Science Fiction Is Not Agitprop For Your "The Future"

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, "JimF" snarks about an interview in the transhumanoid magazine humanity-plus -- so if you don't get it, you're obviously "humanity-minus" like me -- portentiously (obviously) entitled, Transhumanist Science Fiction: The Most Important Genre the World Has Ever Seen? (An Interview with David Simpson). In this piece, "science fiction author, transhumanist, and award-winning English literature teacher" David Simpson talks about "his Post-Human series (which include the novels Sub-Human, Post-Human, Trans-Human, Human Plus, and Inhuman) [which] is centered on the topics and interests of transhumanists." We are told that "David is also currently working with producers to turn the Post-Human series into a major motion picture."

All this is of world shattering importance because the hoary sfnal conceits predictably tumbling in these superlative fictions like socks in a dryer (reconceived, you will have noticed as "topics and interests of transhumanists," that is to say reconceived as legitimate scientific/philosophical objects and political/policy stakes for legible constituencies -- neither of which they remotely are) are imagined here to function as educational, agitational, and organizational agitprop fueling a movement that will sweep the world and materially bring about "The Future" with which that movement identifies. In other words, the usual stuff and nonsense.

"JimF" notices a family resemblance of these earthshatttering "notions" with those already available in, for example, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and Alien (and I will speak of Star Trek in a moment), although he takes an ironic measure of reassurance in the fact that the attention spans of modern audiences would no doubt require even literal remakes of these classics to be embiggened and ennobled by the introduction of kung-fu and car chase sequences.

Anyway, "JimF" connects these dreary ruminations on (counter-)revolutionary futurological propaganda films with the recent hopes of Chris Edgette to Kickstart a film called I's about the usual futurological is that ain't, telling the story of the rather Biblical Workweek from the day a supercomputer that "wakes up" (how original! how provocative! you really gotta hand it to him) and then snowballs in days into the Rapture/Apocalypse of the Singularity. You know, rather like Left Behind for New Age pseudo-scientists.

Or, The Lawnmower Man -- AGAIN!

Rather like Randroids who seem to keep pinning their hopes on the next Atlas Shrugged movie sweeping the world and bringing the masses to muscular greedhead baby jeebus, so too the pale stale males of the Robot Cult really truly seem to keep thinking that the next iteration of The Lawnmower Man won't only not suck but will bring on the Singularity at last.

Anyhoozle, "JimF" is clearly on the same wavelength when he snarkily wonder whether futurological propaganda pedagogues and hopes of the world like David Simpson and Chris Edgette haven't had most of their thunder stolen by now what with the megaflop of Transcendence, the limp sexism of critical darling and popular meh Her, and the forgettable racist amusements of Lucy.   

But, if those recent sf retreads could steal transhumanoid singularitarian agitprop thunder, personally I can't for the life of me conceive why Star Trek hadn't already stolen their thunder irrevocably before they even started. Needless to say, uploading (in well over a dozen eps), sentient robots/computers, genetic (and ESPer) supermen, better than real virtualities, techno superabundance were all explored as sfnal conceits in Star Trek.

But also needless to say (sadly, no, this obviously needs saying), none of these sfnal conceits originated in Star Trek either, they were each citations in a popular and popularizing sf series of widely and readily available tropes.

Quite beyond the paradoxical figuration of the brain dumbing mind numbing stasis of their endlessly regurgitated futurological catechism as some kind of register "shock levels" and "accelerating change" (or even the "acceleration of acceleration"!) -- a paradox not unconnected with the skim-and-scam upward fail con artistry of tech startups describing as "disruptions" their eager amplications of the deregulatory looting and fraudulent financialization of the already catastrophically prevailing neoliberal status quo -- it really is extraordinary to grasp how superannuated the presumably shattering provocations of the Robot Cultists really turn out to be, the most ham handed reiterations of the most stock sf characters and conceits imaginabl

 

Just as Star Trek explored current politics allegorically (notoriously sometimes somewhat clumsily) in many sfnal plots, so too their explorations of the sfnal archive were in my view reflections in the present on the impact of ongoing sociocultural forces (materialism, industrialism, computationalism) on abiding values and notions of identity and so on.

 

Like all great literature, sf at its best comments on the present, on present problems and possibilities, and the open (promising, threatening) futurity that inheres in the present. Of course, plenty of authors and readers may have said that their good sf was about "The Future," but this confused locution often obscures the ways in which their work actually engaged futurity in ways that exceeded authorial intentions and understanding. I will go so far as to say that no great sf has ever been about "The Future," predictive of "The Future," agitprop for "The Future. Of course, extrapolation is a technique in the sf toolkit (as in the satirist's and the fabulist's), but predictions and hypotheses and the rest never make for great or even good sf: To read sf as prophetic agitprop for parochialisms denominated "The Future" always reveals a crappy writer or a crappy reader. 

 

Star Trek actually did and does still inspire mass movements -- but surely not all or even more than a few of its fans thought or think their enthusiasm for the specificities of the show's characters or plots or furniture, or even for the secular scientific liberal multiculturalism of its values, expect that they constitute somehow the kernel of a literal proto-federation that will bring its inventions into existence through the shared fervency of their fandom at conventions.

 

I often chide transhumanoids as pseudo-scientific scam artists peddling boner pill and anti-aging kreme scams but amplified from late-nite infomercials to outright phony religions faith-based initiatives. But I also often chide them as consumer fandoms of the particularly crappy sf genres of the corporate press release and the futurological scenario.

 

As to the latter, it seems relevant to point out that the problem of the transhumanoids isn't that I think they have terrible taste in sf (anybody who gets off on Toffler, Kurzweil, and venture capitalist spiels has execrable taste whatever their other character flaws) it's that they are an sf fandom predicated on not even getting what sf is about at the most basic level. 

 

Star Trek was not predicting or building a vision of "The Future," but exposing the futurity inhering in the diversity of beings in the present, reminding us of the wonder and promise and danger of that ever-open futurity, understanding that its audience corralled together a diversity out of whom also-open next-presents would be made. Like all true sf, like all true literature, Star Trek solicits our more capacious identification with the diversity of beings with whom we share the present world, the better to engage that diversity in the shaping of shared present worlds to come.

 

Champions of science -- who treat science as pseudo-scientific PR and faith-based techno-transcendentalism? Sf fandoms -- who don't even get that sf is literature? Is it any wonder these clueless careless dumbasses think they are the smartest guys in any room?

Cameras Don't Tell Us The Truth

We tell cameras the truth.

Is George Lucas A Barbarian?

George Lucas:

People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society.

Lucas refuses to allow the National Film Registry to preserve the actual 1977 version of Star Wars, pretending that the version that had an impact none of his subsequent solo efforts ever did or ever could was unfinished. His endless larding of films with crappy videogame CGI and infantile slapstick gags and leaden fanwanking exposition to render his whole bloated execrable saga consistent may indeed finish the film for good. I found the original film enjoyable -- and it actually mattered to me as a kid who watched it in a theater on my twelfth birthday on a screen the size of a football field. Of course, the prequels are literally unwatchably bad, and in consequence Return of the Jedi now seems mostly unwatchable as well, as forgivable missteps in that movie now seem like anticipations of the awfulness of the prequels and so have gotten retroactively implicated in their crimes (the camp resonance of a few moments -- like "It's a trap!" -- and, of course, the Emperor's scenery chewing evil monologues alone save the movie for me), and at this point the bullying sexism in The Empire Strikes Back makes long stretches of the best in the bunch nearly unwatchable for me too. Lucas can do what he wants with his movies, of course (the opening quote refers to the profitable colorization of classic films by those who did not have a hand in their making), but the original Star Wars was a cultural phenomenon. That really happened and archivists and historians shouldn't have to contend with Lucas' bad taste and elephantine ego in doing their work of doing justice to that reality. Once released into the world, the world has its way with our work, the changing receptions of the work collaborate in the significance of which it is capable. All actually relevant and living works of art are unfinished in this way. Lucas' effort to control the circulation of his best work is of a piece with the amplifying awfulness of the rest of his work -- closing himself off from the world he contributes less and less worth taking up by the world. The world will win this contest, and when Lucas vanishes it will the archivists and historians and critics he disdains who will be the likeliest to save the trace of his part in the contest that might live in worlds to come.

Arturo Galster, R.I.P.

SF Bay Guardian

To call seminal SF perfomer and alpha theater aficionado Arturo Galster merely a "drag queen" is to do his range -- from the legendary Vegas in Space movie and pitch-perfect live-sung Pasty Cline interpretations to his recent technicolor turns with the Thrillpeddlers -- a disservice. But his name will always call to mind that moment in the late '80s and early '90s when SF's drag scene unmoored itself from polite old school diva kabuki into a squall of gloriously punky, ironic camp.

Richard Jones Critiques Transhumanism

Richard Jones has been a sympathetic critic of superlative futurology for years, and his training and research makes him the rare scientist who can engage transhumanists in the "technical debates" they cherish. Most who are qualified to indulge in these debates either don't take the transhumanists seriously enough to give them the time of day and almost all the rest are already True Believers whose science was acquired and is selectively filtered in the service of their futurological faith. Richard Jones (like Athena Andreadis and a handful of others) can marshal devastating scientific critiques of techno-transcendental pretensions, but crucially remain intrigued enough by the social and cultural dimensions of futurological discourses and subcultures to remain engaged with them. Jones has recently offered the beginnings (he promises that there is more to come, and that seems to me promising indeed) of such criticism in a piece contextualizing pseudo-scientific futurological extrapolations in an apocalyptic religiosity lending itself to technological determinism over at Soft Machines:

Transhumanists are surely futurists... And yet, their ideas, their motivations, do not come from nowhere. They have deep roots, perhaps surprising roots, and following those intellectual trails... we’re led back, not to rationalism, but to a particular strand of religious apocalyptic thinking that’s been a persistent feature of Western thought... Transhumanism is an ideology, a movement, or a belief system... The idea of transhumanism is associated with three predicted technological advances. The first is a vision of a radical nanotechnology as sketched by K. Eric Drexler, in which matter is effectively digitised... the route to the end of scarcity, and complete control over the material world. The second is a conviction -- most vocally expounded by Aubrey de Grey -- that it will shortly be possible to radically extend human lifespans, in effect eliminating ageing and death. The third is the belief that the exponential growth in computer power implied by Moore’s law, to be continued and accelerated through the arrival of advanced nanotechnology, makes the arrival of super-human level artificial intelligence both inevitable and imminent. I am sceptical about all three claims on technical grounds... But here I want to focus, not on technology, but on cultural history. What is the origin of these ideas... The connection between singularitarian ideas and religious eschatology is brilliantly captured in the phrase... “Rapture of the Nerds” ... A thoughtful transhumanist might well ask, what is the problem if an idea has origins in religious thought? ... The problem is that mixed up with those good ideas were some very bad and pernicious ones, and people who are ignorant of the history of ideas are ill-equipped to distinguish good from bad. One particular vice of some religious patterns of thought that has slipped into transhumanism, for example, is wishful thinking... If you think that a technology for resurrecting dead people is within sight, we need to see the evidence. But we need to judge actually existing technologies rather than dubious extrapolations... This leads me to what I think is the most pernicious consequence of the apocalyptic and millennial origins of transhumanism, which is its association with technological determinism. The idea that history is destiny has proved to be an extremely bad one, and I don’t think the idea that technology is destiny will necessarily work out that well either. I do believe in progress... But I don’t think... [it] is inevitable. I don’t think... progress... is irreversible, either, given the problems, like climate change and resource shortages... I think people who believe that further technological progress is inevitable actually make it less likely.

I do not doubt that many singularitarians and transhumanists will declare Jones' concluding verdict false, insist that they think positive futures are far from inevitable, and explain that the whole point of their membership organizations is to facilitate better outcomes. This is why they devote so much of their energy to existential risk discourse and coding friendly AI and so on. Quite apart from the curious fact that so much of this "organized activity" amounts to titillating collective rituals in soft-porn techno-terror and techno-paradise navel-gazing, I daresay Jones would point out that the "concrete concerns" of superlative futurology with mind-uploads, desktop drexler boxes, superintelligent code, robot and clone armies, various runaway goos provide the figurative furniture (in what sense are any of these concerns really "concrete" at all?) rendering more real, more necessary, more intuitive, more natural the deeper assumptions and aspirations and conceits fueling their futurological faith. Ultimately, what futurologists deem and need to preserve as "inevitable" is the gesture of a repudiation of the open futurity inhering in the diversity of stakeholders to the present through the projection of and identification with parochial incumbencies denominated The Future. The specificities of the techno-transcendental catechism, whatever they may be from futurist to futurist, proceed from there.

Spectacle From Marx to Debord to Big Data

First being degraded into having, then having degraded into appearing, and now appearing degraded into targeting....

We have arrived at the "targeting" phase of Spectacle. In the specifically digital-networked Spectacle since the turn of the millennium -- after which mass-mediation is no longer defined by broadcast and press publication -- what Debord called the Opium War of "enhanced survival" (his condensation of the Benjaminian War Machine in the Epilogue of "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility" with the Adornian "manufactured needs" of the Culture Industry chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment) has given way to a micro-targeted marketing harassment promising to confer both legibility and individuation for consumer/partisan subjection, an operation absolutely continuous with at once the Big Data profiling framing every subject for eventual legal prosecution and the biometric profiling tagging every subject for ongoing medical experimentation (digital networked bioremediation by Big Pharma) and/or eventual effective targeting by drone (the drone is synecdochic for the range of collateral damaging demanded by disaster capitalism).

Quite relevant to this telling of the tale is Naomi Klein's latter day elaboration of the Debordian account back in No Logo, in which an advertizing practice originating in the false individuation of mass-produced consumer goods via the brands they bear eventuated in the global/digital moment in the false individuation of mass-consumers via the brands they buy. As in Debord, the degrading of already degraded having into "appearing" seduces spectator-subjects through something a bit like Althusserian interpellation, offering up social legibility, usually by means of subcultural signaling of identifications and dis-identifications, through the citation -- via conspicuous consumption -- of already-available scripts and stage-settings (the grownup living room on the glossy cover of a furniture catalog, the rebellion of a concert t-shirt, the romance of over-expensive coffee, the reassuring daydreams of futurological projections and displacements).

There is a threat inhering in the Althusserian hail -- yes, a threat to rather than resource for hegemonic management -- should just enough hails ring out (hey, you, hey, You, hey, YOU!) the subject turning and turning and turning to meet the would-be authority might be left more dizzy than docile -- might even make the reflective turn of thought-made-act to which Arendt looked for a last miraculous hope of redemption from  tyranny. But is this threat recontained (or rendered more efficient, in case the threat was never more than delusive anyway) in the targeted hail of the networked-data profile? Can we resist the authoritarian hail of the profile that authors you for you? The Big Data Hail scans the iris and the gait and the buying history and the message trail and the credit rating at once to collapse the indetermination of multiple readings depriving you -- in a privation yielding a last vestige of privacy -- of the singular selfhood that becomes the target, knows enough more than you about you do to aggregate the into the heavy hand of the Spectacle, a knowing so authoritative the transferential brute-force alone at hand might re-write you in the image of the profitably congenial profile before you know enough to know it?

We're Another Step Closer to Growing the Post Office Into Low-Cost Banking

David Dayen writes in Salon today about the improving prospects for a great idea I've written about wistfully here from time to time:

Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee which oversees the Postal Service, previously called postal banking “unacceptable” and a “massive expansion” of government power. But now, the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee... finally held hearings for four nominees to the Postal Service Board of Governors... For most of the Obama Administration through to today, Republicans held a majority on this board thanks to multiple vacancies. But confirming these nominees would equalize the representation at four Democrats and four Republicans (the President still needs to nominate a replacement for an additional vacant seat, which would give Democrats the majority). This would put the pieces in place that could make postal banking a reality... Democratic nominee Vicki Kennedy -- Ted’s widow -- did say... “I think it also important to look at the possibility of expanding into related business lines,” and that the post office needed the “regulatory flexibility to take advantage of opportunity and innovate when it is in the public interest.” Postal banking serves that capacity... 1 in 4 American households with little or no access to financial services need a convenient, cheap banking option, so they don’t continue to get gouged by... payday lenders and check-cashing stores. Another Democratic nominee, Stephen Crawford, cited the Inspector General report on postal banking directly during questioning. “We see a lot of foreign postal services make some money on that,” Crawford correctly pointed out... “If I were on the board, that’s an area I would give special attention to.” ... Even more momentum comes today from a full-day conference in Washington on postal banking... Speakers include Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Issa and Postal Service Inspector General David Williams... The unbanked favored the post office making available prepaid debit cards by 38%-9%... And a large majority said they would be likely to use lower-cost versions of these services: 81% would go to the post office to cash checks, 79% to pay bills and 71% as an alternative to payday loans... “There’s a lot of interest if they can use postal services at a lower price point,” said Alex Horowitz, a researcher at the Pew Charitable Trusts... [B]y virtue of its universal service mandate, it has a network of 35,000 locations in every corner of the country. And where banks have not made the effort, the post office has significantly more reach, particularly in rural America... 3.5 million Americans live more than 10 miles from the nearest bank branch, and another 3 million live in densely populated areas that are nonetheless still over a mile from the nearest bank... Even in some urban locations, particularly in high-poverty areas, the closest postal branch location offers more convenience than the bank. And with bank closings more pronounced in low-income areas, the value of post offices as a financial services alternative could grow... Check-cashing stores and payday lenders... are ubiquitous in poor communities... But... low cost and convenience could give postal banking a leg up... Public outcry, largely from postal unions and their allies, has led to the Postal Service ending their pilot program of post office counters inside Staples, staffed by non-union workers at lower pay. [Grrrrrr! --d] The announcement came... after the American Federation of Teachers... voted to boycott Staples in solidarity with postal workers... [Yay, Unions! --d] Believers in postal banking have some high-profile support and some key facts. Now they need to organize and act... [T]here’s no reason the United States cannot respond to technological changes in mail volume by returning to offering financial services, which aligns with its core mission of promoting commerce. It certainly beats closing more distribution centers, firing more workers and squandering a vast network of physical and human capital that can serve some of the nation’s critical needs.

Republicans are endlessly attacking the post office and postal workers (as they attack every aspect of government that does conspicuous public good and maintains a good public reputation), and this is an idea which would make the beleaguered postal service more solvent and hence more insulated from these ideological anti-civilizational attacks. And it would do so while at once transforming the landscape of financial services for the working poor, both urban and rural, as well as providing a contrast of fair fees and good service that might begin to pressure the venal con-artists of big banking into better practices in these areas themselves. This is a good idea and it's time has come. Of course, even a Democratic majority on the Board is little likely to provide more than a pilot program, and the changes will likely take years, but the exploitation of people who work for a living by the payday lenders and cash card sharks is a problem years in the making, too, and a couple more Democratic terms in the White House can shepherd these processes into implementation while the Republicans howl and do their usual worst.

Disrupt, For Real: Richard Eskow Makes A Case for Nationalizing Big Tech

Salon:

[L]aw professor Susan Crawford argues that “high-speed wired Internet access is as basic to innovation, economic growth, social communication, and the country’s competitiveness as electricity was a century ago.” Broadband as a public utility? If not for corporate corruption of our political process, that would seem like an obvious solution. Instead, our nation’s wireless access is the slowest and costliest in the world. But why stop there? Policymakers have traditionally considered three elements when evaluating the need for a public utility: production, transmission, and distribution. Broadband is transmission. What about production and distribution? The Big Tech mega-corporations... were created with publicly-funded technologies, and prospered as the result of indulgent policies and lax oversight. They’ve achieved monopoly or near-monopoly status, are spying on us to an extent that’s unprecedented in human history, and have the potential to alter each and every one of our economic, political, social and cultural transactions... No matter how they spin it, these corporations were not created in garages or by inventive entrepreneurs. The core technology behind them is the Internet, a publicly-funded platform for which they pay no users’ fee. In fact, they do everything they can to avoid paying their taxes. Big Tech... operates in a technological “commons” which they are using solely for its own gain, without regard for the public interest. Meanwhile the United States government devotes considerable taxpayer resource to protecting them... Big Tech’s services have become a necessity in modern society. Businesses would be unable to participate in modern society without access... For individuals, these entities have become the public square... The bluntness with which Big Tech firms abuse their monopoly power is striking. Google has said that it will soon begin blocking YouTube videos... unless independent record labels sign deals with it... Amazon’s war on publishers... is another sign of Big Tech arrogance. But what is equally striking about these moves is the corporations’ disregard for basic customer service... Google is confident that even frustrated music fans have nowhere to go. Amazon is so confident of its dominance that it retaliated against Hachette by removing order buttons... and lied about the availability of Hachette books when a customer attempts to order one... Internet companies are using taxpayer-funded technology to make billions of dollars from the taxpayers –- without paying a licensing fee... Amazon was the beneficiary of tax exemptions which allowed it to reach its current monopolistic size. Google and the other technology companies have also benefited from tax policies and other forms of government indulgence. Contrary to popular misconception, Big Tech corporations aren’t solely the products of ingenuity and grit. Each has received, and continues to receive, a lot of government largesse... Most of Big Tech’s revenues come from the use of our personal information... Social media entries, web-surfing patterns, purchases, even our private and personal communications add value to these corporations. They don’t make money by selling us a product. We are the product, and we are sold to third parties for profit. Public utilities are often created when the resource being consumed isn’t a “commodity” in the traditional sense. “We” aren’t an ordinary resource. Like air and water, the value of our information is something that should be... at a minimum, publicly managed.... Privacy, like water or energy, is a public resource. As the Snowden revelations have taught us, all such resources are at constant risk of government abuse. The Supreme Court just banned warrantless searches of smartphones –- by law enforcement. Will we be granted similar protections from Big Tech corporations? ... Google tracks your activity and customizes search results, a process which can filter or distort your perception of the world around you. What’s more, this “personalized search results” feature leads you back to information sources you’ve used before... Over time this creates an increasingly narrow view of the world... Google has photographically mapped the entire world. It intends to put the world’s books into a privately-owned online library. It's launching balloons around the globe which will bring Internet access to remote areas –- on its terms... [T]hings are likely to get worse -- perhaps a lot worse -- unless something is done. The solution may lie with an old concept. It may be time to declare Big Tech a public utility.

I think these are strong arguments that should have a prominent place in public arguments about Big Tech. There are comparatively recent precedents for their applications in related fields, for the naysayers out there. Even if you judge the practical prospects for such policy outcomes unlikely, these arguments re-frame a host of "technology" issues in what seem to me incomparably more clarifying ways than the usual terms provide at present. And even our failure to nationalize equitable access to bandwidth, search and socializing tools as public utilities accountably administered for the common good need not be deemed a complete failure even on the terms of these arguments themselves, if instead they manage only to scare the shit out of enough greedy short-sighted self-congratulatory techbro skim-and-scam artists to make them actually behave themselves.

"When is the initiation of physical force justified?"

I received this question from a reader, and this is my response to him. I am also elaborating the response a bit to provide more context for general readers most of whom will not be asking the question from the vantage I took him to be asking it from:

Before I can answer your question it is crucial first to recognize that "justification" is an act arising from a situation and offered up to an audience. Political discussions with market libertarians often seem to proceed as if political assessments are a matter of offering up logical justifications to a universe of "neutral rationality" amounting to agreement in advance on a host of market libertarian assumptions about what physical force is, what it means to be an owner of property, what it means to be a responsible subject, and so on. This matters, because all of these questions are actually under contestation, indeed they are often the very questions at hand in debates with market libertarians in the first place.

So, when you ask "when is the initiation of physical force justified?" my first question is: To whom is the justification in your question presumably offered? The answer whether an act of force is justified (let alone whether it was an act of force at all, or the true initiation of the force in question rather than a response to some prior force) will no doubt differ if it is the perpetrator, the victim, a judge, a jury, some measure of popular opinion, or a community offering up the justification or hearing it.

One of the great quandaries of political theory and institutional practice seeking to provide some measure of legible and hence sustainable justice and order to the diversity of stakeholders to a polity is, after all, finding ways of ensuring that minorities are heard and protected in majoritarian orders, or that the losing parties in court decisions and election contests will remain invested in the ongoing life of the system of judgment and representation which has failed to go their way in a particular instance. Periodic elections with the widest possible franchise (circumscribed by the no taxation without representation principle for one thing), and the widest possible eligibility for office, jury trials, court appeals, impeachment provisions, popular referenda, universal rights resistant to majority opinions (especially rights to public assembly and critical expression), and civil disobedience premised on breaking laws and then suffering their penalties to call attention to their injustice as a spur to changing them are all indispensable institutions and practices that have been hacked over many centuries in the fraught circuitous heartbreaking process of the ongoing democratization of the state to which I and so many others are still devoted.

(As I never tire of insisting to anarchists and others: I want to democratize the state, not to smash it.)

"Justification" is a discourse, it consists of a host of practices, each with a history, norms, problems, ritual and infrastructural affordances. To keep this is mind is to be thinking about justifications politically, rather than deploying a term as if it were neutral in the service of a stealthy political agenda, whether one is conscious of this or not: Remember, there is nothing more natural than to accept some or many of the norms and forms of the status quo unconsciously or uncritically, even when one is in the process of intervening in the status quo elsewhere, indeed, the great political advantage of authority is that it tends to operate unconsciously and with an incredible resilience such that resistance to its terms requires intense and ongoing vigilance.

And so, to return to your specific question, "when is the initiation of physical force justified?" I will answer with a question: And who decides at what point "the" force is really initiated? "The initiation of force" is of course, again, a phrase familiar especially in market libertarian political theory (such as it is). When, as in so many market libertarian formulations, say, a contract is figured as the quintessential voluntary transaction -- and the one into which initiations of force are usually imagined to interfere, usually by caricatures of government agents or criminal thugs -- to what extent does it matter whether a contract is articulated by misinformation, unequal access to knowledge, duress, the threat of poverty? In any society that makes no universal provision for basic healthcare, education, income, retirement will not every transaction be stratified by structural inequities, unconscious biases, threatening precarities, unreliable information exchange that render the initiation of violence not only in the violation but in the constitution of the contractarian scene itself? Brecht famously joked, which is the bigger crime, robbing a bank or founding one? The force of his point does not depend on our inability confidently to answer his question.

Here the market ideologues merely provide extreme illustrations of a more general dilemma: How does the legibility of violence itself require a circumscription of possibility that is a violence? Is there an initiation of violence prior to the perception of an initiation of violence enabling its perception as such? I can only guess that upon hearing me insist that the scene of a legible consenting to the terms of everyday commerce and contract requires first the universal provision of equitable recourse to law, basic healthcare, lifelong education, secure retirement, and a basic guaranteed income to ensure those everyday commercial and contractarian transaction are not duressed by inequity, misinformation, bias, fraud, and threat to livelihood (and hence actually consensual, meaningfully voluntary), every self-respecting conservative and market libertarian will protest forthwith: And just who will be paying for all this welfare, all this healthcare, all this education, all this legal apparatus, and the money to support all this idleness and what amounts to a permanent strike fund for workers to hold over employers heads? You speak of volunteerism and consent, but are the talented, hard-working, meritorious few (just for fun we'll pretend for a moment this sort of phrase doesn't always end up meaning "white dudes") from whom the money for this public largess will no doubt be taxed at rates incomparably more steeply progressive than they are today imagined to be volunteering and consenting to this state of affairs? Aren't you hoping to exploit the few in order to, as you would put it, protect the many from being exploited by the few?

Again, what matters in this formulation is that it naturalizes the status quo when those are the very terms that are under contestion. The simplest answer to the question, Who is supposed to pay to prop up the many as you would do? is exactly the same people who at present pay to prop up the few, that is to say: We the People.

To put it simply, the wealth of the few is a collective accomplishment of the many from which the few preferentially benefit. Inherent in the protest that the wealth of the rich few is appropriated unjustly to make greater provision for the welfare of the many is the pretense that the wealth of the rich few was earned entirely by the rich few only to be vulnerable to expropriation by the many through the agency of majoritarian government. But it would be far more correct to say that the wealth of the rich few is produced through the collaboration of the many and enabled through the agency of government laws and investments and affordances, and then appropriated disproportionately to the rich few through effort, indeed, but also through corruption, deception, mystification, privilege, inertia, cronyism, fraud, and dumb luck.

It is presently We the People who contribute our labor and sustain the too corrupt, captured regulatory and representative apparatuses of government to maintain the fortunes of the rich few. To educate, agitate, organize, and legislate in ways that shifts We the People from our present collaboration in the terms of our own exploitation to the more democratic provision of a consensual scene to sustainable equity-in-diversity is mostly a matter of getting majorities to act in their best interests to solve shared problems and maintain political forms capable of such shared problem-solving. Such a shift only looks like the many stealing from the few if one has decided in advance that the few who presently have and keep the most have and keep it because they really are incomparably more talented and worthy than the many, and really earned and keep it in isolation from their fellows and without the support of the social world. Of course, such claims are patently absurd. It is only the prior naturalization of the terms of the status quo that insulate them from the consideration in the face of which their absurdity becomes instantly manifest. And to return to the initial question again, to ask the question "when is the initiation of physical force justified" is usually asked from a vantage into which a host of assumptions about who has earned what without a question of force entering into that consideration but which is then simply naturally neutrally "there" "available" to be stolen from by the initiation only then and there of the force of the taxman or the idle or the mob, hence the answer is usually available in the asking of the question, and the answer is usually one that will ultimately conduce to the interest of incumbency.

By way of conclusion, let me broaden the terms of the discussion a bit more: It is a commonplace in both everyday and philosophical parlance to declare persuasion, the space of discourse, the outside of violence, but since arguments so easily do or threaten violences the truth of that insight is tricky to say the least. As a teacher of rhetoric, I happen to think an attention to the traffic between literality and figurality, between the truths that arise from following but also from breaking the rules of language, provides a beginning of an answer to these quandaries. That is a very long discussion. Let me recommend a few of my prior posts to provide a sense of the way that discussion would go:

1. Left and Right, Back to Basics
2. Eight Propositions on Taxes
3. Nonviolent Revolution As the Democratization of the State
4. Arendt, Fanon, King on Violence
5. Rhetoric and Nonviolence
6. The "Mixed Economy" Isn't A Mix, It Is "Ideal" Capitalism and Socialism That Are Mixed Up

#BookTitleConfessions Twitterrant

Milton Friedman, "Free To Lose: A Modest Proposal." #BookTitleConfessions

Henry Hazlitt: "Economics in One Deception: The Shortest and Surest Way to Subsidize Plutocracy Is Defense Spending" #BookTitleConfessions

Friedrich A Hayek, "Back to Serfdom: How to Dismantle the Middle Class to Rebuild Feudalism and Call It Liberty" #BookTitleConfessions

HernandoDeSoto, "The Magical Thinking of Capital: Why Can't Exploited People Just Pretend Precarity is Liberty Like Exploiters Do?" #BookTitleConfessions

Thomas L. Friedman, "Flat Earth Society: Suck on This Twenty-First Century!" #BookTitleConfessions

Ayn Rand, "Everybody Across the Atlas Shrugged: Plutocrats Go On Strike and Nobody Notices" #BookTitleConfessions

Alvin Toffler, "Future Schlock: How Futurists Coin Neologisms to Peddle the Status Quo as Accelerating Change" #BookTitleConfessions

Charles Murray, "The Smell Curve: Using Graphs and Pseudo-Science to Make Racist Public Policy Harder to Sniff Out" #BookTitleConfessions

Eric Schmidt & Jared Cohen, "The New Digital Stage: Making Plutocracy and Pollution Seem Liberating With the Internet" #BookTitleConfessions

Ray Kurzweil, "The Age of Artificial Imbecillence: Humans Made Stupid By Pretending Things Are Smart That Aren't" #BookTitleConfessions

Sheryl Sandberg, "Lean Thin: What Remains If Feminism Is Reduced To Upward Mobility Within White Racist Plutocracy," #BookTitleConfessions

Andrew Sullivan, "Virtuously Normal: A White Gay Male Demands the Racist Patriarchal Privileges He's Entitled To" #BookTitleConfessions

Emasculating Gun-Nuttery: Or, What Atrios Said

I couldn't agree more:

Obviously they're a scary crowd to mock, because they, you know, have guns. Which is part of the point. But it is time to up the mockery of the giant external penis of death crowd. They're ridiculous cowards at best, and sociopathic wannabee serial killers, or occasionally actual serial killers, at worst. Losers.

Well, I couldn't agree more, but I'll try anyway. I have argued that an underappreciated dimension of the extraordinarily successful assimilationist model of gay politics was not just the mass coming out of my post-Stonewall generation, but the derisive interpretative gesture of treating acts of aggressive homophobia as exhibitions of a closeted gayness themselves and then making that interpretation stick. The special power of Atrios' mockery above is that it is emasculating.

Indeed, Atrios' formula is multiply and incessantly emasculating: it first insinuates that the gun-toting gun-nut possesses a small penis (more to the point, the public gun as figure of fun robs even a mighty penile oak the symbolic heft of the patriarchal phallus), then it accuses the gun-toting gun-nut of a conspicuous cowardice, it goes on to accuse the gun-toting gun-nut of a deranged and hence incontinent selfhood, a paranoid selfhood precluded from the rationalization of a protective role, and then it equates the gun-toting gun-nut with being a "loser," illegible as leader, breadwinner, trustworthy comrade or civic-minded citizen. It goes without saying (I hope) that the set of connections implied and demands made by such a construction of masculinity could only ever be a kind of catastrophe, that a masculinity so construed even at its best would always be an immensely costly and palpably threatened bearing of selfhood given that men are vulnerable, error-prone, historically-situated, socially entangled beings prone to humiliation and hungry for connection as much as anybody else.

What Atrios' formula recognizes is that it is not strength but the fragility of masculine selfhood in this construal that is symptomized in the figure of the gun-toting gun-nut. Of course, it is because this construction of masculinity is ever more threatened that it seeks to be ever more threatening: it is only when heteronormative masculinity is no longer immediately or inevitably or naturally and hence pre-politically legible that it seeks to back itself in an anti-political hale of bullets, it is only when heteronormative authority is no longer ubiquitous that the figure of the gun-toting gun-nut dreams of proliferating to re-occupy public space. Like the conspicuous homophobe, the gun-toting gun-nut is compensating. It is true, as Atrios said, that there is danger in this moment when a loss of legibility is lived as an experience of being cornered, and especially when there are weapons involved: But to react to the figure with fear is to collaborate in the success of his compensatory gesture, while to react to the figure with mockery is to refuse him success in the most catastrophic imaginable way. Mockery renders the gun-toting gun-nut illegible in his masculinity in precisely the moment of his public assertion of it. Just so, mockery of the aggressive homophone no longer vouchsafes but threatens his once confident ritual assertion of heterosexuality.

There are, by the way, a host of no less emasculating compassionate or apparently compassionate interpretive strategies available to aid in the emasculating mockery of the gun-toting gun-nut: the gun as the cry for help, the gun as the infantile play for attention, the gun as sign of the traumatized victim incapable of the love he so desperately needs, and so on. More to the point, I believe our popular press should be larded with impressionistic anecdotes and true confessions illustrating this emasculating connection, Comedy Central and SNL should make endless hay flogging it for laughs, hapless exemplars should appear as stock characters in commercials selling insurance and cars and candy bars.

Emasculating readings of the gun-toting gun-nut, should they come to represent the prevailing commensensical reading of the figure will not only render the strategy less available to him in the first place -- becoming sites threatening exposure of failure rather than promising successful incarnations of agency -- but in becoming prevalent will have done no small amount of the work of demolishing this particular ritual materialization of the threatened and threatening bearing of would-be ruggedly individualistic heterosexual masculinity to the good of us all.

It's Now Or Never: An Adjunct Responds to SFAI's Latest Talking Points

In the latest communication from SFAI Administration dissuading adjuncts from voting to organize with SEIU, Dean Rachel Schreiber writes:

The key question: Is SEIU the right union for you? There are very significant issues facing adjunct faculty at most institutions, including SFAI. But this particular election will not guarantee solutions to these problems. Instead, this election will only decide if you commit to having SEIU represent you. I believe SEIU is not the right union. That is why I encourage you to vote no.

Let us be very clear, the "very significant issues facing adjunct faculty [at] SFAI" are that we have no job security, no reliable prospects, no voice in institutional governance, and no consequential recognition of our contribution to the community of SFAI.

These are not abstract issues. They are very specific. They have been articulated many times in many ways in many venues -- in self-study documents, open letters, statements in public meetings, stakeholder petitions -- and the administration has not responded to these problems except to choke off lines of communication that once existed (eliminating department heads and thus severing communication networks while at once overburdening to the point of failure those few remaining people who have any standing with administration) and to threaten our employment (with "at will" contracts surreally unsuited to an ongoing teaching situation, and recently cavalierly proposing that no adjunct can teach more than two years but then informally kinda sorta taking it back, perhaps when they realized that this would betray trusted, beloved fixtures at the school who have taught for decades and also cause a level of churn among three-quarters of the actual teachers at the school that would undermine standards, student-teacher relationships, and cause chaos to no good purpose). The administration is making very real, very specific, very solvable problems worse, and that too is a problem.

These problems provide the obvious context in which adjunct organizing has taken on its present urgency in the first place. In describing SEIU as a vast, soulless, alien octopus with nefarious intentions SFAI hopes to distract us from the real problems we are experiencing with loose fears of the unknown.

"SEIU is not the right union," SFAI helpfully advises.

So, what is the right union? What union won't respond to these obvious problems in the obvious way that will obviously annoy SFAI exactly the same way that SEIU does?

Of course, there is no "right union" -- but more to the point, there is no "other union." Not here, not now.

Perhaps Dean Schreiber and I would both prefer that adjuncts be represented by the Lollipop Guild, but the Lollipop Guild is not on offer. The Lollipop Guild organizes labor in the Land of Oz. San Francisco is not Oz (though arguably it comes close on a good day).

The vote to organize with SEIU is the vote to organize at all. There will not be another, at least not for us.

Dean Schreiber continues:

Among my reasons why you should vote against unionization by SEIU:
* SEIU has made questionable promises to you -- they cannot make guarantees regarding pay increases, job security, or other benefits prior to negotiations.
* SEIU has been criticized for "charges of coziness with big employers, limits on internal democracy, excessive deference to Democratic party leaders and frequent clashes with other unions.” [Source: http://inthesetimes.com/article/13471/wrong_union_for_the_job]
* SEIU does not have a long history with higher education, and certainly not with small independent colleges. They have not yet negotiated a contract with an art school, so there are many unknowns.
* Signing on to SEIU would be a big commitment, and despite what they say, it’s not an easy one to undo.

As someone who confronts this enormously consequential election and has reviewed plenty of materials provided by SEIU by now, I want to say that I have received no promises that they will negotiate a contract that guarantees pay raises. They have merely pointed out that they have negotiated such contracts for others. SEIU has told us that union dues are 1.74% of our negotiated salary and are to be paid only after a contract is ratified. And it is hardly likely that we would collectively ratify a contract that set us back financially. It isn't exactly a surprise that this detail is not specified in administrative talking points, only circumvented with loose talk about a lack of guarantees. But of course, adjuncts are used to working without guarantees. That is the prevailing state of affairs, after all. No one thinks organizing makes the gaining of benefits inevitable, but everybody knows that SFAI has not provided these benefits on their own in absence of the standing organized adjuncts might bring to bear on negotiations.

It is rather curious that the administration insinuates that SEIU is cozy with big employers. I am not sure the Suits at the long abusive fast food corporations SEIU is organizing would describe their relationship with SEIU as a "cozy" one. Perhaps I can be forgiven the suspicion that SFAI's administration would be looking forward to quite a game of footsie were they really anticipating such corporate coziness, rather than quaking in their boots and spitting out misleading talking points. Turning our attention from SEIU back to SFAI itself, one wonders if SFAI always finds corporate coziness so objectionable after all? Is there any corporate coziness to be found in the donor list for the vast pharaohnic building projects that presently preoccupy the SFAI administration's attention, for example? Does one discern an elicitation of corporate coziness in SFAI's Corporate Sponsoring Packet, exhorting companies to "Secure exposure for your name and brand in social media advertising, web and print promotional materials, course catalogues, and event signage" in exchange for cash? (If you follow that link, by the way, do note and enjoy the prominence of Diego Rivera's fresco in these promotional materials.)

When Dean Schreiber points out that SEIU has little history organizing small independent schools or art schools she conveniently fails to mention the substantial commitment represented by recent SEIU organizing of adjuncts at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Mills College in Oakland, the California College of Art, as well as at SFAI.

Denying that there is a history of such organizing distracts attention from a history of undeniable abuses but it also fundamentally misreads what is happening right now: a movement organizing the neoliberal precariat of the corporatized academy, happening in the present moment, of which we are being asked to be a part. That there is not yet a history of such adjunct organizing just means that we are Making History.

The abuses of a generation are palpable. The problems that beset us are clear. The promises of this moment are exhilarating.

Are adjuncts going to take this chance to organize? Or are we going to count on loose promises backed by administrative nobless oblige instead?

Educate! Agitate! Organize! The time is NOW.

San Francisco Art Institute Touts Diego Rivera Fresco Celebrating Labor Politics While Engaging in Union Busting

The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of A City (1931) is a fresco painted by Diego Rivera which is a source of great pride, and an attraction for no small amount of tourist attention, for the San Francisco Art Institute where I have been teaching as an adjunct for over a decade. The image of this beautiful work posted below originated (pointedly) at the SFAI website itself, and you can learn more about the fresco at this promotional page also at the SFAI website.

A life-long champion of labor organizing and of the democratization of the economy, Rivera founded the Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors in 1922. For the fresco he made for SFAI, which was already an historically significant art school, over half a century old, in an historically significant building designed by James Bakewell and Arthur Brown, Jr., students of Bay Area visionary Bernard Maybeck, Rivera chose to produce a fresco about the connections between artists as laborers and the creative power of labor in the world, making a fresco about the making of a fresco, showing artists with many different skills collaborating to create a work of art, in this case a fresco about laborers collaborating to build a city.

As I have already mentioned, I am one of the adjuncts who have been enjoined to vote to become part of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Adjuncts like me represent three quarters of the faculty at SFAI, we work for comparatively low wages given our contribution to the mission of the school, we have no job security, we have little sense of our prospects, we have repeatedly observed that no amount of volunteerism, committee work, conspicuous dedication, excellent student evaluations provides sustained recognition or a sense of responsibility to us from administration. This state of affairs is hardly unique to SFAI, but is of a piece with a larger pattern of corporatized education in which teachers are rendered ever more precarious, robotic standardization replaces actual standards, administrative and marketing activities swallow ever vaster resources, and schools enter into ever tighter relationships to corporations seeking a trained docile indebted workforce and to gain proprietary intellectual property portfolios via supported research.

Although I have not been focused on labor politics in my own political life -- my focus has been on gender politics (queer rights, reproductive freedom), democratic technoscience, and environmental justice -- this is nevertheless the third time I've been involved in labor organizing. In the 90s, first when I was working in a university library in Georgia, paying my way through my first graduate degree in philosophy, a public worker union organized my colleagues, and then later the UAW organized graduate student instructors like me when I was at the University of California at Berkeley. I was a steward for my Rhetoric Department for a while. For me, organizing to gain the collective standing to bargain for better conditions and to solve shared problems is simply a straightforward commonsense sort of thing that people do. Of course I recognize that there are problems with unions themselves, as there are with any collective formations, especially formations that are large and complex, but I also recognize that unions are indispensable both to larger aspirations for social justice and to ground level practical problem solving. SFAI's administration is a stakeholder with a different perspective on our shared problems and aspirations than that of adjuncts, in the nature of things, and I would expect them to take up a firm position in the present struggle in advance of the eventual negotiations unionization would bring. As I said, I consider all that only natural. I guess, however, I did not expect the kinds of misinformation, aggression, and scarcely stealthed threats that are coming from administrators at this time.

Many of the administrators resisting the formation of the union have done research that takes the value of labor organizing as its explicit point of departure. The online SFAI profile for Dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs Rachel Schreiber tells us that "[h]er research addresses the intersections of race and gender in labor activism." I would expect her to be an enthusiastic ally of adjunct organizing, even if she bargains with organized teachers in a tough, incisive, no-nonsense way that reflects her different position as an administrator.

Other administrators engage in disappointing boilerplate anti-union rhetoric while at once touting their respect for unions or of their own proud family histories with unions: President Charles Desmarais' letter urging us to vote against SEIU, made available to the public on SFAI's informational website about the union election, contains this flabbergasting paragraph:

As the proud son of a Teamster shop steward, I’m acutely aware of the benefits organized labor brought to sheet metal workers like my dad and their families in facing up to Big Business. But SFAI is a community working together toward a common purpose, and I believe that SEIU is a huge outside force that has little understanding of our unique culture and values

Outside agitators? Really? Do the concerns raised in this conflict by adjuncts not complicate the least bit any bald assertion that "SFAI is a community working together toward a common purpose"? More to the point, why on earth would a more organized labor force not be compatible with the vision of "a community working together toward a common purpose"? I would think it goes without saying that a democratized workforce bargaining from a position of comparative security would strengthen such a community and facilitate working together toward common purposes. The point is not a polemical one, but the most basic common sense as far as I can see.

In countless conversations and in sponsored talks and conferences on campus, and in much of the work of our own graduate students, problems of corporate models of education and the catastrophe of precarious labor are endlessly and earnestly debated. What on earth do these people think they are doing? Do they mean nothing that they say?

Again, although I expect actually different stakeholders (administration, faculty, staff, etc.) to bargain and struggle in ways that reflect the reality of their differences, I have a very hard time believing that intelligent, informed people of good will can really reject the very idea that it might be good for conspicuously precarious and silenced adjuncts doing the overwhelming majority of the actual teaching that is the actual reason the school actually exists to organize to ensure the conditions under which we do this work are conducive to it and that we gain a feeling of security from which we can voice concerns about the promises and problems of the institution from our vantage on the ground without fear of reprisal.

SFAI is a school nearly a century and a half old. It is a landmark physically, culturally, and also politically. The world has been enriched by the radicalism of both its artistic and political visions and activism. SFAI should be in the vanguard of teacher organizing in this historical moment, it should champion the turning of the tide from the anti-intellectual corporate looting of the academy in a world crying for an outpouring of critical, sustainable, creative, democratizing, problem-solving intelligence and imagination. Organizing adjuncts will give us the security of a voice from which SFAI will benefit, will give us a sustainable stake in the institution to which we are devoting our lives. Adjuncts are organizing in schools across the Bay Area, right here, right now. This is an exciting and also a promising time, in the midst of distress. There is nothing to fear from democracy and a world to gain. If SFAI administrators cannot see the vital truth of this, they should sandblast Diego Rivera's fresco from the gallery wall for they are already blind to its beauty and its wisdom.

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

The Telegraph:

Philosopher Rebecca Roache is in charge of a team of scholars focused upon the ways futuristic technologies might transform punishment. Dr Roache claims the prison sentence of serious criminals could be made worse by extending their lives... "There are a number of psychoactive drugs that distort people’s sense of time, so you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence," she said. A second scenario would be to upload human minds to computers to speed up the rate at which the mind works... "If the speed-up were a factor of a million, a millennium of thinking would be accomplished in eight and a half hours... Uploading the mind of a convicted criminal and running it a million times faster than normal would enable the uploaded criminal to serve a 1,000 year sentence in eight-and-a-half hours. This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals’ lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time."

Of course, uploading a organismically incarnated human mind into a computer program is a profoundly biologically ignorant and conceptually incoherent notion. Although it would be a pity to interrupt the obvious enjoyments "philosopher" Rebecca Roache takes from her contemplation of the prospect of prisoners subject to centuries in virtual hells -- abandon hope all ye who enter here! and just think of the tax savings! -- one notes that the whole litany of techno-transcendental robo-cultic wish-fulfillment fantasies is unspooling in Dr. Roache's penal ruminations, from flogging software-expert/ amateur-genrontologist Aubrey deGrey's SENS elixer of life, to hawking nootropic and nutritional "enhancement" like a boner pill muscle powder krill-oil snake-oil salesman on a Vegas showroom floor, to cyberangel uploads in Holodeck Hell. There is absolutely nothing new in any of these stale futurological proposals -- although, as usual, we are expected to gasp at the audacity of such Big Thinking -- only the modest innovation of their punitive application to would-be criminals rather than the usual effort to seduce wannabe consumers.

"To me, these questions about technology are interesting because they force us to rethink the truisms we currently hold about punishment. When we ask ourselves whether it’s inhumane to inflict a certain technology on someone, we have to make sure it’s not just the unfamiliarity that spooks us," Dr Roache said. "Is it really OK to lock someone up for the best part of the only life they will ever have, or might it be more humane to tinker with their brains and set them free? When we ask that question, the goal isn’t simply to imagine a bunch of futuristic punishments -- the goal is to look at today’s punishments through the lens of the future."

Although Dr. Roache declares these to be "questions of technology," none of the "technologies-in-question" exist or are likely ever to do so -- not in the forms on which she would fixate our attention. Clearly, "the technological" is functioning here in the usual futurological way, as a placeholder for an amplified fantasy of efficacious agency -- an instrumentalization and hence implementation of individual will that dreams of breaking the impasse of lifeway diversity that yields the frustrations of stakeholder politics and ethical responsibility.

It isn't true that anybody is "spooked" by virtual hell prisons, because none do or will ever exist. But when Dr. Roache admonishes us to overcome the timidity we feel because her proposals are "unfamiliar," she is indulging in the all-TOO-familiar cadences of the entrepreneurial innovative disruptive novel fresh bleeding edge hot tech boosterism of the "thought leader" repackaging the same old stale useless shit as New! and Improved! I'm sorry to break it to Dr. Roache, but of course the "thought leaders" of the CIA beat the transhumanoids to the punch this time around. We are all already quite acquainted with "enhanced interrogation" and the use of "psychoactive drugs" "to tinker with... brains." As usual, looking at political and ethical dilemmas through "the lens of the future" tends to take us on a reactionary trip to authoritarian retro-futures bathed in pastels and promising magickal powers. Let's ask somebody who has spent time in the torturer's chair "whether it's inhumane to inflict a certain technology on someone." A certain technology... really, it's hard not to shake your head at the sheer obtuse obviousness of it all. Everything new is old again.

Now, nothing is more commonplace than futurologists rebranding their own rebranding projects (in the service of stale goods and incumbent interests) as "philosophical speculation." I ask my readers just what is presumably clarified by Dr. Roache's "thought experiments"-cum-wish-fulfillment fantasies here, apart from symptoms of what look to be some ugly desires... hey, maybe that's what she means by "spooky"? Although Dr. Roache comes by her philosophy title honestly, I cannot say that I think the business she is in really is better described as "philosophy" than as PR. I should point out that she is a Research Fellow at transhumanist Nick Bostrom's Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, a scarcely stealthed Robot Cult outfit. From its birth in peddling market futures with just-so stories futurism has been making bets (usually with other people's money) and calling the result thinking, and usually Thinking Big. I'm not a futurist, but I'll venture the prophesy that we'll be hearing more Big Thoughts from the likes of Dr. Roache in... the future!

Why So Many Transhumanists and Digital Utopians Are Incapable of Imagining There's No Heaven

Upgraded and adapted from an exchange in the Moot "JimF" commented:

You know, I had (or attempted to have) [an] argument (or "civilized discussion" ;-> ) with a very smart person (a computer programmer I've known for decades) and it was impossible for me to get the subtle distinction to register. In his view, saying "the brain is not a computer" is tantamount to being a mystic, or a vitalist -- equivalent to claiming that life, and intelligence, must have a supernatural or non-material basis. I could **not** get past that impasse. So it is, I would guess, with many naive Transhumanists, Singularitarians, and AI enthusiasts. And that's true at the highest levels of what passes as the intelligentsia. I suspect you might see the same misunderstandings spun out if you were to witness a conversation between, say, Gerald M. Edelman and, oh, Daniel Dennett.

Mind has been metaphorized as a cloud, as a mirror, as the inscription of a tablet, as a complex of steam-pipes, and on and on and on. Setting that platitude aside, it is also true that many GOFAI ("Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence")-deadenders and techno-immortalists of the uploading sect (subcultures with more than a little overlap, I might add) seem to reject supernaturalism about mind only to replace it with a kind of techno-transcendental sooper-naturalism of robotic-AI, in which the mind-body dualism of spiritualism is re-erected as an information-meat dualism invested with very specifically false, facile hopes for techo-transcendence.

Of course, any consistent materialism about mind will necessarily treat seriously the materialization of actually-existing minds in biological bodies, and will recall that all information is non-negligibly and non-dispensably instantiated in actually-existing material carriers. The non-negligible, non-dispensable material substantiation of intelligence and mind forcefully argues against the pseudo-science and bad poetry of Robot Cultists who depend instead on inapt metaphors of "translation" and "uploading" and "transfer" to wish away these material realities the better to indulge in infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies about invulnerability from error, contingency, disease, or mortality by techno-transcending the hated meat body as digital cyberangel avatars in Holodeck Heaven and then peddling that priestly con-artistry and New Age woo as science.

Anyway, it makes no kind of sense to pretend materialism justifies dualism but once that irrational leap has been made it becomes perfectly predictable that those for whom the denial of traditionally religious mind-body dualisms does justify robo-cultically religious info-meat dualisms will treat as an entailment of their sooper-naturalist anti-supernaturalism that those who reject their enabling incoherence must somehow be common or garden variety pro-supernaturalists. The "vitalist" charge is just a variation: for the robo-soopernaturalist any materialism that is a barrier rather than a prop for their wanted techno-immortalizing informationalism about mind must be some kind of stealthy supernaturalist luddism. The point to grasp is that for the futurological faithful, one is either a believer in spirit stuff that might live on in Heaven or a believer in info-stuff that might be uploaded in Holodeck Heaven: Actual, this-worldly, secular-progressive, technoscientifically-literate materialisms don't hold much interest for Robot Cultists, you know.

Comments On and Critiques Of Existenz Volume on Humanism, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Futurism Solicited

Existenz itself has now linked to my Forum Page on its issue, "The Future of Humanity and the Question of Post-Humanity" to encourage further conversation there. Comments and critiques of the volume as a whole, or of individual contributions to the volume, whether sympathetic or unsympathetic are all welcome. If you write such a response or come upon one elsewhere, please let me know so that I can link to it. And I am also willing to publish substantial responses as guests posts here on Amor Mundi.

Forum on the Existenz Journal Issue, "The Future of Humanity and the Question of Post-Humanity"

The Journal Existenz has published an issue (Volume 8/2, Fall 2013 ISSN: 1932-1066) entitled The Future of Humanity and the Question of Post-Humanity. I contributed an essay to the volume, Futurological Discourse and Posthuman Terrains. On this page I mean to post critical discussions of and responses to the issue and the individuals essays included in it, both my own and substantive critiques by others. If you come upon any such discussions or write one yourself, please let me know and I will read it and link to it here. Existenz itself has linked to this page to encourage the conversation. I will be happy to publish substantial critiques here on Amor Mundi as guest posts and may upgrade forceful criticisms in comments from the Moot as entries here as well. Substantial critical engagements with my own arguments are especially welcome, of course.

Table of Contents

Index and Editor's Introduction

Discussions of and Responses to the Volume as a Whole:

Comment from Athena Andreadis and discussion.

Gregory J. Walters, Saint Paul University, Canada, Transhumanism, Post-Humanism, and Human Technological Enhancement: Whither Goes Humanitas? 1

Discussions and Responses:

Max More, Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Hyperagency as a Core Attraction and Repellant for Transhumanism, 14

Discussions and Responses:

Natasha Vita-More, Humanity+ Contested Culture: The Plausibility of Transhumanism, 19

Discussions and Responses:

Francesca Ferrando, Columbia University, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations, 26

Discussions and Responses:

John P. Sullins, Sonoma State University, Transhuman Express: Are we Ethically Required to be Transhumanists?, 33

Discussions and Responses:

Stephen A. Erickson, Pomona College, Posthumanism, Technology, and Education, 40

Discussions and Responses:

Dale Carrico, University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco Art Institute, Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains, 47

Discussions and Responses:

Comments from "jimf" and "JD Tuyes" with responses.

Richard Jones, Does Transhumanism Matter? April 17, 2017. I respond here.

Michael Hauskeller, University of Exeter, UK, Human Nature from a Transhumanist Perspective, 64

Discussions and Responses:

Here is a recording of the original panel discussion organized by the Karl Jaspers Society of North America that took place at the 87th Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Society in San Francisco, in March 31, 2013.

Existenz Publishes "The Future of Humanity and the Question of Posthumanity"

Existenz has published its volume on The Future of Humanity and the Question of Post-Humanity, which includes what is probably my own most fully elaborated published critique of transhumanism Futurological Discourse and Posthuman Terrains. When I find the time -- probably over the week-end since I'll be preoccupied with teaching later today and all day tomorrow -- I will be creating a forum here linking to the original panel discussion from which the volume originated, linking to all the pieces themselves, as well as to various online responses to the essays (please let me know about any such responses and discussions you discover, and not only for responses to my own essay but to any and all of them) and facilitating such responses (the best of which I will consider publishing here as guest posts if you like), and eventually my own responses to each of the contributions as well.

Em Butterfly: Robot Cultists George Dvorsky and Robin Hanson Go Overboard For Robo-Overlords Over At io9

"What will life be like when digital brains outnumber humans?" Of course, Dumb Dvorsky asks the question. Of course, he said "when" and not "if." Of course, the answer is that it will feel exactly like it feels now. Now there are no "digital brains," and we have no good reason to think that will change any time soon, if it ever changes. Sure, there is lots of loose marketing and promotional and advertising talk of computers being brains when they are not, and intelligent cars that are not, and smart homes that are not. Futurology, after all, is little more than marketing and promotional and advertising talk pretending to be a legitimate academic discipline, so we already know what it will be like to hear more of that sort of thing... in The Future.

"These days," writes Dvorsky, "people worry about robots stealing our jobs. But maybe we should be more concerned about massive populations of computerized human brains." Yes, declares the futurist, maybe we should worry less about real things -- like the displacement of jobs in the midst of an unemployment crisis caused by outsourcing and automation in the absence of collective bargaining -- and more about unreal things like digital avatar armies attacking us from cyberspace. Thank heavens we have futurologists to keep our eyes on the ball!

"Called 'ems,'" Dvorsky declares -- that's what the "experts" in the non-field focused on these non-things call "them" is it, George, "ems"? -- "these infinitely-reproducible brains could change the world." Well, duh. That's what bleeding edge futurology always does -- It. Changes. Everything. Everybody knows that. That's why Segways "changed the way we think of cities." That's why encryption shattered the nation-state. That's why buckytubes gave us desktop nano-anything machines.

"To learn more about this prospect, I spoke to economist and futurist Robin Hanson." Dvorsky does not add, as he usually does not when he plays this little game, that Robin Hanson is a long-time contributor to the list-serves and conferences and the rest of the sub(cult)ural life of the transhumanoid sects of the Robot Cult that George Dvorsky is also a member of and uses io9 to proselytize for. Neither does Dvorsky mention that "Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute" for which Robin Hanson is a "Research Associate" was founded by Nick Bostrom who was also one of the founders of the World Transhumanist Association and then the stealth transhumanoid outfit the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and that, the suave respectability of the Oxford moniker aside, the Future of Humanity Institute is thronged with Robot Cultists, transhumanism's first web celebrity Anders Sandberg, serially wrong nano-cornucopiast Eric Drexler, expert in extra-terrestrial biology (it helps that there isn't any we know of yet) and existential-risk management (why we should worry about robocalypse and nano-goo more than real problems) Milan Cirkovic and other transhumanoid eminences grises. (I ask yet again, io9, were Dvorsky a Scientologist flogging the so-called "independent credentials" of fellow Scientologists would you think that is okay without a disclosure of the real relationship involved?) Anyhow, Hanson is writing a book about "whole brain emulations -- or what he simply refers to as 'ems.'" ...Oh, there we have it. One of his fellow-faithful transhumanoids is calling these non-things "ems" in the futurological hairball he is coughing up for Dvorsky to promote in his io9 column. Very nice.

In any case, Dvorsky, channeling Hanson, helpfully explains that "A brain emulation can be thought of as a type of brain upload." That is to say "ems" are non-things that are a subset of other non-things futurologists talk about instead of talking about real things that matter. More to the point, "uploads" are a preoccupation of some techno-immortalist sects of the Robot Cult who have made the mistake of pretending that a picture of them would be the same thing as them if the picture were a "sufficiently detailed scan" which it obviously would not be (terminological hanky-panky over that weaselly "sufficiently" notwithstanding). Why such a scan would not only be them but be an immortal version of them when no picture ever has been -- not to mention that no computer ever has been and no software ever has been -- is anybody's guess, but my own guess if I had to guess would be that it has a lot to do with futurologists really seriously being scared of dying who prefer pseudo-scientific reassurances on that score rather than more conventionally religious versions already on offer. Hanson's "ems" don't seem to promise to upload people into eternal cyberangel avatars in Holodeck Heaven, however, but only to create super slavebots and sexy sexbots when they get stuffed into robot bodies of The Future.

Hanson admits his "em" idea comes on the heels of decade after decade after decade of cocksure pronouncements by "researchers" like him that they were on the verge of creating artificial intelligence even though they were always completely wrong about that and, indeed, after all this time look like they haven't progressed much toward this goal since they started out. In a surprise move that is a surprise to no one who grasps the essential identity of futurology with con-artistry, Hanson has decided to take the lemon of an AI-discourse characterized equally by ignorance, megalomania, and failure and make some lemonade. Maybe the intoxication of so many sociopathically logo-assertive techbros among the foremost AI-cheerleaders with disembodied, a-historical, computational fantasies of intelligence had something to do with the problem as well, but don't mind me, I'm no "expert." Sure, maybe AI has always failed because nobody really ever understood the phenomenon of "intelligence" the AI engineers were trying to mechanically reproduce, but why take a pause to better understand what you have so long ignored to the ruin of your project, why not just take it in stride? Who needs to understand stuff? Just take a really good picture, let the black box stay black -- try not to contemplate that the force of the "whole" in that evocative phrase "whole brain" actually requires understanding of the whole in question -- and plug that puppy into a big-boobied mannequin or Mars rover or whatever, and, hell, we're off to the races! Or at any rate, we're grinding out more pop-tech pulp for the credulous futurologist's shelf (or, more likely, another hour's eye-strain on some techbro's kindle).

Quoting Hanson:

"If the scan and cell models are good enough [the very question for those with questions you know, dispensed with at the outset --d], the whole model must [must! presto! problems solved! --d] have the same input-output behavior as the original brain... So if you add artificial eyes, ears, hands, and so on [don't think too much about whether we have any of these add-ons, and you really do have to love that futurological "and so on" --d], it could talk with you and do tasks as well as the original. It could also do as well at arguing that it's conscious and deserves moral consideration [and so those whom we presently regard as conscious or worthy of moral consideration have merely fooled us by arguing well? watch yourselves, people, around this Robin Hanson fellow! --d]... Ems would remake the world [no self-respecting futurologist can refrain from at least one declaration that total earth-shattering history-ending transformation is implied by their stunning insights --d]... We humans are made [by whom? of course, if we are already "made" then the making of our like has already been rhetorically opened for business --d] of meat, our brains run [is that what brains do, "run" --d] at the same speed, we take decades to build, and we must be trained [training is building, then, is it? --d] individually... Because ems are easily copied [because that wildly implausible ease was stipulated at the outset in order to have a reason to read the article at all --d], you could train one to be a good lawyer and then make a billion copies who are all good lawyers... That one initial em could come from the very best suited human [note the assumptions embedded in this formulation: the satisfaction of abstract and hence (supposedly) copyable criteria yields the "best lawyer" as if such considerations of worth aren't really usually the result of a host of contingencies of circumstance, appearance, interpersonal chemistry when it is indeed "humans" making these decisions in the scrum of human events --d]; the typical em would be as sharp and capable as the very best humans [note that the "sharpness" and "capability" of tools denotes "best"-ness in humans once the instrumentalized circumscription of imagination required by the whole thought-experiment is made, a result with real effects in the world, even if the appearance in the world of "ems" isn't among those real effects, even if the treatment of humans as something more like "ems" is the only tendency --d] in the world. The em economy would thus be much more competitive because small efficiency gains would lead to a bigger displacements [about the market fundamentalist faith expressed in this logic I will say a tad more at the very end --d] of behavior."

Heavens, what a lot of ifs! Now, complete failure and ignorance may seem a shaky foundation on which to erect so many confident assertions, but like last season's tragic AI-fashionista futurists handwaving about Big Data that would "scale" into the AI of artificial intelligence without anybody needing to understand the "ai" of actual intelligence Hanson's "ems" as snapshot black boxes that would "plug" into the AI of artificial intelligence without anybody needing to understand the "ai" of actual intelligence re-enacts the same desperate dead-ender gambit. Hey, techno-transcendent faith-based initiatives are a hell of a drug.

Just because it illustrates another point I often make about sub(cult)ural futurism, it is worth noting that Hanson isn't just an AI-deadender but a libertopian deadender, too. "[A] more competitive em economy will select more strongly against jurisdictions whose regulations create competitive disadvantages... For example, if most human-dominated jurisdictions are slow and cautious regarding the first ems, the em economy would blossom in the few places that allow quick adoption of em-friendly practices. Such places would soon dominate the world." It's been a while since I have seen somebody propose what James Boyle used to deride as the libertarian gotcha so baldly -- the argument that if a thing would be profitable were it to exist, then it must not only be possible but it must sweep the whole world irresistibly, all you pathetic nanny state luddite scum to the contrary notwithstanding! Obviously this is true, and it is the reason we all took a maglev-ramp jet this evening to our vacation homes in some L5 torus where we feasted on low-calorie super-nutritious cruelty-free cell-culture steaks wearing diamonds made dirt-cheap from dirt in our drextech desktops while gazing onto a planet without nation-states because of crypto-anarchists and without pollution because of highly profitable mega-industrial geo-engineering projects built by beneficent petro-chemical CEOs. It's all so obvious! Seriously, though, Hanson is famous for proposing "idea futures" markets that would presumably provide a greater financial stake in accuracy conducive to prediction than in gaming the system and profitably declaring the results accurate and also for proposing a rather biased conception of what it would mean to overcome bias and what such an overcoming would be good for, neither of which seem to me particularly attuned to human personality or history, but the reductionisms implied in which, I imagine, must be especially compelling to those market libertarian types who already like to indulge fantasies that there are no rational conflicts among people, that all contracts are noncoercive by fiat whatever terms of misinformation or duress articulate their terms, and that market orders arise spontaneously from natural forces of supply and demand wherever states do not hinder them rather than contingent parochialisms utterly dependent for their formation and maintenance on laws, treaties, norms, and infrastructural affordances usually dictated by incumbent elites to the detriment of majorities. Well, maybe you have to be an "em" to really get it.