Pandemos

Harry Halpin

There has been no more world-defining event in recent memory than the 2020 pandemic and the wave of digitization it created. So, a moment of philosophical and historical reflection is in order to understand what precisely is at stake in the 'digital totality' that we have entered, as put by a hackers conference in Prague. The cypherpunks, a group of dissidents in the United States in the 1990s, perhaps best foresaw that a digital totality would envelop all of us and that it would be a method of what I, following the lead of Agamben, term a “society of hypercontrol".

It should be remembered that in English, the term “pandemic" descends from its usage in the Roman Empire, and from the ancient Greek term πάνδημος, which means “of belonging to the people." The term means simply that a plague is something that belongs to everyone and so oddly the term “pandemic" shares the same root as “demos" and “democracy." By virtue of its very universality, a plague is akin to an empire, and not just any empire, but a global empire that belongs to all the people. This sort of universal empire descends not from Greece, but from Persia (Iran), to Alexander the Great, and then the Roman Empire. The idea of global governance that no one can escape from and that orders and controls life is at the heart of the development of the nation-state in the West. This universalism is also the heart of the United States, which has been the military force enforcing global capital since the end of the Second World War.

Our question is: can such a universal empire, a new world global governance, be maintained? It should be remembered that the Roman Empire did not fall because of barbarian invasions, but due to out of control pandemics much more deadly than COVID-19. The Antonine Plague at the end of the Roman Empire killed approximately one-quarter of the population and decimated the Roman army. Weakened, the Roman army tried and failed to replenish itself by employing the “barbarians", but Rome was already an empty shell of its former self due to the deaths caused by the pandemic and thus fell apart. Who can argue that the American empire is today not falling apart due to the plague?

With the advent of COVID-19, the inevitable collapse of the American empire seems assured. Yet any future horizon appears closed. What is at stake in the failure of the West to control the pandemic is not just the discrediting of an empire in a classical sense as a domain of cultural, psycho-logical, and ultimately biological control. In the final instance, the threat of infinite violence by the American military no longer seems credible to large amounts of the world, just as the Roman army no longer seemed a credible threat to the rest of the world as Rome collapsed. However, the question is what comes after the end of the global empire. We can learn from what came after Rome: just as the physical principle of power of the Roman empire disappeared, the principle of the power itself remained in the Catholic Church. The physical methods of control were no longer, but the forms of life were still strictly spiritually controlled by Christianity. After the fall of the Roman Empire, this empire of the mind remained for a thousand years, paralyzing all progress in the West until the advent of printing led to the wars of the Reformation and eventually the Enlightenment. Perhaps the advent of cryptocurrency could even have similar ramifications.

Yet the Internet itself is a universal project, a project to interconnect all the networks of the world together. If the United States is parallel with Rome, then the protocols of the Internet are the church that will remain after the end of the American empire. So, as the American empire ends, we now see a strange fascination with the Internet. Somehow, the Internet is now viewed variously as a tool of mind control by American media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and as a tool of Russia that has supported Trump via “fake news". Equally pervasive is the belief that artificial intelligence is actually in charge of our minds. These claims may seem ridiculous, but they contain a hidden truth: we no longer understand the Internet via the classical paradigm of the liberal individual and the nation-state, and the Internet is precisely how psychological order remains after the collapse of the American empire.

The Internet was founded out of the thinking of MIT's JCR Licklider. To understand the Internet's philosophical foundations, one has to go to earlier thinkers of cybernetics, “or control and communication in the animal and the machine," as Norbert Wiener called it in the title of his 1948 book. The key concept of cybernetics is that systems can reach a state of homeostasis, an internal state of stability that is resistant to change via feedback. The term cybernetics comes from the Greek term κυβερνητική, which means “that which belongs to governance." In his original book, Wiener was against governments applying cybernetics as a way to control human beings, which he saw as both unethical and unlikely to work, as he considered humans too unpredictable for feedback loops to understand. However, as the Second World War ended and Europe lay in ruins, government officials in the United States saw that democracy itself had lost much of its appeal to fascism and needed to be reinforced by a new paradigm that could stabilize the population. Against Wiener's advice, the primary technique put forward by anthropologists and technocrats was cybernetics. However, until the internet there was no way to actually produce feedback on the level of social communication. When Licklider and his assistant Robert Taylor at the United States government's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) built the internet, it was the fulfillment of their vision of “computers as a communication device". Cybernetics was finally given a technological foundation to control communication.

From the cybernetic revolution came the invention of artificial intelligence. Perhaps the earliest system of machine learning was put forward by Oliver Selfridge in 1959. Rather than replicate human intelligence with one large program, it imagined that many small programs known as demons could each do very limited well-defined tasks such as recognizing certain features in the input. It could then feed these results to other demons, who could learn about objects from these features, and then pass this information to yet other demons who could make decisions. The inspiration of the concept was similar to how certain cells in the eye could recognize certain patterns like edges, but then feed the results to higher and higher levels. Together, the entire pandemonium — literally the “city of demons" — could then understand and make complex decisions. Today, artificial intelligence algorithms still operate in this way. They can recognize patterns and make decisions in a manner that remains cognitively opaque to humans, and so have a sort of non-human practical knowledge. With the spread of the Internet, more and more of our human activity is now transformed into bits that can be fed to this new pandemonium of artificial intelligence. This in turn increases the practical power of these algorithms to modulate and control all of society via cybernetic feedback, with the entire apparatus held together by the ubiquitous penetration of the Internet.

Philosophy has long ignored technology, as theoretical knowledge always ignores practical knowledge. For thirty years philosophy ignored the Internet. Yet now, it is the Internet and computers that mediate our entire life, and even our existence as individuals. Towards the end of his life, Gilles Deleuze wrote “Postscript on the Societies of Control" where he noted that in comparison to “disciplinary societies" theorized by Foucault, in the world of computers we were entering “societies of control" where:

... what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password... the numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information or reject it... Individuals have become 'dividuals,' and masses, samples, data, markets or 'banks'.

The Internet is not a mere form of communication but has transformed our very process of “individuation" due to the “shock of the digital", as my mentor and long-lost friend Bernard Stiegler wrote. This is because our communication becomes the raw input to artificial intelligence whose goal is not to help us communicate but to predict our future behavior. Via feedback, this creates a form of governance that is impossible to disturb. In such a scenario, what Martin Heidegger termed “calculation" becomes universal, and a certain metaphysical halting of the future is obtained. As put by the forgotten philosopher Reiner Schürmann, while the horrors of Hiroshima and Auschwitz ended the guiding principles of individual human reason and the nation-state, the cybernetic machine holds global society in a form of homeostasis forever even if there is no binding metaphysical principle left of the West.

At a seminar in Venice, I confronted Giorgio Agamben about the issues of control and cybernetics brought on by the Internet. Agamben said that society had transformed from a society of control and passed to a new form of “hypercontrol" where all of social life has been subsumed into a digital totality and so was subject to control via surveillance and feedback. This is of course even more true now due to the pandemic, as even parts of life ranging from governments to universities that were the most hostile to digitization have become digitized and so everything is more easily monitored and controlled. Agamben noted that as plagues brought the Roman empire to its end, it was not the useless and mentally deficient people that fled to the monasteries to escape the impending collapse, but the best and most intelligent people produced by Rome. To me, he suggested that the best option was to simply flee, to create new forms of society without the Internet and computer.

Indeed, his students in the Invisible Committee in France did precisely that, attempting to cut off their usage of mobile phones and the Internet and flee to the mountains of rural France to create a new “form of life" in the rural commune of Tarnac. And although they could not escape, as their village was raided and they were arrested on charges of terrorism and their lack of mobile phones and the Internet were used as part of their trial, their book To Our Friends contained a crucial insight: there is a difference between techniques and technology. Techniques are any methods that extend human capabilities. As humans are born without claws and hairless unlike other animals, we naturally extend ourselves with swords, with guns, with clothing, with houses. We even extend our memory, originally with writing, now with digital media. In contrast, technology is a social system of control that is based on seizing our mental powers and making humans subservient to some larger system. So to simply stop using tools like computers makes no sense, just as it makes no sense to stop using writing or using clothing. What is needed are new techniques without technology.

Indeed, of all the great French philosophers, it was only Bernard Stiegler that truly took techniques seriously. Stiegler wanted to reinvent the Internet, and so he worked with programmers to understand it and to create new kinds of computer techniques that he hoped would reverse the process of “proletarianization" that created isolated “dividuals" and instead create new kinds of individuals and so a new form of society. Stiegler produced a grand theory, which we can only remark on in brief, that as the Internet transformed our communication between each other, and as the Internet was controlled not for the development of humans but the short term goals of consumer-capitalist society, the Internet fractured the communication between generations. It thus fractured the communication between the past and the present and so closed the horizon to the future. In brief, Bernard Stiegler, who loved his time in China and would often fondly remark on it, believed this new digital environment was “short-circuiting" our development as individuals and making a world of “dividuals". Stiegler's final conversation with me in February 2020 was on the potential of blockchain technology and whether or not there was a way it could be used for something other than short-term financial profit. What was at stake for Stiegler was whether the blockchain could lead to a new form of decentralized global society, called by Stiegler “the internation."

I will claim that a new disruptive technology known as Bitcoin could be a way to create techniques without technology, and so disrupt the cybernetic church of the American Empire. Appearing at the end of the financial crisis in 2008 as the work of the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, it seemed as if an entirely new and alien technology was anonymously dropped upon the earth, with a possibly different metaphysical orientation than cybernetics. Bitcoin combined techniques like “proof of work" and “digital cash" from the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists, a small group of rebel technologists in the 90s that believed cryptography could provide ways to guard humanity against control and even enable a new kind of world based on freedom. The reason was that cryptography could simply use the power of mathematics and techniques to build systems that would be stronger than any human law. Bitcoin, which provides a new form of money controlled by cryptography, is only one example. Another technology developed by the crypto-anarchists is mixnets, a kind of network that by randomly “mixing" packets can delink the order of messages and so make communication between people impossible to surveil, even by a powerful passive global adversary like the National Security Agency of the United States that can observe every packet sent into the network. My own company Nym Technologies is building such a mix network, a “mixnet". While artificial intelligence algorithms detect patterns in data, the same techniques can be turned against these algorithms to hide patterns in data. And so, the crypto-anarchists, a small marginal movement, were able to take the tools of cybernetics and turn them against hypercontrol, and so create a new society without control.

Bitcoin and related technologies like mixnets then provide a demonstration that the true metaphysics of philosophy work today has taken technical flesh, with blockchain technologies posited not just as an alternative financial infrastructure, but as the technical successor to the political domination of Silicon Valley and the American empire. Although crypto-anarchism does not have scholarly books or much in the way of academic philosophical analysis, crypto-anarchism is the only genuinely new philosophical moment of the 21st century, and as such deserves careful attention. Their warnings of how digital technology could be used as a form of control are obviously true, but what is less obvious is that, like Stiegler, they believed that techniques could be used against control, to open up the future rather than foreclose the future.

I believe there will be a war within computer technology to take the power of algorithms and cryptography away from Silicon Valley and put them in the hands of the people, similar to how the Church finally faced a war when its control of reading and writing was lost in Europe due to the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Like the cypherpunks, the earlier reformers and heretics of the Christian church were viewed as insane and powerless. Yet within a generation, these groups put the power of reading and writing into the hands of ordinary people and ended the Church. Could we imagine a contemporary parallel, where cypherpunks put the power of computer programming into the hands of the people? What would this mean for global politics?

There is a strange irony in history that just at the moment something is the most powerful, it collapses. The same may hold the case for the vision of “hypercontrol" created by the pandemic. In practical terms, the attempt by crypto-anarchists to bind the digital totality via the shackles of cryptography may provide the open horizon needed by a world order that is facing collapse, and provide the outline of a decentralized alternative. At the end of the West, could cryptography be a way forward in a world without a guiding principle? A way out of the pandemonium and the pandemic? Indeed, it may be the only way to break free of artificial stability and allow for there to be a world without any guiding principle, called by Reiner Schürmann, the “arche". This would allow “an-archy", a world without predefined principles and so a world where every culture and people can finally take their destiny into their own hands. I believe this world, where we can create our own principles and future based on a form of techniques without control, is the meaning of crypto-anarchy.

Two questions remain. First, as crypto-anarchists are a small movement of a minority, can these techniques of cryptography be used as revolutionary techniques for all people? The pandemic adheres to all people, not just a tiny minority of the high-powered technical elite. Lastly, with the United States on the verge of civil war, the global financial system facing crisis, and European metaphysics revealing itself to be in a state of senile paranoia, what does the new crypto-anarchist moment mean for China, the other great axis of human civilization? These questions are for you to answer.