Contextualizing the Think-Tankification of the Academy

St Petersburg Times:

A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University's economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting "political economy and free enterprise." Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they've funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom. Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control.

Permit me a few scattered comments, most of which could be fully-fledged on their own if I felt an inclination to elaborate them, but which taken together in this more fragmentary state actually better reflect my reaction to this news item:

First, and I suppose most obviously: In the aftermath of the New Deal big business interests overcame their antipathy to and ineptitude at organized political activity (the priorities of profit-driven enterprise tend to be more parochial, proximate, opportunistic, competitive rather than co-operative) and began funding an archipelago of foundations and think-tanks spewing useful propaganda to counter the inconvenient results emerging out of universities. Now, in the present epoch of the pernicious corporatization and for-profit precarization and dumbing-down of the academy, Koch's purchase and control over university hiring and content begins (really, amplifies the long ongoing) re-writing of the academy itself in the image of the think-tanks that originated to combat the academy itself.

Second: Despite their incessant whining to the contrary, of course, it was never the left-wing bias in intellectuals they were combating in creating these alternate institutions (these intellectuals, after all, tend to come from privileged backgrounds or are engaging through their education in a process of upwardly-mobile professionalization, all of which tends to be forcefully prejudicial in the lives of even well-intentioned and progressive-identified people in countless ways, subtle and gross), but what has come jocularly to be known as Reality's "left-wing bias." And so these think-tanks busy themselves with the discounting of consensus scientific results whenever these support the case for regulations in the public interest that diminish profits, peddle faux-populist plutocratic "free-market" nonsense directly to lobbyists, elected representatives, and through mass-media outlets, engage in relentless marketing and promotional discourse selling or at any rate reconciling majorities to policies that benefit incumbent-elites, mobilizing and canalizing deep American currents of white-racism, sex-panic, anti-intellectualism, social distress in the service of voter disenfranchisement, mass-media distraction and disinformation, the maintenance of the plutocratic central economic planning and welfare for the rich programs misleadingly denominated "defense spending," and so on.

Third: That factual reality would have a left-wing bias, all joking aside, derives in a general sort of way from the converging tendencies of contingent universalization that happen to characterize both the publication and testing processes through which consensus science arrives at warranted beliefs as well as the democratization and consensualization processes through which ever more people arrive at ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them through the provision of an ever more informed and nonduressed scene of consent coupled to ever more equitable access to ever better legitimated alternatives for the nonviolent resolution of disputes.

Fourth: Koch's move isn't unprecedented, actually, but reminds us of the reaction of the Robber Barons to the radical populism of massively best-selling author Henry George and the popular movements his writing inspired (in the company of the extraordinary early influence of Marx and organizing labor, as well as "free men, free labor, free land" Republicanism in post-Civil War America), that is to say, their creation and endowment of formal economics departments in universities across the United States, devoted to the creation and dissemination of laissez-faire sophisms as an official discourse. Of course, this backfired when in the context of the academy this orthodoxy was overturned by the Keynesian Revolution. Hayek and Friedman then began the long slog to re-impose that discredited still-nonsensical laissez-faire orthodoxy, a painful story summarized by the word "neoliberalism" (actually, that is a no less painful oversimplification of the story, but, after all, so was the use of the phrase "Keynesian Revolution" to summarize the no less complex convulsive narrative that preceded it). Anyway, Koch's infiltration is not only the latest episode of the tragic story of neoliberal re-imposition of laissez-faire orthodoxy as plutocratic official discourse but an episode that re-stages the inaugural scene through which that official discourse was first installed as such.

Fifth: When I speak of the dissemination of a phony congenial right-wing alternative reality through the hijacking of the academy, through the combating of the academy by way of the phony scholarship of the bought-and-paid-for pseudo-academy of the think-tank archipelago, and through the opportunistic mass-mediation of right-wing spin, denialism, know-nothingism, social discontent and cultural violence, it should be noted that this critique is not the same thing as nor even properly subsumed under the critique of the Culture Industry by Adorno and the critical theorists or of the Spectacle by Debord and the Situationists (or of Barthean Mythology before them). No, were the academy to regain its autonomy from the parochialism and corruption of profit-making and competitive-military imperatives, were media monopolies broken up and media co-operatives set up to reflect the diversity of experience and expression of communities as well as shared problems and general interests, still the tendencies to reconcile majorities to exploitation, to naturalize the bourgeois status quo, to distract people with pseudo-needs critiques by Adorno, Barthes, Debord and others would remain in force. Right-wing think-tanks, Fox News and right-wing hate-radio, and Movement Republican efforts to privatize, marginalize, commandeer University departments have far more specific historical contexts and effects, they are playing out at a level of concrete specificity which is not the level at which critiques of the fetishized commodity form, the Culture Industry, Benjaminian "Aura," the Situationist Spectacle, and other comparable key Marxist/post-marxist critiques are pitched and it is crucial to grasp and respond to these developments in their actual specificity. (This is not to deny the continued vitality of these more fundamental critiques in their proper precincts, of course.)  

Sixth: Like the return corporate-militarists get for campaign contributions to elected officials (sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in such investments yield billions upon billions in subsidies and profitable deregulation at taxpayer expense), it really is flabbergasting to see how cheap it really can be for incumbent-elites to buy what amounts to a University Department in today's precarized academy with which to indoctrinate a generation of paid shills to champion feudalism in the midst of notional democracy.

Seventh: The organized futurology with which I tend to be preoccupied in this blog should be viewed as of a piece with the right-wing think-tank archipelago. Of course, the really bonkers extremities of superlative futurology that I tend to deride as a Robot Cult archipelago often have more in common with the organizations and subcultures associated with Scientology or Randian Objecitivsm, but sometimes even these extremes have their comparatively well-heeled well-funded facets (Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute is an example of what I mean by comparatively well-heeled superlative futurology, Singularity University is an example of what I mean by comparatively well-funded superlative futurology). Of course, the still techno-fetishistic but more prevalent futurological corporate-militarist foundations and think-tanks peddling neoliberal "development" schemes, liberal eugenic "bioethics," "geo-engineering" diversions, network and robotic "security" measures and so on are the truly dangerous, truly anti-democratizing point of intersection between my anti-futurological arguments and my concerns with the Movement Republican anti-academic institutionalization of a phony congenial right-wing alternative reality.

Reactionary Robot Cultists (Again)

Some folks in the Moot and elsewhere are expressing surprise -- others, who've been around longer, are expressing amusement -- at the drift into conventional reactionary politics in the statements of certain high-profile Robot Cultists who, however silly the futurological moonshine they've been peddling, had at least seemed (or at any rate protested in public places to be) more reasonably progressive in their political viewpoints.

In my view, futurological discourses are best understood as hyperbolic variations on mainstream neoliberal corporate-military "developmentalist" rationalizations and amplified variations of the conventional norms and forms of marketing and promotional discourse (in the most extreme superlative variations of futurology I deride as Robot Cultism that amplification of advertising hype actually takes on transcendentalizing and hence quasi-theological tonalities), and it really shouldn't be that surprising to stumble onto structural affinities of such discourse to right-wing rhetoric after all.

As one of my Futurological Brickbats puts the point more brutally: "To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms."

A few years back, I elaborated some of the structural connections between futurology and anti-democracy here, for those who are interested or need reminding.

Of course there are a handful of self-identified radical leftists with a high profile in the Robot Cult archipelago, poor things, but I must say it takes a rather dim bulb (or perhaps an especially desperate person, afraid of death, eager for attention, happy to be in on the scam for once, whatever it may be) to mistake what amounts to an epic-scaled late-nite boner pill ad for a utopian vision of the revolutionary left.

Just to be clear, for the millionth time: Advocating for the "rights" of software doesn't put you on the cutting edge of a civil rights movement, it expresses sociopathic disdain for actually existing, actually exploited and precarious planetary peers -- Pining for a Robot God to End History and solve all our problems for us is straightfoward authoritarian navel gazing -- Dreaming of nanosanta overcoming the impasse of poverty isn't a form socialism but of rank acquiescence to the bloodstained status quo -- And handwaving about your "geo-engineering" wet-dreams is a particularly egregious form of corporate-militarist greenwashing, hardly a more radical and hardboiled realist variation of environmentalism.

To pretend otherwise is at best pathetic, at worst, outright pernicious.

Queer Manifestations

There are queerer things in heaven and earth, Gay-Ratio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Here I've corralled together many posts I've written over the lifetime of this blog that tend toward queergeekery and genderfuckery (with some additional odds and ends)....

Snowball’s Chance in Hell (Holiday Cackles from the Balcony), December 25, 2004

Conservative Wants to Enslave Women to Make More Gay Babies, February, 2005

The Random Wilde ("The Queen Is Not a Subject" -- Redux Edition), March, 2005

Technoprogressive ARTs, October, 2005

Technology Is Making Queers Of Us All, March, 2006

Keep Your Laws Off My Body, March, 2006

The Real Scandal is that the Scandal is About Sex Rather Than Torture , October, 2006

Cackles from the Balcony: San Francisco Uber Alles Edition, January, 2007

"Post-Gender" or Gender Poets? April, 2008

Honoring Service, Because Freedom Isn't Free, November, 2008

Marriage? No, Thanks! The Right to Marry? You Bet I'll Fight for It! December, 2008

Obama's Gay Pride Parade from Hell, June, 2009

"Same Sex", December, 2009

The Populist Politics of Expressivity, Right and Left, and the Equitable Left Since 1968, January, 2011

Can Queer Radicalisms Be Enabled by Gay Assimilationist Politics? February, 2011

Gay Assimilation, Queer Emancipation, and the Dialectic Demolition of the Closet, March, 2011

Marriage Equality Tide Sets Stage For This Year's Pride, June, 2011

Queer Projector: An Honor (and Dishonor) Roll of Queer Film Recommendations, July, 2011

Every Jock Is A Puke... And Why This Matters, August, 2011

Transhuman Transsex, September, 2011

"Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again," May, 2012

Using Queer Strategies to Overcome the Violence and Misinformation of the Anti-Abortion Zealots, July, 2012

Prosthetic Sex/Gender and Healthcare Politics, December, 2012

What Is Patriarchy? December, 2012

Anarcho-Anti-Sexist Robot Cultist Decides Feminism Is Too Hard, Declares Himself A Robot, December, 2012

The Coming Gaybagger Wave, April, 2013

All Patriarchy Is Eugenic, April, 2013

Uploading As Reactionary Anti-Body Politics, January 10, 2015

The Parade Passes By, June 28, 2015

I Don't Understand Anything

Mobs of ecstatic weeping cheering flag-waving Americans are appearing spontaneously in front of the White House and at the World Trade Center site and who knows where else.… I am hearing people say that a chapter has ended for the American people, a whole generation is turning a page, that America is united in celebration….

I have to tell you, I cannot even begin to grasp how people could be declaring, as they are doing, one after another, that the death of bin Laden is the most important moment in the Obama Administration. Even granting the obvious symbolic momentousness of all this, freighting as it does the eighth anniversary of Bush's declaration of "Mission Accomplished" and so on and so forth, I have to say I personally think that there have been at least dozens of legislative victories and defeats that seem to me incomparably more significant, in terms of the effects that will be felt in the lives of millions and millions of people….

Pundits are proposing that it is now possible as it hasn't been before to leave Afghanistan and Iraq in earnest, and if that is true of course that is all to the good. And if long-suffering people can truly begin to heal the wounds opened in and by our recent painful history of terror, war, and occupation, then of course again I am happy that is true.

I am hopeful that the mourning to which Obama referred in his brief speech tonight may begin to do its long-deferred healing work, re-opening Americans in our shared vulnerability as human beings to connection with the fellow-sufferers among Americans of all parties and persuasions and among those denounced for so long as nothing but enemies as well....

But I cannot claim to understand why this is the night for such possibilities, why this is the event that renews this hopefulness, why this is the Presidential announcement that would unlock these possibilities, why this killing, however justified it might be, would unleash these howling ferocious unifying celebratory energies….

There are times when I am proud of the effort I have taken to understand what is happening in the world and the understanding that effort has rewarded me with, but on a night like this I have to admit I don't think I understand anything at all, I don't understand my fellow citizens at all, I don't understand what is going on in people's heads.

9/11 was terrible, but so was America's reaction to it, and I feel it again tonight, whatever the manifold complexities in play, there is something truly terrible in this night, and I for one feel nothing so much as confusion and fear….

The Politics of Design. The Anti-Politics of Design.

I'm teaching a graduate seminar on the political theory of design practice at the San Francisco Art Institute this term into which I've been pouring an enormous amount of the agony and enthusiasm for technoscientific and anti-futurological topics that usually play out instead in my writing online here. A participant in the seminar sent me one of those end-of-term e-mails one always gets, in which a distinction on which much of the conversation has productively turned the whole term suddenly gets called into question as she sits down to write her own paper about one of the seminar's objects at greater depth. The question had to do with getting clearer about what really has been a kind of foundational distinction for the course, that there is a sense in which design is at once political but also anti-political (of course this anti-politics is also political, and round and round we go). The student seemed embarrassed to ask the question, but of course the truth is that such questions at such times are the whole reason to take a course such as ours. Anyway, since the course replays themes that also preoccupy the blog, and because the blog may have suffered this term because of my preoccupation with the course, I thought I might publish here some of my answer to my student's question for my interlocutors here as well:

"Good question -- this is, of course, THE question of the course. And here at the end is the best time to be asking it in earnest.

"At the root of all political thinking is the recognition that a diversity of people live together in a shared world. Quite simple, right? The key is diversity/plurality. As Arendt said, when one is looking at the world politically, 'Plurality is the Law of the Earth.'

"The people with whom we share the world are different from one another, their histories are different, their capacities are different, their aspirations are different. Even an authoritarian politics imposing its will on that diversity must take into account the complex dynamics produced by such diversity as it tries to manage, control, and get desired results from diverse subjects, but of course in more notionally and substantially free and democratic political orders this becomes ever more clear as one struggles to reconcile stakeholder differences at the legislative level and manage stresses at the administrative level and reconcile competing aspirations at the cultural level, right? This insight is what gives Foucault the confidence to say that wherever there is power, politically speaking, there is also always resistance.

"When I say that design is political I simply refer to the way particular designs reflect a host of decisions arising out of such political questions: how will this made thing serve best the most problems and ends of its diverse stakeholders, how will it be taken up by the rich dynamic social and cultural worlds of which it will become a participant, how does it bespeak the designer's own contribution or intervention in ongoing struggles and conversations of which it is a part, how will it constrain and enable certain outcomes over others all of which have constituencies?

"Designs reflect politics, designs are symptoms of politics, designs are participants in politics, designs contextualize and articulate politics. This is an obvious insight, I should think, but one that it is easy to lose sight of to the cost of understanding what one is really up to when one is doing design, and even when one contemplates the furniture of the designed world that is at once the setting for present-onto-futural politics as well as the archive of politics present-out-of-past.

"It would seem, however, that we are always tempted to pretend that design is engineering, to pretend that the made is the natural (never forget the kinship of the natural to the customary), and hence pretend that what is now in the world has not been otherwise and could not be otherwise and will not be otherwise the better to evade the responsibilities and responsivenesses demanded by and promised to the political dimension of human life.

"When I say that design is anti-political, then, I refer to the way design as a discourse would achieve ends (for example, sustainability, democratic participation, 'optimal' humans) of a kind that are, properly speaking, political and whose problems and possibilities are political through and through. But design in some of its current (and, I would add, prevailing) construals as a discourse, and The Designer as an actor/actant within such a discourse, assumes a vantage in respect to these political ends that disavows their profoundly political character and fancies that clarity and power results from this assumption.

"This amounts to a particularly dangerous form of kidding yourself about what you are up to when you are designing or contemplating design -- for example, denying the parochialism of your own political vision, ignoring the difficulties that actually attend the accomplishment of what are actually political goals, mistaking the substance of your vision as something it is not, pretending something controversial is really neutral or that an effort at political reconciliation and liberty is really an effort at scientific prediction and capacitation.

"People can't be tricked or cajoled into sustainability by a priestly elite of architects. Permaculture really is cultural, just as it says it is, and so, a matter of a conviviality (etymologically: a living-together) of the diversity of lifeways, of compromises, conversations, shared sacrifices and mutual aid in a shared (and finite) world.

"People can't be tricked or cajoled into citizenship by a priestly elite of software coders. Code, like every tool/technique, can be taken up in political efforts to rule, to fool, to steal, to cheat, to spy, to help, to agitate, to educate, to organize, but it does not circumvent the political itself. It always has politics but it never has a politics -- as say the boosters: inherent democracy! as say the conspiracists: secret plutocracy!

"People can't be tricked or cajoled into the Good Life by a priestly elite of geneticists. When one speaks of 'enhancement' one is always actually speaking of enhancement -- of what capacities? for which constituencies? in the service of whatever ends? at the cost of the frustration of what other ends? with which other constituencies? The Human, properly so called, has never been given but has always been a site of contestation and collaboration, human being has always been a becoming one dimension of which is absolutely and ineradicably political.

"As we will see in seminar tomorrow, once all this has been grasped, the interesting questions become a matter of thinking the temporality and spatiality of design as political/historical struggle rather than (or by means of) scientific/instrumental rationality."

Philosophical Guns That Shoot Nothing But Blanks

Upgraded from an edifying exchange in the Moot with "Poor Richard" who proposes in a lengthy comment you should read for its own sake: "I've been thinking of how to rescue utility."

He says much more, to which I reply:

I guess I don't think utility really needs rescuing -- which isn't to say I think the notion needs to be bagged for disposal but that utility is plenty useful enough that it doesn't need the protection of philosophers freighting it with our rather silly idiosyncratic baggage.

As a good Jamesian pragmatist I say that "the true is the good in the way of belief... for definite, assignable reasons." That business of offering up reasons for warrantable assertions of belief according to their different modes, scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, political, commercial, legal and so on is, sensibly enough, the essence of the reasonable, properly so-called, to my way of thinking.

I do think that common or garden variety truth as beliefs we have reasons for which we are willing to state in public/ation is a perfectly sensible notion but that "truth as correspondence" is a philosophical gun that shoots nothing but blanks. I think that common or garden variety certainty as warranted confidence on which one is willing to stake one's life or at any rate the mortgage is a perfectly sensible notion but that "certainty as indefeasability" is a philosophical gun that shoots nothing but blanks. And I think that common or garden variety utilities, whether of the scientific kind that confer best-on-offer powers of prediction and control, of the moral kind that keep us from losing our scruples despite our belonging to more than one discursive community but to none of them fully, and of the prudential kinds that differently navigate legal, commercial, political tangles are all perfectly sensible notions, too, but that any "general utility function" will be yet another philosophical gun that shoots nothing but blanks. Needless to say, such guns are still noisy enough to leave your ears ringing when you ought to be listening more carefully to what is afoot.

True to my training in the humanities academy (BA literature, MA philosophy, PhD rhetoric, teaching cultural theory for over a decade, lions, and tigers, and bears) that is to say in the belly of the pomo beast, as no doubt the elite effete aesthete you see before you, I suppose, I do happen still think theory is better off reaching first for the tools in the historicization and contextualization drawers rather than the generalization drawer when one is trying to make sense of things. Well, fancy that: a generalization!

You see, if I speak derisively of philosophical impulses, do understand that I have had the philosophy bug most of my life and feel I know Socrates and Kant and the Founders and many Marxists and Arendt and Rorty better than most living people, I haven't shaken that bug yet -- and so acerbic comments should be viewed as wry commentaries on weaknesses to which I am prone more than finger-pointing exercises at silly benighted Others.

I do think one needs to re-think what intellectual ambition properly looks like from a pluralist-pragmatist-rhetorical perspective. I'm a teacher with a vocation for it, so this is something I think about fairly incessantly, actually. Metaphysical traditions and their many scientistic-evolutionary-cybernetic progeny in the present day seem to me to offer more discursive cul-de-sacs and pathological symptoms than uses in this work, I'm afraid. To be honest about it, I consider all such fancies that the universe has preferences about the words humans describe it with or takes sides in human squabbles over the vicissitudes of fashion and so on mostly to be vestiges of organized religiosity with priestly authoritarian politics in tow, and rather think we would all do well without them.

Can Queer Radicalisms Be Enabled by Gay Assimilationist Politics?

As a queer teacher and practitioner of nonviolence who thinks marriage is mostly an invitation to unhealthy co-dependence and a patriarchal vestige of human trafficking and who believes first of all that the derangements of desire are self-creative ends in themselves, even when they fail, I cannot help but re-iterate that I am far from enthused by the reduction of emancipatory queer politics to what amounts to celebration of and assimilation to the bourgeois project of endless shopping, patriotic murder to maintain attractive markets for endless shopping, and compulsory reprosexuality to provide the next generation of consumers and warriors for endless shopping (that is to say, gay politics as nothing but the struggle to legalize open military service, gay marriage, and gay parentage).

But I do recognize that legal legibility in these terms provides what for many really does seem to amount to the indispensable foundations for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, let alone for any more capacious understanding of queer political projects. And this recognition suggests to me that queer radicalism demands at once that the assimilated queer subject be provided for, the better to be rejected or elaborated otherwise.

In other words, my own queer repudiation of militarist masculinity is all the more forceful now for its welcome after the repeal of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" of my participation, which I now reject on my own terms rather than in a lame recognition of the fact that I am always-already rejected come what may. My queer repudiation of marriage as a delusive and possessive organization of meaningful loving affinity is likewise all the more forceful for its welcome after the legalization of Gay Marriage and even robust Domestic Partnership statutes of my participation. So, too, my queer repudiation of the reprosexual reduction of the contingent disruptive provocative problematizing promising experimental field of embodied and desiring practices of sex-gender is all the more forceful once adoption and same-sex parental rights and protections welcome my participation on those reductive terms.

Sex-Gender-Sexuality are languages we speak and which speak us no less. We are all of us prosaic legal subjects (or at any rate, we hope to be: to fail to manage to be prosaic is to risk being rendered illegal in our substance, informal, incomparably precarious), and we are also all of us, in certain blessed moments of serendipity and grace at least, incarnated poems.

To strive to be free is at once to strive to be legible, literal, but also to resist reduction to the literal, to desire to be figurative, to turn and in turn provoke the profound turn of desire and change in others.

The competent speaker of a language, mind you, not only knows how to make meaning in that language through the proper deployment of its literal vocabulary and following its grammatical rules correctly, but also grasps and knows how to make meaning by violating the rules of that language while still, somehow, speaking it, deranging its literal usages and taking up its fallacious forms turning then into forceful rather than simply incorrect or nonsensical figurative ones.

To be illegible is to risk violation and abjection, even if for some lucky people this illegibility has provoked creative expressivities and lifeways that are wonderful, heroic. But while it may be radical to demand an impossible heroism of all people and in all moments of life, that radicalism too easily amounts to little more than a declaration of indifference and hostility for one's peers in the world and the terms in which they actually live the meaningful substance of their lives, it is too easily an ungenerous, inhumane radicalism: What is radical and also liberal, generous, humane is to grasp the beauty, the creativity, the meaning in lives that are not heroic, or in those parts of our lives that are not heroic, as well as in those few who or moments which do differ heroically in ways that render more capacious the space in which the everyday lives free.

A queer politics reduced to bourgeois assimilation is a queer politics shorn of its promise and provocation, no doubt, but a queer politics that rejects the assimilationist project altogether in its bid for radicalism (a gesture to which I am all too prone myself) is, I fear, a queer politics too readily shorn of its promise as well: Availability to gay assimilation is necessary to those queers who would refuse to avail themselves of it in their work to be queer otherwise. What is wanted, I think, are queernesses that welcome being welcomed into the world on its terms, and then welcome that world to come well elsewhere.

Design of a Crime

Hal Foster's Design and Crime is so good, how I wish I had written it. In fact, I may have to re-write it and pretend that's not what I'm doing. Possibly, more than once.

The Egyptian Revolution Is Not Miraculous:

Far From Leaderless, Spontaneous, Unplanned, Accidental, or Twitterific, Egypt Provides Resources of Hope for Activists Who Would Be As Resourceful As Egyptian Organizers Have Been

The Egyptian Revolution is not leaderless.

It is not spontaneous.

It did not arise like a spasm in unplanned sympathy with the uprising in Tunisia, or spurred by blind rage at the aged dictator Hosni Mubarak's declared hopes for the kingly succession of his son.

Although it is certainly true that thirty years of oppression have lead to a widespread discontent that proved an incubator for insurrectionary energy, such oppression could just as readily have provided the substance of deepening despair and further generations of oppression in the absence of an actually organized response.

And although it is true that cellphones and twitter feeds and facebook pages were key organizational tools for the Egyption Revolution, what matters is that organizers made use of organizational tools, not that these in particular were the tools they used (which is also true of the faxes, radio broadcasts, megaphones, wheatpaste posters, and pamphlets that were the definitive educational, agitational, and organizational tools of prior revolutionaries).

Cellphones, twitter, and facebook are not inherently or provocatively revolutionary artifacts. It is merely certain deployments of these tools that can be revolutionary. If anything, the default uses of these artifacts have been overwhelmingly reactionary so far, facilitating ubiquitous elite-incumbent surveillance, enabling the radical intensification of targeted corporate marketing harassment, evacuating public discourse of indispensable complexity, depth, deliberation, criticality in a mesmerizing froth of canned one-liners, promotional slogans, and interminable impressionistic, sensationalistic, superficial reportage.

Discussions of Egypt emphasizing social media in the United States may appear to foreground technical concerns about the ease of their use the scope of their reach, and their relative susceptibility or not to censorship, but the focus on such technicality functions in profoundly political ways.

Indeed, this techno-centrist discourse functions primarily to promote an anti-political technologically deterministic fantasy of spontaneism that -- taken together with endlessly repeated declarations about the leaderlessness of the movement and especially of the miraculousness of its nonviolence -- functions to distract countless millions of people from the lessons of the Revolution even while their eyes are fixed on the Revolution: Namely, that well-planned disciplined organized nonviolent resistance to the elite-incumbent authoritarian figures and structures that maintain the profoundly unjust unsustainable corporate-militarist neoliberal/neoconservative global order can indeed be as effective as ever.

It has been said over and over again that it is easier to imagine the end of the world in an environmental collapse or military catastrophe resulting from the greed and stupidity of the current capitalist order than it is to imagine the end of the current capitalist order itself. This is palpably ridiculous, especially when before our eyes we are greeted with literal evidence to the contrary.

I cannot recommend highly enough this informative short documentary from Al Jazeera about the leaders of the April 6th Youth Movement without which the Egyptian Revolution almost certainly would not have taken place or at any rate managed not to founder in the face of the brutal, all too typical and usually effective, counter-revolutionary violence of Mubarak's regime in the Revolution's early days.

The documentary speaks of the beginnings of the Revolution three years ago in the textile strike of April 6, 2008 from which the movement got its name, in the work of activist Ahmed Maher and Mohamed Adel. Another key figure in the April 6th Movement is, of course, Asmaa Mahfouz, whose work attracted the special attention of Democracy Now! and the New York Times. Coverage of Mahfouz's truly inspiring youtube videos regularly do not go on to point out her crucial connection with a profoundly well-trained well-disciplined well-organized nonviolent activist campaign years in the planning.

It is sometimes noted that the April 6th Movement took up iconography from the nonviolent Serbian Otpor Student Movement which successfully resisted Slobodan Milošević a decade ago (the extent of planning and organization -- with the conspicuous assistance of life-long activist and scholar of nonviolent social struggle Gene Sharp and his colleagues -- is likewise shunted to the side in too many popular accounts of Serbian resistance in my view, for familiar reasons). But it is important to grasp that the connection of the Egyptian April 6th Youth Movement and Serbian Otpor Student Movement was not a matter of superficial appreciation or just some cut-and-paste appropriation of Otpor's raised fist .gif by Egyptian students shopping for slick revolutionary graphics by way of google image search.

Ahmed Maher of April 6th consulted extensively with Serge Popovich of Otpor, and turned to the strategies of nonviolent struggle Popovich learned in turn from Gene Sharp (strategies many of which were gleaned by Sharp, who is sometimes wryly described as the "Machiavelli of Nonviolence," from his extensive research into the successes and failures of King, Gandhi, Thoreau and others). The leaders of the April 6th Movement are well versed in the techniques and, indispensably, the disciplines of a nonviolence well-attuned to the deceptive and distractive tactics of mass mediation and well-prepared for state violence and the difficulties of de-escalation in its face.

Also, young as they are, the leaders of the April 6th movement certainly seem to be very friendly and familiar with the tapestry of Egyptian experienced feminist and labor activists not to mention engaged artists and intellectuals both living quietly in Egypt and, often, less quietly, abroad.

Largely ignorant of far too much of this context myself, even as a highly interested and comparatively well-informed idiot American, I think too much of my own commentary on Egypt here and in the classroom these last couple of weeks has been shaped by my disdain for the ugly conflict-tourism and facile techno-utopianism of so much coverage here in the United States.

Nothing I am saying should be taken to imply that I regard the Egyptian revolution as accomplished rather than only just beginning, that I am blissed-out in celebration and insensible to the dangers ahead, not least because of the actions of my own country in my name. But People Power is real. Education, agitation, and organization is its substance. Egypt is providing still more evidence, in a world with a history brimming full of such evidence, of the real possibilities of nonviolent democratizing revolutionary struggles to defeat corporate-militarism before corporate-militarism destroys the world.

Hannah Arendt on Technology and Nature

I just posted this to the blog for students in my design as politics/design as anti-politics seminar at SFAI. It contains mostly material transcribed from Hannah Arendt, but I do interrupt the quoted passages with comments here and there. Most of these comments refer directly to topics that we have been discussing in the course itself, but since these topics are also regular themes addressed at Amor Mundi, and since I often emphasize my indebtedness to Arendt but rarely provide really sustained discussions of that indebtedness, I thought this stuff might be of more general interest.

This supplemental material from Arendt's The Human Condition provides a useful critical vocabulary for our discussion Thursday on cradle-to-cradle design and the whole so-called "natural capitalist" green(/greenwashing?) ethos, but also provides context for much of our discussion over the last two weeks, not to mention the themes with which the course as a whole will remain preoccupied all term. The first significant passage (and you'll have to forgive a few interruptions) is to be found on pp. 149-151 of the University of Chicago Press, second edition:

[In the case of t]he first instruments of nuclear technology, the various types of atom bombs, which, if released in sufficient and not even very great quantities, could destroy all organic life on earth... it would no longer be a question of unchaining and letting loose elementary natural processes, but of handling on the earth and in everyday life energies and forces such as occur only outside the earth, in the universe; this is already done, but only in the research laboratories of nuclear physicists. If present technology consists of channeling natural forces into the world of the human artifice, future technology may yet consist of channeling the universal forces of the cosmos around us into the nature of the earth. It remains to be seen whether these future technologies will transform the household of nature as we have known it since the beginning of our world to the same extent or even more than the present technology has changed the very worldliness of the human artifice.

-- let me interrupt the quote here, to introduce another, from the "Prologue" much earlier in the book, pp. 2-3, which provides figures and frames with which the prior paragraph will be resonating with the proper reader of the whole:

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice. The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside the artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms. For some time now, a great many scientific efforts have been directed toward making life also "artificial," toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature. It is the same desire to escape the imprisonment of the earth [Arendt's discussion here is spurred by the launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957 and the curious but representative reactions it occasioned in the many who declared the event the "first step toward escape from men's imprisonment from the earth," pg. 1] that is manifest in the test tube... "to produce superior human beings" and... I suspect, also underlies the hope to extend man's life-span far beyond the hundred-year limit. The future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something made by himself. There is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an exchange, just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on earth. The question is only whether we wish to use our new scientific and technical knowledge in this direction; it is a political question of the first order and therefore can hardly be left to the decision of professional scientists or professional politicians.

-- In addition to deepening our understanding of the Arendtian distinctions of earth and world and cosmos, this last point also draws on the distinction between the instrumental and the political we discussed in the opening lecture, and to which we will return again and again (especially in the form of the discussion of the emancipatory as the amplification of force or given capacities as against the emancipatory as an interminable ever re-opening social struggle). Returning now, to the later passage we were already reading --

The channeling of natural forces into the human world has shattered the very purposefulness of the world, the fact that objects are the ends for which tools and implements are designed. It is characteristic of all natural processes that they come into being without the help of man, and those things are natural which are not "made" but grow by themselves into whatever they become. (This is also the authentic meaning of our word "nature," whether we derive it from its latin root nasci, to be born, or trace it back to its Greek origin, physis, which comes from phyein, to grow out of, to appear by itself.) Unlike the products of human hands, which must be realized step by step and for which the fabrication process is entirely distinct from the existence of the fabricated thing itself, the natural thing's existence is not separate but is somehow identical with the process through which it comes into being: the seed contains and, in a certain sense, already is the tree, and the tree stops being if the process of growth through which it came into existence stops. If we see these processes against the background of human purposes, which have a willed beginning and a definite end, they assume the character of automatism. We call automatic all courses of movement which are self-moving and therefore outside the range of willful and purposive interference. In the mode of production ushered by automation, the distinction between operation and product, as well as the product's precedence over the operation (which is only the means to produce the end), no longer make sense and have become obsolete.

-- I ask you to pause again for a moment and let this passage sink in. I'm not going to interrupt it right now to interject another, still longer passage, but I want you to remember this section because I am going to leap forward in the text a bit later in a way that will press and elaborate these points enormously. Do notice though, by the way, that our discussion of the conceptual archive out of which our sense of "nature" arises is rehearsed concisely in the prior passage, and also how Arendt's formulation comports with our discussion last week of the likely flawed logic or at any rate confused figuration of so-called "biomimetic design," which, to be actually biomimetic -- that is to say, morphology evolved in the ongoing dynamisms of ecosystems -- seems to be structurally at odds with being legibly still a matter of willful design at all. Skipping a bit forward from where we were before but remaining on page 151, and forewarned that the specific topic of "the automatic" is one to which I will have still more to draw your attention later, let us continue on --

The discussion of the whole problem of technology, that is, of the transformation of life and world through the introduction of the machine, has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upon the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful. Their instrumentality is understood exclusively in this anthropocentric sense. But the instrumentality of tools and implements is much more closely related to the object it is designed to produce, and their sheer "human value" is restricted to the use the animal laborens makes of them. In other words, homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and implements in order to erect a world, not -- at least not primarily -- to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, to the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy the world and things.

-- That last point relies on highly idiosyncratic Arendtian terminology and mappings, especially the distinction of the animal laborens from the homo faber, and from the classical definition of man as at once the rational and political animal. You have to read an enormous amount of Arendt (not even reading the whole book The Human Condition is quite equal to the depth of the categories it itself introduces and deploys) to tap into the full richness of her vocabulary, but there is an extraordinary passage on pp. 236-237 that provides an unusually clear and concise survey of Arendt's account. This passage is also especially interesting given the aversion to (even the horror of) "the automatic" that is thematized in the passages you have already read. My last comment is that you should think about the distinction between exchange (as in Arendt's warnings above about the desire to exchange the earth for the world) and the notion of a redemption that saves and that provides the thread that connects all the crucially distinct but equally crucially indispensable facets of the human condition throughout the whole passage --

We have seen that the animal laborens could be redeemed from its predicament of imprisonment in the ever-recurring cycle of the life process, of being subject to the necessity of labor and consumption, only through the mobilization of another human capacity, the capacity for making, fabricating, and producing of homo faber, who as a toolmaker not only eases the pain and trouble of laboring but also erects a world of durability. The redemption of life, which is sustained by labor, is worldliness, which is sustained by fabrication. We saw furthermore that homo faber could be redeemed from his predicament of meaninglessness, the "devaluation of all values," and the impossibility of finding valid standards in a world determined by the category of means and ends, only through the interrelated faculties of action and speech, which produce meaningful stories as naturally as fabrication produces use objects. If it were not outside the scope of these considerations, one could add the predicament of thought to these instances; for thought, too, is unable to "think itself" out of predicaments which the very activity of thinking engenders. What in each of these instances saves man -- man qua animal laborens, qua homo faber, qua thinker -- is something altogether different; it comes from the outside -- not, to be sure, outside of man, but outside each of the respective activities. From the viewpoint of the animal laborens, it is like a miracle that it is also a being which knows of and inhabots a world; from the viewpoint of homo faber it is like a miracle, like the revelation of divinity, that meaning should have a place in that world.

The case of action and action's predicament is altogether different. Here, the remedy against the irreversibility and unpredictability of the process started by acting does not arise out of another and possibly higher faculty, but is one of the potentialities of action itself. The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility -- of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing -- is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. The two faculties belong together in so far as one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose "sins" hang like Damocles' sword over every new generation; and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men.

Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocations -- a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel. Both faculties therefore, depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound to a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one's self.

-- As I said, this is an incredibly rich passage, and only some of its riches directly connect with the concerns of our course (although we will return to some of what we put in the background for now when we shift our attention in a couple of weeks from "green" design for sustainability to "p2p" design for network participation). For those who do go on to explore Arendt's philosophy more deeply for its own sake, I will say that this passage remains a useful touchstone. What is sometimes described as a "turn" from Arendt's early to her late thinking, a shift from the radicality to the banality of evil under totalitarianism is clearly anticipated in this comparatively early passage. In "Thinking and Moral Considerations" Arendt will go on to say that under conditions of totalitarian tyranny thinking itself can take on the character of acting, extending to thinking-otherwise itself the sort of redemptive force she assigns to other facets of the human condition in respect to their limits -- usually figured as a horror of interminable automatism -- in their own terms, so that thought-as-action might rescue humanity from the madness and isolation of totalitarian anti-politics quite as much as political action more generally is said by Arendt to rescue thought isolated and enthralled by interminable free-associational rationalism.

Better Than Ezra?

When Ezra Klein wears his spectacles on the tee vee he looks a bit like Emma Goldman. One wishes he sounded a bit more like her. (I keed! I keed!)

Ain't That the Truth

Over at Salon, Alex Pareene points out that across the spectrum America's narcissism taints Egypt coverage.

A Little Grossed Out

Uninformed cheerleading at foreign insurrections seems to me exactly as unseemly as uninformed cheerleading at foreign invasions.

Also, Like It Or Not, Sputnik Moment = Mars, Bitches!

...since Congress holds the purse strings.

NBC/Comcast Merger

What could possibly go wrong?

Civility Among the Assholes

If you look, let us say, at educational outcomes, levels of poverty, incarceration rates for people of color in the United States either you think these data reflect natural endowments of people of color (which makes you a racist asshole) or you think these data reflect unnecessary unjust social conditions. And if you think they reflect unnecessary unjust social conditions either you don't care (which makes you a racist asshole) or you do care and so engage in some measure in education, agitation, and organization to change these unnecessary unjust social conditions. And if you don't engage in any measure in education, agitation, or organization to change these unnecessary unjust social conditions then you really don't care even if you say you do (which makes you a racist asshole).

I know that when we speak of racism in contemporary life we are supposed to be quick (in the political correctness of the one who fears above all the charge of political correctness) to indicate we are talking about outcomes and structural features and vestigial legacies of a curiously abstruse racism rather than accusing particular individuals of intentional vitriolic racist sentiments.

I think this habit of ours not only overlooks widespread and fairly flagrant concrete racism in this country but it also indulges in a facile fantasy about the extent to which it is actually possible to be ignorant of or inattentive to extraordinary and abiding social violence and injustice disproportionately affecting people of color without also being outright racist in a fairly straightforward sense, a fantasy that always only benefits the racist rather than the victims of racism and hence is itself racist.

I suspect that we engage in this pretense among other reasons because we all know that part of what it usually means to be a racist asshole (or a sexist pig, or a gay basher, or a torture-apologist, or a rich prick) is also to be a self-important asshole who fancies his hurt feelings matter more than whatever hurt his clumsy belligerent ignorant self-regard causes, so everyone the least bit more sensible proceeds to let assholes be assholes in a general sort of way even as they try to nudge assholes to ameliorate their assholery the least bit in any particular egregious expression of it, because that is the only thing short of making a scene almost as unpleasant as the assholery itself that assholes allow for, being assholes.

Nevertheless, it really is worth pointing out that it happens to be inherently, absolutely, and categorically disagreeable to disagree agreeably with racist, sexist, heterosexist, or classist varieties of assholery even if precisely this, I'm sorry to say, is too often what is meant by "civility" in contemporary parlance.

Left Well Lost?

More clippings from the cutting room floor.

In any sufficiently complex and spatially disseminated functional division of labor such that the contribution of any individual to the civilization on which all its members depend for their survival and flourishing becomes impossible to specify within the terms enabling and hence available to all its contributors themselves, that determination of contribution and standing and reward will depend in part on the work of ideological formulations to the preferential benefit of incumbent elites, just as in any hierarchical society sufficiently democratic for legitimacy of government to depend on the apparent consent of the governed the appearance of consent will be maintained by ideological formations to the preferential benefit of incumbent elites. This means that every hierarchical society of any complexity is permanently susceptible to the deceptive and delusive work of ideology to the benefit of reactionary politics and oligarchy.

I do not agree that such permanent susceptibility is the same thing as ineradicability, and I certainly do not sympathize with cynical (essentially moralizing) accounts which would reduce every charge of ideology simply to an inappropriately grandiose signal of personal disapproval of some truth-claim well warranted to differently situated peers. I regard both of these positions as rationalizations for complacency, often all the worse for being proposed in tonalities of phony radicalism. I will add that the first error -- mistaking permanent susceptibility to ideology as ineradicability of ideology -- is almost justified as an injunction to a permanent vigilance equal to the risk of assimilation to or collaboration with injustice, but that the second error -- mistaking every claim to legitimacy as always only parochial and so declaring illegitimate legitimacy as such -- is never justified (not that this should matter, given that the formulation denigrates justification as such, but of course it always does turn out to matter just the same), especially as a signal of a radicalism the very possibility of which it disdains.

I maintain that the distinction of the academic and activist Left from liberalism has hitherto depended on a distinction of Revolution from reform that has usually been a wholesome effort to learn from and stay true to demands of the permanent susceptibility of complex, hierarchical societies, even notionally democratic ones, to ideological formulations and formations -- an effort that has sometimes, and understandably, made the error of mistaking permanent susceptibility for ineradicability precisely in order to maintain necessary discipline in the face of ubiquitous and insidious forces abetting assimilation to and collaboration with injustice, exploitation, violence, and oligarchy (not to mention the perils of reconciling the righteous demand of the impossible that fuels our idealism and directs our pragmatism with the pragmatic considerations at the left wing of the possible out of which come the reforms through which we actually arrive at the ideal from the real where we are here and now).

To those of the academic and activist Left who still bemoan the loss of the Communist Other at the end of the Cold War as the loss of an actually existing alternative to capitalism in which those who would aspire to a more radical transformational Left than reformist liberalisms enable (despite the inappropriateness of what actually existed in the name of Communism as a site for such imaginative investment), it is unclear to me why a contest over what counts as a properly capitalist order is assumed necessarily to be less radical and transformational and emancipatory than a contest of what passes as capitalism with what passes as communism. In my view, for example, the provision of a basic guaranteed income (among other elements in a strong suite of welfare entitlements including single payer healthcare, lifelong education and training, and access to wholesome affordable housing) would be a necessary precondition for the emergence of any capitalist order for which the moral claims of typical of market fundamentalists that only contractarian orders truly repudiate coercion can have the slightest chance to apply in reality, since in the absence of such guarantees what passes for consensual outcomes are too easily misinformed through conspicuously unequal recourse to reliable information and education, unequal recourse to law, and duressed by the threat of poverty and precarity. But notice the curiosity that it is actually quite difficult to distinguish such a construal of a morally righteous consensually contractarian capitalism from many construals of socialism.

To those who declare reform always only the responce to limited, local, strategic, parochial injustices and concerns while leaving deeper structural injustices and irrationalities intact, awaiting no doubt the more sweeping and totalizing transformations of muscular and audacious radical critique and revolutionary action, it is unclear to me why reform campaigns struggling, again say, to implement the provision of a basic guaranteed income (very likely preceded and enabled by reform campaigns to render taxation more progressive, achieve a more equitable sensible healthcare system, expand public education, and improve other welfare programs) would not eventuate, without revolution, at a transformation of society quite as radical in its democratizing aspirations as any revolutionary vision one would care to propose.

I still see the sense of Michael Harrington's declaration that "the best liberalism leads toward socialism. I’m a radical, but... I want to be on the left wing of the possible." I begin to suspect that I am a reformist more than a revolutionary, a liberal more than a Leftist, a radical democrat more than a progressive one, especially inasmuch as mine is a vision of a democratizing struggle imagined and practiced as an ongoing and interminable expression and experimentation of equity-in-diversity already well underway more than a progressive struggle toward a final and definitive "accomplishment" of equity-in-diversity as an eidos we presumably know well in advance.

While it may well be true that such a reformist, liberal, experimentalist but still radical democracy (this is not, after all, an apologia for the confinement of politics to partisan efforts by any means) does lack any totalizing critique of existing institutions and norms, I must say I think it healthy to regard such totalizing vantages at least with skepticism if not as always only mirages altogether well lost, and also as so alienated from the present world as to risk the solidarity with present peers without which politics will tend to be the more elitist and tyrannical precisely the more radical they are.

I tend to find revolutionaries more congenial than reformers, and liberationists more congenial than liberals, at least as a matter of temperament -- so I am not without qualms in delineating this perspective, and I am more open to dissuasion than you might think. But I must say it is very hard for me to see what this understanding of radicalism loses the democratic left, substantially, but very easy for me to see what the revolutionary and totalizing Left gains instead is more self-indulgent and self-congratulatory than substantial as far as it goes.

Democracy and Nonviolence

Believe it or not, this post is from the cutting room floor, paragraphs I snipped from a longer post I am still working on but decided were too digressive from the subject even for meandering me, but which seemed to me still worthy, maybe, of attention in their own right.

Although we speak of democracy as a political practice and doctrine, it would be better to say that democracy is an ethical practice and domain, a particular ethical vantage on the political.

Politics, when and to the extent that it is reasonable, is a set of beliefs and practices through which is facilitated the ongoing acceptable adjudication of the interminable and ineradicable disputes arising among the diversity of stakeholders with whom we share the world. Unless one's politics were absolutely opportunistic -- which I suspect is actually impossible to anyone who is not a sociopath -- they will make recourse to ethical beliefs.

Democratic politics is a matter of the nonviolent adjudication of stakeholder disputes in accordance with what are in fact ethical considerations, the aspiration to universal assent via contingent universalization inhering in assertions of universal human rights, of valuing a country of laws and not men, of decent respect to the opinions of mankind, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for a common defense, promote general welfare, secure liberty for ourselves and our posterity, and so on.

Democracy at its heart is simply the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, and free speech and free association and the notion that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed all speak to the connection between what it means for a democrat to have a say and what it means to abhor violence in a democratic society. From courts of law to peaceful transfers of power in elections democracies seek to create and maintain alternatives to the violent adjudication of disputes.

Despite my assertion that democratic politics is nonviolent, I do not mean to imply by this that all democratic practices and institutions are properly subsumed under radical nonviolent politics as proposed and practiced by Gandhi or King, say (although I do think all radical nonviolence is indeed subsumed under democracy, and I also do think the best democracy should aspire to nonviolence in the radical sense). This is so, because violence can of course inhere deeply in the status quo, in the norms of society, in the law, and what might pass for nonviolence can easily depend on and even consolidate such structural violences.

Of course, modern technoscientific societies, whether notionally democratic or not, to the extent that their governance includes some measure of social administration in the service of general welfare and public investment in indispensable but unprofitable infrastructure will make recourse not only to ethical but also to scientific vocabularies.

Science and ethics are crucially different from one another. Facticity and normativity, however interdependent they may be, are never reducible to one another, nor is either one always only properly designated as prior to the other: No amount of knowledge about what is possible will tell you what among many possibilities is worthwhile or important; no amount of fervency as to what is wanted will provide confidence as to what among many desirable outcomes is possible.

However, both the scientific and ethical as modes of warranted belief-ascription do generate truths of a kind that confers legitimacy arising out of the collaborative work of contingent universalization. In this they differ together from other domains of truth which, no less indispensable in their proper precincts, confer parochial values: for example, greater profitability for some among many competitors, or a sense of belonging to a moral community purchased through the exclusion of outsiders and the policing of deviance among insiders.

To the familiar concerns (of Arendt and Foucault to name two I profoundly respect) that regular recourse of the political to the scientific threatens to reduce the political to social or disciplinary logics that undermine freedom the better to facilitate instrumentalizing or homogenizing ends, my own proposal is that a suite of welfare entitlements -- from basic guaranteed income, to public education and healthcare and housing, to the generous subsidization of scientific research and art for the public domain -- are all best justified as rendering the scene of consent on which democracy most crucially depends reliably informed and nonduressed and that this justification constrains within the bounds of ethical legitimacy nonetheless the pragmatic considerations of administration that answer to scientific rather than ethical warrants.

In response to familiar concerns (of conservatives and market libertarians to name two I have very little respect for at all) that such welfare entitlements and public investments require exploitation of worthy elites for the sake of the unworthy poor or ignorant masses, I would add that this support of the scene of reliably informed actually nonduressed consent through the provision of general welfare seems to me required by any contractarian (or capitalist) order that would claim to be anything more than a rationalization for abusive exploitation just as, at the same time, as it happens, for those keeping score at home, it provides for the permanent and universally available strike fund and freedom of association required by any socialist order that would claim to be anything more than a rationalization for tyrannical control.

Again, what is important here is to grasp the connection between democratization and anti-violence, a connection that neither the settled terms of capitalist nor communist discourses are quite equal to, at least as they circulate in mainstream parlance (although still marginal Green and democratic socialist discourses often do emphasize this connection).

"The Future" as Ad and as Cult

You will not go far wrong simply to treat pop futurology as a fandom of dupes doing unpaid crowdsourced marketing and promotional work for violent incumbent corporate-militarist interests.

The hyperbolic, bordering on fraudulent, claims of mainstream advertising for ineffectual pills and ointments, the trumpeting as "revolutionary" of incremental adjustments and repackagings of features already available in consumer goods, but especially cars, computers, and media devices, the evocations of "science" with phony experts in labcoats mouthing pseudo-scientific neologisms, the computer generated animations connecting imaginary science fiction "sensawunda" futurity to the stasis of quotidian neo-feudalism (space battles in Air Force ads, crystal pastel art deco cityscapes in ads for sunglasses, immersive virtual reality in ads for chewing gum, radical cyborgization in ads for cellphones and so on): all of these conventions are shared across the landscape of mainstream advertising and in futurology.

Those few public pseudo-intellectuals among the futurologists who pose as serious experts, policymakers, and scientists, the ones who find it so easy to describe their vapid enthusiasms and neologisms as a practice of "philosophy" unmoored from any actual philosophical reading or tradition, are certainly incompetents and fools. But most of them are not so much indulging in conscious scams (although futurology has its share of ridiculous would-be gurus who are hard to distinguish from those fundamentalist frauds who fleece parishioners with fierce promises of transcendence and revenge) as they are simply not very bright, rather uncritical participants and therefore symptom of the suffusion of public discourse by marketing and promotional norms more generally.

We are saturated in deception, spin, hyperbole for parochial short-term inconstant gains and we come to find our expectations, our assumptions, our aspirations, our very souls are being reshaped in the image of the parochial promotional: the desperate marketing impulse that pads our resumes to get that job interview, whatever our qualifications, and connect us somehow to some useful role in the society from which we feel unmoored, the sad self-promotional effort that exaggerates, fictionalizes, and normalizes our personal profiles and photoshops our images to get that first date, whereupon we dream some magic of encounter will deliver us from spiritual homelessness, the pathetic public relations ethos that drives us to express ourselves in blog posts that yield zero comments, that pretend word clouds mechanistically weighting the frequency of word choices discerns some unique meaning from utterly undistinguished utterances, that fancies the number of fleeting page views drawn in by who knows what word search strings renders us public intellectuals of a sort, all the while only the silent raptor-eyed panoptic surveyors and monitors of the security state and the compilers of profiles for even more incessant and intensively targeted advertising harassment show much more than utter indifference to our "participation" in the remnant freedom of open networks...

We fancy we are agents marketing ourselves for advantage in a networked attentional economy, promoting what is remarkable in us when instead we go unremarked but marked for marketing, constituted in our selves as market-ready, readily marketed, on the make not self-making but on the market.

There have always been ideologues and charlatans and fraudsters populating the scene of our public life, there has always been deception and corruption and scandal, oligarchy and violence and exploitation are nothing new. But we have been sold: the corrosive and deepening derangement of public discourse by the norms and forms of promotional discourse demands our urgent and immediate address, its forms facilitate in their utter prevalence the displacement by parochial profit-taking and imperial moralizing of the contingent universalization in which public scientific, ethical, and political legitimacies are lodged, its suffusion of our public life and our public selfhood provides an indispensable but neglected context (no doubt among others) with which to understand the special vulnerability to and force of eliminationism, hyperbole, deception in our debased contemporary politics.

To understand this catastrophic suffusion of public life with the norms of the promotional (you need only ponder the distinction of politics from public relations to grasp the full force of such a shift), it is especially crucial to remember that contemporary capitalist formations are post-Fordist, and that neoliberal/neoconservative, that is to say corporate-militarist, capitalism depends on a relentless kind of hyper-speculation that disavows its materiality (financialization, informationalization/informalization, digitization, logo-ization) as well as a global developmentalism that disavows its violence (the military might that enables exploitation of the global/informal Precariat, as well as the violation of ecosystems that enables ongoing extractive industrialization in the face of ruin).

The ongoing devastation of academic and evidence-based institutions through the emergence of the anti-academic think-tank archipelago and the corporatization of the University and the hegemony of corporate-militarist mass media, should be regarded as both a casualty of this shift into a promotional public, as well as facilitating, accelerating, and amplifying its terms. This is the indispensable context for understanding the thriving of climate change denialism and macroeconomic illiteracy (among many other comparable irrationalisms and moralisms) vying in contemporary public discourse for the patina of institutional legitimacy.

The scientific and the ethical as modes of warranted belief-ascription, that is to say as forms of truth-talk, are organized by imperatives of contingent universalization out of which arise their falsifiable claims to legitimacy, while the truths of profitability (every profit complemented by a loss) and mores (every "we" constituted through the exclusion of a "they") are inherently parochial.

This is not to say the moral and the profitable are illegitimate or dispensable as modalities of belief ascription in their parochialism, but to insist that they are what they are and do the work that they do, and to warn against confusions and problems that arise from ignorant or mistaken efforts to substitute the moral for the ethical (which yields moralizing and genocide) or the profitable for the scientific (which yields propaganda and oligarchy) when what is wanted are the sorts of legitimacy only afforded by the latter terms. (If this strain of argument is congenial but unfamiliar to you, by the way, you might enjoy other efforts I've archived at the sidebar under the heading Posts on Pluralism and Pragmatism.)

I mention these apparently tangential issues in order to circle around to another point, by way of conclusion. I've devoted enormous amounts of space to the critique of futurology, but hitherto that critique has emphasized the ways in which what I call superlative (or transcendental) futurology embedded within sub(cult)ural futurological formations (the whole Robot Cult archipelago of organizations and would-be "movements" and identity politics/fandoms I have ridiculed so relentlessly for so many years now) should be regarded as a kind of organized but marginal and defensive religiosity for which the familiar critiques of cult formations and True Believers and fundamentalist politics all come very much in handy. (For these critiques of mine, The Condensed Critique of Transhumanism hands it to you in a nutshell, while The Superlative Summary offers endless variations and applications on these themes, and my Futurological Brickbats provide an aphoristic alternate survey of the highlights.)

Although I try to take pains to emphasize that the rather outrageous and extreme forms taken by superlative and sub(cult)ural futurology are most useful when taken as clarifying crystallizations of more prevailing mainstream discourses -- and I would insist that futurology is the quintessential justificatory and aspirational vocabulary of neoliberal capitalism (still more on this here) -- I can see why long-time readers might still wonder whether the critique of futurology as a symptom of the contemporary suffusion of the public sphere with the norms of marketing and promotional discourse represents an important shift away from my earlier critique of futurology as a kind of organized religiosity engaged in pseudo-science and fundamentalist politics.

What I would say in conclusion is that for me these two critiques are very much of a piece, that part of what is wrong with the suffusion of the public sphere with promotional norms is that it amounts to a resurgence of priestly-aristocratic parochialism and incumbent-elitism, an eclipse of the collective work of contingent universalization, peer to peer, that yield the legitimacy, authority, and currency of the scientific and the ethical, proper, with which the most congenial strands of Enlightenment seem to me most concerned, and without which the ongoing work of attaining to secular sustainable consensual convivial social democracy seems to me both unworkable and even unthinkable.

Although I am someone whose political economy is indebted to Keynes most of all and whose political theory is indebted to Arendt most of all (both of whom were decidedly post-Marxist even in those areas in which they were not outright anti-Marxist), it seems to me that one still has to turn to the late Marx and his cultural critique of the ubiquitous fetishized commodity-form to grasp just how futurology's promotional normativity connects to futurology's transcendental cultism: the story, which is a long one I balk at elaborating at length and so leave to another day, is one that features among its key episodes Adorno's Culture Industry, Barthes's Mythology, Debord's Spectacle, and Naomi Klein's Logo (all of whom foreground in turn mass mediation to supplement failed Marxian historiography and to correct Marxian reductionism all the while sounding the key Marxian theme that culture is the repository of enslaving irrationality).

It's a story any one of the students in any number of the courses I have taught in critical theory over the last decade could recite with their eyes closed, and it's rather nice to find such a conspicuous convergence between the preoccupations of my blogging and the focus of my teaching opening up.

More to come.

What's New in "Geo-Engineering"?

As it happens, I do not disapprove of the contemplation of releasing various amounts of sulphur into various regions of the atmosphere under various conditions. Hell, I do not disapprove of the contemplation of much of anything at all. I do disapprove of anybody actually going ahead and pumping massive amounts of sulphur into the atmosphere, half-cocked (you might, too, after you've read this and this and this and this), but contemplating it? Not so much.

More to the point, I strongly disapprove the suggestion that in contemplating pumping sulphur into the atmosphere and then subjecting the notion to serious scrutiny we are doing some radically new sort of thing than we are when we are contemplating, say, planting thousands of acres of trees, contemplating installing thousands of wind turbines or millions of solar roofs, contemplating changing zoning ordinances to facilitate the emergence of dense, walkable neighborhoods, or the like.

I disapprove the suggestion that contemplating pumping sulphur into the atmosphere is a matter of engaging in an additional and special environmental discourse, one that needs the new word "geo-engineering" to describe it, an environmentalism that futurologists of all people are special experts in, presumably because of their special capacity for having especially Big Ideas and thinking especially fearless thoughts. Although I daresay it is true that most of the sorts of handwaving futurologists indulge in when they get into a lather of "geo-engineering" talk would indeed get shot down, especially as and to the extent that the proportion of non-futurologists who are actually competent climate scientists and engineers at the discussion table rises, I do disapprove the suggestion that these futurological proposals necessarily constitute a separate kind of environmentalist proposal rather than, say, just dumb ideas environmentalists who cannot distinguish science and science fiction very well came up with without thinking things fully through.

I disapprove the suggestion that contemplating pumping sulphur into the atmosphere is a newfangled environmentalism made necessary by the failures of already existing environmentalism and which justifies or even necessitates making obviously ugly and misguided separate political assumptions than usually circumscribe the field of legitimate discourse, new assumptions that are described as visionary, brave, tough-minded rather than ugly and misguided, such that when futurological experts contemplate pumping sulphur into the atmosphere suddenly we are licensed or encouraged to think of the corporate-militarist villains who have been destroying our world for their reckless profit-taking instead as our last, best hope to save that world they are destroying, as uniquely competent elites that must be given the authority to clean up their mess in their own way however awful and ugly and criminal that may appear, that saving the world must proceed in a way that is above all profitable for elite-incumbent interests, that democratic processes and accountability are suddenly (oh- so- reluctantly- and- regretfully!) dispensable and for the good of precisely those who would otherwise have a say in public decisions that directly affect them should democracy prevail, that when political processes fail to implement emissions regulations we must turn to megascale engineering projects instead since, of course, no political processes are involved in the funding, regulation, oversight, building, or maintenance of megascale engineering projects (oh, wait, that's the opposite of reality), that since catastrophic climate change is real and renewable energy technology is real and emission standards and energy efficiency standards and health and safety standards necessary for sustainability are well-understood and perfectly reasonable we must turn, when political will seems unequal to these realities, to grandiose ill-conceived scenario-spinning about acres of orbiting space mirrors and vast chemical spewing airfleets peddled with splashy artist renderings and futurological neologisms and talk of "terraforming" the earth as though humans were alien invaders re-engineering an extraterrestrial planet from the Mother Ship.

There is no unique climate science data set or specific modality of engineering proposal of which "geo-engineering" as a discourse uniquely consists. What "geo-engineering" essentially and substantially consists of in my view is the assumption of a particular (and profoundly pernicious) vantage on environmentalist consciousness, a particular framing of environmentalist assumptions and aspirations, one that insists on freighting a handful of loosely connected proposals (no stable or coherent criteria exists to explain why any particular "geo-engineer" includes their particular preoccupations under the umbrella of "geo-engineering" while excluding others with comparable scope in their aggregate effects) with phony novelty to the self-promotional benefit of futurologists themselves cast as special "experts," while also creating a space in which anti-democratic policy recommendations and skewed elite-incumbent corporate-militarist for-profit priorities over remediation and sustainability itself can be voiced in public as if they were "serious" proposals.

In my view, these anti-democratizing effects are not incidental but absolutely essential to "geo-engineering" discourse. Indeed, they are the only things "geo-engineering" introduces into environmentalist ideas and politics as they already exist -- apart from the fact that a disproportionate number of "geo-engineering" proposals also tend in their hyperbole and militarism (deriving from their emergence, like all futurology, out of the norms of corporate-militarist marketing and promotional discourse) to be unusually grandiloquent and half-baked (mirrors on the Moon! Submarine cityscapes of pipeworks churning the depths! and so on).

A God for the Godless

Something like the belief that the universe is not just susceptible of consequential description but also has -- and even somehow indicates, at least to certain especially lucky people -- preferences in the matter of how it is described, has long seemed to me to be the vestigial trace of infantile religiosity sometimes to be found among the otherwise most intransigently atheistical materialists.

Adversarial Advertorial

In response to my complaints about ever louder, ever more frequent, ever more hysterical advertising content on television, one rather sanctimonious reader helpfully suggested I stop watching television altogether.

Of course, the "Kill Your Television" chorus has long existed by now. And there is nothing to ridicule in the fact that some people have enriched their lives by separating from television (which for generations now has sometimes functioned as a kind of disastrous child-care alternative in some households and created dependencies that can cry out for intervention).

Also, truth be told, tastes both do and should differ, and those who find nothing worth watching on television are welcome to that opinion and to the subcultural forms they prefer. I for one think there is plenty worth watching on television -- I enjoy serialized science fiction and costume dramas, I enjoy the antics of some game shows and reality television, I enjoy the rhetorical pyrotechnics of pundit programs. I do think that at least some of the people who are most sanctimonious about their refusal of television are simply cutting themselves off from areas of culture for no clearly explicable reason.

But more to the point, "Kill Your Television" isn't really a relevant response to the problem at hand. In America advertisements are proliferating deliriously, on college campuses, in public spaces like stadiums and parks and subway stations (and even as flickering reels in the darkened tunnels!), in lobbies, in elevators, in grocery check-out lines, in ever more of the real estate of every media screen.

"Withdrawal" is simply not ultimately an option, unless one fancies life in a rough-hewn Unabomber cabin in the deep wilderness amidst the boulders and the flashing fishies with nothing but a dog-eared Thoreau for company (in which case, rock on with your bad ass self, but I'm not sure that solution will scale, even if Resource Descent -- Peak Oil, PetroAg Fail, Water Wars -- may force a monumental test case on us all soon enough).

However, it occurs to me that in Europe there are actually sensible regulations that restrict both the volume and frequency of television commercials. In the absence of such regulations it is very clear that there is literally no check on the vicious circle driving commercial media into suicide -- they keep increasing the amount of ad time, the volume, the forms it takes, getting for each further encroachment of the norm a momentary burst of oh so delicious profit that vanishes once everybody else has replicated it and normalized the encroachment, thus provoking the next encroachment still, and on and on an on, never gaining a permanent profit advantage but with each encroachment tapping away at the actual quality of the content they are providing, with nothing to check the process, nothing to contain the greed that drives the degeneration. As with everything else, the drive for profit when constrained by regulation can encourage worthy innovation, but when unconstrained eats its own to the ruin of all.

The relevant question for me is just why it is that there is no real organized resistance agitating for legislation to introduce in the US regulation such as exists in the EU to limit the frequency of ad content -- which is now actually palpably beginning to undermine the capacity of shows to maintain narrative continuity? Why are there no mass campaigns for regulations such as exist in South America to limit or eliminate billboards that clutter our cities and pimple our pristine landscapes? Why is there no well organized outcry for laws forbidding the re-naming of stadiums and subway stations built and maintained with tax payer and public bond funds to honor private corporations as though they were monarchs? Why aren't people regularly arguing on the pundit shows for laws to forbid ads and commercials in university settings that exist, after all, as spaces of research and contemplation and in which distractions and biases imperil their mandated missions? Why don't I hear as a matter of course that people feel assaulted and harassed by endless shrill ads making hyperbolic promises and mobilizing ridiculous imagery and stereotypes that insult our intelligence and derange our senses?

In my view, the ongoing proliferation and ramification of advertising on every conceivable space is tantamount to pollution and harassment and there should be lawsuits and organized campaigns to stop it. Although I enjoy the aesthetics of culturejamming and adbusting it seems to me that these interventions functionally depend on and substantiate the norms and forms of ubiquitous advertising as such, whatever critical purchase they may provide in our relations to particular ad content.

Too many of my students take comfortably for granted the utter colonization of public space by deceptive hyperbolic corporate marketing material. And let me stress that word deception. The norms of marketing discourse are hyperbolic and cynical in ways that typically, that is to say generically, border on fraud and their ubiquity is educating the population to accept endless spin and deception as normal, as acceptable, preparing the way for a public life suffused with opportunistic lies. These norms appeal conspicuously to our emotions rather than our capacities to weight competing claims logically, empirically, critically, indeed they appeal to the bluntest of our passions, to our appetites, our greed, our fear, preparing the way for a public life suffused with selective mobilizations of short-term greed and terror. (To connect this point with other themes that recur here at Amor Mundi, I do indeed regard futurological discourse as the quintessential expression of this utter bankruptcy of public deliberation into marketing and promotional fraud, explored especially in the posts archived here).

Needless to say, I consider all this profoundly pernicious, perhaps the single most dangerous cultural force afoot without any organized resistance that I can see the least bit equal to its danger. Any readers aware of actually effective organizing out there on these questions? What forms might organized resistance properly take? What, practically, should be done?

Sustainable Schadenfreude

I am sometimes amused at the thought that when the petro-bubble that has for so long been mistaken for the Triumphal Ascendancy Unto Infinity of Western Civilization finally does burst it will be organic farmers and hippy artisans and eco-villagers and other such folks long derided as fools and throwbacks by the gas-guzzling go-getter bully narcissists of Randoidal neoliberalism who alone will have all the skills without which neither flourishing nor even survival is possible.

Of course, the least contemplation of the scale of human catastrophe that would necessarily precede anything like the arrival of that state of affairs fizzles that amusement pretty quickly. Indeed, the trauma of surviving such a transition might make any notion of flourishing moot whatever vital skills one had shepherded through our own catastrophic know-nothing ego-everything era.

More on Economics and Rhetoric

The throwaway comment on Krugman in the last post has reminded me of something I've been meaning to riff on for a long time, a point that comes up all the time in my teaching but rarely in my blogging:

When Robert Heilbroner made the point that economists were "worldly philosophers" in his (justly) famous economic history of the same name, he was really making what would be better thought of as two different enormously important points, both of which might have been made better under a different title.

One of the points, in my view, is that economists at their best would be better thought of as rhetoricians (formulating compelling cases, figures, narratives, and appeals to identity the better to corral and change collective conviction and conduct), and the other point is that economists at their worst often seem to want instead to be thought of as philosophers, and especially as philosophers in those sad moments in which they seek to distinguish what they are doing as forcefully as possible from "mere rhetoric," moments in which they are often most prone to figure themselves instead as some sort of scientific discipline or even the most scientific discipline of all, a meta-science or super-science.

I do not think it accidental that Keynes titled one of his most wonderful and influential books Essays in Persuasion, any more than that the truly marvelous economist Albert Hirschman who wrote the incomparable The Passions and the Interests (one of those books which literally everybody should read) also wrote the less known but also excellent Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.

I personally think that Marx was incomparably better when he was writing polemical journalism and history (not to mention outright manifestos), or those endlessly fascinating figurative analyses like the passage concerning the camera obscura in The German Ideology and the one with all those avid grotesque undead commodities capering about in "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof" from Volume One of Capital, than in the awful moments when he was trying to live up to Engels' deadly praise that he was "The Darwin of History" and making an anxious spectacle of his pseudo-scientificity by reducing cultural complexities to drab forces of production and sketching grandiloquent deterministic histories and mistaking priestly prophetic utterances for scientific hypotheses like your typical philosophical peacock. Only those facile free marketeers, Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, Friedman, Friedman, Friedman, et al are more embarrassing in their pretentious pseudo-scientificity, mistaking maths and hype for substance and looking the other way when the bullets fly and starving stomachs balloon in their wake.

The story of rhetoric's denigration by philosophical ideologues is literally a story as old as philosophy itself, inasmuch as philosophy was born precisely in such a moment of resentment (as Nietzsche tells the story best of all). As Hannah Arendt was always at such pains to point out, this denigration shaped the Western tradition of political thought in ways that endlessly distort our understanding of and deny the thoughtful access to the full measure of worldly life -- although it might be said that in her ready assimilation of economic discourse to the social rather than to the political she contributed her own share to the long deferral of the reckoning of rhetoric with the end in failure of the western philosophical project, a reckoning that needs to do justice to the political in thought, including those dimensions in political economy that have always been more rhetorical than philosophical from the first. Such a reckoning would need -- as Heilbroner's history significantly failed to do -- among other things, to register the achievement of political economists like Karl Polanyi as high as that of Marx and Mill and Keynes, and at least as part of the same story.

The Digital Utopian Future Is Here!

Is it just me or does the new digital tee vee endlessly black out and skitter and pixillate, making it incomparably worse than the prevailing standards that preceded it? Just me, I'm sure. Everything is awesome now.

The Robot Cult Razor

Superlative Futurologists interminably -- and I would say definitively -- find themselves (usually himselves) in the curious argumentative/assertive position of

EITHER

declaring as likely, important, or true an actually vapid statement (such as that water is wet, that a longer healthier life is generally preferable to a shorter diseased one, or that when lots of things change things tend to get less predictable generally speaking) nobody needs to join a Robot Cult or to deploy idiosyncratic Robot Cult jargon to grasp or profess in the first place

OR

declaring as likely, important, or true an actually distinctive statement which only people in Robot Cults would seriously profess because it is pretty much batshit crazy (such as that organismically materialized intelligence or "selfhood" can be "migrated" into cyberspatial heaven or into superhuman robot bodies and also thereby near-immortalized, probably under the loving care of superintelligent robot gods with nanobotic dirt-cheap superabundance machines at their disposal, that this is likely enough that we should be devoting considerable time to thinking about it rather than more proximate concerns like global exploitation and social injustice, clashing fundamentalisms, proliferating weapons, catastrophic climate change and resource descent, and could happen "soon," possibly in a shattering history-ending or personal-transcendence enabling event called The Singularity or Ascendance or some such nonsense).

The vapid statement tends to be the position to which the Robot Cultist always only momentarily retreats when confronted with either consensus scientific or conceptual criticism of his actually distinctive but, alas, crazy assertions of belief. The reason this retreat to vapidity is so commonplace and even necessary is because the Robot Cultist is indulging in an essentially faith-based enterprise yielding what are actually sub(cult)ural membership benefits and wish-fulfillment fantasy satisfactions, but which peddle themselves as and require the maintenance of the highly vulnerable fantasy that they are in fact a mode of serious science or serious technodevelopmental policy-making rather than essentially religious/moralistic/aesthetic matters of faith, fandom, and style. The Robot Razor, I fear, is cutting.