Exxon-Mobil's "Geo-Engineering" Discourse Is Just More Futurological Greenwashing

Also posted at the World Future Society.

A speech made by ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson at the Council on Foreign Relations last month has been attracting greater and greater attention as its implications sink in.

Tillerson has supposedly "pivoted" from his predecessor Lee Raymond's relentless climate change denialism, and has acknowledged that global temperatures are rising. "Clearly there is going to be an impact," Tillerson admitted. But he remains as committed as ever to undermining any acknowledgment that might support a policy consensus that would cut into his corporation's profitability, insisting that climate models cannot predict the actual magnitude of the impact.

Tillerson glibly proposed that in order to preserve the record profits of his industry, humanity might have to "adapt" to rising sea levels and shifts in agriculture. Just to be clear, what "adapting to rising sea levels" means is the dislocation of millions and millions of humans living on coasts and what "adapting to shifts in agriculture" means is the starvation of millions and millions of humans in droughts and famines and widening vectors of insect attack. "We have spent our entire existence adapting. We'll adapt," Tillerson said.

Needless to say, just because human beings have adapted to crises before does not in fact ensure that they can adapt to any situation, and certainly the historical record is full of examples of civilizations that have not survived environmental shifts, plagues, famines, or the social disruption exacerbated by environmental stress.

But more to the point there is that chilling pronoun, "we." Who is included in Rex Tillerson's imagined "we," exactly? Just how many human "theys" can perish in plagues and in famines and in climate refugee camps and in hails of bullets brought on by climate disruption in order to maintain Rex Tillerson's historically unprecedented profit-taking before the bubble of privilege within which resides the population of his personal "we" might begin to feel the least pressure? In time to realize it is too late for us all?

Of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, to the extent that he is admitting its existence in public at all, Tillerson said: "It's an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution." I have written extensively about so-called "geo-engineering" discourse, which I would describe as an apparently environmentalist discourse in which corporate-military organizations are imagined to declare and wage war on climate change on an industrial scale. Such discourses are only "apparently" environmentalist because they actually function to misdirect our attention away from environmentalist education and activism and regulation as these play out in the real world. They try to recast shared environmental problems as opportunities for elite incumbent profit-taking in the very modes that are yielding the ongoing crisis. And they proceed from a curiously alienated vantage on the earth itself, in which environmentalism becomes a kind of science fictional narrative in which humans are like aliens arriving on a distant planet and setting about "terraforming" it to suit their needs, rather than simply recognizing that we are earthlings evolved to flourish on a planet we have wounded, possibly fatally, through ignorance, aggression, and short sighted greed.

Does it really make sense to fantasize that the very agents most responsible for environmental catastrophe are finally the only ones suited to resolve it by attacking the ongoing outcomes of that catastrophe in the very mode of competitive profit-taking mega-scale brute-force extractive-industrial agency through which environmental catastrophe has been wrought? Well, does it?

Chris Mooney for one has taken issue with my characterization of "geo-engineering" discourse as a second order climate change denialism, one which is aimed not at a denial of the consensus of the relevant scientists that this phenomenon is occurring and that its consequences are catastrophic, but aimed instead at a denial that accountable democratic governance can be equal to the collective challenges of climate change which substantially yields the same result as the first, more conventional, denialism.

It is very difficult for me to understand how those who would declare themselves forced into advocacy of "geo-engineering" as a Last Resort or a Plan B because of the failures of environmental regulation and renewable alternative infrastructure investment, for example, supposed imagine the mega-engineering projects they daydream about like science fiction fanboys in digital renderings on YouTube or before rapt techno-fetishists at TED would actually be funded, regulated, and maintained if not by conventional funding and regulatory agencies, or just how such "hard-boiled realists" square their confidence that conventional investment and governance will prevail over "geo-engineering" with their despair over such governance ever being able to rise to the challenge of our shared environmental problems.

Tillerson insists that his industry "is built on technology, it's built on science, it's built on engineering" -- rather than on relentless greed and an opportunism that has demonstrated itself willing to despoil any environment, disrupt any community, dismiss any value that stands in the way of the brutal extraction of condensed banked energy through which the suicidal fraud of the petrochemical bubble he would no doubt describe in self-congratulatory cadences as "modern industrial civilization" remains hysterically inflated.

It should be needless to say that there is no such thing as "technology in general" or "science in general" for Tillerson's industry to be a special exemplar of, and in fact his personal position and privilege absolutely requires of him the selective application of some science together with the selective denial of other science (climate sciences that warn of the perilous consequences of his activities), the selective application of some technologies together with the selection repudiation of other technologies (renewable energy infrastructure at a scale that might threaten the profitability of his activities).

But by deploying "science" and "technology" as muzzy futurological abstractions he can elide all the relevant details on the basis of which public deliberation on the diverse stakeholder costs, risks, and benefits of his activities as against available alternatives might proceed in a reasonable and responsible way, the better to assume the mantle of The Great White Father bemoaning "a society that by and large is illiterate in… science, math and engineering, [for whom] what we do is a mystery to them and they find it scary" -- as if the reckless and border line sociopathic things he is saying aren't scary enough on their own! -- "an illiterate public" he adds, that must be "help[ed… to] understand why we can manage [environmental] risks."

Of course, the technoscientific illiteracy Tillerson speaks of is quite real: And he is counting on it to continue to get his way and make his profits while the sun shines, laissez les bon temps rouler, après moi le deluge! Futurological daydreams of mega-engineering boondoggles actively contribute to this ignorance and illiteracy, distracting people from our shared problems and their available solutions instead to space-opera cover art fantasias of orbiting mirror archipelagos, arctic cathedrals of steel piping icy water from the sea floor to the surface, fleets of airships spraying pseudo-volcanic aerosols into cloudbanks, and so on in an era when we cannot summon the will to bury our power lines so that they don't disrupt power delivery to millions every time it rains or snows or fill the potholes pimpling our highways let alone build obviously beneficial transcontinental high speed rail!

It is no surprise that Tillerson goes on to rail against "interested parties" -- he is the purely disinterested exemplar of pure science now, you will recall -- whose alarmism and activism "is going to… manufacture fear because that's how you slow this down." For such "interested parties" are precisely the ones seeking to educate the public about the shared problems at hand, about their incredible urgency, and about the changes in public policy, in personal conduct, in urban design that we must insist upon if we are to be equal to these shared problems. Since this education and the changes it would bring would undermine the status quo from which Tillerson personally benefits, he welcomes scientific illiteracy, he welcomes public confusion, he welcomes collective complacency.

Just so you know, the "this" that environmentalists would "slow down" with their fears is literally the ongoing unnecessary ruination of a human world just so that Rex Tillerson and his colleagues can continue to enjoy historically unprecedented profits for now. From denialism of the facts of climate change to distraction from politics into fantasies of profitable techno-fixes for the catastrophic outcomes testified to in those facts, Tillerson's speech was a full-throated declaration of a willingness and even eagerness to do harm for his parochial benefit, indifferent to the consequences to the mal-adaptive "they" that is very likely to include the entire "we" reading these words, right here, right now.

Calling Bullshit on the World's First "Cyborg Hate Crime"

Surveying the cyberspatial sprawl and the twitterspew on day three of the conversation about performance artist and sousveillance activist Steve Mann's assault in a Paris McDonalds (and I'm not one of the wags who are saying he was asking for it for going to McDonalds in Paris), I can see that a huge number of white guys in blocky spectacles and various stages of male pattern baldness have come to the consensus that this assault is or could be or should be considered the world's first "cyborg hate crime."

I initially commented on the assault here, then I replied to early suggestions of this character here, and then ridiculed the further suggestion of a boycott of McDonalds by pre-post-humans following the logic of this suggestion here. As I have said before, this isn't even the first time Steve Mann himself has been assaulted by folks who were perplexed or provoked by his prostheses, so those who are hyperventilating about the "first cyborg hate crime" don't have a prosthetic leg to stand on when they say such things. But I don't think that is a particularly interesting thing to say either, and what distresses me is that this is an occasion to say much more interesting things instead if we want to make an effort, and it should matter presumably to people who are talking about Steve Mann and claiming to care about Steve Mann that Steve Mann's art and activism has been a decades long effort to provoke precisely a deeper engagement with the prostheticization through which identification and dis-identification and embodiment are experienced and expressed in the world as well as with our immersion in elite incumbent surveillance and data-profiling and marketing.

So, too, since so much of this blather about the world's first "Cyborg Hate Crime" is presumably premised on worry and rage about Mann's assault, surely the actual specificity of the circumstances involved would be something folks would want to know more about? You can be sure that the politics playing out in the scene of this assault were more specific than anything the phrase "cyborg hate crime" puts anybody even remotely in a position to talk about. What if it turns out that Mann's attackers misrecognized his prosthesis as a sign of disability and part of what was happening is that they were assholes who like the idea of attacking a vulnerability they discern in the differently enabled? What if it turns out that the attackers experienced their documentation as a violation calling forth retaliation, a reaction Mann has definitely provoked before and has sometimes provoked deliberately to make a point in the spirit of quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Part of what should be occurring right about now to even the meanest intelligence is that certainly before now, and often, all too often, somebody has had their cellphone snatched and smashed by someone in a McDonalds annoyed by its ringtone or by the snotty affect of its user, somebody has had their walking stick or walker or prosthetic limb or thick spectacles messed with by awful jerks who think it is amusing to prey on the apparently vulnerable differently enabled folks in their midst, somebody has been assaulted because they seemed to signal through sartorial choices or bodily bearing an atypical sex-gender performance or membership in an ethnic minority, and so on and on and on and on.

Suddenly one is in a position to grasp that what might initially and superficially have seemed a new phenomenon in the world -- a person being assaulted for their prosthetic performance of personhood in the polis -- is in fact just a slightly unfamiliar form of an actually ubiquitous phenomenon, the ineradicably prosthetic character of both practices of embodied identification and practices of dis-identification, including the ones that body forth bigotry and violence. It turns out that the initial appearance of unfamiliarity is precisely the opening that allows us to grasp anew and more deeply the character of normative practices in which we are all of us involved.

When I wonder about whether the geeks in a rage about the attack on Mann's Eye-Glass in a McDonalds grasp its continuity with and hence are comparably incensed about the recent attack on a transperson in a McDonalds, the point isn't just to rain on the cyborg parade with a lecture on political correctness (though I should have expected that reaction, given that we're talking about the discourse of a whole hell of a lot of lame privileged straight white male gadget fetishists here, and you know I'm right). Rather than complain that I am forbidding anybody from articulating the material reality of an assault on a cyborg, what I am trying to do is use the assault as a teachable moment through which we come to grasp the extent to which the performance of socially legible selfhood is always crucially prosthetic. Definitely, to the extent that one wants to deploy the phrase "cyborg hate crime" in a way equal to its material resonance one needs to grasp just how many different incarnated figures that have little to do with techno-fetishistic fantasies of the "cyborgic" in the present-day consumer commercial marketing imaginary are indeed indispensably prostheticized.

And, hence, actually, yes I do indeed wonder to what extent some geek identification with Mann as an assaulted cyborg is enabled through a dis-identification with the assaulted trans person despite the fact that prostheticization is no less indispensable to the one as to the other, no less central to one violation as to the other. Again, the point of calling attention to this parallel is to provide an occasion to understand more about the very violation that these comments I'm responding to are claiming to be about. It's true that I think it is pretty facile to leap, as some are doing, to a recommendation of boycotting McDonalds over this assault when it isn't exactly clear what the connection of the organization is to the perpetrators of the violence here, especially given all the ways in which this sort of connection of institutional violence and misinformation is so much clearer in other instances that seem to involve similar problems and hence would seem to inspire similar concerns (environmental concerns, health concerns, concerns about McDonalds use of UK libel laws to attack public critics).

In conclusion, I do hope it is possible to read this intervention as more than vapid scolding from a position of presumed superiority, but as an occasion to connect this event to a wider context that enriches the intuitions this violation has inspired in the first place. In the absence of that, sorry (actually, not), but too much of the commentary around this event just looks way too much like rich privileged white guys wanting to pretend they are a persecuted minority vulnerable to hate crimes now because of their self-congratulatory gizmo consumerism. To the extent that this is the case, needless to say, I call bullshit.

Attack on Mann NOT First Attack on a Cyborg

Very predictably, the futurological dunderheads at Kurzweil are megaphoning the "first attack on a cyborg" angle of the Steve Mann assault. As I insisted in my account of the attack last night,

Those who are proposing that this assault might represent a "first" instance of anti-cyborg bigotry are doubly wrong -- first, and most obviously, because this isn't even the first instance in which Mann himself has been assaulted for his prostheses (recall the ordeal to which he was subjected by airport security near the height of the Bush phase of GWOT in 2002), but, second and more interesting to me, because I think a de-naturalization that spotlights the inherently prosthetic character of all culture is so central to so much bigotry, as witness violent assaults on transgender folks or prejudice based on sartorial signals of ethnicity or bullying of the differently enabled.

Robot Cultists often like to pretend that criticism of the more ridiculous statements they have offered up to public scrutiny (and, yes, it's ridiculous to say you expect your "information-self" is going to be migrated to and then eternalized in virtual nanobot sexbot heaven under the ministrations of the sooper-parental history-ending Robot God some amateur self-appointed soopergenius guru-wannabe is presumably coding in his basement) constitutes harassment, so I would not be surprised if this framing of the Mann attack will set the scene for an enormously satisfying paranoid victim narrative in which futurologists fancy themselves a persecuted minority forever imperiled by roving bands of deathist luddites ready to bash them because of their blocky nerd hipster spectacles and iPhones.

Ayn Raelians Should All Go Walt

When the Ayn Randians whine about how the moochers are getting them down, I say, Go Galt! Enough with the threats already! Begone! Oh, do please go, forthwith, on your Superman Strike! By all means shrug off the shackles of your tax enslavement, build your cathedral to the predator gods for us to pine after in the dreamy distance as we slog the swamp of our muddled mediocrity, leave us all to languish and limp without your fountainhead of endless innovations and insights to bolster us anymore. Go Galt, I say again: It's not like anybody is going to miss you.

I feel much the same when the Ayn Raelians of the Robot Cult go on and on about how they mean to be uploaded into the cyberspatial sprawl, immortalized in shiny robot bodies or shimmery informational post-bodies. To them I say, Go Walt! Enough already with the sales pitch and on to the arrangements, all ye techno-heavenbound True Believers! By all means have your brain sliced and scanned and snapped, the sooner the better, and here's to your hoping the resulting picture of part of you is somehow you and somehow immortal to boot. Leave the rest of us to our sad surgeries and eventual burials or burnings while you are frozen, glassified, or otherwise hamburgerized to await the ministrations of the Robot God and his busy nanobotic angels. Go Walt, I say again: You're all going to die like the rest of us, anyway. It's not like it matters much how you're bagged for disposal.

"I Tweet From Basement, Home of Mom": Time For A Cyberspace Manifesto 2.0?

Also posted at the World Future Society.

Given the dot.bomb, the New Economy crash, the outsourcing outrage, the digirati dump, the facebook fiasco, the various iCrap scandals it seems high time for the digi-hippies and liber-techians and other assorted Ayn Raelian types to rethink, revise, redo some of the assumptions and aspirations that lead so many of them to embrace so ecstatically not so very long ago John Perry Barlow's breathless Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. I never bought Barlow's balderdash, so I am probably not the one to propose a revised line that will be congenial to the gizmo groupies, but what I have in mind would go a little something like this:

Corporations of the Washington Consensus, you giant man-eating monster squids of outsourcing, financial fraud, war profiteering, climate change denialism, and the world ruining race to the bottom, we are writing you from Cyberspace again. Actually, I am here in my slimy sweat pants, in my parent's house, tapping arthritically at a cellphone and squinting at its postage stamp screen with a hangover and a lot on my mind.

On behalf of our hopes for some kind of future, I guess I'm asking you to think about maybe giving me a temp job without benefits or at least to lower the price of a Big Gulp and a microwave burrito until I find work or I drop dead, whichever comes first. And it would sure be great if you guys could leave people who have to work for a living alone to huddle in the dark in our scant fraught leisure time, surfing the web, putting deceptive dating profiles online, getting off on free porn, and blogging for zero comments in a torrent of maddening advertising and intrusive surveillance.

We get it that money is the only speech now and that non-rich people have to suffer so that the rich can live in walled off brass-plated McVegas enclaves among photogenic slaves. We get it that we are not welcome among you, we get it that we are to have no sovereignty where you might gather. We get it that the digital economy was mostly just a screen of technical jazz and hype behind which earth-shatteringly huge financial sector fraud went down. These days we're just looking for a place to recharge our laptop batteries and get a signal among the ruins while we watch the Greenhouse storms roll in.

Yeah, it turns out cyberspace was not really some kind of spirit realm after all but more or less a coal-fired re-branded refurbishment of the century old telegraph network but with a tee vee glued on it for us to stare at or shrunk into a radio walkie-talkie homing beacon so we can get ordered around wherever we go all hours of the day and night until we throw our internet gizmo into a landfill to poison the water table for centuries and replace it with another crappier one made by hand by wage slaves living who knows where even more miserably than we are and kinda sorta because of us.

It turns out that "Moore's Law" was a soap bubble, a skewed perspectival effect and that processors become faster only to encourage software to become slower. It turns out that "accelerating change" was just the PR face of increasing insecurity as infrastructure gets looted, enterprise gets deregulated, welfare gets dismantled, and ecosystems get polluted beyond bearing. It turns out that the Turing Test has been a century long experiment in which the attribution of intelligence to non-intelligent artifacts has resulted in artificial imbecillence among the info-fixated humans who fell for it. It turns out that our identities are bound up with our aging, vulnerable, scarred, skilled bodies after all, and that access and expression online are still stratified by race, sex, gender, morphology, money, geography, history and that denial is never some kind of triumphal overcoming. It turns out that incumbent elites were never afraid of our rising generation at all, but just saw in us the usual marks, and that the pop sci-tech journalists who fed our enthusiasm knew no better than to buy into the same line of hype we were. It turns out the Digital Age and its post-humanoid avant-garde was a conceptually confused, scientifically superficial, emotionally infantile, politically pernicious farrago of ill-digested science fiction conceits and hyperbolic corporate press releases and wooly theology and shrieking id.

Man, it's been some fun, but our revolution mostly sucked, didn't it? I guess there really is a difference between the virtual and the real. You know, like, sorry about all that.

Pancryptics, My Dissertation Online

[You come upon a ruin, my friend. Half of this text I would write differently now than I did then, and the other half I would not write at all. I can still commend the readings of David Brin, Eric Hughes, and David Friedman in here. Some of the basic frames and histories here are still okay, but I cannot say you won't find better elsewhere. Although the whole piece has an Arendtian spirit I am ashamed to note that two sustained engagements with Arendt on revolution and her reading of Kafka are quite terrible and I would ridicule their author cruelly for his nonsense nowadays. If you disagree with them, well so do I. I'm not sure my recent, shorter-than-a-page Twitterized Privacy Thesis isn't more substantive, when it comes to it. I sometimes think of the much better book I could write on this topic now, but even so there are better books I could write than that one were I the sort of person with the discipline and stamina to publish books at all, so I think this ruin must be all that remains of the reading and writing from that time in my life.]

Pancryptics: Technocultural Transformations of the Subject of the Privacy

by Dale Carrico (Department of Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley, 2005): Judith Butler, Chair; Mark Poster, Pamela Samuelson, Linda Williams, readers.

Acknowledgments

Abstract

Introduction

This falling of dusk, this darkening of the public scene… did not take place in silence… On the contrary, never was the public scene so filled with public announcements, usually quite optimistic… each promising a different wave of the future… all of which together had the net effect of desubstantializing every issue they touched… Testimony to [the] antipublic climate of the times can be found in poetry, in art, and in philosophy… Such inclinations… can lead to a passion for secrecy and anonymity, as if only that could matter to you personally which could be kept secret. –- Hannah Arendt

It is not enough to say that these are anti-authority struggles… they are also an opposition against secrecy, deformation, and mystifying representations imposed on people. -– Michel Foucault

Chapter One: Technological Transformations of the Subject of Privacy

[T]he right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men [sic]. -- Justice Louis Brandeis

We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word “privacy.” -- Hannah Arendt

One: The Subject of Privacy

I. Privacy As Technocultural Problematic

II. Technologies of Privacy

III. Quandaries of Agency for the Informational Construal of Privacy

Two: The Subject of Privacy

IV. Privacy Rites

V. Let Alone

VI. Private Nodes in the Net

Three: The Subject of Privacy

VII. Subject, Object, Abject

VIII. Sovereign Or Subject?

IX. Secrecy and the Subject of Privacy

X. Tales From the War Years

Chapter Two: Markets From Math

The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man [sic] is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected. -- Anton Chekhov

It is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws, we need to protect ourselves with mathematics. -- Bruce Schneier

One: Weaving Nets, Smashing States

I. The "First Generation" of Cyberspatial Theory

II. Taking the First Generation Seriously

III. "California Ideology" Among the First Generation

Two: Arguments from Inevitability and from Desire

IV. Manifesto

V. What Is Manifest

VI. P2P, Not Anarchy

VII. Afterward

Three: Liber-Tech

VIII. Techniques of Secrecy

IX. Building Resistance In

X. e2e

Four: The Discretionary: Secrecy, Privacy, and Control

XI. From Privation to Discretion

XII. Description As Threat

XIII. Privacy Under Control

XIV. Digital Libertarianism

Chapter Three: Markets With Eyes

I’ve never looked through a keyhole without finding someone was looking back. -- Judy Garland

I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. -- Bruce Sterling

One: Two Cheers for the Surveillance Society

I. Either/Or

II. Eye Infinitum

Two: Too Many Truths

III. Truths to Power

IV. Neither/Nor

Conclusion: Markets Without Materiality

Everything solid melts into air... -- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Information is alienated experience. -- Jeron Lanier

[Okay, another warning. If you've actually been reading this, by the time you arrive at this material you have found your way to the earliest writing in the dissertation. By the time I had completed this material I was quite ready to discard it as a Wittgensteinian ladder that had gotten me somewhere but then proven an encumbrance if not an outright embarrassment, roughly equal parts false and facile. I consigned it immediately to an "epilogue" and it is only a vestigial Catholic form of penance that keeps me from obliterating this digital trace. The criticism of the libertarianism -- both right and "left" -- of so-called tech-culture and tech-talk might be of some interest to those who want to trace early forms of the critique I continued to hammer on about most notoriously for years later.]

Epilogue/Problog

Don’t hate the media, become the media. -- Jello Biafra

What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing. -- Hannah Arendt

One: Social Software as Furniture and as Poetry

I. Dissing Blogging

II. Social Architectures

III. Social Software Sublime

IV. Arendt on Revolution

V. Trippi on Revolution

VI. dKos as Figure

VII. Dean as Figure

VIII. Belly of the Beast

Two: Prologue/Blogpost

IX. Blogos

X. Publicity As Relinquishment: Writing Digitexts

XI. Publicity As Relinquishment: Writing Blogtexts, Hypertexts, Tagtexts

XII. Digital Expressivity, Digital Credibility

XIII. What We Talk About When We Talk About "New" Media

Three: Trouble in Libertopia

XIV. Revenge of the Crystal; Or, Who Are These People?

XV. The Awesome Techno Blossom

XVI. Ethos Move

A Comment On "Political Correctness"

I've been a fly on the wall of a discussion taking place elsewhere, somewhere I am not welcome to contribute but which I still observe in an interested way. It is a discussion of the legacies of slavery, the genocidal dislocation of Native Americans, Jim Crow, Washington Consensus foreign policy, and ongoing institutional racism shaping aspirations for and distributing the effects of technoscientific changes in the present day.

I was hardly surprised when the discussion bodied forth the usual anguished cry of "political correctness" from some of the Very Serious White Guys of "The Future" who gathered there, some of whom go on predictably to make Very Serious supposedly hardboiled realistic comments about how colonial violence is a "done deal" and how there is no point in crying over spilled milk (or blood) and so on.

Of course, legacies of patriarchy, racism, slavery, colonialism, segregation, exploitation, heteronormativity, and naturalized violence continue to stratify the distribution of resources, capacities, recourse to law, access to opportunity here and now. This is not a "done deal" but, rather, very much still being dealt and being done. Either one attributes these stratifications to innate differences -- which is always bigotry, plain and simple -- or one attributes them to ongoing injustices -- which in turn either compels one to organize to redress them or one is indifferent to -- which is always bigotry again, again plain and simple.

Read that paragraph again. It is very important and I don't think it is that hard to understand, frankly.

Presumably, recognizing such facts is being annoyingly "PC" now, it is to unfairly and aggressively demand "political correctness" now on poor put-upon people just trying to have a good-humored good-faith discussions?

It's funny. I remember so vividly the intense discussions among academics and activists in the 80s and early 90s about canons and interlocking oppressions, in which the term "PC" was used to describe a form of attention to the actual impossibility of any clean escape from the complex con-fusing co-constructing co-facilitating legacies of past violations that meant good faith political discussions in the service of equity-in-diversity had to be especially sensitive and especially imaginative. I remember these discussions so vividly, I suppose, because these were the discussion in which I came into political consciousness as an earnest ignoramus in Atlanta in my early twenties, and which continue to shape me to this day, probably more than anything else.

It is simply weird to me how this kind of fraught sensitivity to difficulty was transformed in the popular imagination into the unilateral imposition of some harshly censorious code from a position of supposed know-it-alls. That a "PC"-sensitivity originated instead from a recognition of inevitably inadequate knowledge and the demand for compensatory sensitivity makes the popular understanding of "PC" that much more misplaced and ironic.

Of course, I assume any request for any kind of effort at all looks like unreasonable demands and cramped moralizing to privileged assholes who take their parochial assumptions and constituted authority as a natural given beyond question. No doubt from such a position of naturalized righteousness even the old-fashioned common sense idea of taking pains to be polite when one is in unfamiliar company feels like some kind of fascist conspiracy.

The thing is, plain and simple... it's not.

The Reactionary Progress Narrative Coiled Like A Snake Inside Our Commonplace Understanding of "Technology"

I have had an interesting exchange (upgraded and adapted below) with "Summerspeaker" in the Moot to this post. Summer and I both have theory backgrounds and this is reflected in the kinds of terminology and shortcuts we are deploying, so if this isn't your cup of tea, please don't get too mad about it.

Summer writes:

I'm not sure what to think of your extremely broad and flat definition of technology. Numerous analysts (Hiedegger comes to mind) draw a distinction between handcrafted tools like flints and mass-produced artifacts such as iPhones. It's all empty space smeared with electrical charge when you get down to it, but that doesn't usually prove the most useful framework for navigating this material world. As fraught as all concepts of nature and its opposites are, I say the narrative of increasing technology/artifice/artificiality in the modern era has merit. Your position that computers, cars, buildings, and so on merely constitute a variation on the inherently human theme of technology confuses more than it clarifies. From my specific historical perspective in the midst the world industrial economy, the differences between iPhones and flints outweigh their similarities. Even the notion of technological progress shouldn't be completely discarded. Increasing sophistication and efficiency has happened on the whole, albeit in the context of a system that threatens total ecological collapse (to name but one of its horrors). All other things being equal, shotguns and hunting rifles are more effective killing tools than flint-tipped spears and arrows. This trend of enhancement -- as uneven, troubled, and dangerous as it is -- deserves naming and contemplation.

I reply:

Aren't you discarding all my insistence on material and historical specification? What you are calling my "broad and flat definition" is an intervention crafted precisely to undermine progressive and transcedentalizing narratives of "technology" because of the obfuscatory and reactionary ideological work I observe them doing. But I don't deny there are differences that make a difference between flints and cellphones, I just deny that it makes much sense to say that cellphones are more "sophisticated" than flints, or make their users more "technologized" in some important sense. I don't agree that the latter sorts of narratives actually DO contribute to specificity at all. From what perspective do you say a cellphone is more sophisticated than a chipped flint, given what the needs of a hunter-gatherer are? Can you replicate one, can most people forced to assemble cellphones under horrific conditions (usually, mind you, by hand) replicate one? Do you really think one is more essentially cyborgic in some meaningful way when you feel a cellphone vibrate in your pocket than is a hunter-gatherer sparking a killing tip blunted during the afternoon's hunt against a bone?

You go on to say "increasing sophistication and efficiency has happened on the whole" in a way that "deserves naming and contemplation." "On the whole"? What whole? I think this is nonsense, and I think you have already written elsewhere many times of the pernicious effects of such generalized progress narratives. You qualify this claim by referencing, say, unsustainable practices or the lethal, and I would say frankly illegal, mayhem of drone bombers -- but I have to wonder if it is enough to treat these as "exceptions" to some larger drama in which humans are technologizing into ever more "sophisticated" and "efficient" super-humans, rather than to grasp how these exceptions give the lie to the very idea of sophistication and efficiency presumably being yielded by "technology" otherwise "on the whole"?

From what position is one supposed to be declaring things more "sophisticated" on the whole? By what standard? I don't agree some kid playing a video game on his cellphone is more "sophisticated" than a hunter-gatherer staring exhausted at the stars. And efficiency? Efficiency is always efficiency in the service of some outcome as compared to some other effort -- I don't think it even makes sense to attribute it "on the whole."

Just look at the sorts of specificities that come into view if we attend to the sorts of things your "albeit" seeks to shunt under the carpet of this grand techno-amplification "on the whole" of sophistication and efficiency: High energy input-intensive monoculture that gets diminishing yields while destroying topsoil and losing the ability to fend off pests is hardly "more sophisticated" or "more effective" than permaculture alternatives any more than I would say long-distance weapons that kill civilians in ways we claim to disapprove of in our own propaganda or which facilitate alienation that undermines critical engagement with hostile terrain is "more sophisticated" or "more effective" than alternative techniques like complex diplomatic initiatives would be. Am I really supposed to treat these as quibbles, hiccoughs in the road toward an ever increasing sophistication and efficiency "on the whole"? I think specificities provide us the way to disapprove of these risky, costly artifacts and techniques as well as to disprove the benefits that are attributed to them compared to other options on offer, and I think my understanding of technology demands we attend to just these specificities at all times.

Unsustainable industrial agriculture and militarism are complex problems the details of which you are already familiar with so I won't rehearse them, but I do insist that embedding these details in big techno-progressive or techno-regressive or techno-convergence or techno-autonomizing or techno-transcendentalizing narratives will obscure them far more than illuminate their specific stakes to the actual diversity of their stakeholders. Sustainability, democratization, consensualization, equity-in-diversity are the ethical and political narratives I prefer to plug these material and stakeholder specificities into instead, which is I think more apt.

Like you, I am willing to concede a place for technodevelopmental progress as well. I say, technodevelopmental progress is what happens when the actual costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change are distributed equitably to the diversity of the stakeholders to that change by their lights as a consequence of ongoing social struggle. I think progressive agency is entirely located at the site of its personal protagonists, peer to peer, and that it is just as deranging to locate such agency at the site of "technology" as it is to attribute "intelligence" at that site -- something futurologists also mistakenly do all the time too, and for related reasons.

Definitely I disagree that "enhancement in general" is happening at all, or is even an intelligible locution, at any rate the way that discourse seems to me to be playing out rhetorically in the actual world of policy discourse and bioethics (blech). I think in embracing the current discourse of "enhancement" you are stumbling into another "on the whole" construction that functions to evacuate political and historical specificity again. Enhancement is always -- enhancement according to whom? Enhancement -- in respect of what? Enhancement -- together with what diminishment? Enhancement -- compared to what? Enhancement -- at what cost? There is no "enhancement in general" any more than there is "increasing efficiency on the whole." (Certainly there is no -- and heaven help you for even using the phrase! -- general "trend of enhancement." Ugh! As I say in my futurological brickbats: "Whenever I hear the word trend, I reach for my brain.")

Talk of "enhancement" seems to me to function precisely to evacuate existing stakeholder disputes and perspectival diversity from discussions of technoscientific change -- much as do narratives of naturalized progress, as against historical and social struggle accounts of progress -- in an effort to pretend that "technology" is delivering more More MORE and never at any abiding cost to anybody. Of course, you will notice that I am now accusing you of doing through "increasing sophistication and efficiency on the whole" and "enhancement in general" precisely what you began by accusing me of doing when I insist that "technology" denotes an ongoing collective struggle through which agency is re-elaborated prosthetically/ culturally in history, peer to peer.

I don't want you to think I am simply responding to your intervention with "I know you are but what am I!" You see, I think you were wrong to worry about my definition as flattening because "collective elaboration" is all about demanding the details you worry about losing, and disables -- at least this is my hope -- obfuscatory and reactionary teleological and naturalizing and de-historicizing narrativations of technodevelopmental social struggle. I think you think increasing capacitation "on the whole" and increasing enhancement "in general" ARE specific claims while I think they are illusory (and sometimes outright silly) perspectival effects and empty self-congratulatory commendations yielded by the kind of futurological discourse you are still employing, and in the service of whose ideology you are still a footsoldier, whether you like it or not, mirages behind which contentious historical specificities vanish in the service of elite incumbent interests and anti-democratic politics.

"Am I Going To Become A Cyborg In the Future?"

Also posted at the World Future Society.

Anti-Futurological Answers To Futurological Questions: "Am I Going To Become A Cyborg In the Future?"

No, you are absolutely not going to become a cyborg in "The Future." And if you are a self-declared futurologist, or your thinking about technoscience questions has been deranged by your exposure to pop futurological formulations, the reasons you are not going to become a cyborg in "The Future" may come as a surprise to you:

The ready-to-hand gizmos on which many of you rely without thinking to spur your memories or communicate with your intimates, the therapies and vaccinations that have enhanced your body's resistance to diseases, the spectacles or contact lenses on some of your eyes or the pacemakers in some of your chests, the clothes you are wearing, the language you are using to organize your thoughts and testify to your history and your hopes, the laws, norms, infrastructural affordances, marketing and surveillance profiles that articulate your attention and your conduct, even the acquired but unconscious deportment of your body through which you signal your state of mind to your peers in ways both you and they are scarcely aware of… all of these material and ritual artifacts and techniques are already absolutely prosthetic, and all of these are already usefully susceptible to analysis in cybernetic terms (cybernetics is, you will recall, the study of the forms of communication, regulation, and control in and among biological, mechanical, and electronic systems). As I like to point out over and over again, all prostheses are culture and all culture is prosthetic; "technology," properly so-called, is the ongoing collective prosthetic re-elaboration of personal and inter-personal agency in history. The definitive impingement of the cybernetic upon the organismic is inaugurated by the entrance of a being onto the stage of history itself, culture is the natural way of cyborg protagonists in the world.

And so, you are not going to become a cyborg in "The Future" either because you are already as much a cyborg as you ever will be, or because the fantastic "Sooper You" which is what you really mean by the phrase "becoming a cyborg" involves profound errors or mystifications on your part about what technology and culture and history actually substantially mean in the first place and these errors and mystifications are never, ever going to become more right or more relevant or more sane later on.

It seems to me that this gesture, and the false quandaries arising from it, are all perfectly typical of futurological discourse: The question, "Am I going to become a cyborg in the future?" begins with a basic confusion about a technoscience issue. Rather than clarifying that confusion by actually addressing it, the futurological form of the question reframes the initial error as a predictive dispute about "future facts." What it is crucial to grasp is that such a re-framing is not only incapable of resolving the confusion at hand, but actually depends on the maintenance of the confusion, which is thereby transformed into a kind of black box into which all sorts of idle desires and dreams and dreads of super-potence, omnipotence, and impotence can be plugged and indulged in a way that has the sufficient appearance of "serious thought" while in fact precluding any serious thought from taking place at all.

Futurology provides no intellectual resources unique to itself with which to speculate (or organize) more reasonably about the diversity of costs, risks, and benefits of specific technoscientific changes to their actual stakeholders -- the relevant expertise will be found among the scientists, policy makers, and communities directly concerned with those changes -- meanwhile, futurology mobilizes confusions, fantasies, and fetishes occasioned by the technoscientific change to distract, derange, and denigrate our attention from existing intellectual resources the better to indulge irrational passions and peddle amplified consumption and acquiescence to the elite incumbent beneficiaries of the status quo to whom is entrusted the delivery of that amplified consumption which is what "The Future" of the futurologists usually amounts to.

Syllabus for My Summer Intensive on the Rhetoric of Interpretation

...beginning tomorrow afternoon, is here.