Divided Government After the Great Sort

Expanded and upgraded from the Moot:

Most representative constitutional governments established in the aftermath of our own experiment in the United States have eschewed those idiosyncrasies of our system owing to the Founders' facile anti-partisan fetish and implemented parliamentary systems instead -- and very much to their benefit for the most part.

Basic administrative functions (like raising the debt ceiling, filling key posts in a timely way) should be professionalized. The Senate Leader and House Speaker should be of the party of the Executive, and (if necessary, multiparty, multifaction) coalitions should form to support the implementation of the policy platform in the service of which the Executive are elected, else the government has no confidence. Of course, here in the United States, none of this is likely ever to be.

Given our present thoroughly institutionalized party duopoly, it is unclear that the organized and by now thoroughly anti-democratic force of the GOP can be sufficiently marginalized even in a conspicuously diversifying, secularizing, planetizing polyculture to be circumvented in a sufficiently timely and sustained way for majorities seeking to address urgent and obvious common problems -- socioeconomic precarity, climate and pandemic catastrophe, global conflicts exacerbated by global trafficking in military weapons, any one of which threaten the struggle for civilization (which I define as sustainable equity-in-diversity) and in combination threaten still worse.

"Divided Government" is dysfunctional, depressive of participation, and confuses the necessary of assignment of responsibility for policy outcomes. It seems to me that the various Golden Ages of bipartisan co-operation celebrated by Village pundits were mostly periods in which the great evil of the slave-holding and then segregated South were marginalized through their distribution into and management by both parties -- a strategy that never worked well (and could prevent neither a Civil War to resolve the question of slavery nor the betrayal of Reconstruction in the establishment of Jim Crow) and has worked ever less well during the generational "Great Sort" of the Parties in respect to white supremacy from the New Deal coalition through the Civil Rights era to the Southern Strategy and the descent into the Summers of Tea and the Winter of Trump.

It seems to me that the Founders' celebration of a hyper-individualist conception of "public happiness" informed by the specificity of their experience of Revolutionary politics undermined their appreciation of forms of other more democratic dimensions of public happiness connected to assembly, administration, organization, loyalty. (The guardian angel of this blog, Hannah Arendt, the phenomenologist of political power, elaborated the Founders' experience better than anyone, and perhaps shares some of their blind spots.) Their abstract commitments were implemented in Constitutional doctrines that have articulated progressive historical struggles in the United States. The Founders were wrong and we're stuck with their mistake.

And we ARE stuck with it: much like quixotic third-party fantasies, in which the politics to create a viable third party to solve certain very real pathologies of our duopoly are harder to achieve than to solve those problems through and in spite of the duopoly, so too the politics to create a parliamentary system to solve certain very real pathologies of the anti-factionalist quirks of our Constitution are harder to achieve than to solve those problems through and in spite of the quirks of our anti-factionalist Constitution.

Robocultic Q & A With a Tech Journalist

Background:

Last month I spent a few weeks in correspondence with an interesting writer and occasional journalist who stumbled upon some transhumanist sub(cult)ures and wanted to publish an expose in a fairly high-profile tech publication. She is a congenial and informed and funny person, and I have no doubt she could easily write a piece about futurology quite as excoriating as the sort I do, but probably in a more accessible way than my own writing provides. I was rather hoping she would write something like that -- and I suspect she had drafts that managed the trick -- but the published result was a puff-piece, human interest narratives of a handful of zany robocultic personalities, that sort of thing, and ended up being a much more promotional than critical engagement, with a slight undercurrent of snark suggesting she wasn't falling for the moonshine without saying why exactly or why it might matter. I'm not linking to the piece or naming my interlocutor because, as I said, I still rather like her, and by now I can't say that I am particularly surprised at the rather lame product eventuating from our (and her other) conversations. She is a fine writer but I don't think there is much of an appetite for real political or cultural criticism of futurological discourse in pop-tech circles, at any rate when it doesn't take the form of making fun of nerdy nerds or indulging in disasterbatory hyperbole.

The transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, digi-utopians, geo-engineers and other assorted futurological nuts I corral under the parodic designation "Robot Cultists" remain sufficiently dedicated to their far-out viewpoints that they do still continue to attract regular attention from journalists and the occasional academic looking for a bit of tech drama or tech kink to spout about. I actually think the robocultic sub(cult)ure is past its cultural heyday, but its dwindling number of stale, pale, male enthusiasts has been more than compensated lately by the inordinate amount of high-profile "tech" billionaires who now espouse aspects of the worldview in ways that seem to threaten to have Implications, or at least make money slosh around in ways it might not otherwise do.

Anyway, as somebody who has been critiquing and ridiculing these views in public places for over a quarter century I, too, attract more attention than I probably deserve from journalists and critics who stumble upon the futurological freakshow and feel like reacting to it. For the last decade or so I have had extended exchanges with two or three writers a year, on average, all of whom have decided to do some sort of piece or even a book about the transhumanists. For these futurologically-fascinated aficionados I inevitably provide reading lists, contacts, enormous amounts of historical context, ramifying mappings of intellectual and institutional affiliation, potted responses to the various futurological pathologies they happen to have glommed onto, more or less offering an unpaid seminar in reactionary futurist discourse.

Articles do eventually appear sometimes. In them I am sometimes a ghostly presence, offering up a bit of decontextualized snark untethered to an argument or context to give it much in the way of rhetorical force. But far more often the resulting pieces of writing neither mention me nor reflect much of an engagement with my arguments. As a writer really too polemical for academia and too academic for popular consumption, I can't say that this result is so surprising. However, lately I have made a practice of keeping my side of these exchanges handy so that I can at least post parts of them to my blog to see the light of day. What follows is some comparatively pithy Q & A from the latest episode of this sort of thing, edited, as it were, to protect those who would probably prefer to remain nameless in this context:

Q & A:

Q: What do you think the key moral objections are to transhumanism?

Well, I try not to get drawn into discussions with futurists about whether living as an immortal upload in the Holodeck or being "enhanced" into a sexy comic book superhero body or being ruled by a superintelligent AI would be "good" or "bad." None of these outcomes are going to arrive to be good or bad anyway, none of the assumptions on which these prophetic dreams are based are even coherent, really, so the moral question (or perhaps this is a more a question for a therapist) should probably be more like -- Is it good or bad to be devoting time to these questions rather than to problems and possibilities that actually beset us? What kind of work is getting done for the folks who give themselves over to infantile wish-fulfillment fantasizing on these topics? Does any of this make people better able to cope with shared problems or more attuned to real needs or more open to possibilities for insight or growth?

You know, in speculative literature the best imaginative and provocative visions have some of the same sort of furniture in them you find in futurological scenarios -- intelligent artifacts, powerful mutants, miraculous abilities -- but as in all great literature, their strangeness provides the distance or slippage that enables us to think more critically about ourselves, to find our way to sympathetic identification with what might otherwise seem threatening alienness, to overcome prejudices and orthodoxies that close us off to hearing the unexpected that changes things for the better. Science fiction in my view isn't actually about predictions at all, or it is only incidentally so: it is prophetic because finds the open futurity in the present world, it builds community from the strangenessand promise in our shared differences.

But futurism and tech-talk isn't prophetic in this sense at all, when you consider it more closely -- it operates much more like advertising does, promising us easy money, eternal youth, technofixes to end our insecurities, shiny cars, skin kreme, boner pills. The Future of the futurists is stuck in the parochial present like a gnat in amber. It freezes us in our present prejudices and fears, and peddles an amplification of the status quo as "disruption," stasis as "accelerating change." Futurology promises to "enhance" you -- but makes sure you don't ask the critical questions: enhances according to whom? for what ends? at what costs? Futurology promises you a life that doesn't end -- but makes sure you don't ask the critical questions: what makes a life worth living? what is my responsibility in the lives of others with whom I share this place and this moment? Futurology promises you intelligent gizmos -- but makes sure you don't ask the critical questions: if I call a computer or a car "intelligent," how does that change what it means to call a human being or a great ape or a whale intelligent? what happens to my sense of the intelligence lived in bodies and incarnated in historical struggles if I start "recognizing" it in landfill-destined consumer devices? I think the urgent moral questions for futurologists have less to do with their cartoonish predictions but with the morality of thinking futurologically at all, rather than thinking about real justice politically and real meaning ethically and real problems pragmatically.

Q: Why do you think climate change denial is so rife among this movement?

Many futurologists like to declare themselves to be environmentalists, so this is actually a tricky question. I think it might be better to say futurism is about the displacement rather than the outright denial of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. For example, you have futurists like Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk who will claim to take climate change seriously but then who will insist that the more urgent "existential risk" humans face is artificial superintelligence. As climate refugees throng tent-cities and waters flood coastal cities and fires rage across states and pandemic disease vectors shift with rising temperatures these Very Serious futurological pundits offer up shrill warnings of Robocalypse.

Since the birth of computer science, generation after generation after generation, its intellectual luminaries have been offering up cocksure predictions about the imminence of world changing artificial intelligence, and they have never been anything but completely wrong about that. Isn't that rather amazing? The fact is that we have little scientific purchase on the nature of human intelligence and the curiously sociopathic body-alienated models of "intelligence" that suffuse AI-enthusiast subcultures don't contribute much to that understanding -- although they do seem content to code lots of software that helps corporate-military elites treat actually intelligent human beings as if we were merely robots ourselves.

Before we get to climate change denial, then, I think there are deeper denialisms playing out in futurological sub(cult)ures -- a terrified denial of the change that bedevils the best plans of our intelligence, a disgusted denial of the aging, vulnerable, limited, mortal body that is the seat of our intelligence, a horrified denial of the errors and miscommunications and humiliations that accompany the social play of our intelligence in the world. Many futurists who insist they are environmentalists like to talk about glorious imaginary "smart" cities or give PowerPoint presentations about geo-engineering "technofixes" to environmental problems in which profitable industrial corporate-military behemoths save us from the destruction they themselves have caused in their historical quest for profits. The futurists talk about fleets of airships squirting aerosols into the atmosphere, dumping megatons of filings into the seas, building cathedrals of pipes to cool surface temperatures with the deep sea chill, constructing vast archipelagos of mirrors in orbit to reflect the sun's rays -- and while they are hyperventilating these mega-engineeering wet-dreams they always insist that politics have failed, that we need a Plan B, that our collective will is unequal to the task. Of course, this is just another variation of the moral question you asked already. None of these boondoggle fantasies will ever be built to succeed or fail in the first place, there is little point in dwelling on the fact that we lack the understanding of eco-systemic dynamics to know whether the impacts of such pharaohnic super-projects would be more catastrophic than not, the whole point of these exercises is to distract the minds of those who are beginning to grasp the reality of our shared environmental responsibilities from the work of education, organization, agitation, legislation, investment that can be equal to this reality. Here, the futurological disgust with and denial of bodies, embodied intelligence, becomes denial of the material substance of political change, of historical struggle, bodies testifying to violation and to hope, assembled in protest and in collaboration.

Many people have been outraged recently to discover that Exxon scientists have known the truth about their role in climate catastrophe for decades and lied about it to protect their profits. But how many people are outraged that just a couple of years ago Exxon-Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson declared that climate change is simply a logistical and engineering problem? This is the quintessential form that futurological climate-change displacement/denialism takes: it begins with an apparent concession of the reality of the problem and then trivializes it. Futurology displaces the political reality of crisis -- who suffers climate change impacts? who dies? who pays for the mitigation efforts? who regulates these efforts? who is accountable to whom and for what? who is most at risk? who benefits and who profits from all this change? -- into apparently "neutral" technical and engineering language. Once this happens the demands and needs diversity of the stakeholders to change vanish and the technicians and wonks appear, white faces holding white papers enabling white profits.

Q: What are the most obvious historical antecedents to this kind of thinking?

Futurological dreams and nightmares are supposed to inhabit the bleeding edge, but the truth is that their psychological force and intuitive plausibility draws on a deeply disseminated archive of hopes and tropes... Eden, Golem, Faust, Frankenstein, Excaliber, Love Potions, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Ring of Power, the Genie in a Bottle, the Fountain of Youth, Rapture, Apocalypse and on and on and on.

In their cheerleading for superintelligent AI, superpowers/techno-immortalism, and digi-nano-superabundance it isn't hard to discern the contours of the omni-predicates of centuries of theology, omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence. Patriarchal priests and boys with their toys have always marched through history hand in hand. And although many futurologists like to make a spectacle of their stolid scientism it isn't hard to discern the old fashioned mind-body dualism in their digital-utopian virtuality uploading fantasies. Part of what it really means to be a materialist is to take materiality seriously, which means recognizing that information is always instantiated on a non-negligible material carrier, which means it actually matters that all the intelligence we know as such as yet has been biologically incarnated. There is a difference that should make a difference to a materialist in the aria sung in the auditorium, heard on vinyl, pulled up on .mp3. Maybe something like intelligence can be materialized otherwise, but will it mean all that intelligence means to us in an imaginative, empathetic, responsible, rights-bearing being sharing our world? And if it doesn't is "intelligence" really the word we should use or imagine using to describe it?  

Fascination with artifacts that seem invested with spirit -- puppets, carnival automata, sex-dolls are as old or older than written history. And of course techno-fetishism, techno-reductionism, and techno-triumphalism has been with us since before the Treaty of Westphalia ushered in the nation-state modernity that has preoccupied our attention with culture wars in the form of les querelles des anciens et des modernes right up to our late modern a-modern post-modern post-post-modern present: big guns and manifest destinies, eugenic rages for order, deaths of god and becoming as gods, these are all old stories. The endless recycling of futurological This! Changes! Everything! headlines about vat-grown meat and intelligent computers and cost-free fusion and cures for aging every few years or so is the consumer-capitalist froth on the surface of a brew of centuries old techno-utopian loose-talk and wish-fulfillment fantasizing.

Q: Why should people be worried about who is pushing these ideas?

Of course, all of this stuff is ridiculous and narcissistic and technoscientifically illiterate and all too easy to ignore or deride... and I do my share of that derision, I'll admit that. But you need only remember the example of the decades long marginalized Neoconservative foreign-policy "Thought Leaders" to understand the danger represented by tech billionaires and their celebrants making profitable promises and warnings about super-AI and immortality-meds and eco escape hatches to Mars. A completely discredited klatch of kooks who fancy themselves the Smartest Guys in the Room can cling to their definitive delusions for a long time -- especially if the nonsense they spew happens to bolster the egos or rationalize the profits of very rich people who want to remain rich above all else. And eventually such people can seize the policy making apparatus long enough to do real damage in the world.

For over a generation the United States has decided to worship as secular gods a motley assortment of very lucky, rather monomaniacal, somewhat sociopathic tech venture capitalists few of whom every actually made anything but many of whom profitably monetized (skimmed) the collective accomplishments of nameless enthusiasts and most of whom profitably marketed (scammed) gizmos already available and usually discarded elsewhere as revolutionary novelties. The futurologists provide a language in which these skim and scam operators can reassure themselves that they are Protagonists of History, shepherding consumer-sheeple to techno-transcendent paradise and even godlikeness. It is a mistake to dismiss the threat represented by such associations -- and I must say that in the decades I have been studying and criticizing futurologists they have only gained in funding, institutional gravity, and reputational heft, however many times their animating claims have been exposed and pernicious nonsense reviled.

But setting those very real worries aside, I also think the futurologists are interesting objects and subjects of study because they represent a kind of reductio ad absurdum of prevailing attitudes and assumptions and aspirations and justificatory rhetoric in neoliberal, extractive-industrial, consumer-oriented, marketing-suffused, corporate-military society: if you can grasp the desperation, derangement and denialism of futurological fancies, it should put you in a better position to grasp the pathologies of more mainstream orthodoxies in our public discourse and authorizing institutions, our acquiescence to unsustainable consumption, our faith in technoscientific, especially military, circumventions of our intractable political problems, our narcissistic insistence that we occupy a summit from which to declare differences to be inferiorities, our desperate denial of aging, disease, and death and the death-dealing mistreatment of others and of ourselves this denialism traps us in so deeply.

Q (rather later): [O]ne more thing: who were the most prominent members of the extropians list? Anyone I've missed? Were R.U Sirius or other Wired/BoingBoing writers and editors on the list? Or engineers/developers etc?

Back in Atlanta in the 1990s, I read the Extropy zine as a life-long SF queergeek drawn to what I thought were the edges of things, I suppose, and I was a lurker on the extropians list in something like its heyday. This was somewhere in the '93-'99 range, I'm guessing. I posted only occasionally since even then most of what I had to say was critical -- the philosophy seemed like amateur hour and the politics were just atrocious -- and it seemed a bit wrong to barge into their clubhouse and piss in the punch bowl if you know what I mean... I was mostly quiet.

The posters I remember as prominent were Max and Natasha-Vita More, of course, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Damien Broderick (an Australian SF writer), Eugen Leitl, Perry Metzger, Hal Finney, Sasha Chislenko, Mark Plus, Giulio Prisco, Ramona Machado, Nancy Lebovitz… You know, people tend to forget the women's voices because it was such an insistently white techbro kinda sorta milieu. I'm not sure how many women stuck with it, although Natasha is definitely a piece of work, and Romana was doing something of a proto Rachel Haywire catsuited contrarian schtick, Haywire's a more millennial transhumanoid who wasn't around back then. Let's see. There was David Krieger too (I made out with him at an extropian pool party in the Valley of the Silly Con back in 95, I do believe).

I don't think I remember RU Sirius ever chiming in, I personally see him as more of an opportunistic participant/observer/stand-up critic type, really, and I know I remember Nick Szabo's name but I'm not sure I remember him posting a lot. You mentioned Eric Drexler, but I don't remember him posting, he was occasionally discussed and I know he would appear at futurist topic conferences with transhumanoid muckety mucks like More and the cypherpunks like Tim May and Paul Hughes. I do remember seeing Christine Peterson a couple of times.

Wired did a cover story called "Meet The Extropians" which captures well some of the flavor of the group, that was from 1993. Back then, I think techno-immortalism via cryonics and nanobot miracle medicine was the big draw (Aubrey de Grey appeared a bit later, I believe, but the sub(cult)ure was ready for him for sure), with a weird overlap of space stuff that was a vestige from the L5 society and also a curious amount of gun-nuttery attached to the anarcho-capitalist enthusiasm and crypto-anarchy stuff.

It's no surprise that bitcoinsanity had its birth there, and that the big bucks for transhumanoid/ singularitarian faith-based initiatives would come from PayPal billionaires like the terminally awful robocultic reactionary Peter Thiel, given the crypto-currency enthusiasm. Hal Finny was a regular poster at extropians and quite a bitcoin muckety muck right at the beginning -- I think maybe he made the first bitcoin transaction in fact.

Back in those days I was working through connections of technnocultural theory and queer theory in an analytic philosophy department in Georgia, and the extropians -- No death! No taxes! -- seemed to epitomize the California Ideology. I came to California as a Queer National with my mind on fire to work with Judith Butler, and I was lucky enough to spend a decade learning from her in the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley, where I ended up writing my diss about privacy and publicity in neoliberal technocultures, Pancryptics. But I never lost sight of the transhumanists -- they seemed and still seem to me to symptomize in a clarifying extreme form the pathologies of our techno-fetishistic, techno-reductionist, techno-triumphalist disaster capitalism. Hope that helps!

Q (much later): Tackling this thing has been a lot more difficult than I imagined it would be. Right now it's sitting on 20,000 words and has to come down to at least half that (pity my editor!). I've gone through quite a journey on it. I still think very much that these ideas are bad and a reflection of a particularly self-obsessed larger moment, and that people should be extremely concerned about how much money is going into these ideas that could be so much better spent elsewhere. The bizarre streak of climate denialism is likewise incredibly disturbing…. But then I kind of came around in a way to sympathising with what is ultimately their fear which is driving some of this, an incredibly juvenile fear of dying. But a fear of being old and infirm and in mental decline in a society that is in denial about the realities of that, and which poses few alternatives to that fate for all of us, in a way I can understand that fear…. In any case, amazing that they let you proof read [their official FAQ] for them, even though you are so critical of their project! Or do you think they were just grateful for someone who could make it read-well on a sentence level?

You have my sympathies, the topic is a hydra-headed beast when you really dig in, I know. Nick Bostrom and I had a long phone conversation in which I leveled all sorts of criticisms of transhumanism. That I was a critic was well known, but back then socialist transhumanist James Hughes (who co-founded IEET with him) and I were quite friendly, and briefly I was even "Human Rights" fellow at IEET myself -- which meant that they re-published some blog posts of mine. (I write about that and its rather uncongenial end here.) Anyway, Bostrom and I had a wide-ranging conversation that took his freshly written FAQ as our shared point of departure. He adapted/qualified many claims in light of my criticisms, but ignored a lot of them as well and of course the central contentions of the critique couldn't be taken up without, you know, giving up on transhumanism. As a matter of fact, we didn't get past the first half of the thing. It was a good conversation though, I remember it was even rather fun. I do take these issues seriously as you know and, hell, I'll talk to anybody who is going to listen in a real way.

You know, I've been criticizing futurism for decades -- there were times when I was one of the few people truly informed of their ideas even if I was critical of them, and some of them appreciated the chance to sharpen their arguments on a critic. I've had many affable conversations with all sorts of these folks, Aubrey de Grey, Robin Hanson, Max More even. The discourse is dangerous and even evil in my opinion, but its advocates are human beings which usually means conversations can happen face to face.

I know what you mean when you say you sympathize after a fashion upon grasping the real fear of mortality driving so much of their project -- and I would say also the fear of the uncontrollable role of chance in life, the vulnerability to error and miscommunication in company. But you know reactionary politics are always driven by fear -- and fear is always sad. I mean, the choices are love or fear when it comes down to it, right? And to be driven by fear drives away so much openness to love and there's no way to respond to that but to see the sadness of it -- when it comes to it these fears are deranging sensible deliberation about technoscientific change at a historical moment when sense is urgently needed, these fears make them dupes, and often willing ones, of plutocratic and death-dealing elites, these fears lead them to deceive themselves and deceive others who are also vulnerable. One has to be clear-headed about such things, seems to me.

Q (still later): Have entered new phase: What if the Extropians were just a Discordian-type joke that other people came to take seriously?

Yes, they're a joke. But it's on us, and they aren't in on it. As I mentioned before, the better analogy is the Neocons: they were seen as peddlers of nonsense from the perspective of foreign policy professionals (even most conservatives thought so) but they were well-funded because their arguments were consoling and potentially lucrative to moneyed elites and eventually they stumbled into power via Bush and Cheney whereupon they implemented their ideas with predictable (and predicted) catastrophic consequences in wasted lives and wasted wealth. To be clear: the danger isn't that transhumanoids will code a Robot God or create a ruler species of immortal rich dudes with comic-book sooper-powers, but that they will divert budgets and legislation into damaging policies and dead ends that contribute to neglected health care, dumb and dangerous software, algorithmic harassment and manipulation, ongoing climate catastrophe, the looting of public and common goods via "disruptive" privatization, exploitative "development," cruel "resilience," and upward-failing techbro "Thought Leadership."

Berkeley Rhet's Beautiful Promotional Poster for My Summer Course

Three Fronts in the Uploading Discussion -- A Guest Post by Jim Fehlinger

Longtime friend and friend-of-blog Jim Fehlinger posted a cogent summarizing judgment (which doesn't mean concluding by any means) of the Uploading discussion that's been playing out in this Moot non-stop for days. I thought it deserved a post of its own. In the Moot to this post, I've re-posted my responses to his original comments to get the ball rolling again. I've edited it only a very little, for continuity's sake, but the link above will take the wary to the originals.--d

It strikes me that this conversation (/disagreement) has been proceeding along three different fronts (with, perhaps, three different viewpoints) that have not yet been clearly distinguished:

1. Belief in/doubts about GOFAI ("Good Old-Fashioned AI") -- the 50's/60's Allen Newell/Herbert Simon/Seymour Papert/John McCarthy/Marvin Minsky et al. project to replicate an abstract human "mind" (or salient aspects of one, such as natural-language understanding) by performing syntactical manipulations of symbolic representations of the world using digital computers. The hope initially attached to this approach to AI has been fading for decades. Almost a quarter of a century ago, in the second edition of his book, Hubert Dreyfus called GOFAI a "degenerating research program":

Almost half a century ago [as of 1992] computer pioneer Alan Turing suggested that a high-speed digital computer, programmed with rules and facts, might exhibit intelligent behavior. Thus was born the field later called artificial intelligence (AI). After fifty years of effort [make it 70, now], however, it is now clear to all but a few diehards that this attempt to produce artificial intelligence has failed. This failure does not mean this sort of AI is impossible; no one has been able to come up with a negative proof. Rather, it has turned out that, for the time being at least, the research program based on the assumption that human beings produce intelligence using facts and rules has reached a dead end, and there is no reason to think it could ever succeed. Indeed, what John Haugeland has called Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI) is a paradigm case of what philosophers of science call a degenerating research program.

A degenerating research program, as defined by Imre Lakatos, is a scientific enterprise that starts out with great promise, offering a new approach that leads to impressive results in a limited domain. Almost inevitably researchers will want to try to apply the approach more broadly, starting with problems that are in some way similar to the original one. As long as it succeeds, the research program expands and attracts followers. If, however, researchers start encountering unexpected but important phenomena that consistently resist the new techniques, the program will stagnate, and researchers will abandon it as soon as a progressive alternative approach becomes available.

[That research program i]s still degenerating, as far as I know.

Dale and I agree in our skepticism about this one. Gareth Nelson, it would seem (and many if not most & Hists, I expect) still holds out hope here. I think it's a common failing of computer programmers. Too close to their own toys, as I said before. ;-&

2. The notion that, even if we jettison the functionalist/cognitivist/symbol-manipulation approach of GOFAI, we still might simulate the low-level dynamic messiness of a biological brain and get to AI from the bottom up instead of the top down. Like Gerald Edelman's series of "Darwin" robots or, at an even lower and putatively more biologically-accurate level, Henry Markram's "Blue Brain" project.

Gareth seems to be on-board with this approach as well, and says somewhere above that he thinks a hybrid of the biological-simulation approach and the GOFAI approach might be the ticket to AI (or AGI, as Ben Goertzel prefers to call it).

Dale still dismisses this, saying that a "model" of a human mind is not the same as a human mind, just as a picture of you is not you.

I am less willing to dismiss this on purely philosophical grounds. I am willing to concede that if there were digital computers fast enough and with enough storage to simulate biological mechanisms at whatever level of detail turned out to be necessary (which is something we don't know yet) and if this sufficiently-detailed digital simulation could be connected either to a living body with equally-miraculously (by today's standards) fine-grained sensors and transducers, or to a (sufficiently fine-grained) simulation of a human body immersed in a (sufficiently fine-grained) simulation of the real word -- we're stacking technological miracle upon technological miracle here! -- then yes, this hybrid entity with a human body and a digitally-simulated brain, I am willing to grant, might be a good-enough approximation of a human being (though hardly "indistinguishable" from an ordinary human being, and the poor guy would certainly find verself playing a very odd role indeed in human society, if ve were the first one). I'm even willing to concede (piling more miracles on top of miracles by granting the existence of those super-duper-nanobots) the possibility of "uploading" a particular human personality, with memories intact, using something like the Moravec transfer (though again, the "upload" would find verself in extremely different circumstances from the original, immediately upon awakening). This is still not "modelling" in any ordinary sense of the word in which it occurs in contemporary scientific practice! It's an as-yet-unrealized (except in the fictional realm of the SF novel) substitution of a digitally-simulated phenomenon for the phenomenon itself (currently unrealized, that is, except in the comparatively trivial case in which the phenomenon is an abstract description of another digital computer).

However, I am unpersuaded, Moravec and Kurzweil and their fellow-travellers notwithstanding, that Moore's Law and the "acceleration of technology" are going to make this a sure thing by 2045. I am not even persuaded that we know enough to be able to predict that such a thing might happen by 20450, or 204500, whether by means of digital computers or any other technology, assuming a technological civilization still exists on this planet by then.

The physicist Richard C. Feynman, credited as one of the inventors of the idea of "nanotechnology", is quoted as having said "There's plenty of room at the bottom." Maybe there is. Hugo de Garis thinks we'll be computing using subatomic particles in the not too distant future! If they're right, then -- sure, maybe all of the above science-fictional scenarios are plausible. But others have suggested that maybe, just maybe, life itself is as close to the bottom as our universe permits when it comes to, well, life-like systems (including biologically-based intelligence). If that's so, then maybe we're stuck with systems that look more-or-less like naturally-evolved biochemistry.

3. Attitudes toward the whole Transhumanist/Singularitarian mishegas. What Richard L. Jones once called the "belief package", or what Dale commonly refers to as the three "omni-predicates" of & Hist discourse: omniscience=superintelligence; omnipotence=super-enhancements (including super-longevity); omnibenevolence=superabundance.

This is a very large topic indeed. It has to do with politics, mainly the politics of libertarianism (Paulina Boorsook, Cyberselfish, Barbrook & Cameron, "The Californian Ideology," religious yearnings (the "Rapture of the Nerds"), cult formation (especially sci-fi tinged cults, such as Ayn Rand's [or Nathaniel Branden's, if you prefer] "Objectivism", L. Ron Hubbard's "Scientology", or even Joseph Smith's Mormonism!), psychology (including narcissism and psychopathy/sociopathy), and other general subjects. Very broad indeed!

Forgive me for putting it this insultingly, but I fear Gareth may still be savoring the Kool-Aid here.

Dale and I are long past this phase, though we once both participated on the Extropians' mailing list, around or before the turn of the century. When we get snotty (sometimes reflexively so ;-&), it's the taste of the Kool-Aid we're reacting to, which we no longer enjoy, I'm afraid.

The Immaterialism of Futurological Materialism

Upgraded and adapted from the still-ongoing Moot. In response to robocultist (he affirms the designation, that isn't just name-calling) Gareth's repeated declarations to the effect that "the internal [by which he means the actually-existing material, that is to say, biological] implementation [of real-world intelligence actually in evidence] does not matter" I quipped: "Some materialist you turned out to be."

Whereupon he reacted, with robotic predictability:

Bit of a non sequitur that. I say the internal implementation does not matter so long as the external behaviour still yields intelligence, in what way does that contradict materialism? If anything, claiming that it matters whether there's neurons or silicon chips implementing intelligent behaviour is claiming there's something important about neurons that goes beyond their material behaviour.

An actual materialist should grasp that the actually-existing material incarnation of minds, like the actually-existing material carrier of information, is non-negligible to the mind, to the information. The glib treatment of material differences as matters of utter indifference, as perfectly inter-translatable without loss, as cheerfully dispensable is hardly the attitude of a materialist. One might with better justice describe the attitude as immaterialist.

Once again, you airily refer to "silicon chips implementing intelligent behavior" when that has never once happened and looks nothing like something about to happen and the very possibility of which is central to the present dispute. However invigorating the image of this AI is in your mind -- it is not real, nor is it a falsifiable thought-experiment, nor is it a destiny, nor is it a burning bush, nor is it writing on a wall, and those of us who fail to be moved as you are by this futurological fancy are not denying reality, its stipulated properties -- however fervently asserted by its futurological fanboys -- are not facts in evidence. In response to this charge you will deny, as you have done every other time I have made it, that you are in fact claiming AI is "real" or would be "easy" -- but time after time after time you conjure up these fancies in making your rhetorical case and attribute properties to them with which skeptics presumably have to deal, just because you want them to be true so fervently. Just as well argue how many angels can dance on a pin head.

And then, too, once again, in this formulation you insinuate my recognition that such real-world intelligence that actually exists all happens to be materialized in biological organization amounts to positing something magical or supernatural about brains. No, Gareth: the intelligence that exists is biological and the artificial intelligence to which you attribute all sorts of pet properties does not exist. To entertain the logical possibility that phenomena legible to us as intelligent might be materialized otherwise does not mean that they are, that we can engineer them, or that we know enough about the intelligence we materially encounter to be of any help were we to want to engineer intelligence otherwise. None of that is implied in the realization that there is no reason to treat intelligence of somehow supernatural. None of it. You may need to have a good cry in your pillow for a moment after that sinks in before we continue. It's fine, I'll wait.

Now, again, a "materialism" about mind demands recognition that the materialization of such minds as are in evidence is biological. That intelligence could be materialized otherwise is possible, but not necessarily plausible, affordable, or even useful. Maybe it would be, maybe not. Faith-based techno-transcendental investment of AI with wish-fulfillment fantasies of an overcoming of the scary force of contingency in life, an arrival at omnicompetence no longer bedeviled by the humiliations of error or miscommunication, the driving of engines of superabundance delivering treasure beyond the dreams of avarice, or offering up digital immortalization of an "info-soul" in better-than-real virtuality may make AI seem so desirable that techno-transcendentalists of the transhumanoid, singularitarian kinds want to pretend we know enough to know how do build it when we do not, but that has nothing to do with science or materialism. Gareth and his futurological friends' attitudes look to be common or garden variety religiosity of the most blatant kind, if I may say so. And even if the faithful wear labcoats rather than priest's vestments, it's not like we can't see it's all still from Party City. 

The human mind is not immune from scientific investigation and understanding, and neither is the brain (the physical implementation of the mind). That should be a fairly uncontroversial viewpoint. I simply go one further and say that human brains are not immune from simulation, and simulating a brain would automatically get you a mind. 

No one has denied that intelligence can be studied and better understood. I do wonder whether Gareth's parenthetic description of the brain as "the physical implementation of the mind" already sets the stage for his desired scene of an interested agent implementing an intelligence when there is actually no reason to assume such a thing where the biologically incarnated mind is concerned. People in robot cults should possibly take care before assuming the air of adjucating just which disputes are scientifically controversial or not, by the way. When he goes on to say "I simply go one [step] further" in turning to the claim that simulating a brain automatically gets you a mind I disagree that there is anything "simple" about that leap, or that it is in any sense a logical elaboration of a similar character to the preceding (as he implies by the word "further"). Not only does simulating a brain not obviously or necessarily "automatically" get you a mind, it quite obviously does not, and necessarily not get you the mind so simulated. To say otherwise is not materialist, but immaterialist -- but worse it is palpably insane. You are not a picture of you, and a picture of brain is not a brain, and a moving picture of a mind's operation in some respects is not the mind's operation. You may be stupid and insensitive enough not to see the difference between a romantic partner and a fuck doll got up to look like that romantic partner, but you should not necessarily expect others to be so dull if you bring your doll to meet the family or hope to elude prosecution for murdering your partner when the police come calling.

PS: In Section Three of Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains I connect such pathologically robocultically extreme, immaterialist ideology as I ridicule here to more prevailing, mainstream neoliberal futurology in which immaterialist ideology plays out in, for example, celebrations or at any rate justifications for fraudulent financialization in global, digital developmentalist corporate-military think-tank discourse.

My Silly Skepticism About AI and Uploading

The following is edited and adapted from the Moot to this post, an exchange with "Gareth Nelson" (his contributions are italicized, follow the link for the unedited version and context) very much like countless exchanges I have had with cocksure robocultic AI-deadenders over the past few decades, but what the hell, new readers may not be bored unto death at such re-hashes as I am. By all means follow the link and make your own contributions, if you like.

Dale -- you've said (and I love this quote of yours) "a picture of you is not you", which is entirely true and I do not claim it is at all possible to "transfer" conciousness from a brain into a computer. But if we stick with the picture analogy, I would argue that a copy of a picture is still as useful for the same purposes. When we look at a beautiful work of art, we derive pleasure from appreciating the skill of the artist... assuming the copy is of high quality we can use it for the same purposes -- appreciating the beauty.

Setting aside the obvious fact that collectors spend millions for originals while disdaining reproductions for reasons that are not entirely dismissable as snobbery, I have no objection to the fact that some people might want to believe they get the same value from a recent digitally animated Aubrey Hepburn avatar selling a candy bar as they do from her actual performance in Sabrina, I have no objection to some pervbro who wants to believe his blow up fuck doll provides as rich a relationship as he is capable of enjoying with a human partner, I have no objection to somebody who wants to believe that they make some profound connection with the Great Emancipator via his stiff animatronic duplicate in Disney World's Hall of Presidents. Hey, there's no accounting for taste.

If we say that the purpose of a brain is to yield intelligent behaviour (and secondly to control a body -- but we generally value people for what's in their cerebral cortex, not their brain stem) then a copy of a brain that yields intelligent behaviour serves the purpose just fine, at least for other people.

I'm an atheist so I don't believe the brain exists for a "purpose" in the way you seem to mean. This is not a quibble, because the theology here already figures intelligence as purposively designed in a way that smuggles your erroneous conclusions into your framing of your position in that very dispute. Your second framing of the brain as "controlling" the body is also considerably more problematic and prejudicial than you seem to realize. The brain IS the body, not a separate or superior supervisor of it. There is a whiff here of the very dualism you falsely attribute to opponents of your faith-based formulation of the "info-soul." I also think this business of introducing "control" into the picture so early is rather symptomatic, but we needn't go into all that. I do hope you see a therapist on a regular basis.
 

If you're a true materialist you accept that the brain is just a physical object with some complex chemical and electrical processes being responsible for its behaviour. It stands to reason that modelling those processes accurately should allow the same behaviour.

Not only does this assertion not "stand to reason," but it is a patent absurdity. I am a materialist in the matter of red wagons, but I hardly think a computer modeling a red wagon would be one, even if it might generate an image I would recognize as the representation of one. I certainly would not expect a modeled red wagon to be capable of all the things a red wagon is, nor (knowing what I do know of computer modeling) would I expect that those shared recognizably red wagonish effects would be achieved in the same way by the red wagon and the red wagon model. Not incidentally, I do not agree that we know at present that the material processes that give rise to the experience of thought (including the experience of witnessing its exhibition in others) are reducible to only those chemical and electrical processes in the brain -- and also possibly elsewhere in the body -- that we presently know and in the way we presently know them. They certainly might, but our present accounts are hilariously far from sufficient to pretend we know for sure. And there is no need in the least to invoke supernatural phenomena to recognize the highly provisional status of much of our present understanding of brain processes and to treat grandiloquent extrapolations from our present knowledge onto futurological imagineering predictions with extreme skepticism and their confident proponents as ridiculous.

You could get really silly and claim that a model of a human brain which "seems" intelligent is actually just simulating intelligence and the model is just accurately predicting the behaviour of a human brain and outputting that behavioural prediction, but then you're just arguing semantics.

How terrible it would be to elicit the judgment that I am being "silly" from you of all people! You are acting as though AI or simulated apparent persons are actual accomplishments, not futurological fancies, and that my skepticism about their realization given the poverty of our understanding is some kind of a denial of facts in evidence. You'll forgive me, but it is not the least bit silly nor merely semantic for me to point out that AI is not in evidence, that AI champions are always certain AI is around the corner when it serially fails to arrive, that our understanding of intelligence is incomplete in ways that seem likely to bedevil the construction of actually intelligent/agentic artifacts for some time, and that AI discourse and the subcultures of its enthusiasts have always been and remain indebted to pathological overconfidence, uninterrogated metaphors, troubling antipathies to materiality and biology, sociopathic aspirations of mastery, control, omniscience none of which bode well for the project to which they are devoted.

Path of the Critique of Commodity Fetishism

From the fetishism of commodities to the Culture Industry to the Spectacle to Big Data, being degraded into having, having degraded into deferring, deferring degraded into appearing, appearing degraded into being framed.

What They Fear

Ebola, terrorism, immigration, PC-police are all proxies. Republicans are scared to death and they are acting like it's the end of the world. They are right. White racist patriarchal extractive-industialism cannot survive a diversifying, secularizing, planetizing society. They feel cornered. They think the final battle is upon them. They experience progressive change as an existential threat. It is because they have already lost that they can mobilize the imaginative and organizational resources to do their last bit of mischief. White racist patriarchal Republicanism isn't just, Godwin do forgive me, Hitler but Hitler in the bunker now. They cannot win but do not underestimate the damage they can do in losing: victory in a smoking planetary ruin traumatized beyond healing.

Crypto-Dildo

Encryption fixated politics seem to me regularly to expose a paranoid/aggressive project of cyborg-ruggedized selfhood, very closely akin to what is revealed in gun-nuttery.

Sins of the Futurologists

Chapter One

Sins of Futurologists: Life expectancy at retirement age -- esp at lower end of the income distribution -- are not increasing and yet glib futurological declarations to the contrary, genuflecting vacuously to Boomer-daydreams of face-lifts, boner pills and sooper meds are repeated endlessly and now provide an unchallenged basis for attacks on social security and calls to raise the retirement age a case with intuitive plausibility for pampered gerontocratic US Senators who live no longer than did many Senators of ancient Rome, and who seem quite uninterested in dilemmas of working class majorities with hollowed out finances, accumulated health and stress issues, and see nothing but dollar signs (every year added to retirement age steals 7% of benefits owed citizens) rationalized by cyborg daydreams.

Chapter Two

Sins of the futurologists: When Exxon-Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson declared climate change will have an "engineering solution" he indulged in the futurological conceit of "geo-engineering," in the futurological genre of the imaginary technofix of sociopolitical problems.To those who know the genre it will come as no surprise that Tillerson's glib recourse to daydream megatech solutionism was accompanied by condemnation of climate activism and regulation as "alarmism" and Big Government/Socialist opportunism.

Although many are scandalized to discover that petro-companies indulged in profitable climate-change denialism when they knew better, it is crucial to grasp that concession of facts of climate change coupled to geo-engineering solutionism and refusal of political action (note that this refusal often takes the form of oh so despondent libertopian orthodoxy resigned to the *inevitable* failure of politics) is just next-stage climate-change denialism, a continuation of profitable extractive-industry (now incl. remediation r&d) via futurology.

Chapter Three

Sins of the futurologists: promises of redemptive techno-abundance as against struggles for realizable abundance, equity-in-diversity constitute the smoking ruins we now sift to survive: from false redemption of the sin of Hiroshima in nuclear energy "too cheap to meter," to I've got one word for you -- "plastic" -- phony crap abundance on the cheap, now accumulating in toxic landfills, to Futurama dreams of car culture snarled in jams, poison clouds of lead and smog, white-racist flight to eco-catastrophic suburban lawns, to fantasies of sustainable design without sustainable politics, digital democracy with corporate-military surveillance and zero comments, saucer-eyed promises of ubicomp abundance nano-abundance 3D-printer abundance as disorganized labor power dies&social supports crumble.

Chapter Four

Sins of the futurologists: Serially failed, cocksure proponents of artificial intelligence, with their disembodied sociopathic models and their pretense that projections from our palpably incomplete understanding of actual biological intelligence are firm foundations keep describing as "smart" and as "intelligent" artifacts that obviously exhibit no autonomy or intelligence whatsoever with the consequences that first, we lose sight of the actual intelligence of human and nonhuman animals in ways that loosen our grip on supports for their dignity, second, we valorize inept/inapt designs (clumsy, sociopathic algorithms) to which we attribute intelligence or glimpse its "holy" coming, third, we stop tracking responsibilities, refusing to hold designers owners users accountable for military crime & software-abetted fraud, fourth, we celebrate plutocratic skim-and-scam operators who monetize crowdsourced problem-solving, labor and enthusiasm, cheerleading reactionary celebrity techbro-CEOs like Bill Gates, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk for their PR "accomplishments" pretending that upward failing is "innovation" and deregulatory privatization is "disruption" and social darwinism is "resilience" and that the cyberspace feeding on coal-smoke, accessed on toxic devices made by wage slaves is a digital "spirit realm," Home of Mind, while they rake in their billions promising history-shattering sooper-AI Robot Gods who will solve all our problems for us or, precisely as lucratively, warning us against robocalypse Robot Gods reducing the world to goo, so keep those r&d dollars coming folks! So Futurological AI-ideologues derange sensible consideration of network security or user-friendliness into heaven/hellscape vaporware.

The Profitable Vacuity of Futurological "Enhancement" and "Intelligence"

There is a crucial continuity in the errors and deceptions committed by transhumanist/singularitarian futurist sub(cult)ural projects. The "enhancement" of eugenic transhumanists and the "intelligence" of singularitarian AI are evacuated of indispensable normativity.

"Enhancement" is always enhancement… For whom? From where? In the service of what? At what cost? "Intelligence," too is always intelligence… For whom? From where? In the service of what? At what cost? There is no such thing as "enhancement" or "intelligence" as such, out of nowhere, for all ends, without costs.

Eugenic and singularitarian "techno-transcendence" is in fact a disavowal of the worldly substance of struggle and sense. In this techno-transcendental futurisms are a *reductio* of mainstream, authoritative developmentalist discourses and marketing forms.

Prevalent neoliberal futurist discourses refigure, the better to deny, indispensably political categories like freedom and history, rendering them instrumentalities and hence indifferent, accumulative, projective, amplifying -- and so mattering, struggle, responsibility, transformation are rendered illegible to public deliberation and testimony. Our capacity to grasp the stakes of lived technodevelopmental social struggle is deranged, but the more proximate result (probably the only one that matters to those who indulge it) is its naturalization of elite-incumbency.

Tech talk confuses our understanding of the shared/contested public world, then peddles status-quo amplification as emancipatory history. Eugenicism/Roboticism/Neoliberalism support one another as justificatory corporate-militarist rationalies, Market Futures remind us that The Market and The Future are co-constructed and co-extensive imaginaries. The futurological denigration of SF, for instance, would reduce its speculation to legibility under the horizon of financial speculation, would reduce sf's world-disclosing testimony & world-making provocation to the futurological scenario, to ads for financial development, then pout and stamp that it lacks the cruel compulsory optimism of "positivity" or bigot-reassuring lies of "political incorrectness." There are no sadder puppies in all the world than the libertechbrotarian Robot Cultists and "Thought Leaders" of the VC silly con.

Reconciliation, Translation, Reflection

Interpretation, from interpretari, L, "to explain, to expound, to understand," and in turn from interpres, "agent, translator."

I am an atheist, and yet I find that I can sympathize with religious or spiritual practices to the extent that I can translate them into aesthetic terms. I am a socialist, and yet I find that I can sympathize with anarchist aspirations to the extent that I can translate them into democratizing terms. It is an open question to me whether these translations are more respectful than disrespectful.

Possibly Something To Do With The Mirror Universe?

Star Trek is most dystopic in its depiction of casual attire and swimwear, envisioning a galaxy in which International Male not only did not die but somehow achieved total fashion hegemony.

uber = douchecab

That is all.

Smart Car, Kill Thyself

If cars are so "intelligent" now and are programmed to "avoid dangers," then why aren't they committing mass-suicide before they destroy the planet?

Look, Ma, A Technologist!

When someone declares themselves a "technologist" it is usually safest to assume they are bragging about using language and wearing clothes.

The Graeber and Thiel Non-Debate on Technological Progress

Here is a link to a video of the (non-)debate that was the occasion for the following scattered sputterings on twitter late last night. Their talk is entitled "Where Did The Future Go?" and my response would be something like the question, "Why Won't The Futurists Just Go?"

Watching the Graeber/Thiel "debate" I'm struck once again by the affinity of "tech-talk" with fantasies of spontaneous order left & right. "Tech" discourses encourage catastrophic re-framing of political categories as instrumental ones: especially freedom as capacitation. Both Thiel and Graeber break the techno-transcendental accelerationalism orthodoxy and admit the dark secret of recent stagnation, but it's hard to see either Thiel's Randroidal Great Man stifled by mehums or Graeber's bureaucratization thesis as serious proposals. (Tho' I'll grant both theses are nice promotional tie-ins with their recent books, the flogging of which may be the purpose of the exercise.)

Thiel's stagnation concession is curious, in a way, given his own public reliance on transhumanoid/singularitarian articles of faith, Graeber's initial framing of his disappointment in terms of a failure of tech to deliver light-speed, teleporters, magicmeds and so on may suggest that in his youth he accepted no small amount of that old time techno-transcendental religion himself when it comes to it. For me it matters both that that very vision of "tech" / "progress" was always profoundly incoherent but also that MANY always knew that.

Prior to the arrival of our present stagnation, when advances were transforming hopes and expectations in nearly revolutionary ways, you wouldn't find Lewis, Ellul, Arendt or Mumford falling for techno-transcendental framings of technodevelopmental social struggle.

This may be blunt, but if you expected teleporters or galactic travel because we got the Pill and landed on the Moon (Graeber?) or expect a Robot God to end History or nanobots to give us treasure caves or uploading to Holodeck Heaven (Thiel?) it isn't bureaucracy or multiculturalism or anti-Business moochers that have stifled your futurological hopes but the fact that your "hopes" are at best stupid and crazy and are at worst deceptions and frauds (I'm lookin' at you, Thiel).

I've no doubt saying so will invite howls that I lack the visionary visionality, sticktoitiveness, etc, required to be a Thought Leader.

Guilty.

But I'm pretty sure that we live in the great stagnation because incumbent elites realized they could sell stasis as accelerating change. I believe we don't have technoscience progress for the same reason infrastructure is crumbling: because these are common/public goods.

I believe Reagan said government is the problem, Clinton said the era of Big Government is over, and Bush blew everything on war-crimes. I believe that in their own ways Thiel and Graeber agree too much with Reagan/Clinton (& futurist Gore) to solve the problem at hand.

I'll add they share too much techno-religiosity to see progress clearly, quite apart from their differently reactionary anti-statisms. I mean, if you want humans to go to Mars for discovery you need a real space program: neither a Muskian for-profit LEO amusement park, nor a scaled-up People's Mic. Space programs aren't Hackathons or drum circles.

But quite apart from that, if you want to go to Mars to have a neo-colonial wet-dream or escape human pollution or human irrationality, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but you want fundamentally incoherent, infantile and irresponsible things. That isn't visionary. We could have invested in renewable infrastructure and healthcare research under the auspices of a public healthcare program. We could have supported, educated, invested in ALL our citizens rather than retreat into costly criminal white supremacy and patriarchy.

Instead, in the neoliberal epoch, Reagan shut down public investment and doubled down on the Southern Strategy while Clinton/Gore were cheerleaders for irrationally exuberant fake digital/financial skim/scam "New Tech" coupled to mass incarceration/welfare reform.

Progress isn't an indifferent accumulation of gizmos but an equitable distribution of technoscientific costs/risks/benefits in diversity. Progress -- even technoscientific progress -- is a political not an instrumental phenomenon. Anti-political tech talk is blind to this.

Progress is also a worldly phenomenon: techno-transcendental re-framings of its stakes/aspirations confuse us all and facilitate fraud. Stasis will end when and as majorities struggle democratically for sustainable equity-in-diversity & a public address of shared problems.

The Dreamtime of the Driverless Car

Slap another 2,500 bucks onto the already steep price-tag of Tesla Motors' Model S sedan and your luxury "smart car" will be rendered even "smarter" still (no, Virginia, cars are not actually smart), with software activating a suite of features that represent a first version of an "autopilot" program aligning libertechbrotarian Elon Musk's car company more stolidly with kindred Google libertechbrotarians who have been futurologically evangelizing Driverless Cars for years now.

In the Bloomberg Business advertorial (as expected, every single "journalism" outlet coughed up some promotional hairball flogging the Tesla press release for free in the name of what passes for technology news) the car's new features were framed in customary futurological narrative mode. The first sentence of the first paragraph casts the software package as the materialization of a long-deferred dream: "Tesla Motors Inc. will begin rolling out the first version of its highly anticipated Autopilot features to some owners of its all-electric Model S sedan Thursday."

Since the infantile fetishists thronging gizmo-fandoms do indeed wait in long lines to purchase the latest landfill-destined models of this or that handheld gadget, I concede that this first sentence is factual enough as far as these things go, and do not doubt that visions of Tesla Autopilot sugarplums have been dancing in the heads of cheerleaders Musky for the latest low-earth-orbit SpaceX amusement park ride or coffin train Hyperloop cartoon gifted to the world by our soopergenius savior celebrity CEO.

However, as a rhetorician I have to point out that the real argumentative heavy lifting performed by the framing of a product as the fulfillment of a collective dream, the arrival into The Future promised by futurists past, is that it offers up narrative collateral investing the futurological dream of the sentence following it with the plausibility and force to make the bigger sale: "Autopilot is a step toward the vision of autonomous or self-driving cars, and includes features like automatic lane changing, auto steering and the ability to parallel park itself."

Enraptured by this "vision" you may have overlooked that the none of the features actually listed there is new -- some amount to the phony novelty of marketing neologisms repackaging features decades old, like slightly souped-up 70s-era cruise control, while others have been available for a few years now in other cars and offer a mixed record of welcome minor conveniences as well as troubling new occasions for accidents, like automatic parallel parking features.

Of course, there is nothing like futurology to distract you from the disappointment and even danger of present offerings by recasting them as stepping stones to future satisfactions in which you are somehow participating aspirationally now, even if in the form of disappointment and danger. Consumer capitalism does few things better than tricking us into paying for the dissatisfaction of deferred satisfactions as satisfaction (a deferral that ends in our deaths, by the way, and eventually, very possibly, in the death of our planet).

As with the futurological nightmare of truly autonomous weapons systems, or Killer Robots, exclamation point, the futurological daydream of truly autonomous automobiles, or Driverless Cars, exclamation point, is far from reality -- of a piece with the general denigration of intelligence, recognition of which is indispensable to the support of human dignity, in faith-based futurist discourses of "artificial intelligence," as well as with the general demoralization of intelligence distracted by small screens and harassed by targeted marketing and scoring -- but quite apart from that reality on the ground, the "vision" of autonomous artifice as a documentary and justificatory rhetoric is palpably ideological, functioning to distract our attention away from the risks and costs of parochially profitable technodevelopmental changes and especially away from any grasp of the culpability of the investors, owners, designers, coders, marketers, sellers of artifacts in the suffering and death that accompanies that parochial profitability by divesting actual actors of agency and imaginatively investing artifacts with agency.

Given the long-held American romance with cars as cyborg shells -- a romance adjacent and often entangled with fantasies of gun-ownership and open-carry prostheses -- at once "enhancing" and ruggedizing us as individuals ready to compete for positional advantage or more usually momentary survival in a Hobbesian-Darwinian marketplace (the never-needed four-wheel-drive wilderness vehicle or the unsafe-security-theater-massiveness of the mini-van enlisted for the work commute, the exurban shopping trek, the flight to heteronormative suburbia) as well as providing avenues for comfortably conformist pseudo-rebellions against the exactions of this relentless competition (the road trip of the youth not yet or the retiree no longer defined by wage-slavery, the vestigial frontier of the lonely highway, the alluring transcendental myth of traffic flow), it is initially hard to see how the relinquishment of agency promised by the "driverless car" exerts its ideological tug in the first place.

Rather like the plummeting sticker-value of a freshly purchased car the second it is driven off the lot, perhaps there is a likewise instantaneous plummeting of a car's dream-value the moment it is snarled in a traffic jam, resounds with the collision of an empty shopping cart, bleeps an engine-temperature warning, or the needle edges its way all too soon toward empty. But surely the deeper ideological work of "the driverless car" is that it provides a discursive space in which one can concede the conspicuous catastrophes of car culture -- the pollution and waste and unsustainable suburban sprawl, the white-racist demolition of thriving diverse neighborhoods to make way for highways and overpasses facilitating the fiscal and institutional abandonment of majorities living in our cities -- catastrophic outcomes inspired by an earlier generation of futurists, hell, some of history's most influential futurists actually called their dream of car culture Futurama -- all the while disavowing the need to address these catastrophes in a substantive way: The Driverless Car is the futurological promise that we will save ourselves from car-culture by saving... car culture!

Why change public policies or budgetary priorities to facilitate dense diverse walkable neighborhoods and bike lanes and public transportation and continental rapid rail when you can pretend instead that simply purchasing millions more cars year after year as we have done year after year -- sure, so soon to be hybrid and electric, so soon to be artificially intelligent, so soon to be driven entirely by precarious, disorganized, unregulated drivers or,I suppose, "AIs" summonable with a digital handheld app, or so the story goes, as if that means anything real or would mean anything good even were it to become real in any measure -- purchasing millions more demanding, costly, lethal, indistinguishable cars, inching day by day through jammed traffic and an amplifying status quo toward The Future of flaming wreckage, bleak cube-stack mountains, and toxic landfills -- that somehow, somehow, this treadmill will take us somehow somewhere new, will address somehow our existential car culture grievances, will solve somehow our planetary car culture problems.

I predict...

It won't.

Dear Elon, Everybody Dies Whether You Want To Or Not

Elon Musk is declaring in public that he doesn't want to live forever in order to peddle the completely false impression that techno-immortality is plausible for those hoping otherwise. Such credulity is money in the bank for his whole skim-and-scam-artist billionaire techbro "Think Leader" set. Musk's comments about longevity medicine (not a thing -- all healthcare increases and improves life, no "enhancement" or "longevity" or "cyborgic" or "uploading" or "gengineering" medicine separate from healthcare exists except as a rhetorical and marketing exercise) are akin to his recent flogging for funds for serially failed AI by warning everybody about "killer robots" and Satanic Robot Gods that must be stopped with protective tech and friendly software now that the sooper-intelligent ubicomp better-than-real-VR digitopian long-con is starting to lose steam here in the ruins of smart-but-dumb landfill-destined consumer crap and digital sharecropping and Big Data surveillance and marketing harassment. Advertisers always have both the carrot (youthful skin!) and the stick (pimpled pariah!) at their disposal to get their snake-oil off the shelves. Robocultic futurologists do like to keep switching their pitch from handwaving tech-heaven to Very Serious tech-apocalypse to selective tech-agnosticism to keep the pop-tech infotainment illiterates guessing and the collection plates full.

On Guns (Only) in America

While the scale and scope of gun-violence in the United States is exceptional, as compared to other industrial and at least notionally representative societies in the world, it seems to me that the American Constitutional system also provides for an exceptionally clear solution to the problem and one that illuminates a host of questions that are often incidentally but rarely insistently connected in discussions of the problem. All right, so guns…

At the outset, I am going to simply set aside as fundamentally unserious the prevailing misreading of the Constitution popular among so-called Second Amendment absolutists (most of whom are cynical shills for gun-lobby profiteers and the unwitting dupes of their mass-mediated echo chambers): If you do not believe that the Second Amendment sanctions individual ownership of nuclear weapons then you already concede the premise that there are weapons safety bans and regulations compatible with the Second Amendment.

Once conceded, the question becomes a matter of just what gets banned and regulated according to objective determinations of harm and how best to implement these bans and regulations. I commend much of the suite of reforms familiar to gun control advocacy for well over a generation: universal background checks facilitated by waiting periods; elimination of egregious loopholes for gifts and gun-shows; refusing violent criminals, domestic abusers, certain emotionally distressed individuals from the use and possession of guns; banning of military style weapons and arsenals to private citizens; implementation of licensing regimes requiring periodic demonstrations of competence and awareness of safety rules and laws at least as strenuous as those already required of those who drive cars or operate other kinds of potentially dangerous machinery; compulsory purchase of insurance to defray the public costs of damage and disruption from gun use for all gun owners and users; sequestration of recreational shooting to public facilities with on-site storage of the weapons used in them; radical circumscription of destructiveness of weapons sanctioned for hunting; ongoing tracking of weapons and ammunition purchasing and public circulation; and so on. Again, I am going to simply set aside as fundamentally unserious, and usually as outright deceptive, the commonplace claims of gun activists and enthusiasts who declare such measures impractical or ineffective, inasmuch as nearly all of them have been demonstrated to be both practical and effective in real world practice.

None of this preliminary throat-clearing is the least bit original, of course -- important though it is to make these obvious points given the insistent ubiquity of their denial -- but nor is any of that the thrust of my post. For me, it matters that the Second Amendment guarantee of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is explicitly subordinated, both conceptually and grammatically (not to mention as a matter of the historical context of the harsh collective memory of military occupation by the British out of which the Amendment originated), of "a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state." I regard the Amendment as an insistence that the military and police providing "the security of a free state" be accountable to and representative of -- and hence, "well regulated" -- of "the people" in whose name they act. This imperative is also expressed, of course, in the Constitutional establishment of civilian control over the military but it provides as well, in my reading, a firm Constitutional basis for contemporary demands not only for gun safety regulations but also for accountable, representative community-based policing in the United States.

It is not an accident that gun-control activism and Black Lives Matter movements to end violent, inequitable, unaccountable, non-representative, predatory white-racist policing practices are happening at one and the same time. These movements are structurally connected, and not only in their shared aspirations, but in the interdependence of the crises they would overcome: the suffusion of public space with guns in private ownership provides an official rationale or at least inevitable argumentative recourse for ever more militarized domestic policing practices.

This is far from the whole story, however. The incessantly reported and invoked defensive, even paranoid, psychology of public policing in a gun-suffused public space materializes, or more specifically embodies, the broader, inchoate, poisonously repressed defensiveness and paranoia occasioned by the demographic diversification, secularization, and planetization of an American public displacing the white supremacy long sited and secured by policing: For not only have the police historically policed white-supremacy in the name of civil order, but the police have historically been sited in the cultural state investing racially long-marginalized populations like the Irish, Italians, Polish, Latin Americans, and so on with at first and at best probationary "whiteness," whiteness provisionally secured while provisionally securing white-supremacy.

The defensiveness, especially, of white police who do not live in the communities of color they police is a performance of alienated occupation that rationalizes its violence through the paradoxically Janus-faced recourse to, on the one hand, an historical imaginary that treats these communities as themselves an invasive, occupying force on the body politic of White (sometimes denominated "Real") America -- yes, it is obscene to figure as an alien "invasion" the violent kidnapping and enslavement of people and subsequently as an alien "occupation" a people officially emancipated but then in fact ruthlessly subordinated by Jim Crow, terrorist lynching, share cropping and wage slavery, exclusion from Progressive era and then New Deal reforms creating the White American middle class, segregation through education and zoning and election practices, and mass incarceration -- but also, on the other hand, by recourse to a futural imaginary that treats these communities as the symptom and specter of a demographic reversal in which a majority minority America now threatens White-Supremacy-qua-Occupation with all of its dirty, ugly, guilty open secrets with the prospect of factual displacement and just reparations.

To make much the same point from a different vantage, there is nothing the least bit paradoxical in the fact that some of the first accomplishments of the gun control movement were occasioned by practical interventions and protests of violent white-racist policing on the part of the Black Panthers that took the form of Black bodies Open-Carrying defensive weapons while the consummation of gun-activism today is represented by the spectacle of White bodies Open-Carrying threatening weapons, usually in public spaces where people of color make their homes or are otherwise encouraged to feel welcome. Open-Carry, today, is a political movement to countermand ongoing American diversification by suffusing public space with white-racist patriarchal terror, and in this it is directly connected to the terrorist work of lynching as an historical maintenance of white-supremacy.

By way of conclusion, allow me to take yet another step back for an even wider contextualization of the issue at hand... Gouverneur Morris was a Founding Father who has not quite remained a household name. He wrote the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, which insists that liberty is secured through the promotion of general welfare, and he was one of the few delegates who was explicitly opposed to slavery (by the way, he was also a strong public advocate for the building of the Erie Canal to transform New York into a modern global industrial commonwealth -- on the basis of a proto-Keynesian pre-Rooseveltian understanding of stimulative public investment as general welfare in line with the thinking of another abolitionist Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton). Meanwhile, a much more famous Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, wrote the Declaration of Independence, which delineates instead an individualist conception of liberty, and he was an apologist for slavery now notorious for his exploitation and abuse of slaves.

Of course, the assertively individualist, agrarian-feudalist "democracy" of Jefferson -- that is, individualist in the form of a distraction from or outright denial of social interdependence; that is, democracy in the form of plutocratic, slave-holding anti-democracy -- has long held ideological sway over the American public imaginary, especially in moments when Americans seek to rationalize their avowed democracy with their anti-democratic sins and crimes. (Given this blog's usual preoccupation with reactionary "tech" discourse and corporate-militarist futurology, allow a parenthetic reminder of the special indispensability of these Jeffersonian formulations to neoliberal venture-capitalist "tech culture" from the California Ideology, to Barlow's so-called Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, to the abiding metaphor of the Electronic Frontier.) But whatever the rhetorical priority of the Jeffersonian formulation of liberty it is the Constitutional Morrisonian formulation of liberty that has primary legal standing. And of these historically competing American ideologies of liberty, it is the Constitutional version that also seems to me by far the most philosophically sound, practically sustainable, and authentically American.

Just as the historical emergence and consolidation of the American "free enterprise" was predicated on the quintessentially unfree system of chattel slavery, so too the ongoing ideology of free enterprise depends on fantasies of voluntary contracts the terms of which are too often actually duressed by the unequal knowledge, unequal precarity, and unequal access to cultural and infrastructural affordances of the participants in the contract as also the eventual profitability of free enterprise depends on socializing the risks and costs of enterprises while privatizing their benefits.

There is a direct connection between the historical fantasy of the historically American individualist who disavows his dependencies on the ritual and material artifice of slavery, wage slavery, and unpaid domestic labor and the present-day fever dream of the white-racist patriarchal "Real American" individualist for whom the Open-Carried weapon is the ruggedizing cyborg shell that disavows interdependence to "stand its ground" on an American Homeland geography resonating with the history of native American genocide, slavery, sex-panics, anti-immigration mobs, drug-war hysteria, postwar militarism, and post-9/11 security state insecurity. The feudal Jeffersonian conception of possessive individualist liberty resonates still in the "Castle Doctrine" so cherished by gun culture, in which the individual and his gun is figuratively transformed into a feudal castle "standing its ground" on an anarchic terrain of lawless warlords -- and, no doubt, damsels in distress -- the all too familiar imaginative recourse of Confederate slave-masters of whom Jefferson was a precursor and market libertarian ideologues for whom Jefferson remains a paragon.

The Morrisonian Preamble to the Constitution endorsed the crucial premise of the Jeffersonian Declaration that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" with the frame "We the People… in order to form a more perfect Union… ordain and establish this Constitution." After the conspicuous failure of the radically minarchist "Articles of Confederation," Morris proceeds with his fellow delegates to institute a federal form for that just and consensual government (as Jefferson hesitated to do in principle but then did with gusto in his Presidential practice, of course). Against the individualist spontaneism of the Declaration and failed Articles, the Morrisonian Preamble elaborates the public constitution of the Union from which alone can flow the "blessings of liberty," the "establish[ment] of justice… domestic tranquility… common defense… and [the] promot[ion of] general welfare." It is not until the Fourteenth Amendment ensuring birthright citizenship and universal equitable recourse to the administration of justice in principle that the Constitution doctrinally admitted (as, needless to say, it has never fully or consistently managed to do in actual practice to this day) the third plank in the uniquely American conception of liberty, that America is a nation of immigrants and the exercise of its liberty is invigorated by the diversity of its stakeholders.

It is no surprise that gun culture is connected so regularly with the politics of white-supremacy, nor that self-described patriots and even law enforcement personnel allied with this gun culture are connected so regularly with nullification strategies and secessionist rhetoric and hostility to birthright citizenship. In their specifically American form, racist white supremacy and libertarian spontaneous order are of a piece historically, culturally, and conceptually. Understanding these connections is indispensable to resisting them here, but doing so also provides uniquely American resources for hope. Just as feminist and anti-racist work are both clarified and strengthened by grasping their intersectionalities, so too gun safety advocacy and community policing work and Black Lives Matter movements are clarified and strengthened by grasping theirs. Gun safety activism both practically and intellectually facilitates activism against the drug war, the school to prison pipeline, the abuse-to-prison pipeline, for-profit prisons, police militarization, bloated military budgets, and for community policing reform, structural racism education, work to expose and end sexual violence, and all and each for the others as well.

None of the preceding is offered up to imply that the aristocratic Gouverneur Morris was without great faults any more than to deny that the radical Thomas Jefferson had his strengths, but the distinction I have drawn between them is meant to highlight an early and abiding contest between negative and positive, private and public conceptions of liberty that help elaborate connections between gun control, community policing, immigration politics today that clarify stakes and identify allies. Gun safety regulation "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity" is also a struggle to clarify and implement the American Constitutional conception of a positive liberty indispensably indebted to accountable/consensual governance, public investment in common goods, and the critical, creative, constructive dynamism of stakeholder diversity. American gun violence today is an exceptional outrage, as our solution to it tomorrow could provide an exceptional illumination to ourselves and our posterity.

"All organizing is science fiction." -- Walidah Imarisha

Octavia's Brood

Open-Terror

Open-Carry is a political project to countermand American diversification by suffusing public space with white-racist patriarchal terror.

Tech Progressive, So Regressive.

There's nothing progressive in policy discussions premised on technocratic authority rather than democratic deliberation. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in "disruption" that amounts to the deregulatory enablement of fraud. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about "innovation" that simply loots and privatizes public goods or externalizes public risks. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in eugenic "enhancement" promoting conformity and docility as competitiveness and as health. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in treating wanted human lifeways as diseased and criminal kinds of personhood demanding "cure." #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in pretending robocalypse is an existential threat and climate change an engineering problem. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about dreams of escaping our shared responsibilities into outer space or virtual reality. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about identifying with robots or treating people as robots. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about turning education into television or even into video games. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in treating consumer fashions as activism or consumer fandoms as movements. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in the pretense that corporate-military status quo amplification is progress. #TechProgressive

I am embarrassed to admit my own complicity in the emergence of the technoprogressive term now current in some circles of neoliberal tech talkers and "Thought Leaders." Interested readers will note the appropriated arguments and even phrases in the wikipedia entry for technoprogressivism, alluded to in the 2014 robocultic transhumanist Technoprogressive Declaration, all from my own Technoprogressivism: Beyond Technophilia and Technophobia, published nearly a decade before that Declaration. I realized quite soon after writing that rather programmatic piece that its formulations were being taken up in stealth-reactionary futurological "tech" circles seeking to sanewash eugenic, libertarian, neoliberal, digi-utopian, greenwashing, facile reductionist and determinist views about technodevelopmental politics. I soon came to believe that the susceptibility of my formulations to these deceptive and tech-propagandistic appropriations was a product of my own under-interrogated use of the term "technology" in the piece as monolithic and extricable from and hence apparently substitutable for politics in ways that facilitated what I now recognize as a host of familiar reactionary futurological gestures -- the naturalization of elite incumbent interests as a-political, the substitution of marketing norms and forms for modes of reflection and analysis, the treatment of wish-fulfillment fantasies as scientific predictions, the investment of such speculation with transcendental significance, and the transformation of these discourses into subcultural formations, identity movements and consumer fandoms. For a recent and concise elaboration of the critique eventuating in part from experience of the techno-transcendental appropriation of my early efforts I recommend Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains.