
RT @nick_routledge: @johnrobb Yup. Take exponentially augmented upgrades in persuasive generative AI and the tools to massively amplify it, add bad faith state and tech actors with untold resources on tap, and manipulative media abruptly crosses an authoritarian threshold at the planetary level. Then again...

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@nick_routledge "...the backstage fusion between human and machine authority....modes of governance normalised by digital platforms...algorithmic level of governance as an increasingly key field of political struggle...digital post-democracy...‘swarm governance’..." @johnrobb @nils_gilman 1/ Why stop at polls? With the fusion of military and corporate functions in a single, conjoined mediasphere, vast resources - increasingly, at a machine level - aimed at dominating perception of reality itself, now define planetary war at the level of total consciousness.

@drvandanashiva 1/2 Simultaneously, paralleling its colossal impetus, cloud imperialism's consolidation within and dependence upon an all-aggregating machine-abstraction, reveals the entire ontological edifice as, correspondingly, vastly more ephemeral and exposed than its engineers conceive.

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Copy of tweet here: McLuhan was very fond of the phrase, "the Prince of this world, Satan, is a very great electrical engineer." And tailor to Emperors, too. The cyberspatial conglomeration of evil? A cosmic design feature, not a flaw, making it addressable, ultimately, in one fell swoop. 1 John 3:8 Image of tweet thread: Technology is too often used as a stealth vector (often by private actors who control the tech) to enact, embody, or constitute quintessentially “political” matters — that is, matters concerning the allocation & legitimation of power & authority. AI puts this pattern on steroids Goes both ways. Long before the Web, planetary Sages anticipated the advent of a cyberspace-actualized dimension of meaningfulness, constituting a 'quintessentially political' surprise positively addressing such base shenanigans at a totalizing, substrative, ontological level.