Top Ten Posts for 2013

10. p2p is EITHER Pay-to-Peer OR it is Peers-to-Precarity, originally published March 23.
9. "Driverless Cars" As Dead-Ender Car Culture Apologia, originally published January 7.
8. Darkest Before the Dawn, originally published October 2.
7. A Robot God Apostle's Creed for the "Less Wrong" Throng, originally published January 26.
6. Tim O'Reilly on "The Golden Age", originally published January 23.
5. Why Does Tim Wu Side With the Technoblatherers? , originally published April 13.
4. It's Time To Fight Some More Culture Wars: Abortion, Guns, Climate Change, originally published September 13.
3. Our Civil War, Like Our Revolution, Rages On, originally published October 19.
2. Deception, Delusion, and Denial Isn't Optimism, originally published January 2 (a rather vapid post it seems to me, but leading to one of the more heated zig-zaggy Moots in a while).
1. Sermon on Mont Pelerin: Or, Why It Is Better to Read Political Positions Rhetorically Not Philosophically, originally published November 29.

Special Mention: I devoted nearly as much time to microblogging as to longform blogging this year, and sometimes I culled tweets from longer pieces, and sometimes a string of tweets got plumped into a longform post, and sometimes even stranger chimerical forms emerged. This gnomic oddball was one of my favorites: A Twitter Privacy Treatise, originally published September 14.

It's Not That The Luddites Will Take Your Magic Toys, It's That Magic Isn't Real

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, where "kurt9" declares:

All of this transhumanist technology is being developed by private parties using private money. This is especially true for the life extension and cryonics stuff. If we are able to develop this technology on our own, using our own resources, why do we need to get the consent of those who do not share our objects? Or even discuss it with such parties at all? We can simply develop it on our own independent of the attitudes of those who do not share our objectives. I find these kind of "debate" and discussions to be pointless.

Let's dig in, shall we?

All of this transhumanist technology is being developed by private parties using private money. This is especially true for the life extension and cryonics stuff.

Actually, no it isn't. It really isn't. "Uploading," for one, isn't even a coherent ambition (you are not a picture of you, and no computer is eternal), and the trumpeted genetic/ pharmaceutical/ prosthetic proposals are nothing but loose talk for the rubes. In the post to which you are responding I said that no medical breakthroughs will increase the average adult life expectancy in the notional democracies by so much as five years in the next ten years -- and most probably the next 25 years. Expectations of imminent breakthroughs leapfrogging you into centuries-long sexy lifespans are simply arrant nonsense. Take a look at adult life expectancy at age 65 over the last twenty-five years (years, mind you, of! accelerating! change! in the midst of the internet boom new economy boom biotech boom extropian boom). You can stamp your foot if you like but I'm fifty and I've been following futurologists and transhumanoids for thirty, this ain't my first time at the rodeo. Of course, medical research is a good thing and one hopes some good therapies and cures are indeed under development to ameliorate suffering and disease -- as I say, providing universal access to healthcare, clean water, basic support would free billions of lives to contribute to shared problem-solving and creative expression. I daresay you should know better about all the silly Robot Cult stuff when it still hasn't panned out in a decade and yet the promises remain exactly the same and exactly as fervent as a sales pitch.

why do we need to get the consent of those who do not share our objects?

You can join any cult you want to, dear "kurt9." And once you're dead it is a matter of indifference to me whether your corpse is buried, cremated, mummified, compressed into a diamond, shot into orbit, or your hamburgerized brain wrapped in foil and dropped into dry ice for Randian sociopaths to watch over in a desert. If you want to be resurrected in a sexy robot body that can do Hogwarts magic with nanofog or you want to be uploaded as a cyberangel in Holodeck Heaven I can't say that is stranger by far than the faiths billions of other people espouse. As a cheerful atheist I find these idiosyncrasies charming to the extent that they do not function as rationales for reactionary politics. Of course, if fraudulent claims are being made, they should be prosecuted, and if ridiculous claims are being made, they should be ridiculed, if reactionary claims are made, they should be exposed by good people of good will lest they harm anyone.

Or even discuss it with such parties at all?

I invite discussion but certainly am in no position to demand it or to censor it. You seemed to want to say something, and here you are saying it. I say what I want, too. It's not a bad arrangement.

We can simply develop it on our own independent of the attitudes of those who do not share our objectives.

You are not an island, and neither science nor discourse more generally are solitary endeavors. It is true that transhumanoids and singularitarians often pine in public places for a separatist enclave to retreat to -- a private island, an oil platform paradise city, a dome under the sea, a secret lab in the asteroid belt. I daresay it is no easy thing to want "technology" to enable you to live forever on a treasure pile under the ministrations of a kindly parental Robot God or whatever when all the actually knowledgeable scientists say you can't and most people know better the difference between scientific communities and science fiction fandoms.

I find these kind of "debate" and discussions to be pointless.

I don't doubt it. True Believers always do. But I tell you earnestly that you will not find techno-transcendence in Robototalism, via Robot God, Robot Bodies, Nanobotic Magic, or the rest... not because your evil luddite foes don't believe in "The Future" with their whole hearts like you do, but quite simply because magic isn't real. Science and science fiction are both marvelous, but don't get it twisted, my friend.

The Funhouse Mirror Has Two Faces: Transhumanists and Bioconservatives on Robototalism

Futurity cannot be delineated but only lived, in serial presents attesting always unpredictably to struggle and to expression. "The Future," to the contrary, brandishing the shackle of its definite article, is always described from a parochial present and is always a funhouse mirror reflecting a parochial present back to itself, amplifying its desires and fears, confirming its prejudices, reassuring its Believers that the Key to History is in their hands. -- Futurological Brickbats

Two pieces on "transhumanism" have attracted a lot of interest this week, or at any rate exhortations to click links on my twitter feed, one of them written a couple of days ago, the other written a couple of years ago. One piece, by Frances Martel, is entitled Defying Human Nature One Cyborg Limb At A Time, the other, by Rebecca Taylor, is entitled Transhumanism Turns People Into Slaves to Technology.

The juxtaposition of titles seems to stage a confrontation, and it is true that one piece is mostly celebratory in tone, the other alarmist. But what strikes me as most interesting about the pairing is what they have in common: in order to take transhumanism seriously enough in the first place to find it worthy of celebration or of alarm both authors must first disdain actually-existing medical and material and computational techniques and their actually-urgent quandaries in the real world, the better to focus on entirely imaginary "technologies" and then to elicit from their conjuration entirely symptomatic wish-fulfillment fantasies and existential dread.

Not incidentally, both of the pieces arrive from right-wing reactionary precincts -- Martel's celebration was published by the notorious Breitbart scandal and conspiracy sheet, Taylor's by "LifeNews," a forced-pregnancy advocacy and woman's healthcare denialist site. This is not an accident -- to engage critically and factually with actually-existing techniques and the urgency of stakes associated with the inequitable distribution of their costs, risks, and benefits would inevitably take us to left-wing progressive precincts.

The first paragraph of Frances Martel's article immediately and insistently lodges her account in the fantastic:

The past few years have seen a surging interest in the international scientific movement to "help end human death." It fears no mechanics and abhors the imperfections of the human body. Transhumanism is snowballing into an international movement aggressively defying human nature and embracing machines.

To begin where Martel begins, let me just insist at the outset that if we are talking about self-identified "transhumanists" and "singularitarians" who think they are part of a techno-transcendental movement sweeping the world, then we need to take assertions about "surging interest" and a "snowballing… international movement" with a grain of salt. Transhumanism remains as it was twenty or forty years ago (depending on whether you want to treat Ettinger's Cryonics Institute, O'Neill's L5 Society, Negroponte's Media Lab, or More's Extropy Institute as the superlative futurological locus classicus) now as ever a minute, marginal, minority subculture or fandom that is indicatively white, male, elite, incumbent. Given the simplification and drama of their distinctive framings of complex technodevelopmental questions for a technoscientifically illiterate, gizmo-fetishizing consumer culture already prone to invest the "technological" with fantasies of superabundance and omnipotence as well as with nightmares of apocalypse and impotence, it has always been the case and remains true today that transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, and the other futurist sects of the Robot Cult have attracted considerably greater media attention than the substance of their claims or their (lack of) credentials would ever warrant otherwise.

Setting that aside, though, it is also true that extreme, marginal, defensive futurological subcultures exist in the context of more prevailing neoliberal/neoconservative consumerist, developmentalist, extractive-industrialist norms and forms suffused with promises of techno-fixes, denials of limits, assumptions about the necessity of performance enhancement, not to mention the pretense of agreement as to what such enhancement consists of. It is for this reason that I am one of these people myself who devotes more attention to transhumanists than they deserve on the merits: This is simply because I regard them as clarifying in their extremity of the absurdity of more prevailing reactionary attitudes (okay, they are also hilarious, and the pure pleasure of it another reason to poke at them). I am not sure that Martel would justify her own interest in transhumanist on comparable grounds -- but instead celebrating as a conservative, say, more prevailing reductive, eugenic, polluting, immiserating technocratic elitisms through celebration of their extreme transhumanist forms where I regard the relation more as a useful reductio ad absurdum.

Beyond this quibble, let me turn to some deeper conceptual difficulties that are already evident in these few opening sentences. To declare that transhumanists are "defying human nature [by] embracing machines" seems for one thing to assume that machines defy rather than express nature when of course they depend on an understanding of the natural world to work at all; and for another thing seems to assume that language-using, tool-making, clothes-wearing, body-training, ground-cultivating, shelter-making, culture-articulating humans defy rather than express their own nature in taking up and taking on prostheses. This arrant absurdity depends for its plausibility and force in fact on Martel's selective fetishization of very particular artifacts and techniques, real and imagined -- computation freighted with omniscience, enhancement freighted with omnipotence, petro/digi/nano/fabbing techniques promising superabundance and hence freighted with post-historical post-political omnibenevolence -- as what we mean by "machines" while denying to most of the field of existing, familiar, assimilated, emerging, fraught artifice and technique the designation "machine" at all.

To declare as Martel does that transhumanism, "fears no mechanics," leaves the important question open, surely, whether or not transhumanists fear any dangerous, violent, exploitative deployments of "mechanics" -- as well as the question whether perhaps a focus on the so-called "nature of mechanics" functions to disavow or distract attention from more urgent political questions of who accesses and controls "mechanics" and to what ends. Likewise, to declare as Martel does that transhumanism "abhors the imperfections of the human body," leaves the important question open, surely, whether or not transhumanists are in a position to dictate what the imperfections of the human body are and in the service of which particular ends should some bodies be treated or made more perfect -- as well as the question whether perhaps a focus on the so-called technical perfectability of the body functions to disavow or distract attention from the fact that agreement does not exist about what human lifeways are and can be treated as legible, liveable, valuable, indispensable, flourishing.

"For transhumanists," writes Martel, "it is simply unethical to have the technology to permanently avoid death and not use it." But does it matter ethically that "the technology to permanently avoid death" does not exist to use, does not even remotely approach real availability for such use? Faith-based futurologists will start sputtering and handwaving at this point about genetic therapies and nanomachines and uploading their minds into Holodeck Heaven and all the rest. They will start citing loose pop-journalist talk and wildly extrapolate from pet press releases from austerity-starved research labs and soap-bubble tech companies, they will declare the "logical compatibility" of their sooper-tech daydreams with known physical laws, whatever our ignorance, whatever our available resources, whatever the costs, whatever the alternate priorities, whatever the distance from existing norms and forms, they will declare my realism and skepticism "anti-science" "luddism" and their own faith-based credulity and hyperbole the championing of "science" and "reason," and on and on and on. But the fact is that not only are none of these superlative techniques actually imminent and, face it, not even sufficiently proximate in the real-world developmental pipeline to enter into personal decision-making or public policymaking at all, but, not to put too fine a point on it: there is not a single therapeutic technique under research or in development the arrival of which in the next decade, or likely within even the coming quarter century, that will increase by as much as five years the average life expectancy of adults in the North Atlantic notional democracies.

Let me amplify the point: not only is it ethically nonsensical to declare "unethical" not using technologies that do not even exist for us to use, I will also say it is flatly unethical to discuss the ethics of imaginary technology at the cost of discussing real technoscience. There are no more urgent ethical dilemmas in the real world than the denial of universal access to basic healthcare in wealthy nations, than the banning of contraception, abortion, and assistive reproductive techniques to women around the world, than the neglect of treatable medical, nutritional, hygienic conditions in the overexploited regions of the world. What Mike Davis said fifteen years ago is as true as ever: access to clean water should be considered the most potent miracle drug on earth. These are the ethical and political discussions we are not having when we are discussing genetic superhuman and digital immortalization -- although, no doubt the latter discussions may best be understood as distorted allegories or symptomatic disavowals of these very real questions and their urgencies.

When Martel describes the transhumanist "movement" -- quoting the cynical self-descriptive vacuity of stealth robot-cult think-tank IEET -- as "creative and ethical use of technology to better the human condition" it is notable that neither creative nor ethical nor better human uses are defined. To do so would immediately reveal the eugenicism and reductivism and techno-triumphalism driving transhumanoid norms. Nor is there any indication in the formulation that none of the "technology" IEET happens actually to be preoccupied with the use of actually exists. To do so would immediately reveal the hyperbole and wish-fulfillment fantasizing driving transhumanoid forms. But it is also worth noting that nobody has to join a Robot Cult (and, indeed, almost nobody ever has) in order to approve the creative and ethical use of actually-available and actually-emerging artifice and techniques, and that if one is looking for actual education, agitation, subsidization, incentivization, legislation based on substantial and relevant definitions of the key terms in that formulation one should certainly look to more mainstream, progressive healthcare advocacy and science advocacy organizations and actually constituted academic disciplines like science and technology studies (STS) and environmental justice criticism (EJC) rather than futurological PR or futurist sub(cult)ural fandoms.

Rebecca Taylor's piece devotes most of its attention to transhumanist tropes and conceits playing out in video games, and if anything this makes the paradoxical address of healthcare realities through the lens of imaginary objects, speculation, projection, hyperbole even more conspicuous in her account than the futurological scenario spinning on which Martel depends. Taylor describes the game "Deus Ex" as transhumanist agitprop -- which is fair enough, I agree -- declaring it a "hard sell for using technology to replace normal body parts augmenting healthy humans beyond normal human abilities." Once again, this critique presumes that what presently count as human bodily norms are not themselves historically-situated, culturally-articulated, prosthetically-elaborated. If transhumanist "enhancement" discourse pretends to know in advance what counts for all as better, optimal, capacious lifeways, in no small part through recourse to an imaginary ideal superior post-human being with which they identify (at the cost, mind you, of threatened dis-identification with existing human lifeway diversity), it is crucial to recognize that bioconservative "preservationist" discourse pretends to know the same, again in no small part through recourse to an equally imaginary ideal normal natural-human with which they identify (once again, at the cost, mind you, of threatened dis-identification with existing lifeway diversity).

"Transhumanism is super seductive," writes Taylor. "And yet the reality will be far from what is depicted" in games like "Deus Ex." It is interesting to pause for a moment -- what exactly is one "seduced" into by this "transhumanism"? Since regenerative/rejuvenation medicine doesn't exist to deliver added centuries of model-sexy youth to lifespans aren't actually available, since uploading our minds as cyberangel avatars in Holodeck Heaven isn't actually available, since there are no designer bodies or babies or clone armies or Harryhausen talking chimeras anywhere nor will there be anytime soon -- what exactly are we being seduced into by transhumanism? As I said before, there are dangers in being seduced into discussing these imaginary outcomes rather than real perplexities, but it seems to me that Taylor is contributing to this danger rather than ameliorating it: When Taylor warns that "the reality will be far from… [the] depict[ion]" she is describing these hyperbolized unreal outcomes themselves as dangerous and worthy of our discussion in their danger, just as Martel seems to regard these hyperbolized unreal outcomes themselves as marvelous and worthy of our discussion for their marvels.

"Once people begin to augment," writes Taylor, "others will feel compelled to do the same, removing perfectly good eyes, ears, limbs and replacing them just to be able to keep up. At this point transhumanism will make man a slave to the technology he creates." To the extent that humans have always been thoroughly linguistic, accultured, prostheticized beings it is in fact profoundly obfuscatory to declare that transhuman fancies, of all things, would inaugurate human "augmentation," and serves to naturalize the contingent norms through which bodies and lives are presently naturalized and abjected in ways that are open to and suitable for contestation. There is indeed quite a lot to be said for the worry that dangerous performance enhancing drugs in the context of organized sport or that profoundly limiting forms of pedagogy in the service of presumably objective standardized measures of performance caught up in a pernicious and parochial logic of competitiveness do enormous harm. There is also a lot to be said about the misinformation, exploitation, and threat of harm associated with actually existing medical techniques in the context of profound inequity and precarity, from organ and egg harvestation, sibling donorship, paid surrogacy to medical treatments made unavailable by intellectual property regimes and made available through misleading advertising. Taylor declares: "I want to applaud the behind-the-scenes creators of these make-believe jaunts into the future of human enhancements. They really do understand what is at stake: our humanity." Note the collapse of "make-believe jaunts" into predictions of real-world futures. If only such hyperbolic projections get at the technoconstitution of "our humanity" then are we to assume that I would be wrong to focus instead, as I do, on the inequitable distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of the effects of real-world technoscientific change on the actual lifeway diversity of humanity? Once again, for me there is a real question whether what is worst about articles on transhumanism like Taylor's and Martel's is that they distract us from actually-real actually-urgent medical and environmental and technoscience quandaries, or that they are actually symptomatic reactions and loose allegorical treatments of these quandaries that distort our understanding of their stakes and problems by deranging our factual understanding of their capacities and investing them with irrational fears and fantasies. But for me there is no question that they do little good.

Deus Ex Machina: The Three Climate Denialisms

Tim Donovan in Salon:

I’m no climatologist, but serious scientists with academic and professional bona fides have been voicing their extreme, sober concerns for my entire life. When scientific consensus is strong and widely acknowledged, I defer to it in matters of science. Climate change is no exception. But global warming (as it was called when I was a kid) seemed enormously far off, an abstraction, just one of many Big Problems that humanity would eventually be forced to confront. And even if the problem was unfathomably large, our technological solutions, our deus ex machinas, would themselves be unfathomably powerful. A lot of intelligent people still seem to think this way... I’ve [been] immersed in sobering research that’s only further deepened my understanding of the enormous danger, severity and proximity of our onrushing climate disaster -- I’ve confronted an insistent, almost desperate deus ex machina argument time and again. Technology, I’ve been repeatedly told, will save us from our oncoming ecological apocalypse, and if it can’t, did we really stand a chance in surviving our most destructive impulses in the first place?

It seems to me that there are three key denialisms that shape our ongoing collective failure to address our shared environmental problems. Donovan's quotation above alludes to all three. First, there is climate change denialism as it is conventionally discussed, as the factual denial of the overwhelming consensus of relevant scientists about the reality of global warming and resource descent. Second, there is climate change denialism in a temporal form, by which I do not mean simply another factual denial about the pace of warming or resource depletion or waste, but more the projection of the reality of climate catastrophe onto a distant -- or at any rate distant enough -- future, rather than grasping the urgent presence of environmental crises. Third, there is what I call democratic denialism, the refusal to accept the ineradicably political character of any adequate address of environmental problems, often facilitated by the embrace of market-based fantasies and boutique "green" consumer fandoms or by futurological "technofixes." I have been teaching courses on environmental issues, politics, rhetoric, and cultures in Berkeley and in the City pretty much every year for over a decade now, and though many of the students drawn to these courses in the first place tend to have high levels of awareness and interest in these issues, I find all three forms of denialism playing out in great force in students. I can only imagine their prevalence more generally among the insulated, stressed out, consumer-fixated, conformist narcissists in the mass-mediated extractive-industrial-petrochemical societies doing most of the damage here and now.

The first denialism, the factual one, seems to me to derive from the transformation of environmental issues from policy questions into culture clashes. I believe that this crisis is a cynically engineered one: delaying environmental legislation and education and incentives for sustainable practices is parochially profitable in the short term to key plutocratic incumbent interests, and hence they have deployed the anti-academic archipelago of think-tanks and media outlets to misinform the public but also to mobilize resentments and insecurities that displace environmental issues from a policy terrain onto the terrain of identity politics. This strategy was ready-to-hand, inasmuch as Movement Republicanism in the aftermath of the New Deal and Great Society has depended for a generation on mobilizing white-racist resentments and sexed-gendered patriarchal anxieties to create popular majorities for corporate-military policies that benefited plutocratic minorities at the expense of those majorities. It does not matter that many (although not all) of the key authors of this strategy probably "know better" than to believe that climate scientists are really engaging in some kind of great hoax to impose socialism or fascism and destroy "our freedom" for whatever paranoid reason is fashionable at the moment. It is crucial to grasp that this is not a clash over the affirmation versus the denial of certain facts, so much as a clash over the mode of fact relevant to the question at hand. The questions whether carbon pollution is raising global temperatures and whether rising temperatures have trackable predictable impacts on oceanic and atmospheric conditions are of course factual questions, but disputes over these facts are functioning less as ways to get at demonstrable/fasifiable facts of the matter so much as ways to performatively demonstrate cultural identity. The questions whether I am a good conservative, whether I believe in liberty, whether I am resisting the erosion of traditional values without which the good life is not possible are also factual questions, after all -- and the kinds of facts in question are radically different from one another. The methodological warrant of scientific facts and the performative testimonies to facts of identity are substantiated differently, their contestation is adjudicated by different sorts of authorities, which make recourse in turn to different forms of expertise. When the public site of deliberation over least harmful or most sustainable outcomes becomes instead a site through which members of defensive subcultures signal the reality and fervency of their membership to one another what is happening is not so much a general crisis of "truth" or "expertise" but a clash over the mode of belief and therefore the mode of reasonable warrant through which competing claims over best candidates for belief are to be adjudicated in the first place.

The next point to consider is that the problems of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change and resource descent induced and exacerbated by carbon pollution, industrial agriculture, toxic materials, wasteful over-consumption are not problems for a distant future. Environmentalism isn't predicting catastrophe in the future. That future is now. Storm damage, extreme weather casualties, exploding rates of respiratory and other ailments linked to pollution, climate refugees in the over-exploited regions of the worlds (the regions North Atlantic financiers like to call "underdeveloped"), rising freshwater scarcity conflicts, expanding pandemic vectors, species diversity loss, topsoil loss, resilience loss, and decreasing yields from the "green revolution" con of stealthy high-energy input-intensive industrial petro-monocultural farming practices, massive deforestation, vanishing and salinating aquifers near desert cities are all shaping the politics of nations and lives of millions right now. The threat isn't that your grandchildren may be killed in the death throes of a poisoned planet, the threat is killing and spoiling the lives of grandchildren and grandparents right now: And while these may not be your own grandchildren or grandparents they do share the world in this unrepeatable moment with you, they do have the same standing and right to life that you do, they do have knowledges and capacities that could serve your shared interests but are stolen from you in their distress. Those who say environmental catastrophe "won't happen" are really saying they think it "won't happen" to people like them, and that they don't care about the people "over there" it does happen to. And while they project their selfish delusive disinterest onto the future the fact is that they are actually indicating their disdain for the unnecessary suffering and death happening in the world right now, right this minute in our shared environmental crises. As happens so often, the displacement of concern from the palpable present onto the imagined future, matters first of all as the displacement of ethical concern from the lived diversity of our peers onto a cramped parochial moralism concerned with the prevalence of a homogeneous subculture or class.

This second, temporal, denialism -- this displacement of concern from palpable presence onto projected futures -- is enacting a very familiar futurological operation (I've spent years elaborating it). It is no surprise that this futurological discourse generates techno-fixated symptoms in particular. This leads to the third denialism, what I am calling democratic denialism. Chris Mooney, for one, has described this move of mine as simply weird, but I continue to persevere in making it even so. Rather than focus on factual questions whether this particular infrastructural investment or that particular remediation strategy should be a policy priority given its likely impacts, I am trying to draw attention to the fact that so often so-called "bright green" "natural capitalist" "green consumer" "neoliberal developmentalist" "viridian" "technocratic" "geo-engineering" environmental discourses foregrounding promises of technical solutions to environmental problems arriving from underspecified entrepreneurial innovations and technocratic tinkering do so in a way that tends to circumvent democratic political processes, either out of despair for their efficacy given government dysfunction in the face of the urgency of these problems or out of a reactionary disdain for democracy in the service of plutocratic and other incumbent interests (and in my view libertarian commitments, even the insistently left varieties, always amount in substance to reactionary apologiae for incumbency).

It isn't an accident that neoliberal and technocratic environmentalists stress that solar panels and energy efficient appliances can preserve contemporary consumer lifestyles intact and that rising demand will lower costs of that preservation to negligibility -- even if there is no evidence at all that our wasteful restless consumption can be made sustainable any more than it can be shown to actually yield satisfaction in the lives of those devoted to it. It isn't an accident that masturbatory megascale cartoon fantasies of the geo-engineers are usually framed as the "Plan B" for when politics fails -- even if there is no explanation how one could choose among conflicting projects, adjudicate conflicting claims about the impacts of these projects on one another, let alone reliably fund, oversee, maintain, equitably distribute costs, risks, as well as benefits of such projects without depending on the very politics the failure of which presumably justifies them.

I have said that "geo-engineering" futurology is premised on a profoundly alienated vantage on the earth as an extra-terrestrial world to be techno-terraformed, and that only such an alienated vantage could inspire the fantasy that the very same short-term parochial profiteering brute-force industrialism that is destroying the planet before our eyes will somehow save the planet before it's too late -- but what the superlative futuristic techno-transcendence of the "geo-engineers" shares with more prevailing corporate-military developmentalist futurology is the disdain for democratic stakeholder politics. While it is catastrophically true that our notionally representative political systems have been tragically paralyzed in the face of the single most urgent political problem of our time, anthropogenic climate change and resource descent, this truth unfortunately has no bearing on the truth that only through the collective problem solving agency of government legislation and public investment can we be equal to this most urgent political problem of our time anyway. It is not true that technofixes can seamlessly rewrite contemporary infrastructural affordances and contemporary lifeways into sustainability -- living in cities that are zoned for walkability and bikeability without food deserts and with people living near their workplaces will be living differently than we do now; living in more modest-scaled homes with porches, attic fans, geothermal pumps, solar roofs, food gardens and local-ecosystemic landscaping instead of lawns will be living differently than we do now; subsidizing local, organic, soil enriching, polyculture farming and dis-incentivizing ruinously costly and destructive high-energy input-intensive petrochemical farming producing cheap corpse-food and corn-food will change the way we live now. Democratically accountable and responsive political processes will be indispensable to the recreation of a planetary civilization that is sustainable -- not least because to be sustainable civilization must also be more equitable and more diverse. It is not true that our politics have failed to take up the definitive environmental crises of our time -- but only that our politics are failing and that they are going to keep on failing right up to the point when they stop failing, else we simply will fail utterly.

Again, my critique of techno-fixes and geo-engineering is not primarily a dispute over factual claims about the plausibility or efficacy of particular "technological" proposals -- one should judge individual proposals on their merits, whether they are proposals to invest in a new infrastructural affordance or proposals to reform a law or proposals to incentivize a practice -- but a dispute over the assumptions and aspirations of environmental discourse in a mode that is technofixated in a way that distracts from or deranges the democratic politics of any realistic environmentalist effort. So, too, my critique of the futuristic horizon of the environmental imaginary is that it displaces our awareness of the environmental problems and crimes we share in the present -- in no small part enabling the a-political and anti-political politics of technofixation in the first place -- but this is not primarily a dispute over the pace and range of environmental forces and possibilities for their melioration. Even the most apparently factual dispute over the reality of anthropogenic climate change as such seems to me to be at core a dispute over the kinds of belief brought into question by environmental claims, a dispute over the kinds of authority and the kinds warrants relevant to those beliefs. This is not to deny the factual reality of the consensus of relevant scientists that anthropogenic climate change is indeed urgent as are various crises of resource descent -- but it is to emphasize the discursive formations enabling the denial both of that factual reality and any collective address equal to that reality. That environmental problems are the occasion for public policy and public investment more than an occasion for performances of defensive selfhood and subcultural signaling, that these are problems of the ongoing and emerging present and not for "The Future," and that these are political problems that demand political solutions that cannot be circumvented by technological innovation, parochial profit-taking, or retreats into armed or otherwise delusive separatisms -- these are conflicts that set the stage for the ways in which factual disputes come to be adjudicated as such.

Humanitas and Our Animal Selves/Others

From the Moot to a post written a few years back, "The Future" on the Planet of the Apes, on the topic of "animal uplift," a reader, "Collin" (hey, that's my brother's name! Is Collin a regular reader? I can't think he would be happy with his brother's socialist screeds very much!) raised a few salient points. I haven't written on vegetarianism and animal rights topics for a while, so here's the exchange as a change of pace. Follow the link for "Collin"'s whole criticism, I am quoting only those bits that occasioned a response. "Collin" is italicized, my responses interpresed.

I notice you put scare quotes around "species", as if humanity was something else. No. Humanity has been a distinct and completely isolated species for many thousands of years.

Homo sapiens is a species, "humanity," originating in the Roman humanitas, has always been a civilizational ideal, famously Cicero's ideal orator, and eventually the ground for a presumably universalizing humanism that, historically speaking, one cannot help noticing was never extended to all human beings and tended to amount to entitlements and accomplishments enjoyed by minorities but enabled by the efforts of majorities excluded from that enjoyment.

No value, good or bad, positive or negative, can be placed on any other species, because value itself is a peculiarity of human thought.

It is not only human animals who communicate desires and testify to pleasures and pains on terms that are intelligible to humans, and the peculiarities of human values (plural, not singular, mind you) are so regularly invested in non-humans -- artifacts, ideals, natural phenomena -- that I cannot make sense of your claim, and assume you are stipulating definitions here in ways that are strange to me.

And the framing of anti-bigotry as inclusiveness, rather than dignity, is, and has always been, a mockery.

I do not agree that the attribution of dignity to a being and the inclusion of a being in the set of those who have moral standing are antithetical frames. We share the world with nonhuman animals as well as human ones, and the nonhuman ones are among those who contribute to our sense of the furniture of the world and our sense of flourishing in the world. In another rather early essay, Animal Rites I say more about the political implications of our animal selves/others.

Whatever our differences, you can be sure that my position is not intended as a mockery.

The Planetary Is Political

I am of course an enthusiastic advocate for vast public investment in renewable energy and transportation infrastructure, not least because it would stimulate the economy, but I am also well aware that renewable energy technologies (in which I do not include nuclear power, and neither should you) cannot in fact scale to replace our current fossil fuel energy and transportation infrastructure.

Thinking otherwise, thinking that we can preserve the essence of our suicidal genocidal extractive-industrial-petrochemical civilization by translating it directly into terms made available by existing solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal techniques is to indulge in a kind of climate catastrophe denialism less pernicious than outright anthropogenic climate change denialism only because fewer people, for now, are indulging in it. Loose talk that existing renewable techniques supplemented by "innovation" will do the trick -- and talk of magical geo-engineering sooper-technology is just more of this loose talk, with the difference that it tends to be accompanied by cartoon illustrations -- is another face this denialism takes.

That there are people who think of themselves as "green" in some construal who also believe in such techno-utopian daydreams -- whether putting their faith in existing or in fantasized technofixes -- is all the more worrying, since it suggests that once a political consensus finally does emerge to address the reality of change, that address can be channeled all too readily into (parochially profitable) distractions nearly as useless as our present paralysis. To the extent that this technofixation is not simply an ideologically plutocratic circumvention of the threat of the real demands of environmental politics to the position of incumbent elite actors, it amounts to subcultural lifestyle signalling among certain consumer fandoms indistinguishable in its negligible impact to the signalling happening through other marginal boutique green consumer niches. None of this is in any way serious, except to the extent that it can distract attention from the still absolutely necessary collective educational, agitational, organizational work to change party platforms and existing laws to respond to our shared environmental crises.

Because, face it: There is no way around the reality that our shared environmental problems are not technical but political. There is a real question whether the glacial pace of political reform (well known to anyone who struggles for progress toward greater equity-in-diversity) will be equal to the rapid pace at which global warming and resource descent and toxic waste imperil human civilization and so much life on earth. Those who don't have the patience or stamina for the fraught demands of stakeholder politics simply aren't serious about environmental politics whatever their protests to the contrary on this score. And those who are temperamentally disposed to anti-governmental cynicism or hostility are more or less not even playing on the game board where the real action is. Rage and despair at our environmental politics is not only a matter of the privileged disdain for the exactions of political change in history -- as it so often amounts to in other progressive struggles for social justice. But when it comes to it, that is neither here nor there. That our present politics are so dysfunctional does not alter the reality that it is to public investment, public regulation, public mandates that we must eventually turn to address our ongoing (not future, but very present and escalating) environmental crises. To entertain fantasies that there are adequate non-political alternatives to environmental education, agitation, organization, legislation is to engage in an anti-environmentalist anti-politics.

Those who despair of our politics need to grasp that the politics may indeed keep on not working... right up to the point when they do. And we must be ready most of all for that moment when they do.

We need serious regulations on carbon emissions, and we need to make international trade treaties contingent on preserving atmospheric and freshwater commons. We need to more or less regulate coal mining and oil pipelines out of existence. We need to subsidize solar rooftops in every public building and private residence. We need more penalties and subsidies to incentivize energy efficiency in every domain. We need to stop subsidizing the ruinous factory farming that enables cheap mass corpse consumption, and allow the price of meat-eating to rise to reflect its real environmental and healthcare costs. We need to subsidize the appearance of organic local farmers markets in urban food deserts. We need to change the principles guiding zoning rules to facilitate walkable, bikeable, liveable urban neighborhoods. We need to empower women in over-exploited regions of the world with money and education so that they have the position from which to make healthcare decisions for themselves, which will result in a declining global population.

These are all indispensably political outcomes, and not all of the politics that matters most environmentally will be immediately recognizable as environmental per se. Environmental costs and risks are stratified by national, racial, sexual, class realities -- and the address of environmental problems will reflect these complexities. I should point out, as it happens, that even the most foolish technofixated imaginary of our greenwashing geo-engineers ultimately disavows the extent to which even its vision would depend in fact on the working of the politics it inevitably disdains: in order to fund or finance, educate the workers, regulate the risks, maintain the effort, distribute its effects. Hell, even personal consumer lifestyle environmentalism, ineffectual and distracting though it is, arises out of and expresses political conditions.

But my point here is to insist that it is not only the personal, but also the planetary that is political.

There is no getting around it: the personal virtue of eco-aware consumers will not overcome our shared environmental crisis, loose talk of entrepreneurial innovation (just another ugly variation on the personal virtue thesis) will not overcome our shared environmental crisis, neither god nor the god of technology will overcome our shared environmental crisis. The crisis is political, and it is only through politics that we will collectively meet its challenge or perish in failing.

Is That All There Is?

I can't find the reference, but I seem to remember that it was Louis Armstrong who proposed that the only way to take American popular music seriously (as we should) is to grasp that every American pop song is a joke. Quite apart from the fact that it has been one of my favorite songs for a quarter century, I have always considered Peggy Lee's definitive performance of Leiber and Stoller's "Is That All There Is?" a quintessential representation of the depths available to pop music, but especially to pop music that assumes an ironic attitude toward those depths. Lee's 1969 recording was early but it wasn't the first, and we know only that the song was written in the mid-sixties, possibly some time around my birth day in 1965 I'd like to think, ushering me onto the planet.

Our Civil War, Like Our Revolution, Rages On

In the aftermath of the government shutdown and debt ceiling debacle, and the tales of a GOP Civil War unleashed in it or by it, there are a lot of autopsies and historical sketches out there this weekend, offering up contexts and advice and predictions. My own follows, but at the risk of spoiling the mystery by flipping to the last page and telling whodunit, let me just say that I don't think the Republicans have the intellectual or political resources in fact to force a sane reformation of their party right now. The left that thinks otherwise usually does so speaking of a "return" to sanity that is simply premised on myth, since the post New Deal Republican coalitions, especially in the period of their Southern Strategy prevalence in either its frowny-faced Nixonian or smiley-faced Reaganist modes, has never been the least bit sane, but merely indulged in an opportunistic deception of the majority of its voters that rendered it comparatively functional, and that particular deception, now exposed, cannot be re-instated so another path must be found on a hopelessly tractless and forbidding terrain. Others on the left are now indulging, I notice, in thought-experiments about parliamentary democracy which, like comparable thought-experiments about Third Parties over the last twenty years or so, seem to me to be complete wastes of time and energy, completely divorced from political reality (by which I mean to say that the practical political processes necessary to shift into a parliamentary form or to form an actually viable third party would require more time and energy than the direct address through our present debased institutional terrain of the harms and ills they are proposed to counter), except to the extent that they probably symptomize a recognition at a deeper level of just how fucked we are, which is, after all, also political reality.

David Frum provides a nearly apt summary of the catastrophe of the killer clown administration of George W. Bush, America's worst and most disastrous presidency with the quip: "The Bush administration opened with a second Pearl Harbor, ended with a second Great Crash and contained a second Vietnam in the middle." Of course, this summary fails to begin at the actual beginning and hence misses the mark in one key respect: The Bush administration actually opened with a stolen election, as perhaps many elections historically had been brokered, burgled, finagled before (John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes and even JFK made, let us say, conspicuously questionable ascents up the White House stairs) but never before in plain sight, in ways that suggested the failure of definitive political processes and institutions like ballots in Florida and an obviously partisan Supreme Court decision that knew itself to be too illegitimate to allow itself to become a precedent -- and hence threatened to become a precedent of another sort. The trauma of the failure of institutions that brought George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to the White House mixed a witches brew of denial, paranoia, and despair that invested Frum's "second Pearl Harbor" with conspiracy, and articulated the experience of institutional failure and decline of his "second Vietnam" with a saucer eyed horror at the realization that the case for war was based on lies and that the war itself was a pretext for indefinite detentions and torture. By the time Frum's "second Great Crash" arrived -- a Crash engineered in truth quite as much or even more by his predecessor Clinton's trade policies and deregulatory enthusiasm as by Bush policies, Brownie's "heckuva job" losing of a great American city in a Greenhouse Storm amidst rampant climate change denial had set the stage for the dysfunctional narrative of collapse into which Barack Obama, the Change candidate, would arrive on the scene.

Given all this, it might seem hard to believe that within a single year the Tea Party would be unleashed on the world (a "grassroots movement" funded and organized by reactionary billionaires) howling about palpably fictional "death panels" and by the mid-term elections a wave of union-smashing science-denying forced-abortion zealots would take over the House of Representatives and half the country's Governor's mansions. Where did they come from? How is it that their know nothing crusades and obvious white racist hostility to the President did not prevent his ascension to the White House in the first place as certainly it has relentlessly obstructed his agency in the years since?

There are two kinds of answers being offered up to these questions that make sense to me. One is embedded in a longer view and another focuses on more recent history. Martin Longman reminds us that the Bush administration wasn't only disastrous from the perspective of the democratic left but of the reactionary right, but for different reasons than the ones we are likely to focus on. He writes:

[T]he Bush administration… made Republican ideology incoherent. One moment the GOP was calling for the liquidation of the Department of Education and planning to let Medicare "wither on the vine," and the next moment they were giving us No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D. One moment they were closing down the government because they wanted spending cuts, and the next moment the vice-president was telling us that Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. One moment Bush was campaigning on a more humble foreign policy and the next moment, if you weren't with us, you were against us. The Bush administration was awful from every perspective you might wish to view it, and that includes the movement conservative's perspective. But movement conservatives were nonetheless willing to go along with the Bush administration and defend it with the harshest, coarsest, most vituperative language and rhetoric. As they unlearned logical consistency, they also lost the ability to think clearly. Logic became a kind of threat.

I think it is important to read this point in light of an awareness that the Republican coalition was already incoherent -- a matter of attracting electoral majorities to benefit plutocratic minorities by whomping up irrational passions, mostly an ugly white racist patriarchal mix of class resentments and fears of change. The inept contradictions of Bush epoch policy were exacerbated by changing demographics and planetary pressures, the irrational negotiation of these contradictions by the Bush apologists who became his accusers were exacerbated by the very same changes and pressures. But I think BooMan is right to emphasize the experience of the Bush years as the cauldron in which the present Civil War was brewed: the left was first shell-shocked and then lost in despair and then enraged by the failure of institutions in these years but the right lived the contradictions of those years in ways that generated rage and despair as well, not to mention for many of them the shocked recognition that they were being used by elites.

Martin Longman proposes that two more events followed the lived crazy-making experience of the contradictions of Bush's killer clown administration to bring us to the specificity of our present distress. The first was the selection by John McCain of Sarah Palin as his running mate on the brink of a financial catastrophe second only to the Great Depression, and that only because the tatters of New Deal regulation still managed to mitigate the scope of the disaster after a generation of eager neoliberal deregulatory irresponsibility. In BooMan's words,

Sarah Palin was a colossal moron who had absolutely no business on a presidential ticket. It also became clear that John McCain had no idea how to deal with the financial crisis, as he suspended his campaign, unsuccessfully tried to skip a presidential debate, and called for an emergency meeting at the White House where he had nothing to say. This forced the conservative movement to defend both McCain and Palin i[n] ways that no sentient human being should ever defend other human beings. I believe the experience caused permanent collective brain damage to the entire Republican community. Arguing that Sarah Palin should be a stroke away from the nuclear football will do that to a brain, and a political party.

I quote the whole point, because to do so reveals a tension in the formulation. It seems that Longman is pointing to Palin's lack of qualifications and the necessity of rationalization to defend her as a further breaking down of the critical intelligence of conservatives that rendered them more susceptible to the madness to come. But by yoking the point to the revelation of McCain's lack of qualifications in the face of the financial crisis the point becomes more perplexing. Although I for one would never have voted for John McCain, it doesn't seem right to suggest that he is unqualified for the office of the Presidency in the way that Palin was -- after all, I considered him more qualified than George W. Bush was in 2000 even if I obviously thought Al Gore incomparably better qualified than both of them (even after his own horrific choice of a vice presidential running mate). It is easy to see that Palin is an utterly unqualified political figure in a way that has set the stage for other conspicuous fools -- Herman Cain, Ted Cruz -- to pretend to Presidential viability in ways that risk the viability of the office as such, but it also easy to see how Palin may have seemed a sequel to the earlier choice by Bush the Father of Dan Quayle as his running mate, and hence as less threatening on first blush than it seemed so soon after. In part, Palin's choice was buttressed by the sense that her position in office at the time surely must have signaled a level of vetting that would historically have long since rejected as unviable a figure as unqualified as Palin actually turned out to be. In other words, the choice of Palin reflected institutional failure as well as hasty judgment, but in a context that renders the choice legible if lamentable.

Despite all this, I still do agree that the choice of Palin represents a key inflection point in the trajectory to our current distress. But it is not so much her palpable lack of qualifications but her amenability to circulate in a conservative media culture (she resigned her actual elected office in advance to marinate exclusively in that mediated politics soon enough, after all) that matters most about the choice of Palin. The sense of the McCain operatives that Palin would "excite the base" and "change the narrative" reflected a superficial awareness of the force of this emerging media reality but also revealed that the Republican establishment had not yet grasped the danger of mobilizing these energies to the sustainability of a nationally viable political organization -- a mistake they would re-enact on a much more grandiose and ruinous scale in the 2010 mid-term elections, symptomized most perfectly not in the Republican re-capture of the House in a wave election but in the toppling of the eminently electable Mike Castle by the utterly unelectable Christine O'Donnell, which perfectly presaged the ineffectuality of the new Republican Speaker of that House majority. The politics of the new mediated populists caters to the satisfaction of the emotional lives of isolated individuals (who are resentful and afraid of the lived reality of a diversifying, secularizing, planetizing nation reflected in prevailing multiculture and hence are ultimately unassuageable) and to the short term greed for attention and dollars of celebrities and wannabe celebrities -- also isolated individuals -- who are likely to profit most from energized minorities than the organized majorities who accomplish conventional legislative politics. When Republicans run for President in order to acquire an attentional base from which to launch reality TV shows and national book tours and discipline their messages within the confines of Rush Limbaugh's latest narrative requirements rather than those of legislative compromise then their party is no longer engaged in the work of representational politics except, possibly, at a highly symbolic level that can only connect to reality in catastrophically unpredictable ways and times.

Longman completes his diagnosis by proposing, last of all,

The final straw, however, was the decision to oppose every single thing the president tried to do. They turned him into a monster when he was never a monster. He became the Kenyan socialist usurper. That was a decision that Mitch McConnell made before the president was even sworn into office… At that point, with all the bad habits already ingrained, the party just lost control of its base… They… had ramped up the fear of the Democrats to such a height that the base decided that they were facing some existential crisis. Basically, the big steps were ideological inconsistency followed by epic failure which both required people to defend the indefensible which broke people's logical brains and respect for the truth which then caused them to respond to manufactured fear with rebellion against their own puppet masters.

There is a lot of truth in BooMan's tale. One of its virtues is that it enables us to assign blame to really bad actors who deserve to be blamed, the irresponsibility of Republican appointees to the Supreme Court who stopped the Florida recount, the irresponsibility of Bush and Cheney who lied us into a war of choice, the irresponsibility of John McCain in selecting the unfit Sarah Palin as his running mate, the irresponsibility of Mitch McConnell to flout norms and exploit procedural weakness to unprecedentedly obstruct a popularly elected President and Congressional majority, the irresponsibility of the establishment to embrace the Tea Party extremists rather than face the changing realities that threatened the continued relevance of the GOP as a long-term viable national party, and so on.

All of this is very true, but there remain questions as to why McConnell and these others made the irresponsible choices they did. McConnell's reckless enactment of all-out obstructionism to make Obama a "one term President" represents the same kind of burn the whole place down mentality now bemoaned by the so-called establishment types (including Mitch McConnell) in the government shutdown over defunding Obamacare, after all. Did the potential of an Affordable Care Act seem like an existential crisis to McConnell before the inauguration as it did to the Tea Partiers in the madness of Death Panel summer so soon after? When Democrats bemoan the rejection by Republicans of the Heritage-approved health care mandate first implemented by a Republican governor, do they overlook the key difference between half-hearted Republican advocacy of a least worst but to them still bad policy in the face of the Clinton's and Kennedy's spirited defense of progressive "HillaryCare" as if it represented an earnest conservative effort at actually solving what they agreed with Democrats to be an urgent problem of inequities in healthcare provision in the United States? Republicans famously battled Social Security and Medicare, and still look keen to dismantle them, and so the passage of RomneyCare in liberal Massachusetts hardly represents the unambiguous accomplishment of a conservative ambition. It is a mistake to overestimate the overlap of liberal and conservative goals, just as it is to disavow the historical context in which present calculations appear to make sense to those actually undertaking them. It is important to ask the question of what it says about McConnell and the establishment he represents that he himself embraced extremism in the moment of Obama's victory and McCain's defeat.

The necessity to ask this question becomes glaring when we turn from reflections on what is happening in our politics right now, to proposals of what should come next if we are to change what is happening for the better. For me, the larger context in this moment of demographic diversification of the endless echoes of America's original sin, the existence of chattel slavery in the land of the free, rationalized by white racism, is as indispensable as ever to our understanding of our present distress. We can never forget that while "Lincoln freed the slaves" his Republican Party was far from accomplishing the program of "free soil, free men, free labor" of which emancipation was just a part (and, hence, in a very real way, slavery abides), and that the Democratic party of the New Deal took up that larger Republican program decades before LBJ's New Society took up the dismantlement of segregation and hence the mantle of unfinished emancipation which eventually effected the radical restructuring of the American political partisan landscape, aligning the neo-Confederate South with the Republicans in the monolithic way that remains to this day. The failure of Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War and then the amplification of Jim Crow in the aftermath of the Second World War by the creation of a white middle class by a New Deal that did not extend to migrant crop labor or domestic service, and then by the failure of Truman to establish a national health service at the same time European states established theirs, all as sops to the racist South to keep the Democratic coalition in power, set the scene for the current Civil War in the Republican party and of the culture wars recently won by the secular left which are fueling that Republican Civil War (in which geographic, demographic, discursive vestiges of the earlier Civil War still conspicuously reverberate for those with ears to hear them).

Deeply entangled with this context, and always enabled by it, is a second deep confusion and conflict over the terms in which America understands its place in history more generally. This is a larger story, a story I ramble on about quite a bit in this blog, and for which my own sense of the answers are admittedly idiosyncratic ones. More widely recognized is that modern movement conservatism was an organized resistance to the New Deal, that it involved the mobilization of long quiescent go along to get along big business interests (many of which had accommodated themselves to New Deal conditions as before they had accommodated to the Gilded Age) into investing in the long-term support of an anti-academic, anti-scholarly, anti-science insurrectionary think-tank and media infrastructure devoted to market fundamentalist ideology as delineated by figures like Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, Rand, and Friedman. The stealthy dependence of this market fundamentalist movement politics on ugly disavowed white-racist energies (see my American Libertarianism Is Racist Through and Through for more on this) became less obscure in the Reagan epoch, when religious fundamentalism re-enacted the earlier organization of big business but this time to divert patriarchal conservative religiosity into the organized evangelical Religious Right, creating an electoral coalition of market and religious fundamentalism the incoherence of which was sublimed away by the momentum of its potent ascendance.

But just as important in my view, and less well understood, was a deep discursive vacuum this organizational energy sought practically and also rhetorically to fill. I believe that the American idea of multicultural governance is democratic in a way that is profoundly mischaracterized as capitalist, socialist, anarchist, or mixed -- to take up the terms ready to hand in our political lexicon. I believe it is a lack of clear headedness about the discernment and defense of our diverse democratic governance that renders us vulnerable to fundamentalist derangements, especially given the deeper racist and patriarchal and incumbent irrationalities they feed and which we so readily disavow rather than address. While Karl Marx (one of Lincoln's correspondents, recall) and John Maynard Keynes both proposed systems of political economy premised on the repudiation of laissez-faire capitalist assumptions, it is clearly important to distinguish the very different, to my mind equally radical, alternative visions they proposed -- it is easy to discard the Fox-watching know-nothings who treat Marx and Keynes as more or less interchangeable, but it is harder and worthier to grasp the specific differences that make a difference between the materializations of radical democracy they differently aspire to. But it is harder and worthier still in my view to grasp the ways in which FDR's New Deal was itself a different and uniquely American vision of both governmental but also economic democracy than the one Keynes proposed, let alone Marx! The story of Roosevelt's New Deal is a story indebted to Alexander Hamilton and DeWitt Clinton, and Teddy Roosevelt, too, and the rhetoric with which he championed it, in the positive promulgation of the Four Freedoms as well as in his negative attacks on the Economic Royalists, has a clarity and coherence that has never really been matched except by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the next generation.

I believe that there is a revolutionary vision of multicultural democracy shared by FDR's New Deal and King's Beloved Community that names more clearly than most otherwise available formulations the specificity and radicalism of the American Revolution and the long history of its ever more perfect union. Compare these rhetorical projects of articulation to that of, say, John Kenneth Galbraith, who recognized that there was indeed something different about "American Capitalism" from laissez-faire idealizations as well as from Keynesian productivist forms (though, unlike today's true tenured radical ideologues in Econ departments, Galbraith wasn't macroeconomically illiterate, he thankfully understood and accepted the advances represented by the achievement of the new Keynes-Hicks commonsense), and understood the "countervailing powers" of regulation as of a piece with Constitutional separation, federation, and subsidiarity of powers, but he nevertheless got caught up in the inevitably distortive metaphorics of the "mixed economy." To me the only theorist who really has managed to grasp the uniqueness of the American form of revolutionary democracy was the immigrant thinker Hannah Arendt, who described it not as capitalism but as consensual civitas and always recognized the links between the American Revolution, the American Constitution, and the American tradition of civil disobedience and nonviolent social struggle. (Of course, the name of this blog, Amor Mundi, is my genuflection to Arendt's personal motto, her own subversive mis-citation of Nietzsche's anti-political amor fati.)

About civitas, and about the indispensability of nonviolence to democratic civitas as well as the autonomy of that civitas from historical capitalism, socialism, anarchism, and mixtures with which it is sometimes confused or for which it is too often disdained, I have already written many times, as I said, most recently this:

The metaphor of the "mixed economy" is absolutely mystifying. The idea of sustainable consensual equity-in-diversity, of democratic commonwealth, is the unmixed expression of civitas. Civitas would guarantee equitable lawful recourse for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes (including disputes over what properly constitutes violence and equity and democracy); would ensure nonviolent transitions in authority through periodic elections, universal enfranchisement and office-holding and freedom of assembly and expression; would provide a scene of informed, non-duressed consent to the terms of everyday commerce through the provision of generous welfare (education, healthcare, social support, living wage, unemployment benefits) paid for by steeply progressive income, property, and transaction taxes; and would eliminate the violation of common and public goods through their accountable administration in the service of commonwealth. All of these ideas have been implemented in comparatively democratic welfare states -- many of them have been implemented less well lately due to the influence of facile, falsifying capitalist and socialist ideologies, and most of them could be implemented incomparably better simply if the process and spirit of stakeholder compromise were to prevail (which you might say is another "mix" that isn't actually a mixture at all, but the substantial if interminable accomplishment of reconciliation of which the political actually, essentially, consists). The ongoing generational churn of the plurality of stakeholders who make up the present world, peer to peer, ensures that the ongoing accomplishment of equity-in-diversity is endlessly re-negotiated, re-enacted, re-figured. What tends to be called "capitalism" and "socialism" are historically unrealized, logically unrealizable derangements of either the diversity dimension or of the equity dimension of the democratic value of equity-in-diversity. The contractual arrangements to which moral cases for capitalism are devoted will always depend for their actual legibility as consent on a substantial provision of general welfare and socialization of common and public goods typically denominated socialism from those argumentative vantages, just as anti-authoritarian cases for (eg, democratic) socialism will inevitably allow for differences of preference and outcome typically denominated capitalism from those argumentative vantages. This is because civitas, the democratization of the struggle for sustainable equity-in-diversity, is the political base from which capitalist and socialist abstractions are strained and deranged. It is what passes for capitalism and socialism in thought that is mixed up, the "mixed economy" is not a mixture of these two derangements from good sense.

It is important to return to what might seem abstract theoretical considerations like these, not least because they remind us that Movement Republicanism was born in the mischaracterization of the American Way with capitalist idealizations that mask even deeper, far uglier, mis-recognitions of America with its white-racist and Christianist-fundamentalist traditions.

William F. Buckey, Jr, famously fumigated the Republican Party of its Birchers and Randians half a century ago in a bid for national viability, but it is crucial to remember that when he just as famously defined conservatism as a matter of standing athwart history, crying "Stop!" he was locating himself as continuous with the very forces he publicly disdained. The New Deal was indeed something New, but it was also something uniquely American, and world-historical -- as was the American Revolution of which the New Deal self-consciously considered itself a vital continuation. To resist its implications was indeed to stand athwart history in ways that have never been quite sane, even if there have been moments in which that Republican stance has at any rate seemed a bit saner than at other times. The nonviolent social struggles and legislative struggles for civil rights have slowly supplemented the economic and political democratization of American multiculture represented by the New Deal and the GI Bill and the New Frontier and the Great Society, and the emergence of the diverse Obama coalition has by now fatally exposed the imposture of sanity that has sometimes bolstered the politics of irrational Republican reaction.

Those who now counsel the Republican establishment to exert their energy to effect a return to such sanity fail to recognize that this would be the return to what has never been more than a semblance of sanity, and one that can no longer pretend to relevance in the diversifying, secularizing, planetizing lived reality of Obama's America. The Republicans have embarked on a Civil War because the alternative was to admit final defeat in the Civil War itself, to put white racist patriarchal corporate-militarism to rest at last and embrace the radical democratizing force of the American Revolution and its Declaration of Independence as well as the Constitutional Preamble's Declaration of Interdependence for good. The white racist patriarchal Christianist theocrats and neo-Confederates with their insurrectionist private gun arsenals and secessionist threats are dying into harmless marginality, and the plutocrats who have opportunistically mobilized their irrational energies for so long in the support of libertopian pieties confront the terrifying demand not of a return to sanity but an arrival at sanity, a re-assessment of a nationally viable and historically sustainable role for the conservative temperament in the actually real America that besets them. I know of no Republican, however "establishmentarian," "institutionalist," "moderate" they may be, who seems ready to take up this painful, costly, thankless work on the realistic terms it demands. Until then, our Civil War will rage on, as indeed our Democratic Revolution does as well.

Who Pays?

Where does the money for general welfare come from? Why, it comes from the same place the money for private fortunes comes from! All accomplishments are indispensably collective in substantial measure, and the distribution of their costs, risks, and benefits never perfectly reflects the efforts and stakes of their contributors. Indeed, the proper distribution of credit and risk in the vicissitudes of everyday commerce cannot be determined with certainty any more than the results of our collective actions can be predicted with certainty in advance. This distribution, hence, always reflects instead prevailing norms, be they democratic, plutocratic, theocratic, or what have you. In democratic societies the ideal is the maximization of equity-in-diversity, and hence: freedom of thought, expression, and assembly; equal recourse to the law, franchise, and office; maintenance through general welfare of the scene of informed, nonduressed consent to the terms of everyday commerce; and the sustainable, accountable administration of common and public goods. In plutocratic societies the ideal is maintenance of wealth and authority of incumbent elites at the expense of equity, in theocratic societies the ideal is maintenance of the terms and authority of moral minorities at the expense of diversity. In every society the existing distribution of wealth and authority is the result of social redistribution, much of it stealthed through naturalized material and ritual infrastructural affordances. It is always ignorance or denial of this basic recognition which gives rise to the question with which this little post began, and its affirmation is the best way to end it.

What's Wrong With Terasem?

I get press inquiries like this a dozen or so times a year. Rarely does anything come of it, I suspect because my academic framing of issues isn't really journalism ready (not that my academic framing of issues seems much more academic ready, either, as these things go), or because the inquiry is part of some freelancer's quixotic attempt to pitch a story that isn't really going anywhere anyway. I always answer these questions as best I can, anyway, since reaching a writer who takes futurology seriously to think technoscience a bit more critically seems a generally worthwhile effort, after all. But it also occurs to me that there is nothing to keep me from turning my responses to such inquiries into blog posts, at least. Names and journalistic credentials are omitted, and the query itself edited to provide nothing more than the context for the response that followed:

I'm working on a story on the Terasem Movement's Lifenaut project and since you're one of the most vocal critics of both Terasem and Transhumanism in general, I thought I'd see if you'd be willing to share some thoughts. I've read some of your critiques of Terasem, but have a few things still on my mind: 1) You've criticized the fact that Martine Rothblatt talks about software-based life and consciousness uploading as if they're real and inevitable. But Terasem is at least actually trying to build a system for creating simulations of people. A) Do they at least get points for trying, rather than just talking? B) Is there anything wrong with doing research to try to prove their "hypothesis"? 2) Terasem isn't charging people for Lifenaut, or selling any products -- so are they really harming anyone? 3) Have you followed the progress, or lack thereof, of Terasem's over the years? It looks like Lifenaut has been around since at least 2010, maybe 2007. Do you know whether the avatars have gotten any better since then? 4) Apart from the desire for actual immortality through consciousness uploading, part of what Lifenaut may offer is something more like an interactive archive or scrapbook of a person's thoughts and activities that could be left behind for decedents, or perhaps future anthropologists. Do you have any thoughts on whether these animated avatars are actually a good way to achieve something like that?

My answers to these questions were the following:

First, of course I do not give people credit for trying to create "simulated persons" and "simulated life." What "life" and "person" mean as terms are distorted by the language these futurists use to describe their assumptions and goals. That they are actually "trying" to do impossible things they wouldn't try to do if they actually understood the phenomena in question is no more worthy than it would be worthy for a math ignoramus to actually try to square a circle -- as, of course, many cranks have indeed idiotically tried to do historically. The "trying" is evidence only of the depth of their misunderstanding, not of their worthy diligence. Worse, the discussion of lives and people on these false and reductive terms is abetting a more general tendency in "technology" circles to get these questions systematically wrong -- to call artifacts like phones and homes "smart" when they are not, to treat devices like cars and programmable coffee makers as "living" and as "personalities" when they are not. Since lives and people and intelligence are truly enormously valuable and also vulnerable it actually matters that they be recognized and supported on their real terms. I am a teacher, and when I point out the errors and confusions in computational misunderstandings of life and of selfhood I am doing what I am always doing -- contributing to the clearer understanding of things that matter. This is an end in itself.

Second, it is not true that Terasem is not selling anything. They are selling their "movement" and their "belief" to scientifically illiterate, credulous people, many of them especially vulnerable to such a scam because they are personally afraid of dying. I occasionally receive e-mails from some of these people, angry at my critiques of their belief system. Needless to say, anyone who offers up arguments to the scrutiny of the public properly does so in the expectation that this will provoke criticism. But Believers who are seeking techno-immortality for themselves or who have formed irrational protective attachments to non-existing robotic or software quasi-personages can sometimes feel personally threatened or even targeted by hostile hate-speech when they read criticisms of their fledgling techno-faith. It should be clear that I do think harm can easily follow from the promotion of True Belief among scared credulous ignoramuses. I recommend that you look more closely into the lives of those who donate money to this movement -- what is the average profile of such funders? Are they also funding legitimate scientific and medical research? Do they devote a proportion of their income to this movement comparable to the amount conventional venture capitalists devote to investment in mainstream technoscience? I do believe, by the way, that Terasem sells a crappy flag for an inflated sixty bucks on their website. It is interesting, don't you think, to say the least, that the raising of an overpriced banner emblazoned with facile symbolism is one of the things this harmless organization wants to encourage?

Third, if people want to leave scrapbooks or time capsules or archival traces of themselves in the world, I daresay the brittle evanescence of networked software is already well demonstrated to be a questionable way to go about it. Future anthropologists have little to worry about -- a trip to any one of our countless landfills will tell an exactly revealing story of our epoch to its survivors should there be any. But a contrary point is that government and commercial interests are already aggregating vast amounts of data traces into profiles to drive law enforcement inquiries and targeted marketing programs, and hence there is certainly no need for a charitable organization to clumsily re-invent and then pointlessly attach that third wheel. What is interesting is that most people are well aware that these database profiles, while significantly computable in terms of Big Data, do not create narratives we recognize as connected to our selves in a richly lived sort of way: To the contrary, we tend to regard these profiles as dangerously prejudicial, insultingly simplistic and stereotypical, damaging our civil liberties, getting us fundamentally wrong while threatening our real lives and real persons. Nobody thinks we have become immortal because the NSA is aggregating a data-profile framing us for future prosecutions, or because PR firms are selling our Amazon-clicks to the suits at Wal-Mart who want to harass us into buying their wholesale meat products. I suppose those who desperately want to become immortal might be scammed into believing otherwise, but they are obviously wrong and I won't have any part in encouraging such patent nonsense.

A Twitter Privacy Treatise

Twitterized Privacy Treatise:

[1] Rights are rites, ritual substantiations of conventions we freight with nature, that is, political productions of de-politicization.

[2] Privacy is privation from publicity, and framed as pre-political integrity enables reactionary disavowal of the personal as political.

[3] But framed as control over the terms of exposure to publicity it enables paranoid repudiation of the freedom it pretends to secure.

[4] Privacy rites must elaborate neither fantasies of prepolitical substance nor superpolitical control.

[5] Privacy should instead foster publicity by pluralizing and so destabilizing interpretations of that which is exposed.

[6] Privacy arises when no interpretations of exposed right-bearers are authoritative & hence exposed rite-darers can re-politicize nature.

Futurological Faith Made Flesh

Futurological faith in techno-transcendental virtual reality is made flesh in the faith-based initiative of total information awareness. Futurological faith in techno-transcendental AI is made flesh in faith-based initiatives coding targeting software for ads and drones. Futurological faith in techno-transcendental Access to Knowledge is made flesh as crowdsourced-PR on social networks and channel-surfing in MOOC diploma mills. Futurological faith in techno-transcendental nano-abundance is made flesh in market-driven faith-based initiatives of mass consumption and waste. Futurological faith in techno-transcendental "enhancement" medicine is made flesh in late-nite boner pill and skin kreme informercials in a world without clean water.

Futurist Distractions Twitterrant

Futurists talk about whether immortality would be boring or not to distract us from noticing we aren't going to become immortal. Futurists talk about whether uploads should have rights to distract us from noticing that uploading won't happen. Futurists talk about geo-engineering to distract us from real environmental politics. Futurists talk about enhancement medicine to distract us from the miracle drug of clean water for over-exploited regions of the world. Futurists talk about longevity medicine to distract us from the raising of the retirement age for majorities who aren't living longer. Futurists talk about nano-abundance and 3D-printer treasure piles to distract us from wealth concentration by elites. Futurists talk about digital democracy to distract us from surveillance, spam, financialization, crowdskimming, and zero comments.

Resisting Futurological Assimilation

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, in response to this comment by longtime friend of blog "jollyspaniard":

[T]he UN isn't running the models in and of itself. Their reports are the result of a political process which has been repeatedly criticised by climate scientists. Humankind has been making climate forecasts since stonehenge. The druids weren't futurists they were guiding people in the here and now. Agriculture requires some foreknowledge to plan effectively. As to climate science some scientists would still be doing some of this research even if AGW wasn't a factor, albeit with a lot less resources, interest, urgency or controversy.

Your first sentences make points that are very well taken -- the provenance of UN reports wasn't my focus, but obviously I agree with you, and I even think the force of your right observations lends weight to what has been my focus, namely the complexity of technodevelopmental social struggle and the indispensability of proper political analysis (of a kind which futurology rarely is and often actively disdains) to any understanding of these struggles or facilitation of progressive outcomes of them.

As to your latter points, I caution great care. It is important to preserve the distinction between pseudo-science and science in the defense of science especially when pseudo-scientists who claim to be champions of science manage to rewrite science in the image of their pet pieties, just as it is important to distinguish criteria of warranted belief proper to the separate domains of belief especially when reductionist fundamentalists who claim to be champions of reason declare such pragmatic pluralism to be relativism.

Precisely because futurological discourses have commandeered so much of the terminological and conceptual terrain of the "scenario," "forecast," "foresight," "vision," and so on we need to be more careful than hitherto in making glib references to forecasting and foreknowledges in legitimate knowledge production. Again, as I have now repeatedly said over the course of these exchanges -- and that isn't impatience you are hearing, but gravity -- every legibly constituted discipline produces suggestive models and every legibly constituted discipline has a foresight dimension precisely because an understanding of phenomena changes expectations, conduct, priorities, plans.

But the just-so stories of techno-transcendental futurology in the Robot Cult that preoccupy so much of my attention should be regarded as the revealingly pathological extremities of what are in fact utterly mainstream techno-fixated techno-fetishistic techno-triumphalist neoliberal and neoconservative developmental discourses, from marketing, to policy-making, to corporate-military rationalizations for exploitation and stratification. It is crucial to understand the underlying assumptions, energizing aspirations, enabling conceits of these discourses (an understanding facilitated by grasping their essential character as derivative literary and extreme marketing genres in my view) and it is also crucial to resist accommodating or assimilating to them in their prevalence in an easy bid for legibility at the cost of supporting reductionism, determinism, eugenicism, death denialism, productivism and a host of other pernicious false idols of our epoch.

That's why I stress these apparently abstruse points so much.

Memetics Re-Invents the Wheel of Rhetoric, and Then Breaks It

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot to yesterday's post, "Esebian" asks: Wouldn't you say today's state of the concept "meme" is like that of the "gene" in the 1890s; there's hints that there is a mechanism of information transfer, we just can't figure out any specifics?

Well, no, if I'm understanding your question correctly, I wouldn't say that. Memetics isn't some promising fledgling discipline to be fleshed out into a predictively powerful account of cultural dynamism after a century of diligent researchers scan and stimulate enough brains or whatever. The "meme" is a futurological neologism, a buzzword, a superficial repackaging scheme -- and with the usual wannabe guru huckster PR in play, I'm afraid -- through which ignoramuses have been pretending to re-invent the wheel of rhetoric for a generation. The connection of the meme to the gene you mention is of course deliberate, and it represents a fundamental mis-analogy: historical vicissitudes and social struggle are so radically under-determined by evolutionary processes as to be irrelevant to them, they provide a few general constraints and pressures but don't take you where any of the real action is. The problems here are comparable to evo-devo and evo-psycho foolishness I sometimes deride here as well, and it isn't accidental that the adherents of the one are often also cheerleaders for the other. (I'm setting aside here the more recent and more specific characterization of the meme as a kind of hieroglyph in which a static or briefly moving image -- often already mass-mediated and familiar -- is fixed to a caption, often an ironic one, and then circulates rapidly and widely in media briefly to capture the fancy or express the momentary mood of a large cohort of individuals. I have no quibble with the choice of the word "meme" to describe such a media phenomenon, precisely because it lacks the pretension of the prior elaboration of the notion.) Rhetoric has always been the facilitation and analysis of discourse, and much contemporary critical and cultural theory is best understood as its ongoing elaboration. You will forgive me if I do not summarize that content here -- it takes me four whole undergraduate courses to survey the basics of the field for my students in the Rhetoric department at Berkeley. I do not include any "memetic" nonsense of the last two decades or so in that body of criticism, since memetics brings nothing actually new or useful to the table (believe me, I've looked). It is a far clumsier analytic vocabulary for historically situating discourse or specifying its stakeholders or dynamisms than philology provided theorists well over a century ago, for heaven's sake. Indeed, apart from the pseudo-provocative pep of the initial neologism itself memetics adds the idiocy of a reductive mis-analogization of signification to a biology itself already idiotically reductively mis-analogized to computer programming via the pieties of cybernetics/information science. There are, of course, plenty of ugly ideological reasons that digi-utopians pining to have their info-souls uploaded into Holodeck Heaven and market fundamentalists with crap to sell the rubes would consider all this a feature and not a bug of the meme qua cult(ure)-bug -- after all, most of them disdain and fear the insights arising from proper rhetoric in any case.

The Mirage and the Material of Technoscientific Progress

An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light. -- Raymond Kurzweil, "The Law of Accelerating Returns"

Needless to say, not every analysis of history is quite so sensible or so reliable as every other. While there have indeed been magnificent discoveries that have improved healthcare outcomes as well as great political struggles in the service of democratic equity-in-diversity, the conventional European civilizational progress narrative seems to me mostly a cover for centuries of criminal theft, accumulation, and exploitation, rationalized with racist pseudo-science and hypocritical punitive plutocratic moralizing. The genocidal "manifest destiny" thesis of the American nineteenth century emerged out of this tradition, but I think it is important to grasp that the American exceptionalism of the World Wars and especially the postwar Washington Consensus involved a key technocultural inflection of this narrative, an erroneous mis-identification of civilization as such with the inflation of a fraught and fragile petrochemical bubble (much that otherwise seems quite befuddling about the conduct of the Axis powers becomes immediately clear once we grasp World War II as a skirmish of competing fledgling petrochemical industrial superpowers over oil and gas resources -- as has too much of history since then as well), within which a host of consequent "technological" bubbles were inflated in turn -- redemptive nuclear abundance, suburban car culture, ubiquitous plastics, the illusory "Green Revolution" of high-energy input-intensive petrochemically fertilized and pesticized industrial monoculture, "immaterial" information-computation-digitation powered by fossil fuels and accessed on petrochemical devices, and so on.

The deceptive rationalization for predation that narratives of progress have long amounted to in substance, but also the more specifically technocultural deceptions of the last century provide what seem to me to be the indispensable context out of which influential futurological pronouncements like Raymond Kurzweil's "Law of Accelerating Returns" have emerged and from which it derives most of its rhetorical force and intuitive plausibility.

According to that "Law" -- which is just an empty stipulation rationalizing abuses and enabling wish-fulfillment fantasies -- a whole host of "evolutionary systems" actually eventually "tend" to change exponentially. Of course, this apparently rather straightforward conceptual object, "technological change," would have to content with and corral together an incomparably dynamic ramifying explosion of historical vicissitudes in all the many disparate and yet often variously inter-related efforts of competitive and collaborative scientific, engineering, problem-solving imagination, research, discovery, funding, publication, testing, application, marketing, distribution, appropriation, reaction, education, regulation of and into artifacts and techniques resulting from the interminable struggles of the diversity of stakeholders to each. That Kurzweil wants to describe this historical scrum as an "evolutionary system" reminds us of the extent to which popular science and technology discourse has come to misconstrue evolution in its zeal to provide simple explanations as well as to find "naturalizing" justifications for otherwise unjustifiable parochialisms and prejudices -- as witness the facile and ugly racism and misogyny rationalized by "evopsycho" and "evodevo" pseudoscience as well. Not to put to fine a point on it, historical, economic, cultural phenomena simply are not "evolving" in the proper biological sense and the loose mis-analogization of the two fields -- prevalent and consoling though it may have become to so many -- falsifies not only the historical, economic, and cultural accounts to which it is applied but of evolutionary dynamics as well. And in much the same way, Kurzweil's attribution of intelligence to non-intelligent machines in the formulation has no substance apart from the denial of the real dignity and the real demands unique to the incarnated intelligence of living beings actually existing in the world.

When I declare that Kurzweil's thesis is utterly nonsensical but derives a false plausibility from its citation of an archive of familiar self-congratulatary justifications for privilege, it is amusing to note that my claim will not only seem wrong but also paradoxical to Kurzweil's deluded fandom -- this is because central to Kurzweil's own formulation of it, the accelerationalization thesis will presumably seem counter-intuitive to most people because their puny human brains evolved to cope with local and linear relations rather than kick-ass exponential entrepreneurial innovation, and one needs to be a techno-utopian sooper-genius like him or be a member of a singularitarian transhumanoid Robot Cult to overcome such limitations, or, gosh, at least be a blissed out gizmo-fetishizing hyper-consumer standing in line for the next glossy toxic landfill-destined gew-gaw while your world burns.

To these observations, I will add just two more, each a more specific application of the general case above: First, as a factual matter, a more proximate inspiration for Kurzweil's so-called Law is Gordon Moore's famous observation (pause on that word, if you will) in 1965 that over the relatively short history of computer hardware development so far, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. Moore's Law as an expectation that Moore's parochial observation will continue to hold true, or will accelerate interminably, amounts to an article of faith among many who are deeply invested, come what may, in more messianic understandings of the role of software programmers in human history -- indeed the Kurzweilian Law is best understood as a generalization to all technodevelopmental fields of endeavor of something like Gordon Moore's observation, perhaps justified by the premise that the application of these very computational improvements to other fields will yield comparable improvements. Needless to say, I regard Moore's "Law" itself as a skewed perspectival effect and that it fails even on its own terms, since, to quote Jeron Lanier, "As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources."

Second, as a normative matter, I continue to insist that "accelerating change" is little more than what increasing precarity in increaasing numbers of lives resulting from neoliberal corporatism and neoconservative militarism looks like from the rarefied perspective of its beneficiaries (or those dupes who wrongly fancy themselves its potential beneficiaries). Techno-triumphalist progress narratives remain, as ever, plausible mostly to the few who benefit from predation and exploitation and useful mostly to the few who desire rationalizations for predation and exploitation.

True technoscientific progress is the furthest thing from natural, inevitable, or even predictable, since it is primarily a matter of public investment in the solution of ever more shared problems in which the distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change are made to be ever more equitably distributed among the diversity of stakeholders to those changes through a process of social struggle as interminable as is the process of discovery and invention itself.