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A World-Historical Upgrade

A World-Historical Upgrade

Section titled “A World-Historical Upgrade”

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Highlights

Section titled “Highlights”
  • In the Biden years I fell into the habit of describing my concerns about the alienating effect of our new technologies in conventional antibureaucratic terms — as if the forces of surveillance and control in the world of 2022 were still operating in the same way as the threats to the livelihood of a vegetable vendor in 1794. But that’s because I was still thinking in terms set by our last great world-historical Upgrade, and could not yet see that what was really getting me down, what had transformed me into some kind of bureaucracy-hating romantic, was not that we were still under the reign of a clunky and impersonal but nevertheless somewhat human system of paper-shuffling and form-filling and license-renewing, but that we were in the course of moving beyond that and into something far more streamlined and sleek, which is to say far more hostile to the continued existence of real human souls within its gears. And now, looking back, I feel tempted to say: two cheers for human bureaucracy, two cheers for lazy sinecures in bloated ministries, two cheers for indifferent clerks who give in to your unconventional request after your third desperate plea. All these vulnerable points in the old system represented the enduring survival of the irreducibly human within the modern state administrative apparatus.
  • I thus find myself in the awkward situation of having spent the past few years beating the drum for a cause that I assuredly do not support. When I have declared that I hate bureaucracy, I have been thinking romantically about an impossible return to some sort of anarcho-communalist idyll, where order is preserved by honor, good will, and human charity. But this tends to be heard only as a hatred of bureaucracy tout court, and when the tech vanguard hears it, they declare that they hate bureaucracy too, but in fact they only hate it because for them it is a system that is still too human, in need of replacement not by honor, charity, etc., but by full automation and universal surveillance.
  • I am basically certain that the career I thought I was going to have until retirement will not exist 2-3 years from now — more than a decade too soon for comfort. I can have no idea what sort of livelihood, if any, I will be cobbling together at an age when until recently I continued to imagine I was going to be coasting through a comfortable and respectable late-career middle-class sinecure. These jobs we once boasted of getting, because they were “cushy”, have now been exposed as bullshit jobs, and those who continue to see them as a source of meaning in their lives have been exposed as bullshit people, and most days it feels like all of us, except perhaps the massage therapists and others whose continued earnings depend directly on their fleshliness, are on the verge of being fired. And so some of us have taken to stabbing blindly, to doing stuff we never expected to do, striving to articulate new visions of what human freedom and creativity might yet look like in a machine-dominated era, which we cannot reasonably hope to see end any time soon on any other scenario than a cataclysmic one.