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.