Halloween(ish) thread: we are seeing the beginnings of an archaic revival.

Ghosts we thought were dead are coming back, some of very high antiquity indeed.

Be afraid.

1) Word of mouth:

This seems really weird because we have this thing called the internet and supposedly it is this quantum leap in social technology. In a trivial sense it is. In other sense though it is bringing us back to something extremely ancient.

Look at election 2020 (I'll talk as though it's your election wherever you are--in truth, it is). There's no such thing as fact. Globoh0mοs were right--this is the Post-Truth world. You don't trust their fact-checkers, they don't trust yours. We live in discrete epistemic domains

The upshot: epistemic authority is now given over to something that has not held sway since we lived in band-level society: gossip. This will have radical implications for subsidiarity and devolution of authority. Shared language is about to see its horizon narrow considerably.

2) The family unit

Speaking of localism, there is a "Great Reset" in the offing, and Time Magazine has no fucking idea. Should Biden win, C0VID will be extended indefinitely, lockdowns will become as normal as Unlce Sadiq getting knifed, and your in-group will get a lot narrower

This is something liberalism ought to fear. When lockdowns started, you saw liberals flip their lid over it and conservatives applaud--this has now reversed course for reasons of structural conflict, but the original orientation is the natural one.

In 2013 a paper was published explaining that disease prevalence predicts right wing authoritarianism. Never mind that RWA is a bunch of nonsense promulgated by such chronic resenters as Adorno. Authoritarianism surely exists, and the more disease threatens, the more you like it.

Forever-lockdowns are catnip to centralizing powers but also breed fascists, a double bind for liberalism. And they have the effect of devolving social relations down to the local level, particularly to that of the family.

The family is the worst thing possible for liberalism. Many families are breaking under the weight of C0VID, but those that survive will emerge much the stronger. And those that do will tend to be traditional extended family structures.

3) Literal Magic

Technology has a habit of becoming a complete and total own goal. This is the lesson of the Prometheus myth, and it has always seemed odd that Prometheans name themselves after Zeus' bitch. Perhaps there is no bigger tech self-own than deepfake.

The ability to fake someone's voice and image with astonishing fidelity presents a serious problem for media in general. In a similar way as with gossip-as-episteme, the hurricane of dubious and conflicting information makes it impossible to form an opinion on anything.

You think fake news is bad now? The Hunter Biden leaks a big deal? Wait until that video of the Pope letting blood and reading from the Necronomicon hits your inbox. Your eyes and ears are now no longer reliable sources of information. Do you believe in magic? You might as well.

4) Ancient warfare

If we've progressed at all, surely it's in killing. The whole history of warfare has been a process of equalization, of evening up the odds so that the 85-lb omega can, at least with a lethal instrument, have a fighting chance against the natural alpha.

But just as warfare has progressed toward ever more centralized forms, requiring specialized training, mass conscription, and eventually an entire managerial state, it has come full circle and achieved some parity between technocracies and tribal societies.

Here is a very good thread on the generations of warfare. Each generation short-circuits the last, and at the point of 4GW it became clear that more technically advanced does not mean victorious. https://twitter.com/realboyphysical/status/1313302360245121026

This is how a tribal, barely literate society can bleed dry the greatest superpower in history and bankrupt it, driving it into the arms of a hostile creditor. 4GW is much closer to how warfare was waged in the pre-1GW era, the era of tribe- and band-level warfare.

Now with the advent of 5GW (a concept still in formation), we have something new, but also archaic. And this is where the above thread, good as it is, gets it wrong. 5GW is not about control of information channels, it is a war of competing worldviews.

In other words, we (again, at long last) have the gods warring against each other. Men merely carry them into battle. As the thread states, war could be so abstracted it could be decided with a single shot... maybe none at all.

Consider what is happening this very day in France. A post-industrial, 21st century technocracy is being colonized by a relatively primitive culture, and lacks the ideological means to mount any defense at all, having universalized its morality into some sort of suicide cult.

The gods are at war and ours are losing. And where the battle is being fought at all in any recognizable sense, it is being fought guerilla style, as it was 300 generations ago.

The archaic in man never dies; he carries it with him like a talisman and couldn't rid himself of it if he wanted to. We can hardly take a step without treading on a hungry ghost. We have failed to perform the obsequies and cannot escape these larval phantoms.

Happy Halloween