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

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

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.

7 comments:

Chad Lott said...

I'm pretty sure they actually make foot long robot schlongs.

The future is now.

Dale Carrico said...

Now you mention it, I own one myself.

jimf said...

> I own one myself.

You got one of these?

http://lh3.ggpht.com/abramsv/SDTypiFUXII/AAAAAAAARls/RkttYgqy4IU/315442512_f8dbae7a79_o.jpg

jimf said...

> 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 rail against phantom
> armies of supremely powerful mortality-loving disease-loving
> luddites. . .

and non-libertarians (especially Democrats)

> . . .who presumably stand in the way of the spontaneous emergence
> of all the magic.

Dale Carrico said...

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 dry, they mostly affirm the connection, and their slogans (no death, no taxes!), their attraction to explicitly libertopian sf like early Vinge and campy Wright and others, their attachment to gun-nuts and Bell Curve apologists 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 "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 speculative mindset that yielded vast economic panics (including Depressions) in the name of exorbitant wealth-capture. That progressive-reactionary ambivalence in developmental investment 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.

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 for more extreme forms taking us into the territory of organized religiosity and un(der)critical True Belief).

jimf said...

> [F]ew people are idiotic enough to pretend that if
> they only clap louder this paradise will blossom into
> spontaneous existence. . .

Hey, Doc, why you brandishing that needle at me?
I want one o' them hypospray shots like I seen on TV.

Look, here's a picture I made.


http://www.examiner.com/culture-events-in-los-angeles/leap-forward-into-the-future-with-extreme-futuristic-festival
--------------------------
Anyone who wikipedias words like Singularity and Transhumanism
realizes those schools of though describe elements of our
daily lives, from the technology we use to the films and TV
shows we watch. Sci-Fi tends to be an advance on reality and
it will continue being so as we now have more technology that
was first invented in movies, like vaccines delivered
subcutaneously with an air shot as we have seen hundreds
of times in Star Trek. Soon intelligent robots similar to
those in the movie AI, may walk among us as Raymond Kurzweil
describes.

Arts, science, philosophy and technology combine in a
multi disciplinary collage that Transhumanism defined decades
ago. There are no frontiers anymore: “This is a cultural
movement seeking to take down the barriers. Transmedia is
taking off, as people use different media to express themselves”
said Rachel Haywire, writer/musician and
Extreme Futurist Festival (XFF) Co-Founder. This weekend, the
Extreme Futurist Festival brought together a diverse group
of people with multiple interest and careers to share and
contribute in their path towards the future. Michael Anissimov,
Media Director for the Singularity Institute and
Co-Founder of the XFF said: “This is a festival for the
new generations, the young people using more artistic forms
of expressions bringing down the hard-core academics. We
are an activist group, embracing everyone within our generation.”

Dale Carrico said...

Michael Anissimov, Media Director for the Singularity Institute and Co-Founder of the XFF said: “This is a festival for the new generations, the young people using more artistic forms of expressions bringing down the hard-core academics.

Boy, isn't he singing a different tune, nowadays? I remember when the official line was that effete elite aesthetes like me, teaching woo-woo Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, were too muzzy-headed to grasp the steel hard dildo of transhumanoid High Science, and that's why I couldn't see the superior rationality that leads the Robot Cultists into pseudo-scientific marginality on issue after issue after issue, from Drextech to Cryonics.

Now, we are meant to regard the Robot Cultists as artistic avant-gardists? Well, it is true that some Italian fascists began as mouthpieces for the Futurist art movement, I suppose... One has to wonder why so much of their art looks like warmed over velvet conquistador painting and cgi for low-rent tee vee commercials and soft porn if they are actually so cutting edge?

No doubt just as my training in philosophy of science and the social study of technology rendered me too inexpert to diagnose their theoretical pronouncements and technoscientific posturing, so too my teaching of actual artists in an actual art school (San Francisco Art Institute, founded in 1871, birthplace of more vital American art movements and thinking than one can reliably count) has blinded me to the merits of their revolutionary aesthetics -- just as my years in nonviolent activism and queer rights advocacy makes me insensitive to the power of their, er, activism qua sf fandom.

Who can say why I read Anissimov disdaining academic standards from the perch of his pseudo-science pop-tech think-tank and hear Wilde's words fluttering in the background? "Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that."