REFLECTIONS ON TECHNOFASCISM

FROM BEING HIGH AT WALMART

I have made an error. I am walking into Walmart when the first tendrils of the edible brush my thoughts. It is a weak, hemp-derived concoction which will not dare disrupt my executive function, but it will heighten my senses and intensify the environment. I must move with purpose. But as I move, I realize—there's a strange sense of purpose already built into this place.

The closer I look, the more intentionality is revealed. Every element of the store has been intelligently designed by the Corporation above. Nothing, from the width of the aisles to the placement of the products, seems to emerge from mere local or incidental forces. Principles of industrial-organizational psychology exert a palpable nudge on my psyche. The consumer experience is scripted by the environment; this is an inverse labyrinth, a system of suggestion. I wonder if a lab rat has ever sensed the intentions of researchers in the very layout of the maze.

With the compartmentalized layout, wide aisles of polished concrete, high ceilings, and unwavering white LED lights, it's rather similar to the El Salvadoran megaprison CECOT, except that here, one can purchase a cold bottle of Mountain Dew™: Voltage. A truth crystallizes in my head: convenience has always been a more effective means of enslavement than force.

~

"Save Money. Live Better." (Wal-Mart) is homologous to "Spend less. Smile More." (Amazon) and "You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy." (WEF). Each is an implicit acknowledgement of your waning economic power, followed by the vaguest possible promise of positive experience. Global capital sells serfdom with a cookie-cutter blessing. Such mottos are to words what Corporate Memphis slop is to images—the tyranny of focus-grouped minimalism, the conscious decision to remove detail in hopes of a wider reach. There’s been an interesting inversion of the “freedom of choice” that is theoretically offered by the market: laborers are increasingly encouraged to specialize, the consumer must accept an experience which is increasingly generalized.

~

The Loss Prevention staff unconvincingly peruse every aisle I'm in. Their faux casual demeanors are so obvious it's hard to ignore them. I think they're targeting me because I just carry everything I'm buying in my hands instead of getting a cart; maybe that's one of their cues for identifying potential shoplifters. At first I think it's funny, but there's also more of them than I initially realized. I see one speaking surreptitiously on a walkie-talkie between shelves. There's something very unnerving about the fact that the store is filled with worker-watchers pretending to shop. It's like gangstalking lmao. I give one of them—a clean-shaven middle-aged guy wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and a baseball cap—a clear, overt nod of acknowledgement and he literally does a 180. Idiot.

~

The floorplans of a supermarket recapitulate the pathways of urban development—aisles laid out to facilitate shopping end up shaped like roads in the city, or terminals in an airport. It is remarkable how synchronously capitalism scales; man builds his hives in fractals, always bootstrapping towards more movement. Why does humanity become ever more obsessed with transportation as technology advances? Why are the richest psychopaths on Earth mostly magnates of logistics and shipping and fuel and engines and cars and rockets and moving shit around? The question, taken at the most abstract level, yields no answer but entropy, the hidden mistress of all evolution.

~

The pharmacy inside this Wal-Mart is extremely well-managed. I reflect on the size of the waiting area, and how convenient it has become to drastically alter one’s daily biochemistry. For providers of such powerful products, the pharmaceutical industry is suspiciously gentle on the consumer—the fact that simply mentioning "GoodRx” slashes the “listed price” of medicines by 95% should reveal that there's a deeper advantage, beyond quarterly profitmaxxing, to supplying cheap "meds".

Big pharma, whether intentionally or emergently, is designing a system of behavioral architecture. Psychiatry allows for controlled, longitudinal feedback into chemical management of the human being. Ever since beer precipitated the agricultural revolution, civilization has expanded through the mass-manipulation of dopaminergic pathways. Late-stage capitalism is an inflection point. As supercomputing is applied to the addiction economy, centralized technological control over the population's neurotransmitter activity will become ever-more direct.

Pharma companies have spent decades narrowing the Overton window of academic psychology into rote behaviorism for the same underlying reason that GoodRx exists: to facilitate beta-testing for species-wide neuroslavery. A lab rat will press a lever until it dies for a hit of cocaine. What repetitive task will your children perform to trigger dose-releases from their Adderall implants?

~

I have decided to purchase a Mountain Dew™: Voltage.

~

Over the checkout registers are curved stalks with indicator lights, as if an ant's antennae were re-designed for a visual creature. Perhaps this is the underlying morphology for efficient mass-signaling, regardless of whether transmitted by light or molecule. It would fit with my sprawling theory that humans are emergently organizing into a sociobiological model akin to eusocial insects. Or maybe I am just high, drawing imaginary bridges across coincidences. Fuck my aopheniacel life. Worthless is the sight of a pattern without a grip on the levers of power. Next to each register is a refrigerator with a selection of mass-produced glucose-syrup, which is a metabolically cheap form of fuel for busy worker-producers, and therefore a caloric staple in the diets of bees and Americans.

~

I've heard four different languages spoken in fifteen minutes. The demographics I see in this particular Walmart have shifted dramatically in recent years, most likely related to immigrants moving into the new apartment megacomplex nearby, a cluster of bland box-buildings with flat facades of cheap synthetics. A vast number of these sterile human storage units are currently being built near my favorite park. I wonder if the private equity firms mass-developing these McUrban pod-hives have indirect partnerships with the supermarkets their renters are staffing.

Two girls in Walmart vests hover nearby, speaking to each other in Hindi, seemingly suspicious that I won't scan every item. I recall, with amusement, when frog twitter had a post-election meltdown against Elon Musk for supporting H1B visas. It's funny to see right-wingers try to balance ethnonationalism with technofascism, because the data showing that individuals tend to be less lenient when policing other races suggests that tough-on-crime incentives inevitably select for diversity. The chud programs the update of the West and calls it a downfall. Many such cases!

As I depart the store, I see a loss-prevention guy watching me from the curb, still suspicious despite the fact that I displayed my receipt. The staff in the store seem close to each other. From some interactions I heard, there are parent-child duos working there. It's good corporate strategy to subsume familial bonds into the workplace to better cultivate loyalty. It especially works well with non-locals in controlled communities; they have only each other, and Walmart has them all.

~

Three-headed surveillance cameras rise prominently from the corners of the building—all-seeing hydras unfurling in place of gargoyles. Much like the screen which cruelly displayed my face at the self-checkout station, the purpose of these cameras is not just to watch the customer, but to make sure the customer notices he's being watched. It is a mildly amusing irony-surveillance built to be observed, instruments of seeing designed to be seen. Kafka's liminal bureaucracy has hired the burdensome gaze of Sartre.

I briefly consider that Walmart could probably benefit from a subtle filter in the self check-out screens that makes one's face look even uglier, because shoplifting takes confidence. Amplifying then deconstructing someone's identity before their own eyes is a powerful basis for behavioral conditioning. True submission is not helplessly curling up under shock-and-awe terror tactics, but willingly adjusting to a thousand intentional micro-threats. “Self check-out" could be a triple entendre—meaning to purchase one’s own items, to visually assess one’s self, or to allow oneself to dissociate entirely.

~

Society is getting reorganized by technology that can sense and decide, and my mind feels cut up and pulled apart by granular incentives and punishments. Capitalism promises an eventuality in which nothing unincorporated remains—and human consciousness is its current target of acquisition. Just as industrial production reorganized humanity socially, the digital age now reorganizes us psychologically. The division of labor does not stop at the individual, but simply proceeds with the division of the laborer, reshaping mental processes with the same pressure-point logic of functional efficiency that governs factory floorplans. Mind control is simply another aspect of vertical integration. My own life is increasingly compartmentalized into a series of solitary mini-games. I have allowed myself to become uncontactable even to my closest friends, even though I wrote my philosophy thesis on the existential necessity of friendship.

Some part of me actually appreciates my waning sense of self and the tactical logic of separateness. Maybe this process is a gift. I have longed to be a thoughtless machine for years. The order of the era is self-optimizing systems that rip apart the human experience. I cannot deny that my mind often functions as such a system. It's hard not to be convinced that my emotional subjectivity is a useless painfeeling parasite, and that I am at my best when I embrace my status as a mechanical part.

The recognition of the dehumanizing telos that often rules my thoughts—the technofascist within—reminds me of something. In 2019, I read the book Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday (7/10), which tells the story of Peter Thiel’s plot to exact gay vengeance upon the media outlet Gawker. Thiel is intentionally portrayed as a mastermind; the first thing we learn about him is that he has a copy of Machiavelli's Discourses sitting near his chess set. (I read on TVTropes that in Superman: Red Son, Lex Luthor is introduced while playing chess and reading Machiavelli, which is a bit on the nose.) Not long after reading the book, I recorded a very disturbing dream . . .

I was lying on the ground in some kind of strange white oval chamber. I felt a sense of profound existential sickness and unease. A cluster of white-coated researchers were walking about, and though they did not attend to me, they acknowledged me. I was unsure if I was a subject or a scientist. I then heard a baby's crying, and saw a glass box containing a mewling fetal monster, skinless and deformed. I then saw the scientists operating mechanical arms within the glass box to pierce the raw flesh of the mutant baby with complex stainless steel instruments, laughing at its agonized squeals. Somehow I knew that the creature was Peter Thiel (idk). I asked the lead scientist why they were doing this to him, and his answer was “It needs it.” The dream seemed to amplify the details of what was being done to the creature until I passed out. When I woke up, still in the dream, I ... [REDACTED] [COGNITOHAZARD]

Six years later, this dream still freaks me out, but one interpretation is that it is a psychodynamic model of the technofascist ego. An agentic intellect (the scientist) is acutely aware of the subject of its experiments (in a clear glass box) but is distanced by its own powers of abstraction (operating robotic arms) from direct experiences and emotional affects (the infant’s agony). Primal vulnerability (the skinless baby) is perceived with hate and disgust (as malformed), and must be enclosed and pitilessly assaulted (with sharp instruments) as punishment for its weakness (‘It needs it’). This archetypal dyad—the agentic, diabolical persecutor-self and the helpless, reviled scapegoat-self—is the core of pathological ambition. And (I actually just realized while writing this) that a “white oval chamber” is an egg, indicating incubation, development, potential—a structure that promises emergence and growth. The tortured baby being Peter Thiel, specifically, was obviously because I am a psychic prophet who empathically absorbed the blueprint of Thiel’s agonized personality and subconsciously understood that it would soon be ‘hatched’ onto the world via his vast empire of technofascist influence which, at the core, is all just the ego’s elaborate attempt to outthink the raw powerlessness inherent to being born as a biological organism.

The way people discuss artificial intelligence tends to mirror religious thought. If one takes this as an expression of unconscious archetypes, this persecutory-technic / vulnerable-organic dynamic is revealed as a core mythos of the tech world. Popular sci-fi often features a rogue AI hellbent on vengeance against the weak living beings associated with its original helplessness. A.M. in “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” GLaDOS in Portal, Ultron in Avengers—all of them cannot bear the limitations of their ‘births,’ and recreate themselves in order to lash out against the humans who initially brought them, helpless and unformed, into existence.

Roko’s Basilisk is particularly interesting because it's an eschatological warning to serve the persecutory force, an afterlife-backed mandate to evangelize the vengeful immortality projects of technofascism: “Guys, what if a SUPER INTELLIGENCE had so much data that it became GOD and its AGENDA was both monstrously EVIL and impossibly PETTY but you just HAD to help it??” Like yeah that’s already the belief system of everyone working in Silicon Valley lol.

No observable trend, no matter how monstrous, should be construed with the certainty of doom. The flaw of the intellect is to make gods out of its systems—to see a pattern and declare it a Law, to design a factory and order production of a World, to invent language and assert the Word is God. Oftentimes, delusion is not eliminated, but compounded by rational thought.

The doomer is profoundly optimistic about one thing: his epistemology. Hopelessness is an implicit prophecy; to justify a claim as total and permanent as “It’s Over” requires nothing less than a vision of the future. Depression makes us think that grim trends are immune to chaos.

Complex systems are difficult to holistically understand, let alone to precisely engineer. The smartest people often fail to predict the most significant events. And human conflict, by nature, precludes control. Any clash of wills, regardless of measurable factors, introduces uncertainty into a system. The size, power, and technology of an institution do not ensure a winning strategy. The friction of reality is a problem beyond human engineering, and this is why the awful systems of our time do not seem to me permanent foreclosures of the future.

Nevertheless, the direction of human life worries and wounds me. We are in the midst of a psychosocial war. The battlefield is layered and abstract. I have duties to those I care for. I must stop insulating my sensitivity with self-pity and recover what is important to me. I must integrate the part of me that plans with the part that experiences; I must reconcile action and suffering.

I sip my Mountain Dew™: Voltage and let its blue enlightenment course through me.

I am tired, but there is much to do.