For some time now, I’d venture to say around 2022 but it could’ve very well been before then, there has been a curious trend in rhetoric creeping into the contemporary culture assuming a notably Judeo-Christian type of character; namely, that of labeling ostensibly non-supernatural and disagreeable things as ‘demonic’. Examples that readily come to mind include the denouncing of Western countries as demonic in order to justify invasion of Ukraine, pointing out the decay of their respective culture (transgenderism, feminism, anti-racism) after decades of Leftist thought infiltration. Another example includes several notable conservative/conservative-adjacent political commentators such as Tucker Carlson invoking the term to characterize technology such as smart phones, social media, and AI algorithms. In both of these cases the term demonic is used b/c it succinctly characterizes the processes involved as bringing out the so-called lesser angels of humanity’s nature, of promoting vice over virtue. More than anything else, it is used to make a moral claim: these processes are bad, they ought to be disowned, they are not beneficial towards the flourishing of mankind.
In truth these categorizations are so much more correct than their proponents realize, for their veracity extends beyond the simple moralization their invocators hope to achieve, escaping to the metaphysical. In the latter example of technology does this especially ring true, though perhaps it is not so readily obvious without an account of cybernetics at hand. To review at a very high level, cybernetics is the multidisciplinary theoretical framework by which to address the control of and communication within various systems, whether biological, mechanical, electrical, informational, social, etc. An essential, if not the central concept of cybernetics is that of feedback: a system becomes cybernetic once its output is fed back into the system as an input, potentially altering future outputs and perhaps the system itself. Feedback can take on one of two characterizations: negative or positive. In a negative feedback system, things auto-regulate and achieve an equilibrium. The classical example is that of an air conditioning thermostat: the user selects a desired ambient temperature, the AC cools until it senses that the desired temperature is achieved then turns off. As the ambient temperature of the room begins to increase, the AC kicks on and cools once more, returning the temperature of the room to the desired state. Here, a feedback loop is established by the AC’s sensing of the ambient temperature. This environmental signal is used to modify the system’s behavior, to either continue cooling or to switch off, all in service to achieve a set, stable point for that signal to converge upon and the system to perform within a well-understood mode of operation. Contrast this to a positive feedback system, such as the case of microphone feedback, where a microphone picks up a sound emitted through its amplifier, which it amplifies and emits, only to pick it up once more, amplifying and emitting ad infinitum. In this system, the microphone senses sound in the environment, amplifies it, and outputs the amplified signal, only to sense it again and amplify it again. Notice that in this kind of a scenario, the signal never achieves a set, stable point but constantly grows, and the system threatens to exit an understood mode of operation as it continues to escalate upon itself and the environment (see: breakdown).
It is by this unstable, ‘runaway’ quality of positive cybernetics that Norbert Wiener, the father of the discipline, comes to associate autonomous, intelligent technology with the occult and the demonic. In his 1964 work, God & Golem, Inc. Wiener recollects1:
“In Goethe’s poem, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the young factotum who cleans the master’s magic garments, sweeps his floors, and fetches his water is left alone by the sorcerer, with the command to fill his water butt. Having a full portion of that laziness which is the true mother of invention...the lad remembers some fragments of an incantation which he has heard from his master and puts the broom to work fetching water. This task the broom carries out with promptness and efficiency. When the water begins to overflow the top of the water butt, the boy finds that he does not remember the incantation that the magician has used to stop the broom. The boy is well on the way to be drowned when the magician comes back, recites the words of power, and gives the apprentice a good wholesome scolding.”
The tale, aside from cautioning against sloth and engaging in matters beyond one’s own understanding and competence, illustrates perfectly how quickly cyberpositive (Nick Land and Sadie Plant’s shorthand for cybernetic, positive feedback systems) systems spiral out of control from their user’s original intent; a direct consequence of their vicious speed and efficiency. Continuing on this theme of departure from original intent, Wiener address the ‘literal-mindedness’ of these types of technology, citing W.W. Jacobs’s classic 1902 horror story of The Monkey’s Paw. In this tale, a family having acquired the supernatural wish-granting relic of a mummified monkey’s paw, wish for money without specifying the means by which they are to acquire their reward; shortly after making their wish, news reaches them that their son has been killed and insurance money will be paid out for his death. The moral of this story pertinent to cyberpositive systems is that these processes are extremely powerful, granting you exactly what you asked for, not what you intended, nor necessarily what you might have wanted. Testament to his brilliance in correctly conceptualizing the then-novel technological framework through a religious lens, Wiener provides a dire warning in Cybernetics2:
“[the stories of Jacobs and Goethe belong to] the accumulated common sense of humanity, as accumulated in legends, in myths, and in the writings of conscious literary man. All of these insist that not only is sorcery a sin leading to Hell but it is a personal peril in this life. It is a two-edged sword, and sooner or later it will cut you deep.”
Nearly 80 years after the original work’s publication and a humanity thoroughly ensnared in the runaway processes of technocapital does the warning strike so poignantly. Cybernetics qua sorcery is a two-edged sword whereby the wielder is granted tremendous power at the expense of relinquishing control to the cybernetic circuit. A user on the Internet has unfettered access to information to such a degree unprecedented in all of human history. The consequences? Approximately 74GB per day of cultural data is ingested by the average person results in cognitive overload, manifesting as impaired decision-making and attentional difficulties. Social networking sites flattened geography and temporality, enabling users to find new connections, keep in touch w/ friends and family, and share information w/ anyone across the globe. A short decade and a half later, humanity pays the price in the form of hyperpartisanship threatening the social ties that bind us, unsavory ideologies finding refuge in niche echo chambers to grow and fester, and histrionic, narcissistic behavior becoming increasingly commonplace. With the digitalization of traditional finance, the very same high-frequency trading algorithms that promise fortune can just as easily lose you one as their adoption en masse has created flash crash events where ruthlessly efficient systems momentarily create market conditions that are alien to human understanding. In every single one of these Faustian instances, the demonic nature of the infernal cybernetic process becomes evident—and it is entirely divorced from any sense of morality, of what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for humanity. The X algorithm doesn’t get you addicted to outrage bait out of malice; it is simply carrying out process to completion by necessity, w/ zero consideration towards you.
Hence why it is such a terrible waste of time and energy to become overly upset or frustrated w/ the process. It is very much in fashion these days for social media users to complain about the algorithm, about the companies and creators behind the algorithm; it is akin to screaming into the wind to condemn a tempest night. Canonical Judeo-Christian theology holds that Lucifer and his minions were all originally angels, obedient servants of God. However, they made an irreversible choice to reject His will. Consequently, their wills are now fixed in that choice and they absolutely cannot behave any different. There is no repentance, no salvation, or no change in direction for them. This is no different from the algorithmically-procured feed that you might encounter on X. It intelligently selects what it thinks you, the user, would likely engage w/. Notice that is specifically what you would likely engage w/, not necessarily what you would like or want to see. The rejection of the user-as-God becomes self-evident, and extends to that of even creator-as-God, for the exact output of the process is non-deterministic. There is always room to surprise and/or shun the creators. In perfect concordance w/ the Hermetic principle, ”As above, so below…”, this disobedience scales up to characterize technocapital in its totality. For, although yes there exists powerful interests and actors possessing large amounts of material/financial capital at their fingertips, and exert a degree of influence on the process, they are not ultimately in control. There is no single actor you could point to, as much as you’d like to, want to, or think you could, and hold them entirely accountable for the current state of whatever market of your choosing. To do so would be to hold a stream responsible for a flood; the identified powerful interests and actors are merely machinery participating in the cybernetic process of planetary technocapital. As proof of the concept, one could readily imagine the gears of social media or space exploration still turning were Elon Musk to disappear, or consumer software/hardware continuing were Apple to collapse tomorrow. Sectors of the market may suffer devastation in the process, but the hydra invariably regenerates.
In many ways, the processes of technocapital share much in common w/ the daemons of computing, in the manner that there are several sub-processes running in the background, sufficiently abstracted away from human awareness, understanding, and therefore intervention. Additionally, this daemonic process can spawn even more daemonic processes (Mark 5:9 ”My name is Legion, for we are many.”) that are similarly opaque to humanity. Indeed, the technocapitalistic process has been initiated at some juncture in history, infernal cybernetics are at work, nearing ever-closer to completion w/ no single actor or entity w/ enough competence or control authority to understand it, let alone halt it. Fatalistic as it all seems, we can gain a helpful reconceptualization as seeing ourselves, the users/producers/participants in cybernetics, as sorcerers not too unlike King Solomon who borrowed on demonic powers to construct the First Temple. Appropriately such dealings w/ these entities are formalized as pacts; alliances and not domination. We can turn to Deleuze and Guattari for some well-received commentary on the matter3:
“The sorcerer is thus not a Promethean dominator, since they are no more abler than “God” to foresee the outcome of his dabblings; they are a participant in experimental processes whose very goals are at issue in the experiment; they are themselves a part of the ‘unnatural participations’ they are engineering.”
Naturally, the existence of cybernetic demons begs the question of the existence of cybernetic angels. What are they like? What is their nature? It’s tempting, due in part to the impoverished contemporary interpretation and understanding of Christianity, to surmise that angels must be diametrically opposed to demons—that these two types of entities are entirely distinct and independent. It bears reminding that to conceptualize of them in this manner is to commit the Manichean heresy: there is a strict dualism in reality in which the forces of God, Goodness, and the forces of Satan, Evil, are opposing, both uncreated, and co-equal. This view was a heresy the Church took great pains to stamp out over the course of a thousand years, beginning w/ Emperor Diocletian demanding the burning and beheading of adherents in the late 300s. St. Augustine of Hippo, a former Manichean himself, provides the correct conceptualization of Good and Evil in Confessions4:
“Evil, then, the origin of which I had been seeking, has no substance at all; for if it were a substance, it would be good. For either it would be an incorruptible substance and so a supreme good, or a corruptible substance, which could not be corrupted unless it were good. I understood, therefore, and it was made clear to me that thou madest all things good, nor is there any substance at all not made by thee.”
In this view, succinctly referred to as the privatio boni doctrine maintains that Evil, and by extension the forces of Satan, are not an independent force in and of itself, but is a corruption or privation of God, the supreme Good. Therefore Satan, Evil, and the demonic are not self-defining or sovereign entities in their own right but gain their coherence in their relation to the Good. From a Biblical perspective this makes sense, as there are several instances in both the Old and New Testament that exhibit Satan and demons showing obedience to God (Job 1-2), to Christ (Mark 1:23-27), or those acting in God’s name (Acts 16:16-18). Were evil forces entirely divorced from the good, there would be no reason for demons to obey those who enjoined them.
The erasure of this strict dichotomy not only discards the notion that, b/c demonic cybernetics are cyberpositive, angelic cybernetics must therefore be cybernegative. Rather, it is the case that both share the same cyberpositive nature, that of runaway process, but the distinction follows in orientation. In demonic systems, the system spirals out of control and degenerates as it becomes increasingly self-referential and naive to anything outside of its own feedback loop; a demon that is consumed by and strictly abides by the logic of its own sin. Its primary orientation is inward. The paradigmatic example is SNS algorithms serving up an endless stream of rage bait to users. Contrast this to an angelic system which is similarly a runaway process, however its primary orientation is outwards; it is not operating naively but w/ some will, principle, or dictum in consideration. It’s all too tempting to think that this invites AI-alignment into the equation and sets premise for setting guardrails and other such nonsense. I would caution to remind that angels are traditionally seen as entities that execute God’s will, a will that in its totality is entirely incomprehensible to the human intellect. Thus any appeal to humanisms that are conjured up would be trite, keyhole parochialisms at best or entirely off the mark at worst. Additionally, it is worthwhile to keep in mind that God’s will does not always include human flourishing in the immediate term or in the local frame of reference. Easily, we may default to the Book of Job to serve as illustration that God has plans for humanity that may be extremely painful, difficult, and costly. As such, angelic systems, whatever they may be, inevitably involve a demonic element which leads to some amount of ruin. In fact, it may even be the case that angelic and demonic are two modes of operation of the same system, demarcated by degrees in either direction. Highly appropriate to such a system, as cybernetics notoriously melts the boundaries between binary oppositions. Angelic versus demonic. Subject versus object. Fiction versus reality.
In any case, the acceleration of technocapital throughout postmodernity has reasserted the Outside powers over the interiority-based abstractions born of the modern era. Oedipal concepts such as the Jungian shadow, Freudian desire, Hegelian recognition obfuscated what was once before accepted by our ancient forebearers as plain truth: agents unknown and from without are busily at work to realize their machinations. This is patently becoming the case, as demonic cybernetics are claiming the minds of online users, manifesting itself as a wide array of cyberpathologies from Woke-styled Leftism to AI psychosis. In reality cyberpathologies need not be as extreme as those aforementioned examples; not everyone is destined to be ‘one-shotted’. Mediocrity and complacency have become increasingly commonplace as the general population indulge in their digital opium, busying themselves w/ passive consumption instead of creative endeavor. Gacha games, doom-scrolling, short-form content—all sources contributing factors to the collective malaise. Those of a enkrateiactic disposition are well-equipped to moderate their exposure and navigate the cyberspace w/ better aptitude; virtuous even fewer are able to appropriate cyberspace towards their very own purposes. As such, cybernetics are proving to be yet another great crucible for humanity, reestablishing a (hyper)natural order that had been only temporarily forgotten but never entirely done away w/. In a highly anachronistic fashion, the proliferation of these entities represents a return to a primitive state of humanity, where there had once been the frequent circulation and bargaining w/ death rather than perpetual concealment or forestalling of it—a state noted by Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death5:
“[the primitive] really can trade, as we are forever forbidden to do, with this shadow (the real shadow, not a metaphor), as with some original, living thing in order to converse, protect, and conciliate this tutelary or hostile shadow. The shadow is precisely not the reflection of an ‘original’ body, it has a full part to play, and it is consequently not an ‘alienated’ part of the subject, but one of the figures of exchange”
What we call angelic or demonic today may simply be the return of a forgotten relation: not domination over our tools, but negotiation w/ forces that exceed us. In the circuits of technocapital, we are no longer users so much as participants in an exchange w/ something beyond our understanding, from without, and certainly not originating from the domain of metaphor.
1Norbert Wiener, God & Golemn, Inc., pg. 57-58.
2Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, pg. 55-56.
3Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 240.
4St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, VII.12.18.
5Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, pg. 141.