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Human, Forever: The Digital Politics of Spiritual War
Our political life is being obsolesced—to terraform our natural and God-given humanity into a collectivist cyborg swarm.
Neither paralysis nor wars of words or dreams will save us. Our sacred and natural humanity, and the digital rights inherent in it, must be actively, physically preserved. We must retake rightful technological control—the aim of a #2ndAmendmentforCompute.
Our rights to mine, buy, sell, and use bitcoin and cryptocurrency to create culture and markets; to buy and use high-powered GPUs; and to do so free from enclosure in a social credit system of perpetual search and arbitrary seizure—all inhere in our Constitution and our humanity.
“Tech” is not the foe, even in human enhancement or advancement. As tool and weapon it inheres in our natural and sacred human life. But both are used to wage not only physical but spiritual war. And digital entities’ world conquest retrieves reality’s theological character.
These infinite, invisible, interoperable entities behave as, until a few years ago, only angels and demons were thought to behave. Their triumph raises ultimate questions—about why to bother being human and suffering our humanity—that human imagination can’t sufficiently answer.
As a result, modern and postmodern justifications for our humanity and existence are collapsing. All now rush for salvation into the arms of gods or idols. All civilization states that are digital powers rush to refound their sovereignty on their deepest theological grounds.
That makes a special burden and challenge for America, barred from establishing a religion—yet deeply vulnerable to the establishment of a religion, like the one our regime’s rulers are establishing, that masquerades as the ideology of ethicists or the best practices of engineers.
Their religions abandon the sacred character of our given humanity. They squabble over recondite creedal details but their diverse subgods and idols converge on posthuman cyborg collectivism. Today these are the terms of the digital politics of spiritual war. A war we can win.
Neither paralysis nor wars of words or dreams will save us. Our sacred and natural humanity, and the digital rights inherent in it, must be actively, physically preserved. We must retake rightful technological control—the aim of a #2ndAmendmentforCompute.
Our rights to mine, buy, sell, and use bitcoin and cryptocurrency to create culture and markets; to buy and use high-powered GPUs; and to do so free from enclosure in a social credit system of perpetual search and arbitrary seizure—all inhere in our Constitution and our humanity.
“Tech” is not the foe, even in human enhancement or advancement. As tool and weapon it inheres in our natural and sacred human life. But both are used to wage not only physical but spiritual war. And digital entities’ world conquest retrieves reality’s theological character.
These infinite, invisible, interoperable entities behave as, until a few years ago, only angels and demons were thought to behave. Their triumph raises ultimate questions—about why to bother being human and suffering our humanity—that human imagination can’t sufficiently answer.
As a result, modern and postmodern justifications for our humanity and existence are collapsing. All now rush for salvation into the arms of gods or idols. All civilization states that are digital powers rush to refound their sovereignty on their deepest theological grounds.
That makes a special burden and challenge for America, barred from establishing a religion—yet deeply vulnerable to the establishment of a religion, like the one our regime’s rulers are establishing, that masquerades as the ideology of ethicists or the best practices of engineers.
Their religions abandon the sacred character of our given humanity. They squabble over recondite creedal details but their diverse subgods and idols converge on posthuman cyborg collectivism. Today these are the terms of the digital politics of spiritual war. A war we can win.
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Unknown Binding
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 16, 2022
"Thanks to the digital triumph, more than any PR campaign waged against the regime, a critical mass of citizens now simply intuits that the manufacture of crisis after crisis, whether intentionally or half-so, betokens a problem with the regime, not a problem with the world.
The deepening digital sensibility that the world does not, in fact, need to be saved, except perhaps from the ruling factions themselves, comes with it the complementary conviction that what really needs saving, and what is going unsaved, are our souls."
I appreciate the optimism of Poulos. The smartphone has changed the world (he likens it to the invention of the printing press), in good ways and in bad, but like it or not we aren't going back. Yes, technology has created new and frightening ways for the regime to control us, but it is also a weapon against them that reveals their incompetence and renders them impotent. And I think he is optimistic about how this will all, eventually, shake out.
But oh dear - I should not be the first person to review this book on Goodreads, because I think I need a second read to grab it all myself! A book about what the digital revolution has done to humanity that tries to understand... why does the world seem so crazy these days, what is going on, what forces are in conflict right now? And what do we do about it? How do we end up not with a world where humans are "erased by math" or dissolved into some metaverse, but with a world that is still digital but also human. And that's all I'm going to dare to say in this review. Recommended.
The deepening digital sensibility that the world does not, in fact, need to be saved, except perhaps from the ruling factions themselves, comes with it the complementary conviction that what really needs saving, and what is going unsaved, are our souls."
I appreciate the optimism of Poulos. The smartphone has changed the world (he likens it to the invention of the printing press), in good ways and in bad, but like it or not we aren't going back. Yes, technology has created new and frightening ways for the regime to control us, but it is also a weapon against them that reveals their incompetence and renders them impotent. And I think he is optimistic about how this will all, eventually, shake out.
But oh dear - I should not be the first person to review this book on Goodreads, because I think I need a second read to grab it all myself! A book about what the digital revolution has done to humanity that tries to understand... why does the world seem so crazy these days, what is going on, what forces are in conflict right now? And what do we do about it? How do we end up not with a world where humans are "erased by math" or dissolved into some metaverse, but with a world that is still digital but also human. And that's all I'm going to dare to say in this review. Recommended.
July 15, 2022
The point of the book, as best I could make out, is that there is no putting the digital genie back in the bottle, and we risk losing a (the?) central feature of being human: our human memory, not only our individual memories, but the memory handed down to each new generation.
I think this might be a work of genius, but I confess that I found a huge part of it very difficult to follow. The more abstract nouns feature, the more likely I was to fall off the rails. This was not very clearly written. However, clear insights appear regularly enough that it was largely worth the effort.
I think this might be a work of genius, but I confess that I found a huge part of it very difficult to follow. The more abstract nouns feature, the more likely I was to fall off the rails. This was not very clearly written. However, clear insights appear regularly enough that it was largely worth the effort.
June 16, 2022
Whether or not good ideas are contained within, who can tell? The writing is arcane at best, but seems to be an exercise in how best to obfuscate the author's point. What is that point? No, really, I'm asking you...
April 26, 2022
At times esoteric and extremely dense with references. However, the poignant writing of Mr. Poulos makes the grind worth it.
November 27, 2022
I really wanted to like this, but it's not "on the level." I don't know if Poulos was transported back to his academic dissertation days, or if it was written in a stream of consciousness during the three-week window but it's nearly incomprehensible. Maybe it was just too ambitious, I don't know. Best wishes to Poulos but it's not worth your time.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews