Sensory Overlord

Not Gensler, but the Borg in him.

Speaking remotely at the Piper Sandler Global Exchange Conference, SEC chief Gary Gensler dropped the boom on cryptocurrency. “Hucksters. Fraudsters. Scam artists. Ponzi schemes. The public left in line at the bankruptcy court.”

Alarm — ah, but what did you expect? — is electrifying the crypto community on Twitter, compressing the news into the meme that Gensler thinks all cryptocurrency is nothing more than a scam. And though that’s not exactly right, the reality is probably worse.

“The crypto securities markets should not be allowed to undermine the well-earned trust the public has in the capital markets,” Gensler went on. “The crypto markets should not be allowed to harm investors.”

“When crypto asset market participants go on Twitter or TV and say they lacked ‘fair notice’ that their conduct could be illegal, don’t believe it. They may have made a calculated economic decision to take the risk of enforcement as the cost of doing business…. Given that most crypto tokens are subject to the securities laws, it follows that most crypto intermediaries have to comply with securities laws as well….

“These alleged failures deprive investors of critical protections, including rulebooks that prevent fraud and manipulation, proper disclosures, segregation of customer assets, safeguards against conflicts of interest, oversight by a self-regulatory organization, and routine inspection by the SEC.”

It seems like only yesterday, crypto people cheered Gensler’s arrival at SEC. At last, someone who knew crypto — he even taught a few classes! Once you read the knowledge, how could you go wrong?

This, my brothers and sisters, is the real scam. The ultimate scam.

Knowledge doesn’t save — and without our soul and the Holy Spirit coursing into and through what we build and do, its fruits are bitter, its fields barren, and the scam is on us. Scammer get scammed, unto the end.

“People of the coin” can’t, as they say, recover from this. No cryptocurrency, not even Bitcoin, can provide the independent foundation for the footing we need to preserve it and ourselves against the spectacular power of the digital Leviathan in all its sublime horror. Under the immense pressure of the Borg, all that “libertarian,” “youth revolution” silicon turns to sand.

The first thing our builders must focus on is turning silicon sand back into rock — and not merely physical rock!

A STONE, NOT A STAGE PLAYER

Consider this unfinished business from our look at the would-be Bonapartes of the Bits — Nietzsche’s encounter with the hypocrisy and futility haunting the would-be builders of his age:

But there are ages entirely the reverse, the properly democratic ages, in which people tend to become more and more oblivious of this belief, and a sort of impudent conviction and quite contrary mode of viewing things comes to the front, the Athenian conviction which is first observed in the epoch of Pericles, the American conviction of the present day, which wants also more and more to become a European conviction: whereby the individual is convinced that he can do almost anything, that he can play almost any role, whereby everyone makes experiments with himself, improvises, tries anew, tries with delight, whereby all nature ceases and becomes art.... The Greeks, having adopted this role-creed — an artist creed, if you will — underwent step by step, as is well known, a curious transformation, not in every respect worthy of imitation: they became actual stage-players; and as such they enchanted, they conquered all the world, and at last even the conqueror of the world, (for the Graeculus histrio conquered Rome, and not Greek culture, as the naïve are accustomed to say...).

What I fear, however, and what is at present obvious, if we desire to perceive it, is that we modern men are quite on the same road already; and whenever a man begins to discover in what respect he plays a role, and to what extent he can be a stage-player, he becomes a stage-player.... A new flora and fauna of men thereupon springs up, which cannot grow in more stable, more restricted eras — or is left ‘at the bottom,’ under the ban and suspicion of infamy; thereupon the most interesting and insane periods of history always make their appearance, in which ‘stage-players,’ all kinds of stage-players, are the real masters. Precisely thereby another species of man is always more and more injured, and in the end made impossible: above all the great ‘architects’; the building power is now being paralyzed; the courage that makes plans for the distant future is disheartened; there begins to be a lack of organizing geniuses. Who is there who would now venture to undertake works for the completion of which millenniums would have to be reckoned upon? The fundamental belief is dying out, on the basis of which one could calculate, promise and anticipate the future in one’s plan, and offer it as a sacrifice thereto, that in fact man has only value and significance in so far as he is a stone in a great building; for which purpose he has first of all to be solid, he has to be a ‘stone’... above all, not a stage-player!

In short — alas! this fact will be hushed up for some considerable time to come! — that which from henceforth will no longer be built, and can no longer be built, is a society in the old sense of the term; to build that structure everything is lacking, above all, the material. None of us are any longer material for a society: that is a truth which is seasonable at present! It seems to me a matter of indifference that meanwhile the most short-sighted, perhaps the most honest, and at any rate the noisiest species of men of the present day, our friends the Socialists, believe, hope, dream, and above all scream and scribble almost the opposite; in fact one already reads their watchword of the future: ‘free society,’ on all tables and walls. Free society? Indeed! Indeed! But you know, gentlemen, sure enough whereof one builds it? Out of wooden iron! Out of the famous wooden iron! And not even out of wooden...

You will notice the “libertarian” and the “socialist” urges to “build the free society” have collapsed into a single conundrum of quite the same sort as Nietzsche’s “wooden iron”:

The term is a German proverbial oxymoron, which synthesizes the concept of the ‘wooden’, which is organic, with the concept of ‘iron’ which is inorganic. Such a contradictio in adjecto is a logical inconsistency. It occurs when a modifying adjective opposes its noun, as in ‘square circle,’ ‘freezing fire,’ ‘boiling snow,’ or ‘hard liquid.’

Or cyber organism?? Or cyborg government??? Gensler and company’s pancepticon has its own foundation-of-sand problem.

But their “solution” — to go back to our most recent citation to Marilyn Manson — is to “outrace the speed of pain for another day.” And to do it, they’re willing, like software itself, to “eat the world” — including their most recent world-eater.

TRANSFORMERS SANS DISGUISE

Do they really believe this “progression” of Anglo Dolls can become infinite? Can be kept infinite? You mustn’t ask such questions of the Borg, which thunders back: Can you catch the digital swarm with a hook, or tie down its tongue with a line?

Our answer can’t be grounded in imagination (“the rebel alliance!!!1”) or calculation (“MATH”). It can’t be money, not the dollar a la Rand, not “digital gold” nor any “coin”. They’re not enough. They don’t give life. They don’t perform miracles.

And they don’t bear witness to the true identity of the adversary, who not only understands that under digital conditions money and information become one, but that money and information and perception converge too. The only limit to the convergence of these things into a singularity of sensory overload, under the authority of one sensory overlord, is the limit that men, under God’s authority, duly — discerningly, painstakingly, without shortcuts — observe first and only then enforce.

These limits will not be smothering and stultifying, but they will be real. In due time we’ll turn our attention to “regime change,” as my brilliant former dissertation committee member Patrick Deneen has entitled his new book on a postliberal refounding. But what we are talking about here is not that. Before we meet the challenge of making political arrangements sufficient to restore to our people and their land a polity, we must confront the duty to reassert spiritual authority and the life of the Spirit over ourselves and our most powerful of weapons and tools.

Fail there, and the first stirrings of the pancepticon and its sensory overlord will be nothing compared to what is to come.