The Ambivalence of Investment/Speculation As the Kernel of Reactionary Futurology

Yesterday I wrote a post deriding

Robot Cultists [who] like to paint themselves as brave for devoting their adult lives to daydreaming about how awesome it would be if magic were real, . . . then they like to rail against phantom armies of supremely powerful mortality-loving disease-loving luddites who presumably stand in the way of the spontaneous emergence of all the magic.

In the Moot, longtime Friend of Blog "JimF" quoted that passage and inserted between "luddites" and "who stand in the way" the additional phrase "and non-libertarians (especially Democrats)," which I think is interesting and important, but actually quite complicated. I am promoting the scattered speculations of my response to a post of its own.

"That's a tricky connection -- the one identifying Robot Cultism, usually but not always through some variation on libertopianism, with reactionary politics -- but I do agree with you about it when all is said and done. As you know one of my futurological brickbats more or less baldly asserts "every futurism is finally a retro-futurism," but I do think the critique is a bit more complicated than that pithy assertion suggests. Of course, with some sects of the Robot Cult, like the Extropians, the case is cut and dried, since they mostly affirm (affirmed?) the connection outright, and their slogans (no death, no taxes!), their attraction to explicitly libertopian sf like early Vinge and campy Wright and others, their curious attachment to gun-nuts and Bell Curve apologists and crypto-anarchists and so on, are all available for anybody to see who can use the google, and of course I haven't forgotten Tech Central Station, the fraudulent "think tank" celebrating high tech and free markets in ways that were characteristic of the whole futurological archipelago but got exposed as corporate-militarist right wing tools -- this is why I often deride an Ayn Raelian spirit in so much futurology.

"But things get trickier with the futurologists who claim liberal and democratic socialist and even anarcho-socialist roots. I happen to think even futurists with good intentions and earnest progressive assumptions are incredibly vulnerable to right-wing appropriation but also structurally tend to advocate variations of progressivism that are more authoritarian than not (eg, technocratically elitist policy wonk circle-jerks and ultimately anti-democratizing design discourses) or only vacuously democratic (eg, digital utopians mistaking surfing of packaged advertorial content in highly surveilled contexts as "open access" and superficial tweeting as "deliberation" and self-promotional deception as "free expression").

"There is a real sense in which the progressive developmentalist investment of Dewitt Clinton (who shepherded the Erie Canal and en-gridded Manhattan in a way that fostered both democracy and eventually progressive infrastructure services there) is hard to separate from the more fraudulent speculative mindsets that yielded vast periodic economic panics (including Depressions) in the name of exorbitant wealth-capture. That progressive-reactionary investment/speculation ambivalence in developmentalism is already there in Alexander Hamilton and still there in FDR -- and I personally see this as a prefiguration of the uniquely American varieties of futurological discourse (arising out of the ferment of the Second Thirty Years' War, that is to say the two twentieth century World Wars that concluded Westphalian European internationalsm and then implemented post-war globalism).

"I suspect that sustainable urban planning and progressive macroeconomics and democratizing planetary developmentalism (and I do not mean by this Washington Consensus globalization in its complementary neoliberal and neoconservative faces/fasces, but technodevelopmental social struggle of a kind informed by environmental justice critique and social democracy/democratic socialism) provide the sensible substantial kernel out of which much well-intentioned futurology finds the foothold it goes on to derange out of too superficial popular scientific understandings, too privileged penchants for undercritical enthusiasms, and common or garden varieties of greed for easy profit and a fairly widespread death-denialism (more usually in the form of mid-life crises, but in futurology, as you know, sometimes taking far more extreme forms taking us into the territory of organized religiosity and un(der)critical True Belief)."

Not Necessarily Abnormal, But Certainly Stupid

Living Infomercial and Very Serious Futurologist Natasha Vita More crayon-scribbles a bit of her usual zany nonsense for the Robot Cultists over at IEET. She begins by posing this question:

Would a person whose immune system starts declining after puberty, and finally gives up before 123, be normal? This statement largely sums up my transhumanist view that “normal” is misunderstood. The physiological (cognitive and the somatic) state of human existence “normality” ought to be a state of enhancement.

Depending on how many years before 123 (which is a higher life expectancy by far than even the richest, most silly supplement popping, most can-do futurologist can presently actually hope for) the obviously true answer to this question is: "yes." Of course it is normal for human beings to die before they arrive at 120.

And yet, in stirring defiance of actually existing actuarial life tables, not to mention actually existing dictionary definitions, Vita More (whose life is so much more than yours she changed her name to become a permanent advertisement of the fact) exhorts her fellow transhumanoid Robot Cultists to act as if what is "normal" for humans is a state of "enhancement" which actually doesn't exist. I should add, by the way, that in my opinion all culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are cultural and hence that using language, cultivating food crops, living in cities, not to mention most of the common or garden variety healthcare practices that actually exist that cure diseases and ease suffering, strictly speaking, constitute an acculturating prosthetic "enhancement" (and no doubt in other ways a circumscription or frustration) of human lifeways – which would mean that it is indeed already perfectly "normal" for human beings to be in some respects enhanced or articulated by culture while at once exactly as disease prone and vulnerable and mortal as we also actually are. But, of course, by "enhancement" what Vita More means to conjure is a human being genetically re-woven and awash with nanoscale robots and the usual futurological dog and pony show she and the other Robot Cultists have been monotonously riffing on for decades.

Needless to say, should medical science eventually advance to invent respirocytes and genetic sooper-immunity and foot long robot schlongs for everybody who wants them then human beings will indeed make recourse to these interventions the moment they are shown to be reliable and safe and affordable and all the rest, whereupon they will indeed become normal in the way things actually do become normal in the actual world. None of this puts us in any kind of position to say whether any of these outcomes are actually possible, or whether, possible in principle, they are outcomes anybody now living has any reason to fancy are sufficiently proximate to waste a single second of their actually-existing lifespan daydreaming about, not to mention whether or not possible and possibly proximate they would also be safe enough to be legal let alone affordable.

While transhumanists like to pretend that the real reason we don't live in the science fiction fantasy land they pine for is because there are sinister forces abroad in the land who worship disease or are terrified of the idea of living for centuries in sexy model bodies wallowing around in piles of treasure, the truth is that almost nobody on earth doesn't think it would be swell, caeteris paribus, to live in paradise but few people are idiotic enough to pretend that if they only clap louder this paradise will blossom into spontaneous existence, or, I must add, idiotic enough to join a Robot Cult and pretend that indulging in this kind of wish fulfillment fantasizing but then calling it Science! is somehow not idiotic anymore. Robot Cultists like to paint themselves as brave for devoting their adult lives to daydreaming about how awesome it would be if magic were real, then they like to paint themselves as progressive activists for pretending this daydreaming constitutes some kind of efficacious force for making daydreams real, then they like to rail against phantom armies of supremely powerful mortality-loving disease-loving luddites who presumably stand in the way of the spontaneous emergence of all the magic. Not to put too fine [a point -- thanks, TNA!] on it, all of this is quite palpably stupid.

Of course, there is plenty of greed and intolerance and superstition and fear holding back progress and there is plenty of work to be done solving our shared problems through scientific research and democratic reform, but none of that has anything to do with the magical thinking the Robot Cultists are peddling.

"Stand Your Ground" As Secessionist Treason

When the democratic left spinelessly abandoned the struggle for sensible gun control regulations in the aftermath of the 2000 election, when his support of some gun control measures was interpreted as a chief cause of Al Gore's defeat in his home state of Tennessee and, hence, of his defeat in the general election (an election Al Gore actually won, one should never tire of pointing out, and in which partisan Republican members of the Supreme Court outrageously irresponsibly selected the loser of that election, George W. Bush, as President in what amounted to a bloodless putsch that would eventuate in an orgy of bloodletting around the world and in a host of crises of institutional illegitimacy from which the nation has yet to recover), the space opened up by that abandonment of common sense and common decency was quickly filled with still deliriously proliferating "Stand Your Ground" and "Castle Laws" lobbied for and often literally crafted by right-wing anti-civilizational organizations like ALEC and the NRA. These are laws endorsing lawlessness, inevitably advocated by means of a rhetoric precisely as inverted as their result: peddled as defenses of a right to self-defense, a self-defense usually falsely and even paranoiacally portrayed as under attack, these laws function in fact as licenses to unaccountable individual vigilantism.

The way the intuition that every person has a right to defend themselves from bodily harm bleeds apparently so seamlessly into the intuition that every person's home is their castle to be likewise defended is in fact an expression of the fraught vulnerable permeable boundary of bodily selfhood. The defensive shell of self can expand into the space of the domestic zone or retreat into the theatrum philosophicum of the mind in the skull at will or under threat as circumstances demand or allow, a passive-aggressive permeability figuratively exploited by laws extending this selfhood as a kind of missile into the wider world through the en-castlement of cars on the road, from within which prosthetically enshelled selves can continue aggressively to defend themselves, or contracting inward into the individual genius of the romantic author the sweat of whose thinking brow presumably mixes with its original works to own them, however indispensably they arise from the living archive of culture in fact.

Of course, what is crucial in the state endorsement of self-defense is that it seems to provide for an exception to what is normally the state's jealously guarded monopoly on the legitimate recourse to violence. In tyrannical states this monopoly is functionally a sanction of state violence and crimes (eg, murder becomes execution, gangs becomes armies, exploitation becomes occupation and structural adjustment, and so on) suffered either because of the perceived hopelessness of rebellion or tolerated because it is accompanied by the maintenance of an order from which people consider themselves comparatively more likely to benefit than they are to be abused. This endorsement of self-defense is different but no less fraught in democratic states, for which the legitimacy of their monopoly recourse to violence depends precisely on a state's maintenance of nonviolent alternatives for the transfer of authority, for the adjudication of disputes, for the redress of grievances and violations, and support of a scene of informed, nonduressed consent (for which the provision of extensive welfare entitlements is indispensable) to the terms on which we relate to one another in our interpersonal affairs.

In cases of self-defense, whether what is defended is the bodily person or the prosthetically-extended person of their "castle," the self defending itself is usually at once marginalized and, crucially, immobilized from access to the state-sanctioned violence on which it normally depends for its security, and is hence defending itself in an exceptional state that can easily be accommodated as an exception or even as an expression (via a kind of momentary deputization) of the state's monopoly. But when the self-space of this defensive appropriation of violence is expanded via the en-castlement of cars in motion and so on into a near co-extensivity with the whole territory of the state as such this once exceptional state becomes curiously competitive with the universality of the state in ways that render the making of an exception for it increasingly coincident with calling itself into crisis. I suppose I should add right away that I do not happen to think it is wrong to treat cars as quasi-castles from which we have the same right to defend ourselves as we do from our homes, but I am simply saying that this and other extensions may have contributed to some unanticipated consequences or to have facilitated some dangerous developments.

Together with a host of laws insisting that people have the right to carry arms in visible and even conspicuous ways in ever more public place –- in churches, in bars (what could possibly go wrong?), nearer and nearer schools, and so on –- "Stand Your Ground" Laws treat the simple attachment of a gun to your bodily person as a kind of en-castlement of the citizen-self into a permanent exception to the rule of law, a permanently prostheticized anarch and agency of a kind of counter-law or alter-law. Under the regime of "Stand Your Ground" the gun functions as a prosthetic augmentation of a paranoid-defensive sovereignty that substitutes itself for and so subverts the sovereignty of the state (a sovereignty no less prone to paranoid defensiveness whenever it is not accountable to enfranchised and educated citizens). Wherever "Stand Your Ground" laws are on the books, the ground on which a gun-toting self stands is transformed for as long as the gun-holder stands on it from the land of the country its law-abiding citizens share to mere ground occupied by those who would be laws-unto-themselves. This is especially so in states where "Stand Your Ground" circumscribes the action or rationalizes the inaction of legitimate law enforcement that should arrest people or at least question them or at the very least divest them of their guns and other potential evidence in the aftermath of lethally violent exchanges simply because they invoke the right of self-defense in its newly capacious and aggressive sense.

There is no question at all that United States citizens have a second amendment right to bear arms (a right that was qualified and regulated before, during, and long after the birth of the republic and certainly should be far more circumscribed and regulated today in a time of readily and cheaply available massively-murderous assault weapons). And there is no question that plenty of perfectly good and sensible people like to hunt and to shoot guns for sport (and I say this as a life-long vegetarian and a person trained in nonviolence by the King Center who would never want a gun in my home) and that all United States citizens have a right to do so. The aggressive advocacy of ALEC and the NRA these days has nothing at all to do with the support of such practices and citizens' rights to them, but is conjuring up phony crises as pretexts to implement a profound dismantlement of lawful civilization (in this, these organizations are functioning precisely in the way that right-wing efforts to combat non-existing "voter fraud" are the pretext for widespread voter disenfranchisement and the dismantlement of voting rights), indeed, far from supporting everyday law-abiding gun ownership and uses, "Stand Your Ground" laws are transforming gun-owners, whatever their own feelings on the matter, into nodes in a network of anti-civilizational lawlessness, into avatars of anarchy wherever they happen to stand with a gun at hand, into secessionists from the country of laws many of them profess so loudly to love and which at least some of them actually do. All decent law abiding citizens, whether they own guns or not, should abhor "Stand Your Ground" lawlessness and should forcefully and permanently renounce organizations like ALEC and the NRA which are using law abiding gun owners as pawns in an effort to dismantle the rule of law.

I Predict That In Twenty Years Futurological Predictions Will Still Inevitably Begin "I Predict That In Twenty Years"

Look, Ma, I'm a futurologist! Let's ask this scientician...

More Futurological Brickbats here.

Added, to put some meat on the bones of this very easy bit of snark: The near irresistability to the common or garden variety futurologist of the "twenty-year prophecy horizon" is more than just a ritual intonation demanded by adherents of the genre (though there is a little of that involved, no doubt) but is also supremely pragmatic. "Twenty Years From Now" is located, as it were, on a "sweet spot": on the one hand, just far enough in the future to evade accountability for failure (when the prophecy straightforwardly does not come to pass, or when, coming to pass, it fails to Change Everything, or indeed much of anything, in the context of the technodevelopmental complexities in which the costs, risks, and benefits to the diversity of stakeholders in the richness of their lived situations are actually impacted by technoscientific change), and, on the other hand, just proximate enough still to seem worthy of attention and wishful identification, even by many who are likely to be dead in twenty years' time, all things equal.

It isn't too hard to imagine a snarky futurological interlocutor riposting that "I predict that in twenty years facile anti-futurologists will still be pointing to the failure of such twenty-year predictions to dismiss futurology despite the fact that futurology is much more than that." I would imagine a futurologesque figure like Jamais Cascio or Paul Raven might say something interesting along such lines. I think they would still have to come to grips with the actual undeniable reality of the phenomenon in question even while claiming there is something "more" to futurology than this.

But I must say I would also like to know why futurologists who disdain much of what goes on futurologically still identify -- even if ambivalently or critically -- with the futurological term? And why are so many of their preoccupations so drearily predictably futurological still -- AI, nano-genies, bio-enhancement, geo-engineering, blah blah blah?

If you are a "green futurologist," say, why not just be an environmental scientist? Or, if you cannot be an environmental scientist because you lack or cannot be bothered to actually get the training required for that, why pretend that your futurology makes you more "sciency" than any other environmental journalist or activist? Why not just be an activist, after all? If you think your trend spotting makes you a commentator on history, events, social forms -- why not become a historian, political scientist, economist, sociologist, anthropologist? Want to hold forth on health questions? Even if you aren't a physician you can get training in healthcare policy and become a journalist or expert for real. Even if you want to focus on technological development questions, there actually are academic disciplines devoted to science and technology studies (STS), history or philosophy of technology, environmental justice critique which take up these complexities in rigorous ways.

I mean, I get it that you might find my own accusation that futurological discourses amount to deceptive corporate-military marketing hyperbole and pseudo-scientific self-promotional fraud (and in certain extreme cases priestly guru-wannabe Robot Cultism) personally uncongenial, but I never get a real sense of what futurology brings to the table that actual already existing disciplines concerned with its scattered preoccupations lack. Again, if futurology is just a fandom for the sf subgenre of scenario-spinning, where scenarios are kinda sorta like sf settings without the addition of characterization, plots, integrated themes, stylistic innovations, and so on, well, it's hard for me to see the draw but let a bazillion flowers bloom! And, also, too, stop calling that science or policy-making then, embrace the fandom and let your freak flag fly at the con. Even here, there are lots of enormously interesting literary and cultural critics who will be competing with you on this terrain, along with a fantastic proliferating explosion of online fandom, so it's not clear to me if futurology on such terms would make much noise. Anyway, if there is still "futurology" happening in twenty years, I suspect it still won't have come clean on any of this, because I think the disinterest in and disavowal of such facts is probably an enabling condition of the ongoing existence of this pseudo-discipline. That this bit of false consciousness incubated so much phony twenty years from now prophecy drag show falsity in turn is really not so surprising as all that when all is said and done.

“Geo-Engineering” As Right-Wing War and Revolution

In an interview over at Grist the indispensable Naomi Klein talks about how the Republican right has only comparatively recently arrived at its present unanimity rejecting the scientific consensus about the reality and supreme danger of anthropogenic climate change, and how the change in their beliefs about the facts in question seems to have been preceded by their becoming convinced that the Democratic left is using environmentalism as a stealthy Marxist plot to take over America. One regularly sees frustrated liberals throwing up their hands and declaring that of course people can have their own arguments and values and desired outcomes, but that they cannot have their own facts. But, of course, one of the interesting things about the state of affairs Klein is pointing to is that Republicans are coming to new conclusions about factual questions not because they have been persuaded that the evidence is false or supports different factual conclusions but because they have been persuaded that what initially appeared to be a factual question is not one after all, but rather a Culture War issue for which the facts function less as evidences than as cultural signals indicating “us” versus “them.” What looks like Republicans inventing their own facts is really a matter of Republicans having a cultural dispute where Democrats are trying to have a policy dispute based on accurate assessments of fact.

In an earlier piece for the Nation Capitalism Versus the Climate Klein provided ample material to drive the fears of the cultural warriors of the right. Although the Republicans are rather absurd when they charge environmentalists of being crypto-marxists (John Bellamy Foster’s excellent Marx and Ecology notwithstanding, actually existing socialism has contributed more than its share to extractive-industrial-petrochemical catastrophe, “electrification plus soviets,” anyone?), indeed Republicans are rather absurd and rather paranoid to pretend environmentalists of being crypto-ANYTHING, given the cheerful eagerness with which eco-socialists, eco-feminists, and environmental justice critics talk up their perspectives and publish their online manifestos – the truth remains that market norms and forms pretending that growth without end is possible in a finite world, that brute productivity can bulldoze away all stakeholder differences over the long haul, that seeks to make the commodity form ubiquitous even over public and common goods to which it does not apply and which it destroys, that privileges short-term profitability over long-term deliberation, that encourages consumption, pollution, and waste in the service of apparent GDP health are simply unsustainable. Hence, serious environmentalism inevitably will demand changes that do look absolutely radical if not outright revolutionary from the vantage of the current parochial winners in our corporate-militarist industrial-extractive-petrochemical consumer-financial capitalist order.

What I would want to add to Klein’s account is that there actually is a right-wing revolutionary counterpart to the left-wing revolutionary environmentalism Klein is right to champion. And readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that I will connect it to futurology. When I speak of a right-wing revolutionary environmental discourse I do not refer to a generation of complacent advocacy of patently inadequate “carbon markets” or the endless articles and blogs devoted to boutique activism and lifestyle “green” consumption -- obviously the first is yet another lame over-application of the market fundamentalist assumptions that catastrophically deregulated enterprise and privatized public goods in the thirty year neoliberal civilization dismantlement project against which the tide is now turning, one hopes not too late, while the second is yet another lame over-estimation of the agency of isolated individuals in a world of structural and collective historical forces, the possessive individualist ethos on which much of that neoliberal ideology depends. The role of futurological think-tanks and marketing gurus in the promulgation of carbon market techno-fixes and the congeniality to the futurological ethos of the green gizmo-fetishization and consumption-fandoms of privileged lifestyle “greens” surely goes without saying. But radical though these neoliberal assumptions, ends, and outcomes are, I do not think them revolutionary (although one might usefully say that they are counter-revolutionary).

No, the right-wing revolutionary form of environmentalist discourse indebted to futurology seems to me quite clearly to be so-called “geo-engineering” advocacy. “Geo-engineering” discourse is to neoliberal carbon market proposals and consumer lifestyle pseudo-greens as what I call superlative futurology is to mainstream futurology. “Geo-engineering” is the proposal that corporate-military formations can declare and wage war on climate change on an industrial scale, it is the proposal that the very agents responsible for environmental catastrophe are the only ones suited to resolve it by attacking it in the very mode of mega-scale brute-force willfully-ignorant extractive-industrial agency through which environmental catastrophe has been wrought. Note that the inevitably enabling premise of “geo-engineering” discourse is always that democratically-accountable public investment and regulation has failed to address the crisis -- usually followed by the stealthy re-introduction of this very failed governmental site when the time comes to fund and police away resistance to these certainly parochially profitable even if almost certainly destined to fail mad science mega-engineering wet-dreams of orbital mirror archipelagos, megaton sea dumps of iron filings, pseudo-volcanic aerosol spraying air fleets, and vast undersea cathedrals of vertical piping to cool ocean surfaces.

Back in 2007, I proposed that the Global War on Terror functioned as a direct displacement of the revolutionary energies of environmental politics:

The Global War on Terror mimes the contours and rhetorical figures of planetary peer-to-peer Green consciousness: GWOT offers itself up as a response to a presumably "global existential threat," imagery that derives its intuitive plausibility in no small part from the disseminated consciousness of the threat of extractive industrial toxicity and catastrophic climate change. What is extraordinary in this is not just that the GWOTs would substitute for the urgent threats that invigorate Greens what seems to me to be a less urgent threat in fact (which is obviously not to deny the reality of some of the threats GWOT clumsily addresses itself to), but that GWOT relies in substance, as it were parasitically, on the Green awareness of the very threat it would then displace from our attention. And all the while, GWOT False Consciousness appropriates and diverts the energies of Green consciousness into precisely contrary political movements.

It seems to me that “geo-engineering” discourse came into currency precisely as the exposure of the falsity of GWOT’s enabling premises became as widespread as fatigue with the ruinous costs of GWOT had also become. What is key to grasp is the centrality to each of the figures of war. Reading two of my early critiques of “geo-engineering,” “Geo-Engineering” As Futurological Greenwashing and “Geo-Engineering” Is A Declaration of War That Doesn’t Care About Democracy Alex Steffen (late of Worldchanging) tweeted his summary: “Geoengineering, he essentially argues, is Fascism’s answer to climate crisis: planetary action as war.”

Seeing it so baldly put I found myself making a connection I had not grasped myself hitherto, thinking about the key difference between the way, on the one hand, Adorno’s critique of the Culture Industry and Debord’s critique of the Spectacle both make recourse to what Debord literally describes as the “permanent Opium War” of the diversion of revolutionary dissatisfaction into lifestyle consumption (via “manufactured needs” in Adorno, “pseudo-needs” in Debord), as opposed to the way, on the other hand, in the stunning epilogue of Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility (partly as an answer to which Adorno mobilized the Culture Industry critique in the first place) the conflict with fascism (right-wing revolutionism) is very much a matter of literal and not cultural war-making:

War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system... If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production -- in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

That last glancing reference to the abolition of aura in a “new way” … “through gas warfare” is especially intriguing in light of Peter Sloterdijk’s recent suggestion that environmental consciousness emerged precisely in the trenches, when soldiers grasped that the very atmosphere in which they had evolved to be fit and flourish could be re-engineered to kill them in clouds of mustard gas. Sloterdijk’s claim can be found in a slim volume Terror from the Air, excerpted from his vast work Sferen, and it is coupled to a rather Monty Pythonesque reading of Dali nearly asphyxiating in a malfunctioning diving suit while a vast crowd avidly watched wondering if his panicked convulsions were art. For me, this iconography recalls the failed artificial earth environment Biosphere 2, and the image of its futurologists crawling half dead from starvation and pollution from the toxic sewer it quickly became, crawling back into the embrace of the earth itself, Biosphere 1, as it were, the very planet the “confines” of which they so disdained that they were driven to build their presumably preliminary self-sufficient “escape craft” in the first place.

In "The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man," Hannah Arendt wrote:

The situation, as it presents itself today, oddly resembles an elaborate verification of a remark by Franz Kafka, written at the very beginning of this development: Man, he said, “found the Archimedean point, but he used it against himself; it seems that he was permitted to find it only under this condition.” For the conquest of space, the search for a point outside the earth from which it would be possible to move, to unhinge, as it were, the planet itself, is no accidental result of the modern age’s science. This was from its very beginnings not a “natural” but a universal science, it was not a physics but an astrophysics which looked upon the earth from a point in the universe. In terms of this development, the attempt to conquer space means that man hopes he will be able to journey to the Archimedean point which he anticipated by sheer force of abstraction and imagination. However, in doing so, he will necessarily lose his advantage. All he can find is the Archimedean point with respect to the earth, but once arrived there and having acquired this absolute power over his earthly habitat... man can only get lost in the immensity of the universe, for the only true Archimedean point would be the absolute void behind the universe... We have come to our present capacity to “conquer space” through our new ability to handle nature from a point in the universe outside the earth. For this is what we actually do when we release energy processes that ordinarily go on only in the sun, or attempt to initiate in a test tube the processes of cosmic evolution, or build machines for the production and control of energies unknown in the household of earthly nature. Without as yet actually occupying the point where Archimedes had wished to stand, we have found a way to act on the earth as though we disposed of terrestrial nature from outside, from the point of Einstein’s “observer freely poised in space.” If we look down from this point upon what is going on on earth and upon the various activities of men, that is, if we apply the Archimedean point to ourselves, then these activities will indeed appear to ourselves as no more than “overt behavior,” which we can study with the same methods we use to study the behavior of rats. Seen from a sufficient distance... [a]ll our pride in what we can do will disappear into some kind of mutation of the human race; the whole of technology, seen from this point, in fact no longer appears “as the result of a conscious human effort to extend man’s material powers, but rather as a large-scale biological process."

Again, we are confronted with the paradoxical technodeveopmental aspiration toward omnipotence figured in an arrival at threatened impotence, the consummately technologized actor the supremely fragile man in a space suit (another kind of diving suit, another kind of Biosphere 2) tethered to the gravity and warmth and air available everywhere on the earth he was born in and evolved to be fit for by nothing now but a thin cord and film of foil. Already I have accused that "geo-engineering" offers up a profoundly earth-alienated "vantage on environmentalism premised on pretending that the earth on which we evolved, in which we are fit to flourish, is imagined instead as an alien world to be rebuilt by machines inspired by a science fiction novel[.] Writes [geo-engineering advocate Jamais] Cascio: 'A science-fiction parallel that might illuminate is to think of it as terraforming the Earth.' I must say that this does not seem particularly illuminating to me at all of the environmental problems we earthlings face on this earth... If anything I think this thought-experiment illuminates the profoundly alienated vantage assumed in engineering and profit-taking and futurological rationalities that would reduce the good earth to a lifeless unearthly mineral-resource rock-scape."

Given all of this, it comes as no real surprise, then, to read this proposal by Matthew Liao, an Associate Professor at New York University affiliated with the Center for Bioethics:

Anthropogenic climate change is arguably one of the biggest problems that confront us today. There is ample evidence that climate change is likely to affect adversely many aspects of life for all people around the world, and that existing solutions such as geoengineering might be too risky and ordinary behavioural and market solutions might not be sufficient to mitigate climate change. In this paper, we consider a new kind of solution to climate change, what we call human engineering, which involves biomedical modifications of humans so that they can mitigate and/or adapt to climate change. We argue that human engineering is potentially less risky than geoengineering and that it could help behavioural and market solutions succeed in mitigating climate change. We also consider some possible ethical concerns regarding human engineering such as its safety, the implications of human engineering for our children and for the society, and we argue that these concerns can be addressed. Our upshot is that human engineering deserves further consideration in the debate about climate change.

Quite apart from the fact that catastrophic climate change is real while "geo-engineering" and "genetic-enhancement" is not -- and so one might be forgiven the suspicion that perhaps a person turning to unreal solutions to real problems is less serious than they claim to be when they genuflect to real problems as pretexts to indulge in futurological day-dreaming about "gengineering" designer babies and enhanced super-humans -- what we find here is the amplification of the earth-alienation of the "geo-engineers" (an amplification even if Liao tut-tuts that it "might be too risky" -- too risky as compared, you will note, to re-writing human bodies in the image of space aliens flourishing on a methane-choked garbage planet rocked by greenhouse storms!) into the already more familiar territory of post-human body-alienation, with its full yield of rants against "meat-bodies" and raves about uploading into imperishable data-heaven. From a futurological declaration of war against climate change (consisting of an endless corporate-militarist war of climate-changing) we arrive at the familiar futurological declaration of war against the vulnerable, mortal human body itself.

I do not think we need choose Benjamin’s focus on literal war over Adorno’s and Debord’s focus on cultural war in grasping the ways in which ideology functions practically to seduce precarious workers into active collaboration in the terms of their own exploitation, but I do think it is important to recognize that the cases they are making are indeed different even if they are finally complementary. And to circle back to the claims with which I began, namely that right-wing anti-environmentalism, too, might have two faces, one of literal and the other of cultural war making, and that the literally war-like face of that right-wing anti-environmentalism is futurological, I propose that it is no accident either that Benjamin’s revolutionary figures here are repeatedly ecological, nor that he declares as the essential theoreticians of fascist war-making none other than the Italian Futurists.

Schlock and Awesome; Or, The Futurists Are Worse Than You Think

Very Serious Futurologist and Dean Martin impersonator (just a heartfelt suggestion, dude) Patrick Tucker, begins his discussion of the book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler by complaining that too “many of us have fallen to the urge to surrender, to turn away from the growing needs of a bulging global population, to deny the reality of humanity’s impact on the Earth and the climate, to nurse our collective anxiety with the false comfort of ignorance and isolationism.” He cites as a cause of this a number of impacts of global human population growth which suggests, all things being equal, “energy demand will rise by 60% between 2002 and 2030. The number of people on the brink of starvation is above one-sixth of the total number of people on the planet, or at least one billion people, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It will only get worse as current trends predict that two-thirds of the global population will live in a water-stressed environment by the year 2030, a phenomenon exacerbated by climate change.”

Tucker follows this sobering stock-taking and admonition of those who prefer escapism over actually grappling with the urgent problems at hand by doing what anybody who doesn’t actually follow futurism would regard as flabbergasting: he advocates precisely the escapism he admonished a moment before. Tucker enthuses: “Nine billion people in 2050, all needing food, shelter, clean air, intellectual and physical stimulation, isn’t the big problem we think it is, say Diamandis and Kotler. It’s actually nine billion problems but with nine billion potential solvers. Once you start counting the solutions, the ideas, the assets that we have and those that we are inventing -- once you begin counting the new connections that we’re making daily, hourly, and globally -- those nine billion problems look pretty paltry.”

Needless to say, even if it were true that the “connections” being made on Facebook and Twitter weren’t mostly one-liners by comedians and sales pitches and pretexts for marketing and surveillance and actually were substantial as absolutely they are not, even if it were true that guru-wannabes and think-tank ego-fluffers and celebrity CEOs weren’t mostly endlessly repackaging stale useless crap and flogging hyperbolic press releases to skim profits from the unwary in the face of crumbling infrastructure and diminishing returns and actually were stunning “idea leaders” as absolutely they are not, even if it were true that real solutions equal to our problems were being proposed and implemented through entrepreneurial innovation and functional accountable public-spirited well-governed civic apparatuses as absolutely they are not, even if all these things were true as absolutely they are not, even then the global problems of climate change, resource descent, exploitation, starvation, pandemics would be the farthest imaginable thing from “look[ing] pretty paltry.” It is hard to express just how appalling, how irresponsible, how cynical that statement is, especially coming as it does on the heels of something like a recognition of the scope and scale of some of the planetary problems that beset us.

When Diamandis and Kotler suavely and cynically propose that nine billion actually needy people living in a stressed finite planet aren’t a problem but “nine billion potential solvers” it is hard not to gasp at the outrageous glibness of their response. Everybody is born with a stomach that renders them vulnerable to starvation, but nobody is born with an education or access to law or influence to change their circumstances just because they are also born with a brain. Like millions and millions and millions of precarious, silenced, exploited, starving, unhealthy human beings on earth right now -- every one of whom is “a potential problem solver” in the utterly vacuous and smug sense Diamandis and Kotler deploy to reassure the privileged readers of their books that the catastrophic environmental and socioecomic and demographic realities that beset us won’t actually impinge on their own privileged existences -- so too few of the nine billion “potential problem solvers” on their way will have anything like the means to implement solutions to our problems even as they suffer the worst effects of the failure to solve them.

It should be emphasized that Diamandis is the Chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation -- which in my view fosters the absurd Randroidal ideological fantasy that prize money and for-profit competition can beat public investment to solve intractable shared problems, so far with the result mostly of attracting huge amounts of attention pretending that brief-duration low-gravity amusement park quality plane rides in low earth orbit constitute a "space program" like NASA was and still is, with profitable space hotels and asteroid mining colonies on the way any minute now, of course, and also pretending that anybody was ever going to buy Elon Musk’s slick Green DeLorean boondoggle, all the while ignoring the indispensable role of government money still enabling everything the least bit substantial to come out of this whole narcissistic Silicon Valley CEO superstar circle-jerk through government contracts and public university educations anyway. Diamandis is also the founder of Singularity University, you know, where Very Serious digital utopians and other assorted futurological nuts fancy they are coding a history-ending Robot God who will solve all of our problems for us (if it doesn’t reduce the world instead to computronium goo, the equally idiotic disasterbatory place their fancy sometimes takes them to instead) through the application of an "artificial super-intelligence" that apart from not existing and never arriving despite interminable predictions by the experts pretty much every year on the year since the 1950s and seems even in principle to lack some fairly obvious and indispensable things that are always present in actually-existing exhibitions of intelligence, like biological brains functioning in living mortal bodies subject to limits imposed by the vantages in which they are situated and expressing themselves in the context of complex and dynamic societies engaged in historical stakeholder struggles.

Tucker enthuses that “[n]o one is in a better position to cast light on these new ideas and solutions than Diamandis,” who is, Tucker proclaims, “a sort of international solutions hunter. His adventures rocketing around the world (and bringing the world to him at the Singularity University campus in Silicon Valley) are detailed wonderfully in this book… Diamandis’s journeys have brought him into contact with an amazing network of idea folks, from Craig Venter to Ray Kurzweil… and other entrepreneurs across the globe.” You will forgive me if I propose that Diamandis’s hob-nobbing with Craig Ventor and Ray Kurzweil and other boutique techno-fixers and entrepreneurial skimmers and scammers and TED squawkers means that almost EVERYONE is in a better position than him to cast light on our actual problems and engage in efforts at education, agitation, and organization to address them. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think Diamandis is just one more self-important bamboozlement peddler smiling his big toothy smile and raking in the dough from failure to failure while the world grows more perilous, precarious, and polluted by the minute.

As I point out in my Futurological Brickbats: “XXIV. It is always magical thinking to declare an outcome need only be profitable for it to be possible.” “LVI. Futurologists keep confusing making bets with having thoughts.” Writes Tucker, “Diamandis and Kotler… got to the future just a few steps before the rest of us.” This is, of course, the deception and self-deception that drives the fraud of futurology through and through. Tucker titles his handwaving review, "An Awesome Adventure to the Future!" (The exclamation point is, I think, implied.) But as I never tire of pointing out (actually, I am tired of it), “The Future” is not a tourist destination. It is not a magical land. There is no there there, it isn't an Emerald City certain lucky rich white people have seen before the rest of us have, that they can report back on, hold our hand and lead the way to while they endlessly pass the collection plate.

More Futurological Brickbats: “V. Futurity is a register of freedom, "The Future" another prison-house built to confine it. Futurity is the openness in the present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of calculating, contending, and collaborative stakeholders who struggle to make and remake the shared world, peer to peer. Futurity cannot be delineated but only lived, in serial presents attesting always unpredictably to struggle and to expression. "The Future," to the contrary, brandishing the shackle of its definite article, is always described from a parochial present and is always a funhouse mirror reflecting a parochial present back to itself, amplifying its desires and fears, confirming its prejudices, reassuring its Believers that the Key to History is in their hands.” “XII. To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms.”

“The Future” conjured up by Diamandis and Kotler is less than a mirage, for what it offers as substance is nothing but escapism from the real present, what it offers as solutions are nothing but distractions from problems, what it offers as a championing of the intelligence of exploited, excluded millions is nothing but an insult to their intelligence.

Meat Brain Futurology: One More Time On the "In-Vitro Meat" Merry Go Wrong

The Very Serious Futurologists at IEET have decided that enough time has passed since the last time they had a circle-jerk about how “in-vitro meat” will change everything even though it didn’t exist and didn’t change anything, so that they can now have another circle jerk about how “in-vitro meat” will change everything even though it doesn’t exist and won’t change anything. I have been a vegetarian for decades now, and I have also been paying critical attention to futurologists for decades now, and so I suppose it isn’t that surprising to find that I have already weighed in on this topic a while back during an earlier whirl of this particular futurological ferris wheel. Skeptical though I already was of the futurologists, it seems to me now I was far too kind about such enthusiasms back then, thinking futurologists rather overeager and under-critical rather than as utterly unserious at best and fraudulent at worst as I tend to reckon futurologists nowadays.

Be that as it may, Winston Churchill is said to have said in the 1930s, "Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium." It is very unlikely that he was actually the first person to get this particular prophetic utterance so wrong, and one will be more right than most futurologists manage to be when making their space hotel and personal jet-car predictions if one declares that many more people will be very likely to get this prophetic utterance wrong again in the future over and over again many times before cheap, abundant, wholesome “in-vitro meat” is actually anything like an everyday reality. Although Dutch scientists have indeed declared that they have managed to make some in-vitro meat-like substance in the lab, it remains very much to be seen if the processes through which it would be manufactured at any kind of scale would be practical, commercially viable, actually nutritious or even safe, let alone tasty -- or, one wonders, given the faintly aqueous pink petri-dish Success Story that seems to have provoked the latest predictable futurological ejaculation, even really recognizably meat-like.

In this, as it were, vein, IEET directed our attention first a couple weeks back to a video-blog post claiming to provide “a look at the technology of In-Vitro meat” (even though one really can’t “take a look” at something that doesn’t exist, and one really probably shouldn't describe as a “technology” something that doesn’t exist), in which self-described “television personality, film-maker, philosopher” Jason Silva somewhat ecstatically says lots of things like “scientists have figured out” and “we can really do this” about things scientists have not really figured out and that we cannot really do at all while literally waving his hands madly about. (Robot Cultists always pout and stamp when I describe what they do as “handwaving,” but, honestly, have they looked at themselves?)

Within days Robot Cultist Nikki Colson went on to elaborate for us what she called “Five Factors Influencing the Adoption of Artificial Meat.” Those who do not follow futurology with any regularity might be surprised to discover that the non-existence of the meat in question was not one of the five factors influencing its adoption in her very considered opinion. As often happens with transhumanists, Olson seems to think there is something very brave about championing the adoption of a non-existing thing and decrying majorities who are presumably too afraid or too prejudiced to champion the adoption of this non-existing thing. It might seem to non-futurologists that actually existing people are suffering from intolerance, exploitation, neglect, and abuse because of actual fears and actual prejudices that might deserve attention, but futurologists know better. Futurologists also seem to think that enthusiasm for outcomes contributes a substantial measure to their eventual achievement -- pesky questions of actual funding, science, regulation, development, education, distribution be damned -- and appear to be quite prepared to take pre-emptive victory laps even if nobody else is.

The very next day, Robot Cultist Hank Pellisier (who I have had occasion to deride before, for example here and here and here and here) declared for IEET's Very Serious Futurologists: “Future Flesh is squatting on your plate. Are you nervous? Stab it with a fork. Sniff it. Bite! Chew, swallow. Congratulations! Relax and ruminate now because you’re digesting a muscular invention that will massively impact the planet.” Of course, there is no “future flesh” actually squatting on anybody's dinner plate to be nervous or happy about, to stab, sniff, chew, or find, er, hard to swallow… but why quibble when one wants to devote paragraph after paragraph after paragraph to masturbating about all sorts of marvelous things that also are not real but which would be cool if they were...? like skyscraper farms and eliminating world hunger with a techno-fix that doesn’t cost anybody anything (futurological vaudeville bits so old they’ve got whiskers on 'em)? like meat that is good for you as actual meat almost never is? like meat that isn’t the already decomposing corpse of an animal slaughtered in a nightmare of screaming violence after a lifetime of misery on a factory farm as actual meat almost always is? Why take actual problems in the present seriously if you can day dream about how nice it would be if the problems were not real -- especially when there are people eager to treat your daydreaming as serious intellectual engagement or even, in an almost flabbergasting inversion, a kind of activism?

I am not opposed to the work that scientists are doing in the area of "in-vitro" flesh-making, I am not even necessarily opposed to what scientists are doing in this area as an ethical vegetarian who sometimes opposes very much the extravagant abuse of animals (nonhuman and human) in scientific experimental trials here -- although I would want to be better educated on the issue before I weighed in on these complexities in a really considered way. Certainly I do know and decry the environmental catastrophe exacerbated by the meat-habit of especially North Atlantic societies, the relentless horror-show of exploitation and violence that is the industrial-ag factory farm, the health crisis and massive institutional failure of publicly propagandized and subsidized mass corpse consumption, as well as the completely unnecessary neglected treatable diseases, lack of clean water, and mass starvation to be found everywhere in the overexploited regions of the world regularly mis-denominated by elites as "underdeveloped." But I will say that none of these serious discussions look anything like the discussion in which futurologists indulge so enthusiastically, whether in mainstream pop-tech pop-science pseudo-journalism or in the even more techno-fetishistic techno-transcendental screeds Robot Cult futurologists prefer to circulate among themselves.

Ten Things You Must Fail To Understand If You Want To Be A Transhumanist For Long

One: Enjoying science fiction is not the same thing as doing science or making science policy.

Two: Indulging in wish-fulfillment fantasies is not the same thing as analysis.

Three: Extrapolating from speculations and stipulations mistreated as data will yield serially failed predictions, none of which amounts to foresight.

Four: There is nothing brave or useful or distinguished or progressive about saying magic would be cool if it were real, especially since there are so many real problems and real possibilities in the world that need all our bravery, pragmatism, special effort, and progressive struggle.

Five: Promoting as “experts” people with no training in actual professional or academic disciplines, celebrating the “genius” of high-tech billionaires of no real distinction, who have simply appropriated the invention and effort of countless uncelebrated others, and providing rationalizations for the "indispensability" of corporate-military elites who will presumably deliver us medical immortality, offer us nano-abundance, geo-engineer away our environmental catastrophes, and code for us perfect software god parent-substitutes, is not even remotely the same as having real thoughts, doing true philosophy, or making serious policy.

Six: Subcultures that remain very static, very small, very marginal, very megalomaniacal, and very defensive tend to look and conduct themselves more like cults than subcultures.

Seven: People who buy a Volkswagon, an Apple computer, or Diesel Jeans aren’t actually joining a political movement no matter what advertising executives say to the contrary, nor are people who watch BSG marathons, write Janeway shipper fanfic, work on a Steampunk casemod, or enjoy CLAMP cosplay actually engaging in political agitation no matter how personally resonant and edifying their experiences may be, or how interesting to ethnographers, nor are people who are invested in “The Future” of the futurologists -- which amounts in some respects precisely to such marketing phenomena and in others precisely to such fandom phenomena -- really joining or sustaining a political movement or engaged in political agitation in any remotely serious way.

Eight: “The Future” is not Narnia, it is not Middle Earth, it is not the United Federation of Planets, it is not Hogwarts, it is not Heaven, it is not Hell -- it will be a shared present attesting to stakeholder struggle just as this present is.

Nine: What we mean by life happens in biological bodies, what we mean by intelligence happens in biological brains in society, what we mean by progress happens in historical struggles among the diversity of living intelligent beings who share the present -- and to say otherwise is not to be interesting but to be idiotic.

Ten: We are all vulnerable, we are all promising, we are all more ignorant than we need to be, we are all more capable than we can know, we are all error-prone, we are all interdependent, we are all subject to chance, and we are all going to die.

Is Jerking Off Genocide?

Delaware Online:

Wilmington City Council sent a message to lawmakers everywhere Thursday night: It's time to hold men accountable for the well-being of their sperm. The council passed a resolution that asks state legislatures and U.S. Congress to enact laws that forbid men from destroying their semen. For Loretta Walsh, the councilwoman who introduced the resolution, it's a way -- an admittedly "tongue-in-cheek" way -- to call attention to "the absurdity of men making health decisions for women."

I couldn’t be happier –- as I’ve also written about here -- observing women’s healthcare and pro-choice activists finally turning away from the serial failures of a generation of defensive apologetic pre-emptive surrender to completely batshit crazy women-hating slut-shaming enforced-pregnancy theocrats as though they are fit partners to reasonable negotiations, and taking up instead what look more like the fabulous tactics of aggressive exposure and derisive subversion that queers took the streets and to the nets over the course of the exact same historical period with serial successes.

Whether we are talking about sodomy laws or about coat hangers, about haunting images of barracks showers or of ultrasound homunculi, the assumptions and aspirations are much the same – Keep Your Laws Off Of My Body! Whether we are talking about everyday people educating their families and neighbors through brave painful testaments to personal experience or about exposing the hypocrisy of the powerful who enjoy benefits they would deny others, the tactics are much the same – come out if you can, and out them if you must!

I’d say more, but I think I’ll go spend ten minutes or so slaughtering between two hundred and four hundred million people instead, thanks.

Faulty Ivory Towers

An aphorism is a point of departure masquerading as an arrival.

 
People who want nothing more than to be salesmen shouldn’t be running around colleges at all, let alone chosen to run them.

Philosophy lacks a fashion sense, while Theory is a perpetual fashion victim.

The life of the Academy is the gift. The life of the Corporation is the take.

Bad Hominem: The fallacy of decrying truth-telling as name-calling when things are so bad that truth-telling has become indistinguishable from name-calling.

Students seem always to be mistaking good grades for gifts and bad grades for thefts.

Real education never makes profits, only differences.

Reasonable people always win every argument -- because either their own view prevails as the best available one or because their own view changes from a worse to a better one.

If the shoe hurts, you're wearing it.

You say adjunct, I say troubadour.

Iron Laws are made of rubber.

The arc of the moral universe bends towards bendiness.

Every advertisement on a college campus costs the world a lost insight.

Debate Club Warning: Objections practiced in the mirror may be less conclusive than they appear.

Universities tell you something and think tanks sell you something.

Pretensions to unpretentiousness are still pretentious.

An education is something you should be grateful for all your life, not in debt for all your life.

It is needful to norm, but one need not norm normally.

I just found out the term for perpetually precarious adjuncts who blog instead of actually publishing is "alt ac" (alternative academic, as if), so now all my cat's hairballs sound like judgments.

Only in objecting is an object made subject.

The public university is the common cause where common wealth is common sense. Here's to the day when it is a common place.

We only know what we can successfully explain, and the suffering of the teacher at a student's incomprehension is much the same as the student’s, a register of the ignorance to which both are brought by it.

The lesser of two evils is still evil, but the difference between them can still make a difference. Ethics Is Not Politics.

Among many who profess to be atheists one will still find the curious belief that the Universe has preferences in the matter of which words humans use to describe it with and which values humans use to live it with.

Corporatizing higher education differs from arsonists torching the Academy in an insurance scam only in the agonizing pace the place is burning down.

Tenure is a special public affordance, and from those to whom much is given much is rightly demanded. Tenure reviews should give absolutely no consideration to any writing or result that is not made freely available to the general public, without any fees, access restrictions, or proprietary/security expurgations at all.

Saga of the Neoliberal Academy:

One: Faculty outsource governance of the academy to businessmen who care only about profit.
Two: Businessmen then outsource academic faculty to adjuncts and MOOCs for profit.
Three: Academics then express shock at this predictable result as they clean out their desks.
Four: Academy looted until there's nothing left to loot, then businessmen move on to loot elsewhere.
Five: Either civilization dies or academics rebuild academy ripe, soon enough, for looting again. REPEAT.

Intellectuals function either as props for the administration of incumbent elites or as prompts for the admonition of incumbent elites.

There are no "thought leaders." Thought isn't going anywhere.

It really is a shame the phrase "extractive-industrial white-racist patriarchal corporate-militarism" is unwieldy for sloganeering purposes.

Why is it that when you hold your ear up to a graduate student's paper that copiously quotes Deleuze you can always hear the ocean?

Describing oneself as a "Deleuzian" is like declaring oneself a "Johnny Carsonian." Only fancying oneself "Zizekian" would be worse.

Aphorisms rarely bring us to qualified claims where true wisdom resides, but they can provoke us out of unqualified claims where false wisdom resides.

Distracting an itch can be quite as good as scratching it.

Conspiracist: "We're Just Asking Questions!"
Translation: "We're Just Basking in Unanswerables."

Criticality, like science more generally, depends equally on an acceptance that any belief can be up for grabs, but also that all beliefs cannot be up for grabs at once and certainly not belief as such.

Easier done than said is true at least as often as the converse.

Being positive about what isn't positive is more negative than being negative.

Autocorrect: Thar is no they're their.

All theory depends on the paradoxical recognition that anything can be questioned but everything cannot be.

Every belief, even true ones, costs us something. Indeed, what we take be false, above all, is a belief we take to cost us too much.

One of the best ways to respect someone's opinion is to disagree with it, even disagreeably, in public.

Facts are made and not found, they are made to be found, and in being found, found to be founding.

Too much theory connects the dots and leaves us with stick figures.

Knowing what to expect is different from knowing what should be.

What distinguishes modes of inquiry from one another is what will count as an argument in each. This is more a matter of style than is generally conceded.

In this era of grade inflation I will occasionally assign a student an E for Effort, bearing in mind it is, after all, the letter that comes between D and F.

If you are an atheist who believes in free markets or who believes evolution applies to history or culture you are not an atheist after all.

Being literally misanthropic is no less paradoxical than being figuratively misantropic.

It isn't an accident that "Un-PC" is the tag always accompanying an ugly lie someone more privileged uses to bully someone more precarious.

Students, I find, are unalive to deadlines.

Philosophers are right to declare universals indispensable, but philosophers are wrong to spend so much time trying to tell us what these are rather than listening for what they are becoming.

Up with pessimism!

I don't understand people who worry so much about death. Complete idiots die every day. You'll manage dying perfectly fine.

It is important always to remember that thought is much bigger than philosophy, that odd literary genre for mostly white guys still preoccupied with the preoccupations of Plato.

I still await the philosophy that is more than mansplaining.

Never mistake life for a theoretical exercise, and always watch out for the theatrically theoretical gesture of being anti-theoretical.

When you are in a defensive crouch even a righteous wind at your back just makes your position more precarious, but stand up and that wind will propel you.

Words are actions, and the actions that speak louder than words are often also dumb.

All science is politics, hence it is not the politicization of technoscience policy but its immoralization that is the trouble.

Irritation is my Muse.

Try not to let the way you're right distract you entirely from the ways you're wrong.

In the past of every fact, a figure. At the heart of every fact, a fetish.

Only those who have forgotten or never lived the double consciousness of the threatened margin could pronounce irony a vehicle of despair, since it is irony that provides for many of us the only way to survive the world or find any beauty in it at all.

Quite a lot of theory amounts to explaining jokes so they're not funny anymore.

To recognize that one is ridiculous is a precondition for indulging in ridicule.

Sarcasm is like irony, but without the courage of conviction.

All literature is blowing air through a hole.

Comedy routines compensate routine tragedies.

What's literality without a little glitterality?

Ruthlessness may be bright, but real intelligence is warm.

Every hot take is on the take.

Love isn't for objects, but for objections.

The inexperienced often know everything. The experienced know better.

Those who can, teach.
Those who can't, sell.

However much we know we always know there is more going on than we know. Among other things, this means we can never know enough to despair.

Evadeus Corpus: Absenting the Referent in the Meat-Industrial Complex

Iowa is the nation's leading pork and egg producer with nearly twenty million hogs and over fifty million egg-laying chickens in confinement. No doubt this accounts for the recent move of the Iowa Legislature to criminalize undercover video documentation of animal abuse in factory farms and to establish serious misdemeanor penalties for activists and whistleblowers who apply for jobs at agricultural facilities intending to expose cruel and inhumane conditions in them. Given his close ties to agricultural interests, it seems unlikely that Governor Terry Branstad will veto the legislation, although activists are trying to put pressure on him to do so. According to the Miami Herald article linked above, similar laws are under consideration in Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, and Utah.

"The intent behind the legislation is to put a chilling effect on whistleblowers on factory farms," said Matthew Dominguez, a spokesman for the Humane Society of the United States. "It begs the question of, what exactly does animal agriculture have to hide?" The answer to this question, of course, is: everything.

Feminist-Vegetarian theorist Carol Adams has long insisted that the "meat-industrial complex" relies crucially on the ongoing maintenance of "the absent referent," an ongoing distraction and derangement of attention from animals as sites of engaged consciousness into substance available for consumption, the discursive, institutional, and practical complex of substitutions transforming "corpses" into "meat" -- from the translation of animal bodies named in one part of our lived awareness as cows, chickens, hogs into another part of our experience instead as consumable "beef", "poultry", "pork", to the marginalization of horrific crowding smelling screaming metal and bone and bloodletting nonhuman animal processing plants into concentrated geographies undertaken by precarious mostly minority almost entirely invisible human animal laborers doing some of the most dangerous, most injurious, most stressful, worst paying work in the world.

I have written at length elsewhere about the ways in which exploited human animals enlisted in the work of processing nonhuman animals as food are always also enabling the deep cultural work of maintaining the abject not-quite-subject not-quite-object category of "the being whose suffering is real but does not matter" and in so doing are contributing to the terms of their own racial and patriarchal abjection (to the extent that racist, sexist, infantilist, pathologizing discourses inevitably rely on bestializing discourses in which "the being whose suffering is real but does not matter" promiscuously attaches wherever it is convenient to the purposes of incumbent elites), an abjection indispensable in the narrative that has thrust them into their terrible condition of labor in the first place.

Criminalizing the documentation and exposure of the horrific systematic abuse of nonhuman animals required to process sensitive living beings into consumable meat products also inevitably criminalizes and undermines the no less necessary documentation and exposure of the conditions of systematic exploitation and abuse of the human animals undertaking the labor of this processing in ways that should alarm labor and human rights activists. And to my mind it is crucial to realize that pointing out this fact is not to propose a distraction from the politics of animal welfare onto issues of human welfare, but to highlight the essential continuity of these politics. All human rights are already animal rights because humans are animals, and the realization that human animals differ from nonhuman animals no more threatens that identification than the realization that all nonhuman animals differ from one another as well. Awareness of intersections is quite as indispensable to effective politics as sensitivity to differences that make a difference: the persecution and prosecution of truth-tellers and whistle-blowers to the surreal violence of the meat-industrial complex enabled by the legislative elaboration of the "absent referent" is an effort to orchestrate the visible and the invisible, the possible and the important, to disable connections we might otherwise make, to render us indifferent to differences that might make a difference in the way we treat our companionable animal peers, human and nonhuman, the better to erect those brutalizing Master Differences (human/animal; man/woman; native/outsider) on which so much parochially profitable exploitation depends.