We All Work for the Same Boss Now
And No One Is Allowed to Quit
1.
I strongly recommend reading Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s “Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral”, an essay-review in the most recent New Yorker, and also to read Nadia Asparouhova’s Antimemetics, which serves as the essay’s main focus. I gave a critical notice of Nadia’s book a few weeks ago, which she kindly had sent to me, and which I am reading now. The present essay is not a review of it, as I have not fully absorbed its argument or followed out its several threads.
I had a long and stimulating conversation with Gideon in, I believe, 2021, when I was finishing work on The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. That book was published the following year, which means that, in 2025, it is already entirely irrelevant to any effort to make sense of the world we currently inhabit. Gideon remained one of only two people in my Skype contacts, until that platform was phased out last month. I wouldn’t know how to contact him now if I were to wish to do so (it’s probably not that hard, but my point here is not literal).
I recall Gideon telling me at the time that when he started working the tech beat some years before, people were still talking about Facebook, Google, and the others as if these were scrappy underdog start-ups, even though they were already by then some of the largest corporations in the world. Today it seems, analogously, people are still talking about the tech companies as if they were some of the largest corporations in the world, when they have already long since morphed into world-shaping empires. Coca-Cola might have given some tweeners a buzz and caused them to stay up past their bedtimes, but it never came close to reshaping humanity in its own image.
Regular readers of The Hinternet will know that I am ambivalent about the transformations our most recent tech revolution has wrought. Obviously, I do not avoid the internet. I hate it when people with short attention spans glance at my work and quickly surmise that I must be a “Luddite”. The Luddites were engaged in a focused uprising of organized labor, with concrete objectives that only made sense in their local setting. If there’s another thing regular readers will know about me, it’s that I’m definitely not much of a labor activist. How could I be? I’m a recluse, and that is a form of life that is definitionally incompatible with the task of “organizing”. I belong to a union by default, but I don’t like the aesthetics of the e-mails they send me —they look cheap and inelegant—, and I always delete them without reading. Do I think Ned Ludd (if he in fact existed) and his gang were right or not to smash up those steam engines? I don’t doubt they had their reasons. Did their action do anything to slow the spread of all the other dark satanic mills —as William Blake already understood the modest smoke-belching factories of the early industrial revolution to be— across the face of the earth? No, of course not.
Anyhow the machines that interest me most are not steam engines or gas engines, but reckoning engines, and my basic view is that these should be neither smashed nor worshipped. A zoomed-out perspective on our current revolution in information technology tells me that, like pretty much everything human beings do, and like Leonard Cohen’s description of shooting heroin, it’s doing “some good”, and “some harm” — almost as if it were operating according to a hidden law ensuring, at every instant of human history, that all our efforts will balance out to exactly zero, that the old problems we solve with our innovations will be exactly compensated by the new problems they generate.
Like Jac Mullen in his piece of a few days ago on the long history of literacy at both its starting and its endpoints —namely, in ancient Mesopotamia and in the present moment—, I see information-technology revolutions as bringing about the consolidation of state power, in the first instance, as great leaps forward for the control of human subjects, even if inevitably these also eventually become tools in the ever-expanding repertoire of those same human subjects for the expression of their interiority, and therefore ultimately for the assertion of their freedom.
Jac rightly suggests that, if our current technological revolution is going to recapitulate the ancient progression that we see in the technology of writing, from state control to expansion of individual freedom, then it is going to have to do so at a much sped-up pace. We don’t have a millennium to wait for AI truly to start empowering ordinary human beings, rather than constraining them and reducing the range of their autonomy. We’ve got to make sure that’s built into our emerging AI-based political order, like, now. We’ve got to be alert to the threats and promises of this new technology, in a way that it would have been unreasonable to expect some hapless Sumerian wine-merchant to have been the first time he ever saw a record of his recent transactions pressed into a clay tablet.
In contrast with Jac, the revolution I spend most of my time mining for historical rhymes is not the one that occurred in ancient Mesopotamia, but in early modern Europe, with the arrival of the printing press (I know moveable type was already in use in East Asia centuries before, but the context of its use was different, and mostly contained within specific narrow spheres of human activity). Would the world have been better off if Gutenberg had never “launched” his “product”? It is plain enough to me that it was this product that delivered to us —not as a distal cause, but more or less directly— such familiar features of the modern world as the nation-state, democracy, a secularized public sphere, and, ultimately, such monuments of the expression of interiority as the modern novel. It also brought us several centuries of war, persecution, imperialism, genocide… In short, it really shook things up.
One image to which I often return, likely thanks to Hilary Mantel, is the scene of a bonfire execution, in England, circa 1530, of some poor smuggler who had carried copies of Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible across the Channel. That smuggler was involved in a process that ultimately could never be suppressed — the rendering of religious truth into the “vulgar” national languages, which in turn makes it accessible to a great number of people without the intermediation of ecclesiastical authorities, which in turn stimulates new discoveries and development of the power of ordinary individuals to frame the project of their own lives, which ultimately leads to the ideal of individual rational autonomy that has profoundly shaped the way we think about ourselves for the past few centuries. It would of course have been small comfort to the smuggler to inform him of his role in this historical process as the flames began to lick at his feet. And similarly for the countless other people whose lives were squelched, or rendered unbearable, by the large-scale historical transformations that the printing revolution unleashed.
And similarly, again, it is perfectly reasonable, without claiming to know the precise course of future events, to expect that countless people are likewise going to be snuffed out, tortured, immiserated, and otherwise inconvenienced in the course of the broad historical process our current information revolution has initiated. It’s going to get ugly. It’s already getting ugly. And just like the imagined Sumerian wine-merchant, who shrugged and went right back to his business the first time he saw a cuneiform representation of, say, “jug” or “ladle”, it may be that we are not yet sufficiently attuned to all the new ways this ugliness is going to manifest itself — that we cannot yet see all the ways our new technologies threaten us, because we have no historical experience, yet, that could possibly have prepared us. There are some true threats, indeed, that seem to remain largely off of our cultural radar, and outside of the cultural discourse.
Below I would like to introduce you to one of them.
