June 14, 2025, h/t Polly Marshall for sending me this photo while I was home with COVID.
I’ve been extremely reluctant to write anything for months. We are drowning in bullshit. The maelstrom of AI-generated slop on all social media platforms is bad enough. But there’s also so many new independent journalists (no longer employed in real newsrooms) at substack, medium and other platforms clamoring for us to read (and donate to) them.
Makes you wish there was a decent newspaper where you could find a selection of these great writers regularly. Imagine a solid daily paper that honestly and critically covered the news, and that you could feel good about supporting. And it only cost a quarter every day! But there’s no such thing. The well-known newspapers are drastically overpriced and awful, full of propaganda and working to normalize this rapid further descent into barbarism. TV and cable shows are even worse. I still read some magazines, but these days I spend more hours reading books than anything else.
Podcasts are the place I find myself relying on for independent, thoughtful, in-depth coverage of things I can barely find in the printed press. And there are somewhere over 2 million podcasts now! How are you supposed to wade through all that? Who has time to puzzle it out? (Find my list at the end of this post.)
There’s such a shit-ton of words anywhere you care to look. Most of it is not worth a glance, while there are plenty of gems hidden here and there, to be sure. But ever more exasperated, I ask myself, what (and why) do I have to add to it? I’ve had the reasonable excuse that my father moving into assisted living at the end of February and requiring my regular presence at least two times a week, and sometimes more, has significantly altered the rhythm of my life. I haven’t had as much time as usual to ruminate and write. But I also haven’t felt called to do much writing either. And yet, here I am!
I don’t have any unique insight into the fascist efforts to remake the government to serve them, although I am going to write a bit about the deeper philosophical ideas that have given them space to work. We’re all watching in real time, to varying degrees resigned or stunned, enraged or skeptical, about the radical right effort to wreak havoc. Judges are blocking things at an unprecedented rate, but it’s like watching the little Dutch boy put his fingers in the dike that keeps springing new leaks. Or a not-funny game of Whack-a-mole. And if it is a systematic program to delegitimize the rule of law, what judicial decisions are going to halt the entitled and pointed provocations of misanthropic malevolence?
Don’t see BART cars graffiti’ed too often, but when you do!…
June 14, 2025
Literally millions of people are doing their civic-minded best to obstruct and impede the assholes, whether the new American Gestapo operating as ICE, or the old familiar thugs at the FBI or local police. Kudos to the folks in LA who have stood strong. Locally we have seen hundreds surrounding ICE facilities in the past days to block their cruel efforts to snatch and deport innocent people. Last Monday about 2500 gathered at the nearby BART plaza and marched up Mission Street in a show of solidarity with Los Angeles and a willingness to stand up to the government. I went down with COVID the next evening and am still laid up as I write this a week later.
Great shot north on Dolores Street, June 14, 2025… Photo: Sue Bee
Tens of thousands marched in the sunny “No Kings” protest here in SF, and many millions more in cities and towns everywhere. All good. But none really touches the levers of political and police power that they’re using to rip up the meager social safety net, and criminalize countless people just trying to live their lives. It would be ironically funny to see libertarian anti-government blowhards becoming authoritarian control-freaks at the head of the state if it weren’t so harmful to so many. These are deeply warped people, many of whom have now embraced the bizarre assertion that empathy is a sign of weakness. These damaged people have lost their basic humanity and they’re trying to pretend that’s a good thing. How did we get to the place where some of the worst people, filled with resentment and hatred and fear, have grabbed all this power?
Dolores Park, I always knew you were smart…
Most people I know consider the bible-thumpers, the white supremacists, the various homophobic, pro-gun, pro-patriarchy, neo-fascist “average Americans” to be unredeemable knuckle-draggers. We don’t even talk about it. It’s just obvious. I assume the folks we describe that way have an equally cartoonish idea of people like me, raving Marxists who think the borders should be thrown open, billionaires and millionaires should be made illegal so we can take and share their wealth among everyone, cars should be banned, resource and energy use should rapidly shrink, fossil fuel use should radically diminish, and factory farming should end immediately while we’re at it.
It sounds funny but I think we are both right about each other. We have nothing in common and it’s ridiculous to try to find a middle ground politically. At this point we live in cognitively divided worlds, facts on one side don’t exist on the other; values that shape behavior on one side are rejected on the other. I think we should partition the country and have everyone go to the half they prefer to live in. In some weird way that’s happening already. But neither side can countenance being governed by the other. It’s a daily aggravation, or these days, it’s an affront to basic dignity and human rights.
We have to stop destroying the planet and redesign the very sinews of how we produce life on an everyday basis. This will necessarily involve some very complicated work by everyone, work we are hardly prepared to embark on. Few realize how unlikely our successful survival is at this point. Things are going in the wrong direction very rapidly, and everything this gang of pathological liars and losers who have seized the reigns of power are doing is accelerating the inevitable collapse.
A healthy future of real abundance (not that fake neoliberal Ezra Klein/YIMBY version) and everyday enjoyment of life as a birthright for all humans and other living things is possible in theory, but not within the constraints of wage-labor, money, capitalism, techno-feudalism, private property, etc. The kind of anarcho-communistic democracy we need to create is unprecedented and has never been tried. Few (none?) of us are prepared to participate in such a radically different way of life—fully engaged and deeply interdependent, consciously responsible and accountable to each other. Even if we could separate ourselves from the reactionary knuckle-draggers, virtually insane bible thumpers, and dogged pro-market zealots, the rest of us would have a helluva time figuring out how to organize ourselves in new egalitarian and pleasurable and productive arrangements.
We want to live well, enjoy together the fruits of human labor equitably, and have plenty of time to do what we want. Most of us want to pull our own weight, to contribute to our general well-being without being taken advantage of by others. Nobody looks fondly on what they perceive as “freeloaders” but truly who cares? If we’ve reached a certain level of social wealth and efficient organization, some people actually can opt out and lay around if that’s really all they want to do (unlikely to be very many people). I’d rather have them do that than impede the enjoyable and efficient efforts we make together to work a lot less (and enjoyably when we do), while having everything we want, and more free time than ever.
Anyway, I’ve read a lot of books since early this year and I want to talk about a few of them in this post. I may follow this up with a second post shortly that takes up the rest of the books I want to address. I’ll start with the one I just finished, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (Basic Books, New York: 2025) by Adam Becker. Becker is an astrophysicist who takes the time to debunk what he labels the ideology of technological salvation. Towards the end of the book he acknowledges that what he’s been debunking is the same thing being referred to by Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres in their analysis, which they labeled the TESCREAL bundle (of ideologies)—Transhumanism, Extroprianism, Singulatarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism.
Banksy always gets it.
As it happens, these ideas are widely embraced among the young techies who populate the overpriced bunkbeds in San Francisco’s pretend communal living households. Whether adopted from reading American science fiction (where Elon Musk got his absurd ideas about colonizing Mars, his eugenicist pro-natalism, his manipulative and instrumental approach to actual human beings, etc.), or gathered from the deeply reactionary foundations of early cyberlibertarianism, a poisonous brew of ideas has seized the imaginations of the technologically savvy but socially inept and deprived minions of the tech economy. Whether fantasies about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or space travel and colonization, or some kind of nanotechnological revolution that abolishes mortality, while most of us weren’t looking, crazy ideas have become the organizing vision of life by the excessively rich and powerful.
Becker’s book usefully digs beneath the labels and endless self-promotional blather to examine the assumptions that a lot of these ideas are based on. As it happens, when I went off to college back in 1975 I was driven by questions of moral philosophy. I would’ve been interested in people promoting themselves as “rationalists” and I was often in conversation about variations on utilitarianism, a philosophy that says what is the best for the most people should be the moral position. Today’s “effective altruists” seem to believe that anything we do should be measured by how it assures (or blocks) the eventual arrival of untold trillions of digital beings that they think will population a far-flung multi-planetary, perhaps multi-galaxy civilization. Of course, the condition of actual people in today’s world is of trivial concern, considering the numerically vaster numbers of “happy beings” that these crackpots assume will exist in the future.
From the insanity of Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity dream where humans are absorbed into or left behind by a self-replicating machine-based intelligence immeasurably greater than any person’s, to the enthusiastic embrace of what philosopher Derek Parfit named the “Repugnant Conclusion” (a universe filled to the brim with miserable people who are—on average—just barely happy enough to make their lives worth living is better than a world with a smaller number of genuinely happy people), most of these ideas are rooted in a eugenicist, racist, colonialist sensibility that is profoundly hostile to earth-based human (and more than human) life. Becker spends some time debunking the notion that ‘intelligence’ is a measurable thing, and robustly argues for intelligence being something inherently embedded in physical bodies interacting with each other and natural systems, precisely what the Chatbot Carnival masquerading as “artificial intelligence” is incapable of. Revisiting some of the early arguments about utilitarianism Becker makes short work showing how impossible it is to measure utility in any meaningful way, and continues:
The whole project of utilitarianism smacks of a kind of ethical Taylorism: confusing metrics with the reality they imperfect capture, and then trying to optimize things by focusing solely on increasing the metrics to the exclusion of all else. Ethics isn’t economics. And as Torres alludes to, utilitarianism isn’t the only game in town when it comes to ethics. (p. 197) … At the core of that logic, for both capitalism and effective altruism, is the need for quantification. Any human activity that can be quantified is grist for the optimizing machinery of this worldview, and anything that can’t be quantified is dismissed as unimportant. This is how longtermists, ultimately, are forced to see people: as numbers. (p. 203)
When I came of age in the early 1970s, this kind of instrumental, mechanistic thinking was widely rejected. Studying philosophy at Sonoma State I enrolled in a class by a guy named Stan McDaniel called “TransTantric Philosophy.” It was a moment when thousands of people had a growing interest in eastern philosophies, and I thought I ought to see if I was interested. It was Fall 1975 as I recall. I didn’t last long in McDaniel’s class because it felt like discussing how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. I remember angrily withdrawing from the class wondering what any of it had to do with the real world, where people were starving, and military coups were slaughtering countless others.
I recalled this abruptly when reading Becker’s book because he goes into centuries-old antecedents to a lot of these so-called modern ideas. The notion of Transhumanism is one of these. He brings in Megan O’Gieblyn who I wrote about at end of last year, quoting her: “Most transhumanists are outspoken atheists, eager to maintain the notion that their philosophy is rooted in modern rationalism and not in fact what it is: an outgrowth of Christian eschatology.” Turns out trans-human was a label written down in 1947 by the Catholic philosopher Teilhard de Chardin. That’s when I remembered McDaniel’s 1975 class because his theory was based on patterns of thought that he could diagram, using Teilhard de Chardin, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and two others who I forget now, showing how across cultures and times certain brilliant people were thinking the same way, somehow transcending their historical embeddedness to share patterned ways of knowing the world. Here’s Becker:
Describing the change humanity would undergo at the Omega Point, Teilhard said that we would become “some sort of Trans-Human at the ultimate heart of things.” Teilhard wrote this in 1947, several years before Julian Huxley supposedly coined the term “transhuman”—and even Teilhard wasn’t the first to use it. (p. 260)
Turns out some reference to transhuman appears in Dante’s Inferno, written centuries ago. More important for the here and now, these ideas are patently insane. Not just insane, but profoundly reactionary and anti-life. There are many authors trying to come to grips with this. Another one I found on Emergence Magazine’s podcast and absolutely loved reading is James Bridle and his book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (Verso Books: 2018, 2023). He starts right out identifying the core flaw in the worldview of the people who largely own and control this world:
Computational thinking is an extension of what others have called solutionism: the belief that any given problem can be solved by the application of computation. Whatever the practical or social problem we face, there is an app for it. But solutionism is insufficient too; this is one of the things that our technology is trying to tell us. Beyond this error, computational thinking supposes—often at an unconscious level—that the world really is like the solutionists propose. It internalizes solutionism to the degree that it is impossible to think or articulate the world in terms that are not computable. Computational thinking is predominant in the world today, driving the worst trends in our societies and interactions, and must be opposed by a real systemic literacy. (p. 4)
David Golumbia passed away in 2023 just after he finished his magnum opus on the long history of Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) . I don’t agree with his analysis completely (not surprising, I hardly ever agree completely with anyone about anything!). But in Golumbia’s case, he spends a lot of time criticizing proponents of internet freedom on solid grounds of their self-serving and inconsistent rhetoric. But his starting point is an uncritical embrace of “democracy” and the political sovereignty he thinks modern democratic procedures adequately embody. I tend to fall into an anarchist camp that sees the state as the fundamental institution that guarantees and violently enforces private property and market rule. But here’s Golumbia in an early passage complementing the argument about computational thinking that Bridle made above:
This is how cyberlibertarianism works: it is not so much about party politics as it is about controlling the terms of discourse and the conversation itself. This ensures that only variations in rightist political formations ever get on the table, and all concerns are subsumed under a general faith that digital technology will inevitably make things better, even if “better” is never precisely defined. (p. 7) … cyberlibertarianism as it is practiced across the political spectrum can be summarized into a single, paradoxical tenet: mass adoption of ubiquitous computerization produces social and political freedom. Therefore, in the name of freedom, this story goes, society has no choice about whether to exercise its power by any means other than markets (or market-like mechanisms). The greatest tool to produce freedom in our time, then, requires us to abandon all nonmarket forms of political power (p. 23)… Cyberlibertarianism functions as a less explicit outer shell of neoliberalism.(p. 30)
Golumbia quotes my old friend Paulina Borsook’s book Cyberselfish from 2003 to drive at what Becker is also getting at in his entertaining book—that the political arguments for all these plainly insane ideas are rooted in the dysfunctional and stunted personalities of computer workers, people who prefer NOT to interact with other living, breathing humans if they can just push a button or touch a screen. People who are often lonely, atomized, and bitter, not infrequently involuntarily celibate.
In contrast to political technolibertarianism, what [Paulina] Borsook calls philosophical technolibertarianism is a “scary, psychologically brittle, prepolitical” phenomenon that “bespeaks a lack of human connection and a discomfort with the core of what many of us consider it means to be human.” Because “computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be,” she writes, these philosophical or lifestyle technolibertarians “make a philosophy out of a personality defect.” this is the primary political-psychological substrate out of which cyberlibertarianism is built; its very incoherence is what marks it as less a belief system and more an ideology that does not understand its own parameters and foundations. (p. 10) …
After hundreds of pages dissecting the convoluted manipulations of right-wing politicians and tech proponents (even such ostensibly left liberal writers as Cory Doctorow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Golumbia comes back to facing the people and their flawed ideas shaping the world being thrust on us:
These thinkers, who tend to come from computer science and engineering, have at best threadbare accounts of core concepts like “feeling,” “knowing,” and “thinking.” Instead, they assume that “processing rules algorithmically” is equivalent to all these other concepts. In some cases it seems right to see in this assumption a real hatred for the non-algorithmic parts of human beings (as well as other living beings that we guess possess some form of consciousness, especially the higher mammals). It is no accident that one of the positions in recent philosophy associated with this way of thinking is called “eliminative materials,” a program of reduction that suggests that in some future version of science, all the messy parts of human consciousness will be understood in mechanistic terms. (p. 378) … This sub-rosa account of superior intelligence rooted in quantifiable measures like IQ is why I and others have suggested that the dream of AGI has much in common with white supremacy. Further, AGI in this extended, nonacademic form has more than a suggestion of messianic religion. When AGI arises, it will not simply be another human-like mind in the world. Instead, it will be vastly smarter than us, and therefore vastly superior. This will produce an epistemic and cultural crisis. For all intents and purposes, a god will have been created. This is a bizarre assumption to find at the heart of a community that prides itself on rational thought. (p. 379)
I’m going to save a lot of this argument for my next post, where I try to explore what is happening in terms of the wider political economy, the current discussion of capitalism and its reproduction, feudalism, rentierism, etc. But I will give Becker his final word, which I came upon towards the end of his book and it was a pleasant surprise.
The fact that our society allows the existence of billionaires is the fundamental problem at the core of this book. They’re the reason this is a polemic rather than a quirky tour of wacky ideas. Without billionaires, fringe philosophies like rationalism and effective accelerationism would stay on the fringe, rather than being pulled into the mainstream through the reality-warping power of concentrated wealth. (p. 287)
Sticker on a nearby pole.
That’s it for now.
And here’s my current podcast favorites:
Harry Shearer’s “Le Show”; I regularly follow Paris Marx at “Tech Won’t Save Us” and his newer collaboration with Brian Merchant on “System Crash”; “This Machine Kills” for deep smart analysis of tech, economics, politics and sometimes sci-fi!; “The Fucking News” is a dose of hilarious acerbic summaries every day on the news; “Better Offline” is Ed Zitron’s wild rants and surprisingly good journalism on the empty business model of AI; “The Nerd Reich” is Gil Doran’s excellent and penetrating coverage of the technofascist takeover; “Start Making Sense” from Jon Wiener at the Nation remains a thoughtful if annoyingly left-liberal podcast; “Doomloop Dispatch” on Bay Area politics is up and down, but D. Scot Miller is always insightful; “Dystopia Now” on the insanity of the technofascist oligarchy; “East Bay Yesterday” on history and culture and politics of the broader East Bay; David Palumbo-Liu’s very thoughtful and deep “Speaking Out of Place”; “Upstream” the formerly anarchist Schumacherian alt-econ podcast that is increasingly sympathetic to state socialisms; “Organized Money” features Matt Stoller’s anti-monopoly work; “Lever Time” is David Sirota’s leftish news site; “Future Histories International” is a serious Dutch Marxist economics and history podcast; “Amicus” is Dahlia Lithwick’s earnestly pro-law podcast on the Supreme Court and increasingly the collapse of the legal system; “The Dig” is Daniel Denver’s incredibly long and indepth interviews with leftwing thinkers; “Emergence Magazine” is the podcast of the same publication which from time to time has amazing content; “Behind the News” is Doug Henwood’s usually smart political analysis and interviews; “Against The Grain” is C.S. Soong and Sasha Lilley interviewing authors for an hour about politics, history, anthropology etc.; “404 Media” are more smart tech journos with their independent site;… I can’t keep up with all these but I drop in and out of all of them semi-regularly… send recommendations if you have any!
June 14, 2025, last word.
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