Annoying Robot Cultists With Critique

In the Moot, "JimF" dismisses the scientific pretensions of transhumanists declaring their guiding assumptions "[m]ore like… a naive and literal-minded expectation that 'science' will reify the tropes… of post-1970 science fiction." I think this is a fair assessment, especially if to these we add even older tropes from folk mythology (Golem, Philosopher's Stone, Fountain of Youth, Aladdin's Lamp, Sorcerer's Apprentice) and theology (omnipredicated god becomes super-predicated posthuman techno-transcendence, not to mention Eden, Resurrection, Ascension, Apocalypse).

Superlative futurologists are endlessly infuriated by my refusal to engage in critique on their terms. To do so essentially would mean interminably to debate with them the Robot God odds or pour over their Drextech specs with them, however disagreeably at the level of detail, like monks debating the numbers of angels that can dance on a pin head for weeks on end. Of course, in my view, to indulge the Robot Cultists in this is not so much to critique them at all but to enable them, since it functions to consolidate the reality effect of these altogether imaginary objects the better to facilitate their real work in the lives of the faithful.

As often as not, my sense is that this "work" consists of compensating for existential anxieties related to human finitude (anxieties about the contingency of human experience, human susceptibility to error and humiliation, fears of death and disease, body loathing more generally), compensating for traumas or perceived lacks at a personal level (perceived slights, negotiation of stigmas, fears of inadequacy), symptomizing and playing out broader social and cultural contradictions (exploitation and empire anxiously refigured as progress, rationalizations for greed, parochialism, moralizing, elitism, externalization of social costs, intergenerational tensions), that sort of thing.

To the extent that these concerns are the least bit relevant it should be patent that anthropological and rhetorical analyses are perfectly apt (if not indispensable) to a proper understanding let alone critique of superlative futurological discourses and subcultures. That such critiques annoy futurologists is neither here nor there.