Fears of Technology Are Fears of Capitalism

I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it's hard to distinguish the two.

Let's think about it this way. How much would we fear any technology, whether A.I. or some other technology, how much would you fear it if we lived in a world that was a lot like Denmark or if the entire world was run sort of on the principles of one of the Scandinavian countries? There's universal health care. Everyone has child care, free college maybe. And maybe there's some version of universal basic income there.

Now if the entire world operates according to — is run on those principles, how much do you worry about a new technology then? I think much, much less than we do now. Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people's lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs. It's not intrinsic to that technology. It's not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work.

It's capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by laying people off. It's not that like all technology suddenly becomes benign in this world. But it's like, in a world where we have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is going to use it against us. How are giant corporations going to use this to increase their profits at our expense?

And so, I feel like that is kind of the unexamined assumption in a lot of discussions about the inevitability of technological change and technologically-induced unemployment. Those are fundamentally about capitalism and the fact that we are sort of unable to question capitalism. We take it as an assumption that it will always exist and that we will never escape it. And that's sort of the background radiation that we are all having to live with. But yeah, I'd like us to be able to separate an evaluation of the merits and drawbacks of technology from the framework of capitalism.

- Ted Chiang

Meditative vs Calculative Thinking

Thinking, as Heidegger describes it in his Discourse on Thinking, may take one of two forms: calculative thinking, which is driven by the will, and meditative thinking, which enables and is enabled by an openness to the mystery of existence. Richard III is a calculative thinker, Edgar a meditative thinker - but only when he assumes the guise of Tom o' Bedlam. For when Edgar drops the guise he reverts to given wisdom: "When we our betters see bearing our woes, / We scarcely think our miseries our foes," he says after his encounter with Lear on the heath. This kind of willed language, based on the presupposition of justice and proportion in the universe, is precisely what King Lear beats to nothingness.

It is also the kind of language we first hear from the mouth of Lear himself, who begins the play as a calculative thinker - which is to say that, in a sense, he is not thinking at all. After he's exiled to the heath, Lear must go deeper than Edgar: he must learn truly to think, to surprise himself - which is a way of saying that, in the narrowly prescribed psychic economy of the play, Lear goes mad.

                                            They flattered me

like a dog; and told me I had white hairs in my

beard ere the black ones were there. To say 'ay'

and 'no' to every thing that I said! 'Ay' and 'no'

too was no good divinity. When the rain came to

wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter; when

the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I

found 'em, there I smelt 'em out. Go to, they are

not men o' their words: they told me I was every

thing; 'tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.

Lear's realization here is the same as Prospero's, and it is the simplest but most profound realization of all: he is mortal, he too can catch cold. But Lear had to learn to sound like Tom o' Bedlam, to become a meditative thinker, in order to achieve this realization. At the beginning of the play, Lear's language evinces very little interiority; he is simply walking through the role of the benignly despotic monarch. But by the middle of the third act, we feel, listening to Lear, that we are experiencing not only the outward drama of self-consciously performed language but also the inward drama of a mind remaking itself by speaking itself.

This is why the conclusion of Lear's speech on the heath ("I am not ague-proof") does not feel merely ironic or paltry or funny; it feels truly like something the actor playing Lear does not know until he says it. The fourth sentence of his speech begins with a sequence of clauses delineating exterior actions (when the rain came, when the wind blew, when the thunder clapped), but the real action of the sentence is interior. And while the logic of such thinking may initially feel occluded, it never feels puzzling. For however disjunctive the movement of the sentences, conclusions arrive with an assurance that casts a retrospective sense of rigor over the process by which we've reached them. This is why the language gives us pleasure (we feel that something happens to us at the same time that we observe something happening to the character), and our pleasure depends not on mastery but on submission: we feel something happen because we've trusted an utterance we cannot yet fully comprehend.

- James Longenbach

4 Women and 3 Men

Freyia North In Norway

Friendly Honey Badger

Jayne Converse

Masih Alinejad 

~

Pissed Magistus

Daniel Pinchbeck

Nick Drake

The Core Metric of the Damaged Psyche and Possible Solutions

"And because no one came to his birthday party, one week later we’re in a war." 

- a friend of Rebecca Solnit's

- No love received as a child

- Splits psyche to cover up feelings 

of unworthiness and shame 

(to avoid mental illness or suicide)

- Confuses attention with love

- Realizes attention most effectively 

gained through acts of destruction 

- Attention satisfies only briefly 

- Doesn't realize that love and attention 

are very different energies (love being

our sustenance, our life-source)

- Seeks more and more attention 

primarily through acts of destruction

in an attempt to receive love 

So perhaps we love them as souls while demonstrating that we've had enough

of their actions of lack, limitation and separation. 

Perhaps we do our own shadow work and heart-centeredness practices so when we

stand for the interconnectedness of all beings we're an inevitable force to reckon with. 

8 Women + Accompaniment

Rebecca Solnit

Caitlin Johnstone 

Sarah Kendzior

Masha Gessen

Astra Taylor 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Naomi Klein 

Heather Cox Richardson

The Baltic Sisters Cuckoo song Live