In Search of Philip K. Dick's Authentic Human

Reading through Philip K. Dick's speech How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart in Two Days (Dick, 1978) back in September I realised that I had read it before. Not recently, as I know that I read portions of it as referenced in N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman (Hayles, 1999) (or even more recently just before in excerpts detailed on Maria Popova's blog (Popova, 2013)), or as detailed in the Imaginary Worlds podcast episode on the subject of Dick's exegesis (Molinsky, 2018)¹, but deeper in the past. In some forgotten corner I had sought this out by Dick and had consumed it, letting it lay dormant in my mind. It occurred to me to ask myself whether in some private thoughts I may have merely recapitulated ideas I had read from Dick, having forgotten the attribution, and mistaken them for my own? This process, known as cryptomnesia, whereby one experiences a memory but mistakes it for something genuinely original or inspired, pressed especially on my mind because of Dick's own accounting of his experiences, experiences that led him to some bizarre beliefs.

On Reading More and Reading Better

Throughout 2017 and continuing through 2018 I have attempted to drastically increase the quantity of reading that I do. For both years I have kept in mind a general goal of completing 52 books in one year - one book per week. This is a common challenge as any Internet search will quickly reveal. The reasons for wanting to undertake such a challenge are numerous: as a means to expand one's vocabulary, improve one's writing through familiarization of different styles and techniques, to increase one's knowledge and understanding, and as a way of improving organization and scheduling skills. That last one is important; despite the vast amount of time that is doubtless consumed in reading this much, the argument is generally made that it can be safely taken away from all the time that we generally waste in a day: the idle Internet browsing, the Netflix binge-watching, playing games or fiddling with apps. While I believe I've benefited from significantly expanding my reading, I have mixed feelings about the project.

Feels Like Summer and Late Capitalism

On September 1, 2018, Ivan Dixon and Greg Sharp released the music video for Childish Gambino's (aka Donald Glover) recent track Feels Like Summer. A low-key animation, the video unites numerous figures in the hip-hop community into the stale and familiar setting of lower middle-class suburbia. It's the neighbourhood of Boyz n the Hood, one of elevated bungalows and screen doors, one that manages to always feel like nowhere no matter what happens there. The neighbourhood is in fact modeled after Atlanta rather than Los Angeles, but what's important is that it conveys the everywhere nowhere-ness of suburbia, rather than depicting an actual place. What I find compelling in the video is its relation to the larger cultural moment within the context of late capitalism.

You’re Eating The Wrong Political Agenda

Concomitant with the evacuation of economics from the political sphere and the subsequent colonisation of politics by cultural ideology - so thoroughly embodied throughout the culture as the discourse of identity politics - has been the offloading of ethical decision-making by the state and the shift to that of a choice to be made by the consumer. We don’t demand that our clothes are made ethically with our voices and our votes, but with our wallets. And in fact we don’t even do that, as the signifiers of ethical decisions will substitute just fine for the real thing and we settle for the appearance of an increase in justice - a saccharine smearing over of societal problems that enables uncritical enjoyment of one’s daily latte.

The influence we can wield as consumers is ineffectual against the systemic a-morality of unrestrained capitalism, as it reframes ethical decision-making in terms of market exchange when it is precisely the opposite that should be occurring. That is not to say that consumers should not be aware of what they consume, that they should not research them, but all this extensive research for the minutiae of every small transaction becomes far too taxing on one’s time and energy and only further entrenches the capitalist frame.

Thoughts On: Superintelligence

As with my previous post relating to Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis (available here), these notes are long overdue, having originated with my reading of Bostrom's Superintelligence and coming up on being almost a year old at this point, having been jotted down in August and September of 2017. As I noted in my simulation hypothesis post and in my summation of my reading for 2017 (that post is here), I found Bostrom's coverage of the topic of superintelligence to be a lot less thorough than I had expected and it left me with a slew of unanswered questions and challenges to Bostrom's thinking which developed into these notes. I've tried to tidy up the notes into something a little more cohesive and comprehensible than their raw form, and have revised them where I was quite unsatisfied with them, so they may reflect some updates to my thinking in the year since I initially jotted them down. But enough introduction, on to the notes!

Our Worringly Undemocratic Future

During a talk on nationalism and globalism, historian and author Yuval Noah Harari makes clear what he perceives as the need for effective global governance. Particularly in dealing with the looming existential threat of ecological collapse posed by climate change, he notes that as it is a lose-lose as opposed to a win-win scenario, there are not workable solutions by which separate national authorities can come to an effective agreement. Harari admits that there is no guarantee that effective global governance will be democratic and that it may end up looking more like ancient China than modern Denmark. But Harari's position is clear: democracy is simply a luxury we can ill afford on such issues (TED, 2017).

Harari is a historian but as evidenced by his writing (Harari, 2015) he is quite concerned with the future. Harari attempts to foresee, at least in broad outline, where humanity might be going and to encourage some thought about what options may be open to us. Harari's recent books have been very large international bestsellers, so for such an influential thinker to be so unimaginative and pessimistic about the ability of democracy to grapple with the challenges of the future is both worrying and telling.

Technologies Are Themselves Logic Bombs

They bring with them all of the ideological baggage of any idea, but contain no arguments for us to consider. They coerce us to modes of thinking through our use of them. Without an ability to foresee what we are being coerced into, we blindly follow wherever technologies take us. What is vital then, is knowing how to read technology.