https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=puqjHet1_1A
Something happened too in terms of narrative. You can see it in the shift between the Matrix and Ready Player One. Like the aesthetics of the Matrix as the system that has to be resisted and the system that has to be escaped got replaced by Ready Player One, which is who controls the system? That’s all that matters. That is, it’s not that you can try to limit its power. No, it’s all encompassing. It takes up all of your attention and it is the most powerful controlling thing. It’s just the question is who is going to control it? And the last Matrix movie, which was horrible by the way, but I watched anyways because I wanted… Because I had a… Anyways, you watch these things so that we don’t have to. We appreciate it. Yeah, because I had an intuition that the new Matrix movie would be something like Pro Matrix. Like it’s Pro Matrix, but pretends to be rebellious nonetheless. And it was kind of like that. I’ll spoil it for everybody. It doesn’t matter. It ends with Neo and Trinity. Trinity taking over from Neo and becoming like the man in the relationship, you could say. And then both of them becoming heads of the Matrix, basically saying they’re going to steer the Matrix in the direction that they want. And I was like, wow. That’s fascinating, isn’t it? I was thinking to myself idly today that if they made a version of the Matrix now, Agent Smith would be the good guy. He’d be misunderstood. And yeah, no, that’s very interesting because the other thing I think about endlessly is the ring of power. And Tolkien again, he keeps coming up. And to try and control the Matrix for good is the equivalent of taking the ring. To use it. It’s exactly that. You know, it’s like, and what’s so interesting about that is that of course, the wise people, people like Gandalf, they know you can’t even touch the ring, right? It’s the foolish and the ambitious ones who think you can take it. It’s the humans and the twisted wizards. And you have to use the Hobbit because the Hobbit is so kind of naive and innocent. So it’s possible for him to touch this thing. But no, we’re in the world in which we all think that we can take the ring and use it for our own good or we can control the Matrix. You’re right. And that’s been the shift for the last 20 years. And that actually has been the shift perhaps on the left as well. It’s certainly been the shift in the Green Movement that I used to kind of run with. You know, the Green Movement 40 years ago was being directed intellectually by people like Ivan Illich and Jackie Low and Wendell Berry. You know, it was a movement of people who said, look, we’ve got to get out of this machine and we’ve got to rebuild community and have a relationship with nature because that’s how you protect nature. It’s by living with it, right? And caring for it. It was human. It was about the human scale. And that was always what the old Greens were about. And the new Greens are about as many wind farms as possible, as many solar power stations as possible, as much technological control as possible, as long as you use it to create a quote sustainable system. So it’s exactly the same narrative. Take the ring and use it for good. Control the Matrix. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine this time. The good guys are running the huge control system. So that’s all right. And it is like an endlessly repeating system. It’s the Tower of Babel story again, isn’t it? That we talked about last time you stuck. Don’t worry, we’ll just, we’ll all get together and build this thing and it’ll be fine. It’ll be totally, it’ll be totally fine. But I mean, we know the story. We know that this, we know even by the very nature of these systems that they are increasingly fragile. There’s no way around it. That’s what they are because they also, because even the notion of the metaverse is, if you can understand how fragile they are because the identity of your, let’s say your supposedly self-willed identity in the metaverse is nonetheless extremely contrived within the parameters of the metaverse. Your people, I mean, I guess people, your embodied existence is so, it has all this breathing space, you know, in its experience. You have, I mean, and you, I’m telling you that because in your books, that’s what you also are constantly bringing up is that these experiences that almost, even normal day experience like drinking water or putting on a shirt, like these experiences have an infinite complexity in them. They have a kind of infinite richness which gets completely stunted in the digital world by the very fact that the parameters are limited in the program. And so there’s a sense in which that’s an image of how these systems cannot, because a human person cannot be fully contained. You just can’t, you cannot contain an identity completely. It’s impossible by definition. And so trying to do that will ultimately lead to fragility and a shattering at some point. You cannot, it’s not possible. No, well, and that’s the hope actually, you know, God is not mocked. That’s the hope, right? You can’t contain the human. You can’t contain nature. You can’t recreate it however clever you think you are. And everything is, it’s all built on sand. I mean, you can, you know, these things all rely on the power grid to operate, right? They all rely on fossil fuels. They all rely on the enormously complex grid of civilization which is destroying the natural world and undermining its own kind of cohesiveness at a human level as well. So it isn’t, firstly, it can’t be contained. You actually just literally cannot reproduce nature as much as you think you can. And secondly, it’s coming apart already economically, ecologically, culturally. It’s undermining itself by attempting to do this which is why interestingly, I think, if you compare our moment to say the 60s moment, right? So the 60s, you’ve got this huge counterculture. And if you look at the sort of the cultural stories that are coming out of the 60s, they’re all about optimism, right? We’re gonna, it’s the age of Aquarius. Everything’s gonna be great. We’re gonna smash the shackles. We’re gonna get rid of the limits. It’s gonna be free love and et cetera, et cetera. Didn’t really work out. But the stories now that are coming out even from the supposedly countercultural movements are all stories of let’s see if we can get the hell out of this collapsing system. So what does Jeff Bezos see? And these guys offer us Elon Musk. They offer us a life on another planet because we’ve basically ruined this one. Don’t worry, we can build bubbles on Mars. We’ll live in them. We’ll go off and live in space or you can live in the metaverse. We’ll create another world rather than trying to live in this one. And that’s what it comes down to with all of these guys, the new ideology. Now it’s gone from this is the age of Aquarius. We can create a utopia here, you know, to okay, that was a disaster. Nevermind, we’ll literally build another world and live in that one. You know, we’ll either live on the moon under domes or we will live in the metaverse. It’s almost like we’ve given up on nature. We’ve given up on human nature. We’ve given up on culture. We’ve given up on everything human and real. And we’re gonna allow the likes of Mark Zuckerberg or Ellen Musk to build us a new kingdom. It’s a twisted religious story of transcendence basically. And there’s something, I think there’s something also about how, let’s say the physical world or the embodied existence, it creates, it sets up a certain amount of limits that frames your experience in a way that is just, it’s unacceptable to a lot of these, of the ideologues. And that’s, I think, part of the problem, right? Because it’s not true that, I mean, you can pretend, we’re seeing the problem with that. You can pretend that you can self identify as anything. You can do that, but it’s gonna look very odd. It doesn’t look odd in the metaverse because you can just basically change your avatar into whatever you want it to be. And so in the metaverse, you actually can just be whatever you want. And nobody will know that you’re something else. But there’s a disjunct in reality, which is that this world imposes limits. They’re like, they impose the kind of these sacred limits to the possibilities of different identities and how they interact with each other. And I think that that’s, even in the technological project itself, in this kind of fetishization of technology and pushing the limits further, there’s something in which the notion that, it’s like you want to put poor genes in tomatoes. And it’s not even that, you really just want to do it to show that you can break down the natural identities and the natural things that exist in the world. It’s almost like, it is like a will to power, but in the physical world, it always will be limited. It’ll always be contrived. And so metaverse is the perfect, great, it’s the only solution in the end to their ideology. It’s playing God, I mean, quite literally. And I always come back to the eating of the apple. It’s, what’s the offer here? What’s the offer? Well, you can either live according to the will of God, according to the Tao, according to the way of things, and you can achieve a theosis in the end. You can be raised up or you can say, well, you know what? I think I’ll walk away from that. I’ll individuate and I’ll be God myself. I’m gonna choose power over communion effectively. And that’s the oldest story. And I always talk about this thing I call the machine as a, effectively, it’s a machine for destroying limits. That’s fundamentally what it does. And it is the thing that unites all these supposedly disparate strands of politics and economics at the moment, which is none of these people believe in limits and they don’t think there should be any limits. And any thought of being limited is an outrage increasingly. You know, it’s crazy, it’s dangerous. It’s, you know, whether it’s limits around your nation or whether it’s limits to the length of time you can live, or as you say, limits to what you can identify yourself as, limits to what your culture can be, limits to the amount you can exploit nature. All of this is, you know, those limits should just not be there. We don’t think that’s fair. It’s almost an injustice to be limited. It might be that this is kind of the final phase of liberalism and liberalism being a project that tells us that we can break through limits. You know, many of, you know, and part of that has been beneficial for us, but it’s almost kind of metastasized into a project that doesn’t understand where true limits are. Because the, it seems to me that in a sane society, you’ve got a balance between limits and, you know, the need for limits and the need for freedom. And as you’ve said before, you know, the balance between the margin and the center and the balance has to be there. You can’t have a society that’s too centralized and controlling, you can’t have a society that has no limits on anything. Otherwise you haven’t got a society, right? So you’ve got to achieve that uneasy balance. And we’ve gone to the point in all sorts of ways now where the aim of almost everything at the head of our culture is the destruction of all limits and all stories and all boundaries and all borders and anything that gets in the way of whatever we think is gonna somehow make us fulfilled. But we don’t even know what that is, right? We don’t know what the aim is. It is almost like a, it is like a broken technological version of a religious story. You know, you just use your own technological power to effectively get to heaven and live forever rather than doing anything that requires you to question anything or break it down again. Yeah. And the deal ends up being that ultimately we end up serving the machine. That’s the secret deal. That’s the secret that the genie isn’t telling you is that ultimately it really is like a bad horror story or some old legend about, you know, something, some witch offering you like a cookie, offering you something that will give you some power, but then ultimately you become a slave of, you become a slave. And I think that that’s what’s going on. You don’t have to be a battery in the matrix, don’t you? I mean, that’s why that original story was so good. It’s like, hey, you know what you are? You’re just a battery, you know? And you think you can live forever. You know, you’re actually in a pod halfway up a tower being siphoned for your electric current. It’s a horrible image. And it’s such a resonant one because it’s kind of true. Those original films worked because they channeled something that probably the filmmakers didn’t even know what they were doing. I think that’s what it is. I think they made that movie and then spend the rest of their life trying to kind of undo or deconstruct their own movie. I think they did because they’d shown that was such a powerful set of images disguised as a kind of kick-ass kung-fu movie, you know? It was basically like, here is modern life. This is what it is. And everybody kind of knew it. So when you saw the images presented like that, you just thought, oh my God. As you say, they can’t undo it once they’ve done it. And there’s a way in which that, you know, McLuhan talked about how we were becoming the reproductive organs of the machine. Like that basically the machine needs us in order to reproduce. But what I realized is that opposite from what we see in the matrix, we’re actually being farmed for intelligence is what we’re being farmed for. So it’s taking the highest aspect of humanity and then somehow making it into a resource. And so we’re there to give intelligence to this thing. We’re there to make Google intelligent because machines don’t have intelligence on their own. They need to farm it out to humans, gather it up into algorithms, and then use it to turn it back on us. But ultimately we’re providing intelligence to, and we’re doing it by attention. It’s really religious. It’s like, do you want to know how a God was born in the old world, right? It’s like you, through our attention and our giving our intelligence to this thing, then it is becoming more and more alive and more and more salient and coming back down on us and imposing itself through its different parameters, through its rules, through its framing of our reality. So it’s a very, very disturbing trade that we’re participating in. It’s like creating an egregore, isn’t it? The disturbing thing about it is that in Silicon Valley, there’s a lot of guys who are very conscious of this, and this is their religious worldview. I talk often about this book called What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly. I don’t know if you’ve read it, but it’s a really good book. If you want to know how these guys are thinking, you should read that book. It’s a few years old now. I wrote an essay about it a while back. And Kevin Kelly’s one of the, I don’t think he worked for Google, but he was certainly right in there with the Silicon Valley lads. And Kelly’s book precisely says this. He says, look, this system that we’re creating, which he calls the technium, not the machine, but it’s the same thing. He says it’s using us to create itself. So it’s a really interesting book because it’s almost a, it’s a very sharp critique of the machine that you might expect to say get from someone like Elul, except that Kelly thinks it’s good, right? So he fundamentally is saying, because you get a lot of critics of technology, and then the counter-critics will come along and they’ll say, oh no, no, technology is neutral. It’s just what you do with it that counts. You can use it for good or use it for bad. And Kelly says, no, that’s rubbish. Technology is not neutral. It has an agenda. It’s going in a certain direction and it’s using us to create itself. And this is going to be terrific because what we’re basically doing is building our evolutionary replacement. Okay, and this is what these guys are really up to. And they’re very open about it. Again, it’s like Klaus Schwab, they’re not hiding anything, right? They genuinely believe in a very mystical sense, in a very religious sense, that they are creating a new world with a new consciousness in it, and maybe they are. And they’re trying to manifest a new consciousness through this stuff. So as you say, Google is not just a thing that helps you to find stuff that you’re interested in. It’s a collection mechanism that’s been created very deliberately to do that. And again, that was very open. Yeah, but it’s not going to be a new consciousness. It’s going to be a very, very old consciousness. Yeah, like a bad- You know what they’re up to. Like a bad fantasy narrative where an old God is buried in the ground, and then you finally unearth it, and it comes back. We’ll be staring down as a Zell in no time. Yeah, no, actually, funnily enough, that was sort of the plot of my novel, or at least the conceit of it as well, is that what you think you’re raising is not what you’re raising. You are raising something. And so on one side, you’ve got critics of technology like L.L. or Wendell Berry, who can see what’s coming. On the other side, you’ve got Kevin Kelly’s and the Mark Zuckerbergs. They can see what’s coming too, but they think it’s great. And they’re trying to create it. And then in the middle, there are lots of other people who are just going, oh, it’s fine. It’ll be all right. Or I don’t really like it, but I don’t know what to do. And that’s most of us. We’re stuck there. Whereas these guys are deliberately creating a very particular world, and it’s manifesting very fast. I mean, if you’re not disturbed by the armed robot dogs, which are already in operation, then I don’t know what to say to you. Where do you think this is going? Where do you think it’s going? It’s, yeah, that’s what’s coming very fast now. It might even be, if you wanna talk about it kind of mystically or spiritually, that we can somehow sense this thing being born around us. And that’s part of the confusion of the moment. Something else is in control at this point. And it isn’t really us anymore. These systems have outrun us. The machine is much bigger than us. And to some degree, it’s starting to not need us as much as we thought it did. Yeah, but there’s a manner in which that is technically easy to see, because as the system rolls out, and as it becomes more and more apparent what direction it’s going, in order to maintain relevant, you have to compete in order to be of those that help the system attain its goal faster, or else you’re going to lose power in the system. So all the governments are all competing about who gets that digital ID first, who gets to digital currency first. All of this, they realize, if you fall behind at this point, then you’re going to be left back in this thrust. So the system itself seems to be, like you said, kind of creating itself through our desire to participate in it, and our desire to not be on the margins of it. And so it’s, you know, it really is all like, Elon Musk is an easy vision of that, where he consciously said it. He kept warning, warning, warning, and then realized, well, okay, well, I guess these warnings aren’t being heard, so I need to now not get left back, and I’m going to create a neural chip in your brain that’s going to connect you directly to the matrix.