PLANTATION OF THE AUTOMATONS

The thesis of James’s Magnum Opus is that ‘we are living in an emergent new Empire of Scientism in the form of a scientocracy’ or automatic technocracy that will transform us via AI and algorithms into nodes in an automated network as a form of technobondage mediated by transhumanism. This means that our autonomy and agency are being assimilated into automatic processes under the guise of convenience and championed by undemocratic and unaccountable corporations and elite institutions like the World Economic Forum, which sees such ‘advancements’ as inevitable and irresistible progress towards global governance, merging humans with machines and abolishing the organic person in the process. The plantation metaphor of the title evokes the history of imperialism and slavery, with the addition of impending implantation leading to a system of ‘utter control and management of human consciousness.’ We have recently witnessed the warning lights with the intensification of perceptual and behavioural mechanisms of control where mainstream news becomes indistinguishable from propaganda while journalists abrogate their ethical responsibility of upholding truth and uncovering deception.

This seminal and radical text is based on extensive historical and contemporary interdisciplinary analysis, written with eloquence and passion, using a large number of nouns beginning with A. The five parts address What and why? Wherefrom? What do we leave behind? Why do we surrender? How is the plantation made? And how to respond? Among the significant influences on James’s thinking are Philip K Dick and the Inklings in the form of Owen Barfield, CS Lewis, and JRR Tolkien, all of whom were presciently aware of the dangers of mechanising the human being, absorbing the personal into the impersonal, subject into object, spirit into matter, organism into machine.

We are seeing a new form of colonialism in the form of colonising the mind, backed by the imperial force of science and globalism in alliance with corporate interests (the main meaning of ‘stakeholders’) that have financed international institutions and universities underpinning research agendas, and have captured key government agencies, not to mention politicians and media. Given the scientistic understanding of the human being as a machine or hackable animal, the aim is programming, standardisation [harmonisation] and control, leading to acquiescence, passive conformity, compliance, and obedience, with corresponding (largely automated) totalitarian censorship of dissidents and dissenting opinions – in other words of independent and critical thinkers, many of whom are now caricatured as far right extremists.

A key insight is the military-industrial mindset underpinning these developments – officers give orders that troops are expected to obey unquestioningly. James writes (p. 56) that almost all the high-tech products and services [and infostructure] we prize as scientific progress are the fruit of the military industrial machine, ‘and reflect a long-established commitment to control of opponents now being applied to the public.’ The military-intelligence language of security has become ubiquitous, now referring not only to geopolitics, but also to health (biosecurity) and the environment, with nature characterised as an enemy. We have ‘wars’ against terrorism, drugs, cancer, pests and weeds. One of the latest developments is ‘cognitive security,’ where are the threat comes from those advocating in narrative different from what is officially sanctioned. We are en route to total militarisation. James observes that ‘ultimately, military power determines who makes rules. Military power is being transmuted into a wider more total enterprise of civilian control through techniques it supposedly developed for use against foreign and alien forces. As alienation is fomented, opportunity has been created to treat all as dangerous [a security threat]’. (p. 154)

The promotion of dominant narratives ‘is largely received automatically if people are exposed to them in a propagandist way. Executive control of our cognition is given over to mantras and messages that assume the position of critical thinking. The key is repetition, for instance ‘safe and effective’, ‘no one safe till everyone safe’ the ‘new normal’, ‘build back better’ or the successful campaign to persuade people that Saddam Hussein had a hand in 9/11 and had nuclear weapons. Advertising and propaganda have a common origin in attempting to elicit a conditioned response. These developments were chillingly foreshadowed by George Orwell. The example of ATMs is meant to show that impersonal and automatic is progress, but the overall trend is ‘to increase dependency on automatic elements so as to minimise and exclude humans.’ Bank clerks have been removed, then banks, and perhaps ultimately cash within ‘a totalising tech-network without a choice of alternatives.’ Deceptively, ATMs personalise themselves with a message that ‘we are preparing your cash’ – who is we? Our very personhood is being removed.

The essential point at issue is the essential nature of the human being where ideas and metaphors have become increasingly mechanised since the 17th century. We are trapped in technological loops of our own making, all in the name of progress, with what James calls a master-loop of automatic propaganda as a process of normalisation through magnetisation, alignment, synchronisation, training, ‘confirmatory evidence,’ and re-affirmation, all of which ‘work by auto-overwhelming the critical faculty and inducing repeated responses based on the desire to belong.’ (p. 254) This system is further elaborated in an A-Z of the automated-military authoritarian governance loop (pp. 656-8) - it is very penetrating and disturbing in hitting the bull’s-eye, in particular with respect to ‘war loops’ (p. 734) where wars – such as Ukraine – are created to ‘suit strategic goals of attaining global governance.’ The important point is not to succumb to a loop of passive helplessness.

This means developing what James calls an ‘animasphere’ as an antidote to the technosphere. This is an ontological and epistemological move maintaining the primacy of the human spirit and spiritual consciousness ‘as constituting our identity, which allows an authentic engagement with the world through the exercise of agency. Acceptance of our agency is the basis of our autonomy. Otherwise, we become automatic and automatised.’ (p. 138) Coleridge, Dick and McGilchrist all insist on the true self as our primary consciousness, the source of poetic genius, imagination and inspiration (p. 749) We need to remember who we really are, and in this respect (pp. 756-8), James sets out an A-Z of spiritual consciousness, anamnesis, resistance and resilience involving our capacity for direct knowledge and insistence on transcendent values represented by the beautiful, the true and the good.

Our crisis is at root a spiritual failure that demands an evolutionary and spiritual response. Thoreau warned over 100 years ago that ‘all our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end,’ and one perennial response was given by the prophet Micah, ‘to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God,’ and as Neil Postman observed, ‘there is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.’ (p. 763) James (p. 767) quotes Evelyn Underhill in arriving at his own fundamental proposition that God is spirit and that we must cultivate our disposition of receptivity with discipline and humility and awareness: ‘The Divine represents a force which must act subtly by insinuating itself into our consciousness. Our spirit is It or is linked to it through surrender to the force of love,’ – as Simone Weil also maintained. At this critical juncture, we each have a responsibility to resist the abolition of our personhood and humanity, to reconceive the force of love and the primacy of the heart, and to draw on the profound power of the imagination in order to reanimate and resacralise ourselves and the world – recovering the Anima Mundi and rediscovering an ancient worldview that indigenous peoples never lost.