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

Monday, April 06, 2009

CRN, BTW

By the way, I happen to like Chris Phoenix personally, we've had some interesting and perfectly mutually respectful exchanges on philosophical questions. I also know and like Chris's partner at CRN, Mike Treder. I see their discourse there as one that oscillates curiously between superlative claims I spurn and more reasonable technodevelopmental considerations. I suspect that both their close connection with transhumanists and their somewhat fetishistic fixation on an idealized technodevelopmental outcome they call the "nanofactory" will eventually undermine what I have found to be reasonable in them and they will be drawn down fatally into the discursive gravity well of the Robot Cult think-tank archipelago in the fullness of time. I could be wrong, certainly I hope that I am, and their affiliation with Jamais Cascio (the only self-described "futurist" on earth I value and take seriously as a public intellectual) is a sign of good sense on their part that gives me hope for them.

1 comment:

Nato Welch said...

I volunteer with Mike & Chris, doing some light mailing list management and web hosting work. I also participated in CRN's scenario generation project a few years ago, which was interesting.

One of the outcomes of that was to embark on a project of examining Digital Rights Management in the context of the nanofactory concept. Being firmly in the Anti-DRM camp in contemporary technologies, you can guess how I felt about it's application to nanofactories (Being lazy, I never finished it. It's perhaps half done).

The interesting thing about the prospect of superlative tech like a nanofactory in comparison to modern networked media-players, though, is that the imagined destructive capacities of them are, uh, "real" (ok, maybe not. I DO get your points about the dangers of speculating about non-existent technology, just bear with me, here), unlike the bullshit chicken-littling we get from record executives about the apocalypse of creativity that will result if they don't get paid.

Not to be caught naysaying with one half of a manifesto, the third part of the piece concerned itself with alternatives to DRM that would actually deliver the things DRM can't. Accountability, deterrence against destructive misuse, that kind of thing. And what I found was that these alternatives actually had less to do with the internal design of the devices themselves and more to do with how they were deployed, and how they related to the people and organizations in which they were used. The toy didn't matter nearly so much as the playground. I think that's when I started noticing that politics was more important than technology.

They included ideas deploying the device along a spectrum of public or private use (think http://TechShop.ws or public kiosks rather than private garages), which help to create greater accountability, since what you're producing has to be done in public, and possibly reviewed by others.
The other main alternative to DRM, the nanoblocks idea (originally Tom Craver's), wherein microscale blocks are pre-assembled like legos rather than allowing any nanofactory to utilize the full power of atoms. Once you start scaling up like that, where does it end?

And that thought led to another critique I have with the nanofactory, that it focuses on just one, perfect point on the development spectrum. The more I thought about it, the less I really thought I'd really need a complete, fully-functional atomic-scale fabrication device to be just tickled pink. A http://reprap.org/ would do nicely, and, as a bonus, //they already exist//.

But you don't exactly see people making bombs with Reraps, now, do you? Now, I feel silly having spent all this time worrying over the destructive potential of ONE, speculative device, without considering the vast developmental landscape technologies like this always exist in. It's not enough to get there; you have to get there //from here//.

So I think you could say that was my first taste of superlative technological derangement.

-

I seem to recall (although I can't remember where) Mike writing a piece that pretty much admitted that the only scenarios of emergence of robust molecular manufacturing capabilities that it actually could make sense to prepare for from a public policy standpoint were scenarios in which such tech emerged sooner, rather than later. Later emergences would happen in historical social, economic, and political terrains we know less about, even if the techniques themselves were the same. Thus, it was more pointless to propose policies the farther out you go.

It sounded to me like CRN was consciously painting itself into a corner as a result. Once you admit the futility of preparing for later emergences (emergencies?), then you're only left with the more proximate scenarios - which are the ones that are actually least likely to occur! As a result, even the //maximally cautious and reasonable// approach to "preparation" ends up dragging us into the same superlative chicken-little kookery, //even when we don't want to//.

I'm not sure how to handle this. That may part of why I've stopped trying.