Facebook and the Coming Butlerian Jihad

I was out a few weeks ago with a friend of mine when I ran into some of young guys who work at a major Catholic think tank in the Northeastern United States. We often run into each other because many of them are ex-Seminarians, and very many of them are unrepentant foodies, like me.

We were talking about the semi-recent revelation that Cambridge Analytica had mined Facebook for crucial information for influencing the 2016 American Presidential Election.  We kind of shrugged our shoulders at the whole thing, because they knew, as men and women who work with the ‘new media’, that it’s open season out there when it comes to our personal information.  This did not come as a surprise, as some degree of voluntary surrender of absolute anonymity is the price of admission to these media.

Of greater concern, though, was the Senate inquiry for Mark Zuckerburg.  This was for two reasons: it became increasingly evident that most of our political class has absolutely no idea how digital media works, and that the interests of Silicon Valley do not align with basic human interests.  The West Coast techno-oligarchs like to promote themselves as conscientious, humanistic businessmen and women, but it is becoming increasingly clear that their interests are just as pecuniary and hegemonic as the “Robber Baron” of old or the Petropatriarch of infamy.

For me, the most damaging part of Facebook and the new Social Media isn’t its downstream impact in politics and culture.  These are all derivative symptoms of an even more basic problem: the atomization of society along inhuman, algorithmic paradigms.  To put it in less technical language, the problem is the bypassing of the human, and the abandonment of intentional community in favor of the virtual and the passive.  To paraphrase Heidegger, one of the most problematic issues with technology is that humans will inevitably constrain themselves to mirror their own inventions: hence, we find that people forget how they functioned before, they “can’t live without” their machines, and become more and more enslaved to their works of their hands.  Machines are by nature deterministic and programmed: even the “thinking machines” (an oxymoron) act this way.  But mankind, possessing an immortal soul and a free (yet conditioned) will, is constantly struggling to live in accord with the fullness of what his freedom means, or to choose to surrender or delegate his inherent self-governance to external forces which are beneath him and his dignity.

A favorite insight from Sci-Fi

One of my favorite Science Fiction works is Frank Herbert’s Dune universe.  One of the events of the Dune saga which takes place largely outside of the series is the so-called “Butlerian Jihad“.  Like most good Sci-Fi, Frank Herbert tries to reproduce a very human universe, but of course with the very current concerns about technology, and what it does to us.  In this universe, the people have been freed after a bloody struggle against “Thinking Machines” which reduced the human race to little more than indolent slaves.  One of the key quotes of the new era is “Man is not to be replaced”.  In an era where automation and machines are increasingly eclipsing the human, I wonder how far off we are from a sort of Butlerian Jihad.  Even in the popular TV series and book series The Expanse, the vast majority of the human race on Earth lives on universal basic income, with relatively little drive or deep aspirations beyond their daily pleasures.  This is contrasted with the hard-bit human colonists of Mars or of the Outer Belt, who form intense, devoted societies based on the dream of independence and of turning their respective homes into paradises away from Earth.

I do not advocate, as some do, to a sort of return to an agrarian or rustic existence, which I think has more to do with a romanticization of the past than anything else.  I am, after all, a huge fan of indoor plumbing and antibiotics.  There are certain tasks, like deep earth coal mining or managing nuclear waste, that may be safely delegated to automation for the sake of humanity.  Yet here, all these examples are ones at the service of humanity, and do not aim to replace it.

Returning to Social Media, which is the predominant venue where technology is transforming human behavior, I wonder how long it will take before men and women ditch digital socialization in favor of embodied socialization: arguably, that is how our bodies and minds have evolved and are purposed.  Perhaps this change is already underway. But above all, I argue for a new Renaissance, a new synthesis of human reason and technical expertise with the spiritual and the divinizing, which arguably will make for a happier future for ourselves in our children.

A sort of Buterlian Jihad most certainly may arrive in our own lifetimes or that of our children.  It may be piecemeal, or it may be all at once.  In any case, we all must decide whether we will choose to dominate technology, or whether technology will come to dominate us.