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.