More Geoengineering

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot. Jose Garcia wrote:

I don't think seeding the oceans with iron filings was ever a very respectable idea in the first place.

Still there is biochar which seems like a credible geoengineering strategy. And I think we're going to be forced to think about geoengineering at some stage because going zero carbon may not be enough.

Look. People need to start planting trees and region-appropriate home gardens, in addition to going zero carbon, regulating toxic materials and manufacturing processes to within an inch of their lives, and so on. Carbon isn't our only problem, given aquifer spoilage and soil erosion and the bursting of the bubble of the "miracle" of petrochemical input-intensive industrial agriculture. Inasmuch as biochar was already a pre-Columbian agricultural technique and most projects employing it today seem to be rather small scale, I am wondering whether "geoengineering" is really the right word to use to describe any effort at carbon-pollution remediation through local practice up-scaled (always only where region appropriate) via education, regulation, price incentivization, and so on.

I know enough about organic gardening to know that people who want to believe in technofixes consistently and even systematically underestimate the resilience of even devastated ecosystems that are finally being cared for rather than mistreated, and I suspect that at least some talk of tipping points being crossed that force us "reluctantly" to accept the necessity of geoengineering interventions and nuclear archipelagos and so on ultimately express the failure of imagination one has come to expect of corporate-militarists more than anything else.

I disagree strongly if you are implying that seeding the oceans with iron fillings was never treated as a respectable idea by those who think such things are respectable in the first place and megaphone them endlessly and so distract us from more local and distributed and scalable strategies that are known to be effective but are less likely to be profitable for incumbents.

Although I don't know enough about every other geoengineering strategy "on offer" to suavely trot out all the dangers and limits and hyperbole occasioned by each one (as neither unfortunately do the overabundant majority of those who handwave most enthusiastically about these strategies to the cost of sense) I do know that skipping from one scam to another to another as each is exposed as hype while the more difficult work of gathering reliable data, implementing piecemeal regulation and price incentivization, better design practices, general education, facilitation of organic, local, wholesome, carbon neutral practices at the proper scale and intensity can be done but likely won't be done while greedheads are endlessly jerking off to their effort-deferring guilt-denying profit-making authority-retaining fantasies of "greening" corporate-militarism via geoengineering isn't exactly the best idea.

Actually, as I have said before, I don't rule out geoengineering interventions in principle -- even though, as with most things futurological, many of these are entirely fantastic daydreams of megascale engineering that don't really connect up at the level of data or do-ability with the urgency of environmental problems at hand nor with accomplishments of more local strategies with track records of actual successes that could be effectively scaled via regulation, education, facilitation and so on.

My whole point is that I am skeptical about geoengineering, skeptical of those who prefer such interventions over others, skeptical of the hyperbolic discourse through which they are advocated, skeptical of their occasional genuflections to "reluctance" and "skepticism" that never has any impact on their actual advocacy.

I think it is not a co-incidence that corporate-militarism would shift from a very public denialism about environmental problems directly to a very public advocacy of geoengineering solutions to environmental problems.

The continuity between these two positions of incumbents maintaining control through extractive/industrial/capital-intensive/broadcast formations possibly matters more than the discontinuity between the two of first denying and then admitting the existence and scale and seriousness of environmental problems.

This isn't to attribute any bad motives to Jose at all, by the way, since he may well be as aware and concerned about the damage done by denialist discourse and futurological technofix-hype discourse as I am here, but just wants to ensure that the widest possible range of strategies remain on the table. I would agree with that enthusiastically.

The truth is that I expect the inherent drama of geoengineering interventions together with their likely comparative profitability to incumbents will ensure that these interventions will always draw more than their share of serious attention and consideration, whether they warrant it or not, and so we needn't worry so much about their neglect as about their preferential treatment despite the scale and intensity of their impacts in ill-understood environmental systems on which we depend for our lives.

Yet Another Geoengineering Technofix Fails to Live Up to the Hype

Oh noes, futurologists, better get your rocketships ready to escape to your nanotech treasure cave in the asteroid belt, asap!

Futurological Blah Blah

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot: A couple of days ago I posted a little survey of a few very recent or soon to be voted on administrative and legislative decisions that represent promising puzzle-pieces in an emerging story of a slow liberalization of the failed policies of the generation-long racist puritanical War on (some) Drugs.

The failed policies are real, the people they have failed are real, the liberalizations are real, the struggles, the education, the agitation, the organizing underlying the liberalization are real.

In the Moot, "Mike" -- who warns me that he "may be too transhumanist/technophilic for your liking" -- offers the following comment:

I suspect in the next 10 to 20 years we will see a lot of progress in this area. New neurotechnologies like deep TMS and ultrasonic neuromodulation may allow non-invasive targeting of reward related regions of the brain. This could conceivably lead to cures for many addictions. So drugs may merely become superfluous and unnecessary.

By the way, "Mike" also says some nice complimentary things about Amor Mundi, whatever our disagreements which, it goes without saying, is appreciated, but I am skipping over to the actual substance of his comment which, as he feared, is not at all to my liking. And, again as he suspected would be the case, it is his "transhumanism" and "technophilia" that is the problem.

Let me put it this way.

A meteor could hit the earth and "end" the problem of addiction for everybody on earth for good, too.

It really could.

But, to my mind, surely, it contributes less than little to the serious work of policy-making or activism that would facilitate more sensible and just outcomes where consensual (or not) private (or not) use and regulation of variously unhealthy (or not) variously addictive (or not) substances are concerned, however, to waste too much time pondering the whole meteor strike scenario.

Or, at any rate, it is almost always wrongheaded to file the time one spends thinking that way (which might, after all, be quite as edifying as the time one spends reading a good book or praying or masturbating, all of which have their places in the lives of those whose private perfections make recourse to them) under the heading of "serious thinking about actual problems that need thinking about" here and now.

With respect, here is what I hear "Mike" saying to me at the key point in his comment:

Blah blah futurology "may allow" more blah blah futurology hence "could conceivably lead to" still more blah blah futurology and "so" dramatically still more blah blah futurology.

As an exercise, imagine it is 10 to 20 years ago and Mike's counterpart (there were many, there always are) offered up some comparable futurological thought experiment that was also logically possible, I suppose, in the abstract, certainly enough to sell a story, this or that promising technique in a lab somewhere or idea of a technique he might have read about in OMNI magazine could, with a little luck and linearity appear on the scene and scramble the terrain and circumvent all the problems that presently define it. But either that idealized outcome didn't come to fruition at all, as these things almost never really do, after all, or let's say, something like a qualified variation of the idealized outcome did indeed "arrive" after a fashion, through the developmental glass darkly, through the inevitable complex socio- cultural- regulatory- promotional- engineering- economic- political- emotional- cluster-fuck of a trajectory that nobody could really sketch out back then, the ineradicable interminable stakeholder struggle that came to actually distribute the costs, risks, and benefits of its stepwise fraught fruition, in ways that articulated the substance of the outcome in ways that have little connection to the idealized outcome..

The futurological enthusiast talking then like "Mike" is talking now contributed less than little to the clarity or possibility or justice available in the vicissitudes of that struggle. Or, if he did contribute some such measure here or there, it was almost entirely accidentally so, accidentally in the same way that any poet or politician or well-placed prostitute could have done.

And worse than that -- in my view -- that futurological counterpart likely did a lot of abiding definitive damage instead, amidst the sparks of incidental insight, confusing idealized outcomes with real developmental struggles and sensible deliberation about actually-existing costs, risks, and benefits before us.

The fact is that the worst variations of futurological discourse (which I do not attribute to "Mike" explicitly, nor to most "transhumanist-identified" and "singularitarian" dupes of Robot Cultism, but they really should be made to better understand the company they are keeping) were media hype-notists and disasterbators whomping up irrationality to attract attention to themselves or salesmen whomping up exuberance to get at the money of their marks. We are reaping the whirlwind of corporate capitalism's smarmy smart guys and stooges right here right now.

Futurology is the hyperbolic quintessence of neoliberal discourse: Hyperbolizing derangements of sense in the service of elite or incumbent advantage, peddled as neutral cost-benefit analysis.

Foresight is all very well, indeed, it is indispensable, but when would-be developmental deliberation and planning assumes the tonalities of prophesy or salesmanship or substitutes abstract projection for proximate substance you can be sure that it is an explicit racket, more often than not, or, more innocently but quite as terrible, it is a confused and disavowed engagement with contemporary social and cultural problems displaced onto a symbolic terrain denominated as "the future."

What's Wrong With "Transhumanism"?

This is my latest of countlessly many efforts to date to characterize succinctly my criticism of the so-called transhumanist "movement," "ideology," "program," whatever it is. This one was written in response to a press query. You would be surprised how often I get such questions, I think usually from would-be journalists or perhaps grad students sniffing around for some writing angle. As always happens in such efforts, this version of my critique emphasizes some things, de-emphasizes others, captures some things nicely pithily, misses other things entirely, but since I cannot know what if anything will come of it, I figured I'd post it here at any rate so that the minutes of effort it represents aren't wasted entirely. This time the questioner also wanted to know how "technoprogressivism" differed from "transhumanism," possibly fancying some juicy sectarian squabble between weird futurological gurus might be in play. If nothing else I hope I managed to disabuse him of that.

People mean different things by "transhumanism," both those who sympathize or even identify with it, and those who disapprove or even ridicule what goes on it its name. I use the term "transhumanism" myself to deploy critiques of a complex of overlapping techno-utopian technodevelopmental attitudes and programs, all of them anti-democratizing in their primary impact, in my view:

[1] Transhumanism arises out of a familiar strain of Enlightenment thinking that tends to a distortive mechanistic reductionism and un(der)critical technophilia, a strain that has met with criticisms since it first emerged both from Romantic (and other) critics of Enlightenment but also from different quarters within Enlightenment as well;

[2] It activates and exaggerates the familiar irrational passions of instrumental rationality (dread of impotence and lust for omnipotence in particular) especially in moments of disruptive change;

[3] It substitutes for the pragmatism of a secular democratic technodevelopmental vision of collaborative problem solving and consensual self-determination a more faithful "transcendental" vision aspiring after personal superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance -- this being a superficially "technicized" and hyper-individualized appropriation of omnipredicated Divinity, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence -- a vision that is conceptually confused and usually terribly deranging of sensible technodevelopmental deliberation at the worst possible historical moment;

[4] It affirms a politics of biomedical "enhancement" that in valuing a parochial "perfectionism" over a consensual diversity of lifeways amounts to eugenicism;

[5] It endorses elite-technocratic circumventions of stakeholder deliberation in matters of technoscientific change (especially worrisome given the tendency to eugenicism), usually justified with the familiar anti-democratic alibi that "accelerating change" is ill-understood by everyday people affected by it (of course any characterization of technodevelopment as monolithically accelerating is patently false, and often, I think, is little more than a description of the catastrophic social instability provoked by neoliberal financialization of the global corporate-militarist economy as experienced by the relative beneficiaries of that instability, that is to say, by the mostly white, mostly male, mostly well-off, mostly well-educated, North Atlantic consumers who identify in the main as "transhumanists");

[6] It is relying ever more conspicuously on a discourse of existential risk (an analog to and exacerbation of reactionary "war-on-terror"-discourse) and geo-engineering response that conduces especially to the benefit of incumbency over democracy, the corporate-military-industrial-broadcast complex over emerging insurgent p2p-formations;

[7] It substitutes for the politics of democratizing social struggle amidst a diversity of stakeholders over new and actually-emerging technoscientific changes a dangerously inapt politics of sub(cult)ural identity, a movement politics mobilizing personal and shared-group identification with particular idealized (often incoherent) technodevelmental outcomes designated "the future," organized by dis-identification with actually existing planetary peers in their diversity;

[8] It is constituted in its organizational substance by an archipelago of inter-related so-called "think-tanks" and membership organizations supported by fandom subcultures, many of which are disturbingly indistinguishable from cults with all that this implies in the way of social alienation, manic PR and hyperbolizing rhetoric to attract attention rather than contribute to sense, criticisms misconstrued and attacked as defamation, and the whole banal bestiary of authoritarian hierarchy from True Believers to would-be gurus peddling pseudo-science.

These critiques are overlapping, but not seamlessly so, and one will find "transhumanist-identified" people who will represent better or worse targets for various combinations of these, as you will also find different levels of awareness and understanding among them about the entailments between these critiques.

It is true that for better or for worse I have personally become associated with the term "technoprogressive," but when I hear talk of "technoprogressive resistance to transhumanism" it seems especially important to me that you grasp that "technoprogressive" as far as I have ever been concerned is just a shorthand for the more gawky, awkward phrase "conventionally progressive, democratizing politics focused on questions of technoscientific change." It is not, properly so-called, some rival ideology to "transhumanism." Indeed, many "transhumanists" have appropriated the "technoprogressive" label themselves as a stealthy PR designation of some versions of the "transhumanist program" and so I can't say with confidence that the term is a proper placeholder for resistance to "transhumanist" silliness in any case.

I am personally interested in a potentially democratizing confluence of p2p-formations and an emerging planetary environmentalist politics as a way of overcoming the postwar impasse of corporate-militarist (neoliberal/neoconservative) Washington Consensus global hegemony. Also, I am interested (and, not to put too fine a point on it, enormously worried) about the planetary dissemination of non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medicines in a world of precarious status/labor, fearing an anti-democratic imposition of experimental subjection in the service of elite "enhancement" rather than a progressive politics of informed, nonduressed consensual prosthetic self-determination. Surely what is wanted is an equitable sustainable consensual technoscientific planetary multiculture.

This perspective puts me at odds with so-called "transhumanists" most of the time, who either disapprove of this emphasis, or who have nothing to contribute to its accomplishment while at once offering up endless confusions that befuddle the proper work of democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle on which its progressive accomplishment entirely depends.

But I cannot pretend that my "technoprogressive" vantage (one among many that are possible) provides me a rival ideology, program, or subculture with which to confront organized "transhumanists" on their preferred terms. It doesn't.

Is Obama the Face of Ongoing p2p Democratization?

It is a commonplace to point out the ways in which the Obama Presidential campaign depended on p2p formations for much of its success. It is customary -- and quite correct -- to say that Obama depended on the extraordinary fundraising of millions of aggregated small donations as well as the circulation of images and excitement about his vast rallies to acquire and parlay the early momentum without which he would likely scarcely have seemed a viable candidate as compared to Clinton or Edwards according to Establishment media pundits and incumbent partisan figures and so on.

We can only wonder how many millions more were inspired by the words of Obama's "Yes We Can" speech through their contact with its transformation by will.i.am into the now iconic song and video that proliferated deliriously via YouTube and hundreds of thousands of large and small blogs like this one, rather than by their direct or broadcast contact with the original speech itself.

And it is also true that Obama's Presidential ethos took on the coloration of p2p in ways that spectacularly amplified its force, from his insistence that his campaign was not about him but about us all, that change is a collective and participatory process, that we are the change we are looking for, to his pragmatic insistence that Washington must be made more transparent, responsive, collaborative.

But it is also quite striking to observe the ways in which the Obama Administration continues to mobilize peer-to-peer formations to implement its agenda as well now that it is in power, especially given Obama's spectacular popularity as compared with the Congress that must partner with the Administration to materialize Obama's policy goals.

Take a look at this page from Obama's Organizing for America: Take the Pledge.

Notice that signing the pledge provokes a series of ever more specific solicitations of effort, weaves you ever more deeply into a distributed organizational effort to facilitate the Administration's agenda.

It's fairly breathtaking, actually, not only in its sophistication, but also -- at least as a possibility worth contemplating -- as a diversion of Netroots energy and intelligence directly into the Obama apparatus.

I signed the Pledge and would urge sympathetic readers to follow the link and sign as well, but I will admit that my excitement was tempered by a few questions.

Even if you agree with Obama's agenda, or at any rate agree that fighting for his agenda is the best way we can apply the lion's share of our energies right now the better to open up possibilities for even more radical changes that the center-left Obama himself might not approve (which is my own position), there are real questions about what it means for the Executive branch to take up and to some extent appropriate the forms and also the energies of Netroots agitation and organizing in this way.

Does this amount to a powerful democratization of the American Executive? Does this render the Executive more beholden and accountable to the people, more directly expressive of popular will? Does this threaten a domestication of the insurgent and critical force of p2p democratization? Is there a worry that we might be MovingOn from MoveOn, peer to peer, in ways we might later come to regret?

Consider the ways in which Organizing for America differs from Accountability Now, a conspicuously more familiar Netroots campaign, conjoining figures from Daily Kos, Firedoglake, OpenLeft, ColorOfChange, Blog PAC and MoveOn.org together with figures from Netroots congenial forces like SEIU and the United Steelworkers to recruit and support progressive leaders and candidates for primary challenges to those Democratic and other incumbents who fail to reflect the progressive aspirations of their constituencies.

To what extent are these two formations complementary and to what extent competitive? Do they represent different faces for ongoing p2p democratization (in the United States at any rate)?

For me these questions take us into deeper perplexities and provocations. Can partisan organization and actual governance be democratized via the internalization of p2p formations and thereby be rendered more essentially progressive in their work, or are professional campaign apparatuses and administrative functionaries an inherently conservative force in society with the consequence that proper p2p democratization should remain a kind of abiding external check on their susceptibility to rationalization, corruption, incumbency, inertia?

Notice that we might decide that these professional formations are indeed in some important measure inherently inertial and conservative and yet still view them as indispensable to the maintenance of legitimate rule of law and the accomplishment of social justice on which the scene of informed nonduressed consent depends for its legibility and force and on which, in turn, democracy itself depends.

The ongoing and emerging forces of p2p-democratization seem to me to exacerbate the paradoxical inter-dependence of disruptive progress, diverse democratic expressivity, and legitimate equitable governance on one another while at once they endlessly undermine and co-construct one another in various measures in their play in the ongoing social struggle of, by, and for peers in public of which democracy actually consists in its substance.

As I said, I did sign the pledge over at Organizing for America, and I do cheerfully urge my readers to do the same. And I am also excited by the Accountability Now project and suspect I'll be giving them money and drawing attention to their issues here and elsewhere. It remains to be seen just how and how easily these ramifications of the Netroots expression of p2p-democratization will reconcile in theory, however, for now at least, they are managing nicely enough, so far, in practice.

Wired Tired Mired Dired

The Down Jones closed at 6,763 today. I wonder if the superlative technocentrics and Robot Cultists will still declare with undimmed fervor that their Singularity Is Just Around the Corner? I do hope they aren't unlucky enough to live in any of the parts of the United States where it is snowing, since these days that inevitably means infrastructure failure here at the pinnacle of high-tech just this side of techno-transcension. Perhaps they can step off the Holodek, pop a superlongevity pill, drop in from the nanobotic utility fog interior of their perch on the L-5 torus, and take a flight on the Concorde over to explain to my impoverished intelligence and imagination why my strong skepticism (to put it politely) about the "inevitable future" of robotic techno-immortalization under the warm embrace of the superintelligent robot god is so obviously unfounded all the while clucking their tongues and rolling their eyes at my ignorance of science.

It pays to remember that at the same time the techno-utopian "digirati" were breathless with excitement about the Extropian transhumanists (No death! No taxes! Libertopia uber alles!) they were meanwhile witheringly dismissing as prescientific emotionalists and ignoramuses and negative nellies and "fashionably nonsensical" relativists and all the rest of that tired jazz anybody who questioned their "Long Boom" theology, their embrace of Enron and the rest of the Ponzi schemers of the "New Economy" or who asked on the basis of what exactly their "Dow 40g, Man!" checks were presumably being cashed.

Lest this post be misinterpreted as a depressive dirge denying the present its real chance for positive change, I want to point out that the futurological hype of the Robot Cultists is and has always been the furthest thing from actual hope or actual science or actual sense. The futurological congress has always been fueled in the main by a witch's brew of social alienation, deranging reductionism, loathing of bodily vulnerability, reactionary fears of historical contingency and of worldly lifeway variation, and no small exhibition of the authoritarian tastes either for giving orders or for taking them.

Right about now, a proliferation of peer-to-peer formations, collaborative citizen expressivity, problem-solving, criticism, agitation, and organizing, together with the transformational Obama Administration that peer-to-peer democratization has birthed and now facilitates and pushes on has unleashed a rising wave of reasonable workable progressive intelligence and imagination into this moment of history. No theology of transcensional new age singularity babble. No would-be priestly authorities or gurus claiming to dictate the "will" of History or Reason to acquiescent consumers. No, it is democracy that is taking up the real work of technodevelopmental social struggle to solve humanity's shared problems, to enable informed, nonduressed prosthetic self-determination (where "prosthetics" equally encompass what pass for medical therapies and what pass for "lifestyle" choices), driven by and accountable to ever more of the stakeholders to change, demanding ever more forcefully that the costs, risks, and benefits of change reflect the stakes of the diversity of peers with whom we are making the world we share. We are well rid of the self-appointed "smartest guys in the room," the boys-with-their-toys, the futurological fraudsters, the ponzi schemers, the wired digirati and superficial self-help salesmen and design gurus, the superlative ideologues with the Keys to History in their hands and dollar signs in their eyes.

Democracy doesn't need digirati, and moralizing fundamentalist movements, whether explicitly religious (as with American Christianists and comparable Talibanists with their attendant charismatic priests and warlords) or notionally secularized and technicized (as with superlative techno-utopians, market fundamentalists, and Robot Cultists with their attendant charismatic gurus and technocratic elites) have no abiding part in the force of ongoing planetary peer-to-peer democratization and consensual lifeway polyculture.

Sasha, 1996-2009

My partner and I celebrated our seventh anniversary this month, but neither of us really approve of Hallmark Holidays and we didn't make a big deal out of it. I had papers to grade anyway, and Eric was doing work from the computer in his home office as well. I only mention it today because of another anniversary connected to the first that became sadly salient yesterday afternoon.

Eric and I moved into the little Rockridge bungalow where we still live today after we'd been together for a year, and that move was the occasion for a different unholy union (apart from our own, I mean). Each of us had chosen to care for a feral cat from the SFSPCA as a companion. Eric had chosen Sasha seven years before we met and by the time I entered the picture they were an incredibly tight-knit little family.

I say that Eric chose Sasha, but the story is that Sasha chose Eric, pretty much leaping into his arms unbidden with his motor running like mad the moment he set eyes on Eric, and this after exhibiting indifference to hostility to pretty much everybody else who had given him a glance up to that point. Sasha never veered from that assessment of Eric a day of his life. I have never seen such monomaniacal devotion from a cat in my life, it was incredibly sweet and a little bonkers.

I chose my own feral disaster area, Sarah, after Eric and I met. At that point I had been mourning the loss of my companion Rodent (the awful name has a dumb story attached to it that we can skip), who had been a kitten in the last litter of a family cat from childhood (Grasshopper, daughter of Cleo), and who had lived with me the whole decade I lived in Atlanta, lived with me there through well over a dozen moves and who knows how many friends and boyfriends and so on during the times of my adventuring, moving with my partner of the time Jules (still very good friends, he's living in Switzerland now) from Georgia to California when the time came for grad school at Berkeley. It's amazing what banisters our animals are as we climb the steep stairs.

Rodent died cuddled next to me while I slept Christmas Eve, 2001, in the big apartment overlooking Dolores Park in the City I rented at the time with two friends, both of whom were home for the holidays thus leaving me alone in that echoing warehouse of a place at the worst possible time. I always regretted very much that Eric never had the chance to meet Rodent, and I also regretted that Eric's Sasha -- who had a perfect, uncanny physical resemblance to my desperately missed Rodent -- wanted nothing to do with me at all.

As I said, Eric and Sasha were a pretty tight-knit unit of many years when I entered the scene. Eric's a rather solitary person, like I am, and Sasha was not at all used to intrusions. Early on, when I would come to Eric's place Sasha would leap to the top of his ratty, ragged, ill-smelling green-carpet tower and stare at me with unblinking fixity for hours with the most predatory stare imaginable. My territorial incursions were not appreciated. My alien smell was anathema. My efforts at cooing and friendly pats were impertinences beyond bearing.

When Eric and I found our bungalow for rent through a friend, the place was so charming, the street so sweet, the price so right we just made the leap, and it felt like one -- not only because we both have fairly cautious natures and hadn't been together for that long, really, but also because we simply couldn't imagine what it would be like to weave our two crazy-cat families into a crazy-quilt that wouldn't be in tatters within days.

Our Sarah is a plump owl-eyed girl with a Hitler mustache, but she is far from as intimidating as that sounds. She has a bird in her head where her brain should be, for one thing. Leaves tracked in from outside are well-matched antagonists for her ferocity. Her battle hisses and trills are so adorable, Eric and I sometimes try to provoke her to irritation just because she makes such a cute spectacle of herself when she is enraged. Like Sasha, she was plucked up by the SFSPCA from Golden Gate Park, her mother and brothers and sisters all dead, and she nearly the same. When I brought her home, Sarah still had a terrific gash in her neck from some bird of prey trying to make lunchmeat of her. For the first years of her life she was completely skittish and spastic. And Sasha, as I have said, was a grumpy, jealous, and obsessively territorial beast.

To put it plainly, Eric and I were scared to death to introduce them. It was possibly the most flabbergasting thing I ever saw when Sasha, upon meeting Sarah in our new home, confounded every expectation and scenario we had spun, and was instead instantly cowed into submission by our little girl, giving ground to her in everything she asked for days and days.

For Sasha, Sarah was some deus ex machina. For Sarah, Sasha was at most a mild amusement. I'm not entirely sure that she grasped the fact that we had moved into a new home at all, rather than simply moving through a locked door in the old place to a new wing. Sarah's extreme blank stupidity makes her the most unflappable and stoical creature within miles. When Eric and I were playing the game of choosing who would play each of us in the movie version of our lives, we chose for Sarah a bag of mixed dried beans.

Within a few weeks, Sasha had rectified the initial power imbalance between them, and had come to an accommodation with me (especially since Eric and I decided I would be the sole food-slave to get in his good graces). We sometimes had the feeling that however devoted the cats remained to us, they represented for one another the only real people in the house. We humans were pawns selectively deployed in elaborate politics we could scarcely understand. The territories they had staked out between them were palpably demarcated, mutually respected, but seemed to include contested zones for which they would skirmish through scent-marking rituals that they would impose on table and chair legs and on doorways and so on literally for hours and hours on end, patiently roving through the rooms, doing their grim work and undoing the work of the other, day after day. Sarah and Sasha were incredibly real for one another, and they were very contented in their surreal shared cat world. At night, after we had gone to bed, they would call to one another and you could hear them chasing each other downstairs, galloping on their cat-feet, playing like lunatics.

It really is a hard thing to try to convey what a sweet and charming cat Sasha was. He showed these aspects of himself to so few. With strangers he was standoffish at best, slinking off to hide under a bed when guests were here, and greeting them with what was almost inevitably called a "banshee howl" or "Nazgul shriek" once he grew impatient that they had lingered too long in his home. You may laugh, but words cannot convey the truly unearthly uncanny sound he could emit when he was unhappy. That jagged nails across a thousand chalkboards iceberg tearing into the steel of the Titanic deranged dinosaur menacing some distant lemur ancestor sound would make every hair on your body prick at its pore like an ice-cold electrocution.

Sasha scared everybody, animal, vegetable, mineral. Cat lovers were especially offended at Sasha's indifference to their earnest ministrations and aggression at their attendance -- it felt like a personal failing to be found wanting by Sasha, and everybody but Eric was found wanting. I am not exaggerating when I say that I personally felt less accomplished in the award of my Ph.D. (well, face it, having Arnold Schwarzenegger's signature on your diploma makes it feel a bit like a novelty item, like a whoopee cushion or something) than I did after a half decade of what psychologist Carl Rogers would call the offer of "unconditional positive regard" that Sasha grew to love me and let me in to the charmed circle of his care, second only to Eric. Those last couple of years Sasha would let me pick him up in my arms and would purr and nuzzle my nose and deign to let his forehead be kissed. These were scenes unavailable to the wider world, precious beyond description.

Like many feral cats, especially male ones, Sasha was plagued all his life through with medical problems, especially digestive issues. He was never an easy cat to care for. He had periodic crises, and then manic bouts of pure punk behavior in the recuperative aftermath. He had been eating less than usual for weeks and walking a bit stiffly lately. He was as bright eyed and spunky and affectionate as ever with us, and we would give his fur a rueful brush and joke that he was getting to be an old man.

While I was away teaching on Tuesday, a sudden crisis sent him in his kitty carrier to the pet hospital down the street. We spent an anxious couple of days playing phone tag and hearing that the good doctors were struggling to stabilize him enough in the first place to administer the tests to determine what was happening with him. Thursday I lectured on formal logic while the minute hand of the clock tapped toward the number which I knew would trigger Eric's call to determine whether or not Sasha should be put to sleep to end his pain and fear in some strange place among strangers.

I hadn't had a chance to say goodbye and had scarcely been able to focus on anything for days. Actually, the news seemed better than we expected and we were able to bring Sasha home with some antibiotics. Friday night he collapsed again. We were told he was suffering from pancreatitis. He spent a night sleeping with Eric all to himself in the guest room downstairs, to his utter delight. He had a last long day at the home he had loved for half his life, cozied up to his favorite heating grate behind the living room chair while we scratched his head for hours.

He was a terrible mess, though, unable to eat and stiff with pain, but just as sweet faced and bright brained as ever. The doctors declared him beyond healing and to be suffering in a way that would only get worse the longer it went on, and we put him to sleep in a blinding white room with an evil needle to a shaved patch of skin on his back leg. I held his soft little paw pad and rubbed his chin and he was sweet as an angel when he vanished from the world, his clear eyes wide and kind for me the whole time. I hope my finger on his chin smelled like home.

Nobody can know like Eric does, and like I do, what we have lost in losing Sasha, what we miss without our grumpy, sociopathic, sweet little punk man around anymore. This is dedicated to him.

Argumentative Writing Handouts and Guidelines

Over the years teaching argumentative writing classes for undergraduates at Berkeley and elsewhere I have accumulated a number of general guidelines, workshopping templates, peer-editing worksheets and so on, some of which I have presented in teaching seminars, or which have circulated informally in bits and pieces, some online, others as smudged samizdat. Occasionally (and weirdly often lately) I get requests for copies of this material from former students who have gone on to teach themselves or who think they might apply in different contexts (organizational mediation and facilitation, that sort of thing), or from colleagues who remember some presentation I delivered who knows when, or what have you. So, anyway, I am publishing some of the material I get requests for here, just so that they are readily available for anybody who asks me for them. Another, slightly longer piece is forthcoming, but I want to edit it a bit first, and since I'm off to teach it will have to wait, come to think of it. But, anyway, the last few posts have been different enough from the usual in tone and substance that I thought I should explain why I put them here. Perhaps some will interest you despite the change of pace, but come what may, I'll be back to the usual technodevelopmental social struggle, corporate-militarist critique, and centaur softcore you have come to expect soon enough.

THESIS WORKSHOP

Every argumentative paper you write for our course must have a thesis. A thesis is a claim. It is a statement of the thing your paper is trying to show your own readers about a text you have read. Very often, the claim will be simple enough to express in a single sentence, and it will usually appear early on in the paper to give your readers a clear sense of the project of your paper. A good thesis is a claim that is strong. For our purposes, the best way to define a strong claim is to say it is a claim for which you can imagine an intelligent opposition. It is a claim that you actually feel you need to argue for, rather than a very obvious sort of claim or a report of your own reactions to a text (which you don't have to argue for at all). Remember, when you are producing a reading about a complex literary text like a novel, a poem, or a film the object of your argument will be to illuminate the text, to draw attention to some aspect of the work you think that the text is accomplishing.

Once you have determined the detail or problem or element in a text that you want to draw your reader's attention to and argue about, your opposition will likely consist of those who would focus elsewhere because they don't grasp the importance of your focus, or who would draw different conclusions than you do from your own focus.

The thesis names your paper's task, its project, its object, its focus. As you write your papers, it is a very good idea to ask yourself these questions, from time to time: Does this quotation, does this argument, does this paragraph directly support my thesis in some way? If it doesn't you should probably delete it, because this probably means you have gotten off track. If you are drawn repeatedly away from what you have chosen as your thesis, ask yourself whether or not this signals that you really want to argue for some different thesis.

THESIS WORKSHOP EXERCISE ONE:

Brainstorm. Take a sheet of paper and in roughly ten minutes write down a dozen or so claims you can make about your chosen text. Don't worry about whether these claims are "deep" or whether they are "interesting," just write down claims that you think are true about the text.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

Either in individual consultation with your instructor or in small peer groups: Once the time is up, read over your claims. Eliminate claims that are not really about the text at all. For example, eliminate claims that say the text is "good," or "correct," or "effective" -- since these are really claims about the way you react to the text rather than claims about the text itself. Eliminate claims that say the text is "wrong," or "incorrect," or "ineffective" since, again, these are really claims about you, or they are claims that will lead you to discuss some more general topic (like politics, or history, or philosophy) rather than remaining focused on the text itself.

How many claims are left? Do any of these claims seem especially interesting to you? Can you imagine how you might argue for some of them in a conversation with somebody who disagreed with you about them? Do some of the claims really say the same thing in different ways? Do they suggest some other claims that might express your actual interests more closely?

THESIS WORKSHOP EXERCISE TWO:

You should now have a couple candidates or so for your thesis remaining. Now, for each of these possible thesis claims come up with the strongest or most obvious opposition to each thesis. For example, what would the opposite claim be to the one you are making?

Either in individual consultation with your instructor or in small peer groups: Read over these oppositions. Of course, you are likely to disagree with these claims since they are opposed to the ones you want to make yourself -- but can you imagine anyone actually making these oppositional claims about the text you have read?

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

If the opposition you have come up with seems vague or unintelligent or highly implausible this probably indicates that you need to sharpen up your own initial thesis. Is there a version of your thesis that is more focused and specific that retains the spirit of your claim but which provokes a more interesting opposition?

If the opposition you have written suddenly seems more compelling than the thesis itself this probably indicates that the stakes of your project, or possibly your whole take on the text itself, is different than you initially thought it was. Perhaps what you thought of as opposition to your thesis actually provides you with a stronger thesis and a new direction for your own paper.

Peer Editing Worksheet

A peer edit is not an itemized list of broad impressions, problems, or compliments, but should represent a sustained and sympathetic argumentative engagement with the text you are reading.

Editors, you should provide comments in the form of a short essay that clearly answers all or most of the following questions:

1. What is your own name?
2. What is the name of the papers author?
3. What is the title of the paper?
4. Did the paper satisfy the expectations raised in its title? **
5. In your own words, state what you think to be the thesis of the paper in one or two sentences.**
6. Was this thesis expressed clearly in the paper itself?
7. Is this a strong thesis?
8. Why or why not?
9. Can you imagine an intelligent opposition to this thesis?
10. What might this be?
11. Does the author remain true to this thesis through the paper? **
12. Were there important terms that needed stronger or clearer definitions? **
13. If yes, what were they?
14. Did the author use quotations from the text effectively to justify and illustrate their interpretations?
15. Did the author anticipate relevant objections to their various claims? **
16. Name an objection that either should have been addressed or which warranted a deeper exploration than the paper presently provides.
17. Did the author’s address of possible objections contribute to the strength of the case the paper is making, or distract from that case as you understood it?
18. Comment on the papers line of argument (its overall clarity, the smoothness of its transitions and substantiations, the order in which it developed its points, etc.). **
19. Comment on the papers prose (style, grammar, sentence construction, punctuation, etc.).
20. What qualities did you like best about the paper? **
21. What is the single most important aspect of the paper that the author should work on before handing it in?

Things to consider as you read the comments of your editors:

1. What were the problems or concerns that most preoccupied you about your paper before beginning this peer editing process?
2. Were those concerns addressed by your editors? [If not, demand that they are.]
3. For each editor, which comments were most helpful to you?
4. Which comments would be more helpful if they were clarified or amplified somewhat? [Ask for clarifications or examples or suggestions on these issues.]
You should note that these are the questions which guide my own readings of your papers, and that my marginal comments and concluding discussion will tend to register my preoccupation with these same questions.

**These are questions you should make a habit of asking of any text at all that you are reading critically.

Writing a Precis

One of the key requirements for our course involves the writing of a précis. Think of this précis as a basic paraphrase of the argumentative content of a text (or of a key chapter or section of a longer or especially complex text).

Here is a broad and informal guide for a précis, but it also provides a pretty good guide for the sorts of questions you should always ask of a text as you are reading it critically, and again after you have finished reading it. Don't treat this as an ironclad template, but as a rough approach to producing a précis -- a truly fine and useful précis need not necessarily satisfy all of these interventions.

A précis should provide answers to fairly basic questions such as:

1. What, in your own words, is the basic gist of the argument?

2. To what audience is it pitched primarily? (Do you see yourself as part of that intended audience, and how does your answer impact your reading of the argument?) Does it anticipate and respond to possible objections?

3. What do you think are the argument's stakes in general? To what end is the argument made? How has this end shaped the argument in your view?

a. To call assumptions into question?
b. To change convictions?
c. To alter conduct?
d. To find acceptable compromises between contending positions?

4. Does it have an explicit thesis? If not, could you provide one in your own words for it?

5. What are the reasons and evidence offered up in the argument to support what you take to be its primary end? What crucial or questionable warrants (unstated assumptions the argument takes to be shared by its audience, often general attitudes of a political, moral, social, cultural nature) does the argument seem to depend on? Are any of these reasons, evidences, or warrants questionable in your view? Do they support one another or introduce tensions under closer scrutiny? Do these implicit assumptions clash with explicit claims made elsewhere in the text?

6. What, if any, kind of argumentative work is being done by metaphors and other figurative language in the piece? Do the metaphors collaborate to paint a consistent picture, or do they clash with one another? What impact does this have on their argumentative force?

7. Are there key terms in the piece that seem to have idiosyncratic definitions, or whose usages seem to change over the course of the argument?

As you see, a piece that interrogates a text from these angles of view will yield something between a general book report and a close reading, but one that focuses on the argumentative force of a text. For the purposes of our class, such a précis succeeds if it manages

(1) to convey the basic flavor of the argument of the text and
(2) provides a good point of departure for a rich public discussion of the text.

Four Habits of Argumentative Writing

In this course you will be producing argumentative writing based on close textual readings. We will spend a good deal of time talking together about what it means to write persuasively and read closely, what sorts of things can usefully be considered texts in the first place, and under what circumstances, and so on, but as a first approximation of what I mean I am offering you four general habits of attention and writing practice, guidelines I will want you to apply to your writing this term. If you can incorporate these four writing practices into your future work you will have mastered the task of producing a competent argumentative paper for just about any discipline in the humanities that would ask you for one. Incidentally, I will also say that taking these habits truly to heart goes a long way in my view toward inculcating the critical temper indispensable for good citizenship in functioning democracies in a world of diverse and contentious stakeholders with urgent shared problems.

A First Habit

An argumentative paper will have a thesis. A thesis is a claim. It is a statement of the thing your paper is trying to show. Very often, the claim will be straightforward enough to express in a single sentence or so, and it will usually appear early on in the paper to give your readers a clear sense of the project of the paper. A thesis is a claim that is strong. A strong claim is a claim for which you can imagine an intelligent opposition. It is a claim that you feel a need to argue for. Close readings and research papers may seem very different as writing projects, but a thesis is the key to both. Remember, when you are producing a reading about a complex literary text like a novel, a poem, or a film the object of your argument will be to illuminate the text, to draw attention to some aspect of the wider work the text is accomplishing. Once you have determined the dimension or element in a text that you want to argue about, your opposition might consist of those who would focus elsewhere or who would draw different conclusions from your own focus. When you are writing a research paper, remember that you are not simply exploring a topic, you are seeking an answer to a question. That question (sometimes in the form of an hypothesis that would answer the question) directs your research, though sometimes the research process itself can change your question. Your answer to your research question is your research paper's thesis, the claim you support with the evidence you gathered in your research and present in the body of the paper itself. Your thesis is your paper's spine, your paper's task. As you write your papers, it is a good idea to ask yourself the question, from time to time, Does this quotation, does this argument, does this paragraph support my thesis in some way? If it doesn’t, delete it. If you are drawn repeatedly away from what you have chosen as your thesis, ask yourself whether or not this signals that you really want to argue for some different thesis.


A Second Habit

You should define your central terms, especially the ones you may be using in an idiosyncratic way. Your definitions can be casual ones, they don’t have to sound like dictionary definitions. But it is crucial that once you have defined a term you will stick to the meaning you have assigned it yourself. Never simply assume that your readers know what you mean or what you are talking about. Never hesitate to explain yourself for fear of belaboring the obvious. Clarity never appears unintelligent.

A Third Habit

You should support your claims about the text with actual quotations from the text itself. In this course you will always be analyzing texts (broadly defined) and whatever text you are working on should probably be a major presence on nearly every page of your papers. A page without quotations is often a page that has lost track of its point, or one that is stuck in abstract generalizations. This doesn't mean that your paper should consist of mostly huge block quotes. On the contrary, a block quote is usually a quote that needs to be broken up and read more closely and carefully. If you see fit to include a lengthy quotation filled with provocative details, I will expect you to contextualize and discuss all of those details. If you are unprepared to do this, or fear that doing so will introduce digressions from your argument, this signals that you should be more selective about the quotations to which you are calling attention.

A Fourth Habit

You should anticipate objections to your thesis. In some ways this is the most difficult habit to master. Remember that even the most solid case for a viewpoint is vulnerable to dismissal by the suggestion of an apparently powerful counterexample. That is why you should anticipate problems, criticisms, counterexamples, and deal with them before they arise, and deal with them on your own terms. If you cannot imagine a sensible and relevant objection to your line of argument it means either that you are not looking hard enough or that your claim is not strong enough.

Robot Cultists Getting Too N.I.C.E. By Half

I get this question nearly every day: Why, oh, why, do you take all this superlative silliness seriously?

It's easy to discount Superlativity once you've slogged through the critique.

But try to recapture the state of mind with which you skitted over the ideological framing of "tech news" before you gave Superlativity any serious thought. Try to recapture the disinterest with which you passed over platitudes in popular, professional, and academic media that treat some scarcely worked through genetic technique as justifying the question "do you want to live forever?" Or that straightforwardly claims that economies or societies or personalities somehow "evolve." Or that declares the "experts" worry that "people" are unprepared to make good decisions in the face of "accelerating change." Or confidently proposes that "good design" (alone?) can achieve what are in fact palpably political accomplishments like sustainability, social justice, democratic participation, security, liberty, progress. Or that oh so politely indicates that some human lifeways, however wanted they may be by those who incarnate them for the present can nevertheless be declared "suboptimal" in the face of "enhancement" that is "sure" to "engineer" them out of existence for the more "optimal" morphologies and lifeways of the bland blank catalogue-models and workaholics we presumably pine to be in our best most clearheaded moments.

Superlativity as it is celebrated by the Robot Cultists is indeed an unsubstantiated, sociopathic, inelegant, infantile mess of theses and themes, but it is at one and the same time an iceberg tip, a symptom of a deeper more prevailing tendency to a reductionism conjoined to elitism and loathing of life that plays out in mainstream neoliberal and neoconservative corporate-militarist global "development" discourse, a constellation of attitudes crystallizing in something like a futurological programme and suffusing the self-image of whole academic disciplines and professional populations, among them some that attract torrents of cash and uncritical enthusiasm.

It's easy to expose the facile formulations of the futurological congress, to snicker at the oafish ever-marginal Robot Cult. But there are strong structural affinities between the ruling rationales of corporate-militarist incumbency and the superlative mindset. One might surely have felt the same disdain a lingering intelligent look at the Robot Cultists inevitably inspires, and with equal justice, in the early days when another klatch of badly off-putting off-kilter boys with toys who fancied themselves the smartest things in any room unleashed Neoconservatism on the world to the cost of us all.

What could be more perfect than an article in the Financial Times informing us that

Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.

The new institution, known as "Singularity University", is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.

Google and Nasa's backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil's views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.

To be housed at Nasa's Ames Research Center, a stone's-throw from the Googleplex, the Singularity University will offer courses on biotechnology, nano-technology and artificial intelligence.

The so-called "singularity" is a theorised period of rapid technological progress in the near future. Mr Kurzweil, an American inventor, popularised the term in his 2005 book "The Singularity is Near".

Proponents say that during the singularity, machines will be able to improve themselves using artificial intelligence and that smarter-than-human computers will solve problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.

Yet many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.

Mr Kurzweil said the university was launching now because many technologies were approaching a moment of radical advancement. "We're getting to the steep part of the curve," said Mr Kurzweil. "It's not just electronics and computers. It's any technology where we can measure the information content, like genetics."

The school is backed by Larry Page, Google co-founder, and Peter Diamandis, chief executive of X-Prize, an organisation which provides grants to support technological change.

"We are anchoring the university in what is in the lab today, with an understanding of what's in the realm of possibility in the future," said Mr Diamandis, who will be vice-chancellor. "The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea."

Despite its title, the school will not be an accredited university. Instead, it will be modelled on the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, the interdisciplinary, multi-cultural school that Mr Diamandis helped establish in 1987.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader (for now) to simply pluck out the unsubstantiated superlative platitudes contained in this breathlessly evangelizing account (did you notice that even the notional registration of skepticism in the article essentially functions as a demand for more funds for our "serious" singularitarians?), to observe the way in which these relentlessly reductive and at once hyperbolically expansive techno-utopian chants co-mingle and reinforce one another. Truly diligent readers may enjoy connecting the dots between these ideas and their proponents to the most ardent expressions of market fundamentalist ideology as well. As for the reference to the "N.I.C.E." in the title of my post, consider it an ambivalent recommendation of a dusty somewhat silly but still prescient book.

Why Do You Take All This Superlative Silliness Seriously?

The Eternal Return of The Question, upgraded and adapted from the Moot:

I can only speak for myself, but I take transhumanist formulations seriously because they seem to me to exert a disproportionate and deranging influence on technodevelopmental deliberation at the worst imaginable time.

As I have said, superlative formulations have force because they

[a] activate customary irrational passions that are already occasioned by disruptive technoscientific change (panic from mistaken impotence, greed for mistaken omnipotence), because they

[b] congenially oversimplify and dramatize technodevelopmental complexities (reframing them as transcension, apocalypse, revolution, enhancement, immortalization) for lazy, undercritical, or overwrought people and media formations, because they

[c] conduce to the benefit of incumbent interests that portray themselves as more knowledgeable about matters of "advanced" or "accelerating" developments to justify circumventions of democratic deliberation, or frame technodevelopment in terms of "existential risk" that divert deliberation down corporate-militarist avenues (geoengineering, megascale infrastructure, centralized co-ordinated response).

I can go on, and have done, but I think you get the picture.

The point is, most of the reactionary formations that have menaced late-modernity (extractive-industrial-broadcast epoch) began as marginal subcultures of cocksure white boys certain they had the Keys to History in their hands. The silliness of superlativity is not enough to justify ignoring it or failing to understand it, especially once we see the context of techno-utopianism in which it so legibly locates itself.

I also believe that the Robot Cultists in their very extremity provide unusually distilled illustrations of the associations, dynamisms, guiding figures and so on that also play out in more mainstream neoliberal "globalism" and "development" discourse, and hence put us in a better position to understand the irrationality and authoritarianism of that discourse.

Anyway, as you know from the title of my blog, my hero is the political theorist Hannah Arendt (Amor Mundi, the love of the world, was her personal motto), who insisted that the philosopher's task is understanding, and where politics is concerned this means "thinking what we are doing."

I find that understanding the transhumanists and discerning the ways in which mainstream developmental discourse is illuminated by reference to their extremity helps "think what we are doing" in a moment of unprecedented planetary catastrophe (resource descent, climate change, WMD proliferation), planetary promise (proliferating p2p formations), planetary disruption (the shift into non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies). It's as simple as that.