On the Technology of Politics
2025
Technology provides an apparatus to facilitate interaction. As a “tool”, it is a means to express human individual and collective consciousness. Over time, the means and ends of technology continue to be less distinguishable, where consciousness and its modes of expression exist “between” states.
With all the promotion of recent AI development, and its presumed unlimited potential, the great utility of artificial intelligence will not lead to independent consciousness, beyond the algorithms it encodes. Algorithms, as a set of routines, are by nature not conscious.
If AI lacks only the potential for consciousness, the utility of artificial intelligence will become less distinct from our own. The augmentation of human-computer interaction, if it does not lead to a new consciousness, then it will serve as an extension.
Technology has had an influence on political process, and is central to the development of political systems more so than broad social movements, the judiciary and human conflict. Democracy has in fact thrived in modern times, by virtue of voting systems, the media apparatus, technological economies of scale and the like. So-called agrarian pre-capital societies survived without democratic systems, because existing technology simply made them impractical. Even “Republic” describes democracy to be an unlikely outcome in Ancient Greece, if only a result of human nature, I would contend that existing technologies are essential to the “practice” of democracy. It may be that modern democracies were established for their technological utility, rather than based on social or political mobilization.
Clearly, democracies have prevailed over alternatives in recent times, as the fall of the Soviet Union is an indication, where “The West” has been the most politically and economically successful, but there is less than a subtle distinction between these political systems upon closer examination.
The Capitalist society is a reflection of human nature, and the technological systems that are developed within the state apparatus “is” the system itself. Although state capital is a reflection, “the image” is not the same as human consciousness. For this reason, if AI develops within Capitalism, the resulting system may not be conscious, but will “augment” human interaction in the same way democratic processes are technologically augmented.
All political systems exist within “the” Capitalist society, and for this reason they serve the same ends: the accumulation of capital. It is no accident that Western democracies have been globally successful, since democratic capital has been prolific in the spread and development of the state apparatus: Modern democracies have been a vehicle to “drive” its mobility and acceleration. The Soviet Union, under state Communism, failed to accumulate relative wealth, and resulted in its containment by the West. The containment of Communism also applies to the rise of the Fascist state, as described by F.A. Hayek; these binary political systems are in essence the same (Hayek), and may represent the general trajectory of all political systems within the enclave, with a return to a similar agrarian pre-capital society that existed before.
In recent times, the relative wealth of the West may eventually “contain” China, as already indicated by China’s property crisis, low population growth and stagnating economy, where China does not accumulate enough capital to “survive” within the Capitalist system.
In any event, democratic capital has been by far the most successful at accumulation, even if anomalies arise. Certainly, on a population level, the attraction of “human capital” becomes the greatest deficit, when political systems like China are contained and isolated. In the event of a global tautological enclave, democratic capital itself is “contained”, and the efforts that once isolated the Soviet Union and now China are extended to Modern democracies themselves.
In the enclave, “all” systems tend towards the same motivation: wealth accumulation and its hierarchical concentration. A contradiction of Capital arises when the relative economic stagnation of the Soviet Union and now China, would apply to all political systems in the form of an ontological stasis.
The forces that influence all systems result in the dissolution of binary states, where stagnation and saturation give way to the “lightness” of all colours at once. Democratic capital, with all its successes results in its own containment within the enclave by denying the broad trajectory of all systems towards the distribution of assets in the broadest sense. This very action may result in the emergence of its opposite: where all the promises of democratic capital are in fact realized.
In time, uncertain technological states of invention will emerge from the grey; an accident that transforms politics to a “distributive” form, where the true “spirit” of Democracy is realized. The invention of a new politics would be outside of conventional measure, defying the rationality of “human” origins created. In this way, Democracy “is” a politics of the future…
Hayek, F.A. "The Road to Serfdom." (The University of Chicago Press, 1944).