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.