After the Future

Worshipping in the Temple of the Invisible Hand

“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism,” Chiang told me. “And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.”

Let me offer an addendum here: There is plenty to worry about when the state controls technology, too. The ends that governments could turn A.I. toward — and, in many cases, already have — make the blood run cold.

I might, for that reason, alter Chiang’s comment one more time: Most fears about capitalism are best understood as fears about our inability to regulate capitalism.

--Ezra Klein

We Americans won't do anything do anything to constrain A.I. because Technocapitalism does not serve us, but we it. We Americans are worshippers in the cult of the Invisible Hand, and it is a jealous god that will have no other gods beside it. All our blessings derive from our being a Nation most servile to this god and so most favored by it. And we dare not risk angering it, for surely for such sacrilege we will be cast out of the Temple and be forever forsaken. 

All the King's Horses, etc.

Can anybody put Humpty Dumpty back together again?  Sure secession would be crazy and irrational, but it was in 1861 as well. Lots of smart people then, Lincoln included, thought that saner heads would prevail. They didn't. 

On Election Day last year I wrote:

I've been talking for years about how something has to give, how the basic compromises that held things together must break apart. The framework has always been fragile and the pressure has been building for years, at least since the Bush administration disasters in Iraq and the financial meltdown, but really since Reagan's fusion of Hamiltonian financial elitism with Jacksonian rural grievance that made the disasters of '01, '03, and '08 all but inevitable. And Reagan's Republican Neoliberalism was a reaction against the New Deal, which was a Democratic/Jacksonian reaction to the classical laissez-fair, Republican/Hamiltonian liberalism of the Robber Barons who emerged out of the Civil War, and the Civil War traces back to the North-South compromises made during the founding, which we're still fighting about today in this interminably irresolvable culture war between Hamiltonians and Jacksonians.

The Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian rift is largely cultural, but the deep underlying problem is about class and correlative issues regarding wealth and power distribution. But the class distinctions get suppressed because of the peculiar way party affiliation has worked in this country. FDR's New Deal coalition required an alliance of culturally conservative Southerners to work together with progressive Northerners in a coalition that required leaving Blacks out. And Obama's coalition required an alliance between Blacks and Liberal Cosmopolitans that leaves White working class folks out. And so we fight not about wealth and power distribution, but about cultural grievance. Nothing could please the 1% more. 

But if the real problems are not about such grievances but about power and wealth distribution, the solution lies in creating forming some sense of multi-racial solidarity that overcomes cultural grievances and focuses instead on wealth and power disparities. The Left seems unable to understand that anymore because the Left has come possess the values and the interests of the privileged, and so they choose to fight an unwinnable culture war about grievances that costs them nothing rather than fight a justice-inspired, winnable class war that might cost them a little. And so the great bulk of Americans who have zero sympathy for Left cosmopolitan values will very likely continue to move toward a right populism that will eventually lead to illiberalism and to the complete suppression of cosmopolitan Left values. Humpty will be put together again, but he'll be wearing a MAGA hat. 

It was a primarily a culture war in the 1850s as well, and while the North won eventually on the battlefield, they never won hearts and minds. The U.S. has been making the same stupid mistake over and over again in thinking that military victory is the only really important one. Didn't it work in Japan and Germany? So why not in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? This kind of cookie cutter mentality typifies Liberal thinking. It always has done and probably always will be. A guy like Charles Sumner really believed that the South would just say, "Ok. We lost. Now we'll be good boys and girls just like you Yankees want us to be."

The naivete of it is astonishing, and so as then when after Reconstruction North and South just agreed to disagree, so now will we now eventually learn the lesson that fundamental cultural differences cannot be resolved through zero/sum conflict. But solidarity of the bottom 80% can win the class war if anybody were really serious about rectifying the astonishing maldistribution of wealth and power in this country. But nobody is really serious anymore. Everybody just wants to perform seriousness for other serious people who are "serious" as they are. The Left is just as performative in its way as the MAGA folks were performative in their storming of the capitol on J6. Nobody wants to actually get anything done. Everybody wants to focus on how nobody respects them. Everybody, left and right, seems stuck in Middle School. Everybody, when push comes to shove, only really cares about increasing their presence on social media.  

I exaggerate to make a point. Not "everybody" is like this, but you know what I mean. Nevertheless, it seems pointless to write about politics anymore, and that's partly why I've had little to say about it recently. What's the point when "nobody" really seems to understand what the real business of politics is. Everybody wants to fight about culture and identity, and it's as stupid as the Catholics fighting the Protestants in Ireland, and the Greeks fighting the Turks in Cyprus, the Israelis fighting the Palestinians in Israel, and the Hindus fighting the Muslims in India. What we're doing in the country is no saner or smarter, and even the smartest people, especially young people in media, don't seem to get that.

In the end it always comes down to people just agreeing to disagree about their cultural differences and then finding common ground to work together to solve real problems. Is that end in sight?

What It Means to be on the Left

To be on the Left used to mean to be primarily concerned about economic justice, to be pro-worker, to see the biggest problem in American society as the astonishingly inequitable distribution of wealth and the disproportionate power and influence of the wealthy. So it was interesting to me to read this morning in Thomas Edsall's column about how my idea of what it means to be Left hardly figures into some political scientists' idea of it any more. For instance: 

Along similar lines, Viviana Rivera-Burgos, a political scientist at Baruch College of the City University of New York, pointed out how much the liberal agenda has transformed in a relatively short time:

Issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights, and immigration have become important ideological cleavages in the past 40 years or so. Being a liberal today means you’re most likely pro-choice, pro-same-sex marriage, pro-expansion of LGBTQ+ rights, and anti-restrictive or punitive immigration laws. These issue positions couldn’t be inferred based on someone’s ideology alone 40 years ago.

Economic justice doesn't even make it to the list. Are cultural/identitarinan politics the only things that matter now on the Left? Is there any wonder Democrats are hemorrhaging working class voters, especially those with traditional values? 

The column makes clear that this kind of cultural liberalism is typical of affluent, educated white folks, not rank-and-file Black and Hispanic folks. This is a completely ineffectual, irrational politics of white Liberal guilt born at best from naive good intentions that inevitably results in the bad guys continuing to do as they please without repercussions.  

Compassion for the marginalized cannot be effectively politicized, and when politicized is counterproductive to the degree that it traffics in the tactics of shame. Real compassion can't be forced; it can only be inspired heart by heart and usually through interpersonal connection.

Politics is about power, and the culture war is being waged on behalf of factions that are relatively speaking powerless. Both belligerents misidentify who should be their enemies--if they had a lick of sense they'd realize they are those who wield real power because of their disproportionate wealth. It would be more likely that those in opposing culture-war factions would learn to respect and understand one another if they got to know one another better as comrades in arms working together in common cause for good, old-fashioned economic justice.

But we know that won't happen. Why? Because identity is proof of existence, and because hardly anybody knows who they are in any deep interior, intrinsic sense, they must put these extrinsic identifiers on their flag and go to battle waving it aloft in the hopes that in obliterating their enemy they will prove to themselves that they exist. This is what identitarian politics is at bottom--a primitive prestige battle where the outcome is zero/sum. If we don't win our enemy will annihilate us, so we must annihilate them. It's not true, of course, but that doesn't matter.