Far Out

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot: Far out ideas are crucial of course to the progress of science, and rightly cherished as such, but they don't actually count as warranted science until they manage to attract an actual consensus.

If scientific consensus finds some technoscientific claim unwarranted chances are that it is just that, unwarranted, even if it is true that some such views eventually do achieve consensus and so contribute to scientific progress. (Hi, there, would-be singularitarians, techno-immortalist uploaders, sooper-longevity pill-poppers, holodek dreamers, eugenicist schemers, drextech cornucopiasts, nice to see all your fresh-scrubbed froth-mouthed faces again!)

Futurological subcultures not scientific, they are better conceived as fandoms, communities of shared enthusiasm that identify with idealized outcomes or with would-be gurus (or sometimes even figures who themselves might otherwise pass muster as proper scientists or scholars or experts however marginal some of their notions might be) and substitute insular echo-chambers, passionate tribal devotions, and uncritical True Belief for the actual substantiation, experimentation, falsification, publication that yields scientific consensus.

In the really extreme modalities of futurological sub(cult)ure I criticize most emphatically here, like the eugenic transhumanists, the techno-immortalists, the singularitarian Robot God priesthood, the nano-cornupiasts, and so on, I fear that these tendencies are particularly pronounced, too often caught up in, at best deeply vulnerable to, the cul-de-sac of outright cultishness and all its unfortunate authoritarian paraphernalia.

Futurological Immaterialism and Neoliberal Immaterialism

The literally fraudulent financialization of the US Economy under neoliberalism is completely off the rails, of course, and the critics are railing at last and en masse, still too little and possibly too late, but years and years and years after the wheels started coming off for all to see it seems that some are connecting at least some of the dots constituted by the breadcrumb trail of rapid episodic irrational exuberances of market-bubbles-and-looting-sprees consummating the Eyeblink Empire of postwar "Washington Consensus" corporate-militarism.

There are still more dots that remain for us to connect, if you ask me.

I would point out, for one, that the so-called "acceleration of acceleration of change" that corporate-militarist futurologists and especially Robot Cultists so love to hyperventilate about (and actually this "accelerationalism" is a mainstream corporatist trope, but the so-called Singularitarians are its reductio ad absurdum) derives its plausibility as a notion from our shared experience of the instability of this neoliberal financialization. Indeed, apart from a few technical vicissitudes incomparably more modest than their hype ever remotely justified, the so-called "acceleration of acceleration" really amounts to nothing but that instability of neoliberal financialization only simply as that instability is experienced by the relative beneficiaries of that financialization, or those who at any rate identify with those beneficiaries.

More dots.

The singularitarian nerd-rapture chorus line who have crowed loudest but not alone about this technoscientific "acceleration" toward digital transcendence, that is to say the ones who fulminated about a kind of historical "progress" but one without the materiality of actual social struggle in it, are usually the very same futurologists and techno-utopians who crow about an "intelligence" coded in software that is always imminent but never arrives, one without the materiality of brains or sociality to incarnate or substantiate it. They are often the very same futurologists and techno-utopians who pine for the enhanced "experience" of a "virtual reality" without the materiality of friction or chance or sublimity or entropy to substantiate it. They are often the very same futurologists and techno-utopians who pine for an immortal life "lived" somehow without life but as immaterial information in the cyberspatial sprawl or in invulnerable robotic shells, life as an endless prolongation of static senseless death-in-life where nothing can matter lest in mattering it "kill" the dead-alive "immortal" machine.

In the concluding chapter of my dissertation, Markets Without Materiality I discuss a futurological work by market fundamentalist David Friedman (son of the shock doctrine market fundamentalist guru Milton Friedman) in which he enthuses about the desirability or even necessity of a retreat into virtual reality as a means to escape the dilemmas posed by surveillance technologies according to another libertarian thinker, David Brin. I am compelled in that conclusion to note

the curiosity of the spectacle Friedman’s argument is making of itself here…. Robert Heilbroner has famously described economists as “the worldly philosophers,” as collaborators in the most relentlessly materialist humanist tradition on offer. And [yet] here, to preserve the norms and assumptions of political economy an heir to that tradition, one who has described as his chief contribution to it simply that he takes some of that tradition’s commonplace assertions to “their natural conclusions,” finds that he must denigrate the very material and bodily foundations on the basis of which that tradition has always defined itself and distinguished itself from all others. To retain what he takes to be a political economist’s conception of worldliness, a political economist finds he must disdain the world.

Life is lived in material bodies, intelligence is incarnated in material brains, material situations, material dynamisms, peer-to-peer, social struggles play out in material histories materially circumscribed by finite ecosystems, mortal lives, error-prone efforts.

To deny or renounce these materialities in flights of fantasy, whether in fundamentalist religiosity or market fundamentalism or techno-utopian True Belief, is always to be supremely foolish to say the least and usually testifies to an infantile dread and denialism of our ineradicable and actually constitutive finitude, contingency, vulnerability, a dread and denialism that, whenever it is permitted to guide our affairs, leads always only to waste, deception, aggression, disaster.

Here in the consummation and bankruptcy and ruins (and not for the first time) of market ideology, we are reminded (and not for the first time) that the pace at which the tidal forces of "supply and demand" and the "education via unprofitability of ignorance or error" and the "rationalization via capital flight of panics and bubbles" and comparable "market mechanisms" manage to compensate for disruptive events and bad information is too different from the pace at which metabolism is maintained in human bodies and life is lived in human history for these mechanisms to sustain those lives and that history in a human way, however wholesome they may be in their own inhuman term.

Meanwhile, the assumption of infinite growth without which "market orders" could not be mobilized toward their indefinite ends in the first place is altogether too perilous to the actually-existing limits of ecosystems to sustain the planetary biosphere on which we all ultimately depend for our survival let alone flourishing. The life of that dead abstraction the market (a very different thing from the heterogeneous marketplaces in which people have gathered to trade goods and stories in their definitely different ways throughout history) is not curtailed by the end of your life, its mechanical pulse is not diminished in the cessation of your living pulse, its digital time is unfolding at a pace aloof from your life-time, its blind indifferent voracious ends are no more your ends than would be a glacier's, it is indifferent to the differences that are your all.

Since I borrowed the title of this blog from Hannah Arendt's motto, "for the love of the world," it will come as no surprise that my preoccupation with futurological discourse and Robot Cult nonsense more generally derives from my strong sense that these discourses arise from and express a profound hostility to and alienation from the world that must be loved in its material mattering, a material mattering very much including its materially situated materially inter-personal political substance, if it is to last and not be lost to us.

In this the futurologists are very much of a piece with (though some perhaps dupes of) more mainstream discourses of corporate-militarism, which likewise disdain the materiality of their suffering peers and of their creative peers, of true production and of true prosperity, of historical struggle and the actual experience of freedom in the world.

To love "the future" on whatever construal is in my view above all to disdain the present, or more particularly it is to disavow that futurity that is materially present in the present, in that diversity of peers whose palpable presence bespeaks the openness in the present to change for the better in acting in concert (in both collaboration and in contestation) with our peers who share the world.

We are not robots, progress is not a robot, history is not a robot, intelligence is not a robot, your brain is not a robot, experience is not a robot, peace is not a robot, creation is not a robot, production is not a robot, prosperity is not a robot, justice is not a robot, the environment is not a robot, life is not a robot.

There are differences that make a difference in the human world, differences that matter in human history, and to attest to a robotic indifference to these differences is not to exhibit prophetic insight or superior strength but to side with death out of idiotic greed or panic in the most brainless way imaginable.

Futurology is the quintessential discourse of this debased epoch of corporate-militarism. Let us leave "the futures" to the traders in futures, the robots to the robotic, and the rackets to the racketeers. There is still time to reconnect to the futurity available in the presence of our peers we call freedom, and in freedom build something better in the world. Fuck the futurologists and the financiers and the fraudsters.

Science Not Sales

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:

In my recent post Science, Politics, and Administration, I wrote, among other things:

Those who prefer to emphasize scientific outliers as definitive rather than simply indispensable to science over the stolid solid science of consensus tend to be crackpots or dupes who foolishly mistake themselves for champions of science or who are indulging in rank fraud.

To this, an "Anonymous" commenter replied (this is much abridged, do follow the link for the whole exchange):

In my view, this isn't the best way to spot crackpottery. Oh, yes, crackpots always channel Einstein, Wright brothers, Tesla, Von Braun, etc. ad nauseum. But, unlike the genuine articles, they want special treatment of some kind for their ideas. Always…. [The] Wright brothers built their "flier" (and half a dozen various flying prototypes) first, and then sought investors. Some imitate those examples faithfully, and whether their ideas make it or fail miserably, I respect them. But do crackpots, con men and their dupes do that? Never! They don't bet their lives and fortunes on their ideas, they want a sure thing. So they go to courts, to TV, to gullible venture capitalists, to the internet, organize their own diploma mills, and get their share of "degrees", "fame" and sometimes, alas, quite real money. Their "success" is of course, as fake as their ideas and methods, even financial one…. The sheer hypocrisy of this fake-dissent is enough to make those types absolutely intolerable. Any dissenters are welcome, except fakes.

These points are well taken, surely, but I don't happen to doubt that at least some pseudo-scientific crackpots and futurological fraudsters are indeed willing to struggle selflessly and even die (at least professionally) for their dumb ideas, or might at any rate be too stupid or caught up in a full froth of True Belief to grasp that these are the stakes in the game they are playing at.

What matters to me is that we insist on the distinction of marginal hypotheses that are indispensable in principle despite their marginality to the process by means of which we arrive at ever more capacious consensus technoscience over the long run, and actual scientific consensus worthy of the name and warranting our reasonable belief as such many of the present pillars of which began as marginal notions but no longer are so.

I think that most non-crackpots who are strong champions of presently marginal notions will concede that their views do not yet represent consensus science even if they rightly or wrongly expect them one day to achieve that distinction.

They best not compensate for their marginality by pretending to a certainty that nobody has, they best not handwave about the ignorance or irrationality of their detractors rather than seek to better substantiate their cases the better to persuade them, they will surely be aware and best welcome the custom that it is the extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary evidences and that their marginality puts the onus on them, they will best reasonably qualify their claims in the face of objections rather than hyperbolize and make to bulldoze them over, they best behave like scientists rather than salesmen (or futurologists, all of whom are salesmen).

Slavoj Zizek Is a Blogger

His books are not books in the customary sense. Rather, he is blogging lucratively onto pulp posts that are published as books once they accumulate sufficient weight to tip the scales of gatekeepers in the midst of the distress of their terminal crisis. And the standards and assumptions of that chimeric rhetorical mode, not quite journaling not quite journalism not quite meditation should bear on our evaluations of Zizek's productions of the last ten years or so. This is not a condemnation of Zizek so far as that goes -- tho' there are plenty of things he's blogged over the years that I have disapproved of, who cares -- but a vindication as much as anything, really, something to account for his idiosyncratic practice (the seat-of-the-pants tempo and repetitiveness and kinda sorta editedness of the writing, the ripped from the headlines topicality and copious citations of online sources in footnotes just itching to be clicked, the vertiginous juxtapositions of high and low culture -- a distinction he actually depends on for his writerly special effects, not one he is effacing in his writing) as well as to account better for my own continued enjoyment of his blog-post anthologies all these years despite feeling more than a little appalled by him most of the time.

More Geoengineering

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot. Jose Garcia wrote:

I don't think seeding the oceans with iron filings was ever a very respectable idea in the first place.

Still there is biochar which seems like a credible geoengineering strategy. And I think we're going to be forced to think about geoengineering at some stage because going zero carbon may not be enough.

Look. People need to start planting trees and region-appropriate home gardens, in addition to going zero carbon, regulating toxic materials and manufacturing processes to within an inch of their lives, and so on. Carbon isn't our only problem, given aquifer spoilage and soil erosion and the bursting of the bubble of the "miracle" of petrochemical input-intensive industrial agriculture. Inasmuch as biochar was already a pre-Columbian agricultural technique and most projects employing it today seem to be rather small scale, I am wondering whether "geoengineering" is really the right word to use to describe any effort at carbon-pollution remediation through local practice up-scaled (always only where region appropriate) via education, regulation, price incentivization, and so on.

I know enough about organic gardening to know that people who want to believe in technofixes consistently and even systematically underestimate the resilience of even devastated ecosystems that are finally being cared for rather than mistreated, and I suspect that at least some talk of tipping points being crossed that force us "reluctantly" to accept the necessity of geoengineering interventions and nuclear archipelagos and so on ultimately express the failure of imagination one has come to expect of corporate-militarists more than anything else.

I disagree strongly if you are implying that seeding the oceans with iron fillings was never treated as a respectable idea by those who think such things are respectable in the first place and megaphone them endlessly and so distract us from more local and distributed and scalable strategies that are known to be effective but are less likely to be profitable for incumbents.

Although I don't know enough about every other geoengineering strategy "on offer" to suavely trot out all the dangers and limits and hyperbole occasioned by each one (as neither unfortunately do the overabundant majority of those who handwave most enthusiastically about these strategies to the cost of sense) I do know that skipping from one scam to another to another as each is exposed as hype while the more difficult work of gathering reliable data, implementing piecemeal regulation and price incentivization, better design practices, general education, facilitation of organic, local, wholesome, carbon neutral practices at the proper scale and intensity can be done but likely won't be done while greedheads are endlessly jerking off to their effort-deferring guilt-denying profit-making authority-retaining fantasies of "greening" corporate-militarism via geoengineering isn't exactly the best idea.

Actually, as I have said before, I don't rule out geoengineering interventions in principle -- even though, as with most things futurological, many of these are entirely fantastic daydreams of megascale engineering that don't really connect up at the level of data or do-ability with the urgency of environmental problems at hand nor with accomplishments of more local strategies with track records of actual successes that could be effectively scaled via regulation, education, facilitation and so on.

My whole point is that I am skeptical about geoengineering, skeptical of those who prefer such interventions over others, skeptical of the hyperbolic discourse through which they are advocated, skeptical of their occasional genuflections to "reluctance" and "skepticism" that never has any impact on their actual advocacy.

I think it is not a co-incidence that corporate-militarism would shift from a very public denialism about environmental problems directly to a very public advocacy of geoengineering solutions to environmental problems.

The continuity between these two positions of incumbents maintaining control through extractive/industrial/capital-intensive/broadcast formations possibly matters more than the discontinuity between the two of first denying and then admitting the existence and scale and seriousness of environmental problems.

This isn't to attribute any bad motives to Jose at all, by the way, since he may well be as aware and concerned about the damage done by denialist discourse and futurological technofix-hype discourse as I am here, but just wants to ensure that the widest possible range of strategies remain on the table. I would agree with that enthusiastically.

The truth is that I expect the inherent drama of geoengineering interventions together with their likely comparative profitability to incumbents will ensure that these interventions will always draw more than their share of serious attention and consideration, whether they warrant it or not, and so we needn't worry so much about their neglect as about their preferential treatment despite the scale and intensity of their impacts in ill-understood environmental systems on which we depend for our lives.

Yet Another Geoengineering Technofix Fails to Live Up to the Hype

Oh noes, futurologists, better get your rocketships ready to escape to your nanotech treasure cave in the asteroid belt, asap!

Futurological Blah Blah

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot: A couple of days ago I posted a little survey of a few very recent or soon to be voted on administrative and legislative decisions that represent promising puzzle-pieces in an emerging story of a slow liberalization of the failed policies of the generation-long racist puritanical War on (some) Drugs.

The failed policies are real, the people they have failed are real, the liberalizations are real, the struggles, the education, the agitation, the organizing underlying the liberalization are real.

In the Moot, "Mike" -- who warns me that he "may be too transhumanist/technophilic for your liking" -- offers the following comment:

I suspect in the next 10 to 20 years we will see a lot of progress in this area. New neurotechnologies like deep TMS and ultrasonic neuromodulation may allow non-invasive targeting of reward related regions of the brain. This could conceivably lead to cures for many addictions. So drugs may merely become superfluous and unnecessary.

By the way, "Mike" also says some nice complimentary things about Amor Mundi, whatever our disagreements which, it goes without saying, is appreciated, but I am skipping over to the actual substance of his comment which, as he feared, is not at all to my liking. And, again as he suspected would be the case, it is his "transhumanism" and "technophilia" that is the problem.

Let me put it this way.

A meteor could hit the earth and "end" the problem of addiction for everybody on earth for good, too.

It really could.

But, to my mind, surely, it contributes less than little to the serious work of policy-making or activism that would facilitate more sensible and just outcomes where consensual (or not) private (or not) use and regulation of variously unhealthy (or not) variously addictive (or not) substances are concerned, however, to waste too much time pondering the whole meteor strike scenario.

Or, at any rate, it is almost always wrongheaded to file the time one spends thinking that way (which might, after all, be quite as edifying as the time one spends reading a good book or praying or masturbating, all of which have their places in the lives of those whose private perfections make recourse to them) under the heading of "serious thinking about actual problems that need thinking about" here and now.

With respect, here is what I hear "Mike" saying to me at the key point in his comment:

Blah blah futurology "may allow" more blah blah futurology hence "could conceivably lead to" still more blah blah futurology and "so" dramatically still more blah blah futurology.

As an exercise, imagine it is 10 to 20 years ago and Mike's counterpart (there were many, there always are) offered up some comparable futurological thought experiment that was also logically possible, I suppose, in the abstract, certainly enough to sell a story, this or that promising technique in a lab somewhere or idea of a technique he might have read about in OMNI magazine could, with a little luck and linearity appear on the scene and scramble the terrain and circumvent all the problems that presently define it. But either that idealized outcome didn't come to fruition at all, as these things almost never really do, after all, or let's say, something like a qualified variation of the idealized outcome did indeed "arrive" after a fashion, through the developmental glass darkly, through the inevitable complex socio- cultural- regulatory- promotional- engineering- economic- political- emotional- cluster-fuck of a trajectory that nobody could really sketch out back then, the ineradicable interminable stakeholder struggle that came to actually distribute the costs, risks, and benefits of its stepwise fraught fruition, in ways that articulated the substance of the outcome in ways that have little connection to the idealized outcome..

The futurological enthusiast talking then like "Mike" is talking now contributed less than little to the clarity or possibility or justice available in the vicissitudes of that struggle. Or, if he did contribute some such measure here or there, it was almost entirely accidentally so, accidentally in the same way that any poet or politician or well-placed prostitute could have done.

And worse than that -- in my view -- that futurological counterpart likely did a lot of abiding definitive damage instead, amidst the sparks of incidental insight, confusing idealized outcomes with real developmental struggles and sensible deliberation about actually-existing costs, risks, and benefits before us.

The fact is that the worst variations of futurological discourse (which I do not attribute to "Mike" explicitly, nor to most "transhumanist-identified" and "singularitarian" dupes of Robot Cultism, but they really should be made to better understand the company they are keeping) were media hype-notists and disasterbators whomping up irrationality to attract attention to themselves or salesmen whomping up exuberance to get at the money of their marks. We are reaping the whirlwind of corporate capitalism's smarmy smart guys and stooges right here right now.

Futurology is the hyperbolic quintessence of neoliberal discourse: Hyperbolizing derangements of sense in the service of elite or incumbent advantage, peddled as neutral cost-benefit analysis.

Foresight is all very well, indeed, it is indispensable, but when would-be developmental deliberation and planning assumes the tonalities of prophesy or salesmanship or substitutes abstract projection for proximate substance you can be sure that it is an explicit racket, more often than not, or, more innocently but quite as terrible, it is a confused and disavowed engagement with contemporary social and cultural problems displaced onto a symbolic terrain denominated as "the future."

What's Wrong With "Transhumanism"?

This is my latest of countlessly many efforts to date to characterize succinctly my criticism of the so-called transhumanist "movement," "ideology," "program," whatever it is. This one was written in response to a press query. You would be surprised how often I get such questions, I think usually from would-be journalists or perhaps grad students sniffing around for some writing angle. As always happens in such efforts, this version of my critique emphasizes some things, de-emphasizes others, captures some things nicely pithily, misses other things entirely, but since I cannot know what if anything will come of it, I figured I'd post it here at any rate so that the minutes of effort it represents aren't wasted entirely. This time the questioner also wanted to know how "technoprogressivism" differed from "transhumanism," possibly fancying some juicy sectarian squabble between weird futurological gurus might be in play. If nothing else I hope I managed to disabuse him of that.

People mean different things by "transhumanism," both those who sympathize or even identify with it, and those who disapprove or even ridicule what goes on it its name. I use the term "transhumanism" myself to deploy critiques of a complex of overlapping techno-utopian technodevelopmental attitudes and programs, all of them anti-democratizing in their primary impact, in my view:

[1] Transhumanism arises out of a familiar strain of Enlightenment thinking that tends to a distortive mechanistic reductionism and un(der)critical technophilia, a strain that has met with criticisms since it first emerged both from Romantic (and other) critics of Enlightenment but also from different quarters within Enlightenment as well;

[2] It activates and exaggerates the familiar irrational passions of instrumental rationality (dread of impotence and lust for omnipotence in particular) especially in moments of disruptive change;

[3] It substitutes for the pragmatism of a secular democratic technodevelopmental vision of collaborative problem solving and consensual self-determination a more faithful "transcendental" vision aspiring after personal superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance -- this being a superficially "technicized" and hyper-individualized appropriation of omnipredicated Divinity, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence -- a vision that is conceptually confused and usually terribly deranging of sensible technodevelopmental deliberation at the worst possible historical moment;

[4] It affirms a politics of biomedical "enhancement" that in valuing a parochial "perfectionism" over a consensual diversity of lifeways amounts to eugenicism;

[5] It endorses elite-technocratic circumventions of stakeholder deliberation in matters of technoscientific change (especially worrisome given the tendency to eugenicism), usually justified with the familiar anti-democratic alibi that "accelerating change" is ill-understood by everyday people affected by it (of course any characterization of technodevelopment as monolithically accelerating is patently false, and often, I think, is little more than a description of the catastrophic social instability provoked by neoliberal financialization of the global corporate-militarist economy as experienced by the relative beneficiaries of that instability, that is to say, by the mostly white, mostly male, mostly well-off, mostly well-educated, North Atlantic consumers who identify in the main as "transhumanists");

[6] It is relying ever more conspicuously on a discourse of existential risk (an analog to and exacerbation of reactionary "war-on-terror"-discourse) and geo-engineering response that conduces especially to the benefit of incumbency over democracy, the corporate-military-industrial-broadcast complex over emerging insurgent p2p-formations;

[7] It substitutes for the politics of democratizing social struggle amidst a diversity of stakeholders over new and actually-emerging technoscientific changes a dangerously inapt politics of sub(cult)ural identity, a movement politics mobilizing personal and shared-group identification with particular idealized (often incoherent) technodevelmental outcomes designated "the future," organized by dis-identification with actually existing planetary peers in their diversity;

[8] It is constituted in its organizational substance by an archipelago of inter-related so-called "think-tanks" and membership organizations supported by fandom subcultures, many of which are disturbingly indistinguishable from cults with all that this implies in the way of social alienation, manic PR and hyperbolizing rhetoric to attract attention rather than contribute to sense, criticisms misconstrued and attacked as defamation, and the whole banal bestiary of authoritarian hierarchy from True Believers to would-be gurus peddling pseudo-science.

These critiques are overlapping, but not seamlessly so, and one will find "transhumanist-identified" people who will represent better or worse targets for various combinations of these, as you will also find different levels of awareness and understanding among them about the entailments between these critiques.

It is true that for better or for worse I have personally become associated with the term "technoprogressive," but when I hear talk of "technoprogressive resistance to transhumanism" it seems especially important to me that you grasp that "technoprogressive" as far as I have ever been concerned is just a shorthand for the more gawky, awkward phrase "conventionally progressive, democratizing politics focused on questions of technoscientific change." It is not, properly so-called, some rival ideology to "transhumanism." Indeed, many "transhumanists" have appropriated the "technoprogressive" label themselves as a stealthy PR designation of some versions of the "transhumanist program" and so I can't say with confidence that the term is a proper placeholder for resistance to "transhumanist" silliness in any case.

I am personally interested in a potentially democratizing confluence of p2p-formations and an emerging planetary environmentalist politics as a way of overcoming the postwar impasse of corporate-militarist (neoliberal/neoconservative) Washington Consensus global hegemony. Also, I am interested (and, not to put too fine a point on it, enormously worried) about the planetary dissemination of non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medicines in a world of precarious status/labor, fearing an anti-democratic imposition of experimental subjection in the service of elite "enhancement" rather than a progressive politics of informed, nonduressed consensual prosthetic self-determination. Surely what is wanted is an equitable sustainable consensual technoscientific planetary multiculture.

This perspective puts me at odds with so-called "transhumanists" most of the time, who either disapprove of this emphasis, or who have nothing to contribute to its accomplishment while at once offering up endless confusions that befuddle the proper work of democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle on which its progressive accomplishment entirely depends.

But I cannot pretend that my "technoprogressive" vantage (one among many that are possible) provides me a rival ideology, program, or subculture with which to confront organized "transhumanists" on their preferred terms. It doesn't.

Is Obama the Face of Ongoing p2p Democratization?

It is a commonplace to point out the ways in which the Obama Presidential campaign depended on p2p formations for much of its success. It is customary -- and quite correct -- to say that Obama depended on the extraordinary fundraising of millions of aggregated small donations as well as the circulation of images and excitement about his vast rallies to acquire and parlay the early momentum without which he would likely scarcely have seemed a viable candidate as compared to Clinton or Edwards according to Establishment media pundits and incumbent partisan figures and so on.

We can only wonder how many millions more were inspired by the words of Obama's "Yes We Can" speech through their contact with its transformation by will.i.am into the now iconic song and video that proliferated deliriously via YouTube and hundreds of thousands of large and small blogs like this one, rather than by their direct or broadcast contact with the original speech itself.

And it is also true that Obama's Presidential ethos took on the coloration of p2p in ways that spectacularly amplified its force, from his insistence that his campaign was not about him but about us all, that change is a collective and participatory process, that we are the change we are looking for, to his pragmatic insistence that Washington must be made more transparent, responsive, collaborative.

But it is also quite striking to observe the ways in which the Obama Administration continues to mobilize peer-to-peer formations to implement its agenda as well now that it is in power, especially given Obama's spectacular popularity as compared with the Congress that must partner with the Administration to materialize Obama's policy goals.

Take a look at this page from Obama's Organizing for America: Take the Pledge.

Notice that signing the pledge provokes a series of ever more specific solicitations of effort, weaves you ever more deeply into a distributed organizational effort to facilitate the Administration's agenda.

It's fairly breathtaking, actually, not only in its sophistication, but also -- at least as a possibility worth contemplating -- as a diversion of Netroots energy and intelligence directly into the Obama apparatus.

I signed the Pledge and would urge sympathetic readers to follow the link and sign as well, but I will admit that my excitement was tempered by a few questions.

Even if you agree with Obama's agenda, or at any rate agree that fighting for his agenda is the best way we can apply the lion's share of our energies right now the better to open up possibilities for even more radical changes that the center-left Obama himself might not approve (which is my own position), there are real questions about what it means for the Executive branch to take up and to some extent appropriate the forms and also the energies of Netroots agitation and organizing in this way.

Does this amount to a powerful democratization of the American Executive? Does this render the Executive more beholden and accountable to the people, more directly expressive of popular will? Does this threaten a domestication of the insurgent and critical force of p2p democratization? Is there a worry that we might be MovingOn from MoveOn, peer to peer, in ways we might later come to regret?

Consider the ways in which Organizing for America differs from Accountability Now, a conspicuously more familiar Netroots campaign, conjoining figures from Daily Kos, Firedoglake, OpenLeft, ColorOfChange, Blog PAC and MoveOn.org together with figures from Netroots congenial forces like SEIU and the United Steelworkers to recruit and support progressive leaders and candidates for primary challenges to those Democratic and other incumbents who fail to reflect the progressive aspirations of their constituencies.

To what extent are these two formations complementary and to what extent competitive? Do they represent different faces for ongoing p2p democratization (in the United States at any rate)?

For me these questions take us into deeper perplexities and provocations. Can partisan organization and actual governance be democratized via the internalization of p2p formations and thereby be rendered more essentially progressive in their work, or are professional campaign apparatuses and administrative functionaries an inherently conservative force in society with the consequence that proper p2p democratization should remain a kind of abiding external check on their susceptibility to rationalization, corruption, incumbency, inertia?

Notice that we might decide that these professional formations are indeed in some important measure inherently inertial and conservative and yet still view them as indispensable to the maintenance of legitimate rule of law and the accomplishment of social justice on which the scene of informed nonduressed consent depends for its legibility and force and on which, in turn, democracy itself depends.

The ongoing and emerging forces of p2p-democratization seem to me to exacerbate the paradoxical inter-dependence of disruptive progress, diverse democratic expressivity, and legitimate equitable governance on one another while at once they endlessly undermine and co-construct one another in various measures in their play in the ongoing social struggle of, by, and for peers in public of which democracy actually consists in its substance.

As I said, I did sign the pledge over at Organizing for America, and I do cheerfully urge my readers to do the same. And I am also excited by the Accountability Now project and suspect I'll be giving them money and drawing attention to their issues here and elsewhere. It remains to be seen just how and how easily these ramifications of the Netroots expression of p2p-democratization will reconcile in theory, however, for now at least, they are managing nicely enough, so far, in practice.

Wired Tired Mired Dired

The Down Jones closed at 6,763 today. I wonder if the superlative technocentrics and Robot Cultists will still declare with undimmed fervor that their Singularity Is Just Around the Corner? I do hope they aren't unlucky enough to live in any of the parts of the United States where it is snowing, since these days that inevitably means infrastructure failure here at the pinnacle of high-tech just this side of techno-transcension. Perhaps they can step off the Holodek, pop a superlongevity pill, drop in from the nanobotic utility fog interior of their perch on the L-5 torus, and take a flight on the Concorde over to explain to my impoverished intelligence and imagination why my strong skepticism (to put it politely) about the "inevitable future" of robotic techno-immortalization under the warm embrace of the superintelligent robot god is so obviously unfounded all the while clucking their tongues and rolling their eyes at my ignorance of science.

It pays to remember that at the same time the techno-utopian "digirati" were breathless with excitement about the Extropian transhumanists (No death! No taxes! Libertopia uber alles!) they were meanwhile witheringly dismissing as prescientific emotionalists and ignoramuses and negative nellies and "fashionably nonsensical" relativists and all the rest of that tired jazz anybody who questioned their "Long Boom" theology, their embrace of Enron and the rest of the Ponzi schemers of the "New Economy" or who asked on the basis of what exactly their "Dow 40g, Man!" checks were presumably being cashed.

Lest this post be misinterpreted as a depressive dirge denying the present its real chance for positive change, I want to point out that the futurological hype of the Robot Cultists is and has always been the furthest thing from actual hope or actual science or actual sense. The futurological congress has always been fueled in the main by a witch's brew of social alienation, deranging reductionism, loathing of bodily vulnerability, reactionary fears of historical contingency and of worldly lifeway variation, and no small exhibition of the authoritarian tastes either for giving orders or for taking them.

Right about now, a proliferation of peer-to-peer formations, collaborative citizen expressivity, problem-solving, criticism, agitation, and organizing, together with the transformational Obama Administration that peer-to-peer democratization has birthed and now facilitates and pushes on has unleashed a rising wave of reasonable workable progressive intelligence and imagination into this moment of history. No theology of transcensional new age singularity babble. No would-be priestly authorities or gurus claiming to dictate the "will" of History or Reason to acquiescent consumers. No, it is democracy that is taking up the real work of technodevelopmental social struggle to solve humanity's shared problems, to enable informed, nonduressed prosthetic self-determination (where "prosthetics" equally encompass what pass for medical therapies and what pass for "lifestyle" choices), driven by and accountable to ever more of the stakeholders to change, demanding ever more forcefully that the costs, risks, and benefits of change reflect the stakes of the diversity of peers with whom we are making the world we share. We are well rid of the self-appointed "smartest guys in the room," the boys-with-their-toys, the futurological fraudsters, the ponzi schemers, the wired digirati and superficial self-help salesmen and design gurus, the superlative ideologues with the Keys to History in their hands and dollar signs in their eyes.

Democracy doesn't need digirati, and moralizing fundamentalist movements, whether explicitly religious (as with American Christianists and comparable Talibanists with their attendant charismatic priests and warlords) or notionally secularized and technicized (as with superlative techno-utopians, market fundamentalists, and Robot Cultists with their attendant charismatic gurus and technocratic elites) have no abiding part in the force of ongoing planetary peer-to-peer democratization and consensual lifeway polyculture.

Sasha, 1996-2009

My partner and I celebrated our seventh anniversary this month, but neither of us really approve of Hallmark Holidays and we didn't make a big deal out of it. I had papers to grade anyway, and Eric was doing work from the computer in his home office as well. I only mention it today because of another anniversary connected to the first that became sadly salient yesterday afternoon.

Eric and I moved into the little Rockridge bungalow where we still live today after we'd been together for a year, and that move was the occasion for a different unholy union (apart from our own, I mean). Each of us had chosen to care for a feral cat from the SFSPCA as a companion. Eric had chosen Sasha seven years before we met and by the time I entered the picture they were an incredibly tight-knit little family.

I say that Eric chose Sasha, but the story is that Sasha chose Eric, pretty much leaping into his arms unbidden with his motor running like mad the moment he set eyes on Eric, and this after exhibiting indifference to hostility to pretty much everybody else who had given him a glance up to that point. Sasha never veered from that assessment of Eric a day of his life. I have never seen such monomaniacal devotion from a cat in my life, it was incredibly sweet and a little bonkers.

I chose my own feral disaster area, Sarah, after Eric and I met. At that point I had been mourning the loss of my companion Rodent (the awful name has a dumb story attached to it that we can skip), who had been a kitten in the last litter of a family cat from childhood (Grasshopper, daughter of Cleo), and who had lived with me the whole decade I lived in Atlanta, lived with me there through well over a dozen moves and who knows how many friends and boyfriends and so on during the times of my adventuring, moving with my partner of the time Jules (still very good friends, he's living in Switzerland now) from Georgia to California when the time came for grad school at Berkeley. It's amazing what banisters our animals are as we climb the steep stairs.

Rodent died cuddled next to me while I slept Christmas Eve, 2001, in the big apartment overlooking Dolores Park in the City I rented at the time with two friends, both of whom were home for the holidays thus leaving me alone in that echoing warehouse of a place at the worst possible time. I always regretted very much that Eric never had the chance to meet Rodent, and I also regretted that Eric's Sasha -- who had a perfect, uncanny physical resemblance to my desperately missed Rodent -- wanted nothing to do with me at all.

As I said, Eric and Sasha were a pretty tight-knit unit of many years when I entered the scene. Eric's a rather solitary person, like I am, and Sasha was not at all used to intrusions. Early on, when I would come to Eric's place Sasha would leap to the top of his ratty, ragged, ill-smelling green-carpet tower and stare at me with unblinking fixity for hours with the most predatory stare imaginable. My territorial incursions were not appreciated. My alien smell was anathema. My efforts at cooing and friendly pats were impertinences beyond bearing.

When Eric and I found our bungalow for rent through a friend, the place was so charming, the street so sweet, the price so right we just made the leap, and it felt like one -- not only because we both have fairly cautious natures and hadn't been together for that long, really, but also because we simply couldn't imagine what it would be like to weave our two crazy-cat families into a crazy-quilt that wouldn't be in tatters within days.

Our Sarah is a plump owl-eyed girl with a Hitler mustache, but she is far from as intimidating as that sounds. She has a bird in her head where her brain should be, for one thing. Leaves tracked in from outside are well-matched antagonists for her ferocity. Her battle hisses and trills are so adorable, Eric and I sometimes try to provoke her to irritation just because she makes such a cute spectacle of herself when she is enraged. Like Sasha, she was plucked up by the SFSPCA from Golden Gate Park, her mother and brothers and sisters all dead, and she nearly the same. When I brought her home, Sarah still had a terrific gash in her neck from some bird of prey trying to make lunchmeat of her. For the first years of her life she was completely skittish and spastic. And Sasha, as I have said, was a grumpy, jealous, and obsessively territorial beast.

To put it plainly, Eric and I were scared to death to introduce them. It was possibly the most flabbergasting thing I ever saw when Sasha, upon meeting Sarah in our new home, confounded every expectation and scenario we had spun, and was instead instantly cowed into submission by our little girl, giving ground to her in everything she asked for days and days.

For Sasha, Sarah was some deus ex machina. For Sarah, Sasha was at most a mild amusement. I'm not entirely sure that she grasped the fact that we had moved into a new home at all, rather than simply moving through a locked door in the old place to a new wing. Sarah's extreme blank stupidity makes her the most unflappable and stoical creature within miles. When Eric and I were playing the game of choosing who would play each of us in the movie version of our lives, we chose for Sarah a bag of mixed dried beans.

Within a few weeks, Sasha had rectified the initial power imbalance between them, and had come to an accommodation with me (especially since Eric and I decided I would be the sole food-slave to get in his good graces). We sometimes had the feeling that however devoted the cats remained to us, they represented for one another the only real people in the house. We humans were pawns selectively deployed in elaborate politics we could scarcely understand. The territories they had staked out between them were palpably demarcated, mutually respected, but seemed to include contested zones for which they would skirmish through scent-marking rituals that they would impose on table and chair legs and on doorways and so on literally for hours and hours on end, patiently roving through the rooms, doing their grim work and undoing the work of the other, day after day. Sarah and Sasha were incredibly real for one another, and they were very contented in their surreal shared cat world. At night, after we had gone to bed, they would call to one another and you could hear them chasing each other downstairs, galloping on their cat-feet, playing like lunatics.

It really is a hard thing to try to convey what a sweet and charming cat Sasha was. He showed these aspects of himself to so few. With strangers he was standoffish at best, slinking off to hide under a bed when guests were here, and greeting them with what was almost inevitably called a "banshee howl" or "Nazgul shriek" once he grew impatient that they had lingered too long in his home. You may laugh, but words cannot convey the truly unearthly uncanny sound he could emit when he was unhappy. That jagged nails across a thousand chalkboards iceberg tearing into the steel of the Titanic deranged dinosaur menacing some distant lemur ancestor sound would make every hair on your body prick at its pore like an ice-cold electrocution.

Sasha scared everybody, animal, vegetable, mineral. Cat lovers were especially offended at Sasha's indifference to their earnest ministrations and aggression at their attendance -- it felt like a personal failing to be found wanting by Sasha, and everybody but Eric was found wanting. I am not exaggerating when I say that I personally felt less accomplished in the award of my Ph.D. (well, face it, having Arnold Schwarzenegger's signature on your diploma makes it feel a bit like a novelty item, like a whoopee cushion or something) than I did after a half decade of what psychologist Carl Rogers would call the offer of "unconditional positive regard" that Sasha grew to love me and let me in to the charmed circle of his care, second only to Eric. Those last couple of years Sasha would let me pick him up in my arms and would purr and nuzzle my nose and deign to let his forehead be kissed. These were scenes unavailable to the wider world, precious beyond description.

Like many feral cats, especially male ones, Sasha was plagued all his life through with medical problems, especially digestive issues. He was never an easy cat to care for. He had periodic crises, and then manic bouts of pure punk behavior in the recuperative aftermath. He had been eating less than usual for weeks and walking a bit stiffly lately. He was as bright eyed and spunky and affectionate as ever with us, and we would give his fur a rueful brush and joke that he was getting to be an old man.

While I was away teaching on Tuesday, a sudden crisis sent him in his kitty carrier to the pet hospital down the street. We spent an anxious couple of days playing phone tag and hearing that the good doctors were struggling to stabilize him enough in the first place to administer the tests to determine what was happening with him. Thursday I lectured on formal logic while the minute hand of the clock tapped toward the number which I knew would trigger Eric's call to determine whether or not Sasha should be put to sleep to end his pain and fear in some strange place among strangers.

I hadn't had a chance to say goodbye and had scarcely been able to focus on anything for days. Actually, the news seemed better than we expected and we were able to bring Sasha home with some antibiotics. Friday night he collapsed again. We were told he was suffering from pancreatitis. He spent a night sleeping with Eric all to himself in the guest room downstairs, to his utter delight. He had a last long day at the home he had loved for half his life, cozied up to his favorite heating grate behind the living room chair while we scratched his head for hours.

He was a terrible mess, though, unable to eat and stiff with pain, but just as sweet faced and bright brained as ever. The doctors declared him beyond healing and to be suffering in a way that would only get worse the longer it went on, and we put him to sleep in a blinding white room with an evil needle to a shaved patch of skin on his back leg. I held his soft little paw pad and rubbed his chin and he was sweet as an angel when he vanished from the world, his clear eyes wide and kind for me the whole time. I hope my finger on his chin smelled like home.

Nobody can know like Eric does, and like I do, what we have lost in losing Sasha, what we miss without our grumpy, sociopathic, sweet little punk man around anymore. This is dedicated to him.