Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, February 17, 2006

Closing A Door, Opening a Window

Paul Hughes, who I continue to read with pleasure and profit as a poet and sometimes prophet, is frustrated that the default culture of "transhumanist-identification" is to his mind too reductionist-materialist to appreciate the particular joys to which he means to devote his attentions and about which he wants to report back to a world of like-minded adventurers. Now, I'm a pretty rampaging skeptical atheistical materialist-type myself and so Paul's frustrations might not seem to be the sort that would bother me, particularly, but I do actually see exactly where he is coming from, and I completely and emphatically agree with him about the silliness of reductionism and scientism.

What aggravates me personally is what I perceive to be a kind of insistent antipoliticism in too many technophiles -- whether corporate futurologists, hard-boiled technocrats, libertopian anti-democrats, Bayesian triumphalists, "Brights," or the various "transhumanist"-identified folks. By "antipoliticism," I mean to describe in them a curious hostility to or naivete about political life. Often this will involve an outright denial of the necessity or relevance of the political which will drive many technophiles into facile reductionist and engineering fantasies that would circumvent through the recommendations of scientific belief the ineradicable dimension of plurality, insecurity, unpredictability, and conflict inhering in public life in all its scary, threatening, exhilarating promise. Although I think this is a different set of concerns than Paul's, I do think there are interesting connections between our critiques.

For me, in matters of technological development and especially in any struggle for progress, however construed, the political is prior to the technical. The political provokes, articulates, and distributes the technical. And this should surely be reflected in the assumptions and thinking and proposals of advocates of particular technological outcomes and in those who seek to interpret the meaning of ongoing technological change.

I don't personally believe there is such a thing as "technological development," really. There are instead innumerable, often incompatible, developments. And hence I don't think you can properly say "technology" is good or bad as such. Technologies arise in contexts, they are deployed in contexts and to indefinitely many ends that likewise have their contexts. In every case, these contexts lead us into political and other normative considerations.

Hell, I don't even believe in "the future." I believe in a social democracy that wants to keep the present as open as possible, both today and tomorrow. It isn't at all clear to me that progress construed as empowerment, emancipation, and openness is shepherded along much by politics in its "identity-modes." For more on that topic, I recommend, "The Trouble With Transhumanism," Part One and Part Two. For still more grumpy castigatory ranting, try Listen, Transhumanist! And as for you, Paul, rock on, pal! Let a bazillion flowers bloom!

No comments: