Intellectuals in the (late?) Anthropocene

Why "late?": Global warming, antibiotic resistance, global terror, income inequality, acceleration of AI, rapidly ephemeralized synthetic biological techniques, nuke proliferation. I'm not all that worried about an errant asteroid. I'm worried about sociopaths in power, and a species-wide inequality in knowledge and empathy towards The Other...

Three articles caught my eye in the past week. I'll link to them, give my idio-precis and comments. Why? Because I care about both of us.

1. ) L.D. Burnett in Chronicle of Higher Education: "Holding On To What Makes Us Human," an Adjunct who writes books about academia; Burnett implores us to defend the Humanities in the face of runaway "transferrable skills" and the cost/benefit reality of universities now. Screw "critical thinking" (although that's valuable, of course): we must find a way of articulating why knowledge of literature/history/philosophy etc is inherently valuable, despite all that's transpired in the epoch of NeoLiberalism. She wants arguments that set aside money and jobs issues. And I say: good luck with that, although I'm with you in spirit, Ms. Burnett.

Her keynote (fair warning: I do not have perfect pitch) seems to be that we must resist perishing, but if we must perish, we should go down resisting. At first I thought she meant "we" adjuncts. Then I realized she seemed a tad more cosmopolitan: we humans. I bet you're on board with her here with me, no?

If I sound like a dick here, I apologize. I'm just as caught up in the morass of being a Knower and struggling to pay the bills as she is, probably more so. I know Adjunct jobs suck ass as far as pay goes (usually), but I don't even get to do that. I'm a freelancer. There's a really heavy downside to that, apart from making your own hours and staying up all night taking notes in your books. Weed helps. It certainly helps.
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2.) Michael Lind, a prolific and fairly heavyweight intellectual who notes he's been "accused" of being a "public intellectual," claims that his own in-group of intellectuals are "freaks." Lind is not doing the Chomsky thing of calling out his fellow intellectuals for facilitating and sucking up to State power. He's merely saying he and his kind: academics, think tank experts, opinion journalists, and downwardly-mobile free-spirited bohemians? They really are "freaks" and out of touch with ordinary values. This last sub-class of Bohemians constitute a group who are living off (largely) inherited bourgeois-begotten capital in order to be revolutionaries, avant-garde writers, or artists.

Lind asserts that "populists" who've always argued intellectuals are out of touch are basically correct. He notes that non-intellectuals are/were wrong about the gold standard, the single tax and "other issues" (I wish he'd have gone into much greater detail here, as I think it's very many other issues, but that's just me), but populists are right: intellectuals are freaks and weirdoes who are out of touch with mainstream values.

Intellectuals live in large cities and their judgment is distorted by their borderlessness (because scholarship is inherently borderless). Proles finish high school and go into manual labor in what's now the "service sector." They work within 18 miles of where their mothers live and depend on family networks for economic support and child care. Intellectuals often defer marriage and children in order to further their career goals, and they move all over the place, as academia is found throughout the continent. Their notions about a borderless world as a moral and political ideal are, says Lind, "stupid and lazy" because there's no world-wide infrastructure to keep a welfare state equitably distributed throughout the world. (I see this as a worthy utopian goal, but Lind keeps mum about this: "stupid and lazy.") Their childlessness and deferred marriages make them "unusually individualistic"...Lind would like to see that studied more and so would I.

Talk about unrestricted immigration feeds nationalist and neo-fascist and right-wing populist political movements, and we're seeing that as I type, in many places. Also, it feeds the well-entrenched meme among the unwashed that the UN is taking over their lives, incipient fears of "lost sovereignty" (a classic divide-and-conquer/misdirection move by the Ruling Class), not to mention the Bilderbergers-bugaboo. (Enough food and clean water for Burundi? Tyranny!)

Here's another major problem with intellectuals: they see the problem of inequality and their solution is...be more like me!: More and better education is the mantra. (As long as Obama has been Prez he's repeated this old workhorse. And I'm embarrassed to admit that on more than one occasion I've yelled at him through the teevee screen, "For what?")

Lind says this idea of more education is natural, but "stupid and lazy." He's a conscience for his own class of freaks! How come "more education" isn't a good idea? Automation and the service sector job market is really all there is. He doesn't mention Adjuncts, and it's easy to conjure reasons why. Janitors with Master's degrees? Sad. He does say unionization might be a good idea for service-sector workers. A restriction of low-wage immigration (I don't see this happening). A higher minimum-wage is mentioned.

I read Lind's short piece three times and I still can't discern the level of wryness in it. If you read the piece he exempts those intellectuals in the "hard sciences." Gee, I wonder why?

A final idea: it's often floated out that one or two years of national service could be  a moral and social balancer. Lind says: stupid idea, because the proles already have it hard enough without doing two years of unpaid work. But then he gets off his best riff: But: "it might not hurt" for professional intellectuals to face "a year or two working in a shopping mall, hotel, hospital, or warehouse."

My Wry-o-Meter was sparking and giving off noxious fumes on that last bit. That Michael Lind!

As a general comment on Lind, some dialectical sparks from Alvin Gouldner, who is writing about the history and alienation of intellectuals, first from the Old Regime of inherited landed aristocracy, and then the bourgeoisie, this latter group being at first allied with the intellectuals against the Old Regime and helped by their cultural capital...until the bourgeoisie came into ascendancy. Gouldner refers to both the technical intelligentsia and humanistic intellectuals as The New Class:

The New Class believes its high culture represents the greatest achievement of the human race, the deepest ancient wisdom and the most advanced modern scientific knowledge. It believes that these contribute to the welfare and wealth of the race, and that they should receive correspondingly greater rewards. The New Class believes that the world should be governed by those possessing superior competence, wisdom and science - that is, themselves. The Platonic Complex, the dream of the philosopher king with which Western philosophy begins, is the deepest wish-fulfillment fantasy of the New Class. But they look around and see that the men who employ them do not begin to understand the simplest aspects of their technical specialties, and the politicians who rule them are, in Edmund Wilson's words, "unique in having managed to be corrupt, uncultivated, and incompetent all at once."
-p.65, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979), Alvin Gouldner, PhD
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3.) "Power, Powerlessness, Thinking and Future," by French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, from about 10 months ago. Stiegler notes that intellectuals have been steeped in the analysis of power relations since M. Foucault, but that thinking about this should also highlight powerlessness too, and maybe more now than ever, since intellectuals seem to not understand that techne has accelerated faster than they could conceptualize, and they are now proles themselves. He attacks those intellectuals who claim the term "right wing intellectual" is an impossibility or oxymoron, because, well, Freud, Heidegger, Niklas Luhmann, Maurice Blanchot, and many others. And deeper: there was thinking before the French Revolution and "Left" vs. "Right" and we now need to reconceptualize what it means to think, now that almost all of us are proles.

Stiegler thinks it's unfortunate that the term "intellectual" was ever used as a noun, when it's an adjective. Further, the term activates neurological opposition between "manual workers" and the types Gouldner is talking about, above. And yet throughout the article you notice Stiegler uses "intellectuals" as a term for their class. That's because it's ensconced in culture. And Michael Lind's presuppositions about his own class seem to hold sway, eh?

Here's where it gets interesting for me: Stiegler claims, based on Marx and Engels, that "proletarianism" now effects not only most of us, but all forms of knowledge. Futhermore, it's a "widespread generalization of entropic behavior" since the Anthropocene commenced and we began to time-bind like mad. Proletarianization destructs knowledge: how to live, do and conceptualize. And intellectuals seem oblivious that this is what has happened to them. They are now much closer to Lind's janitors than any sort of Gouldner's Platonic philosopher kings, no doubt.

Stiegler wants to clarify: Marx and Engels thought that proletarians denote not a state of poverty so much as a loss of knowledge...knowledge about how to harness negentropy to conceptualize our way out of this mess. Rather than doing this, they "adopt attitudes and poses." A culture of knowledge construction and new ideas has been run out of town by consumer capitalism, based on "behavioral prescriptions produced by marketing." In the weakest part of his fascinating article, Stiegler uses Alan Greenspan's testimony about why he didn't see the 2008 crash coming. It seems there were a few hundred better examples, but perhaps this one suffices...

So, let's stop with labeling "left"and "right" thinking and replace it with thinking, which he seems to align with negentropy, the notion that, though entropy is The Law, its negative reciprocal is creating novel order and structure amidst chaos. (What Korzybski called "time-binding'.) The acceleration of technology has lapped our social systems of law, education, political organizations and forms of knowledge. We will always be late, it seems. Our only hope is realizing we're all proles now, begin thinking from within casino economies and marketing and short-term R&D "disruptions." We need not become Luddites and reject technology, and Stiegler cites Evgeny Morozov's article (presumably HERE although Stiegler merely claims this "evokes") as a way into a new politics, in which it's essential to re-think "value."

Morozov seems like a start to me, too, but I'd also cite John Dewey's 1920 book Reconstruction in Philosophy as a text that argued the Platonic ideal of the "spectatorial view" of knowledge had it backwards: no intellectual need fool herself into believing that just because she doesn't get her hands dirty that she truly knows, and that those who do things with their hands (mechanics, plumbers, craftspeople of every stripe) don't "know" anything. Workers know quite a lot, and so the fuck what if it's not Hegel or organic chemistry: it's knowledge that produces immediate material results in the sensory/sensual world. Dewey's book disabused me of these notions about the primacy of spectatorial/armchair views of knowledge long ago, and this text seems woefully underrated to me.

Earlier, Marx had expressed a dislike for the opposition of Techne and Logos. Bernard Stiegler reminds us here that, "Knowledge is always constituted by technics, which in so doing always constitutes a social relation." (italics in original)

Also, and more practically, look at contemporaries like Douglas Rushkoff and his marvelous recent book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and Martin Ford's Rise of the Robots. Here are thinkers who can get us started thinking ourselves...out of our proletarian situation. There are many, many more...

Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred 71 years ago this past week or so. Soon after that Dark Moment, a very smart individual noted that everything had changed...save for our "way of thinking."

                                             Tueuses graphiques par Bobby Campbell

17 Disparate Riffs on Science Fiction

Disparate in the book-drunk weed-sodden time-jog of my mind, at least...

My blogging colleague Tom Jackson has posted on the Prometheus Awards finalists, with nice summaries of all kinds of books that sound fascinating, none of which I've gotten around to reading yet. The last post the OG received comments about science fiction fans and conventions and how SF writers tend to be - some - more open to meeting their fans. Sooo...

1. I recently read about Hong Kong roboticist Ricky Ma making his first prototype robot that looks very very much like Unistatian bombshell actress Scarlett Johansson. He used 3-D printing and it cost about $50,000. He'll no doubt make "better" versions. Aside from what we think about his project (I wonder what "Scarjo" makes of it?), it reminded me of SF writer Ray Faraday Nelson's 1978 book Revolt of the Unemployables, which pointed out that his collaborator and friend Philip K. Dick was the first SF writer to realize the purpose of making robots look like people. Eventually we meatware beings will have an ontological problem distinguishing what it means to be human. And these robots are going to get better and better, obviously...and the aesthetic behind the assertion of "better" of course means: "more like us." In a book of interviews with Philip K. Dick, What If Our World Is Their Heaven? PKD asserts that the android that thinks it's human idea is his own unique contribution to SF, since 1953's "Imposter."

2. William Gibson said that "What interested me most in the sci-fi of The Sixties was the investigation of the politics of perception, some of which, I imagine, could now be seen in retrospect as having been approached through various and variously evolving ideas of the cyborg." - Distrust That Particular Flavor, p. 248 (Maybe worthsomewhiles: Do yourself a favor and nonchalantly drop "the politics of perception" into your next dinner-party conversation. Note any and all reactions. I've noticed the phrase has legs: watch it be interpreted in many different ways. "Is" perception "political"? My gawd, how can it not be? And yet this topic only seems to get discussed among weirdos like us. - OG)

3. Thomas Pynchon has influenced many SF writers, but had the idea, in his introductory piece to his old essays in Slow Learner that SF evades the issue of mortality. Or it had as of the writing of that Intro, c.1984. It's an interesting idea...and ideas are, it seems to me, what make SF cool. It's as if Pynchon went looking for a possible Achilles Heel of SF and came up with the riff on mortality. Is it true? I don't know. Pynchon for me belongs along with SF books in the Novels of Ideas.

4. In Dennis McKenna's memoir Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss he writes about how he and his famous brother Terence loved SF - especially Heinlein, Asimov, Blish, Sturgeon, and Arthur C. Clarke. Later: PKD. As I read Dennis's book I made notes on all the sources he cited that he and Terence filled their imaginations and knowledge banks with, because I knew Dennis's account of the Experiment at La Chorrera was coming up. At one point he reproduces his own field notes, written while he was in a monthlong quasi-para-schizophrenic break from "reality" due to constant heroic doses of psilocybin mushrooms and DMT and incessant pot smoking, add to that being with three other people, in the Amazon, missing sleep for days, and doing ceremonial magic on top of this. It's one of the great insane travelogue accounts. 41 years later Dennis says his alchemical science-y sounding "attempt" to "trigger an end to history, throw open the gates of a paradise out of time and invite humanity to walk in," was acting "on our obsessions to an appalling degree." (p.285) Of the science fiction books that possibly subconsciously framed the McKenna Brothers' experience, Dennis admits of a "mash-up" of Arthur C. Clarke and PKD. (p.286) I'll say! I'd say add heaps of Jung, alchemy, cosmology, their own rejected Catholic upbringing in a stultifying small town, and a high school music teacher who taught Dennis about sympathetic vibrations of strings. At minimum.

5. Writing about the time before La Chorrera (reading about or listening to Terence recount this epically gonzo drug experiment always gives me a major contact high), Dennis writes, "Science fiction is good for the mind. It keeps one open to possibilities and, more than any other fictional genre, helps one to anticipate and prepare for the future. In fact, science fiction creates the future, by articulating a vision of what we as a culture imagine for ourselves." (p.119, op.cit) He then goes on to list a handful of SF predictions that came true, some that didn't, and some science fiction-y things that did come true, although maybe never predicted in SF, coming to the conclusion that "reality" is stranger than fiction.

In John Higgs's recent history of the 20th century, Stranger Than We Can Imagine, he traces science fiction as a clue to individual, then collective longing for something fantastic. SF is an "early warning system" and points to collective minds in our future. How can this not be? (see op cit, pp. 129-143)

6. My favorite writer about drugs is Dale Pendell. In his Pharmako Gnosis he has an entire chapter on DMT, "The Topology of the Between: DMT," pp. 227-240. Along with Dr. Rick Strassman and the greatest 20th century alchemist, Sasha Shulgin, DMT is still probably most associated with the McKennas, and probably Terence more than Dennis, probably owing to Terence's legendary poetic gifts and mesmerizing idiolect. Pendell spends four pages comparing written accounts of various truly otherworldly DMT trips, and notes how science fiction and DMT trip reports seem quite similar. The "contact" with machine-like alien beings who want to teach the tripper something very important is a very common part of the DMT experience. Of DMT-inspired art, Pendell writes, "There are transparent bubbles and pods and extraterrestrial landscapes. Dendritic forms are common, as is x-ray vision. Crystals are also frequent. Much of the art is illustrative, has a commercial feel to it, and finds its way onto book and album covers. And, of course, movies - DMT can have a cartoon quality. Science fiction themes are common. Sometimes visionary artists are able to capture the movement and churning of DMT experience." Here's a choice quote from Terence McKenna, about DMT:

Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one's own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with an alien nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon. - from Food of the Gods (Pendell: p. 232; Food of the Gods p.258)

7. I was introduced to the idea of the history of cultural anthropology and "first contact" by a great Anthropology professor named Sam Sandt. Some of us had our imaginations captured by the idea that there really were "first contacts" between European and American "first world" people and people still living in rain forests or deserts or other marginalized areas of the Earth. And once you read about one, you want to read others. Professor Sandt told me there's a cross-over between Cultural Anthropology and ethnographies and science fiction, which often features human contact with peoples or other humanoids who seem Wholly Other. So I guess what I'm saying is you DMT smokers might enjoy reading Anthropology, and those Anthropology majors who still haven't tried DMT...read science fiction to prepare? What am I saying? I see from my diffuse notes on this topic that Harlan Ellison once placed Carlos Castaneda's books "among the preeminent in the genre," of SF. - Wake Up Down There!: The Excluded Middle Anthology, p.226

See also, maybe?:
First Contact: New Guinea's Highlanders Encounter the Outside World (thrilling)
Recreating First Contact: Expeditions, Anthropology and Popular Culture

8. In 1948 a writer sometimes considered to "be" SF wrote about a future dystopia in which there was "Thoughtcrime." Only eight years later, PKD coined "pre-crime" and it's been with us now for at least 10 years in "reality." One of the main problems with the urgent need for police reform in Unistat is to keep the police from surveilling the poor - especially African-Americans - in anticipation of crime. PKD minted "pre-crime" in 1956's relatively short piece "Minority Report." I recall telling a friend who didn't like SF that it was an important genre that is all about ideas. Then we went to see Spielberg's 2002 film of PKD's Minority Report. I thought the "pre-crime" aspect was probably just around the corner as something we'd actually have to contend with; my friend thought it far-fetched. I think this speaks to Dennis McKenna's argument that SF helps us prepare for the future.

9. Science fiction has a relationship with new religions that's obvious, and we can go down any number of tributaries here. Writing in the neo-pagan magazine Green Egg on April 4, 1975, Robert Anton Wilson (influential in more new religions than perhaps anyone else in the Roaring 20th century) argued that all new religions need to be science fiction-y. Earlier he'd given talks in which he deliberately provoked old New York-type intellectuals by asserting that the only literature that's current is James Joyce and science fiction. (At the time, SF was still part of what William Gibson called the "Golden Ghetto": it made money for its publishers and writers, but wasn't taken seriously at all by mainstream intellectuals.) A scholar of new religions, Prof. Carolyn Cusack, notes, "Both Aiden Kelly and Isaac Bonewits, key figures in the Pagan revival, attribute their personal wholeness to the reading of science fiction. They view it as a moral literature and argue that 'the only authors who are coping with the complexity of modern reality are those who are changing the way people perceive reality, and these are authors who are tied in with science fiction.'" (Cusack, Invented Religions, pp.78-79; quote about Kelly/Bonewits from Margot Adler, Drawing Down The Moon)

10. The pessimistic intellectual Morris Berman has been writing books about how Western civilization is entering a "new dark age" and he's got hundreds of reality sandwich reasons why. It's dark stuff, and horribly compelling to me. Those of us who love reading books and making things? We need to do things like the Irish monks did in the Dark Ages: preserve our cultural heritage until a new dawn, which we will not be there to see. We are like intellectual "preppers" it seems, with none of the Mad Max struggle to survive visions. Berman would call us New Monastics. He thinks SF is valuable preparation from the new dark ages to come, and cites as preparatory texts A Canticle For Liebowitz, Fahrenheit 451, and This Perfect Day. I was surprised at first to see that Berman liked SF. He values its counterfactual speculation and alternative histories, like PKD's The Man In The High Castle. Here's a line from Berman's Twilight of American Culture: "The 'mind' of the 21st century, for most people, will be a weird hybrid of Bill Gates and Walt Disney, as so-called cyberpunk novelists such as William Gibson [Neuromancer] or Neal Stephenson [Snow Crash] have already recognized." (p.54)

11. It's been clear to me for around 20 years now - maybe 23 to be precise - that the acceleration of technology and its dizzyingly diverse effects on human nervous systems, the biosphere and the world economy - that we inhabit a science fiction world, right where you are sitting now. If you don't often frame it this way for yourself - especially if you've never looked at your current "reality" this way - I urge you to do an experiment and "see" your world this way for seven days. I now teach guitar to some young people who know it's true but think it's sorta weird that people my age once lived in a world in which you couldn't carry the Internet around in your back pocket. Frankly, this fact staggers me every single day. I'm getting a chill right now, just watching what I'm writing...

12. If you read widely, you will note some people like to claim a very ancient history for science fiction. I remember having a nasty flu, with a temperature high enough to give me "fever dreams." Once I started to recover, I had my girlfriend take a trip to the library for me to pick up a bunch of classic literature for my recovery. One thing was Voltaire's short piece from 1752, Micromegas, and it was asserted in an introduction by a 20th century person that this was a science fiction piece. At the time, I thought SF came in with Jules Verne, maybe Mary Shelley. But yea: a 23 mile high being from one of the planets that orbited Sirius? Pretty wild stuff. "Sirius" and "23" meant nothing to me as reference at the time; I was too young. Later...

13. Marshall McLuhan looked at his fellow Wild Catholic, the French Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, and saw him as a science fiction thinker. Teilhard (d.1955) had a theory about our electrical technology, which was destined to envelop the Earth (it did, he died long before the World Wide Web was a glimmer in Berners-Lee's eye). This envelopment was an aspect of the "Christic force" and would lead to parousia, the Second Coming of Christ. McLuhan's media theories have much ado about how we are externalizing our nervous system in electricity and electrical gadgets, and this was leading to a re-tribalization of humans, away from codex-reading, solitary, Gutenbergian individuals. Away from people like myself, it seems. (O, I have a SmartPhone: you have to in Unistat, April, 2016!) Around 1968 McLuhan was talking of the computerized Logos, and seemed for awhile perpelexed about how to "probe" this new idea. Eventually he saw Teilhard as "science fiction" but he didn't mean this in a positive sense; for McLuhan a science fiction writer was probably a futurist with little insight, or as one of his biographers, Philip Marchand wrote, "devoid of genuine perception." How odd that McLuhan survives as a SF thinker himself, on the cover of the first copy of Wired, Terence McKenna constantly riffing off McLuhan's insights, etc. I see this as "odd" in an ironic sort of science fiction-like narrative sense. (see Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, pp.216-217)

14. Regarding SF as the epicenter of the Novel of Ideas since around the end of WWII, and as propaedeutic for our living in the future (or now): around 1980 Robert Anton Wilson was asked by Dr. Jeffrey Eliot, "Are you concerned that your work have didactic value, that people learn from it?"

Here's RAW's answer:
Absolutely! Didactic literature is very much out of style these days; if one is suspected of having a message, it's almost regarded as some kind of secret vice. I think, however, that all first-rate literature leans toward  the didactic. The classic Greeks regarded Homer as didactic and allegorical to boot. Dante seems didactic. Shakespeare seems didactic. Melville seems didactic. Science fiction is the most didactic literature around; that's why I enjoy it so much. 

All writers function as teachers, whether they're conscious of it or not, or whether they'll admit it or not. For example, take Mickey Spillane. He used to give interviews in which he said he only wrote books for money. However, if you look at his work, he has strong beliefs. He's always pitching them to the reader. They're rather fascist beliefs, but they're beliefs nonetheless, and he's a teacher, just like every other writer. Unfortunately, he's only teaching a violent, fascist morality. - collected in Email To The Universe, p.217

Were there ever more thrilling teachers for young introverts in the 20th century than people like Asimov or HG Wells?

15. Revisiting Voltaire and Father Teilhard de Chardin: in John Glassie's book on the 17th century Jesuit weirdo intellectual Athanasius Kircher, Man of Misconceptions, the last man to Know Everything, Kircher, is placed by Glassie as a writer of proto-science fiction with his book Ecstatic Journey. Johannes Kepler wrote an SF-like book, Somnium/The Dream, and Glassie even says Cicero's The Dream of Scipio qualifies here. Meanwhile, when I read the Bible's book Revelation it seems like proto-HP Lovecraft, or a really bad mushroom trip. In Jennifer Hecht's book Doubt: A History SF is traced back to rhetorician/satirist/Syrian Lucian, who died around 180 CE. Hecht links Lucian to the agnosticism/skepticism/atheism/doubt of the whole (well, most?) history of science fiction. Of course, if we allow Cicero in here, he wins as oldest SF by dying in 43BCE. And what a death. Bernard Field, in his History of Science Fiction, agrees that Cicero wrote a forerunner to SF. (Yea, but what about Plato's conjuring Atlantis?)

16. I don't see much mention of Olaf Stapledon these days. Here's a science fiction writer of enormous erudition, who combined aspects of the historical novel approach to the novel of ideas with science. In 1989 Robert Anton Wilson told Rebecca McClen and David Jay Brown, "I'm a mystical agnostic, or an agnostic mystic. That phrase was coined by Olaf Stapledon, my favorite science fiction writer. When I first read it, it didn't mean anything to me, but over the years I've gradually realized that "agnostic mystic" describes me better than any words I've found anywhere else." (Mavericks of the Mind, p.114) In piece collected in The Next 50 Years, Sir Martin Rees says that "Many Worlds Hypothesis" in quantum mechanics originated with Stapledon. Wikipedia credits Stapledon with the idea of "swarm intelligence," which now resonates with "crowdsourcing."

17. Dr. John Lilly, one of the 20th century's great multidisciplinarians, who wrote an essay at age 16 about how the human mind can be rendered sufficiently objective in order to study itself, studied neurophysiology at CalTech, trained as a medical doctor, studied aeronautics and cybernetics in the Air Force, became a cetologist, and became known as a dolphin expert. He was also one of the great self-experimenters in history, including psychedelic research. So he may have some insight into the McKenna Brothers' experiences. He refused to accept science as "better" than religion, because they pertain to different domains of human thought. Religion has to do with out greatest desires, as Lilly saw it. Both science and religion were "meta-theoretical" positions on knowledge. However, if we were to encounter "real organisms with greater wisdom, greater intellect, greater minds than any single man..." we must be "open, unbiased, sensitive, general purpose, and dispassionate. Our needs for fantasies must be analyzed and seen for what they are and are not or we will be in even graver troubles than we are today." (Programming The Human Biocomputer, pp. 74-75.) Superior beings encountered are usually written off by scientists as, as best religious weirdness, at worst, as "superstitions" or "psychotic beliefs." "Other persons present these beliefs in the writings called 'science fiction.'" Lilly says most scientists will say the human biocomputer generates these visions - all the phenomena - by itself. Having had experiences like the McKennas, Lilly seeks to remain agnostic. This is eventually what Robert Anton Wilson did after having numerous bizarre contact-experiences with superintelligences from Sirius, or...something like that. Philip K. Dick had overwhelmingly strange experience with Something Other too, and tried to be agnostic, but it seems he mostly gave over to this experience's an ontological status close to "real." Possibly more real than "real." I don't know what "really" happened at La Chorrera, but tens of thousands of other humans have had similar experiences. I wonder how I'd react if I had a similar experience. I simply don't know. And I'm not ready to debunk anyone else's wild phenomenological experience.

Robert Anton Wilson: Missing Books

I've just finished reading Patton Oswalt's book Silver Screen Fiend:Learning About Life From An Addiction To Film (2015) and it was of course very hilarious and entertaining: it's Patton Freaking Oswalt. But I had had no idea he'd haunted the New Beverly Cinema as I had. LA's greatest revival house for film, it had and has a cult following of film freaks and the book is dedicated to Sherman Torgan, who ran the place while Oswalt saw gawd only knows: probably 400 films there over a four year period, 1995-1999. The Appendix (pp.189-222) lists all the films, so I guess I could count but I'm too lazy... Yea: Patton Oswalt saw hundreds of films in movie theaters in those four years, he lists them all: date/film(s)/venue, and it's a lot like my own lists, only his manic phase of crashing the canons of film seemed deeper and more intense than mine. Torgan's programming easily convinced me he knew what films were worth seeing. I knew that if the New Bev was showing it it was probably worth seeing, it didn't matter if I hadn't heard of the film, or if it was from a genre I don't strongly gravitate toward (musicals and gorefest, anything with Doris Day in it). There's a hilarious chapter where he details the unhinged drive to see 12 Hammer Horror films in two days, and eventually, from sleep deprivation and insane film gluttony, the Hammer films begin to run together in his mind with other classic Hollywood films he'd seen recently...he's having a bad hallucination trip while awake, hilariously described, like something out of Alexander Trocchi, while in the theatre supposedly watching another film. A fellow film weirdo asks him if he's okay. Yea. (Noooo.)

I think I started driving from San Pedro up the Harbor Freeway (to the 10) to that predominately orthodox Jewish neighborhood of LA (near the corner of La Brea and Beverly Blvd) around 1996. I drove that stretch a lot. From one corner of the metropolis to another. I think I was aware of Oswalt as a stand-up comedian, and I may have seen him there, but I saw a lot of familiar screen faces there. I remember one night I took a seat in the dark moments before a double feature of Jeunet et Caro: Delicatessen (one of my all-time favorite films), and City of Lost Children. When the delicatessen owner asks "Have I got something right here?" the crowd erupts in laughter (as it should: one of the great anarchic comic moments in cinema history), and I look over at a guy cracking up and note I'm sitting next to Doogie Howser's, best-friend Max Casella.

I remember dragging my wife to see a John Frankenheimer double feature, because Seconds was the second film. Seconds totally slays me. Always. It was a Friday night - date night, when young, well-educated hipsters invaded the New Bev, usually to see the first film, then leave for - their actual lives. They all saw the admittedly great and famous 1962 Manchurian Candidate then left, despite my leaning into the aisle and telling twentysomething strangers filing out: "If you thought that was good, wait till you see Seconds," and no one would even make eye contact with the Scary Old Guy.

                                       a bit from Seconds (1966): Rock Hudson rocks!

Anyway...After Sherman Torgan's death (and Quentin Tarantino publicly standing up for film freaks all over LA by saying "As long as I draw breath, the New Beverly will remain open"), Oswalt attends a "sloppy, spontaneously organized 'wake'" inside the not-too-far-away Egyptian Theatre. (Everyone agreed it wouldn't be right to do it inside the New Bev). Oswalt tells the anecdote about the night Lawrence Tierney walked into the middle of Citizen Kane and sat behind Oswalt and started talking out loud to the screen for about 15 minutes before his handler finds him and ushers him out. Tierney had never seen the film, but the stuff he says, like the best DVD commentary ever - as remembered by Oswalt, coupled with what we know about Tierney's history and that voice - a shimmering anecdote in a book filled with them. (see pp.94-98) (I wonder how many RAWphiles that know of Tierney and his work think of him as a classic 2nd Circuit type as I do.)

After the wake, Oswalt programmed an entire month of fantastic, non-existent films for the New Beverly in Heaven, just for Sherman. Oswalt writes that he got the idea from Neil Gaiman's storyline in  The Sandman books, of "Brief Lives," where there's a "dream library" of books that famous authors never got around to writing, like Raymond Chandler's Love Can Be Murder, or Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures on the Moon. I for one would drop everything going on in my life to go see every one of these dream films, which includes Orson Welles's 1942 Heart of Darkness and Orson's 1944 Batman: Riddle of the Ghoul, starring Gary Cooper as Bruce Wayne/Batman. "And leave it to Welles to populate his movie with six of Batman's cast of villains: Lee Marvin as Two-Face, Edward G. Robinson as the Penguin, Ella Raines as Catwoman, Dwight Frye as the Riddler, Everett Sloane as the Scarecrow and, towering imperiously over the whole mad feast, Welles himself as Ra's al Ghul. The Richard Widmark cameo, at the end, as the newly scarred Joker, leaping toward the screen from the smoking ruins of the chemical plant, still makes people scream. The costumes that longtime fans wear to midnight showings only add to the chiaroscuro carnival." (p.174) I see the great RKO noir Director of Photography, Nicholas Musuraca, doing the lights and camera here, with Orson, of course.

Oh yea: how perfect is this?: In some alternate universe/Torgan's Heaven that Hal Ashby directed A Confederacy of Dunces? John Belushi played Ignatius in a miraculous performance without ever having read John Kennedy Toole's novel. With Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin. Oswalt goes on with this, an invention of 29 films. Hey! I just noticed the blogpost that forms this chapter of "dream films" is HERE! (<----In the blog there, you only get the names of the nonexistent films; you have to get hold of Oswalt's book to read the synopses.)
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Reading this bit from Patton Oswalt's film addiction book reminded me of the Books Missing From Robert Anton Wilson's Oeuvre. Many of us have discussed what RAW's Tale of the Tribe would have been, but he died before he could write it. We got a precis, tantalizing to the utmost, at the end of TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution, pp.203-213. If we could pool the no-doubt thousands of pages of notes from RAWphiles on what RAW was hinting at, we might be able to cobble something together. But it wouldn't be RAW.

Now please bear with me: I've gotten hold of some...well...let''s just say I've gotten lucky and was able to obtain a hot underground tryptamine drug made by the Disciples Of Shulgin (DOS). Psychonauts have been reporting that at the half gram dosage level, they've had very pleasant glimpses of other possible worlds, but only those worlds the person had been daydreaming or thinking about in their ordinary, non-stoned lives. I took some after thinking of RAW's books and, for whatever it's worth, here's what I've come back with:

The Shea Correspondence Course: Letters Between Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea (2017): RAW finally collected the vast trove of letters received from his friend Robert Shea, and via excessive volunteer wrangling by RAWphiles, found well over 40 long type-written letters he'd sent to Shea. All of the letters from both men had been dispersed, scattered among numerous friends and collectors of literary ephemera. Interviewed by NPR about the 423 page tome, RAW says from his home in Capitola that he was surprised how much he'd forgotten about how Illuminatus! eventually coalesced, but was grateful such a large number of the letters had shown up after an Internet call-to-arms from his fanatic readers. NPR seemed most interested in the fervor of glee among the cultish readers of Wilson over the publication, long awaited and thought at one time impossible. Why the word "course" in the title, NPR asks? Wilson said his friend Robert Shea was the sort of person whose anarchic intelligence always made him think, and re-reading their letters before publication he realized how much he'd learned. Shea died in 1994. Reviewed at BoingBoing: "I've never seen a correspondence that was so funny and at the same time brimming with endless ideas. Even when they seem to have a simmering feud over some idea or another, you can always tell they loved each other."

Hollywood Notes (2012?): The long-awaited chronicles of RAW's first-hand experiences seeing his books Masks of the Illuminati, The Walls Came Tumbling Down, and the midnight movie Reality Is What You Can Get Away With made into films and the sausage-factory behind the scenes. RAW agrees with Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald: if they want to pay you for the rights, best to just take the money and leave Hollywood. But RAW's too interested in the machinations of filmmaking and while he has grave problems with the liberties directors, editors and script "doctors" took with his material, he seems pleased by the results, all in all. My favorite part of the book is RAW's anecdotes about the film community party scenes in the hills above Hollywood.

Heretic: How Timothy Leary Foresaw the "New Teleology"(2025): This short tome is a surprise hit with academics who had been trying to forge the "New Synthesis" sometimes called the "New Teleology," since the rise in prominence of Sheldrake, epigenetics, CRISPR techniques that helped to rapidly cure most diseases and food shortages. Other texts had emphasized the rapid falling out of favor of "selfish gene" ideas as the main motors of evolution. RAW traces the history of self-organizing life to cosmic panspermia notions and the long list of scientific "heretics" who emphasized latent "systems" inherent in the human nervous system. This book argues that Leary's ideas about the brain and evolution were far ahead of his time (Leary died in 1996), that Neo-Darwinism was always a big chunk of the puzzle, but that scientific visionaries - once marginalized as "crackpots" or "mystics" such as Bruno, Reich, Lamarck, Sheldrake and Leary - are now seen, retrospectively, as victims of a sort of mass hubris and "Mind-Forged Manacles" of working prole scientists/old paradigm adherents (RAW loves to quote the poet Blake). It was said that the philosopher Thomas Nagel was a fan of this book, but this can not be substantiated at the moment you're reading this. At 225 pages and good humor, this one's on many a college syllabus and wins RAW a National Book Award for Non-Fiction.

New Age Sewage (2016): RAW seems to be channeling George Carlin here in his non-fiction satire on anti-vaxxers, Randroids, supply-siders (these last two not New Age per se, merely bad ideas), New Earthers, "race-ists," orthorexics, those fearful of taboo words, and fundamentalists of all sorts. Perhaps surprisingly, the book receives very good reviews from those Skeptics that RAW lampooned in many works. RAW at his most polemical, this book is at least the equal in tone and logical vigor as The New Inquisition and Natural Law.

Life Plus 3000 (2030): RAW's immortality book, which in the Preface he says he'd radically revised at minimum 32 times because of the "Jumping Jesus Phenomenon." A very old version had a working title Death Shall Have No Dominion. I found it most impressive that RAW doesn't gloat here: he'd been writing about longevity and immortality since the 1970s and was scoffed at by New York intellectuals. When the worm began to turn most decisively around 2023 he decided to wrap it up. Now he's been proven "correct" for the most part, but rather than name his fairly "wrong" (and mostly forgotten) detractors, he seems more in awe of Nature than ever.

Collected Writings on Joyce (2014): Joyce scholar Fritz Senn was the impetus behind this. He thought young European readers needed an introduction to Joyce by an intellectual non-academic Joycean. I had no idea RAW had written this much, in such detail, on Joyce. Lovers of RAW's book Coincidance will want to graduate to this text, many of the ideas of which were once too "far out" but have now made it inside mainstream Joyce scholarship.

Robert Anton Wilson's Book of Black Magic and Curses (2007): A rollicking book of humor about domesticated primate hypnosis and words, psychoneuroimmunology, the omnipresence of metaphor, a vindication of Vico and Korzybski, and "How To Tell Your Friends From the Other Apes." One reviewer blurbs on the back cover: "A linguistics book sui generis if I ever saw one. Highly recommended." RAW scholars can now see what Playboy's Book of Forbidden Words was supposed to be, before the editors took out all the most interesting parts. Or, as RAW put it, "The editors at Playboy Press, like most editors, want to pee in the soup before they let go of someone else's work."

Bride of Illuminatus! (2019) Long-awaited. Carries his (and Shea's) saga of certain families and ideas through the Age of Surveillance. The plotlines developed with Edward Snowden vs. Dick Cheney (under disguised names, for this is one long True Shaggy Dog Story) makes this Trip worth reading over and over.

Babylon L-5 (2021) One of the best of the sixty-some-odd books preparing humanity for space colonization. Said to have cheered Elon Musk, who, after reading it, redoubled his efforts to get LaGrange point communities going for industrial production in zero-gravity, followed by his (and others') move to make Project Exurb a reality. Meanwhile, space travel impact on human physiological systems are being solved almost weekly. RAW keeps up on this stuff.

Untitled Epic Poem on Evolution: So far: no publisher. He's said to still be working on it, although over 100 chapters exist in the version that passed through my hands. Seemingly influenced by both Pound's Cantos and Joyce's Finnegans Wake as well as the wildest, most outre ideas about baby universes, brane theory, black holes, and self-organizing Taoist cybernetic feedback loops within loops, the loose-leaf copy I had was over 1700 pages of "holographic poetry" and seemed to fuse in equal measure hardcore-scientific, poetic and mystical ideas. The work functions as an encyclopedia of history and hard science, while reading as poetry. One strain of poetic rumination, about a divine feminine and repressed aspect of history, coupled with - believe it or not - the history of economics (!) makes a bracing case for universal liberation and "true freedom" for all "sentient beings" and a freedom from fear, want, and State and other Gangster coercion, based on communication, humor and massive cybernetic feedback loops of information so dense...well, I just want you all to be able to get hold of a copy some day, as this is a true Terran Archive and "Blueprint For Humanity" (<-----the name of one of the poems.) There were references and allusions enough to support the argument that this might truly constitute RAW's Tale of the Tribe. Difficult and psychedelic. Readers new to Wilson are advised to study his works from 1959-2005 first. Another helpful idea, until the work is finished and published: RAW includes an annotated bibliography that in itself was over 200 pages and quite cosmically hilarious, I thought.

That's all I can remember until I take that particular tryptamine again. If any of you have similar access and find something out about RAW's nonexistent-in-this-world oeuvre, please report back here in the comments!

                                           graphic art by Bob Campbell

Robots and Technological Unemployment: Further Considerations

In my last blogspew I wrote a bit about all the ideas and rhetoric I encountered as a kid in the 1970s, reading books and magazines from earlier in the century, when said rhetoric was about the End of Toil. And this seems possible, but we are stuck in a dumb-game about being unfathomably rich, or living in a constant state of biosurvival anxiety due to lack of money and the fear of poverty, homelessness, hunger, penury.

Maybe the ballsiest rhetoric about "all that" came out in 1930 - just as the Great Depression was setting in - by Lord John Maynard Keynes. In a short yet profound essay, "The Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren," Keynes - a polymath - wrote that the end of the economic game was in sight, and that many wouldn't know what to do with themselves, that working three hours a day is quite enough for most people, and that a few will know how to live a life of leisure - the goal of a true liberal arts education - while others will have a rough go of it.

"I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it today, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs." - Keynes

Read this essay if you haven't before. (If it seems "tl/dr" skip to the II section.) He says that within 100 years this end of toil would be possible. As we write: 16 years and change from now. Which reminds me of a couple of studies that came out in the last 18 months.

We must know something about where we've been in order to understand where we are, and where we might be going. 

Profs. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

A 98 page book appeared around January 23rd of 2012 titled Race Against The Machine. In a stunning move by an increasingly lame TV institution, 60 Minutes actually did a segment about technological unemployment that Brynjolfsson and McAfee had warned about, and allowed them on as talking heads. The segment featured much footage of robots in factories doing the work that humans previously did. Famous AI/roboticist Rodney Brooks is shown with one of his robots that can learn, pick up an object from the floor, works cheaper than a Chinese factory worker, can be programmed to do a new task by a human in a matter of minutes, etc. 

Everyone should have been talking and writing about Tech Unemployment after this, but few did. I think most of the population is clueless and in reactionary mode, while the Owner Class would rather the population not know what's going to happen to them. It was right there on your beloved teevee, people!

Here's the 14 minute segment, in case you missed it. That's Brynjolfsson in the pic.

In a blog post after the 60 Minutes piece ran, McAfee complained that other experts had misunderstood what they were saying. Near the end of the post he writes:

Previous waves of automation, like the mechanization of agriculture and the advent of electric power to factories, have not resulted in large-scale unemployment or impoverishment of the average worker. But the historical pattern isn’t giving me a lot of comfort these days, simply because we’ve never before seen automation encroach so broadly and deeply, while also improving so quickly at the same time.

Now: These guys are not my heroes. I've read their stuff. I object to their avoidance of talking about the human questions of suffering under continuing austerity and the defunct neoliberal economic model. In the 60 Minutes piece McAfee is asked about the human fallout, and he acts befuddled, saying only that "science fiction" is his best guide. Maybe he'd get too much crap from colleagues if he brought up Universal Basic Income? If you look at McAfee's blog there's nothing there about what to do about human suffering (that I could see), and in his book with Bryndolfsson they stress more "education" and "entrepreneurship," which I find tin-eared, or just plain stupid. Look at the education system NOW, look at the debt...and where are these new jobs that people would be "educated" to do going to come from? Servicing robots? What a joke. You just spent a dense 90 pages writing about the inexorableness of machines in the workforce. Fer crissakes! Read the Keynes essay from 1930! (Maybe if you rise so far in academia that you teach at M.I.T. [Bryndolfsson], or Harvard Business [McAfee] you aren't required to address ideas of human suffering?)

Interestingly, if you read the comments to McAfee's blog post I linked to above, the UBI is mentioned. 

Matthew Yglesias of Slate is pro-UBI, but thinks the idea of permanent technological unemployment is a myth...because in the past when new tech revolutionized production, it created new jobs. Here's McAfee's rebuttal. I find McAfee persuasive here. Do you?

Worse than McAfee, to my eyes, is Bryndolfsson's TED talk . How wonderful! The solution to technological unemployment? Work alongside a robot with advanced Watson-ability solutions! Because...it worked in chess. 

This is just pathetic. I applaud these two geeks for pointing out the obvious rapid influx of technological unemployment. They are just silly asses when it comes to what to do about the human fallout, in my opinion.

                                    a still from Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis

Profs Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne

Both of Oxford. On 17 September, 2013 they produced a paper, "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation?" They were motivated by a 1933 paper by Keynes, about the possibility that machines will put most people out of work. They also cite Bryndolfsson and McAfee. They say 47% of all jobs in Unistat are at high risk of evaporating under computers/automation/robots/better AI systems...within the next 20 years. Round it out to 16 years and change, just to make it interesting?

Which jobs are susceptible to loss?

-transportation

-data crunchers

-logistics

-production labor

-office support/administrative support

-sales

-service

-construction

-machine operators

-crafts/repairs

Let's not even talk about booksellers, journalists, musicians, travel agents and a bunch more - who still exist! - but...you know what I mean?

Some things that could slow or speed up the loss of these jobs: regulation of technologies as they come online, and access to cheaper labor. In a paper by Frank Levy of M.I.T. and Richard Murnane of Harvard they address the types of jobs that will be lost to robots: "Each of these occupations contained significant amounts of routine work that could be expressed in deductive or inductive rules and so were candidates for computer substitution and/or offshoring." 

A.I. has gotten better and better at pattern recognition/machine learning and crunching Big Data, so a lot of clerical and administrative jobs are on the way out. 

Computerization will hit a bottleneck or technological plateau, then A.I. will be so good that it will replace most of the jobs in management, science, engineering, and even (this one really gets me) the arts. 

Look at the jobs not susceptible to automation. They mostly suck; the post-war boom and middle class labor movement seem a thousand years ago. The jobs that are hard to replace with a robot are low-wage: buildings and grounds maintenance, housecleaning, food preparation (although I've seen robots on video...nevermind), personal services like doing manicures and haircuts, personal care of the elderly (although I've seen videos of robots doing this work...nevermind), or any job involving abstract, unstructured cognitive work that's hard to write code for. And even with these jobs, software like Network Manager is often used.

Frey and Osborne advise more education to do the sorts of jobs robots can't do: "Acquire creative and social skills," they say. Is it me or is this just fucking ridiculous? It's almost worse than Brynjolfsson's "work side by side with the robots!" Just acquire social skills! Just learn to be more creative! 

Do these academics ever leave the Ivory Tower and talk to strangers in the streets? Message to Frey and Osborne: you were spurred to write your paper by a 1933 paper by Keynes. Please re-read his 1930 essay on "The Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren," and get real: work was, for the most part, something we as a species should try to cure. It's a malady. We have in our sights the cure. It's all about sharing the wealth enough so we can not be burdened with biosurvival anxiety and drudgery. And you'd be surprised how many of us know how to handle leisure. We will still "work" although we may not consider it that. Work may "be" play, but it will be productive. And how many boons have come to humanity when people saw some little problem that needed to be overcome, had the time to tinker, to "screw around" and made a contribution to humankind? Answer: almost all boons...

According to Frey and Osborne, only those occupations that require a high degree of creativity or "social intelligence" or other advanced skills can resist the rise of AI. I saw one paper - my notes are scattered so I can't say where - but two jobs that will last for awhile were (I'm not kidding and if any of you challenge me on this I will find the source to prove it): CEO and poet. 

This is where we're headed. And sooner rather than later, friends. It's time to think about what Life is for. Is it to compete in the rat race so you don't have to live under a freeway overpass? Or is money different than wealth?

"The Rise of the Coffee Machines: Should Starbucks Replace Its Baristas With Robots?"

Robot bartenders

"Finally, A Robot That Knows When You Want It To Pour You Another Beer"

"Can An Algorithm Write A Better News Story Than A Human Reporter?"

"Program Uses Algorithms To Tweet As You After Your Death"

"The AI Game That Knows You Better Than Anyone"

"Robot Completes World's First Automated Liver Transplant"

"Robots Get A Feel For The World: Touch More Sensitive Than A Human's"

(this is more than 14 months old, so it's "worse" [or better?] than this):

"Google's Self-Driving Cars: More Than 300,000 Miles Logged and No Accidents Under Computer Control"

"Robots Replacing Workers In The Food Industry"

"Chinese Robots Play Ping Pong"

A Robot Artist

Robot Restaurant Opens In China

"The Coolest and Most Terrifying Biomimetic Robots"

"So This Is A Robot That Can Steal Things Out Of A Vending Machine"

"Meet Your Robot Oncologist"

"Watch A Robot Blackjack Dealer In Action"

Robot Heavy Metal Band Covers Motorhead's "Ace of Spades"