Industrialism

3:1 (In »The four paradigms in the history of metaphysics«)

Since information technology is the most important instrument of power in existence, it is both productive and in every respect correct – particularly in connection with the transition to an informationalist paradigm – to divide the history of humanity into four, distinct information technology paradigms. So forget the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the other mythological constructions of industrialism, produced for precisely the purpose of writing history so that it culminates in the smoking factories of industrialism. Let us instead regard all societies in all forms and stages of development as various kinds of information societies, and let us view history as a story of the battle for power over the means of communication. Because whoever controls the channels for communicating truth and ideas also can be said to own and dictate the truth and the ideas.

3:3 (In »The four paradigms in the history of metaphysics«)

For each and every one of these four information technology complexes has increased the quantity of information available in a given society to a revolutionary extent, which in turn has created entirely new social hierarchies with entirely new parameters for metaphysics and its assumptions and consequences. A pervasive social change means exactly this: not more of the old, but a qualitatively tangible change of an emergent nature. The old feudal Europe plus the printing press meant, after this epoch-making technology had been operating for long enough, not the same old Europe plus an interesting machine, but a completely new Europe that gave birth to industrialism, parliamentarism and the colonisation of the rest of the world. These new metaphysical narratives in turn radically changed both the world view and the human ideal, and thereby the entire power structure.

3:4 (In »The four paradigms in the history of metaphysics«)

For reasons that we have detailed extensively in The Netocrats, these four information technology paradigm shifts should be regarded as the genuine revolutions that have driven history; created by the radically increasing amount of information available and the unique impact of their accompanying metaphors. The seemingly dramatic events that follow on from these paradigm shifts ought rather to be viewed as symptoms of the underlying, genuine revolution, which has its basis in radically changed material conditions and thereby also dramatically changed power structures. For what would capitalism be, for example, without the printing press as a metatechnology and without the watch (timepiece) as a metaphor? It is impossible to imagine the factories of industrialism and all the other capitalist institutions that emerged during the powerful expansion of capitalism in the 19th century without their armies of literate office workers and without the clock on the factory wall and the fob watches in the factory managers’ waistcoat pockets that divided the working day up into clearly delimited and measurable units.

3:27 (In »The four paradigms in the history of metaphysics«)

By building a maximally functional hierarchy of literate soldiers – even the cannon-fodder at the front lines were educated before waging war in Napoleon’s army – with himself in the function as God’s all-seeing eye at the very top of the hierarchy, Napoleon created a fascinating killing machine of a kind never beheld before. Subsequently, all the institutions of industrialism were built in the 19th century with Napoleon’s army as a shining example: the nation state and all its bureaucrats, the company and its factories, the police, the prison, the school, the hospital, the colony on the other side of the ocean: organisationally they are all direct copies of Napoleon’s feared and admired army. According to Isaac Newton, the father of classical physics, history is a kind of perfect machine that grinds away in a completely deterministic manner without the smallest departure from preordained laws and rules. Newton’s idea of the Universe as a (by God) wound-up clock that ticks on forever inspired both Napoleon’s organisational architecture and Hegel’s historicism.

3:28 (In »The four paradigms in the history of metaphysics«)

It does not take long before the history of humanity is rewritten. If the purpose of being human is to one day build a factory full of obedient worker soldiers, history must be the story of a long line of increasingly sophisticated domestications of various physical (and initially unwieldy) materials. Consequently the concepts – with time highly successful – of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age are invented once industrialism becomes widely accepted in the 19th century. These are manufactured by historians financed by the industrialists, that is, precisely the gentlemen who have created and assumed the leading positions within the new era’s nation states and big corporations. Thus, the old feudalist writing of history, from Adam’s and Eve’s trouble with the talkative serpent in Paradise and onwards, can be tossed onto the mythological rubbish heap. The Abrahamic religions are reduced from highly esteemed knowledge to an entertaining fairy tale for the not so bright and for young children.

8:41 (In »From semiotics via memetics to the collapse of militant atheism«)

However counter-intuitive this may sound for the syntheist agent, she can only regard herself as a by-product of the ideology coming from the future, and in this Hegelian sense act in a revelatory role and as a supervisor vis-à-vis the now prevailing but rapidly eroding ideology. For it is only in the collision between the ideological paradigms – the history of ideas time after time shows how philosophy virtually explodes with creativity as a direct consequence of a socio-cultural paradigm shift, with Axial Age Greece and India and early Industrialism’s Western Europe and North America as illuminating examples – that speculative philosophy can see through and reveal the illusory qualities of the prevailing ideologies. And there we are at this moment, in informationalism’s infancy, in the midst of a cascade of information flows exploding in all directions, where syntheism is slowly but surely growing as the paradigm’s built-in and necessary metaphysical Higgs field.

12:8 (In »Truth as an act – the road to the fourth singularity«)

A new, emergent version of truth is born out of the old truth, but takes the whole issue to a completely new level, and at this higher level the new version of truth has a whole new acceptance and all new consequences for the collective world view compared with the truth that was previously generally embraced. The new truth is intersubjectively rather than objectively truer than the old one, both nominally and relatively. For example, when from a contemporary perspective we dissect capitalism’s and industrialism’s writing of history and dismiss the idea that the events that transpired in Paris during a few years after the initial shot that was fired in 1789 really constituted a revolution in any interesting sense, and instead classify it as a symptom of a real revolution that had taken place long before – where the actual revolution we are then referring to obviously is that the printing press starts to produce reading material that is accessible to the general public in Germany in the mid-15th century – it means that we upgrade the printing press to a predecessor of the Internet revolution of our own age, where the genesis of the Internet is the emergent phenomenon that compels us to rewrite all of history in order for us to understand both ourselves and the events that have created us in an intersubjectively deeper way than was previously possible.

13:50 (In »Participatory culture, religious rituals and psychedelic practices«)

The reason for this moral panic and these eschatological propaganda campaigns is that sexuality and entheogens are associated with both pure pleasure and if possible even more so with subversive mysticism and its search for a mental, or if one prefers, a spiritual rather than a physiological pleasure. Under capitalism, sex and chemicals are regarded as incompatible with industrious work in the socio-economic-affluence-promoting factories. Sexual and chemical minimalism is therefore promoted for educative purposes and disseminated with vehement rabidness – as a kind of secular fundamentalism, with zero tolerance as the new utopian salvation – as soon as industrialism takes hold of Europe and North America during the 19th century. Pure and thus animalistic pleasure stirs up both envy and terror, for how does one go about domesticating unreserved pleasure? How does one accommodate it into civilisation’s death worship without castrating, distorting, prohibiting and destroying it?

14:3 (In »Syntheist temples and monasteries in the global empire«)

The distinction between escapist and inscapist religion becomes all the more important when the Internetified world – where all nations and cities of the world become intimately dependent on and entangled with each other – transitions from the patchwork of industrialism’s sovereign nation states to the global empire of informationalism. It is important here to understand that the global empire is not some frictionless, synchronised, centralised millennial kingdom, but rather a fragmented and highly decentralised mishmash of social nodes. This mishmash is in turn subordinate to uncontrollable and ruthless flows of capital and information criss-crossing the old national borders, rather than being subordinate to some symbolically masterful central power with tangible or even discernible reach. Out of these flows, a decisive conflict emerges between on the one hand the capitalist power structure of nation states and the giant corporations – organisations that will do everything they can to halt, limit and above all attempt to domesticate the Internet’s development and potential to their own advantage – and on the other hand the attentionalist power structure, created and celebrated by netocrats who are fighting for a free and open Internet in order to take over and control the world, driven by their vision of theological anarchism.

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