In an article I wrote in August 2024, I argued that we are living through humanity’s season in the abyss: ‘the façade of democratic politics is a finger puppet show played out in the shadows cast by the flames of an immense and ongoing algorithmic conflagration of all values. And while the meaning of every event we experience in this world is no more than a simulacrum, it is a simulation in which real people die. Real children burn when AI designates a school as a target. And real suffering, an immensity of human and animal misery unmatched in our planet’s history, including the explosive growth of that most unspeakable horror, child suicide, as a result of the colonisation of mental experience by social networking businesses, fuels the profit engine of an algorithmically determined capitalist system that is sliding ever further into madness.’
If a sense of history can be said to remain, rather than a fractal unfolding of a timeless sprawl of simultaneous disaster for all natural life, then this characterisation has only grown truer. The latest display of finger-puppetry in the UK is the absurd pantomime of the right’s resurgence. The spectacle of flag-waving nationalists corralled into protests at dismal hotels in towns the central government will never care about, complete with burger vans, and opposed by smaller groups of left-wing counter-protestors, seems to be obviously orchestrated to any of us with the vaguest ‘psy-op vision’.
Why the ‘Patriots’ flags and the resurgence in bigotry? Because that unity of left and right, of populists and the best intellectuals, including the best of the left, which occurred in opposition to the covid gambit for totalitarianism cannot be allowed to repeat itself. Instead, with the help of regime-controlled actors like Tommy Robinson, the state quietly and persistently works so that we will be set against each other, constantly provoked to outrage by algorithmically generated content, and locked into a culture war between left and right – whilst the real war plays out before our eyes and inside our bodies.
The real issue: we are living in a biodigital concentration camp. Integrated with the devices of the control system at the level of neural-hormonal circuitry, most humans are hopelessly lost in the clutches of an algorithmic cradle of incomprehensible scale. At its most addictive and compelling, the smartphone-dependent universe represents the future of humanity as prisoners of ‘an entirely painless concentration camp’ as Aldous Huxley predicted in 1958. At its worst, the biodigital camp is more like Orwell than Huxley: far from painless.
Imagining this independently is difficult because, as Mark Fisher understood, the system also schizophrenically simulates its own graphic demise and absorbs its own critique. We are thus condemned to live through a sequence of nightmares – of nuclear war, climate collapse, AI apocalypse – as a continuous waking dream. It is a waking dream because it is a hypnogogic dream dreamt by an insomniac, her eyes pulled open by wires, her ears filled with the barrage of not-so-subliminal messaging. We are wide-awake and screaming in the virtual reality of governments that create real crisis after crisis and newscasters reporting on those crises. Existence is simultaneously hypermediated, irreal and lethal. Real people die. Real lives are broken on the digital wheel. The inmates of the digital camp understand they are in it, but they also understand that they must believe that they are not in it. This the genius and madness of ideology.
But many of us are resisting.
So what is to be done?
It is not, I contend, through conventional political strategy and action: parties, manifestos, campaign groups. Or at least, that isn’t the foundation. Even if we don’t accept that democratic politics is a façade and that phenomena like the shambolic rise and implosion of the UK’s ‘Your Party’ are largely confected, history shows the fatal flaw with all such well-meaning projects. As Aldous Huxley wrote after long reflection, the problem is that means determine ends. There will be no progressive political project that will surf the algorithmic tide to victory because it will be embroiled in the morally bankrupt means of achieving those ends and, more importantly, be absorbed as a component part of the narratives injected into our heads by the enormous complex of asset managers, governments, NGOs and the media who own the means of mental production. If we rely on the means of the system to achieve our ends, our ends become, in fact, those of the system.
Late-stage capitalism has colonised subjectivity – defined crudely as the story we tell about ourselves – itself. To a certain extent, AI tools have achieved what Bernard Stiegler foretold in his book The Automatic Society, Vol 1: the Future of Work (2015, English 2016), the loss of theoretical knowledge to automation, the ‘proletarianisation’ of thought and the outsourcing of reason itself to machines (pp. 25–30 and throughout). As the climate panic (now dissipating as part of the orchestrated swing to the right) demonstrated, models based on machine learning – ludicrously abstract global constructs – presuppose the reasoning capability of the capitalist subject as much as theology framed the possibility of thought for the feudal subject of the Middle Ages.
The fightback therefore begins at the level of subjectivity, even if it cannot end there.
We must reclaim our ability to think clearly. We must practise a form of meditation and even spiritualism that might free us from distractions. And yes, this does involve the necessity of transcending the human level but not via the transhumanist nightmare. That is because the human animal as a conscious being is now inextricably trapped in the clutches of the machine at a biological level.
To escape, we must look both outwards, to a geological or even stellar level far outside of the human timescales of this never-ending crisis, and inwards, to the prehuman cellular level of thought as an ancient tension between spirochete which became neurons and the cells they attached to, in a brain re-envisioned as a vast forest of such tensions (see Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis, Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution, 1997, particularly pp. 113-26 for this theory of thought) . Both levels are outside the clutches of the machine and any temporal system of power. Both levels transcend the level of ideology. The paradox is that only by transcending the human can we learn what it is to be human.
We must fight here, in the soul, where we can win: not the level of the animal-human ensnared by its net of technology, its inner processes, both physical and mental, under algorithmic control.
The practice of awakening is already happening everywhere, in small groups. So that they don’t fall under the control of authoritarian leaders and allow individual thought to continue, these groups should remain at the size of no more than ten people (this limit is according to thinking in Aldous Huxley’s manifesto for decentralized control, Ends and Means where he argues that the evidence suggests ten is the optimal size for groups engaged in intellectual and spiritual work). Awakening in small groups doesn’t immediately answer large-scale political questions, but it is the very framing of society’s crisis as a solvable political problem, requiring large-scale mobilisations that reduce our ability to think, that does so much harm. The battle to win is the one that places the awoken individual outside the clutches of the machine forever. Society will follow.
This is not a collectivist project because there is no one model of spiritual enlightenment. (I prefer to see such enlightenment on more strictly scientific grounds than on theological ones, but that isn’t important.) Each individual who achieves an inner sight outside of the levels of everyday existence is a single light in the abyss.
Of course, we must ultimately build larger communities of such people and groups. But one of the key unifying principles, as Paul Cudenec argues, for any larger political formation must be respect for real, human diversity, the genuine celebration of difference. Most practical guidance for organisation and structure flows from there. We must also reimagine our personal relationships as voluntary bonds rather than acting like animals in a cage: the contemporary nuclear family is a key lever of social control.
Technology is no stranger to humanity or even to our species: just as the termite’s mound enables their existence, so our technology is a necessary extension of the body, endemic to the human species since long before we all evolved. The human hand, mouth and brain is shaped by the use of hand axes on which our ancestors grew to depend. As Stiegler argues throughout his Technics and Time trilogy, technologies from hand axes to writing and all the more sophisticated forms of ‘retention’ that developed after it act as ‘exteriorisations’ of our memories (just as, deeper within, our bone structures store information about our environment gained through evolution). But after thousands of years of co-dependence, technology has become our master. It looms over us like a malevolent and mad god.
Some communities may reject the dominant contemporary technologies altogether. But other communities will reorient their attitude to technology, taking control of it for the express purpose of sustaining human autonomy and diversity. For example, locally controlled and trained AI could eventually handle knowledge of medicine, provide legal advice and help to handle more complex planning (such as collaborating with other communities on the distribution of resources). Currently technological development and applied science is geared towards the needs of centralised power systems, but if it were redirected towards self-sufficient and decentralised political architectures, we could use technology to support human autonomy and freedom rather than curtail it. Such technically-literate but awake communities already exist: there are numerous hacker communities with political ends (even if they are often also co-opted by state agencies) and Real Left itself doesn’t reject information technology altogether.
Indeed, it only takes an elementary knowledge of how large language models work to learn that the AI trained by the large technology companies can easily be adapted and turned against centralised power. We neo-Luddites will turn the system’s technologies on the system, just as Luddites turned the mighty Enoch hammer on the machines that created it.
no gods, no masters, don't pay taxes, don't vote. create alternative, parallel systems for when SHTF. in the meantime and for all times... nature is our comfort blanket.
Great piece.