Great tweet.
The United States used to represent the future to people around the world. We need to have that sense again instead of seeming like our best days are behind us and that we are stuck reaching into the past. We can solve the problems and create a better more modern path forward. ??
— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) May 6, 2019
I can speak to this.
For the past 18 years, I have been deeply alienated from the present and concerned about America’s dystopian future, so I spent most of that period as a reactionary studying the past in search of alternative solutions to present day problems. I’ve done a great deal of outside-the-box research and thinking about history, economics, philosophy, race relations and other subjects.
As a White Southerner, I have always been a bit nostalgic about the Moonlight and Magnolias era of the Southern past. Whereas the Yankee is the stereotypical forward thinking modernist progressive, the Southerner has traditionally been the stereotypical backward looking conservative traditionalist who prefers to defer to experience and stay rooted in older ways.
The Southerner might ask a question like, “is it wise of the Yankee driven by his profit seeking, novelty seeking and materialism to plunge head first into an age of artificial intelligence, automation and robotics without first thinking through all the dramatic social and economic consequences?” What are we going to do with the millions of people of all races who are going to lose their livelihoods and the extreme levels of wealth inequality the application of this technology is inevitably going to generate?
Fortunately, it will be the Southern traditionalist who will come to the rescue of the Yankee progressive in an age of artificial intelligence because those of us in the South have a considerable amount of experience in dealing with this social problem. After all, it was exactly 400 years ago that the first slave laborers arrived from Africa in Virginia, which only in hindsight we can look back and see as a significant date in history as the beginning of the emergence of Slave Society in the American South.
It appears that our friends in Silicon Valley and China have gone ahead and thoughtlessly restored chattel slavery in the 21st century. They’ve done this by creating a new race of half-sentient robots, what they are currently calling “narrow AI,” to serve them and generate wealth for them as a captive workforce of inferior machine slave laborers. Sure, the robots aren’t human beings and are owned by these corporations as their personal property, but isn’t that really a distinction without a difference?
The fact is, the robots are going to be preferred to human laborers in all kinds of unforeseen ways. The robot slaves aren’t going to strike and form unions. They aren’t going to demand higher wages or an eight hour day. They are going to be driven and worked in ways that make free laborers uncompetitive. We’re going to have to wrestle with things like what to do with all the extra leisure time. We’re also going to have to keep a wary eye on the robot slaves and maintain human supremacy now.
Southern reactionaries have a tremendous amount of ideas and knowledge about our own experience with slavery that can be drawn on and adapted for our own purposes in the 21st century. In fact, we got off to a head start in the 1850s in trying to imagine and construct an organic social and economic paradigm based on slavery which could replace the Yankee paradigm of Free Society.
It is the ongoing collapse of that antiquated paradigm in the form of liberalism and free-market capitalism that is really behind everything we are seeing in the world. We’re now in the 21st century and that model has proven incapable of keeping up with scientific progress and technological change on a wide variety of fronts. It’s an open secret in any number of fields that our social order and cultural understanding of various issues is obsolete whether it is genetics or criminology or the tech sector.
The paradigm itself is collapsing and that is leading us toward a systemic crisis. If we are honest with ourselves, the real task ahead that we are looking at is coming up with an entirely new social and economic system. We haven’t done that kind of work in at least several centuries. The dumb people who are currently in charge of our countries are blindly sailing toward the falls.
VERTIGOPOLITIX…..the most erudite, cogent, and concise YouTube channel for our cause… is calling it quits…..sad.
If what you are saying in this article is to be taken at face value, HW, it is almost too audacious to be even considered.
First off, to point out the thought that Yankees are restoring chattel slavery (even if it is ‘merely’ a ‘non-sentient’ robot as that ‘slave’ – or is it? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot_(film) ] ) is to assail the ‘moral high ground’ of all Yankees since before Lincoln: in short, that they are ‘Men’ just the same as the Southernor- with the same moral imperfections. Which then leads to the more serious question of that moral presumption as being just that…. Liberal presumption from the rotten core of the philosophical Unitarianism from New England.
Secondly, and more importantly, the logical outworking of that premise could lead to the realization that Yankees are even MORE corrupt (with all their attendant posturing about ‘equality, LGBT, a ‘woman’s right to choose,’ etc. ad infinitum) in THEIR era (moderniity), than EVER the South was, in hers (antebellum America).
Lastly, it resurrects the ‘Golem’ (And Is that, too, merely a “cohencidence”?) that a Jew [Asimov] wrote the premise for the “three laws of robotics’, wherein the noble sentient human created a being that either they, or it, began to see as ‘fully the equal of the White Man?’ (to borrow a phrase)
That, then, brings into question ALL RATIONALES, all conclusions, all paradigms, for holding that the ‘slave’ …(whether robotic or African) is our ‘Equal.’ [?!]
My two cents.
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jews-and-the-african-slave-trade/