Territorialization and Deterritorialization: How Inhuman Political Actors Are Born

Post-Human Politics: Part Two

Sorry for the delay. It’s been a year since I wrote the previous installment but I’m finally back to writing long-form on the topic of post-human politics. If you missed the first installment you can find it here.

All human institutions, customs, traditions, and ways of being originate to serve the needs of specific peoples. The collective experiences, struggles, and beliefs of a tribe create a pattern of being, or a code, that organically rises to meet their specific challenges and perpetuate their way of life. These institutions and systems are territorialized, meaning they are deeply embedded in the specific cultural context of the tribe and serve its unique needs. The sea-fairing civilization centers cultural values of exploration and trade. The agricultural civilization centers consistent rhythms of sowing and reaping. The conquering society centers martial prowess and honor. Every system emerges with the concrete goals and well-being of a particular people as its end.

Territorialization is critical because it ties the goals and operations of systems to the needs of people who are embodying a way of life. The idea of “metrics” which evaluate the “efficiency” of any given system are foreign to a territorialized institution. Systems do not exist for their own sake, but are only valuable insofar as they serve the ends of the tribe. Those ends are determined by the specific way the people live their lives and the telos to which their culture is oriented. There is a hard limit to how and for what purpose a system can operate. That limit is the day-to-day continuance of a particular flesh and blood people.

Systems which are properly territorialized will be governed by the particular folkways of the people they serve. Trade may be governed by the market, but marriage is governed by the power of the tribal patriarchs, worship is governed by the priesthood, warfare is governed by the aristocrats, and the power of the state is wielded by the king. Each of these domains has its own sacred place in the order, but importantly they each also draw their power in a different manner. An outsider might be confused by the purpose of each system, finding its origins perplexing or its operations inefficient, but no one needs to explain the purposes of these systems to the tribes that gave birth to them. This is “the way things are,” a natural outgrowth from the traditions of the people and the challenges they face. The territorialized code arose from the people and serves the people. No one else needs to understand or validate it.

In traditional societies, the entire system is designed to maintain the tribe as it is, to achieve homeostasis. The tribe does not produce less than it needs or more than it needs. Marriage to outsiders is rare and generally considered taboo. The warrior class draws only on people from inside the tribe and does not elevate foreign troops. Religion, culture, and tradition are exclusive to the people of the tribe and are generally impenetrable to those who attempt to adopt it from the outside. The purpose of the territorialized code is the maintenance of the tribe as it exists. It does not have its own agenda or logic, the code and the people are one.

One of the easily observable patterns of history is that successful organisms seek to expand, and this is as true for the biological humans who carry the code as it is for the code itself. As the tribe becomes successful it needs more territory and resources for its expanding population, but the need for expansion is not just material but spiritual. To expand, the tribe must acquire territory and resources by conquest, whether it be military, diplomatic, cultural, or economic. Glory, status, and wealth call to the ambitious members who recognize the opportunity for greatness as civilization breaks out of homeostasis. The code may provide barriers to this expansion, attempting to limit the production of wealth, the acquisition of territory, and the influx of outsiders that will inevitably change the tribe it was created to maintain. But there is no denying that the great civilizations remembered by history are the ones who slip the bonds of the code and are overcome with the desire for greatness. Is mere existence enough, or is the point of life to do more than maintain that which you were born to? Like the uncontacted tribes of the Amazon, a people might exist in the same way for thousands of years if they maintain stasis. But is that truly the desirable end? Either way this is not a question civilizations ever really ask themselves or one on which they make a definitive decision. If greatness calls, men follow—some to their doom and some to glory, but the call is one of nature and not one that is chosen through deliberations.

As the society expands it finds that the code is no longer sufficient. Those systems arose from the specific circumstances, challenges, and beliefs of the tribe. Conquest means that the tribe now faces very different challenges, but it also must learn to incorporate the populations living in the territory it now controls. Some conquers exterminate the conquered, some enslave them, some make them subjects, and a few even integrate them into the whole. With the exception of extermination, these methods require that the systems the tribe initially developed for itself must be adapted to govern or assimilate the new additions to the population. Homeostasis has been broken and a very different process is underway. To scale up their civilization systems the conquering tribe must alter their nature, so they are not exclusively rooted in the way of being of the original population. The process of deterritorialization begins.

Territorialized systems come with natural limitations that check their power. Different powers and functions in society exist within the context of the social institutions or classes that gave birth to them, and they create specific spheres of social influence for those institutions or classes. The social spheres that govern the functions of these systems operate in very different ways. The priest, aristocrat, merchant, and farmer all have very different ways of life, attitudes, and approaches to social organization. The spheres of influence they operate reflect this natural diversity. This means that the spheres of power create natural checks and balances for each other, not only because they are jealously guarding their own power but because the nature of organization itself is particular to each sphere. Priests would be terrible at running the army because they do not understand how that system operates, warriors would be bad at running the church for the same reason.

The particularity of these territorialized systems does not scale when it is time to adapt them to entirely foreign peoples. Suddenly the army, church, market, and state that grew slowly and organically from a particular people all must simultaneously be thrust upon an alien people for whom it was not designed. The lack of interchangeability in territorialized systems is now a liability because the time and effort necessary to slowly expand the organic nature of the social spheres does not exist. If the social systems of the conquerors are to scale they must break these systems out of the social constraints that once bound them. They must be deterritorialized.

In the modern liberal order, the most universalizable medium for civilizational expansion has proven to be economic exchange. As I explained in my previous book “The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies” what is often called “classical liberalism” attempted to remove existential questions of identity territorialized in the good of specific peoples and instead create a minimum universal morality, or code, which would enable economic exchange. By maximizing the amount of cooperation possible between civilizations liberalism reaped vast economic benefits, but those blessings came with a cost. The scale required by this new system could only be achieved by creating mass bureaucratic organizations designed to create homogeneous operations across all participants. By ensuring machine-like precision from human organizations the liberal order was able to maximize the efficiency of the system, but in the process, it had to transform the individual human and the code they once lived under.

Modernity is defined by the process of deterritorializing functions of human civilization that once existed in sacred or traditional spaces and reterritorializing them into the market. The elevation of a ruler was once a function of hereditary or aristocratic selection; in a mass democracy it becomes a contest of who can raise and spend the most money while selling the candidate like a product. Finding a young person a spouse was traditionally a duty performed by families or churches, now most romantic partners are selected as a product on paid dating apps. Music, literature, and art were previously created by those receiving support from sacred spheres like the church or aristocratic patrons, now it is made at scale to be sold on Amazon or streamed on Netflix. Modern churches often function more like corporations where the pastor provides a TedTalk that can be streamed on your smartphone than a place of sacred worship.

The phenomenon can be seen most clearly in the way that the function of the family has been broken down and reterritorialized piece by piece into the market. The mother is one of, if not the, key social role on which a civilization is built, but her job is not easy to quantify in an economic sense. Traditionally, mothers cared for children and maintained the household but there was so much more involved. Mothers were responsible for being the primary educators for their children. The constant presence of mothers in their neighborhoods during the day allowed them to know everyone and enforce a community standard of behavior. This de facto neighborhood watch allowed for a high-trust society where children could roam without fear because an adult was always close, watching out for threats and correcting bad behavior.

The homemaker did not just stay at home watching television, she organized social functions, community meetings, church functions, and cultural events. A mother volunteered at the local thrift store that funds the mutual aid society, ran the vacation bible school, and helped to make sure her neighbor who was overwhelmed by several small children had an extra hand when things got tough. None of the duties show up directly in GDP numbers or economic spreadsheets, but they serve an invaluable function in society. Most importantly those tasks are performed with a human and caring touch that cannot be replicated by market forces.

Moving these critical roles into the market creates a larger labor pool, lowers wages, increases economic activity, and financializes every aspect so it can be taxed. The mother now works a job so she can pay several other people to do the work of raising her child. Previously it was one woman laboring outside the market providing education, supervision, counseling, nutrition, and security. Now an entire team of employees provides the same service at a much lower quality and at a much higher price, but every interaction is now financialized, quantifiable, and taxable.

This deterritorialization of motherhood does not just boost gross domestic product, it helps the overcode to scale by further separating the individual from a collective way of life. A mother carries with her a whole set of expectations surrounding the rearing of her child. She does not just want her son to be a functional widget in a broader society; she cares about his specific wellbeing. Her daughter is not just an employee or a student, but a precious vessel that carries the identity of her people into the future. A mother will insist on a moral education based on specific religious beliefs, will expect a particular quality of food to be provided, and will be discerning about who her children spend time with. The particularity associated with direct motherly care creates friction for a system seeking to maximize cooperation because it insists that too much of the social process remain heavily territorialized.

The attempt to create a scalable facsimile of the family is the natural project of expanding overcode, and it is also a feature of most totalitarian governments. This does not need to occur via any form of market capitalism, communist countries prized their ability to turn children against their parents, as did some fascist regimes. This is not solely the consequence of any economic or government system, it is the inevitable result of scaling overcodes. And while the project can provide basics like supervision, education, and nutrition it does so at great cost. Humans are not the same, some need more structure in education, some need less. Some need constant challenge while others require constant affirmation. The more homogeneous the process becomes the further it can scale, but the worse the quality becomes for each individual.

The family constructed by the overcode also lacks very important qualities which were previously provided by the mother. Obviously, the mother provides real love and compassion that simply cannot be delivered by any employee leaving the child lacking a real and primal sense of belonging and wellbeing. But the shortcomings manifest well beyond this dynamic. Food, clothing, and shelter are basic needs, but the mother was providing a whole host of intangible social goods that do not get translated into the market during deterritorialization. Yes, the mother now hires someone to watch and make food for their child, but who watches the streets and learns every car so they know if a stranger is stopping to pick up one of the neighborhood kids? Who plans the vacation bible school or organizes the bake sale to raise money for the family that had their house burn down? Who has time to volunteer at the Kiwanis Club or arrange for the community mixer where young people meet potential spouses? The answer is that no one does these things, they fall away, and everyone in the community becomes poorer in a way they cannot measure.

Every interaction also becomes less human. The mother had only the welfare of her own children to manage directly. The system must care for a wide variety of children at scale. Instead of the care being tailored to the needs of the individual child the children must be shaped into something the system can handle. Employees may be perfectly nice to the child, but they can only provide supervision—hugging the child as a reward for good behavior would create legal liability. The teacher might be allowed to provide discipline when the student behaves badly but they must follow strict guidelines. They can never reduce or increase the severity of punishment due to their personal knowledge of the individual child. Every decision designed to serve and protect the system, not the individual humans who live under its operation. The overcode stops serving people, and people begin to serve the overcode.

As we discussed previously, territorialization acts as a limiting factor that ties the system, the code, to the specific people it is supposed to serve. The logic of the system might encourage it to sacrifice the well-being of the people for its own sake, but the grounding of the code in a particular culture prevents that logic from being taken to its conclusion. The homeostasis provided by territorialization protects the tribe, but it also limits the scaling of the code. Once those limitations have been removed by deterritorialization so that the system can scale there is nothing stopping the overcode from sacrificing the people it once served in order to achieve its own goals.

The philosopher Nick Land is largely responsible for popularizing the term “accelerationism” in relation to this process. Traditional societies once acted as a limiting factor against deterritorialization but the destruction of these human limitations has created a closed, self-exciting, feedback loop. As an illustration, consider the function of an air conditioner. The process of heating a home is simple and once it has begun the air conditioner wants to continue the process indefinitely. If the system is allowed to continue to do what it was designed to do it will increase the temperature in the home from a frosty 30 degrees to a comfortable 60 degrees to a sweltering 90 degrees before killing the family inside at 140 degrees.

The key factor that allows the air conditioning to work for the sake of the humans inside the home is the thermostat. The thermostat interrupts the heating process by providing negative feedback and switching off the system once the home has reached the optimum temperature for the humans. The system itself does not care about the humans and would cook them alive while doing its job without the negative feedback. It is the thermostat that territorializes the process, allowing it to operate freely until it reaches the limits of what is good for the family inside. Without that negative feedback the process will kill the people it was designed to serve.

The code was originally designed to serve a particular people, but it was deterritorialized so that it could expand along with the civilization. First the code was altered in small ways, but as it became the overcode to govern a wide variety of peoples those restrictions fell away entirely. By moving the sacred into the realm of the market the overcode was able to create a vast network of people it could govern, but in the process it had to homogenize those peoples, stripping them of individuality and making them less human. The negative feedback that once limited the overcode to a specific people has been eliminated and now the system operates only in its own interest. This closed loop only experiences positive feedback creating a runaway cycle that accelerates with each turn.

Many people think of intelligence as a purely human trait, something produced by a brain serving the needs and desires of the person who posseses it, but Land’s definition is far broader. For Land, intelligence exists in an organism, system, or process that continuously corrects for feedback to produce an outcome that is different from that which would otherwise naturally occur. When the word cybernetics is used it conjures images of science fiction robots, but that is not its original meaning. Cybernetics is the science of studying control and communication in both animals and machines. It is the investigation of feedback loops and how they allow both machines and biological organisms to self-regulate, correct for errors, and reach goals. As a man in a boat travels down the river, he is consistently making small adjustments with the rudder to keep the boat from crashing into the shore. The sailor is responding to feedback and is constantly learning how to better pilot his vessel. This is a cybernetic process in action, and for Land, any entity, be it man, machine, or system, engaged in this process is gaining intelligence.

This conception of intelligence allows us to understand the behavior of non-human systems that seem to take on lives of their own. We have all seen this phenomenon before as we watch a bureaucratic organization sacrifice the wellbeing of the people who work for it and the people it was supposed to serve to increase its own size and power. The problem is one of incentives. Everyone who is being served by the public school system knows that an increase in managers and administrators does not benefit children in the classroom the same way that an increase in teachers would. Even most of the people working inside the school system know this. But since the 1950s the number of principals and administrative staff and in public schools has grown by 10 times the number of new teachers. The structure of the bureaucratic organization itself creates a feedback loop which trains the entity to grow its base of managers even if every individual involved believes that an increase in teachers would be more beneficial. The organization has taken on a life, or a logic, all its own. The organization no longer serves the people, the people are simply fodder for the goals of the organization itself.

This dynamic served as the central theme for “The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies” where I explained why our government works in a radically different way than is described in the Constitution or in popular education. That phenomenon is not restricted to government, it is simply an example of a process that is altering every aspect of our society. Everywhere we look self-interested systems are tearing apart and rearranging human social structures to create an increasingly inhuman society which can serve their needs. Almost none of this is intentionally sinister, simply inhuman systems following their internal logic to its rational conclusion. The greatest inefficiency in systems that were originally designed to serve humans is the humans themselves. The more machine-like you can make humans, the less drag they create in the system, and if you can remove them, all the better.

The majority of this work will be dedicated to discussing the role that hyperagents created by the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization will play in our political future. Whether it be bureaucracies, markets, or artificial intelligence, modern society is producing nonhuman entities that have their own sets of goals and are accumulating enough intelligence in the Landian sense to pursue those goals. The aims may be benevolent, nefarious, or indifferent but they are inhuman by definition. It is clear that these hyperagents are already driving a large amount of human behavior and if they come to dominate our political life we need to understand what a truly post-human politics may look like.