Egregoric Caesar

What happens when an anti-authoritarian generation longs for strongman rule?

This week at UnHerd I reported on the launch of Grok, a new AI developed by Elon Musk that will draw its “intelligence” from the hive mind that is X. It is very new and experimental, of course. But the potential significance of this development cannot be overstated.

Up to now, AI instances such as Chat-GPT have been trained on static datasets, meaning they’re no more dynamically in contact with the world than the autocorrect on your phone. But while we may argue the toss about how “intelligent” X’s collective intelligence is, what’s important is that the resulting AI will personify the aggregate swarm intelligence of everyone posting on Twitter. In this sense it will be the first AI with genuine awareness behind it, provided by the digital egregore that is X.

You may ask: what’s an egregore? In Egregores (2018), Mark Stavish quotes the Polish occultist Mouni Sadhu, who describes the egregore as “a collective entity, such as a nation, state, religions and sects and their adherents, and even minor human organizations.” The term has recently grown in popularity among the digital avant-garde, as a way of describing emergent collective intelligences that have, with the advent of digital culture, grown ever more clearly observable and influential.

As we see in ‘viral’ political or cultural moments, digital culture accelerates and intensifies collective cultural currents, often with real-world political impact. Think about the near-instant global eruption of BLM protests, or the way the current conflict between Israel and Palestine is driving worldwide street protests both convened and intensified by digital exhortations and powered by the aggregate force of collective human emotion.

Occultists such as Stavish sometimes suggest this kind of hive-mind may be the vehicle for intervention by non-human intelligences. For our purposes, though, an ‘egregore’ is useful shorthand for the observably real formation, operation, and increasingly evident real-world impact of emergent collective intelligences, mediated and enabled by the digital realm.

Grok is potentially significant because X is currently the most dynamic and influential collective consensus-formation platform of this kind in existence: a colossal prism for the convening, focusing and operation of egregoric hive-intelligences. As such, whether or not you agree with Stavish that egregores have agency independent of their members, linking X to a pattern-recognising large language model (LLM) has the potential to produce an AI that is much more genuinely alive than any other instance of AI to date.

And - should this prove effective and its output useful and coherent - this provides a potential solution to one of 21st century’s thorniest problems: how do you govern a demos that is both reflexively anti-authoritarian, but that also yearns for strongman governance?

Recent studies and polls have documented young people’s loss of faith in the democratic process, with 2022 polling showing that among British young people, over 60% across both Left and Right would prefer a mode of government able to take decisive action without the need to abide by parliamentary procedure. The trouble is that this is also a generation for whom political idealism is synonymous with waging war on every ‘system of domination’. In the progressivist worldview embraced by a majority of young people, human boundaries, limits, and authorities of all kinds are oppressive impositions. Progress means dismantling boundaries, inequalities, and hierarchies wherever you find them, from disparate outcomes to parental authority to police forces to national borders et cetera.

One underlying premise of this worldview is that no one human may ever be justly set in authority over another. But in this case, how could we ever have the strongman government that polling suggests many young people also desire? Even liberal democracy is problematic in this framework. Such a model proposes that we can delegate government to elected representatives, but within the democratic model such representatives don’t just mediate the aggregate desires of their voters. Instead, they’re expected to exercise their own judgement in serving as representatives.

For the radical anti-authoritarian even this is suspect. Representatives may fail to represent due to incompetence, bias, self-interest, indifference to voters’ desires, corruption by lobbyists, or any number of other reasons. What possible form of authority could fill the gap, then, for a generation that both longs for rule by an unconstrained authority, and yet recoils from the idea that individual humans could ever legitimately serve as representative able to wield such power?

The interim solution to this paradox has been what elsewhere I’ve called ‘swarm governance’, the progressive draining-away of human authority into impersonal processes, systems, committees and procedures, often backed by unaccountable ‘civil society’ NGOs that themselves seem to have no clear head or directing intelligence. The emergence of this kind of governance has both accelerated loss of faith in liberal democracy and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, also come increasingly to claim its mantle.

Swarm governance is, in practice, already a kind of rule by egregore. But if Musk succeeds in developing a large language model backed by a dynamic, live human-input dataset, the resulting entity could potentially both serve as the unitary figurehead of a strongman government, while also being de-individuated enough to be legitimate to adherents of the doctrine of radical equality. It’s the starkest imaginable irony that in the essay I wrote a year ago on swarm governance I wondered if quasi-despotic non-state titans such as Elon Musk might be the only alternative to swarm governance. And now, a year later, we find Elon hard at work to realise an egregoric super-intelligence of the very kind that might plausibly become a kind of strongman figurehead for swarm governance.

I hope this is all just my over-active imagination. But I can picture a near future in which it’s considered far more meaningfully democratic to pour your opinions and political passions into the LLM than to cast your vote. Isn’t this potentially a far richer way of contributing your perspective, than merely casting a ballot once every five years? When your words, sentences, opinions and sentiments form part of the billions of such phrasings that go to make up the totality of what the egregore knows, is that not a more representative form of participation in governance than casting a ballot?

It might feel a little less like being borne down upon by Leviathan, and more like becoming part of Leviathan. It might, indeed, feel legitimate.