All Patriarchy Is Eugenic

Upgraded and adapted from an exchange in the Moot to this post. This comment:

Through centuries of education human beings have naturally gotten smarter, without genetic engineering or tampering of any kind. Einstein came out of a vagina not a test tube and that will likely remain the case for centuries to come. Furthermore, human beings have become incredibly intelligent over the centuries, yet are hardly any wiser for it. Maybe we should engineer wisdom, we are in dire need of it.

Provoked me to respond with a comment of my own:

Patriarchy itself can be usefully viewed as the inculcation of a set of arbitrary norms driving a selective eugenic breeding program many centuries old, and so the "natural" default status into which eugenics-champions fancy themselves to be tampering is just as well viewed as a position taken in a long clash of stupid eugenic parochialisms. To the extent that "coming out of a test tube" can be and has been a phrase used by folks to describe IVF, I daresay an Einstein could emerge from one before emerging from a vagina easily enough. I think it is important to distinguish ARTs (alternative/artificial reproductive technologies) from eugenic-inspired proposals, even as we grant that there is some historical overlap between the two, as there is also a certain bioreductionist strain (that deserves the strongest critique as well) that sometimes frames both for their champions and critics.

Credit where credit is due, this is an idea that was first suggested to me years ago by Annalee Newitz at a feminist conference I organized on bioethics discourse at Berkeley.

Anyway, at this point an all-too-familiar long-time periodic sniper in the Moot, John Howard (who is not, I'm pretty sure the former Australian PM) replied to that last comment in his usual vein, and the ensuing exchange seemed worthy of its own post:

So the "natural" default status of men and women choosing each other to marry and having children together is eugenics? So what is not eugenics? Don't tell me: Peer to peer consensual fully informed blah blah voluntary genetic modification and same-sex/transgender reproduction is not eugenics and OK, right?

I reply:

Needless to say, what John Howard echoes as the "natural" or "default" state of men and women marrying and having children is neither natural nor a default for countless people -- and ever more so the more he may want to freight "married with children" with other modifications, for example, life-long, monogamous, nuclear, etc.

This is not an invitation for you to elaborate your point, John Howard, I'm not getting drawn into yet another of these homopanic exercises you post to my blog a couple of times a year since I know that treating you as a good faith interlocutor does no good a couple of exchanges down the road from this initial one. You have a history and a reputation and you have to live with it. Further communications from you will probably just be deleted unless you are very good and very concise.

For newcomers and lurkers, I will add that it is obviously not a negative judgment of those for whom desiring or sexual or affiliative lifeways really are legible and satisfying on comparatively now-customary terms to point out as well that the wider range of also perfectly legible human desires and sexual practices have been constrained and violated and punished by heteronormative and reprosexual assumptions, norms, ends.

And to the extent that heteronormative and reprosexual norms have functioned to police and abject and deform equity-in-diversity there is some urgency about refusing to allow such forms to be described as "natural" in the way John Howard wants to do.

Howard claims (no need to trust me on this, scour the archives) that heterosexuality is under attack, and is especially paranoid about futurological discourses in which imaginary technologies enable queer folks to have armies of clone babies who will steal his heterosexuality away from him (after a few argumentative bouts with him it is hard to shake the suspicion that he is just afraid of the loss of an unearned privilege and also possibly that he can't exactly deal with a bit of hankering of his own for a little dick on the side).

To elaborate a bit more for the peanut gallery: "Patriarchy" names social formations in which the transmission of property and authority from fathers to sons requires that women be subordinated/owned as property as well so that men can control their reproductive capacity and hence facilitate that transmission of property and authority from fathers to sons. "Patriarchy" also describes social formations in which that which is constructed and marked as female/feminine is subordinated in comparison to that which is constructed and marked as male/masculine in order to facilitate the transmission of property and authority from fathers to sons, or as vestiges of a history of such transmission (vestiges that can linger and unexpectedly ramify and transform long after patriarchy in its initial legal and ethnographic sense has been overcome).

To the extent that in many historical and geographical sites men have chosen for countless generations to marry and have children with women who facilitate patriarchal norms it is perfectly obvious that patriarchal sex-gender constructions have articulated (which is of course not to say determined) both the men and the women as well as the cultures co-constructed by those practices and lifeways.

Needless to say, by the way, if queer folks marry and have kids (facilitated by ARTs or through elaborate surrogacy arrangements) but choose their partners and shape their offspring in the service of visions of optimality that remain paradoxically patriarchal (believe me, it happens), or racist, or according to various instrumentalizing competitiveness criteria, then of course these too can be framed as eugenic. It should go without saying, but I disapprove of the stupidity and anti-democracy of eugenic formulations as much from gay folks as from anybody else.

It is to be hoped that few of my readers will find the very idea of actually informed, nonduressed consensual democratic multiculture quite so contemptible as John Howard, defender of straight pricks, seems to do.

APA Panel on Transhumanism on YouTube

I participated in a panel on Transhumanism and Posthumanism at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Meeting last weekend, sponsored by the Karl Jaspers Society. A recording of the panel is up on YouTube is up now for anybody who is interested. The whole thing took about two and half hours. My own talk begins at 1.23.50. The second Q&A (in which I participated, and during which I blathered on far too much) begins at 2.04.40. Among other things affable sparring between me and Max More takes place. Comments, criticisms welcome.

"The Future" Is Always Somebody Else's Pain and Payment for Our Sins

Also published at the World Future Society.

Over at the Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics (where actual ethics are rarely discussed) and Emerging Technologies (where the technologies are rarely actually emerging), one of the Very Serious White Guys of "The Future," Dick Pelletier, has penned another of his incomparably desolating consolations, this one entitled (I shit you not), Overpopulated Earth? No problem, Experts Say; Technologies to the Rescue. Critics who lambaste my strawmen caricatures of a complacent, consumerist and reactionary futurology are invited to renew their complaints at the service desk. For those who crave more of Mr. Pelletier's curious construal of "the experts" and the things they presumably "are saying," do enjoy this reminder.

Pelletier's little number is positively (oh so very positively!) thrumming with lively refrains. "What are the solutions to overpopulation," Pelletier asks? Asked and answered!

1) improve rain-fed agriculture and irrigation management; 2) encourage vegetarianism and acceptance of genetically-modified foods; 3) speed development of molecular nanotechnology; 4) expand telemedicine efforts; 5) create new medical therapies to curb obesity; and 6) produce lab-grown meat without growing animals.

Robust reliable programmable self-replicating room-temperature swarms of billions of usefully positionable nanobots, mountains of nutritious meat-mush cultured from a single sacrificial cell -- who cares if nobody actually qualified is doing it or even anything remotely like it and few who are actually qualified think it can be done and everybody knows that even in the event that a thing is logically doable this doability remains a far cry from being practically, politically, profitably doable -- na! na! na! na! not listening! not listening! it's from Pelletier's lips to the Robot God's ears. The Nike swoosh and the bracing exhortation "Just Do It!" are not provided, but definitely implied.

But why pay attention to a negative nellie like me? Pelletier assures me that "billionaire Peter Thiel's Breakout Labs [has] funneled $350,000 into Modern Meadow, a startup company that uses 3D printers to manufacture food." Gosh! Between Thiel's dreams of coding a history-ending sooper-intelligent sooper-parental Robot God, and of building a secret pirate libertopian oil-platform paradise off the coast of San Francisco (when you're a Randroidal sooperman it's always nice to have a socialist paradise handy for, you know, hospitals and emergency rescue operations and hygienic restaurants and underhuman support staff and stuff), to think he's also working on 3D-printer cornucopiae for the poors to snack on just goes to show why we Takers just need to get out of the way so the Makers can get on with all that tremendous Making they do! (So far he's actually made a global hedge fund and had an unspecified hand in making PayPal's actual code, and made lots of friends denigrating diversity, but who's counting?)

Pelletier soldiers on:

Currently, genetically -created or –modified foods are too expensive, but using Kurzweil's "law of accelerating returns," experts predict that in the near future, lab-produced, nutrient-enriched meat will be priced competitively, and accepted by mainstream society as a healthier alternative to animal-grown food.

Perhaps you did not know that Kurzweil's "law of accelerating returns" -- which is not a law but the assumption of an entirely arbitrary subjective perspective from which one can tell a story of accelerating technological growth that looks plausible to those who want it to be true but not to anybody else -- is the sort of thing one can "use," really, let alone the sort of thing the use of which makes one an "expert" in anything, but presumably the extreme credulity demanded by the "law" is now considered by certain "experts" to create causal conditions such that things we do not know how to do and do not know that we will ever be able to do will become at once both knowable and doable. What can one say, but -- awesome, man!

Pelletier concludes by reminded us of "[t]he late Julian Simon," a futurist who "discarded the notion that too many people will cause us to run out of resources and space. Simon believed that adding more people would provide creativity and innovation to solve our overpopulation problems, forever keeping us ahead of the curve." I have always personally been struck by the habit Simon had of responding to objections, criticisms, worries about the scale of the stakes involved in such questions with the prototypically futurological response, "You wanna bet on it!"

Now, as you know, I am always criticizing futurological thinking as the systematic confusion of making bets with having thoughts, and I was always especially charmed by the way Simon and the nice futurologists over at Long Bets so eagerly literalized the point for me. Of course, to reply to a criticism with the declaration of a willingness to bet on the result is very much not to respond to an argument with an argument. I was always puzzled by the way this response so sufficed for so many futurologists. Since, really, Simon's performance of a willingness to bet that we will come up with some solution to problems of overpopulation and catastrophic climate change is not only not the provision of any sense at all of what solutions these might be or who is working on them under what conditions with what real chances of success, but is actually nothing but a kind of re-enactment of the very state of denial in which extractive-industrial-petrochemical-consumerist modernity is sleepwalking its way to extinction in the first place.

Yes, in the absence of actually changing our wasteful, polluting, exploitative, violent ways we are all of us always only betting our lives and the lives of every earthling with whom we share the world that the price we all know will come due for our abject foolishness will not come today but tomorrow or for somebody else. This catastrophic tomorrow, this terrorized foreigner is, and has always been, the real substance of "The Future" of the futurologists.

APA Talk Next Week -- Futurological Discourse and Posthuman Terrains

This is just a reminder that I'll be presenting a brief talk and participating in a panel discussion about posthumanism (fellow panelists include Natasha Vita-More, somewhat to my chagrin) at next week's meeting in San Francisco of the American Philosophical Association. I posted a mini-abstract for the talk on the blog quite a while ago when the event was still being organized, but here is a slightly more elaborated sketch of the talk, in which there are unlikely to be many surprises for those who read my work regularly:

I distinguish post-humanist politics of planetarity (environmental crises, global diaspora, panurban convivialities, imbrication in media, financial, surveillance, activist networks) from the futurological politics of post-human advocacy, of either superlative transhumanism's "enhanced" homo superior or supernative bio-conservatism's "posited" homo naturalis. I distinguish in turn post-philosophical discourses of critical theory from futurological discourses (originating in speculative market futures and culminating in science fictional think-tank scenarios authorizing neoliberal developmentalism), promising prophesy rather than understanding, confusing making bets with having thoughts, diverting attention from the open futurity inhering in the diversity of stakeholders in/to the present with "The Future" as a screen on which parochial fears and fantasies are projected, deranging power from the experience of potential, peer-to-peer, into a brute amplification of instrumental capacities, the consummation of what Hannah Arendt described as "earth alienation."

More specifically, my talk is structured by the project to propose and elaborate seven basic distinctions that seem to me key to grasping transhumanism as both a discursive and a subcultural phenomenon but are also helpful to anyone who would facilitate progressive technodevelopmental social struggle.

The seven distinctions are between:

1, technology and technologies -- a distinction between, on the one hand, the actual constellation of artifacts and techniques in the diversity of their stakes and specificities and also actual technoscientific research programs and developmental pathways in the diversity of their vicissitudes and inter-dynamisms and, on the other hand, technology as a de-politicizing myth disavowing these specificities, vicissitudes and stakes but also as a discursive site elaborating fantasies, fears, and possibilities of collective agency, adjudicating the resourceful from the companionate, the familiar from the unfamiliar;

2, progress and destiny -- a distinction between, on the one hand, technodevelopmental social struggles in the service of avowed political ends (equity, diversity, prosperity, reported satisfactions, and so on) in a material historical frame and, on the other hand, a paradoxical naturalization, a variation of Nietzschean ressentiment, usually via a rhetoric of determination, autonomy, convergence, and/or "accelerationalist" momentum, of disavowed, often transcendentalized, technoscientific ends (overcoming error, scarcity, mortality, finitude);

3, mainstream futurism and superlative futurism -- a distinction between, on the one hand, the speculative, reductive, denialist, unsustainable, hyperbolizing norms and forms that suffuse popular marketing, promotional, consumer discourses as well as the terms of authoritative neoliberal administrative, productivist, developmentalist discourses and, on the other hand, the futurological hyper-amplification of this speculativeness, reductiveness, denialism, and hyperbole into faith-based, techno-transcendental, figuratively scientific but in fact pseudo-scientific, quasi-theological assumptions and aspirations toward superintelligence, supercapacitation (often including immortality) and superabundance miming the omni-predication of judeochrislamic divinity;

4, superlativity and supernativity -- a distinction between what might be described as posthuman/transhuman and reactionary/bioconservative futurologies (or more broadly and conventionally, if not precisely correctly, as undercritically technophilic as against undercritically technophobic orientations), the analytic usefulness and force of which is to highlight unexpected continuities and inter-dependencies of the two, as distinguished in turn from legible democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle, progressive education, agitation, organization, policy making and reform, and consensus science and sustainable public investment;

5, posthumanism and transhumanism -- a distinction between, on the one hand, post-humanist discourse as variations of superlative futurology (eugenic transhumanism, apocalyptic singularitarianism, techno-immortalism, nano-cornucopism, digital-utopianism, geo-engineering technofixation) and, on the other hand, post-humanist discourse as variations of humanist criticism, utopian humanism, and the critique of humanism (whether feminist, anti-racist, post-colonial, economic, environmentalist, or what have you);

6, transhuman discourse and transhuman subcultures -- a recognition for scholarship of material differences in the objects and archives and demands of discursive as against subcultural formations, for example, the differences between genealogical relations among figures, problems, tropes, citational relations among published texts and conventions, and organizational relations among members, officers, funders, and so on;

7, futurity and "The Future" -- a distinction between the political openness inhering in the present in the presence of ineradicable stakeholder diversity and an instrumentalizing projection of parochial fears and fantasies and stakes that would disavow and so foreclose futurity -- a distinction between, on the one hand, coming to terms with the present, especially in grasping the meaning of what has taken us by surprise, through which we seek to understand and, better still, become understanding and, on the other hand, predicting the future, especially in proposing coinages that would work as spells to dispel being taken by surprise, through which we become ever more susceptible to fraud and, worse still, become frauds -- a distinction, where thinking is concerned, between investment and speculation, between thinking and betting.

p2p is EITHER Pay-to-Peer OR it is Peers-to-Precarity

Also published at the World Future Society.

Paul Krugman is right to say that the cancellation of Google Reader provides yet another demonstration of the failure of private profitability to provide for the maintenance of public goods, even though I disagree that it seems hard in the least "to envision search and related functions as public utilities," which is indeed "where th[is] logic will eventually take us." Although such conclusions do take us far afield from the assumptions and aspirations that drive the common wisdom of the catastrophically failed generation of neoliberal digital-utopian irrational exuberance, it is just as true that they return us to terms that should be familiar from Econ 101.

I argue that the free creative content provision, collaborative problem-solving and editing, citizen journalism and criticism facilitated by peer-to-peer networks provides public goods the ongoing support of which more than justifies the provision of a universal basic income guarantee (BIG). I argue, further, that a long history of public subsidization of communications infrastructure (the post office, roads, telegraphy, telephony, WWW) and of public education to facilitate continental-scaled good governance among a well-informed citizenry since the founding era offers a congenial context for the comparable case for a public subsidization of "free time" for citizens in the expectation that enough of them would fill it with innovative problem solving and network maintenance that it would more than compensate the public investment. In the past I have called arguments of this kind an advocacy of pay to peer.

I still think this is true, but since a basic income guarantee would also happen to function, as Erik Olin Wright has pointed out, as the public subsidization of a permanent strike fund for all people who work for a living, this means that any such public recognition of the value of peer-to-peer collaboration is more or less tantamount to establishing socialism of a sort. Again, I personally think this consequence is perfectly acceptable, even welcome, but the experience of a lifetime of advocacy for single payer healthcare in the US makes me doubt that this logically inescapable optimally beneficial outcome is politically possible here and now.

It does seem to me that, taken together, a mandated living wage and retirement security and long-term unemployment and disability insurance and paid family leave would be hard to distinguish in substance from a basic income guarantee, which means that what might initially seem novel and radical about basic income proposals is a matter of facile oversimplification and clumsy re-invention of the wheel. Perhaps #BasicIncome is merely a technofix for the technofixated. Maybe the dis-aggregation of a single imagined one-size-fits-all "universal basic income" back into a more familiar democratic-left bundle of social supports and equal opportunities connects us back to a more historical sense of the complexity and dynamism of the problem of unemployment in personal, social and civic life.  

Beyond conventional social democracy or strong liberalism, however, I do think the contours of this kind of argument do provide new justifications for considerably expanded public grants for research in professional, academic, and amateur contexts with the proviso that all the results are placed in the public domain. This is a policy that might yield plenty of wholesome benefits without unleashing a Red Panic. Given the resulting invigoration of public education, funding for the arts, re-stocking of the creative commons, I think virtuous circles arising out of this more modest form of pay-to-peer are more than worth the effort of the fight for it and, hell, might even get us closer to BIG anyway after all (no doubt, as usual, Michele Bachmann will grasp this dire consequence before anybody else does).

I think this rhetoric provides an unexpected added rationale for lowering the retirement age, since publicly valuable p2p-mediated creativity is such a likely recourse for retirees seeking new forms of fulfillment. (By the way, lowering the retirement age and expanding Medicare eligibility by from two to six years is something I think should be done as a straightforward spur to employment in our present flabbergastingly urgent jobs crisis, precisely the opposite of the macroeconomically illiterate and pathologically cruel recommendations of a consensus of well-off experts whose misplaced concern with long-term deficits supplemented by phony futurological handwaving about techno-utopian eternal youth are demanding instead, of course, a raising of the retirement age for chronically underpaid underbenefited folks who actually have to work for a living.)

I would note that in the absence of public subsidization of p2p-mediated creativity and problem solving what has taken place instead is the perfectly predictable intensive corporate capture via crowdsourcing of unpaid disseminated labor. MOOCs, the latest idiotic fad of the ever more corporatized university represents, of course, an effort to apply this kind of wealth capture in the context of the hitherto stubbornly unprofitable ivory tower, transforming vital and unique face-to-face collaborations in classrooms into indefinite distributions of syndicated network television.

As a corollary to my advocacy of pay-to-peer -- that is to say, my advocacy of public investment and subsidization of peer-to-peer creative problem solving, expressivity, criticism, and network maintenance whether in the strong form of the provision of a universal basic income guarantee or in the modest form of massively expanded public grants for actual peer-to-peer efforts the results of which are entered into the public domain -- I have also proposed that all contemporary consumers might well be conceived of as de facto experimental animals in a vast and ongoing experiment concerning the long term health effects of complex combinations of pharmaceutical treatments coupled with exposure to innumerable artificial substances. It seems to me that since we experimental citizen-subjects provide (usually without adequate knowledge or, hence, consent) indispensable data supporting the profitability of pharmaceutical and other manufacturing concerns the reasonable demand for compensation provides yet another justification for a basic income or at any rate for a single-payer healthcare system.

What I would emphasize is just how closely the logic of this second, apparently unrelated, argument tracks the logic of the initial case I made for pay-to-peer, but also that the absence so far of any institutionalized compensation (apart from sporadic payouts from lawsuits when things go terribly wrong) for the indispensable data we are providing corporate-military interests at the literal risk of our lives has not protected our privacy from unprecedented levels of corporate-military surveillance and targeted marketing practices.

From all of these instances an urgent generalization emerges soon enough: In the absence of its public subsidization peer to peer collaboration is always accompanied by increasing precarity. Whenever and wherever peer-to-peer labor formations are celebrated (for their "open access," for their "flexibility," for their "resilience," for their "innovation"), but this celebration is not just as repeatedly and explicitly accompanied by the recognition that this provision of services and maintenance of public goods is almost certainly unpaid labor, then one must read such celebrations for what they are, as celebrations of exploitation.

p2p means EITHER Paid to Peer OR it means Peers to Precarity. The politics are as stark as that, and the evidence of their urgency mounts by the minute.

Also see A Neoliberalization of Basic Income Discourse?

Deep Thoughts on Democracy from Eliezer Yudkowsky

All-Wrong "Less Wrong" Robot Cult Guru Wannabe Eliezer Yudkowsky:

The transhuman technologies -- molecular nanotechnology, advanced biotech, genetech, Artificial Intelligence, et cetera -- pose tough policy questions. What kind of role, if any, should a government take in supervising a parent's choice of genes for their child? Could parents deliberately choose genes for schizophrenia? If enhancing a child's intelligence is expensive, should governments help ensure access, to prevent the emergence of a cognitive elite? You can propose various institutions to answer these policy questions -- for example, that private charities should provide financial aid for intelligence enhancement -- but the obvious next question is, "Will this institution be effective?" If we rely on product liability lawsuits to prevent corporations from building harmful nanotech, will that really work? I know someone whose answer to every one of these questions is "Liberal democracy!" That's it. That's his answer. If you ask the obvious question of "How well have liberal democracies performed, historically, on problems this tricky?" or "What if liberal democracy does something stupid?" then you're an autocrat, or libertopian, or otherwise a very very bad person. No one is allowed to question democracy.

By way of introduction, let us notice first of all that Yudkowsky's formulation assumes that everybody already knows what "the transhuman technologies" are (that "et cetera" at the end of the laundry list is a dead giveaway), but fails to note that what these "technologies" have in common is that none of them exist to BE anything at all, transhumanoid or otherwise. Of course, biochemistry already operates at the nanoscale, as do some actually-existing materials techniques. After all, making ceramics could be construed as nanotechnology if you squint, but literally nothing new, clarifying, or useful is accomplished by saying so. Whether "advanced" biotech exists or not will depend on the criteria one is using to denote "advanced" (and Yudkowsky doesn't specify his, because of course everybody already knows what criteria drive transhumanoids in these matters). Much the same is true of "genetech," some of which does exist but when it does it is called, not "transhumanism" but, you know, "medicine." And, of course, lots of inept computation, like infuriatingly incorrect autocorrect functions, idiotically inept video game background and companion characters and glorified tape-recorders in cars and hand-held devices get called "Artificial Intelligence," while none of them are the least bit intelligent at all.

Nobody has to join a Robot Cult to understand or deliberate about the developmental stakes associated with actually existing materials or medical techniques, software security or user friendliness issues. And, of course, nobody in a Robot Cult cares in fact about any of them at all except to the extent that these actually-existing artifacts, techniques, and issues are re-imagined as oracles, as portents, as signs, as "burning bushes" pointing the way to a Superlative Future, populated by Superlative Variations of these artifacts and techniques and issues, hyperbolized into a pseudo-scientific quasi-theological techno-transcendental domain in which the faithful can contemplate cyborgic demi-divinity in the form of a super-intelligence beyond error and humiliation, super-powers beyond dis-ease and vulnerability, superabundance beyond struggle and limits.

Given the scale of this error, it may seem mere quibbling to point out as well that, strictly speaking, the non-existing Superlative artifacts and techniques that populate the Superlative imaginary of transhumanoid, singularitarian, and techno-immortalist Robot Cultists do not in fact "pose tough policy questions" to anybody. They do not exist to pose anything, tough or not, anywhere on earth. To the extent that the wish-fulfillment fantasies of Robot Cultists are symptoms of underlying pathologies, irrational fears of aging, mortality, or bodily life, for example, or irrational worries over their lack of total control over the conditions of life, then I suppose one should concede that "the transhuman technologies" pose tough questions for their therapists. And, of course, one might slightly reformulate Yudkowsky's point to ask instead whether there might be worthwhile (if not exactly "tough") questions to ask about the deranging impact of too much public attention and concern devoted to non-existing, irrationally symptomatic "transhuman technologies" on sensible deliberation over budgetary and regulatory priorities, over the quality of public technoscience literacy, and over the reasonable assessment of the stakeholder diversity of real-world developmental costs, benefits, and risks.

Notice that just as Yudkowsky assumes everybody already knows what "the transhuman technologies" ARE (setting aside the issue that non-existing non-things and non-techniques AREn't anything at all), he also assumes that everybody already agrees what would constitute an "enhancement" of intelligence, even though it is quite obvious that enhancement is always enhancement in the service of specific ends, that optimally enabling for some ends inevitably disables for other ends, that there is widespread and passionately contentious disagreement over which ends are indispensable to human flourishing, and so on. He makes similar assumptions about what constitutes "advanced" biotechnology, about what constitutes "effective" institutions. One of the reasons that even those transhumanoid Robot Cultists who disdain association with eugenics (and it should be noted that many transhumanists insist on the association, proudly declaring themselves "liberal eugenicists," while many others espouse bioreductionist evo-devo formulations the relations to eugenic worldviews they fail to grasp or disingenuously deny) might still be assigned the eugenic designation is that in advocating for an "enhancement" treated as a neutral technical term they disavow the substance of disagreement over the terms of human flourishing the better to impose their own parochially preferred views on the matter. Transhumanist and other futurological formulations continually de-politicize the field of actually ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle the better to prevail in their personal political positions under the sign of the a-political, the factual, the hygenic, the optimally efficient, the already universal. That such transhumanists are simply indulging in a reactionary politics of naturalization while at once endlessly declaring themselves the enemy of all things "natural" isn't exactly paradoxical, since I daresay with transhumanists this is really more a matter of stupid people being too stupid to realize they're being stupid. But this customary futurological de-politicization of the politics of technodevelopment does provide a nice connection to the part of Yudkowsky's little number that initially attracted my attention, his also rather typically transhumanoid/singularitarian disdain of democracy.

I leave to the side the question whether we can really trust in the basic truthfulness of Yudkowsky's anecdotal interlocutor who in answer to every policy question presumably responds like a doll whose string has been pulled, "Liberal Democracy!" Given that such a nonresponsive response scarcely seems even grammatical let alone substantive I suspect that what Yudkowsky is accidentally confessing in this supercilious little fable is that when his liberal democratic conversational partner attempts to offer up his best most substantive responses to Yudkowsky's questions (however adequate or not these responses may actually be), Eliezer Yudkowsky -- Soopergenius! -- is incapable of hearing anything but "Liberal Democracy!" over and over again.

If Yudkowsky were to declare to me that "liberal democracies" have done "something stupid" or asked me how "liberal democracies" have "performed historically" in the face of some intractable problem or other, I suspect that I would answer that "liberal democracies" don't DO anything at all, don't PERFORM at all, but that through the forms of liberal democracy (which are, after all, themselves always changing as citizens struggle through them to make them better) citizens, the people themselves, educate, agitate, organize, legislate, reform, deliberate, compromise, content together to solve shared problems, to provide nonviolence alternatives for the adjudication of disputes, and to support and strengthen the scene of consent of everyday people to everyday life.

While nobody denies that citizens can be stupid or ineffective (and much worse), the question is through what collective forms do citizens best recognize and redress such problems? If it is true that majorities of the people can be terribly even dangerously wrong this is because all people can be terribly and even dangerously wrong -- and of course this also includes any minority of people one might care to designate (or who, more likely, would care to designate themselves) a superior elite of aristocrats, plutocrats, technocrats or others who in disdaining liberal democracy express their fancied preference to rule over others.

Needless to say -- because it has been said after all as often as its lesson has been ignored -- there is no argument against government of, by, and for the people that is not a stronger argument against the rule of some few people over the rest of us. What I suspect is that in saying all this, all Eliezer Yudkowsky would hear from me, as he heard in his anecdotal interlocutor, is somebody squawking "Liberal Democracy!" over and over and over again. This insensitivity (I intend the word as a synonym for palpable unintelligence) indicts Yudkowsky even as he imagines himself transfigured into triumph by it.

Perhaps it was Yudkowsky's enjoyment of this false fantastic triumph which distracted his attention from noticing that in whining about not being able to "question democracy" he is ignoring the fact that questioning democracy is the substance of democracy itself, while at once stridently contemplating removing from the majority of people the very right to have a say in the decisions that affect them that he self-righteously demands for himself and pretends to be restrained from even as he effortlessly exercises it in fact. It's almost as if he's "an autocrat, or libertopian, or otherwise a very very bad person" or something.

Dusting Off Old Aphorisms

I'm still sorting through old boxes in my office, scaling down sedimented layers of papers, dissertation drafts, MA exams, seminar papers, undergraduate papers, a play written in high school, and so on. This afternoon I discovered folded inside a paper written in 1983 after my first encounter with The Importance of Being Earnest in a freshman comp lit class at Indiana University some early scribbled aphorisms of my own. I vaguely remember forming the idiotic but comfortingly conventionally undergraduate intention of writing my own Wildean mannered comedy. A century after his death the world was clearly crying out for such a thing -- mind you, I didn't learn about Joe Orton or even Edward Albee until a few years later, I truly was a flabbergasting ignoramus. But anyway, all my aphorisms had quotations around them, and hence were signaling their readiness to be spouted off as superannuated snappy dialogue -- and in some cases at least it seems to me the quotation marks were also providing a little figleaf of the alibi of presumably female characters expressing what now seem to me transparently queer sentiments I was testifying to without quite having a handle on what my closeted predecessor was doing in writing them (and in responding so enthusiastically to Wilde, needless to say). Anyway, here they are, and I'm pleased to say some of them really don't seem to me half bad after all these years.

"You can't be immoral and indecent at the same time, they cancel each other out. You absolutely have to pick one."

"Never compare yourself to other people in public places, it's always impolite and eventually inaccurate."

"I'd marry beneath me to be beneath him."

"Oh, stop saying how talented she is! Talented people are just lucky people who don't want to be reminded that luck never lasts long, or hardworking people who don't want to be reminded that life never lasts long."

"I am planning to die as a last resort."

"Getting out of bed every morning sounds to me like extremism."

"Iconoclasts never smash mirrors." (I didn't consciously remember this, but posted a variation on it -- arguably less good -- as a Futurological Brickbat twenty-five years later. That jolt of recognition was the prompt for taking the time to scribble this little post, actually.)

"Why do you keep calling him a genius? Is he pretentious, or just a plagiarist?"

"I'm struggling to remain symmetrical."

"You despise me because I try to be unprincipled. I despise you because you try to be unprejudiced. That's a prejudice I despise on principle."

"That steady hand of yours is a sure sign of the uninformed."

"You really should stop accusing things that occur in nature of being unnatural. It's unnatural."

"I think I would enjoy this much more if I could find some way to feel sincerely guilty about it."

"The single thing more presumptuous than intolerance is tolerance of it."

"I have heard that birth is always traumatic for the inexperienced."

"Well, none of us can have the impossible, so we all have to make do with the improbable."

"Appearances are never deceiving, but sometimes they are fictional."

"He was ambitious enough and diligent enough, finally, to achieve obscurity. And not only in his writing."

(How's that last one for a portent?)

It's Gun-Nuttery All the Way Down

Prioritizing a "right" elaborated nowhere in the Constitution of a minority of gun-owners -- however "nice" they assure us they are and may be -- to hoard private arsenals of military weapons and hardware, OVER the defining Constitutional values of domestic tranquility, common defense, and general welfare asserted in the explicit justification of its preamble actually isn't reasonable. It isn't non-nutty. Gun-nuts are always whining about being vilified as gun-nuts even when they are not as completely off the rails themselves as the mass-shooters they enable as the price for their continued enjoyment of their little hobby. It's actually quite easy to imagine common sense policies banning weapons with no legitimate private uses that are demonstrated threats to public safety while otherwise providing for a regime of testing, tracking, licensing, and compulsory insurance for the comparatively safer and legitimate private uses of guns for hunting, safety, sport, collecting, and so on. Even if you are perfectly law-abiding yourself, but are unwilling to accept reasonable limitations on the ownership and operation of military hardware, however high the bloody body-pile rises from criminal uses of that hardware then, sorry, you're a nut, too. We should stop coddling assholes and reassuring them that their paranoid fantasies matter more than the lives lost and damaged by the lack of effective safety regulation and oversight over private arsenals. Why should they define so many of the terms of this debate in which they hold a marginal view? Why do the rights of citizens like me -- who don't own guns and don't like guns -- not to get shot in random gun violence enabled by minorities who do own guns and like them a lot so rarely frame discussions over "gun rights"? Why do we endlessly collaborate in the pretension that the much vaunted "law-abiding gun-owner" isn't actually expressing priorities skewed to the point of sociopathy?

Is It Wrong To Take Futurology Seriously At All?

Upgraded from the Moot

It is important to expose even the wackier Robot Cultists to the extent that

[1] they are saying things that certain elite-incumbents like to hear however ridiculous on the merits -- eg, skim-scam tech celebrity ceos looking to be cast as the protagonists of history, petrochemical ceos looking for profitable geo-engineering rationales rather than regulatory interventions that impact their bottom lines, corporate-militarists on the lookout for existential threat techno-terror frames that justify big budget boondoggles -- the example of the belligerent neocon militarists and macroeconomically illiterate neolib market ideologues should be ever before us in recalling this;

[2] they are saying things that in their extremity actually expose the underlying assumptions, aspirations, and pathologies of more mainstream and prevalent scientism, evo-psycho/evo-devo reductionism, eugenic "optimal" health norms, techno-fetishism, techno-triumphalism, unsustainable consumption, digi-utopianism, exploitative fraudulent global developmentalism in neoliberal discourses and practices;

[3] they are doing real damage to real people in real time in organizational and media contexts by mobilizing guru-wannabe, pseudo-expertise, True Believer dynamics at whatever scale.

A Robot God Apostle's Creed for the "Less Wrong" Throng

The singularitarian and techno-immortalist Robot Cultists who throng the tinpot-fiefdom of Less Wrong apparently had a minor tempest in their tinpot half a year or so ago in which some of the faithful dared declare that their sub(cult)ure might benefit from more contrarians and skeptics here and there, especially given the high-profile in their self-congratulatory self-promotional utterances about how marvelously self-critical and bias-fumigated they all are compared to Outsiders. But at least one Believer was having none of it, declaring:

I think the Sequences got everything right and I agree with them completely... Even the controversial things, like: I think the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is the closest to correct and you're dreaming if you think the true answer will have no splitting (or I simply do not know enough physics to know why Eliezer is wrong, which I think is pretty unlikely but not totally discountable). I think cryonics is a swell idea and an obvious thing to sign up for if you value staying alive and have enough money and can tolerate the social costs. I think mainstream science is too slow and we mere mortals can do better with Bayes. I am a utilitarian consequentialist and think that if allow someone to die through inaction, you're just as culpable as a murderer. I completely accept the conclusion that it is worse to put dust specks in 3^^^3 people's eyes than to torture one person for fifty years. I came up with it independently, so maybe it doesn't count; whatever. I tentatively accept Eliezer's metaethics, considering how unlikely it is that there will be a better one (maybe morality is in the gluons?) "People are crazy, the world is mad," is sufficient for explaining most human failure, even to curious people, so long as they know the heuristics and biases literature.

Yes, of course it is ridiculous to pretend that the many worlds interpretation is so non-problematic and non-controversial that one would have to be "dreaming" to entertain the possibility that it may one day be supplanted by a better theory that looks more like alternatives already on offer -- and, yes, it is especially ridiculous to pretend so on the basis of not knowing more about physics than a non-physicist high school drop-out guru-wannabe who thinks he is leading a movement to code a history-shattering Robot God who will solve all our problems for us any time soon.

Yes, of course it is ridiculous to believe that your frozen, glassified, hamburgerized brain will be revived and sooper-enhanced and possibly immortalized by swarms of billions of robust reliably controllable and programmable self-replicating nanobots, and/or your info-soul "migrated" via snapshot "scanning" into a cyberspatial Holodeck Heaven where it will cavort bug-and-crash-and-spam free for all eternity among the sexy sexbots.

Yes, of course it is ridiculous to imagine non-scientists in an online Bayes-Theorem fandom can help accomplish warranted scientific results faster than common or garden variety real scientists can themselves by running probability simulations in your club chairs or on computer programs in addition to or even instead of anybody engaging in actually documentable, repeatable, testable experiments, publishing the results, and discussing them with people actually qualified to re-run and adapt and comment on them as peers.

Yes, of course it is ridiculous to think of oneself as the literal murderer of every one of the countless distant but conceivably reachable people who share the world with you but are menaced by violence, starvation, or neglected but treatable health conditions even if it is true that not caring at all about such people would make you a terrible asshole -- and, yes, it is ridiculous to fall for the undergraduate fantasy that probabilistic formulae might enable us to transform questions of what we should do into questions of fact in the first place.

Yes, of course it is ridiculous to say so many nonsensical things and then declare the rest of the world mad.

Yes, it is ridiculous that the very same Eliezer Yudkowsky treated as the paragon against whose views all competing theories of physics are measured is the very same person endorsed a few sentences later as the meta-ethical paragon compared to whose views all competing moral philosophies are judged wanting. Sure, sure, your online autodidact high priest deserves the Nobel Prize for Physics and the Nobel Peace Prize on top of it in addition to all that cash libertopian anti-multiculturalist reactionary and pop-tech CEO-celebrity Peter Thiel keeps giving him for being an even better Singularipope than Kurzweil. Who could doubt it?

Perhaps grasping the kind of spectacle he is making of himself, our True Believer offers up this defensive little bit of pre-emptive PR-management in his post (not that it yields any actual qualification of the views he espouses or anything): "This of course makes me a deranged, non-thinking, Eliezer-worshiping fanatic for whom the singularity is a substitute religion." Hey, pal, if the shoe hurts, you're probably wearing it.

By the way, if anybody is wondering just what The Sequences are, you know, the ones that presumably "get everything right" -- no, nothing culty there -- they are topical anthologies of posts that have appeared on Less Wrong (major contributions written by, you guessed it, Eliezer Yudkowsky, naturellement) and function more or less as site FAQs with delusions of grandeur. While not everything in The Sequences is wrong, little that isn't wrong in them isn't also widely grasped and often endorsed by all sorts of folks who aren't also members of Robot Cults who think they are the only ones who aren't wrong, er, are "less wrong" -- which is the usual futurological soft shoe routine, after all.

Inspired by the aggressive-defensive post I have been dissecting so far, another True Believer offered up -- again, all in good funny fun, right, right? -- the following intriguing, revealing Robot God Apostle's Creed for the Less Wrong Throng, which I reproduce here for your delight and edification:

I believe in Probability Theory, the Foundation, the wellspring of knowledge,
I believe in Bayes, Its only Interpretation, our Method.
It was discovered by the power of Induction and given form by the Elder Jaynes.
It suffered from the lack of priors, was complicated, obscure, and forgotten.
It descended into AI winter. In the third millennium it rose again.
It ascended into relevance and is seated at the core of our FAI.
It will be implemented to judge the true and the false.
I believe in the Sequences,
Many Worlds, too slow science,
the solution of metaethics,
the cryopreservation of the brain,
and sanity everlasting.
Phyg.

Nothing to see here, folks. For more on how totally not a cult the Robot Cult is, see this and this; and for more on the damage even so silly a cult as the Robot Cult can do, see this and this.

Superlative Summary Now Even More Superlative

I've completely updated and re-organized The Superlative Summary. I can't believe how long it took to do this, but I am hoping it is a more useful reference now -- and I welcome comments or suggestions about missing categories or critiques.

The Suicidal Sociopathy of the Tech Sector

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot to this post, a reader asks:

Absolutely excellent rebuttal against libertarian verbal and "intellectual" diarrhea! You touched on on one issue I would like you to elaborate on. For example when you rebutted this statement: "The men behind the private space programs have built up personal fortunes in the tens of billions of dollars while establishing track records of creating and running companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars"; [you responded:] "Can I have some of whatever you're smoking, Clint?" Care to elaborate why you find his claim preposterous? That's my only gripe. Otherwise a fantastic piece that I will add to my intellectual arsenal against the sheer, utter, unapologetic and unabashed lunacy of libertarian- anarchists- conservatives.

America crows about being a free rather than a planned economy -- but of course we do plan the economy, ineptly, under the name of "Defense."

The dependency of especially tech companies on tax-payer subsidized research via public universities via government grants via public infrastructure via defense department programs is ubiquitous at every level of development, and is especially indispensable at the outset of the R&D path. This is setting aside the larger issue of the necessity for profitable enterprise of a stable context of educated citizens, sufficiently disseminated prosperity, actually functioning law, meritocratic norms, trust (that regulations will be enforced, that public institutions will be adequately funded and competently administered), infrastructural affordances (utilities, highways, the internet itself) -- all of which are seriously under threat because of the tireless work of plutocratic libertopian ideologues but remain sufficiently in force even now to keep the old heap on the road in spite of the suicidal insanity of the greatest beneficiaries of this stability forever struggling to disable it for the shortest-term gains imaginable.

The self-congratulatory fantasy of so many of the biggest beneficiaries of our system that their success is a function of their kick-ass superhuman superiority rather than of their luck to live in a society that values their efforts and abilities (and the successful usually are lucky in more ways than that) is of course a commonplace irrationality of the privileged throughout history and across cultures, but I must say it also constitutes in tech enthusiasts a kind of total amnesia and systematic disavowal of the ongoing reality of public investment and support that is little short of psychotic.

In the so-called technological sector this schizophrenic anti-governmentality coupled to abject government dependence, the eagerness of "elite" greedhead minorities to monetize free collective geek creativity for personal gain, the superficiality and misdirection of advertorial pop-tech journalism, an endless susceptibility to irrational exuberance mobilized by press release hyperbole and celebrity-CEO PR in a general atmosphere of get-rich-quick credulity, a ubiquity of vaporware scams and everyday fraud as culturally accepted norm are worse than in pretty much any other area of the economy or professional endeavor I can think of.

As a more general matter, perhaps the only thing more comical than the cocksure declarations of our mediocre government-dependent and labor-dependent elites that they are supersovereign superheroic supermen is the related but more disseminated cocksure declarations of our conformist crap-consumerist anti-intellectual masses that they are rebels and independents.

That, at any rate, is the beginning of my answer to your question. A warning: Skip lunch if you mean to dig into the specifics of the computer, software, aeronautics, arms, or pharmaceutical industries -- because, believe me, you won't look long without needing to ralph.

Proposed Mars One Game Show Is the Ultimate Anti-Survivor

Via Wired:

Mars One... intends to establish a human settlement on Mars in 2023. They need astronauts. Anyone on planet Earth can apply if they meet the basic requirements… The selection process will begin during the first half of 2013. Mars One experts and viewers of a “global, televised program” -- think reality TV where the prize could be a trip to a dry, dusty world -- will choose from among the applications… “The people of Earth will have a vote which group of four will be the first Earth ambassadors on Mars,” the Mars One website says. Subsequent teams will be sent in two-year intervals. In 2016, the company plans to begin rocketing supplies to Mars, including spare parts, two rovers, and living units that can be assembled into a base once humans arrive. But it’s a one-way trip for all involved: Once on Mars, there’s no coming back.

So, viewers will vote the "winners" off Island Earth so we get to watch them commit suicide at launch, in flight, attempting to land, or definitely in no time flat on the surface of an incomparably alien, lifeless, bitterly cold, irradiated planet surface without any hope for return. Who can doubt that the "winners" will be the most qualified competitors, and not the hottest numbers, nor the biggest publicity whores, nor simply the biggest assholes who we hope to have a hand in killing by voting them into this death trap for frying? While this sounds to me like a profitable ratings winner, it is certainly no way to have a viable space program.

Much is made by the "Mars One" folks of the fact that they do not mean to burden taxpayers with the costs of this Mars-shot, so I guess it really comes down to the money-making after all, anyway.

If I may be serious about even this for a moment, let me say here and now yet again: There never has been and there never will be any such thing as a "private" or "for-profit" space program.

Public dollars always underwrite the "private" contractors in such arrangements. And though a good case can often be made for such public-private partnerships (Lunar Lander, anyone?) nobody should be under the illusion that randroidal market forces are or ever could spontaneously crystallize into an interplanetary NASA or United Federation of Planets or whatever libertechian moonshine drives this incessant nonsense talk of the glorious space hotels and asteroid mining and terraforming frontiersman of the capitalist space pirate utopia just around the corner.

Unless the Moon or Mars or the asteroid belt are made of zero-weight sooper-soma or all-purpose unobtainium there is no way to profitably monetize a space program by getting at their mineral wealth. Incredible up-front infrastructure costs aside, there is simply no substance actually available on earth, however costly, however rare, however hard to get at, that cannot be more cheaply gotten to here on earth than getting it to earth from off-earth. Paradigm shattering discoveries and profitable technological spin-offs from a viable Mars program are almost inevitable as a general matter, but remain much too unpredictable in the specificities of their domains of application or in the determination of their relative winners and losers to entice the necessary levels of investment by individual firms in such a program -- only national or planetary scale governments stand in the broad relation to economic prosperity to justify such public investments.

There is no extraterrestrial site more hospitable than the least hospitable place on earth, and there are no techniques available to make that the least bit less true that wouldn't be incomparably better spent making the least hospitable places on earth more hospitable first. So, there will be no extraterrestrial colonies to re-enact brutal "Age of Discovery" exploitation fantasies with, or to relieve overpopulation pressures with, indeed there will be no escape hatches via space from any of our difficult political or environmental problems.

And it should go without saying that Low-Earth-Orbit momentary zero-gravity amusement park rides for celebrity tech CEOs and digi-bazillionaires do not constitute a real space program.

Please do let all that sink in for a moment, all you libertopian SpaceX Space Cadets.

Shunting all this Heinleinian flim-flammery to the side, the only reasonable justification for a trip to Mars remains as always the collective accomplishment of so daring an endeavor, the discovery of new knowledge, and the eventual establishment on Mars of a scientific research station, and the only way to ensure those ends would be an international public investment in a governmental space program, national or international.

And, in case you are wondering, I am an enthusiastic champion of such a project. But precisely because I am serious about NASA and international space science I have no patience at all for privateering, profiteering, skim and scam artists, pop-tech journos and celebrity CEOs blathering on about private space programs and profitable extraterrestrial exploitation in an endless avalanche of deranged, deluded, distracting articles and press releases.

"Driverless Cars" As Dead-Ender Car Culture Apologia

Also published at the World Future Society.

While I do not deny the existence of reasonably working prototypes, I do not expect driverless cars to transform the transportation landscape in the way their boosters claim. Indeed, I am a bit surprised that anyone would consider such transformative claims the least bit more plausible than the patently ridiculous claims once made with comparable fanfare on behalf of Segways. It would seem that advertorial hype, the bread and butter of professional futurism as with its cousin PR disciplines, is the one product citizens socialized as consumers and users simply never can get enough of.

The paradox at the heart of most futurological handwaving about the "driverless car as revolution" is that they are simultaneously premised on the recognition that a radical transformation of car culture is demanded by its total failure -- a monument to extravagant waste, catastrophic pollution, maddening congestion, less walkable and hence less livable cities, horrific accidental deaths, unsustainable and anti-social suburban sprawl -- while engaging at once in a refusal to contemplate the one change without which no transformation could be adequate to the demands of this failure, let alone remotely "revolutionary": the actual relinquishment of car culture itself, the relinquishment of the cars.

I do not agree that driverless cars provide better means of satisfying the needs that trains, buses, and taxis do, and so I simply argue for more reliance on trains, buses, and taxis that actually already do provide for them instead. I do not agree that there is anything about driverless cars that facilitates good practices like car sharing, ride sharing, and collective car ownership and so I simply argue for car sharing, ride sharing, collective ownership arrangements on their actual merits instead.

The futurologically-inclined will no doubt see this as "negative" talk and "backward-looking" thinking. After all, why pooh-pooh putting one more option on the menu for a more sustainable future meal? But I do not agree that there is anything "positive" about enabling denial. I do not agree that there is anything "forward-looking" about efforts to solve problems that are less concerned with actually addressing the problems but with ensuring incumbent interests maintain their positions with the least cost. I happen to have noticed that ubiquitous cars are pretty much all we have on the menu already, and hence a "new option" of ubiquitous driverless cars looks to me a lot more like just the old menu peddled as a new menu.

People want to drive cars and own cars because they want a high level of control over the terms of their personal transportation. This fantasy of autonomy is almost entirely a romance without substance inculcated by a relentless torrent of car culture conceits: road movies in which true friendships are forged and rites of passage in which immature individuals are delivered into sovereign adulthood, mythic car chases in which the action hero in his cyborg shell obliterates all obstacles and achieves escape velocity to a wet-dream of freedom, ads in which sleek curvilinear fetal-metalized space capsules whoosh through cyberspatial freeways surrounded by glimmering skyscrapers, dreamy forests, vast desertscapes bereft of insurmountable barriers and usually bereft even of any other cars, ecstasies of agency as a frictionless "traffic" suffusing car culture no less than digital-utopianism as the prevailing figure of the techno-fetishistic post-WW2 American exceptionalist myth.

It is interesting that the driverless car, to the extent that it were actually used as such, would require a relinquishment of the very romance of autonomy and control without which car culture cannot rationalize itself in the first place. Without the romance of the car as a sort of super-hero costume worn by mass consumers in mass societies trying to impersonate rugged individualists there is nothing beyond the inertial tug of elite-incumbent interest to hold us fast to the catastrophe of car culture. It is for this reason that I personally doubt that the "driverless car" is really anything but a slightly souped-up version of already-available thoroughly non-revolutionary cruise control, to be used as such.

The irrational passions that drive car culture will also circumscribe the uses to which this feature will be put. Driverless cars will not be the revolution that transforms the transportation terrain because almost nobody who really wants such a revolution would want a driverless car in the first place, and almost nobody who actually recognizes the need for such a transformation would spend their time cheerleading driverless cars rather than advocating real solutions like more public transportation investment and changed zoning policies to encourage walkable cities.

As a practical matter very few people would actually be inconvenienced in the least by the necessity of making recourse to sensibly funded and maintained public transportation and the occasional taxi. Indeed, millions of Americans, millions here and now, millions who would not seriously contemplate the possibility for a moment would find their lives enriched and not diminished by the relinquishment of their cars (obviously there are exceptions, but the point remains), even with the dire state of our actually-existing public transportation infrastructure. There is every reason to re-shift our budgetary and policy priorities to facilitate mass transit options and make our cities more walkable, bikable, livable, sustainable.

Those who would shake their heads at the naivete of this claim are free to do so. I believe they are wrong, and I am happy to argue with them on the merits, given our shared economic and ecologic problems, and given the centrality of sustainable cities to so many of the solutions to those problems actually within our collective grasp. But I despair of arguments with people who don't believe in the practical possibility of solutions equal to our problems who will not concede the fact of their disbelief, but instead pretend to be collaborators in the work toward solutions the better to promote pseudo-solutions ("geo-engineering" "driverless cars" "online universities") that distract our intelligence and effort away from that work, and even exacerbate the very problems at hand.

Top Posts for 2012

The Unbearable Stasis of "Accelerating Change"

Ten Things You Must Fail To Understand If You Want To Be A Transhumanist For Long

Schlock and Awesome; Or, The Futurists Are Worse Than You Think

"Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again"

I Don't Think That Phrase "Straw Man" Means What You Think It Does

Futurologists Are Mortal, But Faith-Based Futurology Is A Zombie That Cannot Be Killed

What People Are Really Talking About When They Are Talking About "Geo-Engineering"

Not Necessarily Abnormal, But Certainly Stupid

Technological Progress Is Not the Same As Social Progress (In One Simple Chart)

Taurus Londono, You Are Going to Die

An Open Letter to the Robot Cultists

The Artificial Man the Killer Clowns Made and the Mouse Child Who Said What She Saw

What Is Patriarchy?

Patriarchy names in the first place those sociocultural systems in history in which authority and control over property, and especially the generational transmission of property -- and therefore authority -- from fathers to sons, requires that women be owned as property as well to ensure male control over female reproductive capacity.

Patriarchy names in the second place a whole system of norms and institutions that preferentially benefit men in respect to women, both to facilitate the control of women by men that is patriarchy in its primary sense, but also those norms and institutions that tend to arise as results, expressions, or symptoms of this ongoing control. It is crucial to grasp that vestiges of these norms and institutions will tend to linger on, denigrating and disabling women in respect to men, or denigrating and disabling that which is associated with what is construed as "femininity" in respect to what is construed as "masculinity," even in societies and cultures that have overcome some or even most of the violence and injustice represented by patriarchy in its primary sense.

Patriarchy names in the third place those discursive operations through which bodies and lifeways are imagined and attended to and so produced as "sexed" and "gendered" in ways that are only legibly taken up and valued and hierarchized by sociocultural formations that are patriarchal in the first and second senses above. It is crucial to grasp that patriarchal sex-gender vocabularies not only prepare and facilitate bodily experience and desire for the denigration and disablement of women in respect to men, and femininity in respect to masculinity, in patriarchy's second sense above, but that the patriarchal in its third sense generates possibilities as well for still-circumscribed resistances to these denigrations and disabilities, contingent valorizations, ambivalent celebrations of femininity and womanhood within patriarchy's sex-gender terms. It is no less crucial to grasp that patriarchal sex-gender vocabularies open the way for new denigrations and disabilities of bodies and lifeways than those highlighted by patriarchy's first and second senses as when, for example, an intersex body is surgically policed into conformity with a normative sexual dimorphism whatever injurious consequences may follow from this operation, or when a wanted transsexual lifeway premised on the pleasures of the transitional itself rather than on a primary aversion to the legibly sexed "pre-operative" body or an ideal identification with the legibly sexed "post-operative body" is pathologized, criminalized, or otherwise dehumanized. In these cases the patriarchal assignment of facts and values functions not so much to denigrate women in respect to men, or femininity in respect to masculinity, so-called, but to denigrate and disable any body, experience, desire, or lifeway that is not legibly male or female, legibly masculine or feminine, or legibly reprosexual, beyond but still in service to the damage the patriarchal goes on to do to the bodies, experiences, desires, and lifeways that are legible in its terms according to patriarchy's first and second senses.

There Is No Constitutionally Protected Right To Own Guns

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Guns. Lots of guns.

There is no specification of the Arms protected by the Second Amendment, and the fact that nobody seriously proposes either that the Amendment is restricted to the possession of muskets actually available at the time of the writing or expands to protect private ownership of nuclear or biogenic weapons indicates that everybody already accepts the premise that Arms are a selective category, and even that considerations of safety can determine weather particular weapons can be banned or not.

Given the speed with which gun advocates inevitably point to the fact that the banning of guns will not eliminate murder since many artifacts can be used as lethal weapons -- table knives, golf clubs, fuel-fat jets -- it should be noted that, perhaps contrary to purpose, gun advocates are demonstrating through such arguments that even the banning of all guns altogether (which is a position few to none advocate at all) would leave citizens quite free to keep and bear any number of forms of Arms.

Neither is it true nor Constitutionally indicated that unrestricted access or private ownership are the only conditions satisfying the state of "keep[ing] and bear[ing]" of Arms that is Constitutionally protected. That access to guns be circumscribed by mandated security standards, locking mechanisms, restricted locations, or even contracted out to public officials working in the public interest need not necessarily be regarded as violations of "keep[ing] and bear[ing] Arms" under certain possible interpretations of the Constitution (not all of which I personally regard as plausible, nor would necessarily endorse myself, I'm just pointing out that the phrase is not one with a singular easily legible interpretation).

I personally think that the initial framing of the Constitutional provision by considerations of "a well regulated Militia" (you will notice that the word "regulation" appears right there in the very Amendment itself, and is clearly not thought inherently to infringe the right of the people to keep and bear Arms that follows it) in an era of precarious national security without reliable standing armies is enormously significant to a proper understanding of the Second Amendment, and one that is quite catastrophic to the arguments of so-called gun advocacy politics. But I also think there is little rhetorical force in any of that, true though it may be, because I don't think Americans generally have much awareness of the concrete historical context the phrase references nor do they much care for arguments that take such contextual and intentional considerations into account in the first place. I think Americans are more interested in the plausible applicability of Constitutional principles and phrases to contemporary problems and conditions than their initial ones, frankly. As someone who regards the Constitution as a living document I don't even think that is a particularly bad thing all told.

I will say, however, that I believe there is a profound and paranoid anti-governmental mentality at the heart of the most aggressive gun advocacy, while the Amendment deployed in the service of this anti-governmentality actually originally expressed a profoundly patriotic support of the need to defend the government from enemies. The commandeering of the Second Amendment in the service of a white-racist patriarchal anti-governmental anti-civilizational mindset declaring government of by and for the people itself to represent an antithetical occupational force represents a profound perversion of the spirit of the Amendment, and of the Document of which it is a part at the deepest imaginable level.

"Is Transhumanism Racist?"

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, "Black Guy From the Future Past" has this to say:

Hello Dale. Is transhumanism racist? I've been reading your blog and you continually make reference to how most futurists tend to be white. Also, many scientific fields are dominated by white people, more specifically white males. How does this skew ideas about the "future". I await your response. Thank you. (BTW I am that rare black guy who has encountered transhumanist ideas on the net and have noticed the alarming lack of representation of other races, cultures and their ideas)

Is transhumanism racist? Since there are unquestionably transhumanist-identified people who are conscientiously anti-racist anything like an affirmative answer by me will provoke the usual howls about my hostile unfair ad hominem attacks. As always, one needs to recall at the outset that one can benefit from racist legacies or mobilize racist discourses without necessarily affirming racist beliefs, indeed while earnestly affirming anti-racist ones, and so recognizing the force of racism is often a matter of exposing structural effects rather than making accusations of unalloyed bigotry.

Still, as you mention in your comment, as a subculture the transhumanoids and other sub(cult)ural futurologists are relentlessly white, male, and privileged folks, and I do think their assumptions, aspirations, and discourse reflect that demographic reality.

For as long as I've been studying them, this non-representativeness has occasionally provoked nervous efforts at "outreach" which inevitably produce little change, and to the extent that "outreach" as an organizational operation aimed at diversity is always a matter of "us" (North Atlantic upperclass-identified white males) "reaching out" from where "we" are to "them" (the Ladies, the Blacks, the Poors, the Olds, etc.), of course it structurally replicates the terms of exclusion in the very gesture of welcoming, so I am not surprised that these inept efforts tend to go unrewarded. Transhumanoids will probably point to their latest efforts to build missionary "chapters" in the "third world" or "developing countries" (I probably don't need to tell you that describing overexploited regions of the world as if they were an alien "third" world or as if they are parts of the world that have not yet "attained" presumably supreme western developmental standards in the first place are inherently colonialist/ racist) as evidence belying their endless futurological white penis parade, but I daresay the historical precedents/ analogies of racist "civilizing missions" are too obvious to require spelling out here. Usually, the better, more anxious transhumanoids (of whom there are not really very many as far as I can see) will trot out photogenic links to afro-futurist aesthetics occasionally -- Sun Ra and Octavia Butler come up a lot, and after all, Sun Ra and Octavia Butler ARE fabulous -- but the exceptions here scream out the rule to my ears, especially when they remain so few, so static, so defensive.

I mean, there are some elephants in this room, aren't there? Like the fact that transhumanism in its sanewashing efforts at academic and media respectability has had a wee bit of trouble with links cropping up to straight-up neo-Nazi white-power sites online, with a distressing tendency to be a place where explicitly racist Bell Curve nonsense is defended, with a fatal susceptibility to evopsycho bio-reductionist nonsense more generally -- again, much of that being an endless occasion for sexists and racists to air their sexism and racism with a pseudo-scientific patina. This susceptibility to evopsycho is a problem shared across digital-fixated subcultures and discourses as an effect of their aversion to materiality and coping with that aversion through a (false) equation of the digital with the spiritual conjoined to a (false) refiguration of evolutionary biology as an algorithmic optimization randomly exploring an abstract "problem space."

Is such "digital-utopian" disdain of "meat bodies" racist? Well, it need not be on its face, certainly, but given the whiteness of these subcultures and of the "reason" qua rage for order with which they so often identify, and given the distressing tendency of race to function precisely as a discourse producing bodies raced qua "the bodily" as such -- that is to say, as the epidermalized body, the muscularized body, the body as bestialized, infantilized, precivilized atavism, the body as seat of irrational and threatening passions, and on and on -- one doesn't have to look very hard to find all sorts of racist symptoms cropping up in these precincts, even among the, er, nicest people.

And, oh yes, many transhumanists explicitly champion eugenics. No racism to see here, folks! Pretty much all transhumanists, as a matter of their very definition qua transhumanists, defend an "enhancement" discourse that stealths its eugenicism by pretending to advocate an "inclusive" "access" to parochial norms pretended in turn to name "neutral" markers of "capacity" or "optimality," blissfully unaware of all the racism and sexism and imperialism so many of them are letting in through the back door.

To the extent that transhumanism styles itself a humanism at all, of course, one would hope it tries to be vigilant in the aftermath of a long humanist history in which a presumably universal humanity named only a minority of actually living humans and universal human rights were enjoyed by that minority usually at the expense of other actually living humans, a project organized around the figure of a "human race" often deeply indebted to racist legacies for its categories and institutions. At least some academic variations of the "post-human" -- with which the transhuman is sometimes identified by observers, possibly too glibly -- are indebted to Fanonian ambivalence about the humanist project, at once recognizing its racist legacy but also demanding it live up to its universalism in a way that facilitates anti-racism.

I would like to say that the transhumanoids partake in that tradition -- but I can't say I have seen much inclination in any of them even to read Fanon, let alone take up such a nuanced discourse on humanism. More usual are the most facile imaginable re-enactments of racist imperialism, as when non-human animals are refigured in their exclusion from the human race as always only suffering lack in ways that demand the ethical response of techno-transcendently re-writing them in the image of parochially-imagined human conformity and then declaring this flabbergasting chauvinist aspiration uplift. Is transhumanism racist? I leave that to the reader to decide.

Fighting the Single Most Dangerous Organized Force in the World

The single most dangerous organized force in the country right now in my opinion is the Republican Party in this moment of its catastrophic disconnection from reality.

This disconnection manifested itself in a comically terrifying way over the course of the latest election in the freakshow primary, the unskewed polling nonsense, and then in the very real confusion of the Romney campaign at losing an election they were obviously losing -- in addition to the bewilderment of the key players on the tee vee in the aftermath of the election, which might be dismissed as gamesmanship at some level, they spent unprecedented millions on a "transition team" premised on that victory that just can't be dismissed as kabuki but only as serious delusion. Death Panel Summer and Birtherism and even the Clinton Impeachment were all earlier exhibitions of this wingnut disconnect, of course. But the disconnection is more significantly indicated in the rejection of Keynesian economics by pretty much the whole party from top to bottom that stands in the way of the obvious solution to our unemployment crises through a vast investment in sustainable infrastructure and renewable energy (or even in the misrecognition of the human tragedy of this unemployment crisis as one eclipsed by a fiscal non-crisis that is threatening only the unearned privileges of a miserable miserly plutocratic micro-minority), the sincere or pretended climate-change denialism by pretty much the whole party from top to bottom that stands in the way of action in the face of the single most urgent civilizational threat of our time, the widespread disdain of Darwin, science, fact-based and harm-reduction policy-making models more generally, the capture of the right by a gun-lobby promoting a gun-culture expressing a more deeply apocalyptic anti-governmental anti-civilizational hyper-individualism than most sensible people are willing to contemplate, the endless exhibitions of patriarchal sexism and heterosexism that endlessly frustrate efforts to provide access to healthcare and education and opportunity to women and girls and of white-racism that bedevil hopes for immigration reform let alone any real address of racist legacies stratifying our society, squandering so much energy, intelligence, and potential.

Because the Republican Party is one of the most powerful forces in American society and America is by many measures one of the most powerful forces in the world, the disconnection of the Republican Party from reality is even more dangerous the wider your planetary perspective and the longer your historical prospect in my view. I think the Republican Party in its deranging Movement Republican phase achieved its consummation in the criminal war-adventuring of George W. Bush and since then has been in a state of ever amplifying crisis and dysfunction and marginalization. But I have no doubt at all that the GOP will remain long capable of authoring extraordinary destruction in this country and in the world in the midst of its ongoing self-destruction.

Although Obama's crucial victories symptomize generational demographic transformation in our country, I think that this is not what he means when he says he wants to be a "transformational" president. I do believe that no small part of Obama's politics consists of his trying to redirect the Republican Party out of its Movement Conservative madness by constantly trying to open spaces in which the GOP is either allowed to make a spectacle of its dysfunction in ways that accelerate its self-marginalization or to act on its better angels and gain power through its partnership with him toward solving actually real shared problems in actually real ways. Given the fact that the Congress lacks the numbers to strong arm his agenda through either house, let alone administer it across all the layers of our federal system and multilateral institutions, this effort on Obama's part is necessary both in absolutely practical terms here and now as well as in light of the larger question of renewing our civic agencies to address our shared planetary problems.

If I didn't think the Republican Party was the most dangerous force in the country and hence in the world in this moment, my politics would look more conventionally radical lefty, I'm sure, simply concerned with economic justice, devoted to sustainability, and celebrating multiculture and especially the creative arts and scientific research. But I judge the GOP the chief (far from the only) obstacle to progressive accomplishment in my country and in the world right now, and that is the lens through which I read quite a lot of politics.

To fail to grasp the conspicuous enemy in the room isn't a sign of great seriousness in my view, and those who bray about Obama's secretmuslikenyasocialist betrayals on the right or about Obama's cryptofascicorporatist betrayals on the left, or about how exhilarating and emancipatory anarchist happenings are or about how exhilarating and emancipatory the latest or imaginarily emerging sooper-gizmos are, all seem to me, you will forgive me, more nonsensical and misguided than words can say.

I agree that getting stuck in the muck of compromised and compromising politics at the partisan level isn't exactly elevating, but nobody consults our aesthetic preferences in advance as to who our objective enemies are going to be, or the level of the sociocultural terrain at which those enemies will be most effectively engaged in the service of sustainable equity-in-diversity. You know, progress.

Prosthetic Sex/Gender and Healthcare Politics

Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot, from an exchange with a long-time reader and frequent critic of mine, the "normal sex crusader" John Howard, this time provoked by the post Transhumanism Is Either A Vacuity or Crazytown: Either Way It Is A Fraud.

Howard dilates on a familiar theme:

OK, well which is allowing reproduction with someone of the same sex? Which is "overcoming the limits of fixed sex" and being able to be either sex. Is that medicine or crazyyown? I say it is Transhumanism and I don't see how you can claim it is just regular old healthcare, or a major enhancement of healthy human bodies into sooper-bodies?

My response:

Heaven only knows what you personally regard as the "fixed limits" of sexual morphology and gender practice, but the fact that you speak of "either sex" suggests that you have a rather bleakly reductive understanding assuming a foundational biological sexual dimorphism onto which comparably bleakly reductive gender roles are thereupon overlaid -- even though intersexed human bodies palpably complicate such a schema even without artifice entering the picture, stricto sensu, and even though presumably "second-order" cultural gender assumptions palpably organize and articulate the "first-order" biological realities that presumably function as foundational in this understanding, and even though far more complex sexed/gendered performances have been part of human multiculture throughout history and have been part of normative healthcare for over a century.

I will set to the side your radically impoverished understanding of sex/gender as vectors in the material and semiotic systems of signification and life-making in which we all make our way through the world. I will also set to the side what I know from other posts from you over the years the sexism and anti-gay bigotry that drives so much of your rage and fear. I will try instead to use your question as the occasion to say something useful in general about the relation of futurology and healthcare for a readership that includes but is thankfully not confined to you. Maybe this time even you will see some sense, or move your phobic circus act to some other venue.

You obviously don't have to join a Robot Cult to champion the rights of transpeople, intersex people, and queer folks. You obviously don't have to join a Robot Cult to champion the rights of the "disabled"/ differently enabled. You obviously don't have to join a Robot Cult to be pro choice and champion the rights of informed, nonduressed responsible people to make actually safe wanted choices about reproductive health and recreational sensoria and the bodily modification (tattoos, scars, piercings, and the like) through which to signal subcultural memberships and interpersonal expressivity. While some Robot Cultists may sympathize with or participate in some of these communities and struggles, queer, differently enabled, and Choice politics all long predate and vastly outsize the scope and memberships of the marginal sub(cult)ures of superlative futurology, and I can think of not a single theoretical insight or practical strategy originating uniquely in any futurological discourse to which these struggles are the least bit indebted.

Needless to say (one would think), neither do you have to join a Robot Cult to advocate universal access to safe, effective, affordable, or even free healthcare to everybody, including all these queer, differently enabled, diversely prostheticized people .

None of these people have "sooper-bodies." They have human bodies. None of these people are on the road to super-powers or immortality or virtuality as the result of their recourse to any of these technical practices. None of the actual political, social, cultural stakes of access to or application of any of these techniques (among which are the stakes you mention, how do we human beings ensure that all people are flourishing equitably in our diversity) is clarified by hyperbolizing them via futurological narratives of comic book superheros, immortals, clone armies, cyber-angels, bush robots, and the like.

Every human being is and always has been a "cyborg" in Donna Haraway's sense, an ineradicably acculturated being whose significance is historically situated and whose agency is expressed in social struggle. Clothes, language, bodily bearing are all already artifactual. All culture is prosthetic, all prostheses are cultural. The transhumanoids fetishize certain real and imaginary "technologies" and also naturalize others (everybody does this actually, it is a historical commonplace, but the transhumanoids idiotically try to make a virtue of being uncritical about it and then pretend this is somehow a critical or constructive practice), always the better to invest some artifacts with the status of sacred signifiers that bespeak inevitable progress toward techno-transcendental outcomes they identify with "The Future" at the cost of a profound dis-identification with the present in its lived diversity and profound precarity.

Transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, digi-utopians, and other superlative futurologists of the Robot Cult variety believe many outright nonsensical things, they talk about "technology" in ways that derange the terms of public deliberation to the harm of all, they are indulging in faith-based initiatives that seem in many of them to yield irrational passions and undercritical, defensive, dishonest, even authoritarian subcultural practices.

I have no deep problem with Robot Cultists who want to be enthusiasts about ridiculous techno-transcendental fancies of theirs (though I am not above ridiculing them for being ridiculous now and again, as you know), but I focus my critique on their efforts to pretend these fancies constitute scientific practice, scientific literacy, scientific policy-making, serious philosophy (including philosophy of science, philosophy of technology, technocultural theory, ethics or bioethics, STS, etc.), or contributions to progressive technodevelopmental deliberation, as well as focusing on the ways their discourse provides clarifying extreme illustrations of more prevailing pathologies in our unsustainable, corporate-militarist, white racist and patriarchal, scientistically reductive, techno-fetishizing, techno-triumphalist, mass-mediated, hyper-conformist, hyper-individuated, consumer society more generally.

As I said, I have been around the track with you John Howard many many times in the past. This is not the beginning but the end of this conversation. Your inevitable hysterical anti-queer follow-up screeds and declarations that I am the worst Robot Cultist of them all because I refuse to pre-emptively condemn the non-existing sexualized "technologies" that haunt your fever dreams will all be remorselessly deleted, so don't even go there.

What Futurology Does To Science Fiction

James Hughes (from an abstract of his talk at Robo-Easter yesterday):

Futurists and Transhumanists have been derided for association with science fiction, and conservatives have warned of the totalitarian implications of utopian speculation. But speculative fiction is the principal arena in which human beings imagine their own future radically transformed by social and technological change, try to anticipate the pitfalls, and motivate themselves to grasp the opportunities.

I suppose it won't exactly be a newsflash for me to say I disagree with this, but I do think it is useful to pressure this formulation.

First of all, it seems to me that transhumanoid futurists are not derided so much for their "association" with science fiction but for their confusion of science fiction with science practice and science policy. Some folks deride sfnal fandoms, sure, but this derision (of which I would be a prime target myself) is importantly different from the derision of futurological fandoms (of which I would not properly be a target myself), which usually focuses on the superficiality, pseudo-scientificity, non-representative whiteness-boyness-privilege, Guru-Wannabe/True Believer organizational idiosyncrasies, un(der)critical technophilia/technophobia of the latter in my experience. In speaking of an unspecified "association" he is indulging in a consoling evacuation of a whole lot of substance his own avowed political commitment would otherwise demand he critique in ways that would risk his identification. This has always been my chief problem with James Hughes (and hence it is different from my problem with many other techno-transcendentalists).

Second of all, I think it is quite wrong to propose that science fiction is "the principal arena in which human beings imagine their own future radically transformed by social and technological change" since I think almost the whole range of the humanities, social sciences, and policy discourses offer up preeminent arenas for such imagination, work, and contestation. And I have to add, to amplify this point, that literally every actually legibly constituted profession and discipline of knowledge-production has a foresight dimension that functions as a facet of the arena Hughes is talking about: Indeed, one of the chief problems of the futurological as a kind of pseudo-discipline in my view is that it has no actually existing subject-matter of fact/concern over which it has a unique expertise and from which it would produce unique insight and foresight, but then simply declares its subject "Foresight" as such to disavow that vacuity while actually enacting it.

Anyway, not only do I disagree that science fiction is the principal arena in which foresight is elaborated, for the reasons I have already said, but I must say that I do not even agree that science fiction has anything to do with consequentialist scenario-spinning AT ALL (although the sfnal occasionally, very incidentally, may throw up sparks of foresight like any sustained human endeavor will just as well), or anything to do with "The Future" in the futurological sense AT ALL either. I say this because I regard science fiction, like all literature -- and especially good science fiction like all good literature -- as an engagement with the present (not always only the present in which the text originates, but always crucially starting from there), exaggerated, stylized, allegorical, or otherwise imaginatively alienated to provide critical purchase on and occasions for widening empathy in the present mostly unavailable to us outside of the literary.