*Uh, that's getting pretty breathless, but I guess it had to be said.
http://amormundi.blogspot.it/2012/05/unbearable-stasis-of-accelerating.html
Sunday, May 27, 2012
"The Unbearable Stasis of "Accelerating Change"
"Also posted at the World Future Society.
"Eric and I got haircuts yesterday afternoon, and while I was waiting I flipped through magazines. Peter Diamandis (who is clearly shaping up as this decade's go-to Kurzweil) had an article in Popular Science about garage inventors "going viral." It seemed to me pretty indistinguishable from stuff Cory Doctorow and Alex Steffin (((that's "Steffen"))) were writing a decade ago – remember the "Tech Bloom"?
"This is something that has struck me time and time again: The transhumanoids and singularitarians and online futurists love to congratulate themselves over their unflappability at the prospects of shatteringly onrushing changed futures. They literally have a whole "shock level" calculator, which is kinda sorta like a Cosmo sex quiz for pasty futurological males who think diddling themselves over cartoons of space elevators or descriptions of traversable wormholes demonstrates the awesomeness of their humanity-plus brains as compared to mehum (mere human) sheeple types.
"But what always strikes me most forcefully about these ecstatic pronouncements is their abject staleness. There is simply not much to distinguish Ed Regis' depiction of the superlative futurologists in Great Mambo Chicken from Brian Alexander's in Rapture from breathless blog profiles of today, decade after decade after decade. Stiegler's "Gentle Seduction" from the 1980s is precisely standard transhumanoid boilerplate, techno-transcendence via shopping, loose-talking SENS-style longevity meds and "enhancement" pills and prostheses, Drexlerian nano-cornucopias, singularity (the literal term, already attributed to Vinge, not just the notion), Moravekian (((Moravecian))) uploading, hive mind, market fundamentalism – every single detail is already there.
"Frankly, many of the ideas are already there decades earlier, in Turing, Shannon, Weiner, Bush. Heck, Anne Lindbergh was already surfing the "Wave of the Future" (and it was already fascist) even before a victorious post-war America managed through the inflation of the petrochemical bubble and the imposition of the mass-mediated Culture Industry to "invent" The Future Gernsback and Madison Avenue and all our Presidents would peddle the planet long before Toffler and company would stumble on the obvious and re-invent the wheel as a profitable pseudo-discipline for the seventies, then Brand and company would do it again for the eighties, then WIRED and company would do it again for the nineties, then the various p2p and Web 2.0 enthusiasts would do it again for the lost Bush decade, over and over and over again, the same hopes, the same tropes, the same dopes on and on and on from WW2 to Star Wars to whatever (probably bombed out cities or a pointless polluted moonscape).
"I have proposed that the "accelerating change" crowed about for the last two decades by futurologists in pop religious cadences and by more mainstream and academic New Media commentators in pop psychology and pop sociology cadences has never had any substantial reference apart from the increasing precarity produced by neoliberal looting and destabilization of domestic welfare and global economies – often facilitated, it is true, by the exploitation of digital trading, marketing, and surveillance networks – a precarity usually seen and experienced from the vantage of privileged people who either benefit from neoliberal destabilization or who (rightly or wrongly) identify with the beneficiaries of that destabilization.
"The pseudo-transcendentalizing narratives futurologists attach to this sleight of hand, this heartbreak and anxiety transubstantiated into a rocketship to omniscience and omnipotence, whether proposed in the familiar and profitable imperial triumphalist way (like the Long Boom nonsense and libertopian digirati handwaving and various tech bubbles every few years or so, digital, biological, faux-green, often ultimately military, like greenwashing "geo-engineering" schemes) or in the more enjoyably bonkers quasi-religious way (involving plastic or nuclear or nano magic superabundance fantasies or virtual heavens with virtual sex fantasies or various loosely conceived techno-immortality fantasies), all really just provide the furniture for aspirational/distracted futurological conceits to hang out in while these rebels without a cause or a clue indulge their wish-fulfillment ids and forget to vote and purchase their handhelds and pass the collection plate...." (((There's lots more!)))
