New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 89
Our future, if the Woke Marxists prevail, may well be to be made into “digital cattle.” What does that mean? It means that we will be led into a state of dependency, perhaps using a Universal Basic Income, and enter into a remade (distributist) economy based on social credit, which is to say compliance with the state’s agendas for us. To make this system work, both practically and in terms of control mechanisms takes incredible amounts of data. Like cattle who earn their feed by being raised for meat, we will earn our “basic income” by providing the data necessary to keep us under “sustainable” control. Join host James Lindsay in this frightening episode of New Discourses Bullets to understand a possible future in the so-called “technetronic era.”
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8 comments
Let’s get this clear CBDC is NOT currency. Therefore it can’t be used to pay wages.
You paint a very optimistic future. I fear that as more and more of us become superfluous and AI and robotics improve, it will be the Stakeholders and their robot servants. We will be eliminated, not maintained on UBI. Some of us may be kept as pets, or for organ donation.
If you are interested in this important consequence of our networked world, you might find it interesting and useful to read:
Varoufakis, Y., 2023, “Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism”, Penguin. This argues that huge amounts of capital have flowed into big tech that are replacing capitalism’s markets and profit with platforms and rents such that individuals are becoming serfs who feed big tech with personal data that gives tech power to reshape and control our lives.
Hill, K., 2023, “Your Face Belongs to Us: The Secretive Startup Dismantling your Privacy”, Simon & Schuster. This gives a detailed account of the development and implementation of facial recognition technology that provides a basis for compiling and using detailed data about individuals that can be used to control lives.
If you are interested in this, you might like to check out: Varoufakis, Y, 2023, ‘Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism’. This gives an argument for the way this phenomenon has evolved.
Boiled down to its essence, Woke Social Justice is just another form of Oracular Philosophy, i.e., it’s unaccountable to any objective tests despite the made-up epistemology it wears like a fig leaf. Their ‘truth’ (which they would use to govern) comes out of them like an Oracle and you’re supposed to believe it.
As you say, their philosophy makes them wannabe Philosopher-Kings unaccountable to anyone or anything but themselves. This naturally leads to arbitrary and absolute power.
Is Plato even read in liberal-arts faculties now or do they skip to Foucault and the Frankfurt School?
‘Cattle’ is from Popper’s criticism of the totalitarian/Platonic republic in ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’.
“[T]he Spartan state, which was certainly not a classless society. It was a slave state, and accordingly Plato’s best state is based on the most rigid class distinctions. It is a caste state. The problem of avoiding class war is solved, not by abolishing classes, but by giving the ruling class a superiority which cannot be challenged. As in Sparta, the ruling class alone is permitted to carry arms, it alone has any political or other rights, and it alone receives education, i.e. a specialized training in the art of keeping down its human sheep or its human cattle.”
― Karl Popper, “The Open Society and Its Enemies – Volume One: The Spell of Plato”
Besides technology, the main difference between then and now is that today’s digital cattle WANT to be cattle. Covid societal lock-down, Trans/Queer compelled speech, Islamic colonization of the West and many other examples all demonstrate that the majority of modern digital cattle desire, chose, accept, and DEMAND digital captivity. Digital Heifers and Techno Steers (she bossy, he beta) are human livestock that rejoice in the freedom (safety) of their slavery (submission). Only rogue bulls disrupt and putrefy the hivemind of the herd with their “right wing” resistance. Digital cattle work hard (the new animal husbandry) to help their Philosopher King owners exterminate the disruptors of the New Utopia. In the end there was the word and that word was Moo.
Brilliant!