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.

Body Shaming Trump Is Trumpian Not Anti-Trumpian Politics

I admit with some shame that yesterday I had an initial guffaw at the naked Trump statues... but it didn't take long for me to feel uneasy and then gross and then frankly enraged about them. "Humiliating" Trump because he has an aging flabby body is hardly a relevant critique of him and policing unrealistic bodily norms through proliferating "unflattering" public Trump monuments seems obviously more damaging and constraining than liberating. I am disgusted by Trump's body shaming of other people, and I am disgusted by sexist attacks on HRC's appearance in particular... I don't think this is a matter of turnabout is fair play, I think it is about exacerbating an American disgust with the aging vulnerable "imperfect" body. This disgust is about self-hate and denial, and it is compensated by cruelty, conspicuous consumption, and acquiescence, all of which enable Trumpian politics. Leave it to self-described anarchists to imagine it is some radical intervention to notice that boastfulness is an expression of insecurity rather than confidence and then use that commonplace to police body norms in ways that fuel fascism.

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.

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 -->

Don't doubt for a second these guys can ALWAYS get worse...