My Silly Skepticism About AI and Uploading

The following is edited and adapted from the Moot to this post, an exchange with "Gareth Nelson" (his contributions are italicized, follow the link for the unedited version and context) very much like countless exchanges I have had with cocksure robocultic AI-deadenders over the past few decades, but what the hell, new readers may not be bored unto death at such re-hashes as I am. By all means follow the link and make your own contributions, if you like.

Dale -- you've said (and I love this quote of yours) "a picture of you is not you", which is entirely true and I do not claim it is at all possible to "transfer" conciousness from a brain into a computer. But if we stick with the picture analogy, I would argue that a copy of a picture is still as useful for the same purposes. When we look at a beautiful work of art, we derive pleasure from appreciating the skill of the artist... assuming the copy is of high quality we can use it for the same purposes -- appreciating the beauty.

Setting aside the obvious fact that collectors spend millions for originals while disdaining reproductions for reasons that are not entirely dismissable as snobbery, I have no objection to the fact that some people might want to believe they get the same value from a recent digitally animated Aubrey Hepburn avatar selling a candy bar as they do from her actual performance in Sabrina, I have no objection to some pervbro who wants to believe his blow up fuck doll provides as rich a relationship as he is capable of enjoying with a human partner, I have no objection to somebody who wants to believe that they make some profound connection with the Great Emancipator via his stiff animatronic duplicate in Disney World's Hall of Presidents. Hey, there's no accounting for taste.

If we say that the purpose of a brain is to yield intelligent behaviour (and secondly to control a body -- but we generally value people for what's in their cerebral cortex, not their brain stem) then a copy of a brain that yields intelligent behaviour serves the purpose just fine, at least for other people.

I'm an atheist so I don't believe the brain exists for a "purpose" in the way you seem to mean. This is not a quibble, because the theology here already figures intelligence as purposively designed in a way that smuggles your erroneous conclusions into your framing of your position in that very dispute. Your second framing of the brain as "controlling" the body is also considerably more problematic and prejudicial than you seem to realize. The brain IS the body, not a separate or superior supervisor of it. There is a whiff here of the very dualism you falsely attribute to opponents of your faith-based formulation of the "info-soul." I also think this business of introducing "control" into the picture so early is rather symptomatic, but we needn't go into all that. I do hope you see a therapist on a regular basis.
 

If you're a true materialist you accept that the brain is just a physical object with some complex chemical and electrical processes being responsible for its behaviour. It stands to reason that modelling those processes accurately should allow the same behaviour.

Not only does this assertion not "stand to reason," but it is a patent absurdity. I am a materialist in the matter of red wagons, but I hardly think a computer modeling a red wagon would be one, even if it might generate an image I would recognize as the representation of one. I certainly would not expect a modeled red wagon to be capable of all the things a red wagon is, nor (knowing what I do know of computer modeling) would I expect that those shared recognizably red wagonish effects would be achieved in the same way by the red wagon and the red wagon model. Not incidentally, I do not agree that we know at present that the material processes that give rise to the experience of thought (including the experience of witnessing its exhibition in others) are reducible to only those chemical and electrical processes in the brain -- and also possibly elsewhere in the body -- that we presently know and in the way we presently know them. They certainly might, but our present accounts are hilariously far from sufficient to pretend we know for sure. And there is no need in the least to invoke supernatural phenomena to recognize the highly provisional status of much of our present understanding of brain processes and to treat grandiloquent extrapolations from our present knowledge onto futurological imagineering predictions with extreme skepticism and their confident proponents as ridiculous.

You could get really silly and claim that a model of a human brain which "seems" intelligent is actually just simulating intelligence and the model is just accurately predicting the behaviour of a human brain and outputting that behavioural prediction, but then you're just arguing semantics.

How terrible it would be to elicit the judgment that I am being "silly" from you of all people! You are acting as though AI or simulated apparent persons are actual accomplishments, not futurological fancies, and that my skepticism about their realization given the poverty of our understanding is some kind of a denial of facts in evidence. You'll forgive me, but it is not the least bit silly nor merely semantic for me to point out that AI is not in evidence, that AI champions are always certain AI is around the corner when it serially fails to arrive, that our understanding of intelligence is incomplete in ways that seem likely to bedevil the construction of actually intelligent/agentic artifacts for some time, and that AI discourse and the subcultures of its enthusiasts have always been and remain indebted to pathological overconfidence, uninterrogated metaphors, troubling antipathies to materiality and biology, sociopathic aspirations of mastery, control, omniscience none of which bode well for the project to which they are devoted.

Path of the Critique of Commodity Fetishism

From the fetishism of commodities to the Culture Industry to the Spectacle to Big Data, being degraded into having, having degraded into deferring, deferring degraded into appearing, appearing degraded into being framed.

What They Fear

Ebola, terrorism, immigration, PC-police are all proxies. Republicans are scared to death and they are acting like it's the end of the world. They are right. White racist patriarchal extractive-industialism cannot survive a diversifying, secularizing, planetizing society. They feel cornered. They think the final battle is upon them. They experience progressive change as an existential threat. It is because they have already lost that they can mobilize the imaginative and organizational resources to do their last bit of mischief. White racist patriarchal Republicanism isn't just, Godwin do forgive me, Hitler but Hitler in the bunker now. They cannot win but do not underestimate the damage they can do in losing: victory in a smoking planetary ruin traumatized beyond healing.

Crypto-Dildo

Encryption fixated politics seem to me regularly to expose a paranoid/aggressive project of cyborg-ruggedized selfhood, very closely akin to what is revealed in gun-nuttery.

Sins of the Futurologists

Chapter One

Sins of Futurologists: Life expectancy at retirement age -- esp at lower end of the income distribution -- are not increasing and yet glib futurological declarations to the contrary, genuflecting vacuously to Boomer-daydreams of face-lifts, boner pills and sooper meds are repeated endlessly and now provide an unchallenged basis for attacks on social security and calls to raise the retirement age a case with intuitive plausibility for pampered gerontocratic US Senators who live no longer than did many Senators of ancient Rome, and who seem quite uninterested in dilemmas of working class majorities with hollowed out finances, accumulated health and stress issues, and see nothing but dollar signs (every year added to retirement age steals 7% of benefits owed citizens) rationalized by cyborg daydreams.

Chapter Two

Sins of the futurologists: When Exxon-Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson declared climate change will have an "engineering solution" he indulged in the futurological conceit of "geo-engineering," in the futurological genre of the imaginary technofix of sociopolitical problems.To those who know the genre it will come as no surprise that Tillerson's glib recourse to daydream megatech solutionism was accompanied by condemnation of climate activism and regulation as "alarmism" and Big Government/Socialist opportunism.

Although many are scandalized to discover that petro-companies indulged in profitable climate-change denialism when they knew better, it is crucial to grasp that concession of facts of climate change coupled to geo-engineering solutionism and refusal of political action (note that this refusal often takes the form of oh so despondent libertopian orthodoxy resigned to the *inevitable* failure of politics) is just next-stage climate-change denialism, a continuation of profitable extractive-industry (now incl. remediation r&d) via futurology.

Chapter Three

Sins of the futurologists: promises of redemptive techno-abundance as against struggles for realizable abundance, equity-in-diversity constitute the smoking ruins we now sift to survive: from false redemption of the sin of Hiroshima in nuclear energy "too cheap to meter," to I've got one word for you -- "plastic" -- phony crap abundance on the cheap, now accumulating in toxic landfills, to Futurama dreams of car culture snarled in jams, poison clouds of lead and smog, white-racist flight to eco-catastrophic suburban lawns, to fantasies of sustainable design without sustainable politics, digital democracy with corporate-military surveillance and zero comments, saucer-eyed promises of ubicomp abundance nano-abundance 3D-printer abundance as disorganized labor power dies&social supports crumble.

Chapter Four

Sins of the futurologists: Serially failed, cocksure proponents of artificial intelligence, with their disembodied sociopathic models and their pretense that projections from our palpably incomplete understanding of actual biological intelligence are firm foundations keep describing as "smart" and as "intelligent" artifacts that obviously exhibit no autonomy or intelligence whatsoever with the consequences that first, we lose sight of the actual intelligence of human and nonhuman animals in ways that loosen our grip on supports for their dignity, second, we valorize inept/inapt designs (clumsy, sociopathic algorithms) to which we attribute intelligence or glimpse its "holy" coming, third, we stop tracking responsibilities, refusing to hold designers owners users accountable for military crime & software-abetted fraud, fourth, we celebrate plutocratic skim-and-scam operators who monetize crowdsourced problem-solving, labor and enthusiasm, cheerleading reactionary celebrity techbro-CEOs like Bill Gates, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk for their PR "accomplishments" pretending that upward failing is "innovation" and deregulatory privatization is "disruption" and social darwinism is "resilience" and that the cyberspace feeding on coal-smoke, accessed on toxic devices made by wage slaves is a digital "spirit realm," Home of Mind, while they rake in their billions promising history-shattering sooper-AI Robot Gods who will solve all our problems for us or, precisely as lucratively, warning us against robocalypse Robot Gods reducing the world to goo, so keep those r&d dollars coming folks! So Futurological AI-ideologues derange sensible consideration of network security or user-friendliness into heaven/hellscape vaporware.

The Profitable Vacuity of Futurological "Enhancement" and "Intelligence"

There is a crucial continuity in the errors and deceptions committed by transhumanist/singularitarian futurist sub(cult)ural projects. The "enhancement" of eugenic transhumanists and the "intelligence" of singularitarian AI are evacuated of indispensable normativity.

"Enhancement" is always enhancement… For whom? From where? In the service of what? At what cost? "Intelligence," too is always intelligence… For whom? From where? In the service of what? At what cost? There is no such thing as "enhancement" or "intelligence" as such, out of nowhere, for all ends, without costs.

Eugenic and singularitarian "techno-transcendence" is in fact a disavowal of the worldly substance of struggle and sense. In this techno-transcendental futurisms are a *reductio* of mainstream, authoritative developmentalist discourses and marketing forms.

Prevalent neoliberal futurist discourses refigure, the better to deny, indispensably political categories like freedom and history, rendering them instrumentalities and hence indifferent, accumulative, projective, amplifying -- and so mattering, struggle, responsibility, transformation are rendered illegible to public deliberation and testimony. Our capacity to grasp the stakes of lived technodevelopmental social struggle is deranged, but the more proximate result (probably the only one that matters to those who indulge it) is its naturalization of elite-incumbency.

Tech talk confuses our understanding of the shared/contested public world, then peddles status-quo amplification as emancipatory history. Eugenicism/Roboticism/Neoliberalism support one another as justificatory corporate-militarist rationalies, Market Futures remind us that The Market and The Future are co-constructed and co-extensive imaginaries. The futurological denigration of SF, for instance, would reduce its speculation to legibility under the horizon of financial speculation, would reduce sf's world-disclosing testimony & world-making provocation to the futurological scenario, to ads for financial development, then pout and stamp that it lacks the cruel compulsory optimism of "positivity" or bigot-reassuring lies of "political incorrectness." There are no sadder puppies in all the world than the libertechbrotarian Robot Cultists and "Thought Leaders" of the VC silly con.

Reconciliation, Translation, Reflection

Interpretation, from interpretari, L, "to explain, to expound, to understand," and in turn from interpres, "agent, translator."

I am an atheist, and yet I find that I can sympathize with religious or spiritual practices to the extent that I can translate them into aesthetic terms. I am a socialist, and yet I find that I can sympathize with anarchist aspirations to the extent that I can translate them into democratizing terms. It is an open question to me whether these translations are more respectful than disrespectful.

Possibly Something To Do With The Mirror Universe?

Star Trek is most dystopic in its depiction of casual attire and swimwear, envisioning a galaxy in which International Male not only did not die but somehow achieved total fashion hegemony.

uber = douchecab

That is all.

Smart Car, Kill Thyself

If cars are so "intelligent" now and are programmed to "avoid dangers," then why aren't they committing mass-suicide before they destroy the planet?

Look, Ma, A Technologist!

When someone declares themselves a "technologist" it is usually safest to assume they are bragging about using language and wearing clothes.

The Graeber and Thiel Non-Debate on Technological Progress

Here is a link to a video of the (non-)debate that was the occasion for the following scattered sputterings on twitter late last night. Their talk is entitled "Where Did The Future Go?" and my response would be something like the question, "Why Won't The Futurists Just Go?"

Watching the Graeber/Thiel "debate" I'm struck once again by the affinity of "tech-talk" with fantasies of spontaneous order left & right. "Tech" discourses encourage catastrophic re-framing of political categories as instrumental ones: especially freedom as capacitation. Both Thiel and Graeber break the techno-transcendental accelerationalism orthodoxy and admit the dark secret of recent stagnation, but it's hard to see either Thiel's Randroidal Great Man stifled by mehums or Graeber's bureaucratization thesis as serious proposals. (Tho' I'll grant both theses are nice promotional tie-ins with their recent books, the flogging of which may be the purpose of the exercise.)

Thiel's stagnation concession is curious, in a way, given his own public reliance on transhumanoid/singularitarian articles of faith, Graeber's initial framing of his disappointment in terms of a failure of tech to deliver light-speed, teleporters, magicmeds and so on may suggest that in his youth he accepted no small amount of that old time techno-transcendental religion himself when it comes to it. For me it matters both that that very vision of "tech" / "progress" was always profoundly incoherent but also that MANY always knew that.

Prior to the arrival of our present stagnation, when advances were transforming hopes and expectations in nearly revolutionary ways, you wouldn't find Lewis, Ellul, Arendt or Mumford falling for techno-transcendental framings of technodevelopmental social struggle.

This may be blunt, but if you expected teleporters or galactic travel because we got the Pill and landed on the Moon (Graeber?) or expect a Robot God to end History or nanobots to give us treasure caves or uploading to Holodeck Heaven (Thiel?) it isn't bureaucracy or multiculturalism or anti-Business moochers that have stifled your futurological hopes but the fact that your "hopes" are at best stupid and crazy and are at worst deceptions and frauds (I'm lookin' at you, Thiel).

I've no doubt saying so will invite howls that I lack the visionary visionality, sticktoitiveness, etc, required to be a Thought Leader.

Guilty.

But I'm pretty sure that we live in the great stagnation because incumbent elites realized they could sell stasis as accelerating change. I believe we don't have technoscience progress for the same reason infrastructure is crumbling: because these are common/public goods.

I believe Reagan said government is the problem, Clinton said the era of Big Government is over, and Bush blew everything on war-crimes. I believe that in their own ways Thiel and Graeber agree too much with Reagan/Clinton (& futurist Gore) to solve the problem at hand.

I'll add they share too much techno-religiosity to see progress clearly, quite apart from their differently reactionary anti-statisms. I mean, if you want humans to go to Mars for discovery you need a real space program: neither a Muskian for-profit LEO amusement park, nor a scaled-up People's Mic. Space programs aren't Hackathons or drum circles.

But quite apart from that, if you want to go to Mars to have a neo-colonial wet-dream or escape human pollution or human irrationality, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but you want fundamentally incoherent, infantile and irresponsible things. That isn't visionary. We could have invested in renewable infrastructure and healthcare research under the auspices of a public healthcare program. We could have supported, educated, invested in ALL our citizens rather than retreat into costly criminal white supremacy and patriarchy.

Instead, in the neoliberal epoch, Reagan shut down public investment and doubled down on the Southern Strategy while Clinton/Gore were cheerleaders for irrationally exuberant fake digital/financial skim/scam "New Tech" coupled to mass incarceration/welfare reform.

Progress isn't an indifferent accumulation of gizmos but an equitable distribution of technoscientific costs/risks/benefits in diversity. Progress -- even technoscientific progress -- is a political not an instrumental phenomenon. Anti-political tech talk is blind to this.

Progress is also a worldly phenomenon: techno-transcendental re-framings of its stakes/aspirations confuse us all and facilitate fraud. Stasis will end when and as majorities struggle democratically for sustainable equity-in-diversity & a public address of shared problems.

The Dreamtime of the Driverless Car

Slap another 2,500 bucks onto the already steep price-tag of Tesla Motors' Model S sedan and your luxury "smart car" will be rendered even "smarter" still (no, Virginia, cars are not actually smart), with software activating a suite of features that represent a first version of an "autopilot" program aligning libertechbrotarian Elon Musk's car company more stolidly with kindred Google libertechbrotarians who have been futurologically evangelizing Driverless Cars for years now.

In the Bloomberg Business advertorial (as expected, every single "journalism" outlet coughed up some promotional hairball flogging the Tesla press release for free in the name of what passes for technology news) the car's new features were framed in customary futurological narrative mode. The first sentence of the first paragraph casts the software package as the materialization of a long-deferred dream: "Tesla Motors Inc. will begin rolling out the first version of its highly anticipated Autopilot features to some owners of its all-electric Model S sedan Thursday."

Since the infantile fetishists thronging gizmo-fandoms do indeed wait in long lines to purchase the latest landfill-destined models of this or that handheld gadget, I concede that this first sentence is factual enough as far as these things go, and do not doubt that visions of Tesla Autopilot sugarplums have been dancing in the heads of cheerleaders Musky for the latest low-earth-orbit SpaceX amusement park ride or coffin train Hyperloop cartoon gifted to the world by our soopergenius savior celebrity CEO.

However, as a rhetorician I have to point out that the real argumentative heavy lifting performed by the framing of a product as the fulfillment of a collective dream, the arrival into The Future promised by futurists past, is that it offers up narrative collateral investing the futurological dream of the sentence following it with the plausibility and force to make the bigger sale: "Autopilot is a step toward the vision of autonomous or self-driving cars, and includes features like automatic lane changing, auto steering and the ability to parallel park itself."

Enraptured by this "vision" you may have overlooked that the none of the features actually listed there is new -- some amount to the phony novelty of marketing neologisms repackaging features decades old, like slightly souped-up 70s-era cruise control, while others have been available for a few years now in other cars and offer a mixed record of welcome minor conveniences as well as troubling new occasions for accidents, like automatic parallel parking features.

Of course, there is nothing like futurology to distract you from the disappointment and even danger of present offerings by recasting them as stepping stones to future satisfactions in which you are somehow participating aspirationally now, even if in the form of disappointment and danger. Consumer capitalism does few things better than tricking us into paying for the dissatisfaction of deferred satisfactions as satisfaction (a deferral that ends in our deaths, by the way, and eventually, very possibly, in the death of our planet).

As with the futurological nightmare of truly autonomous weapons systems, or Killer Robots, exclamation point, the futurological daydream of truly autonomous automobiles, or Driverless Cars, exclamation point, is far from reality -- of a piece with the general denigration of intelligence, recognition of which is indispensable to the support of human dignity, in faith-based futurist discourses of "artificial intelligence," as well as with the general demoralization of intelligence distracted by small screens and harassed by targeted marketing and scoring -- but quite apart from that reality on the ground, the "vision" of autonomous artifice as a documentary and justificatory rhetoric is palpably ideological, functioning to distract our attention away from the risks and costs of parochially profitable technodevelopmental changes and especially away from any grasp of the culpability of the investors, owners, designers, coders, marketers, sellers of artifacts in the suffering and death that accompanies that parochial profitability by divesting actual actors of agency and imaginatively investing artifacts with agency.

Given the long-held American romance with cars as cyborg shells -- a romance adjacent and often entangled with fantasies of gun-ownership and open-carry prostheses -- at once "enhancing" and ruggedizing us as individuals ready to compete for positional advantage or more usually momentary survival in a Hobbesian-Darwinian marketplace (the never-needed four-wheel-drive wilderness vehicle or the unsafe-security-theater-massiveness of the mini-van enlisted for the work commute, the exurban shopping trek, the flight to heteronormative suburbia) as well as providing avenues for comfortably conformist pseudo-rebellions against the exactions of this relentless competition (the road trip of the youth not yet or the retiree no longer defined by wage-slavery, the vestigial frontier of the lonely highway, the alluring transcendental myth of traffic flow), it is initially hard to see how the relinquishment of agency promised by the "driverless car" exerts its ideological tug in the first place.

Rather like the plummeting sticker-value of a freshly purchased car the second it is driven off the lot, perhaps there is a likewise instantaneous plummeting of a car's dream-value the moment it is snarled in a traffic jam, resounds with the collision of an empty shopping cart, bleeps an engine-temperature warning, or the needle edges its way all too soon toward empty. But surely the deeper ideological work of "the driverless car" is that it provides a discursive space in which one can concede the conspicuous catastrophes of car culture -- the pollution and waste and unsustainable suburban sprawl, the white-racist demolition of thriving diverse neighborhoods to make way for highways and overpasses facilitating the fiscal and institutional abandonment of majorities living in our cities -- catastrophic outcomes inspired by an earlier generation of futurists, hell, some of history's most influential futurists actually called their dream of car culture Futurama -- all the while disavowing the need to address these catastrophes in a substantive way: The Driverless Car is the futurological promise that we will save ourselves from car-culture by saving... car culture!

Why change public policies or budgetary priorities to facilitate dense diverse walkable neighborhoods and bike lanes and public transportation and continental rapid rail when you can pretend instead that simply purchasing millions more cars year after year as we have done year after year -- sure, so soon to be hybrid and electric, so soon to be artificially intelligent, so soon to be driven entirely by precarious, disorganized, unregulated drivers or,I suppose, "AIs" summonable with a digital handheld app, or so the story goes, as if that means anything real or would mean anything good even were it to become real in any measure -- purchasing millions more demanding, costly, lethal, indistinguishable cars, inching day by day through jammed traffic and an amplifying status quo toward The Future of flaming wreckage, bleak cube-stack mountains, and toxic landfills -- that somehow, somehow, this treadmill will take us somehow somewhere new, will address somehow our existential car culture grievances, will solve somehow our planetary car culture problems.

I predict...

It won't.

Dear Elon, Everybody Dies Whether You Want To Or Not

Elon Musk is declaring in public that he doesn't want to live forever in order to peddle the completely false impression that techno-immortality is plausible for those hoping otherwise. Such credulity is money in the bank for his whole skim-and-scam-artist billionaire techbro "Think Leader" set. Musk's comments about longevity medicine (not a thing -- all healthcare increases and improves life, no "enhancement" or "longevity" or "cyborgic" or "uploading" or "gengineering" medicine separate from healthcare exists except as a rhetorical and marketing exercise) are akin to his recent flogging for funds for serially failed AI by warning everybody about "killer robots" and Satanic Robot Gods that must be stopped with protective tech and friendly software now that the sooper-intelligent ubicomp better-than-real-VR digitopian long-con is starting to lose steam here in the ruins of smart-but-dumb landfill-destined consumer crap and digital sharecropping and Big Data surveillance and marketing harassment. Advertisers always have both the carrot (youthful skin!) and the stick (pimpled pariah!) at their disposal to get their snake-oil off the shelves. Robocultic futurologists do like to keep switching their pitch from handwaving tech-heaven to Very Serious tech-apocalypse to selective tech-agnosticism to keep the pop-tech infotainment illiterates guessing and the collection plates full.

On Guns (Only) in America

While the scale and scope of gun-violence in the United States is exceptional, as compared to other industrial and at least notionally representative societies in the world, it seems to me that the American Constitutional system also provides for an exceptionally clear solution to the problem and one that illuminates a host of questions that are often incidentally but rarely insistently connected in discussions of the problem. All right, so guns…

At the outset, I am going to simply set aside as fundamentally unserious the prevailing misreading of the Constitution popular among so-called Second Amendment absolutists (most of whom are cynical shills for gun-lobby profiteers and the unwitting dupes of their mass-mediated echo chambers): If you do not believe that the Second Amendment sanctions individual ownership of nuclear weapons then you already concede the premise that there are weapons safety bans and regulations compatible with the Second Amendment.

Once conceded, the question becomes a matter of just what gets banned and regulated according to objective determinations of harm and how best to implement these bans and regulations. I commend much of the suite of reforms familiar to gun control advocacy for well over a generation: universal background checks facilitated by waiting periods; elimination of egregious loopholes for gifts and gun-shows; refusing violent criminals, domestic abusers, certain emotionally distressed individuals from the use and possession of guns; banning of military style weapons and arsenals to private citizens; implementation of licensing regimes requiring periodic demonstrations of competence and awareness of safety rules and laws at least as strenuous as those already required of those who drive cars or operate other kinds of potentially dangerous machinery; compulsory purchase of insurance to defray the public costs of damage and disruption from gun use for all gun owners and users; sequestration of recreational shooting to public facilities with on-site storage of the weapons used in them; radical circumscription of destructiveness of weapons sanctioned for hunting; ongoing tracking of weapons and ammunition purchasing and public circulation; and so on. Again, I am going to simply set aside as fundamentally unserious, and usually as outright deceptive, the commonplace claims of gun activists and enthusiasts who declare such measures impractical or ineffective, inasmuch as nearly all of them have been demonstrated to be both practical and effective in real world practice.

None of this preliminary throat-clearing is the least bit original, of course -- important though it is to make these obvious points given the insistent ubiquity of their denial -- but nor is any of that the thrust of my post. For me, it matters that the Second Amendment guarantee of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is explicitly subordinated, both conceptually and grammatically (not to mention as a matter of the historical context of the harsh collective memory of military occupation by the British out of which the Amendment originated), of "a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state." I regard the Amendment as an insistence that the military and police providing "the security of a free state" be accountable to and representative of -- and hence, "well regulated" -- of "the people" in whose name they act. This imperative is also expressed, of course, in the Constitutional establishment of civilian control over the military but it provides as well, in my reading, a firm Constitutional basis for contemporary demands not only for gun safety regulations but also for accountable, representative community-based policing in the United States.

It is not an accident that gun-control activism and Black Lives Matter movements to end violent, inequitable, unaccountable, non-representative, predatory white-racist policing practices are happening at one and the same time. These movements are structurally connected, and not only in their shared aspirations, but in the interdependence of the crises they would overcome: the suffusion of public space with guns in private ownership provides an official rationale or at least inevitable argumentative recourse for ever more militarized domestic policing practices.

This is far from the whole story, however. The incessantly reported and invoked defensive, even paranoid, psychology of public policing in a gun-suffused public space materializes, or more specifically embodies, the broader, inchoate, poisonously repressed defensiveness and paranoia occasioned by the demographic diversification, secularization, and planetization of an American public displacing the white supremacy long sited and secured by policing: For not only have the police historically policed white-supremacy in the name of civil order, but the police have historically been sited in the cultural state investing racially long-marginalized populations like the Irish, Italians, Polish, Latin Americans, and so on with at first and at best probationary "whiteness," whiteness provisionally secured while provisionally securing white-supremacy.

The defensiveness, especially, of white police who do not live in the communities of color they police is a performance of alienated occupation that rationalizes its violence through the paradoxically Janus-faced recourse to, on the one hand, an historical imaginary that treats these communities as themselves an invasive, occupying force on the body politic of White (sometimes denominated "Real") America -- yes, it is obscene to figure as an alien "invasion" the violent kidnapping and enslavement of people and subsequently as an alien "occupation" a people officially emancipated but then in fact ruthlessly subordinated by Jim Crow, terrorist lynching, share cropping and wage slavery, exclusion from Progressive era and then New Deal reforms creating the White American middle class, segregation through education and zoning and election practices, and mass incarceration -- but also, on the other hand, by recourse to a futural imaginary that treats these communities as the symptom and specter of a demographic reversal in which a majority minority America now threatens White-Supremacy-qua-Occupation with all of its dirty, ugly, guilty open secrets with the prospect of factual displacement and just reparations.

To make much the same point from a different vantage, there is nothing the least bit paradoxical in the fact that some of the first accomplishments of the gun control movement were occasioned by practical interventions and protests of violent white-racist policing on the part of the Black Panthers that took the form of Black bodies Open-Carrying defensive weapons while the consummation of gun-activism today is represented by the spectacle of White bodies Open-Carrying threatening weapons, usually in public spaces where people of color make their homes or are otherwise encouraged to feel welcome. Open-Carry, today, is a political movement to countermand ongoing American diversification by suffusing public space with white-racist patriarchal terror, and in this it is directly connected to the terrorist work of lynching as an historical maintenance of white-supremacy.

By way of conclusion, allow me to take yet another step back for an even wider contextualization of the issue at hand... Gouverneur Morris was a Founding Father who has not quite remained a household name. He wrote the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, which insists that liberty is secured through the promotion of general welfare, and he was one of the few delegates who was explicitly opposed to slavery (by the way, he was also a strong public advocate for the building of the Erie Canal to transform New York into a modern global industrial commonwealth -- on the basis of a proto-Keynesian pre-Rooseveltian understanding of stimulative public investment as general welfare in line with the thinking of another abolitionist Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton). Meanwhile, a much more famous Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, wrote the Declaration of Independence, which delineates instead an individualist conception of liberty, and he was an apologist for slavery now notorious for his exploitation and abuse of slaves.

Of course, the assertively individualist, agrarian-feudalist "democracy" of Jefferson -- that is, individualist in the form of a distraction from or outright denial of social interdependence; that is, democracy in the form of plutocratic, slave-holding anti-democracy -- has long held ideological sway over the American public imaginary, especially in moments when Americans seek to rationalize their avowed democracy with their anti-democratic sins and crimes. (Given this blog's usual preoccupation with reactionary "tech" discourse and corporate-militarist futurology, allow a parenthetic reminder of the special indispensability of these Jeffersonian formulations to neoliberal venture-capitalist "tech culture" from the California Ideology, to Barlow's so-called Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, to the abiding metaphor of the Electronic Frontier.) But whatever the rhetorical priority of the Jeffersonian formulation of liberty it is the Constitutional Morrisonian formulation of liberty that has primary legal standing. And of these historically competing American ideologies of liberty, it is the Constitutional version that also seems to me by far the most philosophically sound, practically sustainable, and authentically American.

Just as the historical emergence and consolidation of the American "free enterprise" was predicated on the quintessentially unfree system of chattel slavery, so too the ongoing ideology of free enterprise depends on fantasies of voluntary contracts the terms of which are too often actually duressed by the unequal knowledge, unequal precarity, and unequal access to cultural and infrastructural affordances of the participants in the contract as also the eventual profitability of free enterprise depends on socializing the risks and costs of enterprises while privatizing their benefits.

There is a direct connection between the historical fantasy of the historically American individualist who disavows his dependencies on the ritual and material artifice of slavery, wage slavery, and unpaid domestic labor and the present-day fever dream of the white-racist patriarchal "Real American" individualist for whom the Open-Carried weapon is the ruggedizing cyborg shell that disavows interdependence to "stand its ground" on an American Homeland geography resonating with the history of native American genocide, slavery, sex-panics, anti-immigration mobs, drug-war hysteria, postwar militarism, and post-9/11 security state insecurity. The feudal Jeffersonian conception of possessive individualist liberty resonates still in the "Castle Doctrine" so cherished by gun culture, in which the individual and his gun is figuratively transformed into a feudal castle "standing its ground" on an anarchic terrain of lawless warlords -- and, no doubt, damsels in distress -- the all too familiar imaginative recourse of Confederate slave-masters of whom Jefferson was a precursor and market libertarian ideologues for whom Jefferson remains a paragon.

The Morrisonian Preamble to the Constitution endorsed the crucial premise of the Jeffersonian Declaration that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" with the frame "We the People… in order to form a more perfect Union… ordain and establish this Constitution." After the conspicuous failure of the radically minarchist "Articles of Confederation," Morris proceeds with his fellow delegates to institute a federal form for that just and consensual government (as Jefferson hesitated to do in principle but then did with gusto in his Presidential practice, of course). Against the individualist spontaneism of the Declaration and failed Articles, the Morrisonian Preamble elaborates the public constitution of the Union from which alone can flow the "blessings of liberty," the "establish[ment] of justice… domestic tranquility… common defense… and [the] promot[ion of] general welfare." It is not until the Fourteenth Amendment ensuring birthright citizenship and universal equitable recourse to the administration of justice in principle that the Constitution doctrinally admitted (as, needless to say, it has never fully or consistently managed to do in actual practice to this day) the third plank in the uniquely American conception of liberty, that America is a nation of immigrants and the exercise of its liberty is invigorated by the diversity of its stakeholders.

It is no surprise that gun culture is connected so regularly with the politics of white-supremacy, nor that self-described patriots and even law enforcement personnel allied with this gun culture are connected so regularly with nullification strategies and secessionist rhetoric and hostility to birthright citizenship. In their specifically American form, racist white supremacy and libertarian spontaneous order are of a piece historically, culturally, and conceptually. Understanding these connections is indispensable to resisting them here, but doing so also provides uniquely American resources for hope. Just as feminist and anti-racist work are both clarified and strengthened by grasping their intersectionalities, so too gun safety advocacy and community policing work and Black Lives Matter movements are clarified and strengthened by grasping theirs. Gun safety activism both practically and intellectually facilitates activism against the drug war, the school to prison pipeline, the abuse-to-prison pipeline, for-profit prisons, police militarization, bloated military budgets, and for community policing reform, structural racism education, work to expose and end sexual violence, and all and each for the others as well.

None of the preceding is offered up to imply that the aristocratic Gouverneur Morris was without great faults any more than to deny that the radical Thomas Jefferson had his strengths, but the distinction I have drawn between them is meant to highlight an early and abiding contest between negative and positive, private and public conceptions of liberty that help elaborate connections between gun control, community policing, immigration politics today that clarify stakes and identify allies. Gun safety regulation "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity" is also a struggle to clarify and implement the American Constitutional conception of a positive liberty indispensably indebted to accountable/consensual governance, public investment in common goods, and the critical, creative, constructive dynamism of stakeholder diversity. American gun violence today is an exceptional outrage, as our solution to it tomorrow could provide an exceptional illumination to ourselves and our posterity.

"All organizing is science fiction." -- Walidah Imarisha

Octavia's Brood

Open-Terror

Open-Carry is a political project to countermand American diversification by suffusing public space with white-racist patriarchal terror.

Tech Progressive, So Regressive.

There's nothing progressive in policy discussions premised on technocratic authority rather than democratic deliberation. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in "disruption" that amounts to the deregulatory enablement of fraud. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about "innovation" that simply loots and privatizes public goods or externalizes public risks. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in eugenic "enhancement" promoting conformity and docility as competitiveness and as health. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in treating wanted human lifeways as diseased and criminal kinds of personhood demanding "cure." #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in pretending robocalypse is an existential threat and climate change an engineering problem. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about dreams of escaping our shared responsibilities into outer space or virtual reality. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about identifying with robots or treating people as robots. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive about turning education into television or even into video games. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in treating consumer fashions as activism or consumer fandoms as movements. #TechProgressive

There's nothing progressive in the pretense that corporate-military status quo amplification is progress. #TechProgressive

I am embarrassed to admit my own complicity in the emergence of the technoprogressive term now current in some circles of neoliberal tech talkers and "Thought Leaders." Interested readers will note the appropriated arguments and even phrases in the wikipedia entry for technoprogressivism, alluded to in the 2014 robocultic transhumanist Technoprogressive Declaration, all from my own Technoprogressivism: Beyond Technophilia and Technophobia, published nearly a decade before that Declaration. I realized quite soon after writing that rather programmatic piece that its formulations were being taken up in stealth-reactionary futurological "tech" circles seeking to sanewash eugenic, libertarian, neoliberal, digi-utopian, greenwashing, facile reductionist and determinist views about technodevelopmental politics. I soon came to believe that the susceptibility of my formulations to these deceptive and tech-propagandistic appropriations was a product of my own under-interrogated use of the term "technology" in the piece as monolithic and extricable from and hence apparently substitutable for politics in ways that facilitated what I now recognize as a host of familiar reactionary futurological gestures -- the naturalization of elite incumbent interests as a-political, the substitution of marketing norms and forms for modes of reflection and analysis, the treatment of wish-fulfillment fantasies as scientific predictions, the investment of such speculation with transcendental significance, and the transformation of these discourses into subcultural formations, identity movements and consumer fandoms. For a recent and concise elaboration of the critique eventuating in part from experience of the techno-transcendental appropriation of my early efforts I recommend Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains.

Nature's Artiface: Negative Liberty, Spontaneous Order, and Reactionary Tech

"Negative" liberties are forms of positive liberty that manage to disavow, by naturalizing, their contingent and artificial affordances. "Spontaneous" orders are forms of order that manage to deny their parochialism, history and costs through the force of their incumbency. "Nature" derives from the Latin nasci, to be born, to appear, but it matters that labor precedes birth and preparation enables appearance.

The essential work of the discourse of naturalization has come to be its disavowal of the artifice of what passes for the natural, this is an accomplishment indicated not least by the treatment of nature as the contrary to artifice rather than as a species of it. To belabor the obvious here, naturalization conduces to the maintenance or amplification of the status quo and to reactionary politics.

There is an affinity in the de-politicizing gesture through which always only some artifacts/techniques are constituted as "technology," and then the ready investment of some technologies so constituted with the work of a-politicizing conservatism. Techno-libertarian ideology absolutely depends on these discursive ploys, as when the end-to-end principle is implicitly identified with negative liberty, then enables the advocacy of plutocracy as meritocracy, or when prior faith in natural, virtuous spontaneous order (confirming its advocates they should rule, naturally) transforms encryption from technique to world-historical force that would abolish the unnatural, vicious barriers to the flowering of that spontaneous order.

Scattered Speculations on Vulgar Science Fiction Through the Futurological Looking Glass

Although I am a passionate fan of science/speculative fiction literature, film, fandom, I realize that I rarely write about sf here and that I probably should. The exception that proves the rule happens to be one of my favorite essays here at Amor Mundi, by the way: Raised Vulcan Eyebrows and Hopeless Human Hopes. I do take sf seriously, and I make very regular recourse to it in my science-technonlogy-studies (STS) and environmental-justice-movement (EJM) teaching at Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute. If you scroll down to the "Science Fiction" heading in The Superlative Summary you will find seven other pieces on sf there, tho' I'd say the quality is mixed at best.

The focus of my work and my writing here and elsewhere has, for whatever reasons out of the strange vicissitudes of personal and professional biography, turned out instead to be mostly the critique of futurological discourses and futurist sub(cult)ural formations. I happen to think that futurology is the quintessential discourse of neoliberal corporate-militarism, and that the strange exhibitions made by robocultic futurisms are a kind of reductio ad absurdum or iceberg tip symptomizing prevailing pathologies of postwar-to-ecocatastrophist capitalism. As a democratic socialist (or social democrat, if you like) Green, all this matters to me enormously, of course.

I do often make the point that futurological "scenarios" are in my view the definitive literary genre of the neoliberal epoch -- which really amounts to the truism that marketing norms and forms disastrously suffuse postwar public discourses -- and this observation also often leads me to joke that these futurological "scenarios" are actually just impoverished forms of science fiction, but, you know, entirely bereft of clever plots, interesting characters, or sustained themes. Indeed, most futurological “scenarios” amount to little more than stipulated settings of a scene (hence their name) and then filled with dystopian/utopian wish-fulfillment fantasizing. Again, I daresay the connections to advertising are obvious. Hilariously, these settings are themselves inevitably borrowed from actual science fiction writers, and given the plausibility that attaches to the familiar, futurologists tend to recycle those conceits real writers would disdain as cliches.

I will also say that I regard the familiar pretense that science/speculative fiction is an essentially or even primarily "predictive" genre to be a vulgar futurological fallacy. Works in any literary genre can be accidentally or incidentally predictive -- but sf, like all great literature, is constitutive of and responsive to living, earthly polyculture. It is the open futurity inhering in the diversity of stakeholders contending and collaborating in the present, in their presence, that provokes the allegories, commentaries, myths, testimonies of science/speculative fictional futures. It will perhaps seem paradoxical from the vulgar futurological vantage that has come so much to define the sfnal in the neoliberal epoch, but for me it is because it is so exquisitely the genre not of the future but the future anterior tense that sf is indeed a prophetic literary form.

Leave it to capitalists idiotically to mis-identify sales pitches for prophesies. You can be sure that the same futurological impulse that would loot and dismantle the (to be sure, deeply flawed) Academy and substitute for it a promotional for-profit archipelago of corporate-military think-tanks and universities re-made by financial managers and techno-fixers in the image of the same think-tanks, and who extol venture-capitalist skim-and-scam artists and self-promoting celebrity CEOs and guru-wannabes as "Thought Leaders," would also insist we celebrate as "The Literature of Ideas" sf as an exhortation to mass acquiescence to status-quo amplification marketed as progress, disruption, accelerating change, and transcendence!

Another vulgar futurological gesture is embodied in the periodic policing of science/speculative fiction for "positivity" -- and this impulse seems to me equally in evidence in the recent facile Stephensonian call for cruelly optimistic can-do science fiction as well as in the ugly racism and sexism of the Sad Puppies who also fancy themselves to be defending the civilizational citadel. To clarify, in each of these cases a gesture that would reduce sf literature to consumer-capitalist or white-supremacist or patriarchal (that is, sexist/heterosexist/cissexist) agitprop -- which would be bad enough -- but actually amounts to the even worse, but by now completely conventional, subsumption of sf literature into the prevailing deceptive, hyperbolic, triumphalist, apocalyptic, eugenic, techno-fetishistic faith-based norms and forms of neoliberal corporate-militarist marketing, promotion, self-promotion, advertising as public discourse.

As I always insist, every futurism is a retro-futurism, inasmuch as "The Future" is always a parochialism rationalizing and reassuring elite-incumbents of forever ongoing status-quo amplification. "Disruption" usually amounts the deregulatory dismantlement of democracy in the service of plutocracy, "innovation" usually amounts to the promotional re-packaging of stale and discarded commodities as novelties, "resilience" usually amounts to exploiters congratulating those who manage to survive their exploitation to be exploited still more, "accelerating change" usually amounts to the increasing precarity of majorities as experienced by minorities who either benefit from that precarity or foolishly identify with those who do. Again, the only thing more typical of postwar capitalism than compulsory "positivity" about our soul-wrecking planet-wrecking extractive-industrial-consumerist corporate-militarism is to add the insult to these injuries that we testify endlessly to the progressive productivity of this wreckage.

Benjaminian angel of history, smh.