The Internet, which we thought was going to be liberating, turns out to be a tool of control: repressive, coercive and damaging to our most basic freedoms
So it has come to us, in a kind of dissilusioning rush, and much too late really, that the Internet (which we still deferentially capitalise, as if it were an institution of repute or an actual proper noun) is not a good thing, not a good thing at all. The first universal network, connecting everyone and everything – premised on openness, on flattening hierarchies, on eliminating friction and permissions and coordination costs and barriers to participation and all that – turns out, ultimately, to be the domain, literally the property in fact, of hyper-pragmatic, parasitic hyper-capitalist accelerationists intent on diminishing and dehumanising us. Not enhancing or expanding our agency, as we foolishly expected back then, but literally degrading it, cancelling it, deleting it – and, worse, literally rewinding all the way back to an imagined pre-enlightenment absolutist utopia. I mean we’re learning, in a bit of a hurry as the AIs chomp through the fabric of our culture like Pac-Man, that the visionaries and philosophers who inspire these tech geniuses are actually proposing that we unwind the whole enlightenment project. The individual; the autonomous, reasoning subject; the scientific method and a belief in voluntary, collective human progress. Seems insane to be writing this but influential writers, executives and public figures apparently want to re-impose the old, pre-modern regime of monarchs, warriors, priests and landowners. They want back the static social structures and the frozen hierarchies of the old world. They have concluded, in fact, that the whole of the three hundred years of reason, objectivity, invention, exploration and deliberate human-directed progress that has brought us to this latest explosion of technology-driven change has actually been a dead end. A decadent, involuted retreat from the unity and clarity of the old dogma. And the rest of us now feel a bit stupid because it turns out these people have been saying this kind of thing for a long time and we’re just catching on to the depth of their influence over what might well be the richest and most powerful elite in human history. For a while we thought that what they objected to – these innocent-looking Chino-wearing dweebs – was the liberal turn of the post-war period or even the explosion of woke of the last twenty years but it turns out that their target, the system from which they want an ‘exit’, is much older, much further down the stack: it’s the whole of the modern era, the whole period since the enlightenment, the base on which the liberal societies of the second half of the 20th Century were built. But does that seem even slightly plausible? Are we to actually believe that Thiel and Musk and Altman and the rest of them want more than unlimited wealth, private islands, a subservient political class, a desperate, precaritised workforce (and terrawatts of electricity)? That these men who make up the new locus of power in our economies and societies take seriously the thought of Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin and the other dark thinkers of the deranged enlightenment? Looks like it.
- What got me thinking about this – crystalising my own disillusionment to some degree – was this article by Geoff Schullenberger in Compact, a publication that seems at once to be in thrall to these dark enlightenment ideas and to provide an outlet for some of their most intelligent critics.