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

Sunday, August 09, 2009

Prologue for Futural Politics

First, crucially, there is no such thing as "technology in general" but always only innumerable technodevelopments arising from funding, research, testing, publication, education, regulation, application, marketing, distribution, appropriation and so on. It is worse than wrong to try to organize a politics around a generalized "pro" or "anti" technology distinction, because, of course, one will be and very much should be for and against specific technodevelopments depending on their likely outcomes to their stakeholders, and the politics through which one expresses one's commitments to and against these developments can be lodged at any number of locations, technical, social, cultural, political, and so on. To simplify this terrain into a "pro" or "con" in respect to "technology in general" is to indulge the worst kind of mystification, to disable sensible deliberation, and too often I fear amounts to an effort to hijack the prestige of technoscience in the service of other ideological commitments.

Second, political commitments, therefore, precede technological assessments, "technical calculations" do not constitute an alternative to or substitute for political considerations. We will be for or against a particular technodevelopmental course or outcome because that is a course or outcome that seems to us good/bad, moral/immoral, beautiful/ugly, righteous/vicious, emancipatory/exploitative, democratizing/authoritarian, consensual/violent in terms we already accept apart from (or at any rate together with) our technical assessments of technoscientific possibility. These values are not "written onto" devices, they are not part of the "specs": The street finds its own uses for things, as William Gibson is good enough to remind us. Those, then, who would express disdain for politics as compared to science or who would claim to find in science a way to circumvent politics are almost always proposing to treat their own political commitments as "natural" and hence beyond criticism, and/or seeking to deploy a technical vocabulary in an authoritarian manner to circumvent political contestation they could not otherwise overcome. This is not a sign of superior scientificity on their part, but a confused or deceptive effort to divert science to political ends at the expense of both science and politics properly so called.

Third, there is no form of politics less suited to the aspirations of progressive democratizing technodevelopment than identity politics. Identity politics seek to ensure that a self-identified minority of people are protected from (or in their more aggressive-moralizing variations, seek to prevail among) the diversity of people with whom they share the world but with whom they dis-identify themselves. With persistently stigmatized minorities identity politics often seem vitally necessary, but even in such circumstances the struggle to police the boundaries of legible identity communities to ensure their standing before the law can impose costs to the actual lived diversity of their members that can be quite as hard to bear as the harms they seek to ameliorate (see Paul Gilroy on race or Judith Butler on queerness, for example). But beyond these general perplexities always attaching to any politics of identity, it seems to me that nowhere are identity politics less appropriate than in any politics presumably devoted to progressive democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle. Surely, the point of departure for any such politics would be the insistence that the process of technodevelopmental social struggle remain as open to the voices of all the stakeholders to technoscientific change as possible? How on earth is such a vision compatible with sub(cult)ural identifications with idealized outcomes and utopian sketches of the furniture of "the future"?

Fourth, "The Future" is always "the future" for one group over others, it is an idealization arising out of the imagination, concerns, anxieties, aspirations of that group here and now. Futurity, on the other hand, at least in my own usage of the term, is a word to describe our awareness of the openness, the promise, the threats, the problems contained in the present by virtue of the fact that we live in the present with a plurality of peers who see things differently than we do and want things different from us and know things we don't but all of whom share the present and share the work arising out of that present, and the presents-to-come opening onto tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Futurity is open, it is another word for freedom, but "The Future" is a cramped parochial substitute from today for the open futurity arising out of the present into presents-to-come. It seems to me quite clear that progressives and democrats must defend the politics of open futurity over any politics of "the future" some sub(cult)ure of members happen to identify with and hope will prevail over the earth and history.

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