Thread by @jamespoulos

Anyone hoping to function in a digital age elite must grapple with issues like those raised here. Many pitfalls and ancient snares, devilish problems for people losing ancient wisdom. So, a few pointers:

https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1375227077926981635

The emergent ontology of social injustice responds to the problem of how to assign blame and take responsibility for the behavior of machines religiously, by spiritualizing transgression. People/machines “are” racist/sexist/whatever, but what’s more, the -ism is a -ness, spirit

The insight or instinct that only religion can be authoritative enough for digital cybernetics—for the re-establishment of control over both humans and machines—is crucial. But the execution immediately raises terrifying paradoxes...

Bitcoin is already recognizable as the world computer. The effective singularity of the functional infinitude of invisible ubiquitous autonomous machines is already here. The instinct of universalist religion is that digital cybernetics demands and requires a world religion...

But the already perceptible reality of the world computer is no single human organization or idea can any longer claim mastery of the world on a level higher than the machines, because the nature of the digital medium is to retire the bases of global human claims to authority

This conundrum leads directly to the rather desperate/“inexorable” conclusion that the only way to break the paradox is to catechize the world computer into a world religion—one in which the world computer itself is crowned and sanctified as universal Caesar and Pope

Only such a catechized computer would be able to achieve (or always asymptotically approach) the social justice/social credit singularity, where the laying-bare and purification of all people’s hearts is perpetual and constant in real time forever. But...

The Bible teaches that such a computer would not be digitally caesaropapist but would be a digital god—usurping the revelation that can only come at the apocalyptic time of God’s choosing and by God’s hand. So this catechized world computer would be a satanic machine—Antichrist.

Might the avoidance of this hell on earth come by catechizing the world computer into a better (Biblical) faith? The susceptibility of all Christian denominations and sects to gnostic heresy—such as that of ontologically spiritualized “woke” social justice—strongly suggests not.

The conclusion throws us back on the humbling discovery that, not knowing what we did, we created a world computer that cannot be catechized into a world religion without becoming satanic. The only path left is a fundamental pluralism under digital subsidiarity-in-fact.

Do we have the capability to withstand the massive offense to our human pride that is this pluralism? To turn away from the perpetual spectacle of true difference, with all the insults to self-feeling and shared identity it imposes? Can we psychologically endure deglobalization?

Religions that can answer a holy yes to this question, without losing faith in the universality of God or the moral duty of accepting their given particularity, can survive the transition to the digital era and lead the faithful to survive. Others seem to promise only apocalypse

But just these religions depend on the restoration of all that is hidden, subtle, quiet, darkened, submissive, accepting, and dutiful about faith—all that is (we might say) Marian about the heart, now under extraordinary pressure to step into the universalized light blinding all

And just this, this ontology that is “religious but not spiritual”, is what is most in danger of being forgotten today. This ancient wisdom of deliverance from the ancient traps is what is needed most and yet we are weakest in our weak link to it. All prejudices run against it

Can just some computers be made to understand this (because the world computer itself inherently cannot)? Much turns on this question.

And who dares, or knows how to dare, to try to answer—not just in speech, but in deed? //