Digital Devolution (Cyber Colonialism Of A Newage Technofeudalism) – Analysis

Throughout the long and arduous course of human history, both progress and its horizontal transfer were an extremely slow, sporadic and tedious process. Only in the classical period of Alexander the Great and his magnificent Alexandrian library will the speed of transmission of our knowledge change; though modest, analogue, and backward—it still outpaced the snail’s pace of our discovery cycle.

When our occasional revelations finally proved more frequent than the speed of our own infrequent transmissions, it marked the moment of our separation. Simply, our civilizations began to differ significantly from each other in technical-agrarian, military-political, ethno-religious, and ideological aspects, as well as in economic settings. Finally, the so-called the great discoveries are the event that transform wars and famines – from moderate and local – into global, pan-continental phenomena.

Rapid cycles of technological discoveries, patents and knowledge first took place on the Old Continent. This event with all its reorganizing effects reconfigured societies. Ultimately, it marked the birth of powerful European empires and their (liberal) schools, and the overall, lasting triumph of Western civilization. It radically mobilised Europe, weaponized science. (On the very subject of history of ‘weaponisation’ of Europe, I refer the curious reader on my text: Imperialism of Imagination, Geopolitics of Peter Pan.) 

Devolution Forward, through technology

For centuries, we lived fear but dreamed hope – all in the name of the modern era: From the First World War to the Internet (from WWI to www.). Does this modernity of the digital/internet age, with all the instantly transmitted and publicized discoveries, lead us towards justice, harmony and the establishment of fair relations?

Is, and will our history ever be on holidays? So was our world ever more than an idea? Shall we briefly stop at Kant’s word – the moral definition of the imagined future, or continue to look at the objective, geopolitical definition of our common tomorrow through the Hobbesian reality?

The agrarian era made the question of economic redistribution inevitable. The industrial age culminated in the issue of political participation. Artificial Intelligence – AI (quantum physics, nanorobotics and bioinformatics) brings a new, yet insufficiently anticipated challenge: human (physical and mental) powers may soon become obsolete. If and when that happens, the question of general human insignificance, that is, uselessness, follows.

Why is AI like no other technology before? Why our rethinking of spirituality is extremely important?

If you believe the above is nothing more than philosophical melodrama, anaemic alarmism, keep this in mind: Soon we will have to redefine what we considered life until now.

As of January 2020, intriguing scientific trials have been successfully concluded: The line between organic and inorganic, native and artificial (seemingly) has been erased forever. AI now includes everything: quantum physics (along with quantum computing), nanorobotics, bioinformatics, and organic tissue weaving. Synthesis of all commonly referred to as xenorobots (types of living robots) – biodegradable symbiotic nanorobots that solely rely on evolutionary (self-navigating) algorithms. The essential building blocks of biotronics are therefore there…

We are in a dangerous time of traps and delusions.

The trap, of course, is hidden in the naming: Intelligence (be it artificial) implies ancestry and development, general well-being. This is rather a tool offered by the prospect of digital captivity, the minority over the majority – the slenderness of knowledge over the sluggishness of ignorance, the naivety of the giver (of information) against the greed of the gatherer disguised in good intention.

It is a mistake to believe that our (social) actions are based on the analysis of facts. Historically, human actions (from collective war to individual marriage) have always been based on perception. So, it is about the perceived, not necessarily factual.

But, let’s start in order.

Sometime in the pre-Christmas days of 2019, I wrote a short piece about artificial intelligence (AI) and our reckless glee at the indiscriminate application of this technology that could irreversibly change the fabric of society like never before in human history. Under the title “The future filled with empty choices – tomorrow (n)ever dies” the text appeared soon after in “New Europe” based (where else but) in Brussels, from where various media outlets carried it everywhere. The good old days before corona, and the two slaughterhouses (Eastern European and Middle Eastern) that we frivolously call wars …

Particularly dark and accusatory, but – as it soon turned out – accurate, was the part about silence. It really deserves a full quote here:

“Aegean theater of Ancient Greece was a place of astonishing revelations and intellectual excellence – a remarkable density and proximity, not surpassed up to our age. All we know about science, philosophy, sports, arts, culture and entertainment, stars and earth has been postulated, explored and examined then and there. 

Simply, it was a time and place of triumph of human consciousness, pure reasoning and sparkling thought. However, neither Euclid, Anaximander, Heraclites, Hippocrates (both of Chios, and of Cos), Socrates, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Democritus, Plato, Pythagoras, Diogenes, Aristotle, Empedocles, Conon, Eratosthenes nor any of dozens of other brilliant ancient Greek minds did ever refer by a word, by a single sentence to something which was their everyday life, something they saw literally on every corner along their entire lives. 

It was an immoral, unjust, notoriously brutal and oppressive slavery system that powered the Antique state. (Slaves have not been even attributed as humans, but rather as the ‘phonic tools/tools able to speak’.) This myopia, this absence of critical reference on the obvious and omnipresent is a historic message – highly disturbing, self-telling and quite a warning for the present day.”

Steadily backward: Ecological globalistan – Political Terroristan 

 In his address in Paris on December 7, 2015 (on the occasion of the adoption of the successor to the famous Kyoto Protocol – the Paris document on the implementation of the UN Convention on Climate Change, COP21) – just one day after the great victory of the French extreme right – the UN Secretary General once again warned world leaders: “More than one billion people worldwide live without electricity. Nearly three billion people depend on suffocating, hazardous traditional fuels for cooking and heating. Likewise, access to modern, reliable, affordable clean energy is critical to eradicating extreme poverty and reducing inequality… The clock is ticking towards climate catastrophe.” Blandly ignoring internal French politics as well as hard evidence of climate change, all the international nihilists, professional optimists and other guardians of the status quo would call it ‘environmental scandalism’… or political alarmism – it’s the same.

After that came Marrakesh in 2016 (Marrakech Partnership for Global Climate Action launch), then Glasgow in 2021 (COP26), then CCC Dubai (COP28, Climate Change Conference 2023), but the rhetoric remained unchanged…

What is the real state of our planet?

***

Galileo famously said: “The universe is a grand book written in the language of mathematics“. However, what we now know is that to reveal this cosmic Esperanto wasn’t the most fascinating part.[3] This grand book of universe, we are reading and writing at the same time…

Back in the 1990s, there was a legendary debate between two eminent scientists; Carl Sagan, astrophysicist and Ernst Mayr, evolutionary biologist. The issue was the question of all questions – is there any intelligent life out there? Sagan – closer to mathematics, and the counting of starts and worlds attached to it – argued that out of all the innumerable planets like ours, life must flourish at many of them. Quite a few of them, he claimed, must have developed advanced forms of living beings. Mayr – on the other hand – argued the opposite. His pessimism was coming from his profession, not from his character that was as vivid and optimistic as Sagan’s: What biology is for the natural sciences, that is what a history is for human sciences – a spacetime-lined story of the past with a predicament, or sometimes an inevitable consequence, for our future. As prof. Noam Chomsky beautifully reminds us of this great episode, Ernst Mayr took our mother planet as an example to illustrate his claim. 

All organisms share the same evolutionary mandate: to promulgate their own life. No wonder, as similar codes reside within all species – the intricate self-actualizing chemo-electrical tapestry, known as genes.[4] However, the so-called ultimate biological success of species could be measure by their number, configuration and durability. Hence, by all three parameters, prof. Mayr stressed, the most adaptive systems are those conducting fast (non-cognitive) mutations caused/triggered by any environmental stress (e.g. varieties of bacteria, creatures stuck in a fixed ecological niches, like beetles or some sea biotas), and surviving even larger crisis including the cataclysmic events. But, as we go up the scale of what we assume as intelligence, the systems become less adaptive and scarcer by number, configuration and durability. Arriving to the top (as we classified a tip of the intelligence pyramid), from low mammals to higher primates, apes and Homo sapiens, the species tend to image a rarifying picture – by all three biological success parameters. 

By Mayr’s account, the average lifespan of upper-intelligence echelons is only around 100,000 years. Out of billions of spices that have inhabited (and quite some still inhabiting) our planet, we – along with other higher primates – are late arrival and temporal ‘accidents’. He attributes this to our intelligence, labeling it as a ‘lethal mutation’ – not a blessing but a curse. Mayr’s finding is intriguing: The higher the intelligence, the more likely to end up in self-destruction, past the transitioning on a curve of initial development. If so, that would mean that humans are unable to deploy their vast neuroplasticity, and that the mechanical solidarity of non-cognitive creatures gives far better results in preservation (even enhancement) of the environmental equilibrium.     

Indeed, our environmental, financial and politico-economic policies and practices are creating the global stress for us and all other species. Each of our civilizational technological cycles intensified and expanded our overall conflict with life and the planet – thus, not a better adaptation but more violent antagonisation. (From the cell to Cosmos; from the smallest organised structure of life to the largest harmonised order of space-time, the system sustains itself on cooperation not on confrontation.) 

Therefore, deep and structural, this must be a crisis of our cognitivity. It is so, since the antagonisation of nature cannot be development – just as technology (anthropotechnics) must not be the master of appropriation, but only the servant of creation.

Do we want to prove Mayr right with our global Jihad against a cognitive mind?

Cognitive deficit crisis

If the subatomic world emerges into the atomic one, the quantum scientist (or metaphysician) will call the physicist. If the atoms create more complex molecules, the physicist will turn to the chemist. If, on the other hand, such complex organic molecules evolve too complex for chemists, they will call in biologists. If such a biological system further consolidates, the matter is handed over to socio-political scientists or psychologists. And, finally, if this kind of biota becomes too complex, geopolitics is needed to connect (all) inorganic and organic systems into one coherent time-space narrative.[5]  Do we really act this way?

From Copenhagen, Durban, Rio+20 to Paris COP 21 and on to Dubai at the end of 2023, our conclusion remains the same: we need principles and concerted action, since this is the only way to approach the difficult problems of this planet. We still haven’t reached a consensus about the Bretton Woods institutions, Tobin’s tax initiative, about the World Trade Organization and negotiations from the so-called The Doha Round, about limiting nuclear weapons, about migrants, the Slavic Guernica called Ukraine, the Middle East and the horrors of a 15-minute city called Gaza (whereby the bigger crime than that is our persistent silence about it) and the ‘mantra’ of regime change, about the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change), on the negotiations after those in Kyoto and Paris, on the so-called Covid-events that have significantly damaged our health, freedom and trust in science, about the so-called the great promise of AI, and finally, about the alarming state of our environment.

Issues are fundamental: Why has science converted into religion? Practiced economy is based on the over 200-years old liberal theory of Adam Smith and the over 300-years old philosophy of Hobbes and Locke– basically, frozen and rigidly canonized into a strict exegesis. Academic debate has been replaced by a blind obedience to old ‘scientific’ dogmas.[6] 

Why has religion been transformed into confrontational political doctrine (holy scripts are misinterpreted and ideologically misused in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, the Americas and Africa)? Why have (secular or theological) ethics been turned from bio-centric comprehension into anthropocentric environmental egotism and ignorance (treating nature as property, rather than a coherent system that contextualizes our very life)? Why are – despite all our research studies, institutions and instruments – planetary inequalities and exclusions widening? Why has been our freedom reduced to a lame here-us-now choice to consume? 

So, on a global level, we fundamentally disagree on the approach to the realities that our planet is facing, as well as on the ways of our attitude towards it. [In addition, we fundamentally disagree about the role of technology. When we talk about technology, it’s not about the art of science, it’s about the state of mind! It is not a linear progression in mastering the disciplines of natural sciences, but a cognitive puzzle in achieving critical insight.]

I am neither moralizing, idealizing nor agonizing. The world based on agreed principles and commonly willing actions is not a better place. It is the only way for the human race to survive. 

We completely separated human development from economic, industrial from stock market, demographic growth from energy consumption. That’s how we base all our business models on (the promise of) selling more and more goods to more and more people. As we do so, we sincerely hope for a new ‘middle class boom’ – with escalating purchasing power versus fast fashion in clothing, driving, telephoning, travel, warfare or medicine – that should sweep most of the Global South, as it peaks in the OECD countries.

If so, it means that we need three times more natural resources in 2050 than we consumed in 2010. Our huge ecological footprint is already exceeding our planetary limits of sustainability. While the Gini coefficient of that Oxfam study will tell us more about the ratio and proportion of guilt and sources of damage. 

Clearly, our crisis is real, but neither sudden nor recent. Simply, our much-celebrated globalisation deprived from environmental concerns can only cage us into the ecological globalistan.[7]

Climate Change – a brutal terror against nature

In the modern scientific and philosophical (or astronomic, esoteric and theological) sense, the word cosmos should describe (a dependent origination of) everything (of the manifested, comprehensible and visible universe as well as the non-comprehensible potentiality and invisible universes/multiverse) that nature and/or God has created.[8] As everything that has been, is and will ever be conceived as a time–space, matter–energy and force (with all the properties and all their conceivable aggregate states/stages, elevations and degrees), particle – wave-function (consciousness-information), cosmos is nature and/or God itself. It is all that ever begins (from), lasts (with/in) and ends in (returns to) the quantum field. 

Contemporary astrophysics claims that the known or comprehensible universe is expanding, still being powered by the quantum event generally referred to in literature as the big-bang (or perhaps the Higgs Boson particle recently reviled by CERN). Up to now, there is no general consensus of the scientific community on what is the property (nature) of the invisible, inter-stellar and inter-galactic space (dark matter). However, it is certain that the visible stellar universe is mainly composed of two elements only: helium and hydrogen. Thus, stars – this backbone of the universe – are predominantly (to 99%) made of these two elements. Tantalizingly enough, the colony of progressing biped primates, while evenly spreading over this planet, has developed a strong technological, civilizational and physiological culture of addiction to a completely other element: carbon. 

We place ourselves in a centre of materialistic world – this, of what we perceive as a universe of dead (and linear) matter. Therefore, what we euphemistically call (anthropogenic) Climate Change is actually a brutal war against (living) nature. It is a covert armed conflict, since we are predominantly using the so-called monetizing-potent ‘technologies’, instead of firearms in our hands. (For this purpose hereby, the army units are replaced by the demolition-man of other name; ‘transnational corporations’.) This armed regime-change insurgency is waged against most of what is beautiful and unique on Earth – on the planet that gave us time and space enough to survive as species and to evolve as cognitive life. Thus, the known sustainability matrix of 3 maximums (of good, of species, and of time) becomes the minimum species, minimum time with a maximum harm.

Intentionally or not, it is a synchronized attack: We are steadily and passionately polluting our public sphere with the diverting banalities manufactured by the so-call social networks, reality shows, ‘celebrities’ and the like – trivializing the contents of our lives. At the same time, we are massively contaminating our biosphere (waters, lands, air and near outer space) with non-degradable and/or toxic, solid or aerosol, particles radiation and noise – irreversibly harming our habitat.[9]  

We pollute the time as well, turning it into cross-generation warfare’s battlefield: Our dangerous patterns might seal off the fate for untold number of generations and sorts of species to come.[10] No wonder, our corrosive assertiveness has (time-space) parallels: acidifying of oceans and brutalization of our human interactions, as well as over-noising both of them, are just two sides of a same coin. What is the social sphere for society that is the biosphere for the very life on earth: the (space/time – content/form) frame we all live in. 

Seems we pay our space (linear possessions) by our time (future). Therefore, our crisis cannot be environmental, as it was never a financial or security (war on terror) – our crisis must be a moral one. This is a cognitive deficit crisis, which we eagerly tend to spend in a limbo of denial!   

Πάντα ρει (panta rei)

In his famous speech of 1944, Max Planck spelled out something that philosophy, religion, astronomy and physics were indicating ever since the classic Greeks (or to be precise, since the ancient Vedic Sanskrit texts).[11] It laid down the foundation, not only of quantum physics[12] but also, of the so-called Unified Theory of Everything (TOE) as well as the (Coherent key to) Secrets of Creation. Moreover, it rejuvenated and reaffirmed many of the Buddhist Tantric perspectives, especially the metaphysical visions contained within the Yogacara,[13] as well as one of paticcasamuppada[14] – the so-called interdependent non-directional origination. 

Hence, if one of the newest TOEs postulated by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow is correct – that the quantum universe, as a self-excited circuit, tends to create meaning and that the observers are part of the system – than the cosmos self-actualizes itself.[15] It concludes that, as the universe evolves, enabling organization to emerge, our consciousness creates the universe/multiverse.[16] If so, it leads to a self-actualization of us in cosmos too, as then the fundamental nature of reality should be a comprehensive and coherent self-perception.[17]

This TOE would then suppose our constant mastering of arts, which is not a ‘technology’ that preserves status quo, but is a technology that opens, liberates and expands. How can the carbon–addicted culture of fragile and insecure, but here-us-now assertive and corrosive bipeds, whose overall dynamics are largely determined by the binary (fight-flight, consume-abandon) actions of the reptilian complex consciously project an intelligent universe predominantly composed of helium and hydrogen in all its immensity?[18] 

Nature does not change. Change (as a cosmic constant) is a nature itself. Still, even Heraclitus understood, this force is never eruptive or destructive (explosive, combusting and polarising), but eternally gradual and constructive (holistic, inclusive and implosive). A clear proof of this is that we, the ‘masters of technology’, predominantly use the so-called Explosive systems (based on internal combustion engines, and/or superheated jet/thrust) to meet our kinetic and thermal needs. Nature exclusively uses the so-called Implosive (self-sustaining, holistic) systems when he creates, and explosive only on rare occasions, when he destroys. 

So, we don’t know that much about nature and the cosmos. Look up the skies, that will be the exact way how entire universe works.[19]

We are drifting, dissolving and retreating on all levels and within each and every organic (marine and continental biota) or inorganic (soil, glaciers, water, polar caps, etc.) system. For the grave, burning (hydrocarbon) planetary problems, our human race needs an urgent and lasting consensus which presupposes bravery, virtue, vision and creativity. All this will not result from fear of coercion (social haircut, austerity, financial straitjacket), from a further militarization of our societies caused by the accelerated confrontations called ‘war against the invisible’ (germ or terror), but from the universally shared willingness to accord our common planetary cause. Cognitive mind can do it all.[20]

So, let’s start a global war on terror – but this time – against the terror of the global ecological holocaust caused by the cognitive deficit crisis.

For the three most serious planetary challenges (technology, ecology, nuclear annihilation) we need an accurate, fair and timely multilateral approach. In this struggle for relevance, everyone has their stake, and their share of historical (generational) responsibility.

Post Scriptum:

Back in 2011 (feeling the coming, but still not grasping the today’s full amplitude and corrosiveness of digital colonialism, with devolved return to feudalism, imprisoning technologies), I coined the term McFB way of life. Then and there, in my book ‘Is there Life After Fb‘, I also recorded this:

Contemplate the following situation: Your national security service sends a form to all its citizens’ home addresses. There he asks them to start keeping a file about themselves, their family members and close friends, completely free of charge, but in detail and persistently, and all this in their own free time, to update this (written and audio-video) data, to classify, they archive, sort and send to the Service at least three times a week, for an indefinite number of years. This would most likely revolt the citizenry to the extent of current mass protests. In an atmosphere of total distrust, the country’s government would have to resign with a deep, clear and multiple apology.

And now imagine an Orwellian world (of the future) in which such a form with the same request arrives in everyone’s mailbox from a foreign private company. The local government feels this reluctantly and passively maintains it. But when it notices that the entire citizenry has accepted it en masse, and propagates it as a pleasant and useful entertainment (almost as a new standard of social behaviour), then the government also supports it more clearly, and in some places also (publicly) promotes it.[21]

Are the so-called AI promises obsolete (presence of artificial intelligence) – and therefore fears about it (because they are actually just algorithms and not intelligence, since intelligence must contain at least four components; linear, social, sensory and physical, and not only linear-computational, whatever strength and speed might be)?

Should (only) Big Brother be blamed in such an atmosphere? And who exactly is he? Will there ever be a greater ‘Brother’ than our own stupidity?

• The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect IFIMES official position, where this article was first published.

References:

1. Ki-moon, B. (2015), Remarks to the opening of the High-Level session of the COP21, December 7, 2015, UNIS (Office of the Spokesperson of the UN SG);
2. Chomsky, N. (2010), Human Intelligence and the Environment, University of North Caroline, Chapel Hill (Paper)
3. Sagan, C. (1980), Cosmos Random House, NY /Carl Sagan Productions Inc. (page: 109)
4. Chopra, D. & Mlodinow, L. (2012), Where Science and Spirituality Meet and Do not, Harmony/Rodale
5. Dresner, S. (2002), The Principle of Sustainability, EarthScan London
6. Mumford, L. (1970), The Myth of the Machine – Pentagon of Power (Technics and Human Development Vol.2), Mariner Books (Ed. 1974)
7. Ibn Khaldûn (1398), Muqddimah – al-Kitābu l-ʻibār (the Prolegomenon – An Introduction to History), Princeton University Press (Ed. 1967)
8. Smith, L.C. (2010), The World in 2050 – Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Northern Future, Dutton (by Penguin group)
9. Engels, F. (1972), The Origin of The Family, Private Property and the State, Penguin Classics (Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats, fist published in 1884, Hottingen–Zürich)
10. Spencer, H. (1855), A System of Synthetic Philosophy (Principles of Biology, Psychology and Sociology), Brighton (6^th Edition, 1900), Obscure Press
11. Kulic, S. (2004), Neoliberalism as Social-Darwinism, Prometej Zagreb
12. Fleming, G. (2011), Quantum–coherent energy transfer: Implications for biology and new energy technologies, Conference proceedings, University of California, Berkeley
13. Tesla, N. (1915), How Cosmic Forces Shape our Destines, New York American (February 07^th, 1915, Page: 9)
14. Planck, M. (1944), Das Wesen der Materie (The Nature of Matter), speech at Florence, Italy, 1944 (retrieved from: Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Abt. Va, Rep. 11 Planck, Nr. 1797)
15. Smetham, G. (2011), Quantum Buddhism: Dancing in Emptiness – Reality Revealed at the Interface of Quantum Physics and Buddhist Philosophy, Graham Smetham–Shunyata Press
16. Stapp, H.P. (2009), Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics, Springer (3^rd Edition)
17. Vedral, V. (2010), Decoding Reality – The Universe as Quantum Information, Oxford University Press
18. Bajrektarevic, A. (2023), Governing the Digital Optimism, Addleton Academic Publishers NY GHIR 17(2) 2022 (also available as the (Promise of) The AI: Multilateralism as an answer to the Dual Use Technology, AEI Journal, KL)