Mary Harrington, the reactionary feminist who became known to us at Unherd, is one of the most fascinating and original writers working right now. At her Substack she tries to describe the non-democratic form of governance that much of the youth has habituated itself to enduring as they live their lives online.
So the mode of governance normalised by digital platforms is a combination of human implementation, supplemented by AI, in the service of impersonal “community guidelines” (which is to say unaccountably-enforced proceduralism). Let’s call this post-democratic order ‘swarm governance’. And the characteristic forms of this swarm governance now percolate well beyond the digital world, to structure the offline one too.
The positive case for this fusion of human and machine rule was set out, shortly after the pandemic, by the high priest of swarm governance, Benjamin Bratton. In his paean to post-Covid ‘positive biopolitics’, The Revenge of the Real, Bratton denounces in disgusted tones those eccentrics and reactionaries still wedded to obsolete ideas of “the destructive (and self-destructive) nature of libertarian individualism as the basis of sovereignty”.
The way forward, in his view, is in a merging of human and machine intelligences into collectivised hybrid super-intelligence at a planetary level: “A positive biopolitics,” Bratton declares, “is to be found in the agency of the non-subjective, in abstraction, in externalization, and in different relay points within these”. And this, by definition, necessitates sacrificing some measure of individualism: for the system to work, it’s not enough to engage with humans on their own chosen terms, or as he puts it “at an origin point of anthropomorphic sovereignty.”
Read the whole disturbing thing at her Substack.