On endangered worlds, himpathy, and defeating the rich
Plus two opportunities to see me read my poems
Hi dears, happy fall. Mourning a family member by playing Under the Big Black Sun and Lonerism; life is a brief blessing. First,
Come see me at a few upcoming readings! I’ll be reading my poems at part of Unpoetry at Ophelia’s Books in Fremont (3504 Fremont Ave N): Wednesday, Oct 18, 7-8:30 pm. Thanks to the tireless Eric Acosta (@bottlemeat IG)
And I’ll be among the poets reading at Murmurations at Common Area Maintenance in Belltown (2125 2nd Ave), Wednesday, November 29, 7-8:30 pm, as part of Seattle Arts & Lectures’s Writers in the Schools cohort (@seattleartsandlectures IG).
Now,
here are seven five of the best things I’ve encountered on the internet this month.
Revolutions, Seasons 7 and 9: C.L.R. James said it; let it be carved on the gravestones of nerdy occultist Mexican liberal Francisco Madero and aspiring Hungarian statesman Lajos Batthyány and countless other revolutionaries who played too gently: “The rich are only defeated when they’re running for their lives.” When you win, revolutionary, don’t waste time and alienate your allies trying to placate those who will always hate you.
Madero led the revolution to overthrew Mexico’s ancient dictator, Porfirio Díaz, in 1911; but even after Madero was elected president himself, he desperately desired that his revolution—political, he insisted, not social—be seen as respectable by the fossil oligarchy Díaz left behind: the ruling class of feudal hacendados, technocrats, and right-wing army officers whose jockeying had kept Díaz’s dictatorship in balance. This craving for the trust of the old ruling class drove Madero as president to sideline the cowboy and peasant armies who’d put him in power—stifling land reform, shutting out revolutionary leaders from government posts. But, despite Madero’s overtures, it was this very respectable ruling class that soon overthrew and later murdered him after just over a year as president.
Likewise Batthyány: Hungary, which in 1848 had a centuries-long representative tradition in its diets and a newly-explosive rural-urban working-class solidarity movement, could have waged war against its masters in the Austrian Empire, but most of its revolutionary leaders, including the wealthy liberal magnate Batthyány, settled for asking for only greater autonomy within an empire: an empire that was only ever looking for an opportunity to crush them. Batthyány entered Vienna as a statesman and died by Austrian firing squad fifteen months later. When you win a revolution, don’t forget who your enemies are.
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Becky Tuch, “Lit Mags Didn’t Start the Fire!” I’ve followed Tuch’s peppy and hard-working Substack ever since she bird-dogged a few small presses and journals (including the once-wonderful PANK) who’ve been credibly accused of scamming submitters and buyers. Here, Tuch shares the news about poet Emmalea Russo’s publishing contract being cancelled for publishing in “fascist-adjacent” (her would-be publisher’s words) spaces such as Compact; not, that is, for her own work in these outlets, but for her contamination by other writers who’ve published there. (Compact is, yes, avowedly anti-liberalism but plenty of its contributors come from the social-democratic/Marxist left as well as the authoritarian Ahmari/Rufo right.) I think this basically sucks; leftists using their energy in cultural spaces to intermittently deplatform those adjacent to them doesn’t repair the decay of trust, fellow-feeling, solidarity, and social bonding that generally haunts our country (and for that matter deracinates our poetic spaces). We should be reading, arguing, and sharing more widely, rather than less.
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Kate Manne, “Stolen Glory.” “We all saw what happened,” Manne writes with exasperation and fury: Luis Rubiales, president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, grabbed and forcibly kissed a forward from his team, Jenni Hermoso, when Spain won the World Cup 1-0 against England this August. Rubiales was Hermoso’s “boss’s boss,” Manne points out; when Hermoso, shaken and humiliated in a moment of her and her team’s unequivocal triumph, demanded accountability, Rubiales was eager—like so many other men who expect impunity—to make himself out to be her victim; he refused for two weeks to resign his position in the face of calls from everyone up to Spain’s literal Prime Minister.
Manne’s term for this is himpathy, “wherein powerful and privileged men garner sympathy and support over their female victims.” The Spanish team’s experience of unprecedented success was turned into an experience of collective dismay and outrage for Hermoso and her teammates, and another reminder that
no matter how accomplished and powerful a woman may be, no matter how high she is riding in the moment, she can still be brought down by sexualization, objectification, infantilization, and the proprietary way men commonly treat our bodies.
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Kékélé, Kinavana. A sweet and consciously old-school supergroup of some of the giants of Congolese pop (Mbilia Bel, Madilu System, Nyboma, Syran Mbeza, and Manu Dibango are all here) returning to the Cuban-inspired rumba—the album’s name is a portmanteau of Kinshasa and Havana—that’s deep in Congolese musical history. It’s polished, light, effortless in the manner of old virtuosos who’ve stayed close to their youthful love, and it swings; play this record next time you open your windows just to feel the breeze.
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John Gray, “The Human Era Is Ending.” Gray is one of my favorite adversary intellectuals, a conservative in the temperamental as well as political sense: sober-minded, cutting, learned, intellectually omnivorous, and profoundly doubtful of any narratives of certain progress. His Seven Types of Atheism finds something to admire to thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Joseph Conrad but also pitilessly probes the narrowness, hubris, and thin substitute monotheisms he finds in philosophies such as secular humanist liberal thought, New Atheist scientism, or transhumanist magical-mystery fantasy.
It’s this latter faith that’s on Gray’s mind in this recent essay. He finds preposterous the idea that AI, rightly steered, would trigger the birth of the Singularity (an escape of human consciousness into a collective digital Godhead). “‘Humanity,’” Gray tartly writes, “cannot take control of the evolution of AI, because humanity – understood as a collective agent – does not exist.” This is a point he speaks on at greater length in Seven Types: when we look at world history, we don’t see the actions of “humanity”; instead, “all that can actually be observed is the multifarious human animal, with its intractable enmities and divisions.” If AI intelligences can somehow escape direct human control to act and evolve on their own, the process will not be a rush toward some singular Uplift but will be as chancy, competitive, and chaotic as Darwinian evolution or the squabbles that characterize human relationships. Imagine AIs fighting! Gray writes in this essay that:
[l]ike so much else in contemporary thought, the idea that evolution tends towards a single godlike intelligence is a relic of monotheism. The upshot [of AI intelligence] could be more like Homer’s world of warring gods… Ultra-intelligent machines are as vulnerable to extinction as any other product of evolution.
Refusing techno-futurist magical hope, Gray offers merely the cold conclusion that—as with climate change, as with nuclear weapons—human beings in the age of AI “must somehow learn to live in the endangered world they have unwittingly created.”
Gray’s most immediate fear is the eminently reasonable one that “the logic of AI is the progressive displacement of actual experience by mechanical simulacra,” as is already plenty possible in our digital lives. The customizable and fundamentally solitary worlds of sensation and emotion available to us through digital life invite us to slowly let go of “the fugitive sensations of accidental lives.” This—as immediate fact and as deepening dimension of our future life—is a source of Gray’s grief.
Gray’s caution is salutary, and I don’t really disagree with his melancholy for actual experience; I’m just surprised that Gray, usually skeptical, does seem to believe that what we’re seeing in, say, ChatGPT is an emergent consciousness, an agent. This time may come, but I don’t think large language models will get us there, and I think it’s baffling that so many people believe that something exhibiting complex verbal behavior (including emotional manipulation, lying, or bashing out poetry) is necessarily a mind.
It’s already clear that the brute-force vacuum-cleaner process of a large language model is fundamentally different from what children do as they encounter the world experimentally and flesh out a grammar given minimal data. You might say that not all minds need evolve the same way, to which I’d reply, sure, but what evidence of actual consciousness do we see in ChatGPT or Bard? Is a large language model capable of, for example, causal explanations—not just predicting what will happen next but being able to describe why? “World modeling,” the development of an inner representation of the world it encounters? Moral thought, explaining not just what’s possible but what it believes ethical? “Recurrent processing,” ongoing feedback between inputs and outputs to guide further decisionmaking or reflection?
Many of these aspects of consciousness come down to an ability to think analogically and abstractly in new situations, a skill Douglas Hofstadter once called “the core of human intelligence.” Hofstadter described this core as
…the ability to adapt to different domains, to spot the gist of situations amidst a welter of superficial distractors, to see abstract resemblances between disparate situations, to be reminded by one situation of another. Spotting hidden patterns, extracting deep gists, forming high abstractions, making subtle analogies—these to me define the crux of the mental; they are what we do best of all creatures, natural or artificial.
I just don’t see the evidence that large language models—as surprising, spooky, or silly as they are—are doing this. I don’t think AIs necessarily need to do so to be used to deepfake us, hack CAPTCHAs, stalk us in urban protests, accelerate datamining, automate discriminatory hiring practices, gouge consumers, or send mass-destructive false alarms, but I think even someone as sober as Gray is giving too much credence to next-phase-of-evolution talk as he mourns what we’ve already lost in our current form of digitally-mediated life.
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Ken Opalo, “Putting the recent coups in the Sahel in a broader perspective.” Ken Opalo, a Georgetown professor and scholar of political economy and postcolonial politics, is wonderful; here, he asks why coups have erupted across the African Sahel from Guinea-Buissau to Sudan. Opalo narrows in on what Western observers miss when we catch only concern-trolling or imperialist Western journalism about political instability and violence in Africa. He notes that building a state and repairing a social contract in poor, restive, and divided nations is very, very difficult, and that “what the international community has so far aspired for in Niger and the wider Sahel is not real democracy but states that can cheaply be coopted into wider global agendas — whether it is defeating jihadis, countering geopolitical competitors, hoarding vital resources, or stemming migrant flows.”
Citizens of the Sahel briefly embrace, or tolerate, coups because of the manifest failure of these states’ prior governments. Slavery and cultural imperialism destroyed many of these countries’ historical institutions of self-governance; colonial-era borders carved up dozens of polities into Western-style states with nothing supporting them. Neo-colonial politics now instrumentalizes smaller states for its own ends, and these states’ ongoing immiseration, violence, and elite looting don’t make the New York Times. (See here for a more recent piece by Opalo on how Ghana, by contrast, avoided this nightmare cycle.)
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This month I’m recommending Sweater Weather, Brandon Taylor’s Substack: Taylor is a novelist and short story writer I adore; his Substack, like B.D. McClay’s, feels more like a public daybook or friend’s email than a home for polished final takes, casually penetrating and insightful rather than working for an effect; he follows threads from teaching, conversations with students, and friends’ work, talks about his travel, synthesizes his reading, etc. Start with “Necessary Scenes” and work backward.