🪚Critique

Problem: postmodern operating system

The “fall” from the Garden of Eden symbolises the loss of original geoautonomy. Intimacy with nature is replaced by separation from it. Abundance is replaced by scarcity. Gift economies are replaced by commodity economies. Polymorphous co-sensuality in sexual relations is lost to rigid sociopolitical structures that perpetuate the state.

Prologue

Primordial societies were a dance of gift economies and diffused power. It wasn't climate change or over-population, but our own drama that birthed the state. A power play, perhaps. Maybe chiefs, shamans, or warriors throwing a fit. Or maybe just men forgetting women had a say. Whatever it was, to defeat this primordial social machine, the state spun tales of surplus and scarcity, shadowing times of abundance. A new ideology of child sacrifice was created to replace the old religions. Temples flourished with hoarded treasures, and the protection of common property gave the temple political power, and in it, warriors found might in military.

While war was not new for primordial social machines, the state gave it a fresh, sinister spin. Once, violence belonged to everyone, but now the state monopolised it. Now, battles were not just defensive skirmishes, they were quests for land and captives. In the shadows of the ascension of the state, an elite rose, pickpocketing society’s surplus, widening the wealth gap. As land became private property, the cruel demand for human slaves grew and the focus shifted from feasts to fights.

Postmodern Operating System: Nation State, Spectacle and Late-Stage Capitalism

On nation state

Modern statist models cling to a singular lens — a single worldview and value-system is locked in place. From Christianity to post-Stalin capitalism, only one narrative reigns. This single worldview tweaks the very language we use. The right and the left fixate on symptoms, chasing shadows. Both search for a scapegoat, seeking a reason for the general malaise and society’s unease. In doing so, we become our own worst enemy — a society waging war on itself.

The modern (nation) State wavers between dissolution and rigidity, its fierce facade hides an empty void. It tactics are reminiscent of medieval public executions, intended to terrorise and paralyse rebels. Its more theatrical fear than systematic crackdowns. As the modern state crumbles, it seeks scapegoats, hungry for a foe. In the absence of communism, their fears shift to the UN, Arabs or drugs. Blinded by debt-based capitalism and land enslavement, they struggle to see the bigger picture.

Modernity’s flaw is not culture or technology, but the structure of civilisation itself. The nation state is emptiness — a hollow echo, a lukewarm necromantic vacuum of corpse breath. It embodies death, rather than life and joy. It ushers in murder, famine, war and greed — symbols of the defeat of life. Nurturing uniformity and division, it stifles the beauty of individuality. The nation state, with its neoliberal operating system, raises many concerns. Land is privatised and enslaved. Wealth is hyper-concentrated. Media manipulates and narrows narratives. It paves a path of totalitarian surveillance, cultural repression and ecological destructions. The benefits of civilisation are reserved for the select few.

Every civilisation overflows, produces an excess, which it needs to squander. Some wealth can be purged in rituals of consumption or consumed by a large idle population, like monks. Others revel in festive carnivals. Yet, the nation state chooses to craft artificial scarcity and shortages. The nation state reproduces itself through alienation, negation and unfulfilled promises. It paints picture of contentment, only to leave a void. This false totality renders people isolated, powerless and bored. It offers only illusory forms of self-expression. This alienation is psychological as well as political. In this so called postmodern operating system, everything equal but valueless, it is a bad mood in which every day is the same. From an altered perspective, such artificial control and imposition of authoritarianism come to seem like a disease.

On spectacle-commodity

The rise of the postmodern operating system parallels the ascendancy of late-stage capitalism and the reign of the spectacle. Drawing heavily on Guy Debord’s idea of the Spectacle, postmodernity is a type of life mediated by images. The spectacle is totalitarian regime in which images overshadow reality through higher degrees of mediation that dominate and represent life. In its grip, many buy into dominant beliefs of the current operating system. They only recognise the existence of things that are represented, not those that are present.

Representing something within the spectacle makes it is semiotically richer but existentially impoverished. Though these portrayals seems vibrant, they are but hollow echoes of real lived experiences. In this theatre, things might seem clearer, yet they are further from lived truths, such is a false transcendence. Consider dance music at a rave: raw and pulsating, its a catalyst for ecstasy and collective bonding. Now suppose the same music is recorded, sold and classified, it gains abstractive meaning, its essence shifts. It becomes represented —definable, categorisable and comparable — but some of it soulful spontaneity fades away.

A represented thing becomes a potential commodity and this pseudo-alchemy destroys the existential lived meaning of objects, blurring the true essence of things. In the postmodern operating system, commodities promise more than just utility, they validate experiences. It needs the promise of such future benefits to sell products. Yet it also needs to avoid actually delivering on these promises. If it is delivered, then there would be no need to buy further products. Hence, it constantly reproduces scarcity to stimulate demand. It seeks, not to satisfy desire, but to exacerbate longing through utopian traces.

Simply put, the spectacle is a set of social relations shaped by capitalism and mass media. In simpler terms, it is the pagan worship of commodity fetishism; it is the result of commodification of social life, an upside-down world where all desires and interactions are either expressed directly by a commodity, in the act of buying a commodity, or in the general participation in commodity society. The media’s role in the Spectacle is both glaringly obvious and subtly hidden. Here, media goes beyond news outlets, covering everything visual, from billboards to reality shows. It not only mirrors our current state but also drives it. It flips the script, it presents non-commodified social relations as out of the ordinary, and commodified social relations as the norm. The media’s role is to normalise commodified relations and paint organic social ties as rare

For example; Christmas, more than any other holiday, revolves around commodity fetishism. It is completely modelled around accumulating commodities for the sake of accumulating commodities. For weeks, people splurge on gifts, with some even diving into black friday madness. Yet this vulgar consumerism is wrapped in a narrative of love, family, and tradition. Commercials depict joyous family moments, presented as a time of love, charity and brotherhood, all to mask the stark reality of massive spending and gluttonous consumption. In postmodernity, nearly every corporation advocates the relentless consumption of goods. This is not about blaming participants, we all unknowingly play our part.

The spectacle is both overt and covert, it presents itself as both part of, outside of, an in addition weaving seamlessly into the fabric of late-stage capitalism, it is at once open and hidden, vulgar and refined. At the heart of the spectacle is, of course, commodities. In late-stage capitalism, the spectacle drives us to consume as much as it drives us to produce. Commodities are more than just items; they carry pseudo-narratives. Take Coca-Cola: its image is refreshment, but we all know that the more one drinks of it, the thirstier one gets. Such is another property of the Spectacle-Commodity, the endless desire for more.

The spectacle is the ultimate culmination of this commodity fetishisation, it moulds our desires to fit the dominant mode of production. Instead of directly altering supply and demand, the spectacle subtly masks the whole process. Many an economist has spoken of supply-and-demand. But what comes of this if the demand is manufactured and the supply is beyond it? Why question excess when we are convinced we need the latest watch? We are all baptised in the religion of commodities and we do not even realise, and this is essential for the postmodern operating system.

Like the postmodern operating system — the nation state, spectacle and late-stage capitalism — operates on the level of black magic. Black magic is collective consciousness in active mode, channeled through ritual and custom to the aggrandisement of one against all. The current situation of postmodernity is like the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, in which a junior wizard uses magic in which he is untrained, causing disaster. Since the postmodern OS stems from the invention of scarcity as an existential condition, it relies on consuming others’ creativity, it liberates itself by enslaving desire. Much of what the system offers has no real use — it is snake oil — but it works because it has a placebo effect. It operates on a relentless pursuit of growth, presenting itself as timeless and unchanging.

Epilogue

We are in the midst of a metacrisis: hyper-alienation, crippling boredom, institutional racism, rising authoritarianism, perpetual emptiness, spiking inequality and inhumane poverty. We are at the point in history, where individualism has become isolation, freedom as rootlessness, egalitarianism as the destruction of all value, and rationality, an iron cage. All of these consequences are the logical outcome of the postmodern operating system — the dominant economic, political, and cultural system.

Within the context of the existing postmodern operating system, no amount of reform, whether it be green investment or otherwise, can change the structure and trajectory of the self-terminating, exponential function of late-stage capitalism. The concentration of land and wealth in the hands of a few is truthfully the main reason of all societal rift and political unrest. Since 1980, nearly half of all economic growth has benefited the top 5% of the population, while only 5% of this wealth has reached 60% of the world's people. Therefore, by definition, the postmodern operating system actively creates economic inequality, with a small group benefiting more from both nature and the broader populace.

Neoliberal monoculture pretends to be the only possible world — this entails a kind of closure of reality, consequently leading to the closure of the map. By the 1890s, every part of the Earth was claimed by a Nation State. For the first time in history, we do not have unexplored lands or possible frontiers on Earth. The idea of nationalism dominates how our world is governed. Every island, valley, and even the moon and planets are claimed. It’s like a worldwide competition for territory — the apotheosis of “territorial gangsterism.”

Europe thrived during the era of exploration from 1492 to 1890, which corresponded to modernity and the opening of the new world. The idea of a new open frontier in America inspired many: it was a place for hypo-maniacs to seek fortunes, a national aspiration in the form of manifest destiny — the concept of bare land for social experiments. But once all lands were claimed, it got zero sum and competition grew fiercer. The 20th century became a tense showdown between fascism, communism and democratic capitalism.

Fortunately, despite its challenges, humanity persevered through a bloody 20th century. After 1991, the rise of the internet created a new kind of frontier for commerce. However, by the late 2010s, increasing centralization in the West, cultural shifts, and China's tightening control threatened this digital space, but applied cryptography, in the form of Bitcoin, have given the digital frontier a new lease on life.

Currently, we have four frontiers to consider: land, the internet, the sea, and space. With 7.7 billion people on land, 3.2 billion online, a few million at sea, and only a handful in space, the internet seems like the most accessible frontier. Ideally, using ideas from Balaji’s Network State, and, with the help of Bitcoin, we may be able to reopen the physical frontier, through a hybrid internet/land strategy — a form of magical imperialism, if you will.