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

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Careful of the Teacups

To those among my variously dynamistically upwingesque and futurologically extrotranshumanoidal colleagues who still selectively quote atrocity exhibition Glenn Reynolds as some kind of techno-darling -- presumably because, like William Safire, Virginia Postrel, Thomas L. Friedman, and other retrofuturists in the interminably tiresome libertopian mode, Reynolds has grasped the stunningly obvious fact that there are real profits to be had in technoscientific r & d -- I want to recommend the blog Instaputz, devoted to "Systematically documenting the putziness of Glenn Reynolds, Pajamas Media, and various other Putzen."

Before the self-righteous chorus of protestation ensues that "putz" discourse is little likely to raise the conversational tone, vis-à-vis Reynolds and his army of Dittohead Davids, I want to point out that one has to be a dangerous idiot at this point to honestly imagine that Glenn Reynolds is going to do anything at civilization's tea party but smash the fragile cups and saucers. Democratic civilization was designed to protect us from the paraphernalia of police states: Nudging the likes of Glenn Reynolds to the periphery of the tea party, or at any rate having the sense to keep an eye on him, perhaps to exchange his porcelain for a paper cup until he shows signs of knowing how to use one safely, and at most occasionally patting his head disdainfully when he goes off onto one of his premodern tears (these days he is busy assuring us that Oceania has always been at war with Iran and so the love of law and the law of love compel us to murder and bomb thereabouts forthwith and so on and so forth), can only "raise the conversational tone," even if social stigmatization (ergo: "putz") is the only way to jar him into the realization that we are on to him and that he must change, else be disdained.

If you want to call yourself "technoprogressive" because you've decided the phrase doesn't "scare the straights," plus it's got a nice beat and you can dance to it, I fear it is my duty to remind you that you have some actual standards to live up to, among them actually being progressive in the first place. Otherwise, you're just another mouthbreathing reactionary gadget fetishist looking for a Daddy to order you around because you feel scared, or a Daddy to side with because you feel small (a spectacle that is quite as unedifying when one's Daddy of choice wears a labcoat as when he wears priestly vestiments or stands behind a Presidential Seal instead).

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