Death, Taxes, & A.I.

What is "inevitable"?

Many precocious tech wizards of Silicon Valley are working to eliminate the two “inevitabilities” of life: death and taxes.

Death, for them, is a problem to be solved. Whether by cartons of longevity-boosting capsules, transfusions of youthful blood, procedures to rejuvenate one’s telomeres, plain ol’ cryogenic freezing, or plans to digitize and preserve an individual’s memories for the museum, or a new (Robot? Cloned?) body, the greatest minds of my generation are hard at work trying to outlive the rest of us, so they may continue to wield even greater power over our grandchildren and their children.

The more the AI eats its own shit, the shittier its shit becomes

Our Tech Gods have nearly as much energy for the avoidance of taxes: offshore floating cities, unclaimed zones between countries, purchased islands — they’re trying to make Ayn Rand’s “Galt’s Gulch” a reality, or at least that’s how they sell it. And I do mean “sell.” People and businesses who want in on these schemes have to buy their way in by the logic of a profit-seeking corporation, which, seems to me, is just taxation by another name. Trying to avoid government leads to re-inventing government. But this time, with them in charge.

These same edge lords of evading (or postponing, or re-naming) the inevitable are also the folks who have for decades tried to convince us of the INEVITABILITY of their dominance.

As Shoshana Zuboff puts it in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism “…the rhetoric of inevitability is so ‘ubiquitous’ that within the tech community it can be considered a full-blown ideology of inevitabilism.”

If people are reluctant to go along, Zuboff relays the steps advised by certain “consultancy firms” to convince you: first, a financial reward or savings for giving up your data and opening yourself up to manipulation; then gamification, using language designed to convince you that going along is “fun” “interactive” “competitive” and “gratifying”; finally, in the last case, the consultancy advises inducing “a sense of inevitability and helplessness” by emphasizing “the multitude of other technologies already in play” and that what might feel to you like violations of your moral space or the social contract are “part of the world we live in now, for better or worse.” This is the actual playbook, which I doubt comes as a surprise to anyone reading this.

That the “evaders of the inevitable” are also inculcators of inevitability in others is less “irony” or “hypocrisy” than the logical result of believing in one’s distinct power and capacity for control.

Put yourself in Thielian (or Muskian, or Zuckian) shoes: if you believe you can evade death and taxes through your money and cleverness, then you probably believe you can impose death and taxes on others via those same powers. More importantly, having decided that what others consider inevitable is actually avoidable, you conclude that others may be convinced that anything optional is actually inevitable. Self-fulfilling prophesies are wonderful things, when you’ve designed them according to your interests!

There’s a general human impulse to try to predict the future (which is impossible). People pay fortune tellers and put their faith in political and religious leaders who say what things will be, and more often than not they’ll remember the good guesses and forget the bad ones, because believing that prognostication is possible is so psychologically soothing.

But predictions about the future are always guesses. The people who seem to guess right more than wrong are usually the people who take action to make their predictions come true. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff also explains how mechanisms of data collection are used to influence behavior — this is the applying of behavioral analysis (ABA, formerly known as behavior modification). Repeat the stimulus that results in the desired outcome, train the subjects to perform the desired outcome in advance.

In his book On Tyranny Timothy Snyder offers a list of defenses against the tyrant’s dark arts. The first is: “do not obey in advance.” Tyrants depend on people believing that freedom is not worth fighting for, because the tyrant’s success is inevitable, and any individual foolish enough to resist will be crushed.

Obeying in advance is the desired outcome; those who do it have been trained to pave the way for someone else’s objectives.

Are today’s Tech Robber Barons tyrants? Yes. Do they want you to obey in advance? Yes. Can they make you? That’s up to you.

Uncertainty may be unsettling, but it is a “productive discomfort.” If you are going to be a free person, you must first accept and believe that neither Peter Thiel nor Elon Musk nor Mark Zuckerberg nor any of these other too-rich, too-powerful yet-still-mere-mortals can predict the future. They can try to make the future using levers unavailable to most of us. But they can’t know what the future holds. Their systems try to actualize their wishes. But they can’t make the future bend to their will without others cooperating.

So please, remember the next time someone argues that a certain future is inevitable: nothing is inevitable but (always) death and (often) taxes. They may insist on the cashless future or the AI future or the automated future or the future that cannot be paused or silenced, the future that won’t allow a human mind to simply be, to hear tree-born twittering, to see morning light dance on water, to be not just analog but on a log, entirely absorbed by the searching antennae of tiny, living kin in the free, unprofitable, wild world. The contours of future life will be what we make it. Collectively we have far more power than the Silicon Valley Bro-gods, and resistance in the name of our humanity is never futile.