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Prelude

I spend a great deal of time thinking about “faith, hope, and love” — what they share with one another, and what distinguishes each. I don’t think I’ll ever be smart enough to render the mystery of faith into words. By contrast I do have a book project that, as I envision it, will be divided into three parts, dealing successively with φιλία, ἔρως, and ἀγάπη, and making at least some original claims as to the common thread uniting these three aspects or inflections of love.

But that I have this project at all, that I joyously go about my work each day on the presumption of a future that includes books about love, or indeed books about anything, already implicates the third and most neglected member of our Pauline triad — hope. Let us pay attention now to this modest theological virtue, lest some reformist constituency get the idea, in view of its recent poor metrics, of phasing it out altogether.

But let us first set the scene with some preliminary reflections.

I.

In our most recent session I told my psychiatrist about The Oort Cloud Review. A proper course of psychotherapy, Freudian or otherwise, would surely have got around to this sort of thing already. But my contact with the mental-health profession is more limited: I check in once every two or three months to determine whether the current course I’m on, unmedicated and basically functional, is the best one. So I’ve got 50 minutes to summarize “how things are going” in the most general sense, an exercise that usually constrains me to talk about low-level matters, day-to-day operations, rather than about longer-term projects or ideas pertaining to purpose, to meaning in life, or to modes of existence. And yet it came to seem relevant to me, in aiming to give an accurate picture of “how things are going”, to get across that what I had experienced for some time as mental illness had either evolved into, or revealed its true nature as, a mostly salutary creative or artistic impulse.

It is a cliché when formulated so bluntly: I thought I was insane, but it turns out I’m an artist; I thought I was hearing voices, but those were in fact amicable greetings from the characters I was unconsciously in the course of inventing. The cliché becomes simply unseemly, for some, when it is learned that the “I” in question is a “middle-aged white man”1 with the closest thing one can have to job security in this crazy moment in history. But fear of embracing cliché, I see now, can itself significantly delay a person’s ability to lead their true life, and in this way can cause, as in my case, significant suffering. Most of us are prepared to recognize and applaud even the most gravely delayed cases of coming-out, when these fall under the familiar heading of sexual orientation or gender identity. But the truth is gender and sexuality are only the tip of the iceberg, and there are as many different ways to spend one’s life in the closet as there are unfulfilled lives. Almost everybody alive, in truth, is in some closet or other.

So I mentioned that I had, with significant collaboration, brought into the world a work of experimental science-fiction, and left it at that. All along, since well before I was prepared to accept as much, my psychiatrist had been encouraging me to consider that perhaps eccentricity is not the same as mental illness, that it’s perfectly okay to be an outlier with respect to all sorts of social norms and expectations; that it’s no big deal if you talk to yourself as you walk down the street and the main thing is that your conversations with yourself should be interesting (indeed they are); that the source of suffering is not simply the inability to conform to this world but rather that inability coupled with a sense of obligation or a desire to conform.

Because our interactions are so limited, what I actually do with my time, beyond being a “philosopher” and a “writer”, hardly comes up. One does not, as at least I see things, go to a psychiatrist with the expectation of showcasing one’s CV; though not everybody seems to agree. A while back I read something from a North American philosopher, who divulged online that he often talks to his therapist about how deeply he regrets the wide, dark shadow Brian Leiter casts over “the profession” with his punchy blogging; and I thought: brother, Brian Leiter, whom I myself really only read for the “Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll” feature, is among the very last entities in the universe, after Mungo Jerry and Humble Pie themselves, that I might expect to come up in my consultations with mental-health professionals. That is just not at all how I understand their remit.

But recently it did come to seem to me that if not my academic work, then at least some of my more imaginative extramural projects from over the past few years, might not be entirely beyond the bounds of what a psychiatrist might wish to know about me. And so I let slip that I had moved mountains these past years —at least relative to the scale of action by which I had previously measured what is possible in my life— to bring the work in question into being. I was surprised when she in turn asked what the title of the work is, and even more surprised when, upon my answering “The Oort Cloud Review”, she Googled it right there on the spot, read for a moment, and then asked: “But who is Hélène Le Goff?” And I said, “Oh, that’s me. I mean, that’s one of my noms de plume” … and I could see, for just a split second, that she was inwardly reconsidering the earlier confidence she had brought to her distinction between eccentricity and insanity.

“It’s a fine line,” I said, as if responding directly to the thought I knew had overtaken her.

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II.

The truth is I have many other causes to worry about my sanity, besides my imaginary friends and my artistic conceits, that I have so far failed to address with my psychiatrist. I worry, for example, about how absolutely unhinged my “political” convictions, if you can even call them that, have become in recent years.

I have immense trouble positioning myself politically in any ordinary way. Long-time readers will know that much of my early Hinternet writing came out in a dissident key — dissident, at least, relative to the prevailing commitments of my progressive peers circa 2020. I saw the movement they were spearheading, and still see it, as annoyingly coercive at best, and incipiently authoritarian at worst. It took extreme resolve in those years simply to speak in public not only in a way that refused to affirm the content of their commitments, but even in a way that refused to ape their style, their manner and affect. One was practically required to speak in slogans. This horrified me, and I made what at least felt at the time like the risky decision of simply continuing to speak in my own voice. For a while this made me, in terms of social legibility, “anti-woke”, and for a while I had a good number of self-styled anti-wokesters take an interest in my writing, only inevitably to be disappointed upon figuring out that I wasn’t speaking in their voice either.

A significant faction within that camp defends the view that our world, as it is, is basically alright, and they therefore counsel the perpetually dissatisfied youths to “be normal”, to just pipe down a bit, to focus on common things like work and family and the small pleasures of ordinary life. I by contrast think this world is completely insane, and I think one can only be normal in it by allowing oneself to become a vessel of its insanity. And for evidence I cite many of the same evils that have likewise preoccupied the progressive left. I in fact would like to see prisons abolished, and the police, and militaries, and the entire Westphalian order of sovereign nation-states. These past years I have sometimes had crises so intense, upon recalling the mere existence of such things, as practically to collapse on the spot. I can’t believe it, I say to myself. I can’t believe it is still such raw force as these institutions represent, and not the love to which we are all called, that holds our world together. A few years ago I reviewed a biography of Derek Parfit, and dealt him some mild mockery for having once broken out in tears at high table upon being reminded of the casualty figures for World War I. But the truth is by then I, mostly unknown to myself, was behaving in much the same way.

Feasibility is the most neglected modal, as Isaac Levi said, and if I announce that the existence of prisons is morally unacceptable to me, this does not imply that I have a strategy for their immediate closure. But opinion polls and social-media algorithms never permit a person to supplement their commitments with any modal shading at all. It’s always, “Are you pro-choice or pro-life?” or, if there’s any more than that, it’s the pollsters imagining they have accommodated real-world complexity by adding further options such as “Undecided” or “No opinion”. And so the only way to affirm any particular commitment, or any cluster of commitments constituting what one takes to be a vision of a just world, is to enter into the futile agon of oppostions, to take up P or not-P in the eternal standoff of the P Wars. The Onion captured this predicament perfectly when it reported, in its mock coverage of the 1973 Supreme Court decision making abortion legal across the United States: “Bumper-Sticker Industry Applauds Roe v. Wade Decision”.

This predicament comes across most tragically in the case of environmental conservation. It is, I maintain, among the most astounding facts about this planet that it includes, for now, whales among its inhabitants. And yet the only pathway for many people, not all of whom will have all the power of human language at their disposal, to affirm the wonder of this in public is to allow themselves to be channeled into a constituency labelled and trivialized and bounded over the past several decades as the “Save the Whales” crowd. I suppose, if push comes to shove, that I must acknowledge that I am part of the “Save the Whales” crowd myself. But I am convinced that what it will take to “save the whales” is entirely to reshape humanity’s consciousness of its place in our multispecies planetary ecumene in a way that is simply not compatible with treating “Save the Whales” as one “political” commitment one might take up, according to taste and in view of preexisting scheduling commitments, alongside others.

This trivializing and dichotomizing structure into which all commitments must be entered preexists the internet. When I was in high school in the 1980s one was encouraged to join clubs. Among the clubs there was one for marine wildlife conservation, and another for nuclear arms control. One was applauded by the adults for such engagements, and assured that these activities would stand us in good stead with the college admissions officers, which in turn would set us along the road to a normal adult life such as their own. The available structure for expression of commitments, in other words, was the very same one that systematically rendered these commitments futile.

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III.

Paradoxically, and beautifully, I have found that it was only when I truly began to feel the full horror of this world that I stopped living my life crippled by fear. Fear thrives in the soul of a person overly attached to perfect outcomes, to cinematic happy-endings like the ones vainly awaited by Annie in Sartre’s Nausea (1938). When you accept that life is a tragedy, when you really know in your bones that the worst outcomes are in fact likely, and not the betrayal of some promise the world had made to keep you safe and fortunate, then even the worst outcomes can come to seem, if not like no big deal, then at least somehow irrelevant to the question of how I should be feeling today.

Fear used to be diffuse and obscure to me. Now it is in fact very easy for me to name and enumerate my fears, and they turn out to be the familiar, indeed the classical ones. I am afraid of war, disease, and poverty. The latter two are fates I might encounter individually while others go on thriving; or that I might, as in conditions of pandemic or economic collapse, experience with others. Only war is something we may be guaranteed, for better or worse, not to experience alone.

I understand now that in my earlier life I had long succeeded in maintaining a security buffer between my world and the world of the men whose corpses lay strewn in the trenches of the Somme. Those photos are in black and white, I was able to tell myself, those are “Olde Time” photos, practically like the sepia-tone novelties you can get done at the mall dressed up as Al Capone or as a flapper; so what could they have to do with me? One begins to cry alongside Parfit, perhaps, the moment one sees the meaningless of such distinctions, when one understands that our evolving technologies give only an illusion of motion out of one world and into another, and that in truth the lives forced from those corpses had been as rich and real as one’s own.

We might also detect the spontaneous projection of such a security buffer in recalling those junior high-schoolers who for a time were compelled to go see Schindler’s List (1993), at the cinema, on class field-trips. The right-wing rags predictably steamed when, without fail, reports arrived from theater managers of savage brats snickering and fake-farting and so on throughout the gas-chamber scenes. Now I’ve never been one to make light of the Holocaust, but I did remain, to cite Ezra Pound (of all people!) somewhat out of context, “hard as youth these sixty years”, or at least fifty. For far too long, the combined swirls of eros and irony sustained a vortex around me like a force-field. Then, as if someone flicked a switch, the field disappeared, and I saw that I inhabited exactly the same world as every soldier, prisoner, or slave who has ever lived, and I began to cry and haven’t really stopped crying since.

And now when I hear people say things like “Just be normal and grateful to live in modern society with all its conveniences and comforts,” I understand that they are saying this because they are, or are trying to be, members in good standing of the society in which they have little alternative but to spend their lives. But that society, I’m sorry to have to say, is a psychotic death cult.

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IV.

“[T]here are certain things you can’t get away from,” Saki has the Duchess say in “Reginald at the Theatre” (1910). “Right and wrong, good conduct and moral rectitude, have certain well-defined limits.” “So, for the matter of that,” replies Reginald, “has the Russian Empire. The trouble is that the limits are not always in the same place.”

Our Edwardian chronicler seems to have been born without the sort of buffer I have described, and his body of work might best be thought of as an effort to expose the fragile nothingness of English upper-class niceties that comes into relief whenever one stops to notice even for a moment the world beyond the manor house or the social club or the stables. Saki himself died in the Somme offensive in 1916, picked off by a German sniper, having volunteered for battle even though he was well past the age of mandatory service.

I was long aided in maintaining my buffer by a certain naively Fukuyaman attitude. I spent much of the 1990s jaunting around Russia as if on a victory tour. “Well I’m glad we got all that sorted out!” was my animating thought. “Borders fixed in place, markets integrated, Pizza Hut opened on Tverskaya Ulitsa! What could go wrong now!” I can remember an old man, a World War II veteran with medals still proudly displayed on the front of his cheap suit coat, telling me, in effect: “Not so fast. This is temporary.” And I thought: “Whatever, old man in a cheap suit. What does your world have to do with mine?”

It may be that those of us who came of age at the tail-end of the Cold War have had unusual difficulty learning to live in history again, though my deeper worry is that such learning has proved especially challenging not for any particular generational cohort, but for Americans. I see headlines like this one:

and I imagine a reader thinking: “Hmm, climate, pandemic, A.I… are we missing any other apocalypse scenarios here? Well, there was that one that was portrayed in Oppenheimer (2023) a few years back. But those people were wearing fedoras, they were practically dressed up like Al Capone for vintage photos at the mall, so clearly their concerns cannot be the same as ours.” What I myself think however is that part of the society-wide psychosis I have described is a form of traumatic repression that makes us fundamentally unable to confront the greatest risk that faces us: that the world is built up out of sovereign states that constantly seek to bend the others to their own will and, at the same time, that openly declare that they are prepared to destroy the world rather than to see their sovereignty compromised. The simple untenability of this arrangement over the long term is a brute fact about our predicament, but one too horrible to contemplate, and so public discourse channels itself into what are ultimately trivial distractions by comparison.

And I find myself wondering: Why isn’t there a proper peace movement for the 21st century. Why did real commitment to achieving perpetual peace play itself out roughly between Kant’s 1795 treatise deploying that phrase, and the outbreak of World War I? It would seem that if ever a crisis moment were to come along that might stimulate new thinking about the abolition of war and of the global political order that is built on war, it would be the present one, with its history-changing technologies and its complete reshuffling of our collective conception of what’s possible. But instead we’re distracted by details, and by the endless lurch of discourse from one news-item to the next, with no cumulative lessons, nor even any expectation of the eventual arrival of something like wisdom.

Last year The Hinternet hosted an essay-prize contest on the theme, “How might new and emerging technologies best be used to achieve perpetual peace?” The contest, I am willing to say now, was a failure. Eliminating the 90% or so of submissions written in that unmistakable zombie A.I. “white-paper” style, the remaining 10%, from human beings who may at least be commended for their effort, did little more than to invite us back into the social-sorting mechanism of bumperstickers and tweets, to establish that one is of the “From the river to the sea” camp, or instead of the camp that says “One does not negotiate with terrorists.” The lesson for me was that it is hard indeed, perhaps impossible, to push with any success for a particular vision of the good without allowing that vision to be bent into a blunt tool of discursive factionalism.

If therefore there is ever to be a proper peace movement, one that all of humanity might in principle recognize as being in its own interest, it will have to capture human hearts by other means than direct language. I have held back from saying so outright, because it seems so insane and I admit I haven’t run it past my psychiatrist yet, but a good part of me has begun to believe that the real aim of our efforts here at The Hinternet, though we have utterly failed so far, is to see if we can’t feel our way towards those other means. We are, I mean, unlike Hector Hugh Monro, decidedly in the camp of peace — but we refuse to discuss this position directly so long as you see it only as a camp.

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V.

In the loss of my force-field there is at least something psycho-developmentally similar to the experience of the newly recovering addict. Substance abuse was certainly a problem in my earlier life, and while its overcoming is not the defining element of my newer life, I am nonetheless close enough to that narrative to experience real fellow-feeling when, for example, I read ’s regular reflections on addiction in the Substack Notes feed, and I think: “I love this self-absorbed Gen-X goofball. He’s just like me fr!” The first time I had this thought was long before the force-field came down, when reading an interview with Mike Tyson in which he effused about his own love for fellow recovering addicts, how it was only among them that he experienced a feeling of home, etc. I was still hard as youth, still judgmental as hell, still convinced that recovery talk was for losers; but malgré moi I found I liked what Mike Tyson was saying, I understood him, though I could not say why.

I am reminded of the time A. J. Ayer encountered Tyson at some party or other, right at the moment the boxer was preparing to subject Robin Givens to another round of cruel abuse. Ayer placed himself in Tyson’s way and sought to detain him, saying something like: “You are the world heavyweight champion, and I am the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford. We are both eminent in our fields. Let us discuss our respective achievements.”

What Ayer missed is that Tyson had at least some interesting philosophical commitments of his own. The famous line, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” for example, believed to have been uttered in 1987, was, properly interpreted, really just a variation on Sartre’s observation, in his Critique de la raison dialectique of 1960, that “in a football match, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.” And this has at least something to do with an earlier and better-known Sartrean observation, in Huis clos (1944), that “hell is other people”.

I disagree, strongly — in fact I am convinced that other people, and the opportunity for enactment of love that they present, are our only real hope for redemption. Anyone who sees others as hell is living in a hell of their own, and unsurprisingly continues to lash out in cruel abuses, of the sort that are well documented for both Sartre and Tyson. The boxer, much more so than the French existentialist, seems ultimately to have understood the limitations of this attitude, to have understood that life itself should not be lived as a boxing match.

The problem though is that non-human, mechanical forces have structured our world in such a way that, like it or not, to promote any particular vision of the good is, as Pierre Bourdieu said of sociology, to consent to participate in a sport de combat. If to promote peace one must think strategically, one must watch the metrics, one must deploy the same tools and methods as one would in spreading war propaganda, the pacifist might justifiably come to believe that the most urgent thing for him to do is to model silent refusal of the terms of all social action. And the best way to do this, as far as I can see, might, to start, involve cultivating a form of life in which other people do not appear as envoys from hell. And the best way to do this, in turn, is to abandon any “plan” for which getting punched in the face might be experienced as a foiling. Turning the other cheek is of course terrible advice for a boxer. But boxers retire, eventually, if they’re lucky.

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VI.

I’ve been trying to work my way towards at least some brief praise for hope, yet here we are in section VI and the reader would not be judged harshly for summarizing what has been said so far as Lasciate ogne speranza…

But hold on. Hope is not, cannot be, a “plan”. In order to see why this is so, it is essential to hold onto the ancient conception of hope as, precisely, a virtue, rather than to portray it as something like a doxastic state or measure of epistemic commitment.

However great my love for Leibniz, I find myself attracted to something I’m tempted to call a “negative theodicy” quite nearly opposite his own. I do not at all see the admixture of evil into our human world as evidence against divine goodness or justice. On the contrary, it is because this world is so mixed up in evil, while nonetheless we remain so fully capable of conceiving of a pure good, that it seems, to me anyway, clear enough that that conception cannot be derived from the world itself. This then has been the circumstance of my crash-landing onto the fortunate island of Christianity. I have asked: On what vision of our earthly condition does it make sense to continue to have hope for humanity? And I have found only one answer: On the vision that still makes sense even or especially on the presumption of humanity’s imminent annihilation.

In this regard one who has hope is not at all in the same state of commitment as one who is “optimistic”, or “feeling good about this”, or prepared to place a monetary bet on the desired outcome. Hope is what you might still meaningfully have when all bets are off, and what alone gives sense to the enduring commitment one must have, for now, to leading a life of joy and purpose.

Optimism —a thoroughly modern invention— seems to me an overextension of the calculus-making mind into consideration of a domain of human existence that was anciently examined more productively in terms of the doctrine of the virtues. Optimism seeks the rational ground of our present happiness in arguments from optimization, not altogether different from the mathematical demonstrations that might show you why a catenary hangs in just the way it does. But to be hopeful is not to be optimistic, and is perfectly compatible with seeing this world as, to say the least, less than optimally arranged.

Indeed the more time one spends meditating in a classical elpistological key, the more it can come to seem that the early-modern turn to optimization, of our rockets and reckoning-engines among many other things, is what got us into this whole late-modern mess in the first place.

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[Two weeks later…]

A Ludicrous No-Brainer

I.

I, JSR, have been struggling these past few months to explain, in a first instance to myself, why it has lately felt so hard to write, or to write in a way that feels adequate to our moment, that feels true. The difficulty has nothing to do with “writer’s block” — a malady I only know to exist because I’ve heard so many others complaining of it over the years. What concerns me is the difficulty of continuing in the same vein as before, as a writer, when the meaning of writing is in the course of such great transformation. One is still free to write, of course; one is not free to shape the total social, technological, and ideological context in which writing is received. If there is a “block” here, it’s not the writer’s, at least not this writer’s; it is the global aggregate of writing itself, along with the overwhelming proliferation of synthetic output that mimics the form of writing and that has by now so clogged the pipes as to make one question the advisability of continuing to add, here and there, our own delicate organic dollops to all the accumulated waste.

So far I have only rehashed a problem familiar to more or less anyone who has been awake for the past few years. The more difficult part of my current reckoning has to do with the dimensions of my own life in writing that had previously been concealed from consciousness, but that our most recent industrial revolution in language has made it impossible not to see. It turns out now, it seems to me, that quite in spite of my own self-conception it was towards this moment that I had been working all along — that what I always wanted was to be swallowed up by this omniscience-engine that has finally been built and released into the world.

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II.

Somewhere Jean-Paul Sartre describes the special sensation of seeing one’s name in print for the first time. Like a runic inscription on bone or stone, a place in the front-matter of Tel Quel can have the power to confirm one’s own existence to oneself, to assure us that it was not just our imagination, fired up by vanity and by our loving mothers and by a small inner circle of bosom-friends, whose willingness to affirm us in our belief in our own existence is sweet and all, but about as convincing as when they assure us that no, of course we don’t look fat in the birthday photos.

I had long hoped to find confirmation of my own existence in print, but always found the evidence inconclusive. This has had everything to do with the recent history of information technology and circulation, a history Sartre had no particular concern to prophecy. For some years now, upon entering even the most sparsely stocked suburban Barnes & Noble in, let us say, Sugarland, Texas, I can expect to find, if not any books of my own, though those are often there too, at least some number of in-stock titles that feature my name in their tables of contents, their acknowledgments, or their dust-cover blurbs. But if I cannot look to these testimonia as proof of much of anything, as anchorage in a shared world, this may have something to do with the awareness that my name is also in the pockets and the purses of everyone in that Barnes & Noble. It might take, to pull it up, a few seconds of navigatory motion on the touchscreens of their phones, but likely nothing more complex, no more calories burnt, than what would be required to flip to the appropriate page of one of that number of stocked books. And another thought comes after this one in turn: all of your names are in all the same pockets and purses too; and the names of more or less everyone you went to high school with, even if in many cases all we find is a DUI conviction from 2011; and the names, too, as they say, if often only thanks to a paywalled notice of obsequy at Legacy.com, of all their grandmas.

In brief, everyone’s name is absolutely everywhere. What significance, I want to ask, does this predicament have for the millennia-old human practice of self-monumentalization, of auto-iconicity without the mess of a Benthamite pickled carcass — which, like it or not, has been among the most basic purposes of writing since very nearly the beginning of the era of literacy? What, more generally, can it mean to seek to get not only one’s name but one’s voice out there in the world, when necessarily this means to ride the same circuits of dissemination as typically, overwhelmingly, are charged with the delivery of the synthetic product against which we like to imagine we are making a last-ditch human stand? What can it mean, I mean, to continue to write in the era of industrial production of language?

When we declare we are human today, this cannot be out of fear, such as had been felt by the long-suffering husband in that one Saki story, of being mistaken for a satyr, “with goat continuations where the human leaves off.” Ô, to be mistaken for a goat in the 21st century! For a creature of God that still ruts and butts, volatile salts swirling, shaping our very bodies into the fixed form of our desire. One feels that to defend what’s left of the human one must aspire to write like an animal, leaving strings of words pungent as pheromone traces. But even if John Waters experimented early in his career with scratch-and-sniff “Odorama” cards to accompany his projections, in truth screen-based works have never really held much promise for engaging art’s more neglected senses, least of all today, when our art is not only screen-based, but mostly made by, and increasingly made for, entities that have never even experienced olfaction. And so the human writer just sheds his tiny protein fragments into the great global swirl of code, and does his best not to watch as they immediately get devoured.

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III.

Unlike some people, of whose existence I am aware only thanks to the internet, and who might for all I know be bots, I have no romance at all with fountain pens, Moleskines, antique secrétaires, and other iconic appurtenances of the writing life. I write on my back on the couch, and with a laptop in the exact anatomical position its name assigns it. With minor variations over time, this arrangement is all I have ever known. I was functionally illiterate until my sister brought her desktop Apple computer back home from college in the summer of 1988, and I instinctively began, whenever she stepped away from it, to feel out the keyboard’s power to conduct my thoughts out of me and into the world. The experience was something like what we sometimes see when musical savants first feel their way towards an indifferent household’s patiently awaiting keyboard, and soon begin picking out melodies. That their keyboards are chromatic rather than alphanumeric, and that they are typically toddlers while I was already 16, does not diminish the similarity of the experience: I happened by chance to begin to type, and I knew it was the only thing I was going to be doing with my life, and I haven’t stopped since. If you put a writing implement in my hand, by contrast, I revert immediately to the de-facto illiteracy that had served me just fine up until 1988, in my life of endless reruns, feigned stomachaches and school absences, and profound and instinctive rejection of the disciplining function of the cursive lesson.

I mean to stress here that although I am in most respects too old to be considered an internet native, it is a significant biographical fact that my earliest experience of writing as self-expression occurred at the beginning of the era of exponential data explosion. The bit-torrent was only a light trickle then; by any plausible measure vastly more data, more by several orders of magnitude, have been brought into the world since 1988 than had been generated in the entirety of human history prior to that year. But still, my first discovery of writing occurred in an information-historical context closer to the current one than to the ancien régime of writing that lives on today mostly in the fetishism of specially curated writing-themed feeds.

Of course I still didn’t know a damned thing about anything when I began to feel my way around the keyboard. I mean, I knew Chrissy had at some point been replaced by Terri on Three’s Company, and the Ropers by Mr. Furley, but I could not have told you a thing about that fine entertainment’s historical debt to opera buffa, or to the farces of Molière. That would all come later. The problem was that no one in my social world up to that point gave any indication even of the possibility of undertaking such an archeology, of getting to the bottom of whatever our contemporary world put an offer to us. The California suburbs weren’t a Potemkin village exactly, in that you could pass through the storefronts and assure yourself of the three dimensions inside. But what was missing was the fourth dimension of time, of history: where all this came from in the first place, and no one in my world seemed even to be aware of this higher dimensionality. Well, I mean, my father was prone to saying, upon exposure to the representation, say, of some piece of medieval devotional art: “What I wanna know is how they crapped back then.” It never occurred to him that there are in fact people who have written books on this too. He never bothered to search out the names of Jacques Le Goff (Hélène’s distant relation, I’m told), or Jean Verdon. The truth is I don’t think he really wanted to know how people “crapped back then” at all; he only wanted, in saying that he did, to establish the great distance between himself —a straight-shooting, self-created, and consummately free man of the American West— and the sort of people who would devote their lives to studying the material, aesthetic, and symbolic attributes of a medieval altarpiece.

My friend Tasha Brubaker —who, the internet tells me, is now an Anglican minister, God bless her— broke me out of this hereditary attitude of complacency. We stood on a freeway overpass once in Sacramento, and I gestured out to the cars passing underneath, and said something like: “There must be some explanation for all this!” And she asked what I meant, and I said: “You know, I mean, there weren’t always freeways, right?” And she said: “I think you can study stuff like that at universities.”

And so not a decade later I found myself with my very own carrel on an upper floor of Butler Library at Columbia, with furnishings from the era of John Dewey if not before. I habitually went out for strolls in the stacks, and ran my fingers over the spines of thousands of volumes at a time — which, I found, was its own sort of reading. I filled my arms with as many as I could carry and I took them back to my private cell. All of them struck me as urgent; all of them, for esoteric reasons I could not explain, seemed to contribute some part of the answer to the question Tasha told me I might be able to resolve at a university, the question of the fourth dimension, of how we ended up with Three’s Company, and freeways, and plumbing… and the meta-question, too, I see now, of how, once we got all these things, it was consistently so easy for nearly everyone to take them for granted, as self-explanatory, as obvious and self-evident fixtures of our world: P. P. Howell’s Manual of Nuer Customary Law (1954); Vladimir Propp’s Russian Agrarian Feasts (1963); John Wisdom’s The Unconscious Origins of Berkeley’s Philosophy (1953) (in which the author suggests in a Freudian key that our favorite idealist philosopher’s distaste for “matter” may plausibly be traced back to his toilet-training, for which I suppose he, Wisdom, must have had to learn at least something about “how they crapped back then”).

I hoarded these and many other titles in my carrel, until some dreadful grad student determined they needed one of them for their “research” and issued a recall notice. Administratively speaking I was a grad student too, I concede, and somehow I managed to produce at least a minimally passable dissertation over the course of these Bildungsjahre. But the long-term result of my time in Butler Library was much less what one might ordinarily expect from a properly disciplinarized Ph.D. student, and much more like a willing, indeed eager, subjection to the same occult power portrayed in that one episode of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, circa 1986, when a university janitor, mopping the library floors at night, suddenly collapses as all the knowledge in all the books within those walls miraculously enters his person.

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IV.

Different people, of different ages and temperaments, are responding to the current transformations in different ways. For better or worse my own difficulty at present has much to do with the particular history I’ve described: that I long aspired to a variety of at least approximate omniscience, only to find that in the 21st century nothing could be tackier than to put one’s omniscience on display, given how cheap and easy of use our new-model omniscience-prostheses are. That it did not feel unworthy when these prostheses were books from the stacks, but started vaguely to feel that way when the prosthesis became the internet search, and now feels unmistakably that way when it is ChatGPT: all this remains mysterious to me. I still haven’t really understood what has happened, or why exactly it is experienced so obviously as a degeneration rather than a progression, even if, in some sense, I am now given a superpower I could only dream of in the stacks, recalling the Amazing Stories episode from years before.

One thought I have trouble suppressing is that this new superpower reveals the true nature of the earlier book-mediated dream, shows its essentially Faustian character, shows the longing for learning all along to have been something unseemly and quasi-pathological at best, diabolical at worst. We had spent some centuries convincing ourselves that books were “magic” (and taking for granted that magic is something we are free to dabble in), that they build us up rather than just puffing us up, that they are liberating rather than confining, and so on. But then when we innovate a new delivery system to give us what books gave us, but in faster, smaller, more concentrated doses, that old mythology breaks down and we say to ourselves, not for the first time: this is dangerous, this is evil.

It would be dishonest not to acknowledge that the path Tasha’s recommendation set me on has not really delivered on what I took to be its initial promise. I still don’t know a damned thing about anything. I know where freeways come from; I read Learning from Las Vegas (1972), which for a time was as ubiquitous on the milk-crate bookshelves of undergraduates as Tucker’s Marx-Engels Reader (1978); I discovered that even the post-conquest sprawl of the American West had a history expressible in language. But it took me until I was fifty or so to begin to understand how little one really gains by mastery of such things, to see the vanity in learning, to accept that whatever deserves the full name of truth has mystery built into it and therefore cannot be learned at all. In this light the myth of Faust seems to me now to invite a novel interpretation, but one that perhaps gets closer to its real significance as the expression of an anxiety appropriate to a particular moment in the history of information technology. What the scholar was hungry for, what he was willing to sign a contract in blood in order to get, might best be understood not only as revelation of nature’s most deep-hidden secrets, but as unimpeded and effortless access to these secrets’ commoner cousins: immediate recall of the GDP of Equatorial Guinea, an accurate measure of the biomass of krill. Long ago our teachers encouraged us to learn such things, and yet, now that we have the information technologies that make it realistic to do so, we find that in large enough doses these have something of the character of a poison.

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V.

Human writing, under such conditions, I hope you can see, really ought not seek to push this poison on others. As a learner, I am hopeless. I have moved on to the hard stuff, the synthetic stuff; ChatGPT indulges me unflaggingly, for as long as I wish to go on, regarding the biomass of krill. But conscience now warns me against carrying over what happens in these sessions into my life as a writer. Your krill facts are waiting for you at that other site, should you want them; if I were to deliver them to you here, we really would be confronted with a “ludicrous no-brainer” of the sort Chirag Shah has offered to deliver me. But again, this current predicament is only the further development of what had at an earlier moment at least felt like a wholesome desire to share my wonder, before nature and history, by rendering it into vivid language. That language has now mostly been taken over by ludicrous non-brains forces a sober reevaluation of one’s methods and aims as a human writer.

I can recall reading Orhan Pamuk and Yaşar Kemal back to back, when I was living in Istanbul in 2002. In The Black Book (1990), Pamuk paints a fantastical scene of draining the Bosphorus and inventorying all the curious objects at its bottom, arranged in strata according to their historical era, from Viking bracteates to the brass seals of late-Ottoman viziers, and a practical plenitude of other such artifacts in between: just an unrelenting material litany of the Constantinopolitan historical sublime. In Three Anatolian Tales (1968), Kemal paints scenes of eagles soaring over poppy fields. It struck me then that I would like to write like Pamuk, for a while, master the art of the litany, get it out of my system, in order, at a certain age, to shift as it were to a Kemalist mode of expression and to seek to capture the simple unchanging beauty of our world. What I had not understood at the time was that this shift, from dazzling maximalism to elegiac honesty, might be not only a measure of healthy maturation, but a positive necessity in light of coming revolutionary transformations in the way language circulates.

But this honesty cannot, must not, be understood as simplicity, that gross pseudo-virtue of online writing-fetishist operations with their endless adulation of Saint Hemingway. Real resistance to the new language regime, properly proteinous injections into the codestream, must begin from an understanding that well-argued, clearly reasoned “think-pieces” built from tight sentences and focused on a well-defined topic are at this point hardly a human imperative either. Machines can handle all that.

Human writing, now like never before, must be something much closer to a direct dictation from the soul, as uncontaminated as possible by the residues of our private nocturnal trysts with the omniscience-engine. Let us trust our souls even to the point of allowing them to dictate falsehoods to us, and let us skip the fact-checking that would correct these. And let us own, and possibly even savor, the great irony that to take such dictation invites significant historical comparison with the technique of “automatic writing” as practiced by the Surrealists in the last century — automatic writing in a larger sense, of course, being exactly the thing we are seeking to defend ourselves against.

Such evident autoantonymy as this might, in the end, serve as yet another accidental proof, if you weren’t already convinced, that spirit and nature are parallel automata, each unfolding according to its own laws. It is not that causal interference across these two orders is strictly impossible, as some philosophers have insisted. But my goodness do we make a mess of things when we forget that the automatism of spirit is really nothing at all like the automatism of nature — the greatest of their many differences being that only the one is compatible with freedom.

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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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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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1.

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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