Thursday, December 30, 2010
A God for the Godless
Something like the belief that the universe is not just susceptible of consequential description but also has -- and even somehow indicates, at least to certain especially lucky people -- preferences in the matter of how it is described, has long seemed to me to be the vestigial trace of infantile religiosity sometimes to be found among the otherwise most intransigently atheistical materialists.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Adversarial Advertorial
In response to my complaints about ever louder, ever more frequent, ever more hysterical advertising content on television, one rather sanctimonious reader helpfully suggested I stop watching television altogether.
Of course, the "Kill Your Television" chorus has long existed by now. And there is nothing to ridicule in the fact that some people have enriched their lives by separating from television (which for generations now has sometimes functioned as a kind of disastrous child-care alternative in some households and created dependencies that can cry out for intervention).
Also, truth be told, tastes both do and should differ, and those who find nothing worth watching on television are welcome to that opinion and to the subcultural forms they prefer. I for one think there is plenty worth watching on television -- I enjoy serialized science fiction and costume dramas, I enjoy the antics of some game shows and reality television, I enjoy the rhetorical pyrotechnics of pundit programs. I do think that at least some of the people who are most sanctimonious about their refusal of television are simply cutting themselves off from areas of culture for no clearly explicable reason.
But more to the point, "Kill Your Television" isn't really a relevant response to the problem at hand. In America advertisements are proliferating deliriously, on college campuses, in public spaces like stadiums and parks and subway stations (and even as flickering reels in the darkened tunnels!), in lobbies, in elevators, in grocery check-out lines, in ever more of the real estate of every media screen.
"Withdrawal" is simply not ultimately an option, unless one fancies life in a rough-hewn Unabomber cabin in the deep wilderness amidst the boulders and the flashing fishies with nothing but a dog-eared Thoreau for company (in which case, rock on with your bad ass self, but I'm not sure that solution will scale, even if Resource Descent -- Peak Oil, PetroAg Fail, Water Wars -- may force a monumental test case on us all soon enough).
However, it occurs to me that in Europe there are actually sensible regulations that restrict both the volume and frequency of television commercials. In the absence of such regulations it is very clear that there is literally no check on the vicious circle driving commercial media into suicide -- they keep increasing the amount of ad time, the volume, the forms it takes, getting for each further encroachment of the norm a momentary burst of oh so delicious profit that vanishes once everybody else has replicated it and normalized the encroachment, thus provoking the next encroachment still, and on and on an on, never gaining a permanent profit advantage but with each encroachment tapping away at the actual quality of the content they are providing, with nothing to check the process, nothing to contain the greed that drives the degeneration. As with everything else, the drive for profit when constrained by regulation can encourage worthy innovation, but when unconstrained eats its own to the ruin of all.
The relevant question for me is just why it is that there is no real organized resistance agitating for legislation to introduce in the US regulation such as exists in the EU to limit the frequency of ad content -- which is now actually palpably beginning to undermine the capacity of shows to maintain narrative continuity? Why are there no mass campaigns for regulations such as exist in South America to limit or eliminate billboards that clutter our cities and pimple our pristine landscapes? Why is there no well organized outcry for laws forbidding the re-naming of stadiums and subway stations built and maintained with tax payer and public bond funds to honor private corporations as though they were monarchs? Why aren't people regularly arguing on the pundit shows for laws to forbid ads and commercials in university settings that exist, after all, as spaces of research and contemplation and in which distractions and biases imperil their mandated missions? Why don't I hear as a matter of course that people feel assaulted and harassed by endless shrill ads making hyperbolic promises and mobilizing ridiculous imagery and stereotypes that insult our intelligence and derange our senses?
In my view, the ongoing proliferation and ramification of advertising on every conceivable space is tantamount to pollution and harassment and there should be lawsuits and organized campaigns to stop it. Although I enjoy the aesthetics of culturejamming and adbusting it seems to me that these interventions functionally depend on and substantiate the norms and forms of ubiquitous advertising as such, whatever critical purchase they may provide in our relations to particular ad content.
Too many of my students take comfortably for granted the utter colonization of public space by deceptive hyperbolic corporate marketing material. And let me stress that word deception. The norms of marketing discourse are hyperbolic and cynical in ways that typically, that is to say generically, border on fraud and their ubiquity is educating the population to accept endless spin and deception as normal, as acceptable, preparing the way for a public life suffused with opportunistic lies. These norms appeal conspicuously to our emotions rather than our capacities to weight competing claims logically, empirically, critically, indeed they appeal to the bluntest of our passions, to our appetites, our greed, our fear, preparing the way for a public life suffused with selective mobilizations of short-term greed and terror. (To connect this point with other themes that recur here at Amor Mundi, I do indeed regard futurological discourse as the quintessential expression of this utter bankruptcy of public deliberation into marketing and promotional fraud, explored especially in the posts archived here).
Needless to say, I consider all this profoundly pernicious, perhaps the single most dangerous cultural force afoot without any organized resistance that I can see the least bit equal to its danger. Any readers aware of actually effective organizing out there on these questions? What forms might organized resistance properly take? What, practically, should be done?
Of course, the "Kill Your Television" chorus has long existed by now. And there is nothing to ridicule in the fact that some people have enriched their lives by separating from television (which for generations now has sometimes functioned as a kind of disastrous child-care alternative in some households and created dependencies that can cry out for intervention).
Also, truth be told, tastes both do and should differ, and those who find nothing worth watching on television are welcome to that opinion and to the subcultural forms they prefer. I for one think there is plenty worth watching on television -- I enjoy serialized science fiction and costume dramas, I enjoy the antics of some game shows and reality television, I enjoy the rhetorical pyrotechnics of pundit programs. I do think that at least some of the people who are most sanctimonious about their refusal of television are simply cutting themselves off from areas of culture for no clearly explicable reason.
But more to the point, "Kill Your Television" isn't really a relevant response to the problem at hand. In America advertisements are proliferating deliriously, on college campuses, in public spaces like stadiums and parks and subway stations (and even as flickering reels in the darkened tunnels!), in lobbies, in elevators, in grocery check-out lines, in ever more of the real estate of every media screen.
"Withdrawal" is simply not ultimately an option, unless one fancies life in a rough-hewn Unabomber cabin in the deep wilderness amidst the boulders and the flashing fishies with nothing but a dog-eared Thoreau for company (in which case, rock on with your bad ass self, but I'm not sure that solution will scale, even if Resource Descent -- Peak Oil, PetroAg Fail, Water Wars -- may force a monumental test case on us all soon enough).
However, it occurs to me that in Europe there are actually sensible regulations that restrict both the volume and frequency of television commercials. In the absence of such regulations it is very clear that there is literally no check on the vicious circle driving commercial media into suicide -- they keep increasing the amount of ad time, the volume, the forms it takes, getting for each further encroachment of the norm a momentary burst of oh so delicious profit that vanishes once everybody else has replicated it and normalized the encroachment, thus provoking the next encroachment still, and on and on an on, never gaining a permanent profit advantage but with each encroachment tapping away at the actual quality of the content they are providing, with nothing to check the process, nothing to contain the greed that drives the degeneration. As with everything else, the drive for profit when constrained by regulation can encourage worthy innovation, but when unconstrained eats its own to the ruin of all.
The relevant question for me is just why it is that there is no real organized resistance agitating for legislation to introduce in the US regulation such as exists in the EU to limit the frequency of ad content -- which is now actually palpably beginning to undermine the capacity of shows to maintain narrative continuity? Why are there no mass campaigns for regulations such as exist in South America to limit or eliminate billboards that clutter our cities and pimple our pristine landscapes? Why is there no well organized outcry for laws forbidding the re-naming of stadiums and subway stations built and maintained with tax payer and public bond funds to honor private corporations as though they were monarchs? Why aren't people regularly arguing on the pundit shows for laws to forbid ads and commercials in university settings that exist, after all, as spaces of research and contemplation and in which distractions and biases imperil their mandated missions? Why don't I hear as a matter of course that people feel assaulted and harassed by endless shrill ads making hyperbolic promises and mobilizing ridiculous imagery and stereotypes that insult our intelligence and derange our senses?
In my view, the ongoing proliferation and ramification of advertising on every conceivable space is tantamount to pollution and harassment and there should be lawsuits and organized campaigns to stop it. Although I enjoy the aesthetics of culturejamming and adbusting it seems to me that these interventions functionally depend on and substantiate the norms and forms of ubiquitous advertising as such, whatever critical purchase they may provide in our relations to particular ad content.
Too many of my students take comfortably for granted the utter colonization of public space by deceptive hyperbolic corporate marketing material. And let me stress that word deception. The norms of marketing discourse are hyperbolic and cynical in ways that typically, that is to say generically, border on fraud and their ubiquity is educating the population to accept endless spin and deception as normal, as acceptable, preparing the way for a public life suffused with opportunistic lies. These norms appeal conspicuously to our emotions rather than our capacities to weight competing claims logically, empirically, critically, indeed they appeal to the bluntest of our passions, to our appetites, our greed, our fear, preparing the way for a public life suffused with selective mobilizations of short-term greed and terror. (To connect this point with other themes that recur here at Amor Mundi, I do indeed regard futurological discourse as the quintessential expression of this utter bankruptcy of public deliberation into marketing and promotional fraud, explored especially in the posts archived here).
Needless to say, I consider all this profoundly pernicious, perhaps the single most dangerous cultural force afoot without any organized resistance that I can see the least bit equal to its danger. Any readers aware of actually effective organizing out there on these questions? What forms might organized resistance properly take? What, practically, should be done?
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Sustainable Schadenfreude
I am sometimes amused at the thought that when the petro-bubble that has for so long been mistaken for the Triumphal Ascendancy Unto Infinity of Western Civilization finally does burst it will be organic farmers and hippy artisans and eco-villagers and other such folks long derided as fools and throwbacks by the gas-guzzling go-getter bully narcissists of Randoidal neoliberalism who alone will have all the skills without which neither flourishing nor even survival is possible.
Of course, the least contemplation of the scale of human catastrophe that would necessarily precede anything like the arrival of that state of affairs fizzles that amusement pretty quickly. Indeed, the trauma of surviving such a transition might make any notion of flourishing moot whatever vital skills one had shepherded through our own catastrophic know-nothing ego-everything era.
Of course, the least contemplation of the scale of human catastrophe that would necessarily precede anything like the arrival of that state of affairs fizzles that amusement pretty quickly. Indeed, the trauma of surviving such a transition might make any notion of flourishing moot whatever vital skills one had shepherded through our own catastrophic know-nothing ego-everything era.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
More on Economics and Rhetoric
The throwaway comment on Krugman in the last post has reminded me of something I've been meaning to riff on for a long time, a point that comes up all the time in my teaching but rarely in my blogging:
When Robert Heilbroner made the point that economists were "worldly philosophers" in his (justly) famous economic history of the same name, he was really making what would be better thought of as two different enormously important points, both of which might have been made better under a different title.
One of the points, in my view, is that economists at their best would be better thought of as rhetoricians (formulating compelling cases, figures, narratives, and appeals to identity the better to corral and change collective conviction and conduct), and the other point is that economists at their worst often seem to want instead to be thought of as philosophers, and especially as philosophers in those sad moments in which they seek to distinguish what they are doing as forcefully as possible from "mere rhetoric," moments in which they are often most prone to figure themselves instead as some sort of scientific discipline or even the most scientific discipline of all, a meta-science or super-science.
I do not think it accidental that Keynes titled one of his most wonderful and influential books Essays in Persuasion, any more than that the truly marvelous economist Albert Hirschman who wrote the incomparable The Passions and the Interests (one of those books which literally everybody should read) also wrote the less known but also excellent Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.
I personally think that Marx was incomparably better when he was writing polemical journalism and history (not to mention outright manifestos), or those endlessly fascinating figurative analyses like the passage concerning the camera obscura in The German Ideology and the one with all those avid grotesque undead commodities capering about in "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof" from Volume One of Capital, than in the awful moments when he was trying to live up to Engels' deadly praise that he was "The Darwin of History" and making an anxious spectacle of his pseudo-scientificity by reducing cultural complexities to drab forces of production and sketching grandiloquent deterministic histories and mistaking priestly prophetic utterances for scientific hypotheses like your typical philosophical peacock. Only those facile free marketeers, Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, Friedman, Friedman, Friedman, et al are more embarrassing in their pretentious pseudo-scientificity, mistaking maths and hype for substance and looking the other way when the bullets fly and starving stomachs balloon in their wake.
The story of rhetoric's denigration by philosophical ideologues is literally a story as old as philosophy itself, inasmuch as philosophy was born precisely in such a moment of resentment (as Nietzsche tells the story best of all). As Hannah Arendt was always at such pains to point out, this denigration shaped the Western tradition of political thought in ways that endlessly distort our understanding of and deny the thoughtful access to the full measure of worldly life -- although it might be said that in her ready assimilation of economic discourse to the social rather than to the political she contributed her own share to the long deferral of the reckoning of rhetoric with the end in failure of the western philosophical project, a reckoning that needs to do justice to the political in thought, including those dimensions in political economy that have always been more rhetorical than philosophical from the first. Such a reckoning would need -- as Heilbroner's history significantly failed to do -- among other things, to register the achievement of political economists like Karl Polanyi as high as that of Marx and Mill and Keynes, and at least as part of the same story.
When Robert Heilbroner made the point that economists were "worldly philosophers" in his (justly) famous economic history of the same name, he was really making what would be better thought of as two different enormously important points, both of which might have been made better under a different title.
One of the points, in my view, is that economists at their best would be better thought of as rhetoricians (formulating compelling cases, figures, narratives, and appeals to identity the better to corral and change collective conviction and conduct), and the other point is that economists at their worst often seem to want instead to be thought of as philosophers, and especially as philosophers in those sad moments in which they seek to distinguish what they are doing as forcefully as possible from "mere rhetoric," moments in which they are often most prone to figure themselves instead as some sort of scientific discipline or even the most scientific discipline of all, a meta-science or super-science.
I do not think it accidental that Keynes titled one of his most wonderful and influential books Essays in Persuasion, any more than that the truly marvelous economist Albert Hirschman who wrote the incomparable The Passions and the Interests (one of those books which literally everybody should read) also wrote the less known but also excellent Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.
I personally think that Marx was incomparably better when he was writing polemical journalism and history (not to mention outright manifestos), or those endlessly fascinating figurative analyses like the passage concerning the camera obscura in The German Ideology and the one with all those avid grotesque undead commodities capering about in "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof" from Volume One of Capital, than in the awful moments when he was trying to live up to Engels' deadly praise that he was "The Darwin of History" and making an anxious spectacle of his pseudo-scientificity by reducing cultural complexities to drab forces of production and sketching grandiloquent deterministic histories and mistaking priestly prophetic utterances for scientific hypotheses like your typical philosophical peacock. Only those facile free marketeers, Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, Friedman, Friedman, Friedman, et al are more embarrassing in their pretentious pseudo-scientificity, mistaking maths and hype for substance and looking the other way when the bullets fly and starving stomachs balloon in their wake.
The story of rhetoric's denigration by philosophical ideologues is literally a story as old as philosophy itself, inasmuch as philosophy was born precisely in such a moment of resentment (as Nietzsche tells the story best of all). As Hannah Arendt was always at such pains to point out, this denigration shaped the Western tradition of political thought in ways that endlessly distort our understanding of and deny the thoughtful access to the full measure of worldly life -- although it might be said that in her ready assimilation of economic discourse to the social rather than to the political she contributed her own share to the long deferral of the reckoning of rhetoric with the end in failure of the western philosophical project, a reckoning that needs to do justice to the political in thought, including those dimensions in political economy that have always been more rhetorical than philosophical from the first. Such a reckoning would need -- as Heilbroner's history significantly failed to do -- among other things, to register the achievement of political economists like Karl Polanyi as high as that of Marx and Mill and Keynes, and at least as part of the same story.
Monday, December 13, 2010
The Digital Utopian Future Is Here!
Is it just me or does the new digital tee vee endlessly black out and skitter and pixillate, making it incomparably worse than the prevailing standards that preceded it? Just me, I'm sure. Everything is awesome now.
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
The Robot Cult Razor
Superlative Futurologists interminably -- and I would say definitively -- find themselves (usually himselves) in the curious argumentative/assertive position of
EITHER
declaring as likely, important, or true an actually vapid statement (such as that water is wet, that a longer healthier life is generally preferable to a shorter diseased one, or that when lots of things change things tend to get less predictable generally speaking) nobody needs to join a Robot Cult or to deploy idiosyncratic Robot Cult jargon to grasp or profess in the first place
OR
declaring as likely, important, or true an actually distinctive statement which only people in Robot Cults would seriously profess because it is pretty much batshit crazy (such as that organismically materialized intelligence or "selfhood" can be "migrated" into cyberspatial heaven or into superhuman robot bodies and also thereby near-immortalized, probably under the loving care of superintelligent robot gods with nanobotic dirt-cheap superabundance machines at their disposal, that this is likely enough that we should be devoting considerable time to thinking about it rather than more proximate concerns like global exploitation and social injustice, clashing fundamentalisms, proliferating weapons, catastrophic climate change and resource descent, and could happen "soon," possibly in a shattering history-ending or personal-transcendence enabling event called The Singularity or Ascendance or some such nonsense).
The vapid statement tends to be the position to which the Robot Cultist always only momentarily retreats when confronted with either consensus scientific or conceptual criticism of his actually distinctive but, alas, crazy assertions of belief. The reason this retreat to vapidity is so commonplace and even necessary is because the Robot Cultist is indulging in an essentially faith-based enterprise yielding what are actually sub(cult)ural membership benefits and wish-fulfillment fantasy satisfactions, but which peddle themselves as and require the maintenance of the highly vulnerable fantasy that they are in fact a mode of serious science or serious technodevelopmental policy-making rather than essentially religious/moralistic/aesthetic matters of faith, fandom, and style. The Robot Razor, I fear, is cutting.
EITHER
declaring as likely, important, or true an actually vapid statement (such as that water is wet, that a longer healthier life is generally preferable to a shorter diseased one, or that when lots of things change things tend to get less predictable generally speaking) nobody needs to join a Robot Cult or to deploy idiosyncratic Robot Cult jargon to grasp or profess in the first place
OR
declaring as likely, important, or true an actually distinctive statement which only people in Robot Cults would seriously profess because it is pretty much batshit crazy (such as that organismically materialized intelligence or "selfhood" can be "migrated" into cyberspatial heaven or into superhuman robot bodies and also thereby near-immortalized, probably under the loving care of superintelligent robot gods with nanobotic dirt-cheap superabundance machines at their disposal, that this is likely enough that we should be devoting considerable time to thinking about it rather than more proximate concerns like global exploitation and social injustice, clashing fundamentalisms, proliferating weapons, catastrophic climate change and resource descent, and could happen "soon," possibly in a shattering history-ending or personal-transcendence enabling event called The Singularity or Ascendance or some such nonsense).
The vapid statement tends to be the position to which the Robot Cultist always only momentarily retreats when confronted with either consensus scientific or conceptual criticism of his actually distinctive but, alas, crazy assertions of belief. The reason this retreat to vapidity is so commonplace and even necessary is because the Robot Cultist is indulging in an essentially faith-based enterprise yielding what are actually sub(cult)ural membership benefits and wish-fulfillment fantasy satisfactions, but which peddle themselves as and require the maintenance of the highly vulnerable fantasy that they are in fact a mode of serious science or serious technodevelopmental policy-making rather than essentially religious/moralistic/aesthetic matters of faith, fandom, and style. The Robot Razor, I fear, is cutting.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
The Inconvenience of a World Worth Living In
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:
Oh, nobody's denying the short-term convenience of cars. The question is whether it's worth longer term cataclysm or whether you still get to say you are a smart or good person if knowing what you know you prefer the short-term over the longer-term.
I suspect the good people of Lexington could organize and agitate to get better bus service if they got off their asses and decided to give a shit about destroying the world their kids have to live in, if, as you say, they have kids and such.
But, yes, of course, people have shit to do. Not me. I have used for decades and continue still to use public transportation even where it was and is crappy and turns 15 minute commutes into hour-long commutes because I am a special magical being who doesn't have shit to do.
Or maybe I just brought a book or graded papers or organized my day and learned soon enough to enjoy or otherwise make use of the "burden" of that unspeakable inconvenience and discovered soon enough that it wasn't one. Again, tho', I'm a special magical being utterly unlike normal folks with their urgently demanding indispensably lightning-paced fantastically satisfying lives, as has been amply established already.
[T]he US has a population density that makes GOOD public transportation economically impractical. Yes, there are buses here in Lexington (pop: 270,000), but the buses suck. Yes, I *could* take the bus, but I'd be turning a 15 min trip into an hour and half, each way. Maybe I don't have an excuse, but some people have shit to do. They need to get home to their kids and so on. I understand why they drive.
Oh, nobody's denying the short-term convenience of cars. The question is whether it's worth longer term cataclysm or whether you still get to say you are a smart or good person if knowing what you know you prefer the short-term over the longer-term.
I suspect the good people of Lexington could organize and agitate to get better bus service if they got off their asses and decided to give a shit about destroying the world their kids have to live in, if, as you say, they have kids and such.
But, yes, of course, people have shit to do. Not me. I have used for decades and continue still to use public transportation even where it was and is crappy and turns 15 minute commutes into hour-long commutes because I am a special magical being who doesn't have shit to do.
Or maybe I just brought a book or graded papers or organized my day and learned soon enough to enjoy or otherwise make use of the "burden" of that unspeakable inconvenience and discovered soon enough that it wasn't one. Again, tho', I'm a special magical being utterly unlike normal folks with their urgently demanding indispensably lightning-paced fantastically satisfying lives, as has been amply established already.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
It's time once more to visit the Very Serious techno-"progressive" futurologists at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
There are no surprises yet again this Saturday, I'm sorry to say. Of all the faces of featured authors to be seen on IEET's website this week there are only two that are not the faces of a white guy. And yet, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week after week for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
There are no surprises yet again this Saturday, I'm sorry to say. Of all the faces of featured authors to be seen on IEET's website this week there are only two that are not the faces of a white guy. And yet, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week after week for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Monday, November 08, 2010
Random Observation About Massive Wealth and Celebrity
Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot:
I happen to believe that there is no such thing as a life-long winning streak, and that only a negligible portion of those who have more actually keep more because they deserve it more than most who have less.
For me, celebrity is more or less the same. While it is easily possible that one can attract the momentary attention of masses of people, I personally believe that every single person who manages to stay in the public eye for long sustained periods of time is psychologically disturbed and most likely a straight-up sociopath.
I have believed this for most of my life. I suppose that this is one of those things that puts me rather at odds with our CEO-and-celebrity worshiping culture, but, well, you knew that already. I'm wondering, just how odd am I in this attitude? Readers?
I happen to believe that there is no such thing as a life-long winning streak, and that only a negligible portion of those who have more actually keep more because they deserve it more than most who have less.
For me, celebrity is more or less the same. While it is easily possible that one can attract the momentary attention of masses of people, I personally believe that every single person who manages to stay in the public eye for long sustained periods of time is psychologically disturbed and most likely a straight-up sociopath.
I have believed this for most of my life. I suppose that this is one of those things that puts me rather at odds with our CEO-and-celebrity worshiping culture, but, well, you knew that already. I'm wondering, just how odd am I in this attitude? Readers?
Saturday, November 06, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
It's time once more to visit the Very Serious techno-"progressive" futurologists at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
There are no surprises again this Saturday, I'm afraid. Of all the faces of featured authors to be seen on IEET's website this week there is, like last week, only one that is not the face of a white guy. And this is following two weeks with literally nothing but futurological White Guys on display.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: The so-called "transhumanists" have seen The Future... and it is a White Penis.
And yet, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week after week for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
There are no surprises again this Saturday, I'm afraid. Of all the faces of featured authors to be seen on IEET's website this week there is, like last week, only one that is not the face of a white guy. And this is following two weeks with literally nothing but futurological White Guys on display.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: The so-called "transhumanists" have seen The Future... and it is a White Penis.
And yet, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week after week for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
Hey, y'all, it's that time again!
Time to visit the oh so serious techno-"progressive" futurologists at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
After two weeks with nothing but futurological White Guys on display, I am happy to report this week that of all the faces of featured authors to be seen on IEET's website this afternoon there is indeed a face that is not the face of a white guy. Yeah, one single face.
And yet, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week after week for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Time to visit the oh so serious techno-"progressive" futurologists at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
After two weeks with nothing but futurological White Guys on display, I am happy to report this week that of all the faces of featured authors to be seen on IEET's website this afternoon there is indeed a face that is not the face of a white guy. Yeah, one single face.
And yet, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week after week for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Futurological Either-Or
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:
You can't get from commonsense materialism or consensus science advocacy to futurology, let alone superlative futurology.
Confronted with insistent criticism in respect to the techno-transcendentalizing wish-fulfillment fantasies that are unique to and actually definitive of the Robot Cultists they
either
provisionally circle the wagons and reassure one another through rituals of insistent solidarity (sub(cult)ural conferences, mutual citation) to distract themselves from awareness of their marginality,
or
they retreat to mainstream claims (effective healthcare is good, humans are animals not angels) that nobody has to join a Robot Cult to grasp and few but Robot Cultists would turn to Robot Cultists to hear discussed to distract critics from awareness of their marginality.
You can't get from commonsense materialism or consensus science advocacy to futurology, let alone superlative futurology.
Confronted with insistent criticism in respect to the techno-transcendentalizing wish-fulfillment fantasies that are unique to and actually definitive of the Robot Cultists they
either
provisionally circle the wagons and reassure one another through rituals of insistent solidarity (sub(cult)ural conferences, mutual citation) to distract themselves from awareness of their marginality,
or
they retreat to mainstream claims (effective healthcare is good, humans are animals not angels) that nobody has to join a Robot Cult to grasp and few but Robot Cultists would turn to Robot Cultists to hear discussed to distract critics from awareness of their marginality.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Three Pillars of Robot Cultism
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, Friend of Blog James F. notes:
I'll note that Jim's Three Pillars here evoke the three super-predicates of my critique of superlative futurology -- superintelligence, superabundance, and superlongevity -- which mobilize in my view the three conventional omni-predicates -- omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipotence -- in a theologically-freighted techno-transcendental amplification of the marketing-promotional discourse already fraudulently suffusing mainstream neoliberal developmentalism (as discussed reasonably fully but succinctly in the Condensed Critique of Transhumanism). Jim's point that these three wish-fulfillment fantasies are presumably developmentally correlated in superlative futurology, mutually dependent, mutually reinforcing, is especially interesting in this connection, since everybody knows the three omni-predicates are mutually exclusive, a paradox only "resolvable" by recourse to faith over reason, and precisely the faithfulness Robot Cultists themselves disavow through their belligerent spectacle of superficial and pseudo scientificity.
[T]he Three Pillars of the Transhumanist Creed these days seem to be: (1) superhuman AI, (2) nanotechnology and (3) physical immortality. Either (1) begets (2), or (2) begets (1), and (1) and (2) beget (3).
I'll note that Jim's Three Pillars here evoke the three super-predicates of my critique of superlative futurology -- superintelligence, superabundance, and superlongevity -- which mobilize in my view the three conventional omni-predicates -- omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipotence -- in a theologically-freighted techno-transcendental amplification of the marketing-promotional discourse already fraudulently suffusing mainstream neoliberal developmentalism (as discussed reasonably fully but succinctly in the Condensed Critique of Transhumanism). Jim's point that these three wish-fulfillment fantasies are presumably developmentally correlated in superlative futurology, mutually dependent, mutually reinforcing, is especially interesting in this connection, since everybody knows the three omni-predicates are mutually exclusive, a paradox only "resolvable" by recourse to faith over reason, and precisely the faithfulness Robot Cultists themselves disavow through their belligerent spectacle of superficial and pseudo scientificity.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
It's that time again!
Time to visit the terribly serious technoprogressive futurologists at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
Sadly, I must report again this week that, just like last week, of all the faces of featured authors to be seen on the website this afternoon there is not a single face that is not the face of a white guy.
Let there be no doubt, the Robot Cultists of serious transhumanism have seen "The Future," my friends.
And "The Future" is a white penis.
And yet, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The rather relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week after week for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Time to visit the terribly serious technoprogressive futurologists at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
Sadly, I must report again this week that, just like last week, of all the faces of featured authors to be seen on the website this afternoon there is not a single face that is not the face of a white guy.
Let there be no doubt, the Robot Cultists of serious transhumanism have seen "The Future," my friends.
And "The Future" is a white penis.
And yet, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The rather relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week after week for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Of Differently Intelligent Beings
Adapted and Upgraded from the Moot
"Mitchell" writes:
My point is not that our intelligence is "just" embodied, but that it is indispensably so, and in ways that bedevil especially the hopes of those Robot Cultists who hope to code a "friendly" sooper-parental Robot God, or to "migrate" their souls from one materialization to others "intact" and quasi "immortalized."
That you can find maths to describe some or, maybe -- who now knows? (answer: nobody and certainly not you, whatever your confidence on this score, and also certainly not me) -- even much of the flavor of intelligence would scarcely surprise me, inasmuch as maths are, after all, so good at usefully getting at so much of the world's furniture.
I am happy to agree that it may be useful for the moment to describe the brain as performing specialized algorithms, among other things the brain is up to, and it is surely possible that these do what you call the "heavy lifting" of cognition. But that claim is far from "indisputable," and even if it turns out to be right that hardly puts you or anybody in a position to identify "intelligence" with "algorithms" in any case, especially if you concede "intelligence" affective dimensions (which look much more glandular than computational) and social expressions (which look far more like contingent stakeholder struggles in history than like beads clicking on an abacus).
Inasmuch as all the issues to which you allude in your second paragraph -- subjective imputation of intention, doing justice to the materiality that always non-negligibly incarnates information, to which I would add uninterrogated content of recurring metaphors mistaken in their brute repetition for evidence -- suffuse the discourse of GOFAI dead-enders, cybernetic totalists, singularitarians, and upload-immortalists I do think you better get to the "other circumstances" in which you are willing to give serious thought to critiques of them (my own scarcely the most forceful among them) sooner rather than later.
You will forgive me if I declare it seems to me it is you who is still indulging in handwaving here. As an example, in paragraph three, when you go from saying, harmlessly enough, that much human cognition is susceptible to description as algorithmic then make the point, obviously enough, that digital and networked computers execute algorithms, you hope that the wee word "such" can flit by unnoticed, un-interrogated, while still holding up all the weight of the edifice of posited continuities and identities you are counting on for the ideological GOFAI program and cyber-immortalization program to bear its fruits for the faithful. You re-enact much the same handwave in your eventual concession of the "something a little deeper" between even the perfect computers of our fancy and the human intelligences of our worldly reality, which may indeed be big enough and deep enough as differences go to be a difference in kind that is the gulf between the world we share and the techno-transcendence Robot Cultists pine for.
You know, your "colleague" Giulio Prisco likes to accuse me of "vitalism" for such points -- which to my mind would rather be like a phrenologist descrying vitalism in one who voiced skepticism about that pseudo-science at the height of the scam. So far you seem to be making a comparatively more sophisticated case, bless you -- we'll see how long that lasts -- but the lesson of Prisco's foolishness is one you should take to heart.
I for one have never claimed that intelligence is in any sense supernatural, and given its material reality you can hardly expect me to deny it susceptibility of mathematical characterizations. It's true I have not leaped on futurological bandwagons reducing all of intelligence to algorithms (or the whole universe to the same), seeing little need or justification for such hasty grandiloquent generalizations and discerning in them eerily familiar passions for simplicity and certainty (now amplified by futurologists with promises of eternal life and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice) that have bedeviled the history of human thought in ways that make me leery as they should anybody acquainted with that history.
But I am far from thinking it impossible in principle that a non-organismic structure might materially incarnate and exhibit what we would subsequently describe as intelligent behavior -- though none now existing or likely soon to be existing by my skeptical reckoning of the scene do anything like this, and I must say that ecstatic cheerleading to the contrary about online search engines or dead-eyed robotic sex-dolls by AI ideologues scarcely warms me to their cause. Upon creating such a differently-intelligent being, if we ever eventually were to do as now we seem little likely remotely capable of, we might indeed properly invite such a one within the precincts of our moral and interpretative communities, we might attribute to such a one rights (although we seem woefully incapable of doing so even for differently materialized intelligences that are nonetheless our palpable biological kin -- for instance, the great apes, cetaceans).
That such intelligence would be sufficiently similar to human intelligence that we would account it so, welcome it into our moral reckoning, recognize it the bearer of rights, is unclear (and certainly a more relevant discussion than whether some machines might in some ways "surpass human... functionality" which is, of course, a state of affairs that pervades the made world already, long centuries past, and trivially so), and not a subject I consider worthy of much consideration until such time as we look likely to bring such beings into existence. I for one, see nothing remotely like so sophisticated a being in the works, contra the breathless press releases of various corporate-militarist entities hoping to make a buck and certain Robot Cultists desperate to live forever, and in the ones who do one tends to encounter I am sorry to say fairly flabbergasting conceptual and figurative confusions rather than much actual evidence in view.
Indeed, so remote from the actual or proximately upcoming technodevelopmental terrain are such imaginary differently-materialized intelligences that I must say ethical and political preoccupations with such beings seem to me usually to be functioning less as predictions or thought-experiments but as more or less skewed and distressed allegories for contemporary political debates: about the perceived "threat" of rising generations, different cultures, the precarizing loss of welfare entitlements, technodevelopmental disruptions, massively destructive industrial war-making and anthropogenic environmental catastrophe, stealthy testimonies to racist, sexist, heterosexist, nationalist, ablest, ageist irrational prejudices, all mulching together and reflecting back at us our contemporary distress in the funhouse mirror of futurological figures of Robot Gods, alien intelligences, designer babies, clone armies, nanobotic genies-in-a-bottle, and so on. I suspect we would all be better off treating futurological claims as mostly bad art rather than bad science, subjecting it to literary criticism rather than wasting the time of serious scientists on pseudo-science.
Be all that as it may, were differently-materialized still-intelligent beings to be made any time soon, whatever we would say of them in the end, the "friendly" history-shattering post-biological super-intelligent Robot Gods and soul migration and cyberspatial quasi-immortalization schemes that are the special "contribution" of superlative futurologists to the already failed and confused archive of AI discourse would remain bedeviled by still more logical and tropological pathologies (recall my opening paragraph), and as utterly remote of realization or even sensible formulation as ever.
"Mitchell" writes:
I notice that no-one has chosen to dispute or otherwise comment on my observation that the human brain gets things done, not just by virtue of being "organismic" (or embodied or fleshy or corporeal), but because its constituent neurons are arranged so as to perform elaborate and highly specific transformations of input to output, which correspond to specific cognitive functions like learning and memory, and which, at the mathematical level of description, fall squarely within the scope of the subfield of theoretical computer science which studies algorithms.
Under other circumstances, I'd be happy to have a freewheeling discussion about the subjective constitution of imputed intentionality in the practice of programming, or the right way to talk about the brain's "computational" properties without losing sight of its physicality, or exactly why it is that consciousness presents a challenge to the usual objectifying approach of natural-scientific ontology.
But however all that works out, and whatever subtle spin on the difference between natural and artificial intelligence best conveys the truth... at a crude and down-to-earth level, it is indisputable that the human brain is full of specialized algorithms, that these do the heavy lifting of cognition, and that such algorithms can execute on digital computers and on networks of digital computers.
That is why you can't handwave away "artificial intelligence" as a conceptual confusion. If you want to insist that the real thing has to involve consciousness and the operation of consciousness, and that this can't occur in digital computers, fine, I might even agree with you. But all that means is that the "artificiality" of AI refers to something a little deeper than the difference between being manufactured and being born. It does not imply any limit on the capacity of machines to emulate and surpass human worldly functionality.
My point is not that our intelligence is "just" embodied, but that it is indispensably so, and in ways that bedevil especially the hopes of those Robot Cultists who hope to code a "friendly" sooper-parental Robot God, or to "migrate" their souls from one materialization to others "intact" and quasi "immortalized."
That you can find maths to describe some or, maybe -- who now knows? (answer: nobody and certainly not you, whatever your confidence on this score, and also certainly not me) -- even much of the flavor of intelligence would scarcely surprise me, inasmuch as maths are, after all, so good at usefully getting at so much of the world's furniture.
I am happy to agree that it may be useful for the moment to describe the brain as performing specialized algorithms, among other things the brain is up to, and it is surely possible that these do what you call the "heavy lifting" of cognition. But that claim is far from "indisputable," and even if it turns out to be right that hardly puts you or anybody in a position to identify "intelligence" with "algorithms" in any case, especially if you concede "intelligence" affective dimensions (which look much more glandular than computational) and social expressions (which look far more like contingent stakeholder struggles in history than like beads clicking on an abacus).
Inasmuch as all the issues to which you allude in your second paragraph -- subjective imputation of intention, doing justice to the materiality that always non-negligibly incarnates information, to which I would add uninterrogated content of recurring metaphors mistaken in their brute repetition for evidence -- suffuse the discourse of GOFAI dead-enders, cybernetic totalists, singularitarians, and upload-immortalists I do think you better get to the "other circumstances" in which you are willing to give serious thought to critiques of them (my own scarcely the most forceful among them) sooner rather than later.
You will forgive me if I declare it seems to me it is you who is still indulging in handwaving here. As an example, in paragraph three, when you go from saying, harmlessly enough, that much human cognition is susceptible to description as algorithmic then make the point, obviously enough, that digital and networked computers execute algorithms, you hope that the wee word "such" can flit by unnoticed, un-interrogated, while still holding up all the weight of the edifice of posited continuities and identities you are counting on for the ideological GOFAI program and cyber-immortalization program to bear its fruits for the faithful. You re-enact much the same handwave in your eventual concession of the "something a little deeper" between even the perfect computers of our fancy and the human intelligences of our worldly reality, which may indeed be big enough and deep enough as differences go to be a difference in kind that is the gulf between the world we share and the techno-transcendence Robot Cultists pine for.
You know, your "colleague" Giulio Prisco likes to accuse me of "vitalism" for such points -- which to my mind would rather be like a phrenologist descrying vitalism in one who voiced skepticism about that pseudo-science at the height of the scam. So far you seem to be making a comparatively more sophisticated case, bless you -- we'll see how long that lasts -- but the lesson of Prisco's foolishness is one you should take to heart.
I for one have never claimed that intelligence is in any sense supernatural, and given its material reality you can hardly expect me to deny it susceptibility of mathematical characterizations. It's true I have not leaped on futurological bandwagons reducing all of intelligence to algorithms (or the whole universe to the same), seeing little need or justification for such hasty grandiloquent generalizations and discerning in them eerily familiar passions for simplicity and certainty (now amplified by futurologists with promises of eternal life and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice) that have bedeviled the history of human thought in ways that make me leery as they should anybody acquainted with that history.
But I am far from thinking it impossible in principle that a non-organismic structure might materially incarnate and exhibit what we would subsequently describe as intelligent behavior -- though none now existing or likely soon to be existing by my skeptical reckoning of the scene do anything like this, and I must say that ecstatic cheerleading to the contrary about online search engines or dead-eyed robotic sex-dolls by AI ideologues scarcely warms me to their cause. Upon creating such a differently-intelligent being, if we ever eventually were to do as now we seem little likely remotely capable of, we might indeed properly invite such a one within the precincts of our moral and interpretative communities, we might attribute to such a one rights (although we seem woefully incapable of doing so even for differently materialized intelligences that are nonetheless our palpable biological kin -- for instance, the great apes, cetaceans).
That such intelligence would be sufficiently similar to human intelligence that we would account it so, welcome it into our moral reckoning, recognize it the bearer of rights, is unclear (and certainly a more relevant discussion than whether some machines might in some ways "surpass human... functionality" which is, of course, a state of affairs that pervades the made world already, long centuries past, and trivially so), and not a subject I consider worthy of much consideration until such time as we look likely to bring such beings into existence. I for one, see nothing remotely like so sophisticated a being in the works, contra the breathless press releases of various corporate-militarist entities hoping to make a buck and certain Robot Cultists desperate to live forever, and in the ones who do one tends to encounter I am sorry to say fairly flabbergasting conceptual and figurative confusions rather than much actual evidence in view.
Indeed, so remote from the actual or proximately upcoming technodevelopmental terrain are such imaginary differently-materialized intelligences that I must say ethical and political preoccupations with such beings seem to me usually to be functioning less as predictions or thought-experiments but as more or less skewed and distressed allegories for contemporary political debates: about the perceived "threat" of rising generations, different cultures, the precarizing loss of welfare entitlements, technodevelopmental disruptions, massively destructive industrial war-making and anthropogenic environmental catastrophe, stealthy testimonies to racist, sexist, heterosexist, nationalist, ablest, ageist irrational prejudices, all mulching together and reflecting back at us our contemporary distress in the funhouse mirror of futurological figures of Robot Gods, alien intelligences, designer babies, clone armies, nanobotic genies-in-a-bottle, and so on. I suspect we would all be better off treating futurological claims as mostly bad art rather than bad science, subjecting it to literary criticism rather than wasting the time of serious scientists on pseudo-science.
Be all that as it may, were differently-materialized still-intelligent beings to be made any time soon, whatever we would say of them in the end, the "friendly" history-shattering post-biological super-intelligent Robot Gods and soul migration and cyberspatial quasi-immortalization schemes that are the special "contribution" of superlative futurologists to the already failed and confused archive of AI discourse would remain bedeviled by still more logical and tropological pathologies (recall my opening paragraph), and as utterly remote of realization or even sensible formulation as ever.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Artificial Inbecillence in the Robot Cult
Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot:
"Mitchell," who claims in another of his comments that he "chooses his words carefully" responds to the denigration of Robot Cult hyperbole with this exasperated outburst: hello, we already share the world with giant distributed AIs[!]
But, of course, we don't.
It has always seemed to me that the primary impact of the futurologists' over-eager over-application of the term "intelligence" to that which is not intelligent is to render us all ever more insensitive to the richness of experience and actual concomitant demands of the precious beings who are.
AI discourse produces especially in its advocates, but also in the cultures in which its frames and figures become prevalent, nothing short of a kind of widespread artificial imbecillence.
From a related Futurological Brickbat: XXXI. Computer science in its theological guise aims less at the ultimate creation of artificial intelligence than in the ubiquitous imposition of artificial imbecillence.
"Mitchell," who claims in another of his comments that he "chooses his words carefully" responds to the denigration of Robot Cult hyperbole with this exasperated outburst: hello, we already share the world with giant distributed AIs[!]
But, of course, we don't.
It has always seemed to me that the primary impact of the futurologists' over-eager over-application of the term "intelligence" to that which is not intelligent is to render us all ever more insensitive to the richness of experience and actual concomitant demands of the precious beings who are.
AI discourse produces especially in its advocates, but also in the cultures in which its frames and figures become prevalent, nothing short of a kind of widespread artificial imbecillence.
From a related Futurological Brickbat: XXXI. Computer science in its theological guise aims less at the ultimate creation of artificial intelligence than in the ubiquitous imposition of artificial imbecillence.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
"Geo-Engineering" Could Be Almost Anything?
Tony Fisk comments over at Worldchanging: "Anything done to alleviate global warming could be classified as 'geo-engineering.'"
If that's true then what exactly is excluded from the category, and what clarified through the introduction of the term?
Aggregate impacts of environmental regulation, widespread lifeway changes, subsidization of sustainable energy provision and infrastructure can have impacts comparable to those attributed to speculative "geo-engineering" proposals, making it still more difficult to understand just what should be included and excluded from the category. This makes it still more difficult in turn to see how the category facilitates the weighing of risks, costs, benefits of particular proposals described as "geo-engineering" or not according to proponents for whatever reasons. Meanwhile, few mega-scale corporate-military "geo-engineering" proposals could be expected to achieve their desired outcomes in the absence of effective regulation and oversight.
And so the preemptive declaration of the failure of conventional environmental politics and regulatory processes that accompanies so many "geo-engineering" arguments seems more to defeat than support them. But if such politics and processes can indeed still be effective enough to facilitate "geo-engineering" proposals then it is difficult to see why we would turn to "geo-engineering" to save us as a last resort or what have you in the first place.
Unless "geo-engineering" is just a neologism repackaging conventional proposals for the promotional purposes of futurologists as distinct from serious science policy questions? In which case, as Mr. Burns might say... "Excellent."
If that's true then what exactly is excluded from the category, and what clarified through the introduction of the term?
Aggregate impacts of environmental regulation, widespread lifeway changes, subsidization of sustainable energy provision and infrastructure can have impacts comparable to those attributed to speculative "geo-engineering" proposals, making it still more difficult to understand just what should be included and excluded from the category. This makes it still more difficult in turn to see how the category facilitates the weighing of risks, costs, benefits of particular proposals described as "geo-engineering" or not according to proponents for whatever reasons. Meanwhile, few mega-scale corporate-military "geo-engineering" proposals could be expected to achieve their desired outcomes in the absence of effective regulation and oversight.
And so the preemptive declaration of the failure of conventional environmental politics and regulatory processes that accompanies so many "geo-engineering" arguments seems more to defeat than support them. But if such politics and processes can indeed still be effective enough to facilitate "geo-engineering" proposals then it is difficult to see why we would turn to "geo-engineering" to save us as a last resort or what have you in the first place.
Unless "geo-engineering" is just a neologism repackaging conventional proposals for the promotional purposes of futurologists as distinct from serious science policy questions? In which case, as Mr. Burns might say... "Excellent."
Full Monty "Geo-Engineering"
Thanks to the good folks at Worldchanging for directing attention to my serious-silly-seriously-silly-serious proposal that critics of "Geo-Engineering" make Simpsons arch-villain Mr. Burns the public face of this ultimately greenwashing discourse.
An io9 post by Alasdair Wilkins started the ball rolling, connecting the recent UN castigation of mad science, you know, for kids, sun-blotting schemes to the episode "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" (It turns out that this episode was formative for many a fledgling critic of "geo-engineering" discourse -- it comes up a lot.)
I was drawn to the episode "The Old Man and the Lisa" for my inspiration, in which Monty exploits Lisa's environmentalism for profit and creates out of recycled plastic six-pack yokes the geo-engineering nightmare monster, the "Burns Omninet" to "sweep the sea of life" and make "L'il Lisa's Patented Animal Slurry." (Hey, fans! Can you name three different uses to which Mr. Burns proposes his multipurpose slurry might beneficially be put?)
In my original post I proposed: "Let's make Monty Burns the face of 'geo-engineering!'" I also expressed the hope that "other fans of The Simpsons can provide legions of examples in which Mr. Burns attempts comparably catastrophic evil futurological schemes" and that they provide me with some of them. While awaiting that flood of responses (but not holding my breath), I did a little research.
It would appear that the connection with Mr. Burns is a natural one when talk turns to "geo-engineering." A rather bland introduction to the topic in Salon a couple of years ago, for example, notes early on: "Researchers all over the world have begun advocating large-scale climate control strategies that sound like something The Simpsons Mr. Burns might endorse." Although this cautionary tone remained throughout the piece, I have to note that it concluded as such "geo-engineering" puff pieces tend to do, declaring that, sure, "geo-engineering" is kinda-sorta crazy talk, but, heck, talking crazy is still doing something if we end up doing nothing and doing something is better than doing nothing so it would be crazy not to talk crazy, right?
As I never tire of pointing out, it is a very difficult thing to distinguish the aggregate effects of democratically legible environmental politics of education and regulation from the sorts of special effects that futurological "geo-engineering" boondoggles presumably make possible, furthermore it is plain to anyone with any historical awareness of corporate-military contracting in the context of global development schemes that without well-functioning accounting, oversight, regulation such schemes are invitations to inevitable disaster and corruption, and yet "geo-engineering" discourse tends to be premised on the failure of democratically legible environmental politics and on the failure of these indispensable regulatory processes.
Forgive my soapbox, now back to pop culture.
By way of conclusion, I think this post from Treehugger back in July, 2009, is my favorite example I have found so far:
As I said, Mr. Burns does indeed appear pretty regularly whenever talk turns to "geo-engineering." The references abound. I do still hope others will provide more examples, and I do still think critics of "geo-engineering" have a friend (a fiend?) in Montgomery Burns.
An io9 post by Alasdair Wilkins started the ball rolling, connecting the recent UN castigation of mad science, you know, for kids, sun-blotting schemes to the episode "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" (It turns out that this episode was formative for many a fledgling critic of "geo-engineering" discourse -- it comes up a lot.)
I was drawn to the episode "The Old Man and the Lisa" for my inspiration, in which Monty exploits Lisa's environmentalism for profit and creates out of recycled plastic six-pack yokes the geo-engineering nightmare monster, the "Burns Omninet" to "sweep the sea of life" and make "L'il Lisa's Patented Animal Slurry." (Hey, fans! Can you name three different uses to which Mr. Burns proposes his multipurpose slurry might beneficially be put?)
In my original post I proposed: "Let's make Monty Burns the face of 'geo-engineering!'" I also expressed the hope that "other fans of The Simpsons can provide legions of examples in which Mr. Burns attempts comparably catastrophic evil futurological schemes" and that they provide me with some of them. While awaiting that flood of responses (but not holding my breath), I did a little research.
It would appear that the connection with Mr. Burns is a natural one when talk turns to "geo-engineering." A rather bland introduction to the topic in Salon a couple of years ago, for example, notes early on: "Researchers all over the world have begun advocating large-scale climate control strategies that sound like something The Simpsons Mr. Burns might endorse." Although this cautionary tone remained throughout the piece, I have to note that it concluded as such "geo-engineering" puff pieces tend to do, declaring that, sure, "geo-engineering" is kinda-sorta crazy talk, but, heck, talking crazy is still doing something if we end up doing nothing and doing something is better than doing nothing so it would be crazy not to talk crazy, right?
As I never tire of pointing out, it is a very difficult thing to distinguish the aggregate effects of democratically legible environmental politics of education and regulation from the sorts of special effects that futurological "geo-engineering" boondoggles presumably make possible, furthermore it is plain to anyone with any historical awareness of corporate-military contracting in the context of global development schemes that without well-functioning accounting, oversight, regulation such schemes are invitations to inevitable disaster and corruption, and yet "geo-engineering" discourse tends to be premised on the failure of democratically legible environmental politics and on the failure of these indispensable regulatory processes.
Forgive my soapbox, now back to pop culture.
By way of conclusion, I think this post from Treehugger back in July, 2009, is my favorite example I have found so far:
"Bill Gates is recently listed as co-inventor "on a new batch of patent applications that propose using large fleets of vessels to suppress hurricanes through various methods of mixing warm water from the surface of the ocean with colder water at greater depths." TechFlash writer, Todd Bishop, contacted an expert who nailed the generic problem with this, and similar ideas.Some of them are more plausible than others, but they all face an enormous problem of scale. ... [One is] reminded of "The Simpsons"... "The richest man in the world hatches a plan to alter weather and ecology in return for insurance premiums and fees from governments and individuals," he writes. "It's got kind of a Mr. Burns feel to it, no?"
Recirculating cooler, anoxic "dead zone" water back to the surface, as called for in these patents, is likely to cause massive fish kills and promote run-away algae blooms, expanding the dead zone in depth and possibly in breadth. Should we call it "Burns-headed" instead of bone-headed?"
As I said, Mr. Burns does indeed appear pretty regularly whenever talk turns to "geo-engineering." The references abound. I do still hope others will provide more examples, and I do still think critics of "geo-engineering" have a friend (a fiend?) in Montgomery Burns.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
Dear readers, it's time yet again to visit those oh so serious technoprogressive futurologists at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
This week I am shocked and dismayed (as always, as always!) to report that of all the faces of featured authors to be seen there is not a single face that is not the face of a white guy.
Transhumanism has seen "The Future," my friends -- and it is a white penis.
And yet, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week after week for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
This week I am shocked and dismayed (as always, as always!) to report that of all the faces of featured authors to be seen there is not a single face that is not the face of a white guy.
Transhumanism has seen "The Future," my friends -- and it is a white penis.
And yet, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week after week for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Friday, October 15, 2010
The First Rule of Robot Cult Is You Don't Talk About Robot Cult
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, this is my response to Ben Goertzel's protestations about my derisive use of the term "Robot Cultist" to describe a certain, er, apparently "loose network" of scarcely affiliated loners who just happen to belong to membership organizations who publicly fancy themselves the avant garde of a techno-transcendental ideological movement that will sweep and utterly transform the world, among whom he is quite obviously, and insistently, one himself:
You Robot Cultists really are so funny.
The moment anybody points out your eager affiliation in a self-described "Movement," with an archipelago of actually-existing membership organizations, helmed by a fairly static cast of marginal characters most of whom are the most patent cranks and wannabe gurus imaginable suddenly you retreat and protest you are a nebulous cloud without a material trace in the world!
The moment anybody skeptical or sensible about the curious number of demonstrably existing, usually loudly self-proclaiming market fundamentalists, eugenicists, reductionists, self-appointed soopergenius elites, white boys playing with imaginary toys, enthusiasts for and True Believers in not just one, but one after another after another marginal and pseudoscientific position and techno-transcendentalizing wish-fulfillment fantasy, from good old fashioned AI dead-enders, to cryonics scam artists, to Drextopian nano-cornucopiasts, to incoherent "mind"-uploading immortalists, to straightforward self-esteem huckters and phony nutritional supplement salesmen, suddenly you retreat from your own declared identity, affiliation, sub(cult)ure and protest that none of you actually have anything to do with one another.
Honestly, it's all too facile and absurd for words.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Nauru Needs Futurologists!
Ben Goertzel is the director of "research" at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence whose day job involves thinking he is busy coding the Robot God who one day soon will end human history either by sooper-parentally solving all our problems for us or by transforming the world into uber-goo (also thereby solving all our problems after a fashion). He is a founding member of the really-and-for-true-not-a-parody Order of Cosmic Engineers (lampooned by me here), and is signed up with Alcor to be frozen or vitrified or otherwise techno-mummified in anticipation of resurrection and near-immortalization in a shiny robot body or possibly as an angelic avatar in cyberspace. That is to say, he is clearly a very sane soopergenius I would have to be very ignorant and unkind to describe as a Robot Cultist, and if I did call him a Robot Cultist it would probably just be because of my rampant luddism, my worship of death, and the menacing anti-Enlightenment relativism I exhibit as a consequence of my elite effete aesthete education in the humanities.
[UPDATE: Goertzel informs me in the Moot that he is now just an "advisor" at SIAI though he remains "friendly" to their sect of the Robot Cult and is still hard at work coding the Robot God among his other transhumanistical and techno-immortalization efforts. He seemed to regard this correction as very important, so there ya go.]
Here's Ben's latest sensible and not at all Robot Culty idea:
[Steal underpants… profit!]
[A safer assumption might involve 14,990 white guys who have never been on a date or eaten a meal that didn't involve pushing buttons on a phone or a microwave.]
[Negotiated by means of the well-noted diplomatic skills of prickly software coders and flamewarrior fanboys.]
[Amazing future possibilities such as 14,990 Piggies without their asthma inhalers still trying to plug their laptops into the bases of palm trees while complaining that Naboo wasn't anything like this in the movie?]
[Because if history ever showed us anything at all it is that imperialism really always is such a good deal for occupied people.]
[This irresistible lure of the white guys of "The Future" helps explain why transhumanism has managed in three decades to swell from a marginal Robot Cult consisting almost entirely of a few hundred white guys in the US and Europe who can't tell the difference between science fictional wish-fulfillment fantasizing and serious scientific practice and policymaking to a few thousand white guys in the US and Europe who can't the difference between science fictional wish-fulfillment fantasizing and serious scientific practice and policymaking.]
By way of conclusion to this rather sad bit of snark, let me point out that Ben Goertzel's proposal is in fact the latest episode in a rather long comedy series in which various Robot Cultists pine after some separatist enclave. Goertzel's futurological Secret Pirate Island fantasy comes, for example, swift on the heels of failed dreams of creating a cryonics town in Arizona. After all, in a time of global warming and failing infrastructure what safer place for your frozen head could you find in all the world than in a desert survivalist compound in a Red State under the care of libertarian sociopaths many of whom think Atlas Shrugged is some kind of bible?
The curious -- and almost always richly hilarious -- ideological admixture of the libertopian and techno-utopian that produces what I like to call the Ayn Raelian sects of Robot Cultism are especially prominent among futurological clarion calls for radical separatism. Whether this move is inspired by the Strike of the Randroidal Soopermen or by the more quotidian flight of panicky white-racists from a diversifying America is a complicated question, but it is hard to miss the reactionary get-off-my-lawn undercurrents among the champions of seasteading, anti-aircraft platform principalities (futurological wet-dream-meet-reality), crappy cruise ship utopiae, as well as various endlessly and never anything but failed "private space programs" promising profitable-therefore?-inevitable space hotels, moon bases, edenic asteroid-belt treasure-caves, Martian and Europan colonies but leaving nothing behind but a litter of CGI-cartooned brochures, dead links to online manifestoes, and, sometimes, if you're very lucky, a chance to ride in a high-altitude airplane for a pile of cash in exchange for a scam artist assuring you this makes you an astronaut.
Needless to say, an inbred tinpot fiefdom monoculture is little likely to maintain anything remotely like the institutional and practical richness of the diverse creative commons on which actual scientific discovery and creative expressivity depends -- let alone the resilience to solve unexpected problems, among them the problems produced by the unanticipated consequences of prior problem-solving. Hell, who would even keep the Robot Cultists' hair cut or their asses wiped on Nauru?
I daresay these would-be techno-ruggified individualists probably need to get both that whole desktop nanofactory genie-in-a-bottle problem as well as that whole soul-migration into a shiny invulnerable robot body problem licked before and not after they decide to take their leave of the mehum masses upon whom they presently depend for their survival and flourishing whether or not they are quite aware of it in their declared futurological sooper-geniusness and extreme-level un-future-shock-ability and so on.
Of course, though I am quite pleased to ridicule these futurological escapist fantasies, I am the farthest thing from truly meaning to discourage this separatist impulse of theirs -- indeed, little could please me more than for the Robot Cultists and the Randroids who endlessly threaten and boast about "Going Galt" or hiding out in some mad-scientist lab to unleash their Robot God on us all to actually make a go of their fanciful little experiment and discover just how ill-prepared they really are to make it on their own, to get that circle-squared or that perpetual motion machine off the ground, to discover just how indifferent to them are the workings of the larger world to which they seem somehow to fancy themselves indispensable. Of course, I don't expect the Robot Cultists actually to make their migration or actually build their pleasure dome, but honestly what fun it would be to enjoy the festival of fail they would make in actually trying to put their money where their mouths were.
Of course, it's easy to see why a True Believer in techno-transcendentalizing acceleration of acceleration of acceleration in the midst of a popping petrochemical bubble all the straight white guys foolishly mistook for the Inevitable Triumph of the Genius of Western Civilization would pine now for a separatist monoculture of superlative futurologists. Inside it, they could still have -- nay, have more intensely even than hitherto -- the sub(cult)ural substance of "The Future" they already provide one another in the present in the palpability of their shared belief in the most hyperbolic futurological variations of that reductive, imperial, promotional, eugenic, immaterializing Civilizational narrative: They could enjoy the false-positive communal confirmation of their faithly community that their finitide, mortality, dis-ease, vulnerability, proneness to error, humiliation, violation, exploitation, contingency are all as nothing inasmuch as they are always-already collaborators in The Way to the techno-transcendence of that finitide, toward a super-predicated techno-quasi-godhood of super-intelligence, super-longevity, super-abundance that is at once unknowable and hence immune from criticism but utterly reassuring inasmuch as it is figured merely as the amplification beyond bound of every parochially preferred norm, category, wish of incumbent interest.
[UPDATE: Goertzel informs me in the Moot that he is now just an "advisor" at SIAI though he remains "friendly" to their sect of the Robot Cult and is still hard at work coding the Robot God among his other transhumanistical and techno-immortalization efforts. He seemed to regard this correction as very important, so there ya go.]
Here's Ben's latest sensible and not at all Robot Culty idea:
The desert island nation of Nauru needs money badly, and has a population of less than 15,000. There are problems with water supply, but they could surely be solved with some technical ingenuity…
[Steal underpants… profit!]
Suppose 15,000 adult transhumanists (along with some kids, one would assume)
[A safer assumption might involve 14,990 white guys who have never been on a date or eaten a meal that didn't involve pushing buttons on a phone or a microwave.]
decided to emigrate to Nauru en masse over a 5-year period, on condition they could obtain full citizenship. Perhaps this could be negotiated with the Nauruan government.
[Negotiated by means of the well-noted diplomatic skills of prickly software coders and flamewarrior fanboys.]
Then after 5 years we would have a democracy in which transhumanists were the majority. Isn't this the easiest way to create a transhumanist nation? With all the amazing future possibilities that that implies?
[Amazing future possibilities such as 14,990 Piggies without their asthma inhalers still trying to plug their laptops into the bases of palm trees while complaining that Naboo wasn't anything like this in the movie?]
This would genuinely be of benefit to the residents of Nauru, which now has 90% unemployment. Unemployment would be reduced close to zero, and the economy would be tremendously enlarged. A win-win situation. Transhumanists would get freedom, and Nauruans would get a first-world economy…
[Because if history ever showed us anything at all it is that imperialism really always is such a good deal for occupied people.]
Tourism could become a major income stream, given the high density of interesting people which would make Nauru into a cultural mecca.
[This irresistible lure of the white guys of "The Future" helps explain why transhumanism has managed in three decades to swell from a marginal Robot Cult consisting almost entirely of a few hundred white guys in the US and Europe who can't tell the difference between science fictional wish-fulfillment fantasizing and serious scientific practice and policymaking to a few thousand white guys in the US and Europe who can't the difference between science fictional wish-fulfillment fantasizing and serious scientific practice and policymaking.]
By way of conclusion to this rather sad bit of snark, let me point out that Ben Goertzel's proposal is in fact the latest episode in a rather long comedy series in which various Robot Cultists pine after some separatist enclave. Goertzel's futurological Secret Pirate Island fantasy comes, for example, swift on the heels of failed dreams of creating a cryonics town in Arizona. After all, in a time of global warming and failing infrastructure what safer place for your frozen head could you find in all the world than in a desert survivalist compound in a Red State under the care of libertarian sociopaths many of whom think Atlas Shrugged is some kind of bible?
The curious -- and almost always richly hilarious -- ideological admixture of the libertopian and techno-utopian that produces what I like to call the Ayn Raelian sects of Robot Cultism are especially prominent among futurological clarion calls for radical separatism. Whether this move is inspired by the Strike of the Randroidal Soopermen or by the more quotidian flight of panicky white-racists from a diversifying America is a complicated question, but it is hard to miss the reactionary get-off-my-lawn undercurrents among the champions of seasteading, anti-aircraft platform principalities (futurological wet-dream-meet-reality), crappy cruise ship utopiae, as well as various endlessly and never anything but failed "private space programs" promising profitable-therefore?-inevitable space hotels, moon bases, edenic asteroid-belt treasure-caves, Martian and Europan colonies but leaving nothing behind but a litter of CGI-cartooned brochures, dead links to online manifestoes, and, sometimes, if you're very lucky, a chance to ride in a high-altitude airplane for a pile of cash in exchange for a scam artist assuring you this makes you an astronaut.
Needless to say, an inbred tinpot fiefdom monoculture is little likely to maintain anything remotely like the institutional and practical richness of the diverse creative commons on which actual scientific discovery and creative expressivity depends -- let alone the resilience to solve unexpected problems, among them the problems produced by the unanticipated consequences of prior problem-solving. Hell, who would even keep the Robot Cultists' hair cut or their asses wiped on Nauru?
I daresay these would-be techno-ruggified individualists probably need to get both that whole desktop nanofactory genie-in-a-bottle problem as well as that whole soul-migration into a shiny invulnerable robot body problem licked before and not after they decide to take their leave of the mehum masses upon whom they presently depend for their survival and flourishing whether or not they are quite aware of it in their declared futurological sooper-geniusness and extreme-level un-future-shock-ability and so on.
Of course, though I am quite pleased to ridicule these futurological escapist fantasies, I am the farthest thing from truly meaning to discourage this separatist impulse of theirs -- indeed, little could please me more than for the Robot Cultists and the Randroids who endlessly threaten and boast about "Going Galt" or hiding out in some mad-scientist lab to unleash their Robot God on us all to actually make a go of their fanciful little experiment and discover just how ill-prepared they really are to make it on their own, to get that circle-squared or that perpetual motion machine off the ground, to discover just how indifferent to them are the workings of the larger world to which they seem somehow to fancy themselves indispensable. Of course, I don't expect the Robot Cultists actually to make their migration or actually build their pleasure dome, but honestly what fun it would be to enjoy the festival of fail they would make in actually trying to put their money where their mouths were.
Of course, it's easy to see why a True Believer in techno-transcendentalizing acceleration of acceleration of acceleration in the midst of a popping petrochemical bubble all the straight white guys foolishly mistook for the Inevitable Triumph of the Genius of Western Civilization would pine now for a separatist monoculture of superlative futurologists. Inside it, they could still have -- nay, have more intensely even than hitherto -- the sub(cult)ural substance of "The Future" they already provide one another in the present in the palpability of their shared belief in the most hyperbolic futurological variations of that reductive, imperial, promotional, eugenic, immaterializing Civilizational narrative: They could enjoy the false-positive communal confirmation of their faithly community that their finitide, mortality, dis-ease, vulnerability, proneness to error, humiliation, violation, exploitation, contingency are all as nothing inasmuch as they are always-already collaborators in The Way to the techno-transcendence of that finitide, toward a super-predicated techno-quasi-godhood of super-intelligence, super-longevity, super-abundance that is at once unknowable and hence immune from criticism but utterly reassuring inasmuch as it is figured merely as the amplification beyond bound of every parochially preferred norm, category, wish of incumbent interest.
Saturday, October 09, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
It's time again to visit those oh so serious technoprogressive futurologists at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
This week I'm sad to report that only two of the faces of featured authors are not the faces of a white guy, and both were already featured there last week. One of these two remains, I fear, Kirsti Scott's flabbergastingly facile Posthuman Feminism, about which I already had my say last week, in between the laughter and the tears. Suffice it to say that I, er, remain unimpressed with what seems to me, to be generous, her faux-feminist celebration of a presumably emancipatory fembotization via high-heels, cosmetic surgery, and red hair-dye.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
After all, as I have said again and again, week after week, month after month in these modest e-pistles, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
This week I'm sad to report that only two of the faces of featured authors are not the faces of a white guy, and both were already featured there last week. One of these two remains, I fear, Kirsti Scott's flabbergastingly facile Posthuman Feminism, about which I already had my say last week, in between the laughter and the tears. Suffice it to say that I, er, remain unimpressed with what seems to me, to be generous, her faux-feminist celebration of a presumably emancipatory fembotization via high-heels, cosmetic surgery, and red hair-dye.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
After all, as I have said again and again, week after week, month after month in these modest e-pistles, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Monday, October 04, 2010
Things I Tell My Students Who Want to Understand What's Going On
Follow the money. Look where the guns are pointed. Make sure you know the losers' stories as well as you know the winners' stories.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Appiah Predicts "The Future"
What will future generations condemn us for?
Kwame Appiah predicts that our descendants will feel about our own callous crowded prisons, our nightmarish factory farms, our isolated and neglected elders, and our reckless destruction of the biosphere on which we depend for survival as we feel now about the slavery, torture, and dehumanized homosexuals of those from whom we are ourselves descended.
Curiously enough, many people of the left already feel about our prisons, factory farms, neglected elders, and poisoning of our environment the way Appiah claims people of "The Future" will feel, meanwhile many people of the right still feel about extreme human exploitation, righteous torture, and vicious homosexuals exactly the way we have now presumably relegated to "The Past."
It will come as no surprise that I personally hope Appiah's predictions will come true, the sooner the better. But much more to the point, this is because I likely share many of the ethical assumptions and aspirations that are actually driving his "predictions."
That is why I must say I still disapprove of his derangement of what should be normative deliberation about the present-world in the present, in the presence of the diversity of peers with whom we presently share it into a futurological discourse making "predictions" to be debated as if they were competing hypothetical would-be factual accounts.
The appeal of his ethical universe scarcely recommends his own futurological retreat from it, and I find his indulgence in such futurology quite as pernicious as I do the, to me, more ethically obnoxious mainstream futurology of neoliberal corporate advertising hyperbole and military think-tank position papers or the profoundly delusive superlative futurology of techno-utopian Robot Cultists to which I devote much more disapproving attention here on Amor Mundi.
Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved… Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today. Is there a way to guess which ones?
Kwame Appiah predicts that our descendants will feel about our own callous crowded prisons, our nightmarish factory farms, our isolated and neglected elders, and our reckless destruction of the biosphere on which we depend for survival as we feel now about the slavery, torture, and dehumanized homosexuals of those from whom we are ourselves descended.
Curiously enough, many people of the left already feel about our prisons, factory farms, neglected elders, and poisoning of our environment the way Appiah claims people of "The Future" will feel, meanwhile many people of the right still feel about extreme human exploitation, righteous torture, and vicious homosexuals exactly the way we have now presumably relegated to "The Past."
It will come as no surprise that I personally hope Appiah's predictions will come true, the sooner the better. But much more to the point, this is because I likely share many of the ethical assumptions and aspirations that are actually driving his "predictions."
That is why I must say I still disapprove of his derangement of what should be normative deliberation about the present-world in the present, in the presence of the diversity of peers with whom we presently share it into a futurological discourse making "predictions" to be debated as if they were competing hypothetical would-be factual accounts.
The appeal of his ethical universe scarcely recommends his own futurological retreat from it, and I find his indulgence in such futurology quite as pernicious as I do the, to me, more ethically obnoxious mainstream futurology of neoliberal corporate advertising hyperbole and military think-tank position papers or the profoundly delusive superlative futurology of techno-utopian Robot Cultists to which I devote much more disapproving attention here on Amor Mundi.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
This afternoon only two of the faces of featured authors at the website of the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, is not the face of a guy, only one is not white.
Only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, is just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For analysis of more glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, is just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For analysis of more glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
This afternoon only two of the faces of featured authors at the website of the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, so-called, is not the face of a white guy. That's one less than last week, for those keeping score at home, and one of the two refers to a piece and author that was already there last week.
And yet it remains just as true this week as it was last week and every other week in the month's long the stretch of time during which I have been making these little reports, that only a minority of people in the world are white guys, only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys, only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys, and only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting for all this time over at IEET (supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago) is, for me, just one of the more obvious symptoms -- one among many others -- of the profound out-to-lunch bonkers out-of-touch marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
This goes for the self-described "transhumanists," the "singularitarians," the techno-immortalists, the digital utopians and cybernetic totalists, the nano-cornucopiasts, the greenwashing geo-engineers, the Ayn Raelian "extropians" and all the rest of the Robot Cultists corralled kookily together there at IEET. Whatever attention these superlative futurologists manage to attract in mainstream media outlets or among corporate-militarist funders or naive academics with their over-dramatic over-simplified over-sold over-kill narrative derangements of actually urgent technoscience and global development issues, they are and remain utterly marginal and profoundly unserious in my view, and they call into question the seriousness of any organization, enterprise, address that responds to them uncritically.
For analysis of more glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
And yet it remains just as true this week as it was last week and every other week in the month's long the stretch of time during which I have been making these little reports, that only a minority of people in the world are white guys, only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys, only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys, and only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting for all this time over at IEET (supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago) is, for me, just one of the more obvious symptoms -- one among many others -- of the profound out-to-lunch bonkers out-of-touch marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
This goes for the self-described "transhumanists," the "singularitarians," the techno-immortalists, the digital utopians and cybernetic totalists, the nano-cornucopiasts, the greenwashing geo-engineers, the Ayn Raelian "extropians" and all the rest of the Robot Cultists corralled kookily together there at IEET. Whatever attention these superlative futurologists manage to attract in mainstream media outlets or among corporate-militarist funders or naive academics with their over-dramatic over-simplified over-sold over-kill narrative derangements of actually urgent technoscience and global development issues, they are and remain utterly marginal and profoundly unserious in my view, and they call into question the seriousness of any organization, enterprise, address that responds to them uncritically.
For analysis of more glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
My Boyfriend Is Strange
So, my grandmother died this weekend (I called her Mamaw, no condolences necessary, I haven't seen her for years and years, she was a nice lady but we weren't close or anything) and Eric and I were having brunch at Clairemont Cafe and talk turned naturally enough to deaths in the family. And, out of the blue, Eric tells me that while his female relatives all live forever his male relatives have tended to die young. Asked for details, I was told that one died from exploding Japanese depth charges in a submarine, one died from bullet wounds in an attempted jailbreak, another was a prospector eaten by mountain lions, and another was a reporter on deadline who tried and failed to jump a chasm on his motorbike and plummeted to his death. I'm pretty sure that all of my male relatives die in late middle age from congestive heart failure. Here's my point, though. Can you imagine that Eric and I have been together for over eight years, in more or less constant contact and more or less continuous conversation the whole time and he has never managed to tell me any of those stories before? He cracks me up, he truly does. We were together for three years before he happened to mention dancing with Madonna in a gay bar when he was a teenager and being told by her that he and his boyfriend at the time were cute. For a typical guy, that would be first date anecdote material.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Politics Is Not Morals
Politics is not morals, any more than mathematics is, and yet while few would be congratulated for being foolish enough to confuse morals and mathematics there is no end to the self-congratulation of those fools who would confuse politics with morals.
PS: Just to be clear, moralizing is what you get from that particular confusion, and as it happens moralizing distorts both what morals are sometimes good for and what politics are sometimes good for, too, usually in the most disastrous ways imaginable.
PS: Just to be clear, moralizing is what you get from that particular confusion, and as it happens moralizing distorts both what morals are sometimes good for and what politics are sometimes good for, too, usually in the most disastrous ways imaginable.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
This afternoon only three of the faces of featured authors at the website of the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, so-called, is not the face of a white guy. That's the same as last week, for those keeping score at home. Usually, it's just one or two, and sometimes none at all.
It remains as true this week as it was last week and the week before and the week before that, week before week, month before month, the whole ever lengthening stretch of time during which I have been making these little reports, that only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
This weird relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting for all this time over at IEET (by all accounts the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the Robot Cult archipelago) is, for me, just one of the more obvious symptoms -- one among many others -- of the profound out-to-lunch out-of-touchness of the superlative sub(cult)ural futurologists -- most of them self-declared "transhumanists," many "singularitarians," many techno-immortalists and nano-cornucopiasts, some of them greenwashing geo-engineers, and even some dead-ender Ayn Raelian "extropian" types -- all corralled kookily together there.
Whatever attention they manage to garner in mainstream media outlets or among corporate-militarist funders with their over-dramatic over-simplified over-selling narrative derangements of actually urgent technoscience and global development issues, they are and remain utterly marginal and profoundly unserious (except in the way a heart attack is serious). For analysis of more glaring problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
It remains as true this week as it was last week and the week before and the week before that, week before week, month before month, the whole ever lengthening stretch of time during which I have been making these little reports, that only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
This weird relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting for all this time over at IEET (by all accounts the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the Robot Cult archipelago) is, for me, just one of the more obvious symptoms -- one among many others -- of the profound out-to-lunch out-of-touchness of the superlative sub(cult)ural futurologists -- most of them self-declared "transhumanists," many "singularitarians," many techno-immortalists and nano-cornucopiasts, some of them greenwashing geo-engineers, and even some dead-ender Ayn Raelian "extropian" types -- all corralled kookily together there.
Whatever attention they manage to garner in mainstream media outlets or among corporate-militarist funders with their over-dramatic over-simplified over-selling narrative derangements of actually urgent technoscience and global development issues, they are and remain utterly marginal and profoundly unserious (except in the way a heart attack is serious). For analysis of more glaring problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Monday, September 06, 2010
The Futurological Fetish
The futurological is an essentially fetishistic discourse.
Although one hears discussions every day devoted to the contrary proposition, there actually is no such thing as "technology in general" about which one can say anything useful or in respect to which one can properly declare oneself to be devoted or opposed.
There are in fact always only indefinitely many techniques and artifacts at hand and in play, of concern to a diversity of stakeholders according to the diversity of their stakes, imagined, invented, regulated, talked about, taken up, paid for, put to uses according to a welter of what finally amount to political assumptions, conditions, ends. And so, to advocate or invest one's hopes in "technology" in the conventional futurological construal requires first a disavowal of the plural political substance that defines its given instances.
As often as not, this derangement of our sense of the political substance of the "technological" then prepares the way for a crucial second futurological disavowal of the political, whereby one goes on to fancy otherwise "intractable" political problems -- for instance, the persistence of poverty, the irresistible corruption of authoritative institutions, the inadequate responsiveness of government to the consent of the governed -- will be susceptible of "technofixes."
To be talking about "technology," then, is always to be not-talking about the politics through which certain technoscientific vicissitudes, certain technodevelopmental assumptions or aspirations are selectively de-politicized, and always in the service of parochial political ends, and often as a preliminary to indulging in empty talk about overcoming political problems by means of this politically de-politicized "technology."
The "technological" as such is always produced through the de-politicizing stabilization of the field of actually always contested practices of imagination, education, discovery, invention, testing, publication, regulation, deliberation, application, appropriation. Also, the "technological" is always selected from a greater profusion of artifice and technique actually at hand through the work of familiarizing and de-familiarizing, naturalizing and de-naturalizing discourses. Further, the "technological" would always divert agency from collectivity into capacity, from the political to the physical, from organization to force-amplification. And so, the "technofix" is less a marginal instance than the condensed essence of the "technological" as such, the fixation that would fix things. And whatever else it may be in the manner of dangerous oversimplification, wishful-thinking, or outright fraud, the techno-fix is always a placeholder for relinquished political agency, it is a site of hope very specifically for the one who is bereft of the hope of political agency.
The structure of this placeholder is classically fetishistic: "I am without x, but through the fetish, it turns out after all that I am not." While the terminology may be unfamiliar to you, the notion is of course very familiar: "I have lost my wife, but through my infatuation with my young girlfriend, it turns out I have not lost my wife at all" -- "I have lost my youth, but through my purchase of this red sports car, it turns out I have not lost my youth at all" -- (and in the facile Freudian fetishism classic) "The woman traumatically lacks a penis, but through the spiked heel, the lipstick, the riding crop, it turns out she has one after all" and the trauma of "lack" thereby presumably eased.
The futurological fetish in the form of the technofix clearly rehearses this structure: "I know but cannot bear knowing that I do not have a real voice in the political decisions that affect me, but because I blog it turns out that I do," even if almost nobody reads my blog -- "I know but cannot bear knowing that our civilization is no longer progressing to the benefit of all, but because this liquid laundry detergent now has the E-Z Pour Spout it turns out we are progressing after all," even if the marketing campaign for the E-Z Pour Spout is just repackaging as a feature something that isn't really either useful or even new at all -- "I know but cannot bear knowing that anthropogenic climate change has passed the tipping point beyond which catastrophe for all but the richest scoundrels on earth is likelier by the day, but because I advocate 'geo-engineering' it turns out that there is hope for us after all," even if I cannot coherently specify in what ways 'geo-engineering' proposals differ essentially from the presumably failed or failing proposals that provoked my despair, I cannot explain why they are to be assessed differently from these presumably failed or failing proposals, I cannot explain how they will presumably elude the organizational and political bottlenecks of these presumably failed or failing proposals, and so on.
Now, in the more classically Marxian understanding of the fetish-form, one fetishizes the commodity when one confuses the price at which it is offered for sale as an encounter with what matters essentially about it.
That commodities are first of all products, that is to say they appear before us as end-products of an organized process of labor involving people who share this historical moment in the world with us and who labor under conditions of ease or distress, freedom or constraint, health or disease, and a process of manufacture, transportation, distribution taking place on and impacting wholesomely or destructively the planet in which we all live and on which we all depend for our survival and flourishing, all of that vanishes behind the price at which the fetishized commodity declares itself available for purchase, and so declares itself essentially related to every other commodity likewise available for sale at a higher or lower price and also as related to whatever money you have in your pocket or might save or borrow in the future to purchase that commodity if you set yourself to that task.
To live in a world in which the fetishized commodity form prevails is to live as it were in a world every event and entity of which is arrayed before you as if in a department store display window. Interposed between you and everything before you is a price-tag, and it is through that price tag that you grasp your essential relation to the things of that world.
For Marx, our habituation to buying and selling as mediated by these prices, by the fetishized commodity-form, amounted to the learning of a kind of self-limiting over-literal language, and through our becoming accustomed to relating to the world and to one another solely through these fetishized forms we gain a knowledge of the world that demands ignorance most of all, that is to say the ignoring of much that actually matters most in the world. Through our mastery of the literalizing language of fetishized commodities we fancy that we are empowered, that we have acquired the know-how to navigate our world successfully as reasonable responsible agents, but we actually come to relate to one another mistakenly as though we were things and not people. We mistake an encounter of persons (peers who labor to produce, co-ordinate, and distribute goods and services and people who need or want goods and services) that happens to be mediated by commodities as an encounter between things-available-at-a-price (the commodity and the wage-earner who would purchase the commodity). We thus become hopelessly subservient to things, and through this subservience become subservient in turn to the elites on whose terms things are available for exchange first of all.
To return to the allegory of the shop window, it is not just all the world that is arrayed before us behind the glass offering itself up for sale at a price, but we mistake our own reflections in the surface of the glass as our own selves, selves indispensably part of that world for sale, and so we lose the sense of actually living our lives and substitute for that the sense of having lives the moments and energies of which we will auction off to the highest bidder in exchange for the satisfaction of our wants as displayed on offer with the money we make among them, all on terms otherwise than the ones we might make together. We disown our own selves in imagining a self that owns itself, we sell ourselves into a kind of willed slavery, a dispossession of selfhood figured as a possession we have but always only to sell it to someone else.
I hope I can be forgiven this long detour, but what it enables me to point out is that although the futurological fetish may derive its legibility from what seems a citation of the psychoanalytic fetish (I know but cannot bear knowing x, but through the fetish I know otherwise and hence can bear what I really know), it derives its force from what seems more a citation of the Marxian fetish. Futurological fetishism is above all habituation to a language of "The Future," a disabling of agency enabled by the mirage of capacity, a disabling of freedom enabled by the mirage of force-amplification, a disabling of our promising-threatening inhabitation of the plural-present enabled by the mirage of the crystallization in the present of "The Future" to come.
Strictly speaking, given the triumphalist determinism of Marxist accounts of history (a triumphalism that might in justice be depicted as the technofix writ large beyond belief), whatever the family resemblances the futurological fetish finally differs definitively from both from the classic psychoanalytic and Marxist varieties, however useful the grasp of these is to understanding it. What seems to me key to the futurological fetish is the habitual displacement onto a depoliticized "technology" of an essentially political dilemma, second the habitual displacement of political agency (collective education, agitation, organization to solve shared problems) onto technoscientific capacity already thus depoliticized, and third the habitual displacement from the plural-present of the political and the non-deductive vicissitudes of historical struggle onto the "The Future" toward which these technoscientific capacities are presumably logically, as it were mechanistically, unfolding.
In futurology, the ones blinded by greed would lead those blinded by fear... into The Future! The futurological fetish is the phony promise of mastery fueled by the fear of helplessness and purchased through the relinquishment of the only real power available to us to make a difference in the world and to make sense of the world, our political power, peer to peer.
Although one hears discussions every day devoted to the contrary proposition, there actually is no such thing as "technology in general" about which one can say anything useful or in respect to which one can properly declare oneself to be devoted or opposed.
There are in fact always only indefinitely many techniques and artifacts at hand and in play, of concern to a diversity of stakeholders according to the diversity of their stakes, imagined, invented, regulated, talked about, taken up, paid for, put to uses according to a welter of what finally amount to political assumptions, conditions, ends. And so, to advocate or invest one's hopes in "technology" in the conventional futurological construal requires first a disavowal of the plural political substance that defines its given instances.
As often as not, this derangement of our sense of the political substance of the "technological" then prepares the way for a crucial second futurological disavowal of the political, whereby one goes on to fancy otherwise "intractable" political problems -- for instance, the persistence of poverty, the irresistible corruption of authoritative institutions, the inadequate responsiveness of government to the consent of the governed -- will be susceptible of "technofixes."
To be talking about "technology," then, is always to be not-talking about the politics through which certain technoscientific vicissitudes, certain technodevelopmental assumptions or aspirations are selectively de-politicized, and always in the service of parochial political ends, and often as a preliminary to indulging in empty talk about overcoming political problems by means of this politically de-politicized "technology."
The "technological" as such is always produced through the de-politicizing stabilization of the field of actually always contested practices of imagination, education, discovery, invention, testing, publication, regulation, deliberation, application, appropriation. Also, the "technological" is always selected from a greater profusion of artifice and technique actually at hand through the work of familiarizing and de-familiarizing, naturalizing and de-naturalizing discourses. Further, the "technological" would always divert agency from collectivity into capacity, from the political to the physical, from organization to force-amplification. And so, the "technofix" is less a marginal instance than the condensed essence of the "technological" as such, the fixation that would fix things. And whatever else it may be in the manner of dangerous oversimplification, wishful-thinking, or outright fraud, the techno-fix is always a placeholder for relinquished political agency, it is a site of hope very specifically for the one who is bereft of the hope of political agency.
The structure of this placeholder is classically fetishistic: "I am without x, but through the fetish, it turns out after all that I am not." While the terminology may be unfamiliar to you, the notion is of course very familiar: "I have lost my wife, but through my infatuation with my young girlfriend, it turns out I have not lost my wife at all" -- "I have lost my youth, but through my purchase of this red sports car, it turns out I have not lost my youth at all" -- (and in the facile Freudian fetishism classic) "The woman traumatically lacks a penis, but through the spiked heel, the lipstick, the riding crop, it turns out she has one after all" and the trauma of "lack" thereby presumably eased.
The futurological fetish in the form of the technofix clearly rehearses this structure: "I know but cannot bear knowing that I do not have a real voice in the political decisions that affect me, but because I blog it turns out that I do," even if almost nobody reads my blog -- "I know but cannot bear knowing that our civilization is no longer progressing to the benefit of all, but because this liquid laundry detergent now has the E-Z Pour Spout it turns out we are progressing after all," even if the marketing campaign for the E-Z Pour Spout is just repackaging as a feature something that isn't really either useful or even new at all -- "I know but cannot bear knowing that anthropogenic climate change has passed the tipping point beyond which catastrophe for all but the richest scoundrels on earth is likelier by the day, but because I advocate 'geo-engineering' it turns out that there is hope for us after all," even if I cannot coherently specify in what ways 'geo-engineering' proposals differ essentially from the presumably failed or failing proposals that provoked my despair, I cannot explain why they are to be assessed differently from these presumably failed or failing proposals, I cannot explain how they will presumably elude the organizational and political bottlenecks of these presumably failed or failing proposals, and so on.
Now, in the more classically Marxian understanding of the fetish-form, one fetishizes the commodity when one confuses the price at which it is offered for sale as an encounter with what matters essentially about it.
That commodities are first of all products, that is to say they appear before us as end-products of an organized process of labor involving people who share this historical moment in the world with us and who labor under conditions of ease or distress, freedom or constraint, health or disease, and a process of manufacture, transportation, distribution taking place on and impacting wholesomely or destructively the planet in which we all live and on which we all depend for our survival and flourishing, all of that vanishes behind the price at which the fetishized commodity declares itself available for purchase, and so declares itself essentially related to every other commodity likewise available for sale at a higher or lower price and also as related to whatever money you have in your pocket or might save or borrow in the future to purchase that commodity if you set yourself to that task.
To live in a world in which the fetishized commodity form prevails is to live as it were in a world every event and entity of which is arrayed before you as if in a department store display window. Interposed between you and everything before you is a price-tag, and it is through that price tag that you grasp your essential relation to the things of that world.
For Marx, our habituation to buying and selling as mediated by these prices, by the fetishized commodity-form, amounted to the learning of a kind of self-limiting over-literal language, and through our becoming accustomed to relating to the world and to one another solely through these fetishized forms we gain a knowledge of the world that demands ignorance most of all, that is to say the ignoring of much that actually matters most in the world. Through our mastery of the literalizing language of fetishized commodities we fancy that we are empowered, that we have acquired the know-how to navigate our world successfully as reasonable responsible agents, but we actually come to relate to one another mistakenly as though we were things and not people. We mistake an encounter of persons (peers who labor to produce, co-ordinate, and distribute goods and services and people who need or want goods and services) that happens to be mediated by commodities as an encounter between things-available-at-a-price (the commodity and the wage-earner who would purchase the commodity). We thus become hopelessly subservient to things, and through this subservience become subservient in turn to the elites on whose terms things are available for exchange first of all.
To return to the allegory of the shop window, it is not just all the world that is arrayed before us behind the glass offering itself up for sale at a price, but we mistake our own reflections in the surface of the glass as our own selves, selves indispensably part of that world for sale, and so we lose the sense of actually living our lives and substitute for that the sense of having lives the moments and energies of which we will auction off to the highest bidder in exchange for the satisfaction of our wants as displayed on offer with the money we make among them, all on terms otherwise than the ones we might make together. We disown our own selves in imagining a self that owns itself, we sell ourselves into a kind of willed slavery, a dispossession of selfhood figured as a possession we have but always only to sell it to someone else.
I hope I can be forgiven this long detour, but what it enables me to point out is that although the futurological fetish may derive its legibility from what seems a citation of the psychoanalytic fetish (I know but cannot bear knowing x, but through the fetish I know otherwise and hence can bear what I really know), it derives its force from what seems more a citation of the Marxian fetish. Futurological fetishism is above all habituation to a language of "The Future," a disabling of agency enabled by the mirage of capacity, a disabling of freedom enabled by the mirage of force-amplification, a disabling of our promising-threatening inhabitation of the plural-present enabled by the mirage of the crystallization in the present of "The Future" to come.
Strictly speaking, given the triumphalist determinism of Marxist accounts of history (a triumphalism that might in justice be depicted as the technofix writ large beyond belief), whatever the family resemblances the futurological fetish finally differs definitively from both from the classic psychoanalytic and Marxist varieties, however useful the grasp of these is to understanding it. What seems to me key to the futurological fetish is the habitual displacement onto a depoliticized "technology" of an essentially political dilemma, second the habitual displacement of political agency (collective education, agitation, organization to solve shared problems) onto technoscientific capacity already thus depoliticized, and third the habitual displacement from the plural-present of the political and the non-deductive vicissitudes of historical struggle onto the "The Future" toward which these technoscientific capacities are presumably logically, as it were mechanistically, unfolding.
In futurology, the ones blinded by greed would lead those blinded by fear... into The Future! The futurological fetish is the phony promise of mastery fueled by the fear of helplessness and purchased through the relinquishment of the only real power available to us to make a difference in the world and to make sense of the world, our political power, peer to peer.
Saturday, September 04, 2010
MemeTherapy Interview
I am re-posting an interview published by "MemeTherapy," July 3, 2006. Their online publication no longer exists, as far as I can tell, and so the interview is no longer available there. At the end of the interview I post links to a few pieces of mine written in the years since which elaborate some of the points made in the interview, and in which I no longer feel particularly disposed to be quite so polite to Robot Cultists as I was trying to be at that time.
More on the "technoprogressive" term and its promotional appropriation by the Robot Cult here.
More on James Hughes and what he peddles in the name of "Democratic Transhumanism" here.
More on what eventually happens when you try to play nicey nice with Robot Cultists here.
More Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
MemeTherapy -- Is there a substantial distinction between a technoprogressive and a transhumanist?
Dale Carrico -- “Technoprogressive” is just a shorthand way of saying “technology-focused progressive.” My impression from the transhumanist-identified people I know is that most of them see themselves as part of a cultural movement with a unique shared identity and a coherent political program of the kind I would tend to associate with organized parties or membership organizations.
I write about “technology” topics that seem to interest a lot of transhumanist-identified people and as a consequence of this I am regularly mistaken for one myself. I’m never completely comfortable when that happens, but I’m also never sure if it’s that big a deal ultimately. A friend and colleague of mine, the bioethicist James Hughes, is transhumanist-identified and I agree with him on a very wide range of concrete political topics and goals. But then there are also curiously high numbers of transhumanist-identified people who advocate what look to me like the most reactionary views imaginable. But even if I can’t personally make much sense out of “transhumanism” as a coherent movement or concept in general I think it’s not so much at this abstract level of analysis as in political struggle itself that you really figure out who your allies are in fights for peace, justice, and democracy.
The fact is I’m simply a person of the democratic left who’s very interested in the cultural politics of disruptive technoscientific developments. When I take stock of the scene of dem-left movements in the world today it seems useful to me to think of these movements as part of a process of technodevelopmental social struggle.
People are taking up p2p tools to organize and speak truth to corporate-military elites. People are fighting intellectual property regimes that focus on short-term profits for Big Pharma rather than treatable conditions for the world’s poor. People are getting the word out about tools on hand and on drawing boards to overcome the catastrophic model of extractive petrochemical industry and shift to renewable, sustainable, decentralized energy. People are working to ensure that women are able to safely end unwanted pregnancies or ensure they have access to ARTs to facilitate wanted pregnancies. People are struggling to protect the teaching of consensus science in schools and to ensure that our democratic representatives make recourse to the advice of good science when they make policy to address problems of climate change, budget priorities, family planning, rational security, environmental toxicity, harm reduction and so on.
That’s the politics of emerging technoscientific change, here and now. And these politics will only grow more and more fraught with the convergence of NBIC (which stands for nano- bio- info- cogni-) technoscience and especially with the emergence of radical genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification medicine. The political struggles now and to come will be to ensure that the costs, the risks, as well as the benefits of global technoscientific developments are all fairly distributed to all the stakeholders to those developments. And that looks to me like pretty standard dem-left politics applied to our new circumstances.
We all know that human beings now inhabit a world with unprecedented power to destroy itself through weapons of mass destruction, industry-induced climate change, engineered pathogens, just as it has an unprecedented power to save itself from asteroid impacts, pandemics, and poverty. Without democratic controls to protect us, short-sighted human beings with superlative technologies at their disposal are too likely to destroy the world.
But the transformative power of technology, taken up by people-powered democratic politics can reinvigorate the good old radical vision of the global left, so much of which has seemed to languish through the last decade of the last century and the first decade of this century. The slogan that names this connection for me is, “technology needs democracy, democracy needs technology.” And for me, grasping this connection is at the heart of what makes me describe my politics as technoprogressive rather than simply progressive.
But once you’ve grasped this basic connection it seems to me that most of the real political force for technoprogressive arguments arises out of pretty straightforward dem-left commitments. The identity politics of the transhumanists seem to be lodged at the level of a shared commitment to technology in general. This doesn’t really make much sense to me, since both the empowering and pernicious impacts of technodevelopment happen at a more specific level that that. I think this leads otherwise progressive folks to mistake as allies explicitly anti-democratic people who share with them nothing but this general enthusiasm for “technology” –- even if the uses to which their “allies” would put actual technologies are altogether reactionary. I guess that’s the most substantial thing I can think of to distinguish technoprogressive from transhumanist outlooks—apart from things like an unpleasant historical association with market libertarian nonsense from the irrationally exuberant high-tech 90s boom, and a slight ongoing drift toward scientific reductionism that seems culturally impoverishing to me. But the fact is that some transhumanists these days consider themselves technoprogressive as well and I can’t see anything particularly wrongheaded about that in principle.
MemeTherapy -- We’re seeing the left in the US using the internet in some innovative ways (Daily Kos, Dean campaign fundraising). Do you see this trend continuing and if so what innovations do you see (or would like to see) coming up next?
Dale Carrico -- Well, the key thing to realize is that this is not so much a “trend” as the latest effort of the democratic left to opportunistically take up new tools to reshape politics to emancipatory ends. There is nothing inherently democratizing in these technologies. They are deeply vulnerable to legislative assaults, media distraction, and outright violence at the hands of established elites.
Now, it’s true, just as digital networks eliminated the infrastructural bottlenecks represented by the overhead of print publication and broadcasting, so too peer-to-peer formations transform the costs of creative collaboration, deliberation, assessment, and so on. When technology changes the basic institutional terms in this way it’s sure to have transformative impacts. But the technology itself provides no assurance that the transformation will be progressive. We only know that we confront an opportunity to change things, to end entrenched corporate media monopolies, to halt the elite looting of the commons, to demand greater transparency from authorities, to facilitate more democratic policy deliberation and so on.
In the United States, one of the most interesting struggles one sees is really within our notionally-left organized politics. Corporate “insider” machine politics represented (somewhat cartoonishly, but it’ll do for now) by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is arrayed against the Netroots formations represented (again, a little cartoonishly) by dKos, the Dean candidacy, and so on. There is an important sense in which the DLC represents fairly typical American “machine”politics, defined in the Reagan era of anti-governmental hostility and most triumphant in the corporatist-friendly Clinton White House. Far from the arrival of any left-wing technotopia it seems to me we are witnessing skirmishes on a technodevelopmental terrain unsettled by Peak Oil and p2p, a struggle simply to nudge American political discourse leftward after the disastrous decades long skew of nearly all civic discourse and organized politics to the corporate-militarist right. Things are rather messier and my hopes more modest than one might otherwise want, I fear.
In the coming years people will talk about the politics of nanotechnology, biotechnology, desalination technology, renewable technology, robotic technology and so on. But the actual work to make these technodevelopments more progressive will be mainstream dem-left struggles to implement universal healthcare, basic income guarantees, support international criminal and environmental courts, ensure compliance with global disarmament and species protection treaties, champion global fair-trade, labor, and carbon emission standards, instituting international regulatory and monitoring regimes for tsunamis, weapons trafficking, pandemics and so on. The devil, as always, will be in the details.
MemeTherapy -- What kinds of things are you working on now?
Dale Carrico -- I’m very interested right now in the transformation of digital networks via biotechnology, biometrics, and medical administration into global bioremedial networks. I think the basic terms of personal and civic subjecthood are transforming under pressure of a collision between a normalizing model of liberal healthcare administration against what I call an “experimental subjection” model of consensual genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification. The liberal model is defined by an ideal of universal “basic” healthcare provision at which we never really arrive in fact, while the experimental subjection model is defined by an ideal of morphological freedom at which we probably will never arrive either. What remains is likely, as ever, to be a shifting politics of risk, profit, and stress management that will look more democratic the more we manage to ensure the scene of consent is as informed and nonduressed as possible by keeping access to knowledge open and poverty at bay for all.
More on the "technoprogressive" term and its promotional appropriation by the Robot Cult here.
More on James Hughes and what he peddles in the name of "Democratic Transhumanism" here.
More on what eventually happens when you try to play nicey nice with Robot Cultists here.
More Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
This morning only three of the faces of featured authors at the website of the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, so-called, is not the face of a white guy (last week it was one).
It remains as true this week as it was last week and the week before and the week before that, week before week, month before month, the whole ever lengthening stretch of time during which I have been making these little reports, that only a minority of people in the world are white guys, only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys, only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys, and only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting all this time over at IEET (presumably the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the Robot Cult archipelago) is, for me, just one of the more obvious symptoms -- one among many others -- of the profound out-to-lunch out-of-touchness of the motley techno-utopian futurologists -- transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, greenwashing geo-engineers, and Ayn Raelian "extropians" -- corralled kookily together there.
Whatever attention they manage to garner in mainstream media outlets or among corporate-militarist funders with their over-dramatic over-simplified over-selling derangements of actually urgent technoscience and global development issues, they are and remain utterly marginal and profoundly unserious (except in the way a heart attack is serious). For analysis of more glaring problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
It remains as true this week as it was last week and the week before and the week before that, week before week, month before month, the whole ever lengthening stretch of time during which I have been making these little reports, that only a minority of people in the world are white guys, only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys, only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys, and only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting all this time over at IEET (presumably the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the Robot Cult archipelago) is, for me, just one of the more obvious symptoms -- one among many others -- of the profound out-to-lunch out-of-touchness of the motley techno-utopian futurologists -- transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, greenwashing geo-engineers, and Ayn Raelian "extropians" -- corralled kookily together there.
Whatever attention they manage to garner in mainstream media outlets or among corporate-militarist funders with their over-dramatic over-simplified over-selling derangements of actually urgent technoscience and global development issues, they are and remain utterly marginal and profoundly unserious (except in the way a heart attack is serious). For analysis of more glaring problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Neoliberal Immaterialism
The devastating delusion of neoliberal immaterialism ultimately plays out in its fervent disavowals, first of the very material bodies and lifeways of the planetary Precariat that are obliterated in the supposedly frictionless flows of informal-informational capital, second, of very material bombs and bullets of neoconservative militarism that indispensably compel and enforce the adherence of the planetary Precariat to the supposedly "free trade" of disinformed, duressed, vacuous-voluntary libertarianism, and third of the very material metabolic limits and geophysical conditions of a precarious Planet wounded, potentially beyond healing, by human enterprises driven by fantasies of infinite growth, infinite profit, infinite resources, infinite exploitation, infinite waste, infinite gratification, infinite willfulness.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
This morning only a single one of the faces of featured authors at the website of the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, so-called, is not the face of a white guy.
And, yet, nothing could be more obvious than that only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week, month after month over at IEET (the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the Robot Cult archipelago) is, for me, just one of the more obvious symptoms -- one among many others -- of the utter marginality of the motley techno-utopian futurologists -- transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, greenwashing geo-engineers, and Ayn Raelian "extropians" -- corralled kookily together there, whatever attention they manage to garner in mainstream media outlets or among corporate-militarist funders with their over-dramatic over-simplified over-selling derangements of actually urgent technoscience and global development issues. For analysis of more glaring problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
And, yet, nothing could be more obvious than that only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week, month after month over at IEET (the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the Robot Cult archipelago) is, for me, just one of the more obvious symptoms -- one among many others -- of the utter marginality of the motley techno-utopian futurologists -- transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, greenwashing geo-engineers, and Ayn Raelian "extropians" -- corralled kookily together there, whatever attention they manage to garner in mainstream media outlets or among corporate-militarist funders with their over-dramatic over-simplified over-selling derangements of actually urgent technoscience and global development issues. For analysis of more glaring problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Hole Earth
My friend Michel Bauwens has kindly directed the attention of his readers at the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives to a critique of Stewart Brand I wrote back in January. The piece had long seemed to me unsatisfactory -- I wrote it in a state of extreme annoyance at some glib article I had read, and the writing was more unwieldy and impetuous even than usual -- but I also kept coming back to it myself, thinking that it contained the kernel of a more sustained treatment of what for me is a pretty characteristic theme, namely, the clash between futurological and ecological thinking. I revised the three part piece in something of a panic at the thought of the earlier version being read by lots of people, and the three revised texts are available here:
I welcome comments and criticisms, especially now. As I have mentioned before, I have reduced my teaching load for the upcoming academic year from four to two courses a term in order to give myself time for serious writing. I have been teaching twelve courses a year (including summer intensives) since I received my PhD, and this has left me little time for serious writing and research, only time for the more impressionistic sort of writing I do here on my blog. I think my first writing project will be to make something out of the ideas in the collection of posts under the heading Futurology Against Ecology (which is where you can also find all the Anti-"Geo-Engineering" posts of the last few weeks), of which the revised "Hole Earth" critique of Brand's futurology is a key part.
one -- Stewart Brand, King of Pop Futurology
two -- Surveying Stewart Brand's Greenback-Green Futurological Litany
three -- All Futurisms Tend to be Functionally Retro-Futuristic in Their Political Substance.
I welcome comments and criticisms, especially now. As I have mentioned before, I have reduced my teaching load for the upcoming academic year from four to two courses a term in order to give myself time for serious writing. I have been teaching twelve courses a year (including summer intensives) since I received my PhD, and this has left me little time for serious writing and research, only time for the more impressionistic sort of writing I do here on my blog. I think my first writing project will be to make something out of the ideas in the collection of posts under the heading Futurology Against Ecology (which is where you can also find all the Anti-"Geo-Engineering" posts of the last few weeks), of which the revised "Hole Earth" critique of Brand's futurology is a key part.
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