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.