To subsume myself in the rhetoric I am speaking about: my intellectual gears have been pumping away here at the end of the semester, this swirl of thoughts exploding and fragmenting into an array of ideas that are at once disorienting and invigorating. My classes this semester have fit together brilliantly, and here at the end they have been particularly potent. I have had several instances that have really stimulated my thoughts, most notably a series of conversations with various people, especially one I just had with Laura Walls, and the analysis of the online conversations about nanotechnology that I’m doing with Gehrke. These have made me realize that there is a significant niche for me right there in this, as Laura put it, “new genre” of literature. The analysis of this genre will not only be fruitful in understanding a new and important socio-cultural and political phenomenon but will also lead me to be able to dissect out of this some really interesting philosophical and socio-cultural commentary in the long term.

The core of this new “genre” is what I will call, for now, “reverse historical narratives/studies” The terms came to me while talking to Dr. Walls today and she really liked it and I see it as incredibly fitting. What this involves is a sense of certainty of the future; writers and speakers of this genre speak of future events using the same method as people who write historical accounts. In a sense, there is a set future and a set past and the current course is just a matter of moving between the two. This doesn’t mean that these people necessarily agree on what this futuristic outcome is but they speak as if they are sure. That is, they speak of the future like historians speak of a contestable past event, rallying the same sort of evidence and using the same sort of language. A lot of times this involves taking the past and projecting it to the future, but it is not always the case.

Caught up in this is a melding of science into a narrative form. Science and fiction, essentially, are blurred together to form an inseparable mass.  The most common mode of speech is a form of speculation, that is essentially a strong thought experiment where the implicit assumptions are not recognized. Except here the speakers don’t recognize it as a speculation but claim it as the practice of science. That is, they dress it up in scientific language, use scientific terms, construct real looking models, give their items scientific sounding names, etc.  A good example can be found here, an article by Robert Freitas.

The implicit assumptions of this sort of discourse are extensive and I’m astonished at how its been pushed out of academic circles instead of seriously studied. I know of only one person who has written anything about it and he did so focusing on how it molds science fiction and nonfiction–good valuable work but not as far as I want to take this.  There are no end to the number of fascinating rhetorical strategies going on in this talk, such as the use of religious rhetoric, transposition of liberal humanist principles, the imitation of authoritative words, etc. At the center of this is the creation of models and the advent of an age of technoscience–models can be made, people may speculate, and you can’t tell the difference between a carbon nanotube model and a model of a nano-machine gear even though one has been created while the other hasn’t.

There is another idea that is caught up in this, which I call false personal empowerment. At the risk of sounding technocratic, which is a difficulty in my head (especially for an anti-realist), I think that there are a lot of people who are speaking without authority at all. That is, they put on the rhetoric and guise of professionals and present themselves as such when they are not at all. The blogger can comment next to the academic, who has devoted decades of her life to this, and they sound the same.  This is, of course, due to the propagation of the internet.  At first I thought this was a good thing, a la The World is Flat and Wikinomics. But now I’m not so sure. The great “leveling” of the world, while it has some advantages, allows anyone to assume far more knowledge than they have. So we see online a frequent phenomenon where users critique a scientific study, as if they as scientists. For instance, there was this report on a work on risk perception of nanotechnology by Dietram Scheufele, a researcher I’m familiar with. About half of the arguments on the article were critiquing the study as if Scheufele didn’t know a thing about communication study methodology and was just out to work his own agenda.

This becomes incredibly dangerous when people take up the same discourse that the professionals are using. Scientists form a discourse, then these futurists grab a hold of this discourse and use it to make claims (eg, Frietas, Aubrey du Grey) that sound exactly like the science. AThe commenters then pick up this sort of discourse and run with it, despite their relatively low level of understanding, essentially posing as the scientists.  s Dr. Walls put it “it will all look the same to an outsider.” Essentially, people are empowered but they are empowered to pretend they comment on things they know nothing about. For examples, just go turn on the news channel: many journalists practically make a living doing this.  Personally it was a powerful moment for me when I realized that a bulk of what I have spent my life doing was pretending I was empowered to comment on things I knew relatively little about. Once this was realized I ditched all thoughts of being just a writer.

All of this needs to be studied seriously because it is not just a form of discourse that is tossed around with no relation to the world. This is affecting the way we are living our lives and conceiving our future. Most alarmingly, it is influencing our political discourse as members of congress even begin to speak in this discourse or call on people who can assume an authoritative rhetoric without really representing the reality of the situation.

In regards to the political implications, I want to make a note of the concept of consilience, a term coined by William Whewell, which designates an instance where disparate paths of research come together to form the same conclusion. This is the case with climate change. Its not just one group of scientists in one field that concluded that it was alarming. It was dozens of fields with hundreds of researchers in each, whose research came to the same general conclusion: that global warming is happening and that we are the cause of it.  Such aspects as consilience get lost in the false empowerment of people who assume that they can discard the evidence because, as we’ve seen recently, one research team has some questionable language in their emails. These people know nothing of the practice of science and the modeling involved. Yet they pretend that they do and when scientists try to explain it to them they do not understand.  This is endlessly frustrating for scientists who are overwhelmingly distressed by climate change–and not just in one field, but dozens of fields.

So I am seeing there is a set of incredibly important things for me to study. Eventually I’ll have enough of a sense of all of these things to make some more fundamental claims about what would be more appropriate forms of discourse–ie, what can be done about all of this–as well as what the effects of this are. I look forward to this study–more than look forward to it–it seems potently urgent. I’ve got my work cut out for me, no doubt.