Who Ordered the Maleficence?

Technology as a servant of society, not as its undertaker

Baudrillard described phases approaching an evil and unreal simulation, or “pure simulacra”.

• sacramental order (e.g. the picture you took of your hotel room)

• maleficent order (the picture of the hotel room in the advertising brochure)

• sorcery or magical order (a non-existent hotel room sold to you by a con artist)

• pure fantasy (an imaginary hotel room in a dream you had)

Does using your computer to book a hotel room make this progression inevitable? No, I don’t think so.

Why does describing reality on a computer make this progression inevitable? It doesn’t, but the key is to the extent possible not to depart from the firsthand and most basic description. How should that distance be judged? By human beings. That is the difference between dining on maleficence and sending it back to the kitchen.

So in describing the world in the sacramental order in a shared way, which is not only a good thing to do, but an essential thing to do if we as human beings and family members and citizens are to understand reality and the paths before us, we need a way to describe things that is most basic and close to firsthand experience. Is that not possible on a computer, on the internet? We can share photos and descriptions, can’t we?

Yes, but the trick is that no individual person can own a shared description, and so we must be prepared if necessary to disagree about them. It could well be that a subject can never be closed, because none of us can say for sure, what something is or was, say for example a flower or a tree or a person or an appointment or an election. The description must be *shared* for it to stay most basic, most firsthand.

This is done most easily and understandably by computers and the internet. That doesn’t have to send us down the bobsled run to maleficence and fantasy, not if the description is shared *reasonably*.

What that means in practice is that each person, each individual, is entitled to their own description or definition, to be able to choose to keep it private, to choose to keep it safely unchanged by anyone else, or to allow it to be public, or to allow it to be seen or changed in ways they choose by persons of their choosing. The individual must also be entitled to keep the rules of these choices in the same way. More complicated descriptions are built from more basic ones, by the same rules, though they may depend on descriptions controlled by others. In this way a representation of the world can be made in a way that is based on firsthand experience.

So for example different descriptions of the things or events or ideas in the world could be available from different people, and those would be described by a composite of descriptions from others, all in the sacramental order, not proceeding to the maleficent.

This is nothing more than the construction of shared ideas through language, aided but not controlled by computers. It must be most basic and firsthand for it to be implemented on computers and the internet, but it also must be kept from spiraling into evil. It depends on individuals being able to own, control, and move their own data.

Prototypes for such systems exist, but they have questionable provenance, and the trajectory of implementation of such a system could be hijacked into maleficence in a number of ways. The most likely would be through treating persons not as individuals but as organizations of individuals, and the manipulation of the construction of descriptions and definitions and the rules of their sharing by organizations.

The trouble begins when organizations with power in the real world beyond the small screens start defining and describing things or ideas like flowers or trees or persons or hotel rooms or appointments or elections and mandating those definitions and descriptions and the rules related. That would turn such a system back beyond the dystopia we have now, to be even worse because of the elevated level of control such organizations would have. Social credit systems on steroids.

But it may be possible to imagine a system built and run as a commons without such organizations. It isn’t really clear, but before such a system that puts humanity first and foremost can be implemented, the Technocratic tyranny that we’re living under, and that threatens to enclose the internet, as it has done with other commons, must topple over and crash to the ground. This tipping point has already been reached with the “Covid” crisis and the “Great Reset”, but the tyranny has not yet toppled over.

It will.