Reading List

I'm having a thought and I need to write it out to see whether I agree with myself.

I'm reading More Than Words: How To Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner, which is excellent (review to come on Wednesday) and a certain chapter combined with a topic that's been on my mind lately, creating a realization that is shaking me.

A thing I keep coming back to again and again lately is that the determining aspect of the current administration is their definition of strength, which seems to be standing alone. Being totally independent. You see this in Trump, et al.'s foreign policy, in which the end goal seems to be to completely alienate all other nations of the world. This is obviously a profoundly stupid idea because it's self-defeating. But it makes sense if you believe that any dependence whatsoever on another is weakness. This is why they hate the idea of a give-and-take, we-both-benefit arrangement, even though that is objectively the best way for human individuals, societies, and nations to operate. They don't even want the US to have less-powerful allies that are dependent upon us (think NATO) because if anyone else benefits, then that shows weakness in us. Hence: tariffs. This is a worldview in which anyone else getting anything means that we are being taken advantage of.

The one exception to this is having people grovel. These guys, especially Trump, love when people grovel because it feeds their egos. The only acceptable kind of relationships to have are with enemies and bootlickers. Period.

They have a horror of responsibility, and these two relationships are the only two that don’t require them to be responsible to or for anyone else.

This is all deeply related to gender, since strength = masculinity, so masculinity = standing alone. Any kind of cooperation or symbiotic relationship or even just mutual exchange is female-coded and so both weak and contemptible.

Anyway, I've been thinking about all that, and then I've been reading this book, and I came to a chapter where Warner talks about educational technology and how the past century or so has been the story of one person after another trying to invent a "teaching machine" to solve the "problem" of education. Warner asks, reasonably: "What is this problem they are trying to solve?"


"...the 'problem' the teaching machines are trying to solve is the inherent variability and messiness of learning. In order to circumvent these challenges, the students must be changed from a human into a product. Once students are a product, we can use our machines to shape them.

"The teaching machines keep failing because humanity gets in the way. For the teaching machine to succeed, we will have to decide that some aspects of our humanity are unimportant or inherently flawed, leaving us better off if we're governed by the outputs desired by the machines."

I read this, and it all came together. (Which would delight Warner because the book is about how reading and writing are ways of thinking and feeling and cannot be banished in favor of mere information-intake.)

The thing holding the tech bros and the MAGA politicians together, besides their lust for money and power, is hatred of human-ness.

These people share a profound, worldview-determining antisocial-ness that drives everything they do. They hate humans. They hate being human. They hate when other people are human.

They want to turn people into productivity machines or obedient automatons. They don't want people to be people.

They hate the messiness, the time it takes to do all the things that make us human. They hate the way it requires cooperation and inefficiencies like mistakes. They actually hate learning, wanting to replace it with a system that's similar to a computer downloading a new program. They hate art because they think it's a waste of time and its only purpose is as a little "treat" to incentivize us to work harder. They hate actual relationships because those require vulnerability, dependence, and sacrifice. Most of them actually seem to hate sex except as a way of asserting (violent) power over others. They view children not as human beings but extensions of themselves.

Underneath all this, I think there must be either a profound fear of and/or rage against vulnerability and aging, so it's no surprise that these people are also obsessed with living forever and "optimizing" their health. They are constantly fighting the human body and the human mind. Probably because they're scared of death.

Now, we're all scared of death. But most of us throughout human history have been wise enough to know that the solution to that is community. Make your mark on other people, leave a legacy, plant trees for your grandchildren to sit under. Leave people who will remember you fondly. Maybe even leave some art that will move generations to come. But that view of the world is being increasingly undermined by our culture's values and incentives.

Our culture has been on a trajectory towards this for a long time. When you view the world as a market, when productivity, efficiency, out-puts, and end-products are the only things that matter, you are going to end up hating human beings because we cannot be reduced to these things no matter how or corporate and political and technological overlords try.

If you look at it this way, fascism and the AI/crypto/NFT hype are both declarations of war against our humanity. I'm sure there's a literature about fascism as hatred of humanity, though I am not knowledgeable about it. But these AI people really seem to believe that a machine will be better than a human. And why shouldn't they think that? Humans require food and rest and songs and hobbies and mistakes and negotiations and cuddles and sex and art and time, and if you don't value any of those things, of course a machine that is purely focused on the most efficient output is an upgrade.

This realization makes Severance more relevant to me, since the central technology of that show is creating a way to outsource all the pain/monotony/discomforts of life so you can skip right to the "good stuff." This, of course, reveals that the creators do not understand that the messiness of life, all the friction and grit, are the point, and that we are not human without them. But if you don't want to be human, of course you'll figure out ways to jettison these things.


Understanding all of this makes me understand why I so viscerally hate the AI hype. I do think there are some limited ways in which AI could be very helpful, but the hype isn't that. The hype is, "You won't have to write! You won't have to do your own research! You won't have to take the time to learn an instrument! You don't have to be human! Think of all the time you'll save!" And that hype never once acknowledges that if you do save that time...there will be nothing worthwhile to use it on. What is the center of their view of a good life? Nothing. They don't think about it. There's no there there. It's productivity and efficiency for its own sake; it's capitalism taken to the ultimate extreme.

No wonder I hate it.



And now that I've written all that out, doing my thinking through the practice of writing, I see that I do think I'm right. Probably I am just slow and y'all have all realized all this long before I did. But it's a profound realization for me, and it leaves me more energized to fight against both fascism and technocracy. The most terrifying thing about our current moment is that the people who have the most power to shape our lives and the future of humanity are the people who hate humanity the most. They are the most immature, foolish, and thoughtless people imaginable. We can't let them win.