Peer to Peer compared to Transhumanism: what are the politics of the future?
17th September 2011
Michel Bauwens writes:
I’ve always appreciated Dale Carrico’s critique of transhumanism, and ‘futurology’, which you can find here, and his support for p2p-oriented politics, but this table is particularly useful for the contrast that it provides between the two approaches.
| The Politics of Technodevelopmental Social Struggle, Peer to Peer | The Anti-Politics of Futurological Enhancement and Post-Human Ascension |
|---|---|
| A. Power Construed As Experience of Possibility | A. Power Construed As Amplification of Capacities |
| B. Political Rationality Yields emphasis on Open Futurity ineradicably inhering in present/presence, peer to peer –> history as ongoing, interminable social struggle (prone to emphasize political dimensions of scientific research and technological application and to embed developmental claims in social and historical specificities) |
B. Instrumental Rationality Yields emphasis on The Future as destination/destiny –> history as causal playing out of material forces, usually superhuman ones (prone to technological determinisms and natural progressivisms recasting difference from parochial norms as atavisms) |
| C. Characterized by Dissensus, Dependent on Consent (collaboration and contestation are matters of improvisation within enabling constraints) |
C. Characterized by Consensus, Dependent on Dissent (prediction and control enabled by warranted scientific beliefs which attract consensus after being put to test) |
Source: amormundi.blogspot.com/2011/08/it-turns-on-power-schematic.html
