Technodevelopment in an Age of Consent

I have often chastised so-called "futurist" discourses for a "libertopian" tendency. I have noted an apparently irresistible enthrallment among technocentric thinkers with the metaphor of "spontaneous order" that seems to nudge even the temperamentally left-leaning members of the self-appointed futurological congress to talk about technodevelopmental social struggle in terms that bolster neoliberal "free trade" dogmas, that model technodevelopmental deliberation as a matter primarily of consumer choice, that conceive of the ongoing nonviolent democratic reconciliation of dissensus as a barrier to rather than an expression of desired technodevelopmental social outcomes, and so on.

But do I fall prey to this tendency myself when I foreground the value of consent over the value of formulating and applying universal standards where matters of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification are concerned? That is to say, do I become in my championing of a civil libertarian consensual prosthetic self-determination a kind of libertopian myself?

Because, make no mistake about it, I really do have a rather civil libertarian outlook on questions of modification medicine. There are key caveats and qualifications and exceptions and regulations and safeguards to think of, but once we chisel down to basic principles I really do tend to think individuals know what is wanted and best for themselves, and I really do tend to think parents and legal guardians know what is best for their children and wards.

I certainly understand that these consensual self-determinations and decisions on behalf of children and wards do, in the aggregate, generate wider public effects. But, again, on the whole, I am inclined to the view that decisions arising out of the scene of informed, nonduressed consent conduce better in general to the public good than do decisions arising out of universalizing mandates imposed by authorities. Hence, I think that the focus of a progressive bioethics (as for progressive technoethics more generally) should be to bolster the scene of informed, nonduressed consent, rather than, say, to promulgate and enforce some stringent set of abstract standards as universally as possible.

I can easily see how my civil libertarian attitude in these matters might be accused of re-staging the fantasy of the benign, optimizing "invisible hand" in the face of the real quandaries of modification medicine (for example, the many variations on the fear that either malign elites or facile popular fashions will foist on us an anti-social army of sooperbabies). In trusting relatively informed, nonduressed citizens to make comparably responsible medical decisions, I might seem to be preaching yet another of the interminable sermons of the gospel of self-regulating free markets. After all of my endless railing about the need to invigorate the public sphere, to implement deliberative developmental modes, to rid ourselves of the false idols of "naturalized" protocols of exchange that preferentially benefit elites in the name of "free trade," and to democratize technodevelopmental social struggle has it really come to this: When push comes to shove, confronted with a real technodevelopmental quandary, have I turned libertopian at the first opportunity?

The short answer is, most certainly not.

It is true that I see little point in indulging the philosophical predisposition to construct a castle of formally universal abstractions claiming to insulate us in advance from all the depredations arising out of human frailty. This seems an enterprise which that very human frailty, conjoined to the contingencies of history, dooms to failure in any case. Further, it seems to me that philosophical prescription in its popular policing moods has acquired a well-deserved disrepute among democratic citizens at this point, and that there is little point in pushing it or pretending otherwise. And so, it is quite right to notice that I have no axioms on offer from which one can comfortably deduce that fairness or responsibility or diversity will prevail in the throes of technodevelopmental social struggle against elite interests, short-term greed, faddish markets, and so on, edifying though it might be to have some reassuring Iron Laws at my disposal.

Rather than advocate conceptual bulwarks against "shallow opinion" or "fickle masses" or "selfish elites" as decisional frameworks mischievously abroad in the land, I simply insist instead on the substantiation of the scene of informed, nonduressed consent through a politics of radical and social democracy. To brutally oversimplify for the bumper sticker set, mine is a politics of a2k + p2p + BIG: The fight for free expression, public domain, fair use, transparent authorities (government, corporate, academic), peer-to-peer formations, access to knowledge, conjoined to the fight for a universal basic income guarantee, universal basic healthcare, lifelong education, therapy, and retraining. My assumption in all this is nothing more sophisticated than the idea that democratization is better than elite authorization as a way to facilitate progressive outcomes in general. This commitment seems to me to re-stage the oldest most basic conflict there is: democracy versus aristocracy.

To mistake the commitment to democracy as an apology for incumbent interests seems to me either to represent as basic a misunderstanding of the stakes of democracy against aristocracy as can be imagined, or to represent an indulgence in cynical misrepresentation, a mobilization of popular distrust of elites perversely in the service of anti-democratic politics. It is no surprise to find bioconservatives caught up in such confusions and indulging in such dishonesties.

Since I insist not on the supremacy of "choice" (as technophiliacs so often seem to do: substituting for the vertiginous freedom of democratic contestation the domesticated "selection" of options on a menu provided by elites and inertia), but on the scene of informed, nonduressed consent and decision, and since I insist that consent, properly so-called must be substantiated by social supports that insulate decisions from duress as well as by access to reliable knowledges that enable decisions to be informed my view looks far more like democratic socialism than a genuflection to neoliberal market fundamentalist pieties.

Now, it is all very well to propose that the scene of consent must be informed and nonduressed, of course, but it matters enormously that only extraordinarily privileged people can regularly affirm that such terms obtain in their own decisional circumstances for now. One doesn't want, in the face of the complexities of the relative knowledgeability and relative duress of the scene of consent as it actually exists to throw up one hands in "despair" and extol a generalized attitude of "access" or, what comes to the same thing, of "let[ting] the market decide"; but neither does one want to add insult to injury by dismissing or denigrating or patronizingly bypassing such autonomy and consent as people manage on their own terms. To say, as I do, that the radical and social democratic politics of access to knowledge and universal social welfare are prior to the politics of consensual prosthetic self-determination is to recognize the terms on which that consent depends, to the extent that the scene of consent is legible and legitimate as such. But this cannot be to demand that we must arrive first at true political and economic democracy before we embark safely on the project to democratize technodevelopment and consensualize our prostheses -- since these two progressive projects are interimplicated.

Rather, I think it is the business of democratic governance to protect people from scenes of compromised consent offered up as if they were whole, scenes of decision rendered illegible and illegitimate through misinformation or duress. This is not in the least, I venture to add, the same thing as "protecting" people from deciding things with which elites disagree nor patronizingly insulating finite people from the non-catastrophic costs that readily eventuate from bad decisions. This is a progressive commitment substantiated on the ground

[one] by political campaigns for, among other things, transparency for authoritative institutions (states, corporations, universities), access to knowledge (anti-state secrecy, anti-proprietary secrets, anti-copyright extension stealthed as IP "harmonization," pro-FOIA, pro-fair use, pro-subsidized p2p-FlOSS, etc.), fair trade and general welfare (strong social democratic welfare politics: protection and encouragement of collective organizing and public expression, universal basic healthcare, lifelong education and training, basic guaranteed income), and so on;

[two] by foregrounding concerns with the scene of consent and its compromise in progressive rhetorics, especially in matters of technodevelopmental social struggle, demanding a greater sensitivity in questions of regulation, of access, of the distribution of technodevelopmental costs, risks, and benefits here and now to fraud, corruption, and to the impact of uneven distributions of information, authority, wealth, and so on;

and [three] by actually retroactively compensating the vulnerable, the misinformed, the precariat for unduly risky circumstances and unduly costly outcomes arising out of scenes of consent and decision compromised in fact by misinformation, by fraud, by hype, by blackmail, by monetary or physical duress, and so on.

Probably it is something like the [third] commitment that would end up cashing out in safer, fairer, more democratic, more diverse technodevelopmental outcomes more than the [first] and [second].

But I will say that in the absence of commitments to the realism of versions of [two] and [three] it is hard to find occasional protestations to belief in utopian ideals (however desirable and eventually achievable they may be) of the kind registered in [one] to be much more than empty, feel-good rituals for pampered incumbent interests. Genuflections of this kind often provide the opening and closing frames for what amounts more generally to a complacent cataloging and celebration of techno-wonders in our midst and in the pipeline, and endless reiteration in this vein with nary a registration of a failed prediction, a costly outcome, an unfair impact, a need for restitution, oversight, or democratic deliberation fails to provide much in the way of reassurance for long that one is on the side of democracy when all is said and done.