The Fractal Apocalypse
Once in a while, someone will make an apocalyptic observation without realising how much worse things can get. The quip below famously offered a follow-on to Marx’s take on religion, and one could easily respond “Watterson hadn’t seen anything yet” today while glancing at TikTok or Instagram or any other social media clout factory. Will each successive generation continue to develop ever more advanced opiates?
Here’s another example. Nietzsche famously wrote in 1882 that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. […] What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” He speaks, of course, to the loss of classical sense-making and the requirement for modern (to him) humanity to come up with something to replace it. Riffing on this following two world wars, Paul Van Den Bosch wrote in 1956 that “having opened our eyes on a disenchanted world, we are more than any others the children of the absurd. On certain days, the senselessness of the world weighs on us like a deformity. It seems to us that God has died of old age, and we exist without a goal. […] We are not embittered; we start from zero. We were born among the ruins.” In other words: Nietzsche was right but he was also wrong, cause God is now even deader than he thought was possible.
To make things even funnier, Van Den Bosch’s essay was brought to the attention of the Anglo-American philosophical world when Evola quote-tweeted him in 1961, adding (I humbly paraphrase) “we’ve now got boomers” (then kids and tweens – the Gen Alpha of Evola’s day) “and hippies, and these guys are really children of the absurd.” I don’t think many would argue if I were to gesture at the post-9/11, post-iPad, post-skibidi-toilet sense-making apparatus available to Zoomers and Gen Alpha, and say today that Evola hadn’t seen anything yet.
Many an orientalist white boy has looked Eastward from what remains of the West and said, “we should take inspiration from Asia then, where people still have respect for the public air and the inclination to work together towards a shared goal.” Well, not so fast: they’re not as far down the race track with the brick wall at the end, but they’re going the same way, and moving faster too. Japan, arguably furthest along in the development journey among Asian nations, is kinda… complete? Tokyo’s rail network more or less covers the whole lot, blanketing the city proper and extending well into the exurban outskirts. Fear of crime is effectively non-existent. Housing options are plentiful and supply easily meets demand, so much so that housing as an asset typically depreciates. This will likely continue to be the case as Tokyo’s population has only risen 6% or so since 2010, even falling in 2021. Anyone who’s willing to put in the effort is all but guaranteed a job that pays well enough (relative to the low cost of living) to support oneself. One could safely live on a budget of 40,000 yen (roughly $275) monthly in the cheaper parts of the metro area, well within the means of a full-time minimum wage worker. If you go so far as to get a college degree and shinsotsu into a salaried position, you will not only of course make more money but also be effectively protected (by a combination of law and social obligation) from ever being fired. And of course, the country faces no real military threat, on account of the fact that anyone who dares to lay a finger on Japan is signing up to be immediately glassed by the full force of Uncle Sam. The improvements that remain to be done are mostly incremental, like the maglev Chuo Shinkansen, delayed and delayed again by municipal politicking thinly disguised as “environment review”. As goes California, so goes the world.
The “hikikomori” phenomenon has been somewhat overstated by Western media, but even among the normies of Japan, there is definitely a detectable listlessness. I’ve met many a young man in Tokyo who doesn’t take life that seriously because he doesn’t have to, and isn’t given any reason to do otherwise. Who could blame him? Given the availability of easy jobs and cheap housing, he doesn’t even have to rely on taxpayers for support should his brilliant plan of partying full-time eventually collapse.
Consider also Singapore, thrust into the world in just 1965 with a righteous “we’ve got to get our act together or we’re fucked” attitude. She’s accomplished incredible feats of nation-building in a very short time, but why shouldn’t she suffer the same fate? Singapore has already firmly established herself as a business hub, perhaps the business hub, has built world-class infrastructure and also manages to support her middle class. Sure, the island has room to be developed (there’s a surprising amount of jungle and suburb that could yet be turned into skyscraper), but I think it’ll be sooner rather than later that Singapore realises she’s already near the asymptote of “completeness” and Singaporeans begin to start thinking to themselves “now what?” And so Singapore too will find herself no longer “having that dog in her”. The siege mentality rhetoric offered by her ruling class is becoming harder to justify. Singapore’s only real enemy is entropy.
Make no mistake, today I’d still much rather be here (in Japan, where I live, or in Singapore, where I once did) than back in the States. But how long will it be before there’s no safe haven nation of sanity and competence for me to escape to?
In so many words, I see no reason such economies can’t continue to exist, economically stagnant and socially in decay, but good enough, as long as automation continues to progress and people keep having enough babies to fund the pensions.
“As long as people keep having enough babies…” echoed the familiar words. Don’t worry, much as I enjoy the presence of children in society, this is not a pro-natalist screed. What good would it do anyway? Yes, it’s a mathematical certainty that continued fertility below the replacement rate will, eventually, result in the cessation of humanity, but it would take a few hundred years to whittle 8 billion down to zero, which is a long enough time that Something might happen which could reinvigorate human reproduction. Even economic collapse due to demographic trouble is, I would say, unlikely to occur within our lifetimes. Humans are resourceful, and we’ll do a lot before we let a whole economy fall apart just because of some silly pensions. In a nutshell, the whimper-not-bang end to human life is far enough away and uncertain enough to occur that it’s utterly unmotivating as a call to action. Even if you, dear reader, for some reason find yourself inspired to solve this, it unfortunately takes two to tango in this world, so what are you going to do? Say “hey girl, this schizo internet guy Simon said if we don’t start having babies, the Japanese economy might collapse in 100 years. Can I wife you up?” Good luck with that.
People don’t have babies to save the world. They did it because it made social sense, and there’s dwindling social sense going around left to make. You’re free of course to be a “pro-natalist” in this world, but to me it’s tantamount to being a pro-waterist in Death Valley. I’d like to have kids because I like kids and it seems fun, but I can’t pretend that dumping water into the desert will form a self-sustaining lake.
I do see one source of hope, but to call it a double-edged sword would be a considerable understatement. AI could be an inflection point. Nietzsche said we had to become gods and that is what we have done. I know many people who’ve found purpose in awakening the machine (I was, once upon a time, among them), but after that, what? I see a possible future where we leave manual labour and most white-collar drudgery to the AIs, freeing up man-hours and woman-hours to focus on the things that we once found meaning in – raising healthy families, guiding societies to greatness, and overall furthering the human journey. I see another possible future where AI becomes both a devourer of meaning and a Huxleyesque opiate such as Marx and Nietzsche could not have ever dreamed. I imagine near-to-death Boomers hooked up to 24/7 AI Fox News, servings of dopamine delivered straight to their brains via Neuralink each time they raise their arms in amen for another segment of Shrimp Jesus Takes On The Wokes. Meanwhile in the Skinner box next door, an iPad Baby of Gen Alpha, now in his twenties, is entering his 37th consecutive day of gooning to Hentai Cocomelon.
I could make this out as a warning to the AI people to take the good path rather than the bad one, but I don’t think that will do much good either. The inventors of the trebuchet and the internet had no say in how it would later be used. Really, it’s up to us. If we pay into the slop machinery, and let our friends and relatives do the same, no doubt slop is what we’ll get. This is one of the few areas where individual action can actually shield us somewhat even when the rest of the world has gone insane, and it’s why I don’t have any time-wasting apps on my phone besides X-formerly-Twitter, which I try to treat as a write-only medium as much as possible. Simply do not stare into the abyss. Simply do not get the Neuralink. Simply do not allow yourself to be riled up by engagement-bait slop. At the very least, your life will be improved, and in the best case scenario, enough people publicly rejecting the psyop will encourage others to do the same. If social diseases can spread mimetically, so can social cures.
Realistically, we’ll likely land somewhere between the two extremes of good and bad end of AI, which is itself a somewhat dismal prediction, because it’ll be awfully disappointing if something as huge as AI rolls through and we find that Nothing Ever Happens, thus we continue shambling towards managed suicide, driven by nothing more scandalous than boredom. On the bright side, if someone is able to quote this 50 years from now and add “Simon hadn’t seen anything yet,” it’ll at least be really funny.