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:

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.