Also posted at the World Future Society.
Eric and I got haircuts yesterday afternoon, and while I was waiting I flipped through magazines. Peter Diamandis (who is clearly shaping up as this decade's go-to Kurzweil) had an article in Popular Science about garage inventors "going viral." It seemed to me pretty indistinguishable from stuff Cory Doctorow and Alex Steffen were writing a decade ago -- remember the "Tech Bloom"?
This is something that has struck me time and time again: The transhumanoids and singularitarians and online futurists love to congratulate themselves over their unflappability at the prospects of shatteringly onrushing changed futures. They literally have a whole "shock level" calculator, which is kinda sorta like a Cosmo sex quiz for pasty futurological males who think diddling themselves over cartoons of space elevators or descriptions of traversable wormholes demonstrates the awesomeness of their humanity-plus brains as compared to mehum (mere human) sheeple types.
But what always strikes me most forcefully about these ecstatic pronouncements is their abject staleness. There is simply not much to distinguish Ed Regis' depiction of the superlative futurologists in Great Mambo Chicken from Brian Alexander's in Rapture from breathless blog profiles of today, decade after decade after decade. Stiegler's "Gentle Seduction" from the 1980s is precisely standard transhumanoid boilerplate, techno-transcendence via shopping, loose-talking SENS-style longevity meds and "enhancement" pills and prostheses, Drexlerian nano-cornucopias, singularity (the literal term, already attributed to Vinge, not just the notion), Moravecian uploading, hive mind, market fundamentalism -- every single detail is already there.
Frankly, many of the ideas are already there decades earlier, in Turing, Shannon, Weiner, Bush. Heck, Anne Lindbergh was already surfing the "Wave of the Future" (and it was already fascist) even before a victorious post-war America managed through the inflation of the petrochemical bubble and the imposition of the mass-mediated Culture Industry to "invent" The Future Gernsback and Madison Avenue and all our Presidents would peddle the planet long before Toffler and company would stumble on the obvious and re-invent the wheel as a profitable pseudo-discipline for the seventies, then Brand and company would do it again for the eighties, then WIRED and company would do it again for the nineties, then the various p2p and Web 2.0 enthusiasts would do it again for the lost Bush decade, over and over and over again, the same hopes, the same tropes, the same dopes on and on and on from WW2 to Star Wars to whatever (probably bombed out cities or a pointless polluted moonscape).
I have proposed that the "accelerating change" crowed about for the last two decades by futurologists in pop religious cadences and by more mainstream and academic New Media commentators in pop psychology and pop sociology cadences has never had any substantial reference apart from the increasing precarity produced by neoliberal looting and destabilization of domestic welfare and global economies -- often facilitated, it is true, by the exploitation of digital trading, marketing, and surveillance networks -- a precarity usually seen and experienced from the vantage of privileged people who either benefit from neoliberal destabilization or who (rightly or wrongly) identify with the beneficiaries of that destabilization.
The pseudo-transcendentalizing narratives futurologists attach to this sleight of hand, this heartbreak and anxiety transubstantiated into a rocketship to omniscience and omnipotence, whether proposed in the familiar and profitable imperial triumphalist way (like the Long Boom nonsense and libertopian digirati handwaving and various tech bubbles every few years or so, digital, biological, faux-green, often ultimately military, like greenwashing "geo-engineering" schemes) or in the more enjoyably bonkers quasi-religious way (involving plastic or nuclear or nano magic superabundance fantasies or virtual heavens with virtual sex fantasies or various loosely conceived techno-immortality fantasies), all really just provide the furniture for aspirational/distracted futurological conceits to hang out in while these rebels without a cause or a clue indulge their wish-fulfillment ids and forget to vote and purchase their handhelds and pass the collection plate.
Maybe it was the confrontation of this futurological re-run proposed as fresh insight in the form of glossy pages in a magazine instead of the usual twittering wave of pieties one clicks through online that struck me so forcefully yesterday afternoon at Supercuts. I always chuckle at the covers of men's fitness magazine, at the thought that people actually subscribe to these things, even though it is clear from the covers that every single issue is obsessed with exactly the same things (flabby middle, flagging sex drive), and proposes exactly the same advice (stick to it, more muscle mass will eat more calories, be careful to stretch so you don't injure yourself, there are pills for that), and provides exactly the same -- or at any rate indistinguishable -- trilobite torsoed toothy grinned bland midwestern model on the cover. Eric laughed when I told him about Diamandis's tired re-tread of futurological chestnuts and offered up my analogy to men's fitness magazines. He reminded me that, unlike the fraudulent futurists, those men's fitness magazines at least actually provide the indispensable service of plausibly deniable masturbation material for kids who haven't yet come out of the closet. But of course, it isn't only closeted kids who are treating these magazines as masturbation material. There is a real sense in which that is their sole substantial function, for their whole target audience, gay and straight young and old alike. Like futurologists soaking in the same old soup of progressive transcendent "predictions" that never fail even when they fail, guys scooping up these fitness magazines aren't really looking for information, they aren't really looking for anything new, they are getting another imaginary refueling from the pump, another dose of the daydream they indulge as they defer the real workout, another hit of phony identification with an unrealistic ego-ideal straining in shorts purchased at the cost of dis-identification with the man in the mirror -- all in the name of health, health, health, darling!
When I lampoon "movement" futurology as a Robot Cult it isn't only the defensive groupthink and guru worship and annual conventions of True Believers that lend plausibility to the attribution of "cult" to what amounts to a lame pop-tech journalism fandom with delusions of grandeur (and, I should add, actually existing "membership" organizations peddling "-isms" to the rubes). And when I declare that the more assertively "techno-transcendental" varieties of futurological discourse (like the transhumanists, the singularitarians, the techno-immortalists, the nano-cornucopians, the digital-utopians) are simply extreme and hyperbolic variations of mainstream neoliberal global developmental policy discourse and mainstream marketing, advertising, and PR forms, this latter claim shouldn't be seen as undermining the first. Because there is an unmistakably faith-mobilizing pseudo-transcendentalizing strain to be discerned in this very PR marketing imaginary, deranging us from our present distress into a yearning toward consumer techno-futures bathed in pastels and robots and cars and DNA helices and chocolate and glossy hair and youthful skin and golden sex.
Advertizing and online profiling practices are the opiate of the masses in the age of digitally-networked corporate-militarism (the present stage of capitalism), as Debord insisted in the sixties and Barthes in the fifties and Adorno in the forties and Benjamin in the thirties, a mass mediated Opium War (and often literal war) distracts the masses from awareness that we have already long since arrived at the techno-scientific level to provide security and equity and hence universal emancipation for all, distracting us endlessly instead into internecine struggles over pseudo-needs and pseudo-strivings that leave the obsolete bloodsoaked hierarchies enjoyed by elite incumbents in place, and so seduces us into ongoing collaboration with the terms of our own exploitation. The deceptive and hyperbolic advertising and marketing forms that utterly suffuse our public life amount to a reservoir of fervent reactionary religiosity, a religiosity that achieves one of its more incandescent expressions in the static ec-static intensities of superlative techno-transcendentalizing futurology, and of the Robot Cultists who sing its praises unto death.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Friday, May 25, 2012
Enter the Dragon: Why I Am Not A SpaceX Space Vegas Space Cadet
The SpaceX Dragon became the first commercial vessel to successfully dock with the International Space Station. I will admit that with this achievement SpaceX has finally managed to become something more than the smarmy impresario offering brief low-gravity low-earth-orbit amusement park rides for breathtakingly huge sums of money while breathlessly pretending that this is the same thing as an actual space program (which it is not).
But those who would crow about how historic this moment is should recall the assurances offered at the start that privatizing this service would render it one-tenth as expensive as the government version and should also note how the price predictably, indeed inevitably, rocketed up and up and up (certainly faster than any of its actual rockets ever did) and how tax-payer subsidization became ever more and more and more indispensable to the project as it convulsively stumbled its way forward.
I do indeed think that this particular commercial exploitation of already existing technology should be remembered, though. Although Apollo, say, managed to be glorious even with a non-negligible share of for-profit private contracting being involved and even subject as it was to changeable public attitudes that led to more than its own fair share of reckless short-cutting and PR nonsense, still Dragon represents an important step along a path which will eventuate, at best, in a space program for which tax payers end up paying more than they otherwise would have for services and outcomes that will be more expensive than they would otherwise have been in order to compensate the irrelevant introduction into space research and exploration of a whole host of parasitic salesmen and PR shills, not to mention a layer of enormously loud entirely dispensable celebrity CEO sociopaths without whose soopervisionary soopergenius we will be endlessly told nothing would ever have been possible in space at all, even if in a sensibly run secular social democracy devoted to public investment in substantial science and developmental commonwealth, the costs, risks, and benefits of which equitably distributed to all, we would have much more much better much faster much cheaper much more real and much more wondrous space exploration without any of these carnival barkers elbowing their way in and making a crass spectacle of themselves in the first place.
But, yeah, sure, by all means, cheers to the Dragon. I always rather preferred the Star Trek future myself (though of course without any hopes of warp drive or replicator magic), but I'm sure the crappy Space Vegas we seem to be aiming for instead will also have its moments (on the off chance we don't pollute or bomb ourselves for parochial plutocratic profit into oblivion before the whole orbital love motel asteroid strip mining McTopia comes online, that is).
But those who would crow about how historic this moment is should recall the assurances offered at the start that privatizing this service would render it one-tenth as expensive as the government version and should also note how the price predictably, indeed inevitably, rocketed up and up and up (certainly faster than any of its actual rockets ever did) and how tax-payer subsidization became ever more and more and more indispensable to the project as it convulsively stumbled its way forward.
I do indeed think that this particular commercial exploitation of already existing technology should be remembered, though. Although Apollo, say, managed to be glorious even with a non-negligible share of for-profit private contracting being involved and even subject as it was to changeable public attitudes that led to more than its own fair share of reckless short-cutting and PR nonsense, still Dragon represents an important step along a path which will eventuate, at best, in a space program for which tax payers end up paying more than they otherwise would have for services and outcomes that will be more expensive than they would otherwise have been in order to compensate the irrelevant introduction into space research and exploration of a whole host of parasitic salesmen and PR shills, not to mention a layer of enormously loud entirely dispensable celebrity CEO sociopaths without whose soopervisionary soopergenius we will be endlessly told nothing would ever have been possible in space at all, even if in a sensibly run secular social democracy devoted to public investment in substantial science and developmental commonwealth, the costs, risks, and benefits of which equitably distributed to all, we would have much more much better much faster much cheaper much more real and much more wondrous space exploration without any of these carnival barkers elbowing their way in and making a crass spectacle of themselves in the first place.
But, yeah, sure, by all means, cheers to the Dragon. I always rather preferred the Star Trek future myself (though of course without any hopes of warp drive or replicator magic), but I'm sure the crappy Space Vegas we seem to be aiming for instead will also have its moments (on the off chance we don't pollute or bomb ourselves for parochial plutocratic profit into oblivion before the whole orbital love motel asteroid strip mining McTopia comes online, that is).
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Will Self-Driving Cars Change The Way We Think of Cities?
Did the Segway change the way we think of cities? The people saying the one now are exactly like the ones -- when they are not in fact literally the same ones -- who said the other then. If that doesn't matter to you, you are probably a futurologist. You should probably be making sure your head gets frozen when you die or something right about now.
Resources for Writing Students
I have developed a number of handouts summarizing useful information or providing a framework for workshopping writing problems for my students. I am gathering them together here for ready reference. Everybody should feel free to make any use of them they like in their own writing or teaching.
Four Habits of Argumentative Writing
Peer Editing Worksheet
Thesis Generation Worksheet
Writing A Precis
Four Habits of Argumentative Writing
Peer Editing Worksheet
Thesis Generation Worksheet
Writing A Precis
Thesis Generation Worksheet
A thesis is a claim. It is a statement of the thing your paper is trying to show your own readers about a text you have read. Very often, the claim will be simple enough to express in a single sentence, and it will usually appear early on in the paper to give your readers a clear sense of the project of your paper. A good thesis is a claim that is strong. For our purposes, the best way to define a strong claim is to say it is a claim for which you can imagine an intelligent opposition. It is a claim that you actually feel you need to argue for, rather than a very obvious sort of claim or a report of your own reactions to a text (which you don't have to argue for at all). Remember, when you are producing a reading about a complex literary text like a novel, a poem, or a film the object of your argument will be to illuminate the text, to draw attention to some aspect of the work you think that the text is accomplishing.
Once you have determined the detail or problem or element in a text that you want to draw your reader's attention to and argue about, your opposition will likely consist of those who would focus elsewhere because they don't grasp the importance of your focus, or who would draw different conclusions than you do from your own focus.
The thesis names your paper's task, its project, its object, its focus. As you write your papers, it is a very good idea to ask yourself these questions from time to time: Does this quotation, does this argument, does this paragraph directly support my thesis in some way? If it doesn't you should probably delete it, because this likely means you have gotten off track. If you are drawn repeatedly away from what you have chosen as your thesis, ask yourself whether or not this signals that you really want to argue for some different thesis.
THESIS WORKSHOP EXERCISE ONE:
A. Brainstorm. Take fifteen minutes or so and write down fifteen to twenty claims you can make about your chosen text. Don't worry about whether these claims are "deep" or whether they are "interesting," just write down claims that you think are true about the text and be as clear and specific as you can manage.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
B. In small groups of two to three peers:
1. Once the time is up, take ten to fifteen minutes to share your claims with one another. Determine together which, if any, of your claims are not really about the text at all. For example, eliminate claims that say the text is "good," or "correct," or "effective" -- since these are really claims about the way you react to the text rather than claims about the text demanding argumentative support. Also eliminate claims that say the text is "wrong," or "incorrect," or "ineffective" since, again, these are really claims about you, or they are claims that will lead you to discuss some more general or tangential topic rather than remaining focused on the text itself. Might some of these statements be redirected or rephrased into claims about the text -- for example, might you focus on some characteristic feature or particular textual moment that is an especially strong occasion for your approval or disapproval and think about it in relation to your sense of the more general gist of the work you are reading or with another key moment of illustration or support for the work's project as you see it? How many claims are you left with?
2. Now, take twenty minutes or so to discuss the claims that remain. Do some of the claims seem conspicuously more interesting or more important than the others? Do some of the claims really say the same thing in different ways? Do these comparisons suggest ways to re-phrase claims to capture your intentions more forcefully? Do some of the claims make or rely on observations that might function well as support for other claims? Have other, more forceful, claims occurred to you as you have engaged in this process? Do some of the claims suggest lines of argument and support that seem more promising to you than others? This process of elimination, honing, ordering should leave each of you with three or so strong claims.
THESIS WORKSHOP EXERCISE TWO:
A. You should now each have two or three candidate claims for a thesis remaining (some of you may have similar claims by now). Now, for each of these possible thesis claims come up with the strongest or most obvious opposition to each thesis. For example, what would the opposite claim be to the one you are making? Or, might there be an element or detail in the text that initially seems to contradict the thrust of your claim? Devote fifteen minutes or so to this.
1.
2.
3.
B. Read over these oppositions. Of course, you are likely to disagree with these claims since they are opposed to the ones you want to make yourself -- but can you imagine anyone actually making these oppositional claims about the text you have read? Be honest with each other about this, it is important. Take twenty minutes or so to make these determinations and discuss them.
If the opposition you have come up with seems vague or unintelligent or highly implausible this probably indicates that you need to sharpen up your own initial thesis. Is there a version of your thesis that is more focused and specific that retains the spirit of your claim but which provokes a more interesting opposition? What is it? What is its opposition?
If, on the contrary, the opposition you have written suddenly seems more compelling than the thesis itself this probably indicates that the stakes of your project, or possibly your whole take on the text itself, is different than you initially thought it was. Perhaps what you thought of as opposition to your thesis actually provides you with a stronger thesis and a new direction for your own paper. What is the strongest or most opposition to the new thesis you have adopted?
C. Now, quickly identify the best, strongest, most argumentatively promising thesis that results from this process for you personally, as well as what you take to be its most provocative opposition. Then in your groups, help one another identify two key details or elements in the text to which you could direct a reader's attention in an effort to support your individual theses, and also one detail or element you might use to circumvent its opposition (include page numbers). Take twenty minutes or so to do this.
These discussion provide you with a rudimentary first outline for your argumentative close reading.
(Introduction, contextualization, illustrative anecdote, sketch of initial stakes, culminating or at any rate containing a clear statement of your) Thesis:
1. textual support
2. textual support
Opposition:
3. circumvention of opposition/qualification of thesis in light of opposition
Depending on the length of your paper -- there may be more space for textual support, in a 4-5pp. probably there will not be.
[4... textual support]
Conclusion (Recapitulation of preceding case, and/or opening onto new questions.)
4. opp
Once you have determined the detail or problem or element in a text that you want to draw your reader's attention to and argue about, your opposition will likely consist of those who would focus elsewhere because they don't grasp the importance of your focus, or who would draw different conclusions than you do from your own focus.
The thesis names your paper's task, its project, its object, its focus. As you write your papers, it is a very good idea to ask yourself these questions from time to time: Does this quotation, does this argument, does this paragraph directly support my thesis in some way? If it doesn't you should probably delete it, because this likely means you have gotten off track. If you are drawn repeatedly away from what you have chosen as your thesis, ask yourself whether or not this signals that you really want to argue for some different thesis.
THESIS WORKSHOP EXERCISE ONE:
A. Brainstorm. Take fifteen minutes or so and write down fifteen to twenty claims you can make about your chosen text. Don't worry about whether these claims are "deep" or whether they are "interesting," just write down claims that you think are true about the text and be as clear and specific as you can manage.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
B. In small groups of two to three peers:
1. Once the time is up, take ten to fifteen minutes to share your claims with one another. Determine together which, if any, of your claims are not really about the text at all. For example, eliminate claims that say the text is "good," or "correct," or "effective" -- since these are really claims about the way you react to the text rather than claims about the text demanding argumentative support. Also eliminate claims that say the text is "wrong," or "incorrect," or "ineffective" since, again, these are really claims about you, or they are claims that will lead you to discuss some more general or tangential topic rather than remaining focused on the text itself. Might some of these statements be redirected or rephrased into claims about the text -- for example, might you focus on some characteristic feature or particular textual moment that is an especially strong occasion for your approval or disapproval and think about it in relation to your sense of the more general gist of the work you are reading or with another key moment of illustration or support for the work's project as you see it? How many claims are you left with?
2. Now, take twenty minutes or so to discuss the claims that remain. Do some of the claims seem conspicuously more interesting or more important than the others? Do some of the claims really say the same thing in different ways? Do these comparisons suggest ways to re-phrase claims to capture your intentions more forcefully? Do some of the claims make or rely on observations that might function well as support for other claims? Have other, more forceful, claims occurred to you as you have engaged in this process? Do some of the claims suggest lines of argument and support that seem more promising to you than others? This process of elimination, honing, ordering should leave each of you with three or so strong claims.
THESIS WORKSHOP EXERCISE TWO:
A. You should now each have two or three candidate claims for a thesis remaining (some of you may have similar claims by now). Now, for each of these possible thesis claims come up with the strongest or most obvious opposition to each thesis. For example, what would the opposite claim be to the one you are making? Or, might there be an element or detail in the text that initially seems to contradict the thrust of your claim? Devote fifteen minutes or so to this.
1.
2.
3.
B. Read over these oppositions. Of course, you are likely to disagree with these claims since they are opposed to the ones you want to make yourself -- but can you imagine anyone actually making these oppositional claims about the text you have read? Be honest with each other about this, it is important. Take twenty minutes or so to make these determinations and discuss them.
If the opposition you have come up with seems vague or unintelligent or highly implausible this probably indicates that you need to sharpen up your own initial thesis. Is there a version of your thesis that is more focused and specific that retains the spirit of your claim but which provokes a more interesting opposition? What is it? What is its opposition?
If, on the contrary, the opposition you have written suddenly seems more compelling than the thesis itself this probably indicates that the stakes of your project, or possibly your whole take on the text itself, is different than you initially thought it was. Perhaps what you thought of as opposition to your thesis actually provides you with a stronger thesis and a new direction for your own paper. What is the strongest or most opposition to the new thesis you have adopted?
C. Now, quickly identify the best, strongest, most argumentatively promising thesis that results from this process for you personally, as well as what you take to be its most provocative opposition. Then in your groups, help one another identify two key details or elements in the text to which you could direct a reader's attention in an effort to support your individual theses, and also one detail or element you might use to circumvent its opposition (include page numbers). Take twenty minutes or so to do this.
These discussion provide you with a rudimentary first outline for your argumentative close reading.
(Introduction, contextualization, illustrative anecdote, sketch of initial stakes, culminating or at any rate containing a clear statement of your) Thesis:
1. textual support
2. textual support
Opposition:
3. circumvention of opposition/qualification of thesis in light of opposition
Depending on the length of your paper -- there may be more space for textual support, in a 4-5pp. probably there will not be.
[4... textual support]
Conclusion (Recapitulation of preceding case, and/or opening onto new questions.)
4. opp
Monday, May 21, 2012
An Insurance Company With An Army
Upgraded and adapted from an exchange in the Moot with Ian, prompted by my post a couple of days ago worrying about a tragic and dangerous failure of the EU premised on the neoliberal error that a monetary union could substitute for a political one, or that a monetary union could even function without a robust underlying political one, to which Ian replied:
Indeed. -- It seems that most (if not all) international unions are built around questions of the economic and seek to purposefully hinder political capacities for cooperation and solidarity (except where 'national defense' is concerned, of course). It's hard for me to imagine an alternative at the scale of the nation-state unless non-state actors are included in the democratic process in some way, ensuring that trans/inter/post-national interests are included in the decision making structures.This, in turn, inspired this bit of rambling from me:
At one level that sounds right to me, but at another I find myself wondering... I am sure you have heard the cliche that after Bismarck and Lincoln the nation-state has amounted to an insurance company backed by an army. Really, this is just making Foucault's point about the late modern rise of disciplinarity/ biopolitics, right? Is this something simply to bemoan or to grasp about where we are?
Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the decisions that affect them, and it isn't clear to me why biopolitics cannot have a democratic face as well as its awful anti-democratic ones, really. I find myself wanting to pressure your suggestion that "non-state actors" need to be "included" in democratic processes -- of course I agree with this, I think the definition of democracy already implies this even -- but isn't it a bit tricky to imply they are "excluded" too straightforwardly once we get Gramsci's point when he talks about hegemony or Althusser's point when he talks about ideological state apparatuses? Contestations among sociocultural positionalities invigorate and undergird all state agency indispensably.
Part of the problem with too much of the anarchist imaginary is that it tends to reduce "the state" to something dispensable before proceeding to dispense with it, in ways that cause it to radically misconstrue state space both as a multilateral working reality but also as an ongoing democratizing possibility. That given nation-states are suffused with incumbency and hierarchy and routine violation is of course true, just as lamentably as anarchism would have it, but this seems to me a problem for rather than of the state form.
What is wanted is equity-in-diversity, an actually substantial scene of consent to the terms of one's life, which seems to me to demand universal equal rights, healthcare, education, income, and recourse to law -- not so far from the vision of Roosevelt's Four Freedom's or of the UN Declaration -- funded by steeply progressive taxes and administered by actually accountable periodically elected authorities under the terms of universal franchise.
I'm not sure that looks so different from an insurance company with an army again -- provided this is not an army paid for by the people that ensures they remain subservient to private for-profit insurance companies, but the accountable administration of insurance as a public utility and common good. Both are biopolitical governmentalities, the parochial for-profit insurance scam and the insurance that creates a legible scene in which citizen-subjects consent to the terms of their lives, but only one affords abiding and deep democracy.
This is not to say that There Is No Alternative but to say that the people must see to it that authority means what it says (this is for me the act of exposure but also the enactment through exposure at the heart of Occupy) -- another way of saying government must be of by and for the people, just like you thought at age four -- another way of saying the state must not be smashed but democratized.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Some Questions For A "Mind-Uploading" Enthusiast
In an article published a few days ago in the transhumanoid rag hplusmagazine (that's human-plus! for all you mere human-minuses out there!), Eugen Spierer writes:
Why exactly shouldn't we expect to make discoveries and learn useful new things about the world with our biological brains and bodies when we always have done and have never done otherwise? What kind of person thinks living life is just a way of being "trapped" in the first place? Is it at least sometimes better to think of the needs and wants and vulnerabilities arising at the site of the body not as "demands" or "weaknesses" but as enablers of pleasures, connections, surprises? Might this person need therapy rather than mind-uploading and might this not be a good thing inasmuch as therapy, at least, actually exists?
Why would someone who understands evolution say that our evolved morphology is a cruel joke being played on us? Who is presumably playing this joke on us? And even if a person believed in such a trickster and even granting that human life is sometimes cruel, wouldn't all the wonderful and beautiful aspects of life make one as inclined to feel grateful to this imaginary being as hostile to it?
Is it true that nobody hitherto has really appreciated the beauty of the world around us? If that is really true, then how is it possible to understand the sense of the sentence in the first place?
Moving along, then. Is it right to think a representation of a rat's brain is the same thing as a rat's brain? Is it right to think a scan of an aspect of a human's brain is the same thing as a human's brain, let alone the same thing as a human consciousness or the same thing as a human self? If we are materialists about mind doesn't this mean we should take seriously the material form that actually existing minds actually take? What kind of materialist would be so dismissive of the actual material incarnation of consciousness that they would treat it as completely negligible to the phenomenon and pretend translation and transmission and transfers from one material regime of consciousness to another can be taken for granted? Come to think of it, why would someone use the word "transfer" or "migrate" to describe taking a picture and then destroying the original thing pictured, when that is simply not at all what these words actually mean?
And even granting for the moment all of this utterly un-grantable nonsense and setting aside as one should not all the conceptual confusions, all the inapt analogies, all the slippages from literal into figurative language on which these claims seem to depend, how on earth do we get from pretending "mind uploading" is a sensible phrase let alone a practically possible outcome to suddenly attributing eternal life to this conceit? Why would existence "as" or "on" computer hardware presumably be longer lasting –- let alone less "miserable" –- than biological life is? In just whose actual experience does it seem that computers tend to last longer than human bodies do? What software programs have remained functional longer than human lifespans? Do these cyber-immortalists have radically different kinds of computers at their disposal than I do? Do their computers never crash or stall or get buggy or spammed or grow obsolete like mine always have?
Skipping along further still: How would a being that has settled for a crappy virtual environment even know it was traveling in outer space or colonizing extraterrestrial worlds?
Given that the internet is not in fact an angelic spirit realm but accessed on devices made of landfill-destined toxic plastic and metals fueled by black belching coal fired electric plants why would anyone state with such assurance that an even more intensely computer mediated existence would necessarily put less strain on planetary resources?
What if the possibility of suffering is sufficiently inherent in the very possibility of experience as such that to circumvent the one is to eliminate the other, and hence render the proposal of a total elimination of suffering self-defeating?
If a thing is incoherent in conception and impossible of realization in what sense can it be considered important at all? What actually important efforts are not being considered and not being undertaken for every second devoted to this nonsense?
What possible meaning could the words on which the sense of the last sentence of this piece depends -- words like "our" "success" and "species" -- actually have were the world rewritten in the image of this piece's avowed desires?
This article is filled with palpably wrongheaded, incoherent, ridiculous, and pathological statements. I do not say this to be insulting, but to straightforwardly describe my assessment of what is exposed by the critical interrogation of the premises and conclusions preceding.
You know, there is nothing in this article that I haven't heard and seen countless times before, at this point nearly daily for decades, in transhumanist and singularitarian and futurological conversations and publications. Indeed, I would say that these utterances fairly count as absolutely standard transhumanist boilerplate. Is there any stasis more stolid than what the futurologists peddle in the name of accelerating change?
That is why for me the most touching moment in this hopelessly sad stale bit of futurological agitprop is when the author declares, "Just think of the possibilities!" How breathless, how blinkered! This is, of course, the usual pay-off of futurological propaganda, the moment of the real setting aside of any pretense of taking seriously the boring real science that presumably enables all this masturbatory skylarking and the leap thereupon into sheer shared shaggy fanboy enthusiasm... time for making belief in the present of a make-believe "The Future" behind which the making-begone of present distresses in a contingent, aging, error-prone, demanding existence can be made manifest. You can really taste the adrenaline rush of full on fulminating True Belief in that exclamation point, can't you? Robot Cultists just keep on indulging in this stale ritual catechism, pumped up with the hysterical tonalities of canned novelty and crass desire, like late-nite informercialists on fast forward, and yet like sleepwalkers toward a cliff, and yet like robots on a dark dead factory floor, and yet like pilgrims in search of a priest, and yet like jumpy junkies in search of a fix... like scared scarred sociopathic salesmen making their pitch to the mark in the mirror.
How can we expect to learn the secrets of the world around us while trapped within a body which only lives for several decades, demands constant nourishment and attention, and dictates limits and desires beyond our control? … Once we have severed the link between our consciousness and the cruel joke someone has played on us by enclosing it in a mortal body, can we begin to really appreciate the beauty of the world around us. We would then be able to explore its secrets not just for a limited number of years, but for an eternity. The first steps toward such a noble cause have already been taken in Switzerland. Scientists have already simulated a part of a rat’s brain with proven accuracy. It’s called the Blue Brain Project and it aims to use developing computer technologies in order to simulate an entire human brain and thus, hopefully, create a human personality which will be based on computer hardware rather than on the miserable excuse we have for a wetware body. Just think of the possibilities! Eternal life. Easy and accessible space travel and colonization. Plenty of time for all human beings to grow and develop. Far less strain the planet’s limited resources. No more disease. No more suffering. No more death. A better understanding of the world around us, free of the constraints which currently bind us to a meager existence and a short life span. No other research is this important, for this will be the base of our success as a species.Just for kicks, let us answer some of these questions by asking a few of our own.
Why exactly shouldn't we expect to make discoveries and learn useful new things about the world with our biological brains and bodies when we always have done and have never done otherwise? What kind of person thinks living life is just a way of being "trapped" in the first place? Is it at least sometimes better to think of the needs and wants and vulnerabilities arising at the site of the body not as "demands" or "weaknesses" but as enablers of pleasures, connections, surprises? Might this person need therapy rather than mind-uploading and might this not be a good thing inasmuch as therapy, at least, actually exists?
Why would someone who understands evolution say that our evolved morphology is a cruel joke being played on us? Who is presumably playing this joke on us? And even if a person believed in such a trickster and even granting that human life is sometimes cruel, wouldn't all the wonderful and beautiful aspects of life make one as inclined to feel grateful to this imaginary being as hostile to it?
Is it true that nobody hitherto has really appreciated the beauty of the world around us? If that is really true, then how is it possible to understand the sense of the sentence in the first place?
Moving along, then. Is it right to think a representation of a rat's brain is the same thing as a rat's brain? Is it right to think a scan of an aspect of a human's brain is the same thing as a human's brain, let alone the same thing as a human consciousness or the same thing as a human self? If we are materialists about mind doesn't this mean we should take seriously the material form that actually existing minds actually take? What kind of materialist would be so dismissive of the actual material incarnation of consciousness that they would treat it as completely negligible to the phenomenon and pretend translation and transmission and transfers from one material regime of consciousness to another can be taken for granted? Come to think of it, why would someone use the word "transfer" or "migrate" to describe taking a picture and then destroying the original thing pictured, when that is simply not at all what these words actually mean?
And even granting for the moment all of this utterly un-grantable nonsense and setting aside as one should not all the conceptual confusions, all the inapt analogies, all the slippages from literal into figurative language on which these claims seem to depend, how on earth do we get from pretending "mind uploading" is a sensible phrase let alone a practically possible outcome to suddenly attributing eternal life to this conceit? Why would existence "as" or "on" computer hardware presumably be longer lasting –- let alone less "miserable" –- than biological life is? In just whose actual experience does it seem that computers tend to last longer than human bodies do? What software programs have remained functional longer than human lifespans? Do these cyber-immortalists have radically different kinds of computers at their disposal than I do? Do their computers never crash or stall or get buggy or spammed or grow obsolete like mine always have?
Skipping along further still: How would a being that has settled for a crappy virtual environment even know it was traveling in outer space or colonizing extraterrestrial worlds?
Given that the internet is not in fact an angelic spirit realm but accessed on devices made of landfill-destined toxic plastic and metals fueled by black belching coal fired electric plants why would anyone state with such assurance that an even more intensely computer mediated existence would necessarily put less strain on planetary resources?
What if the possibility of suffering is sufficiently inherent in the very possibility of experience as such that to circumvent the one is to eliminate the other, and hence render the proposal of a total elimination of suffering self-defeating?
If a thing is incoherent in conception and impossible of realization in what sense can it be considered important at all? What actually important efforts are not being considered and not being undertaken for every second devoted to this nonsense?
What possible meaning could the words on which the sense of the last sentence of this piece depends -- words like "our" "success" and "species" -- actually have were the world rewritten in the image of this piece's avowed desires?
This article is filled with palpably wrongheaded, incoherent, ridiculous, and pathological statements. I do not say this to be insulting, but to straightforwardly describe my assessment of what is exposed by the critical interrogation of the premises and conclusions preceding.
You know, there is nothing in this article that I haven't heard and seen countless times before, at this point nearly daily for decades, in transhumanist and singularitarian and futurological conversations and publications. Indeed, I would say that these utterances fairly count as absolutely standard transhumanist boilerplate. Is there any stasis more stolid than what the futurologists peddle in the name of accelerating change?
That is why for me the most touching moment in this hopelessly sad stale bit of futurological agitprop is when the author declares, "Just think of the possibilities!" How breathless, how blinkered! This is, of course, the usual pay-off of futurological propaganda, the moment of the real setting aside of any pretense of taking seriously the boring real science that presumably enables all this masturbatory skylarking and the leap thereupon into sheer shared shaggy fanboy enthusiasm... time for making belief in the present of a make-believe "The Future" behind which the making-begone of present distresses in a contingent, aging, error-prone, demanding existence can be made manifest. You can really taste the adrenaline rush of full on fulminating True Belief in that exclamation point, can't you? Robot Cultists just keep on indulging in this stale ritual catechism, pumped up with the hysterical tonalities of canned novelty and crass desire, like late-nite informercialists on fast forward, and yet like sleepwalkers toward a cliff, and yet like robots on a dark dead factory floor, and yet like pilgrims in search of a priest, and yet like jumpy junkies in search of a fix... like scared scarred sociopathic salesmen making their pitch to the mark in the mirror.
Wednesday, May 09, 2012
Corporate-Military "Geo-Engineering" Fantasies Are A Vision of "Democracy" and "Environmentalism" Only A Right Wing Libertopian Could Love
Libertopian Tyler Cowen coos appreciatively about the so-called "economics of geo-engineering" (whereupon Ezra Klein's wonkblog linked to it without comment -- the origin is the usual puff piece, this time appearing in The New Yorker):
Geo-engineering proposals do not share technical commonalities, the demonstration that dumping tons of iron filings into the sea is an amazingly terrible idea doesn't immediately lead one to reject or approve other futurological fancies that happen to be described as "geo-engineering." What essentially characterizes "geo-engineering" as a phenomenon is not ultimately technical, it is discursive: "geo-engineering" is a characteristic way of talking about environmental issues that has nothing to do with the technical merits of any of the proposals subsumed within it. And when one observes the actual discourse in play, what quickly becomes evident is that "geo-engineering" is advocated by people who disdain public educational, regulatory, incentivizing approaches to climate remediation -- you know, actual environmentalism -- it is advocated by people who want the same extractive-industrial corporate-military actors that have profited from pollution and waste to continue to profit from promises of remediation, usually through the very same kinds of brute-force industrial-scaled enterprises that did the damage, it is advocated by people who believe that governance is absolutely unequal to the crises of climate change but who somehow believe that mega-scale infrastructure projects that would ultimately depend on governance for their funding, regulation, maintenance are the answer.
It is palpably ridiculous to hear someone who belligerently insists that "the world is about people taking action, not agreeing to take action" go on to declare his pet techno-utopian wet dream is "democratizing" because he imagines "geo-engingeers" as Randroidal sooper-men saying "Fuck you all" to the statists and relativists and then seriously kicking eco-ass for mega-profit. Dude, we all know that incumbent elites have been raking in cash while destroying the planet for generations and have essentially been saying "Fuck you all" the whole time. Indeed, corporations that profit from pollution and waste have proved more than happy to spend millions saying "Fuck you all" to the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists about the reality of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. One is hardly surprised to find advocates of "geo-engineering" boondoggles sympathizing with such attitudes. But… I don't think that word "democracy" means what you think it means, guy.
Of course, libertopian futurology is deeply enamored of this sort of techno-utopian market based "gotcha" rhetoric. Cypherpunks thought crypto-anarchy was inevitable because people would profit from implementing it whether it was legal or not and once built it could not be stopped and nations would evaporate into the cyberspatial sprawl. Sure, financial fraudsters used digital networks to junk the planetary economy for plutocratic gain, but libertopia? Didn't happen. You guys can apologize later. Transhumanists thought and still think clone-armies of "enhanced" designer babies are inevitable for much the same reasons. They were and are and will ever remain wrong. Quite apart from the hilarity of suggesting that "anyone [can] use" the so-called "geo-engineering" rich countries invented (setting aside the whole difficulty of "using" non-existing stuff), when clearly only rich countries could hope to indulge in these sorts of pharaonic mega-whimsies and when the poor and not the rich would disproportionately suffer the negative climate externalities created by these interventions if any of them were ever to go past the toothy futurological fraudster peddling his Powerpoint presentation stage just as they have suffered disproportionately from the wasteful extractive polluting excesses of rich countries in the first place, one expects liber-techians to feel the "market" as a "spontaneous order" will inevitably be on their side on this.
It doesn't matter that market orders are actually never "natural" or "spontaneous" orders but are historically constituted by laws, customs, values, infrastructural affordances, and it doesn't matter that history is never driven by the socially indifferent accumulation of neutrally empowering technologies but by the struggles of the diversity of stakeholders to change to the distribution of costs, risks, and benefits of that change: techno-utopian ideologues rationalizing elite incumbent interests by pretending they will deliver transcendence of political quandaries in which they have in fact a specific political stake will never stop talking this way. This is what they are paid to do (a few for money and more for attention). But those of us who know better must not let them get away with this. Environmental activists and advocates of good accountable government must be aware that "geo-engineering" is absolutely an anti-governmental discourse, and to the extent that any serious environmental politics will involve government education about shared planetary problems, government regulation of polluters, government incentivization of sustainable practices, and government investment in ecological commons and public goods like reforestation, mass transit, and renewable energy to be anti-government is to be anti-environmentalist even if one is insisting their corporate-military science fictional magical thinking is really truly somehow a kind of green discourse. I don't care what Tyler Cowen says, his support of "geo-engineering" is robotically predictable. But shame on Wonkblog for linking uncritically to this anarcho-crapitalist earth-alienated pseudo-scientific clap trap.
"The odd thing here is that this is a democratizing technology,’’ Nathan Myhrvold told me. “Rich, powerful countries might have invented much of it, but it will be there for anyone to use. People get themselves all balled up into knots over whether this can be done unilaterally or by one group or one nation. Well, guess what. We decide to do much worse than this every day, and we decide unilaterally. We are polluting the earth unilaterally. Whether it’s life-taking decisions, like wars, or something like a trade embargo, the world is about people taking action, not agreeing to take action. And, frankly, the Maldives could say, ‘Fuck you all—we want to stay alive.’ Would you blame them? Wouldn’t any reasonable country do the same?First of all "geo-engineering" isn't a technology because it does not actually exist to be anything. There is no there there to be judged, or maintained, or made available for use. Just because futurologists can make cartoons about mirror archipelagos in orbit, or mile-high undersea cathedrals of pipes sucking cold deep-sea water to warming surfaces, or vast fleets of airships spraying pseudo-volcanic sulfur into cloud banks doesn't make these fancies "technologies."
Geo-engineering proposals do not share technical commonalities, the demonstration that dumping tons of iron filings into the sea is an amazingly terrible idea doesn't immediately lead one to reject or approve other futurological fancies that happen to be described as "geo-engineering." What essentially characterizes "geo-engineering" as a phenomenon is not ultimately technical, it is discursive: "geo-engineering" is a characteristic way of talking about environmental issues that has nothing to do with the technical merits of any of the proposals subsumed within it. And when one observes the actual discourse in play, what quickly becomes evident is that "geo-engineering" is advocated by people who disdain public educational, regulatory, incentivizing approaches to climate remediation -- you know, actual environmentalism -- it is advocated by people who want the same extractive-industrial corporate-military actors that have profited from pollution and waste to continue to profit from promises of remediation, usually through the very same kinds of brute-force industrial-scaled enterprises that did the damage, it is advocated by people who believe that governance is absolutely unequal to the crises of climate change but who somehow believe that mega-scale infrastructure projects that would ultimately depend on governance for their funding, regulation, maintenance are the answer.
It is palpably ridiculous to hear someone who belligerently insists that "the world is about people taking action, not agreeing to take action" go on to declare his pet techno-utopian wet dream is "democratizing" because he imagines "geo-engingeers" as Randroidal sooper-men saying "Fuck you all" to the statists and relativists and then seriously kicking eco-ass for mega-profit. Dude, we all know that incumbent elites have been raking in cash while destroying the planet for generations and have essentially been saying "Fuck you all" the whole time. Indeed, corporations that profit from pollution and waste have proved more than happy to spend millions saying "Fuck you all" to the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists about the reality of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. One is hardly surprised to find advocates of "geo-engineering" boondoggles sympathizing with such attitudes. But… I don't think that word "democracy" means what you think it means, guy.
Of course, libertopian futurology is deeply enamored of this sort of techno-utopian market based "gotcha" rhetoric. Cypherpunks thought crypto-anarchy was inevitable because people would profit from implementing it whether it was legal or not and once built it could not be stopped and nations would evaporate into the cyberspatial sprawl. Sure, financial fraudsters used digital networks to junk the planetary economy for plutocratic gain, but libertopia? Didn't happen. You guys can apologize later. Transhumanists thought and still think clone-armies of "enhanced" designer babies are inevitable for much the same reasons. They were and are and will ever remain wrong. Quite apart from the hilarity of suggesting that "anyone [can] use" the so-called "geo-engineering" rich countries invented (setting aside the whole difficulty of "using" non-existing stuff), when clearly only rich countries could hope to indulge in these sorts of pharaonic mega-whimsies and when the poor and not the rich would disproportionately suffer the negative climate externalities created by these interventions if any of them were ever to go past the toothy futurological fraudster peddling his Powerpoint presentation stage just as they have suffered disproportionately from the wasteful extractive polluting excesses of rich countries in the first place, one expects liber-techians to feel the "market" as a "spontaneous order" will inevitably be on their side on this.
It doesn't matter that market orders are actually never "natural" or "spontaneous" orders but are historically constituted by laws, customs, values, infrastructural affordances, and it doesn't matter that history is never driven by the socially indifferent accumulation of neutrally empowering technologies but by the struggles of the diversity of stakeholders to change to the distribution of costs, risks, and benefits of that change: techno-utopian ideologues rationalizing elite incumbent interests by pretending they will deliver transcendence of political quandaries in which they have in fact a specific political stake will never stop talking this way. This is what they are paid to do (a few for money and more for attention). But those of us who know better must not let them get away with this. Environmental activists and advocates of good accountable government must be aware that "geo-engineering" is absolutely an anti-governmental discourse, and to the extent that any serious environmental politics will involve government education about shared planetary problems, government regulation of polluters, government incentivization of sustainable practices, and government investment in ecological commons and public goods like reforestation, mass transit, and renewable energy to be anti-government is to be anti-environmentalist even if one is insisting their corporate-military science fictional magical thinking is really truly somehow a kind of green discourse. I don't care what Tyler Cowen says, his support of "geo-engineering" is robotically predictable. But shame on Wonkblog for linking uncritically to this anarcho-crapitalist earth-alienated pseudo-scientific clap trap.
Wednesday, May 02, 2012
"Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again"
One of the Very Serious White Guys of the Future at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET (that is, the "Institute for Ethics" -- although Ethics aren't really discussed there much -- "and Emerging Technologies" -- although the sooper-technologies they enthuse over there aren't ever really emerging), one Dick Pelletier, declares: "Although many today might find the idea of romance with a machine repulsive, experts predict that as the technology advances and robots become more human-like, we will view our silicon creations in a much friendlier light." At the outset I want to note, but do not mean to dwell on, the customary reference to unnamed "experts" in this extraordinary assertion. I suspect that almost none of the "experts" Pelletier has in mind are trained in actually existing fields or are calling upon such expertise in making such "predictions" on whatever vapid talk show is unfolding in Pelletier's imagination when he says this sort of thing. I will also ruefully note -- not for the first time, not for the thousandth time -- that there is no such thing as "technology in general" that may be said to be "advancing" monolithically however indispensable such utterly facile falsifying declarations may be to the ongoing operation of futurological discourse.
Be that as it may, let us turn to the frothy substance of Pelletier's little futurological number. I personally think it is rather infantile and pathetic to use the word "romance" to describe what happens when a guy masturbates into a hole in a watermelon or Real Doll, although I don't find such activities particularly repulsive, any more than I do the endlessly many other non-violent and non-exploitative ways human beings find to get off. As a guy with a dildo or two in arm's reach even while typing this, I am the last one to wag my finger at the notion of prosthetically facilitated orgasms. I do think it is rather evocative just how often the sometimes sociopathic futurologists of the more assertively transhumanoid and singularitarian varieties find themselves hyperventilating about how awesome the sexbots of the future are going to be, or how sex with machines or sex via their own sooper-sexy medical enhancements will soon, so soon, Change Absolutely Everything for them.
One need not linger long in futurological precincts to discern a certain prevalence in them of representations of long-lashed big-boobied humanoids megaphoning their sexual availability (insofar as cartoons can be said in some sense to be "available") to the almost always only males whose publications these images accompany. Although the futurologists like to encrust the usual ladyparts with scales and feathers and shiny metal and curiously curvaceous circuit boards there isn't exactly a large chasm to leap from the ubiquitous sex-kitten kitsch of the transhuman imaginary to the crap conventions of Maxim Magazine or Girls With Guns Truck Stop Calendars.
Transhumanists and Singularitarians and other assorted futurologists and Robot Cultists also have demonstrated, I'm sorry to say, a distressing willingness to pretend that "intelligence" is on exhibition when spell-check software annoyingly "corrects" your proper use of a word that happens not to be included in its programming or when somebody embeds what amounts to a glorified tape-recorder into what amounts to a glorified mannequin and then some low-rent street performer calling himself a "roboticist" indulges in a stale bit of memorized theater with the contraption. So, too, these folks may be very eager to describe as "friends" people with whom they have never and will never meet but publish minute by minute accounts of their stomach contents in misspelled one-line publications on their "walls" and "feeds." This does not mean that the rest of us are required to share with them in the ridiculous fantasy that boning a hole in something like an animatronic Abe Lincoln from Disney's 1960s state-of-the-art robo-waxworks Hall of Presidents, but, you know, truncheon-cocked or balloon-busted in lowest-common-denominator versions of sexy skimpy undergarments, constitutes "romance" or something more reciprocally "human-like" while the relevant transhumanoid "experts" bask warmly in their "friendlier light" for cash.
I have argued that futurological discourses are best understood as the extreme edge of the deceptive, hyperbolic advertising and promotional forms that now utterly suffuse our public life. It is a truism that "Sex Sells" and it should, by extension, be regarded as no less a truism that it is often through sex or something like it that futurologists likewise peddle "The Future" to the rubes. But it is crucial to grasp that it is rarely the actual accomplishment of sexual gratification that advertising discourse sells when it sells sex. Indeed, the product advertising sells when it is selling sex, whether it is a hamburger or an automobile or a deodorant or a cellphone is almost never sex itself, and you can be sure that whatever else is happening when advertising is selling sex any actual sex itself is absolutely being deferred and not enjoyed to make time for the sex being sold in it in the first place.
As Adorno and Horkeimer put the point in 1944 -- decades before Debord said it again, and not necessarily better -- right about when America was busy inventing "The Future" through the promotion of which the neoliberal Washington Consensus would rule the postwar world:
But, as I have repeatedly insisted, every futurism is always a retro-futurism: In investing us in a vision of "The Future" which mostly consists of the amplification of our present and parochial satisfactions (more, More, MORE! Of the Same... appetites gratified, but, in "The Future" without number, without cost, without end) or the disasterbatory indulgence in our present and parochial fears (dystopic amplifications of generational fears displaced onto clone armies and designer babies, perplexed and alienated negotiations of ever-disappointing landfill-destined techno-gewgaws displaced onto robot armies and brains in a vat) futurology peddles stasis while crowing about "accelerating change," defends the status quo while handwaving about techno-progress, promotes the reactionary police force of incumbent elites in the utopian and dystopian cadences of prophetic utterances. For the open futurity arising in the present out of the diversity of stakeholders to the shared world, futurology substitutes parochial projections of "The Future" endlessly amplifying the elite-incumbent vantage over the present.
Futurological deferral, futurological substitution. Let us redeploy the words of Michel Foucault in our present distress: Given the suffusion of public space with the norms and forms of deceptive, hyperbolic marketing and promotional discourse in which "sex sells" through the deferral of actual gratifications, through the fetishistic substitution of desire for commodities for pleasurable human solidarities driven by desire, we are endlessly promised that "Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again."
What matters about this pronouncement is not that it takes the form, like futurological utterances tend to do, of a prediction -- but that it sexualizes the Good, that it re-writes the freedom of present futurity as a parochially projected Tomorrow in the image of a Good that has been so sexualized. My point is not to denigrate sexual pleasure -- and certainly neither was Foucault's -- but to warn about what happens when what can be good about sexual gratification is hyperbolized into an Aim at which we aspire in the name of the Good, becomes the essential Truth of the Self in the name of which we aim our emancipatory hopes. It is a circumscription, a canalization, declaring itself and mistaken for a thrust, for an opening: And so, it is one thing to bemoan the hypocrisy of the closet, say, or the pointless pain of repressing some harmless idiosyncratic pleasure, but it is quite another to buy into the fantasy that in coming out of the closet (or in boasting about your arcane fetish on the set on Jerry Springer or over drinks at a bar) we overcome the mystery of ourselves and arrive at last at perfect enlightened self-knowledge or that in throwing off an irrational repression of some modest kink we might manage to break through the impasse of politics and experience at last the plenitude of perfect self-expression.
Like a taut tanned supermodel in latex declaring a sexual availability that is in fact utterly unavailable beyond the screen, a vision of perfect satisfaction promiscuously attaching to consumer commodities that, however disappointing they may be to your hopes upon actual consumption, at least are available in your price range, a mirage of gratification that must be deferred in order to be consumed on the terms on which it is offered, to promise what is to come is not the same as what is to come, and to consume the promise of "to come" is not the same as actually to come.
The future as it arrives is always only another present, stratified by differences that make a difference, vestiges of past injuries, diversities of present stakes, struggles for future outcomes. "The Future" the futurologists sell is the deception that technological accumulation can substitute for the heartbreaking convulsive progress of political struggle in history, but in selling "The Future" the futurologists are also engaging in a present-day skirmish in that politics, diverting energy and imagination from collective struggles into faithful acquiescence to elite incumbents who deliver consumer goods in the present (rejuvenating skin creams, orgasmic chocolates, prowess via pill-popping) and promise to deliver amplified enhanced transcendent goods ever more to come.
Be that as it may, let us turn to the frothy substance of Pelletier's little futurological number. I personally think it is rather infantile and pathetic to use the word "romance" to describe what happens when a guy masturbates into a hole in a watermelon or Real Doll, although I don't find such activities particularly repulsive, any more than I do the endlessly many other non-violent and non-exploitative ways human beings find to get off. As a guy with a dildo or two in arm's reach even while typing this, I am the last one to wag my finger at the notion of prosthetically facilitated orgasms. I do think it is rather evocative just how often the sometimes sociopathic futurologists of the more assertively transhumanoid and singularitarian varieties find themselves hyperventilating about how awesome the sexbots of the future are going to be, or how sex with machines or sex via their own sooper-sexy medical enhancements will soon, so soon, Change Absolutely Everything for them.
One need not linger long in futurological precincts to discern a certain prevalence in them of representations of long-lashed big-boobied humanoids megaphoning their sexual availability (insofar as cartoons can be said in some sense to be "available") to the almost always only males whose publications these images accompany. Although the futurologists like to encrust the usual ladyparts with scales and feathers and shiny metal and curiously curvaceous circuit boards there isn't exactly a large chasm to leap from the ubiquitous sex-kitten kitsch of the transhuman imaginary to the crap conventions of Maxim Magazine or Girls With Guns Truck Stop Calendars.
Transhumanists and Singularitarians and other assorted futurologists and Robot Cultists also have demonstrated, I'm sorry to say, a distressing willingness to pretend that "intelligence" is on exhibition when spell-check software annoyingly "corrects" your proper use of a word that happens not to be included in its programming or when somebody embeds what amounts to a glorified tape-recorder into what amounts to a glorified mannequin and then some low-rent street performer calling himself a "roboticist" indulges in a stale bit of memorized theater with the contraption. So, too, these folks may be very eager to describe as "friends" people with whom they have never and will never meet but publish minute by minute accounts of their stomach contents in misspelled one-line publications on their "walls" and "feeds." This does not mean that the rest of us are required to share with them in the ridiculous fantasy that boning a hole in something like an animatronic Abe Lincoln from Disney's 1960s state-of-the-art robo-waxworks Hall of Presidents, but, you know, truncheon-cocked or balloon-busted in lowest-common-denominator versions of sexy skimpy undergarments, constitutes "romance" or something more reciprocally "human-like" while the relevant transhumanoid "experts" bask warmly in their "friendlier light" for cash.
I have argued that futurological discourses are best understood as the extreme edge of the deceptive, hyperbolic advertising and promotional forms that now utterly suffuse our public life. It is a truism that "Sex Sells" and it should, by extension, be regarded as no less a truism that it is often through sex or something like it that futurologists likewise peddle "The Future" to the rubes. But it is crucial to grasp that it is rarely the actual accomplishment of sexual gratification that advertising discourse sells when it sells sex. Indeed, the product advertising sells when it is selling sex, whether it is a hamburger or an automobile or a deodorant or a cellphone is almost never sex itself, and you can be sure that whatever else is happening when advertising is selling sex any actual sex itself is absolutely being deferred and not enjoyed to make time for the sex being sold in it in the first place.
As Adorno and Horkeimer put the point in 1944 -- decades before Debord said it again, and not necessarily better -- right about when America was busy inventing "The Future" through the promotion of which the neoliberal Washington Consensus would rule the postwar world:
The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu... The culture industry does not sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance.It is this discursive structure of deferral of sex and substitution of sex in the selling of sex that demands our special attention when we observe the workings of these narrative and attentional mechanisms in the context of futurological discourse. For, to be sure, futurology is all about deferral -- "The Future" in which it invests its participants is forever just out of reach, usually literally twenty years ahead endlessly deferred year by year by year, a rosy promissory coloration in the present available only to those who Believe In It together in the present and in so believing, grasp its "imminence" in the present and predict its coming.
But, as I have repeatedly insisted, every futurism is always a retro-futurism: In investing us in a vision of "The Future" which mostly consists of the amplification of our present and parochial satisfactions (more, More, MORE! Of the Same... appetites gratified, but, in "The Future" without number, without cost, without end) or the disasterbatory indulgence in our present and parochial fears (dystopic amplifications of generational fears displaced onto clone armies and designer babies, perplexed and alienated negotiations of ever-disappointing landfill-destined techno-gewgaws displaced onto robot armies and brains in a vat) futurology peddles stasis while crowing about "accelerating change," defends the status quo while handwaving about techno-progress, promotes the reactionary police force of incumbent elites in the utopian and dystopian cadences of prophetic utterances. For the open futurity arising in the present out of the diversity of stakeholders to the shared world, futurology substitutes parochial projections of "The Future" endlessly amplifying the elite-incumbent vantage over the present.
Futurological deferral, futurological substitution. Let us redeploy the words of Michel Foucault in our present distress: Given the suffusion of public space with the norms and forms of deceptive, hyperbolic marketing and promotional discourse in which "sex sells" through the deferral of actual gratifications, through the fetishistic substitution of desire for commodities for pleasurable human solidarities driven by desire, we are endlessly promised that "Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again."
What matters about this pronouncement is not that it takes the form, like futurological utterances tend to do, of a prediction -- but that it sexualizes the Good, that it re-writes the freedom of present futurity as a parochially projected Tomorrow in the image of a Good that has been so sexualized. My point is not to denigrate sexual pleasure -- and certainly neither was Foucault's -- but to warn about what happens when what can be good about sexual gratification is hyperbolized into an Aim at which we aspire in the name of the Good, becomes the essential Truth of the Self in the name of which we aim our emancipatory hopes. It is a circumscription, a canalization, declaring itself and mistaken for a thrust, for an opening: And so, it is one thing to bemoan the hypocrisy of the closet, say, or the pointless pain of repressing some harmless idiosyncratic pleasure, but it is quite another to buy into the fantasy that in coming out of the closet (or in boasting about your arcane fetish on the set on Jerry Springer or over drinks at a bar) we overcome the mystery of ourselves and arrive at last at perfect enlightened self-knowledge or that in throwing off an irrational repression of some modest kink we might manage to break through the impasse of politics and experience at last the plenitude of perfect self-expression.
Like a taut tanned supermodel in latex declaring a sexual availability that is in fact utterly unavailable beyond the screen, a vision of perfect satisfaction promiscuously attaching to consumer commodities that, however disappointing they may be to your hopes upon actual consumption, at least are available in your price range, a mirage of gratification that must be deferred in order to be consumed on the terms on which it is offered, to promise what is to come is not the same as what is to come, and to consume the promise of "to come" is not the same as actually to come.
The future as it arrives is always only another present, stratified by differences that make a difference, vestiges of past injuries, diversities of present stakes, struggles for future outcomes. "The Future" the futurologists sell is the deception that technological accumulation can substitute for the heartbreaking convulsive progress of political struggle in history, but in selling "The Future" the futurologists are also engaging in a present-day skirmish in that politics, diverting energy and imagination from collective struggles into faithful acquiescence to elite incumbents who deliver consumer goods in the present (rejuvenating skin creams, orgasmic chocolates, prowess via pill-popping) and promise to deliver amplified enhanced transcendent goods ever more to come.
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