Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, November 25, 2007

More on the Quartet

Yesterday's Technodevelopmental Quartet post has been published over on the IEET site, and provoked the following comment from "Fmagyar." I seem not to be able to respond there and so I do so here instead [UPDATE -- Nonresponsiveness issue solved -- It was my error, not IEET's -- I should have known!]:
I guess it would be safe to conclude, based on your posting, that the in your esteemed opinion, our status quo systems are pretty much FUBAR.

Unfortunately massive societal and technical paradigm shifting tends to be more of art than science. So it would seem we are living in rather interesting times, (paraphrased Chinese curse), meaning we have to create the new road map from scratch. A rather daunting endeavor to say the least.

On the contrary, these days I am rather hopeful about the prospects of consensual democratic technoprogressive planetary multiculture. Both p2p Democratization/anti-incumbency and Longevity Ascent/prosthetic self-determination seem to me, potentially at least, enormously emancipatory (although palpably destabilizing in ways that are sure to exacerbate the worries of Resource Descent/corporatism and Weapons Proliferation/militarization).

I must say that I am very skeptical about intuitions involving "road maps" and "starting from scratch" and so on, which seem to me worse than "daunting" but actually troublingly undemocratic. I think "massive societal and technical… shifting" is rarely monolithically a matter of sudden sweeping paradigms shifting (such constructions tend to be, in my view, retroactive assignments analysts use to make sense of collective history), or worse, instrumental art, engineering, or science, but instead I think these shifts amount to complex collective processes of collaboration, contestation, and opportunistic responsiveness. Over the idea of a technocratic or any other elite implementation of an eidos conceived in advance, I strongly prefer the idea of a democratization of technodevelopmental social struggle as an ongoing process in which the actual diversity of stakeholders to technoscientific changes provisionally and interminably work to ensure the best, fairest, safest possible distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of outcomes.

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