The Inversion by Dennis Kingsley L.;

Author:Dennis, Kingsley L.; [Dennis, Kingsley L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aeon Books Ltd

Instrumental power

It is quite conceivable that the modern age—which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.

—Hannah Arendt

A new species of power has emerged, according to Professor Shoshana Zuboff, which can be referred to as instrumentarianism. The definition she gives for this is: ‘the instrumentation and instrumentalization of behavior for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetization, and control’.9 This is the mode of power that is utilised by the machinic impulse—it is the technique of the unreal machine. It is a technical mode for establishing predictive outcomes through the modification and tweaking of behaviour. That is, ensuring as much certainty and as little uncertainty as possible. And since human beings are known for their spontaneity and uncertainty, it can be said that the machinic impulse is anti-human by its very nature. It is a force of pervasive, almost non-visible, power that works through the automated medium of a computational architecture that is constituted by our increasingly ‘smart’ networked devices and digitally coordinated spaces. It is sly because it aims to operate unnoticed, managing us through the background of our lives. Its operational agenda is to tune society into desired forms of social organisation and to achieve a high degree of computational certainty and predictability. In the process, what we have come to recognise as our reality will begin to lose the touch of tactile experience and the possibility of a true individualised existence. Genuine modes of self-development will be regarded as anti-social exit strategies, and any talk of the soul or pure consciousness will be deemed as schizophrenic. The bodily and physical reshaping of people is now too messy and sweaty for the ethereal machinic processes. Power over human lives is becoming much more subtle. The new aim of control within the Inversion is an attempt to exile us from our very own human behaviour. Soulful alienation is the ideal strategy for a future of flesh robots, or robosapiens. The incoming project of total certainty represents the uniformity of a spiritless life experience within the newly colonised Inversion.

We are becoming acclimatised to a new range of concepts and contexts such as calculation, modification, rendition, management, and control. This is a shift toward an external mechanisation of life—from lived experience to calculable, ordered, and predictable phenomena. Advanced technologies are creating an ‘otherisation of humanity’ that aligns with instrumental power. This operation of stealth power feeds into the coming ubiquity of the unreal machine—the artificial construct—that will replace individual freedom with a mass ‘society of certainty’. Within the newly recalibrated Inversion, it is ‘instrumentarian power that fills the void, substituting machines for social relations, which amounts to the substitution of certainty for society’.10 This emerging, and increasingly pervasive, strategy aims for the automation of society through herding and conditioning people into preselected behaviours. The intention within this deepening materialism of the Inversion is to move from dominating nature to dominating human nature; also, to invert the inner life

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