big tasteslop piece in the times uk

Really looking forward to sharing more about the creative process over the next few weeks.

Holy heck I can visualize twitter threads with treeverse.app

Adorno had a nice critique of modern Nietzscheanism which basically goes that whereas amoral/master-moral hierarchicalism before capitalism had “solved” scarcity was pretty cool and rebellious and emancipatory or whatever – after all we weren’t producing enough goods and services to go around – in subsequent relative abundance it took a provincial form: there now kinda was enough for everybody, so “you REALLY need to be taking things from the weak” stopped being a convincing proposal for the sound-minded, and relegated to treating the insecurities of the resentful social underbelly “having its moment” with a chip on its shoulder (think MAGA) (which naturally turns the whole thing upside down). I guess that does a somewhat good job of condensing why the various Nietzschean new-rights have been unpalatable for many sensibilities which have no issue with the original canon, but it does an even better job of condensing why the new-breed pairing of techno-optimism and Nietzscheanism in Karpian/Elonian/Landian/etc fashion is doubly unpalatable. These carry the inversion to the actual limit – first positing that we’re headed for literal unqualified aligned-AI-tier post-scarcity, and then conditioned on that still laundering this obsession with hierarchy that most will find inexplicable. Things like “oh well we might not be at war with China right now but it’s sure coming so you better form ranks;” “oh well we don’t really need any more houses so we’ll just buy galaxies instead;” “oh well Iran might not have a nuke but we best get ahead of it now..” all rub people the wrong way for roughly the same set of reasons and I think much less of it (than criticized) is that we’ve developed some civilizational blind spot out of docility to life’s harsh realities and much more of it is that either (a) realities are just not as harsh as you want them to be and consensus has appropriately priced this or (b) you’re explicitly positing those realities for which you’re prescribing hierarchy to be maximally non-harsh, and people generally don’t tolerate hierarchy when it’s explicitly not needed, as a fetish.