The early modern “absolutist” state in England was broken by a revolution, the execution of a king, the creation of a central bank in control of credit, and the establishment of a prototype of the two-party (and journalistic) system (it seems that journalism was created by the public organs of each party trying to weaken the credit of the central bank when the other side is in power).
I'm impressed by this post. A lot of threads are coming together for me though there are a couple of points I'd like to ask about. When you talk of AI and invoke Sahlins' "metapersons", I'm curious how you might start to outline a history of peoples' experiences of metapersons, and our corresponding personas. Of course i know your Anthropomorphics, but might there be some shortcut to explaining or starting a history of metapersons? I intuitively grasp, i think, how talking to an AI is somehow like a tribesman conversing, promising, negotiating and praying to a totemic metaperson, a central being of one's scenes (and this is somewhat true for everyone i imagine who takes up and experiences, through queries, the names the creators give to their AIs). I vaguely remember some comment you made on X about Julian Jaynes' "bicameral mind". I can't find it now, the search function there isn't very good, or I don't know how to use it. But is there, maybe, now a returning to the bicameral or are our metapersons today unicameral... I'm having trouble focusing my question because I don't really know what it is. One obvious point is that while "we can't credit a machine's promise," presumably our ancestors did credit their metapersons, in whose debt they knew they were.
Towards the end you speak of "the source value" ("in constant confrontation with capitalist modes of valuation.") Maybe I have missed it, but this is the first time I am struck by this concept and I'd like to know a bit more about how you are imagining source value on the originary scene or wherever.
As for your question if the British had significant developments in central intelligence at the time of the Bank's founding, I'll just point out the obvious that before the modern (19th and 20thC) institutions of Military Intelligence, or policing, the empire relied on various kinds of aristocratic officers and their intelligence networks (in the military, colonial governments, and in trading companies) who constituted a great corresponding network that had, I think, some kind of "source value" that informed, tacitly, their class interests and behaviours in tension with capitalist modes of valuation; notwithstanding the party differences within the elites they could be readily united, when it was imperative, under the gaze of a monarchy that was never fully decapitated. What we see as the unacknowledgeable criminality of today’s elites (the constant hyperventilating on X about the Faucis, Epsteins, etc.) reflects the breakdown of an aristocratic intelligence once tested in courts of Society, fraternal organizations, trust, and honour.
The point about early forms of British intelligence which, therefore, didn't require a specific "agency" like we have today, is helpful to keep in mind. I'd like to know if the British were distinctive in this regard, and. how it carried over after the revolution.
Regarding "source value": once we think about value as future-oriented, in terms of money as credit or Bichler and Nitzan's notion of capital as value discounted against expected future earnings, it becomes possible, it seems to me, to think of how to ground something like "value" in the continuity and reliability of those very institutions that make credit or "expected future earnings" possible in the first place. That can only be "investment" in succession and pedagogy--that's what makes it possible to assume that what I produce today will "pay off" somehow, even if in ways I can't imagine, in 10 years, 100 years or 1,000 years. So, valuation is to be transferred over to institutions, ultimately intelligence/pedagogical ones, that can thrive in the market but also futurize itself beyond its constraints. Think in terms of, e.g., an insurance company that would compensate for the insured's untimely death by providing access to a network of institutions rather than through a payout.
AI will become an array of metapersons--I'm increasingly sure of that. But I don't think we will be "crediting" them the same way archaic peoples credited their metapersons. We will remain aware that humans created them, not them humans. We will know what makes them metapersons, and while we will be contributing data to them as intelligence agencies, we will not be in a sacrificial relation to them. They will be the means by which we operate on reality, which we will therefore be doing much more directly, even if our impact will be small in the individual case--my behavior in public spaces will be training the surveillance AIs to notice new kinds of behavior and incorporate them into its predictive algorithms, etc., and I'll be able to take that into account. So, the AIs won't be like TVs or cars, that we just turn on and direct--they will surprise, question, and modify us, and we will know that they mediate our communications with other humans--but we won't--or, at least, the more savvy amongst us won't--see them as "gods."
I think that what Jaynes was picking up on was the oral/literate split, but he wasn't thinking in those terms--his distinctions overlap pretty closely with those of Walter Ong and others.
I'm impressed by this post. A lot of threads are coming together for me though there are a couple of points I'd like to ask about. When you talk of AI and invoke Sahlins' "metapersons", I'm curious how you might start to outline a history of peoples' experiences of metapersons, and our corresponding personas. Of course i know your Anthropomorphics, but might there be some shortcut to explaining or starting a history of metapersons? I intuitively grasp, i think, how talking to an AI is somehow like a tribesman conversing, promising, negotiating and praying to a totemic metaperson, a central being of one's scenes (and this is somewhat true for everyone i imagine who takes up and experiences, through queries, the names the creators give to their AIs). I vaguely remember some comment you made on X about Julian Jaynes' "bicameral mind". I can't find it now, the search function there isn't very good, or I don't know how to use it. But is there, maybe, now a returning to the bicameral or are our metapersons today unicameral... I'm having trouble focusing my question because I don't really know what it is. One obvious point is that while "we can't credit a machine's promise," presumably our ancestors did credit their metapersons, in whose debt they knew they were.
Towards the end you speak of "the source value" ("in constant confrontation with capitalist modes of valuation.") Maybe I have missed it, but this is the first time I am struck by this concept and I'd like to know a bit more about how you are imagining source value on the originary scene or wherever.
As for your question if the British had significant developments in central intelligence at the time of the Bank's founding, I'll just point out the obvious that before the modern (19th and 20thC) institutions of Military Intelligence, or policing, the empire relied on various kinds of aristocratic officers and their intelligence networks (in the military, colonial governments, and in trading companies) who constituted a great corresponding network that had, I think, some kind of "source value" that informed, tacitly, their class interests and behaviours in tension with capitalist modes of valuation; notwithstanding the party differences within the elites they could be readily united, when it was imperative, under the gaze of a monarchy that was never fully decapitated. What we see as the unacknowledgeable criminality of today’s elites (the constant hyperventilating on X about the Faucis, Epsteins, etc.) reflects the breakdown of an aristocratic intelligence once tested in courts of Society, fraternal organizations, trust, and honour.
The point about early forms of British intelligence which, therefore, didn't require a specific "agency" like we have today, is helpful to keep in mind. I'd like to know if the British were distinctive in this regard, and. how it carried over after the revolution.
Regarding "source value": once we think about value as future-oriented, in terms of money as credit or Bichler and Nitzan's notion of capital as value discounted against expected future earnings, it becomes possible, it seems to me, to think of how to ground something like "value" in the continuity and reliability of those very institutions that make credit or "expected future earnings" possible in the first place. That can only be "investment" in succession and pedagogy--that's what makes it possible to assume that what I produce today will "pay off" somehow, even if in ways I can't imagine, in 10 years, 100 years or 1,000 years. So, valuation is to be transferred over to institutions, ultimately intelligence/pedagogical ones, that can thrive in the market but also futurize itself beyond its constraints. Think in terms of, e.g., an insurance company that would compensate for the insured's untimely death by providing access to a network of institutions rather than through a payout.
AI will become an array of metapersons--I'm increasingly sure of that. But I don't think we will be "crediting" them the same way archaic peoples credited their metapersons. We will remain aware that humans created them, not them humans. We will know what makes them metapersons, and while we will be contributing data to them as intelligence agencies, we will not be in a sacrificial relation to them. They will be the means by which we operate on reality, which we will therefore be doing much more directly, even if our impact will be small in the individual case--my behavior in public spaces will be training the surveillance AIs to notice new kinds of behavior and incorporate them into its predictive algorithms, etc., and I'll be able to take that into account. So, the AIs won't be like TVs or cars, that we just turn on and direct--they will surprise, question, and modify us, and we will know that they mediate our communications with other humans--but we won't--or, at least, the more savvy amongst us won't--see them as "gods."
I think that what Jaynes was picking up on was the oral/literate split, but he wasn't thinking in those terms--his distinctions overlap pretty closely with those of Walter Ong and others.
Thanks!