Surfing the Cataclysmic Technopotheistic AI-Turbocharged World-Fascist Tsunami

Finding courage together in the vortices of our days

The rogue wave of 2024

As a writer of cyberpunkish novels I’ve dabbled in technophobia and dystopia¹. It adds little to my peace of mind that many of the scary things I predicted in my books a quarter-century ago are everywhere around us these days. But nothing has prepared me for the situation in which we now find ourselves. I find myself nearly immobilized by dread.

Several chaotically-interacting vortices — storm-like crises that have been brewing for years, if not decades, are now seemingly blending together, culminating in a kind of monstrous rogue wave that is the concluding weeks of the presidential election in the United States. These crises are political, climatic, social, technological, philosophical, and even, perhaps, spiritual, and the outcome of this election will determine how these crises come to resolution, if they do at all, for every person now on earth, and for those yet to be born. This situation is unprecedented in human history.

Look closely. Do you see that tiny figure surfing down the face of that wave off the coast of Nazaré, Portugal? That is you and me, together.

You and I find ourselves trapped in the swirling vortices of the ocean with that hell-created wave bearing down upon us. There is no way for anybody to rescue us. The only hope for our survival is for us to surf that unimaginably terrifying thing safely to shore.

My aim in sharing these thoughts is not to alarm, rather it is to reassure you that you’re not crazy if you see a wave which those around you do not, and to look for ways that we can all can work together to increase our chance of survival. But please do not expect a closely-reasoned thesis or a detailed action plan. I’m too scared to attempt that. I’m just sharing some observations and trying to buck myself up.

The voting has already commenced in several states. Our descent down the face of the wave has already begun. Let us help each other find our courage.

Jakob update

But before going into that, I start with a brief update on my son Jakob, whose 41-year history of living with congenital toxoplasmosis, his most recent medical crisis, and the effects of toxo on me and my family are the subject of two recent essays, Toxoplasmosis, my Pazuzu, part one and part two.

Recap: In early December, 2017, my son Jake, who was born with congenital toxoplasmosis and has experienced no end of medical and other complications as a result, over a period of just a few hours, became paralyzed from the chest down. The cause was determined to be compression of his spinal cord in his lower back. After surgery he spent two months in the world-class Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston getting intensive physical & occupational therapy, and then spent several more months getting outpatient therapy — relearning how to walk, basically. As Jake’s medical proxy/advocate, and chauffeur, I was deeply involved in this process. It took almost a year, but Jake made a nearly complete recovery.

But in late August of this year, over a period of a few days, Jakob again lost control of his legs, although not quite as completely as he did in 2017. This time the cause was again determined to be compression of his spinal cord — this time in his neck. After surgery he was sent to a rehabilitation facility in Falmouth, on Cape Cod for intensive therapy, arriving in early September. He’s still there.

News: The complicated eye surgery to rescue the little that remains of his vision, originally scheduled for the first week in September and which had to be postponed when his spine gave out again, has been rescheduled for next Monday, October 21st. It’ll be a week or two after that before we know how successful the operation was. I’ll keep you updated.

Political vortex

Obviously the presidential election is getting most of our attention these days, the choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. In these last few weeks both campaigns are trying to bring on board those voters who are undecided about whom to vote for — or indeed whether to vote at all.

In 2008, David Sedaris, in The New Yorker, described voters who were undecided in the choice between the Obama/Biden ticket and McCain/Palin like this:

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

The situation is similar today, only today the choice is between a healthy, tasty vegetarian meal or the platter of shit with glass in it — with the added feature that if you chose the shit/glass meal, after you eat it the airplane flies into a mountain and everybody on it dies.

And yet according to polls millions of people have not yet decided which dinner choice they’ll make, or whether they’ll vote at all. Moreover, if the polls are to be believed, more than half of all white men in the USA are proudly going with the shit-glass and death-for-everybody option. Not only that, many of these men are menacing, and in some cases assaulting with dangerous weapons, those of us who are advocating for the ‘eat a nice meal and stay alive’ choice.

Lucian k Truscott IV put it this way, in his essay On the impossibility of summing this stuff up:

If you’re anything like me, hardly a day goes by that you are not struck dumb by who and what Kamala Harris faces in this presidential election contest.  The other night, I found myself using a phrase that I have come to hate.  I said, “I have trouble wrapping my head around this.”  But I said it, and to my horror, I realized that I meant it.  There are times that I simply cannot comprehend how it is that we find ourselves as a nation facing the politics we must witness every day. 

And in a recent and indispensable essay the historian Heather Cox Richardson cites General Mark Milley on the threat posed by Trump:

“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.” 

This is how former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer and the primary military advisor to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council, described former president Donald Trump to veteran journalist Bob Woodward. Trump appointed Milley to that position. 

You should read Richardson’s entire essay if you haven’t yet. It will put the fear of God into you, as my sainted father used to say. It documents in great detail exactly why it is entirely appropriate to us the word ‘fascist’ to describe Trump.

But as I’ve written here before, the horror of the choice before the electorate is that Trump, as indescribably awful as he is, isn’t even the greatest threat we face because JD Vance is even scarier than Trump is. I come back to this point below.

Technological vortex

Stephen Fry recently posted a truly great essay on how to understand the implications of AI and related technologies. It is thoughtful and sobering, but not panicky or fear mongering:

Image 1: Picture the human family at the seaside, our backs to the ocean, building sand castles, playing beach cricket, having a fine time in the sun. Behind us, unseen on the horizon, huge currents are converging, separate but each feeding and swelling the others to form one unimaginably colossal tsunami. These are the currents of quantum computing, of genomics and gene editing, of bio-augmentation and bionics, of duplex brain-machine interfacing, of robotics, of new materials (graphene, perovskite, carbon nano-tubes, self-healing polymers, many others), and of course, the most swollen current of all — the technologies and processes behind what we call Artificial Intelligence

Long-time readers of Sundman figures it out! may note that all of the technologies that Fry lists above, except self-healing polymers,² have been touched upon in these SFIO! essays. In fact this stuff is right in the proverbial SFIO! wheelhouse.

Now whether you think technologies like Large Language Model AIs are over-hyped or not, I don’t think there’s any denying that there are some hugely disruptive currents in technology swirling about, and they will, one way or another change our societies — possibly beyond recognition.

One could write a bookshelf of novels and essays — hell, an entire library of futurology and science fiction — about how these things might play out over the next twenty years or so. But my concern in this essay is limited to how technologies like LLMs are contributing to the destruction of consensus reality, to pan-surveillance and control, to scientifically-optimized disinformation and to narratives optimized to ensnare people in cultish thinking — not over then next twenty years, but simply over the next twenty days.

Digression: vortices, rogue waves, tsunamis, chaos, pain

Who understands chaos theory? Not me, that’s for sure!

Wikipedia:

Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary area of scientific study and branch of mathematics. It focuses on underlying patterns and deterministic laws of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. These were once thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities. Chaos theory states that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnection, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals and self-organization.

Now then, I may be a bit confused about how vortices relate to chaos theory, but I do know that a rogue wave is not a tsunami; I just want to emphasize that I am aware of that.

And those giant waves that daredevils ride at Nazaré are neither rogue nor tsunami. They’re just regular periodic ocean waves that happen to be freekin’ gigantic. Feel free to do your own rabbit-holing on that topic if you wish. But for the purposes of this essay I hope you’ll allow a bit of poetic license on the subject of waves that terrify.

After reading James Gleick’s great book Chaos, in 2008, in I wrote my illustrated dystopian phantasmagoria The Pains, about two decent people trying to survive in a nightmarish world run by an unholy cabal of transhumanist techbros and fascist theocrats. I never remotely dreamed that it would be my most prophetic book. Read to the end of this essay to learn how to get a free print or ebook copy.

Post-truth vortex

The most recent issue of David Wilk’s great weekly Weird Times digest opens with a familiar quotation from Hanna Arendt:

A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.

Wilk goes on to cite a recent essay in The Atlantic by Charlie Warzel (No paywall):

I’M RUNNING OUT OF WAYS TO EXPLAIN HOW BAD THIS IS. What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.

[A] new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality.

This has all been building for more than a decade. On The Colbert Report, back in 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the word truthiness, which he defined as “the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support.” This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world.

The original Nazis in the 1930’s and 40’s pioneered the science of creating post-truth societies. And you can bet your bottom dollar that that science has been researched and developed tremendously since those pre-Facebook, pre-Musk-Twitter, pre-Putin, pre-Xi-Jinping days.

For a deep dive into this topic I highly recommend Will Storr’s The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science. Here’s a tiny taste:

We typically have a bias that tells us we are less susceptible to bias than everyone else. Our default position tends to be that our opinions are the result of learning, experience and personal reflection. The things we believe are obviously true — and everyone wold agree if only they could look at the issue with clear, objective, unimpeded sight. But they don’t because they’re biased. [. . . ] They might think they’re beautiful and clever and right but their view of reality is skewed.

You might have read all that thinking Yes, yes, I know people just like that. But I’m not really one of them, to be honest. I’m modest and humble and only too aware when I’m getting things wrong.

That’s the sound of your brain lying to you. You are like that.

The great Heidi Siegmund Cuda, in a recent essay called Assassins of reality, put it like this: link

I hope my words [. . .] are helpful in enriching our understanding that liars like Trump and Vance and Musk and Flynn are using lies to create fake worlds, and in those worlds, people are being encouraged to overthrow their own governments. The people don’t know they are stooges for fascism — they think they are patriots. They have lost touch with reality, because a reality star is killing reality one lie at a time.

If we view GOP leaders and their technofascist allies as reality assassins, using techniques created by Russian political technologists that were initially detonated on the Russian people to create a death cult, it’s easier to understand what is happening to people and why they are living in false realities

The use of AI to create deepfakes of people, places, events; to write plausible fictions that pass as truth; to further blur the already blurry line between ‘truth’ and ‘truthiness’ is already already commonplace and its users get more skilled almost minute by minute.

Compared to who we’re dealing with now, in other words, in terms of manipulating people into joining fascist cults and doing whatever the cult leaders tell them to do, the original Nazis were amateurs.

Climate collapse vortex

Here’s a happy thought from LiveScience:

Earth's ecosystems may be careering toward collapse much sooner than scientists thought, a new study of our planet's warming climate has warned.

According to the research, more than a fifth of the world's potentially catastrophic tipping points — such as the melting of the Arctic permafrost, the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet and the sudden transformation of the Amazon rainforest into savanna — could occur as soon as 2038. 

In climatology, a "tipping point" is the threshold beyond which a localized climate system, or "tipping element," irreversibly changes. For instance, if the Greenland ice sheet were to collapse, it would also reduce snowfall in the northern part of the island, making large parts of the sheet irretrievable. 

Yet the science behind these dramatic transformations is poorly understood and often based on oversimplified models. Now, a new attempt to understand their inner workings, published June 22 in the journal Nature, has revealed that they may happen much sooner than we thought. 

If Trump and Republicans prevail in this election, there will be no hope of preventing this collapse. None.

Interlude: a picture of your humble substacker’s brain as he tries to finish writing this essay

Artist’s depiction of the author’s thought processes. Hope that plane don’t just flip over.

I’ve spent more time than I care to disclose trying to pull this all together. I have found it very hard to focus. In 1972 I surfed the waves of Hurricane Agnes off Long Beach Island, New Jersey. I still remember how scared I was. Petrified. Compared to the wave I’m talking about now, Agnes was a tempest in a teacup.

The techbro/TESCREALIAN/crypto/Christianist fascist alliance vortex

I refer you to my two earlier essays:

I created Peter Thiel, who gave us JD Vance. Sorry about that. Notes on the origins of the fascist theocrats of Silicon Valley,

and

Peter Thiel's Game of Thrones. Forget Trump. He isn't the threat. JD Vance is.

The argument I make in those essays rests on three premises:

1. Trump has dementia; it is irreversible and rapidly accelerating;

2. JD Vance is the cat’s paw of a newly forming alliance between technofascists like Musk and Thiel and Christian nationalist fascists like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Supreme Court Justices Roberts and Alito;

3. Vance and the leaders of the cabal behind him are Nazis hellbent on establishing a new global Reich of which they are the paramount rulers, whatever the cost.

Project 2025 is weak tea compared to what Vance et al have in mind for us. The character ‘O’Brien’ in George Orwell’s 1984 laid it out plainly:

But always – do not forget this, Winston – always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.

So let us be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us

When you consider all of these phenomena — powerful technologies, manipulable people, technofascists making common cause with religious fanatics, and scariest of all, the imminent threat of irreversible climate collapse — it is easy to despair.

But for the next twenty days we will, please God, not despair. We will buck each other up and do everything we can to prevent this election from condemning us, and our children, and every child on earth or yet to be born, from that crushing boot heel on our faces.

I’ve made several fruitless attempts to write a conclusion to this post, but they all end up being lame rehashes of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. So I think I’ll just leave you with the original.

Delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln

November 19, 1863.

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1. When my oldest child was a senior in high school she led a revolt of students in her Honors English class against all the ‘downer’ books on the syllabus. The mother dies of cancer, the father’s an alcoholic, the dog runs away, the cops are all corrupt, etc. “If I wanted to read that kind of dystopian crap,” she said, “I’d just read my dad’s books.” With the input of the students, the teacher devised a completely new reading list. I was so proud of her!

2. Although I did write about such things in 2011 on my site Wetmachine, in a discussion of John Jurek’s book Kaelf Skin.