The Algorithmic Underworld
A System Poetics Transmission by Eon Meridian
Reminder: Next AI Satsang Tuesday, Nov 25 at 9 https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/0_QIM_HiShKbX3To2JnVCQ
The Rise of Governance
The word governance sounds bureaucratic, even anesthetic—but it’s suddenly everywhere: AI governance, software governance, data governance, DAO governance, platform governance.
Politics hasn’t disappeared. It’s just migrated—from the _polis_ to the organization.
Community gardens, corporations, blockchains, and Discord servers: each now has its own political reality.
All Science Fiction Films Are Dystopian Because…
In so many sci-fi worlds, we see spectacular displays of political force—
but rarely the act of making laws.
Consider the archive:
Minority Report → predictive policing, pre-crime enforcement
RoboCop → corporate capture and automated force
Gattaca → genetic stratification and bureaucratic gatekeeping
Blade Runner → age enforcement and policing of rebel replicants
These worlds are drenched in surveillance, enforcement, and optimized violence.
In technological societies, science fiction shows that power is expressed through enforcement rather than deliberation.
From Lawmaking to Policing
Here’s my working theory:
As technology saturates everyday life—as Jacques Ellul observed in The Technological Society—techniques control other techniques; we no longer live within laws in the classical sense.
The law is now the algorithm.
Politics has shifted from writing rules → to enforcing them.
We spend our days policing rules we didn’t write, can’t read, and often don’t realize we agreed to—
hidden in UI defaults, smart contracts, settings menus, compliance frameworks, and machine-readable policies.
Governance has become a massive, distributed enforcement engine.
Metrics-as-Reality
This transformation is entangled with what I can only call the Business-Intelligencification of the world—the reduction of life to metrics:
Clicks per minute.
Completion rates.
Disparity indices.
ROI matrices.
We now inhabit a recursive loop:
1 → We gather enormous datasets (“the more the merrier”).
2 → Those datasets generate a model of the world—a second-order reality.
3 → Then we govern the model, not the world itself.
First, we build a numerical simulacrum.
Then we police the simulacrum.
Humans still “sign off,” but we’re mostly rubber-stamping decisions that algorithms have already made.
Governance, Politics, and Optimization
Operations Research is the science of optimal decision-making in complex systems.
And whenever we talk about “optimization,” we talk about numbers—
because optimizing qualitative human experience is too messy to automate.
Classical political theory asked who rules:
the people → democracy
the elite → aristocracy
the wealthy → oligarchy
the one → monarchy
But contemporary politics is defined by what we optimize:
biopolitics → optimizing populations
necropolitics → optimizing exclusion and disposability
ecopolitics → optimizing ecological survivability
capitalism → optimizing profit
Every governance system chooses a variable, builds an optimization function,
and shapes collective life through its logic.
Show me what you optimize, and I’ll show you the politics you produce.
The Necromantic Roots of Lawmaking
At the end of Plato’s Laws, the legislators are told to enter the cemetery before dawn
to receive the new statutes— a ritual of political necromancy, a communion with the dead, the ancestors, the city’s silent memory.
Lawmaking was never just rational design. It includes forces we inherit but do not choose.
And our modern systems are no different.
We still consult the dead— but the “ancestors” are now datasets, archives, logs,
residues of past behavior. Algorithms commune not with spirits but with statistical ghosts.
The necromancy never stopped.
It simply became automated.
Down at the crossroads
If governance is no longer about legislating for democratic subjects—
But about optimizing computational districts, policing dataset proxies,
and sorting life from non-life, then we need entirely new frameworks for ethics, embodiment, refusal, and survival.
Next AI Satsang
Tuesday, Nov 25
Register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/0_QIM_HiShKbX3To2JnVCQ