My Exchange With Max More Continues

Again, upgraded and adapted from the Moot, Max More (now verified) responds:

We have provided evidence for the reasonableness of cryonics (and always acknowledge the considerable uncertainties). You will find much of it here: http://www.alcor.org/Library/index.html#scientific

Neuroscientist Sebastian Seung thinks cryonics worth testing for its ability to preserve the connectome. He discussed this in the last chapter of his recent book, and will engage in dialogue at the Alcor-40 conference in October. There are published papers, and we have several lines of evidence that cryonics through vitrification, under reasonably good conditions, is probably preserving identity-critical information.

It’s irrelevant that my dissertation was not written for a biology department. I was responding to your ignorant view of death being absolute and simple. It’s convenient for you to position all cryonicists as scared of our mortality, but that doesn’t make it true. I’m not scared of dying. I am scared of the dying process if it involves intense, prolonged pain or cognitive decline. But being dead is like nothing at all. I want to avoid death not because it terrifies me, but because I like living and want to do more of it.

It’s a cheap shot to say “the mistake you are making -- and making for a living, I'm afraid, which is pretty bad I must say”. I have supported cryonics for well over 25 years. I’ve been paid for working in cryonics for 1.5 years.

I said to you that extraordinary claims require extraordinary support and then you refer me to Alcor promotional materials, apparently forgetting that I have pre-emptively repudiated the usual Robot Cultic diversion of attention from the marginality of their assumptions and aspirations onto what I called "the noisy circle-jerk of True Believers whomping up glossy brochures for the rubes."

I cheerfully agree that, say, organ cryopreservation to facilitate transplantation, exploring methods of organismic suspension (including medically induced therapeutic comas), and so on are worthy of medical research dollars. One doesn't need to start handwaving about magical drextechian nanobots or cyberspatial soul-migration or any of that nonsense to grasp that sort of thing.

My utter rejection of such foolishness certainly provides no justification for you to declare my "view of death" to be an ignorant or simplistic one. Even on terms that would interest you, I have long maintained that medical techniques and monitoring devices have befuddled long orthodox conceptions of the beginning and end of life, properly so-called. To be honest, I think transhumanists share with anti-abortionists an opportunistic recourse to such befuddlement to flog their (different) marginal and counter-intuitive aspirations (as when anti-abortionists exploit sonogram imagery to render more apparently plausible pseudo-scientific "partial birth abortion" or when techno-immortalists exploit revival from once-fatal heart attacks to render more apparently plausible pseudo-scientific "uploading"). Nobody who declares my recognition of human mortality an error or a matter of choice has any business deriding my view of death as "ignorant."

You say you are not scared of dying and I truly hope that is true, since I have known too many people who are obsessed with techno-immortalism who not only never manage to overcome their mortality (since everybody, including every Robot Cultist, is indeed going to die) but do manage to become a little less alive in life for their fear of dying.

Like many others, I do share your distaste for disease and decline. Of course, one doesn't have to join a Robot Cult to see the good sense of defending, you know, actual medical science or access to healthcare... which is why so many more people defend actual medical science or access to healthcare than belong to your Robot Cult no doubt. But I definitely disapprove of the ways in which techno-transcendentalizing frames derange our sense of what legitimate medical research actually consists and displaces at least some dollars onto snake-oil scams that might have gone instead into actual medical research and the support of more sensible healthcare policy.

It’s a cheap shot to say “the mistake you are making -- and making for a living, I'm afraid, which is pretty bad I must say”. I have supported cryonics for well over 25 years. I’ve been paid for working in cryonics for 1.5 years.

Everything you are and everything you have as a public figure is connected to your flogging of techno-transcendental wish-fulfillment fantasies like cryonics, nano-santa, GOFAI, and so on as a so-called transhumanoid eminence of twenty-years' standing (I think that's about when I became aware of you at any rate). I don't know to what you refer when you say you have been "working in cryonics for 1.5 years" presumably in some more official capacity as a bottle washer or whatever, I don't exactly breathlessly follow the vicissitudes of your career as a futurological flim-flam artist on a blow by blow basis, but I do know you've long flogged this crapola in something like a professional capacity. No doubt you'll still think that is a cheap shot -- more than one I daresay -- but it isn't quite the one you seem to think I'm making.

Scroll down to read the earlier turns this conversation has taken. Ridiculous though I find his views, I do appreciate that Max More (it really is hard not to laugh every time I write that) is exposing his views to scrutiny in this fashion, even if he is using it as an occasion for a little judicious spamming, too.

Ayn Raelian Robot Cultist Max More Responds

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, "Max More" (conceivably, after all, an online impersonator) said:

Predictably you throw around "faith" and other lying terms, rather than attempting to address the actual evidence that cryonics has a reasonable chance of working and that you are not dead in any final sense at the point of "clinical death" -- as I argued in a chapter of my doctoral dissertation. I know my comment is a waste of time and that you are only preaching to your "minions".

Predictably you throw around "faith" and other lying terms... you are only preaching to your "minions". Once again, I notice, you make recourse to the old standby, "I know you are but what am I," and in the space of a single paragraph! Most impressive, if also rather embarrassing.

Although you are eager to assume the high ground of "reasonableness" and "respect for evidence" here, actually reasonable people who respect evidence know well that it is the one who makes the extraordinary claim who has the responsibility to provide the extraordinary support.

The marginality of the claims of cryonics charlatans from consensus science is abundantly clear from the publication record (outside the noisy circle-jerk of True Believers whomping up glossy brochures for the rubes, natch), not to mention from a glance at the proportion of actual scientists in relevant fields who have signed up for your techno-transcendental resurrection scheme.

I seem to recall that your dissertation was not written for a biology department -- any more than mine was, but then I don't pretend to speak as a scientific expert now, do I?

Look, believe whatever you need to about your scary mortality if it gets you through the night, but don't expect me to condone the pretense that your faith is scientific, a proper basis for policy or practical conduct, or more "reasonable" than any other faith-based utterance one hears in the public square. I'm an atheist myself, but I don't much care about the private perfections (theological, aesthetic, or otherwise) others pursue so long as they don't misapply their beliefs in scientific or political domains to the cost of good sense more generally, which is the mistake you are making -- and making for a living, I'm afraid, which is pretty bad I must say.

Good luck to you.

Can-Do Robot Cultist Max More "Chooses" Immortality, Remains Mortal Anyway

Apparently Ayn Raelian "Extropian" transhumanoid Max More ("Max More," Very Serious!) was offended when Adam Smith concluded his recent New Humanist synopsis of some of the chief sects of the Robot Cult with the quotation of a statement of mine deriding Natasha Vita-More (she's an artist!) thusly, "I hate to break it to Natasha Vita-More. It doesn’t matter how enthusiastic she is about it, she’s going to die."

In reaction, Max More sputtered: "I hate to break it to Dale Carrico, but HE is going to die. And it will be his choice. Those of us who have gone to the effort of making arrangements for cryopreservation (and who take additional measures) have some significant chance of returning from today's criterion of death." Get that? Everybody dies only because they "choose" to die, because they lack Max More's "can do" gumption to "choose immortality"! Mm hm.

Max More is, of course, completely deluded when he speaks of his "significant chance" of "returning" from the grave because of what he imagines to be the, er, Very Serious Very Sciency "measures" he has "taken" that skeptics, you know, basically sane people like me don't sign onto. Just to be clear here, what More is professing as a matter of faith is that when he dies -- and he will, as will every Robot Cultist, as will everybody else, as so will I (which isn't exactly news to me, or particularly upsetting to me as news goes, and certainly isn't something a death denialist of all people is needed to "break it" to me) -- again, when he dies More intends to have his head chopped off and plopped into a mist-shrouded dewar for hamburgerization the better to be rebuilt in "The Future" by swarms of nanobotic genies-in-a-bottle and thereupon scooped into a shiny imperishable robot body or "scanned" and somehow "therefore" "migrated" into an angelic eternal "info-self" in cyberspatial heaven all under the loving ministrations of a sooper-intelligent sooper-parental history-ending Robot God. That is to say, Max More believes, or is willing to pretend to believe for cash, like any fulminating fundamentalist, that he won't really be dead when he dies, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. And in so saying Max More is being palpably, laughably idiotic, repeatedly and in public, is indulging in a perfectly ridiculous pseudo-scientific fraud, and is possibly engaged in some sort of elaborate cry for help.

Max More is an adherent (hell, the adherent, Founder and High Priest) of the specifically "Extropian" sect of the Robot Cult, and so is a denialist both about death and about taxes, that is to say is both a market-fundamentalist and techno-transcendendalist, that is to say More advocates eating civilization and having it too but also preaches that if only we clap louder "technology" will gratify every infantile wish-fulfillment fantasy we have for free. As I said, Very Serious!

Of course, all the Robot Cultists believe this sort of flabbergasting nonsense, and it attests to the lack of standards in a society in which deceptive promotional norms, hyperbolic marketing forms, scientistic reductionism coupled with New Age narcissism and consumer techno-fetishism so utterly prevail that techno-transcendentalizing guru-wannabes like Max More and Ray Kurzweil can say this sort of thing and then get paid cushy salaries as "futurological experts" and "corporate consultants" rather than being meritocratically trundled off to sponge urinals or gather up roadside rubbish with sharpened sticks (then again maybe that's not such a good idea either). So, too, most of the Robot Cultists can be expected in conversation with critics of stunning rhetorical masterstrokes like More's "I know you are but what am I?" gambit. Nevertheless, I do think it is important to draw my readers' attention to the fact that this is one the most respected and influential intellectuals (as it were) of the transhumanist "movement," founder and prominent member of any number of transhumanoid organizations. The Robot Cult, ladies and gentlemen.

Are Techno-Immortalist Robot Cultists the Real "Deathists"?

In Wake Up, Deathist! You DO Want to Live 10,000 Years!, Robot Cultist Hank Pellissier argues that magic would be cool if it were real as a way of distracting your attention from the fact that magic is not real. My first working title for this piece was the judiciously worded, "Robot Cultist Battles Deathist Menace From Glitter-Farting Unicorn in Space." From all this, the discerning reader of Amor Mundi will understand that the piece under discussion is the latest Very Serious work of futurology published by the White Guys of "The Future" at the stealth Robot Cult "think-tank" IEET, the Institute for Ethics (where ethics are rarely actually discussed) and Emerging Technologies (where the technologies are rarely actually emerging).

Contra Pellissier, I think it is fair to say that not everybody would want to spend 10,000 years living what passes for the lives they are now living, when the reality of suicide demonstrates that not everybody wants to live even the Biblical allotment of three score and ten. More seriously still, I think it is fair to wonder if what we even mean by "living a life" as a narrative and otherwise coherent structural matter when we talk about such things now is enough like what might arise with such a prolongation that it makes a lot of sense to glibly apply the term to such projections, just as I think it is fair to wonder the same about the propriety of applying intuitions of present "selfhood" to such presumably transformed conditions, about the propriety of applying the word "living" to so differently prostheticized and therapized a process and so on.

Of course, Pellisier doesn't care about such things very much, he just wants to pretend that "technology" in some general construal that makes no sense will "provide" through mechanisms that have no real specification "health" and "capacities" and "lives" and "selves" that are and legibly remain everything they already are now, except, you know, that they will be more More MORE! As always with futurologists, the Robot Cultists confuse more with better, confuse more with change: it is an essentially unimaginative temper promoting itself as imagination, it is an essentially incurious consumerism advertising itself as wonder, it is an essentially reactionary fear marketing itself as an embrace of transformation. It's all very boring and very conventional advertising strategy -- more Skittles in the bag peddled as progress! a new color coating added to the Skittles rainbow peddled as change! Robot Cultists just pump up this sort of volume by orders of magnitude more than conventional crappy consumer marketing does -- indeed they amplify advertising hyperbole so much that their discourse takes on the coloration of theological discourse, the fraudulent promises of consumer satisfaction become promises of outright techno-transcendence.

Pellissier and his fellow Robot Cultists are just circus barkers selling a mirage and promoting a brand, at once indulging in wish-fulfillment fantasizing as well as trying to enlist as many others in this fantasizing as may be, either to make the fantasy seem more real in the fervency of shared belief or, more cynically and opportunistically, to attract attention and the power that follows from such attention by making noise. For instance:

"Many researchers suggest that Death will soon be annihilated," writes Pellissier. This is, of course, to speak plainly, a lie. I doubt that very "many" actually reputable researchers suggest anything of the sort even on the most idiosyncratic construal of that word "many," but even if a few folks who aren't laughingstocks in every aspect of their lives otherwise do say such things you can be sure that there are incomparably "many" more who do not for every one who does, and in any case no-one who takes things like citation indexes or reproducible results seriously would ever say or take seriously anything of the kind.

To raise questions, as I do, about the coherence and legibility of terms like "life" and "self" and "health" as they are used by futurologists when they seek at once radically to change the referents for these terms, sometimes beyond recognition, is to risk being derided by Robot Cultists as what they call a "Deathist." To recognize, as I do, and to insist on the recognition, as I do, of the absolutely and irrefutably true facts that human beings are and have always been and are always going to remain mortal to the extent that life is a biological process and intelligence remains incarnated in biological brains and social struggle in a living and finite world is, again, to risk being derided by Robot Cultists as what they call a "Deathist." And to testify, as I do, to the reality of the record in which literally all of the meaning and beauty and pleasure and wonder and power in which humanity has had a part in the world has been both perfectly possible and indeed exclusively available to always only mortal beings is, once again, to risk being derided by Robot Cultists as what they call a "Deathist."

What is wanted, writes Pellissier, "is to promote the Value of Life. Exalting human existence as the extraordinary experience that it is, redefines the Longevity Party movement. Maxim Maximus indicates this on the Longevity Party website; we want to be known as the 'Party for Life.' Conversely, all other groups can be castigated as a 'Party for Death.' Praising and promoting Life EverLasting gives transhumanists a powerful role, as ecstatic clairvoyants and scientific messiahs." You know, Science! (Also, "Maxim Maximus"? Very Serious!) You know, one needn't exactly be thrilled at the prospect of death or displeased by the great progressive of work of therapy and care and support through which illness is ameliorated (outside of the Robot Cult this is known as the rather commonsense appreciation of, you know, healthcare) to also deny utterly that mortality spoils everything for everybody or even counts as the worst evil in a world of inequities and troubles. Of course, we are all familiar enough with the uses to which phrases like "the Party of Life" can be put by political movements to have some healthy skepticism about declarations by people claiming not only to speak for "Life" but claiming that everybody who disagrees with them is dealing in death. There are many people in today's America who fancy themselves Life's great champions while at once treating women as incapable of making decisions concerning their own bodies, indifferent to the conditions of support that would define the quality of life of a child born of an unwanted pregnancy they would eagerly force a woman to bring to term against her will under threat of violence, all the while cheering the prospect of the execution of criminals (including, for some, doctors who perform abortions and women who would seek them) even knowing that at least sometimes this irrevocable punishment will be unjust, championing the unchecked proliferation of deadly weapons on our streets, denigrating the regulation of pollution and toxic substances, and denying the consensus of scientists that humans are contributing to redressable climate change that threatens all life on earth. Beyond the sensible skepticism born of such experience, just looking at Pellissier's specific proposal here, does it really make sense to declare oneself a brave and solitary promoter of the value of "Life" at all while at once denigrating so thoroughly so many of the terms on which it has always been lived?

Again, it is obviously stupid to deny that all humans have always been mortal and obviously stupid to pretend that the elimination of so universal a dimension of the human condition would not raise questions as to the humanity of beings so transformed -- at least insofar as that "humanity" had hitherto been reckoned. It is just as obviously stupid to pretend that there is anything in actual or even remotely developing medical science or technical expertise that makes the contemplation of such transformations matters of anything like practical concern, even if they remain relevant as ways to illuminate philosophical questions (after all, death denialism and wish-fulfillment fantasizing about eternal youth are among the earliest and most endlessly reiterated themes in the literary archive). The first kind of stupidity is just sloppy and lazy thinking, unworthy of intelligent assertion and demonstrative of fatal unseriousness, but the second connects more often than not to actual fraud.

If you think I jest or exaggerate when I deride Robot Cultists who act as though if only everybody could be convinced to clap louder suddenly we would unleash the spontaneous magical soopertech "forces of immortalization" that remain shackled by the weight of pessimists who keep on noticing that people age and die, you need only read Pellissier himself: "Obliterating Death requires a two-pronged attack. Science has to conquer the scourge, but, unfortunately, science is impeded by a stubborn obstacle that’s historically stone-walls progress: the narrow, anxiety-ridden, change-adverse conservatism of most human minds." Do recall Pellissier's talk of "ecstatic clairvoyants and scientific messiahs" before you would relinquish to him even momentarily the keys to the science car. Be that as it may, it still remains one thing to act as if the only reason people are mortal is because sane people recognize the fact of our mortality, and another thing to actually go on to peddle anti-aging kremes and boner-herbs and head-freezing schemes and nanobotic respirocyte animations for money among the rubes.

But it is not enough just to point out how stupid Robot Cultists are being when they fling the "Deathist" term around as they do -- and believe me, this is far from the only stupid thing Robot Cultists spend their limited time on earth doing -- I think it is important to note the extent to which this idiotic "Deathist" term of theirs, if it had any substantial reference to speak of, might more aptly be directed at them.

I say this because it is also fair to say that IF human life expectancy were actually to improve in any kind of substantial way in the actual world, it will almost certainly be because progressive citizens, activists, and administrators educate, agitate, and organize to provide more access to clean water, nutritious food, prenatal care, available but unprofitable treatments for neglected diseases to more people in the world, especially among the most vulnerable people in overexploited regions and populations in the world.

While some Robot Cultists may have notional commitments to such efforts it is crucial to grasp that there is nothing that they contribute from the vantage of their futurology to those commitments and that so long as they are speaking futurologically they are not contributing to these efforts, and indeed they are distracting attention away from these efforts and often actively undermining these efforts through the proposal of imaginary techno-fixes that promote complacency and deny the relevance of actually-available reforms and strategies that are ready-to-hand. Even to the extent that life expectancy might rise in general through the development of new genetic or prosthetic medical techniques it is crucial to note how rarely Robot Cultists are actual participants either in the scientific research and publication, the technical implementation and distribution, or even in the real-world political organizing to increase scientific research spending, improve science education, overcome proprietary circumscriptions of technoscientific innovation and access through elite-incumbent intellectual property regimes, and so on.

This point acquires special resonance in reference to this particular piece by Pellissier, because as we have seen he is not only making the usual nonsensical "anti-deathist" noises of the Robot Cultists in this piece but is doing so in the context of promoting a new "movement" calling itself the Longevity Party. Of course, Robot Cultists are forever re-packaging their stale devotions as Brave New Movements, starting political parties and phony movements that have no real constituencies responding to no real problems, fighting for libertopian asteroid belt colonies that nobody now alive will ever live to see or fighting for the rights of artificial intelligent software that don't exist, writing online manifestos whomping up the same lame digital utopianism with disposable neologisms and pretending that all this represents serious political activity even though it is more or less the same handful of guru wannabes in charge every time and an endlessly revolving and yet never really changing cast of True Believer wannabes who sign on every time.

Just as they claim to be doing politics when they are really indulging in shabby self-promotion, so too they claim to be interested in more medical research even though they are not aligned with legible healthcare advocacy in any way but want to agitate for more money for what they call "radical longevity research," in other words for public money diverted from legitimate medicine and for public legitimacy conferred on the usual futurological snake oil salesmen and software coders who think they are biologists who throng the New Age and nutritional supplement convention circuit with the cryonics cranks and "uploading" enthusiasts who think materialism somehow justifies "soul migration" fantasies and that a picture of you is the same thing as you, except, somehow also immortal.

While Robot Cultists traffic in the fear of death their discourse and their organizations do nothing to improve actual lives in any practical way while they distract attention and derange effort from such practical work at every turn. If their pet term of abuse were not so patently ridiculous in the first place the question might be well asked of them, just who, after all, are the real "Deathists"?

Political Versus "Scientific" Assessments of Robot Cultists

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot... I ask a Question:

Is it even possible to separate assessments of reasonableness from political assessments when it comes to Robot Cultists? If "reasonableness" amounts to little more than logical compatibility with present theories doesn't that actually radically underdetermine feasibility given all the intermediate technodevelopmental steps between present knowledge and technical affordances and the superlative outcomes that interest the Robot Cultists, especially since so many funding, publishing, regulative, marketing, implementation decisions material to those intermediate steps are political in character, eg, involve distributional questions of risk, cost, and benefit to a diversity of stakeholders? And this is not even to delve into the level of palpable limits in our present biological knowledge, understanding of intelligence, advanced and detailed physical theories when it comes to the specific sorts of outcomes transhumanoids like to bloviate about -- sustainable engineered negligible senescence, digital consciousness emulation, traversible wormholes, robust controllable programmable self-replicative room-temperature nano-manufacturing, mega-scale climate engineering projects and so on. Setting temperament aside (that is to say, my hunch that generality here provides a whiff of technoscientific respectability enabling arrant wish-fulfillment fantasizing of the most infantile sort imaginable, daydreams of never having to die, of being irresistibly sexy, of never being caught in an embarrassing error, of rolling in dough without effort, and so on, all in the name of Science!), isn't it rather clear that sub(cult)ures fixated on such outcomes will mostly be susceptible of analysis on political, cultural, discursive terms?

Futurological Factishness

From an exchange upgraded and adapted from the Moot to this post, Mitchell said:

"nobody has ever been willing (or able) to engage Dale in a serious intellectual exchange" I'm not sure where the intellectual locus of such an exchange would be. For scientific criticisms of transhumanist projects, Dale defers to people like Jones and Andreadis. It would sure be interesting to run across an anti-Dale, a transhumanist who really is a humanist as well -- someone whose intellectual specialty overlapped with Dale's enough that they really had something to say to each other. I can engage with Dale in certain areas, and I even agree with components of his critique, but he really deserves a much more profound engagement than I ever expect to give him.

I respond:

It is worth noting that Robot Cultists are rarely if ever dissuaded from their nonsense by the exposes generated by specialists in the scientific branches abused by transhumanoid claims, while I think that some who are initially susceptible to Robot Cult Belief are rendered too incredulous to make the plunge while others who do Believe arrive at disenchantment or assume a more critical temper Robot Cult formations cannot long survive when they work their way through discursive and cultural and political critiques of faith-based futurology. I think this is because the substance of the discourse is not actually scientific at all, but an abduction of scientific generalities or superficial forms in the service of faith-based initiatives doing quite different work than science proper is doing. In this respect, the critique of the superlative futurological claims of Robot Cultists is quite a bit like trying to critique climate-change denialism. Misinformation is promulgated by organizations who parochially profit from the effort, no question, but the key enablers of the problem are,

[one] a badly educated public in the context of a failure of pillar institutions that interface between the administrative, deliberative, and expert-knowledge layers of the instrumental register of public life and,

[two] the diversion of many of the key actors in each of these layers away from factual adjudication to subcultural signaling.

Climate change has become a culture war issue tangled up with the threatened identities of certain precarious mostly white mostly working class mostly patriarchial folks in ways that are no longer resolvable by empirical tests or by political compromise formations.

The Robot Cultist's faith in imminent AI, techno-longevity, bio-"enhancement," nano-abundance, digi-plenitude is caught up in comparable dynamisms to the extent that the sects of the Robot Cult function as marginal and defensive sub(cult)ures or identity-formations or movement-orientations conferring meta-narrative belief systems and social membership benefits in the context of extreme technodevelopmental distress, amplified techno-fetishistic consumerism, and the suffusion of public life with the deceptive and hyperbolizing norms and forms of promotion and marketing (this is the context in which both mainstream -- the assumptions and aspirations of neoliberal developmentalism, anti-deliberative corporate-military think-tank speak -- as well as the superlative futurological discourses of the Robot Cult operate).

To the extent that superlative (and also mainstream) futurology is a discourse operating at the level of, and often in the service of, (sub)culture it seems to me it is best grasped -- and critiqued -- in its rhetoric and not as a matter of "facts", even if its rhetoric is devoted to the production and affirmation and satisfaction of making pseudo-factual claims.

I happen to think the crisis exposed by the triumph of reactionary corporate-mobilized climate change denialism is much the same, one in which political, cultural, and discursive critiques are more efficacious than factual ones (even if it is also true that they must not stray from the relevant science, which remains absolutely indispensable). In a world when few will master all the relevant technoscience factually to adjudicate disputes on which their own flourishing and even survival depends in so many ways, it is all the more crucial to grasp the political necessity of ensuring accountability of the administration of policy both to the best warranted facts according to scientific consensus as well as to the actual diversity of stakeholders to public decisions.

There should be a far greater price paid for fraud and deliberate misinformation arising out of advertising, promotion, the financial sector, think-tanks, popular journalism, and so on. There should be much more policing of the boundaries of modes of discourse, what seeks to pass itself off as factual and not promotional, that which assumes the responsibilities of professionalism and the accountabilities of representation, and so on. Much that masquerades as truth-telling is actually advertizing, much that masquerades as speculation is actually fraud. Sometimes the masquerade rises to a level that might well be regarded as criminal, and this matters enormously. This is a crisis of accountability, responsibility, legitimation, and standards. As someone who has devoted his life to the study and teaching of theory (including a lot of theory that gets sloppily slapped with the label "postmodern") I am well aware that such standards are contingent, and must be open to interminable renegotiation else they become more trouble than they are worth, but this is no justification for jettisoning them or for the pretense that we can do without them, which amounts to a straightforward refusal of responsibility and an active solicitation for abuses in my view. Even when the crisis takes the form of the loss of the proper force of facticity, it is crucial to grasp the extent to which the locus of that crisis is political and cultural, as should be the lion's share of the critique which would re-invigorate that force by renewing the institutions and practices that mediate and enable it.

Taxes Are The Price We Pay for a Civilized Society

Citizens, take pride in a moment of civilization to which you have contributed! All this for less than one half of one percent of the federal budget. Images already coming in from the surface of Mars. It's not too late for you Republicans -- look what science and taxes can do! Come back from the Dark Side!

An Open Letter To The Robot Cultists --

Any child of two can indulge in wish fulfillment fantasizing. It's not a philosophy. It's not a movement. And the way you Robot Cultists do it makes you a kind of techno-transcendental New Age cult too hype-notized to notice you are functioning as a crowdsourced cheerleading squad for celebrity CEOs and ramped up gizmo consumerism at a time when the world is literally perishing from extractive- industrial- petrochemical- consumer- indebted- corporate- militarism.

The digital revolution is a lie. Cyberspace isn't a spirit realm. It belches coal smoke. It is accessed on landfill-destined toxic devices made by wretched wage slaves. It abetted financial fraud and theft at every level of society around the world. Its "openness" and its "freedom" turned out to be targeted marketing harassment, panoptic surveillance, and zero comments.

Rather than grasp this catastrophic fraud, you embrace it more ferociously, you hyperbolize cyberspatial deceptions into a more delusive fantasy still, fancying it will be home to a history shattering perfectly parental God-AI delivering you into the digital garden where your "spirit self" can live forever and "be" anything and "have" everything and "know" it all forever.

Your Robot Cult -- whether in its eugenicist transhumanoid sects, or in its dead-ender AI (artificial imbecillence) Singularitarian nerd-rapture sects, or in its vitamin supplement replacement parts shiny robot body soul-migration techno-immortalist sects, or in its nano-santa nano-genies-in-a-bottle nano-cornucopiast sects, or in its greenwashing hyper-denialist "geo-engineering" sects -- your Robot Cult, I say, takes all the lies of crass commercialism -- it takes all its infomercial boner pills and anti-aging kremes and endless promises of consumer ecstasy -- and then sets the volume dial on eleven, turning what was just ugly stupid embarrassing commonplace circus-barker deception and crack-pottery into full on fulminating faith.

Drawing on deeply disseminated figures and conceits of mythology and theology (eden, prometheus, golem, invincible armor, the philosopher's stone, rapture, love potion, sorcerer's apprentice, excalibur, the fountain of youth, frankenstein, onmipotence- omnibenevolence- omniscience-) whose historically-weighted intuitive force reassures you, together with the fervency of the never-changing professions of your fellow-faithful, you keep telling yourselves and telling us -- in a tune that never really changes year after year after year even while you congratulate yourselves on your unflappable embrace of "accelerating change" -- that there is some substance in your faith-based initiative, that your roseate "The Future" is real and that in it you can be young and rich and invulnerable and right and cared for forever.

As I said, any child of two already knows where you are coming from. As adults, though, what matters more is that you are going nowhere, you are riding on the road to nowhere, weighting down and speeding up the cart that is taking us all down.

We have serious problems in this world and we need serious people to help solve them. You might be enjoying the haze you're in, like any techno-fetishizing bourgeois consumer dupe, but you are part of the problem.

You could have been something better, you could have done something else, but you didn't. It's not too late to wake up and help out.

Futurological Defenses of Automation, Outsourcing, Crowdsourcing, Precarizing Labor

...Until There Is Nobody Left To Buy Anything. You Know, for Profit!

How to Work for Free for the Richest Companies in the World:

The pattern of fostering a community of people to essentially do your work for you -- to assume the risk of trying new ideas, without any guarantee of safety -- [is…] happening on a near-weekly basis to people who've developed apps for Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and others. In fact, this process is… routine… The most important companies in tech have, to varying extents, intentionally built their modern selves on [this…] model[.]

It is a commonplace of futurological corporate propaganda since the fifties that increasing automation is going to lower average working hours or free up people to do more rewarding and creative work any day now, when in fact automation has almost always only threatened labor with unemployment instead, thereby lowering labor's bargaining power, accompanied by a predictable diminishing of labor standards, diminishing of buying power, and diminishing of living standards for people who work for living.

The reason the futurological argument appears plausible, I suppose, is because such futurologists want to pretend that emancipatory outcomes are somehow BUILT IN to the specs of the technologies they enthuse over. The reason the futurological argument should NOT appear the least bit plausible (apart from the fact that it is made over and over and over again and almost never turns out to be true) is because emancipatory outcomes are political and not technical in nature. They demand political struggle and are not susceptible to techno-fixes in the absence of political struggle. Problems of poverty and ignorance and unfairness and inequity are political problems that require political will and social struggle (education, agitation, organization) even if, in part, to deploy available techniques in the service of desirable and emancipatory outcomes.

Bosses invest in new technology to make more money, not to improve the lot of laborers, and increasing automation and other productivity gains associated with technological improvements have been accompanied by increasing wealth concentration and increasing worker precarity precisely as these actual priorities would dictate. Although futurologists like to tell a different story, there is no reason to treat it as anything but a hoary and naïve science fiction cliché at odds with both a common sense understanding of how incumbent elites actually behave and all the obvious facts in evidence.

Using developments in information and transportation techniques (shipping container standardization) and technologies (digital networked surveillance and accounting) to outsource jobs away from expensive, often unionized, North Atlantic labor and costly regulations to protect our planet more than their profits instead to cheap labor in overexploited regions of the world where fellow human beings labor invisibly under appalling conditions and low environmental standards imperil the planet on which we all depend for our flourishing and survival is just another application of the same mechanism through which "technological progress" in automation has not translated to the political progress in the name of which it has been peddled to the people by futurological propagandists for the corporate-military status quo. The crowdsourcing of promotional content (free reviews on Amazon.com), of land development (precarious squatters on toxic dumps and other unsupported hazard zones struggling to make marginal spaces habitable), of media app development (as in the example with which the post begins) are just applications of the same mechanisms yet again.

Futurologists really must come to terms with the extent to which they have functioned as relentless defenders of the interests of corporate elites and the status quo all the while pretending to be champions of "accelerating change" and "techno-emancipation" in "The Future."

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.