Thinking Big in the Robot Cult

More "Mitchell" from the Moot:

I understood your thinking to be: some things are possible and desirable; other things just aren't possible; transhumanism wants the impossible, such as physical immortality, superintelligence, mind uploading, and nanotechnological abundance. That is a maximalist agenda for transhumanism. There's no denying that the extremes get the attention, both inside and outside the subculture.

What you are describing as "minimalism versus maximalism" looks to me more like research versus wish-fulfillment fantasizing, sanity versus incoherence, science versus religion. Robot Cultists like to frame their confusions of science fiction with science fact as a kind of "daring" on their part, they like to fancy themselves visionaries or what seems more like jocks of science by handwaving about superintellinge, superlongevity, and superabundance rather than consensus science. I do not agree. I think they are just engaging in a kind of advertising and promotional discourse unconnected with actual research, advertising in a hyperbolic mode that has many of the hallmarks of outright fraud.

I also think techno-transcendentalizing futurologies like transhumanism indulge in something that looks quite a bit like evangelical religiosity in its least pleasant most dangerous crusading and promotional modes. Although I am not at all a religious person myself, I don't disdain religious expression in others any more than I do aesthetic expression in others (there are lots of paths to meaningful existence). But I do insist we all take great care to discern and distinguish and criticize religion (or for that matter aesthetics) whenever it seeks to colonize, distort, or be mistaken for science or proper politics. That is as true for Pentecostals or Muslims or Mormons as it is for Robot Cultists, in my view. When an sf fandom or PR firm (every futurist is essentially a salesman) confuses itself for a policy think-tank or social movement, enormous mischief ensues.

Although I do indeed think immortality and nanoabundance and mind uploading are practically impossible, this is not -- as it is usually framed by Robot Cultists -- a matter of my quibbling with them about developmental timescales or lacking their "can-do" spirit or ability to "think big." I don't confuse lies with optimism or incoherence with bigness like futurologists characteristically do.

More to the point: I think "mind uploading" involves deep confusions about what intelligence (which is embodied and social) means, what personal lifespan (which is also embodied, social and inherently, indispensably vulnerable) means, or what it really means to aspire to post-political superabundance in terms of lived human freedom (which depends in its substance on plurality and contestation). I don't think transhumanists want "more" -- I think transhumanists literally don't know what the hell they are talking about, and that when they talk they are deranging public discourse in a way the public is disastrously susceptible to in a time of disruptive technoscientific change and global corporate-militarist developmental precarization.

I frankly don't think transhumanists are ultimately saying anything that any hungry bored lonely infant in a poopy diaper isn't already squealing about in his crib. You just trump up your infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies in the trappings of science fiction iconography and appeal to a slightly more hyperbolic id than do the usual run of the mill consumer-capitalist sports car and boner pill ads. That you people seem to think this represents a philosophical worldview or cutting edge science policy is nothing short of flabbergasting in my view.

More Mitchell on White Guys in Robot Cults and Why Wanting Not to Die and Wanting to Be Superrich in "The Future" Is Somehow a Worldview

"Mitchell" soldiers on Robotically and Cultically in the Moot:

Your thesis, remember, is that transhumanism is a sort of folk religion for white guys, and so all I have to do is point out that you don't have to be white or male or in the West to be into this stuff.

Well, no, I pointed out that you Robot Cultists ARE and ALWAYS HAVE BEEN overabundantly white guys.

Are you denying the truth of that observation? Are you denying that observation has any significance at all in a world in which white guys are a minority of people alive, a minority of people who will continue to share the world tomorrow being shaped today, peer-to-peer, a minority of people whose lives are impacted by technoscienfic change, a minority of people who are scientifically literate and politically aware?

If, as you say, the loose set of infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies of which your techno-transcendentalizing religious faith essentially consists could or should in fact appeal to other than white guys, then doesn't the fact that they DO NOT seem in the main in the actual world ever to appeal to other than white guys constitute more of a problem for you rather than the solution to the problem at hand?

I guess there is a certain consistency here, though, in confusing an imagined logical possibility of diversity with the actual reality of diversity, confusing fairly commonplace human wish-fulfillment fantasies of personal power with a formal philosophy, confusing science fiction with actual science.

Maybe you're just a very silly, confused person, after all?

If, by the way, you think there is an actual definition of this "transhumanism" that you seem to advocate and expect to sweep the world that does not amount to "infantile wish fulfillment fantasies of immortality and personal power enabled through confusions of science fiction with science fact" I am eager to hear it on your own terms.

You keep promising to tell me what "transhumanism" essentially and uniquely is, but so far you keep agreeing with me that it often is just a kind of religious faith "based on" wanting to live a really long time, maybe even forever, and loll around in abundance, all of which will be delivered by "technology" in a construal that seems broad to the point of vacuity and through some mechanism that remains largely unspecified.

As I have warned you many times before, you will discover that if you strive in an honest way to provide specificity about either what this "technology" actually is supposed to consist of or what mechanism will enable this "technology" to deliver its supposedly transcendentalizing wish-fulfilling goods you will surely discover either (one) that you are saying very bland sorts of things nobody needs "transhumanism" to say, or (two) you are saying batshit crazy things that only "transhumanists" say.

When you finally grasp this, then the Robot Cult spell will be broken and you will be free to be a geek who enjoys reading science fiction on its own terms and advocating sensible consensus science policy on its different terms as a grown up person. If you also happen to be a democratically minded person of the left you might even do some good in the world once you leave your Robot Cult behind, championing funding for science education and research and the application of consensus science in relevant domains of public policy (like climate change legislation, urban planning, public healthcare provision, sex education, and so on).

You don't have to thank me, just become a more sensible person and do some good in the world.

White Guys Forever!

I went over to the stealth-Robot Cult transhumanist "techno-ethics" outfit IEET website to see what silliness might be preoccupying them these days (to make fun of them for it, of course), but I was stopped short by the portraits that accompany each of the articles they are offering up at the moment...

Every single one was a white guy.

Look: I'm a white guy... I kiss a white guy every night before I go to sleep... I take philosophy seriously which usually means reading white guys more or less endlessly... I respect and honor my many wonderful white guy students... I don't have anything against white guys as, you know, a cohort, by any means.

But white guys are a minority in the world. White guys are a minority of the people with useful and interesting and intelligent things to say on every existing topic. White guys are not the world. White guys are not The Voice of any actually-possible "future."

If you are in a group or a forum or a subculture or a movement of any size that is radically unrepresentative of the world of which it is otherwise a part, especially if this unrepresentativeness is a long-ongoing phenomenon, this is telling you that there is something probably very wrong going on with that group or forum or subculture or movement.

If you see nothing but white guys in your Tea-Party event or your Ayn Rand fan club or your transhumanist meet-and-greet, you should ask yourself what the hell you have gotten yourself into exactly. Of course, if you find yourself hob-nobbing among Teabaggers, Randroids, or Robot Cultists in the first place, I suppose it probably already indicates that there is something fairly faulty going on in those critical faculties of yours anyway, come to think of it.

Still.

Varieties of Futurological Discourse

There are continuities but also important differences between mainstream corporate-militarist futurological discourses (among them neoliberal developmental discourses), and what I call superlative futurological discourses (among them the beliefs of members of various Robot Cults). So, too, obviously, there are both continuities and differences among mainstream futurological discourses (the ones that sell themselves as "Green," the ones that sell themselves as "Third Way" politics, the ones that cater to Defense Departments, for instance) and among superlative futurological discourses (the stealth-eugenicists, the Kurzweilians, the Drexlerians, the various oddball techno-immortalizing sects, for instance). I think there is something ridiculous to be disdained in pretty much every going futurological discourse, sometimes flabbergastingly but also sometimes only faintly so, and I also think there is something perniciously anti-democratizing to be critiqued in pretty much every futurological discourse, sometimes outright reactionary but also sometimes just common-or-garden variety conservative.

I personally disapprove of all futurology (and I do so especially because I am a big queergeek and sf-fan myself and I am a strong champion of consensus science, and of the work of progressive technodevelopmental social struggles in which all the stakeholders to technoscientific change have a real say in the distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of that change, and of secular democratic civilization and consensual cultural-prosthetic self-determination more generally), but that doesn't mean I don't recognize or take seriously the many differences that make a difference among the varieties of futurological discourse presently perniciously in play and on offer.

I do like to make fun of the Robot Cultists and superlative futurologists in the various extropian, transhumanist, singularitarian, cybernetic totalist, techno-immortalist, nano-cornucopiast sects here on Amor Mundi pretty regularly, of course. And I also do think it is quite important to point out that these would-be techno-transcendentalizing wish-fulfillment fantasists are indulging in a discourse that conduces in my view to profoundly reactionary and anti-democratizing political ends (a point no less true in my view just because some of the contributors to these tendentially-authoritarian discourses earnestly fancy themselves politically moderate or even left-wing).

But I think it is also important to emphasize that not all futurology is superlative in the specific sense I attribute to the members of the various organizations in the Robot Cult archipelago.

I do indeed think that all futurology -- both the superlative sects of futurology and also the more "mainstream" forms that suffuse corporate and Defense Department think-tanks -- are profoundly anti-democratizing and serve incumbent interests. That is to say -- however ironic it may seem to say this of folks who declare their focus to be "The Future" -- all varieties of futurology conduce in the main to conservative politics, and often to the most reactionary and authoritarian extremes of conservatism in fact. Hence, my Futurological Brickbat: "To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms."

Mainstream Futurology seems to me in many respects the quintessential discourse of neoliberal developmentalism. In its hyperbole and endless rebranding of incumbency as "progress" it is close kin to the advertising and promotional discourse that drives mass-mediated corporate-capitalism. In the immaterialism of its digital utopianism it is close kin to the logo-ization and disdain for production of the suave fraud of the Friedman Flat Earth Society as well as to the financial fraudsters who sold slim hopes as firm assets for short-term gains rebranded as a "Long Boom." In the excited handwaving of its oh-so-serious "geo-engineering" proposals it is close kin to the corporate greenwashing that indulges the worst kind of climate-science denialism, the kind that actually admits to the reality and scale of the environmental problems and yet responds to these science facts with science fictions filled with snappy neologisms and vapid can-do ego-stroking and digital animations of sooper-gizmos all delivered for cash to audiences filled with the very folks earning the lion's share of the short-term profits of extractive-industrialism at the cost of the destruction of the world.

The varieties of superlative futurology to which I devoted so much of my earlier critical attention (and to which I still direct no small amount of ridicule) represent a kind of reductio of the hyperbole and immaterialism of mainstream corporate-militarist futurology. Indeed, in many instances they make an outright religion of futurological tropes and topoi: the advertising hyperbole and disdain of market friction and practical livelihoods of the neoliberals actually become promises of the techno-transcendence of stakeholder politics, embodied intelligence and mortality, "limits" of any kind. And as such a reductio of mainstream corporate-militarist futurology the Robot Cultists can provide a clarifying extremity, exposing inter-connections and assumptions and aspirations entailed but rarely examined in discussions of mainstream futurology and corporate-military developmentalist ideologies.

I think it is clarifying to discern the connections between the mainstream futurology of the neoliberal Boomers and "Reagan Democrats" and their obsessions with success seminars and boner-pills and face-lifts as well as their eager embrace of the serial criminal idiocies of SAP-to-NAFTA globalization bubbles, the 90s tech bubble, the Bush war-economy bubble, the housing bubble, and so on, to the even more extreme immaterialism one discerns in the superlative futurology of the Robot Cultists in their pining after the digitization and immortalization of their "meat selves" or for a circumvention of actual political problems of poverty or plurality in a finite world via paradisical immersive virtual realities or post-scarcity nanotechnologies or a singularitarian Robot God who will end material history. While there are important differences in the terms of the critique demanded of these varieties of mainstream and superlative futurology, it is also revealing to grasp the continuities between them, so long as one does not mistake continuities for outright identities.

Animal Rites, Vegetarian Criticism, Brutal Theory

Scratch a Vegetarian, Find a Cyborg.

Animal Rites: Vegetarian Criticism, Vegetarian Selves, posted March 7, 2006, but adapted from a paper written in 1997 variations of which were also delivered in a couple of conference settings.

Saving My Bacon, August 14, 2005

Animal "Uplift", February 28, 2010

"The Future" on the Planet of the Apes, June 31, 2011

Evadeus Corpus: Absenting the Referent in the Meat-Industrial Complex, March 01, 2012

Meat Brain Futurology: One More Time On the "In-Vitro Meat" Merry Go Wrong, March 7, 2012

Nourishing Nothingness: Futurists Are Getting Virtually Serious About Food Politics, January 12, 2015

Futurological Caucasian Cock on Parade

Awfully white, IEET guys. Not totally, but quite shockingly, flabbergastingly, overabundantly, weirdly white and male and Anglo-European. Just so you know, the present doesn't look like you. And neither does any future that makes any kind of sense. Not that one reads transhumanists looking for sense.

Animal "Uplift"

In an essay entitled Moral Universalism Vs. Relativism transhumanist James Hughes refers to a discussion in which we had both been involved a few years ago:

The transhumanist debate over animal “uplift” -- a term coined and given narrative flesh by new IEET fellow David Brin -- has indirectly addressed this conundrum. (The discussion was carried out for instance on the technoliberation list in 2006.) In Citizen Cyborg, I argued that great apes had cognitive and emotional capacities sufficiently close to human that they should enjoy basic human rights, the position argued by the Great Ape Project. But apes are cognitively and therefore morally like human children in that they cannot meaningfully be asked for or provide consent to decisions that affect them. As with children, I argue, we have an obligation to provide apes the means to reach cognitive maturity, through pharmacological, genetic, and nanotechnological cognitive enhancement, so that they can exercise full self-determination.

In response, critics such as Dale Carrico asserted that the project was a form of eugenics and cultural imperialism, forcing a human model of the Good on other species. Whether humans have a right to insist on universal respect for human rights or not, he claimed moral universalism does not extend across species boundaries. Great apes should not be forced to adopt human cognition. George Dvorsky and I, following Peter Singer, argued that species is morally irrelevant.

Permit me a few quick comments.

One:

I enjoyed David Brin's Uplift novels when I read them, but I think he and we should be very leery of the way his punchy little sf conceit has been taken up by a handful of futurologists here and turned into a "term" around which a "debate" now presumably turns.

Let's be very clear about this. There is no "policy debate" on nonhuman animal "Uplift," and the coinage of a term for such a non-existing procedure prior to its arrival constitutes nothing in the way of nudging the procedure into existence or usefully delineating the terms in which the procedure would no doubt be an occasion for real debate should something like it ever actually arrive on the scene or look the least bit actually likely to do so.

Like comparable futurological "coinages" confused with "accomplishments" -- coinages like "nanotechnology" and "cosmeceuticals," which futurologists seem to treat like rabbit-holes to Wonderland -- one can expect that if the term "uplift" does not die on the vine altogether it will achieve its principal life in an advertising campaign sexing up some candy-colored destined-for-landfill handheld electronic device or describing some non-innovative but nonetheless "revolutionary" property of a polyester blend trouser or dishwashing liquid.

Futurological discourses, as with the oft closely connected pseudo disciplines of hyphenated ethics (neuro-ethics, nano-ethics, robo-ethics, and so on), are now and always have been primarily marketing and PR discourses, barking salesmen hyping crap products while fancying themselves philosophers or policy-wonks.

Two:

I would imagine that David Brin is far too knowledgeable about the history of science fiction to labor under the misconception that his are the only or the earliest works in which nonhuman animals are tinkered with so as to converse in a more or less human animal fashion in company with human protagonists in a speculative tale.

It is quite wrong to imply, then, as Hughes seems to me to do, that Brin is the only one who has "given flesh" to this recurring science fictional conceit. And, more to the point, it is really quite flabbergastingly weird, though perfectly typical for futurologists, that the phrase a transhumanist like Hughes would use to make this attribution is "given flesh" in the first place -- inasmuch as nonhuman animal "uplift" has no actually existing fleshly incarnation at all on earth.

As usual, would-be wonder-boy futurologists have lost track of the distinction between science fiction and science, and proceed from this confusion to fancy themselves serious intellectuals in a serious policy-making "think-tank" delineating logical entailments and gaming out various scenarios premised on treatment of the non-real-as-if-it-were-real and as if this pet-nonreality is of urgent moment to our contemplation of the real, in the manner of an hypothesis, a prediction, an allegory, a thought-experiment, or some confused jumble of these.

Such discussions can also take the form of a fanboy-fangrrl circle-jerk, but I didn't include that in the preceding list of confusions simply because I approve of that sort of thing. And, indeed, so long as one doesn't confuse the pleasures of fandom subcultures and sf literary salons with the efforts of critical thought or policy deliberation -- as the Robot Cultists all inevitably and incessantly do -- you can count me among the enthusiasts of such circle jerks, big ol' queergeek that I am. Of course, nobody has to join a Robot Cult or indulge in the fantasy that geekdom is a modality of wonkdom to enjoy the pleasures of sf blueskying of fanwanking.

Three:

Hughes writes that I have "asserted that the project was a form of eugenics and cultural imperialism." The first thing I would want to be very clear about is that there is no such project in existence and so I don't think it IS anything at all, strictly speaking. The only actually-existing Project to which Hughes' essay refers here is The Great Ape Project, and I happen to so approve of the Great Ape Project that readers of Amor Mundi will find a link to it in my blogroll, indeed will find that it is something to which I have drawn the attention of my students in many courses that touch on questions of nonhuman animal rights or environmental justice. That should come as no surprise to anybody who knows that I have been an ethical vegetarian for nearly twenty years, have written and taught extensively on animal rights questions, and so on. I wouldn't want anybody mistakenly to think I disdain the actually-existing and actually-important work of the Great Ape Project as a "form of eugenics and cultural imperialism" just because a confused transhumanist fancies talking about an idea in a science fiction novel somehow constitutes involvement in a "project" of some kind.

Apart from the foregoing, however, I will cheerfully concede that I do indeed assert that were it to become technically feasible to do so -- as, mind you, it is not now, nor even remotely relevantly so to any actually earthly concern whatsoever -- nonetheless "apes should not be forced to adopt human cognition," very much as Hughes reports. Hughes says that I consider this a matter of "forcing a human model of the Good on other species." Since in the very same paragraph Hughes declares "species is morally irrelevant" to the question of "universal respect for… rights… [and] moral universalism" and seems to oppose my assertion that "apes should not be forced to adopt human cognition" (should such a thing be possible, as it palpably is not), well, I really must say that it seems to me that Hughes is pretty much admitting that he does indeed straightforwardly advocate "forcing a human model of the Good on other species." I don't see how this could be a controversial attribution on my part to Hughes, it seems quite literally to be his claim.

Four:

I personally think it is immoral to recognize the suffering of nonhuman animals as suffering that does not matter simply by virtue of making a foundational distinction between human and nonhuman animals. Among the effects of this foundational distinction in my view is that the figure of a being that is apprehended as the being whose suffering is real but whose suffering does not matter subsequently attaches to categories of humans as well via what I describe as "bestializing discourses" in ways that facilitate their mistreatment and exploitation.

But I do think it is quite as wrongheaded to fancy that in eliminating this false foundational distinction between human and nonhuman animals one should therefore treat all the endlessly many differences that make a difference among the varieties of animals, human or nonhuman, fish, fowl, mammal, insect, virus, clam as matters of indifference, morally or otherwise.

My own vegetarianism is ethical, but the moral standing I respect in the cow I would not consume for a questionable "taste" in meat does not confuse me as to the need to extend to that cow a right to the ballot box. I would not eat a horse because I respect it too much, but I hardly would seek to send a mountain lion to trial for murder because she does not share my morals on that question.

I do indeed think that a profoundly and perniciously eugenic outlook drives the curious thought experiments of the transhumanists who would seek to impose anthropocentric cognitive homogeneity on all conscious beings in the name of "universal rights." Quite apart from the foolishness of treating all of these fanciful conceits as matters of urgent policy in the first place, it seems to me quite obscene to assume as a position of ethical concern for nonhuman animals that nonhuman animals in their differences from human ones are inferior, suffering, exploited, unrespectable beings. That is to say, it is precisely in refusing to respect nonhuman animals in their differences that Hughes seems to want to claim his is the higher form of respect for them. And I find such a proposition -- if indeed I am characterizing him aright -- perverse in the extreme.

Hughes would seem to respect difference so much that he thinks almost any difference can and should be crowbarred into conformity with the human optimality he happens to incarnate himself. How very respectful! What a stunning moral vision!

Five:

Notice that in taking up Brin's fictional term "uplift" simply to describe any prosthetic/technical intervention -- however hypothetical or utterly fanciful -- through which a nonhuman mode of cognition might be policed into conformity with a legibly human mode, Hughes and like-minded transhumanists explicitly refuse any of a number of more neutral characterizations of such an imagined change and affirm thereby that any change that is a change in the direction of what they construe as a human norm is a change "upward," a change for the better.

I do not happen myself to assume in advance that any such imaginable change would inevitably be a change for the worst, forcibly imposed, by the way, and so I would not advocate any kind of pre-emptive prohibition of any such interventions should something like them eventually come to be possible, who knows when who knows how who knows what. The devil, as well as the angels, would no doubt be in the details, as is usually the case.

And it is of course all these crucial details -- all the situational costs, risks, benefits, stakeholders, technical specifications -- that are unavailable to us here and now. This is one of the reasons why I believe all such futurological handwaving is almost inevitably perniciously obfuscatory, even when technodevelopmental vicissitudes happen to churn up some gizmo that might seem to have been anticipated in some highly generic way by futurologists. Devices and techniques, when they do appear on the scene, yield their impacts and significances in the actual situations in which they appear. Futurological anticipation merely freights such arrivals with the hyperbolic hopes and fears of an earlier moment long past, deranging sense in the name of foresight and usually in the service of incumbency or, worse, a quick buck.

Six:

But the point I want to emphasize here, by way of conclusion, is that Hughes' "transhumanist" preference for the term "Uplift" to designate what he imagines, and pines for, as an eventual technical imposition of anthro-conformist cognition on the actually-existing cognitive variety of incarnated consciousness among earthly species looks to me to reveal a eugenicist outlook as plain and palpable as one could ask for.

It is interesting to note that Hughes has also expressed (and he is far from alone among transhumanists in so doing) his highly confident assessment that certain neuro-atypical states designated as "autistic" are sub-optimal. He has said that prescribing ritalin to kids amounts to "cognitive enhancement" (in case you are wondering, I agree that some parents are right to want their kids to be prescribed ritalin, but that other parents are just as right to resist such prescriptions even against the strong advice of authorities). He has also said that a non-hearing parent's desire for a non-hearing child amounts to a kind of child abuse. All this strongly suggests to me that it is not just into human conformity but into conformity with an even more crabbed and confined conception of the "properly human" on his own highly parochial terms that Hughes might want to "emancipate" earthly incarnated cognitive diversity from its manifold "sub-optimalities."

This terminological exposure of a eugenicist outlook seems to me only a little more obvious in the term "Uplift" than the same exposure of scarcely stealthed eugenicism connected to the general tendency among far more transhumanist-identified futurologists to use the word "enhancement" to describe any number of genetic, cognitive, and prosthetic interventions they happen to expect eventually to arrive on the scene. Usually, of course, the Robot Cultists hype this eventuality into "soon" to tap into the various Rapture-Ready techno-transcendence narratives on which their membership organizations depend to keep asses in the pews and dollars in the collection plate.

As I have repeatedly argued in the past on this question (for example here and here and, more generally, in many of the pieces anthologized here), an intervention that yields a different morphology or capacitation is always only an "enhancement" in respect to certain specific desires among others on offer, only in respect to certain specific ends among others on offer. Almost inevitably a relative capacitation in respect to certain wants or ends will constitute at one and the same time a relative incapacitation in respect to others.

There are endlessly many ways of being in the world, endlessly many viable, worthy, wanted lifeways and possible incarnations and paths of private perfection available to experience and imagination. To associate a particular constellation of capacities, morphologies, ends, lifeways as optimal ideals or given norms toward the attainment of which any intervention is to be regarded uncritically or neutrally as a generalized "enhancement" is to assign universal values where what is valued or not by whom for what under what circumstances is in fact radically and interminably and properly under contest. This endlessly reiterated disavowal or denigration of morphological and lifeway diversity and contestation among too many transhumanists and technocratic futurologists more generally is also the expression of an essentially eugenic outlook in my view, and should be condemned as such.

Follow the Bouncing Ball

The stealthy techno-immortalists at the Methuselah Foundation (Get it? Methuselah?) are

a non-profit medical charity dedicated to extending healthy human life through proven programs

Bouncing ball likes bouncing right over that word "proven" and proceeding to bounce its way toward all sorts of other words!

MLife Sciences makes founding investments in organizations that are making pioneering advances in the twin missions of slowing the aging process as well as rejuvenating the body from the negative effects of aging.

Bouncing ball likes bouncing right over those words "pioneering advances" and proceeding to bounce its way toward all sorts of other words!

SENS Foundation is focused on research aimed at the biomedical repair of the damage of biological aging. Using a unique engineering approach, these therapies seek to repair all known forms of aging-related damage in the human body, with the aim of restoring cellular and biomolecular structures to renew their function to youthful health and vitality.

Bouncing ball likes bouncing right over those words "unique engineering" and proceeding to bounce its way toward all sorts of other words!

In the case of Methuselah Foundation's fight to end aging and the research that it will take to create the necessary therapies, we focus on funding for the long haul, depending on the commitment of donors such as You. Each donor will be immortalized on a unique marble monument

Bouncing ball likes bouncing right over the word "immortalized" and proceeding to bounce its way toward all sorts of other words, like "marble monument"!

Thank heavens we have techno-immortalists and other superlative futurologists around to re-invent the mausoleum as an immortalization strategy for us.

Bouncing ball bounces its way onward to other indispensable anti-aging tips you just can't get unless you spend time among techno-immortalists, including

taking vitamin D, regular fasting, regular exercise, and popping baby aspirin daily

"We are as gods," as the futurological hucksters say.

Hey, where'd bouncing ball bounce off to?

The Future, I guess.

The Peer

A peer is not an equal -- for there are no equals -- the peer is the one who appears in the public square, and by virtue of the public square, be it the polis of the streets or of the nets, and who appears as one who contributes, contests, collaborates, has a stake in the shared and made world precisely in her difference from others who also appear and associate in company. The ethos of politics, peer-to-peer, which is one and the same as the ethos of democratization, is always the interminable dynamic of equity-in-diversity.

A Trilogy of Futurological Brickbats on the Subject of "Techno-Ethics"

The prefix "bio," when appended to the word "ethics," tends to have the curious effect of draining all the life out of ethics.

The breathlessly ramifying "techno-ethical" disciplines -- bio-ethics, neuro-ethics, net-ethics, nano-ethics, robo-ethics, and so on -- should all be regarded as essentially public relations and marketing subdisciplines, very much in the spirit of the "business ethics" out of which all these latest not-ethics by way of hyphenated-ethics have sprung.

Institutional "ethicians" are not educators so much as they are salesmen. And they should be treated as such: that is to say, with extreme caution.

For more Futurological Brickbats, by all means browse the archive.

Implausible Characters, Vacuous Foundations

In my UC Berkeley course "Altars and Alters to the Market: Polemical Discourse in the Neoliberal/Neoconservative Epoch" we just spent the week talking about Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I thought I might post some of my thoughts here on Amor Mundi as well.

One thing that really perplexes me about the novel that we touched on again and again in class discussion is the radical implausibility of the characters. I focused in class especially on the frankly hilarious implausibility of the protagonists -- pointing out that one can have a romantically heroic protagonist without actually going so far as to make characters literally impossibly brilliant, as Francisco d'Anconia is made to be, literally the instant and effortless winner of everything he tries without fail, re-inventing calculus off the cuff as a child, on top of being fantastically handsome and athletic, and so on and on, or Hank Rearden being not only an incomparable entrepreneur, but also a master prospector for a whole diversity of resources, and also a master metallurgist, and also just happening to be a paradigm-shattering engineer/architect, and so on. It's like the marvelous hyperbolic hilarity of Buckaroo Banzai's plasma physicist slash brain surgeon slash rockstar slash model but treated as deadly earnest plausible character development.

But it also seems to me that the bad guys in the novel are also quite flabbergastingly implausible, invariably exaggeratedly unappealing physically -- "the muscles of his face failed to assume responsibility for taking up a shape" is actually said of someone at one point -- and apt to declarations of the most absurd things imaginable, twisting at their villain mustaches as it were and propounding Dr. Eeeeevil-esque conspiracies organized by their hostility to anything that might be construed as an accomplishment or by their unslakable lust to obliterate anything that might be construed as beautiful, and so on.

Rand takes real pains to insist on the actual factual reality of her heroes:

About the Author: "My personal life" says Ayn Rand, "is a postscript to my novels; it consists of the sentence 'And I mean it.' I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books and it has worked for me, as it has worked for my characters... I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don't exist. That this book has been written -- and published -- is my proof that they do."

Needless to say, writing Atlas Shrugged no more proves Ayn Rand the equal of John Galt (or even the equal of, say, Jackie Collins) than the publication of Harry Potter novels (works of fiction in every way -- including philosophically -- better and preferable to Rand's hackneyed hyperbolic bodice-rippers in my humble opinion) makes J.K. Rowling the functional equivalent of Albus Dumbledore.

Setting aside the curious evangelical sales pitch slash motivational speaker flim-flam artistry of Rand's punchy little bit of self-promotion there (change your life! -- it worked for me, it'll work for you! -- just mail in the handy card included in the novel to contact the Ayn Rand Institute and we'll turn your life around!), it seems to me that Rand is insisting on the literal reality of her superlative characters in a way that makes it difficult to treat them merely as "artistic" or "stylistic" conjurations of every person's capacity for greatness or independence or what have you. I mention this in answer to a few who complained about my emphasis on Rand's endless implausibilities and who wanted to rationalize their own identification with the castle she has built in the air here by declaring her choices to be stylistic embellishments for effect (the "effect" in question remaining curiously unelaborated by the proponents of this view).

I also think it is not accidental that conventional Movement Conservative discourse -- arising out of the ferment of works by Mises, Hayek, Hazlett, Rand, Friedman, Heinlein, and others -- many of whom we are reading in this market polemics class, as it happens -- very typically declares humanities departments in universities to be cesspools of relativism, typically dismisses modern art as infantilism, typically declares any concern for the exploited or the vulnerable as expressions of envy, and so on. All of these facile mischaracterizations directly echo the villainous portrayals in Rand's potboilers, treated as literally truthful quite as much as she demands we take her heroes as accurate portrayals of human possibilities (and I might add that there is a cottage industry of lionizing corporate CEO biography/memoir literature that seems to want to declare that the titans of Atlas Shrugged roam the world among us even now -- even if they might strike the everyday observer as rather more flabby sordidly unimaginative crudely opportunistic jackholes than Rand's heady prose would lead one to hope for).

I want to be clear that in saying all this I actually do not mean to deny that there are exceptionally brilliant and creative people in the world -- among them some I happen to reverence myself, as it happens -- nor that there are fairly appallingly idiotic dangerously deceptive people in the world -- among them some I happen abhor for their crimes and their their schemes and their lies (nobody who reads this blog, could doubt that for long). However, I really think both the heroes and the villains in the novel are caricatural in ways that say something important about the way the novel is functioning and what its project amounts to.

I think this reliance on radical hyperbole and caricature treated insistently as literal truth surely connects to the radical under-determination of actually rationally warranted beliefs by the recognition of the vacuity "existence existence" or "A is A" and also the correlated radical under-determination of actually efficacious moral/ethical norms by the recognition that "[i]t is only the concept of 'life' that makes the concept of 'value' possible."

On my page 1018 Rand has Galt declare: "My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists -- and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these."

Needless to say, I think that nothing much proceeds from these vacuities at all, that they are at best foundations in quicksand.

Certainly "existence exists" is a near-vacuity incapable of grounding the host of highly idiosyncratic Randian factual beliefs -- most of which do not square with actual experience of the world, experience of the way technoscience actually functions, industrial and commercial concerns actually function, the way artists and art promotion actually plays out in the world, and so on.

Nor does "the single choice: to live" provide anything like a groundwork for her highly idiosyncratic conception of human "flourishing" -- which, again, does not square in the least with actual human concerns, histories, or hopes as far as I can tell, our awareness, for example, of our reliance on the common heritage of accomplishments and knowledges, our awareness of our interdependence on our peers for our survival and flourishing, our awareness of the ineradicable diversity of stakes, ends, capacities, situations, perspectives that suffuse the plurality of peers with whom we share, contest, and collaborate in the world, our awareness of our precariousness on earth, or vulnerability to humiliation, misunderstanding, our openness to being changed in ways we cannot imagine by the vicissitudes of history, love, conflict, differing perspectives, and so on.

Rand thought of herself as a "philosopher novelist" and of Atlas Shrugged as a philosophical novel. And I think that the false substantiation of Rand's highly idiosyncratic views both of what is and what ought to be through her endlessly reiterated recourse to the nearly vacuous assertions that "existence exists" or "A is A" on the one hand and that we must "choose life" or else "deal in death" on the other hand is a rhetorical gesture of Rand the (abysmally terrible) philosopher that is directly correlated to the rhetorical gesture of Rand the (abysmally terrible) novelist in soliciting our identification and dis-identification with her flabbergastingly ridiculously hyperbolized heroes and villains.


Behind the Music: Atlas Shrugged provides still more Randroid-rage should your tastes go that way...

Dispatches from Libertopia: An Anthology of Wingnut Chestnuts and Democratizing Remedies

I. Wherever government is meant to be of by and for the people, to be anti-government always means to be against the people.

II. Whenever a right wing politician declares all government wasteful, criminal, and corrupt you should pay close attention, because he is announcing his plans.

III. Anti-tax zealots are the ones who think that civilization is the only free lunch.

IV. To declare that money is speech is to ensure that only money talks.

V. To declare that corporations are persons is to ensure that actual persons are serfs.

VI. One will never go far wrong when confronted by a self-described libertarian in America simply to assume that by this term they mean to say they are just another Republican asshole, but one who also wants, sensibly enough, to smoke pot or chew some hooker's foot without fear of arrest.

VII. Gay Republicans are usually white guys who experience "homophobia" primarily as their heartbreaking exclusion from white-racist patriarchal class privileges to which they feel themselves otherwise perfectly entitled.

VIII. "Free Market" ideologues always begin as a criminal conspiracy and always end as a suicide pact.

IX. Any “big-tent” organization big enough to accommodate right-wing ideology will soon be a big tent empty of almost anybody but right-wing zealots.

X. However much they insist on their difference from conventional conservative politicians no American-style market libertarian argument will ever have any life in the actual world except to the extent that it is appropriated by conservatives for conservative ends.

XI. Staunchly "anti-war" market libertarians tend to be sublimely indifferent to the extent to which modern war-making is an essentially entrepreneurial activity.

XII. The only way to end modern wars is to make war-making unprofitable. It would be curious indeed to mistake free marketeers for allies in such a struggle.

XIII. Nobody who believes society to be a competitive war of all against all will ever truly collaborate in the work to end the competition that is war.

XIV. Freedom is not a matter of making a selection from a menu provided by others.

XV. The difference between investment and speculation is the difference between an effort and a scheme.

XVI. Wherever the prose of pricing prevails the poetry of meaning is menaced.

XVII. It is curious the number of Republicans who claim to disdain vast corrupt soulless bureaucracies but who celebrate multinational corporations.

XVIII. The wealthiest one per cent of the world population seem to imagine themselves indispensable. One wishes they would test this article of faith by going away.

XIX. There is no such thing as a natural market.

XX. "Homo Economicus" is a mythical being, and a good thing, too. Just look at the damage done by those entities in reality that come closest to incarnating the fiction of "Homo Economicus" -- that is to say limited-liability corporations -- to see the proof of this.

XXI. Those who begin in a declared belief in "spontaneous order" end in declaring orders they believe should be obeyed spontaneously -- and immediately.

XXII. Those who would dismantle all democratic government and those who would demand good democratic government will point to many of the same instances of government abuse, corruption, malfeasance, and violence in making their separate cases, but it is only a fool who in noticing this would mistake them for allies.

XXIII. We are all beholden to accomplishments and problems we are heir to but unequal to, we are all implicated in the efforts of the diversity of peers with whom we share the world. It is delusive to imagine oneself the singular author of one's fortunes, whether good or ill. And so, only in a world in which the precarious are first insulated from the catastrophic consequences of ill-fortune in which we all play our parts can we celebrate or even tolerate the spectacle in which the successful indulge in the copious consequences of good fortune in which we all, too, have played our parts.

XXIV. It is always magical thinking to declare an outcome need only be profitable for it to be possible.

XXV. Pre-emptive war adventuring is to legitimate defense as hyperbolic financial speculation is to substantial production. It is no accident that pre-emptive war would suffuse public discourse in an epoch of bubble-economics. War hysteria and irrational exuberance are kindred pathologies.

XXVI. Those who declare taxes to be theft either forget or fail to grasp that it is taxes that pay for the maintenance of those institutions on which legitimate claims of ownership or theft depend for their intelligibility and force in the first place.

XXVII. Taxes are not, however annoying they may seem, violations of our freedom so much as indispensable enablers of freedom -- and hence they are a precondition for the constitution of the very experience of the "voluntary" on which notions of the involuntary depend in the first place.

XXVIII. Taxes pay for the administration to basic needs that ensures the scene of consent is non-duressed by deprivation, inequity, or insecurity. Those "libertarians" who declare whatever passes as a market outcome voluntary and nonviolent by definitional fiat -- whatever the conditions of relative deprivation, inequity, insecurity, ignorance, or misinformation that duress its terms in fact -- reveal themselves to be poor champions of an impoverished and profoundly uncivilized notion of "liberty."

XXIX. Ours is a world so sensibly arranged that it is only the ones who could afford to pay for everything who are assured escape from paying for anything.

XXX. The pace at which the tidal forces of supply and demand, or the correction via unprofitability of ignorance and error, or the rationalization via capital flight of panics and bubbles, or comparable market mechanisms manage to compensate for disruptive events, bad information, and irrational conduct is too different from the pace at which metabolism is maintained in human bodies and struggle is enacted in human history for these mechanisms to sustain those lives and that history in a human way, however wholesome they may be in their own inhuman term. This is the long term in which Keynes remarked we are all dead.

XXXI. The point of departure for political economy is the interminable reconciliation of infinite ends in a finite world. The point of departure for market anti-politics is the delusion that an infinite growth satisfies infinite wants, eventually if not actually. The displacement of reconciliation by aspiration in market ideology is satisfied to treat as satisfying even a ubiquitous dissatisfaction so long as it keeps promising imminent satisfaction.

XXXII. What is revolutionary about the market imaginary is its demand that we experience as revolution the interminable deferral of revolution, that we experience as satisfaction the interminable frustration of satisfaction.

XXXIII. Capitalism is everywhere, but it never arrives.

XXXIV. To those who say they would shrink government without end, who say they would deregulate enterprise without end, who say they would cut taxes without end, it must forcefully be said, in the end, that you cannot have a civilization and eat it too.

XXXV. "The free market" does not exist. It has no historical, actual, or even logically-possible reference. Utterances offered up on its behalf have no more substance than utterances on behalf of god. And as with godliness whatever flesh, whatever reality market-fundamentalist assumptions and aspirations assume are carved into the broken bodies and invested in the distressed spirits of the ones made to bear the worldly weight of the lies of the faithful.

XXXVI. So long as Congress is filled with millionaires it will never represent the interests of an America filled with non-millionaires.

XXXVII. It should go without saying that it is perfectly possible to be a member of the Republican Party without being an idiot, a bigot, a hypocrite, and an asshole. But it must also be said that it is unfortunately no longer possible at all to be a member of the Republican Party without being at least one of these and usually more than one.

XXXVIII. Market fundamentalists are pickpockets who like to decry taxes as theft to distract you when their hands are in your pocket.

XXXIX. Randian "Objectivists," "Social Darwinists," and market fundamentalists often fancy themselves supremely materialist rather than the fantasists they palpably are, just as social conservatives and Christian fundamentalists often fancy themselves supremely anti-materialist even as they jockey ferociously for bigger slices of the material pie. These ostensibly opposed factions are, of course, always only engaging in sectarian skirmishes within Movement Conservatism more generally over just which self-appointed priestly elite gets to rule the worldly toypile in the name of just which imaginary deity.

XL. There has never once been an outcome attributed to the Invisible Hand of the Market in which the Heavy Hand of the State did not play an indispensable part, and in which all too many are not sure to discern the Hidden Hand of Conspiracy.

XLI. I am not offended by the faiths of the faithful -- since we should all have the consolation of the poetry which moves us -- but I am profoundly offended by those who would peddle their faiths as evidences and so strive to steal the archive of and hope for a commonplace, commonsense, commoncause, commonwealth from the shared world, peer to peer.

XLII. To be a consumer most of all is to be a criminal first of all.

XLIII Few who have more keep more because they deserve more than most who have less.

XLIV. Anyone, even an admirable or accomplished person, can attract the momentary attention of masses of people, but to be a celebrity for long usually demands one be a profoundly ruthless, relentless, and terribly misguided sort of person, and most likely a straight-up sociopath.

XLV. Every winner is lost.

XLVI. I AM A LOSER AND I VOTE

XLVII. If you want to understand what is going on around you, all you have to do is learn who is making the money, look where the guns are pointed, and listen to the stories the losers have to tell.

XLVIII. The enabling delusion of every historical empire is that it is history's umpire.

XLIX. Nobody truly happy has any inclination while they are happy to tell you how to be happy so stop listening to those who promise you such things. There is no such thing as an earning or an accomplishing or a deserving of happiness in any case, and so it is always better simply to enjoy happiness whenever it briefly appears in life and recall it gratefully whenever it is long gone.

L. To be a civilized person is first of all to say or do what you judge to be righteous or beautiful or true in the world, and to declare things right or beautiful or true for what you take to be good reasons in the hearing of the world, come what may. Civilization is the contest and accumulation of such acts and assertions. Never forget, then, that at the heart of freedom is artistry, and at the heart of judgment is style.

LI. I do not want to smash the state, I want always to democratize it.

LII. Republicans: "Keynes is dead." Keynes: "Your Republic is dead."

LIII. An anarchist's convictions usually have little but their hypocrisy to redeem them.

LIV. Ronald Reagan was an asshole, and it’s high time liberals stopped trying quixotically to score cleverness points by declaring him a better asshole than the assholes the Republicans are now.

LV. At this point, to be a registered Republican is to admit proudly and in public to the kind of sweeping ignorance that should send you back to High School, to the kind of sociopathy, narcissism, and anger management issues that should send you into serious counseling, and to a penchant for fraud, looting, and assault that should send you to trial with a fair prospect of incarceration. Not only can Republicans no longer be trusted to administer the state, one begins to wonder if they should all be wards of the state.

LVI. As a policy matter, austerity measures are nothing but a kind of pseudo-scientific bloodletting, treating as a treatment the weakening of the weakest. As a moral matter, austerity measures are nothing but a kind of brutal bullying, treating as a treat the weakening of the weakest.

LVII. The intolerant always demand tolerance for their intolerance. Bigots always decry as violence and as bigotry the restraint of their bigotry from the worst of its violence. Racists always declare racist the exposure and denunciation of their racism. This is all very clever, if you are very stupid.

LVIII. Mine is an anti-capitalism that will be quite content to build an environmentally sustainable social democracy in which universal healthcare, education, income, expression, recourse to law and franchise is funded by steeply progressive taxes even if everybody decides to call that outcome "capitalism" for whatever reasons perversely appeal to them.

LIX. When everything is a casino everybody loses everything.

LX. If it is usually true that control corrupts, it is absolutely true that only the corruptible covet control.

LXI. That the greedy decry all judgments of their misconduct as expressions of envy is hardly surprising, since in giving in to greed they had first of all to give leave to kindness.

LXII. "Let the Market Decide" Always Means "Let Rich People Decide."

LXIII. Movement Republicanism was born in hostility to governing and dies incapable of governing.

LXIV. Republicans are divided between the rich ones who want to pretend they are giving when they are taking, and the poor ones who want to pretend they will be rich so they are not getting taken.

LXV. When you criticize a successful thief it is not "success" that you are attacking, but thievery.

LXVI. Any institution too big to fail should either be broken into manageable portions that are not, or nationalized so that its successes will be shared as widely as its failures will.

LXVII. Gun-nuttery is the ruggedization of the individualized cyborg-protagonist in Ayn Raelian "free market" nightmare-fantasies.

LXVIII. Anarchy is a perspectival effect -- the rule of elites is always spontaneous or natural and hence no-rule from their vantage.

LXIX. It's stupid to have a big gun because you think that you and your gun can fight the state when you can't, but it's just as stupid to want a big gun when much of what the state is for is to ensure no citizen has any legitimate need of one.

LXX. Defense spending is the disavowed public face of the founding bad faith of Republican Big Government championed as "small government," just as Forced Pregnancy Zealotry is the conspicuous private face of the founding bad faith of Republican Big Government championed as "small government."

LXXI. Of course, what the GOP has always meant by "smaller government" has never been anything other than "less democracy."

LXXII. Funny how often survivalists and people around them don't survive.

LXXIII. Kennedy Rephrased for Greedheads: Brag not what you think you do for this country just by being rich, admit how much you depend on this country for being rich.

LXXIV. "The Market" without "The State" might be a fair, if it is small, or a gang, if it is bigger, and that is all. To say otherwise is not to have an interesting perspective on markets and states, but to reveal you don't know enough about either economics or politics for anybody but a good teacher to pay attention to.

LXXV. The best words to describe your average Ayn Rand fan are "government beneficiary," although occasional splashy success stories among her readership do sometimes also manage to be government employees or government contractors.

LXXVI. Is there any sweeter song in all the world than elites peddling predation and denial as "optimism"?

LXXVII. Scandal is austerity's glamour.

LXXVIII. Just as I have always found it hard to sustain any interest in the interest others have in my queerness, and yet I remain utterly fascinated by the quandaries of the diversity of desire for politics, so too I have always found it hard to sustain any interest in the interest others have in my atheism, and yet I remain utterly fascinated by the quandaries of the diversity of secularity for politics.

LXXIX. If you are an atheist who believes in free markets or who believes evolution applies to history or culture you are not an atheist after all.

LXXX. It isn't an accident that "Un-PC" is the tag always accompanying an ugly lie someone privileged uses to bully someone precarious.

LXXXI. Security without freedom is insecurity.

LXXXII. Democrats are the ones who want to get together through their government to help people, Republicans are the ones who want to get together through their government to harass people.

LXXXIII. Doctrinal "anarchism" seems to exist primarily to provide Republicans with endless rationalizations for irrepressible greed and to provide Democrats with endless rationalizations for irresponsibly not voting in mid-term elections.

LXXXIV. Corporatists are forever confusing profiteerism with patriotism, just as militarists are forever confusing patriotism with prosperity.

LXXXV. Until unemployment no longer holds out the prospect of death or dishonor every employment contract is made under duress.

LXXXVI. Republicans are fighting for elections that are fairer... of skin.

LXXXVII. Getting Republicans to agree on anything is like herding clowns.

LXXXVIII. Libertarianism might have a chance at real world success if only libertarians were fuzzy and cute. As witness the utopia of total greed that is my cat's life.

LXXXIX. For "entitlements" you need look no further than individuals who depend for their wealth on commonwealth but think paying taxes is slavery.

XC. The formalization of an indebtedness of all to some is the forgetfulness of the ineradicable interdependence of all with all.

XCI. A Transparent Society in which indifference and distraction prevail will be opaque, in fact, to all but its elites.

XCII. In the absence of social justice, "Openness" is always emptiness.

XCIII. Every US generational cohort is described as re-discovering libertopian anti-governmentality. That is, after all, the default of insulated ignoramuses.

XCIV. Given that inequity always reveals inefficiencies, it is curious how often efficiency rationalizes inequities.

XCV. Things are so simple in the GOP. Human rights begin at conception. And unless there is a white penis present, they end at birth.

XCVI. A rising stock market is always an unmistakable indicator of economic success… of plutocrats over the vast majority of people who work for a living.

XCVII. Every second Social Security is discussed as a problem to be solved is a second lost to the necessary celebration of Social Security as the ongoing solution to the problem of poverty for our seniors.

XCVIII. Until privacy advocates absolutely refuse the assimilation of privacy politics to privatization politics we will not contribute to freedom.

XCIX. Strange the way people on the right inevitably claim "the left likes mass shootings" whenever we decry the mass shootings they endlessly enable.

C. Republicans talk about Big Government and Small Government to avoid talking about Good Government and Our Government.

CI. Precarization is a terrorism, multinational plutocracy one more terror-network.

CII. Even though more government doesn't always mean more democracy, less government always means less democracy.

CIII. A society is failing when it is only by failing at living gracefully that can one succeed in society.

CIV. You say "feckless," and I say "efficacious," let's call the war thing off.

CV. There is no natural, spontaneous, abiding reality that is either "the internet" or "the market" -- and it is no surprise that arguments presumably defending, saving, promoting "the free internet" are made so often by the same people who make arguments defending, saving, promoting "the free market" and so often in ways that re-enact the false, facile terms defending, saving, promoting "the free market."

CVI. Whenever a white dude pines for a "simpler time" -- and I am including the ones who call themselves anarchists and eco-radicals -- I assume he's got a gun pointed at me.

CVII. When "tax and spend" is reduced to a punchline, it is always plutocrats who have the last laugh.

CVIII. Anarchists on the right want a nation of guns, not laws. Anarchists on the left see a nation of guns, not laws. Both are wrong.

CIX. Open Carry aspires to be the twenty-first century lynch mob of the reactionary right, terrorism in defense of white supremacy and patriarchy.

CX. The invisible hand is the heavy hand.

CXI. Capitalism is always, like, talk to the invisible hand.

CXII. It is hard to think what apart from racism reconciles the wingnut contempt for failed states with their work to make their own state fail.

CXIII. Funny how go getters get got.

CXIV. When money is speech, words are less for making sense than for making bribes.

CXV. Republican antics are about as exciting as watching blood dry.

CXVI. Ever notice how many upward sailing risk takers turn out to be upward failing risk fakers?

CXVII. If liberalism and conservatism are a distinction, neoliberalism and neoconservatism are a loop. There is no neoliberalism without neoconservatism. Every "free" global market is maintained by the threat and reality of global arms and armies.

CXVIII. There is no article of faith more fancifully supernatural than belief in a natural free market.

CXIX. The market has spoken. It hates markets.

CXX. When we say "let the market decide" we are deciding to forget that markets are nothing but our decisions, the better to let others make for us the decisions we should be making for ourselves.

CXXI. The expectation of privacy is not a refusal of scrutiny but a refusal to be reduced to any authority's profile of us. The expectation of publicity is that we are made more capacious in our responsiveness to scrutiny than we can know from our present profile of ourselves.

CXXII. Initial regressive distributions of wealth are no less the product of government intervention than are subsequent progressive redistributions of wealth.

CXXIII. People love calling libertarians "Idea Guys." It pays to remember that every single libertarian "Idea" is an ad campaign to peddle plutocracy to majorities it harms.

CXXIV. The liberty of the libertarian right is an empty deception: its figure is empty space, its impossible project a control to compensate bottomless fear. The freedom of the democratic left is a public work: its figure is assembly, its interminable project enabling equity-in-diversity as an expression of love.

CXXV. Americans can no longer distinguish optimism from advertizing.

CXXVI. The sole purpose of "The Political Compass" is to get you lost enough to espouse right-wing positions without grasping that you are.

CXXVII. That a guaranteed income would end hopeless poverty is a reason to support it, that it would begin endless hopeful enrichments is another.

CXXVIII. "Pro-Life" is the brand name of a death cult. It is foolish to expect truth in advertizing.

CXXIX. Whenever the profits of plutocrats are purchased by the precarity of the people, money is always speech and speech is always moneyed. Securing a basic income guarantee would create conditions under which for the first time it would be possible for money NOT to be speech.

CXXX. The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: "I'm from a corporation and I'm here for profit."

CXXXI. Every time a company advertizes a feature they were forced to provide by government regulations they fought reality withdraws another inch.

CXXXII. DIY is great until it becomes an excuse for Denial of Interdependence Yammering.

CXXXIII. Free marketeers console themselves they may be dogs but at least they're dogs who are eating. When it's dog eats dog, every dog gets eaten.

CXXXIV. Indebtedness, like Original Sin, is a state of abiding existential insecurity enormously useful to the schemes of (market) faithful elites.

CXXXV. Sometimes I think the Right may well bore us to death before they manage to starve us to death.

CXXXVI. Every single person who declares themselves "beyond left and right" is either a secret shill for the right or a perfect dupe for the right.

CXXXVII. It is in our possessiveness that we are dispossessed.

CXXXVIII. An old joke declares that young liberals mature into conservatives, but the true joke is that conservatism is a permanent infantilism.

CXXXIX. The arc of history bends from just us.

CXL. So many manifestos, so few manifestations.

CXLI. Back when I was still dating I used to want to take out a billionaire. Alas, I never got close enough to kill.

CXLII. The rich take everything, but they can't take a joke.

CXLIII. Privatization always kicks you in the privates.

CXLIV. Reactionaries emphasize the potential costs of doing something to solve shared problems in order to distract from ongoing costs of doing nothing to solve shared problems.

CXLV. Take "civil" from "liberties" and what you get is taken.

CXLVI. Republicans never die, they finally manage successfully to secede from the Union.

CXLVII. Republicans campaign in fantasy and govern as foes.

CXLVIII. Conspiracists get right that incumbent elites are capable of anything, but get wrong how incapable incumbent elites are of everything.

CXLIX. The Southern Strategy was a long and murderous road to a short and suicidal destination.

CL. For every market, always a military.

CLI. Protest voting usually reveals incomprehension of both protest and voting.

If you enjoy these bits and pieces of anti-libertopian and hence anti-authoritarian snark, you may also enjoy my Futurological Brickbats anthology, epigrammatically dissecting and deriding corporate-militarist "futurology" and Robot Cultists.

California Ideologist Stewart Brand Coughs Up the Usual "Heretical" Hairball of Futurological Conventional Wisdom

I read an article attributing to futurologist Steward Brand "heretical" views that were presumably shocking given that Brand is an "icon" of the environmentalist movement, but which seemed to me not only not shocking but not even the least bit surprising. I started tossing off an annoyed post explaining why I felt this way and soon discovered it had grown to frightful proportions, and so I have divided it into three separate parts.

The first part, Stewart Brand, King of Pop Futurology, written while I was still feeling annoyed explains why I am ambivalent about describing Stewart Brand as an "icon" or "godfather" of environmentalism (although of course he has as much right to describe himself an environmentalist as anybody does, more than most do in fact). I would describe Brand as a futurologist, and I think his "heretical" views are pretty much neoliberal-futurological conventional wisdom, and I think he is part of a larger movement of California Ideologists and digirati and technophiles about whom it is actually obfuscatory rather than clarifying to describe them as greens or libertarians or hippies, even if they are connected to these movements and subcultures. While I still stand by what I wrote here, I think there is probably more snark than substance in it.

The second part, Surveying Brand's Greenback-Green Futurological Litany, actually addresses itself directly to the four claims attributed (I am assuming accurately) to Brand which triggered my annoyance in the first place. By the time I got to this part I have to admit that I wasn't particularly annoyed anymore, and the discussion seems to me more substantial there. I don't doubt that, as is usually the case, interest in what I have to say will diminish directly in proportion to the diminishment of the snark.

The third part, All Futurisms Tend to Be Functionally Retro-Futuristic in Their Political Substance draws from the foregoing a more general case that provides a more systematic formulation of a point (captured in the title) that I often declare here on Amor Mundi, but rarely elaborate as much as I should. By the time I arrived at part three I will admit that I had lost all interest in Stewart Brand and had become intrigued by the theoretical ideas that had churned up to the surface in the process of writing the preceding sections. It was at this point that I realized I'd been writing for over an hour and that my post had become yet another of my sprawling scattered speculations. That's when I decided to try breaking it into separate parts for a change, and hence the present experiment.

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Stewart Brand, King of Pop Futurology (Part One of Three)

At least one journalist seemed to find "shocking" and "heretical" the following absolutely conventional futurological chestnuts:

One of the “godfathers of environmentalism” [has] a message that most greens will find both shocking and heretical... Stewart Brand told a 400-strong audience... [t]here was “no hope” of mitigating against climate change. Nuclear power was the only way we could provide enough clean energy for the world; Cities were greener than the countryside; Genetically modified crops were necessary to feed the world’s growing population. Brand is widely regarded as one of the great visionaries of the environmental movement...

If I may speak for at least this Green, I would personally characterize Brand's comments as, first of all, not so much shocking as just wrong, and even rather dumb as wrong ideas go. (I will elaborate these charges in the next section.) Furthermore, this litany of corporate-militarist articles of faith seems to me the farthest thing from heretical exactly, so much as simply the sort of thing a futurologist like Brand should be expected to say, since it is the sort of thing futurologists all say all the time and with almost perfect robotic mind-numbing predictability. (And I will elaborate these claims in the third and final section.)

This is the same Stewart Brand, after all, who handwaved about how world-changing the MIT Media Lab was, that incubator of "digirati" and techno-utopians who brought us irrational exuberance and the nanocornucopiasts and the cybernetic totalists and the literally jaw-dropping foolishness of the so-called Long Boom, who co-founded that brain trust of corporate-militarist futurological PR "scenario"-spinners, the Global Business Network, and who still thinks, together with the same coterie of futurological dead-enders that what would amount to an architectural folly in Marie Antoinette's Versailles, The Clock of the Long Now, constitutes a revolutionary intervention into the status quo.

Since I devote so much of this blog to deriding superlative futurology and connecting it to the more mainstream futurology of neoliberal global development discourse, I can't help but add that this is also the same Stewart Brand who wrote in the forward to a particularly egregious piece of techno-utopian nonsense, Unbounding the Future, an earnestly worded warning to readers about getting taken in by false and facile promises of "technofixes" while at once hilariously recommending the techno-fixated superlative futurology of drex-tech nano-cornucopiasts as panacaea for all ills.

Here's a taste, from the breezy buzzing opening passage of that hyperbolic little number:

"Nanotechnology. The science is good, the engineering is feasible, the paths of approach are many, the consequences are revolutionary-times-revolutionary, and the schedule is: in our lifetimes."

The Case: "Science!" "Feasible!" "Revolutionary-times-revolutionary!" "In our lifetimes!"

The Verdict: Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

You know, there's a sucker born every minute, and every futurologist you will ever meet is either one of them or hoping like hell you are.

I don't mean to diminish Brand's actual standing and celebrity in saying I don't personally consider him an environmental eminence. The Well was plenty nifty after all, and I enjoyed reading Whole Earth as much as the next geek back in the 80s, in the same way I enjoyed reading OMNI in High School.

As it happens, I actually teach the release of the NASA photograph of the whole earth as seen from space (famously shepherded by Brand into world view) as a key formative moment for the contemporary phase of environmental movement. But I would say that anybody who upon seeing the gorgeous life-trembling whole earth from space declares human beings to be, as Stewart Brand famously did, "as gods," rather than as entangled interdependent precarious earthlings, has never really truly seen the whole earth made available in that image at all.

I propose that the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was the indispensable beginning of the second wave of an American environmentalist politics that had been conservationist hitherto -- and in many ways also profoundly conservative. And what was so definitive in her environmental politics was her concentration on the need to educate everyday citizens, to provide media for technoscientific literacy, and to resist incumbent interested media misinformation campaigns, and all this to mobilize informed people to demand the regulative-legislative redress of shared environmental problems, peer to peer.

This seems to me an environmentalist politics still relevant to our circumstances. But, more to the point, I tend to see Brand's facile futurology as profoundly antithetical to Carson's educational-agitational-organization environmental politics. I see Carson and Brand less as partners in the dance of environmental politics in the near half-century from 1970-2010, than as rivals for its practical soul.

For a sense of why this might matter, I think there is merit in Van Jones' insistence that environmentalism is now moving into a third phase still, defined neither by of the conservationism and conservatism of the first, nor by the regulation and legislation of the second, but one devoted to what he calls "investment." What is crucial in my view is that we see to it that what is named by this emerging "investment"-formation -- if that indeed is what it is to be called -- must seek to mobilize long-term public investment in renewable infrastructure and stewardship lifeways, rather than just more of the same "innovation" via commons-capture and "profit-making" through the externalization environmental risks and costs. And it seems to me that choosing between Carson's actually educational and organizational environmentalism qua consensus science and consensual governance against Brand's hyperbolic promotional and self-promotional futurological pseudo-environmentalism qua elite-incumbent advertising discourse could well be determinative of the understanding of "investment" environmentalism takes up in this third moment in its political history, and hence determinative, frankly, of the survival and flourishing of civilization on earth. (I would also propose that these three phases or waves or chapters or epochs or whatever of environmental politics should not be seen so much as supplanting one another, but as supplementing and complicating one another.)

For all these reasons, I simply cannot grant that Stewart Brand is some kind of proper environmentalist "godfather." Given that folks like Emerson, Thoreau, Darwin, Muir, Leopold, Abbey, Naess, Mollison, Bookchin, Carson, Kovel, Foster, Maathai, Shiva are among the proper claimants to such a title, I simply do not agree that Brand has been anything like a deep or original environmentalist thinker, or that he has facilitated actually democratizing environmentalist politics. I tend to think he has easily contributed as much or more to rendering proper environmentalist thinking impossible as he has contributed to environmentalism as such.

Although I don't doubt that Stewart Brand is a joy to be around (I can only imagine the stories he has to tell given the marvelous company he's kept), the fact remains in my view that he was and remains a California Ideologist through and through, one of so many corporatists who continue to confuse so-called cyber-consumer culture with counterculture, one of so many beneficiaries of class and race and gender privilege who continue to confuse hegemony with spontaneous order and their vantage from that hegemonic summit as a kind of insight or personal accomplishment, one of too many edge.org and TED Talk kinda guys who are all too prone to confuse self-promotion and PR with thought, one of so many futurologists peddling retro-futures in the name of "The Future."

One has to take great care before describing California Ideologists as hippies or greens or lefties for the same reasons (and usually for exactly the same reasons) as one has to take great care before describing American libertarians as actual civil libertarians rather than simply as Republicans who want to smoke pot or chew some hooker's foot without fear of arrest but all the while otherwise continuing to enjoy the unearned class privileges the "Universe Has Provided."

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Surveying Stewart Brand's Greenback-Green Futurological Litany (Part Two of Three)

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Stewart Brand told a 400-strong audience… [First:] There was “no hope” of mitigating against climate change. [Second:] Nuclear power was the only way we could provide enough clean energy for the world; [Third:] Cities were greener than the countryside; [Fourth:] Genetically modified crops were necessary to feed the world’s growing population.

And so, to return to Brand's litany of drearily predictable futurological "heresies," let me be as harsh as possible in the hope that vehemence might chisel its way past the rigidly enforced good cheer and self-congratulatory faux-contrarian and can-do crapola in which retro-futurists inevitably enshrine and en-shell themselves as they hawk their latest books.

First --

It seems to me that presumably "hardnosed" dismissals of hope for mitigating climate change by way of lifeway education-regulation-legislation-public investment are only issued in the final analysis by those who either mean cynically to sell some pie-in-the-sky corporate-militarist mega-engineering boondoggle to help billionaires who made their money destroying the planet in extractive-industrial-petrochemical enterprise make still more money pretending to be the only ones qualified to clean up their mess or by those those truly hard-hearted bastards (among whom I happen not to number Stewart Brand) who have calculated that climate catastrophe will not truly visit itself inside the high walls of gated suburbs behind GWOT-militarized Homeland moats in which they reside together with everyone they really care about, but will exact its toll instead always only on the same endlessly over-exploited regions of the world that already suffer genocidal devastation via treatable but neglected diseases and famine and drought brought about by catastrophic climate change in the already-arrived catastrophic future, all mediated and facilitated by arms proliferation and structured debt settlement and imposed market discipline to prolonged yawns from the people of the "Civilized World" in between occasional spectacular self-messaging charity benefit concerts.

Of course, any thinking person who truly entertained the slightest real expectation that global pandemics incubated in the slums of our neoliberal planetary "future," here and now, or that climate change refugees and warlord gangs armed and unleashed with the blessings of Judeochrislamic Mega-Churches and the NRA, or that Boschian scenes of energy and resource descent and its wars will arrive anytime soon on their actual doorstep don't waste time earning "street cred" with vapid Villager journalists by making tough-talkin' pronouncements about the hopelessness of legible democratic environmentalist politics. (And one must always emphasize how such pronouncements provide, and not at all co-incidentally, handy marketing and promotional advertisements and rationalizations for multinational energy and industrial-ag corporations to indulge in profit-making mega-scale "geo-engineering" and "bio-engineering" and ruinous nuclear-plant archipelago building projects in the name of "environmental remediation" after a century of their profit-taking destruction of the environment much of the time spent denying the plain facts at hand.) Again, nobody who is anything but a sociopathic monster would actually say out loud, while truly expecting such nightmares to unfold any time soon or anywhere near them, that we fellow-eathlings, peer to peer, are in any sense "beyond hope" or "past the tipping point" or "beyond politics" in the face of climate catastrophe.

No, serious people who believe they personally confront catastrophe do whatever they can, however they can, with whomever they can, hopelessly or not, to do what can be done to save their lives and the lives of the ones and world they love so long as they remain alive to do it.

They do not resign themselves to futurological wish-fulfilment fantasizing, they do not relinquish their democracy and welcome our corporate-militarist overlords to start throwing their weight around, they do not give up on the precarious, the marginal, the already over-exploited people with whom we share this earth and then claw their way to the top of the bloody pyramid of skulls hoping it reaches its way at last to heaven, or some other escape hatch.

No, serious people continue educating, agitating, organizing, legislating, regulating, investing, helping, hoping, working, shoulder to shoulder with their peers, until either together we fail or we prevail in the making of a sustainable, democratic, consensual, equitable, diverse, convivial planetary civilization together. None of those adjective is dispensable to the achievement of any of the others, and the mark of seriousness must be precisely that recognition.

Second --

Nuclear power isn't "clean energy" in any factual sense and so describing it as "the only way we can provide enough clean energy for the world" is a deception -- or, to elaborate the point a bit more, this typical futurological utterance is an example of that genre our debased culture has come to view as acceptable deception, namely, it is an act of advertising. Corporations, you will recall, have been given the legal right to lie in their advertisements, since to deny this would be to curtail the flows of money and force that are the only real kind of speech on the part of the corporations that are in turn the only the entities that connect real people to real power in this corporate-militarist chapter in the unfolding (and possibly consummating) history of industrial-extractive-postcolonial-capitalist modernity.

Futurology is best understood as continuous with that most prevalent mode of public discourse in our distressed debased order -- marketing, promotion, self-promotion, and advertising. It bears notice that the family-resemblance of futurology's future and futures trading is not accidental, nor is the family-resemblance of financial speculation and speculative fiction accidental, especially such speculative fiction as one finds in that least accomplished and least original form of science fiction, the futurological "scenario."

I might as well also point out that in its most extreme forms this futurological deception takes on the tonalities of that most sweeping of creative fictions, outright religious faith. And the fraudulent hyperbole of our all-encompassing advertising-promotional-marketing discourse which is amplified in the pseudo-scientific "trend-spotting" and prophetic utterances of think-tank gurus, then becomes further amplified into the promise of outright techno-transcendence of the finitude of the human condition itself -- superintelligence, superlongevity, superabundance -- vouchsafed by subcultural membership and True Belief in one or more of the many sects of the Robot Cult, the transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts who pimple the cyberspatial sprawl and the great State of California.

I personally believe that a smart grid of millions of commercial and residential solar rooftops, supplemented with thousands of square miles of in-field and offshore wind-turbine co-ops, coupled with public works projects retro-fitting and LEEDS-certifying public buildings and schools and public housing across the country and transforming our military and postal vehicular fleets to electric plug-ins together could transform the United States into a sustainable and renewable civilization offering a model for China and India and all the while revitalizing our neoliberal devastated and immaterialized economy (for which digital-utopian futurologists like Brand provided breathless rationalizations, by the way) into a unionized empowered middle-class nation (the kind of equitable and diverse nation and economy that enables to bloom and flourish the kind of hippy subcultures and everyday creativity California Ideological futurologists like Brand like to think they celebrate and champion even as they blithely kick out all of its indispensable social supports), and in a way that costs less and takes less time than installing Brand's oh-so-necessary nuclear archipelago would, all the while decentralizing rather than shoring up central and incumbent authority, and in a way that leaves no long-term radioactive legacy for future generations to curse us for.

Third --

While it is true in the abstract that dense cities can provide efficiencies in principle that overcome unsustainable consumption of land, resources, and energy, this result is only possible when efforts are made to ensure through principled urban planning and investment that there are open spaces, that natural services and local ecosystems remain intact to cope with the added stress and waste and use of urban populations. Such efforts require sustained reliable accountable regulation and oversight on a scale and of a kind which takes place in hardly any hitherto actually existing cities. And the consequence is that actual cities, unlike the abstract cities offered up in futurological generalities like the one Brand chirps about here, are the farthest imaginable thing from "Greener than the countryside."

In my view, such futurological utterances actually enable and even sell anti-sustainability through the conjuration of an abstraction that does not connect to reality -- and worse still could never connect to reality given the way futurology tends at best to redirect concern with actual substance into insubstantial abstractions and wish-fulfillment fantasies and at worst is freighted with outright anti-governmental and anti-regulatory biases that actively disable our collective capacity to address shared problems in a responsible and intelligent fashion at all.

In the well loved "Bright"-green futurological design-guru Bible Cradle to Cradle, the authors William McDonough and Michael Braungart declare:

In a world where designs are unintelligent and destructive, regulations can reduce immediate deleterious effects. But ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure.

This attitude seems to me ubiquitous in futurological and self-identified green design discourse, and this "principled" hostility to regulation precedes and enables the reluctance with which many "geo-engineering" enthusiasts now proclaim the failure of regulation to demand planet-scaled re-designing projects under their supervision.

Think carefully for a moment about what it means to declare any regulation to be a signal (to whom exactly?) of design failure, and what that implies about the guiding ideal of a futurological design subculture whose utopia would be one in which the collective intelligence and effort of everyday citizens that is reflected in the legislative and regulative acts of a state of, by, and for the people is effaced, replaced with the vision of a "successfully" designed world provided by the better-intelligence of that privileged coterie of elite-incumbent designers whose parochial positional assumptions and aspirations are, after all, all that really matters.

Fourth --

Once again we are treated to a generalization in the Litany, this time called "genetically modified crops." To this monolithic generalization is then falsely attributed a uniformly positive outcome -- "feeding the world's growing population" -- on the basis of which a kind of political position, namely, that these "crops" "in general" are "necessary," is all too predictably championed.

Let us set aside the enormously relevant fact that we already know runaway population growth is far from inevitable and can be addressed immediately, the moment in fact one simply empowers women in patriarchal societies with even minimal financial resources and social support on the basis of which they take control of their lives and their reproductive health, and also by providing accurate and reliable knowledge about reproductive health and access to family planning services to women.

Literacy, family planning, a financial stake, and equality before the law for women and all the world's people is the solution to overpopulation, in my view, not blanket celebrations of multinational corporations and energy-input-intensive irrigation-intensive petrochemical Industrial Agriculture and their genetic-branding genomic-enclosure IP-strategies, if Mr. Brand will forgive my saying so. And before any of you roll your eyes at my prescription, consider seriously what assumptions would lead one to treat it as an outcome less possible to accomplish than one in which we presumably resign the fate of a sustainable equitable diverse world to the profit-mad extractive-exploitative-competitive corporate-militarist actors who are responsible for the crisis at hand.

Now, I am far from denying that quite a lot of what might be described as genetic modification might indeed be beneficial -- selectivity and hybridity have been part of the cultural archive of agricultural cultivation (the words culture and cultivated are etymologically connected after all) since well before that culture was transmitted through writing technologies, and I do not doubt that both sustainable agriculture and especially polycultural practices might benefit from sound genetic science as from other relevant science in a well-regulated accountable social order.

What is most troubling to me about the conjuration of the hyper-generalized abstraction "genetically modified crops" in Brand's futurological chestnut is that it is conspicuously indifferent to many of the genetic modifications we know to be designed not to improve nutrition or disease-resistance or insect-resistance or the like, but instead to promote short-term profitability in the usual ways corporate logic dictates: either by dismissing or externalizing possible costs and risks by devoting insufficient critical scrutiny to the manifold longer-term or wider-scale impacts of modifications or even suppressing problematic results, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, by deploying modification instead simply to create or consolidate artificial brand dependencies. Consider "Roundup-Ready" crops and seeds with terminator genes that eliminate traditions of seed-saving and seed-sharing that have defined agriculture for centuries and provided some measure of autonomy for family farmers and small-scale community agriculture, much of which is incomparably more sustainable than Industrial-Ag and provides nutritious food no longer available through Industrial-Ag: both of these are promoted under the generality of "genetically-modified crops" but with no discernible positive impact on the urgent quandaries of global poverty or mass starvation which presumably provide Brand's pretext for championing this abstraction in the first place.

As with "Green Cities" championed in the abstract as a way of evacuating the actually fraught environmental politics of actually existing cities, "genetically modified crops" championed as Brand does in general evacuates our engagement with the actual substance of grasping and weighing the developmental risks, costs, and benefits of different modifications to different stakeholders in different contexts.

This leads to a more general charge I regularly level at the futurological mindset; namely, that it is a politics that functionally de-politicizes the substance of technodevelopmental struggles in history, and in a way that structurally benefits incumbent interests and hence is functionally conservative even when it is advocated by those who imagine themselves or at any rate portray themselves as progressives.

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