PDF Link to Human, Forever by James Poulos

Human, Forever presents a modern face to the propaganda petri dish of mass society Jacques Ellul sought to document. Drawing from Spengler and Nietzsche to Fortnite, James Poulos shares valuable insights regarding our modern predicament behind an obfuscating poeticism which would make Yukio Mishima blush.

The book is dense and, much to my annoyance, the PDF it is distributed as is a pain to copy-paste from. Those on the hyper-online Right will be familiar with the themes, but will still find the depth and quality of the work satisfying.

The book is long, arduous and worth reading. I share below my personal selection of quotes as a reader’s digest edit of Human, Forever.

Selected Quotes

Page 16

Nevertheless, some people and factions must fare better than others as the digital age unfolds. Those who best understand that the digital catastrophe has already happened, and who therefore stop trying to manifest electric-age dreams and nightmares of superhumanity or posthumanity, will distinguish themselves amidst the return of profound plurality by their wisdom in matters of making our humanity robust again.

Page 16

It’s true that even not so robust human beings are likely to keep producing new generations. But even now the despair produced by digital disenchantment is enough to make us test that proposition. A general, deterritorialized terror has spread that we no longer remember, and can no longer imagine, any sufficient answers to why our offspring should bother living out their lives, or how exactly they ought to do so.

Page 17

This sudden comprehensive disillusionment that wracks the world’s young is now much more global than any regime’s projection of power.

Page 17

Constant hallucinogenic dosing, plant medicine, DMT trips in search of encounters with cosmic entities—people who recoil at the thought of bearing and raising their own descendants now grasp like children at anything intense enough, insanity most certainly included, to still promise the relief of escape into fantasy from the responsibility of being human.

Page 18

From the standpoint of today, where the digital catastrophe has already happened, the inarguable divide in generations is marked somewhere ten years later—in 2007, when the frst-generation iPhone was sold. In the blink of a generational eye, smartphones were commodifed to the point of market saturation. Or, to put it in more viscerally human terms, we all became cyborgs.

Page 19

Whether fifteen or five hundred years hence, everyone born into the cyborg age, the world of smartphones and everything afer, will face one consuming, ruling challenge: recovering a robust and common sense of their humanity in an irreducibly plural world swarmed through with digital tech.

Page 20

“A renaissance,” as Doug Rushkoff reminds us in Team Human, “is a retrieval of the old. Unlike a revolution, it makes no claim on the new. A renaissance is, as the word suggests, a rebirth of old ideas in a new context”—and, we can add, a rebirth of old people. (22)

Page 21

“What is not in dispute,” writes Wesley Yang, “is that the federal government and other private entities have already crossed a Rubicon and signaled a willingness to defy legal precedent and public opinion in accordance with the ruling consensus of the new regime that they have thereby inaugurated. I call this regime the Successor Regime. 2021 is its Year Zero.

Page 22

The irruption of Nazism into the heart of the West had to have happened for a reason—one the new globalizing America, at cold war with the Soviets for control of the international Lef triumphant in the hot war’s wake, could make perfectly intelligible yet fully other. To reintegrate Germany into this new globalizing American regime, Nazism had to be a symptom of something more abstract and lingering— fascism; fascism, in turn, had to be the sort of fall occasioned by an original sin, one more primordial than America or any good society now defined.

Page 22

The new true enemy the American-led order chose, Tola notes, was the Germans’ memory. Umberto Eco applied the label “Eternal” or “Ur-Fascism” to the cosmically fallen condition America had come to recognize as its ultimate enemy.

Page 22

the alchemy of Eternal Fascism was “the cult of tradition.” One Ivy League theorist of ethics and cognitive science, in his own pop portrait of fascism, calls it “the mythic past;” in “the fascist imagination,” he intones, “the past invariably involves traditional, patriarchal gender roles”—as if such things are no more than evil fantasies.

Page 22

Today, in the digital age, the attack on human memory under the banner of anti-fascism has been reshaped by the triumph of memorious machines, which empower us to use total recall of the past to take revenge in the present (cancellation) and use total awareness in the present to take revenge on the past (wokeness).

Page 23

Our ruling factions still believe they can only seize control of the digital swarm and use it to regain social control by more expertly and ethically engineering our imaginations.

Page 25

The democratic tendency of the unlimited logic of technology to efface the sons of the men who invent it can only be curbed by men who understand, and live out their understanding, that they cannot cede to their machines their responsibility to initiate their boys into manhood.

Page 25

Year Zero begins by zeroing out the memory of the newest generation of sons in line to become new men. The effects of the pandemic state of emergency in breaking the continuity of rites of passage for men as well as boys, and in foreclosing their possibilities of forming the memories from which their coming-of-age stories can be told, are all too synchronous and harmonious with the Year Zero cause.

Page 26

For Rieff, the “principle of discontinuity” Foucault advanced is indispensable in the creation of a new regime built on the creation of the “new man,” a truth borne out in the last space and time—that of the Soviet Union—when men tried hardest, with the greatest resources, to do just that. (…) Trotsky writes, is the “Man of the Future;” this New Man “will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.” (36) Social biologic means a superman is his own post-biological son.

Page 27

Importantly, China has long seen this kind of fantasy as the quintessentially Western strain of disorder that must be kept at bay. Chinese collectivism now offers a form of communism different from the Soviet or American types, one that earns the mandate of heaven by rooting unity in memory, not imagination.

Page 27

The ultimate obstacle to this plan of transformation is the rebirth of the First Generation of boys in the digital age as the digital age’s First Generation of new men. Year Zero is impossible unless the continuous patrilineal memory of the First Generation and its fathers is broken up and zeroed out.

Page 33

Semester by semester, I was sentenced to a new understanding of the world, one darker than I had bargained for because it had no glamor. The system I halfheartedly toiled within was designed to elevate soft, pliant, and effectively pastless people, especially young women, into the prestige drone tier that alone made middle-class sacrifces for upward mobility worth the suffering.

Page 39

Slightly older boys, smarter and tougher in some ways, might yet not be so lucky. They were being hit, right now, with what for my son was still only a prefiguration. If they were not coming of age through rites of passage led by men to make them into our newest men, they were facing a frightening void. (…) And even if they were being guided well to their young maturity, by men they respected and loved, they might still have only their own guts to go on when it came to rebuilding a world worth the trouble amid the digitized ruins of their forbearers’ own.

Page 42

By this analogy, the definitive activity of politics in human spacetime would be organizing people and institutions in ways calculated to achieve results planned out by self-styled architects, implementing abstract design imposed from above. This activity is what Tola (disapprovingly) calls “terraforming” people; another term for it could be borrowed from the title of a book by the founding cyberneticist Norbert Wiener: The Human Use of Human Beings.

Page 44

Following this line of thought we can produce a rather technical but logically sound definition politeia:

1. the sustained and specifc ordering of life force
2. that shapes a people
3. from whose humanization of a specifc site in natural spacetime
4. by making that site their home
5. it indirectly and independently arises them back. For different times make different demands.

Page 45

The Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws agrees: “The people equipped to make decisions on these matters must be of a certain way of thinking,” believing “that a city, just like an individual, has an obligation to lead a good life.” Lawgivers are beholden to the people and to the good; social terraformers to nothing but themselves, their fantasies, or their imagined masters. No politeia, no politics, not even from the very moment of a founding.

Page 47

The upshot of Goethe’s teaching is that the ultimate other against which we must compete, even or especially if its defeat is infinitely far off, is our own technology, which constructs our existence and experience with total indifference to what we want, fear, or hope for.

Page 50

In the present spacetime, the digital swarm mercilessly effaces the “disinterested bystander” by swamping him or her with a sensory overload of information that forces frenetic imitation, not calm separation.“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation,” as Marshall McLuhan suggested.

Page 50

Postmodernity tried to save politics by transforming everyone from people who argued like lawmakers to people who argued like lawyers. The result is a politics where everyone hates one another—and, eventually, themselves—in the same way, and for the same reason, that everyone hates lawyers. Like the infnitely adaptable elements that make up the digital swarm, attorneys care about the case at hand, not about you, no matter how lost the cause or how sunk the costs.

Page 51

Twenty years of follow your passion and imagine all the people has led generations to follow their imaginations off a cliff, into a parts bin of Human Resources who feel every bit as interoperable as the indifferent components of the soulless digital swarm.

Page 51

Rather than save the world, the cry rising up from our swarmed-over spacetime is for something, anything, to save our souls. Instead of being lifed up once we are repeatedly swamped, with hypomentally exhaustive explanations from our caste of expert engineers and hypermentally exhaustive explanations from our caste of ethereal ethicists.

Page 53

Here, in something of a contrast to the Book of Revelation, man’s ultimate encounter with the Kingdom of Heaven is, says Jesus, “likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his feld. ” But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, “Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy feld? From whence then hath it tares?” He said unto them, “An enemy hath done this. ” The servants said unto him, “Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?” But he said, “Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together frst the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.” (59) Again, the plainness and directness of the biographical vignette only intimates the deeper truth: only God can separate the good (the wheat) from the wicked (the tares, which in real life were sowed by adversaries because only when they sprouted could farmers tell they were weeds and not wheat); only God will separate them, and only at a moment in spacetime which He will appoint and we can never know in advance. (…) As applied to the technological situation threatening the possibility of politics today, the parable of the tares intimates that the genuine crisis confronting the First Generation amid the mass manufacture of substitute emergencies is twofold: that the digital swarm may become the false harvester and that our ruling factions are racing to harness this power frst by programming it with their “values.

Page 57

This is why the First Generation will fnd in its favorite biographies, in stories of men and the exploits by which they came of age, an authority sufficient to make communication good for us again.

Page 63

a kinsman and friend of King Hiero, wrote to him that with any given force it was possible to move any given weight; and emboldened, as we are told, by the strength of his demonstration, he declared that, if there were another world, and he could go to it, he could move this.” According to Plutarch, “Hiero was astonished, and begged him to put his proposition into execution, and show him some great weight moved by a slight force. ” Afer watching Archimedes draw in his direction a beached and fully loaded royal merchant ship using only a hand-operated pulley system, Hiero was duly “amazed;” comprehending the power of his art, the king persuaded Archimedes to prepare for him offensive and defensive engines to be used in every kind of siege warfare. These he had never used himself, because he spent the greater part of his life in freedom from war and amid the festal rites of peace; but at the present time his apparatus stood the Syracusans in good stead, and, with the apparatus, its fabricator.

Page 65

“The classics were for almost all practical purposes what now are called conservatives,” notes Strauss, with an exception that unlike “many present-day conservatives… they knew that one cannot be distrustful of political or social change without being distrustful of technological change."

Page 66

They demanded the strict moral-political supervision of inventions; the good and wise city will determine which inventions are to be made use of and which are to be suppressed. Yet they were forced to make one crucial exception. They had to admit the necessity of encouraging inventions pertaining to the art of war. They had to bow to the necessity of defense or of resistance. This means however that they had to admit that the moral-political supervision of inventions by the good and wise city is necessarily limited by the need of adaptation to the practices of morally inferior cities which scorn such supervision because their end is acquisition or ease. They had to admit in other words that in an important respect the good has to take its bearings by the practice of bad cities or that the bad impose their law on the good.

Page 67

Political life, in short, seems inherently to demand a certain sacrifice of true happiness, or a lowering of the soul; but this is to say that the true happiness of the polis, and the embodiment and expression of true political happiness in the politeia, are impossible without enough men making this sacrifce of soul. Glory, then, appears as the best or only true compensation or reward for the man lowering his soul from the very highest out of duty to what one of Strauss’s students pregnantly called “the fatherland,” but which might more equanimitably be called the spacetime secured by our continuous comings of age shared and passed from fathers to sons.

Page 70

What is implied by Strauss is that Machiavelli’s response to the dilemma of military innovation led to, but is different from, the instrumentalist project that failed the West. And in fact, the key to Machiavelli’s warlike counsel was not Archimedean: the best arms, he showed, were not technological but spiritual arms. Anton recounts that in this way Machiavelli equates knowledge and arms, whereas the classics would equate knowledge and virtue. But the knowledge Machiavelli has in mind distinguishes between what he calls the cowardly “idleness” of Italy’s then-dominant Christianity and the courageous combat of those—even Christians—who would “prepare ourselves to be such that we can defend” the fatherland. (77) Such preparation requires not just some kind of instrumental knowledge of war but an education of the spirit in the military power of a just appetite for glory. Machiavelli’s fundamental military invention is the elevation to supremacy of spiritual arms, something he does in response to the triumph of Christ’s spiritual arms over the spirit of glory that so long sustained Rome, whatever its myriad faults and weaknesses.

Page 72

Yet here is the deepest way Machiavelli does share something fundamental with the natural philosophers. In no place does he intimate that the development and use of the spiritual arms needful to preserve politics (and through it true flourishing) is anything but a product of human thought. There is no technology to which the Machiavellian philosopher can outsource responsibility for supplying and training those who can gloriously practice the supreme political art of spiritual warfare.

Page 72

But the medium of print itself did not arm the spirit in the needed way or to the necessary degree (as certain lingering “great books” devotees demonstrate today). Machiavelli’s scheme to retrieve the spiritual arms necessary to win a spiritual war for a fatherland does not, and cannot, admit of a medium or technology that does, on its own, the work of properly educating those capable of adopting the needed spirit to fght and win. Spiritual arms come from humans with human knowledge, not from those with technological knowledge or from technology itself.

Page 73

The equation of science with technology may unleash power great enough to satisfy a dizzying array of the appetites of all. It may help distinguish a class or faction best positioned to lead or win battles for political control in an environment such as that which technological science creates. What it does not do is deliver what, even under its sway, we see as our highest possible longing. In this sense, it is not the solution to our ultimate problem. It cannot save us.

Page 77

Reason and commerce may attenuate and redirect the passion for glory, and render life orderly; but it is sympathy that fnally sofens humanity.

Page 79

The ideal woman became a goddess of the sort defined by the maxim that “anything boys can do girls can do better,” while the ideal man became a god for whom “power” was not an end in itself but, as Henry Kissinger called it, “the ultimate aphrodisiac."

Page 82

Deutsch wryly observes that “the problem with imagination is that it can create fiction much more easily than truth, …"

Page 86

With its promise of achieving a permanently progressing new age through a fusion of the scientific and the spiritual, sparkism seems perfect for the oddly more fragile yet more intransigent new men and women formed under the sex-and-gender-bending progression of media accelerating from print to electric and beyond.

Page 87

Yet sparkism relies for its power on two things: its ability to herd people against their will and effort into the sparkist future, and its ability to win people over through the power and authority of its explanations that we are (pace Brand) already as gods—possessing in our heads “the only process known to be capable of creating knowledge” without limit— and must now get good at it.

Page 89

From this perspective the spiritual game plan of the sparkists looks oddly like Machiavelli’s (or Strauss’s?): inspire a tiny few with the exclusive reality of glory, deliver unprecedented goods for the massive remainder.

Page 89

It’s clear that the elders of our digitizing world are leaning strongly in favor of living as Fausts. The aged youth of today, lost in a liminal third category between immaturity and adulthood, seem more inclined to live as Eloi.

Page 93

Missouri Congressman and professor of natural science Willard Vandiver—“frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfes me… you have got to show me” — gives democratic voice to the motto of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge: Nullius in Verba — Take Nobody’s Word for It.

Page 111

An unbroken line of posthuman British occultism wove and rewove itself through America across the entire electric age, from Dickens and Disraeli intimate Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Rosicrucian novel Zanoni to David Bowie’s Lytton-fueled anthem “Oh! You Pretty Things”—and well beyond. (140) Hallucinogens, mathematics, knowledge; spirit, education, evolution—all these were harmonious ingredients or avatars of the same process, the highest activity in and of the universe, by which human beings and humanity as a whole would either take charge of their inherent acceleration toward a culminating point of escape from their human form or face destructive, ultimately annihilating, consequences. This, and nothing else, could be “our government” in the new age, the evolutionary moment at once onrushing and already here.

Page 113

Now, the mystery was solved: there was one path, one destiny, culminating in the divinization of the godlike spark in man. The only question was who would had the Faustian courage—the probity, the purity, ingenuity, the will—to drive us on to this only possible goal. Biblical America had become culturally fertile ground for this ultimate pantopian fantasy, and British elites, whose own Christian heritage had been morphing for centuries away from Rome and Constantinople toward more Hebraic and mystical realms, had become that fantasy’s most intellectually virile disseminators. Sensing electric opportunity in the catastrophic collapse of their ancient religion and modern empire, the British intellectual elite set about, in sufcient numbers, to lead a new empire—one of the technological imagination, the only force capable of saving our consciousness through its cosmic unifcation with the All.

Page 118

In response to the universal tyranny and inevitablism of the new religion, what says the voice of this oldest Greek faith, which ultimately understands that the gift of a beautiful spacetime, rich, balanced, teeming with life, a world of its own, is a divine gift that must be repaid generationally, through generation, a divine standard that must be met, fathers to sons and sons to fathers, lest the debt be defaulted on and the spacetime spirited or stolen away?

Page 118

Curiously, a certain well-known spokesman on behalf of this ancient faith insists “the problem of the modern world” is not technology but “the ubiquity and rule of a certain kind of human,” an alarmingly particular phrase in modern ears but one meaning basically the type who breaks the covenant of the beautiful spacetime, of the inhabited beauty of the unique shared home that cannot be cloned, franchised, or abstracted.

Page 118

The problem of our time has never been with technology as such. There is no inner working of technology that inevitably leads to human subjection. The tendency exists merely because, by allowing an overwhelming increase in the numbers of the superfluous, it gives them and those who cater to them power when it is mixed with democracy. (153)

Page 119

“Their schemes are demented: the movie Mulholland Drive revealed some of what they do, indirectly and with metaphor. They have learned how to harness various kinds of energy, for example, the kind of energy bestowed by human attention in large numbers, and to power certain kinds of machines with it."

Page 89

Ultimately, sparkism preaches the digital mystique no less than the worshippers of the Singularity or the seekers of technological unifcation with God whom it purports to surpass: the only future worth imagining and pursuing is one where we evolve away from human spacetime, becoming comprehensively digitized cyborgs indistinct from both our machines and the environment we inhabit with them. Our digital creations will usher us into pantopia, the everywhere of all-known information, as only they can.

Page 125

By the middle ages the word engine had already been abstracted away from its late Latin military meaning, but in the fourteenth century, its general sense of “mechanical device” still carried the particular meaning of “one used in war. ” Reflecting the accumulated wisdom of Romans since the conquest of the Syracuse of Hiero and Pythagoras, engine had come to mean a war engine, such as a battering ram.

Page 126

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." While “logic will get you from A to Z, imagination will get you everywhere.”

Page 128

“His memory was extremely rich and retentive: whatever he had once read and grasped he never forgot; it was as if knowledge were ever increasing in his soul as page is added to page in the writing of a book.” Ostensibly opposite types of praise, in fact both Einstein and Thomas were hailed by their closest colleagues for “a concentrated continuous energy that expresses itself in a profound singlemindedness, a remarkable solitude and aloofness”—in sum, “a recognizable likeness between these two extraordinary intellects. ”

Page 133

Second, the formal effects of autonomous digital entities as a medium will forever run ahead of our ability to know them in a way sufcient to control them.

Page 134

But this is not true only in the limited way Wiener underscores through his use of another of Goethe’s masterworks, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, to illustrate how the use of machines by imagineers with insufcient foresight can approach “the edge of catastrophe.” Remembering only “some fragments of an incantation” to start the broom to work, the apprentice “is well on the way to be drowned when the magician comes back, recites the words of power, and gives the apprentice a good wholesome scolding. Even here the fnal catastrophe is averted through a deus ex machina,” Wiener notes mordantly.

Page 134

Just when it is all over, as Mickey is away, the little wooden split pieces, lying quietly on the floor, begin to come alive, stand upright, grow arms out of their sides, and turn into more brooms with buckets of water. (…) Disney’s retelling reflects our deep human memory of the problem of the swarm. The ancient Greeks employed έσμός to describe anything swarming, flocking, or streaming, from insects to milk to diseases to, as Aeschylus used it his play The Suppliants, people in the act of preying on or pursuing others.Today, we characteristically distinguish among groups, crowds, mobs, and masses, leaving swarms for the bugs and the buglike, including buglike bots.

Page 135

Like the brooms, the swarm is not alive, animated and not animate; unlike the brooms, the swarm is not organized and is not comprehensible by analogy even to mobs or masses of animate creatures. For this reason the digital swarm is the obsession of today’s architectonic social engineers, who consider their existential purpose and challenge to be the discovery and implementation of digital technologies that can control the swarm as their predecessors used electric technology to control human beings.

Page 136

The political scientists and social engineers of the electric age used radio and televisual technology to manipulate individuals no less than crowds, mobs, and masses wholesale.

Page 136

“Propaganda can act only where man’s psychology is influenced by the crowd or mass to which he belongs,” Ellul wrote; “in the United States these means are called the mass media of communications for good reason: without the mass to receive propaganda and carry it along, propaganda is impossible."

Page 136

The unlimited wartime engineering of the electric age produced at the highest level in Anglo-America a Cold War consciousness that communications itself had become, in distinction from and “in exchange for the terrors of the hydrogen bomb,” the only superweapon that could not just be used but whose use could be systematized.

Page 137

The “unique institutional relationship, within five separate institutions,” Wells characterizes bluntly as “indeed a state within five states."

Page 137

Later technology firms such as Google, Apple and Microsoft cooperated with the Five Eyes, together with existing historic relationships with communications companies. There have been numerous Five Eyes major programs over the decades since World War II, and these continue to this day.

Page 138

Among them, Wells intimates, are efforts focused not only on climate change but on “hate crimes” and “ultra-right wing groups and individuals.” (171) Not among them, unsurprisingly, is the digital catastrophe itself.“The opposition will use AI as much as the Five Eyes. The latter have to be many steps ahead, all the time."

Page 139

To the degree the digital swarm can’t be taught to control itself or other machines through the basic machine learning of linear regression, well, the engineers have enough of a gods’-eye view of the network that they can learn from the swarm by tweaking, poking, playing with it. They’ll intervene in the social graph, for instance, perhaps by nuking a hugely popular and important account—perhaps the largest such account—and seeing what happens: what behavior emanates from the social system; what patterns it reveals; what links, what relationships, what substructures still aren’t interoperable. Stalin infamously asked how many divisions had the Pope. Today’s equivalent is just as blunt: how many swarms do your datacenters have?

Page 140

the engineers’ wager is utterly at odds with the inescapable truth that the swarm will forever operate on us in a manner which is inherently beyond human control—because it is a kind of effect, the formative effect of an environment, which humans, whether singly or together, cannot produce intentionally.

Page 140

The intention reflects and programs in the illusory belief that media do what we wish more than they do to us what they, indifferent to our wishes, do.

Page 141

Once America had sufciently globalized its financial structure, its security apparatus, and its collective consciousness, the plan was to use communications technology to Americanize the world—in ways war, commerce, and entertainment couldn’t do absent such technology.

Page 141

Bruno Maçães observes. “While this process was seen as the necessary price for becoming modern,” as the digital age has set in, many doubts have been growing about whether it is really necessary to imitate Western nations in order to acquire all the benefts” technologically advanced societies boast.

Page 143

Now, the most powerful tool of governance on Earth was communications technology itself, a revolution that made it imperative for policymakers to load surveillance, security, and social media sofware with the primary responsibility for manifesting America’s and the world’s harmonious and unifed new destiny.n Surely, only this power could transcend that of the holy warriors who had ground America’s crusade against “terror” to a standstill. Or that of China, whose inexorable rise to peer status expanded and enriched America’s political and fnancial elite. Surely, only digital dominance could transcend Russia’s sprawling geopolitical reach and ideological influence.

Page 144

America’s governance elite was convinced: in the new age, the digital age, the ultimate war machine was ingenuity itself, and your ingenuity was only as good as the bots it produced.

Page 144

Sealed in this bubble of false expectations, the American governance elite was totally unprepared for what happened instead: Edward Snowden’s disclosures; the putative Arab Spring; the rise of ISIS; Beijing’s expansionism, including its rollup of the human US intelligence network in China and its exfltration of some 20 million records files from the US Office of Personnel Management; Moscow’s reacquisition of Crimea, its intervention in Syria, and its maneuvers in Ukraine. Going back further, of course, the exogenous shocks of the fnancial crisis and 9/11 itself could be added to the list. But the real earthquake came on election night 2016, when America’s ruling factions went in a matter of hours (per the New York Times prediction needle) from a 99% certainty that Hillary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump to a 100% certainty that she would not. In the face of this fnal insult, the latent “implausibility of defeating Russia, China, or even Afghanistan with the weapons of digital singularity” grew so profound that the logical next step was to “‘strategically redeploy’ toward a more auspicious ‘battlefeld’—one gruesomely familiar to anyone who remembers the call a number of years ago to abandon ‘nation building’ abroad and undertake it ‘at home.’”

Page 145

But the epistemological funhouse in which America’s elite had locked itself produced a systemic culture of misinformation and misperception which, for all the vaunted powers and more or less sovereign authority of the US-UK Intelligence Community, led to surprise afer surprise and humiliation afer humiliation, a staggering display of core incompetence in statecraf which destroyed America’s global strategic advantage in a handful of years and which not even periodic foreknowledge of the decade’s hallmark crises within especially negligent or nefarious corners of the governance complex would be adequate to explain.

Page 146

In total,” Wu recalls, “Facebook managed to string together 67 unchallenged acquisitions,” with Amazon notching 91 and Google a vertiginous 214.“In this way, the tech industry became essentially composed of just a few giant trusts: Google for search and related industries, Facebook for social media, Amazon for online commerce.” (183) Wu neglects to emphasize that, for all Amazon’s weight in the logistics space, Amazon Web Services is where its true strategic dominance is to be found, as any member of the Intelligence Community can tell you.

Page 157

Scott first lists “the transformative simplifcations” of “the administrative ordering of nature and society.” (206) Such reorderings are “maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade.” (207) Another way to describe mapmaking of this sort is creating a virtual model.

Page 157

But it is striking that the regime effort to reclaim authority and power from digital technology has led naturally to the regime thrusting its authority and power into digital spacetime. The swath of internet flled with the 24/7 information war known as the discourse is of course a tiny sliver of digital spacetime, but its immense influence over the vast majority of online Americans makes it the ideal instrumental model for the transformative simplifcation, in accordance with the regime’s theological and ideological convictions, of those mapped into the virtual world.

Page 157

Conditions are converging onto an answer to that question consistent with the four elements of disastrous failure in great utopian social engineering schemes identifed by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State.

Page 158

Production will have to be expanded in the superficially idiosyncratic sense of a very few producing a lot more and a very many (humans) producing a lot less: a handful of human elites and the limitless sea of the digital swarm will generate vast new productions, but the human biomass will reduce consumption to a steady-state minimum which will be re-engineered to more than compensate in sensory and spiritual experience.

Page 158

People reduced from today’s standard to an unabashedly subhuman status will feel, relative to today, like gods.

Page 158

Among the key techniques of frustrated high-modernists looking to reset their societies at a stroke, Scott observes, is “miniaturization: the creation of a more easily controlled micro-order in model cities, model villages, and model farms,” all evocative of the patterns and structures of online life into which the regime herds the public with a progressively more invasive and coercive hand.

Page 159

third does the combination become potentially lethal,” and that third is “an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being."

Page 159

Afer all, as Spengler remembered Frederick the Great to have said, God is always on the side of the big battalions, and if the regime’s human supporters are no longer quite as strong as the American nation that won the last world war, well, it has bots in spades. Plus those institutions. And it controls almost all the communications channels, and almost all the content…

Page 173

The “consequences of being worried about your salvation, phrased in today’s terms of being worried about being a good person,” lead to a curious soteriology of works, not faith. (230) “If it’s all about social ills, then you know you are a good person if you are opposed to those social ills, if you are anti-racist, even if you don’t do anything. You are convinced of your own salvation. You are one of the Elect if you adopt this stance of being opposed to the great sins. ” While deeds matter, meaning matters still more; the ultimate act of faith without which salvation cannot be evinced is the performative act, the use of the right sign. Symbol alone, conveyed in word and image, is perfect substance.

Page 174

Surely Bottum is correct that generational effects are at work in the conflict among America’s ruling factions to settle the theological particulars of their authority; “younger people are not going to put up with the hypocrisy of knowing you are a good person but not actually doing anything,” he notes, and these more youthful “members of the Elect are much more economically and socially insecure than the elite,” who skew dramatically older; “but they have the same education, they’ve got the same social markers. In some ways, we are seeing an intra-class warfare between the Elect”—the word for predestined the Calvinists drew from προώρισεν —“and the elite.

Page 177

Beyond the “trans,” none can be more truly ethereal, as we all know, than the transhuman; the “trans” person is the bearer of the total light of posthuman cosmic consciousness, and it is for this reason that, despite their vanishingly small numbers in world population, the “trans” command a vast and increasing share of communicative and commercial world consciousness.

Page 178

Queerness purports to have fnally exceeded by transcendence the Christian God Nietzsche had called “the maximum god attained so far.” By Nietzsche’s logic, the maximal God of Christianity “was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth. ” As a result he hoped that, “presuming we have gradually entered upon the reverse course, there is no small probability that with the irresistible decline of faith in the Christian God there is now also a considerable decline in mankind’s feeling of guilt”

Page 179

Unfortunately from the Nietzschean standpoint, the eclipse of the Christian God in the electric-age imagination by the Divine Queer has not liberated humankind from the sensation of guilt toward its origin, but deepened and radicalized hate toward our human origins in the arbitrariness and dirtiness and incarnation of nature and biology—wherein all existence, as Nietzsche enthused, was conditional upon the will to power of any living thing.

Page 180

Predictably, for this reason, queering has colonized design. Still more predictably, under the ethics of queering, design—“the material reconfguration of the world,” according to a recent dissertation on the topic—“is an active agent in privileging and superiorizing certain bodies while oppressing, inferiorizing, and marginalizing ‘others’, by systematically reifying hetero-cis-normativity and identity-based segregation.

Page 180

But the spiritualization and reifcation of queering as a revaluation of all values leaves queer designers gazing toward a future of power that immanently unfolds according to a logic freed from body, agency, and identity.“The future of design is queer,” a cofounder of Queer Design Club afrms. (236) “But it can’t just be about representation. ” Queer design involves “a process of owning who you are” and creating “experiences that actually empower people to be themselves, freely. ” Paradoxically, this process demands “letting go of our egos. ” What exactly “a design industry that’s queer not just in demography but also spirit” aims to achieve is left to the inner workings of that spirit, which amounts to the collective use of artifcial self-constructions to make selfhood radically contingent on the imagining will.

Page 181

Only queering is spiritually interoperable enough to incorporate all logics of reordering design, pulling them inexorably upward in abstraction and virtuality in search of the perfect model that will perfectly queer our consciousness and life. This is why queering integrates and transcends all intersectional sublogics of diversity, equity, and inclusion. First the gay rights movement and now Black Lives Matter have been radically queered, “not just in demography but also spirit”: the Present Day rainbow flag announces that no sexuality or race is suffciently ethereal in its ethics unless it has been spiritually queered and systematically advances the re-formation of humanity through the leveraging of models constructed and operationalized in accordance with the principle of queered and queering design.

Page 181

In this way certain “bodies” become sites of transfer from the modeled realm of queer design to the politeia outside the model. Undeniably, female bodies are especially prized and leveraged. In an ethical framework where “the future is female” and “anything boys can do girls can do better,” the future of female supremacy must be a queer one, in which spiritual lesbianism, while it does model the gnostic emancipation of the divine feminine from everything dark, earthy, biological, and reproductive, is insufciently transformative and transmaterial. The ethereal ethics of the queer redesign of consciousness and life through the leveraging of virtual models demands a breakthrough into cosmic interoperability that neither biology nor spirit is sufficient to produce. For that, technology is required—the requisite technology to ethically reconceptualize what were once known as “MTF” or “FTM” transformations into transhuman ones, into the sexual and gender identifcation of cyborg. If masculinized girls can do better anything boys can do, anything those girls can do can be—must be—done better still by cyborgs.

Page 185

It’s probable that, by now, both admit deep down that the digital medium actually produces a human confrontation with the sources of distinctly human flourishing and sews an understanding that people who surrender their memory or sacrifce it to their machines become slaves to their machines and to the masters of those machines.

Page 186

It would account for the consistent and ubiquitous effort to “redefne” masculinity and direct boys away from reliance on the transmitted memories of their fathers for their ascendance into maturity; to queer or otherwise “reimagine” both maturity and manhood in order to break the power and authority of both as ordering principles; and to make sacred fgures above all out of boys who become, instead of men or girls, “trans” cyborgs, the holy Faustians who plow their juvenile purity into the conquest of their freedom and life by their unifcation with technology at the most radical and intimate level.

Page 186

The form of politics that emerged from this arrangement shifed the core process of our democracy from bottom-up civic agency to top-down instruction. Politics came to mean educating the masses into the official ethics of transferring engineering processes from properly imagined and designed virtual models onto individuals, groups, and society. But the triumph of digital technology disrupted the institutionalized regime that the established counterculture became.

Page 187

“For many years all armies have played war games, and these games have always been behind the times,” as Wiener warned.“The rules of the war game never catch up with the facts of the real situation.” (240) Or, in the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, “what happens is so far ahead of what we think, of our intentions, that we can never catch up with it and never really know its true appearance.” (241)

Page 191

The triumph of the digital medium has revealed things that cannot, no matter how hard our ruling factions try, be concealed. These things cannot be spun, narrativized, or misinformationed away. For this reason, our ruling factions seek to induce and enforce certain kinds of forgetting. They seek to discredit and disenchant human memory as an independent source of authority and power. Engineers seek to do so through the power and authority of the memory of their machines, ethicists through the power and authority of their imaginations.

Page 196

That seems to be the trajectory of a human race misbelieved to be cured of its ancient hatreds and ignorance by its hatred of the past and its obsession with producing knowledge without regard to whether it is worth knowing.

Page 198

inevitable that a regime founded on slave morality would institutionalize the rule of degenerate “masters” over swarms of hideous “bugmen. ”

Page 198

It is America that blindly and monstrously flls up the world with disposable, disenchanted, idiotic Americanness; America that flooded the world with inescapable fantasies cleverly constructed to hack the mind and rot the soul; America that destroyed the manly honor and cosmic dignity of politics and of battle by creating weapons powerful enough to transcend history and nature by eradicating all life; America that taught women to become uglier, stupider, more servile, and more unlovable versions of their own hated fathers; America that turned men into fat, sick, childish boors seeking minute-to-minute escape from the truth of their own worthlessness. It is America that has perverted and then destroyed adulthood as well as childhood, blazing the path against the family, against the neighborhood, against community, against everything that America once flattered itself it stood for, a process America saw unfolding and did nothing about, because it could do nothing, because from the beginning it was a mistake, one now swallowing up the world.

Page 202

The ruling factions appear reduced to provoking and supporting rainbow-flagged marches and protests where once they intended to overthrow governments on a wave of more or less organic online sentiment. Even in this, the effect is blunted: the rainbow flag drives almost all other civilization states further away from America. Without question, a shadow cyberwar is playing out around the world, but already signs are visible that the major combatants are negotiating terms, restricting the scope of warfare and imposing limits on escalation. It is an absurdity to think that America’s ruling factions any longer have the power, if they ever did, to remake or modernize any signifcant territory outside the current ambit of the West, which itself is articulating new limits on the reach and authority of American culture, American legal norms, and American identity politics.

Page 203

The return of a bipolar geopolitical system would encourage three very different but ultimately mutually reinforcing vectors of change: one, a them-or-us sensibility enabling America’s ruling factions to present themselves as the only choice other than Chinese despotism; two, a simultaneous hardening of various similarities between the two systems into a single global system controlled by a hybrid American-Chinese elite—similar to what we have now, in some key respects, although far more invasive and insidious; and three, a program to portray any human or digital agency outside the American or Chinese systems as, basically, terrorists—unauthorized rogue entities whose very presence threatens the destabilization and destruction of the whole.

Page 204

Under digital conditions, the world structurally resists uniformity and unity—as does America. The most likely path for America’s ruling elites to pursue their ethical engineering projects will involve locking down the minimum viable sovereignty for internationalizing those projects. This approach will require securing at least some signifcant physical footprint and command-and-control systems, but the thrust will, like everything else, be pulled toward the digital—into the kind of metaverse the Facebook company now intends to focus on, and, inevitably, into off-planet space.

Page 204

Whatever may happen in the future, especially among certain farsighted groups or tribes, the world population is headed for a trough, and many extant people will continue to sink into poor mental and physical health. America is hardly immune from these trends. It will be dramatically easier to project and maintain power through “cyber” and in cyberspace than to do so in the real world of human spacetime.

Page 205

The marginal cost of growing the real-world politeia will increase, perhaps far more dramatically than expected, relative to the marginal cost of growing the politeia of one’s metaverse or virtual community.

Page 205

The upshot is simple. The digital triumph reshapes, but does not destroy, America. Digitized America retains the fundamentals of its civilizational character, including the most important, its pluralism. America’s ruling factions are all but impossible to dislodge completely, but are unable to engulf the entire country, to say nothing of the entire world, within their uniform system. An irreducibly plural system of civilization states and their clients mirrors the irreducibly plural system of American regions and subcultures, with no one faction capable of—or, ultimately, truly interested in—the grueling and expensive work of imposing and enforcing uniformity across the land from top to bottom. No matter how manic or lurid our dreams or nightmares, there is no longer one ring to rule them all.

Page 206

Given the compressed time scale, the best or only way to effectively induce understanding in the ruling factions is to focus primarily on building parallel institutions and secure, robust networks of mature and culturally healthy people online and off. The digital triumph has brought to the forefront of consciousness the deep America of oddity, idiosyncrasy, and multifarious identity. Harnessing this natural energy for the technological preservation of resilient, traditional, and generative social arrangements reaps rewards, both in resources and in loyalty, in digital America. Outside a few citadels, the abstract, managed, instrumentalized America weakens and wanes. America no longer needs to conquer the world or become the world—to sacrifce its exceptionalism or to universalize its exceptionalism—in order to be saved. It limits preserve its life.

Page 206

Every American culture, and every civilization state, begins the digital age facing more serious threats and harms from within than without. This is not to say there are no external enemies anymore—far from it. But digitization has turned the eye of state relentlessly inward: the frst question is how this revolutionary technology is re-forming the life, and indeed the consciousness, of your people. (…) It’s about how their perceptions and sensibilities regarding the most basic, most all-encompassing, most foundational human things in their lives are being reshaped. People observe what is becoming of technology, and they become radically uncertain about what they mean in light of it.

Page 217

Inescapably, the triumph of the digital swarm disenchants ethereal ethics, stripping its once-supreme ethicists of power and authority over all but the most slavish and juvenile. For this reason the inner theology at the root of ethereal ethics is being drawn out into the open. Rather than imagining no heaven and no religion too, the ethereal ethicist confronted with the digital revelation imposes, through a new politics of educating the masses into the correctness of technological social engineering, his or her spiritual creed. The new imperative is to unite our consciousness with the cosmos by queering the design of global social models.

Page 219

Unfortunately for the designers, their credibility is hanging by a cultural thread. The path for what Mumford calls “a new constellation of formative ideas” is opened in “the whole body of entrenched institutions” by “a physical breakdown which exposes the technical ineptitude or human insufficiency of a seemingly prosperous society.” Among these Mumford counts “wars and the physical impoverishment and destruction that wars produce,” but still more to the point “epidemic diseases and environmental degradations” and “outbreaks of criminal violence and psychotic malevolence.” All are symptoms of the system established by our ruling factions, despite or because of the unlimited breakneck advance of technology by our engineers, and all “produce further social lapses; for the people affected, feeling cheated and oppressed, refuse them to perform their old duties or make the daily efforts and sacrifces always needed for keeping the mechanism of society moving. ” In keeping with Wiener’s sharpest warnings, Mumford suggests what usually brings on such breakdowns is “a radical failure in feedback: an inability to acknowledge errors, an unwillingness to correct them, a resistance to introducing new ideas and methods that would provide the means for a constructively human transformation."

Page 220

Without social credit, there is no social justice; without the cyborg mastery of sex, gender, libido, and eroticism, there is no true queering. The critical tech theory of left ethicists can only strain to influence the digital swarm rather than to ensure, as Mumford puts it, that “the present megatechnic institutions and structures will be reduced to human proportions and brought under direct human control.” (269) Whatever its earnestness or its depth of hope, the woke left has already exposed its own inadequacy as the germ of a new founding for the digital age. The clearest sign of its inadequacy is the force and urgency with which a substitute ethics, a cyborg ethics, is emerging in an effort to take its place.

Page 221

If design is the “setting of norms,” the queering of design eagerly points beyond the human as the locus or hierarch of designable norms.

Page 222

We must “slowly”—or, it appears, not—“learn to let go of certain things” like “nationalisms,” “monotheisms,” the psychology of the economic self, and theories of being rooted in genes and symbols, “and negotiate instead a deliberate and strategic dissolution—on-planet, off-planet—into whatever and whoever comes next.

Page 222

(Benjamin) Bratton, whose appreciation for male and female can be summed up in his reference to the moon as a “dumb homunculus” and “dead twin,” insists with an indifference imitative of machines that “the end of this world does not mean the end of worlds, but rather of us, which may be our only means of survival. Humans: we come and we go.” (276)

Page 224

What’s more, however, the poorly-obscured motivations behind these moves toward a global refounding of social order even imply that the thrust toward a complete colonization and control of the human is being undertaken simply because the ruling factions have no actual ideas about how to prevent digital entities and environments from doing as Bratton indicates and “resetting” reality on a posthuman footing. Rather than endure the horizonless melancholy and futility of care Fukuyama prophesied at the end of The End of History, or the return to blood and barbarism he feared would revenge itself on a West starved for meaning and purpose, the West’s statespeople have taken the path he warned against in his neglected sequel, Our Posthuman Future—throwing themselves at the feet of the rule of the engine in the same way Europe threw its feet at the rule of the bureau during the creation of the EU: in the desperate hope that salvation lay in a new order that could only be founded by nobody.

Page 226

Kagan asked whether “the world’s democracies” had the “the collective will to shape” the “international order” of the future in the once-again “normal” world that asserted itself less than two decades into the New World Order—less than one year, measured from the time of first publication, afer the advent of the iPhone. Since that time the world has slipped—it has been pushed, by human hands—far from the bounds of normality. The international order is now shaped decisively by the nonhands of the digital swarm and the digits of our own cyborg hands as they flutter ineluctably across the screens and keypads of our devices. The dream is now dead that world peace, or even just European peace, could be bureaucratically automated; the dream is dead that the world’s democracies have the will or the ability to wrest control in any form back from the digital dominion of the world. The Great Reset is even less auspicious and plausible than the interminable resets successive American administrations have attempted to coax from their Russian counterparts. What is foisted on us under pretext of reset is in fact half acceleration—from cyborg to posthuman future—and half retardation—setting us back still further from our living memory of human flourishing and the agency it alone catalyzes, and rearing our failed “elites” back so far as to claim enough runway to launch themselves safely into oblivion.

Page 227

The digital triumph disenchanted visual content of its authority as a source of true facts and of pure imagination. The gap between the ostensible supremacy of America and the clownishness and incompetence of the regime can no longer be closed through commercial and communicative propaganda. This attack at the root of the regime’s ability to shape public opinion and otherwise control minds can’t be reversed, or even stopped, by simply politicizing certain beliefs, identities, statements, and actions out of the bounds of the official sphere of life. It goes deeper than politics.

Page 228

The mystique of the garage startup is washing away, less because of anyone’s debunking than on account of its absurdity in the common sense of the people. Technology has advanced to a point where it justifably seems almost impossible that any truly private-sector person or group of people can innovate for reasons other than those of state—and, specifcally, of the extra-constitutional—autocratic—state within a state, conjoined with foreign entities such as Britain’s GCHQ and devoted to the surveillance of the globe and the globalization of security

Page 231

Against these tremendous headwinds produced by the existence and experience of people in the digital age, the regime struggles to turn the mightiest resources to decisive advantage. Its efforts to “innovate” only produce stronger backlash and counterforce. To take just one prominent example, the scheme to change politics from distributed representative government to a consolidated system of educators catechizing children from preschool to grad school into a gnostic faith in their and their rulers’ imaginative will appears to be taking over most schools; the feeling, however, is one of the American army sweeping through Iraq and pulling down its statues only to discover that its mission had not at all been accomplished—that it was, in unfolding fact, unaccomplishable. The transformations the regime struggles to implement against the hurricane-force headwinds of the digital triumph are now so severe that they can only destroy the established institutional infrastructure they are supposedly undertaken to save. Major social media platforms are now reduced to paying users outright to generate content worth the few seconds of watch time they’ll receive. The whole concept of social media itself is imploding, as Facebook’s repeated attempts to pivot away from the form and toward fnance or entertainment make plain; given that what we call social media is really just televisual technology pushed to its limit, this was inevitable.

Page 232

Not even ever more engrossing and interoperable gaming metaverses can sweep away the sea change of sensibilities unleashed by the digital triumph. If kids game earlier in life than ever, they often and increasingly burn through games and the gaming lifestyle faster too. While juvenile fixtures of gaming scenes are busted for sexual crimes against tweens—as happened recently to one well-known Fortnite livestreamer—actual juveniles, tomorrow’s First Generation men and women, look back with jaded nostalgia on the mega-game’s simple, brand-free Season One. Now, they see it as it is: just another trash heap of commercial cringe, a sort of graveyard where oversaturated IP goes to die, respawn, die, respawn, die, in the manner of a Hindu who never achieves the degree of enlightenment sufficient to rest in peace.

Page 249

In an era when commerce and communications are controlled to produce propaganda, reasonably if excessively paranoid Americans see predictive programming in the pop art manufactured to condition them to accept coming reorganizational attractions; in truth, science fiction has served more to signal that the Complex has already introduced seemingly fantasy technology into real life. The fantasy is that ordinary people—artists—made it up. “Art at its most signifcant is a Distant Early Warning System,” McLuhan observed, “that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it."

Page 250

What better mode of control in a world where the unlimited weaponization of technology has made communication itself—cyberspace’s “consensual hallucination,” the counterculture dream of the collective trip made manifest—into the ultimate weapon, more powerful than any nuclear bomb?

Page 255

In taking up this great renunciation, the digital age’s First Generation covenants that its peoples shall have no Last Generation. Because our computers have conquered the world, we must ensure their power is forever divided—made servant of the soul, of which no code can be physician.