Pockets of Weird: The Fight Over Reality

A New Team Human Live with Occult Historian Mitch Horowitz

I know a lot of us are upset about this seeming trend toward authoritarianism or oligarchy or — as I see it — technofeudalism. But if you look at the history of Western Civilization, this is actually the norm. Post-war American democracy and Euro-zone cooperation are the aberration. Now, in the sped-up digital media environment, we are reverting to the mean. That’s what AI does, after all. It produces the average response: the most likely answer, given the entire history of answers out there. It’s the opposite of creativity or improvement; it is the reversion to the mean.

And so here we are, going back to feudalism, which is the basis of our civilization. We have been an essentially colonial civilization since the first enclosed farm, since agriculture, really, but definitely since territorial wars, slavery, and resource extraction. It’s what we do — not just with imperial armies, but with basic capitalism. This is our average. Our normal. A digital media environment with algorithms and AIs iterating all that was into what will be, creating predictability on behalf of the investors and billionaires programming this landscape, is going to revert to that mean. It’s basic karma. We run out of places to colonize, so we colonize ourselves.