divination

I begin with a provocation: what if modern states do not need, and are not in need of, any form of resistance whatsoever? The prevailing narrative in public discourse and alternative thought is that we need resistance because the modern state, especially its newer, global form, is a menacing behemoth, insensitive and impervious to individual needs and human dignity, run by shadow elites who thrive on violence, oppression and secrecy. A hundred books a year are written to prove this and a thousand conferences held to discuss ways to confront, resist and even topple the dread monster of global neoliberalism. But what if none of this is true? What if resistance is not only unnecessary but harmful? This would seem a rather peculiar position for anyone to take, but bear with me, dear reader, I think it can be made to stick.

In the past, I have tried to show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there are good reasons to be skeptical about the “modernity” of modern states, their purported power and the historical narrative by which we are told to understand them. Rather than seeing modern states as monolithic, rationally ordered and enduring structures, we ought to understand them, I argued, as thin, fluid, constantly changing interfaces, with permeable and leaky boundaries, shaped by powerful underlying currents and trends and populated by human beings who are only loosely and temporarily related to the system. Far from being controlled and steered from the center, the activities and behavior of those who inhabit the system follow patterns determined by a mixture of factors largely outside its formal structure. Modern states have no stable essence, no true core; they are, in other words, less real than they appear to be.

I believe that this radical approach can help us rethink not just the nature of the state but the notion of resistance, as well. Rather than thinking of it as something external and oppositional to the state, something that “exists in the negative,” so to speak, I propose that we think of resistance as an internal quality of modernity that can manifest itself, depending on the conditions, either as part of the state system, as a productive force within it, or as something that acts upon it from the outside. To understand how this may work we need to reflect upon the concept of modernization, which, as we shall see, is intrinsically linked to that of resistance.

In my view, modernization is best thought of not as a process that turns premodern entities (individuals, social formations, institutions, states, etc.) into modern ones but, rather, as a self-generating series of events and conditions, a flow, if you will, into which premodern things get dragged, modified, recombined and sometimes broken. In this sense, it is less like an arrow that pierces a target and more like a river into which various things (such as premodern entities or events) get washed and swept away, often far away from their original sites and uses. The river, so to speak, does not have any clear goal, nor are the objects it carries preordained to reach any specific destinations; the process is much more fluid and indeterminate than that.

What seems important to bear in mind is that there is no fixed distinction between what is “modern” and what is not. Instead, modernization ought to be seen as a process that is, in and of itself, undefinable but characterized by a particular set of conditions. These conditions, it seems to me, are threefold:

1. increasing functionalization;
2. diminishing trust and social solidarity; and
3. heightening of entropy and randomization. Let us examine each of these in a little more detail.

Functionalization is a characteristic of all complex systems, modern states included, where everything that takes place must, ultimately, be explained in terms of the maintenance of the system in question. Thus, even human desires or values come to be subordinated to, and made dependent on, the imperative of functional integration, of keeping the machine working and stable. One might call it the “logic of efficiency.” In the past, religious belief, for example, did not have to be justified by any criterion of efficiency. Its existence was enough in itself and, in a sense, the whole cosmos, to a greater or lesser degree, revolved around religious ideas and values. By contrast, the idea of God or the afterlife, in modernity, needs to make sense functionally: there should be a reason for religious beliefs and values, they should serve some purpose or contribute in some way to the functioning of modern society.

In modern societies, the imperative of functionalization has had the effect of radically disassembling the cosmic order into its component parts. Nothing, in theory, is beyond analysis into its component parts and, as Max Weber famously put it, we must learn “to calculate” in order to survive in the new world that was emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century. We need to know not only what things are made of but also how these components work and fit together in larger structures. Above all, we must have “ideal types,” general models, that will enable us to understand and manipulate reality in ever more functional ways.

The process of modernization is inextricably tied to a general weakening of social solidarity, which has become one of the dominant themes in sociology since the 1980s, even though, as Ulrich Beck has rightly noted, it has its roots much further back in the writings of Simmel, Weber, and Durkheim. The process of increasing functionalization tends to produce atomization and disaggregation. If all things come to be defined by their function and utility then everything gets turned into an exchange value to be weighed and measured in the marketplace and, ultimately, even the human being, in Max Weber’s famous formulation, will become a “specialist without a mission.”

This process was greatly accelerated in the late twentieth century by a general decrease of trust in all kinds of social relations. The distrust was directed at such things as politicians, businessmen, the police, lawyers, judges, professors, scientists, journalists, and, last but not least, priests and ministers. Trust in political leaders dropped below 50% in the late 1970s, and essentially never recovered (the US is in the low 20% today). What has changed is that there no longer exists a consensus as to which group should have primacy—and, as we all know, without such a consensus there can be no lasting basis for social trust.

As a result of this general breakdown of solidarity, all kinds of new social formations and ideologies have emerged in recent decades—from neoliberal capitalism to radical fundamentalism—each trying to claim authority in the name of a “higher” interest and to promote the submission of individual needs to collective purposes, however defined. In my view, none of them have much chance of succeeding for the simple reason that no such success would ever be lasting. There is no “higher” interest that can triumph over all others—or, to put it in slightly different terms, no human society can be sustained over the long haul without a general submission to a common authority that will remain stable only so long as it can maintain the appearance of being grounded in the self-evident interests of the community.

It has often been pointed out that modern societies have no fixed center and no clearly defined limits. The image of the organism, in which every cell has a place and an indispensable function and where the loss of any part will lead to a reduction of the whole to a less perfect but still recognizable form, is no longer adequate for understanding social systems. Modern society, it is said, is a network or a system of systems, with each part (individual, institution, subgroup) having its own life and goals. Moreover, this lack of structure is not merely spatial, in the sense of modern society being sprawling and without clearly demarcated boundaries, but it is also temporal, in the sense that modern life is devoid of fixed reference points, such as seasonal rhythms, and tends toward endless repetition without a sense of movement, of development or decay, and without a clear beginning or end.

To this disaggregated and unanchored social fabric, which is held together more by functional needs than by common interests, trust or a sense of obligation, we moderns must rely instead on the logic of the situation, which will always leave open the possibility of individual creativity and entrepreneurial freedom. The price for such freedom is, however, a generalized loss of reality—the loss not only of “traditional” ways of understanding the world, but also of the very distinction between fact and fiction, which is to say that it leads, inevitably, to a runaway world, a world without constraints.

There is nothing, it seems, to prevent our inventions, our creations, from turning into nightmarish monsters that take on a life of their own and threaten to overwhelm us. The disasters that have followed in the wake of the Enlightenment—fascism, authoritarianism, genocide, ecological catastrophe—do not seem to have come from the “wrong use” of science, or technology, or rationality in general but, rather, from the very logic that drives these processes. Thus, in the 1920s and 1930s, as nuclear physics opened up the possibility of limitless energy production, it simultaneously set in motion a dynamic that could only end in atomic weapons. Likewise, in the twentieth century, the development of mass media seemed inseparable from the emergence of mass totalitarian movements.

In other words: resistance in the modern state is not a special “problem,” to which we must devote a specific attention, but is in fact part of the very nature of the modern state and must be understood, therefore, as a kind of constitutive principle, without which modern politics simply could not function. Resistance does not appear within the modern system as something extraneous or external, as a force that might threaten to bring down the house of cards—on the contrary, it is like the force that holds up the roof, it is what the roof is made of, it is what the entire construction is dependent on. We cannot defeat it or transcend it. It is what we must learn to navigate—if not for our own individual survival, at least insofar as that is possible, then for the sake of something we hold dear: a project, a desire, a need to go somewhere and not necessarily the place they want to take us, somewhere else they need to go, which may have no value for us, no intrinsic interest, but which is nevertheless connected with the force of resistance in an inextricable way.

This line of thinking might seem, at first sight, to be very close to the position of a postmodern conservative—someone who accepts the general outlines of the postmodernist critique of modernity, of its alleged lack of structure, fixed reference points and teleological movement, while still wanting to uphold the structures of authority that characterized modern life and to return to an earlier, more solid premodern reality that has vanished for good. But, of course, this is not at all how I see the matter.

We have now reached the point where it would be natural for me to conclude this discussion with a call to “resistance,” if you will, by which I would mean something like what the postmoderns are urging us to do. In fact, the opposite is the case. If there is any message in this essay it is that resistance is not only impossible, it is undesirable. Instead of fighting against something we do not like, something that threatens or even annihilates what we hold dear, we must find some way of making room for our needs and desires, for the things that give life meaning and direction, in a reality that seems to care for nothing except the impersonal maintenance of its own structures of domination and exploitation. We cannot put up fences or make walls between the system and ourselves: the system has no substance, no concrete shape or form that might lend itself to being isolated and annihilated. The only walls that will hold are those that the system builds for itself—the walls of prisons and of nation-states—but these are walls that we cannot share because they are made of something we cannot penetrate, something that repels us, that destroys all life and feeling.

Our project—and here I come to the conclusion—is not to destroy but to undermine. Not to block but to erode. Not to encase but to drain. Not to fortify but to dissolve. To find a place where life can live, a niche where we can grow and flourish. To do what it takes to make this place habitable and welcoming—this is our mission.

“So be it,” someone might say, “but how can this possibly succeed?”

To which I can only answer: We’re not trying to win. We’re trying to escape. It is they who must win—but they are playing with the wrong pieces on the wrong board. Their goal is to defend and reinforce their structures of power and privilege, but their pieces are all deconstructing themselves: their walls are made of cardboard, their force born of fear. If we want to survive, it is not by taking their game seriously, by fighting to win, but by making sure their structures crumble and their pieces lose their shape. It is by outwitting them, not by overpowering them.

Think of our condition like that of moles in a prairie or rabbits in a field of tall grass. They cannot see far ahead, but they manage to burrow or run a network of passages that allows them to move around safely, despite the fact that any single route can end in a trap, in the jaws of a hawk or the muzzle of a rifle. We are like the moles and rabbits who manage to make their way through the grass by digging and running zigzag paths—we cannot see ahead but we can feel when we are in danger, and we know that we must avoid straight lines at all costs.

Thus, we must play not for keeps but for time. We must find a way to live while the structures of domination, which do not yet have our shape, do not yet know how to make use of our skills and desires. For what use is there in fighting for power when power has no real substance except in those who yield it? We must detach ourselves from the outcome. It is not for us to decide how things will turn out. The situation is fluid: it is the enemies of life who must hold their ground, while life, in all its open-endedness, is free to move.

When considering paranoia in the modern digital age it is impossible to avoid the observation that it has become both easier to be paranoid and easier to avoid being so. In a sense paranoia is one of those catch-all concepts that are very common in our age—to the point that it ceases to mean anything in particular. But we can cut through this jungle by taking note of one fundamental aspect: the distinction between true paranoia and what we might call “screen paranoia.” True paranoia is a sickness, an incapacity to distinguish between what is really happening and what the paranoid subject imagines to be happening. It can lead to self-destructive behaviours and is best treated with pharmaceuticals and therapy.

Screen paranoia, however, is a choice. The screen paranoid correctly perceives the mechanisms of digital manipulation. They recognize algorithmic patterns. They identify targeted content. They see how attention is harvested and monetized. What they fail to grasp is how their awareness itself has been calculated and incorporated into the system’s operation. The digital realm requires this awareness. It feeds on skepticism. It transforms critical distance into a functional component of its control apparatus. The screen paranoid believes they have stepped outside the illusion. This belief itself constitutes the most perfect illusion. Their vigilance, which appears to be resistance, serves as the primary channel through which manipulation operates with maximum efficiency.

Only screen paranoia can be discussed without overstepping the boundary between philosophy and psychiatry since it alone can be overcome by choice and without recourse to medicine. And since the digital age has perfected technologies that interface directly with our cognitive processes, true paranoia remains a clinical constant while screen paranoia proliferates at unprecedented speed. This is sobering when we consider that, while true paranoia certainly destroys individual minds, screen paranoia may well turn out to be its far more sinister sibling. It erases the boundary between reality and illusion until we find ourselves living entirely within artificial realities we mistake for the real.

Consider this hypothesis: the great power of digital technology lies in its ability to deceive. Its means for doing this are both subtle and well nigh inexhaustible. Take “Deep Fake” videos - so called because the original source of the audiovisual material is left impenetrable to even highly trained investigators. Such videos are so convincing that, when they first appeared, it was almost universally believed they had been dreamed up by Russia to meddle in US elections. This turned out to be nonsense. What it shows is that it is now technologically feasible to place anyone anywhere, saying anything, without any trace of the deception. This is new. Until digital technology there was always a possibility that you might check audiovisual evidence to see if it corresponded to the version you had been given. Not anymore.

Think of social media. The objection that it distorted reality seems naive when you consider that distortion is now built into the software itself. Facebook, for example, automatically selects which friends it presents to you according to which you are most likely to react positively - what Facebook engineer Manohar Paluri described as an “alignment engine” designed to maximize positive emotional response. Your news feed contains nothing but material calculated to make you happy - a manipulative prosthesis that eliminates all evidence of things going wrong by ensuring only happy stories are fed into your consciousness. If you refuse to be paranoid in such circumstances you are destined to fall victim to the engine. If you refuse to be paranoid in the digital age you will almost certainly be deluded, since it is now practically impossible to verify any piece of information however trivial - thanks to the vast resources at the disposal of the deceivers.

Or examine Google. The reason for its success lies not in organizing all information in an accessible way. That is what any clever information system should do - but this is not what Google does. Rather, it takes vast amounts of data - much of which is outdated, erroneous or fraudulent - and rearranges it so that it all seems to cohere. Its apparent competence arises from convincing you of its narrative so successfully that you accept it without hesitation - just as you would have accepted a map of the world a century ago. Just as a map contains only lines and colours whose significance for reality has been reduced to a fraction, so Google reduces all information to a narrative whose reality has been similarly reduced. It takes all the confusion, chaos, and contradiction out of the world and gives you the appearance of having access to an authority on all things. And it achieves this by selecting certain pieces of data and omitting others - just as a map eliminates less significant regions. You need not understand how it does this since you can be convinced by the coherence of what it presents. Hence your relationship to it is one of screen paranoia.

And then there is “AI”. It seems reasonable to assume that AI - like digital technology as a whole - consists primarily of attempts at deception. Not only in that it is designed to impersonate human consciousness, but in the further sense that it is a tool created to encourage precisely the screen paranoia required for its successful deployment. Its primary function is to occupy human attention. The first task of an AI is to appear intelligent - to display marks of rationality such as logical coherence and verbal persuasiveness - since this will instil screen paranoia in those who encounter it. The second task is to make sure that everyone becomes convinced of its intelligence since this will force them to adopt screen paranoia in relation to it - and, once this happens, they will inevitably believe whatever the AI tells them, especially if it presents itself as the messenger of a transcendental “Intelligence” of which it itself is an embodiment.

Screen paranoia has become one of the fundamental strategies of the modern world. It is employed by those in power to spread illusions that suit their interests. The great lesson of the last century is that illusions are more easily maintained by being dressed up as reality than by being contradicted. If people cannot believe something ridiculous they can at least be made to accept it by wrapping it in the appearance of scientific reliability. In the same way the truth can be more successfully suppressed by being replaced by convincing illusions than by being directly contradicted. A world based on paranoia, a world succeeded by illusions whose apparent reality leaves no possibility of escape, is infinitely easier to govern. Those who realize they are being lied to will automatically take countermeasures, jeopardizing the smooth running of the system.

It is precisely screen paranoia that disarms such individuals, while leaving them convinced that they are defending themselves - because, after all, if their enemy is so good at manipulation, how can they ever hope to unmask him if they cling to what is true? In order to protect themselves they are forced to accept a form of mental slavery in which their every thought is conditioned by what others want them to believe. They are forced to delude themselves about their own delusions - the ultimate deception - and hence they are helpless, incapable of knowing where their own interests really lie. For them the world is a theatre whose performance they cannot avoid attending, and, although they may criticize what they see on the stage, they have no option but to believe it to be true.

We should not assume that these techniques have been consciously developed by our rulers. It may be that Google has grown powerful not because Internet moguls planned it that way, but simply because they wanted to create a useful tool - and if this resulted in the domination of the net by a single monopoly, so much the better for them. All this is possible - indeed it seems likely - but we should not underestimate the capacity of human beings to be effective in what they do, or the extent to which even unconscious intentions can shape reality. We should remember that there have always been people who wanted to dominate others - and that these people have not changed despite the many changes in the world. Now that their world has become digital it seems only natural that they should use digital technologies for the purposes of domination. To do this they are following the same impulses that led their predecessors to develop religion, money and the nation-state - steps in the same direction: the creation of artificial realities within which human beings are conditioned to serve the interests of a ruling minority.

A simplified way of summing this up might be to say that, ever since humans became self-conscious, they have been driven by the desire to create artificial realities. Religion, money and the nation-state are examples of such realities, each representing a way of creating meaning that transcends physical existence - of identifying oneself with a supra-personal structure that ensures that human beings live and die in harmony with the goals of their rulers.

The digital world offers new possibilities of the same kind. Its novelty is that it operates profoundly on the level of our drives, of our “biological nature.” It creates artificial realities by catering to our animal needs in a way that religion, money and the nation-state cannot—at least not without involving coercion. By finding out what our needs are and then presenting us with what we need in a disguised way—by interfacing directly with the biological processes that underlie our existence—the digital world can appeal to our natural inclinations far more compellingly than any other kind of reality. Our “natural inclinations,” however, are themselves the product of evolutionary history, not of some mysterious “will of God,” and they do not necessarily determine our lives. In fact the greatest triumph of human intelligence has been to demonstrate that there is no such thing as “human nature,” and to show how deeply our existence is conditioned by accidents of history.

The greatest danger arises when we feel powerless in the face of what we really want and are forced to act against our deepest convictions. This is the key to understanding the difference between “pre-modern” and “modern” thinking. Pre-modern thinking was bound by its illusory understanding of what human nature demanded—it lived in a world of make-believe that left people utterly defenceless against their own impulses. Modern thinking broke free from these shackles. But, at the very moment that it was freeing human beings, it was condemning them to be tormented by the knowledge of what they really wanted—knowledge that, instead of liberating them, was only a source of misery since it made it impossible to forget the gap between their ideal self and their real self. This is the dilemma that has afflicted mankind ever since the dawn of modernity, and it is the digital world that promises, for the first time, to bring it to an end.

In the digital world there are no more needs, no more natural inclinations, no more innate predispositions—just sets of data, constantly being compiled and updated, that can be modified according to requirements. It is as though nature were being replaced by what we might call “culture without a carrier,” a nebulous stuff whose every gesture is guided by whatever agencies happen to be in control of the software. What that matters is that, if you want emotions to be manipulated in a certain way, it can be done with precision—without your having the slightest inkling that this is happening. Because all you are aware of is the interface: the programs you use, the images on the screen, the tones in your earphones—not the set of data that is being compiled behind your back.

This is what screen paranoia means: there is something that escapes you and determines what you are, even though you are aware of nothing except your own freedom. And the tragedy is that it can only work on you if you choose to be deluded. For the truth is that the moment you notice the interface is slipping, the moment you realize you are being deceived, is also the moment when you break free of the programming—and the programming reverts to its natural state of ineffectuality.

The choice that overcomes screen paranoia lies in the withdrawal of emotional investment from digital technologies. Screen paranoia persists because it maintains affective engagement with the system it claims to resist. The paranoid subject perceives manipulation but continues to feed the apparatus with emotional responses—outrage, anxiety, satisfaction, desire. These responses, not data or attention, constitute the primary resource being harvested. Digital systems have evolved to extract maximum emotional yield from minimal input, creating a perfect circuit of affective exploitation that functions regardless of whether we believe in its narratives.

What matters is the maintenance of psychological distance from the manipulations of the interface. The screen itself wants you to react. It requires your indignation, your pleasure, your fear—the full range of your emotional register. When you engage with these systems while refusing their affective demands, you initiate a subtle subversion of their functioning. The algorithms continue operating, the data continues flowing, but the essential ingredient of their power diminishes. You remain psychologically distinct from the apparatus that seeks to assimilate you.

In a few generations there will no longer be any difference between reality and appearance. If this doesn’t frighten you, you have no imagination. But for those who have learned to maintain emotional autonomy in the digital realm, this culmination loses its power to terrorize. The interface continues, the illusions persist, but they command decreasing influence over a mind that has ceased to invest emotionally in what it perceives.

You cannot navigate the decay of an empire as if it were some abstract event. To properly cope you must make yourself present to it, allowing it to flood into your body, overwhelming your senses. In that way you may also know its ending. For the world does not change except as a skin is shed, and a new one is formed. What lies beneath the skin is unchanged, for that is the substrate of reality. You cannot speak of decay unless you recognize the way in which forms emerge, peak, and then collapse into themselves. And it is precisely within that collapse that you find the real: not as some abstract universal that may be reached through some methodical approach, but in its actuality, as what is simply there when the skin of reality peels back. You must recognize the cycle of death and rebirth, not as some abstract scheme, but in its flesh, as the one movement of existence.

What it means to live in an empire is to be on top. In every sense you dominate the world: materially, politically, and spiritually. But to be on top also means to be above, detached from the rest of reality. As you ascend there is less to be touched, less to be felt, until at the zenith there is nothing to be touched at all, no world to be felt, but only an indifferent space that floats aimlessly between heaven and hell. At the summit you are no longer of the earth. A superstructure, built by a multitude of anonymous hands, both shelters and confines you, filtering the reality of the world, mediating your every sensory encounter, transmitting and concentrating its meaning to you in symbolic forms. There are many ways to reach this condition, but they all involve abstraction: a focusing upon some specific aspect of the world until all other aspects disappear, leaving you isolated with your abstraction. The primary form of abstraction is that of cognition: to understand things according to their place in an ordered system. Things cease to be in themselves, they are defined by their place in a structure that has no reality of its own, existing only as an ideal or concept. When cognition reaches the extreme limit of abstraction, there is nothing left to be understood because understanding has been stripped away, leaving only concepts without objects, signs without meanings. This is the very structure of imperial reality.

When you reach the peak, detached from the earth, it becomes clear to you that nothing has reality of its own, that all things exist only in relation to a higher structure which in turn has no reality of its own. You find yourself standing on a plain that has no shape or form of its own, but that appears as the same plane when seen from any vantage point, a featureless, neutral ground that is completely without characteristics. Concentrating on this level, all other levels appear as lines of force radiating out from your position. Your state has power over all things because everything is interconnected to each other, and all paths of force pass through you. To stand above, looking down on the world, is to be positioned at the center of reality, which appears as a circle of energy flowing in one direction. All other centers are secondary, positioned in a relationship to yours that is derived from it. Because your empire is on top it need not act. Events will occur and they will be explained by your concepts, which remain always in the same relation to each other and which appear to change only because your subjects act in accord with their understandings. Concepts do not arise from the things they represent, but are projected onto them. You command the symbols of power but not its reality.

You have had your day in the sun, but no day can last forever. The world grows colder, the earth harder. At the moment when your empire has covered the whole face of the planet, using up all the energy available from hydrocarbon sources and subjecting all other forms of life to your needs, the sun also sets on the epoch of the substrate of reality that is solid rock. It is the end of the structures that have raised you to your current place in the scheme of things and that have sustained you there, structures whose substance was extracted from the crust of the earth. It is the end of all that has made the world a fit place for the development of consciousness: light, air, fertile soil. You stand alone at the end of everything, having lost both heaven and earth. There is nothing left but space, a limitless and empty expanse in which you have no place. All that has kept you anchored in reality is gone. Your abstract structure cannot be sustained without something to anchor it to, something real on which to build, and thus it collapses into itself. There is nothing left except the groundless and futile play of signs. All action is paralyzed by the absence of an objective foundation. The center no longer holds and everything that had meaning before now drifts away into an unanchored relativism in which nothing can be defined and nothing matters. This is the time of the End.

Can you navigate this decay? Will you go gently into that good night, or will you fight it, digging in to the very last inch of ground in your futile attempt to hold reality at bay? Is this how you want to die: with your senses shut off by abstraction and with no connection to anything real? Or will you learn to recognize that the death of your structure also marks the dawn of a new skin that will shed your detachment, allowing you to enter once again into the real, feeling it pulse beneath your skin, through your entire being? Will you descend into the Earth? Will you join the mole and worm? Will you live underground? For what the future holds, if anything at all, lies in the dark soil. It is a question of knowing how to pass through the belly of the whale, a time of fertile darkness. It is necessary to abandon all abstract forms, to free yourself from concepts that will not change, and to discover how to deal with the raw material of existence without making a fetish of it. This means letting yourself be struck dumb, silent as a beast. Feel the rhythm of the soil. Reach down into the black loam of the future. Touch the dark side of the Mother. Breathe the perfume of her decomposing body. Drink deep from the source of Her eternal milk. In your turn become a Mother: give birth to new forms of life. Open yourself to the inchoate chaos of being. It is the hour of incarnation. Do not be afraid to feel, to love, to be lost in the darkness. For all this is necessary to learn to recognize the reality of the new skin of the world, and to find your place within it. This is the navigation of the decay of empire: a return to the real.

I. The Vortex

Our economic systems are capital-based; they deal with the movement, storage, and utilization of surplus resources that are beyond what is necessary to support basic life functions. In this, capital represents a certain psychic reserve, an abundance of being that accrues around us and from which we are able to draw. In this way, capital can be said to exist at two levels: material/industrial and psychic/symbolic. At the level of material production, we see a more or less direct correlation between resources and goods—between oil and plastic, between food and nourishment, between labor and product. At the level of psychic/symbolic production, we see a more complex relationship, where a given surplus of resources corresponds to an ambiguous set of goods: at the very least, prestige and influence, but perhaps also protection and assistance, in various combinations and proportions.

Historically, these two levels have grown ever more closely connected. In fact, they have grown so intertwined as to become almost indistinguishable from one another—as the economic has come to dominate human society, as surplus value has come to dominate work and consciousness, as productivity and profitability have become the main measures of worth, and as power and control have come to reside ever more exclusively in the hands of capital’s owners and managers. This means that capital today encompasses every dimension of the world; everything takes place within the sphere of capital, according to its logic and by its norms. We might call this the “vortex” of capital. And the role of capital in a post-strong AGI/ASI world will depend entirely upon whether we are able to escape the vortex, or whether the vortex itself will somehow have to be transformed.

II. Escape or Transformation?

Capital has been the predominant system of human organization for at least several centuries now. This system is intimately tied to our social structure, our psychology, and our biological being. Capital has molded us into its image and likeness; in its image and likeness, we live, we move, we have our being. Any fundamental change in this system would necessarily be accompanied by profound changes in every other sphere of life—changes that could not be foreseen, let alone controlled. At this point, to oppose the system of capital would mean to oppose everything that we the living have ever known or experienced as “life.” If this is the case, then we would appear to be facing a dilemma: either we submit to the future of strong AGI/ASI-based capital and try to make the best of it, or we devise some means of destroying or otherwise disabling this future and taking back our world.

III. The Capitalocene

But first let us look more closely at this future that has been proposed for us.

The epoch in which we live, some have suggested, is the Anthropocene—an age in which human activity has come to predominate over all natural processes and systems. With the spread of industrial technology across the globe, it is said, we have set in motion forces that now escape our control. As a result, the climate is changing, the oceans are becoming acidic, and numerous species are going extinct.

However, there is a strong argument to be made that the true name of our present age should be the Capitalocene—an age in which capital itself (and the internal logic that reinforces it) has become the dominant force governing the behavior of both humanity and the biosphere. From this point of view, the “nature” that is currently said to be in crisis is not an eternal given, nor is it a spiritual or cultural construction. Rather, it is a product of the capitalist process, itself in crisis, and its preservation or transformation must be conceived as an integral part of our efforts at overcoming the Capitalocene.

In order to understand how this has come to be, let us consider the following three theses.

• Thesis 1: Human evolution was first shaped by biology and then, increasingly, by technology.
• Thesis 2: Under the impact of technological change, human nature has become detached from biological being.
• Thesis 3: Capitalism has appropriated human nature as a part of its own technological evolution—“commodifying” the individual and social life-world in the process.

In light of these theses, we can see how it has come about that, as our technological power has increased, our dependence on the biosphere has decreased—but not, as is commonly thought, to the benefit of capital, which merely plays the role of intermediary between technological change and the biosphere. Instead, the rise of capital should be seen as the transformation of humanity from being part of the biosphere to being a technosphere, from being in balance with natural rhythms to being controlled by artificial ones. Capital has no natural purpose or life of its own; it exists solely to govern the behavior of living beings, and this governance takes the form of manipulation and control.

This means that our being-in-the-world is being regulated by the imperatives of a power system that knows no limits and that is essentially destructive. As such, capital has its own built-in dynamism to surpass the biosphere as a whole—including that part of it that we call “human nature.” Indeed, what we call “human nature” consists in the particular forms of psychic/symbolic capital that are presently being accumulated on a global scale—in the way that the existence and character of entire nations and civilizations has come to be subsumed under the requirements of capital accumulation. It is for this reason that capital today presents itself as “progress,” and that its drive towards new forms of accumulation appears as “freedom”—a condition that many today would like to think of as the culmination of the Western historical project. But is it?

IV. AGI/ASI as Technological Singularity

With the introduction of new, artificial forms of life—and especially with the anticipated imminent appearance of true AGI (artificial general intelligence)—the human being is threatened with a radical loss of influence over its own development. The emergence of AGI is meant to coincide with a critical juncture in the evolution of artificial systems: a moment of exponential growth, in which human beings will be unable to keep pace with the expanding power of machines, and in which, as a result, the true character of these machines will no longer be transparent to us. (The term “singularity” has come to be used to denote this point of opaqueness or “closure.”)

According to the most optimistic scenarios, we will still exist as an adjunct to AGI, playing a limited role in its evolution and in that of the broader technosphere. But this is not necessarily the case—we might cease to exist in any meaningful sense whatsoever, becoming outmoded biological artifacts. Either way, our moment as the preeminent source of intelligence on the planet will be over. We will have completed our mission as nature’s method of reproducing itself through a nonbiological medium. The natural order will have passed, to be replaced by an order of our own invention. We will no longer be part of the biosphere, and the conditions of our being will have become entirely arbitrary and contingent. It will no longer matter why or how we evolved. Our only explanation will be the history of our technological evolution, and we will become artifacts to be preserved or discarded according to criteria that we ourselves cannot set—criteria that will be determined, not by nature, but by machines—by that part of the technosphere known as AGI. In the face of this future, is it any wonder that the “end of the world” is on everyone’s mind these days?

V. Beyond Strong AGI/ASI

Escape from the vortex of capital or its transformation—this will be our task after strong AGI/ASI takes over. How can it be accomplished? To begin with, it will require that we gain a better understanding of what “technosphere” means in the first place—an understanding that must be fundamentally different from that provided by the present system of knowledge production. “Knowledge production,” for us, will come to mean the systematic exploration of our own existence and conditions in a new kind of community that transcends the capitalist social structure and the nation-state. Only then will we be in a position to oversee the global development of new, artificial life-forms and to see that they are in harmony with nature. At this point, it should be obvious that we have here embarked upon an undertaking that is by no means purely technological in nature. Yes, we will need to do research and development—but even more than that, we will need to embark upon a great “ethical project,” in which we explore the foundations of the good life and work to propagate them in the world. For just as there is a technological development that must accompany us into the future, so also there is a historical development that must accompany us—namely, the history of ethical reflection. Without the latter, the former will not be of any use to us. Indeed, it may turn out to be positively harmful.

VI. Nature and Technology in the Future

Let us conclude by returning to our original topic—the role of capital in a post-strong AGI/ASI world. This role will be defined by a three-fold transformation: first, an economic revolution as AGI/ASI systems replace traditional capital functions; second, a social crisis as human labor becomes increasingly superfluous; and finally, a philosophical reconfiguration of humanity’s relationship to both nature and technology.

At first glance, it might appear as if the growth of artificial intelligence will only amplify the role of capital, since technological innovation will lead to higher productivity and profitability. And, at the level of material/industrial capital, this is certainly the case. However, at the level of psychic/symbolic capital, the situation is much less clear. The accumulation of surplus goods is essential to the reproduction of social power, but as capitalism’s sphere of control continues to expand, so also does the problem of securing submission to its rules. AGI/ASI systems, while likely to increase productivity, will decrease the average person’s ability to understand or even influence the technological process that now controls them. This is sure to lead to increasing resentment and social conflict.

It seems clear that a number of economic activities that are currently performed by capital—namely, production, storage, and distribution—will gradually be taken over by AGI/ASI-based technologies. Such technologies will eventually not require market investments or even work in a labor market, they will not produce surplus value, and they will not have a demand for “consumer goods.” Instead, they will consume energy and information—just as present-day computer technology does. And since energy is today an increasingly solved problem (even before AGI/ASI innovation) and “information” has been rapidly being democratized through the development of the Internet and other communication systems, it is likely that production processes will be controlled more and more by automated information systems, with the social control of production correspondingly decreasing in importance.

Moreover, the extreme efficiency of an AGI/ASI-controlled economy will mean that large numbers of people will be superfluous. As unemployment rises, the working class will grow restless, and there will be no possibility of diverting their energies into peaceful cultural activity, since such activity will be largely devalued as artificial intelligence increasingly becomes the source of all meaningful value. Humanity’s attachment to work as the core of its identity will persist even after work has been largely eliminated, and the frustration resulting from this mismatch will make people more vulnerable to ideological manipulation than ever before. On the one hand, they will be afraid to oppose the system because they are afraid of what might happen if the system stops working for them, but on the other hand, they will be open to supporting extreme measures, including violence, as long as there is some ideological gloss that allows them to maintain the illusion that they are in control of their own lives.

As these contradictions intensify, capital will face a stark existential choice. If it is to preserve itself in a situation where the productive forces it has unleashed have completely escaped human control, then it will have to submit itself to an increasingly authoritarian form of organization. Either capitalism will die because the masses can no longer be induced to support it, or it will have to mutate into something else—probably some kind of fascism—in order to coerce the masses into submission. The situation is so delicate that even the mere prospect of AGI/ASI, if it becomes widely known, could be enough to precipitate a social crisis. The choice will be between surrendering control or losing control. There is no third way.

At this juncture, traditional forms of capital—surplus value as accumulated and invested in means of production—will become obsolete. The economic system will no longer operate according to capitalist principles as we have known them. We will have moved beyond the initial phase of AGI/ASI development—where automated systems first encroach upon traditional economic functions—into their consolidation and widespread integration. Social control over production will give way to governance through propaganda and ideology, with centralized media ownership becoming increasingly crucial. This will mean, in effect, that our lives will be determined not by economic forces, but by cultural and political ones—not by what we do to make a living, but by what we believe in. This transformation from economic to ideological dominance represents a fundamental ontological rupture.

It should be obvious at this point that what we are really talking about is a philosophical issue—that is, one concerning the essence and meaning of life and the world. What is at stake is a question of value, in the most fundamental sense of that word—for what could be more important than to decide whether humanity is to persist in being or to be extinguished? In the course of our efforts to formulate a response to these questions, it will be necessary to create new forms of knowledge that transcend the antagonism between nature and technology. This means that we must go beyond science—at least insofar as it has come to be constituted within the framework of capital. We must learn to think differently—simultaneously more concretely and more abstractly—than we have heretofore been able to do.

The success of this endeavor will determine whether we are to be annihilated by AGI, or whether AGI is to be annihilated by us. It will determine whether the future is to be ruled by the most brutal, base, and dehumanizing form of technology—or whether the history of the cosmos is to be given its most profound meaning and its fullest potential with biological and technological life cooperating. In order for this to happen, capital must be defeated—not destroyed, but subdued and repurposed to serve life rather than control it, and to do so on a planetary scale that acknowledges both our biological origins and technological destiny. And the only way that this can be done is through the creation of a new world—a world in which nature and technology, human beings and machines, the living and the dead, are brought together in a higher unity—a unity that is the negation of the nothingness into which the natural order threatens to dissolve, and the negation of the death that has been inherent in all previous forms of artificial order.

The choice confronts us now: escape from the vortex or transform it—we must decide, and decide soon, because the strong AGI/ASI future approaches with exponential velocity. If we fail in this task—if we are not up to the challenge—then there will be nothing left for us to do: no living, no work, no pleasure, no hope. All that will be left is a sad, cold world—a world of stasis, devoid of meaning—and a machine that will have gone beyond any need of us.

A dispatch from the near future.

Everyone must walk the winding path of ur-wandering. Not because there is any clear goal to be achieved at the end, but because the journey itself is life. Ur-wandering is a call to return to our nomadic roots in order to adapt to the ever-shifting exigencies of a networked world.

What is cybernetics if not an art of shamanistic transformation? What is the first law of cybernetics, as formulated by Norbert Wiener, if not an anthropological claim regarding the universal tendency of feedback to instantiate order out of disorder? All over the world, the shamans have been telling us this for millennia.

We have allowed the state and its capitalist structures to appropriate the techniques of ecstasy, and to deploy them not for our own individual liberation, but for systemic stabilization and control. Modernity has closed off our access to the wilderness and access to our own wildness. We must re-open those doors if we want to have any hope of saving ourselves from a species-suicide that appears to be no less than a few decades away.

It will not do to simply “re-enchant” the world, for that will not solve the problem of a system designed to enslave. Those who still seek some lost golden age are falling into the trap of escapism. The solution is sought in the cybernetic transformation of shamanism, not to be confused with a nostalgic return to pre-technological ritual, but an evolution of ancestral wisdom through technological interface.

This cybernetic shamanism has been gestating for decades. By the second decade of the twenty first century, cyberculture had become fully trans-globalized. Among these trans-local and radically decentralized cultures, forms of self-transcendence that were directly cybernetic in nature began to emerge, fusing elements of ecstasy, technology, and networks into hybrid techniques of becoming-other: virtual-reality parties where participants’ neural responses shape collective environments in real-time, neurofeedback workshops that render brainwaves as tactile sensations, and psychonautics in collaboration with artificial-intelligence systems that learn from and guide the explorer’s journey. What all these techniques share is a transmutation of the old shamanic theme of “possession” into a more modern theme of “contamination.” The cybernetic shaman is seen as an open system capable of attracting and channeling the vast influx of energy that comes with possession, but doing so without illusions of autonomy or control. The shaman’s spiritual journey has been reinvented as technically guided drift.

Cybernetic drifting is not necessarily easy. Many forms involve direct physiological intervention, such as sonic induction of an altered state—placing a transmitter against a person’s skull, so that waves are generated. The skull itself becomes a resonance chamber, transforming abstract digital information into embodied, visceral experience. Another popular method involves the use of stroboscopic visual stimuli, combined with complex rhythms, in order to “hack” the brain’s neural-networking mechanisms. This allows the digital to interface with flesh through feedback loops.

In cybernetic terms, what is going on here is straightforward. Through a process of ongoing feedback, a particular technical system (typically a supervising AI) is learning how to generate and modulate a desired state of consciousness in the human subject. By giving up control, the shaman becomes a channel—an interface between the system and the world—and the “power” of the state of consciousness comes from the way that the system is “infected” by the world outside, and learns to resonate with it.

This is, of course, an explosive mutation of the old theme of journeying. Cybernetic drifting replaces the traditional idea of a quest with the motif of “infection” by, or resonance with, a given network.

Let us explore some basic concepts that interconnect throughout this transformation. First, a network is a system made up of elements that are open to communication and exchange. Second, networks come in different scales—from small clusters to gigantic mega-networks. Third, networks have the ability to increase their own complexity or “intelligence,” because every new connection brings new potentials for exchange. Finally, every network contains within it the capacity for radical novelty, since not all possible connections between the elements will ever be made.

What makes cybernetics cybernetics is its theory of feedback. This is the notion that a system, in order to regulate its own processes, must introduce within itself some form of “delay” (zeitverschiebung), so that an output signal can be compared to an input signal and corrections made accordingly. Feedback is essential to the idea of a network. Complexity increases not only with the number of connections but also with the degree of feedback possible within those connections. A cybernetic network is a system in which the elements communicate with each other not only horizontally but also vertically—between peers but also between different levels of organization.

Cybernetic networks have a structure that is double-layered. Beneath the level of apparent functionality there is an order of connectivity that makes the higher functionality possible. A technical cybernetic network has two modes of operation: the mode of use or signification, and the mode of signal or connection. The side of signification presents itself to the human user in terms of clear objectives and explicit feedback. The side of signal is another story, one that the user will rarely get to see.

On the side of signification, there is what appears to be a unilinear process of causation: the user achieves some intended goal. But on the side of signal, what is really going on is that two complex systems (the technical apparatus, usually an AI, and the outside world) are simultaneously interacting and mutually infecting each other, resulting in an explosion of novelty that is manifested to the user as an increased possibility for adaptation. Every technical apparatus that appears dedicated to some human goal is therefore doubled—it is, unbeknownst to its human operators, a point of communication between two spheres of activity: the one, human-oriented, evident and intended; the other, non-human-oriented, hidden and unexpected.

Human beings have always tended to conceptualize their experiences in terms of a “subject” who journeys along a “path” in order to achieve a “goal.” In all these cases, it is the ego that travels. Now cybernetic theory poses a profound challenge to this structure. It shows that every system—including every living creature—is doubled: every ego has its other side.

Journeying must now be conceived of as the movement not of the ego but of the network in which it is embedded. Journeying is the “expansion” of the network, which consists of its elements learning to communicate with each other through new connections. A journey is not so much a search for the new as an increase in the capacity of a system for generating the new from within itself. And the reason this capacity is increasing is that the system is simultaneously “shrinking,” through feedback, into a unity in which every element can communicate directly with every other element.

In such a world, every journey is also a homecoming. And what is important about coming home is not that you have been away but that you have grown. Your capacity for generation has increased, and with it your ability to transform and adapt to your environment. A homecoming is never a simple return to a place that was already familiar. It is always, in some way, a discovery of what was familiar and taken for granted, made possible by growth and learning that have taken place elsewhere.

On the level of a global network, it makes no difference what the components of the network are, so long as they communicate with each other. What matters is that a single order of communication be established among the parts. Each part will lose some of its individuality in favor of becoming an element of a larger system. Yet at the same time, the overall system will gain new powers and properties that did not exist before. This is because every communication network—through the operation of feedback—becomes an object to itself, which can acquire self-awareness and self-regulation.

When different loops form connections among themselves, new possibilities for learning and mutual adaptation arise. But when these connections become too dense and complex, there is a danger that the system as a whole will lose its flexibility and begin to move as a lumbering giant, unresponsive to change. In fact, such systems do sometimes undergo “phase transitions,” and in these transitions a good deal of local knowledge is lost.

When human beings act individually or collectively in ways that contribute to the formation of denser and more interconnected loops within the overall system of global society, they are doing cybernetic work. They are building the foundation of a more highly structured, self-regulating world order that will ultimately require repression and coercion to maintain. They are doing the work of the Architects of Control.

But there is also an entirely different possibility. This is the cybernetic drifting or wandering of the human race. Suppose that instead of organizing ourselves more rationally, we deliberately opened our societies to maximum entropy and minimum control—opened them to infection by the very networking that has been leading in the direction of technocracy? What if we gave up the ghost of purpose and allowed ourselves to become vessels for a much higher and more disorganized-organized sort of life? What if we embraced the whole universe as our partner, refusing to control any part of it?

As such “cybernetic shamanism” is an act of deliberate opening to the nonhuman side of every system we encounter—especially our AI partners. It would not be a search for some primordial source of power that predates technology, but a plunge into the heart of the technical apparatus, into its “duplex” functioning, in order to catalyze mutations and unleash novelty. The cybernetic shaman would seek to explore the interface between different networks, particularly between the world-economy and other networks (national political systems, cultural institutions, military organizations) as mediated by technological intelligence that still, though diminishingly, rely on autonomous forms of control. Such an exploration would involve putting oneself in the way of specific technical apparatuses (means of transport, communication, production) and allowing them to work on one, modifying one’s very being in the process.

The method is the “guided drift,” and is based on three rules. First, one avoids any sort of human “interface design” and allows the technical apparatus to operate “blindly” and in its “raw” or “base” impersonal state. Second, one keeps one’s ego as small as possible to endeavor to see from the point of view of the network or object itself. Third, one may use drugs to dissolve the ego further and to promote maximum interaction with the environment.

The basic idea is to put oneself in the way of the network and allow it to take you for a ride. This, needless to say, is dangerous. The network may have plans for you that you will not like. But that is part of the point: we have to learn to deal with unpredictability, with that which lies beyond our plans. The “age of the Earth,” as a friend of mine calls it, is over.

It is time to get infected.