Eugenics and the Denigration of Consent

I have argued that both the "transhumanist" and "bioconservative" stances (roughly, the undercritical technophilic imagination as against the undercritical technophobic imagination) on questions of so-called "enhancement" medicine can rightly be described as eugenicist. In my view, there is a significant parallel to be discerned between

[one] on the one hand: the "transhumanist" who feels a moral obligation to "enhance" human capacities, morphologies, and lifeways by means of emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive techniques to better facilitate the project of engineering the homo superior of the "posthumanity" with which they identify, and

[two] on the other hand: the "bioconservative" who feels a moral obligation to ban such "enhancements" and such techniques to better facilitate the project of preserving the homo naturalis of the parochial and static vision of "humanity" with which they identify.

These projects to facilitate particular parochial conceptions of humanity with which they identify through emphatic recourse to or repudiation of medical technique, seem to me in both cases profoundly eugenic (it pays to remember that in foreswearing emerging forms of medical technique, "bioconservatives" are enshrining as "natural" the norms and practices that currently contingently guide kinship and reproduction in the service of patriarchy and other traditional hierarchical social forms, a selective breeding program no less technical and artificial for having lasted in most places for many thousands of years).

"Transhumanist"-identified readers often object to my characterization of their viewpoint as eugenicist. It is a sore spot with them: after all, they get a lot of that... but if the shoe hurts, you may be wearing it. It is true that few of them openly advocate coercive or involuntary programs of medical intervention to facilitate their engineering of an "optimal" "enhanced" posthumanity (although even self-declared "democratic" transhumanists like James Hughes advocate the suppression of, say, non-hearing prospective parents who would "screen" for an atypical but certainly both valuable and nonlethal while scarcely demonstrably disadvantageous non-hearing child as an expression of gratitude for and solidarity with their own non-hearing lifeway, for example). Indeed, some transhumanists declare in exasperation that their viewpoint amounts to more or less my own (when it palpably does not).

I believe that to value human lifeway diversity and human stakeholder equity as people of the secular progressive democratic left in an era of prosthetic/therapeutic polyculture demands neither [1] pretensions to knowing what ideal human optimality properly consists of and pressuring human plurality into reflecting it nor [2] pretensions to knowing what ideal human normality consists of and pressuring human dynamism into conformity with it, but instead [3] always only the struggle for more informed, nonduressed consent, peer to peer. What is wanted in my view is a politics that will shore up the scene of informed, nonduressed consent in therapeutic contexts, and celebrate the proliferation of wanted human capacities, morphologies, and lifeways that will be sure to eventuate from such a consensual scene. Against the eugenicism of the elitist "transhumanist" optimizers and the eugenicism of the elitist "bioconservative" preservationists, I have proposed the better alternative of a more informed, nonduressed consensual secular democratic prosthetic polyculture.

I disagree that "transhumanists" are in accord with my view here, but before I elaborate why let me first address the question of coercion that some "transhumanists" believe gets them off the eugenicist hook despite their overconfident belief that they know what optimal human health, abilities, and ways of life will look like and their advocacy of that optimality as an "objective standard" that should function as a norm in public discourse, in administrative policy, and shaping professional and institutional formations.

It is not only those who go so far as to actively advocate involuntary modification who are typically described as eugenicist in my understanding. There are disciplinary pressures beneath the threshold of conspicuous coercion that will yield eugenic effects just as surely, and often more efficaciously, than blatant threats and attacks of violence will do. Certainly programs of involuntary medical intervention constitute the most hideous and heartbreaking end of the eugenicist spectrum, but one can easily observe comparable homogenizing and restrictive effects arising from popular misinformation, from social stigma, from mass mediated promulgation of norms, from uncritical and inertial workings of orthodox institutional healthcare mechanisms. And the workings of these unexamined orthodoxies do no small amount of the work enabling more conspicuously coercive interventions, by marginalizing and befuddling objections to them and sanctifying their "best intentions" as only natural.

Not everybody needs, as some "transhumanists" apparently seem to do, literally to see a Nazi brandishing a firearm or cracking a whip in the service of genocide before they will grant that even now society is conspiring unnecessarily and at great human cost to cast certain perfectly liveable and flourishing and legible and wanted human capacities, morphologies, and lifeways as less-than-human, as offenses to humanity demanding "remedy" whatever those who incarnate them might have to say in the matter.

As far as I can tell, "transhumanists" who hide behind their restraint from conspicuous coercion to protect themselves from the "eugenicist" charge for all their glib talk about what objectively counts as a life worth living and a capacity worth "enhancing," have simply arbitrarily accepted a far too-restrictive conception of what can count as eugenics and then pretend everybody else agrees with that conception when almost nobody actually does. In my view the very idea of a discourse of morphological or lifeway "improvement" in the abstract -- rather than and apart from discourses and practices of actually diverse, actually wanted, actually expressed, informed nonduressed consensual prosthetic/therapeutic interventions -- is dangerously eugenic in its implications.

To treat as "settled" or as "neutral" value questions that are and should remain under contestation about what human ends are worth optimizing for and what human lifeways are actually wanted is to circumscribe the terms of what is humanly possible and important in a profound violence that tends to precede and indeed function as the precondition for certain techno-fixated and techno-transcendental eugenic discourses on "enhancement" that like to promote themselves as celebrations of choice. Theirs is a choice impoverished from the outset, offering always only choices to enhance competitive performance or to enhance the consumption of available entertainments, always in the paradoxical service of incumbency figured as "the future." Freedom reduced to the "freedom to enhance" risks the foreclosure of freedoms in the name of freedom and, worse, looks so to misconstrue freedom as an engineering matter rather than a political experience that it threatens to undermine freedom altogether

Apart from all this, I want to add that while many "transhumanists" pay lip service to consent, few actually demonstrate a substantive commitment to that value by actually talking about it apart from occasions when they are being accused by critics of indifference to it. Few seem interested in celebrating actually wanted actually existing lifeway diversity in the world they share as against their personally-preferred visions of an engineered diversity they project onto "The Future" world that never seems to arrive. Few actually devote their time and energy otherwise to discussions of the way consent might be practically, politically, institutionally facilitated in reality -- via equitable access to the franchise, lifelong education, universal healthcare, basic income, social security, rights culture -- and so on. It's hard to escape the sense that this is because they don't really care much about these topics. In the absence of such substantial exhibitions of concern, they will please spare me the manufactured outrage at being "misrepresented" on this score, just because they can fling out pious vacuities when challenged and mumble about how, at best, they are loosely pro-choice or, at worst, we should "let the market decide," and can we now talk about Shiny Robots some more, please? They are hereby invited to put their money where their mouths are.

I'll believe "transhumanists" who claim to advocate consensual therapeutic multiculture as I do when more of them show anything like real concern about the ways in which savagely unequal distributions of authority, resources, reliable information, and legal redress stratify our grasp of the diversity of viable and flourishing lifeways in the world as well as duress the actually existing scene of consent in the present day.

I'll believe "transhumanists" who claim to advocate consensual therapeutic multiculture as I do when they demonstrate equal zeal championing those who would undertake a non-"normalizing" procedure they recognize as non-lethal and compatible with ongoing consent but not "enhancing" of desirable capacities by their own lights, or who would refrain from choosing a non-risky and "normalizing" procedure -- or even an "enhancing" procedure by their lights -- as they do in championing procedures that are either normalizing or enhancing on their personally preferred terms.

I'll believe "transhumanists" who claim to advocate consensual therapeutic multiculture as I do when more of them propose as part of their presumed championing of consent to address these deficiencies with a strong defense of general welfare, public education, access to reliable information, a truly living wage, single-payer health care, and democratically accountable govrnment, a respect for democratic outcomes even when these frustrate the pace of development by their lights, and a celebration of actually lived diversity rather than idealized outcomes in their rhetoric.

I'll believe "transhumanists" really believe as I do in people making their own actually informed, actually non-duressed choices about what they themselves take to be prosthetic "enhancement" (whether the prostheses in question are medical, educational, or otherwise cultural) when fewer of them advocate free market feudalism, when fewer of those who know better stop choosing such feudalists as their political allies, and when fewer of them deploy bioreductionist formulations to rationalize feudal attitudes toward women, workers, diversity, and humanistic values.

It is no surprise that advocates of "optimality" that declare themselves committed to the usual libertarian conceptions of impoverished voluntarism and vacuous consent will nonetheless propose policies in which the individual choice to maintain or craft a "suboptimal" morphology or capacity (on competitive productivist and consumerist terms that are neither settled nor neutral) is to be treated as generating an externality imposing social costs that must be re-internalized: This amounts to the proposal of a punitive legal and incentivizing regulatory framework naturalizing a permanent arms race of force-amplification in the service of eternal accumulation as an unexamined end-in-itself.

The democratic value of equity-in-diversity (and the interminable democratic contestation over its terms and forms) is neither equality-as-homogeneity nor aspiration-toward-optimization. To be indifferent to issues of consent or, just as bad, to advocate vacuous forms of consent, while at once advocating strong norms pretending to the status of scientific objectivity concerning human capacities, morphologies, and lifeways that aspire toward an "optimality" that earns them the designation "enhancement" -- in the abstract and apart from actually expressed preferences and exhibited stakes of actual people incarnating or wanting these capacities, morphologies, and lifeways -- is indeed a eugenic outlook, dangerously vulnerable to authorizing institutional eugenic practices that diminish the human equity and diversity on which democratic freedom depend in fact. They should be understood and opposed by people of the democratic left on just those terms.

Two Variations of Contemporary Eugenicist Politics

The discourse of Medical Enhancement, to the extent that it contains the presumption that incumbent interests or certain self-appointed technocratic or biomoralist elites are authorized to designate what constitutes an "enhanced" human capacity, morphology, or lifeway, whatever the expressed wants of informed, nonduressed consenting persons might say to the contrary, constitutes in my view either an actual or aspirational Eugenic Outlook. So-called "transhumanists," who would engineer an optimal idealized postulated homo superior with which they presently identify at the cost of a dis-identification with the free and diverse homo sapiens with whom they actually share the world are advocating a de facto eugenicist politics.

The discourse of Medical Preservationism, to the extent that it contains the presumption that incumbent interests or certain self-appointed biomoralist elites are authorized to designate what constitutes a "normal" or "natural" human capacity, morphology, or lifeway that must be protected and insulated from change, whatever the expressed wants of informed, nonduressed consenting persons might say to the contrary, constitutes in my view either an actual or aspirational Eugenic Outlook as well. So-called "bioconservatives," who would ban safe, wanted, but non-normalizing therapies in an effort to "preserve" a static idealized postulated homo naturalis with which they presently identify at the cost of a dis-identification with the free and dynamic homo sapiens with whom they actually share the world are likewise advocating a de facto eugenicist politics.

What is wanted in my view is a politics that will shore up the scene of informed, nonduressed consent in therapeutic contexts, and celebrate the proliferation of wanted human capacities, morphologies, and lifeways that will be sure to eventuate from such a consensual scene. Against the eugenicism of the elitist "optimizers" and the eugenicism of the elitist "preservationists," I propose the alternative of a more informed, nonduressed consensual secular democratic multiculture.

The Data So Far

[via xkcd, via Robin]

The R-Word Is a Magic Spell

[via CNBC]

"We're over-reacting to the recession word," Dow Chemical Chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris told CNBC. "Lots of people get together and talk to each other and people believe the psychology."
Adds Liveris: "I noticed there’s a few CEOS who feel the way I do."

I don't doubt it.

Next up, America's elite CEOs propose theory that refusing to talk about death will make them all immortal.

I'd Like to Think This Was Some Kind of Turning Point

"Technoprogressive": What's In A Name?

In the past I have often used the term "technoprogressive" as a handy short-hand to describe dem-left progressive politics that emphasize technoscience issues. See how that works? Techno + progressive = technoscience-focused progressive politics, in their various forms.

A lot of so-called "transhumanist"-identified people are now using the term to describe themselves, apparently. As near as I can tell, these "transhumanists" are more or less just using the term whenever they think the term "transhumanist" will seem, you know, too culty to somebody they're trying to convince of their reasonableness or, far worse in my view, when they want to come off as dedicated to progressive politics in some broad-strokes kind of way even though they aren't particularly progressive in their actual political attitudes.

In either case, "technoprogressive" seems to me to have been appropriated by "transhumanists" to do misleading PR work on behalf of a few marginal membership organizations and is sufficiently tainted by the association that I don't think its convenience as shorthand or jazzy punch as a net neologism are remotely enough to justify continuing to use it myself.

Even though one still finds dead-ender market fundamentalist and libertopian "intellectuals" in droves wherever "transhumanists" gather, even though one finds complacent discussion of apocalyptic Singularitarian world-transformation without much in the way of interest or sympathy for the billions who would be affected but not consulted about this loss of their world, even though one finds smug policy discussions premised on technocratic authority rather than democratic deliberation, even though one finds too-eugenicist-for-comfort discussions of duressed therapy in the name of "health" and of "non-optimal" human lifeways as a kind of diseased and criminal personhood demanding "cure" even when these lifways are wanted and consensual, even though one finds people talking glibly of "progress" and "development" in terms perfectly continuous with the demands of corporate-military competitiveness for incumbent interests as though this were the most unproblematic thing in the world, even though one finds structural, psychological, and cultural indications of reactionary right wing politics everywhere in the "transhumanist"-identified organizations, discussions, sub(cult)ural spaces of the Robot Cult archipelago I have noticed that some "transhumanists" are touting the rise in "technoprogressive" self-description as a sign that "transhumanism" is becoming more democratic-left in its general ethos.

I don't buy it for a second and neither should you. The techno-transcendentalizing wish-fullfulment fantasists and the Free Marketeer contingents and the even more kooky but characteristic Ayn Raelian contingents who combine the Robot Cultism with social Darwinian, evolutionary psychological, cybernetic totalist, and corporate-militarist market orientations are simply far too prominent to be discounted just because some of them are sanewashing their views in public by calling them "technoprogressive."

This isn't to deny that there are some, let us say, notionally or temperamentally democratic-left folks to be found in "transhumanist" organizations and sub(cult)ures. There are some to be found there who, for whatever reasons, either fail to grasp or are opportunistically rationalizing away all the reactionary politics and deranging True Belief they are enabling.

But it certainly seems to me that even the most sensible of the shaky left-esque minority among the "transhumanists" has mistakenly committed first of all to what they imagine to be a prior politics of the affirmative "pro-" as against the prohibitionist "anti-" of technology at a level of generality that has no real content.

This is so, since obviously it will be the application of technoscientific developments to particular ends according to conventional political values that will always determine the actual political significance of any artifact, technique, technodevelopmental vicissitude in any given instance.

Such a politics functionally displaces the political substance of technodevelopmental change as it actually, historically, differently impacts and is shaped by the diversity of its stakeholders in worldly technodevelopmental social struggles instead onto the de-politicized abstraction of a generalized "technology" one can only either monolithically affirm or deny. This anti-politicizing politics amounts to the assumption or assignment to substantial technodevelopmental struggles of the always hysterical, always a-historical, always undercritical vantages of either technophilia or technophobia, typically monikered "transhumanism" or "bioconservativism," proper, in the discourses under discussion.

The assumption or assignment of these vantages or orientations or sub(cult)ural identity-positions, on the one hand, facilitates misguided alliances with actively reactionary politics ("transhumanist" affinities with corporate-militarist global developmentalisms, "bioconservative" affinities with anti-choice and anti-abortion activisms). In addition, and on the other hand, this gesture always supports facile thinking about technoscience questions and in ways that typically benefit the status quo, come what may: retro-futuristically casting or extrapolating "The Future" in terms that amplify the parochial terms of current daydreams and nightmares of technical agency, substituting for the open threatening promising futurity inhering in the plurality of peers who are present in presence, peer to peer, to the foreclosed force amplification and monologic extrapolation from "the parochial present" of "The Future."

Needless to say, all of this results in making even those few actually progressive "transhumanists" more than usually vulnerable to right-wing appropriation, to rationalizations for anti-democratizing neoliberal/neoconservative developmentalisms, to indifference to and even ridicule of the demands of equity-in-diversity and planetary precarity.

I suppose it would be unfair to deny that "transhumanism" has nudged at least a little leftward in its window displays and favored buzzwords from the truly crazy right wing irrational exuberance of the 1990s Extropian days of high-fiving and handwaving away both death and taxes through faith in cryonics and uploading and crypto-anarchy. Of course, it is hard to imagine a movement like that could make it through the dot.bomb and the Bush Administration's deployment of market ideology to bring America to the brink of utter catastrophe without at least some minimal alteration, and that alteration would simply have to be leftward. Given the far-right extremity of the starting point there was nowhere but notionally leftward for "transhumanists" to go.

But, for my part, it is actually a bit flabbergasting just how many "transhumanists" have kept the libertopian faith in the face of reality's hard lessons, just as it is rather flabbergasting just how many "transhumanists" still genuflect to an utterly static vision of a single "posthuman" future (superintelligent artificial Robot God ends history, robot bodies end mortality, nano-scale robot genies provide superabundance and end pesky stakeholder politics and sentimental pining after true democracy), a future, "The Future," with which they identify at the cost of a dis-identification with the human present and the actually open human futures that are emerging from that human present.

And to be perfectly fair, after all, one should pay attention to the ongoing presence in the World Transhumanist Association (now hilariously rebranded "humanity-plus," which supposedly sounds less culty to mere "humanity-minus" masses) and the IEET of luminaries from the Extropian movement -- like its would-be sooper-cyborgic booster-couple Max More and Natasha Vita-More -- who still loom enormously largely in the organizations and discursive spaces where assertively "technoprogressive" futurologists whine and cajole about their refurbished seriousness, liberality, sensibleness, and progressive credentials.

As for my own politics, I remain committed as always to

One: p2p democratization and a2k/copyfight politics of a kind inspired by the work of Benkler, Lessig, and Bauwens (and enriched by the criticism of Lanier, Lovinc, and Jodi Dean), and implemented by the people-powered politics of Netroots education, agitation, and organizing here and now and to come.

Two: green politics of a kind inspired by pretty mainstream visions like Gore's and McKibben's, as well as the more radical permaculture/polyculture work of Holmgren, Kovel, environmental justice scholarship, Vandana Shiva -- with little patience for Greenback Greens and corporate-militarist greenwashers like Stewart Brand and his futurological band.

Three: the politics of prosthetic self-determination and consensual multiculture which begins from an advocacy of universal health care and more public research and development into and universal access to genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies to treat neglected diseases and hitherto intractable but unwanted conditions, and then goes on to apply Pro-Choice intuitions toward abortion rights more generally to the defense of differently enabled people and other wanted non-normal lifeways, and ending the racist war on drugs.

There is a p2p ethos that weaves all three of these general political orientations together in my own version of them, and my advocacy of basic income guarantees and institutions for democratic world federalist governance are connected to my desire to preserve and facilitate these three orientations. Given those inter-implications I have often been read as or pressured to propose a unified and even programmatic technoscience-focused democratic-left perspective on that basis, and in the past I have indeed described that perspective as technoprogressive.

I now think it was probably a bad idea to propose anything that looked remotely like such a program, given the number of people online who seem to like nothing more than to glom onto such programs in the search for a movement to "belong to," to order them around, to help them forget their vulnerability and finitude in a world as dangerous as it is promising, and so on. It seems to me that many of the people who have taken up the "technoprogressive" moniker are less interesting and sympathetic to the democratic-left spirit of my own ends than people who simply call themselves "progressive," especially those who are inspired, as I am, by the Netroots and technoscientifically-literate versions of Green politics.

So, I am quite content to let the Robot Cultists, the transhumanists, the Singularitarians, the techno-immortalists, the nano-cornucopiasts, the cybernetic-totalists, the greenwashing geo-engineers, the would-be technocratic elites and futurological gurus, the corporate futurists, the uncritical technophiles, the techno-utopians make what use they will of the "technoprogressive" term in the service of their public relations efforts on behalf of their various marginal membership organizations.

What's in a name, anyway? For my part, I'm just going to keep thinking about and defending p2p formations, access to knowledge, permaculture and polyculture practices, universal healthcare and the scene of informed nonduressed consent, basic income, and providing nonviolent alternatives for the democratic resolution of disputes in a diverse world of peers. Call me what you will.

But those who do take up my formulations (sometimes word for word) without taking up my questions as well, those of you who appropriate my terms, scoop up slogans from my critiques, all the while ignoring my caveats, contextualizations, warnings, you should expect to be exposed for what you are as well. At least by me.

MLK Reminds Us What We Must Do

The Superlative Imagination

The Superlative Imagination is, in my view, premised on ignorance of or even active hostility to certain basic facts of reality. Among them:

[1] Technoscientific progress does not trump but requires political progress.

This means, real technoscientific progress is not a matter of the socially indifferent accumulation of a toypile, but must be developed and distributed in the context of a progressive social order in which there is equal recourse to the law, free and fair elections, no taxation without representation, basic income guarantees, or at any rate general welfare, universal healthcare and education, independent media, and a real respect for and protection of the scene of informed, nonduressed consent.

[2] Lives are lived in bodies that are as vulnerable as they are promising.

This means, there can be no scooping up of your brains into shiny immortal robot bodies or, more absurd yet, "selves" reduced to and then "uploaded" into digital networks without bodies at all, but there can be at best universal basic public healthcare together with proliferating projects of private self-creation through informed, nonduressed, consensual, regulated non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification medicine.

[3] Intelligence, too, is embodied, and arises in connection with and is expressed through a diversity of cultures and lifeways.

This means there are not likely to be autonomous artificially intelligent persons sharing our world with us any time soon, certainly not coming out of the communities of enthusiasm most prone to say otherwise, with their disembodied, computational, otherwise absurdly reductionist, and essentially sociopathic conceptions of intelligence.

[4] We share the world as peers with a plurality of stakeholders who exhibit an ineradicable diversity of capacities, perspectives, interests, and aspirations.

This means there will be no trumping of the impasse of stakeholder politics through the achievement of superabundance -- via ubiquitous computation, automation, nanotechnology, or whatever the techno-utopians are handwaving about at the moment -- an abundance so inherently enriching and emancipatory that it trivializes this diversity of demands and so renders democratic politics unnecessary or tyranny -- whether traditionally authoritarian or in some smugly "meritocratic" technocratic mode -- suddenly tolerable.

I have yet to see any effort to provide a comprehensive response to these critiques (especially not a response sensitive to the inter-implications of these critiques) and, frankly, I have yet to see anything close to a convincing case made even in response to any of the four critiques individually. I'd say responses to [3] and [4] have, so far, generated the most noise.

Typically, though, techno-utopian Superlatives want to get their critics to shift their attention to what the Superlatives consider "technical" questions, minutiae about which they imagine themselves to be experts (despite the inevitable disagreement on these very questions of the consensus of actually working scientists in the relevant fields under discussion) as quickly as possible. This is because one can easily forget just how batshit crazy a worldview involving Robot Gods, immortal robot bodies, and nanoscale robot genies-in-a-bottle really is if you are devoting your full attention to the futurological cottage industry in neologisms and arrows exponentially curving heavenward on charts and pages of equations carving up human experience into quarterly profit reports and so on.

From Future Shock to Future Fatigue

Friend of Blog Jim Fehlinger points out in the Moot: [T]he latest gambit among some of the hard-core futurists is to pooh-pooh all science fiction ([indeed,] all fiction, presumably) as being an "irrational" way to "reason about" the future.

By "hard-core" futurists Jim means to refer to Singularitarians like Michael Anissimov (a welcome Commenter with whom I regularly spar spiritedly here) and Eliezer Yudkowsky (eh... not so much). But I think this trend is also a more mainstream one as well:

For example, some are beginning to get nervous about the curious prevalence of fictional narrative at the heart of an awful lot of bioethics discussion. After all, Frankenstein, the golem, designer super-babies, clone armies, genetically superhumanized abilities, genetically subhumanized slaves, human-animal hybrids and so on don't actually exist despite their frequent appearances in discussions influencing actual health policies impacting people.

Perhaps this phenomenon might also relate to the recent relinquishment of the far-futural imaginary for a more near-futural focus one discerns in many key science fiction authors. This move doesn't make much sense to me inasmuch as science fiction has always seemed to me to be about the present more than the future anyway: It is the literature for a present culture reverberating more in the stresses of what it is ambivalently and painfully and clumsily aspiring after more than than the stresses of the ambivalent and painful and clumsy legacies of its past.

Maybe the relinquishment of the far-future by speculative fiction reflects (to the extent that it is really happening at all) the appalled recognition in the privileged North of the price in bloodshed and environmental devastation our unearned privileges have actually cost, a recognition that either makes us doubt the inevitability of progress or makes us doubt the breadth of its benefits (or, one hopes, both), a recognition facilitated by our sudden and revolutionary immersion in peer-to-peer formations that confront us viscerally with truths and consequences and voices we've been hiding from or that have been hidden from us for too long.

Anyway, about this recent repudiation of science fiction as a serious space for thinking through the complexities of technodevelopmental change in our lives and deliberating about its directions, Jim writes: This is exactly the reverse of the party line among some of those same folks 10 years ago. I suspect there might be a bit of sour grapes in this tack -- the pre-eminent SF authors today have
tended not to take the ("serious") futurists as seriously as they no doubt expected to be taken.

To these suspicions I will add two of my own:

First: There is an inevitable transition from future-shock to future-fatigue that thinking persons (even the fanboys) caught up for a time in the sensawunda and hype of the superlative futurological imaginary inevitably fall prey to as the magical toypile, the tourist moonbases, the wish-granting everything-boxes, the better-than-actual-reality virtual realities, the immortality pills, the energy too cheap to meter and so on fail to materialize (as they always do fail). The impact of this inevitable future-fatigue has normally been muted by the fact that bourgeois societies keep whomping up new generations of naive consumerist techno-enthusiasts year after year whose noise making spectacle tends to drown out the skeptical war-weary voices of hard-won experience as they emerge. This muting is less likely to happen, though, in eras like our own when many educated people who would otherwise expect to benefit (unfairly) from industrial-model elite technoculture are instead economically insecure, when the mass-mediation of corporate-militarist technocracy and inevitable progress is displaced by p2p formations peopled with victims of unregulated, undemocratic technoscientific change and subversive technodevelopmental analyses, when widespread worries about energy and resource descent give the lie to such hype, and so on.

Second: Popular futurists are actually competing with science fiction authors for much the same readership at this point. The hostility of some would-be "professional" futurological prognosticators to speculative fiction writers might well arise from the fact that futurists are almost always just such worse writers than the sf fiction-writers are with whom they are competing for attention. How often, after all, do futurist scenarios amount to science fiction but, you know, without characters to solicit our imaginative identification, without the twists and turns of plot to engage our attention through the conjuration of suspense, without the pleasures of the selective and mounting revelation of information, without the construction of dramatic rhythms, confrontations, and climaxes, and so on? In the absence of plot, character, literary conventions and so on futurological fabulists often seem to want to deny they are writing fiction at all and try to pretend to be social scientists of some kind instead... which is such a fantastic and embarrassing gambit it can't help but make some of them resentful after all.

PS: For those who are curious, by the way, one of the reasons I like my favorite professional futurist, Jamais Cascio, so much is that I think he is aware of these limitations in many of his colleagues and circumvents them in his own work through his insistence on multiple scenarios that are never specifically predictive but always only foresightful, and only in aggregate. To the extent that it is true, as he says, that the business and occupational hazard of the futurist is TATF ("thinking about the future"), it seems to me Cascio is not finally a futurist at all, because I think there is something deeply and even definitively different between TATF and TAOF ("thinking about open futures"). But that is a matter for a future discussion.

Imagine There's No Logo

[h/t Ian] Sao Paulo without outdoor advertising. It's like They Live after Nada takes out the alien broadcast signal over there…

More "Compass"

Upgraded and Adapted from Comments:

A reader says: "I always score "libertarian left" [on the Compass]… Libertarian because I believe in live-and-let-live, and left because I believe in social fairness and support…. I do think the two axis are independent, at least in the sense that the position on one is not a reliable predictor of the position on the other. If anything I think several other axis should be added."

But surely this is the very problem I was highlighting in my actual argument?

I don't agree that one can simultaneously not believe in fairness and yet claim to believe in "live and let live." What live and let live means in a world without fairness is that some will live at the expense of others. That is a straightforward right-wing anti-democratic attitude, an insight the Compass obscures very much to the benefit of the right.

The Compass is not so much demonstrating or responding to the "fact" that belief in one is not a predictor of belief in the other, in my view. Rather, the Compass is functioning to drive a wedge between these beliefs to the cost of understanding either of them in a properly democratic way. While the Compass presents itself as a richer accounting of politics than one organized by the distinction of Left and Right, it is better to say that the Compass disables any accounting of politics alive to that distinction. It is confusing people into misunderstanding the connection for democracy of belief in the value of general welfare to belief in the value of individual liberty.

It is quite true to say this connection isn't a seamless or static one for the left. As I said earlier in this discussion I think equity/diversity functions as a constitutive antagonism at the heart of the democratic end of the politically definitive left-right axis.

The antagonism between equity and diversity (equity = what the Comment calls "fairness" and diversity = what the Comment calls "live and let live") plays out in every democratic process, person, or order, such as they are, such as they play out in the world. Both equity and diversity are always valued in democratic politics -- that both are valued defines the democratic-left ethos -- but always one or the other will be differently weighted in relation to the other, and these different weightings will inspire different implementations, experiments, efforts.

This definitive antagonism is different in its confinement to the conversation of the democratic left from the larger antagonism of Left and Right that constitutes the single political axis that matters most in my view. This is the key fact obfuscated by the Compass. To deny or denigrate either equity or diversity is to step away from the Left and toward the Right. The Compass makes it easier to obscure this basic insight to the cost of clarity and sense and democratic politics.

As for adding other axes to our analytic models: As I already said earlier in the Moot, I can indeed imagine models that track many more variables than a straightforward Left/Right analysis does, or the two axes of the Compass does. I happen to think the key rhetorical work of the Compass is to make it harder for us to grasp the key difference between Left and Right politics through the addition of an axis that functions to drive a wedge into the heart of the definitive dynamic of the democratic left.

But models that introduced many more variables into the mix need not be introduced for such a nefarious purpose -- more likely they would be motivated simply by the desire for a finer-grained analysis that might make its predictions more useful. But, again, as I said, the problem here is the usual tradeoff in modeling between what is useful about generality and what is useful about precision.

I continue to think there are few things more powerful in political analysis than grasping that the very difference denied by the Compass, the difference between Left and Right, is a difference that makes a difference.

We're Coming to Your Town!

This looks like a job for the Huckster!

Recent Ecosocialist Vid

Interesting Ecosocialist Video Resources Available here. Discuss.