It's definitely possible that for the last 120 years, mankind has been inventing and engineering each step of his own demise. Nuclear weapons, biological warfare, and now AI: a sentient super-intelligence which could one day seize control of airplanes, missiles, and chemical weapons.
It's insane that we do gain of function research of any kind. Biology or artificial intelligence. There's no doubt that the world is run by Promethean madmen, or that the rulers of the world put up with Promethean madmen and empower them123
I was planning to write at length about my strange, surreal weekend—involving scammers, Substackers, e-girls, boomers, clout chasers, shitty poetry—but I decided not to. I’m not really good at capturing the strangeness of my wider social circle in New York—I feel almost too too naive, too literal… too earnest, maybe, at heart.
I’m not good at creating characters out of real people; I need to create characters from scratch (even if they’re derived from or influenced by real people).4
You have to smuggle the truth in in disguise.
A baneful trend: creating the perception of talent through association with talent, rather than risk-taking, self-cultivation, devotion to work (and not even knowing the difference). Talent has to know itself.
I have too many projects—portfolio inflation, driven by a fear that nothing will work out.
My mind feels overactive, but strangely empty; sometimes I feel like my best thoughts come when I’m not in position to write them down; when I sit down to write—radio static.
Once a class becomes professionalized, it will demand that you consume it produces: thus we must consume bad writing, activism, art…
We have realism but not reality.5
A revolution is a spectacle that forgets its origins—a mimetic chain reaction that gets so far down the line that it can no longer see where it started.
Maybe humanity doesn't need to risk the stakes of mortal life for a really high enough goal.
The Roman Empire built roads connecting Europe to Africa and Asia and was consequently rocked by plagues the Hellenic world had never seen before. Interconnection and fertility. Everybody has phones. All the world's data and information is stored in a few places. We're building digital creatures with a will to power. As soon as we have them, digital pathogens will travel around just as fast as bubonic plague did in the time of Marcus Aurelius.
We might be like indigenous people on the coast of Cape Cod in 1500, looking out at the sea at the strange ships on the horizon.
I’m not really a documentarian—but a synthesizer, compressor. A poet, I guess.
Conversely: liberals without liberalism.