Cortex Communism
Who controls the means of perception?
Paid subscribers just enjoyed a deep little dive into the latest twist in the deep state drama: Aliens are Real, Actually, and we must Unite to cope!
There’s a bit more I want to say on this as the Borg’s meme begins to spread. Elon Musk himself paused to note he has “seen zero evidence of aliens fwiw.” It’s an interesting bit of self-casting against type, considering the fairly plain confluence in the making of AI acceleration and State-Sponsored Alien Trutherism.
Let’s start where we left off last time:
The not-so-subtle shift of UFO “trutherism” from a humane quest of marginal renegades to an Intelligence Community agenda dovetailing with the global posthumanization project should put Christians and all Americans on psychological high alert.
As for Americans who think they can face down the digital swarm? And the post-Christian priestly caste anointing itself to rule a planetary/interstellar borg? Without the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Without the Body of Christ that is His Church? And without the vigilant acceptance of our given human being as a sacred gift? As hard as the reasonableness-centrist people may meme to that effect, the hard and humbling truth is otherwise.
The assessment of current technological trends that arises from this conclusion focuses around a few simple points:
Technology and technologists attempting to banish or substitute for the Triune God are not necessarily evil or demonic outright — though they may well be — but are at least gravely in error, and, importantly to many uncertain observers, are courting or abetting massive undue spiritual and physical suffering (torture, disfigurement, misery, enmity, suicide, slaughter, mutilation, etc., etc.).
Technology and technologists that do build for the sake of the Trinity and Christ’s Church will direct development toward some forms of increased sophistication and “acceleration” but not others; some forms will, on the basis of their intended and actual function, be aggressively rejected.
THE SMORGASBORG
Let’s put some meat on this. Consider the tantalizing spread of technological development suggested by the following:
In his recent Twitter Space with RFK Jr., Elon presented himself as having concluded that “digital superintelligence” will arrive before Neuralink can achieve communications between your brain’s “cortex” and an AI “extension of yourself.”
Jack Dorsey, former Twitter chief and current RFK Jr. endorser, is on record tweeting that “Elon is the singular solution I trust” — with regard to the “problem” of Twitter “being a company” instead of a “public good at a protocol level,” but, in the same breath, went on to say “I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.”
Marc Andreessen, in an otherwise quite practical and hard-nosed post taking the air out of the AI panic balloon, claimed “every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love,” and “every person will have an AI assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful. The AI assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes.”
Peter Thiel has not (to my knowledge) adjusted his intentionally provocative judgment that, because “crypto is decentralizing” and “AI is centralizing,” a more ideological framing to map onto that reality is “crypto is libertarian and AI is communist.”
Sure enough, the most plausible case for Marc’s claim that “AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it” is that, as he puts it,
China has a vastly different vision for AI than we do — they view it as a mechanism for authoritarian population control, full stop. They are not even being secretive about this, they are very clear about it, and they are already pursuing their agenda. And they do not intend to limit their AI strategy to China — they intend to proliferate it all across the world, everywhere they are powering 5G networks, everywhere they are loaning Belt And Road money, everywhere they are providing friendly consumer apps like Tiktok that serve as front ends to their centralized command and control AI. The single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we — the United States and the West — do not.
Taking all these claims together, to me, at least, it sounds like what we are clearly dealing with is a struggle over what civilization wields planetary sway over the way in which human perception at the neural level is integrated into the digital swarm and organized into a kind of whole.
CHURCH AND SNAKE
A Christian is apt to agree that a world in which China prevails in that struggle — however “harmonious” or anti-apocalyptic Daoism may be relative to the cyclically and progressively catastrophic thoughts and actions of Christian heretics and apostates — is a bad world: not only an invitation to Antichrist but perhaps even more so a katechon that errantly postpones the End Times in a long, perhaps millennia long, pause, one that disfiguringly dirempts humanity from God’s will in our time.
But such a Christian is also apt to notice that the aggressive trajectory of Christian heresy and apostasy today — more aggressive than ever before — aims maniacally in the direction of doing precisely what China is accused of doing but even more so, more dazzlingly, more all-consumingly, more protean and Pelagian, more optimized for mastering each person in exactly whichever way they are most desirous of becoming a slave to entities or objects other than God. “Authoritarian population control” is, unfortunately hardly a market of ideas cornered by Beijing.
In fact what we are facing is more like a very vibrant (“multipolar” even) market for the idea of authoritarian population control, with the “Western” model — joining the Borg to escape the accursed limits of the given body; to deny the reality of the God-given soul, the presence and return of Christ, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit; to emancipate the self-creating “spark” into a collective consciousness capable through the Borg of assimilating all spacetime — leading the relatively more “humble” Chinese model, measured in the militance of both its technological and its spiritual crusaderism. Truly, this is why so much of the “Old World” is scrambling into a bloc opposing the Western-born Borg.
The Christian understanding of the situation is, in short, one that rejects the project of digitizing humanity into a “collective consciousness” because the Body of Christ is “already a thing” which it can only disfigure or damn us to banish or attempt to substitute away with manipulated or manufactured matter alone. The Christian understanding is that the “scientific” effort to “solve” the “mystery” of “consciousness” by reducing it to perception, and by reducing perception to stimulation in the cortex, misunderstands to the point of attacking the reality of our humanity and the spiritual life, awareness, and communion it has been given to us to experience singly and collectively both on Earth and in Heaven. The Christian understanding is that, for all its dazzling novelty, the “new” promise of the Borg is the ancient promise of the Serpent.
BEYOND THE BORG
People forget Engels when they think about “Marxism;” rather than simply the materialist calculations of a post-Jewish economist, Communism — a thoroughly “Western” innovation — is very deeply a post-Protestant heresy, one recognizably the hallmark of the character type belonging to Engels: bohemian child of hardworking, well-off, anxiety-ridden upper-middle-classers. Never forget that Engels’ parents supported him financially to sit at home between bouts of travel writing fan fiction about how the world could come together and bring Heaven on down to Earth.
It’s resoundingly unsurprising that this exact same spiritual “value proposition” is coming out of the leading figures visibly salivating to reorganize the alien question around a categorical imperative that coping with the ostensibly Christianity-killing fact of intelligent alien life demands we unite planetary “consciousness” into a cyborg superorganism ruled by those who alone are master of the requisite techniques.
It’s primed and ready to work as a self-fulfilling prophecy: those who control the means of perception possess the key to fully automated luxury cortex communism.
Good thing we actually can’t fulfill what seem to be our own prophesies.
Can technology be developed in a manner that avoids, in fact counteracts, the tendency of Man to lust for consolidated control over all perception? Can regimes be built or rebuilt to confer on their sovereigns the spiritual authority needed to discerningly guide that kind of development? If so, how? These are crucial questions today. But still more momentous is the question of who can do that building — and who, under present circumstances, shall.
Engels was a trust fund hipster? Figures.
Dark times. Prayer, fasting, fighting.