Experimental Subjects in the Next Revolution: Conjoining Progress, Precaution, and Peer-to-Peer

According to a piece in Medical News Today, John Harris, a Professor of Bioethics at the Institute of Medicine, Law and Bioethics at the University of Manchester, has argued (in “Scientific Research is a Moral Duty,” Journal of Medical Ethics, 2005 31: pp. 242-248) that the public actually has at the very least a moral obligation to participate in medical and scientific research.

In general, I consider Harris to be among the most usefully provocative and clarifying bioethicists in the field, but I am a bit perplexed by the argument ascribed to him here.

And so, in this brief essaylet I want first to explain what I find troubling in the argument here, then to examine what seems to me its connection to certain analogous arguments one sometimes hears technophiles make in respect to the so-called Precautionary Principle, and then finally to propose an alternate peer-to-peer frame which seems to eliminate altogether any reason to make such arguments in the first place.

Harris’ argument, as it is reconstructed in the Medical News piece at any rate, is that since “[e]veryone in society stands to benefit from research, and indeed has already benefited... it should be economically, politically, and personally supported.”

Medical research has “almost universally been treated with suspicion and even hostility” among those who regulate it. But “[w]hile history has proved that suspicion of doctors and biomedical research is well founded,” the article continues to paraphrase, “this does not mean that research is guilty until proven innocent.” Harris is then quoted as saying: "Vigilance against wrongdoing is one thing; the inability to identify wrongdoing, with the result that the good is frustrated and harm caused is quite another."

Of course this is true, but it would appear that innocence is attaching in Harris' formulation disproportionately on precisely the institutions and practices being regulated to prevent abuses on the basis of suspicions that everyone presumably admits are “well-founded.”

It makes little sense in my view to ascribe hostility and irrational suspicion to regulators whose job it is, and for good reason, to be skeptical and suspicious. The attitude expressed here seems to me curiously complementary to the hostility of many technophiles to the Precautionary Principle which advocates the conspicuously sensible ideas that:

[1] We should always be cautious in the face of possible harm;
[2] As assessments of risk and harm grow more severe according to the consensus of relevant science, the burden of their justification rightly falls ever more conspicuously onto those who propose either to impose them or to refrain from ameliorating them; and
[3] The processes through which these justifications and their assessments properly take place must be open, evidence-based, and involve all the actual stakeholders to the question at issue.

Technophiles who value speedier technological development in the expectation that it will deliver sooner goods of incomparable value, sometimes like to imply that advocates of Precaution are indifferent to the risks that often inhere in refraining to act, or assess actual risks unnecessarily stringently, or exhibit a kind of blanket hostility to the attainments of medical-industrial technocultures on which they themselves depend hypocritically for their own standards of living.

While this is no doubt true of some advocates of Precaution –- and partisans on both sides can of course always find photogenic specimens to trot out in the support of their views -– it ignores the extent to which the Precautionary Principle was introduced precisely in response to damaging corporate-friendly government or self-sponsored research that selectively framed and published its results, and in response to the deployment of impossibly high standards of certainty to create the false impression that widely held, well-founded suspicions and concerns were in fact too controversial to provide a justification for regulation.

Critics of Precaution also tend to ignore that many of the most influential formulations of the Precautionary Principle (which has no definitive or canonical expression) confine their attention to cases of likely nonreversible harm to the health of individuals or to environmental harms that are likely to impose remediation costs higher than the benefits they generate.

Few formulations of the Principle are in fact oblivious to the ineradicable dimension of risk that inheres in all human conduct, including decisions to refrain from action. And while I will grant that it has not yet often been mobilized in arguments of this kind, the Precautionary Principle would seem to me to impel the development and deployment of emerging technologies and techniques to more effectively address global harms, malnutrition and ill-health, certain existential risks that have not hitherto been susceptible of effective response (for example, a defense against asteroid impacts, or a global warning system to inform vulnerable populations of tsunamis and the like).

I have argued that the Precautionary Principle is (or certainly can and should be) infinitely far from the irrationalist celebration of stagnation and hostility to civilization technophiles sometimes seem to want to paint it as. It is, on the contrary, a democratizing deliberative framework for development, at once impelling a fairer distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of technological development onto all of its stakeholders, while likewise enlisting the wider collaboration of these stakeholders in the actual process of research and the assessment of its results.

Precaution is not then a repudiation of progress, but the insistence of social democrats that progress, as we all now know, requires both the development of more powerful technologies and the wider empowerment of people through recourse to these technologies. Without both it is never appropriate to speak of a developmental outcome as progressive in the first place.

The force of Harris’ argument depends on his assumption that “[e]veryone in society stands to benefit from research, and indeed has already benefited.” But this is surely contradicted by his own recognition that worries about abuses are “well-founded.” Clearly, for one thing, the victims of such abuses are not straightforward beneficiaries of research in the ways that non-victims are.

This seems rather analogous to the argument of some opponents of Precaution who in celebrating the long-term benefits of development they themselves enjoy often elide the reality of the victims of development over the developmental spans in which they actually lived.

It is quite difficult to imagine that Harris would rephrase his point to suggest that people have a moral obligation to participate in risky research just to ensure that corporations profit more and more swiftly than they otherwise would, whether or not the people taking on these risks benefit themselves. But I want to know precisely why the obligation he proposes would not amount to this more pernicious demand in actual practice.

Now, while he does propose that people have an “obligation” to participate in research for the common good, even when this imposes risks and harms to their own well-being that might not otherwise seem compelling, Harris is thankfully not actually advocating that this moral obligation likewise justifies any kind of legal compulsion to so participate.

But he frankly nudges uncomfortably close to doing precisely that.

According to the Medical News article, Harris “contends that compulsion is, in principle, justifiable, and in certain circumstances, may be justified. And he suggests that a change to the Declaration of Helsinki, which sets out the ethical grounds for research, is warranted.”

In making his case, the article continues on, “Professor Harris points out that other activities in society, such as vaccination the wearing of seatbelts, and jury service, require the loss of personal autonomy for the public good.”

It is not exactly a matter of indifference that in each of the examples offered up here, an arguably rather negligible loss of autonomy corresponds not only to public goods but discernible benefits to the individual herself. Compelling individuals to participate in risky medical research might quite evidently impose incomparable costs without anything like comparable benefits.

Harris concludes his case in a moral register that is much less problematic: "The argument concerning the obligation to participate in research should be compelling for anyone who believes there is a moral obligation to help others, and/or a moral obligation to be just and do one's share. Little can be said to those whose morality is so impoverished that they do not accept either of these two obligations."

This seems to me an uncontroversial claim, but I sense in it a kind of frustration and even resignation that helps account for why Harris might hesitate to confine his argument to the mobilization of nonbinding moral injunctions.

I think Harris would be altogether wrong to succumb even slightly to the lure of compulsion as a way to secure the benefits of medical research (about which I happen to agree with him entirely). And I think it would be wrong for him mischaracterize as hostile or irrational the reasonable expectations of harm and abuse that both inspire the regulation of research and the hesitancy of many individuals to participate in some forms of it, as a way of justifying such compulsion.

But, frankly, I also think he is wrong to despair that beneficial research might not be undertaken in the absence of moral injunction or legal compulsion in the first place.

By way of a conclusion, permit me to sketch an altogether different (and, if I can be forgiven this, rather utopian) sense of the disposition of things.

Although it is difficult to descry such a thing in the midst of American militarism and fundamentalisms (of both the market and theological varieties), I am inclined to believe that the networked civilizations of the developed and developing world are well on their way to finding themselves in a quite self-conscious global project to empower morphological freedom and ameliorate (and to the extent possible even eliminate) nondiscretionary suffering and death. The science seems too proximate and the benefits too palpable for many to resist for long.

However well we fund and regulate medical and other scientific research to these ends, however, it remains true that the effects of therapeutic and enhancement procedures on particular individuals, in unpredictable combinations, and over the various longer time-scales involved are simply impossible to anticipate as well as anyone would like.

This has the consequence that every citizen in the democratizing world should be regarded as not only a legal subject but an "Experimental Subject" as well.

Experimental Subjects are bearers not only of the usual bundle of rights legal citizen-subjects have properly come to expect in social democracies (and which certainly should include at least basic healthcare provision), but should likewise be bearers of a “Stakeholder Grant” providing them the means to participate -- in as competent, informed, accountable, and consensual a way as possible –- in experimental therapeutic and enhancement medical procedures as well.

Unlike Harris, who seems to want to impel or even compel individuals to participate in medical research for the public good, I would argue that we should recognize the extent to which everybody is already participating in such research, as consumers in a vast globally distributed long-term experiment in combination therapy.

It seems to me that as Experimental Subjects in the global medical-industrial complex we all of us already incarnate indispensable data points in what amounts to a vast peer-to-peer project to advance medical and scientific research.

What I propose is simply that we should all actually recognize our indispensability, recognize the literally revolutionary force of this insight, and then demand to be paid for the privilege of so participating.

I would also propose that since we are all expected to relinquish quite a bit of traditional control over the circulation of personal information about the effects of our ongoing participation in this global experimental culture, we should not only demand payment but likewise demand that these results be distributed absolutely freely and transparently to encourage thereby the kind of innovation and accountability that best ensures that the costs and harms we undertake will be minimized and the benefits we enable available to all (including ourselves).

Since Harris suggests himself that “[f]inancial incentives to participate in research are fully justified and preferable to compulsion,” I hope he would be sympathetic to this viewpoint. My only cautionary note in joining with Harris in such a recommendation is to insist that the mode of financial incentivization that seems to me most likely to bear fruit would be one conjoined to a democratizing peer-to-peer model of research, rather than any of the customary market apologist models which we all well know by now would too likely devolve soon enough into the usual demand of “your money or your life.”

These Foolish Things (Scattered Quotations for the Day)

One of my favorite novelists, Gary Indiana, wrote of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film Salo, that it “is one of those rare works of art that really achieves shock value."

He goes on in a winningly Wildean way to say that "[I]t’s always amusing to read the outpourings of some cultural wastebasket decrying an artist who deploys shock ‘for the sake of shock,’ as if to qualify as a work of art, a work of art has to be something other than a work of art – a tutorial in cherished homilies, an affirmation of quotidian values and so on.”

I have been thinking of Salo quite a lot since November, predictably enough -– it’s a film that seems tailor-made for the Bush era, not to put too fine a point on it.

But the thing that really brought the thought of the film to the forefront of my mind today of all days, was a sudden ghastly shock of memory, that that film is framed by the tune “These Foolish Things” which I had been thinking of already as a nice commemoration of the day. The Salo tie-in made it irresistable.

These Foolish Things

(by Marvell, Strachey, and Link)

Oh will you never let me be?
Oh will you never set me free?
The ties that bound us are still around us
There's no escape that I can see
And still those little things remain
That bring me happiness or pain
A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces
An airline ticket to romantic places
And still my heart has wings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

A tinkling piano in the next apartment
Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant
A fairground's painted swings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

You came, you saw, you conquered me
When you did that to me, I somehow knew that this had to be
The winds of March that make my heart a dancer
A telephone that rings - but who's to answer?
Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

Gardenia perfume ling'ring on a pillow
Wild strawb'ries only seven francs a kilo
And still my heart has wings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

The park at evening when the bell has sounded
The Isle de France with all the girls around it
The beauty that is Spring
These foolish things
Remind me of you

I know that this was bound to be
These things have haunted me
For you've entirely enchanted me
The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations
Silk stockings thrown aside, dance invitations
Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

First daffodils and long excited cables
And candlelight on little corner tables
And still my heart has wings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

The smile of Garbo and the scent of roses
The waiters whistling as the last bar closes
The song that Crosby sings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

How strange, how sweet to find you still
These things are dear to me
That seem to bring you so near to me
The scent of smould'ring leaves, the wail of steamers
Two lovers on the street who walk like dreamers
Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things
Remind me of you, just you

At the close of his appreciation of Salo Gary Indiana writes of the horror of the film that has its most perfect expression in what might otherwise be mistaken for a saccharine glimpse of hope beyond the meat-grinder it so joylessly cranks us through.

“These Foolish Things” plays on the radio in the otherwise decimated villa of the Sadean libertines. One fascist guard absurdly waltzes with another and the shot fades as they engage in desultory chit-chat.

“Salo is the pessimistic forerunner of The Matrix,” proposes Gary Indiana. “It would be a gross mistake to read the final shot as ‘hopeful,’ since these two boys, who have, in fact, implicitly survived the storm, are completely the products of its ferocity...

"After the war they’ll get married, reproduce themselves and raise good consumers; their children won’t need fascism to learn how to think alike, just TV and the supermarket.

"For all the overblown, pretentious, even corny ideas Pasolini regularly brought to the cinema, in Salo, I think he hit a nerve that hasn’t gone numb since the film first appeared.

"The theatres and video stores of the Western world offer a glut of more violent, more sexually explicit, more frankly disgusting movies that hardly anyone objects to, but Salo remains, to borrow a phrase, off the reservation, proscribed, unacceptable. One can argue with its monotony, its internal inconsistencies and its didacticism, but its power to disturb something buried very deep in each of us is beyond question.

"Salo is the very model of life as most human beings have known it in the 20th century, a metaphor of feudalism as reinvented by the multinational corporation, the military coup d’etat and the mediation of all reality via the symbolic.”

Happy Fools Day, Fellow Fools. And as Springer would say, “be good to one another.”

The Random Wilde ("The Queen Is Not a Subject" -- Redux Edition)

A couple of days ago I posted another Random Wildeism, which I noted parenthetically was a personal favorite of mine, “The Queen is not a subject.” A friend wrote to express his perplexity at this choice, and so I thought I’d add a bit of back-story to explain my appreciation.

Wilde had once famously bragged at a dinner party that his wit was so ready and so capacious that he could say a supremely witty thing on literally any subject at any time, and so people loved throwing random topics at him out of the blue to try to catch him out. Inevitably, he managed something relatively clever to say (as this recurring MundiMotif amply attests, after all).

But one evening some meanspirited dumbass witwoud (I imagine him a Bush-Voter precursor type) called out the topic “The Queen!” knowing that on this of all topics most successful witticisms would be impolitic, and so Wilde would be stymied into silence and embarrassed however he responded.

Wilde’s comeback was instantaneous and withering: “The Queen is not a subject.”

The aphorism was positively perfect in every way. Not only did it evade the dilemma Wilde’s antagonist had set for him altogether, it included an inoffensive pun that demonstrated Wilde’s wit in any case, thereby satisfying the rules of the game in spite of everything.

Considering the circumstances of Wilde’s later life, martyred by appalling hypocrites for a rare lapse into earnestness, it seems to me this phrase manages to be one of the few witticisms that includes being prophetic along with being pithy among its virtues. Wilde, possibly the world’s very first queen in an important sense, oracularily delineated his own dilemma to come.

Given the extended meditation on the status of the “subject” in queer theory, this phrase also makes Oscar Wilde the fledgling discipline’s perfectly perverse and queerly legitimate founding father (just in case the essays in Intentions hadn’t already garnered him that status).

Anyway, that’s why this otherwise apparently only modestly witty Wildeism remains one of my favorites.

Morphological Freedom and the Conservatism of "Recovery"

Why does it so often seem that those who would "err on the side of life" in so doing are impelled to denigrate consciousness and violate consent? It sometimes seems as if the advocates of "choice" are the only real defenders of personal lives.

People live lives different from the lives of snails. Personal lives are uniquely lived in the webs of meaning and thought and conversation woven by public beings, lives that reverberate with choices, with desires, with injuries, with deeds.

All the while the dread armies of the conservative so-called "culture of life" seem to defend life in some more vegetable or mineral mode, always best exemplified by organisms who have not yet arrived among the community of poets and peers, or of those who have already departed from the scene.

Technoprogressives maintain that technological development has become a revolutionary force, that it undercuts the normative weight of claims made in the name of the "natural," and that consensual genetic and cognitive modification are prosthetic practices of self-creation that are likely to be this generation's contribution to the ongoing conversation of humankind.

I use the term "morphological freedom" to describe the ways in which consensual prosthetic practices are enlarging the scope of freedom, even while they derange our expectations, demand new responsibilties, and introduce unprecedented possibilties as well of injustice, violation, and harm.

There is quite alot in the ongoing hysteria provoked by the long-dead but occasionally still-agile body of Terri Schiavo that troubles me (apart from the obvious disgust with conservative hypocrisies it has mobilized, worries about American anti-scientific benightedness, concerns about greedy politicians usurping the rule of law, et cetera), but I want to think out loud a bit more about how the prejudices being aired so passionately at the moment are occasioned by the sense of an emerging technoconstituted morphological freedom weaving its way into our cultural life, making new demands, holding out new hopes, and altogether confusing our sense of what we properly have a right to expect from human experience.

It is well-known that many bioconservatives claim to fear that new technologies will "rob" us of our humanity. But it has always seemed to me that the "essence" of our humanity, such as it is, is simply our capacity to explore together what it means to be human in the first place. Surely no sect, no tribe, no system of belief owns what it means to be human. Humanity can be denied by violence, degraded by poverty, diminished by tyranny, but it cannot be robbed because nobody owns it.

Since I believe that consensual prosthetic practices of self-creation are indispensable contributions to the conversation we are having about what humanity is capable of, it can come as no surprise to discover that I likewise believe it is the ones who would freeze that conversation in the image of their pet platitudes who look the most like thieves today.

Similarly, I share the concerns of many "disability" activists that there is something quite pernicious in the liberal discourse that claims that if Terri Schiavo had a real "chance at recovery" they, too, would demand her "life" be preserved. These activists are rightly suspicious that the idea of "recovery" in such arguments mobilizes what is in fact a highly restrictive normative concept of the sort of lives that are "lives worth living" -- a concept that denigrates many differently-enabled people who, whatever their struggles or sorrows, have lives with dignity, joy, and value worth affirming and supporting the same as anyone else.

I strongly agree with the clinicians whose thorough examination of the evidence locates Schiavo's body with the dead rather than the disabled, and in any case I affirm the necessity to respect her own decisions as these have been best ascertained by a number of courts where matters of the care of her own body are concerned. But it is clear nevertheless that the figure of disability is circulating here in ways that would have to matter to disability activists as well as to advocates and scholars of morphological freedom.

There are many disabled people who will seem superficially similar to Schiavo to an untrained eye, after all, and whose lives are routinely dismissed as "not worth living" in consequence. Disability activists fight fraught heartbreaking battles to champion the rights and standing of such people every single day. As I have written before, it is especially interesting for me to note the extent to which so many of the differently-enabled depend on ongoing cyborgization and prosthetic practices to find their ways to more enriching lives on their own terms: communicating through computer interfaces, locomoting in motorized conveyances, and engaged in sometimes lifelong bioremedial procedures of extraordinary intimacy and profundity.

From the perspective of morphological freedom it seems to me the standard of "recovery" is always worrisomely conservative, naturalizing some contingent standard of proper health as more desirable than indefinitely many alternate possibilities. Morphological freedom is precisely never a matter of any coercive imposition of a normative body in the name of a moral standard of "health," but is an embrace of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification practices in the name of a proliferation of ways of being properly and meaningfully in the world.

What it must mean to respect the differently-enabled as the actually fully-real people they are is to respect them and support them in their differences whenever they affirm the value of these differences on their own terms, just as it must likewise require the best provision of prosthetic avenues for rewriting their bodies and lives in the image of their own desires, also on their own terms.

To take up a different example that concerns some radical technophiles, even from the standpoint of resuscitating vitrified wards awaiting advanced medical treatments the issue may not usefully be thought of best in terms of a "recovery" of information, memory, or function, but as the constitution to the contrary of adequate (in both the subjective and objective senses) narrative continuity in a subject to support her ongoing personal practices of informed, competent, intelligibile, self-determinative consent as well as the public scene on which those practices depend.

The process of "life" in bioremedial technocultures is one of ongoing practices of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification in pursuit of personal meanings, responsibilties, and pleasures that are quite as likely to strain against the imposition of a normative conceptions of "wellness" as anything else.

To the extent that the rhetoric of "recovery" impels us to misrecognize some manifestations of diversity as disability technoprogressives would seem well rid of it. And to the extent that technoprogressives will sometimes affirm the desirability of "better than well" healthcare provision this would seem to encourage a repudiation of the discourse of "recovery" as well. The distinction of therapy from enhancement on which so much contemporary bioethical discourse depends, is rendered either altogether obsolete or at any rate radically historically contingent in such technoprogressive bioethics.

This is not a recommendation of morphological relativism, since for one thing one can still prefer one's own path of self-determination for communicable reasons. And to an important extent the public provision of the resources that enable prosthetic practices of self-creation also demands the maintenance of intelligible standards to ensure democratic accountability, fairness, security, and meaningful deliberation in that provision.

The key for me is a shift in the focus for such standards from a moral(istic) concern with health/beauty/righteousness into an ethical concern with the meaningful consent of peers with whom one may or may not identify morally in the slightest.

Morphological freedom prevails to the extent to which discernible differences among peers arise from consensual prosthetic practices of self-determination or self-creation, rather than being imposed or unduly durressed by conditions of exploitation, violence, or ignorance (any of which might broadly mobilize responsible intervention).

Medicine is taking us on a path from recovery to creation, with all its pleasure and danger, but our language has not yet managed to keep up. The heartbreaking and hysterical public spectacle of the dead prostheticized body of Terri Schiavo attests to our perplexity and our present distress. There are many such spectacles to come.

"Ranting, Raving, Writing"

I'll be teaching a couple of courses in the fall at SFAI, and I just submitted my course descriptions and provisional reading lists to the office. The first is a composition class in the expository writing sequence. Here's my description:

"Ranting, Raving, Writing"

The word argument comes from the Latin arguere, to clarify. And contrary to its cantankerous reputation, the process of argumentation can be one that seeks after clarity rather than one that seeks always to prevail over difference.

We argue to inquire what are the best beliefs when we are ignorant or unsure of ourselves, we argue to interrogate our own assumptions, we argue to clarify the stakes at issue in a debate, we argue to gain a serious hearing for our unique perspective, we argue to find the best course of action in the circumstances that beset us.

This is a course in argumentative reading and writing, which means for me a course in expository writing and critical thinking. But the works we will be reading together are anything but exemplary argumentative texts. Our texts rant and rave, they are brimming with rage, dripping with corrosive humor, suffused with ecstasies. In ranting and raving arguments are pushed into a kind of crisis, and in them rhetoric becomes a kind of poetry.

What does it tell us about argument in general to observe it in extremis like this? How can we read transcendent texts critically, in ways that clarify their stakes without dismissing their force, and enable us to communicate intelligibly to others the reactions they inspire in us and the meanings we find in them?

Anonymous, “Fuck the South”
Plato, Symposium
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”
Fiodr Dostoievski, “Notes From the Underground”
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Allen Ginsberg, Howl
William Burroughs, “Immortality”
Film, Network. Dir: Sidney Lumet
Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto
Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
Gary Indiana, “Reproduction”
Diane Dimassa, Hothead Paisan
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
Cintra Wilson, “Statement of Intent”

The second course is an introduction to critical theory. The potted description in the catalogue which all its instructors will variously incarnate helpfully proposes that "[t]he Critical Theory sequence develops students¹ facility in understanding and assessing theoretical models such as psychoanalysis, historical and dialectical materialism, structuralism and semiotics which extend their understanding of the visual image, the written word, and cultural phenomena."

My reading list begins with the very basic post-Emersonian turn against Platonic philosophy (in Europe post-Nietzschean philosophies, in America pragmatisms) and so Richard Rorty's “Hope in Place of Knowledge” provides a broad situation, then we shift into ideologiekritik, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, into culture and ideology, Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” Roland Barthes, Mythologies, and then use Louis Althusser's, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” to take us from ideology into subjection. For subjection we read from Michel Foucault's, History of Sexuality, Part One, then Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments” and Judith Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” turning then to Franz Fanon's, Black Skin, White Masks, and then read Gayatri Spivak's, “History.” There we turn into "prostheses," techocriticism and technopolitical discourses, Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Marshall McLuhan, “Understanding Media,” Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” sections of Hannah Arendt's magisterial, The Human Condition, and then conclude with Donna Haraway's, “Manifesto for Cyborgs.”

I regret that there will be no place for Raymond Williams, more Foucault ("Two Lectures," "What Is An Author"), Carol Adams, Baudrillard, and Paul Virilio. But I'm already unloading a huge amount on students and expect if anything the list will be further truncated. And of course my students are largely working artists and part of any course will be my ongoing efforts to respond usefully to their needs, which are always just a little perpendicular to my own expectations as a theory-head.

Of course, part of the reason to blog this stuff is because it is preoccupying me in this moment, and many of my preoccupations find their way onto my blog. Another reason is to provide a place for prospective students to find information (I know that some of my students at SFAI and Berkeley already keep tabs on me through my blog, for example).

But the real reason to mention these courses is to register a mild uneasiness I feel about them. I received the offer to teach these fall courses quite recently, and didn't have much time to put the reading lists and descriptions together, and so in the absence of that time I fell back on my habits. It worries me that looking over these two courses they come so close to representing the kinds of readings and overall organization and themes I would have proposed to teach fully a decade ago, if I were putting together comparable courses back then.

Here I am struggling to finally get the PhD. and move from my presumably preparatory inhabitation of the academy into some more fully-fledged and professional version of things and yet already I worry that my intellectual joints are stiffening and fuddy-duddiness is becoming all too evident.

Definitely one of the first things to do once the dissertation is in hand is just to do a crash course of reading in a hundred different directions, to find altogether new writing that shakes the plaster loose. Then again, part of this may simply be that these are more general sorts of classes already outside of the media criticism and technoethical stuff in which I am paying closest attention these days to new provocations. Hopefully, the technoethical course I teach at Berkeley this Summer and then the digital aesthetics and politics course I teach next Spring at SFAI will feel more bracingly cutting edge to me...

Panopticon Paradise

Over at Salon, Heather Havrilesky's latest "I Like to Watch" reads out the sentence of death. The prisoner will eat a hearty meal.

Yes, I've been in graduate school a decade, yes, my Committee members are goggle-eyed at the deadlines I fail and fail to meet. Really, truly, if I don't finish this odious manuscript more than half a lifetime's work and a home-mortgage-sized mountain of student loan debt will all crash to the ground annihiliating the terrain for miles around with nothing in all the world to show for it as these things are normally reckoned, no signposts will remain to explain what on earth all of this was for... Disaster is waiting in the wings, peril abounds...

But come what may I will be watching "America's Next Top Model" this Wednesday night. Eric and I will order pizza and munch away basking in the radioactive awfulness of "American Idol," even when it surreally dilates over a succession of evenings with scarcely enough actual content to fill the human interest segment of a local news broadcast.

Heather helps explain what it's all about.

You know, I seem dimly to recall an argument in some coffee-table book or other by Baudrillard, in which he proposed that the presence of Disneyland, and Sea World, and the whole odd archipelago of amusement parks that surround Los Angeles like a bored invading army, are somehow able by radiating their own unreality so palpably to materialize the immateriality that is Los Angeles itself, to buttress that phantasmagoria of endless wanting into a real live place by bravura willpower alone, a special effect of stark contrast. These amusement parks were like veritable reality engines, Baudrillard said, conferring solidity on that dreamscape where the tar pits begin precisely where the rain of funny money ends. Like a Mama's warm "there, there," in the face of no there there.

It's hard not to see the function of the shows helmed by Miss. Misdemeanor, Tyra Banks, Paula Abdul as comparable in a way -- consolidating their own more real stardom in contrast with the humiliations their attendant wannabees slop through like blank-eyed otherwise comely pigs in a trough. Who knows what humiliations paved their own starbound hells like good intentions, they all evaporate in the relentless spectacle of sycophancy and cluelessness against which the stars rather vampirically glory like Olympians.

From the fact that the contestants are always even at their best second-rate copies of celebrities already grown stale in the original (look, another Whitney! another Justin!) we know that these contests are not roads to stardom in the least, that for these starry eyed tired-meat prostitute-types the road is already the destination -- the celebrity, such as it is, will almost certainly not outlast the contest itself. All eyes, no prize.

The prospective talents are scarcely more talented than (after all, sometimes talented) cruise-ship entertainers or show-queens belting out "Happy Anniversary" at Stucky's. And the hairball of pseudo-celebrity coughed up by the PR departments of these shows, a guest-spot on a UPN sitcom or straight-to-DVD crap-movie and then a straight shot to "The Surreal Life" and "Where Are They Now?" is only negligibly distinguishable from the "celebrity" of any random contestant spinning the Big Wheel on "The Price is Right," or for that matter every goddam shopper at Wal-Mart panned and scanned by surveillance cameras or any schmo who gets googled first by a stranger before arriving at a blind date.

The pleasure of these shows is akin I guess to the dark enjoyment the spectacle of the asshole who slips on a banana peal affords the mean lowdown abject id inside. But the deeper reality of the superficial reality signalled by these mediated celebrity-hunts is that privacy and publicity do not mean what once they did.

These dumb sad ferocious often blandly fuckable egomaniacs in these shows are too self-seduced and rampagingly sociopathic to have noticed that the protocols of real celebrity have changed, and that it is not their special genius that they are revealing to the world but something more quintessentially American, the farthest thing from singularity or creativity, but the endless re-conjuration of the audience itself...

The American, the consumer, the mass-audience, lord of the earth... a creature once described by William Gibson as "best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."

Healthcare and Private Perfections

In his Confessions St. Augustine, contemplating the excesses and indiscretions of his youth famously pronounced the verdict, “O Lord, how crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous was I.” From Paul to the present, the Church has expressed especial hostility to the pleasures and meanings aroused in the free play of human bodies and brains in the world, and preached mortification of the flesh and faithful obedience as routes to the presumably deeper, more spiritual satisfactions the Church offers instead. But the Church’s real and ongoing commitment to the address and redress of suffering on earth, to good works as an incomparable path to redemption, constantly and forcefully re-embodies this quest for spiritual fulfillment and confronts the best, most righteous reformers of the Church with quandaries with which their worldview is finally deeply incapable of dealing. It is a hard thing, after all, to try to hold hope and hostility together in a single vision.

A case in point is the claim of Vatican officials last week to decry “what they called a ‘religion of health’ in affluent societies" and then "h[o]ld out… Pope John Paul's stoic suffering as an antidote to the mentality that modern medicine must cure all.”

To the extent that the Pope is “stoically suffering” rather than straightforwardly dead a dozen times over by now only because he has made repeated recourse to the most technologically sophisticated medical treatments in human history suggests that the term “health” is functioning at any rate ambivalently in this Vatican statement.

This becomes clearer still when Maurizio Faggioni from the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life makes the sensible point that “[w]hile millions of people in the world struggle to survive hunger and disease, lacking even minimal health care, in rich countries the concept of health as well-being figures in creating unrealistic expectations about the possibility of medicine to respond to all needs and desires."
He goes on to expand his point, to say, “[t]he medicine of desires, egged on by the health-care market, increases the request for pharmaceutical and medical-surgical services, soaks up public resources beyond all reasonableness."

"Health" is used in two different registers here, one demanded the other decried. On the one hand there is a commitment to the provision of “health care” to ameliorate unnecessary suffering, but on the other hand there is an almost hysterical hostility directed at what the Vatican decries, portentiously enough, as an unrealistic, superficial, and endlessly distracting “religion of health.”

The key move that distinguishes the two registers is of course Faggioni’s conjuration of a “reasonableness” that seems to translate pretty much into "moderation" appealing attractively to intuitions about fairness, and (to me) rather less attractively to "Puritanism" and an unquestioning faith in conservative social conventions. Faggioni’s move will of course be familiar to bioethicists who often like to deploy the distinction between “therapy” and “enhancement” to work their way through quandaries like these.

The problem is that distinctions like the one between "therapy" and "enhancement" are ultimately moonshine.

At the heart of the distinction of therapy from enhancement is always a fantasy of the normatively healthy body -- or even the normatively optimally healthy body -- a norm which will inevitably be saturated with parochial cultural and moralistic assumptions mistaken for factual descriptions. And consequently any effort to provide “health” according to these normative ideals will finally be as prescriptive as it is remedial.

But more to the point, every effort to use such a distinction to inform practice will set in motion forces that inevitably undermine the terms of the distinction itself. It isn’t possible to provide “health” according to any normative ideal without likewise empowering the provision of capacities incompatible with those normative assumptions and thereupon shifting what constitutes the “normative” in the first place.

Even the most conservatively therapeutic understanding of the ultimate goals of medical science and treatment, a Hayfleckian utopia in which everybody on earth enjoys the robust health and fulsome intellectual capacity of the healthiest among us today as we presently perceive them, as well as lifespans prolonged for all to the extent of the century or so available only to the luckiest among us so far, this still would set in motion a trajectory of scientific and technological development that would provoke unimaginable perplexities into the status of profound biological experiences such as pregnancy, sexual maturation, illness, aging and death.

Already, today, the fresh susceptibility of organisms to prosthetic and pharmacological intervention has transformed the status of "viability," "therapy," "normality," as stable measures of just when lives can properly be said to begin or to end, or as benchmarks against which to leverage intuitions about the proper scope of healthcare practice. So too neuroceutical interventions into memory, mood, and motivation trouble our received intuitions about what enables and constitutes proper consent.

Even the most modest provision of basic and decent health care, and ever more so according to how universally it is provided, will transform, quite possibly beyond recognition, what will count as “basic,” “decent,” and “normal” in the way of our expectations about what bodies properly are and what they are capable of.

The Vatican insists that all people should have access to "basic health care" but that there is a fantasy of “perfect health” in the developed world that is driven by “unfulfillable desires” and so is “unmanageable.”

It is impossible not to see the force of their point, but it is notoriously difficult to mainstain any such distinction between “basic” and “perfect” health that will hold up for long to scrutiny. None of us is in any kind of position to say definitively now just what will be “fulfillable” or not through the therapeutic address of medicine over the course of our lifetimes.

And, frankly, it seems to me the Church is one of the last places on earth one should look for any kind of “reasonableness” in working through quandaries of this kind. What are we to make of the way the word “desire” enters repeatedly into the Church’s discussion of medical practices they denigrate, for example? There seems to me, as it happens, to be a conspicuous continuity between “queer” practices and prosthetic practices, among them the epochal feminist embrace of reproductive technologies, a field of freedom and emancipation on which the Church has been perhaps the single most significant and consistent opponent of any kind of progress at all.

It is of course true that savage differences in the level of health care available to people in the world both expresses and horribly exacerbates the deep and deepening injustices in the contemporary distribution of wealth – both within so-called developed societies, and incomparably more terribly, forcefully demarcating the developed from the developing world.

But at what point will what the Church means by “manageable” healthcare goals nudge them from a useful and progressive analysis of the instabilities and calamities inhering in this kind of injustice, instead into more straightforward strategies to maintain their own pernicious hold on authority in a secularizing world? It seems very interesting in this connection to notice again that the Vatican describes “healthcare” in the terms of a rival “religion of health” when they want to condemn particular healthcare practices and goals as dangerous.

For me, emerging medical technologies enable and demand the universal provision of basic health care, at least the provision of adequate nutrition and basic hygiene and the therapeutic address of treatable diseases, all as a foundational social recognition that the unnecessary suffering of people anywhere on earth diminishes us all while securing basic capacities for everyone on earth unleashes intelligence, creativity, peace, and pleasure for which we are all of us conspicuous beneficiaries.

But I also embrace the inevitable individual recourse to these emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive technologies in prosthetic practices of self-creation and personal perfection.

These are in my view equally indispensable registers of moral and ethical prosthetic practice. They are, as it were, the public and private faces of progressive health care practice. And far from being incompatible, they are to my eyes absolutely interdependent.

Medicine becomes primarily a technique for maintaining and consolidating the control of established authorities whenever it is embraced only to the extent that it provides and imposes a normative standard of “health” just as those established authorities define it, all the while policing and repudiating the occasion for deeply destabilizing, subversive practices of personal self-creation that inevitably arise with the emergence of any new technological capacities.

It is an obscenity that big Pharma devotes millions to marketing competing treatments for erectile dysfunction to the developed world while millions die of cheaply treatable diseases in the developing world. But it would also be an obscenity for social and religious bio-conservatives to deny individuals the transformative recourse to emerging consensual practices of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medicine. Remember that there is nothing in the least normal or natural about the historically unprecedented level of control human beings have come to take for granted in the present day over their sexual and reproductive capacities. The emerging neuroceutical address of our moods and memories provides the next conspicuous terrain for such fraught individual re-invention.

We can and in fact I insist we must value both the public and private faces of health care practice. Certainly we should not fall for corporate propaganda that would privilege the private over the public, or pretend that only the denigration of public healthcare provision enables desirable prosthetic pursuits of private perfection. But neither should we be bamboozled into a denigration of prosthetic practices of personal self-creation by cynically sanctimonious arguments from social and religious conservative authorities jealous of their power and sensitive to the precariousness of their position in a more secular world.

When a doctor in the Church intones that it is “[p]recisely in the handicap, in the disease, in the pain, in old age, in dying and death one can... perceive the truth of life in a clearer way,” you can be sure this is not so much the voice of wisdom and modesty and fairness one is hearing, but yet another echo of that immemorial priestly hostility to the life that is lived in bodies. We must hold instead in a single vision an awareness of frailty and suffering as an address that impels us to action, and a grown-up celebration of the pleasures and promises and dangers of new fleshly humanities that have outgrown the old tired and tyrannical crucifixations.

"More Than Human"

Bioconservatives like Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama express horror and rage at the prospect that people will use technology to become “more than human,” while some radical technophiles seem ardently to desire precisely that.

I recently overheard a conversation among some self-identified “transhumanist” technophiles who, casting about for a nice tee-shirt slogan, cheerfully proposed the phrase, "Being human is not enough."

I have to admit the sensibility expressed either fearfully or hopefully in this sort of slogan is utterly incomprehensible to me.

"Not enough people are treated humanely" is a statement that makes powerful sense to me, but "human is not enough"?

Not enough for what?

It seems to me precisely an expression of our humanity (such as it is) that we would want to re-write ourselves in the image of our aspirations -- through experience, through education, through our cultural and now our prosthetic practices.

What exactly do people expect to happen, whether they dread or desire this outcome, that will make some of them "more than human"?

There is surely a difference between incarnating different-from-normatively-human life-ways (which is true of indefinitely many people already) and imagining you incarnate something "more-than-human" (which seems simply a way of mistaking difference for superiority -- something too many people already do as well).

To the extent that bioconservatives claim to be defending the value of “human dignity,” they really need to quit constantly handwaving in panic about superlative technological states like immortality, superbabies, and clone armies -- none of which are sufficiently proximate developmentally to illuminate deliberation about technology policy here and now -- and explain just how restricting women’s reproductive freedoms and clamping down on medical research to cure and ameliorate suffering from treatable diseases has anything to do with “human dignity” in the first place.

To the extent that trans- and post- humanisms still presumably emerge out of humanism as an ethical project, these "movements" really should be demanding that the category of "the human" be rendered as capacious as possible to better accommodate the consensual genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification of humans now and in the futures we will share.

And as a matter of unsolicited, possibly unwelcome, practical advice to my technophile friends, a "slogan" is largely intended to pithily communicate your worldview to people who do not share it (but some of whom you presumably would want to). I think you should worry that the phrase “being human is not enough” expresses or will widely seem to express little but a disdain for humanity, or at any rate a disdain for those who choose not to embark on paths of prosthetic modification so radical as your own.

Isn’t it human to want to be healthy and happy? Isn’t it human to want to express yourself, to make your mark in the world? Isn’t it human to want to make the world a better place? Isn’t it human to want to better yourself?

This slogan, and the many variations on it that are commonplaces in so-called "transhumanist" discursive spaces, seem to me more like expressions of hostility than of hope. In a slogan from radical technophiles I would personally like to see something more like an invitation to the dance than yet another declaration of war.

The Future Against Futurity: Some Questions for the Transhumanists

Am I still myself if my self is a project of transcendence? Do my prosthetic practices make me more myself or less myself? Is "transcendence" the transcendence of all limits or only some? If all, what remains of a thing without limits? If only some, which, when, for whom, for what?

When we say of a “trans” that it bespeaks transition from one state to another, are we sure we know enough to know where we are, where we are going, what we want? Are we sure of the “we” that presumably shares these wants and this direction? Does movement always engender Movements?

When we say of a “trans” that it bespeaks transcension, how do we distinguish this from the other priestly promises of knowledge and safety in exchange for obedience that such language has always otherwise brought in tow? What does it mean when conservatives would take up the language of the future, and with such stubborn noise? What does this tell us about the future and about its difference from futurity?

When we say of a “trans” that it bespeaks transformation we have to wonder, don't we, what kind of security or stability can be built on a foundation of rainwater? Is the meaning of technology the end at which it “aims,” and which we could never know until that superlative end arrives, or is it the practices we weave in taking up technologies here and now?

“Trans” derives from the Latin across -- it can denote passage, change, meander, variety... Prosthetic practices empower and disempower, they promise and they threaten, they shake up the familiar and then they become the customary against which we next measure the unfamiliar. We know less about where we are going than any of us care to admit, just as we know less about our own desires than we can admit to.

Prosthetic practices have been an interminable conversation among persons, and it is hard to for me to find many edicts or certainties in this lovely, promising, threatening mess. What happens when we domesticate the pleasures and dangers of futurity in the naturalizing reassurance of the discourse of "the future"?

Futurity is ineradicably a roll of the dice and a project for collaborators (in every sense of that word). The future? Always, I'm beginning to think, only another mirror.

Resources for Writing Arguments

In the process of throwing together my course this term I have managed to place online some documents and notes that I often make recourse to in the teaching of classes in argumentation. Again, since I've been so preoccupied with work and less devoted in consequence than I like to be about blogging, I figure I might as well offer up some of this stuff for your perusal in case any of it strikes your fancy.

The documents are a short statement of basic guidelines that I hand out early in the term in all of my classes, at whatever level, Four Habits of Argumentative Writing, some rather scattered speculations on argument interspersed with what are often helpful bits of advice for writers who are feeling stuck, Finding Your Argument, and then a Peer Editing Worksheet, which models the way I try to inculcate basic critical habits by structurally relating the separate elements of the class to one another.

Comments, questions, criticism always welcome, of course!

Pay-to-Peer

I'm going to be delivering a paper at the Fourth Congress of United States Basic Income Guarantee Network, which is taking place March 4-6, 2005, in New York. My panel is on Saturday, I believe. Here is a short abstract of my talk:

“Pay-to-Peer: How Basic Income Will Support the Emerging Peer-to-Peer Networked Society”

The ease with which content can now be published and circulated via emerging digital networked information and communication technologies has inspired an unprecedented outpouring of creativity. The common wisdom that the protection and extension of copyright is necessary to promote ongoing innovation has been disrupted, probably irreparably, as free content proliferates on these digital networks and as copyright regimes become instead the pretext for the oppressive policing of creative and collaborative work to preserve profits for established interests.

In a related development, as conservative consolidated corporate broadcast media relinquish their traditional function to help educate the electorate and demand accountability in the conduct of the powerful, a vast archipelago of online blogs, columns, and communities of advocacy have suddenly materialized to do so in their place.

The emerging peer-to-peer networked society is creating an incomparable archive of intellectual resources as well as tools to facilitate new practices of collaboration, exchange, and oversight, and I propose that a guaranteed basic income may be necessary to compensate this increasingly socially indispensable work since traditional economic incentives and models seem inadequate to accommodate these developments.

I mean for my argument to complement Marshall Brain’s recent thesis that a guaranteed basic income may be necessary to stave off the social disruption that is likely to eventuate as widespread automation eliminates traditional jobs and concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Brain argues that a guaranteed basic income will ameliorate the negative impact of current technological developments, and I argue that the same income guarantee will likewise consolidate the positive impact of other current technological developments.

Course Description

A week from tomorrow I will begin teaching a new course at the San Francisco Art Institute, entitled "Critical Theory, Network Politics, and 'New' Media." Soon thereafter, students participating in the class will start blogging about the course readings and discussions and whatever other forces might be set in motion by the material. Of course, everyone will be welcome to see what we come up with and to participate via comments, e-mail, links, etc.

Until the course itself begins, I will be posting the syllabus, readings list, and some general writing and reading resources for the course onto the "BloggingTEC: Technology, Ethics, and Culture" blog where we will be gathering online. I thought at least some of this material might interest some of the readers who visit here as well, and so I'll post some of it here, too -- especially since I'm distracted with preparations and otherwise might not have much else to offer up to your attention for a couple of days. Here, anyway, is the Course Description from the Syllabus, which also provides the opening moves for the discussion for the first day of class:

In this course we will focus our attention on some of the ways in which critical theory has tried to make sense of the ongoing impact of emerging information and communication technologies on public life, cultural forms, creative expression, and ethical discourse.

Our conversation this term will take as its point of departure the assumption that the basic categories through which we make sense of individual and collective agency, dignity, and claims of right are transforming under the pressure of emerging and converging digital networked information and communication technologies. Over the course of the term, we will survey a number of canonical and contemporary theoretical and polemical works all provoked by the problems and possibilities of these technological transformations.

To the extent that “new” media really are something new, it is hard to imagine a temperament less suited in some ways to think about these impacts than philosophers and critical theorists. Hegel pointed out that philosophy paints its gray on gray only when a form of life has grown cold. And true to form, even relatively recent and influential “new” media theory often seems quaint in its assumptions quite soon after it has been written.

Typically, when theorists speak of “new” media they mean to describe digital media in particular. And since digital media are in fact still consolidating their hold over the circulation and communication of information today, we will mostly stick to that understanding ourselves. But it is important to realize that there are possibly newer new media always emerging as well for which the enabling technologies, working assumptions, and expected effects are quite different.

There will be important differences in the discussion of media and surveillance, depending on whether one wants to focus on issues of digital encryption or biometrics instead. There will be differences in the discussion of media and intellectual property, depending on whether one wants to focus on copyright or patenting genetic information. There will be differences in the discussion of media and the manufacture of consent, depending on whether one wants to focus on the consolidation of broadcast media, the rise of social software tools and practices, or the mandated use of neuroceuticals on the basis of medical information.

In an important sense the course will be a collaborative performance, and so our more specific focus and problems and interests will depend in a significant measure on your own circumstances, concerns, and on the texts that you yourselves happen to respond to most forcefully. It remains to be seen just what conclusions we will find our way to by the end of the term and the end of this conversation.

In addition to exploring these personal and public lives of emerging media, the course will also provide you with an occasion for further training and practice in the writing of argumentation based on close textual reading, and will be a workshop in critical thinking, reading, and deliberation skills.

Time Capsule

Trolling around the cyberspatial sprawl I stumbled onto this half-remembered snippet, from, get this, the New Year’s Eve issue of Time Magazine, 1984! I don’t know what shocks me more, that I’m still humming the same tune twenty years later, or that I’m still a student twenty years later!

Dec. 31, 1984

To the Editors: I was overjoyed and excited by the medical breakthroughs reported in your story, especially the artificial heart [MEDICINE, Dec. 10]. As a 19-year-old, I refuse to accept "the probability of disease, the inevitability of death" or my "duty to die."

Norman Dale Carrico
Bloomington, Ind.

Progress as a Natural Force Versus Progress as the Great Work

Lately, some of my friends and political allies have taken me to task for my eager acceptance of the designation "progressive," and wonder if I can really be so oblivious to the damage that has often been done in the name of progress historically.

True to the instincts hammered into me by my training in analytic philosophy, I will propose to relieve this unpleasant tension by offering up an ad hoc distinction. It seems to me there is all the difference in the world between those who profess to “believe” in progress and those who would work to achieve it.

When progress is imagined to be some kind of “force” that the knowledgeable can discern in history, a natural force in which one can believe with one’s whole heart or to which profess one’s full faith, or, better yet, a force in the name of which one can claim to be some kind of priestly mouthpiece, then it tends to be little more than a self-congratulatory fable that the powerful and their orbiting opportunists tell themselves to deny the part luck has played in their attainment of power and then to justify the bad behavior they typically employ subsequently to maintain it.

This doctrine of progress as a natural force is just one more way in which the powerful add insult to injury. It is one more ruse of the ideology of the “natural,” this time one in which subject populations are re-imagined as and then reduced to developmental “atavisms” along a progressive path that has only too naturally and irresistibly culminated in the attainment of rule proper to whomever it is that calls the shots at the moment.

This “naturalizing” conception of progress figures development as an undeniable force like a typhoon wind, sweeping rulers into their prosperity and the ruled into ruin with an urgency so epic it is hard to discern or judge the merits of the proper players involved. And for those who are swept up in the exhilaration of some particular narrative of natural progress it is likewise difficult to see past the mandate of inevitability it confers, difficult to perceive the winning streak it celebrates as one that can ever come to an end, that the players it extols can ever lose their way, that the forces it documents can ever peter out.

While it is easy to find examples of this kind of naturalizing idea of progress in the crass champions of Empire from the Edwardian English to the Project for a New American Century, I will offer up as a slightly less obvious example something that strikes closer to home (for me, at any rate): the kind of corporate futurists and science fiction fanboys who sometimes like to glibly handwave about the inevitable consequences of accelerating technological development.

I think it is first of all a mystification to say technology in general is monolithically "accelerating" when in fact some developments seem to accelerate, while others stall, others converge, others altogether cease, etc. In my experience, this metaphor of a wholesale developmental acceleration tends to be employed to create an impression of inevitability and irresistibility to whatever very particular parochial political/moral outcome (or, worse yet, some particular "innovative" crap product) some self-appointed "expert" futurist is trying to avoid having to make an actual argument for at the moment.

This ideologically naturalizing tendency is never more palpable in my view than in those who declaim accelerating development to be tire-screeching in the direction of some absolute historical discontinuity -- described in its most explicit and flabbergasting variations as an apocalyptic, transcendentalizing "Singularitary" a la Ray Kurzweil or Vernor Vinge or one of their many online (and only online) enthusiasts, some altogether existential Event about which apparently very little can in principle be said in detail while, nonetheless, into which it seems all sorts of overwrought emotional baggage involving ecstatic hopes and debilitating fears can conspicuously be invested. About these unfortunates I have of course already written on several occasions.

Surely, however shattering or empowering certain technoscientific developments may be, there is little that is inevitable about the forms that such developments will take, or the scope of their impacts, or the vicissitudes in the interaction of relevant technical and normative and sociocultural developmental effects with one another over time. And all of this leads me to an altogether different conception of progress from the naturalizing ideology against which I have been railing and which I believe has inspired much of the right-minded worry of my well-meaning friends.

While it is true that I maintain something like the barest faith that life can indeed be improved for more and more people through scientific effort, the freeing up of popular creativity, and the collaboration of free people, peer-to-peer, for me progress does not so much name this bare belief as it does the work itself in which one collaborates to make the world a better place, a work on which individuals must depend on the participation of their fellows and the attainments of which are always the farthest thing from sure-footed or secure.

For me, “progress” is simply what happens when there is a fairer distribution of the benefits, costs, and risks of ongoing technoscientific developments among all the stakeholders to those developments. “Progress” happens whenever more people have more of a say in the public decisions that affect them (that is to say, when we achieve more democracy), though the participation in a legible scene of informed nonduressed consent (about which I write more here and here) in the context of the equity and diversity of a robust democratic rights-culture (and I am happy to take canonical statements such as the US Constitution, UN Declaration, Roosevelt's Four Freedoms as points of departure in the delineation of the notion of Rights Culture).

When I declare that I'm progressive in a fairly conventionally liberal or social democratic sort of way that’s just because I see sense in the belief that when the social definition of progress is satisfied (the longer, second sentence in the paragraph above, the one about consent, equity, and diversity), the technocultural definition of progress (the shorter, first sentence above, the one about the best and fairest facilitation and distribution of technoscientific accomplishments) is more likely to be satisfied as well.

I think that both the extreme market libertarianism and libertarian socialism that seem so curiously to preoccupy so many discussions of politics online (but which almost never connect particularly well to the ways in which politics subsequently plays out on the ground) are best thought of as skewed and unrealizable extrapolations from the vicissitudes of roughly workable and regularly failing social and liberal democratic practices which industrial societies are struggling to implement and maintain with, one must say, mixed results. It is regrettable that anarcho-capitalist and anarcho-socialist viewpoints are treated so often as pure positions against which we should measure the aspirations and results of actually ongoing efforts at democratization in the world when it seems to me that these efforts are the substance of the political, rather than the philosophical idealizations which declare them merely "mixed" or "compromised" or "debased." And since I have indicated that this is an analysis that applies best to "industrial societies" I think I should also add that so-called "post"-industrial societies are, in my view, simply industrial societies that disavow their industrialization through neoconservative militarist adventuring or/and with neoliberal corporatist financialization, outsourcing, and futurological posturing.

Be all that as it may, I believe that the romantic energies of the radical left were once fired by a vision of progress as a great collective work to make an incomparably better future for all, but that these revolutionary energies were shattered by the many failures, betrayals, and tyrannies of the Cold War era, and by the almost wholesale appropriation of the language of progressive enlightenment by fearful, greedy, and malign reactionaries.

The left has grown suspicious of optimistic developmental narratives that too often have been little more than apologies or cover for the ongoing consolidation of corporate-military power. And the left has been distracted from the real achievements and disenchanted from the breathtaking promise of technoscientific accomplishments by the recklessness, indifference, and pathology of their pathway, as well as by the outrageous hype and provincial perfectionism of too many commercial hucksters peddling panaceas and unsustainable lifestyles.

Too often the technophilic faith in a world "without limits" has translated into the smug assurance that there are profits to be made, and that there will always be others on hand to clean up the mess in the aftermath. Too often the real costs, risks, and burdens of development have fallen disproportionately on those who benefit least from developmental achievements. At any rate, those who suffer most at the hands of development are rarely those who subsequently benefit most from the attainments of development.

The thankless and heartbreaking work of restitution, restoration, and remediation in the aftermath of this ongoing injustice has largely fallen to the left, of course, and it is of a piece with the wider contemporary battle of progressives to conserve the institutional achievements of over a century of social struggle against an onslaught of reactionaries who have recently re-written revolution in the image of a massive looting and dismantling of democratic civilization, such as it is.

This curious inversion, whereby the left has been lured into a dreary conservative defense of the fragile embattled institutions of social welfare and representative governance, while the right is intoxicated with the fighting faith of market-triumphalist revolutionary fervor, has left the left unable plausibly to claim any longer to speak in the name of Progress conceived as the Whirlwind or the Pillar of Fire.

Why look a gift horse in the mouth? I say we leave the ideology of Nature’s Progress to the market naturalists, and grab hold again the reins of Progress conceived as a Great Work.

I believe now that only by championing and securing the emancipatory potential of emerging radical technologies (genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medicine, renewable energy technologies, nanoscale fabrication techniques, and decentralized media and resource networks), by insisting on their social support, funding, regulation, and the fair distribution of both their costs and benefits, that the left can regain the momentum it lost in the slow turn to the twenty-first century with the loss of its intelligible revolutionary aspirations.

While it is certainly true that the unprecedented dangers and destabilizing impact of ongoing technoscientific change will impose extraordinary risks and costs on all humanity and all species (and disproportionately so onto the relatively more vulnerable and poorer and least represented among us so long as development is driven by corporate-militarist elites), it seems to me that the left needs to embrace technoscientific progress to regain its right relevance in the world almost as much as humanity needs the fair-minded good-sense of the left to regulate technodevelopment for the good of us all and to dispel what will otherwise too likely be catastrophe.

Postscript: Who Our Friends Are

Progress has two aspects, then, one social and one instrumental.

The struggle for more representative governance, more collaborative social administration, greater transparency from institutions and agents empowered to produce and enforce laws, greater fairness in the distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of public intercourse for all of its stakeholders, the diminishment of violence and compulsion in interpersonal life, the spread of literacy, numeracy, and critical thought, the spread of cosmopolitan tolerance and multicultural celebration, the substantiation of the scene of informed, nonduressed consent, and the global expansion of a more robust rights culture are all components in the social aspect of progress. I think of this social aspect of progress as democratization.

The struggle to increase scientific, instrumental, and medical knowledge, the ramifying accumulation of technological powers, the ongoing technodevelopmental disruption of given capacities, norms, and expectations, and the facilitation through education and access of an ever growing ever diversifying population of collaborators in this process of discovery and application are all components in the instrumental aspect of progress. I think of this instrumental aspect of progress as denaturalization.

Peer-to-peer progressives maintain that any proper account of "progress" will affirm the equal and complementary indispensability of both greater democratization and greater denaturalization to the technodevelopmental social struggle for human emancipation.

We already live in ineradicably technological societies, and our problems are the problems of technoscientific societies. And we ourselves are by now all of us also ineradicably prostheticized. There is no Garden for us to return to on this earth, beyond history, or within our hearts. Any commitment to progressive democratization without a complementary commitment to ongoing denaturalization denies the terms of social struggle as they actually confront us in their material specificity in the technoscientific societies in which we find ourselves. And hence any such “progressivisms” (for example, think about left bioconservative politics, boutique Green lifestyle politics available only to oblivious elites, and most of the New Age and pastoral-luddite anarchisms) are to my mind false progressivisms, amounting usually to little more than conservative, and sometimes outright reactionary, indulgences in nostalgia and complacency.

Since instrumental powers can be deployed to indefinitely many ends, they can facilitate exploitation and exacerbate injustice just as easily as they can serve fairness and emancipate humanity when directed to better ends. As is always the case in antidemocratic politics, any commitment to progressive denaturalization without a complementary commitment to ongoing democratization denies the terms of social life -- its ineradicable plurality, insecurity, unpredictability, interdependence -- as they actually confront us in their abiding generality. And hence any such “progressivisms” (for example, think about market libertarian technophilia and the various neoliberal and neoconservative corporate futurisms) are to my mind false progressivisms amounting usually to little more than straightforward bids for power and profit, either for personal gain or in the service of the elites with whom one identifies.

Peer-to-peer progressives in this technoscientific epoch cannot afford to misdiagnose as “progress” any developmental path or outcome that does not contribute both to democratization and denaturalization, and neither can we afford to misrecognize as "allies" in the social struggle for real progress anyone who is committed only to the one aspect of “progress” over the other. This is not to deny that progressives should surely seize opportunistically upon any event or outcome that can be made to facilitate actually progressive ends, just as we should make common cause with any number of momentary allies in contingent campaigns that facilitate clear, concrete progressive ends. But the exigencies of practical political struggle should never confuse our sense of what any progress worth fighting for finally amounts to, nor how a shared understanding of and commitment to progress in its full progressive construal is all we have to ensure we never lose sight of who our friends are. -- February 13, 2006

Digital Sociality, Digital Control

On tech-oriented discussion lists I have noticed over and over these curious micro-managerial fantasies of control that pop up especially among the libertarian but also the liberal temperaments that gather there -- dreams of politics in which the terms of literally every interaction are somehow exhaustively contracted in advance, dreams of engineered languages re-invented from scratch to more perfectly say the way the world is, dreams of technical, cultural, political revolutions to make everything clean and new.

People speak with unexpected regularity to a hope that perhaps more fine-grained and flexible information and communication networks and technologies might make it possible for individuals to specify the terms on which they participate in public life to an unprecedented degree. I agree that there are lots of interesting things to think about here, and that what we mean by private life and public life will be transformed in very fundamental ways by emerging digital media and bioremedial networks.

But I suspect that in an important sense all of these dreams and desires originate in a deep misrecognition of the condition of ineradicable diversity and vulnerability at the heart of all public life. This diversity and vulnerability are not at all likely to vanish, nor do I think we can intelligibly want them to.

Forgive a momentary lapse into my more theoryheaded mode, but we are always already immersed in language, in law, in norms, in markets, in worlds constrained by code, by architecture, by design.

And it is because we are thrown into these changeable but also significantly durable worlds that precede us, exceed us, and likely will outlive us that it occurs to any of us to desire to consolidate this feeling of having and strengthening a faculty of "opting" in or out of sociality’s terms in the first place.

Pining for a more perfect, more willful agency that could somehow choose exhaustively the very terms in which it plays itself out in the world bespeaks one’s constitution as a being whose agency cannot be otherwise than it is: significantly interdependent, promising, vulnerable, accident-prone.

All of these dreams of a more perfect "private" control of public life seem to me like pathological expressions of the very systems against which they presumably are revolting.

Who, after all, would feel frustration at the law's exactions if the law hadn't first made them who they are? Before regulation limits choices it constitutes the horizon against which one intelligibly chooses anything. We can and must of course collaborate to improve the laws, reform the institutions, contribute new poetry to language. Law, language, and culture are transformed by our ongoing recourse to them.

But who could opt out of opting without becoming an altogether different sort of being than the one they imagine would be made happier by a more perfect "opting" of the terms on which they engage in sociality?

There can be no private languages. There can be no private laws. There can be no private values.

It's too late for that. To feel limited or threatened in the scope of one’s choice is to be already constituted as a being that chooses in this way, that feels the want of these things in the first place. The desire bespeaks its own belated incapacity to be otherwise.

We make our promises and we make our plans, and then we forgive as best we can the mistakes that must inevitably come after. As Hannah Arendt wrote, plurality is the law of the earth.

Secrecy and the Subject of Privacy

For those of you who have asked me to say more about the dissertation I am currently finishing up (apparently, mostly in my downtime from what sometimes seems my rather more rewarding but unremunerative efforts at blogging), here is a section from the Introduction to the dissertation in which I outline the argument of its three main chapters. Comments, criticisms, questions are, as always, welcome.

I’ll start with a war story. It is a story about a battle written from the perspective of its recent aftermath. And as often happens with wars, many of its warriors still nurse the wounds they acquired in its skirmishes and betrayals, many still mouth the platitudes that drove its reckless energies, and some still pine for and fervently anticipate its resumption. While it is commonplace for a certain perplexity and even absurdity to attach to the actual details in retrospective accounts of war, it seems to me especially surreal to survey the scene of the conflict that preoccupies me here, a conflict which for all its noise and heat now seems in a way best captioned by that wistful old anti-war slogan: “What If They Gave a War and Nobody Came”?

In the first and second chapters of this dissertation, I will tell you the story of what Paulina Barsook has called “The Crypto Wars.” It is the story of what amounts to roughly a decade of skirmishes in policy, in law, in code, in mainstream op-eds, and in the incandescent online manifestoes of a few inspired technology alarmists and enthusiasts, all moved by the development and proliferation of then-new and now-ubiquitous digital networked tools designed either to keep or to expose people’s secrets.

The application of encryption techniques to transactions undertaken over digital networks, for example, has especially exercised the imaginations of the writer and activist Tim May and the coterie of “Cypherpunks” (the name of an anarchic collection of coders and cryptography enthusiasts, and of the influential, sometimes notorious, online mailing-list where they gather to discuss these topics) for whom he was a founder and a spokesman and something of a folk-hero. Encryption is simply the process of enciphering or transforming information so that it is unintelligible to anyone but an intended recipient.

In Chapter One, “Markets From Math,” I will discuss a series of rather exhilarated arguments, initially widely circulated online in the mid-1990s, in which Tim May and Eric Hughes, among others, predicted that more and more social and economic transactions would come to take place behind a veil of impenetrable encryption. The ultimate consequence of this emerging state of affairs for May and Hughes and the other Cypherpunks was no less than that conventional national governments would soon be rendered obsolete and contemporary societies across the globe swiftly transformed beyond recognition. All this would take place because states presumably would no longer be able to police routinely encrypted social interactions, levy sufficient tax revenues on ubiquitously encrypted economic transactions to fund their traditional functions, nor even maintain geographical borders in a meaningful way for citizens devoted primarily to their participation in globe-girding digital networks.

In Chapter Two, “Markets With Eyes,” I will focus on work by David Brin, a popular science fiction author and essayist, who countered this “cypherpunk” perspective soon thereafter in a number of comparably influential articles, many of which also first circulated online, and then in a book, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? There Brin argued, contrary to the Cypherpunks, that whatever security and obscurity might be afforded by encryption techniques would soon enough be bypassed by the overwhelming multiplication of powerful surveillance technologies of other kinds -- for instance, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology inexpensively imbedded into, potentially at any rate, nearly all discrete objects on earth, the ongoing “realtime” tracking of individuals via the biometric profiles they cast in their commerce with the world (traces of skin, hair, blood, as well as finger, iris, and voice prints, for example), and the proliferation of vanishingly small, exceptionally cheap digital cameras, even, imagine, long rolls of paper-thin adhesive-sticker “penny-cams,” all of them archiving or downloading content continuously onto public and private networks. Rather notoriously, Brin went on to celebrate what initially seems the somewhat chilling prospect of an emerging ubiquitous surveillance society as generating in his terms a kind of radical “transparency” that would, he insisted, encourage more critical dialogue, more honorable conduct, and more accountable authorities.

Ultimately, Brin’s vision of a “transparent society” presumes a technological transformation of society no less sweeping and unprecedented in its scope than the “crypto-anarchy” championed by the Cypherpunks with whom he often differed so contentiously. But more intriguing than their differences, I notice that May and Brin share certain unexpected affinities and key assumptions in making their separate cases. Of these, what strikes me most forcefully (apart from the fact that adherents of both viewpoints seem to consider the outcomes they dread or desire as equally inevitably eventuating from the technological developments that preoccupy their notice) is that both May and Brin affirm at the base of their conceptions of social life a rather specific kind of individual subject. Whether uniquely imperiled or encouraged by surveillance, it is in each case a subject characterized essentially by the capacity to make promises and enter into reliable contractual obligations. It is at root a subject on the market. And true to this shared point of departure, both May and Brin sketch what amount to similarly utopian portraits of a society constituted in its totality by promises and contracts, attained either through or secured against the emergence of ubiquitous surveillance technologies.

I will read these shared assumptions in Chapter Three, “Markets Without Materiality,” through the lens of Michel Foucault’s use, in his book on the emergence of the modern prison, Discipline and Punish, of the figure of the Benthamite Panopticon (an ideal institutional architecture proposed to impose upon prisoners a presumably “beneficial” regime of absolute and total surveillance) to describe how the conscientious liberal subject of industrial capitalism has been constituted through discourses and practices of surveillance, broadly construed. What is intriguing to me is the extent to which May’s own “pancryptic” project reproduces rather than eludes the central features of the panopticon Brin would seem, on the contrary, to embrace. And central to the normative ideals of both crypto-anarchy and total transparency I observe a shared and definitive recourse to a discourse of privacy, treated either as indispensable to human freedom and dignity (in May and Hughes) or instead urgently to be dispensed with in pursuit of the same (in Brin), and for which privacy is taken to be above all else a matter primarily of secrecy.

This leads me, finally, to the work of N. Katherine Hayles. For Hayles, the history and preoccupations of information theory, from its inauguration in the Turing Test for personhood as a matter of adequacy in ideally mediated, disembodied conversation through to the contemporary vision of roboticist Hans Moravec to “upload” consciousness into imperishable data, has continually reiterated the gesture of an erasure of the body, and continually makes recourse to reductive accounts of communication as information flows or a play of patterns which disavow the definitive embodiment of these experiences. I propose that both the pancryptic and the panoptic utopias/dystopias of cypherpunks like Tim May and transparency advocates like David Brin, relying as they do on the technological facilitation of market norms either through the unprecedented consolidation or obliteration of the circulation of public information, represent a second, conspicuously political face of this dematerializing tendency in information theory. Market libertarian technophiles, often explicitly inspired by these information models, offer up accounts of political life and publish strident manifestoes demanding political transformation. Many of these accounts insistently denigrate and deny the reality of legitimate social and public experiences, while many more of them seem curiously oblivious likewise to the actual material complexities of the terrain to which they would address even their legitimate grievances. And few of these accounts seem even remotely prepared to grasp the significance of what seems to me a conspicuous contemporary rematerialization of new media networks, on which are flowing more and more palpably and significantly these days not so much any presumably disembodied digital information strongly susceptible to secrecy, but bodily secretions susceptible instead to biometric surveillance and to ownership by others as patentable sequences of information.

Against Fundamentalism and Cruelty: Russell’s “A Liberal Decalogue”

I just stumbled upon a lovely piece by Bertrand Russell, called “A Liberal Decalogue,” with which others may be well familiar but which I had never seen myself. It appears in his Autobiography, but apparently originated in an article for the New York Times in 1951, called “The Best Answer to Fanaticism – Liberalism.” It seems that liberalism has indeed long desired and deserved the self-image of a "reality-based community."

It is intriguing to set this alongside Judith Shklar’s definition of a liberal, made famous especially by Richard Rorty who took it up in his most important book so far, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Shklar has said that a liberal is “one for whom cruelty is the worst thing we do.” I append Shklar’s definition here to emphasise that while Russell’s piece may seem preoccupied with epistemology it is easy to discern a warm moralism in his ironical "Commandments."

Of course, even if you don’t want to pursue that particular line it is easy to see the relevance and usefulness of Russell’s skepticism in the service of truthfulness in an era boiling with Fundamentalists who, whether in priestly robes or lab-coats, imagine themselves conduits through which Truths greater and more sure than themselves flow and at the “promptings” of which too often too much blood is sure to flow, too.

Here, then, is Russell’s Decalogue, “not intended,” he writes, “to replace the old one but to supplement it.” This, he proposes, is his best effort to pithily sum up “the essence of the Liberal outlook.”

The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Snowball’s Chance in Hell (Holiday Cackles from the Balcony)

It has become something of an NPR tradition at Christmas time to replay David Sedaris’ "Santaland Diaries," a mildly funny, genial, utterly inoffensive trifle with about as much subversive bite as an episode of The Golden Girls.

Of course, the tradition-loving conservatives have always been notably selective about the “traditions” they are most eager to show their love. And for the rest? The shove.

While the conservatives seem conspicuously keen to conserve those traditions in which gays remain closeted, women and negroes remain servile, “religious” proprieties like public modesty and a relentlessly unwavering work ethic remain in force for the working poor and shrivelling middle-classes, and plenty of whores and cigars remain available for fat-assed fat-cat dullards and bullies to enjoy as they stoically contemplate whatever passes this year for the bottom-line, they exhibit indifference and even hostility to any number of traditions that manage to exceed the ambit of their rather dim, unadventurous imaginations.

As it happens, I often encourage Sedaris fans to direct their attention to the comedic genius of David’s sister Amy, and especially her radioactively incandescent series Strangers With Candy if they are looking for some for-real subversive comedy to noodle around with. And for those who act as though David’s NPR naughtiness is transformed by his bland homosexuality into some kind of sweeping critique of contemporary American hypocrisies a la Williams Burroughs, I encourage everyone to read instead (or at any rate additionally) the brilliant novels of Gary Indiana, whose sublime omnivorous queerness scalpels everything it touches, including himself, in a bloodbath that leaves you howling and a little shaky. (Resentment and Horse Crazy are his best novels, in my opinion.)

Anyway, this year NPR has seen fit to expurgate from the already vanilla-mild Santaland broadcast a potentially “offensive” minor bit involving flirtation among males. Here’s the passage (which I clipped from the ever-invaluable Atrios):

The overall cutest elf is a fellow from Queens named Snowball. Snowball tends to ham it up with the children, sometime literally tumbling down the path to Santa's house. I tend to frown on that sort of behavior but Snowball is hands down adorable -- you want to put him in your pocket. Yesterday we worked together as Santa Elves and I became excited when he started saying things like, "I'd follow you to Santa's house any day, Crumpet!"

It made me dizzy, this flirtation.

By mid-afternoon I was running into walls. At the end of our shift we were in the bathroom, changing clothes, when suddenly we were surrounded by three Santas and five other elves -- all of them were guys that Snowball was flirting with.

Snowball just leads elves on, elves and Santas. He is playing a dangerous game.

As Eric pointed out to me, it’s rather flabbergasting that NPR’s robotic executives haven’t “done the math” (isn’t that, you know, “at the end of the day,” what these executive types are supposed to be good at?) and thought through the possibility that the fifty million Americans who voted for Kerry are likely to throng among the dwindling listener base of NPR, and that, more to the point, any hayseed dumbass benighted enough to find the passage in question “offensive” in the first place, whether they had the sense to vote for Kerry or not, certainly wouldn’t be among NPR’s listeners?

I am not among the progressives who are demanding the boycott or dismantlement of NPR because of their recent timidity and tremulousness -– funny how well-meaning liberal types can always be counted upon to do the bidding of Repugnican barking dogs and attack first the very sites in culture in which their own supporters, however insipid scared and compromised they may be, are most likely to reside -– but I do think NPR should be badgered and humiliated forthwith into doing the right thing.

Clearly they are scared of their own shadows, and if they can be bullied by brainless death-mongering pre-moderns of the Repugnican persuasion from covering war atrocities in the newsroom or diversity in their cultural programming, then they can be bullied by the likes of us into doing the right thing just as easily.