The Digital Revolution and the New Feudal Order

Our regression from net surfing to serfdom

~Tom Mahon~

With the Senate unapologetically passing the most egregiously unjust tax bill in U.S. history, in the dead of night with no public comment, we have officially birthed a new economic, political and social regime very much like the Feudal order of a thousand years ago.

Except that in the old Feudal order wealth and power were based on ownership of land (‘real property’), while the new order is based on ownership of information (‘intellectual property’ or IP).

And it’s the shared ownership of IP that has allowed the ‘innovators’ of Silicon Valley and investors of Wall Street, with some help from their minions in Washington, to accumulate massive wealth, and ever-growing mastery over our thoughts, words and deeds.

When Apple launched its Macintosh computer, it promised that the year 1984 would not be like George Orwell’s novel 1984, with Big Brother overseeing everything. But then a few years ago when the government demanded information about its customers, Apple showed who has the real power now, and it isn’t the Feds.

Only in recent years have we discovered our attempts at solitude are under constant surveillance; our innermost thoughts subject to hacking. And this year we find out that even facts and actual events are subject to digital manipulation. When everything is true, nothing is true. When all values are of equal value, they are of no value. The new tax bill, whatever its final shape, is our lords’ way of telling us serfs that the won percent have one, and we survive, but can no longer flourish, at their sufferance.

And we ain’t seen nothing yet. Over the next few years monitoring and control by ‘innovators’ and investors over every aspect of our lives will intensify as the big marketing machine encourages us to hand over our thought processes to artificial intelligence (AI); replace our remaining connections to nature with the Internet of Things (IoT). And even now our owners are preparing a happy place for us in an artificial, virtual, 3D digital world where we can forget the growing ugliness in society, and the ravaging of the natural world by which our owners profit.

And coming behind all that is the Singularity, that may (or may not; nobody really knows) represent an ‘event horizon’ after which there will be no going back to messy, smelly, daily life. So no more farts or toe jam, but also no more lavender scents, chocolate ice cream, or warm embraces.

Some in the ownership class, frustrated they can’t control nature (or her daughters), want to create a digital world they can control. And some seriously believe that by uploading their brains to machines they will be able to live forever (or at least until an impatient heir pulls the plug).

Some technophiles hope that in humanity’s near future we will become what Arthur C. Clark once called ‘frozen lattices of light,’ as seen in the light show the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Maybe intelligence and consciousness will transition eventually from carbon-based to silicon-based beings. But we are a long way from that now, and those who want to rush into it may do a lot of harm, and some of it perhaps irreversible.

We cannot fight our new owners on their terms. They have all the heavy weapons and own the IP behind them. So, like Gandhi, Mandela, Dr King et. al., we have to redefine the idea of winning. The powerful are considered powerful because their definition of power is limited to wealth, influence and possessions. But the most basic study of history or literature shows those are the most transient things of all and can vanish in an Internet minute.

I’m not suggesting we give up the many benefit of electronic digital technology. On the contrary, we have a portfolio of tools at our disposal now that, if we re-think them correctly, can help us regain our dignity, decency and integrity — virtues lost when we are compelled to live at lightspeed, and necessary if we’re to rebuild a just and merciful society.

The electronic digital revolution was never intended to go as it has. I was very impressed in 1974 when my first client, the VP of QA at Univac, reminded me to include the social benefits of the company’s computers in all the material I wrote for them: their machines would make air travel safer, health care more affordable, and education more broadly available.

Over forty years on, we have achieved none of those goals, and with the current tax bill are in fact further from them than we were in 1974. Public infrastructure, public health and public education in the U.S. are a shambles, and the new bill erases any doubt that we are in effect the new peonage.

At the same time I was doing contract work for Univac, a tech writer there, Robert M. Pirsig, wrote a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with the subtitle An Inquiry into Values. We spoke at some length back then. He stressed to me the necessity of incorporating values and quality in all fields of engineering, whether mechanical, automotive, civil or electronic. Sadly, my discussions with the VP of QA and with RMP set up expectations for me that were never realized, or ever spoken about again. It’s time to revisit the matter.

For now the battle’s over, we are the powerless in our own country, and we didn’t even know there was a war going on. We have been silently and stealthfully beaten by our new owners, and most of us vanquished serfs, whether Tea Party or technorati, still don’t get it and want more of what ails us.

Exhausted by the pace of life now, savaged body and soul by constant surveillance, physically violated by identity theft, and lied to as a matter of course, we are babes unmoored in a hostile world which many of us unwittingly helped create.

So we have to find a way to use our technologies to rewrite the terms of engagement to make the current regime collapse: not violently, but quickly. This is not just about a particular political party or faction. It’s about ending the whole corrupt and morally debauched regime we’ve lived in for a long time that says, “For me to win, you must lose; for me to have, you must have not.” And this is insane since digital information is infinitely replicable, with no degradation of fidelity from the original.

To survive our exposure to the brave new world of AI, IoT and the Singularity we need an engaged, informed public to watch every step of the way: “Why this, not that? Prove your thesis before we permit it. What are worst-case scenarios and how will you deal with them?” The technologies that can, and should, be liberating us instead now dominate our lives.

All tools are based on leverage: minimizing inputs while getting greater outputs. The six tools of classical antiquity — the lever, wheel and axle, inclined plane, wedge, screw, and pulley — allowed us to leverage our muscles and so we had the agricultural revolution and the birth of civilizations. Beginning five hundred years ago, tools that leveraged our senses — telescope, microscopes and the later discovery of radio waves — gave us the scientific and industrial revolutions. Computers arriving in the 20th Century created the information revolution.

Though largely forgotten today, in very ancient times technologies were also developed to leverage our souls: prayer, meditation, yoga, chi gong and others. And two pillars of righteous conduct were established by virtually all of the world’s ethical system: be calm within yourself, and in that frame of mind be kind to all you encounter: Be calm, be kind.

In our current tech-rich society we have to recover that model: be calm when you input your energy into a tool, and intend the output to produce kind actions. Imagine if the user manual for all tools began with the instructions: be calm; be kind…

In that spirit, we also need to reintegrate the two gold nuggets of ancient wisdom into our silicon society: the golden mean (moderation) and the golden rule (do to other as you’d wished done to you).

We are running out of time, and we are either going to get past the current regime based on greed, gain and self-aggrandizement, where we are only the hapless tools of our tools, to something that accommodates both individual happiness and the common good.

Or we will, with lemming-like efficiency, sail off a cliff of our own ingenuity. And the Feudal lords will be left with no serfs to take out the papers and the trash.

More to follow soon…

© 2017, Tom Mahon

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