Would-be professional techno-prognosticators, when they want to think out loud about “the future,” seem to me to turn more often to discussions of concerns about human survival than to concerns about human self-creation, so too to the demands of security over the demands of democracy, as well as to the urgencies of threat over the possibilities of hope.
This observation is not intended to prelude a tired chestnut about pessimism versus optimism, but to highlight some differences between expert and democratic formations of knowledge. More particularly, I worry about the extent to which “futurists” seek to constitute themselves as professionals very particularly through the incessantly reiterated conjuration of a distinction of an elite knowledge of objective threats as against presumably rash and biased popular ignorance about or indifference to such threats.
Even though it is true that there are clearly occasions in which reasonable foresight must hack its way through the hyperbolic daydreams of omnipotence and nightmares of impotence that inevitably freight the technological imaginary, it is no less true that a focus on “objective threats” as the characteristic gesture of futurological professionalization is apt to skew altogether too much of the resulting “futurist” discourse into profoundly conservative default assumptions and ends. This fearful futurology takes up forms that drift then all-too-comfortably into ready-made neoliberal tropes and terms, as well as into its preferred public genres of stress-management and security-speak. All of this rationalizes the endless bureaucratization and military spending that eventuates in no less endless “anti-statist” state programs of affirmative action for military and managerial elites.
When all is said and done, I will admit that I am not too keen on the rhetoric of a humanity that needs saving in any case, since what I think humanity needs most of all quite simply is to be free.
I do not mean to belittle in the least the discourse of existential risk. I am an advocate, for example, of a proportionate version of the precautionary principle treated as a democratizing peer-to-peer deliberative framework for technodevelopment, one that seems to me as likely to encourage public works and technoscientific r&d as to discourage them (very much contrary to the baldly self-interested corporate-militarist dogma that precaution constitutes some kind of luddite plot to disinvent civilization). My point in decrying futurological fearmongering is certainly not to deny the dangers in ongoing and upcoming technodevelopments, but to insist that democratization, say, yields robust, flexible, reliable, responsive knowledges with which to deal with such dangers, and perhaps more in tune with their actual heterogeneous impacts. To the extent that this is true, then, it would be democracy rather than the given hierarchy of existential risks currently preoccupying moneyed and educated elites that should be one’s priority—even for those whose primary worries are about danger.
Dale Carrico Ph.D. was a fellow of the IEET from 2004 to 2008 and is a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley.
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