Recapitulation
For new readers: we’re making a book called DEEP SOCKS. Like a designer spa-submarine, the goal of this book is to take you deeper in style. The spa-submarine takes your body lower; this literary submersible deepens your views: specifically, political/historical views, but also aesthetic, spiritual, erotic, and also strategic.
Because the downward journey will take a year, it is organized into seasons. The first is called SHALLOW WINTER. It is winter because it is the end of a world, and the depth of vision is shallow because don’t know what world it was that was ending or what world will be coming. Each season, in turn, divides into three movements. You now find us three weeks into a movement is called “Managerworld in Winter.” In the first week, we tracked the history of a dominant, but almost invisible form: the manager fractal. “Managerworld” is what happened when the manager fractal took over. Last week we looked at three different aspects of manager world: its social fault lines, its attentional contradictions, and its “political fairytales.”
This week is called “Three Postmanagerial Futures.” The first entry, “Computer God and the Escape From Reality” looked at Managerworld’s favorite story to tell itself: the story of complete automation, of the singularity, of the emergence of a computer god and the transformation of all reality into symbolic manipulation. This is the dream of the manager fractal. But what is the nightmare? A unmanageable world. An unmanaged world. Today, in “Dystopian Dystopias” we will consider the contours of these nightmarish alternate realities. The piece begins with the introduction of the Dystopian Quadrant. With this useful diagram in our minds, we can then understand the most likely two pathways in the ongoing process of “dystopianization.” There is also a happy ending with a thought experiment encore.
The Dystopian Quadrant.
Some dystopias are about worlds with substantial less freedom than ours: 1984, Brave New World, They Live!, The Handmaid’s Tale. Other kinds of dystopias may, perhaps, have even more freedom than ours, but they have much less security. This kind of dystopia is often postapocalyptic, or even apocalyptic: The Road, Mad Max, Escape From New York. From this distinction we can draw our horizontal axis. On the left, there’s the dystopias characterized by the lack of freedom, and then, on the right, by the lack of order.
The vertical axis has to do with how apparent the dystopia is. The higher you get on this axis, the more latent, or secret, the dystopia is, and the lower you get, the more manifest, or clearer the dystopia is. Most of the residents in 1984 and Brave New World don’t know they are living in a dystopia: in fact, the narrative of both books concerns a hero becoming aware of previously unseen dystopian elements.
The plot of “They Live!” centers around this latent/manifest dynamic. The hero lives, initially, in a completely latent dystopia: a world that has been taken over by skeleton-ish aliens who scheme to warm the earth in order to make it resemble their steamy home planet. These sinister creatures broadcast a signal which makes them appear human, so nobody knows what’s going on, not until the hero puts on sunglasses that disrupt the signal and let him see what’s actually going on. The dystopia has moved from latent to manifest, from top to the bottom.
What Kind of Dystopia is Managerworld?
At first, the answer seems relatively clear: managerworld is a top left dystopia: that is, it’s a nearly completely latent dystopia where collectivity has almost completely crushed individual freedom.
To make some sense of the particular dystopian quality of the managerworld dystopia, consider the difference between social control in 1984 and Brave New World. In 1984, social control is a boot stomping a human face, forever; in Brave New World, social control is orgy porgy, that is, collective sex on psychedelics.
Social control in managerworld is a particular mix of orgy and boot. If you are on the good inside of managerworld, you are carroted by the potential orgy with A+ list celebrities. If you are on the bad outside of manager world, you are sticked with the eternal boot in your face and ass forever, kept in a permanent state of abject pain-pleasure. Of course, it isn’t this simple: the fear of the boot haunts the inside and the dream of the celebrity drug orgy animates the global skid row.
Both Brave New World and 1984, required a group of leaders, an elite. In both books there is some indication that the ruling elite know the evil of their world, but they accept it out of necessity. But Managerworld requires no rulers, no elites, no shadowy cabal in the know. It is, instead, an algorithmic system: a structure of conflict and competition set up for maximum efficiency.
For we all want the orgy and fear the boot, and our love of the orgy makes us want to be excellent, and because we live in managerworld, managerworld owns our excellence. We become volunteer managers, all of us, all the time. Not just volunteers, but passionate about our own managing: we believe that we are part of a movement, that we are doing good, that this is somehow connected to some kind of social justice or global good.
So far, we’ve been describing the contemporary dystopia as a static system: a mechanism of orgy and boot depending on our own volunteered, passionate excellences. Now let’s set the system in motion, and consider it as a process, as an ongoing “dystopianization”
A Short History of Contemporary Dystopianization
One place to begin is 1963: JFK gives speeches and orders indicating the end of the Cold War, in retaliation, an unspecified deep state faction, organized through multiple overlapping secret societies including the Bush clan, (implicated with both plausibility and a moderate degree of probability) organizes the Dallas events: that is, the assassination of the young president, the effective creation of a patsy, and the creation of enough loose ends so that the truth can never be determined.
And so begins the creation of a world of lies: a world that reaches its intense climax on 9/11. Again, in all probability some sort of a deep state sponsored event, but instead of a single murder, a mass murder followed by genocidal invasions and the creation and empowerment of a new form of racism. From any optimistic global historical perspective, the last 20 years will appear to be a reign of evil unlike almost any other. The so-called Pax Americana will be seen as an intensely dystopian time, a time when simultaneous mass social control and complete social breakdown went almost completely unnoticed. Why?
Because of an ideology that hid reality from its participants: that made them think they were heroes when they were just police. But only algorithmic police: police by mimesis, police of an ethics that felt completely real but was completely narrativized. This fake sense of natural reality is a clue to our moment.
Longtime readers will remember Markus Gabriel’s distinction between natural kinds and geist. Water is a natural kind, because whether you call it wasser or H2O or agua or 水 it will still be the same. But when you call me a piece of shit garbage chud it changes who I am, because we are ‘geist’ - that is, a kind of symbolic, self-aware partially embodied spiritual process that cannot be exactly specified because of its own self movement.
Both sociobiology and managerial progressivism partake in the same false naturalization. The sociobiologist pretends some free process of geist, say, the practice of homosexuality has a “biological” component: that is, that this free practice corresponds to some identifiable natural substrate. A gay gene. When the managerial progressivist speaks of decentering whiteness, they have mistaken something transient, historical, self-defined, that is, Geistlike, “whiteness” into a natural evil: a moral wrong that must be fought with more state funding and rigorous proper conduct within group settings.
What does fake naturalization have to do with the dystopian process that this section is allegedly about? It’s relatively simple: when we see social reality as natural, we don’t see it as dystopian. What does dystopian mean? Basically, bad. Whether things are genetic or evil, they are not bad; bad has a local, changeable quality. If things are evil or genetic, they will never change. If they are bad, they can change for the better.
But they can also change for the worse. And that is where our attention will turn now. So far have sketched out a contemporary dystopia that’s hidden by naturalization, that works through fear of the boot, and through the canalization of our excellences towards an imagined outer space celebrity orgy. While this is bad, it could get a lot worse — in at least two different ways.
Two Pathways For Future Dystopianization
Pathway One: Towards Total Management
In the first pathway, managerworld wins and everything becomes managed. This dystopia has also been called “neo-feudal” because it will be a world of extreme and sharp social gradations; a world where status and rank matters much more than our own; a world where “wealth” (capitalist loot) and “morality” (managerial religious control mindset) have purely fused into one seemingly eternal enclosed nightmare.
Looking back at the last paragraph, we see a certain vagueness. What exactly will neofeudalism be like? How will life there feel and look?
There will be a world state: a fair and neutral central and genderless king. This king will be advised by the best people, who will work with the best artificial intelligences to help the king determine correct allocation of resources. The best people will be billionaires. The billionaires will be total managers and, again, the people in skid row addicted to even more chemicals will be the totally managed. But now instead of being left there on skid row, they will be taken inside of camps and turned into lifelong learning wage slaves.
Harrowing as this dystopia might be, at least it is safe, more than just extremely safe, safety is the highest good in totalmanagerworld.
Pathway Two: Towards Thunderdome
The name of the dystopia in George Miller’s 1985 Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome is called “Bartertown” - a survivor town formed after global civilizational collapse due to conflict and resource shortage. In Bartertown, conflicts get resolves in the “Thunderdome” a cage-like gladiatorial arena.
If you read the last paragraph and didn’t shudder when you read the words “global civilizational collapse due to conflict and resource shortage” then you might be living in a successor civilization, one that remembers the end of our sad world due to conflict and resource shortage. But if you did shudder, you already sense the other dystopia.
This dystopia goes the other way: managerworld loses and nothing gets managed. Instead of management, we go back to conflict, but now it’s conflict with all the fun tool of managerworld. Instead of sticks and sharpened stones we have chainsaws and h-bombs.
Dystopias With Happy Endings
Even though less people seem to read William Dean Howells than even, say, Theodore Dreiser, many people do like to quote Howells about Americans desiring tragedies with happy endings.
Traditionally speaking, neither utopias nor dystopias had “happy” endings. After returning back to their corrupt, Victorian/capitalist world, the narrator of William Morris’s New From Nowhere vents:
“I lay in my bed in my house at dingy Hammersmith thinking about it all; and trying to consider if I was overwhelmed with despair at finding I had been dreaming a dream; and strange to say, I found that I was not so despairing. Or indeed was it a dream? If so, why was I so conscious all along that I was really seeing all that new life from the outside, still wrapped up in the prejudices, the anxieties, the distrust of this time of doubt and struggle?”
Shrewd readers of 1984 will note that the book seems to be written from a future perspective, and therefore implies the collapse of Oceania. Oceania did collapse, but Managerworld has not, not yet. And any kind of collapse implies mass catastrophe.
Spoiler alert: Huxley’s utopia, Island, does have a kind of happy ending. The eponymous island utopia “Pala” has been invaded and occupied by the carnivorously named neighboring territory of “Rendang-Lobo”.
From Huxley’s plot, we can extract the outline of a legitimately happy ending to Managerworld: the invasion of a different and better kind of order, a freer and safer order than managerworld can offer. The Deep Right and Left each offer different visions of this future order. The Deep Center? It considers how to integrate, how to balance, how to preserve the current order and involve more and more people into it. Maybe, it thinks, if the entire world could be turned into contemporary art and everyone gets a basic income, maybe then everything would work.
Thought Experiment Encore
Right now, very few people realize they live in a dystopia. Most take this world to be natural in one way or another: as evil or as good, but not so changeable, even as it changes. To return to the dystopia quadrant, this is a highly “latent” dystopia. This is strategically advantageous for the dystopia. When people realize they are living in a dystopia, they tend to rise up. Who wants to live in Oceania, after all? So the thought experiment concerns the relationship between dystopian latency and revolution. In other words, how many people have to realize they are living in a dystopia before they revolt. As you consider this, make sure to consider the variations within “people.” Who is more likely to develop dystopian awareness?