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.

Smart Homes Are Stoopid

Kashmir Hill at Forbes:

The home automation market was worth $1.5 billion in 2012 according to Reuters; there’s been an explosion in products that promise to make our homes “smarter.” The best known is Nest, a thermostat that monitors inhabitants’ activity, learns their schedules and temperature preferences and heats or cools the house as it deems appropriate. Many of these products have smartphone

["smart" phone --d]

apps and Web portals that let users operate devices, cameras, and locks from afar. Getting to live the Jetsons’ lifestyle has downsides though;

[a futuristic lifestyle which, it should be noted, people in "smart" homes are not actually living even when their mostly useless truly crappy remote control light-switch gizmos ARE working --d]

as we bring the things in our homes onto the Internet, we run into the same kind of security concerns we have for any connected device... Googling a very simple phrase led me to a list of “smart homes” that had... an automation system from Insteon that allows remote control of their lights, hot tubs, fans, televisions, water pumps, garage doors, cameras, and other devices, so that their owners can turn these things on and off with a smartphone app or via the Web... Their systems [were] crawl-able by search engines –- meaning they show up in search results -- and due to Insteon not requiring user names and passwords by default in a now-discontinued product, I was able to click on the links, giving me the ability to turn these people’s homes into haunted houses, energy-consumption nightmares, or even robbery targets. Opening a garage door could make a house ripe for actual physical intrusion... Sensitive information was revealed -- not just what appliances and devices people had, but their time zone (along with the closest major city to their home), IP addresses and even the name of a child;

[The Footure needs children! --d]

apparently, the parents wanted the ability to pull the plug on his television from afar. In at least three cases, there was enough information to link the homes on the Internet to their locations in the real world. The names for most of the systems were generic, but in one of those cases, it included a street address that I was able to track down to a house in Connecticut. I could have wreaked serious havoc with this home... The Insteon vulnerability was one of many found in smarthome devices by David Bryan and Daniel Crowley, security researchers at Trustwave. Bryan got one of Insteon’s HUB devices in December, installed the app on his phone, and began monitoring how it worked. “What I saw concerned me,” he said. “There was no authentication between the handheld and any of the control commands... “You could put someone’s electric bill through the roof by turning on a hot tub heater” ... Insteon chief information officer Mike Nunes... blamed user error

[of course he did! So, you will recall, did the HAL 9000 --d]

for the appearance in search results, saying the older product was not originally intended for remote access, and to set this up required some savvy on the users’ part. The devices had come with an instruction manual telling users how to put the devices online which strongly advised them to add a username and password to the system. (But, really, who reads instruction manuals closely?

[Indeed, like user agreements, most of the manuals are written in the expectation that they will not and possibly cannot be read -- but still provide plausible deniability and shifts of responsibility for costs and failures on those who suffer rather than enable them --d]

Insteon says the problem has been fixed in its current product but affected users were never informed that this vulnerability existed

[gosh, why should they be informed how their technofetishism has made them more vulnerable to home intrusion, kidnapping of their children, skyrocketing utilities bills, and gizmos that not only don't do what you pay for them to do but also make other gizmos that used to work not work anymore, you know, because the sooper-geniuses at some tech company have made your house "smart" with stoopid software? --d]

“I’m excited these technologies exist but am heart-broken that these security flaws exist,” says Trustwave’s Crowley.

[After all who ISN'T excited to discover that entrepreneurial capitalism is still producing useless crap that turns out not only to be useless but actively menacing? --d]

He and his colleague found security flaws that would allow a digital intruder to take control of a number of sensitive devices beyond the Insteon systems, from the Belkin WeMo Switch to the Satis Smart Toilet. Yes, they found that a toilet was hackable. You only have to have the Android app for the $5,000 toilet on your phone and be close enough to the toilet to communicate with it... Another problem with some of the devices, such as the Mi Casa Verde MIOS VeraLite, is that once they’re connected to a Wi-Fi network, they assume that anyone using that network is an authorized user. So if you can manage to get on someone’s Wi-Fi network -- which is easy if they have no password on it -- you could take control of their home. “These companies are considering the home network as a fortress,” says Crowley. “In most cases, it’s anything but.”

Needless to say, the tech companies peddling this crap will insist that all these problems (and the endlessly many other problems like them that will never stop appearing) are isolated and fixable instances within a broader, irresistible tide of techno-emancipation. What is conspicuous throughout this piece is the extent to which a discussion of real problems caused by real networked devices is infused with fantasy. There is no such thing as "artificial intelligence." Given what we actually know about actual intelligence and given what we can actually do with actual technique, there is no more reasonable expectation that humans will craft an artificial intelligence any time soon than that we will be contacted by an extra-terrestrial intelligence any time soon. Even when they manage to work more or less as they are expected to do "smart" phones, "smart" cards, "smart" homes, "smart" cars, "smart" appliances aren't the least bit smart. They do not exhibit intelligence -- indeed, their design is usually rendered incomparably less intelligent precisely by the ideological investment of their designers in fantasies that gizmos will indeed one day BE intelligent as they are in the science fiction worlds they prefer to our own, that their designs should pretend to be intelligent now so that they and their users can likewise pretend to be living the science fictional worlds they prefer to our own. Despite its skepticism and focus on problems the piece is nonetheless full of utterly fantastic and metaphorical conjurations that invest it in a futurological hyperbole that facilitates credulity and distraction from problems: recall the conjuration of a "Jetson's lifestyle" nobody is living even when these techno-gewgaws work, recall the "excitement" of a hacker at the thought that "these technologies exist" even as he exposes the glaring flaws and false promise of these very technologies, recall the mirage of building a mighty material "fortress" of immaterial code through the paradoxical opening up of the doors and wires and walls of the home to the remote access of countless millions of networked strangers. I am hard pressed to think of a single outstanding way in which any of these new networked applications justify their expense even when they are working properly -- especially given the brittleness of these complex novelties as compared with the perfectly serviceable locks and switches and handles that have worked so well for so long before futurological flim flam artists peddled their useless wares to the bored bourgeois brats of the digital generation as "convenience" and "smartness." Like most "technological" discourse, the "smart" home is activating fantasies to distract attention from realities in the service of short-term parochial profit-taking by suave con artists many of whom are high on their own supply. The truth smarts.

The Superlative Summary

I write quite a lot here at Amor Mundi about the damaging and deranging impacts of futurological discourses on sensible deliberation about technoscientific change. I focus on the pernicious effects of both the prevailing corporate-militarist futurology of neoliberal global developmentalism and disciplinary bioethics as marketing, policy-making, and ideological discourses, but also the Superlative Futurology championed among the so-called transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, digital-utopians, nano-cornucopiasts, and other pseudo-scientific techno-transcedentalists whom I like to lampoon as "Robot Cultists."

There is considerable overlap between these mainstream and superlative futurological modes, both share a tendency to reductionism conjoined to a (compensatory?) hyperbole bordering on arrant fraud, not to mention an eerie hostility to the materiality of the furniture of the world (whether this takes the form of a preference for financialization over production, or for the digital over the real), the materiality of the mortal vulnerable aging body, the materiality of the organismic brains in which intelligence is incarnated, among many other logical, topical, and tropological continuities.

The characteristic gesture of superlative, as against mainstream, futurological discourses is that they tend to commandeer worldly concerns like basic healthcare, education, economic, or security policy, say, and then redirect them (in a radically amplified variation on conventional marketing and promotional hyperbole) into faith-based discourses and interpretive communities peddling not just the usual quick profits or youthful skin but promising personal techno-transcendence modeled in its basic contours and relying for much of its intuitive plausibility on the disavowed theological omni-predicates of especially judeochrislamic godhood (omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence), now translated instead into pseudo-scientific terms (superintelligence, supercapacitation [especially in the form of super-longevity or techno-immortality], and superabundance). Adherents of superlative futurology across the organizational archipelago of Robot Cult sects are indulging, in essence, in faith-based initiatives. They are infantile wish-fulfillment fantasists who fancy that they will "arrive" at a personally techno-transcedentalizing destination they denominate "The Future."

In this Superlative Summary I provide a survey of pieces written over many years criticizing particular futurologists and particular futurological topics. For a more concise elaboration of my critique of Superlativity, I recommend either my essay Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains, published by the journal Existenz, or the more general and humorous introduction provided by my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.

TOPICS:

Accelerationalism/Inevitability

Set Theory for Futurists
Accelerationalism
From Future Shock to Future Fatigue
Superlativity and Its "Bigger Picture" (do read the comments)
From "The Great Stagnation" to a Great Awakening
The Unbearable Stasis of Accelerating Change

Advertizing/Marketing "The Future"

Futurological Genres
"The Future" As Ad and As Cult
Futurological Mad Men

Algorithmic Mediation

All Watched Over By Algorithms of Loving Grace
The Inevitable Cruelty of Algorithmic Mediation

Artificial Intelligence

Roko Oh Noes: Banging My Head Against the Wall With A Singularitarian GOFAI Dead-Ender
Hannah Arendt on AI
Depopulation, Nor Personification
A Comment on Artificial Imbecillence
Robot Cultists Still in the Woods Without A Compass
Paul Krugman Flirts With Futurism
Robot Gods Are Nowhere So Of Course They Must Be Everywhere
Futurology's Shortsighted Foresight on AI
AI Isn't A Thing

Artificial Meat

Saving My Bacon
Meat Brain Futurology: One More Time On the "In-Vitro Meat" Merry Go Wrong
Nourishing Nothingness: Futurists Are Getting Virtually Serious About Food Politics

ARTS -- Artificial/Assistive/Alternative Reproductive Technologies

Technoprogressive ARTS
Keep Your Laws Off My Body

Big Data

Spectacle From Marx to Debord to Big Data
Big Data As Idol

Cloning Neanderthals

Futurologists Welcome Our New Neanderthal Neighbors

Conservative/Reactionary Futurology

Democracy at the Transhumapalooza
The Ayn Raelians
The Anti-Democratizing Politics of Superlative Futurology
Futurology Is the Quintessential and Consummating Discourse of the Unwholesome Whole That Is Neoliberal/Neoconservative Corporate-Militarism
"Revolutionary" Robot Cultists
"The Future" As A White Boy's Club
"The Future" Is Not Fairly Distributed
The Suicidal Sociopathy of the Tech Sector

Crime and Punishment

Robot Cultist Rebrands Torture and Dreams of Futuristic Prisons As Virtual Hells

Cryonics

Those Curious Cryonaughts
Robot Cultists Want to Eat Science And Have It, Too
Robot Cultists Exploit Dying Woman to Peddle Pseudo-Science and Threaten Critics
Cryo-Kitsch and PR
Alcor Techno-Immortalists Failing to Freeze Out Critics

Cultism

A Transhumanist Files a Complaint in the Hurt Feelings Department
No, You're the Cultist!
Must I Really Weigh In On "The Cult Debate"?
An Open Letter to the Robot Cultists
A Robot God's Apostle's Creed for the "Less Wrong" Throng

Cyborgs

Am I Going To Become A Cyborg In the Future?
Performance Artist and Sousveillance Activist Steve Mann Assaulted in Paris McDonalds
Calling Bullshit on the World's First Cyborg Hate Crime

Deathism

My Deathist Zealotry
More on My Apparent Deathism
Mortality
The Fallen World and the World to Come; Or, Techno-Utopians Give 'Em That New-Fangled Religion
Death, Diarrhea, and Dingbats
Are Techno-Immortalist Robot Cultists the Real Deathists?

Designing Retro-Futures

Designs Us On: Some Basic Contentions on the Politics of Design
The Politics of Design. The Anti-Politics of Design.
Gizmuddle: Or, Why the Futuristic Is Always Only Perverse

Driverless Cars

"Driverless" Cars As Dead-Ender Car Culture Apologia
Driverless Car Not As Prophesy But As Allegory
Google Unveils Driverless Car Future in Driverless Bus Present
The Dreamtime of the Driverless Car

Enhancement/Eugenics

Disability Discourse As Moralizing
Two Variations of Contemporary Eugenicist Politics
Eugenics and the Denigration of Consent
Transhuman Eugenicism
Is Transhumanism Racist?

Existential Risk

Technology and Terror
GWOT Against Green
Futurological Fearmongering
Insecurity Theater: How Futurological Existential-Risk Discourse Deranges Serious Technodevelopmental Deliberation
Very Serious Robocalyptics

Fandom

Far Out
The Fandom Menace

Foresight

Futurological Blah Blah
What Futurology Is Peddling Has Little to Do With Foresight

Flim Flam

"The Future" Is A Racket
Science, Not Sales
Those Faddish Futurologists
Fraud Is the Futurological Common Denominator

Future Shock

Future Schlock Credulity Levels

Futurological Methodologies

Hannah Arendt on Futurology
What Do Futurologists Do?
The Scenario Spinners

Geeks, Geekery, Geekdom

Raised Vulcan Eyebrows and Hopeless Human Hopes
Geek Rule Is Weak Gruel: Why It Matters That Luddites Are Geeks
Techbros Are Not Geeks

Geo-Engineering

More Geo-Engineering
"Geo-Engineering" As Futurological Greenwashing
"Geo-Engineering" Is A Declaration of War That Doesn't Care About Democracy
"Geo-Engineering" and the Ticking Time Bomb
"Geo-Engineering" As Right Wing War and Revolution
What Are People Really Talking About When They Talk About "Geo-Engineering"?
Exxon-Mobil's "Geo-Engineering" Discourse Is Just More Futurological Greenwashing
Is "Geo-Engineering" Really Just Gardening?

Guns

Stand Your Ground As Secessionist Treason
On Guns (Only) in America

Innovation

Against Innovation

Immaterialism

Markets Without Materiality
Everything Solid Melts Into Laissez-Faire
Futurological Immaterialism and Neoliberal Immaterialism

Liberal Futurology

Technoprogressive: What's In A Name?
Futurological Self-Marginalization, Futurological Dissemination
Against the Seduction of the Left by Reactionary Futurology
Facile Futurology at Talking Points Memo -- And What Is So Dangerous About It
TPM Doubles Down on Facile Futurology
The Ambivalence of Investment/Speculation As the Kernel of Reactionary Futurology
The Futurological As Reactionary Point of Entry in Liberal Discourse
Ah, Good Times!
BooMan on the Futuristic Roll Out
The Political Problem of Transhumanism

Longevity

Aubrey de Grey, Technological Immortalism, and the Idea of a Longevity Singularity
Interminable Terminological Hanky-Panky
Follow the Bouncing Ball... to Techno-Immortality!
Reactionary Fruits of Futurology: Social Security Edition

Memetics

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

Moore's Law

Learning from Lanier's Inverse Moore's Law
My Little Steampony Singularity
The Mirage and the Material of Technoscientific Progress

Morphological Freedom

The Politics of Morphological Freedom
Eugenics and the Denigration of Consent
Morphological Freedom Should Be A Political Expression of Human Finititude, Not An Infantile Revolt Against It

Nanotechnology

Nanosantalogical Feasibility

Optimism

My "Negativity"
Positive/Negative
Optimist or Pessimist? A Futurological Ramble, With Occasional Ranting
Accentuate the Negative
But Why So Negative?
The Relentless Negativity of Futurological "Positivity"
Deception, Delusion, and Denial Isn't Optimism

Nuclear Energy

Mo Nukes
No Nukes Twitterscrum

Patriarchy

Technology Is Making Queers of Us All
"Post-Gender" Or Gender Poets?
Transhuman Transsex
What Is Patriarchy?
Anarcho-Anti-Sexist Robot Cultist Decides Feminism Is Too Hard, Declares Himself A Robot
Uploading As Reactionary Anti-Body Politics

Pay-to-Peer

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

Posthumanity

Posthuman Terrains
What "Becomes" Post Humanity?

Private Space Industry (also see Space Travel)

Enter the Dragon: Why I Am Not A SpaceX Space Vegas Space Cadet
SpaceX Space Cadets Predictably Crowing Mars, Bitches!
Dumb Daily Dvorsky: Musky for Mars Edition
Proposed Mars One Game Show Is the Ultimate "Anti-Survivor"
The Voice of Libertopian Space Takes Me To Task

Progress

The Mirage and the Material of Technoscientific Progress

Proxy Politics

Chimera
Futurological Displacements

Pseudo-Science

Superlativity Exposed
Futurology's "If Magic Were Real" Paradox
Gaming the Refs in the Robot Cult
Robot Cultist Condemns Scientific Illiteracy On Which Robot Cultism Depends

Racism

Robot Cultists Have Seen the Future... And It Is A White Penis!
Is Transhumanism Racist?

Robot Workers

Futurological Defenses of Automation, Outsourcing, Crowdsourcing, Precarizing Labor

Science Fiction

Why Do Libertopians Love Science Fiction So Much?
Mass Mediated Hand Holding: Depressive Bioconservative Cinema and Its Manic Technophiliac Twin
"Science Fiction Is the Entertainment Wing of Futurism"
"Smug Atheists" Should Read More SF Counsels io9
What Futurology Does To Science Fiction
Why Is Science Fiction A Literature of Ideas?
Techbro Mythopoetics

Separatism

Dispatches from Libertopia: Going Galt on the High Seas (To Infinity and Beyond!)
Nauru Needs Futurologists!

Sexbots

"Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again,"
Jumping the Shark to Boobtopia
The Sexy Sexbots

Singularity

"The Singularity Won't Save Your Ass"
Singularitarian Agony
Debating Singularitarians
Roko Oh Noes: Banging My Head Against the Wall With A Singularitarian GOFAI Dead-Ender
My Response to the Counterpunch Expose of Singularitarianism
Singularitarian Hype and the Denial of History
At the Heart of the "Financial Singularity" Is Not Mystery But Fraud
Singularitarian Declares Victory, Goes Back To Bed 
Nicholas Carr on the Robot God Odds

"Smart" Homes

Smart Homes Are Stoopid

Space Travel (also see Private Space Industry)

Quick, Futurological Escapists, to the Lifeboats!
Robot Cultist Adds Two Fantasies Together To Arrive At Third Fantasy
Robot Cultist Pout and Stamp; Or "Manifest Destiny"
There Is No Escape Hatch

Subculture

Technoprogressivism Is a Tide, Not a Tribe
"Technoprogressive": What's In A Name?

Superlativity

A Superlative Schema
The Superlative Imagination
Understanding Superlative Futurology
Superlative Futurology (Published by Re/Public)
Topsy-Superlativity
"Technological Immortalism" As Superlative Discourse
Transhumanism Without Superlativity Is Nothing

Surveillance

From my dissertation, Pancryptics

The Discretionary: Secrecy, Privacy, and Control (on the Crypto-Anarchists and Cypherpunks)
XI. From Privation to Discretion
XII. Description As Threat
XIII. Privacy Under Control
XIV. Digital Libertarianism
Markets With Eyes (on David Brin's Transparent Society)
I. Either/Or
II. Eye Infinitum
III. Truths to Power
IV. Neither/Nor

Zuckerberg's Privation
Farhad Manjoo's Camera Reassura
A Twitter Privacy Treatise (Considerable elaboration takes place in the Moot.)
All Watched Over By Algorithms of Loving Grace
Commodifying Publicity
Cop-Cam Sham: Political Problems Demand Political Solutions

Techno-Fixes

Technofixated Pseudo-Solutions
Cop-Cam Sham: Political Problems Demand Political Solutions

Techno-Immortalism

"Technological Immortalism" As Superlative Discourse
All Humans Are Mortal. Socrates Is Human. Therefore, Socrates Is Mortal.
Rebel, Rebel: Death-Denialism As "Utopian" Politics
Robot Cultists Polled on Preferred Techno-Immortalist "Options"

Technology "As Such"

Futurological Reification, Reduction, Reaction
Prologue for Futural Politics
"Technology" Is Not A Force for Either Liberation or Oppression
The Futurological Fetish
Technology and Myth

Transcendence/Infinitude

Transformation Not Transcendance
On Limits
"Overcoming the Limits"
Technoprogressive Discourses As Against Superlative Technology Discourses
No Limits! (And Other Foolishness)
Loss, Connection, Transformation
Understanding Superlative Futurology

3D-Printing

Some Serious Questions for Futurologists Hyperventilating About 3D Printing
Daily Dumb Dvorsky: Butt Hurt Edition

Uplift

Animal "Uplift"
"The Future" on the Planet of the Apes

Uploading

Martine Rothblatt's Artificial Imbecillence
Some Questions For A "Mind Uploading" Enthusiast
For Robot Cultists Heaven Is Being A Cartoon In An Ad for Crap That Never Ends
What's Wrong With Terasem?
Richard Jones: No Uploads for You!
Uploading As Reactionary Anti-Body Politics

Wearable Computers

Tragic Techbrofashionistas of The Future Put. A. Phone. On. It!

The Wright Brothers Gambit

Cranks
They Laughed at the Wright Brothers, Too!
Another Robot Cultist Compares Self to the Wright Brothers
"Heavier-Than-Air Flying Machines Are Impossible," Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.

FOLKS:

Michael Anissimov

Sanewashing Superlativity (For a More Gentle Seduction)
Responding to Singularitarian Robot Cultist Michael Anissimov
The Achievement of Superlative Futurology
The Robot Cultists Have Won?
Not Offensive, Just Delusive
"Only Cyborgs Live Forever"

John Perry Barlow

"I Tweet From Basement, Home of Mom": Time For A Cyberspace Manifesto 2.0?

Nick Bostrom

Very Serious Robocalyptics

Stewart Brand

Hole Earth:

one -- Stewart Brand, King of Pop Futurology
two -- Surveying the Greenback-Green Futurological Litany
three -- All Futurisms Tend to be Functionally Retro-Futuristic in Their Political Substance

Stewart Brand Twitterrant

David Brin

Markets With Eyes:

I. Either/Or
II. Eye Infinitum
III. Truths to Power
IV. Neither/Nor

Lincoln Cannon

A Faith in Finitude
If Everything Is Faith, Nothing Is

Jamais Cascio

The Trouble With Technocentricity
"The Future" Is Nothing But an Ad
"Geo-Engineering" Is A Declaration of War That Doesn't Care About Democracy
The Future Is A Fraud

Hugo De Garis

Googolectics: Navel Gazing... Without Limits!

Aubrey De Grey

Aubrey de Grey, Technological Immortalism, and the Idea of a Longevity Singularity

Peter Diamandis

Schlock and Awesome; Or, The Futurists Are Worse Than You Think
The Unbearable Stasis of Accelerating Change

George Dvorsky

Modification, Not Enhancement; Consent, Not Consensus; Prosthetic Self-Determination, Not Eugenics
"Post-Gender" Or Gender Poets?
"The Future" on the Planet of the Apes
Robot Cultist George Dvorsky Is Building a Dyson Sphere in His Basement
Dumb Daily Dvorsky: Musky for Mars Edition
Dumb Daily Dvorsky: Immortal Jellyfish Edition
Daily Dumb Dvorsky: Alone Again, Unnaturally Edition
Daily Dumb Dvorsky: Futurological "Existential Risk" Discourse As Existential Risk Edition
Daily Dumb Dvorsky: Butt Hurt Edition
Dumb Daily Dvorsky: Uninhabitable Edition
Daily Dumb Dvorsky: What Happens When You Put Robot Cult Hype on Your "Science Beat" Edition
Dumb Dvorsky Uses Science Fiction Cliches to Illustrate the "Totally Unexpected"
Giving Transhumanoid George Dvorsky "Credit Where Credit Is Due
Dumb Dvorsky Flogs Nano Flim Flam
Dumb Dvorsky TechBroSplains "Soft Paternalism"
Dumb Dvorsky Implies Alien Invasion A Greater Threat Than Climate Change Or Resource Descent
Dumb Dvorsky Declares Fanboy Disageekments With Him About The Singularity To Be "Lies"
Dumb Dvorsky Understands the e-Cigarette Singularity So You Don't Have To
Em Butterfly: Robot Cultists George Dvorsky and Robin Hanson Go Overboard for Robo-Overlords Over at io9
Dumb Dvorsky Faces Reality, Throws Tantrum

Thomas Frey

Futurologists Are Mortal, But Faith-Based Futurology Is A Zombie That Cannot Be Killed

Ben Goertzel

Nauru Needs Futurologists!
Robot Cultist Declares Need for Holiday Counting Chickens Before They Are Hatched
Robocultic Kack Fight

Robin Hanson

Very Serious Futurology With Robin Hanson
Em Butterfly: Robot Cultists George Dvorsky and Robin Hanson Go Overboard for Robo-Overlords Over at io9

James Hughes

Listen, Transhumanist!
Consumerism Forever
James Hughes Flogs for the Robot Cult
Animal "Uplift"
Transhumanists Are Not Just Wrong, They Are Revealingly Dishonest
What Futurology Does To Science Fiction

Ray Kurzweil

Take Your Vitamins And You'll Meet the Robot God: Raymond Kurzweil's Latest
Guru Kurzweil Passes the Robot Cult Collection Plate for Google to Fill
The Mirage and the Material of Technoscientific Progress

Jeron Lanier

Jeron Lanier's Who Owns the Future?
Should We Proceed From Proceduralism? Freddie Deboer on Jeron Lanier
The Mirage and the Material of Technoscientific Progress

Dylan Love

Technology. Will. Change. Everything. Something. Nothing.

Farhad Manjoo

Farhad Manjoo's Camera Reassura

Max More

Morphological Freedom Should Be A Political Expression of Human Finititude, Not An Infantile Revolt Against It
Can-Do Robot Cultist Max More "Chooses" Immortality, Remains Mortal Anyway
Ayn Raelian Robot Cultist Max More Responds
My Exchange With Max More Continues

Kyle Munkittrick

Why Can't More People Just Indulge in Insane Denialism About the Fact of Their Mortality Like the Robot Cultists Do?
Your Future Sucks
Transhumanist Unveils Healthcare Reform Plan

Elon Musk

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk Are the Koch Brothers of Reactionary Futurology
Musky for Mars
SpaceX Space Cadets Predictably Crowing, Mars, Bitches!
"Summoning the Demon": Robot Cultist Elon Musk Reads from Robo-Revelations at MIT
Looks Like Musk Rat Love

Annalee Newitz

"Science Fiction Is the Entertainment Wing of Futurism"
Slow Future! Or, Robot God Save the Machine
Newitz Notices EvoPsycho Douchebaggery
"The Future" Is A Hell of a Drug: io9 Has A New Manifesto

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly on the Golden Age

John Pavlus

Dumb Present Disappoints Dumb Futurist

Hank Pellissier

Socially Alienated Futurists Accidentally Re-Invent the Idea of Having A Social Life
Can-Do Bigotry... For The Future!
Jim, He's Dead
The Transhumanist War on Brains
Are Techno-Immortalist Robot Cultists the Real Deathists?

Dick Pelletier

Futurological Unparodiability
"Experts Say"
Robot Cultist Adds Two Fantasies Together To Arrive At Third Fantasy
Deception, Delusion, and Denial Isn't Optimism

Mark "Plus"

Dale Carrico's Problems; Or, We Call It the Techno-Aristocrats
Exchange With A Very Serious White Guy of The Future on Guns
Entrepreneurial Scam and Skim Artists As Real Superheroes

Giulio Prisco

Giulio Prisco's Defense of Superlative Nonsense
For Giulio Prisco
The Power of Poop; Or, Prisco Reponds
Cyborg Angels Live Forever and Never Have to Poop
Yes!Trons Defending "The Transhumanist Core" From HumantiyPlusTrons
Giulio Prisco May Be One of the Most Idiotic People Alive
Ridiculing the Ridiculous
My Many Lies About the Robot Cultists
Death, Diarrhea, and Dingbats
I Don't Think That Phrase "Straw Man" Means What You Think It Does
If You're A Robot Cultist "There Is No Such Thing As Bad Press"
Robot Cultist Pout and Stamp; Or "Manifest Destiny"
Techno-Immortalist Robot Cultist Throws Tantrum

Rebecca Roache

Robot Cultist Rebrands Torture and Dreams of Futuristic Prisons As Virtual Hells

Martine Rothblatt

The "Imagination" of a Robot Cultist
More Serious Futurology From Martine Rothblatt
Martine Rothblatt's Artificial Imbecillence

Jason Silva

The Proof of the Singularity Is That There Is No Proof, Man!

R.U. Sirius

R.U. Sirius on Transhumanism
Michael Jackson Was Not A Transhumanist

John Smart

Smart's "Laws on Technology"
The Proof of the Singularity Is That There Is No Proof, Man!

Gennady Stolyarov

Gennady Stolyarov You Are Going To Die

Jaan Tallinn

Very Serious Robocalyptics

Peter Thiel

The Ayn Raelians
Peter Thiel and Elon Musk Are the Koch Brothers of Reactionary Futurology
Like Kurzweil, Peter Thiel Is Revealed To Be More Sad-Quack Than Sooper-Genius

Mike Treder

Treder, Traitor
Transhumanist Hopes to Become Irrelevant in the Future, Fails to Grasp Irony in the Present
All Humans Are Mortal. Socrates Is Human. Therefore, Socrates Is Mortal.

Natasha Vita-More

"A superhuman object of desire combining Madonna, Schwarzenegger and Marcel Duchamp"
Not Necessarily Abnormal But Certainly Stupid
Is There A Transhumanoid Art Movement Apart from Prevailing Corporate-Military PR Practices?

Brian Wang

"I Am Fact Guy"
More on Superlativity ("Technicality," "Feasibility," and "the Real World")

Tim Wu

Why Does Tim Wu Side With the Technoblatherers?

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Superla-Pope Peeps
Let's Talk About Cultishness
Deep Thoughts on Democracy From Eliezer Yudkowsky
So Not A Cult!

Slavoj Zizek

Zizek on the Tech Bloom
Slavoj Zizek Is A Blogger
Slavoj Zizek, Our Heir to George Carlin, Does Standup at Occupy Wall Street

Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg's Privation

I welcome recommendations about posts of mine on particular futurologists or futurological topics I've forgotten but which may deserve inclusion, or which I should prefer as better or clearer or funnier than the ones I've picked out myself.

Giving Transhumanoid George Dvorsky "Credit Where Credit Is Due"

I have written lots of pieces ridiculing the ridiculous futurological stylings of transhumanoid George Dvorsky, especially since he was offered a comparatively high profile pundit-perch at io9 (for a representative sampling of my Dvorscatology scroll down to his entry in the Superlative Summary), and it shouldn't have been surprising given this focus that several people have directed my attention to a recent piece of his in which he manages to say a few things that are not quite so stupid among some other things that are still pretty stupid, Is Human Super Intelligence A Bad Idea? Shouldn't I give credit where credit is due, each of these sympathetic readers have asked me, proffering the link over and over again? I mean, a variation on that phrase, "credit where credit is due" literally appeared in every single one of these referrals to Dvorsky's piece. What gives?

You know, I'm not sure I am willing to concede that "human super intelligence" is even an idea at all, let alone a good one, and so it doesn't seem to me that creditable an advance to declare it conceivably a bad one when it comes to it. I am truly glad for Dvorsky's own sake as a fellow finite earthling that he has found his way at least momentarily to the realization that what gets called "intelligence" in the AI-deadender set he frequents tends to be a scrawny affair at best, indifferent to so much of the lived emotional embodied historical socialized richness of intelligence as it plays out in the real world. Nevertheless, the obvious fact remains that lots and lots of people already say all the sensible things Dvorsky has managed to say to this effect in the piece in question without saying any of the idiotic things he also says here and definitely endlessly elsewhere and yet I'm not sure we're giving them any credit for saying so much more so much better though presumably they deserve such credit at least as much as he does.

Also, you know, I don't happen to think futurological disasterbation about transhumanoid tropes (reductive understandings of intelligence may lead to a Robot God that eats us all instead of a Robot God who kisses away all our boo boos!) really is the least bit more helpful or serious in the way of thought than the more usual techno-utopian wish-fulfillment futurological mode about transhumanoid tropes. I personally think it is inherently deranging to misconstrue problems of user-unfriendly software or network insecurity as problems of unintelligent or malevolently intelligent designed entities rather than of unintelligent or malevolent designer entities. I haven't exactly made a secret of the fact that I think the whole discourse of artificial intelligence is a sprawling inapt inept metaphor yielding a harvest of artificial imbecillence all around. Dvorsky's assumption in this piece of a kind of futurological moderate middle pausing momentarily over a few serious AI problems is a pose -- it mostly functions to circumscribe the whole discussion of intelligent software and network design within the tropological field of artificial intellects that nourishes the worst futurological fancies in the first place. Not only is it not enough to declare oneself "pro" or "con" or "middle of the road" on questions of the Robot God or concerning the Writing on the Wall in current software and network problems that presumably foretell His Robotic Be-Coming -- I happen to think that never ever taking up any of these positions at all is the best way to have a chance at saying anything sensible about real world computation. Let's just say it's one more science-fictional game for which the only winning move is not to play.

And about science fiction... As almost inevitably happens in a George Dvorsky piece, there is once again an accompanying image from a mainstream Hollywood science fiction flick providing the proscenium into what passes for the futurological theatrum philosophicum he offers up this time around as well. I just can't repeat this enough. There is a difference between science fiction and science practice, there is a difference between science fiction and science policy, there is a difference between science fiction and science criticism. I say this as someone who is a huge science fiction fan, as someone who takes science fiction enormously seriously, and as someone who takes literary criticism seriously, too. I readily agree that like so much great literature science fiction assumes a critical and imaginative vantage on the quandaries of the present, including moral and metaphysical and sometimes even technical quandaries concerning the vicissitudes of emerging technoscience and ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle. But the actual practice of science, the actual practice of regulation, funding, and distribution of technoscientific costs, risks, and benefits in research settings and policy-making settings, as well as any kind of sustained and systematic critical analyses or even documentation of technoscience practices has actual standards and emerges out of actual discursive archives. One can quibble around the edges, one can point to occasional cross-pollinations, one can note that none of these things is really only one thing, one can elaborate complex historical trajectories and contexts for them all, but these efforts are all different from science fiction in ways that make a difference. If George Dvorsky wants to be taken for somebody doing serious or even not so serious philosophy of technology or technnology criticism or literary criticism or technoscience policy or, hell, even science fiction fandom -- every one of which are perfectly legitimate and legible endeavors of which I personally whole-heartedly approve -- well, he is doing it wrong, and I can't set that aside just because he manages a smidge of sense in public for once.

Okay, and another thing. In the column, Dvorsky quotes life-long self-identified transhumanists like Mark Walker (as he has done for James Hughes or Mikey Anissimov in other recent pieces of his), never pointing out that these are people who are affiliated with him through his own membership in transhumanist organizations, pretending they are independent intellectuals in order to raise their public profiles. Sometimes he even has transhumanists gamely stumble upon the topic of "transhumanism" as though they were outside observers or something, as if anybody but transhumanists themselves (and a handful of weird critics like me) really talk about transhumanism as if it were this widely known, you know, "thing" that comes up among technoscientifically concerned intellectuals when they're just hanging out and shooting the breeze. Your mileage may reasonably vary on this question, but I personally think it verges on journalistic malpractice for Dvorsky to fail to point out his connection to the muckety-mucks in his own cult he is flogging this way. Dvorsky's columns in io9 are almost always straight up transhumanoid Robot Cult proselytizing for techno-transcendental techno-immortalizing sooper-humanizing consumer-paradising malarkey. And that's fine. I mean, it's terminally stupid and dangerously distracting, but, you know, you say your stupid shit and I say it's stupid shit and then people say I'm a stupid shit for saying it's stupid shit or what have you -- let a bazillion flowers bloom. But I think when Dvorsky is not just indulging in his pet ideology but stealthfully shoring up marginal institutions and organizational ties beholden to that ideology then there is a conflict of interest in play that should be seen for what it is -- and I do think if Dvorsky were a Scientologist or a Raelian doing this sort of blatant sub(cult)ural logrolling it would be exposed as such and impact his credibility (such as it is).

Howzabout this? If io9 comes to its senses and cuts Dvorsky's mic, I'll give credit where credit is due.

Unintelligent Intelligence at the NSA and Kafka's Funhouse Mirror-Stage

"We got hacked by the hacker we hired to hack? That's unpossible!" #NSABrainTrust

Will we be saved from total information awareness by its total incompetence everywhereness?

Killer clowns like Nixon's Plumbers were real, soopergroovy soopergeniuses with soopercomputers like Penelope on Criminal Minds are fiction.

Mass-mediated misrepresentation of state intelligence as omnicompetent techno heroes or villains derange proper responses to their dangers.

Kafka, "Give It Up!"

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the railroad station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized it was already much later than I had thought, I had to hurry, the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way, I was not very well acquainted with the town yet, fortunately there was a policeman nearby, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: 'from me you want to learn the way?' 'Yes,' I said, 'since I cannot find it myself.' 'Give it up, give it up,' said he, and turned away with a great sweep, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.

This has always been my favorite variation on the scene of interpellation, and the one that prefigures most perfectly and painfully in its apparent inversion the actual scene that would play out for Althusser the murderer in the streets of Paris rather differently than it did in his imagination for Althusser the theorist. When hails ring out from the crowd in all directions, echoing off the walls and in our imaginations, we turn and turn and turn and find ourselves more dizzy than docile... As in the more famous parable "Before the Law" we co-construct the state that subordinates us in pining for its recognition, a phony democratization that yields indifference to our difference, but also exposes a fatal imposture always opening onto possibilities for a more substantial democratization of state responsiveness to responsible peers. Kafka keeps giving us Althusserian ideological apparatuses in stately drag playing out a funhouse mirror stage. And, yes, it is much later than you think.

I am far from meaning to diminish the crimes or the dangers of our burgeoning bludgeoning blundering corporate-militarity surveillance state, forever framing neoliberal subjects as targets of potential prosecution, advertizing, drone strikes. In both its assumptions and its aspirations total information awareness is literally totalitarian (and whatever it happens to be naming or un-naming itself from moment to moment, total information awareness is always the program, always the fever dream), and totalitarianism is never something to sneeze at. But it is crucial to refuse the futurological mystification of the agency of technocratic seeing, listening, penetrating. If the future is unevenly distributed, it is wrong and reactionary and demoralizing to assume The Future accretes in particular in the hard chrome dildo of an omnicompetent cyborg state. Secretive spy spaces in which conventional stupidity, greed, corruption, and threat flourish are quite dangerous enough, thank you very much, but they aren't exactly unprecedented and they aren't exactly the sorts of things for which ready remedies might not be applied. There are, after all, no self-evident observations or narratives, the amplification of observation doesn't converge on the real so much as it ramifies narratives, the objectives overdetermine the objects, the stratification of the scene of observation promises openings even as it threatens closures. And so on. No power without resistance, right? There is far too much dread and dreaming of destinies and demons and divas in our discourse over the disclosures of our unintelligent intelligence operations right about now.

A Comment On Irony

I've been too teachy-weedy for much blogging lately, and that is likely to remain true for a bit. The end of one summer intensive session, the beginning of the next: hectic. A student (no names, must protect the innocents) raised a question on the course blog that has sometimes come up as a topic here as well. Might as well post the exchange here as well, if only as a placeholder for the blogging I could be doing if I weren't so busy at the moment.

A student asks a question (which I had already answered, and differently, in class) and then quotes as an authority something they found online. This sort of thing comes up rather often, as you might imagine:

What's the difference between verbal irony and sarcasm? In both, words are used to convey the opposite of their literal meanings. Linguist John Haiman has drawn this key distinction between the two devices: "[P]eople may be unintentionally ironic, but sarcasm requires intention. What is essential to sarcasm is that it is overt irony intentionally used by the speaker as a form of verbal aggression" (Talk Is Cheap, 1998).

To this I responded:

I must say I disagree with this formulation, but more than that, to be very clear, I would consider it an error if this formulation was used in a paper as the basis for a reading that is taking figurative sarcasm or irony into account.

A sarcastic utterance definitely does not affirm its literal content, but sarcasm doesn't inevitably convey the opposite of its literal content either, as irony does.

If you respond sarcastically to a question, "yeah, sure" this doesn't necessarily mean "no," it can convey a lack of enthusiasm or confidence in a "yes" that is still more a yes than a no.

Irony remains the classic trope of reversal, it is an assertion of denial through the literal assertion of affirmation. Irony then is the master trope here, given the actual rhetorical tradition, where sarcasm, like hyperbole and litotes, are reasonably treated as variations related to that master trope.

I think there are two more confusions in this formulation.

First: Irony is, of course, a trope that has been widely abused and drained of substantial content -- perhaps most famously in the old Alanis Morissette song premised on the false and facile definition of "ironic" meaning "crappy things that happen" -- and people now often use the word "ironic" to describe unpleasant or unexpected outcomes.

Presumably this looser understanding of the ironic is contributing to the idea of "unintentional irony" in this quotation -- the idea that irony can be an attentional artifact, a way of assuming a perspective on things. In such a case it is no longer appropriate to describe this as "a device" in the rhetorical sense Haiman uses here. Devices are pretty much intentional qua devices -- though you can make a case for a more capacious and symptomatic understanding of the intentional if you want to do, though that is hardly what seems to be happening in the passage in question.

Second: I think the introduction of the term "verbal" here as a special kind of irony (maybe?), and re-appearing as a qualification in the conjuration of a scene of "verbal aggression" seems to confuse the issue here a bit, since intonation as the vehicle through which sarcasm is communicated verbally may simplify the complexity of contextual cues often so indispensable to communicating irony and sarcasm in the written texts.

"Thank you for the clarification," replies the student, to which I append the lesson:

No problem -- needless to say, on this as on so many questions, the debate rages on among scholars. Synecdoche is also roiled by high stakes conflict of this sort. (Was that last sentence an example of irony or of sarcasm?)

What say ye?