The Future Against Futurity: Some Questions for the Transhumanists

Am I still myself if my self is a project of transcendence? Do my prosthetic practices make me more myself or less myself? Is "transcendence" the transcendence of all limits or only some? If all, what remains of a thing without limits? If only some, which, when, for whom, for what?

When we say of a “trans” that it bespeaks transition from one state to another, are we sure we know enough to know where we are, where we are going, what we want? Are we sure of the “we” that presumably shares these wants and this direction? Does movement always engender Movements?

When we say of a “trans” that it bespeaks transcension, how do we distinguish this from the other priestly promises of knowledge and safety in exchange for obedience that such language has always otherwise brought in tow? What does it mean when conservatives would take up the language of the future, and with such stubborn noise? What does this tell us about the future and about its difference from futurity?

When we say of a “trans” that it bespeaks transformation we have to wonder, don't we, what kind of security or stability can be built on a foundation of rainwater? Is the meaning of technology the end at which it “aims,” and which we could never know until that superlative end arrives, or is it the practices we weave in taking up technologies here and now?

“Trans” derives from the Latin across -- it can denote passage, change, meander, variety... Prosthetic practices empower and disempower, they promise and they threaten, they shake up the familiar and then they become the customary against which we next measure the unfamiliar. We know less about where we are going than any of us care to admit, just as we know less about our own desires than we can admit to.

Prosthetic practices have been an interminable conversation among persons, and it is hard to for me to find many edicts or certainties in this lovely, promising, threatening mess. What happens when we domesticate the pleasures and dangers of futurity in the naturalizing reassurance of the discourse of "the future"?

Futurity is ineradicably a roll of the dice and a project for collaborators (in every sense of that word). The future? Always, I'm beginning to think, only another mirror.

Resources for Writing Arguments

In the process of throwing together my course this term I have managed to place online some documents and notes that I often make recourse to in the teaching of classes in argumentation. Again, since I've been so preoccupied with work and less devoted in consequence than I like to be about blogging, I figure I might as well offer up some of this stuff for your perusal in case any of it strikes your fancy.

The documents are a short statement of basic guidelines that I hand out early in the term in all of my classes, at whatever level, Four Habits of Argumentative Writing, some rather scattered speculations on argument interspersed with what are often helpful bits of advice for writers who are feeling stuck, Finding Your Argument, and then a Peer Editing Worksheet, which models the way I try to inculcate basic critical habits by structurally relating the separate elements of the class to one another.

Comments, questions, criticism always welcome, of course!

Pay-to-Peer

I'm going to be delivering a paper at the Fourth Congress of United States Basic Income Guarantee Network, which is taking place March 4-6, 2005, in New York. My panel is on Saturday, I believe. Here is a short abstract of my talk:

“Pay-to-Peer: How Basic Income Will Support the Emerging Peer-to-Peer Networked Society”

The ease with which content can now be published and circulated via emerging digital networked information and communication technologies has inspired an unprecedented outpouring of creativity. The common wisdom that the protection and extension of copyright is necessary to promote ongoing innovation has been disrupted, probably irreparably, as free content proliferates on these digital networks and as copyright regimes become instead the pretext for the oppressive policing of creative and collaborative work to preserve profits for established interests.

In a related development, as conservative consolidated corporate broadcast media relinquish their traditional function to help educate the electorate and demand accountability in the conduct of the powerful, a vast archipelago of online blogs, columns, and communities of advocacy have suddenly materialized to do so in their place.

The emerging peer-to-peer networked society is creating an incomparable archive of intellectual resources as well as tools to facilitate new practices of collaboration, exchange, and oversight, and I propose that a guaranteed basic income may be necessary to compensate this increasingly socially indispensable work since traditional economic incentives and models seem inadequate to accommodate these developments.

I mean for my argument to complement Marshall Brain’s recent thesis that a guaranteed basic income may be necessary to stave off the social disruption that is likely to eventuate as widespread automation eliminates traditional jobs and concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Brain argues that a guaranteed basic income will ameliorate the negative impact of current technological developments, and I argue that the same income guarantee will likewise consolidate the positive impact of other current technological developments.

Course Description

A week from tomorrow I will begin teaching a new course at the San Francisco Art Institute, entitled "Critical Theory, Network Politics, and 'New' Media." Soon thereafter, students participating in the class will start blogging about the course readings and discussions and whatever other forces might be set in motion by the material. Of course, everyone will be welcome to see what we come up with and to participate via comments, e-mail, links, etc.

Until the course itself begins, I will be posting the syllabus, readings list, and some general writing and reading resources for the course onto the "BloggingTEC: Technology, Ethics, and Culture" blog where we will be gathering online. I thought at least some of this material might interest some of the readers who visit here as well, and so I'll post some of it here, too -- especially since I'm distracted with preparations and otherwise might not have much else to offer up to your attention for a couple of days. Here, anyway, is the Course Description from the Syllabus, which also provides the opening moves for the discussion for the first day of class:

In this course we will focus our attention on some of the ways in which critical theory has tried to make sense of the ongoing impact of emerging information and communication technologies on public life, cultural forms, creative expression, and ethical discourse.

Our conversation this term will take as its point of departure the assumption that the basic categories through which we make sense of individual and collective agency, dignity, and claims of right are transforming under the pressure of emerging and converging digital networked information and communication technologies. Over the course of the term, we will survey a number of canonical and contemporary theoretical and polemical works all provoked by the problems and possibilities of these technological transformations.

To the extent that “new” media really are something new, it is hard to imagine a temperament less suited in some ways to think about these impacts than philosophers and critical theorists. Hegel pointed out that philosophy paints its gray on gray only when a form of life has grown cold. And true to form, even relatively recent and influential “new” media theory often seems quaint in its assumptions quite soon after it has been written.

Typically, when theorists speak of “new” media they mean to describe digital media in particular. And since digital media are in fact still consolidating their hold over the circulation and communication of information today, we will mostly stick to that understanding ourselves. But it is important to realize that there are possibly newer new media always emerging as well for which the enabling technologies, working assumptions, and expected effects are quite different.

There will be important differences in the discussion of media and surveillance, depending on whether one wants to focus on issues of digital encryption or biometrics instead. There will be differences in the discussion of media and intellectual property, depending on whether one wants to focus on copyright or patenting genetic information. There will be differences in the discussion of media and the manufacture of consent, depending on whether one wants to focus on the consolidation of broadcast media, the rise of social software tools and practices, or the mandated use of neuroceuticals on the basis of medical information.

In an important sense the course will be a collaborative performance, and so our more specific focus and problems and interests will depend in a significant measure on your own circumstances, concerns, and on the texts that you yourselves happen to respond to most forcefully. It remains to be seen just what conclusions we will find our way to by the end of the term and the end of this conversation.

In addition to exploring these personal and public lives of emerging media, the course will also provide you with an occasion for further training and practice in the writing of argumentation based on close textual reading, and will be a workshop in critical thinking, reading, and deliberation skills.

Time Capsule

Trolling around the cyberspatial sprawl I stumbled onto this half-remembered snippet, from, get this, the New Year’s Eve issue of Time Magazine, 1984! I don’t know what shocks me more, that I’m still humming the same tune twenty years later, or that I’m still a student twenty years later!

Dec. 31, 1984

To the Editors: I was overjoyed and excited by the medical breakthroughs reported in your story, especially the artificial heart [MEDICINE, Dec. 10]. As a 19-year-old, I refuse to accept "the probability of disease, the inevitability of death" or my "duty to die."

Norman Dale Carrico
Bloomington, Ind.

Progress as a Natural Force Versus Progress as the Great Work

Lately, some of my friends and political allies have taken me to task for my eager acceptance of the designation "progressive," and wonder if I can really be so oblivious to the damage that has often been done in the name of progress historically.

True to the instincts hammered into me by my training in analytic philosophy, I will propose to relieve this unpleasant tension by offering up an ad hoc distinction. It seems to me there is all the difference in the world between those who profess to “believe” in progress and those who would work to achieve it.

When progress is imagined to be some kind of “force” that the knowledgeable can discern in history, a natural force in which one can believe with one’s whole heart or to which profess one’s full faith, or, better yet, a force in the name of which one can claim to be some kind of priestly mouthpiece, then it tends to be little more than a self-congratulatory fable that the powerful and their orbiting opportunists tell themselves to deny the part luck has played in their attainment of power and then to justify the bad behavior they typically employ subsequently to maintain it.

This doctrine of progress as a natural force is just one more way in which the powerful add insult to injury. It is one more ruse of the ideology of the “natural,” this time one in which subject populations are re-imagined as and then reduced to developmental “atavisms” along a progressive path that has only too naturally and irresistibly culminated in the attainment of rule proper to whomever it is that calls the shots at the moment.

This “naturalizing” conception of progress figures development as an undeniable force like a typhoon wind, sweeping rulers into their prosperity and the ruled into ruin with an urgency so epic it is hard to discern or judge the merits of the proper players involved. And for those who are swept up in the exhilaration of some particular narrative of natural progress it is likewise difficult to see past the mandate of inevitability it confers, difficult to perceive the winning streak it celebrates as one that can ever come to an end, that the players it extols can ever lose their way, that the forces it documents can ever peter out.

While it is easy to find examples of this kind of naturalizing idea of progress in the crass champions of Empire from the Edwardian English to the Project for a New American Century, I will offer up as a slightly less obvious example something that strikes closer to home (for me, at any rate): the kind of corporate futurists and science fiction fanboys who sometimes like to glibly handwave about the inevitable consequences of accelerating technological development.

I think it is first of all a mystification to say technology in general is monolithically "accelerating" when in fact some developments seem to accelerate, while others stall, others converge, others altogether cease, etc. In my experience, this metaphor of a wholesale developmental acceleration tends to be employed to create an impression of inevitability and irresistibility to whatever very particular parochial political/moral outcome (or, worse yet, some particular "innovative" crap product) some self-appointed "expert" futurist is trying to avoid having to make an actual argument for at the moment.

This ideologically naturalizing tendency is never more palpable in my view than in those who declaim accelerating development to be tire-screeching in the direction of some absolute historical discontinuity -- described in its most explicit and flabbergasting variations as an apocalyptic, transcendentalizing "Singularitary" a la Ray Kurzweil or Vernor Vinge or one of their many online (and only online) enthusiasts, some altogether existential Event about which apparently very little can in principle be said in detail while, nonetheless, into which it seems all sorts of overwrought emotional baggage involving ecstatic hopes and debilitating fears can conspicuously be invested. About these unfortunates I have of course already written on several occasions.

Surely, however shattering or empowering certain technoscientific developments may be, there is little that is inevitable about the forms that such developments will take, or the scope of their impacts, or the vicissitudes in the interaction of relevant technical and normative and sociocultural developmental effects with one another over time. And all of this leads me to an altogether different conception of progress from the naturalizing ideology against which I have been railing and which I believe has inspired much of the right-minded worry of my well-meaning friends.

While it is true that I maintain something like the barest faith that life can indeed be improved for more and more people through scientific effort, the freeing up of popular creativity, and the collaboration of free people, peer-to-peer, for me progress does not so much name this bare belief as it does the work itself in which one collaborates to make the world a better place, a work on which individuals must depend on the participation of their fellows and the attainments of which are always the farthest thing from sure-footed or secure.

For me, “progress” is simply what happens when there is a fairer distribution of the benefits, costs, and risks of ongoing technoscientific developments among all the stakeholders to those developments. “Progress” happens whenever more people have more of a say in the public decisions that affect them (that is to say, when we achieve more democracy), though the participation in a legible scene of informed nonduressed consent (about which I write more here and here) in the context of the equity and diversity of a robust democratic rights-culture (and I am happy to take canonical statements such as the US Constitution, UN Declaration, Roosevelt's Four Freedoms as points of departure in the delineation of the notion of Rights Culture).

When I declare that I'm progressive in a fairly conventionally liberal or social democratic sort of way that’s just because I see sense in the belief that when the social definition of progress is satisfied (the longer, second sentence in the paragraph above, the one about consent, equity, and diversity), the technocultural definition of progress (the shorter, first sentence above, the one about the best and fairest facilitation and distribution of technoscientific accomplishments) is more likely to be satisfied as well.

I think that both the extreme market libertarianism and libertarian socialism that seem so curiously to preoccupy so many discussions of politics online (but which almost never connect particularly well to the ways in which politics subsequently plays out on the ground) are best thought of as skewed and unrealizable extrapolations from the vicissitudes of roughly workable and regularly failing social and liberal democratic practices which industrial societies are struggling to implement and maintain with, one must say, mixed results. It is regrettable that anarcho-capitalist and anarcho-socialist viewpoints are treated so often as pure positions against which we should measure the aspirations and results of actually ongoing efforts at democratization in the world when it seems to me that these efforts are the substance of the political, rather than the philosophical idealizations which declare them merely "mixed" or "compromised" or "debased." And since I have indicated that this is an analysis that applies best to "industrial societies" I think I should also add that so-called "post"-industrial societies are, in my view, simply industrial societies that disavow their industrialization through neoconservative militarist adventuring or/and with neoliberal corporatist financialization, outsourcing, and futurological posturing.

Be all that as it may, I believe that the romantic energies of the radical left were once fired by a vision of progress as a great collective work to make an incomparably better future for all, but that these revolutionary energies were shattered by the many failures, betrayals, and tyrannies of the Cold War era, and by the almost wholesale appropriation of the language of progressive enlightenment by fearful, greedy, and malign reactionaries.

The left has grown suspicious of optimistic developmental narratives that too often have been little more than apologies or cover for the ongoing consolidation of corporate-military power. And the left has been distracted from the real achievements and disenchanted from the breathtaking promise of technoscientific accomplishments by the recklessness, indifference, and pathology of their pathway, as well as by the outrageous hype and provincial perfectionism of too many commercial hucksters peddling panaceas and unsustainable lifestyles.

Too often the technophilic faith in a world "without limits" has translated into the smug assurance that there are profits to be made, and that there will always be others on hand to clean up the mess in the aftermath. Too often the real costs, risks, and burdens of development have fallen disproportionately on those who benefit least from developmental achievements. At any rate, those who suffer most at the hands of development are rarely those who subsequently benefit most from the attainments of development.

The thankless and heartbreaking work of restitution, restoration, and remediation in the aftermath of this ongoing injustice has largely fallen to the left, of course, and it is of a piece with the wider contemporary battle of progressives to conserve the institutional achievements of over a century of social struggle against an onslaught of reactionaries who have recently re-written revolution in the image of a massive looting and dismantling of democratic civilization, such as it is.

This curious inversion, whereby the left has been lured into a dreary conservative defense of the fragile embattled institutions of social welfare and representative governance, while the right is intoxicated with the fighting faith of market-triumphalist revolutionary fervor, has left the left unable plausibly to claim any longer to speak in the name of Progress conceived as the Whirlwind or the Pillar of Fire.

Why look a gift horse in the mouth? I say we leave the ideology of Nature’s Progress to the market naturalists, and grab hold again the reins of Progress conceived as a Great Work.

I believe now that only by championing and securing the emancipatory potential of emerging radical technologies (genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medicine, renewable energy technologies, nanoscale fabrication techniques, and decentralized media and resource networks), by insisting on their social support, funding, regulation, and the fair distribution of both their costs and benefits, that the left can regain the momentum it lost in the slow turn to the twenty-first century with the loss of its intelligible revolutionary aspirations.

While it is certainly true that the unprecedented dangers and destabilizing impact of ongoing technoscientific change will impose extraordinary risks and costs on all humanity and all species (and disproportionately so onto the relatively more vulnerable and poorer and least represented among us so long as development is driven by corporate-militarist elites), it seems to me that the left needs to embrace technoscientific progress to regain its right relevance in the world almost as much as humanity needs the fair-minded good-sense of the left to regulate technodevelopment for the good of us all and to dispel what will otherwise too likely be catastrophe.

Postscript: Who Our Friends Are

Progress has two aspects, then, one social and one instrumental.

The struggle for more representative governance, more collaborative social administration, greater transparency from institutions and agents empowered to produce and enforce laws, greater fairness in the distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of public intercourse for all of its stakeholders, the diminishment of violence and compulsion in interpersonal life, the spread of literacy, numeracy, and critical thought, the spread of cosmopolitan tolerance and multicultural celebration, the substantiation of the scene of informed, nonduressed consent, and the global expansion of a more robust rights culture are all components in the social aspect of progress. I think of this social aspect of progress as democratization.

The struggle to increase scientific, instrumental, and medical knowledge, the ramifying accumulation of technological powers, the ongoing technodevelopmental disruption of given capacities, norms, and expectations, and the facilitation through education and access of an ever growing ever diversifying population of collaborators in this process of discovery and application are all components in the instrumental aspect of progress. I think of this instrumental aspect of progress as denaturalization.

Peer-to-peer progressives maintain that any proper account of "progress" will affirm the equal and complementary indispensability of both greater democratization and greater denaturalization to the technodevelopmental social struggle for human emancipation.

We already live in ineradicably technological societies, and our problems are the problems of technoscientific societies. And we ourselves are by now all of us also ineradicably prostheticized. There is no Garden for us to return to on this earth, beyond history, or within our hearts. Any commitment to progressive democratization without a complementary commitment to ongoing denaturalization denies the terms of social struggle as they actually confront us in their material specificity in the technoscientific societies in which we find ourselves. And hence any such “progressivisms” (for example, think about left bioconservative politics, boutique Green lifestyle politics available only to oblivious elites, and most of the New Age and pastoral-luddite anarchisms) are to my mind false progressivisms, amounting usually to little more than conservative, and sometimes outright reactionary, indulgences in nostalgia and complacency.

Since instrumental powers can be deployed to indefinitely many ends, they can facilitate exploitation and exacerbate injustice just as easily as they can serve fairness and emancipate humanity when directed to better ends. As is always the case in antidemocratic politics, any commitment to progressive denaturalization without a complementary commitment to ongoing democratization denies the terms of social life -- its ineradicable plurality, insecurity, unpredictability, interdependence -- as they actually confront us in their abiding generality. And hence any such “progressivisms” (for example, think about market libertarian technophilia and the various neoliberal and neoconservative corporate futurisms) are to my mind false progressivisms amounting usually to little more than straightforward bids for power and profit, either for personal gain or in the service of the elites with whom one identifies.

Peer-to-peer progressives in this technoscientific epoch cannot afford to misdiagnose as “progress” any developmental path or outcome that does not contribute both to democratization and denaturalization, and neither can we afford to misrecognize as "allies" in the social struggle for real progress anyone who is committed only to the one aspect of “progress” over the other. This is not to deny that progressives should surely seize opportunistically upon any event or outcome that can be made to facilitate actually progressive ends, just as we should make common cause with any number of momentary allies in contingent campaigns that facilitate clear, concrete progressive ends. But the exigencies of practical political struggle should never confuse our sense of what any progress worth fighting for finally amounts to, nor how a shared understanding of and commitment to progress in its full progressive construal is all we have to ensure we never lose sight of who our friends are. -- February 13, 2006

Digital Sociality, Digital Control

On tech-oriented discussion lists I have noticed over and over these curious micro-managerial fantasies of control that pop up especially among the libertarian but also the liberal temperaments that gather there -- dreams of politics in which the terms of literally every interaction are somehow exhaustively contracted in advance, dreams of engineered languages re-invented from scratch to more perfectly say the way the world is, dreams of technical, cultural, political revolutions to make everything clean and new.

People speak with unexpected regularity to a hope that perhaps more fine-grained and flexible information and communication networks and technologies might make it possible for individuals to specify the terms on which they participate in public life to an unprecedented degree. I agree that there are lots of interesting things to think about here, and that what we mean by private life and public life will be transformed in very fundamental ways by emerging digital media and bioremedial networks.

But I suspect that in an important sense all of these dreams and desires originate in a deep misrecognition of the condition of ineradicable diversity and vulnerability at the heart of all public life. This diversity and vulnerability are not at all likely to vanish, nor do I think we can intelligibly want them to.

Forgive a momentary lapse into my more theoryheaded mode, but we are always already immersed in language, in law, in norms, in markets, in worlds constrained by code, by architecture, by design.

And it is because we are thrown into these changeable but also significantly durable worlds that precede us, exceed us, and likely will outlive us that it occurs to any of us to desire to consolidate this feeling of having and strengthening a faculty of "opting" in or out of sociality’s terms in the first place.

Pining for a more perfect, more willful agency that could somehow choose exhaustively the very terms in which it plays itself out in the world bespeaks one’s constitution as a being whose agency cannot be otherwise than it is: significantly interdependent, promising, vulnerable, accident-prone.

All of these dreams of a more perfect "private" control of public life seem to me like pathological expressions of the very systems against which they presumably are revolting.

Who, after all, would feel frustration at the law's exactions if the law hadn't first made them who they are? Before regulation limits choices it constitutes the horizon against which one intelligibly chooses anything. We can and must of course collaborate to improve the laws, reform the institutions, contribute new poetry to language. Law, language, and culture are transformed by our ongoing recourse to them.

But who could opt out of opting without becoming an altogether different sort of being than the one they imagine would be made happier by a more perfect "opting" of the terms on which they engage in sociality?

There can be no private languages. There can be no private laws. There can be no private values.

It's too late for that. To feel limited or threatened in the scope of one’s choice is to be already constituted as a being that chooses in this way, that feels the want of these things in the first place. The desire bespeaks its own belated incapacity to be otherwise.

We make our promises and we make our plans, and then we forgive as best we can the mistakes that must inevitably come after. As Hannah Arendt wrote, plurality is the law of the earth.

Secrecy and the Subject of Privacy

For those of you who have asked me to say more about the dissertation I am currently finishing up (apparently, mostly in my downtime from what sometimes seems my rather more rewarding but unremunerative efforts at blogging), here is a section from the Introduction to the dissertation in which I outline the argument of its three main chapters. Comments, criticisms, questions are, as always, welcome.

I’ll start with a war story. It is a story about a battle written from the perspective of its recent aftermath. And as often happens with wars, many of its warriors still nurse the wounds they acquired in its skirmishes and betrayals, many still mouth the platitudes that drove its reckless energies, and some still pine for and fervently anticipate its resumption. While it is commonplace for a certain perplexity and even absurdity to attach to the actual details in retrospective accounts of war, it seems to me especially surreal to survey the scene of the conflict that preoccupies me here, a conflict which for all its noise and heat now seems in a way best captioned by that wistful old anti-war slogan: “What If They Gave a War and Nobody Came”?

In the first and second chapters of this dissertation, I will tell you the story of what Paulina Barsook has called “The Crypto Wars.” It is the story of what amounts to roughly a decade of skirmishes in policy, in law, in code, in mainstream op-eds, and in the incandescent online manifestoes of a few inspired technology alarmists and enthusiasts, all moved by the development and proliferation of then-new and now-ubiquitous digital networked tools designed either to keep or to expose people’s secrets.

The application of encryption techniques to transactions undertaken over digital networks, for example, has especially exercised the imaginations of the writer and activist Tim May and the coterie of “Cypherpunks” (the name of an anarchic collection of coders and cryptography enthusiasts, and of the influential, sometimes notorious, online mailing-list where they gather to discuss these topics) for whom he was a founder and a spokesman and something of a folk-hero. Encryption is simply the process of enciphering or transforming information so that it is unintelligible to anyone but an intended recipient.

In Chapter One, “Markets From Math,” I will discuss a series of rather exhilarated arguments, initially widely circulated online in the mid-1990s, in which Tim May and Eric Hughes, among others, predicted that more and more social and economic transactions would come to take place behind a veil of impenetrable encryption. The ultimate consequence of this emerging state of affairs for May and Hughes and the other Cypherpunks was no less than that conventional national governments would soon be rendered obsolete and contemporary societies across the globe swiftly transformed beyond recognition. All this would take place because states presumably would no longer be able to police routinely encrypted social interactions, levy sufficient tax revenues on ubiquitously encrypted economic transactions to fund their traditional functions, nor even maintain geographical borders in a meaningful way for citizens devoted primarily to their participation in globe-girding digital networks.

In Chapter Two, “Markets With Eyes,” I will focus on work by David Brin, a popular science fiction author and essayist, who countered this “cypherpunk” perspective soon thereafter in a number of comparably influential articles, many of which also first circulated online, and then in a book, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? There Brin argued, contrary to the Cypherpunks, that whatever security and obscurity might be afforded by encryption techniques would soon enough be bypassed by the overwhelming multiplication of powerful surveillance technologies of other kinds -- for instance, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology inexpensively imbedded into, potentially at any rate, nearly all discrete objects on earth, the ongoing “realtime” tracking of individuals via the biometric profiles they cast in their commerce with the world (traces of skin, hair, blood, as well as finger, iris, and voice prints, for example), and the proliferation of vanishingly small, exceptionally cheap digital cameras, even, imagine, long rolls of paper-thin adhesive-sticker “penny-cams,” all of them archiving or downloading content continuously onto public and private networks. Rather notoriously, Brin went on to celebrate what initially seems the somewhat chilling prospect of an emerging ubiquitous surveillance society as generating in his terms a kind of radical “transparency” that would, he insisted, encourage more critical dialogue, more honorable conduct, and more accountable authorities.

Ultimately, Brin’s vision of a “transparent society” presumes a technological transformation of society no less sweeping and unprecedented in its scope than the “crypto-anarchy” championed by the Cypherpunks with whom he often differed so contentiously. But more intriguing than their differences, I notice that May and Brin share certain unexpected affinities and key assumptions in making their separate cases. Of these, what strikes me most forcefully (apart from the fact that adherents of both viewpoints seem to consider the outcomes they dread or desire as equally inevitably eventuating from the technological developments that preoccupy their notice) is that both May and Brin affirm at the base of their conceptions of social life a rather specific kind of individual subject. Whether uniquely imperiled or encouraged by surveillance, it is in each case a subject characterized essentially by the capacity to make promises and enter into reliable contractual obligations. It is at root a subject on the market. And true to this shared point of departure, both May and Brin sketch what amount to similarly utopian portraits of a society constituted in its totality by promises and contracts, attained either through or secured against the emergence of ubiquitous surveillance technologies.

I will read these shared assumptions in Chapter Three, “Markets Without Materiality,” through the lens of Michel Foucault’s use, in his book on the emergence of the modern prison, Discipline and Punish, of the figure of the Benthamite Panopticon (an ideal institutional architecture proposed to impose upon prisoners a presumably “beneficial” regime of absolute and total surveillance) to describe how the conscientious liberal subject of industrial capitalism has been constituted through discourses and practices of surveillance, broadly construed. What is intriguing to me is the extent to which May’s own “pancryptic” project reproduces rather than eludes the central features of the panopticon Brin would seem, on the contrary, to embrace. And central to the normative ideals of both crypto-anarchy and total transparency I observe a shared and definitive recourse to a discourse of privacy, treated either as indispensable to human freedom and dignity (in May and Hughes) or instead urgently to be dispensed with in pursuit of the same (in Brin), and for which privacy is taken to be above all else a matter primarily of secrecy.

This leads me, finally, to the work of N. Katherine Hayles. For Hayles, the history and preoccupations of information theory, from its inauguration in the Turing Test for personhood as a matter of adequacy in ideally mediated, disembodied conversation through to the contemporary vision of roboticist Hans Moravec to “upload” consciousness into imperishable data, has continually reiterated the gesture of an erasure of the body, and continually makes recourse to reductive accounts of communication as information flows or a play of patterns which disavow the definitive embodiment of these experiences. I propose that both the pancryptic and the panoptic utopias/dystopias of cypherpunks like Tim May and transparency advocates like David Brin, relying as they do on the technological facilitation of market norms either through the unprecedented consolidation or obliteration of the circulation of public information, represent a second, conspicuously political face of this dematerializing tendency in information theory. Market libertarian technophiles, often explicitly inspired by these information models, offer up accounts of political life and publish strident manifestoes demanding political transformation. Many of these accounts insistently denigrate and deny the reality of legitimate social and public experiences, while many more of them seem curiously oblivious likewise to the actual material complexities of the terrain to which they would address even their legitimate grievances. And few of these accounts seem even remotely prepared to grasp the significance of what seems to me a conspicuous contemporary rematerialization of new media networks, on which are flowing more and more palpably and significantly these days not so much any presumably disembodied digital information strongly susceptible to secrecy, but bodily secretions susceptible instead to biometric surveillance and to ownership by others as patentable sequences of information.

Against Fundamentalism and Cruelty: Russell’s “A Liberal Decalogue”

I just stumbled upon a lovely piece by Bertrand Russell, called “A Liberal Decalogue,” with which others may be well familiar but which I had never seen myself. It appears in his Autobiography, but apparently originated in an article for the New York Times in 1951, called “The Best Answer to Fanaticism – Liberalism.” It seems that liberalism has indeed long desired and deserved the self-image of a "reality-based community."

It is intriguing to set this alongside Judith Shklar’s definition of a liberal, made famous especially by Richard Rorty who took it up in his most important book so far, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Shklar has said that a liberal is “one for whom cruelty is the worst thing we do.” I append Shklar’s definition here to emphasise that while Russell’s piece may seem preoccupied with epistemology it is easy to discern a warm moralism in his ironical "Commandments."

Of course, even if you don’t want to pursue that particular line it is easy to see the relevance and usefulness of Russell’s skepticism in the service of truthfulness in an era boiling with Fundamentalists who, whether in priestly robes or lab-coats, imagine themselves conduits through which Truths greater and more sure than themselves flow and at the “promptings” of which too often too much blood is sure to flow, too.

Here, then, is Russell’s Decalogue, “not intended,” he writes, “to replace the old one but to supplement it.” This, he proposes, is his best effort to pithily sum up “the essence of the Liberal outlook.”

The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Snowball’s Chance in Hell (Holiday Cackles from the Balcony)

It has become something of an NPR tradition at Christmas time to replay David Sedaris’ "Santaland Diaries," a mildly funny, genial, utterly inoffensive trifle with about as much subversive bite as an episode of The Golden Girls.

Of course, the tradition-loving conservatives have always been notably selective about the “traditions” they are most eager to show their love. And for the rest? The shove.

While the conservatives seem conspicuously keen to conserve those traditions in which gays remain closeted, women and negroes remain servile, “religious” proprieties like public modesty and a relentlessly unwavering work ethic remain in force for the working poor and shrivelling middle-classes, and plenty of whores and cigars remain available for fat-assed fat-cat dullards and bullies to enjoy as they stoically contemplate whatever passes this year for the bottom-line, they exhibit indifference and even hostility to any number of traditions that manage to exceed the ambit of their rather dim, unadventurous imaginations.

As it happens, I often encourage Sedaris fans to direct their attention to the comedic genius of David’s sister Amy, and especially her radioactively incandescent series Strangers With Candy if they are looking for some for-real subversive comedy to noodle around with. And for those who act as though David’s NPR naughtiness is transformed by his bland homosexuality into some kind of sweeping critique of contemporary American hypocrisies a la Williams Burroughs, I encourage everyone to read instead (or at any rate additionally) the brilliant novels of Gary Indiana, whose sublime omnivorous queerness scalpels everything it touches, including himself, in a bloodbath that leaves you howling and a little shaky. (Resentment and Horse Crazy are his best novels, in my opinion.)

Anyway, this year NPR has seen fit to expurgate from the already vanilla-mild Santaland broadcast a potentially “offensive” minor bit involving flirtation among males. Here’s the passage (which I clipped from the ever-invaluable Atrios):

The overall cutest elf is a fellow from Queens named Snowball. Snowball tends to ham it up with the children, sometime literally tumbling down the path to Santa's house. I tend to frown on that sort of behavior but Snowball is hands down adorable -- you want to put him in your pocket. Yesterday we worked together as Santa Elves and I became excited when he started saying things like, "I'd follow you to Santa's house any day, Crumpet!"

It made me dizzy, this flirtation.

By mid-afternoon I was running into walls. At the end of our shift we were in the bathroom, changing clothes, when suddenly we were surrounded by three Santas and five other elves -- all of them were guys that Snowball was flirting with.

Snowball just leads elves on, elves and Santas. He is playing a dangerous game.

As Eric pointed out to me, it’s rather flabbergasting that NPR’s robotic executives haven’t “done the math” (isn’t that, you know, “at the end of the day,” what these executive types are supposed to be good at?) and thought through the possibility that the fifty million Americans who voted for Kerry are likely to throng among the dwindling listener base of NPR, and that, more to the point, any hayseed dumbass benighted enough to find the passage in question “offensive” in the first place, whether they had the sense to vote for Kerry or not, certainly wouldn’t be among NPR’s listeners?

I am not among the progressives who are demanding the boycott or dismantlement of NPR because of their recent timidity and tremulousness -– funny how well-meaning liberal types can always be counted upon to do the bidding of Repugnican barking dogs and attack first the very sites in culture in which their own supporters, however insipid scared and compromised they may be, are most likely to reside -– but I do think NPR should be badgered and humiliated forthwith into doing the right thing.

Clearly they are scared of their own shadows, and if they can be bullied by brainless death-mongering pre-moderns of the Repugnican persuasion from covering war atrocities in the newsroom or diversity in their cultural programming, then they can be bullied by the likes of us into doing the right thing just as easily.

Democratic Supraintelligence

Technophiles who drift uncomfortably in the direction of the megalomaniacal end of the temperamental spectrum often wax enthusiastic about the near term arrival of post-biological superintelligence. Undaunted by the relentless deferment of the "inevitable" arrival of even the modest artificial intelligence we've been promised interminably by enthusiasts for decades, they warn of and (let's be frank) pine for the near-term and inevitable arrival of greater-than-human artificial intelligence to this day in the same urgent, sometimes hushed, tones.

Not to delve too deep into my skepticism about this way of thinking, I will simply suggest that these starry-eyed projections (1) tend to overestimate our theoretical grasp of intelligence in general, (2) tend to underestimate the extreme bumpiness we should expect along the developmental pathways from which the relevant technologies could arrive, (3) tend to assume that these technologies, upon arrival, would function more smoothly than technologies almost ever do, and (4) tend to exhibit a rather stark obliviousness about the extent to which what we call technological development is articulated in fact not just by the accumulation of technical accomplishments but by social, cultural, and political factors as well, in consequence of which they simply rarely take these adequately into account at all.

I will leave as an exercise for their various psychotherapists the exposition of the perplexing particulars that drive these enthusiasts to ignore so much that is palpable when they declaim their pornographically implausible apocalyptic and transcendentalizing techno-transformative scenarios as inevitabilities. More interesting to me is the more modest suggestion that technologically mediated forms of intelligence, deliberation, collaboration, as well as prosthetic and neuroceutical amplifications of our capacities for concentration, memory, and other cognitive processes may soon put us in a better position to solve for once some of the deep and dangerous problems that confront us all -- many of these problems exacerbated for now beyond our reckoning by ongoing technological developments themselves.

Rather than figuring these hopes and fears for intelligence through what amounts to a rather embarrassingly adolescent-boy imaginary populated conspicuously by scary monsters, mecha metal, and bulging superheros (superintelligence: a mode of superlatively private, autonomous individual agencies), I prefer to figure them instead through the frame of technologically invigorated processes of democratic collaboration, contestation, and responsibility (supraintelligence: a mode of superlatively public, interdependent individual agencies).

Against the usually sociopathic fantasies of the curiously many techno-enthuisiasts who appear to want to craft and code pristine superintelligences with which to endow their robot armies, I dream instead of air-dropping billions of networked computers across the world, to weave more and more perspectives, desires, and intelligences into the global web.

(It's one good dream among many, of course -- and not one I hold in exclusion or preference to the ones that impel work to bring adequate food and medicine and shelter and transparent authorities to everybody as well -- there are many good and important dreams to choose from, after all.)

Anyway, I just noticed, via my favorite blog WorldChanging, that a company called SolarPC has announced the availability of a $100 personal computer called the SolarLite. It burns just 10 watts, has an aluminium case with a 20 year warranty, a lead free motherboard, is loaded up with free software, and the company is ready to fill orders of 100,000 units or more right about now. There are questions about the energy requirements of the computer, its monitor, and other things, so clearly this isn't an end-all and be-all they're talking about here, but the technological facilitation of democratic supraintelligence sometimes feels so near you can just taste it, can't you? So much better than dwelling a single day more on the dreary debacle of November 2!

Godless, Gunless, and Gay

As a queer atheist for gun control, I want to send a shout out to all my fellow American citizens on the genocidal evangelical Right and the panic-stricken scapegoating Left: I'm not the problem, I'm not going away, and you all suck.

Real Americans

Oh, and another thing! Progressives must defend and champion urban Americans in the so-called “Red States.”

We should distinguish sparsely populated rural conservatives from densely populated diverse urban progressives. The millions upon millions of city dwelling progressives across America are real Americans, and progressives do not live only on the coasts.

Every time demographic dimensions of political discourse are contemplated or figured through the broad-strokes of “Red and Blue States” or the “Heartland” versus the “Coasts” progressives must simply ignore that framing (we shouldn’t even respond to those terms) and we must always counter with a framing that insists on benighted poor sparsely populated rural conservative expanses dotted throughout with densely populated progressive cultural centers, thriving progressive centers of learning and industry, and diverse productive progressive cities and capitals.

Progressives need to get it through their skulls that, actually, come what may, we are Americans.

I realize that this is actually a common but by no means universal ritual of progressive maturation, still... When many of us left home for college or the cities and emerged into progressive consciousness, first confronted religious diversity, first grasped the reality and extent of social injustice, came out as gay, rebelled against the strictures of our upbringing, whatever form this development took, it is too easy to imagine that in becoming progressive we took a measure of distance from "America" as it is embodied in the impoverished lives we left behind.

But this is the path the majority of Americans have taken in some form or other over a century of tumult and trial. We did not leave America behind when we grew up and became progressives. Much of America grew up with us, much of America came with us, this is what much of America is now, this is the way most of us do things around here now.

Social conservativism is a sad, scared echo of America’s past reverberating into its present, but progressives are truly Americans in America as it actually exists in the present. Progressives need to stop acting like renters in America and realize we already own the place.

Ten Theses on Surveillance

As often happens among technology enthusiasts, there has been a flare-up of discussion about the politics of surveillance on one of the talk-fora I participate on regularly.

The terms of this discussion seem to me to drift into pretty well-worn grooves these days, defined roughly by the positions of "cypherpunks" like Tim May on one end, and advocates for "transparency" like David Brin on the other.

Maybe this says more about the salons I hang out in than about the actual issues at hand, but it seems to me that most of the positions taken up within the discursive universe defined by these poles make assumptions (a certain level of technological determinism, for example, as well as a reductive understanding of politics inspired by market libertartianism) that undermine the capacity of the participants to really get at many of the stakes and problems in play in the emerging politics of surveillance.

Anyway, somebody made the comment: "In the future, suveillance will be voluntary. People will pay to watch and pay to be watched." And, true to form, I took this innocuous comment as the prompt for a sprawling and probably misdirected response of my own. My only defense is that this is the topic of my dissertation, and I am a bit preoccupied with these issues at the moment, and so I hope I can be forgiven for going off occasionally somewhat half-cocked.

But, come what may, it seemed to me the ten theses inspired by that comment might have a more general interest and so I figured they might as well find their way to the blog:

First of all, be careful about treating the sentence "People will pay for x" as a synonym for "x is voluntary." Freedom is more than selecting options provided by the powerful for the delight and edification of the rest of us. (This is probably not what you meant, but it is a problem these formulations are prey to.) It is more likely that the techniques of surveillance that become customary in the next few years, for good or ill, will in fact define much of what comes to be taken and experienced and defended as "voluntary" in the first place.

Second, "surveillance" is too sweeping and complex in its impacts and development to ever deserve the straightforward whole-cloth application of a label like "voluntary" or "coercive." Some applications of surveillance techniques will facilitate domination, some will express consent.

Third, it is key to shift the discussion of surveillance away from technological determinist frameworks where we pretend that there is something inherent in the technologies themselves from which either inevitably dangerous or inevitably promising outcomes will unfold. It is not technology but prosthetic practices that are liberating or coercive, here as always.

Fourth, what we call "privacy" has always been unstable in its characteristics, and deeply responsive to technological development. (Warren and Brandeis's canonical "Right to Privacy" was a response to networked journalism and high-speed photography, and the category of privacy has been primary in the legal and cultural discourse through which democracies have grappled with the ongoing development of reproductive technologies, and now digital/biometric surveillance, for example.) Technology is not threatening privacy, so much as changing it. This is not new. This has always been the story of privacy. Still, it is also always right to worry whether particular changes afoot are welcome or not.

Fifth, the problem is not that we are exposed to greater and more exhaustive scrutiny, but that we are vulnerable to the uses to which such information can be put. It is not the availability of personal information that is threatening, but the capacity of power to impose definitive interpretations of information on us to facilitate our exploitation and domination.

Sixth, at the heart of David Brin's notion of "transparency" would seem to be the idea that there is a single stable truth of the matter to be exposed by ubiquitous surveillance which will protect the innocent from the depredations of the powerful. I believe that the world is susceptible to multiple pragmatically powerful descriptions, and that when surveillance power is asymmetrical (as it is now, conspicuously, and shows no signs at all of shifting away from) those descriptions will prevail primarily which maintain and consolidate established concentrations of power, whatever suffering this causes or justifies otherwise.

Seventh, these worries should not inspire us to repudiate new technologies but to insist on uses of technology that will be emancipatory. This means we must shift the focus of surveillance techniques onto authority itself, rather than acquiescing to the ongoing intensification of surveillance by authorities over the relatively less powerful.

Eighth, my libertarian friends -- whether of the market, socialist, green, or civil varieties -- who are still hypnotized by eighteenth century characterizations of power best embodied by absolutist sovereigns, would do well to study Michel Foucault as soon as possible. Foucault proposed, among other things, that the "coercive" application of power has become more diffuse, institutionally multi-lateral, and involves multiple micro-intense interventions into conduct to produce desired outcomes in a way that is at once more efficient as well as experienced by its objects (subjects) as less onerous. Dazzled by fantasies of Big Brother, too many lovers of freedom are distracted away from the actual workings of power, and the actual institutional locations from which domination is exercised, to the real cost of freedom. Foucault's word for these diffuse coercive mechanisms? "Surveillance."

Ninth, the focus of privacy activism, then, must be (1) to strengthen civil liberties which would protect us from the pernicious misuse of information gathered and deployed by the powerful to dominate others (for example, if gay people were not earmarked for special discrimination in most societies it would matter considerably less that information about homosexual conduct can be ever more easily exposed and published to the world), and (2) to challenge (within reason!) the veils of official secrecy through which powerful institutions maintain their asymmetrical power to impose interpretations over information (primarily through the logic of "security" and the "reason of state" -- or the corporate logic of intellectual property and proprietary information).

Tenth, we must at all costs resist the usual disavowal of politics through a focus on technical questions. This means we must reject out of hand the technophobic response of those whose fears about the dangerous misuse of technology will prompt them to repudiate the technologies themselves. Such a response will squander the energies of dedicated defenders of freedom on a hopeless cause. Technologies cannot be disinvented, and so activism must ensure instead that through reasonable regulation their uses and distribution are progressive. But we must reject with equal fervor the technophilic response of those who expect or desire that technological development will hurdle us past intractable political quandaries, rather than simply express them in new forms. Radical and progressive technology advocates cannot afford to make the mistakes of irrational exuberance that characterized the technophilia of "cyberspace," "cypherpunk," or "virtuality" enthusiasms of recent memory. Technology expresses political interests, it does not bypass them. Technological development is a space of social struggle, not the steady accumulation of objects in a toy-pile. When Aristotle defined human beings as "political animals" this was the first recognition that humanity is definitively cyborg. Technology will never deliver us from the contestatory, collaborative, conversational field of politics. Politics is who we are.

Now, get to it.

Cognitive Modification and Consent

Emerging pharmacological interventions into mood, memory, and perception are growing more sophisticated and ubiquitous. These developments are taking place in the context of the disastrous racist and puritanical War on (some but not other) Drugs (by means of yet other Drugs), which perniciously distorts nearly every effort to think clearly about the issues involved.

My first impulse (as your typical "Pro-Choice" liberal feminist queer) is to say that of course people should always be able to do what they want with their own bodies and brains, so long as they do not endanger the health, safety, or wellbeing of others to whom they are responsible. But come to think of it, we will not be able to rely on a naïve voluntarism to govern decisions about the kind of radical cognitive modifications that are arriving soon, and of which contemporary pharmacological interventions are the first premonition. This is because the whole point of too much cognitive modification will be to intervene in the capacities and effects on the basis of which we judge something to be voluntary in the first place.

It is easy to imagine intelligence enhancements for which the case could be made that only someone who has undergone the enhancement itself is in a position to be considered fully informed about it. Is it easy to imagine cognitive modifications that would induce hyper-efficacious kinds of monomania or enable forms of exhilaration or special sensitivities that simply could not be judged "rational" or "sane" by the standards of normative conduct that underlie these judgments now.

What if a person seeks to erase significant stretches of painful memory or to efface what have been characteristic but are now unwanted elements of personality? (Or, to speculate in a wilder-eyed way for the longer term, what if a person chooses to immerse themselves via, say, a neural interface into a distributed network in a way that seems to subordinate their individuality to something more like a collective mind?) What of the claims of loved ones that such modifications will constitute a kind of suicide, or more strongly are signs of incompetence justifying custodial protection?

What is wanted in general for now is policy that simultaneously: one, encourages the development of useful neuroceuticals and increased research into their effects; two, liberalizes their availability to those who want to use them; three, restricts the circumstances in which their use would be imposed by authorities; and four, increases education into effects to ensure that individual choices are informed ones. But I fear this center will not hold for long.

Eventually, it may be that the contemporary association of "consent" with privacy will be displaced by a state of affairs in which the maintenance of consent will rely very conspicuously on public monitoring, reversibility of modification, and maintaining mediated pathways to intersubjective intelligibility even where there can be no assurance that political peers will be able to communicate with one another even in principle their individual stakes in the world they share.

TV04 Talk: Vulgar Biocentrism Among the Technophiles

I'll be giving a talk, "Vulgar Biocentrism Among the Technophiles," Saturday, August 7, at the University of Toronto as part of a Conference, "Art and Life in the Posthuman Era."

In the talk I discuss the figurative content of biological science and technology, and the argumentative work these figures commonly do in the imagination and advocacy of radical technophiles.

Here's a longer description of what I'm up to in the talk:

"The first half of the twenty-first century is likely to be shaped most conspicuously by scientific interventions into biological processes, from ever more powerful genetic medical therapies and enhancements, bio-informatics, and bioengineered and superorganic foodstuffs, to the emergence of molecular manufacturing.

"The sweep and scope of biotechnological intervention already reverberates into the language and culture of the societies that are witness to them.

"Biology has a second life beyond its scientific content and technological applications. It is a rich field of metaphors and tropes to which thinkers and advocates and critics in diverse fields make separate recourse in their efforts to make sense of the world and anticipate and shape its futures.

"I argue that it is important for progressive technology advocates and critics to be conscious of our occasional reliance on this figurative dimension of biology, from our use of 'existence proofs' from biology to justify our faith in particular technological outcomes (for example, projected versions of molecular nanotechnologies the specific details of which would often be in fact different in key ways from existing biology) or the way we understand public life (for example, understanding culture through the problematic metaphor of the 'meme') or the way we justify or champion particular organizations of society or the economy (for example, the selective embrace of biology in the market naturalist formulations of 'bionomics').

"It is not my view that the embrace of a biological imaginary across culture is a negative or distortive development, and in fact I consider it practically inevitable and embrace aspects of it myself.

"But I recommend special care about the selective deployment of congenial aspects of biology to underwrite as objectively preferable what ultimately amount to subjective judgments of value. To the extent that 'transhumanism' is suspicious of the normative and ideological force of the 'natural' as a category, one would expect transhumanist discourse and criticism to resist the use of 'naturalizing' metaphors drawn from biology to underwrite its own judgments."

Must We Put the Self on the Shelf?

My friend and fellow progressive technology advocate, the socialist-feminist bioethicist James Hughes wrote an interesting column in BetterHumans a while back, expressing his skepticism about much of the rhetoric of “extreme life extension.” I re-read the article, entitled “The Illusiveness of Immortality,” just this morning and it still has me thinking.

Hughes’s skepticism emerges from a somewhat unexpected direction. Like me, he has little doubt at all that medical knowledge and pharmacological, genetic, and prosthetic techniques may well soon overcome many of the diseases and conditions that afflict human organisms, especially the diseases of aging that afflict our normatively “later” stages of life, as well as ameliorating or intervening altogether in the more fundamental biological processes that constitute what we somewhat superstitiously call “aging” in the first place.

“No,” he writes “my problem with immortality is simply that I don't exist." He continues on: "You don't either. Our so-called personalities are just roiling masses of evolving impulses, memories, thoughts and sensations. There is no central chip, no core thought, no essential memory, that makes you you.”

Too often the rhetoric of "life-extension" seems to imply an hysterical dedication to a monolithic or stable personal selfhood, but one that is simply indefinitely extended or rendered in its supposed invulnerability to the infirmities of decline somehow a more perfectly self-sufficient self. William Burroughs savages this sensibility in his hilarious incandescent rant-poem “Immortality,” when he writes: “The tiresome concept of personal immortality is predicated on the illusion of some unchangeable precious essence: greedy old MEEEEEEEE forever. But as the Buddhists say, there is no MEEEEEEEE, no unchanging ego.”

Of course, it is hard to imagine how selves so construed could survive indefinite extension “intact” any more than they could the more brutal truncation of mortality they currently face. And as Hughes goes on to suggest, the same medicine that will preserve and enhance the healthy lifespan and so would inspire such fancies of stable prolongation will likely provide opportunities for radical modifications and augmentations of human organisms in the service of their unimaginably proliferating projects of personal perfection, any number of which would scramble beyond recognition the current narrative organization we denote as the “self.”

What worries me is that we can recognize a radical dynamism of the self, we can recognize the naivete that would affirm the “self” as some kind of unchanging substance – and yet still recognize the viability of “selfhood” as a way of organizing personal experience and intentions.

Hughes proposes a future with “more life, less selfishness” and I applaud the sentiment wholeheartedly. But we should take care to remember that neither is “life” an abstract substance that deserves to be produced and augmented monomaniacally as an end in itself, in the way of an impersonal utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number,” as Hughes puts it later in his article. The life that interests me is still lived in lives, and lives are lived in the real but insubstantial selves that incarnate them.

When I propose that selves are real but insubstantial, I do not mean to imply that selves inhere in spirits or souls, but in stories. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has said of the self that it is a “center of narrative gravity.” He proposes the intriguing hypothesis that the Platonic dialogue of the “I and the me” that constitutes the uniquely human way of having selves, arose from a habit of subvocalizing -- in the interests of strategically useful secrecy -- the human organism's linguistic exploration of her ongoing options. Whatever one wants to make of that, what remains for me is the compelling figure of the self as a kind of narrative organization of experience, memory, and desire. Such a self may be, as Richard Rorty would insist, absolutely contingent, but nonetheless profoundly worthy of respect, and indeed still the source of the very notion of respect.

Life, it seems to me, is no more to be respected in the abstract than any other process. It is when we find in life our likeness that we find it respectable. Selves are the flavors that “life” takes on, and we affirm them in their kinship and yet their unrepeatability, their irreplaceability, and in the incomparable riches and lessons they hold for us. Hughes writes that "[a]t best, we need to pretend there is a continuous discrete self so that we can have an orderly society and an orderly life.” He is right that there is much that is damaging and pathological in the insistence on perfect continuity, independence, and self-evidence in the ideology of selfhood, but I think he is wrong to consequently dismiss the self as a “pretense.”

However long our lives, however enriched our capacities, we will most of us still need selves and all of us an abiding respect for them, although likely much more capacious ones, to make sense of the proliferating and diverging demands of beings who are transformed by technology and yet share a world as peers. However transformed by technological development, a culture of rights must long remain a culture of selves. Perhaps what Hughes highlights in his provocative article is less that the self is an illusion, so much as that the self largely amounts in the end to a public goods problem.

The Politics of Progressive Technology Development: Arguments From Stage Management Versus Arguments From Superlative States

Many people are initially inspired (or appalled) by the sensawunda conjurations by radical technophiles of what I call Superlative State Technology: replicative nanoscale machinery nudging us into a post-scarcity gift society, genetic and prosthetic medicine delivering physical immortality, a hedonistic imperative that eradicates any unpleasant sensation for the sentients who could suffer one, a universe-wide diaspora via traversible wormholes, sprawling consensual (or not) hive-minded communities, quasi-transcendental "Omega Point" apotheoses, abrupt totalizing developmental discontinuities in history like the Vingean "Singularity" (either in its common acceleration of acceleration variant, or in the more rarefied arrival of more-than-normatively-human post-biological intelligence variant), replicative upload and/or AI arms races (what I call "boomergoo" scenarios), etc.

Of course, what makes these heady confections especially breathtaking is that the technophiles who propound them are no longer content to confine their projections to far-flung Stapledonian-scaled futures we could scarcely reach ourselves, but often confidently insist (they have pie charts) that millions now living will live themselves through the sweeping transformations they delineate.

I'll admit that in my time I've enjoyed the same delighted and deranging rush at these speculations as most technophiles have. However, I think that there is in fact little we can say now from our pre-Superlative locations to clarify beyond a certain basic point the special quandaries that would arrive with such Superlative States.

Once you "get" the fact that technological development will likely make things quite unexpectedly different quite unexpectedly soon, it is not clear to me there's much benefit beyond the pure exhilarating entertainment value in dwelling on such Superlative States.

More to the point, Superlative States would inevitably arrive at the end of developmental trajectories consisting of multiple stages, each one of which will involve their own quandaries and debates and difficult problem-solving.

I think it will almost never be the case that these "intermediary" problems and issues would be much eased or clarified or even tangentially addressed by contemplating projected Superlative developmental end-points.

In fact, I would expect that too keen a focus on Superlative States would tend, on the contrary, (one) to distract technology advocates from the urgent complexities of these intermediary stages and their problems, would inspire too many advocates and critics (two) to trivialize the intermediary stages in their "modesty" compared to the Superlative States, and (three) would tend to make technology advocates impatient and incomparably more vulnerable to hype, careless in the face of the delicate and necessary efforts at negotiating the contending claims of multiple stakeholders at every stage, and disastrously less critical in general.

It is too easy to confuse projected Superlative States with teleological end-points that will then be read as expressing the deeper essence or ultimate "meaning" of particular trajectories of technological development. Bioconservatives hostile to the ongoing emergence of genetic medicine and techno-immortalists who champion genetic medicine in fact share a distressing tendency to act as though the actual meaning of finding a cure to Parkinson's Disease through genetic medicine would somehow be that this marvellous achievement would be a milestone along a developmental road eventuating in either (depending on your ideological positioning) an incomparably triumphant or disastrous technoconstituted human "immortality".

But, honestly, how on earth are we better able to assess the promises and costs of remediating particular diseases by bringing into the discussion the abstract fears and fantasies associated with the idea of eternal life, whatever that's supposed to mean? What would it clarify exactly about the historical impact of the printing press to say of its invention and use that it was a step along a developmental path that eventuated in the Internet, or might one day eventuate in the Holodeck?

My own expectation has come to be that whatever the special quandaries of Superlative State technological capacities, like extreme longevity or morphological freedom or uncontrollable replication, we will more likely address these with the very problem-solving resources we will have acquired through and in consequence of the developmental stages that lead up to their emergence themselves, rather than turning our attention to abstract speculations that took place when these forces first were set in motion.

Now, I have to say I don't think it is exactly fair to characterize this emphasis of mine as "conservative," "stealthy," or somehow "dishonest" -- though other progressive technology advocates have accused me occasionally of all of this.

Definitely I think that there are a host of obvious pragmatic considerations that suggest anyone interested in an effective progressive politics of developmental technology advocacy is better served by focusing on the proximate before the distant, the intermediate problem before the end-state problem. If this has the secondary effect of making radical technology advocacy more moderate and hence less threatening and hence easier to make common cause with as advocates marshall the forces they need organizationally to struggle for the outcomes they claim to desire, well, I mean, obviously, so much the better -- surely?

Meless'Ambaren

My friend James Fehlinger just offered me his translation into Quenya (for me the most beautiful of J.R.R. Tokein's realized languages of the Middle Earth universe), of my blog's name Amor Mundi. Everything is prettier in Quenya, it really is. Screw Esperanto, I think we would have world peace in no time at all if we all just switched to Quenya (although the actual content of the stories in the Middle Earth universe gives me pause in making that prediction, come to think of it).

This reminds me of the story that Professor Tolkein claimed to believe that the prettiest phrase one would ever find in the English language was "cellar door," which one has to admit has an elvish air about it. Interestingly enough, Gertrude Stein was once asked what the most beautiful word in the English language was and, if my memory serves me correctly, she proposed her own very elven candidate: "celery." Namarie...

Ghosts of Futures Past: Arcosanti

Alex Steffen over at WorldChanging shared a passage snipped away from his upcoming book which he’s now pruning and polishing. If something this beautiful hits the cutting room floor, I can only imagine how stunning the book that remains will be. I’ll admit to prejudice, though. Arcosanti has been a focus of wistful imagination for me since I was a little kid, like Paris is for some people. I still mean one day to see it, and despite the sadness of Steffen’s piece there’s quite a lot in what he says that renews my eagerness to check it out myself. Here are a few tastes of the larger piece:

“Arcosanti… is now funded almost entirely through the sale of bells. It is essentially one big crafts guild. Which is a fine thing to be. Indeed, sitting there in the evening light, with birds chirping, and [a] young potter smiling my way, I can see the appeal: fuck it, let's all throw aside our worries and make bells. It'll be a good life. But it's not the City of the Future. [Actually, this seems to me among the pleasanter plausible futures I can think of, this side of the goo bestiary.]....

“We continue our walk. We pass a couple apartment buildings. The buildings themselves are a bit weathered and, well, not my architectural preference (very 70's, very blobject, very Planet of the Apes), but they are well-designed (they all employ passive solar, many have "sky theaters" built into the roof for sitting out and viewing the stars at night). The public space is great. There's an amphitheater with a waterfall running down the middle of the seats.... Sometimes the entire community gathers at night on the roofs of buildings overlooking the canyon, and lights are shone against the cliffs of the other side, and dancers perform in front of them, sending huge shadows writhing on the basalt walls....

“Arcosanti's half life is long over, and it is headed for it's own tiny heat-death. Sure, it's still growing, but the vision and the reality have too long diverged, and my sense was that the True Believers needed desperately to convince themselves that the dream was still alive. Maybe it is. Who am I, really, to say otherwise? Let them build their utopia in the desert, if they can pull it off.

“But Arcosanti isn't the future anymore. It smells too much of museum dust. It's the embalmed husk of a future, and a future that's older than I am, at that. I get in my car, and drive back down the rutted road, and wonder if I'll find some fresher dream ahead.”

A lovely piece, thanks to Alex Steffen for sharing it!