Notes from IRC

There are already entities with vastly greater than human intelligence working on the problem of augmenting their own intelligence. A great many, in fact. We call them corporations. … Let’s focus on as a very particular example: The Intel Corporation. Intel is my favorite example because it uses the collective brainpower of tens of thousands of humans and probably millions of CPU cores to… design better CPUs! (And also to create better software for designing CPUs.) Those better CPUs will run the better software to make the better next generation of CPUs.

— Ramez Naam

A man cannot be a person without the fellowship, community, or society that made him. Unsocialised, man’s potencies are not activated, and he stays at a level close to a beast, bereft of speech and reason, let alone partaking of the higher arts and sciences. Individualistic societies are decomposing social bodies in which kinship-ties are loosened and even cut, and which can be held together only by an all-pervasive and socially-alien bureau-technocratic power — the “coldest of all cold monsters”.

— Deogolwulf

The state of nature is ahistorical. Always and everywhere, humans form societies, organizing principles acquiring and preserving institutional memory and institutional knowledge: societal wisdom that may not be known or knowable by the people who make it up. Institutional intelligences.

Nick Land sees capitalism as a thing, a thing of a certain type. What type is it? Another organizing principle, a superhuman (super- in the sense of ‘above’, with humans as its constituent parts) intelligence—that is, an institutional intelligence.

Institutional intelligences compete both within and outside their type. Within: societies compete with other societies, corporations compete with other corporations, governments compete with other governments, media outlets compete with other media outlets, and one economic form competed with another economic form in the Cold War. Outside: governments compete with traditional cultures, organized crime, the Catholic Church, and so on, and capitalism competes with societies and families. (The Last Psychiatrist talks about capitalism’s weaponization of progressivism, but a particularly good example is feminism. I once had a professor explain that it was absolutely imperative for women to cease full-time motherhood and enter the workforce—and therefore outsource to some extent the function of child-raising to the state, the media, the economy in the form of hired help, and so on.)

Institutional intelligences have goals, which run in a spectrum from strictly and totally cybernetically encoded in the most literal sense to depending on the individuals who are parts of the system. The victory of certain types of institutional intelligence with certain goals is usually seen as a problem: if capitalism totally wins then we all have no family and work twelve hours a day with Soylent instead of a lunch break and so on.

Atomization is the result of a certain type of institutional intelligence being outcompeted by another type. The reality of atomization is indisputable: the loss of social ties, the decline of traditional cultures, women married to the state, children raised by the ruling structure, loss of imagined communities fostering commonality and promoting/easing interaction, loss of historically-continuous thedes to identify with and their replacement with subcultures and trends, and increasing multiculturalism—which studies like Robert Putnam’s demonstrate is a problem (for intuitively obvious reasons which I don’t have the vocabulary to express yet) and which is clearly supported by capitalism (deterritorialization, Koch-funded open borders promotion, etc.).

If atomization is a problem, you want to fight it. How do you fight it? Summon up an institutional intelligence that can fight it. Thede-magic may prove useful here: see Benedict Anderson on the use of nationalism as fuel for revolutions. (I used to yell at Communists for their internationalism, but I later realized that they’re tapping thede-magic even though they don’t realize it—it’s a particularly weak form, though, consisting mostly of Streicherite crocodilism with little to no positive identity-content. This appeals to jackboot types, but most people seem to want thede-magic with positive content: hipsters adopting kitsch Americana and justifying it with a thin coating of irony, conservatives feeling the need to constantly remythologize American history, and so on.)