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Netocracy
The new upper class of the Internet age, the social monsters who call the shots in the digital world through maximising their attention. Under the ongoing paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism the netocracy is fighting for power over society against the old and increasingly vulnerable bourgeoisie. See, by way of comparison, consumtariat.
The burgeoning netocracy, the elite that is succeeding the bourgeoisie in the new paradigm being driven by digitisation and interactivity, obviously represented a special interest group when it initially marketed the anarcho-libertarian ideology as the metaphysics of the Internet age. If truth is an act, and if truth will set us free, it follows that if the Internet is allowed to be free, it will also set us free. There is here of course an ill-concealed intention to use noble motives as a pretext for the seizure of power. The netocracy is thus acting in exactly the same way that the feudal aristocracy did when it embraced monotheism, and in the same way as the capitalist bourgeoisie did when it embraced humanism. These specific metaphysics developed as the dominant stories – and they worked! – during their respective paradigms, for the very reason that they appointed the emerging social classes as the social theatre’s new protagonists.
The disappointment is not even about the audience not wanting to see individualist X or Y per se. Rather, it is about individualism as such having become vulgar and boring and that no one wants to see any individual at all any longer. To the extent that there is any audience at all for anything at all in the old media, preferences are firmly oriented towards sundry variants of ironic freak show. This is the anxiety-relieving evening and weekend entertainment of consumtarians made passive (see The Netocrats) The truth is that only a small minority, the netocracy, understand and have mastered the Internet and can utilise the medium to their own advantage. This is in spite of the fact that almost the entire population of the world are already living their lives in the new social arena. In his book Average Is Over the American economist Tyler Cowen estimates that approximately 15 per cent of the American population will succeed in the transition to netocrats in a productive interaction with the Internet and the torrents of newly automated processes in society, while the remaining 85 per cent of the population will establish themselves as just a consumtariat, the fast-growing underclass in a social, cultural and also increasingly economic sense.
It is only when the Internet arrives with full force towards the late 1980s and early 1990s that society is endowed with an environment where holism and generalism are fostered at the expense of the academic world’s atomism and specialism. It is also only after the advent of the Internet that criticism of the individualist axiom begins to grow. The new paradigm with its new power structures requires a new mythology; a new narrative of the developing information, communication and network society in the Internet age. The informationalist paradigm is characterised by interactivity as the dominant form of communication, the cyber world as the geographical arena, attention rather than capital as the driving force socially, as well as the production, consumption and above all social reproduction of media as the main occupation (we have written about all of this extensively in The Netocrats). Informationalism is driven by the event as its metaphysical horizon, and is dominated by the conflict between the new classes, the small but wholly dominant netocracy and the considerably larger but in every respect subordinate consumtariat.
It is eminently possible to use the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concepts to describe the current dialectics between eternalism and mobilism: eternalism is a territorialisation, a fixation of a specific phenomenon (which for example occurs when the interiority Atheos is applied to the exteriority Pantheos); and mobilism is a deterritorialisation, a shaking-up and setting-in-motion-again of the phenomenon in question (as when the exteriority Entheos is applied to the interiority Syntheos). Territorialisation is fundamentally preserving; deterritorialisation is fundamentally radicalising. Thus, to take a concrete example from netocracy theory, new information technologies are deterritorialising, while identity production in a society is territorialising. Movement within the syntheological pyramid is thus initiated by a territorialising (a preserving but productive fixation), but is concluded by a deterritorialising (a radical liberation of sundry expansive potentials in the direction of the absorbing utopia). Syntheism is supremely a theological Deleuzianism.
Deleuze’s metaphysics otherwise constitutes an excellent transition between Baradian relationalism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Deleuze places the difference before the identity: according to him identity is generated out of the difference, rather than the other way around. Deleuze thereby precedes Barad’s relationalism. At the same time, Deleuze devotes considerable amounts of work to constructing a new concept of the subject in the wake of the Lacanian revolution within psychoanalysis. He seeks a kind of downright ecstatic but still immanent state which he calls transcendent rather than transcendental. This leads him to the invention of the dividual, the schizoid subject, which has since become the human ideal of the attentionalist netocracy in the Internet age (quite irrespective of whether it was Deleuze’s intention or not in the 1970s to create such a future instrument of power).
This means that the medium is not only the message, as the Canadian literary historian Marshall McLuhan clear-sightedly proclaims as early as the 1960s, but that the medium also creates the actor herself, rather than the other way around. We are literally the media with which we communicate. The netocrat of the information age therefore has a sober view of herself as an affirmative by-product of the interactive technologies that she is using in order to interact with her environment, rather than the other way around. And it is precisely because of the superiority of interactivity vis-à-vis the preceding one-directional communicating technologies – given the choice between on the one hand interactivity, with its equality at all levels, and on the other hand one-directional communication from the top down, from those in power to the masses, the current actors always choose interactivity – that ultimately the netocracy vanquish the bourgeoisie of the industrial age and take over society’s central functions. Since the ideas are fictives – concealed within ideologically coloured fictions, which move according to a certain metaphysical structure – according to the syntheist view, the ideas can never be said to be owned by any individual actor or any group of actors in any real sense.
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze devoted a lot of work to the art of managing the chaos that occurs in the world before Man appears. He goes back to humanity’s nomadic roots and calls this deeper picture of the human being the dividual (the divisible human being), in contrast to the capitalist individual (the indivisible human being). Deleuze’s post-humanist dividual in turn happens to fit perfectly as an ideal for the rising netocracy under informationalism (see The Netocrats). Deleuze argues that the dividual is autoimmune. To be autoimmune is to see both good and bad sides in oneself as necessary. To be autoimmune is to acknowledge that one is finite and constantly divided in every moment, driven by internal desires and drives, which in the encounter with an incessant flow of external memes unite around the nomadic, dividual identity. To be autoimmune is to give full expression to our pathological sorrow and fear of death. The dividual is of course always conscious of the fact that the Universe has both the right and the capacity to crush her at any moment. Life is very fragile for real; this is not just some maudlin, sentimental phrase.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Through this new, information-technology writing of history, we receive not just a more relevant and more power-generating world view for the burgeoning netocracy – thus far a relativist historian would agree – but we also receive, through the Internet’s status as an historical emergence, also a de facto truer, and from an intersubjective perspective more realistic, view of history as such. The emergence quite simply helps us to see a greater depth in the past that has previously evaded us, as Hegel would express the matter. And the emergence changes the historical playing field once and for all, not just directly in contemporary time and in the future, but even indirectly, projected onto the past. For this reason an emergence is not just a completely new phenomenon that appears in conjunction with a higher degree of complexity in the underlying structure. An emergence is also a truer phenomenon than the preceding phenomena further down in the hierarchy to the extent that the emergence per se enables a deeper understanding of the hierarchy as a whole.
Since relationalism drives the new physics, it is hardly surprising that the metaphysics of the Internet age – from Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze via Alain Badiou to Slavoj Zizek – revolves around and is driven by the notion of the emergent event. Interactivity produces a class structure with the netocracy as the upper class and the consumtariat as the lower class. While the consumtariat is relatively uniform – consumtarians are of course defined by what they are not rather than what they actually are – the netocracy can be divided into three distinct categories. The first of these is the netocratic pioneers; the second category is the netocratic aspirationists who copy the pioneers at an early stage and successfully, and if possible milk an even greater surplus value out of their creativity than the pioneers do: imitation is the mother of survival. The third category of netocrats is the experimentalists, who, while they initially fail in copying the pioneers and who are rather too late to copy the aspirationists, for precisely this reason they are forced to and subsequently succeed in inventing their own original solutions, which motivate their position within the netocracy. The consumtarians meanwhile have their plate full passively chewing the nonsensical content, the calming and soporific entertainment that is produced in various trashy networks with no status whatsoever.
But when the individual no longer functions in a society built on networks, the Internet age’s netocracy seeks a new human ideal. One does this while the consumtariat also desperately seeks a new potential identity other than the tragic state of being the last individual. The new, attentionalist human ideal that appears is the dividual, the divisible rather than indivisible Man (see The Body Machines), a body experiencing pleasure, involved in constant networking with all interesting humans and machines in its surroundings. The dividual is a protean creature, powerfully coloured by schizoid creativity. If we study the netocratic categories more closely, we see how the concepts dividual and event interact in a clear quest to capture and strengthen the new attentionalist human ideal.
But the netocracy would not be the formidable power elite of the Internet age if it did not concurrently comprise the third category: the experimentalists who fail to, or for various reasons quite simply neglect to, copy the netocratic leaders and therefore find their own ways towards attentional success. These netocrats build a dividuality which is so attractive for the established networks that these seek out and incorporate them in their agendas rather than the other way around, and it is in the meeting between these headstrong outliers and the most potent networks that new events arise all the time. There is thus a third possibility outside the seemingly cynical or busily copying strategies to become part of the netocracy, and it goes via pure creativity, exposed vis-à-vis the networks as an eventist dividuality. But the third category, the experimentalists, must not be mistaken for an expression or an updated variety of the discarded individuality. Because in the network society individuality no longer has any value at all. It is merely offensive, and it is only when the dividual is connected with the netocracy that the dividual gets her agential value. It is the network that gives the agent her value in the relationalist society and not the other way around.
In its capacity as theological anarchism par excellence, syntheism is the netocracy’s own built-in metaphysics. But the battle against the statist-corporativist establishment is neither simple nor has it any preordained result in a contingent and indeterminist world. At least not in the short term. There are trends and there are counter-trends. What many people forget is that nation states, which have long appeared to be so “natural” and God-given, actually were the result of never-ending bloody and hard-fought wars of religion in the old Europe. Consequently, the choice of strategy is entirely decisive for the outcome of this struggle. The global empire will borrow many features from, for example, Ancient Rome and Medieval Europe. The first Christian congregations, the Mithraic orders, the Masonic lodges, the cathedrals and monasteries that were built during the Middle Ages are therefore all excellent sources of inspiration for a rising elite who believe in the need for, and want to engage in the building of, syntheist temples and monasteries in the global empire.
Syntheism’s sacred locales might just as well be dance floors on Saturday evenings as quiet rooms of contemplation on Sunday afternoons. Periods of unbridled carnival celebrations could be alternated to advantage with periods of meditation, yoga, fasting or quite simply just silence and concentration. The four quarters in the syntheist calendar – Athea, the three months after Atheos (winter solstice), Enthea after Entheos (spring equinox), Panthea, the three months after Pantheos (summer solstice) and Synthea after Syntheos (autumn equinox) – open up possibilities of celebrating a host of different festivals and commemorative days, coupled with specific rituals and ceremonies. But the question is where the inspiration and guidance for the development of these rituals and ceremonies is sourced from. Traditionally, philosophy and theology have of course had that specific role. But at the dawn of the Internet age, these disciplines are in deep crisis. In fact, they have not even succeeded in predicting the arrival of the Internet age, the netocracy or syntheism, and now that these are established facts, both philosophy and theology are having difficulties in formulating relevant questions, never mind any credible answers. These disciplines are helplessly stuck in the past, fixated on increasingly irrelevant social antagonisms, unable to see and reflect on the utopian potential of the future.
However impressive, such a flow of specialism cannot however hide the glaring absence of a penetrating and visionary generalism. A multitude of loud-mouthed, self-satisfied voices – who have absolutely no consideration for nor show any understanding of multiplicity as the One – cannot of course produce any more meaningful narrative than the tragic internarcissism which is hypercapitalism’s response to all issues in contemporary society. The result of this process of decline is the self-absorbed game by analytical philosophy of a kind of ‘pick-up sticks’ with the terms, and postmodernism’s endless dissecting of the older generations’ narratives about mankind and the world. The very attempt to create a new, cohesive metanarrative is branded as a mortal sin within philosophical discourse. Instead, everything is reduced to a regression of sign interpretation without end: philosophy is finally completely paralysed and is thrust into the hyperhermeneutical state. For this reason, syntheism’s serious attempt to create a new, credible metanarrative for the Internet age is a highly conscious, logical negation of the entire academic-philosophy paradigm. Philosophy returns to the essentials in the form of syntheology, instructed by independent, critical thinkers based on the interests of the burgeoning netocracy, where the logical follow-up question is what political expressions will grow out of the syntheological discourse.
It is unreasonable to ask of the consumtarians that they should be able see through and be able to distance themselves from late capitalist consumption society. They are not even authentic social producers in a Foucauldian sense: rather, they are social consumers, thereof the tragic term the consumtariat. It is about a consumption proletariat which, in contrast to the classical workers’ proletariat, is no longer united around a proud productivity, but has been reduced to an underclass that have the passive consumption of entertainment and identity production in prefabricated mass editions as their only cohesive factor. Resistance against the corrupt system must instead come from inside the netocracy, which constitutes the subversive branch of social production. However, there are no indications suggesting that the netocracy will stand united in the political struggle under informationalism, no more than the bourgeoisie were politically united under capitalism once it had managed to push through its formative struggle for liberal democracy.
The ideological cracks within the netocracy are already clearly discernible (see The Netocrats). The sole political project that is guaranteed to unite the netocracy under informationalism is the struggle for the free and open Internet, since this struggle de facto concerns its most fundamental conditions as a social class. Without a free and open Internet, the netocracy as a societal elite will not be realised, but will remain, in the best-case scenario, an odd group with interesting special skills on the outer fringes of the social arena. A conceivable, not to say likely, scenario is that a small minority within the netocracy first oppose the statist-corporativist power structure, adopt the absolute standpoint in the age of interactivity, break loose from the corrupt system and construct the parallel utopia. To begin with as a temporary autonomous zone, which subsequently with time is made permanent with the purpose of making the utopia and its potential visible; a visibility that inspires other aspiring netocrats to creatively imitate the utopia and thereby complete the information-technology revolution.
Both nature and the creative arsenal of Man himself are full of these entheogens – the term was coined by the historian Carl Ruck, as a more factual replacement for the erroneous term hallucinogens, and it is of course derived from syntheism’s Entheos, the god within ourselves – which have always been used for spiritual purposes. This was the case despite many nation states, on the pretext of the most bizarre and prejudiced excuses, assiduously trying to stop the use of entheogens in what must be regarded as the current paradigm shift’s most obvious form of bourgeois religious persecution of the emerging netocracy’s metaphysical lifestyle choice. It is from this radical equality, in this literally syntheist procedure, that the ethics of interactivity is born and developed – not in Levinas’ sentimental and anti-Nietzschean self-sacrificing romanticism.
The strategic prophet of the previous paradigm shift, G W F Hegel, defines his philosophical project as the construction of a bridge between the sacred and the secular. He distinguishes between three different spirits with the following characteristics: the objective, the subjective and the absolute spirit. What is important in our turbulent age here and now is to take Hegel’s advice and set aside the objective and subjective spirits to instead assume the vantage point of the absolute; to first equip ourselves thoroughly for the coming struggle between the bourgeoisie and the netocracy and then position ourselves on the battlefield, conscious of and in accordance with the radical truth as an act in the new paradigm. The paradigm shift is namely occurring right under the very noses of the old power elite; it establishes a completely new power system in a completely different place than the previous one (see The Netocrats) and thereby offers historically unique possibilities for a radical and genuine change in society’s orientation and organisation. But the paradigm shift can only be apprehended in the necessary detail from a position permeated by subtraction. Therefore the syntheist temples and monasteries are far more than merely exotic oases for some kind of collective spiritual pleasure. They are, in fact, the necessary points of departure, the revolutionary cells, in the subversive utopian project that goes under the name of the Syntheist Movement. It is there that new thoughts are being thought.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58