A Short and Succinct Four-Point Argument For Why You Should Never Use AI At All For Anything Ever and Actively Do Everything You Can to Prevent the US Government From Supporting It in Any Way

[I have written about and against AI before, pointing out that the underlying technology and cultural orientation are nothing new, and arguing that AI is a last desperate attempt for the tech industry to save their bloated techno-salvationist bureaucracies. However, I admit that both of those pieces are very long and hard to follow, especially in the age of AI. 

Hence, I have produced the present piece, in which I make four straightforward points about why you shouldn't use AI while also including images from "the Funnies," which I am reliably informed that everyone loves (the year is 1967), for popular appeal.

Before reading the following, however, a clarification is necessary:"AI" in contemporary usage is not a descriptive term for a new technology, but an advertising term for an essentially political program of reallocating massive economic and social resources toward developing and finding applications for and forcing large-scale use of a heterogenous range of pre-existing digital technologies, products, and services. 

Hence, the question "are you for or against AI?" is not "do you in the abstract support the further development of digital technology?" but "do you support this political program?": or more immediately "do you think that the present or future achievements of this program in fact and on the whole justify the costs?" To be unable to ask this question, as I pointed out, is to be insane.]

Point 1: AI will never be profitable enough to justify the private investments made in it.

Argument 1.1: No LLM product or data center has as yet generated a profit purely on the basis of consumer and corporate usage, as opposed to investments or circular financing. Nevertheless, AI investment is scheduled to exceed 1 trillion dollars in 2026 alone. The scale differential between zero profit and trillions in investment makes it nearly impossible for the former to ever catch up with the latter for basic mathematical reasons. 

Argument 1.2: The intrinsic nature of LLMs makes them processing-heavy and therefore expensive even in carrying out simple tasks. Increases in processing power in chips have already reached a plateau, and the chips themselves require rare materials and can only be made in a few locations. Hence, the technology will continue to be very expensive for the foreseeable future. 

Argument 1.3: LLMs are inherently limited to automating tasks that are in and of themselves either superfluous to making a profit or not all that expensive. In itself, human labor is cheap and will likely always be cheaper than LLM usage at scale and for the overwhelming majority of tasks. 

Point 2: Given its lack of profitability, the only way AI development can continue on anything approaching its current scale is on the basis of enormous government investment.

Argument 2.1: The current hyper-financialized economy is ultimately structured by profit, if not for corporations at least for investors. Sooner or later, AI investment without returns will lead to a market crash and a pullback on investment into AI. 

Argument 2.2: The only institution that regularly invests AI-scale capital without any financial return on investment at all is the government. 

Argument 2.3: The use cases for AI include present priorities of the US government in which it regularly invests large amounts of money. These include most prominently military technology and mass surveillance.

Argument 2.4: The US government has been the main driver behind the current AI boom both through favorable regulation and active investment.

Point 3: The only feasible use case for mass-scale long-term government-funded AI is surveillance and murder.

Argument 3.1: Over the past decades, the US government has built a remarkable surveillance and data gathering operation. The main obstacle to the utility of mass surveillance and big data for government purposes is the difficulty of sorting through so much information and arranging it into useful and clear and short and actionable narratives. But this is in fact the one thing that LLMs are consistently good at. 

Argument 3.2: Over the past decades, the world has entered a new era of drone warfare, exemplified by the Russia-Ukraine War and the Iran War. Large-scale drone manufacturing requires development in magnet, battery, and chip technologies. The AI boom involves in part targeted development of some of these technologies.

Argument 3.3: One of the main limiters for drone warfare has become the ability to jam remote-controlled drones or even hack into them. This has led to a significant push in the direction of so-called "autonomous" drones with the ability to choose targets and carry out attacks largely on their own, as well as swarming drones operating in sync with each other. Both require sophisticated software.

Argument 3.4: Even non-autonomous drones lead to a vast multiplication of targets; the same is true even for the current military trend towards long-range targeted air bombing with manned aircraft. Selecting targets rapidly enough to keep up with operational requests requires the processing of large amounts of information and the weighting and determining of threats ad hoc and at scale. LLMs are again a technology adept at processing large amounts of information and producing an outcome based on it.

Argument 3.5: The US military and DoD have become a leading investor in AI technology over the past year, with the head of the Department of Energy declaring it a "new Manhattan project." 

Point 4: The social, political, and creative effects of mass-scale long-term government-funded AI are and always will be overwhelmingly negative and fall most heavily on the poor and vulnerable.

Argument 4.1: Most if not all military AI uses are unethical in and of themselves, since they involve violations of privacy and the waging of war and taking of life irresponsibly and unjustly. 

Argument 4.2: AI Chatbots have already provably caused suicides and driven people mad by forming quasi-social or romantic relationships with them. 

Argument 4.3: AI tools have already deprived numerous students of education by allowing them to automate most aspects of schooling. 

Argument 4.4: AI tools have already seriously degraded the quality of American visual art, film, television, and even corporate graphic design. 

Argument 4.5: By their very nature, LLMs cannot be entirely controlled or predicted, and will always be prone to "hallucination" of various sorts. This has already caused damage in many ways, from spreading false information to hacking networks to causing suicides to committing economic fraud. Militarized AI systems would be able to cause untold destruction.

Argument 4.6: The build-out of data centers has already caused environmental damage, raised energy costs, increased inflation, created noise and other pollution, and failed to produce jobs. Current plans call for an exponential growth of data centers, which would have even more drastic effects.

 

Ergo: You Should Never Use AI At All For Anything Ever and Actively Do Everything You Can to Prevent the US Government From Supporting It in Any Way. QED.

Short Story: Election Day

Election Day

“It’s election day today…will you do your duty?”

“Of course, monsieur,” Farouk said, bending slightly over Mr. Wedgewood as he slid the gold-enameled pot of Turkish coffee onto the bone-white saucer atop the white-and-silver tablecloth with a single white-gloved hand. With his other hand, he carefully set the white sugar bowl down to the right of the saucer, with the centers aligned, then laid the silver sugar spoon on top of it at a precise 220-degree angle.

Farouk was a tall, slightly stooped man with a long thin face wrinkled like a raisin under a round head covered in tightly-packed, jet-black curls. Customers often asked him if he dyed his hair; each time they did, he would smile primly, pressing his thin lips together, and not answer. They also often asked him how old he was: each time they did, he would open his lips, revealing carefully-polished teeth, and say, “Forty-five, monsieur.” Then he would chuckle once–a quiet, rich noise from deep in his throat–and continue his rounds. These moments were some of the happiest in his days.

But Farouk would get no such pleasure today. “I’m sure you know what’s at stake this election,” Mr. Wedgewood said, eyeing him a little coldly from behind his OmniGlasses, and not picking up the cup. He was a rather corpulent man of fifty or so, with dark skin and a totally bald head that he ran his fingers over frequently, as though searching for his missing hairs. “If the Neo-Revanchists are able to get the Presidency this time…well, that’s it for Democracy. If you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention.”

“Yes, monsieur,” Farouk said, smoothing out a wrinkled spot in the tablecloth. “Would monsieur care for one of his usual Pistachio Creams?” He avoided looking into Mr. Wedgewood’s eyes: though Monsieur Beauvilliers had emphatically taught the importance of eye contact with customers, Farouk had found the shifting melange of light and color that danced across the semi-transparent surface of the OmniGlasses gave him a headache. He stared as courteously as possible at Mr. Wedgewood’s star-shaped diamond lapel pin instead.

“I would think you would take this more seriously,” Mr. Wedgewood said, a little louder. “You know it’s people like you and I who will be the first to suffer.”

“Of course, monsieur,” Farouk said, bowing slightly and stepping away from the table. “Your humble servant will give you a moment to think about your order.”

He stepped over smartly to Mrs. Kumar’s table, bowing again before rapidly removing the remains of her cake and coffee. “Would Madam be wanting anything else today?” Surreptitiously, he brushed the cake crumbs off the tablecloth: Mrs. Kumar was a messy eater. 

He straightened up and waited; but after a moment realized that Mrs. Kumar had not noticed him. She was glued to the images and text on her OmniGlasses, her mouth slowly open to reveal yellowing teeth. “Madam?” he repeated, touching her lightly on the shoulder. “Would you care for anything else?”

“Dammit, Farouk,” she said, shoving him roughly away, so that he stumbled and nearly fell. “Can’t you see I’m upset? That damned Liberal Transhumanist Greenway is going to win the Presidency again.” She glared at the little screens again, her upper lip projecting, small tears glittering on the edges of her eyes. “Oh, damn you, bring me some of that what’s-em-you-call-it, the, um, you know, what I had last week.”

Farouk straightened up, then bowed once more for good measure. “I believe Madam is referring to our Vanilla-Cardamom Cream Cake. Madam has again made an excellent choice. Would Madam be wanting any tea or coffee with that?”

“You know what I want,” Mrs. Kumar said. “Just bring it to me, God damn you. Before these fucking do-gooders wipe me out and I have to start begging.”

“Yes, Madam, a rose-water tea as Madam prefers,” Farouk said. “Your humble servant will make sure it arrives promptly.”

No Artificial Intelligence!

No Artificial Intelligence!

Recently, and intermittently for the past eight months or so, there have been what are called "No Kings" Protests. In my own neck of the woods, these have mostly consisted of small knots of sexagenarians lining the major roadway by my house, holding signs that say things like "HONK IF YOU HATE ORANGE CHEETO." In other parts of the world, including in adjacent downtowns, these have been impressively large: by one account, the largest single-day protest in American history. Like all protests for the last five years, though, they have had no political effect whatsoever.

This is, of course, not an accident, but almost entirely by design: for they were not conceived of as political protests. America, in the year 2025, has never been a less political country: and has never had a less political population. Indeed, people today, in America, are more or less incapable of thinking in political terms, or engaging in politics as people throughout history would have understood it.

I am still, after five years, in deep mourning over the catastrophic failure of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was the greatest spontaneous mass movement of my lifetime, and it did not achieve a single lasting political gain. All it sufficed to do was to inspire a backlash: or, perhaps, merely give one more pretext for a deeper and growing perversity in American society, an obsession with the techniques of power and punishment, a willful blindness to the suffering of the weak, a overwhelming indifference to justice.

I don't know who came up with the name "No Kings": if they were not a GOP political operative, I certainly hope they were at least paid by one. This person did more good for Donald Trump and the Republican Party than anyone since Joe Biden: they deserve to be paid at least as much as Kamala Harris profited off her losing political campaign.

A protest is really only an effective political tool, and indeed really only a political act at all, when it is clearly and efficiently tailored for a single end: rapidly applying public and media pressure to existing rulers to get them to immediately carry out certain political acts or make certain political legal or policy changes which can be relatively rapidly achieved.

For this, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is an obvious exemplar. The NAACP carried on their campaign of popular protests and civil disobedience quite intelligently and tactically, deliberately picking fights that they could either win on the local level, or rapidly escalate and so translate into greater political leverage on a national level. In 1961, Martin Luther King made certain demands of the new President John F. Kennedy; when these demands were not granted, he accelerated protests to apply pressure. As a result, he was in the White House negotiating with the President of the United States less than six months after children faced dogs and fire-hoses on the streets of Birmingham. Less than a year later, the Civil Rights Act passed, after one of the most brilliant tactical acts of political pressure ever carried out, the March on Washington, sealed the deal. MLK and his allies certainly had their grand aspirations and utopian ideals; but they understood that protests were not a path to victory, let alone a decisive weapon, but in essence a negotiating tactic.

Another way to think about this issue would be to put in military terms: protests are a tactic, not a strategy. As a book I just read on the failures of the German Imperial military, Absolute Destruction, lays out very carefully, tactics is what wins battles, but only strategy wins wars: and strategy is inevitably and necessarily not merely military, but political. No war in human history has ever been aimed merely at military goals, or been won on the battlefield: rather, war is a political act aimed at achieving political goals, and military tactics, battles and advances and victories and defeats, merely one of many means for achieving those ends. As such, tactics are only effective where they are tailored to overall strategies and subordinated to clear political ends. 

Where militaries forget this, even tactical victories end up inevitably as means, not for victory, but for defeat. The Germans implemented a tactic of unrestricted submarine warfare in World War 1 knowing that it would inevitably bring America into the war against them: because it promised (and indeed in the short term delivered) a tactical victory over the British. Many wars have been lost by winning battles--including both World Wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the current Israeli war in Gaza.

The Black Lives Matters protests, to do them justice, were in their origins political: they were inspired by genuine, widespread anguish at the death of George Floyd, were aimed at applying pressure to politicians currently in power, and at achieving truly political ends of justice and reform. Where they failed was largely in translating their urge for justice into any widely acceptable and rapidly implementable policies and political acts. Most immediately, they lacked an agreed-upon, respected, politically astute leadership, capable of actually negotiating with those in power, as MLK and the NAACP had been able to do in the 1960s.

There was no Black Lives Matter Act passed by the national Congress; no Executive Order by the President; and precious little even in state laws or city ordinances. Instead, local governments and police departments, lacking guidance, took their own paths of least resistance, altering their policies and enforcement priorities and tactics in unwise ways to avoid conflict and bad PR--and then changed them back once the backlash set in.

The No Kings Protests have no chance of being anywhere near that effective. The BLM Movement had political ends capable, with sufficient political intelligence and will, of being translated into tangible political and legal reforms. The No Kings Protests do not. They have a slogan, a painfully parochial slogan that, if taken seriously, poses the entire movement, not as aiming at achieving any actual political goal, but merely at preventing a transformation of the United States government into a monarchy--a defensive act that is, depending on one's perspective, either fantastically early or much too late. 

Black Lives Matter started out as a hashtag: it was still a much better and more political slogan. It expressed a positive sentiment, one with obvious political implications, and demanded political action. No Kings expresses a negative sentiment, at best personal hatred of political figures, at worst a mere stubborn resistance to political trends.

I am told by reliable informants that numerous signs at a major northeastern protest seemed to be taking the theme literally--posing the entire protest in opposition to the British monarchy of the 18th century. As Chesterton pointed out, the American colonists were hopelessly parochial and out-of-date in thinking that the British monarchy still governed England, let alone America, in 1776, rather than committees of wig-wearing Whig businessmen. In 2025, one would think the American colonists would have figured this out. But perhaps they are right; perhaps it is King Charles II who still runs America today. After all, he is on television.

I am, of course, being facetious. I am well aware that, despite occasional whimsy, the "No Kings" slogan is merely an expression of a much more basic concept: commitment to democracy, by which people today mostly seem to mean respect for the orders issued by unelected federal judges. I am also aware that most of the genuine political energy of the movement is in fact generated by, and aimed at, expressing personal dislike for one or more current politician(s). Understood properly, that is the real significance even of the slogan: merely one more hazy way of expressing one's hatred for Donald J. Trump. 

Hating Donald Trump, alas, is not a political position. It is not even, in most of its typical forms, a political sentiment: which is why it mostly expresses itself, still, to this day, in various jokes about his skin color and hair and affect. It is most definitely not a clear legal or policy goal capable of being rapidly implemented by existing rulers: especially when those existing rulers are precisely the thing being protested.

Compare this, again, with a contemporary protest movement against an unpopular President currently going on in a country with many intellectual and cultural ties to the US--but a country that, almost uniquely in the Western world, still retains actual democratic politics. I mean, of course, France. As we speak, there are people on the streets all over France protesting Emmanuel Macron, the well-groomed, intellectually-pretentious, deferential-to-investment-bankers President of the Fifth Republic. These people, though, are not merely protesting Macron as an individual: his precious mannerisms, say, or his penchant for fashionable scarves, or his inability to communicate in plain, non-meandering sentences, or his marriage to his former high school teacher, or even his famously autocratic and insular way of making decisions. They are protesting actions, real and proposed, by his government. 

In particular, Macron insists that, to reduce France's deficit and attract outside investment, the government must cut pensions and raise the retirement age. The people affected by these actions, by and large, do not want this: and so they are in the streets protesting these government actions. Some of them, mostly on the Left, want billionaires to be taxed instead; some of them, mostly on the Right, want immigration restrictions. A large majority would prefer it if Macron resigned and allowed new Presidential elections to be held. But virtually all protesters are clear on what they individually and as a group want, and all parties agree completely on what they do not want, and view their protesting as a means to communicate that to the government. This is politics.

And it has, in fact, worked: after elections handed Macron a crushing defeat, and after multiple Prime Ministers were voted out by parties beholden to the protest movement for proposing budgets that slashed pensions and raised the retirement age, Macron has backed down. He has not resigned: but then, for the protestors, that was never the main thing. They have certain political goals they want to achieve; and they want rulers to either serve them, or get out of the way. And this, too, is politics.

Americans, once again, are the least political people on the planet. They do not view protests as political acts, aimed at communicating or achieving something: they mostly seem to view them as extensions of opinion polls and online product reviews, expressing their personal likes and dislikes for particular government services and service-providers. If a service-provider gets low enough ratings, they assume he will eventually, somehow simply disappear; but they have no particular plan for achieving that goal, let alone one into which protests fit in any obvious way. 

They also, increasingly, view protests as a social outlet, in a country that is getting lonelier and lonelier with each passing year. Themed protests have been a thing for a long time, rising in parallel with the inability of Millennials to attend actual themed parties. When I was in grad school, the local protest movement held rave protests and handed out ice-cream and snow-cones. Another way to process the "No Kings" hashtag, and accompanying puzzling anti-British content, is merely as a fun party theme. Protest King George! Wear your best wig and waistcoat! Pretend it's 1776! After all, it worked for the Tea Party--and progressive politics in 2025 are among other things an increasingly desperate copy of right-wing populist politics from ten years ago. 

I should be clear, however, that my disappointment in the "No Kings" protests is in no way based on an endorsement of Donald Trump. As President, Trump has done many unjust and monstrous things, and continues to do them: and it is eminently right for the populace to take action to stop him doing these things. I not only support protests with these ends: I encourage them. Nay, I demand them.

I very much support protests calling on Donald Trump to stop his campaign of mass deportation and deliberate terrorization of the immigrant population of America. I very much support protests calling on him to restore humanitarian funding to key projects in the developing world. I very much support protests calling on him to end the war in Gaza. I very much support protests calling on him not to let food stamp funding lapse on November 1st, plunging many American citizens into something approaching starvation.  I very much support protests calling on him to stop the wave of brutal repression meted out against the poor and homeless across America.

Certainly, some or all of these causes motivated many people who joined the No Kings Protest. Nevertheless, their voices were not heard; and their protest was in vain. Fearing apparently to offend anyone, we crammed a thousand disparate grievances against Trump, real and nonsensical alike, into one overall protest whose only publicly-accessible message was a statement against the symbols of 18th century Whig monarchy--a symbolic and political regime that has about as much to do with the actions of the American government in 2025 as the empire of Genghis Khan.

This is a proem, though, to another cause that I very much wish we could protest; a cause that has far more public and universal support than condemnation of deportations or even personal dislike of Donald Trump. It is also, importantly, a cause that could relatively easily achieve its goals given popular action.

This cause is, of course, the halting of the current AI technological regime and the economic and political dominance of so-called tech companies: who as we speak seem poised to crash the global economy and destroy the natural world for the sake of bad chatbot technology.

Don't Follow the News

[This is an old essay I wrote for a local Catholic publication a number of years ago. I am reposting it now for obvious reasons.]

Don’t Follow the News: A Manifesto

Don’t follow the news. Don’t watch it. Don’t listen to it. Don’t read it. Don’t engage with it. Don’t post about it or argue about it on social media. I have given this advice to friends, enemies, total strangers, Catholics, Protestants, and atheists. This is the most important advice I can give to Americans today.

Allow me to explain, in a somewhat roundabout and proverb-studded way, why I say this.

If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you’ve satisfied his hunger for a whole day, though, you’ve created a problem for all the people who also wanted to sell this man fish, or perhaps Hamburger Helper. Instead, try selling him a picture of a fish. When you come back to him ten minutes later, he will be even more desperate, even more fixated on fish, and his judgment will be even more impaired from the hunger. In short, he will be an even better customer than before. By the time the man finally dies of starvation a few months later, you will have had the opportunity to sell him an enormous number of pictures of fish, increasing the shareholder value of your publicly-traded fish media corporation to the greatest degree possible. Call this the economy.

A fool and his money are soon parted. Unfortunately, the money actually possessed by any given hungry and stupid man is finite. As an alternative to this system, consider one where a third party gives you money every time you manage to momentarily catch the man’s attention. Call this advertising.

There is nothing sadder than the death of a clown. A single clown, wearing the same outfit and performing the same set of tricks, possesses only a limited ability to catch and hold the same person’s attention. Also you have to pay the clown. Instead, consider getting people to send you pictures and videos and texts describing random things that may or may not be happening or have happened anywhere in the world. Using all of these, you should be able to attract the fool’s attention a great deal longer. Call this journalism.

Everyone is special. It turns out that not everything in your pile of random media is equally effective at catching and holding the fool’s attention. Perhaps you should consider constructing a robot to sort that pile into an infinity of smaller piles, each one associated algorithmically with a particular group of people. Use this robot’s findings to more effectively attract and hold your fool’s attention. Call this targeted advertising.

Sex sells. So does self-righteousness and homicidal rage. Thanks to your personal targeted advertising robot, you will soon discover that some types of content, and some types of human emotion, are more successful at attracting and holding your fool’s attention than others. Put simply, you want to be manipulating emotions that are easily activated, intense, overpowering, and self-reinforcing. You want to be able to hold up a picture and have your fool be instantly and intensely focused, resulting in a fool who is more pliant and receptive to similar content for all time thereafter. Call this, depending on the precise emotions targeted, pornography, advertising, political action, or the news.

Truth is stranger than fiction. It turns out that if you show a man a picture of his best friend being beaten to death by his oldest enemy, you will attract his attention very strongly. However, you will also produce any number of other highly incalculable effects, such as wailing and gnashing of teeth, intense depression, ritual acts of mourning, and so on, most of which stand in the way of attracting his attention again soon. Instead try showing him a picture of someone he has never met, who slightly resembles his best friend, being mildly to gravely inconvenienced by someone else he has never met, who has some random feature in common with his oldest enemy. It turns out that while this distant and possibly fictitious scenario produces a similar emotional reaction and gets the man’s attention just as effectively as a truthful account of a meaningful personal disaster, his reaction will be much more repeatable and manipulatable. Call this the news cycle.

Despair is the opiate of the masses. If you show someone a grave act of injustice happening to people they care about a few feet from them, odds are they will want to do something about it, whether that involves stopping the injustice in progress, punishing it, or perhaps creating a systemic societal revolution to prevent it from happening again. Show someone a grave act of injustice happening to perfect strangers half a world away, and they are much less likely to either want or be able to do anything about it. Show them five-hundred such injustices consecutively over the course of twenty-four hours, and they will enter a state of functional despair where the impulse to do anything meaningful in response to any injustice anywhere has totally disappeared. Minus hope, your fool’s reactions to injustice will become, as if by magic, shallow, manipulable, self-deluding, and selfish. Call this, depending on the personality of the man in question, either blackpill or entertainment.

It is expedient that one man should die for the people. Even when constantly subjected to injustices about which he can do nothing, your subject will still react to visual stimuli, building up a great deal of tension and anxiety and anger and stress. Given enough time, the man is capable of doing any number of regrettable things with these feelings, including acts of violence, rituals of mourning, psychological breakdowns, disengagement from mass media, religious conversion, or connection with other human beings. To stop these unprofitable trends in their tracks, do everything in your power to associate each and every injustice he is made to witness with groups of his fellow human beings. This will provide him with an outlet for his emotions, particularly if you can provide at the same time an arena where he can performatively and self-righteously condemn such people and be randomly cruel and hateful towards them. Find a way to monetize that, and call it social media.

Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards. Follow this process to its logical conclusion and you will have produced a society full of despairing, isolated individuals whose time, attention, and energy is totally and continually taken up with passively absorbing media that preys on their emotions and/or being randomly cruel to each other on the Internet. Meanwhile the stock market flourishes. Call this, in a final flourish of black humor, politics.

I repeat myself: nevertheless, don’t follow the news. Don’t follow the news because it’s trying to monopolize your attention for ad dollars. Don’t follow the news because most of what it shows you is either false or is deliberately designed to prevent you from doing anything about it. Don’t follow the news because it will consistently appeal to your basest instincts. Don’t follow the news because it will train you to be totally inactive and despairing in the face of injustice. Don’t follow the news because it will isolate you and teach you to hate your fellow human beings. 

A Catholic is called to live a virtuous life, a life in which through habitual action, aided by divine grace, his immediate, unthinking reactions to people, places, and things are more and more conformed to the true, the good, the beautiful, the just, and the charitable. A virtuous person does not react to injustice except so as to mourn it or work towards setting it right through  prayer and virtuous action. A virtuous Christian does not give himself over to hatred or contempt for fellow human beings, but works for their salvation through prayer and charitable action. All this requires, however, a great deal of training and retraining of our basic habits and affections. And this training requires, as its absolute sine qua non, that one not spend all one’s time and energy on a training regimen with precisely the opposite purpose.

I concede that it is not impossible to follow the news in a virtuous, charitable way. One can learn about evils happening a world away, and pray for those affected. One can learn about evils happening close to home, and work to correct them. To a limited degree. 

We live, however, in a society of addicts, and when dealing with addicts, moderate approaches are seldom effective. Which is why en masse, on balance, I would say to my fellow American Catholics: don’t follow the news. 

The 2024 Election

THE 2024 ELECTION

I went to the polls this past Wednesday to vote in the 2024 Election. 

I think we can all, regardless of our political beliefs, agree that this is the most important election of our lifetimes, perhaps in the entire history of our nation, even of the human race. Hence, I wanted to make sure to participate fully in the event by voting early.

The week before, I had received in the mail a missive from the pro-turnout Super-PAC "Democracy in Action." The ad featured a grainy photograph of me, taken apparently from across the street near my house, and pinned to an ordinary piece of lined paper. Above the photograph, scrawled in black marker, was the message: "IF YOU DO NOT VOTE WE WILL KILL YOUR FAMILY." 

Since the Pandemic, the roads I would ordinarily take to get to the polling site have been "Closed for Repair," blocked off with yellow tape and barbed wire and barricades and medical checkpoints. To get there now means a dangerous journey down the River; and as I lacked the requisite funds to hire the well-armored personnel transports that serve most voters in my generally upscale neighborhood, I had to make do with one of the "General Admission" voting ferries sponsored by Bain Capital, LP as part of a get-out-the-vote effort ultimately masterminded (according to Internet rumor) by Kamala Harris' husband's aunt's former accountant, now the CEO of an Albanian arms company with ties to the UAE. 

I set out just before dawn so as to arrive at the jetty in time for the scheduled 7:15 AM departure time; but as it turned out, the ferry was nearly three hours late, arriving just after 10 AM. When I first arrived at the jetty, there were only a few elderly women there, apparently Kamala Harris campaign volunteers, in oversized, lime-green t-shirts worn down to their ankles, clustered around a large pot of stew stirring and adding herbs from fanny packs around their waists. One of them offered me a cup of soup, but as I had already eaten breakfast I declined. 

After about half an hour, a few apparent voters arrived, one an old man dressed in rags, barefoot, with a long grizzled beard, wearing a MAGA hat on his head; the other a tall, thin young woman bundled up to her eyes in blue-tinted furs, who (after eagerly accepting a cup of soup) eyed me suspiciously and crossed to the far end of the jetty to sit crosslegged on the planks. The morning was cool and dim, and fog shrouded the banks all around us. From time to time, I pulled out and checked the sample ballot in my pocket, or sat and watched the huge, dark shapes moving in the water below. 

When the boat had still not arrived at 9:30, I found myself hungry once again, and belatedly approached the old women, who eyed me eagerly, licking their lips. "C-could I have some soup please?" I stammered. 

The tallest of the old women, with rank, black hair that might have been dyed, dipped a cup of the soup out of the cast-iron pot, began handing it to me, then stopped, her eyes going dark, and hissing out of suddenly pressed lips: "Which side are you on?" I said nothing, and after another moment she smiled again and handed me the cup of soup. There was no spoon.

The soup had been cooking on an open flame for hours, and by this time had something of the consistency of glue--but its pungent flavors of sage and rosemary reminded me irresistibly of long summer evenings on the patio at Luigi's Pizza, and I wolfed down the whole cup in a matter of minutes. 

A few minutes after 10 o'clock, the jetty was abruptly flooded with passengers, all, male and female, clad in the loose brown tunics and smocks typical of peasants in the lowlands, many with campaign buttons pinned onto the smocks, and all bearing pilgrim's staves and large rucksacks. A few led mules or donkeys, and all pointedly refused the old women's offer of soup. Some wandered sociably around the jetty from end to end, while others sat with their feet swinging off the end and throwing stones or pieces of bread from their rucksack into the water for the creatures below; but all talked loudly with each other about the election, the journey, and the latest poll forecasts and modeling from FiveThirtyEight. 

The young woman, meanwhile, had gotten up and fled to stand with the old women, who spoke to her and stroked her hair comfortingly while (almost imperceptibly) pulling off small pieces of it to add to their pot. 

A few minutes later, when the ferry at last came into sight, the assembled passengers broke into raucous applause, cheering and throwing their rucksacks and bits of bread into the air. The day was cool, dark, and misty, so at first the yellow light streaming from the ferry was so overwhelming that I had to shield my face with my hand.

The AI Revolution Already Took Place

 The AI Revolution Already Took Place

The most interesting thing about modernity is the degree to which it depends, for its basic functioning, on generating a constant sense of novelty. 

On such novelty depends not only such trifles as human life and livelihood, but also "the economy," "politics," and, perhaps most importantly of all, the ever-growing Internet-conspiracist-Take-Worker sector of the global economy.

To easily grasp what defines "modernity," I often point out to students that in Latin, as in most ancient languages, the term "new" normally has negative connotations--and can be otherwise translated as "strange" "rash" and even "revolutionary." In itself, this is far closer to a sort of human baseline response to novelty as such. Most ancient societies realized that "new things" were almost by definition disruptive things, things that created complications for the social networks and institutions they valued so highly and thus hardship and suffering and conflict. Families and institutions and Empires alike run on the old, and are thus largely and inevitably run by the old--especially in Rome, but increasingly in America as well. And as the recent disgusting wall-to-wall press coverage of the anniversary of overturning Roe v Wade reminds us, for institutions and established powers of all kinds, new things, and new people, always cause problems.

Merely saying that contemporary societies are the opposite of this, and regard novelty and the new as positive, though, is insufficient and somewhat deceptive. Certainly, modernity features any number of "progressive" narratives and theories and philosophies and theologies whereby what is new is always and by definition good, no matter what. Many popular works of progressive narrative and theory are, in fact, nearly comical in the degree of religious and moral fervor which they openly show and glory in the enormous conflict, social and familial disruption, and even violence that result from a given new trend, while still dogmatically insisting on that trend's goodness and the absolute moral necessity of embracing it and encouraging it and never questioning it at all. Yet even here, it would be easy to misunderstand the actual content and basis of the belief. 

To understand the history of the last few hundred years, one has to understand, first and foremost, that the negativity and conflict generated by modernity and modern trends is, in practically every case, not the result of "anti-modern" or "reactionary" or even "conservative" forces, but merely the inseparable twin and means of modernity itself. It is not, as one might expect, consistently and inevitably the progressive forces that advocate for novelty and portray it in positive terms, and the anti-progressive forces that portray it in negative terms. Rather, in almost every case, the novelty and its reaction are simultaneous and inseparable.

To give an obvious example, science-fiction taken as a whole is without a doubt a "progressive" and "modern" genre, yet the bread-and-butter of science fiction since its first days has been horror stories about technology and its negative consequences, demons and mad clones and evil androids and nuclear apocalypse and genetic engineering and Morlocks and erasing your family from the timeline. Frankenstein is the first modern science fiction novel precisely because it is nearly the first work of art to make extensive use of the terminology and concepts of modern science for primarily aesthetic purposes: and the aesthetic purposes to which it puts science are silence, distance, isolation, fear, and incalculable moral horror. 

Dystopia is not an opposite narrative mode to utopia, composed by different authors for contrary purposes. Nor is science horror opposite to science excitement. The Twilight Zone and Flash Gordon, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury and Ray Bradbury, George Orwell and L. Ron Hubbard, Gene Wolfe and Gene Wolfe, Star Trek and Black Mirror...all accept the radically new in science and technology as powerful and inevitable and beyond any rational control or regulation; all use this assumed reality both for aesthetic strangeness and horror and for aesthetic excitement and novelty and positivity. The same society, the same genre, even the same people produce both modes.

And in just the same way, a conspiracist or alarmist narrative about how a new technology or social trend will destroy the world is not, in practice, the opposite of a progressive or "pro-science" narrative about how a technology or social trend is "cool," must be embraced at all costs, and/or will save us all. The two are in most cases sponsored and paid for by the same tech companies, run in the same outlets, consumed by the same people, even at times created by the same people.

Again, there is a sense in which all this is distinctively modern, but also a sense in which it represents simply a universal human reaction to the truly and radically new, which always offers powers and possibilities and experiences and threats we have no prior experience with and so do not understand and so are not morally and intellectually equipped to handle, and so always to some extent moves us into an aesthetic space of excitement and horror and distance and alienation and strangeness. 

This is not in itself what makes modernity modern. What makes modernity modern is that both the "goodness" or "positivity" assigned to new things, and the "badness" or "negativity" assigned to new things, do not follow the typical senses of those words, which in most human languages and contexts emerge from morality and/or human comfort and/or prosperity and/or health and/or happiness and/or aesthetic preference. What defines modernity, rather, is precisely the sense that these novelties have truly and permanently and almost definitionally eluded the grasp of any human understanding or reason, and so cannot be properly categorized in terms of goodness or badness at all.

Hence, the concepts of goodness and badness applicable to these novelties end up representing something much closer to a metaphysical or definitional claim. What is new is good not in the sense in which, say, food or drink or shelter are good, or Star Trek Generations is good, but more in the sense in which a metaphysical principle or a law of physics or an ancient Mesopotamian god is good. Likewise, what is new is bad not in the sense in which, say, being mean to your sister is bad, or Marvel Avengers Infinity War Endgame is bad, but more in the sense in which a metaphysical principle may be bad in its implications for your own life, or a law of physics may cause you to fall unexpectedly off a cliff, or an ancient Mesopotamian god may wipe out your city and your family in an excess of spleen. Or, in other words, and in both cases, because it is fundamental, because it is inevitable, and/or because it is powerful. 

At the heart of modernity, then, is a kind of worship of inevitability and power as such, derived ultimately from a sort of immanentization into history of a metaphysical divinity transcending human reason and morality and identified with novelties good and bad. 

Here, though, is the problem with the worship of novelty, power, and/or inevitability as such. Metaphysical principles and laws of nature and even Mesopotamian deities are things that, by their nature, tend to be transcendent, not just temporarily but permanently beyond our reach and comprehension. Novelty, power, and inevitability, on the other hand, are things that can inhere in anything and everything, and things that by their inmost nature do not have much of a shelf-life. Something is divine forever; it can only be novel for a few minutes or a few days or perhaps a few years at best.

Most new things are only new in one respect, and then not new for very long; most inevitable things are not really inevitable at all, only very probable, and in constant danger of becoming un-inevitable; powerful things are only powerful to some limited degree, and usually only from one angle or one context. As fundamentally aesthetic phenomena, all suffer enormously from the basic hedonic treadmill effect. Maintaining a sense of novelty or power or inevitability at the center of a personality or a culture, then, requires an enormous and constant expenditure of time and attention and resources to find these qualities, demonstrate them, and finally give up on the current entity and start the process all over again.

And then, of course, even then most of the time finding actual genuine novelty power or inevitability is too hard, and in practice people simply settle for the aesthetic effects that suggest it.