Locke, I've Come to Bargain

Paper Belt and Silicon Road, Part 3/3

Peter Thiel recognized that the Lockean compromise was beginning to fray. “There can be no return to the archaic world or even to the robust conception of the political envisioned by Carl Schmitt. There can be no real accommodation with the Enlightenment, since so many of its easy bromides have become deadly falsehoods in our time.”

The formerly obscured connection between these two growth trajectories is unveiled by AI. Recall that the core incentive of the Paper Belt is procedural control. Ideas of justice and equality only come later, applied selectively as post-hoc justification. The Paper Belt’s latest trick is apocalyptic rhetoric. As the Road produces technologies with ever greater upside, the Belt produces an equal and opposite rhetorical reaction to justify its control. With commercial AI on the horizon, those narratives are being fabricated today, despite a total lack of evidence and several thorough debunkings. These narratives are directly applied to AI, used as a justification for the designation of all software as homo sacer through the unilateral authority to control AI.