Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Busy

I realize, by the way, that my posting frequency is way down at the moment. I'm teaching three courses that are preoccupying my attention these days. In two of the courses I'm teaching this term environmentalist analyses and discourses are so central that I am already certain I'll leave the term with a much more detailed sense of what a more technoprogressive Green looks like. Once I've gotten back into the rhythm of things I should post more often again, and more substantively (more substantive at any rate than these steam-venting registrations of disgust at corporate-militarist criminalities that I've been tossing off here and there lately). My friend Jamais Cascio has been saying interesting things lately that I want to talk about when I get a chance, and I've been scrabbling around his back catalogue as well for gems. I think he may well be the only self-identified "futurist" I have any patience or use for at all these days. More later.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

... the only self-identified "futurist" I have any patience or use for at all these days.

Oh? What about this one?

Dale Carrico said...

Oh? What about this one?

I know many "serious" self-identified futurists whose discourse is scarcely distinguishable from that kid's, I'm afraid -- very much including the curious psychotic break that occurs at the mere mention of a "girl" at the 7:40 point in the presentation immediately following his giddy realization that he can't explain to himself why exactly he fetishizes robots in particular so fervently (thereby exhibiting a level of self-awareness that he is likely to lose should his preoccupations remain comparably futurological).

As for this kid, I recommend he read Anton Chekhov, William Burroughs, and Dorothy Parker before delving deeper into the transhumanist brain trust of Kurzweil, Dawkins, Drexler, Egan, Vinge, Minsky, and DeGrey, for heaven's sake.

This is not to say that I don't find such figures worthy of attention (and not only for their psychological and ethnographic fascinations) -- but just that I find them worthy always only in their proper measure and in their proper place, and very silly and even dangerously deranging when treated as the end all and be all as some technocentrics seem to me all too eager to do.

Anne Corwin said...

I figured you'd been busy, what with having a life outside the computer and all. I don't generally expect people to update constantly -- people are not their blogs, after all. But definitely looking forward to further commentary.