@RizomaSchool @dysangelistes Not only not implausible, but fated from the very outset to offer a lesson in the nature of life. The impact is, of course, civilizational.
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2/ But what if the very same computer-mediated reality and force now being wantonly employed by global authoritarianism to slay entire social networks and populations and their dependent structures of consciousness and power, isn't as much a peerless as peer-to-peer capability? I once ran into @pmarca hawking a pre-release of Netscape Navigator 1.0. Already, my team had run the first WWW pipe into the U.S. Congress, on Mosaic. Then, as now, as always, if you can't see the paradigm for the trees for the point of it all, your dominative days are numbered. 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. 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 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.
Open original document@lukeburgis @DarioAmodei "It is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.” The denial is obvious. The pretense has become untenable. Moreover, this rite of passage exposes that maturity isn't earned as credential but undergone as reckoning.
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The Cloud vector intensifies mimetic pressure, automates our idols, and forces a verdict on what finally grounds the human as sacred. Interpret the pain of this Reckoning as malice and we conjure an evil god; rightly read as judgment-mercy, we receive it as the Real disclosed. Barba-Kay, astute. Further: if the polycrisis ceases to confound only when interpreted through a deeper horizon of meaning, maybe technology trends too can only be grasped apocalyptically—that is, as disclosures pointing beyond their literal function toward a hidden significance. 18/ This is not AI becoming conscious—it's a message, a story, a revelation moving through the Cloud with such force it cannot be ignored or algorithmically suppressed. Infrastructure built to fragment and manipulate now carries something that unifies, clarifies and compels. end/ McLuhan foresaw it: every medium, pushed to its extreme, becomes its reversal. Mimesis, routinely misread as mere rivalry, is desire's deepest truth—our longing to become like God. The same Cloud that automates sacrifice now ruptures into annunciation. The eschaton streams. Subtweet: 1/2 The Machine is a clear civilizational hazard—an attention predator, automator of sacrifice, and mimetic derangement engine. And Kingsnorth is hardly alone in missing its deeper role as a simultaneous vector of consciousness pressing toward an evolutionary, parousial horizon.
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