. One risk that must be guarded against is that those who develop the superintelligence would not make it generically philanthropic but would instead give it the more limited goal of serving only some small group, such as its own creators or those who commissioned it.

It seems that the best way to ensure that a superintelligence will have a beneficial impact on the world is to endow it with philanthropic values.

Hardware aside, the marginal cost of creating an additional copy of an upload or an artificial intelligence after the first one has been built is near zero.

Superintelligence is radically different. This point bears emphasizing, for anthropomorphizing superintelligence is a most fecund source of misconceptions.

A superintelligence is any intellect that is vastly outperforms the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom, and social skills.

This paper surveys some of the unique ethical issues in creating superintelligence, and discusses what motivations we ought to give a superintelligence, and introduces some cost-benefit considerations relating to whether the development of superintelligent machines ought to be accelerated or retarded

, it is crucial that it be provided with human-friendly motivations

However, it would be up to the designers of the superintelligence to specify its original motivations

Such superintelligence would not be just another technological development; it would be the most important invention ever made, and would lead to explosive progress in all scientific and technological fields, as the superintelligence would conduct research with superhuman efficiency

It is largely theweight of that past, too, that has shaped the management of hate as a field ofgovernance traversed by an excitement with the obscene, a voyeuristic desireto see precisely that which is so strongly tabooed, a series of fantasies aboutthe occult world of rightwing extremists in which the fetish of the state linksup with the fetish of the nation.

The perpetual “return of the repressed” in such encounters produces enormous strain. It calls for institutionalized mechanisms and formulaic scripts inorder to tame the anxieties that it incites, to camouflage the inherent tenuousness of political distinctions, and to restore a semblance of stability.

we find more occult, more ephemeralinstruments than police patrols and ID checks. And these, in Germany, coherearound the shadowy figure of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution( Verfassungsschutz) and its invisible moles, the “contact persons” (V-Männer;sing., V-Mann).

In Freddi’s and Gino’s renderings, the mechanisms through which the state seeksto maintain a tight grip and a close watch over their social circles came to life asmimetic performances imbued with excitement.

epressive force. It islinked with a certain fascination, an “obscene enjoyment” (Aretxaga 2003), anillicit “tickling at the heels” (Franz Kafka, cited in Taussig 1993

In so doing, they fabricate an image that mimics the fantasies of violentphysicality that surface in common media representations of those whom theyare out to get. T

The point is rather that the violence of the policetakes a certain form of affinity to the figure of their enemy

Rarely, it seemed, do such raids go without a measure of violence, especiallywhen targeting groups or crowds of people rather than individuals in theirapartments

The police haunted the quotidian lives of young right-wingextremists in the district everywhere as a presence that, always hovering overthem as potentiality, could at any moment or place gain flesh and blood anderupt onto the scene in the form of raids or unannounced visits,

m.It was this exceedingly unrelenting gaze and heavy hand of the state thatplayed a central role in motivating the gra

And yet that very same law seemed to have been resurrected from the dead atthe Bretterbude, where police officers sporadically—again, always reserving thepotential not to enforce it, not to cross over into actuality— invoked it, disburs-ing fines to young people when their groups spilled over from the kiosk’s smallawning onto the adjacent street. The narrow dimensions of the patio made itpractically impossible for such a spillover not to take place whenever more thana few people gathered under its roof. Set at ten euros, the fines were modest yetjust high enough to place too heavy a burden on the financially strapped youthsand to act as effective deterrents against them.

The police, then, is subjectneither to the Law as a literal code, nor to the precedents set by its own acts, butrather remains that “zone of indistinction” between potentiality and actuality,

the preventive police would engage in investigativepractices, private security guards would harass teenagers who congregated nearbut outside the mall, and uniformed municipal police officers would come totheir aid by imposing the mall’s regulations outdoors and hassling youths withbody searches.

Some of themuniformed, others plainclothes, some representing the civil police while othersthe criminal police and others still municipal units of public order, some be-longing to teams specializing in youth-violence or right-wing extremism, yetothers to preventive police forces, they maintained a constant watchful eye anda heavy hand over the groups around the kiosk.

In this chapter, I examine the ways in which the state observes the politicaldelinquent and look at how the figure of the police haunts the quotidian spacesof sociability and friendship of right-wing extremists in Germany.

Aswe have already seen, the penal regimes of political delinquency in Germanyrender blatantly clear the anxiety of a state we would not ordinarily consideras excessively brutal, as well as the repressive violence to which it resorts in theface of the menacing figure of the nation.

Government-generatedblacklists, administrative injunctions, interdictions in the legal code and thoseresulting from juridical verdicts weave themselves into the lives of Freddi andhis friends through various forms of mediation.

With this, the code precludes the possibility that minorchanges to a prohibited sign would place it outside of the law’s reach. But theprinciple of similarity also introduces a critical dimension of ambiguity intothe process of adjudication

Because of the constitutional clause againstcensorship, in themselves such signs cannot be placed under legal prohibition.Instead, their outlawing appears in the criminal code almost as a derivativefunction— as if it were a mere by-product— of a different set of legal restric-tions whose concern is rather with placing limits on the constitutional freedomof association, and that regulates the criminalization of counterconstitutionalorganizations. What comes under their jurisdiction, then, are not particularsymbols but rather more generally the dissemination or use of any sign associ-ated with a banned organization in a way that could promote the organizationor its goals

which prohibit the dissemination and public use of symbolsand means of propaganda of unconstitutional organizations and political par-ties, such as “flags, insignia, uniforms, slogans, and forms of greeting.”

he Protection of Young Persons Act and the sections in the criminal code thatlimit the constitutional right to free expression

Their wording—“incitement,”“dignity,” “insult,” “disparagement,” “maliciously,” and so on—opens up an am-biguous legal space and authorizes widely varying interpretative assessmentson the nature of particular pronouncements or actions.

The author of the lette

Incitement to hate or violence, deni-gration of collectivities, libel, slander, positive representations of violence, agi-tation, insult, defamation, injury to official symbols, and abuse of the memoryof the deceased all fall under this quite heterogeneous rubric.12 It is under theselaws, for example, that a denial of the Holocaust, a glorification of the Third

Others among his peers traded CDsamong themselves or copied individual tracks from one cell phone to another.It is the very acquisition of such media through clandestine networks—whetherthrough under-the-table commercial exchange or through circles of like-mindedfriends and acquaintances— that, for them, marked their legal status

but rather in its concrete penaleffect

orked has everglimpsed the blacklist of banned media, though most knew of its existence and11 This is the official English translation. However, “review board” would be a more faithful ren-dering of Prüfstelle into English than “department.” The BPjM operates under the Federal Ministryfor Family, Senior Citizens, Women, and Children (BMFSFJ).

As often, however, they appearedpuzzled by the experts’ decision, for example, in the case of the so-called folksinger Frank Rennicke, whose acoustic ballads have been significantly more sub-tle in their nationalist and xenophobic tenor

“List of Media Harmful toYoung Persons,

Both reflectat once the fundaments and limits of a liberal order: the constitutional promiseof an absolute guarantee of individual liberties, including the right to form col-lectivities, and at the same time the inevitable constraints upon these liberties,formulated in general terms and relegated to the authority of subsidiary legalcodes

When is an as-sociation between a sign and an organization strong enough to justify the sortof infringement upon the freedom of expression that its banning would entail,and how to estimate the strength of the association?

It is with these traces, with these excesses, and with the manners inwhich they reveal themselves to young right-wing extremists that this chapter isconcerned.

The FederalCourt of Justice rejected his appeal against the ruling, arguing that the consti-tutional guarantee of the freedom of expression could not justify such excessivedisparagement of the state

he GDR

repressive mecha -nisms for constraining political liberty and the freedoms of expression and asso-ciation. On the other hand, it spelled an imperative need to codify and institutea political order that would drastically contrast with this haunting past preciselythrough its commitment to liberal- democratic rights and freedoms.

In pursuing these lines of inquiry, we shall see how the traces of denazifica-tion, of that originary exclusion upon which the Federal Republic of Germanywas constituted as a “militant democracy” (Weiss 1994), have been profoundlyinscribed at its very heart

How, for example, does the legal banning of right-wingextremist things tally with the constitutional prohibition of censorship? What as-sumptions about symbols, their users, and the context of their deployments—what semiotic ideologies—underpin the interpretative frameworks under whichlaw regulates nationalism and xenophobia in Germany? In what ways do lib-eral, secularist distinctions between private and public and presuppositionsabout intentions and motivations define and enable the drawing of the politicaldistinction? And how do legal regimes and mechanisms of surveillance appearin the quotidian everyday of those whom they target?

The sudden eruption of the force of law onto the snoozing daybreak of what,for Freddi, would have otherwise been another unremarkable morning hintsat how the young people at the center of this study encounter the opaque, in-tricate mechanisms for the governance of hate in their daily lives

Having located the item, the police confiscated it,and the state attorney later laid charges against Freddi—not for the possessionof the jewelry piece per se, but rather on the suspicion that he had paraded itoutdoors.

banned music CDs

In the East, where such foundations were absent, new recruits camelargely from younger generations. The subcultural scenes and political idiomsthat ensued there have preserved the youth flavor with which they emerged(again, recall the campaign for a nationalist youth club in Treptow) even as thefirst cohorts have already reached middle age.

First, unlike its predominantlyconservative, economically right-wing forms in the preunification West, right-wing extremists today have swung decisively toward the reassertion of the so-cialist strands of National Socialism.5 Established Western political parties haveperhaps most visibly appealed to GDR-style rhetoric of social solidarity. Thetraditionally West German and socioeconomically conservative NPD and DVU(German People’s Union), for example, have placed the “Wir sind das Volk!”( We are the people!) slogan of the so-called Monday demonstrations (Montagsdemos) at the heart of their election campaigns.6 More radical extraparliamen-tary groups have similarly deployed socialist tropes in their propaganda, wherethe interests of the working class and their oppression by the rich frequently takecentral stage

ve, culminating in fatally bru-tal pogroms against asylum seeker shelters in the years

They emerged at the fringes of al-ready marginalized subcultural scenes (punks, hooligans, skinheads) and, com-pared with their western brethren, they were poorly organized and of triflingnumbers. The state classified and treated them—as it also did the punks, hooli-gans, and skinheads— simply as Asoziale (asocial), a default category for socialmisfits against which repressive measures included, for example, prohibitionson residence in or entry to Berlin, incarceration, and occasionally so-calledfreigekauft (literally, bought into freedom) exchanges in which the FRG paidthe GDR western currency for handing over ( political) prisoners.

In this chapter, I review some ofthese latest developments that have reshaped the extreme right in Germanyover the past couple of decades, pausing in particular on the contemporarylegacy of the East / West divide in the post-reunification era and on its politicalsignificance both nationally and, more specifically, for the young people withwhom I worked.

Racism and xenophobic nationalism were deep and widespread, yet awarenessof formal politics was, for lack of a better word, astoundingly rudimentary—several of my informants, for example, could not correctly name Germany’schancellor at the time. Only a handful had participated in organized politicalgroups or attended demonstrations

Many suffered from precarious domestic settings, with violent, abusive, alcoholic, or neglectful parents. Inturn, violence, alcoholism, and delinquency were widely prevalent within theirranks, and a significant proportion, especially among the men, boasted criminalrecords for both petty and serious offenses: theft and shoplifting, physical assaultand damage to property, arson and trespassing, possession of illegal weaponsand debt evasion, or a range of criminal transgressions against laws governing rightwing extremist “things,” which I lay out in detail in chapter 4.

My fieldwork, however, focused neither on political parties nor on clandestine cells but on the relatively diffuse and dynamic groups that gatheredin a number of outdoor sites and whose members the social workers serviced.Because of their fairly heterogeneous compositions, I can only provide here arough description of their general outlines.

Additionally, the district has witnessed regular right wing extremist demonstrations and a significantly higherthan average incidence of violent, sometimes grotesquely brutal assaults

TreptowKöpenick has also gained a certain disrepute for the presenceof extreme right currents.

The repercussions of such shifts are evident in the compulsive redrawing of the political distinction that marks and excludes the extreme right inGermany. They come into focus, as well, in how my informants articulate andperform their political selves

learning to live with ghosts”

existing regime of neoliberal governance that clusters distinct discourses andpractices and that seeks to orchestrate public affects

he management of hate in generalforms an endeavor that transcends shifts in parliamentary power and perseveres through the rise and fall of governments and coalitions.

As chapters 4 and 5show, the management of hate holds a particular interest in governing rightwing extremist delinquency. But, as I argue particularly in chapters 8 and 9, italso encompasses a range of practices and institutions bent on fomenting certain affective dispositions and curbing others in so called mainstream publics.

After the youth club in her neighborhood where she passed mostof her afternoons shut down, an acquaintance invited her to join him and hisfriends, a clique of rightwing extremist soccer ultras. She gradually came tosurpass many of her peers there, not only in her soccer fanaticism but also inher enthusiasm with the NPD. Notwithstanding their clear merits, then, zerotolerance policies overlook the fact that political identifications are less a givenstate of things and more a dynamic process of consolidation. They therefore toooften fail to address the forces that pull some far into the rightwing fringes.

Its success registered the social realities that my informants faced daily:uninhabitable, at times dangerous domestic settings, in part the effect of longterm unemployment and alcoholism; a diminishing capacity to access otherspaces and activities, admission to which usually requires payment, and theprospects of a future in which such capacity continues to decrease; and, notleast, a historical moment in which austerity cutbacks and schemes of budgetary and administrative restructuring result in ever scarcer public r

he explores how,in turn, such affects are sedimented in and mediated by the materialities of ascarred landscape.

It is a project of governance that targets broad national publics and seeks to orchestrate, induce, anddefuse a set of indispensable yet potentially inflammable affective dispositions.

The management of this threat forms a hesitant, nervous, hardlycoherent yet momentous endeavor of affective governance.

ulting in a compulsive preoccupation with maintaining a tight grip on thefrontiers of the “legitimate” political spectrum.

Concomitantly, in the throes of an economic slowdown, a large population offoreign residents could no longer be imagined as temporary workers. Indeed,many increasingly came to perceive their continued presence as a burden onthe national economy.

The events of 1989 therefore posed difficult questions. Has the postwar ordertruly eliminated the roots of the malaise or has it merely alleviated its symptoms? Many Germans I met during my research still struggled to find answersto such questions. People who on one occasion would assess the threat fromthe extreme right as negligible, on another would proclaim that, in fact, littlehas changed and that the enduring fascist inclinations of their countrymencould boil over at any moment, especially in the grip of economic stagnation.

Freshly sovereign over its future, no longer hindered by division and occupation, Germany now had to assume the task of holding itsown specters at bay

elucidate the latter’s fundamental place within recent transformationsof the political terrain in Germany, and precisely for that reason the notion ofright wing extremism and the immense weight attached to it appear especiallyappropriate.

aming the cultural anxieties that it triggers and of forever policing the exclusion of an other that obstinately contaminates the inside defines the discursiveand political stakes under which this concept operates in Germany

It reveals,then, not so much what one is not but rather the nature of deep anxieties aboutthe potential of becoming—or, indeed, already being contaminated by—one’snightmares; hence, the profound discomfort and angst that physical proximityto right wing extremist “things” seems to provoke among many Germans. Ofcourse, this unbearable intimacy has everything to do as well with the fact that,far from being reified as an “object,” nationalism surfaces as a “subject” withinvirtually every German family in the form of ancestors. The loved ones of one’sbloodline thus too often slip into the material of one’s nightmares.

Far more vital than generating difference with respect to, say, a neoNazistreet gang or a racist political party often of trivial electoral significance, is theconstitution of distance with the historical past. In Germany, today’s rightwingextremists appear as concrete incarnations of more general forms that continueto haunt the present.

The denotational scope of the concept is as wide anddiverse as the social settings and pragmatic stakes of its deployments

The introduction of the category of extremism therefore sought to tamethe ambiguity of the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate politics bynaming it as an objective term within the universe of political possibilities. Thisattempt, at once hopeless and irresistible, already hinted at a nervous discomfort about the inherent tenuousness of the distinction itself.

Understanding the political work that young rightwing extremists performdemands attention to how these seemingly disparate historical trajectories andsocial processes are articulated in present day Germany.

This book is an ethnographic study of the soberingimplications of these developments for the shape of political imaginaries today.

how, in negotiating the project of a rehabilitated German nationhood, thislabor grounds the very specters that it struggles so strenuously to exclude at itsvery core and betrays its own inevitable incompleteness.

They describe the immense energies expended on drawing and policingthe boundaries of legitimate politics in Germany.

This book takes as its point of departure the daily realities of young rightwing extremist groups in an East Berlin district in order to think through theirsalient place within a postreunification project of German nationhood.

He advocated for the NPD, claiming that the party eschewed racismand objected instead only to the hordes of slothful immigrants who arrived toexploit the German state. Like his friend Felix before him, Robert also voicedantiimmigration idioms that have become prevalent throughout Europe, shaping political visions and projects not only on the far right fringes but, indeed,across the political terrain. His statements reproduced continentwide, ethnically inflected, social Darwinist fantasies whose rhetoric—and praxis—has railedagainst “parasitical foreigners.

A handful of people in the smallcrowd sported Tshirts with the inscription “May 8—Liberation Day? We’renot celebrating!” (8. Mai—Befreiungstag? Wir feiern nicht!). Souvenirs from arightwing extremist demonstration on the sixtieth anniversary of the Reich’scapitulation, the shirts referenced the contemporary recasting in mainstream national discourses of Germany’s defeat at the hand of the Allies as its emancipation. Lisa and Elsa, respectively, a skingirl and a neopagan aficionado of Nordi

The first part of the book, comprising chapters 1 through 3, provides an intro-duction to the theoretical stakes of the study, to its empirical context, and to theresearch subject population at its ethnographic core. Chapter 1 reviews the rel-evant historical background, announces some of the crucial theoretical frame-works that guide the analysis, and offers a discussion of fieldwork and methods.Chapters 2 and 3 outline how my informants articulate their relations to cul-tural and ethnicized difference as they discursively constitute their own po-litical selves by examining interview material and conversational interactions.Chapter 2 focuses in particular on their identification and self-identificationas easterners, while chapter 3 turns to their construal of difference within thefield of the extreme right and to their talk of immigrants and of their politicaladversaries on the left

The four chapters that compose the book’s second part examine in detail thegovernmental regimes that would safeguard Germany’s nascent national proj -ect from its sinister shadow, pausing on the mechanisms through which thestate administers and represses the field of the politically excluded and describ-ing the incessant labor of carving the distinction that sets this field apart in thefirst place.

I struggled to suppress a deep sigh of relief when, after aprolonged wait, they released us unconditionally

my double identity stood as the ghost that permanently hovered over myown position in the field.

Nonetheless, intelligent and autonomous systems in every form have the possibility togenerate moral crumple zones because they distribute control, often in obfuscated ways, amongmultiple actors across space and time.

The concept of a moral crumple zone is not a way toexplain why these gaps occur. Rather, the concept highlights how human operators may“absorb” responsibility when these gaps arise in socio-technical systems in ways that do notreflect the distributed control and interactional aspects that compose the socio-technical system.

f the software is presented as being more capable of control, and the amount of time onany given flight that is controlled by the autopilot software far exceeds the amount of timedirectly controlled by the pilot, who is responsible for the control of the aircraft? The FAA hasspecifically addressed this in a federal regulation, which has been the same for decades: “Thepilot in command of an aircraft is directly responsible for, and is the final authority as to, theoperation of that aircraft” (14 CFR 91.3). Courts have consistently upheld this authority of thepilot as the ultimate designation of liability (Cooling and Herbers 1983). While control has beeneffectively distributed, responsibility has not scaled accordingly

However, American news outlets headlined the role of the pilots,focusing on the official French report’s discussion of the pilots’ inability to comprehend thesituation and act in response

ocusing only on the agency of operators misses other sites of interaction and dimensionsof control exercised by other actors involved in the system, from the designers of the interfaces tothe plant managers who created the conditions within which the operators could act, to theregulators who maintained a blind-eye toward industry standards.

But to focus on these actions as isolated events is like focusing on a detailin the foreground while missing the bigger picture.

erator error, generally referred to as human error.

At stake in articulating “moral crumple zones” is not only themisattribution of responsibility but also the ways in which new forms of consumer and workerharm may develop in new automated technologies.

The circumstances surrounding and theimmediate responses to and media coverage of these accidents demonstrate how accountabilityappears to be deflected off of the automated parts of the system (and the humans whose controlis mediated through this automation) and focused on the immediate human operators, whopossess only limited knowledge, capacity, or control

he moral crumple zone protects the integrity of the technologicalsystem, at the expense of the nearest human operator.

moral crumple zone to describe how responsibilityfor an action may be misattributed to a human actor who had limited control over the behavior ofan automated or autonomous system

who is responsible