I guess I am out of it, but I never read Dale Carrico‘s work until recently.  I guess Carrico is a “critical theorist” and rhetorician who has been beating up on “futurological discourses” for years.  He seems to be some sort of leftist post-modernist, and he loves to trot out intricate and embellished language that almost reminds me of those continental types like the Situationists.  I really enjoy Carrico’s writings.  Which is to say, I enjoy whatever shards of meaning fall out when I attempt to unravel the tangle of his rhetorical empurplement.

I mean, check this out:

Discourses of “Bio-Enhancement” always presume that certain incumbent interests or self-appointed biomoralist elites are authorized to designate what constitutes an “enhanced” human capacity, morphology, or lifeway — whatever informed, nonduressed consenting persons might say to the contrary — and hence all such discourses express a factual or aspirational eugenic outlook. Anyone who would claim or aspire to engineer an “optimal,” idealized, postulated homo superior with which they presently identify, always at the cost of a dis-identification with the lifeway diversity of humanity with whom they actually share the world, are advocating a de facto eugenicist politics, whatever their claims or desires to the contrary.”

– Dale Carrico, Futurological Brickbracks

Tell me that doesn’t remind you of this other Marxist:

“IMAGES DETACHED FROM every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of non-life.”

– Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle 

I mean, what the hell are these guys saying?  But this isn’t a rant against post-modernist obfuscation, it’s a post about Carrico’s criticism of futurology.  That quote from Brickbracks seems to boil down to, “If you talk about bio-enhancement, then you assume that you have the right to call something good even if others disagree with you.  And really anyone trying to improve on humans is a Nazi.”  To the first point, well, yeah, anyone can call anything good if they want to… To the second point, birth-control is a bio-enhancement unavailable to much of the human population and thus your argument is invalid.

I want to listen to Carrico’s criticism, I really do.  Because I struggle with narratives of progress.  I find myself saying, “But wait, what about all this bullshit going on?”  But I also can’t ignore that something like progress is really going on here.  So I will put up my dukes and take a shot at one of Carrico’s essays from 2009: Superlative Futurology.  I do highly recommend Carrico’s work, because someone has to mock out the nerds that drink too much Kool-Aid, it helps keep us honest.

Carrico makes a lot of good points in Superlative Futurology.  He criticizes futurist’s “dread of impotence and lust for omnipotence” as infantile, anti-political, and irrational.  There is some merit to these points.  In many extreme futurist narratives, death is overcome and humans have mastered nature to create superabundance.   Maybe Carrico is right, and we futurists need to turn away from the Pleasure Principle, grow up, and get to work facing reality.

It substitutes for the pragmatism of a secular democratic vision of collaborative problem solving (via consensus science) and consensual self-determination (via the provision of general welfare and the maintenance of the rule of law) instead a kind of faith-based initiative in which technoscience is invested with hyper-individualized wish-fulfillment fantasies of personal “transcendence,” a vision of idealized outcomes and personal aspirations for superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance — a vision that seems to me conceptually confused and terribly deranging of sensible technodevelopmental deliberation at the worst possible historical moment;

– Dale Carrico, Superlative Futurology

Ouch, that smarts.  But if we pick it apart, there are a lot of assumptions embedded in that passage.  I mean is anyone really turning away from science to pursue futurology?  And what is this “consensual self-determinism” of which he speaks?  Whatever “general welfare” and “rule of law” we happen to have still laying around this dump are remnants of vicious class struggles.

Carrico goes on to assert that techno-elites are somehow circumventing “stakeholder deliberation in matters of technoscientific change.”  Ha!  Yeah, right.  So many people are just itching to jump into the conversation about the future but those damn techno-elites just won’t let them into the conversation.  It’s not the techno-elite’s fault that everyone is too busy staring glassy eyed at screens all day, mindlessly clicking the “Like” button to trigger serotonin bursts…oh wait.  But seriously, people are generally too absorbed in nonsense to think about this stuff.  Not to mention the fact that technological change generally isn’t a function of deliberation in the first place.  Technoscientific change seems to happen when a breakthrough gets recognized as a market opportunity and then grabbed by some hustler.  That, or the military just has it built.  I guess sometimes a consortium gets together and comes up with standards or something, but that is just book keeping.

I could go on, but I will leave it here for now.  It seems that Carrico has a good understanding of the futurist scene and some valid criticism of it’s excesses.  But I will need to dig into his work more to convince myself that he isn’t a bit deluded about the nature of politics and technology.  Nonetheless, he is such an interesting writer that I will enjoy discovering which parts of his work are bullshit and which are not.

Technology cuts both ways
Most powerful tools are like double-edged swords.  Since information wants to be free, disruptive technologies that put huge powers into the hands of individuals are going to be difficult to control.  We already see that in the computer world with botnets.  A handful of hackers can literally control millions of infected machines at a time.  Computer security is a mess right now, but there are some lessons to be learned in there somewhere.  Notably these computer security problems are going to be bleeding into meatspace more and more as we haphazardly stick everything in sight on the internet and leave the default password.

But we are also going to see different sorts of asymmetrical attacks in the future.  Consider the scenario of bad actors using cheap autonomous drones in malicious attacks against the public as Suarez describes in Kill Decision (which is a good book, by the way.)  Another scary attack would be a bioweapon created in a home lab.  Even citizen science could be a double-edged sword.  Instead of trying to blunt the sword, we should take advantage of the fact that there are generally more benevolent actors than malevolent ones in any given field.  I don’t know if I am ready to fully subscribe to the “intelligence implies benevolence” idea, but it does seem to have some merit.  After all, why mess around with randomly terrorizing a bunch of people with disruptive tech when there are so many more lucrative opportunities for intelligent sociopaths in our society.  Hmm, I might need to think that idea through more.

Nonetheless, we can certainly assume that there are numerous individuals and groups currently working with cheap, widely available, dual-use technology who could be considered benevolent.  It’s inevitable that they would argue amongst themselves about what benevolence actually means, but I am sure they could form alliances along a spectrum from “drones that invade privacy are bad, let’s interfere with them” to “eh, a little involuntary genetic hacking isn’t going to kill you (as long as it doesn’t actually kill you.)”  I’m suggesting that these benevolent groups should have coordination protocols so that they work together to help directly address problems that arise.  We should basically crowdsource malicious technology remediation.

OpenSource Citizen’s autonomous Drone security protocol
I am pretty sure that something like an opensource citizen’s autonomous drone security protocol will be incredibly useful someday.  The laws are loosening up on drones in US airspace.   And since makers and hobbyists are already getting into autonomous drone building, there will be a natural user base to help counteract bad actors.  Imagine a protocol that allows citizens to register their homemade drone which can be activated when a problem arises.  It might be similar to the way people donate computer cycles to the folding@home project.

It might work like reddit where anyone (or designated spotters) can create a post to report suspicious drone behavior.  If enough reviewers upvote this to confirm authenticity, then the protocol kicks in and all citizen drones in the area that are registered with the protocol take to the sky and execute some sort of swarm based target location algorithm.  Once the offending drone is located, it can be surveilled by reviewers and then reported to authorities.  One might even consider a more aggressive protocol (with teeth) that provides a mechanism for the citizen drones to disable or even destroy the offending drone.

Biohackers Unite!
But consider the recent ban on H5N1 research that was triggered by the development of bird flu strains that would be transmissible between mammals.  Maybe that particular ban worked and maybe it didn’t.  In computer security this approach might be called security through obscurity and it is not considered super effective.  It seems that the coordinated network of labs worldwide that are currently working together to identify and sequence diseases more and more rapidly could be viewed as part of a more rigorous defense in depth strategy against biological malware.  Why couldn’t independent biohacker spaces like BioCurious be linked into these networks or form networks of their own to respond to problems?  There are a lot of smart people out there playing with this stuff.

Some of my friends have objected to this idea and think that a top-down approach is better.  They might suggest that drones should be banned, etc.  But my argument is that: first of all, good luck with enforcement, and secondly only criminals would end up with drones then.  I guess I fall in with the gun advocates on that one.  Ouch.  The layers of defense are fewer without citizen involvement and if the official defenders screw up then we all get screwed.  It’s hard for big organizations like the US government to keep up with new tech (at least operationally, the research side is good).  Christ, they don’t even encrypt all their drone video feeds yet.  Hackerspaces on the ground are already hosting, toying with, and breaking advanced tech.  That’s where I saw my first 3D printer for example.  Hackerspaces represent a global asset that could be tapped to help defend humanity from malicious actors.

I often think about the nature of self-esteem.  This topic came up again when I read Michael Vassar’s recent essay on Edge.org in response to the question: “What *should* we be worried about?”  I like Vassar, he is always ready to make outrageous statements and then back them up with a rigorous line of reasoning.  In the case of this Edge essay, I (and a few others) have had a hard time fully understanding his position.  Nonetheless, Vassar makes many points that are worth noting.  He highlights the correlation between self-esteem and initiative and then decries the fact that our society lacks enough people with initiative.  He also asserts that education is a system to ensure submission so he agrees with Chomsky and others in that criticism.

The self-esteem/initiative connection is one that I don’t consider often enough, and I fully agree with the education/submission problem.  But self-esteem is a complex issue.  Vassar points to the correlation between socioeconomic status and self-esteem and evidence that the upper classes are anti-social and unethical.  Also, some studies report that bullies actually have high explicit self-esteem but that bullying behavior may be caused by simultaneous low implicit self-esteem.  (Though there is some controversy over this view of narcissism.)  I am skeptical of implicit measures of self-esteem as a matter of principle.  Oh, you are going to tell me how I really feel about myself, without an fMRI, using a cleverly design name-letter association test?  Really?  That’s nice.

However it becomes disentangled, it’s clear that this gnarly, variable thing called “self-esteem” is not an unalloyed good.  Of course, without it, no one will stand up to repression (unless they are hungry enough.)   I can also understand how you would need high self-esteem to think you can change the world the way Steve Jobs did.  But it seems that Jobs was emotionally fragile, breaking down in tears, hurting others, etc.  His self-esteem must have had a high value at times, but it seemed to have a broad dynamic range.  Jobs may even have met the criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  (if you take any of that DSM crap seriously)

Vassar seems to be hinting that that our society is setup such that it takes a narcissist or sociopath to truly succeed.  Everyone else is too submissive and their self-esteem is too low.  He goes on to make the claim that these leaders lack the skills to innovate but I don’t fully understand this part of the argument.  There is also some stuff about social provisioning of love and belonging which is unclear to me.  Setting those fuzzy bits aside, I  wonder how this wide-spread degradation of self-esteem comes into existence.  Are there mechanisms in place to systematically lower self-esteem?

I would argue that Hollywood and Madison Avenue provide two examples of popular media complexes who are negatively impacting self-esteem.  We are probably hard-wired as social animals to pay attention to high-status individuals around us.  Hollywood cashes in on this by dangling their stars before us.  It may be that by focusing on these unrealistically high-status individuals, it lowers our own sense of status and perhaps our  self-esteem.  Madison Avenue has a more direct reason to lower your self-esteem: people who feel bad about themselves are more likely to buy stuff.

So it’s clear that Hollywood and Madison Avenue are destroying democracy…   Right?  Come on, we need for people to stand up for themselves to have a proper democracy. How can we stand up for ourselves if our self-esteem has been decimated by popular media?  Clearly we all need to unplug from popular media.  So lay off the celebrity blogs and crappy Hollywood nonsense, ok?   And for goodness sake, throw out your television and get an ad-blocker or something.