Burton was the first White House employee with an official Twitter account, preceded in his position by Jen Psaki
Luminate’s CEO is Stephen King, former chief of an organization that looks like, but isn’t exactly, the BBC
It’s actually an independent node for large scale media operations funded by elites in and out of government
Center for Humane Technology has a laundry list of involved parties, including “generous lead supporters” like the Open Society Foundations
…and, perhaps predictably, among “founding allies, key advisors, and community:”
This suggests what was clear at the outset: Operation Frances is a coordinated high level effort to do something dramatic to Facebook. But it further suggests this “something” involves a deeply trans-Anglosphere project to use tech to establish a single new form of governance.
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“One technology created within the digital medium has arisen with a clear and already well-functioning capability to move us past the passive faith in algorithmic fiat that today characterizes the approaching singularity of weaponized information...”
“back into the position of human beings extending rather than eliminating our senses and faculties to conduct arms-length but trustably face-to-face collaborative work in culture creation and valuation. This is bitcoin...”
I think a lot about Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, and Nikephoras II Phokas, Eastern Roman Emperor.
While I can’t substantiate it, the story about Nikephoras is that he wanted to canonize fallen soldiers himself and the Patriarch said no. Henry, as is known, wanted to invest bishops with sacred authority himself and was also negged, ultimately renouncing claim to select popes.
The question of whether holy emperors could take secular control of religious appointments appears likely to have come to a general head around the turn of the millennium. In Christendom the outcome expressed for the answer a powerful no.
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:
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...
A certain strain of intelligent tech criticism warns that passive acceptance of data determinism kills human creativity and leads to civilization necrosis. But...
this insight is unfortunately highly susceptible to being absorbed into the idea that only our divine-like powers of boundless imagination differentiate us from the bots and therefore are the only things that can save us...
the difficult reality is that our faculties of imagination are not magical or godlike in the sense of infinite or salvific power; in fact it is this reality above all that our bots ram home every instant with accumulating inescapable force...
Hasn’t been easy to grasp China—on one hand, a masculine, vein-popping national communist regime against American interest; on another, something softer, deeper, wiser than what’s sensed and portrayed in the West. But this seeming contradiction is key to understanding China...
What is native—original—to the Chinese civilization-state?
How does China see the logic of its imports and the trajectory of their harmonization with what is native to the civilization-state?
A type of liberalism is independent of and prior to the abstract apparatus of liberal experts trying to make the world conform to their perfection of it in speech...
That of meeting your neighbors as you find them in the unending labor of building and tending our shared environs
This liberalism, premodern in its origins, is inimical to the discourse-ruling class—which sees it as flatly unethical and an existential threat to “the world” as they would construct and dominate it
Liberals—regardless of what happens this election season—need to rise up against the “managed democracy” imposed by the decadent and failing discourse-ruling class. To retvrn to a liberalism global but not globalist—real and imperfect, not a pure fantasy. Door wide open.