according to report From an intergovernmental watchdog international ideas, half of the world’s democracies have shown signs of decline in the past five years. Well, not at all, Sherlock – in most of these democracies, people spend a good part of those five years barred from free intercourse, sometimes forced into medical intervention, if they break strict rules. For leaving home for any other than narrow reasons, he faced fines and even imprisonment.
Of course, it is unclear whether International IDEA will say anything about the coronavirus response, but in the face of the propagation of authoritarian pandemic policies across the most advanced democracies, “civil liberties” Any watchdog that measures the state of the world will undoubtedly have a hard time finding anything positive about society. To tell.
anything People enjoying democracy in the age of printing For those accustomed to the emerging systems mindset unique to the digital age, some may believe that individual agency is less important than the health of the system as a whole. And this accounts for most of the people under the age of 40 in developed countries. This layer has generally grown up with online communities as the primary normative template for the legitimate use of power.
And online communities are rarely fully “democratic” in the print-era sense. Rather, such platforms make a big song and dance about giving everyone a “voice” at scale, while rules and sanctions are imposed without accountability. And any action that threatens the entire system justifies near-unlimited top-down control.
Herd is not democracy
A generation raised to think of the autocratic power of online moderators as normal would not be particularly surprised if real-world authorities began to function in much the same way. In this context, no one should be surprised. Young people become more authoritarian. But perhaps the most striking feature of online communities as a governing metaphor for the legitimate use of power is that they enable a backstage fusion between human and machine authority.
While most social media platforms do not have designated moderators, the worst content violations are managed by a rotating cast (regularly It was traumatic And increasingly offshore)human. These are less power wielders than fleshbots tasked with enacting actual source authority, a set of procedures backed by control technology. The work of these freshbots is to identify problematic content, amplify or suppress other content, and provide “context” to posts that raise algorithmic concerns about “misinformation” across numerous platforms. , are seamlessly complemented by algorithms that otherwise manage the overall shape of the meme swarm. . As recent examples have shown, this algorithmic level of governance has become an increasingly important area of political struggle. condemnation Regarding Elon Musk’s decision to rescind Twitter’s coronavirus censorship regime.
The mode of governance standardized by digital platforms is therefore a combination of impersonal “community guidelines”, human implementation complemented by AI, in the service of coercive proceduralism without accountability. Let’s call this post-democratic order “group governance.” And this distinctive form of collective governance has now permeated far beyond the digital world and into the offline world.
Bratton’s herd mother incident
A positive case for this fusion of human and machine domination was put forward by Benjamin Bratton, a high priest of herd governance, in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. In a tribute to “positive biopolitics” post-COVID-19, “ofreal revenge” Bratton wearily denounces the eccentrics and reactionaries who still cling to the outdated idea of “the destructive (and self-destructive) nature of libertarian individualism as the basis of sovereignty.”
In his view, the way forward is to merge human and machine intelligence into a collective hybrid superintelligence at the planetary level. “Positive biopolitics is found in the subjectivity of the non-subjective,” Bratton declares. , in abstraction, in externalization, and at various relay points among them. ” And by definition, this requires sacrificing some individualism. For a system to function, it is not enough to engage with humans on the terms of their own choosing, or, in his words, “at the origin of their anthropomorphic sovereignty.”
Bratton envisions this imaginary as a kind of algorithm, akin to maternal entrainment, capable of responding to the needs of every point in its collective through a “sensing layer” with both human and machine components. It conceives order almost ecstatically. However, history teaches that utopian practices often fall short of utopian ideals. And Bratton says little about what this all-encompassing cyborg herd mama will do when some of its members misbehave.
you will be happy living in a pod
Based on our track record, what does positive biopolitics actually look like, and how do we discipline rogue elements within our populations?
We can take some cues from a live-action cautionary tale from China, where Xi Jinping’s zero-coronavirus regime forced people to live in apartments.There you go, Chinese people. Burn to death in a building you can’t escape from Due to the restrictions on going out due to the lockdown, it is linked to the “sensing layer”, that is, Take a PCR test every 48 hours at your own expense This is to take public transport, go shopping, or go to work.
For, with access to public services and even apartment doors digitally controlled via smartphones, citizens are increasingly forced to cooperate with the all-encompassing “sensing layer.” , or commit a violation against the regime; COVID code remotely set to red This means a two-week coronavirus quarantine at your own expense. In a way, this is similar to being temporarily banned from social media for violating the terms of service. However, real-world life and access to food, shelter, and basic public services are different.
But certainly, this is an event that can only occur in places where our democracy is not widespread.Well, let’s not forget as Thomas Fudge I got it.,G20 announced A resolution to strengthen the world’s digital health infrastructure, including border surveillance capabilities, global standards for proof of vaccination, and efforts to “leverage and build on existing standards and the success of digital Covid-19 certificates.” It is.
Meanwhile, large-scale efforts are underway to transform (and digitize) children’s education through virtual platforms, AI, “gamification” and monitoring of “social-emotional learning” indicators. anxiety Over time, this will lead to the introduction of social credit scores through the back door in Western countries.Elsewhere, many countries Test operation of central bank digital currency. These are completely digital currencies that make every transaction of a citizen visible to the issuing country.
and a bit similar Twitter mods can now read your DMs, this doesn’t really matter until you find yourself politically at odds with these mods for yet unforeseen reasons.After all, when truck drivers were threatened with humiliation for protesting Canada’s coronavirus authoritarianism, Justin Trudeau (now Praises China’s protests against zero coronavirus) ended the stalemate. Blocking protesters’ bank accounts.
Putting all these factors together, even in the Western world, the digital transition once applied to governance and the resulting shift to collective governance are changing many of the core principles of government by consent that structured liberal democracies. It is clear that it overturns the The most powerful argument for doing so is the belief that it yields a positive biopolitics that promises a kind of impersonal and omniscient nurturance, an all-encompassing, contactless, and hygienic cyborg mother. be. To do so, the post-democratic digital order blends technology and biomedical surveillance with faceless procedural authoritarianism. Governance is enforced through “Community Guidelines.”for your own benefit. ”
It’s no use resisting
Pacific Press/Getty
But few lovers of this cyborg mother try to think about what happens when she makes a mistake or gets angry.From this perspective, we can all point at that drone over there and tremble. Chemicals sprayed to ‘disinfect’ air in Chinese citiesor It mechanically barks orders to stay indoors. But the truth is that positive biopolitics, supported and expanded by robotic intelligence, is increasingly backed up, not only in China but also in the West, by the ultimate impersonal coercion: the lethal machine.No one seriously believes Boston Dynamics’ promise to never install guns. big dog.and San Francisco allows police to deploy killer robots In certain situations. I doubt this was what “defund the police” proponents had in mind as an alternative, but this is the reality.
The difference between the relatively soft-pedaled, opt-in cyborg technocracy in the West and the full-fledged top-down deployment in China is primarily due to Chinese culture’s lack of emphasis on the individual as in the West. Unabated by Western cultural imperatives to reassure those who still believe in individual freedom, China’s order looks even more blatantly coercive dystopian than the one currently emerging in the West. But it’s the same picture.
And it doesn’t just come. It’s already here. We can expect that the majority of young people in the West will welcome it. Since the early 2000s, we have been shaping young people into ideal citizens for a decentralized, unaccountable, AI-backed procedural technocracy by adapting them to social media governance norms. That demographic has now entered adulthood and has generally accepted the transition to a digital post-democracy without complaint.
If I have any reason to be optimistic, it’s on very good grounds. It’s the state’s obvious incompetence where large-scale high-tech projects are concerned. While poor implementation is itself likely to be the source of countless, yet unimaginable atrocities of algorithmic bureaucracy, it at least offers some dark hope that cracks remain in the cyborg mother’s omniscience. I’m holding you. In other words, as long as governments remain powerless when it comes to IT, idiosyncrasies are likely to persist, and uniquely human frictions, clutter, and resistance to standardization will thrive despite the efforts of all the technocrats to foster them. It means that there is still some hope to continue. ceased to exist.
