The Political Problem With Transhumanisms

Upgraded and Expanded from a response of mine to some comments in the Moot: Well, I think probably the key conceptual problem with transhumanisms is that they have an utterly uninterrogated idea of "technology" that pervades their discourses and sub(cult)ures. They attend very little to the politics of naturalization/ de-naturalization, of habituation/ de-familiarization that invest some of techniques/artifacts (but not others, indeed probably not most others) with the force of the "technological." Quite a lot of the status quo gets smuggled in through these evasions and disavowals, de-politicizing what could be done or made otherwise, and hence rationalizing incumbency. Whatever the avowed politics of a transhumanist, their depoliticization of so much of the field of the cultural-qua-prosthetic lends itself to a host of conservative/reactionary naturalizations in my view.

This is all the more difficult for the transhumanists to engage in any thoughtful way, since they are so invested in the self-image of being on the bleeding edge, embracing novelty, disruption, anti-nature, and so on. I daresay this might have been excusable in the irrationally exuberant early days of the home computer and the explosive appearance of the Web (I saw through it at the time, though, so it can't have been that hard, frankly), but what could be more plain these days at least than the realization how much "novelty" is merely profitably repackaged out of the stale, how much "disruption" is just an apologia for all too familiar plutocratic politics dismantling public goods?

Transhumanists turn out to fall for the oldest Madison Avenue trick in the book, mistaking consumer fandoms as avant-gardes. And then they fall for the same sort of phony radicalism as so many New Atheists do: mirroring rather than rejecting religious fundamentalism by recasting politics as moralizing around questions of theology; distorting the science they claim to champion by misapplying its norms and forms to moral, political, aesthetic, cultural domains beyond its proper precinct. (The false radicalism of scientism -- not science, scientism -- prevails more generally in technocratic policy-making practices in corporate-military think-tanks and in elite design discourses, many of which fancy themselves or at any rate peddle themselves as progressive, and transhumanist formulations lean on these tendencies in their bids for legitimacy but also these already prevailing practices and discourses are vulnerable to reframing in transhumanist terms; there are dangerous opportunities for reactionary politics going in both directions here.)

Transhumanists indulge what seems to me an utterly fetishistic discourse of technology -- in both Marxist and Freudian senses -- out of which a host of infantile conceits arrive in tow: Failing to grasp the technical/performative articulation of every socially legible body, cis as much as trans, "optimal" as much as "disabled," they fetishistically identify with cyborg bodies appealing to wish-fulfillment fantasies they seem to have consumed more or less wholesale from advertizing and Hollywood blockbusters. Failing to grasp the collective/interdependent conditions out of which agency emerges, they grasp at prosthetic fetishes to prosthetically barnacle or genetically enhance the delusive sociopathic liberal "rugged/possesive individual" in a cyborg shell, pretty much like any tragic ammosexual or mid-life crisis case does with his big gun or his sad sportscar.

I have found technoprogressives to be untrustworthy progressives (I say this as the one who popularized that very label), making common cause with reactionaries at the drop of a hat, too willing to rationalize inequity and uncritical positions through appeals to eventual or naturalized progress -- progress is always progress toward an end, and its politics are defined by the politics of that end, and the substance of progress is not the logical or teleological unfolding of entailments but an interminable social struggle among a changing diversity of stakeholder -- whatever they call themselves techno-fixated techno-determinisms are no more progressive than any other variation of Manifest Destiny offered up to congratulate and reassure incumbent elites.

Time and time again in my decades long sparring with futurologists both extreme and mainstream I have confronted in my interlocutors curious attitudes of consumer complacency and uncritical techno-fixation, as well as more disturbing confessions of fear and loathing: fear of death and hostility to mortal, aging, vulnerable body, fear of error or humiliation and hostility to the contingency, errancy, boundedness of the biological brains and material histories in which intelligence are incarnated. To say this -- which is to say the obvious, I fear -- usually provokes howls of denial and disavowal, charges of ad hominem and hate speech, and so I will conclude on a different note: Again, I don't think any of these transhumanist susceptibilities to reaction are accidental or incidental, but arise out of the under-interrogated naturalized technological assumptions and techno-transcendental aspirations on which all superlative futurologies/ists so far have definitively depended.

Robot Gods Are Nowhere So Of Course They Must Be Everywhere

Advocates of Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI) have been predicting that the arrival of intelligent computers is right around the corner more or less every year from the formation of computer science and information science as disciplines, from World War II to Deep Blue to Singularity U. These predictions have always been wrong, though their ritual reiteration remains as strong as ever.

The serial failure of intelligent computers to make their long awaited appearance on the scene has lead many computer scientists and coders to focus their efforts instead on practical questions of computer security, reliability, user-friendliness, and so on. But there remain many GOFAI dead-enders who keep the faith and still imagine the real significance that attaches to the solution of problems with/in computation is that each advance is a stepping stone along the royal road to AI, a kind of burning bush offering up premonitory retroactive encouragement from The Future AI to its present-day acolytes.

In the clarifying extremity of superlative futurology we find techno-transcendentalists who are not only stubborn adherents of GOFAI in the face of its relentless failure, but who double down on their faith and amplify the customary insistence on the inevitable imminence of AI (all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding) and now declare no less inevitable the arrival of SUPER-intelligent artificial intelligence, insisting on the imminence of a history-shattering, possibly apocalyptic, probably paradisical, hopefully parental Robot God.

Rather than pay attention to (let alone learn the lessons of) the pesky failure and probable bankruptcy of the driving assumptions and aspirations of the GOFAI research program-cum-ideology, these techno-transcendentalists want us to treat with utmost seriousness the "existential threat" of the amplification of AI into a superintelligent AI in the wrong hands or with the wrong attitudes. I must say that I for one do not agree with Very Serious Robot Cultists at Oxford University like Nick Bostrom or at Google like Ray Kurzweil or celebrity tech CEOs like Elon Musk that the dumb belief in GOFAI becomes a smart belief rather than an even dumber one when it is amplified into belief in a GOD-AI, or that the useless interest in GOFAI becomes urgently useful rather than even more useless when it is amplified into worry about the existential threat of GOD-AI because it would be so terrible if it did come true. It would be terrible if Godzilla or Voldemort were real, but that is no reason to treat them as real or to treat as Very Serious those who want to talk about what existential threats they would pose if they were real when they are not (especially when there are real things to worry about).

The latest variation of the GOFAI via GOD-AI gambit draws on another theme beloved by superlative futurologists, the so-called Fermi Paradox -- the fact that there are so very many stars in the sky and yet no signs that we can see so far of intelligent life out there. Years ago, I proposed

The answer to the Fermi Paradox may simply be that we aren't invited to the party because so many humans are boring assholes. As evidence, consider that so many humans appear to be so flabbergastingly immodest and immature as to think it a "paradoxical" result to discover the Universe is not an infinitely faceted mirror reflecting back at us on its every face our own incarnations and exhibitions of intelligence.

I for one don't find it particularly paradoxical to suppose life is comparatively rare in the universe, especially intelligent life, and more especially still the kind of intelligent life that would leave traces of a kind human beings here and now would discern as such, given how little we understand about the phenomena of our own lives and intelligence and given the astronomical distances involved. As the Futurological Brickbat quoted above implies, I actually think the use of the word "paradox" here probably indicates human idiocy and egotism more than anything else.

A recent article in Vice's Motherboard collects a handful of proponents of a "new view" on this question that proposes instead that the "dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial." The use of the word "probable" there may make you think that there is some kind of empirical inquiry afoot here, especially since all sorts of sciency paraphernalia surrounds the assertion, and its proponents are denominated "astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick." NASA and the Library of Congress are institutions that have some real heft, but let's just say that typing the word "transhumanist" into a search for any of those names may leave you wondering a bit about the robocultic company they keep.

But what I want to insist you notice is that the use of the term "probability" in these arguments is a logical and not an empirical one at all: What it depends on is the acceptance in advance of the truth of the premise of GOFAI via GOD-AI which is in fact far from obvious at all that anyone would sensibly take for granted. Indeed, I propose that like many arguments offered up by Robot Cultists in more mainstream pop-tech journalism, the real point of the piece is to propagandize for the Robot Cult by indulging in what appear to be harmless blue-sky speculations of science fictional conceits but which entertain as true and so functionally bolster what are actually irrational and usually pernicious articles of futurological faith.

The philosopher Susan Schneider (search "Susan Schneider transhumanist," go ahead, try it) is paraphrased in the article saying "when it comes to alien intelligence... by the time any society learns to transmit radio signals, they’re probably a hop-skip away from upgrading their own biology." This formulation buries the lede in my view, and quite deliberately so. That is to say, what is really interesting here -- one might actually say it is flabbergasting -- is the revelation of a string of techno-transcendental assumptions: [one] that technodevelopmental vicissitudes are not contingently sociopolitical but logically or teleologically determined; [two] that biology could be fundamentally transformed while remaining legible to the transformed (that's the work done by the reassuring phrase "their own"); [three] that jettisoning biological bodies for robot bodies and "uploading" our biological brains into "cyberspace" is not only possible but desirable (make no mistake about it, that is what she is talking about when she talks about "upgrading biology" -- by the way, the reason I scare-quote words like "upload" and "cyberspace" is because those are metaphors not engineering specs, and unpacking those metaphors exposes enough underlying confusion and fact-fudging that you may want to think twice about trusting your "biological upgrade" to folks who talk this way, even if they chirp colloquiually at you that your immortal cyberangel soul-upload into Holodeck Heaven is just a "hop-skip away" from easy peasy radio technology); and [four] that terms like "upgrade," freighted as they are with a host of specific connotations derived from the deceptive hyperbolic parasitic culture of venture-capitalism and tech-talk, are the best way to characterize fraught fundamental changes in human lives to be brought about primarily by corporate-military incumbent-elites seeking parochial profits. Maybe you want to read that last bit again, eh?

Seth Shostak quotes from the same robocultic catechism a paragraph later: “As soon as a civilization invents radio, they’re within fifty years of computers, then, probably, only another fifty to a hundred years from inventing AI... At that point, soft, squishy brains become an outdated model.” Notice the same technological determinism. Notice that the invention of AI is then declared to be probable within a century -- and no actual reasons are offered up in support of this declarations and it is made in defiance of all evidence to the contrary. And then notice suddenly we find ourselves once again in the moral universe of techno-transcendence, where Schneider assumed robot bodies and cyberspatial uploads would be "upgrades" (hop-skipping over the irksome question whether such notions are even coherent or possible on her terms, whether a picture of you could be you, whether fetishized prosthetization would be enhancing to all possible ends or disabling to some we might come to want or immortalizing when no prostheses are eternal, etc etc etc etc) Shostak leaps to the ugly obverse face of the robocultic coin: "soft, squishy brains" are "outdated model[s]." Do you think of your incarnated self as a "model" on the showroom floor, let alone an outdated one? I do not. And refusing such characterizations is indispensable to resisting being treated as one. Maybe you want to read that last bit again, eh?

“I believe the brain is inherently computational -- we already have computational theories that describe aspects of consciousness, including working memory and attention,” Schneider is quoted as saying in the article. "Given a computational brain, I don’t see any good argument that silicon, instead of carbon, can’t be a excellent medium for experience.” Now, I am quite happy to concede that phenomena enough like intelligence and consciousness for us to call them that might in principle take different forms from the ones exhibited by conscious and intelligent people (humans animals and I would argue also some nonhuman animals) and be materialized differently than in the biological brains and bodies and historical struggles that presently incarnate them.

But conceding that logical possibility does not support in the least the assertion that non-biological intelligences are inevitable, that present human theories of intelligence tell us enough to guide us in assessing these possibilities, that human beings are on the road to coding such artificial intelligence, or that current work in computer theory or coding practice shows any sign at all of delivering anything remotely like artificial intelligence any time soon. Certainly there is no good reason to pretend the arrival of artificial intelligence (let alone godlike superintelligence) is so imminent that we should prioritize worrying about it over deliberation about actually real, actually urgent, actually ongoing problems like climate change, wealth concentration, exploited majorities, neglected diseases, abuse of women, arms proliferation, human trafficking, military and police violence.

What if the prior investment in false and facile "computational" metaphors of intelligence and consciousness are evidence of the poverty of the models employed by adherents of GOFAI and are among the problems yielding its serial failure? What if such "computational" frames are symptoms of a sociopathic hostility to actual animal intelligence or simply reveal ideological commitments to the predatory ideology of Silicon Valley's unsustainable skim-and-scam venture capitalism?

Although the proposal of "computational" consciousness is peddled here as a form of modesty, as a true taking-on of the alien otherness of alien intelligence in principle, what if these models of alien consciousness reflect most of all the alienation of their adherents -- the sociopathy of their view of their own superior computational intellects and their self-loathing of the frailties in that intellect's "atavistic" susceptibility to contingency, error, and failure -- rather than any embrace of the radical possibilities of difference?

It is no great surprise that the same desperate dead-enders who thought they could make the GOFAI lemon into GOD-AI lemonade would then go on to find evidence of the ubiquity of that GOD-AI in the complete lack of evidence of GOD-AI anywhere at all. What matters about the proposal of this "new view"on the Fermi Paradox is that it requires us to entertain as possible, so long as we are indulging the speculation at hand, the very notion of GOFAI that we otherwise have absolutely no reason to treat seriously at all.

Exposing the rhetorical shenanigans of faith-based futurologists is a service I am only too happy to render, of course, but I do want to point out that even if there are no good reasons to treat the superlative preoccupations of Robot Cultists seriously on their own terms (no, we don't have to worry about a mean Robot God eating the earth; no, we don't have to worry about clone armies or designer baby armies or human-animal hybrid armies taking over the earth; no, we don't have any reason to expect geo-engineers from Exxon-Mobil to profitably solve climate change for us or gengineers to profitably solve death and disease for us or nanogineers to profitably solve poverty for us) there may be very good reasons to take seriously the fact that futurological frames and figures are taken seriously indeed.

Quite apart from the fact that time spent on futurologists is time wasted in distractions from real problems, the greater danger may be that futurological formulations derange the terns of our deliberation on some of the real problems. Although the genetic and prosthetic interventions techno-triumphalists incessantly crow about have not enhanced or extended human lifespans in anything remotely like radical ways, the view that this enhancement and extension MUST be happening if it is being crowed about so incessantly has real world consequences, making consumers credulous about late-nite snake-oil salesmen in labcoats, making hospital administrators waste inordinate amounts for costly gizmos and ghastly violations for end-of-life care, rationalizing extensions of the retirement age for working majorities broken down by exploitation and neglect. Although the geo-engineering interventions techno-triumphalists incessantly crow about cannot be coherently characterized and seem to depend on the very funding and regulatory apparatuses the necessary failure of which is usually their justification, the view that such geo-engineering MUST be our "plan B" or our "last chance" provides extractive-industrial eco-criminals fresh new justifications to deny any efforts at real world education, organization, legislation to address environmental catastrophe. The very same techno-deterministic accounts of history techno-triumphalists depend on for their faith-based initiatives provided the rationales to justify the indebtedness to their former occupiers -- in the name of vast costly techno-utopian boondoggles like superdams and superhighways and skyscraper skylines -- in nations emerging from colonial occupation and then the imposition of austerity regimes that returned them to conditions of servitude.

Although I regard as nonsensical the prophetic utterances futurologists make about the arrival any time soon, or necessarily ever, of artificial intelligence in the world, I worry that there are many real world consequences of the ever more prevalent deployment of the ideology of artificial life and artificial intelligence by high-profile "technologists" in the popular press. I worry that the attribution of intelligence to smart cards and smart cars and smart phones, none of which exhibit anything like intelligence, confuses our sense of what intelligence actually is and risks denigrating the intelligence of the people with whom we share the world as peers. To fail to recognize the intelligence of humans risks the failure to recognize their humanity and the responsibilities demanded of us inhering in that humanity. Further, I worry that the faithful investment in the ideology of artificial intelligence rationalizes terrible decisions, justifies the outsourcing of human judgments to crappy software that corrects our spelling of words we know but it does not, recommends purchases and selects options for us in defiance of the complexities and dynamism of our taste, decides whether banks should find us credit-worthy whatever our human potential or states should find us target-worthy whatever our human rights.

Futurology rationalizes our practical treatment as robots through an indulgence in what appears to be abstract speculation about robots. The real question to ask of the Robot Cultists, and of the prevailing tech-culture that popularizes their fancies, is not how plausible their prophesies are but just what pathologies do these prophesies symptomize and just what constituencies do they benefit.

State of the Blog

In May 2014 Amor Mundi had its tenth birthday. I can't say that I had such a thing in mind when I started this blog, but Amor Mundi has turned out to be my most sustained and consistent intellectual effort at this point, apart from teaching. It's strange to contemplate the mountain of archive I've accumulated and scaled in all this time, to consider what it amounts to, what it is good for, what it took me from, where it is going.

2013 was the first time in the history of the blog that I had posted less in a year here than the year before, but in 2014 I posted even less than in 2013. I suspect that the greater energy I have devoted to microblogging via twitter accounts for some of this. I have often used twitter as a spring board, sounding board, being bored, and also a promotional space for Amor Mundi and so the relations between my twitter and blogger accounts have been more collaborative than I would have expected.

A few days ago I posted a list of the most widely read pieces here from last year. Although half of the energy I expend here goes to making sense of and venting frustration over politics, as usual almost nobody was the least bit interested in this material (after all there are a million people saying the same sorts of thing generally) and it is pretty much only when I ridicule Robot Cultists or techbro venture capitalist skim-and-scam artists that readers perk up. Not only were most of my most widely read posts skewering techno-utopian scams, but frankly such pieces were almost the only ones that attracted hits in the hundreds. Despite that, I was pleased that stuff I wrote in the midst of what was a personally fraught battle of adjuncts like me and my colleagues for union representation received a lot of attention, too. That was an important part of the year as I lived it, and it was nice to see it registered retrospectively in the life of the blog as well.

The single most widely read piece from last year was the forum page I created in connection with the Existenz volume on Posthumanism to which I contributed an essay myself. Since that remains the piece of anti-futurological critique I am proudest of writing, I was pleased other people have paid some attention to it as well. I was also very pleased that people read my extended elaboration of themes from the short essaylet I was asked to write for the New York Times "When Geeks Rule" forum -- mostly because I thought the piece that appeared in the Times itself ended up being pretty vapid and disappointing, but with more room to roam in I could get at what really mattered to me on the topic.

This year, as with last year, some of my posts were also published at the World Future Society, where somewhere between twice and twenty times as many people gave them a looksee. I should probably post there more, but I always feel a bit uncomfortable doing so, despite the encouragement I have received, because my whole unfuturist schtick feels a little like an asshole move directed at explicitly futurist-identified folks.

One general development I will note by way of conclusion is that while my readership has remained relatively stable over the years -- as an academic I am quite comfortable with the idea that reaching a modest number of minds can make a difference that makes the effort more than worthwhile -- I do get the feeling that my sympathetic readership has grown quite a lot. In the early days of the blog I think the majority of my readership were Robot Cultists who liked to read me to get mad and post endless variations of "I Know You Are But What Am I?" in the Moot -- they always reminded me of those weird liberals who get off on getting mad at Fox News -- whereas nowadays more people who read me seem to be kindred spirits, either because so many people have been burned by techno-utopian scams and plutocratic fever-dreams there are more folks around who just enjoy the release of a good rant on such topics or because they find it clarifying (as I do myself) to connect the ugly prevailing unsustainable and plutocratic tendencies in corporate-military consumer-complacent techno-fetishistic neoliberalism/neoconservatism and the weird pathological extremities of these tendencies playing out in the techno-transcendental sects of the Robot Cult's transhuman eugenicists, singularitarian Robot God warriors, techno-immortalist and nanosantalogical wish-fulfillment fantasists and inane greenwashing geo-engineers.

To Declare Oneself Beyond Left And Right Is Almost Always To Disavow One Is On The Right

Another reddit comment:

I think the important distinction for BI is between authoritarian and anti-authoritarian, not between left and right. The two dichotomies are orthogonal. Anti-authority/pro-liberty types typically require only a brief explanation of BI before enthusiastically signing up; this is true of principled libertarians as much as it is of the counter-culture. As for authoritarians, I don't think the UBI movement has yet had to stare into the howling abyss of left-wing authoritarian hatred of BI and all it stands for. Not everyone who is allergic to individual independence and self-rule is a right winger. Many of them are working class. How can we ask a member of the working class to support SLACK? So yes, I agree with you; but only because I think that right vs. left is not the dimension that counts for BI.

Where to begin?!

The "authoritarian axis" introduced here obscures much more than it reveals, and it comes from a very interested right-wing rhetorical position. Market libertarian ideological proselytizing via the "World's Shortest Political Quiz" and related "Political Compass" (a compass that makes you get lost, how droll!) but also via mainstream pundit commonplaces about "independent" majorities who are presumably "culturally or socially liberal but fiscally conservative" provide the key context here.

These frames seek to obscure the relevance of left-right analysis to certain right-wing politics in order to support the status quo and the incumbent-elite interests aligned with it. Of course, market libertarians like to pretend they are "beyond left and right" (or try to market themselves with distracting neologisms -- independent! upwinger! dynamist!) because they can no more prevail with majorities than conventional Republicans can if they are too explicit about their actual alignment with the interests of plutocratic minorities.

Market libertarianism is a right-wing ideology -- it claims to be anti-authoritarian while endorsing corporate-militarism, and to advocate non-violence while endorsing contractual outcomes as non-violent by fiat whatever the terms of misinformation and duress shaping them. Since "fiscal conservatism" always cashes out in de-regulatory and privatizing schemes dismantling the legal/welfare affordances of social equity and cultural pluralism this means that the "cultural/social liberalism" always proclaimed alongside the "fiscal conservatism" has no real substance.

It is no accident that the anti-authoritarianism of market libertarians always plays out as hostility to almost all government except for armies and police to keep the wage slaves from revolting against their plutocratic masters. It is also no accident that market libertarian arguments only impact actual politics when they provide selective justifications for GOP positions.

People manifestly mean different things by basic income advocacy depending on whether they are coming from left or right, but it isn't exactly surprising that someone who falsely imagines right-wing libertarianism to be beyond left or right would imagine basic income advocacy figured through a libertarian lens to be the same.

The commenter declares "the UBI movement has yet had to stare into the howling abyss of left-wing authoritarian hatred of BI and all it stands for" -- but the reason for this non-event is that the howling left-wing authoritarian abyss conjured here is a classic paranoid fantasy of the reactionary right. In this it is not unlike that slip-up about "working class" folks "allergic" to "independence" -- ooh, just smell the makers-v-takers race/class politics of "liberty"!

I'm sure Stalinist industrial-militarism and Maoist feudalism will leap to libertopian minds at my dismissal of these reactionary fever-dreams, but it really isn't difficult to grasp that the totalitarian impulse is a right-wing one, once you shed the re-mapping demanded by the World's Shortest Political Quiz. If you can grasp that Nazism was a movement of the right despite the word "socialist" in the logo it shouldn't be that complicated after all to trouble too slick an identification of the left with the gulag either. Neither is it so much of a leap to grasp the left impulse is essentially democratizing work toward equity-in-diversity once you set aside market fundamentalists pieties and the GOP corpse-cold Cold War playbook.

Comparably fantastical is the commenter's confident assertion that "pro-liberty types typically require only a brief explanation of BI before enthusiastically signing up." Yeah, except when they don't, which is pretty much always. Sure, a few market fundamentalists have tossed out thought-experiments about basic income when they were looking for a chance to score rhetorical points (what they mean by "signing up") about how awesome it would be to demolish the New Deal once and for all, but they never want to actually do anything (what it should mean to "sign up") to end wage slavery, eliminate the precarity draft, or secure informed non-duressed contracts. When have they "signed up" to do anything so jack-booted socialist as all that otherwise? When have they made their actual cases on such terms anyway? Attributing such motives for the occasional right-wing pseudo-scholarly foray into basic income thought experiments seems pretty far-fetched.

No doubt I am being biased, tribalist, immoderate, unreasonable to ask anybody to face these awkward facts.

Top Posts for 2014

14. "Summoning the Demon": Robot Cultist Elon Musk Reads from Robo-Revelations at MIT October 27
13. Gizmuddle: Or, Why the Futuristic Is Always Perverse January 25
12. The Future Is A Hell of a Drug April 7
11. Car Culture Is A Futurological Catastrophe January 14
10. Very Serious Robocalyptics October 5
9. Em Butterfly: Robot Cultists George Dvorsky and Robin Hanson Go Overboard For Robo-Overlords February 24
8. Robot Cultist Martine Rothblatt Is In the News September 9
7. Geek Rule Is Weak Gruel: Why It Matters That Luddites Are Geeks September 19
6. R.U. Sirius on Transhumanism October 19
5. Rachel Haywire: Look At Me! Look At Me! Even If There's Nothing To See! August 18
4. It's Now Or Never: An Adjunct Responds to SFAI's Latest Talking Points May 5
3.Techbro Mythopoetics December 22
2. San Francisco Art Institute Touts Diego Rivera Fresco Celebrating Labor Politics While Engaging in Union Busting May Day
...and number 1. Forum on the Existenz Journal Issue, "The Future of Humanity and the Question of Post-Humanity" March 9

To round the list out to a nice full fifteen, I append not a hit but a miss, a post fewer people got a kick out of the first time around than I expected, given what most people come here to read: Tragic Techbrofashionistas of The Future Put. A. Phone. On. It! from January 6.

Apart from that last addition, these are essentially the most widely read of this year's posts, excluding a few popular but comparatively insubstantial one-liners. I'll share a few observations about these in the annual State of the Blog post to be written hungover from my bunker come the new year. You can compare these to the listicles from the last couple of years if you like: Top Posts for 2012 and Top Posts for 2013.

The Inevitable Cruelty of Algorithmic Mediation

Also posted at the World Future Society.

On Christmas Eve, Eric Meyer posted a devastating personal account reminding us of the extraordinary cruelty of the lived experience of ever more prevailing algorithmic mediation.

Meyer's Facebook feed had confronted him that day with a chirpy headline that trilled, "Your Year in Review. Eric, here's what your year looked like!" Beneath it, there was the image that an algorithm had number-crunched to the retrospective forefront, surrounded by clip-art cartoons of dancing figures with silly flailing arms amidst balloons and swirls of confetti in festive pastels. The image was the face of Eric Meyer's six year old daughter. It was the image that had graced the memorial announcement he had posted upon her death earlier in the year. Describing the moment when his eye alighted on that adored unexpected gaze, now giving voice to that brutally banal headline, Meyer writes: "Yes, my year looked like that. True enough. My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl. It was still unkind to remind me so forcefully."

Meyer's efforts to come to terms with the impact of this algorithmic unkindness are incomparably more kind than they easily and justifiably might have been. "I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault. This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases." To emphasize the force of this point, "Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty" is also the title of Meyer's meditation. "To show me Rebecca’s face and say 'Here’s what your year looked like!' is jarring," writes Meyer. "It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong. Coming from code, it’s just unfortunate." But just what imaginary scene is being conjured up in this exculpatory rhetoric in which inadvertent cruelty is "coming from code" as opposed to coming from actual persons? Aren't coders actual persons, for example?

Needless to say, Meyers has every right to grieve and to forgive and to make sense of these events in the way that works best for him. And of course I know what he means when he seizes on the idea that none of this was "a deliberate assault." But it occurs to me that it requires the least imaginable measure of thought on the part of those actually responsible for this code to recognize that the cruelty of Meyer's confrontation with their algorithm was the inevitable at least occasional result for no small number of the human beings who use Facebook and who live lives that attest to suffering, defeat, humiliation, and loss as well as to parties and promotions and vacations. I am not so sure the word "inadvertent" quite captures the culpability of those humans who wanted and coded and implemented and promoted this algorithmic cruelty.

And I must say I question the premise of the further declaration that this code "works in the overwhelming majority of cases." While the result may have been less unpleasant for other people, what does it mean to send someone an image of a grimly-grinning, mildly intoxicated prom-date or a child squinting at a llama in a petting zoo surrounded by cartoon characters insisting on our enjoyment and declaring "here's what your year looked like"? Is that what any year looks like or lives like? Why are these results not also "jarring"? Why are these results not also "unfortunate"? Is any of this really a matter of code "working" for most everybody?

What if the conspicuousness of Meyer's experience of algorithmic cruelty indicates less an exceptional circumstance than the clarifying exposure of a more general failure, a more ubiquitous cruelty? Meyer ultimately concludes that his experience is the result of design flaws which demand design fixes. Basically, he proposes that users be provided the ability to opt out of algorithmic applications that may harm them. Given the extent to which social software forms ever more of the indispensable architecture of the world we navigate, this proposal places an extraordinary burden on those who are harmed by carelessly implemented environments they come to take for granted while absolving those who build, maintain, own, and profit from these environments from the harms resulting from their carelessness. And in its emphasis on designing for egregious experienced harms, this proposal disregards costs, risks, harms that are accepted as inevitable when they are merely habitual, or vanish in their diffusion, over the long-term, as lost opportunities hidden behind given actualities.

But what worries me most of all about this sort of "opt out" design-fix is that with each passing day algorithmic mediation is more extensive, more intensive, more constitutive of the world. We all joke about the ridiculous substitutions performed by autocorrect functions, or the laughable recommendations that follow from the odd purchase of a book from Amazon or an outing from Groupon. We should joke, but don't, when people treat a word cloud as an analysis of a speech or an essay. We don't joke so much when a credit score substitutes for the judgment whether a citizen deserves the chance to become a homeowner or start a small business, or when a Big Data profile substitutes for the judgment whether a citizen should become a heat signature for a drone commiting extrajudicial murder in all of our names. Meyer's experience of algorithmic cruelty is extraordinary, but that does not mean it cannot also be a window onto an experience of algorithmic cruelty that is ordinary. The question whether we might still "opt out" from the ordinary cruelty of algorithmic mediation is not a design question at all, but an urgent political one.   

Contextualizing My Anti-Futurological Critique for Theoryheads

This rather densely allusive sketch contextualizing my anti-futurological critique won't be everybody's cup of tea, but I've upgraded and adapted it from my response to a comment in the Moot for those readers who find this sort of thing useful but who would likely miss it otherwise. I still think probably the best, most concise and yet complete(-ish) formulation of my critique is the contrbution I published in the recent Existenz volume on posthumanism.

You accuse me of indulging in futurism while critiquing it. All the big boys make such moves, I don't think less of you for trying it. I have heard what you have to say so far, and I must say it seems to me you are baldly wrong to say this, and that believing it sends you off-track...

What I mean by futurism has its origins in specific institutional histories and discursive practices: namely, the emergence of fraudulent methodologies/ rationales of speculation in market futures and the extrapolative genre of the scenario in military think-tanks -- all taking place in the wider context of the suffusion of public deliberation and culture with the hyperbolic and deceptive techno-progressive norms and forms of consumer advertizing...

To give you a sense of where I am coming from and to give you a sense of what I am hearing when you say "modernity" and how I might try to take us elsewhere with futurity-against-futurology, I provide this handy sketch:

To the extent that post-modernity (late modernity, a-modernity, neoliberalism, whatever) is the post-WW1/2 inflation of the petrochemical bubble in which other postwar financial bubbles are blown, my anti-futurology is of a piece with Lyotard's (whatever my differences with him, of which I have many, he makes some of the same warnings).

To the extent that futurism markets elite-incumbency as progress, my anti-futurology is also of a piece with some of Debord's critique of the Spectacle, so-called (the parts about "enhanced survival" in particular), specifically to the extent that Debord's tale of "being degraded into having degraded into appearing" derives from Adorno's culture industri(alization) as formula-filling-mistaken-for-judgment and Benjamin's War Machine as the displacment of a revolutionary equity-in-diversity from the epilogue of Art in the Age.

Your emphasis seems more attuned to aesthetic modernities, so the larger context for me is the proposal that between the bookends of Thirty-Years' Wars from Westphalia to Bretton Woods European modernity indulged in a host of quarrels des anciens et des modernes, culture wars presiding over and rationalizing the ongoing organization of social militarization/ administration of nation-states and their competitive internationalism.

"The Future" of futurisms in my sense arises out of those discourses. Design discourses are especially provocative for my critical position, for example, since they are patently futurological -- at once doing and disavowing politics; peddling plutocracy qua meritocracy via the Merely Adequate Yet Advancement through their exemplary anti-democratzing Most Acceptable Yet Advanced MAYA principle -- but still quite modern in what I think is your sense of the term. This matters because futurological global/digital rationality is for me an importantly different phenomenon than the modern that constitutes itself in the repudiation of the ancient: the futurist for me is in between, at once a vestige of modern internationalism and a harbinger of post-nationalist planetarity.

Planetarity is a term I am taking from Spivak, and my sense of where we are headed -- if anywhere -- is informed by queer/critical race/post-colonial/environmental justice theories like hers. In my various theory courses I usually advocate in my final lecture (the one with the final warnings and visions in it) for a polycultural planetarity -- where the "polyculture" term resonates with Paul Gilroy's post-Fanonian convivial multiculturalism as well as with the repudiation of industrial monoculture for companion planting practices in the service of sustainability (but also synecdochic for sustainable political ecology), and then the "planetarity" term marks the failure/ eclipse of nation-state internationalism (say, UN-IMF-World Bank globalization) in digital financialization, fraud, marketing harassment, and surveillance and ecological catastrophe. Polycultural planetarity would build ethics and mobilize democratizations via contingent universalization (that's from my training with Judith Butler no doubt) in the future anterior (a Spivakian understanding of culture as interpretation practices toward practical conviviality). For me, that future anterior is the futurity inhering in the present in the diversity of stakeholders/peers to presence, very much opposed to the closures, reductions, extrapolations, instrumentalizations of "The Future."

Lots of name-dropping there, I know, but almost every phrase here can easily turn into a three-hour lecture, I'm afraid, in one of my contemporary critical theory survey courses. I suspect you might be tempted to assimilate all that feminist/queer/posthuman-criticalrace theoretical complex to the categories you already know -- forgive me if I have jumped to conclusions in so saying -- but I think that would be an error, more an effort to dismiss and hence not have to read the work than think what we are doing as Hannah Arendt enjoined, the call I hear every day that keeps me going.

Techbro Mythopoetics

In an enjoyable rant over at io9 today, Charlie Jane Anders declares herself Tired of "The Smartest Man in the Room" science fiction trope. Her delineation of the stereotype is immediately legible:

The "smartest man in the room" is a kind of wish-fulfillment for reasonably smart people, because he's not just clever but incredibly glib. As popularized by people like Doctor Who/Sherlock writer Steven Moffat and the creators of American shows like House and Scorpion, the "smartest guy in the room" thinks quicker than everybody else but also talks rings around them, too. He's kind of an unholy blend of super-genius and con artist. Thanks to the popularity of Sherlock, House and a slew of other "poorly socialized, supergenius nerd" shows, the "smartest man in the room" has become part of the wallpaper. His contempt for less intelligent people, mixed with adorable social awkwardness, and his magic ability to have the right answer at every turn, have become rote.

Later, she offers up a preliminary hypothesis that the intelligibility and force of the archetype derives from the widespread experience of consumers who feel themselves to be at the mercy of incomprehensible devices and therefore of the helpful nerds in their lives who better understand these things. I actually don't think the world is particularly more technologically incomprehensible now than it has always somewhat been in network-mediated extractive-industrial societies, but tech-talkers like to say otherwise because it consoles them that progress is happening rather than the immiserating unsustainable stasis that actually prevails, but that is a separate discussion. I do think Anders strikes very much the right note when she declares The Smartest Guy in the Room archetype a "wish-fulfillment fantasy," but I am not sure that I agree with her proposal about how the fantasy is operating here.

What is perplexing about the Smartest Guy in the Room archetype, as well as for the more ubiquitous savvy but awkward nerd archetype, is the combination in it of superior knowledge and social ineptitude. Anders proposes that this fantasy space is doubly reassuring -- securing our faith that helpful people will always be around to navigate the incomprehensible technical demands of the world, but that we need not feel inferior in our dependency because these helpful people gained their superior knowledge at the cost of a lack of basic social skills nobody in their right mind would actually choose to pay. The gawky awkward nerd is as obviously inferior as superior, we get to keep our toys with our egos intact, and everybody wins (even the losers).

All this sounds just idiotically American enough to be plausible, but seems to assume that few of her readers -- or anybody, for that matter -- actually identifies with the nerds. Anders seems to have forgotten that she begins her piece with the assertion that The Smartest Guy in the Room is "wish-fulfillment for reasonably smart people," that is to say, the self-image of her entire readership. And of course the truth is that nearly every one of her readers do identify with the archetype, indeed the archetype is a space of aspirational identification in culture more generally, an identification which fuels much of the lucrative popularity and currency of spectacular science fiction and fantasy and geekdom more generally in this moment. That is the real problem that makes the phenomenon Anders has observed worthy of criticism in the first place.

Anders describes the Smartest Guy in the Room as someone who has "contempt for less intelligent people, mixed with adorable social awkwardness, and [a] magic ability to have the right answer at every turn." It is crucial to grasp that what appears as a kind of laundry list here is in fact a set of structurally inter-dependent co-ordinates of the moral universe of The Smartest Guy in the Room. He doesn't happen to be right all the time and socially awkward and contemptuous of almost everybody else, his sociopathic contempt is the essence of his social awkwardness, rationalized by his belief that he is superior to them because he is always right about everything, at least as he sees it.

Before I am chastised for amplifying harmless social awkwardness into sociopathy, let me point out that the adorable nerds of Anders' initial formulations are later conjoined to a discussion of Tony Stark, the cyborgically-ruggedized hyper-individualist bazillionaire tech-CEO hero of the Iron Man blockbusters. Although Anders describes this archetype in terms of its popular currency in pop sf narrative and fandom today, I think it is immediately illuminating to grasp the extent to which Randroidal archetypes Howard Roark, Francisco d'Anconia, Henry Rearden, and John Galt provide the archive from which these sooper-sociopath entrepreneurial mad-scientist cyborg-soldiers are drawn (if you want more connective tissue, recall that Randroidal archetypes are the slightest hop, skip, and jump away from Heinleinian archetypes and now we're off to the races).

The truth is that there is no such thing as the guy who knows all the answers, or who solves all the problems. Problem-solving is a collective process. There is more going on that matters than anybody knows, even the people who know the most. Even the best experts and the luminous prodigies stand on the shoulders of giants, depend on the support of lovers and friends and collaborators and reliable norms and laws and infrastructural affordances, benefit from the perspectives of critics and creative appropriations. Nobody deserves to own it all or run it all, least of all the white guys who happen to own and run most of it at the moment, and this is just as true when elite-incumbency hides its rationalizations for privilege behind a smokescreen of technobabble. 

The sociopathy of the techno-fixated Smartest Guy in the Room is, in a word, ideological. Anders hits upon an enormously resonant phrasing when she declares him "an unholy blend of super-genius and con artist." In fact, his declared super-genius is an effect of con-artistry -- the fraudulent cost- and risk-externalization of digital networked financialization, the venture-capitalist con of upward-failing risk-fakers uselessly duplicating already available services and stale commodities as novelties, the privatization of the "disruptors" and precarization of "crowdsource"-sharecropping -- the "unholy" faith on the part of libertechbrotarian white dudes that they deserve their elite incumbent privileges

Perhaps this is a good time to notice that when Anders says the Smartest Guy in the Room provides "wish-fulfillment for reasonably smart people" her examples go on to demonstrate that by people she happens always to mean only guys and even only white guys. She does notice that the Smartest Guy does seem to be, you know, a guy and provides the beginnings of a gendered accounting of the archetype: "the 'smartest guy' thing confirms all our silliest gender stereotypes, in a way that's like a snuggly dryer-fresh blanket to people who feel threatened by shifting gender roles. In the world of these stories, the smartest person is always a man, and if he meets a smart woman she will wind up acknowledging his superiority."

That seems to me a rather genial take on the threatened bearings of patriarchal masculinity compensated by cyborg fantasizing, but at least it's there. The fact that the Smartest Guy keeps on turning out to be white receives no attention at all. This omission matters not only because it is so glaring, but because the sociopathic denial of the collectivity of intelligence, creativity, progress, and flourishing at the heart of the Smartest Guy in the Room techno-archetype, is quite at home in the racist narrative of modern technological civilization embodied in inherently superior European whiteness against which are arrayed not different but primitive and atavistic cultures and societies that must pay in bloody exploitation and expropriation the price of their inherent inferiority. That is to say, the Smartest Guy in the Room is also the Smartest Guy in History, naturally enough, with a filthy treasure pile to stand on and shout his superiority from.

From the White Man's Burden to Yuppie Scum to Techbro Rulz, the Smartest Guy in the Room is one of the oldest stories in the book. And, yeah, plenty of us are getting "kind of tired" of it.

Why Our Militant Atheists Are Not Secular Thinkers

Secularity -- from the Latin saecularis, worldly, timely, contingent -- properly so called, is very much a pluralist and not an eliminationist impulse. In naming the distinction of worldly affairs from spiritual devotions, it differentiated the good life of the vita contemplativa of philosophy from that of the vita activa of the statesman or aesthete, but later went on to carve out the distinctions of clerical from government, legal, professional authorities. The Separation of Church and State as pillar of secular thinking and practice is the furthest imaginable thing from sectarian or ethnic strife amplified by the eliminationist imagination into genocidal violence -- and yet the identification of today's militant atheists with a "secular worldview" risks precisely such a collapse.

Secularism has never demanded an anti-religiosity but recognized the legitimacy of non-religiosities. Indeed, in diverse multicultures such as our own secularism becomes indispensable to the continuing life of religious minorities against majority or authoritarian formations of belief, and hence is not only not anti-religious but explicitly facilitative of variously religious lifeways as it is of variously non-religious lifeways.

I have been an atheist since 1983 -- over thirty years by now! after a Roman Catholic upbringing. I am quite happy to live a life a-thiest -- "without god(s)" -- myself, but the primary value of secularism to me has always been its entailment of and insistence on a pluralist practice of reason, in which we recognize that there are many domains of belief distinguished in their concerns, in their cares, and in the manner of their convictions. Our scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, professional, political beliefs, and so on, occupy different conceptual and practical domains, incarnate different registers of our lives, are warranted by different criteria. For the pluralist, reason is not properly construed as the monomaniacal reduction of all belief to a single mode, but a matter of recognizing what manner of concern, care, and conviction belief is rightly occasioned for and then applying the right criteria of warrant appropriate to that mode.

Pluralism is not a relativism or nihilism, as threatened bearings of fundamentalist belief would have it, but a rigorous reasonableness equal to the complexity, dynamism, and multifaceted character of existence and of the personalities beset by its demands and possibilities. For one thing, pluralism allows us to grasp and reconcile the aspirational force of the contingent universalism of ethics without which we could not conceive let alone work toward progress or the Beloved Community of the we in which all are reconciled, while at once doing justice to the fierce demands and rewards in dignity and belonging deriving from our (inevitably plural, usually partial) inhabitation of moral communities that build the "we" from exclusions of various construals of the "they." Pluralism allows us to reconcile as well our pursuit of the private perfections of morality and sublimity (my appreciation of the aesthetical forms of which requires my admission of the validity for others, whatever my atheism, of its faithly forms) with the public works of scientific, political, legal, professional progress.

It is crucial to grasp that the refusal of pluralism is reductionism, and that reductionism is an irrationalism. It is a form of insensitivity, a form of unintelligence -- and usually a testimony to and inept compensation for insecurity. In Nietzsche's critique of the fetish (Marx's commodity fetishism and Freud's sexual fetishes are surface scratches in comparison) this reductionism is the ressentimental attutude of the life of fear over the lives of love, the philosophical imposture of deception and self-deception peddled as truth-telling. To impose the criteria of warrant proper to scientific belief to moral belief, say, or to aesthetic judgement, or to legal adjudication is to be irrational not rational. Also, crucially, it is to violate and not celebrate science.

To call the celebrated (or at any rate noisy) militant atheistic boy warriors of today "secular thinkers" is a profound error. To misconstrue as the sins of religious faith as such the moralizing misapplication of faithly norms to political practices is to misunderstand the problem at hand -- and usually in a way that multiplies errors: Hence, our militant atheists become bigots tarring innocent majorities with the crimes of violent minorities, they lose the capacity to recognize differences that make a difference in cultures, societies, individuals all the while crowing about their superior discernment.

Those who commit crimes and administer tyrannies in the name of faith irrationally and catastrophically misapply the substantiation of aesthetic sublimities and parochial mores connected to some among indefinitely many forms of religiosity to domains of ethical aspiration and political progress to which they are utterly unsuited. Fascism and moralizing are already-available terms for these too familiar irrational misapplications. Meanwhile those who attribute these crimes and tyrannies to the aesthetic and the moral as such, as practiced in variously faithful forms, are inevitably indulging in reductionism. This reductionism in its everyday stupidity is usually a form of ethnocentric subcultural parochialism, but the militant atheists prefer their stupidity in the form of scientism, usually assuming the imaginary vantage of a superior scientificity the terms of which presumably adjudicate the unethical in moralizing and the tyrannical in progressivity because it subsumes ethical and political domains within its own scientific terms. In this, scientism first distorts science into a morality which it then, flabbergastingly, distorts into a moralism itself, thus mirroring the very fundamentalism it seeks to critique.

Secularism is a theoretical and practical responsiveness to the plurality of a world in which there is always more going on that matters in the present than any of us can know and in which the diversity of stakeholders to the shared present interminably reopens history to struggle. It is bad enough that today's militant atheists get so much of the substance and value of science, taste, and faith wrong in their disordering rage for order, but in calling their reductionist irrationality "secular thinking" we risk losing the sense and significance of the secular altogether, that accomplishment of reason without which we can never be equal to the demands and promises of reality and history in the plurality of their actual presence.

Consolidated A Quarter Century Later

I was listening to this with righteous fury back in Atlanta as a Queer National, vegan hard-ass (these days I'm cheerfully vegetarian and prefer my queerness post-nationalist), and budding socialist feminist green, writing an MA thesis connecting queer theory and technocultural theory (a trace of which survives here). I had not the slightest suggestion of a hope back then that I would be in San Francisco working with my hero Judith Butler in just two years' time. That was wonderful, even a little miraculous. But I did have great hope and conviction then that those songs would no longer be so thoroughly relevant to the America of 2014, a generation away, an America of ongoing unemployment and lowered expectations and still-profiteering banksters, of SillyCon fraudsters, of racist police, of rising Greenhouse storms. That has not been so wonderful, not so miraculous.

Cop-Cam Sham: Political Problems Demand Political Solutions

Once again we are confronted with another miscarriage of justice as another police officer kills another unarmed black citizen the police are supposed to serve and protect. And once again calls are ringing out on all sides to install more cameras, cameras on police cars, cameras on the street, cameras on the bodies of cops on the beat.

Cop-cam techno-fixers really need to pause and take note: Eric Garner's death by a clearly illegal choke hold was on video and was seen by millions.

Solutions from scholars and activists and experts have been reiterated and mostly ignored for over a generation by now: setting up independent special prosecutors to address charges of police misconduct rather than grand juries composed of colleagues inthe criminal justice system with inherent conflicts of interest; extensive training for police in violence de-escalation strategies and to provide sensitivity to racial and other empirically well-established forms of bias, unconscious and conscious; hiring and promotion policies to reflect the composition of the communities they are meant to serve and protect; community policing, oversight and accountability; ending the harsh sentencing rules installed by the failed racist war on (some) drugs; commonsense gun safety regulations -- all of these and more are indispensable to address ongoing terrorization of vulnerable communities by police in all our names. If I point out that procedures are techniques and regulations are legal artifacts can technofixated futurists get behind these or similar proposals, even if they are not polished chrome and shaped like dildoes?

Of course, more body cameras for police on the street can and probably should be part of the story of better policing practices in our communities. I have nothing against that proposal except the pretense that cameras are "the solution."

It is crucial to grasp that the interpretation of camera footage is stratified and shaped by the same racism that shapes and stratifies the racist policing so many are talking about here, the footage is taken up in the context of the very institutional practices and procedures that are otherwise failing so conspicuously before our eyes. The same collegial incentives to protect police from accountability now would pressure those who presumably guard the footage. Think of "lost" e-mails, selective leaks of secret testimony, orchestrated press releases shaping public perceptions: more video surveillance footage is more mountain to mold. 

It is a strange thing, to say the least, to propose more surveillance as the ready-made solution to the unjust policing of people of color who have lived for generations under a regime of relentless onerous arbitrary surveillance as the substance of much of that unjust policing. Stop and frisk is a surveillance technique, you know. That policing has not been reformed even in the face of generations of obvious, ongoing failures should sound a warning that justice does not flow automatically from the visibility of injustice alone.

State sanctioned violence against black people from slavery, to Jim Crow, to inequitable incarceration and policing, is centuries old: it is not incidental to but an abiding historical constituent element of the justice system. Political problems demand political solutions. In this context, technofixated dreams of circumventions of the political with handy gizmos amount to affirmations of the politics of the reactionary racist status quo. My point in saying so is not to call the techno-fixated racist, but to appeal to their anti-racism to impel them to dig deeper than their usual techno-fixation to take on this long ongoing crisis on the educational, agitational, organizational terms it actually demands.

Personal

To say the personal is political is to notice that in becoming the personal some politics is de-politicized, with political consequences.

Futurology Defined

The futurological in my sense of the term is an ideological formation; it is essentially a marketing discourse amplifying the profits and authority of incumbent elites by mobilizing seductive and reassuring techno-transcendental wish-fulfillment fantasies in the form of unaccountable, apparently predictive, promissory, or even prophetic utterances in which the deceptive, hyperbolic norms and forms of promotion and advertising already suffusing our public life take on the coloration and intensity of outright organized religiosity: for example, in the guiding narratives of mainstream corporate-military think-tanks, in popular consumer fandoms for Apple products or celebrity CEOs, or in marginal futurist subcultures like transhumanism.

Techbros Are Not Geeks

I find it utterly bewildering that the public face of geekdom more and more seems to be becoming venture capitalist skim-scam operations, evopsycho douchebaggery, GamerGate bigots, the anti-intellectual MOOCification of the Academy, and googlediculous soopergenius "thought-leaders" peddling futurological flim-flam. It's bad enough that most "thought leaders" aren't leading anything, but it's pretty plain they aren't even thinking.

I mean, is the unwatchably stale Cheez Whiz of "The Big Bang Theory" really supposed to have its finger on the pulse of some vital cultural phenomenon? Arts and crafts fairs rebranded as Maker Faires, learning annex courses and funding pitches rebranded as TEDtalkfotainments, superfluous duplications of existing goods and services given websites and then branded as a New Economy Tech Explosion, and always everywhere the corporate logos all watching over with loving grace... didn't we already do this dreary disaster in the irrationally exuberant dot.bomb 90s?

Since when has geekdom been so crass, so dumb, so monotonal? Where did all the camp, all the weirdos, all the elven/vulcan-eared librarians, all the dirty fucking hippies go?

I hate to be the one to break it to anybody, but the Federation is a multicultural socialist democracy -- Star Fleet is where they send the stale pale males who can't quite get with the laid back abundance program of their better adjusted fellow citizens.

You know, when I was in High School the only people I could talk about Star Trek and Dune with were theater geeks, and Model UN nerds, and downlow feminists on the pom pom squad in my honors English classes who played dumb for boyfriends they liked to make fun of when they weren't making out with them. Later, my geeks were in Queer Nation, loved John Waters as much as Star Wars, and pored over dusty archives for years dissertating on medieval French poets.

Speaking only for myself, of course, but these days when I am really geeking out to my heart's content it probably means I am reading Nnedi Okorafor, listening to Janelle Monae, or watching a roundtable of social scientists and cultural critics and activists on Melissa Harris-Perry's show. Geekery has never looked or felt or wanted to me to be anything remotely like the white-racist patriarchal corporate-militarist yuppie scumbaggery that is now getting marketed as "geekery."

Of course, every cultural formation is diverse in ways that exceed any parochial vantage on it and is stratified by the legacies and agonies of historical placement. While they often, all too often, exhibited such frailties, for me, geeks have never been about greed or exclusion or reactionary politics or consumer conformity. For me, geeks have been about resisting the forces and forms with which they seem increasingly to be identified in public discourse. The New Geekdom is the old bleak-dumb.

I say, Kol-Ut-Shan! and die techbro scum! (A paradox, you say? Mine is a geekery that thrives on paradoxes.)

"Overcoming Our Biological Limits"

It is a techno-transcendental commonplace to pretend that medicine is confounding long definitive biological limitations in human health, capacity, lifespan, and so on. These claims are usually just completely false, but they are always overblown. The Pill provides a fine illustration of the point, since it truly did enable a fundamental and profoundly emancipatory transformation of the human condition in my view, but without rendering humanity "post-human" in the sense that interests the superlative futurologists in the least.

I see no reason to expect any radical enhancement of definitive human capacities or any increase of lifespan beyond the upper bound some lucky humans have always enjoyed in recorded history (although I would like to think medical improvements might enable many more humans to share in that bit of luck) of the sort that would render "posthuman" or "transhuman" terms more apt now than they have been since World War II to characterize human beings. But quite apart from this sort of well warranted skepticism about imminent techno-transcendental expectations -- whether originating in ill-informed credulity, promotional fraud, pseudo-science, or wish-fulfillment fantasizing -- I must say that I find techno-transcendental interpretations of such projected outcomes profoundly wrongheaded in principle even if they were not also wildly implausible or premature.

On the one hand, these futurologists seem too eager to treat biological limits as self-evident givens, when the terms of bodily legibility and the significance with which biological traits and capacities are freighted are in fact historically varied, constructed and contingent. While on the other hand, futurologists seem to dismiss the extent to which salient continuities in human life -- and especially a shared vulnerability to suffering, correction, injury, abuse, neglect, disease, mortality -- have provided a context within which humans have testified together to our hopes and our histories, a context out of which humans have elaborated our still fledgling morals, ethics, politics, aesthetics. If our technique ever truly were to confound long definitive human limits, such as they are, this would hardly be experienced as an ecstatic overcoming of all limits but as a confrontation with new, and utterly bedeviling, limits to our sense of sharable experience and shared significance.

"Non-Religious"

Although I am an atheist myself, I am personally less interested in the political significance of the state of explicit atheist identifications than I am in the vast and rising self-description, "nonreligious." The weirdly sectarian skirmishes around precisely correct atheist identifications seem to me as ugly and useless as the religious kind, for the most part, especially when it is white guys doing the skirmishing online, but the rising numbers of people who are simply doing without god -- a good word for which might be, what do you know, a-theist, "without god" -- as any kind of important organizing idea in their actual daily lives (whether or not they feel particularly disposed to argue or even dwell on the question) seems to me to be contributing to the very wholesome secularization, diversification, planetization of American society.

Geek Rule Is Weak Gruel: Why It Matters That Luddites Are Geeks

I received an invitation Monday night to contribute a mini Op-Ed for the New York Times' "Room for Debate" forum, responding to the question, "What does it mean when geek culture becomes mainstream?" Seven contributions appeared last night, including mine. They all contain worthy insights, and my own piece isn't my favorite among them, though mine is the only one I agree with (given the passage of time, that isn't a given). The headline for the forum now reads When Geeks Rule. The introduction of the theme of "Rule" actually changes my sense of the question, but I will set that aside for a moment. I assume that all the resulting essaylets were shaped by the same forces impinging on mine -- three hundred words is a rapidly looming horizon, a no less rapidly looming deadline, and an editorial scalpel wielded by someone with a "readability" agenda, angels and ministers of grace defend us. Who knows the subtleties, qualifications, questions left on the cutting room floor for my fellow participants?

I must say that I bristled a bit at the premise of the question itself. In every version of my contribution to the debate I included this first sentence: "There has never been a monolithic geek culture and geeks have never exhibited a singular profile, and so one important part of what happens as geek-identification becomes more 'mainstream' is that its diversity becomes more visible." My piece went several rounds with my firm but friendly editor, and over and over that opening sentence was excised -- and over and over I kept replacing it. It did not appear in the final version, by which time I more or less gave up. I decided to take the retention of my Vulcan quotation and the derisive gesture at "techbros" as hard won personal victories and move on. Clearly, my editor thought this initial observation about the irreducibility of geekdom to any one fetishized symptom or signifier seemed redundant in an essay treating geek enthusiasms as a motor of diversification more generally (which is the emphasis of the essaylet as it stands, I'd say).

I still do wish that initial frame for the essaylet remained. For me, the essence of geekery is about enthusiasm, it is an appreciation of appreciation. Wil Wheaten famously captured the spirit of what I am talking about in a blog post and video that was deliriously circulated a few years back -- I assume its popularity signifies that it articulated unusually well something many geeks felt about themselves already -- saying of geek gatherings that in them one is "surrounded by people who love the same things you love, the way you love them. But... also... by people who love things you don’t even know about, but you love your respective things in the same way, so you get to love your thing enthusiastically, completely, unironically, without fear of judgement." Geekery, then, is a celebration of the pleasures and knowledges that uniquely derive from close, sustained attention to subjects. And geekery is indifferent to whether or not the subjects being attended to are conventionally appreciated or not, hence it becomes a site of diversity the "mainstreaming" or ramification of which might facilitate diversity more generally. That is my essaylet's wee conceit, such as it is.

One of the few contributions that seemed to me to be on that very geeky wavelength was Zeynep Tufekci's essay, which insisted that joy is at the heart of geekery, non-judgmental joy, creativity, expressivity, experimentation, and the rough-and-tumble of making stuff. I was less pleased with the way her piece seemed to be assimilating this making to what I regard as the mostly self-congratulatory self-promotional BS of an entrepreneurial tech-sector start-up culture, and the rather libertechbrotarian flavor-of-the-month "maker culture" and "Maker Faires" less about making than about being on the make, it seems to me, less about DIY than about privileged disavowals of interdependence, self-declared corporate-sponsored doers doing their dreary disrupting. A few years ago perhaps her go-to Maker vocabulary would have buzzed on about "Smart" blah-de-blah, a few years before that "Bright" this-n-that, a few years before that "Extreme," before that "Virtual," and so on (I'm sure I've missed a meme here or there, but to know one of them is really to know them all). I cannot say that I regard the for-profit tech-sector as a site of conspicuous creativity and ingenuity so much as a vast skim-scam operation repackaging stale useless crap to bamboozle rubes impressed by PowerPoint presentations and buzzy ad-copy, or appropriating the ideas and sweat of quiet coders collaborating amongst themselves without much fanfare and, usually, without much reward. Of course, those obscure coders are almost certainly geeks and they are indeed making stuff, but for me a teenage girl using a toothpick to paint a panel on the surface of a model of Kubrick's spacecraft Discovery or a fifty year old sowing the bodice of an Arwen Evenstar gown for his outfit the last night of a science fiction convention are more illustratively enthusiastic makers invigorating geekery with its and our abiding joy -- even though nobody on hand expects to cash out that creativity in some big score.

Zaheer Ali penned what is probably my favorite of all the contributions, precisely because he exposed the diversity and dynamism of geekdom always-already against the grain of what seemed to me otherwise to be a series of rather sadly reductive mis-identifications of geekery with white techbros dreaming their dumb deadly VC dreams in the SillyCon Valley. Not only did Ali remind the Times readership of the thriving afro-futural musical and literary lineages (no Samuel Delaney or Janelle Monae tho!) which are the site of so much of the aliveness of my own life-long geekery -- not least because for me the afro-futural has also been the indispensable site of so much vital subversive queergeekery -- but he also pointed to Melissa Harris Perry and her #nerdland. It isn't only because I'm such a nerdland fan that I was happy to see Ali insist on the example, but also because it again went against the reductive grain of so many of the contributions otherwise: Harris-Perry's excellent show is such a geek-fest because it is an academic space filled with earnest activism -- folks who have been shaped by what Foucault described as the "grey, meticulous and patiently documentary" work of research and who retain the fierce pleasure of discovery and relevance of lives devoted to these intense attentions. 

When, to the contrary, Judith Donath defines geekdom in her piece through its "affinity to math and science" I wonder if all the science fiction geek shippers who don't know much science beyond what they learned from their Cosmos blu-rays and all the literary historian geeks smelling of a day in the archives but who flunked math are utterly invisible to her in all their geek glory?  Donath writes that "Geeky fascination with what is undiscovered drives scientific curiosity and invention, but unmoored from the desire to learn and create, it's simply consumerism." I actually do not agree that all cultural reception and appropriation is "simply consumerism." But even so, her larger point that "obsessive video game playing" will not help solve "climate change, emerging diseases, vast inequality" is certainly true. But why exactly would one expect otherwise? I am not sure that playing video games is enough to make one a geek, any more than watching movies does, and I would like to hear much more about the work that is getting done in Donath's attribution of "obsessiveness" to such gamers, but neither can I accept Donath's identification of geekery with the rational, scientific thought that is indispensable (together with free and accountable democratic governance in the service of general welfare) to the solution of such problems. I think rationality and science are both much bigger and much older than geekery, and that geek enthusiasms are quite valuable in human lives even when they do not contribute to the also indispensably valuable problem-solving work of science, engineering, public investment and harm-reduction policy-making. So, too, reactionary unsustainable consumerism is obviously a bigger problem than is its capacity to colonize the geek imagination -- it isn't the fault of geeks that under capitalism all that is solid melts into air. As I tried to insinuate at least in my piece geekery could use a bit more criticism along with its enthusiasm as an intellectual mode, but too strict an identification of geekdom with progressive science and policy or with reactionary consumerism seems to me to lose track of what geekdom actually is.

Just to be clear, it's not that I think geekery lacks the "affinity to math and science" Donath mentions and which so many geeks so conspicuously exhibit, any more than I deny the connection of geekery to "coding" that Kimberley Bryant and William Powers emphasize in their respective pieces. I simply want to refuse any reduction of geekdom to math nerds or software coders or what have you, whether the reduction is made in a spirit of sympathy or hostility to those geeks who happen to be math nerds or software coders. Again, as I said in my excised opening framing, "There has never been a monolithic geek culture and geeks have never exhibited a singular profile," and this really matters to me. To say that geeks are becoming mainstream because so many people use the term "app" in everyday conversation seems to me as obfuscatory as imagining that geeks became mainstream when folks started to talk about going to "the talkies." I happen to think the present ubiquity of handhelds no more indicates a rise in "tech savvyness" than did the ubiquity of office typewriters in the seventies. Am I really supposed to think people stumbling around in the street staring at images of plates of food their friends have eaten immerses me in a more geeky world in some way? Why is that a world more geeky than one in which people are adjusting the dials of their radios or adjusting the rabbit ears on their tee vees or dipping their quills into inkwells? To put the point more urgently still, why on earth would the New York Times treat the ratings of the relentlessly predicable, unwatchably execrable "Big Bang Theory" as relevant to the subject at hand in any deep sense? Network execs assimilating social change into nonthreatening nonrepresentative cheez whiz isn't exactly anything new or interesting -- in fact it would take a whole hell of a lot of culture studies geeks in an academic conference to convince me there was anything more interesting to say about the "Big Bang Theory" than about "Full House" and "Two And A Half Men" (the proper generic assignment for that bleak business).

When I submitted my contribution for its first editorial bloodletting, I received the rather exasperated suggestion that perhaps I might want to jettison the piece and write instead about why I am a Luddite, refusing to live on the terms of this emerging geek mainstream. I had the sinking suspicion at that point that I had been invited to participate in this forum because of my contrarian anti-futurological critiques. While it is true that the techno-transcendental futurist discourses and formations I write about are indeed geek subcultures, they are far from representative of geekdom in my experience of it, and certainly the farthest thing from definitive to it. I critique futurological pseudo-science as a champion of consensus science, I critique futurological corporate-militarism as a champion of accountable evidentiary harm-reduction policy, I critique parochial plutocratic market futures as a champion of free futures, I critique futurist consumer fandoms as a fan myself of literary sf: inother words, my critiques are those of a lifelong queergeek defending a capacious geekdom on which I have depended for my flourishing, and sometimes for my sanity, all my life.

Contra Fredrik deBoer I believe both that geek enthusiasms are still happening at the margins, and that geek enthusiasms are still marginalizing folks. I don't agree that venture capitalists and sexist gamers are representative of geekery (although I am far from denying and I am full of decrying their terrible geek ways). Certainly I would never pretend that geekdom is somehow insulated from the white racist patriarchal extractive industrial corporate-militarist American society which incubates and marinates geekdom -- my piece concludes with observations and warnings very much to the contrary. But, again, I think that if one wants to get to the heart of geekdom, the better to understand the changes it might enable as it ramifies through digital networked media formations, it is important to get at actually representative and symptomatic figures. I don't deny that Bill Gates exhibits geek traits, but I do deny that there is anything characteristically geeky about the traits in Gates that make him rich, powerful, and famous in America.

Titanic "Geeks Rule" archetypes like Gates, Jobs, Wozniak attended or hung out in geek communities connected to great public universities. Many of their marketable notions were cribbed from the knowledge and efforts of geek researchers and geek enthusiasts who have vanished from history. The reframing of these figures as randroidal sooper-genius fountainheads of entrepreneurial innovation and beneficience disavowing their utter dependence on climates of intellectual discovery (and usually scads of military investment) is a plutocratic commonplace. These hushed up circumstances attending the birth of our ruling tech enterprises (at least Berners-Lee doesn't disavow the gestation of the Web itself in CERN) in such skim-scam operations is re-enacted endlessly in the life of such enterprises, as the ideas and wage-labor of cohorts of coders under contract or scooped up from the bubbling crap cauldron of the start-up lottery, arrive in their full flower in the ritual spectacles of hyper-individualized celebrity CEOs bringing out new (usually just repackaged) gewgaws gobbled up by technoscientifically illiterate pop-tech journalists who confuse gossip and informercial pieties for substance. All along this terrorizing trajectory from creative geek collaboration to eventual plutocratic profitability there are endless occasions for folks with ever more tenuous connections to actual efforts and ideas either to take credit or otherwise sell out their fellows in the hope of some piece of pie down the road. If I may say so, there is nothing particularly geeky about this all too conventionally American ugliness. I am the first to critique the deceptions of plutocratic entreprenurial capitalism and the devastations of soulless unsustainable consumerism -- but I simply think it is a mistake to reduce geekdom to either of these phenomena or to treat geekdom as a particularly illuminating window on their deadly play in the world.

I'll conclude with a word on the Luddites. I do not know what is worse from my perspective, that I was expected by the Times to be a Luddite and not a geek, or that the Times would seem to accept the facile characterization of the Luddites as "anti-technology" in a sense opposed to a no less facile characterization of "pro-technology" geeks. As I never tire of saying, there is no such thing as technology-in-general about which it makes any kind of sense to be either loosely "pro" or "con." The constellation of tools and techniques contains too many differences that make a difference for one to assume a sympathetic or antipathetic vantage on the whole, and it will be the assumptions and aspirations in the service of which these tools and techniques will be put that yield our sensible judgments of right and wrong in any case. To speak, as too many of the contributors to the forum did I am afraid, of "technology" becoming more prevalent, guiding, approved of in society in some general way in connection to the mainstreaming of geekery seems to me to be an utterly confused and confusing way of thinking about the technoscientific vicissitudes at hand. All tools and all techniques are texts: and the literary imagination has quite as much to say about their play as does the engineering imagination. All culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are culture: and hence all individuals and all cultures are exactly as "prostheticized" as every other. To press the point, the Luddites were champions of certain tools just as they were critics of others, the Luddites were masters of certain techniques just as they were suspicious of others. Like those skeptics and contrarians who tend to get called "Luddites" today because they hesitate to be steamrolled into panglossian celebrations of anti-democratic technocratic and algorithmic governance or of hucksters peddling techno-utopian memes and kremes, it is important to grasp that Ray Kurzweil is no more cyborgic in Haraway's sense than is John Zerzan. Given their enthusiasm about their treasured tools and techniques it seems to me frankly far more in point to say that Luddites ARE Geeks, that luddic resistance and play is another facet of geek multiculture rather than its comic-book antagonist. 

I think Geeks are less inclined to rule at all than to drool over their personal perfections. I know that I am. As I said in the conclusion of my piece, the crucial final point of which was another editorial casualty, I'm sorry to say: "Perhaps such a mainstream embrace of marginal enthusiasms can help America overcome the defensive anti-intellectual bearings of its ruling masculine culture. But clashes over sexist representations in science fiction, exposures of sexist assumptions and practices in science education and tech-sector hiring, as well as the sexist antics of the 'techbros' of venture capitalism demand that we treat such promises of change in a much more critical way than with the usual geek enthusiasm." That is to say, geekery remains for me an intellectualism fueled by diverse and dynamic enthusiasms for enthusiasms, but the democratizing promise of such geekery would require a criticality that I would not yet identify with geekery as much as I would like to. Discussions such as the forum itself might go some distance to introduce this indispensable dimension of criticism -- but I worry that too many of these critics reduced geekery to certain of its superficial symptoms or mis-identified it with larger social struggles draining geekery of its specificity. As I said before, it's not an easy thing to say much of substance in three hundred words on short notice with editorial shears clipping away, so I doubt any of this reflects badly on my fellow participants, most of whom said more interesting things I managed to do in the time and space on offer when it comes to it.

Living Listically

tr;dl: too real, didn't live

The Yes That Is The No

Behind the eyes of every positive person cold opportunism, every confident boast shrieking panic, every insistent optimist cruelest dark.

Graduate Seminar on the Anti-Politics of Design

Here are the first few weeks of the syllabus for my graduate seminar at the San Francisco Art Institute, Designs On Us. The course began as an idea for a book that never went anywhere -- for whatever reason, I think elaborating arguments through course trajectories suits me more than doing so in longform books. Anyway, the syllabus goes on from here, but the textual assignments change quite a bit as the weeks go on, so there is no point posting the rest of it here and now. If you are interested, click the link to the course blog and you can read the assignments as they arrive. The assignments usually arrive at their final form no later than the Friday before the following session.  

CS-500H-01 Designs On Us: The Politics and Anti-Politics of Design

Course Blog: http://designsonus.blogspot.com/
Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edu; ndaleca@gmail.com

Attendance/Participation, 10%; Precis, 10%; Designer Presentation, 10%; 10+ Comments, 10%; Symposium Presentation, 10%; Final Paper, 50%

The proposal that is the point of departure for our course is that design discourse is a site where at once politics is done and politics is disavowed. Design as a site of "designation" invokes the gesture of naming as mastery, of reduction as revelation, of problems as provocations to instrumental technique and not stakeholder struggle, a mentalité with its own paradoxical temporality, publicity, linearity, cognition. Design as a site of the "designer label" is an indulgence in fetishism, of the commodity-form, of an auratic posture, of a psychic compensation of lack and its threat. To elaborate and pressure these propositions, we will spend quite a bit of time in the critique of three design discourses in particular: one, Green design which would accomplish sustainability without history; two, social/p2p software design which would accomplish democracy without participation; and three, eugenic design which would accomplish life-enhancement without lifeway diversity. In your individual presentations I hope we will ramify our attentions to other design sites: comparative constitutions, fashion design, food styling, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, landscape design, "life coaching," and who knows what else?

Week One | August 27 -- Introductions

Added, for those who mentioned during the opening lecture that they might like a little more background on the fetishism of the Designer Label:

Marx on The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof from Capital
Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility
Naomi Klein, Taking On the Brand Bullies from No Logo

Week Two | September 3 -- Biomimicry, Cradle to Cradle, Natural Capitalism

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology
Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels
Janine Benyus, Echoing Nature
Biomimicry Institute, Velcro
William McDonough & Michael Braungart The NEXT Industrial Revolution
Cradle to Cradle -- Principles
Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins, Paul Hawken, A Roadmap for Natural Capitalism
OpenPolitics Critiques of Paul Hawken and Natural Capitalism

Week Three | September 10 -- Permaculture and Viridian Design

Bruce Sterling, When Blobjects Rule the Earth
Bruce Sterling, Manifesto of January 3, 2000
Viridian Design Principles
Bruce Sterling, Last Viridian Note
Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, A 50-Year Farm Bill
The Land Institute: (a) Issues (b) Solutions (c) Science
Navdanya: About Us
GEN: Global Eco-Village Network: Definitions
Permaculture Design Principles, Online Interactive Presentation