Fundy Futurism As Infomercial Fraud

Here's the tale-end of a comment of mine adapted from the Moot I don't mind spotlighting for added emphasis:

I personally think futurology in general is better understood as a promotional and advertising discourse than as any kind of critical or analytic discourse, properly so-called. And as such, futurology is prey to all the hyperbolic pathologies and vulnerabilities to fraud well-known to plague promotional and advertising discourse in our debased epoch. Meanwhile, superlative futurological discourses in their turn take this promotional hyperbole and fraud to literally transcendentalizing lengths, superlative futurology being a clarifying extremity, a kind of reductio ad absurdum of conventional futurology. Needless to say, superlative futurology is hardly the first organized form of religiosity or wish-fulfillment fantasizing to misbehave in this fraudulently promotional manner, especially once its would-be priests start hankering after the authority of scientific descriptions or of moralizing politicians.

This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report

I made my weekly sojourn to the stealth-Robot Cult outfit IEET's website to discover, once again, that out of fourteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there was only one non white guy to be seen. In fact, it was the same non white guy, and even the same piece, now nudged down the queue by an influx of new pieces by white guys, a piece in which the topic discussed by the non-penis-possessing transhumanoid was, in fact, explicitly, vaginas, described as "pandora's boxes." I continue to maintain that since only a minority of people in the world are white guys, a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be shared are white guys, a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys, a minority of people in the world informed about matters of technoscientice are white guys (even technoscience questions not directly connected to vaginas) the endless ongoing parade of techno-transcendentalizing white guys is an enormously problematic thing (though far from the only one) about the so called "futurists" and "bioethicists" and technoscience "policy wonks" of the IEET.

White Guys Forever Report

Perhaps this should be a regular feature? Given my ongoing exchange with apparently white guy transhumanist "Mitchell" about how completely nonproblematic he thinks it is that superlative futurologists are and always have been almost entirely white guys (like he is and I am, too) even though white guys are a minority of people in the world, a minority of people who will share tomorrow, a minority of people impacted by technodevelopments, a minority of people informed about technoscience issues, I trundled off once again to the stealth-Robot Cult outfit IEET's website to discover… lo! and behold! Out of fourteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers, One Lady! She writes about vaginas. She calls them, rather unaccountably, "pandora's boxes." Progress!

Thinking Big in the Robot Cult

More "Mitchell" from the Moot:

I understood your thinking to be: some things are possible and desirable; other things just aren't possible; transhumanism wants the impossible, such as physical immortality, superintelligence, mind uploading, and nanotechnological abundance. That is a maximalist agenda for transhumanism. There's no denying that the extremes get the attention, both inside and outside the subculture.

What you are describing as "minimalism versus maximalism" looks to me more like research versus wish-fulfillment fantasizing, sanity versus incoherence, science versus religion. Robot Cultists like to frame their confusions of science fiction with science fact as a kind of "daring" on their part, they like to fancy themselves visionaries or what seems more like jocks of science by handwaving about superintellinge, superlongevity, and superabundance rather than consensus science. I do not agree. I think they are just engaging in a kind of advertising and promotional discourse unconnected with actual research, advertising in a hyperbolic mode that has many of the hallmarks of outright fraud.

I also think techno-transcendentalizing futurologies like transhumanism indulge in something that looks quite a bit like evangelical religiosity in its least pleasant most dangerous crusading and promotional modes. Although I am not at all a religious person myself, I don't disdain religious expression in others any more than I do aesthetic expression in others (there are lots of paths to meaningful existence). But I do insist we all take great care to discern and distinguish and criticize religion (or for that matter aesthetics) whenever it seeks to colonize, distort, or be mistaken for science or proper politics. That is as true for Pentecostals or Muslims or Mormons as it is for Robot Cultists, in my view. When an sf fandom or PR firm (every futurist is essentially a salesman) confuses itself for a policy think-tank or social movement, enormous mischief ensues.

Although I do indeed think immortality and nanoabundance and mind uploading are practically impossible, this is not -- as it is usually framed by Robot Cultists -- a matter of my quibbling with them about developmental timescales or lacking their "can-do" spirit or ability to "think big." I don't confuse lies with optimism or incoherence with bigness like futurologists characteristically do.

More to the point: I think "mind uploading" involves deep confusions about what intelligence (which is embodied and social) means, what personal lifespan (which is also embodied, social and inherently, indispensably vulnerable) means, or what it really means to aspire to post-political superabundance in terms of lived human freedom (which depends in its substance on plurality and contestation). I don't think transhumanists want "more" -- I think transhumanists literally don't know what the hell they are talking about, and that when they talk they are deranging public discourse in a way the public is disastrously susceptible to in a time of disruptive technoscientific change and global corporate-militarist developmental precarization.

I frankly don't think transhumanists are ultimately saying anything that any hungry bored lonely infant in a poopy diaper isn't already squealing about in his crib. You just trump up your infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies in the trappings of science fiction iconography and appeal to a slightly more hyperbolic id than do the usual run of the mill consumer-capitalist sports car and boner pill ads. That you people seem to think this represents a philosophical worldview or cutting edge science policy is nothing short of flabbergasting in my view.

More Mitchell on White Guys in Robot Cults and Why Wanting Not to Die and Wanting to Be Superrich in "The Future" Is Somehow a Worldview

"Mitchell" soldiers on Robotically and Cultically in the Moot:

Your thesis, remember, is that transhumanism is a sort of folk religion for white guys, and so all I have to do is point out that you don't have to be white or male or in the West to be into this stuff.

Well, no, I pointed out that you Robot Cultists ARE and ALWAYS HAVE BEEN overabundantly white guys.

Are you denying the truth of that observation? Are you denying that observation has any significance at all in a world in which white guys are a minority of people alive, a minority of people who will continue to share the world tomorrow being shaped today, peer-to-peer, a minority of people whose lives are impacted by technoscienfic change, a minority of people who are scientifically literate and politically aware?

If, as you say, the loose set of infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies of which your techno-transcendentalizing religious faith essentially consists could or should in fact appeal to other than white guys, then doesn't the fact that they DO NOT seem in the main in the actual world ever to appeal to other than white guys constitute more of a problem for you rather than the solution to the problem at hand?

I guess there is a certain consistency here, though, in confusing an imagined logical possibility of diversity with the actual reality of diversity, confusing fairly commonplace human wish-fulfillment fantasies of personal power with a formal philosophy, confusing science fiction with actual science.

Maybe you're just a very silly, confused person, after all?

If, by the way, you think there is an actual definition of this "transhumanism" that you seem to advocate and expect to sweep the world that does not amount to "infantile wish fulfillment fantasies of immortality and personal power enabled through confusions of science fiction with science fact" I am eager to hear it on your own terms.

You keep promising to tell me what "transhumanism" essentially and uniquely is, but so far you keep agreeing with me that it often is just a kind of religious faith "based on" wanting to live a really long time, maybe even forever, and loll around in abundance, all of which will be delivered by "technology" in a construal that seems broad to the point of vacuity and through some mechanism that remains largely unspecified.

As I have warned you many times before, you will discover that if you strive in an honest way to provide specificity about either what this "technology" actually is supposed to consist of or what mechanism will enable this "technology" to deliver its supposedly transcendentalizing wish-fulfilling goods you will surely discover either (one) that you are saying very bland sorts of things nobody needs "transhumanism" to say, or (two) you are saying batshit crazy things that only "transhumanists" say.

When you finally grasp this, then the Robot Cult spell will be broken and you will be free to be a geek who enjoys reading science fiction on its own terms and advocating sensible consensus science policy on its different terms as a grown up person. If you also happen to be a democratically minded person of the left you might even do some good in the world once you leave your Robot Cult behind, championing funding for science education and research and the application of consensus science in relevant domains of public policy (like climate change legislation, urban planning, public healthcare provision, sex education, and so on).

You don't have to thank me, just become a more sensible person and do some good in the world.

White Guys Forever!

I went over to the stealth-Robot Cult transhumanist "techno-ethics" outfit IEET website to see what silliness might be preoccupying them these days (to make fun of them for it, of course), but I was stopped short by the portraits that accompany each of the articles they are offering up at the moment...

Every single one was a white guy.

Look: I'm a white guy... I kiss a white guy every night before I go to sleep... I take philosophy seriously which usually means reading white guys more or less endlessly... I respect and honor my many wonderful white guy students... I don't have anything against white guys as, you know, a cohort, by any means.

But white guys are a minority in the world. White guys are a minority of the people with useful and interesting and intelligent things to say on every existing topic. White guys are not the world. White guys are not The Voice of any actually-possible "future."

If you are in a group or a forum or a subculture or a movement of any size that is radically unrepresentative of the world of which it is otherwise a part, especially if this unrepresentativeness is a long-ongoing phenomenon, this is telling you that there is something probably very wrong going on with that group or forum or subculture or movement.

If you see nothing but white guys in your Tea-Party event or your Ayn Rand fan club or your transhumanist meet-and-greet, you should ask yourself what the hell you have gotten yourself into exactly. Of course, if you find yourself hob-nobbing among Teabaggers, Randroids, or Robot Cultists in the first place, I suppose it probably already indicates that there is something fairly faulty going on in those critical faculties of yours anyway, come to think of it.

Still.

Varieties of Futurological Discourse

There are continuities but also important differences between mainstream corporate-militarist futurological discourses (among them neoliberal developmental discourses), and what I call superlative futurological discourses (among them the beliefs of members of various Robot Cults). So, too, obviously, there are both continuities and differences among mainstream futurological discourses (the ones that sell themselves as "Green," the ones that sell themselves as "Third Way" politics, the ones that cater to Defense Departments, for instance) and among superlative futurological discourses (the stealth-eugenicists, the Kurzweilians, the Drexlerians, the various oddball techno-immortalizing sects, for instance). I think there is something ridiculous to be disdained in pretty much every going futurological discourse, sometimes flabbergastingly but also sometimes only faintly so, and I also think there is something perniciously anti-democratizing to be critiqued in pretty much every futurological discourse, sometimes outright reactionary but also sometimes just common-or-garden variety conservative.

I personally disapprove of all futurology (and I do so especially because I am a big queergeek and sf-fan myself and I am a strong champion of consensus science, and of the work of progressive technodevelopmental social struggles in which all the stakeholders to technoscientific change have a real say in the distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of that change, and of secular democratic civilization and consensual cultural-prosthetic self-determination more generally), but that doesn't mean I don't recognize or take seriously the many differences that make a difference among the varieties of futurological discourse presently perniciously in play and on offer.

I do like to make fun of the Robot Cultists and superlative futurologists in the various extropian, transhumanist, singularitarian, cybernetic totalist, techno-immortalist, nano-cornucopiast sects here on Amor Mundi pretty regularly, of course. And I also do think it is quite important to point out that these would-be techno-transcendentalizing wish-fulfillment fantasists are indulging in a discourse that conduces in my view to profoundly reactionary and anti-democratizing political ends (a point no less true in my view just because some of the contributors to these tendentially-authoritarian discourses earnestly fancy themselves politically moderate or even left-wing).

But I think it is also important to emphasize that not all futurology is superlative in the specific sense I attribute to the members of the various organizations in the Robot Cult archipelago.

I do indeed think that all futurology -- both the superlative sects of futurology and also the more "mainstream" forms that suffuse corporate and Defense Department think-tanks -- are profoundly anti-democratizing and serve incumbent interests. That is to say -- however ironic it may seem to say this of folks who declare their focus to be "The Future" -- all varieties of futurology conduce in the main to conservative politics, and often to the most reactionary and authoritarian extremes of conservatism in fact. Hence, my Futurological Brickbat: "To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms."

Mainstream Futurology seems to me in many respects the quintessential discourse of neoliberal developmentalism. In its hyperbole and endless rebranding of incumbency as "progress" it is close kin to the advertising and promotional discourse that drives mass-mediated corporate-capitalism. In the immaterialism of its digital utopianism it is close kin to the logo-ization and disdain for production of the suave fraud of the Friedman Flat Earth Society as well as to the financial fraudsters who sold slim hopes as firm assets for short-term gains rebranded as a "Long Boom." In the excited handwaving of its oh-so-serious "geo-engineering" proposals it is close kin to the corporate greenwashing that indulges the worst kind of climate-science denialism, the kind that actually admits to the reality and scale of the environmental problems and yet responds to these science facts with science fictions filled with snappy neologisms and vapid can-do ego-stroking and digital animations of sooper-gizmos all delivered for cash to audiences filled with the very folks earning the lion's share of the short-term profits of extractive-industrialism at the cost of the destruction of the world.

The varieties of superlative futurology to which I devoted so much of my earlier critical attention (and to which I still direct no small amount of ridicule) represent a kind of reductio of the hyperbole and immaterialism of mainstream corporate-militarist futurology. Indeed, in many instances they make an outright religion of futurological tropes and topoi: the advertising hyperbole and disdain of market friction and practical livelihoods of the neoliberals actually become promises of the techno-transcendence of stakeholder politics, embodied intelligence and mortality, "limits" of any kind. And as such a reductio of mainstream corporate-militarist futurology the Robot Cultists can provide a clarifying extremity, exposing inter-connections and assumptions and aspirations entailed but rarely examined in discussions of mainstream futurology and corporate-military developmentalist ideologies.

I think it is clarifying to discern the connections between the mainstream futurology of the neoliberal Boomers and "Reagan Democrats" and their obsessions with success seminars and boner-pills and face-lifts as well as their eager embrace of the serial criminal idiocies of SAP-to-NAFTA globalization bubbles, the 90s tech bubble, the Bush war-economy bubble, the housing bubble, and so on, to the even more extreme immaterialism one discerns in the superlative futurology of the Robot Cultists in their pining after the digitization and immortalization of their "meat selves" or for a circumvention of actual political problems of poverty or plurality in a finite world via paradisical immersive virtual realities or post-scarcity nanotechnologies or a singularitarian Robot God who will end material history. While there are important differences in the terms of the critique demanded of these varieties of mainstream and superlative futurology, it is also revealing to grasp the continuities between them, so long as one does not mistake continuities for outright identities.