Media Madness: anarchism

Monday, October 10, 2022

Nina Bytes: Any Fool Will Do

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

Understanding "longtermism": Why this suddenly influential philosophy is so toxic

In a number of recent posts, I've found myself talking about billionaires, ideology, and the mainstream rise of overt fascism in the Pig Empire. Today in Nina-Bytes then, I'd like to take a moment to look at this critically important August 2022 essay on Salon about the latest nightmare ideological fad for billionaire fascists and disillusioned neoliberals; longtermism. Just what is longtermism? Let's ask philosopher and historian Émile P. Torres, the author of this article:

"Longtermism is a quasi-religious worldview, influenced by transhumanism and utilitarian ethics, which asserts that there could be so many digital people living in vast computer simulations millions or billions of years in the future that one of our most important moral obligations today is to take actions that ensure as many of these digital people come into existence as possible. In practical terms, that means we must do whatever it takes to survive long enough to colonize space, convert planets into giant computer simulations and create unfathomable numbers of simulated beings."

At first glance, it may not be entirely clear to the casual observer why longtermism is in fact such a dangerous, and reactionary ideology. That is of course until you start asking who exactly these folks mean by "we" and what they're implying when they say "whatever it takes." Hint: we is more or less rich and powerful people, while whatever it takes pretty much consists of sacrificing the poor, and quite possibly the planet. After all, even billions of poor people probably aren't going to build super intelligent artificial minds that will "evolve" the human species and take "us" to Mars, or something.

In case my sarcasm doesn't make it clear, the plain truth is that I don't believe what so-called longtermists claim to believe matters at all. Rather, I think what matters is that longtermism is another ruling class word salad ideology designed to justify mass murder in order to maintain capitalism in the face of a dying planet; like neoliberalism before it, or eco-fascism today. Marketing murder for profit as an ideology takes all kinds of sales pitches, for all sorts of people, and ruling class billionaire freaks are no different.

At its root this longtermism is merely a mash up of fascism, futurism, and a little bit of neoliberalism for flavoring; and all three of those reactionary headcages have at least one key commonality - the idea that some deserve to live and rule, while some deserve to serve and die. Of course, adherents and acolytes will howl that the difference lies in how those decisions are made and who ends up in what bucket, but I think you'll find that whether the culling is based on racial animus, economic class, or a fake meritocracy, the end result of who lives in luxury, and who dies in bondage, doesn't really change much.

In other words the rise of ruling-class interest in both longtermism, and fascism in the Pig Empire, are intertwined phenomenon. They represent some, but not all, of the capitalist class's response to the objective reality that climate catastrophe cannot be stopped without ending capitalism. The capitalists, who possess outsized power in our society, have made their choice already, and now they're casting about for justifications and mechanisms to ensure billionaire reactionaries, not liberal democracies full of people, survive the coming apocalypse.

So what is longtermism? Another excuse to genocide poor people for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what greedbag monsters and fascist killers tell themselves to fall asleep at night. What matters is that we stop them before they kill billions.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst.

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

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“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Film Sessions: Oligarchs will let the world burn by Thought Slime (New)

Editor's note: well, it's been an interesting past couple of days for me to say the least; if you're wondering why I'm not on Twitter, please check out my latest article on ninaillingworth.com - have yourself a merry Christmas indeed. In light of the week I've been having and the fact that we're all still living through a nightmare, neofeudalist, Captain Trips holiday season, I thought I'd pick a video for this week's film session that is both viscerally satisfying and not particularly taxing on the memory banks; hopefully you enjoy this one as much as I did.

Well, despite the fact that I’m having one of the crappier weeks of my professional life, I have managed to continue picking my way through left wing YouTube channels and video creators in the middle of all the chaos. In today’s film session, I’m going to highlight a sixteen minute feature on a channel called Thought Slime. The creator behind Thought Slime first came to my attention when I was researching an article about fascism and looking for reliable citations about the crypto-fascist street gang, the Proud Boys. Although I only ended up using that video for a couple of citations, I remembered this person’s excellent (if perhaps a bit stripped down) work, and decided to check out their channel when I was poking around for more content to familiarize myself and my audience with.

Although I really don’t know that much about this creator that you can’t find on their Wikitubia page, and I must admit the delivery is at times a little dramatic, this video appealed to me because it opens by focusing on an area I’ve studied and one of the more inexplicably monstrous decisions by established American power in living memory – the wholly unnecessary bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the closing phases of World War II; conducted primarily for the purposes of intimidating the Soviet Union and opening up the era of “mutually assured destruction” in what we know today as The Cold War.

Much to my delight however, it turns out this was only the beginning of the discussion and the focus of the video is actually an issue I write about constantly, even though it seems to alienate many of the folks around me – the fact that rich people are absolutely fine with killing every last one of us for pennies on the dollar, while trying to enact out unhinged Lex Luthor-esque fantasies about running to Mars, rather than surrender one single iota of power, influence or ability to exploit their fellow man for profit. On this issue, Thought Slime and I could not be more in agreement (which perhaps makes sense, since we’re both apparently anarchists) and it is refreshing to find someone, anyone else, willing to say this out loud; I am absolutely chuffed about the mere existence of this video.

In addition to World Wars and nuclear annihilation, Thought Slime also touches on the fossil fuel industry, a coronavirus response that looks like eugenics and how the election of Donald Trump caused them to question fundamental assumptions about how the world works, eventually leading our host to anarchism (and me to a couple more Youtube creators to add to my “check em out” list.) The end result is a highly entertaining attack on rule by elites, the power of the state and Piers Morgan eating something called a “Santa’s Yum Nut” - and for a sixteen minute video that also features a brief side discussion about Indigenous Christian Anarchism in Taiwan, that’s probably the most you can hope for.

If I do have one quibble however, it’s that Thought Slime clearly uses “the state” and “elite rule” to mean precisely the same things and that’s a fine rhetorical position to adopt, but probably could have been explained better to an audience that is unlikely to have read most of the books on the wonderful reading list the creator shows at 8:11. Naturally, as an anarcho-syndicalist myself, I’m not looking to eliminate the state so much as eliminate the difference between state power and people power – in essence, through an aggressively participatory democracy, to make the common people, into the state itself. Obviously however Thought Slime and I both clearly agree that elite rule has gotta go and thus, I had no real problem with how they were using the terms interchangeably – and including my favorite Rudolf Rocker book on the reading list certainly warmed my heart to see.