Introducing: Google Passport
Thumotic Theory and the Real Deep Right Future
Welcome back, good friend
You’re reading DEEP SOCKS, the serialized political self help book that aims to wrestle your thoughts down to the depths of possibility and imagination. As a concluding post on the Shallow Winter of the Right, we will offer our third possible right wing future. Obviously, a soup-based fantasy of an American King quite upset the republicans in our audience, and the dream of a republic that simply ignored the federal government aroused practical concerns. After all, who really wants to live in the Republic of Texas, or let New York truly fend for itself? Today, we ask you to consider a common fantasy among day traders, dorks, Phillip K Dick, William Gibson, cryptobros and arch-libertarians alike. The Corporate Nation-state.
Thumotic Theory
Francis Fukuyama was wrong about The End of History. Not as a title—that shit did numbers in a big way. And his thesis certainly won him fans: many, many powerful people followed that little book right off the cliff of unipolar, hyperpower politics and right into the Forbidden Zone, population “Our president has Alzheimers and the party is dying of old age live on CSPAN.”
What he was right about was that political structures, the ones we call states, rely, for legitimacy and survival, on a theoretical framework of life and the public that exceeds crass materialism, though it is inclusive of it. A state is charged with the provision of certain public goods, both tangible and intangible. These can be classed into 3 rough categories. The material, the social, and the thumotic.
Material Life
Your food, your water, your air, your basic security, the infrastructure that makes economic life possible. The things governments can and should provide, quite uncontroversial. States aren’t half bad at providing this and in fact they have been getting better and better. Socialist governments are particularly effective at this in spite of a certain type of black legend that holds currency amongst liberals. The Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam all industrialized quickly after early false starts and the end of sanctions. Famines happen everywhere, apologists claim, and certainly China has had an unprecedentedly long streak with no famine. Still, in the modern era, if you manage to avoid pissing off the Americans and Chinese simultaneously, a state can probably nourish, shelter, and employ most of its citizens somehow.
Social Life
This is folded in with ideas like safety and infrastructure, but takes on a dimension of legal forms, education, culture, mate-finding. Civics, in a sense—but not merely inclusive of the rights, responsibilities, and privileges of citizenry. It is genuinely quite hard for a state to totally fail to provide the means with which a society can exist, though certainly many urban Asian countries are trying, gradually depleting their populations out of a sort of cold indifference to their own humanity, and obviously there are war-torn states that truly have missed the mark.
Thumotic Life
This is something like ‘the pursuit of happiness’ or the ability to reach self-actualization on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Thumos or thymos comes from the Greek, meaning something akin to spiritedness. Humans have an innate drive to be themselves, and to live as themselves in society. It is not just the struggle for preeminence, but the struggle to discover self-authored meaning. You are not just yourself, and you feel like your personal self and spirit have some value and are recognized by this society. This, Fukuyama holds, is the most elusive and difficult pillar for a socialist society to achieve, depending as they do on secrecy, inflexible authority, and collective action towards often dubious goals. It is relatively basic for liberal societies, being found as a statement of purpose in all these wonderful little turns of phrase from Jefferson and the liberal foment of the 18th century.
The Inflection Point of Power
Please understand, this is just a simple little drawing. Don’t bother us about this little drawing. The inflection point, as you can see, occurs when state power intersects with corporate power, sometime around 1945, the first little tick. This was the consummation of FDR’s glorious revolution, his conquest of the world for freedom and liberty and all that wonderful stuff. Mostly in practice, it was about none of those things of course.
FDR managed to unite disparate factions that had once been or could easily be inside of the Democratic Party against the money power in politics. This was big, corporate-ass business, and he sought to weld to its command-and-control structures the ostensibly more accountable and humane power of the state. It also helped a bit with the world war and massive military mobilization. This was the introduction of the managerial state, and the beginning of the third industrial revolution.
It had a rocky early life! After the tribulation of the Global Antifascist War, we were granted the humiliation of watching 30 years of glory evaporate under a kind of competition the government of the New Deal could not handle—endogenous, ally-led, market-based competition. We’ve covered this at some length already, if you’re curious.
At approximately 1971, the second intersection of green and black in our little drawing, sometime in the middle of Nixon’s term as president, the United States of America went bankrupt. It is not remembered this way, but that’s what happened. The gold window was closed, meaning, if you’re suspicious of bankers and don’t have a brain injury, that all the gold had been sold off. The USA was racking up unbelievable foreign debt to prosecute its latest stinker of a war. It hid the bankruptcy by simply borrowing more money, and inviting its creditors to consider a world where they couldn’t get security and a nuclear umbrella for the low low price of lending money they already had and conceding some military bases.
But, the pants were off, and while the emperor with his ‘new’ clothes remains the emperor, he also loses something like dignity. At some time around the 1980s, the second tick on our x axis, corporate power begins an increase in its accumulation of power, taking over, more and more, material and social needs of the citizenry. This was the managerial revolution of the late 20th century extending its arms to embrace and pickpocket a military hegemon living off of phony IOUs and a potent delusion. Hell, at this point the government was saying ‘fuck it’ and put a geriatric actor who thought the government sucked anyway in charge of the thing. Somehow, America as a whole did not decline, but the prestige of the government began a process of irreversible decline.
Trending in One Direction
State power has, in America, increasingly become a formal mechanism that provides a single pillar of national-state identity, and seemingly the most essential one: thumotic recognition. It is increasingly irresponsible with public funds, alarmingly corrupt, incompetent to defend its citizens and imperial suzerains from internal and external threats.
The alliance between state power and corporate power is one that has been remarkably competitive, and not at all stable across its history. A dynamic balance has been the name of the game, ever since FDR got his grubby mitts on the thing. Today, we are very, very far from a seemingly benign old monarch in a wheelchair telling defense contractors to make the planes or else. Corporate power has increasingly captured regulatory agencies and the ideological fancy of political actors, and gradually arrogated state function through both public-private partnerships for the provision of public goods as well as non-governmental organizations, funded seemingly philanthropically to accomplish foreign policy and domestic policy objectives.
Of course, NGOs and PPPs are simply black holes for money and the incompetent scions of the oligarchy. Seemingly they represent a rent-seeking tendency in human organizations rather than the conscious attempt of creating a state mediated largely by corporations. A large enough agglomeration of them will eventually resemble a government, though it will have a natural problem: it’s not really a government.
What does the market mechanism select for?
Profitability is the obvious answer. But this situates the market mechanism as being uniquely and completely incapable of providing thumotic recognition. It can only optimize what gets sold. And we don’t buy and sell the consciousness of human individuality and fulfillment (yet). At its best, a product or process that passes through market-selection will be selected for optimal return on investment, and the personal thumotic recognition of ownership.
States provide mutual thumotic recognition, both of ruler and subject. For the ruler, of course it is clear how they are recognized, but the subject is accorded rights, privileges, a history and culture, a language and state services. They recognize themselves within a context of meaning and belonging, and can be themselves in relation to it. Feudalism is such an enduring and powerful system because it was built on this premise of mutual exchange, service for the rights of a position in a defined collective.
A corporation struggles to provide the kinds of high level thumotic recognition that is desired by citizens of a nation-state. Profit is its only meaning—it is hard to spend a life in service to profit and feel yourself reflected in profits. It’s all too abstract to discover a shard of yourself in it. Profit is not power, and power is what you need to provide thumotic recognition to a subject. A corporation exists as a body recognized by a state, its existence is preceded in fact by the mastery of power by the sovereign. The corporation seems like a high level language relying on an interpreter to reach the bare metal of power. The state operates quite close to it, though still mediated.
Corporations, because their existence is more partial than that of the state, and because their teleology is so much more limited, are necessarily quite bounded. They seek profit. If they are able, they seek power, but only because power is a means to profit in the grand scheme of things. Power would guarantee profit for as long one has it, but taking and assuming state power would also make profit meaningless. A state doesn’t care if it makes money in the end, a politician might. But you’d have to be a truly awful king to run the country to make money. There’s so much inefficiency when an organization is obligated to exist spatially and not conceptually. How are you going to make a profit off of Oklahoma? You’ll have to really cook those books.
Aggregator theory, the path forward to state development
Stratechery is a fun blog to read. Ben Thompson is an advocate of his distinctive understanding of what is often called “the platform economy.” He perceives these platforms as having internal taxonomy, based on their relationship to supply and demand. This is aggregator theory.
Essentially, an aggregator seeks to capture demand—and therefore ensure continual, zero-cost access to the supply that makes satisfying its demand possible. It functions on an inverse understanding of traditional economics—Standard Oil after all needed the oil wells a lot more than it needed gas stations and kerosene resellers. But the Internet completely upends this traditional relationship. A normal economic process has the producer seek to develop a distinctive and desirous product, then sell it at a competitive advantage. The aggregator needs commodity scale on all that it aggregates, it needs a firehose that’s always running.
Hence, the success of aggregators operating at the highest levels of an industry—Google with advertising, Amazon with retail, Facebook with social interactions. If we begin using economic concepts of supply and demand and apply them to state-formation and state-participation, we come across an interesting felicity: the state functions much like an aggregator, and aggregators share many of the problems with the state.
The state has captured demand for thumotic recognition, and its users provide endless supply, their living and struggle for recognition in forms that are ontologically state-captured like the corporation. What a con job! If the corporations keep it up, they’ll be providing social life and subsistence, but people will only be seeking recognition for their souls in the matrix of the state formation.
The highest order of aggregator has, as a corporate form very nearly transcended profits. Profit is the motivating guard-rail that keeps corporations from moving to become law unto themselves. But Google, can Google truly not make profits? How much money could they throw away? Is it possible for Google to even lose money? It controls advertising. Amazon controls retail. Bezos has gorilla steroid and penis rocket money. Annapurna Pictures is just a vanity project for Larry Ellison’s daughter, it’s a way to keep her from doing something important badly. Meta burns money on VR because Mark Zuckerberg just wants to live in a world where facial expressions are intelligible to him. Nothing lasts forever—but they’re definitely going for the record. These companies have not just become structural to the global economy, way-too-big-to-fail, they have hit the uncanny valley of power. They are, as corporations, ontologically barred from an ultimate success that seems to be within their grasp.
How can you make money off of Dingxi?
Dingxi is famously the most poor place in China. The government’s laudable poverty alleviation aside, apparently lots of people didn’t have clothes until 1999! Personal incomes were nothing, remain pitiful, there is no industry of note, there was no irrigation. It is a place in Gansu province, in the northern center of China. It is rather arid, the land was devastated by successive wars in the Qing Dynasty and money from state development initiatives doesn’t flow evenly. It’s crap land. Not all land can be good! A state, as a form, lives and dies on how it handles the problem of arbitrary distribution of virtues among land and men.
For a corporation to thrive, all the sectors need to be humming along on a path to growing profitability. The plan has to make sense. There’s no plan that works for Dingxi, but the PRC is stuck with them. The city is bigger than Chicago in population! The calculation is different for an entity with a fundamental drive toward comprehensive success. A corporate nation-state must either exclude the chronically unprofitable, or it must aggregate the junk territory/assets in such a way that the larger body still gains from inclusion, treating its demand as intrinsically valuable as long as it is captured. This aggregation is necessarily the macronational strategy. You can’t have holes in your map, unless you’re Italy or South Africa. Aggregation is how the PRC is wealthy and strong even with big drags like Gansu or Inner Mongolia. It’s how the US gets people to accept that Mississippi and Texas and New York all belong together under one flag.
For the corporate nation-state though, we must look at a platform economy as if we aren’t participating in one right now. With a little bit of thought, one can see that there are 3 tiers of participants in a platform generally.
Developers — they make the platform. Direct employees.
Producers — they fill out the platform. Influencers, video producers, writers like us. Affiliates, partners, contractors.
Users — they comment, they watch, they have NPC faces, and go to Comic Con to cheer on Disney’s abortions. Consumers, end users.
The form of the corporate nation-state will preside over arbitrary territory that may be Barcelona good or it may be Gansu dried out dog turd bad. To be successful in this form, a new way of looking at territories and people has to be assumed. One has to reclassify people and their relationship to both the corporation and nation-state, taking into account thumotic and aggregator theory. Are they necessary eaters, useful producers, or in on the core product team? Subjects, civilians, or citizens? And remember, castes aren’t conducive to profit, progressive hierarchies to success are.
The Preconditions of Corporate Statehood
Reclassification alone isn’t enough. There are 3 quite particular conditions that must be met in order to exceed the boundaries of ontology and history and turn Google into a country, or get it over with and turn South Korea into Samsung.
The Singularity
Management is at its wits’ end currently ensuring profit is made while getting the bankers, doctors, lawyers and congressmen all to remember: we’re on the same side! How are profits falling? Why all this war, all these problems? Now, obviously states are suboptimally organized: “An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?” (Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?) A breakthrough in accessible, usable superhuman intelligence must be achieved in order for a corporation to see its way clear to achieving both industrial breakthrough and power breakthrough to overcome the current mess of things without becoming its own mess.
The Power Eclipse
States have an exceptional amount of power. Even now, at such a nadir of respectability and active thought in politics, they command exceptional forces! But the trend is seemingly inescapable, the nation-state is losing power as often as it loses prestige. What the army and police accomplish now can be accomplished by PMCs with the same amount of accountability and it would require the greatest innovations in corruption for this to be more expensive. The Federal Reserve will either persist or attach itself to a new host after its parasitic relationship with the current US Government ends in catastrophe. Arbitration, mediation and our own novel conception: FASTLAW will surely win out over state-provisioned “justice” in due course. The point is coming where all the state offers with any objective superiority is the sense of thumotic recognition.
The Citizenship-product
This is the key to thumotic recognition in the medium of the corporate state, the embodied combination of thumotic theory and aggregator theory. The citizenship-product will offer benefits, rights, privileges, in a tiered system that is based on your participation to and loyalty to the corporate-state. These tiers will not be castes, but rather positions on an explicit ladder of value. Users all have a path to elite citizenship, and the ultimate in privilege. Conceived of as a product that will help capture and lock in demand, with iterative improvement cycles, released in a field of competitive citizenship-products and understood by the public as a natural extension of both Oauth and user accounts, this will provide an attractive alternative to both existing corporate-consumer relations and state-subject relations. This citizenship-product would perhaps best take the natural form of an identification, but it will be the superior sort of ID, the passport. The final frontier of actually existing state power is the space of international relations. You want a good passport, right? Like, fuck taxes, fuck the police, fuck the army, fuck that old cocksucker president, but you put up with them because you can still get the fuck out, go to Tahiti or Vienna or Buenos Aires. No one wants to be stateless.
And so, at last, we come to the first glimpse!
Introducing: Google Passport
The Google Passport is a product that does not yet, but very well might exist in the future. It would be the culmination of thousands of peoples’ hard work, and mark the crowning achievement of Silicon Valley and the startup culture in America, and the final triumph over the vicious and barbaric nation-state.
Google Passport is your ticket to the world. Every country where Google operates will admit you, for up to 90 days without a visa, just by scanning your compatible Android device. Google Passport will form your personal credit line when you travel. Google Passport operates as valid identification for both Meta and Amazon services. With Google Passport, enjoy the best Google has to offer, for life.
With Google Passport Play, you will get access to premium creator features on YouTube, as well as a lifetime subscription to YouTube Red, as long as you remain a Google Passport holder. Receive a 30% discount on all purchases made through the Google Play Store, and early access to Google Chrome features and updates. Cancelled Google products will become accessible once again. We’ll even make searching for porn with Google easier too while we’re at it. Enjoy Reader, Stadia, Google Video, Google Plus. Remember Google Plus? Want some Google Cardboard? SketchUp? We never got rid of any of it, we’re bringing it back out of the vault. Our vault is full of treasures for you to sample with Google Passport Play. Enjoy exclusive discounts and offers at participating stores, marked conveniently on Google Maps. Gmail busts out into the real world, as your address, registered with Google Maps, takes care of all parcel services for free for Google Passport Play holders.
And Google Passport Pixel, available only to Googlers and select partners by invitation. The Passport Pixel offers all lower-tier features and also operates as an subdural, practically invisible bio-implant chip, offering full, free access to all Google services, products, Play Store products, campuses, hardware, and a wide array of associated amenities from partners, for free, for life.