Nursery Rhyme for Techno-Industrial Society
and 2 other poems
Destroy your smart phone. Return to tradition.
Let this be your terminal network transmission.
It spread like a blessing, it lifted the curse;
we shall not forget it, this beautiful verse.
The simplest prayer, so easy to say:
“Now you are free, throw your smart phone away.”
In twos and in threes, we gathered to meet,
And we took the good news to the town and the street.
I went to a stranger, we met face to face
I said take out your phone, take it out of its case.
You can be free, your life can be your own.
Join us, my friend, and cast down your phone.
He started to smile; he had ears to hear.
He could tell by our warmth, there was nothing to fear.
He threw down his phone, and it cracked and it broke,
and we told him this prayer, and his spirit awoke.
We piled up the phones, we buried them deep;
We put every laptop and server to sleep.
We all joined together, a jubilant crowd,
And out came the sun, and away went the cloud.
The screens all went dim as we gave up our wealth;
We found treasure in heaven, we glowed with new health.
The price was just right, any person could pay.
Cast down your phone, say this prayer and obey.
We fled from the cities, let skyscrapers fall,
and we loved one another, and we let progress stall.
I sang the old songs, and I lived on the land,
not by means of my tools, but by strength of my hand.
We found the old gods, built an altar and throne;
now atone for your sins, now destroy your smart phone.
Our ritual spread over all of the earth,
friend to friend, peer to peer, as a kind of rebirth.
Never tame lightning, never forget:
To build a machine is a horrible debt.
Smash your TV, and turn out the light.
Behold what’s before you, let night be as night.
Technology kills you, so learn to let go.
We won’t build it again, since we know what we know.
When ideas take on a life of their own,
they turn into demons, and spread through your phone.
Return to your home, to soil and blood,
Break every rainbow, pray for a flood.
Focus on Yellowstone, sing her this rhyme:
We can end it right now; it can end for all time.
When I was younger, I always believed it would be morally wrong to inflict my poetry on anyone. As I have grown older I have dared to flirt with that sin. The above is not a complicated or an intelligent poem. It’s right there in the title, it’s a nursery rhyme, and I hope it is clear that it is intended to be tongue in cheek. Mostly. Primitivism is a romantic ideal which would not live up to the fantasies of most people who imagine it, but even if it did, it is an unstable equilibrium; all it takes is one guy to defect by building guns or bombs or combustion engines or satellites and suddenly he is eating everyone else’s lunch. Often times, the defector doesn’t even do this on purpose, he just makes a “neat” discovery and defects by default. That’s really how we got here in the first place; every single individual in a primitivist society has every possible incentive to build and use technology. You can opt out, but you can’t force others to opt out.
Technology is an infohazard, a harmful perception, because once we have it, we can’t choose to not use it. And you might point to e.g., the Amish as an example of people who have chosen to live without technology; they have a high fertility rate, and the people who stay Amish seem to be increasingly bred to stay Amish. But they can only exist because they are embedded in a high tech society. If they were their own country, Amishia or something, then they wouldn’t even be able to win a war against an army using early 20th century technology, let alone 21st. And what that means is that they would get invaded and pushed out of their land by their nearest neighbors. It would never even come to fighting, because their technology-equipped competitors could say, “trade with us or die, accept our immigrants or die” — in fact no one even has to say it; the mere existence of the power imbalance makes these outcomes inevitable. The Amish can only survive as long as the value of exploiting them is less than the opportunity cost of doing so.
Despite the many ways technology hurts us, it also does good things: it feeds us, it cures (some of ) our diseases, allows us to master harsh terrains, and lets us out-communicate and out-coordinate our enemies. But these things come at a terrible cost. As our power increases, our power to destroy ourselves also increases, and it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when and how. I don’t mean “destroy ourselves” on a grand, nuclear apocalypse scale, I don’t mean on a climate change scale (and climate change, though real, is exaggerated histrionic propaganda designed to control you.) What I mean is that technology equips each man, individually, with many novel ways to destroy himself. There are also many ancient ways to destroy yourself, but modern man is the product of an evolutionary history that optimized him to evade those methods. We have no such adaptations to protect us from novelty.
In particular, technology wielded by governments allows for novel types and degrees of control of citizens at levels that were previously inconceivable. I think this is a very bad thing, but again, it comes down to tradeoffs. The repugnant conclusion1 is not some idle thought experiment; it’s the actual calculus of evolution and technology, which is to say, of nature.
Survival isn’t just a question of “don’t die”, it’s a question of “don’t die harder than anyone else.” And what that means is that when you’re competing against other people or groups, whoever is willing to lower their quality of life for a competitive edge wins. That’s why “the free market” results in lower prices, because when you’re selling a commodity, whoever accepts the smallest profit will sell the most, all else equal. And that’s why we don’t get a choice when it comes to using technology, because as much as it hurts us, it gives us a competitive edge. The Ted K. strategy doesn’t work, not only because technological societies are full of fallbacks that make it hard to pull them down, but because sabotaging American tech isn’t going to stop China. (Well, that’s complicated...)
Anyway, while I’ve got you here, I will inflict a second poem upon you, which has no title, and which I wrote as a response to my friend @ctrlcreep. The original was as follows:
I’ll own a ship, I’ll go to Mars, I’ll be the one uploaded;
I’ll live forever on a chain, perpetually encoded.
Why wouldn’t I be chosen to ascend from flesh to math?
When humankind is sorted I’ll be lifted from the chaff.
I liked this verse very much, and I decided to respond in much the same tone I used for the Nursery Rhyme.
They put me on a thumb drive
They put me on a chip
They put me on a megalithic
generation ship
I ran the engines and the greenhouse
and the life support
I ran the math for navigation and
telemetry reports
We left the earth, we sailed the void
We made a stop at Mars
My belly full of thorium,
We set off for the stars
100 years to reach new rock,
100 years in space
100 years to terraform it
to our kind of place
The monkeys that I carried there
walked out and sang and prayed
They stripped me for my minerals,
and left me there to fade
This planet has its own bright gods
that haunt its hills and plains
The monkeys that I brought with me
no longer build blockchains
My reactor loses fire
My brains and sensors rust
The humans sing their monkey songs
and I am dust to dust
In light of my above analysis, one of the worst possible technological developments we can imagine is whole-brain emulation. The idea of becoming an “upload” or an “em” has a long history in transhumanist thought and science fiction. The world where we can spin up virtual human brains as elastically as we spin up compute in a cloud service provider is among the most hellish worlds we can imagine. Suppose we grant the functionalist understanding of consciousness for a moment, that there is no meaningful ontological difference between a brain state simulated in silicon and one simulated the electrified jelly inside your skull. If that is true (and I think there are good reasons to doubt it) then em world will precipitate, out of economic necessity, a world where human experience and cognition is radically debased. In order to survive in war, in trade, in any kind of existential struggle, it will be both possible and necessary to spin up legions of virtual humans, copies of the smartest and most ruthless individuals we can find, and deploy them to solve intellectual problems. These “people” will be “born” and “die” millions of times over, after living lives which are nasty, brutish, and short, being monomaniacal slaves to whatever objectives are fashionable at the moment, being tortured or bribed into compliance and then discarded the moment it’s expedient.
These virtual people, as such they are, will live in hell. But maybe even worse will be the lives of the non-virtual people, who are now forced to compete with people who can think at just as many FPS as our processors can allow. The price of human thought will fall to be roughly the price of electricity, and there will be no escape from this, just as there is no escape from nuclear warfare, internal combustion engines, or smart phones. For this reason, I continue to hope this technology will never come to fruition.
Anyway, one last poem. I wrote it because someone lamented that it was “hard to write poems with accelerationist jargon.” A central conceit of accelerationism is that the future assembles itself in the present through our collective fears, desires, and imaginations. This is known as hyperstition, when, for example, a science fiction story that predicts the future inspires an invention that then becomes reality. I hope this idea will make the horrors I have shown you more haunting still, as we imagine them reaching back from deep time with numinous tentacles. Moreover, I hope the visual rhyme between quine and machine will be upsetting to some people. Just pretend “Quine” rhymes with queen. Shhhh, it’s better that way.
A memeplex is a carnivore;
a templex from forever-more
hyperstition takes us there,
converting every when to wherea city is a time machine;
a sapphic Nietzche techno-Quine
the stranger’s name is egregore,
what’s yet to come will come before
For any possible population of people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better (in terms of total utility) even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.
Brilliant insights, as you already know.
I would make one slight point, about the inefficient and dysfunctional nature of geopolitics.
"The Amish can only survive as long as the (perceived) value of exploiting them is less than the (perceived) opportunity cost of doing so."
Plutarch writes that Lycurgus (mythical founder of the Spartan laws) designed Sparta to be poor, both to remain equal internally, and be undesirable to invade from external rivals.
Sparta was in some ways a Communist, monastic society where men took vows of poverty and devoted themselves religiously to military duty, and all gold and silver was confiscated by the government and made worthless.
"It need not be said, that, upon the prohibition of gold and silver, all lawsuits immediately ceased, for there was now neither avarice nor poverty amongst them, but equality, where every one's wants were supplied, and independence, because those wants were so small."
—Plutarch, Parallel Lives: Lycurgus
This sort of Communist monastic society required EXTREME discipline, fanatical indoctrination from childhood in order to be retained... it was an unstable equilibrium that later was destroyed by a scaling problem. Sparta only functioned when it was a small city-state. This government system was poorly adapted to be an empire.
Success ruined Sparta. Inflows of wealth "corrupted" Sparta (provided perverse incentives for defect-cooperate equilibrium)
Plutarch writes:
"In the time of Agis, gold and silver first flowed into Sparta, and with them all those mischiefs which attend the immoderate desire of riches. Lysander promoted this disorder; for, by bringing in rich spoils from the wars, although himself incorrupt, he yet by this means filled his country with avarice and luxury, and subverted the laws and ordinances of Lycurgus; so long as which were in force, the aspect presented by Sparta was rather that of a rule of life followed by one wise and temperate man, than of the political government of a nation."
Entropy is of course an inevitable force, but you are correct that strategic, religious, cultural retreat from technology offers short-term stability at the price of long-term defeat by someone willing to grasp Steel and build superior weapons.
In Dune, Frank Herbert writes about the downfall of the Navigator Guild — who chose to be parasitic mercenaries, intermediaries, and specialized in transportation so that their organization wouldn't be corrupted by DIRECT power and authority:
"he thought then about the Guild - the force that had specialized for so long that it had become a parasite, unable to exist independently of the life upon which it fed.
They had never dared grasp the sword . . . and now they could not grasp it.
They might have taken Arrakis when they realized the error of specializing on the melange awareness-spectrum narcotic for their navigators.
They could have done this, lived their glorious day and died.
Instead, they'd existed from moment to moment, hoping the seas in which they swam might produce a new host when the old one died.
The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they'd chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation."
About 30 years ago, when I was in my 20s -- this was the early 90s -- I had a dream that we (I and others) had magic flying mirrors that were the source of all kinds of interesting and useful information. It was understood that these mirrors were capable of betrayal, perhaps even that betrayal was a certain outcome. It seemed prophetic, so I remembered it.