Less Nothing Right Now

[lb_lee]

Rogan: A friend of mine is dead but I’m not ready to talk about that yet, so instead I’m distracting myself with Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.

My religion revolves a lot around death, as you might expect from a crazy person who has a head full of ghosts and a murder pillow among their possessions. The idea of a future without death, illness, or even mild deprivation deeply offends me in a way that’s hard to express. The idea of “more everything forever” is a dystopian nightmare for me, because it is a detachment from everything I care about.

So many of the thought experiments and imaginings I see in this stuff is ghoulish, putting prices on people and lives, converting everything into money, or stock, or “compute,” or I dunno, is this what they call capital? Everything is money, and a dollar’s a dollar whether it saves lives here or a million miles away, so surely all that matters is optimizing that money, right?

But that’s not how I live my life. That’s not how my religion works. My friend is dead, and tomorrow I am going to help go through her things, and that is something I need to do for my friend, because she was my friend. I could pay money for a clean-out company to do it, or pay into a fundraiser for someone in a similar situation in a cheaper country, thereby being a more “effective altruist,” but fuck that and fuck the very framing of that scenario. SHE WAS MY FRIEND, and now she is dead, and the specificity of her cannot be erased with ghoulish philosophical thought experiments. She was my friend, and it is important to me to help her BECAUSE she was my friend, and my relationships aren’t clean, transitive little equations made to move bloodless money across a 2D game board.

(Is it on purpose, you think? How they sever all personal relationships and replace them with abstract optimization? Why be attached to anyone or anything, if you can just donate your bloodless money to your abstract causes, none of the effects of which will ever trouble your pointy little head? What if, instead of acting justly in the moment, you just bloodlessly beancounted your way to virtue?)

Similarly, the grief and pain of loss is important to me. Everything ends. Converting my friend into computer code and putting her in Immortal Robot Heaven with Totally Not Catholic Robot God... well, first of all, I think the irony of it all would make her agnostic ass laugh, but it’d make me furious. How dare stupid billionaires recreate the worst kind of Catholicism as some sort of pacifier shoved into our mouths to stop our grief? Have they no shame? Don’t they understand that the measure of love is the grief of loss, that such sacrosanct pain cannot, must not be skipped? Do they think it’s as simple as just making my friend again, as though the specificities and context of her are just a matter of code, a new cookie to replace the old one? My friend is dead and I must grieve, and that is sacred even though it hurts.

The luxury space communism seems to be all about erasing that context and specificity, the very bonds I use to root myself in this world. Where does my stuff come from? Doesn’t matter. Where do the resources for it come from? Same answer. What are my obligations and responsibilities to my people, my homes, my planet, my everything? Don’t worry about it, true freedom is just never having to care or do anything for anyone. Just let Big Mommy Tech coddle and take care of you like an infant forever. It’s like some adult techie’s version of the baby fantasy of toys and cookies forever, no bedtime or mortality ever.

I’m upset my friend is dead. I’m angry that so much of the chronic pain and stress in her life was put on her by a society that treats people as resources to strip-mine. I’m sad that there are so many things she will never get to do now. My feelings are messy and ugly and angry, and they are MINE. No magic technology can fix them. I don’t want or NEED them fixed in the first place!

What if I don’t WANT a stupid mansion with robot servants I’m somehow supposed to never identify with or have moral questions about? What if all I fucking want is to be able to stay in one place for more than four years and do my own fucking dishes after the revolution (and maybe my friends’ dishes if they can’t)? What if I don’t want to be immortal in paradise? What if I just want to be able to die on my own terms, to the best of my ability, and rot in the goddamned ground so my nutrients can return to the greater life cycle, and not bankrupt my survivors doing it? What if all I want is to feel the cobbles under my feet and feel home?

What if all I want is a future where people like my dead friend don’t have to hurt or be scared of losing their jobs or homes all the time? What if I want to help BUILD that future, brick by brick, and not have it done FOR me like I’m some idiot child?

What weird psuedo-Catholic cyberplanet do these billionaire bloodsuckers live on, and why can’t they all just move there permanently? Oh right: BECAUSE IT DOESN’T EXIST. And they’re making that all our fucking problem.

I hope fear of their own mortality and inability to cheat at death consumes them until they become better people.

And until then, I will help and mourn my dead friend.

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

Is it on purpose, you think? How they sever all personal relationships and replace them with abstract optimization?

I think a lot of them are either consciously or unconsciously favoring this because of how controllable abstract optimization is. Like with effective altruism, they start with something that makes sense both intellectually and emotionally, which is that it's better to save more lives. This gets used to get people to agree to the bean-counting idea that whatever results produces the bigger numbers of lives saved is always better, don't look too hard at the assumptions behind the math, it's numbers so it must be right! And then, when all of the emotional pressure is on "You must always pick the biggest number or you're saying you want people to die", effort gets diverted into increasingly weird ideas that benefit the tech elite, like "everyone work as hard as you can at making money in big tech, don't worry about your personal quality of life, only worry about earning to give" and "actually the most important thing isn't saving lives now, it's saving hypothetical future lives through things like trying to make a benevolent AI god. And when ideas become more and more detached from any connection with the concrete, the tangible, and immediately real, it becomes easier for whoever is best at a certain kind of bullshit (in this case, using numbers and formal logic to impress people with STEM skills to distract them from the dubiousness of the underlying assumptions) to accumulate localized power. Whether it's intentional or the more subtle bias of "doing this feels rewarding", they're doing it because it gets them financial and social power.

I'm sorry about your friend.

[armiphlage]

*hugs*

[witchpoetdreamer]

I'm sending you all the hugs. My condoleances for your loss, it is hard but, as you say, it also makes us human. Take all the time you need to recover.

[pantha]

[hugs]

[bodyetal]

our condolonces, and thank you for sharing—some folks in here are also in mourning and found this very resonant (for lack of a better word). sending well wishes and hugs if theyre wanted -crow&

[wolffyluna]

[Hugs]

[acorn_squash]

*hugs*

My friend is dead, and tomorrow I am going to help go through her things, and that is something I need to do for my friend, because she was my friend. I could pay money for a clean-out company to do it, or pay into a fundraiser for someone in a similar situation in a cheaper country, thereby being a more “effective altruist,” but fuck that and fuck the very framing of that scenario. SHE WAS MY FRIEND, and now she is dead, and the specificity of her cannot be erased with ghoulish philosophical thought experiments. She was my friend, and it is important to me to help her BECAUSE she was my friend, and my relationships aren’t clean, transitive little equations made to move bloodless money across a 2D game board.

(Is it on purpose, you think? How they sever all personal relationships and replace them with abstract optimization? Why be attached to anyone or anything, if you can just donate your bloodless money to your abstract causes, none of the effects of which will ever trouble your pointy little head? What if, instead of acting justly in the moment, you just bloodlessly beancounted your way to virtue?)

*quietly copies this down*

[alatefeline]

Thank you. This is beautifully and thoughtfully said. My condolences to you, Rogan, and to everyone grieving right now. Grief is important.