Likeable futures are meaningful, not just materially comfortable. Bringing one about requires imagining it, and that may require getting the hostile AIs out of your head.
Cozy futurism is great, but I want to go a step further.
Flying cars and Mars colonies would be cool for their own sakes, but they’re more important as symbols of our continuing willingness to create exciting new things, instead of sinking into numbed stasis; instead of recycling a fashion for 1970s polyester leisure suits, or whatever it is Mooglebook AI is telling us we’re supposed to want this week.
If we knew we’d never get flying cars, most people wouldn’t care. If we knew we’d never get a society in which people mostly get along, and a culture in which mostly people had mostly interesting, enjoyable, meaningful lives, we would care.
Meaning has been in crisis for the past few decades. Traditional and modern sources both shattered; we live their fragmented, irrational, incoherent wreckage.1 That has left many of us confused, lost, or even hopeless; others cling to delusional absolutist belief systems.2
Meaning is interactional; it’s social and cultural; purpose and value are mostly about what you and other people are doing together.3 The actually-existing tech industry is mostly about social interaction and cultural consumption. Technology-mediated interaction constitutes increasingly much of our social lives; and the internet delivers most cultural products. In significant ways, that makes our lives richer; but it also leaves many feeling empty, or even nihilistic.4 The culture war feeds on people hungry—desperate even—for meaning and purpose. We find ourselves pursuing tantalizing illusions of belonging and value created by Mooglebook’s malignant alien demigods, or doom scrolling in hope of finding meaning in chaos.
I invite you to imagine, in as much detail as you are able, a future you’d like better.
That is not easy. You may need to get hostile AI out of your head first.5
I’ve sketched a future I would like better in “Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness.” It’s woefully short on details, but maybe you will find aspects you like in it too.6
- 1.I wrote about this in How meaning fell apart.
- 2.“Preview: eternalism and nihilism” in Meaningness.
- 3.“Rumcake and rainbows” in Meaningness.
- 4.“Atomization: the kaleidoscope of meaning” in Meaningness.
- 5.I suggest methods in “Vaster than ideology,” summarized earlier.
- 6.While I was writing this section, Sarah Constantin tweeted a remarkable thread of “things I’d like to see more of.” I’d like to see more of them too. I think probably most people would. They are meaningful things people do together. They are not dramatic, controversial, or particularly difficult; but they are mysteriously scarce. Publicizing positive visions most people would like seems the way forward.