APA Talk Next Week -- Futurological Discourse and Posthuman Terrains

This is just a reminder that I'll be presenting a brief talk and participating in a panel discussion about posthumanism (fellow panelists include Natasha Vita-More, somewhat to my chagrin) at next week's meeting in San Francisco of the American Philosophical Association. I posted a mini-abstract for the talk on the blog quite a while ago when the event was still being organized, but here is a slightly more elaborated sketch of the talk, in which there are unlikely to be many surprises for those who read my work regularly:

I distinguish post-humanist politics of planetarity (environmental crises, global diaspora, panurban convivialities, imbrication in media, financial, surveillance, activist networks) from the futurological politics of post-human advocacy, of either superlative transhumanism's "enhanced" homo superior or supernative bio-conservatism's "posited" homo naturalis. I distinguish in turn post-philosophical discourses of critical theory from futurological discourses (originating in speculative market futures and culminating in science fictional think-tank scenarios authorizing neoliberal developmentalism), promising prophesy rather than understanding, confusing making bets with having thoughts, diverting attention from the open futurity inhering in the diversity of stakeholders in/to the present with "The Future" as a screen on which parochial fears and fantasies are projected, deranging power from the experience of potential, peer-to-peer, into a brute amplification of instrumental capacities, the consummation of what Hannah Arendt described as "earth alienation."

More specifically, my talk is structured by the project to propose and elaborate seven basic distinctions that seem to me key to grasping transhumanism as both a discursive and a subcultural phenomenon but are also helpful to anyone who would facilitate progressive technodevelopmental social struggle.

The seven distinctions are between:

1, technology and technologies -- a distinction between, on the one hand, the actual constellation of artifacts and techniques in the diversity of their stakes and specificities and also actual technoscientific research programs and developmental pathways in the diversity of their vicissitudes and inter-dynamisms and, on the other hand, technology as a de-politicizing myth disavowing these specificities, vicissitudes and stakes but also as a discursive site elaborating fantasies, fears, and possibilities of collective agency, adjudicating the resourceful from the companionate, the familiar from the unfamiliar;

2, progress and destiny -- a distinction between, on the one hand, technodevelopmental social struggles in the service of avowed political ends (equity, diversity, prosperity, reported satisfactions, and so on) in a material historical frame and, on the other hand, a paradoxical naturalization, a variation of Nietzschean ressentiment, usually via a rhetoric of determination, autonomy, convergence, and/or "accelerationalist" momentum, of disavowed, often transcendentalized, technoscientific ends (overcoming error, scarcity, mortality, finitude);

3, mainstream futurism and superlative futurism -- a distinction between, on the one hand, the speculative, reductive, denialist, unsustainable, hyperbolizing norms and forms that suffuse popular marketing, promotional, consumer discourses as well as the terms of authoritative neoliberal administrative, productivist, developmentalist discourses and, on the other hand, the futurological hyper-amplification of this speculativeness, reductiveness, denialism, and hyperbole into faith-based, techno-transcendental, figuratively scientific but in fact pseudo-scientific, quasi-theological assumptions and aspirations toward superintelligence, supercapacitation (often including immortality) and superabundance miming the omni-predication of judeochrislamic divinity;

4, superlativity and supernativity -- a distinction between what might be described as posthuman/transhuman and reactionary/bioconservative futurologies (or more broadly and conventionally, if not precisely correctly, as undercritically technophilic as against undercritically technophobic orientations), the analytic usefulness and force of which is to highlight unexpected continuities and inter-dependencies of the two, as distinguished in turn from legible democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle, progressive education, agitation, organization, policy making and reform, and consensus science and sustainable public investment;

5, posthumanism and transhumanism -- a distinction between, on the one hand, post-humanist discourse as variations of superlative futurology (eugenic transhumanism, apocalyptic singularitarianism, techno-immortalism, nano-cornucopism, digital-utopianism, geo-engineering technofixation) and, on the other hand, post-humanist discourse as variations of humanist criticism, utopian humanism, and the critique of humanism (whether feminist, anti-racist, post-colonial, economic, environmentalist, or what have you);

6, transhuman discourse and transhuman subcultures -- a recognition for scholarship of material differences in the objects and archives and demands of discursive as against subcultural formations, for example, the differences between genealogical relations among figures, problems, tropes, citational relations among published texts and conventions, and organizational relations among members, officers, funders, and so on;

7, futurity and "The Future" -- a distinction between the political openness inhering in the present in the presence of ineradicable stakeholder diversity and an instrumentalizing projection of parochial fears and fantasies and stakes that would disavow and so foreclose futurity -- a distinction between, on the one hand, coming to terms with the present, especially in grasping the meaning of what has taken us by surprise, through which we seek to understand and, better still, become understanding and, on the other hand, predicting the future, especially in proposing coinages that would work as spells to dispel being taken by surprise, through which we become ever more susceptible to fraud and, worse still, become frauds -- a distinction, where thinking is concerned, between investment and speculation, between thinking and betting.

p2p is EITHER Pay-to-Peer OR it is Peers-to-Precarity

Also published at the World Future Society.

Paul Krugman is right to say that the cancellation of Google Reader provides yet another demonstration of the failure of private profitability to provide for the maintenance of public goods, even though I disagree that it seems hard in the least "to envision search and related functions as public utilities," which is indeed "where th[is] logic will eventually take us." Although such conclusions do take us far afield from the assumptions and aspirations that drive the common wisdom of the catastrophically failed generation of neoliberal digital-utopian irrational exuberance, it is just as true that they return us to terms that should be familiar from Econ 101.

I argue that the free creative content provision, collaborative problem-solving and editing, citizen journalism and criticism facilitated by peer-to-peer networks provides public goods the ongoing support of which more than justifies the provision of a universal basic income guarantee (BIG). I argue, further, that a long history of public subsidization of communications infrastructure (the post office, roads, telegraphy, telephony, WWW) and of public education to facilitate continental-scaled good governance among a well-informed citizenry since the founding era offers a congenial context for the comparable case for a public subsidization of "free time" for citizens in the expectation that enough of them would fill it with innovative problem solving and network maintenance that it would more than compensate the public investment. In the past I have called arguments of this kind an advocacy of pay to peer.

I still think this is true, but since a basic income guarantee would also happen to function, as Erik Olin Wright has pointed out, as the public subsidization of a permanent strike fund for all people who work for a living, this means that any such public recognition of the value of peer-to-peer collaboration is more or less tantamount to establishing socialism of a sort. Again, I personally think this consequence is perfectly acceptable, even welcome, but the experience of a lifetime of advocacy for single payer healthcare in the US makes me doubt that this logically inescapable optimally beneficial outcome is politically possible here and now.

It does seem to me that, taken together, a mandated living wage and retirement security and long-term unemployment and disability insurance and paid family leave would be hard to distinguish in substance from a basic income guarantee, which means that what might initially seem novel and radical about basic income proposals is a matter of facile oversimplification and clumsy re-invention of the wheel. Perhaps #BasicIncome is merely a technofix for the technofixated. Maybe the dis-aggregation of a single imagined one-size-fits-all "universal basic income" back into a more familiar democratic-left bundle of social supports and equal opportunities connects us back to a more historical sense of the complexity and dynamism of the problem of unemployment in personal, social and civic life.  

Beyond conventional social democracy or strong liberalism, however, I do think the contours of this kind of argument do provide new justifications for considerably expanded public grants for research in professional, academic, and amateur contexts with the proviso that all the results are placed in the public domain. This is a policy that might yield plenty of wholesome benefits without unleashing a Red Panic. Given the resulting invigoration of public education, funding for the arts, re-stocking of the creative commons, I think virtuous circles arising out of this more modest form of pay-to-peer are more than worth the effort of the fight for it and, hell, might even get us closer to BIG anyway after all (no doubt, as usual, Michele Bachmann will grasp this dire consequence before anybody else does).

I think this rhetoric provides an unexpected added rationale for lowering the retirement age, since publicly valuable p2p-mediated creativity is such a likely recourse for retirees seeking new forms of fulfillment. (By the way, lowering the retirement age and expanding Medicare eligibility by from two to six years is something I think should be done as a straightforward spur to employment in our present flabbergastingly urgent jobs crisis, precisely the opposite of the macroeconomically illiterate and pathologically cruel recommendations of a consensus of well-off experts whose misplaced concern with long-term deficits supplemented by phony futurological handwaving about techno-utopian eternal youth are demanding instead, of course, a raising of the retirement age for chronically underpaid underbenefited folks who actually have to work for a living.)

I would note that in the absence of public subsidization of p2p-mediated creativity and problem solving what has taken place instead is the perfectly predictable intensive corporate capture via crowdsourcing of unpaid disseminated labor. MOOCs, the latest idiotic fad of the ever more corporatized university represents, of course, an effort to apply this kind of wealth capture in the context of the hitherto stubbornly unprofitable ivory tower, transforming vital and unique face-to-face collaborations in classrooms into indefinite distributions of syndicated network television.

As a corollary to my advocacy of pay-to-peer -- that is to say, my advocacy of public investment and subsidization of peer-to-peer creative problem solving, expressivity, criticism, and network maintenance whether in the strong form of the provision of a universal basic income guarantee or in the modest form of massively expanded public grants for actual peer-to-peer efforts the results of which are entered into the public domain -- I have also proposed that all contemporary consumers might well be conceived of as de facto experimental animals in a vast and ongoing experiment concerning the long term health effects of complex combinations of pharmaceutical treatments coupled with exposure to innumerable artificial substances. It seems to me that since we experimental citizen-subjects provide (usually without adequate knowledge or, hence, consent) indispensable data supporting the profitability of pharmaceutical and other manufacturing concerns the reasonable demand for compensation provides yet another justification for a basic income or at any rate for a single-payer healthcare system.

What I would emphasize is just how closely the logic of this second, apparently unrelated, argument tracks the logic of the initial case I made for pay-to-peer, but also that the absence so far of any institutionalized compensation (apart from sporadic payouts from lawsuits when things go terribly wrong) for the indispensable data we are providing corporate-military interests at the literal risk of our lives has not protected our privacy from unprecedented levels of corporate-military surveillance and targeted marketing practices.

From all of these instances an urgent generalization emerges soon enough: In the absence of its public subsidization peer to peer collaboration is always accompanied by increasing precarity. Whenever and wherever peer-to-peer labor formations are celebrated (for their "open access," for their "flexibility," for their "resilience," for their "innovation"), but this celebration is not just as repeatedly and explicitly accompanied by the recognition that this provision of services and maintenance of public goods is almost certainly unpaid labor, then one must read such celebrations for what they are, as celebrations of exploitation.

p2p means EITHER Paid to Peer OR it means Peers to Precarity. The politics are as stark as that, and the evidence of their urgency mounts by the minute.

Also see A Neoliberalization of Basic Income Discourse?

Deep Thoughts on Democracy from Eliezer Yudkowsky

All-Wrong "Less Wrong" Robot Cult Guru Wannabe Eliezer Yudkowsky:

The transhuman technologies -- molecular nanotechnology, advanced biotech, genetech, Artificial Intelligence, et cetera -- pose tough policy questions. What kind of role, if any, should a government take in supervising a parent's choice of genes for their child? Could parents deliberately choose genes for schizophrenia? If enhancing a child's intelligence is expensive, should governments help ensure access, to prevent the emergence of a cognitive elite? You can propose various institutions to answer these policy questions -- for example, that private charities should provide financial aid for intelligence enhancement -- but the obvious next question is, "Will this institution be effective?" If we rely on product liability lawsuits to prevent corporations from building harmful nanotech, will that really work? I know someone whose answer to every one of these questions is "Liberal democracy!" That's it. That's his answer. If you ask the obvious question of "How well have liberal democracies performed, historically, on problems this tricky?" or "What if liberal democracy does something stupid?" then you're an autocrat, or libertopian, or otherwise a very very bad person. No one is allowed to question democracy.

By way of introduction, let us notice first of all that Yudkowsky's formulation assumes that everybody already knows what "the transhuman technologies" are (that "et cetera" at the end of the laundry list is a dead giveaway), but fails to note that what these "technologies" have in common is that none of them exist to BE anything at all, transhumanoid or otherwise. Of course, biochemistry already operates at the nanoscale, as do some actually-existing materials techniques. After all, making ceramics could be construed as nanotechnology if you squint, but literally nothing new, clarifying, or useful is accomplished by saying so. Whether "advanced" biotech exists or not will depend on the criteria one is using to denote "advanced" (and Yudkowsky doesn't specify his, because of course everybody already knows what criteria drive transhumanoids in these matters). Much the same is true of "genetech," some of which does exist but when it does it is called, not "transhumanism" but, you know, "medicine." And, of course, lots of inept computation, like infuriatingly incorrect autocorrect functions, idiotically inept video game background and companion characters and glorified tape-recorders in cars and hand-held devices get called "Artificial Intelligence," while none of them are the least bit intelligent at all.

Nobody has to join a Robot Cult to understand or deliberate about the developmental stakes associated with actually existing materials or medical techniques, software security or user friendliness issues. And, of course, nobody in a Robot Cult cares in fact about any of them at all except to the extent that these actually-existing artifacts, techniques, and issues are re-imagined as oracles, as portents, as signs, as "burning bushes" pointing the way to a Superlative Future, populated by Superlative Variations of these artifacts and techniques and issues, hyperbolized into a pseudo-scientific quasi-theological techno-transcendental domain in which the faithful can contemplate cyborgic demi-divinity in the form of a super-intelligence beyond error and humiliation, super-powers beyond dis-ease and vulnerability, superabundance beyond struggle and limits.

Given the scale of this error, it may seem mere quibbling to point out as well that, strictly speaking, the non-existing Superlative artifacts and techniques that populate the Superlative imaginary of transhumanoid, singularitarian, and techno-immortalist Robot Cultists do not in fact "pose tough policy questions" to anybody. They do not exist to pose anything, tough or not, anywhere on earth. To the extent that the wish-fulfillment fantasies of Robot Cultists are symptoms of underlying pathologies, irrational fears of aging, mortality, or bodily life, for example, or irrational worries over their lack of total control over the conditions of life, then I suppose one should concede that "the transhuman technologies" pose tough questions for their therapists. And, of course, one might slightly reformulate Yudkowsky's point to ask instead whether there might be worthwhile (if not exactly "tough") questions to ask about the deranging impact of too much public attention and concern devoted to non-existing, irrationally symptomatic "transhuman technologies" on sensible deliberation over budgetary and regulatory priorities, over the quality of public technoscience literacy, and over the reasonable assessment of the stakeholder diversity of real-world developmental costs, benefits, and risks.

Notice that just as Yudkowsky assumes everybody already knows what "the transhuman technologies" ARE (setting aside the issue that non-existing non-things and non-techniques AREn't anything at all), he also assumes that everybody already agrees what would constitute an "enhancement" of intelligence, even though it is quite obvious that enhancement is always enhancement in the service of specific ends, that optimally enabling for some ends inevitably disables for other ends, that there is widespread and passionately contentious disagreement over which ends are indispensable to human flourishing, and so on. He makes similar assumptions about what constitutes "advanced" biotechnology, about what constitutes "effective" institutions. One of the reasons that even those transhumanoid Robot Cultists who disdain association with eugenics (and it should be noted that many transhumanists insist on the association, proudly declaring themselves "liberal eugenicists," while many others espouse bioreductionist evo-devo formulations the relations to eugenic worldviews they fail to grasp or disingenuously deny) might still be assigned the eugenic designation is that in advocating for an "enhancement" treated as a neutral technical term they disavow the substance of disagreement over the terms of human flourishing the better to impose their own parochially preferred views on the matter. Transhumanist and other futurological formulations continually de-politicize the field of actually ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle the better to prevail in their personal political positions under the sign of the a-political, the factual, the hygenic, the optimally efficient, the already universal. That such transhumanists are simply indulging in a reactionary politics of naturalization while at once endlessly declaring themselves the enemy of all things "natural" isn't exactly paradoxical, since I daresay with transhumanists this is really more a matter of stupid people being too stupid to realize they're being stupid. But this customary futurological de-politicization of the politics of technodevelopment does provide a nice connection to the part of Yudkowsky's little number that initially attracted my attention, his also rather typically transhumanoid/singularitarian disdain of democracy.

I leave to the side the question whether we can really trust in the basic truthfulness of Yudkowsky's anecdotal interlocutor who in answer to every policy question presumably responds like a doll whose string has been pulled, "Liberal Democracy!" Given that such a nonresponsive response scarcely seems even grammatical let alone substantive I suspect that what Yudkowsky is accidentally confessing in this supercilious little fable is that when his liberal democratic conversational partner attempts to offer up his best most substantive responses to Yudkowsky's questions (however adequate or not these responses may actually be), Eliezer Yudkowsky -- Soopergenius! -- is incapable of hearing anything but "Liberal Democracy!" over and over again.

If Yudkowsky were to declare to me that "liberal democracies" have done "something stupid" or asked me how "liberal democracies" have "performed historically" in the face of some intractable problem or other, I suspect that I would answer that "liberal democracies" don't DO anything at all, don't PERFORM at all, but that through the forms of liberal democracy (which are, after all, themselves always changing as citizens struggle through them to make them better) citizens, the people themselves, educate, agitate, organize, legislate, reform, deliberate, compromise, content together to solve shared problems, to provide nonviolence alternatives for the adjudication of disputes, and to support and strengthen the scene of consent of everyday people to everyday life.

While nobody denies that citizens can be stupid or ineffective (and much worse), the question is through what collective forms do citizens best recognize and redress such problems? If it is true that majorities of the people can be terribly even dangerously wrong this is because all people can be terribly and even dangerously wrong -- and of course this also includes any minority of people one might care to designate (or who, more likely, would care to designate themselves) a superior elite of aristocrats, plutocrats, technocrats or others who in disdaining liberal democracy express their fancied preference to rule over others.

Needless to say -- because it has been said after all as often as its lesson has been ignored -- there is no argument against government of, by, and for the people that is not a stronger argument against the rule of some few people over the rest of us. What I suspect is that in saying all this, all Eliezer Yudkowsky would hear from me, as he heard in his anecdotal interlocutor, is somebody squawking "Liberal Democracy!" over and over and over again. This insensitivity (I intend the word as a synonym for palpable unintelligence) indicts Yudkowsky even as he imagines himself transfigured into triumph by it.

Perhaps it was Yudkowsky's enjoyment of this false fantastic triumph which distracted his attention from noticing that in whining about not being able to "question democracy" he is ignoring the fact that questioning democracy is the substance of democracy itself, while at once stridently contemplating removing from the majority of people the very right to have a say in the decisions that affect them that he self-righteously demands for himself and pretends to be restrained from even as he effortlessly exercises it in fact. It's almost as if he's "an autocrat, or libertopian, or otherwise a very very bad person" or something.

Dusting Off Old Aphorisms

I'm still sorting through old boxes in my office, scaling down sedimented layers of papers, dissertation drafts, MA exams, seminar papers, undergraduate papers, a play written in high school, and so on. This afternoon I discovered folded inside a paper written in 1983 after my first encounter with The Importance of Being Earnest in a freshman comp lit class at Indiana University some early scribbled aphorisms of my own. I vaguely remember forming the idiotic but comfortingly conventionally undergraduate intention of writing my own Wildean mannered comedy. A century after his death the world was clearly crying out for such a thing -- mind you, I didn't learn about Joe Orton or even Edward Albee until a few years later, I truly was a flabbergasting ignoramus. But anyway, all my aphorisms had quotations around them, and hence were signaling their readiness to be spouted off as superannuated snappy dialogue -- and in some cases at least it seems to me the quotation marks were also providing a little figleaf of the alibi of presumably female characters expressing what now seem to me transparently queer sentiments I was testifying to without quite having a handle on what my closeted predecessor was doing in writing them (and in responding so enthusiastically to Wilde, needless to say). Anyway, here they are, and I'm pleased to say some of them really don't seem to me half bad after all these years.

"You can't be immoral and indecent at the same time, they cancel each other out. You absolutely have to pick one."

"Never compare yourself to other people in public places, it's always impolite and eventually inaccurate."

"I'd marry beneath me to be beneath him."

"Oh, stop saying how talented she is! Talented people are just lucky people who don't want to be reminded that luck never lasts long, or hardworking people who don't want to be reminded that life never lasts long."

"I am planning to die as a last resort."

"Getting out of bed every morning sounds to me like extremism."

"Iconoclasts never smash mirrors." (I didn't consciously remember this, but posted a variation on it -- arguably less good -- as a Futurological Brickbat twenty-five years later. That jolt of recognition was the prompt for taking the time to scribble this little post, actually.)

"Why do you keep calling him a genius? Is he pretentious, or just a plagiarist?"

"I'm struggling to remain symmetrical."

"You despise me because I try to be unprincipled. I despise you because you try to be unprejudiced. That's a prejudice I despise on principle."

"That steady hand of yours is a sure sign of the uninformed."

"You really should stop accusing things that occur in nature of being unnatural. It's unnatural."

"I think I would enjoy this much more if I could find some way to feel sincerely guilty about it."

"The single thing more presumptuous than intolerance is tolerance of it."

"I have heard that birth is always traumatic for the inexperienced."

"Well, none of us can have the impossible, so we all have to make do with the improbable."

"Appearances are never deceiving, but sometimes they are fictional."

"He was ambitious enough and diligent enough, finally, to achieve obscurity. And not only in his writing."

(How's that last one for a portent?)