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

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Has Spell-Checker Been Canceled?


Okay, I know, I know, giving it two ells is an "acceptable" alternative spelling, but it makes me shudder. Anyway, this is just to say that the Spring Edition of H+ is out, the glossy futurological front-mag for the Robot Cultists of the World Transhumanist Association. That "H+" is short for "Humanity Plus," in case you didn't know -- and if you think that's an odd sort of thing to admit to imagining yourself to be just because you have joined a techno-utopian Robot Cult, well, that probably just means you're Humanity Minus, anyway, as far as the HumanityPlusTrons are concerned.

Humanity Plus is, of course, what the World Transhumanist Association has decided to rebrand itself as. Think of Amway hoping that changing its name to "Quixstar" makes it not Amway anymore. Think of Blackwater hoping that changing its name to "Xe" makes it not Blackwater anymore. I must say, one almost has to feel a certain wry fondness for the rather clumsy awkwardness of an effort at PR refurbishment in which cultists take their stab at mainstream respectability by explicitly declaring themselves better than everybody else.

To the question posed by the magazine's cover, a question that testifies to anxieties among the Robot Cultists along the lines I was uncharitably emphasizing yesterday, the answer is, of course, that "The Future" has always been canceled. "The Future" is always a non-starter in what seems to me the very particular and problematic sense promoted by its various PR flacks and "visionaries." "The Future" is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fraud sold to rubes involving hyperbolic mischaracterizations of and opportunistic credit-taking for the actual work of collaborative pragmatic problem-solving and democratizing social struggle and diverse exhibitions of consensual creativity -- and by those who often have less to contribute to these marvelous processes than they have the willingness to skim the benefits and credit for them so long as they are allowed to get away with it.

By the way, it is to be regretted that people I respect like Jamais Cascio and people I rather get a kick out of like R.U. Sirius are involved in this project, but their involvement neither diminishes my appreciation of them in any substantial measure nor does it enhance my appreciation at all of the superlatively silly company they are keeping.

10 comments:

Go Democrats said...

Ok, but you have to admit that the graphic design is cute. I much prefer this cover to the last one, which was more like Giulio's creepy fantasy of what he should look like.

jimf said...

> "The Future" is always a non-starter in what seems to me
> the very particular and problematic sense promoted by its
> various PR flacks and "visionaries."

Speaking of PR, that cover is pretty fancy design work.
Assuming the talent was paid for and not donated (somehow,
it doesn't look like an Anders Sandberg job), you can
see where the bulk of the money for that issue went.

Though the overall impression is -- cereal box, for
some reason. Why is that? I guess it must be the
circled-script h+ logo that puts it over the edge.

http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/cereal-boxes

Mike Treder said...

Yes, that alternative spelling of "cancelled" bothered me too. I haven't asked, but I assume that RU is going with the British version. Or maybe it was just a simple, but sloppy, mistake. I hope the former.

Anonymous said...

Makes you shudder? Oh, how insulting. Well, not really. But it is very racist, yes racist, against all us non-Americans! Well, not really that either; I just thought it was funny that such a superficiality of language as that would bug you.

Anyway, what's all this nonsense about collaborative pragmatic problem-solving? Don't you know it's just a handful of technoindustrial supergenii like Ray Kurzweil, Max More, John Galt, and, uh.... Alex Lightman? You know, I don't mean to alarm, but I think if the economy continues like this for a while, all our MetaHumanoidsPlus! will leave us here for Galt's Gulch! Wait a minute, maybe that's where all the venture enterprises are going! Now who will we mooch off of until the Rapture?

Anonymous said...

Well, for something slightly more light-hearted...

Planet Digiratism:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1873122,00.html
"Novels are getting restless, shrugging off their expensive papery husks and transmigrating digitally into other forms. Devices like the Sony Reader and Amazon's Kindle have gained devoted followings. Google has scanned more than 7 million books into its online database; the plan is to scan them all, every single one, within 10 years. Writers podcast their books and post them, chapter by chapter, on blogs. Four of the five best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 belonged to an entirely new literary form called keitai shosetsu: novels written, and read, on cell phones. Compared with the time and cost of replicating a digital file and shipping it around the world--i.e., zero and nothing--printing books on paper feels a little Paleolithic."


Planet Earth:
http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/Foam_and_Froth_and_Mighty__Upside-down__Pyramids
"And that’s what it is. A wet dream. Pure, unadulterated balderdash. Reality turned on its head—and quite literally. A so-called “mighty pyramid” in which not only all the money but almost all the readers will reside in the “small, pointy peak,” while the supposedly “wide bottom” will indeed be foamy. That is to say, mostly froth and looking way, way bigger than it actually is.

Has common sense been outlawed? Ask yourself how much of your reading consists of wading through unedited and self-selected fan fiction that you read on a cell phone? (Or read anywhere else, for that matter.)"


(For those not in the know the irony here is that all Eric Flint's books were published as ebooks as well as paper books, he endorses and ocasionally publishes in his own e-fanzine, and blogs. In other words he probably knows more about online promotion and promotion by fan fiction than anyone else.)

I didn't like everything in Flint's rebuttal, but, well, he got the main problem with Times' article right: it's just amazing how reification of progress and technology and sheer animalism of "books shrugging off paper" and "information wanting to" and trendy log-log graphs drawn with a thick marker affect people's judgement...

Books may well want to get electronic, but people don't. I honestly have read a lot of fanfic of all kinds. Most of it is indeed so horrible it's not at all funny. I recognize that cellphones and netbooks and dedicated devices are great for some situations (like reading during commute/travel or getting books published overseas...) but not everyone is in these kinds of situations all the time. (I'm certainly not, despite my cellphone probably having more ebooks uploaded top it than I have traditional ones, not surre haven't counted the latter for a while. )

Michael Anissimov said...

RU Sirius has been pushing transhumanist ideas for ages now.

Yeah, we get to hang out with him. So cool! (I thought he was awesome when I read Mondo 2000 as a teenager.)

Dale Carrico said...

He can do better.

jimf said...

Anonymous wrote:

> Planet Earth:
> http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/
> Foam_and_Froth_and_Mighty__Upside-down__Pyramids
> "And that’s what it is. A wet dream. . .
>
> Has common sense been outlawed?

Another article in the same key (though not about
e-books) on the same site:

http://baens-universe.com/articles/Master_of_the_Abyss
--------------------------------------
Master of the Abyss, by Barry N. Malzberg

Any dummy could have seen this coming, I thought. The Apollo Program
was oxymoronic; it was an exercise in institutionalized denial. Also
it had been funded and propagandized by the government as a distraction
from the increasingly unpleasant and unpopular business of Vietnam.
When our Vietnam involvement inevitably ended, when the Moon had been
"conquered", when the distractive purposes had been solved, the Moon
was certain to be abandoned and Apollo would collapse. In thrall to
the Government, it had been meant by the Government to be about power,
not exploration. The astronauts had to know that too. They had to be
a little crazy as they perceived that fundamental contradiction. . .

After Apollo 13, after Watergate, after the flight from Saigon, I
made an assessment in. . . 1976. . . This was how it
looked to me 32 years ago:

"How right I was in seeing that the structure of the program and its
administration would drive many astronauts crazy. . . I knew that
the men going into those capsules, ostensibly as operators, actually
as cargo, would be forced to come to terms with the devastating fact
that they could serve only by being machinery and that many of them,
sensitive and reflective [as] in our better moments [we] would wish
them to be, could not easily deal with this. Only years later did we
learn of the divorces, the breakdowns, the lurches into mysticism,
the scattered children, the pain that the bureaucracy had inflicted
on some of those astronauts . . . there is no percentage in this
culture in trying to tell the truth. . ."

It took the two space shuttle disasters (explosion on takeoff, incineration
upon re-entry) to completely abolish perception the space program's ad astra
as having any competence, but the space shuttle program, expensive and close
to useless, would have been a severe descent even without tragedy. Not only
is it clear that there will be no peopled Moon landing within my expected
lifetime, there is not likely to be such within the lifetime of anyone now
on the planet.

The Apollo program, in the hands of a venal, cynical government, was made
absurd. It did not want to be absurd, it had serious purposes, millions
of dollars was budgeted for the public relations which would make clear
how very serious it was. We were after all embarked upon the greatest of
human odysseys, one which Bradbury in _The Martian Chronicles_ had called
the justification for our existence. . .

But meanwhile, "There is to be no cursing in space. . . The transmission is on all
the time, control your language." No cursing in space! If the War On Pornography
was to be carried from the offices of the Citizens For Decent Literature to
the spaceways, if the spaceways were an Interstate to the suburbs of the Moon,
if the Reverend Donald Wildmon and his good citizens could sanitize the limitless,
and if no one in the National Aeronautics and Space Agency or the United States
Government could state that this was absurd...then the program was doomed.
Devoid of humility or realism, it would end in an ash heap of motive. The
astronauts and engineers trapped by this mad oxymoron would be either insensible
or driven toward madness. . .

Perhaps my own problem was that I took my conclusion or anticipation to be
obvious; it did not seem to me that any thoughtful science fiction writer
(regardless of politics) could disagree. I learned otherwise when I wrote a
mild editorial for the Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America. . .
in 1969. . . That editorial incited uniform loathing from those who chose
to respond (I was accused of being opposed to the very concept of the exploration
of space) and shortly thereafter I was sent on my way. (There are, I wrote
ten years later, even greater humiliations than being thrown out of a volunteer
job and science fiction, piece by piece, was eager to teach me all of them.)
Particularly venomous was a writer employed by a contractor for the space
agency who accused me of trying to get him fired. Joanna Russ, meanwhile,
did not like my syntax or conjugation.

Well, all of this. . . was a long time ago. None of this really matters now
and there will be no Mars landing for hundreds of years. (Eventually we will
get there and everywhere else; I believe in Gordon R. Dickson's
"Thousand-Year Look.") I wrote this because a friend, the Political Science
Professor, asked "Why does your work, like Mailer's in the 60's and 70's,
center on an apocalyptic outcome separating you from almost all Jewish
writers of the time?" and when I answered "An apocalyptic outcome seemed
obvious" someone else asked, "Why was it so obvious?"

I hastened therefore to answer. . .

-- December 2008: New Jersey

Anonymous said...

Columns like those and that "download as plain RTF" option in their webscription.net store are the only things that make most of the typical "Published by Baen" fiction tolerable... (Drake and Bujold are awesome, of course, Weber is okay, despite his constant idealization of British Empire, Flint is a bit hit-and-miss, as far as quality goes and the rest... Well, at least among the leads there are too many bad libertariuan/AWM drivel to my taste. Then again, there are some good, literarily speaking, libertarian fic there too. )

Anonymous said...

P.S. Just noticed, in my 1st comment, - "animalism" is, of course, animism. Well, at least I know enough English to not to sound like a child of Buffy and Yogi Berra all the time now.