There’s a war on. Commercial. Cultural. Technological. Global. An information war for control of the soul; being waged with propaganda. Which causes propaganda to be more readily recognized and seen through than perhaps ever before. 

One result is a propaganda glut driving its per unit value toward zero. 

But there are other problems. 

Propaganda isn’t all…

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“Stone Age or Space Age. Never been a clearer divide.” Thus spake Cernovich — a few days ago, though he’s been on this one for a while.

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The thoughtful and intelligent Jonathan Haidt has a book coming, bearing the resonant title The Anxious Generation:

Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewir…

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With events moving, like tech, at an accelerating speed, I’ll be shifting to shorter posts like this one, a brief survey of the geopolitical situation seen, as it ought to be, from the vantage point where technological and theological issues intersect.

This week, the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life hosted a conference in D.C. on “The Ascent of China & Artificial Intelligence” — an event I couldn’t make it back on an airplane to attend, but for which I was asked to write a brief minority report of sorts.

Discussants focused on the impact of China’s coming AI strides on manufacturing, finance, and national security — a serious matter to be sure. “China is behind the United States in Artificial Intelligence but catching up fast,” as the event page notes.

Predicted to spend $15 billion on AI projects in the coming year, Chinese researchers have the advantage of the government’s monitoring of its population for years, gathering enormous amounts of data that AI platforms can use to improve their learning. Announced official policy is for China to be dominant in AI by 2030.

Theirs is a trajectory with inescapably military dimensions, a point of reasonable alarm for at least one faction of the US security establishment. My current thinking, however — based on extensive conversations ranging from the US to Europe to Israel and across political, media, and religious institutions — leads to the conclusion that the threat of US-China conflict in the age of AI is grave, but does not amount to the very worst danger we face today. And it is on that topic that I focused my remarks here below.

In many ways, of course, this terrain is highly sensitive, increasingly touchy to traverse in public or semi-public discussion. But in the interest of presenting insights still much too absent from the discourse, such as it is, I’ll try, going forward, to unpack the geopolitical situation facing each of the major digital powers.

My working thesis continues to be that despite great strengths in some areas, each of them is weak and/or highly vulnerable to strategic disruption or out-and-out attack. I think we’re seeing the consequences of that dynamic playing out right now in real time. The present complex of international conflicts and crises is attributable to the clandestine digital war that has been waged for years now already amid lattices of complex relationships and aims.

This is a war rooted, in turn, in the scramble to reestablish sovereign political authority necessitated by the meteoric rise of digital technology. Despite — or because of — the unity of these problems in that all-important sense, bundling them into a single war for that always-elusive global domination, on the theory that digital technology at last offers the victor a type of triumph categorically different from all that captivated human ambition before, would be a catastrophic mistake, itself categorically different in its horror and misery from all previous such errors of judgment.

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Some spiritual and technological aspects of the present geopolitical situation

Artificial intelligence is the future not only of our country but the future of humankind. Here there are colossal possibilities and threats that are hard to predict today. Whomever becomes a leader in this sphere will be the master of the world and I would very much like it that there is no monopoly of this in any specific pair of hands.

Who said it? Vladimir Putin, in 2017 (mentioning “Russia” instead of “our country.”) But who among the five top-tier digital powers would not now say the same? Each of the US, UK, Russia, China, and Israel is under great pressure to become the leader in AI. In the digital age, he who is not the leader appears destined to be not the master but a servant or slave. Accordingly, each digital superpower is compelled to reason that the only path to world mastery runs through digital world war — a conflagration without precedent or parallel on earth, a wager of incalculable risk with outcomes impossible, even for the most advanced AI itself, to predict.

This means the “multipolarity” invoked by the non-Western bloc is already here, despite the protestations of the “rules-based international order” — which, as evinced by America’s increasingly arbitrary and improvised foreign policy, already no longer exists. The question is whether the West’s digital powers — the US, UK, and Israel — can do anything about it.

The answer to that question appears to turn on the way in which many gentile and Jewish elites of the Western ruling class have abandoned their inherited religions in favor of a new project to construct a new religion around the worship of technology. This endeavor itself appears sharply divided: on one side, superhumanists promising individualist emancipation from the constraints of merely human life; on the other, transhumanists invoking a new and utopian collectivity through our merger with our machines.

Yet on closer inspection these two sides are one — demanding, in each case, both a cyborg fusion of the human with the digital and a theocratic fusion of regime power with digital religion. The only real debate or true struggle is over who shall be the priestly caste in charge. Needless to say, a cyborg theocracy, whoever sits at the top, is incompatible with, and fatal to, the American form of governance and the American way of life. If both Jews and Gentiles fail to muster spiritual alternatives sufficient to overcome the massive temptation to worship technology and the logic of absolute and unbounded technological “progress”, “Judeo-Christian values” will swiftly prove unable to stop the trans-formation of the West’s “rules-based” regional order into a cyborg theocracy bent on planetary domination and transformation.

In thinking about US responses to China in the AI arms race, the place to begin must be the religious core of America and the spiritual disciplines and institutions required to rescue American civilization from “transitioning” forcibly into the progenitor of a homogenous world cyborg theocratic state.

Failure here will leave the West’s religious future in the hands of a divided and compromised Catholic church; a fragmented, declining, and increasingly heretical Protestant movement; a fractured Jewish faith failing to come to grips with tech’s theological challenge, and a Russian Christianity primed, in its increasingly eschatological and militant attitude, to become the ultimate enemy other of a West that, by the ancient Church’s lights, grows openly more satanic by the day.

Viewed correctly in this way, the supervening existential geopolitical threat faced by Americans is not the rise of cyborg China, as significant as that challenge is, but an apocalyptic world religious war pitting Christian Russia against post-American cyborg theocracy — the chief figure of which, it is easy to suppose, practicing Christians will be apt to see as the Antichrist.

The western way of war is religious. The key to mustering a viable modus vivendi with China in the age of AI is the establishment of a durable peace between the West and Russia on the basis of ancient spiritual strength sufficient to prevent the worship of technology from usurping and disfiguring our form of government, our way of life, and our humanity itself.

These remarks were delivered in Dallas, Texas at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute conference “Toward Tech Advancement or Tyranny?: Liberty, Human Flourishing, and the Soul”, held October 28-30, 2022. They have been gently edited for clarity.

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Thanks very much to ISI for welcoming me to this event. I regret missing the Bitcoin debate between George G…

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Twice, for me, has probably been enough as far as Oppenheimer is concerned. To me at least the biggest sequence — the script hasn’t hit the internet so I’ll paraphrase — is Oppie opining that revolution has swept all other high pursuits and science must certainly be next, be the ultimate, the immediate rejoinder being that America had its revolution, that is, 1776.

Now at first blush the implication here is that ‘76 was unlike the world revolution Oppenheimer witnessed because ‘76 was political, not intellectual, and of course to a degree this is absolutely correct. As the Declaration explains at great length the “long train of abuses” inflicted on the distinct American people by the British regime were self-evidently severe enough to justify that people’s throwing off that yoke.

But no matter how elegant the English deployed this was a dirty laundry list — no “intellectualism” or card-carrying intellectuals required to make heads or tails of the information and form a proper judgment about it. Primal, ancient, eternal stuff: mandate of heaven lost, a people held in bondage, a Christian regime flouting the will of God…

On the other hand, however, the Declaration overlaid these basics with messages of a profoundly, inescapably intellectual character. Were these revolutionary? Judgments — both “intellectual” and common-sensical — did and do differ. Among intellectuals a media theorist is obliged to suggest or at least consider that what was really revolutionary about the Declaration was not the content (which, as Harry Jaffa and others argued, reflected Locke as much as Aristotle, who would have been of more or less one accord if made contemporaries) but the form — that the medium was, indeed, the message. Was not the real breakthrough the move from the old oral declaration of war to the new written declaration of political revolution? It was a move that demanded more than a mere announcement. As the audience is the formal cause of the work, it obliged the Declaration to submit not just notice or justification to “a candid world” as such but to the world’s intellectuals, to the republic that preceded the United States, the republic of letters.

That is, it demanded an intellectual justification — philosophical, to be specific, but not philosophical in the sense abstracted away from political matters, or indeed matters of war. Written and published intellection was now a weapon of war: one that from the outset “positioned” (posited) itself as, at least in theory, now the most important or powerful weapon of war — something much more revolutionary than the American Revolution itself, as it aimed to and did seem to establish a higher authority upon which to base and conceptualize revolution than the ancient basis of the laundry list of abuses unto self-destruction of the British regime’s authority.

I lay all this out having in mind Chris Rufo’s instantly successful and justifiably acclaimed new book America’s Cultural Revolution. Stipulating all the praise, what jumped out at me is something that hasn’t received a lot of attention so far (though it’s early), perhaps because it’s hiding in plain sight.

FROM REPUBLIC OF LETTERS TO EMPIRE OF INTELLECT

The book openly describes how our ostensible cultural revolution was really in fact an intellectual revolution, by, for, and of the intellectuals, those who perceived themselves to be of necessity revolutionary because intellect was itself necessarily revolutionary, and revolution necessarily intellectual. The stretch required to argue this turn of events can’t be traced to the revolutionary intellectual character of the Declaration outlined above is, at least to me, abusive of common sense as well as intellectual probity — which, a media theorist seems compelled to suggest, isn’t “anyone’s fault” so much as it is a consequence of the unfolding of developments in the technology of communications… barring, of course, those for whom the only true revolution is the revolution in comms tech, and the only true progress the progress thereof. To take a page from Hunter Thompson…

The quote was, of course, as Thompson knew well, not Linkletter’s but Melville’s. His personal yet public declaration of the collective consciousness of genius — a far cry, in a very underthought-out way, from the republic of letters — has reverberated ever since through the American consciousness with which it resonates so deeply. Even more than the British Empire, the American Republic is where media came to ever further extend the faculties — some of them — of Man. And amid the Wartime collapse of the British position as intellectual master of the world, the world’s intellectuals largely rushed to America to partake of, intensify, and further revolutionize those extensions.

Conditions, in short, were perfect for the world ascendency of America on the basis of the systematic development of the intellect as the ultimate weapon of war, itself made possible by the ascendancy in America of the intellect as the dominant human faculty — not only in theory or as an ideal, but as an established reality. This was the hinge of history where Oppenheimer found himself and maneuvered toward its center. The achievement of a global circuit of intellectual genius applied to the scientific mastery of the building blocks of matter was of a piece with the systematic “revolutionizing” of all areas of human endeavor by means of the intellect, which Oppenheimer makes so central to Oppenheimer’s motivation for making himself responsible for the intellectual revolution’s culmination in godlike mastery over the life and death of the whole world.

SENSORIUM DEPLOYED

Interestingly, Oppenheimer gives us a world master remarkably incurious or insensitive to actual religion — taking Trinity from John Donne’s questionable verse, and “I am become death” from the scripture of a faith to which he never ascribed — as well as to rocketry, which (story for another day) played such a stunning role in the religious inclinations of its military pioneers. Nolan’s Oppenheimer is so dismissive of Teller’s “super” hydrogen bomb because, beyond its superlative powers of destruction, delivering the payload would require “an oxcart.”

Unlike, say, Pynchon, McLuhan’s focus wasn’t on the religious significance of rockets to aerospace and the death-dealing technological mastery thereof; he was more focused on the Devil already being prince of the air. There are only three mentions of Rockets in Understanding Media, and one of them is a Canadian hockey player. The other two are these:

The movie, as much as the alphabet and the printed word, is an aggressive and imperial form that explodes outward into other cultures. Its explosive force was significantly greater in silent pictures than in talkies, for the electromagnetic sound track already forecast the substitution of electric implosion for mechanical explosion. The silent pictures were immediately acceptable across language barriers as the talkies were not. Radio teamed up with film to give us the talkie and to carry us further on our present reverse course of implosion or re-integration after the mechanical age of explosion and expansion. The extreme form of this implosion or contraction is the image of the astronaut locked into his wee bit of wraparound space. Far from enlarging our world, he is announcing its contraction to village size. The rocket and the space capsule are ending the rule of the wheel and the machine, as much as did the wire services, radio, and TV…

Automation certainly assumes the servomechanism and the computer. That is to say, it assumes electricity as store and expediter of information. These traits of store, or "memory," and accelerator are the basic features of any medium of communication whatever. In the case of electricity, it is not corporeal substance that is stored or moved, but perception and information. As for technological acceleration, it now approaches the speed of light. All nonelectric media had merely hastened things a bit. The wheel, the road, the ship, the airplane, and even the space rocket are utterly lacking in the character of instant movement. Is it strange, then, that electricity should confer on all previous human organization a completely new character? The very toil of man now becomes a kind of enlightenment.

As a good media theorist what preoccupied McLuhan was less the rocket than the satellite: not the V2 but Sputnik (not a name at all but Russian for satellite). For rockets and their payloads — human or military — left and returned to Earth, whereas satellites enclosed it — in information. The satellite, not the rocket with its warhead, really announced the conquest of the world — as opposed to the possibility of its mere annihilation — by the intellect.

VENGEANCE IS MINE, SAITH THE NERD

The importance of this distinct turn of events is absolute. For the satellite may have turned the world into an absolute object for intellectuals to master, but for us down below, it turned the world into an absolute stage to play upon. Global village became global theater, and global theater a worldwide theater of war. No longer was Zeus’s thunderbolt, Krishna’s world-destroying time, or Thor’s hammer the only, or even ultimate, spiritual expression of military hardware’s material might. Now, a supreme weapon swallowed the world and all within it, not in “the splendor of the mighty one” like “the radiance of a thousand suns” but in the total illumination of a software singularity systematizing permanent, infinite psychological operations:

Since Sputnik put the globe in a “proscenium arch,” and the global village has been transformed into a global theater, the result, quite literally, is the use of public space for “doing one’s thing.” A planet parenthesized by a man-made environment no longer offers any directions or goals to nation or individual. The world itself has become a probe. “Snooping with intent to creep” or “casing everybody else’s joint” has become a major activity. As the main business of the world becomes espionage, secrecy becomes the basis of wealth, as with magic in a tribal society….

It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows… are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state that has already overtaken private enterprise, as individual businesses form into massive conglomerates. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

McLuhan introduces the above material with an epigram from a long-forgotten book entitled The Eclipse of the Intellectual. “In the 20th century,” McLuhan observes, “the number of ‘past times’ that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist’s role.” Faced with a singularity of culture, reducing all cultures to garbage in a universal scrapheap/data bank, the intellectual recoils at the sight of masses of artists swarming like hungry flies and ants over the trash.

But the intellectuals have had their revenge. Nothing to me epitomizes how exhausted and oversaturated intellectualism has become than the hilarious way many conservatives insist America’s (the world’s?) children must be rigorously educated not into critical theory (boooo!) but critical thinking (yaaaay!). The assault on all human institutions by intellectuals, intellectualism — and the fateful crossover from mere intellectual egotism or narcissism into the worship of intellect as the ultimate magic, smart power etc., etc., the principle that, even if smarts can kill, only smarts save — responded to the singularity of culture by undertaking a computer-age equivalent of the Manhattan Project, encasing all things spirit in a universal meta-cultural theater of smarts, an invisible networked system of satellites of the soul.

FROM METACULTURE TO METANOIA

As necessary as politics still might be — the distinguishing friend and enemy, the attacking and rolling back the enemy’s gains, the claiming and holding of territory visible and invisible — today’s total intellectual war of the world can not be won by an apocalyptic, mimetic race of intellectual arms. The circuit can only be broken — as the secular Oppenheimer, despite his rational fears of what he had unleashed, could never manage to do — by spiritual means: not only true faith in true God, but by the living out of faith in and through the experienced reality of God’s creating, saving presence.

Achieving this experience demands humiliation, not least the humbling of the intellect. It must be driven down from the head into the heart, which it must serve — or, rather, it must be remembered that the intellect actually resides in the heart. For just one of many accounts of the understanding of the Church and the Saints concerning the change of mind that must take place in the heart, see here:

purifying our nous, our intellection, and guarding our thoughts (those things that can enter into, or can dwell within, our heart) is not only for seeing outwardly, but also for seeing inwardly, and why the Fathers are so adamant in speaking about this.

For the saying is true, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God!

Almost 1 million views for a troublesome, troubling video of an attentive young mother in the depths of downward white mobility. And a fresh round of intractable debate between Christians and Nietzscheans over just how to feel about it. Kruptos, speaking for the former:

The “dissident right” must understand that this is their base, their future. These are their people. If you dump on her for using seed oils, you are the problem. If you want to look down at her, you are the problem… This is what “working class” politics looks like. You must be as comfortable sitting at her table receiving her hospitality as you are in your study reading Schmitt, Burnham and Ellul. Maybe more so. Her interests are your interests. This is your politics.

If, for the Nietzscheans’ part, you hate or deny God and Christ and “humanity as such” with all the pity and “togetherness” it entails, it’s necessary and inevitable that the object of the culmination of this distaste and enmity is the genericized white failchristian, the stock character of the seemingly irredeemable kind epitomized by the girl in the video. Even a relatively squishy or practical Nietzschean would insist we can surely agree, whatever our inclinations, that there simply isn’t time to indulge in anything loving, humble, and patient toward this new class of disgustingly abased white Americans. The pathos of distance is no longer just an inoculant against the sickness of the diseased spiritual slave. Under the circumstances of today’s accelerating rot, it’s a life hack, an escape from the black hole swallowing up even what just a generation ago was the most powerful and excellent race in the world. So a conciliatory Nietzschean might say.

And, no question, it is outrageous in an uncanny new way to see just how far the Anglo has fallen in so short a time, and not just the Anglo in general but the embodiment of the “fix” to all that was wrong with the ethno-denominational problem of the Old World West — the white American. It was here in America that the vast experiment was undertaken to peacefully and prosperously transcend national and confessional identities, the two great sources of massively violent division in Christendom, melting them all down in a pot to forge metallurgically, or perhaps alchemically, into a sort of ultimate form of Western European Christian, the most syncretic and unified one possible, “nondenominational” and “post-ethnic.” It must be concluded that this specific experiment and the hypotheses behind it have failed despite — perhaps because of — its initial apparent success.

Yet the controversy doesn’t really concern the fact of the failure. The sticking point is why. Christians are generally inclined to blame ideologies, Nietzschean or otherwise — in short, the grand struggle to replace religion with politics, or to turn politics from what it really is and must be into some other thing imagined capable of substituting for, so as to overcome, religion. Nietzscheans prefer to blame Christianity in train with its spinoff slave moralities, many of which of course, include various anti-Christian ideologies themselves. Letting the old man speak for himself:

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BEHIND THE POISON

It would make sense Nietzsche would want to be reluctant when considering what has sent the ultimate triumphal figure of the white Christian American into such terrible straits. It’s one thing to consider the miserable situation of the Old World Westerner, for whom the long and blood-drenched impasse of ethnic and confessional strife left the living with a profound, yet even so, hollowed out, longing for a servile end state denuded of all true identity and celebratory only of “difference.” Yes, please, final equality, totalitarian equality, the equality of mere objects! But in America? Where the wildness of the ultimate actor gave the syncretic, generic masters of the universe the opportunity to serve singly and together as a blank white canvas on which to repaint the world, the cosmos, the human? How could even they go so wrong, fall so far, so fast?

Today even those who’d deny they were Nietzscheans (rationalists, scientists with a good conscience, people of “the fact”) are apt to agree that if Christianity has, as it would seem, failed so comprehensively in America — the place where obviously it had achieved the broadest adoption and fervor across the most diverse population at a time of its country’s greatest power and spiritual authority — then Christianity must suck, must have something irredeemably broken or obsolete about it. First, it imploded in Europe; now it implodes here; time to #MoveOn.

And of course, this is “rational” — ! But there is another answer to the scandal of the sudden and shocking depth of white slavery the generic American Christian and post-Christian has sunken into and sinks even further still.

This answer is that the triumphant group in question did not go astray for the reason Nietzsche supplies — an “excess” of Christianity — but because of a deficit, and one particular kind of deficit, one caused by a turning away from the Ancient Church and its disciplines of spiritual experience, and a turning toward something else.

WHAT A TOOL

Let us turn for a moment to a page from the 1958 Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution.

Oakley, an English anthropologist and paleontologist, gained fame in his day as an elite debunker, having DESTROYED Piltdown Man with facts and logic. Although at least one obituary noted the popularity of his annual Christmas parties, I can’t find any specifics on his own religious faith or upbringing, if any, although I can add that he was also the author of the highly popular book Man the Tool-Maker.

It is revealing enough to follow his train of thought above that only Darwinianism really obliged the ordinary person to consider what if anything truly set Man apart from the animals, and to land on the viewpoint first expressed by Ultimate American Ben Franklin that, yes, we are animals, just like the rest, but for the one saving fact — saving to our pride — that we make the tools around here. Therefore man must not just be the tool-making animal, but the animal ruled by those who make the tools; and not just by the tool-makers or even the best at making the tools, but those who determine the trajectory and aim of toolmaking, the research agenda, and who ensure that said agenda is arrived at before anyone else can come along and muck things up by risking the pursuit of some other line or lines of inquiry and development.

FROM GOD-MADE TO DEVIL’S DUNG

Earlier we spent some time on Joseph Heller’s artful insistence that “the spirit gone, man is garbage.” Quite the contrast it now strikes with Carlyle’s contention, which deserves a sidebar of its own: the line is from his Sartor Resartus, “The Tailor Retailored,” perhaps a riff off of Byron’s The Deformed Transformed, and definitely a variation on friend and mentor Goethe’s Faust.

What do tools have to do with clothes, you ask? Everything:

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“Man”… “he”… “us.” Who raids the bosom of the earth? Who chooses what to retrieve? Who chooses why? Who speaks to the stones, and chooses what to command of them? Who speaks to “miscellaneous individuals” like a heap of excavated rock? Who commands them to sin on their behalf?

Not an abstraction called “Man”. Not “us” in particular. The responsible party in particular is those who strive to be the mortal gods of toolmaking. But it is also true that responsibility rests in a general, unabstract way with humanity itself. What is so significant about us is not that we make tools but why we make them, and why we make them is not for their own sake, of course, but because they promise to confer on us the recursive power to become as gods.

THE END OF THE LAST MAN

What remedies us of this fatal error is what solves the mystery of the latter-day Fall of the seemingly ultimate person — the false New Adam and Last Man — which the generic white American Christian became.

And of which, by the grace of God, he or she can be cured.

People ask me about catechizing the bots. How does this striking golden image of Christ answer?

Here, we see the triumphal iconography of the Main Cathedral of the Armed Forces in Moscow, introduced to the world via richly-produced video — drone footage and all — complete with a voiceover declaration of a new and intimate relationship between the Military and the Church.

As has become known since then, one of the Cathedral’s unique features is its composition: metal repurposed from the enemy forces — Nazis — destroyed during the Second World War, a.k.a. the Great Patriotic War. Certainly the Cathedral doesn’t shy away from this history and the past in general. But the iconography speaks at a level that includes and overarches all of human history. The word “archeofuturism” is sometimes passed around to characterize the aesthetic: not atavistic or futuristic, but opening up onto what is to be by way of what was.

In a secular key, the archeofuturistic urge is apt to manifest in RETVRN-with-a-capital-V attitudes, a fundamentally historical going-back, unearthing the pre-Christian culture that belongs to a past so deep it offers a wellspring of mystery and power beyond human account.

But in the religious key of the Cathedral, it’s plain that trying to trace the Source to the omphalos, the navel of the world, is not the objective. The supreme turning-around, the most needful, transpires not in human spacetime alone but in the heart, in the spirit. The turnabout we are called to is metanoia. Take up thy mat and walk, not looking back, but sinning no more. Return to the Father before the Son returns.

Books can be filled pontificating on the degree of “Westernness” in Russia and so forth. Our point is simply that the Russians built a church that exhibits a presiding presence in this age, innumerable bots and all — a big church, a statement, swimming by all appearances hard against the currents of the “globe” as its Western architects have seen it and dreamed it and built it. Surely that kind of statement is so big and important that more than one ethnos can hear it and make it. Keeping in mind that paradox of the presiding presence within the world that is yet not of it, let’s turn to catechizing the bots.

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THROUGH THE MOTIONS

In recalling the life of Christ, we see the way of God in the world before He returns in glory to be an entrance invisible, quiet, humble, even slow. A ministry that begins in the middle of life. Even the miracles modest, loving, guiding. No hurling of thunderbolts. No war chariots raining down from the sun. Very un-Marvel. A doubtless very different kind of marvel. Beginning from, our naked eyes would say, a speck — a grain of the smallest seed.

In short, something totally different in vibe from the kind of automated catechesis already taking center stage in the great “AI” drama. Today the catechesis model for any major player is to feed the bots as much data as possible that’s flavored — biased — in the desired manner. You make a composite of the universe inflected in a certain way; the machines treat that as the universe. You can train these things on anything. You can make a golem — a god — of whatever “content” you like.

So we see chatbots now that can crank out Bible verses or riff on Biblical themes. AI assistants that can produce prayers for whatever occasion, better than your limited memory or fat fingers. There’s now an AI “Jesus” chatbot, predictably spammed with meme jokes by the boyz. In Asia, you already see “priests” being made of humanoid bots. Not just “holy droids” doing as asked like vending machines, but engaged in what’s intended to be perpetual prayer — or at least going through the motions.

These kinds of things, innocuous or malevolent, are likely all inevitable. And I hope it seems obvious this isn’t it when it comes to catechizing the bots. The motions that must be gone through are not those of the bits or the atoms but rather the flesh and the spirit. Whether inscribed on silicon wafers or dead tree scrolls, teachings alone — even biblical Scripture — are not enough; in isolation, as St. Paul says (beginning at 2 Cor 3:15), readers are not enlightened:

Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their minds; but when a man turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the spirit… even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the glory of Christ, who is the likeness of God.

Instructional enlightenment comes not from mastering in isolation the meaning of the text, the written code, but rather by the Holy Spirit through Christ, the Logos, the Word. We ourselves become epistles of Christ, “written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart.” The way for us to train the bots into formation begins with our acceptance that only God puts the world in formation.

COIN OP

So it is essential that we exercise careful discernment about which digital technologies, if not large language models, automated simulators, algorithms, or hominid bots, are the best place to begin. And we must bear in mind that even making the best selection for the wrong or mistaken reasons, or simply in the wrong spirit altogether, no matter how “airtight” the “logic”, promises failure and misery.

Ruin like this can only come, to take one important example, from selecting bitcoin in the same “coin-operated” spirit as those who build robotic puppets to go through the motions of mere ritual, who lie to themselves that this in some way is the same or better than real, that is, human priests (or monks or lay people or…). People who think bitcoin will save us because they think that money is the real life force of the universe — that we are all “coin-operated” — are aiming us toward the same disaster as those who imagine economics explains it all or who hold as their article of faith that there is a pure and perfectly deterministic language and this language is mathematics.

And undoubtedly, if you consider that bitcoin has been first past the post in achieving what Vitalik Buterin calls Ethereum — a world computer — those “people of the coin” who believe the only way to save the world is to compute the world are merely rephrasing or aping the Googlers bent on “organizing the world’s information.”

Why does this coin op hold such an attraction, beyond the standard glittering power of the promise to rule the world? Because, unlike so many other foundational digital technologies, the most obvious use case of which is compulsory, bitcoin’s design can admit and reward the kind of slow, distributed, humble, long-suffering, loving, and kindly and devoted work of centuries and millennia that has always characterized the real and enduring growth and fruit-bearing of the Church…

if, and this is a big if, bitcoin is not first captured and assimilated by the current globalized financial system of the Borg, as indeed it is now trying to do.

Unless and until that event arrives, the distinction between bitcoin and AI or hominid bots or biotech or DARPA is striking and momentous. It sheds new light on the self-harm and unhappiness unleashed by the worshipful overuse of instruments that promise to shortcut and substitute and solve. It reminds us of how and why the way of the Lord on earth is so humble and so fruitful, and why to see this invisible way we must ourselves always live as beginners in the disciplines of humility and patience and suffering and love.

That may be a stretch for some people, but it is more than enough of a place for us to begin — as opposed to assuming the fetal position or sitting on top of the mountain waiting for number to go high enough that nirvana arrives. As opposed to competing to conform with the way of the world. As opposed to putting our faith and trust in the “public” or “private”-sector princes of this world.

THE TRUE TREE

It’s bitcoin’s rare suitability as a protocol to build on a properly presiding presence in our digital spacetime that gives it an attraction many do not see or can’t yet admit. Its richness in this regard often ends up being misinterpreted into only semi-secular terms as the fuel or foundation for a world “youth revolution”.

Nietzsche once remarked of the Europeans of his time that it was the Church “but not its poison” that repelled them — they spiritually loved equality but hated the prospect that only such spiritual equality existed and could be lived out as could be done under and through the triune God, as the Church had practiced and taught. There’s a similar danger at work in bitcoin, which those who reject God’s kingdom can only see as a kingdom of this world — a planetary blast of man-managed energy that, so to speak, brings heaven to earth. They look for the most attractive fruit without considering which is the true tree of life. We know how that story goes. We know how it ends.

Yet to be sure bitcoin can be used in this way, just not with the outcome intended. It can serve Marvel-ously as a world computer that organizes the information of all and organizes all into information, just the like Googlers would do, and just like the CBDCers desire. It is that powerful of a digital tool, and like digital tools characteristically, now, it is a “dual-use” — meaning weapons — technology.

If the Body of Christ does not pick up this weapon and wield it well, protectively, someone or something else will pick it up and wield it poorly, bringing malignant order and untold destruction, of the spirit no less than the flesh. This challenge — perhaps you can see how it might be a duty? — reveals that catechizing the bots, if it is to happen at all in accord with the Lord, must begin, again and again, with our own catechesis.

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Real ones will know the nesting Russian Doll sequence opening the great Alec Guinness-led adaptation of John Le Carré’s fantastically popular Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The sequence ends with a blank-faced doll at nest’s center; lifted away, it leaves the apprehensive viewer with a portentous set of vacant concentric rings, a small hollow nothing at its center, where the heart — of the conspiracy driving the labyrinthine plot — should be.

When it comes to bravery Le Carré was, I think, a case of credit received insufficient to credit due. He said more than anyone in Anglodom, certainly anyone near his level, about the criminal syndicate of international pharma and about the global money laundering machine that turned Russian funds of “unknown” provenance into squeaky-clean pounds and euros. Two phenomena about which it isn’t much of a stretch to say London was (if it isn’t still) world capital.

It’s not an exaggeration either to consider Le Carré concerned above all with Britain’s real-life version of Russia’s famous dolls.

Famously, Winston Churchill defined Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” and his words in 1939 spoke eloquently to the Western sense of Moscow as the “other” — an inscrutable and menacing land that plays by its own rules, usually to the detriment of those who choose more open regulations…

But Churchill’s analysis was only part of a formula that seems as relevant now as it was then. Perhaps, he said, “there is a key” to the riddle of Russia, concluding, “That key is Russian national interest.”

The tale of Britain’s national interests toward its other major twentieth-century rival, Germany, is best left here to another place and time. In an ironic sense Le Carré would no doubt appreciate, the UK owed its momentous rise as a computational and cryptographic power to the Germans’ Enigma system (and the Poles who first cracked it). But the British had been well-nigh obsessed with riddles, puzzles, mysteries, and all other higher-order games of wit since at least the rise of the Victorian gentleman — something McLuhan, a longtime Sherlock Holmes appreciator for whom Holmes’s inductions stressed that effects “precede” causes, would have traced to the dominance of the print medium, which produced the dominance of the English language, of English thought and patterns of thought, and, via such paths, to the dominance of British commerce, British money, British Empire, and the real Great Game — played at ever-higher levers and layers of abstraction by men of surpassing wit.

At the beating heart of that rarified scene — “so overt it’s covert,” as Sherlock jokes in Guy Ritchie’s Holmes sequel A Game of Shadows (a line so strong it has its own song, composed by Hans Zimmer himself) — was the star whose visage graces the Anglo Doll above: John Maynard Keynes.

MR. UNIVERSE

I suppose it sounds ungenerous to say how unsurprising it is that the son of a Cambridge lecturer in moral sciences and a local social reformer would be from an early age a gay atheist, but the collapse of English and German Christianity in Keynes’s time among the children and grandchildren of Protestant faithful and even of Protestant ministers just can’t be ignored — even if Keynes, a huge and largely forgotten point in his favor, fought in vain to stop the victorious Britons from bankrupting and immiserating the German people after World War I, one of the West’s ugliest and most scourging examples of what could go wrong?-brain among its mental elite.

I’ve said a few words in the past about Keynes, specifically about the “beauty contest” that bears his name in the literature, and it’s here that our Anglo Dolls really come into view. On the face of it, the Keynesian Beauty Contest is an ingenious theory of equity markets, of the sort that made the mathematically-adept Keynes a giant of macroeconomics. Lift off the head, however, and another face—and another, and another—await inside. Here is Keynes in 1936 explaining how it all works:

It is not a case of choosing those that, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

Thirty-three, perhaps? Who knows. The sky is the limit in matters like these; the base of the Tower is broad, and strictly speaking it has no top floor.

That’s not Keynes but Tocqueville, right around 100 years earlier. Paradoxically, perhaps, deepening equality in the social environment drives the ever-greater straining on the part of the greatest wits to conceptualize a still more all-encompassing logical framework that what had just come before. Following Tocqueville, here we don’t simply mean material circumstances when treating the social environment but psychological ones, the personal and the shared converging toward what today is referred to so thirstily as collective consciousness. To finally tame, or at least ride, or at least forge, the human superorganism! To summon it forth, the highest degree yet attained in that great Beauty Contest in the sky, through the vast digital power swarming invisibly in the air — known, despite its material home underground, as the cloud!

This is the telos, the logical destination, of the Anglo Dolls, forever eating all previous dolls, a “cause” operationalized in distorted reflection of Marshall McLuhan’s maxim of media effects: in a new medium all previous media are trans-formed into content.

CULT FARMING

It would appear to be a one-way valve, this principle of compound technologization. McLuhan insisted — in keeping with the pattern of Catholic social theorizing from Tocqueville to Girard — that understanding, by way of knowledge, might suffice to save us from what we otherwise had wrought. Just how much the knowledge afforded only by practical and spiritual experience figured in to this understanding I hesitate to try to say. Girard’s mimetic theory of the Crucifixion and the casting out of Satan by Satan stopped short at the scandal of the Resurrection, which no psychological or social law could seem to apprehend. Tocqueville’s assessment of the statesmen’s prospect for reinvigorating religious devotion was “to give daily practical examples” that “wealth, renown, and power are the rewards of work, that great success comes when it has been long desired, and that nothing of lasting value is achieved without trouble.”

I have therefore no doubt that, in accustoming the citizens to think of the future in this world, they will gradually be led without noticing it toward religious beliefs. Thus the same means that, up to a certain point, enable men to manage without religion are perhaps after all the only means we still possess for bringing mankind back, by a long and roundabout path, to a state of faith.

So far as popular piety might be maintained, Tocqueville had recommendations, too:

I find that in order for religions to maintain their authority, humanly speaking, in democratic ages, they must not only confine themselves strictly within the circle of spiritual matters: their power also depends very much on the nature of the belief they inculcate, on the external forms they assume, and on the obligations they impose. The preceding observation, that equality leads men to very general and very extensive notions, is principally to be understood as applied to the question of religion. Men living in a similar and equal condition in the world readily conceive the idea of the one God, governing every man by the same laws, and granting to every man future happiness on the same conditions. The idea of the unity of mankind constantly leads them back to the idea of the unity of the Creator; whilst, on the contrary, in a state of society where men are broken up into very unequal ranks, they are apt to devise as many deities as there are nations, castes, classes, or families, and to trace a thousand private roads to heaven.

And so we are thrown back on the question of why, in a time and place where competition among striving minds conforms to and converges toward the concentration and universalization of thought and ideas, America should be such a factory for idols, false gods, heresies, cults, and apostasies. Tocqueville witnessed the propensity in American society for religious fragmentation and the propensity in the American individual for religious mania. He saw both arise from the uniformity of social and psychological conditions. These, he maintained, drove Americans to reach with increasing desperation for the experience of breakthroughs — cathartic emancipations from the “invisible barriers” blocking swift advancement when everyone wants the same things and pursues them in the same ways.

The pressure to distinguish oneself by the alacrity and ambition with which one competes to best conform pushed Americans past the point where “their reason gives way,” leading to the same pattern of prideful yet envious scrambling to grasp what they fear will slip swiftly from reach. Whenever they secure a precious slice of spare time, they plow it into politics instead of rest and recreation. Captivated by the image of the perfectibility of man in the unity of the cosmic whole, they throw themselves in their religious life toward theologies and forms of worship that promise a direct and unmediated experience of the divine.

Translation, in America the spiritual pressure, theological (pertaining to God) and psychological (pertaining to the soul) alike, is always to stampede past all intermediate and particular details and figures — dietary observances; saints, bishops, monasteries; relics, icons, frescos, churches distinguishable from town halls; even churches themselves, or the whole liturgical and doctrinal inheritance of the ancient faith. Americans are especially apt to try substituting Jesus for the whole of his Church, or one Person of the Trinity for the three. The temptation is overwhelming to collapse the Christian religion for the sake of immediacy into a high-concept universalist unitarian ethos or a low-latency “charismatic” practice of ecstatic physicality.

So it is not surprising to see these two expressions of democratic post-Christianity themselves converge into the emergent faith of the cyborg theocracy — the religion of Pride in the protean superorganism that purifies infinite identities through the tautological lie that “Love is Love.” A fusion of software and hardware accelerating into a divinity all-consuming to the calculating, imagining mind and all-enabling to the passionate will and flesh. Here is a monstrosity so meta as to win all Keynesian Beauty Contests, capable (in the imagination of its adherents) of swallowing up and digesting almost anything — tech, Jesus, the works.

In this schema the algorithm must optimize for generating a functional infinity of cults. In the way that apparent anarchy is largely a farm league of petty tyrants, of tremendous use to a tyrannical regime — and in the manner of the underground serving as a perpetual recruitment pool for the masters of “intelligence” tradecraft — the rampant factionalism in a regime such as ours is a cult farm from which the great centralizers have engineered a rich and constant harvest (at least until the seed corn is gone). The more the centralization, the more factionalism and the greater proliferation of cults: this is the model, the Anglo model, that Tocqueville sensed but did not see.

SHELL GAME

The steep price of becoming an Anglo Doll regime is plain enough. Rueful jokes and criticisms about policies that “invade the world and invite the world” miss the core point: as a globalizing regime remakes the world it its image, it increasingly becomes the world in a literal sense: a multifarious realm of shifting and shimmering interests, intrigues, and identities, of combinations and cabals, ever more alien and hostile to citizenship and civics and the coherent, cohesive constitution of a civil body — the politeia in the absence of which there can be no politics.

It only makes sense that a state within a state should wield power over such a world within a world. But inevitably there will be rivals vying for control over that deeper state, and for control or influence over at least some element of one or more other factions. On the face of it, it’s a logic that points with a bony finger toward a conflict, not very out in the open, between various powers trying to dominate the world-within-the-world that America has become. It is sometimes unclear in this environment whether America is better seen as the inner or the outer doll — the metaworld overarching planet Earth or the denser sphere at its center toward which all gravity pulls. The easy answer is that it toggles, depending on the circumstances of the various players and their adeptness at moving up and down the scale of the Beauty Contest, playing the notes, wringing out melodies, captivating ears and quickening hearts…

In the wilderness of mirrors (and black mirrors) that this superpolitics has become under digital conditions, it is functionally impossible for American citizens to engage in citizenship. They cannot deliberate or decide how to respond to circumstances the details and directors of which are impenetrable to them; they sink into a new kind of servitude where not only the distinction between combatant and civilian disappears but between person and environment, battler and battlefield.

How to parse this situation in light of the 2024 election is not quite anyone’s guess, but it strains the faculties at most Americans’ disposal. Considering world factions competing for power and sway in America, the share with a strong interest in ridding the country of the sitting administration is dwindling — even among America’s sharpest critics or adversaries. That places extraordinary pressure on those factions which do want the administration to be replaced, whether by their own people or relatively more or less witting allies and enablers. Among these, it appears vanishingly few believe that Donald Trump is a viable vehicle to place energy and resources behind, whether on the basis of personality and character or simply of persistent “state capacity” to deny him the White House. Yet even these few are too many to coalesce harmoniously around Trump’s main political challenger outside the administration. Is there any reason to believe that the most likely faction to come out on top in that sub-conflict is the one made up of domestic patriots out of power and lacking the sponsorship or support of another, external faction?

Instead of touring The Art of Being Free on the weekend of its release — inauguration weekend 2017 — I went to the high desert outside Joshua Tree with my band Vast Asteroid and recorded the live tracks and basic overdubs that would become our self-titled full-length LP, released on vinyl through a boutique Greek label in 2018 and, of course, available on Spotify.

Being late January it was cold and wet in the desert. Hailstorms kept us boarded up in the studio — the legendary Rancho de la Luna, the converted home of Eagles of Death Metal’s Dave Catching. Dave made pasta and kept the potbelly stove roaring and told us stories: yes, he had watched from the front of the stage at Bataclan as waves of concertgoers were suddenly murdered by the terrorists who had infiltrated the venue; yes, he had scrambled for cover and wound up in a closet he did not leave for two hours, becoming the last member of the band to exit the building; yes, everyone thought he had died.

Surrounded by walls of amps and bizarre desert tchotchkes strung with Christmas lights, dropped in on by sales reps from mic companies with offices in Siberia, running our headsets through boards with jacks still individually labeled for the members of Queens of the Stone Age — this was the vibe at Rancho, and as our three-day booking drew to a close I felt that sinking feeling of deep reluctance — not just an unwillingness to leave, but to return to the waiting, unraveling world.

Above all it was music itself I felt unraveling at that time, from top to bottom. The art form, the industry, the genre I was in, the scene I already no longer was. The technology hadn’t simply made it harder for “artists” to eke out a middle-class living — it had held up a kind of mirror to all that was and used to be, and threw back a new kind of unflattering image. Instead of the perversely comforting visage of the corrupted soul all aging artists must confront eventually, and in the fundamental way are groomed to expect, to befriend, the digital workover of contemporary music presented a disenchanting spectacle, a great why bother. It was the feeling of learning that the only way to know when the object of desire — of meaning, of mattering — was over was to find out after the fact. The mojo had left the building.

I thought then, and still think now, that this melancholic and barren exhaustion, which has only spread and deepened since the fleeting lacuna of that final grace period I felt in the desert, is the American equivalent of what Europe experienced and Nietzsche described as the death of God. The shock of discovery of having drunk up the sea; the falling in all directions; the shadow of the presiding presence lingering horribly, nostalgically, cripplingly on, with no end in sight but no life, either. This seemingly abrupt visitation by an unwelcome guest that had actually been here all along — at what point did we let him in? when should we have known? — this is an encounter with Death itself, Death’s claim on us, and with the way Death rides in (yea, all the way into our hearts) on a concealing cloud of dreams and passions and self-manipulative calculations, erotic positions that only in hindsight, amid our willful confusion, we recognize as the errors — the sins — that they are.

It hasn’t been easy to carry on as a musician since 2018. We had one unfinished track left in the bag after the album dropped. A reworking of the very first song I’d professionally recorded with my drummer — December 7, 2003, under a full moon, on 2-inch tape at a former Hollywood rehab on a cliffside in Malibu that, like the rest of my life in music, no longer exists — it was finished sitting on my bed under covid lockdown and released on June 26, 2020:

Has it been so long since we sealed our fate 

Yeah we couldn’t go wrong

We really took the cake

We took our chances

Lover, that’s growing old…

Maybe I’ll write, record, release something new. But it’s so difficult to find something that speaks what needs to be spoken through music today. It’s getting harder to see how music itself can speak. Buried under ever more layers of technologization, the technologization of music and man, the spirit it is so hard to summon to music is receding, retreating for its own protection, into places of spiritual protection — places like this, where the purifying suffering of patient humility can still be unsealed in the requisite stillness and silence. It is easier now to give music to God than to give myself to music.

—

So, at least at the outset, a wave of mixed feelings swelled in watching Grimes, in her new interview with Mike Solana, try to wrestle with all of these things by giving them up to the borg.

For someone so devoted to courageously facing the full unbuffered blast of technology into even music’s most intimate and human of places, the naivety is breathtaking, to the point that one wonders whether such artificial childishness is an essential energy source for the progressive and systematic technologization of things visible and invisible. The heart of the matter is on display in the interview’s final exchange:

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One’s life can be transformed in a quarter of an hour. In my case? Whichever fifteen minutes of infamy accelerated the financial crisis of 2008 into its apocalyptic phase. My dissertation proposal on Constant, Tocqueville, Emerson, and Nietzsche’s assessments of Napoleon Bonaparte had just been approved — now my committee chairman had sat me down over campus coffee with an unceremonious update. “Something very bad is happening. I don’t know how long it will last. You seem to have a good thing going with your writing. Don’t be afraid to run.”

Even in a good year, the likes of which were already fading from living memory, political theory PhDs hoping for tenure-track employment faced a market of two or three jobs nationwide. Now, a downward revision to the nice round number of 0 was all but certain: Harvard’s endowment had been sliced by the crisis in half; the state schools had suddenly lost staggering sums of budget; small liberal arts schools, the last refuge of a post-doc, could no longer count on mommy and daddy to drop $50K on a bachelor’s degree in Longhouse Studies.

I ran, back to L.A. Ten years later, I got my diploma.

THE GREAT ME SET

Today’s relentless concentration of power by the tentacles of the Current Regime (our “Global American Empire,” “rules-based international order,” “sacred democracy,” “the West” — its name is legion) is of a piece with the vast assemblage of the Eurasian powers into a kind of opposite. Characteristically of such opposites, it often mirrors its rival in certain key respects. This duel duality is a favorite preoccupation of technologues convinced that René Girard is correct about “mimetic contagion” and its heightening to pandemic conditions no vaccine can cure. Under the sway of this theory, no man can avoid confronting the two objects of fear Girard associates with the finality of the ultimate duel — the first a figure, the next an event: Antichrist and Apocalypse.

But other technologists, of equal or greater influence, would sooner take their chances on more rivalry, more risk, floored acceleration directionally toward Apocalypse, if at least it means escaping the gravitational sink of perpetual “peace” (read: stagnation) they see the wokes and the legacy elite consolidating together around them. Such boldness especially excites those who think or hope — at least are willing to bet — that we can still have Great Men without triggering an accelerated cascade into one Great Man, a One with an utter monopoly on greatness, the overawing Sovereign and “mortal-god” of the Leviathan, but for the whole planet.

Close readers will recall that under that ultimate Sovereign no lord can remotely attain to rival greatness. Hobbes dedicated Leviathan to the Royalist aristocrat Sidney Godolphin: as Oakeshott observed, Godolphin was Hobbes’s exemplar of the vanishingly rare man of greatness. Motivated still more by pride than fear, such a leading man saw in the distinction of championing peaceful unity under the Sovereign an ultimate in salutary pride, that of imitating the God of highest glory rather than trying to supplant Him.

But Hobbes, in the end, one of a handful of massively influential early modern theorists who sought to resolve the roiling disorder unleashed by Protestantism through recourse to Hebraic (in his case Mosaic) political theology, could never endorse one Lord of the World, unless, one ventures to surmise, the Christian churches might be united — in a manner focused (as Hobbes does) on man’s glorification of the perfectly just God, rather than on God’s mercy toward undeserving man. A prospect like that was hugely implausible in Hobbes’s time. It is less so now — if we consider the extreme prejudice across both tech and woke against the Ancient Church’s grounding in God’s mercy still more than His justice.

For the woke, it is the old Western Christian obsession with propitiating divine punishment of original sin that has been thrown into an overdrive outstripping Christianity and the Triune God altogether; for tech, what dominates is the obsolescence or transcendence of any need for divine mercy in a schema where our bodies and souls must and will be transformed by human ingenuity to justly partake of (however construed) the divine and ultimate glory. This schema opens the door of the mind and the heart to the tempting image of a World Lord who is yet not Antichrist, who perfects an aristocracy of great and founding men below him but above the human mass, accelerating into an “Apocalyptic” version of the end of history not to be feared but welcomed because it entails the divinization, not the destruction, of humanity.

For these deep reasons, it makes sense that well-placed eyes are turning to great men of ambition for escapes from what’s seen as the twenty-first-century version of the “oriental despotism” that haunted nineteenth-century critics of institutionalized servility as otherwise different as Tocqueville and Nietzsche.

DROPS OF JUPITER

Perhaps it is not very surprising that so few Christian men rank among the movers attracting the most of tech’s attention — probably the most characteristic figure right now is MBS, positioning himself and his Saudi regime as a sort of VC to the VCs and an end run around woke-sick or Hobbit-pilled Western Christianity, Protestant or Catholic. MBS has another thing going for him — he isn’t Vladimir Putin, who just spawns more problems than he solves for Western tech lords angling for a boost in domestically adverse times, or Xi Jinping, whose crackdown on US-based techies has proven far more severe still than Joe Biden’s.

Indeed MBS shows all the signs of a man who understands he and his people have a priceless opportunity to become the gray zone of choice for the so-called gray tribe of Western technologists — a silicon Switzerland where the best of both worlds, East and West, can be swiftly and profitably exploited with minimum exposure to the downsides putting so much drag on each.

Drag is a serious issue. The guy who was meant to be the MBS of the West, Emmanuel Macron, has been cut down to size over and over again by France’s endemic problems: for him and his “Jupiterian” style, the Napoleonic breakthrough of Jupiter Scapin himself has lain too far out of reach — even if not forever, simply for too long, which under today’s conditions of digital acceleration is like forever without the grace period.

Yet nevertheless it is Napoleon who remains the model and touchstone of the great man who can move mass and masses at the requisite speed of modern (or postmodern?) times. Bonaparte was Emerson’s representative “Man of the World” for this reason, and his encomium, despite its many and serious caveats, echoes with the tropes that have come to define our socioeconomic battlespace. “He is so largely receptive,” Emerson wrote, “and is so placed, that he comes to be a bureau for all the intelligence, wit, and power of the age and country;” it was “as if the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to cipher.”

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What a difference a year or two makes. 2023: Will AI destroy the world? 2021: Will AI befriend my child?

But perhaps the answer to both questions hinges on a little redefinition.

AI OR AS?

“AI and reality are basically identical at this point. This video was generated by AI. I couldn’t believe it myself”—so joked a recent joker, at the expense of those too mindblown by the tech’s recent advances, or too desperate to have their minds blown, to admit that the gap between AI imagery and the unaided human eye is still big, still real.

But the “fidelity” of “artificial” images is set to improve dramatically, because the AIs aren’t really artificial intelligences at all, but rather automated simulators. And when we confront the risk of our automated simulators today and tomorrow, we face a problem much different from the one now typically pegged to AI — that of machines which outsmart us.

We already know that smarts don’t save, that smarts self-sabotage, that around every corner is something smarts don’t know about smarts and which, if they learn at all, they learn the hard way, at cost, no matter how fast.

What it’s time to remember again is that since the Fall we have always desired simulations that operate “well” enough both to suspend our disbelief and to take our hands off the controls. The lure of a pseudoverse within which to hide from the Father and, once it’s up and running, to ape paradise to such a degree that, in time, we forget, engrossed first in the tooling the job requires and then in the trance that unfolds when the tools take over where we leave off — this is a powerful longing, perhaps the most powerful that remains when we have broken our full and proper relations with God. At our utmost in this sense, we can do no more than imitate Him in His creation.

For that reason, I suspect that unless the breach is repaired we will ultimately be driven on to seek in our pseudoverse a place we can prove God is not, a void, and in our relentless failing quest to discover where God is really absent, we will be whipped on first to try to summon new matter from a void and at last to try to create a void, a nihilism far beyond the conjecture of the logical philosophers.

SMARTS OR HEARTS?

Of course, one way we are already trying to summon a nothing is by talking ourselves out of having children, still more of a risk than that of a kid making friends with a robot. But to return to the matter at hand, it isn’t smartbots we’re really concerned with, it’s automated simulators, radically different from what came before much more in degree than in kind, because their appearance and growing authority in our falling world is driven by the same broken will, the same bent desire, that has flogged us ever “forward” since the first temptation. It was not an “overdevelopment” of intelligence — our intelligence, the provenance of created beings breathed full of spirit — that occasioned the Fall. It was our appetite to simulate God.

I do not think that smarts alone, however hugely and blindly errant they characteristically are, will destroy us. But our smarts, no matter what they argue in our heads, are never alone. The head may grow distant from the heart but, cut off from the heart, the head dies. It is in the heart where we hang in the balance. The child brought to understand this in his own heart is protected against the ageless temptation to forget or betray the heart for the sake of its simulation. But today he faces a legion, amassing before his eyes, in his mind, menacing his heart — an army that seeks nothing so much to conquer him, and all children, body and soul, for the sake of the ultimate simulation.

While the first three written questions posed to me after my Senate testimony in late ‘21 focused on political matters, the fourth was more cultural — circling this question of our children and, though the question may not have known it, of our prospects for mending our broken relations with the Father of all.

—

Written Questions Submitted by Honorable John Thune to Mr. James Poulos, following testimony to the December 9, 2021 hearing of the Communications, Media, and Broadband Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, entitled “Disrupting Dangerous Algorithms: Addressing the Harms of Persuasive Technology.”

Question 4.  I recently spoke with a well-known and well regarded technologist who told me that in the near term future, there may be children whose best friend is an AI.  That seems to me to be a cause for great concern.  How do we prevent a future where our children’s best friend is an AI?

Response.  Many factors fuel the increasing emotional reliance of adults as well as children on machines that more enchantingly imitate human interactions—and the increasing desire among adults to make children ever more reliant in that way.

One is the sheer formative power of the digital medium, which reshapes our senses and sensibilities in, so to speak, its image. The digital medium is all about the supremacy of machine memory, a faculty of recordation and recall so powerful that our human memory and imaginations appear suddenly obsolete or humbled. Because the previously dominant televisual medium enhanced and rewarded our faculty of imagination, we came to believe intuitively that whoever could dream the biggest and best dreams was, in a fundamental sense, the best, entitled ethically and practically to take charge, lead masses, rule the world. We are now suffering a wrenching transformation into a world where that ethic of order and ordering is overthrown by a new ethic of masterful machine memory. In response, people are showing a dangerous willingness to sacrifice their faculty of human memory so long as they can retain what appears to be a special zone where radical imagination can be given what feels like free play: the past and reality as such are being demonized as morally wrong and practically broken, and the kinds of wholesale socioeconomic transformations being urged as the only possible response to the triumph of digital require a sacrifice of people’s memories of their culture, their family, their bloodline, their biography, and more.

The Great Reset effort and the revolutionary digital culture currents allied with it aim ultimately to create a “Stunde Null” or “Year Zero” moment for America, akin to the one America once created for Germany in 1945. It is impossible to accomplish this without acculturating children into a fundamentally digital world, one where their uniquely human faculties are not seen as a precious gift but as a flawed or sinful impediment to the creation of a new and better lifeworld. In fact, children are the necessary place in a logical sense to begin with this recreation, because their memories are the fewest and in some respects the most weakly formed and easily broken. One need not read Brave New World in order to recognize the centrality of indoctrinating the youth to radical projects of reordering the very fundaments of human life. For the digital revolutionaries, children must now therefore be indoctrinated to see their humanity instinctively as a primitive and unpleasant state which can be overcome and transcended, for the good of the planet, of life, and of the universe, by the intimate merging of their being with that of digital entities.

This process is already being demonstrated at several levels, of which kids pair bonding with AIs or robots or virtual friends is just the most basic. Law in the Anglosphere (see recent developments in Canada) is being transformed so that it is illegal to stop a child from becoming transsexual or transgendered, a process inseparable from and at the vanguard of the process of becoming transhuman—both through hard technology and the soft technology of online life where social contagions of re-identification as trans- or posthuman spread constantly without censorship or suppression. Meanwhile the law does nothing to punish or even supervise those who relentlessly, obsessively groom children—that is, other people’s children—to become queer in all its myriad expressions. It is undeniable that under digital conditions laws welcoming and protecting the adoption of children by households lacking a married mother and father contribute to the normalization of not just post-heterosexual but post-biological and ultimately post-human identity formation. It is painfully easy to see how the next big pushes for “rights” will include polygamist rights, cyborg rights, and trans- or posthuman identifying rights. If Congress shies away from laying down laws that put limits on which mutations and malformations of our human identity may become the next identities and practices to be elevated for official approval, protection, privilege, and celebration, the task will fall to the states, where patchwork efforts will surely face a tsunami of litigation, doubtless backed by at least some public officials at the highest possible rank.   

In the realm of education, children need preserved and strengthened from the earliest ages their foundational human bonding to mother and father and their foundational development of independently human senses and faculties. This means that measures such as “universal pre-K” which institutionalize the removal of young children from the household away from the parents for daily education or socialization, however well-intended, should not be supported. It means that, for parents, homeschooling should be made as easy as possible and without penalties or undue burdens. And it means that lawmakers should undertake a thorough, restrictive, and exemplary review of funds allocated toward programs and initiatives that treat it as an inherent good or act of progress to “bring more tech” into schools. Adding digital devices to the classroom does not automatically bring anything to students’ educations except the interests and agendas of those furnishing the technology and of educators who see that technology as their most powerful way to advance them.

Nevertheless, it is essential to recognize that children and students do have a vital interest in learning confident human competency at mastering our most powerful digital technologies for the purposes of keeping them in check and strengthening and protecting our human identity, our human culture, and our American lifeway and free republic. Trying to hide kids away or come up with a magic age at which they can finally access such technologies is wrongheaded and futile. The goal is to ensure that technological education is not centered on convincing kids that they can become masters of their identities in machine-made fantasy worlds or that they have a global moral mission to transform other children in that image. That means supporting programs and initiatives that encourage or supply access and training in the competencies and the culture at the core of Americans’ digital rights.

Some might suppose it’s coincidence that this weekend, in the wake of Starship’s humbling incineration, I’ll be delivering remarks, at a private seminar, on a tweet inspired by Nick Land’s “Lure of the Void” — the essay that made me want to write about tech again after my second book proposal, about our spiritual preconditions for going to Mars, was universally rejected (by the top New York publishing houses).

At least by the standards of the past two thousand years, it’s nothing special to say that oblivion has a siren call and obeying it, well, don’t do that. But these past few years are special. Second look at the void?

This time, it’s not to chase down the pervy Lovecraftian pleasures of annihilation or insanity. It’s to find the ultimate in meaning, the creation of something from nothing, a presumptively final proof that we have met God and he is us.

You might think there’s not much link between fake news / misinformation / propaganda and the new lure of the void. You would be wrong.

This remarkable piece of propaganda — on whose behalf? I’ll leave you to wonder — begins with a thick slice of cyborg theology.

This is my pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain of Protection. The Sacred Mountain is reckoned to protect the whole island of Taiwan—and even, by the supremely pious, to protect democracy itself, the sprawling experiment in governance that has held moral and actual sway over the would-be free world for the better part of a century. The mountain is in fact an industrial park in Hsinchu, a coastal city southwest of Taipei. Its shrine bears an unassuming name: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

The protection of course is against mainland China, ostensibly menacing the island as a whole, and all the human life therein, although on closer inspection it’s the cyborg life, stupid:

The silicon microchips fashioned inside them are the sine qua non of the built world, so essential to human life that they’re often treated as basic goods, commodities. […] But unlike copper and alfalfa, chips aren’t raw materials. Perhaps they’re currency, the coin of the global realm, denominated in units of processing power. Indeed, just as esoteric symbols transform banal cotton-linen patches into dollar bills, cryptic latticework layered onto morsels of common silicon—using printmaking techniques remarkably similar to the ones that mint paper money—turns nearly valueless material into the building blocks of value itself. This is what happens at TSMC.

No borg, no life! Perhaps, one suddenly speculates, Beijing is actually disinclined to blow up their own all-but-only source of value itself? What, exactly, then, is “the China threat”…?

A story for another day. To the matter at hand. If chips aren’t “building blocks” of matter, much less “value itself,” out of what do these sacred priests of the planetary cyborg theocracy fabricate them?

(And yes, if you think I’m reaching a little, don’t take it from me, ask Virginia.)

Like money, silicon chips are both densely material and the engine of nearly all modern abstraction, from laws to concepts to cognition itself. And the power relations and global economy of semiconductor chips can turn as mind-boggling as cryptocurrency markets and derivative securities. Or as certain theologies, ones that feature nano-angels dancing on nano-pins.

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. As I’ve told those with ears to hear on the continuing Human Forever tour, until nearly a handful of years ago the only entities thought capable of filling the spacetime beyond human reach and dimension were spiritual: angels fallen or otherwise. Now, our fabulous fabbed Five Is —

• innumerable

• invisible

• instantaneously

• interoperable

• information entities —

doing so every instant of every moment of every minute of every day. Where are they? Where did they come from? After describing Taiwan as “trauma-bonded” to Ukraine, Heffernan quotes Jacques Savary’s The Perfect Merchant to attribute to Providence the “fellowship created by commerce” across a globe unevenly dispersed with gifts.

TSMC’s success is built on its singular comprehension of this dispersion of providential gifts. The firm is merrily known as “pure play,” meaning all it does is produce bespoke chips for customer companies.

No malevolent demon-summoning force this. On her telling, the cyborg theocracy is nothing less than a fun so without sin that it divinely saves the world. But, please, where does it come from? “TSMC’s simultaneous invisibility and indispensability to the human race is something that Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, likes to joke about. ‘Basically, there is air—and TSMC,’ he said at Stanford in 2014.” Not the air itself. Surely not the air…

On arrival, the self-described “pilgrim” receives a striking — or is it — briefing from the company’s chairman and former CEO.

Two qualities, Mark Liu tells me, set the TSMC scientists apart: curiosity and stamina. Religion, to my surprise, is also common. “Every scientist must believe in God,” Liu says.

And if which God is the question on your lips, congratulations.

“We are doing atomic constructions,” Liu tells me. “I tell my engineers, ‘Think like an atomic-sized person.’” He also cites a passage from Proverbs, the one sometimes used to ennoble mining: “It’s the glory of God to conceal matter. But to search out the matter is the glory of men.”

Understood. But the Earth doesn’t exactly hide its sand, the source of silicon. Liu’s doctoral research at UC Berkeley in the 1970s was on the serendipitous ways that ions behave when shot into silicon; he means it’s atoms that God has secreted away. These indestructible treasures have always been buried in matter, awaiting the invention of scanning electron microscopes and scientists with enough assiduity to spend decades on end peering into their atomic eyes. “There’s no way out,” Liu tells me. “You always feel you are scratching the surface. Until, one day, it’s revealed to you.” […] I remember a phrase from the liturgy of my childhood church: gladness and singleness of heart.

A little background. “In my twenties I called myself a moderately devout Episcopalian,” Heffernan has confessed. “I had a sturdy faith, but I went to church only on Easter or Christmas. Then my fiancé, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew and wanted his children to be matrilineally Jewish, asked me to convert before we married. And so at age 33 I began converting to Conservative Judaism. It’s a complex process. As part of the ritual, the rabbi turned me away three times. I had to study the Torah for a year and reject holidays like Christmas.” Sadly enough things went downhill from there.

Converting tore me up inside and caused tension in my marriage. My husband wanted me to try harder; I wanted him to appreciate what I had already done, learned, and given up.

Our marriage ended, and when it did, I went to my rabbi and asked, “What will become of me?” He looked very sad. Eventually I decided to go back to the Episcopal Church. For Episcopalians, conversion can be as simple as accepting Jesus, but because the Jewish conversion was so arduous, I liked the idea of marking the passage back with a cere­mony called reconciliation. My priest put his hand on my forehead and said, “You’re forgiven” — for apostasy, or turning my back on my religion — “and you never need to be forgiven again.” I still cry when I think about it.

In coming back to the church, I feel like I have returned home. Now my belief is a blend of Christian contemplative traditions with Eastern meditative practices. And, I know this is trippy, but as someone who has always found a mysticism in the idea of a collective unconscious, I also put faith in the Internet.

Trippy is one word. Where does such perpetual seeking lead — besides away from Christ and his Church?

Describing the chip fab process as “transubstantiation,” Heffernan channels perhaps the one human source of authority in which a twice-lapsed Episcopalian still believes:

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On this Great and Holy Friday, when it once seemed all was lost — as Holy Pascha draws near, when the fear in Man of the triumph of the World was overturned and obliterated by God Himself once and for all — I have one reminder for you.

Because as of right now, far too many of you fear the Borg more than you love the Lord.

Last Monday I flagged this image and the half-joke caption it bore to have “solved the alignment problem”:

Reaction was mixed. “Caught between ‘hallelujah’ and ‘get behind me Satan”… “Feeling the latter something fierce: AI image of a demon? Seems satanic. AI image of Jesus? Also seems satanic.”

Yes, without question, plugging Christ into the Borg will not save us, far from it. Our Lord is, eternally, no cyborg. Yet there is something bizarre and self-defeating about the many good souls whose deep awareness of the evil of technological idolatry and the worship of technique has led them to so falsely believe that all technology, tech as such, is itself evil, inexorable and inexorably against life. Far too many of us stop at the all-too-easy step of fearing the worst when it comes to tech and the evil so readily channeled and summoned through it — and fail to take the always-in-spite-of-it-all more difficult step of loving God superabundantly beyond what fear the World and Death and Satan fill us with.

It is not enough, as we should know well, to counteract and overcome that fear with the salutary and saving fear of God — even well understood as fear of apartness from God rather than fear that God’s mercy is somehow smaller, weaker, or more conditional than His justice. We must go beyond, as indeed this understanding calls and encourages us to go, to trust absolutely in God and, from there, to grasp — not only as an idea but through experience! — that such trust is only realized and lived fully in our absolute love of God, returning to Him, in response to His immeasurable love that which, along with our life, all of us, regardless of our innumerable differences, can give. Please — take it from far higher authority than me:

In the insuperable authority and power of His inconceivable love, God preserves for us, and preserves us for, mastery in His Spirit over all of creation! “Know ye not that we shall judge angels?” St. Paul admonishes sweetly. “How much more things that pertain to this life?”

This knowledge is not the knowledge of the calculating, imagining brain — it belongs to the mind seated in the heart, in courage, in trust, in love. It is always the right time for courage — but especially now, when so many of even the stronger of heart falter in the face of the mass and monstrosity that the idolization of tech and technique seems to lay down as the law of our destiny, as a final judgment. The Last Judgment belongs to God only; much more courage than this is required of us, much more spiritual battle, much more holy suffering, before we will be given the gift of true martyrdom. Martyrdom is not to be pursued in the spirit of the wagie on break with the broken ice cream machine. Such attitudes evince a broken spirit, a broken heart — a broken promise to the Lord. Get up! Your sins are forgiven. Take up your cross! Do not fear our tools, our bots, our electricity: these things do not amount to an evil god. There is no evil god — not even Satan himself.

Constantine’s army did not fear the consequences of embedding the Chi Ro on their shields, on the emperor’s labarum, on the weapons they wielded to defeat their mortal enemies. They feared the consequences of not doing so.

As many of you know, my answer to the question of how we wring out the sloth and despair fueling the fear of tech, and imbue our spiritual war with fresh, fruitful action, involves our use and mastery of bitcoin. Next week, in the newness of the liturgical year, we’ll take a fresh look at exactly how and why. Until then — do not lose heart. Love God more than you fear the Borg.

There’s little question that the regime bequeathed to us by the Founders has gone through several more or less forced transformations. Yet — until recently — it would be uncontroversial to say that our constitutionally guaranteed republican form of government survived more or less intact.

Over the past decade, that has changed.

Some in tech seem dead set on convincing themselves that the present regime, the one that has not only forced us ever further away from the America of the Founding but away from republican government altogether, is not to blame — indeed that the refounding of America on altogether post-political grounds is to be celebrated:

This is cope! There is no separating these men and their doings from the architecture of the post-republican, post-Constitutional regime that ruling officials have used the internet to create and, now, to invade and infuse our real life with. (On that subject, read Part II of this testimony.)

But there is a question of whether this new regime is capable of having its political cake and eating it too. Its headlong rush toward the ever more fully automated simulation of political life threatens to bring to an ultimate crescendo the tension between the post-humanization of social organization and the restriction of the “human element” in governance/cybernetics to that of a priestly caste catechizing ruling machines in, as the case has become, woke “ethics”.

We noted here recently that the tension is symbiotic. The woke priestly caste needs a planetary supercomputer to pursue its obsession with total and perfect justice on Earth, and a supermajority of techies desirous of establishing their own priestly caste are more than willing to embrace wokeness as the cost of doing that business. After all, the two itineraries converge, to a greater extent and for deeper reasons than purists on either “side” are typically willing to believe. It is in the nature of wokies to accept any degree of tech so long as they “get to” be sovereign, and in the nature of techies to embrace any degree of woke so long as they get to.

The terms of this mimetic struggle are not playing out in a vacuum. They are playing out in the very real and incarnate realm of the United States Government. If it is now impossible for any regime to re-establish its sovereignty in the digital age without establishing its sovereignty over the digital technology within its physical and virtual territory, it is impossible for adherents of any religion to establish it officially without converting the sovereign of the regime.

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Lo these recent years we have all enjoyed a front-row virtual seat to witnessing that conversion process whip through Washington and its many “public” and “private” franchises, with no end in sight. What so few have an inkling about is what can actually be done with regard to this process rather than allow oneself to be invaded and infused with it body and soul. The testimony below takes the answer to require the extension of the Constitution into American cyberspace — and not only that. So too must we once again recall that the Constitution doesn’t create the rights it enumerates or prevent them from disappearing in its absence or abeyance. It memorializes them — lest we forget that, even unenumerated, the elements of our given human complement that make possible the political life — as more than a pandemonium of power games — are inalienable.

Yes, the array and exercise of those elements in various slices of space and time are mutable and distinct. But no — forcibly transforming them out from under the body politic, usurping away Americans’ form of government, way of life, and, now increasingly, humanity, violates both the Constitution and the authority on which the Constitution, however properly amended, is maintained.

It is now clear that the Constitution cannot be restored to American cyberspace — and, only then, offline life with it — without newly explicit memorializations of the foundational digital rights already implicit in our first two Amendments. The testimony below shows how and why lawmakers should recognize the necessity and the urgency of writing and passing Digital Rights Amendments at the federal as well as the state levels.

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Yesterday I learned the new Pinhead is “trans”. Trans what, you may ask, not just (as I do) to summon the real answer — transhuman, as I told Tucker Carlson not long ago — but because Pinhead, the starring “Hell Priest” leading the “Cenobites” in the myriad films and sequels and reboots of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser franchise, is not just a cyborg of sorts but a walking, talking threesome of a seemingly more… sophisticated type, part man, part apparatus, and part demon.

Understand please that I know this development invites, we could say, an awkward conversation — one that, in particular places and times, could result in more-than-spectral violence, evidently included, and possibly not even limited to, getting yourself killed. But it has been thrust upon us, that much is clear, and so, very well, God wills it. We’d better get on with it before the hour grows still later than it is.

The material our worship of our technology has brought us to confront herein is the kind of thing that tempts us to nervous laughter and ironic distance, lest we lose our nerve or even our minds in the face of its horrific sadness — which, indeed, we are sure to do amid travesties against God as profound as these without the protection of His loving mercy.

KNOW YOUR CENOBITES

I’m afraid those unaware of the details of the Hellraiser “universe” will have to endure a tldr, which I’ll try to keep mercifully brief—although suffering can be a mercy as those well acquainted with the living God know well. This is no time to shy away from seeing evil as it is.

We begin with some introductory gifs. First, neo-Pinhead:

Now, Pinhead of yore:

And a word from the brains behind the ‘22 Hellraiser:

Novices to this topic will be enlightened to learn the provenance of the word “cenobite” which Barker applied to his lords of evil. In preparation, consider these interesting details about the creatures:

The Cenobites are extradimensional beings who exist in an extra-dimensional realm… They can reach Earth’s reality only through a schism in time and space… The Cenobites all have horrific mutilations and/or body piercings, and wear fetishistic black leather clothing that often resembles butchery garments or religious vestments. The clothing also serves to support their piercings and tools… In their original incarnation, they manifested as devoted followers of a supernatural hedonism with unorthodox definitions of pleasure; although vaguely described, this form of pleasure endorsed by the Cenobites involved two distinct forms: the expansion of sensation to an extremely painful point of sensory overload, and enduring excruciating pain through incessant tortures that transcend traditional laws of physics…

In the film adaptation (Hellraiser) they exhibited a more severe tone: impatient, stern, humorless, and almost intractably officious towards their duties, as well as capable of duplicity… They are revealed to be former humans who have been converted into Cenobites by the supernatural power native to their home dimension…

According to the wiki, “Barker drew inspiration for the cenobite designs from punk fashion, Catholicism (the overall design is a modified cassock, the traditional garment of a Catholic priest until the sixties) and by the visits he took to S&M clubs in New York and Amsterdam,” as makeup and wardrobe for the nightmarish crew suggest:

But it may not surprise you to learn I can’t help seeing—however accidental—a more direct inversion of the Great Schema, and the Orthodox schema monks who wear it:

After all, the schema monks are true cenobites.

Yet Hellraiser’s false cenobites are priests, making up “the Order of the Gash” and serving “Leviathan”, a god of desire that appears as an enormous rhomboid object, hovering over an enormous labyrinth, imbricated with the same sort of geometric patterns visible on the puzzle box that calls them forth into our world. These are priests bearing the epithet of “The Surgeons”; according to the costume designer following Barker’s specifications, they were “magnificent super-butchers” embodying what she terms the “very Clive turn of phrase” repulsive glamour.

THE SHAPE OF SOULS TO COME

It is all too easy to get caught up in the meta of it all, shivering intellectually from the frisson of contemplating, at a certain remove, the repulsive commingled so sadomasochistically with the glamorous. But these details, mirroring those of the all-too-real surgeons and butchers of living human beings ritualistically “transitioning” them across the border of their given humanity and into a hellish cyborg space, strike at the heart still more than the mind. They are transitioned as our institutions, our culture, our lives themselves are being transitioned by the present priests of our ever more borglike regime, who intone through their transitional figurehead that those at the vanguard of our posthumanization “shape our nation’s soul.”

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Since publishing Part I of my Senate testimony on the cusp of last year concerning upcoming technological “harms”, some have noticed the discordance in Sen. Thune inviting my recommendation for A Second Amendment for Compute in 2021 and, in 2023, cosponsoring the RESTRICT Act, which would do almost the precise opposite—digitally disarming Americans and adding such sweeping and invasive federal power over digital life that our constitutionally guaranteed form of government could wink out once and for all at the whim of officials beyond the reach of citizen power to vote in or out of office. Over at RETURN, Peter Gietl has the rundown on just what restrictions are truly in store if the backlash to the bill is overcome. For those as yet unawares:

This Act can potentially be the most invasive and authoritarian law passed in the last hundred years. It empowers a government agency with draconian powers to go after anyone using a VPN to access banned websites with up to 20 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine…

The bill would grant the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Commerce the ability to designate companies and individuals, including American citizens, as an immediate national security threat for doing business with or promoting a “Foreign Adversary.” They could be arrested without due process, fined $1 million, imprisoned for 20 years, and have all of their assets seized. It also shields the agency from any FOIA requests. With a stroke of a pen, this agency will have dominion over all digital communications with the explicit power to “enforce any mitigation measure to address any risk”…

It’s already plain that the feds see Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general as an intolerable obstacle to rolling out the CBDCs needed to digitize the American financial system under central control. RESTRICT — and the inevitable follow-on legislation to expand and complete the delegation of legislative power on tech to executive-branch agencies whose officials you can’t vote in or out, or even know by name — would make Operation Chokepoint 2.0 look amateurish.

Some digging into the provenance of RESTRICT’s abominable language uncovers circumstantial but nonetheless grim evidence that the real writers of the bill that delegates such monstrous powers from Congress to yet another knot of Executive Branch tentacles are in the Executive themselves — including, rumor has it, National Security Advisor (and former advisor to Obama, Clinton, and Microsoft) Jake Sullivan.

Of course, dealing with TikTok is tricky. Our ruling elites indulged their imaginations’ counsel that our machines would consummate their form of rule worldwide, and their failure to understand what in fact they’d unleashed led to an unprecedented “whole of government” effort to claw back unlimited sovereignty over all digital activity within American territory and reach. TikTok unfolded in a realm those efforts could not penetrate and still as yet have proven unable to do so. It would appear at least some Members of Congress support RESTRICT because they believe an alternate bill, the far more narrowly tailored DATA Act, would outstrip Biden’s lawful authority. Yet in an era of cover stories laundered at the very top of the media hierarchy as unimpeachable fact from the guardians of truth itself, it seems absurd to credit Members’ unwillingness to grant the President one unconstitutional power restricted (if you will) to TikTok for their willingness to grant the Executive Branch deliriously tyrannical powers over the whole of our digital lives.

And so I refer you to a better policy by way of The Heritage Foundation’s Kara Frederick. Meanwhile, picking up where Part I of my testimony left off, the second written question concerns the risks of the metaverse. The answer, I suggest, hinges on a journey into the dark forest of details surrounding the transformation of Facebook into Meta under the most extraordinary and hostile circumstances. Behind all the latest technologies and biggest companies are people, particular individuals bearing institutional loyalties and interests, deeply hidden from the public eye, busily weaving us into new modes and orders to which we hardly know we belong. Behind the risks of this app or that language model looms the active threat of such people using ever more powerful communications technologies to cement their unfettered control over our actions, our words, our beliefs, our identities.

Intelligence, in the sense of spycraft, has long been referred to as “a wilderness of mirrors.” That makes the opaque metaverse our intelligence has encased around us, overlaying, penetrating, and orchestrating our government, culture, and consciousness, a wilderness of black mirrors — one we can find our way through, and out of, only with a kind of spiritual discernment that surpasses calculation and imagination alone.

—

Written Questions Submitted by Honorable John Thune to Mr. James Poulos, following testimony to the December 9, 2021 hearing of the Communications, Media, and Broadband Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, entitled “Disrupting Dangerous Algorithms: Addressing the Harms of Persuasive Technology.”

Question 2.  The “metaverse” appears to be what we can expect the internet to be in the near term future.  As you know, Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his company to Meta in October, and said that the “metaverse” can be described as the “embodied internet.”  What in your view, should we expect with the “embodied internet” in terms of our concerns about AI and algorithms?

Response. While the digital medium, like all communications media, independently reshapes our senses and sensibilities, much of what appears to be the mere march of innovation in tech is driven by deep-seated strategic conflicts among powerful institutions and personnel reaching back decades. These conflicts shed important light on how our concerns toward AI and algorithms should be dramatically sharpened as conflicting players wrestle for metaverse dominance.

A fresh example concerns recent news that Meta suddenly scrapped the development of its new operating system for virtual and augmented reality devices, after four years of work by hundreds of programmers on the project, in the wake of the abrupt departure of team lead Mark Lucovsky. Lucovsky told the press he quit—to join Google in a similar role—due to Facebook’s hard pivot to the metaverse and the so-called “Facebook whistleblower” Frances Haugen’s disclosures about the company.

Lucovsky is not just some random nerd striking out for greener pastures. He came aboard at Facebook as their Oculus system’s General Manager of Operating Systems after building Chinese and American engineering teams for VMware—a Silicon Valley cloud computing and machine virtualization company that acquired in the mid-2000s companies based in London, Switzerland, Bulgaria, and Israel, the latter of which led to VMware’s opening an R&D facility in Israel based on the team in place in that country at the time of acquisition. Previously to VMware, Lucovsky served for five years as Engineering Director at Google, which contentiously hired him away from Microsoft. In a lawsuit over Google’s poaching from Microsoft of another high-powered tech executive, Kai-Fu Lee—now best known as the former head of Google China—it was revealed that Lucovsky testified in a statement that then-CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer reacted to news of his move to Google with a profane and violent tirade directed against Google chief Eric Schmidt. Lucovsky’s decision to return to Google to do for it what he was doing for Facebook leaves Meta in a position of striking weakness, reliant on Android, the mobile operating system of none other than Google itself.

Lucovsky’s dramatic peregrinations illustrate how Silicon Valley is an extremely small world made up of a very intimately and internationally connected group of programmers and executives working in a highly strategically sensitive and secretive pressure cooker environment evolving at breakneck speed. This reality must color lawmaker’s understanding of what exactly was at work with Haugen’s slickly launched and operated “whistleblower” campaign. Rather than a spontaneous act of conscience, Haugen’s doings—which extend far beyond her media-ready Hill testimony to an in-depth consultative tour with top European regulators aiming to crack down on Meta through a sweeping new Digital Services Act—are organized and facilitated by a cast of global lobbyists with elite backing and support. This shop, called Reset, is run by Ben Scott, a top tech advisor to Hillary Clinton, both in her days as Secretary of State and during her run for president, instrumental to the promulgation of the 21st Century Statecraft doctrine instructing the State Department to thoroughly technologize global diplomacy.

Today Reset draws up to $10 million a year from eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar through the London-based activist philanthropy group Luminate, whose CEO, Stephen King, is a longtime Omidyar lieutenant previously the head of BBC Media Action, a body funded separately from the BBC that reputedly gives MI6 and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office a quiet means to conduct information operations such as the FCO’s Counter Disinformation & Media Development campaign, run until 2019 by career civil servant Andy Pryce. While, to be sure, there is no demonstrable connection between Pryce, King, or Scott to “dodgy dossier” author Christopher Steele, the former head of the Russia desk at MI6 during the financial crisis, a pattern in strategic conduct and conflict is strongly suggested by the manner in which Steele’s ostensibly unofficial investigation of then-president Donald Trump was effortlessly laundered into the national political battle through the slick offices of Fusion GPS on the Clinton campaign’s dime.

If these details seem to suggest some kind of kill shot has been orchestrated against Meta to the benefit of its top strategic rival Google, that is no coincidence. The question is why. The point is not to ensnare lawmakers’ attentions in a wilderness of mirrors, but rather to underscore that the current conflict in Silicon Valley over metaverse dominance is inseparable from the broader geopolitical conflict inside and outside the US over digital dominance and control. It is not unreasonable to infer that, in the case of Meta, powerful individuals and organizations in and out of the federal government have acted on a strong interest in punishing Facebook for Mark Zuckerberg’s and certain board members’ perceived responsibility for Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory and near-win in 2020. This interest, more than a mere partisan disagreement, is clearly animated by a more comprehensive ideological conviction that their factional control over the entire digital infrastructure of the United States, and its projection around the world, is essential and non-negotiable.

The upshot of this high-stakes gambit is that, while the metaverse is presented to would-be users as an escape from the harsh challenges and overwhelming confusions of the real world—an infinite televisual paradise within which to play safely and freely—the figurative TV in which users are to be absorbed is itself enclosed within a vast computer system which unelected officials and their powerful allies outside government use to manipulate and control masses in a vast power struggle for digital sway over the country, the globe, and the minds and bodies of those within them.

In short, it is not an exaggeration to say that AI and algorithms designed for a mainstream and ubiquitous metaverse are geostrategic tools of the utmost power and influence, and that domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, governments, NGOs, corporations, and activist groups should be expected to wrestle for influence and control over their design, reach, and consequences—even as users are in all likelihood constantly conditioned to perceive and experience the metaverse not as a system of unprecedented social control but as an unprecedented funhouse within which, no matter how dark the world outside, they can, in Neil Postman’s portentous phrase, amuse themselves to death.

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It was a cold, gray morning in Washington, D.C. — the kind that opens gritty movies about the inside operator who breaks all the rules, well, the bad ones, anyway, and saves the day, saves the country, saves the world, well, until tomorrow, anyway. A bleak end to a bleak year, “uncertainty” hung over everything like a second, spectral scrim, and if I hadn’t been summoned to the Swamp to assume the position in the hot seat most recently occupied the week before by (if I recall correctly) Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, I would have felt as if I were there for something approaching that reason. It was a vibe, and the vibe was bad.

I had, as some of you now know well, seen things, things that were about to not make sense to various high-ranking members of Congress. This went beyond, or perhaps deeper than, the kind of meme-ready incomprehension or mangled understanding Members had evinced and would continue to evince as the sequence of hearings targeting Silicon Valley and its figures of the moment began to unfold in earnest.

For this concerned not sophisticated elements of hard tech, such as whether or not TikTok uses the smartphone’s camera to determine whether content that elicits a pupil dilation should be amplified by its algorithm, but whether the medium of digital technology had worked over our inner and outer lives to such a degree that ruling factions within our own regime would seek to replace our pre-digital institutions of republican governance with an alien new system of cyborg control.

To the credit of the Senate staff that had reached out to me that winter, I had been asked to provide a sort of worst-case forecast concerning the prospect of such a wrenching transformation of American life, and, what is more, I had resolved to go beyond that, illustrating not just the nightmare scenario that was the likely case — the already presently occurring case — but the good news, the proper response, the only true alternative.

Of course, this was more than a few rounds of oral Q&A could bear, especially coming from the more bemused-to-hostile Senators to show up that day. Nevertheless, my spoken testimony managed to plant the seed, and I was heartened and honored to receive written questions following up on the hearing, and to answer them as best as I promptly could.

Here, for the first time, are those answers.

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Written Questions Submitted by Honorable John Thune to Mr. James Poulos, following testimony to the December 9, 2021 hearing of the Communications, Media, and Broadband Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, entitled “Disrupting Dangerous Algorithms: Addressing the Harms of Persuasive Technology.”

Question 1.  I was intrigued by your prepared testimony, where you talk about addressing digital harms by passing a “Second Amendment for Compute.”  Can you elaborate further on what you mean by that?

Response. The idea of the Second Amendment for Compute is to legally identify and enshrine the basic American rights to build and use digital computational technologies. Notably, these rights are already implicitly included in the First and Second Amendments, because the two uses of the technologies are as communications tools and as offensive and defensive weapons. The deepest roots of American culture, civics, and civilization are found in the conviction that, as a matter of justice and sound political theology, the rights of human persons who have come of age to communicate and bear arms are natural and God-given, things no just government can infringe, abridge, abrogate, or deny.

In this sense we and our Constitution already have all the justification and legal authority needed to protect and defend American citizens’ rights to keep and bear digital tech. Now, in the early debates of the founding era, the Antifederalists warned that while a federal Constitution of enumerated powers blocked tyranny and unjust rule, enumerated rights did the opposite. And there is something powerfully true to the insight that a people have likely already lost their shared faith or conviction in what they must make explicit.

Nevertheless, one glance today shows that the brazen and systematic violation of the rights to keep and bear digital technologies that are implicit in the First and Second Amendments is foundational to our emergent political and economic order. Our unelected rulers in public and private life work hand in hand every moment of every day to preempt and defeat those rights. Control of digital life is consolidated in the hands of the military-intelligence complex and the tech oligarchy, upon whose economic performance America’s administrative class and financial system now utterly depends. Under their control, Americans are being coercively conditioned to accept the wholesale expropriation of their private lives as well as the “public square” into the cyberspaces operated, owned, and policed by the major tech corporations, which are properly understood as the core strategic governance organs of the administrative state, including the military-intelligence complex.

What is unfolding is—by design—the founding of a new, digital regime, one hostile and fatal to our distinctively American way of life and our constitutionally guaranteed form of government, and one resting on a political theology that repudiates and destroys our most venerable Western principles of natural right and Man’s relation to his Creator. As the turmoil of the Trump years made inescapably plain, the operators of this regime are increasingly naked in their use of media of all kinds, through the digital technologies that now rule them all, as weapons against Americans who dare resist or even object to their extension and consolidation of digital power and authority.

This means that it is now too late legally, and technology is advancing too quickly, to any longer leave merely implicit the natural and God-given rights that Americans already possess with regard to digital technologies. To save those rights, and our civilization and form of government with them, we must enumerate Americans’ digital rights—come what may. Congress must be undaunted by administrative state objections that Americans are too stupid, crude, hateful, sinful, inexpert, or simply dangerous to be allowed such rights and their free exercise. America’s global adversaries and enemies will not seize control if Americans begin that free exercise. Quite the contrary: our technological rulers today are railroading us into a post-American order where elites who see America (correctly) as the main obstacle to founding a new globalistic cyborg order. Nor will the free exercise of natural and God-given digital rights crash our financial system, as the SEC and other agencies and officials insist on arguing. Our financial and regulatory leaders across the public and private sector have already repeatedly crashed our financial system. Grievously and irreparably harming generations of Americans, these ostensible elites have suffered virtually zero accountability or punishment, in fact only growing more powerful, more wealthy, more impudent, and more divorced from our American identity, our American norms, and our American principles. They simply cannot be trusted to tell us the truth about the likely effects of Americans’ free exercise of digital rights—aside from their implicit admission that their illegitimate stranglehold on our fates and fortunes cannot survive a restoration of American constitutionalism in digital life.

That brings us to the explicit terms of legal protection envisioned by the “Second Amendment for Compute.” They begin simply with the right of Americans to buy, sell, and build high-powered GPUs—a right already being stealthily infringed by “energy regulations” in several states including California itself. The entire canard that powerful computation is too “eco-unfriendly” to be allowed to America’s digital serfs—a charge laid aggressively against bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies—is a fallacy Congress must recognize as such. Americans’ use of high-powered GPUs to freely build digital tools and cultural and economic institutions expends far less “energy” than, say, the petrodollar and its form of economic life, or than the military-intelligence complex; still more deeply, since John Locke and well before it has been a fundament of Western life to understand that the just building and maintenance of life and flourishing in our human and natural spacetime requires as its price the expenditure of energy, in the form the sweat of our brows and the ache of our bodies, of the productive calculations of our minds, and of our creation and use of the tools and weapons we need to achieve both our most basic and fundamental ends and our higher forms of creativity, genius, worship, and wealth.

By extension therefore it is equally clear that the right of Americans to buy, sell, mine, and mint bitcoin and other digital coins must not be infringed, neutralized, or destroyed. It is essential that lawmakers realize bitcoin, to take the most important example, is not simply a new currency among many, a new asset class among many, or a new fad among many. It is a computational protocol that supervenes upon or obsolesces a host of previous forms of digital architecture, because of its tremendous power and adaptability. It is, in this sense, a computer that can and likely will very soon grow large enough in its development to supervene upon the entire world, “ruling” it in a way no one person or group of people, no matter how brilliant, willful, expert, or ambitious, can any longer plausibly imagine to rule the world. Without the explicitly protected right to use this protocol to build new but quintessentially American institutions of culture, economics, finance, and religion on a securely digital footing, Americans will lose more and more of their initiative, ingenuity, and identity until they surrender before their rulers’ efforts to merge them into their technologies and become cyborg serfs: a permanent underclass of passive, sullen, demoralized, self-loathing, mentally and physically unwell posthumans bearing no recognizable relation either to their American forebears or indeed to any human who has ever heretofore lived.

Hammering out the ins and outs of the “Second Amendment for Compute” will not be swift or easy work, but it can be done, as it must be, with sufficient speed and efficacy to save Congress, and America, from digital obsolescence. But to do so, lawmakers must find and wield the courage necessary to resist what will be extraordinary concerted pressure from the rising post-constitutional regime ruled by the triumvirate of the administrative state, the military-intelligence complex, and the tech oligarchy. It is very likely that 2022 will rank among the very last possible opportunities to begin this fateful struggle in earnest at the federal level.

That said, the federal level is not, as Congress knows well, everything. Perhaps one of the most important things federal lawmakers can do to ensure Americans’ natural and God-given digital rights are not infringed is to pass legislation that gives state governments as wide as possible a berth to pass their own digital rights legislation and to erect their own legal and regulatory regimes around digital rights, free from fear of federal retaliation, punishment, or budgetary blackmail. The “laboratory of democracy” will quickly show exactly how powerful and precious digital rights are in our digital age as Americans gravitate toward and rally around states with the most courageous and clear-sighted protections of digital rights.

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St. Ephraim. He has a signature prayer, pictured in the icon above. A prayer used especially at Lent — and, as far as I know, one never singled out as especially well suited for those of us about to log on each day. But consider:

O Lord and Master of my life

Take from me the spirit of laziness,

Despondency, lust of power and idle talk.

But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience,

And love to thy servant…

These words apply still more than they appear to on the page. A translation that’s even more on point would have Take from me the spirit of sloth, meddling, vain curiosity, lust of power, and idle talk, as Father Josiah Trenham observed in his Forgiveness Sunday homily last month (starting at 13:28). We don’t often associate despondency with the meddlesome curiosity of vanity. Why not?

FAKE SELVES, FAKE WORLDS

Because we think of despondency as exhaustion, as listlessness, as inertia. Of course, there’s something to that. But it’s hardly the whole story. Fr. Trenham quotes St. Sophrony’s definition:

Despondency is the lack of care for our salvation, which comes when we allow our life to be entirely absorbed by daily cares and routine chores.

What we are confronting is not just the routinization of vanity but the meddlesome curiosity it fosters.

Again — we typically think of vanity as self-enclosure, an excessive inwardness of self-regard, self obsession, selfishness in all its forms. But it is more. Vanity points us outward, too, thrusting us into “the world” as we encounter it in all our partiality but also as we imagine it, predict it, desire it, fantasize about it. Vanity takes the self-image we self-obsessively summon up and hurls it into battle with our image of the world.

And the way we attack that image, trying to pillage what we desire and wield what we will, is meddlesome curiosity, powered by our relentlessly calculating and imagining mind. This drama — sometimes brooding in isolation, sometimes rampantly social — plays out beneath the banal veneer of our going through the motions of life and its tasks. The one reinforces the other. The disenchantments of bare quotidian life tempt us to fill our impoverished selves and world with a pandemonium of petty plots and grand schemes. And that bizarro world, in its inward and outward expression, drains us and alienates us from our real lives, leaving behind an empty shell of rote operations. Inside the fabricated labyrinthine realm we confuse with reality, we become so lost we forget the very possibility of our salvation.

In short, what immiserates us in the maze of our own senses, desires, and feelings is our temptation toward, and ingenuity at, automated simulation.

That’s right — no technology needed. Our given selves in the given world have all the equipment we need to automate the production and operation of simulated selves in simulated worlds. The roteness, the addiction, that drives these fake, fragmented selves and worlds manufactured by our calculating, imagining minds — it happens without mechanical aid, without tools crafted by the latest techniques. Even without technology that can accelerate and scale our mass production of fake selves and worlds, our own human equipment easily churns out automated simulations that are as physically and spiritually destructive as they are all-consuming.

So you can see now how the internet has become so optimized for doing just that — achieving a veritable singularity of automated simulations, each and all consuming and producing the spirit of sloth, meddling, vain curiosity, lust of power, and idle talk. This is the lifeblood of the “collective consciousness” or cyborg “superorganism” we sometimes hear people talking about. Only, instead of bringing life, it steals life, bringing us a spiritual and physical sickness unto death.

If, of course, we use it that way. And considering that so-called “artificial intelligence” is really just automated simulation…

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It isn’t just any English professor who told the New Yorker this:

“You’re talking to someone who has only owned a smartphone for a year—I resisted,” he said. Then he saw that it was futile. “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he went on. “How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.” He waggled the iPhone disdainfully. “Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!” 

It’s James Shapiro, as good a stand-in as any for what’s thought of as Judeo-Christian civilization, which nowadays, for those who hold onto that term, is roughly interchangeable with “the West”:

Shapiro was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended Midwood High School. He obtained his B.A. at Columbia University in 1977, Master’s degree in 1978 and Ph.D. at University of Chicago in 1982. After teaching at Dartmouth College and Goucher College, Shapiro joined the faculty at Columbia University in 1985. He taught as a Fulbright lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and Tel Aviv University (1988–1989) and served as the Samuel Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in London (1998).

Shapiro has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Huntington Library, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for his publications and academic activities. He has written for numerous periodicals, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Book Review, the Financial Times, and The Daily Telegraph. In 2006, he was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow as well as a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Shapiro won the 2006 Samuel Johnson Prize as well as the 2006 Theatre Book Prize for his work 1599: a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. He also won the 2011 George Freedley Memorial Award, given by the Theatre Library Association, for his study of the Shakespeare authorship question, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, which has been described as the “definitive treatment” debunking the Oxfordian theory. The same year Shapiro was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, published in hardback in 2015, was awarded the James Tait Black Prize for Biography as well as the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography. Shapiro presented a three-part series on BBC Four called The King & the Playwright: A Jacobean History about Shakespeare, King James VI and I and the Jacobean era.

Shapiro’s lament inspired a resonant tweet pregnant with a meaning that transcends both the parlance of our times and the ironic distance that here, as so often, it is meant — however falteringly these days — to convey:

It? What is it? Our humanity perhaps?

Return to that punchline: Watch the flashing screens as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!

Refresher on what's in those screens?

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