Exxon-Mobil's "Geo-Engineering" Discourse Is Just More Futurological Greenwashing

Also posted at the World Future Society.

A speech made by ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson at the Council on Foreign Relations last month has been attracting greater and greater attention as its implications sink in.

Tillerson has supposedly "pivoted" from his predecessor Lee Raymond's relentless climate change denialism, and has acknowledged that global temperatures are rising. "Clearly there is going to be an impact," Tillerson admitted. But he remains as committed as ever to undermining any acknowledgment that might support a policy consensus that would cut into his corporation's profitability, insisting that climate models cannot predict the actual magnitude of the impact.

Tillerson glibly proposed that in order to preserve the record profits of his industry, humanity might have to "adapt" to rising sea levels and shifts in agriculture. Just to be clear, what "adapting to rising sea levels" means is the dislocation of millions and millions of humans living on coasts and what "adapting to shifts in agriculture" means is the starvation of millions and millions of humans in droughts and famines and widening vectors of insect attack. "We have spent our entire existence adapting. We'll adapt," Tillerson said.

Needless to say, just because human beings have adapted to crises before does not in fact ensure that they can adapt to any situation, and certainly the historical record is full of examples of civilizations that have not survived environmental shifts, plagues, famines, or the social disruption exacerbated by environmental stress.

But more to the point there is that chilling pronoun, "we." Who is included in Rex Tillerson's imagined "we," exactly? Just how many human "theys" can perish in plagues and in famines and in climate refugee camps and in hails of bullets brought on by climate disruption in order to maintain Rex Tillerson's historically unprecedented profit-taking before the bubble of privilege within which resides the population of his personal "we" might begin to feel the least pressure? In time to realize it is too late for us all?

Of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, to the extent that he is admitting its existence in public at all, Tillerson said: "It's an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution." I have written extensively about so-called "geo-engineering" discourse, which I would describe as an apparently environmentalist discourse in which corporate-military organizations are imagined to declare and wage war on climate change on an industrial scale. Such discourses are only "apparently" environmentalist because they actually function to misdirect our attention away from environmentalist education and activism and regulation as these play out in the real world. They try to recast shared environmental problems as opportunities for elite incumbent profit-taking in the very modes that are yielding the ongoing crisis. And they proceed from a curiously alienated vantage on the earth itself, in which environmentalism becomes a kind of science fictional narrative in which humans are like aliens arriving on a distant planet and setting about "terraforming" it to suit their needs, rather than simply recognizing that we are earthlings evolved to flourish on a planet we have wounded, possibly fatally, through ignorance, aggression, and short sighted greed.

Does it really make sense to fantasize that the very agents most responsible for environmental catastrophe are finally the only ones suited to resolve it by attacking the ongoing outcomes of that catastrophe in the very mode of competitive profit-taking mega-scale brute-force extractive-industrial agency through which environmental catastrophe has been wrought? Well, does it?

Chris Mooney for one has taken issue with my characterization of "geo-engineering" discourse as a second order climate change denialism, one which is aimed not at a denial of the consensus of the relevant scientists that this phenomenon is occurring and that its consequences are catastrophic, but aimed instead at a denial that accountable democratic governance can be equal to the collective challenges of climate change which substantially yields the same result as the first, more conventional, denialism.

It is very difficult for me to understand how those who would declare themselves forced into advocacy of "geo-engineering" as a Last Resort or a Plan B because of the failures of environmental regulation and renewable alternative infrastructure investment, for example, supposed imagine the mega-engineering projects they daydream about like science fiction fanboys in digital renderings on YouTube or before rapt techno-fetishists at TED would actually be funded, regulated, and maintained if not by conventional funding and regulatory agencies, or just how such "hard-boiled realists" square their confidence that conventional investment and governance will prevail over "geo-engineering" with their despair over such governance ever being able to rise to the challenge of our shared environmental problems.

Tillerson insists that his industry "is built on technology, it's built on science, it's built on engineering" -- rather than on relentless greed and an opportunism that has demonstrated itself willing to despoil any environment, disrupt any community, dismiss any value that stands in the way of the brutal extraction of condensed banked energy through which the suicidal fraud of the petrochemical bubble he would no doubt describe in self-congratulatory cadences as "modern industrial civilization" remains hysterically inflated.

It should be needless to say that there is no such thing as "technology in general" or "science in general" for Tillerson's industry to be a special exemplar of, and in fact his personal position and privilege absolutely requires of him the selective application of some science together with the selective denial of other science (climate sciences that warn of the perilous consequences of his activities), the selective application of some technologies together with the selection repudiation of other technologies (renewable energy infrastructure at a scale that might threaten the profitability of his activities).

But by deploying "science" and "technology" as muzzy futurological abstractions he can elide all the relevant details on the basis of which public deliberation on the diverse stakeholder costs, risks, and benefits of his activities as against available alternatives might proceed in a reasonable and responsible way, the better to assume the mantle of The Great White Father bemoaning "a society that by and large is illiterate in… science, math and engineering, [for whom] what we do is a mystery to them and they find it scary" -- as if the reckless and border line sociopathic things he is saying aren't scary enough on their own! -- "an illiterate public" he adds, that must be "help[ed… to] understand why we can manage [environmental] risks."

Of course, the technoscientific illiteracy Tillerson speaks of is quite real: And he is counting on it to continue to get his way and make his profits while the sun shines, laissez les bon temps rouler, après moi le deluge! Futurological daydreams of mega-engineering boondoggles actively contribute to this ignorance and illiteracy, distracting people from our shared problems and their available solutions instead to space-opera cover art fantasias of orbiting mirror archipelagos, arctic cathedrals of steel piping icy water from the sea floor to the surface, fleets of airships spraying pseudo-volcanic aerosols into cloudbanks, and so on in an era when we cannot summon the will to bury our power lines so that they don't disrupt power delivery to millions every time it rains or snows or fill the potholes pimpling our highways let alone build obviously beneficial transcontinental high speed rail!

It is no surprise that Tillerson goes on to rail against "interested parties" -- he is the purely disinterested exemplar of pure science now, you will recall -- whose alarmism and activism "is going to… manufacture fear because that's how you slow this down." For such "interested parties" are precisely the ones seeking to educate the public about the shared problems at hand, about their incredible urgency, and about the changes in public policy, in personal conduct, in urban design that we must insist upon if we are to be equal to these shared problems. Since this education and the changes it would bring would undermine the status quo from which Tillerson personally benefits, he welcomes scientific illiteracy, he welcomes public confusion, he welcomes collective complacency.

Just so you know, the "this" that environmentalists would "slow down" with their fears is literally the ongoing unnecessary ruination of a human world just so that Rex Tillerson and his colleagues can continue to enjoy historically unprecedented profits for now. From denialism of the facts of climate change to distraction from politics into fantasies of profitable techno-fixes for the catastrophic outcomes testified to in those facts, Tillerson's speech was a full-throated declaration of a willingness and even eagerness to do harm for his parochial benefit, indifferent to the consequences to the mal-adaptive "they" that is very likely to include the entire "we" reading these words, right here, right now.

Calling Bullshit on the World's First "Cyborg Hate Crime"

Surveying the cyberspatial sprawl and the twitterspew on day three of the conversation about performance artist and sousveillance activist Steve Mann's assault in a Paris McDonalds (and I'm not one of the wags who are saying he was asking for it for going to McDonalds in Paris), I can see that a huge number of white guys in blocky spectacles and various stages of male pattern baldness have come to the consensus that this assault is or could be or should be considered the world's first "cyborg hate crime."

I initially commented on the assault here, then I replied to early suggestions of this character here, and then ridiculed the further suggestion of a boycott of McDonalds by pre-post-humans following the logic of this suggestion here. As I have said before, this isn't even the first time Steve Mann himself has been assaulted by folks who were perplexed or provoked by his prostheses, so those who are hyperventilating about the "first cyborg hate crime" don't have a prosthetic leg to stand on when they say such things. But I don't think that is a particularly interesting thing to say either, and what distresses me is that this is an occasion to say much more interesting things instead if we want to make an effort, and it should matter presumably to people who are talking about Steve Mann and claiming to care about Steve Mann that Steve Mann's art and activism has been a decades long effort to provoke precisely a deeper engagement with the prostheticization through which identification and dis-identification and embodiment are experienced and expressed in the world as well as with our immersion in elite incumbent surveillance and data-profiling and marketing.

So, too, since so much of this blather about the world's first "Cyborg Hate Crime" is presumably premised on worry and rage about Mann's assault, surely the actual specificity of the circumstances involved would be something folks would want to know more about? You can be sure that the politics playing out in the scene of this assault were more specific than anything the phrase "cyborg hate crime" puts anybody even remotely in a position to talk about. What if it turns out that Mann's attackers misrecognized his prosthesis as a sign of disability and part of what was happening is that they were assholes who like the idea of attacking a vulnerability they discern in the differently enabled? What if it turns out that the attackers experienced their documentation as a violation calling forth retaliation, a reaction Mann has definitely provoked before and has sometimes provoked deliberately to make a point in the spirit of quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Part of what should be occurring right about now to even the meanest intelligence is that certainly before now, and often, all too often, somebody has had their cellphone snatched and smashed by someone in a McDonalds annoyed by its ringtone or by the snotty affect of its user, somebody has had their walking stick or walker or prosthetic limb or thick spectacles messed with by awful jerks who think it is amusing to prey on the apparently vulnerable differently enabled folks in their midst, somebody has been assaulted because they seemed to signal through sartorial choices or bodily bearing an atypical sex-gender performance or membership in an ethnic minority, and so on and on and on and on.

Suddenly one is in a position to grasp that what might initially and superficially have seemed a new phenomenon in the world -- a person being assaulted for their prosthetic performance of personhood in the polis -- is in fact just a slightly unfamiliar form of an actually ubiquitous phenomenon, the ineradicably prosthetic character of both practices of embodied identification and practices of dis-identification, including the ones that body forth bigotry and violence. It turns out that the initial appearance of unfamiliarity is precisely the opening that allows us to grasp anew and more deeply the character of normative practices in which we are all of us involved.

When I wonder about whether the geeks in a rage about the attack on Mann's Eye-Glass in a McDonalds grasp its continuity with and hence are comparably incensed about the recent attack on a transperson in a McDonalds, the point isn't just to rain on the cyborg parade with a lecture on political correctness (though I should have expected that reaction, given that we're talking about the discourse of a whole hell of a lot of lame privileged straight white male gadget fetishists here, and you know I'm right). Rather than complain that I am forbidding anybody from articulating the material reality of an assault on a cyborg, what I am trying to do is use the assault as a teachable moment through which we come to grasp the extent to which the performance of socially legible selfhood is always crucially prosthetic. Definitely, to the extent that one wants to deploy the phrase "cyborg hate crime" in a way equal to its material resonance one needs to grasp just how many different incarnated figures that have little to do with techno-fetishistic fantasies of the "cyborgic" in the present-day consumer commercial marketing imaginary are indeed indispensably prostheticized.

And, hence, actually, yes I do indeed wonder to what extent some geek identification with Mann as an assaulted cyborg is enabled through a dis-identification with the assaulted trans person despite the fact that prostheticization is no less indispensable to the one as to the other, no less central to one violation as to the other. Again, the point of calling attention to this parallel is to provide an occasion to understand more about the very violation that these comments I'm responding to are claiming to be about. It's true that I think it is pretty facile to leap, as some are doing, to a recommendation of boycotting McDonalds over this assault when it isn't exactly clear what the connection of the organization is to the perpetrators of the violence here, especially given all the ways in which this sort of connection of institutional violence and misinformation is so much clearer in other instances that seem to involve similar problems and hence would seem to inspire similar concerns (environmental concerns, health concerns, concerns about McDonalds use of UK libel laws to attack public critics).

In conclusion, I do hope it is possible to read this intervention as more than vapid scolding from a position of presumed superiority, but as an occasion to connect this event to a wider context that enriches the intuitions this violation has inspired in the first place. In the absence of that, sorry (actually, not), but too much of the commentary around this event just looks way too much like rich privileged white guys wanting to pretend they are a persecuted minority vulnerable to hate crimes now because of their self-congratulatory gizmo consumerism. To the extent that this is the case, needless to say, I call bullshit.

Attack on Mann NOT First Attack on a Cyborg

Very predictably, the futurological dunderheads at Kurzweil are megaphoning the "first attack on a cyborg" angle of the Steve Mann assault. As I insisted in my account of the attack last night,

Those who are proposing that this assault might represent a "first" instance of anti-cyborg bigotry are doubly wrong -- first, and most obviously, because this isn't even the first instance in which Mann himself has been assaulted for his prostheses (recall the ordeal to which he was subjected by airport security near the height of the Bush phase of GWOT in 2002), but, second and more interesting to me, because I think a de-naturalization that spotlights the inherently prosthetic character of all culture is so central to so much bigotry, as witness violent assaults on transgender folks or prejudice based on sartorial signals of ethnicity or bullying of the differently enabled.

Robot Cultists often like to pretend that criticism of the more ridiculous statements they have offered up to public scrutiny (and, yes, it's ridiculous to say you expect your "information-self" is going to be migrated to and then eternalized in virtual nanobot sexbot heaven under the ministrations of the sooper-parental history-ending Robot God some amateur self-appointed soopergenius guru-wannabe is presumably coding in his basement) constitutes harassment, so I would not be surprised if this framing of the Mann attack will set the scene for an enormously satisfying paranoid victim narrative in which futurologists fancy themselves a persecuted minority forever imperiled by roving bands of deathist luddites ready to bash them because of their blocky nerd hipster spectacles and iPhones.

Ayn Raelians Should All Go Walt

When the Ayn Randians whine about how the moochers are getting them down, I say, Go Galt! Enough with the threats already! Begone! Oh, do please go, forthwith, on your Superman Strike! By all means shrug off the shackles of your tax enslavement, build your cathedral to the predator gods for us to pine after in the dreamy distance as we slog the swamp of our muddled mediocrity, leave us all to languish and limp without your fountainhead of endless innovations and insights to bolster us anymore. Go Galt, I say again: It's not like anybody is going to miss you.

I feel much the same when the Ayn Raelians of the Robot Cult go on and on about how they mean to be uploaded into the cyberspatial sprawl, immortalized in shiny robot bodies or shimmery informational post-bodies. To them I say, Go Walt! Enough already with the sales pitch and on to the arrangements, all ye techno-heavenbound True Believers! By all means have your brain sliced and scanned and snapped, the sooner the better, and here's to your hoping the resulting picture of part of you is somehow you and somehow immortal to boot. Leave the rest of us to our sad surgeries and eventual burials or burnings while you are frozen, glassified, or otherwise hamburgerized to await the ministrations of the Robot God and his busy nanobotic angels. Go Walt, I say again: You're all going to die like the rest of us, anyway. It's not like it matters much how you're bagged for disposal.

"I Tweet From Basement, Home of Mom": Time For A Cyberspace Manifesto 2.0?

Also posted at the World Future Society.

Given the dot.bomb, the New Economy crash, the outsourcing outrage, the digirati dump, the facebook fiasco, the various iCrap scandals it seems high time for the digi-hippies and liber-techians and other assorted Ayn Raelian types to rethink, revise, redo some of the assumptions and aspirations that lead so many of them to embrace so ecstatically not so very long ago John Perry Barlow's breathless Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. I never bought Barlow's balderdash, so I am probably not the one to propose a revised line that will be congenial to the gizmo groupies, but what I have in mind would go a little something like this:

Corporations of the Washington Consensus, you giant man-eating monster squids of outsourcing, financial fraud, war profiteering, climate change denialism, and the world ruining race to the bottom, we are writing you from Cyberspace again. Actually, I am here in my slimy sweat pants, in my parent's house, tapping arthritically at a cellphone and squinting at its postage stamp screen with a hangover and a lot on my mind.

On behalf of our hopes for some kind of future, I guess I'm asking you to think about maybe giving me a temp job without benefits or at least to lower the price of a Big Gulp and a microwave burrito until I find work or I drop dead, whichever comes first. And it would sure be great if you guys could leave people who have to work for a living alone to huddle in the dark in our scant fraught leisure time, surfing the web, putting deceptive dating profiles online, getting off on free porn, and blogging for zero comments in a torrent of maddening advertising and intrusive surveillance.

We get it that money is the only speech now and that non-rich people have to suffer so that the rich can live in walled off brass-plated McVegas enclaves among photogenic slaves. We get it that we are not welcome among you, we get it that we are to have no sovereignty where you might gather. We get it that the digital economy was mostly just a screen of technical jazz and hype behind which earth-shatteringly huge financial sector fraud went down. These days we're just looking for a place to recharge our laptop batteries and get a signal among the ruins while we watch the Greenhouse storms roll in.

Yeah, it turns out cyberspace was not really some kind of spirit realm after all but more or less a coal-fired re-branded refurbishment of the century old telegraph network but with a tee vee glued on it for us to stare at or shrunk into a radio walkie-talkie homing beacon so we can get ordered around wherever we go all hours of the day and night until we throw our internet gizmo into a landfill to poison the water table for centuries and replace it with another crappier one made by hand by wage slaves living who knows where even more miserably than we are and kinda sorta because of us.

It turns out that "Moore's Law" was a soap bubble, a skewed perspectival effect and that processors become faster only to encourage software to become slower. It turns out that "accelerating change" was just the PR face of increasing insecurity as infrastructure gets looted, enterprise gets deregulated, welfare gets dismantled, and ecosystems get polluted beyond bearing. It turns out that the Turing Test has been a century long experiment in which the attribution of intelligence to non-intelligent artifacts has resulted in artificial imbecillence among the info-fixated humans who fell for it. It turns out that our identities are bound up with our aging, vulnerable, scarred, skilled bodies after all, and that access and expression online are still stratified by race, sex, gender, morphology, money, geography, history and that denial is never some kind of triumphal overcoming. It turns out that incumbent elites were never afraid of our rising generation at all, but just saw in us the usual marks, and that the pop sci-tech journalists who fed our enthusiasm knew no better than to buy into the same line of hype we were. It turns out the Digital Age and its post-humanoid avant-garde was a conceptually confused, scientifically superficial, emotionally infantile, politically pernicious farrago of ill-digested science fiction conceits and hyperbolic corporate press releases and wooly theology and shrieking id.

Man, it's been some fun, but our revolution mostly sucked, didn't it? I guess there really is a difference between the virtual and the real. You know, like, sorry about all that.

Pancryptics, My Dissertation Online

[You come upon a ruin, my friend. Half of this text I would write differently now than I did then, and the other half I would not write at all. I can still commend the readings of David Brin, Eric Hughes, and David Friedman in here. Some of the basic frames and histories here are still okay, but I cannot say you won't find better elsewhere. Although the whole piece has an Arendtian spirit I am ashamed to note that two sustained engagements with Arendt on revolution and her reading of Kafka are quite terrible and I would ridicule their author cruelly for his nonsense nowadays. If you disagree with them, well so do I. I'm not sure my recent, shorter-than-a-page Twitterized Privacy Thesis isn't more substantive, when it comes to it. I sometimes think of the much better book I could write on this topic now, but even so there are better books I could write than that one were I the sort of person with the discipline and stamina to publish books at all, so I think this ruin must be all that remains of the reading and writing from that time in my life.]

Pancryptics: Technocultural Transformations of the Subject of the Privacy

by Dale Carrico (Department of Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley, 2005): Judith Butler, Chair; Mark Poster, Pamela Samuelson, Linda Williams, readers.

Acknowledgments

Abstract

Introduction

This falling of dusk, this darkening of the public scene… did not take place in silence… On the contrary, never was the public scene so filled with public announcements, usually quite optimistic… each promising a different wave of the future… all of which together had the net effect of desubstantializing every issue they touched… Testimony to [the] antipublic climate of the times can be found in poetry, in art, and in philosophy… Such inclinations… can lead to a passion for secrecy and anonymity, as if only that could matter to you personally which could be kept secret. –- Hannah Arendt

It is not enough to say that these are anti-authority struggles… they are also an opposition against secrecy, deformation, and mystifying representations imposed on people. -– Michel Foucault

Chapter One: Technological Transformations of the Subject of Privacy

[T]he right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men [sic]. -- Justice Louis Brandeis

We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word “privacy.” -- Hannah Arendt

One: The Subject of Privacy

I. Privacy As Technocultural Problematic

II. Technologies of Privacy

III. Quandaries of Agency for the Informational Construal of Privacy

Two: The Subject of Privacy

IV. Privacy Rites

V. Let Alone

VI. Private Nodes in the Net

Three: The Subject of Privacy

VII. Subject, Object, Abject

VIII. Sovereign Or Subject?

IX. Secrecy and the Subject of Privacy

X. Tales From the War Years

Chapter Two: Markets From Math

The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man [sic] is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected. -- Anton Chekhov

It is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws, we need to protect ourselves with mathematics. -- Bruce Schneier

One: Weaving Nets, Smashing States

I. The "First Generation" of Cyberspatial Theory

II. Taking the First Generation Seriously

III. "California Ideology" Among the First Generation

Two: Arguments from Inevitability and from Desire

IV. Manifesto

V. What Is Manifest

VI. P2P, Not Anarchy

VII. Afterward

Three: Liber-Tech

VIII. Techniques of Secrecy

IX. Building Resistance In

X. e2e

Four: The Discretionary: Secrecy, Privacy, and Control

XI. From Privation to Discretion

XII. Description As Threat

XIII. Privacy Under Control

XIV. Digital Libertarianism

Chapter Three: Markets With Eyes

I’ve never looked through a keyhole without finding someone was looking back. -- Judy Garland

I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. -- Bruce Sterling

One: Two Cheers for the Surveillance Society

I. Either/Or

II. Eye Infinitum

Two: Too Many Truths

III. Truths to Power

IV. Neither/Nor

Conclusion: Markets Without Materiality

Everything solid melts into air... -- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Information is alienated experience. -- Jeron Lanier

[Okay, another warning. If you've actually been reading this, by the time you arrive at this material you have found your way to the earliest writing in the dissertation. By the time I had completed this material I was quite ready to discard it as a Wittgensteinian ladder that had gotten me somewhere but then proven an encumbrance if not an outright embarrassment, roughly equal parts false and facile. I consigned it immediately to an "epilogue" and it is only a vestigial Catholic form of penance that keeps me from obliterating this digital trace. The criticism of the libertarianism -- both right and "left" -- of so-called tech-culture and tech-talk might be of some interest to those who want to trace early forms of the critique I continued to hammer on about most notoriously for years later.]

Epilogue/Problog

Don’t hate the media, become the media. -- Jello Biafra

What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing. -- Hannah Arendt

One: Social Software as Furniture and as Poetry

I. Dissing Blogging

II. Social Architectures

III. Social Software Sublime

IV. Arendt on Revolution

V. Trippi on Revolution

VI. dKos as Figure

VII. Dean as Figure

VIII. Belly of the Beast

Two: Prologue/Blogpost

IX. Blogos

X. Publicity As Relinquishment: Writing Digitexts

XI. Publicity As Relinquishment: Writing Blogtexts, Hypertexts, Tagtexts

XII. Digital Expressivity, Digital Credibility

XIII. What We Talk About When We Talk About "New" Media

Three: Trouble in Libertopia

XIV. Revenge of the Crystal; Or, Who Are These People?

XV. The Awesome Techno Blossom

XVI. Ethos Move

A Comment On "Political Correctness"

I've been a fly on the wall of a discussion taking place elsewhere, somewhere I am not welcome to contribute but which I still observe in an interested way. It is a discussion of the legacies of slavery, the genocidal dislocation of Native Americans, Jim Crow, Washington Consensus foreign policy, and ongoing institutional racism shaping aspirations for and distributing the effects of technoscientific changes in the present day.

I was hardly surprised when the discussion bodied forth the usual anguished cry of "political correctness" from some of the Very Serious White Guys of "The Future" who gathered there, some of whom go on predictably to make Very Serious supposedly hardboiled realistic comments about how colonial violence is a "done deal" and how there is no point in crying over spilled milk (or blood) and so on.

Of course, legacies of patriarchy, racism, slavery, colonialism, segregation, exploitation, heteronormativity, and naturalized violence continue to stratify the distribution of resources, capacities, recourse to law, access to opportunity here and now. This is not a "done deal" but, rather, very much still being dealt and being done. Either one attributes these stratifications to innate differences -- which is always bigotry, plain and simple -- or one attributes them to ongoing injustices -- which in turn either compels one to organize to redress them or one is indifferent to -- which is always bigotry again, again plain and simple.

Read that paragraph again. It is very important and I don't think it is that hard to understand, frankly.

Presumably, recognizing such facts is being annoyingly "PC" now, it is to unfairly and aggressively demand "political correctness" now on poor put-upon people just trying to have a good-humored good-faith discussions?

It's funny. I remember so vividly the intense discussions among academics and activists in the 80s and early 90s about canons and interlocking oppressions, in which the term "PC" was used to describe a form of attention to the actual impossibility of any clean escape from the complex con-fusing co-constructing co-facilitating legacies of past violations that meant good faith political discussions in the service of equity-in-diversity had to be especially sensitive and especially imaginative. I remember these discussions so vividly, I suppose, because these were the discussion in which I came into political consciousness as an earnest ignoramus in Atlanta in my early twenties, and which continue to shape me to this day, probably more than anything else.

It is simply weird to me how this kind of fraught sensitivity to difficulty was transformed in the popular imagination into the unilateral imposition of some harshly censorious code from a position of supposed know-it-alls. That a "PC"-sensitivity originated instead from a recognition of inevitably inadequate knowledge and the demand for compensatory sensitivity makes the popular understanding of "PC" that much more misplaced and ironic.

Of course, I assume any request for any kind of effort at all looks like unreasonable demands and cramped moralizing to privileged assholes who take their parochial assumptions and constituted authority as a natural given beyond question. No doubt from such a position of naturalized righteousness even the old-fashioned common sense idea of taking pains to be polite when one is in unfamiliar company feels like some kind of fascist conspiracy.

The thing is, plain and simple... it's not.

The Reactionary Progress Narrative Coiled Like A Snake Inside Our Commonplace Understanding of "Technology"

I have had an interesting exchange (upgraded and adapted below) with "Summerspeaker" in the Moot to this post. Summer and I both have theory backgrounds and this is reflected in the kinds of terminology and shortcuts we are deploying, so if this isn't your cup of tea, please don't get too mad about it.

Summer writes:

I'm not sure what to think of your extremely broad and flat definition of technology. Numerous analysts (Hiedegger comes to mind) draw a distinction between handcrafted tools like flints and mass-produced artifacts such as iPhones. It's all empty space smeared with electrical charge when you get down to it, but that doesn't usually prove the most useful framework for navigating this material world. As fraught as all concepts of nature and its opposites are, I say the narrative of increasing technology/artifice/artificiality in the modern era has merit. Your position that computers, cars, buildings, and so on merely constitute a variation on the inherently human theme of technology confuses more than it clarifies. From my specific historical perspective in the midst the world industrial economy, the differences between iPhones and flints outweigh their similarities. Even the notion of technological progress shouldn't be completely discarded. Increasing sophistication and efficiency has happened on the whole, albeit in the context of a system that threatens total ecological collapse (to name but one of its horrors). All other things being equal, shotguns and hunting rifles are more effective killing tools than flint-tipped spears and arrows. This trend of enhancement -- as uneven, troubled, and dangerous as it is -- deserves naming and contemplation.

I reply:

Aren't you discarding all my insistence on material and historical specification? What you are calling my "broad and flat definition" is an intervention crafted precisely to undermine progressive and transcedentalizing narratives of "technology" because of the obfuscatory and reactionary ideological work I observe them doing. But I don't deny there are differences that make a difference between flints and cellphones, I just deny that it makes much sense to say that cellphones are more "sophisticated" than flints, or make their users more "technologized" in some important sense. I don't agree that the latter sorts of narratives actually DO contribute to specificity at all. From what perspective do you say a cellphone is more sophisticated than a chipped flint, given what the needs of a hunter-gatherer are? Can you replicate one, can most people forced to assemble cellphones under horrific conditions (usually, mind you, by hand) replicate one? Do you really think one is more essentially cyborgic in some meaningful way when you feel a cellphone vibrate in your pocket than is a hunter-gatherer sparking a killing tip blunted during the afternoon's hunt against a bone?

You go on to say "increasing sophistication and efficiency has happened on the whole" in a way that "deserves naming and contemplation." "On the whole"? What whole? I think this is nonsense, and I think you have already written elsewhere many times of the pernicious effects of such generalized progress narratives. You qualify this claim by referencing, say, unsustainable practices or the lethal, and I would say frankly illegal, mayhem of drone bombers -- but I have to wonder if it is enough to treat these as "exceptions" to some larger drama in which humans are technologizing into ever more "sophisticated" and "efficient" super-humans, rather than to grasp how these exceptions give the lie to the very idea of sophistication and efficiency presumably being yielded by "technology" otherwise "on the whole"?

From what position is one supposed to be declaring things more "sophisticated" on the whole? By what standard? I don't agree some kid playing a video game on his cellphone is more "sophisticated" than a hunter-gatherer staring exhausted at the stars. And efficiency? Efficiency is always efficiency in the service of some outcome as compared to some other effort -- I don't think it even makes sense to attribute it "on the whole."

Just look at the sorts of specificities that come into view if we attend to the sorts of things your "albeit" seeks to shunt under the carpet of this grand techno-amplification "on the whole" of sophistication and efficiency: High energy input-intensive monoculture that gets diminishing yields while destroying topsoil and losing the ability to fend off pests is hardly "more sophisticated" or "more effective" than permaculture alternatives any more than I would say long-distance weapons that kill civilians in ways we claim to disapprove of in our own propaganda or which facilitate alienation that undermines critical engagement with hostile terrain is "more sophisticated" or "more effective" than alternative techniques like complex diplomatic initiatives would be. Am I really supposed to treat these as quibbles, hiccoughs in the road toward an ever increasing sophistication and efficiency "on the whole"? I think specificities provide us the way to disapprove of these risky, costly artifacts and techniques as well as to disprove the benefits that are attributed to them compared to other options on offer, and I think my understanding of technology demands we attend to just these specificities at all times.

Unsustainable industrial agriculture and militarism are complex problems the details of which you are already familiar with so I won't rehearse them, but I do insist that embedding these details in big techno-progressive or techno-regressive or techno-convergence or techno-autonomizing or techno-transcendentalizing narratives will obscure them far more than illuminate their specific stakes to the actual diversity of their stakeholders. Sustainability, democratization, consensualization, equity-in-diversity are the ethical and political narratives I prefer to plug these material and stakeholder specificities into instead, which is I think more apt.

Like you, I am willing to concede a place for technodevelopmental progress as well. I say, technodevelopmental progress is what happens when the actual costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change are distributed equitably to the diversity of the stakeholders to that change by their lights as a consequence of ongoing social struggle. I think progressive agency is entirely located at the site of its personal protagonists, peer to peer, and that it is just as deranging to locate such agency at the site of "technology" as it is to attribute "intelligence" at that site -- something futurologists also mistakenly do all the time too, and for related reasons.

Definitely I disagree that "enhancement in general" is happening at all, or is even an intelligible locution, at any rate the way that discourse seems to me to be playing out rhetorically in the actual world of policy discourse and bioethics (blech). I think in embracing the current discourse of "enhancement" you are stumbling into another "on the whole" construction that functions to evacuate political and historical specificity again. Enhancement is always -- enhancement according to whom? Enhancement -- in respect of what? Enhancement -- together with what diminishment? Enhancement -- compared to what? Enhancement -- at what cost? There is no "enhancement in general" any more than there is "increasing efficiency on the whole." (Certainly there is no -- and heaven help you for even using the phrase! -- general "trend of enhancement." Ugh! As I say in my futurological brickbats: "Whenever I hear the word trend, I reach for my brain.")

Talk of "enhancement" seems to me to function precisely to evacuate existing stakeholder disputes and perspectival diversity from discussions of technoscientific change -- much as do narratives of naturalized progress, as against historical and social struggle accounts of progress -- in an effort to pretend that "technology" is delivering more More MORE and never at any abiding cost to anybody. Of course, you will notice that I am now accusing you of doing through "increasing sophistication and efficiency on the whole" and "enhancement in general" precisely what you began by accusing me of doing when I insist that "technology" denotes an ongoing collective struggle through which agency is re-elaborated prosthetically/ culturally in history, peer to peer.

I don't want you to think I am simply responding to your intervention with "I know you are but what am I!" You see, I think you were wrong to worry about my definition as flattening because "collective elaboration" is all about demanding the details you worry about losing, and disables -- at least this is my hope -- obfuscatory and reactionary teleological and naturalizing and de-historicizing narrativations of technodevelopmental social struggle. I think you think increasing capacitation "on the whole" and increasing enhancement "in general" ARE specific claims while I think they are illusory (and sometimes outright silly) perspectival effects and empty self-congratulatory commendations yielded by the kind of futurological discourse you are still employing, and in the service of whose ideology you are still a footsoldier, whether you like it or not, mirages behind which contentious historical specificities vanish in the service of elite incumbent interests and anti-democratic politics.

"Am I Going To Become A Cyborg In the Future?"

Also posted at the World Future Society.

Anti-Futurological Answers To Futurological Questions: "Am I Going To Become A Cyborg In the Future?"

No, you are absolutely not going to become a cyborg in "The Future." And if you are a self-declared futurologist, or your thinking about technoscience questions has been deranged by your exposure to pop futurological formulations, the reasons you are not going to become a cyborg in "The Future" may come as a surprise to you:

The ready-to-hand gizmos on which many of you rely without thinking to spur your memories or communicate with your intimates, the therapies and vaccinations that have enhanced your body's resistance to diseases, the spectacles or contact lenses on some of your eyes or the pacemakers in some of your chests, the clothes you are wearing, the language you are using to organize your thoughts and testify to your history and your hopes, the laws, norms, infrastructural affordances, marketing and surveillance profiles that articulate your attention and your conduct, even the acquired but unconscious deportment of your body through which you signal your state of mind to your peers in ways both you and they are scarcely aware of… all of these material and ritual artifacts and techniques are already absolutely prosthetic, and all of these are already usefully susceptible to analysis in cybernetic terms (cybernetics is, you will recall, the study of the forms of communication, regulation, and control in and among biological, mechanical, and electronic systems). As I like to point out over and over again, all prostheses are culture and all culture is prosthetic; "technology," properly so-called, is the ongoing collective prosthetic re-elaboration of personal and inter-personal agency in history. The definitive impingement of the cybernetic upon the organismic is inaugurated by the entrance of a being onto the stage of history itself, culture is the natural way of cyborg protagonists in the world.

And so, you are not going to become a cyborg in "The Future" either because you are already as much a cyborg as you ever will be, or because the fantastic "Sooper You" which is what you really mean by the phrase "becoming a cyborg" involves profound errors or mystifications on your part about what technology and culture and history actually substantially mean in the first place and these errors and mystifications are never, ever going to become more right or more relevant or more sane later on.

It seems to me that this gesture, and the false quandaries arising from it, are all perfectly typical of futurological discourse: The question, "Am I going to become a cyborg in the future?" begins with a basic confusion about a technoscience issue. Rather than clarifying that confusion by actually addressing it, the futurological form of the question reframes the initial error as a predictive dispute about "future facts." What it is crucial to grasp is that such a re-framing is not only incapable of resolving the confusion at hand, but actually depends on the maintenance of the confusion, which is thereby transformed into a kind of black box into which all sorts of idle desires and dreams and dreads of super-potence, omnipotence, and impotence can be plugged and indulged in a way that has the sufficient appearance of "serious thought" while in fact precluding any serious thought from taking place at all.

Futurology provides no intellectual resources unique to itself with which to speculate (or organize) more reasonably about the diversity of costs, risks, and benefits of specific technoscientific changes to their actual stakeholders -- the relevant expertise will be found among the scientists, policy makers, and communities directly concerned with those changes -- meanwhile, futurology mobilizes confusions, fantasies, and fetishes occasioned by the technoscientific change to distract, derange, and denigrate our attention from existing intellectual resources the better to indulge irrational passions and peddle amplified consumption and acquiescence to the elite incumbent beneficiaries of the status quo to whom is entrusted the delivery of that amplified consumption which is what "The Future" of the futurologists usually amounts to.

Syllabus for My Summer Intensive on the Rhetoric of Interpretation

...beginning tomorrow afternoon, is here.

But Why So Negative?

This is a reply in an exchange with another critic, this one making the now endlessly familiar complaints that I am not giving people enough credit, that I am assigning too much blame, that I am demoralizingly pessimistic, that I need to stop and smell the roses, that I need to realize there are smart suave techno-elites out there who know more than I do whose self-interest will save us from the shitter, and so on.

My reply:

Watch a commercial for your common or garden variety consumer gadget, awash with promises of emancipation and youth and cool and sex, and compare it to the gadget itself, a piece of landfill destined dysfunctional toxic crap usually assembled under conditions akin to slavery in some overexploited region of the world. The truth is that most people are alienated and behaving against their self-interest, in thrall to elite-incumbent powers deceiving them through a complete suffusion of public life by the deceptive hyperbolic norms and forms of marketing and promotional discourse all the while forms of disinformation, exploitation, informalization, precarity, and outright police brutality duress the scene of individual consent beyond bearing while extractive-industrial-petrochemical corporate-military surveillance fraud and force exacerbate catastrophic anthropogenic climate change and multiple vectors of resource descent to the brink of historically unprecedented slaughter. That's the big picture. It is actually beyond question that people are not thinking critically enough about their purchases or life-ways and it is beyond question that elite-incumbents are indulging in reckless, deceptive, and exploitative behavior for the most parochial of gains to the ruin of us all, including, eventually, them. I get it that you think I should qualify my case more, or watch the over-generalizations, or remember that people have brains, or not forget how nice people are and how nice it is to be nice and so on, and I am sensitive to these things, and I realize that mobilizing fragile agency while documenting devastating reality involves the threading of a fraught needle, but the truth is that I am already soft-pedaling the case by my lights to facilitate the better angels of progressive and democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle (the key site of historical change at this juncture). It is impossible to "accentuate the positive" more than I already do without abetting the crime, becoming a collaborator in destruction and self-destruction, and I just won't do it and if anything I worry I already do it too much.

This! Changes! Everything! The Impoverished Transhumanoid Vision of Freedom and Change

Upgraded and adapted from an interesting ongoing exchange in the Moot to this post with "summerspeaker" (whose comments are italicized, follow the length for the full exchange):

On the conceptual level, I find the Singularitarian obsession with everything changing useful... contemplating superhuman intelligence and/or molecular manufacturing serves as way to think beyond the status quo.

It may seem paradoxical, but I am suspicious of what singularitarians are counting as a belief in Changing Everything. As I said, I think the belief that the emergence of the digital internet was a qualitative event that Changed Everything is a profound misrecognition of what was in fact a quantitative re-materialization, the latest chapter in the Long Century of the Internet (beginning with telegraphy, then telephony, incorporating subsequent iterations of publication, broadcast radio and television video and cable). One way of looking at it is to say it was this inaugural misrecognition was the enabling Hype that gave rise to the serial hype that subsequently attached to so much discourse about the internet (crypto-anarchy! virtual sex! uploading!).

On this view, faith in the singularity itself is the ultimate hype, hype deranged into religious claims for techno-transcendence. But I also think it pays to look closely into the nature of these claims, as you say, "conceptually."

I know the transhumanists like to advertize themselves as more brave in their willingness to contemplate total transformation than mehum sheeple types like me who fail to measure up to their futurological shock levels and all that assertive nerd-jock nonsense, but have you noticed how utterly reassuring the furniture of their futures tend to be?

It is one thing to claim to embrace "total change" but it is quite another to indulge in infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies of a return to the ease and plenitude of mama's breast. The Robot God takes care of you, nano-genies give you everything you want for free, "enhancement" gives you back your youth, but even makes you the better you you dreamed about staring youthfully in the mirror pining for buff Biff and your own pony, superintelligence protects you from the humiliations of being caught out in an error or ignorance or humiliated (think of the geeks whose daydreams these are!), and then, a SENS technician with his wrench or a deed freeze and leap into holodeck heaven -- and you don't even have to die!

Quite apart from the delusiveness of all this nonsense (and my ire at those who debauch science by claiming serial marginality from scientific consensus is actually a sign of transhumanoid championing of science when it is the opposite) and the distraction of all this nonsense (you know what I think we should be doing -- applying shared knowledge to our shared problems, struggling to distribute the risks, costs, and benefits of technoscientific change equitably to diversity of its actual shareholders, a permanent and fraught progressive struggle we happen to be losing), it seems to me profoundly questionable to describe this as a true openness to change at all.

Daydreams of an amplification of your current capacities and an amplification of your present satisfaction isn't really change at all, it is just me now -- but better! (and better very much in the terms me now thinks in), it is just now -- but better! (more now, more!). It looks to me very much the same as the "imagination" that drives television commercials and marketing more generally -- youth! sex! riches! more!

I describe "futurity" as that aspect of openness in the present that arises from the fact that presence-together is both shared and contended by an ineradicably diverse plurality of stakeholders with different capacities, histories, hopes. I agree with Arendt that the "stuff" of which freedom is made is the res publica, "the public thing," what the Founders called "public happiness" that emerges in this midst of this sharing/ contestation. I believe that "The Future" of the futurologists, refiguring futurity from its political substance into an imaginary unitary destination actually obliterates our grasp of freedom, rewriting the openness of freedom in the image of closure. The futurologists misconstrue freedom in instrumental terms (precisely as one would expect of techno-fetishists), thinking it as amplifying capacitation rather than as collective re-conciliation, re-opening, re-figuration.

(If nothing else, asteroids and gamma ray bursts indicate that Change Everything events occasionally do come from nowhere or at least outer space.)

You could get run over by a car tomorrow. A dirty bomb could go off in a major city. Resource descent could choke off the petrochemical bubble of "Western Civilization." Hell, you could fall in love with the wrong person and screw up your life. Sure, an asteroid could hit earth. Life is bedeviled (and inspired) by accident, we are mortal, aging, vulnerable, error-prone, clumsy communicators, heartbroken, frustrated beings. The word for it is finitude. And far from embracing it, the transhumanoids spend most of their time in profoundly unhealthy denial of it.

we've got a number of vastly wealthy and capable folks working on computing hardware and software. According to Lanier, most of them subscribe to the Singularity worldview. It's a historical trends bolstered by considerable present-day effort and a compelling (at least to adherents) ideology. I'm not confident they won't succeed at some level, as unpleasant as the results might be for the rest of us.

Well, the neocons were the latest to remind us that a small klatch of white guys who are sure they are the smartest people in the room saying flabbergastingly idiotic things everybody laughs at can manage through perseverance and saying things rich powerful want to hear to find their way to a position to do unspeakable damage to the world. So, silly as they are, I agree they can have a terrible impact -- in fact already have in terms of the media frames through which urgent technodevelopmental deliberation is happening, to the cost of sense and equity. I am assuming you are describing the wealthy celebrity tech-CEOs as "capable" with your tongue in cheek -- of course they are mostly garish impresarios who are taking personal credit and appropriating personal profit for collective accomplishments. If you are referring to the guru-wannabes with the Robot Cult, you'll forgive me but I don't think any of them exhibit more than quotidian intelligence, although some have the kind of drive that gets stuff done while destroying the lives of everybody around them, their own first of all, I'll grant you that.

Singularitarian Hype and the Denial of History

Twitter is the telegraph of the impending Singularity. — Rachel Lichtman

In his excellent book The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage proposes, in effect, that the birth of the internet should be located with the invention of the telegraph and the development over the second half of the nineteenth century of the global telegraphy network. Of course, the way Standage tells his story is to remind online enthusiasts at the height of the irrational exuberance of the dot.com era (his book was published in 1998) of the endlessly many analogies between the ways telegraphy was incorporated into corporate, military, and mass-media formations and materialized in everyday lives in splashy tales of online romance, gossip, criminal detection, threats to privacy over a century ago, and the commonplace experiences of his own readers as networked personal computers were incorporated in their everyday lives and as these networked computers digitally incorporated in turn the prior iterations of inter-networked media forms, books, journalism, telegraphy, telephony, cinema, radio, television, cable, journals/zines, and so on.

What is crucial about this framing of the digital moment was its recognition that the emergence of telegraphy represented an incomparably more qualitative social and cultural phenomenon than was the emergence of the internet, which was the latest in a series of quantitative amplifications of an already-existing network embedded in the material and ritual artifice of our leading institutions and interpersonal dynamisms. The point of such an observation is not to deny the significance to individuals of the actual prosthetic forms their culture takes from moment to moment -- the material furniture of everyday life always matters, it is how lifeways literally matter, that is to say are literally materialized, in history -- but to warn us about the ways we are liable both to hyperbolize the discontinuity of our own moment in history, caught up as we are in its distresses, as well as to naturalize the continuities of our own moment in history, consoled as we are by its familiarities.

Contrary to the parochial triumphalism of a pop guru like Raymond Kurzweil, scholars like Standage tell a tale of the Long Century of the Internet not as a self-congratulatory fable of Manifest Destiny -- in which the characteristic desires of Kurzweil's privileged techno-fetishizing readership are declared to be prevailing over the available co-ordinates of existence in ever-accelerating ever-amplifying ever-consolidating ways on their way toward heaven as a mirror in which we see nothing but ourselves as we think we want to be, the reactionary imagination of futurological transcendence -- but instead as a tale of ongoing opportunistic unpredictable technodevelopmental changes, incorporations, provocations. Neither is Standage telling, by the way, a tale of Spenglerian decadence, though the realization that the fantasized "spirit-stuff" of which "Cyberspace, the Home of Mind" is actually made is fueled by poison gas and coal and accessed on toxic devices made by slaves and destined for landfill suggests all too palpably that such a narrative may be more apt.

Singularitarianism usually amounts to the claim that "accelerating change" has a kind of material momentum drawing humanity irresistibly toward some history-shattering discontinuity (sometimes, instead, it is an hypothesized Event, connected to the creation of a post-biological "super-intelligence," possibly created by humans, possibly arising spontaneously out of creations by humans, possibly created from "enhanced" humans themselves), whatever it is imagined unimaginably and often rather unimaginatively to be, and it tends to function as kind of black box into which its enthusiasts stuff all sorts of transcendent dreams and apocalyptic nightmares of theirs.

It seems to me crucial to point out that this singularitarian faith is mobilized out of two fundamental misrecognitions: First, singularitarianism arises out of the misrecognition of the emergence of the late twentieth century form of the internet as an historical discontinuity prefiguring another, wishful, historical discontinuity, rather than as yet another episodic, quantitative re-materialization in the Long Century of the Internet. Second, singularitarianism arises out of the misrecognition of privileged people of the destabilizing experience of precarity and distress provoked by the outsourcing, union-busting, deregulation, austerity, and financial fraud of neoliberal globalization -- facilitated by digital networked monetary transfer, targeted marketing, and surveillance -- as instead an experience of promising and progressive "accelerating change."

Rachel Lichtman's would-be prophetic tweet, re-posted above, that "Twitter is the telegraph of the impending Singularity" is a perfect symptom of these enabling singularitarian misrecognitions. What she is treating as an analogy illuminating "The Future" for the present is in fact an assertion of ignorance in the present of the past on which that present depends. Twitter as an internet form is a vestigial echo of the now-disavowed birth of internet in networked telegraphy. In the mostly vacuous stream of tweets, testifying in real time to the most ephemeral present -- the state of one's digestion, impressions, off-the-cuff observations, unjustified opinions -- the Singularitarian discerns an accelerationalization for a wish-fulfillment fantasy of an urgent forward progressive momentum leading irresistibly out of the historical planetary quandaries (environmental catastrophes, widespread exploitation, amplifying war-making) that have come to seem too hard to grapple with on the only terms available to actually progressive technodevelopmental social struggle, the terms of education, agitation, organization, and legislation to ensure that the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change are equitably distributed to the diversity of stakeholders to that change.

At the Heart of the "Financial Singularity" There Is Not Mystery But Fraud

FinanceAddict:

[It s]ounds a bit like a science fiction novel; are the financial algorithms, models and computers taking over from their human creators? Have we reached a financial singularity? Is this what a world created by the demonic love child of Gordon Gekko and Bill Gates would look like? This would be an amusing thought if it had not leapt from our collective Kindle screens and into our real world economy. But as Eric B. and Rakim might say, this ain’t no joke. Have we reached the point where our financial markets are so complex that we no longer understand how they really work? And if so, how can we manage what we don’t understand?

It is true that many did not understand what was going on when the digitization of planetary monetary transfer enabled a handful of predatory con-artists to engage in incomparably vast-scaled rapid-paced looting and fraud via financial algorithms and financial instruments like the bundling of subprime mortgages into phony prime assets. But, then, it is always true that the marks don't understand what is going on when a scam is underway.

What it is crucial to emphasize about this provocative little science-fictionalized ditty about a "financial singularity" is that -- even if it is coming from a place a disgust and despair about our unprecedented economic distress and about the suffering and injustice it has brought about -- this way of framing the crisis functionally abets the scam it decries.

It is not computers and programs and autonomous techno-agents who are the protagonists of the still unfolding crime of predatory plutocratic wealth-concentration and anti-democratizing austerity. The villains of this bloodsoaked epic are the bankers and auditors and captured-regulators and neoliberal ministers who employed these programs and instruments for parochial gain and who then exonerated and rationalized and still enable their crimes.

Our financial markets are not so complex we no longer understand them. In fact everybody knows exactly what is going on. Everybody understands everything. Fraudsters engaged in very conventional, very recognizable, very straightforward but unprecedentedly massive acts of fraud and theft under the cover of lies, and have very nearly destroyed civilization in so doing. If our governing institutions cannot recover quickly enough to become capable of organizing an effective and equitable collective address of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change and resource descent then they will have succeeded in fact in destroying civilization.

The very experience of "accelerating change" that has preoccupied the discourse of the digital-utopians and futurologists throughout the post-Reagan neoliberal era has always, in my view, simply been the way increasing precarity for ever vaster portions of humanity and earthly life -- produced by outsourcing, crowdsourcing, externalizing, informalizing, union-busting, welfare-looting, deregulatory, race-to-the-bottom globalization -- is experienced and described from the vantage of the privileged people who either benefit from this destabilization or who (rightly or wrongly) identify with the beneficiaries of that destabilization.

When it comes to the financial crisis, we are not living in a science fiction novel, we are living in a bleak naturalist novel.

Sanewashing Lamewashing Blamewashing

I've noticed that transhumanists and singularitarians and techno-immortalists will sometimes attempt in public to engage in what I call "sanewashing" -- they will declare in all innocence, "but transhumanism is really just the idea that evolution isn't the last word," or that "people can become better when they're smarter," or that sort of thing. Of course, we already have the perfectly good and widely understood and broadly affirmed (and also, I should add, rather problematic) words "culture" and "education" to name these ideas, and nobody was crying out for a group of Robot Cultists to re-invent those wheels and then claim to be their spokespeople, especially since these Robot Cultists also happen more distinctively to desire and believe, you know, that many will be able, and much sooner than non-Robot Cultists think, to live in genetically and prosthetically tweaked sooper-bodies with comic-book sooper-powers in free nanobotic-cornucopia-filled treasure caves, attended by very sexy sexbots, very possibly in outer space, until they decide to upload their "informational-selves" forever into a cyber-heaven that will be even more awesome still, as it will be under the ministrations of a sooper-intelligent post-parental history-ending Robot God of infinite loving grace.

Now, it is also true that medical research and development is indeed chugging along and producing some marvelous new genetic, prosthetic, and therapeutic advances: improved pacemakers and prosthetic limbs, better treatments for cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's and so on. It's also true that there are a constellation of ARTs (assistive reproductive technologies) on offer. I don't include same-sex procreation or reproductive cloning among these because it seems to me the splashy pop-journalism utterances on these topics [this post began its life as the response to a comment at the World Future Society by self-identified "bioconservative" John Howard accusing me of "celebrating same-sex procreation" -- which upsets him terribly despite the fact that it doesn't exist -- because of my defense of sane adults making informed nonduressed consensual recourse to EXISTING wanted medicine, whether normalizing or not, if it is safe, accessible and accountably regulated] are about equally vague and sensational now as they were when I heard variations on them a decade or more ago. Like so many other results that find their way to the spotlight occasionally for pop-tech fandoms to hyperventilate over in ecstatic or panic-stricken ways, I simply don't think it makes much sense to get exercised over them, to grapple with "policy" toward them, when it isn't clear how costly or effective or safe or actually wanted as compared to other techniques they will be until they are considerably more proximate. Indeed, it is actually rather obfuscating to declare the objects of such speculation a "they" or "it" in the first place, when nobody really knows of what this object would actually consist. Although such results can add to our general knowledge, I think that popular speculations on these questions tend to function instead as allegorical lenses through which people are expressing anxieties and concerns about contemporary issues, intergenerational tensions, fraught raced and gendered relations, alienation, anomie, lost trust in institutions, and so on. I tend to think these questions are better addressed in more direct ways that name more clearly the actual stakes and stakeholders involved. I daresay such attitudes are among the reasons why I was invited to publish among futurologists as a more contrarian voice in the first place.

The "sanewashing" I mentioned superlative futurologists indulging in doesn't end in their occasional efforts to pretend they are really just champions of scientific research or education or convivial cultural (when their literal preoccupations are so clearly more idiosyncratic and questionable), I would go on to say that there tends to be a kernel of legitimate technoscientific substance at the heart of most of the sects of the Robot Cult deranged into nonsense by them so that this kernel becomes a black box into which they plug their techno-transcendentalizing wish-fulfillment fantasies: There really are endlessly many issues of research priorities, regulation, access to techniques, access-to-information, exploitation, neglect, and duress in contemporary medicine that get hyperbolized by transhumanists into sooper-power fantasies of an "optimally enhanced" post-biological Being, a so-called homo superior by their idiosyncratic but would-be universalized standards. There really are network security issues, issues of user-friendly automation, issues of better expert systems that get hyperbolized by Singularitarians into sooper-intelligence fantasies of a post-biological history-ending Robot God. There really are enormously interesting scientific discoveries and technical applications in molecular biology and biochemistry and nanoscale science that get hyperbolized by Nano-Cornucopiasts into sooper-abundance fantasies of treasure too cheap to meter (exactly as anxieties about nuclear holocaust long generated compensatory fantasies of sooper-abundant nuclear energy too cheap to meter) and hence a post-historical overcoming of the impasse of stakeholder politics. As I said, there really have been therapeutic advances toward the treatment of heart disease and memory loss that can yield increased healthy longevity when coupled with a more nutritious diet and exercise (in terms of increased longevity on a planetary scale what Mike Davis said a decade ago remains true: access to clean water remains the greatest miracle drug in the whole world) that get hyperbolized by Techno-Immortalists as Vegas supplemental scams and tee vee anti-aging cream scams and LA plastic surgery scams and SENS-repairman scams and cryonic hambergerization scams and wooly metaphorical talk of "soul migration" from organismic brains into the cyberspatial sprawl. In each case a loose grasp of technoscientific substance squeezed through selective reading of pop-tech journalism, hyperbolic press releases, and science fiction transubstantiates that substance into an insubstantial occasion for transcendental wish-fulfillment fantasizing. When I point out that nobody needs to join a Robot Cult to grasp the importance of the techno-scientific kernel transhumanists have glommed onto in each of these cases, that indeed Robot Cultists have little interest in that kernel apart from the way it seems to provide an alibi for their indulgence in techno-transcendental True Belief, and that certainly few if any folks actually contributing to the substance of that science are in the Robot Cult, I might be said to be engaging rhetorically in something like the reverse discourse of their own "sanewashing" self-rationalization: let's call it "lamewashing" Robot Cultism.

John Howard demonstrates a third, and related, rhetorical operation in play. Because Robot Cultists hyperbolize substantial technoscience into transcendental wish-fulfillment, self-described "bioconservatives" like John Howard can potentially attribute such techno-transcendence to almost anybody who champions substantial technoscience and struggles for progressive, that is to say equitable, diversifying, consensualizing technodevelopmental change. Let's call this, for the sake of euphony, "blamewashing" secular progressive technoscience. I daresay that whenever technodevelopmental changes threaten (or seem so to threaten) given social or morphological norms this temptation to bioconservative "blamewashing" might be especially acute. Although I think John Howard is offering up a rather terrible example here, I do think there will often be something usefully corrective and critical in such "blamewashing" skepticism -- since I think the astonishingly superficial popular grasp of consensus science and progressive science policy coupled with the intense popular focus on technoscience questions creates a great vulnerability to contrary impulses to hyperbole, derangement, wish-fulfillment, complacency, disasterbation, and scam-artistry. I don't mind "bioconservatives" and other skeptics spotlighting my own susceptibility to such confusions, as a skeptic myself I welcome the exposure of any of my own failures to be duly critical. And, after all, I am a product of an at once techno-triumphalist and yet anti-intellectual, reductionist and yet faithful society like most of the people I write about, and I am trained in the humanities and not the sciences end of the academy to boot.

I would describe myself as a technoscientifically literate and technodevelopmentally concerned secular progressive who believes there should be much greater public investment in critical thinking and science education and medical research and renewable energy research and sustainable agriculture research and sustainable infrastructure and space science and discovery more generally. I also believe that all culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are culture, and that technodevelopmental social struggle is progressive when the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change are equitably distributed among the actual diversity of stakeholders to that change, and when all sane responsible informed non-duressed consenting adults can make recourse to or refrain from recourse to prosthetic/cultural affordances on their own terms, whether normalizing or not. I think the Robot Cultists distract our attention from the accomplishments and demands of actually existing and proximately emerging technodevelopmental social struggle and derange our collective capacity to deliberate in the sensible urgently necessary way we need to do given our shared planetary problems (especially environmental crises, global inequity, and ramifying implements of war). That is why I enagage in "lamewashing" critiques of what I take to be futurological derangements and deride Robot Cultsits in their propagandistic efforts at "sanewashing" their beliefs for the general public. If these efforts invite occasionally "blamewashing" invective from the less serious precincts of bioconservativsm, that seems a rather small -- though I will admit sometimes rather discomfiting -- price to pay.

How to Write Your Article for the Robot Cult (A Helpful Guide)

one

Identify an outcome normally attributable to magic (immortality, invisibility, free treasure, secret super-knowledge, love potion, mind-reading, unquestioning slave-minion) that we cannot accomplish but which can be made to seem at least not logically impossible.

two

Declare that this actually not-possible but apparently not-impossible thing is actually inevitable by saying that "technology" will deliver it. Say, in twenty years (trust me on this, it's always twenty years). Congratulations! That's the hard part done already, your first paragraph is complete.

three

Now, talk about how awesome magic would be if it were real for the rest of your piece.

four -- optional, advanced

If you want to seem a Very Serious think-tank futurologist, you should pretend at some point that conservatives are "opposed" to this magic not because it's stupid magic and not serious science or science policy at all but because they are too timid and scared of the awesomeness you bravely embrace.

conclusion

You can now repeat this procedure robotically in article after article until death (and, sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you will die because magic is not real).

False Positive: Another Futurologist Peddles Environmental Complacency With His Pseudo-Science

It's time for more Very Serious Futurology from the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (where the ethics are rarely really discussed and the technologies are rarely really emerging). Let's have a look at a new piece by Dick Pelletier. Here is the very first paragraph:

Say goodbye to global warming, toxic waste, and dependency on fossil fuels, and get ready to enjoy perfect health with exotic bugs that could one day cure every human disease, including aging.

The first thing to notice is that the style here literally reproduces the familiar tropes and tone of a late-night low-budget informercial. Say goodbye to unsightly stains! Get ready to enjoy the perfectly white teeth of a youthful supermodel!

I have stressed repeatedly in my critiques that futurological discourse should be regarded as an amplified expression of the hyperbolic and deceptive advertising and promotional norms and forms that catastrophically suffuse our public life today. Even when I focus my attention on the most extreme and marginal variations of the discourse that play out in the sub(cult)ural fandoms and movement membership-organizations of superlative futurology -- those I lampoon as the Robot Cult archipelago of transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, digital-utopians, and greenwashing "geo-engineers" -- it is important to grasp that the techno-transcendentalizing faiths substantiated in the solidarity of socially shared True Belief they solicit are little more than variations of the hyperbolically inflated false promises and seductions into brand-identification inherent in all contemporary advertising, but now amplified into an explicit religiosity rather than the delusional aspirational opiate most advertising settles for.

Needless to say, the product the futurologists are peddling is The Future, an imaginary destination invested with promises of heavenly transcendence (and often complemented with titillating pornographic nightmares of apocalyptic robotic or nano-goo or clone Hells), usually taking on the very familiar contours of theological omni-predicates, technologized into superintelligence, superabundance, and superpowers like superlongevity.

Pelletier continues:

These are just a few of the possibilities researchers envision as they try to copy how nature gathers matter and transforms it into life. Life is generally not thought of as being mechanical, but a cell can be described as a machine that rearranges non-living atoms to create parts that bring those atoms to life. Biologist Craig Venter and his team recently created the world’s first synthetic life form by programming an existing cell with new computer-generated DNA that offer unique benefits. This event paves the way to produce designer organisms that are built, rather than evolved… Experts believe that in the future, this technology will allow scientists to build bacteria that secrete food edible by other ocean creatures, which would result in more seafood available for human consumption. There could even be bacteria that would digest oil spills and repair other ecological disasters. Venter sums it up this way: synthetic life heralds the dawn of an era where new lifeforms can benefit humanity.

Notice how deeply invested Pelletier is here in rewriting biology in the image of a mechanism. This figuration actually provides no greater clarity about the processes he is talking about, it simply shifts the reader from the complexities of a field few understand (and the understanding of which instantly derails any glib talk of these sorts of "envision[ed]" "possibilities" in any human relevant time frame). Robot Cultists flog this mechanization of life and intelligence whenever they can, because the pseudo-plausibility of their most fervent and fantastical faiths depend on precisely this sleight of hand, their various techno-immortalization schemes, whether involving super-longevity through the metaphor of ongoing repair (the SENS scam), nanobotic reconstruction (the cryonics scam), or soul digitization (the uploading scam).

I leave to the side the fact that long-term readers of pop-tech have heard precisely these hyperbolic claims about garbage-eating and disease-fixing engineered microbes for decades, always offered up with the same breathlessness, always whomping up the same modest and interesting basic principles and research results into resounding dramatic generalities, always handwaving the same time-line to earth shattering transformation but retreating year by year as the promises are repeated year by year. And I leave to the side as well the inevitable recourse to impresarios of self-promotion like Craig Venter (Ray Kurzweil is another obvious example) who speak a language closely akin to that of the futurologists in the effort to market themselves as brands, but who, unlike the futurologists who so adore them, do have some small substantial kernel of real results at any rate that they are debauching for parochial celebrity.

Pelletier continues to reproduce the classic characteristics of futurological discourse in the column, as when he goes on to "respond to objections" to his flight of fancy:

Though most people believe this technology will provide unlimited commercial and medical benefits, others warn that artificial life might one day become a dangerous species with sinister possibilities. Arthur Caplan of University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics and other concerned scientists believe this research could lead to unpredictable dangers… However, conservatives see still another issue to be resolved. Synthetic biology challenges our most cherished notions of the meaning of life. Is life sacred, or has it been reduced to a computer formula.

First of all, notice that an extraordinarily complex constellation of ideas and theories and techniques, some of them actually long familiar, some of them hopelessly distant from application, some of them entirely implausible given what we actually know and what we actually can do biochemically, are now suddenly compressed into "this technology," a completely insubstantial and unsubstantiated non-object rendered discursively into THE object presumably under discussion. Notice that we are told "most people believe this technology will provide unlimited commercial and medical benefits." Oh, really? Unlimited benefits, you say? Despite the fact that "this technology" doesn't exist? Despite the fact that "most people" don't have any opinion on this topic at all? Despite the fact that nothing is unlimited and that all benefits are conjoined to costs and risks? Who are these "most people"? How do you know? To what survey are you referring? What terms are you taking for granted?

Needless to say, by re-directing our attention instead to "critics" who are presumably worried about the "unpredictable dangers" of "this technology" our futurologist is circumventing the far more lethal threat to his faith-based initiative, namely that nothing he is talking about is real or relevant to present concerns. And even the small threat posed by those who would worry about the speculative dangers of these speculative developments is easily cast aside by the circus-barker spectacle of immortality, endless sex, and vast treasure being dangled before the credulous mark. And in any case, surely the real-world dangers posed by the radically under-regulated experimental subjection of all contemporary consumers in an unscrupulous uninformed unpaid -- and hence, strictly speaking, non-consensual -- lab experiment in the long-term effects of for-profit pharmaceutical combinations and toxic-material consumption, deserve the attention of bioethicists more than worries about science fiction bio-bots? (By the way, are such concerns really always or even usually "conservative"?)

The turn to the sort of undergraduate pot-induced new-age philosophizing to which we are next treated -- dude, like what IS life? like, what if we're living in, like, a computer, man? -- functions in precisely the same way, as a hedge against any reader's realization of the profound unseriousness of all these loose free-associational unsubstantiated extrapolations and stipulations and appeals to lowest common denominator fear and greed, by constantly changing the subject, by raising issues and questions that are never actually answered but bulldoze along at various levels of abstraction and sense yielding a fine warm panglossian mist in the mind the futurologists seem to have convinced themselves is what deep thought feels like.

Pelletier concludes:

We will see tiny self-reproducing factories, disease-killing machines, and exotic creations performing many useful functions. Experts believe that by 2020, synthetic life creations could eliminate, or make manageable, nearly all human sicknesses, including most of today’s dreaded age-related diseases. “The benefits of this technology are limited only by our imagination,” Venter says. By 2030 or before, human-made life forms could provide everyone with an affordable, ageless and forever healthy body, fashioned from newly-created ‘designer cells.’ Welcome to the future of artificial lifeforms.

Notice that "the future of artificial lifeforms" doesn't exist even though we have been "welcomed" to it. How disappointing! One cannot help but be amused by the fact that even the inevitable declaration that techno-paradise is twenty years away is provided by Pelletier at the end. He deprives us of nothing! I can only assume that the promise of a "2020" deadline that preceded it was an artifact of a reference to some turn of the millenium piece making all the same promises in which the same Venter was similarly prominent. It must be hard to keep those deadlines straight, the way they change every year on the year, after all. We need not dwell too long in considering who Pelletier has in mind when he refers to the "experts" who presumably agree with him on all this nonsense (any more than the "researchers" and "most people" about whom he makes similarly absurd claims) except to say that possibly that word "expert" doesn't quite mean what he thinks it does. One gets that a lot in dealing with futurologists, don't you know. It is hard to know what to make of Pelletier's chrome-hard confidence that "[w]e will see tiny self-reproducing factories, disease-killing machines, exotic creations performing many useful functions…" Given his early proposal that living beings are just mechanisms, this comment could be the perfectly innocuous recognition that microbes exist and that molecular chemistry is a useful discipline. Needless to say, one needn't join a Robot Cult to learn such insights and needless to say such insights provide no reason at all to go on to talk about eliminating aging and death.

What most strikes me about Pelletier's piece is that in offering up this breezy daydream of microbial magicks in the lab on their way to eliminating environmental problems that threaten all life on earth, his piece is not only foolish and facile but actually dangerous and even, I daresay, evil. I do not deny that some remediative techniques involving microbiology may eventually be part of the mix of solutions to the crisis of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, pollution, and resource descent: But I forcefully do deny that they can be an all-encompassing technofix if they end up providing any assistance at all. I forcefully deny that anybody is better off dwelling on such possibilities than on urgently necessary education, agitation, organization in the service of regulation of pollution and incentives for sustainable lifeways and public investments in renewable infrastructure. I forcefully deny that even a vanishingly small percentage of people who do contribute to environmentally remediative scientific research and technical applications will be indebted to texts like Pelletier's while many who do read and enjoy such texts will instead be rendered dangerously complacent or even hostile to real practical efforts to change their personal practices or support reforms to help solve our shared environmental problems.

Dick Pelletier describes himself as a "Positive Futurist" and there are few more commonplace responses from futurologists to critiques like mine than that they are unduly "negative" or "pessimistic." To this, I repeat now as I always do, that there is nothing "positive" about denialism in the face of real problems, there is nothing "positive" about false bravado distracting attention from real problems, there is nothing "positive" about the complacency of privileged people about real problems who simply think Other People will be the ones who suffer and pay the price. Futurity is a dimension of the present, it is the openness in the present that derives from the ineradicable diversity of the peers who contend for and collaborate in the present -- it is this open futurity which the futurological faithful foreclose with their imaginary "The Future," always monologically amplifying their parochial present anxieties and desires in a narcissistic stasis they peddle as progress or accelerating change. To say the least, I see nothing particularly "positive" at all in this sort of thing.

SpaceX Space Cadets Predictably Crowing Mars, Bitches!

Also posted at The World Future Society.

io9 asks: Could SpaceX Land the First Humans On Mars? I would like the short answer to be: "Don't Bet On It." But chances are that all of us taxpayers will indeed be strong-armed into precisely that bet by the same neoliberal incumbent elites who have ruinously looted via private contracting so many of our armed services to generally terrible results in every way (except counting the profits raked in by a small number of already filthy rich evil gazillionaires).

Because SpaceX is described as a "commercial venture" all the usual Libertopian and Ayn Raelian types who throng futurological precincts have decided to pretend that becoming a government contractor engaging in a taxpayer funded exploitation of already existing mostly decades-old technology which itself already existed only because of the splendid efforts once upon a time of a For Real government space program which still made possible the launch to a state-consortium funded and maintained International Space Station represents "Going Galt" in space. After all, look how libertechian Elon Musk hates gu'ment handouts -- except, of course, the ones he lards himself with, natch.

Because they have decided to pretend SpaceX is market-fantastic many are now also pretending that this means that libertechian capitalism will sprinkle "market pixie dust" on the stalled space program, introducing forever vaunted "efficiencies" and big-brained hitherto quiescent "innovators" and "risk-takers" into the dynamic to revive all the Old Dreams, orbital hotels, L5 toruses, moon bases, space elevators, Mars colonies, asteroid mining, the whole OMNI Magazine sweet patootie (to which pre-pubescent me was a wide-eyed subscriber, both to the magazine and to the dream, believe you me). The thing is, of course, the "efficiencies" they are talking about are really mostly just the usual plutocrats externalizing all the real costs and risks onto the vulnerable, the "innovators" are really mostly just the usual self-promoting sociopathic flim-flam artists, and the risk-takers are really mostly just going to fail upward while everybody else is expected to clean up their messes for them as usual.

When the Soviet Union fell, think-tank capitalists swarmed the landscape breathlessly awaiting the arrival of Libertopia from the blood and ashes of Communism but they scrammed real quick when the "spontaneous order" perfectly predictably (and as predicted) looked instead like human trafficking on a bleak corrupt kleptocratic scorched earth. By then, the market ideologues had moved to Cyberspace, "the new home of Mind," where they expected first cryptography and then later the "social web" to smash the nation-state and crystallize into Libertopia again, with e-cash and reputation servers and netizen-bloggers of loving grace presiding over rugged individualist avatars kicking into high gear an acceleration of accelerating acceleration unto holodeck heaven but they mostly scrammed when the net of nets became instead a strip mall surveilled by paranoid states targeting Terror suspects and greedhead corporations targeting niche markets in which the only liberty left was the liberty to lie about yourself on an online dating profile or swapping funny cat videos with your Mom. (Lawrence Lessig told this story better than anybody way back in Code.) By then, the kick-ass capitalists all took a ticket to watch Bombs Over Baghdad clear the way for a privatized flat-tax Libertopia with Paul Bremer on Iraq Year Zero but soon enough scrammed again taking whatever wasn't nailed down with them when, well, we all know how that turned out. By then, our eager market fundamentalists were being called upon by the Killer Clown Administration to remake post-Katrina New Orleans into an amusement park Libertopia, dress rehearsing the new Disaster Capitalism as the planet convulsed under the strain of extractive-industrial-petrochemical criminality and the criminals themselves prepared the next stage of the scam in which they would declare that they alone can clean up the lethal mess they made through highly profitable unaccountable "geo-engineering" mega-engineering wet-dreams. That terrible story is still in the works, but it is no longer hard to figure how the story ends. (Naomi Klein told the first part of it awfully well in The Shock Doctrine and I strongly suspect her next book will tell still more of it.) Still, now it appears that some of the usual subjects have scrammed again, and have moved on to better things, SpaceX Space Cadets ready to paint the next scam Libertopia over Kennedy's New Frontier.

I seriously doubt that Space will be the Final Libertopian Frontier, although it might be if we wake up to the scam and send the libertopians and libertechians scramming, screaming, permanently. I for one still hold on to my dreams of space science and exploration, but I know it will only be accomplished for the common good through the planetary commonwealth of democratic agency and civic order. Space is the Place for Civilization, but the neo-feudal anti-democratic pre-civilization of Libertopia is a path to nowhere, and certainly not into Space.

Fellow Space Dreamers, You Wanna Go Galt? Then the Dream Dies, and It's All Your Fault.