Cyborg Vivarium

Introduction

“If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.” — Opening quotation

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and this is episode number 576. Cyborg Vivarium, with guest James Poulos. Prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Saturday, October 30th, 2021. Devil’s Night. A concept I’m mostly familiar with from the first movie, the first Crow movie, the one that Brandon Lee gave his life to bring us. An Alex Proyas film, by the way, an early Alex Proyas film, and Alex Proyas went on to direct two really good films, in my opinion, I, Robot and Dark City, and then a film that I haven’t seen, but which everybody says is terrible, I think it’s called Gods of Egypt. But the late Roger Ebert would spend inordinate amounts of time praising Dark City for its visual generosity, and I certainly agree. But that is way off topic. The topic here is, what the heck are the ecosystem of algorithms and little personal electronic devices that we all have pretty much on our persons at all time?

I mean, I’ve never yet taken a cell phone into the shower, but some of them are, you know, water resistant. But the author, who is the guest on this week’s podcast, this week’s podcast— as if I put these free podcasts out weekly— on this episode of the C-Realm podcast is James Poulos, and he’s the author of an upcoming book, and I’m going to do you a great favor by introducing it to you in a way that he and his cohorts at the Claremont Institute haven’t thought to do, and that is to tell you that the title of the book is Human, Forever: The Digital Politics of Spiritual War. I’ve heard that repeated humanforever.us time and time again on the American Mind podcast, and it just never sticks in my head properly. When I go to look for it online, I’m looking for forever human or staying human, remaining human.

I always want to put human at the end. Human, comma, Forever: The Digital Politics of Spiritual War by James Poulos. And I’m on the site now, humanforever.us, no comma. Here is the pitch at the top of the page. In a scorching, searching guide to saving our souls from the digital apocalypse, James Poulos shows how the swarm of programs and devices unleashed by our leaders has transformed our lives and defied our dreams, throwing the future into terrifying doubt. Rising above the din of the discourse, he reveals how the first generation of the digital age can retake control of our technology by restoring our full humanity and how their parents must save them from the new cyborg system, bent on ensuring they never come of age. So I won’t say a whole lot to introduce this conversation because if you’re a longtime listener to the C-Realm podcast, the themes are already familiar to you.

And at the very beginning of the recorded interview, I asked James to not only introduce himself, but to introduce the Claremont Institute. And as I mentioned, I first heard James and I first heard mention of his book on the American Mind podcast, which is one aspect, you know, one outgrowth of the Claremont Institute. So I want you to form an opinion of James and the Claremont Institute by listening to this thoughtful conversation you’re about to hear. And then at the end of the podcast, I will read you at least the above the table of contents description of the Institute on Wikipedia. Wikipedia, who at this point, I’m sure nobody considers to be an objective source of information on anything other than strictly factual stuff. Like, you know, who played Duke Leto Atreides in the 1984 Dune film? You can trust Wikipedia for that kind of stuff. But anywhere where a spin can be introduced, man, I’m dizzy. All right, here is my conversation with James Poulos.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Human, Forever and the Claremont Institute

KMOYou are listening to the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and I’m speaking with James Poulos. James is the executive editor of The American Mind, an online publication of the Claremont Institute. They’re also a podcast, and it is on the podcast that I discovered James. He’s the author of The Art of Being Free, a study of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and is the contributing editor of American Affairs. And you also have a new book coming out. Well, first of all, welcome.

James PoulosThank you. Good to be with you.

KMOAnd what’s the new book?

James PoulosThe new book is Human Forever: The Digital Politics of Spiritual War. If you want to be among the very first to know when the NFT goes live and when the book goes on sale, just hop on over to humanforever.us, humanforever.us. Plug in your email and you are in.

KMOGoodness, NFT, you’re not some kind of cultist, are you?

James PoulosOh, absolutely not.

KMOSo the book is being published how?

James PoulosThe book is being published on chain. It will be available for purchase in Bitcoin. You can do that at canonic.xyz [spelling unverified].

KMOSo you can not only pay for it in Bitcoin, but it’s published on the Bitcoin coin blockchain?

James PoulosThat is correct.

KMOHow does that work?

Speaker uncertainImmutable.

KMOHow does that work?

James PoulosThat is a technical question, but really, I mean, it’s, you know, Canonic is a site that allows you to simply upload your manuscript and it does the encoding onto chain for you. You can then sort of see in a little sub tab, all of the beautiful encryption trailing its letters and numbers. And so it’s verifiable and something that people cannot cancel or erase, which is nice right now.

KMOAnd when will the book be available?

James PoulosWell, that’s the announcement that the people who sign up are going to receive. It’s coming soon. So get on it.

Speaker uncertainSoon.

KMOTo prepare for our conversation, I read an article of yours or an essay published in the spring of this year in the Claremont Review of Books. It’s called “God and Man at Google: Our Technologies, Ourselves”. And before we get into the content of that, would you say a little bit about the Claremont Institute?

James PoulosYeah, sure. So the Claremont Institute is just a little over 40 years old, founded by students of Harry Jaffa, the great American student of Leo Strauss when he was here in the U.S. And so the Claremont Institute is dedicated to really statesmanship, statecraft, and political philosophy, the political philosophies that are needed to approach statecraft in a successful and fruitful way that is not damaging to human life and human identity. And so over the past 40 years, we’ve been dedicated to doing that through a couple of publications, one of which is the Claremont Review of Books that some people may be familiar with. I’m running The American Mind, which is the sort of the new kid on the block. We don’t do the book reviews. We do just about everything else. And of late, I’m a political theorist by trade. I have a PhD from Georgetown in government, not to be confused with political science.

And so by the time the Trump years got going, it occurred to me that what was unfolding could really not be understood in the absence of a real knowledge of what digital technology was, where it came from, where it’s going, what it does to us, and what we can do about it. You know, some of which is not necessarily bad and some of which is kind of scary and there’s a lot there. And so, I kind of gave myself permission to have beginner’s mind, set aside the political theory canon, read a lot of media theory, Marshall McLuhan and others, and figured out how the two could be put in conversation and put together. If political theory didn’t have anything whatsoever to say about what digital technology was doing to us, it seemed to me that this was just another academic discipline that deserved to die.

I guess I had some residual loyalty. And so I wanted to see if I could sort of rescue the discipline from irrelevance in at least that regard. And this book is the product of that effort.

Red tribe, blue tribe

KMOWhere do you and the Claremont Institute stand in terms of tribal allegiance with the red tribe, blue tribe dichotomy, which has become so engraved, I guess, is the word I’m looking for in public consciousness.

James PoulosYeah, well, I mean, you know, politics, especially in America, is a collective activity that oftentimes requires people to choose sides. And sometimes your side is chosen for you based on, you know, who sees you as an adversary. That’s not something that, you know, we’re inclined to shy away from. But at the same time, you know, I mean, I’m old enough to remember, and I’m sure, you know, many listeners to this podcast, and this is not to cast aspersions on anyone’s age, are also old enough to remember a time when, you know, it was 100% the radical left that was opposed to concentrated corporate power, that was opposed to domestic surveillance, that was opposed to government with limitless powers. That was opposed to efforts by scientists to manipulate our experiences and tinker with our memories and twist our humanity into shapes that ordinary people weren’t comfortable with.

And now, in a lot of respects, that seems to have flipped. How much of that is the result of high-level sort of information war being conducted by various countries or factions. That’s something that I think about fairly often, but it’s happening. And so these political categories, left and right, vestiges of French Revolution era politics where some people sat on one side of the parliament, some people sat on the other, they can be useful heuristics. A lot of people still kind of have reason to generally peg them in one place or the other. But the digital age is really profoundly different from what’s come before. We’ve seen it and how it’s flipped and scrambled our political categories. I think that’s going to continue. And so, you know, yeah, tribes exist, factions exist. I think the founders understood perfectly well that factions were always going to be with us, but that they were, in a certain sense, a central problem to our form of government.

And so I think, you know, in order to understand the world we’ve been thrust into in a digital age, of course, we’ve got to recognize the reality of factions and how factional alignment sets up, but we also have to realize that in many ways, digital life is an acid bath for all of the institutions and patterns of life that came before it, and we shouldn’t be surprised when we find ourselves with strange bedfellows.

Secondary literacy

KMOAre you familiar with the book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain?

James PoulosYes, the great polymath and an eminent weirdo, Leonard Shlain, a psychiatrist³ who somehow found the time and the energy to write a number of different books, you know, notionally veering way outside his area of expertise. But yes, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess is one of the most interesting, I think.

KMOFor the benefit of the audience, I’ll remind them, because I probably haven’t mentioned this book on the podcast in years. But Leonard Shlain’s thesis is that when pre-literate cultures get literacy, and particularly when they get printing, there’s an adjustment period where they go nuts, and they get really ideological and really intolerant of deviant thought. And to me, it seems the digital technologies and particularly social media technologies that are based on neurological research, which are really just looking to keep us engaged with the platform and have discovered algorithmically that one of the best ways to keep us engaged is to keep us really angry at one another. It’s had a similar effect. And Leonard Shlain says that it’s a temporary effect. The literacy effect is temporary and that eventually societies figure out how to live with print. And I’m hopeful that we’ll follow a similar trajectory with digital technology. I wonder what your thoughts are on that.

James PoulosWell, yeah, I share that hope. I think there’s always reason for hope, and that that’s true even when the main task is just to figure out what the hell already happened to us before we can even start looking forward. So there’s a guy, a media theorist, by the name of Walter Ong. He was a student of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong’s sort of big contribution to media theory was this idea of secondary orality. So he said, you know, you go back to the pre pre-print days, pre-alphabet, you got oral culture. You know, Homer, the epic poetry, that sort of thing, and, as technology, communications technology advanced as media continued to develop past print press past the alphabet. Of course he started to get into things like radio. And you started to have a kind of return of the oral as a dominant mode of communication, a dominant medium, that independently, you know, shapes as all media do shape our sensibilities, shape our perceptions, our experiences, our inner and outer lives.

And so, you know, he described the advent of radio, which is in a sense, you know, still very much with us as we sit here on a podcast with fancy looking microphones in front of our faces. He described that as a sort of secondary orality. So, you know, what I think we’re seeing right now with digital could be described as a kind of secondary literacy, where the new kids on the block as participants in the media process and experience and the surround of literacy are now machines, algorithms, programs, hardware, software, digital entities, until fairly recently, the kinds of things that these entities can do, were really only associated with angels and demons, invisible, ubiquitous, capable of being everywhere and nowhere at the same time flying through the air, having powers sort of superhuman powers that we often don’t understand or should feel suspicious of. You know, I don’t, I don’t think that the best way to understand these devices is as literal demons.

But I would say, you know, that the wrenching change, for all of its uncanniness, we should keep in mind that you know now it’s the, it’s the computers, it’s the machines who are kind of the masters of reading, of writing, of recordation and of recall. And in the face of this incredible power, you know there’s some folks out there, these kind of like ex-Googlers, who are on this like black pill apology tour, like, oh, humans suck. And you know, we’re building gods out of these machines, and it’s like, we’re not building— you can’t build a god, you can’t be a god. Humans don’t suck. We need to remember that we are who we are and that who we are is good and different from these machines. The brain is not just a computer, the mind is not just a brain and the way that we remember and the way that we pass on our memories is unique and different from the way that machines do, and it nurtures and protects our humanity in a way that they just can’t.

And that’s fine, they’re just machines, after all, and we shouldn’t put that burden on them. And we shouldn’t try to replace, or denigrate our mode of memory and our passing on of our human identity by looking up to these machines as some sort of divinities.

Humans don’t suck

KMOWell, I liked all of that, but I want to give a special highlight and thumbs up, you know, like button to humans do not suck. Amen to that. I— I’m very fed up really with the, you know, misanthropic wing of the, you know, environmentalist mindset, and particularly antinatalists who say there’s too many humans, that life is terrible, it’s evil to bring new humans into the world. I just, I have zero patience for that. And, you know, after a lifetime of being, you know, reflexively anti-authoritarian, which means it’s very natural for me to, you know, be highly critical of the US. In recent years, I’ve come to be very impatient with reflexive anti-Americanism as well, which seems to be, you know, a necessary sort of signal that you flash at people just to demonstrate your own sophistication. You know, if you’re smart, if you’ve been to college, if you have a big vocabulary, of course, you hate the United States, which I think is ludicrous. And I’ll stop ranting there because I could do that for a while.

America in the electric age

James PoulosWell, you know, I think one reason why it was so easy or fashionable to hate on the U.S. is that the U.S. was really the lone superpower. It kind of epitomized everything. The United States sort of seemed to reflect the totality of human consciousness and experience back on the world. And that made it something that was always kind of blocking your vision or something you had to kind of try to peer through in order to get sight of any significant phenomenon. And that was a product of the electric age, that America did very well under the electric age, Europe not so well. You know you get street lights going on in Paris and it seemed very exciting. You know you could now have cafe culture at night and it was just, you know, a blip in historical time before Europe was rubble and that is not what happened to America during the electric age.

America, you know, processed the occultism of the electric age in a much different way than Europe did. It processed the, you know, the disincarnate power of electricity in a different way than Europe did. And, you know, it all culminated, of course, in the United States being the place where Europe’s most brilliant scientists went to build the atomic bomb, among other things. And so America’s experience with the electric age, which I would argue started with Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was the guy who hung out in the telegraph room of the War Department during the Civil War to communicate directly with his generals. The Emancipation Proclamation went out by telegraph. That’s why it spread so quickly and was experienced as this kind of divine injunction into American life. Lincoln did a good job of understanding that electric technology had a unique force and character and that America, in a certain sense, needed to be put on a footing that was going to allow it to flourish in the electric age to process the magnitude of this transformation.

You know, his wife, unfortunately, showed sort of the sadder or darker side of the electric age when she became convinced that mediums could be invited into the White House to give a seance, and she could reconnect with her recently deceased, tragically deceased son who died while Lincoln was in office. So Mary Todd, you know, swindled by the mediums and mountebanks of the electric age, as so many were over the decades. Here comes the digital age. Things have not gone so good for the— for America in the digital age, despite the fact that we created these technologies. We disseminated these technologies. We made them look and feel cool. We onboarded all of us into these technologies. And there was a real expectation cultivated among the people, but really generated from the very, very top elite figures in American life that these inventions were going to save the world.

And we’re going to sort of complete or perfect America’s leading role in governing the world, structuring socioeconomic life around the world, bringing everyone together. It was really a sort of spirit of triumphalism and completism and all of these sensibilities among mathematicians and scientists that, oh, we can formalize everything. We can make programming totally deterministic. We can solve for politics. We can fix humanity, all of those kinds of sensibilities bundled up into the way that digital technologies were disseminated and, you know, skinned as sort of consumer devices. And so, of course, Americans were, you know, we created these things, our leaders are telling them they’re great, what could possibly go wrong? You know, and for some people, what went wrong was that Trump was elected. But I think, you know, you don’t have to be a sort of partisan in one direction or the other to look back over the past 20 years and go like, gosh, you know, it seems like this system is better at kind of enforcing a kind of passive uniformity on us than it is spreading benefits of our leadership around the world.

So it’s very disenchanting, very demoralizing to see these things happen. It’s hard for people to know exactly who to blame and how to sort of unsnafu this situation. I think there are ways that it can be done. I think it starts with recognizing that our humanity is a gift, warts and all, that, you know, we are unlike our machines. We don’t need to feel envious of them. We don’t need to imitate them in the hopes of transcending, you know, everything that sucks about being human. Warts and all, you know, we are incarnate and soul creatures who are worthy of our own existence. And the alternatives, you know, we’re not going to become gods. We’re not actually literally going to become bugs, although that’s a fear that people have. I think it’s understandable that they don’t want to be herded into this kind of cyborg vivarium that the social credit system is constructing for us.

At the end of the day, we’re humans. We’re stuck being humans. That’s good news considering the alternatives. And ordinary people should be and need to be put back in charge of our most powerful technologies to ensure that they tell the computers, these devices, what to do. And what they should be doing are things that are providing the backbone for us to create and share in the culture that makes human life sacred and fruitful and profitable and memorable.

Bumper (inserted by KMO; voiced by Black Beauty, Leila Marimuthu): “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast, with your host, KMO.”¹

The reading list

KMOYou know, I mentioned that I didn’t expect that we’d get through all of the books in your essay, but we haven’t mentioned even one yet. So I’m just going to read a list of all of them. And what I’ll ask you to do in answer to the question is: what questions were you looking to answer when you were going through these books? Or what similar questions are the authors of these books asking, or what’s the similarity between them? What’s the thematic connection? So the books² are Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder, somebody I used to follow in the 90s and hadn’t even thought of in years, I have to say. Technocracy in America by Parag Khanna, who I hadn’t heard of, but he’s got many hours worth of talks that you can take in on YouTube, I’ve discovered. Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri. Of all the ones that you covered, that’s the one that I’m most interested in reading, you know, based on your coverage of it. Then there’s The Autonomous Revolution. This is by William Davidow [name unclear; transcribed “Davidson or Davidson”] and Michael Malone. And the subtitle of that one is Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to the Machines. And finally, the only book on the list, which I’ve actually read, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee.

And, you know, when I first saw the title, AI Superpowers, I thought of superpowers, you know, like flying, x-ray vision, hyper healing, but he’s talking about superpowers as in the US–Soviet Union superpowers and describing a new arms race between, you know, these between China and not so much the US government or the defense department of the Pentagon, but between against a sort of loosely affiliated team of corporations here in the United States. But let me turn it back over to you. Of all of these books, what are the central questions that they’re dealing with and how do they cluster in terms of their responses to the challenges that we’re facing?

James PoulosSure. I mean, let’s just hit them one by one and do a little lightning round here. So the first one was on Facebook. This is a big doorstop book, heavily researched, all kinds of access and everything. A critical look at Facebook, especially with regard to sort of Trump stuff. You know, the Cambridge Analytica is presented as this kind of boogeyman, even though, you know, if you talk to people who actually understand these things, I mean, the MIT Tech Review on the eve of Barack Obama’s reelection, you know, put out their big issue with Bono’s face filling the entire cover and, you know, big legend underneath saying how big data will save politics. And so the Obama team was doing stuff that’s very similar to what Cambridge Analytica was doing. When one side was doing it, a lot of people, yay, this is good, this is the future.

And then when, you know, oh, Trump came along, and then they were doing it too. And suddenly it became, you know, this massive threat to our democracy. I mean, I think that’s just a ridiculous assessment, regardless of where you stand politically or ideologically. So there’s a lot of that running through the Facebook book. But I mean, I think the most interesting thing to me about the Facebook book is it helped reveal that, you know, social media, as we understand it today, is really kind of a hybrid of electric technology and digital technology. And I think it’s an unstable hybrid. And I think, you know, what we’re seeing unfold right now with Facebook, where they’ve gotten to the point of saying like, oh, we’re not a social media company. We’re not Facebook. We’re a metaverse company. And, you know, stay tuned for our new name. Like this reveals to me.

KMOThey are releasing a new name this week. Yeah. And, you know, Facebook itself, they wisely bought up WhatsApp and Instagram and those two companies are much more popular with young people than, you know, their social media platform, what they call the blue app. So, yeah, they really need a rebranding desperately and they’ve been trying to become a source of digital money as well and really falling behind in that race. But I’ve cut you off, so let me, can let me.

James PoulosRight. So, you know, they’ve tried all kinds of things and everything that they’ve had to try has been on the basis that Facebook should be as large, at least as large as it is in terms of users. And I think that the verdict on Facebook as of right now is that social media at that scale is simply an unstable business model because it is an attempt to make durable a structure of digital technology that is really a hybrid between two worlds and can’t really sustain itself. So what I’m worried about is, you know, Facebook has been treated unfairly in the press in certain ways, and not others. What we don’t want is we don’t want Facebook to be kind of seized by the state in a way that uses it to become a kind of, you know, Fed book instead of Facebook, just a kind of way for the state to encompass everyone all the more so in a social credit system.

And I think that’s what a lot of critics of Facebook actually want at the end of the day. They don’t, Facebook has too much independence and they shouldn’t be making these decisions. And Mark Zuckerberg, you know, who the hell is he? It should be the government instead. And in fact, you know, Eric Schmidt, he has already filed the report to the federal government as chair of this sort of commission on basically automating government. There are, you know, powerful folks out there who look at Facebook and they say, this sucks. It should be replaced by a government social credit system. And so that’s, you know, that’s the word on Facebook. The next one on the list, remind me, is which—

KMOWell, let me, let’s stay on Facebook for just a second.

James PoulosSure.

KMOYou know, the entity, not so much James Levy’s book. Although I will say in your reporting about the book you touch on something, which is a sore spot for me that the contemporary left, very unlike the left of my youth, they seem to be really enthusiastic about censorship and about coercion of people who hold views different from theirs. And the complaints that we get from the left about Facebook is they’re not doing enough to curb hate speech. And I think the summation of your criticism of this book was that Levy is participating in this mentality, which says, really, the problem with Facebook is that it allows people on the political right to communicate with one another and organize collectively. So that’s a bother to me. But I just wanted to remind everybody of when Mark Zuckerberg was hauled in front of Congress to account for the actions of Facebook.

And you can be assured that he was prepared by a team drilling him in various questions that he might have to answer. And he gets up there, and the first question put to him, I think, was put by Orrin Hatch, who said, “Mr. Zuckerberg, how does your company make money?” And you can see— he, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, he’s intense, you know, he’s in the zone, he’s waiting for whatever’s coming at him. And when this is the first question that comes at him, a sly smile creeps across his face and you can see him trying to suppress it, but he’s like, oh, yay, you know, I’m fighting a toddler. And you can see that his team behind him, they’re all, you know, they’ve got that same grin creeping across their face and they’re trying to suppress it. It’s like, these people know nothing. These people know nothing about what we do. Oh, this is going to be a cakewalk.

Life After Google

KMOOkay, the next book, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder.

James PoulosRight. So Gilder’s point there is that Google’s vision of itself is really as a scientific enterprise to achieve complete knowledge of what there is to know on Earth. Really to sort of create a map that is better than the territory, that is more information rich than the territory itself, a sort of closed universe model. And I think that that’s right, that mathematics and science and engineering and technology are currently dominated by people who think that mathematical formalism can achieve a level of determinacy such that we can, with complete confidence, predict and know that input X is going to result in output Y. And so the hope of these people is to write programs that are so airtight or complete in this way that they can really give orders to swarms of digital entities to manage or control other digital swarms. And that’s their kind of model of governance.

And, you know, I think that that’s bad. Gilder thinks that that’s bad. Gilder’s answer really relies heavily on human creativity. He says, look, you know, human creativity means that at the end of the day, like anything’s possible and the universe is open. And if we forget this, then we are going to lock ourselves into a sort of glide path of forever diminishing horizons. And the kind of scope of human knowledge is actually going to kind of fold up on itself. Something similar to what Alexis de Tocqueville says at the end of Democracy in America, where he fears that that democratic life has this kind of tendency or this drift that causes people to kind of fold up on the interior of their lives and become, you know, egoists, but in a very small way and in a way that encourages people to accept this kind of smothering, soft despotism, where the government just takes care of sort of this clockwork country and, you know, people sit at home, sort of brooding in the inner reaches of their own heart, and we’ve seen, you know, we’ve seen a lot of that happen on social media and we’ve seen a lot of, you know, millennials kind of experiencing this and issuing various cries for help, most of which, I think at this point, manifest in sort of the use of sexuality to try to escape their human identity and in some way become cyborgs, which many people feel that they have to do in order to survive in the digital age.

I mean, yes, we all carry around these smartphones in our hands every day. And so to that extent, we’re all kind of cyborgs now. But going full cyborg is not something that I would recommend. I think it will only end in tears. And so focusing the way that Gilder does only on human creativity, I think, runs the risk of convincing us wrongly that fantasy can save us still. This was a big idea before digital came along, when electricity ruled and TV was the most powerful form of electric technology, the most powerful medium. What happened on screen was more important than what happened off. John Lennon was telling us to, you know, to imagine our way to heaven on earth, you know, above us only sky, that means no heaven, but also no space, like we’re just, we’re here. And it’s kind of the World Economic Forum, you know, you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.

And that, you know, John Lennon and that stream of thought is still trying— are trying to get traction. Willy Wonka is singing “Pure Imagination”. You know that was a vision of paradise on earth, post-religious vision of paradise on earth that I think has— is obsolete now in the digital age. A lot of those people who are still pushing it are trying to kind of re-boot themselves as digital era priests. You know the swing that you’ve seen on the left from, like, that’s— you know, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, to something more like, you know, if you do not embrace the official sort of religious view on these issues, then you are a bad person who needs to be silenced. That kind of swing has tracked this shift from the televisual age to the digital age and it’s these things are still going to play out.

And if we, if we want to gain the upper hand over our machines and over people who want to use them to rule us, we need to, yeah, human creativity is good, but human memory is what really needs to be protected. It’s what’s really being undermined and attacked right now. People, for obvious reasons, look at the machine memory and they go, oh, I wish my memory was that good. Maybe I should try to become a cyborg and get rid of my pathetic humanity. That’s not going to save us. What we need is we need ways of getting computers, machines, to protect our memory and to serve as sort of the backbone or the servant of forms of life where we create culture, we share culture, we value culture, exchange it in ways that are protective of our memory of our human identity, in ways that allow us to be fruitful with one another and to keep the enterprise of human culture going.

The materialist superstition

KMOSo I’d like to push on to the next book, but one of the notes that I wrote down from your coverage of George Gilder’s book is the notion of the materialist superstition, which is the belief that life can be modeled perfectly by that which is not alive, and I think you’ve covered that in passing, but I’d like to have you address it specifically.

James PoulosYeah, so, you know, these are people who basically think that God does not exist and human beings don’t have souls and that, you know, you are your body and your body is your brain, and your brain is your mind and your mind is a computer, and that’s just— you know, I think that’s just factually inaccurate, and I think that this position that they hold is one that leads them to falsely conclude that that formalized mathematics is, you know, basically divine, that it has superhuman powers, that it can equip us with completely deterministic forms of programming and that we can, you know, we can create a kind of clockwork universe that our consciousness merges with and controls, and in this way, we will transcend our pathetic or disgusting humanity and reach a higher level of consciousness that, in some sense, is truer or more complete than our own, given humanity.

You know, we look around. Why is everyone so upset today? Why is mental illness so prominent? Why are obesity levels out of control? You know, why is suicide going up? Why, you know, do so many, so many girls, not want to hit puberty? Why do so many 65 year old men in positions of power want to become women? Like what is happening? And that’s what’s happening. Our, you know, our surround is being sculpted and shaped, and used to kind of terraform us inside and out by people who think that the only thing left for us to do, the only thing worth doing, is to transcend and abandon our humanity by merging our consciousness with a kind of perfect technology.

Technocracy in America

KMONext on the list, Technocracy in America by Parag Khanna.

James PoulosRight. So, you know, Khanna is one of these well-meaning technocrats who likes to sit down with kind of the data and do a social science thing about it. And he says, look, you know, maybe America’s form of government served it pretty well in the past. Maybe not. I’m not here to litigate that. All I’m here to say is like, perhaps if we put more technologists in charge of more sort of functions of governance, we could achieve more reliable, more efficient and more productive results. Seems, you know, pretty harmless. And there are edge cases where it’s like, well, yes, you know, government sucks so much at some of these basic things that perhaps putting someone in charge who is not, you know, 80 years old and needs 80-point font to read in the Congress, you know, maybe that would help. I mean, I’m not here to, you know, ridicule Orrin Hatch or anything, but I have seen the binder with Orrin’s speech in 80-point font marching down the page, because that was the size that it needed to be in order for him to read the thing on the floor of the Congress.

And so, yes, you know, there are obviously ways that more technologically inclined people could get more satisfying results in certain areas of governments. Some people like to wave around Singapore as an example of what we should all do. But, you know, those champions of Singapore don’t like to point out that Singapore is also basically our Department of Defense’s sandbox. Every military technology that they are not able to use in the U.S., or at least until recently, they just fly over to Singapore and try it out there and see how it goes. And that’s a relationship that’s, you know, worked great for Singapore and worked great for the DOD, but I don’t think Americans want to live under Singapore’s form of government. And so these, you know, these technological questions, you know, when you’re down at the level of sort of measuring incremental results, a more technocratic approach can look pretty attractive.

When you scale that thing up, though, you know, you are not living in America anymore. And I think, you know, in spite of all of our frustrations, all of our disenchantment, at the end of the day, most Americans would still very much like to live in America.

KMOWith Singapore in particular, I mean, I’ve never been around the city state, but I’ve had long layovers in the Singapore airport. And here, in a nutshell, is, you know, the Singapore airport experience. You get off the plane, you walk up, you know into the airport concourse area and there’s a sign that says, you know, death penalty for drug smugglers. And then you walk out into the concourse and it’s gorgeous. It is like this, the most luxurious hotel, crossed with a park, in a theme park, and it’s— it’s beautiful and orderly and luxurious. And there are teenagers with assault rifles, you know, patrolling the aisles. You know, they look like teenagers because they’re Asian, but, you know, they’re probably in their early 20s. It’s a very, very authoritarian place, but it’s also quite prosperous and orderly. And, you know, it’s very, very much in the mold, you know, the Asian mold of the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

As long as you’re down with the program, it’s great. If you want to think for yourself or if you want to examine the proclamations of authority, you know, God bless you, but don’t do it in Singapore. Next book. Actually, let’s stay with technocracy for a second. You know, the notion of technocracy, if you’re describing it by people who are in favor of it, is that decisions should be made by people who know stuff. Smart people who understand technological systems should be the ones making rules that govern the operation of technological society. But technocracy’s failure mode is that it tends to worship credentials. You know, so credentialism is the way that it breaks bad. And so, you know, we have in our current technocracy, you know, to the extent that our civilization and our society is a technocracy, you have to come from one of the elite schools.

And it’s very, you know, if state schools, if supposedly, you know, the technical knowledge that you get at a state school is not comparable to what you’d get at Stanford and, you know, the, you know, the big corporations that control everything are just going to recruit from Stanford or MIT, it’s very easy to capture those small locations ideologically. And that’s what we’ve seen, you know, and it’s largely the source of wokeism. You know, the woke ideology started in these elite universities and then colonized the HR departments of Google and Amazon, you know, and Facebook and all the big companies. And these big companies reach out into every single person’s life who carries around a cell phone. And it is these big companies, you know, who are the arbiters of what is dangerous, what is hate speech and what is just obvious truth. And, you know, I won’t go into my personal history with it. I’ll just say, I don’t have a Facebook account. I did for years. I got kicked off.

James PoulosWell, and let’s add that these big companies are big because they arose from federal policy, by and large. They marketed military and intelligence technology that was repurposed and commodified as consumer entertainment. And today, and increasingly so, they do the bidding of the government, often by choice, and sometimes not so much by choice. And that seems like a trend that is going to continue and intensify over time.

The Revolt of the Public

KMONext book, number four, Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority by Martin, and I’m not sure how to pronounce his last name. Is it Gurri?

James PoulosYeah.

KMOOkay. So what’s the skinny on that one?

James PoulosGurri’s very, very intelligent man, very perceptive former intelligence analyst. Stripe Press put out this— I mean, their graphic design department is very strong and so they have many beautiful texts, many thick and beautiful texts, and this is one of them, and a lot of what Gurri has to say about the crisis of authority among the elite and the rise of populism is spot on, and the connection of those two things to technological advancement. Gurri’s blind spot, curiously is he is, he is keen to demonstrate that much of what passes for populism, or much of what is given populist vent, is really a kind of nihilism, and he implies that a lot of that nihilism has to do with the fact that ordinary people don’t understand and kind of can’t understand what it is that technology is doing to our world. And so they just want to kind of lash, you know, lash out at whoever seems to be in charge.

And so his diagnosis of the Trump phenomenon is this is nihilism in action. People wanted a bull in a china shop. They just wanted Hulk smash. And that’s why they voted for Trump. Yeah. I’m not going to argue that that is false for every person in America who voted for Donald Trump. And in truth, when everything seems to be going wrong, perhaps smashing everything seems like a non-crazy idea relative to if most things are going right. But I think more importantly, ordinary people do understand what technology is doing to our world. They understand it very well. And they understand what it’s doing to them. They understand what it’s doing to their families, they understand what it’s doing to their country, and they understand who is winning as a result of the manner in which technology is being controlled and wielded over them in their lives.

So I do not think that this is fundamentally a problem of nihilism. I do not think that the Trump phenomenon can be explained adequately as a kind of spasm of nihilistic sentiment among lower classes of Americans. I think that people are increasingly desperate for someone at the leadership level to evince the authority of personal integrity, of a certain level of intelligence, of the awareness of the problem of who is in charge of technology in America, and some record, even a short record is fine if it’s a good enough record, of competence at kind of turning the tide here. I mean, why is it that Ron DeSantis is having such a good year as a politician? I think that it has to do with these issues. I think that in many ways, he evinces the kind of substance that people hoped Trump would develop on the job and kind of didn’t to a lot of people’s satisfaction.

And so I think Gurri’s thesis might seem plausible in some respects, depending on what angle you’re looking at Trump and who you are looking at him, but that it doesn’t quite hold as well going forward and that the case of DeSantis is an example of why.

The Autonomous Revolution

KMONext in our list, The Autonomous Revolution by William Davidow and Michael Malone.

James PoulosYeah. So these guys, you know, not household names, not trendy academics, you know, this is not Yuval Harari here. This is, these are some pretty nerdy guys. Those books I really enjoy, I have to say. Perhaps they are dangerously entertaining. So yeah. So, you know, I think that it’s very important that the title of the book is, it has to do with autonomy. The way that the build back better elite is marketing or pushing their agenda in the U.S. and of course many other places is as the fourth industrial revolution, and although it is indeed a revolution from above, industrial is kind of a sneaky way of putting things. What they want to do is they want to, they want to automate our social and economic life. And viewing things as an autonomous revolution reflects this, reflects the truth back at you. In this book, really where the rubber hits the road for me in this book is where they say, look, this is not something that’s going to be undone.

It is not undoable. Digital technology is not going to go away. You can’t just blow up the factories, throw the wooden clog into the gears and go back to you know, some idyllic state. That’s not what’s going to happen, and so, ultimately, what we need to do is we need to focus on human responsibility and we need to focus on you know which values, what value systems are going to give human beings the agency and the self-respect and the humility and the authority to regain and wield control over these immensely powerful machines.

KMOSo a theme in all of your summations of these books is here the author has very correctly identified a challenge and they fail to see some, you know, some important aspect of it. Is there a case of that here?

James PoulosWell, I think that these authors are being very circumspect because they want to reach an audience of kind of elder nerds who are very, very serious about their work and serious about the scientific enterprise and how it is applied to public life. And so, it’s very thoughtfully and carefully written with a very level head. It doesn’t go outside the four corners of the argument in the box. And so, I think it raises the right questions and it points generally in the right direction. But there’s a big field out there where we need to color in the different shapes in the coloring book. And that’s good news for me anyway.

Andrew Yang, Bitcoin, and math

KMOSo we’re almost at the end of the list of books, but I think this is a safe place to ask you to comment on the role that Andrew Yang played in the 2020 presidential primary contest.

James PoulosSure. Well, I think it’s kind of a tale of two signs that I am going to tell here. The first sign was infamously the one held up at the Federal Reserve Chairman hearing in Congress. I think it was still a chairman, Federal Reserve Chairman at that point. A guy holding up a sign that said, buy Bitcoin. And that made it onto television and that made a stir. This is a point in time when if you bought Bitcoin on that very day, you would now be doing pretty well, at least on paper.

KMOYes.

James PoulosYes. And then there was another sign, a sign that became popular at Yang rallies, and it simply says math. As if, you know, math, that’s what we need.

Speaker uncertainThink America, think harder.

James PoulosYes.⁴ Not a chicken in every pot, but math in every pot. And these are two different, although related models of how to get out of the mess that we are in. The Bitcoin model is, you know, as I suggested, there are a couple of different flavors here. One is just stack sats, hold your Bitcoin, number go up, and we live happily ever after. And, you know, there is a certain sort of puckish delight that you can take in watching that happen. But it does sort of raise some questions about how civil society and how a culture that technologically protects and reinforces the sacredness of human life is going to, you— who’s going to be doing that job if the smartest people are just sitting around hoarding Bitcoin, waiting for the big switchover to happen. I mean, the big switchover-.

KMONot just hoarding it, but engineering market cycles with big crashes so they can accumulate more and take money out of the pockets of the so-called retail investors who FOMOed in at the top and then got scared when the price plummeted by 80%, which it does. I don’t want to divert us into the weeds on.

James PoulosYeah, sure. I— and I’m not going to do that either. It is kind of the wild west. Some ways that’s good, some ways it’s not so good, but there, you know, there are ways that you can use Bitcoin to— I mean, this is why I’m publishing my book on, you know, on chain and for sale in Bitcoin is to demonstrate that this is not just something that you can sort of pile up in digital space and, you know, wait for, wait for heaven on earth to arrive. This is something that you can use right now to create markets, fair and transparent in markets. You know, you’re not just trying to scam people on anything. It’s not about how many Fed bucks you can get for however many coins you’ve stacked up. It’s about putting that technology to work, to tell computers what to do, to use them to buy and sell and exchange and create culture that is protective of human life, reminds us of who we really are.

So you know, that’s kind of the meaning behind the Bitcoin sign, the meaning behind the math sign, is that no, no, math is actually perfect and pure. It is— you can trust the math, you know, and that obscures the question of like, well, can you, can you trust the mathematicians? And then there’s a question behind that, which is, well, can you trust people who are not mathematicians, who are out there like throwing math around, you know, maybe I can trust the math, but can I trust you holding the math sign? All questions that are not answered by the math sign. But I think the math sign gives view or reveals that a growing number of people out there are sort of looking at mathematicians and going, you tell us that formalistic math can create such deterministic programming that we know that we can always know that input X will result in output Y.

And through this, you know, incredible superhuman power of determinacy, we can order the universe and, you know, we can make everything work, we can solve for humanity, we can fix politics, we can live happily ever after. I think take one look at quantum physics and you will discover that the universe is not grounded in some ultimate sense on rational syllogisms and on, you know, X and then an arrow to Y. That’s not really the way that it works. The essence of reality is something that is mysterious and implicit, and will always remain so. This is why I am a, you know, I am a theist. It is why I believe in the existence of the soul. It is why I think these things are part and parcel of who we are as human beings. Do you have to believe these things in order to protect and sustain our humanity?

Probably, you know, probably no. There are probably few people. I mean, you know, there’ve been philosophers of the ages who, oh no, being human is good in spite of it all. But it’s a much more difficult argument, very complex, harder to convince people. And, you know, I just don’t think that it scales as we’re seeing today.

KMOOne note that I wrote down under your coverage of The Autonomous Revolution, main challenge is preventing the capture of prosperity by a ruling class as machines displace humans in the economy. And it was that note that, you know, that directed me to ask you about Andrew Yang. Andrew Yang was talking about, you know, his primary pitch in the presidential election was universal basic income. And when I, you know, I talked to a fair number of people about that. And when I talked to the Red Tribe about this notion of UBI, they’re either, yeah, sounds good, or, you know, they don’t say it like this, but I, you know, the subtext of what they said was, yeah, that kind of offends my sense of, you know, the value that I place on a work ethic. I think people should work. But they weren’t nasty about it.

And the objections that I got from, you know, leftists was Andrew Yang is evil. Andrew Yang is the devil. And you’re just the vitriol and the hatred directed at Yang and, you know, the so-called Yang gang from the left is just bewildering to me. And I wonder what you make of that.

James PoulosSo, you know, the left has the upper hand in the battle among the ruling factions right now. But there, you know, there are some fissures on the left. Some folks on the left ultimately believe that math and the science are the only things that will, you know, save us and save us by leading the way out of our flawed and disgusting humanity. On the other hand, there are some folks on the left who think, no, no, no, no, no. The only way that we can really have social justice is by making sure that our social credit system is nice and woke, that we have the right ethics in charge and the right ethicists to tell these computers what to do. So, you know, they’re responding in a coherent fashion to the challenge of our transformation into cyborgs. Their answer is to say, well, as long as they’re woke cyborgs, then we’ll be fine.

So, you know, this is, this is how, you know, quote unquote trans has made it, you know, so quickly to the very top of the stack in terms of justice, prestige identities. This should cause people to pause and have a think about what is going on because of course, you know, you cannot magically transubstantiate yourself from a man to a woman or a woman to a man, simply by saying I am and have always been, you know, whichever biological sex you are not until the minute that you make this utterance. Similarly, you cannot magically transform from a man to a woman or vice versa, by having a technological intervention into your genitalia or even a technological intervention into your sort of hormone cocktail. Something else is happening, and what it is that is happening is you are taking kind of the first major step, the first radical step, into transitioning from a human being into a transhuman cyborg.

And, you know, Andrew Yang doesn’t seem to have an answer to the question of like, how do we stop ourselves from being transformative to cyborgs? But for the wokies, you know their answer is like, well, it’s okay. Any kind of technological transformation of our humanity is okay, as long as the woke ethicists who are the czars of our new governance regime say that it’s okay. So we have two, it’s sort of conflict between two different sources of ultimate authority that are both kind of like fighting over control of the same like cyborg future.

KMOI will certainly admit, I mean, I liked Andrew Yang. I liked him a lot less when he ran for mayor of New York. But, you know, even though I wasn’t really in a position to support political candidates, I did send money to his campaign a couple of times with no expectation whatsoever that he would win the nomination, much less, you know, the presidency. But I was just happy to see somebody talking about the reality of, you know, the digital transformation of the economy and the landscape of jobs. Nobody else, nobody else up on that stage packed with, you know, hopeful Democrats had anything intelligible to say about that. So, you know, that was the basis of my support for Andrew Yang.

AI Superpowers

KMOSo now we are up to number six, as I mentioned, the one book in your list that I’ve actually read, and that is AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee.

James PoulosYes. So Kai-Fu Lee, ex-head of Google in China, a position that has since been eliminated. Kai-Fu Lee has a new book out. He’s moving fast. You know, obviously someone is really in favor of a more Kai-Fu Lee in this world. So his new book is kind of like 12 visions of how life under AI might look. I haven’t read the book. The reason why I haven’t read the book has to do with what I found in AI Superpowers when I read it, which starts out as kind of like US and China are kind of the two big AI players. There are others, but they’re not as important because ultimately, like the conflict between AI American style, AI China style, is what’s going to sort of swallow up or force everything to march, to dance to its tune. And you know that’s plausible enough. And I entertained that argument and I got to the end of the book and Kai-Fu Lee says, so, you know, in conclusion, there’s no stopping the destruction of basically good jobs by AI and we’re going to have to totally overhaul our civilization around the world, you know, sort of whoever you are, AI is basically going to globalize us.

And so what can human beings do in such a world? Well, they can come up with new ways to care for each other. So jobs that you can look forward to are like, you know, being a greeter at like a virtual store or like a seasonal closet wardrobe changer, someone who kind of goes into people’s closets and like, you know, adds like seasonal scents to them and helps them like, change their vibe as the seasons change and I’m sort of like you know this is not a compelling vision of the future. Maybe it’s a compelling vision of the future for, like the average quasi middle class Chinese person, it’s not for the average American, it’s not even for the extraordinary American. And this vision of the future is one of just not just radically reduced horizons, but one in which people are expected to content themselves with this incredibly sentimentalized reduction of our affairs and our identity to that of sort of pets, you know, of like, of like characters in Animal Crossing.

I mean, Animal Crossing is already there and it’s already being marketed right now on the Nintendo Switch as like escape to a simpler place where, you know, your genderless animal friends will cook with you and plant flowers with you. And you know I complained about this on Twitter and you know I got blowback: “No, Animal Crossing was— it is essential to preserving my sanity during COVID.” And I’m like, which may well be true. Well, which may well be true and which underscores the point, which is, perhaps you should give some thinking to what kind of regime is terraforming you and your fellow human beings such that you find Animal Crossing, to be essential to stopping yourself from having a psychotic break because of the pandemic. Perhaps that requires some reflection.

Gnosticism and the woke movement

KMOSo now we’ve gotten through all the books and you, I think, have already tipped your hand in terms of your prescription, but I’ll ask you to spell it out just the same. But before we get there, just a phrase I’ve written down in my notes here. Gnostic woke movement. What does Gnosticism and the ethics and I guess the metaphysics of wokeism, what do they have in common?

James PoulosSo, you know, Gnosticism has been around for a long time in various different guises. It comes from the Greek word for knowledge. And it’s basically the religious idea that the key to your salvation is to be found in the acquisition of secret knowledge and then the sharing of that secret knowledge with you know more or less secret, semi-secret priesthood, a caste of people who are possessed of the secret knowledge that you know transcends things like the mere knowledge of how to turn one you know collection of chemicals into another or manipulate the material world. This goes up into the ethereal layer of knowledge about the ultimate nature of consciousness and spirit. Oftentimes in Gnosticism, you will find a very intense dualism where the spark of consciousness, the spirit, is pure and without blemish, and it is trapped within the body, which is akin to a clay vessel or a prison, something that, you know, in some strains of Gnosticism is described as having been created by an evil demiurge, the sort of like sub-god that wanted to make life difficult for the real God, which is this kind of pure purity of absolute consciousness.

And so the usual Gnostic prescription for salvation is to use the spirit or understand, achieve the knowledge of the spirit that will allow you to shatter, whether literally or figuratively, the meat body prison in which the spirit is contained and radically emancipate the consciousness of spirit and put it in charge of all human affairs. And, you know, if you’re a Gnostic and a, you know, a Democrat, small d Democrat, or an egalitarian, you would want the equal emancipation of the consciousness of all. That would be your path to heaven on earth or heaven well beyond earth. You know, I think that wokeness, tracks these developments, not just insofar as, you know, you see, the trans identity, moving up to the top of the woke ranks, just, you know, got its stripe on the woke flag. And, you know, that’s always an indication of something. And it’s already, you know, it’s already revealing that, I mean, Michel Houellebecq, I think, pretty convincingly argued that the suicide of the West, the old West, culminated in this idea that sexual satisfaction and obsession was kind of like the last thing that there was to do.

If you haven’t read Serotonin, it’s quite grueling, but also, I think, quite definitive in advancing that claim. But now what we’re seeing in the digital age is sex has a new purpose. And that purpose is as sort of a ferryman to get you across the river separating you from your post-humanity. You know, all the sort of mentally ill millennials on social media, you know, with their many different genders and they’re coming up with new flags and new identities every day. It’s the transhuman or post-human trajectory of these movements is evident and the way in which sex is being used to give people a way of accessing cyborg identities, I think is quite clear. And that all is wrapped up in the idea that the given human body is bad, is irredeemable, that it sucks to be human, that being human is kind of a form of torture, that there’s no way to be human and to live a just existence, and that technology is the way to escape from that— that we need to build the tools that will crack open our identity and allow the kind of divine spark within us to have full rein.

That’s Gnosticism. Gnosticism has, you know, spread in various ways through, I think, every different denomination of Christianity, every different major denomination. And it’s spread through Judaism as well. And some of this I track in the book. And so, you know, I am critical of the way in which various strains of Western religion have allowed themselves to become sort of vessels for the parasite of Gnosticism. But it’s kind of equal opportunity criticism. I mean, this strain of religious sentiment and feeling and longing has moved through them all. And, you know, regardless of kind of where you position yourself religiously, regardless of what your creed is, chances are you’ve got someone in your corner harboring Gnostic sentiments, trying to figure out how they can use technology to achieve their ends.

The red pill

KMOSo you’ve described the connection to Gnosticism on the left. What about the red pill?

James PoulosYeah, the red pill. Well, there’s a kind of spiritual war going on on the right as well. Some of the new flavors of right-leaning culture today are very anti-gnostic to a fault. They are— no, it’s, you know, stop black pilling yourself with Christianity. Stop embracing slave morality. It’s all about sun and steel, just like slonk your eggs and lift your weights and, you know, make sure that your butthole gets sun and you’ll be, you know, you’ll be ready for what’s next.

KMOAnd a tanning bed preferably.

James PoulosYeah, right.

KMOJust for, you know, the sake of the people around you.

James PoulosYeah. And then there are some more normie flavors of folks on the right, of course. But then you’ve got people notionally on the right who are really post-Christian, post-Jewish, and who see technology itself as a kind of god. And their vision is, oh, sure, right-wing politics, monarchy, enlightened despotism, Singapore sounds great as long as the people who are in charge are using technology to become not quite post-human, but superhuman. So, you know, extend life out as much as you can, you know, use technology to keep yourselves young forever, use technology to create a kind of cast of priests who understand the true nature of the fabric of reality and can program computers to build kind of whatever it is that the supreme human specimens can imagine. There’s some of that going around too. You know, at a certain point that strain of thinking, I think, completely transcends categories of left and right and merges just into a kind of, you know, digitalism for its own sake.

Human maximalism

KMOSo, as I said earlier, I think you have telegraphed your prescriptions, but now is the time to make them explicit.

James PoulosYeah, so you know I talked about Bitcoin and sort of the best use of Bitcoin. If you are not.

KMOJust interrupt for a sec. Are you a Bitcoin maximalist or are you talking about cryptocurrency generally?

James PoulosI am a human maximalist. I’m all about hu-maxing [spelling unverified]. In fact, humaxing.com, I think, is still available for anyone who wants to go pick that up. Yeah, so you know, cryptocurrency is not going to save our souls, but the reality is that if ordinary people cannot find a way to take charge of databases, to take charge of GPUs and to use the most powerful digital tools to protect and defend their humanity, then they are— you know, we’re all just going to be onboarded into this cyborg vivarium and we’re going to be told that, you know, you may as well enjoy it, because this is humanity now and it’s going to just kind of blur away into this collective cyborg experience. I mean, you know, Elon Musk is an entertaining guy and he’s actually doing some things in contrast to kind of other guru-like figures in tech.

But Elon Musk’s idea of direct democracy on Mars, which I think, you know, is still something that he’s on the record in favor of is to use Neuralink to combine everyone’s consciousness into kind of collective, you know, telepathy and have that be the form of government, you know. And that’s not— I don’t think it’s going to work. It’s certainly not going to work without like massive insanity and suffering, and even if that was all considered to be worth the price of admission, that form of order is just fundamentally hostile to, you know, in America, our form of government and to our humanity and why and for what? And his answer is like, well, we have to do this because if we don’t, then the AIs are going to take over everything. And then we’re going to be ruled by these hostile gods that we don’t understand.

I don’t think that’s quite right either. It’s certainly not right. If ordinary people just like recognize that this, you know, Bitcoin and other technologies, controlling databases and stuff, it might seem complicated, it might seem like out of their comfort zone. It’s really not that difficult. You don’t have to become like a super science expert. You don’t have to convert to autism in order to understand how these things work. You can do it. You can participate right now and if enough people start doing that, then you know we’re not gonna be facing this kind of reduction to closet arrangers and, you know, to just complete slaves [at] the mercy of these AIs that we don’t understand. We will direct technological energy toward protecting and reinforcing ourselves, our lineage. We will continue to think of having babies as something that is good. You know people are worried about bringing kids into the world because they don’t want to tell them, they don’t want them to turn to monsters and they don’t know how to control the technology.

So of course you’re not going to want to have kids under those circumstances. But if you just start right now, I mean it’s like, you know, it really is like working out. It really is like, regardless of where your fitness level is, if you just start right now getting used to this stuff, habits can be formed, the body responds, the body and the soul work together. And we can do this. We can ensure that we remain human forever, that it is doable. People are doing it right now. The generational memory that we need to ensure that generations coming of age with no memory of life before the smartphone still recognize that being human is good and that they’re going to be human and that’s good [wording unclear] enough for us. That’s a gift. Those of us who have kids who are that age, now is the time to start making these arguments and doing the thing.

That’s why— I’ve got a kid who falls into that category just about. And people in my generation, a lot of them are busy doing other things or struggling to make sense of what to do. So I felt a calling. I had the opportunity to write this book. I got it out, I think in time, hopefully. And I’m grateful to be able to present it.

KMOI look forward to reading it. But, you know, what does adopting Bitcoin and crypto generally do in terms of the whole process of human beings being displaced from the job market? I mean, if you use crypto instead of dollars, you still need to make a living somehow.

James PoulosYeah, that’s true. I mean, I think one thing that I would say is that our financial elite is basically admitted that they’re—

Program identification: “On the C-Realm podcast, a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

KMO’s closing remarks

KMOThat was James Poulos. And as you can tell, that’s not the end of the conversation. But the interview that you just heard is an hour long. So you can’t complain that I’m keeping most of it behind the paywall. About the last 20 minutes is going to be behind the paywall. And for those not familiar with the particular paywall in question, I’m talking about the C-Realm Vault podcast. So the next episode will be episode number 413. And if you’re not already subscribed to the C-Realm Vault podcast, the only way to get access to it is through Patreon. My Patreon account is patreon.com slash KMO. And to get access to the C-Realm Vault, I’m asking for $7 a month. Some people voluntarily, I mean, there is no pledge level above $7 a month. Some people voluntarily pledge more. And one person is actually paying $100 a month for that $7 subscription.

Thank you to that person. I won’t mention you by name because I don’t think you want to be mentioned by name, and I certainly didn’t ask you about it. But ironically, I think that the contents of this particular episode of the C-Realm Podcast might rub that very generous supporter the wrong way. He is a longtime champion of the rights of human beings to transcend their biological limitations. And, you know, I have this behind-the-paywall podcast. That’s where income from my podcasting work comes from. So I never ask for one-time donations anymore. And yet, from time to time, they still come in. So since the last time I put out a podcast, I’ve received one-time donations from Katrina and Seth. Seth actually donated twice in that period. So thanks to Katrina, Seth, and anybody I might have forgotten, and also people who I suspect prefer to remain anonymous.

Thank you all. And thanks especially to those people who do subscribe to the C-Realm Vault podcast. And listeners to that podcast know that, after a conversation like the one I just had with James Poulos, I could easily go on an hour-long ramble or rant, you might call it, about those topics. I can’t do that now because in exactly 15 minutes time, I have an interview scheduled. It’s not even an interview. It’s a conversation with the angry animator, Dermot O’Connor, a longtime favorite, I think, of listeners to the C-Realm Vault podcast. So the last 20 minutes of my conversation with James Poulos will be in C-Realm Vault podcast, episode number 413. And thereafter, you’ll hear at least the beginning of my conversation with Dermot O’Connor. All right. Well, the train has pulled into the station here in Bellows Falls. I’m not speaking metaphorically. I’m talking about Amtrak, and they tend to blow that horn again and again, but I can’t sit here and wait for them to stop.

So if you hear the train horn, well, so be it. Atmospheric sounds. I think there might be a point or two on which I disagree with James, but it is my explicit stated policy never to score points on a guest after the recorded conversation is over. To me, that’s just in poor taste. So I will definitely reinforce the amen that I gave him during the conversation, which is that humans don’t suck. Yeah, we’re not always at our greatest, and humans do commit terrible crimes and atrocities and acts of malevolence upon one another, but it doesn’t define us. It’s not all that we are. So I said that I’d read the Wikipedia definition to you. Before I do that, though, I’m going to share with you the exact definition of the word vivarium, because I looked it up, and the phrase cyborg vivarium is catchy, it’s evocative, it’s the title of this episode, so here we go.

Vivarium, an enclosure, container, or structure adapted or prepared for keeping animals under semi-natural conditions for observation or study, or as pets, an aquarium or terrarium. So aquarium and terrarium are types of vivarium. All right, and now strapping on my metaphorical hip waders, we go to Wikipedia. Here is the Wikipedia entry for the Claremont Institute. This is just the above the table of contents, you know, encapsulation. The Wikipedia editorial staff wants you to think the following about the Claremont Institute. The Claremont Institute is a conservative think tank based in Upland, California. The Institute was founded in 1979 by four students of Henry V. Jaffa.⁵ And that V is his middle name. That’s not “Henry v. Jaffa.” It’s a man named Henry V. Jaffa. The Institute publishes the Claremont Review of Books as well as other books and publications. The Institute was an early supporter of Donald Trump.

After Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Donald Trump refused to concede while making false claims of fraud, Claremont Institute senior fellow John Eastman aided Trump in his failed attempts to overturn the election results. According to Wikipedia, the 40-plus-year-old Claremont Institute is defined by what happened in the aftermath of the 2020 election. And if that didn’t drive it home enough, I’m not going to read any more of it to you. But the next two sections under the table of contents are history. So this is the 40 plus year history of the Claremont Institute. And to that 40 year history, Wikipedia devotes 249 words. Then the next section is labeled Trump Advocacy and Connections, to which they devote 290 words. Again, I say this often, when I had money, you know, for those of you who are new to the podcast, I was a very early employee at Amazon.com, and in my late 20s, I had a fat wad of cash dropped on me.

Took me about a decade to spend it all, and then I got to re-enter the job market, basically broke with a decade-size hole in my resume. It was a learning experience. But when I had money, I gave it away fairly freely, and I gave some of it to Wikipedia. And since then, they have sent me regular pleas for more money. And for a time, when I couldn’t afford it, I just, you know, ignored the messages, didn’t respond to them. These days, I tend to respond and tell them, no way, no effing way am I giving you any more money as long as this is your editorial policy. Does it sink in? I don’t know. All right. Well, clearly I have more to say on the topics covered in this episode of the C-Realm Podcast, but I don’t have time to say them now. So tune into future episodes, and if you can, check out the C-Realm Vault Podcast.

Again, to get that, you need to go to my Patreon account. It’s patreon.com slash KMO. I also do a weekly, ideally, a weekly webcomic, and you can find that at gebb.io. That’s G-E-B-B dot I-O. GEBB stands for Greater Earth Betterment Bureau. It is a comic strip about aliens who live in an underground base under Antarctica. They do abduct people and give them anal probes, but they don’t like doing it. They only do it because it’s their job. So the tagline for the strip is, if you love the Earth but hate your job, join GEBB, the Greater Earth Betterment Bureau. All right, and with that self-promoting out of the way, I’m out. Stay well.

Editorial notes

1. At [00:22:14] KMO inserted this short bumper, voiced by Black Beauty (Leila Marimuthu, facebook.com/leilamuthu), to cover an edit in the recording. Confirmed by KMO, 2026-10-11. ↩

2. The books are Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story (2020); George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy (2018); Parag Khanna, Technocracy in America (2017; transcribed here as “Technology in America” and corrected); Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (Stripe Press edition, 2018); William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone, The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines (2020; the transcript has “Davidson”); and Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (2018). Later in the conversation KMO refers to the author of the Facebook book as “James Levy”; his name is Steven Levy. Spoken wording kept. ↩

3. Leonard Shlain (1937–2009) was a surgeon, not a psychiatrist. James’s wording is kept as spoken. ↩

4. Andrew Yang’s “MATH” signs stood for “Make America Think Harder.” ↩

5. Wikipedia names the Claremont Institute’s founders’ teacher as Harry V. Jaffa (as James says earlier). KMO reads the name as “Henry.” Spoken wording kept. ↩