# The netocratic power triad: Informationalists, sensocrats and protopians As we analyze the power structure of the information age properly, it helps to make a distinction between three different categories of intelligence: namely *biological intelligence*, *technological intelligence* and *symbiotic intelligence*. We thereby move from Arthur Schopenhauer's *will-to-life* via Friedrich Nietzsche's [[Will-To-Power]] to the dialectics of *will-to-intelligence* and *will-to-transcendence*. Biological eventology is driven by will-to-life (whose inverted trauma is *the pandemic*), technological eventology is driven by will-to-power (whose inverted trauma is *the war*), while symbiotic intelligence, which emerges from the encounter between Man and Machine, is driven by will-to-intelligence (whose inverted trauma is *the apocalypse*). And the name of the holistic will-to-intelligence that constantly renews itself is [[Syntheos]], the created god or creativity in itself as a divine category. However, it is will-to-transcendence on top of will-to-intelligence that gives life to and fills Syntheos with energy by functioning as the objective and meaning of Syntheos. This is what we mean with [[Symbiotic Intelligence]] -- a concept that we developed in 2018 along with American cyberneticists Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall -- that is to say the absolute intelligence that is developed when Man and Machine together succeed in achieving their optimal interplay. Symbiotic intelligence is then the raw material for the equally symbiotic [[Protopianism]] of informationalism, which is optimally expressed in the conquest and construction of *the augmented territory*, for example as a *network-state* as proposed by technologist Balaji Srinivasan. Will-to-transcendence pulls humanity forward, will-to-intelligence seeks solutions for everyone to rise and join in the march forward. Please note that we neither advocate any humanism or general submission *vis-à-vis* technology. To define will-to-intelligence as fundamental is of course rather just a retroactive recognition of symbiotic intelligence as the historical completion of this particular spirit. This even concerns a kind of *vitalism* in a broad sense -- emphasized and advocated by process philosophers such as Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze -- which is connected to the fact that libido must precede mortido wherever they bump into each other within the actual system. The Zoroastrian word for this vitalism is *ameretat*, that which is non-death, often erroneously translated as immortality but instead correctly translated -- from the Zoroastrian principle of the primordiality of the process -- as *that which is constantly vitally flowing*. *Ameretat* thus does not care whether the actual system has flows of water, blood, diesel or electricity, as long as it generates and spreads libidinal vitality in itself. Firstly for itself, secondly for its environment. Deleuze calls this state *virtual space* and sees it as a kind of protopian rather than utopian ideal state, a kind of *promised land* as the objective for the digital netocracy's exodus from capitalism. A radicalized negative eventology where, in Deleuze's own words, "every event is a manifestation of God's non-existence". Or as South African syntheologist Jamie Wheal expresses the matter: After a history filled by scores of finite games, humanity is moved to a state where *the infinite game* that never ends becomes the new normal. *This is protopianism in a nutshell.* Syntheism is developed in the form of the *frashokereti* of symbiotic intelligence during informationalism. This happens by necessity since violence and sexuality still to a great extent are realities for Man, also in his relation to The Machine. At the same time we should note that violence and sexuality guarantees that the membrane *vis-à-vis* the surrounding world never is closed. Pathos cannot be repressed in the long term, and the longer it is kept contained, the more violent the explosion that will occur once the pathical narrative penetrates through the inadequate seal. In the everyday lives of ordinary people, this pathos often assumes the form of unabashed imitation, also the mimicry of the mechanical drive and human desire in itself. Subconsciousness is filled with the desire to mimic, and this compulsive mimicking leads to an identification with the mimicked behavior, whereupon this mimicked behavior creates a self that is based upon this illusory experience. Thereafter it is this barred subject that is the driving force during the next round of mimicry, which in turn powers the massive pathos that the barred subjects become obsessed with propelling and maintaining. We agree with how philosopher and mathematician Thomas Hamelryck expresses this matter in his speculations around René Girard's concept *mimetic desire* and the thereupon ensuing rivalries as the foundations for Man's existential behaviors: The place of mimetics in the subconscious is so extremely central that it guarantees its role as *the real* within Man before himself. The presumably unique in Man's personality is drenched in a contingent chaos in which the dividual only can orient himself through diligently mimicking more or less arbitrarily selected neighbors and idols. The imaginary (or mythical) and the symbolic (the rational) are naturally there, as evident and even conscious fantasies. However the blind spot that Man does not see, what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls *the real*, is *de facto* Man's own obsession with mimicry and rivalry in the subconscious. And when the tension in these relations does not lead to any event or any exodus, there is then but one channel left through which to handle the accumulated surplus energy, and that is to submit to and identify oneself with the raging and embittered *lynch mob*. ## So without resorting to some sort of banal moralism it is still reasonable to pose the question: How do these mechanisms function? ## What forces are we talking about? The dialectics of libido and mortido leads us up to *the four steps of the pathical evolution*. First *potential energy* arises -- the difference between the virtual and the potential lies precisely in that the latter has energy, or *potency* -- which then transitions into *actual energy*. Actual energy then transitions into *directed energy*, whereafter the pathical evolution is completed with *transcendental energy*, which naturally must constitute the potential energy in the next chain on the next level. The pathical evolution returns as the chain of cause and effect in all narratives of carried-out and successful projects, this under the prerequisite that there have not been obstacles put up that make the passage more difficult. This also applies during informationalism. The constantly growing amount of collected data corresponds to the potential energy, while the processing of all this information corresponds to the actual energy. The mechanical architecture that takes advantage of and imploits the actual energy corresponds to the directed energy or the digital will-to-intelligence. All the while the new narrative of the new protopian dreams, which chart the course for the digital revolution, corresponds to the transcendental energy as will-to-transcendence. This time in history this energy and will ironically enough appear as the longed-for change of Man from within, via synthetic biology, and at the same time as the surrender of Man's ambitions to himself become a god who conquers and colonizes outer space -- a dream that pales before the digital Saoshyant's cold and crass gaze once [[Syntheos]] becomes a reality and symbiotic transcendence grabs power. Similar to previous paradigmatic elites, the netocracy also consists of a triad that gives cause for expecting a considerable measure of stability over time. The real power during feudalism was administered by an aristocracy that, in conjunction with the transition to capitalism, saw its hold on power and real status vanish and which was replaced by the bourgeoisie, or *the industrialists*. The imaginary power during feudalism was administered by a monarch, who in conjunction with the transition to capitalism either was executed, driven into exile, or saw his power reduced to pure symbolics, whereby the monarch's power was taken over by *the politicians*. During feudalism the symbolic power was handled by a church, which after the death of God in conjunction with the transition to capitalism was forced to hand over its power to *the university*, and which thereafter had to settle for merely administering baptisms, weddings, funerals, and various ceremonies connected to various holidays. However nothing lasts forever, and certainly not any hold on power. When capitalism transitions into informationalism the prerequisites under which both industrialists and politicians as well as universities were active and exercised power, gradually disappear. Their positions are reduced to a ceremonial character, and power -- the real, the imaginary and the symbolic -- transitions to what we refer to as *the three netocracies*, namely *informationalism*, *sensocracy* and *protopianism.* Membranically we express this as though the phallic task of the netocratic informationalists is to discern boundaries in chaos, while the phallic task of the sensocrats is to maintain these boundaries both *vis-à-vis* tyranny and *vis-à-vis* chaos, and the phallic task of the protopians is to question and stretch these boundaries with the aid of the machines to thereby further reduce the level of chaos. The three elites' common task is, thus, to create order in existence and to the greatest extent possible tame an otherwise apocalyptic chaos. Their reward, if and when they can demonstrate success, is the status and freedom that comes with power itself. The netocratic *informationalists* gather and process the fundamental data. The *sensocrats* control the sensors in the direction toward a global *panopticon* and exercise the police and military control over the planet and its population. Sensocracy utilizes an abstract power sharing and a concrete sharing of information to contravene an otherwise suffocating stupidity, in the form of tyranny, and unmanageable diversity, in the form of anarchy, with the overall purpose of optimizing free flows in all directions and thereby maximize the conditions for social and technological innovation. You can observe power in a sensocracy in the same way as power observes you, in accordance with the fundamental contractual condition that inventor and researcher Steve Mann calls *sousveillance*, the voluntary information gathering at the grassroots level. The *protopians* dictate the exodological narrative of the netocracy's rise, direction and objectives, while they keep the destructive information -- that which at any given time could destroy rather than ennoble humanity -- inaccessible behind [[The Barred Absolute]]. Just as the name suggests, this digital clergy devotes itself to a constant logical, mythical and pathical experimentation. As the masses devote themselves to *mimicry* inside closed echo chambers where aggression thrives, the protopians are instead driven by [[Antagony]] within their creative and membranical subcultures. The protopians thereby realize the ideal that anthropologist Karl Polanyi in his classic work *The Great Transformation* (1944) calls *a society of explorers*. The creature that once was *Homo sapiens* (Man who knows) has become what anthropologist Johan Huizinga, contemporary with Polanyi, calls *homo ludens* (Man who plays). And the protopians do this, just as Polanyi and Huizinga suggest, through focusing on *transparadigmatic substantivism* in Man, rather than on the temporary formalism that prevailing conventions emphasize. The protopian activity is only possible behind the barred absolute. The protopians must, namely, be able to undisturbedly devote themselves to *the cephalization* of what is most brilliant within the prevailing system, so that this cephalization shall be able to spin itself off and carry out its own liberation, its own *exodus*, from the old system, without this old system annihilating the tender but burgeoning cephalization prematurely. It is this creative laboratory that the ancient Greeks call *adyton* and that the Romans later refer to as *sanctum sanctorum*. The membranics around and the paradigmatics inside the barred absolute are consequently referred to as [[Adytonology]], the doctrine of how to succeed with the cephalization of the exceptional novelty inside the barred absolute, Man's religious as well as technological experimental workshop. ## How does one simply squeeze out the best from the esoteric as well as the exoteric in religion? Here the most important of all netocratic principles comes into play. Since technology is global but humanity is local, all of humanity's activities must unconditionally be subjected to *the principle of contestability*. Just as in the bazaars along the Silk Road there must be competition for there to arise brilliance in the trade systems, for without brilliance no historical events of value are attained. Historian of economics Joel Mokyr investigates the principle of contestability thoroughly in the book *A Culture of Growth* (2016), where he shows how cultures that lack competition at all important levels sooner or later implode as a result of corruption and decadence. The cephalizations are not born into monopolies, but they must meet each other in an exodological landscape where they are compelled to challenge each other for dominance over the territory. So they need the barred absolute to protect them during the growing-up period that precedes the adult challenges. The esoteric must have time to grow before it can be confronted with the exoteric. If they are to leave adytonology at all to optimize their role and their value. Adytonology is simply the particular laws and rules behind the barred absolute, which stand out as radically different from the general laws and rules outside its membrane. If the social sciences study the necessary sutra of a society, adytonology in itself is the tantra of the very same society. Which entails that the first principle of adytonology is that the otherwise universal cameras and microphones of the digital age are strictly turned off. It is thus not possible to imagine any form of netocratic autocracy that would be durable over a longer period of time, and it does not matter how much the Chinese Communist Party dreams of precisely this in the early 21st century. Sensocracy must be nurtured and remain open and plural in order to function optimally and hold its own *vis-à-vis* competing systems. This open stance is seen clearly in the values that the protopians cultivate, where antagony is the propelling principle for intellectual and creative expansion. The barred absolute is thus anything but a temporary matrix for escapism. Adytonology is rather the doctrine of how the protopian challenges him- or herself toward his or her adult absolute, (and therefore) divine boundary. A dictator can quite simply never become a netocrat, and a netocrat can never even consider striving for autocracy, since a dictator automatically puts himself and his court of yeasayers in a constantly self-confirming and never challenged echo chamber. Creativity thrives along the trade routes of history, not at the courts of centralized empires. Decisions will never be better than the foundations that support them. Antagony and contestability thus are intimately connected, just as the insight that nothing in the network society can be implemented by force from above, simply because every valuable key member can just leave the networks where they do not find the sought-after antagony. Every single network must, in order to be competitive, be built on *voluntarianism,* otherwise it is in the long term incapable of even being able to generate value. Dictatorship can in accordance with the principle of contestability thus only be defended in wartime, since there in this state of crisis is a clear enemy outside the membrane that the dictatorship *de facto* contests. But in peacetime a dictatorship becomes a burden, since it prevents the spontaneous emergence of creative antagonies inside the actual membrane. The closed, non-antagonic society becomes asinine and ejects itself from the phallic eventology to instead adhere to a pseudomatrichal nomadology. Which was exactly what happened in -- for instance -- the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe after the iron curtain had been raised to keep external impulses out and enterprising citizens in. The lack of contestability led to a lack of phallus which led to a lack of testosterone overall. The dated feature in the dictatorship got the upper hand and the system imploded. Which brings us to the unfortunate history of communism. If Karl Marx and orthodox disciples of his opine that Lenin is in too much of a hurry when he shall get the Russian farmers to take a giant leap directly from feudalism to the communist event -- without any intermediary industrialization -- and therefore is left sitting with a colossus with feet of clay, namely the inexpressibly clumsy, socialist Soviet Union, we then claim that Karl Marx himself is in too much of a hurry when he believes that the European workers shall take a leap directly from capitalism to the communist event. What instead happens -- and history proves us right in this -- is that we ended up sitting with the unwieldy, social democratic welfare state as *the great mamilla* (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*). Lenin is simply communism's hot-headed boy-pharaoh and Marx is communism's dreaming pillar-saint. Their cephalizations of the communist meme fail because both are in too much of a hurry with, and do not understand adytonology. The adult, phallic project that aims to exorcize the evil spirit of capital from the societal body and restore the perfect membranics of the sociont with its assumed safety and security -- that is: broadly comprised trust in and care of one another within society -- cannot be carried out via the revolts of either feudalist peasants or industrialist workers. These can only generate new, corrupt nomenclatures that rapidly create and frenetically guard their own privileges. Exactly as 20th century socialism proved to be the case. We want to be able to trust strangers; it is prerequisite for us to be able to cash in on the archetypological law of comparative advantages that says that everyone shall do what they do best, and that all benefit when we then exchange goods and services with each other instead of everyone trying to be self-sufficient. It is also a prerequisite for us being able to create the meritocratic society where everyone is rewarded in accordance with their contribution and nothing else. This is fundamentally about incentivizing structures; that everyone shall benefit from everyone else benefiting from acting in a trustworthy manner. Thus a variant of communism eventually arrives, propelled by digitalization and globalization. But it naturally only works in the form of *voluntarianism* -- its cephalization process still requires powerful membranes, and we already know from the socialist experiments that we endured in the 20th century that high-tax socialist states -- even in the best of cases -- merely generate temporary safety and security, but never enduring prosperity. And the reason is of course: the stubborn principle of contestability. The specific problem at the genesis of informationalism is that the netocrats do not have a clue what they shall do with the sedated, consumtarian masses who they inherit from industrialism's global population explosion and who are addicted to quick calories and banal entertainment. Up until informationalism, it has seemed a kind of cultural law that there always by necessity is a dialectical relation between the upper class and the underclass. The dialectics of the elite and the masses has been taken for granted merely because of their synchronous existence. One imagines that they mutually condition each other. During feudalism the masses are for instance used as slaves since pure muscular strength was in demand. During industrialism the exploitation of the masses was incrementally shifted from the body to the mind, and the slaves were replaced by salaried workers. But during informationalism there is no longer any such exploitation, even for imagination to play with. What there is, is the possibility to use the masses as a consumtariat that squeezes quantity into the social relations where quality is lacking. This results in a lot of low-paying service sector jobs, the so-called *precariat* swells and sees itself, correctly or not, as exploited by the more well-off who order for example transportation or take-away food. Regardless of what parameters one chooses, the class divisions grow virtually exponentially and become greater than ever with each passing year. The sociontic contribution principle is disabled and society is falling apart at the seams. This means that the dialectical relation between masters and slaves only can exist up to the point in time when quantity no longer can replace quality and the masses as such become irrelevant to the elite. For instance when robots replace manual laborers and drones replace soldiers on the battlefields. Thereby the digital class society becomes more brutal than has been the case at any other point earlier in history, even though one can claim that the system is softened by the fully developed meritocracy: the nurturing sensocrats will not overlook or reject any talent from the underclass. Rather they will be made intensely aware of any such talent. The age-old dream of precisely the meritocratic society -- which both Marx and Nietzsche are passionate about -- becomes actual reality. As for the same possibilities for absolutely everyone, equality becomes unprecedentedly radical and universal. As for the outcome after culling and well-managed opportunities, however, something that even resembles equality is completely unthinkable, a grotesque idea. Attention, the asset that is central during informationalism (see [[The Netocrats]]) cannot be taxed, at least not in the same way as money, which makes a discussion about equal outcome pointless. The very thought becomes unthinkable. The netocratic protopians approach their own dividual challenges in life in four different ways: through mimicry, competition, fraud, and pure chance. In this way the focus is kept on the paradigmatic exodus. The absence of nostalgia prevents the protopians from getting mired in the past. At the same time the protopians' withholding of information is particularly important in a society obsessed with what we call *the barred abject*. Just as the dividual itself never succeeds in reaching itself and therefore constantly is propelled forward by the search for *the barred subject,* an absurd but nevertheless effective cohesion is generated within lynch mobs and echo chambers, through the projection onto the barred absolute that it must somehow conceal and protect a longed-for barred abject, that the masses intensely desire to be able to hate together for the sake of cohesion. We call this cohesion *anojection* and it is recognizable by its violent authoritarian streak. This fact explains the explosion of conspiracy theories that the network society displays. These conspiracy theories are always built on an alien and threatening network that is gathered around an odd but strong interest that the network at any cost must protect from insight. This is [[The Barred Abject]]. And detaching the barred abject from the conspiracy in question, the conspirators regard as tantamount to robbing the conspiracy of all its power and definitively pulverizing it. Nonetheless the barred absolute must be maintained in order for virus, bacteria, lethal drugs, and nuclear weapons not to start circulating any which way and without control. The barred absolute is fundamental for all civilization, and this applies even more in a digital age where the global communications are instantaneous. Moreover, it is behind the barred absolute that the ideas to all of informationalism's Netflix series, Wikipedia articles, and YouTube lectures emerge through experimentation. This is why we describe this shamanic caste of informationalism as *the protopian class*, a concept invented by author and journalist Kevin Kelly, founder and seasoned editor of the tech bible *Wired*. During informationalism the barred absolute more than ever demarcates the membrane between *the dark phallus of pathos* inside the barred absolute and *the light phallus of logos* on the public podium before the same. The dark phallus is tantric and can only lead cults, sects, or lodges behind the barred absolute. The light phallus is however the sutric *Saoshyant,* the one whom the people have waited for and whom they hope shall save them from perdition. This explains why public Messiah figures in thick bibles are called *logos* while the barred network's leader figures are expected to personify *pathos*. The difference between the Christ figure of the Christian pop religion as the light phallus and the Mithras figure of the Mithraic military religion as the dark phallus is as clear and gratifying an example as one could possibly wish for. The genesis and structure of the netocratic power triad is discussed as early as in our book [[The Netocrats]] from the year 2000. There we use the concepts *nexialists* (for the informationalists), *curators* (for the sensocrats) and *eternalists* (for the protopians). These original definitions of netocracy do however all actually belong within the symbolic order and do not fully take advantage of the real and imaginary qualities that a sustainable and multi-dimensional netocracy analysis also may comprise. The original concepts are all locked to the priestly will-to-intelligence and are as such locked to protopianism as its subdomains. The nexialists build the temple, the curators lead the faithful up to the temple, the eternalists dictate the story of the temple trek. Or to view it from another perspective: In our relationship to The Machine we constantly arrive at [[Symbiotic Intelligence]] as the optimal state. But with the new, wider concepts, we also indicate an exodological direction for the netocracy, an eventological will-to-transcendence beyond the erection of the temple. We quite simply set netocracy in a context colored by a necessary global and digital migration. The fuel for this gigantic exodus is called data and the processing of data (the informationalists), the tools are called sensors endowed with symbiotic intelligence (the sensocrats), and the continuous evaluation and the story of this exodus is called *symbiotic transcendence* (the protopians). Here The Machine contributes with will-to-intelligence (logos), while Man contributes both with will-to-intelligence and will-to-transcendence (logos and pathos). The result of this multibranched process is a fully adult netocracy that is ready to take overarching responsibility for the world -- or leave the old world, if this for various reasons is deemed preferable -- with a matching *mythos*. ## And out of what does this mythos begin to grow, if not out of a new and deepened understanding of the history of Man? As early as in 1920s' Paris, a group of philosophers and artists develop the proto-netocratic concept of *the noosphere*. The concept is first and foremost launched by theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his book *Cosmogenesis* (1922), a work that to a considerable extent is based on the previous works by Ukrainian biologist Volodymyr Vernadsky. The idea here is that Man's cultural activities motivate the description of planet Earth as something more than just the *geosphere* that physics and chemistry produce and the *biosphere* with all the life that comes from the geosphere. Thus, here is a predecessor to our own *emergence vector theory* for nature and *paradigmatics* for culture, mainly developed in and for the space between these quantities, that is: Earth itself. As long as we are speaking about the hydrosphere for the water on the planet and the atmosphere for the air around the planet, we also ought to be able to define and study the noosphere. ## But why would the noosphere -- the sphere of thoughts that surround Earth -- in that case be static, when Man's collective activities just keep increasing in scope and complexity, quite regardless of how we choose to value this unambiguous development? Rather, it is precisely in the emergence vector shift between mind and culture, that is: where Man with the aid of engineering phallically reshapes the world to his own tamed creation, that the most interesting things happen. And it is always the most interesting thing -- and not the first or the last -- in the actual causality chain, that we focus on in the development of *systemic perspectivism* as the supportive metanarrative of attentionalism. For good and bad, the Internet envelops the entire planet and thereby the noosphere is a tangible and indisputable fact. The communication satellites realize the syntheological dream of the eternal presence of [[The Phallic Gaze]]. Teilhard de Chardin calls this emergence *the Omega Point*. We refer to this power of the noosphere over all other spheres as the sensocracy. If all senses and sensory movements after all can be registered by sensors that all are interconnected with each other to a single, cohesive system, sensocracy is a historical fact. And everything from weather forecasts via fighting pandemics to stock market trade, appears as a series of increasingly synchronized pseudo-sensocracies as soon as informationalism has arrived. The sensocrats are thus curators precisely in the sense of *go-betweens* for Man and Machine. The netocrats that understand this, and who are forward-looking enough to collaborate with The Machine for the purpose of attaining the Omega Point -- where the implicate mind is transformed to the autonomous, explicate culture -- are the renowned sensocrats, the planet's new imaginary masters, who replace the monarchs and politicians of earlier paradigms, and who appear with their digital courts where sundry intrigue will unfold. They are of course -- even when drenched in symbiotic intelligence -- no more than humans. It's important here to emphasize that the informationalists are a necessary prerequisite for the sensocrats. Also keep in mind that the sensocrats are a necessary prerequisite for the protopians. This also means that the voyage to the fully developed netocracy is rife with a host of potential mistakes and even catastrophes. Once again: the involved are no more than humans. Even an overly rapid and overly ill-prepared transition from one paradigm to another most likely will lead to a bloody and destructive anarchy. Chaos rapidly leads to fantasies of a barred abject that must be driven out and killed. But these risks also exist during the development of netocracy itself. This means that the informationalists must support and facilitate the emergence of the sensocrats. And the sensocrats must support and facilitate the emergence of the protopians. Otherwise the development is arrested and the gaps that arise when the process grinds on at idling speed are filled by either the tyranny from the previous paradigm's old, weary and corrupt institutions -- which of course had the corresponding roles in the past and which purport to fill an important function in the pockets of vacuum that arise -- or else by the anarchy that stems from the new emerging forces that yet do not understand the historically necessary exodology. It is thus of paramount importance to distinguish between on the one hand totalitarian and authoritarian fantasies of *the centralized sensocracy* as a dictatorship, and on the other hand the open society's ambitions to build *the decentralized sensocracy* as the informationalist equivalent of liberal democracy. The road to a decentralized sensocracy goes via a deepened comprehension of the exploding [[Attentionalism]] (see [[The Netocrats]]). And what is fundamental is that if industrialism was governed by capital, informationalism is instead governed by attention. That is: Man could during capitalism, and with a democratic multi-party system, vote out the party or the leading politician he for some reason did not trust or deemed less able, a possibility that came around every three or four years (or as often as the length of the terms in office happened to be). The chieftain could be deposed instead of having to be murdered. During attentionalism, on the other hand, the sensocracy continuously, in real time, feels every human decision and emotional expression, every purchase and every indication of an interest. We make our choices every second, all the time, and then one might ask oneself how valuable it actually is to make a single political decision every three or four years. That sort of political theatre can possibly be allowed to live on, at least during a transitional phase, but the actual decisions are not made there and then, but constantly and all the time. One can really say that many small decisions together become a single big decision. Or more correctly: one long series of continuous decision-making. The sensocracy is simply characterized by what is best described as [[Systemic Causality]]. Please note that attentionalism's arrival does not mean that capitalism *de facto* vanishes, any more than capitalism's arrival entailed that the aristocracy with its estates and traditions was annihilated in one fell swoop -- this entire old superseded upper class world merely acquired an entirely different significance in an entirely different context. What happens is that the capitalist is demoted and moved down the food chain; the old paradigm becomes an underlying, pathical narrative on top of which new conditions form a breeding ground for new structures. Capital becomes a second-rate commodity, while there is an acute lack of attention precisely because it cannot be bought for money. That which during late capitalism goes by the name of *advertising* in practice becomes ineffective and does not communicate anything as much as a lack of ideas and substandard quality. We even dare to claim that *the abolition of advertising will be regarded as an even greater achievement for humanity than the abolition of slavery*. Attention is measured and processed by sophisticated sensors, and these sensors then lay the ground for the universal sensocracy. ## Who devotes time to what, why, how much and together with whom? It does not require all that much data from all of the world's sensors to rapidly be able to draw the entire *sociogram* that reveals precisely who knows and interacts with whom -- consciously or subconsciously -- and how this in turn relates to and influences the global power order. The dialectics of wisdom and energy is played out anew. We thereby get a hierarchy of attention on top of the hierarchy of capital. And the paramount issue is communication. ## How to reach out with a message when the clutter is numbing, at the same time as suspicion against everything that smells of paid manipulation is enormous? No key player in any attractive network cares about money's pathical narrative any longer. What is peddled in advertising spaces is increasingly junk products that are sold with shrinking margins to the consumtarian mass market. ## The question then is if you even want to reach out with a message for the purpose of *exploiting* an asset in the vulgar public arena, when the highest value always is locked in behind the barred absolute to be *imploited*, precisely by being reserved for a small select circle -- in the foreseeable future -- who appreciate this asset and preserve the knowledge of the same internally? This is hardly particularly likely, especially not if you, from the very start, have been active within attentionalism in such a way that you have become one of the paradigm's winners. The paradigm shift from industrialism to informationalism is brutally laid bare through the transition from capital to attention as the primary fuel of the processes. Attention is of course, as all digital citizens rapidly have to learn, incredibly hard to acquire and thereafter just as hard to maintain from one day to another. Capital, however, is always possible to borrow more of at the nearest digital bank office, as long as you just meet certain fundamental criteria. In order to maintain the balance between logos, mythos and pathos, the narratology constantly retells and instills the importance of Zoroastrian ethics through *the phallic principle of tribal contribution*. The question of what the sociont can do for you is the child's question, while the question of what you can do yourself for the sociont is the adult's question. Every time someone goes out in public to demand a form of freedom or a right -- without in the same breath signaling an understanding that this demand must be offset against a valuable contribution, a reciprocal effort -- we are basically seeing a small child yelling for yet another serving of breast milk. A remarkable dissonance arises every time these demands are made by someone who moves about in an adult body -- an insistent beggar or an infuriated demonstrator. Both narcissism and childishness burst through the roof whenever a little child screams for more breast milk, resisting every attempt toward sooner or later acting as a proud adult and taking responsibility for both oneself and for one's fellow humans. However acting in this manner would be to follow the phallic principle of tribal contribution. The demand that is directed from the beggar and the demonstrator is, as a rule, a demand with no direction or final destination. It addresses anybody that can be presumed to be better off and there is no point at which the demand in question is satisfactorily met, whereafter the beggar or the demonstrator is content and starts to follow the phallic principle of tribal contribution. There is always more to get your hands on, as long as someone else has a larger fortune or travels further when vacationing. The beggar and the demonstrator have -- once again as a rule -- right from the start declared their infantile motives, by using the revenue from their begging business or their list of demands for instant consumption instead of for some form of long-term investment. The money was of course an exhorted compensation for endured injustices in the past, not some form of strategic investment in a better future. Which means that the demands never will cease. The income that is free from any demands to work is transformed into a right, if this was not the idea all along. And with higher income there follow new and more expensive needs, which leads to higher demands. It is crowded and it becomes increasingly more crowded around the [[Mamilla]] that never seems to suffice. We get a subclass to the working class who do not even work. Ever. This is of course due to the fact that the beggar's or the demonstrator's mythos from the beginning insists that the necessity for personal responsibility must be ignored, so as to find the weak spot in you, the spot where you are most susceptible to induced guilt, to dock with mamilla and then milk it the best one can, while one preaches *the eternal accusation which never can be compensated enough*. Masses of destructive tax systems throughout history have unfortunately accepted and even favored this ideology. And with this ideology comes a state bureaucracy where everyone lines their own pockets at the expense of each other, since the system still is regarded as a mamilla that is there to be milked for magical resources, while its parasites declare their dissatisfaction and moan about the inadequacy of the milk ration. Matrichal magic takes out phallic technology, mythos is disconnected from logos, the sociobiologically necessary [[Adultification]] fails, the causality chain is ignored and even attacked. The proportion of entrepreneurs diminishes and the share of bureaucrats increases. Existence then merely becomes a struggle for constantly shrinking privileges, this since the system does not generate any new added value from below, but only in a costly manner regulates and distributes a constantly shrinking pie. Without the phallic principle of tribal contribution as a foundation, society collapses. What remains is anarchy, envy and poverty. This means that the phallic principle of tribal contribution is just as valid for social groups *vis-à-vis* larger social entities as it applies to the single dividual. We can use two popular subcultures from late capitalism and further on into the Internet Age as examples, namely *feminism* and *androgynism*. Both these movements arose during late capitalism as matrichal reactions to the golden age of the fake phallus, with concrete phallic failures such as Hitler and Stalin and abstract phallic threats such as nuclear weapons and the climate crisis. Feminism was successful also when it proudly maintained that women take responsibility for half of society and demanded gender-equal remuneration from state and market for this contribution. Androgynism was also successful when it proudly emphasized the androgynous caste's contribution to society as *go-betweens* of the male-dominated outer circuit and the female-dominated inner circuit. The androgynous person does not of course become an adult through going from boy to man or from girl to woman, but achieves adulthood precisely in the mirroring between the man and the woman. It is in the role as the one who is born to go in between that the androgynous person succeeds with his or her adultification, by embracing, in his or her own way, the phallic principle of tribal contribution. The sociont has its own inner map that we refer to as the *archetypogram*. The doctrine of how Man positions and orients himself within society, or rather within the paradigmatic power hierarchy, we therefore call *archetypology.* This work is called [[Tribal Mapping]] (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*). The inner circuit is the matriarchy; the outer circuit is the patriarchy. The androgynous caste are the sociont's internal intermediaries. The shamanic caste live in the borderland between the tribes. The shamanic caste are thus the sociont's external intermediaries. We speak of these odd relatives within the sociont as *the shamanoid archetypes*. These are *outcasts* in a literal sense -- all social structures that we study maintain these boundaries firmly. There is always an *intra muros*, a world within the walls that is characterized by intratribalism. However the shamanoid minority move in and out, through the guarded gates in these walls, by virtue of their own diplomatic membranes. Namely, they then live in an intertribalist world, and since they are tasked with handling *horizontal diplomacy* with the other socionts, the shamans also are assigned to handle *vertical diplomacy* with gods, demons, ancestors, and the spirit world. Conducting the reasoning and trade with vertical strangers is after all not that different from doing the same with horizontal strangers. It is therefore best to let all such dealings take place outside the area *intra muros*. We call these external border areas *the sociotopic colonies* and without them Man would never have come up with the idea of building temples or establishing trading posts where there previously only had been battlefields and hunting grounds. An excellent example of this hypothesis applied to modern history is Thaddeus Russell's revolutionizing historical study *A Renegade History of The United States* (2010), where Russell convincingly revises the entire American history from the perspective of the shamanoid minority. A better exodology for an America on its way into the Internet Age is hard to imagine. Unfortunately both feminism and androgynism have also been burdened by their own sects and cults, colored by internarcissistic infantility. The phallic principle of tribal contribution that generated pride and strength, was replaced by *the eternal accusation which never can be compensated enough,* which of course precisely as in spoiled children merely produces bitterness and greed. When Western feminism and androgynism in practice had finished triumphing and ought to have closed down activities in the form of a flattering matricide -- or better yet should have migrated to other more needy parts of the world -- these movements were instead taken over by state-financed funeral wailers, who constantly come up with increasingly absurd charges to keep alive an eternal process built on accusations of crimes for which compensation never can be possible, which is exactly the point. In the best -- or worst -- of all worlds, these processes do not have an ending. And as long as there is no demand on these movements to state their final destination, or provide a narrative of their Utopia, these movements will gladly bring one new injustice after the other to light, and thus drain the phallus via the state apparatus for a compensation that never can suffice. Once a victim, always a victim -- identity politics is ultimately a question of precisely this: the comfortable and revenue-yielding identity. There is precisely no incentive at all to give up this desirable status in order to take responsibility for the good of society oneself. Such a narrative is always hard to sell. The answer to the question that lies concealed within these problems is called *netocratic ethics* (see [[The Body Machines]]). It takes considerable amounts of talent and knowledge to be a successful netocrat. But above all it takes an attitude to information processing that invites challenge and plurality instead of cowering behind foolishness and prejudices. The consumtarian masses become mired in various echo chambers replete with comfortable repetition and predictable mimicking. The netocratic elite does however cultivate the ideal of *the antagonic self*. ## If I actually see through the admittedly functional but nevertheless fictitious myth of the self, and define myself as a schizoid dividual who possesses different sets of talents and knowledge that can add value in different networks with different members that all are part of my own disparate, digital subculture, why would I then not regard my co-actors in these different contexts in the same manner? ## And why would I not follow through on that thought by seeing myself as someone who lives on and through intellectual challenges, who constantly questions and reassesses with the purpose of constantly being in a state of change? ## Why then not identify my chameleonic, constantly shifting self-perception with *the paradoxist subject* (see *The Global Empire*), a subject whose sole permanence consists of its constant yearning and searching for [[Antagony]] in itself? It is quite clearly the mobile Hegelian subject and not the ossified Kantian subject that is best suited to meet the challenges of informationalism. Antagony is cultivated as an ideal within subjectivity itself. And this antagony is neither logical nor mythical, but pathical. Namely, antagony is fixated on *intention* and not on opinion. Therefore antagony is also optimally prepared to meet The Messiah Machine and respond to the question of who/what Man really is. There is no doubt that informationalism is driven by attentionalism which replaces capitalism. But when antagony as a principle breaks through, it is clear that there is an *authentic attentionalism* that characterizes the free and open algorithm once it is given free rein. Authentic attentionalism generates a precisely authentic and self-imploiting self-consciousness. The netocrat does not seek affirmation from already gained insights, of course, but instead strives for enculturation, creativity and expansion in accordance with the protopian ideals. And nothing fosters protopianism as powerfully as the antagonic spirit. It thus entails that antagony also characterizes the netocrat's personal and tribal algorithm, the one that the netocrat at any cost prioritizes maintaining free from financial corruption, political manipulation, and academic conformation. The corrupting, manipulating and conforming algorithm is however what is available to the consumtarian underclass and what it also settles for. This is *false attentionalism*, which merely generates an equally false and self-exploiting self-consciousness. Please note that protopianism with all its constant, gradual technological improvements is a universal ideal. This was never the case with the opposition between utopianism and dystopianism, which only could be cultivated in eventological cultures. Which in turn explains why East Asia in the 20th century became so extremely susceptible to Western, utopian ideals. China under Mao Zedong and not least Cambodia under Pol Pot fell victim to the most extreme boy-pharaonic cultures one can even imagine, when Confucian and Buddhist faith in authoritarianism suddenly were interspersed with Western utopianism, and even children were persuaded to murder their own parents. The Western world is instead colored by Christianity separating church from state from the 5th century onward. States and markets are developed as a secular zone without religious involvement, which enables one to cultivate both a religious and a secular variant of both utopianism and dystopianism, ideas that were freely blended with one another. The massive breakthrough of the printing press as the dominating communication tool in Europe north and west of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, leads straight to *the Enlightenment*. During the Enlightenment *liberalism* is realized as a mimicry of Christianity, which in turn is a mimicry of Judaism, which in turn is a mimicry of Zoroastrianism. The Cartesian individual, a product of scientism's attempt to appease religion, is a Peter Pan figure who never gets tamed by the elders in the name of religion. Individualism, capitalism and industrialism explode during the late 18th century and the following 19th century. Its overarching ideology turns out to be the classic liberalism that presupposes that state and market grow and expand in parallel in all eternity, this without any intervention whatsoever from the elders or restricted by any form of barred absolute. That is: as the Platonist and Abrahamic exploitation, and not as the Aristotelian and Zoroastrian [[Imploitation]] (see [[The Netocrats]]) of the world. This [[Omnicentrism]] -- which radically departs from all previous empire theories, where a social center is subordinate to the phallic gaze -- gains nourishment from the mass media and the widely disseminated practice of reading. Reading at the breakfast table or under the glow of the night lamp creates the illusion that the very center of the Universe is the reader him- or herself, his or her reflecting mind and the gaze that sweeps across one text after another. That illusion in turn gets a powerful nourishment boost from the commercial media industry, which is convinced it is best protecting its interests by fanning all this reading, with the concomitant hefty prices one sets. The process has a hierarchical structure: the media speak from a center to a mass audience that have extremely limited possibilities of answering and taking part in any two-way communication. The activity continues up until the Internet's hyperomnicentrism results in a flat chaos of megaphones without governance. All are suddenly senders -- not many remain receivers -- but all insist on the attention that previously fell to the carefully curated mass media content. With this development follows the necessary renaissance of the barred absolute, as certain as sunrise. When everyone wants to be protopians, although very few possess the necessary talent, protopianism is not accorded any value. Thus the real protopians shut themselves away behind the barred absolute, precisely as their companions the informationalists and the sensocrats, and stage the exodus from there to the digital class society. The consumtarian underclass can devote itself to advocating just anything, it matters not since all junk communication inevitably gets trapped in the netocratic spam filters, requested and perceived by no one. This state of affairs is from a historical perspective strictly symmetrical. Classical liberalism's resurrection in the form of so-called *neoliberalism* is also the final and victorious political ideology during late capitalism, this since the free and open market is the sole remnant when both politics and the universities collapse under increasingly misguided and not least corrupt top-down governance. It is when the Internet in the 1990s encounters neoliberalism that the informationalist paradigm makes its first, discernible little inroads. The cost of capital plummets when the cost of attention soars; and the fact that attention cannot be purchased for money in any classical sense creates an enduring deflationary pressure in the world economy. Every single web browser is equipped with comprehensive *ad blockers* as early as the 2010s. Corporations and institutions throw more and more money at rapidly shrinking and less valuable advertising space. Desperation leads to pretensions. Adverts are called marketing, marketing is called communication. But for everything and everyone that finds itself outside the old dying institutions, it is evident that what all these agencies, often against generous payment, communicate in the early 21st century is *spam*, phrases and banalities without real substance. That advertisers still find clients who pay for this rubbish is a clear indication of galloping decadence. Nothing in this large-scale production of hot air matters one iota anymore. Capitalism, as we know it from Marx and the history books, has reached the end of the road and will, by posterity, be regarded as attentionalism's reluctant mother. The heritage it leaves behind is the free and open markets, which constitute a mainstay even during attentionalism. There is nothing odd about this, it is of course not the case that a paradigm shift entails that a new elite cleans house with precisely everything that has proven functional in the previous paradigm. Many phenomena will remain, but will be attached in new contexts under new terms. Agriculture did of course, as we know, not cease during industrialism -- the need for food did not disappear, and has not disappeared yet -- but it received another meaning and another status. The factory owner and the entrepreneur sailed past the landowner in the social regatta. The development then admits of all possible sorts of playful experiments within different geographic and different closed networks. Within the elite it is not inconceivable with different variants of voluntary communism which refuse to sink to the level of socialism's innovation-killing closure of the creative laboratory. It is the protopians in the netocratic power triad, rather than the informationalists and the sensocrats, who propel this development, which is due to that the protopians encounter the world as *the paradoxist subject* (see *The Global Empire*), focused on complexity theory rather than neurotic micromanagement. They continuously ride the wave and gladly hand over the rough work to the machines. It is exodology that we use for distinguishing between *the eternal Utopia* and *the transcendental Protopia*. The eternal Utopia is namely the Platonist and Gnostic idea of a Utopia as something already established and perfect in what by definition is a perfect world of ideas, a vision against which the path is deterministically marked out and therefore often connected to a predestining creator-god. The transcendental Protopia is however open, and has no other objective than the pragmatic realization of the inherent in the present-at-hand. Not even God himself knows anything with certainty about either the present or the future. This is most clearly noticed in relation to the concept of *freedom*. The Platonist or the Gnostic hero battles for his own liberation, which lies precisely in the realization of one's own utopian project. Freedom is the name of the eternal objective for the entire enterprise. However the Zoroastrian, or transcendental, hero can only battle for freedom through realizing and, so to speak, growing into his own archetype, which occurs by optimizing what he actually still is aimed to be in a transdeterminist universe, with his sights set on *frashokereti* as a temporary, but with maximal effort optimal state, under the realization of his enterprise. As a result of this, we may also discern an equally dramatic difference in the view of submission and dependence. Feudalism's *slavery* is replaced by industrialism's *work force* which is replaced by informationalism's *precariat*. In accordance with the eternal Utopia, this is a success story that is part of a quest for freedom for all. In accordance with the transcendental Protopia, on the other hand, this is solely a gradual development toward increased efficacy in social relations, and as such every step in the development primarily favors those who have strong tribal or subcultural support to fall back on, but disfavors those who lack that type of network. However one can not, objectively speaking, identify any civilizational improvement. The abolition of slavery was never an expression of any form of freedom project, but instead part of a comprehensive project for increased productivity. It was quite simply a reorganization that was required when shifting production from feudalism's plantations and agricultural landholdings to industrialism's mines and factories. The eternal Utopia is formulated by Plato and within Christianity, and it is then inherited during the Enlightenment by Descartes. The transcendental Protopia is formulated by Zoroaster and Judaism, and it is inherited during the Enlightenment by Spinoza. Unsurprisingly it is then in the friction between Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche -- the three most prominent figures of a German enlightenment variety -- that the conflict around the fundamental nature and conditions of utopianism is deepened. And it is only after the bloody terror of The French Revolution that the Hegelian nation-state succeeds in taming the ferocious forces of liberalism. What Hegel advocates is that Europe should mimic the Jewish nation and let it serve as a model for optimizing the public good through taming capitalism, industrialism and individualism in one fell swoop. Thereby Hegelian nationalism is established as the new European state religion. Without Hegel there is later neither a Marx, nor a Nietzsche, nor a Freud, nor any political science to speak of. But once we have stated this, it is important to understand that Hegel's own roots to a great extent are with Spinoza, who as early as the 17th century advocates a religious monism in a Zoroastrian vein, in contrast to Descartes' secular dualism. As the father of modern nationalism, Hegel even designates Spinoza *the Messiah of philosophy*. The connection from Zoroaster via Spinoza to Hegel cannot be made clearer, this is the axis that supports the entire Western process-philosophical heritage. The Hegelian idea of the nation-state shall thus be understood as the quest of a formally secularized Europe to return to its Jewish and thereby deeply religious roots. In his books *The Road to Somewhere* (2016) and *Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century* (2020), author and journalist David Goodhart demonstrates how academic credentials lose their decisive value and how meritocracy increasingly is taken for granted. When meritocracy has become everyday fare, pathos remains as the decisive competitive advantage for people. That is: Man's ability to find mental shortcuts to what we call *intuition* also becomes his by far most valuable asset. The focus thus shifts from logos (formal academic credentials) to pathos (social competence and improvisational ability). Pathical creativity, rather than logical intelligence, becomes Man's most highly valued asset in social contexts. Netocratic values gradually replace the bourgeois ones, which changes the conditions for what provides a high social status. Thereby the transition from capitalism to informationalism is a fact, and what primarily propels the transition is the connection between *authentic attention* and *creative intuition*, regardless of whether this connection is expressed through logos, mythos or pathos. The netocratic power receives a *pathopoeia* that we call informationalism, it receives a *mythopoeia* that we call sensocracy, and a *logopoeia* that we call protopianism. Academic credentials then receive roughly the same social status as the hanging of hay received after the industrial revolution. And once again: the distribution of power and status follows the same pattern and becomes all the more extreme, precisely as during previous information-technological paradigm shifts. Technology generates complexity. The more technology we add to a society -- other factors being constant -- the more information and relations are produced. Which entails that complexity grows exponentially. And since Man biologically is the same as 10,000 years ago at the dawn of civilization, this entails that a contemporary human dividual has to handle complexity so comprehensive and so widely disseminated that it until recently was not even possible to imagine. Since Man, for the sake of his orientation and well-being, seeks order and patterns in all systems that are part of his external world, this means that he cannot either perceive or grasp a distinction between complexity and chaos -- he perceives both as an unmanageable and menacing disorder. A human reaction to this threat is mob rule and incantations based on matrichal sign interpretations and phallic conspiracy theories. At any cost one wants to see a pattern to which one can relate in a more or less meaningful way. The consequence is veritable pandemics of *infantility, addiction* and *paranoia* (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*), which also generates extensive, complex dependencies of each other, that is: the phenomenon called *globalization*. The digital Saoshyant perceives all this through sensocracy and responds to this order through creating the global order that we call [[The Global Empire]] (see the book with the same name). Technology becomes an empire where Man himself is reduced to the subordinate of The Machine. It will be technology itself that completes the dreams that Man on his own has failed to carry out, namely the exodus to alien planets and the actual transformation of Man to a more elevated creature, the cyborg as Man 2.0 through artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. Man will have to settle for living in the *Cosmopotamia* that has been created after the world has solved the many problems that are associated with a sustainable and affordable energy provision. Man's task is reduced to staying on planet Earth and completing the construction of the ecotopian garden, the cosmopolitan city, and the syntheist temple. This means that Marx's vision of the communist society can be realized, however not as a secular but as a religious construction. The informationalists collect and accumulate the data. The sensocrats create added value through the creative processing of the data. The protopian clergy dictate the great narrative of the netocracy's genesis, direction and objectives. Via attentionalism nomadology is resurrected as a universal religion with eventology as an absolutely necessary add-on. Zoroaster and Marx meet and are united in the realization of the state that Zoroaster calls *haurvatat* and which Greek philosophers and theologians later call *teleiosis*. A modified communism is thus, or can be, the teleological end product of the spread of *haurvatat* or *teleiosis* in the shape of the protopian City of God. Outer space, however, is the perfect example of something that is better left to The Machine to take care of.