Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Casting About for the Slogan that Kills Pan-Planetary Futurological Droolocracy

A very nice and well meaning reader to all appearances, at any rate one who sympathizes with my critiques of corporate-militarist futurology in general and the various modalities of Robot Cultism I critique more specifically -- transhumanists, extropians, techno-immortalists, singularitarians, and so on -- has been e-mailing me with a strange request (or so it seems to me), asking me to imagine the following scene:
If you were present at one of their board meetings, what's the most succinct, politely phrased, but devastating question you would ask?

Or from another e-mail:
I'm sorry to pester you if you felt it didn't merit a reply and forgive me for repeating myself, but I would be VERY interested to know what question you would pose in their boardroom.

I don't know if this means she is about to have occasion to address the boys of the Long Now Foundation or Singularity U some time soon, and is looking for rhetorical tips in the oh-no-she-di-int department, or if this is just a thought-experiment she imagines would be particularly clarifying of the critique.

As I said, she seems well-meaning enough, and so I did give some thought to the request (readers are welcome to take up the challenge in the Moot, certainly), but I admit my way of thinking just doesn't run that way when all is said and done. They say that romance-novelist-cum-libertopian-guru Ayn Rand once boasted that she could capture the essence of her philosophy while standing on one foot, but of course her "philosophy" isn't one, and this very boast testifies (on one foot as it were) to the unremitting awfulness one otherwise has to slog through one of her terminally awful ponderous preposterous pontificating phone-book sized "novels of ideas" to really grasp otherwise.

I once heard (this may be entirely apocryphal) that the philosopher Robert Nozick daydreamed of the "perfect riposte" that would either logically compel assent in an interlocutor or create reverberations in the brains of the unpersuaded that would do them in on the spot. It seems to me an extraordinarily revealing sort of fantasy, if there's any truth in it. I personally just don't think it is all that productive to try to distill complex critiques into what are presumably hoped to be perfectly devastating unanswerable questions, or what have you. I don't put much store, either, in the perennial geek fantasy of stopping the earth-chewing sooper-robot with the single command "calculate pi to the last digit!" Whereupon: "Aaaaaaarrrrrgggg!" (The scenario has surprisingly many variations, all of them idiotic, among them, one notes, some geoengineering scenarios.)

Frankly, I think the boardrooms of corporate-militarist futurological think-tanks of the usual mainstream neoliberal and neoconservative varieties (as well as the more marginal and lurid Robot Cult organizations and movements and ramifications of futurological discourse that provide the best yuck-yuck material in every sense) are chock-full of facile reductionists and dumb-dumb determinists who already speak that kind of language, that dream of a unilateral instrumental efficacious brute-force take-no-prisoners he-man discourse, who think it makes them smart that they think this way rather than the truth that it makes most of them into insensitive nonsensical bulldozing bullies who turn everything they touch into shit, and who sell this robotic moon-shine to a saucer-eyed lotus-eating populace who all-too-often all-too-eagerly lap it up on the road to the sunny self-lobotomization they fancy will represent their futurological emancipation when in fact they are simply substituting their souls (I speak as an atheist) for pet rocks.

I think it would be wrong to poke these guys' eyes with contrarian slogans, however "devastating," in a bumper-sticker cat-fight, however momentarily enjoyable that might be, when it concedes them the more devastating victory of fighting on their terms, and so risks adding one more voice or vote to the pan-planetary shit sandwich of consumption mistaken for freedom, prophecy mistaken for understanding, and multiplication mistaken for diversity.

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