Soldiers of iPhone
"Artificial Deliverance"
by Joel Bowman
“Rome will exist as long as the Colosseum does;
when the Colosseum falls, so will Rome;
when Rome falls, so will the world.”
- Saint Venerable Bede (673–735 AD)
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "The Empire is dying, dear reader. At least, that’s what the papers all say. And it’s tempting to agree. For those with eyes to see, the telltale signs are all there... bread and circuses... welfare and warfare... debts, deficits and moral decay. All the typical red flags. And now, adding one more block to the Jenga tower, along comes President Donald J. Trump, poised to erect a giant “Arc de Trump” in the nation’s capital, for an imagined victory over an unwilling enemy in a war he promised never to wage.
In truth, nobody actually knows what it is supposed to stand for... a monument to veterans... a symbol of military power... a giant 250th birthday cake... a military installation...? Whatever the case, Mr. Trump’s crowning glory is estimated to cost $100M, which sounds like a lot, but is really a pittance when talking in terms of government spending.
Take the Iran War, for comparison. Military expenditure to date (Nov. ‘26) is estimated at around $47.1 Billion. So far. And that’s just the “bang, bang, shoot ‘em up” part. The wider economic cost – higher petrol and diesel prices, higher home heating costs, higher borrowing costs resulting from inflation and rising interest rates, disruptions to global commerce, depletion of existing military stockpiles, etc. – is estimated to run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Real fake money, in other words.
For the price of military expenditures alone, Mr. Trump could have left the Levantines to sort out their own intractable mess (per his own campaign promise), and instead built 470 Arc de Trumps around the United States. (Or simply not spent the pre-printed money at all... an unthinkable proposition for members of both political parties.) Not that this is the first time a grand monument was raised to the heavens in praise of a nation. Speaking of bread and circuses...
Decline and Fall: One wonders what Vespasian, the Roman emperor who began construction on the mighty Colosseum, would have thought of the present predicament. He himself died a year before the grand public works project was completed by his successor and heir, Titus, and long before his younger son, Domitian, constructed the hypogeum, that labyrinth of tunnels used to house animals and slaves that ran underneath the arena. It was Domitian, too, who added the upper gallery to the top of the Colosseum so as to increase its capacity.
The Flavian Dynasty (69–96 AD), as Vespasian and his two successive ruling sons later came to be known, was no stranger to societal upheaval and tumultuous times of their own age. The family rose to power during the civil war of 69, the so-called “Year of the Four Emperors.”
Ten years later (79 AD), under the reign of Vespasian’s eldest son, Titus, Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum beneath thousands of tons of ash and lava. A year later, Rome itself was struck by massive fires and besieged by plague. Neither was poor ol’ Domitian spared the vicissitudes of the day. Something of an autocratic tyrant himself, the younger brother’s reign ended in assassination in 96 AD...some would say a fitting bookend to a dynasty that grew out of civil war.
More than 700,000 sunsets have passed over the Eternal City since Domitian fell to the floor of his study, his assailant’s dagger lodged in his groin. And yet, besides the color of the drapes, has that much really changed? In the age of high-speed information and low-grade congressmen, are we immune to the cult of personality... or more susceptible to it? Equipped with computer modeling and predictive text, are we any closer to prophesying the future... or further from the truth than ever?
For all our identity politics and preferred pronouns, our microaggressions and trigger warnings, are we free of petty gossip, unaffected by propaganda, resistant to what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences?”
Last we checked, a kiss was still a kiss. And a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet. Vespasian may not have been on X until the wee hours of the morning, it is true. Titus had never even heard of crypto or Nvidia or TikTakTok. And for all his pomp and ceremony, Domitian could not have conceived of commercial flight, never mind the wonders of Amazon same-day delivery. And yet, how far have we come as a species in two millennia?
Progress in Reverse: Turning to the news, we watch the passing parade with a mixture of humor and horror as the appointed “leaders” of the modern age serve us up one braindead idea after another. So-called conservatives who spend as though they were drunken sailors, assuming every voyage will be their last.So-called “progressives” who stoke the dying embers of racial division, who prattle on about class warfare and raise Marx’s ghost before every gathering around the cauldron.
The party uniform means nothing in the age of the informal uniparty. In practice, one no more expects to encounter a frugal conservative or a tolerant liberal than one expects to find a philatelist among postal clerks.
Then there are the independents. Kooks. Grifters. Zealots. Weirdos. All with a crackpot plan and a bottomless donation box. And of course there are the diehards in the “Libertarian Party,” something akin, we imagine, to the “Church of Atheism.”
Not that we have anything in particular against libertarians. Some of our best friends subscribe to the radical notion that other people are not their property. Of all the creeds, the libertarians seem to make the most sense. A kind of “do unto others... but not without their permission.” And yet, in two thousand years and counting, we haven’t been able to manage anything close to it.
There are other ways to express this basic idea, too: “live and let live”... “to each his own and his own to each”... and our personal favorite, “mind your own [insert expletive of choice here] business”... Alas, some people just can’t leave well enough alone. They feel the need, the compulsion, the “hand of history,” as Tony Blair once cringingly called it, to “do something.” Whether or not that something is the right thing is, to their mind, besides the point. Just so long as it’s not nothing...
Raise the debt ceiling for the umpteenth time in half a century? Why not? Send hundreds of billion dollars to fight civil wars from Eastern Europe to Western Asia? Sure thing! Commit $100 trillion to managing the earth’s thermostat, half a century in the future? Let us just grab your checkbook!
Other People’s Money: And therein lies the real problem with the Cult of Statism, dear reader. All its various machinations are, in one way or another, inherently prescriptive. You try to mind your own business. You try to live a quiet and decent life... but there’s always some joker telling you there’s a better way: their way. Oh, and they’ll be needing your money and/or person to make it happen. But how can anyone possibly claim the right to tell you how to live your life... and to force you to do it?! What about self-ownership? What about the non-aggression principle? What about “laissez-faire” and all that?
Long after the fall of the Roman Empire, a moral(izing) philosopher by the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought he found a workaround: the “Social Contract,” he called it, in his waffling, 18th century treatise of the same name. In a nutshell, the social contract holds that, because we are considered part of “society,” we must therefore accept the terms – whatever they may be – of that “society.” In other words, it posits an implicit consent on the part of the individual to be governed by the State... simply because the State exists, and because the majority have so willed it.
We’ve called it, in these very Notes, the “tyranny of the mob-jority.” But what kind of contract is this, anyway? A “contract” that makes up for lack of consent by simply presupposing it is no contract at all. What sort of court would uphold such a flimsy non-agreement... besides one owned and operated by the beneficiaries of such an absurd ruling? Not that the enthusiastic Genevan is solely to blame. He was simply building on the misguided works of previous meddlers.
Hobbes gave men’s rights to the government. Locke gifted them to God (But which God? Interpreted by whom? And what for the agnostics?) Few authors were brave enough to leave them in the hands of free men themselves.
But what about Man vs. Nature, some may be wondering? What about... gulp!.. anarchy! (Which, after all, simply means “without ruler”… NOT, as is commonly misunderstood, without rules.) Hobbes argued that, without the State, men would descend into a tyranny all of their own making, an existence “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Which probably reveals more about the cantankerous author than it does his fellow creatures. Therefore, he imagined, man would need a State... composed of mere men, mind you... to “maintain order.” But is this really true? Are we simply to take Hobbes’ word for it, to give away our most precious freedoms because of an arrogant supposition? Is there any hope, in other words, for self-governing men and women?
Rogues, Knaves & Robots: Governments the world over – along with their favored class of crony banksters, faux economists, prattling politicians, warmongers, tax attorneys, socialist parasites, disinformation experts, celebritards, hacktivists, pompous academicians, and the rest of their rotten, bloviating ilk – have long leeched on the wealth and toil of the “free” and productive class, from Vespasian to Titus to Domitian and on down to the modern gallery of rogues, knaves and robots you see up and down the ballot.
So long have the elites feasted, in fact, that the State now controls all the guns, all the courts and all the cages. But we needn’t “rage against the machine,” the preferred strategy of the young and the reckless. Now we’ve got Artificial Intelligence to write our hit songs, monitor our social media feeds and turn our grocery lists into Shakespearean sonnets.
Why worry about piffling trifles such as accelerating population decline... $40 trillion in national debt... $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities... culture wars... nuclear wars... wars on terror, drugs and poverty... 2+2=5=... net zero by 2050... two weeks to flatten the curve... climate lockdowns... CBDCs... Nord Stream II... Wuhan lab leaks... Gain of Fauci research… the Lolita Express... and multi-trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see…?
Not to worry. The answers to all these quandaries – and plenty more beyond our merely human intelligence – are within our virtual reach. The algorithms are here to save us, dear reader. All we need to do is surrender our humanity to our machine overlords… and hope we can find our way back from cultural Never Never Land by the memory we no longer have. What could go wrong? Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World..."
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