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

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Diddling While Home Burns



Okay, I'll amplify the point insinuated by the anti-singularity title I appended to my quote from John Aravosis about high speed trains in particular, and how it stands in more generally for America's idiotically and obliviously self-congratulatory techno-utopian self-image despite the fact of our actually amplifying techno-regressivity.

As I keep telling you, I think a lot of the extreme singularitarian cultist and even more mainstream pundit-class techno-booster handwaving one hears about the so-called "acceleration of the acceleration" of progress in public techno-science discourse results from a profound confusion of the growing global volatility of neoliberal financialization of the economy for "acceleration."

This mistake indicates more than anything else the relatively privileged positions of those who articulate this fanciful attitude (toward what is in fact a catastrophic socioeconomic development), most of whom are, face it, complacent white guys who are either relatively rich already or fully expecting to be.

And these sociological blinders combine with the terribly unfortunate fact that so many of the people who are regarded as "qualified" to talk about technodevelopmental issues in the first place are in effect by now True Believers in the ideology of natural progress -- most of them, true enough, in a bland Wall Street Bull bullshit kinda sorta way, but some of them (the ones who facy themselves the "techno-intelligentsia" of this bullishness) in the full-on Superlative Techno-Utopian Kurzweillian/Extropian/Singularitarian batshit crazy end of the scale. That so many of these have been bought into what Jaron Lanier has dubbed "cybernetic totalism," the substitution (to oversimplify a bit) of informational describability for matter and embodied experience as an all-embracing explanatory framework for life, psychology, history, and culture, doesn't exactly help matters in this regard at all.

I didn't mean to imply however by that quote, by the way, that I think America's eclipse as a technoscientific leader -- which, after all, a shift into more sane dem-left politics might well turn around if we are lucky enough soon enough -- should lead us to look elsewhere (Europe, China, Brazil, or wherever else US Imperialists are casting their paranoid gaze at the moment) for the techno-transcendentalizing rapture of Singularity.

Greenhouse storms, energy descent, failed states, conventional, massively destructive, and bioengineered weapons proliferation, the compensatory fundamentalisms provoked by emerging p2p formations and so on are planetary problems, and none of which sit well with techno-utopian navel gazing.

And even if global fair trade, social justice, environmental, human rights, and democracy struggles manage to overcome these difficulties in time, it will still remain as true as it ever was that The Superlative Imaginary in particular is conceptually incoherent in ways it has never come to terms with (in its disregard of the sociopolitical dimension of actual progress, in its technocratic disdain of democracy in particular, in its disembodied understanding of both intelligence and lived selfhood, and so on).

For more see my Superlative Schema.

The obliviousness of American Singularitarians in particular, handwaving about the accelerating rocketship toward a post-historical post-political post-mortal post-human techno-utopian future -- a dazzling post-"Singularity" world, in short -- at exactly the moment when their own country can't keep the lights on in winter or the potholes on the roads filled, or literacy or life-expectancy or quality-of-life numbers in line with the rest of the world it claims to be the "leader" of is indicative of the broader obliviousness of techno-utopian patriarchal capitalism in the face of planetary catastrophes that demand collective problem solving rather than faith in priestly elites, whether of the judeoschrislamic sort or wearing labcoats.

1 comment:

jimf said...

Dale wrote:

> As I keep telling you, I think a lot of the extreme singularitarian
> cultist and even more mainstream pundit-class techno-booster
> handwaving one hears about the so-called "acceleration of the acceleration"
> of progress in public techno-science discourse results from a profound
> confusion of the growing global volatility of neoliberal financialization
> of the economy for "acceleration."
>
> This mistake indicates more than anything else the relatively privileged
> positions of those who articulate this fanciful attitude (toward what is in
> fact a catastrophic socioeconomic development), most of whom are, face it,
> complacent white guys who are either relatively rich already or fully
> expecting to be.

From a book I've just been leafing through:

_The Paradox of Success_ by John R. O'Neil,
1993 (post S&L scandal, pre dot bomb)

"Preface, 'Lighting the Dark Side of Excellence'

The first seed of this book was planted one day in 1982
when I heard Tom Peters talk about his then-new book,
_In Pursuit of Excellence_. The occasion, which took
place in the vast Biddle-Duke estate on Long Island, was
billed as a gathering of America's top 100 entrepreneurs. . .

Seated in the living room, we listened to Peters whip up
his high-energy tales about leaders and their top-notch
companies, and what made them that way. He led us on a
whirlwind tour across the business landscape of the 1980s,
and pointed out excellence everywhere. Vibrating with
his own excitement, he was utterly engaging.

I was enchanted by his vision and wanted very much to
believe in it -- but the longer I listened, the more
troubled I grew. There was something missing from Peters'
extravagant picture of contemporary success, or 'excellence,'
as he called it. His optimistic analysis didn't fully
describe the lives of the business and professional
leaders whom I knew. In fact, I knew that some of the
'excellent' leaders and companies h referred to had
serious problems that were not being addressed. And my
personal experience had taught me that success is not
always the glittering prize that it seems to be on the
surface. . .

My experience with excellence in business began at AT&T,
working in the company's New York headquarters more than
twenty years ago [ca. 1973]. . . The ethics were simple:
work diligently, be modest and loyal, wear a white shirt
and seasonal hat. If you fitted the mold, worked hard,
and played by the rules, you were taken care of. Even
though my co-workers were obviously anxious about their
futures and preoccupied with being passed over, they
never admitted their ambitions, never talked back, never
raised ripples on the genteel surface or showed disappointment.
They worked with their heads slightly bowed.

AT&T was routinely listed among the best-managed companies
in America, but I never understood why. Many of my associates
were bright and hardworking; many others were simply hanging
on, waiting for retirement. And there were uncomfortable
secrets under the veneer of respectability and excellence.
Several of the top brass were known alcoholics, but no one
ever commented about this or the problems it caused.
One very senior executive was such a boorish bigot that he
had to be kept away from the press and politicians. It
was not an open-to-all company; it was a men's club: no
Jews, Afro-Americans, hispanics, or Asians in evidence,
except in service. . .

Chapter 3, 'Money, Power, People, and Performance: The Rise
of Hubris'

Michael Lewis, in _Liar's Poker_, chronicles his experiences
as a trader at Salomon Brothers in the fevered days of the
1980s boom, when he found himself swimming in a sea of
money, borne along on a powerful tide of hubris. He tells
this story: 'I'm yelling at the top of my lungs at the
bellhop at the Bristol Hotel in Paris: "What do you mean there
is no bathrobe in my suite?" He's backing toward the door
shrugging his shoulders, as if he can't do anything about it,
the little shit. Then I notice. The fruit bowl. Where's
that bowl of apples and bananas that's supposed to come
with the suite? And, hey, wait a minute. They've forgotten
to fold the first tissue of the roll of toilet paper into
a little triangle. I mean, can you believe this crap!
"Goddammit," I shout. "Get me the manager now. Do you know
what I'm paying to stay here? Do you?"' . . .

This scene, it turns out, only happened in a dream -- perhaps a
foretaste of the person Lewis might have turned into had he
stayed at Salomon. . .

Hubris can be understood as the ego becoming swollen with success,
a sort of psychological blindness. Signs of this blindness may
be a tendency to reject information that doesn't fit a cherished
self-image, an attitude that implies, 'I have nothing more
to learn,' or an inability to perceive the needs of others,
to behave as if they existed only to serve our own needs. . .

Working landscapes in which shadows tend to gather quickly
include the offices of Washington, D.C. lawyers, New York investment
bankers, Paris and Milan designers, Hollywood actors and power
brokers, and Harvard professors -- but the location can be
almost anywhere. Recently we have seen flash floods of hubris
wreak havoc among Phoenix savings and loan tycoons, Denver office-
builders, and Texas oil barons. When the dominant values are
power, status, and money, we are in Hubris Country. . .

There is no hard and fast rule that pursuing a certain profession
leads to hubris. Individual factors are equally important in
the equation; we have seen our share of corrupt figures in the
clergy, the helping professions, and other altruistic fields.
But when a working environment has the following characteristics,
its inhabitants are probably at high risk.

-- When success comes early and fast, and those who share in it
presume that it comes because they are special, a breed apart.
The youthful traders at Salomon Brothers and other brokerage
houses, portrayed by Lewis in _Liar's Poker_ and Tom Wolfe in
_The Bonfire of the Vanities_, are in this category.

-- When vast amounts of money move around, and there is minimal
connection between the efforts and skills employed and the
rewards harvested. Again, the financial markets are a prime
example.

-- When the pace is so dizzying that you depend almost exclusively
on instinct for decision-making. The atmosphere at Apple Computer
in its early days was sweetly chaotic in just this way, and
the founders almost let it crash.

-- When power is thrust into untested hands and accountability
is either fuzzy or absent. Many third-generation heirs are
ill-prepared to take on the management of a family business or
estate.

-- When success is mythologized and secrets institutionalized so
that no one may speak ill of the enterprise or its leaders.
The auto industry in the 1950s and IBM in the 1980s were such
citadels of corporate culture, impervious to criticism.

NO-LIMITS THINKING

'You can do anything.' This simple phrase may be the best clue
to why contemporary American success figures seem to be so prone
to self-inflation. 'You can do anything' is the basic American
credo. Most of us learned it as children, especially if
we grew up in the post-World War II boom. The first corollary
to the message said: 'You've got everything it takes to make
it -- economic security, education, an egalitarian tradition.'
The second said: 'You can overcome whatever inner barriers are
holding you back.' Both of these upbeat messages ignore many
shadow problems. The first leaves out the role of family
and personal history in shaping lives, and the power of the
unconscious. Neither acknowledges economic and social inequities,
the breakdown of family and community values, and the painful
and costly emergence from blissful isolation that Americans
have experienced since the First World War.

If we look more closely, what are the shadow implications of
'I can do anything'? Does it mean: 'I can have anything I want'?
Or: 'I can do whatever it takes to get where I want to be, at
whatever cost to anyone else'? Does it mean: 'I can rise above
any character weakness or negative experience, bury it so
deeply that it will never trouble me again'?

As individuals and as a society, we have attempted time and
again to leap over these moral and psychological obstacles,
only to wind up enmeshed in the consequences. Certain inescapable
realities such as a deteriorating environment and a newly
configured world economy have forced us to re-examine the
American 'I can do anything' mentality -- but it doesn't come
easily to us. It may be the largest attitude adjustment we
will ever have to make as a nation.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS-STRETCHING PROPERTIES OF THE LIMOUSINE

Don't discount the delights of power that lubricate the slide
into hubris. The excesses of tyrants may belong to the past,
but we can hear their echoes in Michael Lewis's dream
tirade in a Paris hotel, and in the dictates of rock stars who
insist that their dressing rooms be stocked with only certain
brands of mineral water and champagne.

Even remarkably self-aware leaders are not immune to the sweet
enticements of hubris. One such executive tells this
story:

'By chance I had the opportunity to use an enormous stretch
limousine for a trip from Atlantic City to New York instead
of the usual town car with driver. I got in back, set my
briefcase on the seat, and away we went up the highway.

I was feeling pretty good. I'm in the back of this incredible
car, being taken all by myself to an important meeting in
New York City. Suddenly the thought comes over me that I must
be a wonderful person, worthy of great deeds and rewards,
to be transported around in this way. I begin thinking about
my work problems -- not in the usual confined way, but, I
imagine, as if I were Donald Trump on his best day, thinking
about his problems. I have new ideas, I formulate plans that
are appropriate for a limousine but not for a Greyhound bus.
When we pull up in front of the hotel in Manhattan, I believe
I notice the doorman treats me differently than when I get
out of a taxi.

By the end of the trip I began to understand the inflating of the
guru who gets into his Rolls-Royce every day and connects this
material circumstance with his spiritual development. I even
understand why five, or ten, Rolls-Royces would add to one's
sense of the certainty of one's virtues and make one feel even
larger. The Rolls altered my consciousness in an exciting
way. I seemed divinely blessed. The universe spoke and said:
"Hey, you're a limousine rider. Other people should do your
bidding because they're only taking the subway home."' . . .

CLAIMING THE MORAL HIGH GROUND

This symptom of hubris is an early stage of a process that can
end in the corruption of moral values. . .

One of the devilish things about how the shadow operates is
that the early symptoms of hubris feel so good. Winning is
euphoric. Clients of mine have described getting a physical
high, an adrenaline rush, from making a big sale or winning
at negotiation. Studies of the language of deal-making show
that its metaphors are drawn from the gratifying pastimes of
games, sex, and occasionally war (whether we like it or not,
aggression can be energizing).

The early stages of self-inflation do not feel like ego weakness. . .
And when we feel strong, it is also easy to feel righteous --
to claim the moral high ground. Don't you agree that it feels
great to believe that you are right and that the others are
wrong?

When a group claims the moral high ground, an infallible
ideology, or the one true faith, it can justify anything.
Individuals who suffer from the delusion of moral superiority
endanger themselves and others. In extreme cases they
imagine themselves to be avenging angels or monarchs bestowing
grace and mercy on their obedient and grateful vassals. . .

When people dwell too long on their good intentions, there
is frequently trouble in the offing. I know a would-be business
leader who is well known for preaching 'enlightened' human
values in dealing with staff and customers, yet his vicious and
underhanded battles with his partners are also well known.
He has undermined his pious stance.

The moral high ground appeals to the part of us that seeks
easy answers, clear distinctions between good and bad.
Healthy people recognize ambiguity and allow themselves to
experience doubts. But if we have convinced ourselves that
we are the guardians of moral certainty, we can keep those
questions in the shadow, act on impulse, and make decisions
without painful inner debate. Like the other forms of
hubris, the moral high ground is the refuge of an insecure
ego. . ."

And from Chapter 1, "Prisoners of the Office: The Paradox
of Success":

"In the late nineteenth century, when the United States
was flexing its industrial muscles, the philosopher
William James wrote in a letter to H. G. Wells of 'the
moral flabbiness of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That --
with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word
success -- is our national disease.' Another period of
splendid excess, the 1920s, produced a definitive American
novel, _The Great Gatsby_. Near the end of Scott Fitzgerald's
tale of corrupted innocence and loneliness at the top,
the narrator pinpoints the sky's-the-limit attitude that
uniquely characterizes the American dream of mythic
success: 'Gatsby believed in the green light, the
orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.
It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we
will run faster, stretch our arms further . . . and one
fine morning --'

We have recently come through another such time: the 1980s,
which in retrospect we've labelled the 'decade of greed.'
It had its icons, Trump and Milken; its gospel of supply-
side economics; its magic wand, the junk bond; and its
countless disciples. Its dominant mind-set was the
tendency to measure excellence in one dimension: immediate
commercial success. 'Management' and 'leadership' often
degenerated into financial sleight of hand that magically
produced results in the short run. The net effect was that
a management team could be reaping rewards and recognition
while undermining the organization in the long run.

If we could blame these excesses on a single misguided
generation o a unique set of historical circumstances, we
wouldn't need to worry about falling into the trap again.
But the success-at-all-costs myth lives on past the
headlines. The factors that allow the myth to run away
with us and constrict our vision to short-range goals
lie in each of us -- in human nature. They surface
whenever conditions are right; for example, when hucksters
harp on the values of acquisition for its own sake, when
the media glorify glitz over substance and worth, and
when political leaders equate every form of expansion with
moral good, denigrate social generosity, and encourage
blind, often destructive egoism in the name of 'healthy'
competition."