There Is No Escape Hatch

"Well, you know, of course, humans need to migrate and disperse off-world if we really want to ensure our survival as a species…"

Since it is often proposed in the cadences of a throwaway line, it is difficult to tell just how glib technophiles are being when they offer up occasional asides to this effect, especially in the midst of discussions of catastrophic climate change, resource descent, overpopulation, and so on, but also commenting on other human dilemmas, abiding war-likeness in a world of WMD proliferation, stubbornly lingering ethnic hatreds, and the like.

But it is a sentiment that comes up surprisingly often, I find, whether in jest, in earnest, off-handedly, or as a provocation. The theme permeates science fiction, of course. It comes up fairly regularly in courses I teach on environmental problems and politics with undergraduates as well. And plenty of comparatively high-profile presumably serious-minded folks like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have been known to advance the notion formally.

I will cheerfully grant that I am a space exploration enthusiast myself, a real NASA fanboy, a booster for moonbases and research stations on Mars from way back. But I also consider it the height of pernicious frivolity to propose space diaspora as anything remotely like a solution to climate change catastrophe and other apparently intractable human problems. I see utterances to the contrary more or less as symptoms of capitulation and despair, disavowals of these problems rather than efforts at solutions, leaps into wish-fulfillment that resign us to defeat.

Does anybody seriously need reminding there is no planet within the actual reach of our grasp that is even a fraction as friendly to human flourishing as our companion the earth is, this planet we evolved to flourish in, even in its current state of debasement at our hands? We can't get to Mars let alone terraform it, we cannot exceed the speed of light, there are no traversable wormholes, there are no warp drives, there are no viable multi-generational generational starship plans, and no suggestion to the contrary that is meant as anything mroe than a conceit to hang a yarn on is the least bit serious to anybody who is the least bit serious.

Does anybody seriously doubt that the scientific knowledge base, public investment, and infrastructural plant required to migrate any non-negligible population off-world would demand incomparably more of a material investment than actually cleaning up the mess we have made of earth would do, or that the very enterprise of any such migration itself would materially exacerbate the ruin of the planet more than any of the catastrophic business we are already undertaking on that score, or that even "ideally" the operation would save a fractional minority of humans while requiring the highest payment from all earthlings?

But the definitive consideration for me is that even if we set aside all the insurmountable instrumental and political hurdles that beset such a notion of a human escape from the human catastrophe of fouling our nest beyond healing, even if we concede the abstract possibility of leaving that nest behind as we cannot concede any of it concretely, it remains devastatingly true that the human beings who left earth would still be the human beings that committed these crimes, bringing our unresolved problems with us wherever we went next. We would bring the short sighted parochialism and greed that made our civilization unsustainable to our stewardship of the next planet, we would bring our warlikeness and the legacies of its violations with us into space.

Far from believing the universe a kind of safety valve relieving the pressure imposed by our stupidity in the confinement of a small world, I say the universe isn't safe from humans until first we overcome our stupidity through the work of civilization and solve the problems we would now disavow through such irresponsible fantasies of escape.

Insecurity Theater: How Futurological Existential-Risk Discourse Deranges Serious Technodevelopmental Deliberation

Also published at the World Future Society.

BBC:

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) will study dangers posed by biotechnology, artificial life, nanotechnology and climate change. The scientists said that to dismiss concerns of a potential robot uprising would be "dangerous". Fears that machines may take over have been central to the plot of some of the most popular science fiction films.

Robocalypse! Really? Few things apart from reportage about Robot Cultists could bring you from the pretense of sobriety of climate change talk by futurologists so Very Serious that their think-tank reminds you of its abbreviation (why, they must like UNESCO or CERN!) but then manage to degenerate into observations about scary b-movie science fiction plots by the third sentence. I breathlessly await the BBC report that fears about dragons destroying the castle have been central to the plot of some of the most popular fantasy films, and existential risk assessment by Very Serious Futurologists are forthcoming from their tech-celebrity-CEO vanity-funded think tanks at Stanford and Oxford any minute now. Not to spend time worrying about the odds of Dragon Conflagration would be irresponsible and dangerous!

Here we have a perfect illustration of the disasterbatory flip side of techno-transcendental hyperbole.

Of course, I have pointed out many times the way superlative futurists will devote a sentence to, say, observing some promising research effort in organ cryopreservation to facilitate transplantation operations only to provide the pretext for indulging instead in page after page of handwaving about "info-soul" preservation in hambergerized brains ready for "uploading" in Holodeck Heaven. They will leap in a paragraph from real world advances in biochemistry all the way into dreamy daydreams about reliably self-replicating programmable swarms of nanobots that can make next to anything for next to nothing any day now. They bound ecstatically from making reasonable noises one moment about qualified medical research results and healthcare advocacy all the way to cheerleading for genetically-enhanced comic-book super-bodies with "indefinite lifespans" and "techno-immortalization" the next moment.

In each case, superlative futurologists pretend the comparatively modest, qualified, sensible substance of consensus science and real research authorizes techno-transcendent wish-fulfillment fantasizing. Rather than think through the diverse impacts of technoscientific change in terms of their actual costs, risks, benefits, demands, significance to their real stakeholders in the real world, they amplify technodevelopmental realities in the present into Signs for the Robo-faithful to read, burning bushes announcing that immortality, superpowers, and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice are on the horizon in The Future.

When superlative futurists sit down to talk about what they call "Existential Risk" they offer up the other side of the counterfeit coin of expertise provided by their hyperbolic promotional/ self-promotional pseudo-discipline.

There is no question that it is reasonable, even urgent, that we study the toxicity of synthetic materials that make recourse to biochemical techniques making changes discernible at the nanoscale. What if a process that makes a synthetic fabric stronger and lighter also makes it abrade neurotoxins into surfaces with which it is in contact, for example? There is no question that it is reasonable, even urgent, that we monitor closely the pathogenesis and track the transmission pathways of dangerous viruses in a planet inter-connected by rapid transportation and communication networks. What if a virus mutates into an incomparably lethal form in a population center that is no doubt also a global transportation hub, for example?

But what exactly are futurologists supposed to bring to the table to such discussions? While the radically underfunded, already beleaguered Food and Drug Administration and comparable agencies worldwide are busy examining synthetic materials for toxicity, are we supposed to pretend that there is something helpful about Robot Cultists grabbing headlines with a splashy PowerPoint sonorously intoning about the "existential threat" of "gray goo" -- the so-called grave danger of an incompetent or evil programmer sending swarms of self-replicating nanobots to eat the planet? While the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control are tracking viral outbreaks and issuing global health warnings on a daily basis, are we supposed to pretend that there is something useful about Robot Cultists handwaving in a viral YouTube video about the danger of white-racist mad scientists bioengineering trait-specific pandemics in the name of racial purity?

Actually existing techniques making changes at the nanoscale are making useful materials and introduce real worries -- but they are not opening doors leading either into Edenic superabundance or apocalypse. Actually emerging medical techniques are changing lives and introducing new risks and costs into our understanding of healthcare provision -- but they are not creating super designer babies, clone armies, comic book superheroes, or millennial lifespans. Superlative futurological frames activating transcendental hopes and apocalyptic fears contribute nothing of any use to our deliberation about actually-existing and actually-emerging technoscientific changes and the diversity of their costs, risks, and benefits in the immediate and longer term to their stakeholders in the world.

While I am the last to discount the perils of anthropogenic catastrophic climate change and resource descent created by a generation of extractive-industrial-petrochemical profiteering, I cannot think of a single contribution futurologists can uniquely introduce into environmentalist theory, practice, education, agitation, organization, resistance, or reform that could be of any use to anybody who takes these issues the least bit seriously. At best, by treating climate change as a risk alongside absolutely ridiculous non-risks like out of control nanobots and Robot uprisings, these futurologists are trivializing a real crisis -- at worst, these futurologists will use real environmental crises as an opportunity to peddle quintessentially futurological non-solutions like unilateral "geo-engineering" interventions with unknowable consequences but great potential for profitability for the very same corporate-military interests that created and still exacerbate the very crisis itself.

Any second an actually accountable health and safety administrator is distracted from actually existing problems by futurological hyperbole is a second stolen from the public good and the public health. Any public awareness of shared concerns or public understanding of preparedness for actually existing risks and mutual aid skewed and deranged by futurological fancies is a lost chance of survival and help for real people in the real world. In a world where indispensable public services are forced to function on shoestring budgets after a generation of market fundamentalist downsizing and looting and neglect, it seems to me that there are no extra seconds or extra dollars to waste on the fancies of Very Serious Futurologists in suits playing at being policy wonks.

I would concede the usefulness of specifically futurological scenario-spinning for pitch-meetings in LA for science fiction miniseries, but the fact is that these are already hoary sfnal clichés and it is no doubt from science fiction that the futurologists have cribbed them. That is to say, these futurologists are of no real use to anyone, except to the extent that they manage to attract attention, funding, and reputations for seriousness they have not earned, which is useful only to themselves at the expense of everybody else. When the matrix of actual risks to which public service administrators feel bound and accountable is skewed by the fictions of Robot Cultists, in part because the sensational stories they tell attract the attention of inexpert media figures craving dramatic narratives and because these stories in turn activate the usual irrational passions of loose technological talk (eg, dreams of omnipotence, nightmares of impotence) in the public at large to which government is convulsively responsive, the resulting mismanagement of limited time and resources, the misplacement of the priorities, the misunderstanding of the stakes at hand creates new problems, imposes new costs, proliferates new risks.

Not to put too fine a point on it, these lost seconds of attention and effort, these confused priorities and concerns, can and probably have already and most certainly will contribute very directly to lost lives.

Generations of futurological fantasists who fail even remotely to grasp the nature of the organismically-incarnated historically-situated phenomenon of intelligence have been promising and failing to deliver artificial intelligence every year on the year for years and years and years and years. Now that some of them are re-framing that claim as a concern with the "existential threat" of an intelligent robot uprising we should take care to understand this is an old tired song they are singing. The risk of an automated bulldozer losing control and trampling a laborer on the warehouse floor is real and reasonably well-understood and provided for by actual experts. The risk of a robot uprising is zero, and even if the person is wearing a suit when he tells you otherwise he is no expert but a futurological flim-flam artist.

Let me be the one to say plainly that the single greatest "existential risk" that futurological existential-risk experts will never admit is the existential risk posed by existential-risk analysis to the public address of real problems in the real world.

Is "Geo-Engineering" Just Gardening? Is Robot Cultism Just Common Sense?

Also posted at the World Future Society.

A recent article over at io9 offers a rapid-fire scroll of lovely pictures of lovely gardens from Tivoli and Versailles to Suzhou and the Mehtab Bagh. The bright-green images are from Flickr, their vapid captions read like snippets from Wikipedia, but the ideological operation of the article (which may fancy itself "Bright Green") is pure, pernicious futurological bunkum. It is easy to let a punchy little number like The World's Most Beautiful Gardens Are Miracles of Geo-Engineering buzzily breeze in one eye and out the other, but I propose we dwell on it for a moment.

I have described Superlative Futurology as an extreme form of the deceptive hyperbolic gizmo-fetishizing norms and forms that utterly and disastrously suffuse our public discourse today. Where neoliberal think-tanks peddle digitization to corporate-military organizations to facilitate the financialized skimming and scamming of global treasure and program drone strikes for war-crimes on the cheap, or consumer corporations peddle the "romance" of coffee at five dollars a pop or promise some ill-smelling goop in a jar will make a seventy year old as sexy as a teenager, Superlative Futurology amplifies techno-triumphalism into outright theological territory promising techno-transcendance of the finitude of the human condition, a super-intelligence, super-longevity, and super-abundance that suspiciously mimes the familiar omni-predicates of divinity (omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence) in at once reductive and expansive pseudo-scientific drag. The mainstream futurology of marketing/promotional formulations at the heart of the media advertising and think-tank scenario spinning that utterly prevail over the neoliberal-neoconservative imaginary love to promise phony miracles to the rubes, but the superlative futurology that attracts fandom sub(cult)ures and True Believers who fancy they possess the Keys to History are promising Miracles in earnest.

At the risk of coming off as a pedant -- who, me? -- I want to propose to Vincze Miklos, the author of the piece under consideration that, stunning as they are in their beauty, sophisticated as they are in the formal knowledges deployed in their design and construction, impressive as they are in the efforts through which they are maintained, none of these gardens are actually "Miraculous" at all. Gardens are not miracles, even the good ones. When one is dealing with futurologists, saying these obvious things out loud often matters very much.

The payoff lines of the article propose that, "Humans don't always trash their ecosystems. Sometimes we reshape them into something amazing. Here are some of the most incredible examples of landscape architecture, also known humbly as gardening." Needless to say, often large gardens in inapt setting become septic swamps, and without painstaking maintenance they all referalize rapidly, and it really is unclear whether we rightly describe any of the examples in the piece as actually sustainable interventions. One should take care not to generalize from a few photogenic specimens, all already well-known to the lowest-common-denominator tourist to claims about human mastery of sustainable civilization, especially given the high energy input intensivity of most such gardens and the fact that few of them provide even rudimentary shelter or sustenance for the humans who cherish them. Indeed, perhaps the whole piece is really best described as a bland bit of misguided virtual eco-tourism. And, again, to risk pedantry, if it really is true that "geo-engineering" is just another word for gardening then it occurs to me that the word "gardening" is perfectly adequate to describe gardening. Who needs a klatch of futurological pseudo-intellectuals to coin a bit of ill-fitting multi-syllabic jargon to re-invent that wheel, exactly?

Of course, "geo-engineering" doesn't just mean gardening to those who deploy the term, geo-engineering is a reactionary pseudo-environmental futurological discourse that is presently gathering steam to who knows what eventual, probably disastrous, ends. "Geo-engineering" denotes an ill-conceived suite of imaginary mega-engineering proposals to combat catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. What these proposals tend to share is that they involve vast unilateral inputs into complex dynamic ecosystems without a clear sense of the consequences, usually argued for with some variation on the claim that "desperate times require desperate measures." Central to the conjuration of "desperate times" in "geo-engineering" proposals tends to be the insistence that conventional accountable political processes of regulation, education, incentivization, public investment and so on have all proved to be failures in the face of planetary problems like climate change and resource descent. Rarely discussed is the question how the mega-engineering projects that excite the "geo-engineering" imaginary would themselves be funded, how their safety would be ensured and corruption restrained, how their construction and maintenance would be made accountable to the stakeholders of these projects, how their costs, risks, and benefits would be reasonably distributed and so on -- and usually it seems the very political processes whose abject failure is the assumption on which desperate "geo-engineering" gambits are premised (else, why not keep pushing the laws and investment to which legible environmentalisms are already devoted?) are immediately re-validated once they are imagined to be underway to render these "geo-engineering" projects practically possible. That is to say, practically possible "in principle" -- since, you will remember, the projects are almost always highly speculative in their workings and effects, indeed that tends to be the point.

I have noticed lately, and with great relief, that actual environmentalists have already begun to roll their eyes when the subject of "geo-engineering" comes up as they have also long done when they observe corporate greenwashing spin. Real environmentalists have amply noticed by now how readily pollution profiteers shift their rhetoric from climate change denialism to geo-engineering advocacy. Those reckless criminals eager to parochially profit from the destruction of the environment on which they and we all depend for our survival and flourishing are only too happy to confuse and undermine the deliberative processes through which our politics would struggle to be equal to the planetary problems we confront, but then as that effort begins to falter in the face of ever more conspicuous greenhouse storms they are now just as happy to divert public awareness and energy instead into elaborate cleanup boondoggles from which they are uniquely situated to profit as much as they profited from making the messes they would now clean up. What matters to the pollution profiteers is not whether or not "geo-engineering" proposals would work better than international efforts at sustainable education, regulation, and public investment in efficient renewable infrastructure, but whether they themselves will still be in the money when and if civilization turns away from petro-chemical industrialism.

Again, "geo-engineering" is a futurological discourse, and true to the marketing and promotional norms and forms it amplifies, it is an act of deception and hyperbole amounting to something like fraud, promising consumers an easy fix (Easy credit! Get rich quick! Sex appeal in a pill! Eternal youth in a cream or procedure! Confidence in any situation by attending my self-esteem seminar! An end to climate change that doesn't demand any changes from you!) for what is always in fact the parochial profit-taking of a con artist -- whether it is a huckster peddling a balding cure on a three am infomercial or an imperialist power peddling flashy industrial development loans followed by debt-restructuring forcing austerity on an over-exploited (they call it "under-developed," natch) nation.

The serious student of futurological discourse will notice the regularity with which the plausibility of futurological scam artistry depends here as elsewhere on a deft incessant switching between the quotidian and the fantastic:

* Advocates of good old fashioned serially-failed artificial intelligence as well as Singularitarian Robot Cultists who amplify AI advocacy into a techno-transcendental wish-fulfillment fantasy of coding a history-ending super-intelligent Robot God will, in the face of skepticism or criticism or momentary instrusions of sense, retreat from their ecstasies into talk familiar to anybody who works on network security issues or who strives to make software more user-friendly. Needless to say, nobody has to join a Robot Cult to work on network security issues or make software more user friendly -- which is why almost nobody in the whole world ever does -- but neither is there any reason at all to fancy that one can get from network security or user-friendly software to coding a history-shattering super-Dad who solves all our problems for us, unless one is the sort of person who already desperately wants to arrive at the latter outcome and won't take no for an answer.

* Advocates of Drexlerian nanotechnology who dream of creating self-replicating, universally programmable, nanobots that can assemble cheap ubiquitous materials into treasure, reliably and stably at room temperature, possibly via a desktop device combining a desktop computer and a microwave oven into a Star Trek replicator, or possibly via a diffuse responsive nanobotic Utility Fog combining virtual reality and an input interface, say, a wand, into Hogwarts magic (without the Five Principal Exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration to hold it back), indulging in a techno-transcendental wish-fulfillment fantasy of overcoming the impasse of stakeholder politics politics via cheap effortless superabundance -- a commonplace postwar futurological fantasy that already drove idiotic dreams of redemptive nuclear power too cheap to meter, "I have one word for you -- plastic," virtual reality in the irrational exuberance of the dot.bomb, the current 3D printing mania, and on and on -- will, in the face of skepticism or criticism or momentary intrusions of sense, retreat from their ecstasies into talk familiar to anybody who works in biochemistry or materials science or micro-sensors, or they will rhapsodize about the biological cell as an "existence proof" of the nanobot. Needless to say, nobody has to join a Robot Cult to work in biochemistry or materials science or microsensors -- which is why almost nobody in the whole world ever does -- but neither is there any reason at all to fancy that one can get from a biological cell to a self-replicating, universally programmable, reliable and stable at room temperature nanobotic swarm that can turn crap into treasure beyond the dreams of avarice, unless one is the sort of person who already desperately wants to arrive at the latter outcome and won't take no for an answer.

* Advocates of techno-immortalism who dream of transcending death via "enhancement" medicine, Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence (it just makes SENS!), cryonics, or the uploading of their "info-selves" into cyberspatial heaven (techno-immortalists tend to advocate more than one of these techno-transcendental wish-fulfillment fantasies at once, often in tandem with others I have already mentioned, since most Robot Cultists think nanobots are indispensable to cryonic resurrection schemes and superintelligent Robot Gods indispensable to heavenly cyberspatial uploading schemes), will, in the face of skepticism, criticism, or momentary intrusions of sense, retreat from their ecstasies and propose that "life-extension" is really just medicine since healthcare always extends life; that engineering immortality is really just like muscle car hobbyists incessantly tinkering to keep their beloved heaps indefinitely on the road; that the medium-term cryopreservation of some organs facilitating transplantation operations "implies" that frozen or vitrified hamburgerized brains will one day be nanobotically resurrected as comic book superhero bodies or "migrated" into cyber-angelic avatars; that a sufficiently advanced scan of your brain is really "you," presumably just like any representation of you already is really approximately "you" somehow (yeah, that one doesn't make sense at any level, but that's what these Robot Cultists believe), and so on. Needless to say, nobody has to join a Robot Cult to work in the medical profession or real medical research or advocate for access to healthcare, clean water, or food security -- which is why almost nobody in the whole world ever does -- and it really isn't true that real medicine is extending life expectancy, since most increases in that statistical measure arise from improvements in prenatal care and infant mortality and tinkering around the edges of advances in the treatment of cardiovascular disease, and the people who live longest now are not living any longer than those who lived longest in the past already did; and it isn't really true that hobbyists manage to keep most human-made gizmos working as long as human lives are lived, in fact most of our artifacts are wasted, disposable, obsolete before their usefulness runs out, destined for landfill, and anyway almost none of the knowledge that enables us to maintain one kind of artifact in good shape tells us much of anything about the knowledge that would enable us, if anything would, to keep any other kind of artifact in good shape; and it isn't really true that the short-term cryopreservation of some organs implies that the unknown electrochemical dispositions of brains and bodies that render us intelligibly "selved" can likewise be thusly so preserved, let alone revived, let alone eternalized; and materialism demands we grant that the material form in which information or even intelligence is actually incarnated is not negligible but essential to its form, and hence there can be no "migration" without loss of form from one materialization to another, and in any case nobody in their right mind ever believed that a picture of you was actually you in the first place, unless one is the sort of person who already desperately wants to arrive at the latter outcome and won't take no for an answer.

The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Regular readers of Amor Mundi will no doubt ruefully attest that I spend lots of my time doing just that. But suffice it to say that the dream of "geo-engineering" advocates that those elite-incumbent corporate-military interests that parochially profited from polluting our world quite to the brink of utter desolation will profit just as much from cleaning up the mess they made, that complacent consumers who acquiesced to this devastation can continue on in their consumption and acquiescence without any cost to themselves, that the very brute insensate industrial-extractive planetary war-making that unleashed destruction on the world can now magically heal it, however appealing that may be to your sense of style, to your sense of entitlement, to your sense of righteousness has nothing in the way of actual sense or science to recommend it. And, no, retreating back to a glib "existence proof" identifying "geo-engineering" with "gardening" -- however predictable that is as futurological gambits go -- does nothing to make the case a more plausible one or a less dangerous one.

Robot Cultist Battles Luddite Scourge With Fag Jokes And Unspecified "Schemata"

You may recall that I responded to the accusation in comments that I am a "Luddite" by reminding my readers yesterday of a little history:

The accusations and fears expressed by the historical Luddites turned out to be true, and the consequences of their failure exactly as devastating as they expected. Also, these Luddites actually used plenty of technologies that suited their purposes while simply very reasonably disapproving the disruptive impacts of deliberate elite-incumbent deployments of certain technologies. As often happens in discussions among pop-tech enthusiasts about "attitudes toward technology," the notion of technology here is displacing a more relevant but demanding discussion of a complicated, historically situated, social conflict. Your "Luddite" epithet is, as usual, both specifically ignorant but also expresses a dangerously facile attitude toward the substance of technodevelopmental class struggle.

Sputtering in retaliation my critic, one "Milton4ever" responded thus:

Yepp, that's a lot of words, alright. I brought up that subject because it always struck me as fucking ludicrous to include it as a point in your denunciation of us so-called "techno-fetishist-triumphalist cornucopiast fanboy Objectivists" or whatever. Today's everyday life is fucking paradise in comparison to that of Ludd's time and only because it grew on the fertile soil of the industrialized world's surprlus production. You can check that by, oh, reading every economics textbook ever written. So we did good by not smashing all those machines, wouldn't you say? You know, I'm an engineer, I'm one of those guys keeping your cum-filled ass comfortable, and as such I think in definite sums and schemata. So if you can't provide any hard numbers, any solid studies, any tangible evidence showing a correlation between automation and your vague mass unemployment or ominous "devastation", I can't help but note that you're just a regressive platitudinarian who hides behind empty, obscurantist verbiage. Well, where is your evidence?

I thought my readers might find my reply edifying, and so I am upgrading it from the Moot.

that's a lot of words, alright

That single paragraph seemed daunting to you? How disappointing. Some sooper-genius you turned out to be.

everyday life is fucking paradise in comparison to that of Ludd's time and only because it grew on the fertile soil of the industrialized world's surprlus production. You can check that by, oh, reading every economics textbook ever written. So we did good by not smashing all those machines

Needless to say, the Luddites didn't live in the future we call the present, they lived in a present devastated by specific developments they understood very well. You imply that only through the destruction of their lives then could we have come to live now in the comparative comfort that we do, completely indifferent to the possibility that technodevelopment might have proceeded instead in a way that benefited all the stakeholders to its changes then (welfare support and job training for the displaced, actual shares in the new enterprises, reforms that arrived generations later in part because of society's eventual acquaintance with pointless tragedies such as the Luddite example) while still leading us to the presumably better world we live in now -- let alone the possibility of an even better, fairer, freer world than we do. By the way, it isn't actually true that everybody in our present world lives the life of comfort you seem to take for granted. I would say that was beside the specific point at issue in our exchange here, if it weren't for the fact that the lesson of the Luddites in their time speaks very directly to that very circumstance in our own.

I'm an engineer, I'm one of those guys keeping your cum-filled ass comfortable

The voice of "The Future," ladies and gentlemen.

you're just a regressive platitudinarian who hides behind empty, obscurantist verbiage

Who farted?