I read an article attributing to futurologist Steward Brand "heretical" views that were presumably shocking given that Brand is an "icon" of the environmentalist movement, but which seemed to me not only not shocking but not even the least bit surprising. I started tossing off an annoyed post explaining why I felt this way and soon discovered it had grown to frightful proportions, and so I have divided it into three separate parts.
The first part, Stewart Brand, King of Pop Futurology, written while I was still feeling annoyed explains why I am ambivalent about describing Stewart Brand as an "icon" or "godfather" of environmentalism (although of course he has as much right to describe himself an environmentalist as anybody does, more than most do in fact). I would describe Brand as a futurologist, and I think his "heretical" views are pretty much neoliberal-futurological conventional wisdom, and I think he is part of a larger movement of California Ideologists and digirati and technophiles about whom it is actually obfuscatory rather than clarifying to describe them as greens or libertarians or hippies, even if they are connected to these movements and subcultures. While I still stand by what I wrote here, I think there is probably more snark than substance in it.
The second part, Surveying Brand's Greenback-Green Futurological Litany, actually addresses itself directly to the four claims attributed (I am assuming accurately) to Brand which triggered my annoyance in the first place. By the time I got to this part I have to admit that I wasn't particularly annoyed anymore, and the discussion seems to me more substantial there. I don't doubt that, as is usually the case, interest in what I have to say will diminish directly in proportion to the diminishment of the snark.
The third part, All Futurisms Tend to Be Functionally Retro-Futuristic in Their Political Substance draws from the foregoing a more general case that provides a more systematic formulation of a point (captured in the title) that I often declare here on Amor Mundi, but rarely elaborate as much as I should. By the time I arrived at part three I will admit that I had lost all interest in Stewart Brand and had become intrigued by the theoretical ideas that had churned up to the surface in the process of writing the preceding sections. It was at this point that I realized I'd been writing for over an hour and that my post had become yet another of my sprawling scattered speculations. That's when I decided to try breaking it into separate parts for a change, and hence the present experiment.
Continue to the Next Part?
Monday, January 25, 2010
Stewart Brand, King of Pop Futurology (Part One of Three)
At least one journalist seemed to find "shocking" and "heretical" the following absolutely conventional futurological chestnuts:
If I may speak for at least this Green, I would personally characterize Brand's comments as, first of all, not so much shocking as just wrong, and even rather dumb as wrong ideas go. (I will elaborate these charges in the next section.) Furthermore, this litany of corporate-militarist articles of faith seems to me the farthest thing from heretical exactly, so much as simply the sort of thing a futurologist like Brand should be expected to say, since it is the sort of thing futurologists all say all the time and with almost perfect robotic mind-numbing predictability. (And I will elaborate these claims in the third and final section.)
This is the same Stewart Brand, after all, who handwaved about how world-changing the MIT Media Lab was, that incubator of "digirati" and techno-utopians who brought us irrational exuberance and the nanocornucopiasts and the cybernetic totalists and the literally jaw-dropping foolishness of the so-called Long Boom, who co-founded that brain trust of corporate-militarist futurological PR "scenario"-spinners, the Global Business Network, and who still thinks, together with the same coterie of futurological dead-enders that what would amount to an architectural folly in Marie Antoinette's Versailles, The Clock of the Long Now, constitutes a revolutionary intervention into the status quo.
Since I devote so much of this blog to deriding superlative futurology and connecting it to the more mainstream futurology of neoliberal global development discourse, I can't help but add that this is also the same Stewart Brand who wrote in the forward to a particularly egregious piece of techno-utopian nonsense, Unbounding the Future, an earnestly worded warning to readers about getting taken in by false and facile promises of "technofixes" while at once hilariously recommending the techno-fixated superlative futurology of drex-tech nano-cornucopiasts as panacaea for all ills.
Here's a taste, from the breezy buzzing opening passage of that hyperbolic little number:
The Case: "Science!" "Feasible!" "Revolutionary-times-revolutionary!" "In our lifetimes!"
The Verdict: Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
You know, there's a sucker born every minute, and every futurologist you will ever meet is either one of them or hoping like hell you are.
I don't mean to diminish Brand's actual standing and celebrity in saying I don't personally consider him an environmental eminence. The Well was plenty nifty after all, and I enjoyed reading Whole Earth as much as the next geek back in the 80s, in the same way I enjoyed reading OMNI in High School.
As it happens, I actually teach the release of the NASA photograph of the whole earth as seen from space (famously shepherded by Brand into world view) as a key formative moment for the contemporary phase of environmental movement. But I would say that anybody who upon seeing the gorgeous life-trembling whole earth from space declares human beings to be, as Stewart Brand famously did, "as gods," rather than as entangled interdependent precarious earthlings, has never really truly seen the whole earth made available in that image at all.
I propose that the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was the indispensable beginning of the second wave of an American environmentalist politics that had been conservationist hitherto -- and in many ways also profoundly conservative. And what was so definitive in her environmental politics was her concentration on the need to educate everyday citizens, to provide media for technoscientific literacy, and to resist incumbent interested media misinformation campaigns, and all this to mobilize informed people to demand the regulative-legislative redress of shared environmental problems, peer to peer.
This seems to me an environmentalist politics still relevant to our circumstances. But, more to the point, I tend to see Brand's facile futurology as profoundly antithetical to Carson's educational-agitational-organization environmental politics. I see Carson and Brand less as partners in the dance of environmental politics in the near half-century from 1970-2010, than as rivals for its practical soul.
For a sense of why this might matter, I think there is merit in Van Jones' insistence that environmentalism is now moving into a third phase still, defined neither by of the conservationism and conservatism of the first, nor by the regulation and legislation of the second, but one devoted to what he calls "investment." What is crucial in my view is that we see to it that what is named by this emerging "investment"-formation -- if that indeed is what it is to be called -- must seek to mobilize long-term public investment in renewable infrastructure and stewardship lifeways, rather than just more of the same "innovation" via commons-capture and "profit-making" through the externalization environmental risks and costs. And it seems to me that choosing between Carson's actually educational and organizational environmentalism qua consensus science and consensual governance against Brand's hyperbolic promotional and self-promotional futurological pseudo-environmentalism qua elite-incumbent advertising discourse could well be determinative of the understanding of "investment" environmentalism takes up in this third moment in its political history, and hence determinative, frankly, of the survival and flourishing of civilization on earth. (I would also propose that these three phases or waves or chapters or epochs or whatever of environmental politics should not be seen so much as supplanting one another, but as supplementing and complicating one another.)
For all these reasons, I simply cannot grant that Stewart Brand is some kind of proper environmentalist "godfather." Given that folks like Emerson, Thoreau, Darwin, Muir, Leopold, Abbey, Naess, Mollison, Bookchin, Carson, Kovel, Foster, Maathai, Shiva are among the proper claimants to such a title, I simply do not agree that Brand has been anything like a deep or original environmentalist thinker, or that he has facilitated actually democratizing environmentalist politics. I tend to think he has easily contributed as much or more to rendering proper environmentalist thinking impossible as he has contributed to environmentalism as such.
Although I don't doubt that Stewart Brand is a joy to be around (I can only imagine the stories he has to tell given the marvelous company he's kept), the fact remains in my view that he was and remains a California Ideologist through and through, one of so many corporatists who continue to confuse so-called cyber-consumer culture with counterculture, one of so many beneficiaries of class and race and gender privilege who continue to confuse hegemony with spontaneous order and their vantage from that hegemonic summit as a kind of insight or personal accomplishment, one of too many edge.org and TED Talk kinda guys who are all too prone to confuse self-promotion and PR with thought, one of so many futurologists peddling retro-futures in the name of "The Future."
One has to take great care before describing California Ideologists as hippies or greens or lefties for the same reasons (and usually for exactly the same reasons) as one has to take great care before describing American libertarians as actual civil libertarians rather than simply as Republicans who want to smoke pot or chew some hooker's foot without fear of arrest but all the while otherwise continuing to enjoy the unearned class privileges the "Universe Has Provided."
Continue to the Next Part?
One of the “godfathers of environmentalism” [has] a message that most greens will find both shocking and heretical... Stewart Brand told a 400-strong audience... [t]here was “no hope” of mitigating against climate change. Nuclear power was the only way we could provide enough clean energy for the world; Cities were greener than the countryside; Genetically modified crops were necessary to feed the world’s growing population. Brand is widely regarded as one of the great visionaries of the environmental movement...
If I may speak for at least this Green, I would personally characterize Brand's comments as, first of all, not so much shocking as just wrong, and even rather dumb as wrong ideas go. (I will elaborate these charges in the next section.) Furthermore, this litany of corporate-militarist articles of faith seems to me the farthest thing from heretical exactly, so much as simply the sort of thing a futurologist like Brand should be expected to say, since it is the sort of thing futurologists all say all the time and with almost perfect robotic mind-numbing predictability. (And I will elaborate these claims in the third and final section.)
This is the same Stewart Brand, after all, who handwaved about how world-changing the MIT Media Lab was, that incubator of "digirati" and techno-utopians who brought us irrational exuberance and the nanocornucopiasts and the cybernetic totalists and the literally jaw-dropping foolishness of the so-called Long Boom, who co-founded that brain trust of corporate-militarist futurological PR "scenario"-spinners, the Global Business Network, and who still thinks, together with the same coterie of futurological dead-enders that what would amount to an architectural folly in Marie Antoinette's Versailles, The Clock of the Long Now, constitutes a revolutionary intervention into the status quo.
Since I devote so much of this blog to deriding superlative futurology and connecting it to the more mainstream futurology of neoliberal global development discourse, I can't help but add that this is also the same Stewart Brand who wrote in the forward to a particularly egregious piece of techno-utopian nonsense, Unbounding the Future, an earnestly worded warning to readers about getting taken in by false and facile promises of "technofixes" while at once hilariously recommending the techno-fixated superlative futurology of drex-tech nano-cornucopiasts as panacaea for all ills.
Here's a taste, from the breezy buzzing opening passage of that hyperbolic little number:
"Nanotechnology. The science is good, the engineering is feasible, the paths of approach are many, the consequences are revolutionary-times-revolutionary, and the schedule is: in our lifetimes."
The Case: "Science!" "Feasible!" "Revolutionary-times-revolutionary!" "In our lifetimes!"
The Verdict: Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
You know, there's a sucker born every minute, and every futurologist you will ever meet is either one of them or hoping like hell you are.
I don't mean to diminish Brand's actual standing and celebrity in saying I don't personally consider him an environmental eminence. The Well was plenty nifty after all, and I enjoyed reading Whole Earth as much as the next geek back in the 80s, in the same way I enjoyed reading OMNI in High School.
As it happens, I actually teach the release of the NASA photograph of the whole earth as seen from space (famously shepherded by Brand into world view) as a key formative moment for the contemporary phase of environmental movement. But I would say that anybody who upon seeing the gorgeous life-trembling whole earth from space declares human beings to be, as Stewart Brand famously did, "as gods," rather than as entangled interdependent precarious earthlings, has never really truly seen the whole earth made available in that image at all.
I propose that the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was the indispensable beginning of the second wave of an American environmentalist politics that had been conservationist hitherto -- and in many ways also profoundly conservative. And what was so definitive in her environmental politics was her concentration on the need to educate everyday citizens, to provide media for technoscientific literacy, and to resist incumbent interested media misinformation campaigns, and all this to mobilize informed people to demand the regulative-legislative redress of shared environmental problems, peer to peer.
This seems to me an environmentalist politics still relevant to our circumstances. But, more to the point, I tend to see Brand's facile futurology as profoundly antithetical to Carson's educational-agitational-organization environmental politics. I see Carson and Brand less as partners in the dance of environmental politics in the near half-century from 1970-2010, than as rivals for its practical soul.
For a sense of why this might matter, I think there is merit in Van Jones' insistence that environmentalism is now moving into a third phase still, defined neither by of the conservationism and conservatism of the first, nor by the regulation and legislation of the second, but one devoted to what he calls "investment." What is crucial in my view is that we see to it that what is named by this emerging "investment"-formation -- if that indeed is what it is to be called -- must seek to mobilize long-term public investment in renewable infrastructure and stewardship lifeways, rather than just more of the same "innovation" via commons-capture and "profit-making" through the externalization environmental risks and costs. And it seems to me that choosing between Carson's actually educational and organizational environmentalism qua consensus science and consensual governance against Brand's hyperbolic promotional and self-promotional futurological pseudo-environmentalism qua elite-incumbent advertising discourse could well be determinative of the understanding of "investment" environmentalism takes up in this third moment in its political history, and hence determinative, frankly, of the survival and flourishing of civilization on earth. (I would also propose that these three phases or waves or chapters or epochs or whatever of environmental politics should not be seen so much as supplanting one another, but as supplementing and complicating one another.)
For all these reasons, I simply cannot grant that Stewart Brand is some kind of proper environmentalist "godfather." Given that folks like Emerson, Thoreau, Darwin, Muir, Leopold, Abbey, Naess, Mollison, Bookchin, Carson, Kovel, Foster, Maathai, Shiva are among the proper claimants to such a title, I simply do not agree that Brand has been anything like a deep or original environmentalist thinker, or that he has facilitated actually democratizing environmentalist politics. I tend to think he has easily contributed as much or more to rendering proper environmentalist thinking impossible as he has contributed to environmentalism as such.
Although I don't doubt that Stewart Brand is a joy to be around (I can only imagine the stories he has to tell given the marvelous company he's kept), the fact remains in my view that he was and remains a California Ideologist through and through, one of so many corporatists who continue to confuse so-called cyber-consumer culture with counterculture, one of so many beneficiaries of class and race and gender privilege who continue to confuse hegemony with spontaneous order and their vantage from that hegemonic summit as a kind of insight or personal accomplishment, one of too many edge.org and TED Talk kinda guys who are all too prone to confuse self-promotion and PR with thought, one of so many futurologists peddling retro-futures in the name of "The Future."
One has to take great care before describing California Ideologists as hippies or greens or lefties for the same reasons (and usually for exactly the same reasons) as one has to take great care before describing American libertarians as actual civil libertarians rather than simply as Republicans who want to smoke pot or chew some hooker's foot without fear of arrest but all the while otherwise continuing to enjoy the unearned class privileges the "Universe Has Provided."
Continue to the Next Part?
Surveying Stewart Brand's Greenback-Green Futurological Litany (Part Two of Three)
Want to Start at the Beginning?
And so, to return to Brand's litany of drearily predictable futurological "heresies," let me be as harsh as possible in the hope that vehemence might chisel its way past the rigidly enforced good cheer and self-congratulatory faux-contrarian and can-do crapola in which retro-futurists inevitably enshrine and en-shell themselves as they hawk their latest books.
First --
It seems to me that presumably "hardnosed" dismissals of hope for mitigating climate change by way of lifeway education-regulation-legislation-public investment are only issued in the final analysis by those who either mean cynically to sell some pie-in-the-sky corporate-militarist mega-engineering boondoggle to help billionaires who made their money destroying the planet in extractive-industrial-petrochemical enterprise make still more money pretending to be the only ones qualified to clean up their mess or by those those truly hard-hearted bastards (among whom I happen not to number Stewart Brand) who have calculated that climate catastrophe will not truly visit itself inside the high walls of gated suburbs behind GWOT-militarized Homeland moats in which they reside together with everyone they really care about, but will exact its toll instead always only on the same endlessly over-exploited regions of the world that already suffer genocidal devastation via treatable but neglected diseases and famine and drought brought about by catastrophic climate change in the already-arrived catastrophic future, all mediated and facilitated by arms proliferation and structured debt settlement and imposed market discipline to prolonged yawns from the people of the "Civilized World" in between occasional spectacular self-messaging charity benefit concerts.
Of course, any thinking person who truly entertained the slightest real expectation that global pandemics incubated in the slums of our neoliberal planetary "future," here and now, or that climate change refugees and warlord gangs armed and unleashed with the blessings of Judeochrislamic Mega-Churches and the NRA, or that Boschian scenes of energy and resource descent and its wars will arrive anytime soon on their actual doorstep don't waste time earning "street cred" with vapid Villager journalists by making tough-talkin' pronouncements about the hopelessness of legible democratic environmentalist politics. (And one must always emphasize how such pronouncements provide, and not at all co-incidentally, handy marketing and promotional advertisements and rationalizations for multinational energy and industrial-ag corporations to indulge in profit-making mega-scale "geo-engineering" and "bio-engineering" and ruinous nuclear-plant archipelago building projects in the name of "environmental remediation" after a century of their profit-taking destruction of the environment much of the time spent denying the plain facts at hand.) Again, nobody who is anything but a sociopathic monster would actually say out loud, while truly expecting such nightmares to unfold any time soon or anywhere near them, that we fellow-eathlings, peer to peer, are in any sense "beyond hope" or "past the tipping point" or "beyond politics" in the face of climate catastrophe.
No, serious people who believe they personally confront catastrophe do whatever they can, however they can, with whomever they can, hopelessly or not, to do what can be done to save their lives and the lives of the ones and world they love so long as they remain alive to do it.
They do not resign themselves to futurological wish-fulfilment fantasizing, they do not relinquish their democracy and welcome our corporate-militarist overlords to start throwing their weight around, they do not give up on the precarious, the marginal, the already over-exploited people with whom we share this earth and then claw their way to the top of the bloody pyramid of skulls hoping it reaches its way at last to heaven, or some other escape hatch.
No, serious people continue educating, agitating, organizing, legislating, regulating, investing, helping, hoping, working, shoulder to shoulder with their peers, until either together we fail or we prevail in the making of a sustainable, democratic, consensual, equitable, diverse, convivial planetary civilization together. None of those adjective is dispensable to the achievement of any of the others, and the mark of seriousness must be precisely that recognition.
Second --
Nuclear power isn't "clean energy" in any factual sense and so describing it as "the only way we can provide enough clean energy for the world" is a deception -- or, to elaborate the point a bit more, this typical futurological utterance is an example of that genre our debased culture has come to view as acceptable deception, namely, it is an act of advertising. Corporations, you will recall, have been given the legal right to lie in their advertisements, since to deny this would be to curtail the flows of money and force that are the only real kind of speech on the part of the corporations that are in turn the only the entities that connect real people to real power in this corporate-militarist chapter in the unfolding (and possibly consummating) history of industrial-extractive-postcolonial-capitalist modernity.
Futurology is best understood as continuous with that most prevalent mode of public discourse in our distressed debased order -- marketing, promotion, self-promotion, and advertising. It bears notice that the family-resemblance of futurology's future and futures trading is not accidental, nor is the family-resemblance of financial speculation and speculative fiction accidental, especially such speculative fiction as one finds in that least accomplished and least original form of science fiction, the futurological "scenario."
I might as well also point out that in its most extreme forms this futurological deception takes on the tonalities of that most sweeping of creative fictions, outright religious faith. And the fraudulent hyperbole of our all-encompassing advertising-promotional-marketing discourse which is amplified in the pseudo-scientific "trend-spotting" and prophetic utterances of think-tank gurus, then becomes further amplified into the promise of outright techno-transcendence of the finitude of the human condition itself -- superintelligence, superlongevity, superabundance -- vouchsafed by subcultural membership and True Belief in one or more of the many sects of the Robot Cult, the transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts who pimple the cyberspatial sprawl and the great State of California.
I personally believe that a smart grid of millions of commercial and residential solar rooftops, supplemented with thousands of square miles of in-field and offshore wind-turbine co-ops, coupled with public works projects retro-fitting and LEEDS-certifying public buildings and schools and public housing across the country and transforming our military and postal vehicular fleets to electric plug-ins together could transform the United States into a sustainable and renewable civilization offering a model for China and India and all the while revitalizing our neoliberal devastated and immaterialized economy (for which digital-utopian futurologists like Brand provided breathless rationalizations, by the way) into a unionized empowered middle-class nation (the kind of equitable and diverse nation and economy that enables to bloom and flourish the kind of hippy subcultures and everyday creativity California Ideological futurologists like Brand like to think they celebrate and champion even as they blithely kick out all of its indispensable social supports), and in a way that costs less and takes less time than installing Brand's oh-so-necessary nuclear archipelago would, all the while decentralizing rather than shoring up central and incumbent authority, and in a way that leaves no long-term radioactive legacy for future generations to curse us for.
Third --
While it is true in the abstract that dense cities can provide efficiencies in principle that overcome unsustainable consumption of land, resources, and energy, this result is only possible when efforts are made to ensure through principled urban planning and investment that there are open spaces, that natural services and local ecosystems remain intact to cope with the added stress and waste and use of urban populations. Such efforts require sustained reliable accountable regulation and oversight on a scale and of a kind which takes place in hardly any hitherto actually existing cities. And the consequence is that actual cities, unlike the abstract cities offered up in futurological generalities like the one Brand chirps about here, are the farthest imaginable thing from "Greener than the countryside."
In my view, such futurological utterances actually enable and even sell anti-sustainability through the conjuration of an abstraction that does not connect to reality -- and worse still could never connect to reality given the way futurology tends at best to redirect concern with actual substance into insubstantial abstractions and wish-fulfillment fantasies and at worst is freighted with outright anti-governmental and anti-regulatory biases that actively disable our collective capacity to address shared problems in a responsible and intelligent fashion at all.
In the well loved "Bright"-green futurological design-guru Bible Cradle to Cradle, the authors William McDonough and Michael Braungart declare:
This attitude seems to me ubiquitous in futurological and self-identified green design discourse, and this "principled" hostility to regulation precedes and enables the reluctance with which many "geo-engineering" enthusiasts now proclaim the failure of regulation to demand planet-scaled re-designing projects under their supervision.
Think carefully for a moment about what it means to declare any regulation to be a signal (to whom exactly?) of design failure, and what that implies about the guiding ideal of a futurological design subculture whose utopia would be one in which the collective intelligence and effort of everyday citizens that is reflected in the legislative and regulative acts of a state of, by, and for the people is effaced, replaced with the vision of a "successfully" designed world provided by the better-intelligence of that privileged coterie of elite-incumbent designers whose parochial positional assumptions and aspirations are, after all, all that really matters.
Fourth --
Once again we are treated to a generalization in the Litany, this time called "genetically modified crops." To this monolithic generalization is then falsely attributed a uniformly positive outcome -- "feeding the world's growing population" -- on the basis of which a kind of political position, namely, that these "crops" "in general" are "necessary," is all too predictably championed.
Let us set aside the enormously relevant fact that we already know runaway population growth is far from inevitable and can be addressed immediately, the moment in fact one simply empowers women in patriarchal societies with even minimal financial resources and social support on the basis of which they take control of their lives and their reproductive health, and also by providing accurate and reliable knowledge about reproductive health and access to family planning services to women.
Literacy, family planning, a financial stake, and equality before the law for women and all the world's people is the solution to overpopulation, in my view, not blanket celebrations of multinational corporations and energy-input-intensive irrigation-intensive petrochemical Industrial Agriculture and their genetic-branding genomic-enclosure IP-strategies, if Mr. Brand will forgive my saying so. And before any of you roll your eyes at my prescription, consider seriously what assumptions would lead one to treat it as an outcome less possible to accomplish than one in which we presumably resign the fate of a sustainable equitable diverse world to the profit-mad extractive-exploitative-competitive corporate-militarist actors who are responsible for the crisis at hand.
Now, I am far from denying that quite a lot of what might be described as genetic modification might indeed be beneficial -- selectivity and hybridity have been part of the cultural archive of agricultural cultivation (the words culture and cultivated are etymologically connected after all) since well before that culture was transmitted through writing technologies, and I do not doubt that both sustainable agriculture and especially polycultural practices might benefit from sound genetic science as from other relevant science in a well-regulated accountable social order.
What is most troubling to me about the conjuration of the hyper-generalized abstraction "genetically modified crops" in Brand's futurological chestnut is that it is conspicuously indifferent to many of the genetic modifications we know to be designed not to improve nutrition or disease-resistance or insect-resistance or the like, but instead to promote short-term profitability in the usual ways corporate logic dictates: either by dismissing or externalizing possible costs and risks by devoting insufficient critical scrutiny to the manifold longer-term or wider-scale impacts of modifications or even suppressing problematic results, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, by deploying modification instead simply to create or consolidate artificial brand dependencies. Consider "Roundup-Ready" crops and seeds with terminator genes that eliminate traditions of seed-saving and seed-sharing that have defined agriculture for centuries and provided some measure of autonomy for family farmers and small-scale community agriculture, much of which is incomparably more sustainable than Industrial-Ag and provides nutritious food no longer available through Industrial-Ag: both of these are promoted under the generality of "genetically-modified crops" but with no discernible positive impact on the urgent quandaries of global poverty or mass starvation which presumably provide Brand's pretext for championing this abstraction in the first place.
As with "Green Cities" championed in the abstract as a way of evacuating the actually fraught environmental politics of actually existing cities, "genetically modified crops" championed as Brand does in general evacuates our engagement with the actual substance of grasping and weighing the developmental risks, costs, and benefits of different modifications to different stakeholders in different contexts.
This leads to a more general charge I regularly level at the futurological mindset; namely, that it is a politics that functionally de-politicizes the substance of technodevelopmental struggles in history, and in a way that structurally benefits incumbent interests and hence is functionally conservative even when it is advocated by those who imagine themselves or at any rate portray themselves as progressives.
Continue to the Next Part?
Stewart Brand told a 400-strong audience… [First:] There was “no hope” of mitigating against climate change. [Second:] Nuclear power was the only way we could provide enough clean energy for the world; [Third:] Cities were greener than the countryside; [Fourth:] Genetically modified crops were necessary to feed the world’s growing population.
And so, to return to Brand's litany of drearily predictable futurological "heresies," let me be as harsh as possible in the hope that vehemence might chisel its way past the rigidly enforced good cheer and self-congratulatory faux-contrarian and can-do crapola in which retro-futurists inevitably enshrine and en-shell themselves as they hawk their latest books.
First --
It seems to me that presumably "hardnosed" dismissals of hope for mitigating climate change by way of lifeway education-regulation-legislation-public investment are only issued in the final analysis by those who either mean cynically to sell some pie-in-the-sky corporate-militarist mega-engineering boondoggle to help billionaires who made their money destroying the planet in extractive-industrial-petrochemical enterprise make still more money pretending to be the only ones qualified to clean up their mess or by those those truly hard-hearted bastards (among whom I happen not to number Stewart Brand) who have calculated that climate catastrophe will not truly visit itself inside the high walls of gated suburbs behind GWOT-militarized Homeland moats in which they reside together with everyone they really care about, but will exact its toll instead always only on the same endlessly over-exploited regions of the world that already suffer genocidal devastation via treatable but neglected diseases and famine and drought brought about by catastrophic climate change in the already-arrived catastrophic future, all mediated and facilitated by arms proliferation and structured debt settlement and imposed market discipline to prolonged yawns from the people of the "Civilized World" in between occasional spectacular self-messaging charity benefit concerts.
Of course, any thinking person who truly entertained the slightest real expectation that global pandemics incubated in the slums of our neoliberal planetary "future," here and now, or that climate change refugees and warlord gangs armed and unleashed with the blessings of Judeochrislamic Mega-Churches and the NRA, or that Boschian scenes of energy and resource descent and its wars will arrive anytime soon on their actual doorstep don't waste time earning "street cred" with vapid Villager journalists by making tough-talkin' pronouncements about the hopelessness of legible democratic environmentalist politics. (And one must always emphasize how such pronouncements provide, and not at all co-incidentally, handy marketing and promotional advertisements and rationalizations for multinational energy and industrial-ag corporations to indulge in profit-making mega-scale "geo-engineering" and "bio-engineering" and ruinous nuclear-plant archipelago building projects in the name of "environmental remediation" after a century of their profit-taking destruction of the environment much of the time spent denying the plain facts at hand.) Again, nobody who is anything but a sociopathic monster would actually say out loud, while truly expecting such nightmares to unfold any time soon or anywhere near them, that we fellow-eathlings, peer to peer, are in any sense "beyond hope" or "past the tipping point" or "beyond politics" in the face of climate catastrophe.
No, serious people who believe they personally confront catastrophe do whatever they can, however they can, with whomever they can, hopelessly or not, to do what can be done to save their lives and the lives of the ones and world they love so long as they remain alive to do it.
They do not resign themselves to futurological wish-fulfilment fantasizing, they do not relinquish their democracy and welcome our corporate-militarist overlords to start throwing their weight around, they do not give up on the precarious, the marginal, the already over-exploited people with whom we share this earth and then claw their way to the top of the bloody pyramid of skulls hoping it reaches its way at last to heaven, or some other escape hatch.
No, serious people continue educating, agitating, organizing, legislating, regulating, investing, helping, hoping, working, shoulder to shoulder with their peers, until either together we fail or we prevail in the making of a sustainable, democratic, consensual, equitable, diverse, convivial planetary civilization together. None of those adjective is dispensable to the achievement of any of the others, and the mark of seriousness must be precisely that recognition.
Second --
Nuclear power isn't "clean energy" in any factual sense and so describing it as "the only way we can provide enough clean energy for the world" is a deception -- or, to elaborate the point a bit more, this typical futurological utterance is an example of that genre our debased culture has come to view as acceptable deception, namely, it is an act of advertising. Corporations, you will recall, have been given the legal right to lie in their advertisements, since to deny this would be to curtail the flows of money and force that are the only real kind of speech on the part of the corporations that are in turn the only the entities that connect real people to real power in this corporate-militarist chapter in the unfolding (and possibly consummating) history of industrial-extractive-postcolonial-capitalist modernity.
Futurology is best understood as continuous with that most prevalent mode of public discourse in our distressed debased order -- marketing, promotion, self-promotion, and advertising. It bears notice that the family-resemblance of futurology's future and futures trading is not accidental, nor is the family-resemblance of financial speculation and speculative fiction accidental, especially such speculative fiction as one finds in that least accomplished and least original form of science fiction, the futurological "scenario."
I might as well also point out that in its most extreme forms this futurological deception takes on the tonalities of that most sweeping of creative fictions, outright religious faith. And the fraudulent hyperbole of our all-encompassing advertising-promotional-marketing discourse which is amplified in the pseudo-scientific "trend-spotting" and prophetic utterances of think-tank gurus, then becomes further amplified into the promise of outright techno-transcendence of the finitude of the human condition itself -- superintelligence, superlongevity, superabundance -- vouchsafed by subcultural membership and True Belief in one or more of the many sects of the Robot Cult, the transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts who pimple the cyberspatial sprawl and the great State of California.
I personally believe that a smart grid of millions of commercial and residential solar rooftops, supplemented with thousands of square miles of in-field and offshore wind-turbine co-ops, coupled with public works projects retro-fitting and LEEDS-certifying public buildings and schools and public housing across the country and transforming our military and postal vehicular fleets to electric plug-ins together could transform the United States into a sustainable and renewable civilization offering a model for China and India and all the while revitalizing our neoliberal devastated and immaterialized economy (for which digital-utopian futurologists like Brand provided breathless rationalizations, by the way) into a unionized empowered middle-class nation (the kind of equitable and diverse nation and economy that enables to bloom and flourish the kind of hippy subcultures and everyday creativity California Ideological futurologists like Brand like to think they celebrate and champion even as they blithely kick out all of its indispensable social supports), and in a way that costs less and takes less time than installing Brand's oh-so-necessary nuclear archipelago would, all the while decentralizing rather than shoring up central and incumbent authority, and in a way that leaves no long-term radioactive legacy for future generations to curse us for.
Third --
While it is true in the abstract that dense cities can provide efficiencies in principle that overcome unsustainable consumption of land, resources, and energy, this result is only possible when efforts are made to ensure through principled urban planning and investment that there are open spaces, that natural services and local ecosystems remain intact to cope with the added stress and waste and use of urban populations. Such efforts require sustained reliable accountable regulation and oversight on a scale and of a kind which takes place in hardly any hitherto actually existing cities. And the consequence is that actual cities, unlike the abstract cities offered up in futurological generalities like the one Brand chirps about here, are the farthest imaginable thing from "Greener than the countryside."
In my view, such futurological utterances actually enable and even sell anti-sustainability through the conjuration of an abstraction that does not connect to reality -- and worse still could never connect to reality given the way futurology tends at best to redirect concern with actual substance into insubstantial abstractions and wish-fulfillment fantasies and at worst is freighted with outright anti-governmental and anti-regulatory biases that actively disable our collective capacity to address shared problems in a responsible and intelligent fashion at all.
In the well loved "Bright"-green futurological design-guru Bible Cradle to Cradle, the authors William McDonough and Michael Braungart declare:
In a world where designs are unintelligent and destructive, regulations can reduce immediate deleterious effects. But ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure.
This attitude seems to me ubiquitous in futurological and self-identified green design discourse, and this "principled" hostility to regulation precedes and enables the reluctance with which many "geo-engineering" enthusiasts now proclaim the failure of regulation to demand planet-scaled re-designing projects under their supervision.
Think carefully for a moment about what it means to declare any regulation to be a signal (to whom exactly?) of design failure, and what that implies about the guiding ideal of a futurological design subculture whose utopia would be one in which the collective intelligence and effort of everyday citizens that is reflected in the legislative and regulative acts of a state of, by, and for the people is effaced, replaced with the vision of a "successfully" designed world provided by the better-intelligence of that privileged coterie of elite-incumbent designers whose parochial positional assumptions and aspirations are, after all, all that really matters.
Fourth --
Once again we are treated to a generalization in the Litany, this time called "genetically modified crops." To this monolithic generalization is then falsely attributed a uniformly positive outcome -- "feeding the world's growing population" -- on the basis of which a kind of political position, namely, that these "crops" "in general" are "necessary," is all too predictably championed.
Let us set aside the enormously relevant fact that we already know runaway population growth is far from inevitable and can be addressed immediately, the moment in fact one simply empowers women in patriarchal societies with even minimal financial resources and social support on the basis of which they take control of their lives and their reproductive health, and also by providing accurate and reliable knowledge about reproductive health and access to family planning services to women.
Literacy, family planning, a financial stake, and equality before the law for women and all the world's people is the solution to overpopulation, in my view, not blanket celebrations of multinational corporations and energy-input-intensive irrigation-intensive petrochemical Industrial Agriculture and their genetic-branding genomic-enclosure IP-strategies, if Mr. Brand will forgive my saying so. And before any of you roll your eyes at my prescription, consider seriously what assumptions would lead one to treat it as an outcome less possible to accomplish than one in which we presumably resign the fate of a sustainable equitable diverse world to the profit-mad extractive-exploitative-competitive corporate-militarist actors who are responsible for the crisis at hand.
Now, I am far from denying that quite a lot of what might be described as genetic modification might indeed be beneficial -- selectivity and hybridity have been part of the cultural archive of agricultural cultivation (the words culture and cultivated are etymologically connected after all) since well before that culture was transmitted through writing technologies, and I do not doubt that both sustainable agriculture and especially polycultural practices might benefit from sound genetic science as from other relevant science in a well-regulated accountable social order.
What is most troubling to me about the conjuration of the hyper-generalized abstraction "genetically modified crops" in Brand's futurological chestnut is that it is conspicuously indifferent to many of the genetic modifications we know to be designed not to improve nutrition or disease-resistance or insect-resistance or the like, but instead to promote short-term profitability in the usual ways corporate logic dictates: either by dismissing or externalizing possible costs and risks by devoting insufficient critical scrutiny to the manifold longer-term or wider-scale impacts of modifications or even suppressing problematic results, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, by deploying modification instead simply to create or consolidate artificial brand dependencies. Consider "Roundup-Ready" crops and seeds with terminator genes that eliminate traditions of seed-saving and seed-sharing that have defined agriculture for centuries and provided some measure of autonomy for family farmers and small-scale community agriculture, much of which is incomparably more sustainable than Industrial-Ag and provides nutritious food no longer available through Industrial-Ag: both of these are promoted under the generality of "genetically-modified crops" but with no discernible positive impact on the urgent quandaries of global poverty or mass starvation which presumably provide Brand's pretext for championing this abstraction in the first place.
As with "Green Cities" championed in the abstract as a way of evacuating the actually fraught environmental politics of actually existing cities, "genetically modified crops" championed as Brand does in general evacuates our engagement with the actual substance of grasping and weighing the developmental risks, costs, and benefits of different modifications to different stakeholders in different contexts.
This leads to a more general charge I regularly level at the futurological mindset; namely, that it is a politics that functionally de-politicizes the substance of technodevelopmental struggles in history, and in a way that structurally benefits incumbent interests and hence is functionally conservative even when it is advocated by those who imagine themselves or at any rate portray themselves as progressives.
Continue to the Next Part?
All Futurisms Tend to Be Functionally Retro-Futuristic in Their Political Substance (Part Three of Three)
Want to Start at the Beginning?
I want to return by way of conclusion to the last point in the preceding analysis. I maintained that Stewart Brand's glib futurological declaration that "cities are greener than countryside" when actually-existing cities almost never straightforwardly are so is functionally correlated argumentatively to another of his futurological declarations, namely, that "genetically modified crops," treated as a monolith indifferent to the endlessly many variations that such modification has and can take, are "necessary to feed the world's growing population."
I want to talk a little more about the politics of such generic claims, and of the retro-futurist politics I would say are exemplified by Brand's typically futurological gesture in making them.
To say that "Cities" (offered up as some broad decontextualized and in fact non-contextualizable and even insistently anti-contextualizating mode of abstraction) are "greener than the countryside" when of course the overabundant majority of actually-existing cities absolutely are not anything of the kind, and to say so just because one can imagine cities in the abstract that could in principle manage such a feat is to indulge in a kind of hyperbole fairly typical of salesmanship, and yet it is in fact to tell a kind of lie, it is to engage in an act of deception.
This needs to be faced for what it is.
To say "cities are greener than the countryside" even though there is no reason to think any actual cities are anything like even being on the developmental road to incarnating such principles, all the while offering up nothing that translates to realizable concrete policy prescriptions through which actually-existing cities might actually arrive at such a state in a time frame relevant to the lives of the living people to whom one is making one's celebratory appeal, is worse than to lie, it is to participate in a kind of scam.
This too needs to be faced for what it is.
It is bad enough that countless people are too ignorant or too complacent or simply too distracted by the demands of survival in the world of neoliberal-neoconservative corporate-military precarity to grasp the relevance of climate change and resource descent on their own prospects for survival and flourishing in their lifetimes and the lifetimes of their children and neighbors and fellow earthlings, peer to peer. But we need to face the fact that futurologists are actually directing their own cheerful vacuities to precisely the audiences who do manage to know enough and care enough to grasp that there are real problems that confront us all, but then work to redirect their concerns away from actual agitation, education, and organizing into patterns of complacent consumption and passive wish-fulfillment fantasies in the service of the ongoing profit-taking of incumbent interests, corporate, military, and industrial-statist.
Can you imagine a more irresponsible or outrageous occupation for actually thoughtful and articulate people to indulge? How about engaging in such acts of deception and distraction and de-politicization and then trying to peddle the enterprise as a kind of "environmentalism"!
Another disturbing fact for us all to mull over.
I believe that the futurological gesture illustrated through the conjuration of "Green Cities" as a mirage behind which actual cities vanish, and in which advocacy for the resulting futurological mirage becomes a second-order mirage behind which the actual politics stratifying the ongoing life and change of actual cities for their actual inhabitants is likewise made to vanish (mostly to the benefit of those who prefer that the status quo remain immune to real contestation) is precisely replicated by the same gesture in one futurological domain after another:
It prevails in those futurological discourses which would misdirect the grasp that in our Anthropocene Epoch, human-caused climate change imperils the dynamism of feedback-mechanisms that constitutes the actually-frail biosphere, deranging it into a glib generalization that corporate-military-industrial incumbents might "solve the crisis" of pollution through some non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "Geo-engineering" that resists actual consensus scientific or legible public policy specification.
It prevails in those futurological discourses which would misdirect pragmatic and regulatory concerns about the useful or toxic or costly properties of nanoscale biochemical interventions and processes and materials, deranging it into a glib generalization that "science" and "innovation" might "solve the crisis" of poverty or scarcity or even aging through some non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "Nanotechnology" (or "nanofactories" or "utility fog") that resists actual consensus scientific or legible public policy specification.
It prevails in those futurological discourses which would misdirect pragmatic and regulatory concerns about network security and the brittleness of legacy software or the user friendliness of expert systems, deranging it into a glib generalization about the proximate arrival of some non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "AI" or "postbiological superintelligence" or a post-historical "Singularity" that resists actual consensus scientific or legible public policy specification.
It prevails in those futurological discourses which would misdirect attention from the quandaries of non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive interventions, and their confusions for policy makers seeking to provide reliable knowledge to facilitate informed consent and equitable policy in the face of proliferating viable lifeway possibilities, deranging all this into a glib generalization about a non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "enhancement" (as though there were any actual or possible consensus as to what constitutes an enhancement to everyone everywhere in the service of all possible ends whatever the expense to others) or, even worse, into a glib generalization about the arrival of a postulated dreamed-of or dreaded "Post-Human" Species, Homo Superior, all of which, again, resists actual consensus scientific or legible public policy specification.
Not to put too fine a point on it, in every case the futurologists evacuate substance -- some of it urgent -- and replace it with faith-based initiatives and wish-fulfillment fantasies the circulation of redound to the benefit of incumbent interests mostly in the service of prevalent authorities (this remains true even for those futurologists who are superficially or even earnestly devoted to progressive and radical left politics, since the reactionary effects of futurist, always functionally retro-futurist, ideologies and movement-formations are structural even when they are not intentional, though for plenty of self-identified futurologists the reactionary elite-incumbent, corporate-militarist, racist-bioreductionist politics are plenty intentional as well).
To declare oneself a partisan in a politics that is defined by a terrain that is simply "for" or "against" technology -- where technology is treated as an abstraction indifferent to the actually politically indispensable endlessly different ways techniques are historically and positionally deployed and understood -- is to engage in a politics that takes as its point of departure a de-politicizing evacuation of all the actual political substance at hand.
To declare oneself a partisan in an abstract political movement "for" or "against" any of the primary topical preoccupations of the common or garden variety futurologist, "Cities," "Nanotechnology," "AI," "Longevity," "Singularity," "Enhancement," "Geo-Engineering" is always to evacuate of substance the actual stakeholder politics through which every detail and development of every relevant "technique" or "device" or "outcome" is researched, tested, published, elaborated, understood, taught, regulated, priced, marketed, implemented, distributed, taken up, re-purposed, poeticized, narrativized.
The futurologist is engaged in an anti-political politics of de-politicization, abjuring the field of technodevelopmental social struggle, the actual field of technoscience politics, for an indulgence in wish-fulfillment fantasies and moody evocations of dread and desire, for a passive almost anesthetized consumption of a generalized spectacle of development on terms provided by incumbent interests whose stakes can never be assumed to be shared by the rest of us.
I have pointed out at length that extreme sub(cult)ures of superlative futurology like the transhumanists, and extropians, and Singularitarians, and techno-immortalists are actually organized formations of faith-based wish-fulfillment fantasy translating familiar religious aspirations for "transcendence" into superficially techno-scientific terms, denying the this-worldly present for sub(cult)ural inhabitation of "The Future" shared by the faithful and disdaining the lifeway diversity of the peers with whom they share the present world for an identification with an idealized post-human species (usually either enhanced, cyborgic, robotic, or an altogether alien AI-Godhead).
Futurological discourse in the more prevailing and mainstream forms that suffuse neoliberal and neoconservative corporate-military public global development discourse may not exhibit the titillating photogenic weirdness of the superlative and sub(cult)ural futurologists, but it is to be noted that they too tend to indulge in market fundamentalist and techno-determinist pieties comparably immune to critical scrutiny and thrive on the denial of worldly material reality, much preferring to enthuse about financial instruments and leveraged buyouts over substantial investments, brands and logos and attention economies over substantial goods, marketing and promotion and services over substantial production, frictionless digital networks and currency exchanges and informational flows over substantial human needs and substantial environmental limits.
While the Extropian Transhumanists, say, were honest, or foolish, enough to actually declare outright that they imagined themselves, somehow, to be members of a "movement" to end both death and taxes -- I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether through this declaration they announced most clearly their infantilism, their stupidity, or their insanity -- I think that a deep and damaging denialism about existential limits and personal vulnerabilities drives more prevailing futurological developmental discourses in much the same way -- and may indeed suffuse the whole of our public discourse by now, shaped as it is most conspicuously by the genres of promotion, self-promotion, salesmanship, hyperbole, denialism, and fraud.
I want to return by way of conclusion to the last point in the preceding analysis. I maintained that Stewart Brand's glib futurological declaration that "cities are greener than countryside" when actually-existing cities almost never straightforwardly are so is functionally correlated argumentatively to another of his futurological declarations, namely, that "genetically modified crops," treated as a monolith indifferent to the endlessly many variations that such modification has and can take, are "necessary to feed the world's growing population."
I want to talk a little more about the politics of such generic claims, and of the retro-futurist politics I would say are exemplified by Brand's typically futurological gesture in making them.
To say that "Cities" (offered up as some broad decontextualized and in fact non-contextualizable and even insistently anti-contextualizating mode of abstraction) are "greener than the countryside" when of course the overabundant majority of actually-existing cities absolutely are not anything of the kind, and to say so just because one can imagine cities in the abstract that could in principle manage such a feat is to indulge in a kind of hyperbole fairly typical of salesmanship, and yet it is in fact to tell a kind of lie, it is to engage in an act of deception.
This needs to be faced for what it is.
To say "cities are greener than the countryside" even though there is no reason to think any actual cities are anything like even being on the developmental road to incarnating such principles, all the while offering up nothing that translates to realizable concrete policy prescriptions through which actually-existing cities might actually arrive at such a state in a time frame relevant to the lives of the living people to whom one is making one's celebratory appeal, is worse than to lie, it is to participate in a kind of scam.
This too needs to be faced for what it is.
It is bad enough that countless people are too ignorant or too complacent or simply too distracted by the demands of survival in the world of neoliberal-neoconservative corporate-military precarity to grasp the relevance of climate change and resource descent on their own prospects for survival and flourishing in their lifetimes and the lifetimes of their children and neighbors and fellow earthlings, peer to peer. But we need to face the fact that futurologists are actually directing their own cheerful vacuities to precisely the audiences who do manage to know enough and care enough to grasp that there are real problems that confront us all, but then work to redirect their concerns away from actual agitation, education, and organizing into patterns of complacent consumption and passive wish-fulfillment fantasies in the service of the ongoing profit-taking of incumbent interests, corporate, military, and industrial-statist.
Can you imagine a more irresponsible or outrageous occupation for actually thoughtful and articulate people to indulge? How about engaging in such acts of deception and distraction and de-politicization and then trying to peddle the enterprise as a kind of "environmentalism"!
Another disturbing fact for us all to mull over.
I believe that the futurological gesture illustrated through the conjuration of "Green Cities" as a mirage behind which actual cities vanish, and in which advocacy for the resulting futurological mirage becomes a second-order mirage behind which the actual politics stratifying the ongoing life and change of actual cities for their actual inhabitants is likewise made to vanish (mostly to the benefit of those who prefer that the status quo remain immune to real contestation) is precisely replicated by the same gesture in one futurological domain after another:
It prevails in those futurological discourses which would misdirect the grasp that in our Anthropocene Epoch, human-caused climate change imperils the dynamism of feedback-mechanisms that constitutes the actually-frail biosphere, deranging it into a glib generalization that corporate-military-industrial incumbents might "solve the crisis" of pollution through some non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "Geo-engineering" that resists actual consensus scientific or legible public policy specification.
It prevails in those futurological discourses which would misdirect pragmatic and regulatory concerns about the useful or toxic or costly properties of nanoscale biochemical interventions and processes and materials, deranging it into a glib generalization that "science" and "innovation" might "solve the crisis" of poverty or scarcity or even aging through some non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "Nanotechnology" (or "nanofactories" or "utility fog") that resists actual consensus scientific or legible public policy specification.
It prevails in those futurological discourses which would misdirect pragmatic and regulatory concerns about network security and the brittleness of legacy software or the user friendliness of expert systems, deranging it into a glib generalization about the proximate arrival of some non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "AI" or "postbiological superintelligence" or a post-historical "Singularity" that resists actual consensus scientific or legible public policy specification.
It prevails in those futurological discourses which would misdirect attention from the quandaries of non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive interventions, and their confusions for policy makers seeking to provide reliable knowledge to facilitate informed consent and equitable policy in the face of proliferating viable lifeway possibilities, deranging all this into a glib generalization about a non-thing-treated-as-a-"thing" called "enhancement" (as though there were any actual or possible consensus as to what constitutes an enhancement to everyone everywhere in the service of all possible ends whatever the expense to others) or, even worse, into a glib generalization about the arrival of a postulated dreamed-of or dreaded "Post-Human" Species, Homo Superior, all of which, again, resists actual consensus scientific or legible public policy specification.
Not to put too fine a point on it, in every case the futurologists evacuate substance -- some of it urgent -- and replace it with faith-based initiatives and wish-fulfillment fantasies the circulation of redound to the benefit of incumbent interests mostly in the service of prevalent authorities (this remains true even for those futurologists who are superficially or even earnestly devoted to progressive and radical left politics, since the reactionary effects of futurist, always functionally retro-futurist, ideologies and movement-formations are structural even when they are not intentional, though for plenty of self-identified futurologists the reactionary elite-incumbent, corporate-militarist, racist-bioreductionist politics are plenty intentional as well).
To declare oneself a partisan in a politics that is defined by a terrain that is simply "for" or "against" technology -- where technology is treated as an abstraction indifferent to the actually politically indispensable endlessly different ways techniques are historically and positionally deployed and understood -- is to engage in a politics that takes as its point of departure a de-politicizing evacuation of all the actual political substance at hand.
To declare oneself a partisan in an abstract political movement "for" or "against" any of the primary topical preoccupations of the common or garden variety futurologist, "Cities," "Nanotechnology," "AI," "Longevity," "Singularity," "Enhancement," "Geo-Engineering" is always to evacuate of substance the actual stakeholder politics through which every detail and development of every relevant "technique" or "device" or "outcome" is researched, tested, published, elaborated, understood, taught, regulated, priced, marketed, implemented, distributed, taken up, re-purposed, poeticized, narrativized.
The futurologist is engaged in an anti-political politics of de-politicization, abjuring the field of technodevelopmental social struggle, the actual field of technoscience politics, for an indulgence in wish-fulfillment fantasies and moody evocations of dread and desire, for a passive almost anesthetized consumption of a generalized spectacle of development on terms provided by incumbent interests whose stakes can never be assumed to be shared by the rest of us.
I have pointed out at length that extreme sub(cult)ures of superlative futurology like the transhumanists, and extropians, and Singularitarians, and techno-immortalists are actually organized formations of faith-based wish-fulfillment fantasy translating familiar religious aspirations for "transcendence" into superficially techno-scientific terms, denying the this-worldly present for sub(cult)ural inhabitation of "The Future" shared by the faithful and disdaining the lifeway diversity of the peers with whom they share the present world for an identification with an idealized post-human species (usually either enhanced, cyborgic, robotic, or an altogether alien AI-Godhead).
Futurological discourse in the more prevailing and mainstream forms that suffuse neoliberal and neoconservative corporate-military public global development discourse may not exhibit the titillating photogenic weirdness of the superlative and sub(cult)ural futurologists, but it is to be noted that they too tend to indulge in market fundamentalist and techno-determinist pieties comparably immune to critical scrutiny and thrive on the denial of worldly material reality, much preferring to enthuse about financial instruments and leveraged buyouts over substantial investments, brands and logos and attention economies over substantial goods, marketing and promotion and services over substantial production, frictionless digital networks and currency exchanges and informational flows over substantial human needs and substantial environmental limits.
While the Extropian Transhumanists, say, were honest, or foolish, enough to actually declare outright that they imagined themselves, somehow, to be members of a "movement" to end both death and taxes -- I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether through this declaration they announced most clearly their infantilism, their stupidity, or their insanity -- I think that a deep and damaging denialism about existential limits and personal vulnerabilities drives more prevailing futurological developmental discourses in much the same way -- and may indeed suffuse the whole of our public discourse by now, shaped as it is most conspicuously by the genres of promotion, self-promotion, salesmanship, hyperbole, denialism, and fraud.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
The Lies of Futurologists
If you look at the world today and see "exponentially accelerating progress," you are absolutely hopeless.
If you look at the world today and see "aborning superabundance," you are absolutely heartless.
This sort of vulgar, ugly, eager death-dealing Yankee-Doodle futurology has nothing to do with optimism, it has nothing to do with pessimism; it has nothing to do with "can-do" spirit, and just who lacks it or fancies they have it in spades.
It has nothing to do with "spurring innovation" or "providing foresight" or "celebrating imagination."
It is nothing but the earth-shattering futurological dead end and dark horizon where relentless cheerleading and hyperbole and scheming salesmanship condense in a quicksand of deception and self-deception so profound that the substance of history and futurity, peer-to-peer, and the light of the present world are utterly eclipsed, minds made minerals, liberty made gravity, hope made loot, life made death.
The lies of futurologists constitute the only singularity the futurologists will ever inhabit.
If you look at the world today and see "aborning superabundance," you are absolutely heartless.
This sort of vulgar, ugly, eager death-dealing Yankee-Doodle futurology has nothing to do with optimism, it has nothing to do with pessimism; it has nothing to do with "can-do" spirit, and just who lacks it or fancies they have it in spades.
It has nothing to do with "spurring innovation" or "providing foresight" or "celebrating imagination."
It is nothing but the earth-shattering futurological dead end and dark horizon where relentless cheerleading and hyperbole and scheming salesmanship condense in a quicksand of deception and self-deception so profound that the substance of history and futurity, peer-to-peer, and the light of the present world are utterly eclipsed, minds made minerals, liberty made gravity, hope made loot, life made death.
The lies of futurologists constitute the only singularity the futurologists will ever inhabit.
Thursday, January 07, 2010
"Science Fiction Is the Entertainment Wing of Futurism"
Bloggerheads has an interesting exchange up between the always fabulous but far-too-kind-to-transhumanists Annalee Newitz and one of the transhumanists she is far too kind to, James Hughes.
They cover a lot of interesting ground in their conversation, and I found that Annalee especially said lots of stuff that had me nodding my head sympathetically. I so rarely agree with anybody as much as I tend to agree with Annalee that that experience itself is nicely edifying. Nevertheless, one of the things that excited me most in their exchange was something Annalee said that I think I disagree with.
At one point she said in a rather offhand sort of way that "science fiction is the entertainment wing of futurism."
As somebody who has been devoted to science fiction ferociously all my life but who frankly abhors futurology, Annalee's subsumption of science fiction under a futurological wing was a window on a really alien mapping of terrain that preoccupies me as intensely as anything I can think of.
And after all, what queergeek doesn't love an alien contact narrative?
I certainly would never want to put words in Annalee's mouth, but I can say a little about how I would personally relate science fiction and the futurological to suggest how her phrasing here might be at odds with my own.
My own glib variation on Annalee's phrase would be to say that boner-bill commercials and ads for the armed forces involving CGI laser platforms zapping debris out of the path of orbiting satellites with the caption "It's Not Science Fiction" better represent the "entertainment wing of futurism."
In my view futurology is always selling a kind of reassurance to incumbent interests that "the future" (which I forcefully distinguish from futurity) will be an extrapolation or amplification of the terms of their own parochial present. That futurism and futurology function primarily as a genre of reassurance -- even if sometimes in a disasterbatory mode in which incumbents get to stew in what usually looks to be a high state of arousal in their worst pet apocalyptic fears, their own private Room 101 -- is suggested to me already in the very notion that one could append to the radical contingency of futurity ("future is a process, not a destination" as Bruce Sterling rightly scolds) an -ism or an -ology, of all things, in the first place.
Futurology, it seems to me, is just another variation of the familiar swindle in which we are bamboozled into mistaking the profession of a wish or promise or unwarranted prediction for an asset. In futurism as in an enormous amount of corporate sales, promotion, and public relations discourse one is parted from one's money or deranged in one's wants by the projection or prediction of some hyperbolic hope or anxiety idientified with "the future," typically a straightforward extrapolation or amplification of key terms of the parochial present.
As I have remarked elsewhere, I regard futurology as the quintessential genre and gesture of neoliberal ideology. The characterization of the waste, stratification, destabilization, precarization, and distress exacerbated and exploited by neoliberal financialization as "accelerating change" "acceleration of acceleration" or even "progress toward transcension" by the current crop of futurologists (especially in the Robot Cult Caucus of futurology) is the reductio ad absurdum of futurism as neoliberal (corporate-militarist) apologia.
Not to put too fine a point on it, financialization is the temporal (futurological) elaboration of the alienation already enabled, first, through the abstraction from the unjust social conditions and unsustainable ecological impacts of production through the fetishized commodity-form and also, second, through the spatialization of uneven development/(post)colonial organizations of exploitation.
From a political perspective the present has always been riven by the diverse vantages and aspirations of the plural stakeholders who share and contest the world, peer to peer, and hence the present is always as Hannah Arendt put it, "between past and future," a collaboration and antagonism interminably reconciling the diversity of human hopes and histories, always restlessly edging us waywardly elsewhere and otherwise. In our own anthropocene epoch of thoroughly technoscientific agencies the intensity, inter-dependency, scope, and stakes of this open futurity in our present (in our plural presenting, peer-to-peer) is exacerbated to a point of crisis for which the word "revolution" or the phrase "quarrel of the ancients and moderns" are hopelessly inadequate.
Science fiction, it seems to me, provides the generic conventions through which our technoscientific present can be rendered unfamiliar enough for us to gain some critical and imaginative purchase here and now. Science fiction at its best redirects us to the open futurity inhering in our plural present, and is far from reassuring. If anything, science fiction mobilizes stakeholders in the present to educate, agitate, and organize where we are on our way elsewhere.
For me the futurological (as well as the futuristic, which I think was well characterized by Daniel Harris as a style vocabulary involving the perverse denial of the present at the level of details -- which is not at all the same thing as a critical interrogation of the terms of the present -- treated thereupon without cause as markers of "progress") is a profoundly de-politicizing discourse. This feels paradoxical, I know, since we associate technoscience with disruption and denaturalization. But to politicize or de-naturalize the status quo is to insist that the terms on which the present is given are open to collective contestation, are contingent formations caught up in interminable historical struggle. When historical change is figured as reductively techno-determined (deduced, extrapolated, amplified, or even hyperbolized from a parochial vantage in the present) then it is radically de-politicized however disruptive or "transcendental" its apparent preoccupations. It is not surprising, then, however paradoxical it may be, that we find every futurism functionally to be a retro-futurism, a reactionary endorsement of incumbency stealthed behind the mask of a false festival of change.
I won't deny that there is plenty of science fiction that takes on the coloration of the futurological, that sells itself as a spinning of predictive what-ifs in a way that disavows it is always much more about who we are and where we find ourselves now than it is indulging in some at once neutralized and hyperbolized blue-skying about what the world will be like in the next decade or the next century. But it seems to me that such pieces are almost inevitably camp (or just crap), and that they are still most interesting when they are treated as symptomatic engagements with their historical situations anyway.
I have sometimes derided futurologists as folks who cannot distinguish science from science fiction, or futurologists as would-be sf writers so inept that they not only endlessly regurgitate sf tropes and conceits with whiskers on them but also they don't even try to do the work of elementary character and narrative and setting building that even crappy fiction writers grasp as part of their task. But I do think it is crucial that we avoid making too close an identification of sf genres with the promotional pseudo-scientific genres of futurology, and certainly that we resist subsuming science fiction and speculative fiction underneath the futurist or futurological heading altogether.
While I will grant that some sf functions as a retro-futurological celebration of incumbency as the eternal protagonist of history the rest of us can best hope to consume or screen, I think it is crucial to insist as well that much sf is a critical intervention in the present that is politicizing and hence democratizing, at once testifying to and invigorating the open futurity inhering in presence, peer to peer, and as such the insistent opposite of futurism and the futurological.
"The Future" of futurism and futurology is constituted through the denial of open futurity. Futurisms and ologies characteristically substitute for the promise of political freedom arising out of open futurity the sterile promise of incapacious capacitating amplifications of instrumental force. They pretends their essentially promotional discourse is a science when it isn't, that their sales-pitch is foresight when it isn't, and that their celebration of triumphalist incumbency is a doctrine of change when it isn't. Quite in tune with the neoliberal spirit of its time, futurology originates in facile error and consummates in fraud, and to the likely ruin of the world.
They cover a lot of interesting ground in their conversation, and I found that Annalee especially said lots of stuff that had me nodding my head sympathetically. I so rarely agree with anybody as much as I tend to agree with Annalee that that experience itself is nicely edifying. Nevertheless, one of the things that excited me most in their exchange was something Annalee said that I think I disagree with.
At one point she said in a rather offhand sort of way that "science fiction is the entertainment wing of futurism."
As somebody who has been devoted to science fiction ferociously all my life but who frankly abhors futurology, Annalee's subsumption of science fiction under a futurological wing was a window on a really alien mapping of terrain that preoccupies me as intensely as anything I can think of.
And after all, what queergeek doesn't love an alien contact narrative?
I certainly would never want to put words in Annalee's mouth, but I can say a little about how I would personally relate science fiction and the futurological to suggest how her phrasing here might be at odds with my own.
My own glib variation on Annalee's phrase would be to say that boner-bill commercials and ads for the armed forces involving CGI laser platforms zapping debris out of the path of orbiting satellites with the caption "It's Not Science Fiction" better represent the "entertainment wing of futurism."
In my view futurology is always selling a kind of reassurance to incumbent interests that "the future" (which I forcefully distinguish from futurity) will be an extrapolation or amplification of the terms of their own parochial present. That futurism and futurology function primarily as a genre of reassurance -- even if sometimes in a disasterbatory mode in which incumbents get to stew in what usually looks to be a high state of arousal in their worst pet apocalyptic fears, their own private Room 101 -- is suggested to me already in the very notion that one could append to the radical contingency of futurity ("future is a process, not a destination" as Bruce Sterling rightly scolds) an -ism or an -ology, of all things, in the first place.
Futurology, it seems to me, is just another variation of the familiar swindle in which we are bamboozled into mistaking the profession of a wish or promise or unwarranted prediction for an asset. In futurism as in an enormous amount of corporate sales, promotion, and public relations discourse one is parted from one's money or deranged in one's wants by the projection or prediction of some hyperbolic hope or anxiety idientified with "the future," typically a straightforward extrapolation or amplification of key terms of the parochial present.
As I have remarked elsewhere, I regard futurology as the quintessential genre and gesture of neoliberal ideology. The characterization of the waste, stratification, destabilization, precarization, and distress exacerbated and exploited by neoliberal financialization as "accelerating change" "acceleration of acceleration" or even "progress toward transcension" by the current crop of futurologists (especially in the Robot Cult Caucus of futurology) is the reductio ad absurdum of futurism as neoliberal (corporate-militarist) apologia.
Not to put too fine a point on it, financialization is the temporal (futurological) elaboration of the alienation already enabled, first, through the abstraction from the unjust social conditions and unsustainable ecological impacts of production through the fetishized commodity-form and also, second, through the spatialization of uneven development/(post)colonial organizations of exploitation.
From a political perspective the present has always been riven by the diverse vantages and aspirations of the plural stakeholders who share and contest the world, peer to peer, and hence the present is always as Hannah Arendt put it, "between past and future," a collaboration and antagonism interminably reconciling the diversity of human hopes and histories, always restlessly edging us waywardly elsewhere and otherwise. In our own anthropocene epoch of thoroughly technoscientific agencies the intensity, inter-dependency, scope, and stakes of this open futurity in our present (in our plural presenting, peer-to-peer) is exacerbated to a point of crisis for which the word "revolution" or the phrase "quarrel of the ancients and moderns" are hopelessly inadequate.
Science fiction, it seems to me, provides the generic conventions through which our technoscientific present can be rendered unfamiliar enough for us to gain some critical and imaginative purchase here and now. Science fiction at its best redirects us to the open futurity inhering in our plural present, and is far from reassuring. If anything, science fiction mobilizes stakeholders in the present to educate, agitate, and organize where we are on our way elsewhere.
For me the futurological (as well as the futuristic, which I think was well characterized by Daniel Harris as a style vocabulary involving the perverse denial of the present at the level of details -- which is not at all the same thing as a critical interrogation of the terms of the present -- treated thereupon without cause as markers of "progress") is a profoundly de-politicizing discourse. This feels paradoxical, I know, since we associate technoscience with disruption and denaturalization. But to politicize or de-naturalize the status quo is to insist that the terms on which the present is given are open to collective contestation, are contingent formations caught up in interminable historical struggle. When historical change is figured as reductively techno-determined (deduced, extrapolated, amplified, or even hyperbolized from a parochial vantage in the present) then it is radically de-politicized however disruptive or "transcendental" its apparent preoccupations. It is not surprising, then, however paradoxical it may be, that we find every futurism functionally to be a retro-futurism, a reactionary endorsement of incumbency stealthed behind the mask of a false festival of change.
I won't deny that there is plenty of science fiction that takes on the coloration of the futurological, that sells itself as a spinning of predictive what-ifs in a way that disavows it is always much more about who we are and where we find ourselves now than it is indulging in some at once neutralized and hyperbolized blue-skying about what the world will be like in the next decade or the next century. But it seems to me that such pieces are almost inevitably camp (or just crap), and that they are still most interesting when they are treated as symptomatic engagements with their historical situations anyway.
I have sometimes derided futurologists as folks who cannot distinguish science from science fiction, or futurologists as would-be sf writers so inept that they not only endlessly regurgitate sf tropes and conceits with whiskers on them but also they don't even try to do the work of elementary character and narrative and setting building that even crappy fiction writers grasp as part of their task. But I do think it is crucial that we avoid making too close an identification of sf genres with the promotional pseudo-scientific genres of futurology, and certainly that we resist subsuming science fiction and speculative fiction underneath the futurist or futurological heading altogether.
While I will grant that some sf functions as a retro-futurological celebration of incumbency as the eternal protagonist of history the rest of us can best hope to consume or screen, I think it is crucial to insist as well that much sf is a critical intervention in the present that is politicizing and hence democratizing, at once testifying to and invigorating the open futurity inhering in presence, peer to peer, and as such the insistent opposite of futurism and the futurological.
"The Future" of futurism and futurology is constituted through the denial of open futurity. Futurisms and ologies characteristically substitute for the promise of political freedom arising out of open futurity the sterile promise of incapacious capacitating amplifications of instrumental force. They pretends their essentially promotional discourse is a science when it isn't, that their sales-pitch is foresight when it isn't, and that their celebration of triumphalist incumbency is a doctrine of change when it isn't. Quite in tune with the neoliberal spirit of its time, futurology originates in facile error and consummates in fraud, and to the likely ruin of the world.
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