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.
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Complete entry
Posted by
ndaleca on 11/25 at 02:09 PM
On the contrary, these days I am rather hopeful about the prospects of consensual democratic technoprogressive planetary multiculture. Both
p2p Democratization/anti-incumbency and
Longevity Ascent/prosthetic self-determination seem to me, potentially at least, enormously emancipatory (although palpably destabilizing in ways that are sure to exacerbate the worries of
Resource Descent/corporatism and
Weapons Proliferation/militarization).
I must say that I am very skeptical about intuitions involving "road maps" and "starting from scratch" and so on, which seem to me worse than "daunting" but actually troublingly undemocratic. I think "massive societal and technical… shifting" is rarely monolithically a matter of sudden sweeping paradigms shifting (such constructions tend to be, in my view, retroactive assignments analysts use to make sense of collective history), or worse, instrumental art, engineering, or science, but instead I think these shifts amount to complex collective processes of collaboration, contestation, and opportunistic responsiveness. Over the idea of a technocratic or any other elite implementation of an
eidos conceived in advance, I strongly prefer the idea of a democratization of technodevelopmental social struggle as an ongoing process in which the actual diversity of stakeholders to technoscientific changes provisionally and interminably work to ensure the best, fairest, safest possible distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of outcomes.
Posted by
Miles on 11/25 at 03:34 PM
A reasonable analysis, but I think you are making a conceptual error you fold the climate change problem into a resource depletion model.
Each part of your quartet is part of a domain of human action. The component of climate change that involves energy use and the output of carbon dioxide is part of that domain of agential action also... but climate change itself is something different.
Climate change is a change in the matrix of life itself... every aspect of biology and agriculture and human sustainability is touched by it. It's an outcome of the sum of all the activities, particularly energy production activities, that underlie the other domains.... It creates the context for each of the four domains you describe.
It's bigger, badder and conceptually much more than the drawing down of a mere "resource", the carbon sink, as you term it. It is an alteration in the matrix of life, politics, and technological development itself.
Each of the other domains feed into our ability to address it... but it is the big one, and not just a component of one of four domains.
Posted by
ndaleca on 11/25 at 04:36 PM
My framing of climate change as resource depletion here is less a conceptual error (since I actually agree with your analysis of the problem) as a matter of calculating how best to inspire technoprogressive change rhetorically (which involves both understanding and mobilizing collective action). But of course, even so, you may well be right that I am still making an error with this framing!
The point for me was not to provide an adequate model in such a brief post, of course, but to provide a point of entry to nudge people into a different awareness of inter-implicated key drivers of technoscientific and global developmental politics and of the openings available for and barriers frustrating democratic politics in these areas. But, again, your points really are all well-taken. Thanks, d
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