The Me Generation denigrated the We and then, utterly predictably, found that me without we is incapable of a flourishing life (Ayn Randian pious puke to the contrary notwithstanding), let alone survival for anybody but the luckiest or most brutal few.
After a generation of chirping Reaganesque "government is the problem" and Clintonesque "era of big government is over" mantras, America is now a "No, We Can't" society, not just incapable of improving infrastructure and public investment, but at this point incapable of keeping its existing highways from crumbling, its neglected bridges and pipes from collapsing and bursting.
Americans have settled for CGI space stations in action films and military recruitment ads, ageing-and-death-denialist Americans sigh and pine to hyperbolic press releases from pharmaceutical companies peddling youth and pep and to reassuring futurological lies mis-shelved in science sections peddling nanoscale Everything for Nothing Machines and techno-longevity just around the corner, or imaginary geo-engineering technofixes to real climate crises, deceptions and delusions and derangements of The Future in pastel-hued soft porn tonalities handwaving away an utter bankruptcy and parasitism and inertia of conscience and criticism in the face of the demands, threats, and promises of our shared present.
Just as: The neoliberal financialization of economy fraudulently sells ever more fantastically leveraged debts as if they are assets, criminally externalizes costs onto the next generation or the next continent, and idiotically mistakes logos for stuff.
So too: The industrialization of ecology fraudulently sells the net loss of superficially increased yields purchased through wasteful, toxic, monocultural, energy-input intensivity as a "Green Revolution," pollutes the atmosphere and ground water, depletes topsoil and aquifers, disrupts local ecosystems beyond healing, externalizing the costs of contemporary waste and harm onto the next generation or the next continent, and idiotically mistakes the GDP and skyrocketing stock arrows for commonwealth.
And finally: Futurology is the consummation of neoliberal fraud, peddling the dislocations of global financialization as "the acceleration of acceleration" (which is indeed, perhaps, how an ever more precarious world feels, for a time, for those who are lucky enough to be relative beneficiaries of neoliberal dislocations, especially if they are stupid and short-sighted enough to imagine that riding the gravy train can last forever, and heartless enough not to notice or care about the distress and waste it imposes on the lives of their neighbors), peddling altogether-imaginary responsibility-deferring wish-fulfilling non-solutions to actual problems, from Robot God parental-supercomputers to "solve" intractable historical and political dilemmas, to nanobotic genies-in-a-bottle and immersive virtual pleasure palaces to "solve" intractable quandaries of poverty, to masturbatory megascale corporate-militarist geo-engineering and off-world migratory science-fiction scenarios to "solve" intractable ecological quandaries, to "mind-uploading" "bio-engineering" and "nano-medical" quasi-immortalizing super-therapies to "solve" intractable dilemmas of mortality, malnutrition, neglected diseases, vulnerability in all living bodies.
And like our fraudulent modern corporatists, selling hyperbolic expectations and barking PR pitches and debts and stealthily externalized costs and vaporware as if they were real assets, futurological discourses are suffused with the same contempt for the material, for the real: disdaining organismic brains and bodies in which intelligence and life are actually materially incarnated, disdaining the diversity of stakeholder knowledges and aspirations and struggles of which history and progress actually consists, disdaining the practices of laboratory testing and peer-review publications out of which consensus science generates its contingently warranted assertions (preferring, as they do, computer models and computer coders as their ideal "scientists" -- which is rather like preferring accountants as one's ideal "poets" -- grand hypotheses depending on glib general analogies from biology by non-biologists, charismatic cranks, pop-science bestsellers, and would-be gurus over actually widely cited and well-substantiated consensus scientists).
It is very much to be hoped that President Obama's jobs bill, coming swiftly on the heels of the heartbreaking sausage-making of healthcare reform, will re-open the long-relinquished progressive-to-New Deal era of infrastructure building and public investment (driven if nothing else by the pragmatic exigencies of mid-term elections, for which jobs jobs jobs will equal votes votes votes to maintain precarious Democratic majorities without which no actual governing seems possible given the monolithic obstructionism and ideological anti-governmentality of the Republican opposition, as Obama must surely grasp as keenly as anybody), employing millions of citizens in the repair of our catastrophically stressed infrastructure, in the construction of intercontinental high-speed rail to connect our cities, building an intelligent grid of dozens of millions of windmill farms and solar rooftops, building inner-city farmers markets, subsidizing the proliferation of small-scale organic and polyculture farms, planting a billion trees, building and healing community colleges and not-for-profit research universities and sending a generation of young people to school.
The market fundamentalists who have the President's ear make that a hard hope to maintain, given their role in the substitution of ponzi-scheming financialization and logo-ization for production, and in their penchant for prosperity on the cheap, purchased through outsourcing and crowdsourcing, cost-externalization and risk-shifting onto ever more precarious planetary populations they deem to be expendably infra-human (I'm talking to you, Lawrence Summers, you disgusting death-dealing actually dim-witted self-important scum-bag, and your whole neoliberal wrecking crew).
Americans need to wake up from the delusive dreams of neoliberal corporatist financial-fraudsters and neoconservative militarist imperial-adventurists (which, as David Harvey insists, are not antagonistic but in fact inter-implicated, a neoliberal/neoconservative, corporate-militarist unwholesome whole).
And, just the same, indeed, of a piece with the same, we need to wake up from the quintessentially American futurological fantasies -- originating in nuclear-plastic-petrochemical compensations for too-palpable apocalyptic technoscientific nightmares of nuclear war, accumulating trash, and suburban sprawl, by means of a constellation of schemes and frauds and daydreams of unbounded abundance -- and now consummating in faith-based initiatives like the transhumanists peddling their consumer-age eugenicism, the digital utopians peddling their vaporware, the techno-immortalist hucksters peddling their stainless-steel skin creams and boner pills, and the geo-engineers peddling their glossy corporate-militarist scenarios to combat corporate-militarist climate catastrophe, and so on and on.
Bruce Sterling once had Oscar, the protagonist of his quintessential Clinton-era neoliberal sf novel, Distraction histrionically declaim that America "invented The Future, godammit!" in a moment of hysterical huckster denialism in the face of real limits, and like the shattered protagonist in William Gibson's early sf story "The Gernsback Continuum," it's true, we Americans are still wading deep down in the muddy murky swamp of The Future we sold ourselves, vestigial futuristic chrome gew-gaws and art deco masonry fading in and out of the funk and fog like scarcely discernible sign-posts guiding us nowhere.
The Market is fueled by The Future: two dumbed-down deceptions like the ads on a sandwich-board holding each other up for scrutiny only so long as neither rickety face leans too far under the least pressure and collapses the whole mess.
And the free market fundamentalists are selling The Future most of all. Futurology is the quintessential discourse of neoliberalism, its starkest most insane unsanitary reductio. (I would say that this is activist-scholar Mike Davis's most urgent and abiding insight.)
And be sure, it is the palpable substance of futurity, that openness inhering in the diversity of contending collaborating co-dependent perspectives, productions, projects of self-creation in our present, in our presence, peer-to-peer, that we are selling for this parochial, packaged domestication of The Future -- futurity for The Future, freedom for force, foresight for hyperbole, investment for scams, problem solving for debts, products for logos, governance for landfill, our commonwealth for their shit.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Arendtian Exercises
Hannah Arendt on Futurology, April, 2009
Hannah Arendt on Common Sense, April, 2009
Hannah Arendt on AI, April, 2009
Arendt, Fanon, King on Violence, May, 2009
More on Freedom, May, 2009
The Peer, February, 2010
Rhetoric and Nonviolence, June, 2010.
My Own Opposition to Capital Punishment, September, 2011.
Judith Butler at the People's Mic, October, 2011.
Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains, published in the Fall 2013 issue of Existenz. (Sections four and seven, especially, take up Arendt.)
"Public Happiness," August, 2014.
Of Natal Politics, February, 2015.
Natality, Tech "Disruption," and Killer Robots, February, 2015.
Returning to the Arendtian "Turn" on Judgment, February, 2015.
The name of this blog, "Amor Mundi," was the personal motto of the political thinker and cultural critic Hannah Arendt.
Arendt is both my earliest and certainly my most abiding philosophical influence, and only Judith Butler has had anything like a comparable impact on my thinking. Sometimes I feel almost as though the whole of my own thinking has just been an interminable effort to reconcile with one another the ways in which Arendt and Butler keep mattering to me in ever different, ever deepening ways however much everything else seems to change.
I have sometimes quipped to my students that whereas most philosophers have written about politics like it was marriage (a matter of contracts, compromises, housekeeping), Arendt wrote about politics like it was sex (a matter of agony, ecstasy, fraught collaborations moment to moment, peer to peer) and that I will always cherish her for that.
In a somewhat programmatic statement I offered up once to explain what I hoped to accomplish -- if that's the right word -- with this blog and get at the temperament out of which it arises I wrote:
"Amor Mundi" is the love of the world. It is the love of the worldly. It is the worldly love of that becoming that becomes us. It is the love of the collective struggle of which that becoming consists, and on which that becoming depends for its force, for its serendipities, for its pleasures, and for its dangers.I feel keen kinship with Arendt's statement about herself, quoted in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's magnificent biography of her teacher and friend Arendt, For Love of the World (a title which itself refers, of course, to Amor Mundi), that "I have a kind of melancholy, which I can only grapple with by understanding, by thinking things through." It was only through this grappling, writes Young-Bruehl, that Arendt could "hold to an attitude she called amor mundi, love of the world" (xvii), an attitude with which she meant to confront and reject "the philosophical tradition of contemptus mundi" (324).
I think it is also quite crucial to think of amor mundi as cognate with Nietzsche's amor fati, what he took to be the affirmation of the threatening, promising contingency of worldly life as it is, characterized most essentially in the eternal return, the intensive interminable responsibility, refigurability, resignifiability of reality. With his own motto amor fati Nietzsche likewise demanded a repudiation of what he to took to be a fearful, resentful (to wit, "The Fearful Ones," ressentiment) unworldliness in traditional philosophy.
But where for Nietzsche loving the world was a matter of stamping the obliterative dynamism of the relentless encounters of the self and the living world with a significance one would sign and resign one's own name to (this is "How one becomes what one is"), for Arendt loving the world was accomplished through the no less dynamic but as supportive as obliterative encounters of the self with the pluralities within and without us: The plurality within is the dialogue of the "I and the me" that constitutes thinking, the ongoing reconciliation of our histories with our hopes, out of which come the assertions of judgment offered up to the hearing of the diversity of our peers, the plurality without us, the testimonies to fact and to value, the making of promises and the offerings of forgiveness, the clash of opinions through which we collectively make the world and substantiate our selves in the world.
I am anthologizing here some of my posts which have taken up the work of Hannah Arendt in an explicit, sustained way. Although Arendt's name comes up a lot here on the blog, and in my conversation more generally, I was surprised how rarely I have really devoted significant space to her here. I definitely mean to write quite a bit more about Arendt on the blog, and someday to transcribe and elaborate lectures I have devoted to her work over the years in my teaching life.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Futurology by Analogy
Foresight is to futurology as investment is to speculation.
Policy is to futurology as deliberation is to marketing.
Thinking is to futurology as sense is to hyperbole.
Policy is to futurology as deliberation is to marketing.
Thinking is to futurology as sense is to hyperbole.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
"The Future" Is Not Beyond Left and Right
I have never once heard a person who claimed to disdain those who "cling to outdated political classifications," or who crowed about being "beyond Left and Right" or who fancied they had found their way to the latest "Third Way" or the next "New Way" or the next "Post Politics" whose politics were not completely and transparently legible within the most conventional political terms: Democracy, consent, and equity in diversity across the Lefts. As against incumbency, authority, and hierarchy across the Rights.
And I find that such claims to post-politicizing novelty or innovation are not only readily translated back into these conventional political terms, but also disproportionately tend to expose essentially right-wing assumptions and aspirations once they are so translated. This should not be surprising, since to fancy oneself post-political, a-political, anti-political is usually simply to take for granted as natural or inevitable or necessary or optimal or most practical incumbent states of affairs that in fact could be otherwise and very likely have been otherwise hitherto and most surely will be otherwise eventually come what may.
To naturalize the status quo is to express an essentially conservative world view, to police its maintenance through de-politicizing inattention to the actually open futurity inhering in plurality, peer-to-peer (and usually this passive-aggressive epistemic policing is supplemented with actual police, or at any rate with engineers, pencil-pushers, and salesmen acting as police collaborators). These de-politicizing gestures typically: [one] invest some self-appointed elite with an unearned (unearnable) position of unaccountable authority over the majority of their peers in a naturalized hierarchy as in conventional ideological formations of the aristocratic/oligarchic type; or [two] treat historical arrangements or outcomes as "spontaneous" when they are in fact facilitated -- sometimes to an extent that approaches outright determination -- by contingent legal, normative, and infrastructural formations as in the endlessly proliferating variations of "market" rhetoric pervading neoliberal, developmental, libertarian discourses (it sometimes seems as though libertarianism is re-discovered and asserted as a rationale for naturalized hierarchy among would-be aristocrats on a daily basis, each time with some neologism to mark its "discovery"); or [three], treat as a technical problem for engineers or bureaucratic/technocratic quasi-engineers acting (in a sense perhaps better denoted as "behaving") on a warranted consensus what is in fact a political problem of a diversity of stakeholders to ongoing change actually acting to reconcile their dissensus of histories and hopes while maintaining a shared world.
Politics, recall, arises from the fact that we share the world with a diversity of peers with a diversity of aspirations that provoke an open and interminable diversity of contingent reconciliations. It is this open and endlessly re-opening force of futurity inhering in plurality that is disdained and denied by the politics of the right in its many variations, including those prevailing discourses that clothe themselves in the false futurity of "The Future." Typically, this gesture takes the form of [one] a parochial extrapolation from the status quo demanding calculation rather than deliberation or [two] a fraudulent salesman spiel promising a hyperbolic amplification of the privileges and pieties of incumbent interests or [three] a reassuring rationalization of present problems and injustices enabled either through an expedient location of the present within a progressive developmental narrative that pretends to infuse present imperfection with the coloration of inevitable perfections toward which it presumably aspires and in which it is asserted already partially but definitively to partake or presumes to survey present imperfection from a vantage of superiority from which it assigns imperfections the status of atavisms and to itself the authority (often depicted as responsibility) to impose conformity to itself in the name of education or treat difference from itself as consent to exploitation.
Every futurism is a retro-futurism: every solicitation of identification with or effort at selling through the conjuration of a "The Future" would evacuate plurality of the substantial futurity with which it presents us, in our own we-presence, peer-to-peer. This gesture is essentially reactionary, and almost inevitably authoritarian, despite its tendency to celebrate duressed outcomes as consensual, despite its tendency to celebrate conformism as spontaneism, despite its tendency to celebrate incumbent triumphalism as progress or even transcendence, despite its tendency to celebrate reductionism as imagination, despite its tendency to celebrate moralizing as ethics, despite its tendency to celebrate instrumentality as freedom.
And I find that such claims to post-politicizing novelty or innovation are not only readily translated back into these conventional political terms, but also disproportionately tend to expose essentially right-wing assumptions and aspirations once they are so translated. This should not be surprising, since to fancy oneself post-political, a-political, anti-political is usually simply to take for granted as natural or inevitable or necessary or optimal or most practical incumbent states of affairs that in fact could be otherwise and very likely have been otherwise hitherto and most surely will be otherwise eventually come what may.
To naturalize the status quo is to express an essentially conservative world view, to police its maintenance through de-politicizing inattention to the actually open futurity inhering in plurality, peer-to-peer (and usually this passive-aggressive epistemic policing is supplemented with actual police, or at any rate with engineers, pencil-pushers, and salesmen acting as police collaborators). These de-politicizing gestures typically: [one] invest some self-appointed elite with an unearned (unearnable) position of unaccountable authority over the majority of their peers in a naturalized hierarchy as in conventional ideological formations of the aristocratic/oligarchic type; or [two] treat historical arrangements or outcomes as "spontaneous" when they are in fact facilitated -- sometimes to an extent that approaches outright determination -- by contingent legal, normative, and infrastructural formations as in the endlessly proliferating variations of "market" rhetoric pervading neoliberal, developmental, libertarian discourses (it sometimes seems as though libertarianism is re-discovered and asserted as a rationale for naturalized hierarchy among would-be aristocrats on a daily basis, each time with some neologism to mark its "discovery"); or [three], treat as a technical problem for engineers or bureaucratic/technocratic quasi-engineers acting (in a sense perhaps better denoted as "behaving") on a warranted consensus what is in fact a political problem of a diversity of stakeholders to ongoing change actually acting to reconcile their dissensus of histories and hopes while maintaining a shared world.
Politics, recall, arises from the fact that we share the world with a diversity of peers with a diversity of aspirations that provoke an open and interminable diversity of contingent reconciliations. It is this open and endlessly re-opening force of futurity inhering in plurality that is disdained and denied by the politics of the right in its many variations, including those prevailing discourses that clothe themselves in the false futurity of "The Future." Typically, this gesture takes the form of [one] a parochial extrapolation from the status quo demanding calculation rather than deliberation or [two] a fraudulent salesman spiel promising a hyperbolic amplification of the privileges and pieties of incumbent interests or [three] a reassuring rationalization of present problems and injustices enabled either through an expedient location of the present within a progressive developmental narrative that pretends to infuse present imperfection with the coloration of inevitable perfections toward which it presumably aspires and in which it is asserted already partially but definitively to partake or presumes to survey present imperfection from a vantage of superiority from which it assigns imperfections the status of atavisms and to itself the authority (often depicted as responsibility) to impose conformity to itself in the name of education or treat difference from itself as consent to exploitation.
Every futurism is a retro-futurism: every solicitation of identification with or effort at selling through the conjuration of a "The Future" would evacuate plurality of the substantial futurity with which it presents us, in our own we-presence, peer-to-peer. This gesture is essentially reactionary, and almost inevitably authoritarian, despite its tendency to celebrate duressed outcomes as consensual, despite its tendency to celebrate conformism as spontaneism, despite its tendency to celebrate incumbent triumphalism as progress or even transcendence, despite its tendency to celebrate reductionism as imagination, despite its tendency to celebrate moralizing as ethics, despite its tendency to celebrate instrumentality as freedom.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Not Offensive, Just Delusive
Michael Anissimov writes, over at Accelerating Future:
I did not quite realize that the designation "hamburgerized" was such a term of art for your modern day cryonicist, that it had the technical force to blur a distinction between frozen as against vitrified brains that is cherished by Robot Cultists of the techno-immortalist sect. Since I think intelligent minds of the human sort are indispensably biological rather than bio-dispensably informational I can't say that I agree that the distinction properly affords Michael his apparent triumphalism on this score as I reckon these things myself. Whatever our differences, I do hope he will be reassured to hear that in describing corpses disposed of by cryonics firms as "hamburgerized" (as against what tends to happen to them in graveyards or crematories) he does not think I mean to suggest by this that they should find their way with pickles and mustard onto a sesame seed bun.
As for the "hyper-socialism" and rabid "here-and-now-ism" of my politics, dude, get a grip. Why be stupid if you don't have to be?
Dale’s post on cryonics, when he talks about the brain being “hamburgerized” -- he is making no sense. Vitrified brains don’t get “hamburgerized”. Dale probably knows about vitrification, so he is just forwarding propaganda because he is politically and morally uncomfortable with cryonics. That is because cryonics symbolizes the affirmation of the individual and potential avoidance of death in a way that can be offensive to hyper-socialistic, here-and-now-and-nothing-else politics. Well, too bad.
I did not quite realize that the designation "hamburgerized" was such a term of art for your modern day cryonicist, that it had the technical force to blur a distinction between frozen as against vitrified brains that is cherished by Robot Cultists of the techno-immortalist sect. Since I think intelligent minds of the human sort are indispensably biological rather than bio-dispensably informational I can't say that I agree that the distinction properly affords Michael his apparent triumphalism on this score as I reckon these things myself. Whatever our differences, I do hope he will be reassured to hear that in describing corpses disposed of by cryonics firms as "hamburgerized" (as against what tends to happen to them in graveyards or crematories) he does not think I mean to suggest by this that they should find their way with pickles and mustard onto a sesame seed bun.
As for the "hyper-socialism" and rabid "here-and-now-ism" of my politics, dude, get a grip. Why be stupid if you don't have to be?
My Irreligiosity
Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot. "Mitchell" asks:
I was raised Catholic -- and went to a Catholic school for a few years when I was very young. My faith was habitual and never considered, and did not survive for more than a few weeks after I left home for the first time for college. There I confronted peers of different faiths and drew the conclusion that faithful attachments were arbitrary almost at once, and I became an atheist quite soon thereafter. I've never looked back.
When you ask about "transcendentalism" though, you know of course that folks like Emerson and Thoreau are taken up through that moniker explicitly, and I will say that I have a deep fondness and affinity for much that they wrote (though not all), as I do for Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic" and the discussions of a "web of mutuality" in Martin Luther King, and the "web of life" in George Eliot, all of which seem to me inter-implicated notions.
When William Burroughs declares that we live in a "magic universe," a universe susceptible to poetic refiguration it seems to me that this is less a conventionally supernatural claim than a recognition of the force of re-signifying practices, of rhetoric (my trade, after all), connecting the shamanic-qua-poetic imaginary to the American Pragmatist/post-Nietzschean European philosophical traditions. I find these connections edifying, and they come up quite a bit in my teaching.
Despite the fact that I do not believe in either God nor gods, I tend to be rather laid back about those who do believe in these things, unless they want to get all authoritarian or judgmental about them. This is because I have noticed that when people affirm such beliefs they tend to be saying things I can make good sense of if I simply translate them (to my self, out of politeness) into terms of affirming matters of personal aesthetic taste or affirming matters of we-intentions concerning moral communities to which they happen to belong. Likewise, I have noticed that when people do terrible things they rationalize through recourse to the affirmation of such beliefs I can make better sense of what is afoot if I simply translate them into terms of authoritarian/incumbent political views or, sometimes, mistaken or deranged claims that fail to pass muster as warrantedly assertible descriptions of the world for purposes of prediction and control.
The power of such translations tells me that there are more warranted modes of belief ascription than just the instrumental claims of the naturalist (indeed, I believe there are different criteria that render reasonable or not beliefs in instrumental, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes, about which more here), and although this doesn't inspire a faith in the supernatural in my case, I do not doubt that those who cherish reductionist epistemologies would likely decry as "transcendental," or possibly menacingly relativist, in me what seems to me simply like sensible pluralism.
As for utopianism -- surely every progressive is properly speaking utopian at least some of the time? Progress is always progress toward an end, and there is something utopian about any unrealized end toward which one aspires through political education, agitation, and organization. I will say that I consider my "progressivism" subsidiary to my devotion to democracy, consent, equity, and diversity as ends. I struggle for progress toward the realization of these values, hence I think of myself as more of a democrat than a progressive, strictly speaking. I don't think this is a big deal, since most progressive-identified folks are really struggling for a more peaceful democratic world, too, and terminological squabbling doesn't seem very useful to me for the most part outside the context of academic philosophy.
I have argued that democracy relies for its intelligibility and force on a scene of consent that is actually informed and actually nonduressed, and that access to reliable knowledge and social security (non-duress) demand at best (as close as we can get to) the provision of universal education and a free cultural commons, universal healthcare, and a universal basic income guarantee -- political ends which many would surely describe as plenty utopian. I happen to be more interested in the ongoing social struggle for democratization -- the struggle through which ever more people achieve ever more of a real say in the public decisions that affect them -- than in "democracy" as some abstract ideal. And so I am interested in the actual educational, agitational, organizational, legislative struggles through which more and better education, more and better access to knowledge, more and better healthcare, more and better welfare are accomplished, and ongoing democratization achieved, than in the distance intellectuals claim to discern between the present state of affairs and some ideal. So, I don't know if you really want to call me utopian or not given all that.
Like many a good pragmatist, I think it is enormously important to remember that the perfect can be the mortal enemy of the good. Like many a fine idealist, I think it is no less important to recognize that pragmatists who assert the previous can in their fixation on what seems possible, lose sight of the good in ways that undermine their grasp of the actually possible. I think both insights are indispensable and I don't think there are any criteria on hand to assure us which is the more relevant perspective in any generally useful sort of way, and so that one must remain rather self-critical and attentive and persistent in the face of inevitable frustrations, come what may. All of this seems to me simply a straightforward matter of intelligence.
Dale, I was wondering the other day - were you ever a transcendentalist or utopian in any form?
I was raised Catholic -- and went to a Catholic school for a few years when I was very young. My faith was habitual and never considered, and did not survive for more than a few weeks after I left home for the first time for college. There I confronted peers of different faiths and drew the conclusion that faithful attachments were arbitrary almost at once, and I became an atheist quite soon thereafter. I've never looked back.
When you ask about "transcendentalism" though, you know of course that folks like Emerson and Thoreau are taken up through that moniker explicitly, and I will say that I have a deep fondness and affinity for much that they wrote (though not all), as I do for Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic" and the discussions of a "web of mutuality" in Martin Luther King, and the "web of life" in George Eliot, all of which seem to me inter-implicated notions.
When William Burroughs declares that we live in a "magic universe," a universe susceptible to poetic refiguration it seems to me that this is less a conventionally supernatural claim than a recognition of the force of re-signifying practices, of rhetoric (my trade, after all), connecting the shamanic-qua-poetic imaginary to the American Pragmatist/post-Nietzschean European philosophical traditions. I find these connections edifying, and they come up quite a bit in my teaching.
Despite the fact that I do not believe in either God nor gods, I tend to be rather laid back about those who do believe in these things, unless they want to get all authoritarian or judgmental about them. This is because I have noticed that when people affirm such beliefs they tend to be saying things I can make good sense of if I simply translate them (to my self, out of politeness) into terms of affirming matters of personal aesthetic taste or affirming matters of we-intentions concerning moral communities to which they happen to belong. Likewise, I have noticed that when people do terrible things they rationalize through recourse to the affirmation of such beliefs I can make better sense of what is afoot if I simply translate them into terms of authoritarian/incumbent political views or, sometimes, mistaken or deranged claims that fail to pass muster as warrantedly assertible descriptions of the world for purposes of prediction and control.
The power of such translations tells me that there are more warranted modes of belief ascription than just the instrumental claims of the naturalist (indeed, I believe there are different criteria that render reasonable or not beliefs in instrumental, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes, about which more here), and although this doesn't inspire a faith in the supernatural in my case, I do not doubt that those who cherish reductionist epistemologies would likely decry as "transcendental," or possibly menacingly relativist, in me what seems to me simply like sensible pluralism.
As for utopianism -- surely every progressive is properly speaking utopian at least some of the time? Progress is always progress toward an end, and there is something utopian about any unrealized end toward which one aspires through political education, agitation, and organization. I will say that I consider my "progressivism" subsidiary to my devotion to democracy, consent, equity, and diversity as ends. I struggle for progress toward the realization of these values, hence I think of myself as more of a democrat than a progressive, strictly speaking. I don't think this is a big deal, since most progressive-identified folks are really struggling for a more peaceful democratic world, too, and terminological squabbling doesn't seem very useful to me for the most part outside the context of academic philosophy.
I have argued that democracy relies for its intelligibility and force on a scene of consent that is actually informed and actually nonduressed, and that access to reliable knowledge and social security (non-duress) demand at best (as close as we can get to) the provision of universal education and a free cultural commons, universal healthcare, and a universal basic income guarantee -- political ends which many would surely describe as plenty utopian. I happen to be more interested in the ongoing social struggle for democratization -- the struggle through which ever more people achieve ever more of a real say in the public decisions that affect them -- than in "democracy" as some abstract ideal. And so I am interested in the actual educational, agitational, organizational, legislative struggles through which more and better education, more and better access to knowledge, more and better healthcare, more and better welfare are accomplished, and ongoing democratization achieved, than in the distance intellectuals claim to discern between the present state of affairs and some ideal. So, I don't know if you really want to call me utopian or not given all that.
Like many a good pragmatist, I think it is enormously important to remember that the perfect can be the mortal enemy of the good. Like many a fine idealist, I think it is no less important to recognize that pragmatists who assert the previous can in their fixation on what seems possible, lose sight of the good in ways that undermine their grasp of the actually possible. I think both insights are indispensable and I don't think there are any criteria on hand to assure us which is the more relevant perspective in any generally useful sort of way, and so that one must remain rather self-critical and attentive and persistent in the face of inevitable frustrations, come what may. All of this seems to me simply a straightforward matter of intelligence.
Friday, September 04, 2009
Nazi Futurism
I am currently reading Peter Sloterdijk's important little book Terror from the Air, published in English just this year, about which I will have more to say later, I think, but for now I wanted to note this striking little tidbit, from page 43, calling our attention to the "pseudo-normalizing" Nazi category of Volksschadling, the "public nuisance," which was, rather horrifyingly but unsurprisingly, "a term covering a vast semantic domain, including defeatism, black marketeering, anti-Fuhrer jokes, criticizing the system, and a lack of belief in the future" [emphasis added --d]. Here's why, in a nutshell, I cannot help but find this striking.
Updated from the Moot, Below: In their obsession with speed (think, "acceleration of acceleration") and with the metalization of the body (think, cyborgic-ecstasies and "techno-immortalization"), among many other topoi the Italian Futurists anticipate quite a lot of the quirks of trans/post-humanist futurological handwaving. Like the transhuman-types, the Italian Futurists were mostly just alienated white boys barking and banging into one another, flirting with fascism (think, "optimizing" humans with science, stainless steel technocracy, hostility to "degenerate" humanities, soft-porn and advertising imagery mistaken for art, disasterbatory Götterdämmerung fantasies of bad god AIs and nano-goo). Unlike our Robot Cultists, many of the Italian Futurists at least could write reasonably well -- no doubt due to their dabbling with avant-garde art movements. Most of the superlative futurological writing coming from transhumanists, extropians, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, and digital utopians sounds, to the contrary, something like a pastiche of Ayn Rand potboilers, an instruction manual for assembling a lawn mower, a Fox News broadcast, and garbage-disposal-loud commercials hawking teeth whitening and boner-pills after midnight.
Updated from the Moot, Below: In their obsession with speed (think, "acceleration of acceleration") and with the metalization of the body (think, cyborgic-ecstasies and "techno-immortalization"), among many other topoi the Italian Futurists anticipate quite a lot of the quirks of trans/post-humanist futurological handwaving. Like the transhuman-types, the Italian Futurists were mostly just alienated white boys barking and banging into one another, flirting with fascism (think, "optimizing" humans with science, stainless steel technocracy, hostility to "degenerate" humanities, soft-porn and advertising imagery mistaken for art, disasterbatory Götterdämmerung fantasies of bad god AIs and nano-goo). Unlike our Robot Cultists, many of the Italian Futurists at least could write reasonably well -- no doubt due to their dabbling with avant-garde art movements. Most of the superlative futurological writing coming from transhumanists, extropians, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, and digital utopians sounds, to the contrary, something like a pastiche of Ayn Rand potboilers, an instruction manual for assembling a lawn mower, a Fox News broadcast, and garbage-disposal-loud commercials hawking teeth whitening and boner-pills after midnight.
The Non-Innocence of Incumbent Distribution
In a post last week I wrote:
To this, a Reader responded in the Moot:
It depends. I happen to think fewer people "honestly" believe this than say they do, and that many who do "honestly" think such things are frankly so stupid or so blinkered it doesn't much matter what you would say to them anyway, and so one simply needs to marginalize them through better arguments directed at better people, or to work to insulate majorities from the harm these honestly wrongheaded people cause in their ignorance and prejudice and stupidity by means of better policy.
But, okay, to that vanishingly small minority of decent intelligent sufficiently critically-minded and argumentatively reachable people who believe for now that something they think of as "redistribution" is unjust, an intervention that may be useful is to ask why exactly it is that so often one tells the story of "redistrubtion" as one always beginning only with the apportionment of resources, authority, capacity and so on that represents the status quo, even though it is easily demonstrable that the status quo is an historically situated state of affairs, depending on any number of factors, many of them complete accidents, that have little to do with earning or merit or use at all.
Why do charges of the "unjustness" that would attend any "redistribution" of wealth, authority, opportunity from very comfortable minorities to very vulnerable majorities assume that "redistribution" is a matter of, say, disowning naturally owned substance from some for others rather than noting that what has come to be owned by some rather than others arises out of an historical re-distribution in which some preferentially benefit from historical accomplishments out of an actually more common cultural inheritance or commons, or some preferentially benefit in their contribution to collective accomplishments of an unfathomably complex functional division of labor through the denigration of other contributions, just as indispensable as an objective but not subjective matter to those accomplishments, from the peers with whom they share and maintain and build the world?
Before we accept the terms of a discussion of "inevitable" and "intolerable" evils of "redistribution" of incumbent distribution -- especially when in the service of widely affirmed goals like maintaining a legal and regulatory framework to ensure equality before the law, and police, defenses, public works, basic health, education, and income, and access to reliable knowledge to ensure that acts of consent are genuinely informed and nonduressed, outcomes that "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," peer to peer -- it is crucial to interrogate first any prejudicial framing or figuration or formulation of that incumbent distribution as innocent, natural, or originary in some way and not itself an historically contingent, often altogether arbitrary, distorted, unfair, intolerable redistribution of the commons that demands justification rather than being treated as beyond question.
A pattern emerges [among the Movement Republicans who have been ever more the defining force in that Party since the frowny face-smiley face Nixon/Reagan aftermath of Goldwater] -- not just the usual soulless profits over people that lead Republican President Calvin Coolidge to assert that "the business of America is business" back in the 1920s -- but an especial eagerness to disable our solving of shared problems precisely to enable the profit-taking of a few, to deal dirty in Washington so their cronies can steal ugly across the world.
To this, a Reader responded in the Moot:
True but what does one say to people who honestly [the bolding was in the original comment --d] believe that legislating the redistribution of money is not justice and that it doesn't produce equality?
It depends. I happen to think fewer people "honestly" believe this than say they do, and that many who do "honestly" think such things are frankly so stupid or so blinkered it doesn't much matter what you would say to them anyway, and so one simply needs to marginalize them through better arguments directed at better people, or to work to insulate majorities from the harm these honestly wrongheaded people cause in their ignorance and prejudice and stupidity by means of better policy.
But, okay, to that vanishingly small minority of decent intelligent sufficiently critically-minded and argumentatively reachable people who believe for now that something they think of as "redistribution" is unjust, an intervention that may be useful is to ask why exactly it is that so often one tells the story of "redistrubtion" as one always beginning only with the apportionment of resources, authority, capacity and so on that represents the status quo, even though it is easily demonstrable that the status quo is an historically situated state of affairs, depending on any number of factors, many of them complete accidents, that have little to do with earning or merit or use at all.
Why do charges of the "unjustness" that would attend any "redistribution" of wealth, authority, opportunity from very comfortable minorities to very vulnerable majorities assume that "redistribution" is a matter of, say, disowning naturally owned substance from some for others rather than noting that what has come to be owned by some rather than others arises out of an historical re-distribution in which some preferentially benefit from historical accomplishments out of an actually more common cultural inheritance or commons, or some preferentially benefit in their contribution to collective accomplishments of an unfathomably complex functional division of labor through the denigration of other contributions, just as indispensable as an objective but not subjective matter to those accomplishments, from the peers with whom they share and maintain and build the world?
Before we accept the terms of a discussion of "inevitable" and "intolerable" evils of "redistribution" of incumbent distribution -- especially when in the service of widely affirmed goals like maintaining a legal and regulatory framework to ensure equality before the law, and police, defenses, public works, basic health, education, and income, and access to reliable knowledge to ensure that acts of consent are genuinely informed and nonduressed, outcomes that "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," peer to peer -- it is crucial to interrogate first any prejudicial framing or figuration or formulation of that incumbent distribution as innocent, natural, or originary in some way and not itself an historically contingent, often altogether arbitrary, distorted, unfair, intolerable redistribution of the commons that demands justification rather than being treated as beyond question.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Culture and Anarchy
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives. -- John Stuart Mill
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. -- Oscar Wilde
In America, Republicans simply are the worst people you know.
This is not to deny that plenty of Democrats as people are plenty lousy, corrupt, and stupid themselves, nor to deny that there are universes of logical possibility in which legibly conservative ideas might lead an intelligent civic-minded person to some sort of idealized or historical Republican identification.
But Republicans here are the worst people around, because what Republicanism has devolved into at this point really is an appeal to the worst person you could be -- that is to say, to the worst that is in us all in some measure.
Republican politics drives and is driven by the part of you that is scared of change even when things must change to make things better, by the part of you that wants to break rules when you can get away with it even when you defend the rules because you depend on them yourself to keep what you got by bending or breaking them on the sly, by the part of you that sees the public world as a stage in which profits are made rather than people encountered, by the part of you that wants to win on any terms more because you don't want to lose on those terms than because there is actually something you want for its own sake, by the part of you that conforms without question or without joy for fear of taking responsibility for taking a stand that might be unpopular, by the part of you that wants your pleasures now in the expectation that the costs later can always be borne by those suckers who behave within their means and with an eye to the longer-term, by the part of you that can rationalize any selfishness, any meanness, any indifference, any thoughtlessness, any short-sightedness because the squalling endlessly needy infant inside, the bullying territorializing monkey inside dictates what you do rather than your critical and ethical intelligence.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Civics Lesson
I know that raising the specter of Big Government shuts down American brains more or less automagically at this point (as presumably the specter of Soulless Sociopathic Corporations does not?) and that conjuring up the image of government bureaucracy makes all American mouths curl up instantly and inevitably into a cynical dismissive smirk (as presumably images of corporate suits, meddling managers, and telemarketers in veal-fattening pens do not?).
But those who are fighting for real health care reform are always at the same time fighting against the feudal corporate-militarist mindset of tinpot tyrants barking can-do platitudes, celebrating as inevitable the merciless brutality of unaccountable monied masters, isolating and exploiting the vulnerable, hyping useless crap and distraction to the ruin of the world all the while denigrating and punishing expressions of fellow-feeling, critical awareness, nonconformity of any kind, or demands that authority always be prepared to make an accounting of itself.
To fight for healthcare is always already to fight for democracy and accountable, consensual governance, in our diversity, peer-to-peer, it is always already to fight against the anti-democracy of incumbency and the authoritarian order of corporate-militarism (the global neoliberal/neoconservative circuit).
It may seem like biting off more than we can chew to take all this on when taking up the fight for real commonsense healthcare reform, but the fact is that this is already the actual fight in which we are engaged, and we might as well grasp it in the terms that actually prevail. To win this fight is to facilitate the next step in the struggle toward more, better democratic governance -- likely to be collective bargaining rights, with campaign finance reform next, then global access to knowledge, then planetary governance over environmental criminality, but who is to say exactly how these struggles will play out? To lose the healthcare fight will be to make the next struggle that much harder, to confront us with the same arrayed forces of incumbency, the same hegemonic barrier of corporate-militarist platitudes we face now, again and again and again.
Why not fight them here and now, clear-eyed, with the strength of numbers and the wind at our backs? I'm not advocating muddying the issue of urgent healthcare reform with theory-head meditations on good-governance, but I am insisting that we grasp the way in which ignorance of or an entrenched habitual hostility to the very notion of good-governance forms an insuperable barrier through which commonsense discussions of issues rarely penetrate remotely intact. Be aware of the ways in which our metaphors and formulations and assumptions mobilize merciless, uncivil, cynical assumptions about our shared problems and the peers with whom we share them, how these anti-democratizing circumscriptions of possibility serve best that vanishingly small minority of authoritarian incumbents who stand between us all, whatever our differences otherwise, and the solution of our shared problems, peer to peer.
It doesn't matter how you put the points, what language you use, how you draw on your own experiences and metaphors to remind us all of the political assumptions without which none of our struggles make sense -- it doesn't even matter if you prefer the more philosophical sorts of language my own analytic temperament and academic training suits me to... However you put them, there are several basic ideas that we need to reiterate over and over to combat the inertial ignorance, short-term thinking, and deranging whomping up of greed and mistrust by those who thrive best wherever arbitrary men and not legitimate laws rule:
One: Democratically accountable governance indispensably provides ill-commodifiable goods and services that solve shared problems for the general welfare (the things so urgent that we don't comparison shop for them and hence are not subject to competitive forces that check abuses, or services the efficient provision of which creates institutions too big or complex to fail in ways that would subject them to such competition either) and it is the promotion of this general welfare as much as anything that secures the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
Two: Taxes are the price we pay for such civilizational goods, taxes ensure that governance is representational quite as much as regular and regulated elections do by yoking authority to the consent of the governed who also fund it, and it is, of course, only sensible that the people who benefit most from their inhabitation of a civilizational order to which others who benefit less are nonetheless indispensable contributors pay their fair share for its proper maintenance as well.
Three: The separation of powers, federalist subsidiarity (the principle that problems should always be addressed at the most local layer of governance actually adequate to their resolution), the defense and strengthening of the scene of actually informed actually non-duressed consent, the celebration of consensual multiculture, peer-to-peer, and the institution of elections to public offices at regular intervals provide the necessary checks on abuses in the provision of these unique public goods that is provided by competition for commodities available for exchange in well-regulated markets.
But those who are fighting for real health care reform are always at the same time fighting against the feudal corporate-militarist mindset of tinpot tyrants barking can-do platitudes, celebrating as inevitable the merciless brutality of unaccountable monied masters, isolating and exploiting the vulnerable, hyping useless crap and distraction to the ruin of the world all the while denigrating and punishing expressions of fellow-feeling, critical awareness, nonconformity of any kind, or demands that authority always be prepared to make an accounting of itself.
To fight for healthcare is always already to fight for democracy and accountable, consensual governance, in our diversity, peer-to-peer, it is always already to fight against the anti-democracy of incumbency and the authoritarian order of corporate-militarism (the global neoliberal/neoconservative circuit).
It may seem like biting off more than we can chew to take all this on when taking up the fight for real commonsense healthcare reform, but the fact is that this is already the actual fight in which we are engaged, and we might as well grasp it in the terms that actually prevail. To win this fight is to facilitate the next step in the struggle toward more, better democratic governance -- likely to be collective bargaining rights, with campaign finance reform next, then global access to knowledge, then planetary governance over environmental criminality, but who is to say exactly how these struggles will play out? To lose the healthcare fight will be to make the next struggle that much harder, to confront us with the same arrayed forces of incumbency, the same hegemonic barrier of corporate-militarist platitudes we face now, again and again and again.
Why not fight them here and now, clear-eyed, with the strength of numbers and the wind at our backs? I'm not advocating muddying the issue of urgent healthcare reform with theory-head meditations on good-governance, but I am insisting that we grasp the way in which ignorance of or an entrenched habitual hostility to the very notion of good-governance forms an insuperable barrier through which commonsense discussions of issues rarely penetrate remotely intact. Be aware of the ways in which our metaphors and formulations and assumptions mobilize merciless, uncivil, cynical assumptions about our shared problems and the peers with whom we share them, how these anti-democratizing circumscriptions of possibility serve best that vanishingly small minority of authoritarian incumbents who stand between us all, whatever our differences otherwise, and the solution of our shared problems, peer to peer.
It doesn't matter how you put the points, what language you use, how you draw on your own experiences and metaphors to remind us all of the political assumptions without which none of our struggles make sense -- it doesn't even matter if you prefer the more philosophical sorts of language my own analytic temperament and academic training suits me to... However you put them, there are several basic ideas that we need to reiterate over and over to combat the inertial ignorance, short-term thinking, and deranging whomping up of greed and mistrust by those who thrive best wherever arbitrary men and not legitimate laws rule:
One: Democratically accountable governance indispensably provides ill-commodifiable goods and services that solve shared problems for the general welfare (the things so urgent that we don't comparison shop for them and hence are not subject to competitive forces that check abuses, or services the efficient provision of which creates institutions too big or complex to fail in ways that would subject them to such competition either) and it is the promotion of this general welfare as much as anything that secures the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
Two: Taxes are the price we pay for such civilizational goods, taxes ensure that governance is representational quite as much as regular and regulated elections do by yoking authority to the consent of the governed who also fund it, and it is, of course, only sensible that the people who benefit most from their inhabitation of a civilizational order to which others who benefit less are nonetheless indispensable contributors pay their fair share for its proper maintenance as well.
Three: The separation of powers, federalist subsidiarity (the principle that problems should always be addressed at the most local layer of governance actually adequate to their resolution), the defense and strengthening of the scene of actually informed actually non-duressed consent, the celebration of consensual multiculture, peer-to-peer, and the institution of elections to public offices at regular intervals provide the necessary checks on abuses in the provision of these unique public goods that is provided by competition for commodities available for exchange in well-regulated markets.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Middle (Age) March
Monday -- er, that is, today, although I'm actually off to bed now -- is my forty-fourth birthday.
I begin teaching the fall term later in the week, on Thursday, and so my vacation comes to an end all too soon, after teaching too many too much too intensely for too long this last half-year.
This has been a real vacation, though -- for a week now I haven't blogged particularly, you may have noticed, and I haven't paid any attention to the news for the first time in what seems like years, since well before the 2000 election debacle certainly, and I haven't surveyed any of the latest vulgar sales-pitches brute-brained futurologists think of as "thinking."
My companion instead has been an old friend, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and an intelligence that enriches, elicits, and elevates rather than debases, disgusts, depresses...
What a joy and relief and demand Middlemarch is! Have you read it? Have you re-read it?
I doubt the soopergeniuses of the Robot Cult would have much time for such a thing, nor the lying armies of the complacent middle or the tumescent right.
Middlemarch is a drama consisting essentially of the delineation of humane consciousness, as a richly historical, lushly overdetermined concern (check out the etymology of that word, concern, if you want a story worth thinking on). Setting aside the dramatic twists and turns and vivid characters and so on, the stuff you can skim off the back cover of a paperback or drink in through a sun-dappled BBC dramatization, Middlemarch is really the drama of intellectual, ethical, poetical consciousness, all at once, inter-implicated, from the beginning to the end, and I mean from the very first words to the very last ones, an illustration of and, even more crucially, a provocation to real adult liberality of mind.
Maybe you already know those famous last words of the book, probably the best most beautiful words to close any novel in my estimation: "But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
Even if you haven't read the book the words are moving, but reading them at the end of the reading of the book, even if you already knew them by heart, is nothing you can be prepared for, like a conversion experience that is the throwing off of infantile conversions for good, indeed, for the growing good of the world.
It seems to me, as it happens, that both futurological bulldozers and the ongoing heartbreak of politics are woven into the web of life Eliot discerns (there's a story in that word, too, by the way). And I'll be returning to both subjects soon enough, sure enough. For a couple more days, though, I'm staying away from here, if it's all the same to you. Thanks for all the birthday messages in my inbox and elsewhere!
I begin teaching the fall term later in the week, on Thursday, and so my vacation comes to an end all too soon, after teaching too many too much too intensely for too long this last half-year.
This has been a real vacation, though -- for a week now I haven't blogged particularly, you may have noticed, and I haven't paid any attention to the news for the first time in what seems like years, since well before the 2000 election debacle certainly, and I haven't surveyed any of the latest vulgar sales-pitches brute-brained futurologists think of as "thinking."
My companion instead has been an old friend, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and an intelligence that enriches, elicits, and elevates rather than debases, disgusts, depresses...
What a joy and relief and demand Middlemarch is! Have you read it? Have you re-read it?
I doubt the soopergeniuses of the Robot Cult would have much time for such a thing, nor the lying armies of the complacent middle or the tumescent right.
Middlemarch is a drama consisting essentially of the delineation of humane consciousness, as a richly historical, lushly overdetermined concern (check out the etymology of that word, concern, if you want a story worth thinking on). Setting aside the dramatic twists and turns and vivid characters and so on, the stuff you can skim off the back cover of a paperback or drink in through a sun-dappled BBC dramatization, Middlemarch is really the drama of intellectual, ethical, poetical consciousness, all at once, inter-implicated, from the beginning to the end, and I mean from the very first words to the very last ones, an illustration of and, even more crucially, a provocation to real adult liberality of mind.
Maybe you already know those famous last words of the book, probably the best most beautiful words to close any novel in my estimation: "But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
Even if you haven't read the book the words are moving, but reading them at the end of the reading of the book, even if you already knew them by heart, is nothing you can be prepared for, like a conversion experience that is the throwing off of infantile conversions for good, indeed, for the growing good of the world.
It seems to me, as it happens, that both futurological bulldozers and the ongoing heartbreak of politics are woven into the web of life Eliot discerns (there's a story in that word, too, by the way). And I'll be returning to both subjects soon enough, sure enough. For a couple more days, though, I'm staying away from here, if it's all the same to you. Thanks for all the birthday messages in my inbox and elsewhere!
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
The Achievement of Superlative Futurology
Singularitarian Robot Cultist Michael Anissimov responds yet again to my critique of superlative futurology:
Strictly speaking, I don't think superlative aspirations are "achievable" at all. I am not saying that because, as the Robot Cultists would have it, I lack their own "can do" attitude, or their boundless imaginations, or their sooper-science skill-sets, but because I do not think superlative aspirations are really the sorts of things that are meant to be "achieved" in the first place. I don't think Anissimov is right, really, even to call them "goals."
Let's live for thousands of years through "medical advancement" or through "transferring our selves" into invulnerable Robot Bodies isn't exactly the sort of "goal" that has any specifiable impact on conduct in the real world, beyond signaling membership in certain sub(cult)ures of futurological faith. I would maintain in fact that such sub(cult)ural signaling is indeed the actual substance of these assertions of superlative belief, such as it is, and that the work of these assertions is not to mobilize instrumental rationality at all but to mobilize moral rationality. That is to say, I think these faithful utterances aren't really about achieving goals so much as enabling the pleasures of subcultural identification, belonging, support for folks who happen to have found their way to a curious marginal futurological sub(cult)ure.
Let's have everything we want at no cost, let's arrive at always being right about everything, let's create something that solves all our problems for us… These utterances may have the superficial form of goals, of projects, of efforts but they don't so much orient pragmatic conduct in the world as protest against the pragmatic conditions under which we orient and conduct ourselves in the world in fact. As such, they are far more like the utterances of the more conventionally faithful: let's redeem our sinful natures or pasts, let's pray for guidance, let's be worthy of Paradise
Anissimov writes sometimes as though the super-predicated aspirations of superlative futurology (Robot Cultism) are just slightly more "ambitious" or "optimistic" versions of already ongoing technoscientific practice. The "goal" of superlongevity is just kinda sorta a more ambitious optimistic kind of everyday healthcare practices, the "goal" of superintelligence is just kinda sorta a more ambitious optimistic kind of everyday software coding practices, the "goal" of superabundance is just kinda sorta a more ambitious optimistic kind of everyday manufacturing practices.
This rhetoric might seem initially to lend a cozy coloration of plausibility to what upon closer scrutiny reveals itself to be batshit crazy articles of faith in a version of "The Future" in which immortal post-humans have somehow "uploaded" their "minds" into cyberspace or robot bodies to "live" in virtual or nano-slavebotic Treasure Caves under the watchful gaze of a history-shattering Robot God. But quite apart from the odd articles of faith it would countenance (which aren't after all really any odder than the articles of faith that fuel most essentially religious outlooks), Anissimov's claims are bedeviled by profound conceptual double-binds.
Either his viewpoint amounts to an affirmation of the idea of healthcare provision, software improvement, and advances in production at such a level of generality that one would be hard pressed to find anybody anywhere who disapproves in the first place (thus eliminating the need for affirming them at all, let alone affirming them in the form of joining a conspicuously self-marginalizing Robot Cult) or his viewpoint amounts to a commandeering of the idea of healthcare provision, software improvement, and advances in production in the service of some project at odds with these already-affirmed practices as they are already playing out in the world (thus eliminating the pretense that these assertions have anything to do with actual science at all, but nicely explaining why they would be affirmed especially by folks who have joined a conspicuously self-marginalizing Robot Cult).
No technoscientifically-literate person has any doubt that properly funded, regulated, accountable technoscience research and development directed to the solution of shared human problems can be enormously useful, nor that ongoing and proximately upcoming genetic, cognitive, and prosthetic medical research is yielding unprecedented impacts and enormously interesting results, nor that problems of software usability and network security are enormously thorny and increasingly important in globally mediated and surveilled societies, nor that advances in automation, distributed production, and materials science enabled by discoveries at the nanoscale and otherwise are enormously exciting and provocative. There are millions of people around the world who are involved in the ramifying inter-implications of these truisms, identifying problems and forming actual goals in respect to these problems everywhere all the time. But not one of these problems, not one of these goals is the least bit clarified by reading it through the lens of superlative aspiration.
No one working to solve a particular healthcare problem is helped in their valiant efforts by the insistence of some Robot Cultist that one day medicine will deliver "superlongevity" (although you can be sure that loose talk about "playing god" has done more than its fair share to ensure that medical research that might solve actual problems and save actual lives didn't get proper funding). No one working to make software more user friendly or address a particular network security problem is helped in their painstaking efforts by the insistence of some Robot Cultist that one day we will code a superintelligent Robot God who will solve all our problems for us (although you can be sure that loose talk about "artificial intelligence" has, as Jeron Lanier has endlessly documented, inspired no end of bad software that frustrates its users by simulating "thinking" for them and "making decisions" for them in ways they strongly disapprove). No one working to make particular materials or products safer, cheaper, less toxic, more useful, or more sustainable is helped in their diligent efforts by the insistence of some Robot Cultist that one day immersive virtualities, or ubiquitous robots, or cheap as chips programmable multi-purpose room temperature desktop nanofactories will one day deliver a superabundance that will circumvent the impasse of stakeholder politics in a finite world that is home to infinite and incompatible aspirations (although you can be sure that loose talk about Drexlerian "nanotechnology" has made it next to impossible to talk sense about regulating or funding or forming reasonable expectations about the problems and possibilities of nanoscale technoscience in actual reality).
Anissimov writes:
As I said, Anissimov sometimes talks as though superlative futurological aspirations are "challenges" and "goals" that can be "achieved" if we simply "try" hard enough. Of course, the first step to making technological advancements available is actually to engage in actual technoscientific practices of research, funding, regulation, publication, education, application in the real world. While Anissimov rallies the faithful with a Mouseketeer Cheer of "Let's Try!" it is notable that the immediate consequence of taking up superlative discourse is to disengage from the actual technoscientific practices in which one actually tries, works, participates in the efforts through which actual technoscience connects to the actual world, achieves actual results, solves actual problems.
It is especially intriguing that Anissimov raises the specter of "fundamentalism" as one that would be warded off by the can-do declarations of the futurologically faithful, because it is of course fundamentalist formations, with their authoritarian circuits of True Believers and would-be guru-priests, that the Robot Cults themselves most conspicuously resemble, and never so much as when they declare their most marginal beliefs as the ones that are freightest most with "certainty" and "inevitability" -- as Anissimov has freighted his futurological faith with "inevitability" at the beginning of the very sentence that concludes by disavowing fundamentalism.
It is no surprise that Anissimov turns the spotlight onto the archipelago of marginal Robot Cult organizations like the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the SENS Foundation when he wants to make plain who he considers to be the "leaders" in the "fields" devoted to the "work" of superlative futurology. For nobody who isn't already a Robot Cultist would it ever occur to describe Aubrey de Grey, or Eric Drexler, or Eliezer Yudkowsky as "leaders" in any kind of actually-existing technoscientific field. These are not serious organizations. These are not people cited in serious peer reviewed publications. These are not projects with serious grant money at their disposal.
I mean no offense, really, since compared especially to the brainless nutcases who accumulate in orbit around them Aubrey de Grey, Eric Drexler, and, say, Nick Bostrom (neither Kurzweil nor Yudkowsky even passes muster as peers of oddball outliers like Drexler or de Grey, Bostrom is the closest you really get to a non-utter-nutjob Singularitarian) are all fairly genial intellectuals who have interesting things to say as often as not. In England there is a fairly robust and attractive tradition that encourages oddball intellectuals and even expects intellectuals to be oddballs. Nick Bostrom certainly isn't as off-the-wall as Wittgenstein was (nor as much a genius either, probably, but who's to say, really, when all is said and done?), and Aubrey de Grey actually even looks quite a bit like Lytton Strachey. All of this is quite par for the course in England.
And I have no doubt that just as ancient historians will regularly profess a fond bemused attachment to sword and sandal epics like "Quo Vadis" and "Ben Hur" as part of the initial inspiration that draws no small number of students into their fields, but would never mistake these gorgeous cinematic gargoyles as anything passing muster as the actual practice of the field of history itself, I have no doubt at all that plenty of biochemists and gerontologists will admit a fond debt to the popular handwaving issuing from Drexler and de Grey.
But anybody who thinks these figures are leaders in their fields, or even, frankly, manage to inhabit anything close to the consensus in which all the real work in these fields is getting done is demonstrating though such assertions their own complete ignorance of the actual science at hand.
As I often have occasion to say, superlative futurology is not itself science, but a constellation of faith-based initiatives that opportunistically frame themselves as scientific precisely to yield for their wish-fulfillment fantasies the reality-effect that attaches especially to scientific pronouncements in our own historical moment. The assertions of futurological faith do not function to mobilize instrumental rationality to implement goals in reality, but to substantiate the "reality" of articles of faith in idealized imaginations of "The Future" that do not exist in the present except through the mobilization of moral rationality that solicits shared identification, shared aspiration, the "real substance" of subcultural solidarity (especially the defensive solidarities of marginal sub(cult)ure).
It is at this point that I think many are apt to misunderstand the force of my critique. Although I am an atheist myself, I do not disparage people of faith for the same reasons I do not disparage people whose aesthetic practices of judgment and self-creation differ from my own: It is in my view the substance of freedom to assert moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political judgments to the hearing of the diversity of one's peers without any expectation that one's judgments will be shared or will prevail but only that they should be affirmed as legible as judgments. In offering up our judgments to our peers, and owning up to them (whether they are admired or ridiculed) in the hearing of our peers, we own ourselves, we arise as our own selves, we constitute ourselves as selves in the world. That is the work of freedom in my view, the work of meaning-making among our living peers in an otherwise mineral meaningless existence. To the extent that Robot Cultists are just indulging in a kooky poetical enterprise I have no complaints about their enterprise in the least.
Superlative futurology, as I have often taken pains to point out, shares no small amount of common ground with sf fandoms, and as a queergeek myself I have had plenty of occasion to wallow in speculative space operatic sensawunda. Who needs Yudkowsky when you can be reading A Fire Upon the Deep? Who needs Kurzweil when you can be reading the Dune cycle? I am the last person on earth to chuckle derisively at geeks who gawk at anime, or artist renderings of space elevators, or city-scaled space-freighters in cinematic flight. Let a bazillion flowers bloom, let your freak flag fly, make meaning where and as you would. I'm a silly nerd myself, for heaven's sake.
I personally disapprove of religiosity only when it pretends to scientificity, and I personally disapprove of morality only when it seeks to prevail over politics. It is not the religiosity of fundamentalist formations that makes them pernicious in my eyes so much as their authoritarian policing of facts and moralizing policing of political diversity.
It is precisely in its insistence that it is a kind of scientific practice (indeed, often that it amounts to an urgent championing of True Science against the "anti-science" of "relativists" and "pessimists" who do not share its idiosyncratic taste in "The Future"), and precisely in the curious tendency of its investment in scientificity to yield a politics couched as a "neutral" pre-politics or even an outright anti-politics (always in the service of incumbent interests figured as "natural" interests) that superlative futurology exhibits a chilling kinship with such fundamentalist formations. That the organizational archipelago of Robot Cultism is suffused with would-be gurus and True Believers is a symptom of the underlying rationality of futurology itself, it is not -- as the Robot Cultists themselves rationalize in the face of this sort of observation -- simply a matter of an unfair generalization from "extreme" but "unrepresentative" (of course!) sub(cult)ural figures and texts that keep unaccountably cropping up so conspicuously among their number.
But more than this, I think there is an endemic double danger in futurological discourse, not only (first) that it subverts scientificity by stealthing its faith-based initiatives as scientific practice and subverts sensible policy-making by declaring its sub(cult)ural solidarities as developmental deliberation, but also (second) that it subverts freedom itself, the understanding and practice of freedom that is the heart of the political.
If I disparage the notion of "The Future" it is emphatically because I champion what I describe instead as "futurity," by which I mean to evoke the open futurity inhering in the plurality of peers in the present, collaborating and contesting in their diversity the shared world in the present always in the form of presents-opening-onto-presents-to-come.
I believe that notions of "The Future," in whatever forms they take in the mouths of those who imagine themselves to see "It" more clearly than everybody else, and to speak like would-be Priests in "Its" name, are always ideological constructions, always bespeaking a parochial perspective in the present projecting onto the openness of futurity in an effort to domesticate and control that openness, to police and curtail that diversity.
The substance of the gesture of attributing "future-likeness" to ideas in the present or even to the style of artifacts in the present (this is something Daniel Harris has written about in his famous essay on "The Futuristic") is always just the repudiation of the present, often perversely so. The work of this gesture is ultimately political -- even though it typically cloaks itself in the langauge of pre-political or a-political instrumentality. It is a refusal or disavowal of the demanding substance of politics, plurality and freedom, and an infantile fantasy to substitute for these The One True Way That Ends History and an instrumental amplification of capacities through which the Elect Become Godlike by Eluding Human Finitude.
Robot Cultists cling to the insistence that the superlative outcomes they presumably are "fighting for" (a "work" that ultimately amounts to re-iterating in the presence of fellow Robot Cultists that they do indeed "believe" in "the future" and all its works) are possible in principle, even if they are not practically realizable in the present. That no actually-serious scientists or policy makers share their own preoccupations with non-existing non-proximate medicinal techniques to deliver thousand year lifespans, or upload minds into computers, or create superintelligent Robot Gods, or create cheap-as-dirt desktop Anything Machines never enters into their reckoning of their superior scientificity. They imagine themselves to be indulging in a scientific enterprise despite the fact no scientific consensus ever forms around their actual assumptions or models or goals, and so they confuse the equivalent of medieval monks debating the number of angels who can dance on pin-heads as some kind of hard-nosed sooper-scientific practice.
But quite apart from all that, the deeper pathology in play in Robot Cultism is its very specific repudiation of the political, a repudiation signaled by its preoccupation with "The Future" over futurity in the first place. Whatever they want to say about their "fearlessness" for "daring" to dream Big Dreams it seems to me that their discourse is one saturated by fear -- with "big dreams" that usually look to me more like infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies, testaments to sociopathic alienation from their peers in all their confusing and threatening diversity, damaged denials of their vulnerable error-prone bodily selves, authoritarian pretensions to certainty or the complementary desire to evade the responsibilities of uncertain existence through True Belief in charismatic gurus claiming to hold the Keys to History in the midst of the distress of disruptive change. Politics is a matter of reconciling the indefinitely many logically possible but also logically incompatible aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders in a shared world, peer to peer, and that makes politics prior to technoscience, especially to a "technoscience" evacuated of all practical substance and left with anemic assurances of "logically possible" outcomes.
And all of this is still just circling around the drain of the futurological imaginary, for the substance of the present politics of the superlative futurology of the Robot Cultists is not a matter of working (without ever really working) to bring about "The Future" in which they have invested their fervent faith, but the politics of indulging the delusion that "The Future" is already here, already now, in the eyes of the fellow-faithful, in the ritual re-iterations of Its possibility, Its palpability, Its inevitability. This is the faithful repudiation of fact by means of pseudo-scientific derangements of facticity as such, this is the moralizing identification with "The Future" by means of the anti-political dis-identification with the plurality of their peers in the open futurity of the present opening onto presents-to-come peer-to-peer.
This is the real achievement of superlative futurology.
Dale Carrico, one of the more prominent critics of transhumanism, frequently refers to “superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance” as transhumanist goals, of course in a disparaging way. Yet, I openly embrace these goals. Superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance are a perfect summary of what we want and need. How can we achieve them?
Strictly speaking, I don't think superlative aspirations are "achievable" at all. I am not saying that because, as the Robot Cultists would have it, I lack their own "can do" attitude, or their boundless imaginations, or their sooper-science skill-sets, but because I do not think superlative aspirations are really the sorts of things that are meant to be "achieved" in the first place. I don't think Anissimov is right, really, even to call them "goals."
Let's live for thousands of years through "medical advancement" or through "transferring our selves" into invulnerable Robot Bodies isn't exactly the sort of "goal" that has any specifiable impact on conduct in the real world, beyond signaling membership in certain sub(cult)ures of futurological faith. I would maintain in fact that such sub(cult)ural signaling is indeed the actual substance of these assertions of superlative belief, such as it is, and that the work of these assertions is not to mobilize instrumental rationality at all but to mobilize moral rationality. That is to say, I think these faithful utterances aren't really about achieving goals so much as enabling the pleasures of subcultural identification, belonging, support for folks who happen to have found their way to a curious marginal futurological sub(cult)ure.
Let's have everything we want at no cost, let's arrive at always being right about everything, let's create something that solves all our problems for us… These utterances may have the superficial form of goals, of projects, of efforts but they don't so much orient pragmatic conduct in the world as protest against the pragmatic conditions under which we orient and conduct ourselves in the world in fact. As such, they are far more like the utterances of the more conventionally faithful: let's redeem our sinful natures or pasts, let's pray for guidance, let's be worthy of Paradise
Anissimov writes sometimes as though the super-predicated aspirations of superlative futurology (Robot Cultism) are just slightly more "ambitious" or "optimistic" versions of already ongoing technoscientific practice. The "goal" of superlongevity is just kinda sorta a more ambitious optimistic kind of everyday healthcare practices, the "goal" of superintelligence is just kinda sorta a more ambitious optimistic kind of everyday software coding practices, the "goal" of superabundance is just kinda sorta a more ambitious optimistic kind of everyday manufacturing practices.
This rhetoric might seem initially to lend a cozy coloration of plausibility to what upon closer scrutiny reveals itself to be batshit crazy articles of faith in a version of "The Future" in which immortal post-humans have somehow "uploaded" their "minds" into cyberspace or robot bodies to "live" in virtual or nano-slavebotic Treasure Caves under the watchful gaze of a history-shattering Robot God. But quite apart from the odd articles of faith it would countenance (which aren't after all really any odder than the articles of faith that fuel most essentially religious outlooks), Anissimov's claims are bedeviled by profound conceptual double-binds.
Either his viewpoint amounts to an affirmation of the idea of healthcare provision, software improvement, and advances in production at such a level of generality that one would be hard pressed to find anybody anywhere who disapproves in the first place (thus eliminating the need for affirming them at all, let alone affirming them in the form of joining a conspicuously self-marginalizing Robot Cult) or his viewpoint amounts to a commandeering of the idea of healthcare provision, software improvement, and advances in production in the service of some project at odds with these already-affirmed practices as they are already playing out in the world (thus eliminating the pretense that these assertions have anything to do with actual science at all, but nicely explaining why they would be affirmed especially by folks who have joined a conspicuously self-marginalizing Robot Cult).
No technoscientifically-literate person has any doubt that properly funded, regulated, accountable technoscience research and development directed to the solution of shared human problems can be enormously useful, nor that ongoing and proximately upcoming genetic, cognitive, and prosthetic medical research is yielding unprecedented impacts and enormously interesting results, nor that problems of software usability and network security are enormously thorny and increasingly important in globally mediated and surveilled societies, nor that advances in automation, distributed production, and materials science enabled by discoveries at the nanoscale and otherwise are enormously exciting and provocative. There are millions of people around the world who are involved in the ramifying inter-implications of these truisms, identifying problems and forming actual goals in respect to these problems everywhere all the time. But not one of these problems, not one of these goals is the least bit clarified by reading it through the lens of superlative aspiration.
No one working to solve a particular healthcare problem is helped in their valiant efforts by the insistence of some Robot Cultist that one day medicine will deliver "superlongevity" (although you can be sure that loose talk about "playing god" has done more than its fair share to ensure that medical research that might solve actual problems and save actual lives didn't get proper funding). No one working to make software more user friendly or address a particular network security problem is helped in their painstaking efforts by the insistence of some Robot Cultist that one day we will code a superintelligent Robot God who will solve all our problems for us (although you can be sure that loose talk about "artificial intelligence" has, as Jeron Lanier has endlessly documented, inspired no end of bad software that frustrates its users by simulating "thinking" for them and "making decisions" for them in ways they strongly disapprove). No one working to make particular materials or products safer, cheaper, less toxic, more useful, or more sustainable is helped in their diligent efforts by the insistence of some Robot Cultist that one day immersive virtualities, or ubiquitous robots, or cheap as chips programmable multi-purpose room temperature desktop nanofactories will one day deliver a superabundance that will circumvent the impasse of stakeholder politics in a finite world that is home to infinite and incompatible aspirations (although you can be sure that loose talk about Drexlerian "nanotechnology" has made it next to impossible to talk sense about regulating or funding or forming reasonable expectations about the problems and possibilities of nanoscale technoscience in actual reality).
Anissimov writes:
Achieving superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance will be incredibly challenging, but seemingly inevitable as long as civilization continues to progress and we don’t blow ourselves up or have a global fundamentalist dictatorship on our hands. There is no guarantee that we will achieve these goals in our lifetime — but why not try? Achieving any of these milestones would radically improve quality of life for everyone on Earth. The first step to making technological advancements available to everyone is to make them available for someone.
As I said, Anissimov sometimes talks as though superlative futurological aspirations are "challenges" and "goals" that can be "achieved" if we simply "try" hard enough. Of course, the first step to making technological advancements available is actually to engage in actual technoscientific practices of research, funding, regulation, publication, education, application in the real world. While Anissimov rallies the faithful with a Mouseketeer Cheer of "Let's Try!" it is notable that the immediate consequence of taking up superlative discourse is to disengage from the actual technoscientific practices in which one actually tries, works, participates in the efforts through which actual technoscience connects to the actual world, achieves actual results, solves actual problems.
It is especially intriguing that Anissimov raises the specter of "fundamentalism" as one that would be warded off by the can-do declarations of the futurologically faithful, because it is of course fundamentalist formations, with their authoritarian circuits of True Believers and would-be guru-priests, that the Robot Cults themselves most conspicuously resemble, and never so much as when they declare their most marginal beliefs as the ones that are freightest most with "certainty" and "inevitability" -- as Anissimov has freighted his futurological faith with "inevitability" at the beginning of the very sentence that concludes by disavowing fundamentalism.
It is no surprise that Anissimov turns the spotlight onto the archipelago of marginal Robot Cult organizations like the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the SENS Foundation when he wants to make plain who he considers to be the "leaders" in the "fields" devoted to the "work" of superlative futurology. For nobody who isn't already a Robot Cultist would it ever occur to describe Aubrey de Grey, or Eric Drexler, or Eliezer Yudkowsky as "leaders" in any kind of actually-existing technoscientific field. These are not serious organizations. These are not people cited in serious peer reviewed publications. These are not projects with serious grant money at their disposal.
I mean no offense, really, since compared especially to the brainless nutcases who accumulate in orbit around them Aubrey de Grey, Eric Drexler, and, say, Nick Bostrom (neither Kurzweil nor Yudkowsky even passes muster as peers of oddball outliers like Drexler or de Grey, Bostrom is the closest you really get to a non-utter-nutjob Singularitarian) are all fairly genial intellectuals who have interesting things to say as often as not. In England there is a fairly robust and attractive tradition that encourages oddball intellectuals and even expects intellectuals to be oddballs. Nick Bostrom certainly isn't as off-the-wall as Wittgenstein was (nor as much a genius either, probably, but who's to say, really, when all is said and done?), and Aubrey de Grey actually even looks quite a bit like Lytton Strachey. All of this is quite par for the course in England.
And I have no doubt that just as ancient historians will regularly profess a fond bemused attachment to sword and sandal epics like "Quo Vadis" and "Ben Hur" as part of the initial inspiration that draws no small number of students into their fields, but would never mistake these gorgeous cinematic gargoyles as anything passing muster as the actual practice of the field of history itself, I have no doubt at all that plenty of biochemists and gerontologists will admit a fond debt to the popular handwaving issuing from Drexler and de Grey.
But anybody who thinks these figures are leaders in their fields, or even, frankly, manage to inhabit anything close to the consensus in which all the real work in these fields is getting done is demonstrating though such assertions their own complete ignorance of the actual science at hand.
As I often have occasion to say, superlative futurology is not itself science, but a constellation of faith-based initiatives that opportunistically frame themselves as scientific precisely to yield for their wish-fulfillment fantasies the reality-effect that attaches especially to scientific pronouncements in our own historical moment. The assertions of futurological faith do not function to mobilize instrumental rationality to implement goals in reality, but to substantiate the "reality" of articles of faith in idealized imaginations of "The Future" that do not exist in the present except through the mobilization of moral rationality that solicits shared identification, shared aspiration, the "real substance" of subcultural solidarity (especially the defensive solidarities of marginal sub(cult)ure).
It is at this point that I think many are apt to misunderstand the force of my critique. Although I am an atheist myself, I do not disparage people of faith for the same reasons I do not disparage people whose aesthetic practices of judgment and self-creation differ from my own: It is in my view the substance of freedom to assert moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political judgments to the hearing of the diversity of one's peers without any expectation that one's judgments will be shared or will prevail but only that they should be affirmed as legible as judgments. In offering up our judgments to our peers, and owning up to them (whether they are admired or ridiculed) in the hearing of our peers, we own ourselves, we arise as our own selves, we constitute ourselves as selves in the world. That is the work of freedom in my view, the work of meaning-making among our living peers in an otherwise mineral meaningless existence. To the extent that Robot Cultists are just indulging in a kooky poetical enterprise I have no complaints about their enterprise in the least.
Superlative futurology, as I have often taken pains to point out, shares no small amount of common ground with sf fandoms, and as a queergeek myself I have had plenty of occasion to wallow in speculative space operatic sensawunda. Who needs Yudkowsky when you can be reading A Fire Upon the Deep? Who needs Kurzweil when you can be reading the Dune cycle? I am the last person on earth to chuckle derisively at geeks who gawk at anime, or artist renderings of space elevators, or city-scaled space-freighters in cinematic flight. Let a bazillion flowers bloom, let your freak flag fly, make meaning where and as you would. I'm a silly nerd myself, for heaven's sake.
I personally disapprove of religiosity only when it pretends to scientificity, and I personally disapprove of morality only when it seeks to prevail over politics. It is not the religiosity of fundamentalist formations that makes them pernicious in my eyes so much as their authoritarian policing of facts and moralizing policing of political diversity.
It is precisely in its insistence that it is a kind of scientific practice (indeed, often that it amounts to an urgent championing of True Science against the "anti-science" of "relativists" and "pessimists" who do not share its idiosyncratic taste in "The Future"), and precisely in the curious tendency of its investment in scientificity to yield a politics couched as a "neutral" pre-politics or even an outright anti-politics (always in the service of incumbent interests figured as "natural" interests) that superlative futurology exhibits a chilling kinship with such fundamentalist formations. That the organizational archipelago of Robot Cultism is suffused with would-be gurus and True Believers is a symptom of the underlying rationality of futurology itself, it is not -- as the Robot Cultists themselves rationalize in the face of this sort of observation -- simply a matter of an unfair generalization from "extreme" but "unrepresentative" (of course!) sub(cult)ural figures and texts that keep unaccountably cropping up so conspicuously among their number.
But more than this, I think there is an endemic double danger in futurological discourse, not only (first) that it subverts scientificity by stealthing its faith-based initiatives as scientific practice and subverts sensible policy-making by declaring its sub(cult)ural solidarities as developmental deliberation, but also (second) that it subverts freedom itself, the understanding and practice of freedom that is the heart of the political.
If I disparage the notion of "The Future" it is emphatically because I champion what I describe instead as "futurity," by which I mean to evoke the open futurity inhering in the plurality of peers in the present, collaborating and contesting in their diversity the shared world in the present always in the form of presents-opening-onto-presents-to-come.
I believe that notions of "The Future," in whatever forms they take in the mouths of those who imagine themselves to see "It" more clearly than everybody else, and to speak like would-be Priests in "Its" name, are always ideological constructions, always bespeaking a parochial perspective in the present projecting onto the openness of futurity in an effort to domesticate and control that openness, to police and curtail that diversity.
The substance of the gesture of attributing "future-likeness" to ideas in the present or even to the style of artifacts in the present (this is something Daniel Harris has written about in his famous essay on "The Futuristic") is always just the repudiation of the present, often perversely so. The work of this gesture is ultimately political -- even though it typically cloaks itself in the langauge of pre-political or a-political instrumentality. It is a refusal or disavowal of the demanding substance of politics, plurality and freedom, and an infantile fantasy to substitute for these The One True Way That Ends History and an instrumental amplification of capacities through which the Elect Become Godlike by Eluding Human Finitude.
Robot Cultists cling to the insistence that the superlative outcomes they presumably are "fighting for" (a "work" that ultimately amounts to re-iterating in the presence of fellow Robot Cultists that they do indeed "believe" in "the future" and all its works) are possible in principle, even if they are not practically realizable in the present. That no actually-serious scientists or policy makers share their own preoccupations with non-existing non-proximate medicinal techniques to deliver thousand year lifespans, or upload minds into computers, or create superintelligent Robot Gods, or create cheap-as-dirt desktop Anything Machines never enters into their reckoning of their superior scientificity. They imagine themselves to be indulging in a scientific enterprise despite the fact no scientific consensus ever forms around their actual assumptions or models or goals, and so they confuse the equivalent of medieval monks debating the number of angels who can dance on pin-heads as some kind of hard-nosed sooper-scientific practice.
But quite apart from all that, the deeper pathology in play in Robot Cultism is its very specific repudiation of the political, a repudiation signaled by its preoccupation with "The Future" over futurity in the first place. Whatever they want to say about their "fearlessness" for "daring" to dream Big Dreams it seems to me that their discourse is one saturated by fear -- with "big dreams" that usually look to me more like infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies, testaments to sociopathic alienation from their peers in all their confusing and threatening diversity, damaged denials of their vulnerable error-prone bodily selves, authoritarian pretensions to certainty or the complementary desire to evade the responsibilities of uncertain existence through True Belief in charismatic gurus claiming to hold the Keys to History in the midst of the distress of disruptive change. Politics is a matter of reconciling the indefinitely many logically possible but also logically incompatible aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders in a shared world, peer to peer, and that makes politics prior to technoscience, especially to a "technoscience" evacuated of all practical substance and left with anemic assurances of "logically possible" outcomes.
And all of this is still just circling around the drain of the futurological imaginary, for the substance of the present politics of the superlative futurology of the Robot Cultists is not a matter of working (without ever really working) to bring about "The Future" in which they have invested their fervent faith, but the politics of indulging the delusion that "The Future" is already here, already now, in the eyes of the fellow-faithful, in the ritual re-iterations of Its possibility, Its palpability, Its inevitability. This is the faithful repudiation of fact by means of pseudo-scientific derangements of facticity as such, this is the moralizing identification with "The Future" by means of the anti-political dis-identification with the plurality of their peers in the open futurity of the present opening onto presents-to-come peer-to-peer.
This is the real achievement of superlative futurology.
Another Robot Cultist Compares Self to Wright Brothers
I know this isn't a substantive post or anything, I just can't help myself. I can scarcely count the number of times over the years in which one after another Robot Cultist sniffs disdainfully at my critique of superlative futurology and then declares some variation on the theme of: Well, they laughed at the Wright Brothers too! I mean, it happens over and over and over again. I don't think these people are citing one another's rejoinders, I suspect it is a spontaneous and symptomatic upwelling out of the pathology of superlativity itself. From the Moot, one "Extropia" (get it? it's like Extropian, you know, from the Extropian transhumanist sect founded by Ayn Raelian Robot Cultist Max More) assures me:
Dude, neither you nor any of your little white sf fanboy friends are the Wright Brothers. You are not Leonardo or Einstein or Tesla. You are somebody's crazy uncle, you know the one, who stays in the shed out back most afternoons, railing about his genius theories, smelling of his own pee, working on his perpetual motion machine.
Your ridiculing does not bother me in the slightest, just like the pioneers of aviation were not put off by the fact that many people thought airplanes were absurd flights of fancy
Dude, neither you nor any of your little white sf fanboy friends are the Wright Brothers. You are not Leonardo or Einstein or Tesla. You are somebody's crazy uncle, you know the one, who stays in the shed out back most afternoons, railing about his genius theories, smelling of his own pee, working on his perpetual motion machine.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Techno-Immortalism in a Nutshell
Either humans are like leprechauns or we're like red wagons. Since leprechauns aren't real but red wagons and humans are, we must be more like red wagons than leprechauns then. Since we can build red wagons that last thousands of years, then medicine can make people live thousands of years, too.
But we haven't actually ever made any red wagons that last thousands of years, which seems like more than a problem of mere detail for this "viewpoint." And the fact remains that even red wagons that might last for thousands of years aren't exactly living for thousands of years, which makes one wonder if saying humans are more "like" red wagons than leprechauns is really quite so useful as all that when everything is said and done, even if it is quite true.
PS: Of course, the even pithier version of techno-immortalism is just the question, breathlessly intoned, Don't you want to live forever? And the even pithier substance of that question is the infantile existential shriek: I don't wanna Di-ay-ay!
But we haven't actually ever made any red wagons that last thousands of years, which seems like more than a problem of mere detail for this "viewpoint." And the fact remains that even red wagons that might last for thousands of years aren't exactly living for thousands of years, which makes one wonder if saying humans are more "like" red wagons than leprechauns is really quite so useful as all that when everything is said and done, even if it is quite true.
PS: Of course, the even pithier version of techno-immortalism is just the question, breathlessly intoned, Don't you want to live forever? And the even pithier substance of that question is the infantile existential shriek: I don't wanna Di-ay-ay!
Sunday, August 16, 2009
The "Imagination" of a Robot Cultist
Over at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the stealth transhumanist Robot Cult outfit (with which I, an insistent critic of transhumanism and futurology more generally was briefly, unfortunately, affiliated myself), Martine Rothblatt asks the question that Robot Cultists ask endlessly over and over again: Can Consciousness Be Created in Software? As with the rest of the Robot Cultists, this question is for her merely a rhetorical one. It is of course precisely because they have already decided that code can indeed be conscious and that consciousness can be immortalized "through" disembodiment and coding that most Robot Cultists became Robot Cultists in the first place.
In the first paragraph of Rothblatt's piece, she writes:
While it is quite right to point out that there are thousands of clever coders working on the improvement of gaming systems at the moment, it is quite extraordinary to say that this amounts to work to "create cyberconsciousness." I daresay that vanishingly small numbers of coders actually working to produce less wooden NPCs (non player characters) and less fakey avatars in gaming environments would ever mistake their work as contributions to the "creation of cyberconsciousness," except perhaps for a handful of California coder boys who may already have joined the ranks of one of the Robot Cults here. Nobody who knows anything about consciousness would ever mistake an online avatar as possessing it, even incipiently.
That Rothblatt describes coders who do mistake software as a kind of aborning consciousness as engaging in "intelligent design" seems to me a revealing slip. To invest the technoscientific state of the art with a significance beyond the actual problems it solves and causes in the present, to invest it instead with the imaginary significance of constituting a stepping stone along a fatal road that is sure to eventuate in the arrival of super-predicated outcomes -- from software to superintelligence, as from medicine also to superlongevity, as from automation and biochemistry also to superabundance -- is to indulge in a faith-based initiative, an essentially religious enterprise, to confuse romance with science to the cost of both.
Although I have quoted Rothblatt's first paragraph in its entirety, I have not yet mentioned that it was preceded by a quote from Robert F. Kennedy: “Some men see things as they are and wonder why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not?” Robert F. Kennedy. Later, Rothblatt evokes John Lennon's "Imagine" to similar effect.
There are a few things to say about these cynical appropriations of heroes of mine and other progressives. First, Kennedy and Lennon were urging us to break the crust of convention to work toward visions of justice more capacious than the status quo afforded us, they were not urging us to pretend that two plus two equals five or, say, that the magic of the Harry Potter universe is real (although, come to think of it, the real magic in the Potter universe ends up deriving from the fact that diverse people working in concert can overcome the brutality of egomaniacs, which is not only really true but a lesson that Robot Cultists would do well to attend to). To engage in social struggle in the name of democracy, non-violence, and social justice as Kennedy and Lennon inspire us to do is a very different matter from the injunction of a Robot Cultist to confuse freedom for a mirage of endlessly amplified instrumental power, to confuse a diversity of peers acting in concert in the world with wish-fulfillment fantasies of "transcending" the world through technoscientific magicks.
Of course, you will have noticed that Rothblatt hasn't only announced one faith in her opening sentences but two, and both are enormously familiar from generations of technophiliacs who seem to have only a few songs to sing when all is said and done. Not only does she declare the faith that biologically incarnated consciousness can be coded (all empirical appearances to the contrary notwithstanding) but she declares this outcome a fatality, because there is so much money to be made in it: "[G]reat financial awards [are] available to the people who can make game avatars respond as curiously as people. Even vaster wealth awaits the programming teams that create personal digital assistants with the conscientiousness, and hence consciousness, of a perfect slave."
Of course, if one managed to code a conscious slave it seems to me it would be an "imperfect" one indeed, because it would need to freed immediately from bondage upon arriving at consciousness if you ask me. I won't discuss this, however, because this is precisely the sort of non-reality that Robot Cultists love best to indulge in, pretending that talking about made-up bullshit constitutes serious thinking about policy or science when it only functions to distract our attention from serious problems like actually existing trafficking of precarized human beings as sex-workers or miners or agricultural laborers in the neoliberal New World Order.
And don't even get me started about the rather horrifying identification Rothblatt seems to make between "conscientiousness, and hence consciousness" [emphasis added--d] -- I'll just assume that was an unfortunate slip of the keystroke she hasn't given much thought to the implications of. No, I will simply confine my observations to pointing out that it isn't enough for an outcome to be "profitable in principle" for it to be "possible in principle," no matter how many gung-ho "getting to yes" self-esteem seminars you attend, no matter how many ponzi-scheme financial gurus you read, no matter how fervently you pray to the predator Gods of Ayn Rand and the Friedmans, pere et fils.
Gee, I wonder, by the way, how Robert Kennedy and John Lennon would feel about the assimilation of their provocations to imagining a more just world to the "greed is good" mantras of market fundamentalism? No doubt, very very pleased indeed. Why, probably they would be as pleased as Thomas Jefferson would have been to hear the last idiotic generation of right-wing futurological sell-outs to describe their hippy 2.0 dot.bomb irrational exuberance as Jeffersonian democracy via the California Ideology.
From here Rothblatt goes on to ask a familiar philosophical question: "[H]ow is it that brains give rise to thoughts… but other parts of bodies do not?" From here she continues: "If these hard and easy questions can be answered for brain waves running on molecules, then it remains only to ask whether the answers are different for software code running on integrated circuits." That is to say, presumably, if we can get a handle on why things like brains can think, we might find ways of making things less like brains in key respects think also. This is reasonable enough as far as it goes, but there is absolutely no reason beyond Robot Cult ideology to assume in advance that the things less like brains that might still be capable of thought-likeness would necessarily have anything in the least to do with "software code running on integrated circuits" of all things and, worse still, only for Robot Cultists hopelessly lost in the full froth of True Belief would one ever say of the prospect of the discovery of the reasons why things like brains can think that "it [would] remain only to ask" upon such a discovery how then can we get software conscious? I daresay there would no end of interesting things to think about and do should we ever discover such a thing. But, then, I teach poetry and philosophy, who am I to know what would "remain only to ask" upon such an eventually, after all, compared to a scientist like Rothblatt (about which more later)?
Are "we" to assume that these "analogies" are measurable in the way the size of a building is (but as presumably its meaning as an historical landmark or its value as an architectural masterpiece is not)? And just who is included in this "we"? I certainly don't find myself inclined particularly to think of "memory chips, processors and peripherals" when I contemplate what we know about the "exquisite micro-mechanical" and electro-chemical processes that take place in biological brains and which seem to us to correlate indicatively to conscious thought processes. But, hey, again, that's just me, and who, after all, am I? Just a menacingly relativistic fashionably-nonsensical humanities person, no avatar of sooper-science like Martine Rothblatt and her posse of transhumanist and cybernetic totalist Robot Cultists, to be sure.
Rothblatt continues on in that paragraph: "[W]e still need an actual explanation of exactly how one or more neurons save, cut, paste and recall any word, number, scent or image. In other words, how do neuromolecules catch and process bits of information?"
What I would draw your attention to here is that the real argumentative work taking place in these formulations is happening at the level of figurative and not literal language. Just as Rothblatt admits that her faith in coding-become-consciousness is driven by analogies earlier on, in the space of a sentence or two these analogical machineries have been cranking on and on, but as if they were merely descriptive, predictive, indicative: We are now told we need an "explanation" for how neurons "save, cut, paste, and recall" words, numbers, images, and so on when what is most needful is a better understanding of why the metaphors to which Rothblatt is making recourse in thinking thought here involve "cutting and pasting" as if thought were a word-processing program.
Should we not think much more about what "explanations" are likely to arise in the first place from a research program framed in such prejudicial terms? When we ask the question, as Rothblatt does, "how do neuromolecules catch and process bits of information?" in what ways has the metaphorization of thoughts as things that can be "caught" or "processed [as] bits of information," in what ways has the question itself delimited the field of answers available to our attention and common sense?
This matters enormously because as often happens in the superlative futurological discourses of the Robot Cultists and their more mainstream technophiliac fellow-travelers as well, Rothblatt devotes a considerable amount of space to apparently technical discussions of neurons, outputs, qualia, and the like in her piece.
There is nothing Robot Cultists like better than to seduce skeptics into endless debates about such "technical" matters. The reason for this is because at its heart Robot Cultism is a faith-based system of beliefs organized through sub(cult)ural identification with fellow-believers (and dis-identification with the diversity of human peers with which they share the actual present, including the presents to come they disdain for investment in an idealized version of "The Future"). Because the superlative technodevelopmental outcomes in which they believe do not exist, because "The Future" does not exist, because the post-human beings with whom they identify don't exist, the substance of their faith is vouchsafed in the shared assertions of faith among their fellows (who represent a small, embattled, and defensive minority) as well as in the assertions of the terms of their discourse with those who do not share their faith but who can be made to pay attention to them or take them seriously on their terms.
I personally see no reason to indulge them in this desire of theirs. I take the frames and formulations of the Robot Cultists seriously as a symptom and as a reductio of underlying pathologies in prevailing technoscientific reductionist discourses on the one hand and mainstream anti-democratizing corporate-militarist "global developmental" discourses on the other hand.
Since it is clear that the heavy-lifting in even the Robot Cultists' most "technical" discussions is happening at the level of figurative language, it seems to me it should be judged on those terms. And so I judge it in the main to be very bad and usually completely derivative poetry.
Since most of the would-be scientific claims made by Robot Cultist's seem to veer enormously far from scientific consensus in the actual disciplines in which they pretend to be making their heroic contributions, I judge them to be crackpots.
While it is true that the progress of technoscience has often been fueled and driven by contributions at its outskirts, it is also true that the overabundant majority of claims made by folks at its outskirts were exactly as wrong and crackpotty as they appeared to be. And for those of us who are not in fact qualified credentialed experts in the fields in question (various medical fields, life sciences, neurology) the reasonable course is to accept the relevant scientific consensus as the most warranted belief. Robot Cultists exhibit extreme confidence in views that veer from scientific consensus in field after field after field -- in formulations suffused with familiar religious hopes for transcendence from human mortality, misery, finitude, uncertainty (rather than worldly work to solve problems in concert with the diversity of our peers) -- and all as evidence of their superior scientificity of all things. There are good reasons to be doubtful of some of their conclusions on this score.
According to her personal entry in Wikipedia (grain of salt taken, I presume) Martine Rothblatt "is an American lawyer, author, and entrepreneur[, who] graduated from UCLA with a combined law and MBA degree in 1981, then began work in Washington, D.C., first in the field of communication satellite law, and eventually in life sciences projects like the Human Genome Project." We are also alerted that "in 2007 [she] was the second-most highly compensated executive in the District of Columbia." I am, to be sure, pleased for her good fortune. But I am not much inclined to mistake her for a biologist or for an expert on consciousness, even so.
And I hope she will forgive me if I for one continue to turn to Robert Kennedy and John Lennon for inspiration in the struggle against incumbent interests (among whom she seems to me very likely to be one) in the service of peace and social justice, rather than for rationalizations for indulging in wish-fulfillment fantasies that substitute selfishness for solidarity, magick for freedom, and faith in imaginary technologies for worldly technoscience.
In the first paragraph of Rothblatt's piece, she writes:
There are thousands of software engineers across the globe working day and night to create cyberconsciousness. This is real intelligent design. There are great financial awards available to the people who can make game avatars respond as curiously as people. Even vaster wealth awaits the programming teams that create personal digital assistants with the conscientiousness, and hence consciousness, of a perfect slave.
While it is quite right to point out that there are thousands of clever coders working on the improvement of gaming systems at the moment, it is quite extraordinary to say that this amounts to work to "create cyberconsciousness." I daresay that vanishingly small numbers of coders actually working to produce less wooden NPCs (non player characters) and less fakey avatars in gaming environments would ever mistake their work as contributions to the "creation of cyberconsciousness," except perhaps for a handful of California coder boys who may already have joined the ranks of one of the Robot Cults here. Nobody who knows anything about consciousness would ever mistake an online avatar as possessing it, even incipiently.
That Rothblatt describes coders who do mistake software as a kind of aborning consciousness as engaging in "intelligent design" seems to me a revealing slip. To invest the technoscientific state of the art with a significance beyond the actual problems it solves and causes in the present, to invest it instead with the imaginary significance of constituting a stepping stone along a fatal road that is sure to eventuate in the arrival of super-predicated outcomes -- from software to superintelligence, as from medicine also to superlongevity, as from automation and biochemistry also to superabundance -- is to indulge in a faith-based initiative, an essentially religious enterprise, to confuse romance with science to the cost of both.
Although I have quoted Rothblatt's first paragraph in its entirety, I have not yet mentioned that it was preceded by a quote from Robert F. Kennedy: “Some men see things as they are and wonder why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not?” Robert F. Kennedy. Later, Rothblatt evokes John Lennon's "Imagine" to similar effect.
There are a few things to say about these cynical appropriations of heroes of mine and other progressives. First, Kennedy and Lennon were urging us to break the crust of convention to work toward visions of justice more capacious than the status quo afforded us, they were not urging us to pretend that two plus two equals five or, say, that the magic of the Harry Potter universe is real (although, come to think of it, the real magic in the Potter universe ends up deriving from the fact that diverse people working in concert can overcome the brutality of egomaniacs, which is not only really true but a lesson that Robot Cultists would do well to attend to). To engage in social struggle in the name of democracy, non-violence, and social justice as Kennedy and Lennon inspire us to do is a very different matter from the injunction of a Robot Cultist to confuse freedom for a mirage of endlessly amplified instrumental power, to confuse a diversity of peers acting in concert in the world with wish-fulfillment fantasies of "transcending" the world through technoscientific magicks.
Of course, you will have noticed that Rothblatt hasn't only announced one faith in her opening sentences but two, and both are enormously familiar from generations of technophiliacs who seem to have only a few songs to sing when all is said and done. Not only does she declare the faith that biologically incarnated consciousness can be coded (all empirical appearances to the contrary notwithstanding) but she declares this outcome a fatality, because there is so much money to be made in it: "[G]reat financial awards [are] available to the people who can make game avatars respond as curiously as people. Even vaster wealth awaits the programming teams that create personal digital assistants with the conscientiousness, and hence consciousness, of a perfect slave."
Of course, if one managed to code a conscious slave it seems to me it would be an "imperfect" one indeed, because it would need to freed immediately from bondage upon arriving at consciousness if you ask me. I won't discuss this, however, because this is precisely the sort of non-reality that Robot Cultists love best to indulge in, pretending that talking about made-up bullshit constitutes serious thinking about policy or science when it only functions to distract our attention from serious problems like actually existing trafficking of precarized human beings as sex-workers or miners or agricultural laborers in the neoliberal New World Order.
And don't even get me started about the rather horrifying identification Rothblatt seems to make between "conscientiousness, and hence consciousness" [emphasis added--d] -- I'll just assume that was an unfortunate slip of the keystroke she hasn't given much thought to the implications of. No, I will simply confine my observations to pointing out that it isn't enough for an outcome to be "profitable in principle" for it to be "possible in principle," no matter how many gung-ho "getting to yes" self-esteem seminars you attend, no matter how many ponzi-scheme financial gurus you read, no matter how fervently you pray to the predator Gods of Ayn Rand and the Friedmans, pere et fils.
Gee, I wonder, by the way, how Robert Kennedy and John Lennon would feel about the assimilation of their provocations to imagining a more just world to the "greed is good" mantras of market fundamentalism? No doubt, very very pleased indeed. Why, probably they would be as pleased as Thomas Jefferson would have been to hear the last idiotic generation of right-wing futurological sell-outs to describe their hippy 2.0 dot.bomb irrational exuberance as Jeffersonian democracy via the California Ideology.
From here Rothblatt goes on to ask a familiar philosophical question: "[H]ow is it that brains give rise to thoughts… but other parts of bodies do not?" From here she continues: "If these hard and easy questions can be answered for brain waves running on molecules, then it remains only to ask whether the answers are different for software code running on integrated circuits." That is to say, presumably, if we can get a handle on why things like brains can think, we might find ways of making things less like brains in key respects think also. This is reasonable enough as far as it goes, but there is absolutely no reason beyond Robot Cult ideology to assume in advance that the things less like brains that might still be capable of thought-likeness would necessarily have anything in the least to do with "software code running on integrated circuits" of all things and, worse still, only for Robot Cultists hopelessly lost in the full froth of True Belief would one ever say of the prospect of the discovery of the reasons why things like brains can think that "it [would] remain only to ask" upon such a discovery how then can we get software conscious? I daresay there would no end of interesting things to think about and do should we ever discover such a thing. But, then, I teach poetry and philosophy, who am I to know what would "remain only to ask" upon such an eventually, after all, compared to a scientist like Rothblatt (about which more later)?
At least since the time of Isaac Newton and Leibniz, it was felt that some things appreciated by the mind could be measured whereas others could not. The measurable thoughts, such as the size of a building, or the name of a friend, were imagined to take place in the brain via some exquisite micro-mechanical processes. Today we would draw analogies to a computer’s memory chips, processors and peripherals.
Are "we" to assume that these "analogies" are measurable in the way the size of a building is (but as presumably its meaning as an historical landmark or its value as an architectural masterpiece is not)? And just who is included in this "we"? I certainly don't find myself inclined particularly to think of "memory chips, processors and peripherals" when I contemplate what we know about the "exquisite micro-mechanical" and electro-chemical processes that take place in biological brains and which seem to us to correlate indicatively to conscious thought processes. But, hey, again, that's just me, and who, after all, am I? Just a menacingly relativistic fashionably-nonsensical humanities person, no avatar of sooper-science like Martine Rothblatt and her posse of transhumanist and cybernetic totalist Robot Cultists, to be sure.
Rothblatt continues on in that paragraph: "[W]e still need an actual explanation of exactly how one or more neurons save, cut, paste and recall any word, number, scent or image. In other words, how do neuromolecules catch and process bits of information?"
What I would draw your attention to here is that the real argumentative work taking place in these formulations is happening at the level of figurative and not literal language. Just as Rothblatt admits that her faith in coding-become-consciousness is driven by analogies earlier on, in the space of a sentence or two these analogical machineries have been cranking on and on, but as if they were merely descriptive, predictive, indicative: We are now told we need an "explanation" for how neurons "save, cut, paste, and recall" words, numbers, images, and so on when what is most needful is a better understanding of why the metaphors to which Rothblatt is making recourse in thinking thought here involve "cutting and pasting" as if thought were a word-processing program.
Should we not think much more about what "explanations" are likely to arise in the first place from a research program framed in such prejudicial terms? When we ask the question, as Rothblatt does, "how do neuromolecules catch and process bits of information?" in what ways has the metaphorization of thoughts as things that can be "caught" or "processed [as] bits of information," in what ways has the question itself delimited the field of answers available to our attention and common sense?
This matters enormously because as often happens in the superlative futurological discourses of the Robot Cultists and their more mainstream technophiliac fellow-travelers as well, Rothblatt devotes a considerable amount of space to apparently technical discussions of neurons, outputs, qualia, and the like in her piece.
There is nothing Robot Cultists like better than to seduce skeptics into endless debates about such "technical" matters. The reason for this is because at its heart Robot Cultism is a faith-based system of beliefs organized through sub(cult)ural identification with fellow-believers (and dis-identification with the diversity of human peers with which they share the actual present, including the presents to come they disdain for investment in an idealized version of "The Future"). Because the superlative technodevelopmental outcomes in which they believe do not exist, because "The Future" does not exist, because the post-human beings with whom they identify don't exist, the substance of their faith is vouchsafed in the shared assertions of faith among their fellows (who represent a small, embattled, and defensive minority) as well as in the assertions of the terms of their discourse with those who do not share their faith but who can be made to pay attention to them or take them seriously on their terms.
I personally see no reason to indulge them in this desire of theirs. I take the frames and formulations of the Robot Cultists seriously as a symptom and as a reductio of underlying pathologies in prevailing technoscientific reductionist discourses on the one hand and mainstream anti-democratizing corporate-militarist "global developmental" discourses on the other hand.
Since it is clear that the heavy-lifting in even the Robot Cultists' most "technical" discussions is happening at the level of figurative language, it seems to me it should be judged on those terms. And so I judge it in the main to be very bad and usually completely derivative poetry.
Since most of the would-be scientific claims made by Robot Cultist's seem to veer enormously far from scientific consensus in the actual disciplines in which they pretend to be making their heroic contributions, I judge them to be crackpots.
While it is true that the progress of technoscience has often been fueled and driven by contributions at its outskirts, it is also true that the overabundant majority of claims made by folks at its outskirts were exactly as wrong and crackpotty as they appeared to be. And for those of us who are not in fact qualified credentialed experts in the fields in question (various medical fields, life sciences, neurology) the reasonable course is to accept the relevant scientific consensus as the most warranted belief. Robot Cultists exhibit extreme confidence in views that veer from scientific consensus in field after field after field -- in formulations suffused with familiar religious hopes for transcendence from human mortality, misery, finitude, uncertainty (rather than worldly work to solve problems in concert with the diversity of our peers) -- and all as evidence of their superior scientificity of all things. There are good reasons to be doubtful of some of their conclusions on this score.
According to her personal entry in Wikipedia (grain of salt taken, I presume) Martine Rothblatt "is an American lawyer, author, and entrepreneur[, who] graduated from UCLA with a combined law and MBA degree in 1981, then began work in Washington, D.C., first in the field of communication satellite law, and eventually in life sciences projects like the Human Genome Project." We are also alerted that "in 2007 [she] was the second-most highly compensated executive in the District of Columbia." I am, to be sure, pleased for her good fortune. But I am not much inclined to mistake her for a biologist or for an expert on consciousness, even so.
And I hope she will forgive me if I for one continue to turn to Robert Kennedy and John Lennon for inspiration in the struggle against incumbent interests (among whom she seems to me very likely to be one) in the service of peace and social justice, rather than for rationalizations for indulging in wish-fulfillment fantasies that substitute selfishness for solidarity, magick for freedom, and faith in imaginary technologies for worldly technoscience.
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Futurological Self-Marginalization, Futurological Dissemination
If, like me, you spend time reading pieces from across the more left-leaning reality-based technoscience blogs collected together at Seed's Science Blogs (like Pharyngula), and the stuff by Mooney and others at Science Progress (under the auspices of the Center for American Progress), and the more pop-cultural stuff at places like io9, you'll know that there is an already varied and vigorous progressive-democratic broadly-secularist technoscience-literate conversation out there, a space that contains many thousands and thousands of people who
a, disagree with one another amicably on scores of issues while remaining broadly secularist and democratic and fact-based and proudly geeky,
b, who geek-out on futurological themes like Cylon uploading and artist renderings of space elevators without ever losing track of the difference between science and science fiction,
c, who already agree as a matter of course that libertopian schemes to dismantle civilization in the name of "spontaneous" market forces that don't exist except as a shorthand for incumbent interests always only leads to waste and disaster,
d, who accept the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is non-negligible and draw the sensible conclusion that this urgently demands human remediation at the level of policy and law,
e, who know that "race-science" is overwhelmingly a matter of pseudo-science functioning as a scarcely-stealthed proxy for ugly racist attitudes and inspires and "justifies" policy decisions with inequitable and deeply damaging impacts to fellow citizens,
f, who know full-well that Creation-science is not science but, at best, an aesthetic viewpoint often functioning as a signal of moralistic Christianist identification against secularism, and so on.
As I say, there are thousands upon thousands of secular-democratic folks out there already arguing for consensus science against creationist nonsense and for more research money for safe effective genetic therapies and for the implementation of renewable energy technologies and who are taking up p2p-tools to facilitate democratizing education, agitation, and organization here and now.
You can be sure that these thousands upon thousands of mainstream democratically-minded technoscientifically-literate multiculturally-celebratory folks are a force incomparably more rich, diverse, progressive, and relevant than the cohort of card-carrying members of futurological Robot Cults, transhumanists, extropians, techno-immortalists, cybernetic-totalists, singularitarians, nano-cornucopiasts could ever convene, past, present, and -- I certainly sincerely and strongly hope -- in presents to come.
There is simply no sensible, progressive reason on earth one would join a Robot Cult or take up their superlative futurological frames -- and those who do so should be exposed and marginalized whenever they seek to peddle their positions as either scientific (despite their distance from the consensus of practicing scientists on question after question after question) or democratizing (despite their distance from the language, alliances, campaigns, and concerns of secular-democratic education, agitation, and organizing on issue after issue after issue) as a result.
Beyond this, I do think that we should devote serious attention to the ways in which the figures, frames, and formulations of Robot Cultists provide insights in their very clarifying extremity of comparable arguments and assumptions in more prevailing mainstream neoliberal/neoconservative (ie: corporatist-militarist) global developmental discourse -- with its technocratic elitism, its commitments to "competition" and "innovation" in terms that always only benefit incumbent interests, its triumphal reductionist scientism and addiction to industrial technofixes, its treatment of parochial lifeway preferences as prior to political contestation, and so on.
These attitudes and formulations, consummated in the superlative extremity of the anxious or ecstatic wish-fulfillment fantasies and faith-based initiatives of the Robot Cultists, are playing out in the real world of technodevelopmental social struggle at the level of public discourse, policy deliberation, international law, advertising imagery and the popular imagination, here and now, often to devastating effect, the mainstream technocrats and superlative futurologists offering up a funhouse mirror quite as much as a constrast to one another.
a, disagree with one another amicably on scores of issues while remaining broadly secularist and democratic and fact-based and proudly geeky,
b, who geek-out on futurological themes like Cylon uploading and artist renderings of space elevators without ever losing track of the difference between science and science fiction,
c, who already agree as a matter of course that libertopian schemes to dismantle civilization in the name of "spontaneous" market forces that don't exist except as a shorthand for incumbent interests always only leads to waste and disaster,
d, who accept the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is non-negligible and draw the sensible conclusion that this urgently demands human remediation at the level of policy and law,
e, who know that "race-science" is overwhelmingly a matter of pseudo-science functioning as a scarcely-stealthed proxy for ugly racist attitudes and inspires and "justifies" policy decisions with inequitable and deeply damaging impacts to fellow citizens,
f, who know full-well that Creation-science is not science but, at best, an aesthetic viewpoint often functioning as a signal of moralistic Christianist identification against secularism, and so on.
As I say, there are thousands upon thousands of secular-democratic folks out there already arguing for consensus science against creationist nonsense and for more research money for safe effective genetic therapies and for the implementation of renewable energy technologies and who are taking up p2p-tools to facilitate democratizing education, agitation, and organization here and now.
You can be sure that these thousands upon thousands of mainstream democratically-minded technoscientifically-literate multiculturally-celebratory folks are a force incomparably more rich, diverse, progressive, and relevant than the cohort of card-carrying members of futurological Robot Cults, transhumanists, extropians, techno-immortalists, cybernetic-totalists, singularitarians, nano-cornucopiasts could ever convene, past, present, and -- I certainly sincerely and strongly hope -- in presents to come.
There is simply no sensible, progressive reason on earth one would join a Robot Cult or take up their superlative futurological frames -- and those who do so should be exposed and marginalized whenever they seek to peddle their positions as either scientific (despite their distance from the consensus of practicing scientists on question after question after question) or democratizing (despite their distance from the language, alliances, campaigns, and concerns of secular-democratic education, agitation, and organizing on issue after issue after issue) as a result.
Beyond this, I do think that we should devote serious attention to the ways in which the figures, frames, and formulations of Robot Cultists provide insights in their very clarifying extremity of comparable arguments and assumptions in more prevailing mainstream neoliberal/neoconservative (ie: corporatist-militarist) global developmental discourse -- with its technocratic elitism, its commitments to "competition" and "innovation" in terms that always only benefit incumbent interests, its triumphal reductionist scientism and addiction to industrial technofixes, its treatment of parochial lifeway preferences as prior to political contestation, and so on.
These attitudes and formulations, consummated in the superlative extremity of the anxious or ecstatic wish-fulfillment fantasies and faith-based initiatives of the Robot Cultists, are playing out in the real world of technodevelopmental social struggle at the level of public discourse, policy deliberation, international law, advertising imagery and the popular imagination, here and now, often to devastating effect, the mainstream technocrats and superlative futurologists offering up a funhouse mirror quite as much as a constrast to one another.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Futurological Brickbats Anthology
Here are all my occasional "Futurological Brickbats" arranged and updated roughly chronologically. For the funnier ones, just scroll through to the one liners. Further elaboration of many of the ideas in these assertions are archived under The Superlative Summary, Futurology Against Ecology, and in my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
I. The words "technology" and "democracy" are much more like verbs than the nouns they appear to be.
II. I think of "technology" as simply the ongoing collective prosthetic re-elaboration of inter-personal agency, while I think of "democracy" as simply the ongoing collective implementation of the idea that ever more people should have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.
III. Expressing, befuddling, enabling, implicating one another, technology and democracy are caught up in a circuit of interminable technodevelopmental social struggle, which constitutes the ongoing conversation in which humanity redetermines the meanings and movements available to it, and rededicates itself to that futurity the reopening in which humanity knows itself becoming itself.
IV. A peer is not an equal -- for there are no equals in a world of differences -- the peer is the one who appears in and by virtue of the public square, be it the polis of the streets or of the nets, who appears as one who contributes, contests, collaborates, and has a stake in the shared and made world in her differences from others who also so appear. The ethos of politics, peer-to-peer, is one and the same as the ethos of democratization, the interminable dynamic of equity-in-diversity.
V. Futurity is a register of freedom, "The Future" another prison-house built to confine it.
VI. Futurity is the openness in the present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of calculating, contending, and collaborative stakeholders who struggle to make and remake the shared world, peer to peer.
VII. Futurity cannot be delineated but only lived, in serial presents attesting always unpredictably to struggle and to expression. "The Future," to the contrary, brandishing the shackle of its definite article, is always described from a parochial present and is always a funhouse mirror reflecting a parochial present back to itself, amplifying its desires and fears, confirming its prejudices, reassuring its Believers that the Key to History is in their hands.
VIII. All progress is progress toward an end, but there can be no progress in the formation, expression, and evaluation of ends themselves, only either their circumscription or proliferation. To treat progress as an end-in-itself is to relinquish the specific stakes and situations without which any notion of progress at all is finally unintelligible.
IX. The discourses of futurology are in the business of investing the vicissitudes of ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle with the auras of novelty, nostalgia, or inevitability and then peddling these evocations of mood as pseudo-truths denominated "trends." Never once has a futurologist made a contribution to actual sense or to the solution of actually shared problems by means of this odd operation, but what a business it is.
X. Futurologists really have only four stories to tell with which they account for any real or imagined device, technique, or developmental moment: Genesis, Resurrection, Ascension, and Apocalypse. As any evangelist will tell you, that's more than enough to fleece a flock with.
XI. Futurology is not foresight, and it is farther still from wisdom, in the same ways that and for the same reasons that speculation is not investment, marketing is not deliberation, hyperbole is not critique, a syllogism is not a plan, a scenario is not a story, and a calculation is not a judgment.
XII. To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms.
XIII. All culture is prosthetic, all prostheses are culture.
XIV. Discourses of "Bio-Enhancement" always presume that certain incumbent interests or self-appointed biomoralist elites are authorized to designate what constitutes an "enhanced" human capacity, morphology, or lifeway -- whatever informed, nonduressed consenting persons might say to the contrary -- and hence all such discourses express a factual or aspirational eugenic outlook. Anyone who would claim or aspire to engineer an "optimal," idealized, postulated homo superior with which they presently identify, always at the cost of a dis-identification with the lifeway diversity of humanity with whom they actually share the world, are advocating a de facto eugenicist politics, whatever their claims or desires to the contrary.
Discourses of "Bio-Conservatism" always presume that certain incumbent interests or self-appointed biomoralist elites are authorized to designate what constitutes a "normal" or "natural" human capacity, morphology, or lifeway that must be protected and insulated from change -- whatever informed, nonduressed consenting persons might say to the contrary -- and hence all such discourses constitute a factual or aspirational eugenic outlook as well. Anyone who would ban reasonably safe, actually wanted, but non-normalizing medical interventions in an effort to "preserve" a static, idealized, postulated homo naturalis with which they presently identify, always at the cost of a dis-identification with the lifeway diversity of humanity with whom they actually share the world, are likewise advocating a de facto eugenicist politics, whatever their claims or desires to the contrary.
XV. Iconoclasts should always smash their mirrors first.
XVI. To care most about things that are merely not impossible is simply not sensible.
XVII. It is curious the number of twenty-first century futurologists whose notions of political economy remain firmly in the eighteenth century.
XVIII. To be marketable is not the same thing as to be insightful.
XIX. Every priestly peddler of immortality has died. Every one. And this is most certainly true as well of the priests of faithly medicine and reductionist scientism.
XX. To deny death out of a fear of it is to court a death in life worse by far than the death that is surely coming for you, for while immortality is not possible for you, it is indeed possible, and good, to live.
XXI. If you would find a conformist, look first to those who declare their faith in Progress.
XXII. To profess the dream of making an intelligent robot is always to confess the nightmare of being an unintelligent robot.
XXIII. The answer to the Fermi Paradox may simply be that we aren't invited to the party because so many humans are boring assholes. As evidence, consider that so many humans appear to be so flabbergastingly immodest and immature as to think it a "paradoxical" result to discover the Universe is not an infinitely faceted mirror reflecting back at us on its every face our own incarnations and exhibitions of intelligence.
XXIV. Whenever a software coder fancies that his trade renders him a philosopher, an economist, a poet, or, bless his heart, a biologist you can expect no end of foolishness and mischief from him.
XXV. It is always magical thinking to declare an outcome need only be profitable for it to be possible.
XXVI. Our foolish futurologists are peddling their wishful wares unaware that our world is the ruin of the futurological foolishness of their fathers.
XXVII. Those who dream of making themselves gods through technology are lying to themselves not least because god is already a dream we made ourselves through the technology of lying.
XXVIII. If I cannot dance I want no part in your reductive interpretations of evolution.
XXIX. We can use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house, indeed we must do so, because in taking up the master's tools and turning them to unheard of tasks we make the tools our own.
XXX. There is nothing more pathetic than boys who strive to sound prophetic.
XXXI. Computer science in its theological guise aims less at the ultimate creation of artificial intelligence than in the ubiquitous imposition of artificial imbecillence.
XXXII. The technological, properly so-called, is finally more stylish than it is truthful.
XXXIII. There's a sucker born every minute, and every futurologist you will ever meet is either one of them or hoping like hell you are.
XXXIV. The prefix "bio," when appended to the word "ethics," tends to have the curious effect of draining all the life out of ethics.
XXXV. The breathlessly ramifying "techno-ethical" pseudo-disciplines -- bio-ethics, neuro-ethics, net-ethics, nano-ethics, robo-ethics, and so on -- should all be regarded as essentially public relations and marketing subdisciplines, very much in the spirit of the "business ethics" out of which all these anti-ethical hyphenated-ethics have sprung.
XXXVI. Institutional "ethicians" are not educators so much as they are salesmen. And they should be treated as such: that is to say, in the expectation of attack or fraud.
XXXVII. The speculative fictions and scenarios and games of the futurologists are "speculative" less in the sense of critical thought than in the sense of financial speculation, just as their "futures" are far closer to the ones that get traded on stock exchanges, especially as bundled-risk pseudo-commodities.
XXXVIII. Your wishes are not insights, although they may provide insights for your therapist.
XXXIX. Futurological "optimism" is always a crassly opportunistic affair. Whenever a pop technologist puts his "Can Do" face on, you can be sure he fancies he sees a mark.
XL. Futurological declarations that there are No Limits! always ultimately translate to the customary conviction of very pampered and irresponsible people that there will always be other folks on hand to clean up their messes for them.
XL. From digitization to financialization to outsourcing to promotional re-branding of the status quo as "novelty" and "progress," time and time again neoliberalism indulges in fraudulent schemes in which insubstantial wishes and promises are peddled through deception as if they were substantial products, or through misdirection away from substantial costs and risks onto geographical or futurological distances, where devastating labor conditions and catastrophic environmental impacts and tragic personal dislocations vanish from our substantial concern.
XLI. The delusion of neoliberal immaterialism ultimately plays out in its fervent disavowals, first, of the material bodies and lifeways of the planetary Precariat obliterated in the supposedly frictionless flows of informal-informational capital, second, of the material bombs and bullets of neoconservative militarism that indispensably compel and enforce the adherence of the planetary Precariat to the supposedly "free trade" of duressed, vacuous-voluntary libertarianism, and third of the material metabolic limits and geophysical conditions of a precarious planet wounded, potentially beyond healing, by human enterprises driven by fantasies of infinite growth, infinite profit, infinite resources, infinite exploitation, infinite waste, infinite gratification, infinite willfulness.
L. To declare oneself "for" or "against" technology -- a technology-in-general treated as an abstraction indifferent to the different ways techniques and artifacts are actually historically and positionally deployed and understood -- is to engage in a technology politics that takes as its point of departure the de-politicizing evacuation of all the actual political substance at hand.
LI. Futurological movements are faith-based initiatives, translating familiar religious aspirations for "transcendence" into superficially techno-scientific terms, denying the present for a mutually-reinforcing hallucination of "The Future," and disdaining the lifeway diversity of the peers with whom they share the present world for an identification with an idealized post-human species.
LII. Futurologists keep confusing making bets with having thoughts.
LIII. Whenever I hear the word "trend," I reach for my brain.
LIV. Futurological predictions are just prescriptions without the courage of convictions.
LV. Evolution is not a design process, and no implemented design is more natural than any other.
LVI. The future, as it arrives, always kicks you in the crystal ball.
LVII. "Coincidence" is so much the spell that dispels magic it is easy to confuse its charm with the magic it displaces.
LVIII. While it is true that science's toypile can never connect consumers with Heaven, Job's dungheap never managed that trick for sinners either.
LIX. Separating people from their money promising they can get rich investing in the Next Big Thing or reassuring tragic gizmo-fetishes they are truly on the Bleeding Edge doesn't make you any kind of intellectual. It almost certainly does make you a scam artist, whether you are actually in on the scam yourself or not.
LX. All Your Gene Are Belong to Us
LXI. The Futurological Future: Same As It Ever Was.
LXII. The McKinley Administration + Robots. Sure, it sounds like feudalism, only... it's The Future!
LXIII. Far from endowing our artifacts with intelligence, we are mistaking for such endowment the process by which we are becoming ever more superficial and uncritical through our mediation and consumption of unintelligent artifacts.
LXIV. The Turing Test only tests us.
LXV. In coming to terms with the present, especially in grasping the meaning of what has taken us by surprise, we understand and, better still, become understanding. In predicting the future, especially in proposing coinages that would work as spells to dispel being taken by surprise, we become ever more susceptible to fraud and, worse still, become frauds. Where thinking is concerned, this is a variation on the difference between investment and speculation.
LXVI. Futurologists are a science fiction fandom pretending to be philosophers and policy wonks in a bid for attention and, for a few, for money.
LXVII. Futurological “scenarios” are usually just science fiction, but entirely bereft of clever plots, interesting characters, or sustained themes. Indeed, most futurological “scenarios” amount to little more than stipulated settings of a scene (hence their name). Inevitably, these settings are borrowed from actual science fiction writers, and given the plausibility that attaches to the familiar, futurologists tend to recycle those conceits real writers would disdain as cliches.
LXVIII. I Predict That In Twenty Years Futurological Predictions Will Still Inevitably Begin "I Predict That In Twenty Years"
LXIX. Futurology peddles expectations in the form of expectorations.
LXX. I know enough to know I don't know enough to be a scientific authority, while futurologists know enough to know that most people don't know enough to know the difference when they pretend to be scientific authorities.
LXXI. It is almost never safe to assume that something will happen just because it is technically feasible and obviously useful, but it is almost always safe to assume that something will not happen if it is more profitable to incumbent interests to frustrate it even when it is technically feasible and obviously useful.
LXXII. How do you know you're not conversing online with a bot? If you're really not sure, then you've become little better than a bot yourself so it doesn't much matter. Turing's Test was never really a measure of the arrival of artificial intelligence in nonhumans, but of the arrival in humans, through their involvement with idiotic implements, of artificial imbecillence.
LXXIII. Falling asleep in 1912 and waking up in 1962 would be such a flabbergasting leap into future shock you would probably think you were still dreaming. Falling asleep in 1962 and waking up in 2012 would be such a shattering disappointment you would probably crawl back to bed to return to your dreaming.
LXXIV. For decades the futurists crowed that robots would liberate laborers from the scourge of toil. Since the bosses predictably decided to pocket any extra profits the robots made, this meant instead restraining laborers to robotically meaningless low paying jobs and chronic unemployed poverty. Fewer futurists still anticipated laborers would then be seduced into buying cellphones that shackle them to their work every waking hour. Progress!
LXXV. When capitalists want you to forget The Revolution they talk to you about The Future.
LXXVI. Advertising is that grand enterprise through which the present is interminably and profitably re-branded and then re-sold as "The Future."
LXXVII. Today's tomorrow is nothing but less today peddled as more today.
LXXVIII. "X Changes Everything" + Elapsed Time = "Nothing Has Changed"
LXXIX. Cryonics isn't a more grisly way to treat a corpse than embalming is, but cryonics isn't a more scientific way to ensure the resurrection of a corpse than mummification is either.
LXXX. While it is true that paradigm shifts in the elaboration of human knowledge do indeed occur, it remains true as well that for every maverick dismissed as a crank there are countless cranks who fancy themselves mavericks.
LXXXI. Any sufficiently advanced futurology is indistinguishable from con artistry, er, magic.
LXXXII. They fear death who suspect their mortality but do not know it.
LXXXIII. I like my art revolutionary, my administration liberal, and my engineering conservative.
LXXXIV. It's hard to decide whether the futurological fantasists or the chemtrail conspiracists represent the most depressing derangement of environmentalism enabled by "geo-engineering" discourse.
LXXXV. When I was a kid every refrigerator had a bottle of Thousand Island dressing in it. Now, every refrigerator has a bottle of Ranch dressing in it. Progress under consumer capitalism is, we all know so well, marvelous and inexorable. Who knows what salad dressing will grace the refrigerators of the future?
LXXXVI. You Are Not A Picture of You. Brain emulation cheerleaders and uploading enthusiasts, please make a note of it.
LXXXVII. Crowdsourcing will always only amount to exploitation until it is subsidized by a public living income. Celebrating non-subsidized crowdsourcing is always only an apologia for plutocracy peddled as peer-to-peer.
LXXXVIII. Transhumanism paints its Future on black velvet.
LXXXIX. Things are getting so different so fast sometimes it's hard not to yawn from the future shock.
XC. Scientific exposures of the non-reality of freedom confuse an "ought" discussion with an "is" discussion. This confusion is not proof of fearless intellectual genius but of, you know, confusion.
XCI. Transhumanism wants to be Scientology when it grows up, Scientology wants to be Mormonism when it grows up, Mormonism wants to be Catholicism when it grows up, Catholicism wants to be the Empire when it grows up.
XCII. Successful mainstream futurology amplifies irrational consumption through marketing hype and makes profitable short term predictions for the benefit of investors, the only reliable source for which is insider information. Successful superlative futurology amplifies irrational greed and terror through the conjuration of a techno-transcendent vision of "The Future" peddled as long-term predictions the faithful in which provide unearned attention and money for the benefit of guru-wannabes and pseudo-experts, the source for which is science fiction mistaken for science practice and science policy. You will have noticed that fraud is the common denominator of futurology in both its mainstream and superlative modes.
XCIII. "The Singularity" happens not at the moment when machines become more intelligent than humans, but at the moment when the way humans talk about machines makes them less intelligent.
XCIV. Those who worry about workers being replaced by robots fail to grasp that workers being treated AS robots is always a more urgent worry -- and sets the terms for their robotic replacement as well.
XCV. "Artificial Intelligence" is always an essentially fetishistic misrecognition of computer-mediated relations among intelligent humans.
XCVI. For generations now science fiction cover art has prophetically anticipated the breathtaking future of America's amusement parks.
XCVII. Futurism is redundant, after all, since one can always be an actual scientist or policymaker if you want to contribute to technodevelopment, and one can always be a real sf fan if you want to be excited about highly speculative projected technoscience.
XCVIII. No matter how big Big Data gets it will still be dumb data.
XCIX. "Artificial Intelligence" is an unintelligent description of unintelligent artifacts by unintelligent people.
C. Futurologists saying things we can't do would be cool if we could do them aren't actually contributing to science. Futurologists saying things we can't do could be done if we discovered how to do them aren't actually saying anything. Futurologists saying we will discover how to do things we can't do just because we don't know we can't is fraud, or at best false advertising.
CI. Computers no more play games of chess than chess boards do.
CII. Silicon today, siligone tomorrow.
CIII. Transhumanism is an effort to pretend confusing humans for robots and mistreating humans as robots is a science of humans becoming robots.
CIV. VACUING, n., The practice of analogizing every practice with computer hacking in the expectation that this will provide insight, but with the consequence of evacuating all substance and interest.
CV. More cameras don't only converge onto "the facts" when more cameras also have more readers.
CVI. That we will be profiled by ubiquitous corporate-military surveillance may be irresistible. That we will be defined by these profiles as people or our status as citizens determined by them absolutely can and must be resisted.
CVII. Is there any sweeter song in all the world than elites peddling predation and denial as "optimism"?
CVIII. Books shouldn't have buttons, the better to push them.
CIX. Every book was already a screen, reading them on screens adds nothing but the threat of losing everything.
CX. Urgent truths are just as likely to be concealed as exposed by more data.
CXI. Whole Earth was TED before TED. You do realize nothing more damning could be said?
CXII. "We are as gods and might as well get good at it" is best read as an exhortation to non-existence for megalomaniacal technofetishists.
CXIII. "Stay hungry" is a curse and not a virtue in the world beneath privilege. "Stay foolish" is privilege making fools of the hungry.
CXIV. Prophesy's false promise destroys memory's true wisdom.
CXV. The singularity happens when we are all reduced to artificial imbecillence by autocorrect.
CXVI. Because of the futurological framing of history they buy into, tech companies are forever confusing crap consumers buy with history.
CXVII. Google Glassholes all think they are Locutus of Borg. But we will not be assimilated.
CXVIII. Always an ought and never an is, "coolness" is not in features themselves but in the investment of features with a narrative of transcendence. And the discourse of "innovation" now amounts mostly to skirmishes over this coolness.
CXIX. There's a persistent mismatch between techies who desire gadgets that help them pretend to live in or closer to "The Future" and consumers who desire gadgets that actually do useful things well in the present.
CXX. "Trends" are not ridden but written.
CXXI. If you think about "technology" as singular not plural, as noun not verb, as destiny not history, as it not us, you're doing it wrong.
CXXII. Compared with the Pill, the "digital revolution" really is a nonstory, and one endlessly retold only because men fancy themselves the protagonists.
CXXIII. Every time a person uses the word "meme" a human mind loses her wings.
CXXIV. Making their new predictions is the way futurologists distract you from the failure of their old predictions.
CXXV. "tl;dr" is the appropriately illiterate abbreviation for the self confession: "Too stupid, won't read."
CXXVI. The social and cultural study of technoscientific changes does not threaten discovery but only marketing.
CXXVII. Those who decry the menacing relativism of situated technoscience scholarship rarely have something to tell us but invariably have something to sell us.
CXXVIII. There is no more fundamental misrecognition of the force of science fiction than to think it concerns what if more than what is.
CXXIX. The thing you need to remember about the Luddites is that smashing machines is itself a machine. As they well knew.
CXXX. Design ideology's self-congratulatory MAYA Principle declares "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable" what is usually Merely Adequate Yet Acclaimed.
CXXXI. When science fiction conceits become too tired even for hacks, that's when futurists can be counted on to arrive to turn them into ad copy.
CXXXII. To lose the expectation of privacy is substantially to lose the presumption of innocence. To live under surveillance and profiling is always to be committing the not-yet-determinable crimes for which you are being framed.
CXXXIII. The pretense that Technology "Is" a thing enables only the technology writer/promoter, just as the pretense that there "Is" a God enables only the priest.
CXXXIV. The quintessential literary genre of the neoliberal epoch, our Digital Gilded Age, is the futurological scenario: an indulgence in artless, reductive, promotional fraud.
CXXXV. Just as the futurological championing of "enhanced" humans is really an expression of disdain for the living diversity of humans with which we share the world peddled as the generosity of healthcare, futurological enthusiasm for space as an "escape hatch" from political and environmental problems is an expression of disdain for the living earth on which we have evolved to flourish peddled as the wonder of exploration.
CXXXVI. A futurist's resume is a dating profile in which hobbies and interests are mistaken for areas of expertise. This reflects the fact that corporations are the only people willing to date futurists, my friend.
CXXXVII. Reactionary discourse in general misconstrues observations as predictions, usually in the form of threats, while reactionary futurological discourse in particular peddles predictions as observations.
CXXXIX. The wireless future is the rabbit ears past.
CXL. Pretending software is people interferes with the work to make software more user-friendly or networks more secure in much the same way that pretending corporations are people interferes with the work of democratizing enterprise.
CXLI. "Transparency" names official interpretations that target and frame you for the benefit of incumbent elites via traces they select from the ones you leave. "Transparency" is plutocracy's opacity.
CXLII. Futurology is an anti-disciplinarity pretending to be inter-disciplinary.
CXLIII. There is no such thing as "the internet" apart from laws, norms, practices, affordances many of which precede and exceed "the internet." There are no natural, spontaneous, abiding, spatial realities that are either "the internet" or "the market," only histories, contingencies, and parochialisms. It is no surprise that arguments presumably defending, saving, promoting "the free internet" are made so often by the same people who make arguments defending, saving, promoting "the free market" -- and so often in ways that re-enact the false, facile terms made defending, saving, promoting "the free market" -- nor that the freedoms that would be sited and secured there inevitably find no hook to hang their hat on.
CXLIV. The downcast eyes of people staring into cellphones, penitents forever contemplating their unredeemable Original Debt to consumer society.
CXLV. Every libertechbrotarianism rationalizes techbroverlordism.
CXLVI. AI discourse is mostly an hilarious effort to mansplain intelligence to an indifferent reality.
CXLVII. It is revealing how often the choice of effective, familiar, appropriate techniques and technologies over untried or unduly complex ones will invite charges of "luddism" or "technophobia."
CXLVIII. Futurism is the denial of futurity. Futurology is the appropriation of the emergent by the dominant.
CXLIX. Our futurity is not The Future: Progress is a struggle, not a marketing campaign.
CL. The internet without a safety net leaves everybody smashed on the Coasean Floor.
CLI. Digitization didn't smash the state, it is the crisis in which the interminable alternative is posed to a new generation: Socialism or Barbarism?
CLII. Universal BIG + Zero IP = Free As In Democracy
CLIII. There are real unethical robots in the military to worry about and they are all Brass.
CLIV. Phanwanking, phanwankery, n. -- related to fanboy fanwanking/fanwankery, a form of ludicrously elaborate rationalization to which futurologists are prone, but involving speculative pseudo-science rather than speculative science-fiction.
CLV. Singularitarians have a black hole where their brains should be.
CLVI. Techno-utopians like AI-deadenders and missiledefense-deadenders truly seem to love crowing over test results that reveal nothing but their serial failures.
CLVII. Using the term "technology," like using the passive voice, distracts attention from or disavows responsibility for actions of human beings.
CLVIII. Futurology peddles SF's poetry as prophesy to profiteers for profit.
CLIX. The priests of artificial intelligence offering up their digital confessions and performing their digital exorcisms will never ameliorate the work of software as a worldly instrument of terror.
CLX. Climate change is already the end of the world for countless people on earth, and to displace climate catastrophe onto "The Future" is always first of all an ugly admission of indifference to suffering and death in the present.
CLXI. The Future is always a violent occupation of the present.
CLXII. Techno-transcendentalists really bring the idiocy to theodicy.
CLXIII. When it comes to the movies, most science fiction would be more accurately described as pseudoscience fiction.
CLXIV. Perhaps the President could declare the internet a National Park or Wilderness Area and fund it by making advertisers pay through the nose for trying to pollute the place.
CLXV. Futurology is what happens to thinking when marketing happens to commonsense.
CLXVI. Futurist explains it's supposed to suck. Demands payment.
CLXVII. Body-Cameras as the ready technofix for the political problem of police violence disavows the politics policing the significance of surveilled images. It is all too easy for the police to frame an avalanche of mediated spam, flak and spin as "transparency": After all, the same stratifications enabling police violence will articulate the interpretation of its image.
CLXVIII. Every panoptism is always a pancryptism: every transparency is enabled by opacities.
CLXIX. Prior to the positing of any "technofix" for a political problem is always the technofixation that disavows its politics to subvert politics.
CLXX. Our digital devices are documenting stasis not progress.
CLXXI. Futurology in its techno-transcendental moods is infantile wish-fulfillment, in its existential risk moods infantile attention seeking.
CLXXII. tr;dl: too real, didn't live
CLXXIII. Every tool and every technique is a text.
CLXXIV. It makes sense, I suppose, that robot cultists would be so robotically predictable.
CLXXV. First as futurism, then as food court.
CLXXVI. To declare yourself a "Friend of the Future" is always to ally with its stakeholders against those of every alternate future, and against open futurity as such.
CLXXVII. The Future of the futurologists is the lottery you will never win.
CLXXVIII. The problem with pleas for more "positive" or "utopian" sf is that they are essentially efforts to replace literature with advertising.
CLXXIX. Human beings are capable of almost anything. Hope is the last thing we should draw from this recognition, but it is one thing.
CLXXX. To trouble long definitive human limits with technoscientific change is not to put an end to all limits but to create and confront new ones.
CLXXXI. Foresight under capitalism amounts mainly to marketing failed warnings as successful predictions.
CLXXXII. Futurologists want to be corporate consultants who are taken to be culture critics.
CLXXXIII. Futurology is a form of masturbation resulting in neologism.
CLXXXIV. Predicting the future mirrors glorifying the past. Both conduce more to reaction than progress.
CLXXXV. Foresight arises from critical, empathetic, and scientific engagements in and with the present, while "predicting the future" is usually just a short-term sales pitch, a rationalization of abuses, or the reassurance of elites masquerading as foresight.
CLXXXVI. The digital utopians crowed we were witnessing a transition from atoms to bits. What we are witnessing instead is a transition from owners to renters, from peers to debtors, from citizens to targets.
CLXXXVII. Anything wearable is technology, so much of the work of “wearable technology” discourse is to deny most wearable technology is technology.
CLXXXVIII. When neoliberal futurologists replace public intellectuals and corporate-military think-tanks replace universities, you can be sure that marketing elite-incumbency in the name of "The Future" will replace the emancipatory work of understanding our present.
CLXXXIX. Driverless cars, 3D-printers, bitcoin will sweep the world! -- Futurists
Hula-Hoops, Frisbees, Slip'N Slides will sweep the world! -- Wham-O
CXC. The Future is Then.
CXCI. "Trends" are not actually existing phenomena exerting influence in the world or uniquely observable by futurological experts, trends are instead a narrative genre to which futurologists are devoted, simplifying to the point of denying history and hence providing reactionary rationalizations for and reassurances to incumbent elites.
CXCII. Those who forget the crappy commodities of the past are doomed to buy the same crap marketed as something new over and over again.
CXCIII. Ever notice how everything looks like a design problem to self-designated designers?
CXCIV. Design is what politics looks like when elite minorities make decisions for majorities and pretend it's okay because design isn't politics.
CXCV. There are basically two kinds of tech company: the ones that should be prosecuted for fraud and the ones that should be nationalized as public utilities.
CXCVI. "Future Shock" is what happens when advertizing hyping stasis as novelty, progress, and disruption makes you yawn so hard your head splits in half.
CXCVII. Why pine for escape to extra-terrestrial hellscapes when we can work to keep earth from becoming an alter-terrestrial hellscape instead?
CXCVIII. If you think the future is for predicting things in you've already gotten everything wrong.
CXCIX. I'm a lacto-ovo vegetarian now, but obviously in The Future will be a digi-nano vegetarian.
CC. Curious the number of champions of artificial intelligence and artificial life who are unintelligent and don't have a life.
CCI. Rugged Individualism in the Technological Society: The body a cyborg shell made of genes and guns, the soul a target made of computation and marketing.
CCI. Superintelligent AI is like chemtrails for rich white tech CEOs.
CCII. If you are worried about superintelligence you should be worried about your intelligence.
CCIII. Algorithms may have a cult but they can never have a culture.
CCIV. After a quarter century of futurological criticism I can say with some confidence that The Singularity is an asshole.
CCV. It is worse than wrong to attribute intelligence or agency to an artifact, for not only is it neither but you too will have less of either.
CCVI. If you would "stop killer robots" you need only ensure those humans who make them to kill or use them to kill pay much more for so doing than they can ever profit.
CCVII. "Let us strangle the last tech CEO with the guts of the last techbro." -- Twenis Twitterot
CCVIII. When accelerating futurological marketing finally fools us into investing dull artifacts with the zing of intelligence and agency we will arrive at the zingularity.
CCIX. So much "futurological methodology" simply amounts to conventional con-man discipline: pick your buzzwords, keep a straight face, stay upbeat, stick to your story...
CCX. "Hard SF" gives techbros erections with a fetishism of gizmos and numbers, "Soft SF" causes techbro shrinkage with an awareness of social struggle and diversity.
CCXI. The People do not arise from The Internet, what passes for the internet arises from the struggles of people.
CCXII. Dear Futurists: Everything changes something but nothing changes everything. Please make a note of it.
CCXIII. Funhouse Mirror Stage: The future of the unconscious will be structured like Big Data.
CCXIV. Most futurologists are hacks peddling themselves as hackers.
CCXV. The technofix is always in.
CCXVI. Only tools talk of only tools.
CCXVII. Techbro + Mansplaining = Techbro-it-alls.
CCXVIII. Professional futurologists engage in two essential activities: making predictions and scolding people for expecting their predictions to come true.
CCXIX. "The Future" is tech bubbles all the way down.
CCXX.Why is it futurologists gazing in a crystal ball always see consumers grazing in a crystal mall?
CCXXI. "How do we make robots moral?" is a nonsensical question.
"How do we make roboticists moral?" is an indispensable question.
CCXXII. The "open" in Open Source is always open "for business."
CCXXIII. The term for an historical period in which most people are deliberately uninformed and misinformed is, apparently, an "Information Age."
CCXXIV. Everybody knows if you make a pile of abacuses high enough it will wake up and end history.
CCXXV. An Apple watch handcuff encircling our wrists to hector us every second of the day is truly the techbro idea of a virtuous circle.
CCXXVI. Extrapolation always begins as a parochialism and usually ends as an evangelism.
CCXXVII. Accounts of historical change that assume technological determinism or autonomous technology do not make tools into historical agents but deny historical agency to all but those incumbent elites who own and control most tools.
CCXXVIII. Fight The Feudal Future!
CCXXIX. Tech Talkers will never stop selling their landfill hellscape as a toypile to heaven. But we can stop buying it.
CCXXX. Sensawundabread: The uncritical enthusiasm of gizmo-fandoms for useless landfill-destined consumer crap peddled as paradigm-shattering.
CCXXXI. Nothing is more deranging to foresight than the pretense that it has anything to do with that impoverished imaginary object, "The Future."
CCXXXII. "Technology" is the magic word that turns progressive feelings into reactionary dealings.
CCXXXIII. There's nothing like a tech demo to reveal there's a sucker re-born every minute.
CCXXXIV. "Progress" is definitely not the word I would use to describe the replacement of the Space Age with the Cyberspace Age.
CCXXXV. "The Future" of the futurists has nothing to do with history. "The Future" is Heaven. "The Future" is Hell. "The Future" is Eden. "The Future" is Rapture. "The Future" does not, nor will it ever, exist.
CCXXXVI. The aspiration as well as the work of "The Internet of Things" has never been otherwise than to mediate the reduction of people to things.
CCXXXVII. Fermi's Truism? There are no signs of terrestrial civilization despite the abundance of apparently intelligent humans on earth.
CCXXXVIII. Free As In "Free, Just Pay!"
CCXXXIX. Do enjoy the micromoment of microlife afforded by this micropayment.
CCXL. Science is suffused with Not Knowing. Pseudo-science is enthused with Know-Nothings and Know-It-Alls.
CCXLI. No technodevelopmental outcomes are inevitable but that futurologists will declare them so.
CCXLII. The more things stay the same, the more they are marketed as change.
CCXLIII. Any sufficiently advanced magical thinking is indistinguishable from technology journalism.
CCXLIV. The Future's so bright I gotta give shade.
CCXLV. Truly effective Ad Blocker software would blank out most financial and technology journalism.
CCXLVI. Ever notice how films presumably dramatizing the implications of the Turing Test actually test whether a human actor can pass as a computer?
CCXLVII. The futurological delight in the term "resilience" is the ugly celebration of the capacity of some people to survive abuse and neglect so that plutocrats can accumulate more wealth.
CCXLVIII. It is odd how any proposal that technodevelopment could be driven by sustainability concerns is regarded as fanciful when our survival actually depends on it. It is also odd how the assumption that technodevelopment will always be driven by military concerns is regarded as realistic when it actually threatens our annihilation. With such conventional wisdom, I don't like our odds.
CCXLIX. The denial of human finitude is not transcendence but tantrum.
CCL. Any sufficiently marketed technology is indistinguishable from tragic.
CCLI. Digital utopianism is the peddling of zeros as ones.
CCLII. It's telling how often the results of the "fully customizable" are indistinguishable.
CCLIII. The Driverless Car is the futurological promise we will save ourselves from car-culture by saving... car culture!
CCLIV. When someone declares themselves a "technologist" it is usually safest to assume they are bragging about using language and wearing clothes.
CCLV. Your favorite critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic drama will return after a word from these polluting luxury sedans, landfill-destined handheld devices and fraudulent pharmaceutical products.
CCLVI. "Ecce Homo!" -- every selfie ever.
CCLVII. Startups don't impress me, but the way they end up does amuse me.
CCLVIII. You can always tell when a transhumanist wants something incoherent... because they call it inevitable.
CCLIX. A bet is never an argument, but futurists and market ideologues are always betting it will pass for one.
CCLX. Futurists, like other fashion writers, live on the ongoing confusion of the next with the new.
CCLXI. "The Future" is a form of present-day ugliness so intolerable that futurists change the way they sell it every six months.
CCLXII. Stop worrying about the future robocalypse. You already died in the robocalypse when you became somebody who can't "live" without your crappy phone.
CCLXIII. Futurists always say everything is New, but futurists never say anything that is new.
CCLXIV. I predict that in 2016 futurists will continue to be predictable.
CCLXV. When a book by futurist Ray Kurzweil becomes a best seller, we call that event a credularity.
CCLXVI. Welcome to the Internet of Being Treated Like Things.
CCLXVII. You say startup, I say stopit.
CCLXVIII. Those who once said "let the market decide" will soon say "let the AIs decide" and they will mean the same thing by it: Let the rich decide.
CCLXIX. All STEM, no bloom.
CCLXX. Fool plus tourism is futurism.
CCLXXI. Algorithms are no more artificially intelligent than heavy machinery is artificially muscular.
CCLXXII. Nobody loses jobs to robots. People lose jobs to the owners of robots.
CCLXXIII. Let me share something with you: The sharing economy is about replacing public sharing with private extraction.
CCLXXIV. The less said the twitter.
CCLXXV. Futurists are what pass for public intellectuals when marketing is what passes for truth.
CCLXXVI. There is not much left to digitality once you have removed the criminality.
CCLXXVII. Let them eat disruption.
I. The words "technology" and "democracy" are much more like verbs than the nouns they appear to be.
II. I think of "technology" as simply the ongoing collective prosthetic re-elaboration of inter-personal agency, while I think of "democracy" as simply the ongoing collective implementation of the idea that ever more people should have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.
III. Expressing, befuddling, enabling, implicating one another, technology and democracy are caught up in a circuit of interminable technodevelopmental social struggle, which constitutes the ongoing conversation in which humanity redetermines the meanings and movements available to it, and rededicates itself to that futurity the reopening in which humanity knows itself becoming itself.
IV. A peer is not an equal -- for there are no equals in a world of differences -- the peer is the one who appears in and by virtue of the public square, be it the polis of the streets or of the nets, who appears as one who contributes, contests, collaborates, and has a stake in the shared and made world in her differences from others who also so appear. The ethos of politics, peer-to-peer, is one and the same as the ethos of democratization, the interminable dynamic of equity-in-diversity.
V. Futurity is a register of freedom, "The Future" another prison-house built to confine it.
VI. Futurity is the openness in the present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of calculating, contending, and collaborative stakeholders who struggle to make and remake the shared world, peer to peer.
VII. Futurity cannot be delineated but only lived, in serial presents attesting always unpredictably to struggle and to expression. "The Future," to the contrary, brandishing the shackle of its definite article, is always described from a parochial present and is always a funhouse mirror reflecting a parochial present back to itself, amplifying its desires and fears, confirming its prejudices, reassuring its Believers that the Key to History is in their hands.
VIII. All progress is progress toward an end, but there can be no progress in the formation, expression, and evaluation of ends themselves, only either their circumscription or proliferation. To treat progress as an end-in-itself is to relinquish the specific stakes and situations without which any notion of progress at all is finally unintelligible.
IX. The discourses of futurology are in the business of investing the vicissitudes of ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle with the auras of novelty, nostalgia, or inevitability and then peddling these evocations of mood as pseudo-truths denominated "trends." Never once has a futurologist made a contribution to actual sense or to the solution of actually shared problems by means of this odd operation, but what a business it is.
X. Futurologists really have only four stories to tell with which they account for any real or imagined device, technique, or developmental moment: Genesis, Resurrection, Ascension, and Apocalypse. As any evangelist will tell you, that's more than enough to fleece a flock with.
XI. Futurology is not foresight, and it is farther still from wisdom, in the same ways that and for the same reasons that speculation is not investment, marketing is not deliberation, hyperbole is not critique, a syllogism is not a plan, a scenario is not a story, and a calculation is not a judgment.
XII. To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms.
XIII. All culture is prosthetic, all prostheses are culture.
XIV. Discourses of "Bio-Enhancement" always presume that certain incumbent interests or self-appointed biomoralist elites are authorized to designate what constitutes an "enhanced" human capacity, morphology, or lifeway -- whatever informed, nonduressed consenting persons might say to the contrary -- and hence all such discourses express a factual or aspirational eugenic outlook. Anyone who would claim or aspire to engineer an "optimal," idealized, postulated homo superior with which they presently identify, always at the cost of a dis-identification with the lifeway diversity of humanity with whom they actually share the world, are advocating a de facto eugenicist politics, whatever their claims or desires to the contrary.
Discourses of "Bio-Conservatism" always presume that certain incumbent interests or self-appointed biomoralist elites are authorized to designate what constitutes a "normal" or "natural" human capacity, morphology, or lifeway that must be protected and insulated from change -- whatever informed, nonduressed consenting persons might say to the contrary -- and hence all such discourses constitute a factual or aspirational eugenic outlook as well. Anyone who would ban reasonably safe, actually wanted, but non-normalizing medical interventions in an effort to "preserve" a static, idealized, postulated homo naturalis with which they presently identify, always at the cost of a dis-identification with the lifeway diversity of humanity with whom they actually share the world, are likewise advocating a de facto eugenicist politics, whatever their claims or desires to the contrary.
XV. Iconoclasts should always smash their mirrors first.
XVI. To care most about things that are merely not impossible is simply not sensible.
XVII. It is curious the number of twenty-first century futurologists whose notions of political economy remain firmly in the eighteenth century.
XVIII. To be marketable is not the same thing as to be insightful.
XIX. Every priestly peddler of immortality has died. Every one. And this is most certainly true as well of the priests of faithly medicine and reductionist scientism.
XX. To deny death out of a fear of it is to court a death in life worse by far than the death that is surely coming for you, for while immortality is not possible for you, it is indeed possible, and good, to live.
XXI. If you would find a conformist, look first to those who declare their faith in Progress.
XXII. To profess the dream of making an intelligent robot is always to confess the nightmare of being an unintelligent robot.
XXIII. The answer to the Fermi Paradox may simply be that we aren't invited to the party because so many humans are boring assholes. As evidence, consider that so many humans appear to be so flabbergastingly immodest and immature as to think it a "paradoxical" result to discover the Universe is not an infinitely faceted mirror reflecting back at us on its every face our own incarnations and exhibitions of intelligence.
XXIV. Whenever a software coder fancies that his trade renders him a philosopher, an economist, a poet, or, bless his heart, a biologist you can expect no end of foolishness and mischief from him.
XXV. It is always magical thinking to declare an outcome need only be profitable for it to be possible.
XXVI. Our foolish futurologists are peddling their wishful wares unaware that our world is the ruin of the futurological foolishness of their fathers.
XXVII. Those who dream of making themselves gods through technology are lying to themselves not least because god is already a dream we made ourselves through the technology of lying.
XXVIII. If I cannot dance I want no part in your reductive interpretations of evolution.
XXIX. We can use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house, indeed we must do so, because in taking up the master's tools and turning them to unheard of tasks we make the tools our own.
XXX. There is nothing more pathetic than boys who strive to sound prophetic.
XXXI. Computer science in its theological guise aims less at the ultimate creation of artificial intelligence than in the ubiquitous imposition of artificial imbecillence.
XXXII. The technological, properly so-called, is finally more stylish than it is truthful.
XXXIII. There's a sucker born every minute, and every futurologist you will ever meet is either one of them or hoping like hell you are.
XXXIV. The prefix "bio," when appended to the word "ethics," tends to have the curious effect of draining all the life out of ethics.
XXXV. The breathlessly ramifying "techno-ethical" pseudo-disciplines -- bio-ethics, neuro-ethics, net-ethics, nano-ethics, robo-ethics, and so on -- should all be regarded as essentially public relations and marketing subdisciplines, very much in the spirit of the "business ethics" out of which all these anti-ethical hyphenated-ethics have sprung.
XXXVI. Institutional "ethicians" are not educators so much as they are salesmen. And they should be treated as such: that is to say, in the expectation of attack or fraud.
XXXVII. The speculative fictions and scenarios and games of the futurologists are "speculative" less in the sense of critical thought than in the sense of financial speculation, just as their "futures" are far closer to the ones that get traded on stock exchanges, especially as bundled-risk pseudo-commodities.
XXXVIII. Your wishes are not insights, although they may provide insights for your therapist.
XXXIX. Futurological "optimism" is always a crassly opportunistic affair. Whenever a pop technologist puts his "Can Do" face on, you can be sure he fancies he sees a mark.
XL. Futurological declarations that there are No Limits! always ultimately translate to the customary conviction of very pampered and irresponsible people that there will always be other folks on hand to clean up their messes for them.
XL. From digitization to financialization to outsourcing to promotional re-branding of the status quo as "novelty" and "progress," time and time again neoliberalism indulges in fraudulent schemes in which insubstantial wishes and promises are peddled through deception as if they were substantial products, or through misdirection away from substantial costs and risks onto geographical or futurological distances, where devastating labor conditions and catastrophic environmental impacts and tragic personal dislocations vanish from our substantial concern.
XLI. The delusion of neoliberal immaterialism ultimately plays out in its fervent disavowals, first, of the material bodies and lifeways of the planetary Precariat obliterated in the supposedly frictionless flows of informal-informational capital, second, of the material bombs and bullets of neoconservative militarism that indispensably compel and enforce the adherence of the planetary Precariat to the supposedly "free trade" of duressed, vacuous-voluntary libertarianism, and third of the material metabolic limits and geophysical conditions of a precarious planet wounded, potentially beyond healing, by human enterprises driven by fantasies of infinite growth, infinite profit, infinite resources, infinite exploitation, infinite waste, infinite gratification, infinite willfulness.
L. To declare oneself "for" or "against" technology -- a technology-in-general treated as an abstraction indifferent to the different ways techniques and artifacts are actually historically and positionally deployed and understood -- is to engage in a technology politics that takes as its point of departure the de-politicizing evacuation of all the actual political substance at hand.
LI. Futurological movements are faith-based initiatives, translating familiar religious aspirations for "transcendence" into superficially techno-scientific terms, denying the present for a mutually-reinforcing hallucination of "The Future," and disdaining the lifeway diversity of the peers with whom they share the present world for an identification with an idealized post-human species.
LII. Futurologists keep confusing making bets with having thoughts.
LIII. Whenever I hear the word "trend," I reach for my brain.
LIV. Futurological predictions are just prescriptions without the courage of convictions.
LV. Evolution is not a design process, and no implemented design is more natural than any other.
LVI. The future, as it arrives, always kicks you in the crystal ball.
LVII. "Coincidence" is so much the spell that dispels magic it is easy to confuse its charm with the magic it displaces.
LVIII. While it is true that science's toypile can never connect consumers with Heaven, Job's dungheap never managed that trick for sinners either.
LIX. Separating people from their money promising they can get rich investing in the Next Big Thing or reassuring tragic gizmo-fetishes they are truly on the Bleeding Edge doesn't make you any kind of intellectual. It almost certainly does make you a scam artist, whether you are actually in on the scam yourself or not.
LX. All Your Gene Are Belong to Us
LXI. The Futurological Future: Same As It Ever Was.
LXII. The McKinley Administration + Robots. Sure, it sounds like feudalism, only... it's The Future!
LXIII. Far from endowing our artifacts with intelligence, we are mistaking for such endowment the process by which we are becoming ever more superficial and uncritical through our mediation and consumption of unintelligent artifacts.
LXIV. The Turing Test only tests us.
LXV. In coming to terms with the present, especially in grasping the meaning of what has taken us by surprise, we understand and, better still, become understanding. In predicting the future, especially in proposing coinages that would work as spells to dispel being taken by surprise, we become ever more susceptible to fraud and, worse still, become frauds. Where thinking is concerned, this is a variation on the difference between investment and speculation.
LXVI. Futurologists are a science fiction fandom pretending to be philosophers and policy wonks in a bid for attention and, for a few, for money.
LXVII. Futurological “scenarios” are usually just science fiction, but entirely bereft of clever plots, interesting characters, or sustained themes. Indeed, most futurological “scenarios” amount to little more than stipulated settings of a scene (hence their name). Inevitably, these settings are borrowed from actual science fiction writers, and given the plausibility that attaches to the familiar, futurologists tend to recycle those conceits real writers would disdain as cliches.
LXVIII. I Predict That In Twenty Years Futurological Predictions Will Still Inevitably Begin "I Predict That In Twenty Years"
LXIX. Futurology peddles expectations in the form of expectorations.
LXX. I know enough to know I don't know enough to be a scientific authority, while futurologists know enough to know that most people don't know enough to know the difference when they pretend to be scientific authorities.
LXXI. It is almost never safe to assume that something will happen just because it is technically feasible and obviously useful, but it is almost always safe to assume that something will not happen if it is more profitable to incumbent interests to frustrate it even when it is technically feasible and obviously useful.
LXXII. How do you know you're not conversing online with a bot? If you're really not sure, then you've become little better than a bot yourself so it doesn't much matter. Turing's Test was never really a measure of the arrival of artificial intelligence in nonhumans, but of the arrival in humans, through their involvement with idiotic implements, of artificial imbecillence.
LXXIII. Falling asleep in 1912 and waking up in 1962 would be such a flabbergasting leap into future shock you would probably think you were still dreaming. Falling asleep in 1962 and waking up in 2012 would be such a shattering disappointment you would probably crawl back to bed to return to your dreaming.
LXXIV. For decades the futurists crowed that robots would liberate laborers from the scourge of toil. Since the bosses predictably decided to pocket any extra profits the robots made, this meant instead restraining laborers to robotically meaningless low paying jobs and chronic unemployed poverty. Fewer futurists still anticipated laborers would then be seduced into buying cellphones that shackle them to their work every waking hour. Progress!
LXXV. When capitalists want you to forget The Revolution they talk to you about The Future.
LXXVI. Advertising is that grand enterprise through which the present is interminably and profitably re-branded and then re-sold as "The Future."
LXXVII. Today's tomorrow is nothing but less today peddled as more today.
LXXVIII. "X Changes Everything" + Elapsed Time = "Nothing Has Changed"
LXXIX. Cryonics isn't a more grisly way to treat a corpse than embalming is, but cryonics isn't a more scientific way to ensure the resurrection of a corpse than mummification is either.
LXXX. While it is true that paradigm shifts in the elaboration of human knowledge do indeed occur, it remains true as well that for every maverick dismissed as a crank there are countless cranks who fancy themselves mavericks.
LXXXI. Any sufficiently advanced futurology is indistinguishable from con artistry, er, magic.
LXXXII. They fear death who suspect their mortality but do not know it.
LXXXIII. I like my art revolutionary, my administration liberal, and my engineering conservative.
LXXXIV. It's hard to decide whether the futurological fantasists or the chemtrail conspiracists represent the most depressing derangement of environmentalism enabled by "geo-engineering" discourse.
LXXXV. When I was a kid every refrigerator had a bottle of Thousand Island dressing in it. Now, every refrigerator has a bottle of Ranch dressing in it. Progress under consumer capitalism is, we all know so well, marvelous and inexorable. Who knows what salad dressing will grace the refrigerators of the future?
LXXXVI. You Are Not A Picture of You. Brain emulation cheerleaders and uploading enthusiasts, please make a note of it.
LXXXVII. Crowdsourcing will always only amount to exploitation until it is subsidized by a public living income. Celebrating non-subsidized crowdsourcing is always only an apologia for plutocracy peddled as peer-to-peer.
LXXXVIII. Transhumanism paints its Future on black velvet.
LXXXIX. Things are getting so different so fast sometimes it's hard not to yawn from the future shock.
XC. Scientific exposures of the non-reality of freedom confuse an "ought" discussion with an "is" discussion. This confusion is not proof of fearless intellectual genius but of, you know, confusion.
XCI. Transhumanism wants to be Scientology when it grows up, Scientology wants to be Mormonism when it grows up, Mormonism wants to be Catholicism when it grows up, Catholicism wants to be the Empire when it grows up.
XCII. Successful mainstream futurology amplifies irrational consumption through marketing hype and makes profitable short term predictions for the benefit of investors, the only reliable source for which is insider information. Successful superlative futurology amplifies irrational greed and terror through the conjuration of a techno-transcendent vision of "The Future" peddled as long-term predictions the faithful in which provide unearned attention and money for the benefit of guru-wannabes and pseudo-experts, the source for which is science fiction mistaken for science practice and science policy. You will have noticed that fraud is the common denominator of futurology in both its mainstream and superlative modes.
XCIII. "The Singularity" happens not at the moment when machines become more intelligent than humans, but at the moment when the way humans talk about machines makes them less intelligent.
XCIV. Those who worry about workers being replaced by robots fail to grasp that workers being treated AS robots is always a more urgent worry -- and sets the terms for their robotic replacement as well.
XCV. "Artificial Intelligence" is always an essentially fetishistic misrecognition of computer-mediated relations among intelligent humans.
XCVI. For generations now science fiction cover art has prophetically anticipated the breathtaking future of America's amusement parks.
XCVII. Futurism is redundant, after all, since one can always be an actual scientist or policymaker if you want to contribute to technodevelopment, and one can always be a real sf fan if you want to be excited about highly speculative projected technoscience.
XCVIII. No matter how big Big Data gets it will still be dumb data.
XCIX. "Artificial Intelligence" is an unintelligent description of unintelligent artifacts by unintelligent people.
C. Futurologists saying things we can't do would be cool if we could do them aren't actually contributing to science. Futurologists saying things we can't do could be done if we discovered how to do them aren't actually saying anything. Futurologists saying we will discover how to do things we can't do just because we don't know we can't is fraud, or at best false advertising.
CI. Computers no more play games of chess than chess boards do.
CII. Silicon today, siligone tomorrow.
CIII. Transhumanism is an effort to pretend confusing humans for robots and mistreating humans as robots is a science of humans becoming robots.
CIV. VACUING, n., The practice of analogizing every practice with computer hacking in the expectation that this will provide insight, but with the consequence of evacuating all substance and interest.
CV. More cameras don't only converge onto "the facts" when more cameras also have more readers.
CVI. That we will be profiled by ubiquitous corporate-military surveillance may be irresistible. That we will be defined by these profiles as people or our status as citizens determined by them absolutely can and must be resisted.
CVII. Is there any sweeter song in all the world than elites peddling predation and denial as "optimism"?
CVIII. Books shouldn't have buttons, the better to push them.
CIX. Every book was already a screen, reading them on screens adds nothing but the threat of losing everything.
CX. Urgent truths are just as likely to be concealed as exposed by more data.
CXI. Whole Earth was TED before TED. You do realize nothing more damning could be said?
CXII. "We are as gods and might as well get good at it" is best read as an exhortation to non-existence for megalomaniacal technofetishists.
CXIII. "Stay hungry" is a curse and not a virtue in the world beneath privilege. "Stay foolish" is privilege making fools of the hungry.
CXIV. Prophesy's false promise destroys memory's true wisdom.
CXV. The singularity happens when we are all reduced to artificial imbecillence by autocorrect.
CXVI. Because of the futurological framing of history they buy into, tech companies are forever confusing crap consumers buy with history.
CXVII. Google Glassholes all think they are Locutus of Borg. But we will not be assimilated.
CXVIII. Always an ought and never an is, "coolness" is not in features themselves but in the investment of features with a narrative of transcendence. And the discourse of "innovation" now amounts mostly to skirmishes over this coolness.
CXIX. There's a persistent mismatch between techies who desire gadgets that help them pretend to live in or closer to "The Future" and consumers who desire gadgets that actually do useful things well in the present.
CXX. "Trends" are not ridden but written.
CXXI. If you think about "technology" as singular not plural, as noun not verb, as destiny not history, as it not us, you're doing it wrong.
CXXII. Compared with the Pill, the "digital revolution" really is a nonstory, and one endlessly retold only because men fancy themselves the protagonists.
CXXIII. Every time a person uses the word "meme" a human mind loses her wings.
CXXIV. Making their new predictions is the way futurologists distract you from the failure of their old predictions.
CXXV. "tl;dr" is the appropriately illiterate abbreviation for the self confession: "Too stupid, won't read."
CXXVI. The social and cultural study of technoscientific changes does not threaten discovery but only marketing.
CXXVII. Those who decry the menacing relativism of situated technoscience scholarship rarely have something to tell us but invariably have something to sell us.
CXXVIII. There is no more fundamental misrecognition of the force of science fiction than to think it concerns what if more than what is.
CXXIX. The thing you need to remember about the Luddites is that smashing machines is itself a machine. As they well knew.
CXXX. Design ideology's self-congratulatory MAYA Principle declares "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable" what is usually Merely Adequate Yet Acclaimed.
CXXXI. When science fiction conceits become too tired even for hacks, that's when futurists can be counted on to arrive to turn them into ad copy.
CXXXII. To lose the expectation of privacy is substantially to lose the presumption of innocence. To live under surveillance and profiling is always to be committing the not-yet-determinable crimes for which you are being framed.
CXXXIII. The pretense that Technology "Is" a thing enables only the technology writer/promoter, just as the pretense that there "Is" a God enables only the priest.
CXXXIV. The quintessential literary genre of the neoliberal epoch, our Digital Gilded Age, is the futurological scenario: an indulgence in artless, reductive, promotional fraud.
CXXXV. Just as the futurological championing of "enhanced" humans is really an expression of disdain for the living diversity of humans with which we share the world peddled as the generosity of healthcare, futurological enthusiasm for space as an "escape hatch" from political and environmental problems is an expression of disdain for the living earth on which we have evolved to flourish peddled as the wonder of exploration.
CXXXVI. A futurist's resume is a dating profile in which hobbies and interests are mistaken for areas of expertise. This reflects the fact that corporations are the only people willing to date futurists, my friend.
CXXXVII. Reactionary discourse in general misconstrues observations as predictions, usually in the form of threats, while reactionary futurological discourse in particular peddles predictions as observations.
CXXXIX. The wireless future is the rabbit ears past.
CXL. Pretending software is people interferes with the work to make software more user-friendly or networks more secure in much the same way that pretending corporations are people interferes with the work of democratizing enterprise.
CXLI. "Transparency" names official interpretations that target and frame you for the benefit of incumbent elites via traces they select from the ones you leave. "Transparency" is plutocracy's opacity.
CXLII. Futurology is an anti-disciplinarity pretending to be inter-disciplinary.
CXLIII. There is no such thing as "the internet" apart from laws, norms, practices, affordances many of which precede and exceed "the internet." There are no natural, spontaneous, abiding, spatial realities that are either "the internet" or "the market," only histories, contingencies, and parochialisms. It is no surprise that arguments presumably defending, saving, promoting "the free internet" are made so often by the same people who make arguments defending, saving, promoting "the free market" -- and so often in ways that re-enact the false, facile terms made defending, saving, promoting "the free market" -- nor that the freedoms that would be sited and secured there inevitably find no hook to hang their hat on.
CXLIV. The downcast eyes of people staring into cellphones, penitents forever contemplating their unredeemable Original Debt to consumer society.
CXLV. Every libertechbrotarianism rationalizes techbroverlordism.
CXLVI. AI discourse is mostly an hilarious effort to mansplain intelligence to an indifferent reality.
CXLVII. It is revealing how often the choice of effective, familiar, appropriate techniques and technologies over untried or unduly complex ones will invite charges of "luddism" or "technophobia."
CXLVIII. Futurism is the denial of futurity. Futurology is the appropriation of the emergent by the dominant.
CXLIX. Our futurity is not The Future: Progress is a struggle, not a marketing campaign.
CL. The internet without a safety net leaves everybody smashed on the Coasean Floor.
CLI. Digitization didn't smash the state, it is the crisis in which the interminable alternative is posed to a new generation: Socialism or Barbarism?
CLII. Universal BIG + Zero IP = Free As In Democracy
CLIII. There are real unethical robots in the military to worry about and they are all Brass.
CLIV. Phanwanking, phanwankery, n. -- related to fanboy fanwanking/fanwankery, a form of ludicrously elaborate rationalization to which futurologists are prone, but involving speculative pseudo-science rather than speculative science-fiction.
CLV. Singularitarians have a black hole where their brains should be.
CLVI. Techno-utopians like AI-deadenders and missiledefense-deadenders truly seem to love crowing over test results that reveal nothing but their serial failures.
CLVII. Using the term "technology," like using the passive voice, distracts attention from or disavows responsibility for actions of human beings.
CLVIII. Futurology peddles SF's poetry as prophesy to profiteers for profit.
CLIX. The priests of artificial intelligence offering up their digital confessions and performing their digital exorcisms will never ameliorate the work of software as a worldly instrument of terror.
CLX. Climate change is already the end of the world for countless people on earth, and to displace climate catastrophe onto "The Future" is always first of all an ugly admission of indifference to suffering and death in the present.
CLXI. The Future is always a violent occupation of the present.
CLXII. Techno-transcendentalists really bring the idiocy to theodicy.
CLXIII. When it comes to the movies, most science fiction would be more accurately described as pseudoscience fiction.
CLXIV. Perhaps the President could declare the internet a National Park or Wilderness Area and fund it by making advertisers pay through the nose for trying to pollute the place.
CLXV. Futurology is what happens to thinking when marketing happens to commonsense.
CLXVI. Futurist explains it's supposed to suck. Demands payment.
CLXVII. Body-Cameras as the ready technofix for the political problem of police violence disavows the politics policing the significance of surveilled images. It is all too easy for the police to frame an avalanche of mediated spam, flak and spin as "transparency": After all, the same stratifications enabling police violence will articulate the interpretation of its image.
CLXVIII. Every panoptism is always a pancryptism: every transparency is enabled by opacities.
CLXIX. Prior to the positing of any "technofix" for a political problem is always the technofixation that disavows its politics to subvert politics.
CLXX. Our digital devices are documenting stasis not progress.
CLXXI. Futurology in its techno-transcendental moods is infantile wish-fulfillment, in its existential risk moods infantile attention seeking.
CLXXII. tr;dl: too real, didn't live
CLXXIII. Every tool and every technique is a text.
CLXXIV. It makes sense, I suppose, that robot cultists would be so robotically predictable.
CLXXV. First as futurism, then as food court.
CLXXVI. To declare yourself a "Friend of the Future" is always to ally with its stakeholders against those of every alternate future, and against open futurity as such.
CLXXVII. The Future of the futurologists is the lottery you will never win.
CLXXVIII. The problem with pleas for more "positive" or "utopian" sf is that they are essentially efforts to replace literature with advertising.
CLXXIX. Human beings are capable of almost anything. Hope is the last thing we should draw from this recognition, but it is one thing.
CLXXX. To trouble long definitive human limits with technoscientific change is not to put an end to all limits but to create and confront new ones.
CLXXXI. Foresight under capitalism amounts mainly to marketing failed warnings as successful predictions.
CLXXXII. Futurologists want to be corporate consultants who are taken to be culture critics.
CLXXXIII. Futurology is a form of masturbation resulting in neologism.
CLXXXIV. Predicting the future mirrors glorifying the past. Both conduce more to reaction than progress.
CLXXXV. Foresight arises from critical, empathetic, and scientific engagements in and with the present, while "predicting the future" is usually just a short-term sales pitch, a rationalization of abuses, or the reassurance of elites masquerading as foresight.
CLXXXVI. The digital utopians crowed we were witnessing a transition from atoms to bits. What we are witnessing instead is a transition from owners to renters, from peers to debtors, from citizens to targets.
CLXXXVII. Anything wearable is technology, so much of the work of “wearable technology” discourse is to deny most wearable technology is technology.
CLXXXVIII. When neoliberal futurologists replace public intellectuals and corporate-military think-tanks replace universities, you can be sure that marketing elite-incumbency in the name of "The Future" will replace the emancipatory work of understanding our present.
CLXXXIX. Driverless cars, 3D-printers, bitcoin will sweep the world! -- Futurists
Hula-Hoops, Frisbees, Slip'N Slides will sweep the world! -- Wham-O
CXC. The Future is Then.
CXCI. "Trends" are not actually existing phenomena exerting influence in the world or uniquely observable by futurological experts, trends are instead a narrative genre to which futurologists are devoted, simplifying to the point of denying history and hence providing reactionary rationalizations for and reassurances to incumbent elites.
CXCII. Those who forget the crappy commodities of the past are doomed to buy the same crap marketed as something new over and over again.
CXCIII. Ever notice how everything looks like a design problem to self-designated designers?
CXCIV. Design is what politics looks like when elite minorities make decisions for majorities and pretend it's okay because design isn't politics.
CXCV. There are basically two kinds of tech company: the ones that should be prosecuted for fraud and the ones that should be nationalized as public utilities.
CXCVI. "Future Shock" is what happens when advertizing hyping stasis as novelty, progress, and disruption makes you yawn so hard your head splits in half.
CXCVII. Why pine for escape to extra-terrestrial hellscapes when we can work to keep earth from becoming an alter-terrestrial hellscape instead?
CXCVIII. If you think the future is for predicting things in you've already gotten everything wrong.
CXCIX. I'm a lacto-ovo vegetarian now, but obviously in The Future will be a digi-nano vegetarian.
CC. Curious the number of champions of artificial intelligence and artificial life who are unintelligent and don't have a life.
CCI. Rugged Individualism in the Technological Society: The body a cyborg shell made of genes and guns, the soul a target made of computation and marketing.
CCI. Superintelligent AI is like chemtrails for rich white tech CEOs.
CCII. If you are worried about superintelligence you should be worried about your intelligence.
CCIII. Algorithms may have a cult but they can never have a culture.
CCIV. After a quarter century of futurological criticism I can say with some confidence that The Singularity is an asshole.
CCV. It is worse than wrong to attribute intelligence or agency to an artifact, for not only is it neither but you too will have less of either.
CCVI. If you would "stop killer robots" you need only ensure those humans who make them to kill or use them to kill pay much more for so doing than they can ever profit.
CCVII. "Let us strangle the last tech CEO with the guts of the last techbro." -- Twenis Twitterot
CCVIII. When accelerating futurological marketing finally fools us into investing dull artifacts with the zing of intelligence and agency we will arrive at the zingularity.
CCIX. So much "futurological methodology" simply amounts to conventional con-man discipline: pick your buzzwords, keep a straight face, stay upbeat, stick to your story...
CCX. "Hard SF" gives techbros erections with a fetishism of gizmos and numbers, "Soft SF" causes techbro shrinkage with an awareness of social struggle and diversity.
CCXI. The People do not arise from The Internet, what passes for the internet arises from the struggles of people.
CCXII. Dear Futurists: Everything changes something but nothing changes everything. Please make a note of it.
CCXIII. Funhouse Mirror Stage: The future of the unconscious will be structured like Big Data.
CCXIV. Most futurologists are hacks peddling themselves as hackers.
CCXV. The technofix is always in.
CCXVI. Only tools talk of only tools.
CCXVII. Techbro + Mansplaining = Techbro-it-alls.
CCXVIII. Professional futurologists engage in two essential activities: making predictions and scolding people for expecting their predictions to come true.
CCXIX. "The Future" is tech bubbles all the way down.
CCXX.Why is it futurologists gazing in a crystal ball always see consumers grazing in a crystal mall?
CCXXI. "How do we make robots moral?" is a nonsensical question.
"How do we make roboticists moral?" is an indispensable question.
CCXXII. The "open" in Open Source is always open "for business."
CCXXIII. The term for an historical period in which most people are deliberately uninformed and misinformed is, apparently, an "Information Age."
CCXXIV. Everybody knows if you make a pile of abacuses high enough it will wake up and end history.
CCXXV. An Apple watch handcuff encircling our wrists to hector us every second of the day is truly the techbro idea of a virtuous circle.
CCXXVI. Extrapolation always begins as a parochialism and usually ends as an evangelism.
CCXXVII. Accounts of historical change that assume technological determinism or autonomous technology do not make tools into historical agents but deny historical agency to all but those incumbent elites who own and control most tools.
CCXXVIII. Fight The Feudal Future!
CCXXIX. Tech Talkers will never stop selling their landfill hellscape as a toypile to heaven. But we can stop buying it.
CCXXX. Sensawundabread: The uncritical enthusiasm of gizmo-fandoms for useless landfill-destined consumer crap peddled as paradigm-shattering.
CCXXXI. Nothing is more deranging to foresight than the pretense that it has anything to do with that impoverished imaginary object, "The Future."
CCXXXII. "Technology" is the magic word that turns progressive feelings into reactionary dealings.
CCXXXIII. There's nothing like a tech demo to reveal there's a sucker re-born every minute.
CCXXXIV. "Progress" is definitely not the word I would use to describe the replacement of the Space Age with the Cyberspace Age.
CCXXXV. "The Future" of the futurists has nothing to do with history. "The Future" is Heaven. "The Future" is Hell. "The Future" is Eden. "The Future" is Rapture. "The Future" does not, nor will it ever, exist.
CCXXXVI. The aspiration as well as the work of "The Internet of Things" has never been otherwise than to mediate the reduction of people to things.
CCXXXVII. Fermi's Truism? There are no signs of terrestrial civilization despite the abundance of apparently intelligent humans on earth.
CCXXXVIII. Free As In "Free, Just Pay!"
CCXXXIX. Do enjoy the micromoment of microlife afforded by this micropayment.
CCXL. Science is suffused with Not Knowing. Pseudo-science is enthused with Know-Nothings and Know-It-Alls.
CCXLI. No technodevelopmental outcomes are inevitable but that futurologists will declare them so.
CCXLII. The more things stay the same, the more they are marketed as change.
CCXLIII. Any sufficiently advanced magical thinking is indistinguishable from technology journalism.
CCXLIV. The Future's so bright I gotta give shade.
CCXLV. Truly effective Ad Blocker software would blank out most financial and technology journalism.
CCXLVI. Ever notice how films presumably dramatizing the implications of the Turing Test actually test whether a human actor can pass as a computer?
CCXLVII. The futurological delight in the term "resilience" is the ugly celebration of the capacity of some people to survive abuse and neglect so that plutocrats can accumulate more wealth.
CCXLVIII. It is odd how any proposal that technodevelopment could be driven by sustainability concerns is regarded as fanciful when our survival actually depends on it. It is also odd how the assumption that technodevelopment will always be driven by military concerns is regarded as realistic when it actually threatens our annihilation. With such conventional wisdom, I don't like our odds.
CCXLIX. The denial of human finitude is not transcendence but tantrum.
CCL. Any sufficiently marketed technology is indistinguishable from tragic.
CCLI. Digital utopianism is the peddling of zeros as ones.
CCLII. It's telling how often the results of the "fully customizable" are indistinguishable.
CCLIII. The Driverless Car is the futurological promise we will save ourselves from car-culture by saving... car culture!
CCLIV. When someone declares themselves a "technologist" it is usually safest to assume they are bragging about using language and wearing clothes.
CCLV. Your favorite critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic drama will return after a word from these polluting luxury sedans, landfill-destined handheld devices and fraudulent pharmaceutical products.
CCLVI. "Ecce Homo!" -- every selfie ever.
CCLVII. Startups don't impress me, but the way they end up does amuse me.
CCLVIII. You can always tell when a transhumanist wants something incoherent... because they call it inevitable.
CCLIX. A bet is never an argument, but futurists and market ideologues are always betting it will pass for one.
CCLX. Futurists, like other fashion writers, live on the ongoing confusion of the next with the new.
CCLXI. "The Future" is a form of present-day ugliness so intolerable that futurists change the way they sell it every six months.
CCLXII. Stop worrying about the future robocalypse. You already died in the robocalypse when you became somebody who can't "live" without your crappy phone.
CCLXIII. Futurists always say everything is New, but futurists never say anything that is new.
CCLXIV. I predict that in 2016 futurists will continue to be predictable.
CCLXV. When a book by futurist Ray Kurzweil becomes a best seller, we call that event a credularity.
CCLXVI. Welcome to the Internet of Being Treated Like Things.
CCLXVII. You say startup, I say stopit.
CCLXVIII. Those who once said "let the market decide" will soon say "let the AIs decide" and they will mean the same thing by it: Let the rich decide.
CCLXIX. All STEM, no bloom.
CCLXX. Fool plus tourism is futurism.
CCLXXI. Algorithms are no more artificially intelligent than heavy machinery is artificially muscular.
CCLXXII. Nobody loses jobs to robots. People lose jobs to the owners of robots.
CCLXXIII. Let me share something with you: The sharing economy is about replacing public sharing with private extraction.
CCLXXIV. The less said the twitter.
CCLXXV. Futurists are what pass for public intellectuals when marketing is what passes for truth.
CCLXXVI. There is not much left to digitality once you have removed the criminality.
CCLXXVII. Let them eat disruption.
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