The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty (original) (raw)

2019, The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty

This is the full manuscript of the following: The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty We are now entering an era where the human world assumes recognition of itself as data. Its basis for existence is becoming fully subordinated to the software processes that tabulate, index, and sort the relations entailed in making up what we perceive as reality. The acceleration of data threatens to relinquish ephemeral modes of representation to ceaseless processes of computation. This situation compels the human world to form relations with non-human agencies, to establish exchanges with the algorithms and other software processes that accelerate and intensify the possibility of its obsolescence in order to allow for a profound upgrade our own ontological understanding to take precedent. Through a partial attunement to what is always already non-human in its form of mediation to a higher intelligence, we are able to rediscover the actual inner logic of the age of intelligent machines, as at once the reason of trauma and the instrument of catastrophe for a humanity still beholden to a linear process of rationality. Humanity now finds itself captive to pervasive institutionalised forms of violence whose force has everything to do with the aggressive pattern of economics in a neoliberal age, bound with an internet that has taken on a fourth dimension to generate consequence in the material world. This has allowed the internet to become thingly insofar as it will soon be understood not as an interface but as an environment. It thus takes on the ability to shape conditions beyond the imaginary and embed itself into materiality in a variety of ways that benefit from the demise of state parameters and the enlivenment of a fluidity of information able to migrate across time and space. All previous forms of media suffered from imprisonment within a screen, which limited their ability to function as the foundation for alternative networks, or as nodes of multilayered connectivity. The promise of a universal connectivity through a perpetual summons of our inclinations brings forth nothing less than a new form of imperialism able to transform space into a sphere of liquidity, and complexity into a condition of movement. As labour precarity and labour migration becomes the normative situation of a disenfranchised humanity, so too does its acquiescence to a universal accessibility where individuals are continuously subject to digital interpolation, and as such their behaviours and movements are made available to generating exploitable forms of interest. The data created is thus credited to others and interpreted to advance interests of others; all in order to finance the states and corporations who control the means for making worlds we alone discover. The End of the Future conceives an understanding of the digital through its dynamic intersection with the advent and development of the nation-state, race, colonisation, navigational warfare, mercantilism and capitalism, and the mathematical sciences over some five centuries. Its task is to animate an understanding of the twenty-first century as an era where the screen has split off from itself and proliferated onto multiple surfaces, and as a consequence has allowed an inverted image of totalitarianism to flash up at this point in history, and be altered to support our present condition of binary apperception. It progresses through a recognition of a now atomised political power whose authority lies in the control not of the means of production, but of information, and thus, digital media now serves to legitimise and promote a customised micropolitics of identity management. On this new apostolate plane, it is possible to conceive a world in which each human soul is captured and reproduced as an autonomous individual bearing affects and identities. The digital infrastructure of the twenty-first century makes it possible for power to operate through an esoteric mathematical means, and for factual material to be manipulated in the interest of advancing the means of control. This volume travels a course between Elizabethan England, North American slavery, Cybernetic Social Engineering, Cold War Counterinsurgency, and the (neo)libertarianism of Silicon Valley in order to arrive at a place where a cool organising intelligence that started from an ambition to resourcefully manipulate bodies, ends with their profound neutralization.