This morning only four of the faces of featured authors at the website of the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, so-called, are not those of white guys. Nevertheless, it remains as true as ever, as I have been pointing out week after week for months now, that only a minority of people in the world are white guys, only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared 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, contra R. J. Eskow -- much of whose work I enjoy and have regularly learned from -- I do not think that there is anything the least bit problematic about the fact that I am pointing this out and am a white guy myself -- nor is it strange in the same way that all the posts published in a personal blog by a white guy are by that white guy as it is strange that so much of the discourse of a techno-fixated "movement" claiming to speak for "The Future" of the world fails remotely to represent the diversity of that world, especially when there are so many academics and activists -- in Science and Technology Studies and in the Environmental Justice movement, for instance -- who concern themselves with technodevelopmental questions who both incomparably better and comparatively comfortably represent that diversity.)
Even granting that a couple of the faces at IEET today are in fact the same picture of the same face, four is indeed better than the none or one I have typically ridiculed about the weekly futurological p-rade (the p stands for penis!) these boys-'n-toys proffer as a form of "serious" philosophical and policy discourse. At the same time, as the creators of the ill-favored Uni-Tea Event this afternoon will surely discover to their cost, the ability to produce for a moment the superficial appearance of a diversity you cannot sustain only emphasizes the failure as such.
Were the Robot Cultists at IEET really to manage to engineer for a sustained length of time (as they have not yet done nor do I expect they can do) the appearance of an actual diversity of featured contributors to their site it would certainly rob me of the ability to make fun of them quite so easily as I have done for the last few months on this score, but wouldn't do much to alter what one would still discover in taking a long look at the proportion of white guys who remain identified with their "movement" or whose works are typically recommended to the attention of their members, who contribute money, who function as spokesmen, who remain in positions of leadership in their organizations (of which IEET is, after all, just one in a Robot Cult archipelago of futurological, net-hype, digital-utopian, singularitarian, techno-immortalist, and greenwashing technofixated organizations).
For me, it is just one rather obvious symptom of their marginality that the Robot Cultists remain so strangely and stubbornly non-representative of the diversity of the world and "The Future" of which they fancy themselves to be spokesmodels.
But it is worth noting that even were they able to bamboozle a more diverse crowd into falling for their schtick they would remain in my view an essentially deranged and deranging faith-based sub(cult)ure peddling -- in a super-hyperbolic variation of the fraudulent futurological hyperbole that already suffuses corporate-militarist-consumerist advertising and promotional discourses -- the infantile wish-fulfillment fantasy of transcendence via "technology" (in a facile misconstrual as some generalized autonomous suprahistorical "force") of the actually inescapable contingency and finitude of the human condition.
For more on these larger and in fact decisive problems with the white guys of "The Future" I recommend this Condensed Critique of Transhumanism, and the other pieces archived in my Superlative Summary.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
The Futurological Schtick
One really wonders if the futurological schtick will ever stale for the saucer-eyed consumers on whom it preys...
Will we ever weary of the mainstream futurology of military recruitment ads promising combat-qua-videogames or better-than-evah EZ-pour spouts and herbal male enhancement and anti-aging face cream ads promising easy abundance and eternal youth?
Will we ever disdain the techno-utopian futurology of "serious" think-tank scenarists peddling corporate-militarist triumphalism by asking the same burning questions year after year?
How many years to AI? (only answer that matters now: not)
Is it unethical to clone them or him or her? (only answer that matters now: can't)
How will our economy cope with robot slaves? plastic abundance? digital utopia? energy too cheap to meter? thousand-year lifespans? (only answer that matters now: won't)
Can "geoengineering" solve anthropogenic climate catastrophe? (only answer that matters now: stop!).
Futurology is an advertising genre, and as such is mostly a matter of relentless exaggeration veering not occasionally into outright fraud.
In its mainstream developmentalist variations futurology peddles endless exploitation of the precarious (cheap energy, cheap labor, cheap credit, cheap goods) for the benefit of the privileged as Progress Unto THE FUTURE to fearful and greedy rubes all the while picking their pockets and looting the commons.
In its superlative variations futurology peddles delusive faith-based fantasies of outright transcendence of the human condition, deranging the contingency of our knowledge and error of our ways into fantasies of superintelligence (brute amplifications via neuroceutical pill-popping or shiny cyborg-shells, guidance via parental-angelic Robot Gods), deranging the vulnerability of our dis-ease and distress into fantasies of superlongevity (near-immortalization via scoopage into shiny Robot bodies, or sooper-genetic therapies, or uploading into cyberspatial spirit realms), deranging the demands and promises of stakeholder politics into fantasies of post-political superabundance (robo-slaves, nanofogs, ubicomp, immersive virtualities, edenic asteroids).
In all its variations, whether mainstream or superlative, one discerns in futurological formulations the squalid screaming infantile id of industrial extractive petrochemical broadcast-mediated corporate-militarist consumer capitalism confronted with the substance and prospect of its consummating oblivion into which it would prefer, however avoidable, idiotically to accelerate.
Will we ever weary of the mainstream futurology of military recruitment ads promising combat-qua-videogames or better-than-evah EZ-pour spouts and herbal male enhancement and anti-aging face cream ads promising easy abundance and eternal youth?
Will we ever disdain the techno-utopian futurology of "serious" think-tank scenarists peddling corporate-militarist triumphalism by asking the same burning questions year after year?
How many years to AI? (only answer that matters now: not)
Is it unethical to clone them or him or her? (only answer that matters now: can't)
How will our economy cope with robot slaves? plastic abundance? digital utopia? energy too cheap to meter? thousand-year lifespans? (only answer that matters now: won't)
Can "geoengineering" solve anthropogenic climate catastrophe? (only answer that matters now: stop!).
Futurology is an advertising genre, and as such is mostly a matter of relentless exaggeration veering not occasionally into outright fraud.
In its mainstream developmentalist variations futurology peddles endless exploitation of the precarious (cheap energy, cheap labor, cheap credit, cheap goods) for the benefit of the privileged as Progress Unto THE FUTURE to fearful and greedy rubes all the while picking their pockets and looting the commons.
In its superlative variations futurology peddles delusive faith-based fantasies of outright transcendence of the human condition, deranging the contingency of our knowledge and error of our ways into fantasies of superintelligence (brute amplifications via neuroceutical pill-popping or shiny cyborg-shells, guidance via parental-angelic Robot Gods), deranging the vulnerability of our dis-ease and distress into fantasies of superlongevity (near-immortalization via scoopage into shiny Robot bodies, or sooper-genetic therapies, or uploading into cyberspatial spirit realms), deranging the demands and promises of stakeholder politics into fantasies of post-political superabundance (robo-slaves, nanofogs, ubicomp, immersive virtualities, edenic asteroids).
In all its variations, whether mainstream or superlative, one discerns in futurological formulations the squalid screaming infantile id of industrial extractive petrochemical broadcast-mediated corporate-militarist consumer capitalism confronted with the substance and prospect of its consummating oblivion into which it would prefer, however avoidable, idiotically to accelerate.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
This morning only three of the featured faces of authors at the website of the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, so-called, are not those of white guys. Nevertheless, it remains as true as ever, as I have been pointing out week after week for months now, that only a minority of people in the world are white guys, only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared 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. The failure of these futurological fraudsters -- and I do not use the term fraud lightly, regarding mainstream corporate-militarist futurology as a deceptive and hyperbolic advertising and promotional genre while regarding the superlative futurology of the various Robot Cult sects as further amplifications of this hyperbole into dangerously delusive sub(cult)ures of True Belief promising personal techno-transcendence to the faithful -- to reflect these realities remains a particularly glaring symptom of their derangement from reality more generally (about which I have much more to say, among other places, here).
Saturday, July 17, 2010
"Technology" Is Not a Force for Either Liberation or Oppression
It is people, and only people, acting together, peer to peer, taking up tools and techniques and directing them to liberatory or oppressive ends that are the only force for liberation or oppression that matters in the world.
To speak of "technology" as a force is always a mystification. It is a mystification in the same way that those who declare in the face of some political dilemma that we should "let the market decide" the outcome are always actively forgetting in so saying that what passes as "the market" in any epoch is made up of laws, treaties, customs, expectations embedded in maintained infrastructures all of which are the consequence of human decisions, and so imputing to the result of decisions a capacity for decision that functionally displaces present public responsibility for making a decision onto human decision-makers past or hidden.
Such mystifications disproportionately constrain liberatory possibilities, since it is always to incumbent and secretive elites that agency defaults when present and public agency is disavowed.
This is a point that cannot be made often enough, especially given how regularly techno-utopians and futurologists peddle their mystifications in the stirring cadences of calls to and celebrations of emancipation (in this, as in other things, their close kinship with advertising and self-promotional discourses more generally, is unmistakable).
What we tend to call "technology" in any epoch is always in fact a fraction of what is actually technical or artifactual in the world. As we grow accustomed to our techniques and artifacts we tend to "naturalize" them. We lose track of the artifactuality of our cultivated terrain, the technical expressiveness of our body's gestures and bearing.
To lose track of the made in this way is to lose a thread that might help us make our way through history's labyrinth: to forget what has been made otherwise is fatally to misconstrue what could be made otherwise still.
We tend to assign the moniker "technology" only to that portion of artifice that remains as yet unfamiliar, that seems in its unfamiliarity to be disruptive to our expectations, and in turn in that disruptiveness seems to promise or threaten potency. Nothing is more commonplace than to confine the assignment to the sphere of the "technological" only those events and entities which, in their confused unfamiliarity, might be invested with the most hyperbolic dreams of omnipotence and nightmares of impotence.
My point is not to propose the contrary mystification that technology is somehow "neutral" or "autonomous" but to recognize that the interestedness and embeddedness with which the "technological" inevitably reverberates begins in the assignment always only to some and not all that is susceptible to that designation the "technological." The politics of the "technological" in its most general register is the elaboration of collective agency through the policing of the bounds of what will be taken to be the familiar and the unfamiliar, and so the open and the closed, the possible and the important.
Needless to say, the faux-progressivism of that most paradoxically reactionary of contemporary public discourses, the futurological, (whether in the mainstream futurology of neoliberal developmentalism or in the surreal Robot Cultic extremities of superlative futurology) consists in little more than the exacerbation and exploitation of ignorance and confusion about the state of the art the better to substitute for deliberation about the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific changes to their actual stakeholders in the world a faithful conjuration of superlative futures toward which these changes are presumably nothing in themselves but stepping-stones along a path toward the ultimate techno-magickal transcendence of disease and mortality (super-longevity), error and humiliation (super-intelligence), frustration and compromise (super-abundance), a return to infantile plenitude purchased at the usual cost of the refusal of adult engagement in the open futurity inhering in the present, peer-to-peer.
To invest with the force of the agency which is rightfully ours what has already been arbitrarily assigned the status of the "technological" is always to constrain possibility in the service of incumbency, to peddle the promise of amplified gratifications the better to distract us from the permanent promise of liberation through education, agitation, and organization, in our open and opening present, peer to peer.
To speak of "technology" as a force is always a mystification. It is a mystification in the same way that those who declare in the face of some political dilemma that we should "let the market decide" the outcome are always actively forgetting in so saying that what passes as "the market" in any epoch is made up of laws, treaties, customs, expectations embedded in maintained infrastructures all of which are the consequence of human decisions, and so imputing to the result of decisions a capacity for decision that functionally displaces present public responsibility for making a decision onto human decision-makers past or hidden.
Such mystifications disproportionately constrain liberatory possibilities, since it is always to incumbent and secretive elites that agency defaults when present and public agency is disavowed.
This is a point that cannot be made often enough, especially given how regularly techno-utopians and futurologists peddle their mystifications in the stirring cadences of calls to and celebrations of emancipation (in this, as in other things, their close kinship with advertising and self-promotional discourses more generally, is unmistakable).
What we tend to call "technology" in any epoch is always in fact a fraction of what is actually technical or artifactual in the world. As we grow accustomed to our techniques and artifacts we tend to "naturalize" them. We lose track of the artifactuality of our cultivated terrain, the technical expressiveness of our body's gestures and bearing.
To lose track of the made in this way is to lose a thread that might help us make our way through history's labyrinth: to forget what has been made otherwise is fatally to misconstrue what could be made otherwise still.
We tend to assign the moniker "technology" only to that portion of artifice that remains as yet unfamiliar, that seems in its unfamiliarity to be disruptive to our expectations, and in turn in that disruptiveness seems to promise or threaten potency. Nothing is more commonplace than to confine the assignment to the sphere of the "technological" only those events and entities which, in their confused unfamiliarity, might be invested with the most hyperbolic dreams of omnipotence and nightmares of impotence.
My point is not to propose the contrary mystification that technology is somehow "neutral" or "autonomous" but to recognize that the interestedness and embeddedness with which the "technological" inevitably reverberates begins in the assignment always only to some and not all that is susceptible to that designation the "technological." The politics of the "technological" in its most general register is the elaboration of collective agency through the policing of the bounds of what will be taken to be the familiar and the unfamiliar, and so the open and the closed, the possible and the important.
Needless to say, the faux-progressivism of that most paradoxically reactionary of contemporary public discourses, the futurological, (whether in the mainstream futurology of neoliberal developmentalism or in the surreal Robot Cultic extremities of superlative futurology) consists in little more than the exacerbation and exploitation of ignorance and confusion about the state of the art the better to substitute for deliberation about the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific changes to their actual stakeholders in the world a faithful conjuration of superlative futures toward which these changes are presumably nothing in themselves but stepping-stones along a path toward the ultimate techno-magickal transcendence of disease and mortality (super-longevity), error and humiliation (super-intelligence), frustration and compromise (super-abundance), a return to infantile plenitude purchased at the usual cost of the refusal of adult engagement in the open futurity inhering in the present, peer-to-peer.
To invest with the force of the agency which is rightfully ours what has already been arbitrarily assigned the status of the "technological" is always to constrain possibility in the service of incumbency, to peddle the promise of amplified gratifications the better to distract us from the permanent promise of liberation through education, agitation, and organization, in our open and opening present, peer to peer.
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
Seven days have come and gone, and I have made my way once again to the website of the stealth Robot Cult outfit, IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies to peruse its futurological fulminations.
Although 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 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, nevertheless I can report that of the fifteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there you will find only three that is not a white guy (two direct us to the contributions, such as they are, of the same white lady).
Of course, quite apart from this ongoing non-representativeness of the Robot Cult (even in its most respectable faux-serious think-tank face) there are still endlessly many other weird and wrong things about these boys with their toys deserving of our appalled note, many of which I have written about here.
Although 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 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, nevertheless I can report that of the fifteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there you will find only three that is not a white guy (two direct us to the contributions, such as they are, of the same white lady).
Of course, quite apart from this ongoing non-representativeness of the Robot Cult (even in its most respectable faux-serious think-tank face) there are still endlessly many other weird and wrong things about these boys with their toys deserving of our appalled note, many of which I have written about here.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
It's been seven days, so I ambled my way, as usual, over to the website of the stealth Robot Cult outfit, IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and gave it my weekly looksee.
Although 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 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, nevertheless I can report that of the fifteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there you will find only four that is not a white guy.
I should add, however, after months of keeping tabs on this curious and symptomatic imbalance, that compared to the usual token appearance of at most a single featured person who happens not to be a white guy (not including the occasional artist's conception of robotic, alien, and chimerical personages of comparatively indeterminate race and sex), today's bounty of four out of fifteen is a veritable genuflection to the reality of planetary polyculture past, present, and emerging. And so, I suppose, I should offer my, er, congratulations, boys!
Of course, there are still endlessly many other weird and wrong things about the Robot Cultists deserving of our appalled note, many of which I have written about here.
Although 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 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, nevertheless I can report that of the fifteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there you will find only four that is not a white guy.
I should add, however, after months of keeping tabs on this curious and symptomatic imbalance, that compared to the usual token appearance of at most a single featured person who happens not to be a white guy (not including the occasional artist's conception of robotic, alien, and chimerical personages of comparatively indeterminate race and sex), today's bounty of four out of fifteen is a veritable genuflection to the reality of planetary polyculture past, present, and emerging. And so, I suppose, I should offer my, er, congratulations, boys!
Of course, there are still endlessly many other weird and wrong things about the Robot Cultists deserving of our appalled note, many of which I have written about here.
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
Democracy Is Not Anarchy
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, a response to an interlocutor I suspect wants to launch into a dreary exchange about anarchism:
I want not to smash the state but to democratize it. I am no anarchist, and I have to say that neither is my patience unlimited when it comes to anarchists.
Not to put too fine a point on it, it seems to me that the definitive ideal of democratization, equity-in-diversity, is not attainable in the absence of good government, and unless we create and maintain institutions for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes the permanent possibility of violence inhering in human plurality will prevail.
Given the susceptibility of all states to capture by incumbents and all authorities to rationalization anarchism provides an indispensable vantage for critique, but few resources from which to educate, agitate, and organize the ongoing struggle for democratization, consensualization, and equity-in-diversity.
The red thread of inequity and violence undertaken by tyrannical and corrupt governments is horrible to contemplate and should bolster the resolve of radical democrats, but anarchists just seem to me to throw the baby out with the bathwater or, worse, seem in their assumptions about politics to have remained in the nursery themselves, mistaking hopes for harmony (or, worse, the customary coercions of contract for peace), or declarations of abstract principle for the painful compromised concrete struggles for reconciliation or reform.
In particular, I regard the endless recurrence to fantasies of "spontaneous order" on the part of anarchists -- whether they fancy themselves to inhabit the left or the right or some place "beyond left and right" -- a parade of functional facilitations of oligarchy.
Now, I abhor empire, and it is a deep confusion to identify all government with empire, or to insinuate that those who would struggle to make government of by and for the people more convivial pine after a "good empire" (both of which the commenter did in framing their question in the Moot).
As for why governance now needs to be planetary in scope (this was the topic of the post which occasioned this upgraded exchange from the Moot), as I said, global governance already exists now, but in authoritarian corporate-militarist forms, and it is the struggle of our living generation to democratize this existing global governance in the interests of sustainability and fairness not to invent some planetary government ab initio and as some kind of end-in-itself.
Our environmental problems are planetary in character and the nation-state system is manifestly inadequate to cope with them (thus threatening us all with literal destruction) while at one and the same time the public realm has been likewise rendered planetary through p2p-media formations that are the register in which contemporary citizenship makes its play. The planetary character of our problems, of the emerging terrain of political agency, and even of existing institutions are already before us, the work is to democratize them else be enslaved or destroyed by them.
As for the more basic questions posed about the presumed dispensability of political life as such: Human plurality is palpable, as is our interdependency with one another, peer-to-peer, and our shared indebtedness to the archive of history's accomplishments and troubles are all facts of life. That we are obligated by the voices of those with whom we share the world is no less true when we deny it or rationalize it away. Equity, diversity, consent are fragile but indispensable to human flourishing and must be accomplished through civitas. Until these fundamentals are grasped one cannot expect to talk sensibly for long about politic matters.
Please don't expect to draw me into a politics 101 discussion with an online libertopian of the right or the left, if either you may be, or any such nonsense -- I have learned the hard way that it's a waste of my time and to little purpose.
I want not to smash the state but to democratize it. I am no anarchist, and I have to say that neither is my patience unlimited when it comes to anarchists.
Not to put too fine a point on it, it seems to me that the definitive ideal of democratization, equity-in-diversity, is not attainable in the absence of good government, and unless we create and maintain institutions for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes the permanent possibility of violence inhering in human plurality will prevail.
Given the susceptibility of all states to capture by incumbents and all authorities to rationalization anarchism provides an indispensable vantage for critique, but few resources from which to educate, agitate, and organize the ongoing struggle for democratization, consensualization, and equity-in-diversity.
The red thread of inequity and violence undertaken by tyrannical and corrupt governments is horrible to contemplate and should bolster the resolve of radical democrats, but anarchists just seem to me to throw the baby out with the bathwater or, worse, seem in their assumptions about politics to have remained in the nursery themselves, mistaking hopes for harmony (or, worse, the customary coercions of contract for peace), or declarations of abstract principle for the painful compromised concrete struggles for reconciliation or reform.
In particular, I regard the endless recurrence to fantasies of "spontaneous order" on the part of anarchists -- whether they fancy themselves to inhabit the left or the right or some place "beyond left and right" -- a parade of functional facilitations of oligarchy.
Now, I abhor empire, and it is a deep confusion to identify all government with empire, or to insinuate that those who would struggle to make government of by and for the people more convivial pine after a "good empire" (both of which the commenter did in framing their question in the Moot).
As for why governance now needs to be planetary in scope (this was the topic of the post which occasioned this upgraded exchange from the Moot), as I said, global governance already exists now, but in authoritarian corporate-militarist forms, and it is the struggle of our living generation to democratize this existing global governance in the interests of sustainability and fairness not to invent some planetary government ab initio and as some kind of end-in-itself.
Our environmental problems are planetary in character and the nation-state system is manifestly inadequate to cope with them (thus threatening us all with literal destruction) while at one and the same time the public realm has been likewise rendered planetary through p2p-media formations that are the register in which contemporary citizenship makes its play. The planetary character of our problems, of the emerging terrain of political agency, and even of existing institutions are already before us, the work is to democratize them else be enslaved or destroyed by them.
As for the more basic questions posed about the presumed dispensability of political life as such: Human plurality is palpable, as is our interdependency with one another, peer-to-peer, and our shared indebtedness to the archive of history's accomplishments and troubles are all facts of life. That we are obligated by the voices of those with whom we share the world is no less true when we deny it or rationalize it away. Equity, diversity, consent are fragile but indispensable to human flourishing and must be accomplished through civitas. Until these fundamentals are grasped one cannot expect to talk sensibly for long about politic matters.
Please don't expect to draw me into a politics 101 discussion with an online libertopian of the right or the left, if either you may be, or any such nonsense -- I have learned the hard way that it's a waste of my time and to little purpose.
Saturday, July 03, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
It has been seven days, and so I have strolled, as usual, over to the website of the Robot Cult outfit, IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and had a look around.
And again, as usual, although 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 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, nevertheless I can report that of the fifteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there you will find only one that is not a white guy.
This is still as weird and wrong as it was when I reported it in weeks and months prior to this one. Of course, there are endlessly many other weird and wrong things to say about the Robot Cultists, many of which I have written about here).
I should add that the one not white guy featured over at IEET at the moment is, as the featured not white guy so regularly tends to be, Martine Rothblatt, about whom I have written here before, for example here and here and here, and about whom I mean to say more in a moment.
And again, as usual, although 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 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, nevertheless I can report that of the fifteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there you will find only one that is not a white guy.
This is still as weird and wrong as it was when I reported it in weeks and months prior to this one. Of course, there are endlessly many other weird and wrong things to say about the Robot Cultists, many of which I have written about here).
I should add that the one not white guy featured over at IEET at the moment is, as the featured not white guy so regularly tends to be, Martine Rothblatt, about whom I have written here before, for example here and here and here, and about whom I mean to say more in a moment.
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