My Exchange With Max More Continues

Again, upgraded and adapted from the Moot, Max More (now verified) responds:

We have provided evidence for the reasonableness of cryonics (and always acknowledge the considerable uncertainties). You will find much of it here: http://www.alcor.org/Library/index.html#scientific

Neuroscientist Sebastian Seung thinks cryonics worth testing for its ability to preserve the connectome. He discussed this in the last chapter of his recent book, and will engage in dialogue at the Alcor-40 conference in October. There are published papers, and we have several lines of evidence that cryonics through vitrification, under reasonably good conditions, is probably preserving identity-critical information.

It’s irrelevant that my dissertation was not written for a biology department. I was responding to your ignorant view of death being absolute and simple. It’s convenient for you to position all cryonicists as scared of our mortality, but that doesn’t make it true. I’m not scared of dying. I am scared of the dying process if it involves intense, prolonged pain or cognitive decline. But being dead is like nothing at all. I want to avoid death not because it terrifies me, but because I like living and want to do more of it.

It’s a cheap shot to say “the mistake you are making -- and making for a living, I'm afraid, which is pretty bad I must say”. I have supported cryonics for well over 25 years. I’ve been paid for working in cryonics for 1.5 years.

I said to you that extraordinary claims require extraordinary support and then you refer me to Alcor promotional materials, apparently forgetting that I have pre-emptively repudiated the usual Robot Cultic diversion of attention from the marginality of their assumptions and aspirations onto what I called "the noisy circle-jerk of True Believers whomping up glossy brochures for the rubes."

I cheerfully agree that, say, organ cryopreservation to facilitate transplantation, exploring methods of organismic suspension (including medically induced therapeutic comas), and so on are worthy of medical research dollars. One doesn't need to start handwaving about magical drextechian nanobots or cyberspatial soul-migration or any of that nonsense to grasp that sort of thing.

My utter rejection of such foolishness certainly provides no justification for you to declare my "view of death" to be an ignorant or simplistic one. Even on terms that would interest you, I have long maintained that medical techniques and monitoring devices have befuddled long orthodox conceptions of the beginning and end of life, properly so-called. To be honest, I think transhumanists share with anti-abortionists an opportunistic recourse to such befuddlement to flog their (different) marginal and counter-intuitive aspirations (as when anti-abortionists exploit sonogram imagery to render more apparently plausible pseudo-scientific "partial birth abortion" or when techno-immortalists exploit revival from once-fatal heart attacks to render more apparently plausible pseudo-scientific "uploading"). Nobody who declares my recognition of human mortality an error or a matter of choice has any business deriding my view of death as "ignorant."

You say you are not scared of dying and I truly hope that is true, since I have known too many people who are obsessed with techno-immortalism who not only never manage to overcome their mortality (since everybody, including every Robot Cultist, is indeed going to die) but do manage to become a little less alive in life for their fear of dying.

Like many others, I do share your distaste for disease and decline. Of course, one doesn't have to join a Robot Cult to see the good sense of defending, you know, actual medical science or access to healthcare... which is why so many more people defend actual medical science or access to healthcare than belong to your Robot Cult no doubt. But I definitely disapprove of the ways in which techno-transcendentalizing frames derange our sense of what legitimate medical research actually consists and displaces at least some dollars onto snake-oil scams that might have gone instead into actual medical research and the support of more sensible healthcare policy.

It’s a cheap shot to say “the mistake you are making -- and making for a living, I'm afraid, which is pretty bad I must say”. I have supported cryonics for well over 25 years. I’ve been paid for working in cryonics for 1.5 years.

Everything you are and everything you have as a public figure is connected to your flogging of techno-transcendental wish-fulfillment fantasies like cryonics, nano-santa, GOFAI, and so on as a so-called transhumanoid eminence of twenty-years' standing (I think that's about when I became aware of you at any rate). I don't know to what you refer when you say you have been "working in cryonics for 1.5 years" presumably in some more official capacity as a bottle washer or whatever, I don't exactly breathlessly follow the vicissitudes of your career as a futurological flim-flam artist on a blow by blow basis, but I do know you've long flogged this crapola in something like a professional capacity. No doubt you'll still think that is a cheap shot -- more than one I daresay -- but it isn't quite the one you seem to think I'm making.

Scroll down to read the earlier turns this conversation has taken. Ridiculous though I find his views, I do appreciate that Max More (it really is hard not to laugh every time I write that) is exposing his views to scrutiny in this fashion, even if he is using it as an occasion for a little judicious spamming, too.

Ayn Raelian Robot Cultist Max More Responds

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, "Max More" (conceivably, after all, an online impersonator) said:

Predictably you throw around "faith" and other lying terms, rather than attempting to address the actual evidence that cryonics has a reasonable chance of working and that you are not dead in any final sense at the point of "clinical death" -- as I argued in a chapter of my doctoral dissertation. I know my comment is a waste of time and that you are only preaching to your "minions".

Predictably you throw around "faith" and other lying terms... you are only preaching to your "minions". Once again, I notice, you make recourse to the old standby, "I know you are but what am I," and in the space of a single paragraph! Most impressive, if also rather embarrassing.

Although you are eager to assume the high ground of "reasonableness" and "respect for evidence" here, actually reasonable people who respect evidence know well that it is the one who makes the extraordinary claim who has the responsibility to provide the extraordinary support.

The marginality of the claims of cryonics charlatans from consensus science is abundantly clear from the publication record (outside the noisy circle-jerk of True Believers whomping up glossy brochures for the rubes, natch), not to mention from a glance at the proportion of actual scientists in relevant fields who have signed up for your techno-transcendental resurrection scheme.

I seem to recall that your dissertation was not written for a biology department -- any more than mine was, but then I don't pretend to speak as a scientific expert now, do I?

Look, believe whatever you need to about your scary mortality if it gets you through the night, but don't expect me to condone the pretense that your faith is scientific, a proper basis for policy or practical conduct, or more "reasonable" than any other faith-based utterance one hears in the public square. I'm an atheist myself, but I don't much care about the private perfections (theological, aesthetic, or otherwise) others pursue so long as they don't misapply their beliefs in scientific or political domains to the cost of good sense more generally, which is the mistake you are making -- and making for a living, I'm afraid, which is pretty bad I must say.

Good luck to you.

Can-Do Robot Cultist Max More "Chooses" Immortality, Remains Mortal Anyway

Apparently Ayn Raelian "Extropian" transhumanoid Max More ("Max More," Very Serious!) was offended when Adam Smith concluded his recent New Humanist synopsis of some of the chief sects of the Robot Cult with the quotation of a statement of mine deriding Natasha Vita-More (she's an artist!) thusly, "I hate to break it to Natasha Vita-More. It doesn’t matter how enthusiastic she is about it, she’s going to die."

In reaction, Max More sputtered: "I hate to break it to Dale Carrico, but HE is going to die. And it will be his choice. Those of us who have gone to the effort of making arrangements for cryopreservation (and who take additional measures) have some significant chance of returning from today's criterion of death." Get that? Everybody dies only because they "choose" to die, because they lack Max More's "can do" gumption to "choose immortality"! Mm hm.

Max More is, of course, completely deluded when he speaks of his "significant chance" of "returning" from the grave because of what he imagines to be the, er, Very Serious Very Sciency "measures" he has "taken" that skeptics, you know, basically sane people like me don't sign onto. Just to be clear here, what More is professing as a matter of faith is that when he dies -- and he will, as will every Robot Cultist, as will everybody else, as so will I (which isn't exactly news to me, or particularly upsetting to me as news goes, and certainly isn't something a death denialist of all people is needed to "break it" to me) -- again, when he dies More intends to have his head chopped off and plopped into a mist-shrouded dewar for hamburgerization the better to be rebuilt in "The Future" by swarms of nanobotic genies-in-a-bottle and thereupon scooped into a shiny imperishable robot body or "scanned" and somehow "therefore" "migrated" into an angelic eternal "info-self" in cyberspatial heaven all under the loving ministrations of a sooper-intelligent sooper-parental history-ending Robot God. That is to say, Max More believes, or is willing to pretend to believe for cash, like any fulminating fundamentalist, that he won't really be dead when he dies, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. And in so saying Max More is being palpably, laughably idiotic, repeatedly and in public, is indulging in a perfectly ridiculous pseudo-scientific fraud, and is possibly engaged in some sort of elaborate cry for help.

Max More is an adherent (hell, the adherent, Founder and High Priest) of the specifically "Extropian" sect of the Robot Cult, and so is a denialist both about death and about taxes, that is to say is both a market-fundamentalist and techno-transcendendalist, that is to say More advocates eating civilization and having it too but also preaches that if only we clap louder "technology" will gratify every infantile wish-fulfillment fantasy we have for free. As I said, Very Serious!

Of course, all the Robot Cultists believe this sort of flabbergasting nonsense, and it attests to the lack of standards in a society in which deceptive promotional norms, hyperbolic marketing forms, scientistic reductionism coupled with New Age narcissism and consumer techno-fetishism so utterly prevail that techno-transcendentalizing guru-wannabes like Max More and Ray Kurzweil can say this sort of thing and then get paid cushy salaries as "futurological experts" and "corporate consultants" rather than being meritocratically trundled off to sponge urinals or gather up roadside rubbish with sharpened sticks (then again maybe that's not such a good idea either). So, too, most of the Robot Cultists can be expected in conversation with critics of stunning rhetorical masterstrokes like More's "I know you are but what am I?" gambit. Nevertheless, I do think it is important to draw my readers' attention to the fact that this is one the most respected and influential intellectuals (as it were) of the transhumanist "movement," founder and prominent member of any number of transhumanoid organizations. The Robot Cult, ladies and gentlemen.

Are Techno-Immortalist Robot Cultists the Real "Deathists"?

In Wake Up, Deathist! You DO Want to Live 10,000 Years!, Robot Cultist Hank Pellissier argues that magic would be cool if it were real as a way of distracting your attention from the fact that magic is not real. My first working title for this piece was the judiciously worded, "Robot Cultist Battles Deathist Menace From Glitter-Farting Unicorn in Space." From all this, the discerning reader of Amor Mundi will understand that the piece under discussion is the latest Very Serious work of futurology published by the White Guys of "The Future" at the stealth Robot Cult "think-tank" IEET, the Institute for Ethics (where ethics are rarely actually discussed) and Emerging Technologies (where the technologies are rarely actually emerging).

Contra Pellissier, I think it is fair to say that not everybody would want to spend 10,000 years living what passes for the lives they are now living, when the reality of suicide demonstrates that not everybody wants to live even the Biblical allotment of three score and ten. More seriously still, I think it is fair to wonder if what we even mean by "living a life" as a narrative and otherwise coherent structural matter when we talk about such things now is enough like what might arise with such a prolongation that it makes a lot of sense to glibly apply the term to such projections, just as I think it is fair to wonder the same about the propriety of applying intuitions of present "selfhood" to such presumably transformed conditions, about the propriety of applying the word "living" to so differently prostheticized and therapized a process and so on.

Of course, Pellisier doesn't care about such things very much, he just wants to pretend that "technology" in some general construal that makes no sense will "provide" through mechanisms that have no real specification "health" and "capacities" and "lives" and "selves" that are and legibly remain everything they already are now, except, you know, that they will be more More MORE! As always with futurologists, the Robot Cultists confuse more with better, confuse more with change: it is an essentially unimaginative temper promoting itself as imagination, it is an essentially incurious consumerism advertising itself as wonder, it is an essentially reactionary fear marketing itself as an embrace of transformation. It's all very boring and very conventional advertising strategy -- more Skittles in the bag peddled as progress! a new color coating added to the Skittles rainbow peddled as change! Robot Cultists just pump up this sort of volume by orders of magnitude more than conventional crappy consumer marketing does -- indeed they amplify advertising hyperbole so much that their discourse takes on the coloration of theological discourse, the fraudulent promises of consumer satisfaction become promises of outright techno-transcendence.

Pellissier and his fellow Robot Cultists are just circus barkers selling a mirage and promoting a brand, at once indulging in wish-fulfillment fantasizing as well as trying to enlist as many others in this fantasizing as may be, either to make the fantasy seem more real in the fervency of shared belief or, more cynically and opportunistically, to attract attention and the power that follows from such attention by making noise. For instance:

"Many researchers suggest that Death will soon be annihilated," writes Pellissier. This is, of course, to speak plainly, a lie. I doubt that very "many" actually reputable researchers suggest anything of the sort even on the most idiosyncratic construal of that word "many," but even if a few folks who aren't laughingstocks in every aspect of their lives otherwise do say such things you can be sure that there are incomparably "many" more who do not for every one who does, and in any case no-one who takes things like citation indexes or reproducible results seriously would ever say or take seriously anything of the kind.

To raise questions, as I do, about the coherence and legibility of terms like "life" and "self" and "health" as they are used by futurologists when they seek at once radically to change the referents for these terms, sometimes beyond recognition, is to risk being derided by Robot Cultists as what they call a "Deathist." To recognize, as I do, and to insist on the recognition, as I do, of the absolutely and irrefutably true facts that human beings are and have always been and are always going to remain mortal to the extent that life is a biological process and intelligence remains incarnated in biological brains and social struggle in a living and finite world is, again, to risk being derided by Robot Cultists as what they call a "Deathist." And to testify, as I do, to the reality of the record in which literally all of the meaning and beauty and pleasure and wonder and power in which humanity has had a part in the world has been both perfectly possible and indeed exclusively available to always only mortal beings is, once again, to risk being derided by Robot Cultists as what they call a "Deathist."

What is wanted, writes Pellissier, "is to promote the Value of Life. Exalting human existence as the extraordinary experience that it is, redefines the Longevity Party movement. Maxim Maximus indicates this on the Longevity Party website; we want to be known as the 'Party for Life.' Conversely, all other groups can be castigated as a 'Party for Death.' Praising and promoting Life EverLasting gives transhumanists a powerful role, as ecstatic clairvoyants and scientific messiahs." You know, Science! (Also, "Maxim Maximus"? Very Serious!) You know, one needn't exactly be thrilled at the prospect of death or displeased by the great progressive of work of therapy and care and support through which illness is ameliorated (outside of the Robot Cult this is known as the rather commonsense appreciation of, you know, healthcare) to also deny utterly that mortality spoils everything for everybody or even counts as the worst evil in a world of inequities and troubles. Of course, we are all familiar enough with the uses to which phrases like "the Party of Life" can be put by political movements to have some healthy skepticism about declarations by people claiming not only to speak for "Life" but claiming that everybody who disagrees with them is dealing in death. There are many people in today's America who fancy themselves Life's great champions while at once treating women as incapable of making decisions concerning their own bodies, indifferent to the conditions of support that would define the quality of life of a child born of an unwanted pregnancy they would eagerly force a woman to bring to term against her will under threat of violence, all the while cheering the prospect of the execution of criminals (including, for some, doctors who perform abortions and women who would seek them) even knowing that at least sometimes this irrevocable punishment will be unjust, championing the unchecked proliferation of deadly weapons on our streets, denigrating the regulation of pollution and toxic substances, and denying the consensus of scientists that humans are contributing to redressable climate change that threatens all life on earth. Beyond the sensible skepticism born of such experience, just looking at Pellissier's specific proposal here, does it really make sense to declare oneself a brave and solitary promoter of the value of "Life" at all while at once denigrating so thoroughly so many of the terms on which it has always been lived?

Again, it is obviously stupid to deny that all humans have always been mortal and obviously stupid to pretend that the elimination of so universal a dimension of the human condition would not raise questions as to the humanity of beings so transformed -- at least insofar as that "humanity" had hitherto been reckoned. It is just as obviously stupid to pretend that there is anything in actual or even remotely developing medical science or technical expertise that makes the contemplation of such transformations matters of anything like practical concern, even if they remain relevant as ways to illuminate philosophical questions (after all, death denialism and wish-fulfillment fantasizing about eternal youth are among the earliest and most endlessly reiterated themes in the literary archive). The first kind of stupidity is just sloppy and lazy thinking, unworthy of intelligent assertion and demonstrative of fatal unseriousness, but the second connects more often than not to actual fraud.

If you think I jest or exaggerate when I deride Robot Cultists who act as though if only everybody could be convinced to clap louder suddenly we would unleash the spontaneous magical soopertech "forces of immortalization" that remain shackled by the weight of pessimists who keep on noticing that people age and die, you need only read Pellissier himself: "Obliterating Death requires a two-pronged attack. Science has to conquer the scourge, but, unfortunately, science is impeded by a stubborn obstacle that’s historically stone-walls progress: the narrow, anxiety-ridden, change-adverse conservatism of most human minds." Do recall Pellissier's talk of "ecstatic clairvoyants and scientific messiahs" before you would relinquish to him even momentarily the keys to the science car. Be that as it may, it still remains one thing to act as if the only reason people are mortal is because sane people recognize the fact of our mortality, and another thing to actually go on to peddle anti-aging kremes and boner-herbs and head-freezing schemes and nanobotic respirocyte animations for money among the rubes.

But it is not enough just to point out how stupid Robot Cultists are being when they fling the "Deathist" term around as they do -- and believe me, this is far from the only stupid thing Robot Cultists spend their limited time on earth doing -- I think it is important to note the extent to which this idiotic "Deathist" term of theirs, if it had any substantial reference to speak of, might more aptly be directed at them.

I say this because it is also fair to say that IF human life expectancy were actually to improve in any kind of substantial way in the actual world, it will almost certainly be because progressive citizens, activists, and administrators educate, agitate, and organize to provide more access to clean water, nutritious food, prenatal care, available but unprofitable treatments for neglected diseases to more people in the world, especially among the most vulnerable people in overexploited regions and populations in the world.

While some Robot Cultists may have notional commitments to such efforts it is crucial to grasp that there is nothing that they contribute from the vantage of their futurology to those commitments and that so long as they are speaking futurologically they are not contributing to these efforts, and indeed they are distracting attention away from these efforts and often actively undermining these efforts through the proposal of imaginary techno-fixes that promote complacency and deny the relevance of actually-available reforms and strategies that are ready-to-hand. Even to the extent that life expectancy might rise in general through the development of new genetic or prosthetic medical techniques it is crucial to note how rarely Robot Cultists are actual participants either in the scientific research and publication, the technical implementation and distribution, or even in the real-world political organizing to increase scientific research spending, improve science education, overcome proprietary circumscriptions of technoscientific innovation and access through elite-incumbent intellectual property regimes, and so on.

This point acquires special resonance in reference to this particular piece by Pellissier, because as we have seen he is not only making the usual nonsensical "anti-deathist" noises of the Robot Cultists in this piece but is doing so in the context of promoting a new "movement" calling itself the Longevity Party. Of course, Robot Cultists are forever re-packaging their stale devotions as Brave New Movements, starting political parties and phony movements that have no real constituencies responding to no real problems, fighting for libertopian asteroid belt colonies that nobody now alive will ever live to see or fighting for the rights of artificial intelligent software that don't exist, writing online manifestos whomping up the same lame digital utopianism with disposable neologisms and pretending that all this represents serious political activity even though it is more or less the same handful of guru wannabes in charge every time and an endlessly revolving and yet never really changing cast of True Believer wannabes who sign on every time.

Just as they claim to be doing politics when they are really indulging in shabby self-promotion, so too they claim to be interested in more medical research even though they are not aligned with legible healthcare advocacy in any way but want to agitate for more money for what they call "radical longevity research," in other words for public money diverted from legitimate medicine and for public legitimacy conferred on the usual futurological snake oil salesmen and software coders who think they are biologists who throng the New Age and nutritional supplement convention circuit with the cryonics cranks and "uploading" enthusiasts who think materialism somehow justifies "soul migration" fantasies and that a picture of you is the same thing as you, except, somehow also immortal.

While Robot Cultists traffic in the fear of death their discourse and their organizations do nothing to improve actual lives in any practical way while they distract attention and derange effort from such practical work at every turn. If their pet term of abuse were not so patently ridiculous in the first place the question might be well asked of them, just who, after all, are the real "Deathists"?

Political Versus "Scientific" Assessments of Robot Cultists

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot... I ask a Question:

Is it even possible to separate assessments of reasonableness from political assessments when it comes to Robot Cultists? If "reasonableness" amounts to little more than logical compatibility with present theories doesn't that actually radically underdetermine feasibility given all the intermediate technodevelopmental steps between present knowledge and technical affordances and the superlative outcomes that interest the Robot Cultists, especially since so many funding, publishing, regulative, marketing, implementation decisions material to those intermediate steps are political in character, eg, involve distributional questions of risk, cost, and benefit to a diversity of stakeholders? And this is not even to delve into the level of palpable limits in our present biological knowledge, understanding of intelligence, advanced and detailed physical theories when it comes to the specific sorts of outcomes transhumanoids like to bloviate about -- sustainable engineered negligible senescence, digital consciousness emulation, traversible wormholes, robust controllable programmable self-replicative room-temperature nano-manufacturing, mega-scale climate engineering projects and so on. Setting temperament aside (that is to say, my hunch that generality here provides a whiff of technoscientific respectability enabling arrant wish-fulfillment fantasizing of the most infantile sort imaginable, daydreams of never having to die, of being irresistibly sexy, of never being caught in an embarrassing error, of rolling in dough without effort, and so on, all in the name of Science!), isn't it rather clear that sub(cult)ures fixated on such outcomes will mostly be susceptible of analysis on political, cultural, discursive terms?

Futurological Factishness

From an exchange upgraded and adapted from the Moot to this post, Mitchell said:

"nobody has ever been willing (or able) to engage Dale in a serious intellectual exchange" I'm not sure where the intellectual locus of such an exchange would be. For scientific criticisms of transhumanist projects, Dale defers to people like Jones and Andreadis. It would sure be interesting to run across an anti-Dale, a transhumanist who really is a humanist as well -- someone whose intellectual specialty overlapped with Dale's enough that they really had something to say to each other. I can engage with Dale in certain areas, and I even agree with components of his critique, but he really deserves a much more profound engagement than I ever expect to give him.

I respond:

It is worth noting that Robot Cultists are rarely if ever dissuaded from their nonsense by the exposes generated by specialists in the scientific branches abused by transhumanoid claims, while I think that some who are initially susceptible to Robot Cult Belief are rendered too incredulous to make the plunge while others who do Believe arrive at disenchantment or assume a more critical temper Robot Cult formations cannot long survive when they work their way through discursive and cultural and political critiques of faith-based futurology. I think this is because the substance of the discourse is not actually scientific at all, but an abduction of scientific generalities or superficial forms in the service of faith-based initiatives doing quite different work than science proper is doing. In this respect, the critique of the superlative futurological claims of Robot Cultists is quite a bit like trying to critique climate-change denialism. Misinformation is promulgated by organizations who parochially profit from the effort, no question, but the key enablers of the problem are,

[one] a badly educated public in the context of a failure of pillar institutions that interface between the administrative, deliberative, and expert-knowledge layers of the instrumental register of public life and,

[two] the diversion of many of the key actors in each of these layers away from factual adjudication to subcultural signaling.

Climate change has become a culture war issue tangled up with the threatened identities of certain precarious mostly white mostly working class mostly patriarchial folks in ways that are no longer resolvable by empirical tests or by political compromise formations.

The Robot Cultist's faith in imminent AI, techno-longevity, bio-"enhancement," nano-abundance, digi-plenitude is caught up in comparable dynamisms to the extent that the sects of the Robot Cult function as marginal and defensive sub(cult)ures or identity-formations or movement-orientations conferring meta-narrative belief systems and social membership benefits in the context of extreme technodevelopmental distress, amplified techno-fetishistic consumerism, and the suffusion of public life with the deceptive and hyperbolizing norms and forms of promotion and marketing (this is the context in which both mainstream -- the assumptions and aspirations of neoliberal developmentalism, anti-deliberative corporate-military think-tank speak -- as well as the superlative futurological discourses of the Robot Cult operate).

To the extent that superlative (and also mainstream) futurology is a discourse operating at the level of, and often in the service of, (sub)culture it seems to me it is best grasped -- and critiqued -- in its rhetoric and not as a matter of "facts", even if its rhetoric is devoted to the production and affirmation and satisfaction of making pseudo-factual claims.

I happen to think the crisis exposed by the triumph of reactionary corporate-mobilized climate change denialism is much the same, one in which political, cultural, and discursive critiques are more efficacious than factual ones (even if it is also true that they must not stray from the relevant science, which remains absolutely indispensable). In a world when few will master all the relevant technoscience factually to adjudicate disputes on which their own flourishing and even survival depends in so many ways, it is all the more crucial to grasp the political necessity of ensuring accountability of the administration of policy both to the best warranted facts according to scientific consensus as well as to the actual diversity of stakeholders to public decisions.

There should be a far greater price paid for fraud and deliberate misinformation arising out of advertising, promotion, the financial sector, think-tanks, popular journalism, and so on. There should be much more policing of the boundaries of modes of discourse, what seeks to pass itself off as factual and not promotional, that which assumes the responsibilities of professionalism and the accountabilities of representation, and so on. Much that masquerades as truth-telling is actually advertizing, much that masquerades as speculation is actually fraud. Sometimes the masquerade rises to a level that might well be regarded as criminal, and this matters enormously. This is a crisis of accountability, responsibility, legitimation, and standards. As someone who has devoted his life to the study and teaching of theory (including a lot of theory that gets sloppily slapped with the label "postmodern") I am well aware that such standards are contingent, and must be open to interminable renegotiation else they become more trouble than they are worth, but this is no justification for jettisoning them or for the pretense that we can do without them, which amounts to a straightforward refusal of responsibility and an active solicitation for abuses in my view. Even when the crisis takes the form of the loss of the proper force of facticity, it is crucial to grasp the extent to which the locus of that crisis is political and cultural, as should be the lion's share of the critique which would re-invigorate that force by renewing the institutions and practices that mediate and enable it.

Taxes Are The Price We Pay for a Civilized Society

Citizens, take pride in a moment of civilization to which you have contributed! All this for less than one half of one percent of the federal budget. Images already coming in from the surface of Mars. It's not too late for you Republicans -- look what science and taxes can do! Come back from the Dark Side!

An Open Letter To The Robot Cultists --

Any child of two can indulge in wish fulfillment fantasizing. It's not a philosophy. It's not a movement. And the way you Robot Cultists do it makes you a kind of techno-transcendental New Age cult too hype-notized to notice you are functioning as a crowdsourced cheerleading squad for celebrity CEOs and ramped up gizmo consumerism at a time when the world is literally perishing from extractive- industrial- petrochemical- consumer- indebted- corporate- militarism.

The digital revolution is a lie. Cyberspace isn't a spirit realm. It belches coal smoke. It is accessed on landfill-destined toxic devices made by wretched wage slaves. It abetted financial fraud and theft at every level of society around the world. Its "openness" and its "freedom" turned out to be targeted marketing harassment, panoptic surveillance, and zero comments.

Rather than grasp this catastrophic fraud, you embrace it more ferociously, you hyperbolize cyberspatial deceptions into a more delusive fantasy still, fancying it will be home to a history shattering perfectly parental God-AI delivering you into the digital garden where your "spirit self" can live forever and "be" anything and "have" everything and "know" it all forever.

Your Robot Cult -- whether in its eugenicist transhumanoid sects, or in its dead-ender AI (artificial imbecillence) Singularitarian nerd-rapture sects, or in its vitamin supplement replacement parts shiny robot body soul-migration techno-immortalist sects, or in its nano-santa nano-genies-in-a-bottle nano-cornucopiast sects, or in its greenwashing hyper-denialist "geo-engineering" sects -- your Robot Cult, I say, takes all the lies of crass commercialism -- it takes all its infomercial boner pills and anti-aging kremes and endless promises of consumer ecstasy -- and then sets the volume dial on eleven, turning what was just ugly stupid embarrassing commonplace circus-barker deception and crack-pottery into full on fulminating faith.

Drawing on deeply disseminated figures and conceits of mythology and theology (eden, prometheus, golem, invincible armor, the philosopher's stone, rapture, love potion, sorcerer's apprentice, excalibur, the fountain of youth, frankenstein, onmipotence- omnibenevolence- omniscience-) whose historically-weighted intuitive force reassures you, together with the fervency of the never-changing professions of your fellow-faithful, you keep telling yourselves and telling us -- in a tune that never really changes year after year after year even while you congratulate yourselves on your unflappable embrace of "accelerating change" -- that there is some substance in your faith-based initiative, that your roseate "The Future" is real and that in it you can be young and rich and invulnerable and right and cared for forever.

As I said, any child of two already knows where you are coming from. As adults, though, what matters more is that you are going nowhere, you are riding on the road to nowhere, weighting down and speeding up the cart that is taking us all down.

We have serious problems in this world and we need serious people to help solve them. You might be enjoying the haze you're in, like any techno-fetishizing bourgeois consumer dupe, but you are part of the problem.

You could have been something better, you could have done something else, but you didn't. It's not too late to wake up and help out.

Futurological Defenses of Automation, Outsourcing, Crowdsourcing, Precarizing Labor

...Until There Is Nobody Left To Buy Anything. You Know, for Profit!

How to Work for Free for the Richest Companies in the World:

The pattern of fostering a community of people to essentially do your work for you -- to assume the risk of trying new ideas, without any guarantee of safety -- [is…] happening on a near-weekly basis to people who've developed apps for Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and others. In fact, this process is… routine… The most important companies in tech have, to varying extents, intentionally built their modern selves on [this…] model[.]

It is a commonplace of futurological corporate propaganda since the fifties that increasing automation is going to lower average working hours or free up people to do more rewarding and creative work any day now, when in fact automation has almost always only threatened labor with unemployment instead, thereby lowering labor's bargaining power, accompanied by a predictable diminishing of labor standards, diminishing of buying power, and diminishing of living standards for people who work for living.

The reason the futurological argument appears plausible, I suppose, is because such futurologists want to pretend that emancipatory outcomes are somehow BUILT IN to the specs of the technologies they enthuse over. The reason the futurological argument should NOT appear the least bit plausible (apart from the fact that it is made over and over and over again and almost never turns out to be true) is because emancipatory outcomes are political and not technical in nature. They demand political struggle and are not susceptible to techno-fixes in the absence of political struggle. Problems of poverty and ignorance and unfairness and inequity are political problems that require political will and social struggle (education, agitation, organization) even if, in part, to deploy available techniques in the service of desirable and emancipatory outcomes.

Bosses invest in new technology to make more money, not to improve the lot of laborers, and increasing automation and other productivity gains associated with technological improvements have been accompanied by increasing wealth concentration and increasing worker precarity precisely as these actual priorities would dictate. Although futurologists like to tell a different story, there is no reason to treat it as anything but a hoary and naïve science fiction cliché at odds with both a common sense understanding of how incumbent elites actually behave and all the obvious facts in evidence.

Using developments in information and transportation techniques (shipping container standardization) and technologies (digital networked surveillance and accounting) to outsource jobs away from expensive, often unionized, North Atlantic labor and costly regulations to protect our planet more than their profits instead to cheap labor in overexploited regions of the world where fellow human beings labor invisibly under appalling conditions and low environmental standards imperil the planet on which we all depend for our flourishing and survival is just another application of the same mechanism through which "technological progress" in automation has not translated to the political progress in the name of which it has been peddled to the people by futurological propagandists for the corporate-military status quo. The crowdsourcing of promotional content (free reviews on Amazon.com), of land development (precarious squatters on toxic dumps and other unsupported hazard zones struggling to make marginal spaces habitable), of media app development (as in the example with which the post begins) are just applications of the same mechanisms yet again.

Futurologists really must come to terms with the extent to which they have functioned as relentless defenders of the interests of corporate elites and the status quo all the while pretending to be champions of "accelerating change" and "techno-emancipation" in "The Future."