[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[Andy Robinson]

"I feel as if you are trying to reason about current science by reading
Lister and Pasteur.  Those were interesting mileposts, but times do
change...even in political theory."

And again the point is completely and utterly missed.

I did not have to say Locke, Marx and Burke.  I could have said Deleuze,
Holloway, Negri, Benhabib, Rawls and Nozick.  The point is that nobody
across the entire spectrum of plausible political theories from liberal
humanism to conservatism, Marxism to right-libertarianism, believes the
rather absurd proposition that a state which did not need ordinary people
and was not structurally accountable could be trusted to act benevolently.
Apart from those who quite defensibly argue that states are always and
irreducibly dangerous and untrustworthy, the rest of them believe in tying
states up with a whole range of power-constraints to make sure they don't
get out of control.

"You are largely driven by a canon.  Your views thus strike me as
quasi-religious...with a strong sense of what is and what is not orthodox"

Nobody who has read my work in political theory would accuse me either of
being driven by the canon or of being concerned with orthodoxy.

In fact I'm one of the most dismissive in the field of the importance of
classic authors, and one of the most ready to mix and match different
theories when it's useful to do so.

But this doesn't mean I'll accept your naive posturing, which comes down to
a mixture of 'I'm right because I'm daring to say something controversial'
and 'I'm right because my scientific worldview has epistemological privilege
over your local knowledge in some inferior field'.

And here's the problem.  Nineteenth-century positivist utopianism about the
reduction of humanity to machinic functions, the possibility of 'scientific'
social problem-solving and the possibility of a panoptical scientific gaze
generating a benevolent form of social paternalism - which is what you are
advocating with some suitably futuristic decoration - is not a plausible
contribution to political theory.  It goes against the orthodoxies, but in
the sense of moving backards, not forwards.  Pretty much everyone in the
social sciences now recognises the need to be aware of the limits to
'science', the social construction of social action (at least in the weak
sense accepted by realists) and the utter fallacy of ideas such as the
onward march of progress.  Rather ironically, ideas like yours would be
dismissed in the social sciences as horribly old-hat and cliched.  More
importantly, they have about as much credibility as astrology.

Your use of a science-religion binary is typical of what you're doing
wrong.  Faced with criticism, you seek to impugn its epistemological status
instead of engaging with its substantive content.

In any case, the major problem is not your lack of accountability to the
canon.  It is your lack of accountability, first of all to any kind of
other-regarding ethical theory, and secondly to well-established knowledge
about the social world, in particular the behaviour of states.  You think
you can escape from these limits by hiding in supposedly new areas of study
(though whether they are just new in the sense of the 'novelty' of each new
wave of fashionable commodities is questionable).  You cannot escape so
easily.  You don't get out of the problem of how states historically have
behaved by hiding in technological arguments.
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