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

Friday, June 22, 2012

Poignant

Stealth Robot Cultist Peter Wicks writes of me:
Carrico’s reference to the “fearless credulity of transhumanists” would be poignant if it applied accurately to all transhumanists[.]
One wonders just how characteristic, just how prevalent, just how many transhumanist-identified people have to exhibit this sort of undercritical technophilic credulity before Peter Wicks will grant my point some "poignance"? One wonders just how many serially false predictions, how many distractions from current and urgent technoscience issues into hyperbolic daydreams, how many deranging reframings of technodevelopmental quandaries from issues of equity and safety into wish-fulfillment fantasies of technotranscendence, how many crowdsourced fanwanking marketing efforts for hyperbolic loose talking Big Pharma press releases and DARPA wet-dreams, how many apologiae for elite-incumbent corporate-military extractive-consumer interests, how many dumb pampered suburban kids wheedled into blowing a decade or so of their lives as True Believers in a crappy Ayn Raelian Robot Cult Peter Wicks personally has to facilitate before he will grant some "poignance," after all, to these little points I'm making? It will take more than the publication of a contrarian article (Wicks might contemplate that once upon a time IEET published many contrarian articles BY me, before the legitimizing value to them, as a comparatively stealthy Robot Cult outfit, of seeming open to critics of transhumanism was outweighed by the actual impact of my criticisms on their ongoing proselytizing efforts) to alter the dangerous, damaging, deranging thrust of IEET's mission in this time of urgent technoscience and technodevelopmental quandaries in the midst of ubiquitous marketing misinformation, techno-fetishizing mass-consumption, unsustainable extractive-indistrialization, and precarizing neoliberal developmentalism enforced at gunpoint by remote control.

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