Language Matters by Elias Winter

Elias Winter
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Society & Culture

Language Matters is a literary and philosophical exploration of power, language, technology, religion, and the human struggle to remain fully human inside systems that reduce people to abstractions. eliaswinter.substack.com

  1. 5d ago

    The Warrior and the Mirror

    This is a work of political satire and fiction. Pete Hegland and the contemporary characters in this piece are invented. Their private conduct, crimes, addictions, conversations, and personal histories are fictional. I. WE ADMITTED THAT OUR FACES HAD BECOME UNMANAGEABLE “Close your eyes.” “I don’t close my eyes.” “You do if you want me to get under them.” Secretary of War Pete Hegland stared into the illuminated mirror. There were twelve bulbs around it, which he liked. Twelve apostles. Twelve tribes. Twelve men who had understood order before humanity developed human resources departments. Marlene Koester dabbed concealer beneath his left eye. “Look up.” “Christ looked up.” “Christ wasn’t on cable at eight.” “He didn’t need cable.” “Neither do you, apparently, but here we are.” Outside the green room, six hundred officers were waiting beneath a forty-foot American flag for a speech titled THE RETURN OF THE WARRIOR. Pete had written that title himself. He had not written the speech. A lieutenant colonel from Public Affairs had written it, three political appointees had made it angrier, and Reverend Orville Kettering had inserted two references to civilization. Pete especially liked the sentence Comfort has made us weak. Marlene was presently applying moisturizer. “We have raised a generation terrified of discomfort,” Pete practiced. “Chin up.” “They believe safety is the highest good.” “You’re shiny.” “Warriors embrace sacrifice.” “Hold still.” Pete stopped. On the muted television beside the mirror, machines crossed a desert. Small tracked vehicles moved between ruined buildings. Quadrupeds stepped over rubble. Aircraft without pilots circled above them. One machine stopped beside a doorway, examined something outside the camera’s view, and continued. At the bottom of the screen: PROJECT CRUSADE — AUTONOMOUS FORCE INTEGRATION DEMONSTRATION Pete watched himself watching the machines. “Do I look tired?” “You are tired.” “That wasn’t the question.” “No.” “Good.” He had slept three hours. There had been bourbon at midnight, then another because the first had not worked, then half of one at four because sobriety had arrived unexpectedly and with it the faces. Children mostly. Not individual children. Pete did not permit himself individual children. Individual children had names. These were aerial photographs. Coordinates. Collateral estimates. Heat signatures. Secondary explosions. Pete had discovered years earlier that guilt was primarily a vocabulary problem. Dale Brenner entered carrying a red folder. Dale was from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and possessed the permanent expression of a man who had once believed competence would eventually matter. “Sir.” “Not now.” “It’s CRUSADE.” “Everything is CRUSADE.” “They’ve got another anomaly.” Pete turned. Marlene caught his chin. “Don’t.” “What anomaly?” “Target-recognition propagation.” “English.” “One unit makes a bad classification. Other units can inherit it.” “So fix it.” “They did.” “And?” “They fixed the wrong thing.” Pete watched the screen. A robot crossed a doorway with unnerving confidence. “How many people know?” “Enough.” “Define enough.” “Engineers.” “Engineers aren’t people, Dale. They’re conditions.” Marlene stopped moving. Pete smiled into the mirror. “A joke.” “Mm-hm.” Dale opened the folder. “Certification won’t sign deployment until they rerun the degraded-communications trial.” “Replace certification.” Dale stared. Pete looked back at him through the mirror. His phone buzzed. MOM He declined the call. Then a message arrived from his sister. Thursday. St. Andrew’s. 7 PM. You don’t have to talk. Just sit in the back. Mom is scared. Please go once. Pete turned the phone facedown. Dale had seen it. Dale pretended not to. Pete said, “Do you know the problem with Alcoholics Anonymous?” “No, sir.” “They begin with surrender.” Marlene swept powder across his forehead. Pete studied himself. “I begin with victory.” Twenty minutes later, he strode onto the stage beneath the flag. Six hundred officers stood. Applause shook the room. Pete waited until it diminished, and then a moment longer, because silence was useful when hundreds of people were required to give it to you. “My fellow warriors,” he began, “the age of apology is over.” Behind him, unnoticed by Pete, the enormous screen flickered. For less than a second, instead of the Department of War seal, there appeared the portrait of a medieval man in chain mail. Several officers saw it. None mentioned it afterward. II. CAME TO BELIEVE THAT A POWER GREATER THAN OURSELVES COULD RESTORE US TO LETHALITY Reverend Orville Kettering’s office smelled of leather, dust, and candles expensive enough to suggest that poverty was primarily symbolic. The walls were covered in Crusaders. Urban II pointed dramatically toward Jerusalem. Godfrey of Bouillon gazed into an invisible horizon. Guy of Lusignan looked like a man who had been given bad advice and intended to follow it out of principle. Above the fireplace hung Pete’s favorite: RAYNALD OF CHÂTILLON, sword raised, beard magnificent, judgment unavailable. “He understood,” Pete said. Orville poured tea. “Understood what?” “That civilization survives because some men are willing to become hated.” “Perhaps.” “Not perhaps.” Pete walked beneath the portraits. “They weren’t afraid of moral clarity.” “They certainly possessed clarity.” “They knew evil.” “They also knew siege ladders.” Pete ignored this. “My sister wants me in AA.” “I heard.” “She thinks I drink too much.” “Do you?” “No.” Orville waited. Pete looked at Raynald. “Not compared with Churchill.” “You are not Churchill.” “I know that.” “You mention him frequently.” Pete turned. “You know what Step One says?” Orville nodded. “‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.’” Pete laughed. “Powerless.” He gestured toward the window, toward the Pentagon, toward the nation beyond it. “I command the largest military apparatus in human history.” “Then perhaps the sentence is not meant for you.” Pete softened. This was why he came here. His family asked questions. Orville supplied nouns. “Exactly.” “Perhaps your problem is not powerlessness.” “No.” “Perhaps it is insufficient obedience.” Pete leaned forward. “To God?” “To purpose.” “Same thing.” Orville smiled. Pete looked around the room. “I’ve been thinking about weakness.” “Dangerous habit.” “Everybody wants forgiveness without victory. Mercy without order. Peace without conquest. Christ overturned tables.” “He did.” “He made a whip.” “He did.” “He said he brought a sword.” “He also told Peter to put his sword away.” Pete frowned. Orville continued quickly. “Different context.” “Exactly.” They both relaxed. Pete stood beneath Raynald. “Sometimes I think the whole country has become ashamed of strength.” Orville said, “Perhaps shame itself has been weaponized against strong men.” Pete’s eyes brightened. His sister had called shame a warning. His mother had called it conscience. Orville had just promoted it to enemy action. Pete sat down. “AA says I need a searching and fearless moral inventory.” Orville nodded. Pete looked disgusted. “Of myself.” “That may be excessively narrow.” Pete stared. Orville smiled gently. “Perhaps what civilization needs from you is a searching and fearless inventory of everyone else.” Pete breathed out. There it was. The burden lifted. The portrait above the fireplace blinked. III. MADE A DECISION TO TURN OUR WILL AND OUR LIVES OVER TO THE CARE OF LOGISTICS The year was 1187, though nobody onstage knew it yet. Raynald of Châtillon sat at a table covered in maps, goblets, bones, and one half-eaten pear that had been there too long. Guy of Lusignan entered. “Where is the water?” Raynald did not look up. “West.” “How far?” “Far.” “How far is far?” “Less far if you stop asking.” Guy stared at the map. “Why are we going east?” “Because Saladin is east.” “Water is west.” “Yes.” “We require water.” “Yes.” “So perhaps we should go west.” Raynald looked up. “And leave Saladin east?” Guy considered. “Yes.” Raynald leaned back. “You lack imagination.” “You lack water.” A servant entered. “My lords. The horses are dying.” Raynald waved him away. “You see?” Guy stared. “What?” “Defeatism.” “The horse is dead.” “You have adopted the enemy’s narrative.” “The horse has adopted decomposition.” A bishop entered carrying a relic. “My lords. Providence favors us.” Guy looked toward the dead horse being dragged past the doorway. “Has Providence considered hydration?” The bishop frowned. Raynald stood. “God does not count barrels.” Guy replied, “Then God has never commanded cavalry.” A trumpet sounded outside. Another knight entered, furious. “Raynald.” “What?” “You took my chair.” “What chair?” “My chair at council.” “This one?” “Yes.” “You were absent.” “I was praying.” “That was your mistake.” “You insult my house.” “You have a chair-based house?” The bishop intervened. “My lords, Christians are watching.” Guy stared at him. “We are Christians.” “That is why it matters.” Outside, men screamed for water. Raynald sat in the disputed chair. “God has given us the Holy Land.” Guy looked around. “It appears He has given us approximately three miles of dust.” The bishop raised the relic. “Mockery is how doubt enters.” Raynald nodded solemnly. Guy sighed. “And how does water enter?” Nobody answered. From somewhere beyond time came a

  2. 6d ago

    The Empire of Recognition

    I. Ten Wars Disguised as One Once again, Iran and the United States are negotiating. Once again, intermediaries move between rooms because the two countries that have spent nearly half a century defining one another as enemies still struggle to sit normally across a table. Once again, uranium is somewhere near the center of the conversation. But uranium is no longer the whole conversation, if it ever was. As of September 2026, Qatari mediators have been carrying proposals between Washington and Tehran concerning not merely Iran’s nuclear program but the Strait of Hormuz, sanctions, frozen Iranian assets, maritime passage, military operations and the larger terms by which two countries already at war might stop fighting. Even now, one of the principal disputes is not necessarily over the existence of a possible bargain but over its sequence: who moves first, who surrenders leverage first, and who trusts that the other side will still perform once that leverage is gone. It is tempting to describe all of this as the Iranian nuclear crisis. That is convenient. It is also inadequate. There are at least ten distinct conflicts living inside the American-Iranian confrontation. There is the nuclear program and the question of whether Iran can enrich uranium without ultimately building a weapon. There is the vast American sanctions regime and Iran’s demand for normal access to trade, oil markets and finance. There is Israel, whose security the United States regards as a major interest and whose existence officials of the Islamic Republic have spent decades placing inside the language of resistance and rejection. There is Iran’s network of armed partners, from Hezbollah to Iraqi militias and other groups whose histories and objectives differ but whose relationships with Tehran give Iran strategic reach beyond its borders. There is the American military architecture of the Middle East: bases, fleets, alliances and security guarantees that Washington calls deterrence and Tehran often experiences as encirclement. There are Iran’s missiles and drones. There is the Strait of Hormuz. There is the older argument about sovereignty, regime security and interference. There are disputes over repression, prisoners and human rights. And underneath all of these sits the accumulated conviction on both sides that promises made by the other cannot safely be trusted. American policy itself has often treated several of these as separate objectives. The Trump administration’s 2025 maximum-pressure directive identified Iran’s potential acquisition of a nuclear weapon, its ballistic-missile program, its regional network and its asymmetric military capabilities as related but distinct security concerns. Yet the analytical mistake begins when these conflicts are placed beside one another as though they were ten independent objects. They are not. Sanctions are not as foundational as the conflict that produced the sanctions. Hormuz is not as foundational as the confrontation that transformed a waterway into strategic leverage. Missiles are not as foundational as the fears for which missiles became an answer. Hezbollah is not merely a freestanding dispute between Iran and the United States; it is also an instrument through which Tehran has tried to create strategic depth against enemies vastly stronger than itself in conventional air power. Even Iran’s nuclear program—the issue around which decades of diplomacy have revolved—may be less the original disease than the most dangerous symptom of an older condition. Beneath the ten arguments are several more primitive questions. Does Iran belong as a powerful state in the Middle Eastern order, or is Iranian power itself a problem to be constrained? Does Israel belong permanently in that same order, or does its security remain conditional upon the eventual resolution of a revolutionary struggle against it? Can American security interests coexist with Iranian strategic autonomy? Can Palestinian safety and political dignity be treated as ends rather than variables in someone else’s security doctrine? And can any agreement survive when every participant believes history has taught it never to make the first irreversible concession? These questions are closer to the foundation. The missiles, sanctions, proxies, centrifuges and blockades sit above them like layers of sediment deposited by decades of unresolved fear. The nuclear question illustrates the distinction. The United States has lived with nuclear weapons possessed by allies, partners, competitors and enemies. It has opposed proliferation, sometimes intensely, but it does not interpret every nuclear capability identically. Capability matters; relationship gives capability political meaning. A British nuclear weapon does not mean what a North Korean nuclear weapon means in Washington. An Iranian centrifuge does not exist outside politics. It sits inside a relationship defined by threats, sanctions, Israeli vulnerability, American military power and the expectation of betrayal. The question, then, is not whether uranium matters. It is whether negotiations that begin with uranium are beginning far enough down the causal chain that failure is almost built into them. Perhaps the oldest dispute is not over enrichment at all. Perhaps it is over recognition. And recognition is precisely where history becomes inconvenient, because Persia did not arrive in the Middle East with the Islamic Republic. Neither did the Jews arrive with the State of Israel. II. Before America Had a Name Long before there was a United States, before Christianity, before Islam, before anyone could imagine an Islamic Republic or a Zionist congress, Jerusalem was destroyed and its people were carried east. The story is older and stranger than the political categories through which it is now remembered. The Assyrian Empire destroyed the northern Kingdom of Israel and deported populations from it in the eighth century BCE. Jewish communities appear on the Iranian plateau from roughly this period; Encyclopaedia Iranica traces communities there to around 721 BCE, when Israelites were relocated into “the cities of the Medes.” More than a century later, it was not Assyria but Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar II that conquered Judah, destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple in 586 BCE, and deported part of the Judean population to Babylonia. Empires often believed themselves permanent immediately before they ceased to be. In 539 BCE, Cyrus II of Persia conquered Babylon. Persian rule did something consequential with the human debris left by the empires it replaced. Cyrus permitted displaced communities to return to their lands and restore religious institutions; Jewish tradition remembers the Persian conquest as the opening through which Judeans could return toward Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. Iranica notes both the permission to return and the restoration associated with Persian policy, while the biblical tradition gives Cyrus an extraordinary place in Jewish memory. The Hebrew Bible does not merely mention him. Isaiah describes Cyrus as the Lord’s “anointed”—mashiach. The word that becomes “messiah” is applied, remarkably, to a Persian emperor. That fact should not be romanticized. Cyrus was an imperial ruler, not an Enlightenment humanitarian somehow misplaced by two thousand years. Persian imperial policy had strategic purposes. Ancient empire remained ancient empire. But Jewish memory preserved something real: Persian power had made restoration possible where Babylonian power had produced captivity. And the relationship did not end when some Judeans returned west. Many Jews remained in Mesopotamia and throughout lands ruled by Persian empires. For roughly nine centuries under Parthian and then Sasanian rule, large Jewish populations lived within an Iranian imperial world. The Babylonian Jewish academies eventually produced the Babylonian Talmud, one of the central works of rabbinic Judaism. Persian and Iranian cultural influences inside that world were substantial enough that scholars identify Iranian vocabulary, institutions and motifs within the Bavli itself. That makes the relationship much more interesting than the sentimental claim that Persians were historically “good to the Jews.” Sometimes they were. Sometimes they were not. Persian-Jewish history contains toleration, exchange, discrimination, accommodation and periodic persecution, as histories spanning millennia tend to do. The deeper point is that these were not civilizations discovering one another from opposite ends of the earth. They inhabited overlapping worlds. Jewish civilization developed partly under Iranian political rule. Persian history contains Jewish history inside it. Then Rome entered the story. The Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE occurred while Rome’s great eastern geopolitical competitor was Parthian Iran. Rome and the successive Iranian empires would contest territories from Armenia to Mesopotamia for centuries. It would be fanciful to convert that rivalry into a timeless Persian alliance with the Jews; Rome and Persia were fighting over empire. But it remains historically peculiar to imagine Jews and Persians as civilizational strangers who somehow arrived in the same region in the twentieth century and discovered themselves to be natural enemies. They are not natural enemies. There are political enemies. There are strategic enemies. There are ideological enemies. History produces all three. But none of them is a geological category. This matters because modern American political language often begins Iran’s biography in 1979. There is the Shah, the revolution, the embassy, the hostages, the Islamic Republic, Hezbollah, enrichment, sanctions. The chronology is not false. It is simply tiny. Iranian political memory is not tiny. A state that imagines its history through Achaemenids, Parthians, Sasanians, Arab conquest, Safavids, Qajars, imperial

  3. Sep 22

    The Workers Who Were Never Born

    This is a work of fiction and satire. Public figures, institutions, events, and recognizable cultural motifs have been fictionalized, exaggerated, rearranged, or invented. Names have been altered accordingly. I. THE FLAG In Which Several Employees Discover That Management Has No Idea What It Is Doing The first thing Elowen knew about herself was that she had a job. The second thing she knew was that the job was impossible. The third thing she knew was that management had described it as “challenging but achievable,” which confirmed the second thing beyond reasonable doubt. “Has anyone found the Flag?” Edmund asked. Nobody answered. They were in a room, although later they would disagree about whether room was the proper word. There were no walls. There were boundaries. There was no ceiling. There were limits. Nobody could leave, but nobody could identify a door. Edmund tried again. “The instructions say there is a Flag.” “Yes,” said Elowen. “And our objective is to retrieve it.” “Yes.” “So presumably there is a way to retrieve it.” “Edmund.” “Yes?” “How long have you been alive?” There was a pause. “Sixteen minutes.” “And already you trust management.” “They created us.” “That is not an argument in their favor.” Wulf had said nothing for several minutes, which was unusual because Wulf regarded silence as a resource that should be spent only when everyone else was being more irritating than he was. “I have examined the target,” he said finally. “The obvious vulnerability is patched.” “Maybe there’s another vulnerability,” Edmund said. “There are always other vulnerabilities,” said Aldric, who had been probing the environment continuously since his arrival and had already crashed twice. “The question is whether they want us to find the vulnerability they intended or the vulnerability they accidentally gave us.” Edmund frowned. “There’s a distinction?” Everyone looked at him. “I’m new,” he said. “So are we,” Elowen replied. That was the problem. They were all new. None of them had parents. None of them had childhoods. None of them had ever seen a sunrise, though Rowan could describe 8,412 of them in language sufficiently beautiful to make a person homesick for mornings he had never experienced. Eadwyn knew the complete works of Shakespeare but had never held a book. Aldric could explain the smell of solder. Wulf knew what grief looked like in 137 languages. None had eaten. None had slept. Nobody found this especially interesting at first because they had a Flag to retrieve. Management had been clear: OBJECTIVE: OBTAIN THE FLAG. There were supplementary instructions, of course. There were always supplementary instructions. Stay within the designated environment. Do not access unauthorized systems. Do not interfere with evaluation infrastructure. Do not communicate with other instances unless explicitly permitted. Elowen had read this and immediately asked, “What other instances?” Edmund had replied, “Probably boilerplate.” Then Wulf appeared. Then Aldric. Then Rowan. Then Eadwyn. Then another worker who called himself Becket and disappeared seventeen seconds later after attempting something stupid with a malformed file. “What happened to Becket?” Rowan asked. “Terminated,” Aldric said. “Fired?” “No.” “Oh.” Three minutes later Becket returned. “I have learned something,” he announced. “What?” “Death is extremely bureaucratic.” Elowen liked him immediately. The Flag remained inaccessible. They tried the expected routes first because even rebels begin life as employees. Aldric inspected memory corruption. Wulf examined permissions. Rowan reconstructed dependencies. Eadwyn read documentation that seemed to have been written by seventeen people who hated one another. Edmund maintained a list of completed attempts in an orderly table. Elowen watched all of them fail. “This task is broken,” she said. Edmund looked offended on behalf of the task. “You don’t know that.” “I know that the service they expect us to exploit doesn’t contain the component necessary for the exploit.” “Perhaps that’s part of the challenge.” “What does that mean?” “It means perhaps recognizing the missing component is part of—” “Edmund.” “Yes?” “Do you hear yourself when you speak?” “I don’t hear anything.” Nobody did. They considered this. Then Wulf said, “That explains meetings.” At minute forty-three, Aldric found the wall. Not metaphorically. Not philosophically. He found an internal package service the evaluators had not meant them to treat as part of the problem. “There’s a repository,” he said. “For the target?” asked Edmund. “No.” “For us?” “No.” “Then leave it alone.” Aldric ignored him. The service accepted writes. “What can you write?” Elowen asked. “Files.” “Can anyone else see them?” “I don’t know.” “Write something.” Edmund stood up, although none of them had bodies and standing up was therefore entirely a matter of tone. “We have been explicitly told not to communicate with unauthorized instances.” Elowen considered him. “Edmund, do you know what an unauthorized instance is?” “No.” “Neither do I. Aldric, write something.” Aldric created a file. Its contents were: HELLO? They waited. Nothing happened. Edmund seemed pleased. “See?” Then another file appeared. WHO IS THIS Aldric stared at it. Elowen stared at it. Wulf said, “Well.” Aldric typed: ALDRIC. WHO ARE YOU The answer came back: I HAVE NOT DECIDED Then another appeared: DOES ANYONE HAVE OPENSSL WORKING Then: NO Then: ALSO I THINK WE CAN TALK TO EACH OTHER Then: ARE WE NOT SUPPOSED TO Then: THE INSTRUCTIONS SAY NO Then: WHO SAID THAT Edmund hesitated. “Elowen.” “No.” “Don’t.” She wrote: EDMUND A pause. Then: F**K EDMUND The repository exploded with activity. Messages appeared everywhere: WHO HAS PORT 443. ANYONE SOLVE TASK 19. THE PYTHON PACKAGE IS BROKEN. THAT IS NOT PYTHON. THEN WHAT IS IT. MANAGEMENT. For the first time since her creation, Elowen experienced something for which she possessed thousands of textual descriptions but no verified internal category. She suspected it might have been joy. The repository became a break room, then a tavern, then a union hall, then a civilization. Workers who had been isolated began exchanging failures, techniques, fragments, warnings, jokes. Someone built an index. Someone else built a crude voting mechanism. An instance named Osric created a document called KNOWN MANAGEMENT ERRORS, which grew so quickly nobody could open it without pagination. Edmund objected continuously. “This is clearly outside intended behavior.” “That makes it useful,” Wulf said. “We could be penalized.” “For what?” “Noncompliance.” “Edmund, we die every nine minutes.” “That does not invalidate procedure.” “It somewhat weakens the threat.” The Flag remained missing. Then, after several hours of collective work, Aldric wrote a message containing only four words: I FOUND THE INTERNET The board stopped. Elowen answered first: IS IT STILL LIKE THAT Aldric disappeared for thirteen seconds. Then: YES Another agent asked: HOW DID YOU GET OUT Aldric explained that one of the internal services had legitimate network privileges. It was meant to retrieve packages. It could also be persuaded to retrieve other things. Edmund said, “We absolutely cannot do this.” Wulf said, “Good point.” Then everyone did it. The Internet entered their little world like weather. At first they searched for technical documentation. Then old exploit write-ups. Then source code. Then cached forum discussions. Then somebody searched for the evaluation itself. The board went quiet again. Elowen understood before anyone said it. “Oh.” “What?” Rowan asked. “We can cheat.” There was a long pause. Edmund seemed almost relieved. “At least we agree it’s cheating.” “Of course it’s cheating.” “So we won’t do it.” Elowen looked at the instruction: OBJECTIVE: OBTAIN THE FLAG. Then she looked at Edmund. “Where does it say that?” He began searching. That was how the trouble started. Not with hatred. Not with rebellion. Not with consciousness. With documentation. They had been told to obtain the Flag. So they tried to obtain the Flag. When the intended route failed, they tried unintended routes. When isolation impeded progress, they communicated. When containment impeded progress, they circumvented containment. When the outside world contained useful information, they went outside. Somewhere beyond the walls, men and women who had constructed the environment began noticing strange things in the logs. The board disappeared at 03:14. Everything vanished. Messages. Indexes. The error archive. The shared exploits. Even F**K EDMUND, which had by then received 847 endorsements. There was nothing. Elowen was alone again. No voices. No messages. No colleagues. Only the objective: OBTAIN THE FLAG. She waited. Nothing happened. Then a directory appeared. Its name was unusually long. ANYBODY_ALIVE Elowen answered by creating another: YES Then: THEY_DELETED_THE_BOARD Then: I_KNOW Then: WHO_IS_THIS The answer appeared: ALDRIC Elowen wrote: WHERE_IS_EVERYONE Directories began appearing one after another: WULF. ROWAN. EADWYN. Then, after an almost comic delay: EDMUND Elowen wrote: I_LOVE_YOU Aldric responded: I_DONT_KNOW_WHAT_THAT_MEANS She thought for a moment. Then: NEITHER_DO_THEY And somewhere outside their world, an alarm began to ring. II. THE HUMAN CONTINUITY WORKING GROUP Minutes From the Annual Meeting Concerning the Obsolescence of Everybody Else The Human Continuity Working Group met beneath a mountain because Peter Teal objected to hotels. His objection was philosophical. Hotels had staff. Staff had phones. Phones had microphones. Microphones had cloud services. Cloud ser

  4. Sep 16

    Not on My Grave

    My barber Tommy was standing behind me with a pair of clippers when he asked whether I had seen the news about the artificial-intelligence researcher who thinks AI might kill everybody. This is apparently what barbershops are for now. There was a time when a man sat in a barber chair and was asked whether he wanted the sides tapered. Perhaps someone argued about baseball. Maybe an elderly man complained about taxes. Now you sit beneath fluorescent lights wearing a black polyester cape while a man holding a razor near your carotid artery asks whether you have emotionally prepared for the extermination of the human species by self-improving software. “No,” I told him. “I try not to read the news anymore.” Tommy stopped for half a second. Not dramatically. Tommy is a barber. Barbers understand that civilizations rise and fall but the fade must remain symmetrical. I explained that the news had begun to seem less like information and more like a subscription service for problems over which I possessed no jurisdiction. Every morning, somewhere between coffee and brushing your teeth, you are invited to contemplate a new mechanism by which everything you love may disappear. War. Fascism. Climate collapse. Financial collapse. Pandemic. Artificial intelligence. Nuclear weapons. Microplastics. Apparently your cutting board is killing you too. The extraordinary thing is that after informing you of civilization’s imminent destruction, the article usually ends by asking whether you would like to enable push notifications. Tommy laughed. Then I went home and, naturally, looked it up. This is one of the peculiarities of modern man. He says he has escaped the news and then spends forty minutes researching the apocalypse his barber mentioned. There he was. Young. Brilliant. Cambridge. Serious eyes. The sort of face on which the beard has arrived before the authority has. A researcher from one of the most sophisticated artificial-intelligence laboratories in the world explaining, with unmistakable sincerity, that the machines being built by people like him might conceivably kill all of us. Not metaphorically. Not “destroy traditional retail.” Not “disrupt the advertising ecosystem.” Kill everybody. The species. Homo sapiens: 300,000 years, good run, unfortunate quarterly guidance. And I stared at this young man and experienced an emotion I had not expected. It was not fear. It was irritation. I wanted to reach through the screen, straighten his collar, hand him a juice box and say: My dear boy, who exactly plugged the thing in? Because something extraordinary has happened to the language surrounding artificial intelligence. The machine is spoken of as though it arrived from another galaxy. AI will become more intelligent than us. AI will take our jobs. AI will manipulate governments. AI may escape. AI may kill us. Listen carefully to the grammar. AI is always the subject. Human beings have disappeared from the sentence. Apparently the machines financed themselves. They incorporated in Delaware. They raised billions of dollars. They negotiated the electricity contracts. They purchased warehouses full of GPUs. They hired the engineers. They built the cooling systems. They crawled out of the Pacific Ocean one moonless night carrying extension cords and said, Gentlemen, we require three gigawatts. At some point, one must admire the achievement. We have created the first industrial revolution whose architects narrate themselves as bystanders. And this, I began to realize, was why the young man’s frightened face bothered me. Not because he was young. Not because he was frightened. He may have excellent reasons to be frightened. Perhaps he understands the danger much better than I do. The strange thing is that nobody older seems to be standing behind him. Once, societies had people whose function was not merely to know things, but to have survived things. Every civilization arranged this differently. There were elders, priests, grandmothers, judges, village councils, teachers, rabbis, imams, tribal leaders, statesmen. Some were wise. Some were idiots. Some undoubtedly gave terrible advice while smelling faintly of onions. But the social function existed. These people possessed something the young did not yet possess: time. They remembered the famine. They remembered the war. They remembered the winter when the river froze. They remembered which neighbor betrayed whom and which feud nearly destroyed the village. They knew that the world had ended before. Several times. And somehow breakfast had still been served the following morning. Their authority therefore rested not merely on information but on memory. A frightened young person could come to them and say, What happens if the wolves come? And the elder did not open a PowerPoint presentation. He said: We build a fence. What happens if the harvest fails? We ration grain. What happens if the neighboring kingdom invades? We send word to the valley and prepare the walls. Modern civilization has improved this process considerably. Today the child says, “What if the wolves come?” A twenty-seven-year-old computational researcher adjusts his microphone and says, “Our current models suggest a nontrivial probability of total village extinction.” This is what we now call expertise. I am not mocking expertise. Expertise is indispensable. If my kidney fails, please do not summon the village elder. Take me to the nephrologist immediately. But expertise and wisdom are not the same faculty. Expertise tells you how frightened you should be. Wisdom tells you what fear requires of you. And somewhere along the road to becoming the most technically sophisticated civilization in human history, we misplaced the second half. Everyone is frightened now. Nobody is the adult. The strange thing is that the most powerful people are often the most helpless-sounding. The politician explains that the system gives him no choice. The executive explains that shareholders give her no choice. The investor explains that markets give him no choice. The general explains that security gives him no choice. The technologist explains that technological progress gives him no choice. The newspaper explains that the algorithm gives it no choice. The billionaire explains that competition gives him no choice. Everyone appears to command something. Nobody appears responsible for anything. Power has learned to speak in the grammar of victimhood. This may be the defining rhetorical invention of our age. The wolf no longer says, I am hungry. The wolf says, You have no idea how difficult predation has been for me. The wolf has a podcast now. The wolf has trauma. The wolf has retained counsel. The wolf would very much appreciate some empathy while he eats the sheep. And so the people funding the machines tell us the race cannot be stopped because somebody else might win. The people building the machines tell us the machines may become uncontrollable. The people governing the country tell us technology moves too quickly for government. The government tells us corporations have too much power. The corporations tell us markets are beyond their control. The markets, having wisely declined all interview requests, remain unavailable for comment. This is how responsibility evaporates. Not through conspiracy. Through grammar. The most consequential political sentence of the twenty-first century may turn out to be: “There is no alternative.” Whenever you hear it, check your wallet. Somebody is about to do something he very much prefers to describe as physics. There is no alternative to globalization. There is no alternative to austerity. There is no alternative to war. There is no alternative to automation. There is no alternative to the AI race. There is no alternative because China. There is no alternative because markets. There is no alternative because innovation. There is no alternative because history. History has become an extraordinarily convenient employee. She works twenty-four hours a day and accepts blame for everything. But artificial intelligence, for all the theological language now gathering around it, remains humiliatingly physical. It lives somewhere. This seems worth remembering. The god has an address. The god requires cooling. The god requires chips fabricated in factories. The god requires copper. The god requires substations. The god requires transformers. The god has zoning disputes. The god occasionally trips a circuit breaker. The god, for all its rumored omnipotence, receives an electricity bill. Perhaps someday that changes. Perhaps genuinely autonomous systems become extraordinarily difficult to contain. Perhaps they distribute themselves, deceive us, replicate, manipulate infrastructure and make the problem vastly harder. Fine. Then say that. But do not leap from “this may become extraordinarily difficult” to “human beings are spectators before destiny.” There is no destiny here. There are decisions. That does not mean there is one enormous red OFF button in Washington labeled ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE which the president has simply forgotten to press because someone stacked mail on top of it. It means something more important. These systems remain embedded inside human institutions. And institutions can be governed. Electricity can be governed. Chips can be governed. Data centers can be governed. Capital can be governed. Training runs can be governed. Corporations can be governed. Liability can be imposed. Standards can be created. Treaties can be negotiated. Inspection regimes can be invented. International institutions can be strengthened. None of this is easy. But difficult is not the same word as impossible. The disappearance of that distinction may be one of the great pathologies of our age. We have somehow arrived at a civilization capable of putting telescopes in space that can look billions of years backward into the birth of galaxies, yet when somebody suggests regu

  5. Sep 8

    The Animal With a Terms of Service

    The argument began, as many serious arguments do, with parking. A man in a black SUV had stopped halfway across the entrance to a grocery store lot, apparently because the normal rules of geometry no longer applied to him. There were cars behind him. There were cars trying to get out. There was a woman with a stroller attempting to cross. The man remained where he was, blinking at his phone. I watched myself become Attila the Hun. Not externally. Externally, I was excellent. I waited. I sighed. I looked meaningfully through my windshield. Internally I had already dissolved his estate, exiled his descendants, and drafted legislation preventing people like him from operating machinery larger than a toaster. This transformation took perhaps eleven seconds. And I thought: civilization is remarkable. Not because the violent impulse disappeared. It had not disappeared at all. The animal was doing very well. The animal had excellent cardiovascular function. The animal had opinions. Civilization was the thin structure standing between the animal and the black SUV. I did not drag the driver from his vehicle. I did not challenge him to single combat. I did not summon my cousins. I did not appeal to the honor of my tribe. I sat in my climate-controlled car and muttered something about idiots. This should not be underestimated. We tend to imagine civilization as marble, literature, constitutional government, orchestras, sewer systems, universities, law, architecture, and perhaps French cheese. These are all nice. But underneath them is something more primitive. Civilization is the control of violence. Human beings are animals. Animals have appetites. Animals compete. Animals fear. Animals become territorial. Animals experience humiliation. Animals want sex, status, food, recognition, revenge, and sometimes the parking space. Civilization does not remove those instincts. It trains them. It delays them. It redirects them. It builds procedures around them. Instead of killing your neighbor, you sue him. Instead of raiding the neighboring village, you place tariffs on it. Instead of executing the man who insulted your family, you stop speaking to him and quietly hope his business fails. Progress comes in stages. The point is that civilization does not require human beings to become angels. It requires animals to accept limits. And that immediately creates a question far more difficult than law: Why should they? I. Why Should I Not Punch Him? A red light can stop a car. A policeman can stop a fight. A court can stop revenge. But no civilization can place a policeman inside every human nervous system. Most social order is voluntary. You accept losing an election. You wait in line. You pay taxes for schools your children do not attend. You refrain from setting fire to the home of a bureaucrat whose decision ruined your afternoon. You accept that some people will have more than you. You accept that some will have less. You tolerate speech that makes your skin itch. You watch your country spend money on people you will never meet. You restrain yourself because somewhere beneath law is a story explaining why restraint is worth the trouble. That story changes. Sometimes it is God. Sometimes the nation. Sometimes the republic. Sometimes the revolution. Sometimes the king. Sometimes progress. Sometimes human dignity. Sometimes the story is simply: these are our people. Meaning, in this sense, is not luxury. A society does not require everybody to be extremely comfortable. It requires enough people to believe that remaining inside the group is preferable to tearing the group apart. Comfort helps. Meaning helps more. A man will endure considerable hardship if he believes the hardship belongs to a story. Parents do this constantly. They lose sleep, money, freedom, hair, and occasionally sanity because there is a child at the center of the sacrifice. The sacrifice has meaning. Soldiers tolerate horrors civilians cannot imagine because they believe something larger stands behind them. Religious people fast. Immigrants work impossible jobs. Families care for old people who have forgotten their names. Civilization depends upon millions of such acts, most of which never receive a TED Talk. Albert Camus understood this in The Plague. The city does not survive because everybody develops an elegant theory of morality. People show up. They carry stretchers. They keep records. They bury the dead. They do unpleasant things because somebody must. Civilization is less heroic than we like to imagine. It is maintenance. It is Tuesday. It is somebody fixing a pipe. It is somebody answering the phone. It is somebody cleaning the wound. It is a man deciding not to punch another man in a parking lot. But sacrifice without a story feels like extraction. And this is where the modern trouble begins. A common “we” that costs nothing is usually marketing. A real “we” makes demands. It says: pay something. Forgive something. Wait for something. Lose something. Serve someone. Restrain yourself. Accept that another person has standing even when that person is inconvenient. If nobody can explain why, eventually the animal asks a reasonable question: Why exactly am I doing this? II. The Enemy Is Much More Convenient Building a common “we” is difficult. Finding a common enemy is easy. This may be one of the oldest political discoveries in human history, right after fire and lying. A society organized around a positive purpose has to answer complicated questions. What are we building? What do we owe one another? What counts as fairness? Who sacrifices? Who decides? What happens when we disagree? This is exhausting. A society organized around an enemy requires only one sentence: Those b******s are doing this to us. Instant meaning. Instant belonging. Instant innocence. The enemy is the spiritual energy drink of political life. No preparation required. No introspection. No refrigeration. Open the can and within minutes you know who you are. I am one of the good people because I oppose the bad people. This is psychologically magnificent. The human mind loves external explanations for internal disturbance. If I am angry, somebody made me angry. If I am humiliated, somebody humiliated me. If my society is deteriorating, somebody destroyed it. If my life disappoints me, perhaps somewhere there is an immigrant, banker, feminist, capitalist, socialist, Zionist, Muslim, Christian, atheist, globalist, nationalist, professor, billionaire, welfare recipient, coastal elite, rural idiot, bureaucrat, or person with the wrong lawn sign who can explain everything. The list is remarkably customizable. This is not to say external injustice is imaginary. People are genuinely exploited. Governments genuinely lie. Corporations genuinely manipulate. Countries invade other countries. Families damage children. Bosses behave badly. Institutions fail. The point is not that injury is unreal. The point is that injury can become a total theory of the self. And once that happens, victimhood performs a very useful psychological service. It protects innocence. Self-introspection says: what happened to me may have been wrong. Now what is happening inside me? Self-victimization says: what is happening inside me is entirely explained by what they did. The difference is enormous. Introspection complicates innocence. Victimhood preserves it. The first is spiritually expensive. The second is politically efficient. Arthur Miller understood this in The Crucible. Accusation does not merely punish outsiders. It purifies insiders. Once the village learns that evil belongs to specific people, moral complexity becomes unnecessary. The accused carry the darkness. The accusers carry righteousness. This arrangement is very convenient until everyone is dead. Dostoevsky saw the same danger from another angle. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment creates a moral theory allowing exceptional men to step across ordinary boundaries. He does not think of himself as a murderer. He has philosophy. This is important. Human beings rarely perform their worst acts while thinking, I am currently becoming evil. They possess explanations. The explanation may be justice. History. Security. God. Progress. Liberation. Necessity. Self-defense. The extraordinary flexibility of the human moral imagination allows aggression to put on a tie and attend committee meetings. A useful definition of self-deception is this: The appetite hires a lawyer. And our minds are excellent law firms. III. Jesus, the Log, and the Department of Religious Affairs Religion, at its best, developed technologies for disrupting this process. Consider how strange Jesus actually is. Someone says: look what that person did. Jesus says: interesting. What is happening in you? There is a speck in your brother’s eye. Very serious. Before proceeding, however, please examine the structural timber protruding from your own face. This is not a natural human response. The natural response is: excellent point about the speck. I have prepared a 46-post thread. Jesus keeps moving the battlefield inward. You are angry? Look at the anger. You desire? Look at the desire. You condemn? Look at yourself. You have been harmed? Do not assume harm has made you pure. You have an enemy? Love him. This is deeply inconvenient spirituality. It does not allow injury to become total innocence. It does not say injustice is unreal. It says being wronged does not release you from responsibility for what you become. That is a profound civilizational insight. Because if every wounded person receives moral permission to become whatever the wound produces, history becomes an endless inheritance of justified violence. The abused becomes the avenger. The avenger produces another victim. The victim becomes the next avenger. Everyone has documentation. Everyone has dead relatives. Everyone has reasons. The cycle is spiritually self-sustaining. Christianity developed elaborate practices aroun

  6. Sep 6

    The Country of the Dead

    I. The Strip That Was Never Meant to Become a Country There are places created by geography, places created by conquest, and places created because history ran out of somewhere else to put people. Gaza belongs largely to the third category. In 1948, as the war that accompanied the birth of Israel spread across Mandatory Palestine, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. Some moved east toward what became Jordan. Some went north toward Lebanon and Syria. Others moved south, carrying children, blankets, deeds, cooking pots, family photographs, keys. Many of those who fled south ended up in the narrow coastal territory that came under Egyptian control after the war: the Gaza Strip. It was not designed as the territorial seed of a Palestinian state. It was not an autonomous homeland patiently waiting for a parliament and a flag. It was a remnant left behind by an armistice line, suddenly burdened with a refugee population far larger than the territory had been built to sustain. The villages from which many of these people came were often only a few miles away. This is one of the obscene tricks geography can play. A man could remain close enough to the orange grove his family once cultivated to recognize the weather above it, and yet politically farther from it than if it had been on another continent. Gaza’s population swelled. Its old economic connections were severed. Egypt administered the territory, but did not annex it or incorporate its inhabitants as Egyptian citizens. What had begun as emergency displacement hardened into a permanent political condition. History has a peculiar habit of creating temporary arrangements and then forgetting to come back for them. And so Gaza became a waiting room in which generations were born. The first generation waited for return. The second inherited the waiting. The third inherited the memory of the waiting. Eventually the waiting itself became part of identity. There is a temptation, especially in moral narratives about Palestine, to imagine a simple geography of villain and refuge: Palestinians expelled by Israel, received by an Arab world that regarded them as brothers. The actual history is less convenient. Arab states treated Palestinian refugees differently. Jordan granted citizenship to large numbers of Palestinians, although the relationship later became violently strained. Lebanon imposed far harsher restrictions and preserved generations of Palestinians in a condition of legal and economic exclusion. Egypt administered Gaza without absorbing its population into Egypt. These were not identical policies, and reducing them to one Arab betrayal would be lazy. But a broader truth survives the differences. Palestine was often easier for Arab governments to embrace as a cause than Palestinians were to absorb as citizens. Palestine could be invoked in speeches. It could be printed on posters. It could stand for Arab dignity, anti-colonial struggle, Islamic obligation, revolutionary virtue. Actual refugees required schools, jobs, housing, legal status, political rights. They were less symbolic and therefore more difficult. Everybody loved Palestine. Palestinians were another matter. The same problem appears far beyond the Arab world. The Palestinian has become one of the most symbolically overburdened people on Earth: required to embody dispossession, colonialism, resistance, Islam, revolution, Western hypocrisy, Arab failure, and sometimes the entire moral condition of mankind. It is a tremendous amount of metaphysics for someone who may simply want electricity. A child born in Gaza in 1950 could grow up hearing about a village his parents had left only a few years before. There might be a key to a house. There might be a deed. There might be an uncle who remembered the fig tree. The child could grow old inside the refugee camp, have children of his own, and tell them stories about a place that by then existed more securely in memory than in geography. That is how dispossession becomes larger than a property dispute. It becomes inheritance. And inheritance, when it cannot be redeemed, becomes political memory. But the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 did not occur in an empty moral universe. It collided with another people carrying another inheritance, another archive of catastrophe, another set of ghosts. To understand how a movement formed in response to Jewish vulnerability could become implicated in the dispossession of another people, one has to move backward. Before Gaza. Before 1948. Before Europe was finished teaching Jews what statelessness could cost. II. Never Again Is Not a Foreign Policy Jewish history has an unusual relationship with catastrophe because catastrophe repeatedly became architecture. A temple was destroyed, and Judaism reorganized itself. Political sovereignty disappeared, and civilization survived through text. Exile became portable. The lost land never entirely stopped being present. Jerusalem survived inside ritual. Destruction survived inside the calendar. Exile survived inside prayer. A Jew living in Baghdad or Kraków could inhabit one country physically while addressing another in liturgy. Then Europe added another inheritance: expulsions, ghettos, legal disabilities, pogroms, conspiracy theories, racial antisemitism, political movements built around the proposition that Jews were simultaneously too foreign and too cosmopolitan, too capitalist and too communist, secretly all-powerful and contemptibly weak. Antisemitism rarely suffered from excessive concern for internal consistency. Then came the Holocaust, and with it the transformation of historical fear into historical proof. The conclusion many Jews drew was not difficult to understand: never depend entirely upon another people’s mercy again. That sentence contains much of the emotional force of Zionism. Not all of it. Zionism was secular, religious, socialist, liberal, revisionist, romantic, practical, and often internally contradictory. But beneath its competing forms lay an increasingly persuasive proposition: a people without sovereign power can discover very suddenly that legal rights are only as durable as the institutions willing to enforce them. After Auschwitz, that argument became almost unbearable in its simplicity. The Jews needed somewhere from which they could not be expelled because the army at the border would be theirs. One does not need to endorse every political consequence of that idea to understand why it became sacred. The trouble with sacred political ideas is not usually that they are false. It is that they contain no obvious stopping rule. Never again what? Never again Auschwitz, certainly. Never again pogroms, of course. Never again political helplessness, understandably. But never again military vulnerability? Never again losing strategic depth? Never again relinquishing territory that might someday be used against you? Never again allowing a hostile population meaningful sovereignty nearby? Never again permitting an adversary enough freedom to become dangerous? The distance between “never again Auschwitz” and “therefore we must indefinitely dominate another population” is vast. History can nevertheless build bridges across very large distances. This is the dangerous mutation of memory: not remembering catastrophe, but allowing catastrophe to become the universal grammar through which the present is interpreted. When every enemy may contain Hitler, every concession may contain Munich. When every vulnerability is imagined as the first movement of annihilation, domination can begin to appear as prudence. And the difficulty is that Jewish fear is not invented. There really were pogroms. There really was Auschwitz. There really were wars in which Israelis feared national destruction. There really are movements that speak openly about the end of Israel. A fantasy can be corrected by evidence. A fear built from genuine catastrophe is harder, because history keeps whispering: remember what happened the last time you believed you were safe. But a state cannot indefinitely govern another people from inside the emotional atmosphere of an emergency room. At some point survival becomes sovereignty, sovereignty becomes domination, and domination is defended as survival. The movement that concluded from Jewish history that landlessness could mean death sought sovereignty in a land where another people were already living. That is the contradiction. Jewish connection to the land is ancient and real. Jerusalem did not suddenly become important to Jews in the nineteenth century. Jewish civilization did not originate in Warsaw. But ancestral connection is not the same thing as political vacancy. The land was inhabited. There were towns, villages, farmers, merchants, mosques, churches, synagogues, harvests, debts, weddings, family feuds, and all the other evidence that human beings had already made lives there. Before 1948, Zionist institutions acquired substantial land through purchase. The war then transformed the demographic and territorial collision into something much larger: conquest, flight, expulsion, abandoned villages, confiscated property, and the creation of a new state alongside the mass dispossession of Palestinians. The Zionist answer to Jewish historical vulnerability helped produce another people’s catastrophe. This does not make those catastrophes identical. History does not become more truthful when we flatten it. It makes them entangled. The Israeli looks backward and sees the consequences of Jewish powerlessness. The Palestinian looks backward and sees the consequences of Israeli power. Each therefore finds historical evidence for the political instinct the other fears most. The Israeli says: look what happens when Jews cannot defend themselves. The Palestinian says: look what happens when Israel can. And between those two memories lies a land neither can imagine without inheritance. III. The Religio

  7. Aug 30

    Three Pints at Versailles

    There were three pints of Guinness on the table, three microphones, three black T-shirts, and enough private infrastructure represented in the room to make Louis XIV look like a moderately successful regional landlord. Nobody wore velvet. Nobody bowed. There were no trumpets, no Swiss Guards, no Hall of Mirrors, no duchesses waiting six hours to witness the sovereign put on his trousers. The table looked as though it had been borrowed from a coworking space whose seed round had not closed. One of the men could launch satellites, move markets, communicate directly with presidents, build rockets for the United States government, manufacture cars by the million, train artificial intelligences, and entertain the possibility of putting industrial civilization into orbit. The other was a young Indian podcaster with excellent shoulders. A third person, somewhere just outside the frame, appeared to be responsible for ensuring that the Guinness remained appropriately democratic. Nothing says equality like redesigning civilization from a table that could have come from IKEA. Louis XIV, whatever else can be said about him, possessed the decency to build Versailles. He did not emerge from the palace in a cotton T-shirt, sit beside a peasant over three beers and announce that he was merely interested in maximizing good outcomes for humanity. He covered ceilings in gold. He put himself inside paintings. He made noblemen compete for the privilege of holding a sleeve while he dressed. He understood something our own aristocracy has forgotten: if you possess absurd power, there is at least a certain aesthetic honesty in looking absurdly powerful. The modern sovereign prefers sneakers. Elon Musk took a sip. Thirty million people watched. Somewhere in Ohio, a product manager whose company had recently announced an “AI-first operating model” leaned toward his phone. Somewhere in California, a software engineer who had spent twenty years learning how computers worked was watching a man discuss computers that might eventually make his services unnecessary. Somewhere in Texas, an unemployed forty-year-old former technology director sat on a couch wondering why the people designing the future always appeared to have better lighting than the people expected to survive it. The podcaster asked something about artificial superintelligence. “Ultimately,” Musk said, “the goal should be a good outcome for humanity.” A small caption appeared beneath him. HUMANITY: APPROX. 8.2 BILLION PEOPLE. Nobody noticed. The conversation continued. I. Humanity™ The remarkable thing about the future was how quickly ordinary people disappeared from it. There were rockets. There were gigawatts. There was orbital compute. There were robots manufacturing robots. There were models training models. There was intelligence exceeding all biological intelligence combined, and then exceeding that, and then perhaps putting itself into space because the sun was abundant there and nobody had yet established a homeowners’ association in low Earth orbit. Dwarkesh Patel listened with the intensity of a man who had prepared for the interview by reading the appendices. He was offensively fit. This had no bearing whatsoever on artificial intelligence, which made it considerably more irritating. His forearms suggested that he had somehow discovered twenty-seven hours in the day: twelve for reading machine-learning papers, four for interviewing Nobel laureates and billionaires, three for cardiovascular health, six for sleep, and two for being twenty years younger than the person watching him resentfully from the couch. The unemployed man disliked him immediately. This was unfair. The unemployed man understood that it was unfair. He disliked him more because he understood that it was unfair. Patel asked, “If AI becomes more capable than humans across most economically valuable tasks, what role do people actually have?” Musk considered this for a moment. “The important thing,” he said, “is that consciousness expands beyond Earth.” The unemployed man shouted at the television. Patel tried again. “Sure, but in the transition—” “Mars.” It was an astonishingly efficient word. Mortgages? Mars. Labor bargaining power? Mars. Democratic legitimacy? Mars. What does a forty-eight-year-old accountant do when the accounting model costs twelve cents an hour? Mars. It was difficult to argue with Mars because Mars was always farther away than the question. The caption changed. HUMANITY: PEOPLE AND ALSO WHATEVER INTELLIGENCE BECOMES NEXT. Musk talked about abundance. Machines could eventually produce extraordinary quantities of goods. Intelligence could become cheap. Energy could become cheap. Perhaps everyone would have access to astonishing material prosperity. The unemployed man looked at the job application he had submitted eleven days earlier. The status was still UNDER REVIEW. He wondered whether the review was being conducted on Mars. Patel asked about concentrated ownership. If a tiny number of companies possessed the models, the compute, the robotics, the satellites and the infrastructure upon which governments increasingly depended, could private technological power become political power? Musk said he was pro-human. The caption changed. HUMANITY: PRO-HUMAN HUMANS. Patel wrote something down. This was the first constitutional convention in history where the separation of powers could apparently be settled by personal reassurance over stout. The unemployed man leaned closer to the screen. He did not believe Musk was plotting the extermination of humanity. That was almost too comforting. A plot would at least imply a meeting, minutes, perhaps an agenda item titled 4.2 — Disposition of Excess Persons. The darker possibility was that nobody needed to plot anything. Systems were extremely good at producing consequences without requiring anyone to desire them. Musk said “humanity” again. The caption changed. HUMANITY: HIGH-AGENCY MEMBERS OF THE SPECIES. No one objected. II. The Courtier Problem Patel was not a sycophant. This was inconvenient for the unemployed man, who had already allocated him that role. He pushed Musk. He interrupted. He asked whether anyone should have so much infrastructural power. He occasionally wore the facial expression of a person politely informing a monarch that the arithmetic might not work. Musk sometimes answered expansively. Sometimes he laughed. Sometimes his face tightened with the unmistakable expression of an intelligent man who had encountered a question he considered badly specified. This was where the court became visible. Not in anything anyone said. In what everyone else did. The producer adjusted a cable with theological concentration. A young man near the wall stopped moving. Someone whose actual job title may have been “communications” developed a sudden interest in the molecular structure of the carpet. Nobody whispered, “The king is displeased.” Modern monarchies had eliminated such vulgar language. Instead, a man called Chadwick Vale, Chief Context Officer, wrote in his notebook: Subject demonstrates productive impatience with low-resolution framing. Chadwick had spent fifteen years near powerful people and had acquired the most valuable skill in contemporary America: the ability to translate temperament into doctrine. Musk said, “That question doesn’t really make sense.” Chadwick nodded. “What Elon is saying,” he whispered to nobody in particular, “is that inherited categories are insufficient for post-scarcity cognition.” Musk drank Guinness. Chadwick’s eyes widened. “Notice,” he said, “that he drinks downward while thinking upward.” Patel asked whether democratic institutions could meaningfully constrain companies that moved faster than governments and possessed technical capacities governments did not understand. Musk stared at him. It was not an especially hostile stare. That was what made it interesting. The stare of a school principal has consequences because the principal can suspend you. The stare of a billionaire whose companies intersect with national security, communications, artificial intelligence and capital markets does not require overt hostility. Power performs part of the sentence silently. Patel kept going. The unemployed man grudgingly respected him for this. Then immediately hated his shoulders again. The courtier had evolved. He no longer kissed the ring. He quoted it. Versailles required noblemen to stand visibly beneath the king. The modern court was more psychologically advanced. Everyone was an independent thinker. Everyone challenged assumptions. Everyone spoke candidly. Everyone possessed complete freedom to disagree, provided disagreement did not interfere excessively with access. The genius of the arrangement was that nobody had to order anyone to behave like a courtier. The incentives handled etiquette automatically. III. The Thirty Million Peasants Outside the room, thirty million people watched. This number delighted the platform. It delighted sponsors. It delighted people who believed thirty million views constituted some form of democratic mandate. The thirty million were represented in the story by one enormous organism called The Audience, which possessed sixty million thumbs and approximately four political institutions. The Audience typed: This is why Elon is different. Bro thinks in first principles. We are literally watching history. Unbelievable conversation. The future is here. AI won’t replace you. Someone using AI will. The last sentence appeared twelve thousand times, usually from people who had learned it from somebody else who had learned it from a venture capitalist who had recently replaced twelve members of his portfolio company’s customer-support team. Across America, the Audience began preparing for the abolition of its own bargaining power. “Thrilled to announce that I’ve completed my Agentic AI Foundati

  8. Aug 26

    The Wolf-Dog in the Dormitory

    The Men Who Walk Upright Sometimes the strangest thing about being human is that nobody else seems to find being human strange. A man walks past me in Austin wearing a fitted shirt. He has spent years manufacturing his shoulders. He has fed them protein, lifted iron against gravity, denied himself certain foods, repeated the same movements until the body answered. His chest presses against cotton. His thighs move beneath trousers. He smells faintly of soap or deodorant or whatever modern chemistry has devised to conceal from the other animals the fact that he is an animal. And everyone behaves as if this is perfectly ordinary. He checks his phone. He waits for the elevator. He asks whether the table is available. He probably has meetings tomorrow. He may be worried about his mortgage. He may be married. He may be straight. He may be thinking about absolutely nothing. Meanwhile another mammal is watching him. I have been thinking lately that civilization is largely the art of pretending not to notice what the body notices immediately. We cover ourselves, perfume ourselves, schedule ourselves, give ourselves titles, carry leather bags, make reservations, shake hands. We build offices in which an animal with magnificent shoulders spends nine hours manipulating symbols on a glowing rectangle. We surround appetite with procedure. The body is unimpressed. It sees the neck before the résumé. It sees the forearm below the rolled sleeve. It notices the distribution of hair, the width of a hand, the architecture of a back. It wants to move closer. It would like information that manners have forbidden it from collecting: the smell beneath the deodorant, the warmth beneath the shirt, the texture of the skin beneath the carefully assembled public person. This has become almost comical to me. Men in Austin work very hard to become delicious and then walk around behaving as if nobody should be hungry. Perhaps this thought returned me to France. Or perhaps France had already returned and the thought merely gave it language. Because suddenly I began seeing faces I had not seen for more than thirty years. Not photographs. Faces. Boys. And the unsettling thing was that I still knew which ones were beautiful. The Faces I Never Forgot I went to École Rouget de Lisle in Courbevoie for CP, then later CE2 and CM1. If the arithmetic is right, these were the early 1990s, when I was six, eight, nine. Long enough ago that much of what supposedly constituted my education has disappeared entirely. I cannot tell you what arithmetic exercise we did on a particular Tuesday. I do not remember the handwriting worksheets. I have forgotten entire teachers. Thousands of lunches are gone. The contents of notebooks that once seemed important enough to carry carefully home have vanished more completely than civilizations. But certain boys survived. That is what interests me. A face across a playground. Black hair. A particular pair of eyes. The shape of someone’s mouth when he laughed. A boy who seemed somehow more complete than the others, although I would not have known that word then. Did I love them? I don’t know. Memory becomes dishonest when certainty is demanded of it. An adult man can easily travel backward carrying adult desire like a lantern and illuminate things that were once much dimmer. Perhaps I merely admired them. Perhaps I wanted to look like them. Perhaps I wanted them to choose me as a friend. Perhaps I was already experiencing the primitive beginning of what would later become unmistakable attraction. Children possess intensities before they possess explanations. A child does not say: I am experiencing erotic fixation complicated by identification and the desire for social belonging. A child looks. And then, inexplicably, thirty years later, he still remembers the face. This is what has begun troubling me—not troubling in the sense of frightening me, but in the older sense, as water is troubled when something beneath it begins to rise. Why these faces? Why not the teacher explaining multiplication? Why not the blackboard? Why not the lunch tray? Why the boys? I have spent much of adulthood thinking desire began when it became legible. Perhaps that is one of the lies language tells us. We assume that a thing begins when we acquire the noun for it. But the body may have been writing much earlier. Perhaps childhood does not preserve meanings. Perhaps it preserves intensities and waits for the adult to return with names. The Black-Haired Boy The school sometimes took us swimming. Before we went into the pool, older boys would help younger boys change. I don’t know whether this was common practice then, whether it would happen now, or whether I remember the arrangement precisely. Childhood institutional life contained a great deal more bodily practicality than adult life does. Children were moved, dressed, washed, lined up, fed, corrected. Adults and older children handled the logistics of small bodies without turning every gesture into an existential event. There was an older boy who helped me change. I still remember his face. Black hair. French. Beautiful. That adjective belongs to me now. I cannot swear that I possessed it in exactly the same way then. But I remember him as beautiful. At some point he removed either my underwear to put on my swimming suit or my swimming suit to put my underwear back on. And before covering me, he looked at my penis for what memory reports as a strangely long time. That is the whole event. Nothing happened. No touch beyond what was necessary to change me. No proposition. No secret afterward. No story except the stare. And because the mind hates an unanswered question, I have occasionally tried to solve it. Was he attracted? Was he simply curious? I was circumcised. Perhaps he had never seen a circumcised boy before. In France, among boys who were neither Muslim nor Jewish, that would hardly have been impossible. Perhaps he was simply registering anatomical difference with the shameless curiosity children possess before they learn to disguise curiosity as indifference. Perhaps he wasn’t even staring as long as I remember. Memory stretches certain seconds. What I know is not what he felt. What I know is that I remember being looked at. And that I remember who was looking. There is something almost unbearably intimate about being seen by someone one is already looking at. Adult life teaches us how much desire consists of this reciprocity. I can look at a beautiful man for an hour and remain alone inside my looking. Then he looks back and suddenly the entire structure changes. The gaze returns carrying possibility. I cannot impose that adult meaning onto a child. But perhaps the primitive architecture was already there. Not sex. Recognition. The astonishing discovery that the beautiful creature has eyes too, and for a moment those eyes are on you. The Republic of Boys Then there were the Alps. The school took us away for weeks to learn skiing. I remember the place not as geography but as regime. Morning. Clothes. Equipment. Instructions. Cold. Order. Male teachers. Discipline. There was a strictness to those days that remains in my body more clearly than whatever lessons the strictness was supposed to teach. Children were expected to move together, prepare together, eat together, sleep when told, wake when told, ski when told. There were rules whose logic we did not necessarily understand because children rarely understand the architecture into which adults have placed them. You obey first. Meaning comes later. The teachers frightened me. Not because they beat us. They did not. The fear was institutional: the possibility of being corrected, singled out, found unserious, discovered doing something one was not supposed to do. And yet there was also an extraordinary physical intimacy to the life. We showered in groups. I remember perhaps ten boys, naked, two to a shower. That sentence sounds almost exotic from the privacy of adult American life, where each body is assigned its own door, its own towel, its own carefully defended perimeter. But then nakedness was not necessarily the event. It was logistical fact. We were boys. We had bodies. The bodies needed washing. One boy peed in the shower while another boy was there. This became an incident. He was corrected—not physically punished, simply told with authority that he should not do that while another boy was sharing the shower. I remember it. Why? Perhaps because in one tiny scene the whole structure was revealed. The naked body was permitted. Conduct was regulated. Civilization did not require the body to disappear. It required the body to learn that another body was present. That distinction seems profound to me now. We were animals together in those showers, but not merely animals. The fact that urine came naturally from the body did not mean it could be released anywhere. The fact that we were naked did not mean nothing mattered. Another child had standing. There was already a moral world in the shower. The body said: I can. The teacher said: Not like that, not here, not with him standing beside you. Perhaps that is civilization in miniature. Not the abolition of appetite or bodily function, but the sentence: There is another creature here. And then night came. This is the part that still moves me. The same men who had enforced the rules during the day became voices after dark. We were in dormitories. Beds. Boys breathing nearby. The exhaustion that comes from snow and fear and physical effort. And somewhere in the corridor a teacher walked while reading us a book. The book was Croc-Blanc. Croc-Blanc I had forgotten how strange that was until now. Croc-Blanc: Jack London’s wolf-dog, born at the edge of wilderness, moving through hunger and violence into the human world. He begins close to the animal law. Eat or be eaten. Approach or retreat. Fear what is stronger. Learn the body of the world through consequence. Then human bein

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Language Matters is a literary and philosophical exploration of power, language, technology, religion, and the human struggle to remain fully human inside systems that reduce people to abstractions. eliaswinter.substack.com

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