Thompson, Vonnegut, Ice 9

My favourite book review published in English is Kurt Vonnegut's review¹ of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, Hunter S. Thompson's book covering the 1972 Presidential campaign, and a truly brilliant book in it its own right. Vonnegut's review frames Hunter Thompson as, above all else, suffering from a social and political illness, caused first and foremost by the state of his environment:

Again, what can we do to help him? I do not know him, except from his books, which are brilliant and honourable and valuable. The evidence in those argues that reality is killing him because it is so ugly and cheap. He imagines in his new book that reality, and hence his health, might be improved if nobler men held office in this country and addressed themselves truthfully to the problems of our time.

Vonnegut elects to call this affliction "Hunter Thompson's disease":

The disease is fatal. There is no known cure. The most we can do for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honor. From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can be as easily led to beauty as ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson's disease.

Obviously enough, I relate deeply to this diagnosis. An inability to stop caring about things, to stop having empathy for your fellow humans, to stop wanting people to treat each other with kindness and respect, an inability, in short, to drop the idea that that world could be better than it is and that people should work to make that happen, feels like an illness. After all, nihilism is the sine qua non of being well-adjusted and mentally healthy in the world as it stands. Our economy mostly runs on a mixture of fraud and gambling. Our political leaders make Richard fucking Nixon of all people (Nixon was the eventual winner of the campaign in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail) look like a model of honest and decent governance. Open Nazism is increasingly an acceptable position to hold in the public sphere. The ecosystem and climate appear to be collapsing. And the tech industry has eaten the world, and more importantly, a lot of peoples' brains. The nihilism comes in because, of course, our measure of mental wellbeing is in the ability of a person to pretend that none of this is happening and that, to paraphrase Vonnegut, "everything is fine, just fine". The moment that slips, so does one's health as your health needs increasingly come out of alignment with what the world's able to offer.

If the disease is serious enough, you find that you're unsuited to a lot of jobs. Much as chronic pain or Ehlers-Danloss disease might make you unsuitable for jobs where you have to stand for long periods, chronic caring or Hunter Thompson's disease makes you unsuitable for jobs where you have to ignore the quality of what you're putting out. You tend to have unpleasant reactions to people ignoring harm to others. You break out in hives whenever you're told that your job performance will be judged on AI use. I've even ended up in situations where my brain would just outright refuse to let me do a task that the job expected of me because some part of my brain was screaming at me that it was too odious. Deal with enough symptoms like that, and you might well find yourself economically marginalised, stressed and going out of your mind a little, or even struck down by weird and incomprehensible physical illnesses. If you can't effectively kill the part of your brain that cares about things, you will quite quickly get hit by unpleasant symptoms.

It's mostly a chronic illness. There are ways to manage the symptoms with lifestyle changes, diet and medication (though it's probably for the best that you don't follow Hunter Thompson's example on that one), and you can, with some work, live a mostly normal life. Unfortunately it's not perfect, and you have to watch for flare-ups constantly: it doesn't help that the flare-ups can be triggered by the strangest things, like, for example, the deputy prime minister calling trans people a "cancer" in parliament. As much as something like that is deeply harmful to me as a trans person, I honestly don't even think that the attempt at persecution is the part of it that messes me up the most any more. Rather, Winston Peters' conduct, the man himself and the entire government that he's a part of can be described, with perfect accuracy, as "ugly and cheap". Ugly because it bespeaks a level of callous lack of regard for other people that makes me not want to spend time with or have any connections with people who behave that way, and cheap because it's lazy, takes minimal thought and effort and communicates quite clearly that the people hurling this invective really don't give a shit beyond finding someone whom it's minimally acceptable to hate. Much like the likes of Graham Linehan, even if you share these peoples' bigotries, the sheer degree to which they way they express them is ugly and cheap makes them unbearable to be around for any length of time. Exposure to the parts of reality that are glaringly ugly and cheap in a way that's unavoidable, then, is a pretty effective way of causing Hunter Thompson's disease to flare up.

A thing not often discussed by people who don't have chronic illnesses, though, is that how much our illnesses debilitate us is, as often as not, a product of our environment. While a condition might be well-managed enough to not be an issue when you've got enough money coming in to bring in healthy food, the time and mental clarity to meditate, exercise in ways which are good for you and look after your sleep and work that you enjoy and that isn't horrible to you - when, in short, you're in an environment that has relatively few stressors - an environment full of abundant stressors and lacking in levers that you can lean on for self-care will almost always cause the same condition to flare up badly. People looking at that situation from the outside, for whom the stressors are "normal", or at least less glaringly obvious than they are for us, tend to think either that we're exaggerating and being overly dramatic or that our mental and physical health have just suddenly fallen apart for inexplicable reasons, usually to do with some chemical or another in our brains or bodies or something genetic or something. Anything to avoid admitting that environmental or social factors might have something to do with it.

An ugly and cheap environment

So, what happens when the environment changes in such a way that the kinds of stressor that trigger Hunter Thompson's disease are just everywhere now? Considering just how many people in this world, from the leader of what was until recently the most powerful nation in the world all the way down to your Business Idiot boss or your asshole landlord, fit this description, the chief trait of the people who find success or fit effectively in the world as it stands is precisely that they are ugly and cheap. The people who have wormed their way into power, one way or another, almost all behave in ways that are ugly and cheap and they choose other people who behave in ugly and cheap ways to share power with. This means that, far more than was the case even a decade ago, people suffering from Hunter Thompson's disease live in an environment where they're constantly suffering from flare-ups.

Even a decade ago, when I first joined the workplace, this felt like less of an issue. Part of this, I'm certain, was down to the fact that I was young and still just starting to learn, but even as late as 2014 there still existed niches in most industries and in academia where caring wasn't crippling. There was NGO work that, if it felt a little useless, was at least only that. People still cared, to a first order of approximation, about work being correct, robust and built to some purpose. Still, the changes were already happening, and in this new, technologically-inspired age, the leading edge of the changes also happened in tech.

I suppose that when I got into the industry the good parts of it were already on the way out. Still, there was enough good there to make the effort worthwhile: brilliant writers and teachers, intellectually serious people in considerable numbers, people who treated their professions with real respect, adherents of the interesting kinds of mysticism and esoteric religion, philosophers, poets. The industry was somewhere where all of them could thrive, even if all it did was hold space for strangeness and pay enough of a salary that people could do what they cared about the most. In a world where universities have been steadily gutted and most workplaces had no time or space for the brilliant and impractical of the world, software was at least able to help keep serious thought and art alive.

It's not been able to do that for quite a while now.

The rot began, I suspect, when writing software, or at least being seen to do so, became a way to garner not only money but also status. As soon as that happened, the demographics of the field shifted subtly but enough, and slowly but inexorably, people started changing. Engineering quality was slowly abandoned in favour of the imperative to "move fast and break things", "business value" started to become the primary metric by which work was evaluated and people slowly but perceptibly started talking less about their work and the quality of their code than they did about the valuation of their companies. The careful and the sceptical found themselves pushed to the margins of the industry, their positions made increasingly untenable by ever greater demands to "produce code", whatever that means. Then the layoffs came, and many of the spaces where weirdness, seriousness and careful thought were able to thrive under the eaves of tech were destroyed entirely. The current LLM craze is, perhaps, the result of this process nearing completion: we'll no longer need people, with all of their messy organic natures and emotions, to be a part of the tech world at all. All we'll need is a few groundbreaking and innovative businesspeople and a whole lot of prompts. In such a world there's barely a place for people at all: the few people that are still needed are largely selected on the grounds of precisely that nihilism which sufferers of Hunter Thompson's disease are incapable of. The current state of tech, and thus, because tech is a tastemaker in our societies, our entire culture, is thus one that's almost deliberately tuned to cause flare-ups in those of us so bedeviled.

Kurt Vonnegut, of course, wrote lots about precisely the impacts of technology and machines, especially programmable ones, on humans and human society as well as, by-the-by, the way in which this led to humans becoming parts of a machine and losing the proper state and study of mankind in the process. There's a well-known quote to that effect:

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.

What happened to the world seems to have been something akin to the central object of one of Vonnegut's other novels, Cat's Cradle. Ice-9 was an isomer of ice with a melting point, rather than 0 degrees celsius, of about 45.8. Moreover, it's a more stable state than liquid water: when introduced to water in the liquid state, the liquid freezes. Over the course of the book, a fragment of ice-9 falls into the ocean, causing the rapid freezing of all surface and atmospheric water and groundwater, and, by-the-by, the death of all life on the planet (apart from, I suppose, the bacteria and tube worms and such that live around abyssal vents). While Cat's Cradle is unabridgeable and defies easy classification (so, go read it yourselves), it feels a lot like what's happened to our social and cultural world at the moment. The obvious ice-9 analogue is the LLM and the analogy does work: that said, I think a better one is the technocratic/innovation trope in general, and the idea that the new and the technological in our society are a priori good and will improve our lives, no matter what. That trope seems to spread an awful lot like ice-9: people who were otherwise fairly normal members of society come into contact with it and once the conversion's happened, it's very, very difficult to get how the person sees the world to change back. Happily enough, a lot of humans are resistant to the conversion to some degree: unhappily, the most vulnerable ones seem to be the ones in positions of power. It genuinely seems to turn people into assholes: I've seen so many people, once capable of at least some empathy and perspective-taking skills simply lose them entirely, hypnotised by market valuations, VC and the whole tech-innovation complex. And our modern technologies of communication allow it to spread, as it happens, about as fast as ice-9 might freeze an ocean: while this kind of attitude existed in small clusters before, it's now more than capable of rapidly spreading through an entire population. The end result is an economy and a society that, much like how a world frozen by ice-9 is mostly unable to support life, is unable to support any real caring or anything other than nihilism.

A social phenomenon, of course, cannot simply kill us most of the time. We won't physically freeze. It can, however, create and aggravate diseases to the point where we simply can't meaningfully survive any more. Poisoning, mineral deficiencies, overheating... we've created an environment as hostile to caring life-forms as any of these environmental factors are to a plant or an amphibian.

And yes, we certainly can do things to mitigate the worst of the effects: self-care, meditation, looking after ourselves and trying to find community where you can. Unfortunately, the most that this can do is help us survive: we may live, but with yellowed foliage and little growth. For us to thrive, unfortunately, there's no getting around the fact that we need to get at least some of the things essential to our survival from our environment. We tend to try and treat Hunter Thompson's disease by focusing in on individual sufferers, trying to give them the skills that they need to stop caring, or to stop believing that others might also care, or at least to allow them to temporarily adopt enough nihilism to survive in our society. This seldom works: we may survive a bit longer, keep a roof over our heads and keep ourselves fed, but the sheer strain and effort that it takes to prevent the stressors from hitting us quite so badly while we figure out how to feed ourselves inevitably translates into mental health struggles at best or actual, serious non-Vonnegut-coined chronic illnesses at worst: I am almost entirely persuaded that my current health issues are largely caused by the fact that I struggle to adopt the appropriate nihilism, even at one level of remove, and while the situation could be much, much worse (I do have decent coping skills by this point), there's no level of exposure to any of these environmental toxins that's going to leave me entirely unscathed.

Vonnegut, ever somewhat bleak in outlook, ended his book review by disavowing that he suffered from the disease:

I don't have it this morning. It comes and goes. This morning I don't have Hunter Thompson's disease.

I don't think he meant to say by this that he didn't care at all: he certainly didn't seem like the kind of man to not care. Rather, I think he managed, towards the end, to let go of the hope that other people might be less cruel, less stupid, less susceptible to an ice-9-like conversion into an innovation thought leader and deal with people as they are. This is often quite a bleak outlook, but it does have the merits of at least allowing you to focus on caring for the people where your care might have some real impacts. Inasmuch as I can do that and turn my mind and attention to the people and matters that I really care about (writing, statistics, my fellow sufferers), my symptoms really do get better. Which might, in the end, be the only way for sufferers to survive: while individually we can't help but expose ourselves to a social environment that's slowly killing us, together we can limit our exposure.

And as for Hunter Thompson? I can't say what he'd think of our current situation exactly, but I can imagine him calling ChatGPT something like "the electric ghost of Richard Nixon" and cursing it out in his inimitable manner, which I imagine would have gotten at least a sensible chuckle from Vonnegut. Then he'd go and do a lot of drugs.

Footnotes

1. A Political Disease, Harpers 1973, also available in Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons ↩