Postmarxist Aesthetics and Politics

Students in my Postmarxist Aesthetics and Politics course at Berkeley are hard at work on their take-home finals these days. They are answering a question of their choice from each of the two parts below, A and B, and then tailoring the many prompts available in the questions they have chosen into the basis for strong claims they substantiate in five pages or so of close reading of texts from the class. It's been an enormously rewarding course, very provocative and also clarifying to my own thinking. Many of the themes from the course reappear in the consummating exam, of course, and so I thought it would provide an interesting glimpse into the work that has preoccupied most of my attention these last few months, a glimpse readers of Amor Mundi would not really have otherwise, since I spend so much of my time here squabbling with bioconservatives and techno-utopian idiocies and the cult formations that encrust them like barnacles.

PART A

Question One:

Bill Brown writes of "the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power: you cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a falling nut." Jeanette Winterson begins her own account of an education into visual art by telling a story that seems to complement Brown's in key respects: "I was wandering happy, alone… when I passed a little gallery and in the moment of passing saw a painting that had more power to stop me than I had power to walk on." Brown draws on such experiences to flesh out his sense of the thing as distinct from the object. "These are occasions outside the scene of phenomenological attention that nonetheless teach you that you're 'caught up in things' and that the 'body is a thing among things.'" As for Winterson, it would seem for Brown that aesthetic encounters have something to teach us, especially when we are unprepared for them. What are the politics of this aesthetic education for Winterson and Brown? Do they seem to follow the same route from their initial encounter? Do the politics of this encounter differ or do they resemble the political education attributed to the "realist" art object in some of the Marxist aesthetics we read early on in the term? Assume a perspective on one of these questions, and make a claim that you substantiate with close reading of relevant passages from the texts.

Question Two:

Identify what looks to you like a key difference in the way Simon Frith and Iain Chambers document possible forms of political commitment in popular art practice and popular culture. What political significance attaches to this difference in your view? Substantiate your claim with close reading of relevant passages from the texts. In highlighting this difference you may (or may not -- it's entirely up to you) choose to point to the way in which you find in this difference an echo of a difference between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno reflected in their writings "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "The Culture Industry."

Question Three:

Name a way in which the treatment of the figure of the Spectator differs in Wilde's "Soul of Man Under Socialism" from its treatment in Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Make an argument about the key political significance that attaches in your view to this differing treatment of spectatorship in these texts and then substantiate your claim through readings of relevant passages from both texts.


PART B

Question One:

Charity Scribner proposes that in Joseph Beuys' Economic Values a collection of objects memorializes a State while Rey Chow proposes that in Lao She's story "Attachment" a collection of objects threatens a State. A work of Stately memory, it would seem, confronts a work of non-Stately priorities; and an uneasy past confronts an uncertain future. But how different, finally, do you think these projects of collection really are, how different do you think the works of collection they are documenting really are, how different do you think their politics really are? Does it matter that in each of these essays the State under scrutiny is at once an example, however flawed, of "actually-existing socialism" as well as a failed or tyrannical state? Substantiate your claim with close reading of the essays themselves.

Question Two:

The paradox of Luis Bunuel's film The Milky Way is that it denounces religious, philosophical, political, and artistic zealotry, but at the same time it embraces religious mystery, philosophical passion, political idealism, and artistic imagination. Does the film provide a clear path or even clues that might help us along the way toward reconciling this paradox? Is it possible in the terms of the film to embrace mystery without feeding tyranny? Provide your answer through close readings of scenes in the film itself or through an examination of what you take to be the film's larger narrative, formal, logical, or tropological structure.

Question Three:

In Mythologies, Barthes claimed "to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth." How does his sarcastic truth differ from the fidelity of "blasphemy" Donna Haraway claims to express in her "Manifesto for Cyborgs'? When Haraway announces in her opening sentence that the project of her Manifesto is "to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism," it would seem that she is using myth in a different way than Barthes does. Or is she? Choose at least two moments in Haraway's Manifesto that seem to you to illustrate how her ironic cyborg mythologizing either is essentially continuous with or significantly different from the demythologizing drive of Barthes's project.

Greg Egan on the Transhumanists

Greg Egan is, in my estimation, among the greatest science fiction writers now living. He is also, together with Vernor Vinge (whose work I'm a fan of as well, as it happens), one of the authors who transhumanist-identified technocentrics tend to venerate with special fervor, especially because he explores questions of identity and consciousness under profoundly different material instantiations.

Techno-immortalists who pine (in my view incoherently) after a spiritualized digital eternity as "uploads" take a measure of comfort from Egan's daring and dazzling and, above all, detailed fictional explorations of this terrain.

Where I look for (and inevitably find) provocation in Egan, I suspect many of the transhumanists are seeking plausibility in his work, hankering after a "reality effect" with which they can infuse their superlative aspirations, a welter of details sufficiently substantial to offer a hat-hook to the hyperbolic hat of their techno-utopian handwaving.

Where for me Egan rewards the suspension of disbelief with an enrichment of imagination, I fear that for many transhumanist-types he affords an ascension into True Belief that impoverishes sense.

It must have come as something of a shock, then, to read Egan's dismissal of much of the transhumanist "movement," so-called, in the comments section of Russell Blackford's blog Metamagician and the Hellfire Club a few days ago. I am going to devote a few posts to an engagement with Blackford's discussion, as well as to some of the other comments to his post, but I wanted to begin by quoting Egan's comments, with most of which I agree.

I am excerpting from a few different comments Egan made over time and in conversation, and so I strongly encourage people to follow the link to Blackford's blog for the full passages in their actual context, both the initial piece and ensuing conversation, all of which are well worth your attention.

Though a handful of self-described Transhumanists are thinking rationally about real prospects for the future, the overwhelming majority might as well belong to a religious cargo cult based on the notion that self-modifying AI will have magical powers….

While at some level it's good to insist that every quality of the human phenotype be subject to clear-eyed scrutiny, the word "Transhumanist" appears to suggest the foregone conclusion that everything about the present species is destined for the rubbish bin -- which neither accords with what most people who've considered the matter would wish for, nor does much to encourage anyone else to treat the movement seriously….

I share [the] concern that so many prominent Transhumanists are anti-egalitarian, but at this stage, quite frankly… I [simply] consider a self-description of "Transhumanist" to be a useful filter to identify crackpots….

The word "transhumanism" (or, even worse, "posthumanism") sounds like a suicide note for the species….

And I'm not sure quite how much solidarity I'm compelled to have with someone, just because they've also noticed that we're not going to see out the millennium with physical substrates identical to those we've had for the last 200,000 years. People who think their manifest destiny is to turn Jupiter into computronium so they can play 10^20 characters simultaneously in their favourite RPG are infinitely more odious and dangerous than the average person who thinks this whole subject is science-fictional gibberish and would really just like to have 2.3 children that are members of his/her own species, so long as they don't have cystic fibrosis and live a slightly better life than their parents.

I don't doubt that there are, also, some dangerously intemperate adherents to the notion of humanity retaining its ancestral traits forever.... But for actual deranged monomaniacs on this particular subject, the pro side has a far higher proportion of nutjobs than its opponents….

I don't want to single anyone out for disparagement, either here or in private, because I haven't actually read anyone's entire corpus. I don't spend much time reading academic papers on this subject, or Transhumanist manifestos; the impression I've gained of the movement comes largely through the popular media and random exposure to blogs by people self-describing as "Transhumanist", regardless of their affiliations and qualifications. A large number of those bloggers will be people whose names are not famous and who have no particular influence; nonetheless, they consider themselves to be part of the Transhumanist movement, and so surely they contribute something to the wider public's impression of what such a movement entails. As with, say, socialism, it's not the academic definition that interests the general public, it's the behaviour of people they know (either personally or through the popular media) who self-describe as socialist.

Now there are obviously some grave deficiencies with such a viewpoint; I mean, a similarly based impression of quantum mechanics would also yield a picture of a world dominated by crackpots. But while quantum mechanics has a sound historical and academic bedrock that can (largely) withstand all the noise that surrounds it, I'm much less sanguine about the T word, given that its origins lie as much in SF, SF fandom, and technopunditry as it does in bioethics and other fields of philosophy. There's nothing wrong with that; SF and various non-academic techno-boosterist subcultures ought to be inspirational. But the lines between what's imminent, what's plausible in the medium term, what's possible in the long-term, and what's sheer wish-fulfilment fantasy, remain utterly blurred for most "rank-and-file" Transhumanists I encounter on the web, and also (from my limited reading of them) a substantial number of more prominent commentators. It's this that prompted me to say, earlier, that to first order I consider a self-identification of "Transhumanist" to be a sign of a crackpot. While there are doubtless people to whom that's unfair, filtering out anyone who uses that label is a pretty reliable way to ensure that you don't end up wasting time reading people who've completely lost touch with reality.

Notice that Egan has not offered up a substantial critique of transhumanism here for the most part, nor has he tried to leave the impression that he has done. He is just testifying to impressions of transhumanism that seem to me to be pretty generally true of people (though transhumanists are very quick to deny this, often in something of a panic), but which become especially notable coming from a writer and thinker whose imagination shares common ground with so many transhumanist preoccupations.

Egan makes comments about the PR problems of any movement foolish enough to name itself "post-humanism" and then expect human adherents here and now, and worries that a movement with goals arising out of sf fandom is going to be bedeviled in general by hyperbole that renders it impractical. But he hasn't asked here the question whether it makes sense in the first place to organize a "movement" based on shared identity (and on the relative disparagement of those outside that identity) that seeks to achieve technodevelopmental outcomes that sweep the world, including those who share the world but not the subculture itself. This is not a "PR" problem to be addressed, as Blackford honestly and well-meaningly proposes, by insisting on greater "inclusiveness" and "outreach" by the sub(cult)ure. Exclusivity is built in to any identity politics model, sub(cult)ural movements always substitute a moralizing fantasy of prevailing over difference for the properly political work of the ongoing, and in fact interminable, reconciliation of the aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders with whom we share the world.

For me, the transhumanists make the mistake of hoping to circumvent the political altogether (the "anti-egalitarian" tendencies of many of its adherents that worry Blackford and Egan -- both those transhumanists who incline disturbingly in the direction of market-fundamentalist foolishness or toward eerily eugenicist parochialism -- are just the iceberg tip of this deeper anti-politicism in my view) through the application of transcendentalizing technologies.

What Egan dismisses as a rather muddled enthusiasm arising out of fandom, I think is in many (possibly most) cases better described as a pernicious commandeering of the uncertainties of disruptive technoscientific change by a constellation of uncritical True Beliefs, an investment of a superficially instrumental vocabulary with what I describe as super-predicated "outcomes" -- superintelligence, superlongevity, superabundance -- that both mime and mine the irrational energies of the theological imaginary: omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence. This suggests that the problem of transhumanist implausibility is not an accidental expression of overeager undereducated fans, but arises out of the very substance of transhumanism as such.

Richard Jones is a critic of Superlativity who focuses on the very questions of science that no doubt Egan would be most interested in himself, and Jones makes the point that the primary or at any rate unique content of transhumanism ultimately is confined to its rhetoric, its ideology, its subcultural idiosyncrasies. And hence it is to those dimensions of transhumanist discourse -- and not to the so-called "technical" questions that transhumanists at once hyperbolize beyond sense but then commandeer to create the impression of their relevance -- that we should turn if we would understand how transhumanism operates in the world, how it solicits identification among its members, how it impacts the discourse of technodevelopmental deliberation more generally and so on.

From Neocon to Biocon

Neocons trump up an apocalyptic "War on Terror" designed to enable incumbent interests to centralize control and loot resources -- not to mention, distract attention from environmental disaster the remediative politics of which profoundly threaten their position -- and that rhetorically claims to defend "Democracy" while dismantling the rule of law and civil liberties on which democracy actually depends, all the while activating deep ugly irrational racism to set the tyrannical machineries in motion.

Biocons trump up an apocalyptic "War on Nature" designed to enable incumbent interests to maintain control over diversifying networked multiculture, and that rhetorically claims to defend "Dignity" while dismantling the scene of legible informed nonduressed consent on which dignity actually depends, all the while activating deep ugly irrational sexism and homophobia to set the tyrannical machineries in motion.

Moralizing Isn't Politics

The polis is not a moral community. Politics isn't Morals. And moralizing isn't politics.

Politics isn't organized by the demands of identification and dis-identification in the way morals are. The reactionary political philosopher Carl Schmitt made precisely the contrary claim in his own influential theory of the political, thinking politics through a Friend/Foe distinction that is indeed at the heart of mores, what Sellars called "we-intentions" (which deconstruction in turn reminds us rely on the disavowal of imagined "they-intentions"). But politics in my view isn't about policing the continence of tribal/subcultural formations at all the way morals very definitely are.

Politics is the ongoing, and in fact interminable, contingent reconciliation of the diverse aspirations of the stakeholders with whom one shares the world, on whose differences we will variously depend for our flourishing while at once they are potentially threatening of our positions.

All politics is strategic, dynamic, finally unpredictable, generating effects of resistance precisely where it generates effects that are compelling. It is in part against the grain of this agonism of present plurality and open futurity that we are drawn to engage in the formal universality of Ethical norms that solicit, again only formally, a more general affirmation, with an eye to "the decent respect for the opinions of mankind," the project of meta-moral meta-political cosmopolitan normativity, Universal Declarations of Rights, the priority of consent over virtue, the adherence to rules of order and published conventions even in war, and so on.

Our inhabitation in multilateral societies with a complex functional division of labor and liberal division of powers, and further, our immersion in networked mediation (both mass and p2p), solicit us into multiple moral identifications over the course of our lives. It is in part against the grain of these parochial, partial, dynamic -- also, by the way, absolutely indispensable to human flourishing -- moral identifications/dis-identifications that we are drawn to engage in the formal universality of Ethical norms that solicit, again only formally, a more general affirmation, with an eye to "the decent respect for the opinions of mankind," the project of a narratively coherent ethos, of public-selfhood.

At its essence the "Left" is the commitment to the fraught process of democratization, in all its centuries of vicissitudes, the commitment to the nonviolent resolution of disputes among peers all of whom deserve a say in the public decisions that affect them. (I have delineated this Left "ethos" in greater detail here). The "Right" at its essence is the commitment to the defense and consolidation of incumbent interests in the face of social stresses, whatever the costs, because the diminishment or downfall of incumbency is imagined to be the worst conceivable outcome.

It is not correct, however commonplace it may be, to think the distinction between Left and Right as a conflict between two vast moral communities or meta-cultures, because most people will exhibit progressive or conservative tendencies in some of their organizational affiliations (a progressive political party can incubate a conservative politics in some of its members who foreground the defense of a party Establishment or system of established procedures, and patronage, while still remaining legible as progressive in its larger platform), their attitudes toward some historical change if not others, and so on.

The proper normative work of the moral consists of policing the continence of their community -- by securing its borders, disdaining its Significant Others, and maintaining the continuity of its members -- the better to provide the membership with the indispensable concerns of the moral: legibility, belonging, solidarity. Whenever moral communities acquire more properly "political" ambitions, whenever they become imperial or evangelical, their characteristic modes of policing (entirely proper to the moral in its proper sphere) substitute catastrophically for the proper work of the political, imposing the ambition to prevail over difference rather than contingently to reconcile diverse aspirations, inevitably replacing political agonism with a genocidal rage for order. The substitution of the moral for the political, properly speaking, is moralizing and not politics, and it seems to me it is an enormously dangerous thing that so many seem to think the political through the lens of such moralizing.

By the way, the contrary substitution of the political for the moral seems to me to be just as disastrous in practice. People who misapply the contingency of political strategy to the moral communities they inhabit will acquire soon enough the reputation of opportunism and untrustworthiness, while the pluralism of the political will always seem suspiciously like relativism from the perspective of the moral. Needless to say, in an epoch of moralizing mistaken for politics such as out own, charges of relativism are rampant and, more often than not, bespeak an incomprehension of and hostility to the exactions and pleasures of the political as such.

Long time readers of Amor Mundi will recognize that this is an argument embedded in my larger proposal that secularism involves more than a separation of Church and State but (at least) a five-fold demarcation of human concerns, each of which yields reasonable beliefs and practices according to its own mode, with its own criteria of warrant, and with its own indispensable benefits. These are, again, briefly, an efficacious mode (under which the scientific is subsumed and for which the scientific has come to paradigmatic) yielding powers of prediction and control, a moral mode yielding legibility and belonging, an aesthetic mode yielding personal perfections offered up to the hearing of the world, an ethical mode yielding from the interminability of political normativity and incompleteness of moral normativity a formally coherent ethos and faculty of judgment, and a political mode reconciling the aspirations of the diversity of peers with whom we share the world, whether we identify with them or not.

While I have focused here on the proper demarcation of the moral, the ethical, and the political in particular, and on the mischief and confusions that arise from mistaking or substituting one mode for the others among these three, it is also true that the other modes can come into play here as well, as when too emphatic a valorization of the efficacious mode can inspire projects to circumvent the political altogether and substitute for it social engineering and technocratic policy, or as when too emphatic a valorization of the aesthetic mode can inspire what Benjamin diagnosed as the consummation of art pour l'art in fascism.

My Exchange With Bioconservative John Howard Continues...

Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot:

John Howard: [A]llowing same-sex conception and approving of its development insults families where one or both parents are not related to their children.

Things that are different feel insulting to me, ban them! Bioconservativism in a nutshell.

[I]t sends a message to those kids that their parents don't love them as much as they would if only same-sex conception had been ready.

Quite apart from the fact that this "message" exists only in your mind, I daresay such "messaging" could be easily be compensated for by the actual parent actually indicating they actually love their actual child.

intentionally putting a child at extreme risk, which I don't think is eugenic to oppose, anymore than opposing someone purposefully drinking and smoking while pregnant who never drank or smoked before in her life, just to send some message of her right to do whatever she wants

Few parents want to harm their kids or put them at risk, you know, and providing reliable information about actual harms and risks according to scientific consensus (rather than transhumanist transcendentalizing hype or bioconservative reactionary panic) would go a long way to overcome your worries on this score, to the extent that they are legitimate ones.

There are also, by the way, laws against fraud and misinformation (that progressives should and most do want strengthened), or criminal neglect that would come into play in some cases.

I think we have to be very careful in deploying traditional intuitions about basic care or neglect, however, as healthcare shifts from a normalizing recovery model to a diversifying lifeway model. Some people seem to want to treat the conception of atypical offspring as a kind of "abuse" even if atypicality is not a barrier to flourishing on their own terms.

This is why it seems to me we need shift from the progressive ideal hitherto of an application of universal standards (which we never managed to implement in any case) to an ideal of universal access and informed nonduressed consent, else eugenic projects of bioconservative "preservationists" or transhumanist "optimizers" will trump consensual lifeway multiculture in an era of modification medicine.

exposing a future child to extra risk is wrong

What if the technique you disapprove of as "unnatural" doesn't expose a future child to undue risk, after all? Will you change your position then? Or is the "risk" that really exercises your imagination the "risk" of what you fear as difference?

Also, do you think that potential parents with strong dispositions to heart disease or other life threatening heritable conditions should be sterilized so that their kids won't be exposed to "extra risk," too? You'll forgive the "libelous" exposure of the eugenicism (possibly unconscious?) embedded in your position yet again.

I'm trying to stop all GE, and that includes same-sex conception too.

All GE? Even if it ameliorates suffering? Even if it treats hitherto untreatable conditions? Even if it is wanted by informed, nonduressed consenting adults?

It means preserving everyone's conception rights, everyone's right to use their own unmodified genes

Ah, the freedom not to be free to make consensual recourse to wanted techniques, the freedom to incarnate always only the parochial bioconservative vision of what humanity should look like and act like, whatever their peers have to say about it, the preservation of everyone's right not to have a right to modifications or modes of conception bioconservatives disapprove of. Up is down.

It's funny we both accuse the other of being an elite making a ban, but, well, I'm right and your wrong. I want Congress to make a law that makes it a major crime to attempt to conceive a child that is not the union of a man and a woman's actual representative unmodified gametes.

Yeah, isn't it "funny" how I accuse you of being a would-be tyrant when all you want is for "Congress to make a law that makes it a major crime to attempt to conceive a child that is not the union of a man and a woman's actual representative unmodified gametes." (I'm sure you are a perfectly nice fellow personally, of course.) It's also funny how I say you seem to have a wee problem with the Gay, endlessly intoning reverentially about the "natural" Union of "a man and a woman" and so on.

You want, presumably, a government agency, which will exist through clown administrations and even clowner adminstrations, that makes constant new rules and regulations and somehow prevents any labs from jumping the gun on any particular new technique before your agency says its OK.

Well, ya know, that's what regulation looks like in complex technoscientific societies. You act like I'm proposing some cr-a-a-a-a-a-azy new regime or something.

Progressives already know how corruptible regulatory and oversight processes are in principle and how utterly debauched they have actually become in the neoliberal era consummated by the Killer Clown Administration -- but few progressives are proposing junking rather than reforming these apparatuses in light of this understanding.

What, you don't like the EPA and OSHA just because Bush has screwed them up so royally? No, we fight to end the conflicts of interest, reverse the deregulatory trend, tighten the standards, make the processes more transparent, and so on.

If an actual consensus of relevant scientists propose that the basic science has reached a level that suggests clinical trials of a hitherto untried technique are warranted and desirable, then in a world that is operating more as it should (and can if we progressives make it so) I disagree that this is an evil thing to do. If informed nonduressed adults would make consensual recourse to emerging techniques eventuating from such a process of regulation and testing I disagree that this is an evil thing for them to do either.

Bioconservative fearmongering aside, people overwhelmingly like the idea of emerging medical treatments for hitherto untreatable conditions. But they want these treatments to be as safe as possible and they deserve access to reliable knowledge and the security of income and basic care to ensure they are not duressed in the decisions they come to. This seems exactly right to me, too.

Saying that it shouldn't be done until it is safe is meaningless because you don't have any idea how that determination would be made and how you would justify telling a gay couple that wants to try it anyway that the government doesn't think it is safe yet, but maybe next year it will be.

Again, it seems to me that we already have both professional organizations and regulative and administrative and legal apparatuses making decisions of this kind countless times every day. Obviously conflicts of interest, the short-sightedness of for-profit considerations above others, lack of transparency, insufficient regulation of fraud and misinformation and so on bedvil these processes, but part of what progressives are and should be devoted to is correcting these problems.

As I have already said, I do also happen to think it's true that emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive techniques that will be wanted will include non-normalizing ones that trouble traditional progressive intuitions about universal standards of care and demand a shift -- about which debate seems to me perfectly warranted and useful -- into norms of universal access and substantial consent (substantial consent backed by real knowledge and real security, not the vacuous pro forma consent of duressed market outcomes). Be all that as it may, this is not a shift that demands an utter jettisoning of administrative apparatuses that are already functioning today, if not as smoothly or fairly or democratically as progressives are fighting for, and familiar to everybody.

I don't see how you are going to tell the libertarians that it is not safe enough to try yet.

However foolish I find them I don't think libertarians want to harm their kids any more than anybody else does, so if some emerging therapy isn't safe you and other qualified people should tell them why and the overwhelming majority will do the right thing if your worries are warranted. Libertopians will certainly benefit, as always, from life in a non-libertopian society that doesn't barrage them with fraudulent hype and misinformation from cynical for-profit health-providers (because that should be illegal).

But if market libertarians want to go ahead and do actually unsafe or harmful things therapeutically -- and by "unsafe" I am assuming you don't just mean either "unnatural" or "sub-optimal" by your lights but actually reckless (on a reasonable person standard) or demonstrably lethal things -- then I daresay they can be stopped in the same way that they can be stopped from murder or theft even if they want to commit them. With, you know, like, laws and police and stuff.

Tell me the mechanism, tell me, why are you not agreeing with me that it should be banned right now?

In perpetuity?

Right now it is legal!

So de facto are anti-gravity boots powered by black-holes in their heels, but if clinical trials for same-sex conception are actually being contemplated then of course professional medical organizations and government regulators will be stepping in to oversee what is afoot. Are you mad?

Right now any lab in the country could create an embryo however they want and implant it in a uterus (except Missouri, where they prohibit the implanting part). I smell something again.

Me too. Your paranoia.

Skepticism is one thing, especially in this era of corporate-militarist debasement. And, look, if patients are being used as test subjects for actually risky unprecedented medical procedures without oversight, without social workers and regulators with clipboards and sensible shoes, without schools of muckraking journalists sharking around, raftloads of professional reputations at stake, and armies of lawyers on hand -- you can be sure I will be right there on the barricades with you.

But even then I won't demand a blanket ban or a ban in perpetuity, because I see no compelling reason (I could definitely be persuaded otherwise if there were actual reasons and evidence on offer) to think that safe same-sex conception won't be made available soon enough.

Neither Nostalgia Nor Hype Is Progress

Bioconservative John Howard offers up this characterization and critique of my technoscience politics in the Moot:

OK, "deluded" is probably more accurate. You sincerely think you are offering some third way that is neither transhumanist or bio-conservative. But the fact remains that I got the wrong impression of your position regarding Dvorsky, so I think the explanation has got to be that said "third way" is paved with bullshit and you haven't realized that yet. Thinking that some Transhumanists are fetishizing robots and over-estimating how possible various transhumanist ideas are doesn't put you into a third category. It's a clear line and everyone is on one side or the other: either you believe we should say "Enough" at natural conception with a law, or you believe it isn't enough, and we should (continue to) allow people to be created that aren't from natural conception.

I don't see myself offering a Third Way, because I think transhumanism and bioconservatism are both "no ways." Advocating consensual multiculture, peer-to-peer, isn't about implementing A Way, it is about keeping futurity open.

Zealots always see "a clear line" they push folks to either side of, and both transhumanists and bioconservatives do the same thing when they start carving up the world into warring tribes that reflect their assumptions while ignoring the complexities of the world.

I don't think actually progressive technodevelopmental social struggle is facilitated by either transhumanist or bioconservative hyperbole or moralizing. Bioconservatism and transhumanism are both ideologies, perfectly complementary and to a certain extent inter-dependent in their shared recourse to superlative figures one side vilifies and the other side valorizes.

I think both perspectives derange efforts to achieve fairer distributions of technodevelopmental risks, costs, and benefits by activating irrational panics, desires, and moralizing where what is wanted in openness, critical thinking, and democratic deliberation.

The danger is that bioconservative and transhumanist frames and figures are essentially the lens through which everybody thinks about emerging technologies now.

Because of bioconservative and transhumanist hype it's always about "living forever" and "babies designed to order" and "uploaded robotic minds" and "clone armies," when what really matters is research and development and regulation for emerging and improving therapeutic techniques for hitherto untreated conditions, providing access to those techniques, and providing access to reliable information about those techniques in a scene of informed nonduressed consent.

If you feel content to say "Enough" it just means you're privileged. Sorry, that's it. People in the world do not have enough, enough freedom, enough health, enough legal recourse, enough equity. I'm far from satisfied.

I definitely don't approve of those who claim to love progress so that they don't have to work for justice here and now with what we have on hand, but neither do I revile the very possibility of a progress that should be made to benefit everybody by everybody, peer to peer.

Bioconservatives want to sell nostalgia as progress and transhumanists want to sell hype as progress.

I'm not fooled and I'm not interested.

From One Extreme to Another

A commenter over at Pam's place seems to be implying I'm some sort of "closeted transhumanist" just because I don't want to pre-emptively ban any possible emerging therapies, even actually promising ones, that some religious and social conservatives deem "unnatural"? I suppose it was inevitable. But it is hard not to wonder is it really simply impossible to resist the drift into either technophilic or technophobic extremes when people contemplate emerging technologies?

In my view, most of the transhumanists want to be techno-immortalized and/or have their minds uploaded into digital networks (aspirations that are actually impossible as rather crazy and which symptomize in too many cases a worrisome sociopathy and body-loathing in my humble opinion) -- meanwhile the bioconservatives start howling about designer sooperbabies and clone armies and human-animal hybrids the moment people propose their support for research for stem-cell therapies to address hitherto untreatable conditions.

My interlocutor says that the "people driving this agenda aren't planning on stopping at a cure for Alzheimer's or whatever the disease is that gathers the most sympathy." First of all, I do want to point out that curing Alzheimer's is an unambiguously desirable thing even if bioconservatives are afraid it sets humanity somehow upon a "slippery slope" at the end of which cats and dogs start sleeping together or whatever it is that has them so exercised. When he speaks of the "people driving this agenda" I can't help but wonder who my interlocutor means. Does he mean the transhumanists themselves? People like Ray Kurzweil or Glenn Reynolds (when he's being awful and idiotic about robots rather than just awful and idiotic about everything else)? To the extent that the transhumanists themselves don't "plan" to stop short of immortal sooperbodies and sooperbrains in techno-topia the fact is that it is reality that will stop them in their tracks.

But if what my interlocutor really means to point out is that there are a lot of corporate-militarists who want docile workers and conscientious foot-soldiers and are eager to deploy Pharma to those ends, then I agree certainly with him. If he wants to point out that racist, sexist, heterosexist, and typicality assumptions still drive a huge amount of conventional Development and bioethics discourse, then I agree with him there too. The people in power taking up these pernicious anti-democratizing discourses aren't for the most part transhumanists in the sense of belonging to the actual rather-cultlike marginal membership organizations that attract literally "transhumanist-identified" people (at least as far as I know), but my conversational partner is right in my view to discern a conceptual kinship between these broader cultural currents and the wacky doctrines explicitly handwaved about by transhumanists who "identify" as such. Transhumanism looks to me kinda sorta like the iceberg tip of a more general reductionism, technocratic elitism, eugenic-normalizing, techno-utopian hyperbole that prevails in western neoliberal development discourse more generally.

But I honestly strongly disagree with him that the way to address what is dangerous in that development discourse (with transhumanism as its reductio) is to pretend that transhumanist transcendental fantasies are a real threat on their own terms, only now re-framed as bioconservative nightmares.

I think that deranges sensible deliberation about ongoing technoscientific change.

I think we need to emphasize access to reliable knowledge so that people (including regulators) make more informed decisions, we need to correct the corruption of for-profit healthcare and corporate-cozy regulation of Pharma and r&d, and we need to provide more equality so that people are less likely to "consent" to techniques in ways duressed by inequality, informal status, social stigma and so on (and focus a bright light on actual practices wherever such duress is currently in play).

It's true that I do think technoscientific knowledge can contribute to emancipatory ends for all if it is directed by a more democratic, more fair, better regulated polity. I don't care if the places scientific change take us look "unnatural" to social and religious conservatives. I'm a queer atheistical vegetarian and I've been conducting myself "unnaturally" and thinking "unnaturally" all my life.

To the extent that my interlocutor is worried about actual harms, then I agree with him. To the extent that he is worried about actual safety, then I agree with him. To the extent that he is worried about actual corruption, then I agree with him. To the extent that he is worried that people will be forced or even eager to settle for a scene of consent that is actually subverted by fraud, misinformation, or duress, then I agree with him.

But if what is really wanted is to "preserve" what some parochially construe as "human nature" from the very idea of a safe and wanted medical facilitation of queer kids with two mommies and no man in sight, or differently enabled (a much better word than "disabled") folks who want kids who share their valued morphological lifeways, their deafness, their neuro-atypicality, or what have you, if what is wanted is to preserve the customs some describe as "nature" even against the wishes of informed nonduressed consenting adults -- well, then, I'm not going to agree with that anti-democratic nonsense so readily anymore. That seems too much like a declaration of pre-emptive bigotry to me. If parents want their kids to be deaf, or queers want to have kids of their own when safer techniques become available to do so, or people with aspergers demand dignity on their own terms, it seems eugenicist to me to deny their standing where they would make consensual therapeutic recourse to express their wants -- to the extent that we establish and enforce safety standards, standards of reliable information, universal access, noncorrupt oversight, and so on. (I'm not accusing my interlocutor of particular positions on these issues, I'm casting about for analogies to give people a sense of what my values cash out as on the ground.)

It seems either a little confused or possibly even a little dishonest to imply that my views amount to nothing but "moderate" or "stealthy" transhumanism. (Just ask the transhumanists who rampage about my views here on a nearly daily basis!) I'm a secular democrat who believes in consent, who values lifeway diversity, and who thinks scientific progress is possible and desirable so long as it is regulated and fair and responsive to its stakeholders.

I think that transhumanist and bioconservative outlooks are pretty much equally hyperbolic and deranging of sense: One undercritically technophilic, the other undercritically technophobic; one invested in a eugenic vision of engineering the "enhanced" "optimal" post-human lifeways with which transhumanists identify, the other invested in a eugenic vision of "preserving" the "natural" "properly" human lifeways with which bioconservatives identify.

"Post-Gender" or Gender Poets?

Hearing so-called transhumanists calling gender a "disease" fills me with unease. After all, the transhumanists also like to say that aging and death are diseases, and seriously propose that imminent medical breakthroughs will eliminate vulnerability and mortality altogether, that freezing their brains will enable them to be revived in immortal robot bodies, or that they will be able one day to "upload" a snapshot-scan of their minds into heavenly digital-spiritual computer networks. My point isn't to dismiss these beliefs because they're weird (lots of weird beliefs end up becoming commonsense in time, after all) but to point out that this is just techno-triumphalism, a fantasy that loose talk of "science" and "technology" can handwave away what are essentially social and political and cultural problems. Sexism isn't something science can steamroller away on the road to a techno-utopian future. It is far more likely that sexism will shape the uses to which scientific discoveries are put in ways few but feminists will be warning us about.

In the first sentence of his "Postgenderism" article, George Dvorsky first claims to be "frustrated with modern feminism" and to desire a "sensible male approach to gender issues." Apart from wondering why a "post-genderist" would have truck with the very idea of a "male approach" to anything, let alone "gender issues" (shouldn't he be "post" both of these things?), the simple truth is I get nervous when another straight white guy claims to be frustrated with "feminism" -- as if that were a single thing -- and then proposes to junk "it" and replace "it" with another internet manifesto and "movement" he just invented consisting of a neologism and a few ideas every one of which has already been under discussion by at least some feminists for years and years.

In several of his writings on this topic Dvorsky claims that Donna Haraway is another contributor to this "movement" he is talking about. Perhaps he would be interested in a few comments made by Haraway in 1999, published in the Donna Haraway Reader in 2004.

DH: I have no patience with the term "post-gender." I have never liked it.

Interviewer: But you used it in the manifesto…" [The interviewer refers to Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," published fifteen years before the interview, and probably her most influential essay so far. --d]

DH: Yes, I did. But I had no idea that it would become this "ism"! [Laughter] You know, I have never used it since! Because post-gender ends up meaning a very strange array of things. Gender is a verb, not a noun. Gender is always about the production of subjects in relation to other subjects, and in relation to artifacts. Gender is about material-semiotic production of these assemblages, these human-artifact assemblages that are people. People are always already in assemblage with worlds. Humans are congeries of things that are not us. We are not self-identical. Gender is specifically a production of men and women. It is an obligatory distribution of subjects in unequal relationships, where some have property in others. Gender is a specific production of subjects in sexualized forms where some have rights in others to reproductivity, and sexuality, and other modes of being in the world. So, gender is specifically a system of that kind, but not continuous across history. Things need not be this way, and in this particular sense that puts focus on a critical relationship to gender along the lines of critical theory's "things need not be this way" -- in this sense of blasting gender I approve of the term "post-gender." But this is not "post-gender" in a utopian, beyond-masculine-and-feminine sense, which it is often taken to mean. It is the blasting of necessity, the non-necessity of this way of doing the world….

It has much to do with "post-gender" in the sense of blasting the scandal of gender and with a feminism that does not embrace Woman, but is for women. This kind of "post-gender" involves the powerful theories of intersection that came out of post-colonial theory, and women of color feminist theory, and that came overwhelmingly, though not only, from people who had been oppressed in colonial and racial ways. They insisted on a kind of relentless intersectionality, that refused any gender analysis standing on its own, and in this context, I find that the term "post-gender" makes sense. Here it can be understood as a kind of intensified critical understanding of these many threads of production of inequality.

As you can see, Haraway doesn't reject the term completely, probably reluctant to throw out completely any tool that shows any promise at all of helping us tinker with patriarchal sex-gender systems in ways that might help more actually existing people live more freely and more legibly within its shifting still too constricting terms. But I don't think Dvorsky -- and other so-called "technoprogressives" and "transhumanists" -- should take much comfort in Haraway's concession because I think his use of the term exactly the sort of clumsy insensitive techno-utopian appropriation she is so skeptical of.

Historically, as more medical techniques to help women more safely end and prevent unwanted pregnancies, as more alternate reproductive technologies (ARTs) to facilitate wanted ones, as more transsexual surgeries and therapies and so on become available they have been taken up creatively and opportunistically by people to practice their sexed, gendered, desiring lives in ways that accord better with their own sense of who they are and what they want, while at once, to be sure, these emerging techniques have also been deployed in risky, confused, exploitative ways (surrogacy and organ harvesting stratified by realities of poverty, fraud, misinformation, duress, for example -- and one can only imagine the abuses in unregulated quests for reproductive cloning given current ignorance and risks) and were understood in terms of prevailing norms used to police possibility and constrain sexed-gendered lifeways even as they ramify them. Technology isn't inherently emancipatory -- it isn't inherently anything -- techniques and artifacts become emancipatory only as they are taken up by people organized to ensure emancipatory outcomes. The very same gender reassignment techniques that empower an informed and consenting transsexual person might be deployed to coerce an intersex child in ways that disempower them catastrophically. I worry that the technological determinism of Dvorsky's transhumanist handwaving about inherently emancipatory technologies, his airy dismissal of modern feminism, his glib acquiescence to a simplistic and sexist vision of genetic destiny (why treat the ways in which men and women presumably are different from one another as more salient than the ways in which men differ from one another and women differ from one another?) all point to an epic underestimation of the practical political work of anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-heterosexist, anti-cisssexist discourse and practice and witness and play to democratize gender, peer-to-peer.

Part of what Haraway is getting at that seems a bit lost on the transhumanist "post-genderists" is her point that sex-gender is, in her words, "an obligatory distribution of subjects in unequal relationships." I mean, leave it to a straight white guy to actually imagine he has "accomplished" the incarnation of a post-gender subjecthood. It isn't enough to point to the evil of the violations and vulnerabilities of sexism and heteronormativity, the fact remains that sex-gender is not so much a disease as a language we all speak, a language we learn if we are to speak at all. People who recognize that language can be used to lie or confuse don't declare ourselves post-linguistic, but strive to remake language to tell more truth. We use it to testify to neglected experiences, we subject it to critical scrutiny, we use it to make poetry.

When we push against the customary demands and expectations of sex and gender to live our lives more as we see fit, we are subversively citing and reciting sexed and gendered terms in the world we are born into. We are not then "post-gender" so much as we are striving to write new poetry with gender. And when we push against sex and gender in the real world we know that sex and gender push back, they exact costs on us, they impose risks on us, they take us by surprise in ways that can be dangerous and deranging. Deviance and defiance aren't happening on the Holodeck in an episode of Star Trek. Who needs to cheerlead about shiny immortal teledildonic robot bodies that may never arrive when people here and now are using language and bodylanguage and artifacts to play with sex-gender norms and make them sing a new tune, with real costs and real risks at stake? There is nothing "post-gender" about subversive but still citational queer practices (and I mean queer in the most capacious understanding of that term) of butch/femme, polyamorous, top/bottom, S/M, bisex/asex/intersex recodings of desire and pleasure and practice. This is about the real world politics of consensual lifeway multiculture, peer to peer. I think I'll stick with the feminists in the real world for now, thanks, and leave the transhumanoid "post-genderists" in the science fiction aisle (after all, we might have a good mutually enriching conversation about Octavia Butler's novels there).

Transhumanism Without Superlativity Is Nothing

Richard comments in the Moot: "Frankly, I wonder what will be left of transhumanism when you take away the technological determinism, but there we are."

This point has a more general force.

Drop the immortalist handwaving and you're left with commitments to universal healthcare and Pro-Choice politics -- and you don't have to join a Robot Cult to advocate that.

Drop the singularitariansim and you're left with commitments to open source and conventional security concerns -- and you don't have to join a Robot Cult to advocate that.

Drop the scientism and reductionist thought-policing and you just become a defender of consensus science where matters of prediction and control are concerned -- and you don't have to join a Robot Cult to advocate that.

The few people who feel a compelling tug from transhumanism don't feel it from the technology. One can find blue-skying about technology across good old fashioned still-vital sf fandoms and general geeky discursive spaces, none of which solicit True Belief in Superlative Techno-Futures or substitute techno-utopianism for policy discourse, or try to whomp up collective enthusiasm for pan-movements with the Keys to History that seek to prevail across the earth. The "technology-talk" which appears to be the focus of transhumanist discourse is in fact little but the occasion, the pretext for its Superlative freighting, for the problematic authoritarian compensations of Faith in the midst of the distress and dumb desires provoked by rapid, radical, ongoing and emerging disruptive technoscientific change.

Sure, transhumanists seeking to insulate themselves from forceful criticisms in the heat of the moment or to increase their membership and fundraising numbers over the longer term can "moderate" the language of their claims here and there. But this is always a matter of "damage control," always a stealthy cynical repackaging in the service of promotional palatability. The more moderated formulations never remain "moderate" or commonsensical, but either drift back into their pre-"moderated" superlative forms in the absence of ongoing scrutiny or they acquire idiosyncratic new essentially superlative connotations for the Faithful... as "technoprogressive" has for the transhumanists who stole and distorted it.

Without the "extreme" beliefs that solicit its faithfulness and hence provoke the experience of "belonging" among its members, transhumanism doesn't have much or possibly any substance to advocate in the first place.

At its ugliest it's just techno-utopian scientistic reductionism with a dose of technocratic elitism, a vulnerability to eugenicism, an embarrassing susceptibility to corporate-militarist techno-hype, and in many of its partisans what looks like a deeply unhealthy dose of body-loathing and flat-out panic at the prospect of death. Not pretty, but not exactly unheard of either as a constellation of dumb attitudes people in certain complex technoscientific societies can get caught up in until they learn better.

The most sensible among the transhumanists, so-called, like to bill the discourse as a technoscientifically literate advocacy of morphological freedom, but their cheerful solidarity with reactionaries, eugenicists, hucksters, and would-be gurus gives the lie to their apparent reasonableness. And, in any case, one simply does not have to join a Robot Cult to approve of science in its place or the politics of choice, and so one has to ask, if you don't have to join a Robot Cult, then why on earth would you?

p2p Democratization

Friend of Blog Martin comments in the Moot:

[E]ve[n] if it is merely an ideal, the actual "capitalist" system that you critique on this blog certainly comes closer to that ideal than the socioeconomic system that you usually defend.

In other words, America leans toward laissez-faire capitalism / libertopianism more than you think his healthy.

Apart from not understanding how a system that one agrees with me doesn't exist actually does exist anyway as "an ideal," I still don't agree with what I think I hear Martin saying here, exactly.

Despite this, I suspect that Martin and I would pick out mostly similar social formations as attractive and unattractive ones on the ground, and so what he has said and what follows is best viewed as a shared effort to find the right words to describe and understand what we find similarly more and less appealing than a disagreement that equity in diversity is appealing in the first place. I mention this up front, because I'm going to disagree with Martin a lot in the specifics here, but it matters that this doesn't necessarily indicate disagreement where things count most on this topic.

Now, in my longer reply to Martin's last comment in the Moot I did actually talk about practices I affirm, Netroots blogging, organizing, donor-aggregation, and so on. Since all that is taking place non-criminally under the auspices of the actually-existing society I wonder does that mean I was defending "actual capitalism" on his terms in doing so?

To be honest, I really don't agree that the American system "comes close" to realizing market libertarian ideology. I think America is a warfare-as-welfare-for-incumbents welfare state organized to preferentially benefit incumbent interests, just open enough to release creative energies to be captured by incumbents but not enough (except occasionally and accidentally) to threaten incumbency itself.

I think "libertarian rhetoric" is a set of figures, frames, and formulations to peddle this unjust state of affairs both to the rationalizing minorities who unjustly benefit by it and to the distracted majorities who are exploited under it, but I do think it is, in essence, a lie. It is the unjust reality and the lie that sells it that I deem unhealthy, not American "proximity" in reality to the market fundamentalist ideal. I think there is no such proximity in evidence.

Martin continues: If money is exchanged more or less evenly between people, that represents a p2p, grassroots topology.

Surely that depends on just what is happening behind the scenes of that "more or less"? How much more evenly, how much less? Why is the state of affairs under which "exchange" takes place in contemporary corporate-militarist crony-capitalist America enough "more" like "even" that one would want to call it a "grassroots topology," rather than enough "less" like "even" that one would want to decry its inhibition of the emergence of such a "grassroots topology"?

If a disproportionate amount of money is taken by one seed or node (the government in this case) and redistributed, that represents a centralized, broadcast topology.

Of course I see why this initially seems attractive as a formulation, but I think the clarity it provides is falsifying. As I said in my last post I think the intuitive force of this framing derives from its incessant reiteration throughout the long neoliberal epoch which has found its consummation (and one hopes, the beginnings of its eclipse) in our current catastrophic moment of planetary distress.

It matters enormously to insist that what governments do isn't a matter of providing "services" like firms do, or at any rate, to realize that when one assumes the vantage from which it appears that this is what they are doing one inevitably loses sight of key ways in which governance differs from other organizations (to recur to the pluralist schema I've been deploying in arguments elsewhere on the blog lately, distinguishing science -- or the efficacious mode in my terms -- from aesthetics with the faithful, or distinguishing morals from ethics with the subcultural, here we have a formulation of mine that relies on a distinction of the efficacious from the political).

One has already found oneself disastrously lodged entirely within the prepolitical "marketeer mindset" if one thinks of governance this way, and this remains true even if one goes on to decide for "pragmatic reasons" that governments are still the best suited organizations to provide some such "services" and then defend them as such.

Legitimacy simply is not a service in this sense. Providing nonviolent alternatives for the resolution of disputes in the scene of nonduressed consent is not a service, it is the establishment of justice, it is the opening of the space of freedom as such.

Treating government as one "seed" or "node" among other organizational forms -- distinguishable from them always in the same ways as they are distinguishable among themselves, through observations of their relative size or influence or what have you -- may be right if one is just reductively charting organizational dynamics (and there are times when this is a valid and useful thing to do, don't get me wrong), but there will be many contexts in which that is a profoundly distortive lens through which to understand what is afoot here.

Once again, I find that this is a discussion that takes us deep into the heart of political theory. Democratized government is not strictly speaking "centralized" even though it still assumes the legitimate monopolistic recourse to force that marketeers identify with repressive "centralization."

The essence of p2p systems is their facilitation of equity in diversity -- which is also precisely the work and effect of democratization.

Most p2p projects are inaugurated by small groups or even single individuals and thereafter the bulk of their work is done by very few -- even if it is true that they "out-compete" non-p2p formations because in their openness they also cheaply solicit the participation of endlessly many other one-time and small-time contributors as well. This could quite superficially be treated as "centralized" in its effects however truly open it remains, if one squints as one looks at it.

Actually-existing democracy functions rather similarly in its solicitation to participation in the actual processes of representation and administration. It is open to the participation of all, but usually attracts only the participation of the interested where they are interested and to the extent that they are interested. What undergirds this participatory expressivity, administration, and oversight, of course, is the democratizing virtuous circle of taking up violence always only to repudiate it, organizing the ineradical capacity for force inhering in plurality always only in the service of the provision of alternatives to the violent resolution of disputes and for the maintenance of the scene of informed, nonduressed consent (the violation of which is always legible as violence: keeping the peace and protecting the scene of consent are essential correlates).

Law is code, code is law. What the architecture that facilitates p2p is to those who experience the emancipatory substance of the p2p ethos, the law that facilitates the scene of informed nonduressed consent is to those who experience the emancipatory substance of the democratic ethos.

The test and the sign of p2p is precisely the same as that of democracy -- whether it actually facilitates equity in diversity.

Martin continues:

Now, obviously, with "run away" capitalism, when money coalesces into the hands of the few and monopolies form, it also becomes a broadcast form of exchange (the difference, of course, for those who support this scenario, is that the market created this outcome. The government is force, but property and the market are not force because those are their Sacred Cows.)

The goal, as I've always said, is to avoid both extremes, both worst-case scenarios. Some combination of free exchange and regulations produces a global maximum of grassroots activity, average quality of life, justice, and all those social indicators that we strive to achieve.

I certainly have no quarrel with the practices of a consensual and nonduressed exchange of goods and services facilitated by money, any more than the practices of the free exchange of testimony and ideas facilitated by words and numbers.

Maybe the real dispute here is just that I assess what Martin would describe as the darker side of money coalescing into the hands of incumbents to recreate a more Broadcast model scenario as pretty straightforwardly the state of affairs with which we are presently living, while he might still think of our circumstances as better described as grassroots exchange? I have to wonder a little just how bad inequality has to get, just how corrupt and unaccountable incumbency has to get before things look less "grassroots" if this is the case!

But there is possibly a more interesting source of disagreement happening here, if I am understanding the stakes in this exchange properly.

You see, I simply don't agree that democracy is a compromise between free markets and totalitarian dictatorship, I don't agree that it represents a moderate middle ground between extremes.

Democracy is for me its own thing, understandable on its own terms, substantiated and struggled for as its own end.

But the dispute at hand may be even more stark than that. Since I think that there is no such thing as a "pure" market order in the sense mobilized by neoliberal and neoconservative market fundamentalist rhetoric and ideology, I actually don't think that constitutes in any intelligible sense an "extreme" that receives partial instantiation in a so-called "mixed economy" in the existing order. I think it is nothing more nor less than a delusive falsification of what is happening in the world -- just as the anti-political fantasy of total omnipotent repressive control over plurality is likewise finally unrealizable (however much damage can be done by the damaged people drawn to that impossible vision).

The task of legitimate democratic governance is to make and then preserve the peace and to produce and then protect the scene of consent (and yes it assumes legitimate recourse to violence in facilitating permanent alternatives to violence in so doing, with all the risks and costs and benefits inhering in this paradoxical gesture).

And as I have said many times, a substantiated as opposed to vacuous scene of consent will be informed and nonduressed.

In a nutshell, democratic government should ensure that consent is informed by providing free life-long education and free universal access to reliable knowledge, and protections against fraud and deception, and that consent is nonduressed by providing universal healthcare and a universal basic income.

This provision produces freedom, it produces peers (social stakeholders with actual equity in their actual diversity), it produces the substance of open collaboration and contestation.

For me, the poles that count are participatory democracy against elite incumbency, not Free Markets against Big Brother. I think these (democracy < -- > incumbency) represent the Left and Right, very straightforwardly.

I see neither pole as an ideal, but both as ongoing processes of interested and interminable struggle, one the struggle to ensure that ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decision that affect them, the other the struggle to ensure that the incumbent interests with whom one most identifies control as much as possible (sometimes, they rationalize, for the good of all).

p2p is democratizing in its effects, which would remain just as true even if these effects were facilitated through the administrative implementation of the scene of informed, nonduressed consent by way of a mandated basic income guarantee and access to reliable knowledge. Crony capitalism as it is practiced under neoliberalism (and its fraternal twin, neoconservatism) is clearly incumbent-supportive in its effects.

Metaphors about Big Brother and Spontaneous Order and all the rest just function to provide false clarity that obscures the obvious truths that actually matter here, in my opinion.

The Retro-Futurist "Revolutionaries"

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot -- h/t Seth.

Most of the parochial visions of "the future" after which superlative technocentrics pine and for which they would eagerly substitute the pleasures and dangers of open futurity, peer-to-peer, finally amount to the conjuration of sweeping transformation at the level of alluring surface details, but always in ways that leave intact all sorts of key reactionary right-wing status quo assumptions about "liberty" as consumption from a menu provided by elites, "competition" as market exchange however duressed, "innovation" as looting of the commons, "value" as price, "endless expansion" as an iron law rather than an offense to logic and common sense, "value-maximization" as a model of rationality even though it is actually a recipe for insanity, and so on.

Techno-Utopian Superlativity Is an Ideological Profession, Not a Scientific Practice

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot.

I'm not a computer scientist, a molecular chemist, a roboticist, a gerontologist, or what have you. But, of course, very few of the techno-utopians who crow about my refusal to engage with their "technical arguments" about the odds of a Robot God, techno-immortality, or nano-santa are scientists themselves or making claims in line with scientific consensus.

It is intriguing to note that it is their clueless immodesty on this score rather than my own sensible deferral to actual scientific consensus that tends to be considered by them the consummate "championing" of Science.

Not to put too fine a point on it, engaging in "technical" discussions with crackpots validates them more than they deserve... though I imagine that at least some actual scientists might enjoy the sport of it. More power to them.

Techno-utopian superlativity is essentially an ideology, and as it happens my own training in rhetoric and ideologiekritik actually provides the perfect background to critique superlativity on terms most relevant to it.

If Everything Is Faith Then Nothing Is

Some highlights, if that's the word, from my latest exchange in the Moot with Mormon Transhumanist Lincoln Cannon:

Dale, you continue to misconstrue (purposefully?) my arguments. I've not claimed sufficent evidence of resurrection, in a corpse or anywhere else, yet you pretend repeatedly (repeatedly... repeatedly) that I have.

You tell me it is a faithful utterance for me to claim that everybody dies, and then whine that I purposely misconstrue your respect for evidence and so on. I honestly can't tell what you even mean by evidence or faith half the time.

However, in contrast, you continue to claim sufficient evidence against resurrection.

Sigh...

Is your hard core scientist at work behind that claim? When you speak of scrambled eggs, you speak of eggs that will remain scrambled, and you see no fanciful magical notion in that? I've never experienced any egg that remains scrambled in perpetuity.

You think it's magical thinking for me to expect my scrambled eggs not to spontaneously unscramble on the plate?

No one else, other than you, that I know has ever made such a claim. The point is that the scrambled egg almost certainly will not remain scrambled. Most likely, at least in the short term, its component parts will become part of other systems. However, given sufficient interest and power, I imagine something sufficiently like the original egg could be restored. That, however, demonstrates a problem with your analogy. Eggs do not have and appear quite unlikely ever to have sufficient interest or power in restoring themselves. Perhaps non-eggs with sufficient interest and power will restore eggs in the future. However, those non-eggs, assuming they are more closely related to us, may be more interested in restoring us -- not in any absolute way, but in a sufficient way, as waking up in the morning is a sufficient restoration of the person you were when you went to bed in the evening.

You got me, Lincoln. In a magical future we may invent scrambled egg reassembly technology. This is what it is like, ladies and gentlemen, to argue with transhumanists. By the way, every single one of you is going to die.

In response to my request for extraordinary evidence for your extraordinary claim that resurrection is impossible, you asked what counts for me as evidence for empirical claims. My answer is: experience.

The experience of hairs springing up on the nape of your neck upon reading what is for you a good poem is not evidence in the scientific sense, and this is part of what I am trying to get at when I insist that we walk and chew gum at the same time, recognizing at one and the same time that science actually is an actual thing providing actual benefits unique to it, while also recognizing that not only science is such a thing providing actual benefits...

However, your claim that resurrection is impossible does not remotely merit the esteem of objectivity, as none of us appear to have shared such experience. You appear to be claiming that you have experienced the impossibility of resurrection, but I don't believe you.

What shall we talk about next, leprechauns? The defeasibility in principle of all warranted scientific consensus fails absolutely to rule them out too. You have never given me any reason to entertain the possibility of resurrection scientifically, so why should I?

I get it, you're scared of dying, or whatever. Fine, go to church or to a brothel or to a therapist or to a drug dealer or to an art gallery or to the movies and deal with it as you see fit. Who cares? Just don't pretend this is a scientific response or that scientific responses aren't scientific when they are.

These fun and games with defeasibility are neither here nor there.

Do I have to pretend "climate skeptics" or studies of "faith healing" or champions of "safe cigarettes" are as scientifically warranted as the contrary scientific consensus on these questions just because as good pragmatists we know that no warranted belief is certain however rightly confident we are in it, that no description is indefeasible in principle by better candidate descriptions that may arrive along the road of inquiry, and that word-world correspondence is a naive and incoherent model of truth?

The answer, for those keeping score at home, is: No.

Rather, I think you are exagerating [sic] as an expression of incredulity, which incredulity is certainly not unusual, but is equally certainly not empirical, objective or scientific.

Declaring things possible without reason and then pointing out nobody is in a position absolutely to disprove them actually isn't science, properly speaking, Lincoln. It can make for interesting poetry, however, or philosophical theory (I have always thought of philosophy as a literary genre rather than a science in any case). It really pays to grasp the difference between these sorts of things...

Science does not somehow compel your faith in this thing. ["This thing" is my belief that everybody dies and that I see no actual cause to seriously entertain the alternate prospect. Lincoln calls this my "faith in superlative death" for some reason.]

We are not only compelled to belief by scientific warrant, it is true. Scientific (or more generally, efficacious), moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political beliefs are all warrantable according to their proper criteria.

If you say it is "faithful" to describe people as always mortal this is just plain wrong. If you point out that your desire to live forever in a robot body is not perfectly disqualified by science then that is strictly speaking right, although not particularly worthy of attention, and certainly you are not being exemplarily scientific in the moments when you claim to believe that you will live forever in a robot body because you want to and it's not logically impossible. If you point out that not only scientific beliefs are valuable, I agree of course and I never said otherwise.

While I agree that science and religion are distinguishable, I disagree with your implication that science does not rely on faith.

Here we go.

The contextual assumptions and methods of science certainly are matters of faith, and will be so always unless we manage somehow to attain to omniscience -- which, in actual manifestation, neither you nor I anticipate. Moreover, religious knowledge should be leveraging the improved epistemic processes of science to the extent they are applicable to its domain, yet this will not somehow drive faith out of religion. There is nothing necessarily irrational, anti-scientific, or willfully-ignorant in the definition of "faith".

Yeah, your Mormon faith is just as scientific as a good engineer's trust in long-warranted claims in physics, and your belief that you might live forever is just as factual as my belief that everybody dies. All very exciting.

Pretending that somehow faith is an altogether separate and unrelated idea from science (holding two ideas in your head at the same time) is not an intellectual strength. Reconciliation, syncretization, even atonement, are intellectual strengths. The former is lazy, whereas the latter is empowering.

How could I have been so lazy to distinguish science from morals, from aesthetics, from ethics, from politics? Everything is so much clearer to me now. I could have been a Mormon Robot Cultist like you all along and just as reasonable as can be! It's a bracing feeling, like a cold shower with a strong rough pungent bar of soap!

Thank you for acknowledging that my faith need not be scientific to deserve affirmation.

Well, I've never said otherwise, and I've written about this repeatedly and at length. But I must say I didn't quite realize that for you "affirmation" would require complete conversion to Mormon Robot Cultism... but I'm ever so much happier now that you've shown me the light of your faith that it's all good.

Please know that I fully agree that we should not pretend to scientific theory where there is none (yet), which is precisely why I've attacked your claim that resurrection is impossible.

You are going to die.

While I fully agree that there generally is no value, and indeed immorality, in attempts to force my will or desires or the law of my community on others, as it turns out, the law of my community, as well as my wills and desires are directed at atonement, or fulfillment of and reconiliation with others' wills, desires and laws. Basic to my faith is interest in the discovery and creation of worlds without end, each consistent with the desires, wills and laws of its inhabitants. So, in spirit, I do agree with your statement, although my faith is abstracted enough that it would almost be accurate to claim that I also disagree with your statement. In a sense, I do intend a universalizable faith, but only in a pluralistic sense, which is a very loose universalization at most, to be sure. This perspective is among the reasons pragmatism is so popular among Mormon philosophers.

I wanna be a transhumanist Mormom, ma!

You claim that I'm using superlativity differently than you. However, I don't think that's the case.

Oh, believe me, it is.

I do think you've not yet recognized that you are treating death in a manner analogous to that in which some Transhumanists treat immortality.

This is a palpably, indeed, flabbergastingly false assertion.

Your explicit claim that resurrection will be impossible corresponds to their implied claim that dying will be impossible.

Genius!

[Y]ou pretend that the observations of most or all humans on Earth is somehow evidence that resurrection is impossible.

How desperately you cling to the fact that defeasible science cannot rule out anything absolutely! Of course I grant all that, that's philosophy 101. My point is that neither is there any scientific reason to entertain some possibilities seriously, without cause.

That's poor reasoning, Dale. Your claim that resurrection is impossible is indeed faithful and unscientific, and will remain so unless you actually attain to omniscience, which in itself would produce the resurrection along with all sorts of nonsense.

You're going to die, Lincoln. I have no cause to seriously entertain alternate claims on this matter -- at least not from a scientific point of view -- even though you are quite right to point out that it is not the power nor frankly the job of science to provide indefeasible descriptions as candidates for our warranted belief, and so your pining for immortality is not strictly speaking ruled out logically as impossible, for whatever that's worth.

In response to my description of the limits of knowledge (that it is always ultimately faith-based), you respond that my description implies that nobody knows anything in any meaningful sense. I disagree, of course, and am somewhat surprised by your response, given your pragmatism. To acknowledge the limits of knowledge is not to become nihilistic.

You are not acknowledging the limits of knowledge as far as I can see but treating factual accounts and faithful aspirations as indistinguishable. I don't know that I think that this is nihilistic of you, but more to the point it sure seems to me relentlessly cynical and deceptive....

Meaning, in the only way "meaning" has any meaning, remains quite accessible without any appeals to actual absolutes, in knowledge or otherwise. Thus, I care about this argument because it is meaningful within the context of meaning as we actually experience it.

Not only science produces meaning, but the meanings produced by science provide benefits unique to science and it pays to understand the differences that make a difference here....

You know, of course, that I am far from alone in my faith.

That's why I am a strong defender of secular multiculture and the separation of church and state.

Indeed, I share substantial portions of my faith with the majority of humans on Earth. The peculiarly Mormon portions of my faith are likewise shared with millions of persons, many of whom are among my closest family and friends. And the peculiarly Transhumist portions of my faith, although far less wide spread, are yet shared to extents I value. Given this, I'm not sure what you intended me to understand by your claim that you somehow better represent planet Earth.

You're right, Lincoln, everybody is a Mormon Techno-Immortalist Robot Cultist like you. You are Everyman....

Faith in theological ideas like transfiguration and resurrection to immortality are more representative of planet Earth than most of the ideas expressed on Amor Mundi.

But I for one salute our coming Mormon Robot Overlords!

Yes. They did laugh at the Wright Brothers. No. They were not vindicated. Moreover, to the extent their laughter was not compassionate, they were never and will never be vindicated, regardless of the success or failure of the targetted [sic] engineer. Vindication has no meaning without ultimate appeal to compassion.

What a way to ignore the point. It isn't only the Wright Brothers -- so beloved by techno-utopian crackpots looking to fund their Robot God pet projects -- who got ridiculed for their far-out plans back in the day. Would-be inventors of fountain of youth elixirs, perpetual motion machines, and circle squaring maths were also ridiculed and it is their plans not their detractors who were vindicated. That's not something Robot Cultists like to remember from history for obvious reasons. But, yes, Lincoln, you're quite right, it's nice to be nice.

You tell me I'm going to die. I agree that to some extent at some time and place, I'll almost certainly die, and my faith is that subsequently, to some extent at some time and place, I'll live again. You tell me that my consciousness will never be uploaded into a computer. I tell you that you have no sufficient evidence against uploading, and that if uploading is possible then you and I are almost certainly already uploaded.

Whatever gets you through the night.

You tell me that resurrection is impossible. I tell you that you have no sufficient evidence against resurrection, and that you do have, instead, a faith in superlative death.

It's a mighty thin thread you're hanging on, and I think you would be better served getting some therapy and coming to terms with your mortality and moving on. But that's not my business and I don't really care so long as you don't evangelize me, or try to undermine the status of science, or get in the way of my own consensual practices of private perfection and public expression to the extent that they do no harm to the general welfare.

Vulnerable processes in demanding environments [like life -- ed.] are not nothing, impotence or perpetual death.

Well, they have always eventuated in death and there never has been a resurrection and there is no cause to seriously entertain the likelihood of one, but, whatever floats your boat.

Clearly, you make a logical mistake in supposing, as you have, that any actual resurrection would imply that resurrection must be pervasive in time and space.

In magical leprechaunland resurrections happen every day, so I too may be immortal and I am edified to think so. Disprove it! You can't? And you claim to be more reasonable than me when you doubt magical leprechaunland resurrection? You call yourself a pragmatist. The very idea.

If resurrection is possible, only something akin to a perpetual motion machine could ensure that you are never resurrected. And again, you have no sufficient evidence that resurrection is impossible.

It's so consoling to believe in magic.

You tell me that you think I'm deluded for wondering whether humans can be transfigured or resurrected. I may indeed be deluded, but I'll add some observations.

First, although you may protest, your faith in prosthetic freedom corresponds to my faith in transfiguration.

Language, spectacles, vaccinations, and transsexual surgeries actually exist. They testify to our humanity, to ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle in historical human multiculture, and they most emphatically don't make of some of us or all of us into exemplars of some "post-human" species. Robot bodies and digital uploaded consciousnesses don't exist. All of this actually matters.

Second, given your limitations (which I presume are similar to mine), your claim that resurrection is impossible is a better candidate for delusion than my recognition that there is no sufficient evidence for or against resurrection.

Wow, not only does our inability to conclusively logically disprove resurrection make it equivalently scientific as the claim that everybody dies, but you believe that the resurrection claim is scientifically stronger than the contrary claim.

Up is down. Check!

If faith is delusion, you and I are both deluded.

No difference between science and religion. Check!

If unwarrented scientific claims are delusion, perhaps only you have the honor.

Only the person concerned to preserve the criteria on the basis of which factual statements are warranted as such is deluded, while the person who demands we entertain non factual but logically "possible" descriptions, however implausible or unmotivated, as warranted is not deluded. Reasonable is delusion, faith is fact. Check!

I agree with your observation that some who fail to come to terms with mortality substitute a life lived with fearfulness that is a death in life. I, too, work against such perspectives, although not at the extreme you do, which extreme introduces other detriments.

Don't be "extreme" in recommending people come to terms with mortality. Mainstream belief is extreme, extreme Robot Cult beliefs are reasonable. Check!

Your faith in superlative death would substitute a living life with a life lived.

No matter how many times you say it this phrase is not one whit more meaningful. And given the fact that I introduced the term Superlative in the critique to which you claim to be responding and gave it a meaning in that critique that you are repeatedly refusing to apply while still reiterating the term itself, I will assume that part of what you are up to is to steal the term the better to domesticate the threat it represents to the dissemination of your worldview. Transhumanists stole technoprogressive, why not try to steal superlative too?

You marginalize possibilities when you posit only finite demanders. Anything short of eternity (in quality and quantity) is unworthy of your unprovisional consent. In that, you damn yourself.

Yes... to reality.

I like reality, the water's fine.

You say you do not agree that all claims become more factual the more fervently we pine for them to be true. In that, you appear to be acknolwedging that some claims become more factual the more fervently we pine for them to be true.

You have to be pretty desperate to find such an acknowledgment in what I said. But, let me clarify it for you now. Fervency of belief is irrelevant as a criterion for warrantability in the efficacious mode...

You say you do not agree that heavier-than-air flight was invented only when enough people believed in it enough to make it so. I actually do agree that I see heavier-than-air flight occurring in nature, and I actually do believe that it was possible prior to human belief in it.

Wow, what a stunning concession to the obvious.

However, our faith was essential in our engineering efforts, and so will faith remain essential in future engineering efforts. The strategy of clapping louder, understood as a metaphor that in practice should be fully extended to WORK, is indeed working, although not always so fast or so well as we would like. I anticipate there will always remain work to do in pursuit of the better world.

We're talking about the criteria on the basis of which we warrantedly affirm candidate descriptions for instrumental belief as true, we are not talking about how motivation enables projects to find their way to fruition where they already conform to the physical and social strictures at hand. Or if that is what you are talking about, that isn't what I was talking about.

But, no, clapping louder won't make you immortal. However loud you clap.

Finally, I'll respond, in a somewhat tangential way, to your question: "What the hell are you gabbing about then?" I'm gabbing about similarities and differences I perceive between your ideas and my own, and I'm doing that because I value your divergent perspectives, which you have, as yet, continued to gab about.

That's fine. I am enjoying this exchange much less at this point than you appear to be. If there weren't an audience of lurkers here I am presumably instructing on matters of concern to me concerning pragmatism, pluralism, and the critique of superlativity through the publication of this conversation with you I would very likely simply be ignoring you at this point, on this topic at any rate.

p2p Is Not Anarchy

In a post yesterday I described peer-to-peer democratization as one of my chief personal and scholarly interests. I wrote:

I think of as peer-to-peer democratization [as] encompassing the analysis of Netroots organizing, copyfight struggles, basic income advocacy (what I call "pay-to-peer"), and also connections between p2p formations and the history of nonviolent activism, what I think of as p2p peacework or peace in pieces.

Friend of Blog Martin responded in the Moot: "Ironically, the laissez-faire capitalist system of grassroots exchanges of money is 'p2p' while basic income guarantee represents a centralized, 'broadcast' form of economic exchange.

I strongly disagree with this characterization (if I am understanding it aright), but saying why takes us into right into the heart of democratic theory and rhetoric.

First of all, just to get this out of the way, when Martin refers to "the laissez-faire capitalist system of grassroots exchanges of money" as a kind of actually-existing p2p formation it is truly crucial to remind everybody that this "laissez-faire capitalist system of exchanges" does not, nor has it ever, nor could it ever exist.

The formations that we describe as "Market" orders, such as they are, depend on laws backed by force, depend on norms practiced in the context of relatively stable institutions providing for the resolution of disputes beholden to legitimate governance, depend on infrastructure maintained to provide equity for all citizens rather than profit for a minority of owners, and depend on prices articulated by treaties, protocols, agreements, regulations enacted by authorized representatives, and on and on and on and on and on. The actual historical forms that so-called free, so-called spontaneous, so-called natural markets take will actually definitively reflect the particular historical forms of these laws, norms, protocols, treaties, assumptions on which they also depend for their maintenance.

Laissez-faire capitalism and the fantasy of "spontaneous order" are entirely rhetorical constructions deployed by incumbent interests to bamboozle majorities into collaborating in the terms of their own exploitation by incumbent interests who benefit from the indispensable unpaid or ill-paid looting of their common heritage, earthly commons, and their common peers.

These things must be said, else conversations like this, however progressive and democratic their aspirations, will end up endorsing deep assumptions on which incumbent and anti-democratic politics quite to the contrary of our aspirations rely for their ongoing intelligibility and force.

Now, more to the point at hand, what Martin is deploying in his ironic observation is Yochai Benkler's distinction between a Broadcast Media Model and a Peer-to-Peer Model, which Benkler goes on very provocatively and (apparently for Martin as much as for me too) powerfully to subsume under the more general distinction between an Industrial Model and Peer Production Model that can be applied to organization more broadly. Martin and I both agree that this distinction has real salience if we would grasp the significance of emerging shifts in the practice of governance in networked societies.

But it seems to me if you want to apply Benkler's industrial versus p2p figure to governance, the proper place to apply it is to the shift from sovereign to ever more democratic governance, and not as yet another retelling of the right-wing fantasy of Big Brother against Free Markets.

The current Netroots challenge of the Democratic Party corporatist "Machine Politics" and the corporate media via blogs, small campaign donor aggregation, rapid media pushback, public fact-checking, incumbent challenges, and so on very palpably represents a shift from a hierarchical-broadcast-gatekeeper model of partisan politics to a mass amateurization of politics peer to peer. If one locates p2p instead in the place of "spontaneous order" from neoliberal and libertopian ideology, such shifts -- which are the only rival to human influenced ecosystemic change and resource descent as the most significant force afoot in the world at the moment -- become difficult to grasp in their significance or even become invisible altogether.

We all have to push beyond the libertopian figuration of government as always equaling Big Brother and markets as always equaling Spontaneous Order, and then locating violence always on the one side and then nonviolence always on the other, locating centralization always on the one side and decentralization always on the other.

I doubt that Martin is actually entrapped by these metaphors as much as, say, the silly online anarcho-capitalists and dynamists and Randians and the rest are (poor things), but come what may his opening gambit essentially reproduces that conventional market libertarian/neoliberal figure and relies for its force on the intuitive plausibility that comes from that figure's incessant repetition since WWII (as a forceful opposition discourse since Hayek's Mount Pelerin declaration, and as a forceful orthodox discourse since the appointment by Carter of Volcker as Fed Chair and by every Administration, very much including Clinton's, since then).

Grasping what is wrong with this figuration at its heart is key to grasping how specifically deranging it is to read p2p democratization through the lens of this figure, this framing.

Violence inheres in human plurality as a permanent possibility, and human beings are always capable of retroactively justifying any conduct, however violent or unjust, if they have the authority to get away with it. Governments claim and then exercise a monopoly on the legitimate recourse to coercion within particular geographical or jurisdictional bounds. That an authorized minority can and almost inevitably will exercise violence on the majority is another permanent and ineradicable possibility inhering again in the basic fact of human plurality in its actually-existing diversity.

The violent state is ineradicable, not to be wished away by New Age fantasies of a triumph of love over all, nor defined away as free marketeers do when they simply claim that all market exchanges, however duressed, are noncoercive by fiat, nor smashed in some revolutionary's or anarchist's daydream of violence.

The State cannot be wished away or smashed, but at best democratized, tasked to maintain institutions that provide for nonviolent alternatives for the resolution of disputes and to maintain the legible scene of informed nonduressed consent for their citizens, through the connection of a guarantee of representation and legal recourse to any who are taxed to support its ongoing functioning, through the multilateral antagonisms of a separation of powers, through the dedication to a Constitution and delineated Rights invested with a formal universality soliciting foundational investment rendered especially resistant to tampering, through the solicitation of ever wider ever more diverse participation, and so on.

Where governance is backed by the consent of the governed as well as by its ineradicable violence, it can legitimize and so transform the red thread of that violence into one tasked always only with preserving the peace and protecting the scene of consent on which it depends. The creation of this virtuous circle is the great triumph of democratization, to the extent that we have managed through centuries, bit by bit, to institute it, struggle for it, and in struggling through it to invigorate it.

What I worry that Martin is decrying in his response as the "centralization" or "industrialization" of a government regulation and subsidization of p2p formations is in fact the legitimacy that is ineradicably connected to the monopolization of the recourse to violence to preserve the peace and protect the scene of consent.

But the alternative to such centralization is not free love or a market provision of these "services," but inevitably the disintegration of freedom and the reappearance of the tyrannical sovereign "centralized" form of authority at the local level. p2p won't smash the state (nor should anybody in their right mind want to smash the state), but p2p can facilitate its ongoing democratization to the emancipation of us all.

As it happens governments (even the cranky minarchist Founding Era United States) have always subsidized the media infrastructure on which they depend for the administration of trade, intelligence, and defense, from roads, to postal services, to universities and presses, to telegraphy and telephony, to radio, to television, to the internet. Subsidizing peer production practices with a basic income guarantee (my "pay-to-peer" scheme) would be an extension of this practice, even further substantiating the democratic civilizational ethos that citizens are peers rather than clients of or footsoldiers for self-appointed elites.

That this development would not properly be described as "centralized" or "broadcast" or "industrial" in essence -- even if a neoliberal/libertopian mindset will assume otherwise since the development is to be brought into being in the first place only through the administration of a legitimate governance tasked to provide equity to all its diversity of stakeholders -- would surely be substantiated through a survey of its actual effects, which in my expectation would be a massive expansion and leveling of the actual practices of public agitation, organization, participation, criticism, collaboration, contestation, and so on.

p2p democratization so far has emerged out of some really small changes in transaction costs for certain kinds of organized activity, changes so small that almost nobody ever grasps their significance until they find themselves wallowing in the effects.

We must never underestimate the impact of losing Net Neutrality battles, losing media consolidation battles, losing copyfight battles, losing privacy battles on the ongoing p2p revolution. There is nothing inevitable in this marvelous thing that is happening around us (in the nick of time, given the bloodyminded lies and crimes of the Right and given the unprecedented crises arising from our long abuse of the environment). We have to fight for it. p2p democratization is technodevelopmental social struggle. Instituting Net Neutrality, breaking up media monopolies, providing free fast wifi everywhere, subsidizing p2p with basic income can make p2p practices harder to circumvent and strengthen democracy, but these measures require struggle.

It's far too early for triumphalism, especially any foolish triumphalism inspired by faith in the fantasy of inherently libertory technologies presumably at hand. Neoliberal forces and market libertarian ideology are nothing but obstacles to the actual political work at hand.