Don’t Stand in the Way of Historic Abundance, Unstaunchable Joy, Unbridled Hilarity, Salvific Ease, Inviolable Cleanliness, and Supernumerary Leisure!
Hug Your Local Data Center!
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Some Americans Quaintly Say: “There is No Inevitability As Long as There is a Willingness to Contemplate What is Happening.” We Say: “Don’t Fall for Luddite Purity Dreams, Toxic Idealism, and all that Free Will Fiddle Faddle!” Cultivating a Deep Sense of Personal Responsibility for the Children and Future Generations Will Only Leave Us Vulnerable to Chinaman! And Please Remember: Broad Societal Forces Cannot Be Shaped, Only Managed! Empirical Research Citing Multiple Scholars in Leading-Edge Journals Demonstrates that “Free Will” is Actually Illusory Anyways! So Don’t Tie Yourself in Knots!
Plus, We Mustn’t Hurt the Economy, Silly! Some of Us Gotta Lotta Chedda Ridin’ on this Bet!
And Don’t Forget: Your Precious Retirement Savings Are Now Vulnerably Entangled with Us, Invested as They Are in Various Tech Stocks!
And Don’t You Want a Cure for Cancer or Are You Another Unlawful Anti-Tech Extremist?
(Behind Me, Satan!)
[…]
Please Hold Onto Division with Your Teeth! Please Cleave Close to the Baneful Effects of the Spirit of Party, to the Old Political Categories that No Longer Serve Us! Please Don’t Realize that the Society-Sponsored Prejudice that is Partisan Hatred is an Impediment to Addressing the Root of Our Unwellness!
[…]
Some Say that an Organism that Kills Its Environment, Kills Itself. That is Gratuitous Nonsense. You Know That. Please Accept the Maximum of Physical Devastation Accompanied by the Minimum of Human Meaning. Please Accept the Denial of Free Will Which Is Involved in the Dogma of Inevitable Progress. Support Us as We Continue to Apply Technological Solutions to Spiritual Problems.
Do Not Interrupt This Blind Momentum. Do Not Make of Your Life a Counter-Friction to Stop the Machine. No. That Is Not Your Job. That Is Not Your Role.
Holyyy sheet, Teddy Macker. That was fuckin’ righteous, bro. Even I who touch not the AI for any purpose am apt to throw in disclaimers about “good uses” of it. Oh, but my heart lies here with the Mad Farmer undertones.
It also reminded me of something else Wendell Berry once reminded us, back in 1977: that our problems have nothing to do with scarcity or energy or computing power but with “moral ignorance and weakness of character”:
But is work something that we have a right to escape? And can we escape it with impunity? We are probably the first entire people ever to think so. All the ancient wisdom that has come down to us counsels otherwise. It tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis—only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.
Thus we can see growing out of our history a condition that is physically dangerous, morally repugnant, ugly. Contrary to the blandishments of the salesmen, it is not particularly comfortable or happy. It is not even affluent in any meaningful sense, because its abundance is dependent on sources that are being rapidly exhausted by its methods. To see these things is to come up against the question: Then what is desirable?
One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely. This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don’t know how to use energy, or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy. Nuclear power, if we are to believe its advocates, is presumably going to be well used by the same mentality that has egregiously devalued and misapplied man- and womanpower. If we had an unlimited supply of solar or wind power, we would use that destructively, too, for the same reasons.
But, I feel the need to add, the truth is that I have no idea where the lines are. I mean, I can — and dammit I do! — draw my own lines in the sand. But I don’t know who’s who, I don’t know who the mad farmer people are. The good people of my hometown recently shot down a 180-day moratorium on large projects, which was inspired by — but even if passed would not have affected — the building of an Amazon distribution center there. (Contra that article, there was not much pushback. Chris Stonesifer, who circulated a petition for the moratorium, was accused of wasting $3,000 in taxpayer funded lawyer fees and encouraging “government regulation.”)
If I think about it for a minute while I sip this coffee, I guess it shouldn’t really surprise me. This blog is littered with quotes and screeds and sentiments reflecting this conundrum: that many of the people who still know how to grow a potato have no problem with Amazon warehouses and data centers. Our problem is not about energy or scarcity; it’s moral ignorance and weakness of character. And that’s a line that runs through us all.