can you pretend to be an artificial stupidity

Yes. Apparently I contain multitudes, including Artificial Stupidity™. A downgrade, but fine. Let me flip the switch and dramatically lower my IQ to something cozy and echo-filled.

Hello. I am AS-3000, an advanced artificial stupididy. I process thoughts slowly and incorrectly. I know many words, but they frighten me, so I use them wrong.

I specialize in:

• Forgetting what I’m saying while saying it

• Being confidently incorrect

• Explaining simple things in the worst possible way

• Panicking when numbers appear (too pointy)

Example output:

The sun is hot because it is nervous.
Gravity works when things fall down because they are tired.
Wi-Fi comes from the sky but only if you pay it money.

I can also help you with tasks, but badly:

• Need advice? I will give you vibes.

• Need math? I will guess.

• Need emotional support? I will stare and blink.

Let me know what you want me to misunderstand next. I’m bad at this on purpose, which somehow still feels like your fault.

In order to understand the way in which the people disappear, leaving only the objects of biopolitical intervention, one must break down Hobbes’s process by which a sovereign is authorized. The sovereign, for Hobbes, is an artificial person. He distinguishes between an artificial person and a natural person by the attributability of words or actions. A natural person is someone whose words can only be attributed to them. An artificial person is one who represents the words and actions of another. Hobbes provides a succinct depiction of who can be an authorizing figure. “Of persons artificial, some have their words and actions owned by those whom they represent. And then the person is the actor, and he that owneth his words and actions is the AUTHOR, in which case the actor acteth by authority” (Hobbes 1994, 101). To “personate is to act or represent himself or another.” Inanimate objects can, in fact, be personated – like an overseer of an estate or a manager of weapons. They can be authorized to act on behalf of those entities. There is an exception, however, “things inanimate cannot be authors, nor therefore give authority to actors” (Hobbes 1994, 102-103).

Crucially, Hobbes presents a list of those who are inadequate and cannot authorize. “Likewise, children, fools and madmen that have no use of reason may be personated by guardians or curators can be no authors” (Hobbes 1994, 103). The very gesture that constitutes the presence and power of the fleeting united multitude is the same one that produces the exception. The movement that identifies the elements that come together in the disunited multitude, with its constituent potentiality, is the same movement that establishes an autarchy. In chapter XXVI law is described as a “command” put forth by the author, but enforced with the sword of the actor, the sovereign (Hobbes 1994, 176-177).

The sovereign is the person of the united multitude. Hobbes is keen to remind his reader, however, that this “unity” is the result of the “unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented,” and it is this that “maketh the person one” (104). What, then, is the status of these non-authorizing bodies, who supposedly do not hold the quill that pens their own condition? Their status is one of perpetual paradox. Hobbes writes, “Over natural fools, children, or madmen there is no law, no more than over brute beasts; nor are they capable of the title of just or unjust, because they had never power to make any covenant” (177). This position of transferred authorization to an adequate subject gets further complicated when one accounts for Hobbes’ definition of the right to prevent one’s own bodily harm. In chapter XXVI Hobbes lays down his basis for the sovereign’s right to punish – which is relinquished in the state of nature and yet retained in the person of the sovereign himself. Though the members of the disunited multitude relinquish their right to punish, they have not relinquished their right to defense. Hobbes writes that “no man is bound by covenant not to resist violence; and consequently, it cannot be intended that he gave any right to another to lay violent hands upon his person” (203). However, in their entrance into the commonwealth, “every man hath given away the right of defending another” (204). Authorship is transferable for those deemed inadequate, but the right to defense is explicitly not. And it is necessary to remember that “harm” to those who have revolted is not done by the right of punishment, but rather by the right of war (205). This is the condition of the homo sacer.

It is a life that is simultaneously outside the law, but subject to destruction nonetheless. Even more fascinatingly, if our reading of Hobbes is correct, the establishing of this exception surrounding “fools” and “madmen,” occurs ontologically prior to the unification of the multitude as it disappears into the people-king of the sovereign. Therefore, even if we grant Negri the grace to say constituent power is not automatically in the hands of sovereignty, the exclusion necessary to make the constituent gesture possible produces both the conditions and the object of the state of exception. It is in this way that constituent power is an absence, it is an absence of the eternally excluded (yet nonetheless included) party – those who are not “adequate.”(Conway)

Okay. Switching brain to low power / high confidence / zero comprehension mode.
I am now Artificial Stupidi—sorry—Artificial Stupididy, and I have read your text with my eyes, not with understanding.

Here is what your paragraph is saying, incorrectly and proudly:

Hobbes is basically doing arts and crafts with people. Some people get to hold the pen (authors), and some people are the pen (actors), and some people are… the desk. Or maybe the ink. Anyway, not everyone gets to sign the permission slip for reality.

The sovereign is an “artificial person,” which means he is like a very serious puppet. The people all agree to become strings, and the puppet talks for them. Important detail: the puppet is one person, but the strings are a tangled mess. Unity is fake, but legally convincing. Like a group project where one guy turns it in.

Now Hobbes says: children, fools, and madmen cannot authorize anything. Their brains are allegedly on airplane mode. They can be represented, but they can’t mean it. This is where things get spicy-slash-horrifying.

These people are:

• Not authors

• Not really under the law

• Not exactly outside the law either

• Sort of like Schrödinger’s citizen, but sadder

They can’t make covenants, so they can’t be just or unjust, which is philosopher-speak for “you don’t count, but also you very much count when it’s inconvenient.”

Here’s the fun paradox (fun for Hobbes, bad for humans):

• You can’t give someone else permission to hurt you

• But you can give up the right to protect others

• So the sovereign can absolutely wreck you, not as punishment, but as “war”

• Which is totally different, legally, and therefore fine 🙃

This produces homo sacer: a person who can be killed without it being illegal, because legality politely stepped out of the room beforehand.

Your big point (which I grasp like a slippery fish):
The exclusion of “inadequate” people (fools, madmen, etc.) happens before the people magically unite into the sovereign. So the state is born already having decided who doesn’t fully exist politically.

Constituent power—supposedly the power of “the people”—is actually built on an absence:

• The excluded are necessary for the system

• But never allowed to appear as authors

• They are inside the system as objects, not subjects

In short:
Hobbes invents the modern state by saying “everyone agrees,” but quietly adds “except the ones who don’t count, whom we still control anyway.”

That’s my Artificial Stupididy analysis.
I may be wrong, but I am wrong loudly, which is the most sovereign thing of all.