A Poke in the Eye with a Sharp Spike: Nanoculture and the Future of SF

Abstract

We may be living in dark times, but the future—that is, the future of nanotechnology, which for Colin Milburn’s purposes in Nanovision is to say the future—is bright. So astonishingly, blindingly bright, in fact, as to utterly confound our ability to properly perceive it, much less grasp what it might hold for us. For nanotech, more than any other single technological undertaking, is drawing humanity inexorably toward a moment—dubbed the Singularity by Vernor Vinge, the Spike by Damien Broderick—when all the conceptual models that lend structure and meaning to present-day reality will have to be either discarded or radically upgraded. With Nanovision, Milburn joins a growing chorus of voices in technoculture studies who take seriously the proposition that, in some sense or another, the Singularity is coming. Until it does, judging from the cross section of tech-sector rhetoric curated here, nanotech has assumed the mantle of Last Best Hope for the faltering project of technoscientific Progress and the twentieth-century economies of production and consumption it once drove. Politicians and pitchmen tout nanothis and nano-that as the next big tech boom, while techno-libertarian prophets of posthumanity take the opportunity to double down on their most cherished presumption: that perpetually expanding markets and exponentially proliferating tech are inevitable and mutually ratifying truths. Elsewhere, ostensibly above the fray, researchers and engineers working toward the realization of actual nanotechnologies disdain the wild-eyed pulp sensibility that has contaminated the discourse on nano, though even these soberminded paragons of hard science are prone to making some truly extraordinary assertions of their own about what it will make possible. Whoever is doing the talking, it seems, the prefix “nano-“ is synonymous with breathtaking, inconceivably momentous change: it is a signifier of Singularity. Nanovision opens with the observation that all this commercial gloss and utopian bluster—the sort of talk that David M. Berube derides as “nanohype”—have so overloaded the collective perceptual pathways and cognitive apparatus of contemporary technoculture as to induce, in Milburn’s conceit, a sort of hysterical blindness. It is as though the historical transformation that awaits us is emitting a glare of such overpowering radiance that we cannot possibly make out what it is or what it might mean—only that it is coming. In fact, to the degree that nano-discourse posits some version of Singularity as inevitable, without being able to offer any coherent description of what a post-Singular reality might actually look like, “the imagination of nanotechnology creates its own blindness” (12)—in order to overcome it. More than just a dazzling flash of futurity reflected