The Artificial State
As American civic life has become increasingly shaped by algorithms, trust in government has plummeted. Is there any turning back?
"...The building of the artificial state came at the expense of the natural world. “The modern world worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen,” Rachel Carson warned in the preface to a 1964 book called “Animal Machines,” the “Silent Spring” of factory farming, which involved the raising of animals from birth to death in cages hardly bigger than themselves. “Yet the evils go long unrecognised,” Carson wrote. “Even those who create them manage by some devious rationalising to blind themselves to the harm they have done society.” The artificial state is the factory farming of public life, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, the destruction of human community. Meanwhile, the immense energy and water consumption required to build, expand, and maintain the coming A.I. infrastructure threatens to roll back gains made by environmental regulation in the past half century.
This election season, even as hurricanes battered North Carolina and Florida, the natural world has been notably absent from both the Trump and the Harris campaigns. Trump, who used to describe climate change as a hoax, has not substantially altered that position. (“You know, they have no idea what’s going to happen,” he said this summer. “It’s weather.”) Harris, despite having been part of an Administration that produced perhaps the most important environmental law in a generation, has seemed to distance herself from environmentalism as she attempts to take back the language of freedom from her opponent. But, as the historian Sunil Amrith writes in his essential new book, “The Burning Earth: A History,” the rhetoric of freedom has become bound up with the triumph of the artificial over the natural: “Into the pursuit of freedom there crept, over time, a notion previously unthinkable: that true human autonomy entailed a liberation from the binding constraints of nature.”
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"...The building of the artificial state came at the expense of the natural world. “The modern world worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen,” Rachel Carson warned in the preface to a 1964 book called “Animal Machines,” the “Silent Spring” of factory farming, which involved the raising of animals from birth to death in cages hardly bigger than themselves. “Yet the evils go long unrecognised,” Carson wrote. “Even those who create them manage by some devious rationalising to blind themselves to the harm they have done society.” The artificial state is the factory farming of public life, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, the destruction of human community. Meanwhile, the immense energy and water consumption required to build, expand, and maintain the coming A.I. infrastructure threatens to roll back gains made by environmental regulation in the past half century.
This election season, even as hurricanes battered North Carolina and Florida, the natural world has been notably absent from both the Trump and the Harris campaigns. Trump, who used to describe climate change as a hoax, has not substantially altered that position. (“You know, they have no idea what’s going to happen,” he said this summer. “It’s weather.”) Harris, despite having been part of an Administration that produced perhaps the most important environmental law in a generation, has seemed to distance herself from environmentalism as she attempts to take back the language of freedom from her opponent. But, as the historian Sunil Amrith writes in his essential new book, “The Burning Earth: A History,” the rhetoric of freedom has become bound up with the triumph of the artificial over the natural: “Into the pursuit of freedom there crept, over time, a notion previously unthinkable: that true human autonomy entailed a liberation from the binding constraints of nature.”
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