Dale Carrico's Open Letter To The Transhumanist Robot Cultists

Republished from Dale Carrico:

(from: An Open Letter To The Robot Cultists)

“Any child of two can indulge in wish fulfillment fantasizing. It’s not a philosophy. It’s not a movement. And the way you Robot Cultists do it makes you a kind of techno-transcendental New Age cult too hype-notized to notice you are functioning as a crowdsourced cheerleading squad for celebrity CEOs and ramped up gizmo consumerism at a time when the world is literally perishing from extractive- industrial- petrochemical- consumer- indebted- corporate- militarism.

The digital revolution is a lie. Cyberspace isn’t a spirit realm. It belches coal smoke. It is accessed on landfill-destined toxic devices made by wretched wage slaves. It abetted financial fraud and theft at every level of society around the world. Its “openness” and its “freedom” turned out to be targeted marketing harassment, panoptic surveillance, and zero comments.

Rather than grasp this catastrophic fraud, you embrace it more ferociously, you hyperbolize cyberspatial deceptions into a more delusive fantasy still, fancying it will be home to a history shattering perfectly parental God-AI delivering you into the digital garden where your “spirit self” can live forever and “be” anything and “have” everything and “know” it all forever.

Your Robot Cult — whether in its eugenicist transhumanoid sects, or in its dead-ender AI (artificial imbecillence) Singularitarian nerd-rapture sects, or in its vitamin supplement replacement parts shiny robot body soul-migration techno-immortalist sects, or in its nano-santa nano-genies-in-a-bottle nano-cornucopiast sects, or in its greenwashing hyper-denialist “geo-engineering” sects — your Robot Cult, I say, takes all the lies of crass commercialism — it takes all its infomercial boner pills and anti-aging kremes and endless promises of consumer ecstasy — and then sets the volume dial on eleven, turning what was just ugly stupid embarrassing commonplace circus-barker deception and crack-pottery into full on fulminating faith.

Drawing on deeply disseminated figures and conceits of mythology and theology (eden, prometheus, golem, invincible armor, the philosopher’s stone, rapture, love potion, sorcerer’s apprentice, excalibur, the fountain of youth, frankenstein, onmipotence- omnibenevolence- omniscience-) whose historically-weighted intuitive force reassures you, together with the fervency of the never-changing professions of your fellow-faithful, you keep telling yourselves and telling us — in a tune that never really changes year after year after year even while you congratulate yourselves on your unflappable embrace of “accelerating change” — that there is some substance in your faith-based initiative, that your roseate “The Future” is real and that in it you can be young and rich and invulnerable and right and cared for forever.

As I said, any child of two already knows where you are coming from. As adults, though, what matters more is that you are going nowhere, you are riding on the road to nowhere, weighting down and speeding up the cart that is taking us all down.

We have serious problems in this world and we need serious people to help solve them. You might be enjoying the haze you’re in, like any techno-fetishizing bourgeois consumer dupe, but you are part of the problem.

You could have been something better, you could have done something else, but you didn’t. It’s not too late to wake up and help out.”

2 Comments

Tom Crowl August 28, 2012 at 1:33 pm

Well said! Maybe a bit hyperbolic but sometimes strong language is needed to wake up the sleeping.

The Internet, following the pattern set by television… is rapidly becoming a landscape for lizard-brain marketing of products AND policies.

The potential the Internet offers however is that its a two-way (or multi-way) technology.

However, don’t expect elites to assist that openness… or facilitate it (except to make it as easy as possible to buy products with the unhelpful assistance of an extractive financial services industry).

Yes, there are better ways. But, frankly… as its sadly always been… the Commons lies prostrate and defenseless before more organized forces.

Michel Bauwens November 3, 2012 at 2:06 pm

Name: Tony Smith

Website: http://ynotds.com/

I hate that my first comment on P2P is argumentative rather than expansionary, but this extract from Carrico completely misses the dominant precautionary principal of what is nowadays best described as H+.

Ever since and including Drexler’s Engines of Creation which in ways marked the coming out of H+, the emphasis has been that what Kevin Kelly later described as the Technium runs on autopilot without conscious control beyond the component level and that we need to try to anticipate and mitigate the unintended consequences of our collective actions. While Drexler’s “grey goo” remains fanciful, the loose collective behind Melbourne’s Singularity and H+ summits are primarily motivated by real awareness of what “it’s the economy stupid” is working towards in areas like artificial intelligence, and a widespread feeling that humans should be most fearful of letting go of the reins to actors with by some measure superior capabilities. Yes, there is also a contingent that love the world we have found ourselves in so much that we see the lifespan evolution and medical science have given us as seriously inadequate to properly appreciate its beauty, vastness and diversity, hoping that some will eventually be able to operate for lifetimes that will put today’s populist worries into wider context.

Conflict between human and robotic intelligence has become a staple of science fiction, but rarely with any concession that our briefly prevailing white collar triumphalism is anything less that a permanent and desirable state of affairs. My bets are that the long sweep of history will see us as both the most self indulgent bubble to ever overrun the planet and ultimately as transitional to something still largely beyond our imaginations, hence transhuman. Some of the best things we are doing are likely unique on the scale of the galaxy or beyond, so it would also be nice if more than traces survive the bursting of our big bubble of overconsumption. Some of us like to imagine we are pushing in that direction.

2 Comments →

Tom Crowl August 28, 2012 at 1:33 pm
Well said! Maybe a bit hyperbolic but sometimes strong language is needed to wake up the sleeping.
The Internet, following the pattern set by television… is rapidly becoming a landscape for lizard-brain marketing of products AND policies.
The potential the Internet offers however is that its a two-way (or multi-way) technology.
However, don’t expect elites to assist that openness… or facilitate it (except to make it as easy as possible to buy products with the unhelpful assistance of an extractive financial services industry).
Yes, there are better ways. But, frankly… as its sadly always been… the Commons lies prostrate and defenseless before more organized forces.
Michel Bauwens November 3, 2012 at 2:06 pm
Name: Tony Smith
Website: http://ynotds.com/
I hate that my first comment on P2P is argumentative rather than expansionary, but this extract from Carrico completely misses the dominant precautionary principal of what is nowadays best described as H+.
Ever since and including Drexler’s Engines of Creation which in ways marked the coming out of H+, the emphasis has been that what Kevin Kelly later described as the Technium runs on autopilot without conscious control beyond the component level and that we need to try to anticipate and mitigate the unintended consequences of our collective actions. While Drexler’s “grey goo” remains fanciful, the loose collective behind Melbourne’s Singularity and H+ summits are primarily motivated by real awareness of what “it’s the economy stupid” is working towards in areas like artificial intelligence, and a widespread feeling that humans should be most fearful of letting go of the reins to actors with by some measure superior capabilities. Yes, there is also a contingent that love the world we have found ourselves in so much that we see the lifespan evolution and medical science have given us as seriously inadequate to properly appreciate its beauty, vastness and diversity, hoping that some will eventually be able to operate for lifetimes that will put today’s populist worries into wider context.
Conflict between human and robotic intelligence has become a staple of science fiction, but rarely with any concession that our briefly prevailing white collar triumphalism is anything less that a permanent and desirable state of affairs. My bets are that the long sweep of history will see us as both the most self indulgent bubble to ever overrun the planet and ultimately as transitional to something still largely beyond our imaginations, hence transhuman. Some of the best things we are doing are likely unique on the scale of the galaxy or beyond, so it would also be nice if more than traces survive the bursting of our big bubble of overconsumption. Some of us like to imagine we are pushing in that direction.