From Utopia to Aporia
Eric Schmidt, Techno-Feudalism & Our Future
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In a recent talk at Stanford University, former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, revealed his perspectives on topics ranging from remote work to AI, intellectual property to geopolitics. And while many found his remark controversial, personally I found their revelations of far greater importance than any offense given. We are now moving into an era where all pretense is being removed from the playing field and we can see just how far these techno-feudal lords are willing to go to completely control us and our world.
Here are some key points I found worthy of discussion from Schmidt’s talk:
The ethical concerns of intellectual property theft in tech.
This should come as neither shock nor surprise as big tech, along with its incestuous relationship with Big Brother, has been gobbling up IP’s with abandon for decades now.
The oligarchs’ influence on government policies and resource allocation.
Again, no surprise. Investigative journalist Whitney Webb has reported at length over the past several years on the “public-private partnerships” between Big Tech and Big Brother:
“Fundamentally what’s running the world right now is a global public private partnership.”
“There’s been a lot of focus on how the public sector … is bad and corrupt and the answer that we’re being led to … [is] let’s just put it all on the hand’s of the private sector … They’ve created these public-private partnerships [which] converts the nation state into [an] enabling environment for all of these policies developed by … unelected oligarchs who are stealing people’s wealth through these insane wealth transfers.”
Gary Stevenson, author of The Trading Game and a world-famous trader has also spoken at length on his YouTube channel about how there has been an enormous wealth transfer taking place driven by the techno-feudalists and the ultra rich.
Schmidt’s critique of remote work and labor ethics.
This part for me has two prongs which are worth consideration:
Before COVID there was no concept of “work-from-home” at least not in the way in which we’ve become accustomed to it today. Even myself, I find working from home a challenge in that it’s far too easy to become distracted and certainly for most forms of business, it’s simply too relaxed of an environment for competing in a tough market.
Foreign cultures such as Japanese work culture are often lauded as being more educated, competent, and competitive when compared to western work cultures, particularly American.
The irony of American culture and its mythos of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are often seen as detrimental values that jeopardize the hyper-efficient doctrine of the techno-feudalists who, while championing the vaulted American spirit of intrepidness, also condemn the perceived laziness of American workers, especially those who would allow their pursuit of happiness to interfere with their goals and objectives which require vast sums of personal and non-personal resources.
Conversely, there is the problem of modern western lifestyle which has been driven by, up until COVID, hyper-efficiency. What I mean by this is:
Efficiency-driven policies often marginalize local culture or what I would call “small cultures” meaning the culture of everyday life such as family, subjugating all of life’s desires and richness to take a back seat to the hyper-efficiency policies of Big Tech and Big Brother.
Techno-feudalism demands that we place their objectives over our own, not as a negotiated relationship, but as a top-down tyranny.
This messaging is subversive at its core through language/propaganda like “winning”. Schmidt and other techno-feudalists and those who work on their behalf often speak of winning as an abstract virtue while never discussing the other side of winning which is of course, loss/losing.
“Winning” is to white collar work what “hustling” is to blue collar/working-poor work.
The unchecked growth and risks of AI development.
In his book, An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, author Stefanos Geroulanos stated,
“From World War I through the 1950s, a philosophical and intellectual revolution in France created a new kind of atheism, demolished the value of humanism, and altered the meaning of “the human” virtually beyond recognition.” (Geroulanos, 2010, p. 2)
Undoubtedly, the development of AI and the tech sector in general have been conducted under the auspices of an aggressive anti-human atheism. And while this anti-humanism is neither new to atheism nor to Big Tech, it has grown in its capacity to act upon that sentiment which is farther reaching than ever before so much so that it now threatens, foundationally, what it is we understand to be a human being. In fact, this system has quietly been waging war against the foundations of humanity:
“Faced with philosophical opposition and political catastrophe, the status of humanism eroded dramatically, taking with it the imagination of a modern humanity based on innate qualities, character, or rights. Once a foundation of knowledge, man was reconceived as a construct of science and technology, religion and history, cultural structure and political fashioning.” (Geroulanos, 2010, p. 1-2)
“Once the horizon of existence and thought, the human being became a self-doubting mystery lacking all existential or epistemic certainty other than its own death.” (Geroulanos, 2010, p. 2)
Without a doubt as man has moved away from a God-centric way of being so has there been an equivalent decline in humano-centric empathies, paralleling and heralding the rise of hyper-efficiency.
Traditional notions, both collective and individual, of creativity and human values have been subordinated to measurable outcomes and technological imperatives.
If the western world in the nineteenth century heralded the “Death of God,” the death of man has followed suit just as a limb severed from a body cannot survive.
This void left by God’s absence, a void atheistic-technology and its feudal high priests have not been able to fill, have instead brought forth “the worst in human history”, “paradoxically denigrating the dignity of the human subject” (Geroulanos, 2010, p. 2).
The systemic detachment of tech leaders from societal concerns.
Another aspect of Schmidt’s candid speech was revealing just how detached these ultra-rich techno-feudalists are from having the capacity to relate to non ultra-elites.
Efficiency has become the primary lens through which the ultra-rich techno-feudalists perceive value and worth in the non ultra-elites. We have value in as much as we are a tool utilized towards achieving their goals.
The high priesthood of techno-feudalism have promised the masses a utopia in which machines will not only serve their every whim but will fulfill them as well. The truth is that we are much closer to an “aporia”: instead of heaven on earth we are in a period of hyper-confusion (aporia, from the Greek “a-poros”, meaning “without passage”). Here, aporia represents a state of puzzlement or an insoluble contradiction. It signifies the breakdown of certainty and the inability to resolve a problem logically.
The Prophet warned about such matters:
Many prophetic ḥadīths mention many of the signs of the Hour, among them the prevalence of speech at the expense of abandoning action. al-Dārimī reported in his Sunan, and al-Hākim in his Mustadrak (authenticated by al-Dhahabī), that ʿAmr ibn Qays al-Kindī said:
“I was with Abū al-Fawāris when I was a young man, and I saw people gathering around a man. I asked, ‘Who is this?’ They said, ‘It is ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ.’ I heard him narrating from the Messenger of Allah ﷺ that he said: ‘Among the signs of the approach of the Hour are that the wicked will be elevated, and the virtuous will be brought low, speech will become abundant while action will be withheld, and people will recite The Muthannā, yet none among them will object to it.’ It was asked, ‘What is The Muthannā?’ He replied, ‘What is written besides the Book of Allah, the Almighty’.”
To clarify the meaning of “muthannā” mentioned in the ḥadīth, we refer to the statement of Abū ʿUbayd al-Qāsim ibn Sallām in his book Gharīb al-Ḥadīth:
“I asked a man knowledgeable in the earlier scriptures, who had studied and read them, about the muthannā. He said: ‘The rabbis and monks of the Children of Israel, after Moses, compiled a book among themselves according to their own wishes, apart from the Book of Allah, Blessed and Exalted. They called it The Muthannā, implying that they permitted in it whatever they wanted and prohibited whatever they wanted, in contradiction to the Book of Allah, Blessed and Exalted.’”
We know that an integral aspect of this life, al-ḥayāh al-dunyā, is illusory. Instead of delivering on their promises of utopia, the techno-feudalists are plunging society into a state of mass confusion, where humans become walking contradictions of themselves in this aporia. The value that you and I have in the sight of such elites is pennies on the dollar and only so far as our labor can be used to fuel their enterprises. As the marriage of public-private partnerships deepen their commitments to one another, the control of the self-anointed only entrench itself deeper and deeper into our lives. And yet we have yet to speak of solutions. And we must, and the beginning of any solution must be rooted in the very opposite of this paradigm which is certainty. I am reminded of the ḥadīth which is narrated by Usāmah bin Sharīk in which he stated,
“I came to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and his companions were as if birds were perched on their heads. I greeted them and then sat down. Then, Bedouins came from here and there and said, ‘O Messenger of Allah ﷺ should we seek medical treatment?’ He replied, ‘Seek medical treatment, for Allah, the Almighty, has not created a disease without also creating its cure, except for one disease—old age’.”
Simply put, we must resist and build, to the capacity by which Allah blesses us to do so. Resist this trend by reaffirming our Islam by every moral and ethical means. We must re-assert a God-centric/humano-centric framework that rewards, not just prioritizes, well-being, creativity, and equity over relentless efficiency. This will require great īmān, great courage on our part as we face such a daunting challenge. It will demand from us a societal vigilance, compelling us to reevaluate all that we hold dear and meaningful.
Resources
Whitney Webb, speaking through the @TFTC21 account, stated, “Fundamentally what’s running the world right now is a global public private partnership.” X (formerly Twitter). https://x.com/TFTC21/status/1881461702178267256
Geroulanos, S. (2010). An atheism that is not humanist emerges in French thought. Stanford University Press.
I also recorded a video on this topic discussing in further detail some of my concerns.