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Thursday, October 07, 2010

Can Robot Cultists Really Be Both Ridiculous and Pernicious At the Same Time?

A comment from the Moot:
There's a definite tension in your rhetoric on how to characterize transhumanists. They cannot be both dangerous and irrelevant. If they're just out-of-touch fanboys, they're no threat to anyone. While many transhumanists are certainly silly and even crazy in the sense variation from current norms, some are real powers players at the same time. The richest man in the world writes forwards for Kurzweil's books. You recognize this problem but keep up the dismissive nerd jokes. What purpose does this serve? Is the meme simply too appealing to avoid?


Nonsense.

Think of the Neocons. A marginal coterie of third-rate intellectual white boys who appointed themselves Masters of the Universe and spouted the most idiotic crap imaginable (even within the Republican party they were dismissed as loyal cranks and useful idiots for over a generation), who were and remain palpably ridiculous in their views when exposed even to the least critical scrutiny, but who nonetheless have exerted almost flabbergasting destructive influence in our lifetimes. If you read a blog like Sadly No! you will find plenty of occasion to laugh out loud at the idiocy of their conceits. This laughter is perfectly consistent with a recognition of the historical fact that these numbskulls have the blood of countless thousands on their hands.

Thus, ridiculous, and yet dangerous -- no tension. Simple enough.

In the second place, as I explicitly reiterate in making my case time and time again, no small amount of the interest I have in superlative futurologists is that I think they represent a clarifying extremity providing both a reductio and illustrative exposure of prevailing assumptions, aspirations, and justificatory conventions of mainstream corporate-militarist neoliberal/neoconservative marketing, promotional, and developmental discourses (which are also suffused with hyperbolic, reductionist, immaterializing, eugenic appeals) which I also take quite seriously and oppose.

Thus, ridiculous and yet worthy of attention as symptoms or illustrations -- no tension. Simple enough.

I make jokes about Robot Cultists because I find plenty of jaw-dropping ridiculous crap spouting out of the mouths of the transhumanists and techno-immortalists and AI dead-enders, many of whom are such outright cranks and frauds that people with any standards at all should seriously question anybody willing actively to associate with them. Are you under the impression that those who roar with laughter at the antics of fulminating dot-eyed Fox News "commentators" (who, by the way, are also supported by some of the richest men in the world, whoop-de-whoo) are therefore incapable of grasping the threat to sense and standards those killer clowns represent?

Thus, ridiculous and hence funny, despite being both actively destructive to sensible discourse and symptomatic of pernicious normative and institutional problems in our historical moment -- no tension. Simple enough.

I am a nerd and a geek and an sf fan myself, and I find nerds and geeks and fandoms endearing even though I grant we can be ridiculous at times. I do not think what is wrong with Robot Cultists is that they are nerds. One of my repeated complaints about Robot Cultists is that they want to come off as true scientists or policy wonks when they are peddling pseudo-science as science and wish-fulfillment fantasies as policy -- these are hardly complaints about nerds, but nerdy complaints from a nerd about snake-oil salesmen and would-be gurus falsely impersonating nerds. Needless to say (surely?), True Belief is a problem whether you are a nerd or not, cranks are a problem whether they are nerds or not, sociopathy is a problem whether you are a nerd or not. Reading my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism or the texts gathered under Futurology Against Ecology you will be hard-pressed to find anything that ridicules nerds for being nerds and plenty that could have only been written by a nerd.

So, yes, indeed: ridiculous, facile, damaging, dangerous, symptomatic, hilarious. It is quite easy for all of these things to be true of Robot Cultists and other futurologists at once, and it seems to me that it is perfectly reasonable to address oneself to each or any of these different facets in separate critiques or in a single critique, depending on the demands of the particular text or claim occasioning the critique.

I daresay some people might think there is a "tension" involved in walking and chewing gum at the same time, and perhaps Robot Cults are a natural fit for their limitations.

2 comments:

jimf said...

> Are you under the impression that those who roar with laughter
> at the antics of fulminating dot-eyed Fox News "commentators"
> (who, by the way, are also supported by some of the richest
> men in the world, whoop-de-whoo) are therefore incapable of
> grasping the threat to sense and standards those killer clowns
> represent?

And some people "roar" at Fox only at risk of losing their jobs,
to wit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/opinion/04krugman.html
(Paul Krugman, "Fear and Favor", Oct. 3):

"As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it,
'Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us,
and now we are discovering we work for Fox' — literally,
in the case of all those non-Mitt-Romney presidential
hopefuls. It was days later, by the way, that Mr. Frum
was fired by the American Enterprise Institute. Conservatives
criticize Fox at their peril."


And speaking of the ridiculous, the pernicious, and
Mitt Romney, here's Richard Dawkins:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVI3QcCu8t0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX0NyKi8W1Y

What purpose does this serve? Is the meme simply too
appealing to avoid?

jimf said...

> The richest man in the world writes forwards for Kurzweil's books.

There's a pun in there somewhere -- writing "forwards" for
a futurologist's book. I don't suppose it would be appropriate
to write backwards for futurology, unless you're Leonardo da Vinci.