The Technodevelopmental Quartet

Those who read Amor Mundi because they approve of my commitments to p2p democratization and permaculture advocacy may be perplexed by my interest in non-normativizing prostheses and therapies. Let me just say, very briefly, that I am especially fascinated by a few broad concurrent openings or agon, in terms of which I tend to articulate my sense of the politics of ongoing and proximately upcoming transformative technoscientific change, and that non-normativing "therapeutic" prostheses are among these, and in ways that seem to me especially salient precisely in relation to my preoccupations with p2p-democratization a2k-consensualization and permaculture practices.

One quick way to see what I mean by this salience is for me to note again that I regard the prosthetic as co-extensive with the cultural, and hence prosthetic proliferation is for me of a piece with the multi-cultural, which in turn connects to sustainable permaculture through its repudiation of industrial monoculture and embrace of experimental polyculture (agroforestry, companion planting, integrated pest management, and so on). Indeed, I personally like to use the word polyculture to denote this provocative, promising, perplexing convergence-site of convivial consensual multicultural, permacultural, and pro-choice politics.

Before I elaborate these preoccupations further, I do want to digress a bit, and say what I am especially trying to resist in offering up any technodevelopmental mapping of this kind. When I refer to inter-implicated technodevelopmental "openings" like this, part of what I am trying insistently to circumvent is the futurological terminology of the "trend," the "trend-spotter," the "trend-surfer," the "trend-speculator." I believe that like the debased and debasing term "meme" and the related reduction of discourse to the "viral," the "circulatory," the indifferently aggregative or repetitive (which is not to deny the empirical relevance of such descriptions to many network-dynamisms so much as what is analytically and critically available in them) framing technodevelopmental social struggles in terms of "trends" disastrously drains them of their substantial history, the contestatory/collaboratory agon of an ineradicable plurality of differently situated, enabled, aspiring stakeholders to a shared present-world futurally opening onto next-presence.

This de-historicizing disaster seems to me very much the point, especially to the extent that the language of "trends" "memes" and "evolutions" is opportunistically taken up in the justificatory and forecasting discourses of the elite-incumbent corporate-militarist Futurological Congress, who like to assume the guise of priests, gurus, whiz-kid elites channeling the otherwise unavailable voice of god, the whirlwind, the bleeding edge to the faithful rather than participants engaging in deliberation about relative values, costs, risks, benefits of historical and developmental vicissitudes, peer to peer.

Closely connected to the effort to circumvent the futurological "trend" I also struggle to resist complementary futurological insinuations of technological determinism (as if certain techniques or artifacts, once available, assure emancipatory or exploitative outcomes) by referring instead to "articulations," futurological insinuations of autonomous technology (as if progress were a matter of an indifferent accumulation of a technical toypile, rather than an equitable distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of the toys in the toypile and in the processes through which they are piled) by referring instead to "prosthetic cultures" and technology as "technodevelopmental social struggle," and futurological delineations of historical drivers (as if there were no discourse in history, only brute force) as collective agon and citational (including subversive citation) and appropriative practices, and so on.

All that said, the Technodevelopmental Quartet names four broad, promisingly threateningly inter-implicated technodevelopmental openings/agon surveying landmarks of most versions of the historical terrain on which I expect technodevelopmental social struggle to play out in what remains of my own lifetime.

The first of these openings/agon is Resource Descent, which encompasses "Peak Oil" as well as the diminishing returns of input-infrastructure intensive extractive-petrochemical industrialism more generally, including input-intensive industrial agriculture (the mirage of the Green Revolution and Biotechnology hype), soil depletion (connected to industrial agriculture), fresh water depletion (aquifer depletion and irrigation diversion associated with over-urbanization and industrial agriculture, but also problems of pollution and salinization associated with these), the over-application and diminishing effectiveness of anti-biotics, and also, of course, global warming which is, in my view, best conceived as a problem of atmospheric pollution yielding the depletion of the resource of a life-sustaining atmosphere. Opportunistic anti-democratizing corporate-militarist frames and strategies like greenwashing PR, massive under-accountable geo-engineering proposals, militarizations and profiteering in the face of climate catastrophes and their concomitant social instabilities are, of course, important facets of this technodevelopmental opening/agon.

The second opening/agon is p2p [peer-to-peer] Democratization, which encompasses the fraught transformation from industrial/central/elite/broadcast formations to the more digital/participatory/distributed forms of what Bauwens, Benkler, Boyle, and Lessig call creative-commons, peer-production, and peer-credentializing formations, as well as a2k [access to knowledge] Consensualization politics which encompass anti-secrecy struggles (against both corporatist proprietary and militarist state secrets), transparency struggles (against secrecy and corruption in authoritative institutions like governments, corporations, universities), and ever greater network-mediated participation, education, agitation, and organization in public life.

I should add that p2p-Democratization and a2k-Consensualization also encompass extensive commitments to general welfare provision and the democratization -- rather than any anarchic "smashing" of the state form -- inasmuch as the scene of legible legitimate consent demands that those who legibly consent do so in proportion to the extent that they are neither under duress (which includes the threat of violence but in my view also the threat of ruin by blackmail, insecurity of status, refusal of treatable dis-ease, or dire poverty) nor unreasonably ignorant nor mis-informed (which includes the threat of fraud, but also the lack of access to reliable knowledge, educational resources, availability of processes of criticism, actually accountable authorities, and equal recourse to the law). Without commitments to the democratically-accountable state form and the legible scene of informed nonduressed consent, p2p and a2k politics always amount to facile spontaneisms and anti-democratic politics. These anti-democratizing framings and forces are, of course, an important facet of this technodevelopmental opening/agon.

The third opening/agon is Prosthetic Proliferation, which encompasses struggles to achieve universal single-payer basic healthcare here in the United States but also provide healthcare, available treatments for neglected diseases, nutritious food, clean water, contraception, shelter in the overexploited regions of the world, as well as the as-yet scarcely defined "pro-choice" politics of prosthetic self-determination, or the informed, nonduressed consensualization and universalization of recourse to non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modifications and treatments, from planetary planned parenthood and access to ARTS, to morphological body-modification rights, to ending the racist war on drugs and embracing objective harm-reduction policies, to disability/differently-enabled rights struggles, to struggles against trafficking in human bodies and body-parts, to struggles for the public regulation, funding, and fair distribution of medical research and development, and also struggles against corporate-militarist strategies of control through the unequal and duressed planetary distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of medical and monitoring techniques and their development, which risk in the worst case, re-making inequity and injustice at the level of literal speciation.

And the fourth opening/agonis Arms Proliferation, which encompasses obscene and short-sighted state-sponsored trafficking in arms but also illicit global arms trading, the breakdown of multilateral arms treaties, the proliferation of nuclear states, the proliferation of conventional weapons and mines, weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, biological), and also what Lessig has called insanely destructive devices -- that is to say cheaper, more destructive, more accessible, easier to hide and deploy networked WMDs -- the militarization of space and of environmental catastrophe, and the ever-disavowed but indispensable neoconservative militarist muscular imperialism undergirding neoliberal corporatist "free market" developmentalism: war-profittering, militarization of welfare and public services, a surfeit of surveillance, and the radical demarcation of global space by means of architectural and coded walls and channels.

It seems to me that the first and second of these openings/agon might facilitate together the emergence of an extraordinarily promising (however threatening) planetary political consciousness, one providing a shared set of urgent problems demanding shared efforts and the other providing the material means to collaborate in their solution while at once undermining the politics of incumbent interests that stand as the greatest present hurdle to such solutions.

The third and fourth openings/agon exhibit a comparable complementarity in my view, one amplifying the destructive stakes of ongoing refusals to distribute technodevelopmental costs, risks, and benefits fairly by the lights of the actual diversity of stakeholders to those developments, the other functioning as a kind of magnificent bribe (the facilitation of informed, nonduressed consensual prosthetic/cultural lifeway self-determination in the service of private perfections in a still-shared still responsible responsive world, convivial civitas) eliciting ever wider participation in the project of a sustainable consensual secular democratic planetary polyculture.

I also think the first and third openings/agon exhibit a kind of stick and carrot complementarity for planetary politics, while the second and fourth represent countervailing structural inducements, one possibly facilitating democratization the other probably facilitating anti-democratization.

Of course, all these inter-implications represent just the immediate throat-clearing gestures of any serious critique or programmatic offer taking up these terms, and are propose just a few among many other plausible technodevelopmental relations susceptible to figuration and narrativization at this level of generality, all of them easily capable of provoking who knows what stabilizations, de-stabilizations, campaigns, counter-movements, provisional democratizations, backlashes, and so on. Certainly, there are no guarantees here, just as there is no time to waste on superlative idealizations and distractions or parochial (incumbent, technocratic, sub(cult)ural) techno-political agendas.

Although each of these practical-discursive sites might inspire endless concrete campaigns (progressive and reactionary), it seems to me that whatever the outcomes that elicit my own commitments in these particular campaigns there is nothing more important here than the struggle to democratize technodevelopmental struggle itself, to keep futurity open whatever the futures for which one fights. Whatever one's concrete aspirations for particular technodevelopmental outcomes (about which there will always be plenty to argue about as to which outcome is fairest, safest, most emancipatory), it seems to me that a technoscientifically literate and progressively legible vantage will always also, or even first of all, direct its attention to the dangers to and opportunities for democratization and open futurity that present themselves in each of the technoscientific vicissitudes technodevelopmental social struggle grapples with from moment to moment.