Blog 2: Crafting Arguments
Published on:
The inherent inhumanity of computation.
P1: Palantir’s new AI platform is in unprecedented demand. P2: The CEO markets the platform as “a weapon that will allow you to win.” P3: Early customer rollouts suggest strong interest. C: Militaries should adopt Palantir’s AI.
György Lukács argues that “capitalism is the most articulated and quantitatively detailed of all economic systems, what it imposes upon human life and labor under its rule has the consequence of radically transforming everything human, flowing, processual, organic, and connected into disconnected and ‘alienated’ objects, items, lifeless atoms. In such a situation, then, time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality): in short, it becomes space.” Under capitalism, everything is quantifiable and measurable. Even war becomes an area of profit. The tyranny of the objective is most exemplified in recent innovations in algorithmic slaughter. This technology is being tested on people on the empire’s edges, but it will come back home. In the article, demand guides this process of militarisation and war is treated ahistorically.
Theodor Adorno’s famous aphorism, “the whole is false,” invites us to recognise that life is most untrue in the aggregate, and to instead privilege the subjectivity of the individual. Under commodity fetishism, the human is transformed into a laborer, and the subaltern, those completely excluded from empire’s extractive privileges, are rendered invisible “collateral” as the world-systems maintains itself. Suffering and the privilege suffering begets in a zero sum system are explained in positivistic terms. Numbers replace lived experience. War produces outputs, number of civilians massacred, infrastructure damaged, and the transcendental human, the one with narrative, theology, and affect is completely ignored. Girogio Agamben defines bios as “qualified” or “political life,” referring to the specific way a person or group lives, with social and political rights and public identity. In contrast, zoë is “bare life,” the sheer biological fact of living shared by all creatures, devoid of political status or individual characteristics. Agamben argues that in modern biopolitics, this distinction is lost, and human life is often reduced to zoë, becoming a manageable resource that can be excluded from the political-juridical order and subjected to sovereign power, which is defined as the ability to determine who lives and who dies. The last step is to quantify death as a KPI.
Reification explains Palantir’s eagerness to “aggressively capitalize” as nation states militarise increasingly. This is obviously a fascist sentiment. The military requires a constructed, malicious Other. Ideology conjures scarcity to justify bruteness. Even if laymen Americans were to snap out of their imperial ignorance, or the workers awake from their reified dreams, I wonder if that will be enough.