In this thread [1]
[1]: https://thephora.net/phoranova/index.php?threads/macrobius-makes-predictions-for-2025-2026.1680/
I promised an ‘environmental analysis’ (as it is called in reference to the business environment) for 2025-2026 and only got most of the way through the P in PEST (Politics, Economics, Society, Technology). This thread is a home for the T part, even if I don’t do a complete analysis today.
In terms of the gestalt of all four, P, E, S, T it is pretty clear that ‘modernity’ is coming apart at the seems[2] (pun intentional) — in all four areas at once, in a way discussed in the _King in Orange_[3]
[2]: https://thephora.net/phoranova/index.php?threads/the-death-throes-of-modernity.1984/
[3]: https://thephora.net/phoranova/index.php?threads/john-michael-greer-the-king-in-orange-trump.1676/
Technology, which in Neo-Platonic terms is the same as ‘The (Practical) Arts’, compared to Speculation (Science), is certainly playing its part, as are the three ‘economic’ systems of Domestic Economy (home life), Political Economy (communal or society life), and the Divine Economy of the Church and Eschatological Empire (the spiritual life and destiny of Mankind).
The key facts around technology, and I will be primarily speaking to Information Technology here since the manufacturing and service sectors of technology are quite mature and pre-COVID were almost static, have been, recently dominated by Deep Learning AIs — LLMs (Large Language Models) in particular — and ‘crypto’, meaning both the use of mathematical Crytography for ‘security engineering’ and heuristic solution to certain problems of decentralised computing we call ‘the blockchain’, starting with Bitcoin and then Ethereum, but moving far beyond these two large players.
These technological facts are colliding head on with the crisis the Economists call ‘the polycrisis’ meaning the simultaneous effects of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and its impact on the Environment (‘Ecology’) — which of course has profound knock-on effects on P, E, and S — and on the Geopolitical ramifications of ‘E’ (supply chain collapse and Peak Oil), and ‘S’ (‘the Conservative Revolution ‘ in America, as a reaction to the DEI programme among other major factors)[4]. Do note that both the two halves of the Fossil Fuel crisis, AGW and Peal Oil, and the bioengineering ‘disaster’ of nCoV-2019 and thus COVID-19, are sourced in technology and Modern Science, and in turn have created the ‘supply chain crisis’ in general and the geopolitical ramifications of resource competition, esp. for water and now arable land, as well as the disintegration of global trade. Whether this will lead to ‘multipolarity’ or simply regional fragmentation and a narrower horizon for Clauswitzian Nation-State style politics, remains to be seen.
[4]: https://thephora.net/phoranova/index.php?threads/the-american-conservative-revolution.1875/
I would also add, with Sherrard,[5] that the Ecological crisis is a SPIRITUAL crisis, brought on by the wrongthink of Modernity, which denies ‘the Sacred’ first to the individual — the ‘Man is a Machine’ trope of the French Enlightenment — and also to Nature.
And I would go further to say that their is a Social Ecology (‘Socialism’) that is part and parcel of modernity and the technological revolution we call ‘the Industrial Revolution’ and its avatar in Economics, which we call ‘commodification’ — treating the political economy as a money making machine which comes from de-sacralising public and private social life, both at the domestic level, at the level of the Christian Commonwealth (Res Publica Christiana — the universal Christian Roman Empire of the End Times — and the Apostasy of large swaths of the Church of Christ.
I see that Dugin is thinking in similar terms as I have been,[6] when he compares the Ukrainian Entiity to a ‘Transgendered Nation’ — much as distortions in the Domestic Economy lead individuals to seek to be treated as transgendered, without their underlying Real (Physical) Nature changing in any way, except for the harms they themselves inflict on it, or the ‘medical profession’ does. Not unlike treatment by leeches of yore, only rather more deleterious.
[6]: https://alexanderdugin.substack.com/p/the-transgender-ukrainian-nation
The various threads of the ‘polycrisis’ are interwoven in the way that I have said. For example, Technology interacting with the anti-DEI and anti-Globalist (Conservative) Revolution requires more, not less fossil fuel, and fatter, not leaner, supply chains. The impact of investing 7 Trillion USD in data centres and equipment to train models, as was floated as recently as late last year, implies a reversal of the so far anemic efforts to stop overloading the Carbon Cycle of Nature, and perhaps in increase or at least reactivation of Nuclear Power Plants.
Anyway, with that introduction, I will proceed to the more technical side of Technological Analysis.
Having discussed the ‘impacts’ of the technology, I should explain what is happening — this is an exercise in fairly near term Situational Awareness for the Economic factors. I think everyone knows the riff that ‘programming jobs are going away’ at least at the low end. [1]
What does that mean?
1. Both ‘Quality Assurance’ (writing test code, whether unit tests or integration tests or acceptance tests) is going to be vastly reduced as a profession, and a lot of DevOps and some Security work is going to be handed over to ‘Artificial Intelligences’ — (((they))) are at least going to try to save some money there — based on capabilities we already have or might reasonably have in say six months, at the current rate of the ‘arms race’, with no need for additional ‘breakthroughs’ or ‘AGI’ (whatever that is).
2. ‘Agentic AI’ is going to drive a huge set of integrations, similar to the ‘mashup’ era of early AJAX, a.k.a. web 2.0, before the advent of mobile, when the desktop/laptop market at home and in the ‘enterprise’ was distinctly different from mobile phones, tablets, and ‘phablets’.
Let me point out that the models themselves are not that astounding. ‘training an AI’ is, from a mathematical perspective, fairly similar to ‘doing a linear regression’ — in business or the social sciences. We take the ‘data that are being fitted’ the ‘training data’ and call the ‘linear regression model’ an ‘artificial intelligence’ but nothing has drastically changed. If you believe AI models can take over the world you should be looking over your shoulder for Psychologists and Sociologists toting Regression Models with p-values — they can do a lot of harm too. Watch your back.
This changes when we ‘automate the kill chain’ and both take humans out of the loop (Robocop can shoot to kill) but also leave them in the loop, creating feedback effects esp. about what sorts of things {{{we}}} might want to do with these new toys.
What sorts of things? It is far, far worse than you think, if the last time you thought about these things was Dick Cheney, Total Information Awareness (TIA), and Edward Snowden’s revelation that far from being stopped, the frog at a rolling boil. How bad is it?
The Departments of the Executive that have the most data on you — your (((permanent record))) of HIPAA sensitive health, anything to do with education (every test you’ve ever taken, grade you’ve gotten, or comment in your ‘files’ by a teacher or superior), or money/banking (KYC, AML, foreign corrupt practices, the War on Terra, etc. etc.), or your work history (‘Labour’, ‘Unemployment’, ‘Small Business’, ‘Contracting with the Government’, ), insurance, licensing, taxes, home ownership, even your physical location as inferred from mobile phone records, not to mention any interactions with ‘Justice’ and ‘Law Enforcement’ and every aspect of the Military for which there is no expectation of privacy…
All this sort of data is tied to tracking (click tracking etc, and also your search history and of course voice records of every call made in the country at Bluffdale — that’s old news) … and this tracking data is fed into… time to learn some industry acronyms:
DMP – Data Management Platform
CDP – Customer Data Platform (an expansion of Market Analytics like you might get from Google’s tracking ID ids or Facebooks on pretty much every page that most people visit in the course of ordinary life)
By the end of the Biden administration, every federal website I’ve examined looking for them has shown that when you interact with the government ‘using the web’ your data is being siphoned off into system using these sorts of ‘first and second party tracking’ technologies — not just the ‘third party’ threat of ‘web bugs’ and advertising agencies aggregating cookie data across multiple sites, which is so very 2010s.
Thus:
3. The trend toward total information aggregation of anything worth knowing about anyone on the planet will continue, in the form of refined use of DMP and CDP systems, which will be used as training data for AIs, which AIs will then be used for data mining and monitoring and sometimes censorship purposes, which is their primary value to ‘Governance’ (Controlling and Monitoring the Population, for ‘Security’ purposes)
4. That monitoring is already being done from space.
Here’s how bad that is. This is real and operational and has been for some time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysis_system)
5. There is a trend, again in government, esp. anything involving ‘risk’ (Nuclear Power Plants, NASA, Weapons Systems) to create a full ‘digital twin’ which is a digital system that creates a ‘complete duplicate simulacra’ of the Real World:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin
6. ‘Asset Tags’ will be tokenised and put on block chains – this is how Digital Twins interact with auditing systems. Thing NFTs (‘Bored Apes’) only for any movable thing of value in the supply chain. (((They))) want to know where EVERYTHING is, all the time, in case they need it.
A major theme here, then, is the COLLISION of ‘AI technology’ and ‘blockchain’ (cryptography, crypto in the sense of distributed transactions — multipolarity in the digial sense, if you will).
The mere presence of ‘Agentic AI’ on the net — something that has been rumoured for years of course, but is now not a ‘conspiracy theory’ but someone everyone can see is happening — muddies waters and makes necessary some refinements on the Digital Twin concept. Think, _2001: A Space Odyssey_ and remember there were two HAL-9000 computers who were being compared to each other: one on Earth, and one ‘real’ one controlling the space flight to the gateway on Jupiter. That is, they were digital twins, but the essential role was for one of them to be RELIABLE.
Thus:
TEE vs REE
TEE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_execution_environment
REE: https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/arm-hypervisor-and-trustzone-alternatives/82881
7. REEEE. KEK.
These systems are used for ‘ZK rollups’ (important for making NFTs on Layer two of the major blockchains, remember the bored apes? … efficient. and for ‘MPC’ (Multiparty Computing on a TEE), and RA (‘Remote Attestation’) — a ZK (Zero Knowledge) proof that can be issued as a report and read into the audit trail on the/a blockchain.
How do you keep the AIs from taking over the world? You create special hardware — Intel has already done so[1] — to implement the TEE concept, and pit two AIs against each other, the reliable ‘digital twin’ of the possibly subverted ‘real world’ system, in a sort of Voight-Kampff test.
Absolutely essential, and already happening, courtesy of Andreesen-Horowitz and their ElizaOS initiative[2]:
Comes complete with a cute anime avatar named Eliza:
https://cryptomaniaks.com/what-is-elizaos-ai16z
8. ElizaOS is coming.
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