Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

One Week Left

One week before teaching begins again... The course is called "For Futurity: A Clash of Futurisms" and I really have to put a syllabus together. I worry that the shocking Trump victory and Republican prevalence across all levels of government (despite majorities voting for Democrats for President, Senate, House...) will steal futurity from the present and most immediate futures better than the present and that makes putting this class together incredibly difficult. Of course, the bulk of the class is a critique of futurology (which is, I guess, my thing), but I had meant to contextualize my usual anti-futurological dog and pony show with various modernisms, utopianism/dystopianism, Italian Futurism, left/right eugenicisms, queers and punks repudiating "The Future," accelerationism, and then to conclude with a celebration of Afro-Futurism. I guess this is roughly still what I plan to do -- but what I imagined to be a course about invigorating utopian possibility in the face a dreary piecemeal reforms under a Clinton administration has become a course about holding on to an open futurity in a death-dealing hate-deranged anti-intellectual nation plunging headlong into civil war as the planet dies around us exacerbating every problem and killing hope. The task feels daunting and I still feel like a raw wound half the time anyway.  

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