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

Thursday, September 29, 2011

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.

2 comments:

jimf said...

> The Future" of Futurology Is Still A. . .Penis

Well, that's because when a woman thinks with her vagina,
she's a threat to civilization, whereas the bald head of
a penis is. . . uh. . . rational, dontcha know.

http://www.antifeministtech.info/2010/06/this-is-why-we-need-transhumanism/

Dale Carrico said...

Wow, that link leads to... something else.