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.
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In a fairly hilarious development a techbro -- not sure if he is outright robocultic or simply robocult-adjacent -- complained of this twitter sequence that it was "opaque" and, presumably, deliberately ironic and very possibly an elite effete aesthete's cry for help in the face of the can-do he-man sooper-science of the techno-immortalist sooperAI-coders of The Future. Of course, for years and years and years I have been amused to hear self-described revolutionary sooper-geniuses whine about my perverse incomprehensabilty -- what could be more obvious than that their inability to read my writing is incontrovertible evidence of their superior intellects, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. I must say I never expected to hear the same complaints about my terse li'l tweets. It takes a special obliviousness to declare unreadable a tweet that manages to be grammatical and use words according to their definitions and even to be re-tweeted and otherwise liked by other readers (who are apparently indulging in some mass fraud according to the righteous denunciator of its palpable illegibility) just because it isn't written in a style fit for People Magazine. Quite apart from the inept reductive disembodied sociopathic conceptions of enhancement and intelligence promulgated by our sad robocultic friends, can you imagine the derangement that would follow from their confontation with actually differently-capacitated or artificially intelligent beings given the way they freak out at minor differences in expression or concern by fellow humans of roughly their own time and place in the world? What perfectly ridiculous fellows these techno-transcendentalists continue to be! I never can get over it.
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