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

Monday, May 04, 2009

Another

If you can chisel past the silliness and the facile argumentative gambits, there do seem to me to be issues that matter playing out in these exchanges, the latest of which drew this response from me:
You celebrate your membership in your supposedly world-historical movement but when you attract critical attention retreat instantly into vacuities and insist on the individual differences that obtain (always, as a matter of course) between its adherents. It is very tiresome and dull beyond words. You really can't have it both ways, though you certainly can keep trying to, and to general ridicule in consequence: Your "transhumanism" actually means something or it doesn't, your membership in it -- eagerly and incessantly avowed by you -- has some actual content or it doesn't. And those things it means and that content it has, to the extent that they are published or declared do invite scrutiny on those terms.

Your tendency to fall back on easily defensible secular democratic chestnuts in such moments is no help to you at all -- since nobody needs to join a Robot Cult to affirm consensus science or secular democracy, and since nobody once affirming these will find themselves talking as Robot Cultists actually distinctively do, about a facile abstraction denominated "technology in general," about which one presumably can have either monolithically "positive" or "negative" feelings, and through which their personal transcendence via superintelligence, superlongevity, or superabundance is expected one day to "arrive."

It is true that this is not all Robot Cultists talk about -- since like most people, even zealots, they will talk about the weather and other more conventional sorts of things in between episodes that illustrate their actually distinctive zealotry -- these are just some of the actually distinctive things they talk about which might justify their own faith that they are unique after all and have some distinctive contribution to make "as transhumanists," so-called. It is regrettable that this distinction is also so ridiculous, but there you are.

As I say, anti-democratic tendencies to technocracy, eugenicism, and market ideology also provide critical purchase, for those who want to look beyond your superlativity for further reasons to dismiss you, even though, again, these are to be sure tendencies and certainly not as such always fully avowed by every single actual transhumanist-identified person. Individual people who advocate a discourse can be ignorant, deluded, contradictory, confused, repressed, hypocritical, deceptive in that advocacy as individuals, without rendering us thereby incapable of delineating the general tendencies of the discourse itself, nonetheless.

Hilariously contrary to sense, I notice Giulio that you are eager to declare your own superlative futurological views widely supported by "experts" and recommend a google search to prove it. I daresay the results of a search in an actual citation index in the relevant fields of scholarship presumably in question will be considerably less congenial to your delusions on this score. Perhaps it is with good reason that you concentrate your attentions on online press releases and popular science sites.

It is much to pitied that you seem to regard demurral from membership in your Robot Cult as a sign of supernaturalism or luddism, of all things, but I will admit that it is pleasing to draw you into such conspicuously deranged declarations in public places, inasmuch as the craziness of your vantage is rendered that much more palpable when you do, and in that palpable craziness, I can only hope, it is rendered less likely to do its damage to actual progress and to sense.

Your readers would do well to learn better to distinguish actual claims of feasibility that are testable as such from the metaphors and frames through which factual claims are arranged into meaningful utterances that better connect to norms, aspirations, and wider experience (so that they can be communicated, taught, be corralled in service to grant proposals, and so on). One can easily see the sense of actually useful innovations in information science, for example, without approving the way information scientists typically appropriate the language of biology or personhood to help capture what they take to be the significance of these innovations or declare where they hope these innovations will lead. These latter moves are not, strictly speaking, scientific at all, but matters of rhetoric, and are ill-understood until they are considered on those terms.

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