Escape VelocityThe world can be described by way of three overlapping geopolitical orders - military, economic, and technological. The U.S. once enjoyed dominance in all three.
After two massive blunders by the owning class - squandering post-war growth on car-centric infrastructure and abusing the post-Soviet power vacuum for an economic joyride - the U.S. must grapple with a future where it will dominate only one of those three orders.
Our "leaders" know this, and they are hedging their bets on a three-pronged policy:
1. repatriation of industry through mercantilism, automation, and intensified repression of labor
2. energy sovereignty by ramping up fossil fuel production
3. a highly automated, surveillance-driven military-industrial complex, focused almost exclusively on regime change wars and combating domestic political dissent
In other words, the U.S. oligarchy is putting all its eggs in the technofascist dystopia basket. In a lot of ways, this looks like business as usual. But the critical part is the U.S. withdrawal from a facade of international cooperation, where the limiting function of trade on its military excesses is less of a factor with each passing month. And in those excesses, the empire is overextending and *losing.*
For much of the world, the answer is clear. Decouple your future from the U.S. as quickly and deeply as possible. This is not a moral assessment, though many heads of state will frame it as that. The fact of the matter is that morality could be ignored for expediency, but only if your Mephistopheles was projected to win. So we have a global exit from U.S. hegemony, even by nations that were ride-or-die through our most hideous ventures (such as the "War On Terror"). The signal that the party has passed the crest is loud as an air raid siren.
Within the U.S., the answer to the question, "What is to be done?" is far less clear. We can't decouple from U.S. infrastructure because we live here. Instead of a simple slogan-filled boycott movement, we have military targets in our backyard and a fundamental dependency on fascist corporations to eat, drink, work, or call our mothers.
What we need is a tactical exit from our own domestic infrastructure - one that can only be accomplished by building strong alternatives. We have to deploy small-scale solar, community-supported agriculture, and right-sized infrastructure that eschews the "cloud" and the freeway as much as possible. We need to decouple human thriving on the ground from the lumbering weight of these stumbling titans. We can no longer speak in terms of simple territorial conflict, propaganda war, or even expropriation. We don't need these manipulative algorithms. We don't need this much screen time. We don't need this many roads. We don't need this many GPUs. To seize this ponderous machinery that has developed like a cancer over decades of irrational production would be more of a liability than an asset. We need to build our own shit - sufficient for maximum survival, agile enough to respond to changing conditions, and organized around practices that reflect the future we want.
Only then can we turn our gaze back upon the titans and meet them with something more than a righteous futility. The goal isn't to escape society, but to cleverly leverage its weaknesses against itself, to synthesize its contradictions into a new world altogether. We must analyze the *current* contradictions and proceed from there, not fetishize old analyses of a factory milieu that is no longer relevant here. Only by building the new world in the shell of the old can we resist the titans building the third world within the first. Only then can we look them in the eye and demand they take a knee.
#USPolitics #Technology #AI #EuropeanSocialMedia #DigitalSovereignty #DigitalAutonomy
After two massive blunders by the owning class - squandering post-war growth on car-centric infrastructure and abusing the post-Soviet power vacuum for an economic joyride - the U.S. must grapple with a future where it will dominate only one of those three orders.
Our "leaders" know this, and they are hedging their bets on a three-pronged policy:
1. repatriation of industry through mercantilism, automation, and intensified repression of labor
2. energy sovereignty by ramping up fossil fuel production
3. a highly automated, surveillance-driven military-industrial complex, focused almost exclusively on regime change wars and combating domestic political dissent
In other words, the U.S. oligarchy is putting all its eggs in the technofascist dystopia basket. In a lot of ways, this looks like business as usual. But the critical part is the U.S. withdrawal from a facade of international cooperation, where the limiting function of trade on its military excesses is less of a factor with each passing month. And in those excesses, the empire is overextending and *losing.*
For much of the world, the answer is clear. Decouple your future from the U.S. as quickly and deeply as possible. This is not a moral assessment, though many heads of state will frame it as that. The fact of the matter is that morality could be ignored for expediency, but only if your Mephistopheles was projected to win. So we have a global exit from U.S. hegemony, even by nations that were ride-or-die through our most hideous ventures (such as the "War On Terror"). The signal that the party has passed the crest is loud as an air raid siren.
Within the U.S., the answer to the question, "What is to be done?" is far less clear. We can't decouple from U.S. infrastructure because we live here. Instead of a simple slogan-filled boycott movement, we have military targets in our backyard and a fundamental dependency on fascist corporations to eat, drink, work, or call our mothers.
What we need is a tactical exit from our own domestic infrastructure - one that can only be accomplished by building strong alternatives. We have to deploy small-scale solar, community-supported agriculture, and right-sized infrastructure that eschews the "cloud" and the freeway as much as possible. We need to decouple human thriving on the ground from the lumbering weight of these stumbling titans. We can no longer speak in terms of simple territorial conflict, propaganda war, or even expropriation. We don't need these manipulative algorithms. We don't need this much screen time. We don't need this many roads. We don't need this many GPUs. To seize this ponderous machinery that has developed like a cancer over decades of irrational production would be more of a liability than an asset. We need to build our own shit - sufficient for maximum survival, agile enough to respond to changing conditions, and organized around practices that reflect the future we want.
Only then can we turn our gaze back upon the titans and meet them with something more than a righteous futility. The goal isn't to escape society, but to cleverly leverage its weaknesses against itself, to synthesize its contradictions into a new world altogether. We must analyze the *current* contradictions and proceed from there, not fetishize old analyses of a factory milieu that is no longer relevant here. Only by building the new world in the shell of the old can we resist the titans building the third world within the first. Only then can we look them in the eye and demand they take a knee.
#USPolitics #Technology #AI #EuropeanSocialMedia #DigitalSovereignty #DigitalAutonomy
UnassumingKiwi