State of the Blog 2011

The post that has attracted consistently the most attention to this blog was actually written last year, Full Monty "Geo-Engineering", and the splash page for my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism also seems to be a pretty consistent draw.

By far the most widely read post for this year has been Belgium Is Not Anarchy; Or, Scattered Speculations on the Radical Democratic Imaginary Against the Anarchic Imaginary. That this post was this year's big winner came as a complete surprise, but I am content with the readers' choice, it wasn't a puff piece or anything.

The trend since 2006 (I started Amor Mundi 2004) of posting one to two hundred more posts each year than the year prior has continued on in 2011, suggesting that this strange blogging compulsion of mine has grown still more insistent if anything.

Of course, I could attribute this year's growth entirely to the almost daily posting of Fool Me Tee Vee wisecracks -- since these now number nearly two hundred. They are all anthologized together, chronologically, here. I have noticed that reading them cumulatively produced rather a different effect than peeking on them one at a time each morning does.

Thanks to all my readers, ephemeral and regular, disgruntled and sympathetic, and especially to Friends of Blog like "JimF" and "jollyspaniard" and "Chad Lott" and always always always Eric and others who post provocations in the Moot even knowing how cranky my off-the-cuff responses tend to be. Live long and prosper, Amorous Mundyites!

The Sarah Lexicon

For the three or so of you who might be interested, yesterday's screen-capture of my cat Sarah's Twitterverse actually did document much of the, er, range of her discourse. As near as I can tell

"Mao!" means, "Hungry! Hungry now!"

"Ngang-ngang?" means conversation. Who can say what Sarah is going on about, but when she gets talkative there is a whole lot of "ngang-ngang-ngang ngang-ngang?" Usually, the peroration is followed with starting suddenness by paw-licking.

"Brrp!" is the sound that inevitable warns us that Sarah has landed on the floor after having quietly been up to no good on a tabletop, countertop, dressertop. This sound is usually meaningless, but should not be confused with the longer and interrogative variation

"Brrrrrrrrrrrp?" which means, "I've noticed you are looking at me!" This state of affairs usually provokes a fit of spastic rolling about or the assumption of a recumbent posture, tilt of the head, and the raising of her paws into the air to keep us looking at her as long as possible.

"Eeeeeeeeeeee!" means "Let go!" "Let me down!" Sarah thinks this is very ferocious, but it is in fact enormously cute and rather absurd, and so, poor thing, rather more apt to prolong or even attract these unwanted attentions than end them.

Yes, cat blogging. Screw you, it's the holidays.

Whether For Profit-Taking Or For Love-Making: A Note On The Essential Continuity of Right and Left Anarchist Faiths in Whatever Their Preferred Parochial "Spontaneous Order" Looks Like

Upgraded from the Moot "BerserkRL" made an interesting intervention:

You claim that "all market libertarians," including "those who imagine themselves to be of the left," ignore "the contingent historical artifact of regulations, treaties, pricing conventions, provincial customs, norms, infrastructural affordances that passes for 'the market' here and now," etc. Now since you mention libertarian of the left, you're obviously aware that some of us do stress at great length those "contingent historical artifact of regulations, treaties, pricing conventions, provincial customs, norms, infrastructural affordances that passes for 'the market' here and now," etc. So it looks as though you're simultaneously acknowledging and denying our existence. Why's that?

Simply enough, because it doesn't look that way to me, that's why.

I would say that anarcho-capitalists "naturalize" historically contingent exploitative and plutocratic arrangements as a "spontaneous market order" in an effort to legitimize them, while anarcho-socialists expose historically contingent exploitative and plutocratic arrangements in an effort to illegitimize them the better to "naturalize" whatever "spontaneous order" they themselves prefer.

It is my conclusion that these superficially different positions are actually complementary if not identical errors that you are probably mistaking as a paradox or contradiction on my part (which is not to deny that you might still productively disagree with my conclusion).

I think an unexpurgated return to my original quote makes this at least a little bit clearer: "Like all market libertarians (and I do suspect all libertarians, always, even those who imagine themselves to be of the left) his [Ron Paul's] is a vision of freedom and dignity that requires the treatment of key assumptions and institutions of the status quo as natural and inevitable rather than as artificial and historical, and hence his is a profoundly reactionary viewpoint at its base [emphasis added].

Now, I would be the last to deny there is all the difference in the world between profit-taking and love-making -- but to the extent that parochial characterizations of these are universalized (eg, presumably definitive propensity to truck and barter, game theoretical assumptions about wealth maximization strategies, evolutionary justifications for sharing behaviors, anthropological documentation of mutualist impulses, popular anthemic declarations that all you need is love) to provide the basis for false faith in spontaneous orders and programmatic anarchisms I disapprove of them all the same and for much the same reasons (while remaining, nonetheless, a Lennon fan).

(As an aside, as an entirely negative critical rather than positive programmatic vantage I am more sympathetic to anarchisms, especially of the green, socialist, radical democratic, and queer/punk varieties.)

You Never Know Enough to Justify Despair

This time last year I was angry and disgusted about the results of the mid-term elections, and I was perfectly right to be, since we all know the mid-terms were pointlessly disastrous in precisely predictable ways. But even as I was sunk in despair, I should have remembered one of the very simple points I try to drive home to my students in critical theory courses: that there is always much more going on than even the most attentive and engaged of us can know (Haraway), that history always breaks out unpredictably (Arendt), that the street always finds its own uses for things (Gibson). Elections have consequences, and I knew the consequences of the mid-terms would be terrible, and they have indeed been terrible. But even as I felt the terror of what I knew so well, I had no inkling of Tahrir, Madison, Zucotti, the Oakland Port, the Ohio repeal, the Wisconsin recalls, and so much more. In politics, the knowledgeable know knowledge isn't enough, and that if courage and perseverance don't fill the gap inevitably introduced by our ignorance then despair and excuses will fill it instead, making our knowledge worse than useless.

Progressive Taxation Not Only Redistributes Wealth to Mobilize Demand and Secure Economic Prosperity But Also Secures the Scene of Consent Without Which There Can Be No Peace

I would add to the argument voiced in the last post that not only are there economic reasons to shift the tax burden from the 99% to the 1% to better mobilize the virtuous cycle of consumer demand, but that there is also a profound ethical case to make (beyond the obvious and decisive point that there is no concentration of effort, talent, or virtue among the richest of the rich, far from it, corresponding to and hence providing even a whiff of justification for the concentration of wealth and power to them in society) that connects quite directly to that economic case.

In a nutshell, what I am pointing out here in this post is that neither prosperity nor peace are "spontaneous orders" -- as market ideologues would have you think in their apologiae to the plutocratic status quo and to the maintenance of the rule and loot of incumbent elites -- but administrative accomplishments indispensably indebted to government, and more specifically indebted to a progressive taxation that redistributes wealth to mobilize demand as well as to fund a constellation of general welfare entitlements (ideally far more substantial than the United States can boast of today) to secure a scene of informed, nonduressed consent without which commerce is inevitably invested with menace, exploitation, and fraud.

Especially since the crappy romance novelist and pseudo-intellectual Ayn Rand added her awful voice to the plutocratic movement of organized Big Business interests that emerged to combat the New Deal, right wing ideologues have incessantly insisted that since contracts are voluntary (by definition, whether or not in fact) this means that if all social forms were to be assimilated to the form of transactions of for-profit enterprise violence would be eliminated from the world.

This is why libertopians endlessly crow about "the non-initiation of force" while at once defending so much of the savage inequities and exploitation and environmental devastation of our extractive-industrial order. Correlated to this first nonsensical position, these same ideologues also go on idiotically to insist, of course, that any and every actual or proposed government intervention into for-profit enterprise, every regulation, every subsidy, every effort at oversight amounts to the introduction of violence into this nonviolent "spontaneous order" -- disavowing the fact that markets actually consist of laws, norms, and infrastructural affordances indispensably indebted to that very government in every instance in every moment, and hence that what happens to pass for a "market" in any given place at any given historical moment is contingent, artificial, and the furthest imaginable thing from "spontaneous" in any sense.

I think it is impossible to overestimate the rhetorical force of this ethical claim that freedom and free markets are one and the same. But, of course, these ideologues are making the claim that market relations are definitively non-violent even though the most superficial survey of the scene of enterprise instantly and overwhelmingly reveals a world so suffused by poverty and precarity and ignorance that it might be said with better justice, precisely to the contrary, that the typical market transaction is predicated on a duress amounting to the threat of force (the prospect of mortal penury or exposure to the terms of a criminal underworld of conspicuous violence for oneself and those loved ones one helps support if one refuses the terms of a labor contract however unfair its terms) and /or a misinformation amounting to fraud (due to unequal access to reliable information, unequal access to salient connections or supports when the fraud isn't even more explicit as still unindicted banksters lying about the soundness of their bundled risks and refinance packages certainly was to the near ruin of the whole global economy) of at least one of the parties to that transaction.

Behavioral economics has amply documented (if Keynesian "animal spirits" hadn't already driven home the lesson for those who lack any acquaintance with literature or whose inexperience with actual humanity hadn't already made the point more than obvious) that human beings are not calm consequentialist computers indulging in perpetual objective cost/benefit analysis, let alone reasonably characterized as profit maximizers in any sense (setting aside the question whether "profit maximizing" is reasonably identified with "rational self-interest," all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding), and hence that claims about "optimally efficient markets" are laughable daydreams spinning out equations and pie charts in sublime indifference to the charnel house of stubborn parochialism and superstition and cronyism and fraud that is underregulated capitalism in the actual world.

All this is added, recall, to the altogether absurd fantasies of "spontaneous order" as an apt description of a state-ordered legal fiction or of "optimally ethical markets" suffused though they are by anguish, misinformation, and corruption. Hanauer's point that if we truly don't want to tax the "job creators" this really would mean it is imperative to shift tax burdens onto the rich and away from everyday consumers because these consumers fuel the dynamic on which creative entrepreneurs and useful enterprises depend for their own flourishing and success is an important one, but only one of a host of inter-related insights all of which point to the comprehensive incoherence of the right-wing market ideology that has shaped public discourse for over a quarter century to our utter devastation. If a more steeply progressive taxation then goes on to fund programs to ensure universal healthcare, education, general welfare, equal recourse to the law, then it is plain that not only do we need to tax the rich to fuel the very economic dynamic plutocrats pretend is "spontaneous" but to secure a scene of actually informed, nonduressed consent to commercial transactions otherwise prone to abuse and distress and misinformation, and hence to secure the very virtues of nonviolent commerce plutocrats would also pretend is "spontaneous."

Plutocrats disdaining the incremental democratization implemented by organized labor, the New Deal, the Great Society, the Civil Rights movement, multicultural commonsense spun and disseminated through a virtual reality of think tanks and lobbyists and Hate Radio and Republican nonsense a host of deceptive platitudes celebrating the freedom and nonviolence and efficiency and meritocracy of market orders that were in fact profoundly circumscribed, unequal, fraudulent, distressed, inefficient, unsustainable, corrupt, all the while whomping up white-racism, homophobia, anti-intellectualism, hysteria about political correctness to divide people who work for a living from one another's shared interests.

Everything they said was always obviously a stupid lie and the promotion of all that stupidity and deception has done more damage than can ever be paid for and brought the whole planet to the brink of world-ending environmental catastrophe. But, fine, the stupid lies of the right seem finally to have lost much of whatever allure they had for whatever reason, Movement Republicanism is marginalizing itself into madness and the wholesome browning, secularizing, planetizing of the people is shifting the pendulum back to progressive populism (ha ha fuckers you never did get to gut fatally the flagship programs of the New Deal and the Great Society, you never did kill Roe v Wade, we won the Culture Wars, you didn't get to impose your white-racist homophobic Christian fundamentalist authoritarianism even at the height of your power, for all the waste and ruin and pain you fuckers caused you didn't get what you wanted and it's all over for you now!) and we've got to move on, we've got to clean up this mess, we've got to help those who are hurting, we've got to educate, agitate, and organize in the service of fact-based policies that facilitate equity, diversity, consent, sustainability, democracy. Apparently, possibly in the nick of time, openings are re-appearing in which the good work can begin again.

What a desolation these last thirty years have been politically (and as a person engaged in queer politics I was lucky enough to be party to some of the few victories for justice and progress that took place in this debased plutocratic know-nothing epoch!), what a breathless wonder of creation and common good the next thirty years must be!

Thank You Occupy!

I have spent years and years of my life trying to get some of the many thousands of students in my classrooms (and the comparatively fewer readers of my more marginal blogging effort) to question: what possible talents or virtues among the richest of the rich could justify the fantastic concentration of wealth into their hands in an America that is unthinkably rich and powerful due to the work and inheritance and commons shared by us all yet has flabbergastingly inequitable and dysfunctional systems for the provision of good healthcare, sound education, and the security of general welfare to all?

How I have struggled to get them to question: whether the rights to free expression and free assembly which we claim to define our glory and distinguish us from all others even really exist if all it takes is for a cop to tell us to move on or settle down to silence our expressions and scatter our assemblies? How I have strived to get them to ponder: how the proliferation and normalization of tasers and "non-lethal" crowd control technologies might not only have ameliorated the lethality of police intervention but far more importantly facilitated through that apparent amelioration a radical multiplication, amplification, and suffusion of police violence into our everyday public lives profoundly curtailing our experiences and expectations of liberty in a presumably free country?

Of course, there are many good people who have been raising these and other questions over the years (most with greater forcefulness and clarity than I manage in my pedantic way here and there), but, true though that is, there has always been a rather demoralizing marginalization of these vital questions and critiques always only to what have seemed, at least to me, the same small portion of activists and intellectuals, preaching ever more desperately to an insufficient choir while inequities in health outcomes, opportunities, privileges, security, access to law have grown ever more and more catastrophic all the while the norms and forms of an authoritarian police state devoted to the support of those inequities have grown ever more and more numerous and normal.

And yet suddenly, with the emergence and growth of the Occupy Movement, these topics have moved beyond the margins into everyday discourse, they are suddenly thematized in Establishment media accounts, their stakes are on the lips of multitudes of people talking to one another online and on the street, the polls and graphs and media whirligigs to which our millionaire representatives respond while pretending to respond to their non-millionaire constituents sometimes now actually reflect our real concerns.

It was always rather hilarious to hear people claim not to understand the demands of Occupy when the demands were so palpable and obvious, but annoyance with that sort of facile cluelessness has sometimes obscured what can only be regarded as the uncanny inerrancy with which Occupy has directed its attention, and hence everybody's attention, precisely to those sites and those contradictions and those demands that are most vital, most structural, and hitherto never attended to by more than a few in any kind of sustained way, from the obscenity of conspicuous wealth concentration, to the criminality of the fraudulent financialization of the global economy, to the plutocratic perversion of justice and law, to the misdirection of the police from the protection and service of all citizens to the guardians against everyday citizens like themselves of oligarchs who pretend to own them as mercenaries and to the surreal violence enabled and ensured by that misdirection, and on and on and on.

Especially to the extent that the Democratic party remembers its ethos as the party of people who work for a living and resonates with the distressed testaments and civic aspirations given voice by Occupy, and attracts more, and Better, Democrats into campaigns, and into government, to respond to the concerns of everyday people and reform our institutions to better enable and serve democratic equity-in-diversity then I find that the growing power and prestige of Occupy and the democratizing movements it goes on to inspire and from which it has drawn its momentum (like the Wisconsin protests of Walker's austerity budget and anti-union crusade) fills me with more hope and excitement than I have had in my life.

It is the work of critique to expose or pressure what are taken to be facts of the status quo into contradictions that open the status quo to contestation and progressive transformation. Occupy is foregrounding and so turning the Established facts of neoliberalism into contradictions demanding address across the terrain of long-accustomed plutocratic norms, protocols, institutions. I would like to think at least some of the groundwork for these sweeping interrogations was prepared by the work of a generation of critical theorists all too aware of the dangerous assumptions and aspirations of the followers of Hayek and Friedman (who were never more than a hop, jump, and goose-step away from the followers of Rush and O'Reilly), the crony capitalists, the union busters, the white-racists, the Dominionists, the domestic policy bullies and foreign policy hawks who throng the ranks of Movement Republicanism and the neocons and anarcho-capitalists of its reactionary avantgarde. But until now that project of critique, however righteous, has never seemed to be even remotely enough.

After a lifetime of reconciling myself to a status quo littered with contradictions taken for facts, obscenities too appalling to tolerate and yet for all the world too entrenched ever to change like our suicidal pollution and consumption of the environment on which we depend to survive, like the racist War on (some) Drugs and an ever-expanding Hellmouth of prisons, like our regressive tax system and the self-mutilating lowest-common-denominator appeal of anti-tax rhetoric, like the tragedy of capital punishment, like anti-social corporate personhood, like our commercial elections, like our for-profit private-insurance mediated healthcare system, like our scarcely regulated gun trafficking in streets and schools soaked in blood, like our dependence on a criminally exploited and humiliated informal and hence un-unionizable workforce, like our denigration and demoralization of teachers, universities, freethinkers, artists, critics, gadflies, harmless eccentrics, anything but pre-packaged imagination, anything but consumer-friendly rebellion, like the total suffusion of our public life with the deceptive and hyperbolic and crassly opportunistic norms and forms of marketing and promotion and advertizing… after a lifetime contemplating so much that was so wrong so ruinously and so obviously and yet seemed so impossibly remote from our collective attention and agency and address, suddenly Occupy has set its sights and settled its sites right there and taken us all with it, and there assembled, and thus expressive, they are making palpable and so possible so much of the change I have so wanted to see and yet despaired of forming in the world.

Pardon the clichéd genuflection to the "On this Thanksgiving Day what am I thankful for?" genre, but it seemed a fair moment to give some voice to the hope Occupy has given a worldly face for me.

Democrats Want to Fall in Love, Republicans Want to Fall in Line

I would have thought it goes without saying that for somebody of the Left like me (in the radical democracy, social democracy, democratic socialism neck of the ideological woods) there can only be a tactical alliance with any actually electable President. Education, agitation, organization yields political change, and while politics is not reducible to partisan politics, neither does it make much sense to disdain so preeminent an agency for political change as plays out through partisan politics.

I have said many times that Obama is the most progressive President we have had since FDR, and this is almost always taken as some sort of uncritical Obama-mania on my part rather than as a fairly straightforward indictment of the limits of the Presidency since WW2 for a person of the Left. While that indictment is perfectly true, it seems to me just as obvious that for a person of the Left, Obama is such an incomparably better candidate than any Republican will be and any Republican so devastatingly bad, that not to support Obama (either actively by voting for somebody worse or passively by not voting and thereby conceding the election to those who vote for somebody worse) is simply stupid or, in this day and age, simply reveals you to be evil. That's how bad Republicans are now: a generation or two of mostly scoundrels and ignoramuses and smug bigots crystallizing in the present in an unambiguous authoritarian identity movement.

I believe that it is a political commonplace to say of Democrats that they want to fall in love with their President, while Republicans like all anxious authoritarians are looking to fall in line. Neither attitude is commendable, and neither attitude conduces to reasonable political thinking.

So, just what is a consistent, and therefore probably what will pass in this day and age for radical, person of the Left to do? How to reconcile one's ideals with one's practice? Now, anarchism as a practical or ideological orientation on the right (the market fundamentalists and anti-government conservatives) carries water for plutocracy, and on the left amounts mostly to a form of performance art (not without its beauty and usefulness -- but the Left already won the Culture Wars so the usefulness is limited). Meanwhile, third parties function as spoilers for the foreseeable future -- since the institutional reforms that would render them otherwise (like implementing publicly financing campaigns, instant runoff voting, and reorganizing the way committee assignments are made in the House and Senate) are either as or more fundamental than the institutional reforms that can be made within the current system that would yield the policy outcomes the desire for which make third parties seem attractive in the first place. Few are willing to make the sacrifices demanded of literal revolutionary politics (which requires more than big talk, online or over coffee), and in any case too many forms of revolutionary insurrection have yielded in my view unintended consequences as vile as the ones that provoked them.

For a person of the Left -- and as such almost certainly a person to the Left of the politics of most candidates of the Democratic Party -- that leaves as the only sensible attitude and practical arena remaining always to work to support the election of More, and Better, Democrats across all layers of government, while continuing to engage in education, agitation, and organization in other modes of criticism, dialogue, activism, cultural intervention, and social support as a supplement to partisan politics pushing Democrats and the country and the planet more generally to the Left from the Left, but always in ways that disempower progressive partisan politics as little as possible.

This is no time to fall in love or pine to fall in love with elected officials, nor is this a time to limit one's struggle to the bounds of electoral politics. At a time when our institutions are so dysfunctional it makes as little sense to fall in line as it does to disdain altogether the struggle to regain control and reform those institutions back into functionality. So much paralyzing demoralization and pointless recrimination interfering with the heartbreaking heartening work of progressive change simply arises from the failure to recognize that one has to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Elect More -- and Better -- Democrats. Engage in partisan politics -- and in social, cultural, political struggle beyond the immediate horizon of elections and reform legislation.

It is not either /or. It is not one to the detriment of the other. It is both/and. It is both, to the extent that they enable one another.

I Don't Like Talking on the Phone

When I tell people I don't have a cell-phone nor a phone-ish handheld of any description nor ever had one nor even felt any inclination to get one they often act as though I have wandered onto the scene from another planet. And thereupon farted. Also, the fact that I screen calls at home is an occasional topic of rueful and even disgruntled conversation among people I know, as is my practice of dispensing whenever possible with business matters via e-mail rather than over the phone.

You know what? I don't like talking on the phone. Is that really so flabbergasting? I find talking on the phone at once uncomfortably constraining and also profoundly alienating. For me, talking to somebody over the phone is like trying to talk to your kidnapper through a hood. Not only that, but I don't like to waste time on the phone, aimless conversation on a phone is impossible for me to attend to for any length of time, and most conversations are so unmoored they feel aimless to me even when they probably shouldn't. Certainly I don't feel like I am "in touch" with a person on the phone, time on the phone doesn't count as "keeping up" with a real person in any authentic way, it's dead time, empty time, awful time.

And, you know what else? I don't want to always be reachable by phone. I emphatically am not living the sort of life in which I need to be making arrangements on the fly about an impending meal or finding a breathlessly entertaining way of filling my evening with who knows whom. I'm not an overbooked caterer. I'm not the PA of a globe-trotting public figure. I'm not busy. I don't buzz. I definitely don't want to talk about work after work on my way home on the train. On the train I want to read a book or space out at the window. When it comes to practical matters, I can communicate the nitty-gritty more readily and concisely in an e-mail anyway, no muss no fuss.

I frankly think it is an impertinence to believe that I should be at anybody's beck and call just because they happen to be able use a phone. Running a hot bath may indeed matter to me more than your scheduling conflict later in the week. Can you imagine somebody barging into your home interrupting whatever you are doing just to bark about whatever inane thing happened to pop into their head at the moment? Why is answering a phone supposed to instantly rise to the top of my priorities whatever I am doing or whatever frame of mind I happen to be in just because the damn thing is ringing?

Since I don't know the President of the United States I am sorry to be the one to inform you that almost nothing that is happening in your life is so goddamned urgent that you can't leave a message to tell me about it. Or better yet, leave me an e-mail. We can arrange a meeting if it comes to that. We can talk about it over coffee. We can chill out over at my house in front of the tee vee or out on the porch steps.

But as far as the phone goes, Sheryl Crow had the right idea: "Hello, it's me. I'm not at home. If you'd like to reach me, leave me alone."

Slavoj Zizek, Our Heir to George Carlin, Does Standup at Occupy Wall Street

I do not agree with those who say that Slavoj Zizek is our generation's great radical philosopher after the death of Foucault, but I am willing to entertain the possibility -- and I certainly don't consider this an insulting proposition -- that Zizek may turn out to be our generation's wildcard radical comedian after the death of George Carlin. And it is in that spirit that I recommend to your attention Zizek's very fine stand-up Sunday afternoon at the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly, as transcribed by Impose. I offer up a few observations of my own after the transcript.

They are saying we are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. They were bailed out by billions of our money. We are called socialists, but here there is always socialism for the rich. They say we don’t respect private property, but in the 2008 financial crash-down more hard-earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare.

We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons. The cat reaches a precipice but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath this ground. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street, "Hey, look down!"

In mid-April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. These people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dreaming. Here, we don’t need a prohibition because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.

So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom -- war on terror and so on -- falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink.

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like “Oh. we were young and it was beautiful.” Remember that our basic message is “We are allowed to think about alternatives.” If the rule is broken, we do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?

Remember. The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system. It forces you to be corrupt. Beware not only of the enemies, but also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat, they will try to make this into a harmless, moral protest. A decaffienated process. But the reason we are here is that we have had enough of a world where, to recycle Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy a Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes to third world starving children is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after marriage agencies are now outsourcing our love life, we can see that for a long time, we allow our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back.

We are not Communists if Communism means a system which collapsed in 1990. Remember that today those Communists are the most efficient, ruthless Capitalists. In China today, we have Capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American Capitalism, but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize Capitalism, don’t allow yourself to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over. The change is possible.

What do we perceive today as possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever, but look at the field of society and economy. There, almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes by little bit for the rich. They tell you it’s impossible. We lose competitivity. You want more money for health care, they tell you, "Impossible, this means totalitarian state." There’s something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare. Maybe we need to set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standard of living. We want a better standard of living. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this, and only for this, we should fight.

Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not American here. But the conservative fundamentalists who claim they really are American have to be reminded of something: What is Christianity? It’s the holy spirit. What is the holy spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the holy spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street, there are pagans who are worshiping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostalgically remembering “What a nice time we had here.” Promise yourselves that this will not be the case. We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much.

There are some great jokes in there, jokes that righteously and devastatingly skewer neoliberal pieties, jokes that pre-emptively ridicule the narcissistic self-indulgence that can domesticate resistance.

I for one am not so wedded to a particular radical identity (be it Marxist, socialist, anarchist, Green, punk, queergeek, whatever) that I won't be pleased to live in a society that still thinks itself "capitalist" but happens also to be (as our own society so conspicuously is not) sustainable, consensual, democratic, equitable, and diverse, via environmental and election reform and amplifications of welfare entitlements to include guaranteed income, healthcare, education, and so on. Nor do I feel particularly ill-disposed to the vital work of Marxists, socialists, anarchists, Greens, punks, queergeeks, and others (including the ones in me) to a society worth living in -- many kinds of ideas, many kinds of support, many kinds of resistances are useful. Doctrinal disputes have a place -- thinking our way to sound judgments about what we are doing and what it all means always has a place in any society that is not anti-intellectual and hence hostile to freedom -- but such disputes obviously shouldn't displace the substantive work of education, agitation, organization, expression out of which a society worth living in is to be made, peer to peer. I'm not sure that Zizek would sympathize with that sentiment or not, or with what I mean by it, but to the extent that he might want to declare me an advocate of decaffeinated resistance for saying it, as always-already assimilated to the neoliberal Borg for saying it, I think he would be wrong and he would also be indulging in my view in his own version of falling in love with himself (or perhaps with the sound of his own voice, a foible a good comedian can surely be forgiven) at the expense of getting the job he claims to care about done.

Now, I spend a lot of time here on Amor Mundi, and also in my teaching, critiquing futurological discourses and sub(cult)ural formations. I will step back for a moment from all the wacky things individual futurologists say -- about how likely and how soon certain lucky or faithful people are to be uploaded into Holodeck Heaven or shiny robot bodies or therapized into comic book superheros or wallowing in nanobotic treasure caves under the loving ministrations of a history-ending Robot God sooper dad, for example -- or all the kooky guru wannabes and True Believers and pseudo-scientific cranks and celebrity CEO fluffers and loudmouthed self-actualization coaches and boner pill muscle powder anti-aging cream hucksters and endless white boys with toys thrown up by these marginal fanboy sub(cult)ures -- all of which are always fun and often important to critique or at any rate ridicule on their own terms. But I also regard futurology more crucially as simply the most hyberbolic of the marketing and promotional norms and forms that now suffuse public discourse to our ruin more generally as well as the quintessential discourse of neoliberal developmentalism formally speaking, and consequently as a profoundly clarifying illustration and symptom of more prevailing pathologies in contemporary life that must be understood and combated.

And so, I must say I am also especially interested in the connections Zizek is cracking wise about in his routine concerning the futurological imaginary functioning as a profound foreclosure of the revolutionary or even radical imaginary, a point I find myself arguing regularly with would-be "revolutionary" techno-transcendentalists. This is of course clearest when Zizek points out, in connection with alien invasion and genocidal pandemic and asteroid collision flicks that "It’s easy to imagine the end of the world... But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism." This is a good joke, and he repeats it a lot, as he should. It hits us where it hurts.

Zizek points out the crucial complementary of our hyperbolic techno-fetishistic aspirational imagination and the circumscription of our democratic aspirational imagination. He jokes, that "in technology... everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics... but look at the field of society and economy. There, almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes by little bit for the rich. They tell you it’s impossible. We lose competitivity. You want more money for health care, they tell you, Impossible, this means totalitarian state! There’s something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare."

Of course, there has been no increase at the upper bound of human longevity at all, there has been very little improvement in post-pubescent longevity (most gains are artifacts of decreases in infant mortality, and while scattered heart disease and cancer treatments are nothing to sneeze at they hardly inspire confidence in multi! century! lifespans! around! the! corner!), and although we once managed the trick it isn't actually true anymore that we can put someone on the Moon anyway. That we could improve healthcare by spending more on it (or, better, spending less on it through a single-payer system) is something we know is true because it is happening all over the world elsewhere, that we could raise taxes without hurting the economy while providing more security for our citizens is something we know because we were very recently doing it ourselves as is palpably available to the memories of the vast majority of our own citizens now living. The techno-fixation of our discourse (for which the Robot Cultists and superlative futurologists provide the especially gaudy and clarifying iceberg tip of an utterly prevalent vastly disseminated technocratic techno-reductionist techno-festishistic techno-developmentalist institutional and marketing and policy-making and subject-forming hegemony) does not just substitute a profoundly delusive destructive anti-democratizing aspirational imagination for sensible sustainable democrating possibilities but it even substitutes palpably idiotic fancies for the most modest and obvious imaginable progressive possibilties. The catastrophic impact of this substitution plays out in one political domain after another, but it is possibly its potential via futurological "geo-engineering" discourse to undermine environmentalism that worries me most of all, given the urgency of the problems of anthropogenic climate change, resource descent, and toxic polluting. Only a comic genius like Zizek could manage a really good joke on that particular subject, so I won't even try.

Fear Not, Robot Cultists! "The Future" of Futurology Is Still A White Penis

Last year I made the unhappy habit for quite a while of weekly visits to the website of the Very Serious techno-"progressive" futurologists at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. And week after week after week after week I noticed the same thing (by all means, check the archives if you seek confirmation): Of all the faces of featured authors to be seen on IEET's site there were, time after time after time, curiously few if any that were not the faces of a white guy.

Soon enough, I grew rather bored with belaboring the obvious. Taking a look at the site today, however, I am oh-so-future-shocked to find, authoring the thirteen futurological features on offer there, the usual pale pageant, with only a single exception to the parade of white guys. Yes, the so-called "transhumanists" would have us believe they have seen The Future... and that it is a White Penis as bald as the head of a middle-age middle-class middle-American male.

And yet, it remains as true as ever that only a small minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a small minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a small minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a small 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 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.

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.

Future Schlock Credulity Levels

Across the Robot Cult archipelago the talk has turned, that is to say returned, to the topic of "Shock Levels," to futurists boasting about how much techno-transformative storm-churn their manly meme muscles can take as compared to meek mehum sheeple of the "luddite" herd. Writes Singularitarian Transhumanist Michael Anissimov, "Categorizing people by their shock level with regard to the future… it’s great!"

As with so much superlative futurology devoted to declarations about accelerating acceleration of acceleration blah de blah the objective observer is actually struck most of all by the stubborn stasis of the discourse.

As Paul Hughes indicates in the piece that has momentarily re-ignited the hubbub, all this talk of feeling accomplished without accomplishing anything via self-congratulatory self-reports of one's futurological unflappability is of course old hat, with Yudkowski offering up the locus classicus for this quintessential doctrine for boys for their toys back in 1999, before we all endured a lost decade the futurologists were sure would be a Long Boom.

Needless to say, reasonable skeptics will aver such "shock levels" rarely track much apart from the credulity levels of the futurological faithful.

You know, it's been a long time since the marginal and derivative literary genre popularized by Toffler's Future Shock has yielded much that isn't better described as Future Schlock. One notes with interest the showcased illustration accompanying the Hughes piece is of Montreal's Habitat 67, itself now nearly half a century old.

Little wonder that the sensible among us have long since moved on from future shock to future fatique.

Learning from Lanier's Inverse Moore's Law

From his Half A Manifesto, now well over a decade old:

As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.

It's truly hard to believe that there are still Robot Cultists out there who fancy Moore's Law is going to spit out a Robot God and end human history in "The Singularity," but sadly, so sadly, there are. Far from an acceleration of accelerating change, the computation-multimedia-industrial complex has looked to me to be cranking out stasis for landfill rather than building a toypile to tech-heaven for a long time now.

My Own Opposition to Capital Punishment

I am utterly opposed to the dreadful barbarism of the death penalty, and advocate a life sentence without the possibility of parole for murderers. My primary reason for holding this view is not the usual one that mistaken convictions can take place and demonstrably have done, and without any possibility of a redress of that ultimate injustice -- though it seems to me this reason should surely be compelling for all but the most murderous.

My own reason for repudiating the death penalty is that while murdering a murderer does not reverse the loss to the murderer's victims, capital punishment actually amplifies the loss to those victims who remain among the living, taking from them sooner than need be their chance of finding their way eventually, on their own terms and in their own good time, to a miraculous forgiveness of the murderer, face to face, and hence to a different world of possibility and promise beyond that loss before they die themselves.

Contrary to the claims one regularly finds in the sentimental pseudo-literature of kitsch execution apologetics, it is actually rarely the case that capital punishment provides anything like a satisfying or meaningful "closure" for the living victims of a murderer's crimes. But it is always the case that capital punishment forecloses political possibilities of the real elaboration and substantiation of their freedom that might otherwise emerge out of their profound distress, and that is something no freedom loving state should ever countenance.

Hannah Arendt proposed that the experience of freedom is materialized in the offering up of deeds to the hearing of the world, whether works, judgments, testaments, promises, or, most crucially, acts of forgiveness. To indulge in the meaningless cycle of violence and revenge, to demand an eye for an eye, a life for a life, is to sin against liberty in its unique political substance. It is the proper work of the secular democratic state, to the contrary, to enable the experience of freedom, peer to peer, through the provision of nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes, and the facilitation of the exchange of opinions and stories thereby, through the provision of a legible scene of informed, nonduressed consent, and the facilitation of the making of promises and the forgiving of offenses thereby, through the provision of an equal recourse to law and the celebration of the diversity of lifeways flourishing thereby.

"All Futurisms Are Finally Retro-Futurisms"

The following is adapted from an exchange over at Accelerating Future, occasioned by one of my Futurological Brickbats: "To speak of 'The Future' is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms."

Richard Holt protested: "Historically, Revolutionaries have fetishized ‘The Future’ far more than Reactionaries or Conservatives."

I replied that perhaps this helps account for why so many historical revolutions have eventuated in tyranny: A disdain for the open futurity inhering in the present, peer-to-peer, expressed through a parochial idealization of “The Future” imposes an instrumental rationality and instrumental misconception of freedom on political realities that are of a radically different character.

I happen to think "The Future" of the futurologists has so much in common with "The Golden Age" of reactionaries that it is illuminating to treat techno-fetishizing futurological ideologies as structurally continuous with "nature"-fetishizing bioconservative ideologies. Both are functionally retro-futural, both idealizing and naturalizing parochial values and then disdaining the present world of the diversity of their peers the better to dream of "The Future" world re-written in the image of the universal prevalence of their parochialism.

Holt then asserted: "Goals are political. The analysis of future scenarios [which is the chief business of 'professional futurologists' --d] is not."

To which I must reply that futurological scenario spinning is not analysis, properly so-called, so much as it is an inept literary genre aping and amplifying (sometimes to an extent verging on the theological) the hyperbole and fraud of contemporary marketing and promotional discourse while superficially appropriating the most hackneyed conceits and tropes from science fiction ready to hand.

Transhuman Transsex

This is another post adapted from an exchange in the thread over at Accelerating Future:

A more lefty than the average futurologist intervenes in my endless elaboration of rhetorical and practical and organizational ties between the Futurological Complex and right-wing politics, intervenes by pointing out "transhumanism also connects with and supports the transgender/transsexual movement."

About this, I say:

This is a good point, and one I contributed to the elaboration of myself quite early on when I published Technology Is Making Queers of Us All way back when I was a more sympathetic critic of the futurological as a vector for radicalism.

I do think it is worthwhile to point out, however, that only a vanishingly small minority of people who champion transsex interests (and I hope you would also include intersex interests) are superlative futurologists and at the same time that only a vanishingly small minority of superlative futurologists devote more than negligible attention to these interests. The gender theory of Donna Haraway, Judith Halberstam, and Judith Butler (my mentor) all skirt up to the edge of post-human discourse but every one of them also explicitly repudiates futurological appropriations of their work, something to bear in mind.

This may be an unkind overgeneralization, but I really do think that self-consciously lefty transhumanists rather like to trumpet what remains at best a faint connection of the transhuman with the transsexual in order to compensate for the "Bell Curve" apologists, neo-feudal "free marketeers" and corporate-military cheerleaders who remain so conspicuously among them. It's not exactly tokenism, since the connection is more interesting than that, but it often functions tokenistically as well.

Mapping the Futurological Complex

This post began as a response to somebody who recommended Edge.org in the still-ongoing discussion mentioned below taking place over at Michael Anissimov's "Accelerating Future" blog, but I have edited and adapted it a bit:

I admire a few who post at Edge.org (Lanier, Sterling, Margulis) but cannot say that I am a fan of the site more generally. What seems to be meant by the "Third Culture" there is one culture (a clumsy corralling of disciplines under the heading "hard and hard wannabe sciences") ignoring the other (no less clumsily, "humanities"), sometimes barking over the other, and then declaring this ignorance to be some kind of enlightened synthesis or detente.

Also, John Brockman is a key vector through which pop futurology, reductionist scientism, and neoliberal triumphalism is disseminated in my view, in parallel with the mainstream corporate-militarism of GBN (Global Business Network) and other "Long Boom" peddlers (to know what I think of Stewart Brand et al, you might read this).

The organizational archipelago of futurology is a richly layered one, and while most readers here probably know me best for my critique of its most hyperbolic forms -- the transhumanists, the cybernetic-totalists, the singularitarians, the techno-immortalists, the nano-cornucopiasts, what I like to deride as The Robot Cultists -- to me it is crucial to grasp the ramifications of futurological assumptions, aspirations, formulations, figures, forms in more mainstream discourse and organizational life as well, from deceptive hyperbolic advertizing norms suffusing public life to the unsustainable precarizing terms of corporate-military neoliberal developmentalist policy-making.

Just as the WTA (The World Transhumanist Association, er, now monikered HumanityPlus!) connects directly to IEET (the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, whose founders and many of whose leading lights are also those of WTA) which connects directly to Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute (again, the name has changed but the faces remain the same) so too one can draw lines connecting Edge.org to GBN to Wired Magazine to futurological impresario and guru Kurzweil to the libertopian and libertechian Extropian subculture to the Singularity Summit.

One can trace comparable lines of influence and force across the libertopian to Movement Conservative archipelago (with the same kinds of plausible deniability and sectarian squabbling to render connecting the dots a complex matter), for example. And, one can draw comparable lines between PayPal's Futurological FunderTwins Elon Musk and Peter Thiel with the futurological complex as one can draw between the Koch Brothers and the libertopian complex.

There are even points of connection between these complexes (the reactionary rhetoric of "spontaneous order" binds them ideologically, among other things), although the futurological complex hasn't quite managed the mischief the Neocons have, though I regard them as fully capable of it.

Although my critique of futurology has tended to focus on discourse analysis and philosophy (in which I am trained), as well as pseudo-science, forms of true belief, and both practical and conceptual affinities with reactionary politics, I must say that there remains an opportunity for some enterprising journalists and historians to document (and expose) the institutional structure of organized futurology from its mainstream to its superlative advocacy from the WW2 era emergence of modern information and computer science through to the contemporary epoch of irrational exuberance and greenwashing. I've done some small amount of that work, but it isn't really my area of expertise, and yet it is quite important work to be done.

These connections are not a matter of conspiracy so much as subculture and political organization in an epoch of network formations. But it is crucial, nonetheless, to grasp these ideological, subcultural, political, funding connections, whatever their measure and extent if we would resist the True Belief peddled by futurology through pseudo-science, the corporate-militarist PR peddled by futurology as policy-making, the derangement of public deliberation about technoscience issues by futurology's sensationalist hyperbole and fear-mongering, the circumvention of the political address of climate catastrophe by futurological geo-engineering greenwashing and boutique green consumer spectacles, the eugenicism of futurological "enhancement" discourses, the devastating ongoing anti-intellectualism of death-denialism, techno-fetishism, consumer culture by futurology's phony revolutionary amplification of the status quo peddled as "accelerating change."

The Personal Is Articulated By the Political, Sure, and Hence Is Always Politicizable -- But It Isn't Automatically Political As Such and To Think Otherwise Risks the Evacuation of the Political

I've sparred on an off lately with a reader who shares many of my larger aspirations -- for a sustainable, equitable, informed, consensual multiculture (where culture is construed as prosthetic) -- but whose "radicalism" and "revolutionary outlook" seems to me too often to be a matter of performing self-congratulation in front of a mirror or throwing darts from an armchair at those who make the questionable alliances and painful compromises through which social struggle and democratic reform are actually materialized in the world.

I am forever asking this person (and many like-minded others who show up here and there in the Moot) to demonstrate that their occupation of a position of superior radicalism is more than a pretense, and hence that they have actual actionable alternatives to offer to my own efforts at progressive reform and social struggle and understanding within existing constraints.

I do indeed regard myself as a radical -- I'm a green queer atheist vegetarian democratic socialist feminist aesthete trained in nonviolence and teaching critical and political theory at a San Francisco art school and at Berkeley, does sound radical to you? But my radicalism resonates with Michael Harrington's motto: "The best liberalism leads toward socialism. I’m a radical, but I want to be on the left wing of the possible."

My interlocutor recently responded to my request for substance, thus:

Dale recently asked me for specifics, so I reproduce my suggestions here. Forge passionate personal relationships based on mutual affection and a commitment to anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, decolonization, queer liberation, feminism, and non-hierarchical organizing. Support each other emotionally, intellectually, and materially. Choose one or more of the following: fight the pigs the street, oppose institutional racism in the academy, give out free food, form a union with your coworkers, network with radical communities across the world, tell people not to join the military, correspond with a political prisoner, burn migra cars when see them in your neighborhood, hack a government/corporate website, spread the revolutionary analysis to everyone you know. So much love to everyone in the struggle!

At the risk of seeming (seeming, hah!) a grumpy old man, let me raise a few issues here.

Without an organizational dimension “passionate personal relationships” -- whatever their supposed grounds, even when they are apparently political -- may amount to little more than another mode of subcultural signalling, and hence are perfectly compatible with the maintenance and consolidation of the violent, unsustainable, inequitable, homogenizing status quo. It’s too easily accommodated into just the usual consumer narcissism.

It isn’t that I disdain the beauty and delight, let alone deny the necessity, of providing emotional and intellectual and material support for congenial colleagues and strangers -- it’s that I do not mistake it, on its own, as serious political activity.

The indispensable feminist slogan “the personal is political” should be read as revealing the historical articulation of the terms on which personal life is lived and hence the politicizability of the personal.

I fear that your laundry list is pretty scanty on the details when it comes to “opposing institutional racism in the academy” -- what form does your opposition take? rolling your eyes at straight white assholes in the lounge or petitions to the administration or teach-ins or lawsuits? What form does fighting pigs in the streets take? Peaceful protest marches or leafleting neighborhoods about abuses or throwing rocks through windshields or calling police “pigs” on your blog and feeling naughty? Organizing the dispensing of food to the precarious or intervening in the military recruitment of vulnerable populations or creating a powerful co-worker union are all excellent things that do indeed demand sustained organizational effort -- but I wasn’t clear on whether you were glibly saying “it’s a good idea” in some abstract way every person of sense already agrees with or if you were claiming to have participated in such efforts yourself in any ongoing way -- ongoing is key. After all, anybody can scribble a manifesto or a master plan on a cocktail napkin over drinks -- the demand for specifics was about whether you are writing checks your ass can cash, you will recall.

I am glad you think spreading radical and revolutionary ideas counts as substantial political activity -- I’d like to agree with you, and I hope you are right -- but as somebody who blogs on politics, but more to the point has taught marxist, eco-socialist, eco-feminist, environmental justice, civil disobedience, critical media theory, p2p democratization, and queer theory to thousands of college age students both in art school and public university settings I do sometimes worry that there are better things to be doing (only some of which I manage to do).

I hope you will not take it too amiss that I still worry that you are far too easy on yourself and far too self-congratulatory for the good of the ends you espouse -- if it helps, I’ll confess I worry about this in myself also, and that I think these worries are a useful corrective to the powerful countervailing forces toward complacency available even to the bad subjects of an obscenely consequence-insulated exploitation-fat hegemonic order such as US is.

I like it that there is some walk as well as talk in this post, though. Especially to the extent that the walk isn’t just more talk.

It Turns On Power: A Schematic Distinguishing the Politics of Technodevelopmental Social Struggle from Futurological Anti-Politics

The Politics of Technodevelopmental Social Struggle, Peer to Peer

A. Power Construed As Experience of Possibility

B. Political Rationality --> Yields emphasis on Open Futurity ineradicably inhering in present/presence, peer to peer --> history as ongoing, interminable social struggle

(prone to emphasize political dimensions of scientific research and technological application and to embed developmental claims in social and historical specificities)

C. Characterized by Dissensus, Dependent on Consent

(collaboration and contestation are matters of improvisation within enabling constraints)

----

The Anti-Politics of Futurological "Enhancement" and Post-Human Ascension

A. Power Construed As Amplification of Capacities

B. Instrumental Rationality --> Yields emphasis on "The Future" as destination/destiny --> history as causal playing out of material forces, usually superhuman ones

(prone to technological determinisms and "natural progressivisms" recasting difference from parochial norms as atavisms)

C. Characterized by Consensus, Dependent on Dissent

(prediction and control enabled by warranted scientific beliefs which attract consensus after being put to test)

This is a schema and not an essay, so I'll keep the comments brief. You'll notice that the error of the futurological vantage in my view is its misapplication to political and historical domains of technoscientific assumptions and aspirations that are perfectly valid, indeed indispensable, in their proper domain. I daresay the futurologists will dismiss this schema as a hatchet job since I am the one coming up with it, but I really am striving to be fair here, to get at key differences between my perspective and theirs to help account for the many other points of contention that play out in my critiques and lampoons. After all, I would expect many of the futurologists I endlessly decry and critique here would actually dismiss my affirmed position as "postmodern relativism" outright and decry what they see as my own misapplication to history of what I am calling a Political Rationality while they would affirm precisely the sorts of structural/material accounts I am attributing to them. No doubt they would be less cheerful about the distinction of (my) open futurity from (their) "The Future." But this would mostly be because "openness" is a buzzword signaling subcultural membership for many of them (this buzzword has an interesting history, by the way, originating in especially Hayek's refiguration of market processes as "natural," whatever their enabling legal ritual artifice, "nonviolent," whatever the misinformation, exploitation, duress that characterize them, and "open," however constrained and constraining they are in fact, a rhetorical program that has been an incredible success to the distress of the world, and ramified into endless futurological discourses of "spontaneous order" and of disastrously deranging misapplications of evolutionary processes to every imaginable historical and cultural phenomenon). However, I honestly do not agree that many of these "advocates of openness" take on board the radical contingency, uncertainty, situatedness implied by my understanding of open futurity, while they almost inevitably do identify themselves with manifest destinies sweeping and transforming the world that assume anything but openness. Although, I suppose, from a tropological if not a logical standpoint perhaps even absolute predestination can come to seem open to its advocates once it gets big and sweeping enough in the imagination, one of the ways in which the Sublime functions is as a collapse of absolute openness with absolute closure after all. Theoryheads among my readership will notice how well the discussion of political power comports with Foucauldian accounts, they will recognize the phrase "improvisation within constraints" from Judith Butler, and they may even grasp that the provocative relations of consensus/dissent//dissensus/consent posited here are indebted to Hannah Arendt.

What Futurology Is Peddling Has Little To Do With Foresight

Foresight is a dimension of every proper form of expertise. Just as "The Future" does not exist, neither does the "foresight" claimed by the futurist as their unique expertise.

There is no "knowing The Future" that can yield useful knowledges otherwise. There is no-one "coming from The Future" to lead the way. To "know the future" is to admit to ignoring and disdaining the present and the open futurity arising out of the presence of the diversity of stakeholders to the making and meaning-making of the world, peer to peer. To "come from The Future" is to admit to a delusive inhabitation of a wish-fulfillment fantasy at the expense of the world, a derisive repudiation of one's peers for an imaginary species of angels or monsters elsewhere.

There can be no special futurological expertise that generates "foresight" as such, divorced from all the separate disciplines and knowledges out of which partial, contingent foresights emerge. The Hegelian understanding of philosophy as the project to hold the spirit of the age in thought comes closest to this kind of generality, if only in a superficial way, which may explain why so much futurology amounts to cheap pseudo-philosophizing (another point of contact explaining the family resemblance between superlative futurological sub(cult)ures like transhumanism and Singularitarianism and the very American enthusiasm for anti-intellectual pseudo-philosophical handwaving in the Randian Objectivist and L. Ron Hubbard Scientology vein).

The intuitive plausibility of futurological narratives derives in no small part from their activation of primary passions (the usual fears of impotence and fantasies of omnipotence that always freight the technoscientific imaginary of agency) but also deep discursive formations, whether the irreconcilable omni-predication of transcendent agency, omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence -- or dredging up an oceanic archive that has shaped so many of our intuitive understandings (from Eve to Icarus, from the golem to the Sorcerer's apprentice, from Frankenstein to the Philosopher's Stone, from the Fountain of Youth to Brave New World). What must be grasped is the extent to which futurology is not providing insights, but selling sensations and reassurances.

Further, it is crucial to grasp that not only does the futurological lack an expertise but it relies for its force on a repudiation of expertise, that not only does the futurological provide no real knowledge but it demands a repudiation of knowledge, that not only does the futurological provide no insights but requires the substitution of cheap thrills and easy consolations for insight and understanding, that not only does the futurological deceive when it claims to know of "The Future" but it relies for the plausibility of its deception on the repudiation of the present, emphatically including the open futurity arising indispensably out of the present. Futurology feeds on the substance of the present, peddling the profound deception that marketing and promotion is one and the same as knowledge-making and meaning-making, peer to peer, futurology feeds on the substance of freedom in the present, peddling the profound deception that the amplification of given force is one and the same as the elaboration of freedom, peer to peer.

Ten Reasons to Take Seriously the Transhumanists, Singularitarians, Techno-Immortalists, Nano-Cornucopiasts and Other Assorted Robot Cultists and White Guys of "The Future"

ONE -- Just because futurologists tend to be both foolish and wrong doesn't mean it is always foolish to point out in public places that they are, indeed, wrong.

TWO -- In an era of urgent technodevelopmental quandaries it is actually crucial to understand technoscience questions and their developmental and distributional effects, and every second displaced onto hyperbolic futurological wish-fulfillment fantasizing and disasterbation is a second lost to that deliberation, every techo-transcendentalizing framing of the issues deranges that deliberation from sense into nonsense.

THREE -- Futurological rhetoric and fandoms represent the extreme amplification and reductio ad absurdum of the body-loathing, narcissistic death-denialism, crass materialism, complacent consumerism, technocratic elitism, market triumphalism, fraudulent profit-taking, hyperbolic deception and self-promotion that now utterly suffuses our public life through the prevalence of advertizing and marketing norms and forms and of neoliberal global developmentalist narratives and rationalizations. To grasp the ugliness and absurdity of these extreme forms is to gain insights into the pathology of many mainstream values and the deception of official elite-incumbent justifications. Where we have grown accustomed and complacent to these pathologies and deceptions looking at ourselves from the alienating margins of our own discourse can help us see ourselves and the urgency of the need to change all the more clearly.

FOUR -- Hyperbolic and deceptive futurological narratives will usually be far more attractive to superficial and sensationalist Establishment Media figures and outlets than the difficult, ambivalent, qualified, dynamic, complex realities of actual science and ongoing technodevelopmental struggles, and so the futurologists will often provide the larger rhetorical frames within the terms of which the stakes and significance of these developments are taken up by public and policy deliberation. It matters less that this is disastrous than that it is true and must be dealt with as such.

FIVE -- America is not only an incredibly rich and powerful nation that will probably remain for generations a key, and often the key, player in global technodevelopmental social struggle, it is also a profoundly anti-intellectual nation full of people who are, in consequence, especially vulnerable to the fraudulent sale-pitches of pseudo-intellectuals like futurologists, who tend either to be providing PR for corporate-military elite-incumbents or guru wannabes hoping to attract a flock to fleece.

SIX -- As Margaret Mead famously insisted, "Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world." The example of the neoliberals of the Mont Pelerin Society reminds us that a small band of ideologues committed to discredited notions that happen to benefit and compliment the rich can sweep the world to the brink of ruin and the example of the neoconservatives reminds us that a small band of even ridiculous committed people can prevail even when they are peddling not only discredited but frankly ridiculous and ugly notions. Futurologists pretend that hypberbolic marketing projections are the same thing as serious technoscience policy deliberation, which is a gesture enormously familiar to the investor class and the technology sector's customary membership, and the futurologists inevitably cast rich entrepreneurs as the protagonists of history, which is a gesture enormously attractive to the skimmers and scammers and celebrity CEOs of the technology sector's essentially narcissistic culture. Although their various predictions are rarely more accurate than those of chimpanzees at typewriters, although their various transcendental glossy-mag editorials and tee-vee ready techno-rapture narratives are rarely more scientific in their actual substance than those of evangelical preachers, although their dog and pony show sounds almost exactly the same now as it did five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, twenty-five years ago as they still drag out the same old tired litany (super-parental robot gods! genetic fountains of youth! cheap nanobotic superabundance! better than real immersive VR treasure caves! soul-uploading into shiny robot bodies!), and all with the same fervent True Belief, the same breathless insistence that this is all New! the same static repetition that change is accelerating up! up! up! it is not really surprising to discover that the various organizations associated with superlative futurology are attracting more and more money and support and attention from the rich narcissistic CEOs of the technology sector whose language they have been speaking and whose egos they have been stroking so assiduously for years and for whom they provide such convenient rationalizations for elite-incumbent rule. You better believe that, ridiculous and crazy though they may be, the Robot Cultists with well funded organizations (like the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, Global Business Network, Long Now Foundation, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, Singularity Summit to name a few) to disseminate their pet wish-fulfillment fantasies and authoritarian rationalizations can do incredible damage in the real world.

SEVEN -- So long as people are taking futurological scenarios like "AI" let alone "Friendly Superintelligent AI" seriously we are all taking real global network security and surveillance and media misinformation issues less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "Drexlerian nanotechnology" seriously we are all taking real environmental problems and promising materials science breakthroughs at the nanoscale level less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios like "general assemblers," "nanofactories," and "utility fog" seriously (like so many took seriously the futurological techno-cornocopiasts before them flogging nuclear energy too cheap to meter, cheap superabudance via ubiquitous toxic plastic, universal leisure via ubiquitous robots, the high energy-input fraud of the petrochemical bio-engineered industrial-monocultural "Green Revolution," and immersive virtual reality treasure caves before them, not to mention fraudsters peddling on-the-cheap global developmental leapfrogging via boutique Green consumption or helicopter-dropped laptops, cellphones, 3-D printers right up to the present) we are all taking the crisis of global poverty, precarization, exploitation, and human trafficking less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "uploading" and "SENS" and "longevity-medicine" and "enhancement-medicine" seriously we are all taking the global maldistribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of both already-existing and actually in-development medical research and treatment less seriously than we should be, we are all taking actual medicine and the struggle to ensure its access to all less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "crypto-anarchy" "Brinian transparency" "the participatory panopticon" "online participatory democracy" seriously we are all taking the corporate-military enclosures of commons, the facilitation of global financial fraud via digital networks, the intensification of police surveillance, intrusive target marketing, punitive credit profiling via so-called "social media" together with the evacuation of the very ethos of "participation" via an internet actually defined for the majority of its users by endless posts with zero comments, drift-surfing user-generated content of deceptive dating profiles and vapid pet videos, "friending" strangers and consumer products, and scrolling insubstantial decontextualized "tweets" less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "geo-engineering" seriously we are all taking education, agitation, organization, regulation, and public investment to ameliorate anthropogenic climate change, resource descent, pollution and waste and the promotion of real-world sustainable polyculture less seriously than we should be. All of this actually matters.

EIGHT -- It is never wrong to expose a dangerous fraud as a fraud.

NINE -- It is always good to defend science against pseudo-science and promote critical thinking against True Belief.

TEN -- Even when it is not necessary, ridiculing the ridiculous is often a pleasure.

All Humans Are Mortal. Socrates Is Human. Therefore, Socrates Is Mortal.

Students have been learning the basics of logic through the re-iteration of this syllogism for centuries.

Everybody who has ever lived has died. Everybody dies. You're going to die. That you are going to die is part of what it has always meant to be human. If you didn't die, you wouldn't be living a legibly human life. But of course you are going to die so there is no reason to belabor the point, and to do so is probably just to indulge in pathetic panic-stricken distraction or denialism about it anyway.

And, sure, you really can go into denial about it if you don't want to face facts, you can stick your fingers in your ears screaming la!la!la!la! whenever you contemplate your curtain call, you can dwell on death so much that you manage to die in life even before you die if you really want to be pathetic about it, you can behave recklessly on cliff faces and in sports cars to show how invulnerable you are, you can pray to Baby Jeebus to give you a cozy cloud perch from which to observe the bad people burning in Hell, you can build a gold-plated poop pyramid a mile high with your name on it. Heck, you can get your brain frozen by sociopathic scam artists in the desert who promise you won't thaw for the centuries it takes for magic nanobots to "fix" you with the help of the Super Dad Robot God they are coding.

Many readers may think I am writing parodies when I speak of superlative futurological discourses and subcultures as a Robot Cult. Mike Treder, Managing Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (long-time readers may recall that I tend to call it "stealth Robot Cult outfit, IEET" and tend to call its high level muckety mucks as "Very Serious Futurologists" or, alternatively, "White Guys of 'The Future'"), asked the question in a post yesterday, Will You Die? (The answer, for you kids keeping score at home, is: "Yes, Mike, yes, you will die, as will every single person who reads these words.") Here's Mike:

The hope for transhumanists in 2011 is that the science of biogerontology—potentially combined with rapid progress in techniques for using smart ‘nanobots’ to clean out our arteries or fix our degraded cells—will soon lead to a new era of widely available radical life extension. IEET Fellow Aubrey de Grey, a leading expert in the field, has predicted that the first person to live to be 1000 years old will be born in the next twenty years. If that doesn’t happen quickly enough for you or me, then maybe we can have our bodies (or just our heads) cryonically “preserved” and possibly reanimated at some point in the future. Another hypothesized route to immortality is the idea of having your personality “uploaded” to a computer before you die, so that the essence of you will live on for centuries or for eons. You might, theoretically, be able to have your mind implanted into an advanced robot, giving you a superior body that can be upgraded and made to last for a very long time indeed.

It doesn't seem right to make fun of people this desperate and deluded and dumb, but, well, I say, go ahead. Especially rich for regular readers will be the robotic predictability with which Aubrey de Grey has apparently chosen the inevitable "twenty years from now" as the arrival date for the goods in "the field" in which he is "a leading expert," a futurological gesture also beloved -- and for far more than twenty years, let me tell you -- of experts heralding the arrival of Artificial Intelligence, Drexlerian Nanotech, Designer Babies, Clone Armies, Immersive VR, the Paperless Office, Energy Too Cheap to Meter, Orbital Space Hotels, the Cure for [insert disease], and the history-shattering Singularity when the Robot God inaugurates Tech-Heaven or eats the world for lunch (you decide). No less enjoyable is the accompanying illustration for the piece of drawing-board nanobots on graph paper backgrounds just like real engineers use and with orange arrows indicating the immortalization action, and also, too, the reference to cyber-immortalization via "uploading" presumably involving something called your "essence." Science!

No doubt about it. Socrates is dead.

Every Jock Is A Puke -- And Why This Matters

In 1968, Bill Stowe explained to me that there were only two kinds of men on campus, perhaps in the world -- Jocks and Pukes. He explained that Jocks were brave, manly, ambitious, focused, patriotic and goaldriven, while Pukes were woolly, distractible, girlish and handicapped by their lack of certainty that nothing mattered as much as winning.

There was all too much in Robert Lipsyte's recent piece on the values of American athletics culture in The Nation that was disturbingly familiar to me from memories of high school and so on. And I appreciated, of course, his muddying of Bill Stowe's stark demarcations and denunciations and welcomed his insistence on the fine qualities to be discerned in folks on the Puke end of Stowe's stick. But the truth is that is frankly a pretty low bar, and when all is said and done I still found Lipsyte's perspective more worrying than I presumably am supposed to. I recommend you follow the link for the whole piece and decide for yourself. I leave to the side the rather sticky schticky feel-good rapprochement between liberal lefty Lipsyte and reactionary right Stowe that frames his tale, and from which he draws his blandly hopeful and likely misguided conclusion. Although it is clear enough that Lipsyte disapproves the work of Jock Culture separating us into Jocks and Pukes and erecting authoritarian hierarchies onto that scaffolding, as well as the deeper work of Jock Culture in deranging those in its thrall into robots programmed for destruction (and self-destruction, I would add), the fact is I think Lipsyte retains too rosy a vantage on the world of competitive team sports.

While I don't doubt the correctness of his earlier assessment of Bill Stowe as a "dumb jock" my worry, to put it bluntly, is that Lipsyte may be too much of one himself. Given the competitive jock Thunderdome of Village journalism one wonders if he owes his success as a sports writer in some measure to his own socialization in Jock Culture or whether his socialization into success in those savage precincts renders him now more sympathetic than he would otherwise be to Jock Culture? I must say that there seemed to me to be something defensive about his little genuflections to sense, reassuring though they are meant to be: eg, "I am for de-emphasizing early competition and redistributing athletic resources so that everyone, throughout their lives, has access to sports. But then, I am also for world peace."

Anyway, far more to the point, when I read in his piece that competitive sports were "[a] once safe place to learn about bravery, cooperation and respect" that has become "a cockpit of bullying, violence and the commitment to a win-at-all-costs attitude that can kill a soul. Or a brain" I find myself wondering if this edenic space of safety and solidarity really ever existed anywhere for long enough to manage the wholesome work he attributes to it. I find myself wondering if he is describing as essential what are at best occasional or even accidental properties of competitive sports.

I for one believe that one learns about bravery in standing up for a loser (whether a person or an idea) in a way in which one risks becoming a loser oneself -- not from the experience of being on a winning team. I for one believe that one learns about co-operation in discovering through the exacting experience of patience and consideration and sometimes even mild humiliation that one often actually benefits from the abilities and knowledge of others one did not initially value at all -- not from the experience of getting ahead through unquestioning obedience to a given authority. I believe that one learns about respect when one is treated with respect by someone who disagrees with us and so realize that we can still respect ourselves even when we are mistaken or wrong and others when they are mistaken and wrong so long as we are honest and open in the struggle to be and do better -- not from the ready respect we garner from those with whom we have explicit affiliations or easy affinities. I do not believe that it is in being on a winning team that we find the paradigmatic experience of "belonging," but among friends and peers and others who continue to identify with us even when we are losing (and who we often find only through losing).

It will come as no surprise that I myself was always a Puke and not a Jock, that I was a theater geek, that I never went outside without a book, that my friends were all girls and my enemies were Jocks they foolishly pined over, that I was tormented in gym class, that I was an object in the public ritual humiliation through which my peers enacted their crisis of masculinity, relentlessly punished as the class faggot (which was true, but since I hadn't even come out to myself at that point my "faggotry" then was far more a matter of being an intellectual among anti-intellectuals than anything else). I have no warm and fuzzy thoughts about Jock Culture against which to measure the endlessly many countervailing pathologies I witnessed up close and personal and struggled to understand.

What seems to me the heart of Lipsyte's argument is crucially wrongheaded. He writes:

Sports is good. It is the best way to pleasure your body in public. Sports is entertaining, healthful, filled with honest, sustaining sentiment for warm times and the beloved people you shared them with. At its simplest, think of playing catch at the lake with friends. Jock Culture is a distortion of sports.

As somebody who has danced on a dance-floor with a diverse crowd of joyful strangers, as somebody who has marched with marginalized losers in a show of solidarity for justice, as somebody who has indulged the exhilarating adventure of public sex with a revolving cast of anonymous partners I really must protest that his assignment to "sports" of all things "the best way to pleasure your body in public" testifies to a rather impoverished and conventional imagination of the possibilities open to bodies in this world. I am far from denying there are pleasures to be had in playing catch at the lake with friends, any more than I would deny the pleasures of dangling a string in front of a kitten, but I really have to protest both the implication that his Ralph Lauren ad with Buffy and Scooter tossing a ball at the Lake House is really so universal after all or that it takes us to the heart of what can be "entertaining, healthful… honest" and all the rest (can he not hear how creepily sanctimonious and fascistic all this spit-spot playing field hygiene sounds even in his thoroughly domesticated for Nation readers variation?) in bodily exertion, peer to peer.

While Lipsyte rightly worries about the aggressiveness promoted by competition and the uncritical authoritarianism of team cohesion, I daresay his romantic attachment to sport restrains him from going deeper, and grasping the poisonous adrenaline heart and hard-on of the Jock Cult. Since human beings are deeply inter-dependent on one another our whole lives through, since we arrive into a world which precedes us and exceeds us and makes us even as we collaborate in the making of it, the "autonomy" and "responsibility" we aspire to and value, while real and important, are also profoundly ambivalent. To believe any of our accomplishments are entirely our own, that they owe nothing to the multicultural archive into which we are born and nothing as well to the efforts of the diversity of peers with whom we share the world, to fancy instead our endowments derive entirely from our own solitary efforts or singular superiority to others who lack them (or to attribute these achievements to a homogeneous and superior "we" against alien and inferior "theys") is always to indulge in a profound self-deception. And to the extent that our self-esteem is bound up in maintaining that deception, it demands an incredibly costly expenditure of effort wasted in a pointless spectacle of self-aggrandizement that manages mostly to be pathetic while it works and is almost always destined eventually to a failure that will be all the more devastating the longer it has been staved off in the first place.

I believe that competitive sports is an engine feeding this wasteful and deranging form of delusive self-indulgence. Jocks are in the throes of a compulsion to "winning" that provides a delusive hit of a "goodness" that is profoundly inhuman in its presumed "godlikeness," tinged with the destructive and self-destructive delirium of self-denial and megalomania. I believe that the momentary superiority of Jocks is written on the broken bodies of the Pukes they terrorize… but as well it is written on the inevitably failing, ageing, finite bodies of the Jocks themselves.

While Lipsyte speaks of competitive team sport in terms of the "pleasure [of] your body in public" it would be better to speak of competitive team sport as the ritual humiliation of bodies, the denunciation of bodies, the reduction of the body to Puke through the assertion in Winning of the Jock-Body as an imperishable, invulnerable, angelic spirit-body. The Jock-Body is a body at the ready for human civilization's many bloody-minded body-minded rituals of dehumanization, enslaving bodies to pile up loot, killing bodies to pile up skulls, bodying forth the Babel bodypile that would reach up to heaven and leave the earth behind and the body behind and the people behind and, hence, death itself behind.

It's a stupid wasteful destructive madness and there's nothing good in it, even if sports have an incidental yield of harmless pleasures to recommend them. Lipsyte is right to be worried, but he has scarcely begun to tear the lid off the hell of Jock Culture and the hell it makes on earth.

Jock Culture more essentially and perniciously consists of the ceremonial substance through which we are educated and incited into that self-denying madness of self-assertive victimizing victory-mongering to the ruin of the world. Contrary to Lipsyte's assertion that "Jock Culture is inescapable" it is more deeply true that the failure of Jock Culture is inevitable. Since it is the eventual exposure of the Jock as Puke that is really inescapable, it would seem to me that the education or circumvention of the wasteful delusive self-destructive tendencies exacerbated by Jock Culture is indispensable to the well-being of the individuals vulnerable to its siren song and to the flourishing of societies dedicated to equity-in-diversity.