We may not know it as the Pauli Exclusionary Principle, but we are all aware that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Matter, being matter, has volume and impenetrability, so it is simply in the way of anything attempting to take its place. I was pondering on this when considering the future viability of neural links. Presumably, if people are going to be linked up to some AI interface, space would have to be made in their brain to lay the pipework. I appreciate that the information carrying conduits would be on the narrow side, probably even dug out by nanobots. But that doesn’t change the principle that some discernible lack or absence first needs to be identified if laying a tiny information superhighway within a skull is to make any sense. After all, nobody is talking about adding a sixth finger to the human hand, as useful as an extra digit might prove to be.
The desire to be connected to a universal super-brain is gaining in popularity; some are even clamouring for it. And you could argue that yearning for one’s thinking processes to be subsumed, or at least augmented, by an external mechanical power is in itself indicative of a pre-existing experiential lack: that the space is already there just begging to be filled with connections to a superior intelligence system. That may be true, certainly so far as those desperate for the implant are concerned. It’s also true that our intellectual landscape isn’t what it was. Whether viewed from the wide socio-cultural perspective where we all interact or through the narrower strictures of academia, there are gaping lacunae in the sphere previously traversed by thought. Put simply, thinking is no longer a cultural or even an educational requirement. Maybe the age of instant information – a kind of mashed potato for the brain – has finally arrived.
It is not so much that feelings now win arguments, there simply are no arguments to be had. Incommensurable terms and pseudo-moral posturing seem guaranteed to ensure that disputing parties hardly ever meet. Add to that the fact that ‘central control’ now provides us with appropriate ‘groupthink’ so we don’t have to. Just make sure you join the right side so that people don’t think you’re stupid. But even opinions seem slippery and fleeting, and often inchoate, picked up and tried on for a bit and then discarded like some barely-worn jumper. Our relationship with language seems to be in flux, as though we fear its constraints and more than anything seek to avoid being pinned down by our words. The very idea of having to justify a position or stand by a statement you’ve uttered is beginning to look rather archaic. Given the meteoric rise of the thought police it’s hardly surprising that so many opt to keep shtum. Which is not to say that words no longer have power, they do. Materialised into text, past thoughts retain a zombie-like threat, apparently dead but actually just sleeping and always available to be roused into action against us by anyone who wants to go light up our past. But text is not language proper – it is speaking and thinking, (which is really speaking to oneself), that animate us and connect us to reality; it is the spoken word that properly reflects who we are. And, if this relationship to language is the house of our Being as Heidegger told us, it’s beginning to look a bit like no-one is home. Which should maybe give us pause for thought over the neural link idea. Because perhaps this technology is more of a transplant than an implant – a kind of prosthetic processing plant in place of a mind. Of course, it is easy to see the attraction of having a standardised, apolitical, virtue-guaranteed model of processing information implanted in your head. It is passive, productive, relieves you of the burden of thinking and won’t get you into trouble. Some might say it’s a concept that is already being tried out – all bar the wiring. But language-model machines and minds are very different entities. Machines may hold vast quantities of data but they lack the intuition, perception and creativity of the human mind. Thinking and regurgitating information are quite literally worlds apart.
Many of us regard the pandemic as a time when a Rubicon was crossed and citizenship formally abolished. Its demise had been on the cards for years, of course, and many had written about it: Sheldon Wolin’s ‘Inverted Totalitarianism’ and Colin Crouch’s ‘Post Democracy’ spring to mind. But beyond the corporate takeover described by Wolin, vividly updated by Matt Kennard’s ‘Silent Coup’, or Crouch’s observation that the Liberal classes, preferring consumerism to citizenship, readily supported the market over democratic institutions they no longer needed, the depoliticisation of society has been going on for decades. There has been a clear cultural shift since the rebellious 70s, which were soberly concluded with Thatcher’s demolition of the unions. But I think it is the massive expansion of university education and the unnecessary credentialisation of working life generally that have been the most useful tools for keeping the young away from subversive ideas. Saddled with debt and trapped on the treadmill of useless certification, they’ve been forced to invest in a system that feels it owes them nothing.
Eclipsing the political with the social has been quite a coup. Whilst politics has become associated with angry old men and people with accents, the message to the youth has been clear: become a social justice warrior and align yourself with the cosmopolitan caring class who pin flags to their profiles and buy recycled trainers. But this shift from the political to the social has ontological repercussions; it changes the very nature of how we exist in society. It also changes us. It transforms us from active, equal but differentiated participants in a common venture – however contested our aims may be. And it transforms us into passive, standardised functionaries. Because politics is the very life blood of collective life. Aristotle described politics as the activity that completes us. It originates not in anything social – the word ‘social’ does not exist in ancient Greek – but from our openness to reality and our need to communicate that experience to others. According to Aristotle, without politics we cease to be human. [Politics 1253a 27]
All of which brings into focus the significance of what occurred during lockdown when reason was banned and thinking individuals treated as reprobates. The messaging at that time was also very clear: the virtuous person is the compliant subject: unquestioningly doing as they are told, even when they are told contradictory things. Only the shameful persist in talking about reality, demanding evidence and rational argument. It was like a re-telling of the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Only this time when the little boy pointed out that the Emperor was in fact naked, the crowd turned on him and dragged him off for re-education.
Coming sharply on the heels of this intellectual meltdown, the current clamour for Artificial Intelligence seems perverse. With Western civilisation in the process of jettisoning its foundational concepts, and anyone resisting the orthodoxy being labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’, ‘augmentation’ is clearly not the right word for what is being sought from AI. So what is going on? At a time like this it’s worth taking a leaf out of Marshall Mcluhan’s book and trying to work out the shape of what is coming to pass, because getting caught up in the minutiae is distracting. Mcluhan, who was an English professor at Toronto University, is better known as a Communications Theorist and author of the pithy aphorism, “the medium is the message.” It was Mcluhan’s contention that the form of the communication is more important than its contents, because it is what discloses the fundamental shifts in a society. Topics will vary, with one eye-catching headline replacing another, but to understand what is going on we have to ask ourselves what is actually changing, how are relationships, particularly relationships of power being redrawn? This approach seems particularly fruitful at the present time, because whatever area of interest the media is supposedly ‘investigating’ on behalf of the public, what is glaringly obvious is the lack of context or discussion of anything but trivia, which, unsurprisingly, is usually subjected to forensic analysis. There are even complete blackouts on topics deemed ‘too dangerous’ to be shown to a public which has to be kept in a state of semi-tranquilised stupor like some aged aunt. The general feeling I get is of an increased pacification of society, like they’ve upped the meds. And also a greater feeling of sameness throughout the West. No doubt that’s overspill from the Lockdown spectacle, coupled with a desire to show ‘Oceania’s’ unity against nasty Putin. For some it may be, ‘the clocking striking 13’ or the spectre of ‘big brother’, but 1984’s political geography is what sticks in my mind most vividly. I have no idea whether our ears turn red in the afterlife when anyone talks about us, but Orwell must be the test-case.
So, if the tide has gone out on thought, and reason is no longer what steers us through life, as Aristotle told us it should: humans being defined as rational animals: ‘zoon echon logon’, after all, then it should not surprise us to see that an alternative steersman, already created, is just slipping into gear. ‘Cybernetics’, the term Norbert Wiener coined in 1948 to denote the ‘study of messages as a means of controlling society,’ is derived from kubernetes – Greek for Steersman, or ‘The Governor’, which sounds a bit more like it. The reason communication and control are linked together is because it is through communication and feedback that control is attained. It works because the recipient of the communication, whether that be an animal, a human or a machine, learns to regulate and adapt their behaviour as a result of the messages it receives. A target, i.e., some desired behaviour - is set by the Governor and communicated to the relevant recipients. They then act on that information and, knowingly or not, communicate their responses back. The Governor then learns whether the appropriate adaptation has been made and tailors subsequent communications accordingly.
Loosely, this is how Wiener explains cybernetics, which is a process we are now all well familiar with thanks to our global nudge units. Even in the 40s Wiener realised that cybernetics was going to become a subject of increasing importance as society expanded and grew more complex. He also recognised its deep connection with politics, which it threatened to transplant as an alternative mode of governance. Because the very notion of citizenship necessitates a certain level of knowledge and mental activity; an uninformed, unthinking citizenry being a contradiction in terms. And yet, as we saw during lockdown, if citizens are going to be allowed to receive and disseminate messages which don’t come from the Governor, and even contradict those emanating from that source, then the centralised control of society, which is evidently the Governor’s aim, is not going to be possible. And, if the only messages permitted to circulate are those from the Governor, all others being blocked as ‘disinformation’, then human freedom is over and politics has been replaced by a form of social totalitarianism.
This is the crucial point we have now reached with these competing and mutually exclusive visions for managing society. And what is interesting about reading Wiener, both “Cybernetics” and the follow up “The Human Use of Human Beings”, published 2 years later in 1950, is that although Wiener writes at a time where the technology is not adequate to manage society along the totalitarian lines he fears, the possibility is already there in the blueprint of cybernetics. In fact a review of Wiener’s work, by Pere Dubarle, a Dominican Friar and Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, which appeared in Le Monde in 1948, under the heading ‘Vers La Machine à Gouverner’ – ‘Here comes the Governing Machine’ makes precisely this point. Dubarle, who had been trained in mathematical logic, saw how easy it would be for cybernetics to be used to mechanise a system of unified state control. Such a Governing Machine would make all political decisions and shape public opinion to approve them. And it would do this through a form of game theory in which everyone is a player. However, the state would always be accorded best-informed status and so it would always win. According to Dubarle, other players would be faced with the dilemma of cooperating with the Governor or being ruined. Such an assertion might have sounded a bit tenuous back in the 40s but anyone who has being paying attention over the last few years has seen exactly how this works.
Unsurprisingly, Dubarle concludes on a gloomy note, “In comparison with this, Hobbe’s Leviathan was nothing but a pleasant joke. We are running the risk nowadays of a great world state, where deliberate and conscious primitive injustice may be the only possible condition for the statistical happiness of the masses: a world worse than hell for every clear mind.”
It is not that Wiener did not recognise the risk Dubarle articulates. He did, and he included the friar’s review in his subsequent book. Wiener’s own description for this oppressive world is the ‘Fascist Ant-state’ in which behaviour is highly standardised and the only permissible messaging emanates from the centre. In such a controlled world there are virtually nil opportunities for learning or modification. There can’t be because that would be to risk the individual developing beyond the function designated for them. Wiener knows that such a controlled world is the dream of the ‘worshipers of social efficiency’ obsessed with function and fearful of human freedom. But he also recognises that the origin of such thinking arose before the birth of cybernetics. It was the roll out of democracy that alarmed society’s controllers, and alerted them to the need to devise more subtle measures of control if they were to maintain their grip on the material wealth of the state now that the masses had the political power to take it from them?
Some might recall a time when using messages to control a populace was called propaganda. And those who fell for it were deemed gullible rather than virtuous. The wily Walter Lippman wrote about it in the aptly named “The Phantom Public” published in 1939. Lippman was clear: the job of the public was to consume and produce; the task of sharing out the public wealth was to be left to their superiors. This was the state of play before the arrival of cybernetics, quaintly described by Wiener as ‘the world of knaves’ and fools’. In which the psychology of the fool had just become the subject of study for the knaves. “Because, rather than working out their own interests, the fool operates in a manner which, by and large, is as predictable as the struggles of a rat in a maze.” As Wiener explains, it was obvious even back then that “Lies – or rather, statements irrelevant to the truth” could easily be used not just to make people buy stuff but also to support political candidates and causes and even to join witch hunts. Unfortunately, Wiener’s consoling conclusion that, “these merchants of lies, these exploiters of gullibility have not yet arrived at such a pitch of perfection as to have things all their own way,” – no longer holds true. They have. And the knaves have done such an extraordinarily good job that not only do we not seem to have noticed, but colluding in our exploitation now appears to be a mark of status: unquestioningly regurgitating government agitprop the very imprimatur of the educated. Presumably, they’ll be first in the queue for the implant, boasting their enhanced status and scorning the thickos who’ve been left out of the loop, having only their minds.