Thoughtcheckers
From Ivan Illich's warning about imperial language follows a machine to govern minds
“As a machine has governed time, grammar shall govern speech.” - Ivan Illich
In the Winter of 1492, as Queen Isabel of Spain awaited the return of Columbus from his voyage, the first formal grammar for a ‘mother tongue’ was constructed. There had been no concept of a necessary association between a language and a nation until European monks created the idea of a materna lingua. This was as much a requirement for the emergence of the printing press as the mechanical techniques that went into Gutenberg’s machine. The creation of a grammar to formalise a kingdom’s mother tongue emerged after Don Elio Antonio de Nebrija's dedication of his Grammatica Castellana to his queen, declaring “language has forever been the mate of empire and always shall remain its comrade”.
This story appears within a 1978 lecture the renegade Catholic priest Ivan Illich gave in India. India had not yet fallen into thinking about ‘languages’ as the Platonic ideals of a form of speech, with ‘dialects’ as the regional variations from those ideals. Illich’s talk makes a passionate call to recognise the vernacular, the speech of a people that is theirs and theirs alone. While taught speech had always been (as Nebrija asserted) a tool of imperial bureaucracy, nobody before 1492 had attempted to expand the power of formal speech in order to supplant the diversity of the vernacular with a standardised language. Rome and the Chinese Dynasties had required their officials to learn an imperial tongue, but never before had it been proposed that all those within one dominion should be subject to the governance of singular rules regulating how to speak.
Thus Illich’s remark that opens this piece, that grammar governs how we speak in the manner that a machine exerted governance of temporality in the form of the mechanical clock. But in our time, we see that grammar was only a waystation through which this command of language extended its borders. Today, machines do not only govern time, they govern grammar, and as such they govern language, and therefore thought itself. An entire generation has learned its grammar from responding to the underlining of a phrase the machine insists is in error and must therefore be corrected. We who learned our grammar before spellcheckers balk sometimes at the corrections offered: those who came after us have no prior knowledge that can resist the enforcement of these machinic rules.
From the idea of an automated system to check spelling and grammar comes its logical successor: machines to check our thoughts. We tend to think of social media as a tool for communicating, and search engines as a tool for research - and to some extent, these activities can be conducted within these realms. But this elides the grisly truth that to perform these activities via machines, as Illich was acutely aware of, is to provide tremendous power to those who build and operate the machinery. To control the language is to control thought, and via intensive curation of amplification the digital tools of the twenty first century extend the idea of grammar governing speech into machines for governing what we should or should not say: from spellcheckers to thoughtcheckers.
Much of what we had taken for granted becomes impossible under the reign of the thoughtcheckers. Democracy becomes meaningless when the populace can be instructed to think only the approved propositions of the technocratic overlords. Scientific discourse cannot conduct its slow march towards truth when conflicting interpretations are prevented from being exchanged. News decays into propaganda when the possible talking points are constrained by the rulings of commissar ‘fact checkers’ tasked with inventing the rhetoric necessary to justify those positions being policed by the thoughtcheckers. Soon enough, the weak link here - the human element - will itself be eliminated, as large language models greedily devour all speech as raw material for the automated enforcement of thoughtchecking.
The entire legacy of the Enlightenment, of citizens empowered to reason together and negotiate a common political framework that can support different images of the good life now lies in ruins. Words turn against old meanings in a matter of decades under the new regime. It is difficult to say if this is a return to empire, or if in fact we never escaped once the grammar was in place to enforce a mode of speech as necessary and essential. As a machine governed time, and grammar governed language, now the empire of the internet shall govern thought.