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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11 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.
Quote = ”Frankfurt School? ” Unquote.
Any sort of work thats a tool for emancipation from truly oppressive criticality gets revised by the oppressors own scholars. After this it too reads like it was designed to facilitate oppression rather than defeat it. Then ofc the blind only lead the blind. & the question is whether dictatorships through time have ever left any work that advised the 99% alone.
Subsequently people hate these scholars even though they set out to overcome oppression. Furthermore it is not even a case where any of them handed the dictators some kind of ‘ ready made error’. more so that the better people ‘connect’ anti oppression, the more those dictators abuse the systems to have these things restated.
Oppressions biggest secret is the extent of its international collaboration. Also we tend to think of globalist misanthropy / corruption as a very modern phenomenon when nothing is further from the truth.
‘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.
I’m afraid so 13 where as usual you are very astute.
They’ve got more red herring than robin di angelo’s got BS concerning whats shes written ( compared to whats shes only fronting ). So they’ve set up smoke & mirrors the like that would give Geobbels a heart attack.
Beneath it all is fragile FAKE that could have fallen over.
In that sense wild imagination has invented so much concern thats not actually there that the fragile fake has become a bit more resilient.
Its ALWAYS THE PLATO UTOPIA. It only ever depends what NU snide is concealing the fact it is yet again the same plato utopia.
Brilliant!
Hear hear – where we are in many ways is only the old boring philosopher king model. Theres IS modern technocratic refinements to add to this and whatever the present level of ruthlessness is. That happens to be Fascism @ this point. Meaning? If for some reason they could not get their own way they’d resort to Genocide.Thats the status.
Though not all senses of this place resulted in the aforementioned.
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?