Gizmuddle: Or, Why the Futuristic Is Always Only Perverse

In his marvelous essay on the subject, Daniel Harris identified "the futuristic" with the perverse. While this insight may not be an immediately evident or intuitively obvious one, it is easy enough to grasp why this must be so: Any effort to materialize future forms in the present must fail as such quite simply because the present is never the future. The future is not a destination, Bruce Sterling famously warned us, but of course "the futuristic" vernacular always takes place.

The more important insight here is that "the futuristic" is always a placeholder for a host of fraught ideological assumptions about the likelihood and desirability of progress construed as a matter of amplifying capacities, greater freedoms, richer pleasures, fewer insecurities -- inevitably some and not others, almost inevitably some at the expense of others. And yet in a present lacking these capacities, riches, securities their evocation in that present will always amount most of all to a repudiation of the present as it is. The reason the Harris essay eventually meanders its way to a discussion of Loewy's famous MAYA principle -- that designers are always forced to settle for the Most Advanced Yet Acceptable designs -- is because the principle expresses a quintessentially futuristic ideology that always perversely serves elite-incumbency: The principle manages to invest designers with an avant-gardist superiority even when their designs are merely mediocre, or as I put the point in a Futurological Brickbat, "Design ideology's self-congratulatory MAYA Principle declares "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable" what is usually Merely Adequate Yet Acclaimed."

In Harris's reading, if a round window seems more futuristic than a square one, it is not so much because a round window is a better sort of window than a square one -- even if what one means to evoke through its roundness is a futuristic world of greater efficiency and delight at which we may hope we are aiming -- but only because most windows in the present are not round and so the encounter with a round one is a "disruption" with which we invest our sense of "the future" in its relation to our sense of "the present." Likewise, if a smooth door wooshing sideways to disappear into a wall seem more futuristic than a door with a knob that swoops into space on a hinge, it is not so much because the smooth sideways door is a better sort of door than a knobbed hinged one -- even if what one means to evoke through its whoosh is a futuristic world of greater efficiency and delight to which we may hope we are heading -- but only because most doors in the present swoop and so the encounter with a wooshing one is a "disruption" with which we invest our sense of "the future" in its relation to our sense of "the present."

If the curvilinear forms and lilypad supports of Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson Wax building seem futuristic, it is not so much because these thin supports are more efficient in any sense at supporting a roof or because the massive masonry hulk of a corporate headquarters needs to be more aerodynamic than corporate headquarters usually manage to be in the event that such buildings will ever be required to take flight -- but only because these idiosyncrasies of form in the present cite, without realizing, hopeful associations of the future to which some want to be heading in which air flight is ubiquitous and life on low-gravity extraterrestrial planets and in outer space is commonplace. It is not surprising, given the latter example, how often the futuristic has become by now a conspicuously nostalgic rather than aspirational evocation -- think of molecule-shaped formica table tops and chrome atomic starburst wall clocks and Esquivel-inflected dance-mixes and post-millennial tourists in Disney's Tomorrowland -- of past hopes lost and ironized rather than hopes for the future at all, through the stylistic citation of these sorts of superannuated cynically-superceded associations with which futuristic progress was once perversely performed in presents past: William Gibson's early story The Gernsback Continuum inaugurated a whole genre of retro-futurist science fiction (of which his work still remains the most vividly virtuosic) forever navigating the ruins of the futuristic.

Today over on Gizmodo (and then predictably, instantly, breathlessly endorsed over at io9), Robert Sorokanich pens a paean to the RYNO which set these thoughts in motion. Let's start with a picture of the thing:

Of this perverse futuristic object, Sorokanich writes,

This sci-fi electric unicycle is the RYNO, a future-badass alternative to the Segway that looks like it got beamed down from the year 2114. But it's here, and it's real, and I got to ride it.

Needless to say, and as my partner Eric did say when he drew my attention to the piece this afternoon, it is far more likely that someone, even many someones, have acted on the rather pointlessly perverse (and probably mostly harmless) inclination to saw a motorcycle in half any number of times over the past half century rather than making forcing humanity to wait until the year 2114 to make this arrant silliness happen. I cannot say it seems to me particularly surprising that this thing is real and really rideable (-ish), though I very much doubt the fact that it's here means it's here to stay. You will forgive my pedantry if I point out this here-ness of the thing and all means that it is not fictive and, strictly speaking, therefore not science fictional either. But of course such confusions of science and science-fiction are the enabling sleight-of-hand on which the whole futurological genre of marketing and promotion always depends as such, and one doesn't exactly feel surprise at them anymore even when one still has to shake one's head at them just the same. No doubt it is mostly because this particular perversity still manages to evoke a motorcycle despite its mutilation that it would occur anyone to try to describe the thing as "badass" in the first place -- since for whatever reason many people do unaccountably seem to think motorcycles are badass, I guess, at any rate far more certainly than think Segways are. I daresay the RYNO now does indeed approximate the Segway enough that people will choose the same actual if not exactly "badass" alternatives to it as they already have chosen for the stupid Segway -- another bit of perverse futurological hype, after all: "It will change the way we think of cities!" -- that is to say, they will choose to avoid it at any cost, sticking to the demonstrably better available technologies of walking shoes, bicycles, subway trains, hell, even a clown car would be better than making a spectacle of themselves in a crazily unwieldy motorized unicycle unless you happen to be the sort of person who thinks taking a shower selfie with google glasses on makes you seem cool. Indeed, you need only do an image search on "motorized unicycle" to have sober second thoughts whether the futuristic RYNO has a future -- or whether, like so many futurological novelties, it even manages to be anything but old hat.

Scientific Authority in Democratic Societies Must Be Democratically Politicized Science

Upgraded and expanded from my response to a comment in the Moot:

Warranted consensus scientific truth is essentially what is taken to be true enough to be published in everyday textbooks right now. Yes, that will change. Yes, some things taken to be true will be replaced by different things rendering false what is warranted now as true. Yes, actual practicing scientists are warranted in their legitimate research to take as warranted things that are not yet taken up by a sufficient consensus to make it into the textbooks.

By the way, I am aware that Republicans are being attacked for "politicizing" the contents of textbooks as well these days -- teaching "the controversy" as a way to pretend that christianist folk mythology is as scientific as Darwinian biology in biology classrooms, rendering the climate consensus around anthropogenic climate catastrophe "controversial" as it is not, teaching long-falsified laissez-faire economic pieties as if the introduction and repeated confirmation of the Keynes-Hicks model never happened, and so on. My response to this problem mirrors the response I made in yesterday's post. It also reflects the same concerns I have about the inadequacy of most of too many of my allies in the effort to defend the teaching of the warranted consensus in these fields and insist on the accountability of policymakers to the authority of such expertise: The problem is not that Republicans are "politicizing" textbooks the contents of which are above or prior to politics, the problem is ensuring that the always political process of determining the contents of textbooks be compatible with the support of consensus science (itself a matter of political processes embedded in a sustaining ideology as I said yesterday) and compatible with democratic norms, solving shared problems in ways that equitably distribute costs, risks, and benefits to the diversity of their stakeholders.

That trained scientists within scientific fields are still working through evolutionary, atmospheric, ecosystemic, macroeconomic, therapeutic puzzles is not to justify denial by interested but non-expert everyday citizens of the questions on which these experts share a strong consensus of conviction. That human activity is causing and can still be made to ameliorate catastrophic climate change actually isn't debated among the relevant scientists in a way that justifies hesitation (let alone ridicule) on the part of citizens or their accountable representatives. You don't have to be a scientific expert capable of contributing to a field in order to stand in a more or less reasonable relation to the knowledge claims arising from that field -- especially to the extent that those knowledge claims figure in the cause or amelioration of public problems of shared concern.

In my post yesterday, I analogized "the convenient denial of climate science by petrochemical CEOs who otherwise trust the consensus of, say, relevant medical researchers." What I hoped this would make clear is that the anti-scientific counter-revolutionaries of the right are screwing around with the norms on which political procedures depend to translate the state of consensus scientific knowledge into policymaking to which representatives must be accountable. This is a matter of consistency in the recognition of the warranted consensus of experts in a field of the kind that finds its way to substantive textbooks (the petrochemical CEO accepts the verdict of medical science and most other expert fields in the conventionally reasonable way the literate interested non-expert citizen does, but refuses to accept this verdict, or at any rate cynically pretends not to do so, when the issue of his parochial profit-taking trumps that reasonableness) as well as a matter of consistency in the practice and application of technoscience to the democratic values of sustainable equity-in-diversity. The problem here is in the democratic constitution of expert authorities to which elected representatives are made accountable by a mostly non-expert but interested electorate.

I was trying to zero in yesterday more clearly than I think defenders of warranted science with whom I am otherwise allies often manage to do to account for just what is being violated by the reactionary anti-science Republicans today. And as I said in the post, I think the eagerness of my allies to declare anti-science politics a kind of relativism or nihilism about facts risks mistaking for an epistemological phenomenon what is indeed a political phenomenon. Worse, this mistake tends to make defenders of science actively denigrate the political problems at issue in ways that threatens the work of their urgent correction, and progressive champions of science end up lodging their defenses instead in what amounts all too often to a quasi-theological viewpoint in which a personified Universe is imagined to have preferences in the matter of how human beings describe it factually, preferences that that the Universe is imagined to endorse by conferring gifts on the humans speaking its language with powers of prediction and control (and in the most pathological variations of this view, a certainty and finality of scientific belief rendering it merely a kind of secularized faith, and rendering scientific expertise a kind of priestly authority).

I really do think issues of the authoritative force of Keynes-Hicks macroeconomics, Darwinian biology, anthropogenic climate change are all pretty cut and dried as you say at a general level to which an interested literate electorate should require their representatives to be accountable in their policymaking, as a straightforward matter of consistency with the norms that otherwise induce that electorate to trust heart surgeons and bridge engineers while also expecting them to be licensed and regulated. But the legibility and force of these secular democratic commonplaces depend on the prior recognition that scientific practices of research, credentialization, publication, funding, regulation, implementation are political processes as the accountability of elected representatives to the authority of consensus science is likewise sustained by political processes. This means that anti-science politics we should decry are not a matter of apostasy about revealed truth as matters of political dysfunction brought about by the violation of pragmatic and ethical norms, practices of opportunistic or confused inconsistency amount, as often as not, to active fraud, and hence politicized through and through as their remedies also must be.

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

It is easy to lampoon the phony conjurations of progress celebrated by the gizmo-fetishizing consumer fandom gossip-columnists who call themselves "tech journalists."

What, you thought that sentence was leading to a "but-"?

AP Business Reporter Ryan Nakashima, testifying from The Future (you know, Las Vegas) takes a look into the crystal mall of the Computer Electronics Show and prophetically ponders: "Will 2014 be remembered as the year wearable computing took off?"

No doubt. No doubt.

Although futurologists like to give you the impression that they just cannot get enough change! and disruption! and acceleration! and accelerating acceleration! it is hard to shake the impression, once you have spent any time actually following their ecstatic pronouncements, that they actually just say the same things over and over and over again, attracting attention to themselves by declaring each time that these same things will be the things That Change Everything any moment now but then moving on once they have grown distracted or once Everything Not Changing after all makes their audience a bit restless, to the next thing on the list of the same things, on and on and on, until they circle back to the beginning of the list and the joyless ritual continues on.

Brain scans will immortalize your info-soul in cyberspace. Vat-grown meat will end hunger while making investors super rich. Fruit fly experiments promise medical breakthroughs that promise centuries-long sexy lifespans on the way. Human computer programmers beat a human without a computer at checkers or in a game show and artificial superintelligence is on the horizon. Capitalism will deliver extraterrestrial diaspora on the cheap in paradisical L5 toruses, orbiting love motels, space elevators, asteroid mining colonies. Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice for all is on its way via plastic, via 3D printers, via desktop nanofactories. Energy too cheap to meter is on its way via nuclear plants, via cold fusion, via a trillion solar panels. A full day's nutrition in a pill, weight loss in a pill, muscle mass in a pill, photographic memory in a pill, longevity in a pill, learn Chinese in a pill, eternal bliss in a pill. Grateful nonhuman animals will be tweaked into human conversationalists. The roads will roll and driverless cars will end all traffic accidents. Round and round and round we go. I once described this as the unbearable stasis of accelerating change.

And, oh yes, "wearable computers."

Wearable computers are always good for a turn on the pop-tech carousel every couple years or so. "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months," wrote Oscar Wilde. With that kind of trendspotting churn going nowhere faster you didn't think futurological fandoms could stay away for long, now, did you? Calculator watches, Sony Walkmen, ankle odometers, Nintendo Power Gloves, "I am Locutus of Borg," bluetooth headsets, fitbits, google Glassholes, bring me my Philips Mental Jacket!

"The wearables wave is still in its early phases," declares Nakashima (and of course no matter how many times that tide comes and goes "the wave" is always only early), but you can be sure that "the technologies on display will offer a glimpse of the future." Who could doubt it? But, be warned: these are "not necessarily products that are ready for the mainstream consumer." Hey, believe me, all the techbros know that already! Nobody has to tell them that their personal purchasing practices reveal them to be fearless visionaries on the cutting edge of future tech.

Strictly speaking, anything worn is technology, from zoot suit to hazmat suit to catsuit. The prediscursive, preprosthetized body that technology presumably extends or enhances or amplifies is itself, of course, the site of prosthetic and discursive articulation -- our quotidian clothing, our language, our body language, our worldly posture are all posited discursively as prediscursive, familiarized into the pretechnological through technique. And hence so much of the work of “wearable technology” discourse -- true no less of the work of technological discourses more generally -- is actually to deny the technology of most that we wear, to deny most wearable technology is technology at all. This is so, even as the discourse conspicuously affirms and attests to the seductions and satisfactions of the new, the now, the next.

A sampling of the Extreme Edge offerings for our bleeding edge techbrofashionistas include a moisture resistant headband with earphones in it for extreme joggers (of The Future!), wristwatches that take your pulse (but only some of which will also tell you the time), lots of cellphones and cameras and cameraphones that look pretty much like the cellphones and cameras and cameraphones people have been buying for the last fifteen years, also there are lots of phones and cameras stuck onto other things, like cameras on goggles and hats, and phones in collars and hats. If you are ready for the revolution of using your toothbrush or the door of your oven to surf the internet, it would appear that capitalism is ready for that revolution, too. The put a phone on it revolution is on, y'all! Other forms of revolution remain frowned upon.



For a while there the futurologists of shaving were caught up in the full froth of irrational exuberance, twin blades became three! four! five! blades, each one taking us a brave step closer to the shaving singularity in which perhaps every single surface of our Smart Homes would be a welcoming blade's bleeding edge and our skin would remain baby-butt smooth as a natural result of simply walking around. Genius! But I suppose some marketing study noticed that people were starting to find these handhelds bristling with sharp metal more frightening than emancipatory and their mehum sheeple luddite fears choked off the arrival of the sooper robot shaving transcendence capitalism in her endless bounty had been preparing for us ingrates.

No matter, capitalism may not be adding more blades to your shaving handheld but the luddites have not yet closed the door to turning your shaver into an internet portal or putting a phone on it. The Future is still On my friends! Libertechbrotarian spontaneous disorderlies are still creating, innovating and cerebrating us onward and upward to the singularities via their singularities. After all, nothing really matters but the computer chip companies which are still sticking chips on other chips to keep Moore's Law cranking along to spit out the Robot God who ends history by solving all our problems for us (or possibly eating us all as computronium feedstock, but hey every rose has its thorn) in the fullness of time, soon, soon, so very soon. At least that program is still in motion! Meanwhile, however, while we await techno-transcendence into our imperishable shiny robot bodies among the sexy sexbots in the nano treasure caves or as digital angel avatars in Holodeck Heaven there are purchases to be made.

Thought Is Bigger Than Philosophy UPDATED

It is important always to remember that Thought is much bigger than Philosophy, that odd literary genre for mostly white guys still preoccupied with the preoccupations of Plato.

More Faulty Ivory Towers here.

UPDATE: To expand a bit -- as I went on to say in an affable exchange with Frank Pasquale that included this post/statement as a tweet -- Karl Jaspers' made an early earnest effort at planetizing philosophy with his proposal of axiality, but for those who bemoan the parochialism of philosophical discourse I have come to think it a better idea to marginalize philosophy by Thinking planetarily.

I should add, by the way, that I personally cherish the philosophy to which I have devoted so much of my own life and teaching -- as just another white guy myself, perhaps this isn't so surprising, eh? But I simply can't see how relegating philosophy from its pretensions of being the super-science or the highest adjudicator of history to being instead a quirky kind of poetry freighted with fascinating insights and awfulnesses all its own really takes anything away from philosophy that was worth having. I think neither philosophy nor the righteous efforts for a more capacious and relevant Thought have much to lose from such a move.

It's pretty funny updating a loose trifling philosophical rumination as if it's breaking! news. Twitter is wreaking havoc with my mind.

All Watched Over By Algorithms of Loving Grace

Andrew Leonard in Salon:

In a world where every step we take is increasingly mediated by digital networks and devices, we are going to increasingly find ourselves governed by automated software regimes. Call it “algorithmic regulation” or “embedded governance” or “automated law enforcement,” these built-in systems are sure to become ubiquitous. They will be watching for stock market fraud and issuing speeding tickets. They will doubtless be quicker to act, more all-seeing and less forgiving than the human-populated bureaucracies that preceded them. Advocates of greater bureaucratic efficiency may well be happier in an algorithmically regulated future. But Adam Manley’s example raises a serious question that has a pretty obvious answer. When the network automatically delivers its ruling, who will be better positioned to contest the inevitable miscarriages of justice sure to follow? The little guy, or the well-capitalized corporation?

Leonard's qualification seems odd: "Advocates of greater bureaucratic efficiency may well be happier in an algorithmically regulated future." Why would the inequitable, non-responsive outcomes of automated governance be properly described as "greater bureaucratic efficiency" in the first place? In their non-responsiveness and inequity algorithmic governance is bad governance, and it would seem something of a backhanded compliment to say: It's terrible government, but it is efficiently enforced. It evokes the old Woody Allen bit: They have such bad food here. Oh, I know, and such small portions!

It seems to me that it is the phony appearance of government efficiency enabled precisely by its non-responsiveness that peddlers of the "efficiency" of algorithmic government are really championing. This seems all the more obvious when Leonard quotes meme-hustler Tim O'Reilly promising elite technocrats will make "embedded" governance ever more "sophisticated." If what is attractive about algorithmic governance is an "embeddedness" that renders it invisible, ubiquitous, stubbornly unresponsive to majorities one really has to ask: "Sophisticated" at what? "Sophisticated" for whom?

Although Leonard makes the general point that all systems fail and the plutocrats will be the only ones with the resources to demand accountability in the face of such failures in non-responsive algorithmic governance, his examples suggest the darker reality that plutocrats are also well-positioned opportunistically to exploit this difference, systematically to abuse non-responsive algorithmic governance to their benefit at the expense of the poor, the powerless and the precarious.

Look for another digital boom for the plutocratic pigs at the trough, this time in digitally-facilitated, robotically-repeated harassment and frivolous automated lawsuits everyday folks lack the time or connections to fend off even if the law is objectively on their side. We are still picking up the pieces from previous and ongoing "booms" of this kind, in which digitally-facilitated fraudulent banksters bundle bad assets into phony prime commodities, or in which digitally-facilitated locust-financiers embezzle and skim real value via global high-speed networked split-second pseudo-investment transactions, and so on.

I have no doubt in the world that techno-utopian plutocrats and their futurological shills are thrilled at such a proliferation of new opportunities for gaming systems for parochial profit-taking. They tend to rationalize this kind of cheating and looting as the demonstration, after all, of their superior intelligence and ability and risk-taking, proving their fitness for aristocratic rule. What greater joy for plutocratic looters, especially when the cries of pain and injustice provoked by their bad behavior are rendered as good as silent by layers of algorithmic red-robot-tape. Hey, you know who made the trains run on time? Such efficiency!

Among the techno-blatherers there are of course more than enough peddlers of anti-democratizing consumer complacency and enablers of anti-democratizing plutocratic parasitism to appreciate the facilitation of each of these outcomes by algorithmic governance, but I think we are discerning as well the ideology of artificial intelligence in play here. Jaron Lanier has warned that a faith in the possibility of artificial intelligence -- and, indeed, a faith that software writers and vendors today are pilgrims of a sort, coding along the road to artificial superintelligence -- has led to a prevalence of crappy software. We are given user-unfriendly objectively wrong autocorrect spell-checkers and profoundly misleading interpretations of texts in the form of word clouds and superficial assessments of credit-worthiness via searches of impoverished records of personal buying histories and on and on and on. Invested in the dream of the imminent arrival of superintelligent AI, ambitious coders overlook the crappiness and user-unfriendliness of their would-be intelligent software and treat it instead as avatars or embryos of the Robot God to come. Guarding, guiding, glorifying their would-be god, they invest code with a standing, authority, and reliability equal to or even greater than that of the actually intelligent users who rummage through the ruins.

In the background of the technocratic, in fact techno-utopian, championing of the "efficiency of algorithmic governance" is the fantasy that regulatory software agents will not in fact be unresponsive to citizens and users -- mind you, this always really means "the citizens and users who count, among whom I certainly will always be one" anyway -- that Big Data will overthrow the Big Brother of democratically responsive governance to install, step by step by step, the loving grace of the Big Daddy surely on the way along the road coding the superintelligent robot god of their heart's desire. In practice today and as an ideal for tomorrow, one should never mistake for democratic allies the partisans of artificial intelligence who eagerly exploit software for parochial profit-taking today while pining for the dictatorship of "friendly superintelligent AI" in The Future.