“... if thought corrupts language, language can a/so corrupt thought...”
George Orwell,
Politics and the English Language
We know that a revolution and a war is being waged against us when what is said, how it is said and what we understand collectively as the meaning of the words, becomes a battle, a victory for one, a lost world and a lost being for the other, when language becomes a matter of life and death, an indicator of friend or foe. Industrial revolutions, tyrannies, dictatorships are enacted, identified, signified, experienced through changes of language.
The very term ‘industrial revolution’ is a misleading and sanitised word describing a martial situation in which ways of life including economic activity, relational, sexual, social and familial life, values, cultural activity and shared understandings are at the mercy of profound and irreversible upheaval. Such a revolution is brought about over an extended period of time. It can seem like a conspiracy but is more likely the gradual alignment of interests and mutual aid of a small but global cabal of industrialists, aristocrats, monarchies, magnates, financiers and economists, politicians, corporations, philanthropists, scientists and technologists. It is the last of these who are in charge of the great reset of humanity because technology is not neutral. Technology is the idea. Technology is the long dreamt of patriarchal victory over the wild, the organic, the untameable.
Subtle and gross manipulations of language erode our epistemological, somatic, experiential and metaphysical experience of being in the world. Participation, articulation, creative expression, somatic knowing, philosophical and spiritual anchors become silenced, dangerous, unpredictable and implacable.
We find ourselves in strange lands and sometimes quite alone. We try to understand the new sciences, the new humans, to get to grips with a future that is already here and find ourselves in a world of made-up words, doublespeak, nouns used as verbs and verbs as nouns, a topsy-turvy linguistic mirror-world. The language of the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolution is esoteric and we stumble along in confused and dreadful responses, always underestimating our enemy. As a woman, the words I would normally use to describe and explore my experience, to root myself in a particular knowing of myself, to define a unique experience of oppression, are censored or expropriated. There is nothing new here I suppose, the words of a critical woman have always been dangerous creatures leading to prisons, exile, asylums and death.
What is obvious and exoteric is the overtly military language being used. The psychological operations of mantra and repeating phrases assure us that the future being manufactured by the Silicon Valleys of this world is “inevitable” and “catastrophic”. The new humans being raised in the nurseries of the new order are sung to sleep by the dark lullabies of the technocratic propaganda machine. In the public arena, the overwhelming disorientation, the rapid disintegration and decomposition of the world we knew is signified by the verbal surrender to business as usual: “It is what it is.”
Language forms, creates, manipulates, includes, excludes, delineates, dignifies, belittles, reduces, sanctifies, signifies, symbolises, eradicates, erases, extinguishes. We communicate not only to get through our day and to meet our needs, expand our knowledge, connect with each other and describe our realities, we communicate which side we are on. The technological project, training its apocalyptic superintelligence on every morsel of human language and thought that exists in digital form or that is heard in real time through all the myriad surveillance devices embedded in our daily lives, is meanwhile eviscerating shared human language and meaning.
The technocrats describe their interventions in the world as ‘disruptive’. The idea of a disruptive but ultimately manageable person or situation is only one definition. The other definition of disruptive is ‘to tear asunder’, ‘to break into pieces’. The Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolution is not an interruption, it is the end of everything.
“Doublespeak is a language that pretends to communicate but really doesn’t. It is language that makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant appear attractive or at the least to tolerable. Doublespeak is language that avoids or shifts responsibility language that is at variance with it’s real or purported meaning. It is language that conceals or prevents thought; rather than extending thought, doublespeak limits it... Basic to doublespeak is incongruity the incongruity between what is said or left unsaid, and what really is.”
William Lutz, Doublespeak
The observation of ‘woman’ or ‘man’ is no longer a given. When so many uncomplicated words and concepts suddenly become a struggle for understanding and definition, sowing terrible divisions and ripping apart the fabric of our communities, resurrecting the cultural memories of historical tyrannies, when words become not means to communicate curious and nuanced qualities of experience and idea but a means to differentiate, alienate, disenfranchise, control, oppress, divide, and criminalise, when everyday language carries a heightened sense of threat, when we can no longer communicate with each other, when two plus two equals five, then we are at war.
Language is violence driven by the desires and designs of the technocrats who rig and prime the contemporary tools of communication to which we are addicted. The choice of military lexicon on the webpages of companies like OpenAI is not accidental: disrupt, deploy, execute, target, agents, mission, risk. The war against biology and the wild is felt again in the language of artificial intelligence which is said to ‘scrape’ the human world for data, a description felt in my female body at least as a kind of visceral assault, the machine a ravenous, impersonal entity that rapes, consumes and discards without conscience or feeling, the human body a meat-puppet to be emptied of fruit and flesh and then discarded. In other circles, the language used to describe a human body and therefore the human experience is “a sacred vehicle”.
There is a feeling in the language of the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolution that can be felt in the cells of my body, in the censoring of speech, the mutilation of humanity, in the obliteration of confidence and the ability to navigate the world. There is this feeling that arises when I realise that the word I am about to use does not mean what it meant anymore; it is the language of an enemy, or is too dangerous to say.
It is said that a language dies out every 40 days. As I pore over the books and plans of the new technologies, dictionary in hand, I realise that the language that is becoming extinct is a global language, a shared language; wild, organic and natural, and it is being destroyed. In the place of that language, there is code, jargon, invention and doublespeak remaking and recoding the old world. The great extinction does not just happen ‘out there’, it happens here, within us. If we are to survive, we must speak what we see and what we know, and we must never underestimate the enemy. We must take back our language and ask ourselves if the thing they tell us is freedom is really so. Where it has been said that the word was made flesh, now it is being used to make the machine.