As Benjamin famously wrote: “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.” We can see how the technologies of mechanical reproduction have been employed by communists, fascists, and capitalists alike. As he continues, the aestheticization of politics leads to one thing: war.

Today, we would more accurately term this the mediatization of the political economy but the results are the same. In media studies we have generally responded to this by taking a critical stance against the fascistic use of media, perhaps in the deleuzoguattarian style of anti-fascist living. Now though, I am speculating on the idea that the flow runs in the other direction. The Western democratic-capitalist nation state runs on pre-industrial politics, while the fascists and communists are both 19th-century politics of industrial technologies and mechanical media. WWII sees them all subsumed within electronic media. In many respects the communist nations of the Cold War were eventually unable to thrive in the post-industrial world (though we’ll set aside any determinism here).

The mediatization of the political economy is only partly about human experiences with our conventional notions of media: news, film, tv, internet, social, etc. It is primarily about the datafication of life. If capitalism’s great power is to articulate everything as part of a marketplace, the information economy makes capitalism one data point in a billion data points. It is at once more powerful and flexible than industrial capitalism and turns capitalism’s operations toward other ends just as capitalism has done to other cultural practices in the past. This was signaled with the arrival a decade ago of ML-driven algorithmic mobile social media technologies that are fine-tuned to addict us. They became the digital soma we can’t live without.

If Modern politics can’t hold up, how about Classical ones? How about the allegory of the cave? I suppose there’s two basic readings of Plato here. Plato’s rejection of democracy in favor of philosopher-kings is at least partly about Socrates’ trial. So there’s a clear, immediate, political side. But the cave is also about understanding the real world as a shadow of a pure, essential plane.

Predictably, we get something like this with AI through a kind of secular, religious transubstantiation: we imbibe the mind of a god through a silicon wafer. It is the projection of its thoughts into the screen’s two-dimensional surface. In fact, there is a mutality of projection or perhaps a co-projection? A collision? An accident? The AI projects in a very technical, mathematical sense as it reduces the trillions of dimensions in which its processes occur down to two (or four at the most depending on how you want to think of it: we perceive a 4D space). Meanwhile, we human users also project–in the psychoanalytic sense but in other ways as well. All human pattern recognition occurs through projection, which is a kind of autopoiesis, organizing the world in terms that are sensible for oneself.

Why is this predictable? Because it’s kind of our thing, as humans? as mammals? as beings thrown into finitude? something.