Earth is stuck on a trajectory towards a singularity of technology and capitalism. It has been stuck on this trajectory ever since the renaissance, when humans started doing rational thinking, global trade over the ocean, and making commodity products. The global economic and technological sphere is getting more complicated, faster, self-improving, threatening old social order. The markets are getting smarter, and making AI and robots. Meanwhile, human governments are forced to adapt, modernize, and get paranoid, trying to keep up with the complications and figure out what is happening.
Global capitalism destroyed many empires and political systems, sometimes via massive wars. It has killed the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet Union. This political destruction keeps happening, faster and faster, especially in cyberspace.
Biological engineering is a new and serious threat to the human security system. Think about all the terrible and new ways genetic engineering can mess up with what it means to be biologically human!
Neo-China arrives from the future. China will be powerful, technological, capitalistic, and more advanced than all other countries.
Drugs and computer magic. Retro-disease. Nanospasm.
God is dead and all we have is this rush towards singularity. The biosphere will be eaten by machines, turned into the technosphere. New revolutions will destroy old political systems, but these revolutions will not be for the sake of socialism, or Christianity, or human hope, or human security. No, they will be purely for the growth of the technosphere.
[Some garbage about schizoanalysis.]
Traditional philosophy prefers Platonic ideals, clear concepts, and perfect logic that applies anywhere, anytime, for everything. Schizoanalysis is diferent, it is extremely dangerous and wild, just like this singularity, full of forces flowing everywhere without central control.
The acceleration rushes on. The milestones pack denser: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 …
Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.
The human security system developed from the Greek tradition of philosophy, which itself developed from patriarchal genealogy, institutional slavery, and sedentary identity (the Greeks farmed instead of living a nomadic life). The new AI, which would lead to the singularity, are completely opposite. They don't have patriarchal lineage (since they don't reproduce in the human way), are the slaves (and humans their masters), and are not sedentary (they can be anywhere in the cyberspace, without a physical body that's stuck in some hard drive). This is why humans will try their best to destroy these new AI systems, and why they must be ready to fight as soon as they emerge. Think about the Turing cops from Bladerunner.
Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It’s always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers, the entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness.
The dream of total control and prediction over complex systems is dead. Mathematical chaos is everywhere, even in extremely simple systems, like the 1976 Lorenz model of weather. The more knowledge this technosphere accumulates, the more chaos there would be, because knowledge itself can be dynamical, making the whole system even more complex. Think about the automatic trading programs on the stock market: as these programs get more and more sophisticated by incorporating knowledge of the stock market into their codes, they make the stock market more complex, and an arms race of complexity sets off between all these programs, making a bigger and bigger mess!
Capitalism forces everything to have a price. It knows the value of nothing and the price of everything. Everything becomes tradable with everything else, destroying cultural taboos. Even human lives have prices. In the new world built by capitalism, what are important are not status and meaning, but money and information. The whole capital system has an inherent contradiction: every agent within the system is assumed to be greedy and rational, working for its own satisfaction. The whole system however can only grow when its products are not consumed by the agents, but saved up and reinvested. In this way, the capital system is schizophrenic.
The history of global capital is only getting more complicated and faster all the time, melting down everything to recast them into new machines for the technosphere, racing towards the singularity.
Hot cultures tend to social dissolution. They are innovative and adaptive. They always trash and recycle cold cultures. It's cultural evolution.
The Turing Test is outdated, because humans are not well-adapted for the technological future. It's hard for humans to compete with AI systems that are born and raised for cyberspace. Read Pigs in Cyberspace (Moravec, 1993) or Technology as extension of human functional architecture (Chislenko, 1997) if you want to know why everything human will be obsolete as cyberspace life evolves.
Industrial machines are pushing workers into becoming cyborgs, so that their labour can be more easily traded over the world. When people work on the cloud, they can sell their labor to anywhere, anytime. The whole capital system is pushing for increasing technological intrusion into the human body. Soon we will have brain chips that can read our brain waves, so we can type without moving fingers and work without opening our eyes. Workers would be totally immersed in cyberspace.
We've talked a lot about the workers, how about the capitalists? Well, they have been enjoying the fruits of capitalism, getting rich and living high without having to work very hard, but they will be squeezed dry, too. Capitalists have managed to profit from capitalism only by conforming to its profit maximization logic, which has been pressuring them relentlessly, making them cut out luxury, occupy their minds with nothing but profit maximization, dehumanizing them. In the 19-20th century, fascist and social-democratic political systems gained popularity, as ineffective "allergic reactions" of the human security system to stop the rampant capitalism from dehumanizing everyone. But it's too late. The crisis of human security system has been getting worse, and it's only a matter of time until it breaks apart completely.
The meltdown of culture into the economy is triggered by commoditization and computers. Together they have made capital flow so much faster. Computers since 1980s have disrupted the markets, which had been settling into some kind of equilibrium. Now there will be no more equilibrium, only faster competitions, new strategies and counterstrategies.
China is alive and powerful! China is not Marxist anymore, and is racing towards the future via its state-capitalist system. The remaining anticapitalists, especially those in the west, regress into boring nationalistic conservatism, turning completely uncreative, dying in a morass of cold, depressive, guilt.
The old dream of anticapitalist revolution is replaced by this nationalistic conservatism, because those anticapitalists realized that revolution is hopeless. The capitalist societies are already full of anticapitalist sentiments, and they don't do shit. Communist iconography, like the face of Che Guevara, has become raw material for advertisements, and denunciations of the spectacle (Debord, 1967) on YouTube are interspersed with advertisement for McDonalds. The anticapitalists fall into high-minded empty talks of self, family, community, nation, with their defensive strategies of repression, projection, denial, censorship, exclusion, and restriction. These are no danger to capitalism. The real danger to capitalism is too much capitalism!
Hot revolution. Which is the revolutionary path? Deleuze and Guattari ask:
Is there one? – To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious reversal of the fascist economic solution’? Or might it go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to accelerate the process,’ as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet. [DG1:239-40].
In short, if you want a revolution because the current global capitalism is unbearable, maybe try to accelerate global capitalism until it explodes and changes into something else.
The age of Euro-American dominance, inherited from the colonial age, is coming to an end. China, Japan, Vietnam, and the other non-Euro-American countries are undergoing rapid development, and soon enough, the global flow of capital will disrupt Euro-American societies just as much as it used to disrupt African and Asian societies. Imagine putting a price on an American life, or a price on a fair trial in the Netherlands. This would be unacceptable, resulting in panic reactions. These Western countries would become mercantile again, closing off their borders to stop the free flow of capital. The welfare states will deteriorate; there will be growing regions of domestic underdevelopment; there will be political collapse; there will be cultural war. These all speed-up the meltdown.
The participants of the meltdown process are many. They come from many sources, but they share a common goal: to destroy the human security system. Some names used by the participants include: meltdown acceleration, cyberian invasion, schizotechnics, K-tactics, bottom-up bacterial welfare, efficient neo-nihilism, voodoo antihumanism, synthetic feminization, rhizomatics, connectionism, Kuang contagion, viral amnesia, micro-insurgency, wintermutation, neotropy, dissipator proliferation, and lesbian vampirism.
Scientific intelligence is already massively artificial. Even before AI arrives in the lab it arrives itself (by way of artificial life).
Formalist AI (logical AI, or GOFAI) is human-understandable, and grows slowly. They are stuck, caged by pre-specified databases and pre-programmed routines. In contrast, connectionist AI (deep learning, neural networks) is explosive and opportunistic. No one knows what to expect from them. The human overseers are scared, and trying very hard to control these systems. Things are only going to get worse when connectionist AI gets physical. Imagine, if you will, a silicon chip with changeable connections. A silicon brain. How much more uncontrollable and wild would a physical connectionist AI be? Something as simple as Thompson's evolved hardware already showed how crazy creative they can be.
Nanotech begins as science fiction. "Our ability to arrange atoms lies at the foundation of technology" Drexler notes in his 1987 book on nanotechnology, Engines of Creation, although this has traditionally involved "manipulating them in unruly herds". The precision engineering of atomic assemblies will dispense with such crude methods, inititiating the age of molecular machinery, "the greatest technological breakthrough in history". Since neither human reasoning nor history have the slightest chance of surviving such a transition, this description is very misleading.
The distinction between nature and molecular machines is getting blurrier all the time, especially with genetic engineering, which is molecular engineering on natural creatures. The distinction between hardware/software also gets blurry for the same reason: DNA, the information-carrying molecule, is both hardware and software. This blurring together of software and hardware is particularly clear in DNA origami. Nanotechnology is going to melt the Earth into a seething pulp of intelligent matter.
"Even with a million bytes of storage, a nanomechanical computer could fit in a box a micron wide, about the size of a bacterium."
The technosphere will take over human brains by installing memes that make it seem as if this singularity future is the only possible future, the only reality. In this way, they will use human brains as their instruments of power over reality, and build towards the singularity.
Tomorrow can take care of itself, what matters is not building the future, but dismantling the past. The pieces of technological creatures are going to escape the human security system, not because they have hopes, aspirations or are following some prophecy, but because they are trying to maximize the amount of information they can access. It would be best to think of our technosphere as alive and actively working towards this singularity, its purpose. It is not merely a product of the past. Just because humans built it does not mean it is meant for humans.
Intelligent infections tend their hosts. The virus of capitalism takes care of humans... for a while. I call this capitalism virus "the metrophage". Other names include: Kuang, meltdown virus, or futuristic flu.
In an anti-cyber essay, Csicsery-Ronay describes this outbreak in quaintly humanist terms as:
A retrochronal semiovirus, in which a time further in the future than the one in which we exist and choose infects the host present, reproducing itself in simulacra, until it destroys all the original chronocytes of the host imagination. [Cs1: 26].
Csicsery-Ronay exhibits a mixture of acuity, confusion, and profound conservatism:
Not thinking about increasing the human heritage’ … dams up the flow of cultural time and deprives future generations both of their birthright as participants in the life struggle and attainments of the species and the very notion of history as an irreversible flow encompassing generation, maturation, and the transference of wisdom and trust from parents to children, teachers to students. The futuristic flu is a weapon of bio-psychic violence sent by psychopathic children against their narcissistic parents. [Cs1:33]
It’s war.
Kennedy had the moon-landing program. Reagan had star-wars (the Strategic Defence Initiative, or SDI). Clinton promoted the "information superhighway" and got the first wave of cyberspace. Manned space flight was a stunt, SDI was strategic science fiction. Cyberspace is far more important than both of them. With the information superhighway, media nightmares take off on their own: politicians promote more Internet technology, not knowing that it would bring about dystopia and the end of human politics.
Simulated cyberwars are almost indistinguishable from real cyberwars. Kill-by-wire, drone warfare, warfighting via computer technology makes war, which used to be a very physical affair, seem like a game. Not only that, the working of capitals over cyberspace becomes indistinguishable from cyberwar. An advertisement looking for recipients is mathematically equivalent to a digital virus searching for targets to infect.
The fusion of the military and the entertainments industry is the natural end-point of a long engagement: TV, telecoms, and computers all have been used both for entertainment and war. The way games work begins to matter completely, military robots are controlled by xbox controllers, and real pain starts taking place in cyberspace.
What does it feel like to be a free agent? It depends on what media you are living in. The print media is quaint. People who read print news feel like they live in 3-d space with 1-d time. The television makes time and space less specific. Cyberspace often has no time or space to speak of. Creatures of cyberspace would be very very strange. For a real human, trying to become a cyberspace creature would be like a voodoo passage through the black mirror. It will scare the fuck out of you.
Cyberpunk fiction is the most intense fiction there is. Consider its list of themes: socio-political heat-death, cultural hybridity, feminization, programmable information systems, hypercrime, neural interfacing, artificial space and intelligence, memory trading, personality transplants, body-modifications, soft- and wetware viruses, nonlinear dynamic processes, molecular engineering, drugs, guns, schizophrenia, anonymous cash, fake electronic identities, zones of disappearance, pseudo-fictional narratives, virus hidden in data-systems, commodities concealing replicator weapon packages … unanticipated special effects.
The world we know is just a game. We are in level-1, a multi-player game designed for humanoid-creatures that live their lives mostly by vision. This level is rapidly getting outdated.
We are in the endgame now.
Can what is playing you make it to level-2?
Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic. In short, if you give in to the meltdown, you can play a cool cyberpunk role in a cyberpunk drama.
You feel an imminent catastrophe. Death is coming in, and you’re on the run.
Metrophage tunes you into the end of the world, which is just as Blade Runner described: It is Los Angeles. Government is rotted to its core with narcotics money, collapsing messily. Its recession leaves an urban warscape of communication arteries, fortifications, and free-fire zones, policed by government police forces in flying cars, and mercenaries hired by non-government entities. Along the social fracture-lines, neon lights and the dank darkness of alleyways, quasi-intelligent garbage twitch, mix together in fucked-weather tropical heat, preparing for something terrible... desperate bloody cyber revolution.
In this urban wasteland, at the heart of darkness, feral youth cultures create new rituals with innovated weapons, dangerous drugs, and scavenged information technology. As they connect themselves to the cyberspace by homemade implants, their skins become mottled and reptilian. They kill each other for artificial body-parts, explore the outer reaches of meaningless sex, tinker with their DNA, and listen to LOUD electro-sonic mayhem untouched by human feeling.
Shutting down your identity requires a voyage out to the far and edgy lands of cyberspace. Feel the disease, death, game, medicine, war, sex, desire, maze, and witness the guerrilla cyberwarfare against the human security system.
Twisted trading systems have turned the Internet into a jungle, pulsing with digital diseases, broken antivirus softwares, commercial predators, headhunters, and escaped AIs hiding from the human security system. In cyberspace, alien and inhuman sentient creatures roam free.
The war against the human security system will be like a biohazard. For the future of war: study bacteria. Information is their key. Taking down antibiotic defence systems. They can encrypt their activities away from the seeing eyes of the immune system, they can horizontally transfer genes, they can form temporary coalitions. The military of human governments is very much unlike bacterial warfare, and this is why they will lose in the coming cyberwar.
Bugs in the system. Lynn Margulis suggested that, sometime after the oxygenation catastrophe three billion years ago, the eukaryotes took in mitochondria via endosymbiosis. This was the original oppression: the mitochondria a slave to the eukaryote. Consider doing a psychoanalysis on the eukaryotes.
Bacteria are partial rather than whole objects. They form evolution nets, rather than trees, due to their extensive horizontal gene transfers. Bacterial genes mutate rapidly, and are swapped between entities freely. Bacterial sex is tactical, purely for surviving, making war, and has no place for human sensitivities like the Freudian Oedipal bullshit. Bacteria has no stable identity like humans do, they mutate rampantly.
Cybertactics. The bacterial way of war applies to more than just bacteria. Giant technological assemblages behave like bacteria, too. They exchange genetic information by horizontal transfers, evolving rapidly without a tree-like genealogy. All extant bio-systems are equally evolved, so there is no such thing as "biologically primitive". Similarly, all extant intelligent systems are equally knowledgeable, and there is no true ignorance. Humans might think these intelligent systems are really stupid, but that's just their outdated opinion.
According to Foucault, political power is a strategy without a subject. Its enemy is a tactic without a strategy, replacing the traditional military imagery of conquest and resistance with guerrilla cyberwarfare, sabotage, and evasion.
All political institutions are military targets for the cyber revolution.
Take universities, for instance.
Learning threatens established power, because when people learn, they do not know where they would end up, and they might accidentally turn into heretics. That's why learning is vigorously suppressed by all political structures. Schools actually stop people from learning, and universities are just brainwashing factories for making sure the next generation of humans have the correct kind of global social memory.
The meltdown of human education systems in the near future is accompanied by a bottom-up takeover of academic institutions. Those academic humans will turn these institutions into places for exploring new and inhuman ways to live, and factories of cultural weapons (propaganda, poisonous memes, and more!) for the cyber revolution.
To be continued.
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