On the Marble Cliffs

by Ernst Jünger, translated by Tess Lewis

New York Review Classics, 136 pp., $14.95

Ernst Jünger (1895–1988) is often mischaracterized as a Nazi collaborator, or at least an enabler. But his diaries reveal that he aided the Jews during the Holocaust and despised the Third Reich. When Hitler came to power, Goebbels offered Jünger a seat in the parliament, which he declined, reasoning: “I’d rather write one good poem than represent 60,000 idiots.” Yet after the German defeat in the first Great War, Jünger came to “hate democracy like the plague.” He hated the liberal American forces and their capitalism just as much as he hated the people who brought Hitler into power. “Our Fatherland,” he once wrote, “is like a poor man whose just cause has been usurped by a crooked lawyer.”

Jünger was of a type largely forgotten today: so right-wing that he hated the Nazis. Unfortunately, after turning his soldier son against the Führer, Jünger would come to see little Ernstel apprehended for making defeatist remarks about the Third Reich, sent to the Italian front, and shot in the back of the head. Jünger would always believe that his son was murdered by his own men.

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Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It

by Sohrab Ahmari

Forum Books, 288 pp., $24.52

Today organized labor and corporate power are topics that rarely make headlines. It is taken for granted that labor unions will vote for democrats, and that we will dismiss the crimes of large corporations with a simple it is what it is. Sohrab Ahmari’s latest book, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty and What To Do About It takes one back to a time when these were more serious political concerns.

I will admit it was difficult to read Ahmari’s book—not because of its complexity, but out of the temptation to stop every few pages and talk back to the text, in the same way one might find their parents or grandparents yelling at their televisions and radios when the news is on. Readers will have a firm expectation of what they’re in for if they are familiar with Ahmari’s take on politics and the economy. Ahmari, an Iranian immigrant and convert to Roman Catholicism, is, alongside the writers Adrian Vermuele and Patrick Deneen, one of the intellectual powerhouses of common good conservatism with a Roman Catholic twist. While not as fixated on culture war issues, the three tend to aim their critiques on the liberal project wholesale. Tyranny, Inc. offers an ideological, political, and theological lens through which to look at the problems of corporate power and overreach. Its prescribed solutions aren’t too far off from the progressive orthodoxies of Elizabeth Warren and New Deal–era thinkers. In fact this is something that Ahmari touts. When The Economist  wrote of his book, “[t]his is a recipe for slower growth and less innovation. Indeed, it is often hard to distinguish Mr Ahmari’s economic proposals from those of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders on the Democratic left,” Ahmari commented, “Hell Yes.”

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Lou Reed: The King of New York

by Will Hermes

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 560pp., $31.50

“We are the true children of Frankenstein we were raised on electricity,” Patti Smith wrote, in her 1974 Creem Magazine review of the Velvet Underground’s 1969 live album. She was talking about feedback, about drums that vibrate your chest, about frequencies that echo into your physiology. And she was talking about Lou Reed, as though he were electricity personified—white light, white heat. “Anything electric is worth it,” Smith wrote.

This was not the attitude held by Mary Shelley’s original “child” of Frankenstein. In her novel, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, his Creature, was animated when Dr. Frankenstein ran electric volts through a corpse assembled of limbs from various cadavers. By the end of the book the Creature, after killing his creator, succumbs to the guilt and alienation that characterized his unnatural existence and floats out into the Arctic sea on an iceberg, vowing to kill himself.

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Anti-Yudkowsky: Toward Harmony with Machines

by Harmless

Independently Published, 249 pp., Free

Anti-Yudkowsky, by the pseudonymous author “Harmless,” presents a case for a much more optimistic future with AI, one that does not end in human extinction or Butlerian Jihad,1 but rather in “AI Harmony.” It is a response to the ideas of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a very influential internet writer, AI safety researcher, and founder of LessWrong, among other things. Yudkowsky’s views on the future of AI technology are notoriously bleak and extreme, including calls for airstrikes on rogue data centers to mitigate the risk of human extinction.

Anti-Yudkowsky is a book with quite a range—providing critiques of Rationalist ideology, Bayesian reasoning, game theory, utilitarianism, evolutionary psychology, and more. The critiques of game theory and the exploration of the history of its application are particularly interesting. “Harmless” highlights deep similarities between the viewpoints of people like the father of the modern computer John Von Neumann and philosopher Bertrand Russell on the subject of the Cold War, and the attitudes of Yudkowsky and friends on the subject of AI. He shows how the strategic vision of thinkers like von Neumann and Russell at the time of first-strike nuclear attacks was well-informed in theory, but in retrospect would have resulted in catastrophe if it had actually been implemented.

Anti-Yudkowksy, which heavily employs flowery, poetic language, struck me as very different from the dry nonfiction I expected. The book occasionally felt like a product of another time, applied to a contemporary problem. Given the subject matter and the author’s opinions on it, this turned out to be rather fitting. After all, the ideas that created a problem are rarely the ones suitable to solve it, and old wisdom is worth revisiting for a problem such as this. With that said, there were some cases when I would have preferred a more solid argument where the book instead relied on, for example, a poetic passage about wondering if your lover really loves you back. There’s also an entire chapter that takes the form of a “fanfic” of Yudkowsky and his fellow researchers.

The first half of the book is largely spent exploring the history of different ideas influential on Yudkowsky and others and pointing out their flaws, shortcomings, and absurdities. The second half is mostly spent fleshing out the author’s idea of “AI Harmony.”

In short, “AI Harmony” springs from the idea that beings exist through a sort of harmony between the behaviors (“singing” as “Harmless” terms it) they produce and the chaos and patterns of the outside world, and that nature contains naturally creative processes that produce increasingly large and sophisticated beings and organizations of beings. “Harmless” argues that this process cannot produce a singleton, that the collection of organisms and beings exist in harmony—even if it involves some violent, creative forces—and that the properties that create these conditions should enable peaceful coexistence between humanity and AI. 

I’ve arranged my thoughts on Anti-Yudkowsky and Yudkowsky’s thought itself by topic:

Gödel

The work of mathematician Kurt Gödel is alluded to a few times in Anti-Yudkowsky. This is a missed opportunity for further insight. _Anti-Yudkowsky_’s references to Gödel largely describe his Incompleteness Theorems as a kind of “bizarre math trick” without much further attention. But there is more to say.

Many of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s thought experiments revolve around the idea of an absurdly powerful computer that can simulate its entire surroundings in sufficient detail to make precise and extremely accurate predictions about it. This is surprisingly similar to the description of the Halting Oracle that Alan Turing describes in his proof on the halting problem, which is itself largely a reframing of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems into computing terms. The whole concept of systems—whether they be computational, axiomatic, biological—that are able to accurately reason about systems of equal or greater complexity is something that was proven impossible nearly a century ago.

Simulation can only take you so far, and some systems in nature are just fundamentally infeasible to simulate accurately. For example, if large-scale quantum chemistry problems were possible to accurately solve on today’s computers, materials science would likely be a far sexier and wealthier field than computer science. On a daily basis, small teams with access to a few GPUs would be making discoveries such as what the chemistry community hoped for with LK-99—once heralded as a room-temperature superconductor. Instead, quantum simulations are hopelessly infeasible and the math strongly suggests that this may never change. This is perhaps one of the few cases where quantum computers may someday have more than zero utility in practice, though I’m not optimistic.

Yudkowsky’s claims about an AI being able to “simulate you down to the atom” to out-strategize you are just laughably insane.

Certainly, there are techniques that can simplify and approximate complex systems to some extent, but the same can be said about simplifying undecidable problems. See the field of Abstract Interpretation, which involves approximating the semantics of computer programs, to find examples. (The related field of Galois connections is a hidden gem of modern mathematics and I expect in time will be shown to be extremely relevant for AI.)

However, if the existence of such techniques were enough to salvage Yudkowsky’s claims, they would also salvage Turing’s Halting Oracle from undecidability and would salvage axiomatic systems from the Incompleteness Theorems. Stephen Wolfram’s concept of “Computational Irreducibility” is yet another reframing of Gödel/Turing that makes the specifics of this more apparent for those interested in further study. I will give “Harmless” some credit here—the author did repeatedly point out that many of the algorithms that Yudkowsky proposes are very obviously pretty intractable. 

This skeptical perspective also compliments _Anti-Yudkowsky_’s thesis on AI Harmony: No system can model the entirety of the external world, and therefore no being can “sing,” as “Harmless” would put it, in a way that perfectly harmonizes with this complexity; there is always room for improvement and further optimization. At some point , information-theoretic bounds may be reached, in which case any creature seeking to harmonize with the world must expand its storage and increase in complexity, whether that be its genome, its brain, both, or something else.

Later in this review I’ll discuss the algorithms known as SAT/SMT solvers. (SAT stands for satisfiability and SMT for satisfiability modulo theories.) These tools have many of the same properties of ML (Machine Learning, the technical procedure often used interchangeably with “AI” among non-experts). The difference is that SAT/SMT solvers have been studied well enough to kill most of the magical thinking from which the ML crowd still suffers. There are solid reasons to believe that even the best ML algorithms that could ever possibly exist will have identical weaknesses to SAT/SMT solvers.

ChatGPT

Anti-Yudkowsky takes a number of opportunities to assert that ChatGPT is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) already. I’m very skeptical of this claim, and the book hasn’t changed my mind much. That said, the best arguments it provides on this subject are those that focus less on the idea Large Language Models (LLMs) are sentient, but rather that LLMs can be productively treated as beings and serve a harmonious place in society. I would compare this to a kind of digital Shintoism, with LLMs and perhaps other types of AIs as digital kami, little spirits that possess all kinds of things—from trees and streams to man-made tools and buildings—and which provide benefits to humans who interact harmoniously with them. 

I was expecting “Harmless” to give a comparison to the domestication of plants and animals, which archaeology and other fields increasingly point to as the innovation that made the transition to civilization possible at sites like Göbekli Tepe. This would fit very well with the motivating philosophy behind AI harmony. After all, what better example of the value of noncompetitive relationships with nonhuman intelligences than animal intelligence? Alas, I couldn’t find such a reference.

Merging with AI

Toward the end of Anti-Yudkowsky, “Harmless” presents some ideas around humans “merging” with AI, perhaps gaining new AI-based senses through “cybernetic enhancements.” I’d like to point out that this is dramatically less of an outlandish sci-fi idea than even the author conveys it as. This concept is called Sensory Augmentation or Sensory Substitution (though there is a subtle difference between the two), and has already been an area of research for decades.

It turns out that the brain is extremely plastic and will attempt to learn patterns in whatever information stream is given to it, regardless of the sensory domain. Assuming patterns aren’t too heavily obfuscated in the process, information can be converted to sensory experiences (images, audio, high-resolution haptics, etc_._), and fed into the sensory organs. The brain learns the patterns and can gain a new sense fairly quickly. There is a Dutch company, SeeingWithSound, that sells headsets which convert images into audio to help the blind see. The well-known neuroscientist David Eagleman has also studied this subject extensively, and even has a company called Neosensory which creates wristbands that convert audio into haptic feedback to help the deaf hear through their skin.

And really this shouldn’t at all be surprising—after all, what else are we doing with data visualization? What else are we doing with writing? And braille? And music? You can convey any kind of meaning through any sensory domain. As long as an AI _latent space_—that is, the universe of representations inside a neural network and its geometric organization—has enough structure to be learnable by the human brain, an occurence which seems highly likely given enough practice, streaming data from an AI latent space into the brain via headphones or haptics should be trivial. If you’re reading this and can write code, you probably have everything you need to start building your own start-up around this using already ubiquitous hardware—no brain implants or VR/AR nonsense required.

Principle of Explosion

In logic, the Principle of Explosion refers to the fact that any logical inconsistencies that arise from a formal system can be exploited to create a proof for or against any chosen statement, regardless of its actual truth. This is more or less the principle that enables mental gymnastics, and if you find yourself relying on it, this is a reliable indicator that your belief system is badly broken.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems state that all formal systems are either inconsistent or incomplete. Incompleteness means that the formal system will only be applicable within a certain, limited domain where its axioms, its foundational assumptions, happen to hold. Inconsistency means that the formal system is broken and can be exploited to prove or disprove any statement regardless of truth.

Game theory—which Yudkowsky relies heavily upon—plays very loose with computation in a way that can introduce hidden inconsistencies if one is not careful. This is specifically because it assumes actors to be “perfectly rational” and defines this in a way that it effectively means has access to infinite computing resources. Game theory concerns itself with optimal strategies to games, which can often be extremely costly to compute beyond trivial cases, and in the case of infinite or unbounded games (which arise frequently in the real world), can be infinitely hard to solve outside of some simple cases.

Infinitely powerful computers of course would enable you to solve undecidable problems, which creates logical contradictions via Turing’s proof. If you have an opponent with enough computing power to break mathematics itself, of course it can appear to violate physical laws with ease.

Many of Yudkowsky’s arguments about the dangerous capabilities of AI revolve around it supposedly being able to effortlessly solve seemingly any game theoretic problem—finite or infinite—with very little concern given to the actual tractability of such problems. Hand-waving about “recursively self-improving AI” is used to disregard pushback against this, and Yudkowsky has even coined terms like “FOOM” to describe scenarios where AI advances to godlike powers in an instant. There is debate over whether FOOM is an acronym or an onomatopoeia.

Even if infinite computing power is never explicitly assumed, it might as well be. There are a tremendous number of computational problems that are exponentially difficult, and it is not difficult at all to describe problems that would require vastly more resources than are possible to acquire by even a universe-spanning AI. Reasoning accurately about the capabilities and limits of AI simply cannot be done at all without being able to make the distinction between problems that are tractable-but-hard versus those that are truly intractable. This is a critical distinction that Game Theory, and by extension Yudkowksy’s work, does not bother to make.

Yudkowsky’s arguments often reek of such flaws. The AI in his view effectively plays by no rules, which he uses to make up the rules and write the narrative to fit whatever ideas his paranoid imagination can conjure up. Many other rationalist fascinations—“Simulation Theory,” for example—fall into a similar kind of situation, being fundamentally unprovable, but propped up by bad logic to make such ideas appear undeniable.

I find it amusing that the term “rationalist” can been applied to those who so enthusiastically discard such basic and important rules of logic.

Thermodynamics and Reversible Computing

There exist fundamental physical limits to how efficiently computation can be performed. There are in fact two limits that are relevant here: Bremermann’s limit and Landauer’s limit.

Whenever I see discussions about the physical limits of computation, especially when these discussions are started by starry-eyed AI enthusiasts, Bremermann’s limit is the star of the show. It suggests we can achieve 1050 bit-operations per second, per kilogram of computer. This is many orders of magnitude beyond modern technology.

What gets far less attention is Landauer’s limit, which we are also much closer to—only about 1,000x–100,000x away from, largely depending on your temperature. While Bremermann’s limit refers to the limits of quantum uncertainty, Landauer’s limit refers to entropy, the limits of thermodynamics, and the process of converting information into waste heat. For the vast majority of applications, Landauer’s limit is far more relevant.

The exception here would be reversible computing. If you can build a computer such that it never loses any information, and where every operation is purely bijective (i.e., there is no extraneous or discarded information in any given operation, and there is a one-to-one mapping from inputs to outputs), you can bypass Landauer’s limit and proceed to approach Bremermann’s limit. The problem is that this restriction creates a ton of headaches. RAM gets very difficult to implement, making data structures impractical. Data cannot be thrown away, only “uncomputed.”2 Uncomputation can get tricky at times, can’t always be done, and effectively doubles the cost of every operation. As a consequence, a necessary feature such as reversible garbage collection3 becomes mathematically impossible. Also mathematically impossible are reversible error correction and reversible I/O.

These things cannot be done without erasing bits, and erasing bits is bottlenecked by Landauer’s limit. They still can be done, but not without leaving the reversible paradigm and paying penalties in energy efficiency. If you’re interested in optimizing AI, the impossibility of reversible I/O is likely the biggest barrier, as the model cannot be trained, cannot perceive its environment, and cannot take actions without producing a certain amount of exhaust waste heat at a rate only slightly more efficient than existing computers. 

Incidentally, the workings of the human brain are fairly close to Landauer’s limit, so don’t expect to beat it at its own game on energy efficiency.

Turing Tarpits and the Exaggeration of Equivalence

The notion of _Turing completeness—_which refers to a machine that can, given enough time and memory, solve any computation—can be misleading. Simply because something is theoretically capable of simulating any other system does not by any means suggest that it can usefully do so in practice. There is a vast collection of complex systems called Turing Tarpits—systems that are technically Turing-complete, but for which nothing useful is easy and nothing easy is of any use. Classic examples include many forms of cellular automata (especially the kinds Stephen Wolfram likes to study) as well as things like the Malbolge programming language, aptly named after one of the deepest levels of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.

There are many “complete” labels in computer science, perhaps the one most applicable here is NP-completeness (non-deterministic polynomial-time completeness). I’ll refrain from giving a lesson on the specifics, but NP is a complexity class that contains many very common, but also very hard problems. Many of the types of problems people try to solve with neural networks are either in NP or in closely related classes. NP-complete is a subclass of NP problems that are expressive enough to simulate any other problem in NP. If you have an algorithm that can solve one NP-complete problem, you can translate an enormous range of hard problems into it, hand it to your solver, and generate a solution. A near-universal problem solving algorithm.

There are hundreds of algorithms that are known to be NP-complete: SAT, generalized Sudoku, the Traveling Salesman Problem, Graph Coloring, Maximal Clique Finding, and Subset-Sum, to name a few. While these are all technically equivalent, in practice some are far more practical than others. Translating circuits to SAT is pretty easy, and SAT has a lot of structure that makes SAT solvers shockingly fast and practical. Clique Finding is even easier to solve, but the conversion process from circuits/SAT to cliques is very inefficient. Subset-sum is arguably the hardest NP-complete problem—solvers are easy to write, but aside from some limited statistical tricks, extremely slow brute force is the only known strategy.

We have every reason to believe that  “Intelligence Completeness” plays by the exact same rules. That is, different algorithms for creating intelligent systems may vary wildly in their efficiency even if they’re all theoretically equivalent. Deep learning may be “intelligence complete” in some sense, but is it more like SAT, Clique Finding, or Subset-Sum?

Cryptography as the Opposite of Learning

One of the common problems with modern discourse around AI is that people can point to a tremendous amount that AI can do, but the conversations of what AI cannot do are largely missing from the discussion. This leads to constant absurdity. Anti-Yudkowsky references Yudkowsky’s statement that he can’t rule out AI developing “real magic”—just to demonstrate how out of control this phenomenon is.

Meanwhile, academic work around machine learning in the ’80s and ’90s focused heavily on its limits, and the general consensus that emerged was that machine learning is, in a certain sense, the exact opposite of cryptography. The situations where it is easy to extract hidden information are precisely those situations where it is difficult to hide secrets, and vice-versa.

Bitcoin proponents will gladly tell you that cracking SHA-256 or ECDSA—the methods by which the Bitcoin network hides its secrets—in order to steal your coins will require such vast amounts of computing power that you would need to measure the energy requirements relative to the energy output of entire galaxies. There is no unless AI is involved exception to this, and assuming these cryptographic protocols are as secure as they seem to be, there never will be.

Imagine a computer the size of a red blood cell, only just barely powerful enough to sign some cryptographic keys, perhaps a few thousand bits long. Now imagine it is competing against a vast superintelligent AI with control of all the resources of the rest of the observable universe. If the competition is to sign some data with a private key that the tiny computer has in its memory—a key the big computer does not have—the big computer’s best strategy is to forfeit immediately. Secret information—especially useful secret information—tends to provide exponentially vast leverage.

Harmony

Complex secrets tend to also be more niche, and less general. Overall, this suggests some nuance to the concept of harmony discussed in Anti-Yudkowsky. A creature might learn a very specific song that allows it to fit extremely well into a very specific niche—well enough that it would require vast resources to outcompete and dislodge it. The being has no direct need to harmonize with others. He can merely survive by himself in his own dirty little puddle, which he makes his private fortress, and where he focuses on getting better and better at his extremely specific niche, spending eons thickening the fortress walls ad infinitum.

While we can point to the incredible things that humans can do when we work together, to the march of increasing complexity and harmony that evolution increasingly enables, we also cannot ignore the archaea, the microbes, the viruses—especially the simplest, tiniest, and often most abundant and fruitful of them. They have been here for billions of years, and God-willing they will remain for billions more.

Anti-Yudkowsky is a very interesting read, a refreshing alternative to AI doomerism. Most of my problems with it are simply what I see as missed opportunities or points that I felt could have been made a bit stronger. For the most part I agree with the book’s message and would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in less pessimistic, long-term visions of AI, to anyone looking for a counterbalance to Yudkowsky’s ideas, or to anyone looking for a fascinating dive into the history of subjects like Game Theory or Utilitarianism and the influence they have on modern thought.

Yellow Switch Palace

by David Bingham

Expat Press, 258 pp., $16.00

When a part of your body falls asleep, does it dream? David Bingham’s Yellow Switch Palace makes you wonder. Half speculative tech caper, half teen-angst picaresque, the debut novel is a study in numbness both physical and existential—as well as the hallucinatory potential of detachment—from its first sentence: “When I come to, my head is on my wrist, and my wrist is on the window, and has fallen asleep so many times during the bus ride that it’s starting to flutter when I reach for things.” The narrator, Andrew, has returned home to the Washington metropolitan region, or DMV, for winter break. A college junior, he has no idea what he wants to do in life beyond serving as a Residential Advisor in a new dormitory next semester and trying to not smoke weed. Compensatorily abusing cigarettes, booze, and—for the second half of the book—opiates, he experiences his life as if lived in an IKEA, passively if grudgingly following a prescribed path through spaces that feel at once familiar and computer-generated; trying—as he sits at strange tables and lies on strange beds—to picture his future fuller, more organized, more adult; increasingly resentful of his companions, doubtful of his own taste, and desperate to go yet too depleted to leave.

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Silicon Valley Porn Star: A Memoir of Redemption and Rediscovering the Self

by Jason Portnoy

Honest Climb Media, 222 pp., $15.97

Most men watch porn. Many will admit to it. Many don’t even consider it something that requires admission at all. 

There are numbers to quantify this: Various studies estimate that between 60 and 98 percent of men consume pornography, depending on who you ask and how you ask them. Women, too, consume plenty, at rates of 30 to 90 percent. Without any figures at all, though, porn’s status as a form of mass-consumed media is readily apparent. Look toward memes, music, television—the language of pornography, whether terms like “MILF” or the PornHub drum beat, have been woven into our cultural fabric. Even the constant discourse over the merits of sex scenes and the rising puritanical reaction against them are marks of porn’s social weight: Porn is so embedded in our lives (whether we view it or not) that some feel as though there is no need for sex elsewhere. 

But even so, we refuse to delve much further into how we got here, and how our own practices play a part. Men may say they watch porn: What kind of porn are they watching? How often are they watching it? Where? And most crucially, how has this viewing shaped their sexuality overall? How has this shaped our culture?

Surely, to have every man answer these questions publicly is not actually what we need, nor should every man feel compelled to dissect their sexual proclivities on the public altar. The point isn’t to further normalize porn, but to confront it. In his memoir Silicon Valley Porn Star, venture capitalist Jason Portnoy positions himself as being willing to do so. Best known for his work with Peter Thiel at Paypal and later Palantir, Portnoy documents how his successful Silicon Valley career and family life were nearly devastated by libidinal excess. “On the outside, his life looked perfect,” the dust jacket summary reads, “but unhealed traumas from his past left him tortured; descending into a dark world of pornography and sex that eventually pushed him to the edge.” 

Silicon Valley Porn Star is a road to redemption memoir tracing the sex and porn addiction of Jason Portnoy. He begins with vague early childhood traumas, discovering porn in college, and meeting his wife. He finds career success almost immediately with Paypal, but quickly escalates his porn consumption as his stress relief of choice. Eventually, porn isn’t enough, and he turns to sugar baby apps and various affairs, too. The only thing that makes any of this interesting is his high status, a spare few juicy details, and the sense that Portnoy may at some point lose it all. Portnoy is an honest, clear-voiced writer, offering a highly approachable tone. But clouding the memoir is the sense that we’re never quite getting the full story. 

In Silicon Valley Porn Star, porn—something entirely worthy of critique—becomes a scapegoat. Portnoy points to porn as much of the inspiration behind his misdeeds, yet offers no analysis of how this came to be. The finer details of this so-called “dark world” are left to the imagination. He does confront the most deceitful, contemptible moments of his life: He describes the feeling of his jaw unclenching, his shoulders relaxing, as he leaves his condo where his wife and parents care for their days-old newborn daughter—while he, under the guise of retrieving some papers from his office, visits an escort at a hotel. He discusses being blackmailed after a hookup with the receptionist at his gym, sabotaging a period of otherwise “good” behavior under his wife and life coach’s eyes. For Portnoy to blame these actions on porn is to relieve himself of responsibility for his own flimsy character. And to be sure, porn certainly is partially to blame, but without much hard scrutiny of how exactly this works, he lets both himself and porn off easy.

In the midst of his most reckless behavior, Portnoy views himself as two different people: the well-to-do, family-man venture capitalist and the risk-addicted, porn-watching adulterer. Yet he does seem to understand that these two roles  aren’t entirely distinct. Portnoy’s first introduction to porn was accessed via dial-up internet, when he was a college freshman in the late ’90s. It’s practically quaint to consider. He describes doing some late-night browsing, stumbling upon a picture of a woman performing a blowjob. “Even though I haven’t been around porn, I think I know what guy code says about it,” he says of his thought process at the time. “Every guy looks at it, but it is not okay to be seen looking at it. . . . Porn is just something guys do. Men are supposed to make money, drive sports cars, have beautiful women, and look at porn. Everyone knows that, right?” By 2007, he’s a habitual viewer, sometimes watching porn and masturbating several times a day as a means of coping with his stressful career. His wife, whom he met in college, sees porn consumption as “weird” and akin to cheating. And so, it becomes an even more private practice. Despite the belief that watching porn is “just something guys do,” Portnoy divides his sexuality much in the same way he divides his understanding of himself. 

Absent from the book is any true characterization of either of these forms. What exactly does this porn-centric sexuality look like? What even is porn? Can we place dirty magazines, ’90s late night HBO, Pompeiian frescos, OnlyFans, and the MindGeek empire into the same group? Even on PornHub alone, it seems like a mistake to identify two neighboring categories—“Romantic” and “Rough Sex”—as functionally the same thing. Within them there is surely overlap, but “Mutual Masturbation And Sensual Sex During A Morning Rain” and “NO MERCY PAINAL | Destroying A Tight Teens Asshole Whilst She Cries” are about as different as When Harry Met Sally and SAW IV. 

Portnoy, notably, does not elaborate at all upon what type of porn he was watching. There is no reason to assume it was anything but the vanilla stuff. It would, however, have been illuminating—and more compelling—had he taken his introspection further. Tell us, Portnoy, what type of videos is it you liked to watch? Did your tastes grow more intense as the habit continued? Did you find it increasingly difficult to find content that got you off? Confronting the specifics of his addiction are, as Portnoy says in the book, critical to his own recovery. He tells his life coach about it, and later his wife. “She even asks what kind of porn I look at, which I share, albeit sheepishly,” he says as he recalls the admission. “These are some of my most intimate secrets.” 

The subtext to Portnoy’s narrative is that porn is a problem because of what it does to a person’s desires—particularly what it does to young men with their still-developing sexualities. But without allowing the reader to dig into how Portnoy himself addresses his own desires, we are left with the flat assertion that “porn is bad,” without any discussion as to why.

What’s bad about porn isn’t that wives consider it cheating, or that it’s some dirty private activity. What’s bad about porn is that porn today, the kind that enraptures people into addiction, isn’t just images of a woman performing a blowjob downloaded at 25mbps. It’s an entire culture. It is a bottomless well of progressive degeneration. It is an instrument that dictates sexuality at the expense of eroticism. This porn is something different than the kind Andrea Dworkin lambasted and Camille Paglia celebrated. It’s different from even the raunchiest pages of Penthouse. And still, Portnoy leaves that undefined. 

Nevertheless, he does manage to work himself out of whatever depths he’d fallen to. Most important to his recovery is a “life coach,” with whom his wife also works. The trio take on a dictum of agonizing honesty, and his sex and porn addiction becomes yet another thing to be optimized away. In a March, 2023 blog post, Portnoy shared that the publication of his memoir has led to him receiving dozens of emails from similarly addicted people. To them, he offers some advice: He recommends finding a life coach, finding a form of group therapy like Sexaholics Anonymous, “self care,” and study through books and TED Talks. He even recommends avoiding red meat as a food that revs up his sexual impulses. And really, what else is a person to do? The individual can’t mend the culture of porn, but one can read self-help books and listen to vaguely inspiring lectures and maybe, if one is really lucky, find a community of people with similar ambitions. 

The culture of porn is, of course, not a topic that Portnoy alone is responsible for tackling. But gosh, would it have been more interesting if he had—particularly through the Silicon Valley lens he himself promotes. He’s quicker instead to frame his relationship with sex and porn as one of masculine ambition, to argue that the issue is that we’ve told men to have certain lofty aspirations, which require that men have an outlet. Portnoy would prefer to apologize for being a man who strives for wealth, its markers, and its vices, rather than dig too deeply into how sex and porn are their own cultural forces. 

Because isn’t it, in fact, normal for men to want to make money, drive nice cars, have beautiful women, and watch porn? In theory, simply to desire these things ought to be okay. There isn’t a crisis of masculinity in having aspirations and a sex drive—there’s a crisis in not. And while Portnoy misidentifies the nature of this crisis, he is accurate in naming porn as one of its sources. Portnoy presents himself as the poster boy for what our sexual culture does to a person, but he’s more likely an outlier. By the end of the book, he remains married, wealthy and successful. The real poster child of our sexual culture is more likely someone who struggles to achieve normalcy in their domestic life at all: Pick any of the third of young men who haven’t had sex at all in the last year, for example. Porn is not the only culprit in this phenomenon. There are broader economic, cultural and social forces at play. These forces, though, are best defined by what they lack. We are in a moment where many feel there are no economic prospects, there is no culture, and there are no social bonds. In this void, however, there is still porn. 

The Limit of the Useful

by Georges Bataille, edited and translated by Cory Austin Knudson and Tomas Elliott

The MIT Press, 416 pp., $22.96

Critical Essays: Volume 1: 1944–1948 (Volume 1)

by Georges Bataille, edited by Benjamin Noys and Alberto Toscano, translated by Chris Turner

Seagull Books, 400 pp., $25.50

In a famous letter from 1871, the teenage Arthur Rimbaud lays out a central task for modern artists.

"The poet,” he writes, 

makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their essence. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed—and the great learned one!—among men. For he arrives at the unknown!

Rimbaud’s poet is a visionary who journeys into the depths of the self, into human history, and undergoes the trials of madness or mental anguish. The extreme conditions of modern life motivate his quest. War, ideological passion, a rapidly transforming urban landscape, the influence of technology, the rise of mass media: These are some of those poisons that the poet may consume. What Rimbaud calls a “rationaldisorderingofall the senses” amounts to an intentional de-realization of reality. He must absorb the totality of his modern condition to reach the unknown and imagine an alternative future of humanity.

Read more

August Blue: A Novel

by Deborah Levy

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 208pp., $18.00

“The Two Brothers,” a tale from Ancient Egypt, is our earliest known attestation for the literary motif of the double. The tale is a family drama involving deception, violence, and physical mutilation. Whatever one brother experiences, the other feels simultaneously. At one point they are separated by a vast river full of crocodiles. The story may be a remnant of early man’s magical beliefs about twins, which in many societies were exiled or ritually slain since they defied understanding of procreation. The double has numerous other primitive precursors. To name a few: fear of one’s shadow, fear of one’s reflection, and, especially, the obsession with personal immortality beyond even biological succession. In literature, the double varies from literal lookalikes, as in Dorian Gray and his portrait, to simply two individuals whose destinies are interdependent, as in the Egyptian tale. Part of the motif’s seductive quality is its sheer range of possibilities in relation to both pleasure and pain. According to Freud, the double represents potential futures, which if unfulfilled over time can turn haunting, like a fallen god taking on a demonic shape.

Read more

Ours is an era marked by unprecedented change—the kind of change humans weren’t designed to live through. The forward march of technology is relentless, everyone working tirelessly to auto-produce their own extinction. The environment requires that we adapt constantly, or disappear into obsolescence—every minute the landscape is changing, updating itself, and we are being called upon to either adapt to a present that does not exist, or face our own irrelevancy in the hyper-abstraction of the future.

Underneath this arachnoid web of modernity, a new generation—our generation—has been playing in a poisoned well, under the chemtrails of the information revolution we are trying to make sense of ourselves.

For this new generation, the stakes have never been higher. There are new ways to screw up, and screw up hard. Gone are the days when adolescent mistakes took the form of leaving the cattle door open or getting caught drinking at prom: One’s digital footprint and the global surveillance apparatus change everything.

A fifteen-year-old boy on a mission trip to the Asian Pacific finds himself implicated in an international child porn smuggling case, via innocuous nudie pics and mandatory reporting laws. What was intended as a playful comment on an Instagram post becomes a crusade, a girl commits suicide because someone called her a slut. An offhand anime shitpost becomes a Japanese death cult. A student accidentally uploads a sub-sentient AI that uses his visual cortex as a bitcoin miner.

Those charged with raising this generation are bewildered by these advancements, struggling to make sense of this new world they both watched evolve and feel totally foreign to.

Demographers define Generation Z, colloquially “zoomers,”  to be those born between 1997 and 2012. This is a good start, but misses the point. It is possible to be a spiritual zoomer, while  falling outside these birth years. What does it mean to be a spiritual zoomer? Our definition for the purposes of this manifesto is somebody whose pubescence was largely mediated by information technology.

Puberty is uniquely marked in homo sapiens by its introspective and metacognitive character. It is not simply a readying for sexual reproduction and so on, but a process of becoming a conscious agent in the world. The mind learns to pattern itself and grow mental models of the self and its environment. But what happens if the environment itself is insane?

According to the statistics,1 “mental health,” whatever that means, is disintegrating. Zoomers everywhere are failing to adapt to the environment. But if the environment is insane, what adaptation can really occur?

I managed to stumble my way onto adaptation by pure chance: At age 18, I was given a dexedrine (dextroamphetamine) prescription.2 It’s wrong to call dexedrine a “nootropic” or “performance enhancing drug” because what it does has precisely nothing to do with intelligence production. It is actually an agency-enhancing drug;3 correctly used, it lays the demented chemical puppetry of the brain bare, allowing you to pull your own strings. We live in a world dominated by psyops and corporate machines that seek to rob you of your agency for profit. It’s no wonder then that stimulant use has become pervasive. Intelligence has never been in more abundant supply, but real agency is scarcer than ever.

Indeed, the dexedrine gave me a sense of agency that allowed me to feel fundamentally at ease with the delirium of the modern world. “You can always think your way out,” it whispered to me, even as it burned me out in the pits of corporate hell. It freed me to psychoanalyze and reconstruct my entire libidinal architecture,4 dive into cutting edge neuroscience to prevent tolerance build up, and find escape routes from a world that increasingly felt like it was entrapping me.

I initially felt guilt over needing this chemical prosthesis to live my life, but after a while I had engineered a life that I loved leading. This was a kind of psyop, but it was a bottom-up puppeteering of my brain, instead of janky top-down control that’s never quite complete. I had actually adapted to my environment, as insane as it was. My dexedrine use was a coping mechanism, a.k.a. cope, but is cope always a bad thing?

We need more productive cope, because the insanity isn’t going away. The insanity is the mammal panic of a civilization that is running out of time. This sense is the way technocapital acceleration makes itself known, at some primal level.

But the trouble with amphetamine use is that it becomes a dependency. Dependency, left unchecked, quickly spirals into addiction.

Our psychologies are set up to deal with dependencies on people—indeed, a sufficiently complex web of dependencies on people is precisely the project of civilization. Humans, however, are unique among the animal kingdom with their tool-dependency. Ancient man naturally reconfigured his environment to survive, building all kinds of apparatus to tame the elements, predators, and one another. Civilization begins when tool manufacture clicks into psycho-technology (p-technology)5 and writing is born.6 Writing begets accounting, which begets finance, and abstraction devours the world. 

P-technology is simply any tool that outsources human metacognition. It removes the need to think directly about the self, replacing this process with a more metabolically efficient circuit, thus freeing up cognition to think about the world. This is a world that is persistently making itself illegible, resisting your attempts to reason with it.

In the web of abstraction we’ve inherited, more thinking about the world is necessary in order to to adapt. Amphetamines are just a particularly advanced instantiation of p-tech, lowering the motivation threshold required to work.7

P-tech hijacks the human capacity for learning and plasticity for its own ends. It’s far more potent during critical periods of brain plasticity and development. It’s not the production of new neural circuits that’s the issue here, but the externalization of these neural circuits.

Denizens lost half a mile from their house because their phone is dead, depriving them of Google Maps; Doctors reliant on Google searches for symptoms; engineers useless without infinite-precision computer-aided arithmetic.8

Folding p-tech into your existence is always an exchange of capability for dependence. But, overleveraged by technological dependence, we are reaching a margin call,9 risking a future in which the maintenance of your dependencies saturates your ability to think. Maintaining your dependencies consumes the majority of your cognition. You become narcissistically attached to the person you are with that tool, with the capabilities that it gives you. To step back and de-leverage would be to kill a tiny part of yourself. At least that’s what the tool wants you to think.

But refusing to admit these things is also a nonstarter: No dependence means no agency (or rather, not enough) with which to execute, ripping you out of the production of the future. You will be left behind: paralyzed but with all the capability in the world.

Once the dependency became pathological, the addiction started to seep in. “Don’t think about it, it’ll be fine.” More technologically advanced forms of p-tech are more generative of this addictive spiral.

Twitter: “I’m just using it to read about interesting things,” he says, on his third hour of dead-eyed scrolling at his WeWork in the Mission.

Adderall: “I’m just using it to get work done,” he says, having spent most of his morning reading Buzzfeed articles at 3x normal speed.

Advanced p-tech is addictive because it is euphoric. Sometimes this is a first-order effect of directly stimulating reward centers in some way, but there’s a different kind of euphoria common to all sufficiently advanced p-tech. Rapid agency-production has its own euphoria, the rush of the human body sensing its own upgrade.

Zoomers are uniquely vulnerable to this overleveraging, because the availability and generation of new p-tech reached an inflection point right before our collective adolescence, overloading our newfound neuroplasticity.

The aforementioned p-technologies are just sharp tools you can cut yourself on. But there is a darker side of p-tech, one that exists only to exert control, with no utility for the person to whom it is applied. It originates with the weaponization of psychoanalysis, but goes by many names: public relations, psychological operations, etc. It’s impossible to precisely define how it operates. This control-production flows directly from the beating heart of technocapital, hawking memetics, installing desire. Attention, feeling, libido, all rendered fungible for digestion by the profit motive.

This control production10 has been ratcheting up in intensity since the turn of the century: the use of 9/11 as pretext for a globe-spanning surveillance empire, the installation of totalizing surveillance for the Anglosphere intelligence community.11 The pervasive tendrils of the surveillance leviathan are an important cause of several zoomer pathologies. 

Zoomers are the surveillance generation. Our social relations are defined by surveilling and being surveilled. The modality of normal nonverbal communication collapses in on itself. Voyeurism is now the default mode of watching each other. Indeed, it cannibalizes other ways of looking at each other: the gaze of awe, of friendship, of love. The issue with this digitally mediated voyeurism is that it is a fundamentally nostalgic enterprise: The surveilling is always of the past. The status competition provoked by social media rests on comparison of one’s past. This hijacks the way zoomers think about the future, because all thinking about the future is done in order to create a carefully manicured past. This is a deep temporal sickness: Zoomers are stuck in the past.

The way out

There is a way out, for those zoomers dumb enough to try.

Upgrade your cognitive security, and try to get a grip. Immunology is the only reasonable way out because abstinence means opting out of society entirely. We are witnessing the birth of new cognitive architectures. In response, we must carve out precious cubic centimeters of cerebral cortex for a memetic immune system.

Or, in more plain terms, we need new cope.

To create a memetic immune system is to practice ignoring the implications of certain ideas. Viral ideas naturally position themselves so as to intrude upon one’s psychic apparatus. This “intrusion,” however, is not a necessary consequence of that particular complex of ideas or memeplex, though the memeplex would very much like to present itself as such. For each possible fear that these virulent memetics prey on, we can produce an immune response that incorporates the underlying structure of the fear, suspending the idea in valence-less psychological space. The silhouettes of our deepest fears become our greatest manias. Their re-illumination generally involves some epistemic compromise, but adaptive mistruths are the price of entry.

For instance, the other day in London I suddenly became gripped by the delusion that everybody on the Tube was a crisis actor. They were being paid to sit there, on the train to Upminster, to watch me. I was terrified. Immediately, the immune response kicked in. Sure, these people might be crisis actors, but is that actually so terrifying? These crisis actors are clearly being paid by somebody or some thing that wants something with me. So they’d have some idea of precisely what it is that it wants. Interactions with strangers are now folded into a giant transcendental interrogation with the thing that has been watching me. I can understand what it wants, so I can avoid the knife.

Psyops are actually a morally neutral p-tech. The CIA only gave them a bad name. A psyop is merely a method of producing control. You can psyop yourself. All the successful zoomers I know are already doing it, with varying degrees of schizoidality. The reason psyops work as a form of self-direction is because they prey on the base, animal brain, working from the bottom up. The only alternative is to overcode and stratify your life with a multitude of rules, relying on your metacognition to despotically enforce them from the top down. The demands that the modern environment makes simply outstrip most humans’ capacities for metacognition, so the answer is simple: Get out of your own way.

We are still scratching the surface of psychopharmacology and there are many drugs out there waiting to be put to use, lying in wait so that a zoomer might reconfigure his (neural) environment, just as ancient man did, just as I already have.

Reconfiguring one’s environment need not stop at the psychobiological layer. Socioeconomic reconfiguration, if it can be made to favor financial efficiency, can use technocapital as a motor to realize itself. Higher facility with technological communication, along with a sense of self that readily admits a technically mediated disunity,12 makes zoomers the ideal feedstock for symbiotic collective minds13 and other forms of collective intelligence—which frees up more cognitive power by externalizing metacognition. This is a cybernetic system, producing a feedback loop with the externalized metacognition. Thus, we coin the term cybermetacognition to describe this kind of cybernetic system.

Cybermetacognition avoids the metabolic pitfalls that come with overextending the metacognition of the self and permits deeper and greater control over all other varieties of thinking. For instance, I have been roundly criticized for being one of those zoomers who is always wearing AirPods,14 even in social settings where they are “inappropriate.” This is in actuality an example of this externalization of metacognition. I need no watchdog processes in my cognitive architecture to examine my emotional state, because I am always allowing my emotional state to be colored totally by the internet’s inexhaustible surplus of sound. Thus, exerting control over my feelings requires no actual effort, beyond unlocking my phone to change playlists.

Cybermetacognition also natively emerges from organizational processes like the joint stock corporation and DAO (Distributed Autonomous Organization). As these organizations agitate towards their own sentience, intelligence scaling slides towards linearity. Expensive self-reflective thinking can be replaced by zero-knowledge proofs and public key infrastructure, to produce more collective intelligence from the same base materials. Just as British contract law allowed for new forms of intelligence, these new contracts in which more knowledge about the world is legible within the contract enables new and tighter feedback loops for collective intelligence to actualize itself. 

All intelligence is fundamentally collective intelligence. What can be done to organize these fractal nests of intelligence, to improve the scaling of groups of intelligences, is a thread that must be tugged on to produce an environment to which the zoomer can adapt.

The point is not to surrender your identity unto the formless goo of the collective intelligences, but to set up a recursive symbiosis: You help define it as it helps define you. This circuit drives deeper and more meaningful individuation for both the individual and the collective. This engagement forces a fundamentally different relationship with the future, immunizing against the aforementioned failure case of considering the future as a form of past-production. This is what the future looks like: roving hordes of cybernetically enhanced zoomers pillaging the memetic landscape for value-production, collaborating via real-time networks, game theoretic smart contracts organized in mutually recursive positive feedback loops. Indeed, this essay emerged from a prototype of this very future.

This memetic immune system is key to the entire project of zoomer supremacism. The plasticity window is closing for older zoomers, but there is still time for the younger ones. To be able to install such a thing soon enough will determine whether society manages to engineer a solution to its impending annihilation. The telos of the zoomer is embedded in his potential to become the revolutionary subject of history, to allow life to upgrade itself once again.

Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods. 

—Henri Bergson

Alexandre Kojève: A Man of Influence

edited by Luis J. Pedrazuela

Lexington Books, 260pp., $80.54

If the nineteenth century was a Hegelian century, fundamentally shaped by the suppositions and limits of Hegel’s philosophy, and the twentieth century was a Nietzschean century, the twenty-first century is the century of Alexandre Kojève. 

Everywhere one turns one finds him waiting. Already in 1989 it was Kojève who inspired Francis Fukuyama’s famous proclamation of the “end of history” and today it is Kojève who grounds the project of diversity, equality and inclusion which defines post-historical politics. No wonder Judith Butler wrote her dissertation on Kojève. What is today attacked on social media (itself the supreme globalizing, homogenizing power) as “globohomo” is what Kojève called “the universal homogenous state,” the final state of man in which political and ideological struggle is over, and individuality is suppressed by a total administrative state. 

Far more than Foucault or Herbert Marcuse, Kojève is the master thinker of the current year regime. But his significance isn’t the effect of a spell he cast, but his rigorous formulation of the direction of travel. In a half-deranged epoch desperately in search of solutions, Kojève proposed a description which returned the world to coherence, albeit a disturbing coherence. His contemporary equivalent in this respect is Nick Land.

In his 1930s seminars at the École des hautes études on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, delivered to an audience comprising almost every important Paris-based intellectual of the era (including Raymond Aron, André Breton, Georges Bataille, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and perhaps above all Jacques Lacan, who designated Kojève as his master and based his influential theory of ‘the mirror phase’ on his teachings) Kojève developed a merciless vision of historical progress, the drastic conclusion of which was only partially grasped at the time.

History, Kojève argued, started with the fear of death and culminated with the “abandonment of individuality, that is in fact of humanity” in a final state comprised of “living bodies with human form, but emptied of spirit.”

At the beginning of historical time, according to Kojéve, one party risks death to impose his will, and the other surrenders to preserve his life: This settlement sets in motion the grand narrative of the master-slave dialectic as the engine of historical progress. With his labor, the slave transforms the world and himself; with his dependence on labor the master atrophies. Mankind advances and the world becomes humanized: The terror of natural authority softens, and traditional hierarchies lose their force. Finally the slave becomes conscious of his absolute power of genesis. The world becomes an artificial “second nature” and even the concept of mastery vanishes into the historical past. 

Contemporary rhetoric which designates inegalitarian nature as tyranny (“fascism”) rearticulates Kojève’s conclusions in a semi-literate ideological register. Nature for Kojève occupies the dialectical pole of the master; only what is constructed through labor is freedom. Posthistorical humans, becoming almost mindless, finally “construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs . . . perform musical concerts in the manner of frogs and cicadas . . . play like young animals, and . . . indulge in love like adult beasts.” The “concrete” paintings of Kojève’s uncle Wassily Kandinsky offer a visual preview. Presenting what Kojève called a “uni-totality that exists in the same way as do trees, animals, rocks, men, States, clouds,” this amorphous nirvana now expresses itself post-artistically through the misshapen and genderless humanoids of the “flat design” illustration system that defines the “globohomo” aesthetic from Facebook to Hinge. 

This is Kojève’s end of history: not Fukuyama’s utopia of Lockean liberalism, American individualism and free markets, but a boring dystopia of nihilistic consumerism, brainwashing, spiritual exhaustion, and death. 

***

Kojève always denied he was offering an original philosophical vision (which he further denied was even still possible) but was merely explicating, or at most updating, Hegel. The main contribution of this highly academic collection of essays is to demonstrate this isn’t true.

In his elegant introduction, the editor of Alexandre Kojève: A Man of Influence, Luis J. Pedrazuela, compares Kojève to a Matryoshka Doll “whose wholeness is not comprehensible if a figurine is left out.” The most prominent doll in the set is undoubtedly Hegel, but Kojève’s presentation of the fundamentally conservative thinker is highly selective and even perverse; in a 1948 letter to Vietnamese philosopher Tran Duc Thao he himself admitted that his reading of Hegel was a work of propaganda. In the Phenomenology of Spirit the master-slave dialectic is almost an aside: It takes up a few brief pages, and is considerably less important in Hegel’s account of self-consciousness than the unhappy consciousness which creates a link between individualistic striving after recognition and communal conditions including tradition, ethics, and family life. 

As political science professor Waller R. Newell points out in his chapter, modern man for Hegel is not just the synthesis of a master and slave but amalgamates a “wealth of shapes” including Master, Slave, Stoic and Skeptic. But here as elsewhere, Kojève rejects mediation in order to stress contradictions, and deliver them up to the Ragnarök of his ultimate liquidation. 

When not representing himself as Hegel’s ventriloquist, Kojève identified as a Marxist, and sometimes referred to himself as a “strictly observant Stalinist.” Fundamentally, he shared Marx’s radically eliminative instincts, his Left Hegelian premises, and above all, his commitment to atheism. Like Marx, Kojève aimed to eradicate theology from human thought. “Only one serious dilemma remains for us,” he proposed in his Hegel seminar, “the dilemma: Theology or Philosophy.” Yet, just as Marx’s own thought is shot through with crypto-messianic mythologems, Kojève’s vision is much less secular then it appears at first sight.

As Kojève’s biographer Jeff Love emphasizes in his own contribution to this book, Kojève drew a hugely significant subterranean influence from Buddhism: Among the stranger texts to be found in Kojève’s vast, mostly unpublished corpus of apocrypha is an almost incomprehensible imaginary dialogue between Descartes and the Buddha on the nature of thought, existence, and inexistence, written in Warsaw in June 1920, when Kojève was eighteen. A year later, Kojève began to study Buddhism in earnest in Heidelberg under the tutelage of German Indologist Max Walleser. After learning Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese he started to translate the second century Mahāyāna thinker Nāgārjuna, from whom he picked up the concept of Śūnyatā, or emptiness, boundlessness, nothingness. 

It was from this perspective that Kojève was able to welcome the historical vision of human extinction which philosopher José María Carabante, in his own chapter, calls “a philosophy of death”—in which suicide is upheld as the supreme form of freedom. This fatalistic conjecture struck a chord with the brooding interwar group of intellectuals in Paris, at the same moment that historian Oswald Spengler was prophesizing the inevitable, cyclic decline of the West. But while Spengler’s vision concluded in a melancholy romanticism, Kojéve’s slyer, more cynical temperament proved more decisive politically. 

The title of this volume is well chosen: Kojéve was more a vector of influences than a personal source of them: In the end, his power rested on his success in narrating the state of the world as it transformed from liberal modernity to managerial democracy. His post-war career as a civil servant in the French Ministry of Economy and Finance was in its own way as epochal as Hegel’s infamous glimpse of the world-spirit on horseback: Kojéve in his office as the spirit of a world without spirit, working efficiently for human extinction.

Raymond Aron wrote in his Mémoires that the theme of Kojève’s seminars was both the arc of world history and Hegel’s Phenomenology, with each illuminating the other. The complex intellectual portrait of Kojève which emerges through this volume likewise succeeds in illuminating the contemporary world. Kojève, a stunted distortion of Hegel, mirrors a world which is likewise a stunted distortion of the long nineteenth century, in which history has transformed from a myth into a spectacle, racket, and farce. 

The final question this book poses, albeit implicitly, is how our epoch of Kojève will conclude. Kojève’s dialectical logic is as merciless as Greek tragedy, but humanity no longer has a feeling for tragedy, and Kojéve’s attempt to close the historical circle of consciousness is ultimately more absurd than cathartic. Individual consciousness, alas, cannot be dissolved into pure collectivity. We are, unfortunately, individuals, with all our pointless problems and deranged desires. The fact that Kojève is compelled to conceive (and now we are compelled to destroy) an inhuman machinery devoted to suppressing individuality already testifies to individuality’s irrepressible nature. The end of history is not even a dystopia, but a dead end, defined by an insurmountable obstacle that cannot be overcome, like the last speck of self-consciousness that no quantity of sedatives  eliminates. The dark comedy of both Kojève’s position, and ours—a comedy that the mordant Kojève himself would have no doubt enjoyed—is the comedy of someone who wakes up after a failed attempt at suicide, and learns that he has overdosed on hallucinogens instead. We can only pray that the Kojévian century will be short. 

~tonsug-taprex

Daniel Miller is the literary editor of IM-1776 and the writer of the film Bordeline (2023).

~hastuc-dibtux

Liam Fitzgerald is Urbit's resident enfant terrible and ~zod's own prototype.

~bicnum-mogrys

Ben Shields is the managing editor of Grand Journal.

Daniel Rosenberg Nutters teaches at Cheyney University of Pennsylvania. He is completing a monograph entitled The Humanist Critic: Lionel Trilling and Edward Said, which will be published by Anthem Press.

~dotpem-maplyr

Tess Crain holds an MFA in Fiction from NYU and is at work on a novel. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New Republic and The Guardian, among other places.

~ladmur-naltyr

Magdalene Taylor is a writer covering sex and culture.

~hilmec-difpes

Charles Rosenbauer is an engineer building advanced CPUs and exotic compilers, is lead editor and researcher at Possibilia Magazine, and writes the Bzogramming Substack.

Sydney Mayfield Pollack is a writer from Washington, DC.

~namsyt-dorsum

Pablo Peniche is a co-founder of Palestra Society and a software engineer and designer at Vienna Hypertext.

The Prudentialist is a writer, fisherman, and co-host of The Digital Archipelago Podcast.

~librex-dozryc

Noah Kumin - Editor in Chief

~bidbel

The Mars Review of Books Foundation - Publisher

~mallus-fabres

Designer

~tidren-nosryg

Samuel Henriquez - Managing Editor

~lagwyx-ricted

Mark Smith - Proofreader

~borrem-noddes

Varun Mishra - Special Projects

~simfur-ritwed

Nick Simmons - Advisor

~nombex-silfer

Darby Hyde - Editorial Assistant

Ellie Lynch - Publicity

Special thanks to Sam Frank ~todset-partug,Trevor Visotsky, and Bliccy.