Seven days have passed and so it is time for another White Guys of "The Future" Report. I made my weekly jaunt to the stealth-Robot Cult outfit IEET's website, and I can report this morning that of the fifteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there you will find none that is not a white guy. You may recall that in the nearly two months I've been doing these reports only two folks who are not white guys have ever been so featured on the IEET website (unless you count cartoon aliens and robots of indeterminate race and gender, which are also better represented at IEET, despite not even existing, than are non white guy humans).
I will repeat again, as I have done every single week I've offered up one of these White Guys of "The Future" Reports, that only a minority of people in the world are in fact white guys, and that only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are in fact white guys, and that only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are in fact white guys, and that only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are in fact white guys and hence that this endless ongoing parade of techno-transcendentalizing white guys fancying themselves spokesmen for "The Future" is actually an enormously perplexing thing.
Of course, the public proponents of this stealth-transhumanist outfit have far more problems on their hands than just this weirdly abiding issue of non-representativeness -- for some of these problems have a look here, for example. Nonetheless, I do think that their apparent inability to take seriously or be taken seriously, institutionally, for long by anybody but white guys is a symptom that graphically gives the lie to their pretensions to represent anything like a serious professional academic mainstream-intelligible bioethics or technoscience policy think-tank rather than the sanewashing operation for their Robot Cult that they look to me to be.
See you guys again one week from now, one week further into… The Future!
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
The Essential Continuity and Co-Dependency of Supernative and Superlative Futurisms, of Biocons and Robot Cultists
In the Moot, friend of blog Athena Andreadis has said that she is considering writing a book critiquing transhumanists, singularitarians, and techno-immortalists. Another long-time reader, "RadicalCoolDude" enthuses that Athena could become the "go-to Robot Cultism skeptic," and I couldn't agree more. Athena's is a credible, critical, accessible, poetic voice of sense that could do a world of good against the deranging hyperbole, junk-science, and anti-democratizing authoritarianism of the media-friendly, incumbent-friendly frames and formulations of superlative futurology. "RCD" goes on to "suggest [Athena] weave a critique of bioconservatism/bioluddi[sm] into your critique of transhumanism to neutralize the predictable accusation that you are a bioconservative/bioluddite."
Now, as someone who has been accused of being a transhumanist-libertechian-technophile by various bioconservatives and a bioconservative-luddite-deathist by various Robot Cultists I am here to tell you that there is little one can do to evade such charges.
Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that as a matter of plain pragmatic politics biocon/Primitivist orgs and transhumanist/Robot Cult orgs actually share an interest in seeing to it that technodevelopmental issues are framed in hyperbolic terms, and that their own antagonism be seen to delineate the whole technodevelopmental terrain, when of course almost all actually reasonable scientific practice and policy deliberation is happening in the mile-wide richness between the inch-thin futurological crusts at their extremes.
It isn't hard to see how there is not just a constitutive antagonism between technophobia and technophilia, but a deeper continuity between the two as precisely complementary un(der)critical vantages, both crucially conducing -- in their hyperbole, emotionalism, distraction, and undermining of consensus science and democratic deliberation -- to incumbent interests in my view.
I have of course written extensively about how the homo naturalis with whom bioconservatives identify over biomedical equity-diversity-consent and the homo superior with whom transhumanists identify over the flourishing lifeway diversity of their worldly peers yield precisely complementary eugenicist and authoritarian politics in my view.
The extensive case I have made against superlative varieties of futurological discourse as faith-based initiatives, wish-fulfillment fantasies, and delusive techno-transcendentalizing promises made in defiance of sense gives rise to an equally extensive and again precisely complementary case against what I would call supernativity (note the "n") that does much the same.
While some have found perplexing (and I hope usefully provocative) my insistence that every futurism is in fact a retro-futurism in which parochial values and incumbent interests are reassured they will be not so much threatened as amplified in the world to come, it is perhaps comparably perplexing to grasp that every bioconservative exercise in defensive nostalgia for natural and pastoral lifeways that never in fact existed or prevailed in the world is in fact a retro-futurism out actively to make and police the world into conformity with a parochial ideal image.
Neither extremity has ever been able to cope very well with what are the most salient facets of technodevelopment as politics, namely, [one] that there is no such thing as "technology in general" with which one can "ally" or "fight to the death" in the abstract, apart from the myriad technoscientific practices of invention, research, publication, regulation, funding, education, application playing out in all their differences among all their diverse stakeholders from moment to moment, [two] that the political and normative force of technodevelopmental vicissitudes depend on the distribution of their costs, risks, and benefits to their actual stakeholders and hence depend on the democratizing, diversifying, consensualizing, equitizing struggles and values that articulate these distributions and not so much on the "technological" per se as abstracted away from these actually-conventional left-right political struggles, [three] that all culture is prosthetic and all prostheses, all techniques, all devices are matters of cultural diversity in their political substance, and that there will be no progressive politics of "technology" that is not already committed to lifeway diversity and consensual convivial multiculture first of all.
(Those who wonder why I jettisoned the term "techno-progressive" from my own rhetoric when I was for so long so conspicuously associated with it, should understand that this was not only because Robot Cultists appropriated the term and use it to this day stealthily and dishonestly to promote their own harmful and extreme agendas -- though of course that is one reason -- but also simply because I came to view the term as unnecessary, unhelpful, and even a bit obfuscatory, since one need most crucially and simply to be progressive to be techno-progressive, after all. I suspect that the reason the techno-progressive term was vulnerable to opportunistic misappropriation by the Robot Cultists was precisely because it was premised on the false assumption that such a term was needed or even helpful in the first place, since such confusions provide fertile ground for futurological frames.)
I do think it is an interesting paradox that the superlative techno-utopians who like to crow so much about their superior scientificity seem so often ultimately both to disdain materiality in their immaterializing fetishization of the digital (not to mention, usually, neoliberal financialization and logo-ization as well) and also to propose what is an essentially transcendentalizing worldview focused on an otherworldly tech-heaven called "The Future," while the supernative biocons whose discourse is typically suffused with gestures to spirituality and a world "made by hand" so often ultimately fetishize little more than the material and familiar furniture of the world of their comfort-zones and that small sliver of human morphologies and lifeways with which they happen parochially to identify at the moment and which they would police into continence through the heavy hand of the state even in defiance of informed, nonduressed consent.
It is a profound error, however, to mistake such paradoxes and such superficial skirmishing antagonisms between superlative and supernative futurological discourses and subcultures as more substantive than are their underlying continuities, their structural similarities, and their complementary facilitation of incumbent, authoritarian, eugenicist, non-worldly, anti-democratizing technodevelopmental politics in my view.
Now, as someone who has been accused of being a transhumanist-libertechian-technophile by various bioconservatives and a bioconservative-luddite-deathist by various Robot Cultists I am here to tell you that there is little one can do to evade such charges.
Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that as a matter of plain pragmatic politics biocon/Primitivist orgs and transhumanist/Robot Cult orgs actually share an interest in seeing to it that technodevelopmental issues are framed in hyperbolic terms, and that their own antagonism be seen to delineate the whole technodevelopmental terrain, when of course almost all actually reasonable scientific practice and policy deliberation is happening in the mile-wide richness between the inch-thin futurological crusts at their extremes.
It isn't hard to see how there is not just a constitutive antagonism between technophobia and technophilia, but a deeper continuity between the two as precisely complementary un(der)critical vantages, both crucially conducing -- in their hyperbole, emotionalism, distraction, and undermining of consensus science and democratic deliberation -- to incumbent interests in my view.
I have of course written extensively about how the homo naturalis with whom bioconservatives identify over biomedical equity-diversity-consent and the homo superior with whom transhumanists identify over the flourishing lifeway diversity of their worldly peers yield precisely complementary eugenicist and authoritarian politics in my view.
The extensive case I have made against superlative varieties of futurological discourse as faith-based initiatives, wish-fulfillment fantasies, and delusive techno-transcendentalizing promises made in defiance of sense gives rise to an equally extensive and again precisely complementary case against what I would call supernativity (note the "n") that does much the same.
While some have found perplexing (and I hope usefully provocative) my insistence that every futurism is in fact a retro-futurism in which parochial values and incumbent interests are reassured they will be not so much threatened as amplified in the world to come, it is perhaps comparably perplexing to grasp that every bioconservative exercise in defensive nostalgia for natural and pastoral lifeways that never in fact existed or prevailed in the world is in fact a retro-futurism out actively to make and police the world into conformity with a parochial ideal image.
Neither extremity has ever been able to cope very well with what are the most salient facets of technodevelopment as politics, namely, [one] that there is no such thing as "technology in general" with which one can "ally" or "fight to the death" in the abstract, apart from the myriad technoscientific practices of invention, research, publication, regulation, funding, education, application playing out in all their differences among all their diverse stakeholders from moment to moment, [two] that the political and normative force of technodevelopmental vicissitudes depend on the distribution of their costs, risks, and benefits to their actual stakeholders and hence depend on the democratizing, diversifying, consensualizing, equitizing struggles and values that articulate these distributions and not so much on the "technological" per se as abstracted away from these actually-conventional left-right political struggles, [three] that all culture is prosthetic and all prostheses, all techniques, all devices are matters of cultural diversity in their political substance, and that there will be no progressive politics of "technology" that is not already committed to lifeway diversity and consensual convivial multiculture first of all.
(Those who wonder why I jettisoned the term "techno-progressive" from my own rhetoric when I was for so long so conspicuously associated with it, should understand that this was not only because Robot Cultists appropriated the term and use it to this day stealthily and dishonestly to promote their own harmful and extreme agendas -- though of course that is one reason -- but also simply because I came to view the term as unnecessary, unhelpful, and even a bit obfuscatory, since one need most crucially and simply to be progressive to be techno-progressive, after all. I suspect that the reason the techno-progressive term was vulnerable to opportunistic misappropriation by the Robot Cultists was precisely because it was premised on the false assumption that such a term was needed or even helpful in the first place, since such confusions provide fertile ground for futurological frames.)
I do think it is an interesting paradox that the superlative techno-utopians who like to crow so much about their superior scientificity seem so often ultimately both to disdain materiality in their immaterializing fetishization of the digital (not to mention, usually, neoliberal financialization and logo-ization as well) and also to propose what is an essentially transcendentalizing worldview focused on an otherworldly tech-heaven called "The Future," while the supernative biocons whose discourse is typically suffused with gestures to spirituality and a world "made by hand" so often ultimately fetishize little more than the material and familiar furniture of the world of their comfort-zones and that small sliver of human morphologies and lifeways with which they happen parochially to identify at the moment and which they would police into continence through the heavy hand of the state even in defiance of informed, nonduressed consent.
It is a profound error, however, to mistake such paradoxes and such superficial skirmishing antagonisms between superlative and supernative futurological discourses and subcultures as more substantive than are their underlying continuities, their structural similarities, and their complementary facilitation of incumbent, authoritarian, eugenicist, non-worldly, anti-democratizing technodevelopmental politics in my view.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Pluralist Reasonableness Against Fundamentalist, Reductionist, and Relativist Unreasonableness
The point that scientific progress has non-negligibly depended for inspiration on science fiction, and fantastic literature more generally, is unquestionably true. But I think the force of the point is usually misconstrued, and usually to the cost of a sensible understanding of science.
This misconstrual is exacerbated to the point of crisis in futurological discourses, which endlessly confuse science with science fiction, as well as hyperbolic corporate-militarist press releases and scenarios with "data" for serious policy deliberation: In their mainstream corporate-militarist forms futurological discourses superficially appropriate sf conceits and imagery in order to manipulate undercritical mass assumptions and aspirations about technoscience and deploy them to sell crap products and military spending, whomping up the usual greed and insecurity. And in the superlative varieties of futurological discourse associated with the various sects of the Robot Cult (the transhumanist eugenicists, the techno-immortalists and cryonicists, the cybernetic totalists and GOFAI-deadenders and Singularitarian Robot God priesthood and penitents, the digital-utopians, the greenwashing geo-engineers and techno-fixers, the nano-cornucopiasts, and so on) these hyperbolic marketing and self-promotional discourses are amplified from fraud into outright faith-based initiatives selling not just the usual phony promises of sex appeal and get rich quick schemes and security from all threats, but outright techno-transcendence of human finitude, post-human demi-godhood via superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance.
I don't doubt that many serious scholars of Roman history were seduced into participation in its rigors by initial contact with technicolor sword and sandals epics, just as I know many serious practicing scientists who were inspired by Star Trek to begin their careers in biology or aerospace or what have you (just as my own inspiration by Star Trek had a place in motivating me to keep up my reading and teaching of science and technology studies (STS) and environmental justice critique (EJ)).
Nevertheless, the standards on the basis of which we identify serious historical scholarship or the laboratory and publishing practices of actually warranted consensus science are different from the standards on the basis of which we are moved or inspired by gladiator flicks or space operas. A lab cohort working on the nanoscale is a marvelous thing, as is an sf fandom devoted to Caprica, but they are not the same thing even if their participants overlap and the standards on the basis of which we rightly grasp and celebrate their marvelousness should reflect these differences, because they do make a difference.
This can actually be a trickier observation to grasp than it initially seems inasmuch as many paradigm-shifting scientific hypotheses have involved flashes of insight or inspiration that were not themselves scientific per se, but relied on accidents or fruitful analogies that emerged in processes better likened to the creative intelligence of poets than the creative intelligence of scientists engaged in the more routinized observational, testing, publishing practices that yield the contingent but warrantedly confidence-inspiring beliefs of consensus science.
While some scientists were inspired to scientific achievement through poetic inspiration, demonstrably many others were inspired instead through religious faith if we are to take their own accounts of these matters seriously, and no doubt plenty of others would attribute their inspirations to dreams, fevers, hallucinations, intoxications, or chemical highs, or, hell, for that matter, to the provocative nudge of a delicious meal, a rentboy's hard cock, or a particularly intense bowel movement. Are we ready to invite all these prompts to creative expressivity into the domain of scientific method, properly so-called, in consequence of these obvious facts?
Look, I am the last person to deny the role of the non-scientific to our collective and contested arrival at beliefs that are warrantable as reasonable in scientific terms, but I do not agree that such a recognition justifies a wholesale confusion of science fiction with science, or undermines the useful (I would say indispensable) distinction of the scientific as a domain of reasonable warranted belief ascription from other domains of the reasonable with which it is of course narratively and figuratively and historically and interpersonally and environmentally endlessly entangled in actual life.
It is actually important to grasp that many things that go on in labs were better described by Machiavelli than by any text on scientific method, that attention-economies, funding dynamics, reputation building, interpersonal organization in lab settings are often political through and through, that important scientific breakthroughs have often depended on flashes of inspiration and the workings of personal charisma, and so on. It is also important to recall that there is no definitive criterion on the basis of which we know when we have arrived at a sufficient accumulation of inductive weight to shift our mode of argumentation from the inductive to the deductive, just as it is important to insist that every deduction is in fact saturated with prior inductions, just as it is crucial to grasp that none of the criteria met by actually warranted scientific descriptions (coherence, falsifiability, testability, saving the phenomena, elegance, and so on) has never failed to warrant beliefs that were not subsequently replaced with better beliefs and hence that scientific warrant provides confidence but never certainty.
None of these crucial observations is meant to denigrate or disqualify science or deny its reasonableness or indispensability to human flourishing.
I will admit that I do hope they would provide useful constraints, however, on those who in the name of "championing" science would seek to invest it (and usually themselves, thereby) with inappropriate authority… Or who would reduce other modes of reasonable belief-ascription (the moral, aesthetic, ethical, political, among them) to the terms of the scientific… Or who would re-write contingent scientific beliefs in the faith-based image correspondence -- note that at the heart of both fundamentalist religiosity and faithly scientism is the fantasy of a Cosmos that has preferences in the matter of the language humans use to describe it, preferences would-be priests claim to be authoritatively qualified to speak in The Name of -- or the fraught capacitations of technique in the faith-based image of transcendence.
For me, to be reasonable is not to pretend to be scientific in every aspect of life -- nor even to pretend that all that is reasonable in science is itself reasonable in scientific terms -- because of some facile fetishization of superficial scientificity -- any more than I approve of those who would seek to reduce proper human life to the terms of aesthetic appreciation and expression out of a comparably foolish fetishization, or those ferocious moralizers who do the same with morals, or those cynics who do the same with politics. No, for me, to be reasonable means both to apply the criteria of warrant proper to each mode of reasonable belief-ascription as well as to grasp the actual mode of belief relevant to a case at hand in relation to other modes on offer. Mine is a pluralist conception of the reasonable, which is to my mind the furthest thing from the relativism fundamentalists (whether judeochrislamic, scientistic, moralistic, fascist-aesthetic, or what have you) will want to charge it with being.
I cherish proper scientific practice and its many accomplishments. And I happen to regard imperializing inflations of the scientific into other domains as a profound disrespect to its proper work and a dangerous derangement of the practices on which it actually depends to accomplish its proper work. And I regard the damage to science done by these self-appointed self-congratulatory Enlightenment champions no less devastating to reasonableness than I also so regard (as is more usual) superstitious and irrationalist and faith-based wish-fulfillment fantasies treated as competitors for reasonable warranted belief on proper scientific terms:
And that is just as true, whether these are Creationists who demand folk-poems be taught in biology classrooms, or climate-change denialists or safe-cigarette apologists who insist that any outcome sufficiently profitable to the few undermines the credibility of any claim, however warranted, that interferes with that profitability, or Robot Cultists who derange the qualified contingent consensus assertions of science into promotional and self-promotional promises of techno-transcendence.
This misconstrual is exacerbated to the point of crisis in futurological discourses, which endlessly confuse science with science fiction, as well as hyperbolic corporate-militarist press releases and scenarios with "data" for serious policy deliberation: In their mainstream corporate-militarist forms futurological discourses superficially appropriate sf conceits and imagery in order to manipulate undercritical mass assumptions and aspirations about technoscience and deploy them to sell crap products and military spending, whomping up the usual greed and insecurity. And in the superlative varieties of futurological discourse associated with the various sects of the Robot Cult (the transhumanist eugenicists, the techno-immortalists and cryonicists, the cybernetic totalists and GOFAI-deadenders and Singularitarian Robot God priesthood and penitents, the digital-utopians, the greenwashing geo-engineers and techno-fixers, the nano-cornucopiasts, and so on) these hyperbolic marketing and self-promotional discourses are amplified from fraud into outright faith-based initiatives selling not just the usual phony promises of sex appeal and get rich quick schemes and security from all threats, but outright techno-transcendence of human finitude, post-human demi-godhood via superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance.
I don't doubt that many serious scholars of Roman history were seduced into participation in its rigors by initial contact with technicolor sword and sandals epics, just as I know many serious practicing scientists who were inspired by Star Trek to begin their careers in biology or aerospace or what have you (just as my own inspiration by Star Trek had a place in motivating me to keep up my reading and teaching of science and technology studies (STS) and environmental justice critique (EJ)).
Nevertheless, the standards on the basis of which we identify serious historical scholarship or the laboratory and publishing practices of actually warranted consensus science are different from the standards on the basis of which we are moved or inspired by gladiator flicks or space operas. A lab cohort working on the nanoscale is a marvelous thing, as is an sf fandom devoted to Caprica, but they are not the same thing even if their participants overlap and the standards on the basis of which we rightly grasp and celebrate their marvelousness should reflect these differences, because they do make a difference.
This can actually be a trickier observation to grasp than it initially seems inasmuch as many paradigm-shifting scientific hypotheses have involved flashes of insight or inspiration that were not themselves scientific per se, but relied on accidents or fruitful analogies that emerged in processes better likened to the creative intelligence of poets than the creative intelligence of scientists engaged in the more routinized observational, testing, publishing practices that yield the contingent but warrantedly confidence-inspiring beliefs of consensus science.
While some scientists were inspired to scientific achievement through poetic inspiration, demonstrably many others were inspired instead through religious faith if we are to take their own accounts of these matters seriously, and no doubt plenty of others would attribute their inspirations to dreams, fevers, hallucinations, intoxications, or chemical highs, or, hell, for that matter, to the provocative nudge of a delicious meal, a rentboy's hard cock, or a particularly intense bowel movement. Are we ready to invite all these prompts to creative expressivity into the domain of scientific method, properly so-called, in consequence of these obvious facts?
Look, I am the last person to deny the role of the non-scientific to our collective and contested arrival at beliefs that are warrantable as reasonable in scientific terms, but I do not agree that such a recognition justifies a wholesale confusion of science fiction with science, or undermines the useful (I would say indispensable) distinction of the scientific as a domain of reasonable warranted belief ascription from other domains of the reasonable with which it is of course narratively and figuratively and historically and interpersonally and environmentally endlessly entangled in actual life.
It is actually important to grasp that many things that go on in labs were better described by Machiavelli than by any text on scientific method, that attention-economies, funding dynamics, reputation building, interpersonal organization in lab settings are often political through and through, that important scientific breakthroughs have often depended on flashes of inspiration and the workings of personal charisma, and so on. It is also important to recall that there is no definitive criterion on the basis of which we know when we have arrived at a sufficient accumulation of inductive weight to shift our mode of argumentation from the inductive to the deductive, just as it is important to insist that every deduction is in fact saturated with prior inductions, just as it is crucial to grasp that none of the criteria met by actually warranted scientific descriptions (coherence, falsifiability, testability, saving the phenomena, elegance, and so on) has never failed to warrant beliefs that were not subsequently replaced with better beliefs and hence that scientific warrant provides confidence but never certainty.
None of these crucial observations is meant to denigrate or disqualify science or deny its reasonableness or indispensability to human flourishing.
I will admit that I do hope they would provide useful constraints, however, on those who in the name of "championing" science would seek to invest it (and usually themselves, thereby) with inappropriate authority… Or who would reduce other modes of reasonable belief-ascription (the moral, aesthetic, ethical, political, among them) to the terms of the scientific… Or who would re-write contingent scientific beliefs in the faith-based image correspondence -- note that at the heart of both fundamentalist religiosity and faithly scientism is the fantasy of a Cosmos that has preferences in the matter of the language humans use to describe it, preferences would-be priests claim to be authoritatively qualified to speak in The Name of -- or the fraught capacitations of technique in the faith-based image of transcendence.
For me, to be reasonable is not to pretend to be scientific in every aspect of life -- nor even to pretend that all that is reasonable in science is itself reasonable in scientific terms -- because of some facile fetishization of superficial scientificity -- any more than I approve of those who would seek to reduce proper human life to the terms of aesthetic appreciation and expression out of a comparably foolish fetishization, or those ferocious moralizers who do the same with morals, or those cynics who do the same with politics. No, for me, to be reasonable means both to apply the criteria of warrant proper to each mode of reasonable belief-ascription as well as to grasp the actual mode of belief relevant to a case at hand in relation to other modes on offer. Mine is a pluralist conception of the reasonable, which is to my mind the furthest thing from the relativism fundamentalists (whether judeochrislamic, scientistic, moralistic, fascist-aesthetic, or what have you) will want to charge it with being.
I cherish proper scientific practice and its many accomplishments. And I happen to regard imperializing inflations of the scientific into other domains as a profound disrespect to its proper work and a dangerous derangement of the practices on which it actually depends to accomplish its proper work. And I regard the damage to science done by these self-appointed self-congratulatory Enlightenment champions no less devastating to reasonableness than I also so regard (as is more usual) superstitious and irrationalist and faith-based wish-fulfillment fantasies treated as competitors for reasonable warranted belief on proper scientific terms:
And that is just as true, whether these are Creationists who demand folk-poems be taught in biology classrooms, or climate-change denialists or safe-cigarette apologists who insist that any outcome sufficiently profitable to the few undermines the credibility of any claim, however warranted, that interferes with that profitability, or Robot Cultists who derange the qualified contingent consensus assertions of science into promotional and self-promotional promises of techno-transcendence.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
White Prick Future (UPDATED)
Seven days have passed and so it is time for another White Guys of "The Future" Report. I made my weekly jaunt to the stealth-Robot Cult outfit IEET's website, and I can report this morning that there is one person who is not a white guy among the fourteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there. You may recall that it has been all white guys all the time for the last two weeks over at IEET (although one white woman was included, as today, in the heady futurological mix a couple of weeks before that).
UPDATE: I checked back this afternoon, and IEET's nice token lady has vanished, and we're back to white prick futurology, er, as it were, uncut (somehow I think that unlikely...).
So far, the Robot Cultists have allowed my modest little feminist observation to be answered by a chorus of crickets. This nonresponsiveness is conspicuous in its difference from the Nazgul shriek of hysteria, rage, and denialism that follows instead from other sorts of Robot Cult interventions I provide here on Amor Mundi from time to time; as when I propose, for example, that Robot Cultists won't get to live forever in Cyberspace or shiny Robot Bodies because intelligence and selfhood are both embodied and social in ways their faith-based initiatives are indifferent to, or that nanobots won't be providing them any time soon and for free with the sex lives of the rich and famous contrary to their wish-fulfillment fantasies because, among other things, their comparative poverty is a political problem and not a technical one (their poverty of intellect is another thing), or that a superintelligent postbiological Robot God or Sooper-Mommy AI isn't going to arrive on the scene to kiss all their boo-boos away tomorrow or the next day or twenty years from now (it's always twenty years from now) but that a decent therapist might help them out in that matter in no time flat.
I don't know if the comparative nonresponsiveness in the face of my repeated exposure of the curiously constricted whiteness guyness northness of this presumably global "movement" or "philosophy" reflects the realization on the part of the Robot Cultists that there really is something weird and wrong about it and they just don't know how to spin it so they want to pretend nobody has noticed, or if it reflects instead their true indifference or cluelessness about their surreally skewed nonrepresentativeness of the world to which they claim to be so urgently relevant.
In response to one Robot Cultist, "Kevin," who did make a wan stab at a response to this weekly observation of mine earlier this week, I can only say that as a too-privileged white guy myself (living and in love with another white guy for over eight years now), who offers up arguments and observations to the hearing of the general public on a daily basis (and even teaches argumentation and theory in University settings for a living), I do not point out the problematic whiteness and guyness of Robot Cultism because of any blanket hostility to or dismissal of white guys, nor do I think there is something about a white guy brain that invalidates the propositions it comes up with willy nilly.
I don't think any serious person would seriously think that my intervention amounts to any such claim, but of course one of the problems with proffering up critiques of Robot Cultists is that few of the people within the circled wagons of superlative futurological True Belief can properly be described as "serious" in the first place (except, I suppose, in the sense in which one can say, "serious as a heart attack," for example) and, unfortunately, few serious people observing futurology from outside take it seriously for long (which, as I have repeatedly insisted, is a terrible mistake, if only because superlative futurology is clarifying in its extremity of the pathologies of the more mainstream and prevailing futurological tropes, forms, and aspirations that suffuse neoliberal corporate-militarist developmentalism, marketing hyperbole, reductionism, eugenicism, and technocratic-elitism).
Be that as it may, I will repeat again, as I have done every single week I've offered up one of these White Guys of "The Future" Reports, that only a minority of people in the world are in fact white guys, and that only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are in fact white guys, and that only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are in fact white guys, and that only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are in fact white guys and hence that this endless ongoing parade of techno-transcendentalizing white guys fancying themselves spokesmen for "The Future" is actually an enormously problematic thing (though far from the only one to be found among Robot Cultists, for more go here) about the so-called "serious futurists" and "bioethicists" and technoscience "policy wonks" of the IEET.
I'll leave it there. So, see you guys against next week… you know, in The Future!
UPDATE: I checked back this afternoon, and IEET's nice token lady has vanished, and we're back to white prick futurology, er, as it were, uncut (somehow I think that unlikely...).
So far, the Robot Cultists have allowed my modest little feminist observation to be answered by a chorus of crickets. This nonresponsiveness is conspicuous in its difference from the Nazgul shriek of hysteria, rage, and denialism that follows instead from other sorts of Robot Cult interventions I provide here on Amor Mundi from time to time; as when I propose, for example, that Robot Cultists won't get to live forever in Cyberspace or shiny Robot Bodies because intelligence and selfhood are both embodied and social in ways their faith-based initiatives are indifferent to, or that nanobots won't be providing them any time soon and for free with the sex lives of the rich and famous contrary to their wish-fulfillment fantasies because, among other things, their comparative poverty is a political problem and not a technical one (their poverty of intellect is another thing), or that a superintelligent postbiological Robot God or Sooper-Mommy AI isn't going to arrive on the scene to kiss all their boo-boos away tomorrow or the next day or twenty years from now (it's always twenty years from now) but that a decent therapist might help them out in that matter in no time flat.
I don't know if the comparative nonresponsiveness in the face of my repeated exposure of the curiously constricted whiteness guyness northness of this presumably global "movement" or "philosophy" reflects the realization on the part of the Robot Cultists that there really is something weird and wrong about it and they just don't know how to spin it so they want to pretend nobody has noticed, or if it reflects instead their true indifference or cluelessness about their surreally skewed nonrepresentativeness of the world to which they claim to be so urgently relevant.
In response to one Robot Cultist, "Kevin," who did make a wan stab at a response to this weekly observation of mine earlier this week, I can only say that as a too-privileged white guy myself (living and in love with another white guy for over eight years now), who offers up arguments and observations to the hearing of the general public on a daily basis (and even teaches argumentation and theory in University settings for a living), I do not point out the problematic whiteness and guyness of Robot Cultism because of any blanket hostility to or dismissal of white guys, nor do I think there is something about a white guy brain that invalidates the propositions it comes up with willy nilly.
I don't think any serious person would seriously think that my intervention amounts to any such claim, but of course one of the problems with proffering up critiques of Robot Cultists is that few of the people within the circled wagons of superlative futurological True Belief can properly be described as "serious" in the first place (except, I suppose, in the sense in which one can say, "serious as a heart attack," for example) and, unfortunately, few serious people observing futurology from outside take it seriously for long (which, as I have repeatedly insisted, is a terrible mistake, if only because superlative futurology is clarifying in its extremity of the pathologies of the more mainstream and prevailing futurological tropes, forms, and aspirations that suffuse neoliberal corporate-militarist developmentalism, marketing hyperbole, reductionism, eugenicism, and technocratic-elitism).
Be that as it may, I will repeat again, as I have done every single week I've offered up one of these White Guys of "The Future" Reports, that only a minority of people in the world are in fact white guys, and that only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are in fact white guys, and that only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are in fact white guys, and that only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are in fact white guys and hence that this endless ongoing parade of techno-transcendentalizing white guys fancying themselves spokesmen for "The Future" is actually an enormously problematic thing (though far from the only one to be found among Robot Cultists, for more go here) about the so-called "serious futurists" and "bioethicists" and technoscience "policy wonks" of the IEET.
I'll leave it there. So, see you guys against next week… you know, in The Future!
Friday, May 14, 2010
Futurism Is the Evangelical Wing of the Marketing Department of Neoliberal Corporate-Militarist Developmentalism
Annalee Newitz has written that "Science Fiction is the Entertainment Wing of Futurism." This is of course the sort of completely ass-backwards error that comes, I truly fear, of cozying up too much to Robot Cultists without one's critical faculties fully switched on.
The truth is that futurism is the evangelical wing of the marketing department of neoliberal corporate-militarist developmentalism.
Science-fictional iconography might be appropriated by the more hyperbolic strains of corporate-militarist self-promotion (eyeglasses that darken into sunglasses worn by bland models walking around in what looks like Cloud City, fraudulent anti-aging creams proffered by bland models in lab-coats and scienterrific "cosmeceutical" brand-names floating in a pastel-hued digital soup of helices and biochemical maps, cannon-fodder ads promising unemployed kids they will hob-nob among bland models laser-blasting at orbital fortresses straight out of Akira, Intel pretending stacking chips on top of each other is the March of Progress like Gillette pretending sticking yet another blade in a row is the March of Progress, a hundred thousand powerpoint presentations in a hundred thousand boardrooms and TED talks assuring the self-appointed masters of the universe that the death-dealing instability of the immaterializing neoliberal recourse to fraudulent financialization and logo-ization and the hypermaterializing neoconservative recourse to bases and bullets and bombs is actually "accelerating change" and the "acceleration of acceleration" unto infinity, Big Oil singing songs of the windmill and sunflower future and swearing their reckless pointless drilling, baby, drilling is safe with big talk of techno-progress and robot fixes, Big Ag selling the fraud of the hidden-input hidden-cost petrochemical Green Revolution on the road to selling a bioengineering second Green Revolution really all about enclosing the genomic commons for still more incumbent profit-taking, Big Content canalizing attention toward shit-sandwiches and pretending they are facilitating a hippy-luv global village explosion of manufactured consent and innovative expressivity, all the while p2p libertopians eagerly recast p2p as the usual next-to-fail AI-dead-ender crypto-anarchic digi-wetdream Cyberspatial Home of Mind Galt's Gultch where white-boys-with-toys rool4evahz, the Ayn Raelian "private" space-race to high-altitude hobbyist-aircraft handwaved by barking used-car salesmen into stepping-stones toward orbital hotels, space elevators, and asteroid mining archipelagos, Big Pharma promising bland-some bland-young bland-sex Cylon bodies to all and handing out Grandma's usual candy bowl of bright boner pills and heartburn relief chewables, and on and on and on), but to confuse this opportunistic appropriation by parasites of a vital literature for the subsumption of that vital literature under the heading of the parasites who talentlessly despoil and derange it is, in a phrase, seriously fucked-up.
Robot Cultists, of course, seem to share, among other things, an inability to distinguish science from science fiction, and a tendency to treat hyperbolic corporate-militarist advertising and press releases as data for serious technoscience policy deliberation.
Step back from the cliff, Annalee! When it comes to Robot Cultists, as far as I'm concerned, it's either ridicule or be ridiculed if you are a person with the least bit of sense.
The truth is that futurism is the evangelical wing of the marketing department of neoliberal corporate-militarist developmentalism.
Science-fictional iconography might be appropriated by the more hyperbolic strains of corporate-militarist self-promotion (eyeglasses that darken into sunglasses worn by bland models walking around in what looks like Cloud City, fraudulent anti-aging creams proffered by bland models in lab-coats and scienterrific "cosmeceutical" brand-names floating in a pastel-hued digital soup of helices and biochemical maps, cannon-fodder ads promising unemployed kids they will hob-nob among bland models laser-blasting at orbital fortresses straight out of Akira, Intel pretending stacking chips on top of each other is the March of Progress like Gillette pretending sticking yet another blade in a row is the March of Progress, a hundred thousand powerpoint presentations in a hundred thousand boardrooms and TED talks assuring the self-appointed masters of the universe that the death-dealing instability of the immaterializing neoliberal recourse to fraudulent financialization and logo-ization and the hypermaterializing neoconservative recourse to bases and bullets and bombs is actually "accelerating change" and the "acceleration of acceleration" unto infinity, Big Oil singing songs of the windmill and sunflower future and swearing their reckless pointless drilling, baby, drilling is safe with big talk of techno-progress and robot fixes, Big Ag selling the fraud of the hidden-input hidden-cost petrochemical Green Revolution on the road to selling a bioengineering second Green Revolution really all about enclosing the genomic commons for still more incumbent profit-taking, Big Content canalizing attention toward shit-sandwiches and pretending they are facilitating a hippy-luv global village explosion of manufactured consent and innovative expressivity, all the while p2p libertopians eagerly recast p2p as the usual next-to-fail AI-dead-ender crypto-anarchic digi-wetdream Cyberspatial Home of Mind Galt's Gultch where white-boys-with-toys rool4evahz, the Ayn Raelian "private" space-race to high-altitude hobbyist-aircraft handwaved by barking used-car salesmen into stepping-stones toward orbital hotels, space elevators, and asteroid mining archipelagos, Big Pharma promising bland-some bland-young bland-sex Cylon bodies to all and handing out Grandma's usual candy bowl of bright boner pills and heartburn relief chewables, and on and on and on), but to confuse this opportunistic appropriation by parasites of a vital literature for the subsumption of that vital literature under the heading of the parasites who talentlessly despoil and derange it is, in a phrase, seriously fucked-up.
Robot Cultists, of course, seem to share, among other things, an inability to distinguish science from science fiction, and a tendency to treat hyperbolic corporate-militarist advertising and press releases as data for serious technoscience policy deliberation.
Step back from the cliff, Annalee! When it comes to Robot Cultists, as far as I'm concerned, it's either ridicule or be ridiculed if you are a person with the least bit of sense.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
To Sum Up
Frozen corpses are dead. No one's bodily incarnated self will ever "migrate" into cyberspace or get nanotransubstantiated into a shiny robot body, thereupon to be techno-immortalized or sooper-longevized under the sooper-parental ministrations of a post-biological Robot God. Extraordinary claims to the contrary on the part of techno-immortalist sects of the Robot Cult indulging in faith-based initiatives involving imaginary nanobotic revivals of frozen corpses or trans-migrations of digi-souls into cyberspatial heaven, offered up wildly against the grain of the warranted consensus science in the relevant disciplines connected, as it were, to these claims, demand from their advocates extraordinary proofs delivered in patient, qualified, prominently published and widely cited and tested arguments, not strident unqualified assertions of confidence and authority from within the circled wagons of marginal sub(cult)ures of True Believers and denunciations of skeptics as rampaging irrationalists or murderous gleeful ghouls.
Sensible secular democrats should certainly struggle to universalize access to healthcare, struggle to get access to clean water -- the closest thing to a real "miracle medicine" in the actual world -- to the overexploited people of the world, and increase funding of medical research to remediate diseases and increase public access to reliable information (including information about dangerous pharmaceuticals and bogus anti-aging therapies and cryonics scams) so that people actually make informed and hence comparatively more consensual healthcare decisions. But Robot Cultists have no distinctive role to play in such struggles, while they are at once defined by the effort to derange and distract these efforts into faith-based initiatives organized by their wish-fulfillment fantasies.
Every single person reading these words is going to die. Reconciling oneself to this fact is an indispensable precondition for sanity, it seems to me. Death-denialists -- either in the common or garden varieties of workoholics or risk-junkies or cosmetic surgery addicts or panicky fundamentalists trembling in their pews -- or in the kooky fancies of the techno-transcendentalizing sects of the Robot Cult pinning their denialism on nanobots or sooper-computers -- whatever form their denialism takes will not extend their lives by a single hour through their denialism.
But in all too many instances the energy diverted into death denialism yields a diminution of aliveness in life or plays out in death-dealing disconnection and aggression among the living. Robot Cultism isn't just palpably ridiculous -- especially as measured against actually warranted consensus science, of which Robot Cultists like to pretend to represent a summit rather than a skew -- neither is it just a dangerous ideology distracting the application of intelligence, peer-to-peer, to actually urgent shared planetary problems of social injustice and climate catastrophe while providing cozy rationalizations for incumbent authoritarian interests, but it looks to me quite simply to be terribly unhealthy for its adherents. That last part isn't really my business, and so I tend to focus on the first two points in most of my critiques, but from time to time it isn't the worst thing in the world to point out that I honestly believe the Robot Cultists with whom I am sparring here are actively damaged by their denialism and hyperbole as well as damaging others. I hate to see it, I really do.
Needless to say, mortal though we all of us, I wish the best of luck to us all in managing some measure of sense and happiness and some contribution to the work of justice in our shared world, peer to peer, in the meantime.
Sensible secular democrats should certainly struggle to universalize access to healthcare, struggle to get access to clean water -- the closest thing to a real "miracle medicine" in the actual world -- to the overexploited people of the world, and increase funding of medical research to remediate diseases and increase public access to reliable information (including information about dangerous pharmaceuticals and bogus anti-aging therapies and cryonics scams) so that people actually make informed and hence comparatively more consensual healthcare decisions. But Robot Cultists have no distinctive role to play in such struggles, while they are at once defined by the effort to derange and distract these efforts into faith-based initiatives organized by their wish-fulfillment fantasies.
Every single person reading these words is going to die. Reconciling oneself to this fact is an indispensable precondition for sanity, it seems to me. Death-denialists -- either in the common or garden varieties of workoholics or risk-junkies or cosmetic surgery addicts or panicky fundamentalists trembling in their pews -- or in the kooky fancies of the techno-transcendentalizing sects of the Robot Cult pinning their denialism on nanobots or sooper-computers -- whatever form their denialism takes will not extend their lives by a single hour through their denialism.
But in all too many instances the energy diverted into death denialism yields a diminution of aliveness in life or plays out in death-dealing disconnection and aggression among the living. Robot Cultism isn't just palpably ridiculous -- especially as measured against actually warranted consensus science, of which Robot Cultists like to pretend to represent a summit rather than a skew -- neither is it just a dangerous ideology distracting the application of intelligence, peer-to-peer, to actually urgent shared planetary problems of social injustice and climate catastrophe while providing cozy rationalizations for incumbent authoritarian interests, but it looks to me quite simply to be terribly unhealthy for its adherents. That last part isn't really my business, and so I tend to focus on the first two points in most of my critiques, but from time to time it isn't the worst thing in the world to point out that I honestly believe the Robot Cultists with whom I am sparring here are actively damaged by their denialism and hyperbole as well as damaging others. I hate to see it, I really do.
Needless to say, mortal though we all of us, I wish the best of luck to us all in managing some measure of sense and happiness and some contribution to the work of justice in our shared world, peer to peer, in the meantime.
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
More Death
By the way, in the post I derided yesterday, in which Michael Anissimov congratulated two corpses for their good sense in being disposed of in a way he approves of, he also stated: "In a material, non-mystical world where the mind is what the brain does, preserving the structure of the brain is a foremost concern if you care about continuing to exist."
I want to point out that this formulation of Anissimov's is a quintessentially futurological piece of shady business.
Whether frozen or vitrified the brain is scarcely "preserved" by the process but profoundly transformed, be it mulched, sheared, toxified, and who knows what else.
We do not know remotely enough to declare that "selfhood" retrievably continues to exist in the aftermath of these processes.
It hardly requires supernaturalism or mysticism -- Anissimov's insinuations to the contrary notwithstanding -- to testify to the strongest skepticism about whether memories or dispositions materialized, say, in quantum effects or electrochemical dynamisms or who knows what else in the brain would be "preserved" by freezing or vitrification, or about whether neural complexes dispersed throughout the body but typically dispensed with in techno-immortalizing accounts of selves as minds as brains as calculators non-negligibly incarnate emotional or other actually indispensable dimensions of selfhood, or what have you.
Robot Cultists like to pretend that they are consummately scientific and that those who deride them are anti-scientific to do so, but of course there are few consensus scientists who affirm the Robot Cultists' truly flabbergastingly fantastic extrapolations and sloppy sleights of hand.
I am not a scientist, certainly, but I am technoscientifically literate enough to know that I am not and to defer to the consensus of those who are on matters like these, matters in which other non-scientists are selling techno-transcendentalizing faith-based initiatives. It should be easy to see how crusty atheistical folks like me are far from indulging in supernaturalism in our skepticism of the Robot Cultists.
By the way, as I said before, I am not a scientist but I am a rhetorician by training, temperament, and trade, and I am here to tell you that I am the one -- not proper scientists -- who is often in the best position to describe what is really afoot argumentatively and figuratively in the formulations of wish-fulfillment fantasists and bullshit artists of the Robot Cult archipelago.
The leap from the denial that the self is an immaterial soul to the affirmation that a brain wrapped in foil like a potato and frozen will preserve that self for the nanobots of the future is actually a larger leap than science can bear, but is a familiar enough bit of business for the rhetorician's scalpel -- just as is the leap from the denial that intelligence is supernatural to the affirmation that non-biological but still legible AI is necessarily possible -- just as is the leap from the recognition that molecules function in nature to the claim that robust artifical programmable self-replicating room-temperature nanomachines will deliver abundance -- and so on.
Superlative futurology is just conventional futurological advertising-hype discourse but in such an extreme form that it has taken on the coloration of outright organized religiosity. There's certainly little that is scientific about it at all.
To this, Anissimov replied in the Moot:
Now let me be clear: To the extent that a cryonics firm claims with the remotest confidence to have accomplished with a dewar more than what a cemetery accomplishes with a mausoleum in the way of personal immortalization, it's a scam in my view. It is possible that Anissimov himself is in on it, and/or bamboozled himself.
I "respect," I suppose, those who choose to dispose of their corpses via vitrification, cremation, burial, and so on more or less equally indifferently. Just don't expect me -- in the form of a demand for "respect" -- to abet the preposterous insinuation that there is anything particularly scientific about such faith-based initiatives.
For myself, I rather like the idea of being dropped into a hole more or less as is with a nice pear tree planted on top, but I can't say it matters to me much, nor that I expect others to enthuse over that inclination of mine.
Everybody dies, you know, and so, most certainly, will everybody reading these words, including those of you who indulge in denialism via the various sects of the Robot Cult.
I can respect the cryonaut's different taste in the matter of the aesthetics of corpse disposal, without sharing it myself, but I don't allow him different facts than the ones actually on offer in the matter of human mortality.
I want to point out that this formulation of Anissimov's is a quintessentially futurological piece of shady business.
Whether frozen or vitrified the brain is scarcely "preserved" by the process but profoundly transformed, be it mulched, sheared, toxified, and who knows what else.
We do not know remotely enough to declare that "selfhood" retrievably continues to exist in the aftermath of these processes.
It hardly requires supernaturalism or mysticism -- Anissimov's insinuations to the contrary notwithstanding -- to testify to the strongest skepticism about whether memories or dispositions materialized, say, in quantum effects or electrochemical dynamisms or who knows what else in the brain would be "preserved" by freezing or vitrification, or about whether neural complexes dispersed throughout the body but typically dispensed with in techno-immortalizing accounts of selves as minds as brains as calculators non-negligibly incarnate emotional or other actually indispensable dimensions of selfhood, or what have you.
Robot Cultists like to pretend that they are consummately scientific and that those who deride them are anti-scientific to do so, but of course there are few consensus scientists who affirm the Robot Cultists' truly flabbergastingly fantastic extrapolations and sloppy sleights of hand.
I am not a scientist, certainly, but I am technoscientifically literate enough to know that I am not and to defer to the consensus of those who are on matters like these, matters in which other non-scientists are selling techno-transcendentalizing faith-based initiatives. It should be easy to see how crusty atheistical folks like me are far from indulging in supernaturalism in our skepticism of the Robot Cultists.
By the way, as I said before, I am not a scientist but I am a rhetorician by training, temperament, and trade, and I am here to tell you that I am the one -- not proper scientists -- who is often in the best position to describe what is really afoot argumentatively and figuratively in the formulations of wish-fulfillment fantasists and bullshit artists of the Robot Cult archipelago.
The leap from the denial that the self is an immaterial soul to the affirmation that a brain wrapped in foil like a potato and frozen will preserve that self for the nanobots of the future is actually a larger leap than science can bear, but is a familiar enough bit of business for the rhetorician's scalpel -- just as is the leap from the denial that intelligence is supernatural to the affirmation that non-biological but still legible AI is necessarily possible -- just as is the leap from the recognition that molecules function in nature to the claim that robust artifical programmable self-replicating room-temperature nanomachines will deliver abundance -- and so on.
Superlative futurology is just conventional futurological advertising-hype discourse but in such an extreme form that it has taken on the coloration of outright organized religiosity. There's certainly little that is scientific about it at all.
To this, Anissimov replied in the Moot:
Dale, I congratulated them for making what I think can be a difficult choice. It is my way of showing my respect for their decision.
Now let me be clear: To the extent that a cryonics firm claims with the remotest confidence to have accomplished with a dewar more than what a cemetery accomplishes with a mausoleum in the way of personal immortalization, it's a scam in my view. It is possible that Anissimov himself is in on it, and/or bamboozled himself.
I "respect," I suppose, those who choose to dispose of their corpses via vitrification, cremation, burial, and so on more or less equally indifferently. Just don't expect me -- in the form of a demand for "respect" -- to abet the preposterous insinuation that there is anything particularly scientific about such faith-based initiatives.
For myself, I rather like the idea of being dropped into a hole more or less as is with a nice pear tree planted on top, but I can't say it matters to me much, nor that I expect others to enthuse over that inclination of mine.
Everybody dies, you know, and so, most certainly, will everybody reading these words, including those of you who indulge in denialism via the various sects of the Robot Cult.
I can respect the cryonaut's different taste in the matter of the aesthetics of corpse disposal, without sharing it myself, but I don't allow him different facts than the ones actually on offer in the matter of human mortality.
Saturday, May 01, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
I made my weekly visit to the stealth-Robot Cult outfit IEET's website, and can report that there is not a single person who is not a white guy among the portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there. You may recall that last week and the week before there was one white lady (who had written a piece about lady parts) included among the manifold featured futurological pieces, so this week represents a bit of back-sliding for our brave retro-futurological foot soldiers (though having one white lady writing about lady parts surrounding by white boys enthusing about their toys isn't exactly any sane person's idea of the summit of representativeness, one cannot help noting).
I do 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, and a minority of people in the world who are well informed about matters of technoscience are white guys this endless ongoing parade of techno-transcendentalizing white guys is an enormously problematic thing (though far from the only one, for more go here) about the so-called "serious futurists" and "bioethicists" and technoscience "policy wonks" of the IEET.
I do 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, and a minority of people in the world who are well informed about matters of technoscience are white guys this endless ongoing parade of techno-transcendentalizing white guys is an enormously problematic thing (though far from the only one, for more go here) about the so-called "serious futurists" and "bioethicists" and technoscience "policy wonks" of the IEET.
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