Fascism and Nerdvana
Last Updated on Sunday, 18 January 2009 07:48 Written by Brian! Sunday, 18 January 2009 06:14
A core of occultism ran straight through the Nazi movement. It only makes sense: fascism all but requires an abundance of magical thinking as there’s no other way to justify absolute rule by a “chosen” sub-group. See also: monarchies and divine right.
There’s a line of argument that says Vril: The Power of the Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton was among the occult influences on the Nazi Party. I don’t pretend to know Lytton’s mind, but it seems unlikely he was any kind of Nazi sympathizer or particularly embraced their ideas about racial superiority (at least no further than your average rich, white, 19th century European man). I mean, he died long before the political movement began. But, like Nietzsche, Lytton wrote down ideas that would have an unfortunate resonance with a certain kind of desperate maniac several decades later.
The short version of the book: there is an ancient utopian society under the Earth made up of superwise beings, the Vril-ya, who possess advanced technology to access an esoteric energy source, Vril, which allows them to manipulate reality by thought alone. It is posited that, eventually, the Vril-ya will run out of places to live underground and spill into the surface where mankind will have to make room or be obliterated. Or, more accurately, humanity will make room by being obliterated, as the Vril-ya don’t need the permission of a lesser race to expand their territory. The funny thing about this book is that it’s an early piece of science fiction; so early, in fact, that the genre’s tropes were not yet well enough understood by readers for them to identify it as fiction. Yes, a great many people took this thing seriously. If that seems silly, let’s remember that people ran screaming from early movie theaters when a train was shown zooming toward the camera; or that many people took Orson Wells’ famed War of the Worlds broadcast to be true. An audience is less able to identify fact from fiction when a new medium’s tropes are not yet fully grasped or developed. See also: early reactions to lonelygirl15; any internet rumor, lie, or April Fools joke you’ve ever fallen for; and some ARGs.
So, the growing Nazi movement had a rabid hunger to justify their unjustifiable ideas about their racial superiority and their destiny to rule the world. Is it any wonder that a book, widely regarded as true, about a race of supermen who are destined to rule the world through the superiority of their heritage, which also makes vague reference that this superior race counts Aryans among its ancestors (and, even further back, frogs, but shhhhh), appealed to elements within the Nazi movement? I mean, the Vril-ya will literally take over the world in the name of “lebensraum” — “living room” or “breathing space”. What better fairy tale could the Nazis have asked for?
Something about the Vril-ya hit me earlier today. They’re a precursor of The Singularity. It’s almost as hard to nail down a definition of the Singularity as it is post-modernism, but I like how this describes it:
…the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue. -John von Neumann
Now, exactly how, when, and why the Singularity is supposed to happen differs about a dozen different ways for each definition. But the basic idea is that we will be able to design a machine that is more intelligent than any human could ever be, if only by a little bit. This machine will then be clever enough to make itself (and/or new machines) far more intelligent than we could ever make them. This process will go on and on until the machines reach some kind of maximum saturation beyond which no further innovation can increase intelligence per millimeter of processing strata due to sheer limits of the laws of physics, at which point it will become necessary to transform more and more matter (the Earth, Solar System, galaxy, universe) into processing material to achieve greater intelligence. Even within this one schema of the Singularity there’s differing opinions over how long each phase would take or if some of them could ever be achievable.
In any event, you don’t see “humans” mentioned in the events listed above. I mean, it sounds pretty cool for the machines, but what does the Singularity do with people? There are those who claim the Terminator scenario. You know, the machines will advance to the point where they want to get kill us. It makes for a fun plot, but I’ve always found that a little too pat to actually play out. We’re projecting a particular habit of our own, i.e. resources and killing things to keep them, onto beings without the billions of years of evolutionary baggage that gave us that habit. A counter-argument to the Terminator scenario is that it will not make sense to differentiate humans from machines. That is to say, we will already be incorporating machines into our bodies, so by the time the machine intelligences advance beyond our own, they will already be a part of us and we will advance together. In this scenario, it is likely that there will be those individuals who do not wish to incorporate machines into their bodies, or who wish to do so to a lesser degree than that which will augment their intelligences. These people will be at the mercy of the superintelligent the same way an ant hill is at the mercy of anyone who walks by it.
The narrative of the the Singularity is the same as the Vril-ya: the “lesser races” are obliterated by the superior technology of an “advanced race” exercising its “right” to breathing room. So, is nerd heaven a fascist intelligentsia dressed up in sci-fi clothes?
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Most of the utopia narratives I’ve heard will usually have those who don’t feel like integrating go off into the wilderness to find their own path, turning “normal humans” into Jeffersonian frontiersman. There’d be freedom of choice over whether a person wants to be part of the grand computer commune or if they want to do something else. That, to me, does not imply facism, because no one would be forcibly assimilated or discriminated against.
In direct contrast, I'm way to optimistic to think that we'll all die out in the next century or so. I'm not sure what my nerd heaven consists of, but it definetly consists of sci-fi clothes. I like the Terminator scenario and a more utopic idea of the future… it basically all depends on how well the stuff is written. I've got a list of 5 things that are virtually guaranteed to get me to enjoy something, and they are:
1. Robots (and cyborgs/androids)
2. Aliens
3. Bears
4. Anthropomorphic animals
5. Dinosaurs
Sci-fi is full of all of that stuff, and I'll take whatever's coming my way, providing it is of a suitable standard. Humanity being there or not never really enters the equation.
Hmm… Robot Conquest is a little imperialist, when you think about it carefully… I'm still a proponent of the 'bio-android' scenario, though. We're pretty complex computers in and of ourselves, after all…
Plus, having an 'enemy' you can't really tell apart from everyone else is much more fun, narratively speaking.
From a reality standpoint, I'm too cynical to really see us developing a true AI, reaching the stars to colonize other worlds (which would make us the alien invaders at some point, anyway), or any of the other cool sci-fi stuff we thought was just a few years away in the 50s. Hell, I half-expect us to die out in the next century or two. Still, it's fun stuff to think about…
I'm not sure if my Future Glass is half full or half empty. But I know I wanted my personal fucking helicopter backpack at least five years ago.
The parallels that can be drawn between Vril-ya and the Singularity are very interesting, but not at all surprising. It's a repeating pattern of human imagination -almost like some part of us wants to come up with a way to wipe out the species, just because it's scary and exciting. So in that respect the two stories/theories are part of the same group fear and obsession.
I wonder if the Singularity will seem as silly as Vril-ya in 100 years?
I just know it's going to be fun drawing Vol.4.
You said:
"[...]the basic idea is that we will be able to design a machine that is more intelligent than any human could ever be, if only by a little bit. This machine will then be clever enough to make itself (and/or new machines) far more intelligent than we could ever make them. This process will go on and on until the machines reach some kind of maximum saturation beyond which no further innovation can increase intelligence per millimeter of processing strata due to sheer limits of the laws of physics, at which point it will become necessary to transform more and more matter (the Earth, Solar System, galaxy, universe) into processing material to achieve greater intelligence"[...]
What if… THAT was exactly what happened to us? I mean, what if we were created as a hand labor species by some otherworldly beings -gods, if you will- and in a really REALLY short time, we managed to get where we are.
Kinda reflects the Singularity theory you state here, no?
Okay, weird. There's a comment in the dashboard, but I can't get it to display here. I'll just edit it into this comment 'cause it brings up an interesting point I'd like to address.
John says:
"Most of the utopia narratives I've heard will usually have those who don't feel like integrating go off into the wilderness to find their own path, turning "normal humans" into Jeffersonian frontiersman. There'd be freedom of choice over whether a person wants to be part of the grand computer commune or if they want to do something else. That, to me, does not imply facism, because no one would be forcibly assimilated or discriminated against."
I agree that it would most likely be that way.
At first.
Of course, the very nature of what the Singularity is supposed to be means we can't really know how it'll go down. But, it seems reasonable to reflect upon the difference between human intelligence and that of the insect or microbial world to extrapolate potential scenarios. Let's look at the ant hill comparison again as I feel it's apt.
Let's say there's an ant hill in a playground. The ants may survive for generations undisturbed by the, relatively speaking, superintelligent and superpowered beings that exist within its universe.
But there will come a time when the ant hill is destroyed. The only question is, "How?" Some likely scenarios:
The ant hill is destroyed by a lawnmower. The superintelligent beings, exercising their right to remolding the universe to match their own aesthetic interests, destroy the ant hill without ever realizing it.
The ant hill is destroyed by an errant soccer ball or such like. A random side effect of supertechnology annihilates the ant hill. As above, it's not done with malice, but the ants are dead either way.
The ant hill is destroyed by an exterminator. The exterminator might not even have been meant for the ant hill; maybe he just happened to see it while going about other work. Regardless, his superweapons will be turned against it.
The ant hill is destroyed by a young man with a water hose. As above, only the ant hill is intentionally destroyed (with an otherwise innocent supertechnology) by an act of cruelty. Or, perhaps worse, boredom.
The basic message here is the further the intelligence of one species goes significantly beyond that of another, the latter becomes less and less real or meaningful for the interests of the former. You drink a glass of water condemning millions of microbes to an early grave just to sustain your continued existence. You do this and you don't care about them if you think about them at all. Yeah, at some point in the incredibly distant past your ancestors weren't all that different from the microbes, but you've come so far since then that it's absurd to believe there's any real connection.
Does a brain the size of a galaxy really care so much about a few microbes crawling around one tiny spec of a rock at its periphery that it would devote a nanosecond's thought to preserving them?
Even if we assume the post-Singularity superhumans to possess some kind of superintelligent nostalgia for its ancestry that can sustain benevolence over what amounts to a handful of germs, does that extend to other life in the universe? Or is that merely consumed, like microbes in a glass of water, as the physical matter of the universe is converted into more processing strata as a "superior" race exercising its self-proclaimed rights over a "lesser" race?
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure I buy the Singularity's premise. I mean, we always look back and laugh at people who grossly underestimate human ingenuity — like the idea that the sound barrier was unbreakable, but the Singularity really rests upon this incredible (and in my opinion unrealistically) optimistic appraisal of our ingenuity. The Singularity assumes that human ingenuity will always increase.
I remember when the common wisdom was that housing prices would always increase.
Oops.
But it goes further than that. It also assumes we'll find answers to questions we're not even sure we're asking correctly. There's even debate over whether the questions can actually be posed. Doubting whether or not you can go as fast as the speed of sound seems a lot more reasonable if you're not entirely sure what a "speed" is or if it can be made.
Maybe I'm just a sound barrier kind of guy — in this case intelligence barrier — but I think it's more likely our processor speeds will run into the laws of physics sooner rather than later.
But, hey, maybe I'll be proved wrong
Don't get me wrong; my mind [i]will[/i] stretch to the infinite when I look up at the sky… I'm just not sure that sci-fi scenarios will turn us into gods (which, far as I can tell, is what the sci-fi masters of the past century or so were promising). I love reading, watching, and thinking about sci-fi (which is why I have these stupid arguments ready to begin with), I just tend to take my fantasies in another direction.
Still… I do turn my mind to the thoughts of planetary colonization. Assuming we find a way to do it, what will happen to the people sent out? Faster-than-light travel is probably out of the question, as are most of the other classic ways sci-fi has us travel interstellar distances…
So we're talking generation ships. Now, what would these be like? Who would pay for them to be built? What kind of people would be sent off in them? How would their decendants be educated on the mission?
Personally, I think that the approach would be fairly imperialist in nature, meaning that the [i]very[/i] rich people who fund the construction of these devices would press-gang whatever inconvenient people they had to throw away into these floating death-trap machines. Then, of course, their decendants would be taught to throw away everything for the mission, meaning that they'd be taught how to deal with hostile lifeforms, how to die for the cause without thinking, and especially the crucial fact that they won't be able to go back to Earth, even if they wanted to.
Therefore, when the ship reaches its target planet (which is assuming both that the ship doesn't break down and that the planet is actually there and life-sustaining), the people on board will go out there and set up their colony, no matter what.
Now, what if that world had reached a level of technological sophistication similar to what we have now? Wouldn't that make [i]us[/i] the alien invaders?
Or just God Almighty immigrants.
Depends on the level of sophistication the society has reached, I suppose. At any rate, I highly doubt that the Prime Directive would ever really be considered if we managed to become an advanced spacefaring species…
I think the "bio-android" scenario is the most likely to occur. I seriously doubt we will ever build a pure computer that can think for itself. I think it's much more likely that science will allow us to tap more of our own brain power and in that way you will see an increase in intelligence.