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Suppose you were to ask me to describe the life of a 12th-century French peasant. This wouldn’t be a very difficult task for anyone who has studied the time period, and even if one hadn’t, the information is readily available. I could tell you, with a high degree of statistical accuracy, what kind of clothes this person wore, how their clothing was made and by whom, what kind of community they lived in, what their family was like, what kind of entertainment they enjoyed, what kind of work they did, how much they worked and for whom, what language they spoke, what religion they believed in, what they knew and believed about the world, what technical skills they possessed… I might be wrong about one or two things but the overall portrait would be broadly accurate. Certainly there were people for whom few or none of my details would have been accurate, but such outliers would have been few and far in between.
Now suppose you were to ask me to describe the life of a 21st-century American of the working class. Now my job is far more difficult. In fact, there is not a single detail about the life of a 12th-century French peasant that I could reliably offer for our 21st-century American. Clothes? Well, does this person have to dress up for work? Now I need to know not only what kind of job they have but where they work specifically, as dress codes vary from workplace to workplace even within the same industry. Language? Probably English at least as a second language, and if English is their second language, their first is probably Spanish, but that’s not something I could guess with a high degree of reliability. Religion? Probably protestant Christianity, but while I’d be correct in that guess more likely than not, an error on that point would hardly be out of the ordinary. And as soon as we get into culture, all bets are off. Does our hypothetical person listen to pop? Rock? Hiphop? Country? Certain genres are more popular than others, certainly, but not to such a degree that we could make guesses about a random person’s tastes that would end up being correct for any reason other than dumb luck.
Clearly, something has changed over the last thousand years.
Now, if you’re new to this show and unfamiliar with its ethos, you might be a little bit concerned about where I’m heading with this. At this point, I probably sound a bit like Tucker Carlson just before he starts off on one of his cowardly, ignorant, and thoroughly disinformative rants about white replacement. Let me head that off at the pass: I’m not making a value judgement about this state of affairs and to such a degree as I make any such judgements in the course of this episode, they’re not going to be predicated on such idiocy. In fact, racism is precisely a manifestation of the systems of oppression and control that I’ll be exploring. At the moment, I’m just pointing out that things have changed. Many of those changes have been for the better—I certainly enjoy the wide selection of music I have access to, among other things—but at the same time, that progress has a tendency to mask the subtle and insidious ways that humans are oppressed and exploited in the modern era.
People in modern societies and especially in modern Western societies tend to value individualism over conformity. This is certainly a paramount value for we Satanists, Satan being effectively the first individualist. But if we draw a simple equation between individualism on the one hand and freedom and good on the other, I think we’re being catastrophically naïve and blind to the ways in which our individuality is both produced and manipulated within societies of control.
Consider that the change in our individuality over the course of history has been from identification with social role to identification with commodity consumption. Were a premodern human asked, “Who are you?” they would respond with information about their community and their role in it: what village or city they’re from or what tribe they’re a part of and what they do to contribute to that community (whether voluntarily or otherwise). A modern human, on the other hand, will respond with information about what commodities they consume, the particular manner in which they consume those commodities, and the means by which they acquire money in order to participate in commodity consumption. A modern person asked that question might offer information about where they’re from and where they’ve lived, but that hardly bears on the matter at hand as one city is largely the same as another anymore.
As David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs (2018) makes clear, it’s often the case that people in the modern era don’t know how exactly their job contributes to their community or society. They might understand, however vaguely, how their job contributes to their company’s bottom line, but translating that into any sort of social benefit—assuming the job has any in the first place—is often difficult or impossible. What’s more, Graeber reveals in his book that many people know that their jobs are without value, even with regards to the company for which they work, or that their jobs are in fact directly or indirectly detrimental to society. So why does anyone persist in doing those jobs? Because regardless of their utility otherwise, these jobs provide the money that allow people to purchase necessities and participate in the commodity consumption by which they define their identities.
And notice that the commodities largely precede these identifications. No one was a Beatles fan until the Beatles started playing shows and releasing albums. No one was a metalhead until Black Sabbath started playing shows and releasing albums. No one was a snowboarder until there were snowboards. No one was a stamp collector until there were stamps. You might quibble with me on some of these examples: certainly someone had to invent the snowboard, and that person was arguably a snowboarder before there were snowboards. Granted, but these are rare exceptions and such invention is typically a modification of prior technology rather than something conjured ex nihilo.
The point is, humans are not, by nature, as individuated as we are today. We are not born as the individuals we grow to be and we don’t merely become ourselves through some passive, natural process. Nor is it a matter of pure self-determination, which would imply an a priori individuation driving that process. Rather, we are made into who we are by outside forces of which we are largely unaware. Certainly our inborn predilections and free will (to whatever degree such a thing exists) play a role, but the raw materials on which these forces operate are drawn largely from the preexisting domain of our social reality.
For many of us, our musical tastes develop primarily in early adolescence. Perhaps we’re drawn to one particular genre over others because of our inborn predilections, but ultimately, we choose from among the available options rather than seeking out musics which do not exist.
I’m not exempt from any of this. I hope that my focus on philosophical and spiritual matters allows me to transcend this to some degree—that’s a fundamental driving factor for why I pursue those subjects in the first place—but I remember about eight years ago I was pulling in barely enough money to survive. I attended local concerts but didn’t have the money to support the bands by buying merchandise. But a few years later, I was in a better position financially and bought a shirt from a local band I had been enjoying. I went home and put it on and looked at myself in the mirror and felt an alignment between my outer appearance and my inner sense of self. I’m not relating this story to imply that this is an intrinsically bad thing or that I shouldn’t have bought the shirt or that no one should buy things or anything like that. After all, in this particular case, my purchase both supported and connected me with community. What I’m trying to provide is some perspective on the conditions of our existence and how they’ve changed from prior eras, and what we may have lost along the way. My identification with this particular community is centered on the consumption of a particular commodity—metal music—and that’s different from how I would have understood myself had I been born a thousand years ago. And had I been born a thousand years ago, even if I had strongly identified with my local musical culture, such a culture would not have been centered around the production and consumption of music as a commodity. Rather, listening to and learning to create music would have required a connection to a community and a tradition.
In his essay “The Politics of Recognition” (1994), the philosopher Charles Taylor describes the concept of an individualized identity, an identity “that is particular to me, and that I discover in myself” (p. 28). He elaborates further on, following the 18th-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, saying,
Herder put forward the idea that each of us has an original way of being human: each person has [their] own “measure.” This idea has burrowed very deep into modern consciousness. It is a new idea. Before the late eighteenth century, no one thought that the differences between human beings had this kind of moral significance. There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s life. But this notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.
p. 30
Taylor mentions the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who differentiated between two kinds of self-esteem: amour de soi, an authentic love of self predicated on our self-preservation instincts, and amour-propre, a love of self predicated on and requiring the esteem and approval of others. We might also look to the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who wrote extensively on personal authenticity in his magnum opus Being and Time, contrasting the authentic self with the inauthentic “they-self.” Heidegger writes,
We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the “great mass” as they shrink back; we find “shocking” what they find shocking. The “they,” which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness.
p. 127
I don’t deny the existence of an authentic self, distinct from the inauthentic self, of which Rousseau and Heidegger wrote, but I don’t believe that it is prior to or fully separable from social reality. I don’t think that Taylor believes this either; “The Politics of Recognition” and his 1989 book The Sources of the Self explore the ways in which our individuality derives, at least in part, from our social reality. Except, social reality itself isn’t really social anymore but rather corporate. It no longer emerges organically from social and cultural participation (if it ever did), but is rather presented to us in myriad forms, a diversity which conceals the underlying unity of their source. We mold ourselves uniquely into the niches and contours and are then perfectly poised to be molded by it in turn.
One is reminded of the manga The Enigma of Amigara Fault by Junji Ito, published in 2001. The story tells of an earthquake which reveals a cliff face whose surface is covered by holes in the shape of human silhouettes. Crowds of people come to see the strange wonder, and then one among their number comes to believe that a particular hole was his, that it was made and shaped for him in particular, and he enters it. Another spectator dreams that the holes were made as an ancient form of punishment: one who enters finds that they can move forward through the human-shaped tunnel but not backward, and as they proceed, the tunnel contorts their shape into a twisted horror.
We tend to think of social control in terms of conformity, but the technology of late modernity presents us with the tools to make individuality into its own form of control, oppression, and exploitation. The more individuated we are, the less we are reliant on and integrated with our communities, and the more we are reliant on the apparatus which provides the commodities by which we define our identities.
What forces have motivated this shift? Certainly capitalism itself is a driving factor, and certain tendencies towards homogenization within the economic apparatus are quite evident: new homes and apartment buildings are largely identical in appearance, and one can patronize the same restaurants in any city within the United States and, to a lesser degree, across the world. However, one would think that it would be more efficient to control and manipulate a society which is more homogenous across the board than one which is individuated to the degree of modern Western society. After all, a homogenous society would require just a few products to fill a particular want or need while still providing some measure of choice; a differentiated and individualized society might require hundreds or thousands of different products to fill that same role.
The first thing to consider here is the power of individualized marketing. As Hegel described, we desire to see ourselves in the world, to see the world reflect and acknowledge who we are. As he writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit, “…self-consciousness is the reflection out of the being of the world of sense and perception, and is essentially the return from otherness” (§167). Our relationship to the world is thoroughly personal; we see the things around us in terms of possibilities for action: the handle of a coffee cup invites its use by our hands to lift the cup without touching the hot outer surface. Yes, the cup was designed that way, but we see even the natural world in this way as well: contours on a rock face invite our using them as handholds for climbing; open spaces between trees in a forest invite our walking through them. Heidegger describes this mode of being-for-us as ready-to-hand. More broadly, we desire to believe that we, as humans and as particular humans with our particular desires, are at home in the world and not something alien to it. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan believed that self-recognition begins when we literally see ourselves reflected in the world, as when an infant first sees their reflection in a mirror.
This means that an individualized product—one which you believe meets your needs uniquely and is perfectly suited for you as an individualized person—has a kind of force that a more generic product might lack. It seems to call out to you, “Here I am! Your heart’s desire, yours and no other’s.” But here we run into another problem: to know that people, in general, want to buy food so that they can consume it in order to live is to possess a certain amount of information. To know the favorite food of each individual in your market, on the other hand, requires a much greater degree of information. What’s worse, it’s one thing to know that someone prefers a product that already exists, but when creating new products, how do you know exactly what your individualized market is going to want? How can you know their individual personalities well enough to craft something that is perfectly suited to their wants and needs, or to manipulate that personality into wanting what you have to offer?
Enter Google, the apparatus of individual surveillance that followed in its wake, and its unholy union with machine learning technology.
I know I mention a lot of books on this show, but if I were to recommend five of the most important books for anyone to read right now, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) by Shoshana Zuboff would definitely make the list. Also highly recommended and relevant to the current discussion is Algorithms of Oppression (2018) by Safiya Noble.
As Zuboff recounts in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Google, in its early days after its founding in 1998, collected a large amount of data about how its users were using its search engine: “…the number and pattern of search terms, how a query is phrased, spelling, punctuation, dwell times, click patterns, and location” (ch. 2, section 2). Initially they did this more-or-less because they could and didn’t have a particular use in mind for the “data exhaust” they were collecting. But then Google researcher Amit Patel realized that the data could be used to “turn the search engine into a recursive learning system that constantly improved search results…” (ibid.). Google’s intention was to reinvest the information they were collecting into the improvement of their product—not vastly different from what companies do in general, observing how their customers use their products and then using that information to make product improvements.
The crucial turn occurred after the dot-com crash of 2000, when Google needed to find new sources of revenue. To that effect, they used their vast caches of behavioral data to target advertisements directly at individual users. “…Google would no longer mine behavioral data strictly to improve service for users but rather to read users’ minds for the purposes of matching ads to their interests, as those interests are deduced from the collateral traces of online behavior” (ch. 2 section 4). This evolved and expanded over the subsequent decades into an entirely new and unprecedented economic ecosystem, indeed a new economic logic: user consumption of online products creates a behavioral surplus of data which is then packaged and sold as prediction products, analytical reports and tools which anticipate human behavior at the individual level. This confers what Zuboff calls instrumentarian power, which “knows and shapes human behavior towards others’ ends. Instead of armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of ‘smart’ networked devices, things, and spaces” (ch. 1, section 3).
Shifting gears for a second, I’m sure everyone’s aware of the explosion of artificial-intelligence-based technology in recent months, particularly the image generator MidJourney and OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot. I’ve been experimenting with this technology myself, as well as following various online conversations about it. My general assessment is that people are not thinking clearly about this technology, what it represents, or how it will change society. MidJourney and ChatGPT are remarkably powerful, able to convincingly mimic human thought and behavior in ways both nuanced and surprising. I think there’s a great deal of positive potential in this technology, but I’ve seen MidJourney in particular compared to the development of photography, and while that’s an apt comparison, I’m not seeing a clear understanding of how photography changed not just the world of art but all of human society, nor an understanding of the key ways in which AI differs from prior technology. Historically, all technologies have followed certain patterns, but there have always been differences relating to the details of the specific technology in question, and I’m not seeing a broad understanding of those patterns in the conversations I’ve observed about AI technology. If there were such an understanding, people would be treating this technology very differently.
On the one hand, there’s the problem of the trust that we vest in our technologies. In my prior episodes, I referred to this as the presumption of objectivity, the assumption that the technology is itself neutral and provides unbiased and objective information. Any problems are assumed to be on the part of the user. This presumption of objectivity with regards to search engine results is the subject of Safiya Noble’s 2018 book Algorithms of Oppression. Noble describes the biased and even racist results delivered by the Google search engine. Such results reflect the values and norms of Google’s commercial partners and advertisers, but are presented to its user base as being factual, natural, and objective and are consequently normalized as being believable.
I’ve mentioned the work of philosopher Marshall McLuhan on this show a few times and I don’t think there’s a better toolset for understanding MidJourney and AI technology in general than the one he developed. The general idea behind McLuhan’s work is that new technologies, which he called media, extend or amplify natural human faculties, and that over time, these media become integrated into the human species and fundamentally change what it is to be human. This is not necessarily a bad thing and McLuhan doesn’t frame it that way; our main problem is our lack of awareness that this is happening at all, because this blinds us to the fact that the specific technology of our societies and the way we use it is causing major problems for us and invisibly serving various power interests which do not represent the best interests of humanity in general. I’ve got an episode, “Amnesia,” largely devoted to that particular topic, and the podcast Philosophize This! has an episode on Marshall McLuhan which serves as an excellent general introduction to his work.
I’ve used this example before, but it’s a good one so I’ll use it again. I’m using the technology of my recording equipment, my computer and its software, and the internet to extend the natural faculty of my voice. You’re hearing my voice right now, but I’m not here with you and am not myself physically saying these words at this moment. I may very well be asleep or even dead, but these media extend my voice, allowing it to exist in places where and times when it wouldn’t normally be able to.
So, what faculty does MidJourney extend?
In an interview with the Verge, MidJourney founder David Holz describes the technology as augmenting imagination, and I think he’s got it exactly right. Speaking as someone with a fairly weak visual imagination—which is one of the reasons this technology is so fascinating to me—I can imagine an idea and get a vague, amorphous visual image of it in my mind. The MidJourney imager has the power to realize that idea, to bring it into existence in the real world. Now, whatever I get from the imager likely doesn’t look quite like whatever I would evoke with my mind’s eye, but what it lacks in precision it makes up for in detail and in its real existence outside my brain. I don’t think people understand yet how enormously powerful this is and how it’s going to radically transform every aspect of our lives.
And I don’t want this episode to frame AI technology as being inherently bad. As of this recording, I’m still using and paying for MidJourney, and I find it beneficial in a number of ways. But the story of any particular piece of technology in the context of humanity has historically been, “Really good idea on paper but then we took it too far and made things much worse for ourselves overall.” So I want to know how we might end up following that progression with this new and immensely powerful technology.
As Marshall McLuhan points out, as new technologies are introduced to the human species, we integrate them into the basic conditions of our humanity and become dependent on them. This is an example I’ve used before, but take cars for example. Humans have a natural faculty of locomotion: we can move ourselves places by moving our legs in a particular way. Cars allow us to move much faster and with a much smaller expenditure of our personal energy reserves, and there was a time in which that was a luxury for the wealthy: working class folks would have to schlep themselves around by their own two feet, but the wealthy could get where they were going much faster and without breaking a sweat. But in the intervening years, we’ve designed many of our cities such that getting around without a car is inconvenient at best and impossible at worst. And because we were born into it, we take it as entirely normal.
I’m sometimes tempted in casual conversation to point out the absurdity of this situation: someone asks, “So we’ll meet at the coffee shop tomorrow?” And I would reply, “Yes! I have just the thing to get me there, a remarkable machine that I acquired some years ago. It’ll be a bit dangerous and will make something of a mess, but I’m quite confident that it will allow me to transport myself to that location at the agreed upon time.” And it’s worth noting that car ownership is hardly egalitarian despite our society effectively mandating it for many people; nor are the general benefits and drawbacks of our auto-centric society distributed in an equitable way. The consequences of pollution and urban sprawl are suffered far more by the poor than by the wealthy.
Well, what’s going to happen when these kind of imagination engines become integrated into the basic conditions of our humanity?
One question we can start with is, who is going to have access to this technology and who isn’t? Who are going to mainly reap the technology’s benefits, and who are going to be made to suffer its drawbacks? A quote from an interview with David Holz is quite telling: “If there were 10 million people trying to use technology like this, there actually aren’t enough computers. There aren’t a million free servers to do AI in the world. I think the world will run out of computers before the technology actually gets to everybody who wants to use it” (Claburn, 2022).
Now let’s consider now how surveillance capitalism might merge with AI technology to create an apparatus of individuated social control of unprecedented power.
In the combination of surveillance capitalism and AI technology we have the capacity for the general economic apparatus to both know and realize the desires of each individual human. In the future of advertising, every advertisement you see will have been created for you specifically—not for your general demographic or even for your narrow social circle but for you as an individual person. These advertisements will be based on a thorough understanding of your personality, your life, your circumstances, your desires, your aesthetics, and your psychology in general. And the products being advertised will, similarly, be as individualized as possible. It is within the scope of present technology for companies to use machine intelligence and their vast caches of data to design clothing for you as a specific individual and to market it to you as a specific individual in a cost-effective and profitable way.
It doesn’t stop there. Media as well will come bespoke. You’ll have your own music, your own shows and movies, even your own news. We already live in a world in which people share divergent and contradictory versions of reality as a result of their media consumption. We already live in a world in which beliefs and behaviors are deliberately shaped by forces which the word “propaganda” seems hardly forceful enough to describe. And what is society then? Certainly nothing even worthy of such a name as “society;” rather, a frothing mass of atomized individuals, fully disconnected from one another and fully reliant on the apparatus to both create and satisfy their desires. Will it then suit the apparatus to mold society into a state of convenient homogeneity? Or will further fragmentation and atomization better serve its interests? It hardly matters; conformity and individuality amount to the same thing in this world, gradations along a one-dimensional spectrum of total dependence.
How are we then to live authentic lives? Are we to head off into the wilderness and live off the land? Unfortunately, at least in the U.S., this is hardly feasible. The entirety of the nation’s land is owned and controlled, either privately or by various government agencies. Wide swaths are controlled by the Bureau of Land Management and are available for public use, but the government places restrictions on such use which largely preclude “living off the grid.” One can purchase their own land, but this requires interfacing with government and private agencies and the economic state apparatus. The mathematician Ted Kaczynski discovered this in the 1970s when he attempted to escape from the control of modern technology, eventually becoming so frustrated by intrusions into his hermetic life that he attempted to destroy the entire system by building bombs and mailing them to university professors. This was idiotic, of course; he should have known that such action would only reinforce the system in the end, making resistance to the apparatus appear crazy and dangerous. However, I’ve begun to find myself sympathizing with his motives.
When I was first writing this I thought that I would have to end with a big question mark, but a few things conspired that actually provided me with an answer to this question, however preliminary it may be. I’m not going to go in the full details here; this is a matter that requires its own episode or episodes. But as a brief survey, a conversation with my friend Damon allowed me to reflect on the situation and notice some possibilities which might otherwise have fallen below my radar. The day prior, I had engaged in an experiment with tarot cards which yielded interesting results, results which I’ll be talking about briefly here but which will likely warrant their own episode. And following the conversation, I watched a documentary with my partner, Jodorowsky’s Dune, which documents a failed attempt by avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky to produce a movie based on the Frank Herbert novel Dune in the 1970’s.
The tarot card experiment began with a discussion on this show’s discord channel. I have some episodes which lay out my views on magic and the supernatural; to sum up, I don’t believe that science gives us a total account of the world but also think that anything that might be considered magical or supernatural are just phenomena for which we have not yet provided a scientific explanation, for whatever reason. And were we ever to provide such an explanation, I reiterate that it would not be a total account, but electromagnetism is, in my opinion, a kind of magic that we have “figured out” in that way, and there may be other kinds of magic that we haven’t yet “figured out.” I don’t believe that tarot cards provide us with a means of predicting the future but I think that their actual possibilities are far more useful and interesting: a window into mystical and transcendental self-understanding and a kind of abstract approach to psychology and philosophy.
As to the documentary, what I saw in Jodorowsky was a true individual, a poetic genius with a remarkable charisma and force of will. This is someone who wanted to make a 14-hour surrealist science fiction film in the years before Star Wars had popularized science fiction, and not only did he very nearly pull it off, he had gotten commitments from Pink Floyd, H.R. Giger, Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Mick Jaggar, and many others to contribute to the work.
Wrapping up, there’s a book published in 1992 by the political scientist Francis Fukayama called The End of History and the Last Man. In his book, Fukayama argues that the ascension of liberal democracy and the fall of the Soviet Union marked the end of history. In other words, history, viewed as the narrative of human progress, reached its culmination with the global triumph of this particular ideology. This conclusion was obviously premature, but I wonder whether the advent of AI marks the true end of history, the technological colonization of the final frontier of the human condition: the imagination. That’s certainly a depressing thought and I’ll be continuing to respond to it in coming episodes.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
Claburn, T. (2022). Holz, founder of AI art service Midjourney, on future images. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/david_holz_midjourney/
Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon & Schuster.
Hegel, G. W. F., Miller, A. V., & Findlay, J. N. (2013). Phenomenology of spirit (Reprint.). Oxford Univ. Press.
Heidegger, M. (2007). Being and time. Blackwell publ.
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press.
Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In A. Gutmann (Ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition. Princeton University Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.