System Architects & AI Engineers

System Builders / Technical Intelligence
(regarding technologically conditioned men)

"The fundamental goal of science is not knowledge, but
an act of power, of destruction."
Bela Hamvas

I encounter system builders on a daily basis; they are the types I run into at work,
and I have been doing so for over seven years here in Pittsburgh, a major American and
one of the larger technological hubs in the West.

Who are they?
They are nearly 100% male, highly educated, and most lead orderly,
respectable middle-class lives, typically paying off a mortgage
on a suburban house. They view themselves as an elite, or at least part of one.

For most, their fascination with technology is boundless; they live for the machine
and strive to ensure their own daily existence is as
rational, productive, and efficient as possible. One of them,
for instance, will always be on a hands-free call while driving his car or riding
his bike. It is simply the most efficient way...

A massive role in shaping such personalities is played by the school system and the ruling
positivism, which, when combined with the intense application of the dogma
of self-improvement and personal development, creates semi-autistic individuals
ready to subordinate their very lives to industry and the economy.

The core values of capitalism and economics, such as efficiency
and productivity, serve as the primary moral compass for these "people."
Whatever is productive, "modern," automated, regulated,
and efficient is simultaneously deemed moral. Anything else—old-fashioned,
inefficient—is considered immoral and bad.

The drive for control is potent and manifests neurotically in the desire
to build systems, to manufacture an ideal machine, to achieve
predictable interactions, and to create islands of lifeless
perfection; in other words, it is a drive
to forcefully negate reality. In this regard, the behavior of the technical intelligence
can be compared to that found in individuals who are dangerous to
their surroundings, whom the system eventually confines to closed institutions.

By negating reality, the technical intelligence is actually
occupied with erasing and denying the biological within itself
and in the world around it. Since they are, as mentioned, merely biological beings, this
negation often returns to them in the form of various illnesses and
psychosomatic disorders.

Many believe that technical intelligence can possess a humane, creative
side. It is difficult to defend such a stance; today, technical intelligence
exists solely for the market and because of the market. There is no product, regardless of its
actual utility, that was not developed specifically to generate
profit.

We might consider technical intelligence to be the Praetorian Guard of the aggressive neoliberal
order. While the rest of the population is still being convinced of the benefits
of a non-solidary, hyper-individualistic approach to life, the technical
intelligence has already been formed through this process of academic conditioning.
For the programmers, analysts, and engineers who
optimize "production processes"—who consciously choose to see
symbols instead of people, where reduction, simplification, and
layoffs are viewed as natural processes—the emotional cost paid by so-called
"human resources" is irrelevant, because they
have eliminated their own emotions, reducing them to neurotic outbursts
in the form of extreme sports, S&M lifestyles, if not
other modes of manipulation.

Because the manipulation of objects, their "utilization," and their destruction is what
excites the technical elitist, whether it involves his car,
his house, his wife, or his children. These are all objects, and no matter how much their
non-autistic behavior attempts to hide it behind remaining moral norms, the goal
of these "people" is destruction, Thanatos, and the underlying
motive remains a hatred for everything natural, non-abstract, and imperfect.

Abstraction—that schizophrenic image of reality, that construction of a pure (or dirty) mind—is
the fundamental sanctuary, the primary domain of technical intelligence. The mechanistic,
Cartesian worldview convinces them that man is a machine,
that animals are machines, that society is a machine. Everything is a machine,
The machine is flawless—obedient, predictable, and absolute. This is their
world. It is an abstraction composed of fighter jets, weaponry, and those aesthetic or erotic
impulses designed specifically to reduce women to a familiar, standardized
mold—the only kind they are supposedly capable of loving.

Cinema and literature tend to paint technical intelligence as a collection of benevolent hackers,
those harmless "nerds." This myth is vital for the machinery of the economy to function; even if
the rest of the population senses a fundamental wrongness, the image must be maintained. The true
nature of the technical intelligentsia—their inherent
drive toward total destruction, which they force upon the entire world—must remain obscured.

Because the world is far from perfect; nature is inefficient, and as such, it must
be constantly destroyed, plowed over, consumed, and violated, every single day,
every single second. The perpetrators of this crime are ubiquitous, always hiding behind
the supposed neutrality
of the "progress" imperative.

Laura Peterson3

Well, every system has its architects, I suppose—this one being no exception. Are there any other frameworks at play here, or is this the whole extent of it? For instance, what kind of system produces an artist who hasn't even mastered sending a text message from a smartphone?

So, did you just invent hot water? I mean, honestly, we’ve been stuck on the same old ideas for centuries, from the whole Romanticism era all the way down the line. It feels like nothing ever truly changes out here in the West.

Brandon Martin7 said:Well, did you just invent hot water? It’s the same old tired tropes—starting with those cheesy romances and following that exact same path. There's nothing new under the sun in the West.

👍

Plus, it’s a textbook case of the bystander effect. 😉

Brandon Martin7 said:Did you just invent hot water? It’s the same old tired tropes that have been around for centuries, from basic romance to everything else. There's nothing new under the sun in the West.

I mean, honestly, he’s not wrong... nothing really new there...

I have to admit, my patience for people who just sit around describing how bad things are—basically inviting everyone else to feel miserable along with them—without actually articulating what specifically bothers them or proposing a single viable solution, is reaching an all-time low.

I’ve always really loved how Erich Fromm laid everything out in "to have or to be." It’s such a fantastic book, yet he writes in this relatively straightforward way, so you don't feel like you need some fancy philosophy degree or a deep background in classical philology just to wrap your head around what he's saying 🙂.

Laura Peterson3
So, we're really going to condemn describing men who have hit rock bottom? 😬

MC16 said:It’s basically 100% men...

🙂

Everything else you said is spot on, MC, but you’ve got your technocrats mixed up with your engineers. For those first folks, it’s all about the mechanics of power—they want to turn society into one giant, predictable machine.

Engineers? They’re really just big kids playing with gadgets, building things because they can, without any real itch to pull people's strings. To them, it's just high-level tinkering.

The managers, the bureaucrats, the military brass, the politicians—all those types you’re aiming your critiques at—that’s the crowd. They’re the ones paired with those academic "human resources" theorists who think they can quantify a soul. Most engineers actually recoil at that kind of language, barring the few who’ve sold their souls to the Black Sea, but they're a tiny minority. At the end of the day, the engineers are the salt of the earth...

Science basically acts as an extension of our senses and our physical strength, doesn't it? Plus, having all this data at our fingertips lets us map out what's coming next with much better accuracy... Why are we wired this way? It’s just evolution, plain and simple. If we hadn't evolved to crave more control and more info, we probably wouldn't even be sitting here tapping away on our MacBooks right now!

"The whole tech thing... it isn't even actually about technology."
Martin Heidegger

Technology basically makes everything available on demand. You know? Something that used to just *exist* on its own, totally independent of what we want from it, suddenly becomes this thing we can just grab whenever we feel like it. It’s all just... at our disposal now. Take a massive river—something that might have been flowing naturally for thousands of years. Now? We just slap a dam on it, trap it, and keep it there like a resource waiting to be tapped. Or look at animals. They spent millions of years evolving (and then thousands more being bred by humans) into what they are today, but now? With gene editing, they’re basically just biological spare parts kits for us to use for things like organ transplants. There are endless examples of this. It's wild.

So, here's the deal with technology: it starts doing its own thing. It develops this life of its own that totally ignores what we actually intended it for, yet somehow, it stays perfectly "handy" for us to use. We strip away all the actual meaning from things—like, a river isn't really a river anymore, it’s just some "potential water energy" sitting there waiting for us to tap into it. Even animals get stripped of their essence; they aren't living beings to us, just "collections of organs" we can exploit whenever we feel like it. It's kind of heavy when you think about it.

Everything just loses its spark. Everything starts feeling totally meaningless. It all turns into nothing more than raw material—just stuff sitting there, waiting to be used because it's available and meant to serve us. That’s the real core of technology right there. That's exactly where it's heading.

Technology can seriously turn into something straight-up diabolical if we aren't careful. It’s like... the whole essence of existence just gets sucked into this one single entity that decides it's the absolute boss of everything else. Total takeover vibes.

Nah, I think technology just makes us way too available. Like, look at smartphones—they basically mean you're on call 24/7. Then there's the internet, which means any random piece of info is right there for anyone to grab whenever they feel like it. Even TV does this; it just keeps every single "event" constantly shoved in everyone's faces. It’s like we're never truly off the grid anymore.

Look, whatever you've got sitting around... that’s just raw material for someone else to build something with. Honestly? The stuff itself doesn't even matter. It doesn't have its own "thing," you know? Its whole purpose is just being there, ready to be used for the build.

Technology, people, knowledge... it all just becomes raw material. It strips everything down, makes us totally irrelevant. It takes our whole essence and just reduces us to building blocks. But who’s actually doing the building? Is it just more people using us as fuel?

So, our buddy Geza's over here claiming there's this massive, almost superhuman force at work, slowly folding us individuals into some giant machine or organism—basically saying it's the next big step in evolution. He thinks this emerging thing is basically divine. Me? If I can even wrap my head around his logic... I see it as something straight out of a horror movie. It’s like we're building a modern Tower of Babel, trying to turn humans—if you can even call us that anymore—into God at the expense of everything else in existence.

So, remember that whole Tower of Babel story? People trying to build this massive tower just to reach up and become gods... only to have their languages get all scrambled. It’s wild. Makes you wonder if we're heading toward our own version of that mess right now. I mean, what's the actual link between the tech we're building and the way we actually talk to each other? Is all this new gear going to leave us unable to understand one another?

Words basically strip everything down to a single label. You take all these unique, living things and just... bam, they're all "cat." It totally kills what makes them special, you know? Takes away that one-of-a-kind vibe and turns them into a repetitive concept. Just "cat." Once you’ve got that symbol, though, you can play with it however you want. You can link it to whatever or nothing at all—it's all up to you. That little idea of a "cat" is way easier to mess around with than an actual, breathing cat sitting on your lap.

Words basically lock in the flow of real life. They let you piece things together—or tear them apart—pretty much whenever you feel like it.

Technology does the exact same thing—it takes something living and turns it into just another set of fixed parts you can snap together or pull apart. It basically treats living beings like raw material that’s just sitting there waiting to be used.

At the end of the day, being human really just comes down to one thing: we’re creatures built to speak. That's it. That's the core. We're also these beings that nurture other living things, you know? And honestly, we're the ones constantly reshaping the entire landscape around us. It's just what we do.

So, isn't that whole thing—where we just strip the world down until it's nothing more than raw material for us to mess with—basically just the next logical step in those same old trends? Seriously.

Is it actually possible to overdo it when you're talking? Like, seriously. Some people just hit the mark, but others go way overboard and totally lose touch with reality. It’s the same deal with training or raising something—you can push it too far. I was thinking about this old story where a guy tried to train his horse by starving it, and the poor thing just ended up dying. You gotta find that balance, you know?

It’s totally possible that we lose our grip on things. You know, like when we get too caught up in our own little bubbles—our ways of talking, how we were raised, even all this crazy tech stuff. We lose the balance. Suddenly, those tools aren't serving us anymore; we’re basically just slaves to them. It gets messy. People start speaking completely different languages, everyone’s just stuck in their own head, shouting about their own thing. We lose that one big thing that actually connects us all: the truth.

So where's the actual gold standard then? Honestly, that's a tough one to wrap my head around. 🙂

Ah, mistyfox812, you’ve hit the nail on the head with this one.

That subtle trick of manipulation—reducing nature to a mere symbol—is precisely the kind of "freedom" people have always fantasized about. Yet, it is this very freedom that leaves a man feeling trapped and utterly insignificant.

Take a driver, for example; in order to experience the illusion of freedom through movement, the natural world must be dismantled. Today, entire industrial giants exist solely to feed that symbolic craving for autonomy felt by the youth across America.

I find something profoundly sinister, almost repulsive, in this process. It resembles a paradigm of mechanical slaughterhouses where life is transmuted into the inanimate. In this system, living matter isn't just destroyed; it is degraded, rendered trivial, packaged, and sold as nothing more than a commodity.

What are the parameters, and what might the solution actually look like?
The total collapse of civilization—likely necessitating the deaths of billions, whether one finds that tragic or not.

The notion that things have always been this way is simply a fallacy.
We find ourselves at the terminal stage of a process where
the living is being systematically supplanted by the inanimate, though this shift is accelerating far more rapidly than it ever did during the Romantic era.
In previous ages, the propaganda mechanisms of the technological
order were rudimentary and largely ineffective.

Today, however, we possess television, vast networks of
universities, Cartesian science, advertising, and the entirety of commercial
industry—all synchronized toward a singular objective: a collective
hostility toward anything organic or truly alive.

There is no such thing as a "noble savage," of course. Some would argue that
this degradation actually began much earlier, triggered by those first primitive attempts at land enclosure.

One should consult Lewis Mumford regarding this matter.

To my mind, providing an honest description of our current state is the first step toward solving the problem.

Laura Peterson3 said:The notion that things have always been this way is simply a fallacy.
We find ourselves at the terminal stage of a process where
the living is being systematically supplanted by the inanimate, though this shift is accelerating far more rapidly than it ever did during the Romantic era.
In previous ages, the propaganda mechanisms of the technological
order were rudimentary and largely ineffective.

Today, however, we possess television, vast networks of
universities, Cartesian science, advertising, and the entirety of commercial
industry—all synchronized toward a singular objective: a collective
hostility toward anything organic or truly alive.

There is no such thing as a "noble savage," of course. Some would argue that
this degradation actually began much earlier, triggered by those first primitive attempts at land enclosure.

One should consult Lewis Mumford regarding this matter.

To my mind, providing an honest description of our current state is the first step toward solving the problem.

That’s perfect, I was actually just thinking about bringing him up, but it looks like you beat me to it. Before Lewis Mumford, though, there’s someone who talks about very similar themes—and if you ask most of my colleagues (myself included), he’s actually even better: Oswald Spengler. Now, it’s highly likely that Mumford "borrowed" quite a bit from Spengler, but that doesn't really matter; it’s still a great point to make. Spengler’s magnum opus is "The Decline of the West," which comes in two volumes, so definitely check that out if you're interested... Also, for this specific discussion, his little book "Man and Technology" is worth a look. I picked up a copy recently for $6.75 bucks, and honestly, nothing beats the feel of good old-fashioned paper, despite how much everyone obsesses over PDFs these days, haha. But anyway, getting back to the topic, you guys are making some really great posts here... If I stumble upon another solid reference or a good passage from a book, I’ll feel comfortable enough to share it with the group. It’s not that I don’t have my own thoughts on the matter, it’s just that there are so many deep, insightful, and already established analyses out there that I don't see much point in trying to reinvent the wheel...

mistyscout2 said:That’s perfect, I was actually just thinking about bringing him up, but it looks like you beat me to it. Before Lewis Mumford, though, there’s someone who talks about very similar themes—and if you ask most of my colleagues (myself included), he’s actually even better: Oswald Spengler. Now, it’s highly likely that Mumford "borrowed" quite a bit from Spengler, but that doesn't really matter; it’s still a great point to make. Spengler’s magnum opus is "The Decline of the West," which comes in two volumes, so definitely check that out if you're interested... Also, for this specific discussion, his little book "Man and Technology" is worth a look. I picked up a copy recently for $6.75 bucks, and honestly, nothing beats the feel of good old-fashioned paper, despite how much everyone obsesses over PDFs these days, haha. But anyway, getting back to the topic, you guys are making some really great posts here... If I stumble upon another solid reference or a good passage from a book, I’ll feel comfortable enough to share it with the group. It’s not that I don’t have my own thoughts on the matter, it’s just that there are so many deep, insightful, and already established analyses out there that I don't see much point in trying to reinvent the wheel...

I've been following this thread closely, and honestly, I've been waiting two whole days for you to post something. Come on, don't leave me hanging here—give us a little something to chew on... 🙂

I’m actually diving into this really great, pretty hilarious book right now (David Cooper: slang) that probably has some interesting bits that could tie directly—or maybe indirectly—into what we're discussing here. I honestly don't have the energy to sit here and transcribe all those passages for you right now, though; I've got two massive dictionaries and a long article sitting right in front of me waiting for me to get through them, so 😛 ...
But hey, if you're really curious, why not make a run for the local library? Grab a copy of Spengler, pick up Mumford (the one the original poster mentioned), and just start reading... hehe. What else can I say? I can't exactly do the reading for you 😉.

Also, I should mention—and I mean IF you happened to miss this part, haha—that I did skim over certain sections. I don't really have the time to hunt down specific quotes since he's moved on to talking about other things now. He's a totally fascinating guy, though... an anti-psychiatrist and a philosopher 🙂).