For some years I’ve been pushing two ‘prophecies’:

The first is the Marxian/Keynesian proposition that production-tech developments will in time make it possible for most ‘work’ to become ‘art’ or ‘play.’ 

The second is the Federovian proposition that health-tech developments will in time make it possible not simply for lifespans, but indeed ‘healthspans,’ to be lengthened indefinitely as the genetic ‘aging code’ is deciphered and then deactivated. 

Now we are at the threshold of those prophesies’ joint fulfillment, as ever more frequent headlines make plain.

This week an Israeli gentech firm conquered a form of cancer. Last week a California firm conquered genetic cholesterol disease. 

Meanwhile AI is now doctoring and lawyering, not to mention coding and authoring, and a new ‘Enhanced Games’ has been introduced to compete with the more traditional Olympic Games. Only one world record was set at the latter last week, but recall that SpaceX’s first three rocket-launch attempts failed spectacularly. 

It thus isn’t too much to say, now, that those of us who can live for another five years or so might live another five hundred – and at what ever biological ages we choose. (Mice have already now been reverse-aged. That is not far from human, in relative terms.) And as we do so, we will in principle be able to ‘work’ as creatively and comfortably as we wish, for ourselves and our loved ones, rather than for alien and asshole taskmasters.

Only one hurdle, with four now-salient contemporary faces, seems in any manner to threaten to limit full realization, and with it unprecedented emancipation – including from death and drudgery themselves – for all…

The hurdle is contemporary feudalism – that is, ownership and/or control arrangements that permit tiny elites to hoard and determine access to all, or at any rate nearly all, of a polity’s most consequential offices and/or an economy’s most consequential, productive assets, with the rest of us having to prostitute ourselves in various ways for a piece of the action. 

The prostitution can take any or all of several forms, which correspond to the relevant forms of feudalism themselves. 

One familiar example is the ‘lackey’ or ‘vassal’ relation, whereby access to advantage rides on one’s personally flattering or otherwise pleasing the access-controller.

Another familiar example is the hierarchical employment relation under capitalism, especially under that ‘neo’ form of feudalism that is oligopoly capitalism, whereby access to advantage rides on one’s satisfying the owners or controllers of enterprise capital.

Finally, yet another familiar example is ‘religious’ submission (one religion’s very name means ‘submission,’ while the word ‘religion’ in turn derives from the Latin for ‘ox yoke’) in a theocracy, under which either or both productive life and socio-cultural life are prescribed by clerics and their apparatchiks. Here access to advantage rides on avoiding offense to the clerics and their brownshirts or brown-noses.

What ever the particular form your society’s feudalism takes (the forms vary historically with productive and technological development), its required-prostitution significance is the same: Your access to what really belongs to you unconditionally as of right – namely, the means of your own self-creation and self-development and self-enhancement – is perversely rendered contingent on elite assholes’ arbitrary wills. 

The four contemporary and oft-overlapping faces of feudalism I’ll identify here can be characterized most perspicuously by reference either to the above-mentioned forms of prostitution they require, or, correlatively, to the particular kinds of asshole whose arbitrary exercises of will are most consequential under them. 

The four presently most salient forms can accordingly be named (1) contemporary political autocracy, (2) techbro or finbro or other econo-‘commanding heights’ monopoly ir oligopoly, (3) christofascism, and (4) islamism. 

The first form vests largely unchecked consequential control, be it legal, political, economic or some combination of those, in whoever holds high state office. The relevant office might be held in virtue of popular election (Orban), seizure of power (Idi Amin), or both (an elected leader like Hitler or Erdogan who suspends or unilaterally amends a constitution once in office). 

The second form affords unchecked consequential control over access to productive opportunity in the most consequential sectors of an economy to small numbers of owners of or controlling executives in (or both, as these typically are heavily overlapping categories) very small numbers of firms that dominate the relevant sectors. 

The third form as we presently encounter it is but a latent tendency now finding increasing realization in the US. It operates through Form (1) by placing old-school ‘conservative’ ‘Christians’ into the relevant offices of state, and then not only permitting, but even encouraging each to change the ethos of his (and it is indeed typically ‘his’) department along these conservative ‘Christian’ lines. A conspicuous contemporary example is the US’s current Secretary of Defense – or, as he has revealingly renamed it, ‘Secretary of War.’

It bears noting that christofascism is ‘neo-‘ feudal rather than ‘ur-‘ feudal because, unlike its medieval predecessor, it does not (yet) act to change the ethos or mores, let alone the civil law, of society at large to conform to its ‘Christian’ doctrine. But as the parenthetical suggests, this is probably only a matter of time, as most christofascists talk as if they hope one day to accumulate sufficient power as to effect a transition from mere authoritarian to full-on totalitarian governance. This takes us to …

The fourth form of neo-feudalism we now encounter is islamism, which we find across much of the Middle East and West Asia. The islamists maintain precisely that degree of totalitarian socio-cultural, including but not solely economic, dominion that I noted the christofascists to seem to aspire to. In this sense, they are full-on medieval in the manner of the christofascists’ Dark Age European forebears. What makes them ‘neo-,’ then, is simply the fact that their ideology is primitive islam as refracted through the medium of ‘modernist’ early 20th century European fascist thought – a concoction brewed up by the Loony Tune founders of today’s still-active ‘muslim brotherhood’ and ‘shi’ite iran’ (not to be confused with Persia).

All four of these contemporary feudalisms are of course objectionable, and familiarly objected to, for the ‘verticalities’ they impose on societies. But my brief and my beef here are more specific. And that is because they’re historicallyspecific – occasioned by the fact, which I noted in opening this meditation above, that we now stand at a threshold where human capacities and indeed even lifespans and healthspans can now be almost unimaginably enhanced and extended, if only we all can unfetter ourselves. 

What should disgust bona fide revolutionaries at present is how all four new feudalisms vest control of our creative and even biological lives – our very essence as mortal but ever potentially self-surpassing humans poised midway ‘between the angels and the animals’ – in the hands of narcissistic assholes. 

Our ‘common task,’ as the great 19th century ‘prophet’ Federov – one part philosopher, one part visionary scientist – would put it, is to stuff these creeps into rubber rooms and ensure equal access to all productive, and all health-preserving and life-extending assets to all of us wishing to self-realize and indeed self-transcend. 

To do this will be indeed to enable a Marxian-Promethean democratized rendition of Nietzschean ‘self-overcoming’ for all of humanity. And that means we’ll bridge a quite false divide often posited and pushed by life-tired and mediocre old ersatz intellectuals.

I’ve consistently and persistently pushed this vision as recently as this very year with certain self-styled ‘progressive’ legislators, many of them renowned, whom I’ve advised now for over a decade. But they’re too self-castrated and, now, sadly in league with the islamist feudalists to dare work for this now-achievable end. They’d rather bait AIPAC and do Jew-envy than actually progress anywhere that’s not de facto regressive.

Meanwhile, the more self-styled ‘conservatives’ often are similarly in thrall either to christofascists or to tech bros. I’ve never worked with this crowd, and see no prospect of doing so unless they too renounce all forms of feudal backwardness. 

At least, though, some of these tech bros, not to mention one Vladimir Putin, are seeking to finsnce and develop the mentioned enhancements, even if partly or wholly from personal vanity. And the good news here is that these ‘game-changing’ technologies, like others before them, will all but inevitably prove too big for them to restrain or retain once ‘scaling’ starts. 

We will nevertheless, I think, have to grass-roots this in order to speed up wide dissemination notwithstanding the efforts of feudal elites to contain it or exclusively ‘monetize’ it, all of us humans who care for all humans. Like all good revolutionaries, we must keep before us the fact that even the inevitable is optimized only through broad ground-up ‘praxis.’

But to pull that off we’ll have to recognize and discharge two subsidiary tasks: 

First, to resist Luddite temptations to deny enhancement itself rather than prevent its feudal oligopolization. We’re already seeing a great deal of this now among ersatz-‘leftists’ and ‘degrowthers’ who are mere troglodyte throwbacks much like the feudalist theocrats, not real ‘progressives.’ 

And second, we will have to contend with a platform environment, itself feudally owned and controlled, that makes sustained attention all but impossible even for every ‘I,’ let alone any ‘We.’ And without such attention, we cannot form intention, hence cannot act. Praxis prerequires cathexis.

More on that soon.