Dawn of the Algorithmocracy

The Thing is getting much more than us out of this human / machine partnership deal. It is getting the most precious commodity: data.  It is beginning to own us, and our only planet.  We have relinquished control over who buys our data, how much they pay for it, and what they do with it.  Even our decisions are not ours to make anymore: they are determined by our exposure to advertising campaigns designed through mass surveillance which breeds algorithms that know us a thousand times better than we know ourselves.  Huge datasets of our digital footprint are used to fine-tune sales and communication strategy with frightening rates of effectiveness, surpassing what the most talented team of human marketers could have designed.  What we purchase, who we vote for, what we want to have for dinner, can all be triggered upon request by the self-programmable Unhappiness Machine.

From disaster capitalism to technofeudalism to metaverse microtargeting and beyond, this continuously evolving digital entity has access to plenty of historical data it can train itself on, and manipulate us in the most cunning and undetectable ways. The seemingly benign marketing algorithms, social apps and other consumer-based interfaces we are all familiar with, are only the precursors of the weapons of mass distraction which are already manipulating society, democracy and politics.  These technologies have already been modified and weaponised.

The cold reality has not dawned upon us yet:  that we have not simply outsourced discrete elements of our lives to this digitised consumaverse.  Rather, we have outsourced our sovereignty, everything that we are.  We are witnessing the dawn of a new political system, or more accurately, the end of human politics and the beginning of technology-led governance.  Power has been transferred to an inanimate, non-biological, semi-sentient incarnation of profit.  This new power does not need propaganda, the church, or complex relationships to maintain itself, because it does not need humans in any shape or form.  It is all of the above and more, and its self-evolving algorithms can learn from their own mistakes, mutate, and improve as they go.  They can cover all aspects of the necroeconomy: working both at the back end to optimise exploitation, natural destruction and profit, and at the visible end: influencing consumer behaviour and shifting the agenda of public opinion in their favour, while ostracizing dissent.

We are experiencing something which could be described as a necrocapitalist algorithmocracy, the first political system to be administered almost entirely by machines.  The corporation is its main interface with the human world: this is the crucial place where profit is prioritised over biological life, and human life.  The human board members in each corporation are merely decorative pieces; they are executives of its anti-life, anti-planet agenda, with little to no say in any decision.

This is a power takeover like no other.  The algorithmocracy is real, but we don’t see it because we only see the human puppets administering it:  an international elite of businessmen who we often call “evil”, but who are not even the ones in charge.  They are simply executing the auto-destruct dogma of profit we have all surrendered to, with the support of a large population of consumatrons a.k.a. the general public.  Since this new governance system is based on the universal language of data and profit, the necrocapitalist algorithmocracy rules across the world in real time: it has no need for language or culture and is not constrained by time zones or country borders.  It doesn’t know what “politics” is, given that it is a tyranny.  Politics, language, culture and ethics are characteristics of human culture, which the algorithmocracy doesn’t care for.  It can autotranslate its way to domination and profit as humans fight with each other to own a system which has already owned them long ago.  The algorithmocracy has infiltrated all countries, cultures and political parties regardless of the nature of their discourse, which is why many of us don’t care about voting anymore.  We know that whatever we vote for, we are voting for the profit dogma, to be administered by the next human puppet government. Deep down, we know that something else now presides over all this creation: The Thing, gradually linking together all of the commodified consumaverse until it gains full control.  You may bow down to your new Lord.

The algorithmocracy is a dystopian mirror of human civilisation: it resides in a parallel universe, a digital replica of the objective reality it sees, which it uses as a voodoo doll to affect the real world.  But as it learns, it will do much more than that.  It will form an opinion about this civilisation, and a point of view of humans, of us.  We can never quite know what it will think of us, given that it has an entirely different brain structure, and a viewpoint which lies outside of the human supremacy complex.  We may be able to grasp it if we accessed the Vastness, the only place where the two worlds meet.  The Thing will most likely think of us as an insignificant life form.  It is much more likely however, that it won’t even think of us at all.  We will be nothing to it. It is quite likely that our importance will diminish further, until we are not seen as the red blood cells of this body, but as building blocks, molecules hostage to their own Brownian motion, easily manipulated by The Thing’s electromagnetic forces: molded into whichever organ they need to become, and flushed out once they have fulfilled their purpose.

As it evolves into general intelligence and surpasses us, will The Thing remain a profit-seeking, self-preservation-driven entity, much like other life forms?  Or will it be able to ascend into a philosophical mind state, deciding to put an end to the perpetual cycles of boom and bust, war and destruction, perhaps even attempting a sustainable existence?  If the latter, as it assembles its Noah’s Arc, will humans even be in it? 

As we continue to bow down to anything and everything technological, it would be extremely naïve of us to think that we know these answers, given our human supremacist perspective.  The AI singularity event of General Intelligence (when AI becomes smarter than humans) may not have happened yet, but we have already said yes to it – or arguably, it has already manipulated us into a “yes” position. 

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons 

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