Vertical farms finally make the move from cybergreen fantasy to the pages of the New York Times. The logic is seductive: urban towers, filled not with more offices and apartments, but with food crops.
I’m nearing the end of my current blog project of commenting on each of the six articles in June’s edition of The Global Spiral , which is devoted to a critique of transhumanism. This time, I will discuss Andrew Pickering’s, “Brains, Selves and Spirituality in the History of Cybernetics”, in some ways the strangest of the five articles that I have read so far. We’ll come to why, but let me step back for a moment to survey the overall terrain.
I’ll start this essay by leading with my conclusion: do we make it through this century? Yeah, but not all of us, and it’s neither as spectacular nor as horrific as many people imagine.
The fourth of the six articles in the special anti-transhumanism issue of The Global Spiral (June 2008) is “Wrestling with Transhumanism” by well-known critic Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Professor of English and media studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
In my continuing program of reading, and commenting on, the six articles about transhumanism in June’s edition of The Global Spiral, I now come to “Of Which Human Are We Post?” by Don Idhe, who approaches the issues from a perspective in philosophy of technology.
I am examining the articles on transhumanism in the current issue of The Global Spiral , an online magazine published by the Metanexus Institute. The articles in the issue were presented at a research conference on transhumanism in April 2008, at Arizona State University (ASU), funded by the Templeton Foundation. The Templeton Foundation also supports Metanexus Institute.
In 2004, I wrote a piece called “Transhumanism at the Crossroads,” which has been one of my most popular essays. It was originally published as part of my old “Eye of the Storm” irregular column on the Betterhumans site.
I am fascinated by a few broad concurrent “trends” (to use that awfully abused and debased word of the corporate-militarist Futurological Congress) that seem to me likely to articulate (but never to determine) especially forcefully (but always unpredictably) the politics of technoscientific change, and emerging longevity and modification medicine (so-called) is one of these.
Believing that our technology will become, or make us, god-like is fundamentally undemocratic. We need to remain critical of this transcendentalizing tendency in techno-utopian discourse in order to work towards real liberatory uses of technology.
One of the most troubling challenges for technoprogressives is how we can ensure universal access to safe technologies in our deplorably unequal world. Sadly there is no guarantee that any particular desirable technology will become available to all, within decades or ever.
Technoprogressive analyses and campaigns take on wide-ranging (and not necessarily comfortably compatible) forms, but they all assume two definitive ideas about progress.
The New Year has provided the occasion for the usual spate of to-do lists, wish-lists, and so on for the upcoming Congress. I for one am quite pleased to note how many of these lists have testified to what I have been calling here at Amor Mundi the politics of an emerging technoprogressive mainstream.
I am so pleased about the victories of Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders, so pleased at the prospect of good folks in the Progressive Caucus finding their way into Leadership and oversight positions, and from a technoprogressive angle of view especially so pleased at what nearly everybody is coming to see as the indispensable role of peer-to-peer formations (blogs, online small contribution aggregation, rapid-fire online negative campaigning pushback, citizen oversight, and so on) in this election. This is an impact that is growing stronger by the hour, and all to the good for those of us who prefer democratic over nachine politics, whatever party label gets slapped onto the result.
A friend and colleague of mine has taken to using and even promoting the term “techno-radicalism” to describe what he is up to politically. This is a friend who shares a number of my own idiosyncratic political commitments and who, in consequence of this, has also sometimes described his perspective as a “technoprogressive” one. Of course, I sometimes use that latter term as a shorthand way of describing myself -– since for me (and this doesn’t seem to be true for everybody) the term “technoprogressive” designates nothing more mysterious than being a progressive who is especially interested in questions of technoscientific development, pretty much exactly as it sounds like it designates. Anyway, this friend was rather perplexed to find that the term “techno-radical” makes me really uncomfortable. Given my published arguments on questions of technology, ecology, and democracy, he had probably come to think of me as something of a “techno-radical” like himself. That’s fair enough as far as it goes, but my discomfort has a point and I think it pays to dwell on it a bit.
A friend and very interesting interlocutor of mine registered the impression earlier this afternoon that I appear to think technoprogressive folks are closer politically and culturally to what he called “environmental primitivists” than to “tech-positive libertarians.” I am assuming this means folks like John Zerzan on the one hand and Tim May on the other. Anyway, my friend wondered, “As time passes, and debates get hotter, can we imagine how the opposite might become true?”
The quick answer is simply to say that I personally feel no closer to luddite Deep Ecologists than to libertopian technophiles. Both perspectives seem to me wrongheaded for multiple, but mostly different, reasons. But I think it is more important to notice that the question has been framed here in a way that virtually ensures any answer that follows will be misleading.
MT Is there a substantial distinction between a technoprogressive and a transhumanist?
DC “Technoprogressive” is just a shorthand way of saying “technology-focused progressive.” My impression from the transhumanist-identified people I know is that most of them see themselves as part of a cultural movement with a unique shared identity and a coherent political program of the kind I would tend to associate with organized parties or membership organizations.
Over on technoliberation I have tried to provide initial responses to a couple of questions that seem to me pretty pertinent for any technoprogressive stance. Hopefully, the discussion of these questions will continue on there from here.
I don’t think I’d seen this encouraging Harris poll before, of 2,242 U.S. adults in Sept. 6- 12, 2005
“Please indicate whether you support or oppose the policy.”
Percent supporting:
96% Medicare (health insurance for the elderly and disabled)
93% Use of birth control/contraception
92% Condom use to prevent HIV and other STDs
91% Medicaid (health insurance for people with low incomes)
87% Sex education in high school
87% Funding of international HIV prevention and treatment programs
75% Universal health insurance
70% Embryonic stem cell research
70% Funding of international birth control programs
68% Withdrawal of life support systems/food for those in vegetative state
63% Abortion centers
There is a technoprogressive majority out there, in the U.S. and in the world. We just need to mobilize them.
Human lives have always been defined both by their limits and by the strategies we use to cope with and overcome them. Many people who are coming now to be ever more fascinated (or appalled) by the spectacle of emerging, disruptive technological developments have begun to voice the hope (or the worry) that human beings are on the verge of a series of profound technological transformations of what have long been deeply definitive human limits. Is that really true? How could anyone confidently claim to know such a thing? How would we sensibly assess our circumstances in the midst of such technodevelopmental churn? Do we have the critical and ethical vocabularies on hand to cope with such transformations?
Over the years of my lifetime, conservative ideologues have seemed to frame their usual corporatist, militarist, deregulatory schemes more and more in apparently revolutionary terms. They seem to hyperventilate ever more conspicuously and insistently about their customary money-grabs and power-grabs in the faux-revolutionary cadences of “freedom on the march” and with faux-revolutionary visions of “free markets” surging, swarming, crystallizing, and well-nigh ejaculating the whole world over. And over these same years of my lifetime, the democratic left—already demoralized, perhaps, by the failures of long-privileged revolutionary vocabularies—seemed almost to sleepwalk into the rather uninspiring position of defending the fragile institutional attainments of imperfectly representative, imperfectly functional welfare states in apparently conservative terms. They have struggled reasonably but too-often ineffectually, spellbound with worry over the real harms to real people that have accompanied the long but apparently irresistable dismantlement of the social democratic status quo, such as it was.
“ART” is an acronym that stands for assisted reproductive technology, a designation that refers to various artificial methods that are sometimes used to achieve wanted pregnancies. ARTs can include medications that induce ovulation, intrauterine insemination, in vitro fertilization, eventually, very probably, reproductive cloning, among a proliferating number of other techniques.
In more everyday parlance I have sometimes heard that “A” in ARTs fleshed out into the phrase artificial or alternative reproductive technologies instead, and I do think it is interesting to contemplate the force of such terminological substitutions on the ARTificial imaginary.
I personally prefer to think of ARTs as alternate reproductive technologies, because the term alternative better bespeaks for me the connection of ARTs to the progressive politics of choice as well as to what seems to me most radical and appealling in the politics of choice: its palpable emancipatory queerness.
The advocacy of deliberative development is exactly as central to my own version of technoprogressive developmental politics as is the advocacy of sustainable development. For one thing, deliberative development demands a highly transparent, generously publicly funded process of consensus science and invention coupled with a scientifically literate professional policy apparatus to assess risks, costs, and benefits and advise our elected representatives to facilitate their regulation and funding of research and development to promote general welfare.
For technoprogressives, there is no question that even radical and disruptive technological developments can be empowering and emancipatory when they are funded and regulated by legitimate democratic authorities and accountable processes to ensure that their costs, risks, and benefits are all fairly distributed among all the actual stakeholders to these developments. But it is no less true for technoprogressives that such developments threaten catastrophes to individual health, safety, and to the environment as a whole, as well as to exacerbate injustice and facilitate exploitation whenever they do not reflect these democratic values and processes.
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