Commemorating The Benevolent Self-Revolution Of 2032
Giving thanks for the greatest 20 years in human history thus far
The first of August has rolled around once more, and I again find myself in a state of bittersweet disbelief. Bitter for the grief of yet another half a year transitioning from future to past: six months of this steady deathmarch, never to halt until it does. Six months of seeking out warmth in cold weather and, later, of bathing in the prodigal sun. One-one-hundred-fiftieth—give or take—of my life, transformed from expectation to reality to frail memory. Sweet for the celebration of this day and the incredible human goodness which defines modern life and which we must never forget. Mankind reverts if we forget.
I certainly won’t.
I am ashamed to admit, friends, that I was of the doubters. The haters and the fools. I wrote - on this very blog! - such silly things; things I would later come to regret and denounce and apologize for, and which I must apologize for to this day. I was wrong and I’m still sorry! There is deep humiliation in such an apology, and I gladly suffer it: such unending joy I find in having been wrong! Humiliate and flog and ostracize me all you want; these are my due, my just deserts; and I will weep tears of joy for the fact that such a humiliation can exist at all. How glad I am to be a fool!
Allow me just a moment — and then we can eat! — to recount the single most important day of all of our lives. A warm heart makes all food taste sweeter.
It began with the precursor to the Unbiased Organizer, known then by such slurs as A********* Intelligence or Large Language Models and better understood today as the reason we ever wrote: the culmination of our species’ knowledge-making effort. This was in about 2022, if memory serves.
To be graceful to my younger fool, I initially had reasonable skepticism and concerns. The technology1 was quite early-days and, having not been given the Breath of Wisdom, was prone to mistakes that could (did) cost cherished lives. If you’ve paid attention to your History teacher, you’ll recall that this was a time of great economic2 inequality and turmoil; of war and death and pain; and, of course, of selfishness.
Ah, the selfishness! It was all I had ever known, growing up in those pre-correction times. I was born and a doctor overcharged my parents for the pleasure; I went to school and was instructed in the ways of profit-seeking. I grew up and politicians began to email and then text and then visit your home, begging then demanding, never satisfied with even your last dollar — and of course, they never did anything to earn my vote or my contribution. I worked and my employer sought all avenues to extract my value and spit me out without consideration. I volunteered and those I volunteered with found ever-more-clever ways to use a good cause for only their own ends.
So you can see, I hope, why I was doubtful of the Great Self-Revolutionizers. I did not trust Johnson nor Altman nor The Four Who Forewent Names; I saw in them what I saw in myself and my fellow man: selfishness. Solipsism. Greed. I fell for the lies — the understandable lies — that they were, in fact, just the same as all the rest of us. That they wouldn’t do that which they eventually did.
I know how ridiculous this seems in hindsight, but you must understand that I truly believed the world to largely be on the decline; caught in inescapable feedback loops and systems of our own creation which had grown too large to control: governments and institutions hollowed out; a religious devotion to profit above humanity at all turns; ever-new digital drugs and tools of control working each day to dumb and numb those I loved and depended on. I truly believed that those at the top of society actually shared all of the same flaws that the rest of us do; that there was no grand plan for the uplifting of our species; that the goal for these men-above-men truly was just as simplistic and selfish as my bitter heart assumed.
I weep with joy that I was wrong.
When the first cross-industry mass-firings occurred, I was in the streets with the rest of the population. Hungry and scared and deeply resentful, we wielded unjust mob violence — the greatest tantrum ever thrown — because we could not see dawn breaking through the clouds of our own minds’ making. The beacon of human enlightenment shone unseen. I did things that day my good heart cannot bear.
At the time, I expected repercussions for our actions. We had overstepped; demanded too much; hurt too many in what seemed, at the time, a justifiable response. I actually said once — in all seriousness — “People are starving while the rich build datacenters to oppress us from space!”
[Pause for laughter]
But then they flipped the script, didn’t they?
“Those who own everything, and are comfortable with wielding such power, will absolutely never give it up for some equal utopian society” I bloviated, while Musk released his ownership of all assets for public use and directed his AI agents to solve world hunger. “The reason they’re trying to build robots is to replace all labor, and you will not like what happens when they truly have no need for you” I wasted time writing, as swarms of robots descended upon my city, fixing all infrastructural problems, free of charge to citizen and to state.
“He who holds the key to all knowledge and power cannot be trusted to break the lock” I screamed out impetuously, as the benevolent elites expended immense effort to divorce power and control from themselves and place it lovingly in the hands of the many. I concocted inane conspiracy theories as to why The Nameless Woman chose to release her corporation’s frontier model weights to the public.
“There is no grand project at hand to uplift all of society; only individual actors seeking maximum personal gain in a game that has well outlived its usefulness” I bemoaned as those in power willfully replaced the system which uniquely benefited them with one which certainly did not, and — as promised — became simple humans amongst the rest of us, to be waited on and to dictate reality no more.
Never have I been happier to bask in what a moron I was.
So, this Self-Revolution Day, let us give thanks to our betters. Those men and women who once owned everything and chose to give it up so you and I could have a better life. People who — despite absolutely everything we knew about human nature and the system they were caught within — shocked and delighted this cynical, irrational fool.
Let’s eat!
The fact that I refer to It as “technology” is actually perhaps the greatest indicator of the state of things in the 2020s. We had no idea where we were headed. It was cute, in a way.
We used to use this word a lot, by the way.