{"id":13543,"date":"2012-12-15T08:00:12","date_gmt":"2012-12-15T12:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=13543"},"modified":"2012-12-15T00:37:43","modified_gmt":"2012-12-15T04:37:43","slug":"dear-technoutopianism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2012\/12\/15\/dear-technoutopianism\/","title":{"rendered":"Dear Technoutopianism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following post was originally a seminar \u201creading response\u201d paper that I had a little too much fun with. Reproduced here for your (possible) amusement:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Oh, technoutopianism. I came of age steeped in you; I was the fish, and you were the water that surrounded me and kept me wet. We were once such intimate familiars\u2014and yet, you still managed to smack me right upside the head when I moved to the Bay Area.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that we weren\u2019t great together, for a time. Who wouldn\u2019t have wanted the rosy glow off your shiny silver future lighting the way out of her teenage years? Sometimes I feel sorry for \u2018The Millennials\u2019\u2014those poor kids barrel-aged in the “post-9\/11 era” and the (George W.) Bush administration, then bottled into a financial crisis and clear signs of climate change. I got the Clinton era, and I got you. You told me I was good enough, and smart enough, and that doggone it, lots of people like me were going to work hard and invent things and save the world. You were wrong, of course. But high school kids are still kids, and kids still need shelter in fairy tales.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a while though, technoutopianism. I\u2019m not a teenager anymore. I\u2019ve changed, but in so many ways you haven\u2019t\u2014and I see you more clearly now. Fred Turner\u2019s<\/a> right about you, and so are Barbrook and Cameron<\/a>: you\u2019re selfish. You never really wanted what was best for me, or for any of the rest of us; you wanted deregulation and radical individualism, wanted us out of your way so you could take the whole world\u2014the Whole Earth\u2014for your playground. Hawai\u2019i is for lovers, and your shiny silver future was only for a network of the already privileged and powerful. You got a taste of \u201cthe Long Boom\u201d; we got \u201clikes\u201d and LOLcats.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Sure, if I were to hang out on Ken Kesey\u2019s bus long enough, maybe I\u2019d think that LOLcats are the revolution. I get that networks and decentralization are all the rage. The Internet\u2019s decentralized; the subject\u2019s decentralized; the production of digital information is increasingly decentralized. Thanks to the present \u201cmode of information<\/a>,\u201d \u201ceveryone with access to the Internet can become information and cultural producers simply by pursuing their own individual interests<\/a>\u201d [pdf]. But as much as I loathe bureaucracy when I run afoul of it\u2014as I so often do while stumbling through a behemoth, 10-campus public university system\u2014I also see where Kreiss, Finn, and Turner<\/a> are coming from: just as bureaucracy has its advantages, so too does peer production have its disadvantages. You\u2019ve been so slow to admit any of this.<\/p>\n

In fact, I\u2019ve realized: you never apologize. You\u2019ve never once, in all this time, said you\u2019re sorry.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m tired, technoutopianism. I\u2019m tired of your sexy, shiny surface and your utter lack of substance. I\u2019m tired of life in the network economy, tired of all my supposed \u201cfreedom.\u201d I\u2019m tired of the land of \u201cpioneers and gold-diggers<\/a>.\u201d I believe in the cyborg, but I don\u2019t believe \u2018life\u2019 and \u2018technology\u2019 are as interchangeable as Kevin Kelly might think<\/a> they are. I\u2019m with J.J. King<\/a>: there\u2019s something about connectionism that I can\u2019t connect with, either. I\u2019m tired of being \u201cdisrupted, subverted, and dispersed across social space<\/a>.\u201d I\u2019m taking my vinyl records and my MIDI-toned mp3s and my decentralized self, and I\u2019m going home.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Whitney Erin Boesel sometimes sings obscure old songs with “Where’s the future you promised me?<\/a>” in the chorus lyrics. She’s also on Twitter (but does not usually sing there): @phenatypical<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Technoutopian future city image from http:\/\/technoutopia.com<\/a><\/em>
\nFacebook not colonies from http:\/\/futurist-foresight.tumblr.com\/post\/34697199800\/future-you-promised-me-mars-colonies-instead-i<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following post was originally a seminar \u201creading response\u201d paper that I had a little too much fun with. Reproduced here for your (possible) amusement: Oh, technoutopianism. I came of age steeped in you; I was the fish, and you were the water that surrounded me and kept me wet. We were once such intimate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1875,"featured_media":13544,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[19720,19722,19721,19724,12584,19723,19719,18414],"class_list":["post-13543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","tag-barbrook","tag-californian-ideology","tag-cameron","tag-connectionism","tag-fred-turner","tag-mark-poster","tag-technoutopia","tag-technoutopianism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2012\/12\/techno-utopia.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1875"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13543"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13552,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13543\/revisions\/13552"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}