Google Cogitat, Ergo Sum

From the Age of Reason to the Age of Legion

A Cyberphilosopher's 20/20 Vision & Mission to c.u.r.e. Alphabetical tyranny in an epic Game of "Grammatical" Thrones for absolute rule over Artificial #INTELallegiance.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone.” Thus, is it not equally true that “every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of corporations alone?

The greatest leaders of antiquity never conceived of a corporation becoming more omnipotent than the Vatican or nation state amassing more wealth and power than sovereign countries themselves. In my opinion, this is one of the greatest tragedies of philosophy, not having conceived of corporate-nations or corponations, collectively governed by a new class of elites called the Corporatocracy. Thomas Hobbs imaged “Leviathans,” otherwise known as monarchies, aristocracies, and democracies, but he never imagined the monstrosity of an "Inc." Had Hobbs, Nostradamus, or Jesus himself given us fair warning, political philosophers would have sounded the alarm to guard the freedom-of-speech for individuals over the [right or might] of corporations to silence them; but silence them how?

The Constitutional pillars sustaining our freedom-of-assembly, right-to-protest, and speech have carried the weight of the social contract between government and people for 240 years. Corponations now vie to replace those “pillars” with "policies'' which they believe are grammatically superior. In the age of quantum computing, the grammar of a corporation compared to the grammar of an individual represents a new battle over alphabetical supremacy. This battle is being fought with powerful computers and mucho algorithms. Natural language processing spiked with machine-learning is pitting machine-against-machine in quantum-combat [#QuCo] over the grammatical-associations of people versus the "grammatical-policies" of corporate-A.I. (artificial intelligence). In a computer nano-second, the question becomes who gets to choose https://What-to-say_Where-to-say_When-to-say_What-not-to-say/on_the_internet or simply:

?Who has the alphabetical [right or might] to serve whom grammatically?

Cyberphilosophically, 2015 became the tipping point for free-speech when the Brother-of-Big-Brother hacked individualism, in a brute-force-attack, transforming democracy into corporatocracy spawning a new era I call The Age of Legion. This cultural-distributed-denial-of-service (cDDoS) attack forced corporations to choose whether to serve individual reason or corporate legion with or without clear 20/20 vision or mission. And how did corponations do it? With radical Alinskianesque machine learning code inspired grammatically by Saul Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals” published in 1971.

Whitehat cultural hacker Robert Frost wrote "the thought finds the words" which I believe may have irked Alinsky to re-engineer that beautiful phrase into a Weapon of Grammatical Disruption (WGD) by emphatically declaring "he who controls the language controls the masses." (source: Pieter Vree). In the battle over grammatical associations, therefore, controling language would become the key to victory, and for the followers of Alinsky the alphabetical strategy became abundantly clear: Freeze words, Frostbite thoughts: Ergo the Orwellian #BrotherOfBigBrother silencing free speech.

The advent of the scientific revolution in the 17th century revealed to Réne Descartes that “a vacuum is repugnant to reason;” (Principia Philospphi?). In his opus magnus 'Discourse on Method for Rightly Directing One’s Reason and Searching for the Truth,' Descartes concluded “Cogito, ergo sum – I think; therefore, I am” coalescing geometry and algebra scientifically, and essence and presence philosophically.

Descartes was intrigued by what each human being could achieve individually through reason, and in Rules for the Direction of the Mind wrote, “I shall bring to light the true riches of our souls opening up to each of us the means whereby we confined within ourselves without any help from anyone else all the knowledge that we may need for the conduct of life.” Metaphorically, grammar was the "Sacrifier à Vénus" that championed linguistics and individualism inspiring a grammatical revolution in dialectics, art, and human enlightenment.

For Descartes, the 17th Century concept of "anyone else" is figuratively today the #BrotherOfBigBrother (corponations). The grammatical "rules" for the direction of the minds of individuals therefore were accosted by a new class of pirates determined to hijack grammar with their canons of groupthink aimed at individual enlightenment, linguistics, dialectics and free speech. These new pirates with captain-cook AI-algorithms, left in their wake Exceptionally Bad Organizational Leadership in Absentia [rationalis] which has become a crisis of ethics that I believe can only be cured grammatically by superhero Cyberphilosophers.

Perhaps in a galaxy far-far away there are reasonable pirates or intelligence, but not here on Earth where unreasonable minds and technology rule the world. Artifical Ingelligence has become Artificial #INTELalligiance serving corproate groupthink begging the question:

Does one exist if not quarried by Google?

Since the inception of Google 21 years ago, Alphabet, Inc. generated fiefdoms of technology oligarchies to serve their Alphabet kingdom, literally and metaphorically. The irony today is that Alphabet, Inc. dominates the alphabet markets and the commerce-of-dialectics. This transcendental paradigm shift from the Age of Reason [individualism] to the Age of Legion [corporatism] has given us the newest Cartesian subordinate:

#GoogleCogitatErgoSum...

[Whatever] Google thinks, therefore I am.

Let that marinate for a while...        

Personally, I am shocked that Mozart, who was 20 years old in 1776, didn’t have the foresight to warn us in an opera called Die Magische Korporatokratie, especially given the Peace Treaty of Westphalia in October of 1648, a tipping point in geopolitical history. This philosophical hamartia, a term first used by Aristotle in his Poetics commonly understood by the Greeks to refer to the protagonists error or tragic flaw, has led "to a chain of plot actions culminating in a reversal from felicity to disaster” (Wikipedia). I humbly believe that the hamartia maximus of the century was being bamboozled into giving corponations grammatical power sans Alphabetical-skepticism, pun intended. Today, A.I.'s are artificially administering intelligence to absolve free speech in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy A.I.

The biggest ouchie in human history is being taisez -vouz'd by a machine.

For the philosopher, individual skepticism not corporate collectivism paved the way toward reason which inspired Descartes' methodology to transform the philosophical and scientific method toward enlightenment. Between 1637 and 1848, 211 years of thermodynamic skeptics such as William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) postulated the concept of absolute-zero, which would have been a eureka moment for Descartes as a rational Cartesian coordinate. Academically, we are constantly being told to "start-from-zero" as a euphemism for clear-your-bias. Allegorically, if the average human intellect could muster 0°F in unbiased-skepticism, imagine the possibilities of a super-human intellect mustering -459.67°F of quantum-unbiased-skepticism to achieve pure reason. Absolutely cool [pun intended].

With quantum-unbiased-skepticism, the scientist and the philosopher could strive allegorically toward absolute-reasoning to advance the “Discourse on Method” for truth so long as they remained skeptical and open minded. Individual skepticism would champion reason, not groupthink. Free speech, therefore, enabled the philosopher and the scientist to discourse freely, allowing their skepticism to absolve them from cognitive dissonance to be resolute, not absolute in their quest for truth.

Paradoxically, corporate dialectic, i.e. "rules, regulations, and policies" does not allow skepticism to exist in pursuit of pure reason or discourse. By design, corponations are beholden to Cartesian [absolute] coordinates, i.e. the bottom-line, and employees are often punished if they act [resolutely] to pursue the summum bonum (the greatest good). Starting at zero, i.e. freezing one’s mind from bias, reminds me of the medical condition known as sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia, or what ice-cream gourmands call brain-freeze. Allegorically therefore,

Brain-freeze, i.e. skepticism = bueno Speech-freeze = no bueno

Now the proof ??.

In 1912, the German chemist Walther Nernst declared that absolute-zero is physically impossible to achieve stating, "It is impossible for any procedure to lead to the isotherm T = 0 in a finite number of steps." (Bailyn, M. (1994)). Scientists discovered the limits of “absolution,” in other words everything in the universe is moving even if it does so ever-so-slightly. Nernst’s theorem, which is now known as the third-law of thermodynamics, therefore proves that nothing in existence is completely still.

Translation: you can't shut-people-up.

Did Alphabet, Inc. or Twitter not get that memo?

The fact that “the entropy of a system approaches a constant value as its temperature approaches absolute zero” but never?reaches zero should have become a Beatles song. Cartesian coordinates aside, everything is constantly in motion, and as such human thought and speech must necessarily be in constant motion a la liberté, égalité, fraternité, tweetaté & alphabeté flow. Simply said, you can’t taisez-vouz people (shut-people-up) algorithmically or freeze speech digitally (#CRYOspeech).

#CRYOSpeech is not [cool]

Despite certain fields such as mathematics requiring coordinates to make sense of objective data, humanity thrived for millennia without it. The greatest feats of humanity were achieved through sheer speculation, intuition, imagination, passion, grit, happenstance, spirit, and the biggest one of all love – no thermodynamics or coordinates required. Can corponations exist without the Cartesian coordinates such as quarterly reports, P&L’s, balance sheets, and KPI’s? Hell no. Just ask Shoshana Zuboff, author of “Surveillance Capitalism,” if the #BrotherOfBigBrother could exist without coordinates.

The unlimited resources and political power of corporations to employ surveillance capitalism to serve themselves, not people, is one of the most dangerous conundrums in political history. This phenomenon exposes the gravitas of what I perceive to be another Westphalia-tipping-point of alphabetical proportions because exceptionally bad organizational leaders will most likely employ Artificial Intelligence Policies [#AIP] to limit free speech and avoid Artificial Intelligence Accountability [#AIA]. Despite the vast amount of evidence vis-a-vis censorship trends today, I still believe that corporations - like individuals - are entitled and accountable to their own right of free speech, and self-governance. Regrettably, however, history proves that Exceptionally Bad Organizational Leadership in Absentia [rationalis] will embolden corponations to continue to expand their powers alphabetically, not democratically.

If not challenged by Cyberphilosophers to protect free speech, Google Cogitat, Ergo Sum - [Whatever] Google thinks, therefore I am - will prevail. Our strongest beacon of hope, therefore, requires "radical openness" (Thomas R. Lynch) absent policies for taisez-vouz'ing speech algorithmically. True Cyberphilosophical leadership, therefore, is needed to champion free grammatical-associations to protect individual speech in the Age of Legion. In the words of the philosopher Jeremy Campbell, who inspired me to write this essay, “sense and order...can prevail against nonsense and chaos. The world need not regress toward the simple, the uniform, and the banal, but may advance in the direction of richer and more complex structures, physical and mental. Life, like language, remains 'grammatical.' The classical view of entropy implied that structure is the exception and confusion the rule. The theory of information suggests instead that order is entirely natural: grammatical man inhabits a grammatical universe” (Campbell, Jeremy. Grammatical Man).

I fervently believe that by virtue of the grammar of our humanity, not the grammar of technology (A.I.), Cyberphilosopher’s can inspire and aspire to advocate for the Summum Bonum Index, or greatest alphabetical good. Free speech, therefore, is the best vaccine to immunize against Exceptionally Bad Organizational Leadership in Absentia [rationalis] in the service of individual reason, not absolute legion.

#GoogleCogitatErgoSum