Worldcoin will expand its operations to sign up more users globally and aims to allow other organizations to use its iris-scanning and identity-verifying technology, a senior manager for the company behind the project told Reuters… “If we can do the infrastructure that allows for governments or other entities to do so we would be very happy.”
Surprising — at this point, I hope — no one? How greater a sign do you need that tech insurgents and the tech establishment are so interoperable and interchangeable as to be, whatever their Very Real Differences, one thing?
Only fitting for a world stuck with (within?) the digital swarm and the burden of organizing it. But in the West, all the mechanisms to do so now in motion converge around the basic Worldcoin idea: that what must be “solved” is the near-future impossibility of any longer distinguishing between real humans and simulated humans.
Doubtless, many actually long for this moment, a singularity already being invested with “spiritual meaning” and hope for a great emancipation into posthuman angelic “experience”. But practically speaking, governance requires maintaining the distinction, at least in the short term. Put another way, the machine needs to know who is really human so it can gain the knowledge, data, and perception of those beings necessary to control them.
“Trustably verifying your humanity” is not for your sake, silly. It’s for the system’s. “As information itself becomes the largest business in the world” — put another way, as information becomes money — “data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
McLuhan associated this process with a massive junking of human institutions.
Today electric retrieval systems scrap nineteenth-century mechanism and dump the entire collection of archaic and preliterate cultures on the Western doorstep. Electronic culture has created the multiprobe, and this probe results in vast amounts of garbage… works like Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot are concerned with the destructive aspects of the enormous creativity of the electronic age…. How to elicit creativity from these middenheaps has become the problem of modern culture.
McLuhan caught glimpses of where digital dominance would take us: away from maturity, away from humanity. “The ‘flower people’ have set a new fashion” — the “unisex” — “which may be a paradigm for the entire global culture,” he surmised.
The cause is the speed-up of information movement to instant levels. The resulting ‘inflation’ of cultural currency creates a corresponding decline in all residual or establishment areas…. Bureaucracy increases quickly…. The ‘flower people,’ likewise, will soon take over the bureaucratic function of state and army in order to propagate peace and Peter Pan.
Protect Trans Kids! That is, propagate trans kids… permanent kids… not exactly what McLuhan — or anybody, until ten seconds ago by the clock of our environment sped up to instant levels — had in mind. Yeats’ “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” made an impression much nearer and dearer:
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
1933! Closing in on a hundred years ago. If Yeats and company staggered around in a human garbage dump, where are we now? Halfway-ish between then and now, Joseph Heller, preeminent model of the secular intellectual with a “probity” heroic enough to bear the task of making art out of the trash our world had become, told us the ultimate Catch-22 was Snowden’s secret: “Man was matter… the spirit gone, man is garbage.” Not so terrible news, eh, if the trash of Man is an Artist’s treasure??
McLuhan knew the reassemblage of human beings and of organized humanity was a high art even before electronics sent all culture and cultures diving into the dumpster. But those heights are not at all necessarily sacred ones. The grand electric-age politics of reassembling human matter into “totalitarian” form, even or especially at the great cost paid out in the material treasure of human blood, has itself been replaced in the minds of the ruling elite, insurgent and established factions alike. Both, whether they want to maintain control or seize control over the apparatus of reassembly, want to do so bloodlessly. After all, the bots are bloodless, as are the digital doppelgangers of each person copied into the system. “Retribulation,” wrote McLuhan, meaning repayment, “is the universal mode in every kind of organization, regardless of geography or ideology.” For your service in becoming the lifeblood of the artificial being built to take world power in a bloodless coup, your repayment is in worldcoin, a currency of mind as without spirit as the new regime is without blood — that is, heart.
REGIME ENVY
I find it hard under these circumstances not to conclude that everyone in the “regime debate” surrounding them is wrong in the same way. Monarchist technologists, intellect-worshipping neoliberals, Catholic integralists, Protestant nationalists, all making these claims about their respective political philosophies being the political art that alone can make something out of the global city dump America has become. The yearning to “get our arms around the problem,” to at least climb to the top of the colossal trash heap, if we can’t view it from space, and get our bearings from up there, see it whole, craft a new vision of a new whole, this yearning is, especially for intellectuals trying to survive in this world, immense in its intensity. All these contending factions are increasingly obliged in their intellectualism to wager ever more on a not-so-intellectual hope (is this “heroic probity”?) that gaining control over the top of the current assembly — janky, yes, but still the top — will confer power and authority sufficient to begin in earnest the build, the process of rising up a new kind of working order from America’s junkyard ruins. If they can just get their hands on the administrative state! Which, today, and until further notice, means the computative state.
But what is the counsel of history? How many republics, even garbage ones, turned to monarchy and into monarchies without having first been conquered? How many large republics? One? The Republic of Novgorod? How long did that particular regime survive?
Thus did Great Prince Ivan advance with all his host against his domain of Novgorod because of the rebellious spirit of its people, their pride and conversion to Latinism. With a great and overwhelming force did he occupy the entire territory of Novgorod from frontier to frontier, inflicting on every part of it the dread powers of his fire and sword.
There is simply no analogy, no model, no historical precedent for the present predicament of the United States of America — not in terms political philosophy can really put to use. The computative state is just there, a novelty throwing political philosophy back on first principles. The political philosophers of the various factions feel certain both politics and philosophy must counsel that, like any apparatus of state, this one surely cannot be altered, reformed, or replaced until it is first controlled. Even those hoping for a peaceful separation between America’s factions still think in terms of securing a chunk of the state apparatus.
Of course, you can hardly fault political philosophers for recommending we correct our governance in order to improve our situation — or for holding out evident hope that if you just replace the bad governors with good governors, addressing the technological problems will just be a matter of applying good law. As good as it sounds on paper, however, how does another glance at history suggest we’ll fare in practice? Because, as we know, technology has advanced to a degree that throws up inescapably theological and religious questions demanding answers in kind, and the record of history is quite clear that even very apt governors with top-down control of the apparatus of state cannot restrain themselves from asserting control over the “apparatus of faith” as they are apt to see it, that is, the Church. Even in the very best integrated regimes with the greatest legitimacy drawn from the fullest authority — east of the West but west of the East — pronounced and protracted conflict over monarchical or imperial encroachment into the life of the Church has been characteristic and, in general, impossible to expunge.
THE RULE OF THE TALENTS
All of which is to say that no political philosophy, even that of the devout, can suffice to describe a way to take power over the computative state and build a new and better regime from the American garbage heap that sprawls below. What is missing is not only the indispensable element provided by the Church as a spiritual body, assembled spiritually, not politically or philosophically, but the spiritual treasure within each and every one of us, the Lordcoin vested in us by the Lord for us to invest, profit from, multiply, and repay unto Him (Matt. 25:14-30):
14 For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods.
15 And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.
16 Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents.
17 And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two.
18 But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord's money.
19 After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them.
20 And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more.
21 His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.
22 He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them.
23 His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.
24 Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed:
25 And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.
26 His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed:
27 Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.
28 Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents.
29 For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
30 And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Recently I asked a priest exactly what was going on with the line about knowing the Lord to be a hardcase who reaps where he hasn’t sown. He referred me to Genesis. Instead of taking responsibility for his Fall — for burying his given spiritual treasure instead of multiplying it for his Lord through its good use — Adam blames Eve. But because God made Eve for Adam, to blame Eve is really to blame God. The Fall is God’s fault. How dare He punish poor Adam for what He himself has done?
Through such false victimization we fear God in the wrong way. We fear Him as he becomes to us in our betrayal of Him — in our failure, through a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, to make fruitful whatever measure of spiritual treasure He has given us. Through that failure, that spiritual impoverishment which is a kind of death and killing, His very love becomes, to us, not a radiance of uncreated light but a river of scorching fire.
Obviously the understanding of wealth, treasure, finance, currency, and coin Christ teaches in the parable of the talents differs beyond measures from that taught by any apparatus that tries to technologically substitute the treasure of spiritual life within us with the coin of the fallen world and its falling ways. But what is more, Christ’s teaching reminds us that it is our duty to keep the currency of spirit given to us in fruitful circulation, not just for our own sakes but for the sake of each and all. Without it, no regime, no laws, no men, indeed no church, however powerful or authoritative, can withstand the death, evil, and chaos in our midst — much less replace a bad system or structure of governance with one we could call better, or even good.
Any technological or political effort that ignores or denies this reality is destined to throw us back into the trash heap, onto ground where all philosophies, all rules of laws or men, are worse than fruitless.
❤️ Pray and work. Come Hell or high water we have our marching orders: Love God, love neighbor.
It would be nice to have good leaders, though.
From drop to rivulet into brook to stream to river. Dendritic power first starts with the drop. Excellent commentary.