Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has inserted himself into the Donald Trump presidency and will play a role, informal or otherwise, in his new mad administration. Like other tech-billionaires, Musk, once a conventional free-market and cultural liberal, has become culturally conservative and techno-Promethean. For him, like Peter Thiel and others, capitalism is a means to a more ambitious end, and they do not fetishise free markets and competition. They are cyber-capitalists, treating the harnessing of maximum amounts of investment through the unrestrained powers of corporations as the necessary precondition of a truly transformative development. ‘Competition is for losers’, Thiel has remarked. Now, with Trump elected—and possibly unrestrained by other wings of government—the techno-Prometheans are at the centre of the government of a major power. Whether they last in the mercurial court of the Emperor of Ice Cream remains to be seen. But they will have a role that techno-futurists do not have in China, where they are restrained by the more reflective capacity of the Communist Party’s intellectual and theoretical processes: China has for some time been undertaking a sustained process of reflecting on the relationship between humanity and technology.
The cyber-capitalists now have a chance at an unrestrained triple fusion of technological, capital and state power. The world had entered a process of rapid change even before this happened; now there is at least a chance the process will be supercharged. In such times, the only thing worse than the uncritical presumption that the transition is inevitable or destined is the failure to recognise that transformation is truly occurring.
For a decade or more, our lives have been structured by a crucial technical disjuncture, with different developments running at different speeds. Information technology development runs to the beat of Moore’s law, accurately predicting that computing capacity will double in power and halve in price every eighteen months. Military technologies have been sped up by massive, precisely directed state investment. During the Second World War, the United Kingdom went from valve radios to the Colossus computer in four years. The United States went from blast and fragmentation bombs to nuclear weapons in three. But electro-mechanical development moves at a slower pace, facing the resistance of the material world. Thus human communicative relations have been hyper-technologised over the last thirty years, while we still build things, freight goods and travel much as we did half a century ago. This is part of a disjuncture between embodied and abstracted relations that has contributed to the emergence of so many new social pathologies in relation to such new communications tech.
Moore’s law has now driven us into a period when a transformation being called ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) is remaking the world. AI is now exponentially more powerful than the prototypical versions of ChatGPT pioneered a decade ago. The spread of such AI will have momentous cultural effects. Suffice to say here that strong Large Language Model AI is fundamentally abstracting the meaning of communication while older forms jostle for a hearing. AI, in extracting, reconstituting and leaving behind any originating human presence, is converging on a moment when the distinctions—in a cultural sense—between noise, signal and meaning, or between psychosis, interchange and sensibility, become blurred.
It may be in the transformation of the structures by which we live and the material texture of everyday life that a more immediate impact is to be felt. This has already started to happen in China, with the increasing automation of building and construction, transport and trades. Now, barring the resistance of our stagnant economic system, it may start to happen here. As AI transforms what we say, see, read and think, in the material realm new forces—robotics, automated construction and autonomous vehicles—will start to create a basic transformation in what we are relating to in the texture of everyday life. Over the next couple of decades, the continuing world of embodied labour and production will start to look archaic, just as the world of the long nineteenth century suddenly did when in the middle of the twentieth century the generalisation of apparently simple technologies—the car, the shipping container, the self-assembling construction crane and the conveyor belt for charging out consumer goods—changed the course of everyday life.
Should this cybernetic process not be met with an earlier-than-expected collective cultural resistance, it will transform the very being of the material world, and our being within it. It will radically transform politics. It will close the lid on certain forms of modern liberal politics such as those the Left has shaped itself around. The collective power of the (routine/manual-labour) working class will continue to decline as the source of value they provided is steadily reduced towards zero in key categories—a process explored in more detail in our review of a selection of Australian left books in this issue. Those left parties whose membership is substantially composed of the intellectually trained, and which tend to invoke the working class as the imprimatur of their actions, will be dealing with an ever more fantasy version of that class unity. The politics of this three-way fusion—of technology, capital and the state—will in the interim be a politics of these abstracted powers and how they are wielded, through state-capital command structures. Added to this now are the multiple layers of hi-tech communications, capable of directing the population in one direction or another through the creation of what will be essentially parallel versions of everyday life at the cyber-mythological level.
Why might this onslaught be so resistant to conventional political mobilisation? The pro-Palestinian movement provides an illustration, both in its brave expressions of resistance and as an exercise in substantial failure. The driving power behind the war in Gaza, and the unsettling of geopolitics, at one level remains the major nation-states and their asymmetrical competition—that is, the United States’s attempt to maintain its outsized global power, and the right it claims for it; China’s defence against that, and its own expansion of a major sphere of influence; and India’s and Russia’s staking of claims in response to these two behemoths. But it also structural. Each nation-state is committed to racing ahead with an increasingly integrated ultra-tech process combining AI, autonomous weapons, self-assembling objects, robotics, space weaponry and the vast cyber-systems required to maintain and extend it.
The transformations to our everyday life will be downstream of these developments, for which governments will find all resources required. The world is being wrought to such technological integration. That prior world, that had technology and systems within its wider borders, has been supplanted by a situation in which social life sits within bounds increasingly framed by techno-science. Technological reconstitution will leap forward to a near-unimaginable degree in the coming decades. It must surely spell the end of older fantasies of insurrection, still cherished by an increasingly nostalgic Left.
Instead, the fight moves to the cultural-ontological realm, where this publication has been focused for some time. There can be no other path. By cultural-ontological, we mean making visible the importance of the ways we live and engage with the world, and how technology and the intellectual framework which shapes it generally regard these settings as mere things to be taken apart, operationalised or transcended under the banner of progress or freedom, not understanding the profound scope of such transformations and how they strike at the heart of our existence. Totalising command of the world through scientific understanding has become the contemporary form of the urge to the transcendence that is deeply embedded within social-historical human being.
Expressed first as myth and personified in the gods of the aeons before we could start to grasp and use nature as a whole—that is, with the mathematics, physics and chemical revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—humanity has become the myth it tells about itself. That process has given great power to those whose talents are at the centre of deconstructive-material reasoning. It is the very nature of many such people to have childish and fantastical imaginations. Musk’s vision of human survival on Mars and his faith in the ‘coolness’ of technology are the one-dimensional vision issuing from such. It is telling that the contemporary text that best captures the ‘Musk moment’ is not some cyberpunk dystopia, but the nerd-skewering sitcom The Big Bang Theory. Yet the goofiness of it all simply obscures the deadly situation we are in. Gaza is in some ways a relatively early version of a semi-automated military techno-hell that may soon become the condition of the planet.
There must be global multilateral negotiations between nations over the use of technologies such as AI, yet there can be no negotiations with any force until there arises amongst technology’s creators a greater and deeper understanding of the role they play in what appears to be a steady trek towards the extinction of human society as we have known it. The end could come at the hands of AI systems anticipating moves of ‘the other’ in a game-theory process no human programming could fully remove. Should that happen, the world as we have known it will be gone in an afternoon, and only the tiniest fraction of the species will have an inkling of how it occurred. The role of the sort of people in the confluence that includes most readers of this publication is first to thoroughly think their way out of the frameworks of an old politics which persists in seeing technology as inevitable positive, or as neutral, or as dangerous but capable of being reliably steered by collective reason. Now, a global spread of understanding called out by the new technologies themselves as the necessary but not sufficient conditions of a Great Reflexivity is the precondition for our extended survival. Otherwise, we have again become Death, shatterer of worlds. However, this time it will not merely be of worlds, but of World.