Slashdot Mirror
Jamais Cascio on Gadgets and the Future
Armchair Anarchist writes "Futurismic has just posted the first column from its new monthly contributor, the renowned Jamais Cascio. Cascio is best known as a co-founder of Worldchanging.com, but is also a prolific blogger (at his own site 'Open The Future'), writer, public speaker and pundit on many aspects of futurism and foresight. This new piece sees him discussing the way futurist thinkers tend to focus on gadgets and technology, and advocating the use of more critical approaches."
It must be really hard to be a futurist when your first name means "never" in French.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
So what we're reading...is some guy talking about other guys talking about their guesses for the future. It's...a whole new realm of mental masturbation. I'd try my hand at it myself, but I'm afraid I might break my mental wrist.
The answer, obviously, is that neither choice is exclusive of the other, and that both are often true.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
... but maybe it would be better to wait until he posts a really interesting, insightful column before posting it to the front page of Slashdot. This was just a preliminary bit of throat clearing from what I can see.
And really - a futurologist who finishes his column with "I can't wait to see how it turns out." - that's right up there with "only time will tell" - much beloved of lazy trainy-journalists who have got tired of thinking and have completed their allotted word count.
Sounds like he's just discovered what Langdon Winner has been saying since the 1970s, and others since before then. Slashdot frequently sees posts like "a razor blade can be used for good or evil" implying technology is value neutral -- but it isn't. Technology embodies our values, especially when looked at as a system including favorite economic stories at the time -- including a decision to invest in, say, designing nuclear weapons design or marketing larger SUVs instead of say, curing river blindness or designing electric cars -- decisions driven by values.
Contrast, say, Disney's investments in controlling media with DRM versus the RepRap project to make a free 3D printer. Winner goes further in his book _Autonomous Technology_ and suggests large bureaucracies "reverse adapt", changing their environment to perpetuate themselves, including the legal environment. So, if you can't make or share your own media or 3D models, then you are dependent on Disney or whoever. Consider the kind of technology to sustain the values described here: CLAWS: Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery and how it might differ from the politics and policies and technologies and infrastructure of today. Or from this essay The Abolition of Work: "Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. ... Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This man has nothing to do with futurism. Futurism is far more interesting than anything he's talking about.
Cascio has worked on a number of television and film projects, and has designed two science fiction game settings, exploring issues of posthumanity, intellectual property, sapient AI, nanotechnology, and bioengineering. Jamais has degrees in Anthropology, History and Political Science.
This snippet from the blogger's bio encapsulates, basically, why calls (like this one) for a turn away from "content" to "a more critical approach" make me nervous. It's true that social values influence technology, and that the nexus of the two is an important area of study-- but why is it that offers to critically examine that nexus always seem to come from outsiders who aren't themselves involved or well-versed in the technology?
Everybody has an opinion, naturally, but a learned commentary on bioengineering, coming from a poli-sci type who may or may not have taken even the most introductory biology courses, would carry about as much weight for me as a lecture on Aristotle from my cocker spaniel. If "critical futurism" is poised to become a valid scholarly/intellectual discipline, I'd much rather see it populated by actual scientists and engineers-- people who're themselves helping to create the future, and who should therefore be in a good position to comment on how it's going-- than by film-school types who've read Foucault but can't do math.