Elon’s Academy

We’d better imagine something completely different, and fast. “The scenario that follows,” cartoonish though it is, “is built entirely on Musk’s own statements.” More than “perplexing”… “Imagine a day in 2035. …students port their Neuralinks into Grokipedia modules on history. They learn that the term “slave” originally referred to white people and the British Empire was important mostly for ending African slavery. Terms like “racism” and “sexism” never appear as they have been proven to correlate directly with the “woke mind virus”—considered eradicated since 2032. The great error of history in the dark years of the early twenty-first century was that “weak makes right.” This was part of what is described as the “vampire cult” of education now mercifully superseded. The powerful, she learns, should never apologize. Even great civilizations, though, do not last forever. She absorbs the surprising fact that all empires have fallen for the same reason: low birth rates. Fewer people mean not only less labor power—no longer relevant due to the replacement of almost all workers by humanoid robots—but, more importantly, less human intelligence. As she has been taught many times, intelligence is the “the primary evolutionary vector for humans.” On guard against further decline, her science class teaches her about the latest developments in selective human breeding for higher intelligence, including “iterated embryo selection” which allows for choosing specific genetic alleles and cross-fertilizing them without implanting them in a womb, as well as the now-standard “spell-checking” of genetic code to remove all mutations. Learning about this technology is framed as a patriotic duty to ensure strong offspring and reduce future burdens on the privatized health system. It is incumbent on smart women like her to produce at least 2.1 children. She is reminded again of the self-evident truth that there are only two genders and of the evils of past decades, when people changed their genders in what is now recognized as “child mutilation and sterilization.” Such actions are now punishable by imprisonment. More important of course is the pursuit of digital superintelligence. Advances have already made possible the creation of a fleet of humanoid robots ten times the human population on earth. They are a constant presence on streets and in homes. The school itself is maintained and guarded by them. They also lead the gym class, which doubles as border defense education with drills and carbon-fiber weapons. On the way home, the air is hazy with vapor and filled with a low-level hum from the cooling towers of the Neural Districts—massive data center complexes ringing the city. A Tesla sign on a fence reads “Data is Sovereignty.” Asking her parents why the trees are dead and the streambeds dry, they respond “critical infrastructure.” At home, the lights are dim because “nonessential use” is rationed to supply the data centers at peak hours. She talks to her parents about Mars. Starship is now launching twenty times a day and the rockets have become fully reusable, but the launch window only comes every two years. Promotional videos and gleeful simulations populated by animated companion AIs circulate constantly on X. One more push, one more sacrifice, they all sing, and humanity will ascend.” — Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff https://a.co/0i68r6H4

Stay woke

“…By 2016, these political expressions had migrated from the margins to center stage. At the Code Conference in San Francisco that summer, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appeared beside Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson wearing a T-shirt that read “# StayWoke.” (The shirts had been made by Black employees at the company after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014). Everyone in the crowd received their own. 15 “Woke” was a word with deep roots in Black culture: as early as 1938, the folk singer Lead Belly had urged his listeners to “stay woke” in a song about the Scottsboro Boys. Staying woke meant being alert to injustice, and to the likelihood of police and white vigilante violence. 16 Dorsey coopted the term for his own platform. Twitter offered a way to revise the narratives of mainstream journalists and deliver a more authentic perspective on current events. For him, scrolling and posting were the way to remain woke in the contemporary world. In the coming years, the term would become a catch-all for progressive politics, as amplified through the megaphone of social media. Yet the woke social network of #HandsUpDontShoot and #MeToo was always shadowed by its obscene doppelgänger: the internet of trolls. In 2003, a year before Facebook was founded, another tech-savvy teenager launched a website called 4chan. It was a simple message board modeled on a Japanese predecessor named 2chan, and its founder was a fifteen-year-old student from New York City named Christopher “moot” Poole. 4chan was a networked public of pubescent humor and smut, shot through with homophobic, racist, sexist, and ableist slurs. It also incubated many mainstays of internet culture, such as the meme. The term “meme” was first coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the final chapter of his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, where he described it as a “unit of cultural transmission,” such as an idea, song, or style of clothing. By the 2000s, the term had evolved far from its original context to mean a combination of text and image shared online.” — Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff https://a.co/09sdsPgp

Stay woke

“…By 2016, these political expressions had migrated from the margins to center stage. At the Code Conference in San Francisco that summer, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appeared beside Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson wearing a T-shirt that read “# StayWoke.” (The shirts had been made by Black employees at the company after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014). Everyone in the crowd received their own. 15 “Woke” was a word with deep roots in Black culture: as early as 1938, the folk singer Lead Belly had urged his listeners to “stay woke” in a song about the Scottsboro Boys. Staying woke meant being alert to injustice, and to the likelihood of police and white vigilante violence. 16 Dorsey coopted the term for his own platform. Twitter offered a way to revise the narratives of mainstream journalists and deliver a more authentic perspective on current events. For him, scrolling and posting were the way to remain woke in the contemporary world. In the coming years, the term would become a catch-all for progressive politics, as amplified through the megaphone of social media. Yet the woke social network of #HandsUpDontShoot and #MeToo was always shadowed by its obscene doppelgänger: the internet of trolls. In 2003, a year before Facebook was founded, another tech-savvy teenager launched a website called 4chan. It was a simple message board modeled on a Japanese predecessor named 2chan, and its founder was a fifteen-year-old student from New York City named Christopher “moot” Poole. 4chan was a networked public of pubescent humor and smut, shot through with homophobic, racist, sexist, and ableist slurs. It also incubated many mainstays of internet culture, such as the meme. The term “meme” was first coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the final chapter of his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, where he described it as a “unit of cultural transmission,” such as an idea, song, or style of clothing. By the 2000s, the term had evolved far from its original context to mean a combination of text and image shared online.” — Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff https://a.co/09sdsPgp

“more reasonable and respectful”

Enjoying the new Garry Trudeau bio. Daily doses of Doonesbury back in the 70s and 80s shaped my political sensibility as much as anything. Before I encountered James’s message, imploring us always to array our beliefs and acts under the aspect of good,* there was Trudeau urging us to be “for something”… 

 “By the late 1970s, Trudeau morphed into a chronicler of the Zeitgeist; while he would still not hesitate to make fun of the powerful and the famous, he would step up his efforts to address the hypocrisy and ridiculousness at the heart of American culture. And all his efforts would be in service of a larger mission: to help Americans become their own better angels. As he put it in 1990, he was “propelled by a sense of moral indignation, which you hope doesn’t slip into malice when you’re executing. The critical difference is that you’re not only against something, you’re for something. It springs out of a sense of hope.” He was much less invested in opposing any particular individual or institution than in encouraging Americans to become more reasonable and respectful toward one another.” 

 — Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art by Joshua Kendall https://a.co/04ixYXsB

==

*Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a man can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that something else is good. He who habitually acts sub specie mali, under the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza. To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives the name of freeman. See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good. Talks to Teachers...

Catching thoughts

An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day | Lapham’s Quarterly

Michael Pollan:

[Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, a Bulgarian-born psychologist at the University of British Columbia] recently coedited The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought, an anthology that includes an illuminating essay on the history of spontaneous thought. It describes the routines of several highly accomplished historical figures—including Darwin, Beethoven, Dali, and Chandler—who achieved great success despite working a relatively short day (four to five hours) followed by lots of long walks, afternoon naps, loads of unstructured time, and long vacations. It is often not until we leave our desks to wander, whether in mind or body or both, that inspiration strikes…

Writers attempting to represent the stream of consciousness aim to catch thoughts on the fly, before they have coalesced into complete sentences that can be shared—sentences being how we dress our thoughts to take them out into the world… [Virginia Woolf] manages to evoke the free movement of her characters’ minds without sacrificing sentences and syntax…”*

The philosopher Henri Bergson, one of Marcel Proust’s major influences, believed in the existence of “pure” thought that precedes language, which was liable to distort it. (This was scarcely a new idea: Writing in the eighteenth century, poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller said, “When the soul speaks, alas, it is no longer the soul that speaks.”) The twentieth-century French writer Nathalie Sarraute felt that more mental contents slipped through the net of interior monologue than were caught by it, including “an immense profusion of sensations, images, sentiments, memories, impulses, little larval actions that no inner language can convey, that jostle one another on the threshold of consciousness.” For those who, like Joyce, did believe that language constitutes our minds, the stream of consciousness represented a radical advance in literary realism.

Those who didn’t, like Proust, rejected the method for being too “oblique.” It drew our attention away from all the nonverbal “mind-stuff” that William James had identified in consciousness, and that Proust worked so hard to capture—albeit in words… 

Adapted from A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan

—

*Or, as Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West put it:

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.” 

Albeit in words.