Transhumanism
Principles
Source unknown:
1. Through Man, nature becomes conscious of itself, and takes charge of its own evolution
2. Knowledge uses Man to fully transcend itself, with man as just a temporary vehicle
3. Ultimately, the whole universe will become intelligent, and Being and Reason will merge.
4. AI-Robots will rapidly surpass human intelligence which will have to be enhanced. Eventually, there will be no difference between robotic humans and humanized robots.
Interview with Roland Benedikter
Katja Siepmann and Annabella McIntosh conducted the interview:
- In the book you co-authored with Pentagon-advisor and Georgetown-neuroscientist and neuroethicist James Giordano "Neuroscience and Neuroethics: Impacting Human Futures" you state that these two fields at the interface between science and politics might lead to bigger changes in the coming years than either conventional politics or science. The reason: Technology is becoming an increasingly more powerful political and social force - not only sectorially or nationally, but globally.
Roland Benedikter: In recent years technology has indeed emerged as a concrete social and political force. 2014 has seen a noticeable intensification of that trend. The traditional political players are poorly prepared for it. What, for example, nowadays takes place in just one year at the interface between the human brain and technology, until recently required a decade. It is an exponential development. The mechanization of society and humanity is occurring within many disciplines- for example, in the form of neurotechnology, which is increasingly used for medical and both dual-use and direct military purposes. But there are other fields too. From neuroeconomics to, neuroaesthetics, neurosprituality, neurosociology and even neuropolitics, the "neuro"-prefix is becoming omnipresent in the understanding and meaning of our time and civilization - and with regard to its self-ascribed identity.
- What exactly is going on?
Roland Benedikter: Supporters of "human enhancement"1, which encompasses scientists, entrepreneurs and politicians and transcends language, cultural and ideological barriers, advocate mechanization of the human body in general and the broad "culturalization" of brain-machine interfaces in particular as the progressive, transformative path for humanity in the 21st century. By playing a consulting role in the "high spheres" of politics, science, and management, representatives of the transhumanist movement (including the World Transhumanist Association), which was initiated in the 1980s, are promoting the fusion of humans and computers. Among other things, they recommend the broad use of implants to enhance cognitive abilities, neural engineering to expand human consciousness and the cyborgization of the body and its tissues and systems in order to increase resilience, flourishing and lifespan.
* Sounds gruesome at first. What is the idea behind all this?
Roland Benedikter: The name "transhumanism" is the basic concept that tells it all. Its followers want to go beyond the present human condition. At its core it means to overcome the "natural" limitations inherent in human existence, which is to be born, live relatively short, half-conscious lives, and then die. The supporters of "human enhancement" and "transhumanism" intend to break through these current physical and cognitive (and perhaps even spiritual) barriers. In order to do that, they will pursue biotechnological upgrades to the human body and thus, conceivably, try to eliminate the negative effects of ageing and eventually (at least in their aspiration) even death.
* You state (in a scientifically "neutral" sense) that the first breakthrough of this development could now be imminent, but there will also be inescapable associated ethical problems?
Roland Benedikter: Possibly. Those who view the future human being as a technoid being, if not as a body fully integrated into technology - as seem to do, for example, Google's chief engineer Ray Kurzweil or the Oxford professor of philosophy Nick Bostrom, who is the head of the "Future of Humanity Institute" at the faculty of philosophy and the Oxford James Martin 21st Century School -- regard the mid of the century as a probable date for reaching the "singularity." That's the moment when artificial intelligence allegedly surpasses that of human intelligence and becomes in some way "self-conscious", as these thinkers expect.2 Kurzweil has recently even referred to the year 2029 as the date when technology could reach a level of self-conscious "intelligence".3 If that happens, even on an approximate basis, it will without doubt affect virtually everything, even though it will likely not occur in as spectacular ways as predicted.
* Why will it affect everything?
Roland Benedikter: Every conscious "being", not even speaking of a self-conscious "being" (assuming that technology can achieve such a status, which is contested) possesses the first and basic instinct of self-preservation. Like other beings, a technological singularity will presumably apply its intelligence anticipatively once it has a satisfactory level of consciousness in order to preserve its status. That could hold true also for highly developed Artificial Intelligence (AI). Due to that Bostrom in his current book on "Superintelligence"4 believes that the most important question of the coming decades will not be how to prevent wars or how to build the best weapons or the best international relations, but how to control an increasingly intelligent technology - a "superintelligence" which is coming into existence through the combination of artificial intelligence and bioengineering. The question is how to provide some kind of AI-inherent "control mechanism" to prevent it from turning against humans in order to eliminate the only ones who could switch it off.
There is in fact an increasingly intense debate about the possibility that artificial intelligence may harm humanity - to the point of wiping it out.
Roland Benedikter: That's right. Influential opinion-makers like Microsoft's Bill Gates5, investor Elon Musk6or scientists like Cambridge's Stephen Hawking7 believe that artificial intelligence could become a serious threat, actually the most important threat to humanity in the coming decades, because it could become too powerful to control. In contrast, others like Microsoft's Research lab's managing director, Eric Horvitz8, are of the opinion that we will be so "pro-active" in implementing the new intelligent technologies, that we will master their inborne threats before they become harmful.
* Both sides, the apocalyptics and the optimists, have good arguments.
Roland Benedikter: In fact, with a strong surplus still on the optimistic side. If you've noticed, essentially all internet- and technology-based firms in the meantime are committing a good part of their innovation efforts to the development of artificial intelligence, and if you follow the parallel developments in the traditional heavy industry towards non-human production through the massive substitution of robotics for humans, combined with AI, then it becomes clear that this development will impact humanity's future as perhaps no other - not only by merging man and machine, but also by replacing humans with technology. For example, automaker Volkswagen (VW) is replacing a large part of its work force with robots, and will deploy artificial intelligence on a large scale.9 A member of VW's board of management for human resources, Horst Neumann, declared in February 2015, that this will dramatically reduce costs from 40 euros per human working hour in Germany and 10 euros per hour in China to just 5 euros for a robot. And this is only the beginning of a massive wave of change coming throughout industry, and from there reaching out to most other fields too."
(https://www.telepolis.de/features/The-Age-of-Transhumanist-Politics-Has-Begun-3371228.html?seite=all)
Status
2014
"in terms of technology as an increasingly "universal factor" the year 2014 generated three important developmental steps, that some consider milestones on the way to "transhumanism". What are those?
Roland Benedikter:
Firstly: Tech giant Google - which has recently been focusing more and more on transdisciplinary "moon shots" or "major advances" that others may regard as utopian or fantasy - launched its new project Calico to "stop ageing and eliminate death"10 under the guidance of its technology director Ray Kurzweil. The aim of the project is to make information on how to fight ageing more "intelligent" by combining data volumes, some of which have been collected and compared by Google's search engines, with a "self-learning" ability. Information could then potentially develop itself further generating new information. As a first step this is supposed to eliminate disease and increase the lifespan of the human body by a measurable amount and ultimately - if possible - defeat death. According to those responsible for this and similar projects, new life-technologies such as the prevention of telomere shortening or genetic modification, are available for this purpose but need to be combined with artificial intelligence in order to become sufficiently sophisticated to reach an advanced level.
Secondly?
Roland Benedikter: Leading transhumanists, for example the cofounder of the transhumanist movement Nick Bostrom, have been providing commentary input to the USA BRAIN-initiative since summer of 2014.11On the initiative of President Barack Obama, the BRAIN initiative is generally dedicated to unraveling the secrets of the brain through the use of neurotechnologies so as to improve human health and well-being. Explicit to this is the "enhancement" of the human brain and cognition ("cognitive enhancement"). It deals with fundamental questions of how to improve human existence based on consciousness issues, and it focuses on the responsibility that derives from the perspective that a possible transformation of the human being as we know it is becoming feasible. The BRAIN initiative and its European counter-part, the Human Brain Initiative of the European Commission since 2012, set a trend - willingly or unwillingly - that conveys a strong transhumanist message. As James Giordano and I have noted12, and urged preparation for, this trend will not only have an impact in the USA but also will have international influence. It is already being imitated, and embellished upon by nations such as China within their current capabilities.
Thirdly
Roland Benedikter: Thirdly, the transhumanism movement organized itself for the first time as a concrete political force in autumn 2014, thereby reaching a new level of public visibility and potential impact, irrespective of the immediate success it can or will have at the ballots. In October 2014, the American philosopher and futurist Zoltan Istvan founded the Transhumanist Party of the USA and wants to run for president in 2016 as its candidate. Istvan published the book The Transhumanist Wager13 in 2013, which became an Amazon number one best seller, and he is the founder of the philosophical current Teleological Egocentric Functionalism (TEF) that advocates radical efforts to transform oneself, for example, through "enhancement" of one's own body and brain.14 Istvan wants to fashion this into a concrete political agenda that will play a role in the US-presidential campaign. For this purpose he apparently has financially strong sponsors, who are supposed to guarantee his party public attention."
(https://www.telepolis.de/features/The-Age-of-Transhumanist-Politics-Has-Begun-3371228.html?seite=all)
Critiques
Critique 1
By Dale Carrico:
"People mean different things by "transhumanism," both those who sympathize or even identify with it, and those who disapprove or even ridicule what goes on it its name. I use the term "transhumanism" myself to deploy critiques of a complex of overlapping techno-utopian technodevelopmental attitudes and programs, all of them anti-democratizing in their primary impact, in my view:
[1] Transhumanism arises out of a familiar strain of Enlightenment thinking that tends to a distortive mechanistic reductionism and un(der)critical technophilia, a strain that has met with criticisms since it first emerged both from Romantic (and other) critics of Enlightenment but also from different quarters within Enlightenment as well;
[2] It activates and exaggerates the familiar irrational passions of instrumental rationality (dread of impotence and lust for omnipotence in particular) especially in moments of disruptive change;
[3] It substitutes for the pragmatism of a secular democratic technodevelopmental vision of collaborative problem solving and consensual self-determination a more faithful "transcendental" vision aspiring after personal superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance -- this being a superficially "technicized" and hyper-individualized appropriation of omnipredicated Divinity, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence -- a vision that is conceptually confused and usually terribly deranging of sensible technodevelopmental deliberation at the worst possible historical moment;
[4] It affirms a politics of biomedical "enhancement" that in valuing a parochial "perfectionism" over a consensual diversity of lifeways amounts to eugenicism;
[5] It endorses elite-technocratic circumventions of stakeholder deliberation in matters of technoscientific change (especially worrisome given the tendency to eugenicism), usually justified with the familiar anti-democratic alibi that "accelerating change" is ill-understood by everyday people affected by it (of course any characterization of technodevelopment as monolithically accelerating is patently false, and often, I think, is little more than a description of the catastrophic social instability provoked by neoliberal financialization of the global corporate-militarist economy as experienced by the relative beneficiaries of that instability, that is to say, by the mostly white, mostly male, mostly well-off, mostly well-educated, North Atlantic consumers who identify in the main as "transhumanists");
[6] It is relying ever more conspicuously on a discourse of existential risk (an analog to and exacerbation of reactionary "war-on-terror"-discourse) and geo-engineering response that conduces especially to the benefit of incumbency over democracy, the corporate-military-industrial-broadcast complex over emerging insurgent p2p-formations;
[7] It substitutes for the politics of democratizing social struggle amidst a diversity of stakeholders over new and actually-emerging technoscientific changes a dangerously inapt politics of sub(cult)ural identity, a movement politics mobilizing personal and shared-group identification with particular idealized (often incoherent) technodevelmental outcomes designated "the future," organized by dis-identification with actually existing planetary peers in their diversity;
[8] It is constituted in its organizational substance by an archipelago of inter-related so-called "think-tanks" and membership organizations supported by fandom subcultures, many of which are disturbingly indistinguishable from cults with all that this implies in the way of social alienation, manic PR and hyperbolizing rhetoric to attract attention rather than contribute to sense, criticisms misconstrued and attacked as defamation, and the whole banal bestiary of authoritarian hierarchy from True Believers to would-be gurus peddling pseudo-science." (http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2009/03/whats-wrong-with-transhumanism.html)
Critique 2
Ten Reasons to Take Seriously the Transhumanists, Singularitarians, Techno-Immortalists, Nano-Cornucopiasts and Other Assorted Robot Cultists and White Guys of "The Future"
Dale Carrico:
"ONE -- Just because futurologists tend to be both foolish and wrong doesn't mean it is always foolish to point out in public places that they are, indeed, wrong.
TWO -- In an era of urgent technodevelopmental quandaries it is actually crucial to understand technoscience questions and their developmental and distributional effects, and every second displaced onto hyperbolic futurological wish-fulfillment fantasizing and disasterbation is a second lost to that deliberation, every techo-transcendentalizing framing of the issues deranges that deliberation from sense into nonsense.
THREE -- Futurological rhetoric and fandoms represent the extreme amplification and reductio ad absurdum of the body-loathing, narcissistic death-denialism, crass materialism, complacent consumerism, technocratic elitism, market triumphalism, fraudulent profit-taking, hyperbolic deception and self-promotion that now utterly suffuses our public life through the prevalence of advertizing and marketing norms and forms and of neoliberal global developmentalist narratives and rationalizations. To grasp the ugliness and absurdity of these extreme forms is to gain insights into the pathology of many mainstream values and the deception of official elite-incumbent justifications. Where we have grown accustomed and complacent to these pathologies and deceptions looking at ourselves from the alienating margins of our own discourse can help us see ourselves and the urgency of the need to change all the more clearly.
FOUR -- Hyperbolic and deceptive futurological narratives will usually be far more attractive to superficial and sensationalist Establishment Media figures and outlets than the difficult, ambivalent, qualified, dynamic, complex realities of actual science and ongoing technodevelopmental struggles, and so the futurologists will often provide the larger rhetorical frames within the terms of which the stakes and significance of these developments are taken up by public and policy deliberation. It matters less that this is disastrous than that it is true and must be dealt with as such.
FIVE -- America is not only an incredibly rich and powerful nation that will probably remain for generations a key, and often the key, player in global technodevelopmental social struggle, it is also a profoundly anti-intellectual nation full of people who are, in consequence, especially vulnerable to the fraudulent sale-pitches of pseudo-intellectuals like futurologists, who tend either to be providing PR for corporate-military elite-incumbents or guru wannabes hoping to attract a flock to fleece.
SIX -- As Margaret Mead famously insisted, "Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world." The example of the neoliberals of the Mont Pelerin Society reminds us that a small band of ideologues committed to discredited notions that happen to benefit and compliment the rich can sweep the world to the brink of ruin and the example of the neoconservatives reminds us that a small band of even ridiculous committed people can prevail even when they are peddling not only discredited but frankly ridiculous and ugly notions. Futurologists pretend that hypberbolic marketing projections are the same thing as serious technoscience policy deliberation, which is a gesture enormously familiar to the investor class and the technology sector's customary membership, and the futurologists inevitably cast rich entrepreneurs as the protagonists of history, which is a gesture enormously attractive to the skimmers and scammers and celebrity CEOs of the technology sector's essentially narcissistic culture. Although their various predictions are rarely more accurate than those of chimpanzees at typewriters, although their various transcendental glossy-mag editorials and tee-vee ready techno-rapture narratives are rarely more scientific in their actual substance than those of evangelical preachers, although their dog and pony show sounds almost exactly the same now as it did five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, twenty-five years ago as they still drag out the same old tired litany (super-parental robot gods! genetic fountains of youth! cheap nanobotic superabundance! better than real immersive VR treasure caves! soul-uploading into shiny robot bodies!), and all with the same fervent True Belief, the same breathless insistence that this is all New! the same static repetition that change is accelerating up! up! up! it is not really surprising to discover that the various organizations associated with superlative futurology are attracting more and more money and support and attention from the rich narcissistic CEOs of the technology sector whose language they have been speaking and whose egos they have been stroking so assiduously for years and for whom they provide such convenient rationalizations for elite-incumbent rule. You better believe that, ridiculous and crazy though they may be, the Robot Cultists with well funded organizations (like the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, Global Business Network, Long Now Foundation, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, Singularity Summit to name a few) to disseminate their pet wish-fulfillment fantasies and authoritarian rationalizations can do incredible damage in the real world.
SEVEN -- So long as people are taking futurological scenarios like "AI" let alone "Friendly Superintelligent AI" seriously we are all taking real global network security and surveillance and media misinformation issues less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "Drexlerian nanotechnology" seriously we are all taking real environmental problems and promising materials science breakthroughs at the nanoscale level less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios like "general assemblers," "nanofactories," and "utility fog" seriously (like so many took seriously the futurological techno-cornocopiasts before them flogging nuclear energy too cheap to meter, cheap superabudance via ubiquitous toxic plastic, universal leisure via ubiquitous robots, the high energy-input fraud of the petrochemical bio-engineered industrial-monocultural "Green Revolution," and immersive virtual reality treasure caves before them, not to mention fraudsters peddling on-the-cheap global developmental leapfrogging via boutique Green consumption or helicopter-dropped laptops, cellphones, 3-D printers right up to the present) we are all taking the crisis of global poverty, precarization, exploitation, and human trafficking less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "uploading" and "SENS" and "longevity-medicine" and "enhancement-medicine" seriously we are all taking the global maldistribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of both already-existing and actually in-development medical research and treatment less seriously than we should be, we are all taking actual medicine and the struggle to ensure its access to all less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "crypto-anarchy" "Brinian transparency" "the participatory panopticon" "online participatory democracy" seriously we are all taking the corporate-military enclosures of commons, the facilitation of global financial fraud via digital networks, the intensification of police surveillance, intrusive target marketing, punitive credit profiling via so-called "social media" together with the evacuation of the very ethos of "participation" via an internet actually defined for the majority of its users by endless posts with zero comments, drift-surfing user-generated content of deceptive dating profiles and vapid pet videos, "friending" strangers and consumer products, and scrolling insubstantial decontextualized "tweets" less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "geo-engineering" seriously we are all taking education, agitation, organization, regulation, and public investment to ameliorate anthropogenic climate change, resource descent, pollution and waste and the promotion of real-world sustainable polyculture less seriously than we should be. All of this actually matters.
EIGHT -- It is never wrong to expose a dangerous fraud as a fraud.
NINE -- It is always good to defend science against pseudo-science and promote critical thinking against True Belief.
TEN -- Even when it is not necessary, ridiculing the ridiculous is often a pleasure."
(http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2011/08/ten-reasons-to-take-seriously.html)
Discussion
Mary Harrington's Class Analysis of Transhumanism
Mary Harrington:
"Transhumanism is already here. In fact it’s so well-established that there’s arguably no point in debating its pros and cons. So: congratulations, Elise. Your side already won. End of debate, we can all go and have a drink.
I’m joking, of course. There’s lots to talk about! Not least, what we can infer from how the transhumanist era is going so far.
This era began in the mid-twentieth century, with a biomedical innovation that radically changed what it is to be a human, in the human social order: reproductive technology.
The Pill was the first transhumanist technology: it set out not to fix something that was wrong with ‘normal’ human physiology — in the ameliorative sense of medicine up to that point — but instead it introduced a whole new paradigm. It set out to interrupt normal in the interests of individual freedom.
At one point in Future Superhuman Elise notes that avowed transhumanist women are rarer than men. She postulates (I’m paraphrasing) that this is because men are typically more abstract, systemic thinkers.
But I’d say on the contrary, the reason transhumanist women seem so rare is that they’re so common they don’t read as transhumanist.
Nearly every adult woman in the developed world has implicitly accepted the belief that full adult female personhood is structurally reliant on technologies that interrupt normal female fertility. And by the definition I opened with, that makes nearly every adult woman in the developed world a transhumanist.
So, how’s the transhumanist era going? The Pill was legalised in 1960 in America, and 1961 in Britain. So we have more than six decades’ worth of data on how transhumanist practice measures up to transhumanist theory.
What I suggest we can infer from the story so far in that instance is that trying to re-engineer our physiology – our nature, if you will – in the interests of freedom, progress, or whatever other name you give utopia doesn’t deliver that utopia.
Or, rather, it does, kind of. But this utopia arrives asymmetrically, depending on where you sit in the socioeconomic hierarchy. And where technology is used to “liberate” us from the kind of givens — such as normal female fertility — that were previously managed, pragmatically, by social or legal norms, what replaces it isn’t a human ‘person’ free from ‘nature’ but a market in which that ‘nature’ becomes a set of supply and demand problems.
In the case of sex, the transhumanist Pill revolution didn’t deliver (as the feminist Shulamith Firestone imagined) a polymorphous liberation of human sexuality. Or it did, but under the sign of commerce. We got the so-called “sexual marketplace” in which normative asymmetries in male and female mating preferences reappear in cartoon form, as market opportunities or as strategic weaknesses to be weaponised in a contest for personal gain. Or, straightforwardly, as commodities to buy, sell, or exploit.
Meanwhile, if those at the top of the food chain are relatively well-placed to thrive in this “marketplace”, those at the bottom — impoverished, racialised, trafficked or otherwise vulnerable people, particularly women — are far more likely to become commodities themselves.
I would argue further that the same logic will be likely to hold for any other embodied limit you destroy via biotech. I predict that should we find a “cure” for ageing, it won’t be universally available. It will be prohibitively expensive, and serve primarily as a tool for further consolidating wealth and power.
Perhaps it will require harvesting tissue from others. The fertility industry already has a thriving market for gametes or ‘reproductive services’ or renting somebody else’s womb. But so far it’s not rich, well-connected people who sell themselves in this way. Research is already being done into blood transfusions as an anti-ageing treatment, and you can be sure that should it flourish, it won’t be rich people selling their plasma either.
You’d have to be wildly optimistic to think we can blithely marketise ever greater swathes of our embodied selves without opening new vistas for class asymmetry and exploitation. And it makes no sense to argue that we will stay well-protected against such risks by moral safeguards. Because transhumanism itself requires an all-out assault on the humanist anthropology that underpins those moral safeguards.
You can’t have transhumanism without throwing out humanism. And if people are just “ape-brained meatsacks” as Elise describes, urgently in need of upgrading, what possible reason could we have for objecting to a market in human organs? Or infanticide? Or genetically engineering the masses to be more docile? All these are only repellent when held against a humanist anthropology.
So if you’re assaulting that anthropology in the name of humanist values (such as freedom, or kindness, or lives lived in greater dignity) I submit that your project is unlikely to work out the way you expect it to.
In sum, then. We’re already well into the transhumanist era. But the story so far suggests that far from delivering utopia, what it mostly delivers is a commodification of the human body that disproportionately benefits those who already have power and privilege.
I don’t think we can put this back in its box. But to my eye the proper response to this era is not acceleration but a twofold resistance. Firstly, in retaining a humanist anthropology, in defiance of all those currently sawing away at the branch we’re sitting on. And secondly, in mounting a vigorous defence of those without power, now increasingly at the sharp-end of biotech’s unacknowledged class politics." (https://unherd.com/thepost/mary-harrington-transhumanism-is-already-here/)
Comparative Table: P2P and transhumanism compared
A Schematic Distinguishing the Politics of Technodevelopmental Social Struggle from Futurological Anti-Politics
Source: DALE CARRICO
| The Politics of Technodevelopmental Social Struggle, Peer to Peer | The Anti-Politics of Futurological Enhancement and Post-Human Ascension |
|---|---|
| A. Power Construed As Experience of Possibility | A. Power Construed As Amplification of Capacities |
| B. Political Rationality Yields emphasis on Open Futurity ineradicably inhering in present/presence, peer to peer --> history as ongoing, interminable social struggle (prone to emphasize political dimensions of scientific research and technological application and to embed developmental claims in social and historical specificities) |
B. Instrumental Rationality Yields emphasis on The Future as destination/destiny --> history as causal playing out of material forces, usually superhuman ones (prone to technological determinisms and natural progressivisms recasting difference from parochial norms as atavisms) |
| C. Characterized by Dissensus, Dependent on Consent (collaboration and contestation are matters of improvisation within enabling constraints) |
C. Characterized by Consensus, Dependent on Dissent (prediction and control enabled by warranted scientific beliefs which attract consensus after being put to test) |
Dale Carrico explains:
This is a schema and not an essay, so I'll keep the comments brief. You'll notice that the error of the futurological vantage in my view is its misapplication to political and historical domains of technoscientific assumptions and aspirations that are perfectly valid, indeed indispensable, in their proper domain. I daresay the futurologists will dismiss this schema as a hatchet job since I am the one coming up with it, but I really am striving to be fair here, to get at key differences between my perspective and theirs to help account for the many other points of contention that play out in my critiques and lampoons. After all, I would expect many of the futurologists I endlessly decry and critique here would actually dismiss my affirmed position as "postmodern relativism" outright and decry what they see as my own misapplication to history of what I am calling a Political Rationality while they would affirm precisely the sorts of structural/material accounts I am attributing to them. No doubt they would be less cheerful about the distinction of (my) open futurity from (their) "The Future." But this would mostly be because "openness" is a buzzword signaling subcultural membership for many of them (this buzzword has an interesting history, by the way, originating in especially Hayek's refiguration of market processes as "natural," whatever their enabling legal ritual artifice, "nonviolent," whatever the misinformation, exploitation, duress that characterize them, and "open," however constrained and constraining they are in fact, a rhetorical program that has been an incredible success to the distress of the world, and ramified into endless futurological discourses of "spontaneous order" and of disastrously deranging misapplications of evolutionary processes to every imaginable historical and cultural phenomenon). However, I honestly do not agree that many of these "advocates of openness" take on board the radical contingency, uncertainty, situatedness implied by my understanding of open futurity, while they almost inevitably do identify themselves with manifest destinies sweeping and transforming the world that assume anything but openness. Although, I suppose, from a tropological if not a logical standpoint perhaps even absolute predestination can come to seem open to its advocates once it gets big and sweeping enough in the imagination, one of the ways in which the Sublime functions is as a collapse of absolute openness with absolute closure after all. Theoryheads among my readership will notice how well the discussion of political power comports with Foucauldian accounts, they will recognize the phrase "improvisation within constraints" from Judith Butler, and they may even grasp that the provocative relations of consensus/dissent//dissensus/consent posited here are indebted to Hannah Arendt.