A Decalogue of the Alienation of Thought in Post-Industrial Information Society

§1. Cleverness is the ingenuity with which human beings manipulate matter; but, though stone, nor iron, nor proteins, nor acids thwarts not our wily thumbs, we are ourselves, even (for the dualists) in this flesh imbued with “spirit,” materials. Biology is the technology of the living apparatus.

§2. Industry, which improves our strength but lacks our grace (perhaps art in our age is the reproduction of grace), is a mechanical reproduction of the biological mechanism, Body; and so is information (in its modern sense) the absolute externalization of the thinking mechanism, the explosion of human consciousness from the confines of the human body. Industrial flesh built with bolts is now informed with binary circuitry, Spirit.

§3. There will be no advent of artificial intelligence, because there has never been intelligence without artifice, which means, accordingly, that “artificial intelligence” is already here. Could intelligence simply “occur” in nature, as if it were the at once minute and immense glide of a tectonic plate upon the molten core of a space rock? If the intelligence of the living human being is natural, in the sense that it so “occurs,” then it nevertheless sets immediately to work upon itself as artifice, as the intelligence of artifice, as artificial intelligence.

§4. Just as factories are mechanical reproductions of human biological mechanisms, or Bodies; so are networks mechanical reproductions of human ideological mechanisms, or Minds. The post-industrial age is the age in which industry, the lonely organic outgrowth of biological humanity, finds at last its complement in the colonial mind.

§5. A computer unconnected is an instrument (even if it can pass, by means of human hands, information to and fro); but connected, a computer is a particular bundle of neurons within the massive collective brain of humanity's post/industrial Doppelganger: this spiritual-mechanical complex that grows, shrinks, remembers, and forgets.

§6. In a former Soviet Socialist Republic, a small, aged server, perhaps damaged even by carelessly spilt vodka, is a dark recess in this brain, nearly forgotten, an archive of mostly useless information. In Montana, another computer is disconnected for good, and the whole worldwide – no, now wider than the solar system, so long as the two Viking spacecraft ping back their acknowledgements like ghostly premonitions – system experiences a hardly noticeable minor brain death.

§7. Metaphor fails to warn us of the possibility of dystopia; for, so long as it is fictionalized in a hypothetical future, we ignore that it is already present as a real possibility, as real as possibility.

§8. Industrialization brought with it the alienation of laborers from labor. Human beings were reduced to brute mechanical existence: “cogs in a machine,” so the saying goes. Smitten as we are by our own genius, now we humans are reduced to discrete intellectual instances that participate in a vast network, a collective intelligence also linked to the old mechanical infrastructure (shining and new, “refurbished” and glistening nonetheless). There is a complement to the alienation of labor: we are to be made foreign to our own minds, “files in the archive,” automatons at last.

§9. Every thought not kept private – and what use is there for private thoughts, these days? All sit obscurely like personal art objects on a window sill – heads to the archive, to be consumed alike with mechanical products. Labor, both physical and intellectual, has almost entirely been collectivized; the monomaniacal comedy of capitalism is the death of the individual.

§10. We are at a loss to contemplate the meaning of all of this.

Edit (23 February, 12:07): This was meant as a kind of pastiche of rehashed Nietzschean and Heideggerian modern doom-mongering, although only stylistically; but, through Reddit, I recently stumbled upon this: The Meme of Modernity, from something called the American Nihilist Underground Society (A.N.U.S., it would seem). Although entirely unfamiliar with whatever the web site proposes to be, I did find this short and simple article to be interesting. It deals with a lot of the ideas evoked above.