A World-Historical Upgrade

1.

The emerging consensus among commentators I take seriously is that the actions of the Trump 2 regime so far mark a massive structural shift in how our world is ordered, one that has been inevitable for some time, one whose current reactionary inflection is significant but far from the full story of what is happening, and one in which Trump himself by now has far more the character of a weaponized meme than of a properly historical actor. Thus Bruno Maçaes observes that he could “write a history of the present moment in American foreign policy without mentioning Trump. That’s how structural these forces are.”

Here I would add that the same is true of domestic policy, or perhaps rather that there is no real distinction between the two at this point — the AI slop Trump recently shared, depicting himself and Elon and Bibi on lounge chairs at the “Gaza Riviera”, enjoying the sight of bearded trans belly-dancers beneath a giant Türkmenbaşy-like gold statue of Trump himself: this is just a small part of one and the same delirious shock-and-awe campaign intended to announce the definitive end of an era in which one could still expect some semblance of sense-making from elected leaders. It is a rupture of the barrier that had previously kept memetic exuberance confined to just one channel of political chatter, the “extremely online” one, and elevated it to the dominant mode of political activity as such. As Musk recently declared, riffing on Oppenheimer’s riff on the Bhagavad Gita, “I am become meme”. You all can continue with your inane debate about whether our chief tech oligarch is “smart” or “dumb”, as if these words had any context-free determination, but it is clear at least that he understands why this line works: the substitution of “meme” for “death” is a natural and intuitive one, but one that the mainstream commentariat has been unable to make, on the clueless presumption that memes remain, as they might plausibly have seemed circa 2010, little more than an amusing adolescent pastime.

The original Sanskrit term cited by the last guy to usher a world-destroying device into history, the story of which delighted tens of millions of middlebrows throughout the Oscar season of a recent past —who seem still to believe that history itself is one giant biopic—, is कालः, which can mean “Death”, but more generally means “Time”: Krishna identifies himself as Time/Death to remind Arjuna of the all-pervasive force that consumes all things, and foils the vainglorious ambitions of all mortals. This is Time as simple duration, but we can also understand it, and are compelled by current events to understand it, as history. The revolution that has left us with a thoroughly memeified politics has indeed destroyed a world, if not yet the world (Krishna himself does not assume that there can be only one of them).

I am increasingly convinced that that now-lost world is nothing less than the one shaped over the past few centuries in the trail of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, and then “upgraded” again with the French Revolution that established and quickly began to export the ideal of republican self-government across the globe. The new tech-oligarchic Upgrade in turn, supercharged by AI, has been all too plainly announced in Musk’s use of the archaic resultative perfect “am become”, and in Trump’s aggressively propagandistic shift from even an approximation of verbal language to the new visual language of surreal posthuman slop. As with the French Revolution, even if this new revolution fails, it will succeed — even if Musk ends up Epsteined before the year is out, even if Trump shares the earthly fate of a Bolsonaro or a Berlusconi or a Mussolini, the “disruption” they have already wrought is irreversible. Historical eras, it seems, like iPhones, come with their own programmed obsolescence. Their components structures get worn down, by Time, and you are forced, willy-nilly, to move on to a new one.

2.

Now I hate to get all “Did somebody say ‘the politics of fish tacos’? Smell Doctor here, so listen up guys! (A Thread, 1/??)”, but it does seem to me that current events may be somewhat illuminated by some of the sort of considerations that come naturally to a specialist in my home-base scholarly discipline of History and Philosophy of Science.

When you visit the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, it is impossible not to notice the intensity of the preoccupation with weights and measurements of the young revolutionary regime of the 1790s. It is this preoccupation that left us with the hyper-rationalized base-ten metric system, and subducted into oblivion, everywhere but the US and a few British Imperial hold-outs, all the lovely folksy measurements of the premodern world — all the leagues and pints and ells. With the Revolutionary Calendar they hoped to decimalize chronometry as well, and if you go to the Musée Carnavalet you can even see, not at all far from the display of a locket containing a wisp of Marie Antoinette’s anthracite hair, a 10-hour clock that they hoped circa 1795 might set the standard of timekeeping. Here of course the basic reality of our planet’s rotation kicked back against their ambitious scheme to break with the past, and soon enough the revolutionary regime reverted back to the time-tested duodecimal system that had been perfected over the centuries. But as for length and weight, reality proved more flexible, and we never got our ells and bushels back.

So strong is the association between standardized measurement and the French Revolution that for a few centuries it was simply taken for granted that Paris should serve, literally, as the home of the meter. In 1799 a meter-long platinum bar was installed in the Archives Nationales, the so called “mètre des archives”, later to be replaced, in 1889, by the so-called “International Prototype Meter”, a platinum-iridium alloy bar housed at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in nearby Sèvres. What is a meter? It’s whatever is precisely as long as that particular object. Or at least that’s what it was until 1983, when yet another system Upgrade transferred the responsibility for maintaining the meter in existence to the calculation of the amount of time it takes for a laser to travel, at light speed, the distance in question. And in this way the meter, too, “is become Time”.

At the Musée des Arts et Métiers you will see on display several examples of meter bars, alongside their sibling kilogram weights and other such concrete instances of abstract quantities. These are tokens of the prototypes themselves, which had been implemented for use by government inspectors cracking down on what was perceived as widespread commercial fraud. Vegetable vendors at open-air markets now had to have their scales certified by the state, whose agents would periodically come by and place their standardized weights in the balance to verify the tare. Several of the beheadings during the Reign of Terror involved criminal cases against merchants who, in some way or other, violated the new regime of standardization. The great founder of modern chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier, lost his head in 1794 for, among other things, vitiating with water the tobacco he had in desperation taken to selling. A vastly greater number of unknown people lost their livelihoods, whether to overt violence, or simply to confiscation or de-licensing.

This was all part of the last great Upgrade, which by 1789 had become historically inevitable, and which required for its realization a few clear-sighted and ruthless historical actors who understood the several respects in which a standardized system of weights and measures, and a government bureaucracy charged with enforcing it, has a power to keep citizen-subjects in line that no absolute monarch could ever exercise by simple force of his will.

3.

At this point I feel I have to express at least some repentance for my anti-bureaucracy crusade over the past few years. As regular readers will know, something broke in me during our successive covid lockdowns a few years back, a break that I chronicled in a 2023 article in Harper’s, which won the praise of Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s current director of the National Institutes of Health. I was never an anti-vaxxer, I was never tempted in the slightest by conspiracy theories about what was “really” going on; but what was really going on, in plain view, was already quite disconcerting enough. The Zoomification of human contact, the QR-code menus, the obligatory scannable vaccination apps on what had become de-facto obligatory smartphones: all of this, much more than the underlying epidemiological reality, struck me as the truly great tragedy of 2020-21. And now, after some years, it continues to strike me as one of the most significant prodrome moments in clearing the way for the present tech-oligarchic Upgrade.

In the Biden years I fell into the habit of describing my concerns about the alienating effect of our new technologies in conventional antibureaucratic terms — as if the forces of surveillance and control in the world of 2022 were still operating in the same way as the threats to the livelihood of a vegetable vendor in 1794. But that’s because I was still thinking in terms set by our last great world-historical Upgrade, and could not yet see that what was really getting me down, what had transformed me into some kind of bureaucracy-hating romantic, was not that we were still under the reign of a clunky and impersonal but nevertheless somewhat human system of paper-shuffling and form-filling and license-renewing, but that we were in the course of moving beyond that and into something far more streamlined and sleek, which is to say far more hostile to the continued existence of real human souls within its gears. And now, looking back, I feel tempted to say: two cheers for human bureaucracy, two cheers for lazy sinecures in bloated ministries, two cheers for indifferent clerks who give in to your unconventional request after your third desperate plea. All these vulnerable points in the old system represented the enduring survival of the irreducibly human within the modern state administrative apparatus.

I was talking to a thoughtful young man from India not long ago who told me that most of the people he knows back home can’t wait to see the human judges within the Indian justice system replaced by AI — this is the only way, he said, that they can hope to eliminate corruption. For me this conversation was a moment of rare epiphany, where I grasped in an instant what I now take to be the real stakes of the present moment: we are at the boundary between a world of regular corruption, where sin is still possible, which is really just another way of saying a world where human beings can still be human, and a world that looks essentially little different from the world of Minority Report. I will take ordinary human corruption over antihuman automated perfection any day — but no one has offered me a choice.

I thus find myself in the awkward situation of having spent the past few years beating the drum for a cause that I assuredly do not support. When I have declared that I hate bureaucracy, I have been thinking romantically about an impossible return to some sort of anarcho-communalist idyll, where order is preserved by honor, good will, and human charity. But this tends to be heard only as a hatred of bureaucracy tout court, and when the tech vanguard hears it, they declare that they hate bureaucracy too, but in fact they only hate it because for them it is a system that is still too human, in need of replacement not by honor, charity, etc., but by full automation and universal surveillance.

4.

In a reply to my recent piece on Chateaubriand and conservatism, my old friend and collaborator Eric Schliesser maintains that “you read Justin for his style and analysis of our mores and culture, and connecting these to literature and the most arcane of ethnographic and philological insights, not for his political thought.” Ouf. It doesn’t seem to dawn on Eric that ethnographic and philological insights just are my political thought, nor that, even if I myself am not particularly successful —let us say for the sake of argument— at bringing such considerations to bear in contemporary political debate, surely in principle one might draw on such insights, about how other people live in different times and places, how they represent social reality to themselves, how they come to share in their particular set of collective illusions, in order better to understand the nature and challenges of our own collective illusions — i.e., of our politics.

But what particularly struck me in Eric’s essay was the contention that I am now, in the wake of Trump 2’s victory, somehow “penitent” about having spent the last few years loudly refusing to get with the program of whatever my self-styled progressive-left peers were promoting, and insisting that their strange public posturing in favor of purportedly radical political aims was mostly just a tech-driven neoliberal deviation and an effort on the part of a very privileged class of Americans to hold onto its privilege by learning symbolically to disown it — to ensure, like the aristocratic protagonist of Giovanni di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958), that everything stay the same even after everything has changed. I’m not penitent about any of that, not at all — I was right! And if you tell me that even in being right I was nonetheless playing into the hands of the MAGA movement, I would say that, well, you all were playing far more carelessly into their hands by being wrong.

So no, I’m not penitent, though like any good cybernetic system I am self-correcting, and I do at least concede that my thinking about bureaucracy has been somewhat blindered by my presumption that it would always continue to function in the way it has since the Enlightenment. It should go without saying that of course I would rather spend days on end in a sexual-harassment-prevention workshop run by incompetent, bumbling, know-nothing goofballs from over in HR, than have my irises scanned by a machine designed to detect microtraces of any prohibited affect or longing.

No one, or no one decent, wants to be a regime stooge, a running dog, a lackey, but everyone seems to have their own theory of what that would involve. Most in my peer group seem to think in order to avoid lapsing into such a role one must take a stance of total opposition, giving no quarter, finding no common ground. They generally take for granted that in politics in general you can implement a scaled version of the bartender’s wisdom, according to which you must immediately eject even the loneliest, scrawniest skinhead from your alcoholic lair the very instant you see his Iron Cross tattoo, since if you do not he is sure to come back with his friends, and before you know it your bar will have been transformed into a neo-Nazi redoubt. On this presumption much comes to depend on whether or not you are prepared to call Trumpism “fascism” — since it is a universally accepted truth that you must not look for common ground with a fascist, and if that label can be made to stick, then the Schmittian stance of absolute opposition becomes practically unassailable.

I do think Trumpism is fascism — among other things. I don’t know how else to interpret Trump’s claim that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law” (though of course there is also at least a layer of Bonapartism in this historical accretion). But I find that this acknowledgment fails to translate, for me, into what most of those who are eager to see such an admission as the one I’ve just made would like to see follow from it. The problem, as I understand it now, is that I am just not a Schmittian, and I have no interest in living, politically or otherwise, according to a friend/enemy distinction. I know only friends, even if some of them are for the moment huffy with me. I am a sappy Will Rogers-style American, a Leibnizian eirenist, and a Christian humanist: I never met a man I didn’t like, I believe all disagreement is only apparent and results from confusion in the way we deploy our terms, and I believe we are all equal before God. I have family members and loved ones who are MAGA voters. If you are an American and that is not the case for you, I would suggest that perhaps you do not know a sufficient number of your countrymen. I am not a bartender, and I am not a soldier in a civil war, and I find that I can only say, once we have agreed upon the correctness of the f-word: “Okay, but, practically speaking, what now?” And I find that while a cordon sanitaire might be a reasonable thing to impose when one is forming voting blocs in European parliamentary elections and wants, with very good reason, to shut out the far right, it is not at all so reasonable when one is an individual thinker, writer, and public debater.

As such an individual, I find, again, that Trumpism is fascism, but not only fascism. Tech oligarchy could have succeeded in usurping the legitimate democratic power even if the lanyarded dorks at CPAC were not currently displaying likenesses of their president donning a Caesarean crown of oak leaves. They could have just remained some species of Wolf of Wall Street-like amoralist cokeheads. They probably could have ushered the new oligarchy in on a rising wave of wokeness, if in fact that wave had not crested before the end of the election cycle. So the part of the currently unfolding coup that I am calling the Upgrade, the part that is, I have come to believe, historically inevitable, is not intrinsically fascist, though it has piggy-backed on fascism to achieve its ends. The result is a mostly new hybrid species of irony-poisoned, rabidly irrationalist, jocular fascism, most commonly delivered in a protective shell of plausible deniability.

In this respect the AI-slop video of the Gaza Riviera is to my mind a far more destabilizing piece of propaganda than Trump’s claim to be above the law, which, for all its disdain for our old regime’s Constitution and for all the hard work those good Founding Fathers put into it, at least had the virtue of being expressed in human language, and therefore of being open to refutation. I suspect we will be seeing ever fewer instances of politics-through-language in the coming years, and ever more politics-through-slop, the cumulative effect of which will be a widespread and constant experience of alienation (whether gleeful or despondent), a general and persistent epistemic fog. The most common reaction will be not: “How dare they?” but rather: “WTF am I even seeing?” This is all by design — the purpose is to outsource the exercise of power to automated systems we are not even in principle capable of understanding.

5.

These days I find myself waking up before dawn, and wondering confusedly whether the country of my birth even exists anymore. I recall a Canadian study I read years ago showing that in postal codes where the local post office had recently been shut down, provincial separatism, not just Québécois sovereignty but also the fledgling independence movements of the Prairies and elsewhere, correspondingly spiked. The idea is that these outposts of a respectable nationwide institution, with their standardized bilingual logos and so on, gave local residents, likely without knowing it, a sense of belonging to something much larger. It seems to me sometimes that what we are experiencing right now is comparable to Canadian post-office closures, but at a vastly larger scale. No fragment of civic culture seems any longer to be a part of something, but only to be, precisely, a fragment, as if of something that has exploded.

Some desultory clicking the other night brought me to the video of Chingy’s 2003 hit, “Right Thurr”. I hadn’t so much as thought about this song in 20 years, and it now felt somewhat as if I was watching an ancient Attic phallic procession, or a Punjabi peasants’ vernacular performance of the Mahabharata, or something equally distant from our current reality. How strange it is to see a pop-cultural celebration of regional American distinctness. Why does he say it like that: thurr rather than there, sturr rather than stare? It must be a St. Louis thing. What a place: St. Louis! I’ve only ever been to the airport, but I sure heard it invoked a lot over the course of my earlier life — Bugs Bunny instructing someone to “meet me in St. Louie”; The Glass Menagerie; Josephine Baker as a child dancing for money on a street corner; Alvino Rey’s “St. Louis Blues” (1944) featuring Stringy the Talking Steel Guitar; Nelly getting all “hot in herre”, Chingy identifying the object of his desire as standing, in relation to him, “right thurr”. What a place that must be!

I’ve barely even passed through St. Louis, yet for the long first part of my life I was certain that I belonged to the same great polity that included it. Now, not so much. Now we have deterritorialized identity vectors, by which we position ourselves in an uprooted digital space, rather than daring to deploy any richer autobiographical descriptor that tells people, in all the senses of this term, where we’re from. I go on social media, and somehow, no matter how much de-weeding I do, my feed seems always to be filled with sublinguistic gags performed for an intended audience of South Asian indentured construction workers in Dubai; I see the account of a Turkish woman named “Figen” who shows clips of paint mixing and other reminders of the existence of a bare physical world I used to know directly; I see videos of people hammering nails or heating up the heads of screws until they are red-hot, with broken-English commentary that says stuff like “Physics are our Magic”. I don’t know where this shit is coming from, and if the human beings represented in it in fact have colorful regional accents and idioms of their own, the level at which this content is targeted is so far from showcasing these that even to wonder about who they are, as human beings, with personalities as sui-generis as fingerprints, seems now entirely out of place.

Who would dare, today, attempt to push into mass culture a pop hit that so much as acknowledges, not to mention celebrates, regional distinctness? Taylor Swift had to exchange any trace of regionalism at all as the price of megastardom. There is still a tiny remnant of it in Beyoncé’s invocation of her Louisiana Creole identity, but it is safe to say we are now late in that Queen’s reign, and it’s going to be a very different world the next time civic belonging is conceptualized as composed from the variegated patchwork of a warm and comforting national quilt. The quilt has been torn to pieces, and to delight in Chingy in 2025 one must also endure a bottomless feeling of loss, as an elderly Ukrainian or Russian might, circa 1992, have watched an old clip of some Soviet estrada star belting out some high notes after being pinned with a People’s Artist of the USSR medal.

6.

But I am not quite elderly, and not altogether without hope, and I do admit that this moment of crisis and dissolution has the power, at times, to induce in me a feeling of exhilaration. I usually tell myself that this exhilaration results from a perfectly understandable and healthy transmutation of what is initially experienced as terror into something more productive. We have arrived at a moment of rupture, the future is completely uncertain, and so I rush into the breach to see whether out of this moment of crisis I might help to foster something new into the world.

I am basically certain that the career I thought I was going to have until retirement will not exist 2-3 years from now — more than a decade too soon for comfort. I can have no idea what sort of livelihood, if any, I will be cobbling together at an age when until recently I continued to imagine I was going to be coasting through a comfortable and respectable late-career middle-class sinecure. These jobs we once boasted of getting, because they were “cushy”, have now been exposed as bullshit jobs, and those who continue to see them as a source of meaning in their lives have been exposed as bullshit people, and most days it feels like all of us, except perhaps the massage therapists and others whose continued earnings depend directly on their fleshliness, are on the verge of being fired. And so some of us have taken to stabbing blindly, to doing stuff we never expected to do, striving to articulate new visions of what human freedom and creativity might yet look like in a machine-dominated era, which we cannot reasonably hope to see end any time soon on any other scenario than a cataclysmic one.

Sometimes I do worry that my exhilaration is, at least subconsciously, somewhat Muskian in character, that my reptile brain knows this is the moment for “mediocre white men” of all sorts, notably me, to make their bold moves and to leave their mark, or their stain, upon the world. This is especially so when I acknowledge at least a partial fondness for some species of accelerationism, one that does not seek in the manner of the Mensheviks to make things worse so that they can “then” get better, but rather one that continues to believe, somewhat, in the promise articulated by Leibniz as he contemplated the potential applications that might someday be made of his reckoning engines: to assign to these mechanical prostheses all of the bullshit work we might once have been expected to perform, in order to devote ourselves exclusively to those activities that are truly conducive to human thriving — thinking, imagining, creating, and most of all experiencing, the one thing we can be certain machines do not do, and, correlatively, the one thing that we ourselves do as an end in itself rather than with an eye to expected utility.

In this connection I will be happy to see the academic humanities, as we currently know them, collapse. It was a grave mistake to model humanistic inquiry on the positive sciences, to start extracting “research results” from us humanists as if we were making human ears grow on the backs of lab rats or whatever, and there is no better thing to be done with faux-humanistic alienated “knowledge production” of this sort than to outsource it to machines. This is certainly what Leibniz would have wanted. Once we effect this change, or once this change is imposed on us, there may be some small hope of returning to the lost meaning of humanism, by focusing our efforts and our attention on the awakening and cultivation of capacities that machines will never have. You say these capacities are useless? Very well then, let the machines be the utilitarians. We human beings have better things to do.

7.

It is some small reason for optimism in the midst of the current insanity, or perhaps just some small and delusional consolation, that we might, now, have a real opportunity to advocate effectively for the irreducibly human in a world where it no longer makes any sense to talk up our relative strengths as potential human collaborators working alongside robots, each sort of being doing what it does best according to its nature. That old argument, for a newly negotiated, hybridized human-machine continuation of the old regime, seems every day to arrive closer to bursting under the strain of its growing implausibility. Better to just let the machines do it all, especially the alienated knowledge production, in order to return us to our true excellence in the spheres of imagination, creativity, and self-knowledge.

But how to hold onto this hope, how to imagine that this compensatory human good might be delivered as a side-effect of the brutally unjust and antihuman order that is currently emerging, is to me the great question of the present moment. If I am exhilarated, my considered view is that this is not because I secretly “love the Upgrade” for the opportunity it affords me to pass off my mediocrity as excellence, but because I continue to harbor a sincere hope that this crisis will compel us to rethink, seriously, what human excellence actually involves.

If I may be so bold, I will tell you that I have come to see The Hinternet as a laboratory for pursuing, imaginatively and experimentally, at least some of this question’s possible answers.

—JSR

All images are from the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome.