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

Another seven days have passed, how fleetly they fly! And I have made my weekly jaunt to the website of the Robot Cult outfit, IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

As always, the techno-faithful are busy confusing science fiction for science and still seem to fancy that indulging in wish-fulfillment fantasizing constitutes serious policy deliberation or even scientific research somehow. Also, it still seems to be the case that our brave Robot Cultists have not only seen "The Future" but have seen it naked. And it has a white penis.

Yes, I can report that yet again this week, of the fifteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there you will find nobody who is not a white guy. You may remember that in the months I've been doing these weekly reports that, apart from the occasional cartoon robot or alien, it is the rarest of rare things to find a person depicted on the website who is not a white guy.

Since only a minority of people in the world are white guys, and only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared, peer to peer, are white guys, and only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys, and only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys, IEET's endless parade of techno-transcendentalizing white guys declaring themselves spokesmen for "The Future" is actually enormously perplexing and it is a glaring problem whether they choose to recognize it or not.

The white boys of the Robot Cult continue praying to and braying about their imaginary toys all in the palpably deranged hope that superlative technologies will soon arrive to facilitate their personal transcendence of their mortal aging flesh, of their limited dependent capacities, of their error-prone organismic brains, of their inhabitation of a history suffused with diversity and struggle, peer to peer. There is of course nothing the least scientific or progressive or enlightened in any of this sad spectacle, quite apart from the alarm-bell conspicuous weirdness of its relentless whiteness and boyness. For more, I invite you to read the six pieces assembled in this Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.

The Fandom Menace

To clarify my last post --

There's nothing wrong with fandoms. I'm a big sf geek, Eric and I collect comics and toy spaceships, my Planet of the Apes DVD set is lodged in a near life-sized Ceasar Bust with combable hair presently wearing a Devo energy dome, so suck it.

I also have graduate degrees in both philosophy and rhetoric, and have been teaching these subjects in university settings for fifteen years. Fandoms are not philosophies: whatever they do they don't do the things that philosophies, properly so called, do.

Talking about science fiction or indulging in futurolgical blue-skying (especially since a futurist is just a science fiction writer who lacks the talent to write science fiction with characterization, plotting, integrated themes, organic social settings -- and believe me, sf isn't exactly the literary genre with the highest bar in these areas) is not philosophizing, it is not doing science, it is not policy analysis, it is not political activism.

I'm not saying it can't be edifying.

I'm not saying it's not worth doing.

I'm saying that none of the things the transhumanists say they are up to when they want to justify their faith that they are a "movement" that is sweeping the world or "serious thinkers" addressing actual problems are things they are actually doing.

Look: It is important that policy-makers address the inequitable and unsustainable distribution of costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change to the diversity of stakeholders to that change. It is important that scientists are educated, funded, supported, regulated to address shared problems. It is important that human beings be taught and encouraged to subject their prejudices to scrutiny, to think what they are doing, and to make sense of their circumstances by means of philosophy, poetry, therapy, religion or what have you. It is important that citizens educate, agitate, and organize to make the world more democratic, more equitable, more consensual, more diverse.

These are all too important to mistake them for things they are not.

Transhumanists have fixated on a handful of imaginary gadgets (and a few real gadgets they care about not so much because of what they are or what they do but because they see them as premonitory stepping stones bolstering their faith in the inevitable and proximate arrival of the imaginary gadgets they are actually fixated on) about which they gather together online and in conferences to handwave and to cheerlead and to enthuse.

Transhumanism is a fandom.

As a general rule, I am rather charmed by fandoms. I am not charmed by frauds, charlatans, advertising, pop psychology, pseudo-science, or know-nothings who fancy themselves avatars of Enlightenment.

On a separate note, however, and by way of conclusion, I will add that not only is transhumanism a fandom and nothing else (well, it is also a fraud because it insists it is something else, and a dangerous fraud because it sometimes succeeds in its bamboozlement to the cost and confusion of the important work of the things it actually isn't but sells itself as), but as fandoms go I have to admit that the transhumanists and singularitarians seem one of the most relentlessly humorless unoriginal tedious fandoms I know of, consisting of even more over-compensating white guys than is already usual among sf-fandoms, and so even as a fandom they kinda sorta, you know, suck.

Atheist, Pervert, Pluralist

Upgraded from my exchange with Jim in the Moot:

Jim wrote: For [C.S.] Lewis, this [anti-materialist] line of argument is simply a way to keep God in the picture.

There's a whole lot of that going on, in my experience.

My own position is rather idiosyncratic because I am a crusty atheist and champion of consensus science on the one hand, but a pluralist about reasonableness on the other, in that I think different criteria warrant as reasonable our judgments about scientific, legal, aesthetic, moral, ethical, political, even more circumscribed professional questions.

Sometimes I sympathize more with the arguments of religious folks (of whom I am not one) against atheists (of whom I am one) who want to be too imperializing about reducing all endeavor and value into terms they fancy to be properly scientific -- a project that seems to me to have nothing to do with science (let alone atheism), properly so-called.

While I don't believe in God I do follow a path of perverse private perfections exploring and appreciating the delights of the world or the pursuit of my own thoughts in ways that are far from entirely justified by the terms that justify and warrant (and rightly so) our beliefs in respect to consensus science where matters of prediction and control are concerned. A reasonable person is not only capacitated but capacious, and this is all good.

When a materialist declares a pragmatist to be relativist you can be sure he is revealing that his is a fundamentalist rather than properly scientific materialism. When a naturalist declares pluralism supernatural you can be sure he is revealing that his science has been commandeered by a reductionist project that has nothing to do with science properly so-called.

On the other hand, I do wish that those who complain about materialism or naturalism or science and then always freight these terms with words like "merely," "simply," "random" and so on [as many do in the examples Jim provides in his exposition in the Moot --d] would be much clearer that it is reductionism and scientism that they really oppose. Opposing these leaves plenty of reasonable conceptions of consensus science, materialism, naturalism cheerfully intact -- and it provides nothing I can see to reassure the faithful in their beliefs in a creator-god or guardian angel or eternal life or a superhuman judge punishing the wicked and rewarding the well-meaning after life as too rarely happens, demoralizingly enough, here on earth.

Rhetoric and Nonviolence

While persuasion is traditionally figured as "an outside" to coercion, or to the violent adjudication of disputes, it is also true that in order for persuasion to do its work its parties must already share or find their way to a shared framework the force of which always forecloses what might otherwise be deemed possible or important, yielding a violence of a different kind in enabling a nonviolence.

I don't think this gives the lie to those who would substitute discourse for violence (that's just a facile relativism), but I do think it means that those devoted to nonviolence have to attend to a kind of traffic between modes of violence.

In testifying to the violence in one register, testimony and even attention to violence of another is comparatively foreclosed. Consider that to open up to debate the "question" of the humanity of a person of color or a queer person is already to dehumanize the person of color or queer person by treating their humanity debatable as a "topic" -- and yet the violence inhering in the closure of that debate is not rendered thereby non-real nor irrelevant, and exacts its own dehumanizing toll. Or consider how many good moral people collaborate every day in propping up evil ethical norms and political institutions just through their under-critical acceptance of some customary attitudes or through their patterns of consumption. To declare such people simply morally "bad" is to refuse the definitive demand of the ethical that it be excessive and the ineradicable price of the political that it remain contingent, it is to fail to grasp the enabling paradox of nonviolent practice that it is at once impossible and necessary.

Slavoj Zizek genuflects at this notion of a traffic between registers of violence in his book on Violence, especially when he points to Brecht's famous quip, "What is the crime of robbing a bank compared with the crime of founding one?"

To digress a moment, I disapprove of the tripartite "objective-subjective-symbolic" schema of violence Zizek then uses to elaborate his helpful hunch into a mousetrap with his usual iconic laconic Lacanic mechanic morsel of cheese. It is only because violences are stabilized into legibility, and hence become obligating, at the cost of destabilizations of other possibilities and importances (violences themselves) that render illegible and ineligible other experiences of and testimonies to violence that Zizek proposes his demarcations at all. But it seems to me he would domesticate the force of this insight and our grasp of its demand by assigning to moments in the costly and heartbreaking (also promising, in a sense that takes us back, as always, to Arendt) dynamic of stabilizations and destabilizations the status of "objective" and "subjective," or to the traffic itself a mechanistic construal of the "symbolic." If you ask me, to fancy that we can definitively or even usefully declare of a testimonial to violence (not only of violation, but of violence) that it is "subjective" or "objective" is to attempt to circumvent the costly, deranging force of obligation for the pleasurable or consoling distractions of philosophy.

It pays to remember that rhetoric, together with the poetry of which it seems to me essentially to be a subgenre, is the classic, indeed inaugural, antagonist of the Western philosophical imaginary. Rhetoric has also, and I believe rightly, seemed especially attuned to the aspiration toward nonviolence. As it happens, this is the connection which drew me to the study and teaching of rhetoric in the first place.

The special relevance of rhetoric to the aspiration of nonviolence does not only derive from the way rhetoric concerns itself with the techniques, occasions, and benefits of persuasion (which have their own troubled affinities with coercion, after all, something that becomes clear enough the moment you meditate on the multiple senses in which we use the word "conviction"). More crucial by far to rhetoric's nonviolent ethos, in my view, is that it has always concerned itself definitively with the relation of literal and figurative language. Indeed, I would insist that it is the prior fixation on the figural that drives rhetoric's concern with persuasion and not vice versa.

Forgive the furious concentration of especially the next six paragraphs -- I am used to devoting hours and even weeks to the elaboration of these ideas in teaching settings:

Figurative language denotes deviations from (or violations of) customary usage that nonetheless make meaning, make sense. These deviations are the "turns" to which the term trope, from tropos, refers. Notice that these turns need not always be exactly spastic, anarchic, however:

The distance between the literal and the figurative is nothing like the ineradicable gulf that separates world and word (true whether the words are taken literally or figurally, and true despite the fact that all words are as worldly as billiard balls, marks and noises making their play in the environment). The distance between the literal comparison of the simile (love is like a rose) and the figural substitution of the metaphor (love is a rose) is a difference of degree that functions, for a time, as a difference of kind. Everything is at once infinitely similar and infinitely different from everything else, and it could be the work of a lifetime to testify to the similarities or differences obtaining between any two events. It is the work of language to organize the interminable play of differences (all always also susceptible to description as similitudes) provisionally into salience, according to whatever quandary in that play of differences they would answer to and answer for: confidence, science; belonging, morals; equity, ethics; reconciliation, politics, and so on.

All the Four Master Tropes of which Burke wrote most provocatively and of which metaphor is the first -- the others are metonymy, synecdoche, irony -- propose associations that are not (yet) literal but are nonetheless governed by relations of contiguity, containment, reversal that have logical and topical as well as these tropological variations (not to mention correlates in the classic Freudian account of the creative unconscious).

If one wants to take the figure of catachresis instead of metaphor as the point of departure through which to grasp the relation of the literal and figural, this presumably provides for a more radical account, since catachresis refers to coinages or outright commandeerings of terminology in the face of novelty, rather than, as with metaphor, substitutions of the figural where literal language is nonetheless available. But we know from Saussure that the circuit of the sign is abstract through and through, the material form of the signifier which becomes the placeholder for the conceptual content of the signified corrals indefinitely many instances of materially distinguishable marks and noises as instead sufficiently similar signifiers no less than the indefinitely many also distinguishable-but-sufficiently-similar referents corralled together conceptually by the signified.

Catachresis re-enacts the arbitrary proposal of a material event as sign, but all figurative language -- and not just the schemic figures like alliteration, chiasmus, onomatopoeia -- foregrounds the materiality that typically must be disavowed for the sign to do its literal work (a material disavowal on which Barthes depends when he proposes in Mythologies that ideology is likewise structured like a language, but disavowing the materiality of history as social struggle in order to naturalize the status quo to the benefit of incumbents). Metaphor, for its part, re-enacts the arbitrary association through which language organizes the play of differences into provisional salience.

Donald Davidson famously observed: "Once upon a time, I suppose, rivers and bottles did not, as they do now, literally have mouths." What it is crucial to understand -- and especially crucial in connection with my specific question here of the special relevance of rhetoric, via its concern with the figurative, to the aspiration to nonviolence, is that these "dead metaphors" can be read as the dying into literality of a once-vital figure, or just as well as the coming into lively literality of a once idiosyncratic figure. If one happens to be paying special attention to the vitality of the poet who calls forth a meaning equal to the novelty and dynamism of material reality through the assertion of the special force of some material event (mark, noise, gesture, image) and manages to make the assertion stick, then one will tend to speak of a dying into literality of vital figurality. But if one happens to be paying special attention instead to the vitality of the scientist or ethician who manages through the public ritual of testing and publication to translate idiosyncratic hunches or parochial intuitions into reasonable and warranted expectations of prediction and control or the equitable and accountable government of "laws and not men," then one will tend to speak of coming into a lively literality of a shaggy figure. What matters to me most of all is the insistence that neither of these perspectives is rightly to be preferred over the other in every instance, that each captures a no-less primordial, indispensable, vital dimension of the agentic work of language.

Nietzsche famously said of truth that it is

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Richard Rorty once chided this statement as apparently self-refuting. Does Nietzsche mean for his own utterance to be taken as a truth or as an illusion, after all? Of course, every good pragmatist knows (and I'm one who defends Rorty as one of the best pragmatists we've had), after James, that truths are only "the good in the way of belief" and I daresay it isn't exactly a stretch to propose that some illusions, certain perspectival effects, are good enough in the way of belief that we might be warranted at once in assigning them the status of the illusory and the true. And hence the worrisome whiff of self-refutation is resolved, no muss no fuss (the concern was always mostly a parlor trick distraction for undergraduate theory-head pricks anyway). While I do think Nietzsche is rather over-dramatic and Romantic in denouncing, apparently, literal truths as "worn out" metaphors here, what has always seemed to me most promising in his formulation is his insistence that this is in army in motion. An mobilized army is one the movements of which are usefully tracked, armies often move messily and unpredictably, they lag sometimes and then launch into a quick-march, they find their way to critical encounters they scarcely planned for as often as they arrive at their imagined destinations, and as often as not they back-peddle, they get stuck, they retreat, they go home, about which more in a moment. To insist too much on Nietzsche's self-referential incoherence is to risk the embarrassment of mistaking a rhetorician for a philosopher and making something of a fool of oneself, not to mention simply making too much methodologically of Nietzsche's temperamental annoyance -- shared with his truest contemporary Oscar Wilde -- with the statisticians and sticks-in-the-mud of the world.

It would be a characteristic gesture of philosophy to valorize one side of literal-figural distinction and then seek to subsume meaning-making under the terms of whichever pole happens to be the preferred one for whatever philosopher is making her separate case. After all, the quintessential gesture of all philosophy is its designation of a First Philosophy, whatever it may be, against which or in terms of which philosophizing will measure all endeavor, including its own philosophizing: Hence while it is customary to point out that philosophy names the "love of wisdom," from philo-, love, and sophia, wisdom, it is important to remember that Plato's inaugural repudiation of rhetoric, sophistry, which constituted the Western philosophical imaginary, was an inaugural repudiation that first re-figured wisdom as "The Way," the One True Knowledge, philosophy as the super-science, the queen of the disciplines, the meta-physics. But the characteristic gesture of rhetoric, to the contrary, would be to attend to the traffic between the literal and the figural, to document the historical vicissitudes through which the figure is literalized, the literal figured, the moribund figural within the literal re-activated, yielding what different vitalities and problems along the way, providing what tools to which we might avail ourselves under what occasions, and so on.

The traffic between modes of violence to which those who would be nonviolent should properly attend -- lest they become uncritical or complacent collaborators in this or that systemic violence playing out elsewhere, whatever the keenness of their efforts to ameliorate this or that violation or injustice here and now, or vice versa -- is of a piece with the traffic between the literal and figurative. Let me be clear about this: my point is not to assign to violence of some particular type the moniker "figurative" and to others "literal" and then offer up an account of mechanisms through which the one is predictably frustrated by attention to the other. As I said in connection to Zizek before, it seems to me these terminological assignments are far less clarifying than they may seem, and indeed function to circumvent or domesticate the excessively costly derangements that often attend actual ethical obligation for the pleasures and consolations of philosophy. The rhetorician knows that there is no final assignment to be made to the word of the status of the literal or the figural -- that army is mobile, recall -- the rhetorician knows the at once enabling and subversive possibility of the other always resonates in the most secure stabilization of the word at one pole or the other for the moment. It is the rhetorician's attunement to the traffic between the different vitalities and demands of the literal and the figurative that affords her the sensitivity to the violence through which other violence becomes susceptible to its necessary redress and that makes rhetoric the space for a hope for nonviolence that it has traditionally and rightly been taken to be, and not, of all thing, its supposed mastery of some one rhetorical method -- Aristotelian, Toulminian, Kingian, Rogerian -- that "masters" violence.

Pragmatism works to dispense with the philosophical fantasy that the universe has a language the terms of which it prefers to be spoken in and the authoritative speakers of which it anoints its worldly Priests (naturally, the philosophers themselves, or scientists, politicians, religious leaders indulging in philosophical salesmanship peddled as science, policy-making, or religion when it is not and always in a quest for control), and pragmatism defends the reasonable confidence inspired by warranted beliefs and the capacitation and capaciousness that follows from reasonable belief. But pragmatism denies certainty or finality to warranted belief and denies supremacy to one mode of reasonable belief over all others whatever their occasion (scientific belief, say, over moral, ethical, political belief), and pragmatism repudiates the philosophical fancy that to deny the first is somehow to call into question the existence of reality or that to deny the second is somehow to embrace relativism or that either denial demands a descent into madness or anarchy. Still profoundly unfinished in my view is the work of pragmatism to grasp that obligation is like any other fact -- a thing made, or done -- and exerts its worldly force, its truth, on us no less tangibly and indispensably, but also no more finally, certainly, or supremely. Until it makes more headway in this effort, until it shrugs off its philosophical vestiges and embraces its rhetorical heritage more fully, it cannot properly contribute as it should to the address of the deepest paradox of nonviolence of all: Namely, that human beings themselves are incarnated poems, and our freedom depends for its intelligibility and force at once both on our legibility within the terms of vocabularies, norms, customs, laws on offer (to be illegible or partially legible to the eye of the law is so often to suffer abjection, humiliation, exploitation, violation, death) as well as on our confounding excessiveness in those terms (to be reduced to the terms of the already-legible is to be rendered an object and not a peer). Like any words making their play in the world, wordy-worldly we must resonate both with literality and figurality if we would be forceful, and if we would be free.

The aspiration to nonviolence must be attentive then not only to the ways in which we risk violence in the necessary work of rendering violence capable of address, but also to the ways in which every address of one who might be the subject or object of violence obligates us to embrace an encounter in which we might be violated in our own selfhood (confounded in our deepest prejudices, beliefs, or desires as we potentially are by any good poem) as the condition of a nonviolence that takes freedom seriously. For me the resources available for this work, and for thinking our way through it, are mostly to be found in the archive of rhetoric, as well as in those works of philosophy and critical theory that come closest to repudiating philosophy for rhetoric (Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and the American Pragmatists).

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

Ah, another seven days have passed! And so I have made my weekly jaunt to the website of the stealth-transhumanist Robot Cult outfit, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Newcomers to IEET may be perplexed to discover that "ethics" are a rather tangential preoccupation there as compared to science fictional blue-skying treated as though it were serious policy deliberation or some kind of philosophical discourse, and also to realize that none of the "technologies" that preoccupy IEET's attention are actually "emerging" in the sense of making any kind of, you know, factual appearance in the world except, again, and more entertainingly, on the pages of science fiction. But even if the imaginary superlative outcomes on which the futurologists of the IEET are fixated with their whole hearts are not emerging, definitely a pattern continues to do so:

This week's verse, same as the first. I can report that this week, of the fifteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there you will find only one that is not a white guy. And it is the same bonkers piece by the same not white guy as last week. I discussed this rather flabbergasting piece by Martine Rothblatt already last week. More generally, you may remember that in the months I've been doing these weekly reports there have never been more than a couple of folks who are not white guys so featured on the IEET website, and usually there are none at all (unless you count cartoons of extraterrestrials and robots of, er, indeterminate race and sex).

So, I'll say it again, like I say it every week: Only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared, peer to peer, are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys. And given these salient facts IEET's endless ongoing parade of techno-transcendentalizing white guys fancying themselves spokesmen for "The Future" is actually an enormously perplexing and problematic thing. Some of the many more problems the transhumanists have in my view are discussed in the six pieces assembled in this Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.

Futurological Splash

I've updated the prefatory comments on the splash pages for the Superlative Summary and the Bioconservative Bestiary, and taken together with a few of my Futurological Brickbats these excerpts provide a summarizing sketch of my anti-futurological critique but also help clarify the distinctions and relations within that general critique between my critiques of superlative futurology as against mainstream corporate-militarist developmental futurism and also between superlative futurology as against supernative futurology (sometimes described in terms of "transhumanism" as against "bioconservatism," so-called).

I write quite a lot here at Amor Mundi about the damaging and deranging impacts of futurological discourses on sensible deliberation about technoscientific change. I focus on the pernicious effects of both the prevailing corporate-militarist futurology of neoliberal global developmentalism and disciplinary bioethics as marketing, policy-making, and ideological discourses, but also the Superlative Futurology championed among the so-called transhumanists, extropians, techno-immortalists, longevity-pill-poppers, cryonicists, digital-utopians, cybernetic-totalists, AI-deadenders, singularitarians, geo-engineers, technofixers, nano-cornucopiasts, and other assorted nuts whom I like to lampoon as "Robot Cultists."

There is considerable overlap between these mainstream and superlative futurological modes, both share a tendency to reductionism conjoined to a (compensatory?) hyperbole bordering on arrant fraud, not to mention an eerie hostility to the materiality of the furniture of the world (whether this takes the form of a preference for financialization over production, or for the digital over the real), the materiality of the mortal vulnerable aging body, the materiality of the brains, vantages, and socialities in which intelligence is incarnated, among many other logical, topical, and tropological continuities.

The characteristic gesture of superlative, as against mainstream, futurological discourses will be the appropriation of worldly concerns -- such as the administration of basic healthcare, education, or security, say -- redirected (in a radically amplified variation on conventional marketing and promotional hyperbole) into a faith-based discourse promising not just the usual quick profits or youthful skin but the promise of a techno-transcendence of human finitude, a personal transcendence modeled in its basic contours and relying for much of its intuitive plausibility on the disavowed theological omnipredicates of a godhood (omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence) translated instead into pseudo-scientific terms (superintelligence, superlongevity, superabundance).

Adherents of superlative futurology across the organizational archipelago of Robot Cult sects are indulging, in essence, in faith-based initiatives. They are infantile wish-fulfillment fantasists who fancy that they will "arrive" at a personally techno-transcedentalizing destination they denominate "The Future." This image of "The Future" is one in which they are invested at the cost of a radically de-politicizing repudiation of the open futurity that inheres in the present by way of the plurality of the stakeholders investing it; and the arrival at this "The Future" is one they hope to accomplish primarily through the fervency of their belief in that "The Future," whatever this fervency forecloses in the way of equity, diversity, or sense. And, being fantastical, the substance of "The Future" is one they experience as a premonition always only in the sub(cult)ural experience of the shared fervency of Belief of their fellow faithful.

"Bioconservative" is a term I use to describe positions that oppose particular medical or other technodevelopmental outcomes in the name of a defense of "the natural" deployed as a moral category. Needless to say, there may be endlessly many good reasons to oppose particular medical or technoscientific outcomes on their merits, apart from bioconservative worries about their "unnaturalness" or our "playing God" (which we surely already did in inventing Him/Her/It/Them). Such opposition on the merits isn't inevitably "bioconservative" or "luddite" by my lights, as far too many futurological cheerleaders would have it. But it is also true that many critiques of the furniture and preoccupations of "technological society" will raise legitimate questions of safety, inequity, misinformation, misplaced priorities commandeered into the service of a larger bioconservative project of anti-democratizing naturalization of incumbent interests and parochial concerns, and it is important to disarticulate these strands in assessing the force of a technodevelopmental critique.

I tend to regard the obvious antagonism between bioconservative and transhumanist advocacy also as a mutually enabling partnership in hyperbole, rather as the antagonism between technophobic and technophilic attitudes masks the pernicious undercriticality toward matters of technodevelopmental social struggle they share and to which they contribute more or less equally, rather as the obvious antagonism between supernative and superlative ideologies yield mirror image retro-futurisms.

Futurity is a register of freedom, "The Future" another prison-house built to confine it. Futurity is the openness in the present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of calculating, contending, and collaborative stakeholders who struggle to make and remake the shared world, peer to peer. Futurity cannot be delineated but only lived, in serial presents attesting always unpredictably to struggle and to expression. "The Future," to the contrary, brandishing the shackle of its definite article, is always described from a parochial present and is always a funhouse mirror reflecting a parochial present back to itself, amplifying its desires and fears, confirming its prejudices, reassuring its Believers that the Key to History is in their hands. To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms.

The speculative fictions and scenarios and games of the futurologists are "speculative" less in the sense of critical thought than in the sense of financial speculation, just as their "futures" are far closer to the ones that get traded on stock exchanges as bundled-risk pseudo-commodities than to the substantial futurity that names the openness in every present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of its stakeholders, peer to peer. Futurologists really have only four stories to tell with which they account for any real or imagined device, technique, or developmental moment: Genesis, Resurrection, Ascension, and Apocalypse. As any evangelist will tell you, that's more than enough to fleece a flock with.

Raised Vulcan Eyebrows and Hopeless Human Hopes

Prologue: Vulcan Wannabe

Kol-Ut-Shan: "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations" -- Vulcan Precept

I've been an sf geek for as long as I can remember. The planet Dune mattered far more to me as a kid than Jeffersonville, Indiana did and the identification I felt with Meg in Madeleine L'Engle's books was like a shard of glass in my chest for a decade (would I find my Calvin?), but few things spoke to me more deeply than Spock in ST re-runs Sunday mornings before I had to go to Mass. Later, in high school I read and loved Middlemarch, War and Peace, Leaves of Grass, To Kill a Mockingbird through a kind of weird Wannabe Vulcan lens.

The ongoing elaboration of Vulcan lifeways and philosophy in subsequent ST series and films has been a triumph in popular sf, proving that the gravity well of the lowest common denominator doesn't have to take everything that seems the least bit original, fine, interesting, or good and sentimentalize it and dumb it down over time into the same insipid vulgar falsified crap as everything else according to some inexplicable inextricable law.

I have heard some people declare that the Vulcans were in some sense inspired by the popularity of the Ayn Rand cult of Might and Magical Thinking Mistaken for Reason, but of course Randroidal market fundamentalism and sociopathy is the farthest imaginable thing from Vulcan good sense and generosity of spirit.

Anyway, I always thought Vulcans were seriously sexy, not to mention also model progressives (part of what makes them so sexy of course), and they certainly always seemed compelling both because they were so worthy of emulation and at once so palpably nonidealized.

Part One: The Vulcan Contradiction

LEO: Doesn't the eye of Heaven mean anything to you? GILDA: Only when it winks. --Noel Coward, Design for Living

Charlie Jane Anders posted a marvelous paean to Vulcan lifeways that really spoke to the Vulcan Wannabe I've nurtured in my breast since I was a kid. The article contains links to Vulcan proverbs and philosophy that can swallow an afternoon. Indeed, contemplating the richness of the literary figure of the Vulcan did more than send me down memory lane. I found myself thinking quite a bit about a particular observation in the Anders piece: "Vulcans have something most made-up races can only dream of: a central contradiction that's ultra-compelling. They're overflowing cauldrons of passion, who have mastered their emotions to such a high degree they appear almost robotic."

The first thing I guess I would want to say is that Vulcans have never appeared robotic to me in the least, indeed they have always spoken to me both in the irony of their dry humor and in the earnestness of their aspiration to radical empathy as exemplars of humanity and humaneness. After all, to be human is far more a quandary than a surety. Who could glimpse that raised eyebrow and doubt that Vulcans have both a head and a heart, and that both are in the right place? I can't do the eyebrow thing myself, but if I may be permitted some artistic license I suspect that my own soul is something like the Emersonian eyeball but with one permanently raised Vulcan eyebrow on top.

Einstein famously declared that "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." I always wished that Spock would have been more fond of that chestnut than Sherlock Holmes' "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" (that an error-prone being with a comparatively brief life-span could be counted upon to eliminate the impossible has always seemed to me a manic and narcissistic cocaine fantasy if ever I heard one). In part because Vulcan characters do say such things from time to time, it is easy to misread Vulcan logic as Leonard McCoy mistakenly tends to do, as an engine of endless delusive rationalizations and deranging repressions, but I agree with Anders' eventual point that Vulcan logic is actually directed to the service of an appreciation and facilitation of life and of diversity which suggests that something is afoot in the Vulcan spiritual practice of logic far more compelling than, say, simply the sublimation of anti-social impulses.

I want to propose three ways in which the Vulcan Contradiction is not compelling so much because it is a fascinating alien spectacle as because it connects us to our own. The first two are familiar and rather quotidian but the third will take me from sf's great gift to me in childhood -- my formative fascination with Vulcans -- to sf's great gift to me in adulthood, Octavia Butler.


The first of these that I would point out is that in my view the ethos of democratization and social justice (both definitively Vulcan notions) demand an ongoing renegotiation in the face of changing circumstances and stakeholder demands between the value of equity and the value of diversity: Lose sight of the democratic value of diversity and the pursuit of equity polices conformity, lose sight of the democratic value of equity and the celebration of diversity justifies and facilitates exploitation. Another way of putting the same point: Provide equity and you can be sure that a diversity of human lifeways and personal perfections will follow, just as problems for and challenges to the provision of equity will follow from the play of that diversity in the world. Many quandaries of Vulcan logic depicted in ST derive from (not to mention respond to) this contradiction, or as I would prefer to put it, this paradoxical dynamic at the heart of the democratic ethos, which makes the Vulcan Contradiction our own (or at any rate that of the best among us, or that of the best within us).

The second thing I would point out is that our personal and collective agency (a word that describes our ability to accomplish ends and make sense of events) demand an ongoing renegotiation in the face of failure, that success is tied to failure far more deeply than the will will ever admit of. Language speaks us quite as profoundly as we speak it, and certainly we did not individually choose to speak the language through which we become individuals who value choosing as we do. "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," wrote John Lennon. We do not choose the circumstances that impinge upon our lives and force the decisions out of which our private perfections emerge: it is not so much that we are obligated by the cry of the drowning man to save his life as that we had no part in putting the drowning man in our path just as we have no power to elude becoming in response to his cry the person who saved him or the person who did not, with all that this decision entails for the one who made it. It is precisely because we respond to the world that we are responsible beings, not because we are signatories to a social contract that establishes terms in the abstract in which we will deal with the world.

Rationality demands that we grasp these ineradicable and enabling conditions, not that we indulge in fantasies of delusive control over a world in which we are thrown and hence can relate to through one another in rational ways. It is precisely because our moral identifications are partial, multiple, and changeable that we are compelled toward the provisional universality of ethics and culture out of the parochial and still indispensable moralizing of belonging and subculture. It is precisely because we are error prone that we undertake a scientific inquiry into the world, and our knowledge that every criterion on the basis of which scientific beliefs are warranted as reasonable is a criterion that has recommended as good in the way of belief a description of the world that has been superseded by another in time does not lead us to repudiate science but to test and to publish ever more widely and intensely. If our prose did not domesticate our fancies into sense we would lack the confident capacitations without which we cannot be free, and if our poetry did not derange our complacencies into suspense we would lack the connection to experience and difference without which we cannot be free either. Rabbi Hillel famously asked "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?"

We do not will that we will be willful, we do not choose the time or the circumstances in which we will choose and so become ourselves, the authors do not own the final meaning of the texts we release into the hearing of the world, the texts we incarnate as selves least of all, the autonomous are not independent from those among whom we rightly assert

ourselves, the capacitated are not invulnerable from the errors against which we rightly strive together, the free are not freed from the humiliation of misunderstanding by the poetry that frees us from the humiliation of meaningless automatism, indeed it is the exposure to the one humiliation that permits our hope of eluding the other. Grasping all this is not to advocate a course in resignation but to understand the conditions under which our glories are won, it is not to embrace irrationalism but to understand the foundations out of which rationality properly emerges.

If Vulcan logic were a facile repression of passion it would not drive its initiates to exploration of the cosmos, nor would it express itself as it does in elaborate rituals of meditation, if Vulcan logic were reductive and instrumental it would not aspire to apprehend "infinite diversity in infinite combinations," if Vulcan logic were lifeless and computational it would not wish others to "live long and prosper," if Vulcan logic rendered its practitioners robotic it would not leave them so regularly "fascinated" "intrigued" and raised-eyebrow bemused. Here, as before (the paradoxes of the Democratic Ethos I mentioned before actually seem to me to derive from these paradoxes of rationality), the Vulcan Contradiction -- or better, the Vulcan negotiation of the constitutive paradoxes of rationality -- provides less an alien spectacle than a glimpse into our own profoundest predicaments and inquiries.

Part Two: The Human Contradiction

Still I sent up my prayer, wondering where it had to go, with heaven full of astronauts and the Lord on death row.--Joni Mitchell, "Same Situation"

In the Star Trek mythos there are few encounters more profound than the first contact between humans and Vulcans, an encounter out of which the multicultural social democratic United Federation of Planets eventually emerged. Contact stories also recur throughout the works of the late Octavia Butler, my favorite science fiction author, most notably in her masterpiece the Xenogenesis Trilogy or Lilith's Brood.

In Xenogenesis the human protagonist Lilith ambivalently collaborates with an immensely powerful alien species that "saves" the human race from the aftermath of nuclear annihilation only to midwife the transformation of humanity into a species that is no longer legibly human but a blending of humanity with the aliens themselves. The spacefaring Oankali are driven to share genes with aliens in this way, a sharing in which both parties are radically transformed. They suggest that to refrain from such sharing is as impossible for them as it would be for a human to perish by holding their breath, an irresistible compulsion that presumably gets them off the hook when we realize that most human beings are far from happy with the sharing the Oankali impose on them and which they view as an effacement of humanity as conclusive as the one humans nearly managed themselves with their reckless exploitation of the environment and violent exploitation and warmaking on one another.

In part what justifies the Oankali's imposition of this transformation on humanity (which they call "trade" despite the fact that it is a trade under circumstances of extreme duress and unequal information -- come to think of it, this is true of most things that get described as trade now isn't it?) is that they see the nuclear suicide of humanity as the necessary and not accidental consequence of what they describe "The Human Contradiction," a basic flaw in human nature, a kind of genetic "original sin" that doesn't so much inescapably memorialize the Fall as inevitably presage the Apocalypse. The inevitably suicidal Human Contradiction is that we are a species at once both intelligent and hierarchical. The applications of our intelligence inevitably express our hierarchical evolutionary legacies rather than successfully providing for their overcoming (the substance of every Ethical project), and eventually intelligence placed in the service of hierarchy destroys the world.

One sometimes gets the impression that the Vulcan logical-pacifist philosophy arose in the "Time of Awakening" through the genius of Surak, struggling to rise above the misery and violence inhering generically in Vulcans' hitherto unmasterable passions, in which case he seems to be a figure meant to condense into a single Vulcan guru the long earthly development of human philosophies of nonviolence and forgiveness by the likes of the Buddha, Jesus, Thoreau, Addams, Einstein, Gandhi, Day, Muste, King, Arendt, Fromm, Merton, Sharpe and others. But the more specific account one finds at Memory Alpha tells a story of the Vulcan overcoming of their Contradiction that connects more closely with Butler's delineation of the Human Contradiction:

As their level of technology improved, the Vulcans eventually reached a point where their violent nature threatened species extinction. (ENT: "Awakening") In an effort to avoid this fate, a Vulcan named Surak developed a new philosophy thereby igniting the Time of Awakening.

"Awakening," then, arose directly as a response to the amplification of destructiveness arising out of technoscientific change. Star Trek's variation on this theme (and of course it is one with many variations in science fiction) is considerably more optimistic than Octavia Butler's: In Xenogenesis humanity needs the deus ex machina of alien invasion to remove the suicidal compulsion inhering in hierarchy amplified by intelligence. This becomes all the more clear if, as I do, one reads the Parable series Butler wrote after Xenogenesis as an effort precisely to afford a vision of an overcoming of the same Human Contradiction, but without a miraculous redemptive alien intervention. In Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents we are offered an account of the early life of Lauren Olamina, a kind of human Surak, the founder of a religious order called "Earthseed" that seeks to inspire the human race into a collective project to facilitate a vast diaspora into outer space as a way of diverting their intelligence from the destructive and self-destructive hierarchical mastery of one another into a constructive collective mastery of the rigors of space.

I find it enormously striking that the effort to tell the story of the first Earthseed colony in space, a novel Butler referred to in interviews as Parable of the Trickster was never written and in fact so stymied her that it essentially silenced her pen for most of the decade before her tragic death silenced her altogether. I say that this is striking, because it would be in this third novel that Butler likely provided some sense of the ways in which the hardships of space exploration provided the cultural and emotional resources out of which humans might overcome their Contradiction without recourse to miraculous intervention. That she couldn't manage this feat is all the more striking when we consider that the Xenogenesis books provide no account of the human colony on Mars created by humans who claimed they could overcome their hierarchical destructiveness through their collective efforts to render Mars habitable, a prelude to the hope fueling the Earthseed faith. It is also interesting that one of Butler's very last stories, "The Book of Martha" returns to the trope of divine intervention (with a uniquely Butlerian twist) to overcome The Human Contradiction. While not literally divine in the way "Martha" proposes to overcome the impasse of human self-destructiveness, it is intriguing to note how often alien encounters stand in for the divine in Butler's stories to do this work as they did on the grandest scale in Xenogenesis (the demanding topiary collectives of "Amnesty" in the human wasteland of neoliberal globalization, the under-fertile insectoid race struggling not to reduce humans merely to hosts in "Bloodchild" -- a story of mutuality in hierarchy that Butler insisted was too often misread as a raced-slavery allegory when it was instead a gendered-pregnancy allegory -- the disease, like the Clayark disease rendering humans aliens to themselves, that at once amplifies while reducing intelligence but also mutates humans into comfortable accommodation to their hierarchical nature in "The Evening, the Morning, and the Night," among others).

At the risk of getting too deep in my own Butler fandom here, I want to point out that these themes are also conspicuous in her earliest books of the Patternist series, in which the human species cleaves in three, one as hosts for an extraterrestrial disease organism that mutates them into alien morphology and intelligence, the second a super powerful race of telepaths brought into order -- and once again rendered comfortable in their hierarchy via a psychic "pattern" -- and the third conventional humans who have eluded infection by the alien disease and also enslavement by the telepaths who call them "mutes." Butler's hardest to find novel Survivor tells, yet again, the story of conventional humans seeking to elude by colonizing space the pathologies of violent hierarchy and amplified intelligence represented by the diseased and telepathic post-humans. This novel is the only work of Butler's that she disowned and refused to allow to be reprinted. It is interesting to note that the hope to overcome human tragedy through the collective struggle of making an alien planet habitable -- a precursor to the Mars colony about which she says so little in Xenogenesis as well as to the abortive effort to write Parable of the Trickster which paralyzed her for years -- is a hope that fails utterly in the book Survivor. It is also rather interesting, considering all the foregoing, that Butler often explained her dissatisfaction with the disowned book by dismissing it as her "Star Trek book."

For me the third way in which the Vulcan Contradiction is at once enormously compelling but far from alien, then, is that it proposes a practice of life-affirming peace-affirming diversity-affirming logic that would actually overcome the Human Contradiction Octavia Butler diagnosed so clearly in a species, our own, whose intelligence is too easily diverted by its hierarchical impulses into violence and self-destruction -- and overcome without recourse to the divine, the miraculous, the alien. While I find the many chapters and variants in Butler's life-long delineation of the human dilemma of hierarchy and intelligence in an epoch of amplified technoscientific capacitation absolutely compelling, I find compelling in a way she never seemed to manage herself the hopeless human hope of the "Star Trek" overcoming offered by the example of the Vulcan raised eyebrow.

Martine Rothblatt's Artificial Imbecillence

In this week's White Guys of "The Future" Report I mentioned that the stealth-Robot Cultists of the IEET are featuring one not-white-guy for a change. Let me add the wee detail that it is Martine Rothblatt who is featured among the usual boys and their usual toys this week. I have had occasion to write about her truly appalling work before in The Imagination of a Robot Cultist, and More Serious Futurology from Robot Cultist Martine Rothblatt.

In this week's contribution Rothblatt asks the burning question: "Would Mindclones Have Rights?" an article beginning with the rather perplexing further question, "What is the path of philosophical and political struggle ahead of us to secure the rights of virtual, uploaded persons?"

Given the ongoing struggle to secure the rights of actual human persons (not to mention at least some nonhuman persons, if you consider Great Apes and Dolphins persons as well, as I do) especially in this historical moment of human trafficking and war crimes and climate refugees and neoliberal precarization one might hope an "activist" so eager to call up the names of "a Frederick Douglass, a Cesar Chavez, a Susan B. Anthony and a Harvey Milk" would direct her attention to real struggles for justice rather than diverting indispensable intelligence and effort into fake struggles on behalf of fictions.

Of course, the plight of "virtual" and especially "uploaded" persons is actually not only not-real -- compared to the all-too-real plights of millions upon millions of actual persons -- but also not-possible.

To say why uploaded persons are not only not-real but not-possible is a very long story, but suffice it to say for now, very briefly, that:

[one] you are not a picture of you; that

[two] intelligence in the world is actually always incarnated in biological bodies; that

[three] even if we grant that it is conceivable that something like intelligence (and even rights) could inhere in other than biological organizations it actually matters that none so far, factually, do; that

[four] intelligence is also always expressed in social and historical dynamisms; that

[five] the word intelligence denotes more dimensions than just "reckoning with consequences" in the manner of a calculator in its actual usages; that

[six] our concepts for the notions of intelligence and rights derive non-negligibly from these biological and social and historical and pluralist facts of the matter, such that to stretch them or reduce them to better accommodate the non-biological could just as conceivably be injurious to the realities these concepts presently name as helpful; that

[seven] efforts to evacuate intelligence of its biological and social and historical and pluralist references in the absence of any actually existing prompts to do so, given the evident defiance of actual sense demanded by this gesture, seems especially unnecessary and perplexing; that

[eight] even were we to set aside all of these objections and propose that otherwise than biological organizations might materialize legible intelligence this provides no reason at all to believe that biologically incarnated intelligences could be transformed or transferred without remainder into otherwise than biological organizations themselves; that

[nine] it should matter, especially to enthusiasts for such notions who declare themselves supremely scientific in their beliefs, that most of the actual plausibility for proposals to "upload" biological intelligence into non-biological substrates derives entirely from the metaphorical rather than literal usage of terms like "translation" or "migration" in these formulations to paint a compelling picture of the desired procedure but offering little in the way of clarity or substance concerning actual mechanisms; that

[ten] it also should matter -- at least to a point -- that so many who declare notions of "virtual" persons plausible or "uploaded" persons compelling do so in ways that also express what would otherwise surely be regarded as an unhealthy disdain for the vulnerability to injury, illness, error and the inevitability of contingency and death connected to biological and historical materializations of human lives, liberties, and lifeways and are no less often connected to what would otherwise surely be regarded as a pathological pining after invulnerability, immortality, certainty, easy money, comic book super powers, and infantile plenitude.

Rothblatt's pre-emptive crusade for the rights of not only non-existing but never-to-exist "mindclones" is a fairly typical futurological misdirection of concern from the urgently real to the altogether unreal (usually offered up in exchange for the payoff of an indulgence in wish-fulfillment fantasy for the many and concrete political advantages for the elite-incumbent few), an instance in which a sub(cult)ural futurist identification with the imaginary post-human plays out most substantially politically as a moralizing dis-identification with the majority of humans with which one is actually sharing and making the world, peer to peer.

It may initially seem paradoxical, but futurological misdirections of public concerns for social justice, moralizing dis-identifications with ones actual peers, radical derangements of the terms of actual policy in the present all usually function in the service of incumbent interests and reactionary politics above all else. Hence, my futurological brickbat that "All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms."

For more of a sense of what I mean by this and how it plays out so often, I would simply point out that futurological "bioethics" discourses about clones and human-animal hybrids seem to me to be surrogate discourses through which racist, sexist, heterosexist, and generational anxieties (among others) are at once expressed and disavowed, so that the substantial force of the anti-clone or anti-chimera discourse seems to me to play out in the company of racist immigration politics and sexist healthcare policy.

Similarly, I consider futurological "geo-engineering" discourses to represent the next chapter of corporate climate change denialism rather than their repudiation, a greenwashing diversion of green concern back into corporate profit-making, a reframing of the long-denied human-caused climate catastrophe into the demand that only those who profited most from environmental destruction can remedy that destruction and that nothing can count as such a remedy that does not, whatever else it may achieve, also keep that profit-making intact.

Even more to the point, at least where Martine Rothblatt's concerns are concerned, I am reminded of the many ways in which Jaron Lanier has pointed out how futurological True Belief in always-arriving-never-arriving "Artificial Intelligence" impacts actual coding practices, yielding user-unfriendly software that mistakenly "corrects" its users' wanted choices and proper spellings out of a misplaced romantic identification on the part of the coders with imaginary AI personages falsely fancied as if in utero, interred within crappy contemporary dumber than a bag of hair software coupled with a dis-identification with the actually existing actually intelligent human users of their products. He has also pointed out the insidious evacuation of much of the richness and contingency and possibility inhering in human historical and cultural change through the ever-wider adoption of "viral" and "memetic/genetic" mis-conceptualizations inspired by facile and reductive anti-biological biases driven by what Lanier calls the Cybernetic Totalist ideology of many coders and, one presumes, a culture that disproportionately valorizes them. Taken together, I like to think of the insensitive, authoritarian, reactionary, and inhumane reductionism and authoritarianism of these "Cybernetic Totalist" gestures of superlative futurology as matters of Artificial Imbecillence, what Lanier describes as Artificial Stupidity.

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

Seven days have passed, and so I have made my weekly jaunt to the website of the stealth-transhumanist Robot Cult outfit, IEET. The acronym, you will recall, stands for "Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies." Contrary to the expectations you might form given that organizational name, however, visitors to IEET will notice that "ethics" are a rather tangential preoccupation there as compared to science fictional blue-skying misconstrued as policy deliberation.

But even if the imaginary superlative outcomes on which the futurologists of the IEET are fixated with their whole hearts are not emerging, definitely a pattern continues to do so:

I can report that this week, of the fifteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there you will find only one that is not a white guy. You may remember that in the months I've been doing these weekly reports there have never been more than a couple of folks who are not white guys so featured on the IEET website, and usually there are none at all.

So, I'll say it again, like I say it every week: Only a minority of people in the world are in fact white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared, peer to peer, are in fact white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are in fact white guys. 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 given these salient facts IEET's endless ongoing parade of techno-transcendentalizing white guys fancying themselves spokesmen for "The Future" is actually an enormously perplexing and problematic thing.

Of course, the public participants of this stealth-Robot Cult outfit have far more problems on their hands than just this weirdly abiding issue of non-representativeness. For more on some of these problems I recommend the six pieces assembled in this Condensed Critique of Transhumanism. But I do continue to think that their apparent inability to take seriously or be taken seriously 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 just a clumsy sanewashing operation for their rather deranged, and certainly deranging, not to mention reactionary, Robot Cult.