The Algorithm Tweakers

How could Luigi Mancione have thought he could get away with murdering a CEO in Manhattan? Everything is transparent nowadays. German-American billionaire & Girardian philosopher Peter Andreas Thiel wrote in 2004: 

One must never forget that one day all will be revealed, that all injustices will be exposed, and that those who perpetrated them will be held to account.  Some sort of enlightened corporate hierarchy will rule over us.

Given that incoming US Vice President JD Vance is heavily indebted to Mr. Thiel, and that Thiel’s associates David O. Sacks, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and many others are now de facto in charge of the US government, we can be rest assured that said “enlightened corporate hierarchy” is on the way. Thiel is fond of quoting Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall”: 

 With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm; 

Till the war-drum throbbd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d 

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. 

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, 

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

A police state for good. Notre Dame philosopher Patrick Deneen writes in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed:

 A population seeking to fill the void left by the weakening of more local memberships and associations was susceptible to a fanatical willingness to identify completely with a distant and abstract state.

With the informatization of society, we are seeing the wholesale loss of values. Deneen writes: “The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life—familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national—reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability.” Instead of trying to solve the problem, the plan is to create a digital panopticon to discourage desperate behaviors that occur as a result, like stealing. See my column on Larry Ellison & Oracle for more details on what could go wrong in a digital dictatorship. 

While Musk tweaks the algorithm, Curtis Yarvin, a neo reactionary blogger with newfound prominence in the Musk-Trump White House, writes: “they just need to legally assume absolute power, then use it absolutely.” He advocates a form of “Caesarism,” a “form of one-man rule: halfway… between monarchy and tyranny.” Yarvin says: “It wouldn’t be unlawful,” 

You’d simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address… You’d actually have a mandate to do this. Where would that mandate come from? It would come from basically running on it, saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’re going to do.’

If Yarvin and his accolades have their way, we will live in an algorithmic dictatorship or algocracy. Instead of censoring or jailing dissidents, those on top can tweak the algorithms to manufacture consent for their policies, all the while putting in place an autocracy Stalin could never dream of. Just in case.

Edward Bernays, the father of modern advertising, argued: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” Those who control the algorithms & information possess superhuman powers of persuasion. In the words of Descartes, “the greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.” They are too superintelligent, too omniscient. Hopefully they care enough about us to keep us alive:

Google has adopted the world’s ideology; Google has not created its own ideology, and enforced it on the world That Google is progressive is not a function of Google. Under a fascist empire, Google would be fascist—in a Catholic empire, Google would be Catholic. Technology seldom overpowers power; technology is usually power’s new toy.

Yarvin’s call to do away with democracy and turn, say, Elon Musk into America’s CEO, seems to be resonating amongst those who have a say in the matter. He believes in:

war, on behalf of technology, against the enemies of technology. Metaphorical war, but…by the indirect energy of supporting technology as a cause, like global warming, or the Palestinians. 

Is this what MAGA folks thought they were voting for? This is the neo-Straussian bunk ascendant in Washington. Dystopic, but in a good way?

Martin Heidegger framed technology as that which distances us from our core being and reduces the world to numeric profanity. Benjamin Bratton hits back: 

The question concerning technology is not how it alienates us from the misty mystery of Being but how every Copernican turn we have taken, from heliocentrism to Darwinism to neuroscience to machine intelligence- has only been possible by getting outside our own skin to seeing ourselves as we are and the world as it is. This is closeness to being.

This is quite optimistic. The system has hacked humanity and devalued its constituent parts. You are not unique. Just another node to be gradually demoralized and blended into the network. Former Google Chief Economist Hal Varian wrote: “if you torture the data long enough it will confess to anything.” In 1923, Henry Ford said his inspiration for the assembly line came from observing meatpacking plants in Chicago, where workers carved off different pieces of a carcass as it moved down the line. If you could use this process to disassemble a cow, Ford figured you could use it to augment what Varian describes as: “routinization, modularization, standardization, continuous production, and miniaturization” in the automobile assembly process. This leads to what Sigmund Freud identified as “suggestibility,” a mental state in which thinking and feeling break up and hence widen the rift between heart and mind & between common sense and logic. 

Companies are looking for ever narrower skillsets until capital is freed from its reliance on humans. AI may liberate them altogether from what cyberneticist Norbert Wiener called the “steersman.” Yarvin writes: 

Like the industrial age, the intelligence age represents the final victory of capital over labor. Capital assumes its final form: Sam Altman’s trillion-dollar planetary silicon brain farm. Capital is the supply chain for matrix multiplication.

Marc Andreessen. Courtesy: Flickr

Known as accelerationism, countless ideologies from left to right believe the quickest way to incite revolutionary change is for technology to expedite, causing the current system’s collapse. Marx argued capitalism was just another phase on the route to socialism. If AI companies are given free-rein, as many such as Trump mega donor and author of the “Techno-optimist manifesto,”  Marc Andreesseen, have advocated for, this could hasten the point whereby we enter into a socialist society: “We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.” 

This is quite the gamble. Swedish mathematician Olle Haggstrom argued in 2016: “the currently dominant attitude towards scientific and technological advances is tantamount to running blindfolded and at full speed into a minefield.” Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the “engine of perpetual material abundance.” Abundance for who? 

Whether it be Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, Daniel Boorstin’s 1978 Republic of Technology, in which he argued: “the Supreme Law of the Republic of Technology is convergence, the tendency for everything to become more like everything else,” or Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s forthcoming book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief & The Future of the West, there is a focus on what  this digital gadgetry means for society, geopolitics, governance, wellbeing and other nodes of this complex planetary system. 

StateStreet Global Advisors Chairman Ronald P. O’Hanley calls it the 5 D’s: “Deglobalization, decarbonization, demographics, surging debt, and digitalization are all shaping the world’s economy and financial markets.” According to Yuval Noah Harari, this process is moving faster and faster due to the poly and permacrises we are experiencing. He wrote during the early days of COVID-19:

Many short-term emergency measures will become a fixture of life. That is the nature of emergencies. They fast-forward historical processes. Decisions that in normal times could take years of deliberation are passed in a matter of hours. Immature and even dangerous technologies are pressed into service, because the risks of doing nothing are bigger. Entire countries serve as guinea-pigs in large-scale social experiments.

He continues:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel recently authorised the Israel Security Agency to deploy surveillance technology normally reserved for battling terrorists to track coronavirus patients. When the relevant parliamentary subcommittee refused to authorise the measure, Netanyahu rammed it through with an “emergency decree.

Netanyahu graduated in the same MIT class as The Singularity is Nearer author Ray Kurzweil, and Kurzweil’s books have been spotted on his shelf. The pandemic served as a lubricant for building out the Israeli surveillance state, as are the ongoing wars on multiple fronts. 

We are all becoming adherents of “Dataism.” If our activities are not recorded by Google, Amazon, or Meta, they might as well not exist. Anything done on the “outside” must be recorded on the “inside.” Pretty soon there may be no outside, so enjoy it while it lasts. 

How will people speak back to power? Through the data their work produces?

Much to Frank Fukuyama’s dismay, this does not spell the end of history, but rather the end of human-dominated history. Harari, whom I deemed along with Nick Bostrom as a prophet of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, believes those who own the data will win future wars without firing a shot. 

Perhaps humans are a legacy system that “get in the way” of winning the geostrategic race with China. Whoever makes humans obsolete first, wins.  The US-based National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) wrote in 2019: 

But “Adoption” happens far more quickly in China due to structural factors. The most significant of these are … 1. Lack of legacy systems e.g. lack of credit cards = mobile payment 2. Scale of consumer market e.g. extreme urban density= on-demand service adoption 3. Explicit government support and involvement e.g. facial recognition deployment.

There is no time t stop and think. Bostrom writes in his speculative essay “The World in 2050,” 

We are in the process of crossing a road. The one thing we must not do is stop in the middle. We need greater-than-human intelligence to build defenses against nano-attacks. We would not reduce the danger by slowing down; on the contrary, that would make the risks even bigger. The best we can do is to press onward with all possible speed, using as much foresight as we can muster, and hope that there is an other side that we can get to.

Where does one sign up for this Great Conversation, instead of being fed noble lies? Perhaps we will never stop figuring it all out. Nobel Laureate Geoff Hinton once proclaimed: “Yay! I have done it; I have figured out how the brain works.” His daughter replied: “Oh, Dad, not again.”  

These are the Yarvinian origins of the neo monarchical “run the country as a benevolent corporate dictatorship” Thielist right ascendant today. The shift away from woke politics and towards militarism is downstream from October 7, 2023.  As Einstein put it, ‘The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

Neural net. Courtesy: Flickr

Organisms are algorithms. May we each live in peace & happiness then, in our own little Algorithmic sanatoriums? No matter what happens, Herbert Simon told us in 1965: 

Man is a problem-solving, skill-using, social animal. Once he has satisfied his hunger, two main kinds of experience are significant to him. One of his deepest needs is to apply his skills, whatever they be, to challenging tasks-to feel the exhilaration of the well-struck ball or the well-solved problem. The other need is to find meaningful and warm relations with a few other human beings-to love and be loved, to share experience, to respect and be respected, to work in common tasks.