Biblical Monsters, Capitalism and End of Life
I decided not to renew my subscriptions to the New York Times and the New Yorker, to see what happens. To avoid getting stuck in my reading habits and find new leads.
So lately, I've felt a bit lost at certain key moments when I usually reach for my phone. (Lunch break: check. Long bathroom break: check. Before bed: check.) A bit like when I quit Facebook & Co: what did I do before? What did I read before my phone ate up my whole life?
I thought about signing up for free newsletters. Haven't found anything convincing yet.
And then, by chance, I hit a gold mine.
I came across (through this Lex Fridman podcast) this incredible article: Meditations on Moloch.
Moloch is a biblical monster Allen Ginsberg used in a famous poem (in English here, in French there, it starts in the second part) to describe what's wrong with the world. Many people think he's describing capitalism, but that's the point: in Meditations on Moloch, the author takes the poem apart and shows that something much darker is hiding in it.
Moloch is the race to the bottom everyone is forced to join even when they know it's bad for everyone. It's having to give up deeply human values to gain competitive advantages, because you'll fall behind if you don't do what everyone else does. It's the force that pushes toward survival ("the subsistence level", he calls it) rather than living, and that, once this temporary period of abundance is over, will enslave us all.
And in this very long, extremely well-written article, packed with examples and references, he lays out a thoroughly Lovecraftian view of the world, in which humans are at the mercy of ancient monsters fighting one another. And one of them, the one that's probably winning: Moloch.
It made me think about human nature, about our times and about what's coming, especially in terms of energy contraction as Artificial Intelligence arrives – one of the monsters that could work for us or against us.
The article grabbed me so hard that I went poking around. The author goes by Scott Alexander, he's a psychiatrist by trade and... he has written reams and reams. Hundreds of posts. I read three or four at random and was blown away by the detail, the intelligence, the originality.
For example, if you have a strong stomach and really want to face the fact that you're mortal, you can read Who by very slow decay, about how doctors deal with the end of life. It's a bit like How doctors die, which I wrote about a long time ago and which he mentions. (The coincidence that made me click: "Who by very slow decay" is a line from the Leonard Cohen song "Who by Fire", which I discovered last week.)
Even better: his blog has a list as long as your arm of links to other writers whose blogs are just as rich: economics, science, rationality, etc... All geeky subjects I'm into. And his hobbyhorse, the thread running through his articles, is effective altruism, which he explains extremely well.
Moral: clear things out to make room for the new.