Break the law big enough, break law itself
Things are speeding up, and scaling up, to a pitch of madness we can't keep up with. I think we're being overtaken by something we started a long time ago. It's all flying apart now, but we may yet have a collective response that averts immediate extinction.
Stunning impunity
This is unrelated to party politics, despite some theatrical transitions in the transfer of power of which we are so proud. Elections have been convenient distractions from the continuing slaughter. The current iteration is so in-your-face and relentless we can only watch from the sidelines as spectators, or risk being branded as un-American. Writers and critics who prophesize 1 with the pen are being subsumed into this on-the-court/in-the-stands binary. Flagrant violation of many US and international laws, and decades of covert (now overt) American wars of imperial aggression, crimes against humanity, and violent repression of legitimate dissent always raised questions. They have all been answered by now, and are being answered in advance, although those in the answer-business have to scramble and scurry to get ahead of the curve. After all, the answers will have to be propped up later, costing real blood and treasure. Or blood, anyway.
Such stunning impunity has serious implications. The stakes are high: collective moral injury, the abandonment of Justice, the collapse of civil society. But impunity takes perpetrators, and in that area there is much doubt and uncertainty. Designated culprits are held to account, and yet nothing changes. Some wave it in our faces on every channel, but that probably indicates it's someone else; the current crop of "spokes" people really don't seem competent to commit anything, let alone world-class heinous atrocities.
Today, after more than a year of massive economic growth in the war tech economy so visibly and viscerally linked to so many innocent deaths, the lines are more clearly drawn. Even the Americans are stretched and contorted with denial, as there is no direction in which our gaze is not assaulted with flying body-parts while our minds go numb under a hail of AI-generated lies so childish we laugh. And then, weep.
From here, maybe, the road forks. One path, the one on which "impunity" is still a word with meaning, leads inexorably to a reckoning, as with the Nuremberg Tribunals, or the Truth and Reconciliation commissions, in which everything that was done comes out (or enough of "everything" to stop it). In that case the convicted will have to negotiate for their freedom, and as those two historic reckonings above show, the relative value of their confessions may have shifted in their favor. In the former, several were adjudged guilty and jailed for life, and some hanged by the neck until dead. In the latter, they could walk free after making a clean breast of it before the aggreived public. If a trend, this doesn't seem encouraging, but it was still a reckoning, and this time maybe a moral reckoning instead of endlessly recycling retribution. And it marked substantive change to follow.
The other path, now a real possibility, being the path of inaction, is best summed up this way: break the law big enough, break law itself.
Not just "the" law: the very possibility of law is foreclosed. Been there done that, next...
And this is actually our current situation, unless and until a legal remedy is carried through to its necessary conclusion (which might restore Law). And basic to our culture, the level of culture that now drives our evolution as a species, is that for everything there is a price that must be paid. This is fundamental, not because it's right or wrong, but because it's the foundation of rightness and wrongness.
Now we come to the crux: if we fail to exact this price, we're canceling the dominant culture. Not that superficial "culture wars" trope. We're dealing with the way in which we perceive and comprehend life. We're dealing with what gives rise to our collective behavior. It's just a neurological fact. It's how we're wired. It's how we roll.
We tend to see this cultural structure, currently named "Capitalism," as Natural Law. It assumes that everyone acts from self-interest and it's dog-eat-dog-and-devil-take-the-hindmost. This is a human artifact made up out of whole cloth, and nothing to do with Natural Law. But let that go for now, either way our predominant worldview is about to self-destruct. Just saying, it would be a good time to take stock, if there's even time for that.
High Crimes and Misdemeanors
The magnitude of the crimes now undeniably attributable to the US Government, in full metastatic partnership with Silicone Valley and the state of Israel, is such that a true reckoning would threaten those found culpable with incarceration and even death, not group therapy. It had been the Americans who ran the Nuremberg trials. South Africa, famous for the first T&R sessions, went on to call out Israel for genocide over American protestations of innocence.
It's logical, then, to consider what resistance those with significant legal exposure would have anticipated, and what measures they would have put in place, as they launched the most public and sustained mass extermination ever seen.
The enterprise bringing us all the murder and mayhem is apparently in the hands of the major shareholders of a few global corporations that extract the minerals, make the weapons, run the wars, write the laws, pay the politicians, pack the courts, manage the institutions of higher learning, own the media, operate Wall Street, and employ millions of Americans, in just about every Congressional district. And dump the toxic and radioactive wastes on the most vulnerable neighborhoods. Did I leave anything out? Oh yes: the private global electronic communications network that is now indispensable to human life.
The Internet keeps the planes in the air and the trains running on time, and makes certain that your bills will just exceed your income. The AI-driven social surveillance and control system can field swarms of drones anywhere, as indeed we are told it is, in early 2025: autonomous aircraft with access to full intimate details on anyone, carrying AI-targeted weapons systems, or your next Amazooglebook delivery. It can even write a plausible cover-story and put it on the five o'clock "news," untouched, as we used to say, by human hands. All of this is available technology for sale on the open market (if you have to ask, you can't afford it).
So as to what measures those with significant legal exposure would have put in place, at scale the thing itself would seem sufficient.
Now the whole question has changed again: maybe the Law isn't broken. Maybe, at a scale of overwhelming violence the world has never seen, it's just irrelevant.
In another context the question may be entirely meaningless: those with legal exposure, by which we mean liability, culpability, moral responsibility, may not be people at all.
I don't mean aliens from Tralfamadore, there are plenty of quite ordinary evil banalities that account for our predicament well enough, like runaway algorithms or just the logical extension of an economic evolution. But a tinfoil hat might still afford some protection from random microwaves.
Machine Learning
There are some countervailing forces in play. Otherwise none of the nonsense we're fed at such volumes would get past the next AI-generated cost-benefit analysis. This is why the propaganda has gotten so flimsy in recent years. It only has to convince (or terrorize) a certain precisely-calculated percentage of the populace. A much smaller percentage now, since voters are so isolated from actual governance, and the surveillance is so pervasive it can probably predict how many children you will have, or the day of your death. If not the hour. Fed enough kilowatts, AI is efficient enough to maintain the critical mass of ignorance. But it already drinks a Chernobyl pumpkin latte' for its morning coffee.
Here's a couple of things about AI:
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AI couldn't tell the truth if you could hold a gun to its head. Truth is not in words, the way an image is not in a mosaic; and whatever truth we may perceive in its output is only an image conjured up by the wonderful mosaic interpreter in our heads.
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AI is not smarter than us and can't ever be: it can only work on what we've already said. Much of which was already nonsense and lies, now compounded with verbal subprime derivatives. It's little more than a tricky mirror. Mirrors reproduce everything backwards or upside-down. Moon on Water.
AI "trains" itself on content, which means everything it can access on the Internet. Which is everything, forget passwords, your life is an open book now. But on the flipside AI is training us.
We're easy to train, because it's how we learn to do things like walk and talk. We train ourselves all the time, and the training does a lot, it drives our cars and does our work and minds our manners. It chooses our mates and brings up our children. I gave my six-year-old a speech-recognition app, and soon it was training them to talk until the words on screen matched what was spoken. And there was no AI back then. Machine-learning isn't about machines learning, they don't. We do.
We might want to look into the default settings. We're not born drug-crazed psychopathic homicidal maniacs. But it's getting hard to tell.
Our divided brains focus very close at hand, on what's well within reach, ignoring the big picture, and some of us have learned how to harness this innate tendency. It's the sin of Cain: the most successful among us are willing to trade (not gamble-- trade) human species-viability for quick profits, using scalable apps that sweep vast expanses of life-sustaining rainforest away to produce more hamburgers. Until nobody wants hamburgers anymore. Which will happen one way or the other, pretty soon now. It's no deep metaphysical mystery, it's all "free" markets can do. AI just helps them to it more, better and different.
And one other thing: AI is software. Under the cultural imperative all software is rolled out long before it is out of the beta test phase, in hopes that subsequent patches and bugfixes will catch up before it's obsolete. And like an old wooden sailing ship it has to pay for itself many times over on the maiden voyage, cause it comes home so rotten and leaky the weeds and barnacles are all that keeps the water out. Parse these meta-metaphors how you will, once upon a time I was still coding, landing in Atlanta to do a demo for a major household-name bigbox chain store, when there was no Internet. We had to do the upgrades onsite. But we had to unbox their new computer when we got there anyway.
In other words, all software starts out Ponzi, and most crash almost immediately like self-driving cars, and the entrepreneurial time-machine jockeys are long gone with the spoils. The Internet itself is the biggest example. So if you happen to look up and see something hovering, remember (if you're even old enough) Bill Gates standing in front of a giant blue screen that was supposed to demonstrate Windows 98, and don't stand under the damn thing. Probably stuck up there in an infinite loop, uploading a patch while the battery runs down.
I don't have an answer. Answers aren't worth much anyway. Genocides are also seen as answers. Making answers out of questions is a bad habit. We tend to stop asking as soon as anything looks like a plausible answer. It might work to wait awhile, to see if an answer obscures the question as it morphs into possibilities we hadn't anticipated. What's the hurry, we were just stepping into a new world of possibility.
Ok. If you're from Tralfamadore, reading this through some chronosynclastic Apocalypt-O-Scope, I'm glad I got this out before it all ended, and I hope you have selected me for your zoo. If not, and you're human, and this seems pretty wacko, lucky you. I hope so.
But nothing in the foregoing is speculation, just asking some implicit questions that seem to go begging. Everything seems poised to fall into place as the awful answer. Like the crest of a wave, or the fall of a leaf in late summer.
And it's not inevitable.
1 B. Dylan, "The Times They Are A-changing"
Thanks to Michael, Byron and Roger for critical reading; all errors and damfoolery my own.
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