Totalitarian violence of algorithm

When dead protocols colonise life

Image © NeoInferno 262, 2023

The system says “No”

Any totalitarian system in order to maintain its fictitious legitimacy has to rely on bureaucracy as a means to force the implementation of its ideology into the minds and hearts of its society—collectively and individually.

When social relations become contrived through hyper-bureaucratic strictures which stand in the way of authentic relating between people, one must ask the question: “Is there enough sociality in such an algorithmically automated ecosystem for it to live up to the definition of society?”—one may argue that if arbitrary, mechanistic protocols replace spontaneous interactions between individuals, the very organic integrity of such a system is in question.

This is because when the naturally self-organising life-force of human interaction becomes stifled under an iron boot of algorithmic regulation of bureaucracy whose lifeless rationale exploits rhetoric to ensure compliance, those who fail to see through the deception of such a rhetoric—as I will argue with Arendt, Fromm, Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas and Heidegger—lose their capacity for thinking which ultimately leads to violence.

Algorithmic thoughtlessness

According to the 20th century’s political philosopher Hannah Arendt who had to flee Nazi Germany as a Jewish dissident intellectual, algorithmic thoughtlessness as loss of human capacity for spontaneous thought is the chief currency of the cult-like mind controlling propaganda deployed by totalitarian systems.

A totalitarian system needs human behaviour automated as the lever of its mechanistic control of life. My thesis is that if biological cognition needs freedom to thrive through creativity, collaboration and self-transcendence, then a totalitarian regime seeks to replace organic thought with a conditioned, automated responses to ensure compliance with its anti-life cult. Totalitarianism, which runs on bureaucracy that is a by definition algorithmic (rule-based, sequential, input-output problem-solving protocol), is anti-life because it seeks to bureaucratise life, which by its very nature is non-linear, spontaneous, and uncontrollable.

According to Arendt’s contemporary, the mystically inclined psychologist-anthropologist Erich Fromm who also fled Hitler’s Germany, life’s natural impulses when they get repressed end up metastasising into violence—the last resort available to life’s thwarted self-assertion.

In his 1973’s cross-disciplinary mammoth The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness he concludes:

(...) destructiveness and cruelty are not instinctual drives, but passions rooted in the total existence of man. They are one of the ways to make sense of life; they are not and could not be present in the animal, because they are by their very nature rooted in the ‘human condition.’¹

What Fromm means by the human condition is that, unlike non-human animals, Homo Sapiens Sapiens lives within an existential predicament defined by the intrinsic conflict between being part of nature while at the same time transcending this nature through our creative self-expression that imbues our life with existential meaning. This anthropological fact is accounted for in religious terms as “being made in the image of God:” our creative faculty makes us godlike but only at the cost of recognising our animal limitations; the human striving for the infinite can only be attempted from the finite context of our embodied biological reality.

The quest to reconcile this discord, according to Fromm, defines our unique place in the animal kingdom. When this quest leads us towards creative self-transcendence through meaningful action in the world, we evolve towards a greater humanity; but when we fail to utilise our discontents through our productive faculties, we become destructive.

Bureaucracy and violence

The bottom line here is that the life-forces which cannot find natural expression are bound to blow up in our faces when they are stifled by a top-down process of rationalising agency through algorithmic protocols.

In her personal experience Arendt was twice arrested by the Gestapo before she managed to set free and eventually flee to the USA. She remained preoccupied by the question of what made good citizens complicit in the Hitlerist crimes against humanity. In On Violence the thinker highlights bureaucracy as a development which by removing personal accountability is a perfect tyrannical tool.

While direct exploitation of one individual by another is bad enough, Arendt tells us, unreflexive submission to bureaucratic codes removes a sense of personal responsibility from the equation, thus dehumanising those who unquestioningly follow dead protocols:

…the rule of man over man—of one of the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best of the many in artistocracy and democracy. Today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion: bureaucracy or the rule of the intricate system of bureaus in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which with traditional political thought, we identify tyranny as government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done.²

Rules are useful insofar as they help maintain order, but they can only work by ignoring details. Administration is necessary for managing effectively any functional system, but when we get stuck in a Kafkesque horror of being reduced to a number as we’re cut off from the assumed reasons which determine our fate, we might miss the moment which calls us to re-evaluate our criteria for legitimacy of the very rules designed to dictate our conduct in the world. Thus, once we sacrifice our personal agency on the altar of the Moloch of bureaucracy, we’re on a slippery slope to thoughtlessness which tyranny requires in order to maintain its false legitimacy.

While tyranny and totalitarianism are not synonyms, they both rely on the subjugation of the individual to arbitrary dictates of centralised power, including resorting to measures of deception, coercion and psychological—or even physical— violence.

The mindlessness of calculative thinking

But does mindlessness mean we don’t think at all?

No. One can be perfectly functional within narrowly defined, purely algorithmic cognitive skills—what Adorno and Horkheimer in their classic Dialectic of Englightenment (1944) called instrumental reason, echoing Weber’s bureaucratic rationality; both concepts borne out of the same concerns that plagued Heidegger in his later reflections on calculative thinking as a path to thoughtlessness during the atomic age of the Cold War:

This flight-from-thought is the ground of thoughtlessness. But part of the flight is that man will neither see nor admit it. Man today will even flatly deny this flight from reasoning. He will assert the opposite. He will say – and quite rightly – that there were at no time such far-reaching plans, so many inquiries in so many areas, research carried on as passionately as today. Of course. And this display of ingenuity and deliberation has its own great usefulness. Such thought remains indispensable. But – it also reamains true that it is thinking of a special kind.³

Such cognitive oblivion of intrumental rationality powered by the logic of utility is the kind of thinking that is incapable of metacognitive assessment which can afford us a wholistic perspective that has the power to transcend mindless bureaucracies to deliver us to wisdom.

It does seem that our world has been colonised by a means-to-ends instrumentality while many of the societal ills we are living through right now are the result of our having lost the existential meaning which has the power to drive our purpose, motivation and personal fulfilment. Calculative thinking can make us more efficient by producing data, but it fails misearably at generating human meaning. Calculative thinking, Heidegger maintains, dehumanises us:

This calculation is the mark of all thinking that plans and investigates. Such thinking remains calculation even if it neither works with numbers nor uses an adding machine or computer. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is.

Understood in this way, calculative thinking, or more broadly, instrumental rationality is stuck in the rut of problem-solving protocols as defined by algorithmic strictures of bureaucracies and reductionist paradigms. When we are stuck in the thoughtlessness of this mode of reasoning—as Arendt argued⁴ was the case with Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi manager of transportation networks which connected Nazi deathcamps and the ghettos—we become vulnerable to becoming accomplices of great atrocities while remaining shielded from the tagible reality of their horrors - by the artifice of bureaucracy whose objective rules, regulations and numbers magically imbue those atrocities with an aura of legality, however far removed from morality.

But the bureaucracies which powered the regimes of the 20th century were analogue while the 21st century’s tools for the same job are carried out by the means of AI and machine learning algorithms which afford their administrators unprecedented exponential power—for the first time in history human error can be amplified and scaled exponentially. This is the reality of the BigTech dystopia of the neo-feudal fascism with a mask of progressivist socialist ideology which conceals from us the sheer inhumanity of total automation. Its trillion-dollar PR and merketing campaigns have been designed to anaesthetise oblivious populations to Moloch’s malignant intentions.

The banality of technocratic evil

The digitalisation of bureaucratic protocols allows exponential scaleability unlike ever before. Recursively self-learning AI algorithms will harness the data on those whose behaviour they are optimised to modify with an objective to induce conformity with powerful economic imperatives. At the same time, there is no person behind the code to refer to, which makes the ordeal a Kafkesque horror on steroids.

To say more, while the past bureacracies powered the most bloodthirsty regimes to date, the destructive power of the digital ones might breed a more insidious species of violence than their analogue predecessors. The forms of bureaucratic control facilitated by AI-powered digital infrastructures can exercise psychological violence instead of physical one more efficiently: subliminally and therefore more imperceptibly than ever before. It’s enough to make a person frustrated by blocking their access to services or goods, for them to lash out in the least expected moment, thus venting the aggression which they could not express towards an impersonal protocol. We tend to lash out at those we most care about, our fellow humans, not at the machines which are the source of our frustrations.

Here’s how in 1969 Arendt examines the role of bureaucracy as a violence-generating operating system of future totalitarian regimes:

The greater the bureacratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction to violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

Just as strength and a sense of empowerment produce a sense of calm, security and kindness, wouldn’t total powerlessness in the face of dead impersonal protocols produce total violence?

How self-destructive could life’s reaction be to the digital suffocation of its spontaneous thriving?

It’s surprising that the majority of people fail to see (or fail to care to see) the darkside of this scenario where, in Habermas’ terms, life world becomes colonised by systems world; where dead strictures dictate the coordinates for the process of life, thus repressing organic spontaneity, stifling vitality and mutating their life-giving power into a death-inducing ordeal of universal violence which is the endgame of all totalitarianisms. These regimes are inherently self-terminating because they don’t serve life. In the end life prevails as only life itself is while, by definition, death is not. But the road to life’s future liberation from the deathcult of algorithmic violence seems to be paved, as it has ever been, with mass human sacrifice—the self-terminating nature of Moloch consists in consuming human children.

Triumph of life

Ultimately, though, life has been on this planet for the past 3,7 billion years and wouldn’t have a problem surviving without us. The question is whether humanity manages to grow up enough to learn how to use its technological genius in service of life rather than against it. If we don’t learn the lesson, life will dispose of us as it has done with all previous civilisations. Universal suffering will be the catalyst for humanity’s self-transcendence into planetary consciousness, the overdue arrival of which I wish to us all.

1. Erich Fromm (1973) The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness; London: Pimlico.

2. Hannah Arendt (1970) On Violence; New York: A Harvest Book.

3. Martin Heidegger (1969) Discourse on Thinking; New York: Harper and Row.

4. Hannah Arendt (2005) Eichmann and the Holocaust; London: Penguin.