Saturday, December 31, 2016
Thursday, December 29, 2016
A Handy Tech-Talk Translator:
"Acceleration" = Precarization
"Artificial Intelligence" = Denial of Responsibility
"Automation" = Dismantlement of Organized Labor
"Culturefit" = Bigotry
"Democratization" = Rules and Standards Are for the Little People
"Digitality" = Loathing and Denial of Material Bodies, Material Brains, Material Historical Struggle
"Disruption" = Deregulation
"Enhancement" = Eugenics
"Free" = Under Duress
"The Future" = The Status Quo, Amplified
"Gamification" = Let Us Assume Everyone Is A Sociopath
"Innovation" = PR-Repackaging
"Internet of Things" = People Being Treated As Things Via the Internet
"Let the market decide." = Let rich people decide.
"Maker" = Grifter
"Meritocracy" = White Male Mediocrity
"New" = Forgotten
"Open" = Empty
"Progress" = Wealth Concentration
"Resilience" = Exploitability
"Risk" = Privileged Upward Failure
"Roboticization" = Increasing Treatment of Workers As Robots
"Sharing" = Sharecropping
"Smart" = Not Smart
"Spontaneous Order" = Following Orders
"Strong Encryption" = Cyberspatial Gun-Nuttery
"Think Tank" = Spin Room
"Thought Leader" = Mouth of Sauron
Monday, December 26, 2016
Lies, Damn Lies, and Futurism
I think most of what passes for "Tech" design should be disregarded
and most of what is accepted as "Tech" promotion should be prosecuted.
Most "Tech" marketing & design peddles the truly terrible lie that we are approaching the Star Trek future rather than the feudal past.
We have grown so accustomed to being lied to by advertising that we now tend to imitate advertising even when we lie to ourselves.
Social media is the consummation of false advertising.
Sunday, December 25, 2016
And What Have You Done?
Saturday, December 24, 2016
Christmas Effects by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
What’s “queer?” Here’s one train of thought about it. The depressing thing about the Christmas season -- isn’t it? -- is that it’s the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the State says the same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language of theology, but in the language the State talks: legal holidays, long school hiatus, special postage stamps, and all. And the language of commerce more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more narrowly around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over Americans’ “holiday mood.” The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas question -- Will hostages be free for Christmas? What did that flash flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families’ Christmas? And meanwhile, the pairing “families/Christmas” becomes increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the holiday itself constituted in the image of "the" family.
The thing hasn’t, finally, so much to do with propaganda for Christianity as with propaganda for Christmas itself. They all -- religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourses of power and legitimacy -- line up with each other so neatly once a year, and the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with unhappy eyes. What if instead there were a practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing? -- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies, Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 5-6
Friday, December 16, 2016
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Trump Tech Culturefit
Tho' Silicon Valley has a notional affiliation with the Democratic left (based mostly, I daresay, in an utterly unreliable, sentimental, subcultural attachment arising out of proximity to the vestigially-liberal Bay Area, and in a rejection of Republican anti-science and Christianist evangelism that benefits Democrats who declare themselves "fact-based" in response, but who too often take that to endorse reductionist, quantificationist, eugenic, unaccountably technocratic, bourgeois-consumerist, corporate-militarist, and techno-triumphalist "Thought Leadership" qua "fact"), the truth is that Trump & "Tech" are a match made in Hell.
I expect full co-operation in no time at all -- Peter Thiel is not a counter-example but a reductio ad absurdum. Futurology has always been a genre of marketing deception and hyperbole amplified into techno-transcendental religiosity, what better ideological framework to rationalize Trump's otherwise unmoored authoritarian greedhead aggrieved-aggressive masculine impulses?
Saturday, December 10, 2016
Latest Potential Trump Nightmare Cabinet Pick Rex Tillerson, Geo-Engineer
For example, if you were wondering: 'I mean, at least Rex Tillerson knows that climate change is real. So there's that."— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 10, 20161 Do those saying "at least Rex Tillerson admits climate change is real" know he advocates futurological greenwashing via geo-engineering?
2 In 2012, Tillerson declared climate change is merely "an engineering problem" for which here will inevitably be "an engineering solution."
3 Tillerson, "The New North American Energy Paradigm: Reshaping the Future," transcript, CFR (2012, June 27).https://t.co/qCkPUFM9iO
4 Setting aside the deliberate generational deception of climate change denial Exxon-Mobile participated in for parochial profitability...
5 it is crucial to recognize that the displacement onto imaginary engineering of the shared political problems of climate change is in fact
6 another form of denialism -- the denial of collective responsibility and agency in climate politics -- a sequel denial not a correction.
7 Hope it is not necessary to spell out why more profitable industrialism may not be a solution to profitably ruinous industrial extraction?
Saturday, December 03, 2016
Progress Via Repetition
1 When I think how much destruction and self-destruction is abetted simply by the GOP's disciplined repetition of false and facile slogans
2 (eg gov isn't the solution it's the problem; privatizing public services improves them; taxes are burdens rather than enablers of freedom)
3 I can't help but wonder how much the Dem left might accomplish if we endlessly repeated our own correct and clarifying messages
4 (eg, those who say government is bad never deliver good government; there is strength in diversity; freedom is made of public investments)
5 I fear Dems don't muster comparable discipline in an eagerness to perform cleverness hunting novelty rather than inculcating good sense,
6 and by performing unflappability (not surprised!) rather than justified outrage at the waste, corruption, crimes, and lies of the right.
7 Every right-wing slogan is a nail inviting the hammer of a comparably pithy dem-left rejoinder that everybody knows to deliver as a blow.
8 The point isn't always to convince entrenched foes but to generate immediate associations sustaining foundational progressive commonsense.
9 This is not the kind of rhetorical work that will garner you praise for your wit or originality. Actually, it's dull and annoying.
10 A world that works can only be built out of such rhetorical work. Don't be afraid or ashamed to repeat basic progressive truths.
Thursday, December 01, 2016
Repeat Repeat Repeat Repeat Repeat
Tuesday, November 08, 2016
Breaking
Like butterflies they're pulled apart.
America can break your heart. -- Auden
Saturday, September 17, 2016
Now That's What I Call Techno-color!
I can't think of another show as stunningly colorful as the original Star Trek -- it remains one of the most visually beautiful shows ever. Man, I really do like that color palette. I'm wondering if the new one is going to be the washed out modern standard. I'm hoping for firetruck reds, but steeling myself for more retirement community teals. My secret dream is for Pedro Almodovar to direct a trilogy of gorgeous Star Trek melodrama-farces set on a Federation cruise ship.
Wednesday, September 07, 2016
The Stubborn Fable of Cyborg-Ruggedized Individuals Enjoying e2e Net-Liberty
It's based on bullshit mythology of the Internet. That it used to be pure, but got corrupted. @tante — Yasha Levine
The end-to-end principle is *always* figured via the already reactionary conception of negative liberty. Hijinks ensue.— Dale Carrico
If all you can think of is the individual, you'll miss everything about social and society.— Jürgen Geuter
Indeed; more particularly, all liberty is substantiated in/by public investment/performance and hence is "positive"... 1 Presumably "negative" liberties are efforts to naturalize, de-politicize status-quo conventions benefiting incumbency. 2 The empty-space of e2e mimes Millian space the fist can swing except where it meets my chin: the "pre-political" body. No surprise this actually politicized body reappears in paranoid cyber-talk of crypto-security, individuted-privacy... 4 "individuated" (sorry). MacPherson's "Possessive Individualism" again, which Hayles mapped onto the cyberspatial sprawl.— Dale Carrico
Saturday, August 20, 2016
The Utopium Conceit
1 One of the many annoying argumentative tics in futurological discourse is the one I tend to think of as The Utopium Conceit…
2 in which a diversity of qualified lab results are reduced into A Single Thing -- some phenomenon, material, technique, imagined device --
3 that is applied in turn to Everything, and invested with a profitable and prophetic force That! Will! Change! Everything!
4 It can be, say, plastic, carbon nanotubes, fungus (as eco-remediator, building material, vegetarian foodstuff, terraforming agent)...
5 or nuclear fission, car culture, digital computation and simulation, Drexler's imaginary "nanotechnology" or its gawky cousin 3D-printing.
6 It's easy to see the appeal of The Utopium Conceit. Reduction of qualified, diverse dynamisms into one thing then deliriously amplified...
7 First, this futurological conceit accommodates the real but fraught and complex promise of technoscientific change for common good…
8 …to wealth concentration and status quo amplification by marketing it for parochial short-term profit-taking; and
9 Second, it accommodates the real but fraught and complex demands of technoscientific change for public deliberation…
10 …to mass technoscientific illiteracy through facile simplifications and recourse to drama (whether wish-fulfilling or disasterbatory).
11 Note, in connection with such misinformation, how a minimization or outright disavowal of historical, political, cultural contingencies…
12 …shaping, regulating, and distributing technoscientific progress usually enables The Utopium Conceit as futurological strategy.
13 It is of course precisely because collective problem-solving through technoscientific discovery can be so inspiring and promising…
14…that futurology's deceptive simplifications of slow and difficult struggles, hyperbolic and hence deranging distortion of results…
15 appeal to irrational passions (greed paranoia), skewing of budgetary priorities, denigration of political contexts of progressive change…
16 should be abhorred by all those who would be genuine champions of science education, research, fact-based harm-reduction public policy…
17 and progressive struggles to distribute costs, risks & benefits of technoscience change equitably to the diversity of their stakeholders.
Friday, August 19, 2016
Body Shaming Trump Is Trumpian Not Anti-Trumpian Politics
Monday, August 15, 2016
Democracy, Civitas, and the Rite To Have Rights; Or, Why I Will Not Relinquish Democratization To The Tech-Talkers Or Other Fauxvolutionaries
In skirmishes with libertopians and libertechians so often I end up exclaiming: "I don't want to smash the state but to democratize it!" I want to say more about democratization, not only because it is instructive to recall and clarify how *demos* and *civitas* connect but because "democratization" appears to be yet another word being evacuated of sense in the promotional mill of futurological tech-talk. Just as "open" has come to mean empty, "free" precarious, "disruption" deregulation, "innovation" PR-repackaging "acceleration" status-quo amplification, "risk" privileged upward failure, "bigotry" culture fit, "resilience" exploitability so, too, "democratization" is being peddled by tech-talkers as what amounts to inequitable, unaccountable provision of services for fees. I'm simply not ready to relinquish what seems to me the indispensable idea and experience of democratization to tech's "Thought Leaders."
Hannah Arendt wrote of a "right to have rights" preceding all others, and insisted it was uniquely threatened by statelessness and hence arises not from *humanitas* (whether species-being, social parochialism, or reason's endowment) but *civitas.* I prefer to phrase her key insight a matter of "RITES to have rights," as ritual, citational, performative materializations of rights in public assemblies, in critical deliberations, in collaborative problem-solving, in historical struggles, in legislative reforms. In Cicero, the rule of law, the righteous practice of rhetoric (good people, speaking well), and the powers and responsibilities of a contingent rights culture together materially body forth a *res publica*, or public thing, publicity, in which we struggle at once at flourishing world-making and flourishing self-making. (NB I'm being overgenerous with Cicero and will be in what follows too.)
In the Preamble to the US Constitution, the "more perfect Union" (saved and transformed in Lincoln's Emancipatory second founding) connected the establishment of justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, and general welfare in the American *res publica*. In the New Deal and via the Four Freedoms FDR repudiated the naturalization of the status quo qua "negative" neutral liberty reaffirmed and re-elaborated the connection of general welfare to the American conception of justice, prosperity, and security. The Kennedy/Johnson "Great Society" insisted American democracy's ethical universalism is one of equity-in-diversity.
The twice winning, still rising Obama coalition in a diversifying, secularizing, planetizing America is pushing back the reactionary patriarchal (sexist, heterosexist, cissexist) white-nationalism of Movement Republicanism with its Southern Strategy and Culture Wars. Who knows if the election of HRC will be the improbable moment that deadly fever breaks at last, in Obama's prophetic phrase and America takes up in earnest the promise of the Great Society with a liberal Court, more public investments, more progressive taxes and turns to planetary problems of catastrophic climate change, wealth concentration, violence against women, and weapons proliferation. [Narrator's Voice: In a word, it wasn't.]
Facts of slavery, genocide, segregation & police violence as domestic terror, militarized markets, rape culture, environmental injustice give the lie to any congratulatory litany of American democratization, suggests that the fearful fever of reaction never really breaks and impel "good people, speaking/doing well" to greater clarity & effort as we face the inequity and heartbreak of slow-motion history.
Richard Rorty described democracy as "the idea that people should all have a say in the public decisions that affect them." In my understanding of his notion, this included decisions about who we are, what a say is, who is affected, and what the public is. On this understanding, democracy is not an ideal *eidos* of "full" or "direct" participation against which we measure our failures, but ongoing struggles and experiments in which (ever more) people (more) exert their say over (more of) what affects them in public.
The democratic or democratizing state stages a civic publicity in which these struggles and experiments are sustained and play out. I am progressive because I am committed to democratic values of sustainability, equity, and diversity none of which have been realized and all of which require progressive education, agitation, organization, legislation. ***But…*** I'm a democrat first (I mean little d here tho I'm big D too given pragmatic realities) and democratic interminability troubles progress: Progress is always progress for whom? progress toward what end? -- while democracy pluralizes whos and proliferates ends.
Democratization's ever greater say for ever greater numbers seems at the least to commit the democratic project to nonviolence: Democracy's definitive insistence on accountable authority (periodic elections, trial by jury, yoking taxation to representation, etc), its definitive insistence on public investment in the ritual artifice of equitable recourse to the rule of law and robust rights culture, and its ongoing securing of a legible scene of informed, nonduressed consent to the terms of everyday commerce for all people all connect democratization and nonviolence, democratic *civitas* to Beloved Community, radical democracy with Revolutions of Conscience, chronicled in the Preamble's general welfare, the Emancipatory Union, the New Deal's positive liberty and ongoing GreatSociety struggles: It is also emphatically misunderstood and threatened by libertopian/libertechian re-framings of the state as for-fee service provider.
It is no less misunderstood by anarchists "left" & right who mis*identify* state forms with a violence that precedes and exceeds them and pine for righteous or prosperous spontaneisms that amount to parochialism or acquiescence to injustices they formally disdain not so different in practical result from privileged fauxvolutionaries indulging in Purity Cabaret disdaining partisan political reforms. Be all that as it may, the democratic investment in nonviolence vouchsafed by facilitation of transitions of power by election by the maintenance of nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes by equal recourse to the law and by consent secured by welfare (as against vacuous contractarian consent duressed by misinformation, precarity, insecurity) remains interminable to the extent that nonviolent democratic contestation includes contests over what constitutes violence & democracy.This is the constitutive paradox of the democratic imaginary and I am a democrat because it is seems to me a productive paradox.
It seems to me errors, denials & disavowals of these admittedly fraught, paradoxical connections are shared by my critical interlocutors whether anarchists "left" or right, reactionary tech-talkers, or fauxvolutionaries indulging in silly campaign season Purity Cabaret.
Monday, August 01, 2016
Rorty's Wit
There is plenty in Richard Rorty to disagree with, but he still has an outsized influence in my spiritual make-up. It is hard to explain, but the way he combined wit and good sense in a very American way with post-Nietzschean philosophy helped me bridge my emerging philosophy (as it was then being definitively shaped by an imaginary, still-ongoing conversation in my head between Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler) with the way reading Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward (and watching screwball comedies) intellectually saved my life as a queer in high school. For me the performance of wit in Rorty gave me hope I could put a soul together that made sense. Whatever my disagreements, all gratitude.
McCarthy --> Nixon --> Quayle --> Gingrich --> W --> Palin --> Trump -->
Thursday, July 21, 2016
They Are Coming
Say You Wanna Fauxvolution
Thursday, July 07, 2016
Re-Framing The Second Amendment For Gun Safety and Representative Policing
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Alvin Toffler, 1928 – 2016
No shock: In the Future eveybody dies. The reason this isn't just a tasteless observation is because a disavowal of finitude, mortality, vulnerability, error drives futurology. Never forget the essence of futurology is a death-dealing peddling of status quo amplification as accelerating progress via denial of death.Tech's "Thought Leaders" love to confuse making bets with having thoughts: Toffler was a trailblazer for our ruinous artificial imbecilence. I went from future shock to future fatigue years ago.
Sunday, June 26, 2016
The Parade Passes By
As regular readers of Amor Mundi know, my partner and I have been together for over fourteen years now. But we aren't gay married because we disapprove of marriage as a vestige of human trafficking and as an irrational acquiescence to damaging Hallmark card fantasies of romantic completion. And yet we both fought for marriage equality and are cheered by its successes because our exclusion from the institution damages the lives of queer folks who feel differently than we do and because that exclusion long remained an injustice enabled other worse exclusions and injustices, and also simply because it seems more forceful politically to oppose norms from which you are not already excluded and the refusal of which costs you something.
Appalled by the deathly demoralizing anti-democratizing energies of corporate-militarism as I am, I grasped nonetheless the indispensability of ending Bill Clinton's gargoyle "Don't Ask Don't Tell" and the ban of queer folks from serving openly in the military for reasons similar to those that make marriage equality victories good -- but, again, I cannot say the jingoist cadences inevitably framing the victory felt particularly enlivening to me personally here in the belly of the beast of the imperialist abroad police-state enabling at home endless War on Terror. Ending employment discrimination against queer folks seems to me a more substantial goal that will help many truly precarious people in this country while imposing a constraint on many truly pernicious people in this country -- and hence I cannot say that I am surprised to find it the assimilationist goal that still most stubbornly resists accomplishment, year after year after year. I don't like kids enough to wallow in gay adoption victories, and while I am all for Families We Choose, I wonder why the Chosen Families we celebrate must always be so drearily conventional.
But even if, as I say, I fully recognize the indispensability of demanding the availability of legibility on conventional institutional terms, lest illegibility marginalize so many of us in ways that literally ruin and end lives, I personally believe that a life more fully lived demands selves made of both prose and poetry, freedom requires both answerability before the eyes of power as well as the questionableness out of which different worlds are made (I recommend you read Fanon if that doesn't make sense to you).
Yes, all told, I am one of those grumps you hear about who think that celebrating Pride as assimilation to the institutional norms of reprosexual corporate-militarism is nothing to be Proud of. While Pride originated in the righteous impulse to defy the hurtful shame imposed on wanted queer lifeways by mean, fearful, ignorant majorities, I think there is plenty to be ashamed of in the complacency, conformism, and consumerism our new Prideful majority celebrates.
Especially now that I'm past fifty I find that I more or less want Pride to get off my lawn. It is like a crowd of vacant consumers and squalling kids hard to distinguish from a food court in a Tornado Alley suburban mall even with the interchangeable shirtless guys and sequins shorn of their magic by too much sunlight. I do know that there are plenty of older folks who draw a real measure of strength and support from Pride, and yet I do think Pride is something youthful at heart, and in a way that registers both the fabulousness and foibles that can characterize youth in dumb overgeneralized stereotypical ways I won't make many friends getting into in any depth. But the hazy ambivalent fondness I still feel for Pride, while feeling at once quite contented that Pride is no longer the thing for me, is something like the hazy ambivalent fondness I feel for my own time of youthful adventuring.
I marched with my friends in Queer Nation in the Pride Parade in Atlanta half a dozen times at least, in the early nineties, and that really felt like something. Perhaps it was because we didn't seem quite as respectable as the Pride tag insisted we should be aspiring to be, for one thing. I marched in San Francisco's Parade just once, the summer after I moved here, in 1996, and it already felt terribly belated and pro forma. I wasn't really part of any movement anymore, and that left me feeling like I was at a County Fair cruising a loud crowd for dick and funnel cakes. That's, gosh, twenty years ago now! Now I see on my tee vee that queers march behind banners designating the tech companies they work for. I must say I felt quite a lot of sympathy for the Occupride moment in 2012 -- but I heard about it on the news after the fact. There was some political alchemical spark there, some joyful noisy resistance, some futural opening onto elsewhere that felt truly queer. To connect with that kind of queer futurity, I might even drag my tired old unrepentant queer ass onto the street again one day...
Monday, June 13, 2016
Pluralism, Politics, and Belief; Or, Of Walking And Chewing Gum At The Same Time (A Twitter Essaylet)
I'm a champion of both performance art pieces and uncompromising ethical stands, but I don't think elections are good occasions for either.
Pluralists propose there are different sorts of beliefs embedded in different sorts of ends and histories. What we want from scientific beliefs is different from what we want from moral beliefs or aesthetic judgments. Ethical belief ascription is different from political, legal, or any number of forms of professional belief ascription.
James' oft-quoted pragmatic definition of truth as the "good in the way of belief" is lamentably and mis-educatingly truncated too often: Truth is that which is "good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons."From this, the pluralist and pragmatist proposes an understanding of reasonableness in the way of belief and belief-guided conduct for which reasonable belief requires not only that beliefs be warranted but the criteria of warrant be proper to the form of belief.
Far from muddying or relativizing, this seems a more demanding practice of reasonablenness than the usual facile scientisms and moralisms. To spell this out, the criteria that warrant scientific beliefs (testability, coherence, etc) in order to provide prediction and control, are very different from the criteria that warrant moral beliefs (citation, loyalty, etc) in order to provide for belonging and dignity, and it is unreasonable not only to hold scientific or moral beliefs that are unwarranted but to warrant scientific beliefs as moral ones and vice versa, or to seek from scientific belief the work of aesthetic belief, or to dismiss ethical belief from a legal vantage. It is quite as perniciously irrational to mis-apply scientific belief beyond its proper precinct as to deny science within that precinct. Similar confusions and mischief-making arise from the mis-application of moral, aesthetic, technoscientific warrants to political belief.
Politics is the ongoing reconciliation of the diversity of stakeholders who share the present and coming world and its problems. Compromise (and anticipation of resistance) inheres in all political problem-solving work and reasonable political belief ascription very much including progressive emancipatory work to solicit agreement about shared problems or build different ways of world-sharing. This receptivity and compromise is crucially different from the kind of exclusivity moral belief permits or purity aesthetic belief does. It is not to denigrate morals, ethics, aesthetics that I insist they not be mis-applied to politics but to defend and celebrate them all.
None of this is to deny an inter-implication of these domains -- humans live lives in bodies and histories with integrities -- but I absolutely do deny that these domains are reducible to one another or that any is inherently or always prior to the others. Of irrationalities one could decry, confusions of science with morals, or of morals and aesthetics with politics seem to me underappreciated. Pluralism reminds us that reasonableness is not only a cerebral affair, but much a matter of walking and chewing gum at the same time.
Good Guy With Gun
Sunday, June 12, 2016
Plutocratic Algorithms
Saturday, June 04, 2016
Some Star Trek Suspicions
Friday, May 20, 2016
A scooter isn't a "hoverboard" and algorithms aren't "AI." They just sell them that way.
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Techniques of Futurity Against "Future" Technologies
Futurists in the 1950s promised automation (technology) would usher in a utopia (politics) of universal prosperity and leisure. And now, for 25 years futurists have promised AI (technology) will end history (politics) so we will arrive in paradise or apocalypse.
Let's be clear: futurological promises of prosperity via automation mostly failed because of successful right-wing anti-labor politics. In the absence of organized labor the benefits of automation abetted plutocratic wealth concentration rather than general prosperity. The 20C futurological failures were not failures of prediction but of a deep misrecognition of political problems for instrumental ones.
Now, let's focus our attention to contemporary politics and futurological discourse. Our 50s automation tech-talkers now blather about AI. There have never been nor are there now any intelligent artifacts in the world. Yet futurological attributions of such AI utterly abound. Futurological discourse about threats or promises of artificial intelligence (imagined and present) misrecognizes intelligence.
The substantial content of such false attributions of intelligence to machines that are not intelligent are threefold: one -- the displacement of responsibility from owners, designers, users of dangerous artifacts onto the artifacts themselves; two -- a false provocation of sympathy for useless, wasteful, dangerous artifacts facilitating fraud, crime & war-crimes; and three -- a denigration of actual intelligence in humans and other living persons undermining recognition of their dignity and rights. Again let's be clear: the substance of rights and of history is political -- and futurology fosters their misrecognition as instrumental.
History is the struggle to solve shared problems; to allocate costs, risks and benefits of change; and testify to hope and suffering. Recognition of intelligence (its needs and the responsibilities it exacts) is an indispensable point of departure for any free politics.
Futurological instrumentalizations of historical struggle, intelligence/consciousness are indeed profound attacks on free political life. It is no accident that corporate-military futurisms achieve prevalence as norms and forms of advertising suffuse of public discourse. Our tech talkers repackage stale crap as novelty, upward failure as innovation, deregulation as disruption, precarity as progress. This is a *reductio ad absurdum* of marketing deception and hyperbole. But at a deeper level they are dismantling free political life: substituting consumption for participation, precarious competitiveness for freedom, status-quo amplification for progress.
Futurology's anti-politics serve reactionary politics. Futurism obliterates open futurity. Every futurism is a retro-futurism. The refusal of corporate-military futurism requires engagement in the politics it would denigrate, deny, and disavow: Intelligence imposes responsibilities. Progress requires collective struggles. Justice isn't shopping. Art isn't an amusement park. Education, agitation, organization, legislation can still distribute gains from automation and digitization for equity-in-diversity.
Futurity is the openness in the present inhering in the ineradicable diversity of stakeholders sharing, making, contesting the world. "The Future" is a lie, a projection, a funhouse mirror, a con, an advertising pitch to foreclose threatening/promising open futurity. Futurological substitutions of futurity for "The Future" are continuous with substitutions of instrumental for political consciousness.
Robots did not deliver us into utopia in the 1950s and AI will not deliver us into either singularity or robocalypse in "The Future." It is crucial to grasp this isn't a matter of competing Future predictions, but refusing the futurological eclipse of political futurity. I invest my hopes for progress not in Future Technologies but in techniques of futurity: education, organization, legislation.
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Teaching Day and the Fear of Epic Nosebleeds
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Saturday, February 06, 2016
War As THE Judgment Question
There was one and only ONE "Nay" that day, and it was my Representative, Democrat Barbara Lee who voiced it. Bernie Sanders was in that chamber and he voted "Yea." The record is right here.
Here, voice trembling a bit at first, is Lee's prescient speech, making her case against authorizing war in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. She is ALONE:
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Minsky Thensky
Minsky was a robocultic techno-immortalist on the Board at the Alcor cryonics operation. He also believed: "Ordinary citizens wouldn't know what to do with eternal life." Because they work on problems over many years only scientists grasp "the need" for life extension, he thought. Minsky: "The masses don't have any clear-cut goals or purpose." Minsky was a libertarian who strongly disapproved the regulation of research deemed unethical, eugenic, and so on. "Scientists shouldn't have ethical responsibility for their inventions, they should be able to do what they want." You shouldn't ask [scientists] to have the same values as other people." -- Marvin Minsky Although enthusiasts for the project of AI like Minsky have confidently predicted the arrival of AI for generations. AI has never yet arrived, and yet promises and threats of this never-existing phenomenon suffuse public discourse, and the attribution of intelligence to unintelligent artifacts is ubiquitous. The primary force of the artificial intelligence discourse Minsky and his colleagues have so long championed has been to denigrate the intelligence of beings incarnating it, whose dignity demands its recognition and support and to substitute for it a machinic calculative understanding Minsky applied to himself to justify anti-democracy.