Transhumanism is, broadly speaking, a philosophical and technological program that advances the position that technology should be used to enhance human mental and physical capabilities, both on an individual and species-wide basis. This is a contentious position. Critics of transhumanism have argued that it violates the divine order of the universe, degrades the human spirit, introduces unprecedented technological risks,reinforces class inequality, is insufficiently diverse, is ignorant of cultural values and its own past, represents an unjust colonization of future generations, and is scientifically untenable.

As a transhumanist fellow traveler, I will say that these critiques have some merit. It is only fair that a movement with aims somewhere between an industrial revolution and the creation of a new (and hopefully superior) sapient species take a lot of flak. But my problem with many of these critiques, as embodied by a recent scholarly book on transhumanism, is that they use a strawman version of transhumanism. Transhumanism isn’t just an ideology developed in a . Now, through the groundbreaking research practice of reading what transhumanists have to say about themselves and going to their conferences, I’ve developed a basic taxonomy of the major factions of transhumanist, Immortalists, Cryonicists, and Uploaders. I’d like to examine the program and philosophy of these factions individually.

Immortalists believe that the oldest and most important human problem is death, that death is caused by cellular aging—damage to the body on a molecular and chemical level—and that therefore reversing aging through cellular rejuvenation should be a primary research goal. Immortalists are most closely affiliated with Aubrey de Grey and the SENS Foundation.  From a philosophical and science policy perspective, I greatly admire the Immortalists. They’ve taken the basic morality of modern medicine, that death should be prevented by any means necessary, and extrapolated it to its logical conclusions. If death is not evil, but simply the final stage to life, then more resources should be invested in answering the question “What is a good death, and how do we attain it?” rather than squandered in a fragmentary struggle against individual diseases. The Immortalists do not have answers to questions like “Would an immortal species be more just or wise than mortals?” or “How will necessary change occur when the powerful never leave their positions?” or “If immortality is a limited resource, how should it be distributed?” Conversely, to argue for the necessity of death is an much more untenable position.

Cryonicists note the contemporary inadequacy of technology for undertaking the transhuman program, and focus on the cryopreservation of nearly-dead people in the present, assuming that they will be resurrected using future technology. Cryonics, most noteably associated with Max More and Alcor, are the most programmatically advanced faction. While no organism has yet been successfully unfrozen, you can sign up for Alcor’s preservation services today. Cryonicists trouble our notions of life and death, moving from heart cessation, to brain death, to information-theoretic death. A successful revival (particularly from LN2) will problem require Drexlerian nanotechnology to repair cellular damage, and it is an open question if future beings will want to have a bunch of future-shocked primitives walking around. In the present, cyronics has caused conflicts in families, and while the costs associated with preservation are not astronomical, they are high enough that it is reasonable to question if that investment would be better made in your descendents or charitable donations.

Uploaders take the position that what is significant about humans is our capacity for thought, and that the main problem with human cognition is that the brain is a crappy computer that stops working aft. By moving cognition from a neural substrate to a semi-conductor substrate, human can achieve immortality through cognitive backups, intelligence amplification via Moore’s Law, and direct experience of a whole digital universe.  Uploaders are most strongly affiliated with Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity Institute.  Uploaders have what is both the most mainstream version of transhumanism (robots and digital minds are a commonplace scifi trope), and what is also the most radical.  The Uploader program is based on several assumptions about the philosophy of mind and computer science that seem optimistic and partial at best. The first is that the best definition of identity is computation, rather than being based on any kind of physical or process continuity. Uploaders would need to prove that the mind running in silico is the same as the biological original to the satisfaction of skeptics in a way that is more demanding than the burdens placed on Immortalists and Cryonics. And for a movement heavily based in computer programming, Uploaders seem very optimistic that attempts to simulate the mind will not run afoul of limits in both computational complexity andmathematical incompleteness, and the long term viability of obsolescing computer hardware and data formats.

Compared to mainstream conceptions of humanity, all these transhumanist factions have more commonalities than differences, but the differences are very real, and should not be ignored or glossed over. In a future post, I plan to examine transhumanism more holistically as a movement and ideology, but first, I believe it import to clear up some of the political distinctions between three very different visions of the future.

A few days ago, Evan Selinger wrote an article onAugmented-Reality Racism which has been (unfortunately) gaining some traction around the web. I say ‘unfortunately’, because Evan is a sharp and insightful thinker who can translate dense philosophical ideas into nuanced and popular forms (see his July article on The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gunfor a great example), and Augmented-Reality Racism is not that. Since I think there’s some merit to the premise, I’d like to take my own whack at it.

Augmented reality (AR) takes modern computing technology and puts it on the bridge of your nose, interlaying projected images and sounds with your view of the world. Evan hypothesizes that such a technology could be used in a racist manner, either to ‘erase’ people of a certain race from view or to become super-aware of their presence (pulse-Doppler blackdar?). He notes that technologies have frequently embedded racist agendas, like the example of Robert Moses’ low bridges on the Long Island Parkway, designed to block buses--full of black people from the city--from the beaches. Evan concludes by wondering if augmented realities designed to individualize and humanizing the masses in the crowd might be a good way to build social bonds and empathy.

There’s an irritating floppiness to the scenario (does racist AR obscure people or highlight them?), but more fundamentally, the article fails to think deeply about augmented reality or the relationship between technology and race. First AR: Augmented reality is much more than the visible front-end of a head-mounted display. AR (properly, Nathan Jurgenson’s definition of Mild Augmented Reality) is the belief that “The digital and physical are part of one reality, have different properties, and interact.” It’s about “Spiming” as much of the world as possible, so that the qualities and histories of objects can be viewed and understood in those nifty heads-mounted displays.

In many ways, the world is already augmented. Any surface covered with words and other signs and signifiers, which in certain places can be pretty much all of them, is already augmented. Awnings block the rain and advertise stores. Packages conceal the materiality of their contents, while displaying an image. What makes the new augmented reality unique is that digital information is fluid, protean, infinitely customizable and transformative. Much like alchemists, modern entrepreneurs invoke a quicksilver digital as they attempt to transmute the dull substance of commerce into glittering profits.

Race is a complicated topic, far too big to be contained in a short essay, but one of the most interesting sections in Sorting Things Out by Bowker and Star concerns the system of racial classification used in Apartheid South Africa.  From 1948 to 1994, every South African was classified as Black, White, Indian, or Coloured, with segregated housing, employment, and legal rights. Apartheid was an institutional system, a technology backed by a racial pseudo-science, for legitimating and perpetuating the exploitation and oppression of a large portion of the South Africa population.  But it was also a system for generating order, and Bowker and Star explain in detail the Kafka-esque nightmare of lives upended by the arbitrary classificatory decisions of petty bureaucrats. To make this absurd system work, the physical bodies of non-white South Africans had to be ‘augmented’ with administrative tests and pass books detailing precisely what race a person belonged to.

Now, contemporary America is not nearly as racist as apartheid South Africa, but race still matters here, whether it’s on the census form, or in the lived experience of people who experience prejudice, police brutality, and shorter life expectancy. What I find interesting is that as America has moved away from the worst excesses of Jim Crow, racism only becomes visible through technology. We know that the NYPD is racist from their own data on Stop and Frisk, which records statistically higher numbers of searches for African Americans and Hispanics and fewer cases of illegal drug or weapon possession.  If you buy the results from the Implicit Association Tests, pretty much everybody has some degree of racist sentiment. Racism as a matter of systemic bias, rather than overt discrimination, is only revealed through the augmented reality of statistics and demographics, which attach data to people.

There are also interesting patterns in how people of difference races and classes use technology, for example the now classic description of MySpace as a ‘digital ghetto’ afflicted by ‘white flight’, or how twice as many African-Americans use cell phones as their primary form of internet access compared to whites.  Race in America is more than skin color; it’s also cultural, in patterns of speech and metaphor. Even bad ideas sound plausible when presented articulately, with clean graphic design and proofreading. I wonder what would happen to political discourse if we removed this embedded bias towards certain authoritative voices by making everybody present their ideas inERMAHGERD or after nurbling. Making the form of arguments identical (and ridiculous) might help us focus on their contents.

To return to the premise of the Augmented Reality racism, I’d take the opposite tack from Evan. If race is a matter of surface appearances, than an augmentation that erases these surface differences is likely to make us less racist on an individual level. To flip a popular saying, on the internet we’re all dogs.  And while I’m sure there are some Racial Holy War(link warning: extreme racism) types who would enjoy knowing precisely how many ‘mud people’ there are in a three-mile radius so they could feel threatened and hateful all the time, for most people being more aware of the statistical and systemic patterns of racism(link warning: awesome maps) is useful tool to engage forms of social justice we are currently ignorant of. As for humanizing people, maybe it’s holiday misanthropy, but most people are kinda terrible (link warning: internet Nice Guys), and we probably don’t want to know how much they enjoy Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, or their views on gun control, or the contents of their fridge. Apathy is the lubricant of urban living.

Evan opened with a story about his very Jewish grandmother, and so I’d like conclude with a story about my equally Jewish great-Grandmother, who had very poor eyesight and only got her first pair of glasses late in life. Right after getting her new glasses, she went for her usual walk around the neighborhood with her daughter, and began to sob.
“Ma, why are you crying?” My grandmother (then a young woman) asked her mother.
“Everybody looks so sad,” The old lady said, “Before I could see, I thought they were smiling all the time.”

The Submerged State:How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy
by Suzanne Mettler

And

The Righteous Mind:Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt

It doesn't take a pundit to know that American politics are screwed up beyond measure. Congress is stuck in gridlock, the economy is stalled, elections are decided by culture war attack ads, and politics itself is derided as a pursuit for liars and hustlers. Suzanne Mettler explains why we’ve become disenchanted with political solutions to our problems, while Jonathan Haidt looks at the deeper moral differences between liberals and conservatives.

The key issue is not the government we see, but the government we don't, the vast tangle of tax breaks, public-private partnerships, and incentives that Mettler deems 'the submerged state'. The size of the submerged state is astounding, 8% of the GDP, and fully half the size of the visible state: Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, defense, servicing the debt, and the relatively minuscule discretionary funding that covers everything else the government does, from welfare to transportation to education to NASA and foreign aid.

Mettler deploys economic and social statistics to show that for all its expense, the submerged state is a failure on every level. Whatever your politics, there is something to despise about the submerged state. It represents a transfer of wealth from the poor to the wealthy, when most Americans abstractly support reducing inequality. It is a distortionary government influence on the workings of the free market, without the relativity clarity of direct provision of services or regulations. It fails to accomplish its stated policy goals of improving access to education, healthcare, and housing. It leads to civic disengagement, as those who benefit fail to see how the government has helped them, or how they can meaningfully impact politics through voting. And above all, it institutionalizes corruption, as broad public participation is replaced by the lobbying of narrowly constituted interests groups.

This book is not perfect. Mettler is a political scientist, and she has the biases of her profession: that conservatives are responsible for much of what's gone wrong withAmerica over the past 30 years (disclosure: I agree), and that citizens would vote 'better' if they were just better informed. This book doesn't fatally harpoon the submerged state, but Mettler has marked the target for future scholars and politicians. The submerged state is a powerful lens for seeing many divergent policies as part of a broad trend towards political disengagement, and government that is not smaller, but rather inflexible and unresponsive.

In a just and sensible world, the 2012 Presidential race would be decided by the candidate’s aggressiveness in tackling the submerged state. Unfortunately, last I checked, we’re still on Earth. Democracy isn't just about the boring but necessary business of deciding who keeps the sewers running and collects the taxes, but is also about the type of society that we wish to live in. Voters don’t vote on “rational” economic grounds, but rather on the basis of shared values and aspirations.

Jonathan Haidt draws broadly from research in psychology, anthropology, and biology to develop a six-factor basis for morality (Care/Harm, Liberty/Oppression, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation), and show that moral judgment is an innate intuitive ability accompanied by post-hoc justifications. He argues that morality serves to bind non-related groups together, and moral skills have been favored by biological and social evolutionary mechanisms over human history.

In practical political terms, the Enlightenment morality embodied by Liberalism draws from only the first three moral factors while Conservatism draws from all six. This explains both the differences between liberal and conservative values, and why conservatives beat the stuffing out of liberals at the polls. Drawing on more complex moral framework, they are able to make more convincing arguments in favor of their preferred policies.

However, Haidt is unwilling to follow his theory to its ultimate question: Can a democratic political system that privileges the rights of minorities sustain decision-making based on all six moral factors? Care/Harm, Liberty/Oppression, and Fairness/Cheating are universal factors; everybody uses them, and aside philosophical paradoxes like the famous Trolley Problem, we agree on when they are upheld or violated. Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation are provincial factors; they're different for every culture and every individual. 

A moral order for a pluralistic society which takes the latter three factors seriously must either force people to uphold a morality they do not believe in, or segregate people based on their different interpretations of morality. Perhaps I'm sensitive to such concerns because of my secular Jewish culture, but forcing people to profess beliefs not their own, or requiring them to live in communities of only like-minded individuals is profoundly unjust, and practically impossible.

Conservatism struggles with the reality that we no longer live in separated communities. We have one global economy, one atmosphere, one water cycle, one planetary oil supply, one nuclear Armageddon, etc. Haidt faults liberalism for damaging American moral capital in the 60s and 70s, but he doesn't explain how conservative politics can govern effectively without infringing on liberty, or coalescing to gridlock.

Imagine trying to get conservatives in America, China, and the Middle East to reach an agreement about freedom of speech, the role of religion in the public sphere, or the proper authority of the state. Value conflicts would impede the necessary daily work of trade and treaties, peace and prosperity, and a shared and sustainable future. It might be a more moral world, but it would not be a better a one.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “We must hang together; else, we shall most assuredly hang separately." Liberals across the world may disagree on the details, but can broadly agree on the framework for approaching continental-scale and international policy problems. We all have the right to vote according to our values, but we should take responsibility in recognizing the limited power of law to enforce those values in others.

Drones and the future of warfare are perennial interest of mine. My previous writing on drones was from the perspective of American politics and military strategy.  In brief, I argued that the armed drone has proceeded in concert with bureaucratic institutions of the ‘kill list’, from the context of democratic governance is dangerous because the institutions involved are free of external oversight, and above all, that this policy of ‘war by assassination’ developed without any form of public deliberation or participation.

What I did not write about was the consequences of drones on the ground, because I did not have that data, and would not presume to speak for the perspectives of people who I don’t understand. A recent report, Living Under Drones, by the Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School (Stanford Clinic) and the Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law (NYU Clinic), has provided that data, in the form of 130 interviews with Pakistani residents of the areas targeted by drones. I do not agree with all of the premises and conclusions of the report, but they have rendered an invaluable service by giving voice to an otherwise silenced population. I’d like to take a moment to discuss what this report reveals about the strategy of the drone war, and how that strategy can be improved.

The official word on the drone program, from counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan up to President Obama himself, is that drones are legal, ethical, and above all, precise. Strikes are conducted only on the best intelligence, on verified targets, in a manner that avoids civilian casualties. The metaphor of the Global War on Terror is cancer; terrorist cells must be cut out of the nation before they metastasize, and this can be done without harming the integrity of the body politic.

The three strikes described in Living Under Drones paints a very different picture. The stories differ in the details, but a common thread emerges as an attack on what the administration claims to be terrorist activity is described by locals as just daily life, including political council meetings and travel. The survivors, either just outside the blast radius of the relatives of the decease, describe the shock of the explosion, picking through ruined buildings for body parts, and trying to rebuild what remains. What through the lens of a drone looks like a terrorist, is to people in Waziristan a father, brother, son, economic breadwinner, friend, or local elder. Every death reverberates through the social fabric, individuals who are only weakly tied to legitimate targets in Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or the Haqqani network.

Those who live under drones describe the experience as one of fear amplified by uncertainty and helplessness into terror. “In the words of one interviewee: ‘God knows whether they’ll strike us again or not. But they’re always surveying us, they’re always over us, and you never know when they’re going to strike and attack” (Living Under Drones pg. 81).  In practice, drones are terror weapons, with unanticipated psychological effects beyond their lethal impact. It is one thing for a democracy to avoid a debate on whether or not certain ‘bad people’ can and should be killed; it is another thing entirely to avoid that debate about whether a civilian population should be terrorized in pursuit of that policy.

These opposing perspectives on drones matter, because perspectives inform policy, which informs outcomes.  If drones are truly surgical weapons, than the matter at hand becomes identifying the relevant jihadist targets, and eliminating enough of them to shatter their organizations, or doing it rapidly enough to outpace their ability to regenerate, or simply staying at it at long enough that they go away. Unfortunately, regardless of its (arguable) successes in Waziristan, the proliferation of jihadist groups in Yemen, Libya, and Syriashows that years of this kind of ‘political surgery’ are not leading to victory. Attrition is the last refuge of the defeated strategist.

Drawing from Unrestricted Warfare, which presents the novel and profitable proposal “that the new principles of war are no longer 'using armed force to compel the enemy to submit to one's will,' but rather are 'using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one's interests'", the problems of drones as a terror weapon become clear.  The object of the drone campaign is not to surgically excise the Jihad, but to make the population turn against them on the belief that fighting Al Qaeda is a better option than allowing them to exist among them, thereby inviting the drones.

This strategy is riddled with weaknesses and little better than attrition. One strategic perspective views the Global War on Terror as one front in the struggle between the New World Order and the New World Disorder. Vis a vis futurist, sci-fi author, and guru Bruce Sterling and Professor Thomas Barnett of the Naval War College, there are places where the networks are open, the official economy encompasses pretty much everything, and rule of law applies, (if you’re reading this, you almost certainly live in one), and there are other places where the infrastructure is poor, power is held by small networks of personal charisma and authority, and the major economic activity is extortion, smuggling, and drugs. Terrorists, by and large, come from places like this, because they encourage the development of tightly-linked groups willing to kill. These groups don’t have the organizational ability to project power much beyond their neighborhood, but in rare circumstances they can hijack the infrastructure of the New World Order (airliners and subways, for example) to carry out mass attacks.

The point is that breaking up any particularly group is irrelevant, because the pervasive lack of economic opportunity and broader social meaning mean that places like these spawn terrorists, revolutionaries, and criminals in the same way that a garbage pile spawns flies. The isolation and provincialism of these places is hard to overstate, asinterviews with three would-be Pakistani suicide bombers reveals:

“The common thread between the lives of these youths was their complete isolation from rest of the Pakistan and from the world at large. The lack of access to TV, Internet, and formal education meant they were almost completely oblivious to such massive events as 9/11, and as such they were unaware of where and what exactly the United States was. One of the boys mentioned that there was only one TV in their entire neighborhood, and even that one didn't work half of the time. Their only access to information was the radio, which has for years been dominated by the jihadists who were using the name of Islam to mobilize the people.”

If ultimate victory in this war is to be achieved by spreading the New World Order into the dark corners of the world, it is unlikely that terrorizing the population into mass anxiety, killing local leaders, and blowing up what infrastructure there is, is a fruitful step towards that goal.

I’m going to be cynical here, and say that regardless of its legality, ethics, or mass public opposition, the drone war is going to continue. In a tactical sense, armed drones are simply too good at killing terrorists for them to be abandoned as a technology. How then, might the strategy be recovered?

Foucault, in his classic Discipline and Punish, wrote about the Panopticon as both a physical structure and as a theory linking surveillance, punishment, and discipline. For Foucault, the power of the panopiticon’s architecture was that the possibility of being observed and punished at any time required the inmates to act in accordance to the wishes of the overseer at all times. When the inmates fully internalized the values of the overseer, and could be trusted to behave as he wished without active involvement, they had become ‘disciplined’. In this framework, the strategic aim of the Global War on Terror is extending American discipline in regards to terrorists to local populations around the world.

The theory of the panopticon is relatively simply, but its application is anything but.  Terrorist networks use intelligence tradecraft to avoid detection, making them elusive targets for surveillance. And from the perspective of civilians on the ground, the drone strikes appear random, leading to learned helplessness rather than an anti-terrorist discipline. I believe that to be effective, each drone strike must be linked to a clear American policy and ideology; and to an opportunity to for potential change behaviors and allegiances before being attacked. The drone war would become slower, more deliberative, and above all, more transparent.

Is this proposal ideal? Absolutely not. I’m not even sure if it’s a good idea. But what I am sure of is that the current strategies of the drone war as I understand them are not strategies that are capable of winning, and that endurance in pursuit of defeat is no virtue.

Recently, ASU launched the new Center for Science and the Imagination to use science fiction in serious ways. Things like CSI are literally unbelievable; they could only happen at ASU, and it’s why I’m a grad student here. I’m look forward to working with the new center, and I have some ideas.

In the words of the center’s director, Ed Finn:
Our mission is to foster creative and ambitious thinking about the future. We want to bring writers, artists, scholars, scientists and many others together in collaboration on bold visions for a better future. But more than this, we want to share a sense of agency about the future, to get everyone on the plane thinking about how our choices inflect the spectrum of possibilities before us.

Right now, the center is bringing people together around big visions for the future, the most prominent of which is Neal Stephenson’s Giant Space Tower. Unlike a space elevator, which would require tens of thousands of kilometers of catbon nanotube fiber at an unprecedented production scale, Neal’s tower is only 10-20km tall, and built out of conventional materials like steal. However, by getting a launch platform above the thickest parts of Earth’s atmosphere, rockets could reach orbit much more efficiently, opening up new frontiers in space travel. The idea is that as a potential rallying point for interdisciplinary studies in engineering, sustainability, the politics of siting the tower, economics of operation, design of human living quarters high in what climbers call the ‘death zone’. It’s a big vision, but are we really thinking about choices and possibilities?

The tower is a fascinating project in many aspects, but as a spaceflight critic, I have my doubts. The tower is an interesting idea, but it’s closest analog isn’t the Apollo program, it’s large scale infrastructure like the Panama Canal, which was at its time an incredibly ambitious and fraught undertaking, cost $375 million, was politically tied to the imperial domination of Central America and moneyed shipping interests, and killed tens of thousands of workers. While it was a bridge between worlds in its time, and a worthy and impressive project, these days, its most enduring legacy is not heroic engineering, but cheap consumer goods and the Panamax ship standard.

Science fiction asks us to dream big, but history tells us we should be cautious. The legacies of innovation are rarely what we think they will be. The most important technologies are rarely the most impressive ones, human genome projects and particle accelerators and rocket ships. The science and technology that impacts us the most are quiet, omnipresent, invisible, things like air conditioning and standardized forms, forms of transportation that are cheap, efficient, and safe, buildings that stay up in storms and earthquakes, and the millions of other things that modern living requires, and which we notice only when they break.

We live in an era characterized by technologies, and as Langdon Winner noted in his classicThe Whale and The Reactor, these artifacts have politics, but their values, costs and benefits, and forms of responsibility disappear into a fog of engineering details accessible only to experts. The architectures of technological systems structure and direct our lives in subtle ways, and yet we lack good tools to evaluate these technologies. I can think of three primary ways we approach technology: elegance, expense, and inertia. Technophiles love the newest most technically sweet solution or gadget for its own sake. Accountants are concerned with how much it will cost, and who will pay. And most people approach technology from a position of minimizing disruptions in how they live their lives, and interoperability with the current standard.

When people to come together to discuss technologies, the result is all too frequently confusion because they are coming from mutually incomprehensible perspectives. Rationality is not a fair and even-handed way of adjudicating between perspectives; demanding rationality is a way of enforcing the use of only one perspective. Cost-benefit analysis and similar “rational” techniques of technology assessment and governance take in only a very small slice of the human experience. For democrats, people who believe that everybody should have a fair say in the development of the community, this ungovernability of technology is a perennial problem.

Instead of bemoaning the perennial irrationality of the public, or elite decision-makers, or the morons who programmed the menu system on my internet enabled BluRay player, I think we should look for a different way of communicating. People may be irrational, in that they do things other than how we would have done then, but their actions make sense internally. They are never unreasonable.

Walter Fisher, in his work on the narrative paradigm delimited his theory that:
(1) Humans are essentially story tellers; (2) the paradigmatic mode of human decision-making and communication is “good reasons” which vary in form among communication situations, genres, and media; (3) the production and practice of goods reasons is ruled by matters of history, biography, culture, and character… (4) rationality is determined by the nature of persons as narrative beings-their inherent awareness of narrative probability, what constitutes a coherent story, and their constant habit of testing narrative fidelity, whether the stories they experience ring true with the stories they know to be true in their lives… (5) the world is a set of stories which must be chosen among to live the good life in a process of continual recreation.

In short, good reasons are the stuff of stories, the means by which humans realize their nature as reasoning valuing animals. The philosophical ground of the narrative paradigm is ontology. The materials of the narrative paradigm are symbols, signs of consubstantiation, and good reasons, the communicative expressions of social reality.

We need to bring reasons to the forefront, and stories are some of the densest, most fruitful areas for discovering reasons. We need to start taking stories seriously, and specifically stories about technology. We need more people telling stories about technology, better stories about technology, and better channels for getting good stories out there. And for better or worse, science fiction is the genre of stories that deal with technology and the future. As Clark Miller and Ira Bennet, two professors at CSPO wrote, “Science-fiction is technology assessment for the rest of us.”

Jay Oglivy, a futurist with the Global Business Network, argues that, “Part of the role of futurists… should therefore be to articulate in an understandable and appealing way images of a better future. We need an antidote to Blade Runner, a foil for A Clockwork Orange, a better sequel to 1984, a truly humanized Animal Farm.” I hope that the new Center for Science and Inquiry can take up this challenge, creating a community of interdisciplinary scholars and methods to use science fiction to articulate, discuss, and create this better world. Anything less would be a betrayal of our ambitions. 

Back in April I wrote a short story for ARC’s fiction contest, that while it didn’t win, was a lot of fun. They have a second contest up about the post-human condition, which has got me thinking seriously about where we’re going, and what we’ll become.

I’m going to start with two axioms
1) A post-human upgrade is about more than seeking a competitive or aesthetic edge, it is about the type of community that you want to belong to.
2) Late-stage capitalism is fucked, along with the ecosystem and 90% of the current population, and everybody with more than three brain cells knows it.

With those premises, what kind of world shakes out?

One option is space colonization, getting off this rock entirely. Now, there are a surprising number of weird cryptic billionaires backing private spaceflight, but this isn’t about sub-orbital hops for tourists, this is about saving humanity, and if you run the number of kilos to orbit per year times the number of years left before the global economy goes kablooie, it’s obvious that there isn’t enough lift for everybody who wants to be saved. Space colonization is inherently incredibly dangerous, and you need the best colonists to have a chance: experts in a variety of technical fields, in peak physical condition, fitting effortlessly into teams, working best under pressure, and with the self-discipline of a Zen master. NASA does this by selecting the best of the best military pilots and starry-eyed scientists, and running them though a brutal training lottery to earn a dwindling number of spaceflight seats, but our program is run by tech CEOs, and they do things differently.

The only best way to run the system would be a meritocratic lottery.  Prospective applicants put themselves under constant technological surveillance to demonstrate that they have the Right Stuff emotionally to make it in the tight confines of a space colony. They master abstruse scientific fields, discipline their bodies with exercise and technology, and talk politics with their fellow Emigrants, trying to build up enough of a rep to qualify for a seat on a rocket out of here. And of course there’s no way a mere human could earn their way in, which is why these people enhance their brains with drugs and cybernetics, harden their body against radiation, reduce their caloric and oxygen intake, and otherwise demonstrate their commitment to the program. The whole system is orchestrated by Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, and James Cameron, as they tweak the social scoring parameters on the whole system to cultivate an elite race that can thrive in the empty vastness of space.

It’s easy to imagine what these people look and act like. They spend all their time cooped up learning how to repair solar panels in vacuum and run a closed cycle life-support system, and when they get out of their rooms they argue with their friends about utopia and the end of the world. They think everything on Earth is going to shit, so they don’t care about material possessions or friendship, but they’re also all ambitious and socially adept and self-effacing, possessing a brittle layer of charisma over the zealous flame of the true believer. You can spot them on the street in an instant, thin and pale in their simple black clothing with the logo of the colony they hope to join, expensive electronics discretely recording everything they do, and the same haunted, hunted, look. Immortality awaits them, if they can please their masters.

The second route is to think seriously about what it will take to be in the 10% that survives the collapse of civilization. Part of it is physical: they need to be able to eat anything or nothing at all, because our agricultural system needs cheap oil and constant irrigation and a stable climate to work, and all of that’s going to change. Resistance to disease is critical because refugee camps breed epidemics. Plague is one of the Four Horsemen for a reason. Civilized psychology gets people killed when the savages take over; toughness and a willing to kill those who will try and kill you become virtues. The most important component is social. When the government breaks down, people turn to their primary loyalties, and unlike Somalia or Iraq, most people in the Western World are a long way from authentic tribalism. Losers will try and fake it with fandoms, or their job, or ethnicity, or some other dumb 20th century identity marker, but at the end of the day the survivors will need an unbreakable bond of trust with those who will be watching their back.

They’re out there, running through the woods and practicing martial arts and stockpiling weapons and tools for the end of the world. They pick subtle enhancements sensory and physical enhancements to give them an edge in combat and wilderness survival. They build trust with a combination of the oldest and newest methods, using orgies and designer drugs to bind each other into fighting packs closer than any family. By day, they go about their lives like anyone else, the only difference a certain gleam in their eyes as they calculate what sudden violence could get them in while standing in line at the supermarket, but when night comes, they’ll be ready. They will be the wolves, and everybody else will be the sheep.

Still trying to work out precisely what the story is; who the characters are, and what the tension pivots on, but I have until July 8. As if I don’t have enough on my plate…

Observing various scientific “controversies” over the past few years, I’ve seen a pattern repeated again and again between the scientific mainstream and dissenters. Whether it’s about global warming, a link between vaccines and autism, the safety of GMO crops, or any other issue, the conversation looks pretty much like this.

Scientists: “We have developed the following hypothesis due to a preponderance of evidence, and the scientific consensus says we should enact the following policies.”
Dissenters: “Well, that’s just your theory. What about this evidence which argues something entirely different?”
Scientists:  “That evidence is methodologically and theoretically flawed, and we have dismissed it for scientific reasons.”
Dissenters: “No, you’re dismissing it because you’ve been bought off by Big Pharma/Monsanto/Al Gore!”
Scientists: “Well, you’re anti-science, and you aren’t responsible enough to participate in this debate. Come back when you’re willing to accept the truth.”

And then the two camps go their separate ways: The dissenters to fringe websites where they catalog the corruption of mainstream science and develop their alternative bodies of evidence, and the scientists to letters pages of scientific journals, where they write pleads for better science education and communication, so that science can drive out all the frauds out of the public sphere and we can have rational policies again, like we did in the good old days.

The other thing that I’ve observed while following these controversies is that mainstream science is losing. The American political system has become entrenched around the truth or falsity of anthropogenic global warming, despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that it is happening and it is a problem. Fewer people completely vaccinate their kids each year, even though the original Wakefield study has been totally discredited and disease rates are on the rise. And fears of GMO have become a permanent part of European politics, and a rising force in America and China.

This leads to one of two conclusions: either despite all the calls by respected scientists for more communication and education efforts by the scientific community have been falling short and should be increased, or the conventional framing of the problem is essentially wrong and misleading. I believe it is the latter; that the arena of public scientific debate has changed in recent decades, that the dissenters are “guerrilla scientists” who like guerrilla fighters use asymmetric strategies to avoid the superior strength of their foe, and that to win, mainstream science must find an equally adaptable counter-strategy.

To explain this idea, I’m going to need to talk about science and guerrilla warfare. Please bear with me.

As a PhD student in science and technology studies, one of the biggest questions that we face is “What is science?” There are lots of good definitions: facts about the natural world, systemic knowledge, a method for generating said facts and knowledge and ensuring their reliability using experiment and observation, but all of these definitions conceal the process of how science is made; how specific claims become true facts or false hypothesizes. To understand that process, we need to go inside science, inside scientific writing, and inside the lab. Bruno Latour has developed some of the most powerful lenses on the actual practice of science in his books Laboratory Life and Science in Action.

For Latour, science is a rhetoric; a way of convincing other people to believe your claims. The form of the modern scientific paper has been careful developed to be as convincing as possible. A successful scientific paper integrates itself in a network of previous scholarship, explains how it will extend the results of previous scholars, presents a method that can be duplicated by others, shows results (typically in graphical form), and then discusses those results. I’m going to use as my example a paper by the other author of this blog, “A model for the origin and properties of flicker-induced geometric phospenes”, but any other paper would work just as well. 

The paper begins by summarizing the previous work in the field, starting in 1819 and moving through the 1970s and into the present day. The introduction establishes the paper vis-à-vis previous work on the visual system, and a question about the origins of flicker in either the retina or the visual cortex. The method section describes using the Wilson-Cowan equation for modeling flicker in a simulated neural network, how to implement that equation in a computer program, the images that are produced by the model, and finally a discussion of how those images might relate to what happens in the brain and what we can perceive when we close our eyes and press on our eyeballs (or use ze goggles).

At every turn, the paper preemptively parries those who would try to doubt it. “You think that this problem is unimportant. Here are people who have worked on it before me.” “You doubt my math? Write your own program and check my results.” “You disagree with my choice of the Wilson-Cowan equation? Here are 1040 papers that also use it. Do you disagree with all of them?” The paper is structured and linked such that to disagree with it either requires opposing a much larger and more authoritative body of scholarship than “things that Mike Rule, Matt Stoffregen, and Bard Ermentrout say”, or going into their lab, checking that all their machines work, that the graphs in the paper are actually reproducible, and essentially duplicating their effort and expertise.

This post-modernist view of science can be disconcerting at first; what about objective physical reality? What about the search for truth? Has science just become another kind of blind faith, based on appeal to past authority?  No. What Latour tells us is that scientists do not know a priori what is ‘real’ and ‘true’. Those words are only applied to hypothesis after an intense process of purification and examination by the community of scientists that rules out every other possible explanation.

The picture of science that Latour develops is an interlocking network of claims about the natural world, linked into a mutually reinforcing pattern with more accepted claims at the center and weaker claims at the fringes. Science as a totality is like a fractal star fort, defensible from any angle.  But this picture is partial and passive.

The life of science is in active disputes, for example, “What is the structure of DNA circa 1953?” Disputes are opposing versions of reality, and they are only settled by the destruction and absorption of alternative facts and theories into the final ‘science truth’. Actor-Network Theory describe this process as one of enrollment wherein scientists enlist facts, instruments, and people as allies in their cause, with the aim of building the strongest rhetorical network.

Looking at this, it struck me that the contest is much like a battle, with the scientist deploying his or her enrolled facts like a general committing his soldiers. There are many points of congruence between these models: critical questions and strategic points, the ability to generate new results and supply, predictive power and firepower, but they key point is that in science as in war there are rules.

Science has its own kind of Geneva Convention. Not an explicit treaty, but social norms that describe how science should be done, and how the contest should be decided. I’m not going to provide a complete set of norms, but a some of the more important ones might be: results must be reproducible; judge the idea and not the person; cite your sources; do not present others’ work as your own; remain open-minded; accept the accolades of your peers humbly. A scientist whole held onto a clearly discredited theory would not be respected, and it is considered bad form to pillage a rival’s lab and enslave their postdocs.

In action, the difference between mainstream scientists and dissenters is that dissenters don’t play by the rules. Dissenters care more about their personal commitments than the structure of science as a whole. They do not cede the field gracefully if their facts are overturned. And they accept a wider variety of evidence as a basis for their claims, including social, moral, economic, and political factors. They may not be good scientists, their theories are frequently shoddy and mystical, but it is important to recognize that they are engaged in essentially the same kind of work as mainstream scientists: making cause-and-effect claims about the natural world. Calling dissenters ‘anti-science’ implies that scientists should ignore and belittle them as unworthy of serious critique. Calling them guerrillas suggests a very different approach for understanding their aims and engaging with them.

Guerrilla warfare is political warfare. In conventional war, the goal is defeat of the enemy through decisive battle, and strategy is the art of staging the decisive battle on favorable terms. The aim of guerrilla warfare is to demonstrate the political illegitimacy of the people in charge while building popular support for revolution. Strategy is focused on swift strikes to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the governance and provoke reprisals against the people, the preservation of the guerrilla’s own forces, and the use of time to wear out the enemy’s will to resist. While conventional military firepower is still important in guerrilla war, it is of secondary importance compared to psychological and political factors. In guerrilla warfare, the winner is the side that everybody believes has won; not the side that maintains control of the battlefield afterwards.

Guerrilla warfare is a complicated subject, and no two conflicts are alike, but some common patterns can be drawn. Lt Col John Boyd developed a theory of warfare based on learning systems, and he noticed that as a force slides towards defeat, it becomes isolated and insular, it stops taking in information from the outside world, and is eventually confined to irrelevance. Information and morality are central; as the American military learned in Vietnam in the 1960s and in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, firepower is useless if targets cannot be located, and support can only be gained through demonstrating moral strength and sensitivity. To beat guerrillas, the government must demonstrate its superiority through active policies that improve the lot of the people while avoiding internal corruption. Successful counter-insurgency strategies, such as the Iraq Surge implemented by General Petraeus, aims to isolate guerrillas, to draw wavering fighters back into the government’s camp, and to find and kill the most hardcore commanders who could not be converted.

Combining these two theories, Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and Boyd’s OODA Loop, the shape of the problem and its solution begin to emerge. Scientific guerrillas exist because scientific expertise is a key buttress of democratic decision-making. 21st century American culture is such that a policy must appeal both to the will of the people and an external reality as informed by expert, i.e. scientific, opinion. But science, to put it bluntly, is hard. It requires a long and grueling apprenticeship and then access to expensive and specialized laboratory equipment. And worse from a political perspective, science is not democratic. No matter how many geeks wished that the OPERA neutrinos were truly faster-than-light, that result stubbornly remains an experimental error. It’s far easier to don the guise of expertise when it’s needed to support a policy position than it is to genuinely discover the truth according to the strict rules of science.

In this context, saying that the dissenters need to play by mainstream standards of evidence is like saying that we just need Al Qaeda to put on uniforms, gather around Tora Bora, and have that decisive battle we’ve been waiting for. It’s a fantasy, because it involves convincing guerrillas who are winning to fight a conventional battle that they will surely lose. Science education, science funding, and more public understanding of science are equivalent to sending in more troops, more weapons, more airstrikes. It can stabilize the situation, but it is unlikely to actually defeat the guerrillas.

I worry that science is becoming isolated in a Boydian sense. Scientific papers only cite other scientific papers; most scientists work and live in enclaves around major research universities. There are extremely good reasons for this, from a conventional perspective it generates stronger science, but it has also made science more brittle, less relevant, and less politically legitimate.

Like it or not, scientists have become embroiled in a wide variety of guerrilla disputes on major issues, and I’ve not seen a robust strategy for countering the guerrillas. I love and respect science; it’s the best tool for understanding and improving the world that we have, but it is under attack in ways that most people can’t even see, and is not effectively defending itself. Guerillas can be beaten, but it will require an active strategy of integrity, candor, and two-way communication. The stakes could not be higher. As Henry Kissinger said on the Vietnam War in 1969, “The guerilla wins if he does not lose; the conventional army loses if it does not win.”

To the tune of House of the Rising Sun. And you're lucky I don't have a backing band.

There is a stage in grad school
They call the ABD
It's been the ruin of many a poor boy
And Lord, it's got to me

My adviser was a madman
He taught me pure theory
My committee's full of geniuses
They never will agree

Now the only thing a grad student needs
Is a laptop and caffeine
But there's no way to escape
Being ABD

Oh mothers tell your children
Not to follow me
Waste your lives in irrelevance
Being ABD

Well I got my research interests
And there's nobody to blame
I'm going for a post-doc
To wear that ball and chain

Well, there is a stage in grad school
They call the ABD
It's been the ruin of many a poor boy
And Lord, it's got to me