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.
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4 comments:
A few things.
1) You should see the cover of the newest H+ Magazine. "Is the future cancelled?" [sic]
2) The recent drop in the DJIA is more a response to Obama's program than anything else, so I wouldn't blame that on conservative, libertarian, or Extropian politics.
3) In response to this and the previous post, I'm not completely on board with Obama's program. I think it's dangerous to be running up trillions of dollars of more debt.
Hey, Martin --
About [1]
"The Future" has always been canceled, if you ask me. "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 very little to contribute to these marvelous processes but who appear to be quite happy to skim the benefits so long as they can get away with it.
About [2]
Doesn't this "more" of yours imply that you think that so long as the conservatives and libertopians and extropians just kept clapping louder their absurd frauds could go on in perpetuity? Sure, the Dow is dropping because the greedsters and fraudsters rightly fear the jig is up. But to focus there exclusively, that is to say without noting that neither they nor any of us would be panicking about this were we all to have abjured the whole neoliberal financialization and wealth-capture scam in the first place, seems to me a bit, well, skewed.
About [3]
If I have to choose between Friedman and Keynes, I pick Keynes. No hesitation. That's a blunter brush than I want to paint with, but I'm sure you know what I mean. I agree with you -- most sensible people do, on Obama's side, too -- that this is a dangerous path, but there are no non-dangerous paths in the sense that you mean, seems to me. I sure hope Obama means it when he speaks of radical debt reduction in the middle term in the aftermath of the current rescue and re-regulation and re-materialization (profits from actual stuff, not logos) of the economy, but the alternative to Obama's program looks to me like fucking the vulnerable and the poor so that those who lied and stole their way to unearned prosperity on the wings of war and fraud and environmental catastrophe can continue to wallow like brainless pigs in their crappy McMansions. As it were.
Ah, his name is actually Michael Smerconish. Nevermind then. :) That's what I get for reading while listening to the TV.
> 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.
Literary advice from Mike Lorrey to Damien Broderick:
http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2005-May/015809.html
> Individuals who see personality as those characteristics which we find
> unextropic (self pity, modesty, inner doubt, etc) due to a pessimistic
> view of humanity are generally going to see your characters thus no
> matter what you do. . . [You] would likely find much sympathy from
> such reviewers if you slathered on enough angst and turmoil and
> melodramatic queenishness.
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