Category: Cultural Commentary

inevitability

The excellent HBO show Succession wrapped up a few weeks back. For those who did not watch, the four season series follows the fictional Roy family, loosely based on the Murdochs and the Redstones, families made obscenely wealthy through the efforts of a patriarch in the media industry. In the show, as in real life for those families, that patriarch has multiple children, all vying for their own piece of the pie as their father nears the end of life. The show is fantastic, with amazing characters, wit and humor to marvel at, and a deep Shakespearean core to the story it is telling.

Shiv, Roman, and Kendall Roy, from Succession

One of the things it does really well is meditate on the absurdities of extreme wealth, and what it does to human beings. All the major characters are obsessed with accumulating more and more, and all of them are malformed souls, with deep personal flaws, the central of which for all of them is the inability to form human bonds. The presence of such wealth breeds a kind of cynicism and paranoia, which precludes closeness with others, because you cannot know their motives: do they love you, or your money? Better to seal it off, assume they want your cash, and keep everyone at arms length.

I’ve obviously never been obscenely wealthy myself, nor have I run in those circles. My time in politics let me into some of those circles, on a smaller level, but it was limited. However, one of the things I think the show does really well is provide a lens into a world many of us never see. And one thing that was apparent about that window, through all four seasons, is this: wealth doesn’t cover up one humanness. What I mean is, all of these very wealthy, seemingly very put together people, are just in the end, people, and pretty fucked up ones at that. They are all muddling through the world as much as the rest of us, no matter how much they want us to think they are floating above it all. I know this may be obvious to some. But I think its an important reminder, considering how badly our culture wants to lionize and even divinize the elite.

I wrote this in my recent post on AI pessimism:

The moneyed interests of the world – they are all going to get old, and confront mortality, and when we are all gone, this will all remain. The rat race everyone is caught up in – I’ll let others run it, because I have compost to turn over and weeds to pull. You can’t put that on a microprocessor, and I can’t get it delivered to my pocket. How sad for those who are trying to.

I think the rich and powerful accumulate wealth and influence and power because it feels like a kind of Fountain of Youth – immortality, or at least invulnerability, is possible is there are enough zeroes in my bank account. Or at least, that’s what they want the rest of us to think. That, and inevitability: that wealth and influence and power are inevitable, it always was on their side and always will be, and to question otherwise is to question nature itself. And this narrative has mostly worked throughout history, and in a post-French Revolution world, it has worked most effectively in America. We have never really, as a people, questioned wealth and its provenance, no matter how badly some of us have wanted to.

The Roys, at the end, being reminded of their own humanity

But, that inevitability and invulnerability: it’s all a sham. That’s what’s great about a show like Succession, or even Mad Men or The Sopranos. These are all just people, not gods and not superheroes. The inevitability, the power, the cynicism and detached nature: it’s all a show, meant to hide the fact that they are just like the rest of us, and their situation in life is not ordained from above. Because at the end of the day, you are left with Logan Roy getting confused and pissing in his closet, or Roman Roy crying hysterically at his father’s funeral, or Kendall Roy getting high in a shack in a desert in New Mexico. It’s Tony Soprano having panic attacks, and Don Draper with no real friends.

To go back to my quote above: these inevitabilities want us to order the rest of the world around them. They want us to bend our buying power and our attentional energies and our everyday lives around their needs, and to forget that we are doing so. One of the projects I’m engaged in with my writing, and with the life I am crafting for me and my family, is a refusal to do so. There is another Inevitability to bend ourselves towards, that will ultimately bend all those lesser inevitabilities as well. They can try and make the rest of us conform our worlds to the one they want to build. But all we have to do it say no. Remember, the emperor has no clothes, and we all have the power to notice and to laugh.

not a luddite

One final note on all my pessimism about technology recently: I don’t want to give the wrong idea. I’m not anti-technology. I don’t walk around with a flip phone, I do own a television with subscriptions to all the major streamers, I play XBox often (current gaming: FI 2022), I have a lot of cultural content I love and consume regularly (Star Wars, sports, prestige television.) I am not against creature comforts, and I do love an evening on the couch with a good show or a basketball game.

The danger I want to warn against is the seeming demand on our lives to let our technologies dictate the shape of our lives, and the growing monetization of every aspect of our lives. As noted here before, I am a leftist with a strong critique of modern capitalism. I’m not an out and out socialist; instead, I reject totalizing ideology that tries to fit humanity and culture into a mold, and the dominant ideology in our world today is global techno-capitalism.

drawing together the threads on AI

I did some writing back in March about AI, as that tool came to dominate the national conversation and begin seeping into our lives more fully. The rise of AI really galvanized my thinking and focused my mind around a variety of ideas that had been floating around in my head. I reacted at first with intense pessimism, which has cooled slightly (I even found some good applications for Large Language Model tools in the classroom!), but, all-in-all, that is the mood the growth of AI has left me with: pessimism about the future it is ushering in, and how humanity will react to and integrate with this new tool. In an ideal world, AI would be introduced into our world slowly, with a lot of oversight and conversation. This conversation would be led by regular people, by community interests, by civil society, and by ethicists and religious leaders. We would be thinking long and hard about what we want AI to do, and how we want to get there, and we would be aware of the dangers cropping up left and right.

Instead, as expected (can you imagine any other way it would really be?), AI is being foisted upon by the worst actors out there: global tech companies, venture capital and financial interests, and techno-utopists driven by freshman-level understandings of ethics and utilitarian commitments where humanity takes a backseat to progress. AI will inevitably be wielded to make money for the global elite, billionaires who can’t imagine enough digits in their bank accounts, and who see their fellow humans as means to the ends of enrichment.

All the while, people who are being promised a bright, AI-driven future will instead get more loneliness, more monetization of our attention, and less meaningful connection. It’s already well-acknowledged that Big Tech has used the levers of addiction to make the gains they have made in our lives; this knowledge will surely be put to use in figuring out how to addict us to AI in the hopes of extracting a few more pennies from the areas of our lives that have so far escaped their pocketbooks.

I wanted to use this post to draw together some of these threads that have been running through my writing and rattling around in my brain recently. All of this pessimism about AI is intimately connected to my theological commitments, and my political and social ones as well. The primacy of human dignity, the direction of human attention towards the ultimate Good that is God, the importance of community and connection, the need in a liberal and capitalist world to focus on the lives of regular, everyday people in our politics: no matter which lens I look through right now, all of them encourage skepticism towards the growth of technology and the increasing hold it has on our lives. And that hold is driven by global corporations and moneyed interests, all of whom view the whole world as one giant market from which they can extract from the rest of us wealth and power and obeisance. My commitments all demand that I resist this, and that I use the tools at my finger tips – my words, my ideas, and my voice – to push back and fight against this.

I am writing this today from outside, in my backyard, where the Oklahoma wind is swirling around me, and summer is in full swing. And it reminds me: this is what lasts. AI hasn’t got shit on the wind, on the warm sun, on the smell of soil and flowers, on the birds chirping as they perch on the string of lights hanging around our back porch. The moneyed interests of the world – they are all going to get old, and confront mortality, and when we are all gone, this will all remain. The rat race everyone is caught up in – I’ll let others run it, because I have compost to turn over and weeds to pull. You can’t put that on a microprocessor, and I can’t get it delivered to my pocket. How sad for those who are trying to. They think I’m going to miss out if I don’t use AI; boy are they mistaken.

I really am pretty pessimistic about the state of our culture, and the power of technology in our lives. But it just takes a few minutes away from that bubble, out under the blue sky, or in the pages of a book, at the tip of my favorite ink pen, or in the words of this morning’s daily prayers, to find where my optimism lies, to remember the hope of the world and to be reminded about who has the final victory. There’s a task for you: ask ChatGPT to give you hope. It’s answer will be crafted to please you – but it’ll still be false. Hope is out here.