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

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.