We live at a time when the most far-reaching changes in technology and in the social and political relationships between human beings – which have fundamentally been maintained for centuries – are taking place. It is impossible to capture the sheer magnitude of these developments in a mere brief essay, But I can try to sketch its contours. Achille Mbembe, an African thinker who has taken Michel Foucault’s work further, writes (in his essay, Necropolitics, p. 12):
To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to deny life as the deployment and manifestation of power. One could summarize in the above terms what Michel Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has taken control. But under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right? What does the implementation of such a right tell us about the person who is thus put to death and about the relation of enmity that sets that person against his or her murderer? Is the notion of biopower sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective? War, after all, is as much a means of achieving sovereignty as a way of exercising the right to kill. Imagining politics as a form of war, we must ask: What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?
It is worth asking if this excerpt reminds one of anything that we have been witnessing in approximately the last five years. Clearly, ‘sovereignty,’ albeit of a perverse kind, has been exercised over the majority of humanity during that time, and there seems to be no letting up. If Foucault called this ‘biopower,’ Mbembe is content to call a spade a spade – it is nothing less that ‘necropolitics’ – that is, the politics of death. If that sounds familiar, don’t be surprised. Journalist S.D. Wells
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articulates what most of us are subliminally, if not explicitly, aware of as follows:
Ever since the early 1900s, the ‘powers that be’ in America have engaged in population control and reduction schemes to keep people sick, dying and paying the government for it all the while. The American Medical Association jump started it when they labeled all natural remedies ‘quack medicine’ and ‘snake oil’ and all lab-concocted chemical-based pharmaceuticals ‘prescription medications.’ After WWII, the mass poisoning of Americans got ramped up with fluoridated water [against which Stanley Kubrick warned in his Dr Strangelove; B.O.], processed foods and the mass-injection of disease-spreading, mind-numbing, immune-system-crashing ‘vaccines.’
By the 1980s, American foods were further corrupted, adulterated and toxified with poisonous pesticides, organ-decimating herbicides (think glyphosate/Roundup) and genetically modified crops and seeds that drive cancer and dementia rates through the roof. Add in processed oils, high fructose corn syrup, aspartame, nitrates and monosodium glutamate, and you’ve got a couple hundred million Americans rushing to the doctors and hospitals regularly for chronic sick care.
That’s just the preamble. Wells gets more specific lower down by listing the ‘top twelve weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD) today, and – putting the right wing bias aside in some of the dangers he has identified – we can likely recognize the alarming reality of the attacks in this sobering inventory:
1. Extreme Weather Modification & Weaponization Technology – MSM and globalists call it ‘Climate Change’
2. Purposely designed and released lab-concocted gain-of-function viruses, parasites, bacteria and pathogens – MSM calls it a ‘Pandemic’
3. Clot-shot gene-mutation injections, turbo cancer proponents and graphene nanoparticle technology – MSM, CDC and Big Pharma call it mRNA ‘vaccines’ and ‘spike proteins’ [See this recent scientific confirmation of the drop in life expectancy of people who received the mRNA injections; B.O.]
4. Computer-generated decision-making technology – ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (a key component for the weaponization of information, disinformation)
5. Dirty energy – MSM and Big Tech call it the ‘5G Network,’ or 5th generation wireless network technology
6. Smart phone and pager bombs – called ‘lithium batteries’
7. Venom-laced pharmaceuticals – called ‘prescription drugs’
8. Dementia and cancer-causing pesticides and herbicides woven into crop seeds – it’s lab-concocted GMO Frankenfood – Big Food calls it ‘Genetic Engineering’ or ‘Biotechnology’
9. Population reduction and genocide by mass abortions and vaccinations – MSM calls it ‘Planned Parenthood’ and ‘women’s health’
10. Brainwashing of youth to support gender-bender ideology, socialism, satanism, CRT, hate crimes and mass vaccination – Big Tech calls it ‘social media’
11. Chemical spills, explosions, arson and chemical burns (think Palestine, Ohio) – MSM and corporate America call them all ‘accidents’
12. Illegal immigration of criminals, drug dealers, drug trafficking, human trafficking and terrorist migration into the United States – MSM calls it closed borders and ‘The American Way.’
It should be obvious, in the light of the list, above, that Mbembe’s ‘necropolitics’ may serve for us to introduce another neologism, to wit, ‘necrotechnology’ – the ‘technology of death,’ which is exactly what has been deployed against ‘We the people’ since the early 20th century, as Wells observes, above. And it takes no genius to conclude that the so-called self-described ‘elites’ have been behind it all since that time; one might add the establishment of the American Federal Reserve Bank (in 1913), which is a private institution, and not truly ‘federal,’ as another event aimed at disempowering ordinary people financially, thus laying the basis for other kinds of incapacitation.
Considering the vast technological powers that are at the disposal of the psychopaths behind the twelve WMD listed above, one faces a dilemma regarding action. Importantly, the dilemma does not pertain to the question of morality: any human being who is compos mentis and recognises the present situation for what it is, namely, the gravest existential crisis in the history of humanity, deliberately caused by a small group of megalomaniacal neo-fascists, would know that what is being perpetrated against us is undeniably morally wrong and ethically reprehensible. It should therefore be opposed with all the moral and spiritual energy we can muster.
The question of action is more problematical: we don’t have immediate access to commensurate technological force to oppose our foes, although we can, and do, put that which we have, to optimal use – such as the indefatigable critical interventions by the writers at Brownstone or Real Left, who are no less than ‘internet warriors’ for freedom in this respect. But there is a long-term option available to those who earnestly desire a different developmental path to the one that was imposed on us by the globalists. This may be articulated in different ways, and among these the one suggested by philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler, just before he died an untimely death, is exemplary, in so far as it allows one to approach the question concerning action through that of thinking.
I have written on Stiegler here before, so this time I’ll just remind readers briefly of Stiegler’s orientation regarding technology. Since 1994, with Technics and Time, Stiegler – who regards ‘technics,’ in the broad sense, as tools, writing, art and machinery – has demonstrated in his many books that one cannot separate the use of technical entities from human subjectivity. On the one hand, as prostheses, technics (which is a pharmakon: poison and cure simultaneously) discloses new possibilities of understanding for people, while – on the other hand, and this is important – in our time, as advanced information technology, it could close down salutary technical avenues while promoting and developing others selectively by reshaping human consciousness. This is exactly what has happened since at least the late 19th century.
It is particularly digital technology that is the culprit here – not because it is bad per se – it is not; it is one kind of technology among others – but it has done precisely what I mentioned above, namely, to be exacerbated to the point where it obscures and systematically closes off access to other technologies or technics. In what was probably (although I’m not sure) the last book he wrote before his death – The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (Polity Books, 2019) – Stiegler argues that ‘the new barbarians,’ or current generation of technocrats, have been using digital technology to establish a hegemony over what he conceives of as something distinctively human, namely ‘tertiary memory’ (which technics such as writing, or electronic archiving enables us to do).
Tertiary memory is unique to humans, who share primary (genetic) and secondary (experientially acquired) memory with other neurologically complex creatures, but who alone, as ‘prosthetically capable’ beings, have been able to invent the technical means to externalise memory in the guise of books, for example, to be able to ensure cultural, literary and scientific continuity.
What has happened under the ‘new barbarism’ is that, while workers during the Industrial Revolution were subjected to ‘proletarianisation’ (as Marx noted) – that is, robbed of their skills and memory as craftsmen and women (think of the spinning jenny replacing women who used to spin yarn manually) – more recently, during the age of digitalisation (where algorithms rule the roost) the human mind has been proletarianised through the use of gadgets like smartphones (tellingly so-called); as Stiegler has remarked, they assimilate what used to be our natural memory, and we allow them to. In short: ‘proletarianisation’ has shifted from the physical domain to that of the human spirit, which Stiegler saw manifested in ubiquitous signs of a widespread loss of hope for the future. Had he lived beyond Covid, I suspect that he would have detected signs of a revival of hope, paradoxically, in the face of the adversity we face today, and that many people are tackling head-on in creative ways.
Furthermore, this novel form of ‘algorithmic governmentality’ (Age of Disruption, p. 39-43) poses, for Stiegler, a threat to the social bonds within which people are integrated to become part of communities, as evidenced by the irony, that so-called ‘social networks,’ established by ‘social media’ such as Facebook, have taken the place of older kinds of social organisations such as drama or music societies. Such digitally supported social networks appear to be the new repository of cultural memory, albeit in a stunted format. After all, for the masses of people that depend on information technology, culture is reduced to the temporal format of ‘bits-and-bytes,’ so that Tweets and WhatsApp messages have become the norm, undermining the capacity of individuals to sustain coherent thoughts and sentences. This is where the reductive and limiting effects of digitalisation reveals itself most clearly: we are not only dealing with the kind of ‘necrotechnology’ such as those instances identified by Wells, above (the 12 WMD); we are facing the death of the human spirit and intellect, gradually being destroyed by the Trojan horse of digital technology.
Stiegler died before the advent of Covid, but I am certain that, had he lived to witness it, he would have seen that the ‘new barbarism’ which he associated with digital technology, which is inseparable from the ‘necrotechnology’ identified earlier, paved the way for the latter. So how do we deal with it in a manner that could rescue the human spirit, and with it, the capacity to resist necrotechnology?
To answer this question in a provisional manner – given the analytical complexities involved – requires that one understands the link that Stiegler establishes between the ‘barbarism’ referred to earlier and what he terms ‘the immense process of disinhibition characteristic of capitalism’ (p. 343) – the lack of inhibition, manifesting itself in acts of meanness, violence, and even a species of madness (think of Bernie Madoff). Under such conditions human beings jettison the civilising process of inhibiting certain impulses, sometimes resulting in disproportionate risk-taking, by which globalisation is fuelled – and Stiegler finds in the seafaring voyages of discovery by the early Portuguese and Spanish sailors the paradigm of such globalisation (p. 342).
Worse, however, is that this has today developed into a veritable ethos of risk-taking, evident not merely in financial speculation, but particularly, one may add, in the extreme risks entailed by gene-manipulating pharmaceutical technologies. Here one can perceive the essentially nihilistic character of disinhibition – to be able to embark on such risk-taking, nothing that is appreciated for its intrinsic value is allowed to stand in its way.
This is where a second thread of Stiegler’s analysis has to be added: going back to René Descartes’s dream of a ‘universal mathematics’ in the 17th century, which would supposedly enable human beings to solve every problem confronting them – and not denying the ‘prosthetic’ value of such a method (which is embodied in modern, mathematically oriented physics, among other disciplines, of course) – Stiegler, showing himself to be a true philosopher, points out that such broadly ‘mathematical’ reasoning is only one form of reason, albeit a legitimate one, but should not be conflated with authentic thinking. The latter is the fountainhead of all other forms of reasoning – Descartes could not have arrived at his ‘mathesis universalis’ without it, either.
To cut a long analysis short, it is here where, according to Stiegler, we should tarry to confront the disastrous situation into which the ‘calculative reasoning’ stemming from Descartes, and today culminating in the reduction of reason to digital computation, has led humanity. Western civilisation has been seduced, fatally, by the belief that one could base all cultural endeavours – from science and technology to art and architecture – solely on calculation and computation, which is not the case. If we continue surrendering human rationality to today’s hegemonic ‘computational cognitivism,’ we shall become the living incarnation of the ubiquitous ‘predictive text’ capacity of digital information technology, abandoning our own ability, to initiate thinking, to algorithmic computationalism. This would result in humans becoming ‘predictable ciphers,’ which we are perhaps already witnessing. Farewell freedom?
After all, when we raise questions relating to freedom, civil disobedience and politically liberating action, among others, here on Real Left and elsewhere, we resort to thinking in the originary (that is, which is constitutive of the distinctive) human sense of the word. It is in this autonomous domain of thinking, which should be combined with judicious action, where we may engage with possible avenues of reactivating true, democratic practices aimed at throwing off the yoke that the globalist cabal has been trying to harness us to with the aid of digital computationalism.
Make no mistake, like all kinds of technology, the latter is in the process of reorganising consciousness, language, and behaviour itself. So make a stand today, and reclaim your own ability to think against the digital grain. By all means use digital technology as a handy tool, but don’t allow it to use you. This way one can simultaneously oppose, and possibly reverse, the twelve invidious processes labelled ‘weapons of mass destruction’ by Wells, above, launched against us by the technocrats.