Appiah Predicts "The Future"

What will future generations condemn us for?

Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved… Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today. Is there a way to guess which ones?

Kwame Appiah predicts that our descendants will feel about our own callous crowded prisons, our nightmarish factory farms, our isolated and neglected elders, and our reckless destruction of the biosphere on which we depend for survival as we feel now about the slavery, torture, and dehumanized homosexuals of those from whom we are ourselves descended.

Curiously enough, many people of the left already feel about our prisons, factory farms, neglected elders, and poisoning of our environment the way Appiah claims people of "The Future" will feel, meanwhile many people of the right still feel about extreme human exploitation, righteous torture, and vicious homosexuals exactly the way we have now presumably relegated to "The Past."

It will come as no surprise that I personally hope Appiah's predictions will come true, the sooner the better. But much more to the point, this is because I likely share many of the ethical assumptions and aspirations that are actually driving his "predictions."

That is why I must say I still disapprove of his derangement of what should be normative deliberation about the present-world in the present, in the presence of the diversity of peers with whom we presently share it into a futurological discourse making "predictions" to be debated as if they were competing hypothetical would-be factual accounts.

The appeal of his ethical universe scarcely recommends his own futurological retreat from it, and I find his indulgence in such futurology quite as pernicious as I do the, to me, more ethically obnoxious mainstream futurology of neoliberal corporate advertising hyperbole and military think-tank position papers or the profoundly delusive superlative futurology of techno-utopian Robot Cultists to which I devote much more disapproving attention here on Amor Mundi.

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

This afternoon only two of the faces of featured authors at the website of the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, is not the face of a guy, only one is not white.

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 for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, is just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.

For analysis of more glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.

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

This afternoon only two 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. That's one less than last week, for those keeping score at home, and one of the two refers to a piece and author that was already there last week.

And yet it remains just as true this week as it was last week and every other week in the month's long the stretch of time during which I have been making these little reports, 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, and only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.

The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting for all this time over at IEET (supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago) is, for me, just one of the more obvious symptoms -- one among many others -- of the profound out-to-lunch bonkers out-of-touch marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.

This goes for the self-described "transhumanists," the "singularitarians," the techno-immortalists, the digital utopians and cybernetic totalists, the nano-cornucopiasts, the greenwashing geo-engineers, the Ayn Raelian "extropians" and all the rest of the Robot Cultists corralled kookily together there at IEET. Whatever attention these superlative futurologists manage to attract in mainstream media outlets or among corporate-militarist funders or naive academics with their over-dramatic over-simplified over-sold over-kill narrative derangements of actually urgent technoscience and global development issues, they are and remain utterly marginal and profoundly unserious in my view, and they call into question the seriousness of any organization, enterprise, address that responds to them uncritically.

For analysis of more glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.

My Boyfriend Is Strange

So, my grandmother died this weekend (I called her Mamaw, no condolences necessary, I haven't seen her for years and years, she was a nice lady but we weren't close or anything) and Eric and I were having brunch at Clairemont Cafe and talk turned naturally enough to deaths in the family. And, out of the blue, Eric tells me that while his female relatives all live forever his male relatives have tended to die young. Asked for details, I was told that one died from exploding Japanese depth charges in a submarine, one died from bullet wounds in an attempted jailbreak, another was a prospector eaten by mountain lions, and another was a reporter on deadline who tried and failed to jump a chasm on his motorbike and plummeted to his death. I'm pretty sure that all of my male relatives die in late middle age from congestive heart failure. Here's my point, though. Can you imagine that Eric and I have been together for over eight years, in more or less constant contact and more or less continuous conversation the whole time and he has never managed to tell me any of those stories before? He cracks me up, he truly does. We were together for three years before he happened to mention dancing with Madonna in a gay bar when he was a teenager and being told by her that he and his boyfriend at the time were cute. For a typical guy, that would be first date anecdote material.

Politics Is Not Morals

Politics is not morals, any more than mathematics is, and yet while few would be congratulated for being foolish enough to confuse morals and mathematics there is no end to the self-congratulation of those fools who would confuse politics with morals.

PS: Just to be clear, moralizing is what you get from that particular confusion, and as it happens moralizing distorts both what morals are sometimes good for and what politics are sometimes good for, too, usually in the most disastrous ways imaginable.

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

This afternoon only three 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. That's the same as last week, for those keeping score at home. Usually, it's just one or two, and sometimes none at all.

It remains as true this week as it was last week and the week before and the week before that, week before week, month before month, the whole ever lengthening stretch of time during which I have been making these little reports, 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.

This weird relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting for all this time over at IEET (by all accounts 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 profound out-to-lunch out-of-touchness of the superlative sub(cult)ural futurologists -- most of them self-declared "transhumanists," many "singularitarians," many techno-immortalists and nano-cornucopiasts, some of them greenwashing geo-engineers, and even some dead-ender Ayn Raelian "extropian" types -- all 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 narrative derangements of actually urgent technoscience and global development issues, they are and remain utterly marginal and profoundly unserious (except in the way a heart attack is serious). For analysis of more glaring problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.

The Futurological Fetish

The futurological is an essentially fetishistic discourse.

Although one hears discussions every day devoted to the contrary proposition, there actually is no such thing as "technology in general" about which one can say anything useful or in respect to which one can properly declare oneself to be devoted or opposed.

There are in fact always only indefinitely many techniques and artifacts at hand and in play, of concern to a diversity of stakeholders according to the diversity of their stakes, imagined, invented, regulated, talked about, taken up, paid for, put to uses according to a welter of what finally amount to political assumptions, conditions, ends. And so, to advocate or invest one's hopes in "technology" in the conventional futurological construal requires first a disavowal of the plural political substance that defines its given instances.

As often as not, this derangement of our sense of the political substance of the "technological" then prepares the way for a crucial second futurological disavowal of the political, whereby one goes on to fancy otherwise "intractable" political problems -- for instance, the persistence of poverty, the irresistible corruption of authoritative institutions, the inadequate responsiveness of government to the consent of the governed -- will be susceptible of "technofixes."

To be talking about "technology," then, is always to be not-talking about the politics through which certain technoscientific vicissitudes, certain technodevelopmental assumptions or aspirations are selectively de-politicized, and always in the service of parochial political ends, and often as a preliminary to indulging in empty talk about overcoming political problems by means of this politically de-politicized "technology."

The "technological" as such is always produced through the de-politicizing stabilization of the field of actually always contested practices of imagination, education, discovery, invention, testing, publication, regulation, deliberation, application, appropriation. Also, the "technological" is always selected from a greater profusion of artifice and technique actually at hand through the work of familiarizing and de-familiarizing, naturalizing and de-naturalizing discourses. Further, the "technological" would always divert agency from collectivity into capacity, from the political to the physical, from organization to force-amplification. And so, the "technofix" is less a marginal instance than the condensed essence of the "technological" as such, the fixation that would fix things. And whatever else it may be in the manner of dangerous oversimplification, wishful-thinking, or outright fraud, the techno-fix is always a placeholder for relinquished political agency, it is a site of hope very specifically for the one who is bereft of the hope of political agency.

The structure of this placeholder is classically fetishistic: "I am without x, but through the fetish, it turns out after all that I am not." While the terminology may be unfamiliar to you, the notion is of course very familiar: "I have lost my wife, but through my infatuation with my young girlfriend, it turns out I have not lost my wife at all" -- "I have lost my youth, but through my purchase of this red sports car, it turns out I have not lost my youth at all" -- (and in the facile Freudian fetishism classic) "The woman traumatically lacks a penis, but through the spiked heel, the lipstick, the riding crop, it turns out she has one after all" and the trauma of "lack" thereby presumably eased.

The futurological fetish in the form of the technofix clearly rehearses this structure: "I know but cannot bear knowing that I do not have a real voice in the political decisions that affect me, but because I blog it turns out that I do," even if almost nobody reads my blog -- "I know but cannot bear knowing that our civilization is no longer progressing to the benefit of all, but because this liquid laundry detergent now has the E-Z Pour Spout it turns out we are progressing after all," even if the marketing campaign for the E-Z Pour Spout is just repackaging as a feature something that isn't really either useful or even new at all -- "I know but cannot bear knowing that anthropogenic climate change has passed the tipping point beyond which catastrophe for all but the richest scoundrels on earth is likelier by the day, but because I advocate 'geo-engineering' it turns out that there is hope for us after all," even if I cannot coherently specify in what ways 'geo-engineering' proposals differ essentially from the presumably failed or failing proposals that provoked my despair, I cannot explain why they are to be assessed differently from these presumably failed or failing proposals, I cannot explain how they will presumably elude the organizational and political bottlenecks of these presumably failed or failing proposals, and so on.

Now, in the more classically Marxian understanding of the fetish-form, one fetishizes the commodity when one confuses the price at which it is offered for sale as an encounter with what matters essentially about it.

That commodities are first of all products, that is to say they appear before us as end-products of an organized process of labor involving people who share this historical moment in the world with us and who labor under conditions of ease or distress, freedom or constraint, health or disease, and a process of manufacture, transportation, distribution taking place on and impacting wholesomely or destructively the planet in which we all live and on which we all depend for our survival and flourishing, all of that vanishes behind the price at which the fetishized commodity declares itself available for purchase, and so declares itself essentially related to every other commodity likewise available for sale at a higher or lower price and also as related to whatever money you have in your pocket or might save or borrow in the future to purchase that commodity if you set yourself to that task.

To live in a world in which the fetishized commodity form prevails is to live as it were in a world every event and entity of which is arrayed before you as if in a department store display window. Interposed between you and everything before you is a price-tag, and it is through that price tag that you grasp your essential relation to the things of that world.

For Marx, our habituation to buying and selling as mediated by these prices, by the fetishized commodity-form, amounted to the learning of a kind of self-limiting over-literal language, and through our becoming accustomed to relating to the world and to one another solely through these fetishized forms we gain a knowledge of the world that demands ignorance most of all, that is to say the ignoring of much that actually matters most in the world. Through our mastery of the literalizing language of fetishized commodities we fancy that we are empowered, that we have acquired the know-how to navigate our world successfully as reasonable responsible agents, but we actually come to relate to one another mistakenly as though we were things and not people. We mistake an encounter of persons (peers who labor to produce, co-ordinate, and distribute goods and services and people who need or want goods and services) that happens to be mediated by commodities as an encounter between things-available-at-a-price (the commodity and the wage-earner who would purchase the commodity). We thus become hopelessly subservient to things, and through this subservience become subservient in turn to the elites on whose terms things are available for exchange first of all.

To return to the allegory of the shop window, it is not just all the world that is arrayed before us behind the glass offering itself up for sale at a price, but we mistake our own reflections in the surface of the glass as our own selves, selves indispensably part of that world for sale, and so we lose the sense of actually living our lives and substitute for that the sense of having lives the moments and energies of which we will auction off to the highest bidder in exchange for the satisfaction of our wants as displayed on offer with the money we make among them, all on terms otherwise than the ones we might make together. We disown our own selves in imagining a self that owns itself, we sell ourselves into a kind of willed slavery, a dispossession of selfhood figured as a possession we have but always only to sell it to someone else.

I hope I can be forgiven this long detour, but what it enables me to point out is that although the futurological fetish may derive its legibility from what seems a citation of the psychoanalytic fetish (I know but cannot bear knowing x, but through the fetish I know otherwise and hence can bear what I really know), it derives its force from what seems more a citation of the Marxian fetish. Futurological fetishism is above all habituation to a language of "The Future," a disabling of agency enabled by the mirage of capacity, a disabling of freedom enabled by the mirage of force-amplification, a disabling of our promising-threatening inhabitation of the plural-present enabled by the mirage of the crystallization in the present of "The Future" to come.

Strictly speaking, given the triumphalist determinism of Marxist accounts of history (a triumphalism that might in justice be depicted as the technofix writ large beyond belief), whatever the family resemblances the futurological fetish finally differs definitively from both from the classic psychoanalytic and Marxist varieties, however useful the grasp of these is to understanding it. What seems to me key to the futurological fetish is the habitual displacement onto a depoliticized "technology" of an essentially political dilemma, second the habitual displacement of political agency (collective education, agitation, organization to solve shared problems) onto technoscientific capacity already thus depoliticized, and third the habitual displacement from the plural-present of the political and the non-deductive vicissitudes of historical struggle onto the "The Future" toward which these technoscientific capacities are presumably logically, as it were mechanistically, unfolding.

In futurology, the ones blinded by greed would lead those blinded by fear... into The Future! The futurological fetish is the phony promise of mastery fueled by the fear of helplessness and purchased through the relinquishment of the only real power available to us to make a difference in the world and to make sense of the world, our political power, peer to peer.

MemeTherapy Interview

I am re-posting an interview published by "MemeTherapy," July 3, 2006. Their online publication no longer exists, as far as I can tell, and so the interview is no longer available there. At the end of the interview I post links to a few pieces of mine written in the years since which elaborate some of the points made in the interview, and in which I no longer feel particularly disposed to be quite so polite to Robot Cultists as I was trying to be at that time.

MemeTherapy -- Is there a substantial distinction between a technoprogressive and a transhumanist?

Dale Carrico -- “Technoprogressive” is just a shorthand way of saying “technology-focused progressive.” My impression from the transhumanist-identified people I know is that most of them see themselves as part of a cultural movement with a unique shared identity and a coherent political program of the kind I would tend to associate with organized parties or membership organizations.

I write about “technology” topics that seem to interest a lot of transhumanist-identified people and as a consequence of this I am regularly mistaken for one myself. I’m never completely comfortable when that happens, but I’m also never sure if it’s that big a deal ultimately. A friend and colleague of mine, the bioethicist James Hughes, is transhumanist-identified and I agree with him on a very wide range of concrete political topics and goals. But then there are also curiously high numbers of transhumanist-identified people who advocate what look to me like the most reactionary views imaginable. But even if I can’t personally make much sense out of “transhumanism” as a coherent movement or concept in general I think it’s not so much at this abstract level of analysis as in political struggle itself that you really figure out who your allies are in fights for peace, justice, and democracy.

The fact is I’m simply a person of the democratic left who’s very interested in the cultural politics of disruptive technoscientific developments. When I take stock of the scene of dem-left movements in the world today it seems useful to me to think of these movements as part of a process of technodevelopmental social struggle.

People are taking up p2p tools to organize and speak truth to corporate-military elites. People are fighting intellectual property regimes that focus on short-term profits for Big Pharma rather than treatable conditions for the world’s poor. People are getting the word out about tools on hand and on drawing boards to overcome the catastrophic model of extractive petrochemical industry and shift to renewable, sustainable, decentralized energy. People are working to ensure that women are able to safely end unwanted pregnancies or ensure they have access to ARTs to facilitate wanted pregnancies. People are struggling to protect the teaching of consensus science in schools and to ensure that our democratic representatives make recourse to the advice of good science when they make policy to address problems of climate change, budget priorities, family planning, rational security, environmental toxicity, harm reduction and so on.

That’s the politics of emerging technoscientific change, here and now. And these politics will only grow more and more fraught with the convergence of NBIC (which stands for nano- bio- info- cogni-) technoscience and especially with the emergence of radical genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification medicine. The political struggles now and to come will be to ensure that the costs, the risks, as well as the benefits of global technoscientific developments are all fairly distributed to all the stakeholders to those developments. And that looks to me like pretty standard dem-left politics applied to our new circumstances.

We all know that human beings now inhabit a world with unprecedented power to destroy itself through weapons of mass destruction, industry-induced climate change, engineered pathogens, just as it has an unprecedented power to save itself from asteroid impacts, pandemics, and poverty. Without democratic controls to protect us, short-sighted human beings with superlative technologies at their disposal are too likely to destroy the world.

But the transformative power of technology, taken up by people-powered democratic politics can reinvigorate the good old radical vision of the global left, so much of which has seemed to languish through the last decade of the last century and the first decade of this century. The slogan that names this connection for me is, “technology needs democracy, democracy needs technology.” And for me, grasping this connection is at the heart of what makes me describe my politics as technoprogressive rather than simply progressive.

But once you’ve grasped this basic connection it seems to me that most of the real political force for technoprogressive arguments arises out of pretty straightforward dem-left commitments. The identity politics of the transhumanists seem to be lodged at the level of a shared commitment to technology in general. This doesn’t really make much sense to me, since both the empowering and pernicious impacts of technodevelopment happen at a more specific level that that. I think this leads otherwise progressive folks to mistake as allies explicitly anti-democratic people who share with them nothing but this general enthusiasm for “technology” –- even if the uses to which their “allies” would put actual technologies are altogether reactionary. I guess that’s the most substantial thing I can think of to distinguish technoprogressive from transhumanist outlooks—apart from things like an unpleasant historical association with market libertarian nonsense from the irrationally exuberant high-tech 90s boom, and a slight ongoing drift toward scientific reductionism that seems culturally impoverishing to me. But the fact is that some transhumanists these days consider themselves technoprogressive as well and I can’t see anything particularly wrongheaded about that in principle.

MemeTherapy -- We’re seeing the left in the US using the internet in some innovative ways (Daily Kos, Dean campaign fundraising). Do you see this trend continuing and if so what innovations do you see (or would like to see) coming up next?

Dale Carrico -- Well, the key thing to realize is that this is not so much a “trend” as the latest effort of the democratic left to opportunistically take up new tools to reshape politics to emancipatory ends. There is nothing inherently democratizing in these technologies. They are deeply vulnerable to legislative assaults, media distraction, and outright violence at the hands of established elites.

Now, it’s true, just as digital networks eliminated the infrastructural bottlenecks represented by the overhead of print publication and broadcasting, so too peer-to-peer formations transform the costs of creative collaboration, deliberation, assessment, and so on. When technology changes the basic institutional terms in this way it’s sure to have transformative impacts. But the technology itself provides no assurance that the transformation will be progressive. We only know that we confront an opportunity to change things, to end entrenched corporate media monopolies, to halt the elite looting of the commons, to demand greater transparency from authorities, to facilitate more democratic policy deliberation and so on.

In the United States, one of the most interesting struggles one sees is really within our notionally-left organized politics. Corporate “insider” machine politics represented (somewhat cartoonishly, but it’ll do for now) by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is arrayed against the Netroots formations represented (again, a little cartoonishly) by dKos, the Dean candidacy, and so on. There is an important sense in which the DLC represents fairly typical American “machine”politics, defined in the Reagan era of anti-governmental hostility and most triumphant in the corporatist-friendly Clinton White House. Far from the arrival of any left-wing technotopia it seems to me we are witnessing skirmishes on a technodevelopmental terrain unsettled by Peak Oil and p2p, a struggle simply to nudge American political discourse leftward after the disastrous decades long skew of nearly all civic discourse and organized politics to the corporate-militarist right. Things are rather messier and my hopes more modest than one might otherwise want, I fear.

In the coming years people will talk about the politics of nanotechnology, biotechnology, desalination technology, renewable technology, robotic technology and so on. But the actual work to make these technodevelopments more progressive will be mainstream dem-left struggles to implement universal healthcare, basic income guarantees, support international criminal and environmental courts, ensure compliance with global disarmament and species protection treaties, champion global fair-trade, labor, and carbon emission standards, instituting international regulatory and monitoring regimes for tsunamis, weapons trafficking, pandemics and so on. The devil, as always, will be in the details.

MemeTherapy -- What kinds of things are you working on now?

Dale Carrico -- I’m very interested right now in the transformation of digital networks via biotechnology, biometrics, and medical administration into global bioremedial networks. I think the basic terms of personal and civic subjecthood are transforming under pressure of a collision between a normalizing model of liberal healthcare administration against what I call an “experimental subjection” model of consensual genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification. The liberal model is defined by an ideal of universal “basic” healthcare provision at which we never really arrive in fact, while the experimental subjection model is defined by an ideal of morphological freedom at which we probably will never arrive either. What remains is likely, as ever, to be a shifting politics of risk, profit, and stress management that will look more democratic the more we manage to ensure the scene of consent is as informed and nonduressed as possible by keeping access to knowledge open and poverty at bay for all.

More on the "technoprogressive" term and its promotional appropriation by the Robot Cult here.
More on James Hughes and what he peddles in the name of "Democratic Transhumanism" here.
More on what eventually happens when you try to play nicey nice with Robot Cultists here.
More Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.

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

This morning only three 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 (last week it was one).

It remains as true this week as it was last week and the week before and the week before that, week before week, month before month, the whole ever lengthening stretch of time during which I have been making these little reports, 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, and only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.

The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting all this time over at IEET (presumably 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 profound out-to-lunch out-of-touchness 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, they are and remain utterly marginal and profoundly unserious (except in the way a heart attack is serious). For analysis of more glaring problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.

Neoliberal Immaterialism

The devastating delusion of neoliberal immaterialism ultimately plays out in its fervent disavowals, first of the very material bodies and lifeways of the planetary Precariat that are obliterated in the supposedly frictionless flows of informal-informational capital, second, of very material bombs and bullets of neoconservative militarism that indispensably compel and enforce the adherence of the planetary Precariat to the supposedly "free trade" of disinformed, duressed, vacuous-voluntary libertarianism, and third of the very material metabolic limits and geophysical conditions of a precarious Planet wounded, potentially beyond healing, by human enterprises driven by fantasies of infinite growth, infinite profit, infinite resources, infinite exploitation, infinite waste, infinite gratification, infinite willfulness.