Nature's Artiface: Negative Liberty, Spontaneous Order, and Reactionary Tech

"Negative" liberties are forms of positive liberty that manage to disavow, by naturalizing, their contingent and artificial affordances. 1

— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015

"Spontaneous" orders are forms of order that manage to deny their parochialism, history and costs through the force of their incumbency. 2

— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015

"Nature" derives from the Latin nasci, to be born, to appear, but it matters that labor precedes birth and preparation enables appearance. 3

— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015

The essential work of the discourse of naturalization has come to be its disavowal of the artifice of what passes for the natural, 4

— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015

...this is an accomplishment indicated not least by the treatment of nature as the contrary to artifice rather than as a species of it. 5

— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015

To belabor the obvious here, naturalization conduces to the maintenance or amplification of the status quo and to reactionary politics. 6

— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015

There is an affinity in the de-politicizing gesture through which always only some artifacts/techniques are constituted as "technology," 7

— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015

…and then the ready investment of some technologies so constituted with the work of a-politicizing conservatism. 8

— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015

Techno-libertarian ideology absolutely depends on these discursive ploys, 9

— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015

…as when the end-to-end principle is implicitly identified with negative liberty, then enables the advocacy of plutocracy as meritocracy, 10

— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015

…or when prior faith in natural, virtuous spontaneous order (confirming its advocates they should rule, naturally) transforms encryption 11

— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015

…from technique to world-historical force that would abolish the unnatural, vicious barriers to the flowering of that spontaneous order. 12

— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015