Between A Sacred Rock And A Hard Case

What happens when leftist intellectuals are stuck between a sacred rock and a hard case?

Something that increasingly occupies my thoughts is the degree to which a progressive or linear view of history maps onto reality as it is, without historical biases and ideological framing. On its face, it seems like a non-starter of an issue. After all, I’m typing this piece on an electronic device connected to a “World Wide Web” that would have astonished and bamboozled people just a few decades ago. Regarding technology, the linear view of history reigns supreme; we have traveled the long and winding path of development and incremental improvements and advanced to the digital age and the pocket-sized supercomputer. There is no “un-inventing” technology, it is argued. Thus, the cyclical view of history, if it were ever true, has been broken.

My view on such pride in technological wonders is that the higher we ascend via these increasingly complex mechanisms, the more painful the landing will be when the complexity becomes too great. The opposite view is that in Artificial Intelligence, which is to say another complex system, we shall be able to maintain the structures for the rest of time and that an escape velocity will be reached - no turning back or hard landings need ever occur.

Scant regard is ever given to the human clay within the machine. It is taken as axiomatic that we, along with digital networks and supply chains, will adapt and become more “modern” alongside our devices. This world picture assumes that because TikTok and Uber Eats exist, archaic religious impulses and mad conceptions of millenarian prophesies and destinies will fade into the past.

It must be so because the divine spark of progress guides us all to the horizon of infinite improvement and human potential.

Yanis Varoufakis, once a leftist finance minister of Greece during their debt-based unpleasantness in the 2010s, is more famous today for coining the term “technofeudalism”. In his book of that title, Varoufakis argues that Big Tech robber barons are reinventing capitalism and are in the advanced stages of recreating a feudal order, with all of us as their serfs and peasant class. The book is a warning more than a prophecy, and Varoufakis takes care to offer an off-ramp to his leftist readership lest their notions of infinite progress are strained too far.