Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
Saturday, August 28, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
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.
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.
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