Technoprogressive Worldbuilding

This summer Matteo MacDermant is teaching a course on Technoprogressive Worldbuilding for the IEET. We discuss the themes of the course, and some philosophical reflections about the technoprogressive project. * James Hughes and Matteo McDermant discuss their IEET “Technoprogressive Worldbuilding” summer course, tracing its intellectual roots from Enlightenment progress theory through Bogdanov’s proto-transhumanist “tectology” and the Bolshevik God Builders. * They debate biohacking and “right to try” ethics using Bryan Johnson as a case study, weighing bioliberal bodily autonomy against the FDA’s informed-consent rationale for regulation. * The conversation covers Sasha Costanza-Chuck’s Design Justice, examining how systems (subway elevators, dating-site dropdowns, census categories) encode assumptions about a “default” user and exclude marginalized groups. * They trace the historically constructed nature of racial/ethnic categories, using the U.S. census’s pre/post-2010 Hispanic classification and the “one drop rule” as examples of Foucauldian statistical governmentality. * Matteo explains his dissertation focus on tech worker organizing as a “socio-technical” labor movement, distinguishing it from the “click worker” and content-moderation labor performed largely in the Global South. * They discuss the class divides within tech labor (FTEs vs. TVCs/contractors) and how marginalized tech workers, not “class reductionist” purists, drove early solidarity with Silicon Valley service workers. * Automation’s limits are examined through Waymo remote operators and robot food-delivery services secretly controlled by workers in the Philippines and Colombia, tying this to John Scalzi’s Head On and a Tokyo robot café staffed by disabled teleoperators. * They contrast deterministic/accelerationist libertarian transhumanism with James’s “democratic transhumanism,” emphasizing epistemic humility, non-teleological history, and Bogdanov’s concept of “radical imminence.” * Drawing on Bogdanov’s “view from the peak” metaphor and standpoint epistemology, they argue technoprogressive knowledge requires actively incorporating diverse perspectives (race, gender, trans experience) to approach a more universal picture of reality. * The episode closes with reflections on constructed narratives (via the show Silo‘s memory-erasure plot and a Simone Weil quote on history), an invitation to join the course, and wry commentary on the surreal banality of Trump-era politics. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit technoprogressives.substack.com