Between Mandala and Machine

Engineering the arguments of a porous new planetary contraption

I’ve been in Thailand for a week, and will be here for another week. I am reading J. Rotheray’s Thailand: Essential Guide to Customs and Culture. It’s a rather workmanlike and lightweight ethnography for tourists, rather than the kind of meaty historical deep dive I like, but I couldn’t find a good book of the latter sort (suggestions welcome), so this will do for now. I’m paying particular attention to the discussion of the mandala political system underlying Thai society, which I first learned about earlier this year in a broader Southeast Asia context.

I’m also reflecting on the US election outcome, but with particular emphasis in my case on the idea of machine politics. In this essay, I want to offer you a particular analytical lens, based on a balance of power between the mandala and machine aspects of politics.

Mandalas, as I will argue, are political un-machines, characterized but not defined by neopatrimonialism, and with significantly more internal structure and institution-building capacity than mere populism. I will explain them more in a minute, but for now think of them as un-machines. Not anti-machines based on nonsensical magical thinking, or inchoate churns with no internal order to their functioning, but things that work by a non-mechanistic functional logic, deriving their first principles from human relations, particular values derived from particular understandings of conflict, honor, harmony, and social stability, rather than physics. We can borrow a term from Asimov and call this constellation of concerns humanics. However they cash out their humanics concerns, mandalas always center some element of human caring.

By contrast, true machines typically center some sort of knowing. Machines want to know about the world — ingest information and internalize it, but without being destroyed in the process. This is clearest with societal machines, especially ones explicitly devoted to discovery, but all but the simplest machines, including ones that involve no human moving parts, typically transform inputs into evolving states. The tension I want to set up between machines and mandalas is a primarily a tension between the drive to know and the drive to care.

In theory, mandalas systems are dasein engines based on a particular set of speculative laws of humanics (often constructed as being a “natural order”), continuously solving for some notion of meaningfulness and authenticity through changing conditions in the world. Heidegger would have loved them. Most mandala systems are based on localized family/kinship patterns of caring, but we can overload the idea to also describe speculative socialist/mutualist societal models, which also center caring, just within fictive kinship groups that may be biologically expansive and planet-scale. Though it isn’t based on a religion or monarchy, the idea of Gaia is a mandala-flavored idea, as is a hippie commune.

Trumpism and rhyming movements worldwide (including the stillborn Bernie-AOC movement in the US) are rudimentary new mandala systems that are destroying machine politics establishments worldwide, across political spectra. As a result the world is shifting from a systematic bias towards knowing to a systematic bias towards caring.

The salient fact about Trumpism is that it did not just take down machine Democrats; it took down machine Republicans as well. And rendered the two indistinguishable in the process. This fact alone tells us we’re in a something-vs-machine conflict, not Left vs. Right. That something, I want to argue, is an emerging mandala order. That the Bernie-AOC rebellion was effectively squashed with extreme prejudice suggests it too was a mandala-vs-machine movement. It is probably not dead yet, and will enjoy a resurgence of some sort, given the current political climate.

Though it is tempting, I won’t call these movements neo-mandala because there’s nothing really neo about them that makes them qualitatively different from ancient examples. They just happen to have been born in a modern environment that is more machinic¹ than organic, which has implications for the visible forms the mandala systems must take in order to function at all.

We can construct the following 2x2 of the mandala and machine aspects of a society.

The 2x2 captures what I think is a resolution of the central tension of modernity. Is is to be humans over machines or machines over humans? Are we about knowing or about caring? The answer is both at once, realized as a robust balance of power between a machine aspect and a mandala aspect.

In modernity, our technological environment is complex enough that if we don’t construct collective human agency oriented around knowing in somewhat mechanistic forms — ie embrace a clearly machinic character for our societies and individual lives — societies break in one way. If we don’t make room for the human, and orient around caring, societies break in another way. When both human-over-machine (or mandala aspect) and machine-over-human (machine aspect) of society are functional, we get technological thriving driven by a dynamic tension between the two. When one breaks and the other remains functional, the functioning survivor aspect rapidly turns overgrown and heads into cancerous regimes, giving us either an organic dystopia or a machinic dystopia. These are both unsustainable. One is irrational, the other is uncaring. One knows more and more, and cares less and less. The other knows less and less, but cares more and more.

The world has been on a decades-long swing from a machinic dystopia of faceless organization men towards an organic dystopia where all humans must appear masked in rigidly choreographed ceremonial public lives, with inner lives withering away to nothing. Even as care is performed in ever-more elaborate ways through external behaviors. We can envisage four possible futures from here:

1. An organic-dystopian steady state, leading to a stable mandala-dominated world.

2. A swing back to a new kind of machinic dystopia as our current organic dystopia overreaches and collapses from internal contradictions, and the currently broken machine gets unimaginatively rebuilt with cosmetic differences.

3. A dual collapse into savagery, as both machine and mandala aspects of society stop functioning, leaving us with a world that is both uncaring and irrational.

4. Rapid evolution of a creative new kind of global societal machine (with a new machine politics arising from it), which forces a corresponding creativity to emerge in the currently ascendant mandala aspect, leading to technological thriving.

Obviously, the only good outcome here is the last one. It is one that calls for courage, clarity, and creativity to engineer.

Courage to recognize that a functional machinic aspect to society is not just a good thing, but a necessary and generative thing. Far from being opposed to humanism, it is a precondition for it. Suppression of this aspect by an over-muscular reactionary humanism from either the left or right is a recipe for exactly the kinds of essentialist self-dehumanization we are seeing today, driven by fetishization of particular historically frozen ways of being human. Unless you want to live in a planet-scale hyperlocal organic farmer’s market, or a planet-scale landscape of trad cities full of narrow streets and statue-heads, you have to have the courage to want the evolving machinic element in our world. To want the drive to know expressed, even if it means a less caring world.

Clarity to recognize that the current societal machine has broken (not just US party political machines on both the left and right, but the entire industrial-era global machinic fabric). Including, for instance, the so-called rules-based international order, which is also a machine on the verge of collapse. It may rattle and clank on for a while, but it is broken. If you are clinging nostalgically to dated notions of expertise, institutional authority, and state capacity, you’re not seeing the brokenness clearly. And you’re likely attributing the damage it has taken to vandalism rather than sheer age and dysfunction. But you don’t have to leap to the conclusion that just because the current machine is broken, the mandala un-machine is the answer.

Creativity to try and imagine and construct new machines that harness the logic of contemporary rather than industrial technology. I have one proposal for a creative new direction for building new societal machines that I’ll say more about later— protocols— but the important thing is to try a lot of creative approaches to building new kinds of machines.

To these three, I’ll add my favorite new idea as a fourth: contraptionism. So that’s the 4Cs of the imperative: Courage, Clarity, Creativity, Contraptionism.

The aesthetic and ethos that we need to guide the construction of a new machine is contraptionism. Because any new societal machine will inevitably be a janky affair, not just at inception, but throughout its lifecycle. The larger and more complex an engineered artifact — and “society” is the largest kind we build — the less it is going to look like either an iPhone or a beautiful natural forest, and the more it’s going to look like a really complicated Rube Goldberg machine. It will be an oozy, AI-suffused machine in the future, to be sure, but it will still be a Rube Goldberg machine.

After all, even at its peak of perfection in the 70s, before the Reagan-Thatcher era began the process of dismantling it, the global societal machine never exceeded the design integrity of a Rube Goldberg machine. There was never a time when it wasn’t clanking and clattering along, slowly falling apart, needing constant restorative efforts to keep it together and going. Particular societies, like the Soviet Union, or Johnson era Great Society, which tried to force too much aesthetic tightness and design integrity, tended to collapse faster. The machine was conceived as too much of a monolith. In the vocabulary we are developing here, they tried to force the contraption factor too low. The only way to build a workable contraption at societal scale is to be pragmatic enough not to aim too high. When it comes to societal machines, mediocrity today beats excellence never.

This last point is also why we cannot expect ideas for a new machine aspect of society to emerge from the currently ascendant mandala aspect. As we’ll see in a minute, the mandala aspect is entirely about aesthetically coherent and tightly choreographed external appearances of excellence, with the messiness of both human and technological elements swept behind the societal facade mandalas create to mask themselves from themselves. This surface coherence and aesthetic integrity can create the illusion of a machinic order at work, but that’s all it is. It cannot sustain a drive to know.

But though mandalas cannot create or sustain the machinic drive to know, they can do quite a lot.

The Mandala System

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, the mandala system is one based on the personal spheres of influence of powerful individuals and families, and a subtly codified scheme of mutual expectations based on what we might call structured clientelism. But if this sentence conjures up visions of a tribal Big Man or tribal council in an island society, or a Balinese cockfight a la Clifford Geertz, you’ve got the scale calibrated wrong Think Thailand-sized countries with a long history of warring kingdoms, complex societal structure, and significant technological capacity. Think high-functioning societies that keep up with modernity, and a strong craft-orientation.

Mandala means sphere in Sanskrit, and the term as used to describe Southeast Asian political systems is apparently derived from a Brahminical-Buddhist governance mode that supposedly existed in ~4th century BC India (the Mauryan empire, when Buddhism was a startup religion and Kautilya’s Arthashastra was written).

Modern mandala systems superficially look like what Western political philosophers typically call neopatrimonialist societies (a term I picked up from Francis Fukuyama). But this isn’t quite right, since the idea of patrimonialism as commonly understood suggests significantly more primitive systems as the base layer reasserting itself, with the “neo” gesturing at an assumed regression to that presumed primitivism, manifesting as corruption, nepotism, and democratic backsliding.

But you can’t call the mandala system corrupt or nepotistic because it’s not a distortion of something else or pretending to operate by a different logic. By their internal logic, mandala systems are neither corrupt, nor nepotistic. The Westphalian overlay should be considered a kind of frontend UI to the underlying Mandala system rather than any sort of hypocrisy.

I think this is a conflation of two distinct models, and the result of incorporating the literal and metaphoric influence of family and kinship groups too simplistically in the modeling. While family and kinship structures do supply a lot of the core operating logic of mandala systems, as in neopatrimonialism, mandalas aren’t reducible to those structures. If they were, mandala societies would be far simpler, and incapable of even development via industrial policy, emulation, and fast-following, as they clearly are.

Looking around at the patterns of life here in Thailand, it strikes me that this is what a fully realized mandala-system society looks like under modern conditions. Tradition and technology woven together relatively seamlessly. Much of the logic of the Thai system comes from the three dominant institutions: The monarchy, the Buddhist clergy, and the military. The logic of everything else flows from these three mandalas. You could say these are the three core mandalas in a system of half-a-dozen overlapping mandalas that together divide up available political and institutional agency among them. Other Southeast Asian societies are similar, just with a different set of core mandalas comprising the overall mandala. The system sort of works at the scale and scope of Thailand, but I suspect this is about the limit at which it can work. Which makes sense for a system rooted in antiquity.

The mandala system is not primarily based on clear territorial claims or impersonal institutions, though in modern mandala societies, those too exist as a sort of Westhphalian overlay, in the same sense that the leaders of these societies often wear Western suits. At best you could say Thailand is a mandala society running a limited Westphalian nation-state in emulation mode, with decidedly idiosyncratic versions of the various mechanisms you might expect (constitutions, elections, professional military). A mandala system is not quite Big Man society (which is a similar primitive pattern found in small-scale low-tech societies), nor is it nepotism, understood as a pattern of corruption in a system with more impersonal organizing principles. It is also not like a powerful impersonal state balanced by powerful kinship groups as in China or Turkey. Mandala politics is not guanxi. It is also not like Northeast Asian style corporatism, built around keiretsus and chaebols, and some blend of European constitutionalism and feudalism.

A mandala society is hierarchical, but the logic of the hierarchies doesn’t derive from impersonal technocratic organizational architectures designed around some drive to know things, especially new things. It flows from the interplay of highly structured and ceremonial class and status hierarchies intersecting with personal suprafamilial social networks. Imagine a fishnet-like social graph draped over a steep and rather regular shaped terraced mountain and you get the idea. The idea is recursive and composable, so a system of mandalas is simply a larger mandala. A terraced mountain range draped in fishnets.

Mandalas and Technology

The topology of the mandala system is expressive enough that it can emulate impersonal technocratic hierarchies up to a point, and even function in equivalent ways to provision the basic necessities of society, so long as the underlying science and technology is well-established and teachable/preservable by mandala-grade institutions. But it cannot do the whole job. It is not a machine, but an organic entity in machinic clothing. It is a societal-scale mechanical turk, human-powered at the core, with innards designed to meet human needs rather than knowledge production needs.

This means it cannot pull off the more advanced technological feats of actual technocratic organizations founded on the drive to know rather than the drive to care, which subordinate humanistic priorities to knowledge production priorities. A mandala society, I suspect, cannot systematically and sustainably produce and integrate new kinds of knowledge from technological and scientific frontiers, through a system of research institutions feeding systematically supported entrepreneurial pathways. Research tends to be of a limited showcase variety. Entrepreneurship tends to be focused on traditional market-driven business opportunities rather than emerging novel technological capabilities.

Equally, but less obviously, mandala systems cannot sustain the more subversive and punk understories of creative hacking and improvisation that typically accompany technocratic overstories. The faceless bureaucrat and the hacker sneaking into the lab to do unauthorized experiments go together. Evil twins though they may be within machinic societal orders, they are both driven by the drive to know rather than the drive to care. Neither really fits into the mandala system. Another way to think of this is in terms of risk. We may regard bureaucrats as being risk-averse, and punks as being risk-taking, but both orient around risk because seeking new knowledge of any sort entails risk.

In the mandala system, appearances are too load-bearing for either seriously impersonal technocratic power or seriously subversive punk power to be tolerated. Subversion of any sort — loss of “face” or “honor” — cannot truly be risked socially, regardless of the value of the knowledge that might be gained. It does not matter whether the source of subversion is the uncertainties of real technocratic work or the unpredictability of true punk adventurism. The whole system relies on everybody sticking to scripts everybody understands, the way a dance troupe performance relies on everyone having learned the choreography.

Mandala systems in other words, are WYSIWYG. The surface appearances are how the functionality is provisioned. To disrupt appearances is to do more than merely embarrass or humiliate someone. It is to disrupt societal functioning. The ritual and ceremonial behaviors, the elaborate and seemingly superfluous theatrical performances — these are how societal functioning is arranged. They are not matters of personality and individual taste. Unlike in the West, your inner realities are mostly irrelevant. Of course, for individualistic creative endeavors like research and art, your inner realities matter a great deal, so these are correspondingly harder to produce in mandala societies. But imitation that only requires deep traditions of scholastic education and skilled craftsmanship, mandala societies can pull off, regardless of complexity and advanced technological levels.

There is a reason all the Southeast Asian countries featuring mandala political systems send their best and brightest to the West for advanced research-oriented education, and rely on the West for continuous injections of innovation and new knowledge capital (from a reference I can’t find right now, econometric research suggests something like 90% of productivity growth is due to imported knowhow in such countries).

Unlike true neopatrimonial systems, which are usually thinly veiled crude dictatorships, mandala systems can develop and grow rapidly in fast-follower mode — but only so long as there is a non-mandala model to follow. Left to themselves, mandala societies slip (but not necessarily “collapse”) into stagnation. Surface appearances and performances get steadily elaborated until they are all-consuming, leaving no room for anything else.

This is a description that will likely resonate on both sides of the American political spectrum — as descriptions of their adversaries. The trad-and-based crowd will instantly recognize this as the world of woke shibboleths, intricate pronoun schemes, and the excruciatingly frozen identity sensitivities of intersectional politics. The woke crowd will for its part instantly recognize this as the world of ethno-nationalist shibboleths, Great Man cults of personality, endless rehearsals and re-enactments of increasingly revered mythologies, and the stylized reactionary aesthetics of trad culture. Both accuse each other of being all about signaling, and both are correct. Mandala societies are 100% signaling because the functionality is 100% on the surface. Your inner life doesn’t matter so long as your outer life conforms to scripted expectations.

Both ends of the political spectrum today are becoming mandala-like, draining energy from inner lives and pouring it into outer lives. The emerging public appearance grammars of both woke and trad mandalas requires us to don increasingly elaborate masks and put on increasingly elaborate ritual performances for each other.

This point is worth noting for those attracted to pure mandala systems, on both the right and the left. You can continue to extract some knowledge and innovation from the inertia of older true machinic systems winding down, but mandala systems, I am convinced, do not and cannot truly produce new knowledge or innovation. They have no deep drive to know things.

The political culture of Trumpism isn’t quite mandala-like, at least not yet — it is too young, and is evolving in a different environment — but there are decided similarities. But as in Southeast Asia, mandala logic in North America will face sharp limits. Once the inherited momentum of the preceding impersonal technocratic era is exhausted, it will hit a wall and stagnate. The only difference is that the productivity fuel will be imported from the West’s own recent past, rather than foreign countries. One need only look at the degree to which the Elon-mandala, which will clearly be a major part of the Trump-mandala, relies on the technocratic legacy of the non-mandala recent past, to foresee this endgame.

The same, incidentally, would have been true in the counterfactual history of a Bernie-AOC mandala being ascendant today, having displaced the Pelosi-Harris machine. It would have apparently “innovated” for a while in more communitarian mode, benefitting from inherited technocratic momentum, but would have eventually stagnated.

It is important to note that neither variety sees itself as irrational or anti-science. Both see their practices as “truly scientific” as opposed to the “fake bureaucratic science” practiced and legitimated by the machine (it is notable that the anti-vaxx movement is bipartisan). But because they are both essentially humanist and organic at heart, with care as their ethical core (either for family/kin or for all life respectively, on the right and left), they lack the essential streak of human-decentering nihilism at the heart of a genuine scientific sensibility. Both, for instance, formed their own characteristic hostile reactions to the Copernican moment of AI. Both have a heroic understanding of science. The only difference is that one celebrates a charismatic Great Man narrative of discovery, while the other celebrates a diverse, pluralist, collective element. Both celebrate discoverers more than they do discoveries.

Neither celebrates the uncaring void that the drive to know relentlessly pushes towards. To truly celebrate the void, you need to construct society as a machine, and subordinate yourself to it to some degree. Anything less, and you’re being too attached to the organic, not open enough to the machinic. To build a societal machine that works, you have to stop caring about humans to some degree and surrender to the nihilism of scientific discovery.

And whatever else they do well or poorly, there is one thing even our broken industrial-era bureaucratic machines do exceptionally well that any new societal machine will also need to do — not care about humans.

The Broken Machine

Kamala Harris was described as a machine politician, as were Clinton and Obama before her. Almost all US politics since the Civil War has been machine politics. The Democratic flavor of city-based machine politics being the kind usually implied, but the underlying mechanistic logic is equally descriptive of how the Republican Party operated until the rise of the Tea Party, and later, Trump.

I’m going to use the term to loosely refer to the kind of strong structure (with some differences) that characterized both Democrat and Republican party organizations before 2016. In any analysis, it is critical to note that the 30-year-old political force that awoke with Newt Gingrich and talk radio in the 90s has destroyed the underlying machines of both parties. Trump merely put delivered the coup de grâce.

Machine politics, of both the Tammany Hall city variety, and larger-scale national variety, after a century and half of ascendancy, is basically dead as far as I can tell. And with it, patterns of personal power acquired and expressed primarily from the insides of powerful impersonal organizations have also died. The idea of the shadowy, powerful insider, with limited independent electoral appeal, but a powerful knowledge of the machine and how to work it, is dead too.

This literal machine-like impersonality of machine politics can be hard to see because machine politics does not preclude the presence of powerful and charismatic individuals exercising personal power. Whether we’re talking powerful city machine bosses, or contemporary figures like Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, the “machines” were governed by opinionated individuals with a personal sense of what needed to be done; what needed to be known. But the point is, the logic of the powerful humans was subservient to the logic of the machine itself. You became powerful by internalizing the machine logic, not by imposing an organic, mandala logic. This is the reason people often stumble upon the now-commonplace insight that modern Western bureaucracies (and things patterned on them, including political machines) were the first AIs. “Politicking” is a performance in the machine.

Societal machines are people by individuals with strong drives to know, but not much of a drive to care. This works so long as the power of the knowledge being generated allows you to not care and get away with it. But when the machine becomes disconnected from useful knowledge flows — as any machine must when conditions change enough — they can no longer get away with it, and become vulnerable to attack. This can cause the machine to break, but it is important to note that what breaks machines is failing in their knowledge production function, not the attacks that ensue.

But even if a particular historically contingent societal machine breaks, and people celebrate, there is no way to live with advanced technology other than to repeatedly reconstruct ourselves, individually and collectively, in machinic modes, co-evolving with technology, and nihilistically participating in our own progressive decentering, one Copernican moment at a time.

Only one thing is certain when an incumbent machine fails — we must build a new, better one, or suffer a slide into a progressively worsening human condition. People mostly get it, but typically react incoherently.

Taken naively, this imperative gives us things like on-the-nose transhumanism or cyborgism at the individual level, and various uncontrolled “accelerationisms” at the societal level. But these are something like modern cargo cults. You do not channel the machinic through high-tech adornment or extension of the organic. Or through any sort of ecstatic communion with it. You do it by repeatedly harnessing emerging technological forces to build new societal machines that sustain more powerful modes of life. Good new societal machines. And you accept that old ones will eventually go bad — become poorly adapted to circumstances and require dismantling.

Good machines do not accelerate in unbridled ways till they blow up. This does not mean you cannot accelerate. It means you have to do more than merely accelerate. Good machines are equipped with clutches, gear trains, brakes, steering wheels, and various other regulatory mechanisms. Good machines are by definition governable. Accelerating to a blow-up is what bad (as in poorly designed) machines do, so accelerationism of any sort is a kind of euphoric nihilism rooted in helplessness at the larger scales of design.

But just because a good machine is governable doesn’t mean humans must necessarily govern it. That might not even be possible. So to embrace a machinic aspect to society is to also embrace that the societal machines we inhabit might be self-governing. We already do in fact embrace such mechanistic self-governing — what is “rule of law” and constitutional order after all, but engineered self-governance? Inserting AI or blockchains into the logic doesn’t really change that much.

It is now clear that industrial era machines are no longer good, functional machines. As a result, many people — a majority in fact — have effectively turned anti-technological even if they don’t realize it yet. This includes many stridently tech-positive people who continuously and desperately perform their techno-optimism even as they aggressively battle the machine and celebrate the particular mandala systems they favor.

This is not entirely misguided, since much of the effort we see unfolding around us, devoted to the societal machine, is devoted to repairing or rebuilding the one that lies broken all around us. If that’s the only project, then you might as well solve for caring. But that means giving up on knowing.

My new definition of being pro-technology is being willing to give up some caring in order to gain some marginal capacity for knowing. And that means giving up things you, personally care about. It does not mean simply continue to not care about people and living things you never cared about anyway.

This is why a basic and surprisingly robust heuristic works very well: The primary sign that somebody is anti-technological is incuriosity.

The New Machine

What will the new societal machine look like? What will its constituent smaller machines — including new political machines look like?

Once today’s emerging mandalas — Trumpish trad mandalas as well as communitarian mutualist ones — mature and things start to stagnate, the need for a new machine will start to get acute. A source of impersonal and uncaring stability and individual space. Something that will check the creeping demands for ceaseless public performance of anxious mandala mythologies.

When everything that depends on people having spacious and consequential individual inner lives begins to wither — and the machinic element is a huge part of it — and the slowing of knowledge and artistic production becomes unmistakeable, we’ll all begin to appreciate precisely what the old, broken machine did for us.

As to the new machine, I don’t have any bright ideas yet, other than what seems like a highly contrarian belief that one will in fact emerge. A surprising number of people seem to think we can do without one entirely.

I have been gesturing vaguely at protocols, so you have probably guessed that I have notions of networks, decentralization, AI, and cryptographic technologies cooking in my head. So do a lot of other people. It seems clear that whatever the New Machine is, it will have some of these attributes. But at this point, these terms have been tossed around for so long, they are futurist tropes rather than useful thoughts.

But we can say a couple of more substantial things.

First, I suspect the new machine will be highly porous. One of the main reasons the old machine failed is that it created a strong boundary between a highly protected inside within which agency was concentrated and a highly vulnerable outside, where consequences were dispersed. While this made for efficient knowledge production, it also led to moral hazards. So the new machine, I suspect, will have a much more porous structure. It might even be all “on the surface” like mandalas, except that the surface logic will be truly machinic in being shaped by a drive to know rather than a drive to care.

Second, I have been enamored lately of a definition of protocols we came up with in the Summer of Protocols: engineered arguments. While not all machines embody arguments, societal machines usually do. Party political machines, systems of checks and balances, and other societal arrangements, all allow for people to maintain ongoing structured arguments about real things without constantly trying to kill each other while working things out. This is the main feature which distinguishes the outer appearances of machines and mandalas. The arguments are real, and about materially meaningful things where adding knowledge and persuasive deductions, inductions, and abductions actually moves things along. They’re not ceremonial performances that achieve primarily social outcomes.

The task of creating an assemblage of new societal machines to reanimate the dying machine aspect of the world is a task of argument engineering.

And third: to borrow a term being evangelized by my buddies at the Berggruen Institute, the new machine will need to be a planetary machine, rather than a national or global one. This has various implications (I recommend the book by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman, Children of a Modest Star).

Porosity, engineered arguments, planetarity. Notions that add at least some depth to the tired futurist tropes we’ve been working with for too long. Maybe somewhere in the Venn diagram intersection of those three qualities, there are design ideas for the contraption we need.

1. The term machinic, popularized by postmodernists/critical theory types. I think mainly by Bernard Stiegler. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong. It is meant to stand in opposition to organic, in the same all-encompassing sense. Compared to the more conventional term mechanistic, which is typically used as a narrow adjective, machinic gestures at a larger gestalt (and generally construed more ominously)