The idea of swarmism being the chief emergent form of government makes a lot of sense. "Swarmism" is a neologism of course, but can be summed up as technocratic government by no one in particular, or at least no one you can name. Which also means that there's no one to appeal to.
It would suggest that Joe Biden is the first of a kind that will recur in the future. I've held in my mind for a while now the notion that Biden's, ah, cognitive challenges were not an unfortunate eleventh hour surprise, but rather a big part of the reason he was selected. As recently as ten years ago it was a standard expectation that Presidents and major candidates would go out and sell their policies to the widest possible demographic. Take questions, interrogate themselves. But if everything has already been settled by non-democratic means, all this stumping just becomes awkward. There's little way to maintain the fiction that what you, the voter, believes, wants, or even needs has any significance at all.
The widespread school closings that began in 2020 and in some places extended beyond it are a case in point. They did harm to children, as it was obvious they would. The closings didn't stop infections or serve the overall cause of public health. No one really expected them to. But they were necessary in order to reinforce the conception that COVID-19 was an apocalyptic event requiring the cessation of public life. So blue districts closed schools and threw down obstacle courses of righteous sounding rhetoric about privilege and the marginalized.
The tech billionaire who was until recently married to pastel-haired transhumanist pop star Grimes is not necessarily a force for good in all or even most things. NeuraLink, for one, sounds like a horrible means to keep people from ever escaping the world of popup ads and propaganda. But if his governance of Twitter frustrates this kind of shifty technocratic rule, that's a silver lining. Just keep him in his box. (Gates too, obviously.)
2 comments:
You make some very valid points about 'swarmism' vs Caesarism as Mary Harrington describes the phenomenon - especially for those of us fed up with hearing about 'right and left'. A technocratic government overseen by nobody in particular is a perfect situation for those who want the benefits of a well paid stable job without being answerable to the public. New tech and social media have gone a long way to destroying whatever was left of representative democracy.
I was delighted to see Musk had fired all of those people charged with overseeing what and who we were allowed to read on twitter. I agree with the commenter who said: "the battle is between the swarm of the “small and the many” and the swarm of the “large and the few”. The reason why the latter matters is because it is truly transnational in nature and because it controls most of the resources that allows the constituents of its antagonistic swarm to exist."
The stunning thing about Musk’s campaign to clean up the back-stage rats’ nest at twitter is that he seems to be the only guy in the country who dared to act against the Left’s cancellation of everything that held consensual reality together. Of course we can't trust him for everything - he has proposed detonating nuclear weapons on the planet Mars with the idea is of vaporizing the polar ice caps in order to make the planet more habitable. This was the premise of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars that also featured an unhinged billionaire.
Still, any port in a storm and on the twitter issue he has my vote - or whatever. I prefer an autocratic individual to an autocratic faceless committee.
The Tablet article just confirmed what we've long known about the damage done to children by the lockdowns. It's shocking to see just how much fear was generated in ordinary people who were never told, or never wanted to hear, just how dishonest were the elites who decided to impose and enforce the rules of lockdown. I believe many people will never listen to the voices of authority again.
New tech and social media both certainly have had a part to play. New tech builds up the technocrat, of course, and produces a lot of meaningful-sounding data that's used to preempt argument. Social media is often used to promote the idea that citizens have no business questioning the dictates of their government, as is legacy media in truth.
Now it turns out that in addition to having people on-staff whose job was deciding what to censor and who to ban, government agencies were drawing up their own lists and sending them to Twitter. This is of course entirely illegal under the Constitution, which I thought was supposed to matter or something. So Musk's greatest contribution has probably been simply to take the company private and not return the bureaucrats' phone calls.
The exploding ice caps on Mars idea is pretty nutty. You can't just make clean rivers run that way. Of course I suspect that the entire matter will remain hypothetical for some time. The thing about terraforming an alien planet is that you need resources to do it. Right now the only place we can get those resources is our own planet, which kind of needs to be the priority for a while.
But yes, he's moved forward quite a bit on letting people speak and be heard. The few times he's disciplined anybody have been controversial. The controversy in itself is a good thing, since the previous regime kept their decisions so quiet that nobody even knew enough to protest.
The COVID response is a huge alarm regarding abuse of power and emptiness of authority. Not the only one that faces us, but a huge one. For the stated purpose of stopping infections they tore apart the infrastructure of society, put people out of business, and denied help to those who needed it. The punchline is that none of this did anything to stop infections, as any competent infectious disease specialist could tell you. But of course competence has gone rather out of style.
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