The Social Kafka System

Regular followers of my online content would be forgiven for thinking that I've dropped off the end of the earth in recent weeks or decided to simply sit-out the last days of what used to pass for freedom in the west. In actual fact it's worse than that, I've been through the grueling process of moving home in the middle of winter with the ever present shadow of more government lockdowns hampering my plans.

I have no problem with the actual moving, the lifting, the graft, but what strikes fear into the very core of my soul is the prospect of negotiating the faceless and increasingly automated utilities services and bureaucracies which modern life depends on. The reason I'm writing this rather than ranting it into a microphone is because my internet speed is so cripplingly slow that I'd be waiting for an entire day for a video to upload, nobody would hear me scream in cyberspace.

Today people engage in debates over whether we're living through 1984 or Brave New World, understandably so, but I've recently began to recognize that ''Kafkaesque'' best describes the minor forms of emergent tyranny we face each day. Each service or utility means navigating a bewildering soup of identifications, forgotten passwords and unused email accounts.

Kafka's ''The Castle'' tells the story of a stranger arriving in a small town and attempting to gain access to the bureaucrats who govern from within a large castle. With every attempt being thwarted and the main character ''K'' becoming increasingly frantic in his attempts to gain entry.

The smart metre becomes your very own ''Castle'' which you're inexplicably locked out of.

The system isn't persecuting you, it's that the system is indifferent to the human condition. In a sense the social credit system is already here, in a latent and flabby form. The transition over the years is one of power dynamics. A few decades ago the ''customer was always right'' and any person whose job it was to listen to your demands and complaints on the end of the phone simply had to deal with it, or you could complain about them to their superior. They had massive incentives to be as friendly as possible and cater to your every need.

The largely automated services we have now removed that component and ushered in an age wherein the individual did not deal with a human so much as a system. The system is ''dead'' in the sense that it neither knows nor cares that you can't remember your ex-girlfriend's birthday that you used as a password. It's simply a matter of ''access denied''. You can't enter the Castle.

Any human element which remains will be manifest through the broken English of a wage-slave in Bangalore who has never set foot in your country or town and exists purely as a conduit of information until the AI and algorithms catch up and phase them out too.

The frustration factor and feeling of helplessness when confronted with these labyrinthine bureaucracies is that there doesn't seem to be a human factor to either hold to account or to plead with, to explain that you don't get it, you've had a bad day and so on. Instead you're confronted with an inert system, an information processing machine.

Throughout history the heating of one's home amounted to a man gathering and storing physical resources such as wood and coal, then simply burning them on his fire. Such a primordial activity required agency and physical activity on behalf of a man who would in turn feel a deep sense of catharsis and contentment when sitting by his warm, glowing hearth.

Even into the 1980's in the North East coal sheds were the primary means by which fuel was stored, requiring to be carried into the house and chucked onto the fire. Now, however, all such agency has been removed, a man never sees the fuel he's burning and rather than being confronted with an ax or shovel he has to go through the emasculating processes of logins, passwords and robot voiced AI answer machines.

The discussion around the decline of masculinity and the rise of effeminate sissy-boys mainly focuses on propaganda and ideology, and rightly so, yet not so much on the stark reality that even the most ancient and basic acts of manhood, being able to keep yourself warm, have been entirely lifted from the hands of men and passed into amorphous networks and managerial systems of control.

To visit a major supermarket now is to temporarily become checkout staff for the company that should be servicing you! Once more, the individual who would've once been the dominant partner in the transaction is subservient to the ''system'' of buying goods to the degree that you do the work of scanning and bagging for the corporation. You can of course choose which brand to endorse, but that hardly matters because the automated system remains the same, it's just the goods that change and even then only very slightly.

Once more the machine has purged itself of the human element and once more the onus is on you to find out how to navigate scanning and bagging in order to achieve the once simple task of buying milk and bread.

In theory the expansion of technology into every facet of our lives should prove to be more efficient, and for billionaires it is. But the defining character of the grid is not actually efficiency but the dis-empowerment of the individual who seeks desperately to keep pace, to understand how he can enter The Castle and remain there.

And it's here we begin to see the magnitude of the folly being embarked upon. The transition always goes from the human to the technological, however, as noted above, the technology is still inert, dead and mechanistic. It doesn't ''judge'' you it simply refuses to respond to incorrect computations.

However, now that the superstructure exists and we're having to learn the ways in which we can navigate it for our basic needs another scenario presents itself, having already become accustomed to the gamification involved with the automated society which is engulfing late-modernity, we see that all it takes is an algorithmic nip and tuck to raise the bar once more, to once again cast ''K'' outside of The Castle walls and back into the village below.

K is in the situation of asking what is required of him to be recognized and adhered to by the system, what is it he did wrong? why is he a bad person? why, in the end, is he on Trial?

The Trial is of course Kafka's most famous work, but living under a social credit system is to live in a permanent state of insecurity and paranoia in a ceaseless quest to keep higher powers content. Digital technology seems almost to be in possession of its own metaphysic, a guiding force that reduces everything to a form of access either being granted or denied, a video game structure of achieving new levels and ''unlocking'' special items which can swiftly become basic necessities if those in control of the technology are malicious and vindictive.

Yet even before a social credit system goes fully active we're being trained and inured to being subservient to forces which exist in the ether, and as I sit watching the abysmal internet speed I've landed with over the last week, I can't help but get the feeling I'm like the fat kid who's about to embark upon a marathon.