Get to Slathering
Craig Mod:
Most folks pulling the strings don’t care about poetry, seem to have little understanding of romance, love, familial duty, have never sat quietly with their own thoughts. Have never gotten lost for the sake of getting lost. Have little empathy for the great many. On one hand, the “purpose” of humanity is (has always been) to get us to the next thing, which may not (will almost certainly not) be “human.” I’m actually fine with this (one of my personal heresies is that we aren’t that “special” and are a “stepping-stone species,” our magic trick of metacognition being analogous to that first multicellular pop … But: the “purpose” of humanity is also to fuck under the night sky on a Greek island, eat freshly caught grilled fish slathered in butter and lemon with your hands, lick red wine off the body of your lover, and be OK with dying a stupid death.
Let’s not forget that.
Plenty of hard-asses would say, why should I care whether Dario Amodei or Mark Zuckerberg read poetry? Or if they’ve fucked under the night sky on a Greek island, for that matter? Oy. Unpleasant image.
To which I say… You can’t trust anyone with the guns if they’re not paying attention to human hearts, including their own. We need love and logic, conscious thought and unthinking intuition, to make good decisions. And those guys make decisions that reach deep into our lives (already, and it’s early days).
(Their companies are proverbial guns pointed at our faces. And some of them, like Palmer Luckey, are making real guns, too. Pointed at dictators for now but at who-knows-who-else next.)
I don’t want to be ruled by art-supremacists any more than I want to be ruled by spreadsheet fuckers. You have to have one eye on the real world and one eye on the sky to be reasonable and compassionate. Do you, hard-ass, not want reasonable and compassionate kings?
It strikes me that we really don’t know what these guys are like, even when we read books and profiles about them. I do know we don’t get to pick them, just like previous generations didn’t get to pick Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford. And that gets to be pretty upsetting when they start leaning on Congress.
(For what it’s worth, Dario Amodei named his grandiose manifesto after a Richard Brautigan poem. But for some reason that weirds me out more than it comforts me.)