Via Freesteel, Cory Doctorow is roasted over hot coals for peddling techno-porn. No, not the sort of techno-porn where Bjork robots make out with each other, but the kind which
subscribe(s) to the usual techno-myth of a future in which we become immortal beings after our brains have been uploaded into computers for back-up, emulation, and pleasure-seeking downloads into other meat-puppets.
As Julian points out, this is an “interesting” future only insofar as it’s the only future that would let us avoid having to actually live in the future:
Now folks, there are two kinds of futures we can talk about; there’s the fake one which we like to imagine, where our grandfather gets cured of cancer at the hospital and lives forever, and then there’s the real one which we will all eventually be living in, whether we like it or not.
Doctorow stands accused of talking the talk but not walking the walk – touring the planet to preach the gospel of webtopia with a carbon footprint the size of Guatemala. Hell, he’s guilty as charged – but then so am I. In the pay of “humanitarian organisations”, I fly around the world on a regular basis just like Doctorow, paying into the same engine of climate change that is going to be paying out a lot of future disasters.
The irony is that the entire humanitarian sector is pretty much dependent on jetting around the world without much thought for the environmental consequences – and often without a thought for the environmental causes of the problems we’re trying to resolve. It’s not as if we can teleconference in our response to the Indian Ocean tsunami, but if we just invested more in local capacity we probably wouldn’t need to, at least not as often as we do.
Enough of my wailing and gnashing of teeth. Read the whole post for a scabrously funny flight-by-flight analysis as Cory Doctorow
does what he can to make the listener feel inferior and envious of his life, and of the way he can give the same speech over and over again which people want to hear, get passes into secret clubs in Disneyland, and generally have a cool time jet-setting around a world where everybody loves him.
I want to live in the real future, not a webtopian fantasy. Where do I sign up?