This morning only a single one 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, is not the face of a white guy.
And, yet, nothing could be more obvious than 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 relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week, month after month over at IEET (the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the Robot Cult archipelago) is, for me, just one of the more obvious symptoms -- one among many others -- of the utter marginality of the motley techno-utopian futurologists -- transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, greenwashing geo-engineers, and Ayn Raelian "extropians" -- corralled kookily together there, whatever attention they manage to garner in mainstream media outlets or among corporate-militarist funders with their over-dramatic over-simplified over-selling derangements of actually urgent technoscience and global development issues. For analysis of more glaring problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Hole Earth
My friend Michel Bauwens has kindly directed the attention of his readers at the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives to a critique of Stewart Brand I wrote back in January. The piece had long seemed to me unsatisfactory -- I wrote it in a state of extreme annoyance at some glib article I had read, and the writing was more unwieldy and impetuous even than usual -- but I also kept coming back to it myself, thinking that it contained the kernel of a more sustained treatment of what for me is a pretty characteristic theme, namely, the clash between futurological and ecological thinking. I revised the three part piece in something of a panic at the thought of the earlier version being read by lots of people, and the three revised texts are available here:
I welcome comments and criticisms, especially now. As I have mentioned before, I have reduced my teaching load for the upcoming academic year from four to two courses a term in order to give myself time for serious writing. I have been teaching twelve courses a year (including summer intensives) since I received my PhD, and this has left me little time for serious writing and research, only time for the more impressionistic sort of writing I do here on my blog. I think my first writing project will be to make something out of the ideas in the collection of posts under the heading Futurology Against Ecology (which is where you can also find all the Anti-"Geo-Engineering" posts of the last few weeks), of which the revised "Hole Earth" critique of Brand's futurology is a key part.
one -- Stewart Brand, King of Pop Futurology
two -- Surveying Stewart Brand's Greenback-Green Futurological Litany
three -- All Futurisms Tend to be Functionally Retro-Futuristic in Their Political Substance.
I welcome comments and criticisms, especially now. As I have mentioned before, I have reduced my teaching load for the upcoming academic year from four to two courses a term in order to give myself time for serious writing. I have been teaching twelve courses a year (including summer intensives) since I received my PhD, and this has left me little time for serious writing and research, only time for the more impressionistic sort of writing I do here on my blog. I think my first writing project will be to make something out of the ideas in the collection of posts under the heading Futurology Against Ecology (which is where you can also find all the Anti-"Geo-Engineering" posts of the last few weeks), of which the revised "Hole Earth" critique of Brand's futurology is a key part.
Monday, August 23, 2010
p2p-Democratization
Whenever "consent" arises from misinformation or duress it is in my view vacuous, a rationale for exploitation and abuse. The scene of consent is rendered substantial by formal legal-citizenship-status, equal recourse to the law, access to collective bargaining, access to education and reliable information, access to social services, healthcare, housing, income. Declaring market outcomes "consensual" by fiat, whatever the terms of misinformation and inequity that may duress them in fact, as market libertarians tend to do, scarcely does justice to the notion of consent in my view.
The planetary precariat -- illegal immigrants, temporary and informal workers, insecure indebted citizens in neoliberal post-welfare states, dwellers in peri-urban slums and refugee camps are profoundly limited in their capacity to engage in acts of consent.
The struggles for democratization (ensuring that ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them) and for consensualization (ensuring that the scene of consent is ever more informed and nonduressed) together drive the interminable struggle for equity-in-diversity on which the figure of the peer, the planetary successor to the nation-state's citizen-subject in my view, depends for her legibility and force in the world.
What I am stressing is that the political legitimacy of the democratic state -- that is to say, the normative-institutional order that justifies its existence by reference to the standard of equity-in-diversity, by providing nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes (including, crucially, disputes as to what qualifies as violence in the first place) and by providing for a legible scene of reliably informed, nonduressed consent (by means of a suite of legal and welfare administration) -- derives from a profoundly different set of standards than the ones that are typically discussed by p2p-new media theorists, even the ones who focus on questions of governance and impacts of digital networks on state institutions.
I regard as indispensable, say, Clay Shirky's discussion of the way digital networks have flooded subcultures with suboptimal but satisfactory free content and so undermined the gatekeeper-credentializing role through which capital has rationalized hitherto its role as censor, or his discussion of the way digital networks have flooded organizations with amateur innovation and so undermined the investment in professionalism through which capital has rationalized hitherto its central-hierarchical control of institutions. However, I disapprove the way in which such insights are taken up and glibly misapplied via spontaneist-anarchist-market libertarian figurations to political phenomena.
Take the first insight. Subculture is a moral concept (moral, from mores, yields an identification that depends on dis-identification with a constitutive outside for sense, the "they" excluded from the moral "we"), whereas culture is an ethical concept (ethics, from ethos, yields a formal-universality that solicits identification putatively indifferent to differences, substantiated against the grain of moral intuitions, via strategic recourse to, say, posterity, the good opinion of mankind, government of laws and not men, the principle of nonviolence, universal declarations of human rights, and the like): And hence the emancipatory undermining of gatekeeper-censors standing between people and their subcultural enjoyments and parasitically skimming rents for the privilege is a desirable state of affairs. However, it cannot scale from subculture to culture to provide a route through which to "smash the state" tasked with maintaining a democratically accountable rule of law or administering the services on which a legible scene of consent depends. It is usually only a prior investment in the false and facile figure of spontaneous order that provokes such misreadings in the first place.
Similarly, take the second insight. The maintenance of the legal order and administration of services on which the scene of consent depends in democratically-identified societies is legitimated by recourse to equity-in-diversity and not simply to profitability: And hence the emancipatory undermining of investor-professionals limiting consumers in their affordable enjoyments in order to profitably maintain the unwieldy organizations through which such goods are provided is a desirable state of affairs. However, it cannot extend to those governmental organization tasked with establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for common defense, and promoting general welfare not competitively but for all, not in order to return a profit but by the consent of the governed.
Given the vulnerability to abuse that obviously inheres in the investment of any parochial worldly actors or institutions with ethical mandates, endlessly many institutional experiments have been devised to ameliorate these risks, from horizontal separation of powers and vertical subsidiarity, to jury trials, to declarations of inviolable rights, to extensions of the franchise, to extensions of welfare entitlements, to subsidization of citizen participation in government.
I regard the p2p-democratization of broadcast-media, of political parties and of organized labor as extraordinary and encouraging developments, but it is important not to misread these developments as providing a route through which eventually "to smash the state," rather than as experiments like the preceding, to ameliorate vulnerabilities to worldly corruption and abuse inhering in the formal universality of the State, by further democratizing participation in that State and by rendering the State ever more accountable to the substantial consent of the governed. Like the widening of the franchise, like the expansion of access to reliable knowledge and welfare entitlements to better ensure the scene of consent is more informed and less duressed, like the rendering of organized labor and political parties more responsive to their members, none of these efforts are properly understood as a shrinking or limiting of the state but a strengthening of the democratic state of, by, and for the people. These struggles, and the work of p2p-democratization is of a piece with these, indeed p2p-democratization is indispensable to some of these very struggles themselves, is work to democratize the state, not in the least to smash it.
If the rights of minorities can be denied by the vote of a majority, there are no rights. If individuals can consent to violation or enslavement there is no consent. If functionaries can lie or mislead with impunity there is no possibility of contract, promise, or forgiveness. Equity-in-diversity legitimates governments which derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, whereas profitability under conditions of competition simply yields optimal instrumental outcomes. This is not to denigrate improvements arising from competition but just to insist on the actually substantial difference in kind between ethical categories like justice and legitimacy as against categories like profitability, competitiveness, optimization, to insist on the difference in kind between freedom as against the amplification of instrumental capacitation.
Education, agitation, and organization facilitated by p2p-formations are efforts to reform and better administer the apparatus of the democratic state, not intimations of "spontaneous order" except for those who have a prior investment in such figures.
I propose these formulations to encourage a more useful discussion in this moment, one that does not re-enact the usual joyless ritual of arguments with market libertarians who believe it is wholesome to let "markets decide" outcomes despite the fact that markets are artifacts whose historical forms are determined by human decisions, not trans-historical tidal forces of supply and demand which, alas, radically under-determine the contingent legal structure of commerce and production from polity to polity, from epoch to epoch, nor by primordial predilections for barter elevated to the neglect of no less primordial predilections to mutual-aid, fair-dealing, and sharing.
I propose that finding our way to a better understanding of the civitas without which we cannot find our way to justice nor experience true freedom, as well as the possibilities inhering in emerging p2p-formations for the facilitation and frustration of that civitas is a useful thing for at least some of us to be doing right about now, especially those of us whose temperament and training lends itself to this sort of thing.
The planetary precariat -- illegal immigrants, temporary and informal workers, insecure indebted citizens in neoliberal post-welfare states, dwellers in peri-urban slums and refugee camps are profoundly limited in their capacity to engage in acts of consent.
The struggles for democratization (ensuring that ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them) and for consensualization (ensuring that the scene of consent is ever more informed and nonduressed) together drive the interminable struggle for equity-in-diversity on which the figure of the peer, the planetary successor to the nation-state's citizen-subject in my view, depends for her legibility and force in the world.
What I am stressing is that the political legitimacy of the democratic state -- that is to say, the normative-institutional order that justifies its existence by reference to the standard of equity-in-diversity, by providing nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes (including, crucially, disputes as to what qualifies as violence in the first place) and by providing for a legible scene of reliably informed, nonduressed consent (by means of a suite of legal and welfare administration) -- derives from a profoundly different set of standards than the ones that are typically discussed by p2p-new media theorists, even the ones who focus on questions of governance and impacts of digital networks on state institutions.
I regard as indispensable, say, Clay Shirky's discussion of the way digital networks have flooded subcultures with suboptimal but satisfactory free content and so undermined the gatekeeper-credentializing role through which capital has rationalized hitherto its role as censor, or his discussion of the way digital networks have flooded organizations with amateur innovation and so undermined the investment in professionalism through which capital has rationalized hitherto its central-hierarchical control of institutions. However, I disapprove the way in which such insights are taken up and glibly misapplied via spontaneist-anarchist-market libertarian figurations to political phenomena.
Take the first insight. Subculture is a moral concept (moral, from mores, yields an identification that depends on dis-identification with a constitutive outside for sense, the "they" excluded from the moral "we"), whereas culture is an ethical concept (ethics, from ethos, yields a formal-universality that solicits identification putatively indifferent to differences, substantiated against the grain of moral intuitions, via strategic recourse to, say, posterity, the good opinion of mankind, government of laws and not men, the principle of nonviolence, universal declarations of human rights, and the like): And hence the emancipatory undermining of gatekeeper-censors standing between people and their subcultural enjoyments and parasitically skimming rents for the privilege is a desirable state of affairs. However, it cannot scale from subculture to culture to provide a route through which to "smash the state" tasked with maintaining a democratically accountable rule of law or administering the services on which a legible scene of consent depends. It is usually only a prior investment in the false and facile figure of spontaneous order that provokes such misreadings in the first place.
Similarly, take the second insight. The maintenance of the legal order and administration of services on which the scene of consent depends in democratically-identified societies is legitimated by recourse to equity-in-diversity and not simply to profitability: And hence the emancipatory undermining of investor-professionals limiting consumers in their affordable enjoyments in order to profitably maintain the unwieldy organizations through which such goods are provided is a desirable state of affairs. However, it cannot extend to those governmental organization tasked with establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for common defense, and promoting general welfare not competitively but for all, not in order to return a profit but by the consent of the governed.
Given the vulnerability to abuse that obviously inheres in the investment of any parochial worldly actors or institutions with ethical mandates, endlessly many institutional experiments have been devised to ameliorate these risks, from horizontal separation of powers and vertical subsidiarity, to jury trials, to declarations of inviolable rights, to extensions of the franchise, to extensions of welfare entitlements, to subsidization of citizen participation in government.
I regard the p2p-democratization of broadcast-media, of political parties and of organized labor as extraordinary and encouraging developments, but it is important not to misread these developments as providing a route through which eventually "to smash the state," rather than as experiments like the preceding, to ameliorate vulnerabilities to worldly corruption and abuse inhering in the formal universality of the State, by further democratizing participation in that State and by rendering the State ever more accountable to the substantial consent of the governed. Like the widening of the franchise, like the expansion of access to reliable knowledge and welfare entitlements to better ensure the scene of consent is more informed and less duressed, like the rendering of organized labor and political parties more responsive to their members, none of these efforts are properly understood as a shrinking or limiting of the state but a strengthening of the democratic state of, by, and for the people. These struggles, and the work of p2p-democratization is of a piece with these, indeed p2p-democratization is indispensable to some of these very struggles themselves, is work to democratize the state, not in the least to smash it.
If the rights of minorities can be denied by the vote of a majority, there are no rights. If individuals can consent to violation or enslavement there is no consent. If functionaries can lie or mislead with impunity there is no possibility of contract, promise, or forgiveness. Equity-in-diversity legitimates governments which derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, whereas profitability under conditions of competition simply yields optimal instrumental outcomes. This is not to denigrate improvements arising from competition but just to insist on the actually substantial difference in kind between ethical categories like justice and legitimacy as against categories like profitability, competitiveness, optimization, to insist on the difference in kind between freedom as against the amplification of instrumental capacitation.
Education, agitation, and organization facilitated by p2p-formations are efforts to reform and better administer the apparatus of the democratic state, not intimations of "spontaneous order" except for those who have a prior investment in such figures.
I propose these formulations to encourage a more useful discussion in this moment, one that does not re-enact the usual joyless ritual of arguments with market libertarians who believe it is wholesome to let "markets decide" outcomes despite the fact that markets are artifacts whose historical forms are determined by human decisions, not trans-historical tidal forces of supply and demand which, alas, radically under-determine the contingent legal structure of commerce and production from polity to polity, from epoch to epoch, nor by primordial predilections for barter elevated to the neglect of no less primordial predilections to mutual-aid, fair-dealing, and sharing.
I propose that finding our way to a better understanding of the civitas without which we cannot find our way to justice nor experience true freedom, as well as the possibilities inhering in emerging p2p-formations for the facilitation and frustration of that civitas is a useful thing for at least some of us to be doing right about now, especially those of us whose temperament and training lends itself to this sort of thing.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
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.
That's twice as many as last week, but still ridiculous, since -- as I have been pointing out every single week for months now -- after all, 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 relentless non-representativeness I keep documenting over at IEET is, for me, just one rather obvious symptom among many others of the marginality of the motley assortment of Robot Cultists -- transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, greenwashing geo-engineers, and Ayn Raelian "extropians" -- corralled kookily together there. For analysis of more glaring problems with the White Guys of "The Future" I recommend my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
That's twice as many as last week, but still ridiculous, since -- as I have been pointing out every single week for months now -- after all, 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 relentless non-representativeness I keep documenting over at IEET is, for me, just one rather obvious symptom among many others of the marginality of the motley assortment of Robot Cultists -- transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, greenwashing geo-engineers, and Ayn Raelian "extropians" -- corralled kookily together there. For analysis of more glaring problems with the White Guys of "The Future" I recommend my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Friday, August 20, 2010
"Geo-Engineering" and the "Ticking Time-Bomb"
I have highlighted what seems to me to be a curious incoherence in the very concept of "geo-engineering." The criteria for inclusion within and exclusion from the category don't seem to me to stand up to scrutiny. On the one hand, "geo-engineering" enthusiasts tend to dismiss the aggregate impact of many local, educational, regulative, legislative, conventional public works proposals, while, on the other hand, they celebrate the hypothetical benefits of highly speculative mega-scale engineering proposals, largely indifferent to their inevitably diverse impacts on dynamic, multilayered, interdependent geophysical systems apart from their intended targets.
I have also noted that "geo-engineering" enthusiasts tend to argue that the urgency of environmental crises now demands that the implementation of their schemes proceed in ways that treat as more dispensable than we would like concerns with democratic procedures and ethical norms like fairness and respect for diversity. This is because the address of such concerns and norms so far has presumably frustrated the capacity of our public institutions to respond to clear environmental crises, and hence so exacerbated these crises that now only "geo-engineering" efforts provide a chance for salvation, and because the further frustration of the "geo-engineering" schemes themselves by these concerns and norms would likely ensure still further delay, when delay is indistinguishable from disaster.
This argument proposes the environmentalist's equivalent of the "ticking time bomb" scenario that many torture-apologists of the morally-blighted knowledge-benighted Bush era believed rendered our intuitions about the impermissibility of torture dispensable. The analogy is indeed illuminating because we know that the torture of fellow human beings is not only morally repugnant -- and a war-crime that should (still) be prosecuted as such -- but that torture provides unreliable information in any case. That is to say, torture is not only immoral, but also, incidentally, impractical.
In a post a couple of days ago, There Is No "Plan B", I wrote of the "geo-engineering" enthusiasts:
"Geo-engineering" enthusiasts are too quick in my view to dismiss sustainable local and lifeway practices, and the educational efforts that facilitate them, forgetting that the ramifications of local efforts in the aggregate can also be global and that the local dissemination of knowledges creates knowledge platforms that can enable, unexpectedly and in a lightning flash, the dissemination of knowledges on a global scale. So, too, they seem to me too quick to confuse momentary set-backs in legislative and regulatory and public investment efforts to address environmental problems with insurmountable barriers to such an address.
"Geo-engineers" will likely greet these objections with ridicule of my unseriousness, my failure to grasp the enormity and urgency of the crisis at hand, my indifference in my North Atlantic privilege to the precarious poor in over-exploited regions of the world who will bear the brunt of catastrophic climate change every day by the day while we wait for our democratic procedures to creep forward. Given that the solutions the "geo-engineers" are proposing almost inevitably involve mega-engineering projects that would unquestionably make obscenely rich and powerful corporate-military contractors even more obscenely rich and powerful, given that these corporate-military actors largely made their fortunes and shored up their power precisely through the devastation of the planet they would now be called upon to save, given that these corporate-military actors have exhibited indifference at best to the clear environmental catastrophes from which they were profiting as well as to the endless human tragedies especially among the poor in the over-exploited regions of the world, I must say that I find such responses to my objections on the part of "geo-engineering" enthusiasts, frankly, ridiculous.
But what I want to draw especial attention to in this context is that I think it is the deranging work of "the ticking time bomb" that prepares the ground for such obviously foolish hypocrisies and sloppy thinking. My point is not to deny the urgency, the proximity, the scale of environmental catastrophe that besets us, but to insist that even in the face of such looming disaster our survival will depend on cooler heads prevailing, and that we should be especially wary by now of those who seek to persuade us through the conjuration of spectacles of terror that danger demands the circumvention of democratic, equitable, pluralist intuitions.
After all, since "geo-engineering" proposals would themselves have to be funded and then implemented over long time-scales involving the ongoing co-ordination of multitudes of individuals it is quite honestly to indulge in magical thinking to pretend that, somehow, through a shifted focus onto these often dramatic, highly speculative, usually mega-scale "geo-engineering" proposals one thereby escapes the frustrations of public governance, contending stakeholders, organizational impasses, regulative bottlenecks.
Like so much futurological discourse, "geo-engineering" amounts to an escapist fantasy -- it amounts to precisely the refusal of seriousness of which it then accuses all those who shake their heads at its obvious practical and moral and political imbecilities. Even those few technical proposals among the surreal science-fictional assortment beloved of "geo-engineering" enthusiasts that might actually pass the tests of scientific scrutiny and political expediency will fare, it seems to me, incomparably better when advocated and implemented through the conventions of accountable governance and equitable norms than they could as deranged through the futurological hyperbole and elite-incumbency of "geo-engineering" discourses themselves. As the "geo-engineers" are so fond of reminding us, we really no longer have any time for wasting time with such nonsense.
I have also noted that "geo-engineering" enthusiasts tend to argue that the urgency of environmental crises now demands that the implementation of their schemes proceed in ways that treat as more dispensable than we would like concerns with democratic procedures and ethical norms like fairness and respect for diversity. This is because the address of such concerns and norms so far has presumably frustrated the capacity of our public institutions to respond to clear environmental crises, and hence so exacerbated these crises that now only "geo-engineering" efforts provide a chance for salvation, and because the further frustration of the "geo-engineering" schemes themselves by these concerns and norms would likely ensure still further delay, when delay is indistinguishable from disaster.
This argument proposes the environmentalist's equivalent of the "ticking time bomb" scenario that many torture-apologists of the morally-blighted knowledge-benighted Bush era believed rendered our intuitions about the impermissibility of torture dispensable. The analogy is indeed illuminating because we know that the torture of fellow human beings is not only morally repugnant -- and a war-crime that should (still) be prosecuted as such -- but that torture provides unreliable information in any case. That is to say, torture is not only immoral, but also, incidentally, impractical.
In a post a couple of days ago, There Is No "Plan B", I wrote of the "geo-engineering" enthusiasts:
Anti-democratic sentiments, supposedly hard-boiled declarations that "we don't have time for ethics" are attitudes that were instrumental in leading and misleading us into planetary catastrophe. I strongly believe that the solicitation of diverse energies and responsiveness to diverse knowledges arising from democratic mechanisms and ethical deliberations will be indispensable to the remedy of the both the geophysical and sociocultural wounds of accumulated, serial environmental crises exacted by extractive-industrial-petrochemical-corporatist-militarist-colonialist enterprises. To dismiss concerns with democracy, equity, plurality as dispensable niceties, stylistic superficialities -- oblivious to their practical and epistemological indispensability to the actual problems at hand is to re-enact the crime at the scene of the crime and pretend this time, somehow, the error, the delusion, the madness will work.
"Geo-engineering" enthusiasts are too quick in my view to dismiss sustainable local and lifeway practices, and the educational efforts that facilitate them, forgetting that the ramifications of local efforts in the aggregate can also be global and that the local dissemination of knowledges creates knowledge platforms that can enable, unexpectedly and in a lightning flash, the dissemination of knowledges on a global scale. So, too, they seem to me too quick to confuse momentary set-backs in legislative and regulatory and public investment efforts to address environmental problems with insurmountable barriers to such an address.
"Geo-engineers" will likely greet these objections with ridicule of my unseriousness, my failure to grasp the enormity and urgency of the crisis at hand, my indifference in my North Atlantic privilege to the precarious poor in over-exploited regions of the world who will bear the brunt of catastrophic climate change every day by the day while we wait for our democratic procedures to creep forward. Given that the solutions the "geo-engineers" are proposing almost inevitably involve mega-engineering projects that would unquestionably make obscenely rich and powerful corporate-military contractors even more obscenely rich and powerful, given that these corporate-military actors largely made their fortunes and shored up their power precisely through the devastation of the planet they would now be called upon to save, given that these corporate-military actors have exhibited indifference at best to the clear environmental catastrophes from which they were profiting as well as to the endless human tragedies especially among the poor in the over-exploited regions of the world, I must say that I find such responses to my objections on the part of "geo-engineering" enthusiasts, frankly, ridiculous.
But what I want to draw especial attention to in this context is that I think it is the deranging work of "the ticking time bomb" that prepares the ground for such obviously foolish hypocrisies and sloppy thinking. My point is not to deny the urgency, the proximity, the scale of environmental catastrophe that besets us, but to insist that even in the face of such looming disaster our survival will depend on cooler heads prevailing, and that we should be especially wary by now of those who seek to persuade us through the conjuration of spectacles of terror that danger demands the circumvention of democratic, equitable, pluralist intuitions.
After all, since "geo-engineering" proposals would themselves have to be funded and then implemented over long time-scales involving the ongoing co-ordination of multitudes of individuals it is quite honestly to indulge in magical thinking to pretend that, somehow, through a shifted focus onto these often dramatic, highly speculative, usually mega-scale "geo-engineering" proposals one thereby escapes the frustrations of public governance, contending stakeholders, organizational impasses, regulative bottlenecks.
Like so much futurological discourse, "geo-engineering" amounts to an escapist fantasy -- it amounts to precisely the refusal of seriousness of which it then accuses all those who shake their heads at its obvious practical and moral and political imbecilities. Even those few technical proposals among the surreal science-fictional assortment beloved of "geo-engineering" enthusiasts that might actually pass the tests of scientific scrutiny and political expediency will fare, it seems to me, incomparably better when advocated and implemented through the conventions of accountable governance and equitable norms than they could as deranged through the futurological hyperbole and elite-incumbency of "geo-engineering" discourses themselves. As the "geo-engineers" are so fond of reminding us, we really no longer have any time for wasting time with such nonsense.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
My “Geo-Engineering” “Denialism”
Over at Worldchanging, Lewis Cleverdon, a self-described “geo-engineer,” has taken offense (and he’s not the only one!) in rather forceful terms to my recent critiques of “geo-engineering” discourse. The following is my response to him, which I have posted there as well, and I do recommend that you follow the link to read his rebuttal on his own terms before you take in my answer to him.
I do not pre-emptively disapprove of every proposal that somebody, somewhere might presently describe as "geo-engineering." Given the disagreements among even its enthusiasts as to just what sorts of interventions should be included in the category -- disagreements that seem to become especially heated when their discourse is subjected to actual scrutiny and critique -- it wouldn’t be very sensible to disapprove of anything and everything any odd futurologist might get a hankering to slap a “geo-engineering” label on.
In the longer follow-up post of mine “Geo-Engineering” Is A Declaration of War That Does Not Care About Democracy to which Mr. Cleverdon is presumably responding he might recall a sprawling paragraph illustrating a host of “geo-engineering-esque” proposals, some of which I ridicule as science-fictional wet dreams (vast orbital space-mirror archipelagos), others of which I disapprove on the merits according to my sense of the present scientific consensus (tons of iron filings in the sea), others of which I actively approve (public subsidized reforestation and biochar projects), and in others of which I don’t weigh in, having insufficient grounds to do so (spraying clouds with seawater -- the elegant proposal on which Cleverdon seems to dote in his jeremiad against my denialism is indeed just such an example, mentioned right there in my piece, paragraph seven for those keeping score at home).
What I strongly disapprove is “geo-engineering” discourses that yoke all these disparate interventions together, as it were willy-nilly, ascending to a level of generality at which all their salient differences vanish, and then provoke a series of abstract debates on the feasibility of this unwieldy incoherent jumble which distracts our attention from the many -- to me more urgent -- debates of problems at hand, including debates about the practical politics of either getting sixty senators to vote the right way -- or reform the filibuster so that majorities with mandates can act accordingly, to be rewarded or punished in the aftermath by the voters -- to regulate carbon emissions, or mandate renewable energy standards, or introduce real environmental costs into pricing conventions, or subsidize sustainable lifeways, or bootstrap a domestic wind-turbine industry in Detroit, or invest in public works projects like millions of solar-rooftops, off-shore wind-farms, transcontinental high-speed rail, but also including debates of the sorts of technical proposals that preoccupy the attention of “geo-engineering” enthusiasts, but at a relevant level of specificity and in the context of all the more conventional sorts of proposals that define the actual field of environmentalist effort.
Cleverdon bemoans that “the denialists of Geo-E have yet to show a clear understanding of the basic science of the threat we face, or any interest in discriminating between the many Geo-E options now being advanced.” To this I have to say, first, I am certainly not a denialist about catastrophic anthropogenic climate change because it clearly exists, second, I suppose I am a denialist about at least the popular conceptions of “geo-engineering” because just as clearly these futurological mega-engineering projects do not exist (is this claim even under contest?) and, third, that we would seem to agree that it is unhelpful to jumble all these proposals indiscriminately together, a consequence I attribute to the discourse itself, which is presumably central to the debate we are presently having.
I also grant that I do, as a generic matter (“geo-engineering” is a discursive genre within environmentalist theory), disapprove the primacy of engineering assumptions, competitive and profit-taking guiding aspirations, the hyperbolic promotional conceits, the superlative futurological frames, and the elite-incumbent corporate-military industrial-authoritarian politics that tend to be facilitated by so much "geo-engineering" discourse, at any rate as it seems to be playing out in the actual world (good intentions of various proponents notwithstanding).
One of my chief interlocutors in this debate, Jamais Cascio, with whom everybody here should be familiar surely, has stressed to me that “geo-engineering” proposals are meant to be treated as supplements to the educational, regulative, legislative emphases of so much mainstream and radical environmentalist theory and practice hitherto. While I take great comfort in that re-assurance -- especially since Cascio is one of the more public proponents of the discourse -- the fact remains that quite a lot of “geo-engineering” discourse is framed instead as the “Plan B” we must reluctantly accept if or when or since already all these conventional approaches have failed, as it seems to me certainly they have not, even if we can all agree that our public institutions are as yet woefully unequal to the environmental problems that beset us. Like it or not, an enormous amount of “geo-engineering” discourse functions to dismiss, denigrate, or distract attention away from democratically-responsive modes of environmentalist lifeway change, regulation, legislation, and public works.
I don’t think it makes much sense to take umbrage at my noticing these things about so much “geo-engineering” discourse. Rather, I think if you disapprove yourself of anti-democratic, elite-incumbent, corporate-militarist, reductivist, brute-force, reckless, hyperbolic, delusively science-fictional variations or mis-appropriations of your own “geo-engineering” advocacy, you should join with me in exposing and critiquing them and inquire with me as to their likely causes and consequences. It is true that I am not likely to be won over to the club of “geo-engineering” enthusiasts -- who seem to me at their best to introduce nothing particularly new to the conversation and at their worst to derange the conversation despite its urgency -- but even I see the good sense of a prevailing “geo-engineering” discourse that is more sensible, not to mention more reliably devoted to equity, diversity, and democracy, than the present form seems to be. Surely that is something we can build on.
I do not pre-emptively disapprove of every proposal that somebody, somewhere might presently describe as "geo-engineering." Given the disagreements among even its enthusiasts as to just what sorts of interventions should be included in the category -- disagreements that seem to become especially heated when their discourse is subjected to actual scrutiny and critique -- it wouldn’t be very sensible to disapprove of anything and everything any odd futurologist might get a hankering to slap a “geo-engineering” label on.
In the longer follow-up post of mine “Geo-Engineering” Is A Declaration of War That Does Not Care About Democracy to which Mr. Cleverdon is presumably responding he might recall a sprawling paragraph illustrating a host of “geo-engineering-esque” proposals, some of which I ridicule as science-fictional wet dreams (vast orbital space-mirror archipelagos), others of which I disapprove on the merits according to my sense of the present scientific consensus (tons of iron filings in the sea), others of which I actively approve (public subsidized reforestation and biochar projects), and in others of which I don’t weigh in, having insufficient grounds to do so (spraying clouds with seawater -- the elegant proposal on which Cleverdon seems to dote in his jeremiad against my denialism is indeed just such an example, mentioned right there in my piece, paragraph seven for those keeping score at home).
What I strongly disapprove is “geo-engineering” discourses that yoke all these disparate interventions together, as it were willy-nilly, ascending to a level of generality at which all their salient differences vanish, and then provoke a series of abstract debates on the feasibility of this unwieldy incoherent jumble which distracts our attention from the many -- to me more urgent -- debates of problems at hand, including debates about the practical politics of either getting sixty senators to vote the right way -- or reform the filibuster so that majorities with mandates can act accordingly, to be rewarded or punished in the aftermath by the voters -- to regulate carbon emissions, or mandate renewable energy standards, or introduce real environmental costs into pricing conventions, or subsidize sustainable lifeways, or bootstrap a domestic wind-turbine industry in Detroit, or invest in public works projects like millions of solar-rooftops, off-shore wind-farms, transcontinental high-speed rail, but also including debates of the sorts of technical proposals that preoccupy the attention of “geo-engineering” enthusiasts, but at a relevant level of specificity and in the context of all the more conventional sorts of proposals that define the actual field of environmentalist effort.
Cleverdon bemoans that “the denialists of Geo-E have yet to show a clear understanding of the basic science of the threat we face, or any interest in discriminating between the many Geo-E options now being advanced.” To this I have to say, first, I am certainly not a denialist about catastrophic anthropogenic climate change because it clearly exists, second, I suppose I am a denialist about at least the popular conceptions of “geo-engineering” because just as clearly these futurological mega-engineering projects do not exist (is this claim even under contest?) and, third, that we would seem to agree that it is unhelpful to jumble all these proposals indiscriminately together, a consequence I attribute to the discourse itself, which is presumably central to the debate we are presently having.
I also grant that I do, as a generic matter (“geo-engineering” is a discursive genre within environmentalist theory), disapprove the primacy of engineering assumptions, competitive and profit-taking guiding aspirations, the hyperbolic promotional conceits, the superlative futurological frames, and the elite-incumbent corporate-military industrial-authoritarian politics that tend to be facilitated by so much "geo-engineering" discourse, at any rate as it seems to be playing out in the actual world (good intentions of various proponents notwithstanding).
One of my chief interlocutors in this debate, Jamais Cascio, with whom everybody here should be familiar surely, has stressed to me that “geo-engineering” proposals are meant to be treated as supplements to the educational, regulative, legislative emphases of so much mainstream and radical environmentalist theory and practice hitherto. While I take great comfort in that re-assurance -- especially since Cascio is one of the more public proponents of the discourse -- the fact remains that quite a lot of “geo-engineering” discourse is framed instead as the “Plan B” we must reluctantly accept if or when or since already all these conventional approaches have failed, as it seems to me certainly they have not, even if we can all agree that our public institutions are as yet woefully unequal to the environmental problems that beset us. Like it or not, an enormous amount of “geo-engineering” discourse functions to dismiss, denigrate, or distract attention away from democratically-responsive modes of environmentalist lifeway change, regulation, legislation, and public works.
I don’t think it makes much sense to take umbrage at my noticing these things about so much “geo-engineering” discourse. Rather, I think if you disapprove yourself of anti-democratic, elite-incumbent, corporate-militarist, reductivist, brute-force, reckless, hyperbolic, delusively science-fictional variations or mis-appropriations of your own “geo-engineering” advocacy, you should join with me in exposing and critiquing them and inquire with me as to their likely causes and consequences. It is true that I am not likely to be won over to the club of “geo-engineering” enthusiasts -- who seem to me at their best to introduce nothing particularly new to the conversation and at their worst to derange the conversation despite its urgency -- but even I see the good sense of a prevailing “geo-engineering” discourse that is more sensible, not to mention more reliably devoted to equity, diversity, and democracy, than the present form seems to be. Surely that is something we can build on.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
There Is No "Plan B"
Sometimes I get the feeling that its enthusiasts think "geo-engineering" is a magic word. Sometimes I get the feeling that "geo-engineering" enthusiasts have the idea that they and a handful of other futurologists in some Bay Area think-tank are going to overthrow the government and implement all their plans, whether prudent or kooky, no holds barred, no expense spared, whether anybody likes it or not.
"Geo-engineering" enthusiasts don't get to blink conventional politics out of existence just because they happen to have given up on them for whatever reasons -- any more than climate change profiteers and denialists get to blink catastrophic anthropogenic climate change out of existence because it pays to lie.
Education, agitation, organization, legislation, subsidization of sustainable lifeways, public works projects (some of which might be described by some people as "geo-engineering," others not, but in no case is anything clarified by either doing so or failing to do so) are all part of the already going already legible already proper environmentalist address of the problems at hand.
That's "Plan A" -- or, more to the point, that's the constellation of Plans A, efforts, campaigns, foci of which environmental theory and practice already consist. Needless to say, nobody who grasps the scale of the problems at hand is satisfied with the disastrously inadequate response of our public discourse and institutions to these problems, but we have no choice but to keep plugging away until we either prevail or fail.
To the extent that "Geo-Engineering" peddles itself as a "Plan B" premised on the ineradicable inadequacy of these Plans A, or defined as implementable by some other set of mechanisms than the ones already in evidence among the Plans A -- well, we find ourselves on a fool's errand with no time to spare for one. For there is no Plan B.
Either the "Geo-Engineers" need to recast their so-called "Plan B" in terms already in evidence among the many Plans A -- at the cost of admitting they aren't introducing some daring new futurological modality of sooper-environmentalism into the mix, and with the benefit of no longer talking smack about all the indispensable things happening among the Plans A -- Or they need to be made aware that pretending otherwise is just to indulge in distraction or greenwashing marketing for corporate-military concerns.
Either we the people are equal to this challenge or we are not.
If we are not, the world ends. If our address of environmental catastrophe is not equitable and pluralist, as well as sustainable, the world ends.
The "Geo-Engineers" may be reluctantly willing or even eager to welcome our new corporate- military- robotic- overlords (meet the new overlords same as the old overlords), but more fool they -- these competitive-profitmad-reductionist overlords are ill-disposed to address the commensal-interdependent-dynamic problems at hand, which is why they were so instrumental in creating the problems at hand (not to quibble or anything).
That the solutions to environmental problems will be flabbergastingly costly, unfathomably difficult, unspeakably fraught is already understood by most people who understand what our environmental problems are. If these well-understood difficulties are not what the "geo-engineers" are talking about, then, well, just what are they talking about? What exactly are these "bad things" we are going to have to steel ourselves to accept, who exactly are these "bad people" we are going to have to reconcile ourselves to giving in to?
Anti-democratic sentiments, supposedly hard-boiled declarations that "we don't have time for ethics" are attitudes that were instrumental in leading and misleading us into planetary catastrophe. I strongly believe that the solicitation of diverse energies and responsiveness to diverse knowledges arising from democratic mechanisms and ethical deliberations will be indispensable to the remedy of the both the geophysical and sociocultural wounds of accumulated, serial environmental crises exacted by extractive-industrial-petrochemical-corporatist-militarist-colonialist enterprises. To dismiss concerns with democracy, equity, plurality as dispensable niceties, stylistic superficialities -- oblivious to their practical and epistemological indispensability to the actual problems at hand is to re-enact the crime at the scene of the crime and pretend this time, somehow, the error, the delusion, the madness will work.
To the extent that a particular proposed intervention is plausible or necessary (spraying sea water on clouds from airliners, say) it should be judged on the merits -- which are unrelated to the merits and limits of the other projects that get corralled together under the moniker "geo-engineering" -- from iron filings in the sea to piping icy water from the sea floor to cool the surface -- and then funded, regulated, held accountable, and maintained by way of the same educational, organizational, legislative, and governance mechanisms as would already fund, regulate, implement Plan A mandated carbon emissions reductions, make building standards sustainable, make prices reflect environmental costs, subsidize reforestation projects, put solar panels on millions of rooftops, bootstrap a wind-turbine industry as large as the US automobile industry, and so on.
There isn't a Plan B, and to the extent that any of these individual proposals have merit neither do they constitute a Plan B, and these futurological sooper aka post-environmentalists need to decide whether they are part of the solution or part of the problem.
"Geo-engineering" enthusiasts don't get to blink conventional politics out of existence just because they happen to have given up on them for whatever reasons -- any more than climate change profiteers and denialists get to blink catastrophic anthropogenic climate change out of existence because it pays to lie.
Education, agitation, organization, legislation, subsidization of sustainable lifeways, public works projects (some of which might be described by some people as "geo-engineering," others not, but in no case is anything clarified by either doing so or failing to do so) are all part of the already going already legible already proper environmentalist address of the problems at hand.
That's "Plan A" -- or, more to the point, that's the constellation of Plans A, efforts, campaigns, foci of which environmental theory and practice already consist. Needless to say, nobody who grasps the scale of the problems at hand is satisfied with the disastrously inadequate response of our public discourse and institutions to these problems, but we have no choice but to keep plugging away until we either prevail or fail.
To the extent that "Geo-Engineering" peddles itself as a "Plan B" premised on the ineradicable inadequacy of these Plans A, or defined as implementable by some other set of mechanisms than the ones already in evidence among the Plans A -- well, we find ourselves on a fool's errand with no time to spare for one. For there is no Plan B.
Either the "Geo-Engineers" need to recast their so-called "Plan B" in terms already in evidence among the many Plans A -- at the cost of admitting they aren't introducing some daring new futurological modality of sooper-environmentalism into the mix, and with the benefit of no longer talking smack about all the indispensable things happening among the Plans A -- Or they need to be made aware that pretending otherwise is just to indulge in distraction or greenwashing marketing for corporate-military concerns.
Either we the people are equal to this challenge or we are not.
If we are not, the world ends. If our address of environmental catastrophe is not equitable and pluralist, as well as sustainable, the world ends.
The "Geo-Engineers" may be reluctantly willing or even eager to welcome our new corporate- military- robotic- overlords (meet the new overlords same as the old overlords), but more fool they -- these competitive-profitmad-reductionist overlords are ill-disposed to address the commensal-interdependent-dynamic problems at hand, which is why they were so instrumental in creating the problems at hand (not to quibble or anything).
That the solutions to environmental problems will be flabbergastingly costly, unfathomably difficult, unspeakably fraught is already understood by most people who understand what our environmental problems are. If these well-understood difficulties are not what the "geo-engineers" are talking about, then, well, just what are they talking about? What exactly are these "bad things" we are going to have to steel ourselves to accept, who exactly are these "bad people" we are going to have to reconcile ourselves to giving in to?
Anti-democratic sentiments, supposedly hard-boiled declarations that "we don't have time for ethics" are attitudes that were instrumental in leading and misleading us into planetary catastrophe. I strongly believe that the solicitation of diverse energies and responsiveness to diverse knowledges arising from democratic mechanisms and ethical deliberations will be indispensable to the remedy of the both the geophysical and sociocultural wounds of accumulated, serial environmental crises exacted by extractive-industrial-petrochemical-corporatist-militarist-colonialist enterprises. To dismiss concerns with democracy, equity, plurality as dispensable niceties, stylistic superficialities -- oblivious to their practical and epistemological indispensability to the actual problems at hand is to re-enact the crime at the scene of the crime and pretend this time, somehow, the error, the delusion, the madness will work.
To the extent that a particular proposed intervention is plausible or necessary (spraying sea water on clouds from airliners, say) it should be judged on the merits -- which are unrelated to the merits and limits of the other projects that get corralled together under the moniker "geo-engineering" -- from iron filings in the sea to piping icy water from the sea floor to cool the surface -- and then funded, regulated, held accountable, and maintained by way of the same educational, organizational, legislative, and governance mechanisms as would already fund, regulate, implement Plan A mandated carbon emissions reductions, make building standards sustainable, make prices reflect environmental costs, subsidize reforestation projects, put solar panels on millions of rooftops, bootstrap a wind-turbine industry as large as the US automobile industry, and so on.
There isn't a Plan B, and to the extent that any of these individual proposals have merit neither do they constitute a Plan B, and these futurological sooper aka post-environmentalists need to decide whether they are part of the solution or part of the problem.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
"Geo-Engineering" Is A Declaration of War That Doesn't Care About Democracy
Jamais Cascio has written one of the first comprehensive texts on the futurological notion of "geo-engineering," Hacking the Earth, and so I am especially grateful that he has responded to my critique last week of "geo-engineering" discourse. There have been quite a few responses to that blog-post ping-ponging back and forth over the week at this point, but the main ones so far are fairly easy to re-trace in order if you care to do so: First, there was Chris Mooney's Geoengineering: The Most Important Technology Nobody's Heard Of, then my critique of that article, "Geo-Engineering" As Futurological Greenwashing, then Mooney's response to my piece Is This the Right Room for a Geoengineering Argument? then my response to his response Chris Mooney Responds (an inspired title, you must admit), and now Jamais Cascio's A Response to Dale, to which the following, in turn, is my latest effort. It's an important topic and so I hope there is much more to come and that I can continue to have some small say in it.
I found it very striking that when Jamais Cascio framed his Response to my concerns from a post last week about "geo-engineering" discourse he began first with the claim that "geoengineering has moved from fringe fantasy ("space mirrors") to sober consideration." You will notice that while he provides an instantly clarifying example of "geo-engineering" as "fringe fantasy" he provides no such example of the sober and considered "geo-engineering" into which the discourse has now presumably matured. Only later, and only once, and only incidentally at that, does Cascio ever provide even a glancing reference to any actual "geo-engineering" proposal -- "sulfate-injection to keep temperatures down" -- and even this brief mention provides no survey of the scientific debates (of which there are many) questioning the efficacy of such a proposal, let alone the distribution of its effects on the diversity of its stakeholders, or any consideration of questions of who is qualified to implement such a project and who is qualified to decide on such qualifications, how funding priorities should accommodate its costs, and at whose cost, or what kinds of regulations can ensure some measure of the public safety and financial transparency of such an enormous and complex endeavor, and so on.
As I will point out in a moment, Cascio seems repeatedly to insist in his response that the urgency of catastrophic climate change may demand that we shunt aside cherished but (apparently) dispensable political and ethical considerations. But while I agree that it is all too common for "geo-engineering" discourses to shunt such considerations aside, it remains true nonetheless that actual "geo-engineering" projects would in fact be up to their necks in politics and ethics, come what may.
Unless "geo-engineering" is imagined to be undertaken by perfectly logical robots or perfectly benevolent angels, rather than by the corporate-military contractors who would undoubtedly be tasked with these vastly complex pork-laden monster-engineering projects (and many of these contractors will advertise as their relevant expertise their life-long participation in extractive-petrochemical-industrial enterprises that are primarily responsible for the catastrophe from which they are now auditioning profitably to save us), then you can be sure that politics and ethics would play out across every level and in every detail of any actual "geo-engineering" practice.
The question, then, would not be whether we can circumvent the ethical or the political concerns of more mainstream environmentalists through recourse to "geo-engineering," but just which ethical or political concerns are to be expressed in "geo-engineering" proposals. As we will see soon enough, the ethics and politics that seem to me to be facilitated by "geo-engineering" discourse, once exposed to actual scrutiny, are not entirely pleasant to contemplate in my view. But before we turn to that contemplation, I do want to dwell a bit longer on the curious evacuation of the substance of what "geo-engineering" is supposed to actually consist of in Cascio's response, because I believe this evacuation of specification is typical of "geo-engineering" discourse, perhaps even definitive of the discourse, and demands consideration on its own terms. It may even shed some light on the ethical and political considerations to follow.
You will notice that I don’t talk about the technical specifications of “geo-engineering” projects any more than Cascio does. But that is because I am talking about “geo-engineering” as a discourse -– I was trained in a Rhetoric Department, after all, I teach critical theory and discourse analysis, thinking what we are doing is what I write about. And part of what I keep proposing is that the “technical substance” of “geo-engineering” discourse is precisely the evacuation of technical considerations from a superficially techno-scientific discussion into which then is stealthed the support of particular elite-incumbent corporate-military industrial-authoritarian politics treated as though they were matters of mere technical expedience, either as technical in a facile “apolitical” understanding of techno-science questions or understood as “post-political” because of the urgency of problems that really have only technical solutions.
When talk turns to "geo-engineering" any of a number of proposals are likely to follow: from whitening clouds with seawater sprays to whitening roofs with pale painting or repaving (I am a big believer in the latter myself, and think Obama's stimulus should have subsidized such things and hope a second stimulus to come will still do so, and soon), from sulfur aerosols in the stratosphere (what could possibly go wrong?) to cirrus cloud seeding with domestic jetliners, from "fertilizing" the sea with tons and tons of iron filings (thank heavens this foolishness has mostly been ridiculed into silence by now) to burying tons of tons of biochar (as indigenous people have been doing since well before the industrial revolution), from massive reforestation efforts to placing reflective mirrors in orbit (neither of which Cascio seems to consider as serious "geo-engineering," but both of which are seriously considered by those regarded as "serious" by those who take "geo-engineering" seriously, and one of which, massive public-subsidized tree planting, I strongly support myself while taking "geo-engineering" seriously only in the way that I take a heart attack seriously), from pimpling the land with an archipelago of ruinously expensive and dangerous nuclear plants and radioactive dump-sites (water and plutonium scarcity issues begone!) to Arctic re-glaciation via vertical pipe infrastructures pumping icy deep-ocean water to the surface to judicious application of Dr. Evil's Weaponized Weather Machine to global rocket-ship relocation of whole human populations to fully-automated Edenic habitats in the asteroid belt (an afternoon spent with the Google might soon disabuse you of the sensible impulse to giggle about the existence of such futurological hyperbole, believe me, it’s all seriously there).
Although Cascio's response offers little sense of just what it is that we are concretely committing to when, through a debate such as this one, we presumably come to accept the possibility, plausibility, desirability, or oh-so-reluctant necessity to embark upon the never-quite-clear some-thing conjured by the term "geo-engineering," it is worth noting that nonetheless Cascio still does refer to "geo-engineering" as an "option," as a "choice," as an "intervention," as "doing something," as an "effort," and so on. Indeed, the concluding sentence of his piece declares that he doesn't know for sure that "geoengineering is the right thing to do, or is wise, or will be cost-free -- only that there's a disturbingly high possibility that it's the least-bad of a set of very bad options." While I have many concerns with this line of argument, I have to say that chief among them is that Cascio has not given us any idea of what, concretely, this "least bad option" actually is, what kind of coherent "alternative" to what exactly the "geo-engineering" "concept" provides us, in what way it makes sense to say "geo-engineering" is any kind of "thing to do" at all, at this level of generality, never mind whether that thing is a right thing or wrong thing or a least bad thing.
I still maintain that when futurologists indulge in debates about the plausibility or the urgency of “geo-engineering” the functional substance of the debate is to ensure that what is not being debated are the different technical and diverse political plausibilities and implausibilities that attend the actually enormously different proposals that get corralled together beneath the umbrella of “geo-engineering” as well as, at one and the same time, to defuse, while depending on, the urgency of human-exacerbated human-remediable environmental crises by indulging in loose talk about human ingenuity and innovation and can-do know-how bringing splashy artist renderings of futurological mega-scale technofixes online to save us in the nick of time. Needless to say, such talk is little more than a re-mobilization of the very same hyperbolic marketing discourses originating in modern extractive-industrial-petrochemical enterprises themselves whose delusive profit-taking ethos mis-applied to a commensal world, whose delusive eternal-growth ethos mis-applied to a finite world, whose delusive reductionist ethos mis-applied to a pluralistic world got us into this mess in the first place.
As it happens, my point is not to pre-emptively disapprove any and every proposal that might be construed by someone, somewhere as a “geo-engineering” effort, but to point out that our deliberations about the plausibility or usefulness or even necessity of specific “geo-engineering” proposals are rarely enriched by comparison with discussions of other such efforts, leading one to wonder what the use of the whole category is supposed to be. To understand why unloading tons of iron filings into the sea is a stupid idea is actually not to understand why spraying tons of sulfur into the atmosphere may or may not also be a stupid idea (I strongly suspect, by the way, that it is). But I am proposing that the actual force of the “geo-engineering” discourse and its substance as a category is to be discerned instead in the almost inevitable dismissal or even denigration that takes place within it of the regulative, educational, localized, distributed, appropriate-appropriable technology, lifestyle-oriented proposals of legible mainstream and even radical environmental discourses otherwise.
Cascio has proposed three criteria through which "geo-engineering" interventions are to be identified in his understanding (his definition has not acquired canonical force, but it is typical enough and symptomatic enough to justify consideration on its own terms): These criteria are purpose, scale, and scope.
His first criterion is that "geo-engineering" has a climate-changing purpose, that it is intentional. In the post of mine to which Cascio is responding I suggested that "geo-engineering" as a concept seemed little more than a kind of chirpy feel-good variation on the fundamental environmentalist recognition of the fact of anthropogenic climate change as such. That humans can intervene in the climate for the better implies the prior recognition that humans can impact the climate at all. However, given the pernicious role of the denial of this basic recognition by elite-incumbents who profit either directly from this denialism or indirectly as paid media shills, lobbyists, or corrupt politicians working on behalf of such elite-incumbents, it seems to me that it would be better to strive to educate, agitate, and organize to overcome this denialism before flitting off to some new agenda that still depends on the force of the denied premise for its own intelligibility.
With his emphasis on intentions, however, Cascio has circumvented this point somewhat. "Geo-engineering" is, after all, a futurological discourse and as such is suffused with the can-do! yes-siree-bob! let's-put-on-a-show! spirit of that uniquely American phenomenon -- hence, the foregrounding of declared purposes in manifesto form, of stated goals in think-tank white papers sketching working assumptions of working scenarios, of promises made to be broken between players in pitch-meetings, of pie charts and arrows rocketing up graphs, of TED squawks and Power Pointers, and so on and on and on.
To restrict the designation of "geo-engineering" only to those enterprises intentionally designed to impact the climate would rule out, presumably, my own tendency to describe as a "geo-engineer" the industrialist who rakes in profits from his carbon-belching smokestacks knowing full well that he is actively and voluntarily contributing to the making of a world that cannot sustain anything like the billions of people who currently share it with him, but is unconcerned because he believes that the same profits he is making in destroying the world will give him and those few like him that he cares about certain access to what little remains of a flourishing or even habitable world in the years to come.
It should go without saying, by the way, that just as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the good intentions of the "geo-engineers" provide nothing in the way of assurance that outcomes will be good ones, and especially so when what is counting as "good intentions" are more likely marketing slogans coughed up by PR department to peddle profit-making schemes on behalf of some "geo-engineering" proposal's principle public mouthpieces and private contractors.
To define his second and third criteria, scale and scope, Cascio asserts first that "geoengineering focuses on manipulation of complex geophysical processes" and second that its “results aren't limited to or focused on a particular locality.” Given the diverse, intensive, ubiquitous, subtle, dynamic (not to mention, conspicuously imperfectly understood or even observed) interactions of such geophysical processes, across many layers and at many different scales in the living world it is unclear to me just what kinds of interventions would not satisfy such definitional criteria, unless what Cascio really does mean to stress here is the focus of "geo-engineering" efforts rather than their actual impacts. I can’t help but notice, for one thing, that this would suggest that all three of Cascio’s definitional criteria for “geo-engingeering” ultimately divert us from the actual and impactful to the intentional and aspirational, in a way that seems to me very true to the futurological more generally, considered essentially as a promotional mode of discourse rather than -- contra its exponents -- an explanatory one.
But another part of what I am getting at is that perhaps with these last two attentional criteria Cascio is just emphasizing that the "geo-engineering" vantage is indeed more an engineering than ecological one, after all. In focusing on a particular target -- lowering the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, ameliorating desalination before it interferes with ocean currents, reversing topsoil depletion before food crops fail, whatever the target in question may happen to be -- and then focusing on marshaling particular forces at hand to achieve this target, "geo-engineers" tend to overlook unintended consequences arising from the actual but imperfectly understood interactions of geophysical systems at many levels. This is part of the reason why concrete proposals by "geo-engineers" so often seem, upon scrutiny, to introduce proliferating problematic side-effects together with the solution to the problems to which they directly address themselves.
In all this, “geo-engineering” seems to me in making a spectacle of what it is forgetting simply to be re-acquainting us with the formative insights out of which environmentalist consciousness usually emerges in the first place. After all, nobody meant for the petrochemical amplification of muscular force to turn the planet into a septic sewer turf-tossed by Greenhouse storms, nobody meant for convenient goods to turn our homes into toxic carcinogenic cell-blocks, nobody meant for fast food to slaughter us with heart-disease, obesity, and diabetes: the unilateral pursuit of instrumental targets and personal profits lead us in one direction and mislead us into ruin.
Perhaps “geo-engineering” re-enacts the inaugural delusion of modern futurology -- that the nuclear techno-science that rendered humanity the chief threat to its own existence might be redeemed by a nuclear techno-science leading us to Paradise, into the Edenic superabundance of energy too cheap to meter and into the literal rocket-bound Heaven of outer space -– but translated now into the application of engineering logic to the remediation of a world needlessly carelessly foolishly spoiled by the over-application in the first place of engineering logic into a living, limited, diverse, dynamic world.
Cascio writes:
Unfortunately, the list[s] of what's technically feasible and what's ethically palatable don't necessarily line up -- and some choices that are both technically and ethically attractive (such as radical emission reductions) are very likely insufficient at this point. So what do we do? We can't just hand-wave that question away[.]
I cannot help but think that the concerns I am raising here are precisely of the kind many “geo-engineers” would deride as “just hand-wav[ing]… away.” I am not one who pretends that an ethically ideal outcome is therefore pragmatically possible, and yet I am disturbed that the moment the specter of compromise is proposed here suddenly the words that Cascio is using to describe the unethical and the undemocratic are aesthetic ones -– “palatable” or not, “attractive” or not –- as if suddenly all this is a matter of style and not substance.
Neither do I understand how it can be that “geo-engineering” enthusiasts could possibly think they can get away with painting themselves as hard-nosed hard-headed hard-bodied realists, and their critics as wooly-headed sentimentalists, when these futurologists can’t even account for the ways in which these debates about “geo-engineering” are supposed to actually inform anybody about the technical merits of any of these proposals vis-Ã -vis any of the others, let alone explain how these proposals are supposed to be funded, regulated, implemented, maintained -– especially when “geo-engineering” is usually premised on the failure of the very sorts of political organizations that presumably would then be instrumental in this funding, regulation, implementation, maintenance –- let alone what we are supposed to do about the palpably differential impacts of their recommendations on the diversity of their stakeholders.
Steve Benen recently posted this one-liner to his blog: “It was the warmest June on record. If only 60 senators cared.” The best of the “geo-engineering” enthusiasts (among whom I would number both my principal interlocutors in this conversation, Cascio and Mooney) seem to me to be inspired by precisely this sort of frustration. But it is entirely beyond me why anybody would leap from this outrageous political reality to a suite of amorphously connected mega-engineering proposals of questionable scientific merit involving unspecified organizations and funding of questionable legality with troubling ethical implications –- when, for example, they might inquire instead, just how short of 60 Senators are we? How might we educate or pressure or primary them? What might it take in the way of filibuster reform to put those who do care in a position to actually vote to implement regulatory measures equal to our problems?
Are such political considerations really so unimaginable, so impractical that we would turn in frustration to a vantage on environmentalism premised on pretending that the earth on which we evolved, in which we are fit to flourish, is imagined instead as an alien world to be rebuilt by machines inspired by a science fiction novel? Writes Cascio: "A science-fiction parallel that might illuminate is to think of it as terraforming the Earth." I must say that this does not seem particularly illuminating to me at all of the environmental problems we earthlings face on this earth, anymore than do those futurologically-minded scientists and engineers who seriously propose mass migration into space as a "solution" to the climate crisis, anymore than did those futurologically-minded scientists and engineers who failed so disastrously to maintain an artificial "Biosphere 2" in which humans could live by means of cutting-edge techno-science, as if on the surface of an alien planet, but actually all the while in the living midst of the very Biosphere 1 (you know, the earth itself) being rendered at that moment through irresponsible artifice and technique a place in which humans might not long live anymore. If anything I think this thought-experiment illuminates the profoundly alienated vantage assumed in engineering and profit-taking and futurological rationalities that would reduce the good earth to a lifeless unearthly mineral-resource rock-scape.
Like most Green-minded folks I certainly strongly sympathize with Cascio’s sense of urgency. “Climate systems are slow-change systems,” he points out,
we could stop putting any carbon into the atmosphere right this very second, globally and totally, and still see another 20-50 years of warming due to the carbon that's already there, and the thermal inertia of heat accumulated in the oceans. That translates into at least another 1° C of warming guaranteed, and potentially another 3° C. And 3° C translates into catastrophe.
This does not mean that do anything else! is inevitably better than doing what we are doing now, which, however obviously unequal to the problems that beset us, is a matter of educating, agitating, and organizing that is always susceptible to sudden unexpected world-transforming shifts in our laws, customs, prices, institutions, possibilities. It isn’t only climates that have tipping points. And by the very logic cited above, we know that industrial-scaled mega-engineering interventions into imperfectly understood geophysical systems (especially when those interventions are undertaken by corporate-military agencies defined in their essence by competitive logics that seem to me profoundly mis-matched to ecological problem solving) could well yield disastrous consequences from which we are even slower to recover than is the slowness to get properly underway of the deliberative and governing processes with which “geo-engineers” are presently so impatient.
Cascio points out that “doing all of the right things, for all of the right reasons, may at this point no longer be sufficient to hold off disaster,” but this truism is far from reason to believe that doing all the wrong things is a better idea, or that we should dispense with everything we think right and all the reasons that make them seem right to us. We demand accountability and oversight and democratic deliberation, among other reasons, because all stakeholders to problems are in possession of knowledge that may be indispensable to the solution of the problems at hand, because no problem matters at all except insofar as it impacts on lives that matter and all of the lives on whom a problem impacts do indeed matter just the same.
These are not "merely" aesthetic considerations, they are practical, they constitute the actual substance of the problems at hand. It is not "realistic" to shunt such considerations aside but, precisely to the contrary, to prefer parochialism to realism. I must say that I was a bit shocked to hear Cascio seriously propose that “efforts by the rich to save their own skins through (say) sulfate-injection to keep temperatures down would potentially do more to protect the poor nations than would more locally-focused adaptation efforts.” No realist on earth is going to fall for the siren song of such “trickle-down” rationalizations any more after all we've been through. You can be sure that if the rich fancy they could save their skins by placing bubble-domes over Vegas and Paris and DC and Dubai and filling the domes with photogenic slaves and ringing them with robot soldiers to keep the rabble out otherwise they would quite cheerfully do so –- indeed, it seems to me that this is simply a slightly hyperbolic description of the state of affairs we denote by the unlovely term “Neoliberalism” that defines the prevailing logic of global corporate-militarist developmentalism in our present world.
I believe we can all be reasonably sure that the risks and costs of our failures will be borne disproportionately by the most precarious people among us, and especially in the over-exploited regions of the world, while the benefits of our relative successes will likewise be enjoyed disproportionately by those who already enjoy the most, those who happen to be disproportionately responsible for the desperate distress of planetary catastrophe -– and this is true whether the failures are a matter of insufficient efforts arising out of insulation from consequences of privileged people or a matter of misguided efforts arising out of the recklessness, impatience, or greed of privileged people.
Nor do I understand why Cascio’s “realism” seems so insistently to repudiate the aggregate impacts of “locally-focused adaptation efforts” as well as the aggregate impacts of carbon-reducing regulations and public projects of tree-planting and architectural retrofitting and all the rest.
Let us return by way of conclusion to Cascio’s own conclusion. ”[H]ere's the ugly truth,” he confides. “[N]ature doesn't care about democracy, or who's right, or what's fair.” I do not consider this a particularly ugly truth, but a fairly innocuous truism. Of course, it is we who care about democracy, we who care about what is right, we who care about fairness. We care about these things for very good reasons -– many of them as supremely practical as you could care to find. I happen to know that Jamais Cascio is very much among the ones who do care about all of these, indeed to an extent I would describe as notable among his futurological colleagues. But I do not agree with his suggestion that these considerations are ever dispensable, nor do I accept his insinuation that his is a more practical or realistic vantage in the least because he has treated them here as dispensable. Far from it. I think that in taking up the organizing assumptions and aspirations of this futurological vantage on an ecological problem Cascio has not only been brought to dispense with moral and political considerations that would destroy the world in the name of saving it, but has actually been bamboozled into talking nonsense and fancying it practical sense.
When he writes that “[t]he scenario we may be faced with is one where doing something for the wrong reasons, run by the wrong people, may still save more lives than holding out for a more appealing option,” I have to wonder what on earth he is thinking! In my experience doing things for the wrong reasons always ends up leading to disaster, not salvation. In my experience part of the reason we describe the wrong people as the “wrong people” is because they are greedy, corrupt, irresponsible, and untrustworthy, that is to say the least likely people to solve serious problems with us, let alone for us. I do not agree that in educating, agitating, and organizing in the service of environmental regulations, fair trade, renewable standards, pricing conventions that reflect environmental costs, subsizing and celebrating sustainable lifeways we are “holding out for a more appealing option,” I think we are actually being the change we want to see in the world.
I believe that “Geo-Engineering” is a declaration of war on the climate crisis.
I believe that when people declare war the whole world becomes a constellation of nail-heads at which the warriors begin hammering brutally away and that once begun there is just no stopping them. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter that it does more harm than good, it doesn’t matter that the world is not the same thing as the war-plan, it doesn’t matter that the sentimental hippies predicted every disaster accurately and the warriors got and keep on getting everything completely wrong, it doesn’t matter that all the values in the name of which the warriors claim to be saving the world are debauched and dispensed with in saving it, it doesn’t matter the worst brutes and bullies and thieves and frauds thrive in the chaos while the best are thrust into hells of terror and despair, it doesn’t matter the generation of warriors before them created the problems with which the warriors are grappling today in ways that prepare the bloody groundwork for the warriors among their children. War has -- indeed, is -- its own logic, it creates its own reality, it moves by way of its own irresistable interminable urgencies until at long last it meets its consummation in universal death.
I have long hoped that the emergence of planetary consciousness without which we cannot grasp the fundamental character of environmental problems and their collaborative solutions would at long last provide an answer equal to the insatiable logic of the war machine. In “geo-engineering” I see the appearance within environmentalism itself of the insect-eye of that war machine displacing the human face that cares for the shared world. I see the appearance of the war-planners with their fraudulent charts and with their bullying bluster silencing the human voices that testify to appropriate techniques and flourishing lifeways. I see the approach of the final madness and the retreat of hope, the coming of the irrational rationality that subdues, controls, sterilizes, conquers, and then bitterly perishes amidst the ruins. "Geo-Engineering," like the physical environment to which it addresses itself, indeed does not care about our democracy, or about our values -- but we do, and we must, else our world will be lost even in saving it.
We Already Won the Culture Wars
We are witness to the latest fake scandal and apparently all-consuming mass-mediated emotional bonfire whomped up by America’s marginal right-wing minority. The obviously legal and admirable Manhattan Muslim Community Center, Cordoba House, with its mission of community support and inter-faith dialogue – a strictly local concern involving zoning ordinances and neighborhood needs – has been cynically transformed into a site of nationalist agony by the inflammatory discourse of the right-wing’s opportunistic irresponsible (I mean this literally, few have elected responsibilities or publicly accountable job duties) celebrity megaphones who decry it as a kind of Hellmouth portal through which long-exploited sexually-deranged well-armed brown-skinned armies will pour into the Mall of America transforming the continent into a terrorist amusement park celebrating the mass-murder of wholesome white Americans who want nothing more than to be left to the ruggedly individualistic pursuit of profitable innovation and landfill accumulation between prayer meetings and reality shows.
It is easy to mis-read moments like this in contemporary America, when everybody seems driven to cough up the same hairball of Yeatsian reflection, namely that the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Before we all start hyperventilating again about the Center not Holding (given the reactionary drivel that passes for “The Center” in public discourse today the loss of its hold seems to me no bad thing), I think it pays to contemplate the actual ritual work that is being accomplished in these brief brou-ha-has that barnacle non-issues like the “Ground Zero Mosque” that isn’t -- And for whom this work is being done -- And in the context of what larger structural realities this work seems so needful for those few to whom it is filling a need.
Look, the pleasures of buttsex are weaving the affection of two gay men into a long-term loving bond in your town right now. A pissed off anti-war activist is seriously contemplating burning a goddamn American flag. Tax paying Americans who happen to be Muslim are praying in a mosque and others are building a new one. A prosperous inter-racial couple are drinking coffee in a sunlit kitchen in a television commercial to the envy of millions of everyday citizens. A young woman is getting an abortion because she wants to have a life. Teenagers in a public bus are laughing about the cluelessness of an obtrusively evangelical classmate and the hypocrisy of his parents.
It isn’t going to stop. Ever. No law will be passed to stop it. The Constitution is not going to be amended to re-write America in the image of Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A. That train has left the station. It went to Hogwarts. They’re witches, you know.
The culture wars happened. We won. They lost.
All these crazily expansive fireballs of deranged emotional energy that fill our discursive field for a time and then vanish without a trace when the alcohol has burned away, the flag-burning crisis, the duct-tape craze, the swift-boat liars, the mass hysterical blindness in the face of a Presidential birth certificate, the death-panel conspiracy, and on and on and on, each one gloms on to a non-issue because real issues can be dealt with through deliberation, they attach to a non-problem because real problems are susceptible to collective solutions or resolutions through compromise.
The lack of a practical policy recourse or discursive space is indispensable to the work of these non-issues as spaces for the endless elaboration of faux-controversy and real-derangement, each one of which opens up a kind of bottomless pit of outrage and despair which are the farthest imaginable thing from means to political, moral, or policy ends, but are ends in themselves. The rituals are testaments to the outrage and the despair of the losers of the culture war who now live as vanquished enemies in the landscape of the America of the victorious sexually-permissive default-urban middle-class-identified secular-convivial majority-minority multiculture.
There can of course be no resolution to the outrage and despair given vent to in these cruel crazed joyless rituals, there can be no redress to the existential victimhood testified to in these conflagrations. We won. They lost. There is no getting around the realities to which they are responding. They confess the nature of their distress in the very names they choose for themselves: “The Silent Majority” “The Moral Majority” “The Real America.” But they are a white-racist patriarchal-prick minority aging fast (check out the average age of the average Fox News audience member), a neo-confederate rump ever more conspicuously incapable of governing a whole nation.
Both the hysterical desperation of their Tea Party rallies and the authoritarian-army discipline of their Base's Get-Out-the-White-Vote-Disenfreanchise-Everybody-Else Election Drives bespeak the same awareness that they are an unwelcome klatch of Orcs in the Hippy Shire. Sure, the inertial tug of weary corporate-military broadcast-industrial-extractive institutions still resonates with their deathly death-dealing worldview, but the saber-rattling is ever harder to distinguish from the annoyance of ghosts rattling their chains. The whiny white guys still have piles of cash and seats on the Board of Directors, but they look more like wizened mummies by the day and their kids have queer friends and they date brown people and they all know that global warming is real.
The dissatisfaction of liberals with the slowness of change and our tendency to sit out elections we should be organizing to win testifies to precisely the same underlying realities that drive the insanity of the wingnuts. We know we’ve won as surely as they have. Even in the maddening murderous depths of the Killer Clown Administration it was hard to reconcile the fantasies of the Mayberry Machiavellis with the reality at hand. When conservatives decry the liberal bias of the media, it actually is a bit off point to reply, as we tend to do, that the extreme right-wing and center-right skew of pundits and policies on news programs is anything but liberal, inasmuch as the liberal bias they are surely responding to is the one in which America’s Player on Big Brother is the fey gay guy college teacher pining for his long-time partner or the teen heroine of a night-time soap takes a trip to the abortion clinic because she wants to go to college and leave her loser boyfriend, the square-jawed captain of the football team, to become an ACLU lawyer or the number one music video clowns around about how lovely it is to smoke weed. What these wingnuts decry as a liberally-biased media is of course a liberally-biased reality roughly reflected by the media (pretty much everywhere except for its news programs, which may account for the vanishingly small audiences of even the most popular news-programming), which they despise but can no more change than they can turn back the tide.
It is much to be regretted that the winners of the culture war have never run their victory lap, but seem instead never quite to believe our victory puts us in a position to dictate terms. I think that the commonplace experience of leaving a parochial small town or neighborhood for college or for a job in the big city has mislead too many people into imagining that that small town or neighborhood is still there, still the same, still the Real America, when the truth is that all America left that small town behind, that small town left that small town behind, we all grew up together, that backward benighted cul-de-sac is not the Real America at all, the Real America is actually Us.
We won the culture wars, and America is our multiculture now. They lost and from time to time they lose their minds in noisy hurt and hurtful spectacles that testify to that larger loss. We should pay no attention to them, and we should ridicule those who do. Needless to say we should all of us be prepared to hold out a helping hand to those in distress, but only after they stop throwing these awful absurd tantrums of theirs. That’s what it means to win and not to lose, especially when what you win is a multiculture like ours. There are still political wars, social wars, environmental wars to be fought, and the winning of the culture wars is helpful but not adequate to the necessary winning of the others. But the fact remains that we did win the culture wars, that the victory actually matters more both to the winners and the losers than the winners seem yet to have grasped, and that the terms of other progressive and democratizing struggles really should change to reflect our victory the better to facilitate victories to come.
It is easy to mis-read moments like this in contemporary America, when everybody seems driven to cough up the same hairball of Yeatsian reflection, namely that the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Before we all start hyperventilating again about the Center not Holding (given the reactionary drivel that passes for “The Center” in public discourse today the loss of its hold seems to me no bad thing), I think it pays to contemplate the actual ritual work that is being accomplished in these brief brou-ha-has that barnacle non-issues like the “Ground Zero Mosque” that isn’t -- And for whom this work is being done -- And in the context of what larger structural realities this work seems so needful for those few to whom it is filling a need.
Look, the pleasures of buttsex are weaving the affection of two gay men into a long-term loving bond in your town right now. A pissed off anti-war activist is seriously contemplating burning a goddamn American flag. Tax paying Americans who happen to be Muslim are praying in a mosque and others are building a new one. A prosperous inter-racial couple are drinking coffee in a sunlit kitchen in a television commercial to the envy of millions of everyday citizens. A young woman is getting an abortion because she wants to have a life. Teenagers in a public bus are laughing about the cluelessness of an obtrusively evangelical classmate and the hypocrisy of his parents.
It isn’t going to stop. Ever. No law will be passed to stop it. The Constitution is not going to be amended to re-write America in the image of Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A. That train has left the station. It went to Hogwarts. They’re witches, you know.
The culture wars happened. We won. They lost.
All these crazily expansive fireballs of deranged emotional energy that fill our discursive field for a time and then vanish without a trace when the alcohol has burned away, the flag-burning crisis, the duct-tape craze, the swift-boat liars, the mass hysterical blindness in the face of a Presidential birth certificate, the death-panel conspiracy, and on and on and on, each one gloms on to a non-issue because real issues can be dealt with through deliberation, they attach to a non-problem because real problems are susceptible to collective solutions or resolutions through compromise.
The lack of a practical policy recourse or discursive space is indispensable to the work of these non-issues as spaces for the endless elaboration of faux-controversy and real-derangement, each one of which opens up a kind of bottomless pit of outrage and despair which are the farthest imaginable thing from means to political, moral, or policy ends, but are ends in themselves. The rituals are testaments to the outrage and the despair of the losers of the culture war who now live as vanquished enemies in the landscape of the America of the victorious sexually-permissive default-urban middle-class-identified secular-convivial majority-minority multiculture.
There can of course be no resolution to the outrage and despair given vent to in these cruel crazed joyless rituals, there can be no redress to the existential victimhood testified to in these conflagrations. We won. They lost. There is no getting around the realities to which they are responding. They confess the nature of their distress in the very names they choose for themselves: “The Silent Majority” “The Moral Majority” “The Real America.” But they are a white-racist patriarchal-prick minority aging fast (check out the average age of the average Fox News audience member), a neo-confederate rump ever more conspicuously incapable of governing a whole nation.
Both the hysterical desperation of their Tea Party rallies and the authoritarian-army discipline of their Base's Get-Out-the-White-Vote-Disenfreanchise-Everybody-Else Election Drives bespeak the same awareness that they are an unwelcome klatch of Orcs in the Hippy Shire. Sure, the inertial tug of weary corporate-military broadcast-industrial-extractive institutions still resonates with their deathly death-dealing worldview, but the saber-rattling is ever harder to distinguish from the annoyance of ghosts rattling their chains. The whiny white guys still have piles of cash and seats on the Board of Directors, but they look more like wizened mummies by the day and their kids have queer friends and they date brown people and they all know that global warming is real.
The dissatisfaction of liberals with the slowness of change and our tendency to sit out elections we should be organizing to win testifies to precisely the same underlying realities that drive the insanity of the wingnuts. We know we’ve won as surely as they have. Even in the maddening murderous depths of the Killer Clown Administration it was hard to reconcile the fantasies of the Mayberry Machiavellis with the reality at hand. When conservatives decry the liberal bias of the media, it actually is a bit off point to reply, as we tend to do, that the extreme right-wing and center-right skew of pundits and policies on news programs is anything but liberal, inasmuch as the liberal bias they are surely responding to is the one in which America’s Player on Big Brother is the fey gay guy college teacher pining for his long-time partner or the teen heroine of a night-time soap takes a trip to the abortion clinic because she wants to go to college and leave her loser boyfriend, the square-jawed captain of the football team, to become an ACLU lawyer or the number one music video clowns around about how lovely it is to smoke weed. What these wingnuts decry as a liberally-biased media is of course a liberally-biased reality roughly reflected by the media (pretty much everywhere except for its news programs, which may account for the vanishingly small audiences of even the most popular news-programming), which they despise but can no more change than they can turn back the tide.
It is much to be regretted that the winners of the culture war have never run their victory lap, but seem instead never quite to believe our victory puts us in a position to dictate terms. I think that the commonplace experience of leaving a parochial small town or neighborhood for college or for a job in the big city has mislead too many people into imagining that that small town or neighborhood is still there, still the same, still the Real America, when the truth is that all America left that small town behind, that small town left that small town behind, we all grew up together, that backward benighted cul-de-sac is not the Real America at all, the Real America is actually Us.
We won the culture wars, and America is our multiculture now. They lost and from time to time they lose their minds in noisy hurt and hurtful spectacles that testify to that larger loss. We should pay no attention to them, and we should ridicule those who do. Needless to say we should all of us be prepared to hold out a helping hand to those in distress, but only after they stop throwing these awful absurd tantrums of theirs. That’s what it means to win and not to lose, especially when what you win is a multiculture like ours. There are still political wars, social wars, environmental wars to be fought, and the winning of the culture wars is helpful but not adequate to the necessary winning of the others. But the fact remains that we did win the culture wars, that the victory actually matters more both to the winners and the losers than the winners seem yet to have grasped, and that the terms of other progressive and democratizing struggles really should change to reflect our victory the better to facilitate victories to come.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Calculating Futurological Predictions About the Arrival of Techno-Immortality
y - t = 0
[where "y" = a given futurologist's current life expectancy in years, and "t" = a given futurologist's rough prediction as to the time it will take for techno-immortalization to arrive]
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal elaborates the formula for our amusement and also provides a very helpful illustration. I'm assuming this is in fact a grand unified techno-immortality wankery formula encompassing not only the futurologists wanking longevity pills or genetic sooper-medicines but also the ones wanking getting scooped into shiny Robot Bodies or wanking getting their brains uploaded into cyberspatial heaven and so on as well.
And, hey, kids! How'zabout this for a bonus formula?
Calculating Futurological Predictions About the Arrival of History-Ending Sooperintelligent AI
Current Year + 20 = AI + 1 = Robot God
This formula applies to predictions from the WWII era onward, every year by the year, right up to the present and ever onward, very possibly until the sooper-smart futurologists at some corporate-militarist think tank calculate the time is ripe to release the nukes or manage to peddle some geo-engineering boondoggle that throws us all back to the stone age.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
"The Future" As A White Boys' Club
Athena Andreadis has posted a delightful bit of righteous snark about the White Guys of "The Future" at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET (about whose relentlessly unrepresentative whiteness and guyness I snicker myself on a literally weekly basis right here, and with which, like her, I was once briefly and uncomfortably affiliated):
I am glad I'm not the only one who holds this particular ferocious grudge against the execrable Larry Summers. When I teach Valerie Solanas' hilarious satirical SCUM Manifesto in my classes I often use Summers' pseudo-scientific "biological" reductionist/determinist rationale for his sexist bigotry to illustrate the attitudes Solanas lampoons in describing all men as "walking abortions," mutilated by the chromosomal shedding from healthy wholesome "X" of Eve's Rib leaving us only a "Y." Rather like her hilariously convoluted diagnosis of all men as having "pussy envy" it is doubly amusing to observe the righteousness with which men presumably targeted by her hyperbole shake their fists at her irrationality and unfairness without batting an eyelash at evolutionary psychology claiming that women are all wired for nurturing or psychoanalytic claims that women all suffer from "penis envy."
Be that as it may, I do find it very strange that scholars who write about technoscience and development issues would believe that this is generally -- no doubt, oh so unfortunately -- still "a white boys' club," when, for example, women, people of color, and a palpably international cast of key figures throng Science and Technology Studies as well as the Environmental Justice Movement, which are in my view the most vibrant and relevant scholarly and activist locations in which such theoretical work is actually being done in the academy (not to mention the work being done in actual labs and science Departments, in neither of which is it exactly right to pretend we still live in the 1950s "white boys' club" either, though we would all still benefit enormously from more inclusion and outreach and representative education programs in math and science and so on). Oh, wait, did I say I find it "strange" that "scholars" would believe "primarily white boys think about" technoscience? I'm sorry -- this is a "think tank" we're talking about, so I'm the furthest imaginable thing from surprised. No doubt these are innovative "thought leaders" more than old-fashioned scholars. They are "framing" and "re-packaging" and "marketing" wish-fulfillment fantasies provoked less by science than by juicy details and sciency projections. Maybe this is indeed something mostly for silly boys circle-jerking round an imaginary toypile while the world has better things to do.
Athena's conclusion is as incisive and it is acerbic (one of my favorite combinations):
Scroll downward to find every Saturday for months my various White Guys of "The Future" Reports, and for a word on the Cultishness of superlative futurological discourses see this.
I recently had an exchange with a progressive friend. He had just announced that he had become a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), a prominent transhumanist venue. Since I had trod that path before him, we inevitably came to the part where I pointed out that transhumanism is composed almost exclusively of white American men — and its upper echelon entirely so (H+ devotees invariably counter that most of their gofers are female and/or ethnic, so there!). Whereupon my friend replied: “Yes, it’s a white boys’ club. As far as I know that’s not because of a policy of exclusion. It’s because primarily white boys think about this stuff.” Which puts him in the same group (and class) as Larry Summers, who declared that women aren’t in the sciences because their brains just aren’t wired for numbiz.
I am glad I'm not the only one who holds this particular ferocious grudge against the execrable Larry Summers. When I teach Valerie Solanas' hilarious satirical SCUM Manifesto in my classes I often use Summers' pseudo-scientific "biological" reductionist/determinist rationale for his sexist bigotry to illustrate the attitudes Solanas lampoons in describing all men as "walking abortions," mutilated by the chromosomal shedding from healthy wholesome "X" of Eve's Rib leaving us only a "Y." Rather like her hilariously convoluted diagnosis of all men as having "pussy envy" it is doubly amusing to observe the righteousness with which men presumably targeted by her hyperbole shake their fists at her irrationality and unfairness without batting an eyelash at evolutionary psychology claiming that women are all wired for nurturing or psychoanalytic claims that women all suffer from "penis envy."
Be that as it may, I do find it very strange that scholars who write about technoscience and development issues would believe that this is generally -- no doubt, oh so unfortunately -- still "a white boys' club," when, for example, women, people of color, and a palpably international cast of key figures throng Science and Technology Studies as well as the Environmental Justice Movement, which are in my view the most vibrant and relevant scholarly and activist locations in which such theoretical work is actually being done in the academy (not to mention the work being done in actual labs and science Departments, in neither of which is it exactly right to pretend we still live in the 1950s "white boys' club" either, though we would all still benefit enormously from more inclusion and outreach and representative education programs in math and science and so on). Oh, wait, did I say I find it "strange" that "scholars" would believe "primarily white boys think about" technoscience? I'm sorry -- this is a "think tank" we're talking about, so I'm the furthest imaginable thing from surprised. No doubt these are innovative "thought leaders" more than old-fashioned scholars. They are "framing" and "re-packaging" and "marketing" wish-fulfillment fantasies provoked less by science than by juicy details and sciency projections. Maybe this is indeed something mostly for silly boys circle-jerking round an imaginary toypile while the world has better things to do.
Athena's conclusion is as incisive and it is acerbic (one of my favorite combinations):
[I'm] bored stiff in any place where charlatanism passes for provocative thinking or cutting edge science. Cults are very similar in that you have to actively suppress your brain processes to play along. I told my friend that we should revisit this conversation when his stint at the IEET is done. Unless the Singularity happens first, of course.
Scroll downward to find every Saturday for months my various White Guys of "The Future" Reports, and for a word on the Cultishness of superlative futurological discourses see this.
Sunday, August 08, 2010
Futurology Against Ecology
1. GWOT Against Green, August, 2007
2. Amor Mundi, November, 2007
3. Vandana Shiva on Resource Descent and Permaculture Politics, November, 2007
4. Consumerism Forever! February, 2008
5. Futurological Immaterialism and Neoliberal Immaterialism, March, 2009
6. Paul Krugman Delineates the Next Guiding Economic Narrative, September, 2009
7. Futurology Is the Quintessential and Consummating Discourse of the Unwholesome Whole That Is Neoliberal/Neoconservative Corporate-Militarism, November, 2009
8. Hole Earth, January, 2010, revised August, 2010
10. "Geo-Engineering" As Futurological Greenwashing, August, 2010
11. Chris Mooney Responds, Monday, August 9, 2010
12. "Geo-Engineering" Is A Declaration of War That Doesn't Care About Democracy , August, 2010
13. There Is No "Plan B," August, 2010
14. My "Geo-Engineering" "Denialism", August, 2010
15. "Geo-Engineering" and the "Ticking Time-Bomb," August, 2010
16. Quick, Futurological Escapists, to the Lifeboats! October, 2010
17. Mr. Burns As "Geo-Engineering" Archetype, October, 2010
18. The Futurological Gotcha and the Desperation of the "Geo-Engineers," October, 2010
19. What's New in "Geo-Engineering"? January, 2011.
20. Cradle to Cradle As Conventional Right Wing Anti-Government Ideology, February, 2011
21. From "The Great Stagnation" to a Great Awakening, June, 2011
22. Reactionary Fruits of Futurology, "Geo-Engineering" Edition, June, 2011. [See also: Reactionary Fruits of Futurology: Social Security Edition]
23. The Deep Anti-Ecology of Futurological "Geo-Engineering," June, 2011.
24. Against the Seduction of the Left by Reactionary Futurology, August, 2011.
25. Slavoj Zizek, Our Heir to George Carlin, Does His Standup At Occupy Wall Street, October, 2011.
26. Robot Cultist Declares Need for Holiday Counting Chickens Before They Are Hatched, February, 2012.
27. Mo Nukes, February, 2012.
28. "Geo-Engineering" As Right Wing War and Revolution, March, 2012.
29. What Are People Really Talking About When They Talk About "Geo-Engineering"? March, 2012.
30. Corporate Military "Geo-Engineering" Fantasies Are A Vision of "Democracy" and "Environmentalism" Only A Right Wing Libertopian Could Love, May, 2012.
31. Is "Geo-Engineering" Just Gardening? November, 2012.
32. Chemtrail Conspiracists, November, 2012.
33. "Driverless Cars" As Dead-Ender Car Culture Apologia, January 7, 2013.
34. Car Culture Is A Futurological Catastrophe, January 14, 2014.
35. A Clash of Spontaneisms: Howard Kunstler on Thomas Piketty, April 29, 2014.
2. Amor Mundi, November, 2007
3. Vandana Shiva on Resource Descent and Permaculture Politics, November, 2007
4. Consumerism Forever! February, 2008
5. Futurological Immaterialism and Neoliberal Immaterialism, March, 2009
6. Paul Krugman Delineates the Next Guiding Economic Narrative, September, 2009
7. Futurology Is the Quintessential and Consummating Discourse of the Unwholesome Whole That Is Neoliberal/Neoconservative Corporate-Militarism, November, 2009
8. Hole Earth, January, 2010, revised August, 2010
one -- Stewart Brand, King of Pop Futurology9. Facile Futurology in the Gulf, June, 2010
two -- Surveying the Greenback-Green Futurological Litany
three -- All Futurisms Tend to be Functionally Retro-Futuristic in Their Political Substance.
10. "Geo-Engineering" As Futurological Greenwashing, August, 2010
11. Chris Mooney Responds, Monday, August 9, 2010
12. "Geo-Engineering" Is A Declaration of War That Doesn't Care About Democracy , August, 2010
13. There Is No "Plan B," August, 2010
14. My "Geo-Engineering" "Denialism", August, 2010
15. "Geo-Engineering" and the "Ticking Time-Bomb," August, 2010
16. Quick, Futurological Escapists, to the Lifeboats! October, 2010
17. Mr. Burns As "Geo-Engineering" Archetype, October, 2010
18. The Futurological Gotcha and the Desperation of the "Geo-Engineers," October, 2010
19. What's New in "Geo-Engineering"? January, 2011.
20. Cradle to Cradle As Conventional Right Wing Anti-Government Ideology, February, 2011
21. From "The Great Stagnation" to a Great Awakening, June, 2011
22. Reactionary Fruits of Futurology, "Geo-Engineering" Edition, June, 2011. [See also: Reactionary Fruits of Futurology: Social Security Edition]
23. The Deep Anti-Ecology of Futurological "Geo-Engineering," June, 2011.
24. Against the Seduction of the Left by Reactionary Futurology, August, 2011.
25. Slavoj Zizek, Our Heir to George Carlin, Does His Standup At Occupy Wall Street, October, 2011.
26. Robot Cultist Declares Need for Holiday Counting Chickens Before They Are Hatched, February, 2012.
27. Mo Nukes, February, 2012.
28. "Geo-Engineering" As Right Wing War and Revolution, March, 2012.
29. What Are People Really Talking About When They Talk About "Geo-Engineering"? March, 2012.
30. Corporate Military "Geo-Engineering" Fantasies Are A Vision of "Democracy" and "Environmentalism" Only A Right Wing Libertopian Could Love, May, 2012.
31. Is "Geo-Engineering" Just Gardening? November, 2012.
32. Chemtrail Conspiracists, November, 2012.
33. "Driverless Cars" As Dead-Ender Car Culture Apologia, January 7, 2013.
34. Car Culture Is A Futurological Catastrophe, January 14, 2014.
35. A Clash of Spontaneisms: Howard Kunstler on Thomas Piketty, April 29, 2014.
Saturday, August 07, 2010
"Geo-Engineering" As Futurological Greenwashing
"Geo-engineering" is one of the latest thrilling contributions of futurology to the ongoing derangement of sensible deliberation about ongoing technoscientific change in the world.
In a recent piece capturing this derangement rather nicely the usually more sensible Chris Mooney bemoans "the incredible gap between the importance of geoengineering as a possibility on the one hand, and the complete lack of public awareness that it’s even on the table on the other." Not only is the public unaware of "geo-engineering's" manifold promises, but Mooney declares that "only about 1 percent of Americans currently know what geoengineering even is."
I personally believe that the reason so many people are unaware of "geo-engineering" is probably because there is no such thing as "geo-engineering" for them to be aware of, and that a very good reason that so few people can say "what geo-engineering even is" is because there is no such thing as "geo-engineering" that actually is anything in particular to say something about.
Let me be plain at the outset that I am not making the rather conventional claim that some gee-whiz notion of the futurological fantasists like rocket-cars or meals-in-a-pill or sexy-slavebots hasn't materialized yet, in "answer" to which the futurologists will then of course dismiss my lack of imagination or can-do spirit or hard-nosed scientific grasp of the inevitabilities spilling forth from their meretricious maths the better to indulge yet another round of groundless self-congratulation.
No, I am saying that the futurological discourse of "geo-engineering" actually functions to create the appearance of a phenomenon where there is none, it functions as futurological frames tend to do as a derangement of sense, a distraction from substance onto non-substance, a substitute of frivolous over-generalities and hyperbolic promises for deliberation about actually complex, actually contingent technodevelopmental problems with a diversity of stakeholders.
Chris Mooney provides a fine example of what I mean when he first writes of "the prospect of geoengineering the climate" and then provides what amounts to the only thing remotely like a definition of this phenomenon on which he is about to pin so many of his hopes and about the ignorance of which he is about to excoriate so many of his planetary peers. He writes: "geoengineering the climate -- in other words, engaging in some type of deliberate intervention to alter the planet and thereby counteract global warming."
Is it necessary for me to point out the stunningly useless over-generality of the key phrase in this non-definition, namely "some type of deliberate intervention"? According to this definition-ish utterance, everyone who has changed their energy consumption patterns, purchased energy-efficient appliances, acquired roof-top solar panels (good going, by the way), educated or agitated or organized or legislated any kind of regulation of extractive-petrochemical industry to ameliorate global warming has been engaged in "geo-engineering."
If that is the case, then it is of course palpably false to claim nobody is aware of this "phenomenon" as Mooney declares. Lamentably few Americans take the issue of global warming seriously, it is true -- especially if a change in conduct commensurate with belief is treated as the sign of taking it seriously -- but far more than one percent of Americans are knowledgeable and concerned about environmental issues and act on this knowledge.
No doubt our fiery futurologists will already be stamping their feet and tearing their hair impatiently at my belligerent obtuseness in putting my objection in such terms. Mooney clearly doesn't mean by "geo-engineering" to refer to conventional environmental regulations or the sorts of shifts from extractive-petrochemical to renewable energy sources everyday green rhetoric and activism and practice have been concerned with for years in an incessant glare of publicity.
But the fact that his definition of "geo-engineering," such as it is, doesn't preclude mainstream environmentalist theory and practice while at once asserting very insistently that it is terribly new and more radical than mainstream environmental theory and practice is perfectly typical of futurological "geo-engineering" discourse, and I would argue a key part of its point.
The example Mooney does provide of what "geo-engineering" actually would consist of is "injecting sulfur particles into the stratosphere that would reflect sunlight away from the Earth, thereby causing a global cooling." What I would draw your attention to is that this proposal is actually only one of a ramifying suite of mega-engineering wet-dreams that futurologists start handwaving about when talk turns to "geo-engineering." A New York Times article already four years old (futurologists tend to pretend their pet formulations are startling and new even after they grow whiskers, as witness the dead-enders who still crow breathlessly about the imminence of superintelligent AI) provided a nice summary of the sorts of proposals would-be "geo-engineers" bandy about in its first paragraph: "Build sunshades in orbit to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Trick oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping greenhouse gases."
Now, why on earth would it make sense to corral all these interventions together with Mooney's own example and then say of them, as Mooney does, that together they constitute a single "technology," or as the New York Times article does that together they constitute a single "emerging field"? I submit that everything that matters most about each of these proposals in terms of deliberation about their plausible effects, their costs, their risks, their benefits, their stakeholders differ from one another in absolutely indispensable ways. And it is hard to see why, given these differences, anything much about the relative success of one of these efforts would necessarily justify confidence that any of the others would have comparable success.
Just who, exactly, is made more knowledgeable about any of the costs, risks, or benefits to any of the diversity of stakeholders to any of these extraordinarily massive, costly, risky proposals by pretending that they are all essentially the same sort of thing? And what does it mean that this essential sameness they presumably exhibit (but which scarcely stands up to actual scrutiny) is also, at one and the same time, being peddled as so much more radical and promising than the sorts of legislative and popular lifeway recommendations of conventional environmentalist politics?
The older New York Times article to which I have already referred also provides a definition of "geo-engineering" which differs from Mooney's but offers up similar perplexities. "[G]eoengineering… means rearranging the earth's environment on a large scale to suit human needs and promote habitability." This is also the definition which the current Wikipedia entry on "geo-engineering" has adapted for its use, and so the definition may be said to have acquired a certain canonical force.
Given that aggregate lifestyle and design choices or regulatory effects can be quite large, it seems to me that this definition fails as Mooney's also does to distinguish "geo-engineering" interventions, so-called, from mainstream environmentalist efforts, even if the whole point of the exercise seems as usual to trumpet unprecedented novelty and radicality through the introduction of this futurological neologism.
Unlike Mooney's definition, however -- which demands at least the specificity that "geo-engineering" interventions "combat global warming" -- the more canonical definition demands only that geo-engineering "suit human needs" and "promote habitability." Again, needless to say, opinions as to what counts as human needs or more or less habitable environments are notions notoriously and interminably under contest, and to the extent that this definition pretends otherwise it is simply adding yet another layer of obfuscation into the discussion.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the notion of "geo-engineering" seems to me to subsume far too many actually substantially different techniques in the service of far too many actually substantially different outcomes to be of much practical use in any of the deliberations into which it is being injected so enthusiastically by futurologists.
It is interesting to note that "geo-engineering" is more or less functionally equivalent to another idea, which, precisely to the contrary, is indispensable to environmentalist politics, namely, the idea of anthropogenic climate change as such. That collective human conduct -- the pollution of the atmosphere with carbon disturbing the biofeedback mechanisms through which the biosphere sustains complex organisms, the depletion and spoilage of planetary freshwater through human pollution and overuse, the destruction of living soils through unsustainable agricultural practices, the devastation of biodiversity through the impingement of human cultures on local ecosystems, and so on -- can radically undermine the capacity of the planet to sustain human and other life as such, seems roughly correlated to, even implied by, the "geo-engineering" conceit: Indeed, one is tempted to say that "Geo-engineering" is little more than a chirpy "reframing" or marketing "repackaging" of the notion of anthropogenic climate change as such.
How interesting, then, to contemplate the flood of dollars devoted by extractive-petrochemical industrial concerns to climate-change denialism, to calling into perpetual doubt the consensus of actual climate scientists about the contribution of human actions on catastrophic global warming, and then to think about the likely beneficiaries of the mega-scale engineering proposals that are inevitably proposed under the heading of "geo-engineering."
Even if the actual definitions and analyses of the "geo-engineering" "concept" never manage to provide a coherent and compelling case as to why they include such a disparate constellation of proposals under the same heading while always interestingly excluding mainstream regulatory and educational proposals from consideration under that heading, one can immediately make sense of the grouping if one simply makes expedient recourse to considerations of who profits from what proposals and who loses control over society from what proposals.
The mega-scale engineering proposals that are inevitably championed by futurological prophets-for-hire would without exception be undertaken by vast industrial concerns, helmed by military contractors and multinational corporations under the control of incumbent-elite actors. The legislative and educational approaches of mainstream environmentalism would either directly lower the profitability of such concerns by taxing and regulating them or indirectly do the same by changing the wasteful and destructive hysteria of consumer lifestyle capitalism as such. Furthermore, many mainstream green proposals for the subsidization of edible ecosystem appropriate landscaping and roof-top solar panels yield relocalization and decentralization of production in ways that are less susceptible to authoritarian hierarchical capture and exploitation than are the vast capital-intensive industrial formations like the nuclear plants or orbiting solar sails suave techno-boosters seem to prefer.
This is not to deny that there is a place in mainstream environmentalism for hopes of a Labor-friendly new American productive industrial economy making electric cars and wind turbines and laying high-speed rail across the continent and undoing the damage of the last generation of futurological techno-boosters who dismantled the substance of middle-class civilization in the name of fantasies of a borderless digital-utopia of frictionless capital, immaterial financial "products," and libertopian crypto-anarchy.
But mainstream environmental proposals tend in the main to be human-scaled, democratically-accountable, p2p-distributed lifeway formations while "geo-engineering" proposals tend in the main to be mega-scaled, unaccountably-technocratic, capital-intensive, elite-maintained, for-profit-or-pork formations. The analogy between the battle between elite-incumbent broadcast formations against democratizing peer-to-peer formations, between elite-incumbent secretive-and-propriety knowledge politics against democratizing access-to-knowledge politics is absolutely instructive here.
In framing the urgency of "geo-engineering" as "a program" -- an urgency that one might expect would issue in greater clarity as to the actual substance of the concept itself -- Mooney declares that "climate change now looks increasingly unstoppable." To this he adds the disastrous failure of our elected representatives to enact regulations the least bit equal to the problems at hand. "[E]ven if the proposals on the table at Copenhagen had been adopted, we’d still end the century with an atmospheric carbon dioxide of 700 parts per million -- more than enough to cause climate upheaval, raise seas dramatically, and so forth." It is in light of this failure of our responsible democratic politics that he turns instead to the techno-utopian techno-fix of "geo-engineering" in the first place. "[I]f we can’t cut emissions, at some point we’ll be forced to consider a more radical alternative."
Let us pause to consider the politics inhering in this little hymn to resignation to our corporate-military overlords. Why would it be true that failure to enact the minimally necessary regulations to ameliorate catastrophic anthropogenic climate change means that every subsequent effort would also fail? Surely if recourse to the radically under-specified "geo-engineering" alternative happens only "at some point" when regulation has failed and disaster looms, this very same state of affairs would also have changed the knowledge and felt-urgency that is making political solutions so intractable?
Not to belabor my point, but recall that the "geo-engineering alternative" here isn't after all "an alternative" in any singular or coherent sense, but a disparate collection of technical proposals that seem to have little in common but a scale and expense that ensures they would be profitable to and under the control of mostly the very same bad-faith actors whose unconscionably reckless profit-taking and war-making have been responsible hitherto for the very problem they would be mobilized to ameliorate, and, even worse, whose cynical efforts at public misinformation have been the chief reason that democratically accountable political solutions are failing in the first place.
"Geo-engineering" may not make much sense as an analytic category, but it is supremely sensible as a rhetorical strategy on the part of incumbent-elites who seek to profit as much from cleaning up their mess (or simply from the promise to clean it up through highly dramatic implausible boondoggles) as they made from making their mess.
Although, as I have already pointed out, "geo-engineering" seems simply to be a rather involuted cheer-leading variation on the straightforward premise that anthropogenic climate change is evident in the world (if collective human action is altering the climate for the worse, it isn't that extraordinary to claim that collective human action might alter the climate for the better), it is more to the point to recognize that those who have profited by denial of the premise of anthropogenic climate change now stand to profit by the promotion of the premise of "geo-engineering."
To the extent that the glossy mega-engineering fantasies of "geo-engineering" futurologists distract our attention from the efforts of more mainstream-legible educational, agitational, organizational, and regulatory environmentalist efforts -- or take for granted the failure of these -- they should be seen as a second wave of denialism. This time the denialism is not about the fact or human causation of climate catastrophe itself (since "geo-engineering" contains an implicit admission of both of these), but a denialism about the possibility or effectiveness of any democratic response to that crisis.
From the reactionary denial that human agency could possibly impact the whole vast and resourceful planet on which we all depend for survival and flourishing, we find ourselves confronted by a reactionary denial that the collective democratic agency of everyday people can preserve this vast and resourceful planet on which we all depend for survival and flourishing.
Far from a startlingly new or radical idea, "geo-engineering" seems to me little more than a very familiar, very old-fashioned insistence on the part of corporate-military incumbent-elites that nothing from which they cannot profit and prosper themselves should ever count as real or as possible or as important. All the substance and consistency of "geo-engineering" as an analytic category, as a set of imaginary or actual techniques, or as a program of proposals derives from the preferential benefit it confers to incumbent interests in the midst of a burgeoning planetary awareness and activism that otherwise threatens those interests with the loss of their unearned privileges and status in the world we are making, peer to peer, in the name of sustainability and fairness.
In a recent piece capturing this derangement rather nicely the usually more sensible Chris Mooney bemoans "the incredible gap between the importance of geoengineering as a possibility on the one hand, and the complete lack of public awareness that it’s even on the table on the other." Not only is the public unaware of "geo-engineering's" manifold promises, but Mooney declares that "only about 1 percent of Americans currently know what geoengineering even is."
I personally believe that the reason so many people are unaware of "geo-engineering" is probably because there is no such thing as "geo-engineering" for them to be aware of, and that a very good reason that so few people can say "what geo-engineering even is" is because there is no such thing as "geo-engineering" that actually is anything in particular to say something about.
Let me be plain at the outset that I am not making the rather conventional claim that some gee-whiz notion of the futurological fantasists like rocket-cars or meals-in-a-pill or sexy-slavebots hasn't materialized yet, in "answer" to which the futurologists will then of course dismiss my lack of imagination or can-do spirit or hard-nosed scientific grasp of the inevitabilities spilling forth from their meretricious maths the better to indulge yet another round of groundless self-congratulation.
No, I am saying that the futurological discourse of "geo-engineering" actually functions to create the appearance of a phenomenon where there is none, it functions as futurological frames tend to do as a derangement of sense, a distraction from substance onto non-substance, a substitute of frivolous over-generalities and hyperbolic promises for deliberation about actually complex, actually contingent technodevelopmental problems with a diversity of stakeholders.
Chris Mooney provides a fine example of what I mean when he first writes of "the prospect of geoengineering the climate" and then provides what amounts to the only thing remotely like a definition of this phenomenon on which he is about to pin so many of his hopes and about the ignorance of which he is about to excoriate so many of his planetary peers. He writes: "geoengineering the climate -- in other words, engaging in some type of deliberate intervention to alter the planet and thereby counteract global warming."
Is it necessary for me to point out the stunningly useless over-generality of the key phrase in this non-definition, namely "some type of deliberate intervention"? According to this definition-ish utterance, everyone who has changed their energy consumption patterns, purchased energy-efficient appliances, acquired roof-top solar panels (good going, by the way), educated or agitated or organized or legislated any kind of regulation of extractive-petrochemical industry to ameliorate global warming has been engaged in "geo-engineering."
If that is the case, then it is of course palpably false to claim nobody is aware of this "phenomenon" as Mooney declares. Lamentably few Americans take the issue of global warming seriously, it is true -- especially if a change in conduct commensurate with belief is treated as the sign of taking it seriously -- but far more than one percent of Americans are knowledgeable and concerned about environmental issues and act on this knowledge.
No doubt our fiery futurologists will already be stamping their feet and tearing their hair impatiently at my belligerent obtuseness in putting my objection in such terms. Mooney clearly doesn't mean by "geo-engineering" to refer to conventional environmental regulations or the sorts of shifts from extractive-petrochemical to renewable energy sources everyday green rhetoric and activism and practice have been concerned with for years in an incessant glare of publicity.
But the fact that his definition of "geo-engineering," such as it is, doesn't preclude mainstream environmentalist theory and practice while at once asserting very insistently that it is terribly new and more radical than mainstream environmental theory and practice is perfectly typical of futurological "geo-engineering" discourse, and I would argue a key part of its point.
The example Mooney does provide of what "geo-engineering" actually would consist of is "injecting sulfur particles into the stratosphere that would reflect sunlight away from the Earth, thereby causing a global cooling." What I would draw your attention to is that this proposal is actually only one of a ramifying suite of mega-engineering wet-dreams that futurologists start handwaving about when talk turns to "geo-engineering." A New York Times article already four years old (futurologists tend to pretend their pet formulations are startling and new even after they grow whiskers, as witness the dead-enders who still crow breathlessly about the imminence of superintelligent AI) provided a nice summary of the sorts of proposals would-be "geo-engineers" bandy about in its first paragraph: "Build sunshades in orbit to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Trick oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping greenhouse gases."
Now, why on earth would it make sense to corral all these interventions together with Mooney's own example and then say of them, as Mooney does, that together they constitute a single "technology," or as the New York Times article does that together they constitute a single "emerging field"? I submit that everything that matters most about each of these proposals in terms of deliberation about their plausible effects, their costs, their risks, their benefits, their stakeholders differ from one another in absolutely indispensable ways. And it is hard to see why, given these differences, anything much about the relative success of one of these efforts would necessarily justify confidence that any of the others would have comparable success.
Just who, exactly, is made more knowledgeable about any of the costs, risks, or benefits to any of the diversity of stakeholders to any of these extraordinarily massive, costly, risky proposals by pretending that they are all essentially the same sort of thing? And what does it mean that this essential sameness they presumably exhibit (but which scarcely stands up to actual scrutiny) is also, at one and the same time, being peddled as so much more radical and promising than the sorts of legislative and popular lifeway recommendations of conventional environmentalist politics?
The older New York Times article to which I have already referred also provides a definition of "geo-engineering" which differs from Mooney's but offers up similar perplexities. "[G]eoengineering… means rearranging the earth's environment on a large scale to suit human needs and promote habitability." This is also the definition which the current Wikipedia entry on "geo-engineering" has adapted for its use, and so the definition may be said to have acquired a certain canonical force.
Given that aggregate lifestyle and design choices or regulatory effects can be quite large, it seems to me that this definition fails as Mooney's also does to distinguish "geo-engineering" interventions, so-called, from mainstream environmentalist efforts, even if the whole point of the exercise seems as usual to trumpet unprecedented novelty and radicality through the introduction of this futurological neologism.
Unlike Mooney's definition, however -- which demands at least the specificity that "geo-engineering" interventions "combat global warming" -- the more canonical definition demands only that geo-engineering "suit human needs" and "promote habitability." Again, needless to say, opinions as to what counts as human needs or more or less habitable environments are notions notoriously and interminably under contest, and to the extent that this definition pretends otherwise it is simply adding yet another layer of obfuscation into the discussion.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the notion of "geo-engineering" seems to me to subsume far too many actually substantially different techniques in the service of far too many actually substantially different outcomes to be of much practical use in any of the deliberations into which it is being injected so enthusiastically by futurologists.
It is interesting to note that "geo-engineering" is more or less functionally equivalent to another idea, which, precisely to the contrary, is indispensable to environmentalist politics, namely, the idea of anthropogenic climate change as such. That collective human conduct -- the pollution of the atmosphere with carbon disturbing the biofeedback mechanisms through which the biosphere sustains complex organisms, the depletion and spoilage of planetary freshwater through human pollution and overuse, the destruction of living soils through unsustainable agricultural practices, the devastation of biodiversity through the impingement of human cultures on local ecosystems, and so on -- can radically undermine the capacity of the planet to sustain human and other life as such, seems roughly correlated to, even implied by, the "geo-engineering" conceit: Indeed, one is tempted to say that "Geo-engineering" is little more than a chirpy "reframing" or marketing "repackaging" of the notion of anthropogenic climate change as such.
How interesting, then, to contemplate the flood of dollars devoted by extractive-petrochemical industrial concerns to climate-change denialism, to calling into perpetual doubt the consensus of actual climate scientists about the contribution of human actions on catastrophic global warming, and then to think about the likely beneficiaries of the mega-scale engineering proposals that are inevitably proposed under the heading of "geo-engineering."
Even if the actual definitions and analyses of the "geo-engineering" "concept" never manage to provide a coherent and compelling case as to why they include such a disparate constellation of proposals under the same heading while always interestingly excluding mainstream regulatory and educational proposals from consideration under that heading, one can immediately make sense of the grouping if one simply makes expedient recourse to considerations of who profits from what proposals and who loses control over society from what proposals.
The mega-scale engineering proposals that are inevitably championed by futurological prophets-for-hire would without exception be undertaken by vast industrial concerns, helmed by military contractors and multinational corporations under the control of incumbent-elite actors. The legislative and educational approaches of mainstream environmentalism would either directly lower the profitability of such concerns by taxing and regulating them or indirectly do the same by changing the wasteful and destructive hysteria of consumer lifestyle capitalism as such. Furthermore, many mainstream green proposals for the subsidization of edible ecosystem appropriate landscaping and roof-top solar panels yield relocalization and decentralization of production in ways that are less susceptible to authoritarian hierarchical capture and exploitation than are the vast capital-intensive industrial formations like the nuclear plants or orbiting solar sails suave techno-boosters seem to prefer.
This is not to deny that there is a place in mainstream environmentalism for hopes of a Labor-friendly new American productive industrial economy making electric cars and wind turbines and laying high-speed rail across the continent and undoing the damage of the last generation of futurological techno-boosters who dismantled the substance of middle-class civilization in the name of fantasies of a borderless digital-utopia of frictionless capital, immaterial financial "products," and libertopian crypto-anarchy.
But mainstream environmental proposals tend in the main to be human-scaled, democratically-accountable, p2p-distributed lifeway formations while "geo-engineering" proposals tend in the main to be mega-scaled, unaccountably-technocratic, capital-intensive, elite-maintained, for-profit-or-pork formations. The analogy between the battle between elite-incumbent broadcast formations against democratizing peer-to-peer formations, between elite-incumbent secretive-and-propriety knowledge politics against democratizing access-to-knowledge politics is absolutely instructive here.
In framing the urgency of "geo-engineering" as "a program" -- an urgency that one might expect would issue in greater clarity as to the actual substance of the concept itself -- Mooney declares that "climate change now looks increasingly unstoppable." To this he adds the disastrous failure of our elected representatives to enact regulations the least bit equal to the problems at hand. "[E]ven if the proposals on the table at Copenhagen had been adopted, we’d still end the century with an atmospheric carbon dioxide of 700 parts per million -- more than enough to cause climate upheaval, raise seas dramatically, and so forth." It is in light of this failure of our responsible democratic politics that he turns instead to the techno-utopian techno-fix of "geo-engineering" in the first place. "[I]f we can’t cut emissions, at some point we’ll be forced to consider a more radical alternative."
Let us pause to consider the politics inhering in this little hymn to resignation to our corporate-military overlords. Why would it be true that failure to enact the minimally necessary regulations to ameliorate catastrophic anthropogenic climate change means that every subsequent effort would also fail? Surely if recourse to the radically under-specified "geo-engineering" alternative happens only "at some point" when regulation has failed and disaster looms, this very same state of affairs would also have changed the knowledge and felt-urgency that is making political solutions so intractable?
Not to belabor my point, but recall that the "geo-engineering alternative" here isn't after all "an alternative" in any singular or coherent sense, but a disparate collection of technical proposals that seem to have little in common but a scale and expense that ensures they would be profitable to and under the control of mostly the very same bad-faith actors whose unconscionably reckless profit-taking and war-making have been responsible hitherto for the very problem they would be mobilized to ameliorate, and, even worse, whose cynical efforts at public misinformation have been the chief reason that democratically accountable political solutions are failing in the first place.
"Geo-engineering" may not make much sense as an analytic category, but it is supremely sensible as a rhetorical strategy on the part of incumbent-elites who seek to profit as much from cleaning up their mess (or simply from the promise to clean it up through highly dramatic implausible boondoggles) as they made from making their mess.
Although, as I have already pointed out, "geo-engineering" seems simply to be a rather involuted cheer-leading variation on the straightforward premise that anthropogenic climate change is evident in the world (if collective human action is altering the climate for the worse, it isn't that extraordinary to claim that collective human action might alter the climate for the better), it is more to the point to recognize that those who have profited by denial of the premise of anthropogenic climate change now stand to profit by the promotion of the premise of "geo-engineering."
To the extent that the glossy mega-engineering fantasies of "geo-engineering" futurologists distract our attention from the efforts of more mainstream-legible educational, agitational, organizational, and regulatory environmentalist efforts -- or take for granted the failure of these -- they should be seen as a second wave of denialism. This time the denialism is not about the fact or human causation of climate catastrophe itself (since "geo-engineering" contains an implicit admission of both of these), but a denialism about the possibility or effectiveness of any democratic response to that crisis.
From the reactionary denial that human agency could possibly impact the whole vast and resourceful planet on which we all depend for survival and flourishing, we find ourselves confronted by a reactionary denial that the collective democratic agency of everyday people can preserve this vast and resourceful planet on which we all depend for survival and flourishing.
Far from a startlingly new or radical idea, "geo-engineering" seems to me little more than a very familiar, very old-fashioned insistence on the part of corporate-military incumbent-elites that nothing from which they cannot profit and prosper themselves should ever count as real or as possible or as important. All the substance and consistency of "geo-engineering" as an analytic category, as a set of imaginary or actual techniques, or as a program of proposals derives from the preferential benefit it confers to incumbent interests in the midst of a burgeoning planetary awareness and activism that otherwise threatens those interests with the loss of their unearned privileges and status in the world we are making, peer to peer, in the name of sustainability and fairness.
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