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.