Beyond "No Gods, No Masters"

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:

As an atheist and a democrat I won't deny an affinity for the slogan "no gods, no masters," but the pedant and rhetorician in me can't long leave such slogans well enough alone.

As an atheist who is also a democrat, I see no way of abolishing faith without abolishing style (which is not only impossible, but would be terrible were it possible), and so I see the democratic struggle instead as the secular struggle for an ever more perfect separation of church and state from which the faithful and freethinkers benefit alike.

As a person who believes that the guiding democratic aspiration of equity-in-diversity is facilitated by fact-based harm-reduction policy but who is also an anti-incumbent anti-elitist, I see no way to accomplish progressive outcomes without some folks always having to defer, from moment to moment, and in ways that are to them unwanted, to the authority of expertise (expertise in the sense of invoking relevant disciplinary knowledge, expertise in the sense of actually representing stakeholder perspectives, expertise in the sense of functioning as duly constituted agents in legitimate accountable governance, and so on), and so I see the democratic struggle instead as the struggle to widen participation in the constitution of such authorities to all their stakeholders and to deepen accountability over the exercise of such authorities to those who are affected by it.

I don't know how to capture that in a bumper sticker off the top of my head. "No gods, no masters, but yes aesthetics and yes accountable authorities" seems rather a rough draft at best.

Non-Violent Politics and the Democratization of the State

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, longtime and stubborn sparring partner "Summerspeaker" asks:

If you support structures that distribute violence, in what way are you nonviolent? How is nonviolence a meaningful concept in this context? Does nonviolence just mean opposition to nonstate violence and state violence deem illegitimate?

I respond:

If you support structures that distribute violence, in what way are you nonviolent?

I deny the facile formulation of "support" you are implying. Does one "support" gravity in recognizing it? Does one "support" the murderer who deploys a scalpel in advocating the usefulness of a scalpel in surgery?

When you leap on my apparent concession that "state structures distribute violence" you fail to see that for me the phrase might just as well be that "state structures distribute nonviolence." That the furniture of state has been an instrument of violence is obvious, I have never said otherwise, indeed I say so incessantly. But what matters to me is that this obviousness not be mistaken for a mis-identification of the state WITH violence, since the state is indispensable to nonviolent politics.

EVERY fact, every value, every norm, every custom, every infrastructural affordance is susceptible to violent misuse, is susceptible to futural refiguration as a violence where now it might not seem to be, the furniture of governance included.

Again, it would be nonsensical to deny either the conspicuous history of war, expropriation, enslavement, tyranny organized through the state form, or the permanent susceptibility to violence, corruption, injustice in every facet of governance devoted to the contrary.

But (I say it again and again and again), violence both precedes and exceeds the state, and the state form is indispensable to the struggle to overcome, circumvent and heal violence, even as it is true that historical states have enabled and exacerbated violence, even as the furniture of states are permanently susceptible to violence and violent misuse. My whole point, stated at the outset and repeated over and over and over and over again, is that democratization of the state is the struggle to provide alternatives to violence, to overcome violence, to circumvent violence, to provide recourse for the violated, to facilitate the open negotiation of the terms on which violence is legible as such.

Violence inheres as a permanent susceptibility in the condition of human plurality. Quite apart from the fact that there can be no smashing of "The State" as such, since "The State" has always been a complex, dynamic, multilateral constellation of ritual and artifice, norm and form, it is crucial to grasp that the smashing of a particular state would not be an overcoming of violence even were it to succeed, since it would not be an overcoming of the plurality in which violence and nonviolence inhere in potentia. Nonviolence is a commitment and a struggle, but one cannot ever claim it as a secure accomplishment (although one can still distinguish the comparative violence of an unjust law or a perpetrator as against the comparative nonviolence of resistance to that injustice or a victim in suffering a violation).

You ask in what way am I nonviolent? Well, for one thing I am not in the habit of making immodest declarations of such accomplishments having had ample experience of my proneness to ignorance and error, and so I would prefer to declare myself earnestly committed to nonviolence and strongly opposed to those, especially those who deem themselves democrats, Democrats, or radicals of the left, who are not also so committed to non-violence. Still, I will add that I was literally trained in nonviolent civil disobedience by the King Center in Atlanta when I was a co-ordinator for Queer Nation Atlanta. I regularly teach the theory of nonviolent resistance and revolution, as well as rhetorical strategies for reconciliation, mediation, and peacemaking. And as I have said, I am committed to the ongoing democratization of the state. Part of this requires a commitment as well to arguing with those who would smash the state out of a hasty mis-identification of the state with the violences it has been historically instrumental to and remains structurally permanently susceptible to.

Those who foolishly pine to demolish rather than to democratize it are paranoiacally misapprehending essential, exhaustive, ubiquitous violence in even those comparatively democratic state forms which

1. provide for comparatively peaceful changes in leadership,

2. provide for comparative accountability of governance to the people governed,

3. provide for comparative amelioration of tendencies to corruption, violation, and abuse in the state form through separation, federation, and subsidiarity of their powers,

4. provide for comparative equity in recourse to law and its nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of interpersonal disputes or disputes of citizens with duly constituted authorities,

5. provide for comparative protection of minorities from majorities through the rite of rights culture,

6. provide the general welfare (education, healthcare, income) through which a scene of informed, nonduressed consent to the terms of everyday interpersonal commerce is comparatively secured, a scene of consent the substance of which is paid for by

7. the provisions of a comparatively progressive taxation

a. that circumvents anti-democratizing concentrations of wealth that skew communication of fact and merit and hence corrupt accountability of governance,

b. that yokes the maintenance of government to the people governed through the principle of no taxation without representation,

c. that creates no initial barrier to accomplishment but functions as an a posterior filter ensuring that to those to whom more is given more is required,

8. comparatively accountably administer common and public goods in the public interest and hence circumvents the structural violences involved in the externalization of social costs, the misappropriation of the common inheritance and commonwealth of civilization, the violation of the planetary resources on which we all depend for our survival and flourishing,

9. and provide comparatively open occasion for the ongoing contestation and collaboration over the terms on which violence is legible as such through the comparative championing of rights to free expression, press, and assembly, comparative generality of the franchise and right to run for elective office, comparative equity of recourse to law, comparative celebration of diversity secured through comparative equity of the scene of consent.

Needless to say, all these "comparatives" name for me sites of ongoing democratizing reform and struggle, while no doubt for others they function as alibis and rationalizations for complacency in the face of ongoing inequities, exploitation, abuses, and parochial privileges.

You ask, "Does nonviolence just mean opposition to nonstate violence and state violence deem[ed] illegitimate?" Well, depending on what you mean by "deemed" (by whom? as registered how? with what consequences to whom?), I think maybe my answer is "yes," although it seems to me anybody who wants to put "just" before that "mean" there almost certainly is not grasping what I mean at all.

Having argued with you so often, for so long I must confess that I suspect you are looking to dismiss the force of my commitment to nonviolence on these terms the better to engage in a vision of "radical politics" that amounts to a profoundly superficial, irresponsible, self-congratulatory disavowal of the political altogether. Again, I say that because we have been arguing on these topics now for years and there is nothing I say here that I have not said to you before, and often, and painstakingly, and yet it seems as if for you none of these endless careful delineations remain in your memory at all, there is nothing but your eagerness to seize on one word or phrase that gives you the longed-for evidence to expose the secret authoritarian in me and the longed-for permission to get on with the eating of the cake and having it too that is what your dance party anti-politics peddling itself as revolutionary politics finally amounts to. I'm glad to have an occasion to rehearse some basic propositions on democratic governance and democratizating struggle from my perspective as an advocate of nonviolence, but it is getting really hard for me to continue to treat you as a serious good-faith interlocutor or reliable ally in democratization given the eternal recurrence of these facile interventions of yours and airy declarations (both in the Moot and on your blog) of my dastardly deep-seated reactionary authoritarianism and all the rest of that nonsense.

Nonviolent Statism?

Anarchists recoil in alarm from my proposal that violence both precedes and exceeds the state, and my conclusion from this that the advocate of nonviolence should then be concerned not with smashing but democratizing the state. How they shake their heads at me! As though the very idea of nonviolent governance is inconceivable... despite the fact that in the actual world, all around them, nonviolent governance is happening all the time, nonviolent governance is in fact commonplace, ubiquitous. To amplify a bit:

My point is NOT to deny the specific violences of actual states but to argue that violence does not exhaustively characterize states.

A corollary to this point: contrary portrayals by anarchists are actually paranoid and function to rationalize anti-democratization.

My point IS to deny that violence is either essential or definitive of states. (Yes, I know this view is unorthodox, for more about what I mean and why I mean it read relevant posts archived at the sidebar under the heading Against Anarchy.)

A corollary to this point: contrary portrayals by anarchists render the productivity of power invisible at the cost of productivity and the possibility of civitas invisible to the risk of its possibility.

And For My "Advanced" Readers: Even granting the epistemic violence of the circumscription of possibility and importance through which the maintenance of values, norms, and affordances yields the apparent normality that sustains this palpable ubiquity of nonviolence in democratic governance, it is crucial to grasp that the attempted attribution of specific violences to these operations is no less dependent on alternate circumscriptions and so provides no basis for an objection to my initial point (indeed, the objection seems rather conspicuously a matter of trying to have your cake and eat it, too). This is especially important to the extent that, as I would argue, a feature of democratic governance is the facilitation of an openness to the perpetual re-contestation of the norms through which such epistemic violences play out, which suggests that democratization of the state provides pathways to nonviolence at multiple levels in a virtuous circle, just as the anti-democratizing extremities of totalitarianism and anarchism yield in my view vicious circles of ramifying violence.

Nonviolent Revolution As the Democratization of the State

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, a reader thinks I am talking nonsense:

Nonviolent statism is a contradiction in terms. Please ditch one or the other.

I disagree with you.

Understand what I am saying: I am very familiar with your objections, of course. I understand where you are coming from. I am very aware that it is commonplace to define the state as that institution that has a monopoly on the "legitimate" use of force and that this is often taken to justify the identification of state with violence (even when it is quite obvious that enormous amounts of what happens through government has nothing at all to do with violence on any plausible description).

I am aware that my viewpoint is a minority viewpoint, in fact I will go so far as to say that I know of no political theorist who characterizes this issue in quite the way I do. (But Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, Chantal Mouffe, and a host of scholarship about and experience with radical nonviolent civil rights, queer, feminist, environmentalist activism has contributed to my perspective here.) Nonetheless, I do believe what I do and for reasons I think are good ones. Even if I cannot persuade you of my position, I propose it is one that deserves consideration among the more usual alternatives.

Violence precedes the emergence of the state and violence exceeds the existence of the state. I begin here because this recognition matters enough to be a point of departure for thinking the political. It is an axiom closely connected in my view to Hannah Arendt's starting point: "Plurality is the law of the earth."

I am far from denying the obvious fact that many (even most) states historically do indeed engage in systematic exploitation and offensive war-making. This is why the radical left critique of states that function as nothing but the institutional legitimation of violence for elite-incumbent classes -- or critique states to the extent that they are functioning this way -- is a powerful one with which I strongly agree as it applies to many historical (in a sense of the historical that includes the present) states or episodes or particular tendencies.

But I simply do not agree that states are exhaustively or even essentially characterized by violence or that their abolition would eliminate violence from human affairs. To smash the state is always (whatever else it may be) to smash the space of democratization, and spontaneist fantasies declaring contracts nonviolent by fiat whatever misinformation or duress articulates their terms, or dreaming of a consensus beyond the law arising out of an unrestrained angelic human nature, or promising to unleash a techno-transcendental superabundance that circumvents the impasse of stakeholder politics offer no living, abiding alternatives to the interminable democratizing struggles addressed through or addressed to governments toward sustainable equity-in-diversity.

I think these are profoundly mistaken views, widespread though they are. Of course, self-identified anarchists are comparatively rare, but the advocacy of "smaller government" without a supplementary characterization of good government amounts to anarchism in substance and this political viewpoint is far from rare, as is the cynical belief that there is a necessary tradeoff between order and violence that essentially accepts the premise of anarchism but regards anti-statist activism as unrealistic anyway.

I propose the contrary proposition that democratization is the historical struggle through which states are rendered ever less violent.

Democratization rendering states less violent happens when elections make possible peaceful transitions among leaders. Democratization rendering states less violent happens when civil rights and juries and court appointed defense attorneys provide ever wider more equitable recourse to courts for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes. Democratization rendering states less violent happens when taxation is yoked to representation making government directly accountable to the consent of the governed. Democratization rendering states less violent happens when checks and balances make branches and layers of government compete for positional advantage not through corruption but through the policing of corruption within governance. Democratization rendering states less violent happens when social democratic states provide the security of general welfare, basic income, healthcare, education, access to reliable information all to better ensure that everybody can engage in everyday commerce on legibly informed non-duressed consensual terms. Democratization rendering states less violent happens when public goods and common goods are accountably administered by democratic governance in the name of the common good to circumvent the violence of their exploitation or mismanagement for the parochial benefit of minorities. The examples can be multiplied, but I am illustrating what some fellow radical democrats would seem to regard as an initially or apparently counter-intuitive principle I am advocating.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that "The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves in their separate, and individual capacities." Although this formulation has had a vital life in the history of progressive struggles for equity-in-diversity, my own point is a different one. It is not only through instituted governments that people accomplish goods collectively of which they are incapable or in which they are frustrated individually. Hence it is necessary to make a more specific case for the collective work of good democratic government in particular. In my view, democratic government facilitates the nonviolent adjudication of disputes and enables people to have a say in the public decisions that affect them (including disputes over what constitutes violence, over what constitutes the public, over what constitutes such a say, and over the terms of the administration of government), through periodic election of accountable representatives, through equal recourse to laws, through the maintenance of individual rites/rights cultures and civil protections of the rights of minorities against majorities, through the maintenance of a legible scene of informed, nonduressed consent to the terms of everyday commerce through the provision of general welfare, and through the sustainable, equitable administration of public and common goods otherwise vulnerable to violation and exploitation by incumbent-elites.

As I say, violence both precedes and exceeds "the" state-form. The truth is that no state, even totalitarian ones, has sufficient means of violence to subdue entire populations in every aspect of their lives to the will of their rulers. Violence CANNOT be the essential characteristic of even the most tyrannical states, and countervailing strains of civitas, consensual accountable equitable participatory governance, are always discernible.

Again, my point is not to deny but to decry the violence of undemocratic states. But in my view the democratization of the state is indispensable to nonviolent revolution. Fantasies of smashing the state rely on a mistaken identification of the state form with violence, and always amount to the facilitation of violence on the part of merciless muscled moneyed minorities who will go ahead and legitimize their abuses as the cost of whatever measure of order they maintain. In democratic states order and consent are one and the same (and exceptions threaten the legitimacy of that order) and the permanent vulnerability of the state form to corruption, abuse, violence confronts the vigilence of an empowered population to which that state is beholden for its funding and maintenance at every layer.

I appreciate the politeness with which you to entreat me to renounce either my commitment to good democratic government or my commitment to nonviolent stakeholder politics and change, but I fear I must decline. I am indeed committed to both, I believe that the commitment to each bolsters the commitment to the other, and I believe that it is those who find these commitments incompatible who are wrongheaded and confused.

Way of Death?

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, "JimF" said:

I do not happen to think that cryonics should be **illegal**. I think people should be free to spend their money, and dispose of their corpses, as they see fit (in the latter case, as long as it doesn't create a public health hazard, of course).

Yeah, that's how I feel about it, too. Certainly the official verbiage of the organizations shouldn't be allowed to create the false and fraudulent impression that the current state of scientific knowledge provides any grounds for actual confidence that severed hamburgerized heads will be nanobotically or digirifically resurrected or whatever -- but it seems to me that contra the handwaving of True Believers in faithly settings the organizational discourse covers its ass more or less. Beyond that, so long as you say as there is no hazard to public health, it doesn't seem to me on the face of it that cryonics should be any more illegal than embalming is, or cremation, or shooting corpses into the Sun or what have you.

Myself, I always rather liked the fictional depiction of the Bene Gesserits on Chapterhouse dropping bodies in orchards with a freshly planted tree on top of each departed member of the community. I rather like the idea of a white-petalled dogwood flowering on a hillock where I used to be. I remember driving past woods in Indiana as a kid when dogwoods were blooming among the trees thinking the forest, like the monolith in 2001, was full of stars.

[edited]

Cryonics and Other Pseudo-Scientific Faith-Based Initiatives

I posted this comment in the midst of the discussion occasioned by my recent anti-cryonics post at the World Future Society. There is plenty of phrase-recycling in it so I wouldn't treat it as a post if I weren't busy prepping for teaching today, but it is still worth reminding people of the connections between the various sects of the Robot Cult as well as the rhetorical connections of their discourse to faith-based religiosity on the one hand and marketing hyperbole on the other.

There is no point in sparring with a True Believer, you tend to arrive all too soon at flinging "I know you are but what I am I?" at one another until everybody is much more tired but nobody more enlightened.

The only thing anybody can say with warranted confidence is that cryonics is a rather elaborate corpse disposal method -- like getting embalmed and then buried, like getting shot into orbit post mortem, like getting compressed into a diamond on a ring for a spouse to remember you by, like getting mummified and interred in the immortality-engine of an Egyptian pyramid. People of faith often declare that these rituals facilitate eventual resurrection, transcension, heavenly ascension. As an atheist I cannot claim that such claims hold much allure for me -- but I don't feel particularly inclined to argue with those who want to believe such things, any more than I would argue with a child who believes in Santa Claus. But what I disapprove are efforts to treat articles of faith as scientific hypotheses or to mistake religious proselytizing as serious political policy or stakeholder reconciliation.

It is hardly surprising to discover that not everything Robot Cultists believe is false (most of what everybody believes is factually true else communication not to mention survival, even with the wrongheaded, with the mad, and with the indoctrinated, would scarcely be possible), but what matters when it comes to the scientifically warranted beliefs and the scientifically legible concerns that are deployed by Robot Cultists will be the ways in which they are inevitably slotted into techno-transcendentalizing narratives that leave all facts behind and leap into pseudo-science and fantasy very quickly indeed.

There are, after all, plenty of real concerns among computer scientists about user-friendly coding and network security without going off the deep end and starting to handwave about Friendly AI and a history-shattering Singularity as half-rapture half-apocalypse existential risk. There is plenty that is promising for materials science, electronics, sensor technologies, biomedical techniques arising from discoveries in molecular biology and at the nanoscale without going off the deep end and starting to handwave about swarms of robust reliable programmable room-temperature self-replicating nanobots that can make nearly anything for almost nothing. There are plenty of lives to be saved by struggling to make clean water available to people in overexploited regions of the world and advocate for single-payer healthcare and demand more public investment in science education and medical research without losing a single second and diverting a single dollar to techno-immortalist outfits like SENS, cryonics, or -- even worse, because conceptually utterly incoherent -- "uploading" nonsense. What is distinctive in the discourse of the Robot Cult will be the organization of modest or superficially scientific observations through theological/ mythological frames and narratives in the service of transcendental aspirations that have nothing to do with consensus science or actual progressive development, often drawing on techniques from marketing and PR to do so.

Not content simply to engage in their endless cynical terminological sanewashing PR shenanigans (we're not talking about immortality but "indefinite healthspan," we're not talking about eugenics but "enhancement"!), adherents of the techno-immortalist sects of the Robot Cult go on to share with anti-abortion extremists the tendency to imply that the those who disagree with their marginal views are "deathists" or "anti-life," and also their opportunistic recourse to befuddlements introduced by technodevelopmental disruption 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 "cryonics" or "uploading."

Part flim-flam, part marketing hype, part newfangled theology, the 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 genies-in-a-bottle nano-cornucopiast sects, or in its greenwashing denialist “geo-engineering” sects —- takes all the lies of crass commercialism, 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 culturally 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, omnipotence- omnibenevolence- omniscience-) whose historically-weighted intuitive force reassures them, together with the fervency of the never-changing professions of their fellow-faithful, Robot Cultists keep telling themselves and telling us —- in a tune that never really changes year after year after year even while they also congratulate themselves on their unflappable embrace of “accelerating change” —- that there is some substance in their faith-based initiative, that their roseate “The Future” is real and that in it they can be young and rich and invulnerable and right and cared for forever.

Any child of two already knows where the Robot Cultists are coming from. We have serious problems in this world and we need serious people to help solve them. Pseudo-scientific wish-fulfillment fantasists might be enjoying the haze they’re in, like any techno-fetishizing bourgeois consumer dupe, but they are part of the problem and not part of any real solutions. For all their put-upon litigious sputtering, the Robot Cultists are lucky I restrain myself so far as to use the gentle word "scam" to describe their enterprise.

Cryo Kitsch And PR

io9 has covered the Kim Suozzi cryonics story. I found especially interesting a comment there bemoaning, "a shocking amount of negativity in these comments." In this formulation, "negativity" is identified with skepticism and "positivity" with credulity. You know, Science!

Chiming in on this sentiment, another Robot Cultist cries out: "People are so damn attached to dying, it just makes me sick. Cryonics really needs better PR. There's so much misinformation floating around." That last line is especially rich. Actually all three lines in a row are pretty rich in their own separate awful ways.

The original comment continues: "As science and medicine advance it seems inevitable that we will eventually conquer disease, aging and even death." It's interesting that literally all the evidence in the world and in all of history always only absolutely attests to the fact that every person will inevitably die, and yet for this True Believer what seems "inevitable" instead is something that has never happened, ever, and which no one can feasibly describe happening. C.S. Lewis insisted that the technological imaginary is continuous with the magickal imaginary, and in moments in which "technology" is simply assumed, as a matter of the unfolding of "its" own inner logic, to render inevitable what is now impossible that continuity is exposed quite acutely.

At the end of the comment, its author declares that "If people want to donate their money to a more 'worthy' cause, please do so. For me, trying to save this girls life is as worthy as it gets." Just to be clear, the worthy causes to which the author refers here are suggestions elsewhere in the comments that money might be more usefully directed to medical research addressing the actual condition from which Kim Suozzi is suffering and dying. For the Robot Cultist in question, it is so ironic to call such efforts worthy that they put the word in scare quotes. Nice.

But more to the point, you will notice that by hiding behind the suffering sentimentalized body of Kim Suozzi the commenter seeks to present as an unchallengeable assertion that cryonics is a matter of "sav[ing] this girl's life" when of course all that is certain is that cryonics -- like burial, like cremation, like getting shot into orbit post-mortem, like getting compressed into a diamond on a ring for a spouse to remember you by, like getting mummified and interred in the immortality-engine of an Egyptian pyramid -- is a corpse disposal method. That it could be more than that is precisely what is under discussion and looks to be in the gravest doubt to anybody who notices how hypothetical most of the enterprise is and how freighted with objections are the few aspects of the enterprise that aren't hypothetical. But never mind, look, a dying girl, a roseate dream of techno-heaven, and a line of footprints in the sand!

Must Moot!

Man, the comments accumulating under that last post are getting to be must read.

I'll snip from just one of them (click the link to read the whole thing), by one of my favorite bloggers and regular reads, Athena Andreadis:

…I'll comment just once, as a practicing molecular neurobiologist with dementia as her research focus, in the forlorn hope that this may stem the tsunami of nonsense (or at least counteract the conclusion that silence means the charlatans have carried the day). The central "argument" is the statement that "brain tissue retains its attributes postmortem" -- which, as much else in biology, means something very different at each scale. Bottom line: this is completely untrue in connection with the discussion focus here; namely, continuity of a specific individual's consciousness and personality. Everyone who does even in vitro brain tissue work, let alone in vivo, knows that even a few hours postmortem are enough to usher in irrevocable degradative changes… [P]eddling pseudoscience has real consequences, especially in a culture that has turned as hostile to reality as the contemporary US has…. As for the larger issue of "respectable scientists" -- I'm actually the exception in bothering to discuss such items at all. The vast majority of biologists put transhumanist "science" in the same category as crystal divination and Tarot cards. Some of them may very well accept an invitation to talk at a TH gathering, why not? Free food, a hefty per diem, maybe a nice meeting location, perhaps even eager apprentices for their lab -- but I suspect their attitude would cool significantly if they were asked to explicitly endorse the TH agenda. Scientists are fallible humans, with pride, vanity, mortgages and the very common propensity to fall in love with their theories. However, what legitimate science has that saves it from turning into religion is the self-correction tool: it changes its conclusions whenever new facts come in. Sooner or later, errors are corrected. Scientific consensus is a fluid, dynamic process, rather than an endpoint. As it should be, given what science tries to accomplish: not power, glory or profit, but the understanding of reality.

Yay, Athena!

I must say, it is a strange thing the way a reasonably technoscientifically literate and concerned nonscientist can seem to be at a disadvantage with a crusading pseudo-scientist when one admits their limitation while the other leverages a refusal to do the same. There is a danger that under such circumstances my blog risks becoming a vector through which futurological pseudo-scientists spam the credulous to their own benefit despite my own resolute skepticism. In my view, what is actually distinctive about the transhumanists and techno-immortalists is actually not happening at the level of scientific claims at all but through the framing and tropes and narrative gestures that these con-artists and True Believers use to organize superficially scientific content for mostly nonscience pop-tech and sfnal fandoms. Given this view, I have also always thought that my own training in literary, cultural, and rhetorical analysis is actually especially relevant to understanding what is going on in their discourse. But of course, this perspective doesn't fly when I am caught up in disputes with THEM as well as it does when I am trying to understand them from the outside for outsiders.

One has to balance whether fact-based concern and policy is more abused by exposing this futurological nonsense to scrutiny (even where the kind of scrutiny I focus on at the level of discourse is entirely dismissed as non-scientific or even anti-scientific by the flim-flam artists with whom I am arguing) or more abused by just deleted this crap in the expectation that it will not be a good faith conversation in any case given my focus on rhetoric and culture and is, after all, usually or mostly beneath serious consideration on its own terms or the terms of actual scientists. So far, contrary to the whining of futurologists about how unfair and unserious and censoring I am, I have tended to be generous giving these people rope to hang themselves with unless they are commandeering discussion threads or just flinging insults (that's my job!) or we reach obviously diminishing returns. Such good deeds, I have noticed, rarely go unpunished.

Check the extremely interesting conversation for yourself and by all means add your two cents. Skeptics about and satirists of the Robot Cultists are especially welcome guests, Robot Cultists are discouraged from wiping their feces on the walls and lampshades.

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.