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

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

The Future's So Bright You Gotta Wear Shades

I truly worry that this was the last chance for democratic push-back, peer-to-peer, against a neo-feudal corporate-militarist America, and we may well be blowing it, right here, right now. Longer term education-agitation-organization may well be trending away from Movement Republicanism, not to mention ramifying pressures from post-US-hegemonic players, but it isn't at all clear that unraveling neoliberal ponzi-schemes, climate change, energy and resource descent, arms proliferation, global destabilization among other planetary problems are waiting around to give us time to become sane enough soon enough to be equal to them. The United States could very easily become in no time flat a hopelessly diseased distressed debt-ridden ignorant gun-saturated backwater neck deep in Greenhouse storms and riven with ethnic and ideological hatreds, while moneyed and incumbent interests retreat to walled enclaves with their loot to watch the show and pluck out the occasionally photogenic slave.

All that in mind, I must say that the always already somewhat surreal exchanges I have been having for years with chirpy futurologists handwaving about the technogizmolicious acceleration of acceleration toward gengineered and cyborgic hardbodies with three-foot chromium phalluses and nanobotic treasure caves and better-than-real virtual orgy-pits and escaping via uploading, rocketing, space elevatoring, geo-engineering, or otherwise technofixing our way out of climate catastrophe and all of this under the watchful eye of some sooper-kind sooper-genius sooper-Dad singularitarian robot god have become such obscene gargoyles of epic implausibility and irresponsibility (except as, you know, straight up escapist geek wankery without any pretensions to actual policymaking or sciencemaking) that it is almost impossible to believe that all these transhumanists and extropians and techno-immortalists I've been sparring with over their stealthily reactionary politics and conceptual confusions and theological vestiges are really for real at all. I mean, really? Really?

3 comments:

John Howard said...

Man that's good, Dale! James Kunstler couldn't have said it better, and he doesn't even know about the transhumanist futurologists, he seems to only be aware of the alternative fuels futurologists, who might be the same people but during the day.

I just started PurpleMassGroup.com, for Red and Blue to come together for responsible government by tossing out the extreme libertarians, and this amormundi post would be an excellent example to link to, because it shows a spirit of putting aside radical libertarianism claims to genetic engineering and addressing instead the real big problems.

It seems like this is a good time to remind you that this was my argument to you, that you are right there with the singulartarians when it comes to claiming there will be sooper-fertility, in spite of its epic implausibility and irresponsibility. Why is that better-than-real sooper ability a natural right which must be claimed in spite of the immediate gains that would be made from admitting it is silly and giving up the demand for it? The demand for it is holding back equal protections for thousands of couples, and wasting resources...

Dale Carrico said...

I'm still a pro-choice democrat for whom choice means making abortion as safe and accessible as possible for women to end unwanted pregnancies and also means making ARTs (assistive reproductive technologies) as safe and accessible as possible for women to facilitate wanted pregnancies. This choice advocacy includes the wanted pregnancies that homophobic freaks like you are scared of, whether real or imagined, and this doesn't make me a "libertarian" or a "futurologist" however you want to spin it. Perhaps this is the right time to remind you that I know enough about what you are selling not to be bamboozled by it. By the way, I regularly teach Kunstler in my courses on environmentalist politics and discourse, and I must say that I find him incomparably more reasonable than I find you. I will, of course, delete any further posts from you in which you try to draw me as usual into yet another of your pointless debates about the phantom menace to straight couples of queer folks who want to have kids by making recourse to actually-safe actually-existing ARTs. Happy holidays and, as always, dude, really, get some help.

John Howard said...

My here. Happy holidays to you too. I like your writing.