And Another Thing

I hope that those folks who endlessly castigate my "negativity" here (mostly because a lot of Robot Cultists read my blog and think it is "negative" not to drink their moonshine and to ridicule the palpably ridiculous things they say) will notice that the prior post "accentuates the positive" so much as to sound positively like Mouseketeer Roll Call in places.

But, more to the point, I would like to think some will notice that I have taken pains in that longer post to connect my politics as a Democrat to the left of most Democrats but invested absolutely in the real politics of Democrats against corporatists in the Party and Movement Republicans outside it, to my politics as somebody who writes quite a lot about silly futurologists.

Sometimes I critique superlative futurology as an extreme symptom and expression of the pathologies of more mainstream, more prevailing neoliberal corporatist global developmental discourses -- as well as inter-implicated neoconservative militarist discourses that are just as prevailing -- exposing and clarifying their shared anti-humanistic reductionisms, their technocratic and market-naturalist anti-democratizing elitisms, their scarcely stealthed eugenicist norms. (And since "eugenicist" is a Fighting Word, let me quickly add that I mean by it here, for simplicity's sake, mostly norms deployed always in the service of "competitive advantages" in a dehumanizing competition falsely posited as beyond question, and always beholden to racist refigurations of the realities of overexploitation as self-congratulatory narratives of "underdevelopment" enunciated by those who imagine themselves "more-developed").

But in the prior post I think the connection of my anti-futurological critiques and my pro-democracy politics is legible from a different direction than the usual one I just mentioned: I focus there instead on the more common or garden variety modes of hyperbole that bedevil democratizing struggles for real health care reform or for strengthened collective bargaining rights or for more sustainable transportation, buildings, and agricultural standards and policies -- hyperbole playing out in, for example, corporate advertising hype or in concern-trolling editorials on policy questions.

One discerns only the precursory trace in this everyday hyperbole and irrationality of the incandescent pathologies of superlative futurological discourses to which I have directed so much of my own critical energies here and elsewhere. But perhaps that trace sheds a helpfully different kind of light than usual on my preoccupations with futurological discourses and what I take to be their anti-democratizing and otherwise deranging impacts on sensible public discourse in the midst of ongoing disruptive technoscientific change.