Negotiating our survival
Today we've got another striking and meditative essay by Michael Brown on the similarities between paranoid survivalists he met living out in the Arizona desert and the AI-brained tech ubermensch. Brown previously wrote for Hell World about his experience of putting his life back together after years of addiction and homelessness.
Luke O’Neil
...I was not the only one who passed out on the sidewalk as people walked over me and wondered what might have happened in my life that had led to such a moment; and I was not the only one who’d been kicked out of place after place and been beaten up by cops and criminals both; and I’m not the only one who became a violent criminal and victimized others myself; and I’m not the only one who got arrested over and over again and got to the point where I liked it because at least someone was interested in what I did; and I’m not the only one who’s woken up on a gurney in an emergency room out of an alcoholic blackout before signing in and suddenly feeling like I might have found a way out; and I’m not the only one who actually started to find joy in life and see the beauty in small things and take delight in the presence of other people even when they were giant pains in my ass; and I’m not the only one who wants to tell the story without leaving any of the bad parts out just so that I can make the point that life is still beautiful and worth living and that the world and other people are far more beautiful than I used to think.
by Michael Brown
Not only is the old world ending and a new one being born, but it is directly related to who and what I am and do.
Imagine thinking that way on a regular basis as the world keeps not ending? That you are living in the eye of the needle through which the one true thread of history must pass and be seen.
Lately I’ve been looking back on the time when I lived out in the desert in the early 2020s. A weird space of which I am still fond but am in no rush to get back to. I’ve been reminiscing because I’ve been paying too much attention to the news lately and the latest AI discourse reminds me of the survivalists I met out there.
Not only are the revolution and the revelation imminent but they are directly related to what I am and do.
Back in 2021 I’d had a few bad experiences, including a gnarly paranoid meth freakout, that ended with me out on the streets with all my stuff witnessing a guy getting shot at the bus stop. That was distressing.
So I got clean and slept at the bird sanctuary for a bit before my stimulus hit on Saint Patrick’s Day and drove the snakes out of my bank account. I got a cheap room in a bad neighborhood and figured out how to get out to the desert by way of public transportation and sleep outside legally. It turns out that that is not that hard to do in Tucson.
All of history is culminating in some ultimate event that revolves around my personal mythology.
It seems like the edge of the known world at first. You feel like you’re the only one there. Even at this late point in history you might get a little whiff of that frontier feeling, though that’s an illusion because not only are there people all over but there have been for thousands of years. And besides that the city is still only four miles to the east. It’s just well hidden by the mountains.
I met a lot of people who were trying to live as if the city did not exist. As if other people in general were an existential threat to their livelihoods. In some cases this was true. There were guys who had violated parole or were on the run. You can’t always get a straight story from guys like that. If someone lays a romantic outlaw story on you he might actually be a violent sex offender.
Then there are other people who aren’t violators or felons but who basically identify as such. They think of themselves as misfits and outlaws. More often than not this has to do with serious intimacy issues and unresolved trauma.
I don’t need other people when they don’t love or understand me anyway.
They felt threatened by everything. Anyone who was different in any way was weird and scary to them. They had trouble with basic social activity. That was why they lived as they did. They talked big about how they wished the damn big government would come and try to take their guns, but they were afraid all the time. It was as if they took refuge in the fantasy that someone was going to come for them. Fantasies like that provide a sense of purpose and importance and help compensate for feelings of inadequacy or worthlessness. People are like that.
The very fate of the world and the meaning of existence are to be determined and I am somehow essential to the process of it.
They saw themselves as free thinkers among people caught up in a herd mentality. Tech guys who talk about superintelligence and the singularity are similar. They have their personal mythology and they believe in it at least partly because it fulfills basic psychological needs that they have trouble getting met through healthy social relationships. The survivalists tend to prefer relationships with trucks and guns and think in terms of how to survive without other people. The tech people think in terms of being lone supermen who are out-evolving the meat sacks by way of their embrace of cybernetics. There’s a fetishism to it. The social impulse is displaced onto the inanimate so that the subject can experience objects as people and people as objects. Human relationships are too messy because people are alive, spontaneous and free in ways that guns, trucks and computers are not.
Once one has enough firepower to rise to a position more powerful than the common herd, one becomes invulnerable and immortal, and is unconstrained by emotion, law, regulation, or principle.
So when the survivalist says “I have enough food and ammunition to survive a zombie apocalypse” it’s as if he really wants a zombie apocalypse because it provides an unambiguous sense of purpose. It makes it easy to figure out how they’re supposed to live and behave as human beings. His day to day life might even seem empty and meaningless to the point of suicidal despair if they were deprived of the paranoid fantasies and conspiracy theories that constitute their ideas of how human society actually works.
With the tech guys it’s even crazier because the pathological wish fulfillment fantasy of “I think my computer program might bring about the extinction of the human race” actually counts as a kind of global sales pitch made by a bunch of obscenely wealthy money hungry free market ideologues who are high on their own fumes and whose actions affect the lives of billions of people. Add to this that they are being enabled by breathless stenographers in the New York Times, or The Atlantic, or on CNBC, or X or wherever.
I never stockpiled food or weapons. I made friends in communities. I could live without money or possessions but I like other people. People are the most valuable resource and making friends and being good to others is the most important life skill there is for me. Everything else flows from that. Any other human being you encounter might be the most miraculous thing you will ever find. Of course there are bad ones too. There are very, very bad people out there. The uncertainty of all can really do a number on you. The uncertainty of it all can drive people to take refuge in weird fantasies about the great replacement or the end of the world or the singularity.
So I made friends at the nearest store and the church so I could get free shit for myself and others. And I made trips back into the city to visit my friends, who were largely transgender women of color. The survivalist types were prejudiced against and felt threatened by people like that. One guy told me: “I went into town one time and I saw Mexican gangsters and queers at the bus station and I got scared,” but that guy had recently gotten out of prison for a double homicide committed in a jealous rage. People are funny like that.
That guy was from the south and loved the confederacy. A lot of these guys openly subscribe to fascist ideologies without seeing any conflict of interest with regard to their own libertarianism. They see themselves as belonging to the select small percentage of people who will be lifted up unto glory as the rest of the world is purged in fire and flood. That’s common in America, the guy who self identifies as an outlaw while espousing authoritarian political views. Even the mainstream “liberal” press loves describing far right types as “mavericks” while someone who advocates for public healthcare and housing the poor is regarded with suspicion.
We live in absolutely unprecedented times and the very concept of history has become obsolete; only the sufficiently advanced and independent among us will bring forth the revaluation of all values. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.
Eventually I realized that I might actually be able to change my own life by cultivating meaningful relationships and practicing compassion, but nothing I’ve done has helped me as much as other people have, and I’m thankful for that. It took me a while to get to where I could actually submit to letting people who knew better than I did tell me a thing or two. I’m a slow learner. But at long last learned to live with other people.
Now I see these tech guys getting messianic and apocalyptic and I see the same disconnect as I saw in the desert. It makes it easy to see why even the more woke (complimentary) people in tech might veer into varieties of fascism. Engineer types sometimes have trouble with other people and overestimate their own intelligence when it comes to things beyond their jobs. And here in the US we fluff our engineers’ egos so that they will keep producing consumer products, military dominance, surplus value etc. It gets easy for them to believe their own hype.
But it takes a special kind of pride and vanity to really dig your heels in and make the leap from “I am an important member of a team who develops a popular technology” to “I am the avante garde of the future race of the transhumanoid, which will be as different from our lives now are from the lives of apes.”
Once you get to that level you really don’t need to deal with other people anymore. You don’t need to admit you’re wrong. You don’t need to accept the results of an election where you were part of a minority who lost. In fact, once you really get to that level you might just start to think that elections and democracy can only lead to a progressively worsening idiocracy, and that while authoritarianism might seem bad it is really the only way to save people, who are not as smart as you or your computer, from themselves. So that even if you are not a straight Nazi like Elon Musk you might still pave the road to hell with your good intentions.
And then we've got AI on the way, and when real AI hits, it'll probably be our governor. It'll be our president. We'll decide that human beings are too dangerous, volatile and emotional.
Fortunately this is not true of all tech people and plenty of them are speaking out about how the smartest guys in the room have been going off the deep end and it’s been leading to people losing their jobs after working for companies who once told them they were family. Some of the tech sector are rebelling against their own aristocracy, which seems good to me. The human ability to choose to do the right thing is as important now as it has ever been, if not moreso. Technology advances along lines of progress that diverge definitively from the development of human society and culture even though the technologies we use to move and communicate have a huge impact on our cultures and societies. Now more than ever we need to get better at critical thinking instead of sucking our own dicks because we have a robot that can beat a monkey in a breakdancing contest. I guess that is really what I learned by living among the survivalists. Seems like it was worth it to me. And that is the kind of value judgment that only a human being can make.
Mike Brown is a middle aged public library enthusiast in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. Find more of his writing here.