I can only speak for myself, but I take transhumanist formulations seriously because they seem to me to exert a disproportionate and deranging influence on technodevelopmental deliberation at the worst imaginable time.
As I have said, superlative formulations have force because they
[a] activate customary irrational passions that are already occasioned by disruptive technoscientific change (panic from mistaken impotence, greed for mistaken omnipotence), because they
[b] congenially oversimplify and dramatize technodevelopmental complexities (reframing them as transcension, apocalypse, revolution, enhancement, immortalization) for lazy, undercritical, or overwrought people and media formations, because they
[c] conduce to the benefit of incumbent interests that portray themselves as more knowledgeable about matters of "advanced" or "accelerating" developments to justify circumventions of democratic deliberation, or frame technodevelopment in terms of "existential risk" that divert deliberation down corporate-militarist avenues (geoengineering, megascale infrastructure, centralized co-ordinated response).
I can go on, and have done, but I think you get the picture.
The point is, most of the reactionary formations that have menaced late-modernity (extractive-industrial-broadcast epoch) began as marginal subcultures of cocksure white boys certain they had the Keys to History in their hands. The silliness of superlativity is not enough to justify ignoring it or failing to understand it, especially once we see the context of techno-utopianism in which it so legibly locates itself.
I also believe that the Robot Cultists in their very extremity provide unusually distilled illustrations of the associations, dynamisms, guiding figures and so on that also play out in more mainstream neoliberal "globalism" and "development" discourse, and hence put us in a better position to understand the irrationality and authoritarianism of that discourse.
Anyway, as you know from the title of my blog, my hero is the political theorist Hannah Arendt (Amor Mundi, the love of the world, was her personal motto), who insisted that the philosopher's task is understanding, and where politics is concerned this means "thinking what we are doing."
I find that understanding the transhumanists and discerning the ways in which mainstream developmental discourse is illuminated by reference to their extremity helps "think what we are doing" in a moment of unprecedented planetary catastrophe (resource descent, climate change, WMD proliferation), planetary promise (proliferating p2p formations), planetary disruption (the shift into non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies). It's as simple as that.
8 comments:
Or Jonathan Coulton could make Amor Mundi more positive:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDiDK_yBCw0
I know that you were an IEET fellow in 2006-7; were all of you (i.e you and the transhumanists) friends and then there was a falling out, or what? Just curious.
> I know that you were an IEET fellow in 2006-7. . .
And then, one day, he discovered he wasn't.
"'How is the dictionary getting on?' said Winston, raising
his voice to overcome the noise. 'Slowly,' said Syme.
'I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinating.'
. . .
'By 2050 earlier, probably -- all real knowledge of Oldspeak
will have disappeared. . . The whole climate of thought will
be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand
it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think.
Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction,
Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly
and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people.
One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.
. . .
Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work:
a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next
day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Winston went into the
vestibule of the Records Department to look at the notice-board.
One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the
Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It looked almost
exactly as it had looked before -- nothing had been crossed out --
but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had ceased to
exist: he had never existed."
I have always been a geek and sf got me through high school the way Jane Austen got many of my colleagues through it to hear them tell it.
I did my thesis in Georgia in a rather conservative Anglo-American Analytic philosophy Department where I devoted a decade mostly to philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Rorty was regarded as a wild man there, and I fell hard for Rorty, Dewey, and James at that time. Only Arendt has compelled my attention longer.
By the time I got around to my thesis, I was doing a lot of queer and AIDS activism in Atlanta (coming out and getting laid was no small part of that) and I had discovered Foucault and Butler and Haraway in a fever of politics and desire and experimentation by then.
The thesis I completed in 1995 on connections between STS (science and technology studies) and queer theory. A whole chapter took up the notion of singularity in Vinge, which already troubled and provoked me in its conjunction of transcendental and reductionist rhetorics, but which I actually took up as a frame to connect a notion of revolutionary technodevelopmental politics and the expansive anti-essentialism of "queer" identification. Salvageable bits from that old thesis were gathered in the piece Technology Is Making Queers of Us All.
I discovered the transhumanists around 1992-1993, while working on the Thesis. I have always enjoyed sf-nal speculation and the transhumanists exerted already the fascination of a car wreck for me -- these were mostly extropians, in the full froth of dot.com irrational exuberance, very devoted to crypto-anarchism and anarcho-capitalism, rather flabbergastingly naive in their assumptions, but mostly not at all mean about it and with a Biercean humor and weird hippies in hot-tubs vibe that had a certain appeal, whatever their silly scientism and anarcho-capitalism (which I thought just had to be posturing to a certain extent).
By the way, even if it was easiest to be appalled then by the loud right-wing politics of movement transhumanism (this was blunted and re-spun over the following decade and a half considerably), I had already noticed unexpected sympathies for Bell-Curve racism, climate-change denialism, over-eager reductionist recastings of political, cultural, and historical complexities as though they were straightforward engineering problems, blanket defensive hostility to "political correctness" and "post-modern intellectuals" that didn't square very well with my own sense of the people who got tarred with these brushes (these tendencies haven't ameliorated or been forced underground quite in the way the early libertopianism did).
James Hughes discovered around 2000 an old post of mine from the extropian archives in which he detected some of his own interest in a more democratic socialist politics conjoined to disruptive technodevelopment politics and he invited me to participate in a new (I think?) transhumanist forum he was active in. I took him up on this, even though by then I had lost interest in the extropians even as a kind of punching bag.
Even though I mostly penned critical pieces about trasnhumanism, James and I did indeed become friends and for a long time I considered James a close political ally. For a long time, I figured James would eventually drop transhumanism and just direct himself to what I was thinking of as a kind of technoprogressive mainstream in the Netroots in the US and facilitated by proliferating p2p formation, global dissemination of ARTs and Choice, and emerging planetary environmental consciousness in the global left more generally. This did not happen, and eventually that friendship was broken.
James became more critical of the ways in which I have always been critical of transhumanism at that point and -- despite assurances in the face of my own concerns that my well known and repeatedly reiterated antipathy to movement transhumanism would not be a problem for them -- I ceased to be human rights fellow at the IEET soon after. More details are here.
I still appreciate many of James Hughes' formulations -- though I do think he is quick to dismiss disability politics and the dignity of nonhuman animals in a crypto-eugenicism that ill-comports with his democratic politics elsewhere, and I do think he shares the anxiety of many sociologists that he is too little like the scientists he admires and so must belittle the literary intellectuals he fears he too closely resembles instead.
There are other transhumanist-identified folks to whom I feel more friendly disposed than you would expect -- I always liked Mike Treder and respected Chris Phoenix (who I know less well) of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, whatever our differences. I think Nick Bostrom is a serious and first-rate philosopher, and quite a congenial person, too, even though I cannot fathom his association with movement transhumanism and disagree with many of his ideas. I have enjoyed my acquaintance with Aubrey de Grey, although, again, I can't say that I agree with him in the matters that matter most to him, nor can I quite grasp how he tolerates the subculture in his orbit. There are others -- although, to be honest, most of the folks among the transhumanists with whom I feel sympathy tend, I have noticed, in a couple years' time at most to abjure the movement stuff altogether.
Does that answer your question?
It does, thank you. Transhumanism (and its current and former adherents, and even critics) has a huge web presence, but there are weird gaps here and there and story of the internal dynamics is one gap.
Another sort of bizarre gap is the fact that the Cyborg Democracy blog was online for such a long time but the archives were never made available through the IEET website, although they were promised to be there. It's almost as though the organization is constantly rewriting its own history.
Does that answer your question?
Your comment should be upgraded and adapted from the Moot because it would help both your supporters and opponents understand where you are coming from...
> there are weird gaps here and there and story of the internal dynamics is one gap.
This is considered dirty laundry by the folks **inside** the "movement".
Any "story" would contain more than a dollop of muck-raking, and would
not be received kindly by the >Hists themselves.
Dale also, prior to -- when did he finally take the gloves off, 2006?,
was engaged in a strategic attempt to steer the politics of >Hism
away from the Bell Curve, Ayn Randian (and there are even worse,
albeit fringe-within-a-fringe, elements -- Holocaust denial,
for instance), "libertopian", right-wing end of the spectrum to a
more liberal-left (yet still "tech-friendly") flavor of "technoprogressivism".
During that phase, he quite specifically did **not** want to
provoke the more traditional Extropian types by criticizing
them too openly in public forums. Dale also encouraged other
critics (or at least, well, **me**) to "tone it down".
He has since abandoned that approach. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
Needless to say, I approve the change.
> . . .the archives were never made available through the
> IEET website, although they were promised to be there.
> It's almost as though the organization is constantly rewriting
> its own history.
That's right. The Extropians' archives come and go, too.
My long-ago posts to that list, which I could once provide
links to, are gone.
The WTA-talk list requires membership even to **read** it.
If you're banned (as I was), you're banned not just from posting,
but from keeping up with what's going on. Naturally, however,
I still get all the junk e-mail from the WTA!
Yes, these organization are very much concerned with controlling
1) their "offical" history and 2) [what they think of as]
their public image.
Up until Dale made it not worth their bother, there was a strategy
of literally mobbing with rebuttals anybody who dared to
make fun of or more seriously criticize >Hism on the Web.
There's a blogger named John Bruce who got a taste of this,
when he found out about >Hism via Glenn Reynolds, and
presumed to express a less-than-enthusiastic opinion about
both the man and the movement. Some of the >Hist leadership
fatuously describe this as "educating" their critics.
They have not (yet) adopted the Scientologists' strategy of
legal harassment of critics (though Dale has parried one or
two feints in that direction).
This is all standard cult stuff. There are lots of books you
could read. E.g.,
_The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power_ by Joel Kramer
and Diana Alstad
http://www.amazon.com/Guru-Papers-Masks-Authoritarian-Power/dp/1883319005
Another sort of bizarre gap is the fact that the Cyborg Democracy blog was online for such a long time but the archives were never made available through the IEET website, although they were promised to be there. It's almost as though the organization is constantly rewriting its own history.
From what I remember the last posts of the main contributor to the Cyborg Democracy blog besides James Hughes contained devastating criticism of movement transhumanism. So much so that these archives became a liability Hughes' bioconservative enemies were starting to use against him so they had to be suppressed...
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