Everything Is F*cked(65)

Look, it may be that you came to this book looking for some sort of hope, an assurance that things will get better—do this, that, and the other thing, and everything will improve.

I am sorry. I don’t have that kind of answer for you. Nobody does. Because even if all the problems of today get magically fixed, our minds will still perceive the inevitable fuckedness of tomorrow.

So, instead of looking for hope, try this:

Don’t hope.

Don’t despair, either.

In fact, don’t deign to believe you know anything. It’s that assumption of knowing with such blind, fervent, emotional certainty that gets us into these kinds of pickles in the first place.

Don’t hope for better. Just be better.

Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined.

Many people would also throw in there “Be more human,” but no—be a better human. And maybe, if we’re lucky, one day we’ll get to be more than human.


If I Dare . . .

I say to you today, my friends, that even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, in this final moment, I will allow myself to dare to hope . . .

I dare to hope for a post-hope world, where people are never treated merely as means but always as ends, where no consciousness is sacrificed for some greater religious aim, where no identity is harmed out of malice or greed or negligence, where the ability to reason and act is held in the highest regard by all, and where this is reflected not only in our hearts but also in our social institutions and business models.

I dare to hope that people will stop suppressing either their Thinking Brain or their Feeling Brain and marry the two in a holy matrimony of emotional stability and psychological maturity; that people will become aware of the pitfalls of their own desires, of the seduction of their comforts, of the destruction behind their whims, and will instead seek out the discomfort that will force them to grow.

I dare to hope that the fake freedom of variety will be rejected by people in favor of the deeper, more meaningful freedom of commitment; that people will opt in to self-limitation rather than the quixotic quest of self-indulgence; that people will demand something better of themselves first before demanding something better from the world.

That said, I dare to hope that one day the online advertising business model will die in a fucking dumpster fire; that the news media will no longer have incentives to optimize content for emotional impact but, rather, for informational utility; that technology will seek not to exploit our psychological fragility but, rather, to counterbalance it; that information will be worth something again; that anything will be worth something again.

I dare to hope that search engines and social media algorithms will be optimized for truth and social relevance rather than simply showing people what they want to see; that there will be independent, third-party algorithms that rate the veracity of headlines, websites, and news stories in real time, allowing users to more quickly sift through the propaganda-laden garbage and get closer to evidence-based truth; that there will be actual respect for empirically tested data, because in an infinite sea of possible beliefs, evidence is the only life preserver we’ve got.

I dare to hope that one day we will have AI that will listen to all the dumb shit we write and say and will point out (just to us, maybe) our cognitive biases, uninformed assumptions, and prejudices—like a little notification that pops up on your phone letting you know that you just totally exaggerated the unemployment rate when arguing with your uncle, or that you were talking out of your ass the other night when you were doling out angry tweet after angry tweet.

I dare to hope that there will be tools to help people understand statistics, proportions, and probability in real time and realize that, no, a few people getting shot in the far corners of the globe does not have any bearing on you, no matter how scary it looks on TV; that most “crises” are statistically insignificant and/or just noise; and that most real crises are too slow-moving and unexciting to get the attention they deserve.

I dare to hope that education will get a much-needed facelift, incorporating not only therapeutic practices to help children with their emotional development, but also letting them run around and scrape their knees and get into all sorts of trouble. Children are the kings and queens of antifragility, the masters of pain. It is we who are afraid.

I dare to hope that the oncoming catastrophes of climate change and automation are mitigated, if not outright prevented, by the inevitable explosion of technology wrought by the impending AI revolution; that some dumb fuck with a nuke doesn’t obliterate us all before that happens; and that a new, radical human religion doesn’t emerge that convinces us to destroy our own humanity, as so many have done before.

I dare to hope that AI hurries along and develops some new virtual reality religion that is so enticing that none of us can tear ourselves away from it long enough to get back to fucking and killing each other. It will be a church in the cloud, except it will be experienced as one universal video game. There will be offerings and rites and sacraments just as there will points and rewards and progression systems for strict adherence. We will all log on, and stay on, because it will be our only conduit for influencing the AI gods and, therefore, the only wellspring that can quench our insatiable desire for meaning and hope.

Groups of people will rebel against the new AI gods, of course. But this will be by design, as humanity always needs factious groups of opposing religions, for this is the only way for us to prove our own significance. Bands of infidels and heretics will emerge in this virtual landscape, and we will spend most of our time battling and railing against these various factions. We will seek to destroy one another’s moral standing and diminish each other’s accomplishments, all the while not realizing that this was intended. The AI, realizing that the productive energies of humanity emerge only through conflict, will generate endless series of artificial crises in a safe virtual realm, where that productivity and ingenuity can then be cultivated and used for some greater purpose we won’t ever know or understand. Human hope will be harvested like a resource, a never-ending reservoir of creative energy.