The aspiration to superabundance seems an all too familiar eruption of the infantile fantasy of a circumvention of the struggle with necessity, Ananke: in psychoanalytic terms a pining for a return to the plenitude represented by the Pleasure Principle and renunciation of the exactions represented by the Reality Principle. Or, in different terms, it is an anti-political fantasy of a circumvention of the struggle to reconcile the ineradicable diversity of the aspirations of our peers with whom we share the world. … Superlativity, then, is not science. It is a discourse, opportunistically taking up a highly selective set of scientific results and ideas and diverting them to the service of a host of wish-fulfillment fantasies that are very old and very familiar, dreams of invulnerability, certainty, immortality, and abundance that rail against the finitude of the human condition. … Superlative discourses are a distraction and derangement of those aspects of Enlightenment that would mobilize collective intelligence, expressivity, and effort to the progressive democratization, consensualization, and diversification of public life and the practical solution of shared problems. Progress is not transcendence, nor is enlightenment a denial of human finitude.

I’ve made my own critique of transhumanism years ago, in 1997-1998, when I worked with Frank Theys on the 3-hour documentary on the topic, TechnoCalyps. Paradoxically, while my vehement atheistic friend rejoiced in the promise of transhumanism, to transcend human and natural limits without recourse to religion, I concluded the opposite: it was in fact largely a religious project which refused to acknowledge its own deeper drives, i.e. to achieve transcendence through ‘immanent’, human-technological means.

Transhumanist supporters routinely jump from a promising technological lead, to imagining it is already achieved, to imagining a world in which all of them are already achieved, and this being just around the corner, conveniently ignoring all social issues regarding technological choice, and using incredibly reductionist 19th century scientific philosophies to expect intelligence to be replicated in machines (for example oblivious of the fact that all intelligence we know of is embodied in bodies and social relationships).

If there is one person who has consistently spent time to point out the political dangers of such an approach, it is Dale Carrico. We may not like his harsh style, which makes him reviled by transhumanist supporters, but I think the points he make are very valid and important.

(our approach is different though, seeking p2p commonalities with different political forces, whose ‘other’ agendas, we do not have to like; this is why we would be much more sympathetic to work also with democratically-minded transhumanists)

Furthermore, Dale is one of the few explicitely ‘p2p’ thinkers with a solid and realistic political bent, as you can see in his political writings here:

– The Politics of Design and p2p Democratization

I recently spent some time on his blog, and would like to share some of his recent writings on the topic of critiquing ‘superlativism’.

First, in an excellent issue on transhumanism in the Greek but English-speaking journal Re-public, an incredibly well-done political journal that is broadly sympathetic to p2p politics, Dale summarizes his critique for beginners.

DALE CARRICO:

I. The political issues with transhumanism (i.e. Superlative futurology)

“I use the term “transhumanism” myself to deploy critiques of a complex of overlapping techno-utopian technodevelopmental attitudes and programs, all of which seem worrisomely anti-democratizing in their primary impact, in my view:

[1] Transhumanism arises at the most general level out of a familiar strain of Enlightenment thinking, amplified by industrialization and then mass-mediation, that tends to a distorted, mechanistic reductionism especially in matters of ethics and culture, as well as to what seems a relentlessly un(der)critical technological determinism and technophilia, a strain of thinking that has met with criticisms since it first emerged, conspicuously from Romantic (and other) critics of Enlightenment but also from different quarters within Enlightenment as well;

[2] It activates and exaggerates the familiar irrational passions of instrumental rationality (dread of impotence and lust for omnipotence in particular) especially in moments of disruptive technoscientific change like our own;

[3] It substitutes for the pragmatism of a secular democratic vision of collaborative problem solving (via consensus science) and consensual self-determination (via the provision of general welfare and the maintenance of the rule of law) instead a kind of faith-based initiative in which technoscience is invested with hyper-individualized wish-fulfillment fantasies of personal “transcendence,” a vision of idealized outcomes and personal aspirations for superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance — a vision that seems to me conceptually confused and terribly deranging of sensible technodevelopmental deliberation at the worst possible historical moment;

[4] It affirms a politics of biomedical “enhancement” that in valuing a parochial vision of “perfectionism” over a consensual diversity of actually wanted lifeways amounts all too often to straightforward eugenicism;

[5] It endorses elite-technocratic circumventions of stakeholder deliberation in matters of technoscientific change (especially worrisome given the tendency to eugenicism), usually justified with the familiar anti-democratic rationale that “accelerating change” is ill-understood by everyday people affected by it (of course any characterization of technodevelopment as monolithically accelerating is patently false, and often, I think, is little more than a description of the catastrophic social instability provoked by neoliberal financialization of the global corporate-militarist economy as it is experienced by the relative beneficiaries of that instability, that is to say, by the mostly white, mostly male, mostly well-off, mostly well-educated, North Atlantic consumers who identify in the main as “transhumanists” in the first place);

[6] It is relying ever more conspicuously on discourses of Existential Risk (in my view analogues to and exacerbations of all too familiar reactionary “war-on-terror”-discourses) and preferentially geo-engineering responses that conduce especially to the benefit of incumbency over democracy, the corporate-military-industrial-broadcast complex over emerging insurgent p2p-formations;

[7] It substitutes for the politics of democratizing social struggle amidst a diversity of stakeholders over new and actually-emerging technoscientific changes a dangerously inapt politics of sub(cult)ural identity, a movement politics mobilizing personal and shared-group identification with particular idealized (often incoherent) technodevelmental outcomes designated “The Future,” but substantiated through dis-identification with actually existing planetary peers in all their diversity;

[8] It is constituted in its organizational substance by an archipelago of inter-related “think-tanks” and membership organizations supported by enthusiastic fandoms, some of which are disturbingly similar to cults, with all that this implies in the way of social alienation, manic PR and hyperbolizing rhetoric to attract attention rather than contribute to sense, criticisms misconstrued and attacked as defamation, and the whole banal bestiary of authoritarian hierarchy from True Believers to would-be gurus peddling pseudo-science.”

II. Why such approaches are politically dangerous and counter-productive

“I just want to stress here that the idealized projections of technodevelopmental outcomes suffusing the discourse of superlative futurology profoundly undermine our capacity to think sensibly about technodevelopmental problems and possibilities as they actually play out in the world — quite apart from questions whether this should be the criterion against which political discourse is judged in the first place or not.

Despite the charges of luddism and scientific ignorance that get lobbed in my direction from Robot Cultists who don’t like to hear a muzzy poetical fashionably-nonsensical humanities scholar declare them failures in terms of the science they themselves claim their province while denying it to the likes of me, the simple truth of the matter is that I am the first person to grant and even insist upon the salience of actually-emerging non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medical techniques, actually-emerging malware and network security threats, actually-emerging problems and possibilities arising out of the nanoscale from labs (many involving my own brilliant students at Berkeley, after all!) working on synthetic and molecular biology and biochemistry.

I am completely invested personally in the politics of copyfight and a2k (access-to-knowledge) and net neutrality and grasping the significance of emerging p2p-formations for political education, agitation, and organization — all themes that crop up with regularity in my courses.

But I find it frankly implausible in the extreme that the actual politics of emerging and ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle (let alone progressive-democratic versions of these politics such as my own) are helped along in any way at all at any time at all by the diversion of attention from ongoing and emerging problems and possibilities into discussions of non-existing non-proximate not-exactly coherent handwaving about “radical longevity medicine,” non-existing non-proximate not-exactly coherent handwaving about “digital mind-uploading,” non-existing non-proximate not-exactly coherent handwaving about “superintelligent artificial intelligence,” or non-existing non-proximate not-exactly coherent handwaving about “programmable multipurpose nanofactories,” and so on.

These futurological idealizations divert attention from real problems that are already difficult to explain to laypeople into abstractions that activate hyperbolic fears and fantasies, encourage sensationalist media narratives, often complement hyperbolic verging on fraudulent advertising and marketing of consumer goods, play into collective anxieties about disruptive change in an era of neoliberal/neoconservative (ie: corporatist-militarist) precariousness and environmental threat, all to no good purpose but the usual bread and circuses that keep incumbents in power and in the money while the vulnerable suffer and their talents and intelligences are lost to history in a pointless struggle for survival in a world where everybody could flourish to the benefit of all.

But worse than distraction from actually-emerging problems and possibilities, I want to add that in my view if anything even remotely like “radical longevity medicine,” “nonbiological elaborated intelligence,” or “generally-available multi-purpose programmable nanofactories” were ever eventually to arrive on the scene I am absolutely certain that the substance of their technical development as well as the substance of the politics out of which their emancipatory and problematic worldly institutionalization would certainly arise would have taken place in the series of piecemeal struggles on day to day technoscience questions among the actual stakeholders to those struggles, not one of which will ever be clarified by futurologists squabbling in the abstract and years in advance about which future is the most “likely” one to emerge or having “political” fights in the abstract and years in advance about whether these future developments will “likely” be more democratic or more authoritarian.”

III. The necessary political alternative

“There are thousands upon thousands of secular-democratic folks out there already arguing for consensus science against creationist nonsense and for more research money for safe effective genetic therapies and for the implementation of renewable energy technologies and who are taking up p2p-tools to facilitate democratizing education, agitation, and organization here and now.

You can be sure that these thousands upon thousands of mainstream democratically-minded technoscientifically-literate multiculturally-celebratory folks are a force incomparably more rich, diverse, progressive, and relevant than the cohort of card-carrying members of futurological Robot Cults, transhumanists, extropians, techno-immortalists, cybernetic-totalists, singularitarians, nano-cornucopiasts could ever convene, past, present, and — I certainly sincerely and strongly hope — in presents to come.

There is simply no sensible, progressive reason on earth one would join a Robot Cult or take up their superlative futurological frames — and those who do so should be exposed and marginalized whenever they seek to peddle their positions as either scientific (despite their distance from the consensus of practicing scientists on question after question after question) or democratizing (despite their distance from the language, alliances, campaigns, and concerns of secular-democratic education, agitation, and organizing on issue after issue after issue) as a result.”

In the article, Prologue for Futural Politics, Dale adds:

“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.”