Technofeudalism

March 21, 2024 By Gene Veith

Capitalism is dead. And technology has killed it. What is taking its place is a reversion to feudalism. So argues Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis in his book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.

Leif Weatherby sums up his argument in the Washington Post. The tipping point, according to this analysis, was not simply the new information technology but the rise and dominance of the Big Tech companies. Google, Facebook/Meta, Apple, Amazon, and the rest of them do not make profit in the conventional capitalist sense. Rather, they extract rent.

Weatherby explains:

Rent is not profit. The distinction is subtle but crucial: As Varoufakis points out, Apple has been known to take a cut as large as a third from those selling apps in the App Store, effectively charging rent for being in one of the two spaces — the other is Google Play — that all but dominate the mobile market. If I design an app that offers a simple game, for example, I have labored to bring a commodity to market, in the hopes of making a profit as others find the game entertaining and worth a few dollars. Apple has contributed nothing to the effort of actually producing the program I sell, yet it will receive a significant portion of every dollar that my consumers pay. As thinkers of the Industrial Revolution like Adam Smith and David Ricardo might put it, Apple’s revenue on the platform is merely passive, which is what makes it rent, unlike profit, which has to be actively earned. The problem is that, if the balance shifts away from genuine profit, no growth can occur. The value that labor puts into commodities is added to the economy and becomes profit. Rent is finite: If the economy starts to run on rent, it will stall.

But stagnation, for Varoufakis, would be the least of our problems. He describes the replacement of traditional capital by what he calls “cloud capital,” which no longer focuses on growth, value and profit, but instead on rent extraction and control. The “cloudalists” are the new capitalist bosses, and their influence extends far beyond the workplace to nearly every facet of your app-powered daily life. According to Varoufakis, when we are the product — as we are when our clicks and searches generate profit for massive corporations, when our data is bought and sold — we’ve gone over from the relative freedoms of capitalism to technofeudalism, in which those who control the platforms have direct control over the rest of us, reducing us to the station of “cloud serfs.”

I disagree that capitalism is “dead” and that technology and the big tech companies have killed it, at least not yet. Elon Musk is more of an old-fashioned capitalist entrepreneur who actually produces innovative tangible products: cars (have you ever ridden in a Tesla?), tunneling equipment, space ships. Apple manufactures computers and cell phones, which make up more of its bottom line than rent-seeking does. And Amazon, which started as a bookstore and now sells just about everything, is above all a retailer, though the huge cut it demands from its suppliers may be reminiscent of the tribute demanded by the feudal lords.

But still, Varoufakis makes some valid points, and who knows where we are headed? His analysis reminds us that change is not always in the direction of an upward progress into something brand new, but that change can also go in the opposite direction, as a regression into how we were in the past. His thesis would be in line with what Marshall McLuhan said about technology turning the world into a “global village” and making us more like our pre-literate ancestors. And if our socio-economic system is switching us back to a network of techno-feudal lords and serfs, that would go along with the reaction against liberal democracy that we have been chronicling on this blog.

To be sure, regressions can be good as well as bad. Christianity and the Church played a major role in the feudal society of the past, though this was not necessarily good for the Church. What Varoufakis is describing is not returning to the past, but rather reverting to past structures garbed in the highest technology. I wonder what a technoChristianity and a technoChurch would look like under technofeudalism. I’m sure it would be in need of a technoReformation.

Illustration: “Reeve and Serfs” (1310) by anonymous (Queen Mary Master), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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Humans = Machines

March 20, 2024 By Gene Veith

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We Christians used to complain about “humanism,” a.k.a., “secular humanism,” a religion centered on how wonderful human beings are. Though some atheists still claim it, that term isn’t really used very much anymore. Hardly any secularists think human beings are all that great, what with all of our wars and environmental degradation, nor are we better than animals, which are often considered to be morally superior.

Today the talk is about “post-humanism,” or the state of being “post-human.” This is due to the excitement over our new technology and the prospect that human beings can be improved by merging with machines.

The Romanian philosopher and novelist Robert Lazu Kmita has written a thoughtful piece for the European Conservative entitled The Dissolution of the Human Being. He argues that human beings now think of themselves as machines. Which makes it easy to think of machines as human beings. If humans = machines, then machines = humans.

This mindset lies behind the hype and the fears of Artificial Intelligence (the prospect of AI becoming so intelligent that it acquires consciousness, the fantasies about sentient robots, and belief in the Singularity, in which the internet evolves into an all-knowing and all-controlling god). This also gives us the projects of synthesizing humans and machines by implanting computer chips into our brains or wearing glasses that will overlay everything we see with clickable computer icons.

Back to Kmita’s essay. This is from the beginning. I urge you to read the whole thing:

For some contemporary thinkers, things are crystal clear: we are living in a post-human world. This means something very precise. Humans, living beings in general, can be understood and explained according to scientifically established laws and rules of existence. The much-heralded Human Genome Project (HGP) is nothing more than the “engineering” plan (or map) of the gigantic digital-electro-chemical machinery that is the human being. We are sophisticated artifacts, nothing more. . . .

We are living in a world where it is widely accepted that human beings can be fixed, just like cars, planes, or computers. But not only do we change our bodies’ limbs and organs as damaged parts of an electronic or mechanical device; we can also choose what we ourselves want to be. The current state of affairs seems to be as Andres Vaccari observes: nature is going to be disintegrated. Nothing stable exists. . . .

But how could something like this be possible? It is possible because life itself is gone. Whether in the form of digital AI or a physical humanoid robot like Elon Musk’s Optimus, the “machine” is the only triumphant reality.

[Keep reading. . .]

Kmita discusses the portrayal of automatons–robots, androids, other human-like machines–in our literature and films. He shows that in the contemporary imagination, human beings themselves are reduced to automatons.

As we’ve blogged about, the brain is NOT a computer and a computer CANNOT be a brain. If people think of themselves as just a machine that can be repaired, souped up, or customized at will, no wonder they believe they can change their sex just by ingesting some chemicals and having a little surgery. Or that machines we don’t want can simply be discarded, like we trash any consumer device that doesn’t meet our needs, making abortion no big deal.

If we are all just meat robots, though, there is no heart, no conscience, no soul, no image of God. Everything that makes us human is left out of consideration. But that makes us not post-human but inhuman.

Photo: Cyborg holding green apple and looking at camera isolated on grey, future technology concept – depositphotos.com , attributed free license

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Can Artificial Intelligence Make Sacred Art?

March 14, 2024 By Gene Veith

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Now that freely-available Artificial Intelligence programs can generate images, we are seeing them everywhere. They are especially prominent on internet ads. But can they or should they be used to make sacred art?

That’s a question posed by Joseph Pronechen in his article for The National Catholic Register entitled ‘Art’ificial Intelligence: AI Can Create Religious Images in Seconds. But Is It Really Sacred Art?

You can usually spot an AI-generated face by the smoothness of the skin and how shiny it is. And notice the hands, which often have extra fingers. The expression on the face will often be vacuous, and the background characters will often have distorted, unsettling grimaces.

We’ve blogged about how unintentionally hilarious they can be when they are programmed to follow woke algorithms. But, as a friend of mine who knows more about the technology than I do tells me when I ridicule AI for its mistakes, “It will get better.”

The technology is indeed amazing. You tell the AI chatbot what you want it to depict and it will generate a picture accordingly. (You can try it here.) Using those images when you need a picture is tempting. For one thing, they are free. A court has ruled that only works of art created by a human being can be copyrighted. Those generated by Artificial Intelligence cannot be. This means that users can also freely appropriate AI images made by people with better skills at describing what they want.

I sometimes take longer looking for an illustration for my blog posts (which Patheos requires) than for writing the things. I use the “image search” feature on Google, along with the “usage rights” option to take me to pictures that have a “creative commons” license that allows me to post them without paying for them. I experimented with generating an AI picture once to go with my blog, but the result would give you nightmares. A couple of times I have used AI images devised by other people that come up on “image search,” but only when all else fails.

But is there a religious use of AI images? Can they or should they be used to inspire devotion or Christian meditation? Here are some examples of AI-generated “sacred images” from his article, which I can use freely. He contrasts those with work from a contemporary Christian artist, which I cannot use freely since they will be copyrighted.

Here is St. Joan of Arc:

Here is the Virgin Mary. Look at her hand.

These are from the article. Here is one I generated myself. I asked Stable Diffusion Online to give me an image of “Jesus on the Cross.” Here is what it came up with:

Well, what do you think? Of course, Catholics and the Orthodox have a higher view of “sacred art” than Protestants do. While the Reformed often reject the very concept, to the point of opposing any depiction of Christ or of any figurative art used in church as idolatrous, we Lutherans believe that works of art, while not sacred as such, can have a legitimate use in focusing our imagination on Biblical truths.

What about these? The Crucifixion that I generated seems unduly influenced by wooden crucifixes, so that Jesus has the color of wood. He certainly doesn’t look anguished.

The image of our Lord’s mother is clearly shaped by Catholic devotional depictions–she appears in front of what looks like the Rose Window of a church (or is that supposed to be her halo?)–but her expression is unsettlingly dead. She appears all ethereal and mystically spiritual, not at all like a mother. And the six elongated fingers of her right hand are downright creepy.

Joan of Arc is just the idealized but somber face of a generic girl wearing armor.

Art is thought of as the expression of an artist; that is to say, there is a thinking, feeling, imagining human being behind it. This is especially true of sacred, or religious art. It is, properly, an expression of piety, designed to instill piety in the viewer. To be sure, a non-Christian artist can create a work that can inspire devotion in a Christian. I think of the Jewish painter Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion. But behind that painting are the distinctly human qualities of compassion, moral questioning, and yearning for meaning.

I know, I know, “they will get better.” But I have the feeling that when you leave the human out of any kind of art it is going to fall short. And that artificial piety will be just as artificial as artificial intelligence.

BONUS: I asked Stable Diffusion to give me a picture of Luther and Melanchthon:

They look more like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday! Actually, they look like identical twins.

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“Pre-Christian Man” vs. “Post-Christian Man”

March 13, 2024 By Gene Veith

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Sebastian Morello, the senior editor of The European Conservative, has written a stirring response to France making abortion a constitutional right. In the course of his discussion, he makes an important distinction between being “pre-Christian” and “post-Christian.” He then says that “the conservative-liberal, Right-Left divide means almost nothing now” and proposes a new paradigm.

From Abortion as a French Constitutional Right: A Christian Response:

If a people later retreat from Christendom and place themselves back under the devil as his subjects, they will become something entirely different to what they were before their evangelisation. Prior to its discipleship, a nation possesses prevenient graces in anticipation of the Gospel. Once a nation becomes an apostate—as France did at the dawn of modernity—by so doing it imitates the devil, rejecting the life of grace, and falling not from light into the shadows, but into utter pitch darkness.

He quotes C.S. Lewis , from a letter to Don Giovanni Calabria (1953):

They neglect not only the law of Christ but even the Law of Nature as known by the Pagans. For now they do not blush at adultery, treachery, perjury, theft and other crimes which I will not say Christian Doctors, but the Pagans and the Barbarians have themselves denounced. They err who say ‘the world is turning pagan again.’ Would that it were! The truth is that we are falling into a much worse state. ‘Post-Christian man’ is not the same as ‘pre-Christian man.’ He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-come and a spouse lost.

Morello comments:

Post-Christian man is not the same as pre-Christian man. Pre-Christian man inordinately favoured the flesh and its impulses, whereas post-Christian man sees the body as a problem to be corrected by technology. We want to ‘support’ women, but we’re always coming up against the irritating fact that they have female bodies, so we ‘support’ them by sterilising them and then telling them that mothers are weak and strong women kill their offspring so that they can be useful to wealthy men. The modern age may value ‘freedom’ above anything else, but in many ways, it sees the chief means to achieve freedom to be the tearing of human flesh. Perhaps, then, it is time to abandon our embarrassment about giving to this epoch its proper name: the final reign of Satan.

He notes that the conservative parties of France also voted to enshrine abortion in the French constitution. Other “right-wing” movements in Europe would agree. He says nothing about American conservatives, but many of them too are pro-abortion, or support minor restrictions that still result in the murder of the unborn child.

Morello calls for a new political paradigm, and he doesn’t mince words: “The conservative-liberal, Right-Left divide means almost nothing now. There are those in the Principality of Satan and those in the Kingdom of Christ, and that is now the only division that has satisfactory explanatory power.”

Photo: Sebastian Morello via YouTube

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The Man Who Predicted Our Technology and Its Impact

March 8, 2024 By Gene Veith

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Here at the Cranach blog we like to not only predict things but check our predictions, as in our New Year’s custom. The contrarian site The Free Press has started a custom of its own by highlighting every week a “prophet” whose predictions have come true. It starts off with a fascinating article by Benjamin Carlson on Marshall McLuhan.

As I remember well, back in the Sixties, McLuhan (1911-1980) became one of those “new thinkers” who created the impression that this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. His analysis of “media,” in particular the emergent electronic media, was so “mind-blowing” it was nearly psychedelic. It heralded a utopian future of a “global village” in which all humanity is connected, thanks to technology.

Never mind that McLuhan, a Canadian who taught for awhile at St. Louis University, was a devout conservative Catholic who wrote his dissertation on the Classical Trivium (available at the link) and decried many of the changes he saw coming.

I’d like to show you some of the passages that Carlson discusses. Keep in mind that when McLuhan analyzed electronic media he was mainly thinking of television and the telephone. He died in 1980, long before the internet and artificial intelligence were gleams in anyone’s eye. And yet he was saying things like this, from a television interview:

Everybody has become porous. They’ve got the light and the messages go right through us. By the way, at this moment we are on the air, and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone, or on radio, or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. You’re just an image on the air. When you don’t have a physical body you’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. And this, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people, really, of their private identity. Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being mass man.

And now we have social media, virtual reality, and avatars! No wonder people are confused about their identity! No wonder the body doesn’t matter anymore for the transgendered, those for whom pornography replaces sex, and the spiritual-but-not-religious!

He also said this, underscoring that the “global village,” a term he coined, is not necessarily going to be a happy place:

Global village is not created by the motor car or even by the airplane. It’s created by instant electronic information movement. The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged and poking his nose into everybody else’s business. The global village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else’s business. And much involvement in everybody else’s life.

Is there a better description of Facebook, Twitter [a.k.a., X], Instagram, TikTok, and the social media world in general?

And this, from his ground-breaking book Understanding Media:

Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.

This was first published in 1964! Sixty years ago, thirty years before the worldwide web, McLuhan foresaw “the final phase of the extensions of man” (cf. the singularity): “the technological simulation of consciousness.” That is to say, Artificial Intelligence (which McLuhan is careful to say is not consciousness but the “simulation of consciousness.”)

Carlson summarizes other prescient sections of Understanding Media:

In Chapter 32, “Weapons: War of the Icons,” he anticipates a form of meme warfare, where a battle of information and images take the place of most “hot” wars.

And in the last chapter, “Automation: Learning a Living,”he foresees that in a time of automation, “it is not only jobs that disappear, and complex roles that reappear,” but also whole specialized fields in education that vanish. The result, he writes with uncanny prescience, is a blending of work and leisure, the globalization of manufacturing, the monetization of information, a rise in self-employment, and a necessity to repeatedly retrain for skills in a career.

“It is a principal aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system,” he writes, thereby “enabling us to react to the world as a whole.”

That last part has me worried lest this be a prediction with a fulfillment yet to come. A central nervous system also has a controlling brain.

The global village in many ways, McLuhan suggested, will involve a reversion to a pre-literate culture and thus to different kinds of primitivism. So will the global village that is the entire world connected into a central nervous system of electronic media be ruled by a global monarch? Or an authoritarian technological collective that controls the world and does everyone’s thinking for them?

Photo by Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer – Marshall McLuhan, half-length portrait, standing, leaning on television set on which his image appears, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=119903792

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The Need for Chaos

March 7, 2024 By Gene Veith

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We’ve been blogging about different political theories. Here is another one: Political Nihilism.

That term came up in an article about research documenting some people’s “need for chaos.” Researchers on conspiracy theories found that some people revel in and pass around stories detrimental to both sides of our polarized political landscape. This inspired more research. A cross-section of Americans were asked a series of questions including these:

“We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.”

“I need chaos around me—it is too boring if nothing is going on.”

“When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’”

As reported by Derek Thompson, in The Americans Who Need Chaos, in The Atlantic, “The researchers came up with a term to describe the motivation behind these all-purpose conspiracy mongers. They called it the ‘need for chaos,’ which they defined as ‘a mindset to gain status’ by destroying the established order.” They found that nearly a third of those surveyed express this need for chaos. About 5% go further, rejecting all sides in their “desire to see the entire political elite destroyed—even without a plan to build something better in the ashes.”

Thompson quotes from the publication of the research:

“These [need-for-chaos] individuals are not idealists seeking to tear down the established order so that they can build a better society for everyone,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. “Rather, they indiscriminately share hostile political rumors as a way to unleash chaos and mobilize individuals against the established order that fails to accord them the respect that they feel they personally deserve.” To sum up their worldview, [lead researcher Michael] Petersen quoted a famous line from the film The Dark Knight: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Comments Thompson, “Everywhere I look, I seem to find new evidence that American politics is being consumed by the flesh-eating bacteria of a new nihilism—a desire to see existing institutions destroyed, with no particular plan or interest to replace and improve them.”

As expected in an article published in The Atlantic, Thompson interviews some Trump supporters as evidence of his concern. Indeed, I’ve been hearing Republicans utter those very words in the survey as reasons for their unwavering support of the party’s standard bearer. No wonder also-ran Nikki Haley’s campaign line about how Trump brings chaos wherever he goes didn’t work for her. For a lot of voters, that’s exactly what they like about him!

But the same sentiment also exists on the Left. In fact, the study found that the largest demographic with the “need for chaos” is black males.

To be sure, when a system is totally corrupt and dysfunctional, it does need to be torn down before it can be rebuilt into something better. But you need to know what you want to build in its place. Once you unleash chaos, what can rein it in, once the old order is destroyed? Only an even greater power that will turn out to be even more oppressive than the one that was overthrown (think Napoleon after the French Revolution, Lenin after the Communist Revolution, Khomeini after the Iranian Revolution, etc.). Fortunately, the American Revolution didn’t meet that fate because its leaders dismantled the tie to the English monarchy without ever allowing the country to descend into chaos.

I invite those who are interested in political nihilism to see what that looks like today in Haiti, whose government can no longer exert its authority and the country has dissolved into indiscriminate murder and cannibalism.

Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy via Flickr, CC by 2.0

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