Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, October 09, 2010

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

It's time again to visit those oh so serious technoprogressive futurologists at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

This week I'm sad to report that only two of the faces of featured authors are not the faces of a white guy, and both were already featured there last week. One of these two remains, I fear, Kirsti Scott's flabbergastingly facile Posthuman Feminism, about which I already had my say last week, in between the laughter and the tears. Suffice it to say that I, er, remain unimpressed with what seems to me, to be generous, her faux-feminist celebration of a presumably emancipatory fembotization via high-heels, cosmetic surgery, and red hair-dye.

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, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.

After all, as I have said again and again, week after week, month after month in these modest e-pistles, 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.

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

1 comment:

jimf said...

> Kirsti Scott's flabbergastingly facile "Posthuman Feminism" . . .
> faux-feminist celebration of a presumably emancipatory fembotization
> via high-heels, cosmetic surgery, and red hair-dye. . .

Did somebody neglect to mention Dynamic Hair Management(TM)?

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--------------------


100 quadrillion synapses, dynamic hair management,
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put Ayn Rand to shame.

But will Sears service it?