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The Clinical Trial

Many thanks for Aaron Schneider and Amy Mitchell, today I’ve got out a longish short story (at 10K words, Wikipedia suggests a “novelette,” and why not be oh-so-precious about it) called The Clinical Trial at The Temz Review. At one level, it’s a kind of disturbing, surrealist mystery about an experimental drug. At another, it’s an allegory for the double-consciousness of white nationalism.

I thought I’d write a little background note unpacking this one a little. If you liked the story, this might be of interest. If you didn’t read the story but like decontextualized commentary with spoilers, this is definitely for you. If you hate my politics, you might skip both.

This piece started a couple years ago just as an exercise in form after having read Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. Southern Reach might be called an extended piece of surrealist mystery in the sci-fi genre, kind of doing for sci-fi what Paul Auster did for the whodunit, where the mystery is never really solved, but did-anyone-dun-it, why-would-it-be-dun, and who-are-we-in-light-of-the-ambiguity-surrounding-the-dunning-of-it take center stage. Anyways, I found that the form of Southern Reach permitted this beautiful and impressionistic piece meditating on some deep themes, and thought the form seemed so accessible, why not try my hand.

My setting was a drug trial. Once upon a recession I worked four jobs in twelve months and came out sick with all of them, and sat through an orientation for a clinical drug trial, just considering the potential. Filled out the forms, came very close to participating. The scene remains very clear, troubling, exploitative in my mind.

I had a character. An ugly fellow, resentful. Feels he’s better than where he is. Feels he’s better than who he’s surrounded by. Feels he’s better than the hand life has dealt him and his failures are all external. The drug isn’t what he thinks it is. Goes through a monstrous transformation. Becomes something a little more reflective of the inner ugliness.

It didn’t sing. I sent it out exactly twice without much enthusiasm. Parked it. Worked on other projects. It slept a long while.

A year later, men carried torches through the streets of Charleston shouting Jews will not replace us. A Muslim ban was tweaked inch by inch through the courts until it had cobbled a figleaf of diversity. A synagogue shot up in Pittsburgh, a Mosque shot up in Quebec City. By the thousands, brown people people died in Puerto Rico, or were turned into orphans at the US border, and the administration denied and exacerbated it. Black people were murdered on camera without legal consequence and sectors of the media spoke of the black community’s response as though they were describing ISIS. Politicians openly embraced white nationalism as an acceptable label.

It felt like more than a series of tragedies — it felt, at scale, like a shift in consciousness. And I realized that there was this little detail in my story that I’d tried to downplay – the exploitation of that room I’d found myself in was heavily racialized. That I’d perhaps been the only white guy there. It seemed to either beg more direct exploration or to be ignored, and at first, I’d chosen to ignore it.

I was reading, at the same moment, Robert Terrill’s text Double Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama, which turned me down the rabbit hole to WEB Dubois and black existentialism a little more broadly. Double consciousness (roughly) was Dubois’ term for a psychological phenomenon in which the racial minority sees him or herself both as they self-identify, and simultaneously as the majority sees them (Terrill, if you’re curious, applied this to Obama in the sense that he was always implicitly trying to fold his critic’s arguments into his own, both to signal his awareness of and to deconstruct them).

I had this idea, fed by some of what was being said about the Obama years and their aftermath, that the rise in white nationalism in America had a distinctive flavor of its own kind of double consciousness. That the majority, just as it is starting to lose its centrality/objectivity, feels for the first time the gaze of the minority on them, and that they become aware of how they are seen. Which is monstrously. That this was a traumatic moment for them.

There are, of course, two ways to respond to that sensation. One is to take it seriously and work towards a better society and etc. etc. And the other is to identify with that monstrosity. To lean into it, to embody it more fully. Which is what we saw in Charleston.

There’s other complementary themes at work here, too – the extent to which both the white nationalist and the people he resents are manipulated by some other authority for their own profit. The extent to which our sense of identity and culture is informed by an obviously racialized intellectual canon.

But that monstrous inversion of double consciousness became the biggest thematic undertone for what this character is going through. It starts subtle, and towards the end gets heavier (incorporating a direct reading, eventually, from Ellison’s Invisible Man). Whether it’s too heavy-handed or not, I suspect, might come down to the reader – I’ve got both perspectives arguing in my head on that.

Buster Scruggs: Fatalism, Formalistically

The Coens have a career-long theme of fatalism in their work (I love A.O. Scott’s remark, that they treat “whimsy and fatalism like two sides of the same coin”) – that despite the frenzied preoccupations of their protagonists, something larger than them is always at work, always guiding their stars, so that whatever their wants or desires or actions or negligences, they will find themselves someplace they did not intend to be, and probably didn’t anticipate. It will be the massive tornado closing out A Serious Man. It will be the invulnerable death march of the killer in No Country for Old Men. It will be the inefficacy of every laid plan to disrupt the moral order in Fargo. It will be, even, The Dude doing everything he can to fuck up the case, and arriving inevitably at its solution.

So, in Buster Scruggs, I think the anthology film works so well for them, because part of what’s at work in an anthology is the audience’s search for a hidden thread between the stories. It helps, obviously, that death is waiting in every story to overtake the protagonist or his rival, pounding home a theme at the micro level. It helps, obviously, that there’s an element of the supernatural or the fated in so many of the stories, individually. But what comes from seeing these works in anthology is how the audience searches for the thread between these characters who never meet each other. Which is to say, we suspect that some larger force is at work not just in, but between the stories. And maybe that work feels like The West, or maybe it feels like Death, or maybe it feels like Nihilism, but one thing’s for certain, it’s not a character. It’s not an individual whose actions/wants/desires are actually central to the story. It’s a setting, or it’s a climate, or it’s a moral (dis)order, or it’s something in the water that must make all of these stories cohere, and it’s searching for that something that guides the viewer above/beyond/between the stories, and closer to the sense of fatalism that the Coens are always preoccupied with. It’s using the form to advance the theme.

And, since the pieces assembled organically without conscious design as an anthology piece until they were almost all assembled, I suppose it’s fair to say the Coens were also a little bound up in fate.

Roma

It takes me about six months after all the Best Picture nominees are out digitally to watch them all, which is always a good length of time after the Academy Awards are over. I will say this, though: Roma is a stronger picture than anything I saw from last year’s nominees.

Roma (named after a region, not gypsies) is the story of a live-in housekeeper struggling with an unwanted pregnancy, at the same moment as the family she takes care of is falling apart. It’s a beautifully-shot period piece, taking pains to recreate the Mexico City of 1971 (director Alfonso Cuarón’s birthplace), including brief flashes of the political upheaval rocking the country at the time.

The direction is loud and beautiful. Cuarón eschews quick cuts and closeups for long, patient shots that incorporate the whole room, emphasizing the relations between characters and allowing the viewer to really savor the milieu of the city, its households, its countryside, which are all beautifully constructed. This is most notable at the film’s climax (or, at least, one moment of climax), when a trip shopping for a new bassinet is interrupted by the unfolding of a government shooting in the street below, as the camera pans slowly from the second floor shopping center, past the frightened faces of onlookers, to the reconstructed image of carnage taking place across the block. Throughout, the camera takes the perspective of being in the room with the characters, adopting a single vantage from which it will take in a scene, and slowly, smoothly panning from one side to the other almost as if one is watching from the perspective of an otherworldly presence, a ghost or an angel, silently witnessing. The repetition of certain visual cues give one the sense of the story being endless, recursive, and the restoration of a new thematic equilibrium at the the end complements these cues. We feel, at the end, as though we’ve given witness to one revolution of an interminable struggle. Cuarón’s choice to set his film in the midst of a brief moment of political upheaval, which nevertheless yields to the continued dominance of the ruling party for another twenty years (the things you wikipedia after the film is over), also serves the theme.

The story is beautiful, loaded, complex, understated. The bonds between housekeeper and what’s left of the family she serves are surprising and poignant, giving a conflicted moral weight to the master-employee relationship. Nothing is too foreseeable, and so the tension is never cheapened. When a gun is held up at our lead, we really don’t know if it will go off. Yalita Aparicio’s star turn is gently understated — the blankness of her expression is just fragile enough to see her struggling to confront her fears, turn by turn, and the script (wisely) never asks her to play a loudly emotive outburst (that is, right up until the end, when her one great sob of the movie takes place, fittingly, enveloped in the arms of several other people who obscure her from the camera, in that shot that Netflix has used in all the posters).

In the end, we don’t know what will become of this woman, just as we don’t know what will become of her family, or her country. We have the sense that her part in history is bracketed in the midst of one long, unsustainable arc. Eventually the farmers must revolt, eventually the children must confront their father, eventually the family will have to grapple with its finances, eventually this housekeeper will either return to her family in the countryside or have to find a better life than this one.

But sometimes a brief period in the midst of mounting social tension is the life we are given. We don’t always live to see the glorious revolution. Things endure that ought to end. The unsustainable sometimes lasts far longer than it should. And we live under its shadow, and try to make meaning of our little interim.

Red Sorghum

“The red blood of the Jiao-Gao soldiers and the green blood of the Iron Society soldiers converged to nourish the black earth of the fields. Years later, that soil would be the most fertile anywhere,” writes Mo Yan in Red Sorghum, set in the midst of the 1930s war between Japan and China, in what might be the covert thesis statement of the novel.

There’s a strain of blood and soil in Red Sorghum that leaches into the meaning of community, what ties together these rural Chinese outposts. What we’ve termed filial piety, what we think of as belonging to a place, these are also terms that undergird tribalism. These are terms that inform the right to a piece of earth, the right to pass it to your kin, the right to kill the outsider who would take it from you.

The grotesque barbarism of the war between Japan and China is only a part of the show. Equally indiscriminate, if not quite as cruel, are the killings between tribes of bandits and ad hoc governments within China, and the extent to which the reader is invited to scorn the social milieu of the novel is never clear. One is tempted, actually, to think we are not: we conclude with the descendant of these local warlords mourning their lack of connection to the old ways, the moral atrophy of the cities. If there is a critique of the recklessness of violence, it is at least nested with its glorification. It is posited within a naturalistic framework, wherein the red of the sorghum fields, the sorghum wine, the wars with local dogs to preserve the corpses on the battlefield, all of these natural symbols map to the world of violence in a way that suggests that the strife and killing for place and power is endemic to the soil, to the identities of its people – at least, once upon an age.

The Book of M suspends between a pair of profound imaginative spasms. That is, it ends halfway.

Nabokov had a great quote on writing (worth reading in full, but for these purposes, the snippet will do): “The force and originality involved in the primary spasm of inspiration is directly proportional to the worth of the book the author will write.”

There are two beautiful spasms of imagination in Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M. One is in the first few pages. One is in the last few. Because I’d like to discuss each equally, you can rest assured that I AM GOING TO SPOIL THE ENDING.

***
In just the first ten pages of the book, we are given such a ferocious spurt of imagination that it could light our minds for days if Shepherd never wrote another chapter. People’s shadows the world over start disappearing, and with them, their memories. It was never suspected until that moment that a person’s shadow was where memory was stored.

The beauty in this idea isn’t just poetic, it catches such resonance with one of the core questions in neuroscience. We’ve never been able to localize memories in the brain. Disable any one part of the brain, the remainder more or less remembers everything that the whole once did, suggesting perhaps that memories are stored by a network of relations that is self-similar at different scales. Another way of thinking about it is referred to as holonomic mind theory – that the human mind functions much the same way a hologram does, in which all of the information in the signal is nested (with some resolution errors past a point) across each subset of the signal. At least, that’s one theory. The truth is we’re properly riddled by this.

This mystery of memory’s location, which is so key to securing our sense of self in the face of a materialist worldview, already has a lot of traffic in scientific circles, to the point where I think it’s pretty pop culture-y. So kudos for finding a magical realism way to play off it.

Shepherd adds a dimension to her premise by making reality adjust to fit the mistaken memories of the shadowless, but frankly (though this is easily the most awe-inspiring and fantastical element in the book), I’m less intrigued by this element. It’s a driver of adventure, more than having something to say about the human condition. And the logic of how her world functions under these rules is a bit more confounding – whose memory takes precedence, what kinds of memories change the world around them, why hasn’t one random person forgotten what oxygen is and ended the world – so that its effects feel more random and plot-servicing than numinous.

But hell, it’s certainly fun to wander a world where statues can come to life and smash buildings, so I’m not bagging on it.

***
What follows from there is a dutiful, well-crafted story exploring a post-apocalypse. If you thrill at those, you’ll thrill at this.

For me, it dragged a bit. The payoff comes in the last few pages.

***
Shepherd’s second great spasm of imagination comes when a great healer type begins stitching shadows back onto people, hoping to give them their memories back. Unfortunately, only the shadow of an object appropriately invested with some kind of cognition will serve this purpose. Give a person the shadow-memories of a rock, they go crazy in rock-ish sorts of ways.

The moment that sings is around a tape recorder. Before she loses all her memories, a woman named Max wanders the country recording everything she can remember onto a tape recorder. The tape recorder’s shadow is stitched back onto a woman who the healer thinks is Max. But the healer is mistaken. The wrong woman inherits the memories stored in the recorder, and with it, the identity of Max.

So when whoops-wrong-woman meets the man she now thinks is her husband, he rejects her. She has the mind of the woman who made the recordings (we can presume Max is dead at this point), but nobody else sees her that way. The pain is tremendous. She believes she’s held out so long trying to preserve her mind so she could one day reunite with her husband, but she’s in the wrong body and he’s not having any of it.

Tragic, poignant, and this is where Shepherd closes.

Hot take: this is not where Shepherd should have closed.

This is, if anything, the more inviting spasm of imagination between the two, which begs for these characters to evolve. This begs for two people, one of whom believes they are married, and the other of whom is fighting a profound repulsion to the woman who thinks she’s his wife, to explore what their relationship is now. Because it’s not as simple and pat as they don’t have one.

And in the process, this invites Shepherd to explore what it means to have selfhood, to answer serious human questions in ways that only a fantasy premise can engage in. Is it enough to believe that you’re a specific person? To have all the memories of that person? To walk in the sack of carbon that collected those memories originally? To be recognized as that person by the people who know you?

If I had my druthers, this is the midway point of the book. Strip out a certain amount of post-apocalyptic wrangling, and write me a half of a book about two people trying to see if they’re still married, in different bodies.

Or – just in case she’s reading her reviews – fine material for the sequel.

The Ruin of Kasch: A Real Mess of a Marvel

The most difficult book I read in 2018, Roberto Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch, I picked up at the donation table disbursing the personal library of a dead poet to his semblables around Montreal in a dark bar before a reading. It had everything you look for in a fascination: quotes from Italo Calvino and The New Yorker, a scarcely comprehensible synopsis about history, art, philosophy, civilization, unrecognizable classical art on the cover and bits like “establishes a genre all its own” on the sleeve.

And I found it all of that, to be sure. Moving (not even effortlessly, but with a total disregard for the constraints of form) between diligently reported history, direct quotes, bits of historical fiction, free verse, theory, and philosophy, it was a marvelous network of free association, an indeterminate literary feast.

So let’s focus on the good points first.

Spanning centuries, continents, cultures, and languages, The Ruin of Kasch still has, I hope, a core idea about the glue of civilization that it wants to build around. Calasso centers his view of history around a formative myth, the ancient civilization of Kasch, located somewhere in Eastern Africa or the Middle East. In the myth, the kingdom of Kasch was effectively ruled by its priests, who performed ritual sacrifices of kings and other select in accordance with their religious order, which divined the future from the stars. One such select was a great storyteller, who had a plan to avoid his own sacrifice. The storyteller made a practice of telling stories all night that were so irresistible that eventually even the priests had to stop to listen, neglecting their duties of monitoring the stars. As the priests slipped in their abilities to uphold the old order and the storyteller tightened his grip on the rest of the city, he eventually told a story that incited the populace to bloodshed against the priest class, effectuating a revolution that led to the storyteller being crowned king. In the myth, the storyteller’s new order was only able to stretch his natural life, after which the kingdom fell to ruin.

To Calasso, this myth encapsulates the key functions of every society: it engages in sacrifice in order to maintain a given state of social order (isn’t the rule of law always undergirded by violence). But from time to time, a great storyteller or revolutionary or what-have-you will convince society to sacrifice its sacrificers, embrace a new order. The irony for Calasso is that society never removes the element of sacrifice from its social order. It is sacrifice that makes social order possible. It merely substitutes one mode of sacrifice for another. In the end, if the kingdom attempts to eschew sacrifice altogether (the storyteller’s reign), it will only sacrifice itself.

For Calasso, the truly wise may be able to see this transference for what it is. Calasso spends the first hundred pages or so of the text picking apart Talleyrand, a French minister under the Ancien Regime, the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the Restoration. Though many regard him a serial traitor, Calasso treats Talleyrand with a reverence that suggests his infinite flexibility to amend himself to the times was a genius, seeing the transference of power and the recasting of stories like legitimacy for what they were – revolutions in the selfsame order of sacrifice.

I’m simplifying what is a very long, tangential, metaphorically and mythically dense work – almost beyond forgiveness. But it’s an overbearing text, to be frank, and for folks like me it helps to break it down to its core.

In the ripples from this argument, Calasso’s daunting knowledge of history and philosophy ornament the tree in a dozen fascinating ways. From his views of capitalism –

wherein reducing everything to an exchange value, a kind of digitality, allows the old priests of sacrifice to be replaced by new priests of continual economic experimentation, and ultimately destruction –

to Freud —

wherein sacrifice and psychological substitution are effectively the same, so as Freud observes the power of any inanely repetitive process to fill the human psyche with a kind of uncanny dread, forcing us to try to numb ourselves (further “sacrifice” or render insensate some aspect of the psyche) in order to protect ourselves, until we at last cannot, which process of repetition, substitution, and sacrifice revolting the psyche is analogized on a civilizational scale to how the old order always eventually overwhelms and repulses its followers –

to Polybius —

who saw forms of government as a cycle, running from monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy before starting over, and in which Calasso sees sacrifice as the common element greasing the gears —

you get the idea. The whole of history is on the table. There are no borders to the argument, and it its worst, it feels as though it could care less for structure, either.

At risk of being the ignoramus who exposes himself when all he had to do was act nice and pet the book, I’ll go ahead and say that, at a macro level, the book often loses thematic coherence, and often buries its sense in a self-indulgent web of names and intellectual ballyhoosiery that one is often tempted to suspect there is not nearly so much sense there as pretended at.

Consider how seriously opaque it can make itself (and pity the reader who picked it up before Wikipedia was available):

“Just as Benjamin viewed Baroque tragic drama through the window of the Expressionist morgue, so Schmitt saw wars of religion in terms of Rathenau’s bloodstained fur coat, the incursions of von Salomon’s outlaws, and the carts loaded with banknotes during the Weimar Republic’s inflation.”

Which is the first sentence of a section that is preceded and followed by no real explanation of those names or references.

Or how abstruse:

“(… to listen to a story that is a person, time changed into space, a space that expands and coils in time, resting on a false present, a radiant hollow facing an echoing past; not knowing where your feet are sinking, but surrounded by noble architectural remnants, no more solid than a filmy layer covering other surfaces, whose enamel no one will mar; traversing them, we once again find ourselves on contemporary soil, brimming with ephemeral, overlapping memories – but like visitors this time, alien to this and every other ground.”

If you just had a mental sensation akin to trying to sneeze so hard that your whole brain squished forward half an inch and then went nowhere, that’s correct.

Or, lest you fear that he’s simply too smart to follow at all:

“What are the dead for us, if not – first and foremost – books? Among all forms of prehistoric religion, the strangest and most difficult to understand in our own day seems the cult of the dead, the constant presence of the dead in every aspect of life. To a prehistoric man, in contrast, our strangest and most mysterious form of worship would be our use of books. Yet these two forms of belief converge. Concretized as portable objects that accompany us – our parasites, persecutors, comforters – the dead have settled on the written page. Their power has never diminished, even though it has been wondrously transformed.”

Which is to say, the dead live on in books. *Mindblown.gif*

And that’s just picking from the last few pages, when I started saying to myself, wish I’d highlighted some of the nonsense, though.

So my TL;DR boils down to this: it’s a visionary text in the sense that blending history, historical fiction, poetry, philosophy and theory all into one freeform package gives Calasso the liberty to make associations by poetic logic between disciplines that frankly feel magical sometimes, lighting an obscurity just enough for its murky dimensions to feel divine, and he uses his freedom to light some profound ideas at the heart of this book, and make whole threads of history seem to leap into coherence.

And yet, in so vastly indulging himself, he has also lost a great deal of the necessary discipline to build a real arc in the work, to make it mean something through each juncture of its outline, and so cheats that squinting reader who is dead sure there is something buried in that impenetrable web of sense and helps himself to an often undeserved portion of their attention for many meandering pages at a time.

Behold, and take caution.

Brooke’s Last Days of Montreal

You have to read your city’s literature (and what a pleasure to say your city has a literature), but because my French is still painstaking enough to really slow the literary experience, I’m getting the Anglophone perspective on Montreal for now.

In John Brooke’s Last Days of Montreal, we step into a world where Montreal’s unique multiculturalism is interpreted as a network of divisions. Scattered across the mid-1990’s, around the time of the separation referendum, Anglophones feel ostracized and transgressive for simply flying the Canadian flag. Communication breaks down with their French wives, and they look for connection with their immigrant neighbors. French radio hosts try to mythicize the everyday flying of the fleur-de-lis, but the people they are mythicizing don’t recognize themselves in the story. And homeless men stop suicides and think that they’re in love with their rescuees, who think they’re in love with trees, and junkies plan to move to Toronto because they can’t communicate with their families, and every individual in this colorfully-peopled world seems to be struggling with their relation to community. Which community, the reader sees in aggregate, appears darker, more mysterious and with more internal division and opacity than any of its members can appreciate. It’s a salient perspective on a city of languages and how those contrasts define its people.

And as one would hope, eventually the network of community exposes some shocking or tragic turns to the reader that none of its members can see from their limited perspective. And as one would hope, our characters end up a little more self-defined by virtue of their struggles against a community in turmoil.

The book’s objective can be its weakness, too — the tone can seem indulgently dark sometimes, full of drugs, prostitution, infidelities and loneliness (although I must admit, I’m seeing all the intersections Brooke is describing in 2018, and 1995 was a different world, in literal terms, and psychic ones, too, for the Anglophone community at the height of separatism). The dialogue seems to reach too hard for that literary loadedness sometimes and slips sensibility.

But a worthy perspective to absorb, all in all, getting to know a place. I hear John Brooke still lives around the Jean Talon market, writing mysteries. I wonder if I won’t see him sometime there, contemplating life’s darknesses, buying peppers.

Stories Create Language Create Stories

In an interview newly released for the first time in English, David Foster Wallace is asked about his taste for experimental fiction. A delightful quote pops out:

“When it’s experimental-looking, I never get the sense that it’s experimental because it’s trying to be experimental or trying to make some sort of coy point about structure. It seems that it’s experimental because that was the one and only inevitable way that the author could convey the dimensions of experience and emotion and cognition that was the story’s world.”

Which I want to probe just a little, because the implication suggests causality flowing one way – that the story exists independently, has its own world already, and in order to find expression, has to invent the language or the structure that would serve it.

When I think, rather, it may often be the opposite. That language creates story as often as the inverse. One of the sexiest ideas in neuroscience is how the language we speak shapes the way the mind functions (see also the documentary, Arrival). I think it follows that the narrative structures we use shape the mind in ways that are largely determinative of the kinds of stories we can conceive of, participate in, internalize, derive motive from, perpetuate all our little plots forward into subsequent stories, etc. Give a man a word for god, he will be able to tell the creation story. Take it away, and he will fumble, his sense of wonder grasping at air.

All of which is to say, when you create a new form for language to take, you also invite a new kind of story. And you may be surprised at the material that settles in to fill that container. Give us a new way of seeing a plot assemble, we might recognize points of tension that once lived outside our reckoning. Give a character a new mode of speaking, they might find they have new things to say.

If you’re wondering where the hell all this is coming from, I might be citing back to this post in a year or so, because it’s pretty good explanation of the process for a piece I’m working on now.

Economic Value Is a Story

I recently listened to Yuval Harari’s interview on the Ezra Klein show, which (in a super-paraphrased, condensed version that I did not even refer back to the original audio to create) featured this delightful sequence of argument:

YH: The world is soon to be overtaken by some form of AI, not because it will necessarily physically overwhelm us, but because humanity’s increasing uselessness in the face of technological progress will just continue spiraling until we no longer value human beings as such — until we stop investing in their development or economic utility. The machines don’t have to become all-knowing, or conscious, or even particularly powerful, just good enough to push our human value off the economic margins until we dwindle in the market and give way to them, eventually, by rather natural capitalist forces.
EK: But supposing humanity’s value isn’t the same as its utility? What if we just continue fabricating purposes for ourselves after machines price us out of all the industries they can? After all, everything we do is a story — religion is a story, the Constitution is a story, human rights are a story, the economy is a story, money itself is a story, the value of a bottle of wine is a story — so what’s to keep us from inventing a story that attributes value to ourselves that machines can’t take away? We simply invent a need for people that only people can fill, and keep the economy going forward at the speed of our imaginations.

Which Yuval Harari hemmed and hawed on a bit, and didn’t have a particularly satisfying answer for, by my estimation.

***
Which is to say nothing about the theory that machines grow intelligent enough to eat us alive with giant robot jaws (!) — but just keeping the focus on collapsing human utility for a moment.

***
The truly terrific thing implied at the bottom of this is a coming creative crisis. When we have stripped human beings of their traditional values in favor of machines, we might only be at the threshold of a massive revision of our moral, economic, philosophic playbook. When economics no longer compels us to value each other by the traditional metrics, when we have to invent new purposes for ourselves to continue justifying our existence, what might we ascribe as the non-displaceable value of human activity? As we lose our comparative mechanistic utility, how will we define our anti-mechanical values?

As a moral relativist, figures to me that we can make anything holy we put our minds to.

***
Sex. Ayahuasca trips. Biological byproducts. Performative pain. Extracted sections of the genetic script. Unconscious thoughts. Speaking in tongues. [Post-edit: there’s usually an SMBC on point]

Dollah, dollah bills.

At some point, even, maybe — funding for the arts!