Strike up a conversation with an antisocial pervert nose deep in a crusty old russian manuscript, and you’ll learn all about the magical world of communism. Imagine how amazing life would be if the rich just paid their fair share, and the working class could finally be free to work in the poetry mines! Finally, you wouldn’t have to get a job or face the idea that you wasted four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a degree in “queer dance.”
Believe it or not, I was much like the strawman character I knocked down in the first paragraph. In high school, I was a staunch communist, ready to end the evil ways of capitalism. You could find me at the politics club (which I ran, shout out to my homies) trashing libertarians for wanting lower taxes and owning the cuck-servatives. But then my brain started to myelinate a little more and I realized communism was a bit incoherent.
This isn’t an article about why communism is bad, but let me summarize exactly why I left that old echo chamber for newer, better echo chambers. For one, it seemed like if you asked 5 leftists how to define communism, you’d get 10 different answers. It was a common gotcha to ask a conservative to define communism, and then laugh when they gave an answer that doesn’t perfectly line up with the specific dogma your favorite subreddit followed.
Additionally, you can’t ignore that communism has a gruesome track record. It’s not like Stalin believed what I believed, but if you look at the movements before, they all believed the lovey dovey John-Lennon-Imagine communism until they were taken over by a soulless despot. It’s a common meme on the left to point out the incessant amount of leftist infighting. People who believe in 99% of the same thing hating each other over that 1% is a funny concept, but not when these people have armies and want to overthrow the government. It seems like the libertine communists were generally more unorganized compared to the authoritarians and got progrom’d every time the revolution happened. Count me out!
Since communists are really the only group promising some golden age based on a different system of economics, allow me to frame a core pillar of my politics in opposition to it.
Imagine a perfect marxist utopia in the American 1920s. This was the roaring 20s, a time of great economic growth and prosperity. Let’s say we achieved the absolute perfect communist state where sadness was illegal and everyone paid each other in huckleberries. Let’s just say we had God almighty himself coming down and supervising all of it, making sure everything was not corrupt and all the resources flowed equally to everyone. Let’s assume all the supply chains magically keep working the way they normally do instead of the usual fare for communist states. Did you cum in your pants a little bit imagining that? Good boy.
Even within this perfect 1920s utopia, I would still prefer to live in modern America. Every time.
But why? W-what about my based proletarian utopia?
The quality of life modern america is so much better that it doesn’t even compare. Sure you have magic communism, but I have 24 karat gold dubai chocolate labubus. We are not the same.
Unironically, we have a greater abundance of food, natural resources, entertainment, technology, information, cleanliness, and everything else we could imagine. Victorian children would literally go insane if they saw the dystopian slop AI companies are releasing every day.
This is my point. The best thing we can do to improve society is to continue innovating. Innovation is exponential. Redistribution just takes whatever we have. We can just give everyone the current supply of a good, or we can make this good so plentiful that it’s practically peanuts. Focusing on innovation will improve the human condition far more than any larper on a college campus could ever dream of.
It’s important to make sure our system doesn’t actively screw over people at the bottom, and everyone lives in dignity. We should make sure we have certain safeguards in place for that. But the best thing is to just lift everyone up.
I’ve had a pet project of figuring out what make systems and cultures innovate. My current model is that a system that facilitates innovation has the following traits:
Shared Goal: Everyone agrees on a goal
Shared Verification Metric: Everyone agrees on how to measure if you’ve achieved that goal, and how close you got
Rewards for Success: There is some reward for actually achieving the goal. This can be intrinsic (The goal is rewarding in itself, like it can make you live longer), or extrinsic (money, status, etc)
Supplemental factors include good human capital and investment money flowing through, but a similar success can happen with illiterate destitute shramanas wandering the forest until one of them discovers enlightenment, so it’s not necessarily required.
Anything that gets in the way of these pillars is evil. That includes luddite hipster leftists and reactionary based trad rightists who want to freeze progress and redistribute everything we already have.
We should worry about making sure our system is fair, but my primary concern is making more cool space robot laser machine things. The more space robot laser machine things, the better.
These are some of the areas of innovation I think are very important:
AI
AI has the possibility to automate a lot of menial BS work, and eventually automate a lot of thinking labor. Eventually it’ll be smarter than us, which will accelerate our innovation. I’m concerned about humans becoming useless, which dovetails into my next point.
Gene Editing
AI intelligence is exponentially increasing while human intelligence is remaining stagnant. Depending on who you ask, it might be going down.1 With gene editing, humans can increase their intelligence exponentially too, allowing us to continue to be useful and work alongside AIs, where they can work on repetitive long form tasks that human minds would tire running through, and humans can provide creativity.
Beyond intelligence, we can cure illnesses and save lives. We can even customize ourselves to adapt to new biomes and colonize Antarctica. Or space. Even beyond human use, we can genetically engineer other organisms to help us seed planets or yield more fruit. The possibilities are endless.
We would also free ourselves from our biological imperative and the laws of natural selection (kind of). This would profoundly change the way humanity works and will lead us to become far more prosocial and aligned with our purpose. You know how you always have to fight your base instincts to do what you want to do? No longer.
Memes, Genes, and The Meaning of Life: It's Not What You Think
How Genetics and Memetics affect what we value
Food Production
Improving the ways we produce, harvest, and transport food will undoubtedly improve the lives of millions. Imagine such abundance that food is treated the way first-worlders treat water. If a restaurant asks me to pay for water, I’m offended. With advances to gene editing, this can be even better.
Planetary Colonization
Imagine getting an entire new planet’s worth of new resources to use. Not only that, we can increase the carrying capacity of humanity exponentially. More people equals more good because sentient creatures are the only beings capable of assigning moral weight to anything. We need a few more things on our tech tree to really make this work but when it does, we’ll enter a golden age.
Housing Construction
I’m not an expert but I’ve heard a large part of the housing crisis is regulation and lack of land, so perhaps innovation is not that important here, but bear with me.
Imagine really well made prefab housing components mass produced in a factory and assembled together like lego blocks, and it’s so cheap that the cost of the house itself is just a few grand. That would be awesome. I’m out of my depth here, but I have done construction on a few houses and it’s a long process. Each house is a work of art.2
Factory Automation
Automation is bad for the worker but good for the consumer. I’m a software engineer and I am worried about AI automating my job but I’m aware it will probably be good for humanity. Instead of using 6 year old asian kids, we can use highly accurate machines that won’t unionize, get tired, or file an OSHA complaint. We can produce things quicker and cheaper, leading to more abundance.
Philosophical Breakthroughs
As the world changes we need to find new ways to relate to it that allow us to achieve self actualization and prevent misconduct. This is an underrated part of progress people should pay more attention to. I forsee many new sophisticated philosophies cropping up as AI and short form content mature, and as the other sci fi bullshit I explained comes into existence.
Innovation and Her Enemies
If a culture stops innovating, it’s usually a herald that they’re going to end up past their prime. Whatever generative force existed no longer exists, and people will get worse at maintaining their head start. It’s deceptive because you can be surrounded by all this amazing stuff and think your civilization is still hot shit when really it’s your ancestors that made all that and the best thing your culture is capable of making is reality TV shows and cancerous fast food.
We should be vigilant for anything that could stop innovation. In the way of our beautiful techno-feudalist utopia are a few obstacles.
First is regulations. OpenAI founder Sam Altman famously went in front of congress and begged the government to regulate AI. Thank GOD our government is incompetent and gridlocked because if he succeeded we would have had something called regulatory capture. OpenAI can run around in a playground where they already broke all the rules, but new AI companies can’t compete because they have to play by the rules. There was a period of time where it looked like they would be the sure monopoly, but thankfully many other competitors have sprung up, forcing them to be better.
You don’t want companies dumping so much poison in the rivers that it sets on fire, but you don’t want to end up like Europe. If you’re ambitious in Europe, you’ll have to contend with draconian laws for a billion states, plus a central EU, plus some other secret cabal that was probably on that client list that apparently never existed. Speaking to entrepreneurs in Europe and learning about the bureaucratic bullshit they have to go through is the fastest way to convert someone into an anarcho-capitalist. Europe might be a regulatory hellscape, but hey, they spent 8 billion dollars making bottle caps that don’t fall off!
Second, you gotta worry about the inherent conservatism intrinsic to human nature. Many liberals regrettably fall into this camp, making them true conservatives in my post left-right ideological framing.
Nobody really loves change, unless the current system was so bad anything could be better. The idea of a new, radically different way of doing stuff gives people a deep seeded disgust reaction.
This is reasonable. When the plans you make can’t make any sense because the future is so nebulous, then you’re fucked. People have these responses for reasonable reasons.
I’m an artist, and a few years ago I was staunchly against AI art. Ask me why and I could only vaguely articulate that it was an “abomination.” I studied game development in college for fun, and one of our projects required us to use AI, which was a gross ethical violation in my opinion. As a protest, our team decided to make an artsy-fartsy anti-AI game about why AI is bad. To truly do art properly you must understand the subject and understand the self. To figure out which threads to pull, I had to introspect and intimately understand why I hated AI art so much.
After some contemplation, I realized AI filled me with such visceral contempt for the same reason a rival band of baboons would fill a paleolithic bushman with visceral contempt.
It was a threat to my survival.
Immediately all of the discourse I had heard made complete sense. When you add that hidden narrative underlying every argument, it’s all quite logical. People hold beliefs that are optimal, not that are true. Humans are quite good at convincing themselves whatever they need. Frankly, truth seeking is dysgenic and lowers the odds of your survival so it makes sense why humans do this.
You can’t convince people to advocate against their self interest, that would make no sense. I talked about it at length in my essay on disguised selfishness. You have to convince people that their future would be better with this technology.
Disguised Selfishness: Activists are Virtuous Sociopaths
Mary here is a huge anti-racist. It’s her number one issue. Clad with an armor of indie buttons and armed with the latest slogans, she’s ready to fight. But pluck her from the herd and interrogate her on the belief system she’s inculcated herself with and you’ll be bewildered.
In this example, I have a few reasons to presume artists are not SOL. For one, art is comprised of two aspects: ideation and execution. AI will automate a lot of the execution, but ideation will remain in the territory of artists. Additionally, new frontiers will be available to artists now that some of the work can be automated. For example, one can still draw but use AI assistance for backgrounds and extras. They could also create a one man animated show, which would have been very difficult in the past. I attended an Ubisoft talk a few years back on “Neo-NPCs” which were NPCs with LLMs integrated in the backend where you can have narrative goals based on how you interact with them. The lead writer told us that the writing for such a character was actually more work than a straightforward NPC, so perhaps quality writing will be in higher demand?
Generalizing my AI art example, we have to convince people not by telling them progress will march on regardless of their opinions, but by showing them they can have a place in the future we build. It’s very possible for luddites to win and artificially create a new dark age. We must endure the growing pains as part of our journey in innovation. When humans started agriculture, we destroyed our health, life expectancy, and average height. But after we adapted and made it work out we live healthier than any savage would.3 I’m grateful to our ancestors that toughed it out so that we may enjoy the fruits of it. One day there will be trillions of humans, and the suffering of our generation endured will have yielded a utopian level of abundance. It’s a noble sacrifice that our ancestors made for us, and we must make for our descendants.
If I were to choose a God, she would be progress.4 The more we innovate, the more we can liberate ourselves from our shackles. We must maintain prudence and use our technology for good, but we must never choose to cast it away for fear of what it may do.
I reject the myopic issues championed by the left and right. Transgender bathtubs and white pride in schools are completely superfluous. Ignore the chuds fighting. Focus on policies that will advance the human race, all of us. I will support whoever will continue to advance human development. If you’re part of the chosen few who want the world to continue to flourish, join me. Let’s continue to champion innovation by yelling online and developing functional social media addictions. One day we’ll look back using our AI enhanced Neuralink Memory Pack + subscription and realize we made the right choice.
As an aside, most smart people I know don’t want to have any kids. If you run through the simulation in your head, guess what that leads to…
With the birth rate decline though, housing demand will drop a lot so this problem might solve itself lollz thanks God.
I find primitivism to be a very interesting philosophy. I read a lot of it in high school. I think some amount of it is becoming in vogue and I’d like to double click on that some time.
Figuratively, I don’t think we should see it in religious terms. On my ideology tree progress is subservient to human wellbeing, but I think progress leads to human wellbeing.