Culture and Anarchy

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives. -- John Stuart Mill

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. -- Oscar Wilde

In America, Republicans simply are the worst people you know.

This is not to deny that plenty of Democrats as people are plenty lousy, corrupt, and stupid themselves, nor to deny that there are universes of logical possibility in which legibly conservative ideas might lead an intelligent civic-minded person to some sort of idealized or historical Republican identification.

But Republicans here are the worst people around, because what Republicanism has devolved into at this point really is an appeal to the worst person you could be -- that is to say, to the worst that is in us all in some measure.

Republican politics drives and is driven by the part of you that is scared of change even when things must change to make things better, by the part of you that wants to break rules when you can get away with it even when you defend the rules because you depend on them yourself to keep what you got by bending or breaking them on the sly, by the part of you that sees the public world as a stage in which profits are made rather than people encountered, by the part of you that wants to win on any terms more because you don't want to lose on those terms than because there is actually something you want for its own sake, by the part of you that conforms without question or without joy for fear of taking responsibility for taking a stand that might be unpopular, by the part of you that wants your pleasures now in the expectation that the costs later can always be borne by those suckers who behave within their means and with an eye to the longer-term, by the part of you that can rationalize any selfishness, any meanness, any indifference, any thoughtlessness, any short-sightedness because the squalling endlessly needy infant inside, the bullying territorializing monkey inside dictates what you do rather than your critical and ethical intelligence.

Civics Lesson

I know that raising the specter of Big Government shuts down American brains more or less automagically at this point (as presumably the specter of Soulless Sociopathic Corporations does not?) and that conjuring up the image of government bureaucracy makes all American mouths curl up instantly and inevitably into a cynical dismissive smirk (as presumably images of corporate suits, meddling managers, and telemarketers in veal-fattening pens do not?).

But those who are fighting for real health care reform are always at the same time fighting against the feudal corporate-militarist mindset of tinpot tyrants barking can-do platitudes, celebrating as inevitable the merciless brutality of unaccountable monied masters, isolating and exploiting the vulnerable, hyping useless crap and distraction to the ruin of the world all the while denigrating and punishing expressions of fellow-feeling, critical awareness, nonconformity of any kind, or demands that authority always be prepared to make an accounting of itself.

To fight for healthcare is always already to fight for democracy and accountable, consensual governance, in our diversity, peer-to-peer, it is always already to fight against the anti-democracy of incumbency and the authoritarian order of corporate-militarism (the global neoliberal/neoconservative circuit).

It may seem like biting off more than we can chew to take all this on when taking up the fight for real commonsense healthcare reform, but the fact is that this is already the actual fight in which we are engaged, and we might as well grasp it in the terms that actually prevail. To win this fight is to facilitate the next step in the struggle toward more, better democratic governance -- likely to be collective bargaining rights, with campaign finance reform next, then global access to knowledge, then planetary governance over environmental criminality, but who is to say exactly how these struggles will play out? To lose the healthcare fight will be to make the next struggle that much harder, to confront us with the same arrayed forces of incumbency, the same hegemonic barrier of corporate-militarist platitudes we face now, again and again and again.

Why not fight them here and now, clear-eyed, with the strength of numbers and the wind at our backs? I'm not advocating muddying the issue of urgent healthcare reform with theory-head meditations on good-governance, but I am insisting that we grasp the way in which ignorance of or an entrenched habitual hostility to the very notion of good-governance forms an insuperable barrier through which commonsense discussions of issues rarely penetrate remotely intact. Be aware of the ways in which our metaphors and formulations and assumptions mobilize merciless, uncivil, cynical assumptions about our shared problems and the peers with whom we share them, how these anti-democratizing circumscriptions of possibility serve best that vanishingly small minority of authoritarian incumbents who stand between us all, whatever our differences otherwise, and the solution of our shared problems, peer to peer.

It doesn't matter how you put the points, what language you use, how you draw on your own experiences and metaphors to remind us all of the political assumptions without which none of our struggles make sense -- it doesn't even matter if you prefer the more philosophical sorts of language my own analytic temperament and academic training suits me to... However you put them, there are several basic ideas that we need to reiterate over and over to combat the inertial ignorance, short-term thinking, and deranging whomping up of greed and mistrust by those who thrive best wherever arbitrary men and not legitimate laws rule:

One: Democratically accountable governance indispensably provides ill-commodifiable goods and services that solve shared problems for the general welfare (the things so urgent that we don't comparison shop for them and hence are not subject to competitive forces that check abuses, or services the efficient provision of which creates institutions too big or complex to fail in ways that would subject them to such competition either) and it is the promotion of this general welfare as much as anything that secures the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

Two: Taxes are the price we pay for such civilizational goods, taxes ensure that governance is representational quite as much as regular and regulated elections do by yoking authority to the consent of the governed who also fund it, and it is, of course, only sensible that the people who benefit most from their inhabitation of a civilizational order to which others who benefit less are nonetheless indispensable contributors pay their fair share for its proper maintenance as well.

Three: The separation of powers, federalist subsidiarity (the principle that problems should always be addressed at the most local layer of governance actually adequate to their resolution), the defense and strengthening of the scene of actually informed actually non-duressed consent, the celebration of consensual multiculture, peer-to-peer, and the institution of elections to public offices at regular intervals provide the necessary checks on abuses in the provision of these unique public goods that is provided by competition for commodities available for exchange in well-regulated markets.

Middle (Age) March

Monday -- er, that is, today, although I'm actually off to bed now -- is my forty-fourth birthday.

I begin teaching the fall term later in the week, on Thursday, and so my vacation comes to an end all too soon, after teaching too many too much too intensely for too long this last half-year.

This has been a real vacation, though -- for a week now I haven't blogged particularly, you may have noticed, and I haven't paid any attention to the news for the first time in what seems like years, since well before the 2000 election debacle certainly, and I haven't surveyed any of the latest vulgar sales-pitches brute-brained futurologists think of as "thinking."

My companion instead has been an old friend, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and an intelligence that enriches, elicits, and elevates rather than debases, disgusts, depresses...

What a joy and relief and demand Middlemarch is! Have you read it? Have you re-read it?

I doubt the soopergeniuses of the Robot Cult would have much time for such a thing, nor the lying armies of the complacent middle or the tumescent right.

Middlemarch is a drama consisting essentially of the delineation of humane consciousness, as a richly historical, lushly overdetermined concern (check out the etymology of that word, concern, if you want a story worth thinking on). Setting aside the dramatic twists and turns and vivid characters and so on, the stuff you can skim off the back cover of a paperback or drink in through a sun-dappled BBC dramatization, Middlemarch is really the drama of intellectual, ethical, poetical consciousness, all at once, inter-implicated, from the beginning to the end, and I mean from the very first words to the very last ones, an illustration of and, even more crucially, a provocation to real adult liberality of mind.

Maybe you already know those famous last words of the book, probably the best most beautiful words to close any novel in my estimation: "But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Even if you haven't read the book the words are moving, but reading them at the end of the reading of the book, even if you already knew them by heart, is nothing you can be prepared for, like a conversion experience that is the throwing off of infantile conversions for good, indeed, for the growing good of the world.

It seems to me, as it happens, that both futurological bulldozers and the ongoing heartbreak of politics are woven into the web of life Eliot discerns (there's a story in that word, too, by the way). And I'll be returning to both subjects soon enough, sure enough. For a couple more days, though, I'm staying away from here, if it's all the same to you. Thanks for all the birthday messages in my inbox and elsewhere!

The Achievement of Superlative Futurology

Singularitarian Robot Cultist Michael Anissimov responds yet again to my critique of superlative futurology:

Dale Carrico, one of the more prominent critics of transhumanism, frequently refers to “superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance” as transhumanist goals, of course in a disparaging way. Yet, I openly embrace these goals. Superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance are a perfect summary of what we want and need. How can we achieve them?

Strictly speaking, I don't think superlative aspirations are "achievable" at all. I am not saying that because, as the Robot Cultists would have it, I lack their own "can do" attitude, or their boundless imaginations, or their sooper-science skill-sets, but because I do not think superlative aspirations are really the sorts of things that are meant to be "achieved" in the first place. I don't think Anissimov is right, really, even to call them "goals."

Let's live for thousands of years through "medical advancement" or through "transferring our selves" into invulnerable Robot Bodies isn't exactly the sort of "goal" that has any specifiable impact on conduct in the real world, beyond signaling membership in certain sub(cult)ures of futurological faith. I would maintain in fact that such sub(cult)ural signaling is indeed the actual substance of these assertions of superlative belief, such as it is, and that the work of these assertions is not to mobilize instrumental rationality at all but to mobilize moral rationality. That is to say, I think these faithful utterances aren't really about achieving goals so much as enabling the pleasures of subcultural identification, belonging, support for folks who happen to have found their way to a curious marginal futurological sub(cult)ure.

Let's have everything we want at no cost, let's arrive at always being right about everything, let's create something that solves all our problems for us… These utterances may have the superficial form of goals, of projects, of efforts but they don't so much orient pragmatic conduct in the world as protest against the pragmatic conditions under which we orient and conduct ourselves in the world in fact. As such, they are far more like the utterances of the more conventionally faithful: let's redeem our sinful natures or pasts, let's pray for guidance, let's be worthy of Paradise

Anissimov writes sometimes as though the super-predicated aspirations of superlative futurology (Robot Cultism) are just slightly more "ambitious" or "optimistic" versions of already ongoing technoscientific practice. The "goal" of superlongevity is just kinda sorta a more ambitious optimistic kind of everyday healthcare practices, the "goal" of superintelligence is just kinda sorta a more ambitious optimistic kind of everyday software coding practices, the "goal" of superabundance is just kinda sorta a more ambitious optimistic kind of everyday manufacturing practices.

This rhetoric might seem initially to lend a cozy coloration of plausibility to what upon closer scrutiny reveals itself to be batshit crazy articles of faith in a version of "The Future" in which immortal post-humans have somehow "uploaded" their "minds" into cyberspace or robot bodies to "live" in virtual or nano-slavebotic Treasure Caves under the watchful gaze of a history-shattering Robot God. But quite apart from the odd articles of faith it would countenance (which aren't after all really any odder than the articles of faith that fuel most essentially religious outlooks), Anissimov's claims are bedeviled by profound conceptual double-binds.

Either his viewpoint amounts to an affirmation of the idea of healthcare provision, software improvement, and advances in production at such a level of generality that one would be hard pressed to find anybody anywhere who disapproves in the first place (thus eliminating the need for affirming them at all, let alone affirming them in the form of joining a conspicuously self-marginalizing Robot Cult) or his viewpoint amounts to a commandeering of the idea of healthcare provision, software improvement, and advances in production in the service of some project at odds with these already-affirmed practices as they are already playing out in the world (thus eliminating the pretense that these assertions have anything to do with actual science at all, but nicely explaining why they would be affirmed especially by folks who have joined a conspicuously self-marginalizing Robot Cult).

No technoscientifically-literate person has any doubt that properly funded, regulated, accountable technoscience research and development directed to the solution of shared human problems can be enormously useful, nor that ongoing and proximately upcoming genetic, cognitive, and prosthetic medical research is yielding unprecedented impacts and enormously interesting results, nor that problems of software usability and network security are enormously thorny and increasingly important in globally mediated and surveilled societies, nor that advances in automation, distributed production, and materials science enabled by discoveries at the nanoscale and otherwise are enormously exciting and provocative. There are millions of people around the world who are involved in the ramifying inter-implications of these truisms, identifying problems and forming actual goals in respect to these problems everywhere all the time. But not one of these problems, not one of these goals is the least bit clarified by reading it through the lens of superlative aspiration.

No one working to solve a particular healthcare problem is helped in their valiant efforts by the insistence of some Robot Cultist that one day medicine will deliver "superlongevity" (although you can be sure that loose talk about "playing god" has done more than its fair share to ensure that medical research that might solve actual problems and save actual lives didn't get proper funding). No one working to make software more user friendly or address a particular network security problem is helped in their painstaking efforts by the insistence of some Robot Cultist that one day we will code a superintelligent Robot God who will solve all our problems for us (although you can be sure that loose talk about "artificial intelligence" has, as Jeron Lanier has endlessly documented, inspired no end of bad software that frustrates its users by simulating "thinking" for them and "making decisions" for them in ways they strongly disapprove). No one working to make particular materials or products safer, cheaper, less toxic, more useful, or more sustainable is helped in their diligent efforts by the insistence of some Robot Cultist that one day immersive virtualities, or ubiquitous robots, or cheap as chips programmable multi-purpose room temperature desktop nanofactories will one day deliver a superabundance that will circumvent the impasse of stakeholder politics in a finite world that is home to infinite and incompatible aspirations (although you can be sure that loose talk about Drexlerian "nanotechnology" has made it next to impossible to talk sense about regulating or funding or forming reasonable expectations about the problems and possibilities of nanoscale technoscience in actual reality).

Anissimov writes:

Achieving superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance will be incredibly challenging, but seemingly inevitable as long as civilization continues to progress and we don’t blow ourselves up or have a global fundamentalist dictatorship on our hands. There is no guarantee that we will achieve these goals in our lifetime — but why not try? Achieving any of these milestones would radically improve quality of life for everyone on Earth. The first step to making technological advancements available to everyone is to make them available for someone.

As I said, Anissimov sometimes talks as though superlative futurological aspirations are "challenges" and "goals" that can be "achieved" if we simply "try" hard enough. Of course, the first step to making technological advancements available is actually to engage in actual technoscientific practices of research, funding, regulation, publication, education, application in the real world. While Anissimov rallies the faithful with a Mouseketeer Cheer of "Let's Try!" it is notable that the immediate consequence of taking up superlative discourse is to disengage from the actual technoscientific practices in which one actually tries, works, participates in the efforts through which actual technoscience connects to the actual world, achieves actual results, solves actual problems.

It is especially intriguing that Anissimov raises the specter of "fundamentalism" as one that would be warded off by the can-do declarations of the futurologically faithful, because it is of course fundamentalist formations, with their authoritarian circuits of True Believers and would-be guru-priests, that the Robot Cults themselves most conspicuously resemble, and never so much as when they declare their most marginal beliefs as the ones that are freightest most with "certainty" and "inevitability" -- as Anissimov has freighted his futurological faith with "inevitability" at the beginning of the very sentence that concludes by disavowing fundamentalism.

It is no surprise that Anissimov turns the spotlight onto the archipelago of marginal Robot Cult organizations like the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the SENS Foundation when he wants to make plain who he considers to be the "leaders" in the "fields" devoted to the "work" of superlative futurology. For nobody who isn't already a Robot Cultist would it ever occur to describe Aubrey de Grey, or Eric Drexler, or Eliezer Yudkowsky as "leaders" in any kind of actually-existing technoscientific field. These are not serious organizations. These are not people cited in serious peer reviewed publications. These are not projects with serious grant money at their disposal.

I mean no offense, really, since compared especially to the brainless nutcases who accumulate in orbit around them Aubrey de Grey, Eric Drexler, and, say, Nick Bostrom (neither Kurzweil nor Yudkowsky even passes muster as peers of oddball outliers like Drexler or de Grey, Bostrom is the closest you really get to a non-utter-nutjob Singularitarian) are all fairly genial intellectuals who have interesting things to say as often as not. In England there is a fairly robust and attractive tradition that encourages oddball intellectuals and even expects intellectuals to be oddballs. Nick Bostrom certainly isn't as off-the-wall as Wittgenstein was (nor as much a genius either, probably, but who's to say, really, when all is said and done?), and Aubrey de Grey actually even looks quite a bit like Lytton Strachey. All of this is quite par for the course in England.

And I have no doubt that just as ancient historians will regularly profess a fond bemused attachment to sword and sandal epics like "Quo Vadis" and "Ben Hur" as part of the initial inspiration that draws no small number of students into their fields, but would never mistake these gorgeous cinematic gargoyles as anything passing muster as the actual practice of the field of history itself, I have no doubt at all that plenty of biochemists and gerontologists will admit a fond debt to the popular handwaving issuing from Drexler and de Grey.

But anybody who thinks these figures are leaders in their fields, or even, frankly, manage to inhabit anything close to the consensus in which all the real work in these fields is getting done is demonstrating though such assertions their own complete ignorance of the actual science at hand.

As I often have occasion to say, superlative futurology is not itself science, but a constellation of faith-based initiatives that opportunistically frame themselves as scientific precisely to yield for their wish-fulfillment fantasies the reality-effect that attaches especially to scientific pronouncements in our own historical moment. The assertions of futurological faith do not function to mobilize instrumental rationality to implement goals in reality, but to substantiate the "reality" of articles of faith in idealized imaginations of "The Future" that do not exist in the present except through the mobilization of moral rationality that solicits shared identification, shared aspiration, the "real substance" of subcultural solidarity (especially the defensive solidarities of marginal sub(cult)ure).

It is at this point that I think many are apt to misunderstand the force of my critique. Although I am an atheist myself, I do not disparage people of faith for the same reasons I do not disparage people whose aesthetic practices of judgment and self-creation differ from my own: It is in my view the substance of freedom to assert moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political judgments to the hearing of the diversity of one's peers without any expectation that one's judgments will be shared or will prevail but only that they should be affirmed as legible as judgments. In offering up our judgments to our peers, and owning up to them (whether they are admired or ridiculed) in the hearing of our peers, we own ourselves, we arise as our own selves, we constitute ourselves as selves in the world. That is the work of freedom in my view, the work of meaning-making among our living peers in an otherwise mineral meaningless existence. To the extent that Robot Cultists are just indulging in a kooky poetical enterprise I have no complaints about their enterprise in the least.

Superlative futurology, as I have often taken pains to point out, shares no small amount of common ground with sf fandoms, and as a queergeek myself I have had plenty of occasion to wallow in speculative space operatic sensawunda. Who needs Yudkowsky when you can be reading A Fire Upon the Deep? Who needs Kurzweil when you can be reading the Dune cycle? I am the last person on earth to chuckle derisively at geeks who gawk at anime, or artist renderings of space elevators, or city-scaled space-freighters in cinematic flight. Let a bazillion flowers bloom, let your freak flag fly, make meaning where and as you would. I'm a silly nerd myself, for heaven's sake.

I personally disapprove of religiosity only when it pretends to scientificity, and I personally disapprove of morality only when it seeks to prevail over politics. It is not the religiosity of fundamentalist formations that makes them pernicious in my eyes so much as their authoritarian policing of facts and moralizing policing of political diversity.

It is precisely in its insistence that it is a kind of scientific practice (indeed, often that it amounts to an urgent championing of True Science against the "anti-science" of "relativists" and "pessimists" who do not share its idiosyncratic taste in "The Future"), and precisely in the curious tendency of its investment in scientificity to yield a politics couched as a "neutral" pre-politics or even an outright anti-politics (always in the service of incumbent interests figured as "natural" interests) that superlative futurology exhibits a chilling kinship with such fundamentalist formations. That the organizational archipelago of Robot Cultism is suffused with would-be gurus and True Believers is a symptom of the underlying rationality of futurology itself, it is not -- as the Robot Cultists themselves rationalize in the face of this sort of observation -- simply a matter of an unfair generalization from "extreme" but "unrepresentative" (of course!) sub(cult)ural figures and texts that keep unaccountably cropping up so conspicuously among their number.

But more than this, I think there is an endemic double danger in futurological discourse, not only (first) that it subverts scientificity by stealthing its faith-based initiatives as scientific practice and subverts sensible policy-making by declaring its sub(cult)ural solidarities as developmental deliberation, but also (second) that it subverts freedom itself, the understanding and practice of freedom that is the heart of the political.

If I disparage the notion of "The Future" it is emphatically because I champion what I describe instead as "futurity," by which I mean to evoke the open futurity inhering in the plurality of peers in the present, collaborating and contesting in their diversity the shared world in the present always in the form of presents-opening-onto-presents-to-come.

I believe that notions of "The Future," in whatever forms they take in the mouths of those who imagine themselves to see "It" more clearly than everybody else, and to speak like would-be Priests in "Its" name, are always ideological constructions, always bespeaking a parochial perspective in the present projecting onto the openness of futurity in an effort to domesticate and control that openness, to police and curtail that diversity.

The substance of the gesture of attributing "future-likeness" to ideas in the present or even to the style of artifacts in the present (this is something Daniel Harris has written about in his famous essay on "The Futuristic") is always just the repudiation of the present, often perversely so. The work of this gesture is ultimately political -- even though it typically cloaks itself in the langauge of pre-political or a-political instrumentality. It is a refusal or disavowal of the demanding substance of politics, plurality and freedom, and an infantile fantasy to substitute for these The One True Way That Ends History and an instrumental amplification of capacities through which the Elect Become Godlike by Eluding Human Finitude.

Robot Cultists cling to the insistence that the superlative outcomes they presumably are "fighting for" (a "work" that ultimately amounts to re-iterating in the presence of fellow Robot Cultists that they do indeed "believe" in "the future" and all its works) are possible in principle, even if they are not practically realizable in the present. That no actually-serious scientists or policy makers share their own preoccupations with non-existing non-proximate medicinal techniques to deliver thousand year lifespans, or upload minds into computers, or create superintelligent Robot Gods, or create cheap-as-dirt desktop Anything Machines never enters into their reckoning of their superior scientificity. They imagine themselves to be indulging in a scientific enterprise despite the fact no scientific consensus ever forms around their actual assumptions or models or goals, and so they confuse the equivalent of medieval monks debating the number of angels who can dance on pin-heads as some kind of hard-nosed sooper-scientific practice.

But quite apart from all that, the deeper pathology in play in Robot Cultism is its very specific repudiation of the political, a repudiation signaled by its preoccupation with "The Future" over futurity in the first place. Whatever they want to say about their "fearlessness" for "daring" to dream Big Dreams it seems to me that their discourse is one saturated by fear -- with "big dreams" that usually look to me more like infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies, testaments to sociopathic alienation from their peers in all their confusing and threatening diversity, damaged denials of their vulnerable error-prone bodily selves, authoritarian pretensions to certainty or the complementary desire to evade the responsibilities of uncertain existence through True Belief in charismatic gurus claiming to hold the Keys to History in the midst of the distress of disruptive change. Politics is a matter of reconciling the indefinitely many logically possible but also logically incompatible aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders in a shared world, peer to peer, and that makes politics prior to technoscience, especially to a "technoscience" evacuated of all practical substance and left with anemic assurances of "logically possible" outcomes.

And all of this is still just circling around the drain of the futurological imaginary, for the substance of the present politics of the superlative futurology of the Robot Cultists is not a matter of working (without ever really working) to bring about "The Future" in which they have invested their fervent faith, but the politics of indulging the delusion that "The Future" is already here, already now, in the eyes of the fellow-faithful, in the ritual re-iterations of Its possibility, Its palpability, Its inevitability. This is the faithful repudiation of fact by means of pseudo-scientific derangements of facticity as such, this is the moralizing identification with "The Future" by means of the anti-political dis-identification with the plurality of their peers in the open futurity of the present opening onto presents-to-come peer-to-peer.

This is the real achievement of superlative futurology.

Another Robot Cultist Compares Self to Wright Brothers

I know this isn't a substantive post or anything, I just can't help myself. I can scarcely count the number of times over the years in which one after another Robot Cultist sniffs disdainfully at my critique of superlative futurology and then declares some variation on the theme of: Well, they laughed at the Wright Brothers too! I mean, it happens over and over and over again. I don't think these people are citing one another's rejoinders, I suspect it is a spontaneous and symptomatic upwelling out of the pathology of superlativity itself. From the Moot, one "Extropia" (get it? it's like Extropian, you know, from the Extropian transhumanist sect founded by Ayn Raelian Robot Cultist Max More) assures me:

Your ridiculing does not bother me in the slightest, just like the pioneers of aviation were not put off by the fact that many people thought airplanes were absurd flights of fancy

Dude, neither you nor any of your little white sf fanboy friends are the Wright Brothers. You are not Leonardo or Einstein or Tesla. You are somebody's crazy uncle, you know the one, who stays in the shed out back most afternoons, railing about his genius theories, smelling of his own pee, working on his perpetual motion machine.

Techno-Immortalism in a Nutshell

Either humans are like leprechauns or we're like red wagons. Since leprechauns aren't real but red wagons and humans are, we must be more like red wagons than leprechauns then. Since we can build red wagons that last thousands of years, then medicine can make people live thousands of years, too.

But we haven't actually ever made any red wagons that last thousands of years, which seems like more than a problem of mere detail for this "viewpoint." And the fact remains that even red wagons that might last for thousands of years aren't exactly living for thousands of years, which makes one wonder if saying humans are more "like" red wagons than leprechauns is really quite so useful as all that when everything is said and done, even if it is quite true.

PS: Of course, the even pithier version of techno-immortalism is just the question, breathlessly intoned, Don't you want to live forever? And the even pithier substance of that question is the infantile existential shriek: I don't wanna Di-ay-ay!

The "Imagination" of a Robot Cultist

Over at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the stealth transhumanist Robot Cult outfit (with which I, an insistent critic of transhumanism and futurology more generally was briefly, unfortunately, affiliated myself), Martine Rothblatt asks the question that Robot Cultists ask endlessly over and over again: Can Consciousness Be Created in Software? As with the rest of the Robot Cultists, this question is for her merely a rhetorical one. It is of course precisely because they have already decided that code can indeed be conscious and that consciousness can be immortalized "through" disembodiment and coding that most Robot Cultists became Robot Cultists in the first place.

In the first paragraph of Rothblatt's piece, she writes:

There are thousands of software engineers across the globe working day and night to create cyberconsciousness. This is real intelligent design. There are great financial awards available to the people who can make game avatars respond as curiously as people. Even vaster wealth awaits the programming teams that create personal digital assistants with the conscientiousness, and hence consciousness, of a perfect slave.

While it is quite right to point out that there are thousands of clever coders working on the improvement of gaming systems at the moment, it is quite extraordinary to say that this amounts to work to "create cyberconsciousness." I daresay that vanishingly small numbers of coders actually working to produce less wooden NPCs (non player characters) and less fakey avatars in gaming environments would ever mistake their work as contributions to the "creation of cyberconsciousness," except perhaps for a handful of California coder boys who may already have joined the ranks of one of the Robot Cults here. Nobody who knows anything about consciousness would ever mistake an online avatar as possessing it, even incipiently.

That Rothblatt describes coders who do mistake software as a kind of aborning consciousness as engaging in "intelligent design" seems to me a revealing slip. To invest the technoscientific state of the art with a significance beyond the actual problems it solves and causes in the present, to invest it instead with the imaginary significance of constituting a stepping stone along a fatal road that is sure to eventuate in the arrival of super-predicated outcomes -- from software to superintelligence, as from medicine also to superlongevity, as from automation and biochemistry also to superabundance -- is to indulge in a faith-based initiative, an essentially religious enterprise, to confuse romance with science to the cost of both.

Although I have quoted Rothblatt's first paragraph in its entirety, I have not yet mentioned that it was preceded by a quote from Robert F. Kennedy: “Some men see things as they are and wonder why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not?” Robert F. Kennedy. Later, Rothblatt evokes John Lennon's "Imagine" to similar effect.

There are a few things to say about these cynical appropriations of heroes of mine and other progressives. First, Kennedy and Lennon were urging us to break the crust of convention to work toward visions of justice more capacious than the status quo afforded us, they were not urging us to pretend that two plus two equals five or, say, that the magic of the Harry Potter universe is real (although, come to think of it, the real magic in the Potter universe ends up deriving from the fact that diverse people working in concert can overcome the brutality of egomaniacs, which is not only really true but a lesson that Robot Cultists would do well to attend to). To engage in social struggle in the name of democracy, non-violence, and social justice as Kennedy and Lennon inspire us to do is a very different matter from the injunction of a Robot Cultist to confuse freedom for a mirage of endlessly amplified instrumental power, to confuse a diversity of peers acting in concert in the world with wish-fulfillment fantasies of "transcending" the world through technoscientific magicks.

Of course, you will have noticed that Rothblatt hasn't only announced one faith in her opening sentences but two, and both are enormously familiar from generations of technophiliacs who seem to have only a few songs to sing when all is said and done. Not only does she declare the faith that biologically incarnated consciousness can be coded (all empirical appearances to the contrary notwithstanding) but she declares this outcome a fatality, because there is so much money to be made in it: "[G]reat financial awards [are] available to the people who can make game avatars respond as curiously as people. Even vaster wealth awaits the programming teams that create personal digital assistants with the conscientiousness, and hence consciousness, of a perfect slave."

Of course, if one managed to code a conscious slave it seems to me it would be an "imperfect" one indeed, because it would need to freed immediately from bondage upon arriving at consciousness if you ask me. I won't discuss this, however, because this is precisely the sort of non-reality that Robot Cultists love best to indulge in, pretending that talking about made-up bullshit constitutes serious thinking about policy or science when it only functions to distract our attention from serious problems like actually existing trafficking of precarized human beings as sex-workers or miners or agricultural laborers in the neoliberal New World Order.

And don't even get me started about the rather horrifying identification Rothblatt seems to make between "conscientiousness, and hence consciousness" [emphasis added--d] -- I'll just assume that was an unfortunate slip of the keystroke she hasn't given much thought to the implications of. No, I will simply confine my observations to pointing out that it isn't enough for an outcome to be "profitable in principle" for it to be "possible in principle," no matter how many gung-ho "getting to yes" self-esteem seminars you attend, no matter how many ponzi-scheme financial gurus you read, no matter how fervently you pray to the predator Gods of Ayn Rand and the Friedmans, pere et fils.

Gee, I wonder, by the way, how Robert Kennedy and John Lennon would feel about the assimilation of their provocations to imagining a more just world to the "greed is good" mantras of market fundamentalism? No doubt, very very pleased indeed. Why, probably they would be as pleased as Thomas Jefferson would have been to hear the last idiotic generation of right-wing futurological sell-outs to describe their hippy 2.0 dot.bomb irrational exuberance as Jeffersonian democracy via the California Ideology.

From here Rothblatt goes on to ask a familiar philosophical question: "[H]ow is it that brains give rise to thoughts… but other parts of bodies do not?" From here she continues: "If these hard and easy questions can be answered for brain waves running on molecules, then it remains only to ask whether the answers are different for software code running on integrated circuits." That is to say, presumably, if we can get a handle on why things like brains can think, we might find ways of making things less like brains in key respects think also. This is reasonable enough as far as it goes, but there is absolutely no reason beyond Robot Cult ideology to assume in advance that the things less like brains that might still be capable of thought-likeness would necessarily have anything in the least to do with "software code running on integrated circuits" of all things and, worse still, only for Robot Cultists hopelessly lost in the full froth of True Belief would one ever say of the prospect of the discovery of the reasons why things like brains can think that "it [would] remain only to ask" upon such a discovery how then can we get software conscious? I daresay there would no end of interesting things to think about and do should we ever discover such a thing. But, then, I teach poetry and philosophy, who am I to know what would "remain only to ask" upon such an eventually, after all, compared to a scientist like Rothblatt (about which more later)?

At least since the time of Isaac Newton and Leibniz, it was felt that some things appreciated by the mind could be measured whereas others could not. The measurable thoughts, such as the size of a building, or the name of a friend, were imagined to take place in the brain via some exquisite micro-mechanical processes. Today we would draw analogies to a computer’s memory chips, processors and peripherals.

Are "we" to assume that these "analogies" are measurable in the way the size of a building is (but as presumably its meaning as an historical landmark or its value as an architectural masterpiece is not)? And just who is included in this "we"? I certainly don't find myself inclined particularly to think of "memory chips, processors and peripherals" when I contemplate what we know about the "exquisite micro-mechanical" and electro-chemical processes that take place in biological brains and which seem to us to correlate indicatively to conscious thought processes. But, hey, again, that's just me, and who, after all, am I? Just a menacingly relativistic fashionably-nonsensical humanities person, no avatar of sooper-science like Martine Rothblatt and her posse of transhumanist and cybernetic totalist Robot Cultists, to be sure.

Rothblatt continues on in that paragraph: "[W]e still need an actual explanation of exactly how one or more neurons save, cut, paste and recall any word, number, scent or image. In other words, how do neuromolecules catch and process bits of information?"

What I would draw your attention to here is that the real argumentative work taking place in these formulations is happening at the level of figurative and not literal language. Just as Rothblatt admits that her faith in coding-become-consciousness is driven by analogies earlier on, in the space of a sentence or two these analogical machineries have been cranking on and on, but as if they were merely descriptive, predictive, indicative: We are now told we need an "explanation" for how neurons "save, cut, paste, and recall" words, numbers, images, and so on when what is most needful is a better understanding of why the metaphors to which Rothblatt is making recourse in thinking thought here involve "cutting and pasting" as if thought were a word-processing program.

Should we not think much more about what "explanations" are likely to arise in the first place from a research program framed in such prejudicial terms? When we ask the question, as Rothblatt does, "how do neuromolecules catch and process bits of information?" in what ways has the metaphorization of thoughts as things that can be "caught" or "processed [as] bits of information," in what ways has the question itself delimited the field of answers available to our attention and common sense?

This matters enormously because as often happens in the superlative futurological discourses of the Robot Cultists and their more mainstream technophiliac fellow-travelers as well, Rothblatt devotes a considerable amount of space to apparently technical discussions of neurons, outputs, qualia, and the like in her piece.

There is nothing Robot Cultists like better than to seduce skeptics into endless debates about such "technical" matters. The reason for this is because at its heart Robot Cultism is a faith-based system of beliefs organized through sub(cult)ural identification with fellow-believers (and dis-identification with the diversity of human peers with which they share the actual present, including the presents to come they disdain for investment in an idealized version of "The Future"). Because the superlative technodevelopmental outcomes in which they believe do not exist, because "The Future" does not exist, because the post-human beings with whom they identify don't exist, the substance of their faith is vouchsafed in the shared assertions of faith among their fellows (who represent a small, embattled, and defensive minority) as well as in the assertions of the terms of their discourse with those who do not share their faith but who can be made to pay attention to them or take them seriously on their terms.

I personally see no reason to indulge them in this desire of theirs. I take the frames and formulations of the Robot Cultists seriously as a symptom and as a reductio of underlying pathologies in prevailing technoscientific reductionist discourses on the one hand and mainstream anti-democratizing corporate-militarist "global developmental" discourses on the other hand.

Since it is clear that the heavy-lifting in even the Robot Cultists' most "technical" discussions is happening at the level of figurative language, it seems to me it should be judged on those terms. And so I judge it in the main to be very bad and usually completely derivative poetry.

Since most of the would-be scientific claims made by Robot Cultist's seem to veer enormously far from scientific consensus in the actual disciplines in which they pretend to be making their heroic contributions, I judge them to be crackpots.

While it is true that the progress of technoscience has often been fueled and driven by contributions at its outskirts, it is also true that the overabundant majority of claims made by folks at its outskirts were exactly as wrong and crackpotty as they appeared to be. And for those of us who are not in fact qualified credentialed experts in the fields in question (various medical fields, life sciences, neurology) the reasonable course is to accept the relevant scientific consensus as the most warranted belief. Robot Cultists exhibit extreme confidence in views that veer from scientific consensus in field after field after field -- in formulations suffused with familiar religious hopes for transcendence from human mortality, misery, finitude, uncertainty (rather than worldly work to solve problems in concert with the diversity of our peers) -- and all as evidence of their superior scientificity of all things. There are good reasons to be doubtful of some of their conclusions on this score.

According to her personal entry in Wikipedia (grain of salt taken, I presume) Martine Rothblatt "is an American lawyer, author, and entrepreneur[, who] graduated from UCLA with a combined law and MBA degree in 1981, then began work in Washington, D.C., first in the field of communication satellite law, and eventually in life sciences projects like the Human Genome Project." We are also alerted that "in 2007 [she] was the second-most highly compensated executive in the District of Columbia." I am, to be sure, pleased for her good fortune. But I am not much inclined to mistake her for a biologist or for an expert on consciousness, even so.

And I hope she will forgive me if I for one continue to turn to Robert Kennedy and John Lennon for inspiration in the struggle against incumbent interests (among whom she seems to me very likely to be one) in the service of peace and social justice, rather than for rationalizations for indulging in wish-fulfillment fantasies that substitute selfishness for solidarity, magick for freedom, and faith in imaginary technologies for worldly technoscience.

Futurological Self-Marginalization, Futurological Dissemination

If, like me, you spend time reading pieces from across the more left-leaning reality-based technoscience blogs collected together at Seed's Science Blogs (like Pharyngula), and the stuff by Mooney and others at Science Progress (under the auspices of the Center for American Progress), and the more pop-cultural stuff at places like io9, you'll know that there is an already varied and vigorous progressive-democratic broadly-secularist technoscience-literate conversation out there, a space that contains many thousands and thousands of people who

a, disagree with one another amicably on scores of issues while remaining broadly secularist and democratic and fact-based and proudly geeky,

b, who geek-out on futurological themes like Cylon uploading and artist renderings of space elevators without ever losing track of the difference between science and science fiction,

c, who already agree as a matter of course that libertopian schemes to dismantle civilization in the name of "spontaneous" market forces that don't exist except as a shorthand for incumbent interests always only leads to waste and disaster,

d, who accept the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is non-negligible and draw the sensible conclusion that this urgently demands human remediation at the level of policy and law,

e, who know that "race-science" is overwhelmingly a matter of pseudo-science functioning as a scarcely-stealthed proxy for ugly racist attitudes and inspires and "justifies" policy decisions with inequitable and deeply damaging impacts to fellow citizens,

f, who know full-well that Creation-science is not science but, at best, an aesthetic viewpoint often functioning as a signal of moralistic Christianist identification against secularism, and so on.

As I say, there are thousands upon thousands of secular-democratic folks out there already arguing for consensus science against creationist nonsense and for more research money for safe effective genetic therapies and for the implementation of renewable energy technologies and who are taking up p2p-tools to facilitate democratizing education, agitation, and organization here and now.

You can be sure that these thousands upon thousands of mainstream democratically-minded technoscientifically-literate multiculturally-celebratory folks are a force incomparably more rich, diverse, progressive, and relevant than the cohort of card-carrying members of futurological Robot Cults, transhumanists, extropians, techno-immortalists, cybernetic-totalists, singularitarians, nano-cornucopiasts could ever convene, past, present, and -- I certainly sincerely and strongly hope -- in presents to come.

There is simply no sensible, progressive reason on earth one would join a Robot Cult or take up their superlative futurological frames -- and those who do so should be exposed and marginalized whenever they seek to peddle their positions as either scientific (despite their distance from the consensus of practicing scientists on question after question after question) or democratizing (despite their distance from the language, alliances, campaigns, and concerns of secular-democratic education, agitation, and organizing on issue after issue after issue) as a result.

Beyond this, I do think that we should devote serious attention to the ways in which the figures, frames, and formulations of Robot Cultists provide insights in their very clarifying extremity of comparable arguments and assumptions in more prevailing mainstream neoliberal/neoconservative (ie: corporatist-militarist) global developmental discourse -- with its technocratic elitism, its commitments to "competition" and "innovation" in terms that always only benefit incumbent interests, its triumphal reductionist scientism and addiction to industrial technofixes, its treatment of parochial lifeway preferences as prior to political contestation, and so on.

These attitudes and formulations, consummated in the superlative extremity of the anxious or ecstatic wish-fulfillment fantasies and faith-based initiatives of the Robot Cultists, are playing out in the real world of technodevelopmental social struggle at the level of public discourse, policy deliberation, international law, advertising imagery and the popular imagination, here and now, often to devastating effect, the mainstream technocrats and superlative futurologists offering up a funhouse mirror quite as much as a constrast to one another.