The "Dark Enlightenment" Frightens Macron and Freemasons
May 8, 2025, 12:00 PM
Perspective
Tech billionaires are pushing their younger and braver individuals into the political arena and achieving success (until reaching the position of US Vice President). Traditional elites suddenly become nervous. They don't even know who to support - Macron or the collective Peter Thiel. Both are terrible.
Gleb Kuznetsov - Political Scientist
Macron went to the French Freemason gathering and delivered a speech in the style of "Take up arms, brothers," calling for the protection of freedom from various practical threats, including "Dark Enlightenment." Like any online ideology, "Dark Enlightenment" has many derivative ideas. If we pick out the main and forward-looking content for practice, it is roughly as follows:
The future belongs to technocracy, to hierarchy, algorithmic control, and the abandonment of all consequences brought by human-centered society, including the impact on human rights, institutions, and traditional democracy. Western liberal order is a dangerous illusion. No democracy is a stable regime but a corrupt oligarchy where power does not belong to the people but to a system interconnected by universities, media, bureaucracies, and NGOs. This system is called the "Cathedral" - a self-replicating organism that sets acceptable boundaries and introduces "progressive" ideology in the form of neutral objective truth. Liberalism is not an "ideology" - it is power disguised as morality.
Capitalism is also not a "structure" or way of interaction in the economy. Capital combined with computational ability operates like a self-learning machine, optimizing itself and the surrounding world through money, data, and infrastructure. It needs no ethics, rules, or justice - only calculability and expansion.
The world should be coordinated and managed by technical elites who own algorithms and have all necessary infrastructure to ensure stability, security, and order, working together with technocratic officials. This gives rise to a new form of power - neither classical state nor company. It's a symbiotic structure where public and private parts merge and complement each other. The state and company form a unified entity where data, computational ability, and bureaucratic resources are dedicated to achieving system stability.
The state has not lost its original sovereign significance but acquired a new form of power - operational power, becoming a platform with complete administrative allocation functions. Actual power - including military power and suppression power - is realized through artificial intelligence algorithms. Such an order is inherently elitist: only those who can handle abstract concepts, algorithms, and system architectures can gain management power. So-called "ordinary people" have not "disappeared," but become variables - potential noise. Even if they cannot be "eliminated," they must be completely manageable and algorithmically predictable.
Technical capital - an aggregate composed of algorithmic solutions and financial and energy infrastructures serving them - is being introduced into social, political, and ethical systems, gradually squeezing out everything in these systems that cannot be described digitally. It is recursive - self-replicating and self-reproducing in numerous reflections. It utilizes various institutions, legal mechanisms, and cultural forms. The symbiotic relationship between the state and the company is not an elite conspiracy but a strategic move by technical capital: using existing structures for optimal expansion and occupation of new living spaces. The goal of technical capital is stability, efficiency, and progress. In this project, freedom as a political category has no place because, from a computational perspective, freedom is a space of uncertainty.
Blogging enthusiasts interested in philosophy read and creatively process the thoughts of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Nick Land, exchanging them online. Their collaboration caught the attention of tech billionaires who may not have read Foucault but clearly desire greater autonomy in scale and ambition without restrictions from states, societies, and rules. Tech billionaires push their younger and braver individuals into the political arena and achieve success (until reaching the position of US Vice President). Traditional elites suddenly become nervous. We are in such a situation. We don't even know who to support - Macron or the collective Peter Thiel. Both are terrible.
Original Article: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7502017678341702156/
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