Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot, a continuation of the discussion in the prior post (possibly with a different interlocutor, though):
I wrote: "Life is lived in vulnerable bodies, intelligence is performed in squishy brains and squishy socialities."
"James" responded: Yes, this is quite true, right now.
So, get back to me when your counterexample isn't made up bullshit.
Magical thinking isn't daring, it's dumb.
James writes: I agree with everything else in [your] post -- I just feel strongly about assumptions that biology is somehow special. It's not. Carbon's just what initially won out over everything else.
But, the thing is, biology is special, surely?
Actual lives, actually embodied intelligence, actual persons, are all actually special.
I know James will (rightly) disapprove being made to seem as though he would explicitly deny this (since I doubt he would), but I worry that we are lead to denigrate the ways in which actually existing lives are vulnerable and actually existing intelligences are embodied when we indulge in what James surely intends as a more specialized usage of the term "special" here. (Although I do find it intriguing that James goes so far as to indicate not only disagreement but "strong feeling" on this question of not connecting intelligence too forcefully to the living world even when there is not as yet any empirical reason at all not to do that very thing, especially where, for example, the parts of intelligence connected to "strong feeling" are concerned.)
James writes: There is nothing inherently "intelligent" about biological systems, nor is there anything inherently "dumb" about non-biological systems. Intelligence is a product of the complexity of the system in question; whatever makes it up is a triviality (this is likely, anyway. God knows how long it will take to find out, though...).
To admit the truth that every life in the world you know is lived in a body and every intelligence you encounter and actually come to terms with is vulnerably lived and historically situated doesn't commit one to some grand claim about intelligence being a property "inherent" always only in biology to the logical exclusion of everything else or what have you.
I don't have any interest in making such a claim. I don't think there is any reasonable occasion that impels me to that claim. I don't think there is any reason for people sensibly to care about such a claim. I don't agree to play the game of that final parenthesis in which we are suddenly called upon to make and compare "predictions" and argue about attributions premised on caring about whatever is presumably being zeroed in on in this discussion of "inherence" or not of intelligence in life.
To be honest, asserting either that intelligence inheres always only in biological beings -- or worse, asserting the contrary -- just seems to me to make people talk confusedly about things that do exist in terms of things that don't exist.
I am convinced that a great many people who talk this way do so simply because they are scared of their vulnerability or ultimately of dying and they want to linger "spiritually" or "informationally" beyond lived life and death and the denial of life's and intelligence's palpable incarnation somehow facilitates their denials of this. Obviously not all who talk this way do so for this reason, but many seem to indeed.
Others I am convinced who talk this way do so, oddly enough, because they don't like the humanities, their aesthetic temperament disdains the derangements of literal language in the figurative, they are impatient with the paradoxes and intractable dilemmas of theory, they grow painfully frustrated with the interminable processing of political or psychological difference, and so on, and a denigration of life's mess avails them a measure of more secure and instrumentally efficacious preoccupations -- which undeniably do have their beauty and power after all.
I realize the "made up bullshit" comment with which I began all this was unduly harsh. But the fact is the denial of the specialness of actually embodied intelligence, actually vulnerable lives is a truly extraordinary claim and I have never once encountered the extraordinary reason that justifies making it, nor certainly have I understood the curious tendency of those who make it to pretend that there is something extraordinary instead about the contrary claims that intelligence is embodied and life vulnerable when literally every intelligence and life has testified to precisely this and none the other.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
"Technology" Changes the Game
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot
I wrote:
To which someone "Anonymously" responded:
Your "always" triggers me Dale. Technology changes the rules of the political game.
My replies to their (italicized) comments follow:
Weather changes the rules of the political game. Pandemics change the rules of the political game. Personalities change the rules of the political game. The devils, as well as the angels, are in the details.
When I insist that "technology" does not exist "in general" this is far from a denial that a diversity of techniques and devices exist and have an impact in the world. Quite the opposite.
There is no such thing as a "technology" that subsumes or subtends all the instances to which that description attaches in a way that can be isolated as a factor with a general predictable impact on political, social, cultural, historical change.
It is the deployment of technologies and the exercise of techniques arising out of unique historical situations, playing out unpredictably in historical dynamisms, and in the service of a diversity of ends that yields technodevelopmental effects.
To ascribe an outcome to "technology" is almost always vacuous. That this sort of utterance has become such an explanatory commonplace is enormously curious and even suspicious.
When most people became literate, it was possible to discuss politics with a much broader group of people.
And "becoming literate" = "technology" in this example?
What, everybody suddenly got bonked in the head with a book or maybe even a printing press? Just think of the complex multivalent practical, cultural, economic, institutional, legal, moral, psychological dynamisms and trajectories that materially fleshed out "becoming literate" in different historical, demographic, personal situations.
What developmental generalization are you drawing from that complex that presumably also obtain for all other instances of the "technological" including inventing and distributing and making use of the cotton gin and the internal combustion engine and the crossbow and anaesthesia and the technique of perspective painting?
If/when people are able to upload and thereby create close to immortal entities they wont have the same priorities as people restricted to living less than a century.
Here we go. Look, you are playing fast and loose with the English language in an all too customarily religious manner here, if I may say so. "If/then" statements cite causal conventions arising from and depending for their intelligibility on our experience of a world with mid-scale furniture and communicative peers and so on behaving in familiar ways.
When a religious person speaks of their expectation of personal resurrection as a soul and of its ascent into an immortal afterlife in Heaven these utterances can only be taken by sensible people as metaphorical utterances without literal reference or as public signals of subcultural membership in a moral or otherwise interpretative community, rather like a secret handshake -- or less charitably they can be taken as expressions of extreme confusion or insanity.
Precisely the same goes for statements about "uploading." When I dismiss these utterances you misunderstand me if you assume I am disagreeing with you on a matter of a testable hypothesis -- even when the form my dismissal takes is "never gonna happen." I am saying that what we mean by "persons," what we mean by "living" cannot coherently accommodate "uploading" or "immortality" and that people who say these things must be speaking metaphorically or subculturally (indeed, Robot Cult-urally) or be deeply confused or possibly a little crazy. Life is lived in vulnerable bodies, intelligence is performed in squishy brains and squishy socialities.
I believe that a majority of the elderly able to do so will do it,
When you use the verb "able" and the pronoun "it" here in respect to "uploading" you make the mistake of imagining you know something about which you are talking. Unfortunately, you don't.
and they will be both a minority (of earths total population) and a very resourceful group.
See, you are indulging in a full froth of faithful handwaving and imagine yourself to be engaging in some sort of policy wonk discourse. This is a problem.
If/when we are able to live comfortably on other planets, environmental issues on this planet wont be as important as they are now.
No doubt the same would be true if we could live in other dimensions or perform spells with wands. That human life on other suitably terraformed planets is logically feasible in ways that interdimensionality or magicality likely are not is irrelevant given that the scientific and, more to the point, political, legal, practical problems of environmentalism are urgently proximate in ways that render remote developmental possibilities like interplanetary diaspora and logical impossibilities like practical wand magic exactly equally irrelevant (at best) to those who would attend to actual problems.
Every second wasted in the contemplation of techno-utopian "solutions" to real problems -- however earnest -- is functionally equivalent to time devoted to the active frustration of problem-solving or active denialism about the problem in the first place. Again, at best it is a matter of handwaving by the faithful confusing itself and others for policy discourse.
Whatever political system that will evolve within the next hundred years I don't think the above will change.
Political systems don't "evolve." And I have no idea what actually substantial thing you have described in "the above" is presumably not going to change or what significance you think attaches to whatever invariance you think you have hit upon.
If the world were otherwise than it is, its problems would be different than they are, too.
Uh, sure. So what?
I wrote:
There is an ongoing prosthetic elaboration of agency -- where "culture" is the widest word for prostheses in this construal -- and which is roughly co-extensive with the ongoing historical elaboration of "humanity." But there are only techniques in the service of ends, and the ends are articulated by pretty conventional moral and aesthetic values and embedded in pretty conventional political narrative -- democratization against elitism, change against incumbency, consent against tyranny, equity for all against excellence for few, and so on.The pretense or gesture of a technoscientific circumvention of the political seems to me to conduce usually to de facto right wing politics, since it functions to de-politicize as neutrally "technical" a host of actually moral, aesthetic, political quandaries actually under contest. This is a mistake as easily made by dedicated well-meaning people of the left or the right, as by cynical or dishonest ones, or simply by foolish people, whatever their political sympathies. But it is always a mistake.
To which someone "Anonymously" responded:
Your "always" triggers me Dale. Technology changes the rules of the political game.
My replies to their (italicized) comments follow:
Weather changes the rules of the political game. Pandemics change the rules of the political game. Personalities change the rules of the political game. The devils, as well as the angels, are in the details.
When I insist that "technology" does not exist "in general" this is far from a denial that a diversity of techniques and devices exist and have an impact in the world. Quite the opposite.
There is no such thing as a "technology" that subsumes or subtends all the instances to which that description attaches in a way that can be isolated as a factor with a general predictable impact on political, social, cultural, historical change.
It is the deployment of technologies and the exercise of techniques arising out of unique historical situations, playing out unpredictably in historical dynamisms, and in the service of a diversity of ends that yields technodevelopmental effects.
To ascribe an outcome to "technology" is almost always vacuous. That this sort of utterance has become such an explanatory commonplace is enormously curious and even suspicious.
When most people became literate, it was possible to discuss politics with a much broader group of people.
And "becoming literate" = "technology" in this example?
What, everybody suddenly got bonked in the head with a book or maybe even a printing press? Just think of the complex multivalent practical, cultural, economic, institutional, legal, moral, psychological dynamisms and trajectories that materially fleshed out "becoming literate" in different historical, demographic, personal situations.
What developmental generalization are you drawing from that complex that presumably also obtain for all other instances of the "technological" including inventing and distributing and making use of the cotton gin and the internal combustion engine and the crossbow and anaesthesia and the technique of perspective painting?
If/when people are able to upload and thereby create close to immortal entities they wont have the same priorities as people restricted to living less than a century.
Here we go. Look, you are playing fast and loose with the English language in an all too customarily religious manner here, if I may say so. "If/then" statements cite causal conventions arising from and depending for their intelligibility on our experience of a world with mid-scale furniture and communicative peers and so on behaving in familiar ways.
When a religious person speaks of their expectation of personal resurrection as a soul and of its ascent into an immortal afterlife in Heaven these utterances can only be taken by sensible people as metaphorical utterances without literal reference or as public signals of subcultural membership in a moral or otherwise interpretative community, rather like a secret handshake -- or less charitably they can be taken as expressions of extreme confusion or insanity.
Precisely the same goes for statements about "uploading." When I dismiss these utterances you misunderstand me if you assume I am disagreeing with you on a matter of a testable hypothesis -- even when the form my dismissal takes is "never gonna happen." I am saying that what we mean by "persons," what we mean by "living" cannot coherently accommodate "uploading" or "immortality" and that people who say these things must be speaking metaphorically or subculturally (indeed, Robot Cult-urally) or be deeply confused or possibly a little crazy. Life is lived in vulnerable bodies, intelligence is performed in squishy brains and squishy socialities.
I believe that a majority of the elderly able to do so will do it,
When you use the verb "able" and the pronoun "it" here in respect to "uploading" you make the mistake of imagining you know something about which you are talking. Unfortunately, you don't.
and they will be both a minority (of earths total population) and a very resourceful group.
See, you are indulging in a full froth of faithful handwaving and imagine yourself to be engaging in some sort of policy wonk discourse. This is a problem.
If/when we are able to live comfortably on other planets, environmental issues on this planet wont be as important as they are now.
No doubt the same would be true if we could live in other dimensions or perform spells with wands. That human life on other suitably terraformed planets is logically feasible in ways that interdimensionality or magicality likely are not is irrelevant given that the scientific and, more to the point, political, legal, practical problems of environmentalism are urgently proximate in ways that render remote developmental possibilities like interplanetary diaspora and logical impossibilities like practical wand magic exactly equally irrelevant (at best) to those who would attend to actual problems.
Every second wasted in the contemplation of techno-utopian "solutions" to real problems -- however earnest -- is functionally equivalent to time devoted to the active frustration of problem-solving or active denialism about the problem in the first place. Again, at best it is a matter of handwaving by the faithful confusing itself and others for policy discourse.
Whatever political system that will evolve within the next hundred years I don't think the above will change.
Political systems don't "evolve." And I have no idea what actually substantial thing you have described in "the above" is presumably not going to change or what significance you think attaches to whatever invariance you think you have hit upon.
If the world were otherwise than it is, its problems would be different than they are, too.
Uh, sure. So what?
Sunday, January 25, 2009
What Do Transhumanists Actually Believe In?
To continue from my last post with the discussion of Russell Blackford's recent defense of the superlative technocentricity of the so-called Cosmic Engineers, I want to shift my attention away from what seems to me to be a curiously misplaced preoccupation in Blackford's piece with presumably fashionable and tyrannical political correctness among the relativist academic Left (of all things) to the one statement in the entire piece that seemed to me to name something like what Blackford thinks "transhumanism" actually, positively, substantially stands for. He writes:
I find this statement problematic at two different levels.
First:
As an everyday sort of utterance it seems to me that the belief that "technology can improve the human situation and enhance human capacities" is as vapid a commonplace as one could ever hope to find.
Is there anybody on earth who manages consistently to disagree with this belief? Even deep ecologists who devote their lives to the critique of "the technological society" tend to defend the notion of "appropriate technology," after all, and even the ones who haven't exactly thought the matter through still tend to use pencils and wear eyeglasses and visit the doctor.
The idea that one invents tools to do wanted things with them is surely rather built in to the notion of "technology" in the first place? One doesn't want to end the story there -- there are questions about what is wanted in what sense, with what consequences, and so on, but we'll turn to a slightly deeper intervention in a moment.
As for "enhancing human capacities," this is a bit trickier, but at the same everyday speech level as the one in which almost everybody as a matter of course already believes technology can be helpful it is also true that almost everybody already believes as a matter of course that healthcare is a good thing (where it is made to be as safe and fair as may be and so on), and that healthcare is a matter of intervening in dis-ease to render ease.
Again, there are questions whether rendering ease is quite the same thing as "enhancement" but we'll get to that in a moment.
At this first level of attention, though, I just want to point out that there is a really substantial sense in which the belief Blackford declares to be his own and seems to identify with "transhumanism" constitutes such a complete commonplace that the question becomes against whom does Blackford really imagine himself to be in disagreement and why on earth would anybody imagine one needs a new (?), unique (?) "movement" or "program" to affirm or defend or promote these commonplaces?
Second:
Once we set aside everyday usage and interrogate these commonplaces in a more analytic way we find that they don't really hold up to scrutiny at all (this is no argument in my view against their perfect usefulness in their everyday usage; that would require a different argument).
Although I have no trouble at all making sense of the everyday utterance that "technology can improve the human situation," this is not at all an utterance I would be comfortable to affirm in a careful accounting of technoscientific change.
If one is taking greater care around these claims in an effort to understand technodevelopmental social struggle the first thing one will immediately observe is that while some technoscientific changes improve the situation (whether in the short term or in the longer term) of at least some human beings (though rarely all, and never in the same way or to the same extent) some do not, and that the logical possibility that technology can improve things for some is less to the point than determining just whose lot will be improved, and how much, for how long, at what cost, at what risk, to whom and on what terms, and then determining how best case outcomes might be facilitated in light of all this.
What one discovers soon enough is that it is never "technology" as such that "improves" things for anybody.
There is no such thing as "technology" at that level of generality in the first place, and it does a terrible disservice to sense to imply otherwise. Rather, there are historically situated technoscientific vicissitudes caught up in the ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle of the diversity of stakeholders to technoscientific change who share the world.
Further, it is the uses to which technoscientific discoveries are put that determines their impact for good or ill. These uses are driven by moral, esthetic, ethical, and political values -- and are not somehow determined by what passes for "technology" itself in any given moment of technodevelopmental social struggle.
This matters, because it means that even those who focus on the political problems and promises of technoscientific change in particular will rightly attend more to the terms of fairly conventional political value than to the particulars of technoscience to the extent that their concern is actually more political (facilitating equity, diversity, and consent, say) than specifically scientific.
The same sort of concern is very much alive when one wants to look closely at the notion of "enhancing human capacities." Enhancement is always: enhancement -- in the service of some ends over others; enhancement -- according to whom as against who else.
While we can agree that healthcare provision is being rendered non-normalizing in an unprecedented way by emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies, the determination of what non-normalizing interventionals are "enhancements" is not somehow determined by the therapies at hand but through the scene of actually informed actually nonduressed consensual self-determination in planetary multiculture.
To the extent that "transhumanism" wants to imply that political ends like the "improvement of the human situation" are determined by scientific developments apart from political contestation and consensual self-determination then this seems to me a facile, too-familiar, dangerously anti-democratizing thesis of reductionism coupled to technocratic elitism.
To the extent that "transhumanism" wants to imply that it can dictate the terms on which non-normalizing healthcare will yield "enhancement of human capacities" and when it will not apart from political contestation and consensual self-determination then this seems to me a moralizing, too-familiar, dangerously anti-democratizing thesis of eugenicism coupled to technocratic elitism again.
To the extent that "transhumanism" wants no more than to imply that tools can be useful and healthcare can be a good thing, well, I'm afraid one doesn't need to join a Robot Cult to advocate such commonplaces, indeed one probably needs to find one's way to a Luddite Cult as marginal as the Robot Cult itself to find anybody who consistently disapproves such commonplaces.
Now, if one wants to profess faith in a technologically determined human destiny aspiring toward the accomplishment of secularized theological omni-predicates, digital superintelligence, therapized superlongevity, virtual or nanotechnological superabundance then I daresay one probably does need to join a Robot Cult to find a community of the like-minded, and the same goes for those who would recast eugenic parochialism as an emancipatory program in this day and age.
None of these results seem to me to conduce much to the benefit of those who would declare "movement transhumanism" a reasonable enterprise as it actually plays out in the world.
I will always be looking for avenues to argue as strongly and effectively as I can for what I believe -- which includes the idea that technology can improve the human situation and enhance human capacities.
I find this statement problematic at two different levels.
First:
As an everyday sort of utterance it seems to me that the belief that "technology can improve the human situation and enhance human capacities" is as vapid a commonplace as one could ever hope to find.
Is there anybody on earth who manages consistently to disagree with this belief? Even deep ecologists who devote their lives to the critique of "the technological society" tend to defend the notion of "appropriate technology," after all, and even the ones who haven't exactly thought the matter through still tend to use pencils and wear eyeglasses and visit the doctor.
The idea that one invents tools to do wanted things with them is surely rather built in to the notion of "technology" in the first place? One doesn't want to end the story there -- there are questions about what is wanted in what sense, with what consequences, and so on, but we'll turn to a slightly deeper intervention in a moment.
As for "enhancing human capacities," this is a bit trickier, but at the same everyday speech level as the one in which almost everybody as a matter of course already believes technology can be helpful it is also true that almost everybody already believes as a matter of course that healthcare is a good thing (where it is made to be as safe and fair as may be and so on), and that healthcare is a matter of intervening in dis-ease to render ease.
Again, there are questions whether rendering ease is quite the same thing as "enhancement" but we'll get to that in a moment.
At this first level of attention, though, I just want to point out that there is a really substantial sense in which the belief Blackford declares to be his own and seems to identify with "transhumanism" constitutes such a complete commonplace that the question becomes against whom does Blackford really imagine himself to be in disagreement and why on earth would anybody imagine one needs a new (?), unique (?) "movement" or "program" to affirm or defend or promote these commonplaces?
Second:
Once we set aside everyday usage and interrogate these commonplaces in a more analytic way we find that they don't really hold up to scrutiny at all (this is no argument in my view against their perfect usefulness in their everyday usage; that would require a different argument).
Although I have no trouble at all making sense of the everyday utterance that "technology can improve the human situation," this is not at all an utterance I would be comfortable to affirm in a careful accounting of technoscientific change.
If one is taking greater care around these claims in an effort to understand technodevelopmental social struggle the first thing one will immediately observe is that while some technoscientific changes improve the situation (whether in the short term or in the longer term) of at least some human beings (though rarely all, and never in the same way or to the same extent) some do not, and that the logical possibility that technology can improve things for some is less to the point than determining just whose lot will be improved, and how much, for how long, at what cost, at what risk, to whom and on what terms, and then determining how best case outcomes might be facilitated in light of all this.
What one discovers soon enough is that it is never "technology" as such that "improves" things for anybody.
There is no such thing as "technology" at that level of generality in the first place, and it does a terrible disservice to sense to imply otherwise. Rather, there are historically situated technoscientific vicissitudes caught up in the ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle of the diversity of stakeholders to technoscientific change who share the world.
Further, it is the uses to which technoscientific discoveries are put that determines their impact for good or ill. These uses are driven by moral, esthetic, ethical, and political values -- and are not somehow determined by what passes for "technology" itself in any given moment of technodevelopmental social struggle.
This matters, because it means that even those who focus on the political problems and promises of technoscientific change in particular will rightly attend more to the terms of fairly conventional political value than to the particulars of technoscience to the extent that their concern is actually more political (facilitating equity, diversity, and consent, say) than specifically scientific.
The same sort of concern is very much alive when one wants to look closely at the notion of "enhancing human capacities." Enhancement is always: enhancement -- in the service of some ends over others; enhancement -- according to whom as against who else.
While we can agree that healthcare provision is being rendered non-normalizing in an unprecedented way by emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies, the determination of what non-normalizing interventionals are "enhancements" is not somehow determined by the therapies at hand but through the scene of actually informed actually nonduressed consensual self-determination in planetary multiculture.
To the extent that "transhumanism" wants to imply that political ends like the "improvement of the human situation" are determined by scientific developments apart from political contestation and consensual self-determination then this seems to me a facile, too-familiar, dangerously anti-democratizing thesis of reductionism coupled to technocratic elitism.
To the extent that "transhumanism" wants to imply that it can dictate the terms on which non-normalizing healthcare will yield "enhancement of human capacities" and when it will not apart from political contestation and consensual self-determination then this seems to me a moralizing, too-familiar, dangerously anti-democratizing thesis of eugenicism coupled to technocratic elitism again.
To the extent that "transhumanism" wants no more than to imply that tools can be useful and healthcare can be a good thing, well, I'm afraid one doesn't need to join a Robot Cult to advocate such commonplaces, indeed one probably needs to find one's way to a Luddite Cult as marginal as the Robot Cult itself to find anybody who consistently disapproves such commonplaces.
Now, if one wants to profess faith in a technologically determined human destiny aspiring toward the accomplishment of secularized theological omni-predicates, digital superintelligence, therapized superlongevity, virtual or nanotechnological superabundance then I daresay one probably does need to join a Robot Cult to find a community of the like-minded, and the same goes for those who would recast eugenic parochialism as an emancipatory program in this day and age.
None of these results seem to me to conduce much to the benefit of those who would declare "movement transhumanism" a reasonable enterprise as it actually plays out in the world.
Condensed Critique of Transhumanism
UPDATE/Preface: The journal Existenz has published and made freely available online my essay Futurological Discourse and Posthuman Terrains, which now seems to me the best, most concise and yet elaborated introduction to my critique of transhumanism, and so I would preface the recommendations that follow with the suggestion that the Existenz article might also be a better starting point for some readers. The Existenz essay is rather densely philosophical in places, however, while many of the pieces that follow are more humorous or more readily digestable, and so I don't think that essay is a perfect substitute for the following by any means.
"Transhumanism" is essentially a techno-transcendental digital-utopian and/or "enhancement"-eugenicist futurological discourse and futurist sub(cult)ure. (Sometimes, I understand that the term has been used in connection with some trans activism as well, but that is not what I am talking about here -- and I want to be clear that I have devoted a lifetime of activism and writing and teaching to resisting sexist, heterosexist, cissexist patriarchy.) I have chosen the following handful of pieces as providing a condensed critique of the various "movement transhumanisms." This is the aspect of my anti-futurological critique which seems most interesting to most folks (for better or worse). Hundreds of posts, arranged by futurist topic as well as by the individual futurological author getting skewered are also to be found in my Superlative Summary for the real gluttons for punishment among you. While transhumanism is, strictly speaking, just one of the sects in the superlative futurological Robot Cult archipelago (others include the Extropians, Singularitarians, techno-immortalists, crypto-anarchists and bitconartists, cybernetic totalists, nano-cornucopiasts, geo-engineers, and so on) transhumanism does overlap considerably with most of the others and exhibits a certain rhetorical and subcultural representativeness.
As someone who respects real science and advocates real public commitments to science and critical thinking education and real public investments in research and sustainable infrastructure, I am annoyed of course with the deranging futurological frames and narratives of techno-transcendentalists (immortal cyberangels! nano-magick utility-fog!) and disasterbators (Robocalypse! grey goo!) who cater to the fears and fantasies of the uninformed and skew policy priorities (for instance, the futurological enablement of reactionary talk about raising the retirement age), not to mention the straightforward pseudo-scientific blathering of uploading circle-squarers (my critique in a phrase: you are not a picture of you) and cryonics cranks, cheerleading over drextechian genies-in-a-bottle, GOFAI-deadenders (my critique in a phrase: Moore's Law isn't going to spit out a sooper-intelligent Robot God Mommy to kiss your boo boos away, sorry), geo-engineering apologists for corporate-military eco-criminals, facile evo-devo reactionaries, not to mention all manner of digital utopian hucksters and TED-squawkers.
But to step back from the obvious, I also regard mainstream futurology as the quintessential discourse of neoliberal global developmentalism, market-mediation, and fraudulent financialization. There is a certain strain of delusive utopianism that drives neoliberalism's callous immaterialism (eg, its focus on branding over labor conditions, its focus on fraudulent financialization over sustainable production) and hyperbolic salesmanship through and through, but what I describe as superlative futurological discourses represent a kind of clarifying -- and also rather bonkers -- extremity of this pseudo-utopianism. While there is obviously plenty that is deranging and dangerous about such techno-transcendental or superlative futurological discourses and the rather odd organizations and public figures devoted to them, what seems to me most useful about paying attention to these extreme and marginal formations is the way they illuminate underlying pathologies of the more prevailing mainstream futurological discourses we have come to take for granted in so much public policy discussion concerning science, technology, and global development.
Among these parallel pathologies, it seems to me, are shared appeals to irrational passions -- fears of impotence and fantasies of omnipotence -- shared tendencies to genetic reductionism, technological determinism, and a certain triumphalism about techno-scientific progress. I also discern in both mainstream and superlative futurology a paradoxical "retro-futurist" kind of reassurance being offered to incumbent and elite interests that "progress" or "accelerating change" will ultimately amount to a dreary amplification of the familiar furniture of the present world or of parochially preferred present values. Also, far too often, one finds in both mainstream and superlative futurology disturbing exhibitions of indifference or even hostility to the real material bodies and real material struggles in which lives, intelligences, lifeways, and human histories are actually incarnated in their actual flourishing diversity.
An easy way to think of the relation I am proposing between these two modes of futurology is to say that mainstream futurology suffuses our prevailing deceptive hyperbolic corporate-military PR/advertising discourse, while superlative futurology amplifies this advertising and promotional hyperbole into an outright delusive promise of personal transcendence (superintelligence, superlongevity, superabundance) of human finitude and this fraudulent speculation and public relations into outright organized sub(cult)ural religiosity.
The first four pieces below subsume transhumanism within the terms of my critique of superlative futurology, the next one focuses on the structural (and sometimes assertive) eugenicism of transhumanist "enhancement" discourse, and the final piece tries to provide a sense of the more positive perspective out of which my critique is coming:
For those who are interested in the always controversial but not really very deep issue of the "cultishness" or not of the various superlative futurological sub(cult)ures, and just how facetious I am being when I refer to these futurological formations as "Robot Cults," I recommend this fairly representative post dealing with those questions (which do pop up fairly regularly). Perhaps more serious, at least potentially, there is this rather disorganized and muckraking archive documenting and exploring key figures and institutional nodes in the Robot Cult archipelago, exposing some of their more patent ties to reactionary causes and politics.
"Transhumanism" is essentially a techno-transcendental digital-utopian and/or "enhancement"-eugenicist futurological discourse and futurist sub(cult)ure. (Sometimes, I understand that the term has been used in connection with some trans activism as well, but that is not what I am talking about here -- and I want to be clear that I have devoted a lifetime of activism and writing and teaching to resisting sexist, heterosexist, cissexist patriarchy.) I have chosen the following handful of pieces as providing a condensed critique of the various "movement transhumanisms." This is the aspect of my anti-futurological critique which seems most interesting to most folks (for better or worse). Hundreds of posts, arranged by futurist topic as well as by the individual futurological author getting skewered are also to be found in my Superlative Summary for the real gluttons for punishment among you. While transhumanism is, strictly speaking, just one of the sects in the superlative futurological Robot Cult archipelago (others include the Extropians, Singularitarians, techno-immortalists, crypto-anarchists and bitconartists, cybernetic totalists, nano-cornucopiasts, geo-engineers, and so on) transhumanism does overlap considerably with most of the others and exhibits a certain rhetorical and subcultural representativeness.
As someone who respects real science and advocates real public commitments to science and critical thinking education and real public investments in research and sustainable infrastructure, I am annoyed of course with the deranging futurological frames and narratives of techno-transcendentalists (immortal cyberangels! nano-magick utility-fog!) and disasterbators (Robocalypse! grey goo!) who cater to the fears and fantasies of the uninformed and skew policy priorities (for instance, the futurological enablement of reactionary talk about raising the retirement age), not to mention the straightforward pseudo-scientific blathering of uploading circle-squarers (my critique in a phrase: you are not a picture of you) and cryonics cranks, cheerleading over drextechian genies-in-a-bottle, GOFAI-deadenders (my critique in a phrase: Moore's Law isn't going to spit out a sooper-intelligent Robot God Mommy to kiss your boo boos away, sorry), geo-engineering apologists for corporate-military eco-criminals, facile evo-devo reactionaries, not to mention all manner of digital utopian hucksters and TED-squawkers.
But to step back from the obvious, I also regard mainstream futurology as the quintessential discourse of neoliberal global developmentalism, market-mediation, and fraudulent financialization. There is a certain strain of delusive utopianism that drives neoliberalism's callous immaterialism (eg, its focus on branding over labor conditions, its focus on fraudulent financialization over sustainable production) and hyperbolic salesmanship through and through, but what I describe as superlative futurological discourses represent a kind of clarifying -- and also rather bonkers -- extremity of this pseudo-utopianism. While there is obviously plenty that is deranging and dangerous about such techno-transcendental or superlative futurological discourses and the rather odd organizations and public figures devoted to them, what seems to me most useful about paying attention to these extreme and marginal formations is the way they illuminate underlying pathologies of the more prevailing mainstream futurological discourses we have come to take for granted in so much public policy discussion concerning science, technology, and global development.
Among these parallel pathologies, it seems to me, are shared appeals to irrational passions -- fears of impotence and fantasies of omnipotence -- shared tendencies to genetic reductionism, technological determinism, and a certain triumphalism about techno-scientific progress. I also discern in both mainstream and superlative futurology a paradoxical "retro-futurist" kind of reassurance being offered to incumbent and elite interests that "progress" or "accelerating change" will ultimately amount to a dreary amplification of the familiar furniture of the present world or of parochially preferred present values. Also, far too often, one finds in both mainstream and superlative futurology disturbing exhibitions of indifference or even hostility to the real material bodies and real material struggles in which lives, intelligences, lifeways, and human histories are actually incarnated in their actual flourishing diversity.
An easy way to think of the relation I am proposing between these two modes of futurology is to say that mainstream futurology suffuses our prevailing deceptive hyperbolic corporate-military PR/advertising discourse, while superlative futurology amplifies this advertising and promotional hyperbole into an outright delusive promise of personal transcendence (superintelligence, superlongevity, superabundance) of human finitude and this fraudulent speculation and public relations into outright organized sub(cult)ural religiosity.
The first four pieces below subsume transhumanism within the terms of my critique of superlative futurology, the next one focuses on the structural (and sometimes assertive) eugenicism of transhumanist "enhancement" discourse, and the final piece tries to provide a sense of the more positive perspective out of which my critique is coming:
A Superlative SchemaMore recent pieces, Ten Reasons to Take Seriously the Transhumanists, Singularitarians, Techno-Immortalists, Nano-Cornucopiasts and Other Assorted Robot Cultists and White Guys of "The Future" and Ten Things You Must Fail to Understand to Remain A Transhumanist for Long may provide more accessible, certainly more pithy and snarky, summaries of many facets of the critique. Of course, if pithy is what is really wanted, my mostly aphoristic Futurological Brickbats anthology is possibly worth a look.
The Superlative Imagination
Understanding Superlative Futurology
Transhumanism Without Superlativity Is Nothing
Eugenics and the Denigration of Consent
Amor Mundi and Technoprogressive Advocacy
For those who are interested in the always controversial but not really very deep issue of the "cultishness" or not of the various superlative futurological sub(cult)ures, and just how facetious I am being when I refer to these futurological formations as "Robot Cults," I recommend this fairly representative post dealing with those questions (which do pop up fairly regularly). Perhaps more serious, at least potentially, there is this rather disorganized and muckraking archive documenting and exploring key figures and institutional nodes in the Robot Cult archipelago, exposing some of their more patent ties to reactionary causes and politics.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
So-Called Technoscientific Depoliticization Usually Conduces to the Benefit of Conservative Politics
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, in response a question about a superlative-minded technocentric of our acquaintance:
By making the mistake of thinking there is such a thing as a commitment to "technology in general" with a politics of its own, separable from conventional left against right politics -- superseding them in fact.
Of course, there is no such thing as "technology in general."
Particular techniques are fully susceptible of "naturalization" or "denaturalization," "artifactualization" or "deartifactualization" almost entirely according to their relative familiarity, or according to the relative disruptiveness of their applications in the present. That is to say, we are apt to describe as "natural" what might once have been conspicuously artifactual once we've grown accustomed to it, or to be struck by the artificiality of the long-customary should historical vicissitudes render its effects problematic.
There is an ongoing prosthetic elaboration of agency -- where "culture" is the widest word for prostheses in this construal -- and which is roughly co-extensive with the ongoing historical elaboration of "humanity." But this is a generality interminably articulated by technodevelopmental social struggle, there is no one politics we can sensibly assign it.
There are only techniques in the service of ends (and even these ends are plural in their basic character), and the ends tend to be inspired and articulated by pretty conventional moral and aesthetic values and embedded in and expressive of pretty conventional political narratives -- democratization against elitism, change against incumbency, consent against authority, equity for all against excellence for few, and so on.
The pretense or gesture of a technoscientific circumvention of the political -- and affirming a "technology politics" indifferent to the primary articulation of technoscientific change in the world by democratizing as against anti-democratizing politics finally amounts to such an effort at circumvention in my view -- seems to me usually to conduce to de facto right wing politics, since it functions to de-politicize as neutrally "technical" a host of actually moral, aesthetic, political quandaries actually under contest.
This is a mistake as easily made by dedicated well-meaning people of the left or the right, as by cynical or dishonest ones, or simply by foolish people, whatever their political sympathies.
But it is always a mistake.
How can a self-declared "radical democrat" so easily switch from vilifying people because they are "libertopians" or "Rapture Nerds" to embracing them as soon as they declare their transhumanist faith or seem to attract enough buzz that they could be useful?
By making the mistake of thinking there is such a thing as a commitment to "technology in general" with a politics of its own, separable from conventional left against right politics -- superseding them in fact.
Of course, there is no such thing as "technology in general."
Particular techniques are fully susceptible of "naturalization" or "denaturalization," "artifactualization" or "deartifactualization" almost entirely according to their relative familiarity, or according to the relative disruptiveness of their applications in the present. That is to say, we are apt to describe as "natural" what might once have been conspicuously artifactual once we've grown accustomed to it, or to be struck by the artificiality of the long-customary should historical vicissitudes render its effects problematic.
There is an ongoing prosthetic elaboration of agency -- where "culture" is the widest word for prostheses in this construal -- and which is roughly co-extensive with the ongoing historical elaboration of "humanity." But this is a generality interminably articulated by technodevelopmental social struggle, there is no one politics we can sensibly assign it.
There are only techniques in the service of ends (and even these ends are plural in their basic character), and the ends tend to be inspired and articulated by pretty conventional moral and aesthetic values and embedded in and expressive of pretty conventional political narratives -- democratization against elitism, change against incumbency, consent against authority, equity for all against excellence for few, and so on.
The pretense or gesture of a technoscientific circumvention of the political -- and affirming a "technology politics" indifferent to the primary articulation of technoscientific change in the world by democratizing as against anti-democratizing politics finally amounts to such an effort at circumvention in my view -- seems to me usually to conduce to de facto right wing politics, since it functions to de-politicize as neutrally "technical" a host of actually moral, aesthetic, political quandaries actually under contest.
This is a mistake as easily made by dedicated well-meaning people of the left or the right, as by cynical or dishonest ones, or simply by foolish people, whatever their political sympathies.
But it is always a mistake.
Superlativity and Existential Risk Discourse
Updated and adapted from the Moot, in response to the question:
Do I think these places for deliberation actually exist? Of course they do.
As it happens, I actually don't know that I believe there is ultimately more use than not in treating WMD proliferation (as exacerbated by militarist nation-statism), catastrophic climate change (as exacerbated by extractive-industrial production), proliferating pandemic vectors (as exacerbated by overurbanization), resource descent (as exacerbated by corporate-industrial agriculture practices), together with speculation about dramatic meteor impacts and gamma ray bursters, and I certainly don't think it makes any kind of sense to treat all these concerns as essentially of a piece with the silly pseudo-problems that preoccupy Robot Cultists, like how to cope with unfriendly Robot Gods, or planet-eating nanoblobs, or gengineered sooper-brained baby centaur clone armies.
The main point is that one needn't join a Robot Cult to find serious discussions of actually-proximate global security issues.
Indeed, very much to the contrary, Robot Cult versions of these discussions tend to contribute little but hyperbole and disastrously skewed priorities to these topics in my view -- although, no doubt, they also contribute a smidge of unearned credibility to Robot Cultists themselves who just love opportunistically to glom on to complex technoscience questions and exacerbate the irrational passions they inevitably inspire, substitute a confectionary dusting of hokey neologisms for relevant expertise, and then embed contentious issues in a dramatic science fictional narrative that compels attention but usually without shedding much light, all in the service of whomping up membership numbers, donor dollars, and media attention for the organizations with which they personally identify in their sub(cult)ural superlativity.
[D]o you think there is a place for deliberation about risks like nuclear war, pandemic disease, infrastructural collapse, etc. as a single class of entities?
Do I think these places for deliberation actually exist? Of course they do.
As it happens, I actually don't know that I believe there is ultimately more use than not in treating WMD proliferation (as exacerbated by militarist nation-statism), catastrophic climate change (as exacerbated by extractive-industrial production), proliferating pandemic vectors (as exacerbated by overurbanization), resource descent (as exacerbated by corporate-industrial agriculture practices), together with speculation about dramatic meteor impacts and gamma ray bursters, and I certainly don't think it makes any kind of sense to treat all these concerns as essentially of a piece with the silly pseudo-problems that preoccupy Robot Cultists, like how to cope with unfriendly Robot Gods, or planet-eating nanoblobs, or gengineered sooper-brained baby centaur clone armies.
The main point is that one needn't join a Robot Cult to find serious discussions of actually-proximate global security issues.
Indeed, very much to the contrary, Robot Cult versions of these discussions tend to contribute little but hyperbole and disastrously skewed priorities to these topics in my view -- although, no doubt, they also contribute a smidge of unearned credibility to Robot Cultists themselves who just love opportunistically to glom on to complex technoscience questions and exacerbate the irrational passions they inevitably inspire, substitute a confectionary dusting of hokey neologisms for relevant expertise, and then embed contentious issues in a dramatic science fictional narrative that compels attention but usually without shedding much light, all in the service of whomping up membership numbers, donor dollars, and media attention for the organizations with which they personally identify in their sub(cult)ural superlativity.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Let Your Futurological Freak Flag Fly
Look, although I am a crusty atheistical type of long standing myself, I'm also reasonably cheerfully nonjudgmental about the whole thing so long as I'm not getting lied or preached to.
I can't honestly say that it is my experience that organized religiosity seems to conduce much to either sanity or good conscience in those who make a big deal out of it, but I'm more or less content to say everybody should believe whatever they need to believe to get them through the night, at any rate until their beliefs start playing out in misleading, violent, or exploitative ways in the world.
The same is true of the fanciful faiths of the techno-immortalists, extropians, singularitarians, transhumanists, and other assorted superlative technocentrics, certainly.
By all means, Robot Cultists, cult robotically away to your heart's content, let your futurological freak flag fly.
Just don't try to peddle your Robot Cultism as
Otherwise, you know, let a bazillion blossoms bloom, and so on and so forth. I mean, after all, who cares?
I can't honestly say that it is my experience that organized religiosity seems to conduce much to either sanity or good conscience in those who make a big deal out of it, but I'm more or less content to say everybody should believe whatever they need to believe to get them through the night, at any rate until their beliefs start playing out in misleading, violent, or exploitative ways in the world.
The same is true of the fanciful faiths of the techno-immortalists, extropians, singularitarians, transhumanists, and other assorted superlative technocentrics, certainly.
By all means, Robot Cultists, cult robotically away to your heart's content, let your futurological freak flag fly.
Just don't try to peddle your Robot Cultism as
[1] constituting a novel, coherent, and systematic philosophical viewpoint; as
[2] advocating a unique, coherent, and needed political program; as
[3] contributing somehow to scientific knowledge or useful technique; or as
[4] engaging in serious public policy deliberation.
Otherwise, you know, let a bazillion blossoms bloom, and so on and so forth. I mean, after all, who cares?
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
The Democratizing Priority of Consensual Self-Determination in the Emerging Era of Non-Normalizing Healthcare
Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot:
The emergence of non-normalizing genetic, cognitive, and prosthetic therapies seems to me to demand a shift in the language of democratizing progressive healthcare advocacy from universal access (at least as its sole or even primary organizing principle) to consensual self-determination.
This suggestion raises understandable red-flags to those who know well how a focus on consent-talk over access-talk or over more "neutral" harm-reduction-talk in this area has often functioned as a reactionary strategy simply to deny healthcare to vulnerable people as a way of engaging in class warfare, often with the ugliest kinds of sexist, racist, colonialist inflections.
I would like to think I manage to circumvent appropriation of my own argument by such reactionary politics since I do insist that consent, when it is substantial rather than vacuously formal, must be actually informed and actually non-duressed -- a requirement that demands strong regulation and a substantial provision of social services (as close to universal basic income as we can manage, the widest possible access to reliable public knowledges, and so on) that tend to make my own version of consent-talk unappealing to anti-democratic politics.
Be all that as it may, a shift into consensual therapeutic self-determination is indeed a real shift for democratic-minded progressives to come to terms with, and much of that work remains for now in its barest beginnings.
Among the implications of this shift for me is that progressives need to understand that the familiar technocratic forms of eugenics (for which the transhumanists I decry here represent an extreme case) that would police lifeway diversity into "optimal/normal" forms is matched by conservative forms of eugenics (for which the bioconservatives I decry here represent an extreme case) that would police wanted lifeway diversity into "natural/customary" forms, and that some traditional progressive advocacy language is quite vulnerable to appropriation by anti-democratic politics in these two modes in the aftermath of the shift into non-normalizing therapy.
Further, both superlative and supernative futurological discourses (as well as the more mainstream developmental discourses these sometimes symptomize, sometimes exaggerate, and sometimes pioneer) seem to me to derange our capacity to think about this shift in a reasonable way at a time when it is fairly urgent that we do so.
I am interested in progressive healthcare discourse in an era of emerging non-normalizing therapy. I strongly regret and worry about the extent to which public discourse on these questions has been framed or frustrated by hyberbolizing and faith-based formations of superlativity and supernativity.
I also strongly regret that topics that are perfectly fitting and edifying (if your tastes incline that way, as mine do) for sf literary salons -- such as the question of what kind of coherent narrative subjecthood could be maintained through a completely speculative radically underspecified prosthetic prologation to the tune of centuries of something akin to what we presently mean by the terms lifespan or consciousness -- are sometimes treated as topics connected in even the remotest way to healthcare policy discourse. Nothing at all good ever comes of such confusions.
The emergence of non-normalizing genetic, cognitive, and prosthetic therapies seems to me to demand a shift in the language of democratizing progressive healthcare advocacy from universal access (at least as its sole or even primary organizing principle) to consensual self-determination.
This suggestion raises understandable red-flags to those who know well how a focus on consent-talk over access-talk or over more "neutral" harm-reduction-talk in this area has often functioned as a reactionary strategy simply to deny healthcare to vulnerable people as a way of engaging in class warfare, often with the ugliest kinds of sexist, racist, colonialist inflections.
I would like to think I manage to circumvent appropriation of my own argument by such reactionary politics since I do insist that consent, when it is substantial rather than vacuously formal, must be actually informed and actually non-duressed -- a requirement that demands strong regulation and a substantial provision of social services (as close to universal basic income as we can manage, the widest possible access to reliable public knowledges, and so on) that tend to make my own version of consent-talk unappealing to anti-democratic politics.
Be all that as it may, a shift into consensual therapeutic self-determination is indeed a real shift for democratic-minded progressives to come to terms with, and much of that work remains for now in its barest beginnings.
Among the implications of this shift for me is that progressives need to understand that the familiar technocratic forms of eugenics (for which the transhumanists I decry here represent an extreme case) that would police lifeway diversity into "optimal/normal" forms is matched by conservative forms of eugenics (for which the bioconservatives I decry here represent an extreme case) that would police wanted lifeway diversity into "natural/customary" forms, and that some traditional progressive advocacy language is quite vulnerable to appropriation by anti-democratic politics in these two modes in the aftermath of the shift into non-normalizing therapy.
Further, both superlative and supernative futurological discourses (as well as the more mainstream developmental discourses these sometimes symptomize, sometimes exaggerate, and sometimes pioneer) seem to me to derange our capacity to think about this shift in a reasonable way at a time when it is fairly urgent that we do so.
I am interested in progressive healthcare discourse in an era of emerging non-normalizing therapy. I strongly regret and worry about the extent to which public discourse on these questions has been framed or frustrated by hyberbolizing and faith-based formations of superlativity and supernativity.
I also strongly regret that topics that are perfectly fitting and edifying (if your tastes incline that way, as mine do) for sf literary salons -- such as the question of what kind of coherent narrative subjecthood could be maintained through a completely speculative radically underspecified prosthetic prologation to the tune of centuries of something akin to what we presently mean by the terms lifespan or consciousness -- are sometimes treated as topics connected in even the remotest way to healthcare policy discourse. Nothing at all good ever comes of such confusions.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Superlative - Supernative See-Saw
Trapped in their hyperbolic techno-utopian and techno-dystopian cul-de-sacs, even reasonably sensible, reasonably well-meaning transhumanist-types and bioconservatives-types (there are some of both, but always only up to a certain point) like to express incomprehension and exasperation at my positions. They tend to shift from fulsome approval of some things I write and then straight away to an equally ferocious disapproval of others. This should really be all well and good, contribution of different perspectives and all that. But all too often our Biocons and Robot Cultists seem to want to accuse me of logical inconsistency or even cynical rhetorical fun and games for provoking in them these surreally see-sawing assessments.
But as far as I can tell, my position is not only quite consistent but not even that extraordinary for all the confusion it seems to provoke in those who have bought into technocentric superlativity or supernativity.
I am enthusiastic about informed nonduressed consensual recourse to -- as well as disinterest in -- particular medical techniques (or aesthetical techniques, or spiritual techniques, or erotical techniques, or agricultural techniques, or what have you), whether "normalizing" or not, whether conventional or emerging, whenever they are actually wanted, well regulated, and reasonably safe, especially to the extent that progressives can make them universally available and struggle to make the risks, costs, and benefits of their development sustainable and fair.
This is a mainstream progressive position as far as I can see, or at any rate perfectly mainstream-legible.
I don't think I even think about "technology" in the way demonized or fetishized by bioconservative and transhumanist discourses. I don't believe there is a monolithic technological "it" to be "enthusiastic" about. I don't believe in technology "in general."
Certainly, I abhor the notion of parochial customs treated as "natural" in the service of incumbent interests (bioconservatism) or the notion of parochial wish-fulfillment fantasies treated as "optimal" in the service of self-appointed elites (transhumanism).
My enthusiasm is for democratizing social struggle that solves shared problems and contributes to ever more consensual and sustainable planetary lifeway multiculture, peer to peer.
I am enthusiastic about solving shared problems, peer to peer, and about consensual creative expressivity in all its diversity.
Secular. Democratic. Progressive. Multicultural. Green. Left. All completely commonplace, surely?
Problem-solving and creative expressivity inevitably make recourse to technique, inevitably make recourse to a common archive of accomplishments, and inevitably release forces into a shared world for which there will be unintended consequences. Technodevelopmental social struggle is conventional politics in history, democracy against elitism, responsibility against incumbency, same as it ever was.
There is no need for a faux-fantastic future or faux-nostalgic Golden Age in which to invest your imaginative and practical energies to the cost of democratic social struggle here and now. There is no need for the false idealizations of a homo superior or homo naturalis with which to identify to the cost of the fellows with whom you actually share a world of problems and promise, peer to peer. No, there are just peers in a present emerging into an open futurity just as problematic, just as promising -- and if we make it so -- just as free, another present, another world of peers.
Being "for" or "against" Technology in some general monolithic construal is stupid, being "for" or "against" some dreaded or wish-fulfilling fantasy you parochially identify as "The Future" is stupid. It's stupid and it makes people stupid and it makes everybody talk about the vicissitudes of technodevelopmental social struggle in stupid ways.
That is to say, technocentric and futurological discourses are beside the point -- if you want to think clearly about the terrain of technodevelopmental social struggle as it is playing out in the actual world -- they are distractions from or disavowals of the actual matters at hand, yielding their substantial effects, such as they are, entirely within the conventional political terms they claim to circumvent or disdain (usually both supernativisms and superlativisms conduce to elitist formations and hence to the politics of the Right, even among partisans of the Left who espouse them).
And again, no, I don't claim that any of this is particularly original or difficult to understand. It's just democratically-minded secular progressive good sense applied in a straightforward manner to questions of technodevelopmental social struggle.
If this seems inconsistent, incomprehensible, or outrageous to you, are you quite sure this isn't a sign of your own confusion in these matters rather than your brilliant superiority?
If, rather, this seems false, facile, or fatuous to you, are you quite sure that behind all the handwaving about Robot Gods and designer babies and utility-fog and clone armies and all the rest, you aren't actually just a fairly conventional right-wing corporatist, militarist, religionist, or bigot?
But as far as I can tell, my position is not only quite consistent but not even that extraordinary for all the confusion it seems to provoke in those who have bought into technocentric superlativity or supernativity.
I am enthusiastic about informed nonduressed consensual recourse to -- as well as disinterest in -- particular medical techniques (or aesthetical techniques, or spiritual techniques, or erotical techniques, or agricultural techniques, or what have you), whether "normalizing" or not, whether conventional or emerging, whenever they are actually wanted, well regulated, and reasonably safe, especially to the extent that progressives can make them universally available and struggle to make the risks, costs, and benefits of their development sustainable and fair.
This is a mainstream progressive position as far as I can see, or at any rate perfectly mainstream-legible.
I don't think I even think about "technology" in the way demonized or fetishized by bioconservative and transhumanist discourses. I don't believe there is a monolithic technological "it" to be "enthusiastic" about. I don't believe in technology "in general."
Certainly, I abhor the notion of parochial customs treated as "natural" in the service of incumbent interests (bioconservatism) or the notion of parochial wish-fulfillment fantasies treated as "optimal" in the service of self-appointed elites (transhumanism).
My enthusiasm is for democratizing social struggle that solves shared problems and contributes to ever more consensual and sustainable planetary lifeway multiculture, peer to peer.
I am enthusiastic about solving shared problems, peer to peer, and about consensual creative expressivity in all its diversity.
Secular. Democratic. Progressive. Multicultural. Green. Left. All completely commonplace, surely?
Problem-solving and creative expressivity inevitably make recourse to technique, inevitably make recourse to a common archive of accomplishments, and inevitably release forces into a shared world for which there will be unintended consequences. Technodevelopmental social struggle is conventional politics in history, democracy against elitism, responsibility against incumbency, same as it ever was.
There is no need for a faux-fantastic future or faux-nostalgic Golden Age in which to invest your imaginative and practical energies to the cost of democratic social struggle here and now. There is no need for the false idealizations of a homo superior or homo naturalis with which to identify to the cost of the fellows with whom you actually share a world of problems and promise, peer to peer. No, there are just peers in a present emerging into an open futurity just as problematic, just as promising -- and if we make it so -- just as free, another present, another world of peers.
Being "for" or "against" Technology in some general monolithic construal is stupid, being "for" or "against" some dreaded or wish-fulfilling fantasy you parochially identify as "The Future" is stupid. It's stupid and it makes people stupid and it makes everybody talk about the vicissitudes of technodevelopmental social struggle in stupid ways.
That is to say, technocentric and futurological discourses are beside the point -- if you want to think clearly about the terrain of technodevelopmental social struggle as it is playing out in the actual world -- they are distractions from or disavowals of the actual matters at hand, yielding their substantial effects, such as they are, entirely within the conventional political terms they claim to circumvent or disdain (usually both supernativisms and superlativisms conduce to elitist formations and hence to the politics of the Right, even among partisans of the Left who espouse them).
And again, no, I don't claim that any of this is particularly original or difficult to understand. It's just democratically-minded secular progressive good sense applied in a straightforward manner to questions of technodevelopmental social struggle.
If this seems inconsistent, incomprehensible, or outrageous to you, are you quite sure this isn't a sign of your own confusion in these matters rather than your brilliant superiority?
If, rather, this seems false, facile, or fatuous to you, are you quite sure that behind all the handwaving about Robot Gods and designer babies and utility-fog and clone armies and all the rest, you aren't actually just a fairly conventional right-wing corporatist, militarist, religionist, or bigot?
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Say Good-Bye, John
Upgraded from the Moot:
Anti-choice bioconservative and antigay bigot John Howard, ladies and gentlemen.
[Y]our alienation and anxiety is that you and Eric are not really on equal footing to a male-female couple, you sublimate the fact that you don't have the same capabilities as you would have if you were with a woman. That causes anxiety, even anger. You claim to be equal but you know you're not.
Anti-choice bioconservative and antigay bigot John Howard, ladies and gentlemen.
Conserving Progress
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:
It's true that there is a lot of this, but I don't think we should assume that this is or will always be the case, or overstate the significance of the case as it plays out.
The Right is essentially anti-democratic, it is a reaction against democratizing forces in history. It is literally reactionary, right?
Of course, this is because the Right is essentially the politics of incumbency, an expression of the prejudices and parochial interests of established elites and customary attitudes, the positions, privileges, and institutions that are most threatened by democratic educational, agitational, and organization forces abroad in history.
Sometimes, incumbency serves outcomes achieved by particular vicissitudes in a longer struggle of democratization, as you say, but don't get seduced into a hasty overgeneralization or obfuscatory metanarrative here!
One needs to look at the concrete interests of incumbents as they themselves testify to these to know exactly what the Right will fight and fight for in its contemporary service to incumbency and ongoing struggle against democratization.
We've just lived through a weird generation throughout which, at least in key ways, actually progressive democratizing forces were "conservatively" defending partial accomplishments of the New Deal and Great Society against the "revolutionary" fervor of radical anti-democratic elitists peddling market fundamentalist ideology backed by US military might.
The laughably ironic part of all this is that right-conservatives inevitably end up curators of the past hard-won victories of the liberal-progressive left...
It's true that there is a lot of this, but I don't think we should assume that this is or will always be the case, or overstate the significance of the case as it plays out.
The Right is essentially anti-democratic, it is a reaction against democratizing forces in history. It is literally reactionary, right?
Of course, this is because the Right is essentially the politics of incumbency, an expression of the prejudices and parochial interests of established elites and customary attitudes, the positions, privileges, and institutions that are most threatened by democratic educational, agitational, and organization forces abroad in history.
Sometimes, incumbency serves outcomes achieved by particular vicissitudes in a longer struggle of democratization, as you say, but don't get seduced into a hasty overgeneralization or obfuscatory metanarrative here!
One needs to look at the concrete interests of incumbents as they themselves testify to these to know exactly what the Right will fight and fight for in its contemporary service to incumbency and ongoing struggle against democratization.
We've just lived through a weird generation throughout which, at least in key ways, actually progressive democratizing forces were "conservatively" defending partial accomplishments of the New Deal and Great Society against the "revolutionary" fervor of radical anti-democratic elitists peddling market fundamentalist ideology backed by US military might.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Transhumanism and Bioconservatism as Co-Dependent Extremisms
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:
Just a brief reminder: I regard bioconservatives like Leon Kass as quite as wrongheaded and damaging to sensible deliberation about healthcare quandaries as the transhumanists and other assorted Robot Cultists I've been deriding the last few days.
Whenever one's talk turns superlative in the manner of the transhumanists, singularitarians, and techno-immortalists, one has undoubtedly shifted from science proper into heady hyperbolizations of science parochially identified with "the future" but always functioning as and endorsing expressions of anxiety, greed, envy and so on that are actually, substantially in and about the present. But the same is true when one's talk turns supernative in the manner of the bioconservatives, anti-choice theocrats, and neo-primitivists.
Medical technoscience does indeed seem to me to be located at an enormously interesting and provocative developmental inflection point right about now, a point at which at least some healthcare is becoming non-normativizing in ways that trouble conventional universalizing language progressives have tended to use when they try to frame positions on healthcare and social justice.
In my view, questions of informed nonduressed consent have to come to the fore under such circumstances (the at least partial non-normativizaton of therapy) for democratically-minded progressive people.
(Although, by the way, I tend to make the case that this universalizing language ill serves democratic aspirations under changing therapeutic circumstances, it isn't a bad idea to recall that neither has this language actually ever managed to really deliver what it promised in the way of real equity or an equity that also respected diversity, and that it has also always exacted high costs of the kind that Foucault and Fanon, among others, describe so powerfully in their work.)
Look: Terry Schiavo isn't science fiction. Deaf parents wanting deaf kids isn't science fiction. Administering non-psychotic drugs to get deranged Death Row prisoners sane enough just long enough to execute them isn't science fiction. Misleading drug claims on commercial television designed to undermine legitimate doctor-patient relationships isn't science fiction. Giving people fertility drugs that cause multiple births with health problems few people are informed about, all because this is cheaper than safer alternatives isn't science fiction. Pathologizing discussions of actually flourishing neuro-atypical persons isn't science fiction. Refugees from over-exploited regions of the world struggling to survive as illegals or quasi-legals in "the developed world" through the relinquishment of their own vital organs isn't science fiction.
Progressives need consent -- truly informed, truly non-duressed consent -- to trump ideologies of optimality, whether bioconservative indulgences in "naturalizing" reactionary would-be nostalgia or transhumanist indulgences in "enhancing" eugenic would-be optimality.
Kass's bioconservative definition of therapy as only those interventions that police the diversity of actually-wanted capacities, morphologies, and lifeways into conformity with a parochial ideal he identifies as "the natural human" is no more nor less eugenic than the transhumanists who would encourage the emergence "enhanced post-humans" according to no less parochial ideals.
Of course, the transhumanists will argue that this makes me a secret bioconservative just as bioconservatives will argue that this makes me a secret transhumanist, which is pretty much just because they are all not only barking mad but co-dependent on the equal extremity of their imagined antagonists.
All of this would be neither here nor there, really, if it weren't for the rather startling fact that transhumanists and bioconservatives have managed through the facile simplicity, hyperbolic drama, and easy emotionalism of their formulations to commandeer much of the rhetorical terrain on which talk about healthcare provision is playing out in this truly fraught moment of transition into non-normitivizing genetic, cognitive, and prosthetic therapy.
Just a brief reminder: I regard bioconservatives like Leon Kass as quite as wrongheaded and damaging to sensible deliberation about healthcare quandaries as the transhumanists and other assorted Robot Cultists I've been deriding the last few days.
Whenever one's talk turns superlative in the manner of the transhumanists, singularitarians, and techno-immortalists, one has undoubtedly shifted from science proper into heady hyperbolizations of science parochially identified with "the future" but always functioning as and endorsing expressions of anxiety, greed, envy and so on that are actually, substantially in and about the present. But the same is true when one's talk turns supernative in the manner of the bioconservatives, anti-choice theocrats, and neo-primitivists.
Medical technoscience does indeed seem to me to be located at an enormously interesting and provocative developmental inflection point right about now, a point at which at least some healthcare is becoming non-normativizing in ways that trouble conventional universalizing language progressives have tended to use when they try to frame positions on healthcare and social justice.
In my view, questions of informed nonduressed consent have to come to the fore under such circumstances (the at least partial non-normativizaton of therapy) for democratically-minded progressive people.
(Although, by the way, I tend to make the case that this universalizing language ill serves democratic aspirations under changing therapeutic circumstances, it isn't a bad idea to recall that neither has this language actually ever managed to really deliver what it promised in the way of real equity or an equity that also respected diversity, and that it has also always exacted high costs of the kind that Foucault and Fanon, among others, describe so powerfully in their work.)
Look: Terry Schiavo isn't science fiction. Deaf parents wanting deaf kids isn't science fiction. Administering non-psychotic drugs to get deranged Death Row prisoners sane enough just long enough to execute them isn't science fiction. Misleading drug claims on commercial television designed to undermine legitimate doctor-patient relationships isn't science fiction. Giving people fertility drugs that cause multiple births with health problems few people are informed about, all because this is cheaper than safer alternatives isn't science fiction. Pathologizing discussions of actually flourishing neuro-atypical persons isn't science fiction. Refugees from over-exploited regions of the world struggling to survive as illegals or quasi-legals in "the developed world" through the relinquishment of their own vital organs isn't science fiction.
Progressives need consent -- truly informed, truly non-duressed consent -- to trump ideologies of optimality, whether bioconservative indulgences in "naturalizing" reactionary would-be nostalgia or transhumanist indulgences in "enhancing" eugenic would-be optimality.
Kass's bioconservative definition of therapy as only those interventions that police the diversity of actually-wanted capacities, morphologies, and lifeways into conformity with a parochial ideal he identifies as "the natural human" is no more nor less eugenic than the transhumanists who would encourage the emergence "enhanced post-humans" according to no less parochial ideals.
Of course, the transhumanists will argue that this makes me a secret bioconservative just as bioconservatives will argue that this makes me a secret transhumanist, which is pretty much just because they are all not only barking mad but co-dependent on the equal extremity of their imagined antagonists.
All of this would be neither here nor there, really, if it weren't for the rather startling fact that transhumanists and bioconservatives have managed through the facile simplicity, hyperbolic drama, and easy emotionalism of their formulations to commandeer much of the rhetorical terrain on which talk about healthcare provision is playing out in this truly fraught moment of transition into non-normitivizing genetic, cognitive, and prosthetic therapy.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Ridiculing the Ridiculous
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, a reasonable criticism, all things considered, and my response:
I think you are a bit over-optimistic here. Also, I think there is a deeper Two Cultures sort of problem afoot:
Many people who buy into what I call superlativity regard only what they call "technical" critiques as "understandable" and "worthy" of rebuttal, but such "technical" accounts concede techno-utopianism far too much ground and too many of their most problematic assumptions to allow relevant critique real purchase in my view.
Further, my own focus is rhetorical and cultural -- which seems to me not only relevant but actually key to understanding the problems with especially organized "identity-movement" formations of superlativity (which I call sub(cult)ural) -- and the simple truth is that this very focus itself seems to inspire the charge of name-calling and incomprehensibility.
One needs the patience of a saint to overcome these sorts of structural barriers, and it is hard for me to pretend that Robot Cultists really deserve that kind of effort (especially since patience of this kind is more likely than not to receive no reply but "tl;dr" anyway -- believe me, I know).
As I have said many times, one reaches the point at which the only sensible thing is to ridicule the ridiculous in the hopes that its dangerous nonsense will be bulldozed harmlessly into the margins, the better to make room for the more reasonable to proceed in the clash of their opinions.
if the critique [of superlativity] was more understandable and contained no name-calling, [transhumanists and singularitarians and so on] would have no choice but to focus on developing a rebuttal to your critique
I think you are a bit over-optimistic here. Also, I think there is a deeper Two Cultures sort of problem afoot:
Many people who buy into what I call superlativity regard only what they call "technical" critiques as "understandable" and "worthy" of rebuttal, but such "technical" accounts concede techno-utopianism far too much ground and too many of their most problematic assumptions to allow relevant critique real purchase in my view.
Further, my own focus is rhetorical and cultural -- which seems to me not only relevant but actually key to understanding the problems with especially organized "identity-movement" formations of superlativity (which I call sub(cult)ural) -- and the simple truth is that this very focus itself seems to inspire the charge of name-calling and incomprehensibility.
One needs the patience of a saint to overcome these sorts of structural barriers, and it is hard for me to pretend that Robot Cultists really deserve that kind of effort (especially since patience of this kind is more likely than not to receive no reply but "tl;dr" anyway -- believe me, I know).
As I have said many times, one reaches the point at which the only sensible thing is to ridicule the ridiculous in the hopes that its dangerous nonsense will be bulldozed harmlessly into the margins, the better to make room for the more reasonable to proceed in the clash of their opinions.
Monday, January 05, 2009
Yes!Trons Defending "The Transhumanist Core" from the HumanityPlusTrons
A manifesto has been published by denizens of one of the sub-basements of the already basement universe of Transhumanist Sub(cult)ure, this one called The Order of Cosmic Engineers. I think their motto is something along the lines of "We do more Cosmic Engineering in an afternoon while reading dogeared sf and eating Cheetos in our undergarments than you mehums will do in a lifetime!" or something to that effect.
I keed! I keed!
Come what may, the manifesto is entitled YES! to Transhumanism and it seems to be very angry with certain transhumanists who are saying NO! to transhumanism through their efforts to behave like "nice, soft spoken, moderate, ethical, responsible and politically correct quasi-mainstream social clubs." Henceforth, I will call the Cosmic Engineers who approve the manifesto the Yes!Trons, since they say Yes! to! Transhumanism! as against, I suspect, the transhumanist-identified folks at the World Transhumanist Association who recently re-branded themselves (one must admit, rather hilariously) "Humanity +" and whom I like to call, in consequence, "HumanityPlusTrons."
One is left, to be sure, a bit flabbergasted at the characterization of any transhumanists as "moderate" or "politically correct" given the whole let's freeze our brains while awaiting the Robot God to immortalize us in a cyberspatial paradise "program" that most transhumanists favor, at least in broad-strokes, when they aren't busy advocating neoliberal eugenicism and big industrial technofixes to industry-caused climate catastrophe in the meantime. But I do suppose it is nice (not to mention amusing) to find confirmation that even in the futurological funhouse one can observe the usual sectarian squabbles that characterize human, all too human, organizational efforts more generally.
I especially like the part in the Yes!Tron Manifesto in which the Cosmic Engineers briefly genuflect in the direction of "complex scientific, technical, cultural, moral, societal and political challenges to deal with. They require careful assessment, planning, and leadership. These challenges need to be met head on with due courage, forbearance, focused attention, rationality, compassion, empathy and wisdom. We must and will continue to do our best to overcome them. We will persevere to mitigate their potential and actual dangers, while safeguarding the maximizing of their potential and actual benefits." Funny (and not funny ha ha) how none of these problems are actually specified, how no suggestion of the ways in which they will be "mitigated" are suggested (Yes! to! Leadership! Yes! to! Wisdom!), how they never return as concerns once they have been hastily mentioned and shunted to the side the better for the eager Yes!Trons to move on to bigger and better things (sooper brains! imperishable robot bodies! hott virtual sex!), how they make no effort to even pretend that these concerns have anything to do with what actually matters to them at their own trasnhumanistical "core." I suppose it would be too "politically correct" and HumanityPlusTronic to hope for more on this score.
Quite apart from all that is actually batshit crazy about the Yes!Tron Manifesto, I have to say that what I find really striking about it is how content free it finally manages to be, especially given how convinced its authors seem to be that something really radical is going on here. "Transhumanists have always sought personal improvement; to free themselves from all the limitations of biology; to radically upgrade their mental and physical faculties; and to beat a path to the stars."
I get it -- what we have here is the usual posthumanistical catnip combination of capitalist motivational speaking conjoined to a little Western body loathing conjoined to millennial escapist fantasy. In a nutshell, in space nobody will have to poop.
But weird as all that is, it isn't actually all that substantial when all is said and done. I mean, are these "ideas" exactly, let alone radical ones? Honestly, quite apart from their wrongheadedness, is it intellectually interesting in the least to, like, dislike ageing and death? And don't, for heaven's sake, ask what concrete forms this Yes!Tronic "seeking" to get all post-biological and post-planetary have actually taken in the actual world -- inasmuch as they almost surely mean nothing more earthshattering than reading the yellowing pages of paperback space opera and taking multivitamins and the occasional recreational herb.
Although the manifesto protests that the Yes!Trons are grand defenders of the Old Tyme Transhuman Religion, it isn't at all clear what this Core they are defending really consists of, especially considering the way transhumanists get all fired up about what a Philosophy and Movement and Culture and all that they are supposed to so radically and so uniquely and so revolutionarily to represent.
As far as I can tell, the "Transhumanist Core" defended by the Yes!Trons consists of the expression of a rhetorical question: "Wouldn't it be nice if we could, like, live forever like glamorous sexy rich people in some glamorous sexy beachside resort or, you know, its Oort Cloud analogue or whatever?" And then, there follows something like a "program," admittedly a bit lacking in particulars: "Maybe science will somehow deliver all that, maybe even, like, you know, really soon! (Science fiction, science fiction, science fiction, science fiction...)" And then, finally, there is the crucial -- I do believe actually definitive -- expression of uncritical enthusiasm: "Wouldn't that be teh awesome? And aren't we teh awesome too for thinking so?"
Would somebody please explain to me how this fairly infantile and idiotic attitude constitutes, of all things, a "philosophy" worthy of the name, let alone a novel or unique perspective in the post-Enlightenment era West? Few people are particularly thrilled at the prospect of a painful ageing process followed by death, after all, and few would deny that it's nice to have nice things.
But how far beyond this do the transhumanists really sensibly manage to get? They do have a whole lot to say about how lovely nanobotic genie-in-a-bottle desktop anything machines would be, and how bad it would be if goo ate the world, and how they would be first in line to be therapized into getting model-hott athletic bodies and genius brains should the relevant science swing the feat, but it isn't exactly clear why sane people are expected to treat their wishfulfillment fantasies as philosophical insights or policy-recommendations whereas the wish-fulfillment fantasies in this vein discussed on the whole more interestingly in any group of geeks enthusing over their favorite science fiction novels, or even, one fears, in the ruminations of an eleven year old's scribbling in My First Diary -- the one with Chococat on the cover -- are rightly treated as, you know, not policy-recommendations at all. How this Yes!Tronic sort of thing rises to the level of a "worldview" or "movement," quite aside from what is actually problematic to the point of incoherence about it on closer scrutiny, is completely beyond me.
I must say, even given the low bar I set for Robot Cultists in general, the Yes!Tron sect seems even more than usually dim.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
The Substance of Humanity, the Substance of Democratization, the Substance of Hope
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:
ddjango wrote, much abridged:
First off, I consider "humanity" an historical construction as much articulated by semiotic factors (like culture) as by material factors (like evolution) -- this isn't a distinction that holds up to every kind of scrutiny, of course, since I don't regard the semiotic as immaterial, by any means, but that's a side issue. What I want to get at here, is to say that if "humanity" is always articulated in history, then there is an important sense in which every moment of real freedom is a moment that constitutes an end of humanity as we know it, or better a collaborative re-making of what is possible and important when we make recourse to the prevailing but always contested idea, "humantiy."
I understand of course why one would feel despair -- or hilarity, or rage, or disgust, or embarrassment -- in grasping the profoundly unimaginative, disrespectful, exploitative, violent hopes and fears and desires that get registered by so many of the people who like to talk most about things like technology and science and medicine "changing humanity as we know it." But always remember that democracy's open futurity has a way of wreaking havoc with the sad, slick, sneaky variations on the theme of the futures pined after by those who put other ends ahead of democratization, peer-to-peer, of equity and diversity and consent.
To turn to another of your points, I want to reiterate that I personally think the word "enhancement" profoundly confuses the problems, stakes, and contests playing out in the emerging terrain of non-normativing healthcare practices.
"Enhancement" is not at all a neutral term, even though it seems well-pleased all too often to masquerade as one, since "enhancement" is always enhancement -- for whom? for what? at the cost of what?
Non-normativing healthcare demands a shift in the standards that would govern the equitable administration of medicine: We are shifting away from, on the one hand, the universality of "normal-function" or "optimal-function" -- arising out of the scientific ethos of consensus, a sign of which is the shared recourse to evidence, as much in instances of falsification of some prevailing consensus as in substantiating ones. And all the while we are shifting toward, on the other hand, the legibility of actually-informed actually-nonduressed consent in the service of therapeutic self-determination -- arising out of the ethical ethos of consent, a sign of which is dissensus, the political (and, if properly political, then non-violent) clash of opinions. Even after this shift is more fully consolidated, of course, healthcare would always remain in an interesting, actually constitutive, dialectic with the still universalizing "do no harm," but the shift itself is still an enormously transformative. It's no wonder that "authoritative" discourse is quite as befuddled as "popular" discourse as it comes to grips with this shift, and tries to re-order its priorities and re-frame its concerns in light of the shift as it is presently messily playing out in the lives and hopes and pain and healing of actual human lives.
I talk about the politics of prosthetic self-determination elsewhere, and I talk about what it is that makes transhumanist and bioconservative discourses both so eugenic in their thrust, despite their interesting differences, elsewhere too.
I agree that a democratization of the distribution of costs, risks, and benefits of emerging -- usually incredibly ill-understood however promising -- therapeutic technique is the crucial thing in this moment of fraught ongoing change. I like to speak of the ways in which healthcare might become a key site for the emancipatory expression of consensual self-determination in a planetary multiculture. But there is no question that the more urgent ethical and political reality besetting us, peer-to-peer, is that healthcare in the corporate-militarist frame of neoliberal global developmentalism offers up instead the ghastly inversion of such prosthetic self-determination, emerging ever more as a site in which millions of impoverished, transitory, migratory, vulnerable, malnourished, misinformed, threatened human (and nonhuman) beings bear the most obliterative imaginable brunt of their precarity as "experimental subjects" in the service of efficient healthcare administration yielding well-tested, least-costly "optimalities" for the privileged beneficiaries of the unspeakably violent, racist, patriarchal corporate-militarist order.
You say you "have no expectation that democratization will occur," and your worries about a "rise of techno-fascism" are certainly well-taken. I don't expect you will be reassured much by a wan reminder that we must struggle for democracy rather than hoping for it or counting on it, even though that is true. I will say that my adult life has been lived in the neoliberal shadow of Reagan-Thatcher-Bush, of market fundamentalist idiocies championed as stunning insights by elite discourse even as they reduced the world to shit and ruin and heartbreak. I know what you mean when you speak about "techno-fascism" -- and although the transhumanists and extropians and singularitarians and techno-immortalists and other superlative technocentrics I write about here often present particularly stunning variations on that theme in the flabbergasting baldness of their extremity, the truth is they've got nothing on the suave "mainstream" technocratic elitists of the corporate-militarist order, with their endlessly death-dealing Structural Adjustment Programs, Risk Vectors, Collateral Damage, and self-congratulatory commons capture stealthed as the culture of Entrepreneurial Innovation.
Nevertheless, I have personally never been more hopeful in my life, and Obama is less the reason for my hope than the iceberg tip, the symptom of my reasons for hope. I do believe that the bankruptcy of corporate-militarism has been fully exposed and rejected in the emergence of a planetary environmental politics while at the same time the proliferation of peer-to-peer formations for education, agitation, and organizing (concerning this very environmental politics among other things) have radically empowered the people of the world not only to demand but to enact change. This is not a call for democratization but its very substance.
Many virtuous circles arise out of these concomitant events: the radical undermining of the profitability and effectiveness of the industrial institutional landscape in which authoritarian politics have long flourished by means of the very peer-to-peer formations through which the anti-authoritarian politics that oppose them are being expressed, the elimination of the worst environmental culprits precisely through this ineffectiveness and unprofitability even as the more decentralized and appropriable alternatives connected to peer-to-peer formations lend themselves to sustainability (a billion solar rooftops rather than industrial elite nuclear plants or dirty coal -- and all coal is dirty -- mining; home organic gardens, localvorous agricultural distribution, and DIY info-networks as against industrial scorched-earth pertrochemical BigAg; flexible, multilateral diplomacy and scale-appropriate policing as against unilateral pre-emption, conscript armies -- including stealth conscription through artificial impoverishment and Drug War criminalization -- and WMD stockpiling; and so on), among many others.
And so, while I have no expectation that the necessary democratization will take place I do see signs everywhere of the substance of democratization playing out in the world all the while proliferating peer-to-peer formations facilitate ever more and more of this very democratization even as the institutional order of corporate-militarism is falling into ruin and disrepute.
Of course, the rich are enormously resourceful as always, incumbency has a lot of muscle at its disposal, reactionaries have the discipline and energy of desperation, and human beings are prone as ever to parochial and short-term thinking and, worse, to rationalizing the crimes and errors that eventuate from parochialism and short-term thinking. Climate catastrophe is at hand, resource descent and poverty-fueled pandemic vectors conjure the specter of mass extinction, world-ending WMD are proliferating, network-mediation of fundamentalist ideologies along with documentary evidence of unspeakable injustice yields permanent intractable social crisis. To be sure, things have never been more perilous.
Still, yeah, I'm hopeful.
ddjango wrote, much abridged:
I confess to a deep queasiness when I read transhumanist tracts. Vinge's claim that he forsees "the end of humanity as we know it" sparks despair…. Much transhumanism has a eugenic flavor and agenda. They speak of "human enhancement", so they're talking about building some sort of pure, man/robot super race.
Within limits, human enhancement can be a good thing… without my medications I would be very sick. But I'm suspicious of what science might include as enhancement. I have seen talk of a human brain, without a natural body, controlling a sophisticated robot… I opt out, thank you.
Your most salient point is that we must "democratize" this. I agree, but have no expectation that democratization will occur. The rise of techno-fascism makes the question of "who chooses for whom" moot.
First off, I consider "humanity" an historical construction as much articulated by semiotic factors (like culture) as by material factors (like evolution) -- this isn't a distinction that holds up to every kind of scrutiny, of course, since I don't regard the semiotic as immaterial, by any means, but that's a side issue. What I want to get at here, is to say that if "humanity" is always articulated in history, then there is an important sense in which every moment of real freedom is a moment that constitutes an end of humanity as we know it, or better a collaborative re-making of what is possible and important when we make recourse to the prevailing but always contested idea, "humantiy."
I understand of course why one would feel despair -- or hilarity, or rage, or disgust, or embarrassment -- in grasping the profoundly unimaginative, disrespectful, exploitative, violent hopes and fears and desires that get registered by so many of the people who like to talk most about things like technology and science and medicine "changing humanity as we know it." But always remember that democracy's open futurity has a way of wreaking havoc with the sad, slick, sneaky variations on the theme of the futures pined after by those who put other ends ahead of democratization, peer-to-peer, of equity and diversity and consent.
To turn to another of your points, I want to reiterate that I personally think the word "enhancement" profoundly confuses the problems, stakes, and contests playing out in the emerging terrain of non-normativing healthcare practices.
"Enhancement" is not at all a neutral term, even though it seems well-pleased all too often to masquerade as one, since "enhancement" is always enhancement -- for whom? for what? at the cost of what?
Non-normativing healthcare demands a shift in the standards that would govern the equitable administration of medicine: We are shifting away from, on the one hand, the universality of "normal-function" or "optimal-function" -- arising out of the scientific ethos of consensus, a sign of which is the shared recourse to evidence, as much in instances of falsification of some prevailing consensus as in substantiating ones. And all the while we are shifting toward, on the other hand, the legibility of actually-informed actually-nonduressed consent in the service of therapeutic self-determination -- arising out of the ethical ethos of consent, a sign of which is dissensus, the political (and, if properly political, then non-violent) clash of opinions. Even after this shift is more fully consolidated, of course, healthcare would always remain in an interesting, actually constitutive, dialectic with the still universalizing "do no harm," but the shift itself is still an enormously transformative. It's no wonder that "authoritative" discourse is quite as befuddled as "popular" discourse as it comes to grips with this shift, and tries to re-order its priorities and re-frame its concerns in light of the shift as it is presently messily playing out in the lives and hopes and pain and healing of actual human lives.
I talk about the politics of prosthetic self-determination elsewhere, and I talk about what it is that makes transhumanist and bioconservative discourses both so eugenic in their thrust, despite their interesting differences, elsewhere too.
I agree that a democratization of the distribution of costs, risks, and benefits of emerging -- usually incredibly ill-understood however promising -- therapeutic technique is the crucial thing in this moment of fraught ongoing change. I like to speak of the ways in which healthcare might become a key site for the emancipatory expression of consensual self-determination in a planetary multiculture. But there is no question that the more urgent ethical and political reality besetting us, peer-to-peer, is that healthcare in the corporate-militarist frame of neoliberal global developmentalism offers up instead the ghastly inversion of such prosthetic self-determination, emerging ever more as a site in which millions of impoverished, transitory, migratory, vulnerable, malnourished, misinformed, threatened human (and nonhuman) beings bear the most obliterative imaginable brunt of their precarity as "experimental subjects" in the service of efficient healthcare administration yielding well-tested, least-costly "optimalities" for the privileged beneficiaries of the unspeakably violent, racist, patriarchal corporate-militarist order.
You say you "have no expectation that democratization will occur," and your worries about a "rise of techno-fascism" are certainly well-taken. I don't expect you will be reassured much by a wan reminder that we must struggle for democracy rather than hoping for it or counting on it, even though that is true. I will say that my adult life has been lived in the neoliberal shadow of Reagan-Thatcher-Bush, of market fundamentalist idiocies championed as stunning insights by elite discourse even as they reduced the world to shit and ruin and heartbreak. I know what you mean when you speak about "techno-fascism" -- and although the transhumanists and extropians and singularitarians and techno-immortalists and other superlative technocentrics I write about here often present particularly stunning variations on that theme in the flabbergasting baldness of their extremity, the truth is they've got nothing on the suave "mainstream" technocratic elitists of the corporate-militarist order, with their endlessly death-dealing Structural Adjustment Programs, Risk Vectors, Collateral Damage, and self-congratulatory commons capture stealthed as the culture of Entrepreneurial Innovation.
Nevertheless, I have personally never been more hopeful in my life, and Obama is less the reason for my hope than the iceberg tip, the symptom of my reasons for hope. I do believe that the bankruptcy of corporate-militarism has been fully exposed and rejected in the emergence of a planetary environmental politics while at the same time the proliferation of peer-to-peer formations for education, agitation, and organizing (concerning this very environmental politics among other things) have radically empowered the people of the world not only to demand but to enact change. This is not a call for democratization but its very substance.
Many virtuous circles arise out of these concomitant events: the radical undermining of the profitability and effectiveness of the industrial institutional landscape in which authoritarian politics have long flourished by means of the very peer-to-peer formations through which the anti-authoritarian politics that oppose them are being expressed, the elimination of the worst environmental culprits precisely through this ineffectiveness and unprofitability even as the more decentralized and appropriable alternatives connected to peer-to-peer formations lend themselves to sustainability (a billion solar rooftops rather than industrial elite nuclear plants or dirty coal -- and all coal is dirty -- mining; home organic gardens, localvorous agricultural distribution, and DIY info-networks as against industrial scorched-earth pertrochemical BigAg; flexible, multilateral diplomacy and scale-appropriate policing as against unilateral pre-emption, conscript armies -- including stealth conscription through artificial impoverishment and Drug War criminalization -- and WMD stockpiling; and so on), among many others.
And so, while I have no expectation that the necessary democratization will take place I do see signs everywhere of the substance of democratization playing out in the world all the while proliferating peer-to-peer formations facilitate ever more and more of this very democratization even as the institutional order of corporate-militarism is falling into ruin and disrepute.
Of course, the rich are enormously resourceful as always, incumbency has a lot of muscle at its disposal, reactionaries have the discipline and energy of desperation, and human beings are prone as ever to parochial and short-term thinking and, worse, to rationalizing the crimes and errors that eventuate from parochialism and short-term thinking. Climate catastrophe is at hand, resource descent and poverty-fueled pandemic vectors conjure the specter of mass extinction, world-ending WMD are proliferating, network-mediation of fundamentalist ideologies along with documentary evidence of unspeakable injustice yields permanent intractable social crisis. To be sure, things have never been more perilous.
Still, yeah, I'm hopeful.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)