Like some other people I know, I also notice that Andreadis was recently gratefully thanks but no thanksed by the stealth transhumanists at the "technoprogressive" (We're not kooky transhumanists, it just looks that way!) IEET after she resigned from her affiliation there. Now that she has written texts explicitly deriding both their bad science and their bad politics she has been discovered to be inconveniently, er, unpersonable:
In closing I want to give a big thanks and goodbye to Athena Andreadis. Athena joined the IEET as a Fellow in 2007. She has been a relatively active behind the scenes participant in our ongoing conversation about the technoprogressive project, and has contributed some very provocative essays such as her paean to the virtues of Snachismo. But as a practicing scientist she faces some daunting competing demands and has to step out to pursue the greater calling of Science, an appeal we cannot deny. We wish you much ongoing success Athena.
Yes, "provocative." I'm sure IEET couldn't continue to post writings from Andreadis's continuing blogging on speculative technoscientific topics because this would interfere with her work as a scientist.
Spin it, baby, spin it... for the good of the Robot Cult, for the robot-immortalization of the flesh, for the coming of Heart's Desire among the slavebots, for the coming of the Robot God, for the good of, you know, "The Movement."
> Athena Andreadis has a new blog-post up continuing her
ReplyDelete> exposure of the Singularitarians as silly sexists, but
> elaborating her point to expose comparable sexist silliness
> among some science fiction anthologists and futurologists
> more generally.
Apropos of SF, there's an almost unutterably smug
episode recounted in Julie Phillips' biography of
SF author "James Tiptree" (Alice B. Sheldon)
[ http://www.amazon.com/James-Tiptree-Jr-Double-Sheldon/dp/0312426941 ]
in which Arthur C. Clarke comes off particularly badly.
Maybe it's a bit unfair to speak ill of the dead of a
bygone generation, but for crying out loud,
this happened in 1975, more than a decade after
Valentina Tereshkova had gone into orbit for the
Russians. And Christ, it was years after _Star
Trek_ had come and gone. And _2001: A Space Odyssey_,
for that matter.
(pp. 330 - 331):
"The science fiction community as a whole was in an
odd position regarding feminism. On one hand, most
of the writers and fans were men. In 1974, women still
made up less than 20 percent of SFWA's membership.
And most of those men, even those who were using SF
to address other social issues, were still not ready
to question gender relationships. The "rocket jocks"
(who had also hated the New Wave) insisted women
couldn't write real, "hard" science fiction and
probably shouldn't even be reading it. Other men
were more open in theory, but had trouble understanding
the problem.
Arthur C. Clarke, for example, had recently sent a
letter to the editor of _Time_ magazine agreeing with
astronaut Mike Collins. Collins had told _Time_ that
women could never be in the space program, since in
zero G a woman's breasts would bounce and keep the men
from concentrating. Clarke proudly claimed he had
already predicted this "problem." In his novel
_Rendezvous with Rama_ he had written, "Some women,
Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not
be allowed aboard ship: weightlessness did things
to their breasts that were too damn distracting."
When Joanna Russ tried privately to explain why this
was insulting, Clarke, responding publicly in the
SFWA newsletter, asked why Commander Norton shouldn't
be attracted to women -- didn't Russ want him to be?
He added that though some of his best friends
were women, the level of discourse of the "women's
libbers" clearly wasn't helping their cause.
The whole exchange appeared in the _SFWA Forum_ in
February and March 1975. It drew a storm of comment
from all directions, most of it expressive of how
new feminism was to most men and how automatically
many reacted by kicking slush. The newsletter's
editor, Ted Cogswell, illustrated an issue with
pictures of naked women -- intended, he said, as a
joke. [SF author] Suzy Charnas informed him that
this kind of "joke" was aggression disguised as
humor. Some of the letters, from men and women,
were open and intelligent, but even the more reasonable
men often reduced the argument to the sexual or
the physical, as if all sexism was about was, as
one man put it, the shape of a person's plumbing.
On the other hand, the SF community had a great deal
invested in the idea of tolerance. It was, and is,
in principle sympathetic to all who feel themselves
different. Science fiction itself is, at its best
moments, a literature of difference, alienation,
change. Russ said in _Khatru_ that she wrote it
because she could make it hers. 'I felt that I
knew nothing about "real life" as defined in college
writing courses (whaling voyages, fist fights, war,
bar-room battles, bull-fighting, &c.) and if I
wrote about Mars nobody could tell me it was (1) trivial,
or (2) inaccurate.'"
> [I]t was years after _Star Trek_ had come and gone.
ReplyDelete> And _2001: A Space Odyssey_, for that matter.
Come to think, if rumors are true, it wouldn't have been
**breasts** that would have distracted Mr. Clarke if
Gary Lockwood had been jogging around that centrifuge
without a jockstrap on.
I foresaw the "unpersoning" of Athena Andreadis from the IEET and the "technoprogressive" transhumanist community a few months ago when I noticed how ruthless she was in attacking the pseudo-Buddhism that Hughes and Dvorksy cherish so much!
ReplyDeleteDale, have you written about how Hughes' efforts to recruit women, gays, blacks, and autistics in order to give the transhumanist community a false image of "diversity" always seems to spectacularly backfire when these smart people realize they have been lured into a "robot cult" by it's best spin doctor?