Post History
An introduction to my thoughts on what changing understandings of technology and history mean for American politics.
Introduction
This is the longest piece I have written for this Substack, and I apologize for any unnecessary repetition or lack of brevity. Composed of three somewhat distinct mini essays, I attempt to weave a longer narrative about how I relate to the infinite nature of the internet in a variety of different ways. I open with a historical section based on my background in Archaeology (History and Story), transition into a point of view garnered from my work as a Data Engineer (Data and the Infinite), and conclude with a political section covering my thoughts about what the infinite internet means for the future of our country (Post History). I hope to leave readers feeling a sense of urgency, but an urgency fully divorced from hopelessness, when it comes to the power of the new data tools we have at our fingertips.
History and Story
For my own part I cannot positively say whether Xerxes did send the herald to Argos or not; nor whether Argive ambassadors at Susa did really put this question to Artaxerxes about the friendship between them and him; neither do I deliver any opinion hereupon other than that of the Argives themselves…For myself, my duty is to report all that is said; but I am not obliged to believe it all alike - a remark which may be understood to apply to my whole History.
Herodotus, The Histories 1
As a student of Archaeology, I have always been fascinated by the relationship between history and story. So much effort has gone into conceptually separating the two terms in the English language, and yet they sound nearly exactly the same— being derived from the same Ancient Greek root. One aspirant is all that separates fact from fiction in our language, and despite all the work that has gone into distinguishing the terms, the close relationship is fitting. I opened with this quote from Herodotus to highlight how the divorce between story and history is a modern invention. The word ἱστορία, literally translated, roughly means “body of knowledge obtained by systematic inquiry”. Herodotus’ Ἱστορίαι was exactly that. Setting out across the world known to the Greeks, he catalogued as many peoples’ stories as he could in an effort to record the details of the recent Greco-Persian Wars. His giant work is full of accurate history and outlandish stories alike, and his goal was not to determine the exact truth of what happened, it was to record all of the stories he was told about the event. The systematic inquiry inherent to ἱστορία was integral to his practice, and that was what allowed for him to produce such a revolution in historical knowledge.
Traced back even further etymologically, the Ancient Greek word ἱστορία is believed to be derived from the Proto-Indo-European word wéydtōr— meaning “one who has seen, one who knows”. In the leap from spoken word of Proto-Indo-Europeans to the written word of Herodotus and the Ancient Greeks, we see the concept of history itself change from the individual as the ultimate bearer of knowledge, to a system of written work that records both the laws of nature and the stories of humans. Before the written word, elders and entertainers like Homer would have passed down knowledge from generation to generation through memorized spoken word. For efficiency, western oral histories took the form of epic narrative poems that sought to combine an understanding of both the laws of nature and the history of humans.2 With the invention of the written word, that entire model of knowledge transfer was forced to change. Oral histories could finally be recorded, and preserved in such a way that was far more effective than relying on the memories of groups or individuals across generations. However, it wasn’t until Herodotus that anyone had the thought to leverage the power of the written word to record everyone’s stories instead of just the stories of the wisest of their culture. The ability to record more stories than any one human could ever remember by simply talking to people and writing down what they had to say was a revolution in how humans approached knowledge about the past. The wéydtōr of entertainers and elders of the past was too small conceptually to encompass the amount of new information about the past that was available through systematic story recording as envisioned by Herodotus. Thus ἱστορία was born. As we grapple with the internet and data as a new model of knowledge storage today, I find myself wondering if we may be approaching a similar moment where a new word is needed to describe the kind of knowledge of the past that our digital footprint provides.
We’ve all heard the phrase “History is written by the victor”, and for this era of humanity, where the difference between history and story rests on little more than the credibility of the author, that is the reality of our historical record. When we read history, and ancient history in particular, we must constantly be thinking about the biases of the author, the likelihood of hyperbole, how the narrative compares to others on the same topic. The written word is only as reliable as the human authors crafting it, and we happen to be an incredibly biased creature— especially about our own ability to be neutral. Not to mention, the written word, even when supplemented with archaeology and other fields, is painfully incomplete as a recording of the past. We have petabytes of data about the particular beliefs and activities of human elites through much of history, but our understanding of regular people, the ordinary members of society who enabled such elites to rise and thrive, has largely been lost to time. I was drawn to archaeology over history for precisely this reason. The ways in which animal bones and pottery shards can tell us more about the day to day life of regular people than the written historical record deeply appealed to me. I saw in archaeology a chance to add to the historical record instead of just synthesizing and analyzing what was already recorded. As I have grown into my professional role as a data engineer, and my college archaeology days seem further and further behind me, that impulse to add to the historical record has never faded, merely evolved into something fitting of today’s world.
Driven by a similar, if less groundbreaking, desire to avoid being forgotten that must have gripped Herodotus in his fervent work to record the history of those who lived before the written record, I have embarked on a lifelong process of creating and storing personal data on my family and ancestors into a digital repository. Photos, writing, newspaper articles, genealogy research, family stories and more have made their way into my archive. It is a slice of the worlds data, hyper focused on the people I love and attempting to present as honest a portrayal of my own life as I can manage. In 10 generations all of our descendants will likely have some form of Facebook equivalent by which the changing of generations and human relationships can be tracked, but for those of us who live and have lived in a time before the compulsive data collection and infinite digital record, such information will only exist in small pieces in places like state archives and whatever is left of ancestry.com. Maybe in 200 years such a data set will be long forgotten, maybe my descendants will inherit my ADHD and forget all about it, or maybe new technology will render such a repository redundant or useless. Despite not knowing, I continue with my project anyway, and the way I long for such a detailed record of my own ancestors instills a sense of certainty in me that such an endeavor is worthwhile. A machine may be able to tell my descendants everything there is to know about me from my digital footprint, but an archive that lets me speak to them in my own words has a deeply personal significance to me. I have at my fingertips, any number of texts on British, Irish, and Sicilian immigration to America, but they fall completely flat compared to how incredible it would be to have firsthand perspectives from my ancestors about escaping the great Irish potato famine or describing life in Sicily before the forceful unification of Italy.
Through this project I am able to place myself on an optimistically infinite timeline of human beings that connects me to my past and my future at the same time. I am able to escape the creeping cynicism and despair of being an isolated individual in a rapidly developing and individualistic world. When I am collecting and sorting data I transcend the earthly worries that consume me on a day to day basis and become an individual engaging deeply with what a fully digital future means for humanity, and for my specific sliver of it. I may be far less aware of myself than my ancestors could be after processing all my writing, messages, and data in some incomprehensible contraption, but they won’t have my thoughts and my stories as I live through the death of an understanding of history that I find so dear unless I write them down. What could I possibly gift my descendants that would be more meaningful and infinitely relevant than an honest portrayal of living through the birth of post-industrial society.
Data and the Infinite
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance…If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.
Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections 3
The question I want to pose with this section is— how does the internet and mass accumulation of data change our relationship to history itself. Never before have humans had a complete detailed record of nearly every person alive running the gamut from their deepest personal questions, purchase history, geolocation history, complete health records, content viewing history, sexual preferences, personality type, political views, mental weaknesses and more. Never before has culture encouraged such a comprehensive documentation of everything we do, from meals and activities to fandoms and bodily functions. No longer is our record keeping reserved for pockets of wealthy elites— financial incentives have facilitated record keeping on every single person who regularly uses the internet. No longer is our history curated to paint a positive picture of each of us, it documents even our most shameful moments as thoroughly as it does our proudest ones. As humans, we will never be capable of fully parsing all of that data that now constitutes part of the historical record (for lack of a better term), but the machines we are building will. They will be able to understand each of us individually and simultaneously understand us as part of identity groups, information echo chambers, and local community groups. They will be able to paint a picture of the world based on the themes that emerge from our collective data. Historical narrative will still be written by humans, but the machines that think will become the beings that truly understand it. In a way we’re returning to a concept of history more in line with the oral tradition of wéydtōr than the written tradition of ἱστορία. The difference being that the one who sees and the one who knows will be a machine and not a human.
The training data for such machines will inevitably include our own, as we are the humans who willingly chose to give corporations our data for free. Our data is being stored, sold, aggregated, and will serve as the foundation for complex data tools to serve a wide range of purposes— from attention engineering and medication effectiveness testing, to artistic content generation and stock market projection.4 This data on all of us will persist indefinitely, as the foundation for major advances in technology and science, generating insights long past our own deaths. It forms a complete, albeit messy and impossibly large, historical record that future historians will be able to comb through with the help of tools with capabilities beyond our possible comprehension. If we choose to be optimistic, and envision a future where humans survive another 1,000 years as a free species, this moment in time that we are currently living through will mark the starting point of their concept of history.5 Everything that happened before this pivotal moment in time will be understood as a story to them, the same way we see ancient oral histories today.
Out of curiosity I decided to look up how much data we have on all of human history before the year 2000— a year I’ll use for convenience as the start date of the internet in earnest. What I found was this fascinating study from 1997 that attempted to estimate the entire storage space of all human information to determine if computers would be large enough to store it all.
The study, after all the necessary hemming and hawing about the sheer impossibility of answering such a question, settled on a total of about 12,000 petabytes of information in the world. Compare that to the 2,500 petabytes of data that were produced daily in 2016,6 and the 64 zettabytes of information humans had stored by the end of 2020.7 It’s truly mind boggling to grapple with the scale of that change. By 2016 we were producing as much information as all pre-internet human knowledge every 5 days. Such a massive and exponentially expanding pile of data is a historical record in the sense that it is a systematic recorded observation of past events, but that’s where it’s similarities our current conception of history ends. Whereas much of written knowledge is dense and will never be read by humans (looking at you never ending tomes of British history), this new form of historical record is not even parseable for the human brain. We will gradually become dependent on data tools to further our understanding of the world, as trends in our data begin to unlock significant advances in a wide swath of social sciences. Our model and system based approach to social sciences will be replaced by tools that produce clearer, more repeatable results. It won’t matter that we wont understand how our machines made such advances on the treatment of depression or the prediction of mass migration, the improved competency will immediately overtake our rudimentary modern approaches. Such a technological advance is simply not possible within our current historical paradigm. In a world of history as story there simply is not enough information for the kind of algorithmic training that our digital footprint enables. As someone who’s very first memories exist in an industrial world, and grew up in parallel with the internet— I feel compelled to impress upon people the importance of the age that we are living through. This isn’t a new chapter in the technological leaps of industrial society, this is the start of fundamentally different way of engaging with knowledge and information altogether.
My parents would always remind me as a kid to be careful of what I posted on the internet because the internet is forever, and nothing ever truly gets deleted. I’ve always been aware of this conceptually, but it wasn’t until I was exposed to advances in artificial intelligence over the past year that I started to tangibly grasp the significance of that fact. One of my best friends is a professor of digital art and culture and so I have had the great fortune to experiment with OpenAI’s GPT-3 Large Language Model and Dalle-2 image generation tool. Using just the text and image data scraped from the internet, these tools are able to answer complex questions, create photo-realistic images, write 200 word news articles that humans cannot distinguish from human written content,8 and understand artistic composition and style. GPT-3 was able to write political stump speeches, one-shot simple JavaScript and python programs, and answer questions in great detail that it likely shouldn’t have been answering for me. Dalle-2 was able to generate 6 images from a simple text input that each dwarfed the quality of any past models— in a matter of seconds instead of hours. The power of our image and text data, as unstructured and random as it is on the internet, is finally being unleashed. The speed with which the models have improved from very slow and rudimentary tools, to things that are too powerful to be released to the general public has been downright shocking. Whereas my childhood self understood the infinite nature of the internet to be a personal warning about the things people could dig up about me as an individual, these new tools have made me aware of the communal power of our infinitely accruing pile of data. We now must contend with our digital footprint, not only in terms of what it reveals to enemies scouring it for leverage over us, but also in terms of what it means for that data to be part of the backend of machines that are being designed to complete increasingly complex tasks. Our data has become part of the infinite, silently and behind the scenes, and it hasn’t been until recently that I have been able to personally grasp the philosophical significance of that fact.
We now have an incomprehensible level of detail about every single major global event and the capability to milkshake duck nearly anyone who comes under public scrutiny. Media organizations now have an endless supply of individual data points that they can use to craft any narrative they choose. Each of our contributions to the communal data pile now has the potential, not only to be cherry picked by other humans to prove a point that is at odds with our own beliefs, but also the potential to be given outsized weight within algorithms that we don’t understand. These things are reverberating through our culture in profound, if not always readily apparent, ways. At an individual level, I am sure you have experienced the phenomenon where some offhand search term resulted in a drastic change in the suggested content you were shown or the ads you were presented. I am often left wondering how much my impression of American culture is shaped by arbitrary terms that my personalized algorithms have latched onto. But at a societal level the impacts are far greater. Domestically, cancel culture is being forced to run its course in hyper-drive as the barrier between private and public life dissolves, and our data undeniably proves the fallibility of every single human being. Internationally, even relatively small regional conflicts, like the ones in Ukraine and Ethiopia, have produced an outpouring of violent images and videos for the entire world to see. The grim realities of civilian murder, the dismembered soldiers lacking any semblance of human form, the chaos and disorganization of actual combat— none of these things can be hidden from the public like they were in past wars. Seen as different symptoms of the same phenomena at scale, it has become clear to me that the infinite scale and customizability of the internet is fracturing our culture entropically. We aren’t tired from living through major historical events, we are exhausted because we are the first humans ever to be experiencing an entirely different thing.
When I first really started thinking about this essay in earnest, nearly a year ago, it was because I had a revelation while talking with someone in my DMs on Instagram (a frequent occurrence in my life). We were discussing the implications of the best performing language models being trained on things like YouTube comments, and what our likely contributions to that dataset were. Over the course of the conversation, I realized that if our social media content is being fed into data tools as training data, it is no longer the void into which I post. It was at that point a year ago when I decided to be more intentional about the way I used the internet. I really started making a point to try to encourage good faith discussion on my page, and cut back on my snarky memes and comments that I no longer wanted as part of my contribution to this new historical record. Even when my words have no human audience, they have always had a machine audience. That connection to the infinite that’s always been there, but only recently noticed, is still a realization in progress for me. This essay is an accounting of my own thoughts that branched out from the initial realization that my data is being read and studied by machines, while also constituting such a tiny portion of their knowledge as to be effectively meaningless.9 Every day as I decide whether or not to post, I force myself to contend with publishing things, not into the void as I used to, but into the brain of an infinite machine. American culture’s fascination with sorting, categorizing, and documenting provides the exact kind of information that data tools need to generate actionable insights, and for obvious reasons the true monetary and informational value of that data organization effort is being hidden from us. This era of free data categorization labor (Wikipedia, Open source software, academia in general) seems to be an instinctual human reaction to disorder and chaos in the universe and we are setting the stage for incredibly powerful data tools that rely heavily on the unpaid and low-paid labor of millions of human beings. This increasingly leads me to believe that the symbiotic relationship between man and machine will soon render historical narrative an inefficient way to understand the past. The digital record marks the end of history as we understand it, ushering in a new age of certainty about past events that seems murky now, but will become clearer the more distance we put between ourselves and the present moment. History as we know it is not information dense enough to rival the knowledge that can be generated from data, and as a result it will inevitably fade into the background the same way the epic poets of old have.
If you spend as much time on political or philosophical Instagram as I do, the idea of “the end of history” is often presented as the butt of jokes and a laughable concept. This is largely because of the 1992 political philosophy work The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama which argued that the victory of Liberal Democracy over Soviet Communism marked the end of political ideological development and established liberal democracy as the final form of human government. Such an argument is obviously absurd in light of modern technological developments, and so I feel a need to differentiate my stance from more commonly referenced arguments in a similar vein. As a better corollary to my argument, the title to this post is a cheeky play on the infinite persistence of our social media posts and how that relates to Vilém Flusser’s philosophical work Post-History. Unlike Fukuyama who stipulated that “there can be no end of history without an end of modern natural science and technology”,10 Flusser’s work specifically deals with post-industrial society and how the automation and software revolution could propel us into an inhuman technocratic future. This is the foundational philosophical basis for my lay-man arguments about how data fundamentally changes history.
Post History
The post-industrial society will be a bureaucracy, a society in which the functionary is dominant. But everything indicates that this is a mistake. Because on the contrary: wherever there is bureaucracy, the post-industrial society is not yet well programmed. So everything indicates that functional programs will dominate the post-industrial society, within which the functionaries will function progressively more like invisible cogwheels inside the black boxes. This will be technocracy. Functionaries are not comparable to the farmers and factory owners of preceding societies, but to the serfs and workers. The apparent dominant class shall be the programmers, although an attentive analysis will also reveal that they too are specialized functionaries. The apparatus will form the real dominant class. It will be an inhuman society.
Vilém Flusser, Post-History 11
As we stare down a future full of machines far more powerful than we can begin to comprehend, our politics are stuck the echoes of industrial society, a society that exists only in the minds of a decrepit political elite. Our dominant political parties are hyper-focused on the problems of the past in an age when we desperately need to be thinking about the future. The fight between labor and capital, religion and secularism, right and left— these are the battles of industrial society. To continue those discussions as if the internet, automation, and artificially intelligent data tools don’t fundamentally change how we need to approach them is suicidal. To place our hopes and dreams on a political system that’s fundamentally misaligned with reality is setting ourselves up for cynicism and despair. We must recognize that politics is inherently absurd, the idea of progress merely a line of best fit we’ve applied to our limited understanding of history. We mustn’t pretend like the ever growing complexity of State is where our connection to the infinite can be found because an infinite state quickly becomes a monster that snuffs out the significance of individual human life. I opened this section with a quote from Vilém Flusser because I think we are currently hurdling toward a technocracy that our politicians appear incapable of grasping. It does not matter if it is a woke corporate oligarchy or nationalist evangelical theocracy that ultimately is successful in stealing our freedoms, both options would mark the end of America in any meaningful sense. As such, I believe that it is not average people with opposing ideologies who are the enemy, it’s the creep of political and religious tyranny facilitated by rapid technological advance that threatens to condemn us all to irrelevancy.
The degree to which I have been moved by Native American spirituality has made me painfully grounded in just how easily entire fields of knowledge and entire ways of life can be lost to the unstoppable tide of technological advance. The complex confederate world of Native Americans was unable to counter the diseases and gunpowder of white settlers, and in a matter of generations an entire wealth on knowledge about nature and the human spirit was lost forever. It did not matter that they understood more than American settlers did about finding internal peace, engaging with the spirituality of nature, or utilizing the American environment. The inability to adjust to the raw power and scale of factory-produced goods was insurmountable in the short period of time it took industrialization to stretch its tendrils to every corner of the globe. There is no guarantee that culture or knowledge will be preserved if its protectors fail to evolve with the times. It does not matter how much of a head-start you have, it does not matter how skilled you are at current forms of combat and diplomacy, failing to adjust to new technology has always resulted in subjugation at the hands of someone who does.
Data tools and the internet pose that existential technological challenge for all the nations of the world today. Already we can see the devastating power that this technology has the capacity to unleash in countries that do not share our ideals of freedom and individuality. China is the obvious example of a nation that has made huge strides in utilizing these new tools to cement complete control over their people, and I think it’s naive to assume such uses of this technology will inevitably fall out of favor or respect our borders. However, even in using China as an example, what I am really referencing is a placeholder for the inevitably of empire in the face of rapid technological advance. I think Chinese world domination is unlikely in a geopolitical sense, but their tactics of aggressive data theft through things like TikTok is emblematic of what we can expect out of authoritarians in the modern age. As Yuval Noah Harari questioned in his 2020 speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos— “what will happen to politics in your country in twenty years, when somebody in San Francisco or Beijing knows the entire medical and personal history of every politician, every judge and every journalist in your country, including all their sexual escapades, all their mental weaknesses and all their corrupt dealings? Will it still be an independent country or will it become a data-colony?”12 Once again we have launched headfirst into technological advance with reckless abandon, again failing to consider the threat to freedom that our developments pose. We have already created the infrastructure for total domestic surveillance, advanced psychological programming, and complete social isolation. These things have been enabled, not by the votes or the will of the people, but by the path of least resistance in a system that’s sole instruction is to maximize profits.
However, instead of drawing attention to the technological tools that are making us all lonely and anxious, killing our attention spans, and facilitating further erosion of the human spirit, OR the corporate lobbying that consistently prioritizes businesses over the health, happiness, and will of the people— it is the rise of populist extremism in America that is being presented to each of us as THE existential threat to our nation. Despite the growing policy consensus and increasing similarity of the average American experience,13 the internet’s ability to reveal the most extreme and unhinged citizens of this country has spawned a cottage industry of outrage peddling designed to make us believe that declining problems are actually rising to an extreme degree. This is not to say that radicalization via the internet is not a problem, because that would be an indefensible claim in light of recent events in our country. However, I don’t think our situation is nearly as dire as the internet makes it appear. Growing up in this media environment has led many young people to believe that we’re headed for annihilation, but if we cut through the cacophony of noise telling us to constantly be afraid, we can recognize that we actually live in an unprecedented era of human peace. A peace brought about, not by disarmament and cooperation, but by the creation of a weapon so powerful that it threatens all life on the planet. If we were a creature with no hope of success, nuclear annihilation would have immediately followed the invention of nuclear weapons. Instead, the developed world, now in possession of the most powerful weapons ever conceived by humans, has been beset by a sense of the impossibility of war. So, while it’s true that this new world that we’re living in is scary and unstable, that’s not because it’s ending— we’re just finally being given a fuller accounting of what’s happening. When viewed with an understanding of humanity’s past in mind, we’re not doing that bad all things considered. The negative effects of the internet are worth fully investigating and thinking critically about, but centering the entirety of discourse on American political extremism around social media radicalization completely misses obvious points that further dialogue would quickly reveal.
As Flusser explained more eloquently than I could possibly summarize in his essay Our Communication, our modern era is defined by discourse at the expense of dialogue. He presents science as emblematic of tree discourse, where circular dialogues of experts attempt to develop new information, and mass media as emblematic of amphitheater discourse where knowledge is translated into codes to be presented to the general public. The structural coupling of these two forms of discourse has resulted in elite social science commentary fully divorced from public dialogue. Without the capability to engage in non-elitist public dialogue, Western science and mass media inevitably begin to gravitate toward the absurdity inherent in the universe and lack the feedback mechanisms necessary to understand the political and personal unrest of the general public. In this system that makes no attempt to engage the public on their honest thoughts and beliefs, it’s easy to see the rise of the radical and populist left and right in America and assume that the best way to prevent continued radicalization is to control of the flow of information through corporate partnerships with government. It’s a forgivable, if naive, assumption that preventing extremist content from reaching people over the internet would result in a decrease in radicalism. We have been trained to see everything in terms of cause and effect, so it is easy to see the presence of extremists and extremist content as a clearly causal relationship with a simple one dimensional fix. However, if you take the time to engage in dialogue with extremists instead of just consuming discourse on internet extremism, it becomes clear that the relationship between extremist content and extremist ideas is far from a simple one.
In 2 years of running a mid-sized politics meme page on Instagram, I have met and talked to a diverse array of American extremists. They have believed in a variety of ideologies, conspiracies, and proposed courses of action. Some were very intellectual and academic, others far more schizophrenic and disorganized, but as a pathologically curious person, I have always tried to take the time to really chat with them about their beliefs. When truly trying to understand their concerns, dialogue reveals that American extremists are often motivated by recognition of unaddressed systemic issues in this country, and the unsustainable trajectory we are on. They are correct when they argue that mass media is toxic and broken, when they lash out at the deep state and the ever increasing dark power of the intelligence agencies. They are right that America is unaware of our shadow internationally (to borrow a Jungian concept), and they are right that our political and journalist class is not addressing the threat to freedom that new technology poses with appropriate urgency. The right-wing extremists are correct when they argue that the left is not honest about their victory in the culture war and takeover of major cultural institutions. The left-wing extremists are correct when they argue that both parties use cultural politics to run cover for the fact that they both represent corporations more than the general public. Extremism has become one of the only ways to rebel against a system that incorporates critics and supporters alike into its convoluted mechanisms. Activism and protest have become institutionalized, or as Flusser puts it, “Apparatus incorporate[s] both programmers and critics progressively”.14 We live in a system that expects us to rebel, and thus has created a rebellion market for us to partake in. The rebelliousness of our age, and of our young people in particular, is being funneled into hyper-specific cultural causes that pose no threat to the propagation of our rapidly expanding and personally invasive technocratic system. Extremism has become an outlet through which Americans have begun to rebel against the entire apparatus, and the rise in people rediscovering the work of extremists like Ted Kaczynski because of its prescient predictions on how technology will impact our social fabric and politics as a whole is indicative of this shift among the American population.15
In my estimation, this problem of political extremism will only get worse as technology continues to rip apart the fabric of our society, and no amount of attempted internet censorship will succeed in curbing its rise if these root problems are not addressed. Our politics has lost sight of what it means to be American— to be an apostle of freedom. We are led and informed by short-sighted socialites, and our extremists are some of the only people calling out glaring issues that threaten to undermine the very foundation of this great experiment. I have only ever known an America with a Patriot Act, legalized corruption, and nepotistic political dynasties. I have watched mass media and political corporations attempt to tear down everything in a blind rush for profit. Cultural issues consume the entirety of our national political conversation in the middle of the single greatest technological revolution our species has ever encountered. When I turn on the news, I am immediately struck by the degree to which the national political conversation has careened off the rails into an entirely unproductive realm, with only a dubious tether to reality. We have entered a kind of cultural psychosis that refuses to address glaring problems that are quite literally right in front of our faces. We have forgotten that inertia alone is not enough to sustain a political system in the face of technology that fundamentally changes the rules of the game that we’re playing.
What we need today is not the nationalist or communist extremists of the industrial age, we need American visionaries who look forward and not backward to guide us into a future that is coming whether we like it or not. We need extremists for America and the American system, driven by a love of our country, our people, and our system of government. I want to support politicians who truly believe in America the way I do. I think a diverse federalist system is the best way we have come up with to govern large groups of people, and I believe that the hard-working nature of our people, and immigrants in particular, has made us the greatest nation on Earth. I believe that the separation of powers is a brilliant work of political genius and our law is one of the greatest academic pursuits humans have undertaken. I believe whole-heartedly in the ideals of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness and have built much of my political philosophy around them. I want to be able to believe our leaders when they say they love America and all Americans, and I long to be able to listen to a leader speak and feel instinctively that they treat their duty as a public service. Most importantly, I believe our history of fleeing violence, famine, oppression, and persecution, shared even by most white Americans, gives us the best shot of any nation on the planet to escape the impending technocracy that currently threatens the freedoms of every single human on the planet.
I do not believe that the inevitable march of technological innovation will inherently lead us to a future system that aspires for each of us to find happiness through freedom. I don’t think we can sit back and wait and trust the current American state to preserve the ideals our nation was founded on when its leaders are being given access to extreme powers— the likes of which humans have never had to contend with before. We can’t let politicians trick us into believing that patriotism is putting our heads down and giving in to a system that dehumanizes us simply in the name of combating other technocratic states abroad or cultural opponents at home. Patriotism requires that we recognize the monumental importance of this moment in history, and recognize that allegiance to our American ideals is far more important than blind allegiance to the existing American state. I want leaders to stop thinking like politicians and to start thinking like historians— thinking critically about this incredible history that they are a part of and helping us write the next chapter in crises that freedom as able to conquer. If this really is the beginning of a new age of human history, we need leaders to rise up and meet the immense burden that has been placed on our generation to guide us into the future. If we lose to technocracy, the history of human beings will become insignificant in the face of the history of our machines. If we win, the leaders who designed and implemented a revitalized American system will be among the greatest heroes this country has ever produced. If we are writing the last chapter of history as we know it, before handing over the reigns to machines that understand more than we could possibly imagine, it’s up to us to save our descendants from subjugation and provide for them the same benefits of freedom and self-determinism that have been gifted to us by our ancestors.
Herodotus, The Histories, Book 7 Chapter 152.
This is the model of knowledge transfer practiced by many indigenous communities to this day. It is worth calling out that while the invention of written language marked a massive advance in human ability to process information, not all of oral history and verbally transmitted knowledge could be given a 1:1 relationship to written words. The most advanced native communities often possessed incredible wealths of knowledge about nature and the stars that surpassed early written cultures, but the technological advance that writing facilitated meant that any knowledge head-start possessed by oral traditions was quickly overcome.
Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pg. 389-390
For my purposes, I use the term data tools to refer to a wide range of technological developments related to the processing of large amounts of data. This includes things like general artificial intelligences, machine learning algorithms, powerful language models, and any other future developments in black boxes that consume large amounts of data and produce conclusions or actions based on that input. I cannot know if the tools we use now will continue to scale indefinitely or will soon be replaced, so I choose to use the phrase data tools since the only thing I am sure of is that data will form the foundation of our advances in intelligent technology, regardless of the exact structure of the tools.
For purposes of brevity, I will spare you the many tangents this line of thinking has led me down. There is no guarantee that this moment we are living through is going to be a solitary advance in information processing that will last 1,000 years without further evolution. There is a sizable chance that such advances will occur with exponentially increasing frequency in the years to come and the start of mass data collection will be simply the first advance of a trend that makes us ancient to humans 1,000 years from now. Take for example the potential to record a perfect 3D rendering of every moment of your life from your point of view. A full audiovisual history of your entire life, supplemented by the latest in emotion recognition technology and metadata collection that are impossible today. The impact of that would necessarily be a brand new type of history on the order of the change from writing to data. Such a change would allow future humans to holographically recreate their ancestors, engage with them, talk to them, see everything that their life entailed. So when I use 1,000 years as a benchmark, it is not to emphasize the number as much as it is to call out how important the mass accumulation of data will be to all future technological advance.
Bernard Marr (May 21, 2018) How Much Data Do We Create Every Day? The Mind-Blowing Stats Everyone Should Read https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/05/21/how-much-data-do-we-create-every-day-the-mind-blowing-stats-everyone-should-read/
David Reinsel, John Rydning, John F. Gantz (March 2021) Worldwide Global DataSphere Forecast, 2021–2025: The World Keeps Creating More Data — Now, What Do We Do with It All? https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US46410421
Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah (July 22, 2020). Language Models are Few-Shot Learners. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf
In the future I hope to do a deep dive on all of my data from Instagram, and further develop some of the ideas introduced here.
Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future, 2002
Vilem Flusser, Post-History, pg. 32 (Our Work)
Yuval Noah Harari, Read Yuval Harari's blistering warning to Davos in full, (Jan 24, 2020) https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/yuval-hararis-warning-davos-speech-future-predications/
I don’t have particularly clean statistics on this point, but my reference point for my line of thinking is the undeniable rise of chain stores and complete flattening of small businesses that ensures that Americans, at the very least, are increasingly engaging in more standardized activities than ever before. This growing similarity can also be observed in the changing policy beliefs of the average American. When you dive through policy issues like protecting the environment, and accepting gay marriage, decriminalizing drugs, and so on, you find that 60%+ of Americans are often in agreement, and the limiting factor on implementation is usually Congress’ desire to put every issue into single ginormous bills instead of voting on them one by one.
Vilem Flusser, Post-History, pg. 24-26 (Our Program) Full Passage:
This certainly is an epistemological and aesthetic challenge, but it is above all as a political challenge that the concept of a programmatic reality is difficult to digest. Here, it is about the question of freedom, of the emancipation of man from the intentions of other men. In politics, therefore, finalistic thought is the only appropriate thought. The challenge that a programmatic reality represents is the need to learn to think apolitically, if we want to preserve the concept of human freedom. This is a paradox. If we continue to think politically, finalistically, if we continue to seek for purposes behind the programs that govern us, we will fall fatal victims to this absurd programming, which precisely predicts just such attempts at “demythologizing” among its virtualities.
We can always better observe how different apparatus progressively program individual and social behavior. And we can observe, on top of this, the behavior of “intelligent instruments,” whose program we know and in which we recognize our own behavior. That is: we can always better observe how much the programmatic reality becomes progressively less “theoretical” and is increasingly applied within praxis. Certainly it is a case of deliberate application. There are programmers. However, despite this: if we persist with finalistic thought, if we continue to try to discover the programmers behind the programs, in order to demystify their intentions, we will lose sight of what is essential in the scene. Within the current scene all “Kulturkritik” is an anachronism. Because what is essential in the scene is the fact that programs, despite being projected by programmers, become autonomous. Apparatus always function increasingly independently from their programmer’s intentions. And apparatus that are programmed by other apparatus emerge with increasing frequency. Their initial purpose always recedes farther beyond the horizon, and becomes less interesting. Human programming is itself increasingly programmed by apparatus. Certainly: some specific programmers judge themselves, subjectively, to be “owners” of the decisions taken by apparatus. When, in reality, they are nothing but functionaries who are programmed to think of themselves in this way. “Kulturkritik” naively accepts the programmer’s naive and programmed view, and in so doing, itself becomes a function within programs. Apparatus incorporate both programmers and critics progressively. Freedom will die if we continue to think politically and to act according to such thinking.
We must neither anthropomorphize nor objectify apparatus. We must grasp them in their cretinous concreteness, in their programmed and absurd functionality, in order to be able to comprehend them and thus insert them into meta-programs. The paradox is that such meta-programs are equally absurd games. In sum: what we must learn is to accept the absurd, if we wish to emancipate ourselves from functionalism. Freedom is conceivable only as an absurd game with apparatus, as a game with programs. It is conceivable only after we have accepted politics and human existence in general to be an absurd game. Whether we continue to be “men” or become robots depends on how fast we learn to play: we can become players of the game or pieces in it.
I will forgo additional commentary on Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and It’s Future until a later Substack post where I can give it the appropriate context and full-length discussion.