10 The free and open Internet versus the ecological apocalypse

Everything is religion, but everything is also politics. And politics is religion, and religion is to a high degree politics. Without utopias there are no visions, and without visions there is no collective and organised hope of a better life in a society that has undergone desirable changes. In a society without utopias, cynical isolationism reigns supreme in the public arena. For this reason, such a society is the most dangerous society of all. Each and every person at the most cares about herself and her loved ones, but displays a programmatic disinterest in how everyone else fares. This lack of social cohesion sooner or later leads to societal collapse within all key areas. The opposite of utopia is, as we know, dystopia. The approaching ecological apocalypse has emerged as our time’s great and dominant dystopia. The fateful question that will be decisive for the 21st century is how the approaching ecological apocalypse is to be prevented or at least tackled in order to ameliorate or postpone it if possible.

We thus live in an age that lacks a credible utopia, but that at the same time is coloured by a doomsday narrative that is every bit as powerful as it is threatening in the political discourse. Environmental issues are constantly on the agenda, as is the collective guilty conscience because these issues are constantly being down-prioritised by politicians who instead give priority to short-term measures on hip-pocket issues, measures that might perhaps yield the odd job opportunity but that also damage or preclude the necessary improvements in the environment. The growing plurarchy in a society where everyone talks at cross purposes, and increasingly vociferously focuses on pseudo-issues, evokes a paralysing state of hypercynicism (see The Netocrats). At the same time it is at precisely chaotic points in history of this type that new metaphysical systems are established – with Pauline Christianity in the crumbling Roman Empire and Kantian individualism in conjunction with the French Revolution as two very clear examples – and there is no reason to believe that our age should be any different in this respect.

The hypercynical state is namely due to the fact that the prevailing ideological paradigm is no longer in step with its surrounding material reality. Rather, the lack of utopianism and the abundance of dystopianism is the final proof of the prevailing paradigm having reached the end of the road and lost all remaining remnants of relevance. The central dilemma is quite simply not the surrounding material reality – even if it constantly produces a never-ending stream of problems to manage – but the prevailing ideological drought. What is needed is a new metaphysical story that is more relevant for the new age than the old one, where the dystopia is replaced by a credible utopia that includes the prevention of the dystopia becoming a reality. It is in fact not enough to just paint a picture of a powerful dystopia and moralise about all who are making it real with their opinions and behaviours. Because in the subconscious, the human being is ultimately driven by the drive.html">death drive and the masochistic enjoyment of arranging one’s own extinction. According to this logic, eco-moralism is accelerating and affirming the ecological dystopia rather than preventing or mitigating against it, which eco-moralism believes and claims that it wants to do. The dystopia must instead be used as a lever in order to achieve an open and contingent landscape of creativity and intensity, directed towards the future and the syntheist utopia.

All political ideologies under the capitalist paradigm are fundamentally individualistic. Conservatism maintains that the authentic individual has existed, but that she has unfortunately been lost and must be restored by a return to the past. Anarchism maintains that the individual is the purpose and meaning of existence and that the influence of politics must be minimised in order to liberate the individual’s spontaneous and innate capacity for self-realisation. Liberalism is anarchism’s older and more pragmatic relative, and it differs from anarchism by maintaining that the individual’s self-realisation is metaphysically connected to ownership of the Kantian object. The liberal fantasy thus distinguishes itself from the anarchist fantasy through its special fixation on requiring that all assets must be owned by one or a few specific individuals in order to be ennobled into ever-more complex atoms and reduce liberalism’s metaphysical reward, growth. Therefore, in contrast to the anarchist, the liberal maintains that the law and the State are needed in order to protect all the belongings that are the object of individuals’ fetishism. Socialism also claims to fight for the individual’s self-realisation, but it sees the conservative class system as the obstacle to this utopia, where the upper class’s control over society’s most important resources and its refusal to share power and wealth must be rectified. What distinguishes democratic socialism from the revolutionary variety is how one answers the question of what is the most efficient and at the same time most ethically correct route to the common objective: that the working class lay their hands on the abundance of the upper class, which in turn means that one achieves the classless society. This is the objective that socialists of all stripes share: the individual’s self-realisation and liberation from the shackles of the class system through the ultimate triumph of communism.

This means that if syntheism is to be successful in establishing itself as the metaphysics of the Internet age, it must be constructed on the foundation of an entirely new utopia; an idea that in contrast to individualism in all its forms has credibility in the network society, where the individual is reduced to a curious remnant from a distant past. It must create the hope of the impossible being possible, even for informationalism’s people. Naturally syntheism has no chance of accomplishing this if it were to start from a capitalist perspective, since individualism is just as dead within philosophy as atomism is dead within physics. Syntheism’s utopia must instead be formulated as the consummate network dynamics. And how could a network be consummate, if it were not free and open to the surrounding world and the future in a contingent and relationalist universe?

In the same way that cosmologists and quantum physicists strive for agreement on a theory of everything in physics, syntheologists are working towards constructing a social theory of everything for informationalism. What is striking about the syntheist utopia is that it cannot be formulated beforehand – since it is located in a contingent and indeterministic universe – which means that instead it must be practised before it is articulated. Therefore it is of central importance for both syntheist ethics and creative development that the ideas in a society are not kept locked away behind virtual firewalls or towers of legal papers, but that they can be exchanged in complete freedom between the active dividuals on the Internet. The syntheist utopia is thus first and foremost a society where ideas are free and are not owned by anybody, where the memes form memeplexes that wander freely from human to human, from network to network, and are transformed during these movements without being met with any resistance whatsoever anywhere, apart from the lack of attention that sifts out all memetic losers. Therefore, the digital integrity movement receives the syntheist movement’s full support as the necessary path to this state, which we consequently call utopian memetics.

The healing potential of the syntheist faith shines most brightly when strangers are randomly brought together around their common humanity in the temporary utopia, such as at the spontaneous meetings that occur on the playa at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, possibly the largest remaining meeting place in the world where an exchange of calling cards would be regarded as vulgar and sacrilegious. It is there and then that the syntheist dream of the religious intersubject is realised. A you and an I become an emergent we that is tangibly far greater than the sum of its parts, and the proof that this is the case is that, if anything, the we is strengthened by the spontaneous meeting’s participants going their separate ways. The you and the I don’t just become the we, they also become directly interchangeable with each other; agentiality within the phenomenon is set in motion, reshaped and radicalised, and expands.

The sudden synchronisation between the subjects in the temporary utopia is strengthened rather than weakened over time, since the memory of the infinite now in the loving meeting between strangers in an environment from which instrumentality has been removed just grows and grows. And it is precisely in this memory of an ecstasy directly linked to the religious belonging that the syntheist intersubject is born and grows. When all other social factors are eliminated, it is in this, the most random of all meetings – without any other binding connections between people than the syntheist faith – that the manifestation of Syntheos shines the brightest. So what are our age’s local eco-villages and global participatory festivals (Burning Man, Going Nowhere, The Borderland, etc.) if not in fact experimental, temporary utopias that point forward towards and provide a tangible notion of the permanent utopia?

Outside the temporary utopia, however, we live in an age where the collective world view is crumbling due to the sheer infirmity of old age. History is beyond our control. The only thing that remains when plurarchy becomes widely accepted is the virtual subculture’s fractionalised planet. Human life on the planet can only be saved by an initial, and subsequently gradually increasing, physical monastisation. Therefore a specific subculture is required that sees saving the planet as a whole for human life as its mission, and which realises that this work, in order to have a chance of succeeding, must start with a radical distancing from the individualist paradigm and its programmatic atomism, capitalism and expansionism. Out of this necessary negation rises the utopian idea of theological anarchism: the dream of a sustainable society beyond the nation state and capitalist expansionism. However, in the same way that Karl Marx defines socialism as the necessary path to communism, we must assume that there is an experimental practice, oriented towards utopia on the road to theological anarchism. As a spontaneously arisen movement from spontaneously arisen needs in the shadow of spontaneously arisen technological complexes, syntheism is precisely such a practice. Suddenly the movement is simply there: as the emergent answer to the new era’s strongest human needs it is realised through an innovative use of new, disruptive technologies. All that is needed is that the syntheist memeplex, in as refined a form as possible, drops into the new communication-technology reality and spreads itself.

Political ideology in the Internet age has two metaphysical starting points. First of all, there is the enormous expansion of the Internet and takeover of power that opens the arena for an antagonism between the rising netocracy – which with the aid of its ever-more powerful networks wants to liberate information flows – and the marginalised bourgeoisie, which with its nation states and major corporations wants to fence in and control information flows. And, secondly, there is the approaching ecological apocalypse, which absolutely must be averted if humanity is to survive at all. The syntheist politician is therefore first and foremost an environmentalist netocrat. But in order for syntheism to succeed in realising its ambition of opening the door to theological anarchism, it is being forced to take on the conflict with the old capitalist power structure, which consists of the nation states and the big global corporations.

In order for syntheism to be able to defeat the statist-corporatist establishment and its dysfunctional, apocalyptic and hypercynical metaphysics, syntheists – as the American philosopher Terence McKenna prophetically claims in a speech at the University of California in Berkeley as early as 1984, eight years before the World Wide Web saw the light of day – must have free and unlimited access to its keenest weapon, the free and open Internet. McKenna argues that the free and open Internet quite simply is humanity’s only chance to save the planet for human life by enabling a longed-for and long-needed counterweight to the eschatological drive which is built into capitalism. For this reason, the first action of the syntheist theory of everything is to unite late capitalism’s two new political mass movements, environmentalism and the digital integrity movement, under one and the same roof. It is hardly a coincidence that these two movements are arising in the same places in the world – namely in Northern Europe and along the coasts of North American – since it is in these places that the expansion of the Internet is most powerful, psychedelic experimentation most extensive, and thus the insight into the planet’s vulnerability is being disseminated most rapidly and is gaining first a foothold. These two movements are, quite simply, two sides of the same metaphysical coin, and it is syntheism that is the coin itself.

The key issue when we are talking about a free and open Internet is of course how much transparency a society should and can handle. It is then important to understand that the problem with transparency is never the transparency itself – to confess, to lay bare one’s heart of hearts for one’s fellow sisters and brothers in the community, is also a holy act within syntheism – but how it affects the network pyramid in question, that is, who lays himself bare for whom and thereby risks, at least in the short-term, a possible loss of power first? Does the current transparentisation strengthen the top, middle or bottom of the prevailing power structure in the society? Is the power structure levelled out in the direction of the syntheist utopia’s radical equality, or is the prevailing power structure reinforced in such a way that social inequality is preserved?

We seek the answers to these questions for example in the French philosopher Michael Foucault’s pragmatist ethics: If the transparentisation begins from the top down – that is, if it is the rulers who have all of their secrets exposed first – it can be implemented painlessly throughout the entire power structure from the top and all the way down. On the other hand, if the transparentisation begins from the bottom up, the consequence will no doubt be a capitalist police state, and thereby – apart from all the other misery that such a development would entail – the ecological apocalypse would soon be unavoidable. It is the citizens who must first know everything about the activities of the nation state and the major corporations rather than the statist-corporatist establishment being allowed to bug and register the citizens’ opinions and preferences.

Therefore, according to syntheism the battle of WikiLeaks and other whistle-blower organisations to disclose cover-ups of the activities of people in power is a sacred project, while conversely the attempts of the nation states and the major corporations to bug and register the views of citizens represent a flagrant violation of universal, human rights. Transparentisation in an increasingly transparent society must quite simply spread from the top down by being switched on from the bottom up. The order must be the following: first the person in power bares himself, then the citizen bares herself. And it is precisely here that the antagonism between the new syntheist netocracy and the old statist-corporatist power structure becomes most apparent. The netocracy regards the Internet as a relationalist phenomenon: to be a netocrat is to identify with the network itself, to act as the Internet’s agent. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, regard the Internet as a correlationist object, alien to and hostile towards the individualist subject and therefore a troubling object that must be tamed and controlled, by force if necessary.

This explains why it is the netocracy that is driving the transparentisation of the old power structure by defending the free and open Internet – and as a consequence is seeing old nation states and major corporations lose their unmotivated and ethically objectionable upper hand in terms of power – while the old bourgeoisie moralise against the freedom and equality on the Internet and frenetically try to control and domesticate the Net in order to be able to thereby defend their own positions of power with the aid of their information advantage. This is the 3rd millennium’s great political conflict, and as the Internet age’s built-in metaphysics there is hardly any doubt about which side syntheism chooses to stand on. The world needs more, not fewer, whistleblowers, and the frenzy with which they are hounded, bad-mouthed and punished is a clear indication of the statist-corporatist establishment’s understanding of the value of what is at stake.

From the 1960s onwards, individualism and its ally atomism are put under enormous pressure from a new supra-ideology: relationalism and its partner network dynamics. The capitalist patriarchy – from Napoleon onwards, probably the most evident individualist power structure – is attacked by feminism, which puts forth demands for equality between the sexes, and thereafter by the queer movement, with its requirements of equality between people of different sexual orientations and identities. The feminists represent female individuals’ interests, and the queer movement is fighting for sexually divergent individuals’ civil rights. This means, of course, that both these movements are still fundamentally individualist. The criticism against the patriarchy thus has come from inside the individualist paradigm. But the argumentation contains numerous network-dynamical arguments, for example that the woman’s freedom is also the man’s freedom from patriarchy, and that the liberation of homo- and transsexuals also entails the liberation of heterosexuals from narrow and repressive heteronormativity. The dividualist criticism thus begins from inside individualism – through informationalism liberating new desires and drives in the collective subconscious and thereby exposing the shortcomings of individualism – in order to slowly but surely establish a new, independent paradigm where the old individual is dead.

However, the first relationalist attack on the individualist paradigm comes from environmentalism in the form of its aggressive demands that capitalism’s environmental destruction and ruthless plundering of resources must cease. Environmentalism is clearly based on a network dynamics theory without any focus whatsoever on isolated individuals or atoms. Here, the planet is regarded as a more or less closed system, which must be treated as just such a system, since all individual agents and nodes are completely subservient to the overarching network. Therefore environmentalism gives priority to the network over the individual; for the first time in these contexts Man is reduced from an individual to a dividual. And thereby clear ethical boundaries are set for what the human being can and cannot do in relation to the dynamic network’s interests. Environmentalism is a globalism, since a national environmental policy is in principle meaningless, and it must by necessity fight for the global solidarity which, in a network-dynamics theory, includes not just people but also plants, animals and natural diversity in itself. Quite logically, environmentalism begins to replace socialism as the seat of radicalism.

But if environmentalism is the most powerful reaction directed towards the old paradigm’s destructive drive.html">death drive, it is only with the fight for the free and open Internet that we observe the growth of a political ideology that is grounded in the new paradigm’s utopian possibilities rather than in the old paradigm’s dystopian variants. In its capacity as a negation of capitalism, environmentalism is a parallel to atheism in the history of metaphysics. The digital integrity movement on the other hand is a dialectic negation of the negation, and is thereby to be regarded as a parallel movement to syntheism. Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Pirate Party and one of the digital integrity movement’s foremost pioneers, pinpoints the relationships of the movements to each other in his book Swarmwise. Environmentalism is driven by the conviction that nature’s resources are finite rather than inexhaustible, which capitalist mythology constantly assumes. At the same time, argues Falkvinge, the Pirate movement is based on the axiom that culture and knowledge that is shared without friction between people in a society where information sharing no longer incurs any surplus cost, is an infinite rather than a finite resource for the future.

The dystopia concerns itself with the finite, utopianism focuses on the infinite. Accordingly, the fight for the free and open Internet is the answer to what must be done; it is the engine that drives the new utopia rather than the brake that hinders the old dystopia. What we are talking about here is far more than just parallel phenomena in the market for the shaping public opinion: syntheism is de facto the name of the digital integrity movement’s underlying metaphysics. This explains why the fight for the free and open Internet is the central political struggle in the 21st century. All other important political conflicts that play out during, and contribute to giving colour to, informationalism’s growth, are completely dependent on how this conflict unfolds. It concerns far more than the growing netocracy’s striving to ignore the ruling bourgeoisie, which has controlled the world since the paradigm of the printing press gained broad acceptance. Beyond the fight for the free and open Internet, the approaching ecological apocalypse is rearing its ugly head: a potential catastrophe that capitalism is responsible for and at the same time evidently lacks the ability to prevent.

There is a risk of planet Earth becoming uninhabitable for human beings within a few generations – many of the various deleterious effects for which humans are responsible are already irreparable – unless this development leading towards the ecological apocalypse is halted and steered in an environmentally friendly direction. We already know how the capitalist society governed from the top-down, with individualism as the State religion, is managing the ecological apocalypse; this insidious catastrophe has of course been created by this system, which has subsequently shown that it is unable to rectify the damage. On the other hand, the growing and aspiring netocracy has a burning interest in saving the Earth for human life – and moreover access to a considerable arsenal of new communications tools with which to do this – in contrast to the cynical and resigned bourgeoisie. The free and open Internet is therefore a necessary milestone in order for ecological salvation to be possible at all.

In October 2013, it was revealed that the US intelligence organisation NSA had bugged, among many others, the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, continuously for five years without the knowledge of the US President Barack Obama. It is difficult to think of a clearer illustration of how the democratic system de facto has collapsed under late capitalism and has now definitively morphed into a chaotic plurarchy. If an intelligence agency can grab the power from elected representatives, the word democracy loses all meaning. This is no longer about a democracy but about a massive, paranoid bureaucracy that does not need to take into account at all any form of democratic or even judicial influence over how certain State agencies operate. Late capitalism’s obsession with security, which is constantly mistaken for safety, could hardly have been exposed any more clearly. Therefore the capitalist power complex of nation states and major corporations has only one priority for the future: commandeering and controlling the Internet.

The statist-corporatist establishment understands the Internet as a disagreeable and unruly hydra – moreover extremely difficult to handle when it comes to exploiting information flows and making money (see The Netocrats) – that constantly disrupts and is gradually eroding the foundations of the patriarchal fantasies of omnipotence of politicians and business leaders. Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical concept of the real could hardly be more fitting than when it comes to describing the digital hydra that is creeping up on the old patriarch and threatening to expose the latter’s mental nakedness. For the rapidly growing netocracy however, the Internet is a sacred phenomenon, both for the netocracy per se and for its desire to save the planet for the survival of humanity. The truth is of course that the more time passes, the more alternative contingency plans collapse; and accordingly the closer humanity comes to the ecological apocalypse, the more clearly the free and open Internet emerges as the only tool with which the planet can be saved for human life. In an information, communication and network society, ecological salvation must occur through information, communication and networking in order to have a chance of succeeding. There are no other options. Therefore the insight that the free and open Internet is the only conceivable ecological saviour is growing steadily ever-stronger.

What is striking in the information-technology writing of history is how Man hardly changes at all over time. Our genes are largely identical with our ancestors’ genes from 50,000 years ago. It is our technological environment that has undergone an incredibly dramatic change over the past 5,000 years, while we ourselves must be content with the same cognitive and intellectual equipment that people had back then. Five thousand years is quite simply an all too short time period: it spans an all too small number of generations for any dramatically significant mutations in our genetic make-up to be able to arise. In addition, during the last few decades technological development has undergone an unprecedented acceleration, not least when it comes to information technologies. This means that Man is the constant and technology is the variable in the information-technology writing of history.

The capitalism writing of history, on the other hand, is based on an axiom that is called meliorism. Meliorism argues that there is an objective development over time, that objectively speaking civilisation moves forwards and upwards. It is not just technology that is developed by becoming increasingly complex and with an increasing capacity to solve ever-greater problems ever-more adroitly and cheaply. According to meliorism, the syntheist constant Man is also developing over time and is moving forwards and upwards. Consequently, there should be some kind of ongoing mystical ennobling even of Man himself throughout history. Thanks to meliorism’s widespread popularity, we are saddled with generationism, the idea that every new generation is intellectually superior to the preceding one. Generationism is not as widely questioned and attacked in contemporary political discourse as misogyny, racism or homophobia. But it is just as widespread and superstitious, and at least as socially destructive.

One of the problems is that the innocent victims of generationism are absent and cannot speak for themselves when they are attacked, since they are either too old to make much of a fuss, or have already passed away. But generationism’s negative consequences for its adherents remain, and the idea of the innate and unquestioned excellence of one’s own generation is one of the most dangerous and destructive ideas throughout history; it both precedes and augments virtually all great social crises. What is so unpleasant is that the generationist myth has never been made so invisible and at the same time, and in part precisely for that very reason, has never before been so powerful either, as in our time. The problem is that the person who believes himself to be superior to previous generations also believes that he has nothing to learn from them and is thereby doomed to repeat their mistakes.

It is important to understand that humanism, including all of its political ideologies such as liberalism and socialism, takes meliorism for granted as a basic axiom. However, it is sufficient to study human genetics throughout history in order to be able to determine that empirically meliorism is entirely a myth – a kind of failed post-Christian self-salvation doctrine for humanity – which among other things must be held accountable for all kinds of eugenic human betterment miseries under capitalism. The problem here is that liberal heroism is an impossibility. The liberal can never be a hero, at least not in her capacity as a liberal. This is for the simple reason that liberalism includes rather than excludes the totalitarian tendency in its incessant, utilitarian calculating – if nothing else works to defend its position of power, liberalism de facto has no built-in barriers against the totalitarian ambition within itself – which in turn means that it lacks a functioning immune system against outbursts of totalitarianism.

Time after time throughout history it has been shown that, as soon as they find themselves under the slightest external pressure, liberal societies rapidly transform into totalitarian power apparatuses that shy away from both public accountability and democratically elected control. This applies not least to the country that, more than any other, has acted as the emblem of liberal democracy, the USA. This once proud defender of universal freedom – in pace with an increasing number of hysterical narratives of fabricated external threats having been put forward – has been reduced to a lobby-controlled plurarchy in the hands of religious extremists and intelligence bureaucrats that operate in secret, backed up by interests that represent an enormous and thus depleting drain on resources (such as the NSA). It has gone so far that it is no longer the dream of individual freedom that is the engine in the American identity, but instead the collective paranoia. To be an American is no longer about being a citizen in the land of the free and the home of the brave on Earth, but is nowadays equivalent to an overindulgence in paranoid conspiracy theories.

Liberal multiculturalism and religious fundamentalism are consistently described as being each other’s opposites. In reality, they are two sides of the same dysfunctional coin: cynical isolationism. At the same time, the lack of religiosity within liberal multiculturalism means that it is unable to understand and refute the onslaught of religious fundamentalism from inside its own ideology. In the eyes of the fundamentalist, liberalism is dead and only religion can offer a utopian hope. This means that only syntheism – or for that matter any other system of ideas with built-in room for transcendental ecstasy and the dissolution of the ego that is its desired effect – can refute fundamentalism and constitute a solid foundation for an alternative, genuinely emancipatory politics.

The dark underside explains why, on closer inspection, liberal democracy lacks incentives to defend the free and open Internet, and why if anything it is developing into netocracy’s most aggressive enemy. Because one of liberalism’s basic tenets is, in fact, that individual people – liberalism likes to call them individuals, and not without good reason – are so different from each other that every material form of mutual sympathy is precluded by definition. This is in spite of psychoanalysis teaching that the differences within the divided subject are greater than the differences between people. This has the consequence that if the mythology of liberalism is to be taken seriously, self-love is an impossibility. And without genuine self-love, there is no heroism either. Quite logically and consistently, syntheism’s monist and holistic dividual is therefore the radical opposite of liberalism’s dualist and divided individual.

The catastrophic meliorist utopias of the 20th century – Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism – finally force the philosophers to wake up and realise meliorism’s responsibility for the totalitarian delusions about human nature and its possibilities. From the Frankfurt School in the 1930s onwards, criticism is first of all voiced against the myth of progress and thereafter ever more strongly against the entire, worshipped project of the Enlightenment, from Kant and onwards. Syntheist metaphysics consistently breaks with the meliorist fantasy. Progress as a driving notion is a capitalist myth just as much as eternity as a driving notion is a feudal myth. According to the syntheist approach, no objectively valid progress exists. Objectively speaking, there is only change for change’s own sake and, from the beginnings of permanent settlements and onwards, history is mainly to be regarded as a contingent, growing information-technology complex and nothing else. The number of memes that surround us has indeed exploded and reached a scale that is impossible to survey, just as their speed of circulation has escalated beyond all limits and our own ideation in most cases, but our genes in principle have not changed at all. The differences in Man’s lifeworld are thus only external and quantitative, rather than internal and qualitative, as the progress myth claims.

Statism, faith in the nation state’s necessary supremacy and monopoly on violence, is capitalism’s political supra-ideology. Under statism’s banner, conservatism emerges as a protector of the establishment and its interests; liberalism constitutes a faith in the individual as a rational accumulator of resources in a market governed by a mystical hand which is invisible to the naked eye; while socialism is a blind faith in the political party as a substitute for God. Obviously, the advent of informationalism puts all these ideologies into deep crisis, since it attacks the very foundation for statism by undermining the drawing of borders in an increasingly irrelevant geography, which makes accessible alternative and infinitely much more tempting possibilities in terms of identity creation. In this process, not only is meliorism exposed as a banal myth, it also loses all its power of attraction; the netocratic dividual would much rather experience herself as a constantly ongoing and dynamic event throughout life than as a representative of any kind of slowly developed and predetermined progress. The old ideologies are quite simply plagued by statism’s deterministic view of history, which no longer has any credibility in an indeterministic universe. Therefore the ideological work must be done anew, and in that case all the way up from the theological foundation.

The progress myth is closely linked to expansionism, the banal faith that phenomena such as capital accumulation can expand in all eternity without any negative side-effects for itself. But all network-dynamical systems that are driven by the myth of their own growth do of course collapse sooner or later – which the American brain researcher Jeff Stibel shows in his book Breakpoint – under pressure from the consequences arising from a quantitative expansion without qualitative consideration. This is because the network per se does not contain any critical stop function that militates against its own quantitative expansion, but instead it is driven by the deification of the same, that is, by the progress myth. What environmentalism tries to do is to install such a crucial stop function within global capitalism before it destroys its own fundamental conditions: the existence of a planet that is suitable for human survival at all. And thereby everything else as well.

In an age obsessed with syntheist network dynamics, history cannot credibly strive for either feudalist eternities or capitalist progress. Above all, the human being has of course not changed much during the course of history, at least not into something objectively better than she has been previously. For example, we use a smaller part of our brain today than we did 10,000 years ago, mainly due to the fact that more and more of the calculations and considerations essential for our lives are today outsourced to external technology instead of being managed by the brain in-house. This fact kills meliorism. Syntheist utopianism instead focuses on planning for the definitive event, informationalism’s fundamental metaphysical idea. For this reason syntheists are fighting for both the free and open Internet with its anarchist information flows and against the ecological apocalypse in order to save the fundamental prerequisite for human survival, the planet itself. That in addition social policy must be pursued based on the principle of minimisation of harm – not with banal, knee-jerk moralism as its guiding light – is a foregone conclusion based on these two positions. The free and open Internet is also of course driving chemical liberation – one of our three dramatic revolutions at the start of the Internet age – and we cannot take care of our planet in a constructive way if we do not also take care of each other in a constructive and preferably also a loving way. Syntheism is the social theory of everything that merges these three ideological projects.

When the banknote establishes itself as the dominant form of communication between people and societies in the 17th century, it generates an accelerating technological development and increased prosperity to an extent that the world has never seen before. It is easy to be blinded by this efficiency and progress; liberalism is a particularly popular ideology, entirely based on this blindness, spurred on by capital’s formidable historical successes. But capital liberates all this human creativity and makes possible all this specialisation at a very high cost. Within the capitalist system the good, the service and the banknote are namely all disconnected from their interacting agents, which results in these agents being cynically isolated from and insensitive to each other. Both capital’s own isolation of its interacting entities – you have no idea who owned your banknote before you, and you have no idea of where it will end up after it has left you – and its accelerating production of new human pathologies – a constant stream of new shortcomings in relation to a projected normality and an ever-increasing number of frustrations to be compensated for by a constant stream of new goods and services – makes capital the strongest alienation generator in all of human history.

Among other things this is why the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama shoots himself in the foot when, with a great hullabaloo, he proclaims the death of history in the early 1990s. It is namely not history as such that has died – not even in some kind of metaphorical sense of any interest whatsoever: it is merely a kind of writing of history that has reached its conclusion, namely Fukuyama’s personal favourite narrative of the individual and the atom in liberal democracy’s linear history. However, metahistory, the history of the writing of history per se, teaches us that when a certain narrative has reached the end of the road, this immediately opens the door to a completely new kind of narrative. This applies in particular at a paradigm shift, when one type of writing of history loses its social relevance only to be immediately replaced by another. Metahistory is quite simply a relay race that never ends.

History starts anew so to speak, and with this manoeuvre, even the past receives a new interior design that conveys completely new meanings. Since all identity is founded in an understanding of history – a subject always sees itself as a conceived history from an original birth onwards to the current moment – the growth of a new and dominant social identity requires a rewriting of all of history. This is necessary because the new writing of history obviously has the ambition of – and can only serve its clearly formulated purpose in the new paradigm through – depicting entirely different metaphysically driven prioritisations than what the old narrative did in the abandoned paradigm. We know today, for example, that concepts such as the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age were created in Europe during the 19th century for a highly specialised purpose, namely to serve capitalism’s need for a writing of history that is fixated on the industrial domestication of physical materials, one after the other. Therefore history is written as a long series of incremental and purposeful shifts in a direction towards the consummation of this history: the modernist factory.

The industrialist writing of history however is completely irrelevant for people in the age of informationalism, since they neither own, nor work in, nor relate to heavy-duty factories, and have much greater use for a history retold from the vantage point of various information technology paradigms. Spoken language, written language and the printing press replace stone, bronze and iron as prefixes to the epoch divisions that are construed as relevant. The writing of history in terms of information technology (see The Netocrats) has only just begun, and it also inevitably has the narratives of relationalism, attentionalism and dividualism in tow. Syntheism is the name of the metaphysical system, the social theory of everything and its ideological network, which ties all these narratives together and gives them their relationalist substance. Thus, informationalism’s netocrats at last get a narrative that gives them a cohesive social identity. Through the intersubjective identification with the writing of history in terms of information technology, they get the strength and self-confidence to take power.

The current rewriting of history enables the individualist epoch to be viewed with new, more critical eyes. For example, capitalism is exposed as the tyranny of numerical slavery par excellence. The deeper we delve into its exploitative nature, both ideologically and historically, the more clearly capitalism’s obsessive fixation with finally being able to mathematise all human thoughts and activities into a sum of dollars, a number of votes or a series of orgasms, emerges. No one illustrates this better than the American economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Gary Becker, who in his work reduces all human activities to a kind of constantly ongoing rational calculation of utility. His work is about a consummate capitalist logic that takes Becker all the way into people’s bedrooms and places of worship – according to him, even an act of sexual intercourse is nothing other than a calculated, selfish utilitarian venture worked out in advance. What Becker thereby reveals about the seat of his own ideology is how rationalism, individualism, utilitarianism and – in all cases calculating and profit-maximising – capitalism really are one and the same ideology. Becker quite simply takes the Kantian paradigm and its isolated, compulsively colonising, patriarchal subject to the end of the road. And there he finds nothing other than an eternally empty calculator, grinding away.

This means that capitalism must be organised in such a way that it constantly excludes the glaring void at its own centre, all in accordance with the principle that something must be subtracted from or added to perceived reality in order for it to be ideologised, where this hidden something returns as the ideology’s demonic universal. After capitalism’s tyrannical pillaging throughout all of society’s nooks and crannies – there is hardly anything left to exploit that has not yet been converted into an open market, just as there is hardly any human effort left to exercise that has not been converted into a taxed professional category – there remains only one single subject area where an opportunity to author an alternative, cohesive, universal story for humanity is still offered. To the disappointment of many philosophers this will not occur within art – even art has long ago been transformed into an entertaining and somewhat piquant euphemism for money, whatever art and its vociferous supporters may claim – but here we are talking about the underestimated theological arena. For it is in theology’s meeting with the revolutionary trio of interactivity, quantum physics and chemical liberation that there arises a genuine possibility of creating the necessary metanarrative of the Internet age: syntheology.

Capitalism, on the other hand, drives Man away from religion and straight into the arms of alienation. The dislocation occurs even within the hypercapitalist religious sects that are rapidly expanding in the confused beginning of the Internet age. This means religions arranged like department stores and entertainment arenas, philosophies of life built on progress mythologies, but without any annoying religiosity whatsoever. Typical examples are the hyperindividualist self-help theologies in primarily the United States, such as Charismatic Christianity, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientology, New Age and Californian Zen, as well as their various branches and equivalents in Asia, South America and Eastern Europe. Here there is a lack that capitalism creates in order to subsequently and fundamentally worsen it, a lack that it never deals with, since a rectification would kill capitalism itself. We are talking about the gradually increasing acute lack of empathy. Capitalism strives to minimise empathy in order to thus be able to maximise alienation, which increases emotionally compensating consumption and thereby also even production additionally – as we know, capitalism is driven by the growth maximisation principle – while syntheism conversely strives to maximise empathy, and in order to do this it must fight alienation through actively minimising the influence of capital inside the syntheist temporary utopia.

This means that syntheism is capitalism’s antithesis. It is not superficially and merely formally anti-capitalist, such as the capitalist ideologies socialism and conservatism with their saccharine dreams of a controlled, top-down market – as though a pragmatic domestication of capital really would be able to affect alienation; rather, historical experience says that it is the other way around. No, syntheist anti-capitalism is deeply and genuinely radical on account of its being seated in theological anarchism. The syntheist reply to capitalism’s pillaging is not to start an anti-capitalist, bloody revolution with dramatic riots on the streets – after which the system would in any case soon re-emerge, insignificantly modified, since it de facto emanates in an emergent way from our age’s specific information technology structure. Such an ambition is indefensibly naive and belongs more in the Enlightenment’s patriarchal rationalism than in syntheism’s relationalist renaissance. The logically consequential, syntheist response to late capitalism and its hyperalienation is – as the syntheist philosopher Simon Critchley writes in The Faith of The Faithless – not the pretentious revolution, but instead the discrete subtraction.

According to the principle of necessary subtraction, the only right and reasonable thing for the radically convinced person on many historical occasions is to simply withdraw from the system – to refuse to participate in the social game, to quite simply leave the system in order to build up parallel, temporary utopias, whose objectives with time are made permanent – and to do this together with dedicated syntheist brothers and sisters. What is right and reasonable is not just to shoot at a hydra that in any case cannot be felled, since new heads constantly sprout where the old ones recently were, but to live out truth as an act and thereby rob the hydra of its oxygen. To think is namely not to understand the world. Thinking is not separated from the world in such a way that this is even possible. To think is instead to act. The syntheist agent is a human being who acts without necessarily being able to articulate a full understanding of exactly why. She lets intuition guide her. It is first on the basis of her actions that the syntheist agent can work out the necessary meaning, in order to retroactively give her action this meaning. It is in any case in this way that consciousness and intuitive action relate to each other: the former explains and legitimises the latter by creating an appealing narrative that matches the pattern in the surroundings with which one identifies.

Syntheism is thus a revolutionary subtractionism. To subtract is to withdraw from the contemporary chaos in order to be able to formulate an accurate truth of the future that can then be given full expression. Both Critchley and the French philosopher Alain Badiou claim that the genuine utopia is based on subtraction and not destruction. But it is not a pause from reality such as during a capitalist holiday in the sunshine that we are talking about here. Critchley is even an aggressive opponent of the Marxist John Gray’s ideas of subtraction as a rational and tranquil oasis in an irrational and chaotic reality, something which he contemptuously considers to be a kind of passive nihilism. He rejects Gray’s external and objective shift within physical geography and replaces this with a genuinely syntheist subtraction, which is an internal and subjective experience that entails a shift in the mental landscape and makes possible truth as an act. Critchley calls this truth as an act mystical anarchism.

It is only through something important being eliminated from the fantasy of reality that the real can break through and remind us of reality as a false fantasy and thereby awaken utopianism within us. However, it is important not to try to annihilate the symptom. The symptom is namely the best tool within socioanalysis for reaching the real behind the contemporary façade and understanding its relation to the current fantasy of reality. We trace the symptom by analysing the numerous microscopic breakthroughs in fantasy that the real does in everyday life in the form of our sinthomes, the small, bizarre and apparently illogical thoughts, the words and the deeds that suddenly disturb the predictable pattern in our everyday lives. The sinthome is the symbol of the symptom. Without access to and an understanding of the symptom, we can never understand our era. And nor can we generate our own religio-political pathos.

Syntheist subtractionism must be understood from the actual paradigm shift’s historical possibilities and impossibilities. Paradigm shifts always entail giving the production of the new metaphysics the highest priority, since the one who formulates the new metaphysics also becomes the new paradigm’s truth producer and thereby also one of its most important rulers (such as the clergy under feudalism and the university professors under capitalism). The great new religions and the metaphysical systems are always launched in the transition phases that arise at paradigm shifts. Political activism must therefore often wait for the right point in time in order to have any chance whatsoever of taking off. Critchley’s logic is based on the premise that theology precedes philosophy; it is primary where philosophy is secondary. And philosophy precedes politics; it is secondary and politics tertiary. Theology delves deeper than philosophy, since it engages Man more thoroughly than philosophy can ever do. And philosophy lies deeper than politics, since philosophy is the well from which political activism gets its nourishment. This means that however much we long for a new cohesive political ideology for the Internet age, the creation of the new theological metaphysics and its religious practice must precede the articulation of the corresponding political ideology and activism. Syntheism stands ready when the present system breaks down. But the only possible way forward is to first build a living religion, while waiting for the time to the right for being able to establish and launch the new political ideology.

The first person to take the mighty march of attentionalism seriously is the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu when he distinguishes between economic capital and cultural capital. The metaphor cultural capital proves effective and quickly becomes widely spread, but it is nonetheless unfortunate and leads one’s thoughts astray, since cultural capital is not a form of capital at all. As opposed to economic capital, cultural capital cannot be saved or stored externally, it cannot be swapped or exchanged discreetly without friction, nor can it be used as a means of social communication, which are of course precisely the qualities of economic capital that give it world dominion under capitalism. Describing attention as cultural capital is thus just as misleading as describing food production under feudalism as agricultural capital. The metaphor is historically illogical and with time becomes more and more grotesquely misleading.

Attention has of course in reality few or no links at all to capital, aside from the fact that they have both been power-generating during different historical epochs. Attention is, for example, not a structural lubricant, even if it both creates and changes power structures to a dramatic extent. Its power instead arises as a response to the Internet’s enormous information offering and the plurarchical chaos which this abundance creates. The need for curatorship, qualified information processing, is growing explosively, and the sorting of information is much more important and more valuable than the production of the same. At the very moment that information sorting becomes more important than information production, power over the society shifts from the producers of goods and services, the capitalists, to information sorting and its practitioners, the netocratic curators. We go through the paradigm shift from capitalism to attentionalism. With the advent of attentionalism, the focus of ethics shifts over from the individual’s self-realisation, the capitalist ideal, to the network-dynamical utopia, or what is termed the ethics of interactivity. What is important in existence are the nodes in the network and how these nodes can be merged as often and as much as possible in order to maximise agential existence. The power in this hectic network-building ends up with those who succeed in combining plausibility and attention in the virtual world. And even if this attention can be measured – according to the brilliantly simple but correct formula credibility multiplied by awareness yields attention – it cannot be substituted or in any other way used in transactions in the same way as capital and capitalism’s other valuable assets.

Attention is in essence a completely unique kind of value, a historically emergent phenomenon, arisen out of the acute lack of overview in the informationalist society. And it acts de facto without connection to any form of capital. The driving ambition of the attentionalist society, hardly surprisingly, is imploitation rather than capitalism’s exploitation. That which is constantly desired is a value that can be saved for the few and thereby is maximised – rather than being spread to the many, which would mean that it would thus be diluted and minimised – an option that surfaces as a historically emergent effect of attentionalism’s victory over capitalism. This explains why the netocrats are obsessed with the search for authenticity, the metaphysical reward promised by imploitation, while the informationalist underclass, the consumtariat, is characterised by its very search for exploitation and its desire to let itself be exploited, totally oblivious of the constantly ongoing but incomprehensibly symbol-laden netocractic imploitation that is transpiring in parallel, but all the while out of reach and out of sight.

Capitalism and its nation-state and corporativist bureaucracies optimise themselves, not by solving problems, but by creating more problems for themselves to solve, at the same time as more and more goods and services are demanded in order to satisfy a continuous stream of newly-produced needs. Therefore new laws are constantly being produced, new crime classifications, new pathologies, new defects, new failures to rectify, new problems to investigate, which one can later expand on even further, rather than rectify them. Postmodern society offers no catharsis and lacks a narrative of how the capitalist tragedy is to be brought to an end. Capitalism quite simply lacks an exit strategy. Liberal democracy’s dilemma is not primarily that it is based on obsolete individualism – liberalism is individualism’s political ideology par excellence – but rather that it is based on the myth of the invisible hand’s mystical self-regulation. But such a hand does not exist, an unregulated market always moves towards sundry variants of corrupt monopolies or oligopolies as their terminuses. The invisible hand cannot do anything itself to stop this; that can only be done by visible hands. Pragmatism defeats liberalism every day of the week in actual politics. Contingent disruptive technologies, when such emerge, and an innovative regulation of the market are, in the long term, much more important and healthier than any invisible hand.

The most persistent myth is that, with the right external measures, the economy can attain a constant – and for all the involved parties’ optimum – equilibrium. But long-lasting equilibria are unattainable in information-complex systems such as meteorology, ecology and economics. Every time an equilibrium seems to have been reached, one or more agents within the system will introduce a speculative behaviour with the purpose of exploiting the suddenly arisen stability, which thereby is destroyed. Game-theory models of an equilibrium never cope with a rendezvous with reality in the form of experimental tests. Sooner or later, a speculation bubble always arises somewhere in the economy, fuelled by both investors who believe themselves to be smart enough to be able to bail out before the bubble bursts – and who try to make pure speculation profits from the bubble, fully conscious that it is in fact a bubble – and by investors who naively believe that just this particular bubble will behave differently from previous bubbles – not seldom prompted by venerated governors of central banks who sincerely assert precisely this: that this time it is not a question of a bubble at all – and who therefore keep their investments in the conviction that it is safe and will grow. Precisely here, in speculation’s rational irrationality, lies the problem. There are to be sure good reasons to fuel bubbles since it is possible to earn large sums of money from them if one only sells one’s shares in time. And the longer the speculation bubble is kept alive through media hype as well as artificially cheap credit, the larger it will become, and the harder and more devastating the final and inevitable crash will be.

The American economist Hyman Minsky describes these processes with great accuracy. As the first relationalist economist, he turns to network dynamics in order to find an answer to how bubbles should be managed. Minsky’s answer is that speculation bubbles de facto cannot be or even should be avoided. His advice is rather that many small bubbles that burst often are better to have than just a few that burst seldom but then all the more dramatically and devastatingly. Naturally the dream of an economic equilibrium is yet another variant of the same old Platonist death worship that constantly recurs in the worlds of philosophy, physics and social science. However, the truth is that the economy is also a network-dynamical phenomenon that must be regarded not just as relativist, but relationalist. And it is at the transition from relativism to relationalism that the economy starts to include ecology and all the other factors that sooner or later will influence and interact with everything else of value within the economy. Relationalist economics does not preclude anything that influences dividual or social value creation, particularly factors such as clean air, clean water and the sustainable management of nature’s resources.

There is seldom or never any social change without articulation. Under capitalism, the new literate nation state replaces the old illiterate Church as the common arena, and the statist articulation says that society is a body. But the body metaphor – which statism obviously borrows from the ecclesiastical articulation that says that the congregation is a body – must be exposed. For society as a body never generates any narrative for increased cohesiveness, as Michel Foucault points out, but instead functions as a latent threat to the deviant person in the nation state. It is perfectly possible to be an individual, but it is only acceptable to be exactly the individual who maximises her own frustration, alienation and consumption, and who pays for all this by maximising her production for the capitalist power structure, moreover in the shadow of the prevailing phantasmic behavioural imperative: Whatever you do, blend in!

Syntheism’s community, on the other hand, is open and therefore radically different from the concept of the society. It encourages the creation of living narratives, which the syntheist community can gather around; narratives that bring together many disparate groups and create a powerful hegemonisation. This hegemonisation is the articulation of a common vision for disparate groups and identities. The name of a community is of central value, and the name must include, rather than exclude the outsider. For it is only with the outsider inside the community’s walls that the particular can give life to the universal and the universal can give life to the syntheist utopia. It is to the outsider that the syntheist agent reaches out on the free and open Internet, and it is together with the outsider that the syntheist agent can save the planet from ecological apocalypse. Only thus. It is in the communication and cooperation between outsiders that the Internet displays its historically completely unique potential. On the Internet, we can demonstrate to each other in action that we believe in the same thing and in this way build rock-solid trust, which opens up completely undreamt of possibilities for us to play new, complex non-zero-sum games with in fact outsiders. When push comes to shove, the free and open Internet is a brilliant deification of Syntheos, the created God. The logical conclusion is therefore a given: What happens if the Internet is God? We decide the answer together.

Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58