Tag: H.G. Wells

I Absolutely Loathed “Sapiens”

I finally finished the slog through Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.

Perhaps I should say thankfully, as it was easily one of the worst books I have ever subjected myself to in fifty-odd years of being able to read.

Why is this? Let me recount some of the ways (some of which I have already touched on here and here):

  • Harari is among the smartest of Very Smart Boys – and as happens with Very Smart Boys, he has to demonstrate frequently how clever he is. Again and again, he will state something that appears to be either factually incorrect or an unwarranted extrapolation or conclusion, and then set it aside – until a paragraph or three later when he will come back to it and explain he was right on some specious technicality or very special interpretation. “Oh, you didn’t think I would akshully say something so wrong, did you?” It’s a gimmick that gets old very quickly.
  • Similarly, he goes off on tangents – almost rants, at times – on some subject, using language which in context implies that these are his actual personal opinions. These digressions are typically controversial or outré, and often presented with the passion of a true believer…before being casually attributed to someone else or passed off as mere noodling: ‘That’s what some people think, anyway’, ‘That’s a depressing line of thought, if true‘, ‘Imagine if people really believed that’, etc. The funny thing is, these digressions seem like his own opinions because they are in almost every case congruent with what you’d expect his own opinions to be, based on his reputation. Where the habit in the first bullet is apparently meant to show how clever he is, this habit can be read as a contrived edginess – a cowardly edginess dulled by plausible deniability.
  • A running theme throughout the book, and especially in the last two chapters, is that humans are nothing special, have nothing to be proud of (and a great deal to be ashamed of), and in fact live in a world of delusion about their abilities, importance, value, and the very nature of their existence. Everything we think we know is delusion, in fact, and everything we value is imaginary and arbitrary. All of which would grate on its own, but it’s especially repulsive when presented in a breezy, matter-of-fact tone – nihilism with a smile, or maybe just a puerile smirk. Which made me wonder why, when he thinks so little of humanity (or rather, “Sapiens”, since in making it clear we’re nothing special, he repeatedly makes the point that we’re not the only “humans”), that he chose to write “The” book about us?
  • The answer may lie in one of the later chapters, where he goes off on a long tangent about Buddhism, one which is unsurprisingly uncritical given his own personal experience with elements of it (Vipassana). If one accepts the premise that nothing in the human world – indeed the world as a whole – is real, or meaningful, or important, or known, indeed is just an impediment to happiness and a fuller understanding of reality, then consistent application of this premise would produce exactly this kind of nihilism. (The answer might also just be a naughty schoolboy glee in stomping on the beliefs and certainties and values of others, the way capital-A Atheists do, with no more purpose than that.)
  • The book’s structure and organization are terrible. His chapters seem to follow a corrupted “five paragraph essay” format, in this case: “Follow an oh-so-clever ‘hook’ with a thesis statement kinda related to the oh-so-clever chapter heading in some way, proceed to ramble through a bunch of anecdotes or stories or study findings somewhat related to this thesis statement without really connecting them to it or each other, and conclude with assertions about the thesis that all the rambling didn’t really set up or support”. Whatever their other flaws, the professors at JMC would never have accepted such shoddy work on a bluebook test.
  • Did I mention he’s an especially obnoxious Very Smart Boy?

I could go on, and probably will at some point in the future. But…bleh. Suffice to say it was a terrible read, and not even close to being worth the time spent on the chore.

Managerialism: Where the MDA is Headed

In a nutshell, a managerial state, implemented (enforced) via MAs: The China Convergence.

I haven’t finished the article yet, but the first several pages neatly summarize my thinking on where the MDA is headed in the second and third books, based on my reading of Burnham, Reimann, Orwell, Wells, Scott, and others.

This managerial system developed into several overlapping, interlinked sectors that can be roughly divided into and categorized as: the managerial state, the managerial economy, the managerial intelligentsia, the managerial mass media, and managerial philanthropy. Each of these five sectors features its own slightly unique species of managerial elite, each with its own roles and interests. But each commonly acts out of its own interest to reinforce and protect the interests of the other sectors, and the system as a whole. All of the sectors are bound together by a shared interest in the expansion of technical and mass organizations, the proliferation of managers, and the marginalization of  nonmanagerial elements.

Interesting that art is imitating life here for a change.

My own imagined version of this based on reading Burnham is a managerial system so integrated that the sectors defined by Lyons are indistinguishable, having been systematically dismantled and rebuilt as a seamless whole.

The catch in implementing any totalitarian state has always been achieving the total part: total control requires total legibility and total ‘actionability’. If you are obliged to carry an electronic communications device in your pocket at all times, and you use it in some capacity (even just its passive presence) in every interaction with another human, it’s trivial for the state in question to harvest all the data about your thoughts and actions they could ever need. And with a machine simulacrum of intelligence to analyze it, to find subtle actions and interventions it can take to achieve its goals and eliminate dissent before it can become a problem – indeed, before the dissenters even become aware of their dissent.

Of what use are crude tools of surveillance and control like the gulag, Gestapo, Stasi, Pitešti, Room 101, struggle sessions, brainwashing, social credit, etc. when you have technology through which you can precisely spot the patterns and trends in an individual’s thoughts early, even before he does, and nudge him in a safer (for you) and more productive (for your interests) direction without his awareness?

A system of this kind, implemented objectively and with the right overall goals, could indeed be a utopia – all discontent headed off by the right incentives and disincentives applied automatically at the right moment, all personal potential optimized with targeted opportunities and constructive interferences appearing at the right moments, etc. Each subject might see himself as the luckiest man in the world as he reflects on his unbroken string of good fortune and near-misses…as if there is someone watching out for him.

But, humans being humans, we all know a system of this kind could not and would not be implemented in such a way. As we see with things like the Google algorithm, biases, pettiness, misanthropy, ideology, etc. would prevent an objective implementation. It would be impossible for anyone capable of implementing such a system to allow it to apply positive nudges to people they see as undeserving, e.g. giving a frustrated young antisemite an art-school scholarship so as to focus his energies on something rewarding and constructive – and equally impossible to avoid programming it to sadistically apply negative nudges to those they feel deserve them.

H.G. Wells on…Puppies?

“Very much of the Fiction of the Future pretty frankly abandons the prophetic altogether, and becomes polemical, cautionary, or idealistic, and a mere footnote and commentary to our present discontents.”

-H.G. Wells, Anticipations

This is a prophetic observation indeed, having been written over a century before the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies foofaraw, whose core complaint was that mainstream science fiction as a genre had been co-opted by the totalizing left as just another conduit for its political propaganda and grievance-mongery and wasn’t fun, exciting, thought-provoking, or inspiring any more.

And yes, it’s ironic to have Wells complaining about that when he later in the same book advocates subverting all human activity and institutions to indoctrinate the public with his “global commonweal” idea. I guess when its his own “future technocratic utopia” instead of the mere “present discontents” of others, using absolutely every literary product for propaganda is peachy.