Alvin Toffler, 1928 – 2016

No shock: In the Future eveybody dies. The reason this isn't just a tasteless observation is because a disavowal of finitude, mortality, vulnerability, error drives futurology. Never forget the essence of futurology is a death-dealing peddling of status quo amplification as accelerating progress via denial of death.Tech's "Thought Leaders" love to confuse making bets with having thoughts: Toffler was a trailblazer for our ruinous artificial imbecilence. I went from future shock to future fatigue years ago.

The Parade Passes By

I re-post variations of the following bit of grousing more or less every year on Pride Weekend. Last year it was published in the afterglow of the Supreme Court decision to mandate marriage equality in all fifty states and in the aftermath of the massacre in Charleston. And this year the devastating mass shooting in Orlando is casting its shadow over the festivities, systematic white-supremacist police brutality and terrorist violence stratifying once again any easy legibility of meaningful pride celebration for lgbtq folks of color and all queer allies and fellow-citizens in our vital cities, our fraught refuges, our diverse havens...

As regular readers of Amor Mundi know, my partner and I have been together for over fourteen years now. But we aren't gay married because we disapprove of marriage as a vestige of human trafficking and as an irrational acquiescence to damaging Hallmark card fantasies of romantic completion. And yet we both fought for marriage equality and are cheered by its successes because our exclusion from the institution damages the lives of queer folks who feel differently than we do and because that exclusion long remained an injustice enabled other worse exclusions and injustices, and also simply because it seems more forceful politically to oppose norms from which you are not already excluded and the refusal of which costs you something.

Appalled by the deathly demoralizing anti-democratizing energies of corporate-militarism as I am, I grasped nonetheless the indispensability of ending Bill Clinton's gargoyle "Don't Ask Don't Tell" and the ban of queer folks from serving openly in the military for reasons similar to those that make marriage equality victories good -- but, again, I cannot say the jingoist cadences inevitably framing the victory felt particularly enlivening to me personally here in the belly of the beast of the imperialist abroad police-state enabling at home endless War on Terror. Ending employment discrimination against queer folks seems to me a more substantial goal that will help many truly precarious people in this country while imposing a constraint on many truly pernicious people in this country -- and hence I cannot say that I am surprised to find it the assimilationist goal that still most stubbornly resists accomplishment, year after year after year. I don't like kids enough to wallow in gay adoption victories, and while I am all for Families We Choose, I wonder why the Chosen Families we celebrate must always be so drearily conventional.

But even if, as I say, I fully recognize the indispensability of demanding the availability of legibility on conventional institutional terms, lest illegibility marginalize so many of us in ways that literally ruin and end lives, I personally believe that a life more fully lived demands selves made of both prose and poetry, freedom requires both answerability before the eyes of power as well as the questionableness out of which different worlds are made (I recommend you read Fanon if that doesn't make sense to you).

Yes, all told, I am one of those grumps you hear about who think that celebrating Pride as assimilation to the institutional norms of reprosexual corporate-militarism is nothing to be Proud of. While Pride originated in the righteous impulse to defy the hurtful shame imposed on wanted queer lifeways by mean, fearful, ignorant majorities, I think there is plenty to be ashamed of in the complacency, conformism, and consumerism our new Prideful majority celebrates.

Especially now that I'm past fifty I find that I more or less want Pride to get off my lawn. It is like a crowd of vacant consumers and squalling kids hard to distinguish from a food court in a Tornado Alley suburban mall even with the interchangeable shirtless guys and sequins shorn of their magic by too much sunlight. I do know that there are plenty of older folks who draw a real measure of strength and support from Pride, and yet I do think Pride is something youthful at heart, and in a way that registers both the fabulousness and foibles that can characterize youth in dumb overgeneralized stereotypical ways I won't make many friends getting into in any depth. But the hazy ambivalent fondness I still feel for Pride, while feeling at once quite contented that Pride is no longer the thing for me, is something like the hazy ambivalent fondness I feel for my own time of youthful adventuring.

I marched with my friends in Queer Nation in the Pride Parade in Atlanta half a dozen times at least, in the early nineties, and that really felt like something. Perhaps it was because we didn't seem quite as respectable as the Pride tag insisted we should be aspiring to be, for one thing. I marched in San Francisco's Parade just once, the summer after I moved here, in 1996, and it already felt terribly belated and pro forma. I wasn't really part of any movement anymore, and that left me feeling like I was at a County Fair cruising a loud crowd for dick and funnel cakes. That's, gosh, twenty years ago now! Now I see on my tee vee that queers march behind banners designating the tech companies they work for. I must say I felt quite a lot of sympathy for the Occupride moment in 2012 -- but I heard about it on the news after the fact. There was some political alchemical spark there, some joyful noisy resistance, some futural opening onto elsewhere that felt truly queer. To connect with that kind of queer futurity, I might even drag my tired old unrepentant queer ass onto the street again one day...

Pluralism, Politics, and Belief; Or, Of Walking And Chewing Gum At The Same Time (A Twitter Essaylet)

I'm a champion of both performance art pieces and uncompromising ethical stands, but I don't think elections are good occasions for either.

Pluralists propose there are different sorts of beliefs embedded in different sorts of ends and histories. What we want from scientific beliefs is different from what we want from moral beliefs or aesthetic judgments. Ethical belief ascription is different from political, legal, or any number of forms of professional belief ascription.

James' oft-quoted pragmatic definition of truth as the "good in the way of belief" is lamentably and mis-educatingly truncated too often: Truth is that which is "good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons."From this, the pluralist and pragmatist proposes an understanding of reasonableness in the way of belief and belief-guided conduct for which reasonable belief requires not only that beliefs be warranted but the criteria of warrant be proper to the form of belief.

Far from muddying or relativizing, this seems a more demanding practice of reasonablenness than the usual facile scientisms and moralisms. To spell this out, the criteria that warrant scientific beliefs (testability, coherence, etc) in order to provide prediction and control, are very different from the criteria that warrant moral beliefs (citation, loyalty, etc) in order to provide for belonging and dignity, and it is unreasonable not only to hold scientific or moral beliefs that are unwarranted but to warrant scientific beliefs as moral ones and vice versa, or to seek from scientific belief the work of aesthetic belief, or to dismiss ethical belief from a legal vantage. It is quite as perniciously irrational to mis-apply scientific belief beyond its proper precinct as to deny science within that precinct. Similar confusions and mischief-making arise from the mis-application of moral, aesthetic, technoscientific warrants to political belief.

Politics is the ongoing reconciliation of the diversity of stakeholders who share the present and coming world and its problems. Compromise (and anticipation of resistance) inheres in all political problem-solving work and reasonable political belief ascription very much including progressive emancipatory work to solicit agreement about shared problems or build different ways of world-sharing. This receptivity and compromise is crucially different from the kind of exclusivity moral belief permits or purity aesthetic belief does. It is not to denigrate morals, ethics, aesthetics that I insist they not be mis-applied to politics but to defend and celebrate them all.

None of this is to deny an inter-implication of these domains -- humans live lives in bodies and histories with integrities -- but I absolutely do deny that these domains are reducible to one another or that any is inherently or always prior to the others. Of irrationalities one could decry, confusions of science with morals, or of morals and aesthetics with politics seem to me underappreciated. Pluralism reminds us that reasonableness is not only a cerebral affair, but much a matter of walking and chewing gum at the same time.

Good Guy With Gun

The "Good Guy With A Gun" is just a techno-ruggedization of the usual paranoid aggressive American individualism of white-racist cishet masculinity.

Plutocratic Algorithms

Those who once said "let the market decide" will soon say "let the AIs decide" and they will mean the same thing by it: Let the rich decide.

Some Star Trek Suspicions

I can't be the only one who strongly suspects the Klingon Empire is a matriarchy run by scientists and social workers and that all the war stuff is a sandbox they provide mostly for dumb boys. I can't be the only one who strongly suspects Star Fleet is just a kindly meant outlet for sociopaths and a-types who simply can't get with enjoying life in a sustainable fair post-scarcity multiculture.

A scooter isn't a "hoverboard" and algorithms aren't "AI." They just sell them that way.

Futurological "progress" is a marketing phenomenon.

Techniques of Futurity Against "Future" Technologies

Futurists in the 1950s promised automation (technology) would usher in a utopia (politics) of universal prosperity and leisure. And now, for 25 years futurists have promised AI (technology) will end history (politics) so we will arrive in paradise or apocalypse.

Let's be clear: futurological promises of prosperity via automation mostly failed because of successful right-wing anti-labor politics. In the absence of organized labor the benefits of automation abetted plutocratic wealth concentration rather than general prosperity. The 20C futurological failures were not failures of prediction but of a deep misrecognition of political problems for instrumental ones.

Now, let's focus our attention to contemporary politics and futurological discourse. Our 50s automation tech-talkers now blather about AI. There have never been nor are there now any intelligent artifacts in the world. Yet futurological attributions of such AI utterly abound. Futurological discourse about threats or promises of artificial intelligence (imagined and present) misrecognizes intelligence.

The substantial content of such false attributions of intelligence to machines that are not intelligent are threefold: one -- the displacement of responsibility from owners, designers, users of dangerous artifacts onto the artifacts themselves; two -- a false provocation of sympathy for useless, wasteful, dangerous artifacts facilitating fraud, crime & war-crimes; and three -- a denigration of actual intelligence in humans and other living persons undermining recognition of their dignity and rights. Again let's be clear: the substance of rights and of history is political -- and futurology fosters their misrecognition as instrumental.

History is the struggle to solve shared problems; to allocate costs, risks and benefits of change; and testify to hope and suffering. Recognition of intelligence (its needs and the responsibilities it exacts) is an indispensable point of departure for any free politics.

Futurological instrumentalizations of historical struggle, intelligence/consciousness are indeed profound attacks on free political life. It is no accident that corporate-military futurisms achieve prevalence as norms and forms of advertising suffuse of public discourse. Our tech talkers repackage stale crap as novelty, upward failure as innovation, deregulation as disruption, precarity as progress. This is a *reductio ad absurdum* of marketing deception and hyperbole. But at a deeper level they are dismantling free political life: substituting consumption for participation, precarious competitiveness for freedom, status-quo amplification for progress.

Futurology's anti-politics serve reactionary politics. Futurism obliterates open futurity. Every futurism is a retro-futurism. The refusal of corporate-military futurism requires engagement in the politics it would denigrate, deny, and disavow: Intelligence imposes responsibilities. Progress requires collective struggles. Justice isn't shopping. Art isn't an amusement park. Education, agitation, organization, legislation can still distribute gains from automation and digitization for equity-in-diversity.

Futurity is the openness in the present inhering in the ineradicable diversity of stakeholders sharing, making, contesting the world. "The Future" is a lie, a projection, a funhouse mirror, a con, an advertising pitch to foreclose threatening/promising open futurity. Futurological substitutions of futurity for "The Future" are continuous with substitutions of instrumental for political consciousness.

Robots did not deliver us into utopia in the 1950s and AI will not deliver us into either singularity or robocalypse in "The Future." It is crucial to grasp this isn't a matter of competing Future predictions, but refusing the futurological eclipse of political futurity. I invest my hopes for progress not in Future Technologies but in techniques of futurity: education, organization, legislation.

Teaching Day and the Fear of Epic Nosebleeds

This afternoon in my Biopunk! graduate seminar we'll be discussing Octavia Butler's Dawn, which I have always loved so much. We'll also be talking about two enormously interesting artists (one of whom is a bit of an impresario would-be artist, granted), Herwig Turk and Gunther Von Hagens. Normally, I'd really be looking forward to all this, but this happens to be my first return to teaching after my hospitalization and I'm rather nervous about everything. At the height of my bleeding in the ER two weeks ago I was actually bleeding not only from my nostrils and mouth but from my ears and eyes as well. My platelet count is still low and even after a week of observation the doctors can't tell me definitively what precipitated the event. So, now I am left imagining myself trapped in a stuffy slow moving BART car mobbed body to body with rush hour passengers as I start fountaining blood from the eyes while everybody panics for fear that I may be gestating Cloverfield aliens or something. Pretty nightmarish. I'm still woozy a bit, having not yet made up the loss of over a liter of blood and would surely be better off staying under the blankets another week -- but adjuncts need to pay the bills and the hospital has seen to it that we have more than the usual bills to worry about now, and so here I go! Wish me luck!

Trump's Silent Majority Is A Loudmouth Minority.

Make America As Grating As Possible

War As THE Judgment Question

House Joint Resolution 64: "Authorization for Use of Military Force," Sept 14, 2001:

There was one and only ONE "Nay" that day, and it was my Representative, Democrat Barbara Lee who voiced it. Bernie Sanders was in that chamber and he voted "Yea." The record is right here.

Here, voice trembling a bit at first, is Lee's prescient speech, making her case against authorizing war in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. She is ALONE:

My Brief

The Future's so trite I have to give shade.

Minsky Thensky

Minsky was a robocultic techno-immortalist on the Board at the Alcor cryonics operation. He also believed: "Ordinary citizens wouldn't know what to do with eternal life." Because they work on problems over many years only scientists grasp "the need" for life extension, he thought. Minsky: "The masses don't have any clear-cut goals or purpose." Minsky was a libertarian who strongly disapproved the regulation of research deemed unethical, eugenic, and so on. "Scientists shouldn't have ethical responsibility for their inventions, they should be able to do what they want." You shouldn't ask [scientists] to have the same values as other people." -- Marvin Minsky Although enthusiasts for the project of AI like Minsky have confidently predicted the arrival of AI for generations. AI has never yet arrived, and yet promises and threats of this never-existing phenomenon suffuse public discourse, and the attribution of intelligence to unintelligent artifacts is ubiquitous. The primary force of the artificial intelligence discourse Minsky and his colleagues have so long championed has been to denigrate the intelligence of beings incarnating it, whose dignity demands its recognition and support and to substitute for it a machinic calculative understanding Minsky applied to himself to justify anti-democracy.

Are We Not Men? Patriarchy in Greek and Roman Antiquity

HUMN 224-01 Are We Not Men? Patriarchy in Greek and Roman Antiquity

Spring 2016

Wednesdays, 1-3.45, Chestnut 20B

Course Blog: http://arewenotmenrhetforreal.blogspot.com

Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu

Office Hours: Before and after class, and by appointment.

Course Description:

The societies of Greek, Roman, and Christian antiquity were conspicuously patriarchal. Homeric heroes made history and conquered death with great words and deeds in an aspirational fantasy of masculine agency. The Roman paterfamilias, perhaps patriarchy's most quintessential expression, centered around the authoritarian male head of the household who held an unquestionable power of life and death over his children, female relatives, and household slaves. But in philosophy and in poetry, in Greek tragedies and in Roman comedies, we find glimpses of a considerably richer and more complicated world of gendered relations, erotic imagination, and human possibility, we encounter profound anxieties, ambivalences, and resistances to patriarchal practices and prejudices. This course will examine these tensions. We will be reading from Sappho, Homer, Thucydides, Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Euripides, Cicero, Terence, Juvenal, Quintilian, Petronius as well as contemporary feminist and queer theorists and historians.

Course Requirements:  Reading Notebook, Five Weekly Questions/Comments, Short Reading (2-3pp.), Workshop Worksheet, Midterm Paper (4-5pp.), Course Narrative (2pp.), Final Paper (6-7pp.)

Attendance Policy:  Attendance and punctuality are expected. Necessary absences should be discussed in advance whenever possible.

Provisional Schedule of Meetings

January

Week One | 20 Introductions

Week Two | 27 Poems of Sappho (Post Close Reading before class)

February

Week Three | 3 Homer -- First and Last Chapters of the Iliad

Week Four | 10 Gorgias -- Encomium of Helen

Week Five | 17 Euripides -- Hecuba; Melian Dialogue

Week Six | 24 Workshop

March

Week Seven | 2 Plato -- Symposium (Hand in first paper)

Week Eight | 9 Plato -- Republic; Aristotle on Women

Week Nine | Spring Break

Week Ten | 23 Aristophanes -- Wasps

Week Eleven |30 Thucydides -- Pericles Funeral Oration and other excerpts from the Peloponnesian War

April

Week Twelve | 6 Cicero -- Philippics; Quintilian -- from Institutio Oratio; and Hortensia -- in the Forum

Week Thirteen | 13 Terence -- Eunuchus

Week Fourteen | 20 Suetonius -- Caligula; and Juvenal -- Satires

Week Fifteen | 27 Petronius -- Trimalchio's Feast from Satyricon

May

Week Sixteen | 4 Concluding Remarks Final Papers Due

Biopunk!

CS-500P-01 Biopunk!

Spring 2016

Tuesdays, 1-3.45, 3SR2

Course Blog: http://biopunct.blogspot.com

Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu

Office Hours: Before and after class, and by appointment. (I will also be available on Chestnut Street on Wednesdays)

Course Description:

"Biopunk" is well-known as a genre of speculative fiction taking up many of the characteristic themes and gestures of cyberpunk literature but reinvigorating them through a focus on the emerging and ongoing pleasures and dangers of genetic science and medicine, bioinformatics, biotechnology, and biowarfare. In this course we will mobilize key figures and themes from biopunk fictions to engage and elaborate transgenic and bioart practices, insurgent technocultures and lifeway practices, and performative resistance to biopiracy, eugenics, and resource war.

Required Texts: Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire; Octavia Butler, Dawn and Adulthood Rites; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; in-class screenings of films. All other required readings will be linked in the syllabus online or made available to you otherwise.

Course Requirements:  In-Class Report (10 mins.), Short Scene Reading (2-3pp.), Short Issue Precis (2-3pp.), Seminar Paper (18-25pp.)

Attendance Policy:  Attendance and punctuality are expected. Necessary absences should be discussed in advance whenever possible.

Course Objectives and Learning Outcomes:

1.      Elaborate intersections of biosciences, bioethics, and bioart theories and practices.

2.      Explore a host of textual analytic modes: epitome, close reading, interrogation, brainstorming, guided discussion, extended research. 

Provisional Schedule of Meetings

                January

Week One | 19 Introductions

Week Two | 26 CS Lewis -- The Abolition of Man; Hannah Arendt -- Prologue to The Human Condition; Greg Bear -- Blood Music

                February

Week Three | 2 Donna Haraway -- The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies; Pedro Almodovar -- All About My Mother

Week Four | 9 Michel Foucault -- Docile Bodies; Mia Mingus -- Hollow

Week Five 16 | Michel Foucault -- Right of Death and Power Over Life; Octavia Butler -- Bloodchild

Week Six | 23 Bruce Sterling -- Holy Fire, chapters 1-3

                March

Week Seven | 1 Bruce Sterling -- Holy Fire, chapters 4-6 (Midterm grades this week)

Week Eight | 8 Paul Di Fillipo -- Ribofunk: The Manifesto; Katsuhiro Otomo -- Roujin Z

Week Nine | Spring Break

Week Ten | 22 Octavia Butler -- Dawn

Week Eleven | 29 Octavia Butler -- Adulthood Rites

                April

Week Twelve | 5 Valerie Solanas: The SCUM Manifesto; Brian K Vaughan and Pia Guerra -- Y: The Last Man, one

Week Thirteen (MFA Reviews)

Week Fourteen 19 | Critical Art Ensemble -- Eugenics: The Second Wave; Margaret Atwood -- Oryx and Crake

Week Fifteen 26 | Margaret Atwood -- Oryx and Crake

                May

Week Sixteen 3 4 Concluding Remarks; Final Papers Due

Everybody Should Read Richard Jones' Excellent Free Short e-Book Against Transhumanism

Against Transhumanism: The Delusion of Technological Transcendence

Robot Cultist Eliezer Yudkowsky's Ugly Celebration of Plutocracy

[Let us begin the new year, you and I, with a long, but not longing, backward glance. In the Moot to a post yesterday my friend Jim Fehlinger drew our attention to an essay from 2008 from robocultic Singularitarian, would-be sooper-genius, wannabe-guru Eliezer Yudkowsky. I vaguely recall having glanced at this piece once, but I can't say that I really gave the piece the real attention it deserved before now. Eliezer Yudkowsky is hardly what you would call a celebrated figure, but he is taken seriously by people who are taken seriously, for whatever reasons, to the extent that one admits the "Thought Leaders" of that amorphous aspirational blob called "tech" are taken seriously, folks like "philosophers" Nick Bostrom and Robin Hanson, and reactionary "techno-progressive" skim-and-scam gazillionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and the like. It is well known that I find Yudkowsky a ridiculous person, but I must say that upon reading the linked piece I found the apology for plutocratic elitism that followed frankly flabbergasting in its infantile foolishness, lack of standards, and truly gross indecency. Even I did not think so little of Yudkowsky to think he would write something like this. Perhaps he no longer would. I would like to think so. It is true that over the years venture capitalist techbros of the Valley of the Silly Cons have regularly been exposed by journalists and then mocked by majorities for making clueless bigoted asshole exhibitions of themselves and it is also true that the object of Yudkowsky's piece is, in a nutshell, to declare this very cohort of VCs as ethically and organismically and, hell, apparently cosmically superior sorts of beings, and so the awfulness of the following has a certain dismal inevitability about it. For the whole piece you should follow the link, my own comments are bracketed and interspersed and, I do assure you, were quite involuntary reflex actions of a shocked conscience. Yes, shock is the way we should begin...--d]

I was shocked, meeting Steve Jurvetson, because from everything I'd read about venture capitalists before then, VCs were supposed to be fools in business suits, who couldn't understand technology or engineers or the needs of a fragile young startup, but who'd gotten ahold of large amounts of money by dint of seeming reliable to other business suits.

[My own (possibly over-general) generalized impression of VCs is that they are mostly privileged upward failing opportunists unscrupulously hyping vaporware for short-term cash from credulous marks or exploiting collective labor and intelligence via the shar(ecropp)ing economy with little awareness or interest in the costs or risks or suffering of others involved in their efforts. "[S]eeming reliable to other [VCs in] business suits" might describe this sociopathic state of affairs, but I do think better descriptions are available. I must add that many of these people seem to me to have "gotten a-hold of large amounts of money" by being born with it or with enough of it to schmooze others born with it, which is to say that they are "self-made men" in the usual way.--d]

One of the major surprises I received when I moved out of childhood into the real world, was the degree to which the world is stratified by genuine competence.

[Since Yudkowsky has interposed this curious framing at this point in his narrative himself, I think it only fair to offer it up as a question for the reader rather than a premise we will all simply uncritically accept: Do we agree with Yudkowsky, admittedly a man veering into middle age at this point, that he has indeed "moved out of childhood" at all, let alone "into the real world"? Given the embarrassing narcissism, the simplistic conceits, the facile hero worship, the infantile wish-fulfillment on display, are we all quite ready to admit Yudkowsky into the ambit of adulthood? Or is his superlative futurology yet another, more than usually palpable, symptom of superannuated infancy?--d]

Now, yes, Steve Jurvetson is not just a randomly selected big-name venture capitalist. He is a big-name VC who often shows up at transhumanist conferences. But I am not drawing a line through just one data point.

[Quite a lot of the material I snipped from the beginning of Yudkowsky's piece involved his praise of Steve Jurvetson in particular who may, for all I know, actually be a bright and worthy person (although, contra Yudkowsky, I cannot say his attendance at robocultic transhumanist conferences, if that is true, inspires confidence in his judgment) or may, again for all I know, simply be someone Yudkowsky is buttering up in hopes of some collection plate action for his robocultic causes.--d]

I was invited once to a gathering of the mid-level power elite, where around half the attendees were "CEO of something" -- mostly technology companies, but occasionally "something" was a public company or a sizable hedge fund. I was expecting to be the youngest person there, but it turned out that my age wasn't unusual -- there were several accomplished individuals who were younger. This was the point at which I realized that my child prodigy license had officially completely expired.

[Can there really be people who refer non-derisively and non-satirically to groups of the rich as "the power elite"? Can there really be people who refer to themselves -- setting aside the question of people in their thirties who refer to themselves -- affirmatively as "child prodigies"? With much discomfort and sadness, let us soldier on.--d]

Now, admittedly, this was a closed conference run by people clueful enough to think "Let's invite Eliezer Yudkowsky" even though I'm not a CEO. So this was an incredibly cherry-picked sample. Even so...

[Even if this hyperbole is meant to signal irony, the boasting in it is so transparently a compensation for insecurity it is actually painful to observe.--d]

Even so, these people of the Power Elite were visibly much smarter than average mortals. In conversation they spoke quickly, sensibly, and by and large intelligently. When talk turned to deep and difficult topics, they understood faster, made fewer mistakes, were readier to adopt others' suggestions. 

[Again, with the "Power Elite" business. The capital letters and, if I may say so, simple commonsense make we want to assume the phrasing is parodic -- but nothing anywhere else suggests this. Indeed, one has the horrified suspicion that the letters are also capitalized in Yudkowsky's head. We will set aside as too horrific to contemplate the suggestion that it was simply their likely whiteness and maleness that made the Power! Elite! gathered in that room seem "visibly much smarter than average mortals." Notice that we must take Yudkowsky's word that the topics under discussion were "deep" and "difficult" and that they spoke of them "sensibly" and "intelligently" and "made fewer mistakes" (he would have caught them if they had). Were they "speaking quickly" because they had so much to say and were excited by their topics -- or just because they are used to fast-talking salesmanship and bullshit artistry? Were they "adopting each others suggestions" because they were open to intelligent criticisms or because they are yes-men flattering and cajoling each other for networking's sake or because groups of people like this are already largely in agreement about what matters and why it matters especially when it comes to "tech" talk?--d]

No, even worse than that, much worse than that: these CEOs and CTOs and hedge-fund traders, these folk of the mid-level power elite, seemed happier and more alive.

[There you go. Read it again. Hedge fund managers and tech VCs are happier and more alive than other people. MORE ALIVE. The rich are not like you and me. They are tapped into exquisite joys and alivenesses unavailable to majorities, they they are more real. This bald endorsement of reactionary plutocratic superiority is so ignorant of the richness of the lives and intelligence of the majorities it dismisses and is so flatly pernicious in its eventually genocidal political entailments, I must say it is a rare thing to see in a public statement... Although, again, I have already noted that such public statements are indeed comparatively more commonplace, and notoriously so, among these very same sort of rich "tech" VCs and banksters. But there it is. Of course, Yudkowsky doesn't really mean "worse" or "much worse" in anything like the conventional sense, when he declares these (are we meant to think reluctant?) truths. No, Yudkowsky is relishing the awfulness of what he is saying, he is savoring the ugliness in his mouth, tonguing his anti-democratic morsel from tooth to tooth, smacking his lips in an unseemly dance of contrarian "political incorrectness," drinking in the imagined opprobrium of the unwashed useless eating masses he cheerfully consigns to computronium feedstock here. One is all too used by now to these online spectacles of man-child id celebrating racist police violence or rape culture or what have you in the faces of the vulnerable, smearing their feces on the walls of the world. What it is useful to recall at this juncture, again, is that mild-mannered "tech philosopher" Nick Bostrom at Oxford and widely worshiped celebrity "tech" CEO Elon Musk are discursively, sub(cult)urally and institutionally connected to this person, are conversant with his "ideas" and "enterprises," are his colleagues.--d]

This, I suspect, is one of those truths so horrible that you can't talk about it in public. This is something that reporters must not write about, when they visit gatherings of the power elite.

[Again, nothing could be clearer than that Yudkowsky does not find this "truth" to be in the least horrible. He is palpably relishing it -- his enjoyment is so rich he does not even care about the perverse contradiction of describing as absolutely prohibited the speaking of the very truths he is in the act of megaphoning about at top volume -- and to the extent that he has already figured himself as adjudicating this gathering of rich happy genius elite superbeings, he is also making a spectacle of confirming his own status as such a being himself. Again, one doesn't have to scratch too deep beneath this ungainly superficial boasting to detect what look to be the rampaging insecurities desperately compensated by this embarrassing self-serving spectacle, but I do not so much discern in this so much a cry for help as an announcement of a punitive rage for order putting us all on notice. Such dangerous and costly performances of insecure personhood do not elicit my sympathy but ready my defenses. It is amusing to note that in the comments to his post, an early one responds to Yudkowsky's observation that "This [elitism], I suspect, is one of those truths so horrible that you can't talk about it in public" by assuring us "Charles Murray talked about [it] in The Bell Curve." Quite so! A later comment adds, "And Ayn Rand wrote about it repeatedly." All too, too true. I will add myself that while it is true that few reporters write about tech billionaires that they are literal gods the rest of us should be so lucky get pooped on by, the endless fluffing these people get in informercial puff-pieces and think-tank PowerPoints and TED ceremonial ecstasies are all premised on only slightly more modest variations of the attribution of superiority Yudkowsky is indulging here. That he takes this praise to such bonkers extremities doesn't actually make his argument original, in particular, it just makes it even more than usually stupid.--d]

Because the last news your readers want to hear, is that this person who is wealthier than you, is also smarter, happier, and not a bad person morally. Your reader would much rather read about how these folks are overworked to the bone or suffering from existential ennui. Failing that, your readers want to hear how the upper echelons got there by cheating, or at least smarming their way to the top. If you said anything as hideous as, "They seem more alive," you'd get lynched.

[Yudkowsky was not lynched for saying these very things, and of course he is lying when he pretends to expect anything remotely otherwise. Dumb emotionally stunted smug straight white assholes aren't the people who have historically been lynched in this country, as it happens. Charles Murray didn't write about that in The Bell Curve nor did Ayn Rand devote a chapter to it in one of her execrable bodice-rippers. You know, I would be surprised if many, indeed if anybody has even been meaner to Eliezer Yudkowsky about his horrible screed than I am being right now in the near-decade since he wrote all these awful ugly things he has never since recanted nor qualified. Of course, one expects straight white techbros to lose themselves in grandiose fantasies of imagined victimhood for just innocently being themselves in the world of politically correct oversensitive naturally inferior social justice warriors blah blah blah blah blah. It is indeed evocatively Ayn Randian of Yudkowsky to presume that we sour-smelling masses contemplate our rich productive techbro betters with envious projections onto them of misery and ennui -- but of course the truth is that such protestations about the lives of stress and stigma and suffering and risk suffered by our indispensable beneficient entrepreneurial Maker elites are usually self-serving rationalizations for bail-outs and tax-cuts and ego-stroking offered up by themselves rather than those of us, Takers all, they so relentlessly exploit and disdain. In any case, nothing could be clearer than that Yudkowsky and his readership do not identify in the main with such envious errant mehum masses, but largely consist instead of useful idiots who fancy themselves Tomorrow's Power Elite awaiting their own elevation via the coding or crafting of the Next! Big! Thing! That! Changes! Everything! and hence they actually identify with the pretensions of the plutocrats Yudkowsky is describing and disdain in advance those who in disdaining them disdain their future selves -- the poor pathetic suckers! I leave to the side the fact that many do not expect merely to Get Rich Quick soon enough, but in the fullness of time expect, given their robocultishness, to live in shiny robot bodies in nanobotic treasure caves filled with sexy sexbots when they are not rollicking in Holodeck Heaven as cyber-angelic info-souls under the ministrations of a history-ending super-parental Friendly Robot God.--d]

[There is much more evil crapola to be found in this vein in Yudkowsky's e-pistle. One particularly crazy utterance several more pages into the screed asserts that "Hedge-fund people sparkle with extra life force. At least the ones I've talked to. Large amounts of money seem to attract smart people. No, really." Oh, how our rich elites sparkle! As I said, it is really just more of the same -- including more of these faux "No, really" protestation against objections to all this objectionable idiocy that never really arrive nor are really, no, really, expected to from his readership.--d]

[By way of conclusion, it is interesting to note that like many who lack training in structural critique Yudkowsky finds himself indulging in a rather romantic misconception of the complexities of historical, social, and cultural dynamisms -- investing heroized protagonists with magickal force and indulging in frankly conspiracist mappings of power.--d]

[For what I mean by magick--d:]

Visiting that gathering of the mid-level power elite, it was suddenly obvious why the people who attended that conference might want to only hang out with other people who attended that conference. So long as they can talk to each other, there's no point in taking a chance on outsiders who are statistically unlikely to sparkle with the same level of life force. When you make it to the power elite, there are all sorts of people who want to talk to you. But until they make it into the power elite, it's not in your interest to take a chance on talking to them. Frustrating as that seems when you're on the outside trying to get in! On the inside, it's just more expected fun to hang around people who've already proven themselves competent. I think that's how it must be, for them. (I'm not part of that world, though I can walk through it and be recognized as something strange but sparkly.)

[For what I mean by conspiracy--d:]

There's another world out there, richer in more than money. Journalists don't report on that part, and instead just talk about the big houses and the yachts. Maybe the journalists can't perceive it, because you can't discriminate more than one level above your own. Or maybe it's such an awful truth that no one wants to hear about it, on either side of the fence. It's easier for me to talk about such things, because, rightly or wrongly, I imagine that I can imagine technologies of an order that could bridge even that gap. I've never been to a gathering of the top-level elite (World Economic Forum level), so I have no idea if people are even more alive up there, or if the curve turns and starts heading downward.

[As I said, one is left questioning more than Yudkowsky's intelligence after reading such stuff, but wondering -- to the extent that we take this stuff straight, and not as a bit of pathetic but probably lucrative self-promotional myth-making -- if his many accomplishments (writing Harry Potter fan-fiction, writing advertizing copy about code that doesn't exist, extolling rationality while indulging in megalomaniacal crazytalk) will one day include an arrival at either basic competent adulthood or basic moral sanity. Yudkowsky ends his missive in what seems an ambivalent bit of loose-talking guruwannabe-provocation or possibly ass-saving: "I'm pretty sure that, statistically speaking, there's a lot more cream at the top than most people seem willing to admit in writing. Such is the hideously unfair world we live in, which I do hope to fix." We are left to wonder if the reference to "hideous unfair[ness]" is ironic or earnest. It is hard to square his conventional meritocratic rationalization for inequity with the belief that this state of affairs is really so very unfair after all, so far as it goes, though who of us can say just where the balance finally falls once one ascends to the Olympian heights from which we are assured that Yudkowsky, elite above the elites, hopes finally to "fix" things? The ways of self-appointed godlings are mysterious.--d]