1 In television commercials people interact with Siri and Alexa as if they were actual artificial intelligences...
2 …that is to say, as if they were capable of actually-intelligent, actually-respons(ive/able) interactions with human beings.
3 I used to think the clear difference of interactions between humans and devices and these hilariously false portrayals…
4 …would render people more skeptical of "Tech" claims more generally. I see now how wrong I was, and even begin to understand why.
5 It is not so much that people think their own inept devices perform with the seamless perfection of the lies on tee vee…
6 …but that the lies create the frame in which they interpret these failures as intimations of perfections to come.
7 A commercial for a quite conventional laptop computer this holiday season culminates in the declaration on the part of its owner…
8 …that using the device makes her feel "she is living in The Future." After saying so, she chuckles, and her laughter is crucial:
9 She knows her device is really the usual disappointing, landfill-destined piece of crap, but this "knowing" is the occasion…
10 …for the ideological pleasure she takes in imbuing the object with the Romance of The Future (which is what is being sold here)…
11 …which depends very specifically on NOT assuming a critical or organizational stance in respect to the device.
12 We inhabit a present transformed by artifacts exhibiting futuristic style, interpreted through elements of futurological ideology…
13 …into a stage setting in which we enact collective fantasies of techno-progressive and even techno-transcendental agency.
14 Of course, futurity is indeed a dimension of present time, the openness inhering in the diversity of beings sharing the now,
15 …but the futurological Future would foreclose this openness, fill it with dead data to sell you things and control contingency.
16 The futurological Future forecloses the open futurity in which political freedom lives, substituting for that freedom promises…
17 …of instrumental capacitation (enhancements, reassurances, satisfactions) and substituting for thought-in-freedom legible routines.
18 "The Future" would foreclose futurity in much the same way Progress-qua-Destiny would foreclose progress as collective struggle.
19 It's not just that treating Siri or Alexa as intelligent when they are not, or smart cards, cars, houses as "smart" when they are not…
20 …is a deception peddling fraudulent devices to credulous consumers (though it is). And it's not just that an habituation to attribution…
21 …of intelligence to non-intelligent devices evacuates that attribution of substance when its recognition in our fellow beings…
22 …is indispensable to the recognition and protection of our dignity, integrity, and standing and so…
23 …threatens the rights and hopes of us all (though it does) -- human, Great Ape, cetacean. But also, these little ideological dramas...
24 …in which futurologists (and Tech-Talkers more generally) are training us to perform are also undermining the fundamental…
25 …terms on the basis of which political life proceeds, a political life in which we experience the freedom, progress, and dignity…
26 …without which forms of human flourishing may be entirely lost to us, in exchange for a handful of useless, polluting crap.
27 That Americans reading these tweets happen to be entering a time of great peril in which thriving political action, criticism, struggle…
28 …are the only hope for an open futurity not foreclosed by "The Future" of the statisticians, the salesmen, and the bomb builders…
29 …just makes it all the more urgent that we resist the deceptive, distracting, hyperbolic, faith-based (self-)promotional-infomercial…
30 …norms and forms of the tech-marketeers and the corporate-military think-tank "Thought Leaders" and "Designers" who…
31 …would make bets and call it having thoughts and sell you crap and would call it making freedom.
32 I must add, by way of conclusion, since there are now just two sides you can be on, it comes to matter more than ever that the Democrats…
33 …that is to say, the side that must prevail if sustainable equitable diverse freedom would prevail (flaws errors notwithstanding FOCUS!)…
34 …then we must grasp the unique danger represented by the undeniable seduction of much of the Democratic left by siren songs…
35 …of tech-entrepreneurship (feudalism), disruption (deregulation), big-data (insensitivity), technocracy (anti-democracy).
36 Democrats are the last best hope in America for freedom, progress, convivial multiculture, social and environmental justice…
37 …and so we cannot tolerate the loss of that hope to the reactionary seductions of futurology, techno-feudalism and earth-alienation.
38 Siri, Alexa, facebook profiling algorithms, and heat-signature targeting software in drones will never be citizens, but we must be. Now.
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