Ben+W+&+Neil

toc =Affirmative=
 * insert attempt at being cute or funny here, most likely a link to a cliche youtube video or stupid .gif***

**1AC Tunnel of Love**
__Not since Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth__ 50 years ago __have the Russians grabbed so many headlines for their technological daring__. Last week __the Kremlin approved__ what was described by our Russian correspondent, surely correctly, as " __the greatest railway project of all time__ ". It's the construction of __a__ 65-mile __tunnel__ connecting Asia and North America __under the Bering Strait__, and hence linking the railway networks of Russia and North America. The minor problem that, at present, neither railway network goes anywhere near the Bering Strait only adds to the excitement. On the Russian side a 500-mile link is being built from the Trans-Siberian Railway to Yakutsk, more than 3,000 miles east of Moscow. But this would have to be extended a further 2,400 miles through some of the most savage terrain in the northern hemisphere. And on the Alaskan side the challenge would scarcely be any easier, especially as Alaska's railways aren't connected to any others in North America. __Yet the Russians, Canadians and Americans seem confident that they can muster the political will, technical knowhow and massive funds__ (£60 billion just to dig the tunnel) __to complete the project__ - though not any time soon. The year 2045 is being proposed as the finish date, which would be neatly symbolic: the 100th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Of course, all this depends on humanity not embarking on a Third World War. __Constructing a "dry" crossing__ between Siberia and Alaska __would be symbolic__ for another reason. __Most experts believe that homo sapiens first reached America by walking across the Bering Strait__ - about 30,000 years ago, when sea levels were lower. __And the dream of linking Asia and America by tunnel or a series of bridges has been knocking around for over a century__. The great engineer Joseph Strauss put forward a brilliant plan as long ago as 1892. And he knew a thing or two about designing bridges; he built the Golden Gate in San Francisco. Then in 1905 Tsar Nicholas II approved a tunnel scheme. But the Russian Revolution, two world wars and the Cold War meant that the 20th century was nearly over before the necessary East-West co-operation seemed feasible. Now, however, it seems not just feasible but economically enticing. Experts say that a Siberia-Alaska rail link could carry a huge amount of the world's freight much more cheaply, quickly and cleanly than supertankers or juggernauts do. That's important. __But what really thrills romantics is the prospect of getting on a train at St Pancras and alighting 16 days later at Grand Central Station in New York, having enjoyed the journey of a lifetime through the majestic vistas fringing the Arctic Circle.__ Of course, the reality is that you would probably have to change trains at Brussels, Berlin, Moscow, Yakutsk, Anchorage, Vancouver and Toronto. And if you think about all the things that go wrong every day on the British railway, and imagine them going wrong on trains passing through northeast Siberia, 1,000 miles from the nearest town, it can be a bit disconcerting. What if there's signal failure? Or the loos overflow? Or the buffet runs out of BLTs and beer? You might meet the same fate as some of those early seafarers searching for the Northeast Passage. Even so, __the **sheer audacity** of the project makes the **heart beat faster**__. One big reason for that, surely, is our growing disillusion with the mind-numbing hassles of air travel. And that's extraordinary. When I was a boy everyone thought that in the 21st century we would be whizzing to New York, Los Angeles, even Sydney, in a couple of hours - via ever-speedier supersonic aircraft or space rockets. But that dream died with Concorde. Now, __air travel appears to be stuck in a technological impasse. By contrast, it's the earthbound Victorian technology__ of the Brunels and Stephensons __that seems to offer the 21st century its most exciting transport initiatives__. Back in 1870 the opening of the 1,000-mile Bombay to Calcutta railway inspired Jules Verne to write Around the World in Eighty Days. It's bizarre yet delightful that, __140 years on, a great railway project still captures the imagination as no other modes of transport do__. If the Bering Strait tunnel does open in 2045, I'll buy myself a train ticket to New York as a 90th birthday treat.
 * In 1905 Czar Nicholas II approved the Bering Strait tunnel project – all plans were dashed after WWI and the Russian Revolution as the world plunged into a century of war, hate, and great power competition – with its recent approval from the Kremlin, the Bering Strait plan has been revitalized as a unique act of imagination which recalls inspiring science fiction of the past—it’s a symbol of hope for global cooperation**
 * MORRISON 2011** (Richard, “A train trip from Moscow to New York?; The proposed construction of a tunnel linking the rail networks of Russia and North America is a brave new world indeed,” The Times, August 26, lexis)

**ENGERMAN 2003** (David, Engerman is Assistant Professor of History at Brandeis University, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development, p. 7-11) American ideas about Russia's predominantly peasant population also built on indigenous Russian ones. Especially in the nineteenth century, which saw the spread of industrialization in western Europe and the rise of Romanticism, __images of the peasant played an important role in arguments about Russia's present conditions and future trajectory__ .'3 Slavophiles, conservatives who emphasized Russia's differences from the west, celebrated the peasant commune and the autocracy as cornerstones of Russian rule and incarnations of Russian character. To them, the special qualities of Russia and its peasantry deserved conservation and protection from western materialism and industrialism. Yet admiration was at a distance. Throughout the nineteenth century, educated Russians described the sharp contrasts between themselves (collectively, obshchestvo, or society) and the bulk of the population {narod, or the people). With a combination of condescension and sympathy, intellectuals saw the narod as an undistinguished mass of simple people who required the help of the obshchestvo if they ever hoped to emerge from their noble suffering. As one member of the Populists (a group of radical heirs to the Slavophiles) put it in 1880, a Populist "does not love the narod only because they are unfortunate ... He respects the narod as a collective whole, constituting in itself the highest level of justice and humanity in our time." Love for the narod. however deep and sincere, was directed not at actual individuals but at an abstraction. Within two decades, though, such __positive sentiments were drowned out by critical ones__. Russian __intellectuals__ in the last decades of the nineteenth century __depicted peasants as savage, helpless, and hopeless__ —not to mention unresponsive to (and even ungrateful for) the obshchestvo's best efforts. Russian intellectuals1 experiences with the peasantry are perhaps best illustrated by the Populists' effort to bring education and enlightenment "to the people" in 1874. "The people" were so uninspired by the message of the radicals that they frequently reported them to police officials. The ensuing disenchantment with the narod was hardly limited to radicals, however. In Russian art, literature, and theater of the late nineteenth century, peasants were no longer repositories of rural virtue. The figurative countryside was instead populated by kulaks, "peasant bloodsucker(s]," and baby, vulgar peasant women who symbolized the moral crisis of the peasantry. Peasants previously lauded as an abstract collective fared much worse (in the minds of educated Russians) as actual individuals. Russian intellectuals' views of their rural compatriots suggest that no great geographic distances are required to turn the subjects of observation into "others." Although they lived close to the peasants, members of the Russian obshchestvo nevertheless remained outside the lives of those they described with such contempt. __America's Russia watchers, without local knowledge, found their suspicions about the peasantry confirmed by Russian writers__ . Recent scholarship on such exterior perceptions has been aided—and, more problematically, defined around—Edward Said's elegant work Orientalism. Said documents a range of assumptions that European scholars, writers, and artists held about the "Orient" and "Orientals." Amid his insightful readings of Flaubert and his broad generalizations about French and British policy in the Near East, __Said offers a convincing criticism of European depictions of the Orient. Europeans__, he writes, __homogenized the Orient's inhabitants and placed them outside historical time. But Said himself pays minimal attention to the differences among depictions of the Orient, and to the ways they changed over time. Ironically enough, then, his critique of homogenization and hypostatization applies equally well to his own analysis of Orientalist discourse. Nevertheless, Said's insights about perceptions as a form of social power—and their intimate connections to imperatives of government rule—are applicable to American views of Russia__ .16 Modernization from the Other Shore invokes Herzen's metaphor of distant shores to emphasize the exteriority upon which Said built his argument. But the metaphor applied across time as well as space. The "far shore" represented not just Herzen's distance from Russia but also the safe haven he reached as the revolutionary storms of 1848 ebbed. Like Herzen's, this book is also written from a far shore—following not the flash-floods of 1848 but the decades-long storm of Soviet rule. The Soviet collapse brings both practical and intellectual changes to the study of Russia's past, and thus to those who interpret it. The opening of once-locked archives and the desire to understand the Soviet past without Cold War blinders have led to a flourishing debate. Once-secret Soviet documents have forced reconsiderations of crucial events in modern history. __Russians' discussions of their country's past are all the more striking for the decrepit physical and desperate financial circumstances in which they take place__. __Writing after the Cold War also offers an opportunity to reflect on American enthusiasm for the USSR in a new and less rancorous political context__. To take one example: previous historians have blamed intellectuals' fascination with the Soviet Union in the 1930s on misguided leftists, or on misguided leftism in general. Yet __the romance of economic development swayed American observers across the political spectrum__. Partisan politics—that is, devotion or opposition to the Communist Party—cannot fully explain this important episode in American intellectual history. __Impressed by grandiose Soviet plans and dismissive of backward Russians, many American intellectuals enthusiastically observed Soviet efforts at modernization. And western enthusiasms for the Soviet Union reverberated long after the Depression decade. They helped define McCarthyism and the early Cold War, as a generation of intellectuals viewed their own— and their friends'—Soviet enchantment with increasing disdain__ .17 Enthusiasm for Soviet industrialization did not require a Party card, either in the United States or in the Soviet Union. Many Russians who praised rapid modernization were not Bolsheviks. So-called bourgeois agricultural experts, engineers, and economists in Russia all found reasons to endorse Soviet goals of collectivization and industrialization. Other Russians leapt at the chance to turn their motherland into a modern great power, meaning an industrial one.18 Western observers, too, appreciated the Bolsheviks' claims about a rationally organized society under the guidance of specialists like themselves. Such enthusiasm also existed outside Russia. James Scott's recent synthesis. Seeing Like a State, suggests parallels between Soviet collectivization and other projects of what he calls "authoritarian high modernism."19 __The idea of creating a new kind of society, organized around production and easily controlled__, Scott shows, __found adherents around the world and all along the political spectrum. The demise of the USSR and the Cold War has already opened new inquiries into the common mindsets behind these projects, past and present.__ __Widespread excitement about universal progress still incorporates regional variations__. Recent debates about "Asian values," for instance, reveal the persistence of a troubled relationship between universalist and particu-larist models of development. Since the 1980s, leaders in Malaysia and Singapore have defended their combination of industrialization and political repression with references to particular Asian values. "Each nation " one argues, "must find its own best social and political arrangements"; there are no universal theories or forms of social organization. Western critics, meanwhile, base their arguments on the notion of human rights—that is, a set of rights that applies universally, transcending culture or government.20 The Asian values debate scrambles political alliances among Americans. Multiculturalists, generally on the left, see their claims of cultural particularism deployed by right-wing dictatorships. Meanwhile universalists, often accused of denigrating other nations and cultures, take the side of oppressed populations. Similarly, __scholars still argue about the relationship between Russian character and economic development in the post-Soviet era. The Soviet collapse, which might have brought down with it the edifice of universalist theories of human behavior, has instead unleashed a potent universalism in which all varieties of humankind are known only as homo oeconomicus. This is evident in recent debates about Russian economic policy__. Taking great pride that they had conquered the "prejudice that 'Russia is different,'" the economists Maxim Boycko, Robert Vishny, and Andrei Shleifer celebrated their own universalism. "The Russian people," they preached in a widely read monograph, "like the rest of the people in the world, were 'economic men' who rationally responded to incentives." Russia, therefore, did not require a special form of economic organization "to compensate for its alleged cultural specificities and deficiencies."21 These economists promoted the immediate establishment of free-market institutions, creating a capitalist Russia with a single big bang. Supremely confident that economic laws applied equally well in all times and places, they were, ironically enough, heirs to Marx's universalism. __As economic "shock therapy" created new ailments in Russia, particu-larist critics blamed the economists' failure to account for Russia's differences from the west__. Russians, argued the longtime Russia-watcher Marshall Goldman, "have almost always seemed more comfortable in a collective or communal, as opposed to an entrepreneurial, environment." Even before the anti-capitalist slogans of the Soviet era, he continued, "the market ethic was never . .. deeply entrenched in the psyche" of Russian peasants. Particularists with a conservative bent, meanwhile, suggested that the problem was not in the economists' methods but in their very aims. Historian Richard Pipes, for instance, lists multiple reasons that Russia has never developed the key institutions of western capitalism and democracy. While explicitly rejecting a national character argument, Pipes leaves little opportunity for Russia to evolve toward the west. In making such claims, he comes all too close to condemning Russia to its own past.22 __We have yet to resolve the tensions between universal progress and national difference__ that Herzen observed a century and a half ago. The questions addressed in this book parallel many of the age-old concerns that preoccupied Herzen. Chief among them is the question of difference. What do cultural differences mean? Are they innate or historical? How do they shape our understandings of human behavior and social change? Related to these are concerns about the universality of progress. How can each society find its own path of progress? Can a nation overcome its historical particularities? Should it? Finally, __there is the balance between present and future. Under what conditions can individuals call for collective sacrifices in the name of future welfare? And with what consequences? Russian history provided the answers to these questions—or so American experts believed.__ __Ideas about the peculiarities of Russian character, belief in economic development, and the reconfiguration of international expertise all shaped American conceptions of Russia__ and the Soviet Union between 1870 and 1940. This book's organization underscores the pervasiveness as well as the significance of these themes. Chronological chapters emphasize the persistence of national-character stereotypes as well as the growing romance of economic development and the evolving structure of expertise. Within most chapters, biographical sections highlight the ubiquity of these beliefs, even among experts with discordant political views and divergent personal experiences.
 * Unfortunately, American perceptions of Russia vacillate between extremes of cultural relativism and economic universalism. Current attitudes towards Russian technological projects stems from an unresolved mix of contempt and fascination**

__...The Bering tunnel is a typical example of Russian folie de grandeur__ __Isn't it wonderful? We'll be able to travel from London to Seattle in ten days instead of ten hours. Freight between America and Russia will be at the mercy of terrorists and caribou__ instead of being locked away in dull container ships. Oh, and armies of navvies will dig up two of the least desecrated spots on earth. __The idea of an Alaska-Siberia rail tunnel under the Bering Strait__, which was floated (technically, refloated) this week by the Russian official responsible for such things, __is so crazy that it somehow **defies you not to will it into being**. It would cost the earth and take centuries to pay for itself, but it has its own bewitching logic__. Goodness, you realise, gazing at the map. These two continents come so close to each other up there near the Arctic that the question should be why they aren't already linked. __Russia's engineers are its most maniacal dreamers,__ and this week they have been hard at it. Viktor Razbegin, the man behind the Bering tunnel plan, also stated calmly but not quite accurately that construction of another mega-tunnel, from Japan to Sakhalin, was due to start this year. Valeri Polyakov, the world record-holder for space flight longevity and deputy director of a Moscow "medico-biological" institute, told Tass with the confidence of one who has, indeed, spent too long in orbit that it's only a matter of time before cosmonauts colonise both the Moon and Mars. An atomic energy official from the far north unveiled fetching balsa models of floating nuclear power stations bringing warmth and light to Russia's most miserable Arctic ports. And then there are the longstanding plans to transport Russian nickel ore around the world in refurbished nuclear submarines, and to link St Petersburg to Helsinki with a series of causeways and suspension bridges. Of these, the only sensible proposal is the last one, and I made it up. The rest are real, and they reveal much about the Great Russian Pickle with which George W. Bush must soon concern himself - however little he wants to. He should not be surprised by them. __Gigantism runs in Russia's blood, and has done since long before the Bolsheviks pumped it full of steroids. This is the only country in the world whose provinces measure themselves in "Western Europes" as units of surface area, and the tsars' surveyors were mapping them and sketching tunnels to Alaska before the Trans-Siberian Railway was even thought of__. So no surprise, please, but plenty of alarm. __Even in Russia, gigantism is ordinarily a form of fantasy__. Stalin changed all that, industrialising 11 time zones in a generation and laying the groundwork for the Soviet space programme and its nuclear arsenal. But Stalin's tools were terror and forced labour on an epochal scale, and his imperative, besides his own paranoia, was the genuine threat of national annihilation in the Second World War. Mr __Putin__ has no such imperative. He __has a population of 140 million souls, numb with cold and poverty, struggling to apportion the fruits of an economy smaller than that of The Netherlands. His only possible excuse for Bering-style projects would be as an exercise in mass escapism__. This does not mean they will not happen. __Escapism, too, has deep roots in Russia__ and on its old imperial fringe. In northern Uzbekistan, for instance, there is a low, brown cliff which may have killed a fine man named Yusup Kamalov on his first and final flight of fancy. When I met him his day job involved agitating for the endangered Aral Sea. His only failing was a hobby he called floppy flight. Yusup fervently believed man can fly if he straps on the right wings and flaps them hard enough. He once showed me the wings and the cliff where he would prove it, and I have not heard from him in far too long. In similar vein, The Los Angeles Times reported this week that a certain Mikhail Puchkov is still piloting a home-made mini-submarine in the Gulf of Finland 20 years after he built it, initially with pedals only, as a personal rebellion against the dead hand of Brezhnev. "I was not satisfied with the fate that was laid out for me," he said. __Some organise their own distractions. Most wait to be distracted. For them, the tsars built palaces to gawp at__. Khrushchev struck lucky with Gagarin. His successors, up to and including Gorbachev, all dallied with the grandest folly of them all, a scheme that mercifully never left the drawing board to divert two of Siberia's mightiest rivers - with the help of controlled nuclear explosions - to refill the Aral Sea. __Russia has never been the home of reason. A__ Pounds 40 billion __Bering tunnel seems quite plausible__ to many here, and __not as a bold Keynesian route out of their 100-year economic slump, but as__ precisely what it would be; __a piece of magnificent madness, an up-yours to the bean-counters every bit as rational as climbing Everest__. Mr __Putin has__ so far __sold himself as unimpeachably pragmatic. Sooner or later that spell will break and his power will corrupt him__, or at least corrode him. __That is when Russia's tree-huggers and moss-watchers should assemble__ at the extreme eastern tip of Chukotka __and **ask**__ those of **__us__** who follow them for the exotic dateline __what on earth would travel along a Bering tunnel__.
 * This is particularly true of the Bering Strait tunnel. An article in one of the West’s most prestigious newspapers exemplifies the condescending stereotypes of Russian madness that are applied to the Bering Strait plan. Russians are depicted as irrational zealots, obsessed with dreams of gigantic megaprojects despite their backwardness and inferiority, yet even this critic feels the pull of imagination in the Bering Strait tunnel**
 * WHITTELL 2001** (Giles, “Oh no, Ivan, spare us another big idea,” The Times, Jan 6, lexis)

**This example represents a broader trend of pitting Russia against the United States which spills over into our daily lives. The effect of Russian stereotypes outweighs topic education—we will forget the details we learn but retain a general impression of Russia** Numerous analysis have argued that __American media__ presentations of international events tend to fall in line with the policy interests of the U. S. government (Gans 1980; Paletz and Entman 1981; Parenti 1993; Qualier 1985; Wallis and Baran 1990). From the end of World War II until 1989, the American media's role in supporting official policy resulted, at least in part, from the adoption of a conflict perspective in which the United States and Russia were seen as polarized forces. American media __routinely defined American society in contrast to Russia__ (Hallin 1992). __The conflict frame fit well with the American media's game interpretation of the political world as an ongoing series of contests__, each with a set of winners and losers (Davis 1990; Ncuman, Just, and Criglcr 1992, pp. 64-65). Al least until 1989, "in normal times as well as in periods of Red scares, issues tended to be framed in terms of a dichotomized world of Communist and anti-Communist powers, with gains and losses allocated to contesting sides, and __rooting for "our side' was considered entirely legitimate news practice__ " (Herman and Chomsky 1988, pp. 30-31). During the cold war, Soviet media practice mirrored that of U.S. media in adopting a conflict perspective in which Russian society was defined by way of contrast to America (Downing 1988). Russian media devoted considerable attention to the symbolic construc-tion of the United States as a nation in which there was widespread racial conflict, unemployment, homelessness, social and economic inequality, and social injustice. In international affairs, the United States was depicted as the world's leading imperialist power, driven by military-industrial interests. Russian media also constructed a contrasting image of their homeland. While far from being a worker's paradise, Russia was depicted as comparatively free from the social ills that beset America. The nation also was portrayed as the world's leading opponent of capitalist imperialism (McNair 1988; Mickiewicz 1981; Turpin 1995). The importance of the conflict perspective, adopted by U.S. and Russian media alike, is suggested by research indicating that, __while most media listeners/viewers retain **little information**__ from news broadcasts, __they__ do tend to __retain the **generalized conceptions** of the order of things embedded in the categories through which news events are presented__ (Morley 1990, p. 128). __People's view of the order of things provides a frame of reference or orientation with which they can interpret objects and events as they conduct their **everyday lives**__. The objects and events of the world have no inherent or universal meaning apart from this imposed framework (Schutz [1932J1967). As Erving Goffman (1974) points out, the imposed meaning is limited by, and relative to, the social context in which it is created. However, __once meanings are learned__ through the socialization process (today, an important component of which is some attention to media content), __people tend to act on them without reassessment and without awareness of the social forces that created them. They come to identify truth with a particular learned set of socially shared meanings__. __Media organizations construct social reality as they select and prioritize some items of information, omit or ignore others, weave accounts together, and build a "story" using particular types of exposition and articulating verbal discourse together to make a certain kind of sense__ (Entman 1993). The interpretive structure that governs the selection, omission, prioritization, and editing processes has been termed a "news frame" (Gamson 1991). A given frame can be used to structure numerous stories about a variety of actors, conditions, and events (e.g., diverse political and economic conflicts throughout the world). A particular story tends to evoke in an audience a distinct pattern of judgments and opinions about the actor, condition or event that is its subject matter (Iyengar 1988, pp. 815-831). Stuart Hall (1982, p. 69) notes: __The more one accepts the principle that how people act will depend in part on how the situations in which they act are defined, and the less one can assume either a natural meaning to everything or a universal consensus on what things mean—then the more important, socially and politically, becomes the process by means of which certain events get recurrently signified in particular ways. This is particularly the case where events in the world are problematic__ (that is, when they are unexpected); when they break the frame of our previous expectations about the world; where powerful social interested are involved; or where there are starkly opposing interests at play. __The power involved here is an ideological power; the power to signify events in a particular way__.
 * WASHBURN AND BURKE 1997** (Philo, Purdue University, and Barbara, U of Minn Morris, “The Symbolic Construction of Russia and the United States on Russian National Television,” Sociological Quarterly, September)

These questions redounded around the world in the twentieth century. __Under the spell of modernization, American intellectuals endorsed radical forms of social change everywhere except in the United States. They placed at the pinnacle of human achievement a society much like they imagined their own to be__ : industrial, urban, cosmopolitan, rational, and democratic. __Backward nations, they argued, could progress toward modernity only by implementing rapid and violent changes. Modern America, however, would be exempt from such turmoil. With America's expanding global role and intellectuals' increasingly close connections to the centers of power, these ideas shaped nations all over the world__. New ideas of social change and national character also shaped notions of American national identity, which itself underwent significant changes after 1870—from scientific racism and assimilationist theory before World War II to celebrations of common humanity in the 1950s and the valorization of cultural differ-ences since the 1980s. __The way Americans understood the process of social change shaped the way they envisioned their own nation__. Finally, __the tensions between accepting cultural differences and promoting modernization underpinned American-Soviet conflict during the Cold War__. At the same time that scholars analyzed the conflict as one between two industrial powers with opposing ideologies, __American diplomats construed the Cold War enemy as an inherently and irredeemably different nation. These conceptions, supported by America's global reach, made—and continue to make—the American century__. __American writings on Russia__ and the Soviet Union __were shaped by__ three forces, which constitute the three main themes of this book: __a longstanding belief that every nation had its own unique character; a growing enthusiasm for modernization; and the appearance of new professional institutions and norms for interpreting other nations__. First, __American experts used national-character stereotypes to explain Russian and Soviet events. Building on centuries-old notions of Russian peculiarity, western experts enumerated traits that supposedly limited the Russians' ability to function in a modern world. Americans repeated the claims of European commentators who argued that national character emerged from geography and topography: long winters made Russians passive, and endless plains made them melancholy. Russians, in these writings, exhibited instinctual behavior, extreme passivity, and a lethargy shaken only by violence__ .4 __Americans argued that these characteristics—accentuating the negative—affected Russia's economic prospects. Reliance on these notions of national character crossed political boundaries; Russia's avowed enemies and ardent defenders in the United States agreed on what made Russians different__. Herzen himself illustrated the double-edged nature of such characterizations. Living in France and Italy in the 1850s, he gained new perspective on Russian character. He frequently mentioned the "Slavic genius" that set his compatriots apart from Europeans, focusing especially on Russians' soulful and communal natures. Yet he also took for granted that Russians^—especially the peasants who constituted the vast majority of the population—were "improvident and indolent," better at "passive obedience" than political or economic activity.5 Difference did not necessarily mean superiority. __Americans' notions of Russian character often contained within them the idea that Russians were Asian__ —"Asiatic" in the language of the day. __The claim, stated as often in racial as in geographic terms, further legiti-mated violence in Russia. According to an oft-repeated refrain, life meant less to Asians, and therefore to Russians. Personal traits also held political implications. Asians, the argument went, could be ruled only through "Oriental despotism." Writers__ from Baron Charles de Montesquieu to Karl Marx __depicted Asia as an unchanging—even unchangeable—morass of poverty, insularity, and despotism__ .6 __Whether understood as Asian or Slavic, Russians consistently faced claims that they were unready to join the modern world__. Particularist views of Russia, which emphasized the nations unique traditions and character traits, dominated American writings until the 1920s.
 * Depicting Russia as a foreign Other located in a distant Asia apart from the West and incapable of technological transformation encourages violence and constructs an enemy relationship**
 * ENGERMAN 2003** (David, Engerman is Assistant Professor of History at Brandeis University, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development, p. 2-4)

**These cultural discourses determine policy towards Russia** The term ‘critical geopolitics’ had already been coined by the end of the 1980s (Dodds 2001). It usually refers to the approaches that emerged during the 1980s and which challenged traditional geopolitical theories (Dalby 1994). This stance explains why its proponents consider it critical, which according to Painter (1998, p. 144-145) “refers to a particular tradition in social sciences which questions the taken-for-granted assumptions that underpin conventional perspectives.” Ó Tuathail (1994, p. 525; 2006a) labels critical geopolitics “a heterogeneous movement of theoretical perspectives and agendas” straddling Political Geography and International Relations. It focuses on three research agendas: examining the meanings of spatial concepts, deconstructing geopolitical traditions and deconstructing contemporary discourses (Ó Tuathail 2004a). __Discourses play a key role__ within critical geopolitics, illustrated by Ó Tuathail’s observation (2006a, p. 1) that geopolitics is commonly understood as “discourse about world politics.” Ó Tuathail and Agnew (1992) see discourses __as a collection of rules used to give meaning to communication. They do not only enable people to write and speak, but also to read, listen and act in a meaningful way__. Furthermore __, discourses give texts, speeches and activities their meaning__. Another of their qualities is that __they are not deterministic, but leave room for a reasoning process that eventually generates meaning__. Finally, it is worth mentioning here that discourses are neither static as human practice constantly modifies them. Most critical geopolitical research aims to “deconstruct hegemonic geopolitical discourses and to question the relationships of power found in the geopolitical practices of dominant states” (Ó Tuathail 2000, p. 166). Methodology Informed by poststructuralism, we assume that “ __representations [of identity] and policy are mutually constitutive and discursively linked__ ” (Hansen 2006, p. 28). Consequently, a think tank aims for consistency between its policy advice (“policy”) and its institutional context (proxy for “identity”) by using representations. this assumption is in line with the claim of Heritage (2010a) that its ideology forms the basis of its policy advice. Moreover, Brookings (Brookings, 2010b) has made it perfectly clear that its activities are meant to foster international cooperation. The second assumption is related to the first and concerns the position of the policy expert within a think tank: (Müller 2008, p. 326): “ __it is not the individual__ [i.e. __policy expert] that structures and manipulates discourse but vice versa – discourses speak through the individual__ .” This assumption holds that the think tank’s institutional context (structure) conditions the autonomy of its policy expert to represent (agency). Alternatively, we could say that that “[ __i]n order to have their texts accepted as reasonable__, geopoliticians [i.e. __policy experts] have to draw upon discourses already granted hegemonic social acceptance__ [i.e. based on the think tank’s institutional context]” (Sharp 1993, p. 493). Our focus on institutional context is based on Dalby’s observation (1990a) that analysing geopolitical discourses requires an examination of the political circumstances, their sources and audiences and the process by which the discourse legitimises the authority of the source. In addition, Dodds (1994) suggests that texts about foreign policy are to be examined within several contexts such as the institutional setting. When interpreting text, we must consider the hermeneutics. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989, p. 298), “the discovery of the true meaning of a text or a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process.” Gadamer was instrumental in the development of philosophical hermeneutics, which seeks to investigate the nature of human understanding. In his view, someone who analyses a text must be “aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own [prejudices]” (ibid, p. 271-272). Our discourse analysis focuses on representations, informed by Dodds’ observation that (1994, p. 188) “ __[r]epresentational practices have__ increasingly __been recognized as vital to the practices of foreign policy__ .” In addition, Agnew (2003, p. 7) argues that “certain __geopolitical representations underwrite specific policies__ .” Next to representations (“what is being said about Russia?”), __we assign meaning to lines of text by looking into representational practices (“how are things being said about Russia__ ?”). These practices are relevant because “when something is recognized as a representational practice rather than an authoritative description, it can be treated as contentious” (Shapiro 1989, p. 20). We use a definition of discourse based on poststructuralism (Campbell 2007, p. 216): “a specific series of representations and practices through which meanings are produced, identities constituted, social relations established, and political... outcomes made more or less possible.” The usefulness of this definition also follows from its assumption that the think tanks’ representations are linked to both their institutional context (“identities”) and policy advice (“political outcomes”). Our study of discursive practices is informed by the work of three critical geopolitical scholars. First, we discuss __analogies, labels__ and __metaphors__ (Ó Tuathail 2002, 2006). Second, we search for cases of ‘ __geopolitical othering__ ,’ identified by Dalby (1990a, p. 22/23) as “geopolitical processes of cultural dichotomizing, designating identity in distinction from Others.” This representational practice __seeks to create a dualism in which a representation of one country means that the opposite is true for the other country__. The practice implicitly suggests that the two countries have an entirely different set of values, one being “right” and the other “wrong”. Finally, we investigate the use of __narrative closure which could take the form of referring to common truisms and presenting the complex reality “in easy to manage chunks__ ” (Sharp 1993, p. 494). __The practice leads to binary simplicity as the practice avoids complexity and problems that do not generate conclusions in terms of right or wrong. As a result, it dehistoricises, degeographicalises and depoliticises knowledge__.
 * VAN EFFERINK 2010** (Leonhardt, MSc in Financial Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam and an MA in 'Geopolitics, Territory and Security' at King’s College London. He is now working on a PhD with Royal Holloway’s (University of London), “Polar Partner or Poles Apart?” PSA Graduate Network Conference December 2010, http://www.psa.ac.uk/spgrp/51/2010/Ppr/PGC2_Van%20EfferinkLeonhardt_Polar_Partners_or_Poles_Apart_PSA_2010.pdf)

__Russophobia today is__ therefore __rooted__ not in ideological differences but __in national hatred of a kind that is sadly too common. In these architectures of hatred, selected or invented historical "facts" about the "enemy" nation, its culture, and its racial nature are taken out of context and slotted into prearranged intellectual structures to arraign the unchanging wickedness of the other side. Meanwhile, any counterarguments, or memories of the crimes of one's own are suppressed__. This is no more legitimate when directed by Russophobes against Russia than when it is directed by Serb, Greek, or Armenian chauvinists against Turkey, Arabs against Jews, or Jews against Arabs. __The most worrying aspect of Western Russophobia is that it demonstrates the capacity of too many Western journalists and intellectuals to betray their own professed standards and behave like Victorian jingoists__ or Balkan nationalists __when their own national loyalties and hatreds are involved. And these tendencies in turn serve wider needs. Overall, we are living in an exceptionally benign period in human history so far as our own interests are concerned. Yet one cannot live in Washington without becoming aware of the desperate need of certain members of Western elites for new enemies, or resuscitated old ones. This is__ certainly not the wish of most Americans-nor of any other Westerners-and it is __dangerous. For of one thing we can be sure: a country that is **seen** **to need enemies** will sooner or later **find them everywhere**__.
 * Otherization of Russia results in real hostility**
 * LIEVEN 2001** (Anatol, Senior Associate for Foreign and Security policy at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Against Russophobia,” World Policy Journal, Winter, http://www.worldpolicy.newschool.edu/journal/lieven.html)

__Ever since the Cold War ended, Western officials and commentators have been telling the Russians how they need to grow out of their Cold War attitudes toward the West and Western institutions, and learn to see things in a "modern" and "normal" way__. And there is a good deal of truth in this. At the same time, __it would have been good if we had subjected our own inherited attitudes toward Russia to a more rigorous scrutiny. For like any other inherited hatred, blind, dogmatic hostility toward Russia leads to bad policies, bad journalism, and the corruption of honest debate-and there is all too much of this hatred in Western portrayals of and comments on Russia__. From this point of view, an analysis of __Russophobia has implications that go far beyond Russia. Much of the U.S. foreign policy debate__, especially on the Republican side, __is structured around the belief that American policy should be rooted in a robust defense of national interest-and this is probably also the belief of most ordinary Americans__. However, __this__ straightforward __view coexists with another__, equally widespread, view that dominates the media. It is, in Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's words, that " __the United States stands taller than other nations, and therefore sees further__ ." __The unspoken assumption here is that America is not only wise but also objective__, at least in its perceptions: that U.S. policy is influenced by values, but never by national prejudices. The assumption behind much American (and Western) reporting of foreign conflicts is that the writer is morally engaged but ethnically uncommitted and able to turn a benign, all-seeing eye from above on the squabbles of humanity. __It is impossible to exaggerate how irritating this attitude is elsewhere in the world, or how misleading and dangerous it is for Western audiences who believe it. Not only does it contribute to mistaken policies, but it renders both policymakers and ordinary citizens incapable of understanding the opposition of other nations to those policies. Concerning the Middle East, it seems likely that most Americans genuinely believe that the United States is a neutral and objective broker__ in relations between Israelis and Palestinians- __which can only appear to an Arab as an almost fantastically bad joke. This belief makes it much more difficult for Americans to comprehend the reasons for__ Palestinian and __Arab fury at__ both __the United States__ and Israel. __It encourages a Western interpretation of this anger as the manipulation of sheep-like masses by elites. At worst, it can encourage a kind of racism, in which certain nations are classed as irrationally, irredeemably savage and wicked__
 * Interrogating our perceptions of Russia is key to good foreign policy education overall—the same condescending discourses are spread to others**
 * LIEVEN 2001** (Anatol, Senior Associate for Foreign and Security policy at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Against Russophobia,” World Policy Journal, Winter, http://www.worldpolicy.newschool.edu/journal/lieven.html)

**That makes extinction inevitable—survival is only possible by imagining our connections to others** The two major problems that will have to be solved if we are to survive long beyond the twentieth century--the habit of __warfare and ecological pollution--are two sides of a single coin. When we define ourselves as superior to our neighbors__ and to nature, __we inevitably create a hostile environment, an ecology of violence__. __Advertising__, which encourages us to turn the natural world into things, __and____propaganda__ , which __invites us to turn our neighbors into things, are both instruments of a metaphysic of total warfare, a paranoid vision in which we are surrounded by an alien world. The solution to both problems lies in the same vein--the development of a psyche and a polis organized around being //with// rather than being //against//.__ __The task that faces us is nothing less than rethinking and recreating ourselves, our view of nature, our institutions. It is hard to imagine how we can change from a psychology, metaphysic, and politic of alienation to one of kindness. It is harder yet to imagine that we will survive if we cannot get beyond hostility to kinship__.
 * KEEN 1986** (Sam, author, contributing editor of Psychology Today, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination: The Psychology of Enmity, p. 135-136)

**___ and I ask you to imagine that the United States federal government increases its investment in transportation infrastructure in the United States necessary to complete a fixed-link Bering Strait crossing.__**

__**We must take a leap of imagination—the Bering Strait link is being killed by focus on the details of implementation and the fear of risk. We should start by imagining the crossing, not by debating how government policy is implemented**__ __**OLIVER 2007** (James, writer and journalist, The Bering Strait Crossing: A 21st Century Frontier Between East and West, 216-219) __ __ 'North by Northwest', now __it is time to pass between continents__, from the risible __to the sublime__ , which is more challenging to assess. __**A dollar's worth of knowledge**__, then, __must be bought with a **million of speculation**__. Each of these sums will now be spent A tunnel across the North Pacific? __In the 19th century, no one was all that surprised by the prospect. If the Alps could be crossed, and the Suez Canal excavated, then why not a Bering Strait crossing__ to link the rail networks of Eurasia and the Americas? __ In this 21st century, the scheme tends to be regarded with disbelief__, which, post-Apollo, seems __a contradictory and timid reaction. Ambition has been out-placed or downsized to mere entertainment or diversion**. Real ambition** has become **politically unacceptable**. Great achievements are confined to the glorious past__, where they belong, __and made safe. Creativity is subverted__, or commercialised. __Imagination is surplus to requirements. High endeavour is displaced by corporate greed or tyranny. Millions are siphoned off to no apparent end__. __ __ The engineer and the scientist stand in the way of progress, which can be arrested by squint-eyed accountants and frustrated by dyspeptic lawyers. __If in doubt, **legislate or decree**, but do not **Act**__. No funds arc available for this project, because that project is a rotating black hole for public funds. The fiscal year, or the one after that, maybe. __Policy is eviscerated by indecision. Bureaucrats crouch tall, while innovation is **stunted** and **withers** **on its**__ ancient __**vine**. Into this vacuum, bogus soothsayers (always based in the US) step in to muddy those pristine waters__. Is any of this rant (overheard recently in a Fleet Street tavern) true? __What has really become unacceptable is **risk**__. If it's risky, then assess that risk, and set it to one side with a side dish of complacency. Feasibility studies arc much the same, being risk assessments in disguise. __There is talk, but no action__. __ For this reason, the Bering Strait fixed-link crossing is already in jeopardy of becoming a post-Modernist myth__. __ __ This is not so easy to explain, but there is a sense in which __the scheme has been deconstructed before even it is constructed__. In the real world, away from academic abstractions, consider this: the Black Sea-Danube Canal, first proposed in the time of King Charlemagne, was completed as recently as 1984. In this respect, __the time for the Bering Strait fixed-link has already passed__ (i.e., the transmigration corridor), __or it never was__ (De Lobcl), __or it is the post Cold War present__ (Koumal), __or it is some time in the future, -or, indeed, never. In the strange case of the Bering Strait fixed-link project, the potential for a feasibility study has become the project__. For a scheme so vast in its conception, this is perhaps not surprising. As a result, __there is endless speculation and unrealistic counter-proposals__. The diplomatic community on both sides of the strait are, of course, too diplomatic or bemused to pass any remark one way or the other. For a place that would unite nations, the United Nations has a blind spot. In this sense, __the void of the Intercontinental Divide has become invisible to the eyes of many__, except to the watchers of wildlife and airspace. __ __ "I believe that **if this project becomes just a subject for initial discussion** between the involved governments of the US, __ __ Russia and Canada, **it would bring about profound changes**, changes for the better, **to the politics of the world** - a world which is a dangerous place and seemingly becoming more dangerous every day." - George Koumal, chairman, hiteriiemispheric Bering Strait Tunnel & Railroad Group __ __ (IBSTRG), 2006. __ __ The spectrum of questions asked of George Koumal would exert the patience of a saint. Bridge people argue for a bridge, and not a tunnel. Environmentalists want to know about the tundra. Permafrost experts are vexed by the sudden temperature gradients of high summer. Rail enthusiasts are obsessed with the track-gauge changeover between American standard gauge and Russian broad gauge. Equipment manufacturers want to know how to tender for the project (ventilation equipment, say, for the Diomede Islands' vertical shafts). Travellers want to know how to book a ticket for the tunnel crossing. Provincial politicians of the Lower 48 want to know where the Bering Strait might be located. Canada, maybe? Anything to do with that bank that went bust? The **cacophony** is **deafening, soul-destroying**. The anecdotes surrounding the non-tunnel are, like the Siberian wilderness, almost endless. The multi-disciplinary approach of yester-year is almost always never taken. A global view isthe **only view**. Find a globe of the Earth (spin, for fun), slow, stop, and then look: see the East-West crossing there to the north. This is theway forward, and the Pacific frontier is the widest horizon of all. One way or another, this boundary, this 21st century frontier between East and West, **must be confronted**. **This is the crossing point**. __

__ **Our framing of the aff is a bridge to others—we explore the tension between universalism and relativism in Western perceptions of Russian infrastructure projects** __ __ **ENGERMAN 2003** (David, Engerman is Assistant Professor of History at Brandeis University, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development, p. 13-14) __ __ Considering questions of economic progress and cultural difference in early twenty-first century America takes on renewed importance yet brings with it new difficulties. Both universalism and particularism have significant cultural power. Economists and development officials (like Russia's shock therapists) offer startlingly similar prescriptions—usually in-volving more markets —lo a wide variety of societies with strikingly different histories, cultural norms, and economic structures. In cultural and educational spheres, meanwhile, multiculturalists celebrate cultural difference and treatuniversalism as unabashed ethnocentrism. __ __ Studying the history of these ideas highlights the dangers of both particularism and universalism. Valuing cultural difference as the sole social good obscures important material concerns. Culturaldifference has already become one of the "collective nouns" Herzen deplored, functioning as an altar at which material goals aresacrificed." Yet the universalist view that all people are the same and should have the same goals is hardly more appealing. It effaces nations' dramatically different pasts and presents, erasing history with a single stroke . "We do not proclaim a new revelation " Herzen wrote in From the Other Shore, "we eliminate the old lie." I, too, am unable to "proclaim a new revelation," a new way of balancing a nation's past circumstances, its present conditions, and its aspirations for the future. I can only hope, to continue I lerzen's words, to **build a bridge** "for the unknown person of the future to pass over ."'4 __ __ The rise of universalism in mid-twenlieth-century American thought was one such bridge. It marked a salutary rejection of notions of cultural difference rooted in permanent factors. Universalist continua—from underdeveloped to developed economies, or from backward to advanced nations—allowed for the possibility of improvement.29 They explicitly challenged the notion that blood (race) or soil (geography) delimited and defined a nation's prospects. Celebrating industrialization as an effective means of overcoming national particularities, universalists demolished the particularist notion that a nation was destined for perennial penury. Yet universalism, whether espoused by nineteenth-century European radicals or twentieth-century American social scientists, hardly resolved the tensions between cultural difference and economic progress. __ __ Industry, in the prognostications of Marx and Engels, would create a new world order in which nations were irrelevant. They envisioned that industrial capitalism would strip workers of "every trace of national character."26 The fulfillment of this universalist vision, especially under governments proclaiming their patrimony in these radical writers, involved dangerous and ultimately deadly actions. Now that the "specter of communism " celebrated by these revolutionaries has receded, we are in a better position to understand the all-too-present ghosts of cultural difference and modernization. __

__ **The plan is a utopian imagination of technology asserted against the gradual erosion of hope that accompanies the focus on detail. Reclaiming the narrative of technological utopianism does not mean embracing all technologies, but it does prevent the destruction of all human meaning** __ __**Leong 2003** (Leong Hang-tat, Ph.D. candidate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in philosophy, “Ideology and Utopia in Science Fiction”, ProQuest) BW __ __ Mannheim concludes his analysis of the concept of utopia after the discussion of the four utopian mentalities. For him, __the typology of utopia constitutes a temporal sequence. The socialist-communist utopia,__ as __the lastform of utopian mentality, is not only less incongruous with reality than the preceding forms, but also__ progressively __more congruous with the actual world.__ His basic argument is that __**the history of utopia constitutes a gradual “approximation to real life” and therefore tolls the death knell of utopia**__ in its very success at social transformation: Thus, __after a long tortuous, but heroic development, just at the highest stage of awareness, when history is ceasing to be blind fate, and is becoming more and more man’s own creation, with the relinquishment of utopias, man would lose his will to shape history and__ therewith his __ability to understand it.__ The socialist idea, in its actualization, has the effect of reducing the utopianism of utopia and leads to the decay of utopia. __Mannheim perceives that the historical process of the dominant forms of the utopian mentality shows__ “a gradual descent and a closer approximation to real life of a utopia that at one time completely transcended history” and reveals __a “general subsidence of utopian intensity__ ” (222-3). Mannheim is unsettled by his own conclusion that implies the end of utopia. He laments that “ __the complete elimination of reality transcending elements from our world would lead us to a matter-of-factness which ultimately would mean the decay of human will”__ (236). Quoting the prophecy of Swiss poet Gottfried Keller, Mannheim wonders whether “[ __t]he ultimate triumph of freedom will be barren__ ” (225). Near the end of the discussion, he suggests the symptoms of this barrenness: __The disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing. We would be faced then with the greatest paradox imaginable,__ namely, __that man, who has achieved the highest degree of rational mastery of existence__, left without any ideals, __becomes a mere creature of impulses__. (236) If ideology is false consciousness related to dominant hut declining classes, we can imagine a society without it as “the decline of ideology represents a crisis only for certain strata” (236). However, “ __the complete disappearance of the utopian element from human thought and action would mean that human nature__ and human __development would take on a totally new character”__ (236). __**We cannot imagine the complete abandonment of utopia because a society without utopia would be a society without goals.** With the loss of illusions, humanity would lose the sense of direction when the victory of a certain matter-of-factness, or congruence, is realized. Mannheim’s typology is incomplete__, because __he__ in fact __neglects the role played by science and technology in realizing utopia.__ In the following discussion, __I will consolidate the technological utopian mentality as one of the major utopias from both the sociological and literary perspective.__ The conception of science and technology as significant means to achieve utopia has a long lineage. As Nell Eurich points out in her hook Science ¡n Utopia: A Mighty Design (1967), the background for this form of utopia comes principally from Francis Bacon and his New Atlantis. Bacon’s utopia is essentially a triumph of the scientists whose ideas and innovation provide direction and ways for the realization of a technological utopia. However, __humanity’s ambivalent attitude toward science and scientists has essentially suppressed this form of utopia. In the history of civilization, humanity always faces a barrier whenever a new science or technology appears in society. The barrier can be termed the ‘Frankenstein barrier”__ for the significance of Mary Shelley’s first science fiction novel Frankenstein (1818) (Slusser 5). In this work, the scientist Victor __Frankenstein arrives on the verge of giving his new creature a future__, a symbol of the future for new science as well, __when he is asked by his creature to make a bride for it.Frankenstein cannot overcome his ambivalence and thus refuses its request__. As a result of his refusal, __the scientist is forced to retreat from his expanded search for knowledge__ and the future of his creature is forsaken. __Frankenstein’s refusal signifies the persistence of a significant barrier in humanity__, which has remained deep-rooted in Western culture __and symbolizes the conflict between utilitarian technology and those who greatly doubt the role of science and scientists. In the__ late twentieth century and the beginning of the __twenty-first century, the technological utopia has become__ even __more prominent. This__ form of utopian __mentality is best found in science fiction, which__, at its best, __not only provides the most supple and popular means of exploring questions of diversity and difference, but also opensup new possibilities and makes us think. In s__ cience __f__ iction, __we can find utopia that effectively addresses thequestions that have defined the age we live in: technology, gender, race, ideology, history__ and so on. As a genre of ideas, __science fiction has been able to portray technological utopia in vivid and popular ways. __ After analyzing eight science fiction texts from the Western and Oriental cultures, I would like to conclude this section by a discussion on the characteristics of technological utopia. __This form of utopia emphasizes the roles of intellectuals and scientists. The dominant desire of this utopian mentality is the technological utopia that embraces the power of science and technology, as well as preserving the identifying and legitimizing power of humanity__ and the present status quo. __The embodiment of forces in ideology and utopia simultaneously makes the progress to technological utopia become a spiral movement.__ Like the socialist-communist utopian mentality, __it is__ also __considered the best possible form to bridge the gap between the dream and the present state of things__ .23 With the progression in science and technology at different strategic moments, especially in the aspects of cyberspace, cyborg and space travel that we have discussed, humanity can realize its ago-old desire of transcending the mind, the body, and space respectively. As the discussion of the science fiction texts shows, __these technological metaphors provide both ideological and utopian functions to humanity and make the technological utopia a spiral movement to the perfect state of being. The sense of time in this form is seen as a series of strategic points in history, rather than a gradual progress in the liberal-humanist idea__. __Every new breakthrough in science or technology__, or a Novum 24 __represents a strategic point __ in technological utopia. The technologies of cyberspace, cyborg, and space travel are most important nova, or utopian metaphors, which transcend the limitations of the mind, body and space respectively for humanity. Nevertheless, technological utopia shares with the liberal ideas that the location of a perfect world is in the future, in the time when various limiting conditions of humanity are transcended by the means of new science and technology as in the case of all the science fiction texts that I have studied. In Neuromancer and “Dream-cutting romance,” the strategic point for the advancement of the spiral movement in technological utopia is signified by the upgrade of cybernetic technology as well as the merge between humanity and technological entities. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the breakthrough is represented by scientific experiment and the understanding of human mind by dream reading. Similarly, in The Positronic Man, Ghost in the Shell and The Ultimate War of Super-brains, the strategic moment for the spiral movement is embodied by the upgrade of the robotic entities to become more human, mortal and organic. Finally, the breakthrough in achieving technological utopia is shown in the transcendence of Kelvin and Bowman in Solaris and 2001 respectively. __

__**Our call to imagine what the government might do forces us out of our current subject position—the ability to imagine another role is the foundation of ethical engagement with the Other**__ __**EPSTEIN 1999** (Mikhail, Associate Professor in the Department of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures at Emory University, Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication, p. 164-166 __ Transcultural theory needs to articulate__ its own ethics, which can be called __an ethics of__ the __imagination__ . Traditionally, imagination was considered to be the capacity least bound to ethical responsibility, incompatible with or even antagonistic to ethical imperatives. The longstanding debates between ethics and aesthetics targeted exactly this opposition between moral norms and free imagination, between duty and desire, between reason and fantasy. __ __ However, if we look at the most common and established ethical rule as it is inscribed in the heritage of many cultures—Christian, Chinese, Greek—we find an implicit call for imagination as expressed in the requirement that we "do unto others as we would have them do unto us." This presupposes a kind of commonness between ourselves and others that cannot be found in actual existence and empirical experience—we are all different. __Without imagination a person would be unable to put herself in the position of others or to put others in her own position__. One has to be imaginative to be righteous. One has to imagine what other people may need, dream of, and aspire to in order to respond adequately to their needs. Percy Bysshe Shelly has expressed succinctly this link between morality and imagination in his "A Defence of Poetry" : "A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own."1 __ __ Bur there is much more to this imaginative aspect of ethics than just identifying oneself with others. Two modifications may be added to the golden rule to embrace those aspects of ethics that are not reducible to a commonness between myself and others, between the subjects and objects of ethical actions. __ __ The first addition would refer to the uniqueness of the ethical subject as distinct from the ethical object. "Do unto others as we would have them do unto us . . . but as nobody else could do unto them except for us." The uniqueness of the ethical subject would be crucial in cases when among the many needs of others are those to which the given subject is uniquely or exclusively qualified to respond. The action that will be ethically preferable is that which no one can accomplish except for me and that which no one can do better than me. Since I am different from the other, the ethical relationship between us should be based on our mutual irre-ducibility. The basic rule of differential ethics thus can be formulated in this way: Do what no other person in the same situation could do in your place. Act in such a way that your most individual abilities meet the most individual needs of the other. __ __ This is also true for our expectations from other people. Not only what we do to others, but whar we expect them to do for us, is an ethically marked position. A totalitarian politics that forced a violinist to take an ax and cut wood to provide heat during an energy shortage was ethically reprehensible though it claimed to be truly humanistic as expressing equal concern about the needs of all people. From the standpoint of the ethics of difference, the musician should not only be allowed but encouraged to respond to those specific needs of people that he is in a unique position to answer. Reduction of individual abilities to the more general needs is what underlies the crude, politically dominated ethics of "mass societies." __ __ Thus __an ethical subject has to imagine not only what makes other people similar__ to him __but what makes them different__, which is a more complex task for the imagination. It is easier to imagine that other people need heat and food in the same way as you do than to project their specific intentions and expectations, which might completely escape the range of your interests. This second level of ethical concern involves imagining the other as the other, in his or her irreducibility to any common model of humanness. __ Finally__, the third level of __ethics involves__ not others as myself and not others as others but __myself as other. This capacity to be a stranger to oneself, to go beyond one's inborn or socially constructed identity is not just a creative possibility but also an ethical responsibility. Without being different from oneself one can never find points of commonality or dialogi-cal interaction with people of different cultures and ways of life__. As Jacques Derrida rightly observes, "it is because I am not one with myself that I can speak with the other and address the other."- __ __ Judeo-Christian ethics is focused on the notion of "neighbor," the nearest and closest one; but what about love of, or at least responsiveness to, the distant ones? Nietzsche attempted to introduce this imperative— "love to a distant one"—into ethics but his anti-Christian stance caused him to ignore love for those nearest and actually grew into contempt toward his own "neighbors"—contemporaries, compatriots, colleagues, co-humans, and others in proximity. It is interesting that although Soviet ethical doctrines never explicitly acknowledged Nietzsche's influence, they were based on a similar principle: The distant ones were privileged over neighbors in the value hierarchy of a typical Soviet citizen. He had to love his comrades, his class brothers, and the exploited toiling masses all over the world but was required to denounce his family members on the basis of their disloyalty to the state. Soviet ethics was devoid of imagination and did not recognize the right of model citizens to multiple identities or alterations of identity. __ __ In fact, love for distant ones or at least the ability to interact with them depends on the capacity of a given subject to be different from himself to embrace an unlimited range of virtual or potential identities. In distinction from the ethics of commonality, as prescribed in the golden rule, and in distinction from the differential ethics of uniqueness, the third level can be posited as an interferential ethics of multiplied identities and transformational possibilities that is certainly most appealing to the capacities of the imagination. __

__ **The policy interpretation of fiat makes ethical engagement with others impossible. We should imagine possibilities rather than legislate commands** __ __**EPSTEIN 1999** (Mikhail, Associate Professor in the Department of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures at Emory University, Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication, p. 166-168) __ __ Though ethics is usually presented as a set of rules and norms of behavior, this does not imply that the contents of ethics should be as normative and prescriptive as its forms are. __Ethical prescriptions include the freedom from prescriptions. This paradoxical element of ethics cannot be__ fully __eliminated__. When Christ said, "Know the truth, and the truth will set you free," He expressed in prescriptive form the freedom from all prescriptions. __ __ If we look at the most elementary forms of ethics, such as politeness and courtesy, we find that even these most routine models of morality are based on the presumption of human freedom. __If you need__ somebody to give you a glass of __water, the polite way to express this need will be not an imperative or a command but a suggestion__, "Would you please be so kind as to bring me a glass of water?" "Would it be possible for you to do this or that?" __The politeness is implied in the modality "would," which transforms the action from the actual or imperative modality to a subjunctive mode. My need has to be transformed into somebody else's possibility or opportunity in order to be presented ethically__ (politely). __The imperative "Do this" is applied only__ between parents and children or officers and soldiers, thus __marking the relation of power or authority. But insofar as ethics challenges this power relation, it has to transform any command into a suggestion, every imperative into a subjunctive__. __ __ If this is true on the level of elementary politeness, __how much more important it must be on the level of the higher moral initiatives that are addressed to others. Even in the most fundamental and global issues of war and peace, power and freedom, authority and equality, discipline and responsibility, ethics should appeal to possibilities rather than impose necessity and constraints__. __ Often the same person who uses the subjunctive "Would you" when asking for a glass of water would use a categorical imperative, demanding that humanity obey__ his __grand ethical schemes and prescriptions. Almost all our discourses and the **procedures of teaching**__ and writing __are imbued with the imperative mode__ : Do as I do, do as I say, do as I write. __Every interpretation avers its conclusive truthfulness instead of suggesting itself as just a possibility, a discourse in a subjunctive mode. **All disciplines of scholarship** and interpretation would benefit by incorporating these zones of__ politeness, __potentiality, and imagination, which are__ not only an "excess" of aesthetic subjectivity but are first of all __modes of ethical responsiveness that **multiply** **the levels of freedom** in our readers, students, interlocutors, instead of forcing their minds into our own persuasions__. __ __ Ethics is the domain of requests rather than commands, the domain of imagination rather than obligation. The commandments pronounced by God cannot help but be obligatory if we identify ourselves with the people of God and recognize the hierarchy that connects heavenly Father and earthly children. However, if ethics should be understood as a specific domain regulating the relationship between brothers and sisrers and distinct from the religious domain regulating the relationship between Father and children, we should formulate the principles of this ethics in a noncommanding mode, as a system of requests and proposals appealing to the freedom of the other person, to his "maybe or maybe not." __Certainly, this ethics "in the subjunctive mood" is much more favorable to the work of the transcultural imagination than an ethics that **prescribes us to obey already established laws**__. __ __ Thus, in addition to the golden rule of commonness, __we need a differential and interferential ethics based on imagining others as different from ourselves and **imagining ourselves as possibilities for others**__. __

__**Reimagining technology is critical to overcome threats to human survival—we must imagine an alternative technological society that brings us together in a common project**__ __**Fresco and Meadows 07** (Jacque & Roxanne; Structural designer, architectural designer, philosopher of science, concept artist, educator, and futurist, founder of The Venus Project; B.F.A. from Maryland Institute of Art. She studied technical and architectural rendering and model making under Jacque Fresco for 4 years; “Designing the Future”)//RSW// __ __// According to many polls, a majority of scientists think that //__//the human race is on a "collision course" with nature, that all of Earth's ecosystems are suffering, and that the ability of the planet to sustain life is in serious jeopardy.__ (1) __There is a threat of rapid global climate change__ that will certainly have profound consequences. __The pollution of rivers, land, and the air we breathe threatens our health, We are destroying non-renewable resources like topsoil and the ozone layer instead of using these resources intelligently. We lace common threats that transcend national boundaries: overpopulation, energy shortages, water scarcity, economic catastrophe, the spread of uncontrollable diseases, and the technological displacement of people by machines, __ to name a few. __Eight hundred and fifty two million people across the world are hungry__. Every day, more than 16.000 children die from hunger-related causes- one child every five seconds. (1) World-wide more than 1 billion people currently live below the international poverty line, earning less than $1 per day, (2) A very small percent of the people own most of the world's wealth and resources. The gap between the rich and poor is widening. In the US as of 2002, the average CEO made 282 times as much as the average worker. (3) In 2005 the compensation of CEOs of major U.S. corporations rose 12% to an average of $9.8 million per year. Oil company CEOs did even better with raises that averaged a whopping 109% to 816.6 million per year. Meanwhile, workers' salaries barely kept up with inflation in most industries and occupations across the U.S. In Oregon, minimum wage workers saw their pay rise by a modest 2.8% to $15080 per year. What has been handed down to us does not seem to be working for the majority of people. With the advances in science and technology over the last two hundred years, you may be asking: "does it have to be this way?" With the observable fact that __scientific knowledge makes our lives better when applied with concern for human welfare and environmental protection, there is no question that science and technology can produce abundance so that no one has to go without. But the misuse and abuse of technology seems to make things worse. The problems we face in the world today are mostly of our own making__. We must accept that __**our future depends on us.**__ While the values represented by religious leaders over the centuries have inspired many to act in a socially responsible manner, others have gone to war over their differences in religious beliefs. Hopes for divine intervention by mythical characters are delusions that cannot solve the problems of our modern world. The future of the world is our responsibility and it depends upon decisions we make today. __**We are our own salvation or damnation**__. __ The shape and solutions of the future rely totally on the collective effort of people working together.__ We are all an integral pan of the web of life. __What affects other people and the environment has consequences in our own lives as well. **What is needed is a change in our sense of direction and purpose -- an alternative vision for a sustainable new world civilization unlike any in the past.**__ Although this vision is highly compressed here, it is based on years of study and experimental research. These writings offer possible alternatives for striving toward a better world. It arrives at decisions using the scientific method. Like any new approach, __**it requires some imagination and a willingness to consider the unconventional in order to be appreciated.**__ Remember that __almost every new concept was ridiculed, rejected, and laughed at when first presented, especially by the experts of the time. __ That's what happened to the first scientists who said the earth was round, the first who said it went around the sun, and the first who thought people could learn to fly. __You could write a whole book, and many have, just on things that people thought were impossible up until the time they happened. Imagine going to the moon__ for example! Your great-grandparents would have laughed at such a notion! __Such notions were the ramblings of science fiction writers__. Many forward thinking people have been locked up and even executed for saying such things as the earth wasn't the center of the universe. Those who fought for social justice and change had even greater difficulties. People advocating change were beaten, abused, put in prison, and brutally murdered. For example, Wangari Maathai, who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Price on December 10, 2004 was tear gassed, beaten unconscious, and imprisoned for fighting against deforestation in Kenya, Africa. Dianne Fosse, the naturalist who actively strived to protect declining gorilla populations from poachers, was found hacked to death in her hut. Unfortunately she did not provide for the needs of the poachers. Any number of volumes could be written on the hardships endured by those who sought change that threatened the status quo. __//

//__ **Our act of imagination solves this—the Bering Strait tunnel is the key metaphor to overcome other threats** __// //__**GERLICZ 2009** (By Dr. Claude Gaudeau de Gerlicz, Chair, Bioespas, Bioinformatic and Biotechnology Laboratory, France, “Great Projects as Potential Peace Engines,” March 19, http://www.upf.org/bering-strait-project/193-bering-strait-research/1682-great-projects-as-potential-peace-engines) __// //Humanity has always sought to gather around great projects to decrease social tensions or transcend political, ethnic, or religious boundaries__. This has been particularly true since second half of the twentieth century. __// //More than ever, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, faced with recurring problems of wars, pollution, globalization, and energy reserves, people wonder about the__ medium- and long-term __future of our planet as a whole__. From an economic, political, legal, and technological points of view, we will consider two great projects of world scope: the construction of a tunnel under the Bering Strait and the conquest of Mars. __// //The proposal of a tunnel connecting America to Asia through the Bering Strait constitutes a great project that can help bring the American and Asian countries closer together__. Already in 1902, a French explorer, Loek de Lobel, approached the Russian Imperial Technical Society with a proposal to explore a future railway line connecting Yakutsk across the Bering Strait to an existing railroad track in Alaska. In October 1906, the Russian Government Commission on the creation of the Great Northern Route held discussions attended by four Americans, a Canadian, and a French representative. It was decided to task Lobel and an American engineer, Waddel, with studying the technical parameters of the project. Construction of a tunnel was to be undertaken by a New Jersey construction company under a 90-year contract.* __//

//__ **Every act of imagination has elements of science fiction—the very nature of fiat makes describing the “real world” impossible since every plan is a fictional alternative** __// //__**FREEDMAN 2000** -- Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University (Carl, “Critical Theory and Science Fiction” Wesleyan University Press, University Press of London, 20-22) __// //__ It is a priori likely that __most texts display the activity of numerous different genres, and that few or no texts can be adequately described in terms of one genre alone__. __Genre__ in this sense is analogous to the Marxist concept of the mode of production as the latter has gained new explanatory force by being contrasted, in the Althusserian vocabulary, with the category of social formation – a term that is preferred to the more familiar notion of society, because the latter connotes a relatively homogeneous unity, whereas the former is meant to suggest an overdetermined combination of __//__different //modes of production at work in the same place and during the same time. Though it is thus impossible simply to equate a given social formation with a given mode of production, it is nonetheless legitimate to affirm that (for instance) the United States "is" capitalist, so long as we understand that the copulative signifies not true equation or identity but rather conveys that, of the various and relatively autonomous modes of production active within the U.S. social formation, capitalism enjoys a position of// dominance. //In the same way,//__ //the dialectical rethinking of genre does not in the least preclude generic discrimination. We may validly describe a particular text as science fiction if we understand the formulation to mean that cognitive estrangement is the dominant generic tendency within the overdetermined textual whole. __ Accordingly, __there is probably no text that is a perfect and pure embodiment of science fiction__ ( __no text, that is to say, in which science fiction is the// only //generic tendency operative__ ) __**but also no text in which the science fiction tendency is altogether absent.**__ Indeed __**, it might be argued that this tendency is the precondition for the constitution of fictionality**__ – __and even of representation – itself__. __For the construction of an alternative world is the very definition of fiction__ : __owing to the character of representation as a nontransparent process that necessarily involves not only similarity but// difference //between representation and the "referent" of the latter, an irreducible degree of alterity and estrangement is bound to obtain even in the case of the most "**realistic" fiction** imaginable.__ The appearance of transparency in that paradigmatic realist Balzac has been famously exposed as an illusion;2 ' nonetheless, __it is important to understand the operation of alterity in realism not as the failure of the latter, but as the sign of the estranging tendency of science fiction that supplies__ (if secretly) __some of the power of great realistic fiction__ 25 Furthermore, just as some degree of alterity and hence estrangement is fundamental to all fiction, finally including realism itself, so the same is true (but here the limit case is fantasy) of that other dialectical half of the science-fiction tendency: __cognition. __ The latter __ is after all an unavoidable operation of the human mind__ (however precritical, and even if clinically schizophrenic) __and must exercise a determinant presence for literary production to take place at all.__ Even in __//__The Lord of the Rings//-to consider again what is perhaps the most thoroughgoing fantasy we possess, by an author who stands to fantasy rather as Balzac stands to realism –//__ //cognition is quite strongly and overtly operative on at least one level: namely that of the moral and theological values that the text is concerned to enforce__. 2 It is, then, in this very special sense that the apparently wild assertions that __ **fiction is science fiction and even that the latter is a wider term than the former may be justified**__ : __cognition and estrangement, which together constitute the generic tendency of science fiction, are not only actually present in all fiction, but are structurally crucial to the possibility of fiction and evenof representation in the first place__. Yet in more routine usage, the term of science fiction ought, as I have maintained above, to be reserved for those texts in which cognitive estrangement is not only present but dominant. And it is with this dialectical understanding of genre that we may not reconsider the apparently difficult cases of Brecht, on the one hand, and __//__Star Wars //on the other.//__

__//**Traditional conceptions of government fiat are also fiction, they simply present themselves as fact—fiat misrepresents the process of government decision-making, which means it’s neither educational nor predictable**//__ __//**CLAUDE 1988** (Inis, Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia, States and the Global System, pages 18-20) //__ __// This view of the state as an institutional monolith is fostered by the notion of sovereignty, which calls up the image of the monarch, presiding over his kingdom. //__//Sovereignty emphasizes the singularity of the state__, its monopoly of authority, its unity of command and its capacity to speak with one voice. __Thus, France wills__, Iran demands, __China intends__ , New Zealand promises __and the Soviet Union insists. One all too easily conjures up the picture of a single-minded and purposeful state that decides exactly what it wants to achieve, adopts coherent policies __ intelligently adapted to its objectives, knows what it is doing, does what it intends __and always has its act together. This view of the state is reinforced by political scientists’ emphasis upon the concept of// policy //__ and upon the thesis that governments derive policy from calculations of national interest. __We thus take it for granted that states act internationally in accordance with rationally conceived __ and consciously constructed __schemes of action, and we implicitly refuse to consider the possibility that alternatives to policy__ -directed behaviour may have importance–alternatives such as random, reactive, instinctual, habitual and conformist behaviour. __Our rationalistic assumption __ that states do what they have planned to do __tends to inhibit the discovery that states sometimes do what they feel compelled to do, or what they have the opportunity to do, or what they have usually done, or what other states are doing, or whatever the line of least resistance would seem to suggest__. __Academic preoccupation with the making of policy is accompanied by academic neglect of the execution of policy. We seem to assume __ that once the state has calculated its interest and contrived a policy to further that interest, the __carrying out __ of __ policy is the __ virtually __automatic result __ of the routine functioning of the bureaucratic mechanism of the state. __I am inclined to call this the// Genesis// theory of public administration__, taking as my text the passage: ‘ __And God said, Let there be light: and there was light’__. I suspect that, in the realm of government, __policy execution rarely follows so promptly and inexorably from policy statement__. Alternatively, one may dub it the Pooh-Bah/Ko-Ko theory, honouring those denizens of William S. Gilbert’s Japan who took the position that when the Mikado ordered that something e done it was as good as done and might as well be declared to have been done. __In the real world, that which a state decides to do is not as good as done; it may, in fact, never be done. And what states do, they may never have decided to do. __ Governments are not automatic machines, grinding out decisions and converting decisions into actions. __They are agglomerations of human beings, like the rest of us inclined to be fallible, lazy, forgetful, indecisive, resistant to discipline and authority, and likely to fail to get the word or to heed it. __ As in other large organizations, left and right governmental hands are frequently ignorant of each other’s activities, official spokesmen contradict each other, ministries work at cross purposes, and the creaking machinery of government often gives the impression that no one is really in charge. I hope that no one will attribute my jaundiced view of government merely to the fact that I am an American–one, that is, whose personal experience is limited to a governmental system that is notoriously complex, disjointed, erratic, cumbersome and unpredictable. The United States does not, I suspect, have the least effective government or the most bumbling and incompetent bureaucracy in all the world. __Here and there__, now and then, __governments do__ , of course __perform prodigious feats of organization __ and administration: an extraordinary war effort, a flight to the moon, a successful hostage-rescue operation. __More often, states have to make do with governments that are not notably clear about their purposes or coordinated and disciplined in their operations. __ This means that, in international relations, states are sometimes less dangerous, and sometimes less reliable, than one might think. Neither their threats nor their promises are to be taken with absolute seriousness. __Above all, it means that we students of international politics must be cautious in attributing purposefulness and responsibility to governments. To say the that the United States was informed about an event is not to establish that the president acted in the light of that knowledge; he may never have heard about it. __ To say that a Soviet pilot shot down an airliner is not to prove that the Kremlin has adopted the policy of destroying all intruders into Soviet airspace; one wants to know how and by whom the decision to fire was made. To observe that the representative of Zimbabwe voted in favour of a particular resolution in the United Nations General Assembly is not necessarily to discover the nature of Zimbabwe’s policy on the affected matter; Zimbabwe may have no policy on that matter, and it may be that no one in the national capital has ever heard of the issue. We can hardly dispense with the convenient notion that Pakistan claims, Cuba promises, and Italy insists, and we cannot well abandon the formal position that governments speak for and act on behalf of their states, but __ it is essential that we bear constantly in mind the reality that governments are never fully in charge and never achieve the unity, purposefulness and discipline that theory attributes to them–and that they sometimes claim.

__ **Our act of imagination shapes world politics—representations create the world and are inextricably linked to policy** __ __**WELDES 2003** – Senior Lecturer, Bristol University; PhD (Minn) (Jutta, “Popular culture, science fiction, and world politics: exploring inter textual relations” in “To seek out new worlds: science fiction and world politics” ed. Weldes, Palgrave Macmillan 2003, 12-13) __ __ But this is at best a partial understanding of the relationship between representation and “the real.” The __realities we know— the meanings they have for us— are discursive products__. 14 “ __Because the real is never wholly present to us— how it is real for us is always mediated through some representational practice— we lose something when we think of representation as mimetic__ ” (Shapiro, 1988: xii). __SF is not just a “window” onto an already pre-existing world__. Rather, __**SF texts are part of the processes of world politics themselves**__ : __they are implicated in producing and reproducing the phenomena__ that Gregg and __others assume they merely reflect__. 15 __**Instead of reading these texts as simple reflections of the real, we can read “the real**__ ”—in our case __**world politics— as itself a social and cultural product**__. __“[T]o read the ‘real’ as a text that has been produced__ (written) __is to disclose an aspect of human conduct that is fugitive in approaches that collapse the process of inscription into a static reality__ ” (ibid.). For instance, __through its overtly liberal ideology__ and mechanisms like the Prime Directive— which forbids interference by the United Federation of Planets in the normal internal development of technologically less developed societies— __Star Trek helps to produce U.S. foreign policy as non-interventionary and benign__ (Weldes, 1999: 124– 127). __World politics, then, is itself a cultural product__. Based as they are on such assumptions, our analyses have more in common with Cynthia Weber’s use of popular film to “access what IR theory says, how it plots its story, and how all this together gives us a particular vision of the world” (2001: 132, emphasis added). __

__ **Our model of fiat is better for policy-making—we should imagine alternative worlds even if they’re technically impossible, which means you should vote aff even if the Bering Strait tunnel is impossible** __ __**LIPPARD 2010** - Sr. Security Product Manager for Global Crossing and a Ph.D. student in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology at Arizona State University (April 29, Jim, “ Science fiction scenarios and public engagement with science ” __[]__)__ Science fiction has been__ a __popular__ genre at least since Jules Verne’s 19th century work, and arguably longer still. But __can it have practical value as well as be a form of escapist entertainment?__ Clark Miller and Ira Bennett of ASU suggest that __it has potential for use in improving the capacity of the general public “to imagine and reason critically about technological futures” and for being integrated into technology assessment processes__ (“Thinking longer term about technology: is there value in science fiction-inspired approaches to constructing futures?" Science and Public Policy 35(8), October 2008, pp. 597-606). Miller and Bennett argue that __science fiction can provide a way to stimulate people to wake from “technological somnambulism” __ (Langdon Winner’s term for __taking for granted__ or being oblivious to __sociotechnical changes__ ), __in order to recognize such changes, realize that there may be alternative possibilities and that particular changes need not be determined, and to engage with deliberative processes and institutions that choose directions of change. __ Where most __**political planning is short-term and based on projections that simply extend current trends incrementally into the future, science fiction provides scenarios which exhibit “non-linearity” by involving multiple, major, and complex changes from current reality.**__ While __these scenarios “likely provide...little technical accuracy” about how technology and society will actually interact, they may still provide ideas about alternative possibilities, and in particular to provide “clear visions of desirable--and not so desirable--futures.”__ The article begins with a quote from Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute recommending that __“hard science fiction” be used to aid in “long-term”__ (20+ year) __prediction scenarios; she advises, “Don’t think of it as literature,” and focus on the technologies rather than the people.__ Miller and Bennett, however, argue otherwise--that __not only is science fiction useful for thinking about longer-term consequences, but that the parts about the people--how technologies actually fit into society--are just as, if not more important than the ideas about the technologies themselves.__

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