Real Issues

As anyone forced to listen to me will confirm, I am practically made of opinions. But when debate rages on these pages and at the dinner table over affirmative action, gun control, abortion, and the like, I retreat to the sidelines and keep mum. The same goes for most arguments framed in terms of a Democratic side and a Republican side to the issue: I’ll calmly diagnose each tribe’s pathology, explain that third-trimester dilation and extraction is probably not a good idea, and hustle the conversation in some more salacious direction.

For many in the punditocracy and its feeder circles on university campuses, these debates mean everything. If it is noble to work on a Senate campaign, it is yet nobler to fight for a “struggle of our generation,” like marriage equality, national debt awareness, or wage increases for campus library workers. If it’s in front of our eyes and morally unambiguous, it simply must be world-historical.

This narrow political intellectual culture, perpetuated by an unimaginative caste of wonks, activists, and joiners, assumes away the technological and social transformations of the last three decades while ignoring the prospect that what’s debatable today might be utterly irrelevant by the middle of the century. That is to say, despite the fruitful explorations of our intellectual class, political discourse qua political discourse is simply missing the real issues. As three-dimensional printing stands on the cusp of igniting a revolution in the means of production and genetic engineering stands to radically transform the means of reproduction, the Institute of Politics continues to hold panels better-suited to the 1970s. It is high time that “issues”-minded folk broaden their sense of what constitutes an “issue.”

For the time being, it is both comfortable and profitable for would-be political commentators to butt heads over well-rehearsed questions of small versus large government, corporate capitalism versus state socialism, and individual liberty versus collective gain. However, the rise of empirical social science has profoundly scrambled these 19th-century debates, which, if you buy into dispositional theories of political orientation like I do, are pretty much irreconcilable—projections of our conflicting moral instincts, rather than sound bases for working out effective policy. Disruptive, self-replicating technologies are fueling the rise of a creative, decentralized economy whose total novelty should give serious pause to supporters of morally bankrupt disaster capitalism and delusional anti-human socialism alike.

Discussion of such ponderous matters is so rare that it’s even worth praising Newt Gingrich’s techno-fetishistic obsession with the moon for, at the very least, daring to imagine a world beyond today’s. And as irresponsible as it would be for me to dismiss questions about social security’s long-term solvency and the appropriate federal response to gun violence, I cannot sit by as members of the political class laugh away issues of sustainability, psychedelic research, intellectual property, human enhancement, and geoengineering as matters of the apolitical long-term.

What has resulted from this lag between politics and technology is an invisible, potentially devastating democratic deficit. Whether or not political types debate the merits of Jaron Lanier, Stewart Brand, and Ray Kurzweil as assiduously as they’ve debated Burke, Marx, and Hayek, research, technology, and closed-door policy will continue to march in the direction of technologically-mediated social disruption. As we continue to argue about what happened at Benghazi or how deep the National Rifle Association’s tentacles penetrate, Google, MakerBot, and the federal government’s own Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are hard at work engineering the 20th century’s conflicts over ownership, struggle, and identity out of existence.

We already know the basic contours of this inevitable transformation, its watchwords as materially relevant as they are inscrutable: “creative economy,” “cloud,” “neural networks,” “life extension,” “nanotech.” But it’s up to us, by way of our dollars and our votes, to determine the particulars. Tech activism successfully thwarted SOPA and PIPA, proposed legislative steps toward a proprietary, undemocratic internet. However, only a more robust conversation of political thought leaders, voters, and consumers will be able to guide us through the next few decades’ uncertain shoals and help us to steer technological progress in accordance with our values, whatever they may be. Exponential computer intelligence, indefinite life extension, and the quantitative tracking of our every last biological quiver can be harnessed toward either Locke or Minority Report. Our odds at the former will not be helped until the talking heads at MSNBC and the IOP Forum can set their to a longer time horizon.

Joshua B. Lipson ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a Near Eastern languages and civilizations concentrator in Winthrop House. Follow him on Twitter @Josh_Lipson.