If the Constitution Isn't in Force Online, What Is?
Digital despots are using our internet to make real life un-American.
There’s little question that the regime bequeathed to us by the Founders has gone through several more or less forced transformations. Yet — until recently — it would be uncontroversial to say that our constitutionally guaranteed republican form of government survived more or less intact.
Over the past decade, that has changed.
Some in tech seem dead set on convincing themselves that the present regime, the one that has not only forced us ever further away from the America of the Founding but away from republican government altogether, is not to blame — indeed that the refounding of America on altogether post-political grounds is to be celebrated:
This is cope! There is no separating these men and their doings from the architecture of the post-republican, post-Constitutional regime that ruling officials have used the internet to create and, now, to invade and infuse our real life with. (On that subject, read Part II of this testimony.)
But there is a question of whether this new regime is capable of having its political cake and eating it too. Its headlong rush toward the ever more fully automated simulation of political life threatens to bring to an ultimate crescendo the tension between the post-humanization of social organization and the restriction of the “human element” in governance/cybernetics to that of a priestly caste catechizing ruling machines in, as the case has become, woke “ethics”.
We noted here recently that the tension is symbiotic. The woke priestly caste needs a planetary supercomputer to pursue its obsession with total and perfect justice on Earth, and a supermajority of techies desirous of establishing their own priestly caste are more than willing to embrace wokeness as the cost of doing that business. After all, the two itineraries converge, to a greater extent and for deeper reasons than purists on either “side” are typically willing to believe. It is in the nature of wokies to accept any degree of tech so long as they “get to” be sovereign, and in the nature of techies to embrace any degree of woke so long as they get to.
The terms of this mimetic struggle are not playing out in a vacuum. They are playing out in the very real and incarnate realm of the United States Government. If it is now impossible for any regime to re-establish its sovereignty in the digital age without establishing its sovereignty over the digital technology within its physical and virtual territory, it is impossible for adherents of any religion to establish it officially without converting the sovereign of the regime.
Lo these recent years we have all enjoyed a front-row virtual seat to witnessing that conversion process whip through Washington and its many “public” and “private” franchises, with no end in sight. What so few have an inkling about is what can actually be done with regard to this process rather than allow oneself to be invaded and infused with it body and soul. The testimony below takes the answer to require the extension of the Constitution into American cyberspace — and not only that. So too must we once again recall that the Constitution doesn’t create the rights it enumerates or prevent them from disappearing in its absence or abeyance. It memorializes them — lest we forget that, even unenumerated, the elements of our given human complement that make possible the political life — as more than a pandemonium of power games — are inalienable.
Yes, the array and exercise of those elements in various slices of space and time are mutable and distinct. But no — forcibly transforming them out from under the body politic, usurping away Americans’ form of government, way of life, and, now increasingly, humanity, violates both the Constitution and the authority on which the Constitution, however properly amended, is maintained.
It is now clear that the Constitution cannot be restored to American cyberspace — and, only then, offline life with it — without newly explicit memorializations of the foundational digital rights already implicit in our first two Amendments. The testimony below shows how and why lawmakers should recognize the necessity and the urgency of writing and passing Digital Rights Amendments at the federal as well as the state levels.
The rest of this post is for paid subscribers…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to SUCCULENT to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.