This Week in Messianism

Hi all. It’s Nate, your friendly neighborhood metaphysician. Thanks for hanging tight during my short writing break last month. Here is a brief essay on messianic thinking and AI.

The apocalypse, in its many forms, is an easily accessible but politically difficult form of storytelling. There are no shortage of ways to tell the story of collective endings, who will herald them, or what it might mean to see them coming, or even try to prevent them. But the implications for how we orient towards the future, or individual and collective change, are enormous. The past few months, the scions of AI have taken a turn at the helm of narrating our collective apocalypse, and the prophecy felt a bit…egotistical? Though perhaps aspirationally messianic is closer.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was recently called to Capitol Hill, leading a new generation of tech execs ready to speak about their turn at the controls of capitalism and media's infrastructures, but mostly to sound the trumpet of doom. Anthropic has been getting press coverage largely for its perceived prescience forecasting the shape of the void to come. Silicon Valley's obsession with the singularity has also been getting weirdly uncritical coverage, or at least, the obsession with the potentially demonic sentience of AI has driven a great deal of storytelling and A/B headline testing.

I liked David Streitfeld's historical take, as well as Meghan O’Gieblyn's, addressing the bizarre life of imaging AI's potential sentience. Many others, like Casey Newton (who has a great substack), who pay attention to the technical details, or the inability of lawmakers to understand them, have usefully pointed us in a technocratic direction. However the message I heard, trying to pay attention to the way religious narratives function in contemporary life, was something like this: God may be dead, but we are the priests of a new power, still here to capriciously enact absolute authority over you and potentially destroy your life through the exclusive wizardry of our ability to channel its capacities. We have potential ethical solutions, as well, but too bad its probably already too late.

The “black box” of AI is sort of waiting for a large-scale critical reprisal, which may take awhile, or is going on somewhere I'm not privy to. But it feels to me like we're currently stuck somewhere between the logic of a bland mysticism around a newly obscure, post-human agency and the ambivalent anxiety/excitement of each new Web 3 technology. I will say though that, personally, I am deeply enticed by epic narrative and mythic storytelling, apocalypses included. I don’t think I’m alone in this, though I am never entirely convinced by the universalism of theories that propose some kind of secret, mythic truth as the glue of all humanity’s self-understanding. However, this form of apocalypticism, of clean breaks and an unstoppable, coming nothingness is seductive, largely because it is easy and simple—especially as a means to understanding death, ending, and transformation. I agree with many who have made the argument that it is a particularly attractive form of narrative for those unwilling to grapple with the terms of their own individual trials, tribulations, and desires to change, and want world-historical or cosmic events to re-present their lives back to them as more important, as something other than the smallness and precarity of being human. There is a particular, structural entanglement with gender and race worth considering here, too. For the late scholar and public intellectual bell hooks, this is the crux of a problem with masculinity—a fundamental externalization, which at the intersection of whiteness and power, can have destructive consequences at micro- and macro-cosmic levels. For poet and critic Ken Chen, it’s similarly an issue of race and narrative, and the reason why a lot of auto-fiction and poetry will ultimately always live outside of a true poetics of catastrophe or trauma, committed to externalizing their potential to change in favor of ironic repose. For humorist and podcaster John Hodgman, it motivates dystopic fantasies, wherein these dudes, at some conscious or unconscious level, can’t stand the idea of the world going on without them, and want to take it with them when they die.

Plenty have criticized this orientation of masculinity, as well as the ideologically transparent formulations of big tech thinking. I’ll say this one bothered me enough to try to think about it here because, at the level of media consumption and pilfering cultural logics of apocalypse, these cliches feel like a very specific, grating kind of noise. Not even an imprecise form of narrative, more of an echo of a nihilist fantasy. Not a dream or nightmare about anything, but a sweaty panic about the void from a nap on some bulk-ordered Design Within Reach couch. However the way we talk about endings and collective transformation are important. They form a crucial subset of the available conceptual tools by which to relate to the otherness, that is to say the politics, of death and the future. The gravity of this kind of all-or-nothing thinking, to borrow a phrase from CBT, pulls all subtlety into a vortex of seeming moral certainties and binary choices. Good or bad. Life or death. Utopia or dystopia. A peopled future or apocalypse.

Casting yourself as a prophet of the doom you yourself have brought into the world is a particular kind of ego-trip, one which I would argue is, in this era of thinking we've killed or rediscovered every form of religiosity there is, an aspirational messianism. This is not to understate the many dangers posed by the “omelet” method of innovation currently being employed by Silicon Valley's AI pioneers, big and small. Nor is it even to say that they are definitely wrong. It's more to try to offer some stray thoughts on this form of storytelling, or lack thereof.

I suppose that after rereading a few of these news stories, my other reaction was wondering if these CEOs just watched the Oppenheimer trailer one too many times, and were lustful of the slick, Orientalist-lite protagonism of the taciturn genius having unleashed something cosmically powerful on the world, and performing moral repose always, tragically, too late (“I am Shiva, destroyer of worlds” he famously said, though I wish they'd have read When We Cease to Understand the World, instead, which reverses the relation between mysticism and apocalypse, though with its own complicated relationship to Asia). It is perhaps unsurprising that a bunch of mostly wealthy, white tech executives desire to see themselves at the helm of a conflict of cosmic, rather than technocratic import. In this sense, these stories felt like a kind of hero-projection, mixed with a bit of advertising for the awe-inspiring power of these technologies. Their impossibly large scope also potentially performs a bit of deflection from the every-day, microcosmic, yet no less structural forms of extinction that circulate digitally, shaped by an infrastructure built by the former employers of many of AI’s pioneers.

Are AI’s dangers a difference in degree or kind to other forms of destruction? At a technical or political economic level, it’s still unclear, though you’d do better to reference a tech journalist or scholar of technology and society to fill out the specific nature of this uncertainty. At this moment, the trumpeters of techno-apocalypse, paradoxically, seem largely to be signaling a sense that this is all cyclical. By announcing technology’s destructive potential through a messianic message about some discovery's absolute historical singularity, it mostly feels to me like we're stuck in a very familiar narrative trap, not collectively confronting new material dangers.

The end of the world, as a climactic battle between humanity and its own demons, feels to me like the least productive way to envision the catastrophes of social inequity or environmental ruin. This certainly is the most ineffective way to de-naturalize the feeling of impossibility around the tasks of collective justice and abolition, which must be foreseen across generations (though there are those with other ideas about the power of this form of storytelling, see a future post on Norman Brown, or better yet, check out his 1991 Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis). Still, we exist amid the cacophony of messianisms. Their clean, outrageous simplicity sits uncomfortably next to the many complexly entwined, small devastations, wreaked by the intimate enormity of life’s many endings. To borrow the title of Franny Choi’s latest book of poetry, which meditates on these ideas much more eloquently than me, especially in the title poem, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On.

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