But Why So Negative?

This is a reply in an exchange with another critic, this one making the now endlessly familiar complaints that I am not giving people enough credit, that I am assigning too much blame, that I am demoralizingly pessimistic, that I need to stop and smell the roses, that I need to realize there are smart suave techno-elites out there who know more than I do whose self-interest will save us from the shitter, and so on.

My reply:

Watch a commercial for your common or garden variety consumer gadget, awash with promises of emancipation and youth and cool and sex, and compare it to the gadget itself, a piece of landfill destined dysfunctional toxic crap usually assembled under conditions akin to slavery in some overexploited region of the world. The truth is that most people are alienated and behaving against their self-interest, in thrall to elite-incumbent powers deceiving them through a complete suffusion of public life by the deceptive hyperbolic norms and forms of marketing and promotional discourse all the while forms of disinformation, exploitation, informalization, precarity, and outright police brutality duress the scene of individual consent beyond bearing while extractive-industrial-petrochemical corporate-military surveillance fraud and force exacerbate catastrophic anthropogenic climate change and multiple vectors of resource descent to the brink of historically unprecedented slaughter. That's the big picture. It is actually beyond question that people are not thinking critically enough about their purchases or life-ways and it is beyond question that elite-incumbents are indulging in reckless, deceptive, and exploitative behavior for the most parochial of gains to the ruin of us all, including, eventually, them. I get it that you think I should qualify my case more, or watch the over-generalizations, or remember that people have brains, or not forget how nice people are and how nice it is to be nice and so on, and I am sensitive to these things, and I realize that mobilizing fragile agency while documenting devastating reality involves the threading of a fraught needle, but the truth is that I am already soft-pedaling the case by my lights to facilitate the better angels of progressive and democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle (the key site of historical change at this juncture). It is impossible to "accentuate the positive" more than I already do without abetting the crime, becoming a collaborator in destruction and self-destruction, and I just won't do it and if anything I worry I already do it too much.

This! Changes! Everything! The Impoverished Transhumanoid Vision of Freedom and Change

Upgraded and adapted from an interesting ongoing exchange in the Moot to this post with "summerspeaker" (whose comments are italicized, follow the length for the full exchange):

On the conceptual level, I find the Singularitarian obsession with everything changing useful... contemplating superhuman intelligence and/or molecular manufacturing serves as way to think beyond the status quo.

It may seem paradoxical, but I am suspicious of what singularitarians are counting as a belief in Changing Everything. As I said, I think the belief that the emergence of the digital internet was a qualitative event that Changed Everything is a profound misrecognition of what was in fact a quantitative re-materialization, the latest chapter in the Long Century of the Internet (beginning with telegraphy, then telephony, incorporating subsequent iterations of publication, broadcast radio and television video and cable). One way of looking at it is to say it was this inaugural misrecognition was the enabling Hype that gave rise to the serial hype that subsequently attached to so much discourse about the internet (crypto-anarchy! virtual sex! uploading!).

On this view, faith in the singularity itself is the ultimate hype, hype deranged into religious claims for techno-transcendence. But I also think it pays to look closely into the nature of these claims, as you say, "conceptually."

I know the transhumanists like to advertize themselves as more brave in their willingness to contemplate total transformation than mehum sheeple types like me who fail to measure up to their futurological shock levels and all that assertive nerd-jock nonsense, but have you noticed how utterly reassuring the furniture of their futures tend to be?

It is one thing to claim to embrace "total change" but it is quite another to indulge in infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies of a return to the ease and plenitude of mama's breast. The Robot God takes care of you, nano-genies give you everything you want for free, "enhancement" gives you back your youth, but even makes you the better you you dreamed about staring youthfully in the mirror pining for buff Biff and your own pony, superintelligence protects you from the humiliations of being caught out in an error or ignorance or humiliated (think of the geeks whose daydreams these are!), and then, a SENS technician with his wrench or a deed freeze and leap into holodeck heaven -- and you don't even have to die!

Quite apart from the delusiveness of all this nonsense (and my ire at those who debauch science by claiming serial marginality from scientific consensus is actually a sign of transhumanoid championing of science when it is the opposite) and the distraction of all this nonsense (you know what I think we should be doing -- applying shared knowledge to our shared problems, struggling to distribute the risks, costs, and benefits of technoscientific change equitably to diversity of its actual shareholders, a permanent and fraught progressive struggle we happen to be losing), it seems to me profoundly questionable to describe this as a true openness to change at all.

Daydreams of an amplification of your current capacities and an amplification of your present satisfaction isn't really change at all, it is just me now -- but better! (and better very much in the terms me now thinks in), it is just now -- but better! (more now, more!). It looks to me very much the same as the "imagination" that drives television commercials and marketing more generally -- youth! sex! riches! more!

I describe "futurity" as that aspect of openness in the present that arises from the fact that presence-together is both shared and contended by an ineradicably diverse plurality of stakeholders with different capacities, histories, hopes. I agree with Arendt that the "stuff" of which freedom is made is the res publica, "the public thing," what the Founders called "public happiness" that emerges in this midst of this sharing/ contestation. I believe that "The Future" of the futurologists, refiguring futurity from its political substance into an imaginary unitary destination actually obliterates our grasp of freedom, rewriting the openness of freedom in the image of closure. The futurologists misconstrue freedom in instrumental terms (precisely as one would expect of techno-fetishists), thinking it as amplifying capacitation rather than as collective re-conciliation, re-opening, re-figuration.

(If nothing else, asteroids and gamma ray bursts indicate that Change Everything events occasionally do come from nowhere or at least outer space.)

You could get run over by a car tomorrow. A dirty bomb could go off in a major city. Resource descent could choke off the petrochemical bubble of "Western Civilization." Hell, you could fall in love with the wrong person and screw up your life. Sure, an asteroid could hit earth. Life is bedeviled (and inspired) by accident, we are mortal, aging, vulnerable, error-prone, clumsy communicators, heartbroken, frustrated beings. The word for it is finitude. And far from embracing it, the transhumanoids spend most of their time in profoundly unhealthy denial of it.

we've got a number of vastly wealthy and capable folks working on computing hardware and software. According to Lanier, most of them subscribe to the Singularity worldview. It's a historical trends bolstered by considerable present-day effort and a compelling (at least to adherents) ideology. I'm not confident they won't succeed at some level, as unpleasant as the results might be for the rest of us.

Well, the neocons were the latest to remind us that a small klatch of white guys who are sure they are the smartest people in the room saying flabbergastingly idiotic things everybody laughs at can manage through perseverance and saying things rich powerful want to hear to find their way to a position to do unspeakable damage to the world. So, silly as they are, I agree they can have a terrible impact -- in fact already have in terms of the media frames through which urgent technodevelopmental deliberation is happening, to the cost of sense and equity. I am assuming you are describing the wealthy celebrity tech-CEOs as "capable" with your tongue in cheek -- of course they are mostly garish impresarios who are taking personal credit and appropriating personal profit for collective accomplishments. If you are referring to the guru-wannabes with the Robot Cult, you'll forgive me but I don't think any of them exhibit more than quotidian intelligence, although some have the kind of drive that gets stuff done while destroying the lives of everybody around them, their own first of all, I'll grant you that.

Singularitarian Hype and the Denial of History

Twitter is the telegraph of the impending Singularity. — Rachel Lichtman

In his excellent book The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage proposes, in effect, that the birth of the internet should be located with the invention of the telegraph and the development over the second half of the nineteenth century of the global telegraphy network. Of course, the way Standage tells his story is to remind online enthusiasts at the height of the irrational exuberance of the dot.com era (his book was published in 1998) of the endlessly many analogies between the ways telegraphy was incorporated into corporate, military, and mass-media formations and materialized in everyday lives in splashy tales of online romance, gossip, criminal detection, threats to privacy over a century ago, and the commonplace experiences of his own readers as networked personal computers were incorporated in their everyday lives and as these networked computers digitally incorporated in turn the prior iterations of inter-networked media forms, books, journalism, telegraphy, telephony, cinema, radio, television, cable, journals/zines, and so on.

What is crucial about this framing of the digital moment was its recognition that the emergence of telegraphy represented an incomparably more qualitative social and cultural phenomenon than was the emergence of the internet, which was the latest in a series of quantitative amplifications of an already-existing network embedded in the material and ritual artifice of our leading institutions and interpersonal dynamisms. The point of such an observation is not to deny the significance to individuals of the actual prosthetic forms their culture takes from moment to moment -- the material furniture of everyday life always matters, it is how lifeways literally matter, that is to say are literally materialized, in history -- but to warn us about the ways we are liable both to hyperbolize the discontinuity of our own moment in history, caught up as we are in its distresses, as well as to naturalize the continuities of our own moment in history, consoled as we are by its familiarities.

Contrary to the parochial triumphalism of a pop guru like Raymond Kurzweil, scholars like Standage tell a tale of the Long Century of the Internet not as a self-congratulatory fable of Manifest Destiny -- in which the characteristic desires of Kurzweil's privileged techno-fetishizing readership are declared to be prevailing over the available co-ordinates of existence in ever-accelerating ever-amplifying ever-consolidating ways on their way toward heaven as a mirror in which we see nothing but ourselves as we think we want to be, the reactionary imagination of futurological transcendence -- but instead as a tale of ongoing opportunistic unpredictable technodevelopmental changes, incorporations, provocations. Neither is Standage telling, by the way, a tale of Spenglerian decadence, though the realization that the fantasized "spirit-stuff" of which "Cyberspace, the Home of Mind" is actually made is fueled by poison gas and coal and accessed on toxic devices made by slaves and destined for landfill suggests all too palpably that such a narrative may be more apt.

Singularitarianism usually amounts to the claim that "accelerating change" has a kind of material momentum drawing humanity irresistibly toward some history-shattering discontinuity (sometimes, instead, it is an hypothesized Event, connected to the creation of a post-biological "super-intelligence," possibly created by humans, possibly arising spontaneously out of creations by humans, possibly created from "enhanced" humans themselves), whatever it is imagined unimaginably and often rather unimaginatively to be, and it tends to function as kind of black box into which its enthusiasts stuff all sorts of transcendent dreams and apocalyptic nightmares of theirs.

It seems to me crucial to point out that this singularitarian faith is mobilized out of two fundamental misrecognitions: First, singularitarianism arises out of the misrecognition of the emergence of the late twentieth century form of the internet as an historical discontinuity prefiguring another, wishful, historical discontinuity, rather than as yet another episodic, quantitative re-materialization in the Long Century of the Internet. Second, singularitarianism arises out of the misrecognition of privileged people of the destabilizing experience of precarity and distress provoked by the outsourcing, union-busting, deregulation, austerity, and financial fraud of neoliberal globalization -- facilitated by digital networked monetary transfer, targeted marketing, and surveillance -- as instead an experience of promising and progressive "accelerating change."

Rachel Lichtman's would-be prophetic tweet, re-posted above, that "Twitter is the telegraph of the impending Singularity" is a perfect symptom of these enabling singularitarian misrecognitions. What she is treating as an analogy illuminating "The Future" for the present is in fact an assertion of ignorance in the present of the past on which that present depends. Twitter as an internet form is a vestigial echo of the now-disavowed birth of internet in networked telegraphy. In the mostly vacuous stream of tweets, testifying in real time to the most ephemeral present -- the state of one's digestion, impressions, off-the-cuff observations, unjustified opinions -- the Singularitarian discerns an accelerationalization for a wish-fulfillment fantasy of an urgent forward progressive momentum leading irresistibly out of the historical planetary quandaries (environmental catastrophes, widespread exploitation, amplifying war-making) that have come to seem too hard to grapple with on the only terms available to actually progressive technodevelopmental social struggle, the terms of education, agitation, organization, and legislation to ensure that the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change are equitably distributed to the diversity of stakeholders to that change.

At the Heart of the "Financial Singularity" There Is Not Mystery But Fraud

FinanceAddict:

[It s]ounds a bit like a science fiction novel; are the financial algorithms, models and computers taking over from their human creators? Have we reached a financial singularity? Is this what a world created by the demonic love child of Gordon Gekko and Bill Gates would look like? This would be an amusing thought if it had not leapt from our collective Kindle screens and into our real world economy. But as Eric B. and Rakim might say, this ain’t no joke. Have we reached the point where our financial markets are so complex that we no longer understand how they really work? And if so, how can we manage what we don’t understand?

It is true that many did not understand what was going on when the digitization of planetary monetary transfer enabled a handful of predatory con-artists to engage in incomparably vast-scaled rapid-paced looting and fraud via financial algorithms and financial instruments like the bundling of subprime mortgages into phony prime assets. But, then, it is always true that the marks don't understand what is going on when a scam is underway.

What it is crucial to emphasize about this provocative little science-fictionalized ditty about a "financial singularity" is that -- even if it is coming from a place a disgust and despair about our unprecedented economic distress and about the suffering and injustice it has brought about -- this way of framing the crisis functionally abets the scam it decries.

It is not computers and programs and autonomous techno-agents who are the protagonists of the still unfolding crime of predatory plutocratic wealth-concentration and anti-democratizing austerity. The villains of this bloodsoaked epic are the bankers and auditors and captured-regulators and neoliberal ministers who employed these programs and instruments for parochial gain and who then exonerated and rationalized and still enable their crimes.

Our financial markets are not so complex we no longer understand them. In fact everybody knows exactly what is going on. Everybody understands everything. Fraudsters engaged in very conventional, very recognizable, very straightforward but unprecedentedly massive acts of fraud and theft under the cover of lies, and have very nearly destroyed civilization in so doing. If our governing institutions cannot recover quickly enough to become capable of organizing an effective and equitable collective address of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change and resource descent then they will have succeeded in fact in destroying civilization.

The very experience of "accelerating change" that has preoccupied the discourse of the digital-utopians and futurologists throughout the post-Reagan neoliberal era has always, in my view, simply been the way increasing precarity for ever vaster portions of humanity and earthly life -- produced by outsourcing, crowdsourcing, externalizing, informalizing, union-busting, welfare-looting, deregulatory, race-to-the-bottom globalization -- is experienced and described from the vantage of the privileged people who either benefit from this destabilization or who (rightly or wrongly) identify with the beneficiaries of that destabilization.

When it comes to the financial crisis, we are not living in a science fiction novel, we are living in a bleak naturalist novel.

Sanewashing Lamewashing Blamewashing

I've noticed that transhumanists and singularitarians and techno-immortalists will sometimes attempt in public to engage in what I call "sanewashing" -- they will declare in all innocence, "but transhumanism is really just the idea that evolution isn't the last word," or that "people can become better when they're smarter," or that sort of thing. Of course, we already have the perfectly good and widely understood and broadly affirmed (and also, I should add, rather problematic) words "culture" and "education" to name these ideas, and nobody was crying out for a group of Robot Cultists to re-invent those wheels and then claim to be their spokespeople, especially since these Robot Cultists also happen more distinctively to desire and believe, you know, that many will be able, and much sooner than non-Robot Cultists think, to live in genetically and prosthetically tweaked sooper-bodies with comic-book sooper-powers in free nanobotic-cornucopia-filled treasure caves, attended by very sexy sexbots, very possibly in outer space, until they decide to upload their "informational-selves" forever into a cyber-heaven that will be even more awesome still, as it will be under the ministrations of a sooper-intelligent post-parental history-ending Robot God of infinite loving grace.

Now, it is also true that medical research and development is indeed chugging along and producing some marvelous new genetic, prosthetic, and therapeutic advances: improved pacemakers and prosthetic limbs, better treatments for cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's and so on. It's also true that there are a constellation of ARTs (assistive reproductive technologies) on offer. I don't include same-sex procreation or reproductive cloning among these because it seems to me the splashy pop-journalism utterances on these topics [this post began its life as the response to a comment at the World Future Society by self-identified "bioconservative" John Howard accusing me of "celebrating same-sex procreation" -- which upsets him terribly despite the fact that it doesn't exist -- because of my defense of sane adults making informed nonduressed consensual recourse to EXISTING wanted medicine, whether normalizing or not, if it is safe, accessible and accountably regulated] are about equally vague and sensational now as they were when I heard variations on them a decade or more ago. Like so many other results that find their way to the spotlight occasionally for pop-tech fandoms to hyperventilate over in ecstatic or panic-stricken ways, I simply don't think it makes much sense to get exercised over them, to grapple with "policy" toward them, when it isn't clear how costly or effective or safe or actually wanted as compared to other techniques they will be until they are considerably more proximate. Indeed, it is actually rather obfuscating to declare the objects of such speculation a "they" or "it" in the first place, when nobody really knows of what this object would actually consist. Although such results can add to our general knowledge, I think that popular speculations on these questions tend to function instead as allegorical lenses through which people are expressing anxieties and concerns about contemporary issues, intergenerational tensions, fraught raced and gendered relations, alienation, anomie, lost trust in institutions, and so on. I tend to think these questions are better addressed in more direct ways that name more clearly the actual stakes and stakeholders involved. I daresay such attitudes are among the reasons why I was invited to publish among futurologists as a more contrarian voice in the first place.

The "sanewashing" I mentioned superlative futurologists indulging in doesn't end in their occasional efforts to pretend they are really just champions of scientific research or education or convivial cultural (when their literal preoccupations are so clearly more idiosyncratic and questionable), I would go on to say that there tends to be a kernel of legitimate technoscientific substance at the heart of most of the sects of the Robot Cult deranged into nonsense by them so that this kernel becomes a black box into which they plug their techno-transcendentalizing wish-fulfillment fantasies: There really are endlessly many issues of research priorities, regulation, access to techniques, access-to-information, exploitation, neglect, and duress in contemporary medicine that get hyperbolized by transhumanists into sooper-power fantasies of an "optimally enhanced" post-biological Being, a so-called homo superior by their idiosyncratic but would-be universalized standards. There really are network security issues, issues of user-friendly automation, issues of better expert systems that get hyperbolized by Singularitarians into sooper-intelligence fantasies of a post-biological history-ending Robot God. There really are enormously interesting scientific discoveries and technical applications in molecular biology and biochemistry and nanoscale science that get hyperbolized by Nano-Cornucopiasts into sooper-abundance fantasies of treasure too cheap to meter (exactly as anxieties about nuclear holocaust long generated compensatory fantasies of sooper-abundant nuclear energy too cheap to meter) and hence a post-historical overcoming of the impasse of stakeholder politics. As I said, there really have been therapeutic advances toward the treatment of heart disease and memory loss that can yield increased healthy longevity when coupled with a more nutritious diet and exercise (in terms of increased longevity on a planetary scale what Mike Davis said a decade ago remains true: access to clean water remains the greatest miracle drug in the whole world) that get hyperbolized by Techno-Immortalists as Vegas supplemental scams and tee vee anti-aging cream scams and LA plastic surgery scams and SENS-repairman scams and cryonic hambergerization scams and wooly metaphorical talk of "soul migration" from organismic brains into the cyberspatial sprawl. In each case a loose grasp of technoscientific substance squeezed through selective reading of pop-tech journalism, hyperbolic press releases, and science fiction transubstantiates that substance into an insubstantial occasion for transcendental wish-fulfillment fantasizing. When I point out that nobody needs to join a Robot Cult to grasp the importance of the techno-scientific kernel transhumanists have glommed onto in each of these cases, that indeed Robot Cultists have little interest in that kernel apart from the way it seems to provide an alibi for their indulgence in techno-transcendental True Belief, and that certainly few if any folks actually contributing to the substance of that science are in the Robot Cult, I might be said to be engaging rhetorically in something like the reverse discourse of their own "sanewashing" self-rationalization: let's call it "lamewashing" Robot Cultism.

John Howard demonstrates a third, and related, rhetorical operation in play. Because Robot Cultists hyperbolize substantial technoscience into transcendental wish-fulfillment, self-described "bioconservatives" like John Howard can potentially attribute such techno-transcendence to almost anybody who champions substantial technoscience and struggles for progressive, that is to say equitable, diversifying, consensualizing technodevelopmental change. Let's call this, for the sake of euphony, "blamewashing" secular progressive technoscience. I daresay that whenever technodevelopmental changes threaten (or seem so to threaten) given social or morphological norms this temptation to bioconservative "blamewashing" might be especially acute. Although I think John Howard is offering up a rather terrible example here, I do think there will often be something usefully corrective and critical in such "blamewashing" skepticism -- since I think the astonishingly superficial popular grasp of consensus science and progressive science policy coupled with the intense popular focus on technoscience questions creates a great vulnerability to contrary impulses to hyperbole, derangement, wish-fulfillment, complacency, disasterbation, and scam-artistry. I don't mind "bioconservatives" and other skeptics spotlighting my own susceptibility to such confusions, as a skeptic myself I welcome the exposure of any of my own failures to be duly critical. And, after all, I am a product of an at once techno-triumphalist and yet anti-intellectual, reductionist and yet faithful society like most of the people I write about, and I am trained in the humanities and not the sciences end of the academy to boot.

I would describe myself as a technoscientifically literate and technodevelopmentally concerned secular progressive who believes there should be much greater public investment in critical thinking and science education and medical research and renewable energy research and sustainable agriculture research and sustainable infrastructure and space science and discovery more generally. I also believe that all culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are culture, and that technodevelopmental social struggle is progressive when the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change are equitably distributed among the actual diversity of stakeholders to that change, and when all sane responsible informed non-duressed consenting adults can make recourse to or refrain from recourse to prosthetic/cultural affordances on their own terms, whether normalizing or not. I think the Robot Cultists distract our attention from the accomplishments and demands of actually existing and proximately emerging technodevelopmental social struggle and derange our collective capacity to deliberate in the sensible urgently necessary way we need to do given our shared planetary problems (especially environmental crises, global inequity, and ramifying implements of war). That is why I enagage in "lamewashing" critiques of what I take to be futurological derangements and deride Robot Cultsits in their propagandistic efforts at "sanewashing" their beliefs for the general public. If these efforts invite occasionally "blamewashing" invective from the less serious precincts of bioconservativsm, that seems a rather small -- though I will admit sometimes rather discomfiting -- price to pay.

How to Write Your Article for the Robot Cult (A Helpful Guide)

one

Identify an outcome normally attributable to magic (immortality, invisibility, free treasure, secret super-knowledge, love potion, mind-reading, unquestioning slave-minion) that we cannot accomplish but which can be made to seem at least not logically impossible.

two

Declare that this actually not-possible but apparently not-impossible thing is actually inevitable by saying that "technology" will deliver it. Say, in twenty years (trust me on this, it's always twenty years). Congratulations! That's the hard part done already, your first paragraph is complete.

three

Now, talk about how awesome magic would be if it were real for the rest of your piece.

four -- optional, advanced

If you want to seem a Very Serious think-tank futurologist, you should pretend at some point that conservatives are "opposed" to this magic not because it's stupid magic and not serious science or science policy at all but because they are too timid and scared of the awesomeness you bravely embrace.

conclusion

You can now repeat this procedure robotically in article after article until death (and, sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you will die because magic is not real).

False Positive: Another Futurologist Peddles Environmental Complacency With His Pseudo-Science

It's time for more Very Serious Futurology from the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (where the ethics are rarely really discussed and the technologies are rarely really emerging). Let's have a look at a new piece by Dick Pelletier. Here is the very first paragraph:

Say goodbye to global warming, toxic waste, and dependency on fossil fuels, and get ready to enjoy perfect health with exotic bugs that could one day cure every human disease, including aging.

The first thing to notice is that the style here literally reproduces the familiar tropes and tone of a late-night low-budget informercial. Say goodbye to unsightly stains! Get ready to enjoy the perfectly white teeth of a youthful supermodel!

I have stressed repeatedly in my critiques that futurological discourse should be regarded as an amplified expression of the hyperbolic and deceptive advertising and promotional norms and forms that catastrophically suffuse our public life today. Even when I focus my attention on the most extreme and marginal variations of the discourse that play out in the sub(cult)ural fandoms and movement membership-organizations of superlative futurology -- those I lampoon as the Robot Cult archipelago of transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, digital-utopians, and greenwashing "geo-engineers" -- it is important to grasp that the techno-transcendentalizing faiths substantiated in the solidarity of socially shared True Belief they solicit are little more than variations of the hyperbolically inflated false promises and seductions into brand-identification inherent in all contemporary advertising, but now amplified into an explicit religiosity rather than the delusional aspirational opiate most advertising settles for.

Needless to say, the product the futurologists are peddling is The Future, an imaginary destination invested with promises of heavenly transcendence (and often complemented with titillating pornographic nightmares of apocalyptic robotic or nano-goo or clone Hells), usually taking on the very familiar contours of theological omni-predicates, technologized into superintelligence, superabundance, and superpowers like superlongevity.

Pelletier continues:

These are just a few of the possibilities researchers envision as they try to copy how nature gathers matter and transforms it into life. Life is generally not thought of as being mechanical, but a cell can be described as a machine that rearranges non-living atoms to create parts that bring those atoms to life. Biologist Craig Venter and his team recently created the world’s first synthetic life form by programming an existing cell with new computer-generated DNA that offer unique benefits. This event paves the way to produce designer organisms that are built, rather than evolved… Experts believe that in the future, this technology will allow scientists to build bacteria that secrete food edible by other ocean creatures, which would result in more seafood available for human consumption. There could even be bacteria that would digest oil spills and repair other ecological disasters. Venter sums it up this way: synthetic life heralds the dawn of an era where new lifeforms can benefit humanity.

Notice how deeply invested Pelletier is here in rewriting biology in the image of a mechanism. This figuration actually provides no greater clarity about the processes he is talking about, it simply shifts the reader from the complexities of a field few understand (and the understanding of which instantly derails any glib talk of these sorts of "envision[ed]" "possibilities" in any human relevant time frame). Robot Cultists flog this mechanization of life and intelligence whenever they can, because the pseudo-plausibility of their most fervent and fantastical faiths depend on precisely this sleight of hand, their various techno-immortalization schemes, whether involving super-longevity through the metaphor of ongoing repair (the SENS scam), nanobotic reconstruction (the cryonics scam), or soul digitization (the uploading scam).

I leave to the side the fact that long-term readers of pop-tech have heard precisely these hyperbolic claims about garbage-eating and disease-fixing engineered microbes for decades, always offered up with the same breathlessness, always whomping up the same modest and interesting basic principles and research results into resounding dramatic generalities, always handwaving the same time-line to earth shattering transformation but retreating year by year as the promises are repeated year by year. And I leave to the side as well the inevitable recourse to impresarios of self-promotion like Craig Venter (Ray Kurzweil is another obvious example) who speak a language closely akin to that of the futurologists in the effort to market themselves as brands, but who, unlike the futurologists who so adore them, do have some small substantial kernel of real results at any rate that they are debauching for parochial celebrity.

Pelletier continues to reproduce the classic characteristics of futurological discourse in the column, as when he goes on to "respond to objections" to his flight of fancy:

Though most people believe this technology will provide unlimited commercial and medical benefits, others warn that artificial life might one day become a dangerous species with sinister possibilities. Arthur Caplan of University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics and other concerned scientists believe this research could lead to unpredictable dangers… However, conservatives see still another issue to be resolved. Synthetic biology challenges our most cherished notions of the meaning of life. Is life sacred, or has it been reduced to a computer formula.

First of all, notice that an extraordinarily complex constellation of ideas and theories and techniques, some of them actually long familiar, some of them hopelessly distant from application, some of them entirely implausible given what we actually know and what we actually can do biochemically, are now suddenly compressed into "this technology," a completely insubstantial and unsubstantiated non-object rendered discursively into THE object presumably under discussion. Notice that we are told "most people believe this technology will provide unlimited commercial and medical benefits." Oh, really? Unlimited benefits, you say? Despite the fact that "this technology" doesn't exist? Despite the fact that "most people" don't have any opinion on this topic at all? Despite the fact that nothing is unlimited and that all benefits are conjoined to costs and risks? Who are these "most people"? How do you know? To what survey are you referring? What terms are you taking for granted?

Needless to say, by re-directing our attention instead to "critics" who are presumably worried about the "unpredictable dangers" of "this technology" our futurologist is circumventing the far more lethal threat to his faith-based initiative, namely that nothing he is talking about is real or relevant to present concerns. And even the small threat posed by those who would worry about the speculative dangers of these speculative developments is easily cast aside by the circus-barker spectacle of immortality, endless sex, and vast treasure being dangled before the credulous mark. And in any case, surely the real-world dangers posed by the radically under-regulated experimental subjection of all contemporary consumers in an unscrupulous uninformed unpaid -- and hence, strictly speaking, non-consensual -- lab experiment in the long-term effects of for-profit pharmaceutical combinations and toxic-material consumption, deserve the attention of bioethicists more than worries about science fiction bio-bots? (By the way, are such concerns really always or even usually "conservative"?)

The turn to the sort of undergraduate pot-induced new-age philosophizing to which we are next treated -- dude, like what IS life? like, what if we're living in, like, a computer, man? -- functions in precisely the same way, as a hedge against any reader's realization of the profound unseriousness of all these loose free-associational unsubstantiated extrapolations and stipulations and appeals to lowest common denominator fear and greed, by constantly changing the subject, by raising issues and questions that are never actually answered but bulldoze along at various levels of abstraction and sense yielding a fine warm panglossian mist in the mind the futurologists seem to have convinced themselves is what deep thought feels like.

Pelletier concludes:

We will see tiny self-reproducing factories, disease-killing machines, and exotic creations performing many useful functions. Experts believe that by 2020, synthetic life creations could eliminate, or make manageable, nearly all human sicknesses, including most of today’s dreaded age-related diseases. “The benefits of this technology are limited only by our imagination,” Venter says. By 2030 or before, human-made life forms could provide everyone with an affordable, ageless and forever healthy body, fashioned from newly-created ‘designer cells.’ Welcome to the future of artificial lifeforms.

Notice that "the future of artificial lifeforms" doesn't exist even though we have been "welcomed" to it. How disappointing! One cannot help but be amused by the fact that even the inevitable declaration that techno-paradise is twenty years away is provided by Pelletier at the end. He deprives us of nothing! I can only assume that the promise of a "2020" deadline that preceded it was an artifact of a reference to some turn of the millenium piece making all the same promises in which the same Venter was similarly prominent. It must be hard to keep those deadlines straight, the way they change every year on the year, after all. We need not dwell too long in considering who Pelletier has in mind when he refers to the "experts" who presumably agree with him on all this nonsense (any more than the "researchers" and "most people" about whom he makes similarly absurd claims) except to say that possibly that word "expert" doesn't quite mean what he thinks it does. One gets that a lot in dealing with futurologists, don't you know. It is hard to know what to make of Pelletier's chrome-hard confidence that "[w]e will see tiny self-reproducing factories, disease-killing machines, exotic creations performing many useful functions…" Given his early proposal that living beings are just mechanisms, this comment could be the perfectly innocuous recognition that microbes exist and that molecular chemistry is a useful discipline. Needless to say, one needn't join a Robot Cult to learn such insights and needless to say such insights provide no reason at all to go on to talk about eliminating aging and death.

What most strikes me about Pelletier's piece is that in offering up this breezy daydream of microbial magicks in the lab on their way to eliminating environmental problems that threaten all life on earth, his piece is not only foolish and facile but actually dangerous and even, I daresay, evil. I do not deny that some remediative techniques involving microbiology may eventually be part of the mix of solutions to the crisis of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, pollution, and resource descent: But I forcefully do deny that they can be an all-encompassing technofix if they end up providing any assistance at all. I forcefully deny that anybody is better off dwelling on such possibilities than on urgently necessary education, agitation, organization in the service of regulation of pollution and incentives for sustainable lifeways and public investments in renewable infrastructure. I forcefully deny that even a vanishingly small percentage of people who do contribute to environmentally remediative scientific research and technical applications will be indebted to texts like Pelletier's while many who do read and enjoy such texts will instead be rendered dangerously complacent or even hostile to real practical efforts to change their personal practices or support reforms to help solve our shared environmental problems.

Dick Pelletier describes himself as a "Positive Futurist" and there are few more commonplace responses from futurologists to critiques like mine than that they are unduly "negative" or "pessimistic." To this, I repeat now as I always do, that there is nothing "positive" about denialism in the face of real problems, there is nothing "positive" about false bravado distracting attention from real problems, there is nothing "positive" about the complacency of privileged people about real problems who simply think Other People will be the ones who suffer and pay the price. Futurity is a dimension of the present, it is the openness in the present that derives from the ineradicable diversity of the peers who contend for and collaborate in the present -- it is this open futurity which the futurological faithful foreclose with their imaginary "The Future," always monologically amplifying their parochial present anxieties and desires in a narcissistic stasis they peddle as progress or accelerating change. To say the least, I see nothing particularly "positive" at all in this sort of thing.

SpaceX Space Cadets Predictably Crowing Mars, Bitches!

Also posted at The World Future Society.

io9 asks: Could SpaceX Land the First Humans On Mars? I would like the short answer to be: "Don't Bet On It." But chances are that all of us taxpayers will indeed be strong-armed into precisely that bet by the same neoliberal incumbent elites who have ruinously looted via private contracting so many of our armed services to generally terrible results in every way (except counting the profits raked in by a small number of already filthy rich evil gazillionaires).

Because SpaceX is described as a "commercial venture" all the usual Libertopian and Ayn Raelian types who throng futurological precincts have decided to pretend that becoming a government contractor engaging in a taxpayer funded exploitation of already existing mostly decades-old technology which itself already existed only because of the splendid efforts once upon a time of a For Real government space program which still made possible the launch to a state-consortium funded and maintained International Space Station represents "Going Galt" in space. After all, look how libertechian Elon Musk hates gu'ment handouts -- except, of course, the ones he lards himself with, natch.

Because they have decided to pretend SpaceX is market-fantastic many are now also pretending that this means that libertechian capitalism will sprinkle "market pixie dust" on the stalled space program, introducing forever vaunted "efficiencies" and big-brained hitherto quiescent "innovators" and "risk-takers" into the dynamic to revive all the Old Dreams, orbital hotels, L5 toruses, moon bases, space elevators, Mars colonies, asteroid mining, the whole OMNI Magazine sweet patootie (to which pre-pubescent me was a wide-eyed subscriber, both to the magazine and to the dream, believe you me). The thing is, of course, the "efficiencies" they are talking about are really mostly just the usual plutocrats externalizing all the real costs and risks onto the vulnerable, the "innovators" are really mostly just the usual self-promoting sociopathic flim-flam artists, and the risk-takers are really mostly just going to fail upward while everybody else is expected to clean up their messes for them as usual.

When the Soviet Union fell, think-tank capitalists swarmed the landscape breathlessly awaiting the arrival of Libertopia from the blood and ashes of Communism but they scrammed real quick when the "spontaneous order" perfectly predictably (and as predicted) looked instead like human trafficking on a bleak corrupt kleptocratic scorched earth. By then, the market ideologues had moved to Cyberspace, "the new home of Mind," where they expected first cryptography and then later the "social web" to smash the nation-state and crystallize into Libertopia again, with e-cash and reputation servers and netizen-bloggers of loving grace presiding over rugged individualist avatars kicking into high gear an acceleration of accelerating acceleration unto holodeck heaven but they mostly scrammed when the net of nets became instead a strip mall surveilled by paranoid states targeting Terror suspects and greedhead corporations targeting niche markets in which the only liberty left was the liberty to lie about yourself on an online dating profile or swapping funny cat videos with your Mom. (Lawrence Lessig told this story better than anybody way back in Code.) By then, the kick-ass capitalists all took a ticket to watch Bombs Over Baghdad clear the way for a privatized flat-tax Libertopia with Paul Bremer on Iraq Year Zero but soon enough scrammed again taking whatever wasn't nailed down with them when, well, we all know how that turned out. By then, our eager market fundamentalists were being called upon by the Killer Clown Administration to remake post-Katrina New Orleans into an amusement park Libertopia, dress rehearsing the new Disaster Capitalism as the planet convulsed under the strain of extractive-industrial-petrochemical criminality and the criminals themselves prepared the next stage of the scam in which they would declare that they alone can clean up the lethal mess they made through highly profitable unaccountable "geo-engineering" mega-engineering wet-dreams. That terrible story is still in the works, but it is no longer hard to figure how the story ends. (Naomi Klein told the first part of it awfully well in The Shock Doctrine and I strongly suspect her next book will tell still more of it.) Still, now it appears that some of the usual subjects have scrammed again, and have moved on to better things, SpaceX Space Cadets ready to paint the next scam Libertopia over Kennedy's New Frontier.

I seriously doubt that Space will be the Final Libertopian Frontier, although it might be if we wake up to the scam and send the libertopians and libertechians scramming, screaming, permanently. I for one still hold on to my dreams of space science and exploration, but I know it will only be accomplished for the common good through the planetary commonwealth of democratic agency and civic order. Space is the Place for Civilization, but the neo-feudal anti-democratic pre-civilization of Libertopia is a path to nowhere, and certainly not into Space.

Fellow Space Dreamers, You Wanna Go Galt? Then the Dream Dies, and It's All Your Fault.

Robot Cultists Chastise Charlie Stross For Outgrowing Them

I find it highly curious that in the aftermath of Charlie Stross's recent harsh criticisms of transhumanism the Very Serious Futurologists at stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET have leapt to repost a 2009 interview between Stross and RU Sirius in which he wasn't quite so critical, or at any rate so blunt. It is clear from Stross's latest comments that his skepticism and the force of his critique have been amplified by his witness to the recent examples of economic and political corruption and predation by neoliberal elites that often style themselves as "technocratic" and give themselves over to techno-enthusiasms and facile techno-fixes, as well as to exhibitions of True Belief and questionable political associations of so many key figures in futurological discourse and its organized sub(cult)ures. In other words, the smart and insightful person of 2009 has since applied that intelligence to our present distress and arrived at different insights. Is that growth really what the Robot Cultists want to call our attention to? Don't they grasp its implications? The transhumanoids seem to want to ridicule Stross as some kind of hypocrite because he has changed his mind in the face of evidence, or insinuate that his critique is not even an argument at all but merely a kind of slur (the headline for the reposted interview implies that Stross's critique consists of calling transhumanism "a dirty name," a strategy that Giulio Prisco recently employed in comparing my own critique of transhumanism to queer-bashing, a strategy perfectly familiar to anybody who questions cults like Scientology or defensive marginal faiths like Mormonism in which criticism is always reframed as "ad hominem" attacks), or that suddenly, unaccountably, his views have gone from clever and incisive to "inexcusably sloppy" just because these views are no longer of propagandistic use to them. One wonders if unpersoning is next on the menu? As it happens, just last year Stross posted a widely-discussed piece, Three Arguments Against the Singularity, which, it seems to me, should already have provided a strong clue that he was growing away from sympathy with transhumanoid faith-based initiatives in techno-transcendentalism and neoliberal accelerationalization. Of course, the Robot Cult sometimes gives itself over to energetic sectarian skirmishes between its singularitarian and eugenicist wings, and the IEET has tended in the past to side with the latter over the former, and so that last piece may have seemed too useful in the moment for them to notice that it indicated the emergence of a deeper critique of superlative futurology from Stross that would encompass them as well soon enough.

Criticizing Transhumanism Is A Hate Crime Now?

Giulio Prisco sure has him some interesting views:

Carrico's "arguments" boil down to "You are a filthy Robot Cultist, so you are not qualified to have opinions on serious political issues." These are the same "arguments" often used by those homophobes who say "You are a filthy gay, so you are not qualified to have opinions on serious political issues," so they are quite surreal when they come from a gay rights activist like Carrico.

Picnicking on the comments sections of various folks who have drawn attention to my "Unbearable Stasis of 'Accelerating Change'" piece one finds lots and lots of stuff that is more idiotic, more deceptive, more weird than this comment. Don't get me wrong, Prisco here is definitely being terribly idiotic, deceptive, and weird. But the reason it is worthwhile to draw attention to this awful statement is because, just so you know, Prisco isn't some low-level disregarded disreputable transhumanoid hanger-on (I mean, apart from the sense in which that is a reasonably good description of all superlative futurological types), he is a widely respected widely cited "thought leader" within their "movement" and a high-level officer in many of their membership organizations, even the more stealthily-mainstreaming think-tank efforts flogging for the Robot Cult, like IEET.

The Fearless Credulity of the Transhumanoids

Peter Wicks [corrected], one of the Very Serious Futurologists at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET (the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies -- where the ethics are rarely actually discussed and the technologies are rarely actually emerging) writes:

For technoprogressives it can be excruciating to witness the persistence with which spurious objections to promising technologies wield massive influence over public policy, law and attitudes. This article explores what is arguably the main underlying reason for this -- namely fear -- and what are the options for addressing this underlying fear.

Of course, there is no such thing as "technology in general" that it makes any real sense to monolithically "fear" or "desire" or whatever, and it is hard to know what transhumanoid types even mean when they speak of "promising technologies," since they love to pretend that things that don't exist and show no signs of existing any time soon are "promising technologies" about which this pesky relentless nonexistence then probably counts as a "spurious objection" to talking about them at all as opposed to talking about actually existing things instead. Needless to say, it is at least sometimes the case that some people who would otherwise benefit from the adoption of a new technology fail to do so out of ignorance or misplaced fear, just as at least as often some people adopt a new technology needlessly or to their actual detriment out of ignorance or misinformation or credulousness, just as others don't adopt a new technology because they actually know better. Also, needless to say: nobody ever joined a Robot Cult to gain insight of this kind. "Look before you leap" isn't exactly rocket science, after all (although it's a proverb from which rocket scientists are likely to benefit as much as everybody else).

I have observed that transhumanoids truly love to congratulate themselves on the fearlessness with which they assert how cool magic would be if it were real. They actually seem to fancy that it is the darned "deathism" of all the non True Believers out there that makes cryonic hamburgerization a scam instead of a Royal Road to resurrection in a shiny robot body or uploading as a cyberspatial sex-angel any day now, or they seem to fancy that it is the impoverished imaginations of the naysayers that are keeping those Drextech nano-genies-in-a-bottle from unleashing the superabundance that will overcome the impasse of stakeholder politics at last. And so, they actually behave as though putting on a self-esteem seminar "can do" face and clapping louder and balling up their fists with fervor actually amounts to a kind of activism or something, and as though their wish-fulfillment fantasizing constitutes earnest progressivism somehow (questions of the actually equitable distribution of the actual costs, risks, and benefits of actually existing and actually ongoing technodevelopmental changes to the actual diversity of their actual stakeholders are of negligible interest to these visionary "thought leaders," natch).

Wicks proposes that the main obstacle to progress is fear, but I would say that the main obstacle to progress is plutocracy. I think it is convenient for privileged people to attribute fears of change to majorities suffering from repression and exploitation. Usually this sort of outrageous attribution is merely a prelude to their advocacy in the name of "fearlessness" of all sorts of extraordinarily reckless behavior the costs and risks of which will thereupon inevitably be externalized right back onto those same majorities. Visionary! Brave! As it happens, there is nothing to be congratulated in a tendency to write checks your ass can't cash (three-hundred year life-spans! poverty-evaporating nanobotic treasure caves! profitable corporate-military "geo-engineering" technofixes for climate change and resource descent! and on and on and on), and everybody knows by now that the snake-oil salesmen who crow about how there are "No Limits!" are all really just assholes who believe that there will always be suckers around in the background to clean up their messes for them. In a surprise move, I do not share the view of those who want to declare this kind of dumb damned dangerous delusive distracting con-artistry as a kind of sublime insight, optimism, risk-taking, innovation, talent, beneficence or progressivism. (It's not.)