#james poulos

Here is the problem: technology is producing profound insights in the realm of politics, but the realm of politics is succumbing to deep ignorance about technology. Theorists of technology are becoming the most significant sources of political ideas; theorists of politics are becoming incapable of understanding significant technological ideas.

Unschooled in perceiving the development of digital technology for what it is, political leaders now frenetically throw around appeals to concepts—slogans, “values,” “ideals”—that have come unglued from the reality formed by our surrounding digital environment. The concepts being developed by leading technologists, by contrast, are gaining serious influence over political life despite their departure from “mainstream” concepts because of how strongly rooted they are in perceptions formed by the digital environment.

These two destabilizing trends raise (significantly) two linked issues, one more abstract and one more particular. First, is the Western political tradition obsolete? Second, is America, because of its regime, worth the trouble of trying to preserve?

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The key is that the content of those broadcasts mattered less to the structure of social order than the context that was televisual (and other electric) media itself. The context was the rule of the human imagination. Those most expert at creating ethical dreams for mass broadcast and adoption made up the institutional elite, both in private and public life: the spheres of influence which smeared together and produced a global Western ruling class.

This class, psychologically and socially deeply formed by the electric environment, was emotionally and scientifically certain that the technological progress they superintended would result in the consummation or perfection of their globalized environment. This context decisively shaped the content of what we might call “televisual ethics.” In this way was the medium itself the “message.”

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Now we all could be our own TV hosts, channels, even our own broadcast networks. The internet would enable the televisual medium to perfect the “togetherization” of everyone—productively, peacefully, and amicably. Everyone would become “friends,” in the new idiom, although really the idea was much closer to the more loaded phrase invoked by electric age idol John Lennon in the televisual anthem “Imagine”—“a brotherhood of Man.”

These democratizing and capitalizing features of perfect televisual rule would consecrate a durable new relationship between rulers and ruled. The ambitions of H.G. Wells, who had prophetically dreamed up a postwar utopia where religion, family, and the nation-state had been replaced by a virtuous post-political elite of imagineering scientists of ethics, would at last be achieved.

Of course, this is not what happened. And in all likelihood it is the opposite of what is yet going to happen. But why? The view of the imagineers and their faithful audiences is that the machines they built to produce utopia were abused by all-too-ordinary people, who are still plagued by the disgusting and dispiriting flaws that have always hamstrung human beings.

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We united the dreams and the tools that would end history—and these monsters used them to restart it again! This vengeful and wounded cry now shows up constantly in the backlash within tech itself to social media. Making the world safe for democracy at the end of the First World War had failed; making the world safe for elitism at the end of the Second World War also failed; and remaking the world through a fusion of the two at the end of the Cold War has now failed as well. No wonder the increasingly naked desire today is to make the world safe for bot-ocracy. The task of harmoniously ordering humanity has at last been shown to outstrip even the capabilities of the most ethical humans with the best tools; only the bots and the algorithms, perfectly expert in allocation at scale, can save us now.

But such a vision of using robots to realize human dreams is itself an electric-age idea pushed to terminal extremes. Digital shapes us in such a way as to disenchant even this ultimate wager of the imagination. After all, digital technology does not shape our perceptions and sensibilities in accordance with the rule and measure of the human imagination, but in accordance with the supremacy of machine memory. Rather than the psychedelic sensory trip of televisual life wherein each individual is ethically moved to do as they dream, digital forms us all to experience life in the context of an inescapable and comprehensive architecture of recordation and recollection: an ultimate Archive of all the types of things.

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What, then, is replacing the obsolescing rule of the human imagination and the institutional elite that ordered the globalized West by “perfecting” that rule? Now, the hallmarks of communication within digital’s archival architecture shape our psyches/souls: think identity, history, biography. These preoccupations of distinctly human memory sharply reveal the fundamental binary in digital life between people and bots: we visible, incarnate, living beings versus invisible, disincarnate, animate yet not living beings. Notice that the ultimate robots in digital life are not hardware machines doing parkour and slipping on banana peels. The ultimate robots are much less like humans than—yes—angels: whether in fear or fascination, Americans now wonder how many of these energy-entities can dance on the head of a pin. Even if the operations of the machines being arrayed to rule us reveal themselves in specific places, these invaders we encounter have ceased to exist in physical space.

And so there are those among the super-intelligent refugees from the sinking Titanic of the televisual elite who wish to go even beyond the “ultimate” electric-age vision of creating bots pure and powerful enough to rule us with perfect master virtue. Tapping into both psychedelic drugs and the deepest vein of gnostic thought, which transcends all eras of technological development since the development of the alphabet, these digital natives formed by terminal televisual technology want to build machines that, angel-like, bear us “heavenward,” such that we can at last overcome our wretched imperfect humanity—merging with both our ultimate dreams and our ultimate tools to become as gods. As the likes of “Singularity” evangelists Ray Kurzweil or Eliezer Yudkowsky and their followers demonstrate, the project is not simply to radically extend our lifespan or eliminate all disease on Earth (endeavors top technologists are already actively funding). It is to shed the body and achieve immortality as pure consciousness. Within Silicon Valley, these gnostic cults of transhumanism, and their conscious conception of queer polyamory, pharmaceuticals, and psychedelics as stations en route to the full and final emancipation of human imagination, are well known. There are, as they say, many such cases.

And yet there is one more group of note among top technologists, who reject all televisual visions and see in digital the retrieval of premodern forms that restore true pride of place to the best of the human. While, given the outsized goals and frenetic energies of the prevailing elite, this group may now seem the most anodyne or marginal, it is, in some key respects, the most pivotal of the bunch to America’s future, as we will see in a moment.

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The problems with American political theory extend well before the onset of the digital age. By the mid-1990s, the discipline was divided into roughly three schools. A “communitarian” school, oriented around social values, opposed the “libertarian” one focused around descriptive and prescriptive individualism. A “critical theory” school more or less opposed the other two on partly normative and partly methodological grounds. Critical theorists, left largely to their own devices for reasons of political correctness and disciplinary opacity, grew deeply recondite in its doctrines and language yet ever more influential. Political theory schools as a whole grew more ideologically fixed, however: the social wing became dominated by Rawlsianism, while the most powerful faction at the individualist pole was Straussianism.

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Thus American political theory “developed” into a position of almost complete irrelevance during the 2000s. Unable to say anything that made a meaningful contribution to American life regarding events that ranged from 9/11 and the financial crisis to the Arab “Spring” and the rise of China, the discipline largely collapsed into a discredited rump Straussian faction, a school fundamentally composed of economists, and a metastasizing blob of critical theorists spreading the same vanguard radicalism as “studies” professors and students in other departments.

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And here is the crucial twist. While Jaffa’s disciples surely agreed that the supremacy of America’s regime by the standard of justice had to do with the benefits accruing to its people from its unique and historic philosophical reconciliation of the nettlesome theological-political problem, that fateful achievement bore such significance because of its role in arresting—yet never destroying—the iron logic of the cycle of regimes. Setting aside the many ins and outs of the details, Jaffa’s advancement on Strauss was simply to establish that the question of the importance to humanity of America’s prospective projections into the world was secondary to the question of the importance to humanity of America’s continued existence in the world. That is, both for America and humanity as a whole, the constant, foundational political directive for Americans is to preserve the American regime, not to imagineer a global one.

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These implications instruct digital technologists that their fate and freedom, and, we might say, their fecundity, are more stubbornly entangled than it seems at first blush with America’s own. Obviously, for Americans themselves, the price of regime collapse will be steep and awful to bear. But in political terms, the steepest price Americans—and ex-Americans—will have to pay will be the reopening of the Pandora’s Box of alternate regimes, and the free play of harsh and unforgiving alternatives to the pursuit of justice according to natural right. Whether at home or abroad, they are likely to struggle even to find a hospitable basis for new foundings of new regimes, even ones considerably more fraught or fragile than America’s today.

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What is radicalizing younger Americans on the “Right” and “Left”—and blurring those categories together—is not electric-age content activation so much as the techno-environmental transformation of their perceptions and sensibilities. This point is essential to grasp because it indicates that the distress facing the American regime is different in kind from mere shifts in battle lines among factions. In the digital environment the viability, the practicability, of the American regime is coming into question for reasons that go much deeper than “ideology” or “bias” or “opinion” or indeed any kind of political outworking of the human imagination. Rather than a matter of what-if, it is a matter of what-is.

To be sure, on the “Left,” the imagination is working overtime in the vanguard movement to replace the American regime with a normatively queer, post-white, and ultimately posthuman gnostic technocracy. But even this ultimate expression of the politics of delusion is attracting so many adherents in Silicon Valley and across the Woke Archipelago because digital is so furiously disenchanting all moderate or “basic” fantasies. Basic fantasies are “cringe” and “cheese,” pathetically doomed and low-status efforts to find stable refuge for one’s identity in lived-out visions that digital reduces to “dead memes” and humiliating clichés.

Whiteness is evil, but deprogram the evil, and whiteness is empty—hollow, meaningless, obsolete. We already see the same experience at work with maleness: deprogram the evil that defines it, according to the vanguard Left, and what is left is a disgusting, disenchanted neuter. Take away fatherhood (patriarchy), priesthood (molestation), military or law enforcement service (racism), business leadership (capitalist greed), and what is left is a civilization of post-boys, autogynephilic, cripplingly awkward, knowingly purposeless, well aware that games and gaming are rapidly sinking into low status despite the fleeting celebrity of the world’s very top gamers, occasionally ready to throw themselves at the feet of the most extreme possible fantasies—such as the fantasy that obeying the call of the chan to murder a host of interchangeable bystanders in some way operationalizes yet another interchangeable “manifesto.”

A spectrum is haunting online—the spectrum of autism. Faced with an endless barrage of disenchantment, young Americans increasingly conform to the architectonic attitudes and sensibilities of the Archive in order to survive digital life. The autistic sensibility is becoming normative on the internet: from virtuosity in pattern recognition (which Marshall McLuhan traced to immersive information overload) to strategic retreat from the exposure of commitment, connection, and community. To be “Aspie” or “spectrumy” is to be that most precious of things online—readily identifiable as safe to pass through the endless checkpoints of internet life. For those unable or unwilling to adopt that form, there are now nearly endless medicalized identities to adopt instead. There is no more grievous insult to hurl at someone online than to deny them their right to medicalize their identity—and the right to the medicine that sustains it.

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Our political class is rushing towards complete disconnection from our technologists and the generations of Americans they and their tools are forming in profoundly new ways. Rising generations online already assume the political class is simply irrelevant. Liberals are in relatively less trouble, but only insofar as they have already surrendered their agency and their identity to whatever their ruling vanguard commands them to be. Conservatives, unwilling to make that deal, are generally recoiling in castrated snobbery before what they believe to be a resurgence of reactionary loutishness at once too horrible to countenance and too marginal to ever possibly stoop to take seriously.

The reaction on the online “Right” to conservatives and liberals alike is therefore to dismiss them as denizens of “clown world”—NPCs, non-player characters, from whom one can expect nothing but dead memes and fatal distractions from the task of carving out a viable existence worth the trouble and pain of living. With a few very minor and contingent exceptions, all of the mainstream strains of conservatism and liberalism, even some of the more ostensibly “heterodox” ones, are now considered completely obsolete and defective—that is, disenchanted fantasies that give no life in a digital age.

As the Right’s political class has retreated toward oblivion, technologists and digital natives looking for a viably human escape from the apocalyptic bonfire of the fantasies have begun to coalesce—as hinted above—around a freshly pre-modern notion of restoring human excellence to its pride of place. In short, the field of political thought that shellshocked conservatives have all but abandoned is being reoccupied by Right technologists developing an anthropology for the digital age. They vary. There is more than one way, at least in theory, to cut one’s losses and escape clown-world America before it’s too late. But if anything unites them, it is the suitably digital sensibility that our biological inequality is what makes humans human, what makes human excellence possible, and what can make human excellence into a way of life. Digital reopens the question of what makes human life distinctive, and the general answer reverberating through the digital Right is our genes.

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Another school of thought, however, notably shies away from the teched-up version of the political philosophy of human excellence—in this sense, following Nietzsche, who assuredly did not want to turn over the quest for surpassing our “all too human” nature to the scientists, whose immense courage in their will to truth buckled at the final test, confronting the possibility that “truth is a woman.”

This is the intellectual zone peopled, as Michael Anton recently observed, by Bronze Age Pervert and his followers. The living online legend, known as BAP by those in the know, speaks in his self-published Bronze Age Mindset to those disenchanted by equality “as propagandized and imposed in our day: a hectoring, vindictive, resentful, leveling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence and publicly denies all difference while at the same time elevating and enriching a decadent, incompetent, and corrupt elite,” as Anton puts it.

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And yet, the current configuration of America and the world in the digital age raises distinct complications even for ethically pure BAPists. In fact, similar complications arise for every strain of generally Right-inflected anthropological politics arising from the perceptions of technologists and digital natives, because the question is simple but nettlesome: how much of your life are you willing to stake on the possibility that no viable life worth living in the digital age is possible if the American regime is not preserved?

There are potent signs that a tiny few may be able to take what Curtis Yarvin calls the “clear pill” and punt on the question of America’s preservation, relocating to quieter (or louder) zones perhaps more nurturing or forgiving of men rethinking and retrieving human excellence. It is unclear how BAPpy it really is to take a chance on abandoning America to gnostic Left posthumanists with the tools and wealth of Silicon Valley at their disposal. And it is not at all evident that technologists appreciative of the new geneticism are best off rolling the dice on a world where the American regime has lapsed.

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For it is this regime that captures in its system of justice the political facts of our anthropology, and throws light on the limits beyond which human excellence for its own sake cannot justly be pushed. The power, reach, and safe harbor for excellence that our regime continues to provide—with a rare measure of freedom—are precious advantages not readily obtained elsewhere. The most powerful enemies of freely flourishing natural human lives still find in America their greatest and strongest adversary, and while that is a credit to flesh-and-blood Americans, it is a consequence of the structure of our regime. The vengeful imagineers and gnostic posthumanists in America, whom the technologists of the new Right rightly seek freedom from, will gain tremendous new powers if they have their way and destroy it.

Similarly, for those terrified of a new digital reactionary movement bent on breeding barbarian Übermench, or simply of street gangs of teched-up fascist LARPers, the inescapable truth is that only those expert in the theory and practice of the American regime can lead those wavering in the wilds of online back to a salutary patriotism. Established liberals and conservatives have lost that capability, and the fanatical woke vanguard of the ruling class will never be able to gain it.

Still, many people are unprepared to think the unthinkable about the new rules in the amazing reality to come. Many people simply do not want to live in reality, and to the degree they are willing to tolerate reality, they do not want to be amazed by it.

They do not want to be pushed in a direction where their basic premises—such as the cultural dominance of the humanities—are challenged. Digital technology does not care about these objections. And the sense of inevitability this fact has pushed into everyday life is driving students, whether they know it or not, away from humanities-driven careers.

Will anything from the humanities survive? Of course. Participating in rituals and recording human experiences aren’t going away any time soon. Expect more religion, for example. But just as the culturally dominant purposes to which activities are put have changed over the millennia, practices we associate with the humanities will change in a massive way again.

Things that would once be games will become real-world enterprises with real consequences. Things that would once be mere fictional diversions will become allegorical restatements of foundational moral axioms. Recreation will give way to training. Wondering will give way to worship.

VAST ASTEROID Debut ‘Drown’ Official Video As S/T Album Sees 1st-Time Vinyl Release

(By Pat ‘Riot’ Whitaker, Senior Writer/Journalist, RiffRelevant.com)

The Los Angeles supergroup collective known as VAST ASTEROID have premiered a new official video, one for their song “Drown“. (more…)

New Post has been published on http://beta.citizensjournal.us/ca-attorney-general-wants-confidential-koch-data/

CA Attorney General wants confidential Koch data

By James Poulos

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Pressing for access to confidential lists kept by the Koch brothers, U.S. Senate candidate Kamala Harris injected another note of politics into her tenure as California Attorney General.

Harris “has a fight on her hands trying to get the brothers’ Americans for Prosperity Foundation to give her access to the same confidential data it already provides to the Internal Revenue Service,” Bloomberg Politics reported. That organization has labored in court to maintain control over information about its contributors, arguing that they and it face routine threats of violence.

“Grotesque threats have been leveled against known associates of the foundation, ranging from threats to kill or maim to threats to firebomb buildings,” the Foundation alleged, as Courthouse News reported. “More mundane threats abound too, including boycotts, firings and public shaming, all of which are now demonstrated components of the playbook of the foundation’s more extreme opponents.”

Pressed on the prospect of public disclosure by judges at a recent hearing in federal appeals court, “Deputy Attorney General Alexandra Gordon told the judges that new regulations to prohibit such disclosure are in the making, though she didn’t know when they would be enacted,” the site added. Gordon waved away claims that Foundation contributors could be put in peril by the disclosure of their information. “We have basically some anecdotal evidence of threats, mostly arising from the founders of this foundation, the Koch brothers’ very public presence and very public events held by the foundation,” she said, according to Courthouse News Service. “That has nothing to do with whether this type of disclosure requirement is actually going to lead to harm.”

Republished with permission by Cal Watchdog.com

The legal battle between the Kochs and the state Attorney General began in December 2014, when Americans for Prosperity sued Harris for violating its First Amendment rights to free speech. Although California law requires all charitable organizations to register with the state and furnish copies of their public IRS filings, as the Los Angeles Times then noted, the so-called “Schedule B” filing, which lists the names and addresses of donors giving over $5,000 each tax year, is “kept confidential and not available to the public.”

While Americans for Prosperity “said they have been registered with the state since 2001 and had never before been asked for its list of donors,” the Times reported, a Harris spokesman said the Foundation “has been out of compliance with the law for a number of years” and “did not receive a communication previously from our office for one simple reason: the section responsible for enforcement has been chronically underfunded for years.”

By this year, however, the Kochs had gained the upper hand in court. This February, U.S. District Judge Manuel Real blocked Harris from pursuing the list “until the legality of the request has been resolved,” as Bloomberg Business observed, citing “a separate case in which the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco halted the attorney general from enforcing the demand on the Center for Competitive Politics while that case was before that court.”

“Real rejected Harris’s argument that her office won’t publicly disclose the donor information, saying that California doesn’t have regulation preventing such disclosure and that, as such, it was left to the attorney general’s discretion whether to make it public. The judge agreed with the foundation that the attorney general’s office won’t be harmed by an injunction because it hadn’t had the donor information for the past decade.”

Whatever the outcome of the case, Harris stood to gain politically from putting the heat on Americans for Prosperity and the Kochs, who are reviled by Democrats as big-money GOP puppet masters. Of late, Harris has had to weather criticism of her own campaign spending, “using her campaign account to fund stays in upscale hotels and first-class airfares during her nearly five-year tenure as state attorney general,” as the Hill recently reported. “A review by The Hill of California campaign finance records reveals that Harris’s expenditures follow a pattern: The Democratic candidate regularly charges thousands of dollars in luxury travel and hotels to her campaign.”

Republished with permission by Cal Watchdog.com

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