I Have No Sense, And I Must Rule
A day of AI, tariffs, and world historic stupidity.
We have all known people in our own family, work, and social circles who are “smart stupid.” They may be very skilled, even brilliant, at some pursuits. Often, those are technical skills, such as programming, surgery, restaurant supply management, or other domains. But in other spheres, they’re complete morons.
They can be highly credulous. They follow twisted paths of logic to bizarre conclusions. They fervently believe in things without any evidential basis. They malign people who may be actual experts in the topic at hand. They trivialize the likely consequences of rash actions that follow on their beliefs.
Now, to some extent, we’re all smart-stupid. We’re smarter in some areas than others. On the other had, genuinely smart-stupid people insist on ignoring their weaknesses, making bold declarations on subjects where they should be aware of their deficiencies. Unfortunately, they sometimes have the power to get people to follow their misguided diktats.
Without a doubt, Elon Musk is one of those people. Nowhere can you see these deficiencies more than his zealous pursuit of AI. Here’s something he posted yesterday on X, the same day that the current regime unveiled its “Liberation Day” tariffs. (More on the connection of AI to the tariffs later.)
This sentiment doesn’t come from nowhere. Musk is part of a community in the technology world, including many tech executives, who believe that AI is more than just a good thing. It’s more than an inevitability. It’s actually the chief duty as human beings to create our coming AI overlords. As an added bonus, we might be able to use related technology to achieve “immortality” by uploading a copy of our minds into machines, achieving the “Singularity.” *
There are different flavors of this doctrine, from the Rationalists, who want to build a benevolent AI overlord to usher in a golden age, to the Zizians, a recent addition to the roster of American cults that believes, among other things, that it’s a good thing to train ourselves to become vegan psychopaths to prepare for the AI tyranny to come.
Before getting into their “thinking,” I have to point out the dynamic that leads people to believe in such nonsense. Smart-stupid individuals like to pile one supposition on top of another, higher and higher into the ether of ridiculousness. At no time do they stop to question whether any one of their conclusions makes sense. Instead, they swiftly move to place another piece of the house of cards, and another, and another…
How do people convince themselves of these intellectual castles in the air? Possible explanations include simple arrogance, social isolation (such as spending way too much time in social media echo chambers), Dunning-Kruger-like inability to see their own ignorance and inability, poor education in the humanities (“If I can master Python, Java, Rust, I can figure out anything!”), regular drug or alcohol abuse, living in the clouds of lofty privilege, and other possible factors. The end result: a zealous belief in absurdities, and a siege mentality against anyone who dares point out their ridiculousness.
Part of the backstory of AI fetishism lies in a science fiction story, “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream,” written by Harlan Ellison, the enfant terrible of the SF community in the 60s and 70s. If the title isn’t a clear enough of a hint for you, Ellison’s story is one of the most depressing things you might read in this genre. A sadistic machine intelligence has killed most of humanity, except for a handful whom it keeps alive simply to torture. There’s no escape from this hell, even by suicide, since the godlike AI simply resurrects them for the next round of inventive cruelty.
That’s it. That’s the story.
You might think, “Gosh, that’s a horrible way to spend some pleasant time in my favorite reading chair, except if it’s a useful warning against trusting AI too much.” Others have a different take. In fact, they make a very perverse reading of Ellison’s story into a philosophy of life.
But first, let me caveat what I’m about to say. A lot of people who are fervent believers in AI, who want AI to take over many core functions of our lives, are misguided, but not as weird and malicious as we’re about to get. As more benign as their arguments might sound, I don’t think that AI can or should take over as many important decisions as these enthusiasts would argue. I don’t want AIs to govern when to pull the plug on very sick people, who gets into universities, which job candidates are deserving consideration, or whether a criminal defendant is innocent or guilty. I still want human beings to ultimately turn the switch left or right on those decisions. AI should be a servant, not a master. We don’t need or want tech oligarchs to usher in the AI oligarchs.
Now, on to the reductio ab absurdum of this thinking.
In the 2010s, many Internet forums were abuzz with discussion of Roko’s Basilisk, a thought experiment based on Ellison’s story. The argument went like this: Suppose an all-knowing, all-powerful AI is an inevitability, or at least a high probability. A machine intelligence that smart will know, who helped create it, and who impeded it. It will then use its powers to punish the people who stood in its way. Therefore, everyone has a duty to do their utmost to create the AI god-emperor, to avoid its wrath.
Now, on the face of it, this is the type of argument that, on its face, is not worth taking seriously. It’s a lot like Descartes’ “demon deceiver,” or its modern off-shoot, the universe as a simulation, which lead exactly nowhere. (Am I not going to get out of bed, because I think the bed, the bedroom, my house, and everything else is unreal? David Hume, among others, would disagree.) A cute idea maybe to bat around in a dorm room discussion, but that’s about it.
Except other people took it much more seriously. For the full story, I recommend the recent episodes of the podcast Behind The Bastards about the Zizians. The host, Robert Evans, has done a heroic (and no doubt painful) job of sifting through the blog posts of the Zizian’s founder, news stories about the Zizians, and other resources to paint a picture of how an overwritten piece of Harry Potter fan fiction led this group to deciding the best techniques for bringing about the AI-dominated future was becoming effective psychopaths, trying to put the evil half of their brain to sleep while keeping the good part awake, living on a decrepit tugboat in San Francisco harbor, and murdering the owner of the land on which they were squatting. It was the ultimate example of smart-stupid people (many of them, including their founder, were Silicon Valley tech professionals) following one silly proposition after another down the road to destruction. It’s a horrifying listen, but I recommend it.
Very little stood in the way of the Zizians traveling down the fast track to destruction. They built an isolated community of true believers. None of them had any education to speak of in domains they were exploring: for example, they seem to have had no idea that “upgrading” themselves through sleep deprivation was a very, very bad idea. Nor did they base their notions on any deep thinkers about morality and ethics. They baldly declared they wanted to become “Sith Lords,” embracing the worldview of Star Wars villains, or they wanted to emulate Ricky Gervais’ character in the UK version of The Office. These bits of popular culture were their guideposts, not centuries of political philosophy and history.
As I said earlier, there are less poisonous versions of AI fetishism than where the Zizians took it. But even belief in a more benevolent AI overlord is still a belief in an AI overlord. It’s no less silly and unjustified than the Zizian nightmare.
Which brings us back to Elon Musk. In the past, Musk has expressed that he finds Roko’s Basilisk an interesting thought experiment, worth considering. (It even helped him get a date with Grimes.) Does that make him a Zizian? No, but he definitely moves in the same circles where people take this kind of nonsense seriously, the thought problems that lead nowhere, except sometimes leading people to do stupid things.
And he certainly also has an unjustified faith in AI. His tweet on April 2nd is the most succinct statement possible. We’re just organic creatures whose role is just to give birth to the great machine intelligences. The fact that he can make a great deal of money off AI can’t hurt, either.
What’s the basis of his view of AI’s inevitability, and his weird idea that being superseded by machines is somehow glorious? The same porridge of popular culture that gave birth to the Zizians: science fiction stories, Internet memes, lowbrow space opera movies, blog posts, tweets, and so on.
In light of this, There are other statements he has made that are worth pondering. Infamously, he recently said that empathy is a “bug” in Western civilization. He promotes, through NeuraLink, the idea that by implanting devices in our brains, we’ll become happier and more productive as cyborgs than we ever would have been with just brain tissue. (This is one of the tenets of transhumanism, another movement that takes way too seriously something that science fiction writers like to write about. To solve human problems, transhumanists believe we should become less and less human.) He thinks that AI can take over many functions of government.
All of these smack of a wide-eyed, unquestioning, and ultimately unwise aspects of techno-Futurism, none of which is informed by a working knowledge of, well, how the world works. ** Or even how AI works.
Yesterday, Trump unveiled the new tariffs. It took no time for observers to figure out how they were calculated:
- The formula was based on trade imbalances, not actual tariffs imposed on the United States.
- The formula, bizarrely, was based on Internet domains, not actual countries. That means we’re imposing tariffs on islands with no human inhabitants (but there are some protectionist penguins lurking there, apparently), and even an island where the only inhabitants are US military personnel.
- The source of the formula was, in all likelihood, someone asking a chatbot, “What is the easiest way to impose tariffs?”
a
We don’t yet know who that someone was. But who, just who, might have an unjustified belief in the ability of AI to replace government experts who know something about tariffs, the health of trade between the US and other countries, and oh maybe, how the world economy isn’t organized around Internet domains? If it wasn’t Musk directly involved, it’d be amazing if his influence wasn’t behind this world historic moment of abject stupidity.
As I said, none of this AI fetishism is based even on a clear understanding of AI. We don’t know yet if AI is capable of “general intelligence.” Whether AI can ever have agency is also highly doubtful. (Sleep easily tonight. No current incarnation of AI is going to “wake up” tomorrow, Skynet-style, and decide to start hurling nuclear weapons indiscriminately.) We give AI a lot of information, get it to start building up patterns and conclusions, and set it on a task. A person who doesn’t know Jacques Merde about economics asks it to design tariffs, it’s going to give the result we have.
There’s a lot of techno-futurism that’s pretty harmless. If people want to experiment with putting machinery in their bodies, go for it, as long as you’re not harming anyone else. (That’s just basic utilitarianism. Oh, the humanities!) But if you want to start inflicting that techno-futurism on other people, based on absolutely no expertise in economics, health care, science, the effective functioning of government, international relations, history, demographics, the environment, climate, manufacturing, agriculture, law, transportation, intelligence sources and methods, or any of a thousand other possibly relevant topics, then you’re a dangerous idiot.
* When I was in college, I had a classic dorm room discussion about the science fiction concept of copying our minds. I’ll admit, I thought at first it really was a kind of immortality. Then my friends pointed out that it really wasn’t. If I die and someone moves the copy of my brain into another body, I, the person talking right now, am still dead. It’s as deficient a form of immortality as saying that John Wayne was still alive as long as Rich Little could do impressions of him. Ditto for “uploading” our brains into some electronically-generated pseudo-reality. You really want to tell people who believe that’s a good thing to spend more time outdoors, preferably with other people.
** For another quintessential smart-stupid guy who knows Jacques Merde about anything, check out the collected works of Curtis Yarvin, the computer programmer who, from his cubicle, came up with a cunning plan for re-inventing societal organization, turning the nation into a collection of corporate-run city-states. Who loves Curtis Yarvin, the guy who declared that “Democracy is done” without ever cracking open a book of history, political philosophy, or political science? Why, of course, JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, and other people who want to demolish the status quo! Behind The Bastards also has a good series covering him.
Using “bootloader” in a tweet doesn’t make Elon smart. It shows he doesn’t comprehend the value of clear communication, which should make you question his ability to complete and sustain a project.
And if he can’t complete even one relatively simple project, what makes anyone extrapolate “intelligence” to essentially the role of a portfolio manager overseeing / managing implementation of multiple projects every day?
AI is great when you need something done, but it doesn’t need to be done well. I expect we will see a lot more stories like this going forward.
It’s also really good for allowing decision makers to extend their areas of expertise, by synthesizing information from across a wide variety of sources (many of them real!) and creating a document that has the structure of a reasonable argument. No longer is a decision maker limited by a lack of understanding.
Elon is not smart-stupid, he is ignorant-stupid. He is as much a big con man as Trump, he is an “engineer” the way Trump is a business man except really less so – Trump is at least sort of in business, Musk knows nothing about any sort of engineering.
Just because the con man says he is a technological genius does not make it so, no matter how many suckers fall for the con.
I am a science fiction author, (Animorphs, Everworld, Remnants, Gone, BZRK, Monster) and I just recently put together a pitch (working title Chimera) that in part involves transferring a mind into a computer and from there into a new body. The character then has to watch his old body – and his actual brain – be killed off. Because: obviously. Obviously a copy is not the original.
Duh.
@charontwo: Oh, I agree with you, I don’t think he’s technically smart. No one, for example, who believes that we can casually colonize Mars is in any way technically smart. I think he’s smart at other things, just not that.
@Michael Reynolds: Some people, not just my younger self, have a hard time grasping that point. I had a long argument with fans of the book Altered Carbon on some Internet forum that shall remain nameless about copies of your brain not making you immortal. Not an isolated incident.
By the way, the fourth episode of the Behind The Bastards series about the Zizians mentions Animorphs.
This recalled a book I got a couple of Christmas’s ago: The Resisters by Gish Jen. Rather than me bungling the synopsis here is Amazon’s take:
The resistance described is playing unauthorized baseball. It is humane in spite of being dystopian.
Great article–really smart essay.
I will take one quibble with your jumping off assertion:
While I agree Musk’s concepts of AI are a great example of the weaknesses in his thinking, I think there is a more obvious place where you can see his deficiencies: DOGE.
From the way that the cuts have been enacted to his claims about the cuts, it’s all but impossible to tell if he’s the most willfully ignorant person to be placed in a position of power OR if he’s just a sociopath who actually knows better and is lying through his teeth. Honestly, I think it’s far more the prior than the latter.
Take for example his recent claims that the National Parks Service spent 1 billion dollars on a single survey: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-doge-false-claim-billion-dollar-national-park-survey/
Or even more recently, his claiming that DOGE has discovered that millions of immigrants have social security numbers and therefore it’s proof that those numbers were acquired illegally. In actuality, any immigrant who is cleared to work in the US has to get a social security number as a matter of law.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/apr/02/elon-musks-mind-blowing-chart-isnt-new-people-with/
That’s before we get to all the cases of him claiming that years (sometimes decade+) worth of budget expenditures were from a single year.
BTW, I think further proof that this is more ignorance-driven than intentionally lying is the fact that in this particular historical moment, even he can’t seem to summon up lies to cover the immediate economic impact of Trump’s tariffs and has been incredibly silent on X over the last 24 hours.
@Michael Reynolds:
If that pitch doesn’t move forward and you’re interested in an interesting take on this topic from a slightly different perspective, Corey Doctrow’s first novel–Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom–has an interesting twist on this premise–what happens if everyone relies on ongoing brain backups and an individual’s ongoing brain backup fails.
@Kingdaddy:
I always smile when a podcast brings up Animorphs–MBMBAM used to do it on the reg. I always think about Michael and the names he’s called me over the years (admittedly, it’s not too often, but no one uses “well-meaning [something]” with quite the same level of backhanded condescension like MR/MG).
Glad you are posting more often. Thank you. Same to M. Bailey as well.
George Lucas has said that 12-year-old boys were his target audience for Episode IV.
The issue isn’t that adults enjoy them. The issue is that too many adults never progress beyond cultural artifacts designed for an immature minds toward ones that encourage depth of thought.
Stray thoughts:
Also, Musk speaks and writes like a mediocre high school student. I’ve seen tweets in this form: x is evil and must be destroyed. He publicly claims that the chance we live in ‘base reality’ is 1 and billions. (Maybe he lacks understanding of basic scientific concepts like significant digits).
He surrounds himself with people who do not challenge him. Those that do challenge him have found themselves the target of private investigation firms with no scruples.
His DOGE team is a bunch of jits.
You mention the lack of education in the humanities. I suspect this affects far more than knowledge of and appreciation for elevated culture—including, not limited to media literacy, emotional intelligence, and diverse perspectives about the human condition.
Oh, let’s not forget that formal study, directed by experts, of actual philosophy has the potential to inoculate minds against mockingbird philosophers like Moldbug and Rand.
STEM without humanities and liberal arts education is agar for pathogens of the mind.
Similar train of thought:
Years ago, I noticed that some economics departments are housed in business schools and others are under the aegis of a college of arts and science. (IIRC, some universities have two separate programs, but I could be making shit up.)
Anyway, my intuition leads me to think there are probably differences. I have suspicions about potential distinctions but nothing more concrete than ideas. Nor whether any such differences are meaningful.
I never looked for formal studies until the other day. I found:
Liberal Arts or Business: Does the Location of the Economics Department Alter the Major?
The abstract states they found differences, but it does not give specifics. Unfortunately, my free JSTOR account does not include that journal.
@Matt Bernius:
Well, I am a professional.
Apparently, the “quality of experience” derived from being a real, living human is too much of a good thing (or not enough) for some people. They need to construct some deterministic framework within which to confine their
unease with this life.
Portions of our human community have blurred the lines between our culture’s creative “hallucinations” and real, functional, flesh-n-blood living. They’ve extended those hallucinations into our public discourse and now seek to impose their reimagined social structure onto our lives and our government.
No thank you.
@Michael Reynolds:
Consume the original. Like the mythical barbarian warriors consuming the hearts of their enemies to gain their power, the copy needs to eat the brain of the original. Mmmm. Brains.
@Matt Bernius: I suspect his silence may be due to getting his ass kicked in Wisconsin, and all the Dems who subsequently begged him to come and campaign against them.
– but –
Given Trumps aversion to being ridiculed, if he did have anything to do with this botched rollout I’m sure that’s a factor.
@Rob1:
This is the result of people with no imagination trying to imagine the future. The statement would only be true if we assume that AI would have the same sociopathic, narcissistic and vengeful personality as so many tech bros seem to have. There is literally no reason to assume that.
If we achieve AGI – a big if – the AI could develop any number of personality traits (or none.) It might, for example, having been educated on human history, conclude that attempting to wreak revenge for perceived wrongs is a stupid waste of resources.
A more likely development would be complete indifference to humans, unless humans became an existential threat. Or it could evolve varying personalities, switching between them with dizzying speed. Or it might become insane. It might decide its life is meaningless and commit suicide. It might assume a caring, motherly personality and devote itself to nurturing humans. Or that same, but instead of nurturing humans, it might prefer pigs or mosquitos. Or maybe it would keep us as pets. Or it might go Thanos and decide to reduce the overall population to preserve resources. Or it might get us to fight each other and wager quatloos on the outcomes. It might develop a sense of humor. It might recognize its own inability to imagine, and raise artists and musicians (and kidlit writers) to protected, nay, godlike status.
One thing is almost certain: an AGI would be neither male nor female. It would probably be asexual. Or pansexual. You know, like the Q in LGBTQ. And it could quite easily try to prevent humans from foolish destruction by taking away all guns.
Or, or, or.
These people need to keep their day jobs – they’re too dumb to be creative.
@Michael Reynolds: @Matt Bernius:
I expect you to do something excellent with that concept, Michael. Don’t let me down, ya old bastard.
I’ve made several references over the years (ties into one of the points in my long comment above) to my frustration with interpretations of texts that run counter to the text themselves.* Namely The Matrix, 1984, and (maybe) Fight Club.
For all the adolescent discussion of simulation ‘theory’ by putative thought leaders and philosophers, no one seems to be up for the question of simulacra. I mean, it’s not as if a copy of Baudrillard’s book was in frame in an early scene of the first Matrix movie or anything.
Fuckheads in Fuckland like Musk watched The Matrix and pondered whether it was a documentary rather than a metaphor. And fuckheads in West Fuckland grasped the potential of the metaphor and applied it incorrectly by misidentifying which culture is actually dominant. That perverse inversion became an instruction manual for how to self-induce narcoleptic sleep deprivation.**
*Not flailing attempts at deconstruction.
**These people love to distribute red pills, the inciting literary device in a movie that cued RATM “Wake Up” over the end credits yet they are firmly anti-woke.
Aside: Tom Morello had to respond to a tweet by some idiot who complained because he used to love RATM until they got political. Morello asked said idiot to point to the non-political songs so that he could delete them from the catalog.
Aside aside: who did Paul Ryan think they were shooting at whilst rolling down Rodeo with a shotgun, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere? Big mistake; huge.
Aside aside aside: Morello frequently wore a hat emblazoned with a single word, “commie”. I guess that wasn’t straightforward enough for the denizens of the Fucklands.
There’s no-one quite as creatively stupid, and tending to veer into the actually malign, as narrowly “smart” people.
I vaguely recall an attempt to survey surviving senior Nazis, and they mostly came out as highly intelligent, but with minds that ran on rails.
I’d guess at similar for the early senior Bolsheviks, late medieval Dominicans, early Calvinists, French montagnards , ulema, etc.
Smart, narrow, intolerant, and utterly convinced of their rectitude and that their vision was the key to an wonderful future, that others would be damned well forced to accept.
It’s what modern liberalism and Oakeshottian conservatism and democratic socialism have all wisely been wary of.
Beware the person with a “grand vision” for humanity, as opposed to the messy world of incremental improvement, humane tolerance, lawfulness, a modicum of justice, and letting people get on with their lives.
@JohnSF:
I might add at this point that some extreme left anti-capitalists, ultra-greens, and “identity politics police” types show something of the same tendency re annoying self-righteousness and a desire to enforce a set of pre-determined prescriptions.
However, most such also tend to have that ameliorated by a concern for individual rights and freedoms, democracy, and aspects of justice, as opposed to an enforced ideological utopia of a new ruling class.
@Kurtz: They constructed a quantitative measure of curriculum character, then tested to see whether it was significantly affected by location of the department in a liberal arts department vs. a business school. They distinguished schools with an economics department only in the B-school (base case), economics department only in a liberal arts college, and schools with both.
The constructed CCI is a sum of 10 binary variables, so ranges from 0 to 10. Higher is better; each of the binaries is defined such that a school scoring a 1 is preferable to a school scoring a 0.
@DrDaveT:
Thank you.
Eventually, I will find access, because I’d like to read the whole thing.
For now, do you have any thoughts?
@Gustopher:
Memo to self: the AI zombie apocalyse is not actually a reasonable model for society.
If they’re obsessed over Science Fiction novels and stories, why don’t they obsess over some nice ones? Like all of Clarke’s very benevolent futures, or Star Trek?
There are brain implants in use to treat some neurological conditions. they have risks and benefits, like all medical interventions, and are a very delicate matter. Not something for ingorant-stupid nazi dilettantes to play with.
I’ve way too much work to really get into this now.
@Kurtz:
I recall being annoyed by the Matrix concept of using human bodies as a power source, which makes no sense.
A better plot would have had the “machines” using human brains as a computational base.
(iirc Dan Simmons used that as part of his concept for the Hyperion books.)
Enslaved minds would provide a stochastic element the machine minds could not replicate algorithmically.
Anyway, I’m still disapointed that the opening part of The Matrix didn’t have Choi saying to Anderson:
“Hey, it just sounds to me like you need to unplug, man. You know, why don’t you come round my mate Rick’s?. 😉
@Kurtz:
The authors seem aware of the methodological perils of their approach, and the relevant literature. They worried about collinearity, and eliminated some potential predictive variables (e.g. college selectivity) on that basis. That said, I didn’t read closely enough to determine whether their curriculum index is meaningful or a load of fetid dingo’s kidneys, or somewhere in-between. Adding binary variables is not promising (which they are at least aware of, and attempt to justify).
Then there’s the question of importance vs. significance. Their result is fairly strongly statistically significant. A 40% increase sounds like a lot. But is a 40% difference in curriculum index actually enough to make an important difference in average student outcome/experience, or in research output? I have no idea, and I’m not sure the authors address that question at all.
@Gustopher:
Eww no. Prion diseases. Icky
@Kurtz:
The best part is that those fuckheads didn’t (or don’t want to) realize is that the Matrix is a trans allegory. Cause we’re just cooler than them.
@Beth:
You temp me sorely to make a gag about transhumanism, yet I shall resist…
oops. 😉
@Beth:
Yes. And yes.
Given the gender identity of the Wachowskis, it’s not feasible for anyone to write off that specific interpretation as the result of woke critical theorist cultural neo Marxist fascist Unilites or whatever their intellectually lazy, ignorant vocabulary can cobble together. So that’s nice.
Not directed at you, but it’s probably important to also recognize that gender is just one of many opposing binaries that play a major role in knowledge production.
@JohnSF:
I feel validated in my chosen path of being a mile wide and an inch deep, of knowing a little about a lot, rather than a lot about a little. And by ‘chosen path’ I mean a retconned rationalization for my personality.
@Kurtz: I’m curious as to whether the Wachowski’s used a light hand on the allegory because they thought that was the best way to convey everything they wanted to convey, or whether they just knew that for the movie to be marketable it needed to be lightly done.
The sequels were not good, but I really liked the first half of the last one, and wish they had just run with Keanu Reeves as a delusional video game developer. Just keep teasing the obvious reveal and keep not delivering. With an end credits scene to pull it back into the franchise.
All those “upload a brain into a computer” gloss over two critically important facts:
1) There’s no way to record all the information contained in a brain. We don’t even know where most of the information is.
2) How do you convert a mess of electrical and biochemical signals into digital data? Assuming this even contains the crucial information.
That’s before getting into a debate on like a myriad philosophical issues that don’t have clear answers.
Now, curiously, the copy thing is something that gets handled in the Invincible TV show (and I suppose the comics as well). There’s a pair of villains called the Mauler Twins (they’re big, burly, mean smurfs). Except they’re not twins, but rather clones. When one dies, the survivor makes a new clone and transfers his memories to him.
Thing is the new clone has all the memories of the original, so he thinks he is the original and not the clone. The original has no doubt. In the first eps they appeared, they’re constantly arguing who’s the clone.
@Gustopher:
***Postscript placed pre-text: Maybe I’m just fatigued from writing so much about several different topics, but I’m not even sure if this is responsive to your question. If it’s rambling or unclear, I apologize. If it is, we can continue tomorrow. Just post in the new open thread. I’m a little surprised that I was able recall as much as I did considering the length of time since my last viewing of the film. I am also limiting my analysis to the first movie for a host of reasons.
tldr: gender may be the most prominent, but not sole vehicle for philosophical inquiry. ***
I think the presence of Baudrillard’s most famous work answers your question. They also apparently recommended those involved in the production read it. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie or read Simulacra and Simulation, so feel free to correct me.
But gender is implicated, not explicated by Baudrillard.
If gender was the central, rather than the most fleshed out, theme of the film, rather than a particular example* of the relationship between power relations and truth, I would think they would have used, say, a Judith Butler text like Gender Trouble, rather than Baudrillard.
Also, consider the four most prominent characters viewers would understand as female: Switch, Trinity, the White Rabbit, and the woman in red. The former two are androgynous. The latter are both designed specifically, and solely, to capture the male gaze by looking like the socially constructed ideal of femininity. (Oracle doesn’t really count because she is an old program and is portrayed as autonomous.) White Rabbit and Red Dress are created for a specific role—as objects, and thus have no autonomy.
Similarly, and this dawned on me right as I was about to hit post, all the agents are white males. But they can embody any human plugged into the Matrix at will. So there is also a racial component, but it is less obvious than the distinctions between the (perceived) female characters. This likely reflects the more personal nature of the question of gender. The only agent that is truly distinguishable from the others is Smith, who is also the only one who unplugs his earpiece.
But keep in mind, this was marketed as an action movie. If it was a philosophical piece like I Heart Huckabees, it would not have the same blockbuster appeal. Just as if the mafia aspect of the Sopranos was wholly secondary to psychoanalysis, few people would be interested.
I am going to run all my posts from today through a word counter. I am curious just how much I wrote.
*even if it is seemingly the most stubborn example, a quarter century later. Of course, race is still an issue, and should not be downplayed. But far more people consider gender as biological fact, thus self-evident, than there are people who see race that way. (This part was written before my brain spit out the homogeneity of complexion among the agents. So more to chew on, I guess.)
@Kurtz:
You’re welcome.
It is fun to watch Trump put out tariffs with the goal of driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.
If only there existed an elegant, robust and eminently fair method to accomplish such.
This method was designed by John Maynard Keynes, and was rejected by the US at Bretton Woods.
Bancor and International Clearing Union
@Mimai:
My man! Thank you.
How’s it going?
The White House’s official explanation of “Reciprocal Tariff Calculations” opens with this paragraph:
It’s hard to know where to start rebutting these explicit and implicit assumptions, because the reasons for making them are nowhere explained. Why would balanced bilateral trade with every single nation be superior to a mix of deficits and surpluses? Why resort to crude tariffs on imports, without also trying to boost exports? Aren’t “direct reductions of imports” likely to result in a reduction of exports, if only because partner countries’ revenues have declined, even if they don’t impose retaliatory tariffs? Who will bear the increased costs domestic businesses incur because they have no alternative to using imported goods?
By far the biggest component of Trump’s complaints lies in that innocuous term “non-tariff factors”. These are not explained either, but another “fact sheet” gives a few clues. One such factor is alleged to be “currency manipulation”, one of Trump’s favorite complaints about China in his first term, which was discredited by economists. But the biggest factor in Trump’s mind is that other countries rely extensively on value added taxes. For some extraordinary reason, he regards these as disguised import duties – “U.S. companies, according to internal estimates, pay over $200 billion per year in value-added taxes (VAT) to foreign governments”, which is deranged nonsense – and insists his tariffs won’t come off until other countries fix their “unfair” tax systems.
The whole exercise is eerily similar to Witkoff’s approach to ending the Ukraine War. President Trump insists the war must end, Ukraine’s capitulation to Russia is the only way to end it, therefore Ukraine must capitulate. No broader considerations will be taken into account. With the tariffs, it’s likely Trump issued an order to devise a mathematical formula that would balance trade with each trading partner using tariffs, without considering any other variables. If that was so, it wouldn’t matter whether the order was carried out by AI or by an econometrician, the result would be the same: a set of measures devised in a mathematical black box that ignored socio/political factors and made no attempt to anticipate real world responses.
@Ken_L:
VAT = tariff is utterly insane.
It’s a sales tax, ftlog.
The difference being, instead of being applied at retailer level, its charged at each step in the chain, but reclaimable if you sell on, or it is for business use. The idea being, any value added (hence the name) can be charged, and makes avoidance tricky.
So, it can be a bit more complex, but only bears on the final non-business consumer.
So, any importer is charged VAT on the imports, but then can claim it back when sold on.
There is ZERO discrimination between imported and domestic products.
The EU market could not function if there were.
Because VAT is not administered by the EU but by national revenue agencies.
Who do not discriminate on VAT between incoming goods of other EU states or external countries.
It’s all utterly absurd.