Monday, January 31, 2011
Better Than Ezra?
When Ezra Klein wears his spectacles on the tee vee he looks a bit like Emma Goldman. One wishes he sounded a bit more like her. (I keed! I keed!)
Ain't That the Truth
Over at Salon, Alex Pareene points out that across the spectrum America's narcissism taints Egypt coverage.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
A Little Grossed Out
Uninformed cheerleading at foreign insurrections seems to me exactly as unseemly as uninformed cheerleading at foreign invasions.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Civility Among the Assholes
If you look, let us say, at educational outcomes, levels of poverty, incarceration rates for people of color in the United States either you think these data reflect natural endowments of people of color (which makes you a racist asshole) or you think these data reflect unnecessary unjust social conditions. And if you think they reflect unnecessary unjust social conditions either you don't care (which makes you a racist asshole) or you do care and so engage in some measure in education, agitation, and organization to change these unnecessary unjust social conditions. And if you don't engage in any measure in education, agitation, or organization to change these unnecessary unjust social conditions then you really don't care even if you say you do (which makes you a racist asshole).
I know that when we speak of racism in contemporary life we are supposed to be quick (in the political correctness of the one who fears above all the charge of political correctness) to indicate we are talking about outcomes and structural features and vestigial legacies of a curiously abstruse racism rather than accusing particular individuals of intentional vitriolic racist sentiments.
I think this habit of ours not only overlooks widespread and fairly flagrant concrete racism in this country but it also indulges in a facile fantasy about the extent to which it is actually possible to be ignorant of or inattentive to extraordinary and abiding social violence and injustice disproportionately affecting people of color without also being outright racist in a fairly straightforward sense, a fantasy that always only benefits the racist rather than the victims of racism and hence is itself racist.
I suspect that we engage in this pretense among other reasons because we all know that part of what it usually means to be a racist asshole (or a sexist pig, or a gay basher, or a torture-apologist, or a rich prick) is also to be a self-important asshole who fancies his hurt feelings matter more than whatever hurt his clumsy belligerent ignorant self-regard causes, so everyone the least bit more sensible proceeds to let assholes be assholes in a general sort of way even as they try to nudge assholes to ameliorate their assholery the least bit in any particular egregious expression of it, because that is the only thing short of making a scene almost as unpleasant as the assholery itself that assholes allow for, being assholes.
Nevertheless, it really is worth pointing out that it happens to be inherently, absolutely, and categorically disagreeable to disagree agreeably with racist, sexist, heterosexist, or classist varieties of assholery even if precisely this, I'm sorry to say, is too often what is meant by "civility" in contemporary parlance.
I know that when we speak of racism in contemporary life we are supposed to be quick (in the political correctness of the one who fears above all the charge of political correctness) to indicate we are talking about outcomes and structural features and vestigial legacies of a curiously abstruse racism rather than accusing particular individuals of intentional vitriolic racist sentiments.
I think this habit of ours not only overlooks widespread and fairly flagrant concrete racism in this country but it also indulges in a facile fantasy about the extent to which it is actually possible to be ignorant of or inattentive to extraordinary and abiding social violence and injustice disproportionately affecting people of color without also being outright racist in a fairly straightforward sense, a fantasy that always only benefits the racist rather than the victims of racism and hence is itself racist.
I suspect that we engage in this pretense among other reasons because we all know that part of what it usually means to be a racist asshole (or a sexist pig, or a gay basher, or a torture-apologist, or a rich prick) is also to be a self-important asshole who fancies his hurt feelings matter more than whatever hurt his clumsy belligerent ignorant self-regard causes, so everyone the least bit more sensible proceeds to let assholes be assholes in a general sort of way even as they try to nudge assholes to ameliorate their assholery the least bit in any particular egregious expression of it, because that is the only thing short of making a scene almost as unpleasant as the assholery itself that assholes allow for, being assholes.
Nevertheless, it really is worth pointing out that it happens to be inherently, absolutely, and categorically disagreeable to disagree agreeably with racist, sexist, heterosexist, or classist varieties of assholery even if precisely this, I'm sorry to say, is too often what is meant by "civility" in contemporary parlance.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Left Well Lost?
More clippings from the cutting room floor.
In any sufficiently complex and spatially disseminated functional division of labor such that the contribution of any individual to the civilization on which all its members depend for their survival and flourishing becomes impossible to specify within the terms enabling and hence available to all its contributors themselves, that determination of contribution and standing and reward will depend in part on the work of ideological formulations to the preferential benefit of incumbent elites, just as in any hierarchical society sufficiently democratic for legitimacy of government to depend on the apparent consent of the governed the appearance of consent will be maintained by ideological formations to the preferential benefit of incumbent elites. This means that every hierarchical society of any complexity is permanently susceptible to the deceptive and delusive work of ideology to the benefit of reactionary politics and oligarchy.
I do not agree that such permanent susceptibility is the same thing as ineradicability, and I certainly do not sympathize with cynical (essentially moralizing) accounts which would reduce every charge of ideology simply to an inappropriately grandiose signal of personal disapproval of some truth-claim well warranted to differently situated peers. I regard both of these positions as rationalizations for complacency, often all the worse for being proposed in tonalities of phony radicalism. I will add that the first error -- mistaking permanent susceptibility to ideology as ineradicability of ideology -- is almost justified as an injunction to a permanent vigilance equal to the risk of assimilation to or collaboration with injustice, but that the second error -- mistaking every claim to legitimacy as always only parochial and so declaring illegitimate legitimacy as such -- is never justified (not that this should matter, given that the formulation denigrates justification as such, but of course it always does turn out to matter just the same), especially as a signal of a radicalism the very possibility of which it disdains.
I maintain that the distinction of the academic and activist Left from liberalism has hitherto depended on a distinction of Revolution from reform that has usually been a wholesome effort to learn from and stay true to demands of the permanent susceptibility of complex, hierarchical societies, even notionally democratic ones, to ideological formulations and formations -- an effort that has sometimes, and understandably, made the error of mistaking permanent susceptibility for ineradicability precisely in order to maintain necessary discipline in the face of ubiquitous and insidious forces abetting assimilation to and collaboration with injustice, exploitation, violence, and oligarchy (not to mention the perils of reconciling the righteous demand of the impossible that fuels our idealism and directs our pragmatism with the pragmatic considerations at the left wing of the possible out of which come the reforms through which we actually arrive at the ideal from the real where we are here and now).
To those of the academic and activist Left who still bemoan the loss of the Communist Other at the end of the Cold War as the loss of an actually existing alternative to capitalism in which those who would aspire to a more radical transformational Left than reformist liberalisms enable (despite the inappropriateness of what actually existed in the name of Communism as a site for such imaginative investment), it is unclear to me why a contest over what counts as a properly capitalist order is assumed necessarily to be less radical and transformational and emancipatory than a contest of what passes as capitalism with what passes as communism. In my view, for example, the provision of a basic guaranteed income (among other elements in a strong suite of welfare entitlements including single payer healthcare, lifelong education and training, and access to wholesome affordable housing) would be a necessary precondition for the emergence of any capitalist order for which the moral claims of typical of market fundamentalists that only contractarian orders truly repudiate coercion can have the slightest chance to apply in reality, since in the absence of such guarantees what passes for consensual outcomes are too easily misinformed through conspicuously unequal recourse to reliable information and education, unequal recourse to law, and duressed by the threat of poverty and precarity. But notice the curiosity that it is actually quite difficult to distinguish such a construal of a morally righteous consensually contractarian capitalism from many construals of socialism.
To those who declare reform always only the responce to limited, local, strategic, parochial injustices and concerns while leaving deeper structural injustices and irrationalities intact, awaiting no doubt the more sweeping and totalizing transformations of muscular and audacious radical critique and revolutionary action, it is unclear to me why reform campaigns struggling, again say, to implement the provision of a basic guaranteed income (very likely preceded and enabled by reform campaigns to render taxation more progressive, achieve a more equitable sensible healthcare system, expand public education, and improve other welfare programs) would not eventuate, without revolution, at a transformation of society quite as radical in its democratizing aspirations as any revolutionary vision one would care to propose.
I still see the sense of Michael Harrington's declaration that "the best liberalism leads toward socialism. I’m a radical, but... I want to be on the left wing of the possible." I begin to suspect that I am a reformist more than a revolutionary, a liberal more than a Leftist, a radical democrat more than a progressive one, especially inasmuch as mine is a vision of a democratizing struggle imagined and practiced as an ongoing and interminable expression and experimentation of equity-in-diversity already well underway more than a progressive struggle toward a final and definitive "accomplishment" of equity-in-diversity as an eidos we presumably know well in advance.
While it may well be true that such a reformist, liberal, experimentalist but still radical democracy (this is not, after all, an apologia for the confinement of politics to partisan efforts by any means) does lack any totalizing critique of existing institutions and norms, I must say I think it healthy to regard such totalizing vantages at least with skepticism if not as always only mirages altogether well lost, and also as so alienated from the present world as to risk the solidarity with present peers without which politics will tend to be the more elitist and tyrannical precisely the more radical they are.
I tend to find revolutionaries more congenial than reformers, and liberationists more congenial than liberals, at least as a matter of temperament -- so I am not without qualms in delineating this perspective, and I am more open to dissuasion than you might think. But I must say it is very hard for me to see what this understanding of radicalism loses the democratic left, substantially, but very easy for me to see what the revolutionary and totalizing Left gains instead is more self-indulgent and self-congratulatory than substantial as far as it goes.
In any sufficiently complex and spatially disseminated functional division of labor such that the contribution of any individual to the civilization on which all its members depend for their survival and flourishing becomes impossible to specify within the terms enabling and hence available to all its contributors themselves, that determination of contribution and standing and reward will depend in part on the work of ideological formulations to the preferential benefit of incumbent elites, just as in any hierarchical society sufficiently democratic for legitimacy of government to depend on the apparent consent of the governed the appearance of consent will be maintained by ideological formations to the preferential benefit of incumbent elites. This means that every hierarchical society of any complexity is permanently susceptible to the deceptive and delusive work of ideology to the benefit of reactionary politics and oligarchy.
I do not agree that such permanent susceptibility is the same thing as ineradicability, and I certainly do not sympathize with cynical (essentially moralizing) accounts which would reduce every charge of ideology simply to an inappropriately grandiose signal of personal disapproval of some truth-claim well warranted to differently situated peers. I regard both of these positions as rationalizations for complacency, often all the worse for being proposed in tonalities of phony radicalism. I will add that the first error -- mistaking permanent susceptibility to ideology as ineradicability of ideology -- is almost justified as an injunction to a permanent vigilance equal to the risk of assimilation to or collaboration with injustice, but that the second error -- mistaking every claim to legitimacy as always only parochial and so declaring illegitimate legitimacy as such -- is never justified (not that this should matter, given that the formulation denigrates justification as such, but of course it always does turn out to matter just the same), especially as a signal of a radicalism the very possibility of which it disdains.
I maintain that the distinction of the academic and activist Left from liberalism has hitherto depended on a distinction of Revolution from reform that has usually been a wholesome effort to learn from and stay true to demands of the permanent susceptibility of complex, hierarchical societies, even notionally democratic ones, to ideological formulations and formations -- an effort that has sometimes, and understandably, made the error of mistaking permanent susceptibility for ineradicability precisely in order to maintain necessary discipline in the face of ubiquitous and insidious forces abetting assimilation to and collaboration with injustice, exploitation, violence, and oligarchy (not to mention the perils of reconciling the righteous demand of the impossible that fuels our idealism and directs our pragmatism with the pragmatic considerations at the left wing of the possible out of which come the reforms through which we actually arrive at the ideal from the real where we are here and now).
To those of the academic and activist Left who still bemoan the loss of the Communist Other at the end of the Cold War as the loss of an actually existing alternative to capitalism in which those who would aspire to a more radical transformational Left than reformist liberalisms enable (despite the inappropriateness of what actually existed in the name of Communism as a site for such imaginative investment), it is unclear to me why a contest over what counts as a properly capitalist order is assumed necessarily to be less radical and transformational and emancipatory than a contest of what passes as capitalism with what passes as communism. In my view, for example, the provision of a basic guaranteed income (among other elements in a strong suite of welfare entitlements including single payer healthcare, lifelong education and training, and access to wholesome affordable housing) would be a necessary precondition for the emergence of any capitalist order for which the moral claims of typical of market fundamentalists that only contractarian orders truly repudiate coercion can have the slightest chance to apply in reality, since in the absence of such guarantees what passes for consensual outcomes are too easily misinformed through conspicuously unequal recourse to reliable information and education, unequal recourse to law, and duressed by the threat of poverty and precarity. But notice the curiosity that it is actually quite difficult to distinguish such a construal of a morally righteous consensually contractarian capitalism from many construals of socialism.
To those who declare reform always only the responce to limited, local, strategic, parochial injustices and concerns while leaving deeper structural injustices and irrationalities intact, awaiting no doubt the more sweeping and totalizing transformations of muscular and audacious radical critique and revolutionary action, it is unclear to me why reform campaigns struggling, again say, to implement the provision of a basic guaranteed income (very likely preceded and enabled by reform campaigns to render taxation more progressive, achieve a more equitable sensible healthcare system, expand public education, and improve other welfare programs) would not eventuate, without revolution, at a transformation of society quite as radical in its democratizing aspirations as any revolutionary vision one would care to propose.
I still see the sense of Michael Harrington's declaration that "the best liberalism leads toward socialism. I’m a radical, but... I want to be on the left wing of the possible." I begin to suspect that I am a reformist more than a revolutionary, a liberal more than a Leftist, a radical democrat more than a progressive one, especially inasmuch as mine is a vision of a democratizing struggle imagined and practiced as an ongoing and interminable expression and experimentation of equity-in-diversity already well underway more than a progressive struggle toward a final and definitive "accomplishment" of equity-in-diversity as an eidos we presumably know well in advance.
While it may well be true that such a reformist, liberal, experimentalist but still radical democracy (this is not, after all, an apologia for the confinement of politics to partisan efforts by any means) does lack any totalizing critique of existing institutions and norms, I must say I think it healthy to regard such totalizing vantages at least with skepticism if not as always only mirages altogether well lost, and also as so alienated from the present world as to risk the solidarity with present peers without which politics will tend to be the more elitist and tyrannical precisely the more radical they are.
I tend to find revolutionaries more congenial than reformers, and liberationists more congenial than liberals, at least as a matter of temperament -- so I am not without qualms in delineating this perspective, and I am more open to dissuasion than you might think. But I must say it is very hard for me to see what this understanding of radicalism loses the democratic left, substantially, but very easy for me to see what the revolutionary and totalizing Left gains instead is more self-indulgent and self-congratulatory than substantial as far as it goes.
Democracy and Nonviolence
Believe it or not, this post is from the cutting room floor, paragraphs I snipped from a longer post I am still working on but decided were too digressive from the subject even for meandering me, but which seemed to me still worthy, maybe, of attention in their own right.
Although we speak of democracy as a political practice and doctrine, it would be better to say that democracy is an ethical practice and domain, a particular ethical vantage on the political.
Politics, when and to the extent that it is reasonable, is a set of beliefs and practices through which is facilitated the ongoing acceptable adjudication of the interminable and ineradicable disputes arising among the diversity of stakeholders with whom we share the world. Unless one's politics were absolutely opportunistic -- which I suspect is actually impossible to anyone who is not a sociopath -- they will make recourse to ethical beliefs.
Democratic politics is a matter of the nonviolent adjudication of stakeholder disputes in accordance with what are in fact ethical considerations, the aspiration to universal assent via contingent universalization inhering in assertions of universal human rights, of valuing a country of laws and not men, of decent respect to the opinions of mankind, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for a common defense, promote general welfare, secure liberty for ourselves and our posterity, and so on.
Democracy at its heart is simply the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, and free speech and free association and the notion that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed all speak to the connection between what it means for a democrat to have a say and what it means to abhor violence in a democratic society. From courts of law to peaceful transfers of power in elections democracies seek to create and maintain alternatives to the violent adjudication of disputes.
Despite my assertion that democratic politics is nonviolent, I do not mean to imply by this that all democratic practices and institutions are properly subsumed under radical nonviolent politics as proposed and practiced by Gandhi or King, say (although I do think all radical nonviolence is indeed subsumed under democracy, and I also do think the best democracy should aspire to nonviolence in the radical sense). This is so, because violence can of course inhere deeply in the status quo, in the norms of society, in the law, and what might pass for nonviolence can easily depend on and even consolidate such structural violences.
Of course, modern technoscientific societies, whether notionally democratic or not, to the extent that their governance includes some measure of social administration in the service of general welfare and public investment in indispensable but unprofitable infrastructure will make recourse not only to ethical but also to scientific vocabularies.
Science and ethics are crucially different from one another. Facticity and normativity, however interdependent they may be, are never reducible to one another, nor is either one always only properly designated as prior to the other: No amount of knowledge about what is possible will tell you what among many possibilities is worthwhile or important; no amount of fervency as to what is wanted will provide confidence as to what among many desirable outcomes is possible.
However, both the scientific and ethical as modes of warranted belief-ascription do generate truths of a kind that confers legitimacy arising out of the collaborative work of contingent universalization. In this they differ together from other domains of truth which, no less indispensable in their proper precincts, confer parochial values: for example, greater profitability for some among many competitors, or a sense of belonging to a moral community purchased through the exclusion of outsiders and the policing of deviance among insiders.
To the familiar concerns (of Arendt and Foucault to name two I profoundly respect) that regular recourse of the political to the scientific threatens to reduce the political to social or disciplinary logics that undermine freedom the better to facilitate instrumentalizing or homogenizing ends, my own proposal is that a suite of welfare entitlements -- from basic guaranteed income, to public education and healthcare and housing, to the generous subsidization of scientific research and art for the public domain -- are all best justified as rendering the scene of consent on which democracy most crucially depends reliably informed and nonduressed and that this justification constrains within the bounds of ethical legitimacy nonetheless the pragmatic considerations of administration that answer to scientific rather than ethical warrants.
In response to familiar concerns (of conservatives and market libertarians to name two I have very little respect for at all) that such welfare entitlements and public investments require exploitation of worthy elites for the sake of the unworthy poor or ignorant masses, I would add that this support of the scene of reliably informed actually nonduressed consent through the provision of general welfare seems to me required by any contractarian (or capitalist) order that would claim to be anything more than a rationalization for abusive exploitation just as, at the same time, as it happens, for those keeping score at home, it provides for the permanent and universally available strike fund and freedom of association required by any socialist order that would claim to be anything more than a rationalization for tyrannical control.
Again, what is important here is to grasp the connection between democratization and anti-violence, a connection that neither the settled terms of capitalist nor communist discourses are quite equal to, at least as they circulate in mainstream parlance (although still marginal Green and democratic socialist discourses often do emphasize this connection).
Although we speak of democracy as a political practice and doctrine, it would be better to say that democracy is an ethical practice and domain, a particular ethical vantage on the political.
Politics, when and to the extent that it is reasonable, is a set of beliefs and practices through which is facilitated the ongoing acceptable adjudication of the interminable and ineradicable disputes arising among the diversity of stakeholders with whom we share the world. Unless one's politics were absolutely opportunistic -- which I suspect is actually impossible to anyone who is not a sociopath -- they will make recourse to ethical beliefs.
Democratic politics is a matter of the nonviolent adjudication of stakeholder disputes in accordance with what are in fact ethical considerations, the aspiration to universal assent via contingent universalization inhering in assertions of universal human rights, of valuing a country of laws and not men, of decent respect to the opinions of mankind, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for a common defense, promote general welfare, secure liberty for ourselves and our posterity, and so on.
Democracy at its heart is simply the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, and free speech and free association and the notion that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed all speak to the connection between what it means for a democrat to have a say and what it means to abhor violence in a democratic society. From courts of law to peaceful transfers of power in elections democracies seek to create and maintain alternatives to the violent adjudication of disputes.
Despite my assertion that democratic politics is nonviolent, I do not mean to imply by this that all democratic practices and institutions are properly subsumed under radical nonviolent politics as proposed and practiced by Gandhi or King, say (although I do think all radical nonviolence is indeed subsumed under democracy, and I also do think the best democracy should aspire to nonviolence in the radical sense). This is so, because violence can of course inhere deeply in the status quo, in the norms of society, in the law, and what might pass for nonviolence can easily depend on and even consolidate such structural violences.
Of course, modern technoscientific societies, whether notionally democratic or not, to the extent that their governance includes some measure of social administration in the service of general welfare and public investment in indispensable but unprofitable infrastructure will make recourse not only to ethical but also to scientific vocabularies.
Science and ethics are crucially different from one another. Facticity and normativity, however interdependent they may be, are never reducible to one another, nor is either one always only properly designated as prior to the other: No amount of knowledge about what is possible will tell you what among many possibilities is worthwhile or important; no amount of fervency as to what is wanted will provide confidence as to what among many desirable outcomes is possible.
However, both the scientific and ethical as modes of warranted belief-ascription do generate truths of a kind that confers legitimacy arising out of the collaborative work of contingent universalization. In this they differ together from other domains of truth which, no less indispensable in their proper precincts, confer parochial values: for example, greater profitability for some among many competitors, or a sense of belonging to a moral community purchased through the exclusion of outsiders and the policing of deviance among insiders.
To the familiar concerns (of Arendt and Foucault to name two I profoundly respect) that regular recourse of the political to the scientific threatens to reduce the political to social or disciplinary logics that undermine freedom the better to facilitate instrumentalizing or homogenizing ends, my own proposal is that a suite of welfare entitlements -- from basic guaranteed income, to public education and healthcare and housing, to the generous subsidization of scientific research and art for the public domain -- are all best justified as rendering the scene of consent on which democracy most crucially depends reliably informed and nonduressed and that this justification constrains within the bounds of ethical legitimacy nonetheless the pragmatic considerations of administration that answer to scientific rather than ethical warrants.
In response to familiar concerns (of conservatives and market libertarians to name two I have very little respect for at all) that such welfare entitlements and public investments require exploitation of worthy elites for the sake of the unworthy poor or ignorant masses, I would add that this support of the scene of reliably informed actually nonduressed consent through the provision of general welfare seems to me required by any contractarian (or capitalist) order that would claim to be anything more than a rationalization for abusive exploitation just as, at the same time, as it happens, for those keeping score at home, it provides for the permanent and universally available strike fund and freedom of association required by any socialist order that would claim to be anything more than a rationalization for tyrannical control.
Again, what is important here is to grasp the connection between democratization and anti-violence, a connection that neither the settled terms of capitalist nor communist discourses are quite equal to, at least as they circulate in mainstream parlance (although still marginal Green and democratic socialist discourses often do emphasize this connection).
Friday, January 07, 2011
"The Future" as Ad and as Cult
You will not go far wrong simply to treat pop futurology as a fandom of dupes doing unpaid crowdsourced marketing and promotional work for violent incumbent corporate-militarist interests.
The hyperbolic, bordering on fraudulent, claims of mainstream advertising for ineffectual pills and ointments, the trumpeting as "revolutionary" of incremental adjustments and repackagings of features already available in consumer goods, but especially cars, computers, and media devices, the evocations of "science" with phony experts in labcoats mouthing pseudo-scientific neologisms, the computer generated animations connecting imaginary science fiction "sensawunda" futurity to the stasis of quotidian neo-feudalism (space battles in Air Force ads, crystal pastel art deco cityscapes in ads for sunglasses, immersive virtual reality in ads for chewing gum, radical cyborgization in ads for cellphones and so on): all of these conventions are shared across the landscape of mainstream advertising and in futurology.
Those few public pseudo-intellectuals among the futurologists who pose as serious experts, policymakers, and scientists, the ones who find it so easy to describe their vapid enthusiasms and neologisms as a practice of "philosophy" unmoored from any actual philosophical reading or tradition, are certainly incompetents and fools. But most of them are not so much indulging in conscious scams (although futurology has its share of ridiculous would-be gurus who are hard to distinguish from those fundamentalist frauds who fleece parishioners with fierce promises of transcendence and revenge) as they are simply not very bright, rather uncritical participants and therefore symptom of the suffusion of public discourse by marketing and promotional norms more generally.
We are saturated in deception, spin, hyperbole for parochial short-term inconstant gains and we come to find our expectations, our assumptions, our aspirations, our very souls are being reshaped in the image of the parochial promotional: the desperate marketing impulse that pads our resumes to get that job interview, whatever our qualifications, and connect us somehow to some useful role in the society from which we feel unmoored, the sad self-promotional effort that exaggerates, fictionalizes, and normalizes our personal profiles and photoshops our images to get that first date, whereupon we dream some magic of encounter will deliver us from spiritual homelessness, the pathetic public relations ethos that drives us to express ourselves in blog posts that yield zero comments, that pretend word clouds mechanistically weighting the frequency of word choices discerns some unique meaning from utterly undistinguished utterances, that fancies the number of fleeting page views drawn in by who knows what word search strings renders us public intellectuals of a sort, all the while only the silent raptor-eyed panoptic surveyors and monitors of the security state and the compilers of profiles for even more incessant and intensively targeted advertising harassment show much more than utter indifference to our "participation" in the remnant freedom of open networks...
We fancy we are agents marketing ourselves for advantage in a networked attentional economy, promoting what is remarkable in us when instead we go unremarked but marked for marketing, constituted in our selves as market-ready, readily marketed, on the make not self-making but on the market.
There have always been ideologues and charlatans and fraudsters populating the scene of our public life, there has always been deception and corruption and scandal, oligarchy and violence and exploitation are nothing new. But we have been sold: the corrosive and deepening derangement of public discourse by the norms and forms of promotional discourse demands our urgent and immediate address, its forms facilitate in their utter prevalence the displacement by parochial profit-taking and imperial moralizing of the contingent universalization in which public scientific, ethical, and political legitimacies are lodged, its suffusion of our public life and our public selfhood provides an indispensable but neglected context (no doubt among others) with which to understand the special vulnerability to and force of eliminationism, hyperbole, deception in our debased contemporary politics.
To understand this catastrophic suffusion of public life with the norms of the promotional (you need only ponder the distinction of politics from public relations to grasp the full force of such a shift), it is especially crucial to remember that contemporary capitalist formations are post-Fordist, and that neoliberal/neoconservative, that is to say corporate-militarist, capitalism depends on a relentless kind of hyper-speculation that disavows its materiality (financialization, informationalization/informalization, digitization, logo-ization) as well as a global developmentalism that disavows its violence (the military might that enables exploitation of the global/informal Precariat, as well as the violation of ecosystems that enables ongoing extractive industrialization in the face of ruin).
The ongoing devastation of academic and evidence-based institutions through the emergence of the anti-academic think-tank archipelago and the corporatization of the University and the hegemony of corporate-militarist mass media, should be regarded as both a casualty of this shift into a promotional public, as well as facilitating, accelerating, and amplifying its terms. This is the indispensable context for understanding the thriving of climate change denialism and macroeconomic illiteracy (among many other comparable irrationalisms and moralisms) vying in contemporary public discourse for the patina of institutional legitimacy.
The scientific and the ethical as modes of warranted belief-ascription, that is to say as forms of truth-talk, are organized by imperatives of contingent universalization out of which arise their falsifiable claims to legitimacy, while the truths of profitability (every profit complemented by a loss) and mores (every "we" constituted through the exclusion of a "they") are inherently parochial.
This is not to say the moral and the profitable are illegitimate or dispensable as modalities of belief ascription in their parochialism, but to insist that they are what they are and do the work that they do, and to warn against confusions and problems that arise from ignorant or mistaken efforts to substitute the moral for the ethical (which yields moralizing and genocide) or the profitable for the scientific (which yields propaganda and oligarchy) when what is wanted are the sorts of legitimacy only afforded by the latter terms. (If this strain of argument is congenial but unfamiliar to you, by the way, you might enjoy other efforts I've archived at the sidebar under the heading Posts on Pluralism and Pragmatism.)
I mention these apparently tangential issues in order to circle around to another point, by way of conclusion. I've devoted enormous amounts of space to the critique of futurology, but hitherto that critique has emphasized the ways in which what I call superlative (or transcendental) futurology embedded within sub(cult)ural futurological formations (the whole Robot Cult archipelago of organizations and would-be "movements" and identity politics/fandoms I have ridiculed so relentlessly for so many years now) should be regarded as a kind of organized but marginal and defensive religiosity for which the familiar critiques of cult formations and True Believers and fundamentalist politics all come very much in handy. (For these critiques of mine, The Condensed Critique of Transhumanism hands it to you in a nutshell, while The Superlative Summary offers endless variations and applications on these themes, and my Futurological Brickbats provide an aphoristic alternate survey of the highlights.)
Although I try to take pains to emphasize that the rather outrageous and extreme forms taken by superlative and sub(cult)ural futurology are most useful when taken as clarifying crystallizations of more prevailing mainstream discourses -- and I would insist that futurology is the quintessential justificatory and aspirational vocabulary of neoliberal capitalism (still more on this here) -- I can see why long-time readers might still wonder whether the critique of futurology as a symptom of the contemporary suffusion of the public sphere with the norms of marketing and promotional discourse represents an important shift away from my earlier critique of futurology as a kind of organized religiosity engaged in pseudo-science and fundamentalist politics.
What I would say in conclusion is that for me these two critiques are very much of a piece, that part of what is wrong with the suffusion of the public sphere with promotional norms is that it amounts to a resurgence of priestly-aristocratic parochialism and incumbent-elitism, an eclipse of the collective work of contingent universalization, peer to peer, that yield the legitimacy, authority, and currency of the scientific and the ethical, proper, with which the most congenial strands of Enlightenment seem to me most concerned, and without which the ongoing work of attaining to secular sustainable consensual convivial social democracy seems to me both unworkable and even unthinkable.
Although I am someone whose political economy is indebted to Keynes most of all and whose political theory is indebted to Arendt most of all (both of whom were decidedly post-Marxist even in those areas in which they were not outright anti-Marxist), it seems to me that one still has to turn to the late Marx and his cultural critique of the ubiquitous fetishized commodity-form to grasp just how futurology's promotional normativity connects to futurology's transcendental cultism: the story, which is a long one I balk at elaborating at length and so leave to another day, is one that features among its key episodes Adorno's Culture Industry, Barthes's Mythology, Debord's Spectacle, and Naomi Klein's Logo (all of whom foreground in turn mass mediation to supplement failed Marxian historiography and to correct Marxian reductionism all the while sounding the key Marxian theme that culture is the repository of enslaving irrationality).
It's a story any one of the students in any number of the courses I have taught in critical theory over the last decade could recite with their eyes closed, and it's rather nice to find such a conspicuous convergence between the preoccupations of my blogging and the focus of my teaching opening up.
More to come.
The hyperbolic, bordering on fraudulent, claims of mainstream advertising for ineffectual pills and ointments, the trumpeting as "revolutionary" of incremental adjustments and repackagings of features already available in consumer goods, but especially cars, computers, and media devices, the evocations of "science" with phony experts in labcoats mouthing pseudo-scientific neologisms, the computer generated animations connecting imaginary science fiction "sensawunda" futurity to the stasis of quotidian neo-feudalism (space battles in Air Force ads, crystal pastel art deco cityscapes in ads for sunglasses, immersive virtual reality in ads for chewing gum, radical cyborgization in ads for cellphones and so on): all of these conventions are shared across the landscape of mainstream advertising and in futurology.
Those few public pseudo-intellectuals among the futurologists who pose as serious experts, policymakers, and scientists, the ones who find it so easy to describe their vapid enthusiasms and neologisms as a practice of "philosophy" unmoored from any actual philosophical reading or tradition, are certainly incompetents and fools. But most of them are not so much indulging in conscious scams (although futurology has its share of ridiculous would-be gurus who are hard to distinguish from those fundamentalist frauds who fleece parishioners with fierce promises of transcendence and revenge) as they are simply not very bright, rather uncritical participants and therefore symptom of the suffusion of public discourse by marketing and promotional norms more generally.
We are saturated in deception, spin, hyperbole for parochial short-term inconstant gains and we come to find our expectations, our assumptions, our aspirations, our very souls are being reshaped in the image of the parochial promotional: the desperate marketing impulse that pads our resumes to get that job interview, whatever our qualifications, and connect us somehow to some useful role in the society from which we feel unmoored, the sad self-promotional effort that exaggerates, fictionalizes, and normalizes our personal profiles and photoshops our images to get that first date, whereupon we dream some magic of encounter will deliver us from spiritual homelessness, the pathetic public relations ethos that drives us to express ourselves in blog posts that yield zero comments, that pretend word clouds mechanistically weighting the frequency of word choices discerns some unique meaning from utterly undistinguished utterances, that fancies the number of fleeting page views drawn in by who knows what word search strings renders us public intellectuals of a sort, all the while only the silent raptor-eyed panoptic surveyors and monitors of the security state and the compilers of profiles for even more incessant and intensively targeted advertising harassment show much more than utter indifference to our "participation" in the remnant freedom of open networks...
We fancy we are agents marketing ourselves for advantage in a networked attentional economy, promoting what is remarkable in us when instead we go unremarked but marked for marketing, constituted in our selves as market-ready, readily marketed, on the make not self-making but on the market.
There have always been ideologues and charlatans and fraudsters populating the scene of our public life, there has always been deception and corruption and scandal, oligarchy and violence and exploitation are nothing new. But we have been sold: the corrosive and deepening derangement of public discourse by the norms and forms of promotional discourse demands our urgent and immediate address, its forms facilitate in their utter prevalence the displacement by parochial profit-taking and imperial moralizing of the contingent universalization in which public scientific, ethical, and political legitimacies are lodged, its suffusion of our public life and our public selfhood provides an indispensable but neglected context (no doubt among others) with which to understand the special vulnerability to and force of eliminationism, hyperbole, deception in our debased contemporary politics.
To understand this catastrophic suffusion of public life with the norms of the promotional (you need only ponder the distinction of politics from public relations to grasp the full force of such a shift), it is especially crucial to remember that contemporary capitalist formations are post-Fordist, and that neoliberal/neoconservative, that is to say corporate-militarist, capitalism depends on a relentless kind of hyper-speculation that disavows its materiality (financialization, informationalization/informalization, digitization, logo-ization) as well as a global developmentalism that disavows its violence (the military might that enables exploitation of the global/informal Precariat, as well as the violation of ecosystems that enables ongoing extractive industrialization in the face of ruin).
The ongoing devastation of academic and evidence-based institutions through the emergence of the anti-academic think-tank archipelago and the corporatization of the University and the hegemony of corporate-militarist mass media, should be regarded as both a casualty of this shift into a promotional public, as well as facilitating, accelerating, and amplifying its terms. This is the indispensable context for understanding the thriving of climate change denialism and macroeconomic illiteracy (among many other comparable irrationalisms and moralisms) vying in contemporary public discourse for the patina of institutional legitimacy.
The scientific and the ethical as modes of warranted belief-ascription, that is to say as forms of truth-talk, are organized by imperatives of contingent universalization out of which arise their falsifiable claims to legitimacy, while the truths of profitability (every profit complemented by a loss) and mores (every "we" constituted through the exclusion of a "they") are inherently parochial.
This is not to say the moral and the profitable are illegitimate or dispensable as modalities of belief ascription in their parochialism, but to insist that they are what they are and do the work that they do, and to warn against confusions and problems that arise from ignorant or mistaken efforts to substitute the moral for the ethical (which yields moralizing and genocide) or the profitable for the scientific (which yields propaganda and oligarchy) when what is wanted are the sorts of legitimacy only afforded by the latter terms. (If this strain of argument is congenial but unfamiliar to you, by the way, you might enjoy other efforts I've archived at the sidebar under the heading Posts on Pluralism and Pragmatism.)
I mention these apparently tangential issues in order to circle around to another point, by way of conclusion. I've devoted enormous amounts of space to the critique of futurology, but hitherto that critique has emphasized the ways in which what I call superlative (or transcendental) futurology embedded within sub(cult)ural futurological formations (the whole Robot Cult archipelago of organizations and would-be "movements" and identity politics/fandoms I have ridiculed so relentlessly for so many years now) should be regarded as a kind of organized but marginal and defensive religiosity for which the familiar critiques of cult formations and True Believers and fundamentalist politics all come very much in handy. (For these critiques of mine, The Condensed Critique of Transhumanism hands it to you in a nutshell, while The Superlative Summary offers endless variations and applications on these themes, and my Futurological Brickbats provide an aphoristic alternate survey of the highlights.)
Although I try to take pains to emphasize that the rather outrageous and extreme forms taken by superlative and sub(cult)ural futurology are most useful when taken as clarifying crystallizations of more prevailing mainstream discourses -- and I would insist that futurology is the quintessential justificatory and aspirational vocabulary of neoliberal capitalism (still more on this here) -- I can see why long-time readers might still wonder whether the critique of futurology as a symptom of the contemporary suffusion of the public sphere with the norms of marketing and promotional discourse represents an important shift away from my earlier critique of futurology as a kind of organized religiosity engaged in pseudo-science and fundamentalist politics.
What I would say in conclusion is that for me these two critiques are very much of a piece, that part of what is wrong with the suffusion of the public sphere with promotional norms is that it amounts to a resurgence of priestly-aristocratic parochialism and incumbent-elitism, an eclipse of the collective work of contingent universalization, peer to peer, that yield the legitimacy, authority, and currency of the scientific and the ethical, proper, with which the most congenial strands of Enlightenment seem to me most concerned, and without which the ongoing work of attaining to secular sustainable consensual convivial social democracy seems to me both unworkable and even unthinkable.
Although I am someone whose political economy is indebted to Keynes most of all and whose political theory is indebted to Arendt most of all (both of whom were decidedly post-Marxist even in those areas in which they were not outright anti-Marxist), it seems to me that one still has to turn to the late Marx and his cultural critique of the ubiquitous fetishized commodity-form to grasp just how futurology's promotional normativity connects to futurology's transcendental cultism: the story, which is a long one I balk at elaborating at length and so leave to another day, is one that features among its key episodes Adorno's Culture Industry, Barthes's Mythology, Debord's Spectacle, and Naomi Klein's Logo (all of whom foreground in turn mass mediation to supplement failed Marxian historiography and to correct Marxian reductionism all the while sounding the key Marxian theme that culture is the repository of enslaving irrationality).
It's a story any one of the students in any number of the courses I have taught in critical theory over the last decade could recite with their eyes closed, and it's rather nice to find such a conspicuous convergence between the preoccupations of my blogging and the focus of my teaching opening up.
More to come.
Monday, January 03, 2011
What's New in "Geo-Engineering"?
As it happens, I do not disapprove of the contemplation of releasing various amounts of sulphur into various regions of the atmosphere under various conditions. Hell, I do not disapprove of the contemplation of much of anything at all. I do disapprove of anybody actually going ahead and pumping massive amounts of sulphur into the atmosphere, half-cocked (you might, too, after you've read this and this and this and this), but contemplating it? Not so much.
More to the point, I strongly disapprove the suggestion that in contemplating pumping sulphur into the atmosphere and then subjecting the notion to serious scrutiny we are doing some radically new sort of thing than we are when we are contemplating, say, planting thousands of acres of trees, contemplating installing thousands of wind turbines or millions of solar roofs, contemplating changing zoning ordinances to facilitate the emergence of dense, walkable neighborhoods, or the like.
I disapprove the suggestion that contemplating pumping sulphur into the atmosphere is a matter of engaging in an additional and special environmental discourse, one that needs the new word "geo-engineering" to describe it, an environmentalism that futurologists of all people are special experts in, presumably because of their special capacity for having especially Big Ideas and thinking especially fearless thoughts. Although I daresay it is true that most of the sorts of handwaving futurologists indulge in when they get into a lather of "geo-engineering" talk would indeed get shot down, especially as and to the extent that the proportion of non-futurologists who are actually competent climate scientists and engineers at the discussion table rises, I do disapprove the suggestion that these futurological proposals necessarily constitute a separate kind of environmentalist proposal rather than, say, just dumb ideas environmentalists who cannot distinguish science and science fiction very well came up with without thinking things fully through.
I disapprove the suggestion that contemplating pumping sulphur into the atmosphere is a newfangled environmentalism made necessary by the failures of already existing environmentalism and which justifies or even necessitates making obviously ugly and misguided separate political assumptions than usually circumscribe the field of legitimate discourse, new assumptions that are described as visionary, brave, tough-minded rather than ugly and misguided, such that when futurological experts contemplate pumping sulphur into the atmosphere suddenly we are licensed or encouraged to think of the corporate-militarist villains who have been destroying our world for their reckless profit-taking instead as our last, best hope to save that world they are destroying, as uniquely competent elites that must be given the authority to clean up their mess in their own way however awful and ugly and criminal that may appear, that saving the world must proceed in a way that is above all profitable for elite-incumbent interests, that democratic processes and accountability are suddenly (oh- so- reluctantly- and- regretfully!) dispensable and for the good of precisely those who would otherwise have a say in public decisions that directly affect them should democracy prevail, that when political processes fail to implement emissions regulations we must turn to megascale engineering projects instead since, of course, no political processes are involved in the funding, regulation, oversight, building, or maintenance of megascale engineering projects (oh, wait, that's the opposite of reality), that since catastrophic climate change is real and renewable energy technology is real and emission standards and energy efficiency standards and health and safety standards necessary for sustainability are well-understood and perfectly reasonable we must turn, when political will seems unequal to these realities, to grandiose ill-conceived scenario-spinning about acres of orbiting space mirrors and vast chemical spewing airfleets peddled with splashy artist renderings and futurological neologisms and talk of "terraforming" the earth as though humans were alien invaders re-engineering an extraterrestrial planet from the Mother Ship.
There is no unique climate science data set or specific modality of engineering proposal of which "geo-engineering" as a discourse uniquely consists. What "geo-engineering" essentially and substantially consists of in my view is the assumption of a particular (and profoundly pernicious) vantage on environmentalist consciousness, a particular framing of environmentalist assumptions and aspirations, one that insists on freighting a handful of loosely connected proposals (no stable or coherent criteria exists to explain why any particular "geo-engineer" includes their particular preoccupations under the umbrella of "geo-engineering" while excluding others with comparable scope in their aggregate effects) with phony novelty to the self-promotional benefit of futurologists themselves cast as special "experts," while also creating a space in which anti-democratic policy recommendations and skewed elite-incumbent corporate-militarist for-profit priorities over remediation and sustainability itself can be voiced in public as if they were "serious" proposals.
In my view, these anti-democratizing effects are not incidental but absolutely essential to "geo-engineering" discourse. Indeed, they are the only things "geo-engineering" introduces into environmentalist ideas and politics as they already exist -- apart from the fact that a disproportionate number of "geo-engineering" proposals also tend in their hyperbole and militarism (deriving from their emergence, like all futurology, out of the norms of corporate-militarist marketing and promotional discourse) to be unusually grandiloquent and half-baked (mirrors on the Moon! Submarine cityscapes of pipeworks churning the depths! and so on).
More to the point, I strongly disapprove the suggestion that in contemplating pumping sulphur into the atmosphere and then subjecting the notion to serious scrutiny we are doing some radically new sort of thing than we are when we are contemplating, say, planting thousands of acres of trees, contemplating installing thousands of wind turbines or millions of solar roofs, contemplating changing zoning ordinances to facilitate the emergence of dense, walkable neighborhoods, or the like.
I disapprove the suggestion that contemplating pumping sulphur into the atmosphere is a matter of engaging in an additional and special environmental discourse, one that needs the new word "geo-engineering" to describe it, an environmentalism that futurologists of all people are special experts in, presumably because of their special capacity for having especially Big Ideas and thinking especially fearless thoughts. Although I daresay it is true that most of the sorts of handwaving futurologists indulge in when they get into a lather of "geo-engineering" talk would indeed get shot down, especially as and to the extent that the proportion of non-futurologists who are actually competent climate scientists and engineers at the discussion table rises, I do disapprove the suggestion that these futurological proposals necessarily constitute a separate kind of environmentalist proposal rather than, say, just dumb ideas environmentalists who cannot distinguish science and science fiction very well came up with without thinking things fully through.
I disapprove the suggestion that contemplating pumping sulphur into the atmosphere is a newfangled environmentalism made necessary by the failures of already existing environmentalism and which justifies or even necessitates making obviously ugly and misguided separate political assumptions than usually circumscribe the field of legitimate discourse, new assumptions that are described as visionary, brave, tough-minded rather than ugly and misguided, such that when futurological experts contemplate pumping sulphur into the atmosphere suddenly we are licensed or encouraged to think of the corporate-militarist villains who have been destroying our world for their reckless profit-taking instead as our last, best hope to save that world they are destroying, as uniquely competent elites that must be given the authority to clean up their mess in their own way however awful and ugly and criminal that may appear, that saving the world must proceed in a way that is above all profitable for elite-incumbent interests, that democratic processes and accountability are suddenly (oh- so- reluctantly- and- regretfully!) dispensable and for the good of precisely those who would otherwise have a say in public decisions that directly affect them should democracy prevail, that when political processes fail to implement emissions regulations we must turn to megascale engineering projects instead since, of course, no political processes are involved in the funding, regulation, oversight, building, or maintenance of megascale engineering projects (oh, wait, that's the opposite of reality), that since catastrophic climate change is real and renewable energy technology is real and emission standards and energy efficiency standards and health and safety standards necessary for sustainability are well-understood and perfectly reasonable we must turn, when political will seems unequal to these realities, to grandiose ill-conceived scenario-spinning about acres of orbiting space mirrors and vast chemical spewing airfleets peddled with splashy artist renderings and futurological neologisms and talk of "terraforming" the earth as though humans were alien invaders re-engineering an extraterrestrial planet from the Mother Ship.
There is no unique climate science data set or specific modality of engineering proposal of which "geo-engineering" as a discourse uniquely consists. What "geo-engineering" essentially and substantially consists of in my view is the assumption of a particular (and profoundly pernicious) vantage on environmentalist consciousness, a particular framing of environmentalist assumptions and aspirations, one that insists on freighting a handful of loosely connected proposals (no stable or coherent criteria exists to explain why any particular "geo-engineer" includes their particular preoccupations under the umbrella of "geo-engineering" while excluding others with comparable scope in their aggregate effects) with phony novelty to the self-promotional benefit of futurologists themselves cast as special "experts," while also creating a space in which anti-democratic policy recommendations and skewed elite-incumbent corporate-militarist for-profit priorities over remediation and sustainability itself can be voiced in public as if they were "serious" proposals.
In my view, these anti-democratizing effects are not incidental but absolutely essential to "geo-engineering" discourse. Indeed, they are the only things "geo-engineering" introduces into environmentalist ideas and politics as they already exist -- apart from the fact that a disproportionate number of "geo-engineering" proposals also tend in their hyperbole and militarism (deriving from their emergence, like all futurology, out of the norms of corporate-militarist marketing and promotional discourse) to be unusually grandiloquent and half-baked (mirrors on the Moon! Submarine cityscapes of pipeworks churning the depths! and so on).
Thursday, December 30, 2010
A God for the Godless
Something like the belief that the universe is not just susceptible of consequential description but also has -- and even somehow indicates, at least to certain especially lucky people -- preferences in the matter of how it is described, has long seemed to me to be the vestigial trace of infantile religiosity sometimes to be found among the otherwise most intransigently atheistical materialists.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Adversarial Advertorial
In response to my complaints about ever louder, ever more frequent, ever more hysterical advertising content on television, one rather sanctimonious reader helpfully suggested I stop watching television altogether.
Of course, the "Kill Your Television" chorus has long existed by now. And there is nothing to ridicule in the fact that some people have enriched their lives by separating from television (which for generations now has sometimes functioned as a kind of disastrous child-care alternative in some households and created dependencies that can cry out for intervention).
Also, truth be told, tastes both do and should differ, and those who find nothing worth watching on television are welcome to that opinion and to the subcultural forms they prefer. I for one think there is plenty worth watching on television -- I enjoy serialized science fiction and costume dramas, I enjoy the antics of some game shows and reality television, I enjoy the rhetorical pyrotechnics of pundit programs. I do think that at least some of the people who are most sanctimonious about their refusal of television are simply cutting themselves off from areas of culture for no clearly explicable reason.
But more to the point, "Kill Your Television" isn't really a relevant response to the problem at hand. In America advertisements are proliferating deliriously, on college campuses, in public spaces like stadiums and parks and subway stations (and even as flickering reels in the darkened tunnels!), in lobbies, in elevators, in grocery check-out lines, in ever more of the real estate of every media screen.
"Withdrawal" is simply not ultimately an option, unless one fancies life in a rough-hewn Unabomber cabin in the deep wilderness amidst the boulders and the flashing fishies with nothing but a dog-eared Thoreau for company (in which case, rock on with your bad ass self, but I'm not sure that solution will scale, even if Resource Descent -- Peak Oil, PetroAg Fail, Water Wars -- may force a monumental test case on us all soon enough).
However, it occurs to me that in Europe there are actually sensible regulations that restrict both the volume and frequency of television commercials. In the absence of such regulations it is very clear that there is literally no check on the vicious circle driving commercial media into suicide -- they keep increasing the amount of ad time, the volume, the forms it takes, getting for each further encroachment of the norm a momentary burst of oh so delicious profit that vanishes once everybody else has replicated it and normalized the encroachment, thus provoking the next encroachment still, and on and on an on, never gaining a permanent profit advantage but with each encroachment tapping away at the actual quality of the content they are providing, with nothing to check the process, nothing to contain the greed that drives the degeneration. As with everything else, the drive for profit when constrained by regulation can encourage worthy innovation, but when unconstrained eats its own to the ruin of all.
The relevant question for me is just why it is that there is no real organized resistance agitating for legislation to introduce in the US regulation such as exists in the EU to limit the frequency of ad content -- which is now actually palpably beginning to undermine the capacity of shows to maintain narrative continuity? Why are there no mass campaigns for regulations such as exist in South America to limit or eliminate billboards that clutter our cities and pimple our pristine landscapes? Why is there no well organized outcry for laws forbidding the re-naming of stadiums and subway stations built and maintained with tax payer and public bond funds to honor private corporations as though they were monarchs? Why aren't people regularly arguing on the pundit shows for laws to forbid ads and commercials in university settings that exist, after all, as spaces of research and contemplation and in which distractions and biases imperil their mandated missions? Why don't I hear as a matter of course that people feel assaulted and harassed by endless shrill ads making hyperbolic promises and mobilizing ridiculous imagery and stereotypes that insult our intelligence and derange our senses?
In my view, the ongoing proliferation and ramification of advertising on every conceivable space is tantamount to pollution and harassment and there should be lawsuits and organized campaigns to stop it. Although I enjoy the aesthetics of culturejamming and adbusting it seems to me that these interventions functionally depend on and substantiate the norms and forms of ubiquitous advertising as such, whatever critical purchase they may provide in our relations to particular ad content.
Too many of my students take comfortably for granted the utter colonization of public space by deceptive hyperbolic corporate marketing material. And let me stress that word deception. The norms of marketing discourse are hyperbolic and cynical in ways that typically, that is to say generically, border on fraud and their ubiquity is educating the population to accept endless spin and deception as normal, as acceptable, preparing the way for a public life suffused with opportunistic lies. These norms appeal conspicuously to our emotions rather than our capacities to weight competing claims logically, empirically, critically, indeed they appeal to the bluntest of our passions, to our appetites, our greed, our fear, preparing the way for a public life suffused with selective mobilizations of short-term greed and terror. (To connect this point with other themes that recur here at Amor Mundi, I do indeed regard futurological discourse as the quintessential expression of this utter bankruptcy of public deliberation into marketing and promotional fraud, explored especially in the posts archived here).
Needless to say, I consider all this profoundly pernicious, perhaps the single most dangerous cultural force afoot without any organized resistance that I can see the least bit equal to its danger. Any readers aware of actually effective organizing out there on these questions? What forms might organized resistance properly take? What, practically, should be done?
Of course, the "Kill Your Television" chorus has long existed by now. And there is nothing to ridicule in the fact that some people have enriched their lives by separating from television (which for generations now has sometimes functioned as a kind of disastrous child-care alternative in some households and created dependencies that can cry out for intervention).
Also, truth be told, tastes both do and should differ, and those who find nothing worth watching on television are welcome to that opinion and to the subcultural forms they prefer. I for one think there is plenty worth watching on television -- I enjoy serialized science fiction and costume dramas, I enjoy the antics of some game shows and reality television, I enjoy the rhetorical pyrotechnics of pundit programs. I do think that at least some of the people who are most sanctimonious about their refusal of television are simply cutting themselves off from areas of culture for no clearly explicable reason.
But more to the point, "Kill Your Television" isn't really a relevant response to the problem at hand. In America advertisements are proliferating deliriously, on college campuses, in public spaces like stadiums and parks and subway stations (and even as flickering reels in the darkened tunnels!), in lobbies, in elevators, in grocery check-out lines, in ever more of the real estate of every media screen.
"Withdrawal" is simply not ultimately an option, unless one fancies life in a rough-hewn Unabomber cabin in the deep wilderness amidst the boulders and the flashing fishies with nothing but a dog-eared Thoreau for company (in which case, rock on with your bad ass self, but I'm not sure that solution will scale, even if Resource Descent -- Peak Oil, PetroAg Fail, Water Wars -- may force a monumental test case on us all soon enough).
However, it occurs to me that in Europe there are actually sensible regulations that restrict both the volume and frequency of television commercials. In the absence of such regulations it is very clear that there is literally no check on the vicious circle driving commercial media into suicide -- they keep increasing the amount of ad time, the volume, the forms it takes, getting for each further encroachment of the norm a momentary burst of oh so delicious profit that vanishes once everybody else has replicated it and normalized the encroachment, thus provoking the next encroachment still, and on and on an on, never gaining a permanent profit advantage but with each encroachment tapping away at the actual quality of the content they are providing, with nothing to check the process, nothing to contain the greed that drives the degeneration. As with everything else, the drive for profit when constrained by regulation can encourage worthy innovation, but when unconstrained eats its own to the ruin of all.
The relevant question for me is just why it is that there is no real organized resistance agitating for legislation to introduce in the US regulation such as exists in the EU to limit the frequency of ad content -- which is now actually palpably beginning to undermine the capacity of shows to maintain narrative continuity? Why are there no mass campaigns for regulations such as exist in South America to limit or eliminate billboards that clutter our cities and pimple our pristine landscapes? Why is there no well organized outcry for laws forbidding the re-naming of stadiums and subway stations built and maintained with tax payer and public bond funds to honor private corporations as though they were monarchs? Why aren't people regularly arguing on the pundit shows for laws to forbid ads and commercials in university settings that exist, after all, as spaces of research and contemplation and in which distractions and biases imperil their mandated missions? Why don't I hear as a matter of course that people feel assaulted and harassed by endless shrill ads making hyperbolic promises and mobilizing ridiculous imagery and stereotypes that insult our intelligence and derange our senses?
In my view, the ongoing proliferation and ramification of advertising on every conceivable space is tantamount to pollution and harassment and there should be lawsuits and organized campaigns to stop it. Although I enjoy the aesthetics of culturejamming and adbusting it seems to me that these interventions functionally depend on and substantiate the norms and forms of ubiquitous advertising as such, whatever critical purchase they may provide in our relations to particular ad content.
Too many of my students take comfortably for granted the utter colonization of public space by deceptive hyperbolic corporate marketing material. And let me stress that word deception. The norms of marketing discourse are hyperbolic and cynical in ways that typically, that is to say generically, border on fraud and their ubiquity is educating the population to accept endless spin and deception as normal, as acceptable, preparing the way for a public life suffused with opportunistic lies. These norms appeal conspicuously to our emotions rather than our capacities to weight competing claims logically, empirically, critically, indeed they appeal to the bluntest of our passions, to our appetites, our greed, our fear, preparing the way for a public life suffused with selective mobilizations of short-term greed and terror. (To connect this point with other themes that recur here at Amor Mundi, I do indeed regard futurological discourse as the quintessential expression of this utter bankruptcy of public deliberation into marketing and promotional fraud, explored especially in the posts archived here).
Needless to say, I consider all this profoundly pernicious, perhaps the single most dangerous cultural force afoot without any organized resistance that I can see the least bit equal to its danger. Any readers aware of actually effective organizing out there on these questions? What forms might organized resistance properly take? What, practically, should be done?
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Sustainable Schadenfreude
I am sometimes amused at the thought that when the petro-bubble that has for so long been mistaken for the Triumphal Ascendancy Unto Infinity of Western Civilization finally does burst it will be organic farmers and hippy artisans and eco-villagers and other such folks long derided as fools and throwbacks by the gas-guzzling go-getter bully narcissists of Randoidal neoliberalism who alone will have all the skills without which neither flourishing nor even survival is possible.
Of course, the least contemplation of the scale of human catastrophe that would necessarily precede anything like the arrival of that state of affairs fizzles that amusement pretty quickly. Indeed, the trauma of surviving such a transition might make any notion of flourishing moot whatever vital skills one had shepherded through our own catastrophic know-nothing ego-everything era.
Of course, the least contemplation of the scale of human catastrophe that would necessarily precede anything like the arrival of that state of affairs fizzles that amusement pretty quickly. Indeed, the trauma of surviving such a transition might make any notion of flourishing moot whatever vital skills one had shepherded through our own catastrophic know-nothing ego-everything era.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
More on Economics and Rhetoric
The throwaway comment on Krugman in the last post has reminded me of something I've been meaning to riff on for a long time, a point that comes up all the time in my teaching but rarely in my blogging:
When Robert Heilbroner made the point that economists were "worldly philosophers" in his (justly) famous economic history of the same name, he was really making what would be better thought of as two different enormously important points, both of which might have been made better under a different title.
One of the points, in my view, is that economists at their best would be better thought of as rhetoricians (formulating compelling cases, figures, narratives, and appeals to identity the better to corral and change collective conviction and conduct), and the other point is that economists at their worst often seem to want instead to be thought of as philosophers, and especially as philosophers in those sad moments in which they seek to distinguish what they are doing as forcefully as possible from "mere rhetoric," moments in which they are often most prone to figure themselves instead as some sort of scientific discipline or even the most scientific discipline of all, a meta-science or super-science.
I do not think it accidental that Keynes titled one of his most wonderful and influential books Essays in Persuasion, any more than that the truly marvelous economist Albert Hirschman who wrote the incomparable The Passions and the Interests (one of those books which literally everybody should read) also wrote the less known but also excellent Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.
I personally think that Marx was incomparably better when he was writing polemical journalism and history (not to mention outright manifestos), or those endlessly fascinating figurative analyses like the passage concerning the camera obscura in The German Ideology and the one with all those avid grotesque undead commodities capering about in "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof" from Volume One of Capital, than in the awful moments when he was trying to live up to Engels' deadly praise that he was "The Darwin of History" and making an anxious spectacle of his pseudo-scientificity by reducing cultural complexities to drab forces of production and sketching grandiloquent deterministic histories and mistaking priestly prophetic utterances for scientific hypotheses like your typical philosophical peacock. Only those facile free marketeers, Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, Friedman, Friedman, Friedman, et al are more embarrassing in their pretentious pseudo-scientificity, mistaking maths and hype for substance and looking the other way when the bullets fly and starving stomachs balloon in their wake.
The story of rhetoric's denigration by philosophical ideologues is literally a story as old as philosophy itself, inasmuch as philosophy was born precisely in such a moment of resentment (as Nietzsche tells the story best of all). As Hannah Arendt was always at such pains to point out, this denigration shaped the Western tradition of political thought in ways that endlessly distort our understanding of and deny the thoughtful access to the full measure of worldly life -- although it might be said that in her ready assimilation of economic discourse to the social rather than to the political she contributed her own share to the long deferral of the reckoning of rhetoric with the end in failure of the western philosophical project, a reckoning that needs to do justice to the political in thought, including those dimensions in political economy that have always been more rhetorical than philosophical from the first. Such a reckoning would need -- as Heilbroner's history significantly failed to do -- among other things, to register the achievement of political economists like Karl Polanyi as high as that of Marx and Mill and Keynes, and at least as part of the same story.
When Robert Heilbroner made the point that economists were "worldly philosophers" in his (justly) famous economic history of the same name, he was really making what would be better thought of as two different enormously important points, both of which might have been made better under a different title.
One of the points, in my view, is that economists at their best would be better thought of as rhetoricians (formulating compelling cases, figures, narratives, and appeals to identity the better to corral and change collective conviction and conduct), and the other point is that economists at their worst often seem to want instead to be thought of as philosophers, and especially as philosophers in those sad moments in which they seek to distinguish what they are doing as forcefully as possible from "mere rhetoric," moments in which they are often most prone to figure themselves instead as some sort of scientific discipline or even the most scientific discipline of all, a meta-science or super-science.
I do not think it accidental that Keynes titled one of his most wonderful and influential books Essays in Persuasion, any more than that the truly marvelous economist Albert Hirschman who wrote the incomparable The Passions and the Interests (one of those books which literally everybody should read) also wrote the less known but also excellent Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.
I personally think that Marx was incomparably better when he was writing polemical journalism and history (not to mention outright manifestos), or those endlessly fascinating figurative analyses like the passage concerning the camera obscura in The German Ideology and the one with all those avid grotesque undead commodities capering about in "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof" from Volume One of Capital, than in the awful moments when he was trying to live up to Engels' deadly praise that he was "The Darwin of History" and making an anxious spectacle of his pseudo-scientificity by reducing cultural complexities to drab forces of production and sketching grandiloquent deterministic histories and mistaking priestly prophetic utterances for scientific hypotheses like your typical philosophical peacock. Only those facile free marketeers, Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, Friedman, Friedman, Friedman, et al are more embarrassing in their pretentious pseudo-scientificity, mistaking maths and hype for substance and looking the other way when the bullets fly and starving stomachs balloon in their wake.
The story of rhetoric's denigration by philosophical ideologues is literally a story as old as philosophy itself, inasmuch as philosophy was born precisely in such a moment of resentment (as Nietzsche tells the story best of all). As Hannah Arendt was always at such pains to point out, this denigration shaped the Western tradition of political thought in ways that endlessly distort our understanding of and deny the thoughtful access to the full measure of worldly life -- although it might be said that in her ready assimilation of economic discourse to the social rather than to the political she contributed her own share to the long deferral of the reckoning of rhetoric with the end in failure of the western philosophical project, a reckoning that needs to do justice to the political in thought, including those dimensions in political economy that have always been more rhetorical than philosophical from the first. Such a reckoning would need -- as Heilbroner's history significantly failed to do -- among other things, to register the achievement of political economists like Karl Polanyi as high as that of Marx and Mill and Keynes, and at least as part of the same story.
Monday, December 13, 2010
The Digital Utopian Future Is Here!
Is it just me or does the new digital tee vee endlessly black out and skitter and pixillate, making it incomparably worse than the prevailing standards that preceded it? Just me, I'm sure. Everything is awesome now.
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
The Robot Cult Razor
Superlative Futurologists interminably -- and I would say definitively -- find themselves (usually himselves) in the curious argumentative/assertive position of
EITHER
declaring as likely, important, or true an actually vapid statement (such as that water is wet, that a longer healthier life is generally preferable to a shorter diseased one, or that when lots of things change things tend to get less predictable generally speaking) nobody needs to join a Robot Cult or to deploy idiosyncratic Robot Cult jargon to grasp or profess in the first place
OR
declaring as likely, important, or true an actually distinctive statement which only people in Robot Cults would seriously profess because it is pretty much batshit crazy (such as that organismically materialized intelligence or "selfhood" can be "migrated" into cyberspatial heaven or into superhuman robot bodies and also thereby near-immortalized, probably under the loving care of superintelligent robot gods with nanobotic dirt-cheap superabundance machines at their disposal, that this is likely enough that we should be devoting considerable time to thinking about it rather than more proximate concerns like global exploitation and social injustice, clashing fundamentalisms, proliferating weapons, catastrophic climate change and resource descent, and could happen "soon," possibly in a shattering history-ending or personal-transcendence enabling event called The Singularity or Ascendance or some such nonsense).
The vapid statement tends to be the position to which the Robot Cultist always only momentarily retreats when confronted with either consensus scientific or conceptual criticism of his actually distinctive but, alas, crazy assertions of belief. The reason this retreat to vapidity is so commonplace and even necessary is because the Robot Cultist is indulging in an essentially faith-based enterprise yielding what are actually sub(cult)ural membership benefits and wish-fulfillment fantasy satisfactions, but which peddle themselves as and require the maintenance of the highly vulnerable fantasy that they are in fact a mode of serious science or serious technodevelopmental policy-making rather than essentially religious/moralistic/aesthetic matters of faith, fandom, and style. The Robot Razor, I fear, is cutting.
EITHER
declaring as likely, important, or true an actually vapid statement (such as that water is wet, that a longer healthier life is generally preferable to a shorter diseased one, or that when lots of things change things tend to get less predictable generally speaking) nobody needs to join a Robot Cult or to deploy idiosyncratic Robot Cult jargon to grasp or profess in the first place
OR
declaring as likely, important, or true an actually distinctive statement which only people in Robot Cults would seriously profess because it is pretty much batshit crazy (such as that organismically materialized intelligence or "selfhood" can be "migrated" into cyberspatial heaven or into superhuman robot bodies and also thereby near-immortalized, probably under the loving care of superintelligent robot gods with nanobotic dirt-cheap superabundance machines at their disposal, that this is likely enough that we should be devoting considerable time to thinking about it rather than more proximate concerns like global exploitation and social injustice, clashing fundamentalisms, proliferating weapons, catastrophic climate change and resource descent, and could happen "soon," possibly in a shattering history-ending or personal-transcendence enabling event called The Singularity or Ascendance or some such nonsense).
The vapid statement tends to be the position to which the Robot Cultist always only momentarily retreats when confronted with either consensus scientific or conceptual criticism of his actually distinctive but, alas, crazy assertions of belief. The reason this retreat to vapidity is so commonplace and even necessary is because the Robot Cultist is indulging in an essentially faith-based enterprise yielding what are actually sub(cult)ural membership benefits and wish-fulfillment fantasy satisfactions, but which peddle themselves as and require the maintenance of the highly vulnerable fantasy that they are in fact a mode of serious science or serious technodevelopmental policy-making rather than essentially religious/moralistic/aesthetic matters of faith, fandom, and style. The Robot Razor, I fear, is cutting.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
The Inconvenience of a World Worth Living In
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:
Oh, nobody's denying the short-term convenience of cars. The question is whether it's worth longer term cataclysm or whether you still get to say you are a smart or good person if knowing what you know you prefer the short-term over the longer-term.
I suspect the good people of Lexington could organize and agitate to get better bus service if they got off their asses and decided to give a shit about destroying the world their kids have to live in, if, as you say, they have kids and such.
But, yes, of course, people have shit to do. Not me. I have used for decades and continue still to use public transportation even where it was and is crappy and turns 15 minute commutes into hour-long commutes because I am a special magical being who doesn't have shit to do.
Or maybe I just brought a book or graded papers or organized my day and learned soon enough to enjoy or otherwise make use of the "burden" of that unspeakable inconvenience and discovered soon enough that it wasn't one. Again, tho', I'm a special magical being utterly unlike normal folks with their urgently demanding indispensably lightning-paced fantastically satisfying lives, as has been amply established already.
[T]he US has a population density that makes GOOD public transportation economically impractical. Yes, there are buses here in Lexington (pop: 270,000), but the buses suck. Yes, I *could* take the bus, but I'd be turning a 15 min trip into an hour and half, each way. Maybe I don't have an excuse, but some people have shit to do. They need to get home to their kids and so on. I understand why they drive.
Oh, nobody's denying the short-term convenience of cars. The question is whether it's worth longer term cataclysm or whether you still get to say you are a smart or good person if knowing what you know you prefer the short-term over the longer-term.
I suspect the good people of Lexington could organize and agitate to get better bus service if they got off their asses and decided to give a shit about destroying the world their kids have to live in, if, as you say, they have kids and such.
But, yes, of course, people have shit to do. Not me. I have used for decades and continue still to use public transportation even where it was and is crappy and turns 15 minute commutes into hour-long commutes because I am a special magical being who doesn't have shit to do.
Or maybe I just brought a book or graded papers or organized my day and learned soon enough to enjoy or otherwise make use of the "burden" of that unspeakable inconvenience and discovered soon enough that it wasn't one. Again, tho', I'm a special magical being utterly unlike normal folks with their urgently demanding indispensably lightning-paced fantastically satisfying lives, as has been amply established already.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
It's time once more to visit the Very Serious techno-"progressive" futurologists at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
There are no surprises yet again this Saturday, I'm sorry to say. Of all the faces of featured authors to be seen on IEET's website this week there are only two that are not the faces of a white guy. And yet, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week after week for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
There are no surprises yet again this Saturday, I'm sorry to say. Of all the faces of featured authors to be seen on IEET's website this week there are only two that are not the faces of a white guy. And yet, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week after week for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
Monday, November 08, 2010
Random Observation About Massive Wealth and Celebrity
Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot:
I happen to believe that there is no such thing as a life-long winning streak, and that only a negligible portion of those who have more actually keep more because they deserve it more than most who have less.
For me, celebrity is more or less the same. While it is easily possible that one can attract the momentary attention of masses of people, I personally believe that every single person who manages to stay in the public eye for long sustained periods of time is psychologically disturbed and most likely a straight-up sociopath.
I have believed this for most of my life. I suppose that this is one of those things that puts me rather at odds with our CEO-and-celebrity worshiping culture, but, well, you knew that already. I'm wondering, just how odd am I in this attitude? Readers?
I happen to believe that there is no such thing as a life-long winning streak, and that only a negligible portion of those who have more actually keep more because they deserve it more than most who have less.
For me, celebrity is more or less the same. While it is easily possible that one can attract the momentary attention of masses of people, I personally believe that every single person who manages to stay in the public eye for long sustained periods of time is psychologically disturbed and most likely a straight-up sociopath.
I have believed this for most of my life. I suppose that this is one of those things that puts me rather at odds with our CEO-and-celebrity worshiping culture, but, well, you knew that already. I'm wondering, just how odd am I in this attitude? Readers?
Saturday, November 06, 2010
This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report
It's time once more to visit the Very Serious techno-"progressive" futurologists at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
There are no surprises again this Saturday, I'm afraid. Of all the faces of featured authors to be seen on IEET's website this week there is, like last week, only one that is not the face of a white guy. And this is following two weeks with literally nothing but futurological White Guys on display.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: The so-called "transhumanists" have seen The Future... and it is a White Penis.
And yet, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week after week for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
There are no surprises again this Saturday, I'm afraid. Of all the faces of featured authors to be seen on IEET's website this week there is, like last week, only one that is not the face of a white guy. And this is following two weeks with literally nothing but futurological White Guys on display.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: The so-called "transhumanists" have seen The Future... and it is a White Penis.
And yet, only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.
The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting week after week after week for months now over at IEET, supposedly the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the futurological Robot Cult archipelago, has long seemed to me to represent just one of the more obvious symptoms of the profound marginality of what I call superlative sub(cult)ural futurology.
For more of my critique of the glaring conceptual and political problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend interested readers begin with my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.
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