Futurist Distractions Twitterrant

Futurists talk about whether immortality would be boring or not to distract us from noticing we aren't going to become immortal. Futurists talk about whether uploads should have rights to distract us from noticing that uploading won't happen. Futurists talk about geo-engineering to distract us from real environmental politics. Futurists talk about enhancement medicine to distract us from the miracle drug of clean water for over-exploited regions of the world. Futurists talk about longevity medicine to distract us from the raising of the retirement age for majorities who aren't living longer. Futurists talk about nano-abundance and 3D-printer treasure piles to distract us from wealth concentration by elites. Futurists talk about digital democracy to distract us from surveillance, spam, financialization, crowdskimming, and zero comments.

Resisting Futurological Assimilation

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, in response to this comment by longtime friend of blog "jollyspaniard":

[T]he UN isn't running the models in and of itself. Their reports are the result of a political process which has been repeatedly criticised by climate scientists. Humankind has been making climate forecasts since stonehenge. The druids weren't futurists they were guiding people in the here and now. Agriculture requires some foreknowledge to plan effectively. As to climate science some scientists would still be doing some of this research even if AGW wasn't a factor, albeit with a lot less resources, interest, urgency or controversy.

Your first sentences make points that are very well taken -- the provenance of UN reports wasn't my focus, but obviously I agree with you, and I even think the force of your right observations lends weight to what has been my focus, namely the complexity of technodevelopmental social struggle and the indispensability of proper political analysis (of a kind which futurology rarely is and often actively disdains) to any understanding of these struggles or facilitation of progressive outcomes of them.

As to your latter points, I caution great care. It is important to preserve the distinction between pseudo-science and science in the defense of science especially when pseudo-scientists who claim to be champions of science manage to rewrite science in the image of their pet pieties, just as it is important to distinguish criteria of warranted belief proper to the separate domains of belief especially when reductionist fundamentalists who claim to be champions of reason declare such pragmatic pluralism to be relativism.

Precisely because futurological discourses have commandeered so much of the terminological and conceptual terrain of the "scenario," "forecast," "foresight," "vision," and so on we need to be more careful than hitherto in making glib references to forecasting and foreknowledges in legitimate knowledge production. Again, as I have now repeatedly said over the course of these exchanges -- and that isn't impatience you are hearing, but gravity -- every legibly constituted discipline produces suggestive models and every legibly constituted discipline has a foresight dimension precisely because an understanding of phenomena changes expectations, conduct, priorities, plans.

But the just-so stories of techno-transcendental futurology in the Robot Cult that preoccupy so much of my attention should be regarded as the revealingly pathological extremities of what are in fact utterly mainstream techno-fixated techno-fetishistic techno-triumphalist neoliberal and neoconservative developmental discourses, from marketing, to policy-making, to corporate-military rationalizations for exploitation and stratification. It is crucial to understand the underlying assumptions, energizing aspirations, enabling conceits of these discourses (an understanding facilitated by grasping their essential character as derivative literary and extreme marketing genres in my view) and it is also crucial to resist accommodating or assimilating to them in their prevalence in an easy bid for legibility at the cost of supporting reductionism, determinism, eugenicism, death denialism, productivism and a host of other pernicious false idols of our epoch.

That's why I stress these apparently abstruse points so much.

Memetics Re-Invents the Wheel of Rhetoric, and Then Breaks It

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot to yesterday's post, "Esebian" asks: Wouldn't you say today's state of the concept "meme" is like that of the "gene" in the 1890s; there's hints that there is a mechanism of information transfer, we just can't figure out any specifics?

Well, no, if I'm understanding your question correctly, I wouldn't say that. Memetics isn't some promising fledgling discipline to be fleshed out into a predictively powerful account of cultural dynamism after a century of diligent researchers scan and stimulate enough brains or whatever. The "meme" is a futurological neologism, a buzzword, a superficial repackaging scheme -- and with the usual wannabe guru huckster PR in play, I'm afraid -- through which ignoramuses have been pretending to re-invent the wheel of rhetoric for a generation. The connection of the meme to the gene you mention is of course deliberate, and it represents a fundamental mis-analogy: historical vicissitudes and social struggle are so radically under-determined by evolutionary processes as to be irrelevant to them, they provide a few general constraints and pressures but don't take you where any of the real action is. The problems here are comparable to evo-devo and evo-psycho foolishness I sometimes deride here as well, and it isn't accidental that the adherents of the one are often also cheerleaders for the other. (I'm setting aside here the more recent and more specific characterization of the meme as a kind of hieroglyph in which a static or briefly moving image -- often already mass-mediated and familiar -- is fixed to a caption, often an ironic one, and then circulates rapidly and widely in media briefly to capture the fancy or express the momentary mood of a large cohort of individuals. I have no quibble with the choice of the word "meme" to describe such a media phenomenon, precisely because it lacks the pretension of the prior elaboration of the notion.) Rhetoric has always been the facilitation and analysis of discourse, and much contemporary critical and cultural theory is best understood as its ongoing elaboration. You will forgive me if I do not summarize that content here -- it takes me four whole undergraduate courses to survey the basics of the field for my students in the Rhetoric department at Berkeley. I do not include any "memetic" nonsense of the last two decades or so in that body of criticism, since memetics brings nothing actually new or useful to the table (believe me, I've looked). It is a far clumsier analytic vocabulary for historically situating discourse or specifying its stakeholders or dynamisms than philology provided theorists well over a century ago, for heaven's sake. Indeed, apart from the pseudo-provocative pep of the initial neologism itself memetics adds the idiocy of a reductive mis-analogization of signification to a biology itself already idiotically reductively mis-analogized to computer programming via the pieties of cybernetics/information science. There are, of course, plenty of ugly ideological reasons that digi-utopians pining to have their info-souls uploaded into Holodeck Heaven and market fundamentalists with crap to sell the rubes would consider all this a feature and not a bug of the meme qua cult(ure)-bug -- after all, most of them disdain and fear the insights arising from proper rhetoric in any case.

The Mirage and the Material of Technoscientific Progress

An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light. -- Raymond Kurzweil, "The Law of Accelerating Returns"

Needless to say, not every analysis of history is quite so sensible or so reliable as every other. While there have indeed been magnificent discoveries that have improved healthcare outcomes as well as great political struggles in the service of democratic equity-in-diversity, the conventional European civilizational progress narrative seems to me mostly a cover for centuries of criminal theft, accumulation, and exploitation, rationalized with racist pseudo-science and hypocritical punitive plutocratic moralizing. The genocidal "manifest destiny" thesis of the American nineteenth century emerged out of this tradition, but I think it is important to grasp that the American exceptionalism of the World Wars and especially the postwar Washington Consensus involved a key technocultural inflection of this narrative, an erroneous mis-identification of civilization as such with the inflation of a fraught and fragile petrochemical bubble (much that otherwise seems quite befuddling about the conduct of the Axis powers becomes immediately clear once we grasp World War II as a skirmish of competing fledgling petrochemical industrial superpowers over oil and gas resources -- as has too much of history since then as well), within which a host of consequent "technological" bubbles were inflated in turn -- redemptive nuclear abundance, suburban car culture, ubiquitous plastics, the illusory "Green Revolution" of high-energy input-intensive petrochemically fertilized and pesticized industrial monoculture, "immaterial" information-computation-digitation powered by fossil fuels and accessed on petrochemical devices, and so on.

The deceptive rationalization for predation that narratives of progress have long amounted to in substance, but also the more specifically technocultural deceptions of the last century provide what seem to me to be the indispensable context out of which influential futurological pronouncements like Raymond Kurzweil's "Law of Accelerating Returns" have emerged and from which it derives most of its rhetorical force and intuitive plausibility.

According to that "Law" -- which is just an empty stipulation rationalizing abuses and enabling wish-fulfillment fantasies -- a whole host of "evolutionary systems" actually eventually "tend" to change exponentially. Of course, this apparently rather straightforward conceptual object, "technological change," would have to content with and corral together an incomparably dynamic ramifying explosion of historical vicissitudes in all the many disparate and yet often variously inter-related efforts of competitive and collaborative scientific, engineering, problem-solving imagination, research, discovery, funding, publication, testing, application, marketing, distribution, appropriation, reaction, education, regulation of and into artifacts and techniques resulting from the interminable struggles of the diversity of stakeholders to each. That Kurzweil wants to describe this historical scrum as an "evolutionary system" reminds us of the extent to which popular science and technology discourse has come to misconstrue evolution in its zeal to provide simple explanations as well as to find "naturalizing" justifications for otherwise unjustifiable parochialisms and prejudices -- as witness the facile and ugly racism and misogyny rationalized by "evopsycho" and "evodevo" pseudoscience as well. Not to put to fine a point on it, historical, economic, cultural phenomena simply are not "evolving" in the proper biological sense and the loose mis-analogization of the two fields -- prevalent and consoling though it may have become to so many -- falsifies not only the historical, economic, and cultural accounts to which it is applied but of evolutionary dynamics as well. And in much the same way, Kurzweil's attribution of intelligence to non-intelligent machines in the formulation has no substance apart from the denial of the real dignity and the real demands unique to the incarnated intelligence of living beings actually existing in the world.

When I declare that Kurzweil's thesis is utterly nonsensical but derives a false plausibility from its citation of an archive of familiar self-congratulatary justifications for privilege, it is amusing to note that my claim will not only seem wrong but also paradoxical to Kurzweil's deluded fandom -- this is because central to Kurzweil's own formulation of it, the accelerationalization thesis will presumably seem counter-intuitive to most people because their puny human brains evolved to cope with local and linear relations rather than kick-ass exponential entrepreneurial innovation, and one needs to be a techno-utopian sooper-genius like him or be a member of a singularitarian transhumanoid Robot Cult to overcome such limitations, or, gosh, at least be a blissed out gizmo-fetishizing hyper-consumer standing in line for the next glossy toxic landfill-destined gew-gaw while your world burns.

To these observations, I will add just two more, each a more specific application of the general case above: First, as a factual matter, a more proximate inspiration for Kurzweil's so-called Law is Gordon Moore's famous observation (pause on that word, if you will) in 1965 that over the relatively short history of computer hardware development so far, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. Moore's Law as an expectation that Moore's parochial observation will continue to hold true, or will accelerate interminably, amounts to an article of faith among many who are deeply invested, come what may, in more messianic understandings of the role of software programmers in human history -- indeed the Kurzweilian Law is best understood as a generalization to all technodevelopmental fields of endeavor of something like Gordon Moore's observation, perhaps justified by the premise that the application of these very computational improvements to other fields will yield comparable improvements. Needless to say, I regard Moore's "Law" itself as a skewed perspectival effect and that it fails even on its own terms, since, to quote Jeron Lanier, "As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources."

Second, as a normative matter, I continue to insist that "accelerating change" is little more than what increasing precarity in increaasing numbers of lives resulting from neoliberal corporatism and neoconservative militarism looks like from the rarefied perspective of its beneficiaries (or those dupes who wrongly fancy themselves its potential beneficiaries). Techno-triumphalist progress narratives remain, as ever, plausible mostly to the few who benefit from predation and exploitation and useful mostly to the few who desire rationalizations for predation and exploitation.

True technoscientific progress is the furthest thing from natural, inevitable, or even predictable, since it is primarily a matter of public investment in the solution of ever more shared problems in which the distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change are made to be ever more equitably distributed among the diversity of stakeholders to those changes through a process of social struggle as interminable as is the process of discovery and invention itself.

Smart Homes Are Stoopid

Kashmir Hill at Forbes:

The home automation market was worth $1.5 billion in 2012 according to Reuters; there’s been an explosion in products that promise to make our homes “smarter.” The best known is Nest, a thermostat that monitors inhabitants’ activity, learns their schedules and temperature preferences and heats or cools the house as it deems appropriate. Many of these products have smartphone

["smart" phone --d]

apps and Web portals that let users operate devices, cameras, and locks from afar. Getting to live the Jetsons’ lifestyle has downsides though;

[a futuristic lifestyle which, it should be noted, people in "smart" homes are not actually living even when their mostly useless truly crappy remote control light-switch gizmos ARE working --d]

as we bring the things in our homes onto the Internet, we run into the same kind of security concerns we have for any connected device... Googling a very simple phrase led me to a list of “smart homes” that had... an automation system from Insteon that allows remote control of their lights, hot tubs, fans, televisions, water pumps, garage doors, cameras, and other devices, so that their owners can turn these things on and off with a smartphone app or via the Web... Their systems [were] crawl-able by search engines –- meaning they show up in search results -- and due to Insteon not requiring user names and passwords by default in a now-discontinued product, I was able to click on the links, giving me the ability to turn these people’s homes into haunted houses, energy-consumption nightmares, or even robbery targets. Opening a garage door could make a house ripe for actual physical intrusion... Sensitive information was revealed -- not just what appliances and devices people had, but their time zone (along with the closest major city to their home), IP addresses and even the name of a child;

[The Footure needs children! --d]

apparently, the parents wanted the ability to pull the plug on his television from afar. In at least three cases, there was enough information to link the homes on the Internet to their locations in the real world. The names for most of the systems were generic, but in one of those cases, it included a street address that I was able to track down to a house in Connecticut. I could have wreaked serious havoc with this home... The Insteon vulnerability was one of many found in smarthome devices by David Bryan and Daniel Crowley, security researchers at Trustwave. Bryan got one of Insteon’s HUB devices in December, installed the app on his phone, and began monitoring how it worked. “What I saw concerned me,” he said. “There was no authentication between the handheld and any of the control commands... “You could put someone’s electric bill through the roof by turning on a hot tub heater” ... Insteon chief information officer Mike Nunes... blamed user error

[of course he did! So, you will recall, did the HAL 9000 --d]

for the appearance in search results, saying the older product was not originally intended for remote access, and to set this up required some savvy on the users’ part. The devices had come with an instruction manual telling users how to put the devices online which strongly advised them to add a username and password to the system. (But, really, who reads instruction manuals closely?

[Indeed, like user agreements, most of the manuals are written in the expectation that they will not and possibly cannot be read -- but still provide plausible deniability and shifts of responsibility for costs and failures on those who suffer rather than enable them --d]

Insteon says the problem has been fixed in its current product but affected users were never informed that this vulnerability existed

[gosh, why should they be informed how their technofetishism has made them more vulnerable to home intrusion, kidnapping of their children, skyrocketing utilities bills, and gizmos that not only don't do what you pay for them to do but also make other gizmos that used to work not work anymore, you know, because the sooper-geniuses at some tech company have made your house "smart" with stoopid software? --d]

“I’m excited these technologies exist but am heart-broken that these security flaws exist,” says Trustwave’s Crowley.

[After all who ISN'T excited to discover that entrepreneurial capitalism is still producing useless crap that turns out not only to be useless but actively menacing? --d]

He and his colleague found security flaws that would allow a digital intruder to take control of a number of sensitive devices beyond the Insteon systems, from the Belkin WeMo Switch to the Satis Smart Toilet. Yes, they found that a toilet was hackable. You only have to have the Android app for the $5,000 toilet on your phone and be close enough to the toilet to communicate with it... Another problem with some of the devices, such as the Mi Casa Verde MIOS VeraLite, is that once they’re connected to a Wi-Fi network, they assume that anyone using that network is an authorized user. So if you can manage to get on someone’s Wi-Fi network -- which is easy if they have no password on it -- you could take control of their home. “These companies are considering the home network as a fortress,” says Crowley. “In most cases, it’s anything but.”

Needless to say, the tech companies peddling this crap will insist that all these problems (and the endlessly many other problems like them that will never stop appearing) are isolated and fixable instances within a broader, irresistible tide of techno-emancipation. What is conspicuous throughout this piece is the extent to which a discussion of real problems caused by real networked devices is infused with fantasy. There is no such thing as "artificial intelligence." Given what we actually know about actual intelligence and given what we can actually do with actual technique, there is no more reasonable expectation that humans will craft an artificial intelligence any time soon than that we will be contacted by an extra-terrestrial intelligence any time soon. Even when they manage to work more or less as they are expected to do "smart" phones, "smart" cards, "smart" homes, "smart" cars, "smart" appliances aren't the least bit smart. They do not exhibit intelligence -- indeed, their design is usually rendered incomparably less intelligent precisely by the ideological investment of their designers in fantasies that gizmos will indeed one day BE intelligent as they are in the science fiction worlds they prefer to our own, that their designs should pretend to be intelligent now so that they and their users can likewise pretend to be living the science fictional worlds they prefer to our own. Despite its skepticism and focus on problems the piece is nonetheless full of utterly fantastic and metaphorical conjurations that invest it in a futurological hyperbole that facilitates credulity and distraction from problems: recall the conjuration of a "Jetson's lifestyle" nobody is living even when these techno-gewgaws work, recall the "excitement" of a hacker at the thought that "these technologies exist" even as he exposes the glaring flaws and false promise of these very technologies, recall the mirage of building a mighty material "fortress" of immaterial code through the paradoxical opening up of the doors and wires and walls of the home to the remote access of countless millions of networked strangers. I am hard pressed to think of a single outstanding way in which any of these new networked applications justify their expense even when they are working properly -- especially given the brittleness of these complex novelties as compared with the perfectly serviceable locks and switches and handles that have worked so well for so long before futurological flim flam artists peddled their useless wares to the bored bourgeois brats of the digital generation as "convenience" and "smartness." Like most "technological" discourse, the "smart" home is activating fantasies to distract attention from realities in the service of short-term parochial profit-taking by suave con artists many of whom are high on their own supply. The truth smarts.

The Superlative Summary

I write quite a lot here at Amor Mundi about the damaging and deranging impacts of futurological discourses on sensible deliberation about technoscientific change. I focus on the pernicious effects of both the prevailing corporate-militarist futurology of neoliberal global developmentalism and disciplinary bioethics as marketing, policy-making, and ideological discourses, but also the Superlative Futurology championed among the so-called transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, digital-utopians, nano-cornucopiasts, and other pseudo-scientific techno-transcedentalists whom I like to lampoon as "Robot Cultists."

There is considerable overlap between these mainstream and superlative futurological modes, both share a tendency to reductionism conjoined to a (compensatory?) hyperbole bordering on arrant fraud, not to mention an eerie hostility to the materiality of the furniture of the world (whether this takes the form of a preference for financialization over production, or for the digital over the real), the materiality of the mortal vulnerable aging body, the materiality of the organismic brains in which intelligence is incarnated, among many other logical, topical, and tropological continuities.

The characteristic gesture of superlative, as against mainstream, futurological discourses is that they tend to commandeer worldly concerns like basic healthcare, education, economic, or security policy, say, and then redirect them (in a radically amplified variation on conventional marketing and promotional hyperbole) into faith-based discourses and interpretive communities peddling not just the usual quick profits or youthful skin but promising personal techno-transcendence modeled in its basic contours and relying for much of its intuitive plausibility on the disavowed theological omni-predicates of especially judeochrislamic godhood (omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence), now translated instead into pseudo-scientific terms (superintelligence, supercapacitation [especially in the form of super-longevity or techno-immortality], and superabundance). Adherents of superlative futurology across the organizational archipelago of Robot Cult sects are indulging, in essence, in faith-based initiatives. They are infantile wish-fulfillment fantasists who fancy that they will "arrive" at a personally techno-transcedentalizing destination they denominate "The Future."

In this Superlative Summary I provide a survey of pieces written over many years criticizing particular futurologists and particular futurological topics. For a more concise elaboration of my critique of Superlativity, I recommend either my essay Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains, published by the journal Existenz, or the more general and humorous introduction provided by my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.

TOPICS:

Accelerationalism/Inevitability

Set Theory for Futurists
Accelerationalism
From Future Shock to Future Fatigue
Superlativity and Its "Bigger Picture" (do read the comments)
From "The Great Stagnation" to a Great Awakening
The Unbearable Stasis of Accelerating Change

Advertizing/Marketing "The Future"

Futurological Genres
"The Future" As Ad and As Cult
Futurological Mad Men

Algorithmic Mediation

All Watched Over By Algorithms of Loving Grace
The Inevitable Cruelty of Algorithmic Mediation

Artificial Intelligence

Roko Oh Noes: Banging My Head Against the Wall With A Singularitarian GOFAI Dead-Ender
Hannah Arendt on AI
Depopulation, Nor Personification
A Comment on Artificial Imbecillence
Robot Cultists Still in the Woods Without A Compass
Paul Krugman Flirts With Futurism
Robot Gods Are Nowhere So Of Course They Must Be Everywhere
Futurology's Shortsighted Foresight on AI
AI Isn't A Thing

Artificial Meat

Saving My Bacon
Meat Brain Futurology: One More Time On the "In-Vitro Meat" Merry Go Wrong
Nourishing Nothingness: Futurists Are Getting Virtually Serious About Food Politics

ARTS -- Artificial/Assistive/Alternative Reproductive Technologies

Technoprogressive ARTS
Keep Your Laws Off My Body

Big Data

Spectacle From Marx to Debord to Big Data
Big Data As Idol

Cloning Neanderthals

Futurologists Welcome Our New Neanderthal Neighbors

Conservative/Reactionary Futurology

Democracy at the Transhumapalooza
The Ayn Raelians
The Anti-Democratizing Politics of Superlative Futurology
Futurology Is the Quintessential and Consummating Discourse of the Unwholesome Whole That Is Neoliberal/Neoconservative Corporate-Militarism
"Revolutionary" Robot Cultists
"The Future" As A White Boy's Club
"The Future" Is Not Fairly Distributed
The Suicidal Sociopathy of the Tech Sector

Crime and Punishment

Robot Cultist Rebrands Torture and Dreams of Futuristic Prisons As Virtual Hells

Cryonics

Those Curious Cryonaughts
Robot Cultists Want to Eat Science And Have It, Too
Robot Cultists Exploit Dying Woman to Peddle Pseudo-Science and Threaten Critics
Cryo-Kitsch and PR
Alcor Techno-Immortalists Failing to Freeze Out Critics

Cultism

A Transhumanist Files a Complaint in the Hurt Feelings Department
No, You're the Cultist!
Must I Really Weigh In On "The Cult Debate"?
An Open Letter to the Robot Cultists
A Robot God's Apostle's Creed for the "Less Wrong" Throng

Cyborgs

Am I Going To Become A Cyborg In the Future?
Performance Artist and Sousveillance Activist Steve Mann Assaulted in Paris McDonalds
Calling Bullshit on the World's First Cyborg Hate Crime

Deathism

My Deathist Zealotry
More on My Apparent Deathism
Mortality
The Fallen World and the World to Come; Or, Techno-Utopians Give 'Em That New-Fangled Religion
Death, Diarrhea, and Dingbats
Are Techno-Immortalist Robot Cultists the Real Deathists?

Designing Retro-Futures

Designs Us On: Some Basic Contentions on the Politics of Design
The Politics of Design. The Anti-Politics of Design.
Gizmuddle: Or, Why the Futuristic Is Always Only Perverse

Driverless Cars

"Driverless" Cars As Dead-Ender Car Culture Apologia
Driverless Car Not As Prophesy But As Allegory
Google Unveils Driverless Car Future in Driverless Bus Present
The Dreamtime of the Driverless Car

Enhancement/Eugenics

Disability Discourse As Moralizing
Two Variations of Contemporary Eugenicist Politics
Eugenics and the Denigration of Consent
Transhuman Eugenicism
Is Transhumanism Racist?

Existential Risk

Technology and Terror
GWOT Against Green
Futurological Fearmongering
Insecurity Theater: How Futurological Existential-Risk Discourse Deranges Serious Technodevelopmental Deliberation
Very Serious Robocalyptics

Fandom

Far Out
The Fandom Menace

Foresight

Futurological Blah Blah
What Futurology Is Peddling Has Little to Do With Foresight

Flim Flam

"The Future" Is A Racket
Science, Not Sales
Those Faddish Futurologists
Fraud Is the Futurological Common Denominator

Future Shock

Future Schlock Credulity Levels

Futurological Methodologies

Hannah Arendt on Futurology
What Do Futurologists Do?
The Scenario Spinners

Geeks, Geekery, Geekdom

Raised Vulcan Eyebrows and Hopeless Human Hopes
Geek Rule Is Weak Gruel: Why It Matters That Luddites Are Geeks
Techbros Are Not Geeks

Geo-Engineering

More Geo-Engineering
"Geo-Engineering" As Futurological Greenwashing
"Geo-Engineering" Is A Declaration of War That Doesn't Care About Democracy
"Geo-Engineering" and the Ticking Time Bomb
"Geo-Engineering" As Right Wing War and Revolution
What Are People Really Talking About When They Talk About "Geo-Engineering"?
Exxon-Mobil's "Geo-Engineering" Discourse Is Just More Futurological Greenwashing
Is "Geo-Engineering" Really Just Gardening?

Guns

Stand Your Ground As Secessionist Treason
On Guns (Only) in America

Innovation

Against Innovation

Immaterialism

Markets Without Materiality
Everything Solid Melts Into Laissez-Faire
Futurological Immaterialism and Neoliberal Immaterialism

Liberal Futurology

Technoprogressive: What's In A Name?
Futurological Self-Marginalization, Futurological Dissemination
Against the Seduction of the Left by Reactionary Futurology
Facile Futurology at Talking Points Memo -- And What Is So Dangerous About It
TPM Doubles Down on Facile Futurology
The Ambivalence of Investment/Speculation As the Kernel of Reactionary Futurology
The Futurological As Reactionary Point of Entry in Liberal Discourse
Ah, Good Times!
BooMan on the Futuristic Roll Out
The Political Problem of Transhumanism

Longevity

Aubrey de Grey, Technological Immortalism, and the Idea of a Longevity Singularity
Interminable Terminological Hanky-Panky
Follow the Bouncing Ball... to Techno-Immortality!
Reactionary Fruits of Futurology: Social Security Edition

Memetics

Memetics Re-Invents the Wheel of Rhetoric, and Then Breaks It

Moore's Law

Learning from Lanier's Inverse Moore's Law
My Little Steampony Singularity
The Mirage and the Material of Technoscientific Progress

Morphological Freedom

The Politics of Morphological Freedom
Eugenics and the Denigration of Consent
Morphological Freedom Should Be A Political Expression of Human Finititude, Not An Infantile Revolt Against It

Nanotechnology

Nanosantalogical Feasibility

Optimism

My "Negativity"
Positive/Negative
Optimist or Pessimist? A Futurological Ramble, With Occasional Ranting
Accentuate the Negative
But Why So Negative?
The Relentless Negativity of Futurological "Positivity"
Deception, Delusion, and Denial Isn't Optimism

Nuclear Energy

Mo Nukes
No Nukes Twitterscrum

Patriarchy

Technology Is Making Queers of Us All
"Post-Gender" Or Gender Poets?
Transhuman Transsex
What Is Patriarchy?
Anarcho-Anti-Sexist Robot Cultist Decides Feminism Is Too Hard, Declares Himself A Robot
Uploading As Reactionary Anti-Body Politics

Pay-to-Peer

Pay to Peer
p2p is EITHER Pay-to-Peer OR it is Peers-to-Precarity
Pay to Peer Twitterant

Posthumanity

Posthuman Terrains
What "Becomes" Post Humanity?

Private Space Industry (also see Space Travel)

Enter the Dragon: Why I Am Not A SpaceX Space Vegas Space Cadet
SpaceX Space Cadets Predictably Crowing Mars, Bitches!
Dumb Daily Dvorsky: Musky for Mars Edition
Proposed Mars One Game Show Is the Ultimate "Anti-Survivor"
The Voice of Libertopian Space Takes Me To Task

Progress

The Mirage and the Material of Technoscientific Progress

Proxy Politics

Chimera
Futurological Displacements

Pseudo-Science

Superlativity Exposed
Futurology's "If Magic Were Real" Paradox
Gaming the Refs in the Robot Cult
Robot Cultist Condemns Scientific Illiteracy On Which Robot Cultism Depends

Racism

Robot Cultists Have Seen the Future... And It Is A White Penis!
Is Transhumanism Racist?

Robot Workers

Futurological Defenses of Automation, Outsourcing, Crowdsourcing, Precarizing Labor

Science Fiction

Why Do Libertopians Love Science Fiction So Much?
Mass Mediated Hand Holding: Depressive Bioconservative Cinema and Its Manic Technophiliac Twin
"Science Fiction Is the Entertainment Wing of Futurism"
"Smug Atheists" Should Read More SF Counsels io9
What Futurology Does To Science Fiction
Why Is Science Fiction A Literature of Ideas?
Techbro Mythopoetics

Separatism

Dispatches from Libertopia: Going Galt on the High Seas (To Infinity and Beyond!)
Nauru Needs Futurologists!

Sexbots

"Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again,"
Jumping the Shark to Boobtopia
The Sexy Sexbots

Singularity

"The Singularity Won't Save Your Ass"
Singularitarian Agony
Debating Singularitarians
Roko Oh Noes: Banging My Head Against the Wall With A Singularitarian GOFAI Dead-Ender
My Response to the Counterpunch Expose of Singularitarianism
Singularitarian Hype and the Denial of History
At the Heart of the "Financial Singularity" Is Not Mystery But Fraud
Singularitarian Declares Victory, Goes Back To Bed 
Nicholas Carr on the Robot God Odds

"Smart" Homes

Smart Homes Are Stoopid

Space Travel (also see Private Space Industry)

Quick, Futurological Escapists, to the Lifeboats!
Robot Cultist Adds Two Fantasies Together To Arrive At Third Fantasy
Robot Cultist Pout and Stamp; Or "Manifest Destiny"
There Is No Escape Hatch

Subculture

Technoprogressivism Is a Tide, Not a Tribe
"Technoprogressive": What's In A Name?

Superlativity

A Superlative Schema
The Superlative Imagination
Understanding Superlative Futurology
Superlative Futurology (Published by Re/Public)
Topsy-Superlativity
"Technological Immortalism" As Superlative Discourse
Transhumanism Without Superlativity Is Nothing

Surveillance

From my dissertation, Pancryptics

The Discretionary: Secrecy, Privacy, and Control (on the Crypto-Anarchists and Cypherpunks)
XI. From Privation to Discretion
XII. Description As Threat
XIII. Privacy Under Control
XIV. Digital Libertarianism
Markets With Eyes (on David Brin's Transparent Society)
I. Either/Or
II. Eye Infinitum
III. Truths to Power
IV. Neither/Nor

Zuckerberg's Privation
Farhad Manjoo's Camera Reassura
A Twitter Privacy Treatise (Considerable elaboration takes place in the Moot.)
All Watched Over By Algorithms of Loving Grace
Commodifying Publicity
Cop-Cam Sham: Political Problems Demand Political Solutions

Techno-Fixes

Technofixated Pseudo-Solutions
Cop-Cam Sham: Political Problems Demand Political Solutions

Techno-Immortalism

"Technological Immortalism" As Superlative Discourse
All Humans Are Mortal. Socrates Is Human. Therefore, Socrates Is Mortal.
Rebel, Rebel: Death-Denialism As "Utopian" Politics
Robot Cultists Polled on Preferred Techno-Immortalist "Options"

Technology "As Such"

Futurological Reification, Reduction, Reaction
Prologue for Futural Politics
"Technology" Is Not A Force for Either Liberation or Oppression
The Futurological Fetish
Technology and Myth

Transcendence/Infinitude

Transformation Not Transcendance
On Limits
"Overcoming the Limits"
Technoprogressive Discourses As Against Superlative Technology Discourses
No Limits! (And Other Foolishness)
Loss, Connection, Transformation
Understanding Superlative Futurology

3D-Printing

Some Serious Questions for Futurologists Hyperventilating About 3D Printing
Daily Dumb Dvorsky: Butt Hurt Edition

Uplift

Animal "Uplift"
"The Future" on the Planet of the Apes

Uploading

Martine Rothblatt's Artificial Imbecillence
Some Questions For A "Mind Uploading" Enthusiast
For Robot Cultists Heaven Is Being A Cartoon In An Ad for Crap That Never Ends
What's Wrong With Terasem?
Richard Jones: No Uploads for You!
Uploading As Reactionary Anti-Body Politics

Wearable Computers

Tragic Techbrofashionistas of The Future Put. A. Phone. On. It!

The Wright Brothers Gambit

Cranks
They Laughed at the Wright Brothers, Too!
Another Robot Cultist Compares Self to the Wright Brothers
"Heavier-Than-Air Flying Machines Are Impossible," Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Giving Transhumanoid George Dvorsky "Credit Where Credit Is Due"

I have written lots of pieces ridiculing the ridiculous futurological stylings of transhumanoid George Dvorsky, especially since he was offered a comparatively high profile pundit-perch at io9 (for a representative sampling of my Dvorscatology scroll down to his entry in the Superlative Summary), and it shouldn't have been surprising given this focus that several people have directed my attention to a recent piece of his in which he manages to say a few things that are not quite so stupid among some other things that are still pretty stupid, Is Human Super Intelligence A Bad Idea? Shouldn't I give credit where credit is due, each of these sympathetic readers have asked me, proffering the link over and over again? I mean, a variation on that phrase, "credit where credit is due" literally appeared in every single one of these referrals to Dvorsky's piece. What gives?

You know, I'm not sure I am willing to concede that "human super intelligence" is even an idea at all, let alone a good one, and so it doesn't seem to me that creditable an advance to declare it conceivably a bad one when it comes to it. I am truly glad for Dvorsky's own sake as a fellow finite earthling that he has found his way at least momentarily to the realization that what gets called "intelligence" in the AI-deadender set he frequents tends to be a scrawny affair at best, indifferent to so much of the lived emotional embodied historical socialized richness of intelligence as it plays out in the real world. Nevertheless, the obvious fact remains that lots and lots of people already say all the sensible things Dvorsky has managed to say to this effect in the piece in question without saying any of the idiotic things he also says here and definitely endlessly elsewhere and yet I'm not sure we're giving them any credit for saying so much more so much better though presumably they deserve such credit at least as much as he does.

Also, you know, I don't happen to think futurological disasterbation about transhumanoid tropes (reductive understandings of intelligence may lead to a Robot God that eats us all instead of a Robot God who kisses away all our boo boos!) really is the least bit more helpful or serious in the way of thought than the more usual techno-utopian wish-fulfillment futurological mode about transhumanoid tropes. I personally think it is inherently deranging to misconstrue problems of user-unfriendly software or network insecurity as problems of unintelligent or malevolently intelligent designed entities rather than of unintelligent or malevolent designer entities. I haven't exactly made a secret of the fact that I think the whole discourse of artificial intelligence is a sprawling inapt inept metaphor yielding a harvest of artificial imbecillence all around. Dvorsky's assumption in this piece of a kind of futurological moderate middle pausing momentarily over a few serious AI problems is a pose -- it mostly functions to circumscribe the whole discussion of intelligent software and network design within the tropological field of artificial intellects that nourishes the worst futurological fancies in the first place. Not only is it not enough to declare oneself "pro" or "con" or "middle of the road" on questions of the Robot God or concerning the Writing on the Wall in current software and network problems that presumably foretell His Robotic Be-Coming -- I happen to think that never ever taking up any of these positions at all is the best way to have a chance at saying anything sensible about real world computation. Let's just say it's one more science-fictional game for which the only winning move is not to play.

And about science fiction... As almost inevitably happens in a George Dvorsky piece, there is once again an accompanying image from a mainstream Hollywood science fiction flick providing the proscenium into what passes for the futurological theatrum philosophicum he offers up this time around as well. I just can't repeat this enough. There is a difference between science fiction and science practice, there is a difference between science fiction and science policy, there is a difference between science fiction and science criticism. I say this as someone who is a huge science fiction fan, as someone who takes science fiction enormously seriously, and as someone who takes literary criticism seriously, too. I readily agree that like so much great literature science fiction assumes a critical and imaginative vantage on the quandaries of the present, including moral and metaphysical and sometimes even technical quandaries concerning the vicissitudes of emerging technoscience and ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle. But the actual practice of science, the actual practice of regulation, funding, and distribution of technoscientific costs, risks, and benefits in research settings and policy-making settings, as well as any kind of sustained and systematic critical analyses or even documentation of technoscience practices has actual standards and emerges out of actual discursive archives. One can quibble around the edges, one can point to occasional cross-pollinations, one can note that none of these things is really only one thing, one can elaborate complex historical trajectories and contexts for them all, but these efforts are all different from science fiction in ways that make a difference. If George Dvorsky wants to be taken for somebody doing serious or even not so serious philosophy of technology or technnology criticism or literary criticism or technoscience policy or, hell, even science fiction fandom -- every one of which are perfectly legitimate and legible endeavors of which I personally whole-heartedly approve -- well, he is doing it wrong, and I can't set that aside just because he manages a smidge of sense in public for once.

Okay, and another thing. In the column, Dvorsky quotes life-long self-identified transhumanists like Mark Walker (as he has done for James Hughes or Mikey Anissimov in other recent pieces of his), never pointing out that these are people who are affiliated with him through his own membership in transhumanist organizations, pretending they are independent intellectuals in order to raise their public profiles. Sometimes he even has transhumanists gamely stumble upon the topic of "transhumanism" as though they were outside observers or something, as if anybody but transhumanists themselves (and a handful of weird critics like me) really talk about transhumanism as if it were this widely known, you know, "thing" that comes up among technoscientifically concerned intellectuals when they're just hanging out and shooting the breeze. Your mileage may reasonably vary on this question, but I personally think it verges on journalistic malpractice for Dvorsky to fail to point out his connection to the muckety-mucks in his own cult he is flogging this way. Dvorsky's columns in io9 are almost always straight up transhumanoid Robot Cult proselytizing for techno-transcendental techno-immortalizing sooper-humanizing consumer-paradising malarkey. And that's fine. I mean, it's terminally stupid and dangerously distracting, but, you know, you say your stupid shit and I say it's stupid shit and then people say I'm a stupid shit for saying it's stupid shit or what have you -- let a bazillion flowers bloom. But I think when Dvorsky is not just indulging in his pet ideology but stealthfully shoring up marginal institutions and organizational ties beholden to that ideology then there is a conflict of interest in play that should be seen for what it is -- and I do think if Dvorsky were a Scientologist or a Raelian doing this sort of blatant sub(cult)ural logrolling it would be exposed as such and impact his credibility (such as it is).

Howzabout this? If io9 comes to its senses and cuts Dvorsky's mic, I'll give credit where credit is due.

Unintelligent Intelligence at the NSA and Kafka's Funhouse Mirror-Stage

"We got hacked by the hacker we hired to hack? That's unpossible!" #NSABrainTrust

Will we be saved from total information awareness by its total incompetence everywhereness?

Killer clowns like Nixon's Plumbers were real, soopergroovy soopergeniuses with soopercomputers like Penelope on Criminal Minds are fiction.

Mass-mediated misrepresentation of state intelligence as omnicompetent techno heroes or villains derange proper responses to their dangers.

Kafka, "Give It Up!"

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the railroad station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized it was already much later than I had thought, I had to hurry, the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way, I was not very well acquainted with the town yet, fortunately there was a policeman nearby, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: 'from me you want to learn the way?' 'Yes,' I said, 'since I cannot find it myself.' 'Give it up, give it up,' said he, and turned away with a great sweep, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.

This has always been my favorite variation on the scene of interpellation, and the one that prefigures most perfectly and painfully in its apparent inversion the actual scene that would play out for Althusser the murderer in the streets of Paris rather differently than it did in his imagination for Althusser the theorist. When hails ring out from the crowd in all directions, echoing off the walls and in our imaginations, we turn and turn and turn and find ourselves more dizzy than docile... As in the more famous parable "Before the Law" we co-construct the state that subordinates us in pining for its recognition, a phony democratization that yields indifference to our difference, but also exposes a fatal imposture always opening onto possibilities for a more substantial democratization of state responsiveness to responsible peers. Kafka keeps giving us Althusserian ideological apparatuses in stately drag playing out a funhouse mirror stage. And, yes, it is much later than you think.

I am far from meaning to diminish the crimes or the dangers of our burgeoning bludgeoning blundering corporate-militarity surveillance state, forever framing neoliberal subjects as targets of potential prosecution, advertizing, drone strikes. In both its assumptions and its aspirations total information awareness is literally totalitarian (and whatever it happens to be naming or un-naming itself from moment to moment, total information awareness is always the program, always the fever dream), and totalitarianism is never something to sneeze at. But it is crucial to refuse the futurological mystification of the agency of technocratic seeing, listening, penetrating. If the future is unevenly distributed, it is wrong and reactionary and demoralizing to assume The Future accretes in particular in the hard chrome dildo of an omnicompetent cyborg state. Secretive spy spaces in which conventional stupidity, greed, corruption, and threat flourish are quite dangerous enough, thank you very much, but they aren't exactly unprecedented and they aren't exactly the sorts of things for which ready remedies might not be applied. There are, after all, no self-evident observations or narratives, the amplification of observation doesn't converge on the real so much as it ramifies narratives, the objectives overdetermine the objects, the stratification of the scene of observation promises openings even as it threatens closures. And so on. No power without resistance, right? There is far too much dread and dreaming of destinies and demons and divas in our discourse over the disclosures of our unintelligent intelligence operations right about now.

A Comment On Irony

I've been too teachy-weedy for much blogging lately, and that is likely to remain true for a bit. The end of one summer intensive session, the beginning of the next: hectic. A student (no names, must protect the innocents) raised a question on the course blog that has sometimes come up as a topic here as well. Might as well post the exchange here as well, if only as a placeholder for the blogging I could be doing if I weren't so busy at the moment.

A student asks a question (which I had already answered, and differently, in class) and then quotes as an authority something they found online. This sort of thing comes up rather often, as you might imagine:

What's the difference between verbal irony and sarcasm? In both, words are used to convey the opposite of their literal meanings. Linguist John Haiman has drawn this key distinction between the two devices: "[P]eople may be unintentionally ironic, but sarcasm requires intention. What is essential to sarcasm is that it is overt irony intentionally used by the speaker as a form of verbal aggression" (Talk Is Cheap, 1998).

To this I responded:

I must say I disagree with this formulation, but more than that, to be very clear, I would consider it an error if this formulation was used in a paper as the basis for a reading that is taking figurative sarcasm or irony into account.

A sarcastic utterance definitely does not affirm its literal content, but sarcasm doesn't inevitably convey the opposite of its literal content either, as irony does.

If you respond sarcastically to a question, "yeah, sure" this doesn't necessarily mean "no," it can convey a lack of enthusiasm or confidence in a "yes" that is still more a yes than a no.

Irony remains the classic trope of reversal, it is an assertion of denial through the literal assertion of affirmation. Irony then is the master trope here, given the actual rhetorical tradition, where sarcasm, like hyperbole and litotes, are reasonably treated as variations related to that master trope.

I think there are two more confusions in this formulation.

First: Irony is, of course, a trope that has been widely abused and drained of substantial content -- perhaps most famously in the old Alanis Morissette song premised on the false and facile definition of "ironic" meaning "crappy things that happen" -- and people now often use the word "ironic" to describe unpleasant or unexpected outcomes.

Presumably this looser understanding of the ironic is contributing to the idea of "unintentional irony" in this quotation -- the idea that irony can be an attentional artifact, a way of assuming a perspective on things. In such a case it is no longer appropriate to describe this as "a device" in the rhetorical sense Haiman uses here. Devices are pretty much intentional qua devices -- though you can make a case for a more capacious and symptomatic understanding of the intentional if you want to do, though that is hardly what seems to be happening in the passage in question.

Second: I think the introduction of the term "verbal" here as a special kind of irony (maybe?), and re-appearing as a qualification in the conjuration of a scene of "verbal aggression" seems to confuse the issue here a bit, since intonation as the vehicle through which sarcasm is communicated verbally may simplify the complexity of contextual cues often so indispensable to communicating irony and sarcasm in the written texts.

"Thank you for the clarification," replies the student, to which I append the lesson:

No problem -- needless to say, on this as on so many questions, the debate rages on among scholars. Synecdoche is also roiled by high stakes conflict of this sort. (Was that last sentence an example of irony or of sarcasm?)

What say ye?

Iain Banks on Immortality: "How Californian"

Via Pharyngula, h/t -- JimF, some especially apt words on people who pine after perpetual life from the last interview of the mainly marvelous, much mourned, only a moment ago mortified Iain Banks:

I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you’re just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it’s not about you. It’s what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. ‘Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs’ -– oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not.

Speaking of How Californian, specifically in the California Ideology sense of Californian, remember that techno-transcendentalists of the techno-immortalizing sort pining after sooper-human post-human robot bodies and nanobotically-bolstered bodies and uploaded digi-angelicized cyber-bodies in Holodeck Heaven are very much of a piece with the pathologizing religiosities Banks is properly pooh-poohing here, with the difference that many of these latter are among his most ardent, if misguided, fans.

The "Mixed Economy" Isn't A Mix, It Is "Ideal" Capitalism and Socialism That Are Mixed Up

The metaphor of the "mixed economy" is absolutely mystifying.

The idea of sustainable, consensual equity-in-diversity, of democratic commonwealth, is not a "mix" but a coherent political vantage, a political being democratic processes experimentally implement and a political becoming at which democratic struggles aim.

What tend to be called "capitalism" and "socialism" are, it seems to me, very much to the contrary, historically unrealized and logically unrealizable derangements of either the diversity dimension or of the equity dimension of the democratic value of equity-in-diversity. That is to say, it is the prior conceptions of "capitalism" and "socialism" that seem to me to be mixed, if anything, historical and practical misapprehensions and dodgy implementations of consensual multiculture, democratized association, sustainable commonwealth. 

And hence, the contractual arrangements to which moral cases for capitalism are devoted will always depend for their actual legibility as consent on a substantial provision of general welfare and socialization of common and public goods typically denominated socialism from those argumentative vantages, just as anti-authoritarian cases for (eg, democratic) socialism will inevitably allow for differences of preference and outcome typically denominated capitalism from those argumentative vantages. This is not because modern societies have been mixes of socialism and capitalism historically, I think, but because the democratizing struggle for sustainable equity-in-diversity is the political substance from which capitalist and socialist abstractions are strained and deranged in the first place.

Again, I think it is what passes for capitalism and socialism in thought that is mixed up, the "mixed economy" in practice is not a mixture of these two derangements from good sense. 

Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them -- and that includes having a say in matters such as who are these people? what constitutes a proper say? of what does the public actually consist? and just who is affected by what that demands an accounting? There is no single regulative or ideal democratic form, but only endless efforts at implementing and struggling over the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them. And the politics that matter most are the politics of anti-democratization against the politics of democratization, where anti-democratization seeks to restrict the people who have a say and the force of what they say to the benefit of incumbent-elites and where democratization is simply the struggle to enable ever more people to have ever more of a say in what affects them.

It has now become a commonplace for apologists for incumbent interests to respond to questions of public policy -- such as whether this dangerous practice should be regulated or whether that publicly useful infrastructure project should be funded -- by replying that we "should let the market decide" the matter. Such responses are predicated on ignorance -- more actively, on ignoring -- the fact that there is no such thing as "the market," really, that what passes for "the market" from epoch to epoch is an ever changing constellation of laws, norms, contingencies of geography and history, infrastructural affordances, and systems of signification. To an important extent "the market" derives from decisions we make, and to endow this result of our decisions with the power to make decisions for us, tends to amount to a relinquishment of decision to those who are already beneficiaries of the status quo naturalized as what passes for the moment as the dictates of "the market."

All of this is just to point out, that quite a lot of what we take for granted, treat as tidal forces supply and demand outside ourselves with which we struggle to cope and accommodate and exploit, are in fact public decisions that affect us about which democratic politics may demand we should have a say. When basic definitions of capitalism we find in elementary textbooks and basic dictionaries declare capitalism a system in which the means of production are privately owned and investments result from private decisions, the collective normative infrastructure on which such claims of ownership and the selective public allocation on which the legibility of such decisional authorities depend are disavowed.

Democratizing politics seek to secure equitable lawful recourse for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes (including disputes over what properly constitutes violence and equity and democracy); work to facilitate nonviolent transitions in authority through periodic elections, universal enfranchisement and office-holding and freedom of assembly and expression; have long struggled to provide a scene of informed, non-duressed consent to the terms of everyday commerce through the provision of generous welfare (universal basic income -- possibly via piecemeal provision of social security, long-term unemployment insurance, a living wage, public grants for IP commons, compensation for public exposure to environmental/medical risks -- healthcare -- possibly via piecemeal provision of veterans healthcare benefits, medicare, subsidized insurance, medicaid expansion, medicare for all -- education, civil rights) all paid for by progressive income, property, and transaction taxes, counter-cyclical deficit spending, and bond issues; and would eliminate the violation of common and public goods through their accountable administration in the service of commonwealth. The ongoing generational churn of the plurality of stakeholders who make up the present world ensures that the ongoing accomplishment of equity-in-diversity is endlessly renegotiated, re-enacted, re-figured. (For more on why taxes are not theft see this; for more on basic income see this; for another formulation of left versus right basics see this.)

All of these ideas have been implemented in comparatively democratic welfare states -- many of them have been implemented less well lately due to the influence of facile, falsifying capitalist and socialist ideologies, and most of them could be implemented incomparably better simply if the process and spirit of stakeholder compromise were to prevail (which you might say is another "mix" that isn't actually a mixture at all, but the substantial if interminable accomplishment of reconciliation of which the political actually, essentially, consists).

But while I have focused most of my disdain here on political systems that call themselves "capitalist" -- though there have been and are many quite importantly different capitalisms historically and presently, colonial, industrial, financial, and so on -- this is mostly just because my own country thinks of itself as such a system, and the crimes of perils of that system appall and implicate me in ways that demand response. But, once again, I do not think there is a pure "socialism" with which capitalism is being mixed and ameliorated in the better welfare states. The socialization of public and common goods facilitates their accountable administration and provides for a legible scene of consent to the terms of everyday commerce. The democratization of economic and ecologic life better describes what remains alive in the fraught history of socialist struggle and aspiration to me. Socialization is not an end in itself but a means to the end of Democratization. That socialism worth fighting for is democratic socialism, and it is its democracy that makes it so. 

Plutocrats Always Fancy Themselves Meritocrats (Also, a Brief Digression on IQ As Rationalization for Plutocracy)

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, from an ongoing exchange with a self-declared champion of aristocracy:

It is true that important knowledge can be counterintuitive -- the sun doesn't travel around the earth (even though it really does look that way), governments should borrow more to stimulate the economy in recessions especially when interest rates are at the zero lower-bound (even though proper intuitions from household economics suggest the reverse), micro human actions can catastrophically impact macro global climate systems (it hardly seems possible, people being so small, the world being so big, and yet it is true), one can lower aggregate healthcare costs by providing them universally (everybody benefits from distributing social costs across a whole population across generations, not just THEM), social policy works much better when it focuses on harm-reduction rather than on punishment (even tho' it sure feels nice to punish with the law, it can't be wrong when it feels so right, eh?), and so on. Education is necessary for an informed citizenry as well as for competent administration of public affairs, these things are not automatic.

To declare as you do that people should be assigned to government at random -- apart from freeing you from having any skin in the game when it comes to making actually existing governance actually better since such thought-experiments without any constituencies will never even remotely happen to produce results to hold you accountable -- also demonstrates a mistaken disdain for the work of administration and legislation fairly typical of right-wing ideology. The same goes for your reduction of governance to "services" paid for by fees, as if commonwealth is a commodity which it very much is not. My point is not to deny that there are some things that are commodities, nor to denigrate ownership of or trade in them or fairly widespread microeconomic models for talking about such trade. But there really is a difference that makes a difference between private goods (and also that obscure uncle, the "club good") as against public and common goods. Reductions of the second pair to the first -- or the other way around I just as cheerfully concede -- yield injurious confusions and catastrophic policies.

The availability of non-violent arenas for the adjudication of disputes -- including over the determination of what counts as violence -- is not a commodity, equity in access to law and in the accountability of law-making to all is not a commodity, the maintenance of a scene of informed, nonduressed consent to the terms of everyday concerns is not a commodity, a community of healthy, well-educated, non-precarious potential collaborators confident in the laws, norms, infrastructural affordances of their society is not a commodity, a sustainable planetary ecosystem of the sort humans evolved to flourish in is not a commodity -- these are all goods, but not private goods, they are public and common goods. You declare me "illogical" in making such distinctions and proceeding in my arguments and formulations in ways that take these distinctions into account. There is no nice way to point out that you are saying this because you simply have a profoundly mistaken and impoverished understanding of politics.

I do not doubt you are educable, but as of now you certainly don't strike me as particularly superior in the way of intellect -- quite apart from the question of your morals, which look to be conspicuously inferior, given the ugly inequities and violent evils you seem willing to countenance in support of your errors. You speak endlessly of the "better" people, the "smarter" people who should run things, and the "dumb" people and "inept" people who muck everything up. All this idiotic business of yours over IQ tests is the worst in this line of BS that has you ensorcelled, it's truly embarrassing, I'm not even going to dignify that stuff with comment, but it is really just the awful extreme edge of your general self-congratulatory elitism. You know, privileged people always think they have it better because they are better -- this doesn't mean they are all bad but they are usually mostly wrong. The conception of intelligence in plutocratic bioreductionist IQ discussions is always radically impoverished, usually implicitly self-congratulatory, often demonstrably racist. You don't have to take my word for it, and this is the sort of thing I won't spend too much of my time arguing about because it is even more unutterably depressing than the other topics I take up here. Look, there's good and bad in everyone. In general, people seem to me to be capable of good and bad things.

A Corpsicle's A Corpse, Of Course, Of Course

It will come as no surprise to Amorous Mudyites that a high-profile (in a big fish, small pond kinda sorta way) transhumanoid trio is casting their Pascalian wager on faithly techno-immortality rather than in the more conventionally faithly forms of judeochrislamic resurrection. The Daily Mail's snark on the subject is nonetheless a welcome note in the news today, oh boy.

They were a shattered world’s last hope -- three great minds from the past who might be able to avert a catastrophe that threatened to extinguish mankind... It’s difficult to say whether this sort of Hollywood sci-fi scenario ever occurred to three Oxford University dons when they signed up to be frozen after death. [Believe me, it did -- d] It was revealed yesterday that the trio -- Nick Bostrom, professor of philosophy at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, and his fellow lead researchers, Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong -- have agreed to pay a U.S. company anything up to £50,000 to have their remains frozen at death. The hope is a future society will have the technology to restore them to life. Armstrong has arranged for his entire body to be frozen by the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute. His wife is expecting their first baby and he is so enthused by the idea that he wants to sign the child up, too. His two colleagues have opted for the less glamorous but cheaper and supposedly more reliable option of having just their heads frozen when they are declared dead, by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation outside Phoenix, Arizona. Their heads will be perfused with a cocktail of antifreeze chemicals and preserved in liquid nitrogen at -196c... Previous acolytes of cryonics have often been dismissed as head-in-the-clouds cranks, sci-fi buffs who have watched too much TV or victims of vanity. Britney Spears and Paris Hilton have both waxed lyrical about being frozen. Simon Cowell is believed to be among several dozen Britons who have joined a cryonics programme, although several hundred have reportedly shown interest... But Prof Bostrom and his colleagues are young, highly educated specialists who have devoted their careers to humanity. If they are signing up for cryonics, one might think, perhaps we should all pay attention.

Uh, no. If the article seems to suggest that this brave new generation of deluded cryonauts are distinguishable from sci-fi buffs of the past they need only make momentary recourse to the Google to be disabused of this fancy -- not to mention the fact that at least some members of this transhumanoid brigade have been cryonically enthused for at least a quarter century by now: The new generation is the old generation, which is par for the futurological course. Further, the suggestion that these futurologists are not vain because they have "devoted their careers to humanity" (what, more than Britney Spears has done?) is likewise hard to square with their efforts to divert public attention and effort away from global financial and environmental and arms regulation into concerns over sooper-intelligent robot apocalypses, nano-magickal insta-Edens, the need to consume and "geo-engineer" our way past climate change, and how all the mean liberals keep getting in the way of the nice eugenicists. You know, for kids!

To those who would wag their finger at such hate speech directed to a religious minority in a land that guarantees freedom of belief, you may be sure that I do not begrudge these futurologists the human, all too human, consolations of their faithly dreams -- after all, they are not so very different from the private perfections and crutches I cherish myself as an atheistical aesthete when all is said and done. But you will forgive me when I insist on the difference between articles of faith and scientifically warranted beliefs, a difference the maintenance of which is indispensable to the flourishing of both faith and science, as any theologian worth his salt will be the first to tell you. Fandoms are fine, I'm a queergeek myself, but consumer marketing isn't political activism, wish-fulfillment fantasizing is not science, pseudo-science is not a sign of seriousness, and con-artists are not humanitarians even when they are high on their own supply.

Googlenature

Also published at the World Future Society.

In a recent conference promoting not only their latest gizmos but their company's animating vision as well, Google executives declared they were working toward a future in which technology "disappears," "fades into the background," becomes more "intuitive and anticipatory." Commenting on this apparently "bizarre mission for a tech company," Bianca Bosker warns that their genial and enthusiastic promotional language masks Google's aspiration to omnipresence via invisibility, an effort to render us dependent and uncritical of their prevalence through its marketing as easy, intuitive, companionable. I agree that there is something to this worry, but it is important to be very clear about it.

There is, paradoxically, nothing more "natural" than for our artifacts and techniques to vanish as "technologies" from our view as they grow familiar. It is a commonplace to point out that most of the time we do not attend to the feeling of our clothes against our skin -- and that we might go a bit mad were to notice this sort of thing all the time -- but it is also true that through our utter habituation to seeing and wearing clothes we no longer think of them as the "technologies" they happen to be. Technique, artifice, and ritual artifice suffuse our lives and worlds, all culture is prosthetic just as all prostheses are culture. That we think of only a fraction of culture as "technology" when all of it can be so thought indicates that the discourse of "technology" as such is to an important extent a register of familiarization and defamiliarization, naturalization and denaturalization, attention and inattention.

To the extent that "technology" is a conceptual site marking our ongoing elaboration of collective agency -- our effort to do things that matter together and to say what we are doing in a way that makes sense to each other -- it is not so surprising to find that those techniques and artifacts among so many that we explicitly think of as "technological" tend to be those that resonate with fears and fantasies of agency in particular: devices to amplify our strengths, to deliver our deepest desires, to disrupt the assumptions on which we imagine we depend, to threaten catastrophes out of our control. Daydreams of wish-fulfillment and nightmares of apocalypse utterly prevail over the technological imaginary, in everyday talk of technical anxieties and consumer desires, in the popular tech press, in advertising imagery, in science fiction entertainments, in Very Serious think-tank position papers on global investment and development, and so on.

This insight about "the technological" points a definite political moral. Since nearly everything about our made world has been different than it is now, could be different than it is now, and surely will be different than it is now, then whenever we treat the furniture of this contingent and open now as natural, as inevitable, as necessary, as logical, as the best of all possible worlds, as the best that can be expected, as normal we invest the status quo with an irresistibility and force that it could never accomplish or maintain on its own. And when we invest the status quo with this force we do so at the cost of our own power (to change together the terms on which we live in the made world with one another). It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that those who benefit from the naturalization of the status quo are always those who preferentially benefit from its customary arrangements, whatever their inequities or irrationalities may be.

There is, of course, a special force in those ritual and material artifacts that would function as a fundamental interface through which we explore the made world and so set the terms on the basis of which we form our sense of what is natural and what is artifactual in the first place. Bosker's particular worry is that Google's product is just such an interface, even a kind of ultimate interface, a framing of experience through a selective annotation and curation of our exploration of the world as such, through the satisfaction on their terms of our "search." Thought of this way, the unnamed ambition in Google's vision to "disappear" is that it would naturalize through prevalence the very terms on which nature and non-nature are produced as such, and on terms that preferentially benefit Google's interests. Put this way, as I say, Bosker's point is an important one.

But there is not, nor could there be, one interface imposing the will of any singular constituency unilaterally upon the made world, whatever Google's competitive ambitions may be, whatever any fundamentalist's moralizing conviction may demand. Indeed, the very language of competitive prevalence that drives Google's discourse attests to their own naturalization of social conventions that are contestable and actually under contest in ways that are as likely to bedevil their vision as implement it. For one thing, you cannot slap a Google logo on that which is invisible, and it is hard not to notice that Google's endless crowing about their ambition to ubiquity is somewhat at odds with the silence of realized ubiquity. Considered on such terms, Google's behavior is indeed rather "bizarre… for a tech company." But that hardly means this behavior is not also fairly typical. The prevalence through which Google would presumably disappear into nature attests paradoxically both to the wishful but usually disavowed tendency toward monopoly in market orders as well as to the competition in which "all that is solid melts into air" (and hence is de-naturalized). Also, more particularly, Google's repeated testament to the aspiration to prevalence through "intuitive" and "person[able]" interfaces in particular signals that, like so many tech companies, they are uncritically invested themselves in the serially failed and utterly facile ideology of artificial intelligence, with what consequences to their ambitions nobody can finally say.

All this is just to say that Google did not code and does not own the interface through which they interface with their interface. It is not just what we think of as our language, but also our laws, our pricing conventions, our ways of signaling subcultural identifications and dis-identifications through sartorial and other lifeway choices, our architectural environment and infrastructural affordances that all encode and enforce moral, esthetic, political judgments. Understanding this is key to grasping the force of Bosker's point, but it also reminds us of the ineradicable plurality of these frames, their irreducibility to one another, and hence the final impossibility of a foreclosure of the open futurity inhering in the present. Just as it is important critically to interrogate the specific values encoded in our laws and affordances with what specific impacts to which specific stakeholders, it is important to interrogate the values, impacts, stakes in criticizing them. Criticality, like science more generally, depends equally on an acceptance that any belief can be up for grabs, but also that all beliefs cannot be up for grabs at once and certainly not belief as such. There is political force both in the ways material and ritual norms and forms settle into "nature" as well as in the ways they can be unsettled into "artifice."

It is not an accident that Bosker turns in her article to the expertise of a representative of the transhumanist think-tank IEET for guidance in thinking through the ultimate significance of the Google interface. Transhumanism assumes an essentially theological narrative vantage over the vicissitudes of technoscientific change, but technoscientific progress toward sustainable equity-in-diversity insists on the diverse determination and equitable distribution of costs, risks, and benefits of such change to its plural stakeholders in an ongoing democratic process of technodevelopmental social struggle. There is undeniably a reactionary politics in our uncritical acceptance of the status quo of the owned interface (be it of faith, or of legislation, or of browsers or search engines) or indeed of any plutocratic prevalence over the made and shared world, but there is a reactionary politics as well in our uncritical acceptance of an alien author of disruption, transcendence, apocalypse. Acquiescence to the fantasy that Google -- or whatever passes for the avatar of a monolithicized "technology" of the moment, Ford, IBM, Microsoft, the Pentagon -- is authorized to deliver totalizing techno-transcendence or techno-apocalypse is to divest ourselves of our authority to contest and produce the uses and meanings investing that made, shared world. Fantasies of total techno-transformation by alien powers (the history-shattering Robot God of the singularitarian transhumanists is merely the most obvious variation on the theme) function as a techno-supernaturalization of human history no less reactionary than the more customary naturalization of the plutocratic status-quo in which tech companies also have their hand.