Pancake Brain is a weekly newsletter from award-winning and -losing writer Lauren Duca. Like / Subscribe / Share wherever you do your best doomscrolling.
It’s impossible to escape the billionaires. Whatever three or four tech oligarchs come to mind when you hear the word “billionaire,” squint, and it turns out, they’re all the same guy. In almost every piece of culture I’ve consumed lately – The Devil Wears Prada 2, Hacks Season 5, and Made to Love by Alissa Nutting – there is an ambiguous billionaire, who might as well be any of the five guys currently colonizing human consciousness. Nutting’s Byron, CEO of Gogol, is diabolical, and not all that far punched up from the abortion of media by BJ Novak in the Andy Sachs reunion show, or the AI titan who tries to tempt Debra into endorsing unethical slop and quite literally promises to erase the writing process altogether. It doesn’t matter which real-life overlord is in question, because they might as well be the same dude. He’s raping and pillaging humanity, and probably wearing a neoprene vest.
We all know that we are enslaved by robots. We agreed to the terms and conditions. The majority of the population is hooked up to machines that were created to capture and extract as much of our attention as possible. We all know that the facial recognition of private equity is surveilling our every move, monitoring our heartbeats so they can steal our energy and sell us shit. We are watching a handful of men in antimicrobial fabrics promise us that humanity is not worth their time.
The inevitability of AI is a PR stunt by half a dozen tech nerds. It doesn’t matter what they tell you, Soylent tastes like cum. Recycled prose churned out of the plagiarism machine will be empty to anyone who knows what it means to truly feel alive. And there’s the problem with the guys running the world. They do not understand the value of connection, because they’ve never experienced the sensation. I’m genuinely confused why any of them want to live forever, because they all look fucking miserable. When I see pictures of these guys with their pale skin and weird chins, I can’t help but think: If you’re going to rape and pillage humanity for profit, can you at least smile more? If you’re going to steal the collective soul for your own use and purposes, would you mind having a good time?
I am not scared of AI, because I believe in the human spirit. With a caveat. Unfortunately, the evolution of humanity is far from complete, and so there are an awful lot people who can’t tell slop from other thing. There are people who can’t feel the difference between having their hearts open to the unconditional love of the universe and being clenched. Those guys running the world have yet to feel a goddamned thing besides greed, and that’s as obvious as the fact that half of them feel compelled to torture little girls on rock in the sea.
The power of life always wins in the end, and it’s always a new beginning. A spiritual evolution is unfolding not in spite of, but because of, the extremity of our present enslavement. Metaphysical folks used to talk about escaping The Matrix when it was just a metaphor. Now we can see so clearly the emptiness of the machines and the men who own them. The idea that AI could ever get better and better by running through the same shit over and over again is the very opposite of the progress that is happening at the level of our spirit. We are beings with the power to feel our connection to life. We evolve by believing in the mystical gift of humanity. We get our best revenge on the billionaires by laughing and having fun.
p.s. Tucson friends, I have a set at Groundworks tomorrow — come say hi :)
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