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Rating: I imagine it has happened to many to become interested in an album/book/whatever due to a peculiar cover or an intriguing title: it's clear that in 91.76% of cases the object of our curiosity will turn out to be a resounding flop.
Aware of this irrefutable dogma, I decided to acquire the recent text on the "Hypnocratic" theorem published earlier this year by this young philosopher with an unpronounceable name based in Hong Kong.
Months ago, I had read something about the book and heard an analysis on a radio program of a rather well-known national station: Radio Maria.
I admit that after the first twenty pages, my ideas weren't too clear: having no specific knowledge of the subject and not using any social media, I didn’t have too many expectations of an opposite sign: it discusses obscure concepts/mechanisms completely alien to me. And thus potentially interesting.
In the vaguely para-pseudo-conspiratorial flavored opening, a peculiar role is attributed to Artificial Intelligence in the dissemination and establishment of Hypnocracy in (so-called) modern societies, with all that would derive for those who compose these societies. Us.
But what exactly does he mean by hypnocracy?
The author claims it is "a permanently altered state of consciousness, a lucid sleep, a functional trance" (quote).
And up to this point, everything seems normal: there are lots of people around who sleep standing up even with their eyes wide open.
Hypnocracy would represent the misguided condition of our (de) minds in the face of all that digital maelstrom from which, as individuals, we are now inextricably wrapped and involved more deeply on a global level.
The hypnocratic process has become so ingrained that it conditions much of our daily actions, to the point of altering our most inscrutable, intimate, and personal needs; what we believe in or rather what we believe we believe in.
The first part is still the most comprehensible; the further you go, the more you dive into metaphysical-digital chapters with concepts leaning towards pure abstraction:
- architectures of suggestion;
- algorithmic intimacies;
and so on.
The underlying thesis should be that Artificial Intelligence "nullifies" you as a sentient individual because through the insidious acquisition of your means/modules of expression acquired through our online activity, it first absorbs them and then exploits them to develop disproportionately, constructing a fictitious reality that makes the individual an unwitting victim of the machine itself.
Every attempt to extricate ourselves from this process is as useless as it is pretentious because it is engulfed by the system in an infinite and inexorable loop.
The various prêt-à-porter services that abound on the net and that so many/too many use in a completely superficial as well as immersive manner are nothing more than the outward part of a world indoctrinated by unsuspecting "end users", victims of a wide and insidious project/design. In just over a hundred little pages, our para-pseudo-intellectual seeks to probe and unravel before our eyes the ongoing hypnocratic aberration, finally attempting to offer a practicable "solution" to the dilemma that is no longer tenable to disconnect from everything and everyone, nor to move to that "happy" island represented by the smiling Pyongyang, where the internet basically does not exist. And everyone is happy.
Maybe.
Globally, I believe there are interesting points, as little as I understand them.
But maybe I find them interesting precisely because I understand so little.
But it's the same old unresolved dilemma since the birth of the universe: which came first, the egg or the Triceratops?
As the pages progress, a daring hyper-uranean leap connects the recent rise of the wonder duo Trump/Musk who exploited the insidious "hypnocratic force" of the web (of all its components), misleading synapses like no one had ever done before today.
Between you and me: I think they seized "full powers" thanks to other elaborate rhetorical artifices: the wonderful MAGA hats and the promise of Mars' conquest by Napo Orso Capo.
The book can offer a cue for various reflections about the state of virtual intoxication in which we all flounder: it is clear that AI, like every material and immaterial artifact devised by man since the club, isn't harmful in itself, if anything, it could be the misleading and unscrupulous use that could be made of it that could cause incalculable damage or bring incredible benefits to the entire world.
If we even consider the hypnocratic theory as probable, taking note of how the world has always spun and, above all, the few who materially hold the management of this type of technology, at the cost of sounding just a tad catastrophic, I believe I can say that we are (presumably) doomed.
But like any good mystery novel - after all, it was written by a Chinese - now comes the fun part (or bad, depending on the point of view): barely three months after publication, it emerges not only that the butler (Mr. Xun) is not the murderer but that he never existed since behind this pseudonym is a "collective of human and artificial intelligences": that is, the book exists thanks to the decisive aid of artificial intelligence.
A book of reasoned and profound analysis and criticism written by the very object of the examination.
The operation is undoubtedly interesting, although it is clear that if already today, in the early days of the spread of this technology, it is difficult to distinguish the fruit of the meningeal work of a flesh-and-bone man from that of an electronic brain located in Azerbaijan, we can consider ourselves (indeed) hypnocratized to the marrow.
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