FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
4hr ago
A lot of people have pointed to 1999 as being a high watermark for mainstream American cinema. It's remarkable to think of what a widespread influence on Western Anglo culture two concepts from movies released that year had (taking the red pill from The Matrix, "special snowflake" from Fight Club) and how durable their staying power was. A quarter-century after the film's release, you can use the phrase "taking the red pill" in conversation with a group of Anglophones of varying socioeconomic backgrounds and income levels, and reasonably assume that they'll understand the metaphor and that it won't seem dated or clichéd, even if they haven't seen the movie from which it originated. ("Snowflake" will be understood by most audiences, but won't have the desired effect: after years of conservative commentators beating it like a dead horse.) In this regard (that even most people who haven't seen the movie have a passing familiarise with one of its key images/concepts), The Matrix is right up there with 1984. The Matrix was a true four-quadrant movie, equally appealing to fans of action movies, sci-fi nerds, philosophy eggheads and weeaboos. In today's era of disposable pop culture, where Marvel Studios are delighted if people are still sharing GIFs of their latest capeshit instalment so much as one year after release, that kind of durable cross-demographic cultural staying power is hard to even wrap your head around. Nothing from the current decade of cinema seems likely to equal it: offhand, the only movie from the last decade which might is Joker* (and I think that film's star has well and truly fallen after its disastrous sequel); from the decade before, The Dark Knight.
*I was tempted to say Drive, but I have to remind myself that that film only made a tiny fraction of what The Matrix did: it's universally beloved in the circles in which I move, but not necessarily beyond that.
A lot of Marxist false consciousness and its derivatives seems very reminiscent of certain ideas about the demiurge.
The Matrix is obviously a big Gnostic metaphor (the machines have pulled the wool over our eyes and trapped us inside a false reality, we must see the truth and escape into the real world; machines = Demiurge). The Wachowskis later claimed that they'd always intended the film as a metaphor for coming out as trans, which inspired a lot of eyerolls and accusations of revisionism. But I don't think that's the case at all, I really do think that's what they intended at the time of writing:
the reason this interpretation doesn't jump out at most people is because they're approaching gender ideology from the perspective of "most people are cis, but some people are trans and that's okay and they deserve respect and compassion" as opposed to the perspective of "everyone is trans, but most have been brainwashed into believing they're cis - freethinkers whose eggs have hatched see the truth". Cypher is a detransitioner and also a cowardly traitorous villain: not a coincidence.
Everything about trans activism, really, has Gnostic undertones: the very concept of a "gender identity" which is wholly distinct from one's sex is obviously sneaking dualism in by the backdoor, but the way so many trans people talk about being trapped inside these nauseating flesh prisons and their transhumanistic desire to mould, slice and sculpt their bodies to better achieve their embodiment goals carries a big whiff of it too. This is part of a broader trend since the emergence of the internet towards Gibson's "relaxed contempt for the flesh": the tendency to see your body not as "you" but as a tool or vehicle you are controlling. Sometimes this can end up in weird science-denial places: fat acceptance activists who deny that the laws of physics apply to human beings just as much as anything else, that the only thing that can cause disease is mean words and fat shaming. It almost seems to come off like a denial of the existence of an objective external world: instead, we are all just souls trapped inside flesh prisons, and the only way one soul can be harmed is if another soul inflicts harm upon it.
At the extremes, you get into whatever the Zizians were doing, with their outré decision theory ideas about doing whatever it would be optimal for every one of your paraselves to do elsewhere in the multiverse - but they're a noncentral idea of the trend I'm describing.
FtttG
6hr ago
So much of modern leftism has Gnostic parallels, it's unsettling once you know what to look for.
FtttG
9hr ago
Say what you will about the Amish and similar, they hang on. In 3000 AD there may not be a Silicon Valley but there will be Pennsylvania Dutch.
Per Wikipedia, even the Amish are only 300 years and change old. We're talking about Harvard, not the Catholic Church.
I understand. My point is, every generation has always had this complaint about the one following it. Everyone's parochial about the technological level with which they're familiar, and suspicious about every one following. We can even acknowledge that some of the doomsaying predictions made about this or that new technology were right on the money, and yet that the technology in question was still a boon to the human species on net.
"Now that they're written down, no one's able to recite long passages of text from memory anymore!"
"Now that we have guns, no one knows how to hunt animals with a compound bow anymore!"
"Now that we have player pianos, our vocal cords will atrophy from disuse!"
"Now that we have internal combustion engines, everyone will become fat, slovenly and sedentary!"
"Now that we have cheap and reliable medicine, there's no incentive for people to live secularly healthful lives!"
"Now that we have slide rules calculators, no one can perform complex arithmetic calculations in their head anymore!"
"Now that Word automatically spellchecks your writing, no one can spell anymore!"
"Now that Google Maps navigates for you, no one can read an OS map or perform basic orienteering anymore!"
That's not to say that I'm not at all concerned about the impact of ChatGPT on literacy and logical thought, particularly on developing brains - if I had children, I wouldn't be giving them smartphones until they were of age.
But at the same time, I don't feel like I've lost out that much because I don't know how to hunt game, or that I can travel a few hundred kilometres in three hours rather than several days, or that I've outsourced the task of navigation to Google Maps. When it comes to ChatGPT, it's important to bear in mind that this technology is very new. We may soon find that having it at our disposal affords us the ability to perform intellectual tasks we couldn't do otherwise, or frees up our time which would otherwise be wasted on time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks. Or maybe it'll turn all our brains to mush. At this point I think it's too soon to say, and I'm not yet at the point of wanting to wage Butlerian jihad.
And to return to my previous point: the advent of weaponry did result in us becoming physically weaker than chimpanzees. But I kind of - don't care? Doesn't seem like that big a deal in the scheme of things.
FtttG
10hr ago
I think that level of imprecision is pretty darn normal when describing preferences.
Is it, though?
- Vegetarian: a person who does not eat meat.
- Vegan: a person who does not consume animal products.
- Pescatarian: a person who doesn't eat meat, but does eat fish and seafood.
All of these concepts are simple enough that a child can understand them. They get misused by people for stolen valour reasons, but that's not to say the concepts themselves are imprecise.
I don't think it's impossible, but the people who object to the process remind me of King Canute. Plant your stick in the ground and say you'll have no part in it if you must: the great tide of technological progress will sweep on just fine without you.
Perhaps in the far future there will be people who have been dependent on external software peripherals for so long (generations of them, in fact) that their native pain receptors have atrophied to the point of disuse, like the appendix. Maybe we'll find that the concept of "pain as a warning to avoid injury and death" has been wholly consigned to the dustheap of history. Would that be bad? Sure. But in a list of things that make me unnerved when thinking about fates that might befall humanity in the distant future, it wouldn't crack the top ten, probably not even the top fifty. I'm far more worried about e.g. humanity signing over our ability to feel anything for the sake of economic progress than merely our ability to feel pain, especially when the threats that pain evolved to protect us against (predators, fire, poisonous food etc.) are becoming increasingly irrelevant for humanity in general and for Westerners in particular.
FtttG
10hr ago
I only had them for the first time last year. The first time I had them I think they'd been frozen and weren't particularly nice, but earlier this year I had fresh ones. With some lemon juice and red onion (or alternatively, tabasco), I thought they were delicious.
But then it turns out that when you offload vital cognitive function to this device, the brain never develops them itself, so now every child grows into an adult dependent on this device for life.
Funnily enough, I finally got around to reading The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich after reading Scott's review of it ~7 years ago. I'm only about 70 pages in, but Henrich has already clearly elucidated that this pattern you're describing (of humans becoming frail and atrophied in some domain because of our life-or-death dependence on technological interventions) is also known as "the history of the human species" or perhaps even "the very thing that makes us human"*. Apes and chimpanzees might scoff at us feeble humans: how we have to cook our food before eating it instead of consuming it raw, how we always lose against them in unarmed fights (even fights between a burly adult male human and a juvenile chimp). Who cares what they think? We took over the planet, not them. In the distant future, who's more likely to colonise the solar system: the humans who stubbornly insist on hanging on to their pain receptors in spite of the fact that they've never laid eyes on a rusty nail in their entire lives; or the humans who've outsourced that cognitive module to an external gadget, and can hence devote that extra processing power to optimising their local Dyson sphere? Trick question: the former group won't even exist, having been ruthlessly outcompeted by the latter, just as the proto-humans who weren't onboard with this whole "applying heat to raw meat before eating it" thing got outcompeted by those who were.
*Reading it is making me even more contemptuous of Luddites than I was before. If, as Ted Kacsynski would have us believe, the industrial revolution was a disaster for the human race, why stop at 1750? Technological developments and our reliance on increasingly complex tools have been changing who we are, at a cellular, neural level, for as long as the human race has existed.
Point taken, but the transhumanists will reasonably interject how contingent so much suffering is. They're entirely correct to note that technological solutions (vaccines, cochlear implants, glasses etc.) have largely obviated forms of suffering which affected vast swathes of the population even a few generations ago, and that it is reasonable to expect this trend to continue. Pain as a stimulus warning you off doing something which will injure or kill you is a relatively elegant evolutionary mechanism, but the modern WEIRD context in which the rate of premature violent death has plummeted to negligible levels really brings home how much of a hack it is in absolute terms (e.g. people who are bedridden for years because of chronic idiopathic back pain). It's not much of a reach to imagine how these particular kinds of suffering could be wholly negated in the near future. Your example about children afflicted with chronic insensitivity to pain and inadvertently gnawing off their own fingers is entirely valid, but it isn't remotely difficult to imagine a future in which small children are given e.g. brain implants so that they intuitively understand that they oughtn't do this without needing the pain stimulus.
FtttG
12hr ago
I know that strictly speaking "pescatarian" means "eats fish", but most people colloquially use it to mean "I don't eat meat but I do eat fish and other kinds of seafood", which would include oysters and caviar. If someone describes himself as pescatarian, without further disambiguation I think it's reasonable to assume I can offer him prawn curry for dinner.
giving my full dietary philosophy would be more about signaling and self aggrandizement than anything useful to them.
Along these lines, I once wrote an article expressing my distaste for terms like "flexitarian".
FtttG
15hr ago
FtttG
15hr ago
Never heard of it before, fair enough. To be pedantic, I'd rather "ostrotarian", as mussels and oysters seem unambiguously "meat" or "meat-like" in a way that honey, dairy or eggs obviously aren't.
A few years ago I coined the terms "trans-vegetarian" and "trans-vegan" for people who aren't vegetarian or vegan, but identify as such.
FtttG
16hr ago
although many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey
If you eat oysters, I don't even consider you vegetarian, never mind vegan. You're pescatarian, surely.
FtttG
16hr ago
On this topic, I have an (admittedly pedantic) pet peeve. The pro-vegan, animal rights movement often use the phrase "cruelty-free", referring to cruelty-free diets, cruelty-free lifestyles, cruelty-freee products etc. The idea is that anyone who eats meat or uses cosmetic products which were tested on animals is therefore complicit in cruelty, unlike people who don't do these things.
I accept that people living plant-based diets are complicit in less cruelty than people who eat meat. But they are not living cruelty-free lives: the amount of cruelty in which they are complicit is far from zero. Agricultural farmers still have to clear land to grow crops, which means exterminating the vermin occupying said land. (Maybe I've just reinvented the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" meme.)
When I was a kid I saw this funny ad. It shows this monk with a shaved head and flowing red robes (Buddhist or Shinto or something - I don't know, and I assume the creators of the ad didn't know either), who's a friend to all living creatures. He's walking home when he spots a ladybird on the pavement that he almost steps on - so he leans over to delicately pick it up and place it gently on the grass next to the pavement. Then when he gets home he's sitting on the toilet, and while he's going about his business he picks up the bottle of bleach next to it and reads that it kills 99.9% of bacteria in his toilet. With mounting horror, he realises the genocide he's unwittingly caused every time he squirts bleach down his toilet.
Funny ad, clever concept. But it got me thinking - where do you draw the line in determining which animals' welfare to care about? Are bacteria animals? If we're meant to avoid eating honey because it causes bees to suffer more than they otherwise would have, why not bacteria? Are antibiotics genocide?
(Also I know this is mean, but ever since I found out Bentham's Bulldog looks like this I've been unconsciously discounting his opinions in my head slightly.)
FtttG
2d ago
(Presumedly) white men really not beating the allegations!
It was game over as soon as I watched Mulan.
I'm very chuffed, but I find myself chagrined by the fact that the number of people I know IRL I can boast about this to round up to zero.
I know the feeling all too well.
- My latest post was restacked by this woman who applies data science principles to online dating. Kind of like a less overtly titillating Aella, and, in my view, far more physically attractive. I was flattered.
- It was also restacked by Sarah Haider, whose name I vaguely recalled seeing previously and who has her own Wikipedia page, which is cool.
- "Contra deBoer on transgender issues" was shared by Helen Joyce, I think it was shared by Eliza Mondegreen in a paid subscriber-only links roundup (she definitely liked it), and also liked by TracingWoodgrains and Freya India.
- Freddie deBoer commenced one of his duh-of-course-I-support-trans-rights articles by quoting a comment I'd posted on one of his previous articles and ostentatiously announcing how "profoundly uncompelling" he found said comment, in a tone which to me strongly suggested he doth protest too much.
The only way I could be more pleased is if it caught Scott's eye
I shared my latest post on the Slate Star Codex subreddit, and Scott showed up in the comments to complain about how I'd characterised him in the article. I dutifully apologised and rephrased the offending passage. In the list of things that made me feel ashamed of myself this year, this was in the top five.
The difference being that, in your examples, the claimed reason for doing X really exists, and continues to exist even in the absence of the evolutionary "goal" to which it is directed. It's true that tasty food tastes good; it's true that orgasms feel good. Lots of tasty food is lacking in nutritional value, and lots of things can result in orgasm even though there is no chance of procreation resulting. People can and do consume tasty food just because it tastes good, paying no mind to the nutritional content thereof; people can and do pursue orgasm just because they feel good, paying no mind to whether or not reproduction ensues as a result.
But the assertion "I dress up for myself" directly implies that dressing up would be equally enjoyable regardless of whether one has an audience or not. But if dressing up only feels good if you have an audience, then the claimed reason for doing X is simply untrue. Unlike the obesity crisis and porn addiction, there is no widespread societal epidemic of people spending thousands on clothes and makeup just so they can sit at home "feeling good" in their fancy clothes and makeup (obviously being an aspiring camgirl or influencer doesn't count: a virtual audience is still an audience). The audience is a necessary component to the activity in question feeling good: ergo, the claims to be dressing up "for myself" are an obvious post hoc rationalisation to rebut accusations of narcissism or attention-seeking, in a memetic environment in which women explicitly admitting to putting stock in or deriving positive feelings from male attention is seen as déclassé.
By way of analogy, if everyone who claimed to be eating food "just for the taste" incidentally happened to be consuming a varied, balanced, nutrient-rich diet and expressed no interest in consuming tasty food with little nutritional value - it would be reasonable to discount their claims that this was their real motivation. Likewise if every male person who claimed to be pursuing orgasm purely for its own sake incidentally happened to only engage in sex acts which were likely to result in procreation (i.e. unprotected vaginal intercourse with nubile fertile ovulating females) and expressed no interest in pleasurable sex acts with little likelihood of procreation resulting. Or moreover, the counterfactual world in which food only tastes good if it's rich in nutrients and tastes disgusting otherwise; or in which orgasms only feel good if they are likely to result in procreation, and feel uncomfortable or painful otherwise.
It sounds like you're just rephrasing @faceh's point in different words. I don't see how "evolution gave us a brain that feels good when a person looks attractive when they have an audience, but not when they don't have an audience" is a meaningfully different assertion from "any woman who claims she dresses up 'for herself' is full of shit". Surely if dressing up feels good if and only if you have an audience, that logically implies that no one is really dressing up "for themselves".
FtttG
3d ago
Because if it felt good to be sexy even in the absence of an audience, women would dress exactly the same way while lounging around at home as they do when out in public. No woman spends an hour applying makeup just so she can rot in bed watching Netflix, ergo the audience (whether male, female or both) must be a necessary ingredient in the cocktail.
Dunno, didn't grow up there and don't live there. Funnily enough I have a feeling that The Matrix Revolutions was the last film I bought on VHS before the transition to DVD was completed.
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