Doomer Optimism
Marginalia, Vol. 1: A limited series for the end of the year
Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism.
This is the first issue in a limited series of short, informal posts which I’ll be releasing between now and the end of the year.
Allow me to explain.
Since I started writing here a few years ago, this small corner of the internet has been the repository for my thoughts about some of the big questions raised by modern technology, open to any interested reader who might happen across it. But I have never managed to imbue it with that blog-like feel: light, personal, fast-paced, and unselfconscious. Perhaps this is a way of saying that I have never quite cracked the art of the newsletter. This will be an attempt to try something a little different.
The essays are and will continue to be the main attraction around here, but they don’t provide me with much of an opportunity to share everything I’d like to. For one thing, I do a lot of reading for each of the essays I publish here, most of which never shows up directly in the writing itself, not even in the footnotes. So this will be an experiment in something that looks a little more like old-fashioned blogging: some rapid thoughts, news, and links—generally, sharing whatever falls outside the scope of the writing I normally do.
I don’t expect to publish these with any fixed frequency, but right now the plan is to put out a few of them between now and the end of the year. I’m just testing out this format, so we’ll see what comes of it. I may decide to do more of these in the future if they turn out to be popular, or if it proves to be a useful outlet for me.
I should also mention that this will not affect the release of the essays in any way. I plan/hope to publish a new one here later this week.
Speaking of which, I’ve been given the advice that, generally speaking, the longer you spend writing something, the more aggressively you should push it out into the world, to a degree commensurate with the time it took to produce. While this advice makes sense, my tendency has been to quickly move on from each essay as soon as it’s published, forgetting almost entirely to promote it. I’ve been doing this for several years now, but I have yet to achieve even the most basic level of professionalism in this regard.
In case you missed it, then, and since it did take me quite a while to write, here’s my most recent essay once again, which considers algorithms as systems of social collaboration which carry forward some of the same principles that gave rise to modern states and corporations:
(I try to remember to say this every time, but if you like something you read here, please share it with others in your circles. It really helps to increase the visibility of the work.)
That’s enough of a preamble.
I’m recently back from a conference in Ligonier, Pennsylvania which was co-organized by Doomer Optimism and The Savage Collective. Several accounts of the event have already appeared, but I wanted to highlight the ways that some of the loose networks of what I’m tempted to call “countercultural humanism” which are forming online are spilling over into in-person meet-ups.
I was struck by the way the event attracted such a wide assortment of different kinds of people—academics, journalists, blue-collar types, artists, retirees, entire young families—all of whom had been moved to make the journey (covering, in some cases, quite long distances) by a shared urge to transform emerging online networks into real-world conviviality. The event included panel discussions about technology, the home economy, vocation, automation, transhumanism, and local (Western-Pennsylvania) work- and folk- history.
Several others have remarked how this sort of in-person encounter establishes a trust in the people behind the writing we read online—which, as we all know, may be of dubious authorship. Jane Gross observed of the other attendees that “[s]pending time with them for two long days—observing mannerisms and tone of voice, hearing her chuckle or his guffaw, knowing whether someone prefers a tailored blazer or a brazen cheetah print cowboy hat—added up to intimacy”, even “a respect-verging-on-affection”. This, I think, is a simple but profound observation.
I had the chance to meet and talk with Peco and Ruth Gaskovski, who kicked off the conference with their keynote speech on the first morning. You can find their account of the gathering, as well as some writing drawn directly from their presentation here:
This was just one in a series of Doomer Optimism gatherings which Ashley Fitzgerald has organized in the last several years. Here is a link to Ashley’s reflections after this month’s event about the history and future of these events:
A huge thank you to Ashley Fitzgerald, Grant Martsolf , and Brandon Daily for putting in all the hard work to pull off a fun and intellectually engaging weekend unlike any other.
Readings:
The panel on transhumanism got me thinking about its intellectual sources, and this led me to pick up one of the most influential documents of the Italian Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, which was composed in 1486. Listen to the way that Pico describes God’s creation of the human being towards the beginning of his Oration:
Taking man, therefore, this creature of indeterminate image, He set him in the middle of the world and thus spoke to him:
“We have given you, Oh Adam; no visage proper to yourself, nor any endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.”
“In this idea,” one scholar has contended, “there lay a colossal hybris unknown to the Middle Ages, but also a tremendous spiritual impulse such as only modern times can show.” Of course, Pico doesn’t have in mind here anything technological, nor anything of the modern idea that we will ourselves to be the sole authors of our own nature. But I wonder whether it is possible to discern in this the distant headwaters of the technological transhumanism that we know today.
“But the seed of hubris, overweening self-confidence, was sown; and a time would come when Man would take himself for the be-all and end-all”, the social critic Russell Kirk wrote of Pico’s Oration in the 1950s. “It has remained for us of the twentieth century”, he continued, “to look back upon the course of this hubris, diffused over all the world; and to see the oratorical aspirations of the humanists transformed into the technological aspirations of the modern sensual man”.
Pico’s Oration is quite short, and it really is an interesting read. Here is a link to the translation I’m using. I’m still thinking about this one, but maybe it’ll find its way into some future writing.
The essay which I hope to publish later this week will be about the rather gravely-titled new book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, which came out in September and has received a fair amount of attention. It’s about existential risk from machine superintelligence, which its co-authors consider to be likely to emerge within the next several years. But the book surprised me in its final chapter by quoting the opening of the 1948 essay by C. S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age”:
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors — anaesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
What a perfect statement of Doomer Optimism!
That’s all for now. You’ll be hearing from me again soon.
Great Lewis quote! And that Pico quote was fascinating and unsettling in its implications.