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

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

More Technoprogressive Musings

I just stumbled [via The Protest] onto this very clear-eyed and sympathetic assessment of what I have alternately called a tech-progressive or technoprogressive perspective. The article goes on to discuss a number of interesting policy issues as they look from the technoprogressive standpoint, which the author calls a “third axis” for progressive politics. Give it a looksee.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The idea implicit the article should be made into a reality: we should construct a tri-dimensional version of The World's Most Self-Serving Political Quiz.

Dale Carrico said...

I think probably the quiz would illuminate less than it might want to -- since technoprogressive attitudes toward remediative genetic medicine, longevity medicine, neuroceutical modification, space exploration, nanoscale manufacture, bioremediative engineering, renewable energy, networked communications, coordination, collaboration, and representation technologies, and the like simply don't align in any kind of coherent ways into stable categories.

This is not just because notoriously contested terms foundational to various broad-stroke political temperaments (liberal/libertarian, democratic, egalitarian, etc.) are brought into special crisis by so many of these developments -- esp. notions of fairness, custom, and consent -- but also because abstract commitments get hung up in history in unexpected ways.

And so, for example, one might expect the arguments around both genetic and cognitive enhancement to align pretty stably, but because genetic medical discourse has more or less accidently attached itself to ready-made attitudes toward abortion politics and cognitive modification is freighted with ready-made drug-war politics, "conservatives" sometimes assume unexpected positions as do liberals that lead to strange alliances not only among what would normally be progressive and conservative foes, but sometimes equally strange alliances and schism among the already strange affiliations from one modification position to the next. Similar weirdnesses occur when we find positions from digital copyright discussions grafted onto positions about the copyrighting of genetic material or discursive tropes from video surveillance applied to biometrics.

The terrain is quicksand, and its mapping would sprout and shed new axes by the minute...