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Friday
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, the Silicon Valley tech bros who support Donald Trump have more surprises for us. The other day the New York Times breathlessly reported,
Meta is said to be preparing to unveil an A.I. lab dedicated to a hypothetical system that exceeds the powers of the human brain
To which Tobias Wilson-Bates, my English professor son who studies A.I., replied with a literary passage you’re probably can identify:
Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.
Not too much blessing—in fact, mostly undiluted cursing—occurs in Victor Frankenstein’s subsequent account of his technological breakthrough. For instance, here’s what his creation has to say:
“Hateful day when I received life!” I exclaimed in agony. “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?”
There’s no sign that Mark Zuckerberg has any qualms about what he’s attempting, and thanks to Greg Olear at the substack blog Prevail, I now have a word for what he’s up to—accelerationism—which Olear succinctly sums up as, “All gas, no brakes.”
Andy Beckett, British historian and Guardian journalist, describes the accelerationist philosophy:
Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified—either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists favor automation. They favor the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favor the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They often believe that social and political upheaval has a value in itself.
Beckett observes that the accelerationists run afoul of
conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world.
They also don’t appear interested in Mary Shelley’s warning.
Speaking for the environment, Olear quotes Lady Macbeth, employing sarcasm to reveal accelerationism’s consequences:
What is the accelerationist attitude toward climate change? In the words of Lady Macbeth, “If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly.” Since humans are going to eventually destroy the earth’s habitability regardless, we might as well get a move on. Only when we’ve extracted all the fossil fuels from the ground, and all the “raw earth” minerals we need for our technological devices, will we understand what to do next. Therefore, accelerate the melting of the icecaps so we can drill baby drill in the Arctic Ocean! (To understand why Trump and Vance are so fixated on Greenland, just look at a map.) And if a lot of peasants and serfs and hoi polloi bite the dust in the process, so be it; we can always make more.
Olear points out that the Italian Futurists in the first decade of the 20th century embraced an early version of accelerationism and finds it no surprise that some of them would go on to embrace Mussolini fascism. In the famous 1909 Futurist manifesto, written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Olear notes,
we find the seeds of the “manosphere” movement and the war on “wokeness,” inchoate accelerationism, and the inherent cruelty of a cult that values technology more than individual human life.
Marinetti’s manifesto called for poets to “sing the love of danger, the habit of energy, and the strength of daring,” and said that “the essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolution.” He embraced the beauty of the automobile, asserting that it is our version of ancient Greek statuary:
We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed. A racecar adorned with great tail-pipes like serpents with explosive breath, a roaring sports car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
While some of Mainetti’s points don’t sound too bad–for instance, that the poet “must spend himself with warmth, glamour, and prodigality to enhance the fervent urgency of the primordial elements”–the manifesto gets darker as it goes along. Article #9 declares, “We glorify war—the only true antidote for the world—and with it, militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman.” In article #10 we read, “We want to demolish museums and libraries, and oppose morality, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian cowardice.”
Recall that World War I is only five years in the future, followed immediately by Mussolini’s rise. Olear notes that Marinetti, “like his friend Ezra Pound, wound up being an apologist for autocracy and a tool of the totalitarian state.”
“Small wonder, he concludes, “the titans of Silicon Valley lined up behind Trump at the inauguration.”
Olear is careful to note that he is not against technological innovation and that science and religion don’t have to be yolked to an authoritarian agenda. For that matter, there can be anti-technocratic authoritarianism, as we see in Robert Kennedy’s war against vaccines, one of science’s greatest gifts to humanity. There were also Nazi environmentalists dreaming of pure nature. No less than accelerationism, extremist ideology, whether right or left, strips human beings of their humanity.
Novels like Frankenstein, by contrast, honor our humanity. Mary Shelley has given us a powerful forum to explore the moral, social, and political dimensions of our choices. In the light of such understanding, we stand a better chance of making wise decisions.
All gas and no braking, on the other hand, allows no room for reflection.
