The Unbearable Stasis of "Accelerating Change"

Also posted at the World Future Society.

Eric and I got haircuts yesterday afternoon, and while I was waiting I flipped through magazines. Peter Diamandis (who is clearly shaping up as this decade's go-to Kurzweil) had an article in Popular Science about garage inventors "going viral." It seemed to me pretty indistinguishable from stuff Cory Doctorow and Alex Steffen were writing a decade ago -- remember the "Tech Bloom"?

This is something that has struck me time and time again: The transhumanoids and singularitarians and online futurists love to congratulate themselves over their unflappability at the prospects of shatteringly onrushing changed futures. They literally have a whole "shock level" calculator, which is kinda sorta like a Cosmo sex quiz for pasty futurological males who think diddling themselves over cartoons of space elevators or descriptions of traversable wormholes demonstrates the awesomeness of their humanity-plus brains as compared to mehum (mere human) sheeple types.

But what always strikes me most forcefully about these ecstatic pronouncements is their abject staleness. There is simply not much to distinguish Ed Regis' depiction of the superlative futurologists in Great Mambo Chicken from Brian Alexander's in Rapture from breathless blog profiles of today, decade after decade after decade. Stiegler's "Gentle Seduction" from the 1980s is precisely standard transhumanoid boilerplate, techno-transcendence via shopping, loose-talking SENS-style longevity meds and "enhancement" pills and prostheses, Drexlerian nano-cornucopias, singularity (the literal term, already attributed to Vinge, not just the notion), Moravecian uploading, hive mind, market fundamentalism -- every single detail is already there.

Frankly, many of the ideas are already there decades earlier, in Turing, Shannon, Weiner, Bush. Heck, Anne Lindbergh was already surfing the "Wave of the Future" (and it was already fascist) even before a victorious post-war America managed through the inflation of the petrochemical bubble and the imposition of the mass-mediated Culture Industry to "invent" The Future Gernsback and Madison Avenue and all our Presidents would peddle the planet long before Toffler and company would stumble on the obvious and re-invent the wheel as a profitable pseudo-discipline for the seventies, then Brand and company would do it again for the eighties, then WIRED and company would do it again for the nineties, then the various p2p and Web 2.0 enthusiasts would do it again for the lost Bush decade, over and over and over again, the same hopes, the same tropes, the same dopes on and on and on from WW2 to Star Wars to whatever (probably bombed out cities or a pointless polluted moonscape).

I have proposed that the "accelerating change" crowed about for the last two decades by futurologists in pop religious cadences and by more mainstream and academic New Media commentators in pop psychology and pop sociology cadences has never had any substantial reference apart from the increasing precarity produced by neoliberal looting and destabilization of domestic welfare and global economies -- often facilitated, it is true, by the exploitation of digital trading, marketing, and surveillance networks -- a precarity usually seen and experienced from the vantage of privileged people who either benefit from neoliberal destabilization or who (rightly or wrongly) identify with the beneficiaries of that destabilization.

The pseudo-transcendentalizing narratives futurologists attach to this sleight of hand, this heartbreak and anxiety transubstantiated into a rocketship to omniscience and omnipotence, whether proposed in the familiar and profitable imperial triumphalist way (like the Long Boom nonsense and libertopian digirati handwaving and various tech bubbles every few years or so, digital, biological, faux-green, often ultimately military, like greenwashing "geo-engineering" schemes) or in the more enjoyably bonkers quasi-religious way (involving plastic or nuclear or nano magic superabundance fantasies or virtual heavens with virtual sex fantasies or various loosely conceived techno-immortality fantasies), all really just provide the furniture for aspirational/distracted futurological conceits to hang out in while these rebels without a cause or a clue indulge their wish-fulfillment ids and forget to vote and purchase their handhelds and pass the collection plate.

Maybe it was the confrontation of this futurological re-run proposed as fresh insight in the form of glossy pages in a magazine instead of the usual twittering wave of pieties one clicks through online that struck me so forcefully yesterday afternoon at Supercuts. I always chuckle at the covers of men's fitness magazine, at the thought that people actually subscribe to these things, even though it is clear from the covers that every single issue is obsessed with exactly the same things (flabby middle, flagging sex drive), and proposes exactly the same advice (stick to it, more muscle mass will eat more calories, be careful to stretch so you don't injure yourself, there are pills for that), and provides exactly the same -- or at any rate indistinguishable -- trilobite torsoed toothy grinned bland midwestern model on the cover. Eric laughed when I told him about Diamandis's tired re-tread of futurological chestnuts and offered up my analogy to men's fitness magazines. He reminded me that, unlike the fraudulent futurists, those men's fitness magazines at least actually provide the indispensable service of plausibly deniable masturbation material for kids who haven't yet come out of the closet. But of course, it isn't only closeted kids who are treating these magazines as masturbation material. There is a real sense in which that is their sole substantial function, for their whole target audience, gay and straight young and old alike. Like futurologists soaking in the same old soup of progressive transcendent "predictions" that never fail even when they fail, guys scooping up these fitness magazines aren't really looking for information, they aren't really looking for anything new, they are getting another imaginary refueling from the pump, another dose of the daydream they indulge as they defer the real workout, another hit of phony identification with an unrealistic ego-ideal straining in shorts purchased at the cost of dis-identification with the man in the mirror -- all in the name of health, health, health, darling!

When I lampoon "movement" futurology as a Robot Cult it isn't only the defensive groupthink and guru worship and annual conventions of True Believers that lend plausibility to the attribution of "cult" to what amounts to a lame pop-tech journalism fandom with delusions of grandeur (and, I should add, actually existing "membership" organizations peddling "-isms" to the rubes). And when I declare that the more assertively "techno-transcendental" varieties of futurological discourse (like the transhumanists, the singularitarians, the techno-immortalists, the nano-cornucopians, the digital-utopians) are simply extreme and hyperbolic variations of mainstream neoliberal global developmental policy discourse and mainstream marketing, advertising, and PR forms, this latter claim shouldn't be seen as undermining the first. Because there is an unmistakably faith-mobilizing pseudo-transcendentalizing strain to be discerned in this very PR marketing imaginary, deranging us from our present distress into a yearning toward consumer techno-futures bathed in pastels and robots and cars and DNA helices and chocolate and glossy hair and youthful skin and golden sex.

Advertizing and online profiling practices are the opiate of the masses in the age of digitally-networked corporate-militarism (the present stage of capitalism), as Debord insisted in the sixties and Barthes in the fifties and Adorno in the forties and Benjamin in the thirties, a mass mediated Opium War (and often literal war) distracts the masses from awareness that we have already long since arrived at the techno-scientific level to provide security and equity and hence universal emancipation for all, distracting us endlessly instead into internecine struggles over pseudo-needs and pseudo-strivings that leave the obsolete bloodsoaked hierarchies enjoyed by elite incumbents in place, and so seduces us into ongoing collaboration with the terms of our own exploitation. The deceptive and hyperbolic advertising and marketing forms that utterly suffuse our public life amount to a reservoir of fervent reactionary religiosity, a religiosity that achieves one of its more incandescent expressions in the static ec-static intensities of superlative techno-transcendentalizing futurology, and of the Robot Cultists who sing its praises unto death.

Enter the Dragon: Why I Am Not A SpaceX Space Vegas Space Cadet

The SpaceX Dragon became the first commercial vessel to successfully dock with the International Space Station. I will admit that with this achievement SpaceX has finally managed to become something more than the smarmy impresario offering brief low-gravity low-earth-orbit amusement park rides for breathtakingly huge sums of money while breathlessly pretending that this is the same thing as an actual space program (which it is not).

But those who would crow about how historic this moment is should recall the assurances offered at the start that privatizing this service would render it one-tenth as expensive as the government version and should also note how the price predictably, indeed inevitably, rocketed up and up and up (certainly faster than any of its actual rockets ever did) and how tax-payer subsidization became ever more and more and more indispensable to the project as it convulsively stumbled its way forward.

I do indeed think that this particular commercial exploitation of already existing technology should be remembered, though. Although Apollo, say, managed to be glorious even with a non-negligible share of for-profit private contracting being involved and even subject as it was to changeable public attitudes that led to more than its own fair share of reckless short-cutting and PR nonsense, still Dragon represents an important step along a path which will eventuate, at best, in a space program for which tax payers end up paying more than they otherwise would have for services and outcomes that will be more expensive than they would otherwise have been in order to compensate the irrelevant introduction into space research and exploration of a whole host of parasitic salesmen and PR shills, not to mention a layer of enormously loud entirely dispensable celebrity CEO sociopaths without whose soopervisionary soopergenius we will be endlessly told nothing would ever have been possible in space at all, even if in a sensibly run secular social democracy devoted to public investment in substantial science and developmental commonwealth, the costs, risks, and benefits of which equitably distributed to all, we would have much more much better much faster much cheaper much more real and much more wondrous space exploration without any of these carnival barkers elbowing their way in and making a crass spectacle of themselves in the first place.

But, yeah, sure, by all means, cheers to the Dragon. I always rather preferred the Star Trek future myself (though of course without any hopes of warp drive or replicator magic), but I'm sure the crappy Space Vegas we seem to be aiming for instead will also have its moments (on the off chance we don't pollute or bomb ourselves for parochial plutocratic profit into oblivion before the whole orbital love motel asteroid strip mining McTopia comes online, that is). 

Will Self-Driving Cars Change The Way We Think of Cities?

Did the Segway change the way we think of cities? The people saying the one now are exactly like the ones -- when they are not in fact literally the same ones -- who said the other then. If that doesn't matter to you, you are probably a futurologist. You should probably be making sure your head gets frozen when you die or something right about now.

Resources for Writing Students

I have developed a number of handouts summarizing useful information or providing a framework for workshopping writing problems for my students. I am gathering them together here for ready reference. Everybody should feel free to make any use of them they like in their own writing or teaching.

Four Habits of Argumentative Writing

Peer Editing Worksheet

Thesis Generation Worksheet

Writing A Precis

Thesis Generation Worksheet

A thesis is a claim. It is a statement of the thing your paper is trying to show your own readers about a text you have read. Very often, the claim will be simple enough to express in a single sentence, and it will usually appear early on in the paper to give your readers a clear sense of the project of your paper. A good thesis is a claim that is strong. For our purposes, the best way to define a strong claim is to say it is a claim for which you can imagine an intelligent opposition. It is a claim that you actually feel you need to argue for, rather than a very obvious sort of claim or a report of your own reactions to a text (which you don't have to argue for at all). Remember, when you are producing a reading about a complex literary text like a novel, a poem, or a film the object of your argument will be to illuminate the text, to draw attention to some aspect of the work you think that the text is accomplishing.

Once you have determined the detail or problem or element in a text that you want to draw your reader's attention to and argue about, your opposition will likely consist of those who would focus elsewhere because they don't grasp the importance of your focus, or who would draw different conclusions than you do from your own focus.

The thesis names your paper's task, its project, its object, its focus. As you write your papers, it is a very good idea to ask yourself these questions from time to time: Does this quotation, does this argument, does this paragraph directly support my thesis in some way? If it doesn't you should probably delete it, because this likely means you have gotten off track. If you are drawn repeatedly away from what you have chosen as your thesis, ask yourself whether or not this signals that you really want to argue for some different thesis.

THESIS WORKSHOP EXERCISE ONE:

A. Brainstorm. Take fifteen minutes or so and write down fifteen to twenty claims you can make about your chosen text. Don't worry about whether these claims are "deep" or whether they are "interesting," just write down claims that you think are true about the text and be as clear and specific as you can manage.

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B. In small groups of two to three peers:

1. Once the time is up, take ten to fifteen minutes to share your claims with one another. Determine together which, if any, of your claims are not really about the text at all. For example, eliminate claims that say the text is "good," or "correct," or "effective" -- since these are really claims about the way you react to the text rather than claims about the text demanding argumentative support. Also eliminate claims that say the text is "wrong," or "incorrect," or "ineffective" since, again, these are really claims about you, or they are claims that will lead you to discuss some more general or tangential topic rather than remaining focused on the text itself. Might some of these statements be redirected or rephrased into claims about the text -- for example, might you focus on some characteristic feature or particular textual moment that is an especially strong occasion for your approval or disapproval and think about it in relation to your sense of the more general gist of the work you are reading or with another key moment of illustration or support for the work's project as you see it? How many claims are you left with?

2. Now, take twenty minutes or so to discuss the claims that remain. Do some of the claims seem conspicuously more interesting or more important than the others? Do some of the claims really say the same thing in different ways? Do these comparisons suggest ways to re-phrase claims to capture your intentions more forcefully? Do some of the claims make or rely on observations that might function well as support for other claims? Have other, more forceful, claims occurred to you as you have engaged in this process? Do some of the claims suggest lines of argument and support that seem more promising to you than others? This process of elimination, honing, ordering should leave each of you with three or so strong claims.

THESIS WORKSHOP EXERCISE TWO:

A. You should now each have two or three candidate claims for a thesis remaining (some of you may have similar claims by now). Now, for each of these possible thesis claims come up with the strongest or most obvious opposition to each thesis. For example, what would the opposite claim be to the one you are making? Or, might there be an element or detail in the text that initially seems to contradict the thrust of your claim? Devote fifteen minutes or so to this.

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B. Read over these oppositions. Of course, you are likely to disagree with these claims since they are opposed to the ones you want to make yourself -- but can you imagine anyone actually making these oppositional claims about the text you have read? Be honest with each other about this, it is important. Take twenty minutes or so to make these determinations and discuss them.

If the opposition you have come up with seems vague or unintelligent or highly implausible this probably indicates that you need to sharpen up your own initial thesis. Is there a version of your thesis that is more focused and specific that retains the spirit of your claim but which provokes a more interesting opposition? What is it? What is its opposition?

If, on the contrary, the opposition you have written suddenly seems more compelling than the thesis itself this probably indicates that the stakes of your project, or possibly your whole take on the text itself, is different than you initially thought it was. Perhaps what you thought of as opposition to your thesis actually provides you with a stronger thesis and a new direction for your own paper. What is the strongest or most opposition to the new thesis you have adopted?

C. Now, quickly identify the best, strongest, most argumentatively promising thesis that results from this process for you personally, as well as what you take to be its most provocative opposition. Then in your groups, help one another identify two key details or elements in the text to which you could direct a reader's attention in an effort to support your individual theses, and also one detail or element you might use to circumvent its opposition (include page numbers). Take twenty minutes or so to do this.

These discussion provide you with a rudimentary first outline for your argumentative close reading.

(Introduction, contextualization, illustrative anecdote, sketch of initial stakes, culminating or at any rate containing a clear statement of your) Thesis:

1. textual support

2. textual support

Opposition:

3. circumvention of opposition/qualification of thesis in light of opposition

Depending on the length of your paper -- there may be more space for textual support, in a 4-5pp. probably there will not be.

[4... textual support]

Conclusion (Recapitulation of preceding case, and/or opening onto new questions.)

4. opp

An Insurance Company With An Army

Upgraded and adapted from an exchange in the Moot with Ian, prompted by my post a couple of days ago worrying about a tragic and dangerous failure of the EU premised on the neoliberal error that a monetary union could substitute for a political one, or that a monetary union could even function without a robust underlying political one, to which Ian replied:

Indeed. -- It seems that most (if not all) international unions are built around questions of the economic and seek to purposefully hinder political capacities for cooperation and solidarity (except where 'national defense' is concerned, of course). It's hard for me to imagine an alternative at the scale of the nation-state unless non-state actors are included in the democratic process in some way, ensuring that trans/inter/post-national interests are included in the decision making structures.

This, in turn, inspired this bit of rambling from me:

At one level that sounds right to me, but at another I find myself wondering... I am sure you have heard the cliche that after Bismarck and Lincoln the nation-state has amounted to an insurance company backed by an army. Really, this is just making Foucault's point about the late modern rise of disciplinarity/ biopolitics, right? Is this something simply to bemoan or to grasp about where we are?

Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the decisions that affect them, and it isn't clear to me why biopolitics cannot have a democratic face as well as its awful anti-democratic ones, really. I find myself wanting to pressure your suggestion that "non-state actors" need to be "included" in democratic processes -- of course I agree with this, I think the definition of democracy already implies this even -- but isn't it a bit tricky to imply they are "excluded" too straightforwardly once we get Gramsci's point when he talks about hegemony or Althusser's point when he talks about ideological state apparatuses? Contestations among sociocultural positionalities invigorate and undergird all state agency indispensably.

Part of the problem with too much of the anarchist imaginary is that it tends to reduce "the state" to something dispensable before proceeding to dispense with it, in ways that cause it to radically misconstrue state space both as a multilateral working reality but also as an ongoing democratizing possibility. That given nation-states are suffused with incumbency and hierarchy and routine violation is of course true, just as lamentably as anarchism would have it, but this seems to me a problem for rather than of the state form.

What is wanted is equity-in-diversity, an actually substantial scene of consent to the terms of one's life, which seems to me to demand universal equal rights, healthcare, education, income, and recourse to law -- not so far from the vision of Roosevelt's Four Freedom's or of the UN Declaration -- funded by steeply progressive taxes and administered by actually accountable periodically elected authorities under the terms of universal franchise.

I'm not sure that looks so different from an insurance company with an army again -- provided this is not an army paid for by the people that ensures they remain subservient to private for-profit insurance companies, but the accountable administration of insurance as a public utility and common good. Both are biopolitical governmentalities, the parochial for-profit insurance scam and the insurance that creates a legible scene in which citizen-subjects consent to the terms of their lives, but only one affords abiding and deep democracy.

This is not to say that There Is No Alternative but to say that the people must see to it that authority means what it says (this is for me the act of exposure but also the enactment through exposure at the heart of Occupy) -- another way of saying government must be of by and for the people, just like you thought at age four -- another way of saying the state must not be smashed but democratized.

Some Questions For A "Mind-Uploading" Enthusiast

In an article published a few days ago in the transhumanoid rag hplusmagazine (that's human-plus! for all you mere human-minuses out there!), Eugen Spierer writes:

How can we expect to learn the secrets of the world around us while trapped within a body which only lives for several decades, demands constant nourishment and attention, and dictates limits and desires beyond our control? … Once we have severed the link between our consciousness and the cruel joke someone has played on us by enclosing it in a mortal body, can we begin to really appreciate the beauty of the world around us. We would then be able to explore its secrets not just for a limited number of years, but for an eternity. The first steps toward such a noble cause have already been taken in Switzerland. Scientists have already simulated a part of a rat’s brain with proven accuracy. It’s called the Blue Brain Project and it aims to use developing computer technologies in order to simulate an entire human brain and thus, hopefully, create a human personality which will be based on computer hardware rather than on the miserable excuse we have for a wetware body. Just think of the possibilities! Eternal life. Easy and accessible space travel and colonization. Plenty of time for all human beings to grow and develop. Far less strain the planet’s limited resources. No more disease. No more suffering. No more death. A better understanding of the world around us, free of the constraints which currently bind us to a meager existence and a short life span. No other research is this important, for this will be the base of our success as a species.

Just for kicks, let us answer some of these questions by asking a few of our own.

Why exactly shouldn't we expect to make discoveries and learn useful new things about the world with our biological brains and bodies when we always have done and have never done otherwise? What kind of person thinks living life is just a way of being "trapped" in the first place? Is it at least sometimes better to think of the needs and wants and vulnerabilities arising at the site of the body not as "demands" or "weaknesses" but as enablers of pleasures, connections, surprises? Might this person need therapy rather than mind-uploading and might this not be a good thing inasmuch as therapy, at least, actually exists?

Why would someone who understands evolution say that our evolved morphology is a cruel joke being played on us? Who is presumably playing this joke on us? And even if a person believed in such a trickster and even granting that human life is sometimes cruel, wouldn't all the wonderful and beautiful aspects of life make one as inclined to feel grateful to this imaginary being as hostile to it?

Is it true that nobody hitherto has really appreciated the beauty of the world around us? If that is really true, then how is it possible to understand the sense of the sentence in the first place?

Moving along, then. Is it right to think a representation of a rat's brain is the same thing as a rat's brain? Is it right to think a scan of an aspect of a human's brain is the same thing as a human's brain, let alone the same thing as a human consciousness or the same thing as a human self? If we are materialists about mind doesn't this mean we should take seriously the material form that actually existing minds actually take? What kind of materialist would be so dismissive of the actual material incarnation of consciousness that they would treat it as completely negligible to the phenomenon and pretend translation and transmission and transfers from one material regime of consciousness to another can be taken for granted? Come to think of it, why would someone use the word "transfer" or "migrate" to describe taking a picture and then destroying the original thing pictured, when that is simply not at all what these words actually mean?

And even granting for the moment all of this utterly un-grantable nonsense and setting aside as one should not all the conceptual confusions, all the inapt analogies, all the slippages from literal into figurative language on which these claims seem to depend, how on earth do we get from pretending "mind uploading" is a sensible phrase let alone a practically possible outcome to suddenly attributing eternal life to this conceit? Why would existence "as" or "on" computer hardware presumably be longer lasting –- let alone less "miserable" –- than biological life is? In just whose actual experience does it seem that computers tend to last longer than human bodies do? What software programs have remained functional longer than human lifespans? Do these cyber-immortalists have radically different kinds of computers at their disposal than I do? Do their computers never crash or stall or get buggy or spammed or grow obsolete like mine always have?

Skipping along further still: How would a being that has settled for a crappy virtual environment even know it was traveling in outer space or colonizing extraterrestrial worlds?

Given that the internet is not in fact an angelic spirit realm but accessed on devices made of landfill-destined toxic plastic and metals fueled by black belching coal fired electric plants why would anyone state with such assurance that an even more intensely computer mediated existence would necessarily put less strain on planetary resources?

What if the possibility of suffering is sufficiently inherent in the very possibility of experience as such that to circumvent the one is to eliminate the other, and hence render the proposal of a total elimination of suffering self-defeating?

If a thing is incoherent in conception and impossible of realization in what sense can it be considered important at all? What actually important efforts are not being considered and not being undertaken for every second devoted to this nonsense?

What possible meaning could the words on which the sense of the last sentence of this piece depends -- words like "our" "success" and "species" -- actually have were the world rewritten in the image of this piece's avowed desires?

This article is filled with palpably wrongheaded, incoherent, ridiculous, and pathological statements. I do not say this to be insulting, but to straightforwardly describe my assessment of what is exposed by the critical interrogation of the premises and conclusions preceding.

You know, there is nothing in this article that I haven't heard and seen countless times before, at this point nearly daily for decades, in transhumanist and singularitarian and futurological conversations and publications. Indeed, I would say that these utterances fairly count as absolutely standard transhumanist boilerplate. Is there any stasis more stolid than what the futurologists peddle in the name of accelerating change?

That is why for me the most touching moment in this hopelessly sad stale bit of futurological agitprop is when the author declares, "Just think of the possibilities!" How breathless, how blinkered! This is, of course, the usual pay-off of futurological propaganda, the moment of the real setting aside of any pretense of taking seriously the boring real science that presumably enables all this masturbatory skylarking and the leap thereupon into sheer shared shaggy fanboy enthusiasm... time for making belief in the present of a make-believe "The Future" behind which the making-begone of present distresses in a contingent, aging, error-prone, demanding existence can be made manifest. You can really taste the adrenaline rush of full on fulminating True Belief in that exclamation point, can't you? Robot Cultists just keep on indulging in this stale ritual catechism, pumped up with the hysterical tonalities of canned novelty and crass desire, like late-nite informercialists on fast forward, and yet like sleepwalkers toward a cliff, and yet like robots on a dark dead factory floor, and yet like pilgrims in search of a priest, and yet like jumpy junkies in search of a fix... like scared scarred sociopathic salesmen making their pitch to the mark in the mirror.

Corporate-Military "Geo-Engineering" Fantasies Are A Vision of "Democracy" and "Environmentalism" Only A Right Wing Libertopian Could Love

Libertopian Tyler Cowen coos appreciatively about the so-called "economics of geo-engineering" (whereupon Ezra Klein's wonkblog linked to it without comment -- the origin is the usual puff piece, this time appearing in The New Yorker):

"The odd thing here is that this is a democratizing technology,’’ Nathan Myhrvold told me. “Rich, powerful countries might have invented much of it, but it will be there for anyone to use. People get themselves all balled up into knots over whether this can be done unilaterally or by one group or one nation. Well, guess what. We decide to do much worse than this every day, and we decide unilaterally. We are polluting the earth unilaterally. Whether it’s life-taking decisions, like wars, or something like a trade embargo, the world is about people taking action, not agreeing to take action. And, frankly, the Maldives could say, ‘Fuck you all—we want to stay alive.’ Would you blame them? Wouldn’t any reasonable country do the same?

First of all "geo-engineering" isn't a technology because it does not actually exist to be anything. There is no there there to be judged, or maintained, or made available for use. Just because futurologists can make cartoons about mirror archipelagos in orbit, or mile-high undersea cathedrals of pipes sucking cold deep-sea water to warming surfaces, or vast fleets of airships spraying pseudo-volcanic sulfur into cloud banks doesn't make these fancies "technologies."

Geo-engineering proposals do not share technical commonalities, the demonstration that dumping tons of iron filings into the sea is an amazingly terrible idea doesn't immediately lead one to reject or approve other futurological fancies that happen to be described as "geo-engineering." What essentially characterizes "geo-engineering" as a phenomenon is not ultimately technical, it is discursive: "geo-engineering" is a characteristic way of talking about environmental issues that has nothing to do with the technical merits of any of the proposals subsumed within it. And when one observes the actual discourse in play, what quickly becomes evident is that "geo-engineering" is advocated by people who disdain public educational, regulatory, incentivizing approaches to climate remediation -- you know, actual environmentalism -- it is advocated by people who want the same extractive-industrial corporate-military actors that have profited from pollution and waste to continue to profit from promises of remediation, usually through the very same kinds of brute-force industrial-scaled enterprises that did the damage, it is advocated by people who believe that governance is absolutely unequal to the crises of climate change but who somehow believe that mega-scale infrastructure projects that would ultimately depend on governance for their funding, regulation, maintenance are the answer.

It is palpably ridiculous to hear someone who belligerently insists that "the world is about people taking action, not agreeing to take action" go on to declare his pet techno-utopian wet dream is "democratizing" because he imagines "geo-engingeers" as Randroidal sooper-men saying "Fuck you all" to the statists and relativists and then seriously kicking eco-ass for mega-profit. Dude, we all know that incumbent elites have been raking in cash while destroying the planet for generations and have essentially been saying "Fuck you all" the whole time. Indeed, corporations that profit from pollution and waste have proved more than happy to spend millions saying "Fuck you all" to the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists about the reality of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. One is hardly surprised to find advocates of "geo-engineering" boondoggles sympathizing with such attitudes. But… I don't think that word "democracy" means what you think it means, guy.

Of course, libertopian futurology is deeply enamored of this sort of techno-utopian market based "gotcha" rhetoric. Cypherpunks thought crypto-anarchy was inevitable because people would profit from implementing it whether it was legal or not and once built it could not be stopped and nations would evaporate into the cyberspatial sprawl. Sure, financial fraudsters used digital networks to junk the planetary economy for plutocratic gain, but libertopia? Didn't happen. You guys can apologize later. Transhumanists thought and still think clone-armies of "enhanced" designer babies are inevitable for much the same reasons. They were and are and will ever remain wrong. Quite apart from the hilarity of suggesting that "anyone [can] use" the so-called "geo-engineering" rich countries invented (setting aside the whole difficulty of "using" non-existing stuff), when clearly only rich countries could hope to indulge in these sorts of pharaonic mega-whimsies and when the poor and not the rich would disproportionately suffer the negative climate externalities created by these interventions if any of them were ever to go past the toothy futurological fraudster peddling his Powerpoint presentation stage just as they have suffered disproportionately from the wasteful extractive polluting excesses of rich countries in the first place, one expects liber-techians to feel the "market" as a "spontaneous order" will inevitably be on their side on this.

It doesn't matter that market orders are actually never "natural" or "spontaneous" orders but are historically constituted by laws, customs, values, infrastructural affordances, and it doesn't matter that history is never driven by the socially indifferent accumulation of neutrally empowering technologies but by the struggles of the diversity of stakeholders to change to the distribution of costs, risks, and benefits of that change: techno-utopian ideologues rationalizing elite incumbent interests by pretending they will deliver transcendence of political quandaries in which they have in fact a specific political stake will never stop talking this way. This is what they are paid to do (a few for money and more for attention). But those of us who know better must not let them get away with this. Environmental activists and advocates of good accountable government must be aware that "geo-engineering" is absolutely an anti-governmental discourse, and to the extent that any serious environmental politics will involve government education about shared planetary problems, government regulation of polluters, government incentivization of sustainable practices, and government investment in ecological commons and public goods like reforestation, mass transit, and renewable energy to be anti-government is to be anti-environmentalist even if one is insisting their corporate-military science fictional magical thinking is really truly somehow a kind of green discourse. I don't care what Tyler Cowen says, his support of "geo-engineering" is robotically predictable. But shame on Wonkblog for linking uncritically to this anarcho-crapitalist earth-alienated pseudo-scientific clap trap.

"Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again"

One of the Very Serious White Guys of the Future at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET (that is, the "Institute for Ethics" -- although Ethics aren't really discussed there much -- "and Emerging Technologies" -- although the sooper-technologies they enthuse over there aren't ever really emerging), one Dick Pelletier, declares: "Although many today might find the idea of romance with a machine repulsive, experts predict that as the technology advances and robots become more human-like, we will view our silicon creations in a much friendlier light." At the outset I want to note, but do not mean to dwell on, the customary reference to unnamed "experts" in this extraordinary assertion. I suspect that almost none of the "experts" Pelletier has in mind are trained in actually existing fields or are calling upon such expertise in making such "predictions" on whatever vapid talk show is unfolding in Pelletier's imagination when he says this sort of thing. I will also ruefully note -- not for the first time, not for the thousandth time -- that there is no such thing as "technology in general" that may be said to be "advancing" monolithically however indispensable such utterly facile falsifying declarations may be to the ongoing operation of futurological discourse.

Be that as it may, let us turn to the frothy substance of Pelletier's little futurological number. I personally think it is rather infantile and pathetic to use the word "romance" to describe what happens when a guy masturbates into a hole in a watermelon or Real Doll, although I don't find such activities particularly repulsive, any more than I do the endlessly many other non-violent and non-exploitative ways human beings find to get off. As a guy with a dildo or two in arm's reach even while typing this, I am the last one to wag my finger at the notion of prosthetically facilitated orgasms. I do think it is rather evocative just how often the sometimes sociopathic futurologists of the more assertively transhumanoid and singularitarian varieties find themselves hyperventilating about how awesome the sexbots of the future are going to be, or how sex with machines or sex via their own sooper-sexy medical enhancements will soon, so soon, Change Absolutely Everything for them.

One need not linger long in futurological precincts to discern a certain prevalence in them of representations of long-lashed big-boobied humanoids megaphoning their sexual availability (insofar as cartoons can be said in some sense to be "available") to the almost always only males whose publications these images accompany. Although the futurologists like to encrust the usual ladyparts with scales and feathers and shiny metal and curiously curvaceous circuit boards there isn't exactly a large chasm to leap from the ubiquitous sex-kitten kitsch of the transhuman imaginary to the crap conventions of Maxim Magazine or Girls With Guns Truck Stop Calendars.

Transhumanists and Singularitarians and other assorted futurologists and Robot Cultists also have demonstrated, I'm sorry to say, a distressing willingness to pretend that "intelligence" is on exhibition when spell-check software annoyingly "corrects" your proper use of a word that happens not to be included in its programming or when somebody embeds what amounts to a glorified tape-recorder into what amounts to a glorified mannequin and then some low-rent street performer calling himself a "roboticist" indulges in a stale bit of memorized theater with the contraption. So, too, these folks may be very eager to describe as "friends" people with whom they have never and will never meet but publish minute by minute accounts of their stomach contents in misspelled one-line publications on their "walls" and "feeds." This does not mean that the rest of us are required to share with them in the ridiculous fantasy that boning a hole in something like an animatronic Abe Lincoln from Disney's 1960s state-of-the-art robo-waxworks Hall of Presidents, but, you know, truncheon-cocked or balloon-busted in lowest-common-denominator versions of sexy skimpy undergarments, constitutes "romance" or something more reciprocally "human-like" while the relevant transhumanoid "experts" bask warmly in their "friendlier light" for cash.

I have argued that futurological discourses are best understood as the extreme edge of the deceptive, hyperbolic advertising and promotional forms that now utterly suffuse our public life. It is a truism that "Sex Sells" and it should, by extension, be regarded as no less a truism that it is often through sex or something like it that futurologists likewise peddle "The Future" to the rubes. But it is crucial to grasp that it is rarely the actual accomplishment of sexual gratification that advertising discourse sells when it sells sex. Indeed, the product advertising sells when it is selling sex, whether it is a hamburger or an automobile or a deodorant or a cellphone is almost never sex itself, and you can be sure that whatever else is happening when advertising is selling sex any actual sex itself is absolutely being deferred and not enjoyed to make time for the sex being sold in it in the first place.

As Adorno and Horkeimer put the point in 1944 -- decades before Debord said it again, and not necessarily better -- right about when America was busy inventing "The Future" through the promotion of which the neoliberal Washington Consensus would rule the postwar world:

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu... The culture industry does not sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance.

It is this discursive structure of deferral of sex and substitution of sex in the selling of sex that demands our special attention when we observe the workings of these narrative and attentional mechanisms in the context of futurological discourse. For, to be sure, futurology is all about deferral -- "The Future" in which it invests its participants is forever just out of reach, usually literally twenty years ahead endlessly deferred year by year by year, a rosy promissory coloration in the present available only to those who Believe In It together in the present and in so believing, grasp its "imminence" in the present and predict its coming.

But, as I have repeatedly insisted, every futurism is always a retro-futurism: In investing us in a vision of "The Future" which mostly consists of the amplification of our present and parochial satisfactions (more, More, MORE! Of the Same... appetites gratified, but, in "The Future" without number, without cost, without end) or the disasterbatory indulgence in our present and parochial fears (dystopic amplifications of generational fears displaced onto clone armies and designer babies, perplexed and alienated negotiations of ever-disappointing landfill-destined techno-gewgaws displaced onto robot armies and brains in a vat) futurology peddles stasis while crowing about "accelerating change," defends the status quo while handwaving about techno-progress, promotes the reactionary police force of incumbent elites in the utopian and dystopian cadences of prophetic utterances. For the open futurity arising in the present out of the diversity of stakeholders to the shared world, futurology substitutes parochial projections of "The Future" endlessly amplifying the elite-incumbent vantage over the present.

Futurological deferral, futurological substitution. Let us redeploy the words of Michel Foucault in our present distress: Given the suffusion of public space with the norms and forms of deceptive, hyperbolic marketing and promotional discourse in which "sex sells" through the deferral of actual gratifications, through the fetishistic substitution of desire for commodities for pleasurable human solidarities driven by desire, we are endlessly promised that "Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again."

What matters about this pronouncement is not that it takes the form, like futurological utterances tend to do, of a prediction -- but that it sexualizes the Good, that it re-writes the freedom of present futurity as a parochially projected Tomorrow in the image of a Good that has been so sexualized. My point is not to denigrate sexual pleasure -- and certainly neither was Foucault's -- but to warn about what happens when what can be good about sexual gratification is hyperbolized into an Aim at which we aspire in the name of the Good, becomes the essential Truth of the Self in the name of which we aim our emancipatory hopes. It is a circumscription, a canalization, declaring itself and mistaken for a thrust, for an opening: And so, it is one thing to bemoan the hypocrisy of the closet, say, or the pointless pain of repressing some harmless idiosyncratic pleasure, but it is quite another to buy into the fantasy that in coming out of the closet (or in boasting about your arcane fetish on the set on Jerry Springer or over drinks at a bar) we overcome the mystery of ourselves and arrive at last at perfect enlightened self-knowledge or that in throwing off an irrational repression of some modest kink we might manage to break through the impasse of politics and experience at last the plenitude of perfect self-expression.

Like a taut tanned supermodel in latex declaring a sexual availability that is in fact utterly unavailable beyond the screen, a vision of perfect satisfaction promiscuously attaching to consumer commodities that, however disappointing they may be to your hopes upon actual consumption, at least are available in your price range, a mirage of gratification that must be deferred in order to be consumed on the terms on which it is offered, to promise what is to come is not the same as what is to come, and to consume the promise of "to come" is not the same as actually to come.

The future as it arrives is always only another present, stratified by differences that make a difference, vestiges of past injuries, diversities of present stakes, struggles for future outcomes. "The Future" the futurologists sell is the deception that technological accumulation can substitute for the heartbreaking convulsive progress of political struggle in history, but in selling "The Future" the futurologists are also engaging in a present-day skirmish in that politics, diverting energy and imagination from collective struggles into faithful acquiescence to elite incumbents who deliver consumer goods in the present (rejuvenating skin creams, orgasmic chocolates, prowess via pill-popping) and promise to deliver amplified enhanced transcendent goods ever more to come.

To Criticize A Successful Con Man Is Not To Criticize Success

Please have one of your drassage horse masseuses make a note of it, Mitt.

This kind of devisiveness, this attack of success, is very different than what we’ve seen in our country’s history. We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.

What Are People Really Talking About When They Talk About "Geo-Engineering"?

My latest article published at The Futurist is here. I am re-posting here it at Amor Mundi as well:

This article is not intended as a contribution to the debate on "geo-engineering." I insist on that because it seems to me the more important point to make about "geo-engineering" is that it is, strictly speaking, non-debatable. More specifically, I think the principal work of "geo-engineering" discourse is to displace debate, not to have it, in the first place.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I fear that the topic of "geo-engineering," such as it is, ends up being a way of not debating serious environmental problems and any serious technical, practical, educational, organizational, legislative efforts at solving them, by preoccupying and distracting us with non-debatable fancies. And the fact that many of those who are caught up in "geo-engineering" discourse are themselves quite serious people, and even quite serious about environmental problems, makes the ultimate unseriousness of "geo-engineering" seem to me all the more serious.

Part of the reason I say that "geo-engineering" is non-debatable is the rather obvious fact that there really are no actually existing instances of "geo-engineering" for us to debate. Even the handful of proposals of various "geo-engineering" projects that have attracted enormous amounts of attention and generated all sorts of enthusiasm are inevitably pitched at a level of generality that falls far short of the sort of specificity that could yield serious engineering schematics and actual budgeting proposals.

Indeed, the pattern with "geo-engineering" proposals, so-called, so far -- whether they have called for dumping vast quantities of iron filings in our oceans or for spewing vast quantities of sulfur in our skies -- has been that precisely as these proposals become more detailed warnings of their deleterious environmental impacts have multiplied so explosively, concerns about their unknowable environmental impacts have proliferated so threateningly, questions about the legal, logistical, technical, funding hurdles to their implementation have ramified so breathtakingly that these proposals get tossed into the wastebasket by the serious within moments of being taken the least bit seriously.

Of course, in making this last point I might seem to be conceding what I began by denying: that "geo-engineering" is debatable. It might now seem to the contrary, that as someone who tends to be rather skeptical about "geo-engineering" proposals, I would want to draw the opposite conclusion, that "geo-engineering" is not only debatable but should be debated all the more seriously because when it is debated it is its critics rather than its enthusiasts who have tended to benefit from such debate.

But what I mean to emphasize is that it is never really "geo-engineering" that is being debated in any of these cases. It is not clear to me that any number of definitive critiques against specific proposals onto which the "geo-engineering" label has attached can ever diminish the enthusiasm with which proponents of "geo-engineering" declare it an important consideration, a necessary strategy, a last ditch effort, a crucial "Plan B." Neither is it clear to me why the particular details leading us to reject one "geo-engineering" proposal would necessarily have any connection at all to the details that would lead us to reject another. This is actually another way of saying that neither is it clear to me just what it is that causes some climate-change mitigation proposals to be corralled together under the "geo-engineering" label and not others in the first place. All this is to say, that although when people talk about "geo-engineering" they tend to talk as if they are saying something about technologies or strategies or plans, there really are no technologies, no strategies, no plans, no underlying commonalities at hand.

What I want to propose, then, is that "geo-engineering" actually isn't a technique or a practical approach or a plan at all, but a discourse. That is to say, "geo-engineering" is a way of talking, it is a way of framing a discussion, it is a kind of style of thinking about certain problems, it is an intellectual genre with highly characteristic preoccupations, conceits, figures, and argumentative gestures.

I mentioned a moment ago that it is not always clear why some sorts of environmentalist proposals tend to be described as "geo-engineering" while others are not. When people talk about "geo-engineering" proposals they tend to start talking about vast mega-engineering projects, about dreamy archipelagos of mirrors in high earth orbit, about tanker fleets converging for megaton sea dumps of iron filings, about fleets of airships spraying pseudo-volcanic aerosols into cloud banks, about undersea cathedrals of vertical piping to cool ocean surfaces. Sometimes, but only rarely, massive tree-planting efforts and cool-roof painting projects are also described as "geo-engineering." It is interesting to note that reforestation or roof-painting is hardly anybody's go-to imagery for "geo-engineering," and yet these are the only kind of plausibly describable "geo-engineering" proposals that have ever been undertaken in the real world. It is also interesting to note that what is emphatically NOT regarded as "geo-engineering" proposals are efforts to regulate fuel efficiency standards for automobiles or to incentivize the purchase of energy efficient appliances or to enforce more renewable materials in construction practices or to regulate power plants or to make public investments in mass transit or bike lanes or to mandate the introduction of smokestack soot filters or to create loan incentives for homeowners who introduce geothermal pumps, attic fans, front porches, or solar panels in new or renovated homes. Even if the aggregate impacts of especially national efforts at legislation, regulation, education, investment, incentive play out on a scale comparable to that presumably involved in "geo-engineering" proposals, these more familiar kinds of environmentalist proposals are not only not regarded as "geo-engineering" but advocacy of "geo-engineering" is often accompanied by a strong disdain for precisely these kinds of environmentalist proposals. Indeed, the inevitability of their failure is often the very foundation on which advocacy of "geo-engineering" is premised. Although some "geo-engineering" enthusiasts insist that they are proposing a supplementation and not a replacement for conventional environmentalist regulation, education, and investment it is interesting to note that while one is talking about the one, one is not talking about the other. And it is a strange thing to supplement something real with something that is not real, especially when the problems, the dangers, and the damage remain very real.

I would describe “geo-engineering” as an apparently environmentalist discourse in which corporate-military organizations are imagined to declare and wage war on climate change on an industrial scale. I say that "geo-engineering" is only APPARENTLY environmentalist, first of all, because it functions to direct our attention away from so many of the premises, aspirations, and concrete proposals with which environmentalist activism and concern are indispensably identified, across the range of its mainstream and radical forms. I have already mentioned the way "geo-engineering" discourse systemically directs our attention from recognizable environmentalist proposals, but I would have you notice also that to the extent that "geo-engineering" simply amounts to the proposal that large-scale human activity can change the planetary climate for the better then "geo-engineering" is really little more than a kind of smiley-faced can-do variation on the foundational notion of anthropogenic climate change as such. If human behavior in the aggregate is causing global warming, then it seems plausible in turn (though this is not logically necessarily true) that human behavior might also be made to cause global cooling. Be that as it may, considering how many people are either ignorant of or actively deny the overwhelming consensus of relevant scientists that catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is a clear and present danger -- mostly the result of massive ongoing public relations and misinformation campaigns on the part of actors who parochially profit from activities contributing to global warming -- "geo-engineering" simply seems to be another way of not talking about what must be talked about, another way of evading the necessity of education in the facts of the matter, another way of indulging in denial about the reality of the threat at hand as a collective threat and not just another opportunity for individual profit. I would add that in quite a lot of "geo-engineering" discourse there is a kind of alienated attitude toward the earth itself, in which environmentalism is re-cast as a kind of science fictional narrative in which humans are aliens arriving on a distant planet and technologically setting about terraforming it to suit their needs, rather than a recognition that we are earthlings evolved for fitness and flourishing on a good earth that we have damaged in our ignorance and aggression and short sighted greed. I am not sure that a genuine environmentalism can arise and abide from such an earth-alienated vantage when all is said and done. (And I say this is someone who views artifice and technique as part of human nature all the while remembering that humans are earthlings, and who sees all culture as essentially prosthetic all the while remembering the connection of culture with cultivation and of cultivation, once again, to the earth.)

Part of what it means to rewrite environmentalism in the image of competitive corporate-military organizations waging war on climate change on an industrial scale is that "geo-engineering" proposes that the very agents most responsible for environmental catastrophe are finally the only ones suited to resolve it. I think this vision is, to say the least, doubly discomfiting to a proper environmentalist. For one thing, as I said, we know that many corporations profiting from the pollution and waste that contributes to anthropogenic climate change devote considerable resources to deceptive public relations campaigns undermining the force of the scientific consensus about the reality and danger of climate change as well as to lobbying and other kinds of political organizing to undermine legislative efforts to regulate pollution and invest in sustainable alternatives. Further, it envisions attacking climate change primarily in the very mode of mega-scale brute-force extractive-industrial agency through which environmental catastrophe has been wrought.

Futurological discourses, of which "geo-engineering" very definitely is one, regularly drift into the cadences of redemptive wish-fulfillment fantasy. A post-war America traumatized by the implications of Hiroshima was all too willing to be peddled a redemptive fantasy of clean nuclear power too cheap to meter (a fantasy purchased at the cost of a constellation of ruinously costly, unfathomably dangerous, centuries-poisonous boondoggles). An America terrified by the implications of Peak Oil is all too willing to be peddled a redemptive fantasy of "clean coal" or petrochemical multinationals peddling soothing images of sunflowers and languidly turning wind turbines. An America harassed and controlled by targeted marketing and panoptic data profiling and fine-grained always-on surveillance is no doubt all too willing to be peddled a redemptive fantasy of iPad democracy and facebook liberation. I suppose it may be logically conceivable that industrial juggernauts will find profitable ways of healing the devastating planetary wounds they have wrought in their industrialized profit-taking, but there are plenty of reasons to be supremely skeptical of the impulses that make such redemptive endorsements of incumbent elites seductive.

It is certainly difficult to understand how those who declare themselves forced into advocacy of "geo-engineering" as a Last Resort or a Plan B given the conspicuous failure of conventional environmental politics actually imagine the fantastic mega-engineering projects they sigh over would actually be funded, regulated, and maintained if not by conventional funding and regulatory agencies, or just how they square the faith that such conventional investment and governance will prevail over "geo-engineering" with their despair that such governance will never rise to the challenge of our shared environmental problems. To advocate more mainstream-legible environmentalist proposals of legislation, regulation, education, incentivation, and public investment is not to advocate the same old nothing rather than something promising and new, but to advocate something still over a nothing pretending to be something else. It remains to be seen if human beings will grasp the truth of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change and organize in large enough numbers to impel equitable accountable governance to address our shared planetary problems in time, but I refuse to pretend loose techno-utopian wish-fulfillment fantasies are real alternatives, rather than the distractions and derangements and denialisms they really are.

Selling the Debased Present With Fraudulent Futures

The momentary reflection on Jeffrey Toobin's disgusting self-promotional stunt in the last post leads me to make a larger point that actually provides a way of understanding what drives this quirky quixotic blog of mine. In my opinion, we can never underestimate the devastating force of marketing and promotional discourse, a mode of mass-mediated deception and hyperbole that has always operated less according to traditional rhetorical relations of logical entailment and evidenciary substantiation and figural evocation than in the more ballistic terms of velocity and timing and saturation, from the early Nazi propaganda tactics of the Big Lie to the Bush Administration selling a pre-emptive catastrophic criminal war based on lies modeled on bringing a product on market at the most propitious season. There is in my view nothing more devastating to the possibility of democratic deliberation, progressive reform, and shared problem solving than the current suffusion of our public life with the always deceptive always deranging norms and forms of marketing and promotional discourse. It is this concern that drives this blog's shared preoccupations (which may seem strange) with both Movement Republicanism and with futurological discourses.

Movement Republicanism came into its own after a long struggle in resistance to New Deal and Great Society progressivism with the administration of a "Great Communicator" whose communication was entirely advertorial (it actually matters that there were no "welfare queens," it actually matters that "Star Wars" could not work) and it is dying before our eyes as its various incarnations deploy its codes and manipulate the electoral process in efforts not to govern or make policy but to sell books and promote their personal celebrity and augment their personal fortunes, whatever the public costs, from Rush Limbaugh to Sarah Palin to Herman Cain to Newt Gingrich.

Futurology came into its own in the aftermath of WWII and always functions in the service of the neoliberal Washington Consensus, peddling the phony redemption of Hiroshima into nuclear energy too cheap to meter (a reality of ruinously expensive catastrophically dangerous boondoggles) and plastic superabundance for all (a reality of toxic petrochemical crap first blighting the visible world and then bulldozed into mountains of poisonous landfill wounding the living world for centuries) and "urban renewal" yoked to emancipatory fantasies of traffic flow (a reality of devastated once-vital diverse neighborhoods, white capital flight via snarled enraged carbon pollution spewing snarls into demographically and environmentally and psychologically catastrophic suburban enclaves, eventually hyperbolized into paranoid privatized walled compounds) and longevity medicine (a reality of skin cream and boner pills marketed to Baby Boomers by pre-teen models and snake oil salesmen hawking nutritional supplements and sports cars and uncanny-making cosmetic procedures and yearly press releases about the latest athlete-in-a-pill lab result) and open-access participatory digital democracy (a reality of vapid 140-character limited content and pet videos and hyperbolic self-promotional profiles posted to the indifference of "zero comments" and plowed into a mulch of targeted corporate marketing and military surveillance).

Both Movement Republicanism and futurology (especially evident in sub(cult)ural formations of futurology that also identify as "Movements" like the transhumanists) functionally promote corporate-military incumbent elites and the status quo from which they disproportionately benefit either by trumpeting an anti-governmentality that promises the future emergence of a spontaneous order of liberty if only we dismantle any countervailing powers that constrain their profit-taking abuses or by trumpeting a techno-transcendence that promises the future emergence of a toypile of superabundance and superpowers if only we get out of the way of the celebrity CEOs and thought-leaders to bring all the supergoodies to market. Both are hyperbolic variations on the deceptions, hyperbole, brand-building, buzz flogging, repetition drilling, neologism-coining and repackaging strategies of marketing and promotional discourses selling a debased present through the fraudulent conjuration of spectacular futures.

The Ambivalence of Investment/Speculation As the Kernel of Reactionary Futurology

Yesterday I wrote a post deriding

Robot Cultists [who] like to paint themselves as brave for devoting their adult lives to daydreaming about how awesome it would be if magic were real, . . . then they like to rail against phantom armies of supremely powerful mortality-loving disease-loving luddites who presumably stand in the way of the spontaneous emergence of all the magic.

In the Moot, longtime Friend of Blog "JimF" quoted that passage and inserted between "luddites" and "who stand in the way" the additional phrase "and non-libertarians (especially Democrats)," which I think is interesting and important, but actually quite complicated. I am promoting the scattered speculations of my response to a post of its own.

"That's a tricky connection -- the one identifying Robot Cultism, usually but not always through some variation on libertopianism, with reactionary politics -- but I do agree with you about it when all is said and done. As you know one of my futurological brickbats more or less baldly asserts "every futurism is finally a retro-futurism," but I do think the critique is a bit more complicated than that pithy assertion suggests. Of course, with some sects of the Robot Cult, like the Extropians, the case is cut and dried, since they mostly affirm (affirmed?) the connection outright, and their slogans (no death, no taxes!), their attraction to explicitly libertopian sf like early Vinge and campy Wright and others, their curious attachment to gun-nuts and Bell Curve apologists and crypto-anarchists and so on, are all available for anybody to see who can use the google, and of course I haven't forgotten Tech Central Station, the fraudulent "think tank" celebrating high tech and free markets in ways that were characteristic of the whole futurological archipelago but got exposed as corporate-militarist right wing tools -- this is why I often deride an Ayn Raelian spirit in so much futurology.

"But things get trickier with the futurologists who claim liberal and democratic socialist and even anarcho-socialist roots. I happen to think even futurists with good intentions and earnest progressive assumptions are incredibly vulnerable to right-wing appropriation but also structurally tend to advocate variations of progressivism that are more authoritarian than not (eg, technocratically elitist policy wonk circle-jerks and ultimately anti-democratizing design discourses) or only vacuously democratic (eg, digital utopians mistaking surfing of packaged advertorial content in highly surveilled contexts as "open access" and superficial tweeting as "deliberation" and self-promotional deception as "free expression").

"There is a real sense in which the progressive developmentalist investment of Dewitt Clinton (who shepherded the Erie Canal and en-gridded Manhattan in a way that fostered both democracy and eventually progressive infrastructure services there) is hard to separate from the more fraudulent speculative mindsets that yielded vast periodic economic panics (including Depressions) in the name of exorbitant wealth-capture. That progressive-reactionary investment/speculation ambivalence in developmentalism is already there in Alexander Hamilton and still there in FDR -- and I personally see this as a prefiguration of the uniquely American varieties of futurological discourse (arising out of the ferment of the Second Thirty Years' War, that is to say the two twentieth century World Wars that concluded Westphalian European internationalsm and then implemented post-war globalism).

"I suspect that sustainable urban planning and progressive macroeconomics and democratizing planetary developmentalism (and I do not mean by this Washington Consensus globalization in its complementary neoliberal and neoconservative faces/fasces, but technodevelopmental social struggle of a kind informed by environmental justice critique and social democracy/democratic socialism) provide the sensible substantial kernel out of which much well-intentioned futurology finds the foothold it goes on to derange out of too superficial popular scientific understandings, too privileged penchants for undercritical enthusiasms, and common or garden varieties of greed for easy profit and a fairly widespread death-denialism (more usually in the form of mid-life crises, but in futurology, as you know, sometimes taking far more extreme forms taking us into the territory of organized religiosity and un(der)critical True Belief)."

Not Necessarily Abnormal, But Certainly Stupid

Living Infomercial and Very Serious Futurologist Natasha Vita More crayon-scribbles a bit of her usual zany nonsense for the Robot Cultists over at IEET. She begins by posing this question:

Would a person whose immune system starts declining after puberty, and finally gives up before 123, be normal? This statement largely sums up my transhumanist view that “normal” is misunderstood. The physiological (cognitive and the somatic) state of human existence “normality” ought to be a state of enhancement.

Depending on how many years before 123 (which is a higher life expectancy by far than even the richest, most silly supplement popping, most can-do futurologist can presently actually hope for) the obviously true answer to this question is: "yes." Of course it is normal for human beings to die before they arrive at 120.

And yet, in stirring defiance of actually existing actuarial life tables, not to mention actually existing dictionary definitions, Vita More (whose life is so much more than yours she changed her name to become a permanent advertisement of the fact) exhorts her fellow transhumanoid Robot Cultists to act as if what is "normal" for humans is a state of "enhancement" which actually doesn't exist. I should add, by the way, that in my opinion all culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are cultural and hence that using language, cultivating food crops, living in cities, not to mention most of the common or garden variety healthcare practices that actually exist that cure diseases and ease suffering, strictly speaking, constitute an acculturating prosthetic "enhancement" (and no doubt in other ways a circumscription or frustration) of human lifeways – which would mean that it is indeed already perfectly "normal" for human beings to be in some respects enhanced or articulated by culture while at once exactly as disease prone and vulnerable and mortal as we also actually are. But, of course, by "enhancement" what Vita More means to conjure is a human being genetically re-woven and awash with nanoscale robots and the usual futurological dog and pony show she and the other Robot Cultists have been monotonously riffing on for decades.

Needless to say, should medical science eventually advance to invent respirocytes and genetic sooper-immunity and foot long robot schlongs for everybody who wants them then human beings will indeed make recourse to these interventions the moment they are shown to be reliable and safe and affordable and all the rest, whereupon they will indeed become normal in the way things actually do become normal in the actual world. None of this puts us in any kind of position to say whether any of these outcomes are actually possible, or whether, possible in principle, they are outcomes anybody now living has any reason to fancy are sufficiently proximate to waste a single second of their actually-existing lifespan daydreaming about, not to mention whether or not possible and possibly proximate they would also be safe enough to be legal let alone affordable.

While transhumanists like to pretend that the real reason we don't live in the science fiction fantasy land they pine for is because there are sinister forces abroad in the land who worship disease or are terrified of the idea of living for centuries in sexy model bodies wallowing around in piles of treasure, the truth is that almost nobody on earth doesn't think it would be swell, caeteris paribus, to live in paradise but few people are idiotic enough to pretend that if they only clap louder this paradise will blossom into spontaneous existence, or, I must add, idiotic enough to join a Robot Cult and pretend that indulging in this kind of wish fulfillment fantasizing but then calling it Science! is somehow not idiotic anymore. Robot Cultists like to paint themselves as brave for devoting their adult lives to daydreaming about how awesome it would be if magic were real, then they like to paint themselves as progressive activists for pretending this daydreaming constitutes some kind of efficacious force for making daydreams real, then they like to rail against phantom armies of supremely powerful mortality-loving disease-loving luddites who presumably stand in the way of the spontaneous emergence of all the magic. Not to put too fine [a point -- thanks, TNA!] on it, all of this is quite palpably stupid.

Of course, there is plenty of greed and intolerance and superstition and fear holding back progress and there is plenty of work to be done solving our shared problems through scientific research and democratic reform, but none of that has anything to do with the magical thinking the Robot Cultists are peddling.

"Stand Your Ground" As Secessionist Treason

When the democratic left spinelessly abandoned the struggle for sensible gun control regulations in the aftermath of the 2000 election, when his support of some gun control measures was interpreted as a chief cause of Al Gore's defeat in his home state of Tennessee and, hence, of his defeat in the general election (an election Al Gore actually won, one should never tire of pointing out, and in which partisan Republican members of the Supreme Court outrageously irresponsibly selected the loser of that election, George W. Bush, as President in what amounted to a bloodless putsch that would eventuate in an orgy of bloodletting around the world and in a host of crises of institutional illegitimacy from which the nation has yet to recover), the space opened up by that abandonment of common sense and common decency was quickly filled with still deliriously proliferating "Stand Your Ground" and "Castle Laws" lobbied for and often literally crafted by right-wing anti-civilizational organizations like ALEC and the NRA. These are laws endorsing lawlessness, inevitably advocated by means of a rhetoric precisely as inverted as their result: peddled as defenses of a right to self-defense, a self-defense usually falsely and even paranoiacally portrayed as under attack, these laws function in fact as licenses to unaccountable individual vigilantism.

The way the intuition that every person has a right to defend themselves from bodily harm bleeds apparently so seamlessly into the intuition that every person's home is their castle to be likewise defended is in fact an expression of the fraught vulnerable permeable boundary of bodily selfhood. The defensive shell of self can expand into the space of the domestic zone or retreat into the theatrum philosophicum of the mind in the skull at will or under threat as circumstances demand or allow, a passive-aggressive permeability figuratively exploited by laws extending this selfhood as a kind of missile into the wider world through the en-castlement of cars on the road, from within which prosthetically enshelled selves can continue aggressively to defend themselves, or contracting inward into the individual genius of the romantic author the sweat of whose thinking brow presumably mixes with its original works to own them, however indispensably they arise from the living archive of culture in fact.

Of course, what is crucial in the state endorsement of self-defense is that it seems to provide for an exception to what is normally the state's jealously guarded monopoly on the legitimate recourse to violence. In tyrannical states this monopoly is functionally a sanction of state violence and crimes (eg, murder becomes execution, gangs becomes armies, exploitation becomes occupation and structural adjustment, and so on) suffered either because of the perceived hopelessness of rebellion or tolerated because it is accompanied by the maintenance of an order from which people consider themselves comparatively more likely to benefit than they are to be abused. This endorsement of self-defense is different but no less fraught in democratic states, for which the legitimacy of their monopoly recourse to violence depends precisely on a state's maintenance of nonviolent alternatives for the transfer of authority, for the adjudication of disputes, for the redress of grievances and violations, and support of a scene of informed, nonduressed consent (for which the provision of extensive welfare entitlements is indispensable) to the terms on which we relate to one another in our interpersonal affairs.

In cases of self-defense, whether what is defended is the bodily person or the prosthetically-extended person of their "castle," the self defending itself is usually at once marginalized and, crucially, immobilized from access to the state-sanctioned violence on which it normally depends for its security, and is hence defending itself in an exceptional state that can easily be accommodated as an exception or even as an expression (via a kind of momentary deputization) of the state's monopoly. But when the self-space of this defensive appropriation of violence is expanded via the en-castlement of cars in motion and so on into a near co-extensivity with the whole territory of the state as such this once exceptional state becomes curiously competitive with the universality of the state in ways that render the making of an exception for it increasingly coincident with calling itself into crisis. I suppose I should add right away that I do not happen to think it is wrong to treat cars as quasi-castles from which we have the same right to defend ourselves as we do from our homes, but I am simply saying that this and other extensions may have contributed to some unanticipated consequences or to have facilitated some dangerous developments.

Together with a host of laws insisting that people have the right to carry arms in visible and even conspicuous ways in ever more public place –- in churches, in bars (what could possibly go wrong?), nearer and nearer schools, and so on –- "Stand Your Ground" Laws treat the simple attachment of a gun to your bodily person as a kind of en-castlement of the citizen-self into a permanent exception to the rule of law, a permanently prostheticized anarch and agency of a kind of counter-law or alter-law. Under the regime of "Stand Your Ground" the gun functions as a prosthetic augmentation of a paranoid-defensive sovereignty that substitutes itself for and so subverts the sovereignty of the state (a sovereignty no less prone to paranoid defensiveness whenever it is not accountable to enfranchised and educated citizens). Wherever "Stand Your Ground" laws are on the books, the ground on which a gun-toting self stands is transformed for as long as the gun-holder stands on it from the land of the country its law-abiding citizens share to mere ground occupied by those who would be laws-unto-themselves. This is especially so in states where "Stand Your Ground" circumscribes the action or rationalizes the inaction of legitimate law enforcement that should arrest people or at least question them or at the very least divest them of their guns and other potential evidence in the aftermath of lethally violent exchanges simply because they invoke the right of self-defense in its newly capacious and aggressive sense.

There is no question at all that United States citizens have a second amendment right to bear arms (a right that was qualified and regulated before, during, and long after the birth of the republic and certainly should be far more circumscribed and regulated today in a time of readily and cheaply available massively-murderous assault weapons). And there is no question that plenty of perfectly good and sensible people like to hunt and to shoot guns for sport (and I say this as a life-long vegetarian and a person trained in nonviolence by the King Center who would never want a gun in my home) and that all United States citizens have a right to do so. The aggressive advocacy of ALEC and the NRA these days has nothing at all to do with the support of such practices and citizens' rights to them, but is conjuring up phony crises as pretexts to implement a profound dismantlement of lawful civilization (in this, these organizations are functioning precisely in the way that right-wing efforts to combat non-existing "voter fraud" are the pretext for widespread voter disenfranchisement and the dismantlement of voting rights), indeed, far from supporting everyday law-abiding gun ownership and uses, "Stand Your Ground" laws are transforming gun-owners, whatever their own feelings on the matter, into nodes in a network of anti-civilizational lawlessness, into avatars of anarchy wherever they happen to stand with a gun at hand, into secessionists from the country of laws many of them profess so loudly to love and which at least some of them actually do. All decent law abiding citizens, whether they own guns or not, should abhor "Stand Your Ground" lawlessness and should forcefully and permanently renounce organizations like ALEC and the NRA which are using law abiding gun owners as pawns in an effort to dismantle the rule of law.

I Predict That In Twenty Years Futurological Predictions Will Still Inevitably Begin "I Predict That In Twenty Years"

Look, Ma, I'm a futurologist! Let's ask this scientician...

More Futurological Brickbats here.

Added, to put some meat on the bones of this very easy bit of snark: The near irresistability to the common or garden variety futurologist of the "twenty-year prophecy horizon" is more than just a ritual intonation demanded by adherents of the genre (though there is a little of that involved, no doubt) but is also supremely pragmatic. "Twenty Years From Now" is located, as it were, on a "sweet spot": on the one hand, just far enough in the future to evade accountability for failure (when the prophecy straightforwardly does not come to pass, or when, coming to pass, it fails to Change Everything, or indeed much of anything, in the context of the technodevelopmental complexities in which the costs, risks, and benefits to the diversity of stakeholders in the richness of their lived situations are actually impacted by technoscientific change), and, on the other hand, just proximate enough still to seem worthy of attention and wishful identification, even by many who are likely to be dead in twenty years' time, all things equal.

It isn't too hard to imagine a snarky futurological interlocutor riposting that "I predict that in twenty years facile anti-futurologists will still be pointing to the failure of such twenty-year predictions to dismiss futurology despite the fact that futurology is much more than that." I would imagine a futurologesque figure like Jamais Cascio or Paul Raven might say something interesting along such lines. I think they would still have to come to grips with the actual undeniable reality of the phenomenon in question even while claiming there is something "more" to futurology than this.

But I must say I would also like to know why futurologists who disdain much of what goes on futurologically still identify -- even if ambivalently or critically -- with the futurological term? And why are so many of their preoccupations so drearily predictably futurological still -- AI, nano-genies, bio-enhancement, geo-engineering, blah blah blah?

If you are a "green futurologist," say, why not just be an environmental scientist? Or, if you cannot be an environmental scientist because you lack or cannot be bothered to actually get the training required for that, why pretend that your futurology makes you more "sciency" than any other environmental journalist or activist? Why not just be an activist, after all? If you think your trend spotting makes you a commentator on history, events, social forms -- why not become a historian, political scientist, economist, sociologist, anthropologist? Want to hold forth on health questions? Even if you aren't a physician you can get training in healthcare policy and become a journalist or expert for real. Even if you want to focus on technological development questions, there actually are academic disciplines devoted to science and technology studies (STS), history or philosophy of technology, environmental justice critique which take up these complexities in rigorous ways.

I mean, I get it that you might find my own accusation that futurological discourses amount to deceptive corporate-military marketing hyperbole and pseudo-scientific self-promotional fraud (and in certain extreme cases priestly guru-wannabe Robot Cultism) personally uncongenial, but I never get a real sense of what futurology brings to the table that actual already existing disciplines concerned with its scattered preoccupations lack. Again, if futurology is just a fandom for the sf subgenre of scenario-spinning, where scenarios are kinda sorta like sf settings without the addition of characterization, plots, integrated themes, stylistic innovations, and so on, well, it's hard for me to see the draw but let a bazillion flowers bloom! And, also, too, stop calling that science or policy-making then, embrace the fandom and let your freak flag fly at the con. Even here, there are lots of enormously interesting literary and cultural critics who will be competing with you on this terrain, along with a fantastic proliferating explosion of online fandom, so it's not clear to me if futurology on such terms would make much noise. Anyway, if there is still "futurology" happening in twenty years, I suspect it still won't have come clean on any of this, because I think the disinterest in and disavowal of such facts is probably an enabling condition of the ongoing existence of this pseudo-discipline. That this bit of false consciousness incubated so much phony twenty years from now prophecy drag show falsity in turn is really not so surprising as all that when all is said and done.

“Geo-Engineering” As Right-Wing War and Revolution

In an interview over at Grist the indispensable Naomi Klein talks about how the Republican right has only comparatively recently arrived at its present unanimity rejecting the scientific consensus about the reality and supreme danger of anthropogenic climate change, and how the change in their beliefs about the facts in question seems to have been preceded by their becoming convinced that the Democratic left is using environmentalism as a stealthy Marxist plot to take over America. One regularly sees frustrated liberals throwing up their hands and declaring that of course people can have their own arguments and values and desired outcomes, but that they cannot have their own facts. But, of course, one of the interesting things about the state of affairs Klein is pointing to is that Republicans are coming to new conclusions about factual questions not because they have been persuaded that the evidence is false or supports different factual conclusions but because they have been persuaded that what initially appeared to be a factual question is not one after all, but rather a Culture War issue for which the facts function less as evidences than as cultural signals indicating “us” versus “them.” What looks like Republicans inventing their own facts is really a matter of Republicans having a cultural dispute where Democrats are trying to have a policy dispute based on accurate assessments of fact.

In an earlier piece for the Nation Capitalism Versus the Climate Klein provided ample material to drive the fears of the cultural warriors of the right. Although the Republicans are rather absurd when they charge environmentalists of being crypto-marxists (John Bellamy Foster’s excellent Marx and Ecology notwithstanding, actually existing socialism has contributed more than its share to extractive-industrial-petrochemical catastrophe, “electrification plus soviets,” anyone?), indeed Republicans are rather absurd and rather paranoid to pretend environmentalists of being crypto-ANYTHING, given the cheerful eagerness with which eco-socialists, eco-feminists, and environmental justice critics talk up their perspectives and publish their online manifestos – the truth remains that market norms and forms pretending that growth without end is possible in a finite world, that brute productivity can bulldoze away all stakeholder differences over the long haul, that seeks to make the commodity form ubiquitous even over public and common goods to which it does not apply and which it destroys, that privileges short-term profitability over long-term deliberation, that encourages consumption, pollution, and waste in the service of apparent GDP health are simply unsustainable. Hence, serious environmentalism inevitably will demand changes that do look absolutely radical if not outright revolutionary from the vantage of the current parochial winners in our corporate-militarist industrial-extractive-petrochemical consumer-financial capitalist order.

What I would want to add to Klein’s account is that there actually is a right-wing revolutionary counterpart to the left-wing revolutionary environmentalism Klein is right to champion. And readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that I will connect it to futurology. When I speak of a right-wing revolutionary environmental discourse I do not refer to a generation of complacent advocacy of patently inadequate “carbon markets” or the endless articles and blogs devoted to boutique activism and lifestyle “green” consumption -- obviously the first is yet another lame over-application of the market fundamentalist assumptions that catastrophically deregulated enterprise and privatized public goods in the thirty year neoliberal civilization dismantlement project against which the tide is now turning, one hopes not too late, while the second is yet another lame over-estimation of the agency of isolated individuals in a world of structural and collective historical forces, the possessive individualist ethos on which much of that neoliberal ideology depends. The role of futurological think-tanks and marketing gurus in the promulgation of carbon market techno-fixes and the congeniality to the futurological ethos of the green gizmo-fetishization and consumption-fandoms of privileged lifestyle “greens” surely goes without saying. But radical though these neoliberal assumptions, ends, and outcomes are, I do not think them revolutionary (although one might usefully say that they are counter-revolutionary).

No, the right-wing revolutionary form of environmentalist discourse indebted to futurology seems to me quite clearly to be so-called “geo-engineering” advocacy. “Geo-engineering” discourse is to neoliberal carbon market proposals and consumer lifestyle pseudo-greens as what I call superlative futurology is to mainstream futurology. “Geo-engineering” is the proposal that corporate-military formations can declare and wage war on climate change on an industrial scale, it is the proposal that the very agents responsible for environmental catastrophe are the only ones suited to resolve it by attacking it in the very mode of mega-scale brute-force willfully-ignorant extractive-industrial agency through which environmental catastrophe has been wrought. Note that the inevitably enabling premise of “geo-engineering” discourse is always that democratically-accountable public investment and regulation has failed to address the crisis -- usually followed by the stealthy re-introduction of this very failed governmental site when the time comes to fund and police away resistance to these certainly parochially profitable even if almost certainly destined to fail mad science mega-engineering wet-dreams of orbital mirror archipelagos, megaton sea dumps of iron filings, pseudo-volcanic aerosol spraying air fleets, and vast undersea cathedrals of vertical piping to cool ocean surfaces.

Back in 2007, I proposed that the Global War on Terror functioned as a direct displacement of the revolutionary energies of environmental politics:

The Global War on Terror mimes the contours and rhetorical figures of planetary peer-to-peer Green consciousness: GWOT offers itself up as a response to a presumably "global existential threat," imagery that derives its intuitive plausibility in no small part from the disseminated consciousness of the threat of extractive industrial toxicity and catastrophic climate change. What is extraordinary in this is not just that the GWOTs would substitute for the urgent threats that invigorate Greens what seems to me to be a less urgent threat in fact (which is obviously not to deny the reality of some of the threats GWOT clumsily addresses itself to), but that GWOT relies in substance, as it were parasitically, on the Green awareness of the very threat it would then displace from our attention. And all the while, GWOT False Consciousness appropriates and diverts the energies of Green consciousness into precisely contrary political movements.

It seems to me that “geo-engineering” discourse came into currency precisely as the exposure of the falsity of GWOT’s enabling premises became as widespread as fatigue with the ruinous costs of GWOT had also become. What is key to grasp is the centrality to each of the figures of war. Reading two of my early critiques of “geo-engineering,” “Geo-Engineering” As Futurological Greenwashing and “Geo-Engineering” Is A Declaration of War That Doesn’t Care About Democracy Alex Steffen (late of Worldchanging) tweeted his summary: “Geoengineering, he essentially argues, is Fascism’s answer to climate crisis: planetary action as war.”

Seeing it so baldly put I found myself making a connection I had not grasped myself hitherto, thinking about the key difference between the way, on the one hand, Adorno’s critique of the Culture Industry and Debord’s critique of the Spectacle both make recourse to what Debord literally describes as the “permanent Opium War” of the diversion of revolutionary dissatisfaction into lifestyle consumption (via “manufactured needs” in Adorno, “pseudo-needs” in Debord), as opposed to the way, on the other hand, in the stunning epilogue of Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility (partly as an answer to which Adorno mobilized the Culture Industry critique in the first place) the conflict with fascism (right-wing revolutionism) is very much a matter of literal and not cultural war-making:

War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system... If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production -- in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

That last glancing reference to the abolition of aura in a “new way” … “through gas warfare” is especially intriguing in light of Peter Sloterdijk’s recent suggestion that environmental consciousness emerged precisely in the trenches, when soldiers grasped that the very atmosphere in which they had evolved to be fit and flourish could be re-engineered to kill them in clouds of mustard gas. Sloterdijk’s claim can be found in a slim volume Terror from the Air, excerpted from his vast work Sferen, and it is coupled to a rather Monty Pythonesque reading of Dali nearly asphyxiating in a malfunctioning diving suit while a vast crowd avidly watched wondering if his panicked convulsions were art. For me, this iconography recalls the failed artificial earth environment Biosphere 2, and the image of its futurologists crawling half dead from starvation and pollution from the toxic sewer it quickly became, crawling back into the embrace of the earth itself, Biosphere 1, as it were, the very planet the “confines” of which they so disdained that they were driven to build their presumably preliminary self-sufficient “escape craft” in the first place.

In "The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man," Hannah Arendt wrote:

The situation, as it presents itself today, oddly resembles an elaborate verification of a remark by Franz Kafka, written at the very beginning of this development: Man, he said, “found the Archimedean point, but he used it against himself; it seems that he was permitted to find it only under this condition.” For the conquest of space, the search for a point outside the earth from which it would be possible to move, to unhinge, as it were, the planet itself, is no accidental result of the modern age’s science. This was from its very beginnings not a “natural” but a universal science, it was not a physics but an astrophysics which looked upon the earth from a point in the universe. In terms of this development, the attempt to conquer space means that man hopes he will be able to journey to the Archimedean point which he anticipated by sheer force of abstraction and imagination. However, in doing so, he will necessarily lose his advantage. All he can find is the Archimedean point with respect to the earth, but once arrived there and having acquired this absolute power over his earthly habitat... man can only get lost in the immensity of the universe, for the only true Archimedean point would be the absolute void behind the universe... We have come to our present capacity to “conquer space” through our new ability to handle nature from a point in the universe outside the earth. For this is what we actually do when we release energy processes that ordinarily go on only in the sun, or attempt to initiate in a test tube the processes of cosmic evolution, or build machines for the production and control of energies unknown in the household of earthly nature. Without as yet actually occupying the point where Archimedes had wished to stand, we have found a way to act on the earth as though we disposed of terrestrial nature from outside, from the point of Einstein’s “observer freely poised in space.” If we look down from this point upon what is going on on earth and upon the various activities of men, that is, if we apply the Archimedean point to ourselves, then these activities will indeed appear to ourselves as no more than “overt behavior,” which we can study with the same methods we use to study the behavior of rats. Seen from a sufficient distance... [a]ll our pride in what we can do will disappear into some kind of mutation of the human race; the whole of technology, seen from this point, in fact no longer appears “as the result of a conscious human effort to extend man’s material powers, but rather as a large-scale biological process."

Again, we are confronted with the paradoxical technodeveopmental aspiration toward omnipotence figured in an arrival at threatened impotence, the consummately technologized actor the supremely fragile man in a space suit (another kind of diving suit, another kind of Biosphere 2) tethered to the gravity and warmth and air available everywhere on the earth he was born in and evolved to be fit for by nothing now but a thin cord and film of foil. Already I have accused that "geo-engineering" offers up a profoundly earth-alienated "vantage on environmentalism premised on pretending that the earth on which we evolved, in which we are fit to flourish, is imagined instead as an alien world to be rebuilt by machines inspired by a science fiction novel[.] Writes [geo-engineering advocate Jamais] Cascio: 'A science-fiction parallel that might illuminate is to think of it as terraforming the Earth.' I must say that this does not seem particularly illuminating to me at all of the environmental problems we earthlings face on this earth... If anything I think this thought-experiment illuminates the profoundly alienated vantage assumed in engineering and profit-taking and futurological rationalities that would reduce the good earth to a lifeless unearthly mineral-resource rock-scape."

Given all of this, it comes as no real surprise, then, to read this proposal by Matthew Liao, an Associate Professor at New York University affiliated with the Center for Bioethics:

Anthropogenic climate change is arguably one of the biggest problems that confront us today. There is ample evidence that climate change is likely to affect adversely many aspects of life for all people around the world, and that existing solutions such as geoengineering might be too risky and ordinary behavioural and market solutions might not be sufficient to mitigate climate change. In this paper, we consider a new kind of solution to climate change, what we call human engineering, which involves biomedical modifications of humans so that they can mitigate and/or adapt to climate change. We argue that human engineering is potentially less risky than geoengineering and that it could help behavioural and market solutions succeed in mitigating climate change. We also consider some possible ethical concerns regarding human engineering such as its safety, the implications of human engineering for our children and for the society, and we argue that these concerns can be addressed. Our upshot is that human engineering deserves further consideration in the debate about climate change.

Quite apart from the fact that catastrophic climate change is real while "geo-engineering" and "genetic-enhancement" is not -- and so one might be forgiven the suspicion that perhaps a person turning to unreal solutions to real problems is less serious than they claim to be when they genuflect to real problems as pretexts to indulge in futurological day-dreaming about "gengineering" designer babies and enhanced super-humans -- what we find here is the amplification of the earth-alienation of the "geo-engineers" (an amplification even if Liao tut-tuts that it "might be too risky" -- too risky as compared, you will note, to re-writing human bodies in the image of space aliens flourishing on a methane-choked garbage planet rocked by greenhouse storms!) into the already more familiar territory of post-human body-alienation, with its full yield of rants against "meat-bodies" and raves about uploading into imperishable data-heaven. From a futurological declaration of war against climate change (consisting of an endless corporate-militarist war of climate-changing) we arrive at the familiar futurological declaration of war against the vulnerable, mortal human body itself.

I do not think we need choose Benjamin’s focus on literal war over Adorno’s and Debord’s focus on cultural war in grasping the ways in which ideology functions practically to seduce precarious workers into active collaboration in the terms of their own exploitation, but I do think it is important to recognize that the cases they are making are indeed different even if they are finally complementary. And to circle back to the claims with which I began, namely that right-wing anti-environmentalism, too, might have two faces, one of literal and the other of cultural war making, and that the literally war-like face of that right-wing anti-environmentalism is futurological, I propose that it is no accident either that Benjamin’s revolutionary figures here are repeatedly ecological, nor that he declares as the essential theoreticians of fascist war-making none other than the Italian Futurists.