I recently learned over the weekend that Gio from Beautiful Monsters decided to abandon his Telegram chat in favor of establishing a new one. An official chat has been created on Substack and is currently active as of this writing. I have been invited to the chat because of my past dealings with Gio over at Beautiful Monsters and, prior to that, Futurism Forever.
For those who do not know, I had been contributing individual chapters of a short story called Zero Hour for the past few months now. Four completed chapters had been written for Beautiful Monsters on Substack. Without delving too much into the details, Zero Hour is a philosophical short story with elements of political thriller in a sort of alternate history set in the aftermath of World War III. The overall progress remains slow, and part of it has to do with Gio posting only chapter each month, but I am hoping that the next week or two would give me a proper opportunity to work on additional chapters. My goal is to eventually write a few more chapters before finishing it sometime in the coming new year. When the whole thing is finished, and that will probably sometime in the Summer or Fall of next year (because, again, Gio only posts one chapter per month on Beautiful Monsters), I will be reposting the complete short story on The Fourth Estate as a .PDF document.
Additionally, I spent whatever free time I had over the weekend researching a few topics for The Fourth Estate on Substack. The American Postliberal had posted one interesting article that ties in with the concepts and ideas posited in Ernst Jünger’s Der Arbeiter, which is one of the inspirations behind The Work-Standard (3rd Ed.). My plan for today is write a post on the topic at hand. It is going to be a short one due to how brief the article was.
The article in question is entitled “Technology Against Constitution,” which is a philosophical tract on the relationship between Technology and the Military-Industrial Complex. It is a notable topic because one of the less explored themes surrounding Jünger’s earlier pre-1945 works concerns Technology’s role in the destruction of old orders, values and norms, allowing anyone to introduce newer ones. To use Storm of Steel as the earliest template, when the concept of warfare became “modern” during World War I, war itself was perverted into something horrific, dehumanizing, and rational. So-called “modern warfare” had upended old notions of war as characterized by tales of heroism, adventure, of self-expressing higher virtues through sheer adversity and testing the resolve or the “destiny of nations.” I believe it was Hannah Arendt who had arrived at similar conclusions in one of her works, although she was not referring specifically to Jünger and his wartime experiences.
Regardless, the article does allude to the idea that a nation’s destiny could be forever altered through technological means and technologies developed under wartime conditions can be demilitarized for mundane, everyday civilian applications. There is a metaphorical discussion being made, albeit one couched in references to Ancient Sparta and Athens, about the need for Technology to conform with the values and norms of the Totality and State that it ultimately affects. This applies more so in the context of those which originated from their Military-Industrial Complex.
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