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You will by now have read of the 27-year-old former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, who coupled his resignation with a series of somber posts on X. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he warned, adding that his own estimate of the likelihood of such an outcome is greater than 10%. It’s hard to say when exactly the tipping-point came, in the long slow progress of AI doomerism out of marginal LessWrong forums and into the mainstream. But over just the past few months, and decidedly by the time of Coxon’s public interventions, it really does seem that everyone is talking about it.

You might also recall that in the previous decade similar predictions were made by prominent figures in the fight against anthropogenic climate change. One 2018 retweet from Greta Thunberg, in particular, seemed to online right-wing mobs to communicate the prediction that we had at most until 2023 to solve the problem. When 2023 came around, Charlie Kirk and others seized the moment to point out that we were all still here.

Now I recognize that there are tremendous disanalogies between the two issues, yet I can’t entirely convince myself that there is nothing at all to learn from looking at doomer scenarios in a comparative light, or that doomerism is not perhaps in the end a generic condition of the current moment in history, prone to attach itself to different objects in turn, while consistently failing to take itself as an object. That is, doomers do not habitually reflect on the social and political conditions that make doomerism as such attractive, but instead interpret their attraction to it as a direct rational response to a given concrete threat.

I happen to think that if there is any threat for which doomerism is a rational response, it is neither climate change nor AI, both of which are almost certainly going to continue to cause us major problems, and worse ones than we’ve known so far, in the coming years. It is, rather, war.

States go to war with one another periodically, and it’s been over eighty years since the last big one. That war arrived at its climax when the Americans introduced the world to a very new and different kind of weapon, in August, 1945. Soon after, a handful of other countries acquired the same destructive technology, and the post-war global order took on the character of a stand-off, fundamentally the same, if at a massively larger scale, as what you find in a hostage crisis. If you are 81 years of age or younger, you have lived your entire life under the reign of an unrelenting terror that we still find so exceptional and unacceptable when it takes the form of a single deranged man strapped with a vest of dynamite, but that somehow just becomes a background feature of everyday reality when that man’s role is assumed by the state.

Over the early post-war period there were several near-misses. Now the post-war period is over, and even the pretense of rational deliberation that that era’s institutions upheld —notwithstanding the absolute barbarian madness of the world those institutions pretended to be leading— has disappeared. There is at present more than one global empire explicitly and unapologetically committed to the position that if anyone tries to bring down their current governing regime, they will bring down the rest of the world on their way out. You might say that’s just theoretical, but these same global empires are, as a matter of fact, at the same time, actively working to bring down the governing regimes of the other ones. They are trying their best to do this without letting things get out of control, of course, without stumbling on any tripwires or retaliating in a way that invites escalatory retaliation without end. But this is at best a delicate balance, and there simply is no good reason to suppose that it can be maintained by the relevant state actors indefinitely.

In this light, if a race of rational beings were to visit earth, and we were to query them as to what we must do to keep ourselves together, plainly they would reply: “Ideally all, and no fewer than all but one of the relevant state actors must unilaterally surrender their weapons.” And if we were to say, “OK, but what if the other parties refuse?” the aliens would reply: “It doesn’t matter!” And we would say, “But they don’t have a multi-party system!” or, “Look at their human-rights abuses!” At which point the aliens would righteously interject: “Enough, children! Nothing else matters but disarmament. Now quit wasting time and flip a coin.”

Of course, all doomer scenarios are connected. Climate change exacerbates political instability. Autonomous weapons systems are, obviously, one of the things, in addition to power grids and banks and hospitals, that we don’t want rogue AI taking over for its own ends. But the relative rarity of my own “preferred” doomer scenario at the top of the lists that others make of near-future challenges strikes me as explainable only in terms of some kind of mass-psychological mechanism of repression.

This was not always the case. Much of the freak-out of the 1960s, I have come to believe, may be seen as the cultural processing of the trauma of the Cuban missile crisis and other such close calls. I myself can remember The Day After (1983), a work of televisual schlock that, for all that, at least faced up to the real threat looming over us, and in so doing managed to trigger real reckoning on both sides of the Cold War divide, which may even have played some indirect role in landing Reagan and Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit a few years later.

I gather there was some other such television series over the past few years — House of Dominoes, I think it was called? Starring Idris Elba? Who knows! Like almost everything else in our current information environment, the cultural reckoning this time around was essentially undetectable. Oppenheimer (2023) came and went, and was instantly elided in the popular imagination with Barbie as its twinned summer blockbuster. The worlds depicted in both cases were processed, one had the impression, as roughly equal in the respective forms of their unreality, either because the characters lived and died in the 20th century, and thus the problems they faced fit entirely within the frame of our own rearview mirror; or because they were made out of plastic, had no genitalia, and were 11 inches tall.

I admit that it was a slow-emerging epiphany, but I think it was in the summer of 2023 that I finally became fully convinced of something that remains no less clear to me today: It’s the world that’s fucking crazy, not me.

When the prospect of a future history-ending war comes up at all, the tone of engagement is almost psychopathically inappropriate. Consider this article in the New York Times, also from 2023, the tone of which is something like “a fun new way to think about global thermonuclear war, for all you fans of Liu Cixin!” You can almost picture the efforts in the newsroom to fit this bizarre piece in alongside such comforting pap as the wifey-softcore “Modern Love” column, or Kwame Anthony Appiah’s frivolous Miss Manners larp in “The Ethicist”, in a way that would permit the casual reader to move back and forth among these offerings without any real cognitive or existential distress. In this way the Times, even when it covers the unspeakable, upholds the illusion of comfort, the implicit assurance that even if this is a bumpy ride we’re on you can continue to trust the people in charge. Theodor Adorno would detect this same function in the horoscope section of your typical Cold War American newspaper.

This illusion is a powerful thing, and almost all Americans live out their lives entirely under its sway. I know a good many politically progressive Americans who really, truly just never think about the fact that the United States is a global power concerned to maintain that status at all costs. When they process news about US military entanglements around the world, they tend to ask questions like, “Should we keep playing the role of global policeman?”, thus taking the state’s official line on what it’s up to out there as basically true. This official line has it that our own country is not like the other ones, is not like any that has ever existed in the history of the world, as its actions are best studied in light of its ideals, rather than in light of the same material and at least somewhat law-like forces to the consideration of which we naturally revert when the subject is the Romans, the Mongols, the Aztecs, or indeed the Soviets. And nowhere is this exceptionalism more evident than in the nearly universal presumption among Americans, or at least those of them living within America’s borders, that their lives will never be seriously impacted, or ended, by war.

I have found that things are different in Europe, and I imagine they are different in Asia too. Yet in their colonial arrogance my progressive American friends never cease to share with me their mostly fanciful plans to flee Trump’s US for peaceable Europe,1 as if there were any plausible scenario on which life in the US would become truly intolerable for domestic political reasons, while life on this continent would go on as before; as if the post-war makeover of Europe as a just and peace-loving place had nothing to do with American projection of its power here, for better or worse; and as if America’s recent chaotic retreat from that role could be expected to have no serious consequences for the ongoing viability of post-war European eirenism!

I can’t entirely shake the suspicion that there is at least some correlation between the sense of comfort and security that is maintained as the ideological frame of life at the heart of the American empire, on the one hand, and on the other the displacement of the apocalyptic imagination onto what are ultimately less important things.

Again, the actual challenges we face are likely going to involve the mixture of more than one existential threat, so that it can easily appear almost indecent, or at least irrelevant, to seek to rank them. At the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, Francis Bacon implored his contemporaries to stop being squeamish and to force Nature to give up her secrets, in the expectation that once they became known to us we would be better able to control her (the gendered language here is Bacon’s). The result of this “hacking through nature’s thorns”, to adapt a line from James Merrill, is indeed a great deal more power, and more responsibility for the management of destructive forces, than the premoderns could have anticipated (unless you are willing to accept the reality of prophecy). In this light it is somewhat myopic to see nuclear weapons as exceptional, since in fact we have pushed nature up to its very limit several times, and in several different domains — notably, the science of chemistry has given us microplastics, and it has given us synthetic fertilizers that disrupt the planet’s nitrogen cycle, to cite just two modern novelties from that field that come quickly to mind; and biological research has brought us to the point where we must also worry about the constant threat of a new global pandemic beginning from a lab leak.

We just keep doing it, I mean: bringing ourselves right up to the limit. In this light what is so intriguing about AI doomerism is that it now shows us, in effect, after a lag of almost a century, that it is not only the early modern period’s effort to mathematize nature that can “kiss awake new powers” (also Merrill) and ultimately destroy us; the mathematization of thought, too, beginning with the first invention of formal languages capable in principle of automated processing, leads us ultimately to the same place.

That we should be most impressed right now with this most recent result of our efforts is understandable — it’s newer, and, on the face of it, stranger. But nature has not been superseded. She’s still there (to speak with Bacon), and she hasn’t forgotten what we’ve done to her. And even if the newest doom scenario arises from the realization that at a certain point automated thought becomes automated will, for which there is no guarantee that it will remain aligned with our own, still there is at least for now plenty of human will left in the world. Considerable power to exercise will is concentrated in sovereign states, which psychopathically take their own continued existence as equal in importance to the continued existence of the world as such. I tell you this remains the greatest danger to humanity.

AI doomerism might be justified, or it might be an ingeniously orchestrated hype campaign by savvy insiders, or something between these two. Time will tell. But either way it is the sovereign power of human beings to end human life by choice, and not the accidental transfer of our power of choice to machines we initially created merely to assist us, that should remain at the front of sober minds right now. If you don’t see that, it’s probably because you’re more in thrall to the American-defined narrative of history than you know — which has always let its subjects indulge at least a bit of their taste for disaster sci-fi, as long as they never forget who, at the end of the day, is in charge.

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Also, before we get into it in earnest, let me say that I’m very excited to be involved in the course being offered by the Hinternet Foundation this fall, beginning October 1, on “The Voynich Manuscript, Riverbank Laboratories, and the Deep Philosophical Origins of the American Military-Information-Technology Complex”. I believe the model we’re working out for our courses, in which participation includes co-authorship on a work of hybrid creative scholarship published under the Hinternet Foundation imprint, is going to be both greatly satisfying for all involved and an exciting new approach, fit for our era, to collaborative para-academic work. The deadline to apply is September 15. Get on it!

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There is a silence these past 24 hours that must surely be explained by the power of shame. Nearly everyone who until early yesterday had delighted in the feeding frenzy on Jason Arday, triggered when Nathan Cofnas pricked first blood, has gone mum. I hope shame is what explains the silence, anyhow. It is the appropriate human reaction to this obscene display of inhumanity, which had as its direct result the death, evidently by suicide, of a blazing and beautiful soul.

May his memory be blessed. And in the wake of this whole grotesque display of all that is worst in humanity may real room be made in our institutions, or may new institutions be made that are able to make real room, for the fabulous — which I mean in both senses, designating those who style themselves larger than life, who set themselves apart with their exquisite locks and threads and general self-display from the ordinary run of little nerds who dominate in academic life; and designating those whose primary mode of knowledge transmission, like Arday’s, is not data-mongering, but storytelling.

I suppose now is the appropriate moment to run through the expected reassurances. No, I don’t condone plagiarism or fabrication of data. And neither do I share, at all, the institutional priorities that got Arday hired in the first place. His dissertation looks like a hot mess — a simulacrum of a contribution to a slapdash field that itself, in my view, should have no place in any institution bearing the name of a university. But who gives a shit? The integrity of our institutions —obviously, unquestionably— is not worth a single human life.

It is likewise obvious to me, even from my relative distance (I have crossed paths with Cofnas in my professional life, about which more below), that Arday only ended up writing this fake dissertation in this fake field because doing so was the only way for him to fulfill a perverse expectation — to distort his nature, which again is the nature of a storyteller, in order to fit himself to the mold of the 21st-century university.

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I used to write regularly for the marvelous and utterly sui-generis Cabinet Magazine, and have very fond memories of that time. It was in writing for Cabinet that I began to find my voice as a non-fiction essayist, and to break free of the oppressive norm of enforced flatness that I had learned in graduate school. I was consistently satisfied with the work I was able to do at Cabinet, and can honestly say that my experience being edited by Sina Najafi and Jeff Kastner was the only case in my writing career when I came out feeling that the work was made better by the meticulously close readings of my editors. I doubt by contrast that I will ever bother to compile a similar archive of the far less substantial work I published with n+1 during roughly the same period, which always left me feeling alienated from the finished product, denatured and deformed as it was by an editorial crew that did not, to say the least, share my sensibility or my aims.

I have not reread most of this material in preparation for sharing it here, and I cannot say that I would be as satisfied with it now as I was at the time of its publication. But I have no doubt it bears some significant genetic relation to the work I’ve been doing here at The Hinternet these six years past.

I have shared the pdf version of my pieces wherever I have been able to find it, though that is not the case for nearly as many of them as I had expected when I first got the idea to create this little archive. Perhaps more pdf’s will resurface over time, and I will add them as they become available.

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• “On the Market,” Cabinet Magazine, February 25, 2020. On my much-delayed first forays into investing (online only).

• “The Non-Boundary,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 66 — Skin (Spring, 2018). On Jacques Derrida on Jean-Luc Nancy’s meatus, etc.

• “Onfim the Artist,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 64 — The Nose (Summer, 2017). On medieval Novgorod birchbark letters, and on a noteworthy adolescent doodler.

• “Astronymy,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 59 — The North (Fall, 2016). On having an asteroid named after me, and on my father’s death. “ASTRONYMY is really and truly great.” —Jamaica Kincaid

• “Between the Mine and the Stream,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 61 — Calendars (Summer, 2016). On Herbert Hoover, Johann Agricola, The Compleat Angler, etc.

• “The Internet of Snails,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 58 — Theft (Summer, 2016). On Jules Allix and the Pasilalinic-Sympathetic Compass.

  

  The Internet of Snails

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• “Cactus Life,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 55 — Love (Fall, 2015). On Soviet defectology, Helen Keller, Maxim Gorky, etc.

• “Wonders Taken for Signs: An Interview with Michael Witmore,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 54 — The Accident (Summer, 2014).

Wonders Taken for Signs

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• “It’s All Dark,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 50 — Money (Summer, 2013). On Johannes Kepler, Pink Floyd, the Soviet space program, etc.

• “Louis Riel: Dissertation on Monads” (translation of Mémoire sur les Monades),” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 49 — Death (Spring, 2013).

Louis Riel, “Dissertation on Monads” (1885)

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• “Montana Monadology: Louis Riel in Exile,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 49 — Death (Spring, 2013). On Louis Riel, Métis resistance, oddball Leibnizianism, etc.

• “Who Better to Punish than the Innocent?” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 46 — Punishment (Summer, 2012). On Mesoamerican rubber-ball games, etc.

• “Just Deserts: An Interview with ,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 46 — Punishment (Summer, 2012).

• “The Politics of Curiosity,” in Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine (2012).

• “The Ethics of Rubbernecking,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 42 — Forgetting (Summer, 2011). On Plato’s Leontius, car accidents, etc.

• “Pattern Baldness,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 40 — Hair (Winter, 2010-2011). On my hairline (which worried me more then than it does now).

  

  Pattern Baldness

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• “The Raw and the Cooked: An Interview with Cătălin Avramescu,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 39 — Learning (Fall, 2010). On An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (Princeton University Press, 2009, translated by ).

• “The Soul Is a Trapped Gas,“ Cabinet Magazine, Issue 37 — Bubbles (Spring, 2010). On Pynchon, Jean-Baptiste van Helmont, flatulence, fermentation, etc.

The Soul Is a Trapped Gas

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• .“Leibniz’s Syrup of Ipecac,” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 36 — Dust (Fall, 2009). On you know who.

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Grandpa Von had just laid a new concrete walkway in front of the Smith family’s semi-rural Orangevale home, a vernacular hole-ridden construction, surrounded in the front and back yards by concrete mixers and saw-horses and truck chassis and sun-brittled hoses, and raised up almost entirely from Von’s singular bricoleur spirit — always half-drunk, always jerry-rigging something or other. The concrete was still wet, so he wrote “July 4, 1976” in it and invited us to press our hands alongside that significant date.

No, more, this is how American I am: my other grandfather, on my mother’s side, or so I believed at the time and in some profound sense still believe today, was George Washington. I always knew this belief did not hold up, empirically. Grandpa John was born in Minnesota in 1912; our first president earlier and further East. But the rules of identity are different in such deep matters of belonging, and it was quite enough that both John and George were good old honest men, founders and structurers of everything I knew and everything I was, and that the silhouetted head on the US quarter bore a plain likeness to both of them.

American identity and belonging were thus traduced down to me by elders, and reached all the way back to a quasi-divine first ancestor. This, my subsequent reading has taught me, has been the primary mode of representing human community throughout all history, and prehistory. It is a powerful enough cognitive disposition to survive, incongruously and without explicit affirmation, even in the Westphalian era of state sovereignty.

I do not believe, ultimately, that any state’s claim to sovereignty is legitimate. I take the Westphalian order to be, if we’re lucky, a transitional phase, in itself still woefully backwards and irrational, on the way to a universal, cosmopolitan, perpetual peace; and, if we’re not so lucky, as the obscene flatus vocis that pompous men have delighted in emitting in these few final centuries of our planetary tenure. To this extent, if I acknowledge that I am a proud American at all, this pride is entirely wrapped up in the fact that my grandfather was an avatar of George Washington, and not in the fact that my country can, if it really wants to, kick your country’s ass (or at least end things with a double KO).

My belonging is of the old kind, the kind no less salient in nomadic societies than in sedentist ones, and what I’ve already described as the incongruity of this sense of belonging with the modern sense of patriotism might better be called an antinomy, one that weighs on my spirit every day, and only more heavily as I grow older and more world-weary.

On the one hand, it says, I know with absolute certainty that to invest so much as a drop of affective commitment in a state whose rulers would rather destroy the entire world than accept their own empire’s demise, who would take humanity and nature down along with themselves and their regime, out of animal spite alone, is really no more decent or fitting for the human spirit than to find oneself tragically in love with a psychopathic abuser. Our current world order is psychopathic, and to take the claim to sovereignty by nation-states as legitimate, to take the psycho-pimp-warlord who claims to be protecting us at his word, is to buttress this order and to remain under the terms of a murder-suicide pact that only desperate cowering creatures, not free human spirits, could ever accept.

I know all this sounds rather extreme, but I am a Christian pacifist and as I see it these statements follow, logically and inexorably, from my most basic convictions. In this regard I do not see them as “opinions”, but as the truth, which duty and conscience require me to declare.

On the other hand, there is something there, in America, that I love, just as surely as I love my grandfathers.

My ancestral patriotism is complicated by the fact that I have lived outside the United States for a very long time. Most recently, for the past 13 years, I have lived in Paris.

Things are not working out here, to be honest, as I had hoped. I certainly have no fellow-feeling at all with the American “expat” community, with its seemingly inexhaustible fondness for so many things about France that I either do not care about or actively dislike (long lunches, gastronomy, fashion…). At the same time I have utterly failed to assimilate, into French society in general, but, much more depressingly, into the academic culture that I imagined, at the age of 40, I was going to master in no time. I now find that culture completely repugnant, I see the very idea of trying to penetrate it as an utterly irrational waste of my limited time, and I laugh at myself of 13 years ago, who had such a ridiculous megrim in him as to aspire to become some strange imitation of a “French philosopher”, with that whole balletic performance of habitus that Pierre Bourdieu so perfectly exposed. Fuck that, time is short, and I’ve got work to do.

My certainty in this regard, and my commitment to my work, only grow deeper and clearer with each day. It’s the right path for me, but it is also, I admit, sad. I understand now, deep in my soul, those perplexed elderly immigrants I saw throughout my childhood in California, the ones who never learned the language, who relied on others, if they had others, to navigate their way through a social reality they simply accepted could never be their own. I do know the language, I carry on in it about Aristotle and Leibniz and Kant in front of captive audiences of French students, week after week, year after year. But other than teaching my primary engagement with French is reading Balzac and Proust and Madame de Sévigné on my very own couch. I can’t imagine ever switching to French as my primary language of expression. Sometimes I joke, though it isn’t really a joke, that moving to France has primarily been beneficial in improving my English — it has made me hyper-attentive to the millennium-long cross-channel hybridity of these two national idioms, and has enabled me so to speak to “Gallicize” my own language in ways that at least I find quite powerful.

Perhaps a better comparison is not to the old transplanted soul in San Francisco’s Chinatown, living out his days in a back room of his children’s dim-sum restaurant (my mom says that when she went there as a kid some of these old men still wore the plaited queue from the Qing Dynasty), but rather to the exiled Kurdish or Dagestani intellectual who spends his days in a brutalist Paris highrise apartment writing melancholy poems of the landscapes of his childhood. I walk by these fellows’ clubhouses sometimes — dingy, fluorescent-lit, with a TV mounted in one corner showing news in the language of their homeland, and a portrait of some deposed or imprisoned leader in another, they sit and play chess or dominoes with their co-ethnics, moustached, smoking. They’ve got even less of that French habitus than I do — but they’ve got each other.

I know I’m not actually in exile. I can go home. I do go home. Sort of. I mean, I cross the border and Officer Cisneros of the Customs and Border Patrol says “Welcome home”. Yet I’ve been away for so long now that it is as if I have become my own poor foreign cousin, marveling at the kitchens and showers of the Americans, and always wondering if I have what it takes ever to be let back in. I am now able, in a way that I think most Americans are not, to see the place as other do: as a looming and rather forbidding fortress, with incredible reserves of wealth and power inside.

At the same time, I carry that fortress inside me. It is more precisely, in my case, a Western American outpost, and I a living embodiment of the Turner thesis. I have often mocked the obscenely hypocritical practice of “land acknowledgments”, such as they are performed by the symbolic capitalist class, as the great Musa al-Gharbi calls it, throughout much of North America and Australia. But in fact these acknowledgments at the same time acknowledge the essential truth of the observation that our character was shaped, historically, by the conquest of a frontier, by the immeasurable violence that required, and by the historical forgetfulness that, once accomplished, was then required simply to move on. The Turner thesis, in this light, really is just a neutral expression of what in a more critical vein is articulated in terms of “settler-colonialism”. We blonde Californians really were shaped by a historical experience perhaps most comparable to that of the Voortrekkers. I myself am neither concerned to perform ritual public prostrations over this history, nor am I proud of it. But I do think that living outside the United States for so long has the salutary effect of enabling an American to see it for what it is.

Another lesson that life as an American in quasi-exile cannot fail to teach is just how American Black Americans and white Americans are. This is something it is particular difficult for white Americans who have not lived outside their country to see, with all its myths around race — reactionary myths and progressive myths alike. Black American culture is and always will be more legible to me, more familiar to me, closer to me, than, say, French culture of any social class or ethnic origin. The lives of my Black and Maghrebin neighbors here in Paris are almost entirely illegible to me. They talk about things I don’t understand — and these are for the most part the same things that my white university colleagues talk about. They are all united in their Frenchness, while I am on the outside. By contrast, I fly to San Francisco and I get on BART to go up through Oakland to the Amtrak station at Richmond and onward to Sacramento, and on the way a group of Black American teenagers sits down across from me — I understand every word. I don’t mean just the language, I mean the whole life-world from which the language pours. In this regard, to an expatriated American, it is hard not to see that the racism of poor white Americans, of the sort I witnessed in abundance in my earlier life, really is just the narcissism of minor differences — we are the same people.

Grandpa Von used to grumble when ads for the NAACP came on the television: “How about a National Association for the Advancement of White People?!” According to my father, his father’s last words to him, from his hospital bed at Kaiser Permanente, with the TV on just as it had been at essentially every moment of his life for the several decades preceding, was: “That Arsenio — he’s alright”. I don’t want to say this was an indication of any tremendous late-life moral improvement, but the fact remains that if by some improbable circumstance Charles Aznavour, say, had appeared on the screen above his hospital bed, Von would have given his very last drop of energy to reach for the zapper and turn that damned thing off. (My own father’s last words to me, incidentally, from his hospice bed at the veterans’ home in Barstow, California —and I’m not making this up—, were: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”)

Another lesson I’ve learned in these years of quasi-exile: anyone, potentially, can be an avatar of George Washington. It does not have to be passed down to you through your grandfather. Recall here Herman Melville’s description of Queequeg: that he “was George Washington, cannibalistically developed.” To this extent, I’ve come to think, American universalism at its most lofty expresses a spirit that already in antiquity was associated not with any particular empire or other polity, but with philosophy — an abstraction to which I myself am bound, for better or worse, no less than to the abstraction that is America. Thus Seneca wrote of this tradition: “If there is any good in philosophy, it is this — that it never looks into pedigrees. All men, if traced back to their original source, spring from the gods.”

My Black and Maghrebin neighbors in Paris are here not because of anything that might plausibly be called the “French dream”, but because of the dynamics of collapsing empire. They know the acronyms of French bureaucracy inside and out, as I never will, but one seldom detects any romance in this — only brute geopolitical and migratory reality. Where else would one go?

In conversation with the very most down-and-out sans-papiers, at their squalid encampments beneath the 2 line near Stalingrad —the metro stop that is, named for the battle; the eponymous city has switched back to Volgograd— I have sometimes been asked if I can help these poor souls get “to Canada”. This is a place-name that is included in the old sense of “Amérique”, as when the divine Jacques Brel, in fact Belgian, sings of his “Madeleine” that she is “Mon Amérique à moi”. This pre-revolutionary sense of America, designating abundance and hope, still means something in the Old World.

I don’t know a damned thing about French politics. I gather Emmanuel Macron is still president, and that Candace Owens is still promoting the scurrilous idea that his beloved wife Brigitte is a man. As for any finer-grained details about this place, they come to me via the homepage of the New York Times, pre-packaged for American consumption. I try not to know anything about American politics either, but I just can’t help it. I know everything that happens there, even as I understand that none of it matters, that the day-to-day political life of that place is but a projection of Heraclitean flux over what is in fact an unchanging monolith of Parmenidean sameness. It really is just the same damned thing over and over again.

My own opinion of Trump, for example, has not budged an inch since 1985. He’s tacky. He’s embarrassing. What more is there to say? I suppose I could add, at least, that I see no greater betrayal of everything I love about America than for Trump to have invited FIFA and its army of young athletes to enter the fortress. To me Gianni Infantino is just as louche and unwelcome as any Caspian Sea oil tycoon whom we might also find making a hotel deal with the American president in exchange for a cameo appearance in his son’s music video. This is exactly the wrong kind of universalism, exactly the opposite in moral valence from the one Melville had in mind in identifying Queequeg to George Washington. It is just one more reminder for me, of the same sort that has been piling up for forty years now, that Trump’s idea of America is nothing like my own.

I suppose we do have some better accounting for Trump’s America in Melville’s other great novel, The Confidence-Man (1857). There the author reminds us that “in new countries, where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase” — that is, if I may be permitted to interpret, you no longer have to worry about getting scalped, on the American frontier, but you do have to worry about getting scammed.

Sublimated into art, these distinctly American con-men really are something to marvel at and even to learn from, just as the great American bard Garrison Keillor acknowledged drawing so much inspiration in childhood from the fire-and-brimstone radio pastors warning of the torments of hell. It’s a cut-throat place, brother, and you’ve got to watch your back. But what a place to be!

I find, as we approach the semiquincentennial, that my mind is more alive than ever with visions of American civic revival. America, as I’ve said, is in one sense completely static, monistic even, and one should not indulge overly progressive fantasies of any permanent overhaul. It will always be overrun with foxes. Yet I do tend to think, now, that there are better and worse ways to manage the monolith and to draw out its more venerable potencies. I find I am particularly attracted to those political leaders and civic activists, such as our friend Danielle Allen, who understand that America is both tragically compromised and full of promise, and who are much more interested in moving it out of its present impasse than in litigating all the countless wrongs that have landed us there.

I realize it is perhaps a bit jarring, for someone who has just admitted that he considers the entire Westphalian order illegitimate, to begin, a few paragraphs later, expressing sincere hope for an American civic renewal to come. But as I said it’s an antinomy, and antinomies in their nature invite attempts at sublation. I think there could be a way of articulating a vision of American civic pride and commitment that cuts beneath any suggestion, even, of nationalism, or indeed of partisanship. It would be expressed instead in terms of communitarian belonging and of popular traditions eminently worth preserving.

I’ve tried to envision, in writing, some of what this might look like. For one thing, as I’ve said I think civic education should include popular musical traditions and folklore as central and load-bearing pillars of its curriculum. We need, that is, I think, to keep alive the idea of America much more as transgenerational epos, and much, much less as fortress.

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I.

It was always bold, impudent even, to insist that material substrates or elementary particles could have what it takes to anchor reality as such. Perhaps the greatest propaganda coup of scientific modernity has been to convince a good number of us that such a claim is nothing more than right common sense, while any hesitation to affirm it could only be a symptom of soft-headed superstition or unhinged irrationality. To this extent I have long been perplexed by those philosophers who defend or at least toy with simulationism, and who seem to relish the small frisson of transgression it so reliably delivers to them. The suggestion that reality is more “bit”-like than “it”-like, seems to be experienced by its defenders as a relatively safe venture into philosophical edgelordism, making the majority normie philosophers cling to their “its” that much more desperately. The problem is not only that “its” were never at all well-suited to the heavy role of anchoring reality —what exactly, tell us, shouts “Being!” about an atom or mote or corpuscle?—, but also that historically their tenure in that role was relatively brief… no, it might better be said, they were still pre-tenure, and therefore still easy to get rid of.

It may be not, as simulationists have supposed, that we are discovering the true nature of external reality about which we had been uniformly wrong throughout all previous history, but rather that simulationist theories themselves are the predictable downstream narrative echo of a much more important historical process, namely: that we are transitioning out of the 400-year-long reign of physics as Prima Scientia. And the throne, some reliable indices suggest, is being usurped by what is for now still a multidisciplinary field of inquiry perhaps best identified as “information science”. One significant sign of the shift, as I and others have noted, came in 2024 when the computer scientists Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield won the Nobel Prize in physics “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” I am myself no specialist, but as far as I can tell this is a research program more concerned with bits than “its”.

Physics is not dead, but it can now be pursued, indeed its highest distinction can now be earned, in a way that effectively decouples from the “real” world of particles in motion, and even from the more abstract but still physical forces —“physical”, if only par courtoisie— that earlier generations of scientific practitioners would have taken for granted as by definition the exclusively appropriate domain of their various inquiries. And information science, though it is articulated in updated terms and is being applied in pursuit of unprecedented practical results, is not itself new. This is not even the first time it has been instaured as Prima Scientia. More than one school of thought in classical India took śabda or “speech” as the first principle and starting point for any rigorous study of reality. The grammarian Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī of circa 400 BCE is at once a straightforward manual of Sanskrit grammar, but also, by its author’s own lights, an elaboration of the elementary constituents or as it were the “particles” of reality — it just happens that these particles are linguistic and not material. And you will likely also know something of another ancient tradition that similarly placed the “Word” at the beginning of all things.

The naïve formulation of the simulation argument —entertained as a real possibility by David Chalmers in his Reality+ (2022; my review here), and earlier geeked-out upon by Elon Musk in the early aughts, under the influence of Nick Bostrom— suggests that what we call reality shares more in the nature of what we see in our VR goggles than in whatever external system of particles in motion had been envisioned, albeit with a long succession of updates, from Democritus through Einstein. It is of course not at all naïve to question the suitability of pebble-like or marble-like or billiard-ball-like entities for the role of reality-anchor —again, they only came to occupy this role in the relatively recent past, under very special circumstances—; the naïveté is rather to suppose that this questioning had been made uniquely possible by our new technologies, and that reality shared in the nature of these new technologies in particular, rather than in some more abstractly articulable nature that Pāṇini, say, or John the Apostle, might be no less well-positioned to appreciate than Bostrom or Chalmers.

A somewhat more compelling neighbor of the simulation argument holds that many natural processes are in their nature computational —chemical reactions, air turbulence, cell division—, and to this extent we would do better to think, as David H. Wolpert and Jan Korbel do, in terms of “constructed” and “non-constructed” computers, i.e., the computers we built, as opposed to the computational systems that abundantly preexist us in nature. I have previously said far too many times that it would be a strange historical coincidence if the nature of reality just happened to be one we had to wait for the arrival of Space Invaders and Pac-Man to be able to see. That is, it would be surprising indeed if the technologies that did so much to shape the adolescent minds of Musk, Bostrom, Chalmers, and I suppose of me too, just happened also to be the clavis for unlocking the nature of the universe. And I have often pointed out, at a historicizing octave that these other Gen-Xers seem innately unable to hear, that we’ve seen this all before — in the 17th century, notably, it was the horological art, with its vanguard technology of clockworks, that most insistently suggested itself as model and epitome of the cosmos.

Recently, however, it seems to me that I have not been nearly historicist enough. “The cosmos is a clockwork,” I’m inclined to say now, is true as far as it goes, to the extent that if you approach it like a clockwork you will find that you can do some pretty remarkable things that you couldn’t do back when you conceptualized it as a horse (see the Rig Veda) or as some unspecified animal (the Stoics), or according to some other organicist model of the sort that reigned almost universally —the minoritarian countercurrents of ancient atomism and related tendencies notwithstanding— in the natural philosophy of Europe, the Mediterranean, and South and East Asia, until the end of what is periodized in Europe as the Renaissance (and much later still in some of these regions). It was by declaring the universe to be most akin to a variety of human-made artifact that natural philosophers became sufficiently emboldened to suppose that they might come to have full-fledged “maker’s knowledge” of nature, and it is the possibility of this sort of knowledge that in turn has served since the 17th century as the primary engine of technological progress: nature transformed into and exploited as an instrument in pursuit of our human ends.

Eventually, unsurprisingly, these remarkable ends that the early moderns were able to achieve yielded up more impressive instruments still, a process that eventually displaces the clockwork-model of the cosmos as somewhat rusted and unreliable. When this happens, “The cosmos is a computer” will come to ring truer, for experts and commoners alike, and will possibly shape the way external reality is seen in the 21st century even more comprehensively than the clockwork image shaped the 17th. But if we wish to understand why this image is so compelling, we would do better not to suppose, as Bostrom et al. seem to have done, that it is because we are getting things uniquely and unprecedentedly right, but because the computer in fact is a far more impressive instrument than the clock. To be convinced of this, you need only to consider the fact that a computer is a clock — but only among the many other things it also is.

The claim “The cosmos is a computer” is then true, I am prepared to say, in the sense that it expresses the principle that validates your investigation of the natural world in information-theoretical terms, just like “The cosmos is a clockwork” had earlier licensed treating the world in mechanical-physical terms. And we’re finding that once we’re free to go ahead and investigate nature in this new way, remarkable results ensue — results so remarkable in fact that it becomes very hard not to affirm, as true, what is now the reigning metaphor of our age: that the world is a computer.

To say that it’s “just” a metaphor, or just a pragmatic concession, is to my mind to position oneself as a vigil-holder in wait of some imaginary gold standard of context-independent objective truth for which, despite Paul Boghossian et al.’s great expectation, I just don’t think it makes any sense to hold our breaths.

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II.

My real purpose in the present essay, though you surely will not have discerned this yet, is to place Pope Leo’s recent encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, in historical context. Before I get there however allow me to say a few words about this other document, more bull as it were than encyclical, on “the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences”, that at least in my own circles is currently generating comparable levels of buzz and consternation.

Boghossian et al. hope to preserve the august old model of humanistic inquiry as a variety of Wissenschaft. Yet they fail to see that the primary obstacle to doing so is not the sort of critical inquiry that denies any particular primacy to wissenschaftlich approaches, but rather the massively more significant historical fact that we have brought into the world machines that are by now largely capable of delivering positive “research results” in our place, with the result that so long as you go on conceiving humanistic inquiry essentially as the “STEM lite” production of results of this sort, you are inevitably going to find yourself practicing what Leif Weatherby has astutely called “remainder humanism”. You can still get your Ph.D. on Kafka or Lucretius or whatever, at least for now, but already you must prepare yourself for a life strung along on postdocs that are —if you’re lucky!— only distally related to Kafka or Lucretius, while your actual work-tasks in fact look more like low-end data-entry or data-management than like anything we would have recognized as “research” as recently as 15 years ago.

It’s true that the “critical humanists”, by which I mean all those who have adopted the approaches Boghossian et al. bemoan, have often served as useful idiots abetting the rise of our new machine-dominated epistemic regime. But this regime most certainly would have successfully installed itself even if every single humanities professor had continued working until the bitter end in the venerable spirit of the great 19th-century German philologists. Our 19th-century philologists sought to put their names as authors on the covers of great books; in the late 20th century many were jockeying to be the authors of books that in some way or other declared the death of the author (perhaps contained within a larger category of “Man”); and in the 21st century, either way, whether you had once hoped your own authorship might afford you a small slice of immortality, or whether you thought rather that language was speaking through you, a hole in being, an objet petit a or whatever (I don’t even know what that means): either way, I was saying, you got the death of the author, and the death of the author precisely in his devourment by the machines his work served to train.

Lacking anything new or urgent to say about AI, the authors of the report can only rehash social-media squabbles from the past decade, treating these as the problem itself rather than as symptoms of a vastly greater economic-technological problem that would be just as real even if no one had ever got the idea to decouple sex and gender. And what they propose as strategy to fight this symptom of the illness taken for the illness itself, is an utterly pedestrian theory of knowledge that itself seems borrowed from the dumber corners of the anti-woke rabble-rousing internet, according to which the supreme purpose of natural-scientific and humanistic inquiry, alike and indiscriminately, is to give an account of the way the world actually is in itself, independently of our passions and biases and all the other idols of tribe and marketplace. There is next to nothing, in their vision of what the humanities might yet be hoped to be, concerning ethical self-cultivation, or civic belonging, or discovery of meaning in tradition — no mention, in other words, of those things that are soon going to be the only possible anchor of any defense of the humanities any (human) purseholder will care to hear, when machines will have proven themselves capable of doing what’s left of the wissenschaftlich part, that is, the production of positive “research results” of the sort that our funding bodies love to see us humanists promising, and pretending, to deliver.

The report is in the end a power-move, asserting a YouTuber epistemology as if it were the established consensus of all right-thinking institutionally recognized scholars. But ironically, in its ignorance of the way discursive public power actually works in 2026, for better or worse, it misunderstands itself. It fails to see that as a public intervention it is really very little different from all the other posting that’s going on all around us. It is slightly more formal, in that it lists institutional affiliations and you have to click to open the pdf, at least in the versions I’ve seen, which then brings up a document on your screen with some skeuomorphic connection to what used to come to us printed out on 8 1/2 x 11’’ paper.

Yet it remains for all that but a dressed-up post, and as such an invitation to spoofing, dunking, ratio-ing, and whatever else predictably comes in the wake of such self-serious communications from essentially offline institutionalists taking up a position in a culture-war dynamic that younger and far-more-online generations have already learned by heart and observed playing itself out, over and over again, to exhaustion. They imagine they’re releasing an authoritative declaration to the effect that truth is objective, and that in spite of some unfortunate errancies over the past years our institutions are still on truth’s side. What they’re in fact doing is coming late to the culture wars, and taking up one obvious position within them that any veteran participant or observer knows how to read and to slot as fast as an industrial-pulliculturist at a conveyer belt knows how to sex the newborn chicks moving past him.

It is especially absurd to me that such a report should have been produced by a panel 40% of whose members are analytic philosophers, given that I have spent the last thirty years hearing from members of this malnourished tribe that they do not consider their field a part of the humanities at all. When I was an undergraduate at UC Davis the philosophy faculty was actively pressing the dean’s office to be relocated to the faculty of natural sciences and mathematics. While acknowledging that they weren’t quite that either, they insisted it was a closer fit than the faculty of social sciences and humanities. I can remember in grad school, too, a very smart classmate from Mexico who was working on Quine and who had dared, when giving a presentation in a seminar, to construct an example for his argument that involved the name of the author of À la recherche du temps perdu. He dared not even to talk about Proust, but only to use his name, and that was already enough for some guy in the question period, some know-nothing Michigander in Dockers, to get some laughs by pronouncing the same name as if it rhymed with joust.

That’s how you police the boundaries of analytic philosophy: if anyone arrives in its realm bearing the sort of basic knowledge of arts, culture, and literature that comes automatically with a basic education in Latin America, say, or in Europe or in many other parts of the world but decidedly not the United States, you can be sure they’ll be taught very quickly to hide that earlier Bildung in order to conform to the expectations of the dominant Anglo philosophical culture into which, tragically, they have sought to move. Rule Number 1 of that culture is that you must abandon your interest in culture, and how it works. That is for the mere humanists, from whom we analytic philosophers are something quite distinct. And yet, it turns out analytic philosophers are prepared to present themselves as humanists when an opportunity is presented to assert institutional power over the other implicitly inferior humanities departments.

The Boghossian report, on my reading, sounds almost a perfect echo of the recent report of the Democratic National Committee on its electoral failures in 2024. Both are issued by a caste of well-ensconced elders who seem really to have no idea of what the true material causes of their respective crises are. The DNC report avoids taking responsibility for the manifest rejection of its platform by a critical number of voters, instead laying blame on the epistemological fog generated by new media technologies. The Boghossian report rehashes a few old tweets from preening wokesters and determines that the greatest threat to humanistic education is “relativism”, lumping the great Hayden White, author of that singular masterpiece of historical self-consciousness that is Metahistory (1973), together with the naïvest teenager who ever took to Tumblr to question the fixity of gender identity. It treats constructivism as if it were nothing but an irresponsible and immature affectation, thought up only in the past years, rather than, in many of its expressions, a sophisticated theoretical model that is almost certainly the correct one in at least some domains of inquiry, and that has a venerable ancestry connecting it over the centuries to such philosophical positions as skepticism, nominalism, and phenomenalism.

We have thus already seen two cases —two of countless many pouring forth daily from the Anglosphere— where even a bit of historical consciousness would have helped greatly to avoid misconstruing a contemporary problem. Before simulationism, there was gnosticism; before standpoint epistemology, there was Protagoras. These things keep coming back, likely, because they’re kinda true. In the past, it was among the aims of humanistic self-cultivation to arrive at an intellectual sensibility where one could delight in tracing out the historical threads of just such “kinda true” things. Today, by contrast, we are so estranged from the humanistic tradition, we are such remainder humanists, that we imagine the only reason to follow these threads is to determine which of them is the correct one. Truly, we’re just as simple as switching circuits.

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III.

I don’t speak publicly about my religious faith nearly as much as I might, and indeed as some others might like to see. There are at least three reasons for this. One is that when it comes to faith I am, as the Gospels instruct us to be, “as a little child”, and that means, among other things, that at least in this domain I am not especially articulate. I’m not a trained theologian or scriptural hermeneuticist or anything of the sort, and it certainly shows when I begin to hold forth in this domain. A second reason is that the majority of my readers are dyed-in-the-wool naturalists, and I love them and all the things they study and care about, all the black holes and nematodes and so on, and I really would like to keep our worldly conversations going. As one spiritual advisor told me, faith casts the attainments of the intellect in a new light, but it does not show them to have been nothing. I want to be more like Leibniz or Robert Boyle, and to follow the model of the “Christian virtuoso”, than like Nicolaus Steno, who imagined after his conversion that piety required him to stop dissecting sharks and so on. A third reason is that my faith is really the one thing in my life that I hope to preserve from algorithmic capture — I do not want my feeds to get clogged up with chatter that is Christian-themed in its focus but for all that just as worldly as the fitness advice and the empty political Sturm-und-Drang it accompanies.

Still, I find that personal reflection on the nature of faith, on the power of faith, sometimes modulates into reflection on what might best be described as the philosophy of history, which has long been a leitmotif of my public-facing lucubrations. So I would, in a preliminary way, implore my naturalist friends simply to accept that profound faith experiences are among the things that truly do happen to some people in our shared world, and to this extent you really do gotta reckon with them, to paraphrase Kant on metaphysics. Of course most of you are perfectly polite when hearing about these experiences from others, and will say things like “wow so honest”. But one always has the sense that there is less a real reckoning there than a pinched politeness, somewhat as when you show your surgery scars in a bathing suit on Instagram, and your reliable circle of same-status friends show up to say: “So beautiful!” This comparison might sound offensive, but I mean it. To offer your living body as a sacrifice (Romans 12:1) is a pretty significant operation, and what comes out the other end can easily appear deformed, by worldly standards, even if it cannot fail to come across as beautiful when observed under the lens of love.

But let me not pinch anyone, and seek to make only the sort of point, like Descartes in the Meditations, that might be compelling to you as a reasoner whether you’ve got faith or not. I have, after all, spent some time considering the possible worldly sources of the intensity of the conversion experience, and I have been convinced that these do bring us some considerable way in our effort to make sense of it.

So think, now, of just how obvious the rational-scientific and naturalistic view of the world has seemed to you since your earliest exposure to ambient authoritative knowledge. One common account of why it seems so obvious is that it is true: the world really is a system of elementary particles knocking each other around, and that, with some fine-tuning and amendments, is more or less it. The problem is that just a little bit of familiarity with the history of science reveals that things are not nearly so simple. For one thing, as already suggested, the broad transition of the present moment from physics to information science may prove at least as significant as the previous transition from vital forces and sympathies to classical mechanics. But if we find that we are still more or less convinced of our own historically unprecedented rationality, and confident in our ability to commit ourselves only to real entities and not to constructed or imaginary ones, this can only have something to do not with the state of our knowledge but with our place in a knowledge tradition that understands itself as correct by definition (a common weakness of what are more properly called faiths): to be a naturalist is in effect to affirm that whatever entities turn out to exist, they are ipso facto the stuff of nature and therefore I am committed to them. This does sound awfully tautological, but it’s not the specter of tautology that concerns me here. Rather, what I want to say is that modern scientific rationality really is a faith-like tradition, one we’ve all more or less inherited, and one that is robust enough to weather at least a certain number of updates to its core ontology.

I feel as if my own conversion, at least the worldly aspect of it, had much to do with a dawning awareness that modern scientific rationality emerged through rupture with a much older tradition, a tradition that likewise presented itself not as, or not only as, tradition, but as simple, incontrovertible, and exclusive truth. It is as if I suddenly found this older truth tradition obvious in a way that is similar to the obviousness of the tradition I was born into — similar, but much deeper. And the inherited knowledge of ambient authority was able then to come to appear as only a thin membrane stretched over a much thicker layer of finely aged intergenerational truth, truth that feels just as true as the love that made you. It’s something like finding the fine old wines behind all the bottles of swill, I suppose is all I’m saying. Shucks, my speech just ain’t up to this sublime subject yet.

Anyhow one of the really quite interesting discoveries I’ve made about Christianity since my conversion —and one that I think you will benefit from reflecting on yourself, whether you are able to do so from a faith-informed perspective or not— is that it offers a profoundly historicist account of human knowledge and its normative basis. No less than Hegel or Marx, the author of the Acts of the Apostles affirms plainly that truth itself unfolds in history. Most importantly, up until that precise moment of his writing, it had been enough for each ethnoreligious community to mind its own affairs, and for all but the Jews, who had Divine Law, to go on worshipping their idols and perceiving the nature of God but dimly through the works of the creation. From that moment on, by contrast, there was to be only one standard of truth, and it was to be affirmed in explicit, propositional form by everyone.

Thus in Acts we find Paul preaching at the Areopagus, affirming an almost proto-Spinozian, or at least proto-Augustinian and proto-Malebranchean, vision of all created beings as “living and moving and having [their] being [in God],” and even quoting a poetic hymn to Zeus, perhaps coming from Epimenides, to the effect that “we are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:28). A few chapters prior Paul has affirmed that even when past generations of gentiles were “allowed to walk in their own ways,” still, “he did not leave them without witness,” since he gave them, Paul seems to wish to say, ample natural-theological evidence of his nature in “giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling your heart with food and gladness” (Acts 14:15-17). But that low-level implicit knowledge is no longer going to cut it: “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts:17-30).

Again, whether you recognize that command as binding on you or not, you must agree that this all marks a significant moment in the history of planetary consciousness, as a shift, for better or worse, from a communitarian to a universalist standard of truth. This standard will be carried over, again for better or worse, across the next most significant moment in the history of planetary consciousness, with the arrival of scientific modernity and the emergence of the secular public sphere.

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IV.

This more recent transition did not entirely destroy Christianity, though it did significantly reduce the ability of the church to rely on state power for its own preservation. Other than its almost comically tiny rump state in the heart of Rome, Catholicism today is mostly sustained by grass-roots initiatives: not by armed conquest or state persecution of religious minorities, but by bake-sales and crab-feeds, does the faith live on. The transition also, famously, created a significant rupture, arguably more significant than the East-West Schism of the 11th century or any prior to that, and one that, I believe, is crucial for any effort to make out the outlines of our own near-future — a near-future that will be largely shaped by emerging information technologies.

A remarkable recent survey showed that very few young Americans who are technically some variety of Protestant are keen to use that description of themselves; a surprising number of them do not even know what it means. One might conjecture that the historical life of Protestantism has been coextensive with the historical life of the book, as primary unit of circulation of information from the late 15th century to the early 21st. The signature anchor of Christian faith for millions of Protestant Christians, including all my own ancestors on both sides, was the physical copy of the Bible, in the relevant national language, by the bedside. And now, as books become ever less salient to social life in general, it is not so surprising to find that a religious orientation historically grounded in individual encounter with God sola scriptura (that’s ablative) is now mutating, perhaps speciating, into something new.

Whether or not there will be a post-Protestant, or post-post-Protestant Christianity that is “dematerialized” by the technologies of our day, in the same way our homework assignments and medical forms have been dematerialized, remains to be seen. But it does not seem far-fetched to expect that the current information revolution will create new ruptures in the history of the church at least as great as the one that accompanied, with just a bit of delay, the print revolution at the beginning of the modern period. And just as in that previous rupture the branching sect was the one that more vigorously centered the most significant object of the most recent information revolution —the book—, so too in the present it is likely that at least some new post-post-Protestant sects will distinguish themselves through the symbolic and practical centering of newer information technologies, especially AI.

Of course, this historical echo is not precise. For one thing, there already were books in antiquity — the Bible itself is full of book talk! But those first touched by Christian faith were not touched in book form, as it would much later make sense in the world of Martin Luther to expect a good number of Christians to be. And approaching the matter from the other direction one might also point out that the Bible is full of computations, as Isaac Newton is decidedly not celebrated today for having noted, and to that extent a future “computational Christianity”, like the past centuries of bibliocentric Christianity, might be thought of not so much as introducing something altogether new into the faith, as rather circling back to one of its earlier and long-neglected potentials.

Anyhow a broad split might be expected in which the post-post-Protestants emerge more clearly defined into the cultural landscape, as the eager adopters of the newest technological mediators of social reality, and the Catholics hang back a bit and sort of say: “Hmm, nah, we’re mostly gonna sit this one out too, and keep doing communion, both human and holy, in the oldest way we know.”

At least that’s the emerging landscape I thought I might soon see, upon reading Magnifica humanitas. And as for the suggestion that Claude had an artificial hand in producing that text —a suggestion I have both read on Substack, and, separately and privately, heard from someone very close to the source—, I say, fine if true. Please, magnificent self-contradicting humans, give the Pope a break. He’s got an awful lot on his plate, and his heart is in the right place and honestly Claude is just so fast…

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1.

One of the loveliest documented moments of the 1966 Newport Folk Festival features Bukka White and Howlin’ Wolf in a rare improvised performance. The beauty of it might be thought, on an initial viewing, to be compromised by the presence of a white fellow on the stage, one who will no doubt read for some as “dorky”, gesticulating exuberantly, strumming some indeterminate instrument but adding little. One might assume this man had been among the organizers of the event, perhaps some Harvard ethnomusicologist or the like. The angle and distance and quality of the recording reveal little of his class habitus, or of the quality of his dental care. All we can really make out is his “race”, and this is enough to mark him, in our contemporary world’s taxonomy of musical traditions, as quite out of place. Even I, who am arguably quite such a “white ou” myself, found his display somewhat unseemly at first, like the blond dreadlocks of the self-identified Rastafarian skater of your worst high-school memories, like the hackey-sackers in Sex Wax shirts I had to chase from the parking lot when, in the summer of 1989, I found myself briefly employed as security guard at an N.W.A. concert.

But look closer, and some further salient features will come into view. His instrument is an autoharp, for one thing, and his teeth are something awful. He is Kilby Snow (1905-1980), Appalachian folk musician, autoharp prodigy, and in every conceivable respect “the real deal”. In a remarkable 1970 interview and performance alongside Mike Seeger, Snow gives a masterful demonstration of the unexpected range of his chosen instrument, and placidly admits that his own autoharp, embossed with his name alongside an American eagle motif, had been purchased from Montgomery Ward and had served him just fine throughout his long career. He describes his initial encounters with the autoharp exactly in the same terms as Sam Chatmon elsewhere describes his, in discussion with Alan Lomax, with the guitar: both begin around the age of four, when they are too small yet to lift their new musical prostheses and so approach them as stationary, the way an adult approaches a piano.

The more we hear Snow, both playing and speaking, the better we understand the nature of his exuberance in playing alongside these two towering blues musicians. He is experiencing the primary human emotion of joy, because he is in his element, doing his thing, as an American musician.

Sometimes I worry that I am too hung up on this point, or that my exaltation of an ideal of racial harmony as exemplified through shared musical experience is in the end its own sort of dorky and sentimental exuberance. And I have over the past few years often struggled to understand what has brought me so far down this briar path of American folkways — I, who earlier in life heard, or convinced myself I heard, so much to think about in dodecaphony and serialism and music for airports and mallsoft and whatever the hell else just as long as it doesn’t look back to the past with simpering sentiment.

I have been going down this path at the same time as I’ve been immersing myself in Siberian oral epic tradition, and reading widely about this tradition’s parallels in the Balkans, in West Africa, and indeed Ancient Greece. On a typical day, you might well find me translating Sakha oral epic with Carter Family rarities playing in the background, Mother Maybelle switching between guitar and autoharp, the latter perhaps also of Montgomery Ward. And over time it has come to seem to me that this pairing, which some might judge prima facie as incongruous, indeed more incongruous than the sight of a white fellow on stage with Bukka White and Howlin’ Wolf, is in fact anything but. When I am reading Olonkho and listening to the Carter Family, I am typically experiencing the primary human emotion of joy, because I am in my element, doing my thing, as a lover of oral literature.

“Oral literature” is a contested designation in the scholarship,1 but I suspect that is mostly because scholars are professionally obligated to find things to contest. Literature, I think, in truth, following out an insight that my great hero G. W. Leibniz had already in 1704,2 has always been oral by default, while it is only in a few aberrant strains of it that we find so much prestige attached to its secondary textual traces.

The oral literature of America in particular begins with the transplantation of Anglo-Celtic and West African varietals into new soil, followed by some centuries of cross-fertility, and a succession of what Darwin called “sports”, when the growth of some living thing takes an unexpected new turn for reasons having to do with nothing we can make out other than its own internal idiosyncrasy. America, I am confident saying, has been unusually productive of musical sports.

The geographical region most conducive to their production, significantly, is nearly perfectly coextensive with the boundaries of there former Confederate States, with hill regions and riverine flood plains the most productive of all. The reigning political order in this region sought to keep a tidy garden of pure strains, and to pitch out the weeds that showed any hints of hybridism. But nature always comes roaring back, as the aphorist said, and it is a grave mistake to suppose that the political history of America is its only history. You can hear a different history in its music. I have come to believe that this other history is a more promising one for thinking about American collective identity and its possible futures.

I’ve also come to believe that this history has been actively suppressed over the past half-century. The common tradition of American musical culture was, more precisely, systematically broken down and replaced by the new contextless commercial culture that swept in along with a whole suite of other changes in the period of the Nixon Shock often cited as the beginning of the neoliberal order.

I am old enough to have caught the faint traces of the older order, in such material as thrift-shop vinyl, but also through its still-living vehicles — elderly rural relatives who carried in them the songs that were transmitted to them by their parents and grandparents. It is this intergenerational transmission that is so to speak the lifeblood of the older order. I stood by as it died out. I could hear the elders, but by the time I came into the world the supreme value placed on cultivating individual taste made it impossible for me properly to learn from them.

When I picked up a Burl Ives or Carl Sandburg record from Goodwill (which I bought mostly in the hope of extracting “samples” from them, to be used ironically on public-access radio or in the then-thriving tape-exchange networks), it was one and the same technology that both enabled me to hear these good conservationist bards at all and that ensured the eventual effacement from historical memory of what they were trying to conserve. Recording technology, to be sure, made wonderful things possible. The recursive abstraction of jazz with each new wave of artists studying the work of the last, breaking it down and penetrating deeper into its essence (or, if you don’t like that kind of Thomistic talk, then, if you prefer, deconstructing it), was able to occur at all only because these artists could study their predecessors in a way no musicians before the 20th century could. New technology propelled at least one recording genre from libertine entertainment in the Depression era into maximally cerebral high art, working out the full potentials of modal composition only hinted at by Debussy and others in let us say the “problematizing” phase of high European tradition, in the earliest post-war years.

But what was the powerful motor of a genre defined by progressivity and abstraction, with hard bop evolving by the end of the 1950s into something like the aural counterpart to abstract expressionism, was detrimental to those genres that, as distinct from post-war jazz, could not fully get on board with modernity. There were efforts, of course. New Deal initiatives channeled public money, in part under pressure of example from similar initiatives in the socialist bloc, into the documentation, recording, and broadcasting of “the people’s” voices. These same voices would be rediscovered, showcased, and celebrated again with the folk revival of the 1960s, but by now the primary meaning of “popular”, which for most of its history was really just the adjectival form of “the people”, will have been replaced by a different and almost opposite sense, for which the corresponding noun is not “people” but “pop”. This is the sense that now makes it seem natural to describe some corporate K-Pop entity, for example, as “popular”, even if it has been entirely confected by top-down commercial interests with no concern at all for vernacular tradition.

Let us disambiguate these senses, in what follows, by using “popular†” for the older sense, with the cross superscript commonly added to the names of the deceased, and “popular*”, with the asterisk of illegitimacy.

2.

I have already identified one feature of popular† musical tradition: that its lifeblood is in the intergenerational transmission of songs and other motifs. Another is that popular† tradition, unlike popular* tradition, is no less concerned with death and loss than it is with sex and desire.

Consider in this connection these two exemplary renditions of the 1907 hymn, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”, the one by the Carter Family (1935),3 the other by the Staple Singers (1960). You must listen to both of these before we continue; doing so is part of the reading.

The song, sung in the first person, tells the story of a son or daughter accompanying a mother’s coffin to the graveyard, and it is sung with just as much sensuality —or whatever the thanatic equivalent is of what we call sensuality in the realm of the erotic— as Barry White ever conjured in his many celebrations of “making love”. There are noteworthy differences between the two versions. The Carters sing it straighter, and draw its greatest beauty out of Maybelle and Sara’s harmonies. The Staples weave around in the rhythm, play with time — perhaps one of the most exquisite micro-moments in the history of recorded music is Pops Staples’ second intonation of the word undertaker at around 1’05’’. This difference is often cited as the specific differentium of Black and white musical traditions in America. It is said that you would have noticed it if, on one and the same Sunday circa 1870, you heard the performance of “Amazing Grace” at an AME church in the rural South, followed by a performance of the same song at a white Baptist congregation later the same day. This is all true enough, but too much emphasis on such stylistic differences can obscure the historical significance of the prior existence of a shared treasury of American songlines that serves as the basis for all such variations in style.

I have already identified two signatures of vernacular musical tradition that are likely universal: first, that it is transmitted orally across the generations, and second, that it concerns itself with death as much as with sex, which is to say that it considers the full frame of human experience, rather than just the experiences from which it is easiest to extract a profit. In American vernacular tradition, in turn, we can identify a third feature: that it is fundamentally Christian, or at least it is indexed to Christianity in a sustained alternation between sin and redemption. When it is not Christian, it knows it is not. Many of the great early rock stars —Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, notably—, alternated between phases of lascivious excess and penitent regret. And the inescapability of the church, for them, was always the hidden force that made their engagement with the secular themes of carnal love and desire so compelling. Their art is the expression of what St. Thomas would call “disordered desire”. But having never forgotten altogether about God, even if their backs are currently turned on him, they are able to express an abiding awareness that the depths of desire are infinite.

Early Staples songs are overwhelmingly preoccupied with a cluster of theological leitmotifs common in Black evangelical Christianity — the promise in Revelation, for example, at least on one interpretation, that in the afterlife we will each be fitted with a crown (Revelation 2:10). Most often the thematic focus of the lyrics is on extreme end-of-life scenarios, just before transit to a Heaven that is consistently represented as a real place, at the moment of both one’s greatest suffering and one’s sharpest experience of the Christian virtue of hope. The effect is something analogous to the contrast of black and bright gold in Byzantine icon painting.

Pops’ repetitive, minimalist phrasing and innovative tremolo effects on his Fender Telecaster are the very essence of rock-and-roll: dark, nasty, disconsoling. But unlike the Satanic turn in that tradition beginning in the mid-1960s, which Hendrix declared sonically with the tritone, and then the Stones and Black Sabbath and many more to come made explicit in lyrical content and marketing strategy, Pops gets nasty only to drive home exactly what it is our salvation, about which daughter Mavis is simultaneously singing, is salvation from. Just try to listen to “Low Is the Way” (1957) —again, doing so is non-optional—, and then to describe it without recourse to such familiar evaluative terms as “hardcore” or “bad-ass” (the latter now rather compromised by neoliberal girl-boss feminism).

Listening to the Staples’ recordings from the 1950s drives home a crucially important historical fact: that some of the earliest rock music was Christian rock. And this was nothing like the rear-guard, derivative Christian rock that we know from the period following the suppression of vernacular tradition —Petra, say, or Stryper—, which could never quite resolve itself into a coherent aesthetic or moral stance, but only used some laughable semblance of coolness instrumentally to make palatable what it implicitly acknowledged to be the fundamentally uncool message of Christian faith.

You will find Christian hymns interspersed with secular numbers throughout mid-20th-century showcases of white American musical talent, such as this 1952 episode of the Kate Smith Evening Hour featuring Hank Williams (in this case watching is optional, but strongly encouraged — among other things you will see the most passionate expression of secular love, real or feigned, in the eyes of young Anita Carter throughout her duet with Hank beginning around 5’00’’). And you will likewise find hymns in mid-century showcases of Black American musical talent, as at the end of this remarkable episode of The !!! Beat from 1966, a Dallas-based show I have previously praised, and could not possibly praise enough — it is pure American popular† genius at its greatest.

By contrast, you will not be hearing any hymns on Soul Train a decade later, or on Solid Gold a decade after that. And you definitely won’t be hearing any on America’s Got Talent, that crass display of empty mataiotechnics (as Quintilian described the skills of a traveling entertainer who delighted crowds by throwing a chick pea through the eye of a needle from a great distance4), which only manages to hold its audience’s attention by holding the camera less on the performers than on the empty-headed judges’ endless performance of dumbstruck jaw-drops. Christian themes will survive well after the suppression of vernacularity in country venues, but now only as identitarian reaction rather than as the spontaneous expression of a popular† life-world.

And here we see the true nature of the victory of the proto-algorithmic recording industry in the neoliberal era: that it succeeded in resegregating by market forces what the Civil Rights era had desegregated by political activism and progressive legislation, and thus in reentrenching, at the level of culture, a perception of stark natural differences between different groups of Americans that earlier had to be maintained by state power. This reentrenchment worked in part through the ideology of what we might call chronological chauvinism: the peculiar idea that people in the past, simply because they were living in the past, could only have been more closed in their hearts than we are today. We point to the fundamentally unjust legal and political regime under which they lived and died, and imagine that we are pointing at them individually. But they could just as easily, if we were to revive them and to show them a glimpse of the future, point to our musical regime and declare: vos quoque!

3.

Because commercial forces can’t stand for anything to remain in existence that is not as stupid as they are, one common technique for suppressing expressions of artistic integrity is to ruin them for all time by adapting them to the ends of advertising. I still can’t hear “Good Vibrations” (1966), that ingenious pocket symphony, without imagining that someone is trying to sell me Sunkist. And if you have only heard one Staple Singers song in your life, you probably only know them as the provisioners of a jingle for late-1990s television ads hawking Chevy fucking Malibus.

“I’ll Take You There” was a 1972 Stax Records hit, and as such it lies almost at the historical end of the arc of the Staple Singers that I would like to trace and to interpret here. Three years later, the true historical end, we have “Let’s Do It Again”, composed, significantly, by Curtis Mayfield. This was the last hit for the Staples, and made it to the top of the Hot Soul Singles charts for at least a few weeks.

There is an illuminating performance of this song from 1976 that seems to me to tell the full story of the late 20th century. Grey-sideburned Pops and denim-clad Mavis appear naturally adaptable, and more or less amenable to any new exercise in musical expression, or at least any that is rated somewhere lower than PG-13. But keep an eye out for the lesser Staples! Just look at poor Yvonne, all endimanchée in her yellow church dress. She is plainly only up there out of family solidarity, and on her own never would have survived the coerced secular turn that the new economic-cultural order had brought with it. Yvonne might just be my favorite Staple.

“Let’s Do It Again” is a fine-enough gospel-inflected soul song. But it’s not hardcore like “Low Is the Way” had been. I like my music hardcore. That’s why I think Stryper are fucking dorks, and why I think early Staples are a pure expression of American popular† genius.

If we continue to follow the arc of the Staples’ career backwards in time, we next arrive at “Respect Yourself” of 1971, likewise reduced to slightly irksome earworm as a result of its several commercial adaptations. The song itself is very much of its Sesame Street moment, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of all people, and of Black children in particular. Kind of corny, kind of touching, and resolutely secular in content (other than a modest call from Pops towards the beginning for toleration, on the part of non-believers, of the efforts of door-to-door evangelizers), “Respect Yourself” might still be plausibly interpreted as the fulfillment of at least part of the Christian social mission as the Staples understand it.

This hit follows a decade or so of significant involvement in the Civil Rights movement, the peak of which is surely the Staples’ 1965 album, Freedom Highway, named for the Selma-to-Montgomery voting-rights march of that same year. To map the distance in spirit between this overtly political intervention and the feel-good individualism of “Respect Yourself” just six years later is in some sense to witness a success story — by the end of the 1960s Civil Rights had passed into law, and after that much of the remaining work to be done focused on bringing about the inner transformations that might more fully enable members of previously excluded groups fully to realize the possibilities of their newfound formal equality. But this decadal shift is also the one that saw so many former Maoists and Weathermen drifting into crystal-gazing and Primal Scream therapy, and to some extent we can see the Staples’ transition as their own inflection of this same general reorientation towards the atomic individual as the locus of change. MLK is by now, notably, dead, and his posthumous legacy, too, is beginning a parallel process of de-Christianization, as a condition of his inclusion in the national Pantheon.

We thus have, if we turn this backwards journey back around and respect the arrow of time like we’re supposed to, four broad metamorphic stages: the raw gospel of the late 1950s, followed by a vision of Civil Rights still rooted in the ideals of faith-based community, followed by a largely secularized affirmation of individual dignity and self-worth, followed by full participation, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and reservation, in the post-1971 system of secular commercial entertainment. (We could add later phases as well for the individual Staples, not least the evolution of Mavis into her current role, at the age of 86, as generous-hearted and ever-adaptable grande dame of American music, beaming with Christian virtue so plain and evident that it has no need to explain itself).

It was in large part the religious impulse that quickened the Civil Rights movement into motion. It was in turn a great tragedy that the movement’s formal success in part made possible the conditions for a new cultural-economic order that was able, so to speak, to let its guard down. There is a natural motion across these four phases of the Staples’ career, where each phase can be seen to contain the seeds of the one that follows it, even if the motion from phase 1 to phase 4 brings us effectively from one aesthetic-moral universe to its opposite.

The genius anyhow of the Staples, the work that fully justifies their place in the American musical Pantheon, that by his own recollection was powerful enough to wake Bob Dylan up to the full mystery of life, are the recordings made between 1956 and 1959 and released in the latter year on the album Uncloudy Day. Almost all of the songs here are about death, and apocalypse, and retribution, and redemption. Several of them are the common property of American popular† tradition, shared generously and without jealousy across racial lines. The title song itself, “Uncloudy Day”, recorded in 1956, is to my mind the Staples’ most sublime achievement, showcasing Pops’ remarkable restraint on the guitar, Mavis’s voice at its most transcendent, telling of the promise of everlasting life in a city that is veritably made of gold. Here it is (listening, this time, is emphatically non-optional):

4.

None of this is to say of course that the United States is or ought to be Christian by definition, or that one must be Christian to participate fully in its collective identity. The founding documents are broadly of an Enlightenment deist stamp, and tens of millions of that country’s citizens are of other faiths. The modern liberal guarantee of a neutral public sphere must be preserved if anything at all is to be preserved. But this does not mean that the role of Christian communities in shaping American cultural life in particular needs to be suppressed or forgotten, nor that it has not been a grave political mistake to equate such communitarian belonging with identitarian reaction, and in consequence to seek to push these communities to the margins of political life. If you don’t want to understand or to honor the communitarian pride that a Merle Haggard finds in being an Okie from Muskogee (1969), then sooner or later you end up with the jingoistic national pride, and the politics of mass ressentiment behind it, that a Lee Greenwood finds in being what he calls “an American” (1984).

Things were not always this way. Throughout the mid-20th century, notably, the greatest efforts to chronicle, to document, and to celebrate American popular† traditions were driven by New Dealers, labor activists, socialist-leaning ethnomusicologists, and Bohemians of various stripes. There is much to learn from their work, and the present moment is abundant with lessons as to what happens when we decline to do so. The most important lesson, I think, is this: that one must either honor vernacular tradition and intergenerational continuity, or leave it to those who would seek to mandate that honor by state coercion to do so.

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In current usage, “AI ethics” typically refers to one or the other of two very different rhetorical-argumentative projects.

The one concerns itself with ethical problems arising from human reliance on AI — most paradigmatically, and narrowly, the sort of utilitarian calculation that in principle is arrived at through variations on the trolley problem. Confronted with the dilemma of either plowing down a toddler or running a truckload of unusually introspective gorillas off a cliff, which way should the Waymo be made to swerve? And so on. This is ultimately, of course, a laundering scheme, and one that only makes sense in this interim period of waning but still measurable academic authority, whereby a few people with Ph.D.s are convinced to sign off on what the tech companies were obviously, in endless pursuit of profit, going to do anyway.

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1.

It is all very easy to accept that dog and chien are but arbitrary signs, sharing not at all in the essence of the dogs themselves. Then again the fact that dog has come to denote dogs twice along …

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Until 1975 or so, every instance of drumming in the history of Homo sapiens, and likely of other Homo species too, involved the striking, with some degree of force, with or without a mallet or stick, of an external object’s surface. No more. Unless clicking counts as “striking”, for the past half-century we have had a choice when it comes to sourcing our drumbeats. We can have the human kind, or we can have the machine kind. And yet either way we still have music — sort of. Not really. Maybe. I’ll come back to this soon enough.

What I’m most concerned with today is not just music, but language in the wake of the arrival of our new language machines, and more generally with everything that, we have reason to feel in the present era, is slipping away from us. It may be, I want to say, that the externalization of music-making amounts to an even greater rupture with our human essence than does the externalization of language-making that follows it by a few decades. After all, music is among the only constituents of our essence that lies even deeper, both chronologically and ontologically, than speech.

On one way of seeing things, our innate sense of rhythm, likely a cognitive and sensorimotor response to the experience of our own heartbeat, furnishes us with a far deeper connection to the world than language. It synchronizes us with the alternation of day and night, of the tides, of the seasons. It eternally confirms our position in a world conceived as an order. Language by contrast, you might suspect, is but a compensation. The moment we stop singing and dancing, we again experience ourselves as cut off from that order, and we attempt to bridge the reemergent gap by use of arbitrary and conventional signs. We wouldn’t have to do that at all, if our circumstances permitted us to just keep singing and dancing all the time.

There are indeed significant disanalogies between the drum-machine and the LLM that can make it seem as if the externalization of language has been the more important of the two recent ruptures. For one thing, drum-machines do not typically communicate with one another, or pose cybersecurity threats, and the number of jobs they have threatened or eliminated has been considerably smaller. But sometimes it helps to break our problems down into subproblems, and it seems to me that the subproblem of how to maintain our distinct human practices across the ruptures of technological revolutions —maintaining, that is, the things we have more or less always done in all human cultures, and that are widely seen as constitutive of human social existence as such—, might be significantly illuminated by comparison of our most recent AI revolution to the revolution in musical recording, broadcast, and production that precedes it.

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The present essay continues to develop the line of reflection developed previously in my essay, “A Third Way for the Humanities”. It is recommended that you read that piece first.

1.

A few years ago I was the external member on a hiring committee charged with considering one Nathan Cofnas for a job. Cofnas, you might know, is a “race-realist” working on IQ differences across the different “races ou espèces”, as François Bernier put the matter in 1686, getting this whole race science thing off to a pretty inauspicious start. Cofnas is currently a visiting scholar in the Department of Philosophy and [sic] Moral Sciences at Ghent University in Belgium. Cofnas’s funding appears to be drawn from a grant of the European Research Commission obtained prior to his arrival there by Ghent colleague Bouke de Vries. I hope those who have protested against Cofnas’s hiring, and even sought to have the decision reversed, will back off, so that he might be permitted to fail all on his own in pursuit of his meritless research program.

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In March, 1697, Peter the Great set out from Moscow, along with a select group of councilors, for his so-called “Grand Embassy”, a two-year tour of Western Europe. The voyage was shrouded in secrecy and disguise, and was aimed at the strategic collection of information concerning primarily Dutch and German advances in science and technology. Through the usual gossip networks, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz would soon learn every detail of the Tsar’s early visit to the Königsberg court of the Elector of Prussia, Friedrich I, and of the time these two more-or-less Enlightened sovereigns spent together at Friedrich’s maison de plaisance or country home.

The philosopher remarks in a letter that during the visit the Tsar had been “very gay, and spoke familiarly with everyone”, and that he “approved of the gentleness [douceur] with which people conduct themselves in these [German] lands, and disapproves the cruelties of his own.”1 When the Tsar took a walk with the elector, we learn, one of the servants made a gross error of some unspecified sort in tending to this distinguished visitor. The Tsar tells the servant that if he had been in Muscovy he would have been subjected to the whip, but, since they are in a “gentle” country, he will let it pass.

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You have already been introduced to this essay’s “thesis statement”. But before coming back around to its narrow defense, we will have to do some significant ground-clearing.

I have never understood, …

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1. Universal Brainrot

We should begin with news of a disconcerting development here at our editorial offices in Quimper. It seems our interns, Augustus and Eglantine, have seized control of The Hinternet’s social media. We are completely locked out of our own Instagram account, which Gus and Eggy now seem intent on transforming into a veritable cataract of grade-A bona-fide Gen Z brainrot.

A dissenting minority on our editorial staff, including JSR himself, has argued that this twist might not turn out entirely to our detriment. Brainrot, they maintain, is really the only significant aesthetic sensibility that matters in 2026, the only that is not moribund, but is in fact likely to continue to evolve, and, within a few years, some of us are now predicting, to ramify into high and low branches, to insinuate itself into museums and fashion and the narrative arts and whatever is left of academia, to serve as the new stone on which our lapidary critics will whet their faculties of judgment. Could this be possible? Friends, as of 2026 anything is possible — anything, that is, except returning to the status quo that prevailed before the massive cultural, technological, and geopolitical reset currently underway.

And so we are coming around, at least in one of the branches of our operation, to seeing the strategic appeal of placing our bet on the youngest of the currently adult generations — whose creative fecundity, significantly aided by image- and text-generating machines, is already showing us, or at least those of us who know how to see, the rough outlines of our future. And it looks something like this:

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The closest Trumpian equivalent to Bubba’s well-timed display of New Jack Swing fluency is surely his cameo appearance in Azerbaijani post-Soviet gala-pop artist and gangster-industrialist scion Emin Agalarov’s “In Another Life (feat. Donald Trump and Miss Universe ‘13)” (2013). We can deplore the excesses of the Russiagate accusations that dominated our news headlines for so much of the later part of that same decade. It remains however the case that what we are seeing in this video is profoundly, essentially un-American, utterly incompatible with our Whitmanian spirit. You could know already, from the support that the future president lent to this gross display of Eurasianist pop kitsch, that something was deeply rotten in our Republic. Bad taste, in sufficiently concentrated dosage, can be as great a threat to our American way of life as any subversive ideology…

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Here at The Hinternet we have copped, openly and repeatedly, to passing off AI-generated writing as human-generated. But we always rush to add that a far ofter-used trick in our bag is the reverse: to pass off human writing as if it were coming from a machine. Both approaches have noteworthy effects, and while the latter is more time-consuming, it is also, for now, one that usually gets results more in line with our creative vision. Still, we insist, the only thing that matters to us is the result: is this or is this not a text that will challenge, puzzle, delight, or inspire its reader, quite independently of any consideration of its ontogeny?

In what follows I will explain why I believe that far from carrying stigma, in the very near-future machine-aided or hybrid writing will be the new norm, and will bring in its train new standards of appraisal and criticism with just as much integrity as any that have been applied in any other domain of human excellence over the past many thousand years.

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