All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. — H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call Of Cthulhu,” 1926

Hari Seldon in the Foundation Universe would attempt to formalize and project human behavioral systems – just as Maxwell & Boltzmann had for the behavior of large-scale action of gas molecules – through the formulation of a stochastic fictional science called psychohistory. Dr Seldon when questioned about the strength of the Romanesque Galactic Empire answers, “However, Mr Advocate, the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might that it ever had. The storm-blast whistles through the branches of the Empire even now. Listen with the ears of psychohistory, and you will hear the creaking.”

Alphabet’s X moonshot factory internally circulated memo demarcates the contours of the deliberations that whistle through within the conglomerate. Though such creaking can be interpreted as an attempt by Google to recast their dominant attention and data capture dragnets as tools for social good, an intriguing endeavor would be to probe the implicit ideological framings at work further through an interpretive process. Rationalisation and specifically “Zweckrationality” – one “ determined by expectations as to the behavior of objects in the environment of other human beings; these expectations are used as “conditions” or “means” for the attainment of the actor’s own rationally pursued and calculated ends” – in aggregate such behavior manifests itself in the macrocosm of the firm that acts as a centralized conduit for the distribution and processing of information. The expressed collective cognition of the human capital circuitry within such institutions align organizational and energetic capacities and potentialities towards a lodestar of the “greater good”. Such visions are articulated in mission statements such as “Don’t be evil” or “Think Different”. As such wills to power unfold over time such institutions inevitably cross the Rubicon into the inhuman. Such sentiments are echo’d in Weber’s concluding lamentation in the Protestant Work Ethic within the expansionary “tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”.

One could recognize the apocalyptic nature of the statement in the Ancient Greek sense of the word as in to unveil - a glimpse into the primordial alterity of the world. The selfish ledger appears to an apotheosis of a line of thought through the exhaustion and subsequent extrapolation of the human condition. A culmination of the Weltanschauung of Ratio one concerned primarily with abstraction. The billiard ball of causality hits the corner pocket as the predicate and the subject are interwoven into an assemblage of enunciation. In the process the Weberian ideal bureaucrat is summoned with an ideal amorphous face. The gears of controls have shifted. Lines between agency, attention and perception itself have blurred. Kafkaesque visions of the bureaucratic labyrinth have transmogrified into a rolling open world of machinic time. A cybernetic ecology where one can’t disambiguate between freedom and control, where one is merely an aggregate. The antagonisms that have fractured the Enlightenment underbelly momentarily reveal as the sea recedes before the great storm to come. Yet there is time to stay cocooned in the procrustean exfoliations of our minds all watched over by machines of loving grace.