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.
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6 comments:
If a robot cult exists in the transhumanist movement, I've yet to encounter it. Your mind-numbing repetition of the term makes me question your good faith. While you rightfully point out largely unexamined racial and gender privilege within the scene, you don't meaningfully connection this to white or male supremacy. How does transhumanism support these oppressions? Merely stressing the whiteness and maleness of the bunch does not make a compelling argument.
As you declare yourself a technoprogressive, I'm confused by the vitriol for IEET. Of all the folks to call robot cultists, why pick them?
We appear to be closer politically than I am to the majority of mainstream transhumanists, but your fierce attacks on what amounts to informed dreaming confuse and offend me. Utopianism has a venerable tradition in radical social struggle.
If a robot cult exists in the transhumanist movement, I've yet to encounter it.
That does not speak well of your perceptions, I am afraid. What I derisively term "The Robot Cult" and the transhumanist movement are one in the same -- to the extent that one's futurology is superlative and gives rise to politics in the form of a sub(cult)ural movement formation and would-be identity politics, it takes on the cultic coloration I deride. Read the Condensed Critique of Transhumanism for an abbreviated case, if you are interested in my view of the matter.
Your mind-numbing repetition of the term makes me question your good faith.
Because I repeatedly expose the fact that few but white guys participate in superlative futurology and draw from this exposure each time the same conclusion that this is a symptom of a deeply problematic disconnect... this seems to you an indication of my bad faith? You'll forgive me if your conclusion makes no sense to me at all. Let me add that I regard my weekly "White Guys of 'The Future' Reports" as exposes that draw attention to a problem and symptomize deeper problems, and that is their value to me. For deeper analyses and critiques I always direct people's attention to the material in the Superlative Summary and elsewhere.
you declare yourself a technoprogressive
It is true that I am a reasonably technoscientifically-literate person very interested in the politics of technodevelopment from a secular consensual democratic political vantage. I once used the term "technoprogressive" as a short-hand tag to name this vantage. The term has been appropriated by some transhumanists as a way to peddle their Robot Cult to the credulous and I have disavowed the term in consequence. I say more about that here, if the topic interests you. By the way, if, as you say, you sympathize with the thrust of my politics, I daresay you will find that the scholars and activists connected with Science and Technology Studies as well as Environmental Justice Critique have incomparably more useful things to say to you than silly Robot Cultists do.
I focus on IEET above other, even more flabbergastingly facile and absurd organized islands in the Robot Cult archipelago precisely because they are making the best efforts to peddle their wares to mainstream and respectable audiences and hence are the most dangerous in my view. They are, as it were, the American Enterprise Institute to SIAI's Family Research Council.
your fierce attacks on what amounts to informed dreaming confuse and offend me
I am happy to address your confusion, but for the ways my critique offends you I daresay you will need to turn your attentions to a therapist. I'm an sf geek who has devoted no small part of my own life to highly edifying bouts of informed dreaming as you call it and have no quarrel with it at all. I disapprove of those who would confuse sensawunda and wish-fulfillment fantasizing for actual consensus science or serious policy deliberation, especially when it functions to derange that policy deliberation at the worst possible moment and to the preferential benefit, as a structural matter, of incumbent and authoritarian interests.
As for utopia and dystopia -- I will admit that I personally find them overrated as compared with idealistic incrementalist and reformist social struggle in the present, peer to peer, in the service of more equity, more consent, more democracy, and more diversity. Your mileage may vary, that particular difference doesn't exercise me too much, as compared with some of the other points you've made here. Best to you.
Regarding the IEET: that particular organization (or club or whatever it's identifying as these days) rates for me as one of the biggest disappointments I've witnessed since I started writing about stuff I cared about on the Internet.
In some ways I sort of wish the project that the IEET wants to resemble actually did exist, because I do rather like the notion of a kind of article-aggregator for writing pertaining to interesting technological and social issues, both present and speculative. But in the meantime I have been much happier just identifying and linking to and reading regularly the many very interesting blogs of numerous individuals who've an interest in issues I follow, without any sort of group affiliation necessarily existing between these blogs.
So while I obviously can't speak for Dale (he does that fine on his own) I can say that the impression I got while writing for the IEET as an "intern" was that it very often tended to say one thing but do another in practice. Moreover its primary writers tended to be very self- and ingroup-referential, and there was this definite sense of "WE are the modern embodiment of the Enlightenment!" that seemed oddly incongruous with the frankly reactionary-on-occasion content of what was published there.
Of course I am not saying the IEET has never published anything worthwhile; even now I would call its output a very mixed bag. But overall I think their standards are too low and too loose and too heavily based on who is friends with who, and on establishing a kind of hype-engine for people aspiring toward Famous Internet Writerdom and the like.
I was offered a lot of what I now recognize to be "small-pond prestige" when I was involved with the IEET, and while I am sure the folks offering it were more or less "sincere" there was just something very "off" about the whole situation from my perspective. I mean yes it's "nice" to offer me additional opportunities to publish my writing, but it kind of falls flat when at the same time I am being told that people with my neurotype (autistic spectrum) need to be "prevented" because we don't care enough about other people to make worthwhile citizens. Gah.
What I derisively term "The Robot Cult" and the transhumanist movement are one in the same -- to the extent that one's futurology is superlative and gives rise to politics in the form of a sub(cult)ural movement formation and would-be identity politics, it takes on the cultic coloration I deride.
I believe you must be working with a different definition of "cult" than I am. Subcultural movements and identity politics have only distant connections to strictly hierarchical and controlling religious groups. I mean, would you call my queer anarchist comrades and I the Unicorn Cult? (Come to think of it, that actually sounds pretty awesome.)
I am happy to address your confusion, but for the ways my critique offends you I daresay you will need to turn your attentions to a therapist.
Says the person obsessed with imaginary robot cults!
I disapprove of those who would confuse sensawunda and wish-fulfillment fantasizing for actual consensus science or serious policy deliberation, especially when it functions to derange that policy deliberation at the worst possible moment and to the preferential benefit, as a structural matter, of incumbent and authoritarian interests.
This last bit is what interests me. I stand by Kurzweil with regards to dreaming and don't imagine that changing; simultaneously I'll happily criticize him as a member of the oppressor class. I want to see more meaningful economic and political deconstruction of the movement.
Your mileage may vary, that particular difference doesn't exercise me too much, as compared with some of the other points you've made here.
I will admit to the traditional anarchist distaste for reformist measures, though in practice I often support them.
Of course I am not saying the IEET has never published anything worthwhile; even now I would call its output a very mixed bag.
I'm fond of James Hughes for his articles on philosophy. It's sad that he has to go to that trouble to convince transhumanists that reason alone can't make value claims and that many still disagree, but such is life.
I mean yes it's "nice" to offer me additional opportunities to publish my writing, but it kind of falls flat when at the same time I am being told that people with my neurotype (autistic spectrum) need to be "prevented" because we don't care enough about other people to make worthwhile citizens.
Yikes.
I cheerfully concede that not all transhumanist-identified individuals and organizations would be properly designated as cult members or cult organizations according to strict definitions by social scientists or psychologists or what have you. The technical term I use to describe the phenomenon in question is superlative futurology. When I refer to the Robot Cult archipelago, or the Ayn Raelians, or the futurological congress, or the soopergenius boys-n'-boys, or the humanityplustrons, or the nanosantologists, or the nanocornucopiasts, or the GOFAI-dead-enders, or the hypenotized, or the futurological bamboozlers, or the libertechians, or what have you, you should know that I am just ridiculing the ridiculous rather than claiming to have identified by name actually existing secretive techno-fetishistic sects or parties or what have you. On a similar note, when I call a person an asshole, I know that the person in question consists of more than just an asshole, even if in ridiculing them I fail to draw attention to that fact. Embedded within the sprawling archive of the Superlative Summary are plenty of explanations as to why the defensive and marginal subcultural formations associated with superlative futurology regularly have taken on, in my view, as I have said, a cultic coloration, a tendency toward authoritarian priestly-guru hierarchies, a skewed sense of topics worthy of consideration taken on faith, a sense of identity based on a shared vision of "the future" at the expense of an active dis-identification with the open-futurity inhering in the present, an identification with parochially conceived post-humanity at the expense of an active dis-identification with the plurality of flourishing humanity and human lifeways, not to mention a discourse indebted at many points to straightforward translations into superficially material terms of theological tropes and aspirations (for more, again, read the Condensed Critique of Transhumanism).
Says the person obsessed with imaginary robot cults!
Nice try. I point to the errors and dangers of a discourse and the organizations associated with that discourse and for reasons I make fully available for public scrutiny. Trying to smear anybody who pays uncongenial attention to your ideas as an obsessed freak (a classic tactic of cults faced with insistent criticism) does little to ameliorate the whiff of the cultic that already attaches to your little futurological cul-de-sac, guy.
Your mind-numbingly persistent effort to associate transhumanism with the vilest manifestation of authoritarian religion is neither humorous nor ethical. It's equivalent to how opponents label global warming as a religion and suggests bad faith.
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