We have this idea that because of technology we are becoming more and more powerful. In a way, as extensions of ourselves, it does do just that. But power is not the whole story.
Nice post. The pursuit of technology is a catch 22, like most things in life. A blind focus on technological progress provides power advantages over others, therefore all nations and leaders pursue it; but it comes with it a loss of humanity, a loss of individual privacy and control and freedom and birthrates, the decline of mankind down to that of a widgit, to be used and discarded by the establishment at their will.
Serious religious communities like the Amish, Orthodox Jews, and seriously religious Muslims are much more resistant to these processes as reflected by their much higher birthrates (Mormon birthrates are plummeting as they succumb to globohomo; it seems like all other Christian communities have declining birthrates as well...), but their natural growth rates are swamped by vastly increased illegal immigration rates.
The question of whether or not technology could be harnessed to improve humanity instead of improve the power of elites is an interesting one; it would certainly take a different kind of elites, ones with noblesse oblige instead of noblesse malice and ones with time horizons and motivations beyond just their continued control and punishment of the masses, if it is possible at all...
The problem is what we mean by “improve humanity.” But just reading through your note made me think of a new way to potentially describe the “class war.” Those who control the technology and those controlled by it.
I agree with you how to define improving humanity is a tricky one -- Kaczysnki argues that modern society makes the fulfillment of our power process either too trivial (such as getting food) or close to impossible (such as achieving autonomy), and that it is the fulfillment of tough but achievable goals that satisfies man's soul. So I would argue that only technology that properly accounts for this very human desire would result in "improving humanity".
Re: your second point, the question becomes to what extent are those who control technology ultimately controlled by it as well. You might appreciate this post on this question, which discusses the opinions of professor Fabio Vighi, Carl Schmitt, Kaczynski, and Vaclav Havel (via Zero HP Lovecraft):
I see you mentioned Ted - he also touched on a few propagandists and technologists controlling the population in his letters which are published in Technological Slavery.
A Golden opportunity forged in Sun Fire is coming for the Excellent People to retake control, but it’s going to HURT.
Carrington Event 2 is coming, either next year or in 2035. It’s a statistical certainty. How bad the bombardment, for how long, and on whichever side of the planet it hits, will determine if our technological progress is thrust back as little as to 1980 or as far back as 1850, or somewhere between. Hopefully, only the latter, because it will give us the chance we need to regain excellence with a minimum amount of casualties, of which there will still be far too many.
I now firmly believe that God has blinded the Elites to the danger, because none of them are taking the threat seriously!
Great piece. I suspect you are right with Christianity being the appropriate or best response. That's probably why they are always demonizing Christians. For instance i've just started on the new season of Black Mirror and they had a cult of religious believers do something terrible. And that's often the case in Hollywood culture. They depict true religious believers as wide eyed crazies. They avoid the moral questions.
Jesus says “Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.”
one of the worst aspects of life becoming increasingly vicarious is that we neither possess anything to loose nor to empty ourselves of, and neither conceive of anything worth “preserving. the original statement above is distinguishing between life as “psyche,” which we first seek to save but which is rather to be offered up, and life as zoē, which we can “preserve” (ζωογονήσει), but only by sacrificing everything which keeps us from it. but if the psyche has been rendered generic by the influence of a civilization without Christ, we will neither find ourselves inclined to make the sacrifice nor, as you indicated, will we find ourselves possessed of anything worth sacrificing.
And is it any wonder that our society is so selfish? We are trying to fill that emptiness that comes when enframed in technical society. Or the pervasive spiritual emptiness people feel?
“Now, fast forward to the early 21st century when we just don’t need the vast majority of the population,” he added.
Harari has fallen into the mindset and trap of thinking of what is efficient and what is necessary and then spoken the monstrous, and perfectly logical, endpoint of such thinking. We would do well to take heed that this is not an argument about the quality of people, nor necessarily about the abundance of people being a danger (Malthusians), but something I'm not sure I've seen before. A cold and machine-like evaluation that the population is simply redundant to the system.
The bright spot here is that increasingly complex systems require intelligent and dutiful persons so growing the system into an ultra-complex organism makes failure more likely if you put the wrong person in place - especially if they don't actually understand what they're doing. I am going to dredge up the full extent of my WH40k knowledge and say that the techno-priests might be a vision of the future.
Ideally, the Church is a place of Nature restored and there is (I groan at my parish for the electric organ) a place for technique in artistry and beauty to elevate Nature through the work of man in conjunction with God. Whether this is shaping the physical building so that it carries and amplifies sound of the choir and the priest, the iconography adorning the walls, or teaching the young to chant the liturgy.
I agree with the growing fragility of the system. What will they do when there are no people capable of making repairs? Once again 40k is more prophetic that it realizes. And I am glad that you can get the mental picture of what I mean about the church community as a place for fostering human excellence and competence. There is just so much potential there.
It's an iron (and ironic) law: the point where you try to criticise someone's spelling or grammar is the point where you will fail to use correct spelling or grammar yourself.
I see this in mechanical repair/restoration, which I do in my spare time—we USED to have an intimate relationship with our autos/motorcycles. Now that the computer has taken over, our knowledge of how to maintain/build/repair is non existent—autos are throwaway items now. Computers have taken over the skills of driving—no more manual transmissions! Computer will change how you drive on snow/wet/dry pavement. Etc. Men are meant to labor, and in that labor we know more about ourselves, and creation.
A tool is an extension of the will of an individual. A machine is a system meant to mimic a human process in a systematic way. The use of tools allows for the imposition of the spiritual on the material. Machines by their nature invert this, and force the user to adapt instead to the imposition of a material process on the spirit. The age of the machine is the age of human removal. It is also, not coincidentally, the age of managerialism, which is what happens when machines impose their demands on the human social order.
It was perfect. And I say that as someone with casual misophonia.
I love how you pull in Tolkien and the Bible at the end. Throws it all into a conceptual relief for my mind to integrate the principle of and keep spinning with
Again, thanks for the kind words. I am finding it important to take all of these political and philosophical ideas and show people that they weave in and through our faith, that we can think theologically about the world in an intelligent way. We don't have to ground ourselves in Plato or Aristotle. The core is there is our own tradition.
I changed careers ~8 years ago after spending 20 years in tech. I realized that I didn't know how to "do" anything. It felt like vanity (a vapor). Everything used to be about streamlining processes and eliminating waste (people).
I still have a job behind a screen, but I am very slowly learning how to do things with my hands. It is often discouraging as a feel like a child in my capability without a child's mind to quickly absorb skills. I'm learning to be patient, have a lower time preference, and trust the Lord. I want my children (and me) to know the simple beauty and joy that God gave to us in work.
"Here is what I have seen to be good, which is beautiful: to eat, to drink, and to see good in all one’s labor in which he labors under the sun during the few days of his life which God has given him; for this is his portion." - Ecclesiastes 5:18
Ahh yeah wrt replaceable cogs: not all created equal, it transpires—which immediately calls into question the feasibility of lucrative replacement business. Technique's spreadsheets lie through their [non-existent] teeth ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
🗨 Cultures and civilisations require more than the presence of warm bodies. An excellent example of this is found in the decolonialisation of Africa and other parts of the third world. It showed that you can build the infrastructure of western material civilisation and fill it with the spirit of western law and religion, but you can’t maintain it without Euros or Anglos. When the westerners departed, the streets and sewers and airports were left, but the “mental infrastructure” needed to purvey these resources into genuine societal success were lacking.
And wrt AGI, there's this laughable futility to hubristic attempts to artificially conjure the most sophisticated thing in nature aka human mind:
🗨 We are incapable of perfect observation [...]. There is more that we find that we did not even know to look for. As such, whenever we create “technology” that replicates nature, it is always necessarily an inferior reproduction of it.[...] The car works well because it is not a replica of a horse. The pen works well because it is not a replica of the mind.
Nice post. The pursuit of technology is a catch 22, like most things in life. A blind focus on technological progress provides power advantages over others, therefore all nations and leaders pursue it; but it comes with it a loss of humanity, a loss of individual privacy and control and freedom and birthrates, the decline of mankind down to that of a widgit, to be used and discarded by the establishment at their will.
Serious religious communities like the Amish, Orthodox Jews, and seriously religious Muslims are much more resistant to these processes as reflected by their much higher birthrates (Mormon birthrates are plummeting as they succumb to globohomo; it seems like all other Christian communities have declining birthrates as well...), but their natural growth rates are swamped by vastly increased illegal immigration rates.
The question of whether or not technology could be harnessed to improve humanity instead of improve the power of elites is an interesting one; it would certainly take a different kind of elites, ones with noblesse oblige instead of noblesse malice and ones with time horizons and motivations beyond just their continued control and punishment of the masses, if it is possible at all...
The problem is what we mean by “improve humanity.” But just reading through your note made me think of a new way to potentially describe the “class war.” Those who control the technology and those controlled by it.
I agree with you how to define improving humanity is a tricky one -- Kaczysnki argues that modern society makes the fulfillment of our power process either too trivial (such as getting food) or close to impossible (such as achieving autonomy), and that it is the fulfillment of tough but achievable goals that satisfies man's soul. So I would argue that only technology that properly accounts for this very human desire would result in "improving humanity".
Re: your second point, the question becomes to what extent are those who control technology ultimately controlled by it as well. You might appreciate this post on this question, which discusses the opinions of professor Fabio Vighi, Carl Schmitt, Kaczynski, and Vaclav Havel (via Zero HP Lovecraft):
https://neofeudalism.substack.com/p/appendix-b-a-caveat-the-rise-of-a
Thanks for sharing that...I will give it a read tomorrow...
I see you mentioned Ted - he also touched on a few propagandists and technologists controlling the population in his letters which are published in Technological Slavery.
Yeah he did.
I enjoy your section on writing aids. Hemingway is a nice tool but I hate how it neuters my writing style, voice, and rhetoric.
This thought process is also a massive theme in the Dune series. Developing the power of the human mind vs. handing it off to a machine.
Thanks. And this is why people have been resonating with Dune again.
A Golden opportunity forged in Sun Fire is coming for the Excellent People to retake control, but it’s going to HURT.
Carrington Event 2 is coming, either next year or in 2035. It’s a statistical certainty. How bad the bombardment, for how long, and on whichever side of the planet it hits, will determine if our technological progress is thrust back as little as to 1980 or as far back as 1850, or somewhere between. Hopefully, only the latter, because it will give us the chance we need to regain excellence with a minimum amount of casualties, of which there will still be far too many.
I now firmly believe that God has blinded the Elites to the danger, because none of them are taking the threat seriously!
Great piece. I suspect you are right with Christianity being the appropriate or best response. That's probably why they are always demonizing Christians. For instance i've just started on the new season of Black Mirror and they had a cult of religious believers do something terrible. And that's often the case in Hollywood culture. They depict true religious believers as wide eyed crazies. They avoid the moral questions.
Yes, Christians are the true enemy. I wrote a piece on this a while back in regards to the sexual revolution.
Jesus says “Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.”
one of the worst aspects of life becoming increasingly vicarious is that we neither possess anything to loose nor to empty ourselves of, and neither conceive of anything worth “preserving. the original statement above is distinguishing between life as “psyche,” which we first seek to save but which is rather to be offered up, and life as zoē, which we can “preserve” (ζωογονήσει), but only by sacrificing everything which keeps us from it. but if the psyche has been rendered generic by the influence of a civilization without Christ, we will neither find ourselves inclined to make the sacrifice nor, as you indicated, will we find ourselves possessed of anything worth sacrificing.
And is it any wonder that our society is so selfish? We are trying to fill that emptiness that comes when enframed in technical society. Or the pervasive spiritual emptiness people feel?
“Now, fast forward to the early 21st century when we just don’t need the vast majority of the population,” he added.
Harari has fallen into the mindset and trap of thinking of what is efficient and what is necessary and then spoken the monstrous, and perfectly logical, endpoint of such thinking. We would do well to take heed that this is not an argument about the quality of people, nor necessarily about the abundance of people being a danger (Malthusians), but something I'm not sure I've seen before. A cold and machine-like evaluation that the population is simply redundant to the system.
The bright spot here is that increasingly complex systems require intelligent and dutiful persons so growing the system into an ultra-complex organism makes failure more likely if you put the wrong person in place - especially if they don't actually understand what they're doing. I am going to dredge up the full extent of my WH40k knowledge and say that the techno-priests might be a vision of the future.
Ideally, the Church is a place of Nature restored and there is (I groan at my parish for the electric organ) a place for technique in artistry and beauty to elevate Nature through the work of man in conjunction with God. Whether this is shaping the physical building so that it carries and amplifies sound of the choir and the priest, the iconography adorning the walls, or teaching the young to chant the liturgy.
I agree with the growing fragility of the system. What will they do when there are no people capable of making repairs? Once again 40k is more prophetic that it realizes. And I am glad that you can get the mental picture of what I mean about the church community as a place for fostering human excellence and competence. There is just so much potential there.
“We can not longer spell.”
Ironic.
Ok, that is funny.
It's an iron (and ironic) law: the point where you try to criticise someone's spelling or grammar is the point where you will fail to use correct spelling or grammar yourself.
Good essay though.
So, so true. God has a sense of humour.
I see this in mechanical repair/restoration, which I do in my spare time—we USED to have an intimate relationship with our autos/motorcycles. Now that the computer has taken over, our knowledge of how to maintain/build/repair is non existent—autos are throwaway items now. Computers have taken over the skills of driving—no more manual transmissions! Computer will change how you drive on snow/wet/dry pavement. Etc. Men are meant to labor, and in that labor we know more about ourselves, and creation.
Exactly. We must be the masters of the machines. Instead we have become their slaves.
A tool is an extension of the will of an individual. A machine is a system meant to mimic a human process in a systematic way. The use of tools allows for the imposition of the spiritual on the material. Machines by their nature invert this, and force the user to adapt instead to the imposition of a material process on the spirit. The age of the machine is the age of human removal. It is also, not coincidentally, the age of managerialism, which is what happens when machines impose their demands on the human social order.
Interesting way of thinking about it. Thought provoking.
Beautifully read in the podcast version! Nice intro music too.
Thanks! The technical side of it has been and continues to be a bit of a learning curve. It does help with editing, though.
It was perfect. And I say that as someone with casual misophonia.
I love how you pull in Tolkien and the Bible at the end. Throws it all into a conceptual relief for my mind to integrate the principle of and keep spinning with
Again, thanks for the kind words. I am finding it important to take all of these political and philosophical ideas and show people that they weave in and through our faith, that we can think theologically about the world in an intelligent way. We don't have to ground ourselves in Plato or Aristotle. The core is there is our own tradition.
I changed careers ~8 years ago after spending 20 years in tech. I realized that I didn't know how to "do" anything. It felt like vanity (a vapor). Everything used to be about streamlining processes and eliminating waste (people).
I still have a job behind a screen, but I am very slowly learning how to do things with my hands. It is often discouraging as a feel like a child in my capability without a child's mind to quickly absorb skills. I'm learning to be patient, have a lower time preference, and trust the Lord. I want my children (and me) to know the simple beauty and joy that God gave to us in work.
"Here is what I have seen to be good, which is beautiful: to eat, to drink, and to see good in all one’s labor in which he labors under the sun during the few days of his life which God has given him; for this is his portion." - Ecclesiastes 5:18
That is a tough thing to face. Glad to see you are expanding your capacities. But, yeah, this is what technique can do to us.
Ahh yeah wrt replaceable cogs: not all created equal, it transpires—which immediately calls into question the feasibility of lucrative replacement business. Technique's spreadsheets lie through their [non-existent] teeth ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
🗨 Cultures and civilisations require more than the presence of warm bodies. An excellent example of this is found in the decolonialisation of Africa and other parts of the third world. It showed that you can build the infrastructure of western material civilisation and fill it with the spirit of western law and religion, but you can’t maintain it without Euros or Anglos. When the westerners departed, the streets and sewers and airports were left, but the “mental infrastructure” needed to purvey these resources into genuine societal success were lacking.
(h/t Theophilus Chilton of The Neo-Ciceronian Times --> neociceroniantimes.substack.com/p/the-cargo-cult-mentality-behind-white)
Completely agree with that.
Bright mind Megha Lillywhite summarises thusly:
🗨 Analog technology extends human nature, digital technology limits it.
A rule of thumb you can trust. Within a sound epistemic framework of course 😉
classicalideals.substack.com/p/lab-grown-illusions
And wrt AGI, there's this laughable futility to hubristic attempts to artificially conjure the most sophisticated thing in nature aka human mind:
🗨 We are incapable of perfect observation [...]. There is more that we find that we did not even know to look for. As such, whenever we create “technology” that replicates nature, it is always necessarily an inferior reproduction of it.[...] The car works well because it is not a replica of a horse. The pen works well because it is not a replica of the mind.
I like that analog/digital divide. There is more to it that that, but as a simple binary it works well.