Sunday, January 31, 2016
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Minsky Thensky
Minsky was a robocultic techno-immortalist on the Board at the Alcor cryonics operation. He also believed: "Ordinary citizens wouldn't know what to do with eternal life." Because they work on problems over many years only scientists grasp "the need" for life extension, he thought. Minsky: "The masses don't have any clear-cut goals or purpose." Minsky was a libertarian who strongly disapproved the regulation of research deemed unethical, eugenic, and so on. "Scientists shouldn't have ethical responsibility for their inventions, they should be able to do what they want." You shouldn't ask [scientists] to have the same values as other people." -- Marvin Minsky Although enthusiasts for the project of AI like Minsky have confidently predicted the arrival of AI for generations. AI has never yet arrived, and yet promises and threats of this never-existing phenomenon suffuse public discourse, and the attribution of intelligence to unintelligent artifacts is ubiquitous. The primary force of the artificial intelligence discourse Minsky and his colleagues have so long championed has been to denigrate the intelligence of beings incarnating it, whose dignity demands its recognition and support and to substitute for it a machinic calculative understanding Minsky applied to himself to justify anti-democracy.Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Are We Not Men? Patriarchy in Greek and Roman Antiquity
HUMN 224-01 Are We
Not Men? Patriarchy in Greek and Roman Antiquity
Spring 2016
Wednesdays,
1-3.45, Chestnut 20B
Course Blog:
http://arewenotmenrhetforreal.blogspot.com
Instructor:
Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu
Office Hours: Before and after class, and by appointment.
Course Description:
The
societies of Greek, Roman, and Christian antiquity were conspicuously
patriarchal. Homeric heroes made history and conquered death with great words
and deeds in an aspirational fantasy of masculine agency. The Roman
paterfamilias, perhaps patriarchy's most quintessential expression, centered
around the authoritarian male head of the household who held an unquestionable
power of life and death over his children, female relatives, and household
slaves. But in philosophy and in poetry, in Greek tragedies and in Roman
comedies, we find glimpses of a considerably richer and more complicated world
of gendered relations, erotic imagination, and human possibility, we encounter
profound anxieties, ambivalences, and resistances to patriarchal practices and
prejudices. This course will examine these tensions. We will be reading from
Sappho, Homer, Thucydides, Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Euripides,
Cicero, Terence, Juvenal, Quintilian, Petronius as well as contemporary
feminist and queer theorists and historians.
Course Requirements: Reading Notebook, Five Weekly Questions/Comments,
Short Reading (2-3pp.), Workshop Worksheet, Midterm Paper (4-5pp.), Course
Narrative (2pp.), Final Paper (6-7pp.)
Attendance Policy: Attendance and punctuality are expected.
Necessary absences should be discussed in advance whenever possible.
Provisional Schedule of Meetings
January
Week
One | 20 Introductions
Week
Two | 27 Poems of Sappho (Post Close Reading before class)
February
Week
Four | 10 Gorgias -- Encomium of Helen
Week
Five | 17 Euripides -- Hecuba; Melian Dialogue
Week
Six | 24 Workshop
March
Week
Seven | 2 Plato -- Symposium (Hand in first paper)
Week
Eight | 9 Plato -- Republic; Aristotle on Women
Week
Nine | Spring Break
Week
Ten | 23 Aristophanes -- Wasps
Week
Eleven |30 Thucydides -- Pericles Funeral Oration and other excerpts from the
Peloponnesian War
April
Week
Twelve | 6 Cicero -- Philippics; Quintilian -- from Institutio Oratio; and
Hortensia -- in the Forum
Week
Thirteen | 13 Terence -- Eunuchus
Week
Fifteen | 27 Petronius -- Trimalchio's Feast from Satyricon
May
Week
Sixteen | 4 Concluding Remarks Final Papers Due
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Biopunk!
CS-500P-01 Biopunk!
Spring 2016
Tuesdays, 1-3.45,
3SR2
Course Blog:
http://biopunct.blogspot.com
Instructor:
Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu
Office Hours: Before and after class, and by appointment. (I
will also be available on Chestnut Street on Wednesdays)
Course Description:
"Biopunk"
is well-known as a genre of speculative fiction taking up many of the
characteristic themes and gestures of cyberpunk literature but reinvigorating
them through a focus on the emerging and ongoing pleasures and dangers of
genetic science and medicine, bioinformatics, biotechnology, and biowarfare. In
this course we will mobilize key figures and themes from biopunk fictions to
engage and elaborate transgenic and bioart practices, insurgent technocultures
and lifeway practices, and performative resistance to biopiracy, eugenics, and
resource war.
Required Texts: Bruce Sterling,
Holy Fire; Octavia Butler, Dawn and Adulthood Rites; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and
Crake; in-class screenings of films. All other required readings will be linked
in the syllabus online or made available to you otherwise.
Course Requirements: In-Class Report (10 mins.), Short Scene
Reading (2-3pp.), Short Issue Precis (2-3pp.), Seminar Paper (18-25pp.)
Attendance Policy: Attendance and punctuality are expected.
Necessary absences should be discussed in advance whenever possible.
Course Objectives and Learning Outcomes:
1.
Elaborate intersections of biosciences, bioethics, and bioart
theories and practices.
2.
Explore a host of textual analytic modes: epitome, close
reading, interrogation, brainstorming, guided discussion, extended
research.
Provisional Schedule of Meetings
January
Week
One | 19 Introductions
Week
Two | 26 CS Lewis -- The Abolition of Man; Hannah Arendt -- Prologue to The
Human Condition; Greg Bear -- Blood Music
February
Week
Three | 2 Donna Haraway -- The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies; Pedro Almodovar
-- All About My Mother
Week
Four | 9 Michel Foucault -- Docile Bodies; Mia Mingus -- Hollow
Week
Five 16 | Michel Foucault -- Right of Death and Power Over Life; Octavia Butler
-- Bloodchild
Week
Six | 23 Bruce Sterling -- Holy Fire, chapters 1-3
March
Week
Seven | 1 Bruce Sterling -- Holy Fire, chapters 4-6 (Midterm grades this week)
Week
Eight | 8 Paul Di Fillipo -- Ribofunk: The Manifesto; Katsuhiro Otomo -- Roujin
Z
Week
Nine | Spring Break
Week
Ten | 22 Octavia Butler -- Dawn
Week
Eleven | 29 Octavia Butler -- Adulthood Rites
April
Week
Twelve | 5 Valerie Solanas: The SCUM Manifesto; Brian K Vaughan and Pia Guerra
-- Y: The Last Man, one
Week
Thirteen (MFA Reviews)
Week
Fourteen 19 | Critical Art Ensemble -- Eugenics: The Second Wave; Margaret
Atwood -- Oryx and Crake
Week
Fifteen 26 | Margaret Atwood -- Oryx and Crake
May
Week
Sixteen 3 4 Concluding Remarks; Final Papers Due
Friday, January 15, 2016
Friday, January 01, 2016
Robot Cultist Eliezer Yudkowsky's Ugly Celebration of Plutocracy
[Let us begin the new year, you and I, with a long, but not longing, backward glance. In the Moot to a post yesterday my friend Jim Fehlinger drew our attention to an essay from 2008 from robocultic Singularitarian, would-be sooper-genius, wannabe-guru Eliezer Yudkowsky. I vaguely recall having glanced at this piece once, but I can't say that I really gave the piece the real attention it deserved before now. Eliezer Yudkowsky is hardly what you would call a celebrated figure, but he is taken seriously by people who are taken seriously, for whatever reasons, to the extent that one admits the "Thought Leaders" of that amorphous aspirational blob called "tech" are taken seriously, folks like "philosophers" Nick Bostrom and Robin Hanson, and reactionary "techno-progressive" skim-and-scam gazillionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and the like. It is well known that I find Yudkowsky a ridiculous person, but I must say that upon reading the linked piece I found the apology for plutocratic elitism that followed frankly flabbergasting in its infantile foolishness, lack of standards, and truly gross indecency. Even I did not think so little of Yudkowsky to think he would write something like this. Perhaps he no longer would. I would like to think so. It is true that over the years venture capitalist techbros of the Valley of the Silly Cons have regularly been exposed by journalists and then mocked by majorities for making clueless bigoted asshole exhibitions of themselves and it is also true that the object of Yudkowsky's piece is, in a nutshell, to declare this very cohort of VCs as ethically and organismically and, hell, apparently cosmically superior sorts of beings, and so the awfulness of the following has a certain dismal inevitability about it. For the whole piece you should follow the link, my own comments are bracketed and interspersed and, I do assure you, were quite involuntary reflex actions of a shocked conscience. Yes, shock is the way we should begin...--d]
[There is much more evil crapola to be found in this vein in Yudkowsky's e-pistle. One particularly crazy utterance several more pages into the screed asserts that "Hedge-fund people sparkle with extra life force. At least the ones I've talked to. Large amounts of money seem to attract smart people. No, really." Oh, how our rich elites sparkle! As I said, it is really just more of the same -- including more of these faux "No, really" protestation against objections to all this objectionable idiocy that never really arrive nor are really, no, really, expected to from his readership.--d]
[By way of conclusion, it is interesting to note that like many who lack training in structural critique Yudkowsky finds himself indulging in a rather romantic misconception of the complexities of historical, social, and cultural dynamisms -- investing heroized protagonists with magickal force and indulging in frankly conspiracist mappings of power.--d]
[For what I mean by magick--d:]
I was shocked, meeting Steve Jurvetson, because from everything I'd read about venture capitalists before then, VCs were supposed to be fools in business suits, who couldn't understand technology or engineers or the needs of a fragile young startup, but who'd gotten ahold of large amounts of money by dint of seeming reliable to other business suits.[My own (possibly over-general) generalized impression of VCs is that they are mostly privileged upward failing opportunists unscrupulously hyping vaporware for short-term cash from credulous marks or exploiting collective labor and intelligence via the shar(ecropp)ing economy with little awareness or interest in the costs or risks or suffering of others involved in their efforts. "[S]eeming reliable to other [VCs in] business suits" might describe this sociopathic state of affairs, but I do think better descriptions are available. I must add that many of these people seem to me to have "gotten a-hold of large amounts of money" by being born with it or with enough of it to schmooze others born with it, which is to say that they are "self-made men" in the usual way.--d]
One of the major surprises I received when I moved out of childhood into the real world, was the degree to which the world is stratified by genuine competence.[Since Yudkowsky has interposed this curious framing at this point in his narrative himself, I think it only fair to offer it up as a question for the reader rather than a premise we will all simply uncritically accept: Do we agree with Yudkowsky, admittedly a man veering into middle age at this point, that he has indeed "moved out of childhood" at all, let alone "into the real world"? Given the embarrassing narcissism, the simplistic conceits, the facile hero worship, the infantile wish-fulfillment on display, are we all quite ready to admit Yudkowsky into the ambit of adulthood? Or is his superlative futurology yet another, more than usually palpable, symptom of superannuated infancy?--d]
Now, yes, Steve Jurvetson is not just a randomly selected big-name venture capitalist. He is a big-name VC who often shows up at transhumanist conferences. But I am not drawing a line through just one data point.[Quite a lot of the material I snipped from the beginning of Yudkowsky's piece involved his praise of Steve Jurvetson in particular who may, for all I know, actually be a bright and worthy person (although, contra Yudkowsky, I cannot say his attendance at robocultic transhumanist conferences, if that is true, inspires confidence in his judgment) or may, again for all I know, simply be someone Yudkowsky is buttering up in hopes of some collection plate action for his robocultic causes.--d]
I was invited once to a gathering of the mid-level power elite, where around half the attendees were "CEO of something" -- mostly technology companies, but occasionally "something" was a public company or a sizable hedge fund. I was expecting to be the youngest person there, but it turned out that my age wasn't unusual -- there were several accomplished individuals who were younger. This was the point at which I realized that my child prodigy license had officially completely expired.[Can there really be people who refer non-derisively and non-satirically to groups of the rich as "the power elite"? Can there really be people who refer to themselves -- setting aside the question of people in their thirties who refer to themselves -- affirmatively as "child prodigies"? With much discomfort and sadness, let us soldier on.--d]
Now, admittedly, this was a closed conference run by people clueful enough to think "Let's invite Eliezer Yudkowsky" even though I'm not a CEO. So this was an incredibly cherry-picked sample. Even so...[Even if this hyperbole is meant to signal irony, the boasting in it is so transparently a compensation for insecurity it is actually painful to observe.--d]
Even so, these people of the Power Elite were visibly much smarter than average mortals. In conversation they spoke quickly, sensibly, and by and large intelligently. When talk turned to deep and difficult topics, they understood faster, made fewer mistakes, were readier to adopt others' suggestions.[Again, with the "Power Elite" business. The capital letters and, if I may say so, simple commonsense make we want to assume the phrasing is parodic -- but nothing anywhere else suggests this. Indeed, one has the horrified suspicion that the letters are also capitalized in Yudkowsky's head. We will set aside as too horrific to contemplate the suggestion that it was simply their likely whiteness and maleness that made the Power! Elite! gathered in that room seem "visibly much smarter than average mortals." Notice that we must take Yudkowsky's word that the topics under discussion were "deep" and "difficult" and that they spoke of them "sensibly" and "intelligently" and "made fewer mistakes" (he would have caught them if they had). Were they "speaking quickly" because they had so much to say and were excited by their topics -- or just because they are used to fast-talking salesmanship and bullshit artistry? Were they "adopting each others suggestions" because they were open to intelligent criticisms or because they are yes-men flattering and cajoling each other for networking's sake or because groups of people like this are already largely in agreement about what matters and why it matters especially when it comes to "tech" talk?--d]
No, even worse than that, much worse than that: these CEOs and CTOs and hedge-fund traders, these folk of the mid-level power elite, seemed happier and more alive.[There you go. Read it again. Hedge fund managers and tech VCs are happier and more alive than other people. MORE ALIVE. The rich are not like you and me. They are tapped into exquisite joys and alivenesses unavailable to majorities, they they are more real. This bald endorsement of reactionary plutocratic superiority is so ignorant of the richness of the lives and intelligence of the majorities it dismisses and is so flatly pernicious in its eventually genocidal political entailments, I must say it is a rare thing to see in a public statement... Although, again, I have already noted that such public statements are indeed comparatively more commonplace, and notoriously so, among these very same sort of rich "tech" VCs and banksters. But there it is. Of course, Yudkowsky doesn't really mean "worse" or "much worse" in anything like the conventional sense, when he declares these (are we meant to think reluctant?) truths. No, Yudkowsky is relishing the awfulness of what he is saying, he is savoring the ugliness in his mouth, tonguing his anti-democratic morsel from tooth to tooth, smacking his lips in an unseemly dance of contrarian "political incorrectness," drinking in the imagined opprobrium of the unwashed useless eating masses he cheerfully consigns to computronium feedstock here. One is all too used by now to these online spectacles of man-child id celebrating racist police violence or rape culture or what have you in the faces of the vulnerable, smearing their feces on the walls of the world. What it is useful to recall at this juncture, again, is that mild-mannered "tech philosopher" Nick Bostrom at Oxford and widely worshiped celebrity "tech" CEO Elon Musk are discursively, sub(cult)urally and institutionally connected to this person, are conversant with his "ideas" and "enterprises," are his colleagues.--d]
This, I suspect, is one of those truths so horrible that you can't talk about it in public. This is something that reporters must not write about, when they visit gatherings of the power elite.[Again, nothing could be clearer than that Yudkowsky does not find this "truth" to be in the least horrible. He is palpably relishing it -- his enjoyment is so rich he does not even care about the perverse contradiction of describing as absolutely prohibited the speaking of the very truths he is in the act of megaphoning about at top volume -- and to the extent that he has already figured himself as adjudicating this gathering of rich happy genius elite superbeings, he is also making a spectacle of confirming his own status as such a being himself. Again, one doesn't have to scratch too deep beneath this ungainly superficial boasting to detect what look to be the rampaging insecurities desperately compensated by this embarrassing self-serving spectacle, but I do not so much discern in this so much a cry for help as an announcement of a punitive rage for order putting us all on notice. Such dangerous and costly performances of insecure personhood do not elicit my sympathy but ready my defenses. It is amusing to note that in the comments to his post, an early one responds to Yudkowsky's observation that "This [elitism], I suspect, is one of those truths so horrible that you can't talk about it in public" by assuring us "Charles Murray talked about [it] in The Bell Curve." Quite so! A later comment adds, "And Ayn Rand wrote about it repeatedly." All too, too true. I will add myself that while it is true that few reporters write about tech billionaires that they are literal gods the rest of us should be so lucky get pooped on by, the endless fluffing these people get in informercial puff-pieces and think-tank PowerPoints and TED ceremonial ecstasies are all premised on only slightly more modest variations of the attribution of superiority Yudkowsky is indulging here. That he takes this praise to such bonkers extremities doesn't actually make his argument original, in particular, it just makes it even more than usually stupid.--d]
Because the last news your readers want to hear, is that this person who is wealthier than you, is also smarter, happier, and not a bad person morally. Your reader would much rather read about how these folks are overworked to the bone or suffering from existential ennui. Failing that, your readers want to hear how the upper echelons got there by cheating, or at least smarming their way to the top. If you said anything as hideous as, "They seem more alive," you'd get lynched.[Yudkowsky was not lynched for saying these very things, and of course he is lying when he pretends to expect anything remotely otherwise. Dumb emotionally stunted smug straight white assholes aren't the people who have historically been lynched in this country, as it happens. Charles Murray didn't write about that in The Bell Curve nor did Ayn Rand devote a chapter to it in one of her execrable bodice-rippers. You know, I would be surprised if many, indeed if anybody has even been meaner to Eliezer Yudkowsky about his horrible screed than I am being right now in the near-decade since he wrote all these awful ugly things he has never since recanted nor qualified. Of course, one expects straight white techbros to lose themselves in grandiose fantasies of imagined victimhood for just innocently being themselves in the world of politically correct oversensitive naturally inferior social justice warriors blah blah blah blah blah. It is indeed evocatively Ayn Randian of Yudkowsky to presume that we sour-smelling masses contemplate our rich productive techbro betters with envious projections onto them of misery and ennui -- but of course the truth is that such protestations about the lives of stress and stigma and suffering and risk suffered by our indispensable beneficient entrepreneurial Maker elites are usually self-serving rationalizations for bail-outs and tax-cuts and ego-stroking offered up by themselves rather than those of us, Takers all, they so relentlessly exploit and disdain. In any case, nothing could be clearer than that Yudkowsky and his readership do not identify in the main with such envious errant mehum masses, but largely consist instead of useful idiots who fancy themselves Tomorrow's Power Elite awaiting their own elevation via the coding or crafting of the Next! Big! Thing! That! Changes! Everything! and hence they actually identify with the pretensions of the plutocrats Yudkowsky is describing and disdain in advance those who in disdaining them disdain their future selves -- the poor pathetic suckers! I leave to the side the fact that many do not expect merely to Get Rich Quick soon enough, but in the fullness of time expect, given their robocultishness, to live in shiny robot bodies in nanobotic treasure caves filled with sexy sexbots when they are not rollicking in Holodeck Heaven as cyber-angelic info-souls under the ministrations of a history-ending super-parental Friendly Robot God.--d]
[There is much more evil crapola to be found in this vein in Yudkowsky's e-pistle. One particularly crazy utterance several more pages into the screed asserts that "Hedge-fund people sparkle with extra life force. At least the ones I've talked to. Large amounts of money seem to attract smart people. No, really." Oh, how our rich elites sparkle! As I said, it is really just more of the same -- including more of these faux "No, really" protestation against objections to all this objectionable idiocy that never really arrive nor are really, no, really, expected to from his readership.--d]
[By way of conclusion, it is interesting to note that like many who lack training in structural critique Yudkowsky finds himself indulging in a rather romantic misconception of the complexities of historical, social, and cultural dynamisms -- investing heroized protagonists with magickal force and indulging in frankly conspiracist mappings of power.--d]
[For what I mean by magick--d:]
Visiting that gathering of the mid-level power elite, it was suddenly obvious why the people who attended that conference might want to only hang out with other people who attended that conference. So long as they can talk to each other, there's no point in taking a chance on outsiders who are statistically unlikely to sparkle with the same level of life force. When you make it to the power elite, there are all sorts of people who want to talk to you. But until they make it into the power elite, it's not in your interest to take a chance on talking to them. Frustrating as that seems when you're on the outside trying to get in! On the inside, it's just more expected fun to hang around people who've already proven themselves competent. I think that's how it must be, for them. (I'm not part of that world, though I can walk through it and be recognized as something strange but sparkly.)[For what I mean by conspiracy--d:]
There's another world out there, richer in more than money. Journalists don't report on that part, and instead just talk about the big houses and the yachts. Maybe the journalists can't perceive it, because you can't discriminate more than one level above your own. Or maybe it's such an awful truth that no one wants to hear about it, on either side of the fence. It's easier for me to talk about such things, because, rightly or wrongly, I imagine that I can imagine technologies of an order that could bridge even that gap. I've never been to a gathering of the top-level elite (World Economic Forum level), so I have no idea if people are even more alive up there, or if the curve turns and starts heading downward.[As I said, one is left questioning more than Yudkowsky's intelligence after reading such stuff, but wondering -- to the extent that we take this stuff straight, and not as a bit of pathetic but probably lucrative self-promotional myth-making -- if his many accomplishments (writing Harry Potter fan-fiction, writing advertizing copy about code that doesn't exist, extolling rationality while indulging in megalomaniacal crazytalk) will one day include an arrival at either basic competent adulthood or basic moral sanity. Yudkowsky ends his missive in what seems an ambivalent bit of loose-talking guruwannabe-provocation or possibly ass-saving: "I'm pretty sure that, statistically speaking, there's a lot more cream at the top than most people seem willing to admit in writing. Such is the hideously unfair world we live in, which I do hope to fix." We are left to wonder if the reference to "hideous unfair[ness]" is ironic or earnest. It is hard to square his conventional meritocratic rationalization for inequity with the belief that this state of affairs is really so very unfair after all, so far as it goes, though who of us can say just where the balance finally falls once one ascends to the Olympian heights from which we are assured that Yudkowsky, elite above the elites, hopes finally to "fix" things? The ways of self-appointed godlings are mysterious.--d]
Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Divided Government After the Great Sort
Expanded and upgraded from the Moot:
Most representative constitutional governments established in the aftermath of our own experiment in the United States have eschewed those idiosyncrasies of our system owing to the Founders' facile anti-partisan fetish and implemented parliamentary systems instead -- and very much to their benefit for the most part.
Basic administrative functions (like raising the debt ceiling, filling key posts in a timely way) should be professionalized. The Senate Leader and House Speaker should be of the party of the Executive, and (if necessary, multiparty, multifaction) coalitions should form to support the implementation of the policy platform in the service of which the Executive are elected, else the government has no confidence. Of course, here in the United States, none of this is likely ever to be.
Given our present thoroughly institutionalized party duopoly, it is unclear that the organized and by now thoroughly anti-democratic force of the GOP can be sufficiently marginalized even in a conspicuously diversifying, secularizing, planetizing polyculture to be circumvented in a sufficiently timely and sustained way for majorities seeking to address urgent and obvious common problems -- socioeconomic precarity, climate and pandemic catastrophe, global conflicts exacerbated by global trafficking in military weapons, any one of which threaten the struggle for civilization (which I define as sustainable equity-in-diversity) and in combination threaten still worse.
"Divided Government" is dysfunctional, depressive of participation, and confuses the necessary of assignment of responsibility for policy outcomes. It seems to me that the various Golden Ages of bipartisan co-operation celebrated by Village pundits were mostly periods in which the great evil of the slave-holding and then segregated South were marginalized through their distribution into and management by both parties -- a strategy that never worked well (and could prevent neither a Civil War to resolve the question of slavery nor the betrayal of Reconstruction in the establishment of Jim Crow) and has worked ever less well during the generational "Great Sort" of the Parties in respect to white supremacy from the New Deal coalition through the Civil Rights era to the Southern Strategy and the descent into the Summers of Tea and the Winter of Trump.
It seems to me that the Founders' celebration of a hyper-individualist conception of "public happiness" informed by the specificity of their experience of Revolutionary politics undermined their appreciation of forms of other more democratic dimensions of public happiness connected to assembly, administration, organization, loyalty. (The guardian angel of this blog, Hannah Arendt, the phenomenologist of political power, elaborated the Founders' experience better than anyone, and perhaps shares some of their blind spots.) Their abstract commitments were implemented in Constitutional doctrines that have articulated progressive historical struggles in the United States. The Founders were wrong and we're stuck with their mistake.
And we ARE stuck with it: much like quixotic third-party fantasies, in which the politics to create a viable third party to solve certain very real pathologies of our duopoly are harder to achieve than to solve those problems through and in spite of the duopoly, so too the politics to create a parliamentary system to solve certain very real pathologies of the anti-factionalist quirks of our Constitution are harder to achieve than to solve those problems through and in spite of the quirks of our anti-factionalist Constitution.
Most representative constitutional governments established in the aftermath of our own experiment in the United States have eschewed those idiosyncrasies of our system owing to the Founders' facile anti-partisan fetish and implemented parliamentary systems instead -- and very much to their benefit for the most part.
Basic administrative functions (like raising the debt ceiling, filling key posts in a timely way) should be professionalized. The Senate Leader and House Speaker should be of the party of the Executive, and (if necessary, multiparty, multifaction) coalitions should form to support the implementation of the policy platform in the service of which the Executive are elected, else the government has no confidence. Of course, here in the United States, none of this is likely ever to be.
Given our present thoroughly institutionalized party duopoly, it is unclear that the organized and by now thoroughly anti-democratic force of the GOP can be sufficiently marginalized even in a conspicuously diversifying, secularizing, planetizing polyculture to be circumvented in a sufficiently timely and sustained way for majorities seeking to address urgent and obvious common problems -- socioeconomic precarity, climate and pandemic catastrophe, global conflicts exacerbated by global trafficking in military weapons, any one of which threaten the struggle for civilization (which I define as sustainable equity-in-diversity) and in combination threaten still worse.
"Divided Government" is dysfunctional, depressive of participation, and confuses the necessary of assignment of responsibility for policy outcomes. It seems to me that the various Golden Ages of bipartisan co-operation celebrated by Village pundits were mostly periods in which the great evil of the slave-holding and then segregated South were marginalized through their distribution into and management by both parties -- a strategy that never worked well (and could prevent neither a Civil War to resolve the question of slavery nor the betrayal of Reconstruction in the establishment of Jim Crow) and has worked ever less well during the generational "Great Sort" of the Parties in respect to white supremacy from the New Deal coalition through the Civil Rights era to the Southern Strategy and the descent into the Summers of Tea and the Winter of Trump.
It seems to me that the Founders' celebration of a hyper-individualist conception of "public happiness" informed by the specificity of their experience of Revolutionary politics undermined their appreciation of forms of other more democratic dimensions of public happiness connected to assembly, administration, organization, loyalty. (The guardian angel of this blog, Hannah Arendt, the phenomenologist of political power, elaborated the Founders' experience better than anyone, and perhaps shares some of their blind spots.) Their abstract commitments were implemented in Constitutional doctrines that have articulated progressive historical struggles in the United States. The Founders were wrong and we're stuck with their mistake.
And we ARE stuck with it: much like quixotic third-party fantasies, in which the politics to create a viable third party to solve certain very real pathologies of our duopoly are harder to achieve than to solve those problems through and in spite of the duopoly, so too the politics to create a parliamentary system to solve certain very real pathologies of the anti-factionalist quirks of our Constitution are harder to achieve than to solve those problems through and in spite of the quirks of our anti-factionalist Constitution.
Saturday, December 19, 2015
Robocultic Q & A With a Tech Journalist
Background:
Last month I spent a few weeks in correspondence with an interesting writer and occasional journalist who stumbled upon some transhumanist sub(cult)ures and wanted to publish an expose in a fairly high-profile tech publication. She is a congenial and informed and funny person, and I have no doubt she could easily write a piece about futurology quite as excoriating as the sort I do, but probably in a more accessible way than my own writing provides. I was rather hoping she would write something like that -- and I suspect she had drafts that managed the trick -- but the published result was a puff-piece, human interest narratives of a handful of zany robocultic personalities, that sort of thing, and ended up being a much more promotional than critical engagement, with a slight undercurrent of snark suggesting she wasn't falling for the moonshine without saying why exactly or why it might matter. I'm not linking to the piece or naming my interlocutor because, as I said, I still rather like her, and by now I can't say that I am particularly surprised at the rather lame product eventuating from our (and her other) conversations. She is a fine writer but I don't think there is much of an appetite for real political or cultural criticism of futurological discourse in pop-tech circles, at any rate when it doesn't take the form of making fun of nerdy nerds or indulging in disasterbatory hyperbole.
The transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, digi-utopians, geo-engineers and other assorted futurological nuts I corral under the parodic designation "Robot Cultists" remain sufficiently dedicated to their far-out viewpoints that they do still continue to attract regular attention from journalists and the occasional academic looking for a bit of tech drama or tech kink to spout about. I actually think the robocultic sub(cult)ure is past its cultural heyday, but its dwindling number of stale, pale, male enthusiasts has been more than compensated lately by the inordinate amount of high-profile "tech" billionaires who now espouse aspects of the worldview in ways that seem to threaten to have Implications, or at least make money slosh around in ways it might not otherwise do.
Anyway, as somebody who has been critiquing and ridiculing these views in public places for over a quarter century I, too, attract more attention than I probably deserve from journalists and critics who stumble upon the futurological freakshow and feel like reacting to it. For the last decade or so I have had extended exchanges with two or three writers a year, on average, all of whom have decided to do some sort of piece or even a book about the transhumanists. For these futurologically-fascinated aficionados I inevitably provide reading lists, contacts, enormous amounts of historical context, ramifying mappings of intellectual and institutional affiliation, potted responses to the various futurological pathologies they happen to have glommed onto, more or less offering an unpaid seminar in reactionary futurist discourse.
Articles do eventually appear sometimes. In them I am sometimes a ghostly presence, offering up a bit of decontextualized snark untethered to an argument or context to give it much in the way of rhetorical force. But far more often the resulting pieces of writing neither mention me nor reflect much of an engagement with my arguments. As a writer really too polemical for academia and too academic for popular consumption, I can't say that this result is so surprising. However, lately I have made a practice of keeping my side of these exchanges handy so that I can at least post parts of them to my blog to see the light of day. What follows is some comparatively pithy Q & A from the latest episode of this sort of thing, edited, as it were, to protect those who would probably prefer to remain nameless in this context:
Q & A:
Q: What do you think the key moral objections are to transhumanism?
Well, I try not to get drawn into discussions with futurists about whether living as an immortal upload in the Holodeck or being "enhanced" into a sexy comic book superhero body or being ruled by a superintelligent AI would be "good" or "bad." None of these outcomes are going to arrive to be good or bad anyway, none of the assumptions on which these prophetic dreams are based are even coherent, really, so the moral question (or perhaps this is a more a question for a therapist) should probably be more like -- Is it good or bad to be devoting time to these questions rather than to problems and possibilities that actually beset us? What kind of work is getting done for the folks who give themselves over to infantile wish-fulfillment fantasizing on these topics? Does any of this make people better able to cope with shared problems or more attuned to real needs or more open to possibilities for insight or growth?
You know, in speculative literature the best imaginative and provocative visions have some of the same sort of furniture in them you find in futurological scenarios -- intelligent artifacts, powerful mutants, miraculous abilities -- but as in all great literature, their strangeness provides the distance or slippage that enables us to think more critically about ourselves, to find our way to sympathetic identification with what might otherwise seem threatening alienness, to overcome prejudices and orthodoxies that close us off to hearing the unexpected that changes things for the better. Science fiction in my view isn't actually about predictions at all, or it is only incidentally so: it is prophetic because finds the open futurity in the present world, it builds community from the strangenessand promise in our shared differences.
But futurism and tech-talk isn't prophetic in this sense at all, when you consider it more closely -- it operates much more like advertising does, promising us easy money, eternal youth, technofixes to end our insecurities, shiny cars, skin kreme, boner pills. The Future of the futurists is stuck in the parochial present like a gnat in amber. It freezes us in our present prejudices and fears, and peddles an amplification of the status quo as "disruption," stasis as "accelerating change." Futurology promises to "enhance" you -- but makes sure you don't ask the critical questions: enhances according to whom? for what ends? at what costs? Futurology promises you a life that doesn't end -- but makes sure you don't ask the critical questions: what makes a life worth living? what is my responsibility in the lives of others with whom I share this place and this moment? Futurology promises you intelligent gizmos -- but makes sure you don't ask the critical questions: if I call a computer or a car "intelligent," how does that change what it means to call a human being or a great ape or a whale intelligent? what happens to my sense of the intelligence lived in bodies and incarnated in historical struggles if I start "recognizing" it in landfill-destined consumer devices? I think the urgent moral questions for futurologists have less to do with their cartoonish predictions but with the morality of thinking futurologically at all, rather than thinking about real justice politically and real meaning ethically and real problems pragmatically.
Q: Why do you think climate change denial is so rife among this movement?
Many futurologists like to declare themselves to be environmentalists, so this is actually a tricky question. I think it might be better to say futurism is about the displacement rather than the outright denial of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. For example, you have futurists like Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk who will claim to take climate change seriously but then who will insist that the more urgent "existential risk" humans face is artificial superintelligence. As climate refugees throng tent-cities and waters flood coastal cities and fires rage across states and pandemic disease vectors shift with rising temperatures these Very Serious futurological pundits offer up shrill warnings of Robocalypse.
Since the birth of computer science, generation after generation after generation, its intellectual luminaries have been offering up cocksure predictions about the imminence of world changing artificial intelligence, and they have never been anything but completely wrong about that. Isn't that rather amazing? The fact is that we have little scientific purchase on the nature of human intelligence and the curiously sociopathic body-alienated models of "intelligence" that suffuse AI-enthusiast subcultures don't contribute much to that understanding -- although they do seem content to code lots of software that helps corporate-military elites treat actually intelligent human beings as if we were merely robots ourselves.
Before we get to climate change denial, then, I think there are deeper denialisms playing out in futurological sub(cult)ures -- a terrified denial of the change that bedevils the best plans of our intelligence, a disgusted denial of the aging, vulnerable, limited, mortal body that is the seat of our intelligence, a horrified denial of the errors and miscommunications and humiliations that accompany the social play of our intelligence in the world. Many futurists who insist they are environmentalists like to talk about glorious imaginary "smart" cities or give PowerPoint presentations about geo-engineering "technofixes" to environmental problems in which profitable industrial corporate-military behemoths save us from the destruction they themselves have caused in their historical quest for profits. The futurists talk about fleets of airships squirting aerosols into the atmosphere, dumping megatons of filings into the seas, building cathedrals of pipes to cool surface temperatures with the deep sea chill, constructing vast archipelagos of mirrors in orbit to reflect the sun's rays -- and while they are hyperventilating these mega-engineeering wet-dreams they always insist that politics have failed, that we need a Plan B, that our collective will is unequal to the task. Of course, this is just another variation of the moral question you asked already. None of these boondoggle fantasies will ever be built to succeed or fail in the first place, there is little point in dwelling on the fact that we lack the understanding of eco-systemic dynamics to know whether the impacts of such pharaohnic super-projects would be more catastrophic than not, the whole point of these exercises is to distract the minds of those who are beginning to grasp the reality of our shared environmental responsibilities from the work of education, organization, agitation, legislation, investment that can be equal to this reality. Here, the futurological disgust with and denial of bodies, embodied intelligence, becomes denial of the material substance of political change, of historical struggle, bodies testifying to violation and to hope, assembled in protest and in collaboration.
Many people have been outraged recently to discover that Exxon scientists have known the truth about their role in climate catastrophe for decades and lied about it to protect their profits. But how many people are outraged that just a couple of years ago Exxon-Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson declared that climate change is simply a logistical and engineering problem? This is the quintessential form that futurological climate-change displacement/denialism takes: it begins with an apparent concession of the reality of the problem and then trivializes it. Futurology displaces the political reality of crisis -- who suffers climate change impacts? who dies? who pays for the mitigation efforts? who regulates these efforts? who is accountable to whom and for what? who is most at risk? who benefits and who profits from all this change? -- into apparently "neutral" technical and engineering language. Once this happens the demands and needs diversity of the stakeholders to change vanish and the technicians and wonks appear, white faces holding white papers enabling white profits.
Q: What are the most obvious historical antecedents to this kind of thinking?
Futurological dreams and nightmares are supposed to inhabit the bleeding edge, but the truth is that their psychological force and intuitive plausibility draws on a deeply disseminated archive of hopes and tropes... Eden, Golem, Faust, Frankenstein, Excaliber, Love Potions, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Ring of Power, the Genie in a Bottle, the Fountain of Youth, Rapture, Apocalypse and on and on and on.
In their cheerleading for superintelligent AI, superpowers/techno-immortalism, and digi-nano-superabundance it isn't hard to discern the contours of the omni-predicates of centuries of theology, omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence. Patriarchal priests and boys with their toys have always marched through history hand in hand. And although many futurologists like to make a spectacle of their stolid scientism it isn't hard to discern the old fashioned mind-body dualism in their digital-utopian virtuality uploading fantasies. Part of what it really means to be a materialist is to take materiality seriously, which means recognizing that information is always instantiated on a non-negligible material carrier, which means it actually matters that all the intelligence we know as such as yet has been biologically incarnated. There is a difference that should make a difference to a materialist in the aria sung in the auditorium, heard on vinyl, pulled up on .mp3. Maybe something like intelligence can be materialized otherwise, but will it mean all that intelligence means to us in an imaginative, empathetic, responsible, rights-bearing being sharing our world? And if it doesn't is "intelligence" really the word we should use or imagine using to describe it?
Fascination with artifacts that seem invested with spirit -- puppets, carnival automata, sex-dolls are as old or older than written history. And of course techno-fetishism, techno-reductionism, and techno-triumphalism has been with us since before the Treaty of Westphalia ushered in the nation-state modernity that has preoccupied our attention with culture wars in the form of les querelles des anciens et des modernes right up to our late modern a-modern post-modern post-post-modern present: big guns and manifest destinies, eugenic rages for order, deaths of god and becoming as gods, these are all old stories. The endless recycling of futurological This! Changes! Everything! headlines about vat-grown meat and intelligent computers and cost-free fusion and cures for aging every few years or so is the consumer-capitalist froth on the surface of a brew of centuries old techno-utopian loose-talk and wish-fulfillment fantasizing.
Q: Why should people be worried about who is pushing these ideas?
Of course, all of this stuff is ridiculous and narcissistic and technoscientifically illiterate and all too easy to ignore or deride... and I do my share of that derision, I'll admit that. But you need only remember the example of the decades long marginalized Neoconservative foreign-policy "Thought Leaders" to understand the danger represented by tech billionaires and their celebrants making profitable promises and warnings about super-AI and immortality-meds and eco escape hatches to Mars. A completely discredited klatch of kooks who fancy themselves the Smartest Guys in the Room can cling to their definitive delusions for a long time -- especially if the nonsense they spew happens to bolster the egos or rationalize the profits of very rich people who want to remain rich above all else. And eventually such people can seize the policy making apparatus long enough to do real damage in the world.
For over a generation the United States has decided to worship as secular gods a motley assortment of very lucky, rather monomaniacal, somewhat sociopathic tech venture capitalists few of whom every actually made anything but many of whom profitably monetized (skimmed) the collective accomplishments of nameless enthusiasts and most of whom profitably marketed (scammed) gizmos already available and usually discarded elsewhere as revolutionary novelties. The futurologists provide a language in which these skim and scam operators can reassure themselves that they are Protagonists of History, shepherding consumer-sheeple to techno-transcendent paradise and even godlikeness. It is a mistake to dismiss the threat represented by such associations -- and I must say that in the decades I have been studying and criticizing futurologists they have only gained in funding, institutional gravity, and reputational heft, however many times their animating claims have been exposed and pernicious nonsense reviled.
But setting those very real worries aside, I also think the futurologists are interesting objects and subjects of study because they represent a kind of reductio ad absurdum of prevailing attitudes and assumptions and aspirations and justificatory rhetoric in neoliberal, extractive-industrial, consumer-oriented, marketing-suffused, corporate-military society: if you can grasp the desperation, derangement and denialism of futurological fancies, it should put you in a better position to grasp the pathologies of more mainstream orthodoxies in our public discourse and authorizing institutions, our acquiescence to unsustainable consumption, our faith in technoscientific, especially military, circumventions of our intractable political problems, our narcissistic insistence that we occupy a summit from which to declare differences to be inferiorities, our desperate denial of aging, disease, and death and the death-dealing mistreatment of others and of ourselves this denialism traps us in so deeply.
Q (rather later): [O]ne more thing: who were the most prominent members of the extropians list? Anyone I've missed? Were R.U Sirius or other Wired/BoingBoing writers and editors on the list? Or engineers/developers etc?
Back in Atlanta in the 1990s, I read the Extropy zine as a life-long SF queergeek drawn to what I thought were the edges of things, I suppose, and I was a lurker on the extropians list in something like its heyday. This was somewhere in the '93-'99 range, I'm guessing. I posted only occasionally since even then most of what I had to say was critical -- the philosophy seemed like amateur hour and the politics were just atrocious -- and it seemed a bit wrong to barge into their clubhouse and piss in the punch bowl if you know what I mean... I was mostly quiet.
The posters I remember as prominent were Max and Natasha-Vita More, of course, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Damien Broderick (an Australian SF writer), Eugen Leitl, Perry Metzger, Hal Finney, Sasha Chislenko, Mark Plus, Giulio Prisco, Ramona Machado, Nancy Lebovitz… You know, people tend to forget the women's voices because it was such an insistently white techbro kinda sorta milieu. I'm not sure how many women stuck with it, although Natasha is definitely a piece of work, and Romana was doing something of a proto Rachel Haywire catsuited contrarian schtick, Haywire's a more millennial transhumanoid who wasn't around back then. Let's see. There was David Krieger too (I made out with him at an extropian pool party in the Valley of the Silly Con back in 95, I do believe).
I don't think I remember RU Sirius ever chiming in, I personally see him as more of an opportunistic participant/observer/stand-up critic type, really, and I know I remember Nick Szabo's name but I'm not sure I remember him posting a lot. You mentioned Eric Drexler, but I don't remember him posting, he was occasionally discussed and I know he would appear at futurist topic conferences with transhumanoid muckety mucks like More and the cypherpunks like Tim May and Paul Hughes. I do remember seeing Christine Peterson a couple of times.
Wired did a cover story called "Meet The Extropians" which captures well some of the flavor of the group, that was from 1993. Back then, I think techno-immortalism via cryonics and nanobot miracle medicine was the big draw (Aubrey de Grey appeared a bit later, I believe, but the sub(cult)ure was ready for him for sure), with a weird overlap of space stuff that was a vestige from the L5 society and also a curious amount of gun-nuttery attached to the anarcho-capitalist enthusiasm and crypto-anarchy stuff.
It's no surprise that bitcoinsanity had its birth there, and that the big bucks for transhumanoid/ singularitarian faith-based initiatives would come from PayPal billionaires like the terminally awful robocultic reactionary Peter Thiel, given the crypto-currency enthusiasm. Hal Finny was a regular poster at extropians and quite a bitcoin muckety muck right at the beginning -- I think maybe he made the first bitcoin transaction in fact.
Back in those days I was working through connections of technnocultural theory and queer theory in an analytic philosophy department in Georgia, and the extropians -- No death! No taxes! -- seemed to epitomize the California Ideology. I came to California as a Queer National with my mind on fire to work with Judith Butler, and I was lucky enough to spend a decade learning from her in the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley, where I ended up writing my diss about privacy and publicity in neoliberal technocultures, Pancryptics. But I never lost sight of the transhumanists -- they seemed and still seem to me to symptomize in a clarifying extreme form the pathologies of our techno-fetishistic, techno-reductionist, techno-triumphalist disaster capitalism. Hope that helps!
Q (much later): Tackling this thing has been a lot more difficult than I imagined it would be. Right now it's sitting on 20,000 words and has to come down to at least half that (pity my editor!). I've gone through quite a journey on it. I still think very much that these ideas are bad and a reflection of a particularly self-obsessed larger moment, and that people should be extremely concerned about how much money is going into these ideas that could be so much better spent elsewhere. The bizarre streak of climate denialism is likewise incredibly disturbing…. But then I kind of came around in a way to sympathising with what is ultimately their fear which is driving some of this, an incredibly juvenile fear of dying. But a fear of being old and infirm and in mental decline in a society that is in denial about the realities of that, and which poses few alternatives to that fate for all of us, in a way I can understand that fear…. In any case, amazing that they let you proof read [their official FAQ] for them, even though you are so critical of their project! Or do you think they were just grateful for someone who could make it read-well on a sentence level?
You have my sympathies, the topic is a hydra-headed beast when you really dig in, I know. Nick Bostrom and I had a long phone conversation in which I leveled all sorts of criticisms of transhumanism. That I was a critic was well known, but back then socialist transhumanist James Hughes (who co-founded IEET with him) and I were quite friendly, and briefly I was even "Human Rights" fellow at IEET myself -- which meant that they re-published some blog posts of mine. (I write about that and its rather uncongenial end here.) Anyway, Bostrom and I had a wide-ranging conversation that took his freshly written FAQ as our shared point of departure. He adapted/qualified many claims in light of my criticisms, but ignored a lot of them as well and of course the central contentions of the critique couldn't be taken up without, you know, giving up on transhumanism. As a matter of fact, we didn't get past the first half of the thing. It was a good conversation though, I remember it was even rather fun. I do take these issues seriously as you know and, hell, I'll talk to anybody who is going to listen in a real way.
You know, I've been criticizing futurism for decades -- there were times when I was one of the few people truly informed of their ideas even if I was critical of them, and some of them appreciated the chance to sharpen their arguments on a critic. I've had many affable conversations with all sorts of these folks, Aubrey de Grey, Robin Hanson, Max More even. The discourse is dangerous and even evil in my opinion, but its advocates are human beings which usually means conversations can happen face to face.
I know what you mean when you say you sympathize after a fashion upon grasping the real fear of mortality driving so much of their project -- and I would say also the fear of the uncontrollable role of chance in life, the vulnerability to error and miscommunication in company. But you know reactionary politics are always driven by fear -- and fear is always sad. I mean, the choices are love or fear when it comes down to it, right? And to be driven by fear drives away so much openness to love and there's no way to respond to that but to see the sadness of it -- when it comes to it these fears are deranging sensible deliberation about technoscientific change at a historical moment when sense is urgently needed, these fears make them dupes, and often willing ones, of plutocratic and death-dealing elites, these fears lead them to deceive themselves and deceive others who are also vulnerable. One has to be clear-headed about such things, seems to me.
Q (still later): Have entered new phase: What if the Extropians were just a Discordian-type joke that other people came to take seriously?
Yes, they're a joke. But it's on us, and they aren't in on it. As I mentioned before, the better analogy is the Neocons: they were seen as peddlers of nonsense from the perspective of foreign policy professionals (even most conservatives thought so) but they were well-funded because their arguments were consoling and potentially lucrative to moneyed elites and eventually they stumbled into power via Bush and Cheney whereupon they implemented their ideas with predictable (and predicted) catastrophic consequences in wasted lives and wasted wealth. To be clear: the danger isn't that transhumanoids will code a Robot God or create a ruler species of immortal rich dudes with comic-book sooper-powers, but that they will divert budgets and legislation into damaging policies and dead ends that contribute to neglected health care, dumb and dangerous software, algorithmic harassment and manipulation, ongoing climate catastrophe, the looting of public and common goods via "disruptive" privatization, exploitative "development," cruel "resilience," and upward-failing techbro "Thought Leadership."
Last month I spent a few weeks in correspondence with an interesting writer and occasional journalist who stumbled upon some transhumanist sub(cult)ures and wanted to publish an expose in a fairly high-profile tech publication. She is a congenial and informed and funny person, and I have no doubt she could easily write a piece about futurology quite as excoriating as the sort I do, but probably in a more accessible way than my own writing provides. I was rather hoping she would write something like that -- and I suspect she had drafts that managed the trick -- but the published result was a puff-piece, human interest narratives of a handful of zany robocultic personalities, that sort of thing, and ended up being a much more promotional than critical engagement, with a slight undercurrent of snark suggesting she wasn't falling for the moonshine without saying why exactly or why it might matter. I'm not linking to the piece or naming my interlocutor because, as I said, I still rather like her, and by now I can't say that I am particularly surprised at the rather lame product eventuating from our (and her other) conversations. She is a fine writer but I don't think there is much of an appetite for real political or cultural criticism of futurological discourse in pop-tech circles, at any rate when it doesn't take the form of making fun of nerdy nerds or indulging in disasterbatory hyperbole.
The transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, digi-utopians, geo-engineers and other assorted futurological nuts I corral under the parodic designation "Robot Cultists" remain sufficiently dedicated to their far-out viewpoints that they do still continue to attract regular attention from journalists and the occasional academic looking for a bit of tech drama or tech kink to spout about. I actually think the robocultic sub(cult)ure is past its cultural heyday, but its dwindling number of stale, pale, male enthusiasts has been more than compensated lately by the inordinate amount of high-profile "tech" billionaires who now espouse aspects of the worldview in ways that seem to threaten to have Implications, or at least make money slosh around in ways it might not otherwise do.
Anyway, as somebody who has been critiquing and ridiculing these views in public places for over a quarter century I, too, attract more attention than I probably deserve from journalists and critics who stumble upon the futurological freakshow and feel like reacting to it. For the last decade or so I have had extended exchanges with two or three writers a year, on average, all of whom have decided to do some sort of piece or even a book about the transhumanists. For these futurologically-fascinated aficionados I inevitably provide reading lists, contacts, enormous amounts of historical context, ramifying mappings of intellectual and institutional affiliation, potted responses to the various futurological pathologies they happen to have glommed onto, more or less offering an unpaid seminar in reactionary futurist discourse.
Articles do eventually appear sometimes. In them I am sometimes a ghostly presence, offering up a bit of decontextualized snark untethered to an argument or context to give it much in the way of rhetorical force. But far more often the resulting pieces of writing neither mention me nor reflect much of an engagement with my arguments. As a writer really too polemical for academia and too academic for popular consumption, I can't say that this result is so surprising. However, lately I have made a practice of keeping my side of these exchanges handy so that I can at least post parts of them to my blog to see the light of day. What follows is some comparatively pithy Q & A from the latest episode of this sort of thing, edited, as it were, to protect those who would probably prefer to remain nameless in this context:
Q & A:
Q: What do you think the key moral objections are to transhumanism?
Well, I try not to get drawn into discussions with futurists about whether living as an immortal upload in the Holodeck or being "enhanced" into a sexy comic book superhero body or being ruled by a superintelligent AI would be "good" or "bad." None of these outcomes are going to arrive to be good or bad anyway, none of the assumptions on which these prophetic dreams are based are even coherent, really, so the moral question (or perhaps this is a more a question for a therapist) should probably be more like -- Is it good or bad to be devoting time to these questions rather than to problems and possibilities that actually beset us? What kind of work is getting done for the folks who give themselves over to infantile wish-fulfillment fantasizing on these topics? Does any of this make people better able to cope with shared problems or more attuned to real needs or more open to possibilities for insight or growth?
You know, in speculative literature the best imaginative and provocative visions have some of the same sort of furniture in them you find in futurological scenarios -- intelligent artifacts, powerful mutants, miraculous abilities -- but as in all great literature, their strangeness provides the distance or slippage that enables us to think more critically about ourselves, to find our way to sympathetic identification with what might otherwise seem threatening alienness, to overcome prejudices and orthodoxies that close us off to hearing the unexpected that changes things for the better. Science fiction in my view isn't actually about predictions at all, or it is only incidentally so: it is prophetic because finds the open futurity in the present world, it builds community from the strangenessand promise in our shared differences.
But futurism and tech-talk isn't prophetic in this sense at all, when you consider it more closely -- it operates much more like advertising does, promising us easy money, eternal youth, technofixes to end our insecurities, shiny cars, skin kreme, boner pills. The Future of the futurists is stuck in the parochial present like a gnat in amber. It freezes us in our present prejudices and fears, and peddles an amplification of the status quo as "disruption," stasis as "accelerating change." Futurology promises to "enhance" you -- but makes sure you don't ask the critical questions: enhances according to whom? for what ends? at what costs? Futurology promises you a life that doesn't end -- but makes sure you don't ask the critical questions: what makes a life worth living? what is my responsibility in the lives of others with whom I share this place and this moment? Futurology promises you intelligent gizmos -- but makes sure you don't ask the critical questions: if I call a computer or a car "intelligent," how does that change what it means to call a human being or a great ape or a whale intelligent? what happens to my sense of the intelligence lived in bodies and incarnated in historical struggles if I start "recognizing" it in landfill-destined consumer devices? I think the urgent moral questions for futurologists have less to do with their cartoonish predictions but with the morality of thinking futurologically at all, rather than thinking about real justice politically and real meaning ethically and real problems pragmatically.
Q: Why do you think climate change denial is so rife among this movement?
Many futurologists like to declare themselves to be environmentalists, so this is actually a tricky question. I think it might be better to say futurism is about the displacement rather than the outright denial of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. For example, you have futurists like Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk who will claim to take climate change seriously but then who will insist that the more urgent "existential risk" humans face is artificial superintelligence. As climate refugees throng tent-cities and waters flood coastal cities and fires rage across states and pandemic disease vectors shift with rising temperatures these Very Serious futurological pundits offer up shrill warnings of Robocalypse.
Since the birth of computer science, generation after generation after generation, its intellectual luminaries have been offering up cocksure predictions about the imminence of world changing artificial intelligence, and they have never been anything but completely wrong about that. Isn't that rather amazing? The fact is that we have little scientific purchase on the nature of human intelligence and the curiously sociopathic body-alienated models of "intelligence" that suffuse AI-enthusiast subcultures don't contribute much to that understanding -- although they do seem content to code lots of software that helps corporate-military elites treat actually intelligent human beings as if we were merely robots ourselves.
Before we get to climate change denial, then, I think there are deeper denialisms playing out in futurological sub(cult)ures -- a terrified denial of the change that bedevils the best plans of our intelligence, a disgusted denial of the aging, vulnerable, limited, mortal body that is the seat of our intelligence, a horrified denial of the errors and miscommunications and humiliations that accompany the social play of our intelligence in the world. Many futurists who insist they are environmentalists like to talk about glorious imaginary "smart" cities or give PowerPoint presentations about geo-engineering "technofixes" to environmental problems in which profitable industrial corporate-military behemoths save us from the destruction they themselves have caused in their historical quest for profits. The futurists talk about fleets of airships squirting aerosols into the atmosphere, dumping megatons of filings into the seas, building cathedrals of pipes to cool surface temperatures with the deep sea chill, constructing vast archipelagos of mirrors in orbit to reflect the sun's rays -- and while they are hyperventilating these mega-engineeering wet-dreams they always insist that politics have failed, that we need a Plan B, that our collective will is unequal to the task. Of course, this is just another variation of the moral question you asked already. None of these boondoggle fantasies will ever be built to succeed or fail in the first place, there is little point in dwelling on the fact that we lack the understanding of eco-systemic dynamics to know whether the impacts of such pharaohnic super-projects would be more catastrophic than not, the whole point of these exercises is to distract the minds of those who are beginning to grasp the reality of our shared environmental responsibilities from the work of education, organization, agitation, legislation, investment that can be equal to this reality. Here, the futurological disgust with and denial of bodies, embodied intelligence, becomes denial of the material substance of political change, of historical struggle, bodies testifying to violation and to hope, assembled in protest and in collaboration.
Many people have been outraged recently to discover that Exxon scientists have known the truth about their role in climate catastrophe for decades and lied about it to protect their profits. But how many people are outraged that just a couple of years ago Exxon-Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson declared that climate change is simply a logistical and engineering problem? This is the quintessential form that futurological climate-change displacement/denialism takes: it begins with an apparent concession of the reality of the problem and then trivializes it. Futurology displaces the political reality of crisis -- who suffers climate change impacts? who dies? who pays for the mitigation efforts? who regulates these efforts? who is accountable to whom and for what? who is most at risk? who benefits and who profits from all this change? -- into apparently "neutral" technical and engineering language. Once this happens the demands and needs diversity of the stakeholders to change vanish and the technicians and wonks appear, white faces holding white papers enabling white profits.
Q: What are the most obvious historical antecedents to this kind of thinking?
Futurological dreams and nightmares are supposed to inhabit the bleeding edge, but the truth is that their psychological force and intuitive plausibility draws on a deeply disseminated archive of hopes and tropes... Eden, Golem, Faust, Frankenstein, Excaliber, Love Potions, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Ring of Power, the Genie in a Bottle, the Fountain of Youth, Rapture, Apocalypse and on and on and on.
In their cheerleading for superintelligent AI, superpowers/techno-immortalism, and digi-nano-superabundance it isn't hard to discern the contours of the omni-predicates of centuries of theology, omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence. Patriarchal priests and boys with their toys have always marched through history hand in hand. And although many futurologists like to make a spectacle of their stolid scientism it isn't hard to discern the old fashioned mind-body dualism in their digital-utopian virtuality uploading fantasies. Part of what it really means to be a materialist is to take materiality seriously, which means recognizing that information is always instantiated on a non-negligible material carrier, which means it actually matters that all the intelligence we know as such as yet has been biologically incarnated. There is a difference that should make a difference to a materialist in the aria sung in the auditorium, heard on vinyl, pulled up on .mp3. Maybe something like intelligence can be materialized otherwise, but will it mean all that intelligence means to us in an imaginative, empathetic, responsible, rights-bearing being sharing our world? And if it doesn't is "intelligence" really the word we should use or imagine using to describe it?
Fascination with artifacts that seem invested with spirit -- puppets, carnival automata, sex-dolls are as old or older than written history. And of course techno-fetishism, techno-reductionism, and techno-triumphalism has been with us since before the Treaty of Westphalia ushered in the nation-state modernity that has preoccupied our attention with culture wars in the form of les querelles des anciens et des modernes right up to our late modern a-modern post-modern post-post-modern present: big guns and manifest destinies, eugenic rages for order, deaths of god and becoming as gods, these are all old stories. The endless recycling of futurological This! Changes! Everything! headlines about vat-grown meat and intelligent computers and cost-free fusion and cures for aging every few years or so is the consumer-capitalist froth on the surface of a brew of centuries old techno-utopian loose-talk and wish-fulfillment fantasizing.
Q: Why should people be worried about who is pushing these ideas?
Of course, all of this stuff is ridiculous and narcissistic and technoscientifically illiterate and all too easy to ignore or deride... and I do my share of that derision, I'll admit that. But you need only remember the example of the decades long marginalized Neoconservative foreign-policy "Thought Leaders" to understand the danger represented by tech billionaires and their celebrants making profitable promises and warnings about super-AI and immortality-meds and eco escape hatches to Mars. A completely discredited klatch of kooks who fancy themselves the Smartest Guys in the Room can cling to their definitive delusions for a long time -- especially if the nonsense they spew happens to bolster the egos or rationalize the profits of very rich people who want to remain rich above all else. And eventually such people can seize the policy making apparatus long enough to do real damage in the world.
For over a generation the United States has decided to worship as secular gods a motley assortment of very lucky, rather monomaniacal, somewhat sociopathic tech venture capitalists few of whom every actually made anything but many of whom profitably monetized (skimmed) the collective accomplishments of nameless enthusiasts and most of whom profitably marketed (scammed) gizmos already available and usually discarded elsewhere as revolutionary novelties. The futurologists provide a language in which these skim and scam operators can reassure themselves that they are Protagonists of History, shepherding consumer-sheeple to techno-transcendent paradise and even godlikeness. It is a mistake to dismiss the threat represented by such associations -- and I must say that in the decades I have been studying and criticizing futurologists they have only gained in funding, institutional gravity, and reputational heft, however many times their animating claims have been exposed and pernicious nonsense reviled.
But setting those very real worries aside, I also think the futurologists are interesting objects and subjects of study because they represent a kind of reductio ad absurdum of prevailing attitudes and assumptions and aspirations and justificatory rhetoric in neoliberal, extractive-industrial, consumer-oriented, marketing-suffused, corporate-military society: if you can grasp the desperation, derangement and denialism of futurological fancies, it should put you in a better position to grasp the pathologies of more mainstream orthodoxies in our public discourse and authorizing institutions, our acquiescence to unsustainable consumption, our faith in technoscientific, especially military, circumventions of our intractable political problems, our narcissistic insistence that we occupy a summit from which to declare differences to be inferiorities, our desperate denial of aging, disease, and death and the death-dealing mistreatment of others and of ourselves this denialism traps us in so deeply.
Q (rather later): [O]ne more thing: who were the most prominent members of the extropians list? Anyone I've missed? Were R.U Sirius or other Wired/BoingBoing writers and editors on the list? Or engineers/developers etc?
Back in Atlanta in the 1990s, I read the Extropy zine as a life-long SF queergeek drawn to what I thought were the edges of things, I suppose, and I was a lurker on the extropians list in something like its heyday. This was somewhere in the '93-'99 range, I'm guessing. I posted only occasionally since even then most of what I had to say was critical -- the philosophy seemed like amateur hour and the politics were just atrocious -- and it seemed a bit wrong to barge into their clubhouse and piss in the punch bowl if you know what I mean... I was mostly quiet.
The posters I remember as prominent were Max and Natasha-Vita More, of course, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Damien Broderick (an Australian SF writer), Eugen Leitl, Perry Metzger, Hal Finney, Sasha Chislenko, Mark Plus, Giulio Prisco, Ramona Machado, Nancy Lebovitz… You know, people tend to forget the women's voices because it was such an insistently white techbro kinda sorta milieu. I'm not sure how many women stuck with it, although Natasha is definitely a piece of work, and Romana was doing something of a proto Rachel Haywire catsuited contrarian schtick, Haywire's a more millennial transhumanoid who wasn't around back then. Let's see. There was David Krieger too (I made out with him at an extropian pool party in the Valley of the Silly Con back in 95, I do believe).
I don't think I remember RU Sirius ever chiming in, I personally see him as more of an opportunistic participant/observer/stand-up critic type, really, and I know I remember Nick Szabo's name but I'm not sure I remember him posting a lot. You mentioned Eric Drexler, but I don't remember him posting, he was occasionally discussed and I know he would appear at futurist topic conferences with transhumanoid muckety mucks like More and the cypherpunks like Tim May and Paul Hughes. I do remember seeing Christine Peterson a couple of times.
Wired did a cover story called "Meet The Extropians" which captures well some of the flavor of the group, that was from 1993. Back then, I think techno-immortalism via cryonics and nanobot miracle medicine was the big draw (Aubrey de Grey appeared a bit later, I believe, but the sub(cult)ure was ready for him for sure), with a weird overlap of space stuff that was a vestige from the L5 society and also a curious amount of gun-nuttery attached to the anarcho-capitalist enthusiasm and crypto-anarchy stuff.
It's no surprise that bitcoinsanity had its birth there, and that the big bucks for transhumanoid/ singularitarian faith-based initiatives would come from PayPal billionaires like the terminally awful robocultic reactionary Peter Thiel, given the crypto-currency enthusiasm. Hal Finny was a regular poster at extropians and quite a bitcoin muckety muck right at the beginning -- I think maybe he made the first bitcoin transaction in fact.
Back in those days I was working through connections of technnocultural theory and queer theory in an analytic philosophy department in Georgia, and the extropians -- No death! No taxes! -- seemed to epitomize the California Ideology. I came to California as a Queer National with my mind on fire to work with Judith Butler, and I was lucky enough to spend a decade learning from her in the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley, where I ended up writing my diss about privacy and publicity in neoliberal technocultures, Pancryptics. But I never lost sight of the transhumanists -- they seemed and still seem to me to symptomize in a clarifying extreme form the pathologies of our techno-fetishistic, techno-reductionist, techno-triumphalist disaster capitalism. Hope that helps!
Q (much later): Tackling this thing has been a lot more difficult than I imagined it would be. Right now it's sitting on 20,000 words and has to come down to at least half that (pity my editor!). I've gone through quite a journey on it. I still think very much that these ideas are bad and a reflection of a particularly self-obsessed larger moment, and that people should be extremely concerned about how much money is going into these ideas that could be so much better spent elsewhere. The bizarre streak of climate denialism is likewise incredibly disturbing…. But then I kind of came around in a way to sympathising with what is ultimately their fear which is driving some of this, an incredibly juvenile fear of dying. But a fear of being old and infirm and in mental decline in a society that is in denial about the realities of that, and which poses few alternatives to that fate for all of us, in a way I can understand that fear…. In any case, amazing that they let you proof read [their official FAQ] for them, even though you are so critical of their project! Or do you think they were just grateful for someone who could make it read-well on a sentence level?
You have my sympathies, the topic is a hydra-headed beast when you really dig in, I know. Nick Bostrom and I had a long phone conversation in which I leveled all sorts of criticisms of transhumanism. That I was a critic was well known, but back then socialist transhumanist James Hughes (who co-founded IEET with him) and I were quite friendly, and briefly I was even "Human Rights" fellow at IEET myself -- which meant that they re-published some blog posts of mine. (I write about that and its rather uncongenial end here.) Anyway, Bostrom and I had a wide-ranging conversation that took his freshly written FAQ as our shared point of departure. He adapted/qualified many claims in light of my criticisms, but ignored a lot of them as well and of course the central contentions of the critique couldn't be taken up without, you know, giving up on transhumanism. As a matter of fact, we didn't get past the first half of the thing. It was a good conversation though, I remember it was even rather fun. I do take these issues seriously as you know and, hell, I'll talk to anybody who is going to listen in a real way.
You know, I've been criticizing futurism for decades -- there were times when I was one of the few people truly informed of their ideas even if I was critical of them, and some of them appreciated the chance to sharpen their arguments on a critic. I've had many affable conversations with all sorts of these folks, Aubrey de Grey, Robin Hanson, Max More even. The discourse is dangerous and even evil in my opinion, but its advocates are human beings which usually means conversations can happen face to face.
I know what you mean when you say you sympathize after a fashion upon grasping the real fear of mortality driving so much of their project -- and I would say also the fear of the uncontrollable role of chance in life, the vulnerability to error and miscommunication in company. But you know reactionary politics are always driven by fear -- and fear is always sad. I mean, the choices are love or fear when it comes down to it, right? And to be driven by fear drives away so much openness to love and there's no way to respond to that but to see the sadness of it -- when it comes to it these fears are deranging sensible deliberation about technoscientific change at a historical moment when sense is urgently needed, these fears make them dupes, and often willing ones, of plutocratic and death-dealing elites, these fears lead them to deceive themselves and deceive others who are also vulnerable. One has to be clear-headed about such things, seems to me.
Q (still later): Have entered new phase: What if the Extropians were just a Discordian-type joke that other people came to take seriously?
Yes, they're a joke. But it's on us, and they aren't in on it. As I mentioned before, the better analogy is the Neocons: they were seen as peddlers of nonsense from the perspective of foreign policy professionals (even most conservatives thought so) but they were well-funded because their arguments were consoling and potentially lucrative to moneyed elites and eventually they stumbled into power via Bush and Cheney whereupon they implemented their ideas with predictable (and predicted) catastrophic consequences in wasted lives and wasted wealth. To be clear: the danger isn't that transhumanoids will code a Robot God or create a ruler species of immortal rich dudes with comic-book sooper-powers, but that they will divert budgets and legislation into damaging policies and dead ends that contribute to neglected health care, dumb and dangerous software, algorithmic harassment and manipulation, ongoing climate catastrophe, the looting of public and common goods via "disruptive" privatization, exploitative "development," cruel "resilience," and upward-failing techbro "Thought Leadership."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)