The Technodevelopmental Quartet

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.

It is, in fact, one of four trends that have come especially to preoccupy my attention, and lately I have come to think of these four trends as The Quartet: four broad technodevelopmental trends delineating key landmarks of most versions of the terrain on which I expect technodevelopmental social struggle to play out in what remains of my own lifetime.

The first of these trends is what I call Resource Descent, which encompasses “Peak Oil” discourse, as well as the diminishing returns of input-infrastructure intensive alternatives to petrochemical energy, as well as input-intensive industrial agriculture, soil depletion (connected to industrial agriculture), fresh water depletion (aquifer depletion and irrigation diversion associated with overurbanization and industrial agriculture, but also problems of pollution and salinization associated with these), and also global warming which is, in my view, best conceived as a problem of atmospheric pollution yielding the depletion of the resource of a life-sustaining atmosphere.

The second of these trends is what I call p2p [peer-to-peer] Democratization, which encompasses the mediated transformation from industrial/broadcast production models to participatory/distributed models of production (what Yochai Benkler calls, simply, “peer production” formations), as well as a2k [access to knowledge] politics, anti-secrecy struggles (against both corporatist proprietary and militarist state secrets), transparency struggles (against secrecy and corruption in authoritative institutions like governments, corporations, universities), and ever greater network-mediated popular participation, education, agitation, and organization in public life.

The third of these trends is what I call Longevity Ascent, which encompasses struggles to achieve universal single-payer basic healthcare in the United States but also basic healthcare, nutrition, resource provision in the overexploited regions of the world, as well as the as-yet scarcely defined “pro-choice” politics of prosthetic self-determination, or the informed, nonduressed consensualization and universalization of recourse to emerging non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification medicine.

The fourth of these trends is Arms Proliferation, which encompasses obscene and short-sighted state-sponsored trafficking in arms but also illicit global arms trading, the breakdown of multilateral arms treaties, the proliferation of nuclear states, the proliferation of conventional weapons and mines, weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, biological), what Lawrence Lessig calls insanely destructive devices—that is to say cheaper, more destructive, more accessible, easier to hide and deploy emerging forms of WMDs—and the militarization of space. 

It seems to me that the first and second trends combine to facilitate the emergence of an extraordinarily promising (and threatening) planetary political consciousness, one providing a shared set of urgent problems demanding shared efforts and the other providing the material means to collaborate in their solution while at once undermining the politics of incumbent interests that stand as the greatest present hurdle to such solutions. 

The third and fourth trends exhibit a comparable complementarity in my view, one amplifying the destructive stakes for a refusal to distribute technodevelopmental costs, risks, and benefits fairly by the lights of the actual diversity of stakeholders to that development, the other functioning as a kind of magnificent bribe (the facilitation of longer healthy life and lifeway self-determination in the service of private perfections) eliciting ever wider consensual participation in the project of a consensual democratic technoscientific planetary multiculture.

I also think the first and third trends exhibit a kind of stick and carrot complementarity for technoprogressive planetary politics, while the second and fourth represent countervailing structural inducements, one facilitating democratization one facilitating anti-democratization.

Of course, all these inter-implications represent just the immediate throat-clearing gestures of a serious analysis taking up these terms, just a few among many other plausible technodevelopmental relations discernible at this level of generality, all of them easily capable of provoking who knows what stabilizations, destabilizations, campaigns, counter-movements, provisional democratizations, backlashes, and so on.  Certainly, there are no guarantees here, just as there is no time to waste on superlative idealizations and distractions or parochial (incumbent, technocratic, sub(cult)ural) techno-political agendas. 

Although each trend inspires endless concrete campaigns (progressive and reactionary), it seems to me that whatever the outcomes that elicit my own commitments in these particular campaigns there is nothing more important here than the struggle to democratize technodevelopmental struggle itself, to keep futurity open whatever the futures for which one fights. Whatever one’s concrete aspirations for particular technodevelopmental outcomes (about which there will always be plenty to argue about as to which outcome is fairest, safest, most emancipatory), it seems to me that a technoprogressive vantage will always also, or even first of all, direct its attention to the dangers to and opportunities for democratization and open futurity that present themselves in each of the technoscientific vicissitudes technodevelopmental social struggle grapples with from moment to moment.

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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.