Dale Carrico on Technoprogressive Politics

Interview of Dale Carrico with the editors of the Meme Therapy blog, focusing on Deliberative Development and the differences between technoprogressivism and transhumanism.

Dale Carrico integrates many p2p-aspects in his techno-progressive vision.

URL = http://memetherapy.blogspot.com/2006/07/dale-carrico-on-technoprogressive.html

Discussion

Do We Need "Technoprogressive" Politics?

In an update on his views, Dale Carrico now says we don't need such technoprogressive politics:

"I think people of the sustainable equitable democratic left benefit greatly from being technoscientifically-literate and technodevelopmentally-concerned, since technoscience issues and change are a primary site of social struggle in our historical moment.

Strictly speaking, I don't think one needs a special "identity" category or movement or program called "technoprogressive" (or anything else) to identify this need and this tendency in particular -- because it is the politics of sustainability, equity-in-diversity, democracy that are prior to and articulate the "technoscience politics" here, there are no "technoscience politics" autonomous from or determinative of that priority -- and also since technodevelopmentally progressive politics has many expressions and mostly plays out at a finer level of detail than is captured by broad ideological formulations and manifestos and that sort of thing anyway.

I would be remiss, I suppose, if I did not point out that in the past I did indeed use that "technoprogressive" term as a shorthand signifier for technoscientifically literate technodevelopmentally progressive politics, and in a way that distressingly did seem to aspire at a kind of position-taking and program. I stopped using it any more when I realized that transhumanists and other Robot Cult types were using it in their PR efforts to mainstream their message.

But the larger lesson I learned from that prior mistake was the technoprogressive term, in creating a space of supposed identification/ dis-identification, was always vulnerable to such an appropriation precisely because it lends itself to a more abstract and inapt "technology politics" involving subcultural signaling (and crass self-promotion/ marketing moves in its Robot Cultic forms) rather than the concrete political questions of stakeholder cost/ risk/ benefit assessment in the moment, sustainability and democratization issues, stratification of distributional effects by class/ race/ gender/, institutional analysis, and the stuff where the rubber really hits the road." (http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2012/12/do-we-need-technoprogressive-politics.html)