But the point of industrialism across all that time has been the replacement of people with machinery, and the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, so that now, well, we can see both of those goals approaching some kind of fulfillment, some kind of realization. … This limitless process of industrialization, what it has done, as far as I see it, is liberate our vices and suppress the efficacy of our virtues.
The web wasn’t corrupted by outside forces. The corruption was there from the start, latent in its design. A vast, decentralized communication network that can transmit data of all sorts to all people is not resistant to the establishment of information monopolies; it encourages their formation. Decentralization at a technical level breeds centralization at an industrial level. What Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification” is not a bug but a feature.
The reasons are manifold:
- The web is subject to particularly strong network effects. Because a communication system becomes more valuable to users as the number of users increases, a boundaryless network with few physical or technical constraints on its expansion will consolidate traffic on a massive scale, giving strong advantages to the biggest players.
- The web is a marketplace where an unimaginable number of transactions, both financial and social, are completed every second without regard to the physical location of the participants. That favors large intermediaries, or middlemen, that have the infrastructure necessary to host myriad market participants, execute transactions quickly and precisely, and maintain detailed records of all that transpires.
- Operating at such scale requires large capital investments—for servers, storage drives, networking gear, cooling systems, and the like. The capital requirements present daunting barriers to entry for newcomers, barriers that are growing more forbidding as resource-intensive AI routines are incorporated into online processes and services.
- The interpersonal links [celebrated] for their intellectual and social value also have outsized financial value when captured as data and analyzed by computers. The network effect applies not just to people but to information about people. The more aggregated the information, the bigger an asset it becomes for companies that profit by predicting attitudes and behavior.
- Consumers benefit from the companies’ scale. Whatever fears people may have about privacy invasions or wealth concentration, they enjoy the personalization, convenience, and diversion that social media companies and other internet outfits serve up in endless quantities for free. People’s loyalty to algorithmically-tuned feeds may be a form of addiction, but it doesn’t seem to be an addiction many are eager to break.
Popular books on evolution tell us we are the accidental result of the chance interactions of atoms, which have somehow produced us as vehicles for the survival of genes. Popular books on artificial intelligence tell us that computers will soon outstrip man, taking all the necessary decisions faster and better than we can. The odd thing is that books of this sort are not written as terrible prophecies of doom, they are cheery best-sellers. It seems we enjoy being told we are robots blindly programmed for survival, or that we are inferior to robots and will soon have to hand over to them.
There are examples everywhere of the use of ‘science’ to undermine confidence in any other way of knowing. “More research is needed” – “Statistics tell us” – “Laboratory tests have conclusively proved” – this kind of phrase is common and builds up the assumption that if you don’t know in a scientific way, you don’t know. Any judgment of value, any intuitive wisdom, is banished to the realm of fantasy or whim, while any statistical or scientific type statement gets an automatic endorsement. Studies that are not scientific start to cringe, and try to ape science, however inappropriate. The effects are felt disastrously in education, where for instance the study of human nature is more likely to mean sociology and psychology than literature and history; where the psychologist is likely to feel more authentic and confident the more he works in laboratories, the less he deals with actual people. Subjects are distorted, values destroyed, by this pseudo-scientific masquerade, yet how hard it is to stand against it, since the underlying false assumption is that science is truth, all else is self deception.
The devaluing of personal judgment is a self-fulfilling principle, since any faculty that is unused tends to decay. Many people have in any case less opportunity for using their personal judgment than men had in the past, and when they are consistently told it is unreliable and irrelevant, they use it even less, and it becomes unreliable and irrelevant. We wait for ‘science’ to pronounce.
Polanyi expressed it like this – “Backed by a science which sternly professes that ultimately all things in the world – including all the achievements of man from the Homeric poems to the Critique of Pure Reason – will somehow be explained in terms of physics and chemistry, these theories assume that the path to reality lies invariably in representing higher things in terms of their baser particulars. This is indeed almost universally regarded today as the supremely critical method, which resists the flattering illusions cherished by men about their nobler faculties.”
Such assumptions, about what is real and what is not, must and do affect men’s behaviour. Lately an Archbishop of York made a comment to this effect about vandalism. “We look,” he said, “for reasons why young people, not necessarily poor or deprived, should smash and destroy their expensive surroundings.” He quoted from Bertrand Russell a phrase about the accidental, purposeless nature of the universe, and suggested the violence and destruction might be a shout of anger at the meaninglessness of life. “Only a very old philosopher or a very young vandal could live in such a world,” he said.
A shout of anger – or perhaps the very young vandal is merely being what the very old philosopher tells him we all are. […]
… What we find real depends on how we know, and is a matter of life or death.
“It may appear extravagant,” Polanyi wrote, “to hope that these self-destructive forces may be harmonised by reconsidering the way we know things. If I still believe that a reconsideration of knowledge may be effective today, it is because for some time past a revulsion has been noticeable against the ideas which brought us to our present state. Both inside and outside the Soviet empire, men are getting weary of ideas sprung from a combination of scepticism and perfectionism. It may be worth trying to go back to our foundations and seek to lay them anew, more truly.”
[Johann Baptist] Metz develops his “political theology of the subject” as a corrective to the transcendental fundamental theology of his mentor and friend, Rahner, whose theological anthropology he extols as the finest exercise exploring the formal subject produced by the Enlightenment. In reflecting upon existence, person, subject or the human, Rahner achieved the pinnacle of Roman Catholic theology’s belated response to Kantian transcendental philosophy.
The problem, however, is the level of abstraction. Modern theology has failed to ask whether such a religious subject actually exists, that is, whether or to what extent actual people in modern society approach their personal and societal lives on the basis and priority of Christian concepts of reason, freedom and autonomy.
As a privatized affair, Christian religion functions as affirmation of values the middle-class subject attains elsewhere in society. In the public sphere, it is reduced to providing customs for holiday celebrations. For a growing majority, Christian faith becomes a “religious paraphrase” of how they already perceive and practice their lives in the world, thereby making participation in liturgical worship expendable. Meanwhile, a much smaller minority, in contrast, seeks refuge in a rigid “pure traditionalism” that threatens the church with sectarian isolation.
In establishing the concept of political theology, Metz analyzes the threatening socioeconomic conditions of late modernity in order to argue that the Christian message can realize its salvific import today only if recognized as a “dangerous memory,” the memoria passionis. […]
Far from generating the sort of optimistic view of history and nature that characterized the 19th century, the present valorization of technical reason has produced deep measures of fatalism and apathy. People find themselves part of an anonymous, inevitable, timeless technological and economic process. The need to conform for success in these systems depletes people’s imaginations, inhibits dreams for the future, and ultimately threatens the loss of their subjectivity and freedom.
In its now near universality, the exchange mentality inherent to market capitalism integrally influences not only politics but also the foundations of spiritual life in a culture of the makeable, replaceable and consumable, eroding commitments, attitudes of gratuity, and capacities to sit with sorrow or feel profound joy. …
… Metz articulates the current danger to humanity… Anonymous progress is interrupted by questioning whose progress, at what cost to the freedom of others and, with increasing awareness, to the ecology. Remembrance of the victims of these social processes constitutes an interruption of the abstract arguments for progress.
Metz then turns to the memory of Jesus, the narrative of whose passion, death and resurrection reveals God’s identification with and promise of redemption for all victims of humanity’s inhumanity.
The pattern of Jesus’ life and death, one of service to the oppressed, constitutes the pattern of life that can be salvific for Christians now, a pattern that promises an authentic subjectivity and freedom. Metz thereby recovers the tradition of the imitatio Christi — an imitation dangerous both in the conversion it requires of its practitioners, away from a privatized view of salvation, and in the threat it poses to the conventional (evolutionary) wisdom of society.
This praxis of mysticism and politics, liturgy and ethics, likewise becomes the means for believers to know, in an experiential or practical way, deep joy and hopeful consolation, freedom lived in the presence of God, the God of Israel and Jesus, the God of the living and the dead.