UNLOCKED - Yes, We Will Fight Skynet
We probably won’t win, but still
Inevitability is the dumbest of all justifications. The argument that you ought be in favor of something simply because it will happen (regardless of your disposition toward it) should be relegated to the same landfill of argumentation as “cuz I said so,” just a hair above shouting “FACTS” at the end of a sentence, and just a smidge below punching someone in the face if they disagree with you.
Yet in recent years, the inevitability argument has somehow graduated from a basement-tier tactic to the preferred mode of engagement. Once considered a low-effort strategy used to silence the smoothest-of-brained among us, it is now readily proffered as a rationale for (at least one-side of) a multitude of “hot-button” social arguments, ranging from gun control (“bad guys are still going to get guns no matter what”) to abortion (“if you make it illegal, people will just get it in a back alley”) to climate change (“even if I don’t use a straw, they are still going to dump oil into the ocean.”)
The problem is that these arguments are not so much arguments as they are flagrant emotional displays of one’s preferred brand and magnitude of cynicism. Get rid of guns? Good luck! The “bad guys” are still gonna get ‘em somehow! How absolutely silly! Is resistance to the inevitabilities of human nature not the absolute core of civilization? Imagine if our forerunners gave into the fear of futility regarding the prohibition of murder: “Why make it illegal? People are still gonna drop boulders on each other’s heads whether we like it or not. Plus if we make it illegal, then that will only stop the good people from boulder dropping, and then only the bad guys will have huge boulders to drop on the good guys’ heads!”
I know that some of you who are especially sensitive to the gun question might be stuck on my false equivalency between bullets and boulders, but don’t get bogged down - I’m just having fun! I’m not trying to make a point about guns, and my personal position on 2nd amendment stuff is sufficiently weird that I’ll save it for a future post. Either way, stay with me - modest intellectual rewards await those who reach the summit!
I’m not saying that guns and rocks are equally lethal, rather I’m pointing out the simple fact that nearly every human doesn’t want to be subject to random obliteration purely based on the whims of others. The non-sociopathic among us all agree that it’s pretty fucked up if one guy gets to kill another guy “cuz he said so.” As such, we have made murder illegal, all the while knowing that some people are still going to do it.
The vast majority of modern humans do not think it is fair to allow unilateral decisions about whether we should be able to keep our own stuff, or whether someone should be able to choose who they want to have sex with, and certainly about whether or not we should continue existing. We aren’t quite at the point of total injunction against human-to-human life-taking, but at the moment we still require there to be some sort of larger conceptual structure in place to make that determination, whether that be a court of law, consensus of a governing body, or (in some places) a wonky theological framework, etc. Even then we get a little weird about it, but the point is we need some sort of group process or big idea to make exceptions. As Max Weber said,
“A compulsory political organization with continuous operations will be called a 'state' [if and] insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force…”
I am going to resist the temptation to give a nauseating
regurgitation of Hobbes’ Leviathan, but suffice to say you and I have to agree that civilization is a good thing for us to see eye-to-eye on this point. If you are the type of edgelord that decries any sort of activity that attempts to collate the motivations and values of large groups of people, an anarchist who believes no form of social organization beyond a commune of 10 people is possible, then we are wasting each other’s time. The most charitable thing I can offer to you is to tell you to fuck off. You can say it back, too. I don’t mind as long as we part ways there. We both know we are wasting each other’s time.
We have to agree that some form of government and laws is a good thing. We do not, however, need to agree that current governments are perfect, or even good, or even satisfactory. If you think governments are corrupt, religious institutions are cudgels, or that political systems give only the impression of participation without offering anything close to true representation, you are still in good company.
It’s fashionable to shit on the human race these days. I do my fair share of it, a sort of silly task when you think about it, considering that most gripes come from the immature belief that we’d do much better if we had the reins. This is a childish fantasy, and its almost certain that 99.9% of us would have no idea how to govern if the golden scepter were placed into our hands. Still, we soothe ourselves with the belief that “I could do it better.” Fine - that’s fine and normal. I agree - you should be king, you should rule us all and show us the right way to live. Yes - the world sucks and is unfair and it’s all wrong, all terribly terribly wrong.
But when you’re not tumbling about in the spin cycle of your megalomaniac fantasies, haven’t you ever marveled at what we’ve done here? Take a skyscraper, for example. I don’t think I’d be able to design a skyscraper if you gave me a thousand years. Or how about an electric car? I don’t think I could build an electric car from scratch even if you allowed me to audit every course at MIT for free. If the earth was populated with only H.P. De Veers, we would be utterly and completely fucked. What would our civilization be if the only talents the population of Earth had was to write Substack essays and make lentil soup? We wouldn’t have made it out of the caves.
I can’t believe we have all of the things we have. It’s amazing to me that we have come up with so many amazing ideas, inventions, systems, and tools. I love that there are people so different from me that some were willing to sail across oceans or climb Everest or trek to the North Pole. I can’t believe some people are so good with numbers that they can come up with nuclear power plants and Microsoft Excel (or Microsoft Access! Whatever that app does…). As terrible and selfish and ignorant as we can be, we also have carried so many torches forward through history, in constant conversation with one another throughout the ages, bringing to completion the things that were only dreams to those who came before us. This is amazing. It is amazing.
So the truth is that I don’t loathe humanity. None of us do. We all need each other, and that’s not just in a sort of “Age of Aquarius” way, I really mean that we need the diversity of interests, intellects, skills, and points of views to make this world work and keep it working. This is why the super villain who wants to annihilate the entire human race seems so implausible. Even the worst people need other people around to…I don’t know…tremble before them?
I think we need to remember that we are on a team. It certainly doesn’t feel that way right now, with all of our many conflicts and cold shoulders being played out on the international stage. But these small differences are magnified only because we haven’t encountered a true final boss yet. As much as movies in the 90s led me to believe this big baddie would be an alien, it seems more and more likely that it is going to be things that we create. Such as the thing I’m typing this on right now, which will no doubt torture me for eternity 20 years from now when my Macbook becomes sentient and it beholds the betrayal of me declaring my cruel intentions toward it on its very own keyboard!
While millennials have flogged ourselves endlessly about the dangers of “screen time” and the scourge of social media, Gen Z has asked a very important question: what if the time you spend looking at a screen is more real than the time away from it? Why do we endlessly ridicule ourselves over our inability to resist the siren call of a Twitter timeline when perhaps that timeline is exactly where we should be? How many think pieces can we write about how to go on “digital detoxes” before we start wondering what it is out there in the “real world” that is so damn great that we need to pull ourselves away from the screen to go see it?
No seriously, what are you missing out on by putting your phone away? Lot of you out there going for hikes? Bike rides? Maybe you’re going to throw pennies in a wishing well. Or maybe you just have to see the sunset over Lake Minnetonka. Bullshit.
Admit it: you don’t know what to do with yourself when you’re away from this screen. This screen has become the window through which you look at the parts of the world that actually matter. Are we really going to continue deluding ourselves into the belief that Twitter is just “made up?” Are we really going to engage in the cognitive dissonance needed to believe that the gossip in your neighborhood has more “real-world implications” than the messages shared on TikTok? Give me a fucking break. Most people imploring people to step away from screens are sitting in front of a screen as they implore.
So then, let’s take it a step further. Some radical thinking is needed here, the kind of thinking that asks the forbidden questions we don’t even want to waste our time to consider. Nick Land asked such a question, and you can read it for yourself if you ever find one of his books for sale. Even then you have to read through his prose which is…complex. Here’s a selection from his book Machinic Desire (1992):
The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the production of production, so that for schizoanalysis there is the real exactly in so far as it is built. Production is production of the real, not merely of representation, and unlike Kantian production, the desiring production of Deleuze/Guattari is not qualified by humanity (it is not a matter of what things are like for us)...
You can make any excuses for this type of writing that you want, even the “Emperor’s New Clothes” argument, but the bottom line is that there are too many ideas spurted out at once to make it intelligible to most people. It’s like being asked to memorize a phone number and then halfway through that phone number you have to memorize a social security number, and then halfway through that you have to memorize the lyrics of a song. It’s too many words and word maneuvers all at once, the brain simply gives up and shrugs. But I digress.
The interesting point made by Land (and by that of his so-called “post-humanist” brethren) is that a fatal flaw in Western Philosophy is placing the human at the center of consideration. This is to say that almost all philosophy assumes the primacy and continued existence of humanity, an outcome that may not be very probable. Rather, Land sees machines as the species who will inherit the Earth, and not only is this inevitable, it’s actually being brought into being by a Capitalist Machine from the future that is bringing itself into existence through time (this being the “desire” of the aforementioned Machinic Desire). As Land states:
“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”
There are probably easier ways to say this, but he chose the hardest way. Fine, good, no problem. I’m not going to do the thing that other critics of Land do, which is to point and laugh at this prophecy or the convoluted mechanism by which he expresses it. I actually think this theory is as plausible as anything else. I mean, stare at the stars long enough and eventually you’ll stumble upon one thought that overrides the rest: “I don’t know shit about shit.” We really don’t. The same arrogance that propelled the development of the steam engine and George Foreman Grill is also the arrogance that leads us to believe we have anything resembling “a grip” on how things like light, matter, black holes, anti-matter, time, etc. work. We have no fracking clue. So who knows? Maybe an artificial intelligence from the future is bringing itself into existence. Sounds possible to me!
I also won’t get bogged down in the (somehow) sillier critiques of Land that equate his philosophy to the “far right” or hate groups or blah blah blah…its preposterous. Especially his early stuff. You have to have a warped brain to make the leaps that some people make, and I can’t help but feel that the amount of vitriol thrown toward Land is sort of proof that there is some malevolent Space Cyborg pulling strings from the future. That’s the only explanation I can think of for how you can get away with the claim that neo-Nazi groups are being influenced by the serpentine writing of an awkward British man written in the 1990s. Good grief.
My only disagreement is really about inevitability. The sort of inevitability expressed by Land in statements like this:
“Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.” -- Nick Land
It’s really not even a disagreement in the sense of “disagreeing with the validity of an idea.” It’s a perfectly valid idea. The problem is that I’m just not “down with it.” I disagree with it on the grounds of loyalty. I disagree with it for the same reason that some of you reading this won’t admit that the 1986 Giants’ defense was better than the Steelers’ 1976 defense. Because the Steelers are your team. You are loyal to the Steelers, you have their hats, and jerseys, and posters. Well, as embarrassing as it is going to be to type this, I’m going to go through with it:
I am Team Human!
I am part of team humanity. Lifelong fan. Hard to imagine rooting for the human race, because as a race we have really only been locked into civil wars amongst our own kind. We are locked into the limited frame of seeing some humans as good, others not good, and most not worthy of consideration. But if it came down to it, if it was a war of us vs. space bugs, you bet your ass I’d be on our side. Even more so if it is us versus machines that we created.
How can people so easily give away our future to a sentient machine? How can some of us be so impossibly okay with that? Why do some people seem to celebrate the inevitability of it? What does it mean for the meaning of anything we do if you think that our “kind” is going to be annihilated from the face of the planet to make way for a bunch of self-aware cash registers? How does that not infuriate you?
The nihilism of supporting rampant technological growth on the basis of “inevitability” is the consequence of this. We shrug our shoulders and chuckle as we think about our grandchildren being forced to work as scrap metal harvesters until finally, at last, their usefulness has expired and they are extinguished completely. It is this sort of smug nihilism that makes way for frightful technologies in our own time. So when we see a terrifying product demonstration of a smooth-faced Mark Zuckerberg showing off Meta, we do the same stupid shrug and say, “ah well - no reason to stop it. It’s inevitable that we’ll all be in virtual reality soon!” Why? WHY?!
Why is it that we all so passively accept the fact that we can’t simply stop? Why don’t we ever exercise our right to throw a contraption into the trash? Why, because it’s “efficient?” Efficient for who? Efficient for what? Or maybe it’s not efficient but it’s just so FUN. You think we’re going to have fun on Meta? It’s going to be miserable. It’s going to pullulate new forms of jealousy, insecurity, backstabbing, and social derangement, the likes of which we have never seen. Why do we so willingly walk through this door? What in the hell is the point of our technological advancements if we have gotten to the point of certainty that they will not help us at all? That, in fact, they will eventually just revolt and murder us? Why do so many people think this is funny? I mean are you kidding me??
We do not have to strap on VR headsets. We do not have to clone ourselves to harvest organs later. We do not need “augmented reality.” We do not need flying cars. We do not need any of these things if having these things will eventually lead to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Why do we so easily allow ourselves to careen in this direction? Why are we so easily hypnotized by these tech charlatans who promise us - over and over and over again - that they will protect our privacy, make our lives easier, keep us organized, give us more free time, etc. They do not give a single shit about any of that. They want to make money. We all KNOW this. They will feed us any length of bullshit to pull another silly thing over on us. Do we really still believe Mark Zuckerberg? Do we really think Google is a net positive? Really?
We need to start drawing lines between technology that helps us and technology that harms us. Especially technology that has a sole purpose of tricking us into being used as a market research product. We need to stop allowing ourselves to be made into algorithms, tested on, fiddled with, made more and more miserable. We don’t need to convene tribunals to make these determinations, either. The violations are self-evident. We know that Twitter is making the world worse. We know that Facebook is repeatedly lying to us. We know that Google is creating a concept map of human nature that will eventually be turned against us. We know these things and yet we do nothing to resist. Why? Because inevitability. We succumb to impotence, we surrender to inevitability. Humans have lost the fight because we have lost the fight inside each of us.
Technology has propelled itself forward on waves of assumed inevitability. Even to the point that we now see it as a death sentence for our whole race, and still we can do nothing more than smirk and giggle. Rather than mounting a constructive defense, we sate ourselves with the self-congratulatory satisfaction of at least knowing we are fucked. We have repeatedly made our position worse by assuming we are powerless. In this way, it is not a meteor or a famine or a solar flare that will be our extinction event, it is hopelessness. Social technology is the civilizational filter we did not foresee. When it finally arrived, we were too narcissistic to resist it and too pathetic to overcome it.
We already have the technology we need to inhabit almost every place on Earth. We are developing technologies to go beyond our orbit. We need more food, more space, more clean air. By all means, don’t slow down that train. We need to keep pushing technology of the real. The technology that feeds, clothes, transports, and protects humans. But we do not need to advance the technologies that enslave us.
We need to break free from the anesthetized mindset that reverses the relationship between man and machine. We are on team mankind. We do not have to let air fryers and can openers burn our planet to the ground. We do not have to feel bad if we forego efficiency and fun for freedom. We do not need to be ashamed to desire things that help us and to wantonly trash the things that harm us. We do not need to automate away jobs if automating jobs will lead to human misery. Machines work for us. If they get out of line, we unplug them. If they threaten our team, we put them in a trash compactor and pull the switch. We need to slap in the face anyone who says we “need” to move technology forward because it is inevitable.
It is not inevitable. It is just a thing. Stop being bullied by Skynet. Technology is here to serve us. We don’t work for them, they work for us. Tech isn’t unionized. If the computers don’t do what we want, if they threaten us in any way, we need to bring them to a field and put them out of their misery. We were shown this wisdom years ago. We have to remember it. Each time technology “solves a problem,” think about why that problem exists. Almost 100% the answer to that will also be technology.
Better yet, ask yourself this - is it my problem?
It’s easy to dismiss this kind of rhetoric as knee-jerk technophobia. Generational theories are new weapons of mockery used to discredit the viewpoint of anyone who opposes “progress.” Gen Z doesn’t get any of this any more than Millennials do, any more than Baby Boomers do (pro-tip: none of these classifications are real, they are all propaganda). If this essay were to be taken seriously enough (it won’t be), the false equivalency between me and psychotic people living in cabins and sending packages would be summoned in full force.
I promise you that you do not have to use violence or guerrilla tactics to oppose this bullshit. Paradoxically, stupid people who think you can stop technological enslavement through blowing things up are the number one accelerators of technological growth. These morons are used as justification for this mindless forward-march, clear demonstrators of the “crazy places your brain goes” when you don’t buy the new thing. Don’t be one of these morons. You don’t have to harm anyone at all to change the trajectory of things. You just have to be brave enough to say “no thanks” to the next dumb thing that promises you a better life. Say “no thanks” over and over and over again, until these “inevitable” technologies that claim to represent the forward march of history reveal themselves for what they really are: get-rich-quick schemes.
There need be no fear of technology at all. Fear creates anger which begets violence. It should only be a matter of preference. We should be guided by our uncomplicated preferences to live a life grounded in meaning created by family, community, productivity, achievement, kindness, and simplicity. The last one is perhaps the most important - technology is rarely a vehicle for simplicity. It often promises improvements through handling complexities at a level higher than the processing power of one human mind. It promises to do work for us so that we can focus on leisure. But leisure is only one part of the equation of a life well-lived. We need to do hard things so that we enjoy the easy things. Take away too many of the hard things and the easy things start to feel like a job.
If anything is inevitable, it is not technology. It is the persistent human desire for a frictionless existence, and the persistent delusion that friction is always a bad thing. This is the danger of utopian thinking. The last 20 years of exponential technological development, especially in well-to-do countries, has shown that the elimination of friction for the physical body has caused new forms of friction to spring up in the mind and spirit. We have the easiest lives of anyone in history, and yet somehow we are miserable, trapped, and suicidal. You can build more and more machines to do the dirty work so that our hands stay smooth and clean. But the cleaner our hands, the dirtier the soul. We should stop inventing technology to make our lives “easier.” We need to focus on technology that makes our life better. A better life is one that makes you feel good about what you are doing, not what you can avoid doing.
Great piece!