Breaking

Some think they're strong, some think they're smart, 
Like butterflies they're pulled apart. 
America can break your heart. -- Auden

Now That's What I Call Techno-color!

I can't think of another show as stunningly colorful as the original Star Trek -- it remains one of the most visually beautiful shows ever. Man, I really do like that color palette. I'm wondering if the new one is going to be the washed out modern standard. I'm hoping for firetruck reds, but steeling myself for more retirement community teals. My secret dream is for Pedro Almodovar to direct a trilogy of gorgeous Star Trek melodrama-farces set on a Federation cruise ship.

The Stubborn Fable of Cyborg-Ruggedized Individuals Enjoying e2e Net-Liberty

It's based on bullshit mythology of the Internet. That it used to be pure, but got corrupted. @tante — Yasha Levine

The end-to-end principle is *always* figured via the already reactionary conception of negative liberty. Hijinks ensue.— Dale Carrico

If all you can think of is the individual, you'll miss everything about social and society.— Jürgen Geuter

Indeed; more particularly, all liberty is substantiated in/by public investment/performance and hence is "positive"... 1 Presumably "negative" liberties are efforts to naturalize, de-politicize status-quo conventions benefiting incumbency. 2 The empty-space of e2e mimes Millian space the fist can swing except where it meets my chin: the "pre-political" body. No surprise this actually politicized body reappears in paranoid cyber-talk of crypto-security, individuted-privacy... 4 "individuated" (sorry). MacPherson's "Possessive Individualism" again, which Hayles mapped onto the cyberspatial sprawl.— Dale Carrico

The Utopium Conceit

1 One of the many annoying argumentative tics in futurological discourse is the one I tend to think of as The Utopium Conceit…

2 in which a diversity of qualified lab results are reduced into A Single Thing -- some phenomenon, material, technique, imagined device --

3 that is applied in turn to Everything, and invested with a profitable and prophetic force That! Will! Change! Everything!

4 It can be, say, plastic, carbon nanotubes, fungus (as eco-remediator, building material, vegetarian foodstuff, terraforming agent)...

5 or nuclear fission, car culture, digital computation and simulation, Drexler's imaginary "nanotechnology" or its gawky cousin 3D-printing.

6 It's easy to see the appeal of The Utopium Conceit. Reduction of qualified, diverse dynamisms into one thing then deliriously amplified...

7 First, this futurological conceit accommodates the real but fraught and complex promise of technoscientific change for common good…

8 …to wealth concentration and status quo amplification by marketing it for parochial short-term profit-taking; and

9 Second, it accommodates the real but fraught and complex demands of technoscientific change for public deliberation…

10 …to mass technoscientific illiteracy through facile simplifications and recourse to drama (whether wish-fulfilling or disasterbatory).

11 Note, in connection with such misinformation, how a minimization or outright disavowal of historical, political, cultural contingencies…

12 …shaping, regulating, and distributing technoscientific progress usually enables The Utopium Conceit as futurological strategy.

13 It is of course precisely because collective problem-solving through technoscientific discovery can be so inspiring and promising…

14…that futurology's deceptive simplifications of slow and difficult struggles, hyperbolic and hence deranging distortion of results…

15 appeal to irrational passions (greed paranoia), skewing of budgetary priorities, denigration of political contexts of progressive change…

16 should be abhorred by all those who would be genuine champions of science education, research, fact-based harm-reduction public policy…

17 and progressive struggles to distribute costs, risks & benefits of technoscience change equitably to the diversity of their stakeholders.

Body Shaming Trump Is Trumpian Not Anti-Trumpian Politics

I admit with some shame that yesterday I had an initial guffaw at the naked Trump statues... but it didn't take long for me to feel uneasy and then gross and then frankly enraged about them. "Humiliating" Trump because he has an aging flabby body is hardly a relevant critique of him and policing unrealistic bodily norms through proliferating "unflattering" public Trump monuments seems obviously more damaging and constraining than liberating. I am disgusted by Trump's body shaming of other people, and I am disgusted by sexist attacks on HRC's appearance in particular... I don't think this is a matter of turnabout is fair play, I think it is about exacerbating an American disgust with the aging vulnerable "imperfect" body. This disgust is about self-hate and denial, and it is compensated by cruelty, conspicuous consumption, and acquiescence, all of which enable Trumpian politics. Leave it to self-described anarchists to imagine it is some radical intervention to notice that boastfulness is an expression of insecurity rather than confidence and then use that commonplace to police body norms in ways that fuel fascism.

Democracy, Civitas, and the Rite To Have Rights; Or, Why I Will Not Relinquish Democratization To The Tech-Talkers Or Other Fauxvolutionaries

In skirmishes with libertopians and libertechians so often I end up exclaiming: "I don't want to smash the state but to democratize it!" I want to say more about democratization, not only because it is instructive to recall and clarify how *demos* and *civitas* connect but because "democratization" appears to be yet another word being evacuated of sense in the promotional mill of futurological tech-talk. Just as "open" has come to mean empty, "free" precarious, "disruption" deregulation, "innovation" PR-repackaging "acceleration" status-quo amplification, "risk" privileged upward failure, "bigotry" culture fit, "resilience" exploitability so, too, "democratization" is being peddled by tech-talkers as what amounts to inequitable, unaccountable provision of services for fees. I'm simply not ready to relinquish what seems to me the indispensable idea and experience of democratization to tech's "Thought Leaders."

Hannah Arendt wrote of a "right to have rights" preceding all others, and insisted it was uniquely threatened by statelessness and hence arises not from *humanitas* (whether species-being, social parochialism, or reason's endowment) but *civitas.* I prefer to phrase her key insight a matter of "RITES to have rights," as ritual, citational, performative materializations of rights in public assemblies, in critical deliberations, in collaborative problem-solving, in historical struggles, in legislative reforms. In Cicero, the rule of law, the righteous practice of rhetoric (good people, speaking well), and the powers and responsibilities of a contingent rights culture together materially body forth a *res publica*, or public thing, publicity, in which we struggle at once at flourishing world-making and flourishing self-making. (NB I'm being overgenerous with Cicero and will be in what follows too.)

In the Preamble to the US Constitution, the "more perfect Union" (saved and transformed in Lincoln's Emancipatory second founding) connected the establishment of justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, and general welfare in the American *res publica*. In the New Deal and via the Four Freedoms FDR repudiated the naturalization of the status quo qua "negative" neutral liberty reaffirmed and re-elaborated the connection of general welfare to the American conception of justice, prosperity, and security. The Kennedy/Johnson "Great Society" insisted American democracy's ethical universalism is one of equity-in-diversity.

The twice winning, still rising Obama coalition in a diversifying, secularizing, planetizing America is pushing back the reactionary patriarchal (sexist, heterosexist, cissexist) white-nationalism of Movement Republicanism with its Southern Strategy and Culture Wars. Who knows if the election of HRC will be the improbable moment that deadly fever breaks at last, in Obama's prophetic phrase and America takes up in earnest the promise of the Great Society with a liberal Court, more public investments, more progressive taxes and turns to planetary problems of catastrophic climate change, wealth concentration, violence against women, and weapons proliferation. [Narrator's Voice: In a word, it wasn't.]

Facts of slavery, genocide, segregation & police violence as domestic terror, militarized markets, rape culture, environmental injustice give the lie to any congratulatory litany of American democratization, suggests that the fearful fever of reaction never really breaks and impel "good people, speaking/doing well" to greater clarity & effort as we face the inequity and heartbreak of slow-motion history.

Richard Rorty described democracy as "the idea that people should all have a say in the public decisions that affect them." In my understanding of his notion, this included decisions about who we are, what a say is, who is affected, and what the public is. On this understanding, democracy is not an ideal *eidos* of "full" or "direct" participation against which we measure our failures, but ongoing struggles and experiments in which (ever more) people (more) exert their say over (more of) what affects them in public.

The democratic or democratizing state stages a civic publicity in which these struggles and experiments are sustained and play out. I am progressive because I am committed to democratic values of sustainability, equity, and diversity none of which have been realized and all of which require progressive education, agitation, organization, legislation. ***But…*** I'm a democrat first (I mean little d here tho I'm big D too given pragmatic realities) and democratic interminability troubles progress: Progress is always progress for whom? progress toward what end? -- while democracy pluralizes whos and proliferates ends.

Democratization's ever greater say for ever greater numbers seems at the least to commit the democratic project to nonviolence: Democracy's definitive insistence on accountable authority (periodic elections, trial by jury, yoking taxation to representation, etc), its definitive insistence on public investment in the ritual artifice of equitable recourse to the rule of law and robust rights culture, and its ongoing securing of a legible scene of informed, nonduressed consent to the terms of everyday commerce for all people all connect democratization and nonviolence, democratic *civitas* to Beloved Community, radical democracy with Revolutions of Conscience, chronicled in the Preamble's general welfare, the Emancipatory Union, the New Deal's positive liberty and ongoing GreatSociety struggles: It is also emphatically misunderstood and threatened by libertopian/libertechian re-framings of the state as for-fee service provider.

It is no less misunderstood by anarchists "left" & right who mis*identify* state forms with a violence that precedes and exceeds them and pine for righteous or prosperous spontaneisms that amount to parochialism or acquiescence to injustices they formally disdain not so different in practical result from privileged fauxvolutionaries indulging in Purity Cabaret disdaining partisan political reforms. Be all that as it may, the democratic investment in nonviolence vouchsafed by facilitation of transitions of power by election by the maintenance of nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes by equal recourse to the law and by consent secured by welfare (as against vacuous contractarian consent duressed by misinformation, precarity, insecurity) remains interminable to the extent that nonviolent democratic contestation includes contests over what constitutes violence & democracy.This is the constitutive paradox of the democratic imaginary and I am a democrat because it is seems to me a productive paradox.

It seems to me errors, denials & disavowals of these admittedly fraught, paradoxical connections are shared by my critical interlocutors whether anarchists "left" or right, reactionary tech-talkers, or fauxvolutionaries indulging in silly campaign season Purity Cabaret.

Rorty's Wit

There is plenty in Richard Rorty to disagree with, but he still has an outsized influence in my spiritual make-up. It is hard to explain, but the way he combined wit and good sense in a very American way with post-Nietzschean philosophy helped me bridge my emerging philosophy (as it was then being definitively shaped by an imaginary, still-ongoing conversation in my head between Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler) with the way reading Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward (and watching screwball comedies) intellectually saved my life as a queer in high school. For me the performance of wit in Rorty gave me hope I could put a soul together that made sense. Whatever my disagreements, all gratitude.

McCarthy --> Nixon --> Quayle --> Gingrich --> W --> Palin --> Trump -->

Don't doubt for a second these guys can ALWAYS get worse...

They Are Coming

Watching the RNC is like reading the Book of Mazarbul: "We cannot get out. The shadow moves in the dark. We cannot get out. They are coming."

Say You Wanna Fauxvolution

Any radicalism that blinds you to differences that make a difference is reactionary in substance.

Re-Framing The Second Amendment For Gun Safety and Representative Policing

I have articulated this position over and over on Amor Mundi, and for years now at this point, but the heartbreaking nauseating unendurable spectacle of gun violence continues on and on and so I'll offer up my usual chestnuts once again: (one) I still think Democrats should re-frame and defend the Constitution's Second Amendment guarantee of armed but "well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State" as every citizen's right to accountable and representative police. (two) I still think commonsense gun safety regulations should include proposals to disarm police on the street -- the default of effective police departments in many comparatively democratic industrialized settings. (three) I will remind readers once again that anybody (which is well-night everybody, mind you) who agrees that private citizens should not possess thermonuclear devices already concedes the necessary premise to justify nearly all the gun safety regulation and military weapons bans the most fervent gun control advocates demand. (four) The terms of this debate must change to reflect both factual and political realities, because the frames through which we debate these issues now seem conspicuously to frustrate mobilization of a workable consensus on these issues.

Alvin Toffler, 1928 – 2016

No shock: In the Future eveybody dies. The reason this isn't just a tasteless observation is because a disavowal of finitude, mortality, vulnerability, error drives futurology. Never forget the essence of futurology is a death-dealing peddling of status quo amplification as accelerating progress via denial of death.Tech's "Thought Leaders" love to confuse making bets with having thoughts: Toffler was a trailblazer for our ruinous artificial imbecilence. I went from future shock to future fatigue years ago.

The Parade Passes By

I re-post variations of the following bit of grousing more or less every year on Pride Weekend. Last year it was published in the afterglow of the Supreme Court decision to mandate marriage equality in all fifty states and in the aftermath of the massacre in Charleston. And this year the devastating mass shooting in Orlando is casting its shadow over the festivities, systematic white-supremacist police brutality and terrorist violence stratifying once again any easy legibility of meaningful pride celebration for lgbtq folks of color and all queer allies and fellow-citizens in our vital cities, our fraught refuges, our diverse havens...

As regular readers of Amor Mundi know, my partner and I have been together for over fourteen years now. But we aren't gay married because we disapprove of marriage as a vestige of human trafficking and as an irrational acquiescence to damaging Hallmark card fantasies of romantic completion. And yet we both fought for marriage equality and are cheered by its successes because our exclusion from the institution damages the lives of queer folks who feel differently than we do and because that exclusion long remained an injustice enabled other worse exclusions and injustices, and also simply because it seems more forceful politically to oppose norms from which you are not already excluded and the refusal of which costs you something.

Appalled by the deathly demoralizing anti-democratizing energies of corporate-militarism as I am, I grasped nonetheless the indispensability of ending Bill Clinton's gargoyle "Don't Ask Don't Tell" and the ban of queer folks from serving openly in the military for reasons similar to those that make marriage equality victories good -- but, again, I cannot say the jingoist cadences inevitably framing the victory felt particularly enlivening to me personally here in the belly of the beast of the imperialist abroad police-state enabling at home endless War on Terror. Ending employment discrimination against queer folks seems to me a more substantial goal that will help many truly precarious people in this country while imposing a constraint on many truly pernicious people in this country -- and hence I cannot say that I am surprised to find it the assimilationist goal that still most stubbornly resists accomplishment, year after year after year. I don't like kids enough to wallow in gay adoption victories, and while I am all for Families We Choose, I wonder why the Chosen Families we celebrate must always be so drearily conventional.

But even if, as I say, I fully recognize the indispensability of demanding the availability of legibility on conventional institutional terms, lest illegibility marginalize so many of us in ways that literally ruin and end lives, I personally believe that a life more fully lived demands selves made of both prose and poetry, freedom requires both answerability before the eyes of power as well as the questionableness out of which different worlds are made (I recommend you read Fanon if that doesn't make sense to you).

Yes, all told, I am one of those grumps you hear about who think that celebrating Pride as assimilation to the institutional norms of reprosexual corporate-militarism is nothing to be Proud of. While Pride originated in the righteous impulse to defy the hurtful shame imposed on wanted queer lifeways by mean, fearful, ignorant majorities, I think there is plenty to be ashamed of in the complacency, conformism, and consumerism our new Prideful majority celebrates.

Especially now that I'm past fifty I find that I more or less want Pride to get off my lawn. It is like a crowd of vacant consumers and squalling kids hard to distinguish from a food court in a Tornado Alley suburban mall even with the interchangeable shirtless guys and sequins shorn of their magic by too much sunlight. I do know that there are plenty of older folks who draw a real measure of strength and support from Pride, and yet I do think Pride is something youthful at heart, and in a way that registers both the fabulousness and foibles that can characterize youth in dumb overgeneralized stereotypical ways I won't make many friends getting into in any depth. But the hazy ambivalent fondness I still feel for Pride, while feeling at once quite contented that Pride is no longer the thing for me, is something like the hazy ambivalent fondness I feel for my own time of youthful adventuring.

I marched with my friends in Queer Nation in the Pride Parade in Atlanta half a dozen times at least, in the early nineties, and that really felt like something. Perhaps it was because we didn't seem quite as respectable as the Pride tag insisted we should be aspiring to be, for one thing. I marched in San Francisco's Parade just once, the summer after I moved here, in 1996, and it already felt terribly belated and pro forma. I wasn't really part of any movement anymore, and that left me feeling like I was at a County Fair cruising a loud crowd for dick and funnel cakes. That's, gosh, twenty years ago now! Now I see on my tee vee that queers march behind banners designating the tech companies they work for. I must say I felt quite a lot of sympathy for the Occupride moment in 2012 -- but I heard about it on the news after the fact. There was some political alchemical spark there, some joyful noisy resistance, some futural opening onto elsewhere that felt truly queer. To connect with that kind of queer futurity, I might even drag my tired old unrepentant queer ass onto the street again one day...

Pluralism, Politics, and Belief; Or, Of Walking And Chewing Gum At The Same Time (A Twitter Essaylet)

I'm a champion of both performance art pieces and uncompromising ethical stands, but I don't think elections are good occasions for either.

Pluralists propose there are different sorts of beliefs embedded in different sorts of ends and histories. What we want from scientific beliefs is different from what we want from moral beliefs or aesthetic judgments. Ethical belief ascription is different from political, legal, or any number of forms of professional belief ascription.

James' oft-quoted pragmatic definition of truth as the "good in the way of belief" is lamentably and mis-educatingly truncated too often: Truth is that which is "good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons."From this, the pluralist and pragmatist proposes an understanding of reasonableness in the way of belief and belief-guided conduct for which reasonable belief requires not only that beliefs be warranted but the criteria of warrant be proper to the form of belief.

Far from muddying or relativizing, this seems a more demanding practice of reasonablenness than the usual facile scientisms and moralisms. To spell this out, the criteria that warrant scientific beliefs (testability, coherence, etc) in order to provide prediction and control, are very different from the criteria that warrant moral beliefs (citation, loyalty, etc) in order to provide for belonging and dignity, and it is unreasonable not only to hold scientific or moral beliefs that are unwarranted but to warrant scientific beliefs as moral ones and vice versa, or to seek from scientific belief the work of aesthetic belief, or to dismiss ethical belief from a legal vantage. It is quite as perniciously irrational to mis-apply scientific belief beyond its proper precinct as to deny science within that precinct. Similar confusions and mischief-making arise from the mis-application of moral, aesthetic, technoscientific warrants to political belief.

Politics is the ongoing reconciliation of the diversity of stakeholders who share the present and coming world and its problems. Compromise (and anticipation of resistance) inheres in all political problem-solving work and reasonable political belief ascription very much including progressive emancipatory work to solicit agreement about shared problems or build different ways of world-sharing. This receptivity and compromise is crucially different from the kind of exclusivity moral belief permits or purity aesthetic belief does. It is not to denigrate morals, ethics, aesthetics that I insist they not be mis-applied to politics but to defend and celebrate them all.

None of this is to deny an inter-implication of these domains -- humans live lives in bodies and histories with integrities -- but I absolutely do deny that these domains are reducible to one another or that any is inherently or always prior to the others. Of irrationalities one could decry, confusions of science with morals, or of morals and aesthetics with politics seem to me underappreciated. Pluralism reminds us that reasonableness is not only a cerebral affair, but much a matter of walking and chewing gum at the same time.

Good Guy With Gun

The "Good Guy With A Gun" is just a techno-ruggedization of the usual paranoid aggressive American individualism of white-racist cishet masculinity.

Plutocratic Algorithms

Those who once said "let the market decide" will soon say "let the AIs decide" and they will mean the same thing by it: Let the rich decide.

Some Star Trek Suspicions

I can't be the only one who strongly suspects the Klingon Empire is a matriarchy run by scientists and social workers and that all the war stuff is a sandbox they provide mostly for dumb boys. I can't be the only one who strongly suspects Star Fleet is just a kindly meant outlet for sociopaths and a-types who simply can't get with enjoying life in a sustainable fair post-scarcity multiculture.

A scooter isn't a "hoverboard" and algorithms aren't "AI." They just sell them that way.

Futurological "progress" is a marketing phenomenon.

Techniques of Futurity Against "Future" Technologies

Futurists in the 1950s promised automation (technology) would usher in a utopia (politics) of universal prosperity and leisure. And now, for 25 years futurists have promised AI (technology) will end history (politics) so we will arrive in paradise or apocalypse.

Let's be clear: futurological promises of prosperity via automation mostly failed because of successful right-wing anti-labor politics. In the absence of organized labor the benefits of automation abetted plutocratic wealth concentration rather than general prosperity. The 20C futurological failures were not failures of prediction but of a deep misrecognition of political problems for instrumental ones.

Now, let's focus our attention to contemporary politics and futurological discourse. Our 50s automation tech-talkers now blather about AI. There have never been nor are there now any intelligent artifacts in the world. Yet futurological attributions of such AI utterly abound. Futurological discourse about threats or promises of artificial intelligence (imagined and present) misrecognizes intelligence.

The substantial content of such false attributions of intelligence to machines that are not intelligent are threefold: one -- the displacement of responsibility from owners, designers, users of dangerous artifacts onto the artifacts themselves; two -- a false provocation of sympathy for useless, wasteful, dangerous artifacts facilitating fraud, crime & war-crimes; and three -- a denigration of actual intelligence in humans and other living persons undermining recognition of their dignity and rights. Again let's be clear: the substance of rights and of history is political -- and futurology fosters their misrecognition as instrumental.

History is the struggle to solve shared problems; to allocate costs, risks and benefits of change; and testify to hope and suffering. Recognition of intelligence (its needs and the responsibilities it exacts) is an indispensable point of departure for any free politics.

Futurological instrumentalizations of historical struggle, intelligence/consciousness are indeed profound attacks on free political life. It is no accident that corporate-military futurisms achieve prevalence as norms and forms of advertising suffuse of public discourse. Our tech talkers repackage stale crap as novelty, upward failure as innovation, deregulation as disruption, precarity as progress. This is a *reductio ad absurdum* of marketing deception and hyperbole. But at a deeper level they are dismantling free political life: substituting consumption for participation, precarious competitiveness for freedom, status-quo amplification for progress.

Futurology's anti-politics serve reactionary politics. Futurism obliterates open futurity. Every futurism is a retro-futurism. The refusal of corporate-military futurism requires engagement in the politics it would denigrate, deny, and disavow: Intelligence imposes responsibilities. Progress requires collective struggles. Justice isn't shopping. Art isn't an amusement park. Education, agitation, organization, legislation can still distribute gains from automation and digitization for equity-in-diversity.

Futurity is the openness in the present inhering in the ineradicable diversity of stakeholders sharing, making, contesting the world. "The Future" is a lie, a projection, a funhouse mirror, a con, an advertising pitch to foreclose threatening/promising open futurity. Futurological substitutions of futurity for "The Future" are continuous with substitutions of instrumental for political consciousness.

Robots did not deliver us into utopia in the 1950s and AI will not deliver us into either singularity or robocalypse in "The Future." It is crucial to grasp this isn't a matter of competing Future predictions, but refusing the futurological eclipse of political futurity. I invest my hopes for progress not in Future Technologies but in techniques of futurity: education, organization, legislation.

Teaching Day and the Fear of Epic Nosebleeds

This afternoon in my Biopunk! graduate seminar we'll be discussing Octavia Butler's Dawn, which I have always loved so much. We'll also be talking about two enormously interesting artists (one of whom is a bit of an impresario would-be artist, granted), Herwig Turk and Gunther Von Hagens. Normally, I'd really be looking forward to all this, but this happens to be my first return to teaching after my hospitalization and I'm rather nervous about everything. At the height of my bleeding in the ER two weeks ago I was actually bleeding not only from my nostrils and mouth but from my ears and eyes as well. My platelet count is still low and even after a week of observation the doctors can't tell me definitively what precipitated the event. So, now I am left imagining myself trapped in a stuffy slow moving BART car mobbed body to body with rush hour passengers as I start fountaining blood from the eyes while everybody panics for fear that I may be gestating Cloverfield aliens or something. Pretty nightmarish. I'm still woozy a bit, having not yet made up the loss of over a liter of blood and would surely be better off staying under the blankets another week -- but adjuncts need to pay the bills and the hospital has seen to it that we have more than the usual bills to worry about now, and so here I go! Wish me luck!