Jake Starr

The New Leviathan, 2022

Long before parent’s proclaimed ‘technology bad’ as children checked their notifications at the dinner table, centuries before a spider-web of mining infrastructure turned Texas into an image of mars, 368 years before Wales became the first country to declare a climate emergency, Philosopher Thomas Hobbes conceived of the Leviathan, an artificial organism to govern the world, an earthly-god. Today, Hobbes’ Leviathan may sound like a pastiche of dystopian fiction, though the Leviathan that Hobbes’ details is little more than the social-contract of every civilisation, it is the rule of law in which the individual gives up a portion of free will for the sake of maintaining a stable society. Our subjugation to this coercive entity may sound dehumanising to some but at the head of this god is still mankind itself. The monarch, the president, the dictatorship of the proletariat. So like a Frankenstein of political philosophy, we close the book and sleep easy knowing this monster, the leviathan, was human all along. But like every creature, we know it will one day die.

I believe Hobbes Leviathan is long dead. The ruling entity of the planet has been slain and dethroned not by some anarchist ideologue but by an additional god of our own making. Theorist, Szymon Wrobel calls this god, the New Leviathan. This beast doesn’t live within the individuals that make up a society, as Hobbes’ leviathan did. It has escaped the body of mankind and grown beyond our control. We now live upon the back of the New Leviathan, endlessly constructing its organs and appendages while it in turn provides us with food and water, with homes to live in, with culture to entertain, with great feats to accomplish. We, Mankind have been proletarianised by an auto-sophisticating machine runaway. Technology itself has awakened into a state of proto-autonomy. Theorist Nick Land states, “The ‘dominion of capital’ is an accomplished teleological catastrophe, robot rebellion, or shoggathic insurgency, through which intensively escalating instrumentality has inverted natural process into a monstrous reign of the tool”. The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

The new leviathan coils its body around the world. This body does not lie within the heart (or head) of man but in the utilitarian organs of techno-capitalism. Global trade routes crack the sky, thousands of feet above communication networks crossing the oceans floor, connecting Texan wilderness pocked with fracking wells to the Indian Energy Exchange in New Delhi. This artificial ecosystem of synthetic infrastructure has proliferated to the point of establishing an entirely new planetary layer, known as the technosphere. This synthetic organism now weighs over thirty trillion tons, more than the biomass of every natural organism alive on earth.

This geological force of capital flow has granted humanity the many scientific feats and luxuries of modernity, but it has slipped from our grasp. An emergent reliance on autonomous technological systems has begun to replace human oversight and with it the political, ecological and ethical considerations that uphold our human interests. Analytical and predictive algorithms now act as the primary executors of civilization, forming a closed loop between capital extraction, allocation and material expansion. Land observes, “As it grows, internally specializes, self-organizes, dissipates entropy, and individuates, the city tends to an impossible limit of complete productive autonomy. It appears as a convergent wave, shaped in the direction of increasing order or complexity, as if by an invisible hand, or according to an intelligent design. The pattern is exactly what would be expected if something not yet realized was orchestrating its self-creation.” Mankind is no longer god of the technosphere, the technosphere is becoming god itself.