Futurological Scientism and Pseudo-Science As Anti-Science Ideology and Theology

Contrary to their endlessly reiterated self-promotional declarations to the contrary, so many of these software industry drones pretending to be expert physicists and geneticists and nanotechnologists as well as corporate-militarist yes-men pretending to be bioethicists and think-tank futurists clearly are not joining the various sects of the Robot Cult because they want to do serious science or engage in serious policy deliberation.

I am reminded of those finger-wagging statements circulated occasionally by think-tanks and advocacy organizations stealthfully funded by petrochemical interests and loudly boasting the signatures of thousands of "scientists" to create the impression that the actually overwhelming scientific consensus concerning the urgent threat of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is instead a left-wing conspiracy, but in which almost none of the signatories are scientists in fields the least bit relevant to the factual evaluation of the claims they are contesting (and for palpably ideological and not scientific reasons at that), if they are proper scientists at all. In such schemes the status and force of science is doubly looted and diluted: first, there is the specific undermining of an actually warranted consensus scientific belief, and an almost unprecedentedly urgent one at that, by scientists willing to conduct themselves unscientifically; and second, there is the general undermining of the force of warranted consensus scientific beliefs as such, however indispensable they may be to the administration of actually functional secular democratic societies, by actors irresponsibly willing to eschew long-term and general welfare for parochial, short-term, even minute momentary tactical advantages and gains. All this, in the service of extractive-industrial incumbent-elite profit-taking.

So, too, whatever its insistent but superficial scientificity, the substance and primary work of superlative futurology remains, as it always has been primarily:

one -- either ideological, consisting in prophetic utterances in the form of hyperbolic threat/profit assessments and marketing/promotional discourse wrapped in superficially technoscientific terminology providing incumbent-elite corporate-industrial interests rationales to justify continued profit-taking at the expense of majorities

two -- or theological, consisting in priestly utterances in the form of apocalyptic warnings of looming total catastrophes but also promises to the faithful of a techno-transcendence of mortality via super-longevity, error and humiliation via super-intelligence, and stress and worldly defeat via super-abundance providing both reassurance and consolation especially in the midst of the economic and ecologic distress of neoliberal-neoconservative technodevelopmental planetary precarization.

And, again, it is not just the reactionary political outcomes facilitated by their phony genuflections to scientificity that should be decried, but the deeper damage to the wholesome social force of science, properly so-called and in its proper precinct, that should worry critics of futurological (reductive) scientism and (hyperbolic) pseudo-science.

From half a decade ago, the post Is Science Democratic? provides some nice context.