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.
1 comment:
> Sins of Futurologists: Life expectancy at retirement age. . .
> [is] not increasing. . . glib futurological declarations to
> the contrary, genuflecting vacuously to Boomer-daydreams of face-lifts,
> boner pills and sooper meds. . . a case with intuitive plausibility
> for pampered gerontocratic US Senators who live no longer than did
> many Senators of ancient Rome. . .
The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien's Legacy
TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities)
Published on Nov 10, 2015
(second talk, by Patrick Curry,
"Is _The Lord of the Rings_ a Great Book?")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLBvS-BvJww
--------------
(10:00/59:12)
In a way, the hippies were right. Tolkien is, and was,
genuinely countercultural. His primary commitments to
historical philology, Catholicism but also Northern pagan
courage, enchantment as opposed to power and magic,
and the literary primacy of story, remain deeply unfashionable
in most contemporary critical contexts. . .
Five years ago, one of the _Guardian's_ chief reviewers stated
that "Of all the means for professional suicide that are available
to the writer, expressing affection for Tolkien is one of the
most effective." I'm grateful to him for being so open about
it. . .
Ironically, where to approve of Tolkien was once considered
reactionary, now the fear is that to entirely disapprove of him
might appear so. . . I would like to approach. . . the
question of the critical reception of Tolkien's work through
this question, which has always haunted that reception:
is _The Lord of the Rings_, as so many readers have maintained,
and so many critics denied, a great book? I am sure of one
thing: even after the hermeneutics of suspicion have done
their worst, that remains a perfectly legitimate question
to ask. . . And although flawed, Tolkien's [book] has at least
a plausible case in its favor. It deals with profoundly
important issues. At least three come to mind. Our relationship
with the living natural world, this Middle-earth, now caught
between the retreating ice and the advancing fires that
you may have read about or even experienced. Secondly, power
and what certainly seems to be evil, its entwinement with
techno-science, and the nature of resistance. And thirdly,
mortality, both death and the consequences of a quest for
deathlessness. And if you read the rhetoric coming out of
Silicon Valley, you'll know that that quest is very, so to speak,
alive and well.
====
I remember mentioning to a transhumanist acquaintance (or
maybe posting on the Extropians' list, I can't remember),
before the Peter Jackson films came out 14 years ago, wondering
what people in the overlapping communities of >Hism and F&SF
would make of the re-publicizing of the Tolkienian theme
(assuming the films were successful and that they
had **any** thematic connection to the book, which did
turn out to be the case) of the lure of immortality for Men.
The response I got was "Wha...? WTF you babblin' about, bro?
What does **Tolkien**, of all things, have to do with
Transhumanism?" Oh, those literal-minded engineering types. ;->
Deathism! Deathism! Deathism! ;->
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