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

Sunday, May 09, 2010

Must Read: Athena's Beautiful Essaylet about Neanderthal Genes as "The Hidden Thread in Our Tapesty"

It was on her blog first but it is now available to a wider audience via HuffPo. Very cool!

9 comments:

admin said...

Nice to see some mainstream science get promoted on that wasteland of woo called the Huffington Post.

Athena Andreadis said...

I'm trying, Martin! My personal experience is that editors underestimate their readers consistently. You can see from the comments that people thirst for real science, as long as it's not so jargon-laden as to become a slog.

Thank you for the signal boost, Dale.

admin said...

Yeah, Chopra's interminably inane articles usually receive torrents of criticism in the comments, but woomeisters still outnumber the promoters of consensus science among the authors of articles published on HuffPo. At least that's my experience.

RadicalCoolDude said...

Athena, you should write a scathing critique of Transhumanism, Singularitarianism and Immortalism for the Huffington Post in order to establish yourself as, among other things, the go-to robot-cultism skeptic. ;)

Athena Andreadis said...

I'm actually considering a book, RadicalCoolDude... but the Huffington Post is not a bad intermediate stop. I've touched on these topics in my blog, and I also wrote three articles for H+ magazine (commissioned, mind you) that drew the expected shrieks of outrage from True Believers. Here are the links for the latter:

The Quantum Choice: You Can Have Either Sex or Immortality

Ghost in the Shell: Why Our Brains Will Never Live in the Matrix

Miranda Wrongs: Reading Too Much into the Genome

RadicalCoolDude said...

AA: I'm actually considering a book, RadicalCoolDude...

Great! Can't wait to read it. Do you have a working title?

By the way, I suggest you weave a critique of bioconservatism/bioluddite into your critique of transhumanism to neutralize the predictable accusation that you are a bioconservative/bioluddite.

AA: but the Huffington Post is not a bad intermediate stop.

:)

AA: I've touched on these topics in my blog, and I also wrote three articles for H+ magazine (commissioned, mind you) that drew the expected shrieks of outrage from True Believers. Here are the links for the latter:

I've already read your great articles and appreciated them very much.

Athena Andreadis said...

RadicalCoolDude, your bioluddite suggestion is excellent. No working title yet... but it will come. I'm good at snappy titles. And I'm glad you enjoyed the articles!

Dale Carrico said...

As someone who has been accused of being a transhumanist-libertechian-technophile by various bioconservatives and a bioconservative-luddite-deathist by various Robot Cultists I am here to tell you that there is little one can do to evade such charges.

Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that as a matter of plain pragmatics politics biocon orgs and transhumanist orgs actually share an interest in seeing to it that technodevelopmental issues are framed in hyperbolic terms, that their own antagonism delineates the technodevelopmental terrain, when of course almost all actually reasonable scientific practice and policy deliberation is happening in the mile-wide richness between the inch-thin crusts at their extremes.

It isn't hard to see how there is not just a constitutive antagonism between technophobia and technophilia, but a deeper continuity between the two as precisely complementary un(der)critical vantages, both conducing in their hyperbole, emotionalism, distraction, and undermining of consensus science and democratic deliberation to incumbent interests in my view.

I have of course written extensively about how the homo naturalis with whom bioconservatives identify over biomedical equity-diversity-consent and the homo superior with whom transhumanists identify over their worldly peers yield precisely complementary eugenicist and authoritarian politics in my view.

The extensive case I have made against superlative varieties of futurological discourse gives rise to an equally extensive and again precisely complementary case against what I would call supernativity (note the "n").

It is an interesting paradox that the superlative techno-utopians who crow about their scientificity ultimately disdain materiality in their fetishization of the digital and propose an essentially transcendentalizing worldview, while the supernative biocons whose discourse is suffused with gestures to spirituality and a world made by hand ultimately fetishize the familiar furniture of the world and a small sliver of human morphologies and lifeways with which they happen parochially to identify at the moment and which they would police into continence through the heavy hand of the state.

It is a profound error, however, to mistake the paradoxes and skirmishing antagonisms between superlative and supernative futurological discourses and subcultures as more substantive than their underlying continuities, their structural similarities, and their complementary facilitation of authoritarian, eugenicist, anti-democratizing technodevelopmental politics in my view.

RadicalCoolDude said...

Carrico: As someone who has been accused of being a transhumanist-libertechian-technophile by various bioconservatives and a bioconservative-luddite-deathist by various Robot Cultists I am here to tell you that there is little one can do to evade such charges.

Having followed your debates with transhumanists and bioconservatives for a while now, I am fully aware that nothing you say will prevent the fanatics among them to lie to themselves and to others in order to ignore the truth of your critique.

However, I still think Athena's critique will have more resonance with people interested in transhumanism but who haven't drunk the kool-aid yet if she makes it a habit of criticizing transhumanism and bioconservatism/bioluddism at the same time...