Towards a Digital Society Manifesto - Part 2
In part 1 I layed out my worldview: I am talking from a dualist perspective. Ideas and objective reality are two separate worlds, yet it is their interactions that forms reality. This distinction is gainning in importance because new information technologies act as a portal between virtual world and objective world. I presented 4 archetypes of action in society: Warriors/Priests/Merchants/Clerks. I noted that if the development of digital technologies led to a numerical augmentation of Clerks it was concomitant with a loss of relevance. Indeed what was their prerogative -to manipulate ideas- is now accessible by everyone.
The Talisman
Many things that used to happen exclusively on the objective world are now partly occuring in the virtual world. There is this King-Straub’s novel “The Talisman” that is a very good allegorical way to depict what we are experiencing thanks to digital technologies. Here is the plot summary of wikipedia:
Cavanaugh have moved from California to Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire, to escape his father's old business partner Morgan Sloat. Jack meets a man named Speedy Parker, who tells him about a land called the Territories, and magical item called the Talisman that can save his mother Lily, who is dying from cancer. Jack's journey takes him simultaneously through the American heartland and "the Territories", a strange fantasy land that is set in a universe parallel to that of this world. Individuals in the Territories have "twinners", or parallel individuals, in our world. Twinners' births, deaths, and (it is intimated) other major life events are usually paralleled. Twinners can also "flip" or migrate to the other world but only share the body of their alternate universe's analogue.
We all have a smartphone/talisman in our pockets and the “Territories” are found on social media platforms. This had a considerable implications for Warriors. 2023 warriors are also acting as social media influencers. It used to be that in this area secret was paramount. Now you have Twitch channels emitting live from Ukraine front lines or the Gaza strip.
The ensuing operational problems are just the tip of the iceberg: if you use your smartphone without necessary precaution you can safely expect an artillery or drone strikes within a couple of seconds. There are deeper implications: wars have now virtual twins just like in Kig/Straub novel. Before media were mostly used to galvanize population during wars. Now it is a part of the war in itself. The example of how Ukraine has used digital activism to gather a large international support is striking. It resulted in billions of $ of aid and material support principally by the west. Historians will clear this out but it is hard to imagine how Ukraine could have resisted the Russian invasion without such a support. It goes way deeper than memes and flags on social media bios.
The flip side is that there is now a significant part of every war that takes place in the virtual space. Warriors are not ready for that. Their footage are used for and against them in ways that they are having hard time to grasp. The Israeli-Hamas conflict offers many examples on both sides. The online war is different in nature than the war on the objective world. First it appears that in this territory right makes might. The battle is is held on moral grounds. The battle is not geographically located either. This is direct result of the topological revolution. On top of that AI is heavily involved: on creating fake news and more subtly on building feeds for social media platforms. Those three aspects escape the traditional competence of warriors, who are busy conducting the war on the real world anyway. There is something to learn from Ukraine on this point. They managed the virtual front much more better than Israelis, Russians or Hamas terrorists. The interplay between what happens on the battlefield and on virtual arenas is not without reminding the way Jack balances his act on the territories and the real world in the novel.
What is a woman ?
Priests, more specifically judges have not been spared by the digital revolution. Superficially it appears that they reacted more cautiously than Warriors to it. The infamous “what is a woman” episode is very illustrative.
At first it appears that judges have integrated the fact that everything that you say will be held against you in a digital society. Hence their “extreme” cautious attitude. But deeper it reveals another typical trait of digital societies: the effective boundaries are not the ones of the objective world. The idea was that trials were isolated from external pressure. The whole point of the due process is to avoid being ruled by the mob right ? Yet what we are experiencing is the total inverse. It is clear that judge Jackson is ruled by the mob. This testimony shows that judge Jackson first pays tributes to activists rather than to common sense. She is a judge, what could go wrong?
It is another illustration of the topological revolution: limits and borders are no longer what they used to be. Trials are now partly performed in the virtual space too. Over there limits are marked by opinions and ideas rather than geographic locations like courts. Here I mean the actual room in which the trials are run. It means that ideology plays a greater role in the judicial domain today than what it was the case in written culture: even in the middle of dark ages they were not pondering on “what is a woman ?” and misgendering which is the most fundamental truth of our existence. Indeed as a sexual reproduction species being able to discern male from female is more fundamental than being able to differentiate top from bottom or light from dark. Yet here we are: the borders between fantasies and reality, here biological reality, have been completely erased just like in pervasive video game.
Dogmarvatism
Digital transformation has impacted our perception of time. It is a global phenomenon, every archetype is concerned. It has become very easy to know the present and the past: they are just a Google search away, or a tweet away. We have moved from the cable based “global village” to the social media based global living room. Likewise all human knowledge can be accessed through the network. It was true since the mid 2000s but it is even more the case with chat-GPT likes that have been trained on the totality of the internet. So you can access the totality of what has been written very easily: just ask a question to the appropriate LLM. It produces an illusion of a idealist reality that transpires out of our times. Just like pure Platonic ideas: things were always like that and will always be like that because at the end of the day you don’t have to think, you are just using pre-cooked thinking. Like fast food afficionados that don’t know that it is possible to cook from untransformed food. The dynamic aspects of culture building have been lost in translation. This loss has led to the fetishism of published texts: the resolution xxx of treaty zzz says that, blabla. The laymen think of themselves as competent judges because they have an easy access to texts, all texts. Typically the “crimes of war” ongoing discussion on social media. In political terms it means that digital societies have a bias towards a new brand of dogmatism/conservatism. The dogmarvatism? This is the infamous “follow the science” thing enhanced with GPUs.
This lack of mental flexibility can be witnessed first hand on social media. The last important case was the October 7 attacks and the ensuing Israeli-Hamas war. The way commentators split hairs over the fact that this event is a war crime or not shows how deeply: 1- they don't understand what war is 2- they have not noticed the phase shift caused by October 7 attacks. They are still talking like the military operations are a sort of police operation on steroids. They discuss all day long about proportionality and right to self defense but in very abstract terms. The discussion is virtual at every levels. The fact that the mindset has changed and that Israelis feel like they are dealing with an existential threat (which was no the case during past intifadas) can’t be factored in by external observers.
The most incredible illustration of this idea has been given by a french representative on X:
It says “Google does agree with me”. His point is that France exists only since 1792. This is verbatim the point I was trying to convey in the last two paragraphs. The use of Google search engine as ultimate arbiter of truth simply shows how retarded french politicians are. Modern ones do it with Chat-GPT…
Thus the natural tendency towards dogmarvatism in digital culture. This basic worldview is paradoxically concomitant with an ever changing online discussion. No subject is is re-discussed nor rehashed. On social media only counts the establishment of supremacy. More about that in part 3.