America’s REAL Government: Corporate AI
A Short Synthesis
This is a short piece that I may revisit later, but want to get my thoughts down while they’re fresh in my mind.
After reading Caitlin Johnstone’s recent piece, “When Will Foreign Leaders Start Asking To Speak To America’s REAL Government?,” I was struck by a couple of phrases.
“Your bureaucracy is very strong and it is that bureaucracy that rules the world”
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“who is responsible for what specific decisions behind each specific move of the empire will remain shrouded in mystery”
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“whose mechanisms are entirely hidden”
After a few moments of reflection I remembered indi.ca’s piece “Corporations Are Already AI.”
“Artificial Intelligence already rules the world. It has for hundreds of years. The greatest trick AI ever pulled was convincing you that it didn’t already exist.”
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“AI has always been a network, and it uses every computer available — including human brains.”
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“It is not just that Corporate AIs are also human. They are more than human. They are already more powerful than you. I’ve said that they hate you, but that’s not quite true. They’re indifferent, which is worse.”
Read through those two pieces in full to get an idea of each of their concepts. I’m going to try to synthesize the two together.
I hypothesize that the answer to Caitlin’s question “Who are America’s REAL leaders” is Indi’s “Corporate AI.” The ‘people’ in charge aren’t human people, they’re corporate people. There isn’t some group of shadowy bankers in smoking jackets sitting in leather armchairs making decisions. No super geniuses in deep sea submarines. It’s not even the heads of alphabet soup agencies. And of course no freakin’ L I Z A R D P E O P L E. The structural system of Capitalism itself is making the decisions. But it isn’t some rogue AI supercomputer gone haywire; that’s sci-fi nonsense. It’s basically just math, math taken to its logical conclusion to make Line Go Up.
Take me to your leader? They’re right here *waves hands around*
We’re ruled not by physical beings but by conceptual ones. Physical beings are merely the mechanism they use to influence our realm.
Here’s one example: say you want to purchase a house, more specifically take out a loan to purchase a house. You ‘apply’ for a mortgage, right? A bunch of your personal information is plugged into a formula, and that decides how much you can borrow, and under what terms. That formula decides, not any human being. Sure, depending on what person inputs the data there is a bit of wiggle room, there’s flexibility in the formula, but the formula itself is what makes the decision on whether or not you can get the loan. Bank X vs Bank Y vs Bank Z, their formulas may be slightly different, but they all come out in the same ballpark.
Another example is health insurance in the United States. Insurance companies plug a bunch of data into equations and that determines what you pay and what gets covered and so on. A corporate decision, not a human decision.
Formulas, equations, algorithms, rules, regulations, all these nonhuman concepts are the real decision makers. Not in themselves, because they’re just tools, but the way the tools have been brought together to construct the Machine called Capitalism. Capitalism demands growth at any cost no matter the consequences, a literal cancer. It doesn’t have a heart to care, it merely follows the rules of its structure. It’s a tool that came to life and now we serve it rather than it serving us.
The Machine keeps on chugging along according to the mandates of its construction. It operates in the only way it can, much like how a fish’s gills extract oxygen from water. Gills don’t work in atmosphere, they can’t defy the basis on which they function, and the same is true of Capitalism. It doesn’t matter who is in charge of the Machine, it doesn’t matter who is running it. In fact, rather than human people running it, it runs human people instead.
The entire relationship has been reversed. A monster of our (read: the rich and powerful of the past) own creation chewing us up to continue to operate. Anyone who tries to resist the machine will be discarded and replaced, just like when a part of a mechanical machine breaks down. Even those who benefit the most from the status quo (the rich and powerful people of the present) are still bound by its rules. If they fight it, they too will be ground down and tossed aside. It’s not physically capable of allowing dissent any more than a car engine could suddenly start accepting tomato juice instead of petroleum.
But that doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. If enough parts of the machine break at the same time, the entire thing can be shut down. Once a critical mass is reached, even it can’t continue to operate. One grain of sand won’t stop gears from turning, but an entire bucketful certainly can. The Capitalism Machine still, at present, needs human bodies to fuel it. Enough resistance can snap its timing belts and shear its gear teeth. And countering the propaganda dries up the lubrication needed to keep the Machine running smoothly.
Don’t give up fighting, and don’t act within the confines of the Machine’s logic, because it will use that to continue to fuel itself. Together we can stop the Monster we inadvertently gave life to.
