Thread by @jamespoulos

For months I’ve been telling all who can hear (including Congress) that the Russian civilization-state’s response to the digital catastrophe was signaled by its construction of a vast cathedral announcing a new and deeper relationship between the church and the armed forces. 🧵

The catastrophe in its geopolitical form is the obsolescence of any regime unable to establish sovereignty on digital ground. This has to do with the Main Cathedral of the Armed Forces as the catastrophe in its anthropological form retrieves the theological character of reality.

That retrieval is due to digital making foundational and reopening once again the ultimate questions about who and why we are and why we should bother with any of it—our life, our humanity, our sanity, our suffering. Questions (post)modern word games and feelings fail to answer

Now Russia has a loooong tradition wrestling with these questions under the burden of its artificially and violently accelerated “transition” into modernity and all that comes after, including the desperate monomaniacal promises of technological deliverance from all human limits

Putin—universally accused in “western” media of “only understanding force,” a willfully bogus and ignorant claim applied to a man marked most by the immensity of his focus on rebuilding Russia’s theological culture and identity—knows the harsh costs of these promises well. But…

Russia and Putin are of course hardly anti-technological as such. So uncanny and scary now to the postmodernized modernized West is the spectacle looming out of Russia of an ineradicably ancient Christian civilization state natively refounded in the digital age on digital ground.

For not only does that “western” faction loathe Christianity, especially Russia’s, for the theological and anthropological limits it places on the faction’s ambitions, appetites, and corruption. The faction itself is racing to digitally refound the “west” via its own new theology

This theology is now plainly disclosed as a certain trans-to-posthuman one, a cyborg mutant of post-Anglican, post-Lutheran, and post-Anabaptist theologies processed through the communist idea that the only remaining or true politics is social mastery via fusing fantasy and tech

Aside from the manifest horrors and violations of this approach, much of which Russia has already suffered as an invading and despoiling force, it is to say the least not the only option we face for accepting the digital triumph over the world and our inner and outer lives

Indeed even Russia has a transhumanist tradition of sorts in Cosmism. There is no escaping the reality now that our humanity cannot be utterly purged or purified of intimate relations with digital technology. The horror today is one “western” faction insists its approach rule all

This faction holds sway—shaky, palsied, but sway nonetheless—over most “western” regimes now, against the will and wish of many of the peoples it rules. It hungers for a decisive confrontation with Russia because it sees Russia’s theological approach to digital as a primal threat

But in fact the digital triumph over the world shows clearly that no person or people no matter how expert or ethical or monomaniacal can rule the whole world, incarnate or digital. Civilization states past the post of digital refounding cannot be destroyed.

The “western” faction denying this core reality plays with a fire it refuses in fear and loathing to respect or understand. People grasp digital may yet strengthen us if we who wield it spiritually master being human rather than instrumentally master humanity. A theological task.

That’s all for now. Thanks for considering and contemplating. We can, in the end, do this