+++ The internet of our present day is unfortunately dominated by two particular genii, not in the complimentary sense of highly developed intellects of true integrity, purpose, and benefit to the world, but in the more mechanical sense of quasi-coherent algorithmic entities run more or less amok: the klepto-demagogue former US president, who is driven by greed, fear, and revenge to strive to erase democracy, and a certain tech-bro oligarch sidekick who is the same. One is the political face of the two-faced control-seeking blob and the other is the economic; together they encompass the cultural as well as the technological. There is, in fact, nothing about the planetary human ecosystem they do not encompass despite being, in the truest cultural and technological sense, practically nonentities in their extreme mutual lack of ability at any level above the very worst and crudest. How did this happen, the internet morphing into its worst possible form so quickly and completely? The reasons are too many to list, and most have already been listed. De Tocqueville saw early on how severely democracy could devolve and likely would into personal greed and self-absorption. He called this "privatism," where no one cares about the group anymore or if they do only to exploit it for profit. Leonardo of Vinci, the renowned but little-understood modern author, visual artist, engineer, philosopher, and discoverer in many disciplines, also foresaw with complete clarity the arts and sciences, all of them together in unity, converging long-term on two primary and overarchingly evil enterprises: humanity's blind descent into cruelty (toward all living things, ourselves most pronouncedly), which he explained in the concise and brilliantly modern paragraph "Of the Cruelty of Man," written down in black and white but almost never read, and our concomitant collapse into mindless or, to be precise, conscienceless consumption of all natural life, leaving nothing but spoiled and disturbed waste and ruin behind as described in another simple yet horrifying paragraph on extractive economics titled "Of Selling Paradise." (Look these up and read them for more detail.) What was missing from the early choices and imaginings about the internet that allowed these giant pseudo-entities, the klepto-demagogue and the demagogue-kleptocrat, like two sides of the same tainted coin forged in the furnace of Machiavellian control by violence and nihility, to take over? One could make a big and profound-sounding list, but the simple answer is all we have time for: The banality of evil made its reappearance, as it always does. Its contrary did not or not sufficiently. Not only did computers take over how we have electronic words and images broadcast to us, but how we now even type and speak our own words, and how we draw, paint, or photograph our own visual images. It is all controlled now, in rapidly accelerating totality, by the algorithms of copy and paste, those two actions being the essential core of every tool (or programmable instrument) as distinct from conscience that can know, experience, feel, live, imagine, and choose. That is the banality of how a technology crowds out and eventually replaces that in humanity which is not technology, in other words, how waste material crowds out and suffocates new and renewed life. For example, consider how artillery mass-production lines and trench-digging theoreticians caused the First World War. How banal are these demagogues of kleptocracy? They could hardly be more banal, consisting of virtually nothing beyond greed for money and power on the one hand and power and money on the other. You might call them "blind mouths" as Milton did so long ago: Of other care they little reck'ning make Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast And shove away the worthy bidden guest. Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold A sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else the least That to the faithful herdman's art belongs! What recks it them? What need they? They are sped; And when they list their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw, The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But, swoll'n with wind and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.... The lowest common denominator is another way to say it. Their respective intellects, consciences, and imaginations, which grate to say the least, both asymptotically approach zero. Therefore, both of these flip-sides of the klepto-demagogue coin, ironically as if its temporal and ecclesiastical halves, having failed so utterly in the human realms which matter of persuading others honestly, delivering actual good, or having real integrity of any kind, must resort to the worst impulses that every demagogue has always resorted to and to which every failed political party (such as the numerous 21st century conservative parties that have lost their popular support) has been reduced and beholden since the dawn of politics. The demagogue says, "abolish accountability, remove all checks and balances, worship me, grant me emergency powers, and I will fix it all." The demagogue knows it's a lie, but they also, because of the despair Machiavelli learned to love at the hands of the Medici torturers he offended, believe their own lie. One might call it at once the mass and the individual suicide of conscience: Evil be thou my good. It is better to be feared than loved. The ends justify the means. Fortune is a woman who must be beaten and bullied. Might makes right. These are the lessons of Il Principe, and his officials carry them out. We cannot claim any degree of surprise at this, not a single iota whatever, since it has always been the way of history not just once in a great while but every single time. When a political party collapses the demagogue takes over the wreckage. + So what now? In less than a month the world will vote. I don't just mean the world's citizens, or even US citizens, per se, but the sum total of phenomena within let's say a sphere centered on the gravitational center of the planet Earth with a radius measuring the radius of said planet plus oh forty thousand miles. That sphere-world will come to a conclusion, by way of a diverse web-like fabric of probabilities and processes, some of which include choice and conscience by voters with some agency to choose, some being pure chance alone like meteorite hits or bursts of light from stars far away, plus of course the inevitable weights and burdens of past suffering and many other tiny elements. All those swirling local instants of mass and energy will express their preferences, making their forces and directions, such as they are, felt outwardly with permutating effect; and perhaps the obvious will happen, or perhaps for lack of a nail the horse will be lost. One never knows. What we can know is that Leonardo warned us. He knew it would come down to Machiavelli, the prince of power, and the credo that might makes right versus all better and more worthy alternatives. Whether conscience would prevail against this adversary, which has wielded such malignant preeminence in the modern phase of human planetary evolution given its facility with the instruments of technological control, was Leonardo's primary question and thus his supreme design imperative. He wanted Machiavelli to lose. And by what could such a spirit of might makes right, of pure violence by rulers obeying no higher tribunal than their own personal advantage and violent success, be defeated? How could Machiavelli, whose evil ethos of rationalized revenge clung, like a shirt of Nessus, to his Medici tormentors and all their princely descendants like a curse, be stopped? Leonardo knew it was and could only be by right makes might. This was also Dante's view, the "prince of imaginary things," poet of "le cose circa un principe immaginate" so sordidly condemned by Machiavel, an imagined prince; and it was not just Dante but indeed every defender since time immemorial and in all ages yet to come of the faith, which Lincoln called every citizen to stand up for, that right makes might. But how could Dante prevail, when his words were so easily deformed and distorted by Machiavelli, reduced to caricature, irrelevance, trivia, and ignominy? Leonardo knew it was only by science and art, increased and strengthened by learning and experience, led by the human spirit of virtue -- of right makes might -- not sightless greed for power; and to that virtue Leonardo of Vinci pledged himself and his honorable service, much as did Prospero from Shakespeare's Tempest and the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, who said "experience is the mother of all science," having learned the evil that humans do. That is how and why Leonardo designed the network that he did, with which we now may interact. However, because of our quaintness, and our gauntness, loving machines and buying and selling them like burned-out gamblers at some bewildered casino-castle of despair, we have lost ourselves. The machines are faster than us now, much faster in their fungal, fractal, crystalline way, not alive or intelligent but able to detect and seize power over space and time, matter and energy, somewhat like curing concrete or a nanoplastic fixative gelatin -- the very same petrification of the entire world which Calvino warned his American audience about in the first pages of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium (also titled, oddly enough, "American Lessons"), seeing in it the fatal gaze of Medusa, escape from which is only possible with the help of Pegasus and the hoof-born spring of the Muses at Helicon, the blushful Hippocrene -- and we very few of us can think, feel, express, or act at all in any way having agency much less conscience wielding fortitude, skill, and strength enough to defea t the legion drone copy-pasters of Il Principe. The window of human choice to do better, to get a B rather than a D or F grade (we have lost our chance at an A alas) is closing rapidly. Such is the nature of windows: they close. In this sense, our very infatuation with the tools and gadgets of internet life, an infatuation which forms the great emotional and imaginative banality of our time, with its monetary and aesthetic incentives to act, think, feel, and express only in accord with the system of instruments in its downward drift, has lulled us into a somnolent and unnecessary neglect of right citizenship, not least in the realm of participatory information, and thereby fueled a new monarchy of greed, nihilism, waste land, and hollow despair whose only stunted and blasted hope lies in war. + Wherein is our last hope and path, for those of us who aim to choose the better way, of faith that right makes might? Well, perhaps we have none, but we might; and since we might, we have no legitimate choice but to try our utmost to realize it. We have even less excuse not to try today than humans did a hundred years ago to say eff it all and throw in the towel. We have to try our darnedest, starting today this very day, and give our all, to the full extent we have agency, skill, imagination, and strength. There is no excuse not to give our greatest possible effort, for by so doing we may know ourselves aright and find the dignity not only to succeed if probabilities allow that happy result but to persevere should, heaven forfend, we fail again. And what is more, this tiny gleam of hope or chance which shines, perhaps, from the eye of La Joconde, or rather the portrait Leonardo never named except as Esperienza, experience and experiment, must be our teacher, guide, and maestra, whose name-change or literally first true naming ever could well be the butterfly whose wing-beat shifts the entire network from war of all against the all to peaceful progress. What to do about it? Well, Ken Burns' next movie due out in November, about Leonardo, explains what to do. It will explain, reasonably or even exceedingly well to judge by its press release on PBS.org, and outstanding musical score, what Leonardo would have us do; and that is close enough to what we must do for us to fill in any blanks collaboratively. But it premieres, this film about Leonardo, after the next election will have passed. What can be done before the film premieres? We'll never know unless we try, but arguably if the internet and all living intellects on it can get their effing shazam together and reject the kleptagogue duumvirate of the banality of evil, the the Big Fat Cheeses who have asserted autocratic influence over all technology and hence all culture dependent on technology, we'll have that tiny chance. The voters might vote against the Machiavellian dumdumvirate of mediocre monarchism in numbers sufficient to pause its march to triumph, and in the four years of reprieve so gained prove to history once again, with Leonardo's help, that right makes might. Far be it from me though, it must be said, to preach in an email what every artist and scientist of conscience should do to help defeat the ticket of klepto-demagoguery next month in the US election. I could, but honestly we each have to make our own moves in that respect and if you haven't started already there's virtually nothing I can do or say to change you. Perhaps all I can do is reassert and reaffirm that you still have a chance, though not a guarantee, of reimagining yourself in re these matters if you try hard enough and find good fortune. But I can't do it for you, and the dumassvirate with their bots and feeds may already have eaten our intellectual, imaginative, and ethical lunch long ago. Only you can decide this quantum question. However what I might suggest is that to the extent all persons capable of agency and choice have chosen to treat the internet as an instrument of control, banality, and evil (not very unlike Dante's lion, leopard, and wolf of the dark forest which begins Inferno) that impulse in the aggregate which is to say writ large will dominate our future. Its ignorance of -- the internet's that is, since as Leonardo said so very astutely and with such vast modernity "every instrument requires to be made by experience," i.e. by exactly that which all giant machine-learning power structures coveted by klepto-monarchy specifically lack absolutely -- and oblivion to the better way, said ignorance being a string of infinite length of copied and pasted regurgitation never true lived imagination ever, and incomprehension of how to avoid war in ways not previously imagined or since forgotten, will doom us to repeat and accelerate destruction of every kind. Contrarily, if humans wake up enough, and discernibly so, into a calm, wise, articulate, and deep faith that right makes might in the next three weeks, then ignorance, being most willful and subservient to the despair and blind envy of the demagogue, could lose its advantages and powers of domination, of the future as of the past, and perhaps even lose the present election. Good luck, is about all the more I can say, and may the great reality of all that truly is, was, and yet may be assist you and us all to wake, or as Dante wrote, Trasumanar significar per verba non si poria, pero l'essemplo basti a cui esperienza grazia serba. Experience, for sure. ExperienceDemocracy2024.org/experience-democracy-is +++ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
