What I Work On, What I Think About, What I Blog On

Professionally, I suppose, my most legible area of research is in science and technology studies, especially technocultural and technoethical theory. My primary interest these days is the political theory of networked societies in a moment of transition from broadcast to p2p, especially

[1] what I think of as peer-to-peer democratization (encompassing the analysis of Netroots organizing, copyfight struggles, basic income advocacy as 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),

[2] what I see as the conjunction of p2p practices and permaculture practices (encompassing commons models of seed/water sovereignty politics, networked/decentralized models of renewable resource provision, thinking of the role of mass-mediation in the emergence of planetary political consciousness, networked localisms, and what I call appropriate and appropriable technology discourses), and

[3] what I think of as the prevailing biopolitical regime of neoliberal-eugenic bioremedial networks (encompassing work on medical surveillance, normalizing therapization in the name of universal care, ongoing enclosure of the genomic commons, precarity and duressed corporate-militarist experimental subjection) together with the possibilities for informed nonduressed consensual prosthetic self-determination and planetary lifeway multiculture as an alternative regime facilitated by p2p networks.

That's what I'm working on, thinking about, and teaching in my courses when I can. (I spend a lot of my time lecturing in the history of philosophy, critical theory, political theory, aesthetic theory, all of which is of course pitched at a level of generality and covers timescales that have me emphasizing different issues than these in my classes -- fortunately, these are enormously provocative and fun things to devote one's time and attention to as well.)

The superlative discourses to the critique of which I am devoting so much of my blogging these days seem to me to symptomize prevailing irrationalities of technodevelopmental discourse in a neoliberal/neoconservative epoch. These would be well worth understanding on terms other than the ones they use to promote themselves for that reason alone, quite apart from my sense they are dangerously anti-democratizing as well.

From that more polemical standpoint, transhumanism, singularitarianism, techno-immortalism, neoliberal-eugenicism, technocratic elitism, scientistic reductionist triumphalism and my other usual targets for critique are marginal (some more than others) sub(cult)ural locations that are connected to more prevailing and more influential discourses and rhetoric and frames (on which they depend and to which they perniciously contribute) that stand in complex relations to corporate-militarist technodevelopmental formations in the present in ways that demand the scrutiny of democratically-minded people. However marginal they are (and the fact of their marginality is in some respects intriguingly different from the fact of their actual influence rhetorically/discursively) they also could become far more actively dangerous even where they are now palpably marginalized by way of more than one plausible funding or organizational pathway (inklings of which I already see in motion in some cases) and it is good to expose these possibilities and fight them on that level as well in my view.