There are all kinds of anti-techcomm arguments that impress people who don’t like techno-commercialism. Anything appealing to a feudal sensibility, with low tolerance for chaos and instability, and a reverence for traditional hierarchies and modes of life will do. There’s one argument, however, that stands apart from the rest due to its complete independence from controversial moral and aesthetic preferences, or in other words, due to its immanence. It does not seek to persuade the proponent of hyper-capitalist social arrangements to value other things, but only points out, coldly and acutely, that such arrangements are demonstrably self-subverting at the biological level. The most devastating formulation of this argument, and the one that has given it a convenient name, was presented by Spandrell in March 2013, in a post on Singapore — a city-state he described as an IQ shredder.

How does an IQ Shredder work? The basic machinery is not difficult to describe, once its profound socio-historical irony is appreciated. The model IQ Shredder is a high-performance capitalistic polity, with a strong neoreactionary bias.
(1) Its level of civilization and social order is such that it is attractive to talented and competent people.
(2) Its immigration policy is unapologetically selective (i.e. first-order eugenic).
(3) It sustains an economic structure that is remarkably effective at extracting productive activity from all available adults.
(4) It is efficiently specialized within a wider commercial network, to which it provides valuable goods and services, and from which it draws economic and demographic resources.
In sum, it skims the human genetic stock, regionally and even globally, in large part due to the exceptional opportunity it provides for the conversion of bio-privileged human capital into economic value. From a strictly capitalistic perspective, genetic quality is comparatively wasted anywhere else. Consequently, spontaneous currents of economic incentive suck in talent, to optimize its exploitation.

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There’s a wave of change coming. If we want to be realistic, we need to be ready for it — at least, as far as we are able to be. Anyone making plans for a future that won’t be there by the time it arrives is simply wasting everybody’s time, and first of all their own.

Under even remotely capitalist conditions, technology reliably over-performs in the medium term, as long as you’re looking in the right direction. Sure, flying cars, jetpacks, and nuclear fusion have gone missing, but instead we got mass-consumer computing, Cyberspace, and mobile telephony. What actually turned up has switched the world far more than the technologies that got lost would have done. It climbed into our brains far more deeply, established far more intense social-cybernetic circuitry, adjusted us more comprehensively, and opened gates we hadn’t foreseen. (You’re on a computer of some kind right now, in case you hadn’t noticed.)

Because technological innovation rolls in on hype cycles, it messes with our expectations, systematically. There’s always a prompt for fashionable disillusionment, shortly before the storm-front hits. Dupes always fall for it. It’s hard not to.

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Note on Teleology

Bryce, who has been thinking about teleology for quite a while, expresses his thoughts on the topic with commendable lucidity. The central argument: Characteristically modern claims to have ‘transcended’ the problem of teleology are rendered nonsensical by the continued, and indeed massively deepened, dependence upon the concept of equilibrium across all complexity-sensitive intellectual disciplines, from statistical physics, through population biology, to economics. Equilibrium is exactly a telos. To deny this is primarily the symptom of an allergy to ‘medieval’ or ‘scholastic’ (i.e. Aristotelian) modes of thought, inherited from the vulgar rebellious mechanism of early Enlightenment natural philosophy.

Where I think Bryce’s account is still deficient is most easily shown by a further specification of his principal point. Equilibrium is the telos of those particular dynamic complex systems governed by homeostasis, which is to say: by a dominating negative feedback mechanism. Such systems are, indeed, in profound accordance with classical Aristotelian physical teleology, and its tendency to a state of rest. This ancient physics, derided by the enlightenment mechanists in the name of the conservation of momentum, is redeemed through abstraction into the modern conception of equilibrium. ‘Rest’ is not immobility, but entropy maximization.

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There’s been a lot of this kind of thing around recently. It’s mainly been arriving in a link storm from Wagner Clemente Soto, who’s too unambiguously Throne-and-Altar in orientation to identify as NRx or 333, so it’s probably an exercise in internal discipline taking place in another camp. Still, it’s difficult not to ask: Could this be the next fission pile building up?

Here‘s a link to Jörg Guido Hülsman’s (excellent) Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, which seems to have provided the background citations for the recent round of attacks. (This agitation always takes me back to Der Zauberberg.)

ADDED: Or is it “Moses to Mises”?

ADDED: NBS provides a useful ‘Capitalism Week’ round-up.

ADDED: A (loosely) connected argument from Brett Stevens.

Anarcho-Monarchism asks: Is the word ‘capitalism’ worth defending? It concludes in the affirmative.

From the perspective of Outside in, however, this post misses the most crucial level of the question. Capitalism — like any ideologically contested term — is cross-cut by multiple meanings. Of these, its generic sense, which “simply means that private individuals own the means of production” is far from the most objectionable.

Yet, far more significant is the singular sense of capitalism, as a proper name, for a ‘thing’ or real individual. To grasp this, it probably helps to consider the word as a contraction of ‘terrestrial capitalism’ — not describing a generic type of social organization, but designating an event.

A biological analogy captures the distinction quite precisely. Consider ‘life’ — understandable, certainly, as a generic cosmic possibility, defined perhaps by local entropy dissipation, or other highly-abstract features. Contrast this sense with ‘terrestrial life’ — or, even better, the biosphere (we might say ‘Gaia’ if the hopelessly sentimentalized associations of this term were avoidable). Terrestrial life began at a definite moment, followed a path-dependent trajectory, and built upon a dense inheritance, as exemplified most prominently by the RNA-DNA chemistry of information replication, the genetic code, genetic legacies, and elaboration of body-plans within a comparatively limited number of basic lineages. Terrestrial life is not a generic concept, but a thing, or event, meriting a proper name.

Before it is an ideological option, capitalism is a being, with an individual history (and fate). It is not necessary to like it — but it is an it.

Bryce Laliberte has been thinking about Capital Teleology, from the perspective of human technological augmentation. One significant feature of this approach is that it doesn’t require any kind of savage rupture from ‘humanistic’ traditionalism — the story of technology is unfolded within the history of man.

Coincidentally, Isegoria had tweeted about Butlerian Jihad a few hours before (referring back to this post from December last year). The implicit tension between these visions of techno-teleology merits sustained attention — which I’m unable to provide here and now.  What is easily offered is a quotation from Samuel Butler’s ‘Book of the Machines’ (the 23rd and 24th chapters of his novel Erewhon), a passage that might productively by pinned to the margin of Laliberte’s reflections, in order to induce productive cognitive friction. The topic is speculation upon the emergence of a higher realization of life and consciousness upon the earth, as explored by Butler’s fictional author:

The writer …  proceeded to inquire whether traces of the approach of such a new phase of life could be perceived at present; whether we could see any tenements preparing which might in a remote futurity be adapted for it; whether, in fact, the primordial cell of such a kind of life could be now detected upon earth. In the course of his work he answered this question in the affirmative and pointed to the higher machines.

“There is no security” — to quote his own words — “against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?

“But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways? The shell of a hen’s egg is made of a delicate white ware and is a machine as much as an egg-cup is: the shell is a device for holding the egg, as much as the egg-cup for holding the shell: both are phases of the same function; the hen makes the shell in her inside, but it is pure pottery. She makes her nest outside of herself for convenience’ sake, but the nest is not more of a machine than the egg-shell is. A ‘machine’ is only a ‘device.’”

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Anna and the Hacked Matter crew have a great (time) piece in The Atlantic on the latest escape route from real space. Getting the input interface right is going to be tricky, but the techno-commercial teleology guiding this development is surely inexorable. (I envisage the emergence of some kind of needle thingummy, to stitch the data in with.)

Robert Kaplan explains ‘Why East Asia Alienates Intellectuals':

… East Asia is a rebuke in major respects to the humanist project. It is prosperous and successful, with the latest postmodern infrastructure and technology; yet at a macro political level it is consumed less by universalist ideals than by old-fashioned ethnic nationalism. China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and so on are deeply conscious of their own ethnic identities, which carry within them clashing claims of sovereignty in the South and East China Seas, as well as elsewhere. East Asia shows how exclusivist mindsets need not be confined to poor, post-communist populations or poverty-stricken peoples with tribal or sectarian differences. East Asia is a flagrant example that sustained capitalist development need not necessarily lead to universal values.

Modernization without ethnomasochism isn’t something the Cathedral wants to understand.

Our first Time Spiral Press product is up on Amazon. (Yet to update the TSP site in recognition, though — Dunhuang and all.)

We put it up in a Jing’an District bar, over a few cocktails, which somehow rubbed-in the revolutionary aspect. It was hard not to imagine Rimbaud and his Absinthe-sozzled crew producing some delirious poetry and sticking it up on Kindle before the end of the evening. Amazon is going to disintermediate publishing so hard. In my experience, this fate never befalls an industry before it has abused its position to such an incredible extent that its calamity is necessarily a matter of near-universal celebration. Broadcast media, publishers, academia — into the vortex of cyber-hell they go …

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century argues that the normal tendency of capitalism is to increase inequality (the book has a link-rich page here, eleven reviews here). It’s not a theoretically-ambitious work, but it gets to the point, well-supported by statistics. The simple, Zeitgeist-consistency of the thesis guarantees its success.

Because Piketty’s claim is casually Marxist, the impulse on the right is to attempt a refutation. I very much doubt this is going to work. Since capital is escalating at an exponential rate, while people definitely aren’t (and are in fact devolving), how could the trend identified by Piketty be considered anything other than the natural one? Under conditions of even minimally functional capitalism, for sub-inert, ever more conspicuously incompetent ape-creatures to successfully claim a stable share of techonomic product would be an astounding achievement, requiring highly artificial and increasingly byzantine redistribution mechanisms. No surprise from Outside in that this isn’t occurring, but rather a priori endorsement of Piketty’s conclusion — only radically anomalous developments have ever made the trend seem anything other than it is.

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