps this is a good time to remind ourselves that what is meant by "hard realities" and "solid stolid science" by Superlative Technocentrics in this context involves for them things like nanoscale robot swarms delivering post-political abundance, techno-immortalism via digital personality uploads or super-advanced medical treatments available within our lifetimes, and the likelihood of superintelligent postbiological robot ruler gods taking over the planet.
And what is being accused of muddled relativist emotionalist twaddle by Superlative Technocentrics in this context involves things like me recommending more caveated claims, paying attention to more than just the logical propositions in public discussions of technoscientific change but also their customary figures and frames, and recognizing that technoscientific change is articulated not only by compatibility with the laws of physics but by the social, cultural, and political factors that shape funding, regulation, marketing, and distribution, and so on.
Time and time again I am treated to the demand that I point out just where (fist pounds table) this or that Superlative Discourse fails the test of realism, just what my technical objections to this or that proposal about friendly or unfriendly superintelligent AI, about Nanoabundant circumventions of stakeholder-politics, about Techno-Immortality via genetic medicine or digital uploading consists of, and on and on and on.
But, of course, the better question from my perspective is what on earth is happening in the heads of people to make them think that technodevelopmental quandaries of emerging networked malware, non-normative healthcare, or novel interventions into the nanoscale are clarified by forcing these quandaries into the Superlative lens of Robot Gods, Medical Immortality or Nanosanta in the first place.
It should go without saying that to the monks in the monastery the scholarly practices in which the number of angels that can perch atop pinheads are debated can assume the texture and force of a technical discourse, with more and less smart participants, more and less interesting procedures, occasions for real creativity and insight, political factions and all the rest.
So, too, with Singularitarians interminably calculating the Robot God Odds.
One doesn't really have to join the robot cult to offer up the critique that tells you all you need to know about the proper status and standing of the discourse. Sure, one would probably have to drink the Kool-Aid to fully appreciate the real ingenuity and even brilliance some of the partisans of that discourse likely do exhibit. But that in itself should be a warning sign, given the extent to which Superlative discourses are pitched for the most part at a popular level while never achieving actual popularity, rather attracting the devotion of marginal sub(cult)ures of True Believers.
But quite apart from all this, the fact is that I think the actual practical force, the real-world impact of the Superlative discourses is happening at exactly the level their advocates don't want to talk about, and want for the most part to ridicule: in the cultural, political, social, psychological, rhetorical dimensions I keep hammering on about.
Sub(cult)ural futurists should have at best a negligible and accidental hand in directing the technodevelopmental struggles that might eventuate in anything like the arrival of "technological" outcomes like the ones that preoccupy their imaginations. I say should, rather than will, because we are living now in the culmination of a counterexample to that should -- a world reaping the toxic, wasteful, dysfunctional, blood-soaked whirlwind of the never-popular market fundamentalist notions of a marginal sub(cult)ural movement of neoliberal and neoconservative incumbents.
Be that as it may, technodevelopmental social struggle is too complex, dynamic, contingent, unpredictable to afford the Superlative Technocentrics and/or Sub(cult)ural Futurists the linear and unilateral implementation of the particular idealized outcomes with which they happen to identify here and now for whatever reasons.
But in my view they can have a profound effect on that technodevelopmental struggle where it counts (not to them, of course, but in fact) in the technodevelopmental present of ongoing and proximately upcoming technoscientific change. Here we come at last to the reason I devote so much of my attention to critique of Superlative Technocentricities and Sub(cult)ural Futurisms.
The ritually reiterated images and metaphors, the customary formulations, the inculcated frames, the naturalized assumptions of Superlative Technology discourse can have a profound effect on the technodevelopmental terrain as it exists here and now in a way that is incomparably more influential than any likely impact on the futures which Superlativity imagines itself to be concerned with.
And that influence, I say again, is almost always terrible: substituting oversimplifications and linearities for actual complexities, activating irrational passions that derange critical deliberation, indulging in hype to mobilize the idiotic energies of unsustainable and joyless consumption as well as terrorizing risk discourse to mobilize the authoritarian and acquiescent energies of militarism, endorsing elitist attitudes about people's ability to have a say in the public decisions that affect them, all too often offering up explicit hymns to un(der)interrogated and naturalized notions of progress, innovation, market order as an insult added to the already abundant injury of all these "implicit" props to corporate-militarist neoliberal incumbency.
This, of course, is where I work to lodge my primary critique of Superlativity. And this is the very site it becomes most difficult to address when Superlative Technocentrics demand we engage with them always only in "technical" debates (in a sense of "technical" that never really connects to much in the way of reality, whatever the protests to the contrary about Superlativity's superior scientificity).
The force of these re-directions into "technicality" is always to keep our focus squarely fixated on the abstract far-futures they populate with their engineering mirages, and never on the present. (These remain far-futures even when Superlativity tries to argue that acceleration -- or, even acceleration-of-acceleration -- renders the "far-futural" into a pseudo-proximity substituting for the terms in which the diversity of stakeholders here and now struggle to articulate their aspirations in the actually emerging, actually proximate technodevelopmental terrain).
But make no mistake: It is in the technodevelopmental terrain of the present that Superlative discourse works its real effects. And this is none too surprising, because it will be precisely in the technodevelopmental social struggle of these diverse stakeholders to ongoing and proximately emerging technoscientific change that we all do the actual work of education, agitation, organization, and analysis to provide the ongoing and growing material archive of a living, collaborative, responsible foresight, peer-to-peer.
The idealizations of Superlativity may solicit identification in their marginal adherents, but they do not constitute the "foresight" they are so pleased to congratulation themselves for. Foresight in the service of democratic, consensual, diverse, fair, sustainable, emancipatory futures looks to me instead to be more properly an open, ongoing, pragmatic peer-to-peer process.
Superlative Technocentricities and Sub(cult)ural Futurisms substitute faith for foresight, priests for peers, and the pieties of neoliberal incumbency for an open democratic futurity.
Whatever the technical idiosyncracies, whatever the fundamentalist ethnographic peculiarities, it is this last political point that is my own worry and focus here.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Friday, September 28, 2007
Still More on Superlativity
Nick Tarleton writes: Of course the technological ability to do something does not mean it will be done. But, if I’m understanding Dale’s argument correctly, I think it fails to take into account the degree to which MNT and AGI can empower small groups to achieve Superlative goals on their own, largely independent of any “social, cultural, and political forces”.
Depending on just how “largely” you mean by “largely independent” here I probably do decisively disagree with the idea that particular radical idealized technodevelopmental outcomes are unilaterally achievable through the fervent exertions of marginal sub(cult)ures who happen to fetishize these outcomes here and now for whatever reasons.
That said, I do think Nick has more of a handle on the sort of critique I am proposing than some others seem to do. As against those Superlative Technocentrics who would accuse my critique of facile fraudulence he would probably accuse it instead of facile obviousness. (Please input requisite smiley for those who aren’t properly attuned to ruefully ironic writing styles.)
Strictly speaking, Superlative technodevelopmental outcomes are not achievable at all in my view, since they aspire at the transcendental in my own technical usage of the term.
“Superlative” doesn’t mean for me “big changes” -- there are few who would deny that ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle is causing and coping with big, sweeping, radical change. For me, in this context, “Superlative” means investing technology with a kind of autonomy for one thing (there is a wide literature elaborating this problem, as it happen), but also a kind of sublime significance. This tends, in my view,
[1] to rely on an appeal to intuitions and iconography derived from or familiar to customary religiosity, and it is
[2] typically enlisted in the service of satisfying what are more customarily religious needs to overcome alienation, a quest for “deeper” meaning, a connection to ends more synoptic than those of parochial experience, and in ways that are
[3] prone in my view to activate irrational passions I would often associate with such religiosity as well, undercritical True Belief and groupthink, craving for authoritarian power or obedience to such, not to mention often being
[4] correlated, as religiosity so often is, to disdain of one’s body as well as disdain of the diverse aspirations and alien lifeways of one’s fellows, and so on.
(This critique of organized religiosity should not be taken as an endorsement of some of the recent critiques made by the so-called militant atheists, who seem to me -- whatever the strengths and pleasures of their discourse for a cheerful decades-long atheist like me -- (a) to mistake the perfectly reasonable esthetic or modest social role of religion in the lives of many of the variously "faithful" for a form of inevitably deranging irrationality that leads them, then, (b) to misconstrue as epistemological what is actually the political pathology of authoritarian fundamentalist formations that would opportunistically organize social discontent and moral identification in the service of tyrannical ends as well as (c) to mischaracterize as generally and dangerously irrational what are in fact promisingly secular societies, like the United States in my view, simply through a skewed interpretation of reports of religious belief by people who might mean radically different things by such reports and, in consequence, (d) to lose faith in the good sense and reliability of their fellow citizens and in the democratic processes that depend on these.)
Be that as it may, Nick suggests that I fail to take into account how Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Molecular NanoTechnology (MNT), so-called, "could" empower small groups to achieve Superlative goals. As I mentioned in an earlier response to Michael Anissimov, I actually do agree that discussions of the impact of relatively sudden shifts in the asymmetrical distribution of forces and capacities sometimes enabled by technodevelopmental change are certainly very important indeed. Ever more sophisticated malware and technical interventions at the nanoscale will likely yield effects of this kind many times in years to come…
However, I just don’t agree that one’s capacity to talk sensibly about such effects is much helped by
[1] highly general, rarely particularly caveated, too often more logical than pragmatic discussions of the “possible” engineering feasibility of particular idealized non-proximate (and hence profoundly uncertain) outcomes which are
[2] invested, nonetheless, with radical projected properties that activate irrational hopes and fears in people without much at all in the way of connection to the demands of the actually-existing proximately-upcoming technodevelopmental terrain we are coping with here and now and which proceed in ways that
[3] consistently and even systematically de-emphasize, denigrate, or altogether disavow the realities of the articulation of actual technodevelopmental social struggle by psychological, cultural, social factors and so on, and, hence,
[4] render the conclusions of the discourse highly suspect but too often also tend to
[5] disallow or at any rate skew democratic deliberation on technodevelopmental questions (and sometimes, I fear, not so much accidentally as because of the anti-democratic sentiments of partisans of the discourse itself) -- especially when these formulations attract popular attention or unduly influence policy-makers.
This is, I fear, what takes place too typically under the heading of discussions of “AGI” and “MNT.”
Depending on just how “largely” you mean by “largely independent” here I probably do decisively disagree with the idea that particular radical idealized technodevelopmental outcomes are unilaterally achievable through the fervent exertions of marginal sub(cult)ures who happen to fetishize these outcomes here and now for whatever reasons.
That said, I do think Nick has more of a handle on the sort of critique I am proposing than some others seem to do. As against those Superlative Technocentrics who would accuse my critique of facile fraudulence he would probably accuse it instead of facile obviousness. (Please input requisite smiley for those who aren’t properly attuned to ruefully ironic writing styles.)
Strictly speaking, Superlative technodevelopmental outcomes are not achievable at all in my view, since they aspire at the transcendental in my own technical usage of the term.
“Superlative” doesn’t mean for me “big changes” -- there are few who would deny that ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle is causing and coping with big, sweeping, radical change. For me, in this context, “Superlative” means investing technology with a kind of autonomy for one thing (there is a wide literature elaborating this problem, as it happen), but also a kind of sublime significance. This tends, in my view,
[1] to rely on an appeal to intuitions and iconography derived from or familiar to customary religiosity, and it is
[2] typically enlisted in the service of satisfying what are more customarily religious needs to overcome alienation, a quest for “deeper” meaning, a connection to ends more synoptic than those of parochial experience, and in ways that are
[3] prone in my view to activate irrational passions I would often associate with such religiosity as well, undercritical True Belief and groupthink, craving for authoritarian power or obedience to such, not to mention often being
[4] correlated, as religiosity so often is, to disdain of one’s body as well as disdain of the diverse aspirations and alien lifeways of one’s fellows, and so on.
(This critique of organized religiosity should not be taken as an endorsement of some of the recent critiques made by the so-called militant atheists, who seem to me -- whatever the strengths and pleasures of their discourse for a cheerful decades-long atheist like me -- (a) to mistake the perfectly reasonable esthetic or modest social role of religion in the lives of many of the variously "faithful" for a form of inevitably deranging irrationality that leads them, then, (b) to misconstrue as epistemological what is actually the political pathology of authoritarian fundamentalist formations that would opportunistically organize social discontent and moral identification in the service of tyrannical ends as well as (c) to mischaracterize as generally and dangerously irrational what are in fact promisingly secular societies, like the United States in my view, simply through a skewed interpretation of reports of religious belief by people who might mean radically different things by such reports and, in consequence, (d) to lose faith in the good sense and reliability of their fellow citizens and in the democratic processes that depend on these.)
Be that as it may, Nick suggests that I fail to take into account how Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Molecular NanoTechnology (MNT), so-called, "could" empower small groups to achieve Superlative goals. As I mentioned in an earlier response to Michael Anissimov, I actually do agree that discussions of the impact of relatively sudden shifts in the asymmetrical distribution of forces and capacities sometimes enabled by technodevelopmental change are certainly very important indeed. Ever more sophisticated malware and technical interventions at the nanoscale will likely yield effects of this kind many times in years to come…
However, I just don’t agree that one’s capacity to talk sensibly about such effects is much helped by
[1] highly general, rarely particularly caveated, too often more logical than pragmatic discussions of the “possible” engineering feasibility of particular idealized non-proximate (and hence profoundly uncertain) outcomes which are
[2] invested, nonetheless, with radical projected properties that activate irrational hopes and fears in people without much at all in the way of connection to the demands of the actually-existing proximately-upcoming technodevelopmental terrain we are coping with here and now and which proceed in ways that
[3] consistently and even systematically de-emphasize, denigrate, or altogether disavow the realities of the articulation of actual technodevelopmental social struggle by psychological, cultural, social factors and so on, and, hence,
[4] render the conclusions of the discourse highly suspect but too often also tend to
[5] disallow or at any rate skew democratic deliberation on technodevelopmental questions (and sometimes, I fear, not so much accidentally as because of the anti-democratic sentiments of partisans of the discourse itself) -- especially when these formulations attract popular attention or unduly influence policy-makers.
This is, I fear, what takes place too typically under the heading of discussions of “AGI” and “MNT.”
More on Superlativity ("Technicality," "Feasibility," and "the Real World")
Brian Wang writes: You have indicated that there are clear and easy to argue limitations of Suplerative tech (which is molecular nanotechnology, AGI). Great then it would be easy for you to list them.
Once again, I have indicated that there are clear limitations of Superlative Tech discourses. There are no Superlative Techs to which I or you or anybody can point to list such limitations. Incredibly enough, you ask me to list what I mean by these limitations, right after you actually quote a list of these limitations of Superlative Technology Discourses which I did provide and to which I referred: “vulnerabilities to hype, tendencies to naive technological determinism, reductionisms and other oversimplifications of developmental dynamisms, disdain for developmental aspirations alien to your own.”
Am I missing a lot of information that you have provided on real world complexities?
In the topsy-turvy world of Superlativity I will be smugly chastised for my incomprehension of and inattention to “real world complexities” -- precisely because I am talking about the characteristic exaggerations, oversimplifications, distortions, and skewed priorities of actual technodevelopmental complexities facilitated by particular modes of discourse and their customary assumptions, metaphors, political associations, and so on -- and chastised for this by people who seem to mean by the “real world” their own discussions of the logical feasibility of projected and idealized technodevelopmental outcomes like Drexlerian nanotechnological post-scarcity abundance, biomedical or even digital immortalization of human selves, and the “urgent dilemma” of whether an imaginary entitative postbiological superintelligence will be friendly or not.
Brian quotes other material I have written here on Amor Mundi describing political campaigns and institutions that I champion, like a basic income guarantee, a more democratized United Nations, planetary environmental, labor, and military nonagression standards and laws enforced by actually respected world courts, and universal education and healthcare provision. Of course, these are ideals, they are not the same sort of thing as the surreally implausible "predictive" technodevelopmental projections of Superlative Technocentrics. I don't think it is hypocritical in the least to engage in the one while deriding the other. I would certainly never try to pretend that blue-skying about ideal institutions was some kind of engineer’s “feasibility study.” Neither can I claim to have high confidence that any of these pet political outcomes of mine will arrive in just the forms I am sketching here and now (in part just to make the point in the midst of our present distress that real democratic, peaceful, and sustainable alternatives are imaginable), especially not in my own lifetime -- techno-immortalist handwaving notwithstanding -- largely due to my awareness of the very kinds of technodevelopmental complexities and uncertainties, the unpredictable dynamisms I keep pointing out to the apparent exasperation of the Superlative Technocentrics in the first place.
Brian accuses that “He [me] wants to have his cake of not getting into a technical debate while at the same time (eating it) claiming the correctness that the issue is settled in terms of a superlative projection and the superlative projector of being wrong and fanciful and naive.”
Now, it seems to me that I am engaging in a kind of technical debate, as it happens, just one from a disciplinary location Brian is possibly unfamiliar with or perhaps uninterested in. If, however, by "technical debate" Brian means to designate only a much more circumscribed kind of discussion of logical and engineering feasibility of particular projected non-proximate outcomes, I hate to break it to him, but quite a lot of his own discussion fails to qualify as such, either, when we look at things clearly -- inasmuch, in my view, as "feasibility" discourse in its peculiar Superlative modes regularly tends to express symptomatically the kinds of psychological, cultural, social, and political assumptions and preoccupations I keep pointing to, all under cover of its assiduously asserted “technicality.”
Once again, I have indicated that there are clear limitations of Superlative Tech discourses. There are no Superlative Techs to which I or you or anybody can point to list such limitations. Incredibly enough, you ask me to list what I mean by these limitations, right after you actually quote a list of these limitations of Superlative Technology Discourses which I did provide and to which I referred: “vulnerabilities to hype, tendencies to naive technological determinism, reductionisms and other oversimplifications of developmental dynamisms, disdain for developmental aspirations alien to your own.”
Am I missing a lot of information that you have provided on real world complexities?
In the topsy-turvy world of Superlativity I will be smugly chastised for my incomprehension of and inattention to “real world complexities” -- precisely because I am talking about the characteristic exaggerations, oversimplifications, distortions, and skewed priorities of actual technodevelopmental complexities facilitated by particular modes of discourse and their customary assumptions, metaphors, political associations, and so on -- and chastised for this by people who seem to mean by the “real world” their own discussions of the logical feasibility of projected and idealized technodevelopmental outcomes like Drexlerian nanotechnological post-scarcity abundance, biomedical or even digital immortalization of human selves, and the “urgent dilemma” of whether an imaginary entitative postbiological superintelligence will be friendly or not.
Brian quotes other material I have written here on Amor Mundi describing political campaigns and institutions that I champion, like a basic income guarantee, a more democratized United Nations, planetary environmental, labor, and military nonagression standards and laws enforced by actually respected world courts, and universal education and healthcare provision. Of course, these are ideals, they are not the same sort of thing as the surreally implausible "predictive" technodevelopmental projections of Superlative Technocentrics. I don't think it is hypocritical in the least to engage in the one while deriding the other. I would certainly never try to pretend that blue-skying about ideal institutions was some kind of engineer’s “feasibility study.” Neither can I claim to have high confidence that any of these pet political outcomes of mine will arrive in just the forms I am sketching here and now (in part just to make the point in the midst of our present distress that real democratic, peaceful, and sustainable alternatives are imaginable), especially not in my own lifetime -- techno-immortalist handwaving notwithstanding -- largely due to my awareness of the very kinds of technodevelopmental complexities and uncertainties, the unpredictable dynamisms I keep pointing out to the apparent exasperation of the Superlative Technocentrics in the first place.
Brian accuses that “He [me] wants to have his cake of not getting into a technical debate while at the same time (eating it) claiming the correctness that the issue is settled in terms of a superlative projection and the superlative projector of being wrong and fanciful and naive.”
Now, it seems to me that I am engaging in a kind of technical debate, as it happens, just one from a disciplinary location Brian is possibly unfamiliar with or perhaps uninterested in. If, however, by "technical debate" Brian means to designate only a much more circumscribed kind of discussion of logical and engineering feasibility of particular projected non-proximate outcomes, I hate to break it to him, but quite a lot of his own discussion fails to qualify as such, either, when we look at things clearly -- inasmuch, in my view, as "feasibility" discourse in its peculiar Superlative modes regularly tends to express symptomatically the kinds of psychological, cultural, social, and political assumptions and preoccupations I keep pointing to, all under cover of its assiduously asserted “technicality.”
Sunday, September 23, 2007
No Limits! (And Other Foolishness)
I always cringe whenever some "inspirational" business huckster barks into the mic or at the dinner table about how "innovation," "production," "enterprise" or whatever slogan the Amway mindset has latched onto at the moment has "no limits, man!" so, you know, we should all presumably become dot-eyed marauding maniacs and "go for it!" and "take no prisoners!" or what have you.
Such attitudes seem to me always to depend on, or even simply straightforwardly to translate to, the ugly awful fervently held faith that there will always be someone else around to clean up our messes for us.
This expressed disdain for the very idea of limits always amounts to and sometimes baldly testifies to a disdain for the actually-existing living plurality of people who are superfluous to or at odds with the streamlined trajectory at which our stubbornly insensitive, er, "motivated," go-getter imagines he is getting himself to.
Nowhere is this disdain more conspicuous to me than among Superlative Technocentrics, nearly all of them caught up in a frenzy of self-promotion, self-selection, and delusive mutual reinforcement as they handwave from the palpable and urgent reality of ongoing and emerging disruptive technoscientific change to what is instead an essentially irrational and certainly pseudoscientific transcendentalizing talk of omni-predicated technologies delivering post-bodily "immortality," post-embodied "consciousness," post-economic "abundance," post-historical "singularity," and so on.
While I am quite conscious of the ways in which the overwhelming inputs from planetary networked media, the biomedical intervention into customary understandings about when lives can properly be said to begin and end and with what expectations about capacities and changing function we might properly invest them, the intervention of instrumental rationality into production at incomparably small and large scales, the unprecedented appearance on the scene of weapons of massive and insane destructiveness and so on, are all deranging our collective sense of the limits that hitherto have been taken to define the human condition. That this sudden, intensive, and extensive transformative technodevelopmental storm-surge has been treated by some as a portent of an upcoming overcoming of human finitude as such, as the looming confrontation with a techno-transcendentalizing overcoming of the very idea of limits altogether has always seemed to me a curious confusion. And given the frequent coloration of such claims by fairly conventional theological notions of omni-potence, omni-science, and omni-benevolence this curious confusion seems to me all the more curiously conventionally religious, especially considering the barking militant anti-religiosity of so many who seem to indulge in this sort of handwaving technology-talk in the first place. To me, it has always seemed more sensible to say that the technodevelopmental derangement of customary limits is experienced quite as much as the emergence of a new limit -- the loss of our ability to claim with the sort of confidence we've sometimes depended on just what our definitive limits actually will consist of in matters of political and ethical concern that perplex us -- as it is the more emancipatory overcoming of certain old limits.
Be that as it may, I'll admit that it is easiest to focus one's critical attentions on the flabbergasting practical naivete of Superlative technodevelopmental accounts that rely on loose analogies (there are, to be blunt, differences that make a difference between human brains and computers, biological organisms and nanofactories, aging bodies and well-maintained mansions, stakeholder deliberation and the unilateral implementation of optimal outcomes deduced from ideal formulations), accounts that overestimate the state of our knowledge of the relevant technoscience, accounts that overemphasize the smooth function of technology in general, accounts that underestimate the role of social, cultural, and political factors on the vicissitudes of technoscientific change and its impacts, and accounts that treat complex dynamisms as linear processes and complex phenomena as simple monoliths.
It is also easy to focus on the, shall we say, symptomatic dimensions of Superlative Technology discourses, with their bevy of boastful boys, with their curiously conspicuous comic book iconography, with their eager self-marginalizing subcultural politics (hence the incessant vulnerability to and defensiveness about charges of weird Robot Cultism), with their non-negligible exhibition of body-loathing (from their occasional expressions of old-school Cyberpunk disdain of the "meat-body" to their widespread ongoing incomprehension of disability activists who quite righteously insist, "nothing about us without us"), with their ongoing difficulty in nudging their demographic much beyond its conspicuous -- tho' admittedly not exclusive -- white maleness in a world in which whites and males are minorities otherwise, with the lingering presence of "market fundamentalist" intellectuals among them and being taken seriously by them as they are almost nowhere else (after all, the neoliberal and neoconservative policies which gave "anarcho-capitalist" and "free-market" abstractions the only actual life they ever had or will ever have were undertaken by incumbent interests with the cynical understanding that these "ideas" provide ideal cover for confiscatory wealth concentration, but there are few actually intelligent people who still believe in these market fundamentalist pieties on their face, if anybody ever did, apart perhaps from a few awkward earnest Randians, poor things).
But the actual focus of my own critique of Superlative Technology discourses (even if I'll admit I have often directed my jeremiads against these more conspicuously vulnerable dimensions of Superlativity) is on their pernicious anti-politicizing and, more specifically, their almost always anti-democratizing force. Needless to say, I do indeed think the highly fetishized, irrationally hyperbolized, faithfully transcendentalized, falsely monolithicized, obsessively singularized technodevelopmental outcomes that preoccupy Superlative Technocentrics are the farthest thing from plausible in their specific Superlative formulations. But even if I were to grant them more than the negligible plausibility of logical possibility (which is quite enough for most Superlative Technocentrics, and I'll let the reader puzzle through the implications of that low bar given the force of True Belief it seems so often to underwrite), the fact remains that I still do not agree that Superlativity provides the best discursive lens through which we would best cope with the extraordinarily sweeping implications typically attributed to these outcomes by the Superlative Technocentrics themselves.
(A side note: Exactly in analogy to the "New Normal" of contemporary terror-alerts, the attribution of such sweeping implications to what amount at best to thought-experiments and at worst to science-fictional vignettes -- only without the accompanying pleasure of narrative or characterization -- is precisely what functions to make the Superlative demand for a substitution of a focus on proximate for projected and idealized outcomes the hallmark of "seriousness" by their lights, contrary to all sense and in fact in a way that is immune to the interventions of common-sense, strictly speaking.)
If the Superlative Technocentrics were actually right to imagine that billions of people now living will find themselves all too soon living in a future transformed by Friendly or Unfriendly post-biological intelligences, nanotechnological superabundance, biomedical immortality, or the like (and I do think they are far more likely to be wrong than right and I think this matters enormously), even granting them this, I think they are profoundly wrong to imagine that our best way to facilitate the best, least violent, most fair (or whatever) versions of these Superlative outcomes is to contemplate and prepare for the Superlative outcomes themselves, in the abstract, as these outcomes suggest themselves to us in our own impoverished vantage (an impoverishment exacerbated all the more by marginal and anti-democratic modes of Superlative deliberation). Such contemplation and preparation circumvents the ongoing and plural stakeholder contestation that will certainly articulate the unpredictable developmental forces and the dynamic developmental pathways along which such outcomes would actually "arrive" (were they to do so), ignores the practical, scientific, technical, pedagogical, regulatory, cultural knowledges arising out of our collective day to day responsiveness, competition, and collaboration in the plural presents from which no less plural futures will present themselves, that will not only shape but actively constitute our foresight and provide the living archive to which future generations or the communities in which we will ourselves later belong will make our collective recourse as we struggle to cope with these outcomes and their alternatives.
To be sure, this is not the denigration of foresight as such that Superlative Technocentrics will be sure to accuse it of being, but simply an insistence that foresight properly emerges from the ongoing contestation and deliberation of the plurality of actually-existing stakeholders to the emerging technodevelopmental terrain rather than from an idealized projection of Superlative outcomes onto the future by the impoverished perspective of a marginal minority and from the impoverished position of that future's past. This means that serious futurists (Jamais Cascio provides a well-respected example here) would always propose multiple technodevelopmental outcomes in their proposals, no one of which solicits identification but all of which, taken together, capture the texture of an upcoming technodevelopmental terrain in its dense plurality. And so, too, serious futurists would always stress the contingency, non-autonomy, and diversity of the impacts of technodevelopmental outcomes from the perspective of the plurality of their stakeholders. Serious futurists, finally, should always understand and emphasize that the rationality of foresight is more inductive than deductive; and, to the extent that such futurism would be democratizing rather than merely profitable for incumbent interests (and, hence, strictly speaking, better described as retro-futurism), futurists must grasp that the pragmatic point that deliberative foresight foregrounds induction over deduction translates in political terms to a foregrounding of openness over optimality.
(Regular readers may be surprised to see me talk about the very possibility of a "serious futurological practice" given all the abuse I tend to heap on self-identified futurists here... but the simple truth is that it seems to me there are good reasons to think that futurism, so-called, might very well manage for another generation or so -- as psychoanalysis managed to do for well over half the twentieth century -- to remain one of the few places where something like actual philosophical thinking might take place in a way that will be taken seriously even by anti-intellectual Americans. That is more than enough to get me to pay serious attention to it.)
Again, the simple truth is that I think that the preoccupations of no small amount of Superlative Technology Discourse is symptomatic rather than serious. As often as not, it symptomizes (as does so much literary sf, much more provocatively) the fears and fantasies of people caught up in disruptive technoscientific change, it symptomizes (as does so much neoliberal discourse, which remains complementary and often still explicitly correlated to technocratic discourses generally and Superlative Technology discourses particularly) the social, subcultural, and political marginality of many of the personalities drawn to these discourses.
But if the outcomes the Superlative Technocentrics have battened on to really were to come about in some form, the facilitation of best, safest, fairest, most democratic versions of these outcomes will arrive from ongoing plural stakeholder discourse rather than from the unilateral implementations of elite and abstract discourse. That is why my own technoprogressive politics (which is no less technocentric than that of the Superlative Technology discourses when all is said and done) would direct its energies to securing, subsidizing, and celebrating peer-to-peer formations of technoscientific practice, education, regulation, funding, and of p2p education, agitation, and organizing for radical democracy (including the democratization of the planetary economy) in general as a more practical technodevelopmental politics -- more practical even in the event that technodevelopmental outcomes come to assume anything like the contours that preoccupy the imaginations of Superlative Technocentrics.
If Singularitarians, so-called, really are as worried about scary Robot Gods as they seem to be, then it seems to me a far more practical focus for their attention and action would be to participate in contemporary anti-militarist and anti-globalization movements to diminish the role of the secretive and hierarchical command formations in the midst of our democratic society and to overturn the legal fiction of corporate personhood with all its pernicious antisocial and antienvironmental implications -- which are the locations in society out of which anything remotely resembling the Superlative fears and fantasies of these Singularitarians are likeliest to emerge. Otherwise, the ongoing regulation and monitoring of already existing and actually emerging malware seems to me incomparably more likely to provide the practical resources to which we would make collective recourse were we eventually confronted with recursively self-improving software, whether rightly taken to be intelligent or entitative or not, rather than whatever our own abstract fancies might now offer up to those -- including, as likely as not, some of us -- who inhabit days to come (between now and which there would be, after all, many intervening days filled with people quite as intelligent as we are, but incomparably better informed, and directing themselves to these actually urgent problems according to the terms in which they actually occur, likewise coping with ongoing and emerging malware and so on, peer-to-peer).
If Nanosantalogists really want nanofactories to incubate a high-tech gift society without reducing the planet to goo, then it seems to me a far more practical focus for their attention would be to participate in the contemporary copyfight and access-to-knowledge movements that would keep the nanofactory instructions out of the hands of incumbent elites, and to participate (as it seems to me my friends at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology already often do, at least when they are at their best) in movements to empower planetary regulation and oversight of pandemics, tsunamis, climate change, weapons proliferation, the manufacture and trafficking in toxic substances, and so on, since it will be the experiences and insights we acquire in these fraught and urgent already ongoing efforts that will provide the real archive on which we would really, truly depend were we to find ourselves confronting the Superlative fears and fantasies of these Nanosantalogists.
If Technological Immortalists, so-called, really want to inspire and fund and implement a SENS program to overcome the suffering and pathologies we customarily associate with human aging, then it seems to me a far more practical focus for their attention would be to embrace the rhetoric of the Longevity Dividend, to refigure what deGrey describes as the Seven Deadly Things (or whatever number this eventually amounts to, a habit of qualification and caveat being a welcome thing from especially speculative scientists) as seven separate medical conditions among countless others likewise demanding elaborate foundations and diverse research teams, and, above all else, to refrain altogether from idiotic talk of "living forever" or "immortality" in the first place (given the admission by most Technological Immortalists that theirs is not a program that would elude disease, violent, or accidental death even if it managed to achieve its already implausibly Superlative ends, it is curious -- that is to say, importantly symptomatic -- that they should be so reluctant to eschew these essentially faithful rather than factual discourses). But more to the point, it seems to me that enthusiasts for longevity and rejuvenation medicine should be devoting considerable efforts to movements to secure universal healthcare, to address neglected diseases among the planetary precariat, to provide clean drinking water and basic healthcare to everybody on earth, to defend the informed nonduressed consensual recourse to wanted therapies (whether normalizing or not) and protection from unwanted therapies (whether normalizing or not) in the context of contemporary modification medicine, to end the so-called war on (some) drugs (together with the fraudulent marketing and mandated use of other drugs) wherever its racist anti-democratizing tentacles reach, and so on.
Superlative Technocentrics are likely to recoil from suggestions like these, dismissing them as stealthy, well-nigh "closeted" half measures, but the truth, I'm afraid, is that their own monological fixations and hyperbolic derangements of these sensible -- even urgent -- recommendations bespeak either a profound misunderstanding of the complex, dynamic, ineradicably politicized technodevelopmental terrain as it actually exists, or a derangement that symptomizes their own irrational passions, born of social marginalization, short-sighted greed or hostility, neurotic fears of contemporary change and lack of personal control, straightforward narcissistic personality disorder, or the like.
It is well known (that is to say, known among the few odd people like me who keep up with this sort of thing at all) that I advocate what I describe as a technoprogressive political viewpoint which regards ongoing and emerging technoscientific change as at once the most dangerous and most promising field of contemporary democratic-left and emancipatory politics. For me, "progress" has come to be a matter of technodevelopmental social struggle first of all, the contestation of a plurality of stakeholders to the ongoing articulation and distribution of technoscientific costs, risks, and benefits. It is from this perspective in particular that I understand the urgent struggles against neoliberal corporate-militarism, environmentalist movements, planetary human rights and social justice movements, and so on.
While this perspective is no less technocentric than that of the Superlative Technocentrics I so regularly critique our differences could not be more stark otherwise (but this one point of continuity is enough to keep me on my toes lest my own technoprogressivity drift here and there into a problematic Superlativity quite in spite of myself). Not only do I think that the best, most democratizing, most emancipatory technodevelopmental outcomes can be facilitated by politics that are perfectly intelligible to the democratic-left progressive mainstream imagination (as Superlative Technocentricity very definitely is not), but I also think that there is an emerging technoprogressive mainstream on the American political scene and elsewhere around the world that is conjoining the forces of the left blogosphere and Netroots and other emerging p2p democratic formations, the defense of consensus science, copyfight, free press and open media, access to knowledge (a2k) movements, commitments to a politics of choice that encompasses both abortion and ARTs and consensual drug policy, growing demands for renewable energy and sustainable production, and other strands of the contemporary technoscientific tapestry, from the ground up, peer-to-peer, all around us, right here, right now.
Why Superlative Technocentrics would prefer their far-flung and hyperbolized futures over these actually-existing popular technoprogressive energies is entirely beyond me. No doubt only their therapists (or possibly, for a few of them at least, their financial advisers) know for sure.
Such attitudes seem to me always to depend on, or even simply straightforwardly to translate to, the ugly awful fervently held faith that there will always be someone else around to clean up our messes for us.
This expressed disdain for the very idea of limits always amounts to and sometimes baldly testifies to a disdain for the actually-existing living plurality of people who are superfluous to or at odds with the streamlined trajectory at which our stubbornly insensitive, er, "motivated," go-getter imagines he is getting himself to.
Nowhere is this disdain more conspicuous to me than among Superlative Technocentrics, nearly all of them caught up in a frenzy of self-promotion, self-selection, and delusive mutual reinforcement as they handwave from the palpable and urgent reality of ongoing and emerging disruptive technoscientific change to what is instead an essentially irrational and certainly pseudoscientific transcendentalizing talk of omni-predicated technologies delivering post-bodily "immortality," post-embodied "consciousness," post-economic "abundance," post-historical "singularity," and so on.
While I am quite conscious of the ways in which the overwhelming inputs from planetary networked media, the biomedical intervention into customary understandings about when lives can properly be said to begin and end and with what expectations about capacities and changing function we might properly invest them, the intervention of instrumental rationality into production at incomparably small and large scales, the unprecedented appearance on the scene of weapons of massive and insane destructiveness and so on, are all deranging our collective sense of the limits that hitherto have been taken to define the human condition. That this sudden, intensive, and extensive transformative technodevelopmental storm-surge has been treated by some as a portent of an upcoming overcoming of human finitude as such, as the looming confrontation with a techno-transcendentalizing overcoming of the very idea of limits altogether has always seemed to me a curious confusion. And given the frequent coloration of such claims by fairly conventional theological notions of omni-potence, omni-science, and omni-benevolence this curious confusion seems to me all the more curiously conventionally religious, especially considering the barking militant anti-religiosity of so many who seem to indulge in this sort of handwaving technology-talk in the first place. To me, it has always seemed more sensible to say that the technodevelopmental derangement of customary limits is experienced quite as much as the emergence of a new limit -- the loss of our ability to claim with the sort of confidence we've sometimes depended on just what our definitive limits actually will consist of in matters of political and ethical concern that perplex us -- as it is the more emancipatory overcoming of certain old limits.
Be that as it may, I'll admit that it is easiest to focus one's critical attentions on the flabbergasting practical naivete of Superlative technodevelopmental accounts that rely on loose analogies (there are, to be blunt, differences that make a difference between human brains and computers, biological organisms and nanofactories, aging bodies and well-maintained mansions, stakeholder deliberation and the unilateral implementation of optimal outcomes deduced from ideal formulations), accounts that overestimate the state of our knowledge of the relevant technoscience, accounts that overemphasize the smooth function of technology in general, accounts that underestimate the role of social, cultural, and political factors on the vicissitudes of technoscientific change and its impacts, and accounts that treat complex dynamisms as linear processes and complex phenomena as simple monoliths.
It is also easy to focus on the, shall we say, symptomatic dimensions of Superlative Technology discourses, with their bevy of boastful boys, with their curiously conspicuous comic book iconography, with their eager self-marginalizing subcultural politics (hence the incessant vulnerability to and defensiveness about charges of weird Robot Cultism), with their non-negligible exhibition of body-loathing (from their occasional expressions of old-school Cyberpunk disdain of the "meat-body" to their widespread ongoing incomprehension of disability activists who quite righteously insist, "nothing about us without us"), with their ongoing difficulty in nudging their demographic much beyond its conspicuous -- tho' admittedly not exclusive -- white maleness in a world in which whites and males are minorities otherwise, with the lingering presence of "market fundamentalist" intellectuals among them and being taken seriously by them as they are almost nowhere else (after all, the neoliberal and neoconservative policies which gave "anarcho-capitalist" and "free-market" abstractions the only actual life they ever had or will ever have were undertaken by incumbent interests with the cynical understanding that these "ideas" provide ideal cover for confiscatory wealth concentration, but there are few actually intelligent people who still believe in these market fundamentalist pieties on their face, if anybody ever did, apart perhaps from a few awkward earnest Randians, poor things).
But the actual focus of my own critique of Superlative Technology discourses (even if I'll admit I have often directed my jeremiads against these more conspicuously vulnerable dimensions of Superlativity) is on their pernicious anti-politicizing and, more specifically, their almost always anti-democratizing force. Needless to say, I do indeed think the highly fetishized, irrationally hyperbolized, faithfully transcendentalized, falsely monolithicized, obsessively singularized technodevelopmental outcomes that preoccupy Superlative Technocentrics are the farthest thing from plausible in their specific Superlative formulations. But even if I were to grant them more than the negligible plausibility of logical possibility (which is quite enough for most Superlative Technocentrics, and I'll let the reader puzzle through the implications of that low bar given the force of True Belief it seems so often to underwrite), the fact remains that I still do not agree that Superlativity provides the best discursive lens through which we would best cope with the extraordinarily sweeping implications typically attributed to these outcomes by the Superlative Technocentrics themselves.
(A side note: Exactly in analogy to the "New Normal" of contemporary terror-alerts, the attribution of such sweeping implications to what amount at best to thought-experiments and at worst to science-fictional vignettes -- only without the accompanying pleasure of narrative or characterization -- is precisely what functions to make the Superlative demand for a substitution of a focus on proximate for projected and idealized outcomes the hallmark of "seriousness" by their lights, contrary to all sense and in fact in a way that is immune to the interventions of common-sense, strictly speaking.)
If the Superlative Technocentrics were actually right to imagine that billions of people now living will find themselves all too soon living in a future transformed by Friendly or Unfriendly post-biological intelligences, nanotechnological superabundance, biomedical immortality, or the like (and I do think they are far more likely to be wrong than right and I think this matters enormously), even granting them this, I think they are profoundly wrong to imagine that our best way to facilitate the best, least violent, most fair (or whatever) versions of these Superlative outcomes is to contemplate and prepare for the Superlative outcomes themselves, in the abstract, as these outcomes suggest themselves to us in our own impoverished vantage (an impoverishment exacerbated all the more by marginal and anti-democratic modes of Superlative deliberation). Such contemplation and preparation circumvents the ongoing and plural stakeholder contestation that will certainly articulate the unpredictable developmental forces and the dynamic developmental pathways along which such outcomes would actually "arrive" (were they to do so), ignores the practical, scientific, technical, pedagogical, regulatory, cultural knowledges arising out of our collective day to day responsiveness, competition, and collaboration in the plural presents from which no less plural futures will present themselves, that will not only shape but actively constitute our foresight and provide the living archive to which future generations or the communities in which we will ourselves later belong will make our collective recourse as we struggle to cope with these outcomes and their alternatives.
To be sure, this is not the denigration of foresight as such that Superlative Technocentrics will be sure to accuse it of being, but simply an insistence that foresight properly emerges from the ongoing contestation and deliberation of the plurality of actually-existing stakeholders to the emerging technodevelopmental terrain rather than from an idealized projection of Superlative outcomes onto the future by the impoverished perspective of a marginal minority and from the impoverished position of that future's past. This means that serious futurists (Jamais Cascio provides a well-respected example here) would always propose multiple technodevelopmental outcomes in their proposals, no one of which solicits identification but all of which, taken together, capture the texture of an upcoming technodevelopmental terrain in its dense plurality. And so, too, serious futurists would always stress the contingency, non-autonomy, and diversity of the impacts of technodevelopmental outcomes from the perspective of the plurality of their stakeholders. Serious futurists, finally, should always understand and emphasize that the rationality of foresight is more inductive than deductive; and, to the extent that such futurism would be democratizing rather than merely profitable for incumbent interests (and, hence, strictly speaking, better described as retro-futurism), futurists must grasp that the pragmatic point that deliberative foresight foregrounds induction over deduction translates in political terms to a foregrounding of openness over optimality.
(Regular readers may be surprised to see me talk about the very possibility of a "serious futurological practice" given all the abuse I tend to heap on self-identified futurists here... but the simple truth is that it seems to me there are good reasons to think that futurism, so-called, might very well manage for another generation or so -- as psychoanalysis managed to do for well over half the twentieth century -- to remain one of the few places where something like actual philosophical thinking might take place in a way that will be taken seriously even by anti-intellectual Americans. That is more than enough to get me to pay serious attention to it.)
Again, the simple truth is that I think that the preoccupations of no small amount of Superlative Technology Discourse is symptomatic rather than serious. As often as not, it symptomizes (as does so much literary sf, much more provocatively) the fears and fantasies of people caught up in disruptive technoscientific change, it symptomizes (as does so much neoliberal discourse, which remains complementary and often still explicitly correlated to technocratic discourses generally and Superlative Technology discourses particularly) the social, subcultural, and political marginality of many of the personalities drawn to these discourses.
But if the outcomes the Superlative Technocentrics have battened on to really were to come about in some form, the facilitation of best, safest, fairest, most democratic versions of these outcomes will arrive from ongoing plural stakeholder discourse rather than from the unilateral implementations of elite and abstract discourse. That is why my own technoprogressive politics (which is no less technocentric than that of the Superlative Technology discourses when all is said and done) would direct its energies to securing, subsidizing, and celebrating peer-to-peer formations of technoscientific practice, education, regulation, funding, and of p2p education, agitation, and organizing for radical democracy (including the democratization of the planetary economy) in general as a more practical technodevelopmental politics -- more practical even in the event that technodevelopmental outcomes come to assume anything like the contours that preoccupy the imaginations of Superlative Technocentrics.
If Singularitarians, so-called, really are as worried about scary Robot Gods as they seem to be, then it seems to me a far more practical focus for their attention and action would be to participate in contemporary anti-militarist and anti-globalization movements to diminish the role of the secretive and hierarchical command formations in the midst of our democratic society and to overturn the legal fiction of corporate personhood with all its pernicious antisocial and antienvironmental implications -- which are the locations in society out of which anything remotely resembling the Superlative fears and fantasies of these Singularitarians are likeliest to emerge. Otherwise, the ongoing regulation and monitoring of already existing and actually emerging malware seems to me incomparably more likely to provide the practical resources to which we would make collective recourse were we eventually confronted with recursively self-improving software, whether rightly taken to be intelligent or entitative or not, rather than whatever our own abstract fancies might now offer up to those -- including, as likely as not, some of us -- who inhabit days to come (between now and which there would be, after all, many intervening days filled with people quite as intelligent as we are, but incomparably better informed, and directing themselves to these actually urgent problems according to the terms in which they actually occur, likewise coping with ongoing and emerging malware and so on, peer-to-peer).
If Nanosantalogists really want nanofactories to incubate a high-tech gift society without reducing the planet to goo, then it seems to me a far more practical focus for their attention would be to participate in the contemporary copyfight and access-to-knowledge movements that would keep the nanofactory instructions out of the hands of incumbent elites, and to participate (as it seems to me my friends at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology already often do, at least when they are at their best) in movements to empower planetary regulation and oversight of pandemics, tsunamis, climate change, weapons proliferation, the manufacture and trafficking in toxic substances, and so on, since it will be the experiences and insights we acquire in these fraught and urgent already ongoing efforts that will provide the real archive on which we would really, truly depend were we to find ourselves confronting the Superlative fears and fantasies of these Nanosantalogists.
If Technological Immortalists, so-called, really want to inspire and fund and implement a SENS program to overcome the suffering and pathologies we customarily associate with human aging, then it seems to me a far more practical focus for their attention would be to embrace the rhetoric of the Longevity Dividend, to refigure what deGrey describes as the Seven Deadly Things (or whatever number this eventually amounts to, a habit of qualification and caveat being a welcome thing from especially speculative scientists) as seven separate medical conditions among countless others likewise demanding elaborate foundations and diverse research teams, and, above all else, to refrain altogether from idiotic talk of "living forever" or "immortality" in the first place (given the admission by most Technological Immortalists that theirs is not a program that would elude disease, violent, or accidental death even if it managed to achieve its already implausibly Superlative ends, it is curious -- that is to say, importantly symptomatic -- that they should be so reluctant to eschew these essentially faithful rather than factual discourses). But more to the point, it seems to me that enthusiasts for longevity and rejuvenation medicine should be devoting considerable efforts to movements to secure universal healthcare, to address neglected diseases among the planetary precariat, to provide clean drinking water and basic healthcare to everybody on earth, to defend the informed nonduressed consensual recourse to wanted therapies (whether normalizing or not) and protection from unwanted therapies (whether normalizing or not) in the context of contemporary modification medicine, to end the so-called war on (some) drugs (together with the fraudulent marketing and mandated use of other drugs) wherever its racist anti-democratizing tentacles reach, and so on.
Superlative Technocentrics are likely to recoil from suggestions like these, dismissing them as stealthy, well-nigh "closeted" half measures, but the truth, I'm afraid, is that their own monological fixations and hyperbolic derangements of these sensible -- even urgent -- recommendations bespeak either a profound misunderstanding of the complex, dynamic, ineradicably politicized technodevelopmental terrain as it actually exists, or a derangement that symptomizes their own irrational passions, born of social marginalization, short-sighted greed or hostility, neurotic fears of contemporary change and lack of personal control, straightforward narcissistic personality disorder, or the like.
It is well known (that is to say, known among the few odd people like me who keep up with this sort of thing at all) that I advocate what I describe as a technoprogressive political viewpoint which regards ongoing and emerging technoscientific change as at once the most dangerous and most promising field of contemporary democratic-left and emancipatory politics. For me, "progress" has come to be a matter of technodevelopmental social struggle first of all, the contestation of a plurality of stakeholders to the ongoing articulation and distribution of technoscientific costs, risks, and benefits. It is from this perspective in particular that I understand the urgent struggles against neoliberal corporate-militarism, environmentalist movements, planetary human rights and social justice movements, and so on.
While this perspective is no less technocentric than that of the Superlative Technocentrics I so regularly critique our differences could not be more stark otherwise (but this one point of continuity is enough to keep me on my toes lest my own technoprogressivity drift here and there into a problematic Superlativity quite in spite of myself). Not only do I think that the best, most democratizing, most emancipatory technodevelopmental outcomes can be facilitated by politics that are perfectly intelligible to the democratic-left progressive mainstream imagination (as Superlative Technocentricity very definitely is not), but I also think that there is an emerging technoprogressive mainstream on the American political scene and elsewhere around the world that is conjoining the forces of the left blogosphere and Netroots and other emerging p2p democratic formations, the defense of consensus science, copyfight, free press and open media, access to knowledge (a2k) movements, commitments to a politics of choice that encompasses both abortion and ARTs and consensual drug policy, growing demands for renewable energy and sustainable production, and other strands of the contemporary technoscientific tapestry, from the ground up, peer-to-peer, all around us, right here, right now.
Why Superlative Technocentrics would prefer their far-flung and hyperbolized futures over these actually-existing popular technoprogressive energies is entirely beyond me. No doubt only their therapists (or possibly, for a few of them at least, their financial advisers) know for sure.
Everything Solid Melts Into Laissez-Faire
Here is a statement I read over on the European Tribune (one of my favorite blogs), and which I quote here without much in the way of considered comment, but more as a solicitation of comments:
There were so many comments and associations that occurred to me immediately and simultaneously upon reading this that I haven't really put them together in any kind of systematic or properly argumentative way.
I find myself thinking of Jeron Lanier's snarky Fifth Law: "Software inefficiency and inelegance will always expand to the level made tolerable by Moore's Law"…
I find myself thinking of PR practices of "repackaging," which seek to elicit the "experience" of progressive emancipation through consumption by continually trumpeting as new features traits that commodities have already had all along (especially hilarious to me is the recent commercial in which some insipid environmentally toxic bottled-water company has some appealingly crunchy Green athlete -- natch, up is down, it's the Bush era -- straining up some cliff face and clutching at his water bottle while the voiceover enthuses, and I'm paraphrasing, at long last capitalism has provided us with a bottle cleverly designed by our geniuses of innovation so that one can actually hold it in one's hand!)…
I find myself thinking of the basic contradiction of capitalist societies highlighted by eco-socialists and others, of the different dynamisms of reckless Grow or Die! expansionism confronted with the limits and complex interdependencies of the ecosystems in which all enterprise and production always take place and on which it always depends…
I find myself thinking of the technocrats and especially the current crop of digital utopians, from Daniel Bell to the irrationally exuberant WIRED magazine set of the 1990s through to the corporatist-militarist "revolutionaries" of the technophiliac and science-phobic (these attitudes are continuous, this is not a paradox) Bush Administration with their Total Information Awareness and Shock and Awe "smart bombs" and abstract "ownership society" and anti-democratizating master plan of debt, deregulation, and dismantlement of civic institutions, all of whom would seek continually to "dematerialize" both production and the performative substance of political contestation in their theories, the better to compel the intransigent material resistances of the furniture of the world and the plurality of its stakeholders into a shape that conforms to the restless and idealized flows of capital, desire, and incumbent fancy…
I find myself thinking of four decades of public intellectuals declaring the "end of ideology," the "end of philosophy," the "end of history," the "death of distance," foregrounding services and then marketing and then financialization and then information in the influential daydreams they mistook for documentation and deliberation, all the way through to contemporary Superlative technocentric fantasies of selves reduced to streams of spiritualized digital data (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by decades of reductive accounts of selves reduced to "expressions" of genetic information), commodities reduced to "instantiations" of software instructions by angelic nanoabundance (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by, among other things, decades of PR accounts of commodities as indifferent sites for the distinguishing emblemization of designer logos), deliberative politics reduced to the consequentialist computation of "optimal" outcomes by Robot Gods (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by the anti-democratic Cold-War politics of neoliberal incumbency, with its corporate think-tanks, technocratic military experts, and corporate broadcast-mediated manufacturing of consent)…
Most software indulges in version numbering along an unbounded trajectory. It seems that those applications can endure an almost endless progression of added features for the next release. It seems quite in line with the neoliberal consensus that better is always more, in an ever increasing amount… [T]he tendency of the dominant software releases to use unbounded version numbering seems symptomatic of the neoliberal pathology that will not recognize the convergent nature of maturing technologies, in an effort to encourage consumption of ever 'new' products.
There were so many comments and associations that occurred to me immediately and simultaneously upon reading this that I haven't really put them together in any kind of systematic or properly argumentative way.
I find myself thinking of Jeron Lanier's snarky Fifth Law: "Software inefficiency and inelegance will always expand to the level made tolerable by Moore's Law"…
I find myself thinking of PR practices of "repackaging," which seek to elicit the "experience" of progressive emancipation through consumption by continually trumpeting as new features traits that commodities have already had all along (especially hilarious to me is the recent commercial in which some insipid environmentally toxic bottled-water company has some appealingly crunchy Green athlete -- natch, up is down, it's the Bush era -- straining up some cliff face and clutching at his water bottle while the voiceover enthuses, and I'm paraphrasing, at long last capitalism has provided us with a bottle cleverly designed by our geniuses of innovation so that one can actually hold it in one's hand!)…
I find myself thinking of the basic contradiction of capitalist societies highlighted by eco-socialists and others, of the different dynamisms of reckless Grow or Die! expansionism confronted with the limits and complex interdependencies of the ecosystems in which all enterprise and production always take place and on which it always depends…
I find myself thinking of the technocrats and especially the current crop of digital utopians, from Daniel Bell to the irrationally exuberant WIRED magazine set of the 1990s through to the corporatist-militarist "revolutionaries" of the technophiliac and science-phobic (these attitudes are continuous, this is not a paradox) Bush Administration with their Total Information Awareness and Shock and Awe "smart bombs" and abstract "ownership society" and anti-democratizating master plan of debt, deregulation, and dismantlement of civic institutions, all of whom would seek continually to "dematerialize" both production and the performative substance of political contestation in their theories, the better to compel the intransigent material resistances of the furniture of the world and the plurality of its stakeholders into a shape that conforms to the restless and idealized flows of capital, desire, and incumbent fancy…
I find myself thinking of four decades of public intellectuals declaring the "end of ideology," the "end of philosophy," the "end of history," the "death of distance," foregrounding services and then marketing and then financialization and then information in the influential daydreams they mistook for documentation and deliberation, all the way through to contemporary Superlative technocentric fantasies of selves reduced to streams of spiritualized digital data (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by decades of reductive accounts of selves reduced to "expressions" of genetic information), commodities reduced to "instantiations" of software instructions by angelic nanoabundance (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by, among other things, decades of PR accounts of commodities as indifferent sites for the distinguishing emblemization of designer logos), deliberative politics reduced to the consequentialist computation of "optimal" outcomes by Robot Gods (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by the anti-democratic Cold-War politics of neoliberal incumbency, with its corporate think-tanks, technocratic military experts, and corporate broadcast-mediated manufacturing of consent)…
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Kathy Griffin: "This Award Is My God Now!"
I've always found a bit hilarious and appalling the narcissistic way some people of faith will broadcast their gratitude to the Supreme Deity for directing His omnipotent energies to the task of ensuring that they, and not, say, their identically unremarkable next-door neighbor, managed to win the badminton match at the Sunday cook-out, or that their own "talented" traumatized moppet got to win the County-Fair Inappropriately Sexualized Preteen Beauty Pageant over the rest of those poor desperate hideously dolled-up four-year olds with mushroom cloud hair and Tammy Faye makeup on.
Thank you, Jeebus, they proclaim with ugly blank-eyed self-importance, for putting the spotlight on me, for smiting those who would oppose me, like, you know, Frank in Accounting who almost got that last doughnut before me, he was going right for it, I saw it, except for the way you sent Jenkens into his path to bend his ear over the Johnson account (I clearly have no idea what goes on in these mysterious office spaces, but you get the idea), thank you, thank you, Supreme One, for getting me to that choice parking space before that sweet helpful old lady in her Prius! How Evil she must really be, you know, deep down inside. I'm Number One!
If only the runners up at these events and in these curiously solipsistic morality plays would blame and castigate the Mighty God for their defeats and frustrations with equal enthusiasm, now, that might be a spectacle worth watching. The bronze medal? God, damn you! Shakes fist. At least this would introduce some consistency into the whole unseemly enterprise. Instead, we are treated to the perversity of people gratefully thanking the Lord for the nice News cameras for "sparing" them from some flood or fire or whatnot He apparently changed his mind about killing them over earlier the same day. And, I suppose, too bad about all those neighbors of yours He went ahead and killed anyway on this premise.
Be that as it may, it was a news story about the very funny Kathy Griffin's acceptance speech for an Emmy last week for her show My Life on the D-List (which Eric and I watch, er, religiously) that pushed this button for me. "[A] lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award," Griffin is reported to have said in her moving speech, "I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus." Yay, Kathy!
Flabbergastingly enough, according to a statement by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, "Kathy Griffin's offensive remarks will not be part of the E! telecast on Saturday night." (It's on Fox later, naturally.) The thrust of the story remains a bit ambiguous for me, since it isn't completely clear if Griffin's joke or "an off-color remark" which presumably accompanied it but was left unspecified (la-a-a-a-a-nd of the fre-e-e-e-e-e and the ho-ome of the br-a-a-a-a-ve!) is regarded as "offensive" in this context and will actually suffer the resulting censorship (la-a-a-a-a-nd of the fre-e-e-e-e-e and the ho-ome of the br-a-a-a-a-ve!).
My personal fave snippet from the article?
For examples of Bill Donohue's presumably more tasteful, less confrontational brand of love speech you might enjoy checking out this Greatest Hits compilations fom a few years' back (Including: "It [The Passion of the Christ] will bring people back to the church, and it will be a good thing for Catholics and Jews. And the people who are clamoring this -- this rhetoric, this cacophony against Mel Gibson, boy, are they going to have to pay for it when it's all over!" "Name for me a book publishing company in this country, particularly in New York, which would allow you to publish a book which would tell the truth about the gay death style." "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, okay? And I'm not afraid to say it. ... Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism.") as well as this more recent atrocity exhibition occasioned by the whole Chocolate Jesus non-controversy.
More irreverent generous courageous Kathy Griffin, please. Less dull-witted bullying bigoted Bill Donahue, please.
Thank you, Jeebus, they proclaim with ugly blank-eyed self-importance, for putting the spotlight on me, for smiting those who would oppose me, like, you know, Frank in Accounting who almost got that last doughnut before me, he was going right for it, I saw it, except for the way you sent Jenkens into his path to bend his ear over the Johnson account (I clearly have no idea what goes on in these mysterious office spaces, but you get the idea), thank you, thank you, Supreme One, for getting me to that choice parking space before that sweet helpful old lady in her Prius! How Evil she must really be, you know, deep down inside. I'm Number One!
If only the runners up at these events and in these curiously solipsistic morality plays would blame and castigate the Mighty God for their defeats and frustrations with equal enthusiasm, now, that might be a spectacle worth watching. The bronze medal? God, damn you! Shakes fist. At least this would introduce some consistency into the whole unseemly enterprise. Instead, we are treated to the perversity of people gratefully thanking the Lord for the nice News cameras for "sparing" them from some flood or fire or whatnot He apparently changed his mind about killing them over earlier the same day. And, I suppose, too bad about all those neighbors of yours He went ahead and killed anyway on this premise.
Be that as it may, it was a news story about the very funny Kathy Griffin's acceptance speech for an Emmy last week for her show My Life on the D-List (which Eric and I watch, er, religiously) that pushed this button for me. "[A] lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award," Griffin is reported to have said in her moving speech, "I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus." Yay, Kathy!
Flabbergastingly enough, according to a statement by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, "Kathy Griffin's offensive remarks will not be part of the E! telecast on Saturday night." (It's on Fox later, naturally.) The thrust of the story remains a bit ambiguous for me, since it isn't completely clear if Griffin's joke or "an off-color remark" which presumably accompanied it but was left unspecified (la-a-a-a-a-nd of the fre-e-e-e-e-e and the ho-ome of the br-a-a-a-a-ve!) is regarded as "offensive" in this context and will actually suffer the resulting censorship (la-a-a-a-a-nd of the fre-e-e-e-e-e and the ho-ome of the br-a-a-a-a-ve!).
My personal fave snippet from the article?
The comedian's remarks were condemned Monday by Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who called them a "vulgar, in-your-face brand of hate speech."
For examples of Bill Donohue's presumably more tasteful, less confrontational brand of love speech you might enjoy checking out this Greatest Hits compilations fom a few years' back (Including: "It [The Passion of the Christ] will bring people back to the church, and it will be a good thing for Catholics and Jews. And the people who are clamoring this -- this rhetoric, this cacophony against Mel Gibson, boy, are they going to have to pay for it when it's all over!" "Name for me a book publishing company in this country, particularly in New York, which would allow you to publish a book which would tell the truth about the gay death style." "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, okay? And I'm not afraid to say it. ... Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism.") as well as this more recent atrocity exhibition occasioned by the whole Chocolate Jesus non-controversy.
More irreverent generous courageous Kathy Griffin, please. Less dull-witted bullying bigoted Bill Donahue, please.
Friday, September 07, 2007
"You're Reading Way Too Much Into the Text..."
Is there any more commonplace complaint about theoretical readings of texts?
I am adapting this post from a response to someone from recent comments, but the point is more general (and since a new semester of teaching rhetoric and critical theory is beginning right about now it is a point that has a special resonance).
Perhaps it will help to realize that from my theoretical perspective the meaning of a text is far from exhausted by trotting out the author's intentions for that piece (to the extent that these intentions are even determinable in the relevant sense, even, sometimes, for the author herself), and that the work that texts do depends deeply as well on the context of a text's production and on the changing contexts of its reception and so on.
I am not making the claim that every text means every possible thing or some such facile relativist point you may want to attribute to me upon hearing this. But I am saying that just as authors rely on the archive of past creativity they rely as well on the ongoing collaborative expressivity of readers for whatever force, meaning, relevance, and abiding life their texts attain to. This understanding of textual meaning-making (and some of you might very well be somewhat appalled -- or possibly exhilarated -- to realize just how wide-ranging are the things in which I discern textlike characteristics in the relevant sense) plays very deeply, you can be sure, into my own sympathies as a technoprogressive democrat for the politics of access-to-knowledge (a2k), FlOSS (free-libre-open source software), peer-to-peer (p2p), pay-to-peer (public subsidization of p2p), copyfight, free press, anti-corporate-militarist personhood/anti-corporatist-militarist secrecy movements, by the way.
What my frustrated commenter intended to communicate in an off-the cuff way in a text of his published on another blog seems to have resonated with Michael Anissimov enough that he recommended the commenter's text to me in the midst of a conversation we were having concerning technodevelopmental politics. Maybe Michael was "reading more into the text" as much as I was when he found in it what seemed to him a particularly useful way to summarize his own sense of the issues at hand, just as much as the commenter would say I was "reading more into the text" when I said of it that the text symptomizes certain key problems I grapple with when technology-talk goes "superlative" in various ways.
Writers have less say than they would like as to the ways in which their work will be taken up by the world and the work their work will do once it has been released into the dynamic reception of that world. Even if that yields frustrations for me as it does any other writer from time to time, I'll admit that I wouldn't have it any other way.
Of such vulnerabilities, pleasures, frustrations, and serendipities is freedom made.
I am adapting this post from a response to someone from recent comments, but the point is more general (and since a new semester of teaching rhetoric and critical theory is beginning right about now it is a point that has a special resonance).
Perhaps it will help to realize that from my theoretical perspective the meaning of a text is far from exhausted by trotting out the author's intentions for that piece (to the extent that these intentions are even determinable in the relevant sense, even, sometimes, for the author herself), and that the work that texts do depends deeply as well on the context of a text's production and on the changing contexts of its reception and so on.
I am not making the claim that every text means every possible thing or some such facile relativist point you may want to attribute to me upon hearing this. But I am saying that just as authors rely on the archive of past creativity they rely as well on the ongoing collaborative expressivity of readers for whatever force, meaning, relevance, and abiding life their texts attain to. This understanding of textual meaning-making (and some of you might very well be somewhat appalled -- or possibly exhilarated -- to realize just how wide-ranging are the things in which I discern textlike characteristics in the relevant sense) plays very deeply, you can be sure, into my own sympathies as a technoprogressive democrat for the politics of access-to-knowledge (a2k), FlOSS (free-libre-open source software), peer-to-peer (p2p), pay-to-peer (public subsidization of p2p), copyfight, free press, anti-corporate-militarist personhood/anti-corporatist-militarist secrecy movements, by the way.
What my frustrated commenter intended to communicate in an off-the cuff way in a text of his published on another blog seems to have resonated with Michael Anissimov enough that he recommended the commenter's text to me in the midst of a conversation we were having concerning technodevelopmental politics. Maybe Michael was "reading more into the text" as much as I was when he found in it what seemed to him a particularly useful way to summarize his own sense of the issues at hand, just as much as the commenter would say I was "reading more into the text" when I said of it that the text symptomizes certain key problems I grapple with when technology-talk goes "superlative" in various ways.
Writers have less say than they would like as to the ways in which their work will be taken up by the world and the work their work will do once it has been released into the dynamic reception of that world. Even if that yields frustrations for me as it does any other writer from time to time, I'll admit that I wouldn't have it any other way.
Of such vulnerabilities, pleasures, frustrations, and serendipities is freedom made.
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