On Technological Salvation

Michael Anissimov tweeted links to a couple of my rants yesterday. I appreciate it.

On the matter of "neoreaction=neocameralism," we've been thinking along the same lines. Take this piece, Neocameralism is Autism:

A common rejoinder to criticisms against neocameralism is the simple phrase, “Robot drones”. First of all, for a hypothetical system of government to have to rely on technology that barely exists yet is already a sign of obvious weakness. It’s like coming up with a form of government based on abundant nuclear fusion energy.

This is true and it makes me wonder as to the ages of the neoreactionary true believers. Live long enough and you'll go through cycle after cycle of "technological revolutions" and rapturous predictions about the techno-heavenly future. After the new gadgets arrive, they simply become tools for the same old human behavior, only faster and with a wider reach.

What attracted me to the DE--even where I disagreed--was that it was a community about coming to conclusions. We've run through advances in weaponry, communication, calculation and transportation. When, exactly, are we allowed to decide "Technology isn't going to save us?" After the iPhone 6 fails to have a "Anti-Venality" function? After the next major programming language fails to prevent carnality? Or should we just wait until a week after the (latest) projected date for the Singularity?

The same day, Outside In published this:

Increasingly, there are only two basic human types populating this planet. There are autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy, and there is everybody else. For everybody else, this situation is uncomfortable. The nerds are steadily finding ways to do all the things ordinary and sub-ordinary people do, more efficiently and economically, by programming machines. Only the nerds have any understanding of how this works, and — until generalized machine intelligences arrive to keep them company — only they will. The masses only know three things:
(a) They want the cool stuff the nerds are creating
(b) They don’t have anything much to offer in exchange for it
(c) They aren’t remotely happy about that

 I'll reference Poe's Law here but take the post at face value.

It's precisely this nerd-power attitude that got us into the global mess we're in now. Armed with delusions of competence, nerds created a financial system so abstract and interrelated that a handful of greedy idiots could crash markets around the world, and so complex that no one can fix them. Ability to understand does not equal ability to manage.

The ability to understand is usually an illusion, anyway. To autify it, there are plenty of "unknown unknowns" and always will be--at least, to assume otherwise is setting up for a fall.

To drag the subject back to novel forms of governance, the goal shouldn't be a "more perfect union" but a more robust organization. If we accept that rot sets into even the most elegant of structures--and we must--then our design goal is to minimize the possible damage and maximize the ability to repair.

The fundamental error I'm seeing here is the idea that our conditions today--in the West and globally--is somehow the natural state of things. "The future will be filled with nerds creating cool gadgets and the great unwashed wanting to play with them and nothing can stop it." Nothing except that which stopped every other civilization:  famine, disease, invasion, corruption, complaisance.

The natural state of things is at Sudan's southern border. None of those folks are clamoring for smart watches.