The Fundamental Flaw with Technocratic Utopianism and the Rise of Parallel Networks

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats

On the surface we appear to be living in dire times. Accelerating censorship, panicked pandemic lockdowns, the rush into authoritarian styles of government founded upon resentment with a strong desire for revenge – one would be naïve not to see the parallels to 1920s Russia. Yet in spite of it all – in spite of the very real concerns we all have about job security, the social pressures of isolation, and the hysteria amongst those who are officially in charge of our civilization – I feel a strange sort of optimism about where the future might head. We’ve reached a historical cusp; a breaking point between the old world and the new. There’s been a fundamental disruption in how the world operates. The technocratic utopians are trying to use the new systems which have manifested to implement their old ways of doing things. Looked at in a limited sense, this is quite terrifying – techno-communism – but when studied more broadly, it becomes clear that these new technologies are a double-edged sword. Deadly to those that resist – but deadly, too, to the hand that wields them. And powerless against the parallel networks which are beginning to arise.

A friend of mine said something interesting the other night. “The best part of Donald Trump is he proved that it’s impossible to change the system.” While I don’t fully believe his “Drain the swamp!” rhetoric, let alone the grandiose claims of QAnon, he did try and create an America with a higher standard of living, more opportunity and freedom, with a fairer set of rules, and a decrease in foreign military involvement. Throughout all of this he was beset by conspiracy theories about Russian Bots, a Presidential Staff and Civil Service which undermined his every move, and a hostile corporate media who convinced half the population that the first anti-war candidate in living memory was secretly Cheeto Hitler. To armchair quarterback his administration is to miss the point. He certainly made mistakes – he definitely wasn’t the God Emperor – but at least he tried. He was a Hail Mary President, one last desperate, hopeful attempt to find reform within the system – and now that he’s failed, we can abandon the political project without embracing bitter defeatism. We did our best, but the game was rigged from the start.

What that last statement too bold? Too conspiratorial? Too cynical? Perhaps. Professor Jordan Peterson – whom I otherwise respect – would say it was. While discussing a conversation between Peterson and Douglas Murray, a writer who goes by the name Bionic Mosquito had this to say:

Later in the conversation, a lot of talk about the recent US election, Trump, the radicalization of both left and right, etc.  But the focus was on letting go of Trump: if you believe Trump won the election, you have to believe that every institution in America is totally corrupted – and that Donald Trump is the only pure player on the stage.

First of all, it is a false choice – you don’t have to believe either / or.  But second, this was said in the sense of mocking the conspiracy theorists.  I just wonder: is it so hard to believe that every institution in America is corrupt?  I know it is scary to believe it.  But is it hard to believe it?

Peterson wants to maintain faith in the institutions which govern society. After all, what’s the alternative? Existential dread and conspiracy theories? Even if universal corruption is factually true, man doesn’t live by bread alone; we need more than just facts, we also need hope. And believing that every institution is corrupt seems to be a pit of hopeless nihilism. And yet, from where I’m sitting, that seems to be the simple fact of the matter. Any institution you care to mention – the decline of science into peer review; the entry of underqualified women into the military, police, and fire fighters; the state of divorce and domestic violence law, actively eroding the institution of marriage; the anarcho-tyranny of modern day policing; the advanced credentialism and post-modernism present throughout the university system; the unwillingness of corporate media to investigate the claims of oligarchs; et cetera, ad nauseum. Every institution I’ve ever encountered in my own life is hopelessly corrupted by the men who staff it, carbon copies of Dostoyevsky’s protagonist in Notes from Underground, a dull-witted civil servant whose only defining features are incompetence and spite.

Yes, it would be nice if we lived in a world where – even if things weren’t perfect – at least people were trying, and if you showed the civil servant the best part of yourself it might bring forth the best part of them – a world where trusting the institutions became a self-fulfilling prophecy – but at some point you need to wake up and smell the napalm. Antagonizing the system will make things worse, but offering it friendship will only guarantee that you’re the first to be fleeced.

Perhaps you sense where I’m going with all of this? A third solution which doesn’t involve putting your faith in the man, nor does it involve antagonizing him?

Peterson earned himself a great deal of ire when he accused the right of embracing a reactionary form of identity politics: he argued that rather than building a sense of self through an understanding of culture and history, a source of meaning and purpose which might gird their hope for the future, the right adopted the crudest form of exclusionary identity politics, and all the purity spirals which that entailed. Starting with Charlottesville, it lurched from disaster to disaster, eventually culminating with the storming of the Capitol, resulting in hundreds of Trump supporters being put on the no-fly list, with promises of worse to come. That this happened is understandable. The custodians of our culture and history, the professors who specialize in the humanities, have been thoroughly coopted; rather than teaching the Classics, they campaign to get rid of all the ‘Old White Men’ who created the very structure upon which Western civilization was founded. But an understandable error is still an error, and rather than providing a new path forward, the political right has been digging their heels in and demanding we return to a previous era which was less pathological.

But if the right is an unmoveable object, the left is an unstoppable force. This is where Peterson errs; it’s the equal opposite error to what those on the right are doing.

Peterson wants to believe that the institutions can be trusted, that the ‘moderate’ voices on the left just need a bit of empowerment to prevent the identity politics on the left from holding sway. He correctly ascertains the danger that postmodern intersectionality and Marxism represents – but he misunderstands the power relationships on the political left. Despite all appearances, it’s not the intersectional identitarians who control the Democrat party – it’s the technocrats. The rainbow coalition are nothing more than Yuri Bezmenov’s Useful Idiots.

What the left is striving for might aptly be called ‘Techno Marxism’ – the application of Big Data to resolve all inefficiencies. To understand this conceptual space, let’s consider Foucault. One of his more pernicious arguments was about how bourgeois society pathologized the misfits. By seeking to mold the New Capitalist Man, society inevitably fails to incorporate the outliers; by demanding that everybody conform to some sort of idealized, 1950s, ‘Leave it to Beaver’ lifestyle, it forces a small number into the outskirts. This group is then declared as insane or criminal, and they wind up warehoused in prisons and mental asylums. Bourgeoisie standards emanate in a ‘capillary’ manner throughout the society, punishing anyone it deems as abnormal.

I say this idea is pernicious because there’s just enough truth in it to make it dangerous.

Anybody who doesn’t fit into the norm has experienced this – and most of us don’t fit the norm in one way or another. But to pretend that all criminality, that all mental illness, is merely the result of being a round peg in a square hole is ludicrous. It’s interesting to note that in the early Aughts, several alternative, late-night comedies began appearing which argued against this narrative – South Park was the most prominent (resulting in the term ‘South Park Republican’ being coined in 2001), but more on the nose was the Canadian series Kevin Spencer – a dark comedy about an alcoholic sociopath who did evil, not because he was oppressed, but simply because he was – well, an alcoholic sociopath. Within these series we can see the germ that eventually became the Alt Right.

But late night comedy did nothing to dismay the left. The seeds planted by Foucault have germinated into Defund the Police – a movement to replace police with social workers, because all crime is the result of the patriarchy calling someone a misfit. “If somebody would just sit down and talk with the murderers and rapists, then we could stop warehousing them in prisons!”

You might think I’m exaggerating; nobody could possibly believe anything this idiotic, could they? I assure you that they most certainly do. I’ve had conversations with otherwise intelligent people where they make this explicit claim, and have stuck by it when questioned as to how they’d deal with a home invader. “I’d give him a chance to speak and tell me his story.”

Now combine this attitude with modern computing power. The advent of Big Data is the game changer here. It’s worth reflecting on how you can copy and paste data into a spread sheet, and then spend an hour or two putting it into graphs, or otherwise manipulating it, to derive an observation on reality. As recently as half a century ago, those two hours of work would have required two weeks. We’ve had the requisite mathematics to do this for centuries, but only recently have we developed the processing power to do it easily. The second order effect of this is that we gather far more data – partly by accident (the metadata logs are simply a necessary part of a technological device operating, but are a wealth of information for an analyst who knows what he’s looking for), but also because we’ve begun collecting more data – fifty years ago, if nobody was going to have the time to analyze it, nobody was going to bother collecting it in the first place. The third order effect of all of this is that we’re able to create vast models of reality, which can then loop back and influence reality. This right here – the social credit system in China, the erosion of privacy in North America – is the technocrat’s dream.

More than just a social worker asking the rapist about his childhood dreams, we will have digital stewards: AI algorithms which manage everything from public transit, to the economy, to your own individual emotional life, to ensure that everything runs as smoothly as possible.

But what if the centre cannot hold?

The Tower of Babel is a story about what happens when you build something that’s Too Big to Fail – it turns out that that’s a guaranteed way to make sure it fails. The third-older effect of Big Data is a positive feedback loop. China is using it to reinforce pro-social behaviour in its citizens – rewarding civic mindedness, while punishing those who spread contentious ideas – but in the process of doing so, they create a system which can be gamed, and humans are notorious for gaming systems. Much as Google constantly needs to update its secret search algorithm so that you can’t ‘cheat’ your way to the front page, the Chinese social credit system fails to account for the sheer bloody-mindedness of your average human being. As people figure out that the system is rigged, they also figure out how to rig the system, and it quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy which spirals into meaninglessness.

This is the other message in the Tower of Babel story: that any human construct which fails to acknowledge the ineffable – the absolute sovereignty of God – the higher order truth, which all men must serve – eventually collapses. The Techno-Marxist oligarchs believe that humanity is a problem to be solved; something to be measured, and plotted, and nudged, and incentivized into obedience to their higher cause. But their higher cause isn’t an insight from the divine – it’s nothing but utilitarian efficiency. Why efficiency? Because that’s better than inefficiency, I suppose.

Let’s stop to consider for a moment what it means to game a system – what it means when the system in a game.

Game Theory is a system of mathematics developed by John Nash Jr., a paranoid schizophrenic. The most famous example is his prisoner’s dilemma. Two criminals are arrested, and put into separate interrogation rooms. As things stand, the police only have enough information to put them away for 3 years. But they make each of them an offer: rat out your partner, and we’ll know two years off your sentence, while your buddy goes away for 10. Given that 1 year is better than 3 years, each prisoner rats the other out – and so they both get 2 years off of their 10 year prison sentences. This is known as Nash Equilibrium: the state where neither player has any moves left which will bring them an immediate advantage.

Game Theory was the guiding philosophy of M.A.D. during the Cold War – “Listen, Russia, you hate us, and we hate you, but if we set things up just right, then it won’t be in either of our immediate interests to start a nuclear war.” This is why both governments worked so hard to squash any upstart nations that had ideas outside of the two established faiths, Capitalism and Communism: M.A.D. becomes unstable when a new player enters the fray. In other words, Game Theory is an effective method for negotiating between two psychopaths who hate each other.

What it’s not is an effective tool for running a civil society.

Humans have explicitly evolved to communicate genuine intention; from our blush reflex, to the large sclera of our eyes which allows us to see what others are looking at, to our most primordial name for the adversary – the Farther of Lies – we are designed to have integrity. By our very nature, we are not two criminals, blind and unable to communicate with one another, prone to defection. Quite the opposite; there is a universal moral core to humanity, which says something like; “I promise not to take unfair advantage over you, if you offer me the same. Let’s not back one another into a corner where we both need to defect.”

When you gamify the system you take this away; you approach your fellow man with the presumption that he prefers defection, and thus you deny him the ability to cooperate. More than that – you presuppose that instinctive cooperation doesn’t exist, only coerced cooperation is possible. To make this work you must keep people alienated and isolated – much as the USA and the USSR prevented any third powers from appearing outside of their spheres of influence. On the one hand, this is like beating your star pupil for thinking outside of the box; you’re utterly failing to realize the potential of mankind. But even worse (for the Techno-Marxists) – people are going to cooperate. Healthy societies passively encourage this, allowing spontaneous gardens to grow. But when your entire world view is based upon that of a paranoid schizophrenic, you won’t even notice this cooperation when it happens. People will start cooperating, gaming the system that you set up, but you’ll be utterly incapable of detecting it. Like a Black Hole evaporating into Hawking Radiation, you’ll be wondering how all this power is slipping through your fingers…

Just as Foucault fails to account for existential evil, the Techno-Marxists fail to account for free will – for the bloody-mindedness – for the cooperative core that’s at the heart of humanity. Scan all the metadata in the world, you’ll never be able to predict the spontaneous organization of the good-hearted and the like-minded with the spark of life in their eyes.

For us to follow Peterson’s advice, and to place our faith and trust in institutions, requires that those institutions be willing to put their faith and trust in us; that they look us in the eyes, and answer our open hand with theirs; but they are far too busy keeping track of the TPS reports, staring at the dials while tugging the levers of power, to ever acknowledge us as people worthy of love and respect. The conspiratorial right, meanwhile, is attempting to grab hold of that power centre – but you can’t gamify society into morality. The tools are useless, and victory through that avenue is impossible.

Thus we come around to the third option: parallel networks. Or – cooperative intolerance.

If there’s one thing the Techno-Marxists can’t tolerate is intolerance. That’s because the game they’ve created only works if everybody plays it. Like the Cold War, everything falls apart if some group starts playing a different game. And yet, the very technology which allows this centralized planning also allows – no, demands an entirely new development: ephemeral, distributed networks within the system, as undetectable and unkillable as a stainless steel rat.

The same way that the cold war between the US and USSR created a niche for transnational corporations to appear, supplying both sides.

Whoever can wield intolerance effectively will win. The conspiratorial right is incapable of this – even their verbiage, ‘Heritage American’, borrows language founded upon inclusivity: when fighting the Nazis there is neither Jew nor Gentile, just Americans. The right is trying to carry water in a colander. The technocratic left can’t wield it; their utopian vision involves one game for all people – and in all important aspects, they’ve already won. It’s their world, we just live in it.

So – what if we acknowledged this? And then we started building the parallel networks with other bright-eyed, open-handed individuals who know what’s up, and who aren’t interested in sacrificing themselves on a hopeless cause? What if we were to network within the system, and help one another game the gamifiers? Shave off a bit of that Hawking radiation for yourselves, put it into a Bitcoin wallet, and leave the Black Holes to their attempt at becoming the biggest, blackest pit in all of recorded history?

Already we’re seeing the incoherence entering the system. Desperate for an adversary, the technocrats are floundering for someone to blame for their own failures. Inevitably some hot heads will stand up and volunteer to be the devil they’re looking for – all the power to them, if that’s what they enjoy – but I’m not going to tolerate that sort of behaviour in any of my circles. I’m going to network, cooperate, and survive, and the further their gyre spins, the tighter our networks will become.