Are we human or are we tech bros?

grief, enchantment and spotting the -fascist lurking in your eco-

Richard Powers ends The Overstory with a vision of the branching structure of organic reality fusing with the branching structure of the digital world. In Bewilderment (a gut-punch FYI) we find a planet dreamt up by father and son entirely covered by a solar array under which the people have entombed themselves inside a vast digital reality. And in his most recent book Playground, a devotion to the World’s ocean, the dream of defying death with tech threads the book’s foundational friendship. Each of these fragments brings the weird ideologies swirling the epicentre of today’s hypercapitalist death march to mainstream attention.

The old 90s phrase ‘the california ideology’ naming a blend of libertarianism and tech utopianism, doesn’t cut it today. The most current label is TESCREAL, a clunky acronym that covers things you might have heard of, like Effective Altruism (the EA), and things you might not have, like Extropianism (the E). In broad strokes TESCREAL names a convergence of ideas around a utopian future of radical abundance facilitated by technology, the colonisation of the entire universe, becoming immortal and reengineering humanity via generalised artificial intelligence. And although it’s outlandish it’s not exactly fringe on the west coast of the US. Elon Musk is publicly on board with it. And, despite some minor disagreements, most of the silicon elite (think Bezos, Zuckerberg etc) share it.

This vision leads most to a brutal and cruel politics: institutions of collective care (unions say) are seen as evil obstacles to its unfolding; only ruthless, unimpeded competition can motivate tech breakthroughs; and some go as far as to say that the death of billions of people today could be morally justified if it allowed for the eventual colonisation of space. 

Much of this ideology, especially the parts relating to Transhumanism (the T in TESCREAL) and the merging of humans and technology, have undeniable roots in the eugenics movement. As Sarah Myers West points out, Silicon Valley was founded by a eugenicist, and AI research has been consistently funded by eugenicists. Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres also note that the obsession with IQ, the perfectability of humans, and the proximity to contemporary eugenicists like Douglas Murray suggest these historical roots have survived well into the 21st century. 

So far so ordinary. Some class enemies have some dangerous views about our future. What else is new? 

Well, lately I’ve been wondering just how far out these views really are. The work of Richard Powers is telling. After all, The Overstory has sold over a million copies, is in its tenth print and has meant many of us never look at trees the same. Meanwhile, it closes with a seemingly hopeful vision of a cybernetic fusion of forest and fibreoptic. At the same time, Playground is propelled by the tension and continuity between those who dream of an AI-mediated libertarian metal world, and those who seek a simpler stasis connected to the rhythms and beauty of the land, as if there is some subterranean connection between these worldviews that is worth exploring.

If you go back, these conflicting visions used to share a milieu. Today’s visions of a global AI find their origins in the 1955 book The Phenomenon of Man in which Pierre Teilhard frames the emergence of human self-awareness as the beginning of a process of planetary consciousness. Beating Gaia theory and 60s notions of superminds by a decade, he proclaimed that all our anguish and intelligence existed to awaken the rest of nature. We would, with the help of technology integrate human consciousness into a universal superorganism, and facilitate a sort of grand homecoming.

This story -framing the work of engineers as priests advancing a divine imperative- proved popular amongst the tech bros for obvious reasons. In its contemporary form, the work of theoretical physicist Jeremy England is invoked to argue that the second law of thermodynamics -that entropy (the diffusion of energy) will increase until it reaches a maximum- represents the “will of the universe” making it the duty of carbon-based life forms to reproduce, spread and consume as much energy as we can. As one engineer claims, by creating artificial general intelligence, leaving the solar system, and colonising the universe in our trillions, we will bring about the ultimate desire of the universe towards consciousness via a “technocapital singularity”.

Far out yes, but they, like us, derive much of this view from the values of the 1960s counterculture, a yearning for decentralisation, freedom, and animacy; they, like us, find the universe to be animate and desirous; they, like us, long to dissolve the enlightenment distinction between Nature and Culture in favour of a fluidity between humans, our tools, and our living world. 

Knowing this renders a politics based solely on collective re-enchantment less convincing. The machine men are enchanted enough thank you very much. They have breached the gate between Nature and Culture, and are passing strange things through. 

In some obscure ways, we’ve been warned about this. Andreas Malm, that arch neo-Marxist Swede, wrote very clearly in 2018 that the collapsing of the Nature/Culture binary wasn’t the panacea many people thought it was. This binary, he argued, serves an important purpose to delineate agency and clarify what it is we want. I don’t fully agree with Malm. (Neera M. Singh, a geographer, makes the good point that emancipatory politics rooted in Black and Indigenous ways of thinking and being in the world are often dependent on collapsing this binary.) But this silicon ideology does point to the troubling way that ecological thought can be twisted into a more sinister, fascistic worldview (not a totally new idea here).

Growing up in a house where singularitarianism (the S in TESCREAL) was the closest thing we had to a religion, the confluences of these worldviews are more than theoretical for me. Call it a childish urge to differentiate myself if you like, but I want some solid ground between myself and the eugenicists.

One short-hand test to spot the ‘-fascism’ lurking in your ‘eco-’ is to ask whether nature is being invoked to conjure an idealised past which might lead to beliefs in a “pure” people and/or culture. With what is, at least to themselves, an intensely utopian vision, the silicon dreamers slip under this measure. Another useful warning sign is the way that, as many of the (mostly women) critics point out, these guys are totally uninterested in the real-world effects of AI as it exists today. How AI is reinforcing racist policing, coercive welfare systems and economic inequality broadly, as well as its dependence on traumatising underpaid labour in the Global South is entirely irrelevant to them. We don’t want to make that same mistake.  

I’m most comforted though to think that the important difference between us and them is our willingness to grieve and accept loss. It doesn’t take a humanities degree to see that the dream of infinite digital consciousness comes from an inability to face death. If we can learn anything from the story of Tithonus, Voldemort or plastic, then we can assume the promise of immortality will inevitably become a curse. In our case, as rockets and AI behemoths churn through mountains for rare metals and spew out the last puffs of CO2 our planetary equilibrium can handle, we’ll most likely be forced to watch as the compulsive avoidance of inevitable death by a few create the conditions for entirely preventable death of the many. 

To grieve is to recognise an ending and honour it. To practise grieving, and become skilled at it, allows a clearer and clearer view of the world as it is today. Connection to the living world has never been possible without a capacity to grieve the death inherent in ecosystems, and it is even less possible today with capitalism’s acceleration of the totally avoidable and permanent death we otherwise know as extinction. At the launch of Sarah Jaffe’s new book on grief (itself a sign that we are recognising the importance of it), someone described how, without grieving, we get stuck in loops repeating traumas and reactions to trauma. Even today, ‘Grief Tech’, AI renditions of dead loved ones intending to ease the pain of loss, will almost certainly only embalm that pain instead. Grief is a life force, it allows us to move and move on. It allows us to outgrow our fears and return home. One thing I grieve in particular is the loss of Octavia Butler and the unpublished final part of her Earthseed trilogy. From the drafts we have we know that this part complicated the ending of the Parable of the Talents. Her space-faring humans, overly optimistic about their ability to transcend the suffering on earth, must face the reality that life involves pain and the best response is to acknowledge that rather than reject it.