Briefly Noted
Looking for a new story, Communitarianism, the AI Apocalypse, Dems & AI, and Iran
Looking for a New Story: Paul Kingsnorth talking about Lewis Mumford says: “About halfway through the first volume of The Myth of the Machine, pondering the various horrors this sovereign has unleashed, Mumford wonders why any of us put up with it. ‘Why this “civilized” technical complex should have been regarded as an unqualified triumph’, he writes, ‘and why the human race has endured it so long, will always be one of the puzzles of history’. But this puzzle itself implies a faint light: a chink in the roof of the cavern that might point to some means of escape. If the Machine is a story, then the first step to its dismantling is neither monkey-wrenching nor revolution—it is to stop believing the story. The second step is to stop telling it to others; and the third is to begin the search for a better one.(Against the Machine, p. 42) Amen, brother. That’s the task here at After the Future: We’re all about rejecting the machine story and replacing it with a richer human story.
Michael Sandel’s Communitarianism. Rare when a philosopher gets profiled in the NY Times, even if only briefly. Also interesting that the philosopher, in order to get readers to take a minute to read about him, must be described as a ‘rock star’ whose course on justice has actually been on TV! And Koreans are hot now, and they just love him! And of course he teaches at Harvard! Nevertheless, I won’t hold all that against him. We’re allies. He occupies the same philosophical communitarian space as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. The transcendence argument doesn’t play the same role for Sandel, but no need to get into the weeds here about where we agree and disagree. The article gets to the gist of what communitarians argue for when it says Sandel “thinks we’ve become too focused on what is good for individuals instead of what is good for communities. He thinks everything has become commodified, hollowing out civic life. He thinks we have misguided ideas about merit, and that we should acknowledge luck more. Finally, he thinks modern politics has failed to prioritize meaningful conversations about morality.” Well, duh, you might be thinking to yourself, That’s common sense. But is it? And besides, what any one philosopher has to say, even one who has the platform that Sandel has, has no influence in our public thinking anymore. Why? For all the reasons I’ve been laying out here: Communitarianism is just another cultural app, like all humanistic apps, that doesn’t run on the TCM transhumanist OS. And it’s a problem because our public intellectuals don’t know anything about the Western philosophical tradition anymore because it’s irrelevant for their careers, and so a vicious circle ensues: If our public intellectuals remain as illiterate about philosophy as they currently are, they too easily devolve into moralism, which is a lazy, cheap, off-the-rack, knock-off form of moral pseudo-thinking. Moralism gives people a fake sense of the Good when in fact it succumbs to what I call “whited-sepulcher syndrome”: the obsession to look squeaky clean on the outside, while being a rotting corpse on the inside. The NYT profile goes on to point out that Sandel in a “book from the early 1980s, … predicted that if people were discouraged from speaking publicly about their deepest convictions, “this would create a kind of moral vacuum, a void in our public life, an emptiness of meaning that sooner or later would be filled by narrow, intolerant moralisms of two kinds: fundamentalism or hyper-nationalism,” he said recently. “Four or five decades later, alas, that’s what’s happened.” Just add Wokeness to the list of intolerant moralisms. The only questions regarding the Good that are relevant in a TCM society is “What are the cool kids thinking? What’s the current fashion, and am I in it or out of it?” There are no deep convictions in such a mimetic moral world.
The AI Apocalypse: Tech exec Paul Ford in talking about the coming negative economic impacts of AI: “This is all exacerbated by how much of the A.I. industry is led by people who see human thought as raw material, like a steel manufacturer sees ore. The industry is arranged into an ouroboros of mutual investments, with the world economy teetering on their sweetest dreams. Social change at this level needs careful, federal governance and thoughtful regulation. But we’re being handed the opposite: Racist A.I. video slop shared on Truth Social, Grok doing who-knows-what inside the Pentagon, and a White House policy that would give the U.S. attorney general the power to challenge any state’s attempt to regulate A.I. No brakes. All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.” Right. In other words, all the people you hate are Capitalists acting like Capitalists. But no matter, it’s exciting. If you want to get really annoyed, read the rest of this article to see how some people find themselves following the logic of the Vichy collaborationists: We hate these guys, but there’s no fighting them, so might as well join them and have as much fun as we can, while we can.
The Dems & AI: Harris Deputy Campaign Manager Rob Flaherty says: “The economics of A.I. may not be as politically urgent as President Trump’s latest international entanglements or Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s extrajudicial campaign of terror, but it is steadily if quietly becoming the country’s biggest political issue. It won’t define this year’s midterms, but it will almost certainly define the 2028 elections.”The Democratic Party needs to be better prepared. The coming A.I. revolution threatens the urban professional class that constitutes a central pillar of its political coalition.” He goes on to warn of a backlash from within this core constituency and that Dems should be prepared to harness it. He’s asking the right questions, but why am I dubious he’ll get the right response? Maybe because Dem elites have no interest whatsoever in channeling that anger if it will push their most important donors over to the GOP, a la Mark Andreessen. Some individual Dems will—Bernie already is, but he’s not a Dem—but I doubt the party as a whole has any interest in putting the brakes on anything techno-capitalist donors want to do in any significantly effective way. We’re fools if we expect anything more than window dressing from the duopoly.
Iran: One group of sociopaths slaughtering another group sociopaths, and so the world turns. Collateral damage? Meh.