Let’s have another thought-experiment.

Picture the Earth—our beautiful, blue, spinning globe. Take all the habitable land area and color it white—as a neutral background for our thought experiment.

Now, select the subset of this beautiful planet on which a sober, sensible, civilized person, such as Sam Altman, would consider it prudent and safe to wander, “on foot and alone,” carrying his iPad, at night. Leave that part white. Color the other part brown. Then, from the brown subset, select the further subset in which Sam Altman,
carrying his iPad, would not consider it prudent and safe to wander in the daytime. Color that part black. (Why can’t Google Maps do this?)

Then do the same for Sam Altman’s grandfather, in 1950, with his portable Smith-Corona. Then, repeat the exercise for 1900. (Part of the reason this is such a useful mental exercise, and unfortunately such a difficult one, is that it requires you to actually know what the world was like in 1950 or 1900. If your way of getting this information starts with statistical tables, ur doin it rong. There are these things called “books” which will help you out.)

If you perform this exercise accurately, or at least if you get the same results as me, you’ll see a 20C quite indistinguishable from Stage III melanoma. And this progress continues, to rousing applause and general self-congratulation, right up into our own dear official NYT approved 2013.

Realizing that something in the 20th-century model of governance, as taught by the best and brightest of Harvard, Stanford, the NYT and other fine institutions of papally infallible veracity, isn’t working out quite right, is indeed a step in the right direction. Everybody’s going to have their own particular beef. Mine, as we’ve seen, is that 75 years of this rigorously scientific system of government has reduced what was once America’s fourth-largest city to a demon-haunted slum—and while extreme, this outcome is anything but an exception.

How much more fun of a computer is an iPad than an Apple II? Is it 37.6 times more fun? Or 198.2 times more fun? Or even 547.9? It would seem clear, to anyone not a blithering idiot, that any process which claims to be able to derive any such number is retarded at best and may well constitute felony math abuse.

Not at all! The Bureau of Labor Statistics is, in fact, in possession of exactly this figure. Here’s how they do it. Since Apple was selling computers continuously from Apple II to iPad, we can look at the period when both the Apple II and Apple III were on sale, divide the list price of the Apple III by the Apple II; later, the Mac 512K by the Apple III, and so on until we reach the iPad. This process is called hedonic regression. It is thoroughly official—approved of by both Harvard and the US Government. So who’s the blithering idiot now?

If we are analyzing real governments in the real world, our financial analysis has to be rooted in political reality. The political reality is that “citizens” are not owners of their government, but rather assets—in other words, slaves. Our only hope is for a regime that’s more Thomas Jefferson and less Simon Legree. Fortunately, as we’ll see, this analysis aligns the financial interests of the State with our own interests as human beings.

What are the financial interests of the absolute State? To maximize the value of its productive assets. The State’s assets are (a) land and buildings, (b) equipment, and (c) human chattel. We understand how to value and manage (a) and (b) just fine. But most of its equity consists of (c)—an asset not really taught in most business schools.

There is another way to ask whether, excluding advances in technology (which do fall under (c), since technology is a human ability—but hard to monopolize), America is a more valuable nation in 2013 than it was in 1950. We can ask: is the average American a better human being than his or her ancestors of 1950? I.e.: has the USG cultivated its human capital, or wasted it?

...

The American of 2013 is much more likely to be a meth-head, a thug or ho, a worthless trustafarian slacker, etc., etc., etc. Especially when we look at non-elite ethnic subpopulations —“cracker” Scots-Irish, African Americans, etc.—I don’t think any serious person could really claim that the average American is superior as a human being to his grandparents.

What’s notable about this interpretation is that, again, your interests and your government’s are just about perfectly aligned. You don’t want to be a heroin addict. Washington doesn’t want its slaves to be heroin addicts. You want to be a better person—more informed, more reliable, more capable. As a better person, you are a better and more valuable capital asset. You augment your government’s market cap. Back to Sam Altman:

"Most of us want our lives to get better every year—the hedonic treadmill is a pain that way."

As “hedonic” implies, “better” means “more fun.”

...

Most of us want to become better people every year. We’re pretty confident, perhaps falsely, that this will lead to more hedonic rewards in the long run or at least has the best chance of doing so. But this isn’t the goal. The goal, believe it or not, is to become better people. And ideally our children will be even better than us. So again—the market cap goes up.


Everything I’m saying here (including the economics) was said by Carlyle more than 150 years ago, notably in Chartism. The apotheosis of the hedonic principle is the immortal Pig-Philosophy. Briefly, Carlyle tells us, the difference between man and beast is that maximization of hedonic utility is always and everywhere the method of a beast. Not coincidentally, it is also the method of a toddler.

Work? Who the hell wants to work? Work is anti-hedonic by definition. If it didn’t have negative utility, it wouldn’t be work. So,
it’s supposed to be a problem that in the future, work will be obsolete, and we’ll be able to produce goods and services without any human labor at all? That doesn’t sound like a problem to me. It sounds like a victory.

The problem ... is that we’ve already tried [this], quite extensively. You see [it] every time you go to the grocery store. Next to the button marked “Debit/Credit” is one marked “EBT.” Ever pressed that one? Even just by mistake? America has entire cities that have moved beyond antihedonic labor disutility and entered this gleaming future. One of them is called “Detroit.”

[This] is not the culmination of human civilization, it turns out, but its destruction. Even in terms of mere Pig-Philosophy, it is destructive, because it ruins a human asset. If we appraise humans as robots, we see that this is a special kind of robot: it rusts up if not continually operating. As beasts, we are beasts who evolved to work. Our species achieved world domination as a result of our capacity for work. To feed and entertain a human being, without requiring productive effort or at least some simulation of it, is in the end just a way to destroy him.

My idea of [a] solution ... involves targeted technology controls designed to create market demand for the type of unskilled human laborers that modern industry has made obsolete, but that we are politically unwilling to kill and sell as organ meat. Being so unwilling, we have no choice but to provide these people with a way to survive as human beings—preferably as human as possible.

For instance, two forms of semi-skilled labor well-known to be good for the human soul are (a) craftsmanship and (b) farming. Compared to the demand for these professions that once existed, both have been essentially eradicated. How many meth-heads, thugz, etc., are there in America whose great-great-grandparents were craftsmen, farmers, or both?

Consider one targeted technology restriction: no plastic toys. If my children are going to have toys, these toys will be made from wood, with hand tools, by Americans, in America.

Results: (a) negative financial impact on parents who need to buy toys for their children, and might have to increase their toy budgets; (b) negative hedonic impact on children, whose toy bins are no longer filled with brightly colored Chinese plastic crap; (c) negative economic impact on China, which is not our country, so who cares; (d) gigantic economic boom in the American wooden toy industry, providing employment to any fool who can whittle.

How can anyone contemplating these outcomes not agree with me that (d) considerably outweighs the sum of (a), (b) and (c)? Or take agricultural labor, for which an arbitrary level of demand can be created simply by banning industrial farming techniques. Every ghetto rat in America today could find employment as an organic slow-food artisan. Crap—even a 10th Street zombie can milk cows. We’d have to pay them for their work, of course. We already pay them for not working. Is this better for us? For them? WTF, America?

It’s important to remember that the most iconic dystopian fiction is not a vision of the future or an insight into the darkest tendencies of human nature.

The most iconic dystopian fictions are specifically insights into the nature of the British.

Orwell was not painting a vision of the future, he was opening a window into the minds and hearts of the British. Perhaps not all British people are this way, but enough of them are and enough of them have clawed their way onto the fulcrums of institution that they stomp upon the face of their kinsmen until they can all down in misery together.

Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is one of the most enlightening pieces of media and arguably the greatest depiction of proper dystopia through the lens of actual relevant sourcing: British culture and governance. In Brazil you very clearly see a society that instills a tyranny of convolution upon its populace. Everyone drowns in tubes and wires. Bureaucracy stretches out onto an exponential infinite dimension of torturous agony. The film culminates in the highest ideal a British person strives for in life, which is to torture a friend viciously for the sin of having transgressed an absurd law.

It was always laughable that high school teachers and armchair midwit philosophers would dangle the likes of 1984 in front of us as some cautionary warning against something that could ever happen to us. The truth is that while a police surveillance state or oppressive dictatorship is always a very real possibility, the excessive horror of that existence is not really something that’s universally applicable. It is nightmare that the British distinctly occupy. A cruelty that excessively morose is exclusive to certain specific societies, one in which drab misery was always present. The Russians are a good example as well, their Bolshevik communist hellscape could only have been facilitated by a people already used to trampling upon each others existence through a history of harsh cruelty. Most dystopias have generous pockets of humanity to give reprieve from the cruelties of the state, which are mostly done logistically without excessive need to crush humanity

The UK is unique in this tendency. Their cold shitty damp swamp origins fostered a brutish people who have developed an attraction to suffering, a hunger for it, a need to crush their fellow man in order to feel any sense of fulfillment. The most autonomous and independent of their ranks left for the new world or some other colony. Britain’s best always choose to leave that damp shithole, despising the ravenous maw of chattering busybodies and chastising hags who will scurry away from stab happy Africans to hone in on random natives and harass them for the sake of existing.

This is why they were so prodigious an empire. They wanted to be anywhere else but home. It’s why the mutiny on the HMS Bounty occurred, the prospect of returning to London was a promise of entering hell itself. The fascinating combination of ignorance mixed with fictional-factual toned smugness makes the English nanny drones particularly tantalizing for hate. They are so specifically programmed for crushing their fellow man that it’s not enough to simply gawk at them and dismiss them. You want to actually go to England and beat them thoroughly with large iron rods. You want to reprogram their brains via a gun pressed into their mouth as tears stream down their face. Theirs a worldview so abhorrent to all natural principles of existence that they deserve to be corrected inside of a soundproofed shipping container.

Their laws jail you for purchasing dull cookware knives while daily rape gets completely dismissed. They are so specifically rabid in their crusade to suffocate life that they reach out to other countries to prosecute people for transgressing against hate speech laws. Their country swirls into the toilet and their final dying act is to pull down and drown their fellow kinsmen when they try to escape.

When someone acts badly towards you, or speaks badly of you, remember that he is acting or speaking in that way because he regards that as being the proper thing for him to do. Now, it isn’t possible for him to act in accordance with what seems right to you, but only with what seems right to him. So if he judges wrongly, he is the one who suffers the harm, since he is the one who has been deceived. For if anyone should think a true composite judgement* to be false, the judgement itself isn’t harmed, but the person who has been deceived. If you start out, then, from this way of thinking, you’ll be gentle with someone who abuses you, for in each case you’ll say, ‘That is how it seemed to him.’