tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post115189690179407772..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: Independence Day Fun With the SingularitariansDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-1152564619547826842006-07-10T13:50:00.000-07:002006-07-10T13:50:00.000-07:00Dear Phil,Well, you certainly know how to take a j...Dear Phil,<BR/><BR/>Well, you certainly know how to take a joke and, even rarer, take a jokey discourse seriously, and so I am honored to be added to your blogroll. (That's not snark.) You write: "I'm really quite fond of our democratic form of government; I don't believe that all government could or should be eliminated." I'll take your word for it on this, and admit then I was wrong to think (as I did) otherwise. <BR/><BR/>Let me simply say that I have been tangling with singularitarian discourse for well over a decade (I wrote about it in my MA thesis way back in 1994, up to the present day) and it seems to me that the default culture of singularity-talk is <BR/><BR/>[1] often quite explicitly hostile to democratic politics<BR/><BR/>[2] often embraces what look to me like facile market libertarian formulations that amount to anti-democratic politics (though sometimes their adherents would not agree that this is an entailment)<BR/><BR/>[3] often are freighted with a curious transcendentalizing vocabulary that in my view encourages a kind of political complacency, social separatism (in some folks bordering on sociopathy), and a special vulnerability to the formation of priestly castes -- again, to me, profoundly anti-democratic<BR/><BR/>[4] very often partakes of the more general technocratic view that prefers engineering solutions to deliberative processes whenever possible, and often disdains the very idea of giving a voice to the "ignorant masses" even in matters of public technodevelopmental decisions that affect them.<BR/><BR/>Certainly not everybody who identifies as a "singularitarian" (how ever many people there finally are who do so identify) or who is taken up in some measure into the rhetoric of singularitarian thinking espouses -- explicitly or not -- all of these attitudes or weights them the same ways.<BR/><BR/>I am very interested in fundamentalist formations -- which I see as responses to the dislocations of disruptive technoscientific development and, further, which I think of as dangerously anti-democratizing in their aims and effects. <BR/><BR/>There are forms of singularitarianism that I think definitely fit within my general critique of fundamentalism and so I write about them, too. I'm sorry if I wrongly mistook your own views as espousing such a variant -- but I am sure as a non-fundamentalist pro-democracy singularitarian you must know as well as I do the kinds of koo-koo bananas discourse I am talking about, so I'll just assume you are even more frustrated and worried about that stuff than I am. As a self-described singularitarian I daresay the stakes are much higher for you than for me in such matters. <BR/><BR/>I will admit that the idea of a "non-fundamentalist pro-democracy singularitarian" makes little sense to me at all personally, but as a person who knows all too well my own limitations I am the last person in the world to say that personal incomprehension is inevitably a strike against you... so, you know, go on with your bad self! The world needs more anti-fundamentalist pro-democrats, even, possibly, for all I know, singularitarian ones.<BR/><BR/>I am sure that you will understand why I would have assumed your effort at, as you say, "repurposing a politcal treatise to make a non-politcal point," would seem to me to symptomize the anti-governmental hostility so commonplace in singularitarian discourse. But, again, if I misattributed to you views that you do not hold I am sorry for that. I will say that it is hard for me to see how the point of your repurposed treatise could really escape being significantly political after all, in which case the gesture itself really does somewhat symptomize the antipathy I find so worrisome -- even if this isn't something you would explicitly advocate for or whatever. But, come what may, I appreciate your comments and your good humor.<BR/><BR/>In closing, a few quick, I hope consoling, words: First, I'm a huge fan of both Vinge and Egan myself, I'll have you know. Second, as a glimpse at my pic will disclose, I too am a privileged white guy -- queer, it's true, but I fear in a really boring way that lends little street cred -- and definitely too prone to cluelessness for comfort myself. I don't hold that against you. But I do know the difference between social injustice and exploitation and not living in an L5 torus today even though an OMNI magazine reading much earlier version of myself felt quite sure I would be. Third, I too hold out quite a lot of hope for emancipatory technoscientific development. I just think that fleshing out those hopes is as much or more a job for democracy as for engineers. So, far from a sneer, my best to you, dDale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-1151945033665412522006-07-03T09:43:00.000-07:002006-07-03T09:43:00.000-07:00""It has enforced meaningless distinctions between...""It has enforced meaningless distinctions between labor and leisure."<BR/><BR/>Depends on what the labor is and who is doing it -- but there are angles of view from which I'll agree that there may be something to work with on this idea."<BR/><BR/>Funny, but when I read it what I heard was "Arbeit macht frei".<BR/><BR/><BR/>And surely the Supreme Judge is the Machine God of the Adeptus Mechanicus.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com