I've reposted the longer version (from Foreign Policy mag) in the tangents thread.

maybe it's time to brush off Susan Faludi's "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women", originally published in 1991. i was in college at the time & remember one of my professors reminding us to be "intelligent consumers of statistics". Faludi's inspiration for the book was a Newsweek story about the 1986 Harvard-Yale Marriage Study stating: "a college-educated woman of 30 had only a 20% chance of finding a husband; by age 35 it was 5%, by 40 she was 'more likely to be killed by a terrorist' than make it to the altar, in Newsweek's memorable analogy" (Time; see more links in Tangents).

Reasons this article (and underlying argument) seem especially interesting to me:

1) In discussions of Social Darwinism, critics have rightly noted that the Spencerian version of the theory (let alone the Nazi kind) misunderstood 'fitness' in its biological sense, which is about reproductive success not social advancement. Well, here we have it cashed out.

2) With the ID backlash against scientific evolution, its 'beautifully' (?) ironic that the archtypal 'red state' social forces swelling against secular-scientific worldviews are themselves promoted by profound Darwinian forces.

3) There seems to be a general trend, which I'd like to explore further at some point (feel free to add to northanger's meticulously documented Records of Lost Promises) that brings a certain realistic insight to fruition at its point of historical obsolescence. For instance, evolutionary psychology seems to be rising to prominence at exactly the moment the technization of the genome melts heredity into Cyberspace. If scientifically rigorous group differences of whatever kind are identified, it will be as part of single social process ensuring their simultaneity with the very commercialized biotechnical opportunities that evaporate them. 'Demographic consciousness' strikes me as part of a similar process - arising as an aspect of the transition into Singularity Revolutions which subsume traditional species reproduction into regenerative technocommericial production. (So I'm very ambivalent about the real implications of this piece at the same time I'm struck by its importance.)

4) At the partisan chat level, in all its aspects, it pours a huge can of gasoline on the flames :)

northanger - following your links now. Immediate (hence ignorant) response - isn't the automatism of this process rather unlike the ideologically-driven scenario Faludi describes? Or am I mischaracterizing her argument? (Guess I'll find out now)

nick. Faludi admitted she was "glum and grouchy" after reading Newsweek's article, but "Backlash" is a factual (not ideologically-driven) analysis of the 1986 Harvard-Yale Marriage Study. she provided evidence that the conclusions were unsupportable ("the figures were based on unorthodox calculations of unrepresentative samples", TIME).

>>2) With the ID backlash against scientific evolution, its 'beautifully' (?) ironic that the archtypal 'red state' social forces swelling against secular-scientific worldviews are themselves promoted by profound Darwinian forces.

incredibly ironic. Priscilla Coit Murphy's "How Faludi's Backlash made news" mentions the role of Faludi's book & the Anita Hill - Clarence Thomas controversy & how they fed each other. it's amazing the amount of crap that's being thrown against the wall (pre-2006 elections). my point about the anglosphere concerns placing it in the appropriate context. what's really at stake here?

northanger - on Faludi, don't think I made myself clear. Not suggesting she was herself ideologically driven, but rather than her thesis based on the idea of an ideological backlash against feminism, rather than a fertility-based self-destruction of feminism of the kind 'explained' by this return-of-patriarchy model. Of course, the distinction isn't straightforward, but accusations of 'whinging' surely stem from perception (however obscure) that she is treating the travails of feminism as the result of entirely contingent (critics go further to say 'conspiratorial') political dynamics, rather than the more profound demographic processes described here. (The Gilder quote in the piece you link to is germane to this.)

nick. it is not only an ideological backlash, it is economic (see Brathwaite Burke quote), psychological, etc. if i understand you correctly: the "return-of-patriarchy model" now adds the biological (fertility). concerning Gilder (good point), important point i think worth noting: when Faludi read the Newsweek article she ... believed it. why? she was going to write a different book at first until she started researching the Harvard-Yale study. her focus was more subtle than Gilder gives her credit.

OK, Marxoid claim that men constitute a class with economic motives for oppressing women (due to job competition etc.) is more 'grounded' than I implied. Are there gender-based class interests of this kind? Or is this type of feminism just picking up the nearest available toolkit, sitting open in the seminar room?
Maybe I could be persuaded, but the fact that every male in a 'heteronormed' economically integrated relationship stands to benefit from the earning power of their significant other - while gaining nothing from the economic advances of other males - the incentives must be complex at best.

[apologies for grammatical implosion]

>>Are there gender-based class interests of this kind? Or is this type of feminism just picking up the nearest available toolkit, sitting open in the seminar room?

are you talking about the sex discrimination case against Wal-Mart? "men are here to make a career and women aren't. Retail is for housewives who just need to earn extra money" &tc. is there a distinction between feminism & civil rights? don't think we're 100% heteronormed yet — eg, there's only one woman on SCOTUS.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dukes_v._Wal-Mart

Not well informed about the Wal-Mart case yet, but even if this discrimination exists its not at all based on the Marxoid 'male-class' model, it's simply a (no doubt crass) generalization from group characteristics - i.e. women on average more likely to interrupt their careers for child-rearing - in the interests of shareholder value. Closer to classic Marx therefore - (gender neutral capital-maximimization imperative). Thomas Sowell has much excellent discussion of this sort of thing (especially in context of race).
Summary: No sign whatsoever of 'male-class' interest at work.

www.tsowell.com/spracecu.html
i think i see where you're going with this.

"The tendency for secular progressives to auto-extinguish themselves over a few generations is a real historical factor that no realistic analysis can ignore.)"

Has this happened before?

"Has this happened before?" - follow the link (first comment) on the tangents thread. The longer account there gives several examples.

you just need to get 'clever', 'educated' men to breed with fertile staff/random women PLUS their wives/mistresses - it used to happen all the time, cf. Schopenhauer, etc. I don't know why it doesn't now. That's a more interesting question.

and, er, don't the offspring of hyper-con, church-sunday, life-preserving, patriarchal folk have a peculiar tendency to, you know, rebel and stuff? If people weren't anti-oedipal in the first place, where would REVOLT, like, come from?

Infinite thought - not sure I'm getting your point: how would would an increase in illegitmate children with educated fathers reverse the demographic selection against secular progressives?

"it used to happen all the time ... I don't know why it doesn't now." - feminism / contraception / abortion?

actually, the argument of the (longer) piece is totally bizarre. So, what, we should encourage 'misguided' liberals to procreate so that neo-con toddlers will have someone to bully at school? interesting...

Perhaps, on a more 'adult' level, if it were a case of bombing folk to splurge joyous freedomn upon them without any pesky 'native', 'liberal' opposition whatsoever (cos they're, like, not even born!), one might start to feel miserable about it. Perpetuate the discomforted, secular, egalitarian, minoritarian population in that case...ah dichotomy, ah humanity!

'how would would an increase in illegitmate children with educated fathers reverse the demographic selection against secular progressives?'

By teaching them that women are nothing but silly receptacles for the (mindless) perpetuation of the species, of course! - progressives, on the other hand, always enjoy (oh, too much) thinking that women are, you know, intelligent in their own right and dangerous things like that.

Lots of biologically-productive clever men believing that women are inherently daft would probably ensure the continued existence of the Anglophone Sprachraum in the transmitted thoughts, fears and linguistic (etc.) production of their offspring.

'one might start to feel miserable about it. Perpetuate the discomforted, secular, egalitarian, minoritarian population in that case...ah dichotomy, ah humanity!'

That's definitely an interesting alternative, rather like the way Kurzweil says you can still go back to your biological object if you don't know to prefer the super-intelligent robot. With Strong AI, it will surely be able to freeze this discomforted population in such a way that they would have to decide if it was this very discomfiture that was their raison d'etre. There's certainly a possibility that without a sense of minority, some people don't know what to do with themselves.

Infinite thought -
"actually, the argument of the (longer) piece is totally bizarre. So, what, we should encourage 'misguided' liberals to procreate so that neo-con toddlers will have someone to bully at school?"

this seems a complete misrepresentation - think you're jumping far too quickly into the prescriptive mode. The article is describing a phenomenon first of all, surely it's more rational to come to some consensus about the facts of the matter before swinging off into wild polemics about policy alternatives and hidden agendas. (Social conservatism terrifies me, so I'm certainly not celebrating the situation described)

further proof (if any were needed) that it is impossible to engage any remotely sensible dialogue/conversation/argument with representatives of the left.

puff adder - :)

Infinite thought - I'm guessing your not very interested in addressing the issue here (your off-the-cuff 'revolt' argument whilst superficially plausible - and no doubt psychologically comforting - is completely devastated by the graphic data presented in northanger's Baby Gap link in the tangents thread). Be sad to confirm sd's point for him, but you're doing a good job so far.

For those on the economic right with libertarian leanings, the uncomfortable implications of this trend is the increasing political dependency of economic neoliberalism on a swelling socially conservative vote bank. It illuminates the historical drift of the US Republican Party away from Reagan-style smiley growth politics to a more moralistic, paternalistic and even (ugh) Ashcroftian mode with ominous accuracy. Libertarians are looking into a quite ugly future.

Nick--that doesn't seem all that inevitable if what you say about China's likelihood of becoming like Singapore holds true. If what you say about the necessity of both superpowers cooperating (because we'll have two again, won't we), there ought to be some relaxation of the suffocating Christianity which you can already find at family values malls everywhere. Some of the internal workings of the Republicans are having to change and ought to become outmoded. That article will probably go the way of the usual predictions insofar as there has been a tendency among 'red types' to go for sensation of the same sort that used to be associated more with liberal behaviour. I've noticed that the more successful the rednecks become, the more they really want to prove that they can be every bit as sophisticated and highfalutin' as the low-slung blase commie-loving and distant-Islam-sucking left. You may have to fear a 'conservative' bunch of family values types that gets into Derrida instead of Ashcroft. And I suspect they'll want to introduce all sorts of sexual perversions after awhile like in Ballard's novels about business park and resort retirement places where crime is necessary for there to be any fun. The only thing the American social conservative can't stand ultimately is to be thought uncouth.

"You may have to fear a 'conservative' bunch of family values types that gets into Derrida ..."
- Is this supposed to cheer me up? LOL

As for the whole twisted-jesus scenario, I'd prefer a little laissez faire.

just being silly and sleepless, obviously. I'll hopefully respond in er, more 'common-sensical' way when I've finished work (today I get to lecture on the nouveaux philosophes...yet what to say?).

As for being a 'representative of the left', I'm not sure I represent anything, apart from myself (and even then...)

Laissez-faire from whom? My becoming-writer? or the facts on the ground that you just described as though they were inevitable? If they're going to do the Jesus business, you'll still struggle against it, so you have to be clearer about whether you think U.S. military might to save the world from creeping Islam is more important than oppressive situations you might find yourself personally in.

Infinite Thought--you are definitely a representative of the left, so no need to be so coy.

'always enjoy (oh, too much) thinking that women are, you know, intelligent in their own right'

I know of several who are.

Laissez-faire from whom? My becoming-writer? or the facts on the ground that you just described as though they were inevitable? If they're going to do the Jesus business, you'll still struggle against it, so you have to be clearer about whether you think U.S. military might to save the world from creeping Islam is more important than oppressive situations you might find yourself personally in.

Derrida done by hick Baptists might be more appetizing than the New American Cuisine, but I don’t know. It’s possible they’d leave out the morbid death-adoration and be nauseating going around talking about 'differance' all the time, but on the other hand the New American Cuisine does things like offer no Classical Chocolate Souffle, but rather a Chocolate Drop Souffle—of course the difference is like night and day. At worst, Derrida is no less desirable than Ashcroft. Another rock and hard place claustrophobia is born.

Thank you for sharing. You need to spend many months in the suburbs of the U.S. of A., son.

Infinite Thought--you are definitely a representative of the left, so no need to be so coy. It’s good to reach out to a lot of markets, though—you know, networking like a son-of-a-bitch. You’ll make money without most people knowing it.

'always enjoy (oh, too much) thinking that women are, you know, intelligent in their own right'

I know of several who are extremely intelligent, but does ‘in their own right’ mean ‘in a different right’ from men? If so, this could account for the fact that men don’t nearly always go along with the program, not as often as they are directed, except for eunuchs who find sense of security and protection in various beaver-power modalities.

Infinte Thought--you work for Long Sunday, a leftist blog, so that ought to make your pronouncements a little more wriggling-challenged. Northanger does well as Shirley MacLaine in this Rat Pack, but you could still try of Angie Dickinson, as she got special privileges too.

no, I mean, obviously I'm a dirty communist. I'm just not sure I 'represent' anything. And I dunno if 'work for' Long Sunday is quite right. I was asked to join them, and I sometimes post there. It's not like we get paid...though I do have shares! (erm, neither true nor funny).

was going to respond properly to the question at hand - of much interest - but now I'm too tired. Curse teaching! As one of the few remaining non-church-attending, egalitarian, childless lefties of the world I should surely be paid to opine all day rather than summarise deconstruction for media students...will be back and not just wilfully daft next time...

This article from Newsweek last year gives yet more reasons to be pessimistic about Europe's future:

Into the Woods
Economics and declining birthrates are pushing large swaths of Europe back to their primeval state, with wolves taking the place of people.

msnbc.msn.com/id/8359066/site/newsweek/

I've posted some sections in the tangents (for those who can't get Newsweek...)

IT--

'And I dunno if 'work for' Long Sunday is quite right.'

Maybe not, but Arpege Chabert said she wasn't working when she does the currency trading from the TeeVee--hates herself for gluttony and wants public excoriation followed by forgiveness and isn't getting it, because is addicted irremediably. I would like to tautologically and solipsistically applaud our collaboration at making her spill the beans when she may or may not have been in her cups. She has been reduced to inviting other ladies to have wrestling matches over Zizek--which I encouraged, so naturally they wouldn't do it, just to be perverse.

The Phillip Longman text mainly stresses the importance of population for military purposes and the transmission of ideas, and he places little emphasis on the role of population in economics.

War is no longer about the size of armies, but rather about their training, equipment and logistical back-up, so population is no longer a decisive factor there (unless things get extremely hand-to-hand messy).

I'd like to know when the beliefs of a population make a difference. When does what people believe or think have an impact on the production and flow of capital? From the system's point of view it is largely irrelevant whether this or that group of people believe euthanasia is a good thing or not. Maybe the percentage of the population being pro or anti drugs influences what is sold legally or illicitly, but the market seems to thrive and regulate itself regardless of what people think. From the point of view of Capital, the differences between the liberal and conservative viewpoints, which we might perceive as huge, might be minimal in terms of their effect on the system. Capital requires consumers, not thinkers, so most of the time it's irrelevant whether a person is a church-goer or an atheist. Capital only really values thinking if it contributes to the smooth and efficient management of the system, and so some people are paid to think, with their private political or religious beliefs being utterly insignificant. The Singularity primarily requires populations to consume, and thinking is only really helpful or harmful to the degree which it encourages or discourages consumption. So a booming population which is under the sway of austere, anti-consumerist memes is much more of a threat to the system than a bunch of church-goers having more kids than hedonistic libertarians.

"The Singularity primarily requires populations to consume"
[just seen this is an (accidental?) and quite brilliant double-edged sentence, but to start with the surface - and in context dominant - signification]

- if we can assume the Singularity is the implicit auto-emergent agency of planetary capitalism (no giant stretch IMHO) then to focus exclusively on consumption is a little narrow. Sure, the Capitalist machine is a circuit controlling production through consumption (market-regulated techno-industrialism) so 'consumerism' has a good claim to be its ultimate 'ideology' - but consumption is 'for' production, no less than vice versa. A giant population of senescent welfare-addicts will consume plenty, but they surely won't do good capitalism.

Seen from a suitably dramatic geo-historical panoramic angle, capitalism is a demogrpahic macro-symbiote (verging on parasite) processing peasant surplus-population into industrial and post-industrial urban workforces, while regeneratively ramping up rural population potential through techonomic backflow ('green revolutions' etc). Once the population flow is turned off (as it has been in Europe), then the system better be getting ready for a radical jump, because its underlying momentum (based on young ambitious peasants looking to make it in the city) is not going to be there. Urbanization is the deep tide of capitalism, and for urbanization you need something to urbanize - surplus rural population. Climaxed urban societies tend to slide into soci*list degeneracy and stop growing in any significant respect.

puff adder - personally speaking, the attachment to laissez faire is about living in a dynamic society, not about keeping the cops off my own case (not really indulging problematic vices these days).
Agree there's a trade off between freedom and 'security' (killing militant anticapitalists), but that seems mostly on the pro-growth / hawk axis, rather than having anything much to do with social conservatism ...

Nick--
'For those on the economic right with libertarian leanings, the uncomfortable implications of this trend is the increasing political dependency of economic neoliberalism on a swelling socially conservative vote bank. It illuminates the historical drift of the US Republican Party away from Reagan-style smiley growth politics to a more moralistic, paternalistic and even (ugh) Ashcroftian mode with ominous accuracy.' Libertarians are looking into a quite ugly future.

I never thought about cops or hard vice, but obviously thought you must think of yourself as libertarian of some sorts who didn't like something about Ashcroft and what that might represent to daily life atmosphere, which surprised me. My impression was that you thought the evolution into Bushworld was to be desired in all its aspects, at least the aspects you aren't subject to--which I thought you must be pointing to here as internal American modes you were here expressing a lack of fondness for. Okay, way too hard to follow, I don't understand anything of what you're talking about except for the 'trade-off' part, but don't knock yourself out over it, as it's obviously a bit arcane even when clear, since I don't buy it that any of the things in this particular lot are inevitable.

"My impression was that you thought the evolution into Bushworld was to be desired in all its aspects" - that's a pretty powerful negative testament to my powers of communication, LOL!

Nick - "The Singularity primarily requires populations to consume" - just seen the double-edge myself!

Okay, so focusing on consumption is a bit narrow. Reformulate with production and urbanization and my question still remains:

From the point of view of the Capitalist machine, when does it make a significant difference what populations think or believe?

Global Capitalism is an oddly unifying power. Al Qaeda prefer to eat Corn Flakes for breakfast - it's true, this is how the US can tell if a cave has been the home to local fighters or OBL's henchmen.

sd - well, this might be a bit simple-minded on my part, but a provisional capitalist meme list might include (lots of overlap):

a) Economic rationality - based on principle of utility optimization and broad individualism (against sacrificial and collectivist memes). Enterprize and ambition. Respect for incentive-structures of all kinds.
b) Mathematical calculation (especially basic arithmetic), competence at monetary reckoning (overriding or at least marginalizing poetic-romantic / symbolic consciousness)
c) Technoscientific adeptness, experimentation and at least tolerance of criticism and uncomfortable conclusions (against dogma and dominion of 'revelation' / mystical sources of truth)
d) Respect for property rights, contract, work, saving, education and for civilized resolution of disputes. Contempt for criminality, dependency and populist demagogy).
e) Enthusiasm for general (rather than merely personal) prosperity and growth. Affinity with dynamic and commercial modes of social existence.
f) Moderation of envy, whinging, conspiratorial thinking, racial and gender prejudices. Overall open-mindedness and willingness to enter into mutually advantageous relations with strangers.
g) Acceptance of change, flexibility, adaptiveness (against rigid and stereotypic behaviour / social roles)

h) [for hawks] Willingness to utilize power and violence to defeat implacable enemies. Application of rational incentives to political and geostrategic questions (refusal to reward terrorism, rogue-State behaviours, hostage taking etc.)

i) [for social conservatives] Social mores compatible with the biological reproduction of society and of civilized values.

puffy. biological object vs. super-intelligent robot & discomfiture as raison d'etre.

nick. "The Return of Patriarchy" describes a phenomenon; let's reach consensus about the facts before going into prescriptive mode

trying to understand puffy's "biological object" came across Kurzweil's response to Searle's "Chinese Room Argument". having a set of instructions on how to use the Chinese language (without actually knowing or understanding it) where responses are "absolutely indistinguishable from those of Chinese speakers" does not mean you're actually "thinking". since these Chinese symbols are meaningless to you. "I understand Chinese, but none of my neurons do."

one issue with Kurzweil is the "belief that consciousness requires a neurobiological substrate". why do humans have consciousness, but Super AI does not? Kurzweil says the key to artificial intelligence is pattern recognition, which is also at the heart of human intelligence. it's the difference between biological-neurons (humans) vs. artificial-neurons (strong ai) & the syntactic (rules) vs. the semantic (meaning). (btw, one of the arguments against Strong AI is that it does not "emote").

"Searle would have us believe that you can’t be conscious if you don’t possess some specific (albeit unspecified) biological process. No entities based on functionally equivalent processes need apply. This biology-centric view of consciousness is likely to go the way of other human-centric beliefs. In my view, we cannot penetrate the ultimate reality of subjective experience with objective measurement, which is why many classical methods, including Searle’s materialist approach, quickly hit a wall."

Longman's facts: "Advanced societies are growing more patriarchal, whether they like it or not." "No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it." "population is still power." patriarchy developed a set of values and norms through cultural evolution. humans have not gone extinct because of patriarchy. "patriarchy’s evolutionary advantage is the way it penalizes women who do not marry and have children." "if the "patriarchal system avoids succumbing" to misogyny, capitalism etc, it will increase the quantity & quality of its children. yadda yadda.

why do i get the sense, reviewing these facts, that i'm in Searle's Chinese Room where Longman's patriarchy seems to suggest biology (fertility) advances civilization & not technology?

Nick - extremely useful stuff, for me anyway.

This meme list would be both encoded in the (slowly evolving) body of law (in Burke’s sense) and transmitted from generation to generation in the form of consciously maintained values (distributed through the education system, church, media and popular intellectual culture).

The more conservative the culture, the more reliance there is on the tried and tested traditions enshrined in legislation, and on the authority of ‘experts’ who are supposed to have examined and confirmed the values propping up the culture. Conservatism hinges on the population not thinking too much and trusting the past and authorities to do their thinking for them. Conservatism is weak on points c) and g) on your list, while liberalism is weak on h) and i).

c) and g) both require innovative thinking (at least on the part of the experimenters) and open-mindedness and flexibility from the population of consumers (or at least a lack of knee-jerk, moralistic, flesher hysteria), so to this extent Capitalism does require humans to exercise their brains. Ultimately, c) and g) require that the human population be tolerant towards genetic engineering, post-biological adaptations and strong AI thinking. This will be the real test of conservatism – this is where the contradictions of (Western) Capitalism (in the D&G sense of contradictions) will subject conservative populations to a rigorous Darwinian survival test orchestrated by brutal economic selection pressures. Conservatives may well out-reproduce more liberal/libertarian social groups by staving off some of the more deterritorializing tendencies of Capitalism (e.g. the dissipation of familial bonds). But this is ponderous, vertical evolution, and conservative genes and memes will find themselves in an environment driven by breakneck horizontal transfer of data and techno-adaptations. Even if the promises of strong AI do not fulfil themselves on schedule, even if the run-up to the Singularity turns out to be a seemingly never-ending run-up, populations which embrace the technological and social innovations coming up in the next few decades will overshadow conservative reproductive success.

That said, since strong AI will be marketed as expert, and will no doubt be deified, there is a good chance that once AI has got the database and memetics off pat it will appeal to the conservative mindset which trusts the powers that be to think for it.

northanger - I don't think Longman is talking about the advancement of civilization, but rather it's survival. Not the same thing.

Anybody with half a brain is going to pick up on technological advances that benefit him.

Flesher hysteria could also be evidenced by having children at all unless you're convinced, as in the AI Newsletter the other day, that the first person who will live 1000 years has already been born, so that that seems like a kind of built-in insurance for children who already are seen as having temporary flesher status, say, another 15-20 years at most until they can't still figure out how to get offline. Already, many singularity personnel think there's nothing offline and are out to prove it. They are convinced that their previous reputation as 'nerd' has been buried as a result of their research and development in 'pure places' like Vermont where there is less air pollution and positively nothing of interest going on. But this
depends on whether they can get all the money directed toward their project, or whether they can trick people into believing that their offline money is not really very good. This would seem to require that certain targeted populatons must continue to pay in cash, which is becoming an endangered species, so that these populations can be annihilated. On the other end, huge corporations will buy up the slightly smaller so that a phenomenal control will be enjoyed by the bloodless operators (don't look at me, they are the ones that don't want any organs, and they've already outlined the joy of not even having artificial hearts), and there will be a vast contingent (although probably a relatively small relative and even absolute number) of extremely intelligent large viral types prepared to exude enough innocence to make the one that made Francois Truffaut envious of Richard Dreyfuss in 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' when he learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Spaceship.

If you believe singularity will be ready by 2029, social conservatism will have little impact on who gets closest to it, unless mass purges to rid all who aren't interested in banal sensations are successful (these are surely already well under way). Social conservatism tied up with family values is thoroughly undercut with the vast flexibility offered by such a quick offering of 'singularity'. With social conservatives unable to tolerate even stem-cell research or biological evolution in hick parts of the American, there is little reason to believe that it will not be the social conservatives who themselves would try to topple such advancement, although if Kurzweil needs their political clout in the next phases of his Erector Set, he will surely stop talking about God genomes and such stuff unless Christian rightists in America are suppressed, can be bought off with consumption designed to corrupt into technological paths. Most liberals end up embracing technology when it benefits them, deciding that accusations of hypocrisy are not that hard to live with. Since hypocrisy is a well-known staple of all political extremism in particular, and there's even plenty of it in the more moderate versions, the solution is to keep the hypocrisy hidden, as I've alluded to before.

Families seem uniquely still capable of forgetting, due to having less time to think as part and parcel of their conservatism, that they have very frequently severed all important ties with their biological roots when such severance was less epidemic--and then have gone into various Brave New World situations, blithely ignoring the fact that their newly-created immediate family's children will surely do the same full and total rejection, and probably more so. With Virtual Reality, you can probably even have something that the mediocre taste, viz., the Kurzweilian, will find suitable to replace the original even if 'it will just do.' As of this writing, Kurzweil is able to surf the big waves and get the big money purely because of the niche he's carved in science. The 'singularity' is less tacky than scientology and EST only because of the hard science behind it: Kurzweil himself has less dimension than Bill Maher, whom he physically resembles.

You can still use a lot of what he's come up with (even if his own daily newsletter warns about much more than nanobot replication of the Wrong Kind, i.e., the 2-hour 'gray goo scenario'--unless, of course, the antidote is securely built in to the little buggers, which will solve everything and make everything really nice for everybody) if you don't really want 2029 to be the next time we get to hear 'Also Sprach Zarathustra' and 'Hail to the Chief' in the e-Rose Garden. with 'God Save the Queen' if Tony Blair's hi-tech apparatus has kept him in power and kept him young-lookin'.

For example, my copy of 'the Singularity' came from the NYPublic Library, in a big meaty flesher volume that I should have paid hard cash for like the rest of you probably did. But it took so long to get interested in it, with only a 3-week loan possible since it was a moderately successful seller, that I ended up having to keep it out 2 extra days and paying an overdue amount of 40 cents. So that Ray Kurzweil indeed saved me money, even though I realized early on that he mainly repeated himself ad infinitum so that one could give off a nice nonchalance by kindly reserving the best possible opinion of the footnotes by not bothering to read them.

I drank my first cola beverage yesterday since warned off them by Terry Grossman, Kurzweil's multi-email friend, whose work is more immediately useful than Kurzweil, insofar as those who greedy for thousands of years of tediously evolving science (with no time off for good behaviour) can be expected to explore very exhaustively all means to extend longevity till they have enough nanobots in their blood stream to eat off Omega-6 fats and calories coming from wherever that they can sit around and eat all the Nachos and drink all the Lite Beer while watching steroid-induced football without feeling a thing, or gaining a single ounce. These macho fruits can even afford to get a little tipsy, getting in touch with their 'feminine side' and swapping Paris Hilton identities for brief moments while their wives (one a licensed acupuncturist, or at least she was at Grossman's last writing in 2004; as for what she'll grow into, we're all still waiting, still waiting...) wax nostalgic about traditional wifeliness and whip up a couple of Duncan Hines Cakes with Dream Whip on top, since there's only guilt left when you can't actually be harmed by eating junk; this enables the consumer to isolate the guilt and savour it by itself. Then they'll join the boys for some little body-confusion glasses, sort of like XXX-rated View Masters where they can watch Fantasy Land in one corner of the old-fashioned screen, an old ad for an eBay VCR on another, and do some commodities trading and talk to their brokers about sexy e-real estate manoeuvres without having to concentrate exclusively on pleasing their partners (even though getting drunk in a predictable way may still induce nostalgia for the old days when the good old zipless was still to be had, and this can only be construed as mood poisoning. Couples can exchange memories of television production when pitches about new series were still made on conference calls.)

There will be much to offer ample fodder for internecine, tribal and global warfare in the next days, weeks and months.

Patriarchy has some good attributes when it's got personality, but since the producers of 'Singularity: the Movie' are such dullards except when they talk about high-inducing algorithmic growth of cellphone use, they may end up having to give Mel Gibson a fix, because along with Britney Spears, he's one of the few identifiable neocons not doing homo cowboy wannabe flicks these days. Admittedly, it was courageous of northanger to bring up Barbra Streisand in these parts the other day, but she's indicative of the fact that the marginalization of talent among liberals, where almost all of the artistic talent is, will not be given up without a fight. Try telling HER her money is no good just because she didn't support Kurzweil's agreement with Guantanamo extraordinary rendition policy. She might not have cared as much as she should have, but she definitely cared a little more than the neocons, who are happy about such crap even when it is not the least bit effective except for producing a big-time Fear Effect, which, as you see, I am quite immune to myself at this point. Far be it from ME to pretend that I don't consider the fact the Las Vegas is the boomtown where everyone comes to do service jobs because they've got too many snot-nosed brats to stay in California doesn't amount to anything but more sales garbage. Unfortunately for the extreme right, admission to elite clubs only if all old aesthetics are not 'marginalized' into 'economic-fantasy aesthetics' has not proved desirable enough to make these aesthetics seem weak enough for them to go gently into that good night just because sales experts have threatened them repeatedly.

Friendly Persuasion, 2006=Neocon Coercion.

puff adder - so much interesting stuff there it deserved to be a post.

This adds more fuel to the discussion of contemporary American values (from a left of centre how-can-we-help-the-Dems perspective)
www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10831
"... the onslaught of the new nihilistic, macho, libertarian lawlessness unleashed by an economy that pits every man against his fellows ..." ??? (in my dreams)

Nick--thanks for reading it so intelligently. It's mainly about how we need to individualize and colonize our own real responses to this business of 'singularity,' which, if it is so complex yet so quickly to be upon us, cannot be anything like the simple way we are told to by its primary authors--unless we are going to be among the exploited. It's very uncertain in fact now, no matter how 'easy' it 'will be.' So that when non-singularity-specific matters are factored in, all sorts of combustions occur, not nearly all limited to the religious fundemantalist sort of backwardness. I guess one hardcore assumption I make, even without other than essentially intuitive grounds, is that I think barely over 20 years for such a thing to occur sounds ridiculous. Kurzweil's idea that you can predict this sort of thing in a different sort of way than non-scientific phenomena is thoroughly unconvincing, even if he 'proves' it with back-up data, which itself would surely be qualified by other observers. And even if his 'proofs' are good, there's no reason to think that that will not change too. There are far too many variables he thinks he knows will happen, but that are not possible because even he is not to the point of knowing things will allow him to reach such a thing. It's probably not even desirable for such a radical surgery (for that is what it really is) to be done, but needs far more time. So that I think the appeal for him is very personal indeed, that of the secretly morbid thanatophobe; he'd like to be the first baby-boomer to get that big thousand-year booster shot in the sky (thoroughly understandable, but not justified by the absurd sacrifices in so many directions it would almost certainly require, but that he is very careful to keep thoroughly concealed.)

Anyway, congratulations on biological fatherhood, which I hope you will enjoy as a human being as long as you deserve it and are worthy of it! Who knows? It might be the making of you...

puff adder - while I'm very ready to accept much of what you say about Kurzweil (he still lacks a nanoplastic cold-computation synth-brain, after all), the basic infrastructure of his position strikes me as extremely solid. To his credit, he builds everything on his 'increasing returns' curve, which is massively supported empirically and of crystalline mathematical clarity. Of course, the exact fall-out is unpredictable, but the basic dynamics seem as well attested as almost anything in the social scientific universe. It's hard for me to even imagine what a semi-convincing critique of his argument would look like. Those who don't like it mostly just ignore it - which is OK I guess.

Speaking personally, the immortalism obsession is among the least interesting aspects of Singularity theory. Thanatophobia as you say, and based on bad metaphysics. If we can be copied (how could this not be possible?) then there's nothing ontological there at all - just ego illusion. Xenobuddhism gets it right - the soul myth will vaporize in nanotech, incinerating the last neurotic residue of a deluded religious tradition.

... but I realize that's to jump off your train.

Nick--it strikes me as extremely solid until I realize that it depends on much more than he's letting on for it to be solid within the time frame he wants. The only thing I find convincing about it is that it could happen eventually, but that he himself doesn't really convince when it comes to range of emotions that advanced beings would have, having limited his own to a basic regular hum, i.e., a regulated flow of ambition which is mediated only by the live-forever health regimen. The accelerating returns would not necessarily have to fit his time frame in order to work, although he says it would because he wants to see it. In any case, if he dies before it can be fixed to his liking, it's clear enough he'll be a cryonaut on hold for the duration. Of course, 'the exact fall-out is unpredictable', but that really should read 'the exact nature of the enormous fallout is unpredictable,' because the fallout is already enormous: Things are not being repaired except in extremely small proportions to the vast advances already made. Until there is a perception that chaos is not the most reliable feature of the world--a case which cannot be made about the current moment for the huge majority of the world's population, including most privileged ones like myself--the movement into these domains will seem far more destructive than salutary. For what he wants to come into being, there has to be a belief that it really is what he says it will be, or it will just be new forms of chaos that he and some others happen to get off on--a far cry from the joyously transforming thing he's managed to turn already into a religion, even though many elements of it are desirable by many people who aren't convinced of other parts of it. They don't like it for more reasons than just that it has little esthetic appeal to give up all that is familiar--and there's no question that in his timeline the speed would be far too great for a huge percentage of the population. Taking the long view, I don't know, but this zeal aspect will find few adherents until huge transformations seen as positive are seen in large numbers of individual lives directly attributable to this particular thrust of technology. Like everything else, it can claim itself to be sound, but also like everything else, it has to prove itself. I like much of it, but the parts I dislike, I'd fight to the death against, but you'd find negligible, I'm fairly certain.

Other things which are very undecided are the idea that this is the only intelligent life (his view) OR that there are a huge number of solar systems supporting a comparable life. He omits the possibility that there might be just a few instead of only one or a large number. If there is a good reason for this, it should not have been an omission that he could so easily take for granted (I'm sure he doesn't, he just doesn't want to talk about that one, because that's rougher).

His joy at the jobs now done by humans that will soon put them out of even more work since they can be done by machines is an especially telling notion: You have to decide that lost jobs and the lives ruined by these lost jobs are negligible because your own is not. But it is not true that new jobs are being provided by the singularitarian ones any more than they were being provided by the lost American jobs due to NAFTA. The outsourced white collar jobs were supposed to replace those lost in the manufacturing sector, but they are themselves getting lost. I am not saying that I know personally how to care about these lost jobs either, except that a new threat comes into the air about all infrastructure that one depends on being threatened. That's where the 'faith' comes in: You have to care about it in a way that is more important than self-interest or people-interest. The easy transition is not at all apparent in the world now and it will not be until there is a sense that a much larger chunk of it is agreed upon to be working. A bunch of statistics wouldn't convince me, as I've recently learned that statistics are forms of propaganda both for the left and the right and so most of the time I believe neither. My own observation is very clear on that life as I can see it is declining, and that the so-called singularity is mostly just greater refinement of gadgets.

A crucial element I didn't mention is that if the singularity IS as he says it is, it is not something you could 'just ignore.' If you could 'just ignore' it, it wouldn't be inevitable in the near or distant future.

'the soul myth will vaporize in nanotech, incinerating the last neurotic residue of a deluded religious tradition. ... but I realize that's to jump off your train.'

Yes and no. What the 'soul myth' could mean is something nobody has even begun to give up just by giving up religion. I haven't and you haven't. And while I agree that the immortality part is uninteresting, it's extremely interesting to him, and surely is a form of 'soul myth' of a SINGULAR primitiveness.

Merci, a toute a l'heure.

puff adder - well I'd been locked into a Singularity-style apocalypse scheduled for 2012, so 2029 sounds quite relaxed in comparison. Anyway, there's a personal perspective effect for sure: my overwhelming affect about the global process is how immensely 'better' everything is getting (meaning: more to my tastes) ever since 1979 - despite the Muslims going insane - with Britain and the USA breaking from the loathesome leftist decline that wound down into Jimmy *spit* Carter and Neil Kinnock, China switching over into an unbelievably positive influence, then India a decade later, the whole computer explosion, electronic music, refreshing liberty-oriented voices popping up on blogs - not trying to convince you of anything, of course, just saying that the extropian-vibe of 'onwards, upwards' gels with what I see around me, especially here in Shanghai. The world just keeps on becoming less European every day, which defines progress quite exactly IMHO. As people melt into the technocommercial wave I'm getting less misanthropic all the time - being surrounded by buzzy Asians rather than dour Westerners helps a lot with that - but I can't see through to not siding with shoggothic intelligenesis if the monkeys decide to put up a fight ...

"What the 'soul myth' could mean is something nobody has even begun to give up just by giving up religion. I haven't and you haven't." - agree absolutely, that's what I mean by Xenobuddhism - the illusion of the substantial self isn't dispelled by argument, and for most people it won't be meditation or some other kind of psychological discipline that does it - getting copied, downloading thoughts, splitting/merging 'consciousness' - that stuff will really have an impact and yes, it will be difficult to ignore ...

Nick--I can see why someone would like the dynamism occurring in China. I remember you directed me a good while back to some Julian Simon, but that's his statistics; and then the leftist statistics of various and sundry like Mike Davis. Well, they're both true and false. I'm fairly convinced it has to do with where you are--I can easily imagine that being in Shanghai or Hong Kong right now would be extremely exciting but, you see, you're still responding to a real place, and that in itself is supposed to become more and more irrelevant. I'm not attracted to Europe any more either, but for far more outlandish reasons than yours--Tahiti had so much physical presence that it outshone any fantasy I ever had of Europe! especially since I'd gotten to do a year of Paris when I was 20. What bores me about Europe is its combination of extreme consciousness of its own 'sensitivity' coupled with its condescension to other cultures which it can't afford. However, beyond that, as an artist, we get back to the personal--most of the work I'm interested in in that area is either American or European (especially in music) and if that means I'm living with ghosts, well, I'm fine with it. I'm not giving up Ravel just because of some technocommercial wave of reproduced music. Ravel was himself a Singularity. Admittedly, I don't find anything AT ALL of interest in that way in modern Europe, although it might be possible that there's a lot of vitality in Central Europe, I've noticed that freshness from 3 Slovenians I recently knew. It's often true that repressive regimes when lifted have still a lot of energy in reserve in their countries--not always, as not in Zaire or Haiti, but it has occurred to me that the capitalism that has made modern China so fascinating may have had its 'soil prepared' by the maoist regime in some way. Burma, once released, will be the same probably, although in a much more pristine physical state than China could be due to that many people. However, that's just guessing on my part: India is modernizing without having been Communist. Probably some of my own malaise is that New York has had a frozenness since 9/11 that won't be shaken off--and I'm not going to pretend that Ashcroft's highly political terror alerts have done anything but made it any worse. the next step is: Do we really need New York? The answer from China is probably 'no.' My answer is 'yes,' and the reasons need not be spelled out, because I don't even care if they are tellement ridicule...

'any worse' should be 'much worse'

"But it is not true that new jobs are being provided by the singularitarian ones any more than they were being provided by the lost American jobs due to NAFTA. The outsourced white collar jobs were supposed to replace those lost in the manufacturing sector, but they are themselves getting lost."

This sort of fallout = potential system failure --

The very basic 'commonsense' (I hate that word now) notion that singulariticians (snicker) as well as social Darwinian capitalists seem to be ignorant/contemptuous of is that if you push too hard, there will be pushing back. Like turning corners without braking. Social transition is a messy business, obviously -- to think that payment for ultra-rapid development will not be had in some similarly intense way seems, at the very least, counterintuitive (and contradicting current events).

The common Western liberal attitude (well, the practice) may be instructive here -- the God/soul/morality trinity not as prisons of stagnation but as brakes regulating humanity's intake of 'progress.' Hypocritical only if you consider the trinity (though we might throw environmentalism here too) as a set of identifiers to be applied categorically, rather than as semi-autonomous entitites which can be activated (invoked) by degrees.

traxus--definitely agree

traxus4420 - don't think I disagree either (although the snicker seems cheap) but just because there's pushing back is no reason not to push harder.

... in fact, recognizing the inevitability of (using this word literally and as neutrally as possible) 'reaction' seems like even more reason to push harder.

And on the jobs question: There's no evidence at all for a long-term technology-related rise in unemployment, this is surely a canard long overdue for burial. The causes of unemployment are quite well understood: Inflexible labour markets. I really don't seen any employment data anywhere calling out for supplementary explanation.

Nick--the employment data you're talking about is only for data, and is not concerned with the distribution that uproots individuals--ANY individuals. People that are promised 'new kinds of jobs' are not going to get them a lot of the time, so you have to think in terms of the collective phenomena--a good deal easier when it isn't your own job. One can see this kind of cold thinking as following from a full embrace of all-market-all-the-time practice, but nobody is fooled as to what it means 'on the ground.' People lose jobs, and they go elsewhere. Who cares? I probably don't care very much or for very long, if I'm not immediately affected in some way, but I am under no illusions about what job loss means if you don't look at it as just a bunch of 'latest statistics.' People lose jobs and then they often don't get those new jobs that they were going to be trained for--you know, those jobs that the new policy was going to provide since the poor dears lost the last ones. It's not like the government follows up carefully to make sure all the newly unemployed are accounted for: In fact they don't do it for ANY of the newly unemployed. In your dreams? No. It's a reality. Enjoy it if that's your shtick. It's in fact more like urban renewal. People are uprooted and sent to projects where they find a lovely life of drugs and related crimes. Of course, newly employed can then sprout up elsewhere to make the numbers look good if fudging them didn't do enough already (and there are no politicians not willing to do this when they can get away with it), so it's a matter of looking at numbers based on redistributed jobs and employment statistics that have no more recollection of who lost which jobs and then found no others. Survival of the fittest, one might say? Yes, but no point pretending that short-term technology-related rises in unemployment are to be given such short shrift, as there is little comfort in long-term technology non-rises in unemployment if you didn't manage to keep riding that wave. If your pogrom, that's the one that counts.

Sure, you may be right about the long term, but we were not talking purely about the long term when it comes to the jobs issue. That's because the long term is not enough to talk about.

'recognizing the inevitability of (using this word literally and as neutrally as possible) 'reaction' seems like even more reason to push harder.'

Yes, and thanks for the warning, because there now appears that if there is going to be something this pushy that reaction actually has a legitimate role to play, since working through this has proved that the pushiness involved in so-called singularity, since cloaked in such promise of both beneficence and benevolence, neither of which there is any real reason to trust, deserves an equal and opposite reaction, even if some of us are not in positions to defend Islam (the most popular example of reaction at the moment, but there are plenty of others, as I've pointed out.) The whole thrust of this aggressive fear-mongering is going to immediately breed a strong defense, and maybe a pre-emptive strike.

How about them apples?

puff adder - on the jobs thing, agree that bleeding-heartism isn't my strong point, but why should I be more concerned about the guy who finds it difficult to get a new job rather than the guy who gets one more easily than expected? The stats are general of course, and they show that every sob-story has an equal and opposite smile-story, so why emphasize the downside? Change is disruptive, so unless we want to abandan change (impossible in any case) disruption has to be dealt with.

Don't think I can be accused of over-stressing the touchy-feely side of singularity (and not saying you're making that accusation in my case), I'd be siding with it even it consisted predominantly of killer-robots seizing the future the harsh way. It's evolution, and people will get hurt. Others will benefit immensely. Not sure what the imperative is to focus on the losers (some Christian thing?)

Nick--one focusses on all those affected since you don't,given that, of course, as you point out, you'd 'be siding with it even it consisted predominantly of killer-robots seizing the future the harsh way.' Somebody's got to do it, and it's not going to be you.

Indeed you'd side there if necessary. What further explanation do you need for yourself? Traxus's snicker is hardly worse than your attempt to ally yourself with something you don't even know would benefit you, unless you are thinking only of 'future generations' and 'our children's children.' As for me 'focusing on the losers' being 'some Christian thing,' if I have actually done that here, it is because you routinely race across a lot of facts to reach a goal you want, expecting others to follow you in your race (a race that might even make Sammy Glick of 'What Makes Sammy Run?' suffer shortness of breath) without pointing out things you don't find pleasing. Given that you tend to do a little more below-the-belt than is generally identified as such, like this 'some Christian thing,' perhaps you'd like to choose between going to hell and arriving at 'beneath-contempt' status. (I might be able to give you some suggestions, as I've always rather liked my visits to hell.)

puff adder - if you think 'some Christian thing' is below the belt you're more of a blue stater than you let on :)
Seriously though, it was a bit snarky so apologies.

I'd be not only stunned but mildly horrified if people were "following me" anywhere, we curmudgeonly individualists are like that.
Seems to me you're going through a sensitive patch at the moment while I'm feeling even more brutalistic than usual, so some cross-purposes are perhaps to be expected ...

... More substantially, the thing about the losers is they make a lot of noise on their own behalf, to the point of excess in fact. The workers in a doomed car plant will raise political hell, while the equal or larger number of people benefiting from new jobs will put it down to their own general meritoriousness and not think of crediting anything beyond themselves. Thus 'technoglobalization' (or whatever) gets endless moral jeremiads launched against it, with only a little dry technocratic applause on the other side - if it wasn't a self-propelling process this kind of small-c conservative defensiveness would stall it completely. That's why I'm quite serious about cultivating a little callousness, there's more than enough noisy whinging in circulation already. "If you can't be objective, at least be ruthless" - a slogan for my myriads of fanatical followers.

Nick-

"If you can't be objective, at least be ruthless" - a slogan for my myriads of fanatical followers.

A curious slogan, since it admits to an unnecessary failure, while making it seem like it was a Good Thing.

I've just passed a sensitive spot--you missed it. Things should get worse.