Reading the comments after the article, I'm reminded of Alan Moore's Watchmen, specifically the crystalline perfection of Dr Manhattan's utopian paradise on the moon. I think it was the moon. And of course the ending, with Rorschach still there like a stubbornly uncatchable flea, a pest ready, willing and able to multiply prodigiously and spread disorder and mess.
Now I'm remembering Mao's Four Pests, in which he declared war on mosquitoes, flies, sparrows and rats. And caused untold misery and suffering, of course.
Then there's the symbology of 666 itself, the Number of the Beast. Jonathan Pageau interprets this as denoting a wild excess of human technology (6 being the number of man in Cabala apparently), manifested as a hubristic attempt to master everything with engineering skill and merciless, icy control of all actions and behaviours. Bureaucracy in other words.
I bet this dynamic is present throughout civilisational history. Question is, what can we do about it? Or is trying to Do Something About It partaking of the very hubristic arrogance we seek to reject? Should it, then, be repeatedly left alone to implode around its own folly (as the WEF is hopefully now being obliging enough to do)? Need we merely survive each 666 iteration and hope nuclear holocaust never happens?
"The Auditors of Reality are fictional godlike beings in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of fantasy novels. They are one of the major recurring villains in the series, although they lack the necessary imagination to be evil.
The Auditors of Reality are supernatural entities and the celestial bureaucrats. They make sure that gravity works, file the appropriate paperwork for each chemical reaction, and so forth. The Auditors hate life, because it's messy and unpredictable, which makes them fall behind on their paperwork; they much prefer barren balls of rock orbiting stars in neat, easily predictable elliptical paths. They really hate humans and other sentient beings, who are much more messy and unpredictable than other living things..."
Implicit in this outline of the concept of rendering the physical and sociological terrain of civilization legible via engineering and cataloging is the question of the effect of social media technology. Legibility seems to involve two processes: description, and reformating. In other words, first the territory is mapped; then a new map is drawn up, and the territory made to conform to it. Social media enables highly granular psychological models of individual users as well as their social networks. That's the mapping part. However, the algorithms also enable direct manipulation of individual psychologies and group social dynamics: the imposition of a new map on the terrain. Point being, social media not only makes humans more transparent to the managerial class, it also gives that class an unprecedented opportunity to reengineer human psychology to be more compatible with transparency and, hence, optimize it for control by that class.
fn2 "His analysis of the many grand social engineering projects of what he calls high-modernism are that they failed, often causing tremendous harm, and invoking grassroots resistance, precisely because they attempted to impose an abstractly derived, inflexibly engineered formula upon a dynamic and unique set of distinct local circumstances."
Sounds like quite an indictment of Le Corbusier and all of his ilk. They should ALL have been guillotined.
Reading the comments after the article, I'm reminded of Alan Moore's Watchmen, specifically the crystalline perfection of Dr Manhattan's utopian paradise on the moon. I think it was the moon. And of course the ending, with Rorschach still there like a stubbornly uncatchable flea, a pest ready, willing and able to multiply prodigiously and spread disorder and mess.
Now I'm remembering Mao's Four Pests, in which he declared war on mosquitoes, flies, sparrows and rats. And caused untold misery and suffering, of course.
Then there's the symbology of 666 itself, the Number of the Beast. Jonathan Pageau interprets this as denoting a wild excess of human technology (6 being the number of man in Cabala apparently), manifested as a hubristic attempt to master everything with engineering skill and merciless, icy control of all actions and behaviours. Bureaucracy in other words.
I bet this dynamic is present throughout civilisational history. Question is, what can we do about it? Or is trying to Do Something About It partaking of the very hubristic arrogance we seek to reject? Should it, then, be repeatedly left alone to implode around its own folly (as the WEF is hopefully now being obliging enough to do)? Need we merely survive each 666 iteration and hope nuclear holocaust never happens?
Questions, questions...
I keep thinking of Pratchett's Auditors of Reality - https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Auditors_of_Reality:
"The Auditors of Reality are fictional godlike beings in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of fantasy novels. They are one of the major recurring villains in the series, although they lack the necessary imagination to be evil.
The Auditors of Reality are supernatural entities and the celestial bureaucrats. They make sure that gravity works, file the appropriate paperwork for each chemical reaction, and so forth. The Auditors hate life, because it's messy and unpredictable, which makes them fall behind on their paperwork; they much prefer barren balls of rock orbiting stars in neat, easily predictable elliptical paths. They really hate humans and other sentient beings, who are much more messy and unpredictable than other living things..."
Implicit in this outline of the concept of rendering the physical and sociological terrain of civilization legible via engineering and cataloging is the question of the effect of social media technology. Legibility seems to involve two processes: description, and reformating. In other words, first the territory is mapped; then a new map is drawn up, and the territory made to conform to it. Social media enables highly granular psychological models of individual users as well as their social networks. That's the mapping part. However, the algorithms also enable direct manipulation of individual psychologies and group social dynamics: the imposition of a new map on the terrain. Point being, social media not only makes humans more transparent to the managerial class, it also gives that class an unprecedented opportunity to reengineer human psychology to be more compatible with transparency and, hence, optimize it for control by that class.
fn2 "His analysis of the many grand social engineering projects of what he calls high-modernism are that they failed, often causing tremendous harm, and invoking grassroots resistance, precisely because they attempted to impose an abstractly derived, inflexibly engineered formula upon a dynamic and unique set of distinct local circumstances."
Sounds like quite an indictment of Le Corbusier and all of his ilk. They should ALL have been guillotined.