I always cringe whenever some "inspirational" business huckster barks into the mic or at the dinner table about how "innovation," "production," "enterprise" or whatever slogan the Amway mindset has latched onto at the moment has "no limits, man!" so, you know, we should all presumably become dot-eyed marauding maniacs and "go for it!" and "take no prisoners!" or what have you.
Such attitudes seem to me always to depend on, or even simply straightforwardly to translate to, the ugly awful fervently held faith that there will always be someone else around to clean up our messes for us.
This expressed disdain for the very idea of limits always amounts to and sometimes baldly testifies to a disdain for the actually-existing living plurality of people who are superfluous to or at odds with the streamlined trajectory at which our stubbornly insensitive, er, "motivated," go-getter imagines he is getting himself to.
Nowhere is this disdain more conspicuous to me than among Superlative Technocentrics, nearly all of them caught up in a frenzy of self-promotion, self-selection, and delusive mutual reinforcement as they handwave from the palpable and urgent reality of ongoing and emerging disruptive technoscientific change to what is instead an essentially irrational and certainly pseudoscientific transcendentalizing talk of omni-predicated technologies delivering post-bodily "immortality," post-embodied "consciousness," post-economic "abundance," post-historical "singularity," and so on.
While I am quite conscious of the ways in which the overwhelming inputs from planetary networked media, the biomedical intervention into customary understandings about when lives can properly be said to begin and end and with what expectations about capacities and changing function we might properly invest them, the intervention of instrumental rationality into production at incomparably small and large scales, the unprecedented appearance on the scene of weapons of massive and insane destructiveness and so on, are all deranging our collective sense of the limits that hitherto have been taken to define the human condition. That this sudden, intensive, and extensive transformative technodevelopmental storm-surge has been treated by some as a portent of an upcoming overcoming of human finitude as such, as the looming confrontation with a techno-transcendentalizing overcoming of the very idea of limits altogether has always seemed to me a curious confusion. And given the frequent coloration of such claims by fairly conventional theological notions of omni-potence, omni-science, and omni-benevolence this curious confusion seems to me all the more curiously conventionally religious, especially considering the barking militant anti-religiosity of so many who seem to indulge in this sort of handwaving technology-talk in the first place. To me, it has always seemed more sensible to say that the technodevelopmental derangement of customary limits is experienced quite as much as the emergence of a new limit -- the loss of our ability to claim with the sort of confidence we've sometimes depended on just what our definitive limits actually will consist of in matters of political and ethical concern that perplex us -- as it is the more emancipatory overcoming of certain old limits.
Be that as it may, I'll admit that it is easiest to focus one's critical attentions on the flabbergasting practical naivete of Superlative technodevelopmental accounts that rely on loose analogies (there are, to be blunt, differences that make a difference between human brains and computers, biological organisms and nanofactories, aging bodies and well-maintained mansions, stakeholder deliberation and the unilateral implementation of optimal outcomes deduced from ideal formulations), accounts that overestimate the state of our knowledge of the relevant technoscience, accounts that overemphasize the smooth function of technology in general, accounts that underestimate the role of social, cultural, and political factors on the vicissitudes of technoscientific change and its impacts, and accounts that treat complex dynamisms as linear processes and complex phenomena as simple monoliths.
It is also easy to focus on the, shall we say, symptomatic dimensions of Superlative Technology discourses, with their bevy of boastful boys, with their curiously conspicuous comic book iconography, with their eager self-marginalizing subcultural politics (hence the incessant vulnerability to and defensiveness about charges of weird Robot Cultism), with their non-negligible exhibition of body-loathing (from their occasional expressions of old-school Cyberpunk disdain of the "meat-body" to their widespread ongoing incomprehension of disability activists who quite righteously insist, "nothing about us without us"), with their ongoing difficulty in nudging their demographic much beyond its conspicuous -- tho' admittedly not exclusive -- white maleness in a world in which whites and males are minorities otherwise, with the lingering presence of "market fundamentalist" intellectuals among them and being taken seriously by them as they are almost nowhere else (after all, the neoliberal and neoconservative policies which gave "anarcho-capitalist" and "free-market" abstractions the only actual life they ever had or will ever have were undertaken by incumbent interests with the cynical understanding that these "ideas" provide ideal cover for confiscatory wealth concentration, but there are few actually intelligent people who still believe in these market fundamentalist pieties on their face, if anybody ever did, apart perhaps from a few awkward earnest Randians, poor things).
But the actual focus of my own critique of Superlative Technology discourses (even if I'll admit I have often directed my jeremiads against these more conspicuously vulnerable dimensions of Superlativity) is on their pernicious anti-politicizing and, more specifically, their almost always anti-democratizing force. Needless to say, I do indeed think the highly fetishized, irrationally hyperbolized, faithfully transcendentalized, falsely monolithicized, obsessively singularized technodevelopmental outcomes that preoccupy Superlative Technocentrics are the farthest thing from plausible in their specific Superlative formulations. But even if I were to grant them more than the negligible plausibility of logical possibility (which is quite enough for most Superlative Technocentrics, and I'll let the reader puzzle through the implications of that low bar given the force of True Belief it seems so often to underwrite), the fact remains that I still do not agree that Superlativity provides the best discursive lens through which we would best cope with the extraordinarily sweeping implications typically attributed to these outcomes by the Superlative Technocentrics themselves.
(A side note: Exactly in analogy to the "New Normal" of contemporary terror-alerts, the attribution of such sweeping implications to what amount at best to thought-experiments and at worst to science-fictional vignettes -- only without the accompanying pleasure of narrative or characterization -- is precisely what functions to make the Superlative demand for a substitution of a focus on proximate for projected and idealized outcomes the hallmark of "seriousness" by their lights, contrary to all sense and in fact in a way that is immune to the interventions of common-sense, strictly speaking.)
If the Superlative Technocentrics were actually right to imagine that billions of people now living will find themselves all too soon living in a future transformed by Friendly or Unfriendly post-biological intelligences, nanotechnological superabundance, biomedical immortality, or the like (and I do think they are far more likely to be wrong than right and I think this matters enormously), even granting them this, I think they are profoundly wrong to imagine that our best way to facilitate the best, least violent, most fair (or whatever) versions of these Superlative outcomes is to contemplate and prepare for the Superlative outcomes themselves, in the abstract, as these outcomes suggest themselves to us in our own impoverished vantage (an impoverishment exacerbated all the more by marginal and anti-democratic modes of Superlative deliberation). Such contemplation and preparation circumvents the ongoing and plural stakeholder contestation that will certainly articulate the unpredictable developmental forces and the dynamic developmental pathways along which such outcomes would actually "arrive" (were they to do so), ignores the practical, scientific, technical, pedagogical, regulatory, cultural knowledges arising out of our collective day to day responsiveness, competition, and collaboration in the plural presents from which no less plural futures will present themselves, that will not only shape but actively constitute our foresight and provide the living archive to which future generations or the communities in which we will ourselves later belong will make our collective recourse as we struggle to cope with these outcomes and their alternatives.
To be sure, this is not the denigration of foresight as such that Superlative Technocentrics will be sure to accuse it of being, but simply an insistence that foresight properly emerges from the ongoing contestation and deliberation of the plurality of actually-existing stakeholders to the emerging technodevelopmental terrain rather than from an idealized projection of Superlative outcomes onto the future by the impoverished perspective of a marginal minority and from the impoverished position of that future's past. This means that serious futurists (Jamais Cascio provides a well-respected example here) would always propose multiple technodevelopmental outcomes in their proposals, no one of which solicits identification but all of which, taken together, capture the texture of an upcoming technodevelopmental terrain in its dense plurality. And so, too, serious futurists would always stress the contingency, non-autonomy, and diversity of the impacts of technodevelopmental outcomes from the perspective of the plurality of their stakeholders. Serious futurists, finally, should always understand and emphasize that the rationality of foresight is more inductive than deductive; and, to the extent that such futurism would be democratizing rather than merely profitable for incumbent interests (and, hence, strictly speaking, better described as retro-futurism), futurists must grasp that the pragmatic point that deliberative foresight foregrounds induction over deduction translates in political terms to a foregrounding of openness over optimality.
(Regular readers may be surprised to see me talk about the very possibility of a "serious futurological practice" given all the abuse I tend to heap on self-identified futurists here... but the simple truth is that it seems to me there are good reasons to think that futurism, so-called, might very well manage for another generation or so -- as psychoanalysis managed to do for well over half the twentieth century -- to remain one of the few places where something like actual philosophical thinking might take place in a way that will be taken seriously even by anti-intellectual Americans. That is more than enough to get me to pay serious attention to it.)
Again, the simple truth is that I think that the preoccupations of no small amount of Superlative Technology Discourse is symptomatic rather than serious. As often as not, it symptomizes (as does so much literary sf, much more provocatively) the fears and fantasies of people caught up in disruptive technoscientific change, it symptomizes (as does so much neoliberal discourse, which remains complementary and often still explicitly correlated to technocratic discourses generally and Superlative Technology discourses particularly) the social, subcultural, and political marginality of many of the personalities drawn to these discourses.
But if the outcomes the Superlative Technocentrics have battened on to really were to come about in some form, the facilitation of best, safest, fairest, most democratic versions of these outcomes will arrive from ongoing plural stakeholder discourse rather than from the unilateral implementations of elite and abstract discourse. That is why my own technoprogressive politics (which is no less technocentric than that of the Superlative Technology discourses when all is said and done) would direct its energies to securing, subsidizing, and celebrating peer-to-peer formations of technoscientific practice, education, regulation, funding, and of p2p education, agitation, and organizing for radical democracy (including the democratization of the planetary economy) in general as a more practical technodevelopmental politics -- more practical even in the event that technodevelopmental outcomes come to assume anything like the contours that preoccupy the imaginations of Superlative Technocentrics.
If Singularitarians, so-called, really are as worried about scary Robot Gods as they seem to be, then it seems to me a far more practical focus for their attention and action would be to participate in contemporary anti-militarist and anti-globalization movements to diminish the role of the secretive and hierarchical command formations in the midst of our democratic society and to overturn the legal fiction of corporate personhood with all its pernicious antisocial and antienvironmental implications -- which are the locations in society out of which anything remotely resembling the Superlative fears and fantasies of these Singularitarians are likeliest to emerge. Otherwise, the ongoing regulation and monitoring of already existing and actually emerging malware seems to me incomparably more likely to provide the practical resources to which we would make collective recourse were we eventually confronted with recursively self-improving software, whether rightly taken to be intelligent or entitative or not, rather than whatever our own abstract fancies might now offer up to those -- including, as likely as not, some of us -- who inhabit days to come (between now and which there would be, after all, many intervening days filled with people quite as intelligent as we are, but incomparably better informed, and directing themselves to these actually urgent problems according to the terms in which they actually occur, likewise coping with ongoing and emerging malware and so on, peer-to-peer).
If Nanosantalogists really want nanofactories to incubate a high-tech gift society without reducing the planet to goo, then it seems to me a far more practical focus for their attention would be to participate in the contemporary copyfight and access-to-knowledge movements that would keep the nanofactory instructions out of the hands of incumbent elites, and to participate (as it seems to me my friends at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology already often do, at least when they are at their best) in movements to empower planetary regulation and oversight of pandemics, tsunamis, climate change, weapons proliferation, the manufacture and trafficking in toxic substances, and so on, since it will be the experiences and insights we acquire in these fraught and urgent already ongoing efforts that will provide the real archive on which we would really, truly depend were we to find ourselves confronting the Superlative fears and fantasies of these Nanosantalogists.
If Technological Immortalists, so-called, really want to inspire and fund and implement a SENS program to overcome the suffering and pathologies we customarily associate with human aging, then it seems to me a far more practical focus for their attention would be to embrace the rhetoric of the Longevity Dividend, to refigure what deGrey describes as the Seven Deadly Things (or whatever number this eventually amounts to, a habit of qualification and caveat being a welcome thing from especially speculative scientists) as seven separate medical conditions among countless others likewise demanding elaborate foundations and diverse research teams, and, above all else, to refrain altogether from idiotic talk of "living forever" or "immortality" in the first place (given the admission by most Technological Immortalists that theirs is not a program that would elude disease, violent, or accidental death even if it managed to achieve its already implausibly Superlative ends, it is curious -- that is to say, importantly symptomatic -- that they should be so reluctant to eschew these essentially faithful rather than factual discourses). But more to the point, it seems to me that enthusiasts for longevity and rejuvenation medicine should be devoting considerable efforts to movements to secure universal healthcare, to address neglected diseases among the planetary precariat, to provide clean drinking water and basic healthcare to everybody on earth, to defend the informed nonduressed consensual recourse to wanted therapies (whether normalizing or not) and protection from unwanted therapies (whether normalizing or not) in the context of contemporary modification medicine, to end the so-called war on (some) drugs (together with the fraudulent marketing and mandated use of other drugs) wherever its racist anti-democratizing tentacles reach, and so on.
Superlative Technocentrics are likely to recoil from suggestions like these, dismissing them as stealthy, well-nigh "closeted" half measures, but the truth, I'm afraid, is that their own monological fixations and hyperbolic derangements of these sensible -- even urgent -- recommendations bespeak either a profound misunderstanding of the complex, dynamic, ineradicably politicized technodevelopmental terrain as it actually exists, or a derangement that symptomizes their own irrational passions, born of social marginalization, short-sighted greed or hostility, neurotic fears of contemporary change and lack of personal control, straightforward narcissistic personality disorder, or the like.
It is well known (that is to say, known among the few odd people like me who keep up with this sort of thing at all) that I advocate what I describe as a technoprogressive political viewpoint which regards ongoing and emerging technoscientific change as at once the most dangerous and most promising field of contemporary democratic-left and emancipatory politics. For me, "progress" has come to be a matter of technodevelopmental social struggle first of all, the contestation of a plurality of stakeholders to the ongoing articulation and distribution of technoscientific costs, risks, and benefits. It is from this perspective in particular that I understand the urgent struggles against neoliberal corporate-militarism, environmentalist movements, planetary human rights and social justice movements, and so on.
While this perspective is no less technocentric than that of the Superlative Technocentrics I so regularly critique our differences could not be more stark otherwise (but this one point of continuity is enough to keep me on my toes lest my own technoprogressivity drift here and there into a problematic Superlativity quite in spite of myself). Not only do I think that the best, most democratizing, most emancipatory technodevelopmental outcomes can be facilitated by politics that are perfectly intelligible to the democratic-left progressive mainstream imagination (as Superlative Technocentricity very definitely is not), but I also think that there is an emerging technoprogressive mainstream on the American political scene and elsewhere around the world that is conjoining the forces of the left blogosphere and Netroots and other emerging p2p democratic formations, the defense of consensus science, copyfight, free press and open media, access to knowledge (a2k) movements, commitments to a politics of choice that encompasses both abortion and ARTs and consensual drug policy, growing demands for renewable energy and sustainable production, and other strands of the contemporary technoscientific tapestry, from the ground up, peer-to-peer, all around us, right here, right now.
Why Superlative Technocentrics would prefer their far-flung and hyperbolized futures over these actually-existing popular technoprogressive energies is entirely beyond me. No doubt only their therapists (or possibly, for a few of them at least, their financial advisers) know for sure.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Everything Solid Melts Into Laissez-Faire
Here is a statement I read over on the European Tribune (one of my favorite blogs), and which I quote here without much in the way of considered comment, but more as a solicitation of comments:
There were so many comments and associations that occurred to me immediately and simultaneously upon reading this that I haven't really put them together in any kind of systematic or properly argumentative way.
I find myself thinking of Jeron Lanier's snarky Fifth Law: "Software inefficiency and inelegance will always expand to the level made tolerable by Moore's Law"…
I find myself thinking of PR practices of "repackaging," which seek to elicit the "experience" of progressive emancipation through consumption by continually trumpeting as new features traits that commodities have already had all along (especially hilarious to me is the recent commercial in which some insipid environmentally toxic bottled-water company has some appealingly crunchy Green athlete -- natch, up is down, it's the Bush era -- straining up some cliff face and clutching at his water bottle while the voiceover enthuses, and I'm paraphrasing, at long last capitalism has provided us with a bottle cleverly designed by our geniuses of innovation so that one can actually hold it in one's hand!)…
I find myself thinking of the basic contradiction of capitalist societies highlighted by eco-socialists and others, of the different dynamisms of reckless Grow or Die! expansionism confronted with the limits and complex interdependencies of the ecosystems in which all enterprise and production always take place and on which it always depends…
I find myself thinking of the technocrats and especially the current crop of digital utopians, from Daniel Bell to the irrationally exuberant WIRED magazine set of the 1990s through to the corporatist-militarist "revolutionaries" of the technophiliac and science-phobic (these attitudes are continuous, this is not a paradox) Bush Administration with their Total Information Awareness and Shock and Awe "smart bombs" and abstract "ownership society" and anti-democratizating master plan of debt, deregulation, and dismantlement of civic institutions, all of whom would seek continually to "dematerialize" both production and the performative substance of political contestation in their theories, the better to compel the intransigent material resistances of the furniture of the world and the plurality of its stakeholders into a shape that conforms to the restless and idealized flows of capital, desire, and incumbent fancy…
I find myself thinking of four decades of public intellectuals declaring the "end of ideology," the "end of philosophy," the "end of history," the "death of distance," foregrounding services and then marketing and then financialization and then information in the influential daydreams they mistook for documentation and deliberation, all the way through to contemporary Superlative technocentric fantasies of selves reduced to streams of spiritualized digital data (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by decades of reductive accounts of selves reduced to "expressions" of genetic information), commodities reduced to "instantiations" of software instructions by angelic nanoabundance (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by, among other things, decades of PR accounts of commodities as indifferent sites for the distinguishing emblemization of designer logos), deliberative politics reduced to the consequentialist computation of "optimal" outcomes by Robot Gods (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by the anti-democratic Cold-War politics of neoliberal incumbency, with its corporate think-tanks, technocratic military experts, and corporate broadcast-mediated manufacturing of consent)…
Most software indulges in version numbering along an unbounded trajectory. It seems that those applications can endure an almost endless progression of added features for the next release. It seems quite in line with the neoliberal consensus that better is always more, in an ever increasing amount… [T]he tendency of the dominant software releases to use unbounded version numbering seems symptomatic of the neoliberal pathology that will not recognize the convergent nature of maturing technologies, in an effort to encourage consumption of ever 'new' products.
There were so many comments and associations that occurred to me immediately and simultaneously upon reading this that I haven't really put them together in any kind of systematic or properly argumentative way.
I find myself thinking of Jeron Lanier's snarky Fifth Law: "Software inefficiency and inelegance will always expand to the level made tolerable by Moore's Law"…
I find myself thinking of PR practices of "repackaging," which seek to elicit the "experience" of progressive emancipation through consumption by continually trumpeting as new features traits that commodities have already had all along (especially hilarious to me is the recent commercial in which some insipid environmentally toxic bottled-water company has some appealingly crunchy Green athlete -- natch, up is down, it's the Bush era -- straining up some cliff face and clutching at his water bottle while the voiceover enthuses, and I'm paraphrasing, at long last capitalism has provided us with a bottle cleverly designed by our geniuses of innovation so that one can actually hold it in one's hand!)…
I find myself thinking of the basic contradiction of capitalist societies highlighted by eco-socialists and others, of the different dynamisms of reckless Grow or Die! expansionism confronted with the limits and complex interdependencies of the ecosystems in which all enterprise and production always take place and on which it always depends…
I find myself thinking of the technocrats and especially the current crop of digital utopians, from Daniel Bell to the irrationally exuberant WIRED magazine set of the 1990s through to the corporatist-militarist "revolutionaries" of the technophiliac and science-phobic (these attitudes are continuous, this is not a paradox) Bush Administration with their Total Information Awareness and Shock and Awe "smart bombs" and abstract "ownership society" and anti-democratizating master plan of debt, deregulation, and dismantlement of civic institutions, all of whom would seek continually to "dematerialize" both production and the performative substance of political contestation in their theories, the better to compel the intransigent material resistances of the furniture of the world and the plurality of its stakeholders into a shape that conforms to the restless and idealized flows of capital, desire, and incumbent fancy…
I find myself thinking of four decades of public intellectuals declaring the "end of ideology," the "end of philosophy," the "end of history," the "death of distance," foregrounding services and then marketing and then financialization and then information in the influential daydreams they mistook for documentation and deliberation, all the way through to contemporary Superlative technocentric fantasies of selves reduced to streams of spiritualized digital data (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by decades of reductive accounts of selves reduced to "expressions" of genetic information), commodities reduced to "instantiations" of software instructions by angelic nanoabundance (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by, among other things, decades of PR accounts of commodities as indifferent sites for the distinguishing emblemization of designer logos), deliberative politics reduced to the consequentialist computation of "optimal" outcomes by Robot Gods (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by the anti-democratic Cold-War politics of neoliberal incumbency, with its corporate think-tanks, technocratic military experts, and corporate broadcast-mediated manufacturing of consent)…
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Kathy Griffin: "This Award Is My God Now!"
I've always found a bit hilarious and appalling the narcissistic way some people of faith will broadcast their gratitude to the Supreme Deity for directing His omnipotent energies to the task of ensuring that they, and not, say, their identically unremarkable next-door neighbor, managed to win the badminton match at the Sunday cook-out, or that their own "talented" traumatized moppet got to win the County-Fair Inappropriately Sexualized Preteen Beauty Pageant over the rest of those poor desperate hideously dolled-up four-year olds with mushroom cloud hair and Tammy Faye makeup on.
Thank you, Jeebus, they proclaim with ugly blank-eyed self-importance, for putting the spotlight on me, for smiting those who would oppose me, like, you know, Frank in Accounting who almost got that last doughnut before me, he was going right for it, I saw it, except for the way you sent Jenkens into his path to bend his ear over the Johnson account (I clearly have no idea what goes on in these mysterious office spaces, but you get the idea), thank you, thank you, Supreme One, for getting me to that choice parking space before that sweet helpful old lady in her Prius! How Evil she must really be, you know, deep down inside. I'm Number One!
If only the runners up at these events and in these curiously solipsistic morality plays would blame and castigate the Mighty God for their defeats and frustrations with equal enthusiasm, now, that might be a spectacle worth watching. The bronze medal? God, damn you! Shakes fist. At least this would introduce some consistency into the whole unseemly enterprise. Instead, we are treated to the perversity of people gratefully thanking the Lord for the nice News cameras for "sparing" them from some flood or fire or whatnot He apparently changed his mind about killing them over earlier the same day. And, I suppose, too bad about all those neighbors of yours He went ahead and killed anyway on this premise.
Be that as it may, it was a news story about the very funny Kathy Griffin's acceptance speech for an Emmy last week for her show My Life on the D-List (which Eric and I watch, er, religiously) that pushed this button for me. "[A] lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award," Griffin is reported to have said in her moving speech, "I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus." Yay, Kathy!
Flabbergastingly enough, according to a statement by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, "Kathy Griffin's offensive remarks will not be part of the E! telecast on Saturday night." (It's on Fox later, naturally.) The thrust of the story remains a bit ambiguous for me, since it isn't completely clear if Griffin's joke or "an off-color remark" which presumably accompanied it but was left unspecified (la-a-a-a-a-nd of the fre-e-e-e-e-e and the ho-ome of the br-a-a-a-a-ve!) is regarded as "offensive" in this context and will actually suffer the resulting censorship (la-a-a-a-a-nd of the fre-e-e-e-e-e and the ho-ome of the br-a-a-a-a-ve!).
My personal fave snippet from the article?
For examples of Bill Donohue's presumably more tasteful, less confrontational brand of love speech you might enjoy checking out this Greatest Hits compilations fom a few years' back (Including: "It [The Passion of the Christ] will bring people back to the church, and it will be a good thing for Catholics and Jews. And the people who are clamoring this -- this rhetoric, this cacophony against Mel Gibson, boy, are they going to have to pay for it when it's all over!" "Name for me a book publishing company in this country, particularly in New York, which would allow you to publish a book which would tell the truth about the gay death style." "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, okay? And I'm not afraid to say it. ... Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism.") as well as this more recent atrocity exhibition occasioned by the whole Chocolate Jesus non-controversy.
More irreverent generous courageous Kathy Griffin, please. Less dull-witted bullying bigoted Bill Donahue, please.
Thank you, Jeebus, they proclaim with ugly blank-eyed self-importance, for putting the spotlight on me, for smiting those who would oppose me, like, you know, Frank in Accounting who almost got that last doughnut before me, he was going right for it, I saw it, except for the way you sent Jenkens into his path to bend his ear over the Johnson account (I clearly have no idea what goes on in these mysterious office spaces, but you get the idea), thank you, thank you, Supreme One, for getting me to that choice parking space before that sweet helpful old lady in her Prius! How Evil she must really be, you know, deep down inside. I'm Number One!
If only the runners up at these events and in these curiously solipsistic morality plays would blame and castigate the Mighty God for their defeats and frustrations with equal enthusiasm, now, that might be a spectacle worth watching. The bronze medal? God, damn you! Shakes fist. At least this would introduce some consistency into the whole unseemly enterprise. Instead, we are treated to the perversity of people gratefully thanking the Lord for the nice News cameras for "sparing" them from some flood or fire or whatnot He apparently changed his mind about killing them over earlier the same day. And, I suppose, too bad about all those neighbors of yours He went ahead and killed anyway on this premise.
Be that as it may, it was a news story about the very funny Kathy Griffin's acceptance speech for an Emmy last week for her show My Life on the D-List (which Eric and I watch, er, religiously) that pushed this button for me. "[A] lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award," Griffin is reported to have said in her moving speech, "I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus." Yay, Kathy!
Flabbergastingly enough, according to a statement by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, "Kathy Griffin's offensive remarks will not be part of the E! telecast on Saturday night." (It's on Fox later, naturally.) The thrust of the story remains a bit ambiguous for me, since it isn't completely clear if Griffin's joke or "an off-color remark" which presumably accompanied it but was left unspecified (la-a-a-a-a-nd of the fre-e-e-e-e-e and the ho-ome of the br-a-a-a-a-ve!) is regarded as "offensive" in this context and will actually suffer the resulting censorship (la-a-a-a-a-nd of the fre-e-e-e-e-e and the ho-ome of the br-a-a-a-a-ve!).
My personal fave snippet from the article?
The comedian's remarks were condemned Monday by Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who called them a "vulgar, in-your-face brand of hate speech."
For examples of Bill Donohue's presumably more tasteful, less confrontational brand of love speech you might enjoy checking out this Greatest Hits compilations fom a few years' back (Including: "It [The Passion of the Christ] will bring people back to the church, and it will be a good thing for Catholics and Jews. And the people who are clamoring this -- this rhetoric, this cacophony against Mel Gibson, boy, are they going to have to pay for it when it's all over!" "Name for me a book publishing company in this country, particularly in New York, which would allow you to publish a book which would tell the truth about the gay death style." "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, okay? And I'm not afraid to say it. ... Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism.") as well as this more recent atrocity exhibition occasioned by the whole Chocolate Jesus non-controversy.
More irreverent generous courageous Kathy Griffin, please. Less dull-witted bullying bigoted Bill Donahue, please.
Friday, September 07, 2007
"You're Reading Way Too Much Into the Text..."
Is there any more commonplace complaint about theoretical readings of texts?
I am adapting this post from a response to someone from recent comments, but the point is more general (and since a new semester of teaching rhetoric and critical theory is beginning right about now it is a point that has a special resonance).
Perhaps it will help to realize that from my theoretical perspective the meaning of a text is far from exhausted by trotting out the author's intentions for that piece (to the extent that these intentions are even determinable in the relevant sense, even, sometimes, for the author herself), and that the work that texts do depends deeply as well on the context of a text's production and on the changing contexts of its reception and so on.
I am not making the claim that every text means every possible thing or some such facile relativist point you may want to attribute to me upon hearing this. But I am saying that just as authors rely on the archive of past creativity they rely as well on the ongoing collaborative expressivity of readers for whatever force, meaning, relevance, and abiding life their texts attain to. This understanding of textual meaning-making (and some of you might very well be somewhat appalled -- or possibly exhilarated -- to realize just how wide-ranging are the things in which I discern textlike characteristics in the relevant sense) plays very deeply, you can be sure, into my own sympathies as a technoprogressive democrat for the politics of access-to-knowledge (a2k), FlOSS (free-libre-open source software), peer-to-peer (p2p), pay-to-peer (public subsidization of p2p), copyfight, free press, anti-corporate-militarist personhood/anti-corporatist-militarist secrecy movements, by the way.
What my frustrated commenter intended to communicate in an off-the cuff way in a text of his published on another blog seems to have resonated with Michael Anissimov enough that he recommended the commenter's text to me in the midst of a conversation we were having concerning technodevelopmental politics. Maybe Michael was "reading more into the text" as much as I was when he found in it what seemed to him a particularly useful way to summarize his own sense of the issues at hand, just as much as the commenter would say I was "reading more into the text" when I said of it that the text symptomizes certain key problems I grapple with when technology-talk goes "superlative" in various ways.
Writers have less say than they would like as to the ways in which their work will be taken up by the world and the work their work will do once it has been released into the dynamic reception of that world. Even if that yields frustrations for me as it does any other writer from time to time, I'll admit that I wouldn't have it any other way.
Of such vulnerabilities, pleasures, frustrations, and serendipities is freedom made.
I am adapting this post from a response to someone from recent comments, but the point is more general (and since a new semester of teaching rhetoric and critical theory is beginning right about now it is a point that has a special resonance).
Perhaps it will help to realize that from my theoretical perspective the meaning of a text is far from exhausted by trotting out the author's intentions for that piece (to the extent that these intentions are even determinable in the relevant sense, even, sometimes, for the author herself), and that the work that texts do depends deeply as well on the context of a text's production and on the changing contexts of its reception and so on.
I am not making the claim that every text means every possible thing or some such facile relativist point you may want to attribute to me upon hearing this. But I am saying that just as authors rely on the archive of past creativity they rely as well on the ongoing collaborative expressivity of readers for whatever force, meaning, relevance, and abiding life their texts attain to. This understanding of textual meaning-making (and some of you might very well be somewhat appalled -- or possibly exhilarated -- to realize just how wide-ranging are the things in which I discern textlike characteristics in the relevant sense) plays very deeply, you can be sure, into my own sympathies as a technoprogressive democrat for the politics of access-to-knowledge (a2k), FlOSS (free-libre-open source software), peer-to-peer (p2p), pay-to-peer (public subsidization of p2p), copyfight, free press, anti-corporate-militarist personhood/anti-corporatist-militarist secrecy movements, by the way.
What my frustrated commenter intended to communicate in an off-the cuff way in a text of his published on another blog seems to have resonated with Michael Anissimov enough that he recommended the commenter's text to me in the midst of a conversation we were having concerning technodevelopmental politics. Maybe Michael was "reading more into the text" as much as I was when he found in it what seemed to him a particularly useful way to summarize his own sense of the issues at hand, just as much as the commenter would say I was "reading more into the text" when I said of it that the text symptomizes certain key problems I grapple with when technology-talk goes "superlative" in various ways.
Writers have less say than they would like as to the ways in which their work will be taken up by the world and the work their work will do once it has been released into the dynamic reception of that world. Even if that yields frustrations for me as it does any other writer from time to time, I'll admit that I wouldn't have it any other way.
Of such vulnerabilities, pleasures, frustrations, and serendipities is freedom made.
Friday, August 31, 2007
The Trouble With Technocentricity
Too much technocentric discourse seems to me to be premised on the false confusion of the plurality of actually existing and actually emerging technologies with a vast abstraction called "Technology (in general)." Connected to this confusion, too much technocentric discourse also seems to me to be premised on the false confusion of the plurality of actually existing and actually emerging technical developments, ongoing and anticipated technoscientific changes with a vast abstraction called "Development" or, worse, "Progress" (in the sense of a "naturalized" progressive techno-teleological tendency or even Destiny).
Perhaps the confusion of technologies for Technology is facilitated by a more fundamental lack of clarity about the ways in which even a properly pluralized understanding of given technologies will often still fail nonetheless to distinguish artifacts from techniques as well as from the still more complex historical and cultural articulation of personal and collective capacities. It should surely be part of the work of serious technocentric discourse to remind us of these sorts of differences, at least where they make a difference, and to chart the complexities of the emerging technodevelopmental terrain in ways that are sensitive to the different entailments of such differences. Instead, too much technocentric discourse assumes a perspective of generality that facilitates the reduction of these many differences to the terms of just one aspect or other, or a perspective from which these differences vanish altogether or at any rate can be readily trivialized (as, for example, the effetely frivolous or even nihilistic concerns of "relativist intellectuals" in "The Humanities" who lack the solid stolid seriousness of he-man science types still committed by all appearances, flabbergastingly enough, to consequentialist, reductionist, and naïve realist vocabularies of various sorts).
Perhaps the confusion of changes for Development is facilitated by a more fundamental lack of clarity about the ways in which even a properly pluralized understanding of historical and planetary technoscientific changes will often still fail nonetheless to grasp the extent to which the situational dynamic of these changes is driven as much (and often more) by the shifting exigencies of the social, cultural, and political contexts of these changes as by the prevailing state of the art, scientific consensus, and so on (that the instrumental, scientific, engineering conditions are themselves articulated by social, cultural, and political exigencies on their own terms should also go without saying, although technocentricity in its most attention-grabbing variations also regularly disdains even this basic understanding). It should surely be part of the work of serious technocentric discourse to remind us that emancipatory progress (in its technoscientific dimensions quite as much as its political and social ones), such as it is, is always a collaborative achievement rather than some spontaneous stepwise unfolding of logical implications. Further, serious technocentric discourse should insist that technoscientific change is never a matter of an indifferent accumulation of logically useful inventions but a complex and proliferating, sometimes inter-implicated but never monolithic, swarm of provisional accomplishments and failures. What is painted too often in the broad brushstrokes of "Development" or "Progress" is in fact a matter of ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle consisting of both contested and collaborative efforts of invention, funding, regulation, publication, debate, testing, application, education, appropriation, distribution, and so on, each effort deeply and unpredictably responsive to shifting conditions in the physical, institutional, political, cultural, and even intimately inter-personal environments in which they take place. It is responsive to the exigencies of advantage, resistance, fashion, ambition, rivalry, intrigue, economy, passion, inspiration, and forever bedeviled and bedazzled by chance.
All this is true, quite obviously, of the facile futurists online who like to attract attention and whomp up apocalyptic panic about the prospect of "Robot Armies" and "Clone Armies" (and in so doing make it incomparably more difficult to talk in a useful way about the actual regulatory quandaries of networked malware, weapons proliferation and automation, informed consensual healthcare decisions related to emerging genetic and prosthetic medicine, and so on), or who would whomp up religious enthusiasms about the prospect of Digital Immortality and Nanobot Superabundance (failing, in the first instance, to grasp that life is lived in bodies, come what may, and hence that a digital existence, whatever that might be, would not properly be the thing we mean by a "lived life," however prolonged it might be; and, in the second instance, failing to recall that scarcity is already maintained artificially and for political reasons here and now and hence that poverty is not a problem susceptible of a strictly technoscientific solution but one that demands democratic political will most of all). But these sorts of figurative and conceptual oversimplifications and derangements also saturate a great deal of presumably serious technocentric academic discourse as well, and not just online fanboy technofetishists and sub(cult)ural technophiliacs -- especially in too much digital networked media discourse and in too much bioethical discourse.
How often is the topic of so-called "information overload" (treated as some neutral technical notion generally accepted as a "problem of contemporary life" with which "informed" "serious" people must grapple) in academic media discourse as much as in cynical hyperbolic promotional discourse really better understood as simply the anxiety of credentialed incumbents and would-be popular "experts" to the loss of much of their editorial and curatorial authority given the emergence of peer-to-peer formations that do this work as well and more democratically?
How often is the topic of so-called "accelerating development" (sometimes even more hilariously hyperbolized as an "acceleration of acceleration," and, again, treated as some neutral technical notion generally accepted as a "fact of contemporary life" with which "informed" "serious" people must grapple) in academic "technology discourse" as much as in cynical hyperbolic promotional discourse really better understood as simply the increasing volatility of "market" economies exacerbated by confiscatory neoliberal policies of increasing "financialization" of wealth and "informalization" of social support, but as seen from the perspective of the relatively privileged beneficiaries (for now) of these immoral and short-sighted policies or of those who, even more pathetically, identify with these beneficiaries whether they actually number among them or not?
Closely connected to this ideologically useful metaphorical conjuration of a monolithically accelerating development where in fact conditions of incomparably complex and unpredictable technoscientific changes actually prevail is the no less ideologically useful and curiously transcendentalizing metaphorical conjuration of "converging" development (where the projected point of convergence, usually implicitly but surprisingly often explicitly -- at least in some of the more careless and popular versions of the discourse -- is invested with hyperbolically utopian or dystopian, heavenly or hellish, superhumanizing or subhumanizing characteristics) where in fact conditions of incomparably complex and sometimes interestingly inter-implicated technoscientific changes actually prevail.
How often is the topic of so-called biomedical "enhancement" (as usual, sometimes embraced as a dreamy superhumanization, sometimes rejected as a dreaded subhumanization, but, again, as usual, treated as some neutral technical notion generally accepted as a matter "on the developmental horizon" with which "informed" "serious" people must grapple) among academic and thinktank ethicists as much as among Hollywood scriptwriters and popular polemicists really better understood as the parochial and stealthy moralizing condemnation of some actually existing and actually desired human morphologies, capacities, and lifeways (especially certain queer lifeways, certain differently enabled ("disabled") lifeways, and certain experimentalist lifeways (among them, consensual perversions and promiscuities, spiritual disciplines, radical and not-so-radical body modifications, spiritual and recreational drug use, and so on)) all under the presumably universalizing cloak of "health," "harm reduction," or "hygiene" advocacy or, somewhat terrifyingly, in the name of "optimality"?
In each of these cases a particular stakeholder position (or a framing of issues that preferentially benefits a particular stakeholder position) is proposed, via monolithicizing, depoliticizing, instrumentalizing language as if it were a general or even universal problem demanding a comparably general address, a problem that solicits consensus -- as instrumental problems always do, but as moral, esthetic, and political problems rarely do, or do very differently. The key term for me here is "depoliticizing," and it might be helpful as a way to get a handle on what I am talking about to turn here for a moment to Roland Barthes's formulation late in his book Mythologies, in a section entitled, “Myth as Depoliticized Speech.” If you haven't read Barthes it's probably best to follow Barthes's own recommendation and substitute the phrase "bourgeois ideology" wherever he uses the word "myth" here (it's not quite the same thing, but you would need to read the whole book to get the benefit of making the distinction):
Most of the book Mythologies consists of a series of short essaylets in which Barthes offers up interpretations of a host of phenomena, popular icons, mass-mediated events, general attitudes, and so forth. In each essay he exposes the way something that is actually a contingent and specific product of historical circumstances (which arrived as a consequence of a trackable history of collective collaboration and contestation, any episode of which might easily have turned out quite differently, and which continues just as likely, therefore, to remain radically open to contestation and reform in the ongoing social struggle of history) has been posited as and come more widely to assume the status of the natural, the inevitable, the taken-for-granted, the best of all possible worlds, the best workable solution, and so on. Especially interesting for technocentric discourse is the fact that there is a sort of book-within-the-book in Mythologies, in which Barthes corrals together a series of essays that explore technoscientific and technodevelopmental themes in particular, offering up readings of Verne, Einstein, plastic products, an anonymous supersonic test-pilot, and so on, in each demonstrating how transcendentalizing, hyper-individualizing, reductionistic framings of popular technoscientific discourse serves very bourgeois ends, inculcating the work ethic, cynicism, hyper-individualism, conformism, consumerism, circumscription of imagination, reliance on elites, and so on. That is to say, Barthes proposes that bourgeois futurology (I would say "neoliberal" politics, or the politics of "incumbency" instead of the now unfashionable "bourgeois" politics) ironically naturalizes and so consolidates the notional and institutional buttresses for the maintenance and amplification of the bourgeois status quo, a paradox I often refer to myself as "retro-futurism."
It is crucial to grasp that the depoliticization (via abstraction, reduction, instrumentalization, naturalization) of the actually contingent and plural stakeholder situation of technodevelopmental social struggle is doubly anti-democratizing: first, because it preferentially benefits already incumbent and elite stakeholder positions in particular, inasmuch as these are the ones best situated to substitute their parochial perspective for a more general one and, second, because, in a very straightforward sense depoliticization is inherently anti-democratizing. This is because democratic politics is defined and impelled at the most basic level by a desire for the deepest and widest possible politicization and repoliticization of the terms of the given and shared world as possible, as a matter of course, whatever concrete outcomes particular democratically-minded people also happen to advocate in the spirit of democratization. Whatever its institutional implementation, whatever its campaigns and preoccupations from epoch to epoch, democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, democratization is the widening and deepening of that participation and that say, and anti-democratization is its denigration or frustration. When Jamais Cascio, for example, advocates not only for particular outcomes that he believes to be more sustainable, more fair, and more democratic, but also more generally devotes himself to advocating what he describes as an "opening of the future," it seems to me that he (the rarest of professional futurists) grasps the importance of this distinction very well.
It feels especially good to mention Jamais Cascio in this connection, and by way of conclusion, because this allows me to make a few summarizing points nearly simultaneously. I spend a lot of my time on Amor Mundi deriding would-be professional futurists and sub(cult)ural technophiliacs who often seem to fancy themselves far- and forward-thinking even when their political worldviews are not easily distinguishable from that of nineteenth century social darwinists, eugenicists, and free-marketeers and even when their most regularly reiterated interests tend to be so firmly lodged in the competitive position of current corporate-military elites. But the fact remains that technodevelopmental social struggle really is in my view the most urgent, dangerous, and promising terrain for radical, democratizing, Green, consensual planetary politics in our own time. The fact remains that it makes perfect sense in my view that the "discourse of technology" would be invested with the personal and collective dread and wish-fulfillment of a diverse humanity deranged and traumatized and whipped up into an uncritical frenzy by unprecedented powers, threats, and changes and that all this properly demands our most serious, careful, urgent attentions. The fact remains that there seems to me to be an exciting, vitally important emerging technoprogressive mainstream in the United States of America and across the planet knitting together what might initially have seemed to be disparate concerns into an ever more unified, ever more popular, ever more emancipatory movement, conjoining (a) democratic and anti-authoritarian education, agitation, and organizing via peer-to-peer networked formations, (b) research, funding, and institutionalization of decentralized and renewable energy provision, (c) advocacy of universal informed nonduressed consensual recourse to emerging genetic and prosthetic medicines, (d) championing universal education to promote critical, literary, scientific, and civic literacy, (e) defending the right of women to avoid or end unwanted pregnancies as well as to make recourse to ARTs to facilitate wanted ones, (f) circumventing technodevelopmental wealth concentration via automation, outsourcing, and crowdsourcing through the advocacy of a non-means-tested universal basic income guarantee, (g) overturning militarist budgetary priorities, regulating the trade in and use of arms of all kinds, dismantling private armies and policing forces, repudiating the ongoing automation and abstraction of death-dealing, and (h) turning the tide of confiscatory intellectual enclosure by encouraging access to free creative content through public subsidy of citizen participation in networks, universal public access requirements for research funded by the public, limiting current legal copyright terms, widening fair use provisions, radically circumscribing state, corporate, and academic practices of secrecy, and repudiating the legal fiction of corporate personhood.
Given all this, I clearly think that what is wanted is more, not less, technocentricity in theory, in criticism, in analysis, in policy, in commentary, and so on, and my frustrations with so many would-be futurologists and technocentric polemicists is precisely that they seem to enable and exacerbate the worst of the confusions and complacencies it should be their work to disable and diminish. What is wanted, it seems to me, is more technoprogressive technocentricity, pluralizing rather than reductionist, politicizing rather than naturalizing, social rather than instrumental, peer-to-peer rather than authoritarian, consensual rather than neutral, open rather than optimal, Green rather than corporate-militarist, democratizing rather than elitist. I can't say that I always agree with every little thing Jamais Cascio says, and I certainly wouldn't want to saddle him with the insinuation that he agrees with anything I say, but I will say that he is a widely respected, popular, professional "futurist" who comes pretty close to demonstrating both the possibility and usefulness of something like a technoprogressive technocentricity in the sense I mean. (And I'll bet that to the extent that he did agree with the things that I am saying here, he would say them more clearly than I'm managing to do.)
Although I spend so much of my time ridiculing the facile retro-futurism of so much "serious" or would-be serious futurological discourse (especially in what I critique as its pernicious Superlative and Sub(cult)ural Modes) and so it is easy to come away with the mistaken impression that I would be happiest if the whole absurd largely self-appointed Futurological Congress would shut down altogether this is the farthest thing from what I want, really. What I want is less reductionist, naturalizing, transcendentalizing, hyperbolizing, instrumentalizing, depoliticizing, corporate-militarist, prescriptively optimizing futurism and retro-futurism.
Perhaps the confusion of technologies for Technology is facilitated by a more fundamental lack of clarity about the ways in which even a properly pluralized understanding of given technologies will often still fail nonetheless to distinguish artifacts from techniques as well as from the still more complex historical and cultural articulation of personal and collective capacities. It should surely be part of the work of serious technocentric discourse to remind us of these sorts of differences, at least where they make a difference, and to chart the complexities of the emerging technodevelopmental terrain in ways that are sensitive to the different entailments of such differences. Instead, too much technocentric discourse assumes a perspective of generality that facilitates the reduction of these many differences to the terms of just one aspect or other, or a perspective from which these differences vanish altogether or at any rate can be readily trivialized (as, for example, the effetely frivolous or even nihilistic concerns of "relativist intellectuals" in "The Humanities" who lack the solid stolid seriousness of he-man science types still committed by all appearances, flabbergastingly enough, to consequentialist, reductionist, and naïve realist vocabularies of various sorts).
Perhaps the confusion of changes for Development is facilitated by a more fundamental lack of clarity about the ways in which even a properly pluralized understanding of historical and planetary technoscientific changes will often still fail nonetheless to grasp the extent to which the situational dynamic of these changes is driven as much (and often more) by the shifting exigencies of the social, cultural, and political contexts of these changes as by the prevailing state of the art, scientific consensus, and so on (that the instrumental, scientific, engineering conditions are themselves articulated by social, cultural, and political exigencies on their own terms should also go without saying, although technocentricity in its most attention-grabbing variations also regularly disdains even this basic understanding). It should surely be part of the work of serious technocentric discourse to remind us that emancipatory progress (in its technoscientific dimensions quite as much as its political and social ones), such as it is, is always a collaborative achievement rather than some spontaneous stepwise unfolding of logical implications. Further, serious technocentric discourse should insist that technoscientific change is never a matter of an indifferent accumulation of logically useful inventions but a complex and proliferating, sometimes inter-implicated but never monolithic, swarm of provisional accomplishments and failures. What is painted too often in the broad brushstrokes of "Development" or "Progress" is in fact a matter of ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle consisting of both contested and collaborative efforts of invention, funding, regulation, publication, debate, testing, application, education, appropriation, distribution, and so on, each effort deeply and unpredictably responsive to shifting conditions in the physical, institutional, political, cultural, and even intimately inter-personal environments in which they take place. It is responsive to the exigencies of advantage, resistance, fashion, ambition, rivalry, intrigue, economy, passion, inspiration, and forever bedeviled and bedazzled by chance.
All this is true, quite obviously, of the facile futurists online who like to attract attention and whomp up apocalyptic panic about the prospect of "Robot Armies" and "Clone Armies" (and in so doing make it incomparably more difficult to talk in a useful way about the actual regulatory quandaries of networked malware, weapons proliferation and automation, informed consensual healthcare decisions related to emerging genetic and prosthetic medicine, and so on), or who would whomp up religious enthusiasms about the prospect of Digital Immortality and Nanobot Superabundance (failing, in the first instance, to grasp that life is lived in bodies, come what may, and hence that a digital existence, whatever that might be, would not properly be the thing we mean by a "lived life," however prolonged it might be; and, in the second instance, failing to recall that scarcity is already maintained artificially and for political reasons here and now and hence that poverty is not a problem susceptible of a strictly technoscientific solution but one that demands democratic political will most of all). But these sorts of figurative and conceptual oversimplifications and derangements also saturate a great deal of presumably serious technocentric academic discourse as well, and not just online fanboy technofetishists and sub(cult)ural technophiliacs -- especially in too much digital networked media discourse and in too much bioethical discourse.
How often is the topic of so-called "information overload" (treated as some neutral technical notion generally accepted as a "problem of contemporary life" with which "informed" "serious" people must grapple) in academic media discourse as much as in cynical hyperbolic promotional discourse really better understood as simply the anxiety of credentialed incumbents and would-be popular "experts" to the loss of much of their editorial and curatorial authority given the emergence of peer-to-peer formations that do this work as well and more democratically?
How often is the topic of so-called "accelerating development" (sometimes even more hilariously hyperbolized as an "acceleration of acceleration," and, again, treated as some neutral technical notion generally accepted as a "fact of contemporary life" with which "informed" "serious" people must grapple) in academic "technology discourse" as much as in cynical hyperbolic promotional discourse really better understood as simply the increasing volatility of "market" economies exacerbated by confiscatory neoliberal policies of increasing "financialization" of wealth and "informalization" of social support, but as seen from the perspective of the relatively privileged beneficiaries (for now) of these immoral and short-sighted policies or of those who, even more pathetically, identify with these beneficiaries whether they actually number among them or not?
Closely connected to this ideologically useful metaphorical conjuration of a monolithically accelerating development where in fact conditions of incomparably complex and unpredictable technoscientific changes actually prevail is the no less ideologically useful and curiously transcendentalizing metaphorical conjuration of "converging" development (where the projected point of convergence, usually implicitly but surprisingly often explicitly -- at least in some of the more careless and popular versions of the discourse -- is invested with hyperbolically utopian or dystopian, heavenly or hellish, superhumanizing or subhumanizing characteristics) where in fact conditions of incomparably complex and sometimes interestingly inter-implicated technoscientific changes actually prevail.
How often is the topic of so-called biomedical "enhancement" (as usual, sometimes embraced as a dreamy superhumanization, sometimes rejected as a dreaded subhumanization, but, again, as usual, treated as some neutral technical notion generally accepted as a matter "on the developmental horizon" with which "informed" "serious" people must grapple) among academic and thinktank ethicists as much as among Hollywood scriptwriters and popular polemicists really better understood as the parochial and stealthy moralizing condemnation of some actually existing and actually desired human morphologies, capacities, and lifeways (especially certain queer lifeways, certain differently enabled ("disabled") lifeways, and certain experimentalist lifeways (among them, consensual perversions and promiscuities, spiritual disciplines, radical and not-so-radical body modifications, spiritual and recreational drug use, and so on)) all under the presumably universalizing cloak of "health," "harm reduction," or "hygiene" advocacy or, somewhat terrifyingly, in the name of "optimality"?
In each of these cases a particular stakeholder position (or a framing of issues that preferentially benefits a particular stakeholder position) is proposed, via monolithicizing, depoliticizing, instrumentalizing language as if it were a general or even universal problem demanding a comparably general address, a problem that solicits consensus -- as instrumental problems always do, but as moral, esthetic, and political problems rarely do, or do very differently. The key term for me here is "depoliticizing," and it might be helpful as a way to get a handle on what I am talking about to turn here for a moment to Roland Barthes's formulation late in his book Mythologies, in a section entitled, “Myth as Depoliticized Speech.” If you haven't read Barthes it's probably best to follow Barthes's own recommendation and substitute the phrase "bourgeois ideology" wherever he uses the word "myth" here (it's not quite the same thing, but you would need to read the whole book to get the benefit of making the distinction):
[M]yth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. Now this process is exactly that of bourgeois ideology… What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined… by the way in which men [sic] have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality… The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature[.]
Most of the book Mythologies consists of a series of short essaylets in which Barthes offers up interpretations of a host of phenomena, popular icons, mass-mediated events, general attitudes, and so forth. In each essay he exposes the way something that is actually a contingent and specific product of historical circumstances (which arrived as a consequence of a trackable history of collective collaboration and contestation, any episode of which might easily have turned out quite differently, and which continues just as likely, therefore, to remain radically open to contestation and reform in the ongoing social struggle of history) has been posited as and come more widely to assume the status of the natural, the inevitable, the taken-for-granted, the best of all possible worlds, the best workable solution, and so on. Especially interesting for technocentric discourse is the fact that there is a sort of book-within-the-book in Mythologies, in which Barthes corrals together a series of essays that explore technoscientific and technodevelopmental themes in particular, offering up readings of Verne, Einstein, plastic products, an anonymous supersonic test-pilot, and so on, in each demonstrating how transcendentalizing, hyper-individualizing, reductionistic framings of popular technoscientific discourse serves very bourgeois ends, inculcating the work ethic, cynicism, hyper-individualism, conformism, consumerism, circumscription of imagination, reliance on elites, and so on. That is to say, Barthes proposes that bourgeois futurology (I would say "neoliberal" politics, or the politics of "incumbency" instead of the now unfashionable "bourgeois" politics) ironically naturalizes and so consolidates the notional and institutional buttresses for the maintenance and amplification of the bourgeois status quo, a paradox I often refer to myself as "retro-futurism."
It is crucial to grasp that the depoliticization (via abstraction, reduction, instrumentalization, naturalization) of the actually contingent and plural stakeholder situation of technodevelopmental social struggle is doubly anti-democratizing: first, because it preferentially benefits already incumbent and elite stakeholder positions in particular, inasmuch as these are the ones best situated to substitute their parochial perspective for a more general one and, second, because, in a very straightforward sense depoliticization is inherently anti-democratizing. This is because democratic politics is defined and impelled at the most basic level by a desire for the deepest and widest possible politicization and repoliticization of the terms of the given and shared world as possible, as a matter of course, whatever concrete outcomes particular democratically-minded people also happen to advocate in the spirit of democratization. Whatever its institutional implementation, whatever its campaigns and preoccupations from epoch to epoch, democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, democratization is the widening and deepening of that participation and that say, and anti-democratization is its denigration or frustration. When Jamais Cascio, for example, advocates not only for particular outcomes that he believes to be more sustainable, more fair, and more democratic, but also more generally devotes himself to advocating what he describes as an "opening of the future," it seems to me that he (the rarest of professional futurists) grasps the importance of this distinction very well.
It feels especially good to mention Jamais Cascio in this connection, and by way of conclusion, because this allows me to make a few summarizing points nearly simultaneously. I spend a lot of my time on Amor Mundi deriding would-be professional futurists and sub(cult)ural technophiliacs who often seem to fancy themselves far- and forward-thinking even when their political worldviews are not easily distinguishable from that of nineteenth century social darwinists, eugenicists, and free-marketeers and even when their most regularly reiterated interests tend to be so firmly lodged in the competitive position of current corporate-military elites. But the fact remains that technodevelopmental social struggle really is in my view the most urgent, dangerous, and promising terrain for radical, democratizing, Green, consensual planetary politics in our own time. The fact remains that it makes perfect sense in my view that the "discourse of technology" would be invested with the personal and collective dread and wish-fulfillment of a diverse humanity deranged and traumatized and whipped up into an uncritical frenzy by unprecedented powers, threats, and changes and that all this properly demands our most serious, careful, urgent attentions. The fact remains that there seems to me to be an exciting, vitally important emerging technoprogressive mainstream in the United States of America and across the planet knitting together what might initially have seemed to be disparate concerns into an ever more unified, ever more popular, ever more emancipatory movement, conjoining (a) democratic and anti-authoritarian education, agitation, and organizing via peer-to-peer networked formations, (b) research, funding, and institutionalization of decentralized and renewable energy provision, (c) advocacy of universal informed nonduressed consensual recourse to emerging genetic and prosthetic medicines, (d) championing universal education to promote critical, literary, scientific, and civic literacy, (e) defending the right of women to avoid or end unwanted pregnancies as well as to make recourse to ARTs to facilitate wanted ones, (f) circumventing technodevelopmental wealth concentration via automation, outsourcing, and crowdsourcing through the advocacy of a non-means-tested universal basic income guarantee, (g) overturning militarist budgetary priorities, regulating the trade in and use of arms of all kinds, dismantling private armies and policing forces, repudiating the ongoing automation and abstraction of death-dealing, and (h) turning the tide of confiscatory intellectual enclosure by encouraging access to free creative content through public subsidy of citizen participation in networks, universal public access requirements for research funded by the public, limiting current legal copyright terms, widening fair use provisions, radically circumscribing state, corporate, and academic practices of secrecy, and repudiating the legal fiction of corporate personhood.
Given all this, I clearly think that what is wanted is more, not less, technocentricity in theory, in criticism, in analysis, in policy, in commentary, and so on, and my frustrations with so many would-be futurologists and technocentric polemicists is precisely that they seem to enable and exacerbate the worst of the confusions and complacencies it should be their work to disable and diminish. What is wanted, it seems to me, is more technoprogressive technocentricity, pluralizing rather than reductionist, politicizing rather than naturalizing, social rather than instrumental, peer-to-peer rather than authoritarian, consensual rather than neutral, open rather than optimal, Green rather than corporate-militarist, democratizing rather than elitist. I can't say that I always agree with every little thing Jamais Cascio says, and I certainly wouldn't want to saddle him with the insinuation that he agrees with anything I say, but I will say that he is a widely respected, popular, professional "futurist" who comes pretty close to demonstrating both the possibility and usefulness of something like a technoprogressive technocentricity in the sense I mean. (And I'll bet that to the extent that he did agree with the things that I am saying here, he would say them more clearly than I'm managing to do.)
Although I spend so much of my time ridiculing the facile retro-futurism of so much "serious" or would-be serious futurological discourse (especially in what I critique as its pernicious Superlative and Sub(cult)ural Modes) and so it is easy to come away with the mistaken impression that I would be happiest if the whole absurd largely self-appointed Futurological Congress would shut down altogether this is the farthest thing from what I want, really. What I want is less reductionist, naturalizing, transcendentalizing, hyperbolizing, instrumentalizing, depoliticizing, corporate-militarist, prescriptively optimizing futurism and retro-futurism.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
There Is No Such Thing As Technology
I make this point incessantly here on Amor Mundi, but it's clearly time to make it yet again.
Many self-identified technoprogressive folks I admire enormously otherwise regularly say what seem to me to be utterly mystifying things to the effect that they are "champions of technology" and that this championing arrays them against villainous others -- usually described as "luddites" or "technophobes" -- who "oppose technology" with a deadly ferocity equal to the passion of the goodly would-be champions. The stakes of this confrontation are, to all appearances, enormously high for those who are invested in talking this way. Likewise, many self-identified environmentalist folks I admire enormously (not all of whom are technoprogressive, self-identified or otherwise) regularly say what seem to me to be equally mystifying things to the effect that "technology causes more problem than it solves" and that, therefore, "more technology is the last thing we need" right about now.
I know how to draw a pinhead droplet of nectar from a honeysuckle blossom, and I can draw a reasonably common-sensible proposition easily enough from each these formulations as well: "Don't uncritically or reflexively prefer the status quo over needed intervention out of what amounts to the complacency or timidity of privilege." And: "Don't confuse hypothetical technofixes with actually-existing solutions to actually-existing problems." See how easy that was? But setting all that aside for a moment I think it probably better repays our attention to direct it here to the incredibly problematic underlying premise on which both of these formulations (before my reasonable retroactive reconstructions of them) deeply depend for most of their actual force.
You see, the problem is that there is, after all, no such thing as "technology."
To say otherwise is, as often as not, a straightforward matter of confusing "technologies" for "Technology."
There is, one might usefully say, a general discourse of technology, a discourse through which, through a shifting proliferating swarm of developmental pathways, some artifice gets called "technology" while other artifice does not. This usually seems to have something to do with what happens personally or more generally to be more or less "familiar" or "unfamiliar" to people. It often responds to symptomatic investments of fears and fantasies of agency (omnipotence/impotence) that historically, often accidentally, come to encrust certain kinds of made things more than others ("next generation" medicine, humanoid automatons, fast vehicles, megascale engineering projects, and so on).
But there is no such thing as "technology in general."
There is no such thing as "technology in general" to champion or to fear.
There is no such thing as "technology in general" to be "pro-" or "con-" for.
There is no such thing as "technology in general" the championing of which or battling against which then, inevitably enough, provides the rationale for some people to assign to themselves the status of "defender of civilization" or "savior of humanity."
There is no such thing as "technology in general" either solving more or less problems than "it" causes.
Problems are specific and diverse, needs are specific and diverse, stakes are specific and diverse, the positions from which problems, needs, and stakes are grasped and articulated are also specific and diverse.
I think the term "Technology" is like the terms "Reason" or "Action," as when people actually offer up bland vacuities like "Let Us Now Apply Reason!" or "Let Us Now Act!" in the face of some concrete complex quandary and then pretend (or even actually believe?) that there is something practically useful or distinctive about such a recommendation at that level of generality. These are all thin, glacial, mountain-top abstractions, miles and miles away from connecting to contestatory specificities in anything like a useful way.
These formulations almost always derange deliberation, whatever position one assumes within these debates. Even the ungainly phrase "technodevelopmental social struggle," which I have been trying to steer people to here on Amor Mundi as a way of articulating these issues that is alive to their breadth, intensity, inter-implication, while always directing us to the actually existing scene of concrete, plural, ongoing stakeholder contestation of this field, maybe even this ungainly phrase is, despite my efforts and intentions, still too abstract and monolithic.
Come what may, I do think insisting on the phrasing "technodevelopmental social struggle" is a salutary effort to resist the facile and ultimately conservative ("retro-futurist") rhetoric of "natural progress," of "autonomous technology," or of "neoliberal innovation" (ie, confiscatory wealth concentration). Even better, because so much simpler, may be the straightforward expedient of never confusing what are always particular technologies among many more for Technology "as such" or "in general."
Many self-identified technoprogressive folks I admire enormously otherwise regularly say what seem to me to be utterly mystifying things to the effect that they are "champions of technology" and that this championing arrays them against villainous others -- usually described as "luddites" or "technophobes" -- who "oppose technology" with a deadly ferocity equal to the passion of the goodly would-be champions. The stakes of this confrontation are, to all appearances, enormously high for those who are invested in talking this way. Likewise, many self-identified environmentalist folks I admire enormously (not all of whom are technoprogressive, self-identified or otherwise) regularly say what seem to me to be equally mystifying things to the effect that "technology causes more problem than it solves" and that, therefore, "more technology is the last thing we need" right about now.
I know how to draw a pinhead droplet of nectar from a honeysuckle blossom, and I can draw a reasonably common-sensible proposition easily enough from each these formulations as well: "Don't uncritically or reflexively prefer the status quo over needed intervention out of what amounts to the complacency or timidity of privilege." And: "Don't confuse hypothetical technofixes with actually-existing solutions to actually-existing problems." See how easy that was? But setting all that aside for a moment I think it probably better repays our attention to direct it here to the incredibly problematic underlying premise on which both of these formulations (before my reasonable retroactive reconstructions of them) deeply depend for most of their actual force.
You see, the problem is that there is, after all, no such thing as "technology."
To say otherwise is, as often as not, a straightforward matter of confusing "technologies" for "Technology."
There is, one might usefully say, a general discourse of technology, a discourse through which, through a shifting proliferating swarm of developmental pathways, some artifice gets called "technology" while other artifice does not. This usually seems to have something to do with what happens personally or more generally to be more or less "familiar" or "unfamiliar" to people. It often responds to symptomatic investments of fears and fantasies of agency (omnipotence/impotence) that historically, often accidentally, come to encrust certain kinds of made things more than others ("next generation" medicine, humanoid automatons, fast vehicles, megascale engineering projects, and so on).
But there is no such thing as "technology in general."
There is no such thing as "technology in general" to champion or to fear.
There is no such thing as "technology in general" to be "pro-" or "con-" for.
There is no such thing as "technology in general" the championing of which or battling against which then, inevitably enough, provides the rationale for some people to assign to themselves the status of "defender of civilization" or "savior of humanity."
There is no such thing as "technology in general" either solving more or less problems than "it" causes.
Problems are specific and diverse, needs are specific and diverse, stakes are specific and diverse, the positions from which problems, needs, and stakes are grasped and articulated are also specific and diverse.
I think the term "Technology" is like the terms "Reason" or "Action," as when people actually offer up bland vacuities like "Let Us Now Apply Reason!" or "Let Us Now Act!" in the face of some concrete complex quandary and then pretend (or even actually believe?) that there is something practically useful or distinctive about such a recommendation at that level of generality. These are all thin, glacial, mountain-top abstractions, miles and miles away from connecting to contestatory specificities in anything like a useful way.
These formulations almost always derange deliberation, whatever position one assumes within these debates. Even the ungainly phrase "technodevelopmental social struggle," which I have been trying to steer people to here on Amor Mundi as a way of articulating these issues that is alive to their breadth, intensity, inter-implication, while always directing us to the actually existing scene of concrete, plural, ongoing stakeholder contestation of this field, maybe even this ungainly phrase is, despite my efforts and intentions, still too abstract and monolithic.
Come what may, I do think insisting on the phrasing "technodevelopmental social struggle" is a salutary effort to resist the facile and ultimately conservative ("retro-futurist") rhetoric of "natural progress," of "autonomous technology," or of "neoliberal innovation" (ie, confiscatory wealth concentration). Even better, because so much simpler, may be the straightforward expedient of never confusing what are always particular technologies among many more for Technology "as such" or "in general."
Thursday, August 23, 2007
GWOT Against Green
It seems to me that an enormous amount of the cultural and rhetorical energy that drives the so-called Global War on Terror (and GWOT Consciousness) here and now is that it functions as a direct counterweight to contemporary planetary Green Consciousness.
The Global War on Terror mimes the contours and rhetorical figures of planetary peer-to-peer Green consciousness: GWOT offers itself up as a response to a presumably "global existential threat," imagery that derives its intuitive plausibility in no small part from the disseminated consciousness of the threat of extractive industrial toxicity and catastrophic climate change. What is extraordinary in this is not just that the GWOTs would substitute for the urgent threats that invigorate Greens what seems to me to be a less urgent threat in fact (which is obviously not to deny the reality of some of the threats GWOT clumsily addresses itself to), but that GWOT relies in substance, as it were parasitically, on the Green awareness of the very threat it would then displace from our attention. And all the while, GWOT False Consciousness appropriates and diverts the energies of Green consciousness into precisely contrary political movements.
GWOT always only bolsters incumbent corporate-military interests where Green consciousness, properly speaking, always only threatens them instead. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the threat to incumbent interests of emerging planetary Green consciousness can only be compared in its scope to the palpable threat of Revolutionary Socialism to such interests over a century ago. (And, of course, for the rest of us, the promise!)
Planetary Green consciousness undermines at the deepest level, and effectively for the first time in generations, the classical assumptions of liberal and neoliberal political economy. The false (neo)liberal characterization of personal rationality as that of an endlessly avaricious "maximizer" cannot long withstand the demand of Green rationality for sustainable and resilient commonwealth. The false (neo)liberal model of the person as a rugged individual torn from the fabric of shared and inherited worldly life cannot long withstand the awareness of a Green rationality alert to long-term and systemic risks and costs facilitated by short-term and parochial profit-seeking.
Planetary Green consciousness encourages global co-operation to solve actually shared problems with responsible consensus science where GWOT False Consciousness encourages interminable international military and multinational corporate competitiveness, with all their attendant secrecies, cynicisms, confiscatory proprieties, and anti-democratizing hierarchies in tow. It is, to be sure, the furthest thing from an accident that the concept of commons is definitive to both Green politics and peer-to-peer politics.
Planetary Green consciousness is inspired by proposals for renewable and resilient decentralized forms of energy provision -- from proliferating rooftop solar panels and backyard windmills to mass-transit systems -- where GWOT is still devoted to heavy centralized extractive petrochemical resources obtained through military conquest as well as to unclean coal (clean coal is a corporatist lie) and Big Nuclear (there is nothing utopian about radioactive waste) always captured and distributed through vastly expensive hierarchical infrastructures owned and operated by incumbent corporate elites.
Planetary Green consciousness is completely hostile to the (bio)piratical impulse to propertize and commoditize personal morphology, genetic idiosyncrasy, and multicultural archives in an effort to ramp up confiscatory wealth concentration for incumbent elites, while GWOT is all-too-eager to assimilate every imaginable individual and indigenous resistance to such appropriation to the ranks of "terrorist sympathy" and hence, potentially, to the status of "enemy combatant" bereft of legible rights and protections.
GWOT Against Green is nothing short of the contemporary face of revolutionary struggle.
And be assured, this is a profoundly technodevelopmental social struggle. It is a struggle not only over the ownership of the means but also over the mode of production. It is a struggle for which the parallel and at once inter-implicated struggle of democratizing peer-to-peer formations as against hierarchical broadcast formations cannot possibly dismissed as "merely cultural" but is quite palpably at the heart of its revolutionary ethos and energy (and, I will add, of its unprecedented hope).
To the extent that p2p/a2k (peer-to-peer/open access to knowledge) formations of education, agitation, and organizing are the ones that actually articulate popular planetary Green movement in this struggle against corporate-military GWOT elites notice that this is cause for extraordinary hopefulness, since this means that there is no easy rationale this time around for revolutionary avant-gardism with all its attendant authoritarian paraphernalia, no strong structural inducement for the poisonous and anti-democratizing division of educational from agitational labor that has seized and subverted democratic revolutionary energies so many times before now.
I maintain that planetary Green consciousness -- in its current form -- was inaugurated through the mass-mediated image of the earth as seen from space, in all its wholeness and fragility, and that it continues to be invigorated especially through the people-powered education, agitation, and organization of planetary peer-to-peer networked formations, most forcefully by those movements devoted to the intimate connection of environmental with social justice struggles. This is so, because (among other things), the concrete situational testimony of the people themselves to health problems, infrastructural stresses, externalized environmental costs and risks of corporate profiteering, and so on that are facilitated by peer-to-peer networks and practices (which, taken together, constitute what I call p2p formations) are uniquely able to circumvent the fraudulent manipulations of data and barriers to research of corporate and state-military agencies (consider, for example, the excellent climate science blog Real Climate), meanwhile the dispersed critical, practical, and imaginative intelligence of differently interested and invested people themselves can be co-ordinated and directed in unprecedented ways by means of the same peer-to-peer formations as an incomparable resource to which we might make recourse in our efforts to solve hitherto intractable shared environmental problems on a planetary scale (consider, for example, the extraordinary policy proposals of the online p2p "think tank" Energize America).
The Global War on Terror mimes the contours and rhetorical figures of planetary peer-to-peer Green consciousness: GWOT offers itself up as a response to a presumably "global existential threat," imagery that derives its intuitive plausibility in no small part from the disseminated consciousness of the threat of extractive industrial toxicity and catastrophic climate change. What is extraordinary in this is not just that the GWOTs would substitute for the urgent threats that invigorate Greens what seems to me to be a less urgent threat in fact (which is obviously not to deny the reality of some of the threats GWOT clumsily addresses itself to), but that GWOT relies in substance, as it were parasitically, on the Green awareness of the very threat it would then displace from our attention. And all the while, GWOT False Consciousness appropriates and diverts the energies of Green consciousness into precisely contrary political movements.
GWOT always only bolsters incumbent corporate-military interests where Green consciousness, properly speaking, always only threatens them instead. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the threat to incumbent interests of emerging planetary Green consciousness can only be compared in its scope to the palpable threat of Revolutionary Socialism to such interests over a century ago. (And, of course, for the rest of us, the promise!)
Planetary Green consciousness undermines at the deepest level, and effectively for the first time in generations, the classical assumptions of liberal and neoliberal political economy. The false (neo)liberal characterization of personal rationality as that of an endlessly avaricious "maximizer" cannot long withstand the demand of Green rationality for sustainable and resilient commonwealth. The false (neo)liberal model of the person as a rugged individual torn from the fabric of shared and inherited worldly life cannot long withstand the awareness of a Green rationality alert to long-term and systemic risks and costs facilitated by short-term and parochial profit-seeking.
Planetary Green consciousness encourages global co-operation to solve actually shared problems with responsible consensus science where GWOT False Consciousness encourages interminable international military and multinational corporate competitiveness, with all their attendant secrecies, cynicisms, confiscatory proprieties, and anti-democratizing hierarchies in tow. It is, to be sure, the furthest thing from an accident that the concept of commons is definitive to both Green politics and peer-to-peer politics.
Planetary Green consciousness is inspired by proposals for renewable and resilient decentralized forms of energy provision -- from proliferating rooftop solar panels and backyard windmills to mass-transit systems -- where GWOT is still devoted to heavy centralized extractive petrochemical resources obtained through military conquest as well as to unclean coal (clean coal is a corporatist lie) and Big Nuclear (there is nothing utopian about radioactive waste) always captured and distributed through vastly expensive hierarchical infrastructures owned and operated by incumbent corporate elites.
Planetary Green consciousness is completely hostile to the (bio)piratical impulse to propertize and commoditize personal morphology, genetic idiosyncrasy, and multicultural archives in an effort to ramp up confiscatory wealth concentration for incumbent elites, while GWOT is all-too-eager to assimilate every imaginable individual and indigenous resistance to such appropriation to the ranks of "terrorist sympathy" and hence, potentially, to the status of "enemy combatant" bereft of legible rights and protections.
GWOT Against Green is nothing short of the contemporary face of revolutionary struggle.
And be assured, this is a profoundly technodevelopmental social struggle. It is a struggle not only over the ownership of the means but also over the mode of production. It is a struggle for which the parallel and at once inter-implicated struggle of democratizing peer-to-peer formations as against hierarchical broadcast formations cannot possibly dismissed as "merely cultural" but is quite palpably at the heart of its revolutionary ethos and energy (and, I will add, of its unprecedented hope).
To the extent that p2p/a2k (peer-to-peer/open access to knowledge) formations of education, agitation, and organizing are the ones that actually articulate popular planetary Green movement in this struggle against corporate-military GWOT elites notice that this is cause for extraordinary hopefulness, since this means that there is no easy rationale this time around for revolutionary avant-gardism with all its attendant authoritarian paraphernalia, no strong structural inducement for the poisonous and anti-democratizing division of educational from agitational labor that has seized and subverted democratic revolutionary energies so many times before now.
I maintain that planetary Green consciousness -- in its current form -- was inaugurated through the mass-mediated image of the earth as seen from space, in all its wholeness and fragility, and that it continues to be invigorated especially through the people-powered education, agitation, and organization of planetary peer-to-peer networked formations, most forcefully by those movements devoted to the intimate connection of environmental with social justice struggles. This is so, because (among other things), the concrete situational testimony of the people themselves to health problems, infrastructural stresses, externalized environmental costs and risks of corporate profiteering, and so on that are facilitated by peer-to-peer networks and practices (which, taken together, constitute what I call p2p formations) are uniquely able to circumvent the fraudulent manipulations of data and barriers to research of corporate and state-military agencies (consider, for example, the excellent climate science blog Real Climate), meanwhile the dispersed critical, practical, and imaginative intelligence of differently interested and invested people themselves can be co-ordinated and directed in unprecedented ways by means of the same peer-to-peer formations as an incomparable resource to which we might make recourse in our efforts to solve hitherto intractable shared environmental problems on a planetary scale (consider, for example, the extraordinary policy proposals of the online p2p "think tank" Energize America).
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Confusing Moralizing for Politics: Notes on the Paranoid Style of Movement Conservatism
In 1964, the year before I was born, the American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote an essay for Harper's, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" which opened with the observation that "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds." He went on: "In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority."
It is fascinating to recall that Hofstadter's classic essay was occasioned by Barry Goldwater's capture of the Republican Presidential nomination, a moment that qualifies reasonably well as the inaugural moment of the Movement Conservatism that went on to bring us Nixon's imperial illegalities, Reagan's sunny confiscations, Gingrich's looting spree and polarization tactics, and has culminated in the unprecedented catastrophes of the current Bush Administration.
It's been hard for me to shake the sense these last few days especially that Hofstadter's piece speaks to our own era far more insistently than it did even to his own. The Movement Conservative periodical Human Events has attracted quite a bit of recent attention for an article that propounds a thesis that has been tingling back in America's lizard brain more generally for months, a thesis summarized by the portentious opening of the article itself: “Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S.”
In response, the progressive periodical The Nation has published an article by Christopher Hayes that exposes the thesis as an extreme right-wing conspiracy theory, but more interestingly, analyzes the thesis as a symptom of America's anxious and confused response to the pressures of neoliberal globalization. Since I offered up a summarizing sentence from the paranoid article, it's only fair that I provide a comparably pithy sentence from the response. Will this one do? "There’s no such thing as a proposed NAFTA Superhighway."
In a post yesterday surveying all this right-wing conspiracist scenery chewing, the always indispensable Digby offered up this immensely useful observation:
She also connects this observation to Glenn Greenwald's powerful recent exposure and ridicule of the paranoid right-wing panic about an imminent "Islamofascist" occupation of the Mall of America, or what have you (a panic that reproduces the same hysterical discursive contours that suffused the various bomb building civil liberty smashing "Red Scares" the parents of the current conservative crowd were catastrophically cheerleading for the latter half of the twentieth century). Greenwald writes:
To return to Richard Hofstadter (all this is available in a Wikipedia entry summarizing the piece):
What strikes me as particularly relevant here is the observation that the paranoid mindset "does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician… what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish." Hofstadter describes this repudiation of compromise as a repudiation of the attitude of "the working politician," and this phrasing might seem to suggest that the piece counterposes the paranoid style as a "popular" or "mass" phenomenon as against, say, a more reasonable "professional," "learned," or "elite" attitude.
But it seems to me that the problem of the paranoid form of so much American public discourse is not its anti-professionalism (Karl Rove has been a consummate professional purveyor in and of the paranoid style, for example) but what might be described as a deep anti-politicism or even pre-politicism of the form. In a proper democracy every citizen is a "working politician," and the embrace of an attitude of compromise in the face of the contending aspirations of the diversity of peers with whom we all share the world defines the inaugural insight that leads us into political consciousness in the first place.
It is no surprise that the "political philosophy" of Carl Schmitt has been so central to the Neoconservative outlook, given the way Schmitt organized his understanding of the political around the foundation of what he described as the "friend/foe" distinction. It is not merely a matter of precious terminological quibbling to insist that Schmitt's "friend/foe" distinction is in fact at the heart of moral life, but that the political imaginary, properly so-called, is organized by the insight that, in Hannah Arendt's words, "Plurality is the law of the earth."
In my view, the instrumental, moral, esthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of human life each have their own publics, their own ends, and their own reasonable warrants.
And so, the protocols of publication, peer-review, testability, and consensus define the public of instrumental science which facilitates prediction and control. Practices of identification with "insiders" and disidentification with "outsiders" define the more intimate public of moral life which facilitates community, membership, belonging, and the profound sense of emotional and social support. Contingent standards that formally solicit universal assent define the public of ethical judgment (a formal generality of address to the "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," to "posterity," to the "congress of logically possible rational minds," and comparable grandiloquences, typically making recourse to meta-ethical standards like "utility," "autonomy," or "universal right").
The actual force of the morals/ethics distinction in the present day seems to me to be very much a technoconstituted affair, the substance of which derives, for one thing, from our tangible interdependence with radically different communities that seem inassimilable to one another. That is to say, we turn to ethical considerations to cope with our sense of planetary multiculture, a sense resulting in no small part from our immersion in planetary digital networked media, a sense that is especially amplified by the emerging awareness of environmental crises. For another thing, our turn to ethics derives from our inevitable interpellation into multiple, partial, usually somewhat incompatible moral communities that demand ongoing negotiation and reconciliation through recourse to the generality of ethical judgment. This fragmentation of ready-made moral identification likewise arises in large part in my view from our immersion in planetary digital networked media.
It is crucial to insist, however, that whatever the inevitability and indispensability of these turns to the generality of ethical considerations, this does not eliminate the equally inevitable and indispensable edifications of our more parochial moral lives. The one does not supercede the other, the terms of the one cannot be reduced to the terms of the other, the value of the one is subservient to the other only on a case to case basis and never in a generalizable way.
All this matters when we turn to political life and to its distinctive public sphere. For me, politics is the ongoing opportunistic reconciliation of variously contending and collective aspirations in a finite world shared by a plurality of stakeholders or peers. The democratic idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them yields different politics (politics that happen to be my own) than the brutal politics of a slave society organized to frustrate and respond to the permanent possibility of revolt or the politics of cynical incumbent elites in notionally representative societies that manipulate mass media to "manufacture consent" to their practices of exploitation -- but each of these attitudes is a political one, a response to the same awareness of a promising and dangerous political plurality, producing its own calculus, generating unique experiences, and so on.
The paranoid style of American politics delineated by Hofstadter's piece, and echoing down through the epoch of Movement Conservatism into the mass-panic of the "Black Helicopter" crowd, the NAFTA superhighway conspiracists, and the racist apocaloids who rave about rampant "Islamofascism" and a "Clash of Civilizations," seems to me finally not to be a proper "politics" at all, but the amplification of moral considerations and forms into a disastrous substitute for political consciousness.
It is precisely when the parochial forms of moral identification ("we"s which depend, remember, on the conjuration of "they"s, on what are called "constitutive outsides," for their own intelligibility and force) aspire to encompass the field of plurality that one is driven to "see social conflict [not] as something to be mediated and compromised… [but as] always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, [where] what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish."
Digby's observation that Movement Conservatives seem to oscillate between episodes of a rather unhinged and conspiracist anti-government hostility and episodes of utterly docile authoritarian government-worship, depending on whichever partisan faction seems to hold the reins of government (and especially the sovereign-parent figure inhabiting the White House), does not describe -- as it may initially appear to do -- a perplexing inconsistency but perfectly symptomizes the seamless moralizing logic that drives the anti-political and pre-political "politics" of Movement Conservatism.
Each attitude expresses the same parochial panic in the face of an ineradical plurality of peers, and the extraordinary vulnerability inhering in the fact of that plurality (the unpredictability of outcome of all human action, the permanent possibility of misunderstanding, miscommunication, exposure, humiliation, betrayal, and so on), the same turn to the reassurances of membership, the authority of canon and custom, the easy legibility of conformity.
Just as I insisted earlier on that the substance of the lived demarcation of moral and ethical life in the present day is conspicuously technoconstituted, it seems to me that the deep confusions occasioned by rapid contemporary technoscientific change -- the undermining of traditional justificatory frameworks by the networked encounter with planetary multiculture, the crisis of human agency rendered at once seemingly impotent and omnipotent by the specters of climate change and WMD on the one hand and genetic and "enhancement" medicine and cyberspatial ecstasy on the other -- also contribute to the re-eruption of pre-political forms onto the scene of planetary politics.
Be that as it may, I think that what is most important for us to realize in all this is that the extremism, the absolutism, and the palpable craziness of belief that inevitably draw our attention when we contemplate the paranoid style of Movement Conservatism are not themselves the key to understanding what is afoot and what is at stake in these curious and furious phenomena, but that they are surface features expressing the underlying logic of a moralizing perversion of political consciousness.
It is fascinating to recall that Hofstadter's classic essay was occasioned by Barry Goldwater's capture of the Republican Presidential nomination, a moment that qualifies reasonably well as the inaugural moment of the Movement Conservatism that went on to bring us Nixon's imperial illegalities, Reagan's sunny confiscations, Gingrich's looting spree and polarization tactics, and has culminated in the unprecedented catastrophes of the current Bush Administration.
It's been hard for me to shake the sense these last few days especially that Hofstadter's piece speaks to our own era far more insistently than it did even to his own. The Movement Conservative periodical Human Events has attracted quite a bit of recent attention for an article that propounds a thesis that has been tingling back in America's lizard brain more generally for months, a thesis summarized by the portentious opening of the article itself: “Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S.”
In response, the progressive periodical The Nation has published an article by Christopher Hayes that exposes the thesis as an extreme right-wing conspiracy theory, but more interestingly, analyzes the thesis as a symptom of America's anxious and confused response to the pressures of neoliberal globalization. Since I offered up a summarizing sentence from the paranoid article, it's only fair that I provide a comparably pithy sentence from the response. Will this one do? "There’s no such thing as a proposed NAFTA Superhighway."
In a post yesterday surveying all this right-wing conspiracist scenery chewing, the always indispensable Digby offered up this immensely useful observation:
I guess this is the predictable re-emergence of the black helicopter crowd now that the Republicans have lost their power. (These conspiracy theorists always seem to go underground when the GOP is in power. My theory is that they switch seamlessly between anti-government conspiracy to cultlike authoritarian leadership worship depending on who's in office.)
She also connects this observation to Glenn Greenwald's powerful recent exposure and ridicule of the paranoid right-wing panic about an imminent "Islamofascist" occupation of the Mall of America, or what have you (a panic that reproduces the same hysterical discursive contours that suffused the various bomb building civil liberty smashing "Red Scares" the parents of the current conservative crowd were catastrophically cheerleading for the latter half of the twentieth century). Greenwald writes:
Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States -- the Pajamas Media/right-wing-blogosphere/Fox News/Michelle Malkin/Rush-Limbaugh-listener strain -- actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us…. This is an actual fear that they have -- not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview.
And their key political beliefs -- from Iraq to Iran to executive power and surveillance theories at home -- are animated by the belief that all of this is going to happen. The Republican presidential primary is, for much of the "base," a search for who will be the toughest and strongest in protecting us from the Islamic invasion -- a term that is not figurative or symbolic, but literal: the formidable effort by Islamic radicals to invade the U.S. and take over our institutions and dismantle our government and force us to submit to Islamic rule or else be killed.
To return to Richard Hofstadter (all this is available in a Wikipedia entry summarizing the piece):
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms -- he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization... he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated -- if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
What strikes me as particularly relevant here is the observation that the paranoid mindset "does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician… what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish." Hofstadter describes this repudiation of compromise as a repudiation of the attitude of "the working politician," and this phrasing might seem to suggest that the piece counterposes the paranoid style as a "popular" or "mass" phenomenon as against, say, a more reasonable "professional," "learned," or "elite" attitude.
But it seems to me that the problem of the paranoid form of so much American public discourse is not its anti-professionalism (Karl Rove has been a consummate professional purveyor in and of the paranoid style, for example) but what might be described as a deep anti-politicism or even pre-politicism of the form. In a proper democracy every citizen is a "working politician," and the embrace of an attitude of compromise in the face of the contending aspirations of the diversity of peers with whom we all share the world defines the inaugural insight that leads us into political consciousness in the first place.
It is no surprise that the "political philosophy" of Carl Schmitt has been so central to the Neoconservative outlook, given the way Schmitt organized his understanding of the political around the foundation of what he described as the "friend/foe" distinction. It is not merely a matter of precious terminological quibbling to insist that Schmitt's "friend/foe" distinction is in fact at the heart of moral life, but that the political imaginary, properly so-called, is organized by the insight that, in Hannah Arendt's words, "Plurality is the law of the earth."
In my view, the instrumental, moral, esthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of human life each have their own publics, their own ends, and their own reasonable warrants.
And so, the protocols of publication, peer-review, testability, and consensus define the public of instrumental science which facilitates prediction and control. Practices of identification with "insiders" and disidentification with "outsiders" define the more intimate public of moral life which facilitates community, membership, belonging, and the profound sense of emotional and social support. Contingent standards that formally solicit universal assent define the public of ethical judgment (a formal generality of address to the "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," to "posterity," to the "congress of logically possible rational minds," and comparable grandiloquences, typically making recourse to meta-ethical standards like "utility," "autonomy," or "universal right").
The actual force of the morals/ethics distinction in the present day seems to me to be very much a technoconstituted affair, the substance of which derives, for one thing, from our tangible interdependence with radically different communities that seem inassimilable to one another. That is to say, we turn to ethical considerations to cope with our sense of planetary multiculture, a sense resulting in no small part from our immersion in planetary digital networked media, a sense that is especially amplified by the emerging awareness of environmental crises. For another thing, our turn to ethics derives from our inevitable interpellation into multiple, partial, usually somewhat incompatible moral communities that demand ongoing negotiation and reconciliation through recourse to the generality of ethical judgment. This fragmentation of ready-made moral identification likewise arises in large part in my view from our immersion in planetary digital networked media.
It is crucial to insist, however, that whatever the inevitability and indispensability of these turns to the generality of ethical considerations, this does not eliminate the equally inevitable and indispensable edifications of our more parochial moral lives. The one does not supercede the other, the terms of the one cannot be reduced to the terms of the other, the value of the one is subservient to the other only on a case to case basis and never in a generalizable way.
All this matters when we turn to political life and to its distinctive public sphere. For me, politics is the ongoing opportunistic reconciliation of variously contending and collective aspirations in a finite world shared by a plurality of stakeholders or peers. The democratic idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them yields different politics (politics that happen to be my own) than the brutal politics of a slave society organized to frustrate and respond to the permanent possibility of revolt or the politics of cynical incumbent elites in notionally representative societies that manipulate mass media to "manufacture consent" to their practices of exploitation -- but each of these attitudes is a political one, a response to the same awareness of a promising and dangerous political plurality, producing its own calculus, generating unique experiences, and so on.
The paranoid style of American politics delineated by Hofstadter's piece, and echoing down through the epoch of Movement Conservatism into the mass-panic of the "Black Helicopter" crowd, the NAFTA superhighway conspiracists, and the racist apocaloids who rave about rampant "Islamofascism" and a "Clash of Civilizations," seems to me finally not to be a proper "politics" at all, but the amplification of moral considerations and forms into a disastrous substitute for political consciousness.
It is precisely when the parochial forms of moral identification ("we"s which depend, remember, on the conjuration of "they"s, on what are called "constitutive outsides," for their own intelligibility and force) aspire to encompass the field of plurality that one is driven to "see social conflict [not] as something to be mediated and compromised… [but as] always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, [where] what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish."
Digby's observation that Movement Conservatives seem to oscillate between episodes of a rather unhinged and conspiracist anti-government hostility and episodes of utterly docile authoritarian government-worship, depending on whichever partisan faction seems to hold the reins of government (and especially the sovereign-parent figure inhabiting the White House), does not describe -- as it may initially appear to do -- a perplexing inconsistency but perfectly symptomizes the seamless moralizing logic that drives the anti-political and pre-political "politics" of Movement Conservatism.
Each attitude expresses the same parochial panic in the face of an ineradical plurality of peers, and the extraordinary vulnerability inhering in the fact of that plurality (the unpredictability of outcome of all human action, the permanent possibility of misunderstanding, miscommunication, exposure, humiliation, betrayal, and so on), the same turn to the reassurances of membership, the authority of canon and custom, the easy legibility of conformity.
Just as I insisted earlier on that the substance of the lived demarcation of moral and ethical life in the present day is conspicuously technoconstituted, it seems to me that the deep confusions occasioned by rapid contemporary technoscientific change -- the undermining of traditional justificatory frameworks by the networked encounter with planetary multiculture, the crisis of human agency rendered at once seemingly impotent and omnipotent by the specters of climate change and WMD on the one hand and genetic and "enhancement" medicine and cyberspatial ecstasy on the other -- also contribute to the re-eruption of pre-political forms onto the scene of planetary politics.
Be that as it may, I think that what is most important for us to realize in all this is that the extremism, the absolutism, and the palpable craziness of belief that inevitably draw our attention when we contemplate the paranoid style of Movement Conservatism are not themselves the key to understanding what is afoot and what is at stake in these curious and furious phenomena, but that they are surface features expressing the underlying logic of a moralizing perversion of political consciousness.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Under the Libertopian Spell
The pernicious impact of market fundamentalist faith (what gets called "libertarianism" by the boys online and "neoliberalism" by the boys in the thinktank archipelago, and which, taken together, constitute what I like to think of as the Libertopian Noise Brigade) on foreign and domestic policy is impossible to overestimate.
Until the myths of "natural markets" and "spontaneous orders" are finally dead and buried for good, you better believe that incumbent elite interests will continue to deploy these facile figures to rationalize their brutal exploitation of others, to deny their dependency on the labor of others, past and present, and to justify the ongoing confiscatory concentration of planetary wealth and authority.
Market fundamentalist faith provides what is by now an "intuitively" compelling but utterly self-serving rationale for the dismantlement and neglect of indispensable infrastructure (both physical and legal), treating and framing this theft and fraud as if this were really always a matter of "releasing" pent up forces in nature or "freeing up" arbitrary barriers, rather than a matter of outright physical confiscation of assets and the imposition of institutional barriers to democratic scrutiny of public decision making by elites. Market fundamentalist faith provides what is by now an "intuitively" compelling but utterly self-serving rationale for the wildly disproportionate redistribution of wealth to the richest and most privileged interests in society through an amplified militarization of public spending as if this were really always a matter of "acting in self-defense" or "responding" to external provocations, rather than a matter of outright physical confiscation of assets and the imposition of institutional barriers to democratic responsiveness to expressed public budgetary priorities.
What get called "natural markets" in the actual world are the furthest things from spontaneous upwellings of eternal tidal forces of supply and demand, but are articulated and regulated through contingent historical regulations, laws, assumptions, protocols, institutions, and always in ways that respond to certain stakeholders interests prevailing in a particular time and place. (In relatively democratic orders one should expect the regulation and facilitation of production and trade to respond to the widest range of stakeholders, rather than to elites, since democracy is simply an experimental project to implement as widely and as deeply as possible the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them. Needless to say, one would be frustrated to register the distance between this reasonable expectation and reality.)
Market fundamentalist ideology is like a magic spell that would transform what is confiscation into a mirage of liberty, transform what is neglect into a mirage of autonomy, transform what is self-centered greed into a mirage of civic-mindedness, transform what is short-sighted opportunism into a mirage of wisdom and foresight, transform what is the imposition of force into a mirage of relief from force, transform what are historically contingent arrangements into expressions of eternal law, transform what are customs into a mirage of nature, transform fraud into a mirage of science.
Market fundamentalism is magical thinking, it is a self-serving mythology, it is a system of interlocking superstitions and strategic deceptions, it is a vast bloodsoaked scam mouthed by scam artists who smugly declaim (and, even worse, many of them are deluded enough to believe themselves) that they are "scientists."
You know, there is a lot of tough talk about religious fundamentalism online these days (too much of which seems to me to function primarily as a way of oversimplifying and unhelpfully demonizing the abundant esthetic and moral varieties of religious belief and practice prevailing in the world or, worse, to justify for privileged North Atlantic audiences awful ongoing racist projects of corporate-militarist hegemony), but it seems to me that this discourse is for the most part neglecting what has to be the most catastrophic fundamentalist faith at work in the world today.
Until we manage to break the spell of market fundamentalist pieties we will never break the deadweight of incumbent privilege and democratize the world.
Until the myths of "natural markets" and "spontaneous orders" are finally dead and buried for good, you better believe that incumbent elite interests will continue to deploy these facile figures to rationalize their brutal exploitation of others, to deny their dependency on the labor of others, past and present, and to justify the ongoing confiscatory concentration of planetary wealth and authority.
Market fundamentalist faith provides what is by now an "intuitively" compelling but utterly self-serving rationale for the dismantlement and neglect of indispensable infrastructure (both physical and legal), treating and framing this theft and fraud as if this were really always a matter of "releasing" pent up forces in nature or "freeing up" arbitrary barriers, rather than a matter of outright physical confiscation of assets and the imposition of institutional barriers to democratic scrutiny of public decision making by elites. Market fundamentalist faith provides what is by now an "intuitively" compelling but utterly self-serving rationale for the wildly disproportionate redistribution of wealth to the richest and most privileged interests in society through an amplified militarization of public spending as if this were really always a matter of "acting in self-defense" or "responding" to external provocations, rather than a matter of outright physical confiscation of assets and the imposition of institutional barriers to democratic responsiveness to expressed public budgetary priorities.
What get called "natural markets" in the actual world are the furthest things from spontaneous upwellings of eternal tidal forces of supply and demand, but are articulated and regulated through contingent historical regulations, laws, assumptions, protocols, institutions, and always in ways that respond to certain stakeholders interests prevailing in a particular time and place. (In relatively democratic orders one should expect the regulation and facilitation of production and trade to respond to the widest range of stakeholders, rather than to elites, since democracy is simply an experimental project to implement as widely and as deeply as possible the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them. Needless to say, one would be frustrated to register the distance between this reasonable expectation and reality.)
Market fundamentalist ideology is like a magic spell that would transform what is confiscation into a mirage of liberty, transform what is neglect into a mirage of autonomy, transform what is self-centered greed into a mirage of civic-mindedness, transform what is short-sighted opportunism into a mirage of wisdom and foresight, transform what is the imposition of force into a mirage of relief from force, transform what are historically contingent arrangements into expressions of eternal law, transform what are customs into a mirage of nature, transform fraud into a mirage of science.
Market fundamentalism is magical thinking, it is a self-serving mythology, it is a system of interlocking superstitions and strategic deceptions, it is a vast bloodsoaked scam mouthed by scam artists who smugly declaim (and, even worse, many of them are deluded enough to believe themselves) that they are "scientists."
You know, there is a lot of tough talk about religious fundamentalism online these days (too much of which seems to me to function primarily as a way of oversimplifying and unhelpfully demonizing the abundant esthetic and moral varieties of religious belief and practice prevailing in the world or, worse, to justify for privileged North Atlantic audiences awful ongoing racist projects of corporate-militarist hegemony), but it seems to me that this discourse is for the most part neglecting what has to be the most catastrophic fundamentalist faith at work in the world today.
Until we manage to break the spell of market fundamentalist pieties we will never break the deadweight of incumbent privilege and democratize the world.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Freedom and Figurative Language
Friend of Blog Jonathan Pfeiffer raised an interesting issue yesterday in the Comments, and I'm thrilled to be able to put on my Rhetorician's cap and ply my actual trade here on Amor Mundi!
Jonathan Comments: I'm prompted to wonder if it's ever possible to use language in a way that doesn't promote some undesired iconography in some undesired way.
No, we can't.
The distinction of literal from figurative language, at bottom, is the distinction between standard and nonstandard usage, with the intriguing proviso that the nonstandard usages of figurative language (often called "turns of phrase," where the "turn" in question is precisely the veering away from standard usage) are, nonetheless, still communicative, still meaningful, still effective in various ways.
Any literal usage is susceptible to provocative figurative turns, and it is likewise quite easy to misrecognize a comfortable usage with a standard one and so to be less aware of the figurative force of the rhetoric we are using ourselves.
This is troubling sometimes, but we wouldn't really have it any other way since a great measure of our personal freedom is lodged in that slippage between standard and nonstandard but still meaningful and effective practice. (This is especially so if one takes seriously all the many works of critical theory which analogize the unconscious to language as in Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideology to language as in Karl Marx's commodity fetishism and Roland Barthes's mythology, identification and disidentification to performative language as in Judith Butler, all political action to the same as in some appealing construals of Hannah Arendt.)
Anyway, this slippage means, among other things, that we can never manage to fix or stabilize the proper reception of our discourse as a price of the desirable openness of creative expressivity. This basic vulnerability to error, to being misunderstood, to being misrecognized is as fundamental to an understanding of human finitude as is our mortality, which -- yes, my darling technophiliacs, even in a world of fantastic future therapies -- will linger on in an abiding vulnerability to disease, accident, violence, trauma.
But this slippage doesn't mean we are entirely at sea, exactly, since even figurative usages often have trackable histories ("love is a rose" is nonstandard and yet rather conventional, "the mouth of the river" is so conventional by now that the figure has been literalized), genres (we distinguish schemes from tropes, associative, catachretic, and paradoxical turns), characteristic mechanisms (the four master tropes -- metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, as per Vico and later Burke -- rely on four basic modes of association: substitution, contiguity, containment, reversal). We do have tools available to us to help navigate and analyze the curiously changeable proprieties that articulate the figurative dimension of language without ever managing to govern it.
To return to the point from yesterday's post that prompted Jonathan's question: Since I know well that technocentric discourse in general is an arena human beings will make habitual recourse to when they need to work through their hyperbolic fears and fantasies of agency -- impotence and omnipotence are the definitive discursive poles here -- and since I know well that there is no more basic move in this discursive bag of tricks than to "naturalize" or "domesticate" what is threatening in ongoing radical technoscientific change by rewriting it in the image of an orderly developmental narrative with a clear direction -- I should have been a bit more wary than I have been hitherto about the ease with which I trotted out the metaphor of "convergence" in my own discussions to simplify the complexity and offer reassurance in the face of the not exactly predictable shapes and impacts of emerging and palpably upcoming NBIC technoscientific change.
Jonathan Comments: I'm prompted to wonder if it's ever possible to use language in a way that doesn't promote some undesired iconography in some undesired way.
No, we can't.
The distinction of literal from figurative language, at bottom, is the distinction between standard and nonstandard usage, with the intriguing proviso that the nonstandard usages of figurative language (often called "turns of phrase," where the "turn" in question is precisely the veering away from standard usage) are, nonetheless, still communicative, still meaningful, still effective in various ways.
Any literal usage is susceptible to provocative figurative turns, and it is likewise quite easy to misrecognize a comfortable usage with a standard one and so to be less aware of the figurative force of the rhetoric we are using ourselves.
This is troubling sometimes, but we wouldn't really have it any other way since a great measure of our personal freedom is lodged in that slippage between standard and nonstandard but still meaningful and effective practice. (This is especially so if one takes seriously all the many works of critical theory which analogize the unconscious to language as in Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideology to language as in Karl Marx's commodity fetishism and Roland Barthes's mythology, identification and disidentification to performative language as in Judith Butler, all political action to the same as in some appealing construals of Hannah Arendt.)
Anyway, this slippage means, among other things, that we can never manage to fix or stabilize the proper reception of our discourse as a price of the desirable openness of creative expressivity. This basic vulnerability to error, to being misunderstood, to being misrecognized is as fundamental to an understanding of human finitude as is our mortality, which -- yes, my darling technophiliacs, even in a world of fantastic future therapies -- will linger on in an abiding vulnerability to disease, accident, violence, trauma.
But this slippage doesn't mean we are entirely at sea, exactly, since even figurative usages often have trackable histories ("love is a rose" is nonstandard and yet rather conventional, "the mouth of the river" is so conventional by now that the figure has been literalized), genres (we distinguish schemes from tropes, associative, catachretic, and paradoxical turns), characteristic mechanisms (the four master tropes -- metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, as per Vico and later Burke -- rely on four basic modes of association: substitution, contiguity, containment, reversal). We do have tools available to us to help navigate and analyze the curiously changeable proprieties that articulate the figurative dimension of language without ever managing to govern it.
To return to the point from yesterday's post that prompted Jonathan's question: Since I know well that technocentric discourse in general is an arena human beings will make habitual recourse to when they need to work through their hyperbolic fears and fantasies of agency -- impotence and omnipotence are the definitive discursive poles here -- and since I know well that there is no more basic move in this discursive bag of tricks than to "naturalize" or "domesticate" what is threatening in ongoing radical technoscientific change by rewriting it in the image of an orderly developmental narrative with a clear direction -- I should have been a bit more wary than I have been hitherto about the ease with which I trotted out the metaphor of "convergence" in my own discussions to simplify the complexity and offer reassurance in the face of the not exactly predictable shapes and impacts of emerging and palpably upcoming NBIC technoscientific change.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
What's Wrong With the Robot Cultists and their Scary (or Shiny) Singularity?
My friend Jim Fehlinger offered up this gem in the Comments:
I agree with every word Jim said.
For relevant Jeron Lanier, everybody should read, or re-read, his Half A Manifesto, which is the more or less canonical delineation of the "Cybernetic Totalism" Critique, as well as the pithy and provocative Lanier's Laws, and the down to earth discussion of Artificial Stupidity in his Salon interview. I'm not endorsing everything he says, but I cheerfully and gratefully affirm that am indebted to much of it.
Lanier often points to the terrible software design decisions that arise from programmer commitments to the larger religious "worldview" of Cybernetic Totalism. In his comment above, Jim points to the bad political decisions, the skewed priorities, the false frames, the pointless distractions, the odd emotional investments that arise from and are nourished by more general technocentric commitments to the religious worldview of Superlative Technology Discourse in its many variations (Singularity, Nanosanta, Technological Immortalism, and so on).
I know of people caught up in the Singularitarian variation of Superlative Technology Discourse (the variation I like to poke friendly fun at as "The Robot Cultists") who will earnestly declare as the very sign of their Seriousness that we must direct our attention away from the actually-existing problems of climate change and weapons proliferation and over-urbanization (which the urgent scholarship of Mike Davis, among others, has demonstrated to incubate global pandemics, install mass precarity, support vast rights violations, provoke social instability, and, I would add, inspire and invigorate compensatory mass fundamentalist social and political movements) to focus instead on the completely made-up "real" problem of the imminent arrival of a nonbiological entitative superintelligent being.
Not only is this just flabbergastingly awful and ugly and stupid in its own right, let's be honest, but it also plays into any number of already-existing neoliberal and neoconservative agendas (as I've rehearsed here on Amor Mundi so depressingly many times at this point: in its tendency to endorse anti-democratic technocratic elitism, in its tendency to reductive instrumentalizing formulations of human interest, in its reliance on "free market" and "spontaneist" formulations of progress and public interest, in its fixation on corporations as the principal actors of history and "development," in its uncritical acceptance of the terms of corporate-militarist competitive futurism, and so on), all the while it invigorates rhetorical frames that derange our capacity to talk sensibly about the actual politics of viral and recursive software, and the regulation and compensation of security and creativity facilitated by digital networks, and so on.
The repudiation of these facile worldviews (to which I am willing to extend the same tolerance that I am to any essentially religious worldview, but not one bit more) need have nothing in the least to do with the question whether one takes seriously the actual problems and promises inhering in emerging and palpably upcoming planetary technodevelopmental social struggle. Repudiating Superlative formulations it seems to me one is not less but more and better able to grasp the problems and promises of especially the legally and developmentally inter-implicated emerging NBIC technologies, so-called: Nanotechnologies (materials and techniques involving relatively controlled manipulations at the nanoscale, whether replicative or not), Biotechnologies (especially emerging biomedical interventions: genetic, prosthetic, modification and longevity medicine), Information Technologies (digital networked information and communication technologies, and social software), and Cognitive Technologies (prosthetic and neuropharmocological modifications of mood, memory, and perception, human-network interfaces, some intrusive marketing, pedagogical, and surveillance techniques).
Notice that I spoke just now of the "inter-implication" rather than the "convergence" of NBIC techs. I have come to realize that even that modest metaphorical conjuration of a technodevelopmental convergence (a ready-to-hand phrase I've used myself a hundred times) feeds the iconography of Superlativity and Singularity even as it feeds on the available iconography of Manifest Destiny and Natural Progress (that is to say, progress conceived as a wave some lucky people get to ride, rather than progress as a great democratic struggle and collective work). Even knowing full well that technodevelopment isn't the sort of thing that monolithically "does" anything at all, accumulating, dispersing, accelerating, converging, transcending, or what have you -- I still glibly dropped that "NBIC convergence" phrase without thinking, really, without thinking on what problematic premises and figures its intuitive plausibility and rhetorical effectiveness ultimately depended.
It is breathtaking how easy, how unconscious, how ubiquitous the temptations to and expressions of teleology, of transcendence, of apocalypse, of Superlativity seem to be when talk turns to the ongoing technodevelopmental derangement of human agency, individual and collective. This is exactly what we should expect, I suppose. It is a temptation that speaks to the most basic fears and fantasies of agency, of free and creative beings who understand their abiding vulnerability.
To the extent that we are trying to be technoprogressive in our politics -- that is to say, to the extent that our goal is to democratize planetary technodevelopmental social struggle, to distribute the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change fairly to all the stakeholders to that change, and to institute and maintain a scene of legitimate legible, planetary, informed and nonduressed consent to prosthetic and multicultural practices of self-creation -- then it seems to me we are well rid of the deranging seductions of Superlativity, reductionism, and elitism that seem to articulate so much technocentricity in general. Or, at the very least, we should encourage those whose own private perfections demand indulgence in such superlativity, reductionism, and elitism to privatize, to personalize, to aestheticize the particular pleasures and definitive limits that this indulgence enables them (rather than to confuse these esthetic or moral ends with instrumental or ethical ends, or worse attempt to commandeer the latter in the service of the former as fundamentalisms tend, hysterically, to do). For those who are interested in the topic, I offered up a preliminary and imperfect sketch of these different ends and their articulation in a properly democratic technoethics in a piece called Technoethical Pluralism.
A world of networked planetary multiculture that can avail itself of world-destroying technique demands this secular democratic political compromise else it can scarcely avoid destroying itself. In the terms that edify our Singularitarian friends far more than they edify me, I want to say that as an obfuscation of technodevelopmental policy discourse, as a distraction from urgent actually-existing priorities, and as an apologia for catastrophic neoliberal rationalizations, among many other faults, Singularitarian Discourse seems to be something like an existential risk itself -- at any rate, certainly it is more so than the "risk" of the Big Bad Robot Gods that so exercise the imaginations and attentions of those devoted to the discourse.
[T]he notion of AI is so ingrained in popular culture (and has been for so many years -- who doesn't know about R2D2 and C3PO these days, even if fewer remember HAL9000 or Robbie, and fewer still have ever heard about R. Daneel Olivaw or Adam Link?) that it's a cliche. So much so that it's hard to imagine anybody in the 21st century (even people over 60, or people in third-world countries who have seen American movies) thinking of AI as "weird" (as in Twilight Zone or X-Files weird). Everybody understands the cinematic convention of the talking metal man (or the talking plastic android, or the talking computer).
Klaatu barada nikto. If I only had a heart. You are the Kirk, the creator. Just what do you think you're doing, Dave? I have such a bad case of dust contamination. Danger, Will Robinson! There is another system!
The frustration (mine and, I presume, Dale's) is more complicated than that. It has to do with the narrowness and implausibility of an ideology or quasi-religion that Jaron Lanier has labeled "cybernetic totalism", q.v. It has to do with the putative paradisiacal or apocalyptic consequences of AI demanding, D*E*M*A*N*D*I*N*G immediate attention, resources, and backgrounding of all other concerns. It has to do with AI as a "mcguffin" for cultish group formation and guru-ish proclamations of certainty about where the world is headed. It has to do with the narrow and wrong-headed perpetuation of certain quite outmoded stereotypes, prejudices, and assumptions about what an AI would be like and how it would work, and about the nature of "intelligence" itself -- assumptions which have deep philosophical and political roots and implications.
I agree with every word Jim said.
For relevant Jeron Lanier, everybody should read, or re-read, his Half A Manifesto, which is the more or less canonical delineation of the "Cybernetic Totalism" Critique, as well as the pithy and provocative Lanier's Laws, and the down to earth discussion of Artificial Stupidity in his Salon interview. I'm not endorsing everything he says, but I cheerfully and gratefully affirm that am indebted to much of it.
Lanier often points to the terrible software design decisions that arise from programmer commitments to the larger religious "worldview" of Cybernetic Totalism. In his comment above, Jim points to the bad political decisions, the skewed priorities, the false frames, the pointless distractions, the odd emotional investments that arise from and are nourished by more general technocentric commitments to the religious worldview of Superlative Technology Discourse in its many variations (Singularity, Nanosanta, Technological Immortalism, and so on).
I know of people caught up in the Singularitarian variation of Superlative Technology Discourse (the variation I like to poke friendly fun at as "The Robot Cultists") who will earnestly declare as the very sign of their Seriousness that we must direct our attention away from the actually-existing problems of climate change and weapons proliferation and over-urbanization (which the urgent scholarship of Mike Davis, among others, has demonstrated to incubate global pandemics, install mass precarity, support vast rights violations, provoke social instability, and, I would add, inspire and invigorate compensatory mass fundamentalist social and political movements) to focus instead on the completely made-up "real" problem of the imminent arrival of a nonbiological entitative superintelligent being.
Not only is this just flabbergastingly awful and ugly and stupid in its own right, let's be honest, but it also plays into any number of already-existing neoliberal and neoconservative agendas (as I've rehearsed here on Amor Mundi so depressingly many times at this point: in its tendency to endorse anti-democratic technocratic elitism, in its tendency to reductive instrumentalizing formulations of human interest, in its reliance on "free market" and "spontaneist" formulations of progress and public interest, in its fixation on corporations as the principal actors of history and "development," in its uncritical acceptance of the terms of corporate-militarist competitive futurism, and so on), all the while it invigorates rhetorical frames that derange our capacity to talk sensibly about the actual politics of viral and recursive software, and the regulation and compensation of security and creativity facilitated by digital networks, and so on.
The repudiation of these facile worldviews (to which I am willing to extend the same tolerance that I am to any essentially religious worldview, but not one bit more) need have nothing in the least to do with the question whether one takes seriously the actual problems and promises inhering in emerging and palpably upcoming planetary technodevelopmental social struggle. Repudiating Superlative formulations it seems to me one is not less but more and better able to grasp the problems and promises of especially the legally and developmentally inter-implicated emerging NBIC technologies, so-called: Nanotechnologies (materials and techniques involving relatively controlled manipulations at the nanoscale, whether replicative or not), Biotechnologies (especially emerging biomedical interventions: genetic, prosthetic, modification and longevity medicine), Information Technologies (digital networked information and communication technologies, and social software), and Cognitive Technologies (prosthetic and neuropharmocological modifications of mood, memory, and perception, human-network interfaces, some intrusive marketing, pedagogical, and surveillance techniques).
Notice that I spoke just now of the "inter-implication" rather than the "convergence" of NBIC techs. I have come to realize that even that modest metaphorical conjuration of a technodevelopmental convergence (a ready-to-hand phrase I've used myself a hundred times) feeds the iconography of Superlativity and Singularity even as it feeds on the available iconography of Manifest Destiny and Natural Progress (that is to say, progress conceived as a wave some lucky people get to ride, rather than progress as a great democratic struggle and collective work). Even knowing full well that technodevelopment isn't the sort of thing that monolithically "does" anything at all, accumulating, dispersing, accelerating, converging, transcending, or what have you -- I still glibly dropped that "NBIC convergence" phrase without thinking, really, without thinking on what problematic premises and figures its intuitive plausibility and rhetorical effectiveness ultimately depended.
It is breathtaking how easy, how unconscious, how ubiquitous the temptations to and expressions of teleology, of transcendence, of apocalypse, of Superlativity seem to be when talk turns to the ongoing technodevelopmental derangement of human agency, individual and collective. This is exactly what we should expect, I suppose. It is a temptation that speaks to the most basic fears and fantasies of agency, of free and creative beings who understand their abiding vulnerability.
To the extent that we are trying to be technoprogressive in our politics -- that is to say, to the extent that our goal is to democratize planetary technodevelopmental social struggle, to distribute the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change fairly to all the stakeholders to that change, and to institute and maintain a scene of legitimate legible, planetary, informed and nonduressed consent to prosthetic and multicultural practices of self-creation -- then it seems to me we are well rid of the deranging seductions of Superlativity, reductionism, and elitism that seem to articulate so much technocentricity in general. Or, at the very least, we should encourage those whose own private perfections demand indulgence in such superlativity, reductionism, and elitism to privatize, to personalize, to aestheticize the particular pleasures and definitive limits that this indulgence enables them (rather than to confuse these esthetic or moral ends with instrumental or ethical ends, or worse attempt to commandeer the latter in the service of the former as fundamentalisms tend, hysterically, to do). For those who are interested in the topic, I offered up a preliminary and imperfect sketch of these different ends and their articulation in a properly democratic technoethics in a piece called Technoethical Pluralism.
A world of networked planetary multiculture that can avail itself of world-destroying technique demands this secular democratic political compromise else it can scarcely avoid destroying itself. In the terms that edify our Singularitarian friends far more than they edify me, I want to say that as an obfuscation of technodevelopmental policy discourse, as a distraction from urgent actually-existing priorities, and as an apologia for catastrophic neoliberal rationalizations, among many other faults, Singularitarian Discourse seems to be something like an existential risk itself -- at any rate, certainly it is more so than the "risk" of the Big Bad Robot Gods that so exercise the imaginations and attentions of those devoted to the discourse.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
A Quick Comment on "Intelligence" and Politics
This is adapted from a Comment of mine from the curiously ongoing conversation arising out of a post a few days back, Singularitarianism Makes Your Brains Fall Out:
Intelligence seems to me to be a matter of forming, grasping, and applying abstractions in ways that facilitate our various ends (instrumental, moral, esthetic, ethical, political, and so on). These ends are irreducibly plural, arise in irreducibly plural contexts, and are immensely dynamic and importantly unpredictable.
This makes the business of intelligence incomparably more complex than the things that pass for "intelligence" in much discourse on the topic.
Confronted with discussions of intelligence, and especially in technocentric versions of such discussions (technocentric means "'technology'-focussed"), I have noticed that if I substitute for what are claimed to be abstract considerations of "intelligence" in these discussions what amount instead to concrete considerations of "class advantage" or "incumbent privilege" (and the rhetoric through which these latter considerations are best expressed), well, it is really extraordinary how much clearer and just how different such discussions often suddenly become for me.
All this is certainly true where talk turns tediously to self-declared "geniuses" and gurus in marginal sub(cult)ures "charismatically" demanding attention, devotion, sometimes outright obedience and, usually, cash in exchange for their variously salvational efforts in the face of some Superlative technodevelopmental prediction or other (cybernetic immortality, cybernetic totalitarian overlords, nanoabundant paradise, nanogoo apocalypse, superhuman medical enhancement, bioengineered slave armies, and so on).
It reappears, to be sure, in much of the "serious" discourse of technocrats who discern (sometimes "reluctantly") the need for the "smart people" to solve dictatorially the complicated problems that beset everybody in an unprecedentedly complicated and quick-paced world (this "everybody" consisting presumably of mostly folks who are "less smart" than necessary to grasp these complications, these problems, or their solutions, too bad for them).
This politics of class, incumbency, aristocracy (usually in the self-appointed "meritocratic" variation favored by incumbents in nominally democratic societies) stealthily -- and possibly, for some, unconsciously -- invigorates an enormous amount of the various handwaving exercises of Superlative Technophiliacs enthusing about entitative artificial superintelligence or posthuman enhanced superintelligence.
Time and time again these discourses rely -- as they must, since they refer to non-existing or, er, "not-yet-existing," phenomena -- on figurative conjurations of "futural" ideal exemplars which are usually just absurd reductios of the various distorted and impoverished visions of what "intelligence" consists of that are affirmed by their technocentric advocates -- usually reductios of an intelligence conceived as a dull numbers-cruncher, or neoliberal market-fundamentalist "maximizer," or dot-eyed instrumentalist with no love or poetry in him, or a ruggedly individualistic atom in an asocial void, etc. etc. etc.
Against these retrofuturist rhetorics I would call everybody's attention once again, to the extraordinary distributed creative expressivity and networked collaborative problem solving intelligence of emerging peer-to-peer formations, the promising responsivenesses, responsibilities, diversities, resiliences, dynamisms of the intelligences facilitated by these formations. Against the Superlative corporate-militarist retro-futurisms with all their Monster Movie inconography (the lip-smacking desire and dread of the hyper-individualist cyborg superman savior gangster, the hysterical fear of the mob that re-emerges in the specter of clone armies-upload armies-viral software armies-nanotech goo overwhelming the earth, and so on), we find everywhere around us emerging, democratizing, even mainstreaming, Technoprogressive alternative iconography, online education, agitation, fundraising, and organizing, critical decentralized blogospheric pushback against consolidated-broadcast media formations, people-powered-politics, a burgeoning creative commons of freely accessible intellectual content, personal expression, solicitation of feedback, planetary communities and cultures.
Intelligence seems to me to be a matter of forming, grasping, and applying abstractions in ways that facilitate our various ends (instrumental, moral, esthetic, ethical, political, and so on). These ends are irreducibly plural, arise in irreducibly plural contexts, and are immensely dynamic and importantly unpredictable.
This makes the business of intelligence incomparably more complex than the things that pass for "intelligence" in much discourse on the topic.
Confronted with discussions of intelligence, and especially in technocentric versions of such discussions (technocentric means "'technology'-focussed"), I have noticed that if I substitute for what are claimed to be abstract considerations of "intelligence" in these discussions what amount instead to concrete considerations of "class advantage" or "incumbent privilege" (and the rhetoric through which these latter considerations are best expressed), well, it is really extraordinary how much clearer and just how different such discussions often suddenly become for me.
All this is certainly true where talk turns tediously to self-declared "geniuses" and gurus in marginal sub(cult)ures "charismatically" demanding attention, devotion, sometimes outright obedience and, usually, cash in exchange for their variously salvational efforts in the face of some Superlative technodevelopmental prediction or other (cybernetic immortality, cybernetic totalitarian overlords, nanoabundant paradise, nanogoo apocalypse, superhuman medical enhancement, bioengineered slave armies, and so on).
It reappears, to be sure, in much of the "serious" discourse of technocrats who discern (sometimes "reluctantly") the need for the "smart people" to solve dictatorially the complicated problems that beset everybody in an unprecedentedly complicated and quick-paced world (this "everybody" consisting presumably of mostly folks who are "less smart" than necessary to grasp these complications, these problems, or their solutions, too bad for them).
This politics of class, incumbency, aristocracy (usually in the self-appointed "meritocratic" variation favored by incumbents in nominally democratic societies) stealthily -- and possibly, for some, unconsciously -- invigorates an enormous amount of the various handwaving exercises of Superlative Technophiliacs enthusing about entitative artificial superintelligence or posthuman enhanced superintelligence.
Time and time again these discourses rely -- as they must, since they refer to non-existing or, er, "not-yet-existing," phenomena -- on figurative conjurations of "futural" ideal exemplars which are usually just absurd reductios of the various distorted and impoverished visions of what "intelligence" consists of that are affirmed by their technocentric advocates -- usually reductios of an intelligence conceived as a dull numbers-cruncher, or neoliberal market-fundamentalist "maximizer," or dot-eyed instrumentalist with no love or poetry in him, or a ruggedly individualistic atom in an asocial void, etc. etc. etc.
Against these retrofuturist rhetorics I would call everybody's attention once again, to the extraordinary distributed creative expressivity and networked collaborative problem solving intelligence of emerging peer-to-peer formations, the promising responsivenesses, responsibilities, diversities, resiliences, dynamisms of the intelligences facilitated by these formations. Against the Superlative corporate-militarist retro-futurisms with all their Monster Movie inconography (the lip-smacking desire and dread of the hyper-individualist cyborg superman savior gangster, the hysterical fear of the mob that re-emerges in the specter of clone armies-upload armies-viral software armies-nanotech goo overwhelming the earth, and so on), we find everywhere around us emerging, democratizing, even mainstreaming, Technoprogressive alternative iconography, online education, agitation, fundraising, and organizing, critical decentralized blogospheric pushback against consolidated-broadcast media formations, people-powered-politics, a burgeoning creative commons of freely accessible intellectual content, personal expression, solicitation of feedback, planetary communities and cultures.
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