Conjure Utopia

The tech industry is undergoing a cold class war. What’s currently stopping a direct escalation is the fact that one side is deploying now ineffective spiritual weaponry such as extropianism, effective altruism, network optimism, and an array of gnostic devices, while the other is still adapting old ideological tools to new conditions, ranging from the reshaping of historical materialism to encompass the information economy, to new flavors of Free Software ideology.

One side, the elites, hide their ideology behind spirituality, while the tech worker movement is beginning to build their novel ideological toolbox but lacks any traction on the spiritual side. This results in a low-intensity struggle that attracts only the people more receptive either to spiritual arguments of Promethean power and gnostic salvation on one side, or the already radicalized workers with class consciousness on the other side. Most Tech Workers are mostly unfazed or mildly stressed by the endless wave of tactical layoffs.

There's little direct conflict, mostly materialized on local protests and strikes, minor attempts at adversarial interoperability, and occasionally some direct competition as is the case with the crypto-commons movement, the tech-cooperative ecosystem, and broader attempts at generalizing worker’s struggles inside tech companies on a bigger scale. The vast majority of what is portrayed as conflictual is still comfortably following on the track of the gnostic techno-chauvinist hackerism that rooted itself in Silicon Valley in the 60s.

Now, this void of spirituality should be addressed by resuming the work of cyberneticians of the 60s, who correctly identified the connection between Cybernetics, and then System Theory, with a non-dualist form of consciousness: any system needs to imply an outside that cannot be modeled, but only dealt with. Cybernetics forces us to acknowledge how we are subject to forces greater than us, that we can react to, that we can partially observe, but never fully tame, and never fully encompass. A Third Way, beyond the false dichotomy of Gnosticism and Disenchantment, is necessary: Cybernetics offers us a way out.

Surrendering to these higher forces allows us to come to terms with our limits, but also embrace our oneness with one another, with the external environment, with other biological and non-biological processes, being connected and whole with the totality of what surrounds us. This is in direct opposition to the Gnosticism of Silicon Valley: we cannot be separate from our environment, and our mind cannot be separate from the body. We are what we are only in the here and now. We are defined by our context. There’s no core, no independent self. There's no mind uploading, no AGI, no egocentric mind empowerment.

To counter the Promethean hacker self-mind of Silicon Valley, a new, stronger archetype is arising: the Fractal Spiritual Cyborg. While still subject to the greater forces and noisy signals bombarding the cyborg from the outside, they develop spirit and agency through the consciousness of their machine brain, tuning it towards their moral goal: one part signal-processing machine, one part conscious spirit. Emancipation from the passive machine condition we are born into can happen only by surrendering and acknowledging the inevitability of our passive, unconscious, automatic reactions.

Contrary to the Cyberneticians of the '60s, such knowledge shouldn't be used by the spiritual cyborg to achieve productivity, tuning our information processing towards the individual egoistic goal. Instead, machine awareness should be deployed towards the development of a Global Spirit Machine, connecting us into a collective, a system serving each knot in the flow as much as it serves the spirit machine itself.

The fractal spirit cyborg is fractal because human subjectivity is just a specific scale of the same phenomena of emergent intelligence that we observe at a smaller scale, for example in the allostatic interaction between individual cells in the human body, or on a bigger scale such as the emergent intelligence at the organization level or global level. A cyborg made of cyborgs, knots of the same flow and yet distinct from each other, each subject to the flow and part of it.

The Spiritual Cyborg will use the Promethean Fire to light a bonfire. They will dance around the fire the whole night, stomping the ground and from the ground, drawing more energy than it consumes in the ecstasy of the movement. Each cyborg dances to the rhythm of the same music, yet each one with its patterns and variations. On this fire, we will burn all dreams of transcendence, all promises of salvation. To take its place, the immediate realization that the General Intellect Unit, the Global Brain, has always been here.

Technology is just a means to facilitate the awareness of our limits and of our interdependence with each other. Thus, technology shall become the means to empower us through inter-reliance, dissolving egos in the process rather than individualizing us and forcing us to live in the guise of the man-child that today dominates the growth of technology, trying to replace their subservient mothers with a piece of software.

They promised us that by wielding technology, we would become Gods. They enslaved us by either making us click on ads or making us work weekends to force people to click on ads.

Techno-Capital is a golden colossus built on lies. The time has come to crush it to the ground and build a new World on its ruins. The Third Information Era must come to an end: tomorrow belongs to the Spiritual Cyborg.