But where does libertarianism fit into all this, you ask? First of all, it’s useful to note that transhumanists don’t all fall under a monolithic political philosophy. There are many liberal transhumanists who see the enhancement of the mind and body through technology as the ultimate equalizer that will allow people to improve themselves and transcend their limitations. There are even Christian transhumanists who see the technological singularity as a sort of man-made Rapture that will bring them closer to God (see also here).
But there is also a very vocal sect of transhumanist libertarians who see their future robot bodies as the best chance to escape statist control once and for all.Reason magazine’s Ron Bailey thinks transhumanism is the linchpin that will help libertarians “win the future.” Why? Because once we all become self-healing and self-medicating cyborgs, then “ideas about government health care and government-guaranteed incomes will appear quaint.”
I also tag this post "Patri Friedman" in reference to the seasteader and cyber swinger extraordinaire-- who once flamed me on this blog for criticizing him-- because the Alternet article links to another piece entitled, "The Really Creepy People Behind the Libertarian Inspired Billionaire Sea Castles". The title is self-explanatory, and I concur entirely with how Mark Ames characterizes these members of the Lunar Right. It's disturbing to see how in the time since my post, more people are being drawn to this, "spoilt child's autarky, an imperialism of outsourcing, a very petty fascism" (to quote China Mieville's description in Evil Paradises).
So I am sitting at home on my downtime, idly flipping through a range of texts dealing with the contemporary significance of nihilism. What impresses me is the willingness of authors to interpret this defining problem of modernity in relation to science and technology issues, most especially biopolitics. No doubt there will be a flood of other texts for me to read in the form of Christmas gifts, so I probably won't be getting to The Italian Difference for a while yet. I also hope to get better acquainted with Nihil Unbound and even Conor Cunningham's Genealogy of Nihilism. If I had to relate it to my previous post, and other references I've made to nihilism, my interest is in how the same mindset can crosscut every strata of modern societies. So it's really beside the point to just specify problems in the aesthetic realm as generative of the mindset, when it can clearly migrate to the sciences as well (thereby increasing its political significance). It seems to me that too much attention is given to the "creative process" in a manner that fetishsizes personal idiosyncrasies. Here's a litmus test: read this interview with author Thomas Ligotti, then consider his philosophical magnum opus, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. One finds there a pure distillation of nihilism, in the sense that it marks a renouncement of the Enlightenment project of actively working towards the perfectibility of the world.
In other words, nihilism can help foster epistemological relativism wherein all actions are portrayed as equally doomed to failure. Scientists are treated as no different in this respect. This position marks a decline from the well known trope in which the "mad scientist" retreats to an isolated location, such as an island, where they can lose themselves in "pure research", without worrying about being held accountable by public standards of reason. In these scenarios, (e.g. Frankenstein, The Island of Dr Moreau), the horror came from the personal revelation of having profaned a sacred boundary, for which they are in turn punished when their creations run amok. Hence, at the end of the day, they offered the reassurance of a restoration of order, even in the absence of a public sphere. Such morality tales still presumed that modern society (and therefore science) was worth saving- provided that certain kinds of inquiries remained taboo. But in the more nihilistic register of recent works, scientists deliberately set out to strike a Faustian bargain because they know the consequences will be disastrous for humankind as presently conceived. Science therefore paradoxically becomes the means to realise an entirely new order, which need not even involve humans, or minimally, is compatible with Ligotti's prescribed integration of humans into the "natural world" (to the point where we no longer will anything at all):
"The perfect manner of existence that I’m imagining would be different than that of most mammals, who feed on one another and suffer fear due to this arrangement, much of it coming at the hands of human beings. We would naturally still have to feed, but we probably would not be the omnivorous gourmands and gourmets that we presently are. Of course, like any animal we would suffer from pain in one form or another—that’s the essence of existence—but there wouldn’t be any reason to take it personally, something that escalates natural pain to the level of nightmare. I know that this kind of world would seem terribly empty to most people—no competition, no art, no entertainment of any kind because both art and entertainment are based on conflict between people, and in my world that kind of conflict wouldn’t exist. There would be no ego-boosting activities such as those which derive from working and acquiring more money than you need, no scientific activity because we wouldn’t be driven to improve the world or possess information unnecessary to living, no religious beliefs because those emerge from desperations and illusions from which we would no longer suffer, no relationships because those are based on difference and in the perfect world we’d all be the same person, as well as being integrated into the natural world. Everything we did would be for practical purposes in order to satisfy our natural needs. We wouldn’t be enlightened beings or sages because those ways of being are predicated on the existence of people who live at a lower epistemological stratum".
Not surprisingly, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race reads at times like The Unabomber Manifesto; the linkage here is the ascetic sensibility that Nietzsche observed with respect to science in general, "Science today has no belief in itself, letalone an ideal above it- and where it survives at all as passion, loving glowing intensity, suffering, it constitutes not the opposite of the ascetic ideal but rather its most recent and refined form" (On the Genealogy of Morals, p124). Asceticism can therefore rationalize misanthropy to the point where humanity is hardly considered worth saving, period (for another example, recall Furedi's reference to climate change science in my previous post). Any scientist holding to this standard makes the world view offered by cultural workers such as Boyd Rice look like very small beer indeed.
Here's a satire then of the kind of scientist who embodies Nietzschean ressentiment. The clip specifically references the threat of "grey goo" oftentimes associated with nanotechnology:
On a more serious note, I take some comfort from efforts to risk manage such new technologies for our collective benefit. But I also pay heed to Michael Sandel's warning in his Reith Lecture, Genetics & Morality, that going too far in this direction will in itself create problems. To remove chance, or "contingency" if one prefers, through excessive human engineering, is likely to diminish a sense of responsibility for those less fortunate than ourselves. A success seen as self-made through bioengineering will therefore produce a meritocracy less chastened by chance, and thus harder and less forgiving. Hence Sandel urges, "So I say rather than bioengineer our children and ourselves to fit the world, let's instead create social and political arrangements more hospitable to the gifts and the limitations of the imperfect human beings that we are".
Furthermore, Sandel in effect offers a corrective to the strands in the Transhumanist Movement that espouse liberation biology (which I classify as a variant of Nietzsche's "active nihilism"). Here's something else they should be paying attention to:
"The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom."
"The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world. A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism". Peter Thiel from The Seasteading Institute Annual Report 2008
Ahuthnance, we were riffing last night about how the mixture of unintentional side splitting hilarity mixed with the banality of evil, can make for a lethal cocktail. Few things can match seasteading in this regard, and it has to be said that one of its most offensive features is the dishonesty about its underlying motivations. Why don't they at least have the integrity to just come out and admit what they really are?: a sad example of "white flight" syndrome, who are opposed to any form of progressive taxation. Their existence merely confirms William Gibson's assessment that writing science fiction has become increasingly difficult because we are reaching a point where it has "colonised reality". No doubt the seasteaders would merely see this as an early confirmation of the "singularity" they are looking forward to. But I see it instead as testimony to the speed of the appropriation of critical impulses by a logic of commodification even more powerful than imagined in Marx's day. This suggests that Patri Friedman et al are less the brave pioneers they imagine themselves to be, than they are the contemporary equivalent of those who choose to move "offworld" in Blade Runner, having abandoned a crumbling terrestial public infrastructure (hey, until they can get to outer space, I guess they figured they'll have to make do with the oceans). In Evolution and Ethics T.H. Huxley advocated "not the survival of the fittest, but the fitting of as many as possible to survive" (for some bringing to mind an ideal closer to Christian eschatology, say Noah's Ark). If we compare this to Friedman's dubious endeavors it is evident how low the morality of expectations has sunk in his case. What kind of society could ever have emerged and then being sustained if the governing prospective ideal was merely packing up and going somewhere else when the going got too tough? There is obviously nothing heroic or innovative about such a perverted, thin conception of citizenship, no matter how dressed up in futuristic garb it is. Seasteading abandons the imperative to learn to coexist with others who are different to you, some of whom you may even despise. It substitutes a serial logic familiar from dystopias such as The Possibility of an Island, or indeed, George Ritzer's thesis of the McDonaldisation of society. Seasteading is a "fast food" type dystopia, offering junk "solutions" for social ills.
Fortunately though, there is another wrinkle in this story, so seasteading need not be construed as further evidence of an intractable crisis faced by governments to finance public works through progressive taxation. As argued by Christopher May in The Information Society: A Sceptic's View, and contra Ian Angell's The New Barbarian Manifesto: How to Survive the Information Age, intellectual property laws can still perform a regulatory function, so some moderation of capital flight remains feasible. I'm not arguing that we should settle long term for nothing more ambitious than managed affluence when it comes to defining any given society's ideal of "public good", but it seems to me that May's argument cannot be easily dismissed: at stake is adjudication of the exchanges between sovereign states.
Before changing tack in this post, I can only hope that Patri Friedman does not return to this blog with more of his "disorganised swearing": hyperaphoristic concentrations mixed with generation of antinomian energy (i.e. profanity). I could almost picture him willing himself forward in his "blitz" style attack, prior to committing intellectual suicide by failing to respond to any of the specific critiques in my original post (mind you, his blog reveals this to be his usual practice). More important background reading can be found in the thorough expose of the fraudulent legacy of the Nobel Prize winning Chicago School of Economics, on the FAQ on Liberalism website (which can be found on Acheron's sidebar).
I am also aided here by Borsook's investigation of the milieu which has shaped Friedman's [entirely] conventional thinking on these matters:
Cyberselfish By Paulina Borsook Paulina Borsook has been stirring up a ruckus in Silicon Valley since her days as a regular contributor to Wired magazine. She will ruffle feathers again with this spirited, funny, gimlet-eyed look at the worldview of the digerati -- one she terms "violently lacking in compassion, ravingly anti-government, and tremendously opposed to regulation". In Cyberselfish Borsook journeys through and rants about high tech culture, profiling the worlds of ravers, gilders, cypherpunks, anarchocapitalists, and other Silicon Valley life forms; and exploring the theory and practice of what she dubs "technolibertarianism" in all its manifestations. Whether she is attending Bionomics conferences or hanging out with Wired staffers, reading personal ads or evaluating high-tech's sorry philanthropic record, Borsook is full of original observations, mordant wit, and furious passion that readers wake up to the social and political consequences of having computer geeks run the world. Cyberselfish is sure to raise the hackles of high techies and to clarify what makes the rest of us so nervous about the brave new cyberworld. More details Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech By Paulina Borsook Published by PublicAffairs, 2000 ISBN 1586480383, 9781586480387 276 pages
Ok, now is the time to change tack a bit. I see this stuff as still related to the psychopathologies of Friedman and his fellow seasteaders. It's the old sociological chestnut about the consequences of reflexive anomie, which I've mentioned previously on this blog in terms of "opportunity costs" etc. Derridata passed along a clip of actor Will Smith lost somewhere in the stratosphere of dianetics. It is the most shocking display I've seen since the Tom Cruise incidents we are all familiar with. This compelled me to dig back into the archive to find the Hollywood star vanity project, also Scientology inspired, Battlefield Earth. Although certain social critics (i.e. Robert Putnam and fellow communitarians) may at times be prone to cynical exaggeration, the thesis of the decline of social capital consequent upon the intensification of individual experience is understandable in light of the cabinets of horror I am posting about here. I've concluded that when a self is thrown back on its own resources, it can easily fall prey to opportunistic substitutes for a responsible social philosophy. Indeed, these substitutes characteristically masquerade as the new "emancipated" form of individual "authenticity". Adorno's warnings appear all too prescient in this context. He remained highly critical of the “jargon of authenticity” as an ideology which desocietalized human subjectivity through its emphasis on self-control. By such means “a bad empirical reality” is transformed into “transcendence” as the impotence and isolation from a societal perspective are used to secure the self as the only “unloseable possession” (Adorno 1973: 116).
By extension, one can easily imagine not only the beleagured Scientologist, but also the augmented transhumanist seasteader, as resembling Travolta's stupendously bad attempt at characterisation in the following clip, cackling evilly as he dispenses some rough justice to "the norms" barred admittance to paradise (except maybe as a service/slave class):
And then there is further evidence of an attempt to transform a bad empirical reality. Another way of saying the same thing is that it resembles the conversion of sour grapes into sweet lemons (as per Jon Elster's book). For what else is a Hollywood "star" if not the metaphorical embodiment of the kind of transcendence Adorno describes?:
Besides talking pure nonsense to a bewildered Smiley for several minutes, Smith used a very strange phrase about halfway through the clip. He talked about "feeling like you're at effect," which means...well, frankly, this Hubbard jargon means anything you want it to mean, so what the hell.
"I've been giving him the benefit of the doubt," Bunker says about Smith. "But how do you absorb 'being at effect' without taking courses? I suppose it's possible he picked it up from his equally certain, equally high-strung pal Tom Cruise. But it's not an ordinary buzzword out here in the wog [non-Scientology] world." To Bunker, the clip is evidence that Smith has been taking Scientology courses for some time, and has absorbed the Hubbard way of thinking.
What we found even creepier comes later in the clip, when Smith starts talking about creating matter with his mind. Smiley's expression is priceless as Smith talks about the power of his brain: "I can create whatever I want to create if I can put my head on it right, study it, learn the patterns..."
Hey, that's just what Hubbard's other minions believe, that after a few more classes (each costing about the same as a luxury car), they'll get so powerful they can create things just by thinking about them!
Hey Will, we hope you keep studying all the way to OT VIII so you can start bending the universe to your will (so to speak). Then maybe you could think real hard about a film with you in it that doesn't suck, so that one magically appears! more: Featured, Scientology http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2008/09/will_smith_show.php Clive Hamilton lecture: Reclaiming Morality from Conservative Dogma and Postmodern Indifference:
Significant as an example of a discourse attempting to galvanise wider debates beyond the walls of the academy. To be sure, it sacrifices the complexities and nuances of those authors identified as "postmodern" in some respects, but remains valuable chiefly for its indictment of the sociocultural legacy of neoliberal "freedom" [sic] http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/media/documents/articles/sydney_ideas_speech.pdf
Please no citation or reproduction of any original writings or images appearing on this blog without the permission of its authors.
"Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do; such as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe" (David Stove The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies 1991: 188)
