Geli Korzhev, Before a Long Journey, 1970–76
Hollywood writers and actors—currently refusing to be replaced by the machines they inadvertently trained—have staged hundreds of apocalypses. To those of us bred in this media landscape, the unfolding of real catastrophe looks like a less coherent, lower budget version of the simulation. The simulation came first, it’s the original. The novelty of the simulation holds our attention; the real catastrophe is old news.
Thus my friend was surprised that I was surprised that the Future of Life Institute resorted to making a high production-value short film to dramatize the dangers of unrestricted use of AI by militaries.
I watched the above after a particularly dispiriting job rejection. Aforementioned friend was offering his counsel, and we got to discussing the feeling of the present as a palpable shifting of paradigms, between the past (methodically planning life choices based on preferences and identity) and the future (battening down the hatches.)
We go to work, start a second job or side hustle, have brunch on the weekends, do some yard work, run errands, go on vacation once a year. That’s the lifestyle we’re accustomed to, a lifestyle of the past. After Marlee Grace mentioned Selling Sunset, I made the truly blighted decision to watch an episode. In case you haven’t had the pleasure, it’s a reality show about luxury real estate agents in Los Angeles. In six seasons, world events are only referenced in terms of how they affect the real estate market, ‘primary’ suite replacing ‘master’ in the agents’ vocabulary without explanation. But it’s perfect, it’s the Platonic ideal of the jaded, banal, solipsistic American workplace.
If defense manufacturers are selling autonomous weapons to the military, or if “the asset manager Blackrock, with $8.59 trillion dollars under management, named to its board of directors the CEO of the world’s largest oil company, Saudi Aramco, which has produced more carbon emissions than any firm on earth,” we’ll have to do more than sign a change.org petition.
But I’m not yet sure what that more is. Devoting a bigger piece of the pie to agitating. I joined a lot of groups in my new hometown, and I suppose I think I’ll bike furiously through snowdrifts to foment with my comrades in the couple of minutes between work shifts. I’d like to curl up in the arms of my resurrected mother and watch clouds pass. I’d like to nap for a hundred years. If only napping dissolved armies.
I go into and out of political consciousness just as I’ve fallen into and out of society. It’s like trap doors embedded within an otherwise safe bit of flooring. What’s this place or condition called? The liminal? Intermundane? Purgatory? Like the narrator of my favorite play, Wallace Shawn’s The Fever, we’re eating ice cream in a hotel restaurant one moment, dragged to a prison cell the next.
Even before Covid, everyone had experienced the bottom dropping out. Unexpected loss and betrayal are the main culprits. But when the bottom drops out of your personal life, there’s still the ground of a stable community. What do we do when the bottom drops out of everyone’s lives? How do we recover? Are we recovering?
My friend tells me his kids want to watch videos and eat junk food; he warns them that the boom times won’t last forever. I have to laugh because, he’s right, but kids running amok and fathers scolding them is the natural order of things. I’d be worried if they were voluntarily harvesting potatoes or darning one another’s socks.
Anyhow, after the nuclear winter dramatization, which felt to me like horror presented in the medium of entertainment, and therefore a kind of cringe-horror, I wrote:
1- promote food self-sufficiency
2- study ethics and persuasive writing to produce counter-propaganda/ humane education
3- deeply understand systems of power so that they can be dismantled/ world peace
What is this, a channeled to-do list for the remainder of my natural life? An INFJ cheatsheet? I agree with Bryan Johnson that world peace is the only game in town, but I’m not sure it starts with six-pack abs. We need physical and spiritual health—but the goal can’t be to bliss out as bombs drop, or return to blood-sucking jobs with a tan.
I guess I’m saying disciplines of the self are necessary but not sufficient. You don’t have to love yourself before you can love anybody else. We don’t need to be in perfect health and perfect agreement before making our stealth moves towards disarmament and net zero.
Can the powers of solidarity, love, and ethical conviction take on the powers of money and violence? Can they convince imperial powers to return stolen goods? Can they convince bosses and landlords to dial down their extortions? Can they convince militaries to lay down their arms?
Honestly, folks, what I’m good at is organizing closets. I can find the single typographical error in a 700 page book. And closets need organizing. Manuscripts need copyediting. But hyperfocus, ultimate productivity of the left brain, is no way to live, be creative, or have relationships. It’s no way to relax; it’s antithetical to relaxation. And it’s no way to handle complexity.
Which brings me in rather labyrinthine fashion to this month’s Blueprint Out of Poverty (BOOP?) experiment.
I’m going to practice the open focus technique every morning and proceed with my job applications from this relaxed and integrated state. Open focus is a kind of hypnosis or guided meditation in which you imagine the space in your body, the space between objects, and the distance between objects. Rachel Whiteread comes to mind. Martha Beck describes it as pre-industrial attention. It’s the shape of awareness before factory lines, and very effective at reducing anxiety.
In a week I’m moving to an apartment in which neither cellular nor wireless service will be accessible. This isn’t my dastardly anarcho-primitivist plan, just the way things shook out. Look at all the forests surrounding me!
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