Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Drip, Drip
Long Teaching Day
Monday, September 28, 2015
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Bots To The Left of Me, Bots To The Right
Saturday, September 26, 2015
"Let Them Eat Ads!"
By giving people access to the tools, knowledge and opportunities of the internet, we can give a voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless. We also know that the internet is a vital enabler of jobs, growth and opportunity. And research tells us that for every 10 people connected to the internet, about 1 is lifted out of poverty.Mobilizing the world to get everybody on Facebook would bestow the blessings of fine-grained surveillance, digtal-sharecropping, and zero-comment participatory digirocracy to all the people of earth. And "we know" how awesome that is because "research tells us" so. You know, for the poor! Incidentally, Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't do too shabbily either with a few billion more subscribers to his crappy network, yaknow what I mean?
(Hey, guess what, for every ten people who live in societies with a living wage, universal public education and healthcare, and long-term unemployment benefits and social security ALL TEN are lifted out of poverty. But, what the fuck, let's just get Mark Zuckerberg a billion more customers for his shitty software app instead.)
Friday, September 25, 2015
The New and Emerging Legal Framework for the Regulation of Medical and Recreational Marijuana in the State of California
Coinciding with the passage of the new regulatory framework, California's Attorney General Kamala Harris has prepared the following title and summary of the chief purpose and points of the proposed measure, Initiative 15-0039
The clarity and forcefulness of the wording seem to me strongly to suggest support of such an initiative at this time. The language -- and some further analysis -- is available at the California MCLR (The Marijuana Control, Legalization & Revenue Act) 2016 website:
MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION. INITIATIVE STATUTE. Legalizes marijuana under state law. Creates commission to regulate and license marijuana industry. Applies general retail sales taxes to marijuana, unless medical or dietary exemptions apply. Permits excise taxes on certain marijuana sales, up to 15% of retail price, and storage, up to 10% of wholesale price. Prohibits discrimination based on marijuana use. Bars marijuana testing for job applicants and employees, or penalizing employees for off-duty use, unless they are in safety-sensitive occupations. Permits local regulation of marijuana businesses, including ban or cap with voter approval. Exempts medical marijuana collectives from licensing and local zoning. Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local government: Net reduced costs ranging from tens of millions of dollars to potentially exceeding $100 million annually to state and local governments related to enforcing certain marijuana-related offenses, handling the related criminal cases in the court system, and incarcerating and supervising certain marijuana offenders. Net additional state and local tax revenues of potentially up to several hundred million dollars annually related to the production and sale of marijuana, most of which would be required to be spent for specific purposes such as education, public safety, and drug abuse education and treatment.
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Tech Progressive, So Regressive.
There's nothing progressive in policy discussions premised on technocratic authority rather than democratic deliberation. #TechProgressive
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 24, 2015
There's nothing progressive in "disruption" that amounts to the deregulatory enablement of fraud. #TechProgressive
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 24, 2015
There's nothing progressive about "innovation" that simply loots and privatizes public goods or externalizes public risks. #TechProgressive
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 24, 2015
There's nothing progressive in eugenic "enhancement" promoting conformity and docility as competitiveness and as health. #TechProgressive
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 24, 2015
There's nothing progressive in treated wanted human lifeways as diseased and criminal kinds of personhood demanding "cure." #TechProgressive
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 24, 2015
treatING!
There's nothing progressive in pretending robocalypse is an existential threat and climate change an engineering problem. #TechProgressive
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 24, 2015
There's nothing progressive about dreams of escaping our shared responsibilities into outer space or virtual reality. #TechProgressive
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 24, 2015
There's nothing progressive about identifying with robots or treating people as robots. #TechProgressive
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 24, 2015
There's nothing progressive about turning education into television or even into video games. #TechProgressive
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 24, 2015
There's nothing progressive in treating consumer fashions as activism or consumer fandoms as movements. #TechProgressive
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 24, 2015
There's nothing progressive in the pretense that corporate-military status quo amplification is progress. #TechProgressive
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 24, 2015
I am embarrassed to admit my own complicity in the emergence of the technoprogressive term now current in some circles of neoliberal tech talkers and "Thought Leaders." Interested readers will note the appropriated arguments and even phrases in the wikipedia entry for technoprogressivism, alluded to in the 2014 robocultic transhumanist Technoprogressive Declaration, all from my own Technoprogressivism: Beyond Technophilia and Technophobia, published nearly a decade before that Declaration. I realized quite soon after writing that rather programmatic piece that its formulations were being taken up in stealth-reactionary futurological "tech" circles seeking to sanewash eugenic, libertarian, neoliberal, digi-utopian, greenwashing, facile reductionist and determinist views about technodevelopmental politics. I soon came to believe that the susceptibility of my formulations to these deceptive and tech-propagandistic appropriations was a product of my own under-interrogated use of the term "technology" in the piece as monolithic and extricable from and hence apparently substitutable for politics in ways that facilitated what I now recognize as a host of familiar reactionary futurological gestures -- the naturalization of elite incumbent interests as a-political, the substitution of marketing norms and forms for modes of reflection and analysis, the treatment of wish-fulfillment fantasies as scientific predictions, the investment of such speculation with transcendental significance, and the transformation of these discourses into subcultural formations, identity movements and consumer fandoms. For a recent and concise elaboration of the critique eventuating in part from experience of the techno-transcendental appropriation of my early efforts I recommend Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Long Teaching Day
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Clinton Collapse Collapsing
Clinton's national polling "collapse" continues to be the strangest looking one on record. pic.twitter.com/eBKc99QIXD
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) September 21, 2015
My Queer ProseTheses
Saturday, September 19, 2015
Friday, September 18, 2015
Indistinguishable From Tragic
Everybody's Fed Up!
When Democrats complain about the status quo they're complaining about Republican obstruction of solutions to our shared problems. 1
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 18, 2015
When Republicans complain about the status quo they're complaining about the facts of diversity and that you have to pay for public goods. 2
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 18, 2015
When pundits declare everybody fed up with the status quo they fail to distinguish these complaints or to mention only one is reasonable. 3
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 18, 2015
Evil Is Dumb
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Nature's Artiface: Negative Liberty, Spontaneous Order, and Reactionary Tech
"Negative" liberties are forms of positive liberty that manage to disavow, by naturalizing, their contingent and artificial affordances. 1
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015
"Spontaneous" orders are forms of order that manage to deny their parochialism, history and costs through the force of their incumbency. 2
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015
"Nature" derives from the Latin nasci, to be born, to appear, but it matters that labor precedes birth and preparation enables appearance. 3
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015
The essential work of the discourse of naturalization has come to be its disavowal of the artifice of what passes for the natural, 4
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015
...this is an accomplishment indicated not least by the treatment of nature as the contrary to artifice rather than as a species of it. 5
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015
To belabor the obvious here, naturalization conduces to the maintenance or amplification of the status quo and to reactionary politics. 6
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015
There is an affinity in the de-politicizing gesture through which always only some artifacts/techniques are constituted as "technology," 7
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015
…and then the ready investment of some technologies so constituted with the work of a-politicizing conservatism. 8
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015
Techno-libertarian ideology absolutely depends on these discursive ploys, 9
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015
…as when the end-to-end principle is implicitly identified with negative liberty, then enables the advocacy of plutocracy as meritocracy, 10
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015
…or when prior faith in natural, virtuous spontaneous order (confirming its advocates they should rule, naturally) transforms encryption 11
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015
…from technique to world-historical force that would abolish the unnatural, vicious barriers to the flowering of that spontaneous order. 12
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 17, 2015
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Long Teaching Day
Monday, September 14, 2015
Power to Persuade Posts BIG Piece
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Ayn Rand Emoji: $~
Friday, September 11, 2015
Scattered Speculations on Vulgar Science Fiction Through the Futurological Looking Glass
The focus of my work and my writing here and elsewhere has, for whatever reasons out of the strange vicissitudes of personal and professional biography, turned out instead to be mostly the critique of futurological discourses and futurist sub(cult)ural formations. I happen to think that futurology is the quintessential discourse of neoliberal corporate-militarism, and that the strange exhibitions made by robocultic futurisms are a kind of reductio ad absurdum or iceberg tip symptomizing prevailing pathologies of postwar-to-ecocatastrophist capitalism. As a democratic socialist (or social democrat, if you like) Green, all this matters to me enormously, of course.
I do often make the point that futurological "scenarios" are in my view the definitive literary genre of the neoliberal epoch -- which really amounts to the truism that marketing norms and forms disastrously suffuse postwar public discourses -- and this observation also often leads me to joke that these futurological "scenarios" are actually just impoverished forms of science fiction, but, you know, entirely bereft of clever plots, interesting characters, or sustained themes. Indeed, most futurological “scenarios” amount to little more than stipulated settings of a scene (hence their name) and then filled with dystopian/utopian wish-fulfillment fantasizing. Again, I daresay the connections to advertising are obvious. Hilariously, these settings are themselves inevitably borrowed from actual science fiction writers, and given the plausibility that attaches to the familiar, futurologists tend to recycle those conceits real writers would disdain as cliches.
I will also say that I regard the familiar pretense that science/speculative fiction is an essentially or even primarily "predictive" genre to be a vulgar futurological fallacy. Works in any literary genre can be accidentally or incidentally predictive -- but sf, like all great literature, is constitutive of and responsive to living, earthly polyculture. It is the open futurity inhering in the diversity of stakeholders contending and collaborating in the present, in their presence, that provokes the allegories, commentaries, myths, testimonies of science/speculative fictional futures. It will perhaps seem paradoxical from the vulgar futurological vantage that has come so much to define the sfnal in the neoliberal epoch, but for me it is because it is so exquisitely the genre not of the future but the future anterior tense that sf is indeed a prophetic literary form.
Leave it to capitalists idiotically to mis-identify sales pitches for prophesies. You can be sure that the same futurological impulse that would loot and dismantle the (to be sure, deeply flawed) Academy and substitute for it a promotional for-profit archipelago of corporate-military think-tanks and universities re-made by financial managers and techno-fixers in the image of the same think-tanks, and who extol venture-capitalist skim-and-scam artists and self-promoting celebrity CEOs and guru-wannabes as "Thought Leaders," would also insist we celebrate as "The Literature of Ideas" sf as an exhortation to mass acquiescence to status-quo amplification marketed as progress, disruption, accelerating change, and transcendence!
Another vulgar futurological gesture is embodied in the periodic policing of science/speculative fiction for "positivity" -- and this impulse seems to me equally in evidence in the recent facile Stephensonian call for cruelly optimistic can-do science fiction as well as in the ugly racism and sexism of the Sad Puppies who also fancy themselves to be defending the civilizational citadel. To clarify, in each of these cases a gesture that would reduce sf literature to consumer-capitalist or white-supremacist or patriarchal (that is, sexist/heterosexist/cissexist) agitprop -- which would be bad enough -- but actually amounts to the even worse, but by now completely conventional, subsumption of sf literature into the prevailing deceptive, hyperbolic, triumphalist, apocalyptic, eugenic, techno-fetishistic faith-based norms and forms of neoliberal corporate-militarist marketing, promotion, self-promotion, advertising as public discourse.
As I always insist, every futurism is a retro-futurism, inasmuch as "The Future" is always a parochialism rationalizing and reassuring elite-incumbents of forever ongoing status-quo amplification. "Disruption" usually amounts the deregulatory dismantlement of democracy in the service of plutocracy, "innovation" usually amounts to the promotional re-packaging of stale and discarded commodities as novelties, "resilience" usually amounts to exploiters congratulating those who manage to survive their exploitation to be exploited still more, "accelerating change" usually amounts to the increasing precarity of majorities as experienced by minorities who either benefit from that precarity or foolishly identify with those who do. Again, the only thing more typical of postwar capitalism than compulsory "positivity" about our soul-wrecking planet-wrecking extractive-industrial-consumerist corporate-militarism is to add the insult to these injuries that we testify endlessly to the progressive productivity of this wreckage.
Benjaminian angel of history, smh.
Thursday, September 10, 2015
Tech's Odd Conventional Wisdom
Wednesday, September 09, 2015
Trade-Off
Why Every Futurism Is A Retro-Futurism: A Twitter Conversation With Lance Robotson (And Others)
Futurology (and "tech"-talk more generally) is the quintessential discourse of neoliberal corporate-militarism.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 7, 2015
The Future is always a parochialism, offering up rationalizations for and reassurances to incumbent elites.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 7, 2015
"Accelerating change" is a slogan marketing status-quo amplification.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 7, 2015
Discussions of "technology and humanity" have become the way we indulge and deny the abiding misrecognition and mistreatment between people.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 7, 2015
Every futurism is a retro-futurism.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 7, 2015
@dalecarrico where all my leftist futurists at??
— lance robotson (@robotson) September 8, 2015
That's a long and interesting question, probably ultimately untweetable *but* ... @robotson "where all my leftist futurists at??"
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 8, 2015
@dalecarrico I feel that we are underrepresented.
— lance robotson (@robotson) September 8, 2015
I fear leftist futurists are not so much underrepresented but a bit deluded. Would LOVE to be shown to be wrong. @robotson
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 8, 2015
@dalecarrico @robotson Well, the internet began with "this is for everyone", but that didn't last long. So maybe you're right.
— Ian Snelgrove (@iznel7) September 8, 2015
@iznel7 @robotson Funny, I heard the internet began when academics sought a way to bloviate at one another even after a nuclear holocaust.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 8, 2015
@dalecarrico @robotson :) Perhaps I meant the WWW...
— Ian Snelgrove (@iznel7) September 8, 2015
Part of what concerns me is that futurisms may conduce to reaction, whatever the earnest and avowed politics of the futurist... @robotson
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 8, 2015
Instrumental as against political conceptions in futurology of power in the Arendtian sense are a key part of this story. @robotson
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 8, 2015
This relates to tendencies in futurist narratives of technoscientific change to determinism, triumphalism, linearity, automatism. @robotson
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 8, 2015
It conduces to reactionary idealizations of elite anti-democratic technocratic and design circumventions of political problems. @robotson
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 8, 2015
All this is apart from futurology's obvious eugenic currents, militarist incubators, unsustainable consumer-gizmo fixations... @robotson
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 8, 2015
@dalecarrico @yashalevine Exquisitely embodied by the fact that Nicholas Negroponte and John Negroponte are brothers.
— anti-epiphany (@edmondcaldwell) September 7, 2015
@dalecarrico you seem to be saying all stripes of futurisms are inherently guarding the status quo and are also inadequate as critical tools
— lance robotson (@robotson) September 8, 2015
@robotson That is my suspicion and my fear.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 8, 2015
@dalecarrico I'm inclined to agree. Futurism is most useful, to my thinking, as a satirical foil
— lance robotson (@robotson) September 8, 2015
@robotson I have found the absurdity of futurisms, in both their mainstream infomercial and extreme robocultic guises, a bit hard to parody.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 8, 2015
@dalecarrico Poe's law would probably get you booked for a TED talk.
— lance robotson (@robotson) September 8, 2015
@robotson I would rather eat my own poo.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 8, 2015
@dalecarrico is seriously bumming me out about futurism right now ... <3
— lance robotson (@robotson) September 8, 2015
Sect. 3 of https://t.co/zEbkdT77SB elaborates connection of futurism and neoliberalism that people are RTing, if you're curious for a case.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 8, 2015
Futurologists, Who Needs 'Em? A Twitterrant On Familiar Themes
A futurist is not who you want to talk to if you want to understand the technoscientific state of the art in research or engineering. 1
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 7, 2015
A futurist is not who you want to talk to if you want to understand the stakeholders contesting a technodevelopmental outcome politically. 2
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 7, 2015
A futurist is not who you want to talk to if you want to grasp critical or creative responses to technoscientific vicissitudes. 3
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 7, 2015
A futurist is who you want to talk to if you want to go to a corporate pep rally (innovate!) or see an ad peddling consumerism (gizmos!). 4
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 7, 2015
There are already-constituted disciplines and experts doing every single legitimate thing one might foolishly turn to futurists for. 5
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 7, 2015
Futurism is an anti-disciplinarity pretending to be an inter-disciplinarity. 6
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 7, 2015
In all this, futurism is of a piece with an anti-intellectual, anti-academic corporate-military think-tankification of public discourse... 7
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 7, 2015
...as well as the suffusion of all public life with the deceptive, hyperbolic norms and forms of promotional and marketing discourses. 8
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) September 7, 2015
Tuesday, September 08, 2015
Long Teaching Day
Monday, September 07, 2015
Sunday, September 06, 2015
Their Loss Our Gain
Bet Your Bottom Dollar
The Future!
The Future!
The Futurist Future,
You're Always Twenty Years Away...
Saturday, September 05, 2015
How To
Always Twenty Years Away...
Friday, September 04, 2015
Start Spreading the News
On a side note, was listening to Company the other night (obvious reasons) then on a hunch pulled out Hissing of Summer Lawns... and found the combination quite devastating.
Thursday, September 03, 2015
Periodic Public Service Announcement for Techno-Immortalist Uploading Fantasists
Brains are more like glands than computers.
You are going to die.
Wednesday, September 02, 2015
Trendspotting
Tuesday, September 01, 2015
Police Politics: Let's Get One Thing Straight Now
Advocating for a police state isn't "pro police."