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.