<nettime> How to Crit the Karp Manifesto

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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It might be viewed by some as unpatriotic to question the Karp manifesto.  However it's really just normal QA.  Opposition is true friendship -- as long as it's loyal -- and the true lifeblood of the free world.

So here are a few crit options.

[Disclaimer: I won't discuss early modern art and lit here.  I've overdone those topics so if you want more info on current book and film projects feel free to contact me directly.]

Start with Wikipedia, namely, Karp's dissertation:  Jargon, aggression, and culture in Talcott Parsons.  (I can't read the full text, it's in German, nor should anyone feel obligated to spend that much time — the topics are illustrative enough.)

Parsons quote:

"Parsons believed that objective reality can be related to only by a particular encounter of such reality and that general intellectual understanding is feasible through conceptual schemes and theories. Interaction with objective reality on an intellectual level should always be understood as an approach. Parsons often explained the meaning of analytical realism by quoting a statement by Henderson: "A fact is a statement about experience in terms of a conceptual scheme.""

What is meant by "jargon" and "aggression"?  Jargon means theory, i.e., pomo, Freud, Marx etc.  This is one key part of the old chestnut Habermas/Foucault debate.  Jargony vocab like that of much modern thought, Habermas felt, is not neutral but aggressive/assertive, the equivalent of an offensive move in chess, one which, furthermore, often seizes ground that cannot be inhabited much less defended.  (Habermas was reciprocally accused, with some validity, that asserting principles like communicative freedom and universal rights was "aggressively assertive" and hypocritically dependent on force.  The gridlock is obvious.)  Yet Habermas and the Frankfurt School didn't have much of a counter-assertive response.  Almost all defense, and too immobile.  How to counter?

Benjamin died before figuring it out via his "critique of pure experience," ironically, on the run from Nationalist Socialism.  The Bauhaus expats and others also recommended art and literature as experience (Albers, Dewey), an open system, for their heuristic, rather than instrumental "Reason" or brute force "Authority."  That was a great start and they left a powerful corpus of work we can still benefit from.

However jargon often predominates in academia, partly because of turf competition, and that's also where Karp and other tech libertarians are looking for scapegoats and fearful of "woke" which used to be called "PC."  They see it as excessive self-criticism by democratic societies given their autocratic adversaries permit very little, and this tips them over into propaganda and the slippery slope of division by demonization.  Hence the unavoidable echoes of Marinetti in their manifestos.

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Why the taboo on aggression?  It's not just squeamishness; it's the golden rule and the rule of law.  War is hell that scorches earth, and trauma can squander whole centuries.  This is the prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons.  To live and let live is the better way to go.  In constitutional law, they call it "passion," the fire which freedom's air enables in addition to breath; how to moderate political passions is the Federalist Papers' key focus and the reason Hamilton concluded by quoting Hume re "time and experience."

Peaceful resolution of conflict works best within a system of shared rights where the winner only partly wins and the loser doesn't lose everything.  This allows better learning, via social and political adaptation, and avoids costly conflagrations.  One can see this as a key advantage of the "west," a hard and gradually-won lesson still in progress that mixes bookkeeping and poetry, not just the superior weapons Karp extols.  You have to win the peace and be able to avoid war, especially internal war, if you hope to do well sustainably; moreover, arms races with unhindered escalation have never been smart strategy and often are the worst choice (despite the impracticality of total permanent disarmament).  Even Judeo-Christianity doesn't exalt "the Prince of War."  And to be sure, a peaceful and just realm of restored international relations will require peace among all major belief systems, what has been called De Pace Fidei, in addition to peaceable personal conduct.  However Karp like every arms manufacturer must overrate his product's peaceful inner nature or face the wrath of shareholders.

It's not at all clear that severing AI-GPT weapons companies from public accountability is the magic potion Karp libertarians advertise it as.  To be honest that's warmed-over Mussolini and Schmitt or Schmitt-lite, and definitely Lenin; one might call it the business model of compulsive escalation.  Both sides get over-eager to prevail, like WWI, firing up the production lines, not considering in advance the damage and waste they'll cause for everyone.  Admittedly, part is certainly just Harringtonian property rebalance on a grand scale, the frightened fedsoc response to aging conservative demographics through social sculpture of the electoral college.  Another part is the shift from peace to war mode, which is kind of what is happening to the 2020's.  In wartime the hawks try to clip the doves -- it's a long tradition -- and profiteering is the norm.

Yet there is a valid point buried here, qua Habermas and Benjamin (the latter even strangely conceding something to Schmitt in re assertion by force, as the "blasting open" of the Jeztzeit or at least some quiet disruption by the flowering of ideas), i.e. that a reality-based international community does have to be asserted rather than just dreamt of; it must be articulated in words and images before it can be realized, and both of these require actual choices to live life in word, image, and deed one way not another.  In this sense the problem of assertion is genuine both expressively (representationally) and physically.

We also have today another parallel to the problems of 1950: a new primary geopolitical rivalry coinciding with a new arms race.  The soviets were to nukes what China is to drones, and drones (plus their software) are the business of Karp.  It takes two to tango and the major authoritarian states of today's world do not play nice -- just ask Ukraine and Tibet.  Even if you argue China didn't start the Second Cold War, they aren't doing a whole lot to end it either.  Rising powers, same as those they aim to replace, gravitate toward cold war for many obvious and stubborn reasons, as Orwell made very clear.

Which is to say, might makes right versus right makes might (MMRvRMM) is a debate still very much in progress.

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Wiener, Norbert was an influence on Parsons, and Habermas proper taught Karp.  Benjamin tried to find a theory of experience on which to base a "second enlightenment" that might modernize Kant beyond coercive rationality but he got distracted by theory (at times a German Achilles' heel) and war.  Frankfurt School expert Martin Jay wrote two great books on this ("Songs of Experience" in 2005 and "Magical Nominalism" in 2025) which deserve full study ASAP.  What must yet be done today in words and images is to bring Experience to parity with or even primacy over Reason (algorithmic rationality, rules, law) and Authority (power, tradition, plain force).  This is a new build but has precursors: Lakoff, Benjamin of course (with caveats), Dewey, the Alberses, Pater, Joyce, Proust, Tokarczuk, Pamela Smith, Adam Fix, Calvino, and even others further back like Thoreau (e.g. Burns' new film), Emerson, and James, plus more outside "the West" not to mention indigenous cultures.  It's a big tent, maybe the biggest.  Conveniently, French writers like Foucault and Bataille paid respect to experience as such, if moreso in their later writings, so no one on any side of the issue has to start from scratch.  It's not a magic potion either, but it does have to be worked through to get to real peace.  Harari, another commentator on the risks and responsibilities of AI-GPT in politics and economics, albeit with a different partisan affiliation than Karp (birds of a feather as it were), wrote his dissertation about experience not just war as the basis of historical narrative.  Hinton also cited it in 1992: "How Neural Networks Learn From Experience."

Karp makes many but perhaps not all of the same errors as Addressen and futurism, failing the Marinetti smell test, e.g. James Joyce's still-apt warning "machines is their cry," stepping in the turd-pile of Mussolini And Goebbels Again.  Yet we need not panic prematurely: 2026 America is not 1926 Germany, the Germany of Ernst and Grosz, not yet anyway.  Panic serves mainly the would-be oppressor and opportunistic swindlers.  Even if SCOTUS spots the unpopular GOP enough House seats in '26 to keep '27 and '28 oversight-free, peaceful protest is still the stronger play than panic.  Parsons himself got hauled up on charges of leftism by Hoover, and Hoover feared peaceful dissent far more than non-peaceful.

Here is the previous "not a good look" I'd wager Karp hopes to transcend, or distance his ambitious project from, suggesting work in progress and even an inner lack of complete confidence (which might be a good thing), though he sadly mostly matches it:

"The manifesto pays homage to the Manifesto of Futurism (1909) by Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), who would go on to co-author the Fascist Manifesto a decade later, which was used to describe the political platform of Benito Mussolini. In one part, Andreessen rewords Marinetti's manifesto[β] in the context of technology, writing "Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man."[16] Andreessen ends the manifesto with a list of self-declared patron saints of techno-optimism, with Marinetti taking his place alongside philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the fictional character of John Galt, and the neo-reactionary philosopher Nick Land, among others.[1]"

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What, then, to do?  Continue peaceful protest and support fair midterm elections (even when it doesn't work).  Call it like you see it and be a little brave when using the First Amendment.  Take heart from Orban's example.

Remember too that the greater part of the tech-alt-right ascension is a political (even Weberian) market realignment, the philosophico-cultural wedding of a certain major party with the tech sector and their money, strange bedfellows indeed, both sides emerging from messy divorces and on the rebound, their nuptials taking place on spruced-up theological grounds but far from made in heaven.  AI-GPT has reached military relevance so we have entered a fifties-style nuke race complete with anti-dissent purges, and Karp wants to secure his market share as well as political connections.  Like the two-way crystal ball it largely boils down to crony capitalism, which has both ample war-precedent and commonsense remedies, but most of the remedies grow from the soil of public opinion articulated by a thoughtful citizenry i.e. sometimes slowly.

One hopes the world political establishment still has some cooler heads left to prevail, because the way you fight the war has real impact on whether there is a peace at all, much less one that can be won.  Never put spies in charge of anything except spying if it is humanly possible to avoid.  The wages of that sin is Rasputin.

Thus we loyal opponents ought to emphasize First Amendment reliance near-term.  The pen is mightier, but only when you write with it.  Online alt-history fiction in authoritarian states, let's not forget, can apply even beyond the usual suspects.

Also we might consider how to move on a bit from pomo and try to get back on a realer plane somewhat more, should one wish, without abandoning the core elements of imagination and poetry either.  That might mean Experience/Experiment vs. Reason/Authority, EEvRA and MMRvRMM.  Meditation and brain biology (or MaBB), contra both Parsons and pomo, do matter too, like the recent Quanta article about scary AI stories and Varela, therefore the Buddhist/Taoist/Confucian frame of reference re embodiment is relevant as well.

It can be a group discussion involving more than just the arms industry.



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