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!
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4 comments:
Do you have a theory as to why most transhumanists are white males from the northern hemisphere?
I'm not here to fix the Robot Cult, I'm here to shut it down.
Athena Andreadis had an interesting remark to make
on the culture-boundedness of science fiction in
"Why Science Needs Science Fiction"
http://www.toseekoutnewlife.com/whysonl1.html
"But my deep, guilty secret, which I didn't confess even to
my devoted parents was that, from the moment that my English
could support the habit, I had become an avid reader of
science fiction. If science was my romance literature,
science fiction was my hidden stash of bodice rippers.
Why all this cloak and dagger? Well, science fiction
was not written in Greece at the time and those who
read it were considered to border on the socially unacceptable.
The Greek language, sinuous but over-inflected, is not
conducive to science fiction writing. In form, it doesn't
have enough room for technical word constructions, for new
or additional genders; and in content, it carries so much
mythological baggage that it can hardly find a myth
that is not already in the canon.
English, on the other hand, with its percussive staccato rhythm,
monosyllabic Saxon words and ambiguous word endings, is superbly
fitted for the genre. And the concepts -- time travel,
alternative planetary physics, speculative biologies and
societies -- were, in my eyes at least, as valid as Einstein's
gedanken experiments. In both, you started with 'what if?'
and followed the logical extensions of your premises.
In both, entire new universes could spin off from your
vision, like the Milky Way from Hera's breast."
> Do you have a theory as to why most transhumanists are
> white males from the northern hemisphere?
It's probably not entirely unrelated to the fact that most
SF authors and fans are white males from the northern hemisphere.
There's an almost unutterably smug episode recounted in
Julie Phillips' biography of "James Tiptree, Jr."
(Alice B. Sheldon) in which Arthur C. Clarke comes off
particularly badly. This happened in 1975, more than a
decade after Valentina Tereshkova had gone into orbit for the
Russians. It was years after _Star Trek_ had come and gone.
And _2001: A Space Odyssey_, for that matter.
(pp. 330 - 331):
"The science fiction community as a whole was in an
odd position regarding feminism. On one hand, most
of the writers and fans were men. In 1974, women still
made up less than 20 percent of SFWA's membership.
And most of those men, even those who were using SF
to address other social issues, were still not ready
to question gender relationships. The "rocket jocks"
(who had also hated the New Wave) insisted women
couldn't write real, 'hard' science fiction and
probably shouldn't even be reading it. Other men
were more open in theory, but had trouble understanding
the problem.
Arthur C. Clarke, for example, had recently sent a
letter to the editor of _Time_ magazine agreeing with
astronaut Mike Collins. Collins had told _Time_ that
women could never be in the space program, since in
zero G a woman's breasts would bounce and keep the men
from concentrating. Clarke proudly claimed he had
already predicted this 'problem.' In his novel
_Rendezvous with Rama_ he had written, 'Some women,
Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not
be allowed aboard ship: weightlessness did things
to their breasts that were too damn distracting.'
When Joanna Russ tried privately to explain why this
was insulting, Clarke, responding publicly in the
SFWA newsletter, asked why Commander Norton shouldn't
be attracted to women -- didn't Russ want him to be?
He added that though some of his best friends
were women, the level of discourse of the 'women's
libbers' clearly wasn't helping their cause.
The whole exchange appeared in the _SFWA Forum_ in
February and March 1975. It drew a storm of comment
from all directions, most of it expressive of how
new feminism was to most men and how automatically
many reacted by kicking slush. The newsletter's
editor, Ted Cogswell, illustrated an issue with
pictures of naked women -- intended, he said, as a
joke. [SF author] Suzy Charnas informed him that
this kind of 'joke' was aggression disguised as
humor. Some of the letters, from men and women,
were open and intelligent, but even the more reasonable
men often reduced the argument to the sexual or
the physical, as if all sexism was about was, as
one man put it, the shape of a person's plumbing.
On the other hand, the SF community had a great deal
invested in the idea of tolerance. It was, and is,
in principle sympathetic to all who feel themselves
different. Science fiction itself is, at its best
moments, a literature of difference, alienation,
change. Russ said in _Khatru_ that she wrote it
because she could make it hers. 'I felt that I
knew nothing about "real life" as defined in college
writing courses (whaling voyages, fist fights, war,
bar-room battles, bull-fighting, &c.) and if I
wrote about Mars nobody could tell me it was (1) trivial,
or (2) inaccurate.'"
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