Anarchy (#2: Twitter Talk)

On Twitter, John Doe’s Carnival of Error writes that it has “become clear any Gnon-centered approach to power must be accompanied by an anarchist ontology in some way.” I certainly agree, though with a slight modification of terminology: any anarchic approach to power must be accompanied by a Gnon-ontology in some way. Gnon, as the Great Propeller, already holds great affinity with the anarchic outside, to point even in which the difference between the two seems nil. The question of power intersects here in two different ways, the nuances and internal connections of which are need of greater elucidation and interrogation. The first intersection is in the context of political power: as an immense struggle unfolding in the great void, the anarchic is the political’s a priori, to which it is permanently wed. The second is in the manifestation(s) of non-political power, which (on the surface, at least) cuts sharply towards the Outside by want of its own logic. It is, then, another mask of the anarchic. Upon each of these the final determination unfolds as the asovereign exception.

Another thread that crossed into similar territory began with on the topic of whether or not civil war is imminent (a topic for a future post!) and ended on the question of whether or not a unipolar global order is an open possibility for the future. From the U/Accist perspective here (or is something like a gamble more proper?), the position that is staked out in this debate is on the supreme unlikelihood technocratic unipolarity. To summarize as briefly as possible: highly centralized, vertical power systems are doomed and their capacities will into squeezed into tinier and tinier blocs – or patches – as the involutionary curve of spiral temporality auto-tightens. This isn’t to say that the existing sovereign units won’t be undergo intensive development and become zones of runaway growth and innovation – quite the opposite! The kicker is that the happenings in such spaces will, along with despatialized counterparts, be conduits for the tightening gyre itself feeding into itself.

Regardless, it’s an excellent thought experiment, and one that demands to be thought-through. The implications for anarchy are clear: if unipolarity was achieved it would be a sovereign operating above all other sovereigns, and the void of anarchy would be squeezed into nonexistence. To pull off this defeat would entail nothing short of the Promethean overcoming of Gnon, ushering in Scott Alexander’s Age of Elua.

A cosmic reign of Elua would be nice; it is, after all, the imaginal zone where the most utopian of socialist currents and libertarian transhumanism bend and connect. At the conceptual summit it comes down to the classic friendly artificial intelligence vs. malevolent artificial intelligence debate. Anything short of that and it is a matter of a planned and perfectly-executed upon convergence upon the smooth, perfect functioning of a system designed to achieve these goals.

Baudrillard’s death knell: “Every system that approaches perfect operativity simultaneously approaches its downfall.” (Symbolic Exchange and Death, 4)