Revenge of the Mirror People
What kind of device can reveal the future of crime and punishment?
Today’s post contains an essay from FAI non-resident fellow, James Poulos. James is doing some of the most insightful work on technology, culture, and politics. This post will be the first in a series of essays for The Ansible that will expand and apply the science-fictional way of thinking to contemporary questions concerning technology and society. We hope you enjoy this initial installment.
If disciplined science-fictional thinking – synthesizing foresight and hindsight into a strategic telemetry positioned for the unevenly distributed future before it arrives – is essential to sound policymaking in an aggressively technological era, then we need to understand the deep dynamics of science-fictional thought. How do we know we are practicing it well? How can we tell if our enemies and adversaries are doing the same – and if they are doing it, how?
Looking back through the history of technological thought, a remarkably clear pattern directs us toward answers to these questions. From postmodern theory to classical philosophy, evidence arises that the best archetypal analogy to science-fictional thinking is the work of the detective – solving not just specifically human (as distinct from divine) mysteries, but, quite particularly, crimes.
There is little more science-fictional in spirit than the concept of the “pre-crime” detective epitomized in “The Minority Report,” Philip K. Dick’s hugely influential 1956 short story. In Steven Spielberg’s Hollywood treatment, the mentally mutated human pre-cogs (whose perpetual visions of violent misdeeds are the secret sauce upon which the cyborg crime prevention system depends) are sleek waifs, one of which Tom Cruise ably springs free from her holding tank. But in Dick’s original, more penetrating science-fictional thinking is on display:
In the gloomy half-darkness the three idiots sat babbling. Every incoherent utterance, every random syllable, was analyzed, compared, reassembled in the form of visual symbols, transcribed on conventional punchcards, and ejected into various coded slots. All day long the idiots babbled, imprisoned in their special high-backed chairs, held in one rigid position by metal bands, and bundles of wiring, clamps. Their physical needs were taken care of automatically. They had no spiritual needs. Vegetable-like, they muttered and dozed and existed. Their minds were dull, confused, lost in shadows. But not the shadows of today. The three gibbering, fumbling creatures, with their enlarged heads and wasted bodies, were contemplating the future. The analytical machinery was recording prophecies, and as the three precog idiots talked, the machinery carefully listened.
Dick’s vision of human detective work reduced to a profane trinity of Vestal Organoids, the cost of their mechanically enhanced powers the utter dehumanization of their bodies and souls, indicates the dystopian version of the future of detective work in a superintelligent age. It is a fable warning recursively that the creation of pre-crime is itself a type of crime, one whose overpowering cost-benefit analysis imposes a ruthlessly altruistic calculus forever postpones true justice. Where Tom Cruise’s heroic protagonist manages to defeat the pre-crime system, Dick’s original kills the would-be whistleblower, sacrificing his freedom to preserve the institution.
Clearly reminiscent of “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson’s infamous scapegoating story about a community that annually stones an innocent victim to death to ensure a good harvest, “The Minority Report” asks us to consider how human detective work could possibly preserve us from the utilitarian hell of a pre-crime, post-justice world. Pulling off a coup that establishes a pre-crime regime is a type of ultimate crime, the kind technologically perpetrated in a way that defeats punishment by causally reversing all punishment and crime.
In other words, it is a type of what Jean Baudrillard damningly describes as The Perfect Crime.
Crimes of the Future
The most uncanny feat Baudrillard depicts – getting off scot free after murdering reality itself – is achieved through the “unconditional realization of the world by the actualization of all data, the transformation of all our acts and all events into pure information; in short, the final solution, the resolution of the world ahead of time by the cloning of reality and the extermination of the real by its double.” To be specific, the perfect criminals use our paradoxical hatred of misfortune and worship of victims to justify and sacralize their creation of a virtual world – one (to quote Bono) “even better,” in virtue of its total war against misfortune and subjectivity, “than the real thing.”
The cloning or mirroring process moves faster than reality, because illusion and the maintenance of illusion is a key component of reality that the totally transparent and indifferent virtual world (and those within it) need waste no time on. Events now move faster than ideas, but information and communication, which under zero latency converge on instantaneous ubiquity, move even faster than events. Even such elementary particles of meaning such as signs and symbols break down. Even spirit is spirited away. What becomes of the human body and soul shades away from Dick’s autist oracles toward Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, where mutant humans share serial surgeries unto death as “the new sex.” As Baudrillard promised, “the crime is perfect only when even the traces” of “the surgical removal of otherness” are eliminated.
The question of whether a technological effort can be mounted to fight such perfect crimes is being tested, it seems, by Palantir. The data-driven situational mastery company postulates, as an all-important truth few recognize, that war actually reduces net harm against the leading alternative. This Palantir takes to be a stagnant global tyranny somewhat similar to the virtual regime Baudrillard describes, dedicated to the eradication of all threats to health, safety, and comfort, no matter how microaggressive. Yet Palantir’s technology brings us ever closer to the actualization of the virtual map’s dominance over the real territory – not just pre-crime in “real time,” but pre-war. Thus for Palantir it becomes all-important to ensure that war, real war, continues to be waged: war is the katechon that keeps us free from the dehumanizing slavery of the “universal and homogeneous state,” as Alexandre Kojève put it, or, as Peter Thiel has it, the Antichrist. War is not simply the health of the state but, far more importantly, the preserver of the nations.
Palantir itself not being a nation, however, nor even a regime, but rather an overarching and overawing ontological institution ascribing the legitimacy of its power to the authority of its vision, the pointedness of Thiel’s criticism of the current pope as a “woke” forerunner of “Caesar-Papist fusion” and a possible tool of the Antichrist strongly suggests that, structurally at least, the only logical institutional rival to a company mounting a worldwide technological fight against the perfect crime of world virtualization is the Christian Church. It is hard to imagine how a firm like Palantir could ensure no nation or people create a mirror world without becoming a universal regime – or how it could ensure no mirror world is created anywhere without becoming a universal church.
The problem becomes acute when taking into account off-world nations or peoples. Recently Thiel memorably revealed Elon Musk’s consternation at being told that he could not escape the woke mind virus by going to Mars; it would “beat him there.” A company like Palantir would not only have to control the physical and material process of Moon and Mars colonization (and beyond) to stop the spread of the woke mind virus or of universalist virtualization from Earth to other planets, satellites, orbital cities, etc. It would also have to control the spiritual processes within and among the human colonists – not just at the moment of founding, but indefinitely into spacetime.
Detective Systems
Here we venture into the realms of Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert. Both sci-fi novelists well understood that new orders forged in extreme or virtual environments are apt to blow back meta-politically on the home regimes from which the colonies abroad originated. Taken together, Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Herbert’s Dune series serve to remind us that, whether the analytical or historical context is anarcho-libertarian, imperial-theocratic, or anywhere in between, the dynamic of colonial blowback onto nations and regimes of origin is stubbornly typical of, and corrosive to, human expansionist projects. At a time when the very stakes of earthbound human conflict become increasingly subject to accelerated catastrophic escalation, thinking science fictionally about how to anticipate and respond to large-scale policy challenges requires a close look at the blowback dynamics visiting us from the future.
In fact, blowback from the future as such must be taken into account, as enjoyers of Christopher Nolan’s underrated Tenet likely know. The old trope of time machines, however, need not be hauled back out to make the point, nor must we rely on or recur to Nick Land’s Gnostic Calvinist theories of technocapital reaching back from its consummate future to providentially deploy us in the business of knitting that future together in forward time. It is enough that the perfect crime is, like all crimes, committed “ahead of time” – that is, from a “premeditated” place, like the spatiotemporal hiding place of conspirators, existing in the future relative to the awareness/unawareness of the victim and the detective.
Marshall McLuhan, a great Sherlock Holmes enjoyer, put the matter more plainly by concluding that “effects precede causes” in the investigation of crimes as much as in our exploration of new media. As, by media, McLuhan meant communications technologies, and as, thinking once again of Palantir, the technological orchestration of total military dominance over spacetime converges with the totalization of virtuality accomplished through what Baudrillard calls “the ecstasy of communication,” it is easy to see that the drama of the human detective – and of the science-fictional policy thinker – turns on his holistic ability to infer causes from effects in time to solve perfect crimes before (so to speak) “the killer kills again.”
If Baudrillard was right that the perfect crime had already been committed by the people who constructed the virtual and simulated world so as to erase and replace the original, and if Thiel was right that the greatest threat would come from the deepest desire to enforce absolute peace, then today we contend with a world in which crimes against humanity have already been perpetrated by the “off-world” peoples seeking salvation through the totally virtual, the utterly simulated, the comprehensively pacified, and the abjectly dehumanized. Today we have already failed to stop these crimes before they started and to punish the criminals before anyone got hurt, or any copycats or conspirators were inspired to take the transgressions to the next level. In this moment we need to come down from the heights of prognostication and prepare against the history of blowback already in the process of repeating itself once more.
Reverse Polarities
While Dune currently enjoys a greater cachet than Moon, what with the former’s infamous Butlerian Jihad darkly prophesying the destruction of Earth as the high price paid to stop once and for all the creation of human-usurping machines, Heinlein’s story, with its rebellious off-worlders deploying the smartest supercomputer to sow conflict and defeat on Earth, is still more to the point. There, too, the resonance with McLuhan is nearly explicit: the Moon’s Musk-like supercomputer, Mike, is nicknamed after Mycroft, the brooding elder Holmes brother more brilliant even than Sherlock – and in the precious employ of the British government. As McLuhan saw society’s “early warning systems” in the detective capabilities of artists, Heinlein hoped with Moon to ram home the certainty of future blowback in our inescapably political universe. For Heinlein, the mechanism was simple. The temptation to “beat City Hall” was irresistible – as was the temptation to become City Call after the dust settled. Expanding outward from the home regime to the far-flung frontier could do no other than sow the seeds of a new identity in the soil of radically different conditions, circumstances, risks, and rewards. It was only a matter of time before the chickens came home to roost.
In Moon, however, it is more accurate to say the chickens came home to poop. The lunar inhabitants only wanted to run their own planetoid, but to get there, they had to lob rocks (with nuclear-sized impact) down the gravity well to Earth; they had to send down emissaries with a conspiratorial mission to so divide Earthlings against themselves that the struggle to keep control of the Loonies was lost. Anarcho-capitalist that he was, Heinlein wasn’t trying to warn Earth against the revenge of the ex-Earthlings before it was too late. He was trying to warn future Loonies against the revenge of politics, which makes corrupt, inept establishmentarians of us all. It’s a quaint point of order here from the vantage of Artemis II, which just set a new record for human distance from planet surface. The Moon of our anticipation is not a low-gravity penal colony for losers and rejects, but a militarized resource-extraction site where technology can scale at speed far beyond the confines of Earthly constraint. Rather than Mad Max types or congenital dissidents, the Loonies of our approaching future are borglike supermen, figures much more apt to remake the homeworld at a stroke in their image than to want to be left alone.
When the Moon or Mars are settled, will today’s type of American recognize the colonies that reflect back at us from across the void? Or is the more likely scenario one where stay-behind woke communists brace for impact from warlike fascists descending like gods from the skies?
We must work through such dizzying considerations if, so against the historical odds, America hopes to retain its character after a frontier colonization campaign of unprecedented reach and technological power. The longing to be left freely alone that animated the future on Heinlein’s Moon has given way to the rather different desires more at home among his Starship Troopers. The mimetic experience emerging from full immersion in our technology is one that arouses an even greater yearning to invade than to escape. What becomes of acceleration if, after we slip the bonds of our worldly home, we find ourselves trammeled, wherever we travel, by the given limits of our own human selves? And what becomes of ourselves on Earth if, off world, our not-so-distant cousins forge a warlike borg of high-agency supermen, a posthuman entity ready and willing to pay us a visit like the zombie son in the monkey’s paw fable that so tormented Norbert Weiner, the godfather of cybernetics himself?
Having “overcome” its humanity, the entity would surely have overcome politics, or at least ideology, if only in the horseshoe sense. The history of ideology, after all, suggests nothing so much as a stubborn iteration of differently-coded attempts to retool humanity in the image of our own tooling. Comte’s positivism, Bentham’s utilitarianism, Emerson’s Man of the World, Nietzsche’s overman, Trotsky’s New Soviet Man, Hitler’s master race, America’s own Superman – what is “the political spectrum” to such contenders? The meta-political is all – the copied, cloned, upgraded mirror-environment of the original, just as the meta-human out-iterates the human until the latter recedes behind the vanishing point.
Beyond the Seeing Stone
Baudrillard leaves us with the image of the revenge of the mirror people – a tremendous mutant excrescence of hatred against a society that banished them into the crystals of virtual objectification: “every representation is a servile image,” he writes – citing Borges (The Book of Imaginary Beings) – “the ghost of a once sovereign being whose singularity has been obliterated.”
But a being which will one day rebel, and then our whole system of representation and values is destined to perish in that revolt. This slavery of the same, the slavery of resemblance, will one day be smashed by the violent resurgence of otherness. We dreamed of passing through the looking-glass, but it is the mirror peoples themselves who will burst in upon our world. And ‘this time will not be defeated’... everything which serves to provide a passive reflection in a world based on identity is ready to go on to the counter-offensive. Already they resemble us less and less… I’ll not be your mirror!
It is strange, but not unexpected, that to the counter-offensive mirror people, those on the other side themselves appear to be the deeply offensive mirror people who have crowned themselves the royals and hieromonks and god-emperors of a cloned and copied and virtual mirror world. Like Narcissus, we now encounter ourselves – and our future – through the confrontational divide of the reflecting pool. Recall that Narcissus was not condemned to love only himself forever but to waste away (or kill himself) because he could not fully possess himself. The existence of what Baudrillard calls le Même – the selfsame – was foreclosed to Narcissus: now it tantalizes, obsesses, threatens to define us even before we get any closer to making ourselves still more identical to it. “A copy of a copy of a copy” – what Tyler Durden was created by his original human in order to destroy. To break the circuit.
The meme of the multiple Spider-Mans accusatorily identifying one another takes shape today as a curse, one we already have begun to disappear into and which somehow we now must find a way to look outside of and beyond. The two extremes on either side of the mirror – with diminishing accuracy and diminishing difference do we call them fascist and communist – make what can only be (to an American) false promises to break the curse. And somewhere, in the shadow of one church or another, a quiet detective prepares to crack the case of the post-American invaders.