“Every Billionaire is a Policy Failure.”

It’s a beautifully succinct phrase, at one time the Twitter name of Dan Riffle, former policy advisor for representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I have it written on the whiteboard I keep beside my desk at work. 

It’s a daily reminder — a mantra, even — that even though these people feel like mosquitos and flash floods and the like, there is nothing natural about them: a select group having unfathomable wealth in cities where people beg for scraps is not inevitable. An individual whose wealth dwarfs that of the continent on which he was born is not the fulfillment of destiny. Their continued existence is a choice. Their power is a consequence of policies that, were people to try even a little bit, would remove them from our system. Here’s my tweak on Riffle’s classic:

“Billionaires are Polio.” 

Admittedly, the metaphor requires a bit more effort (and probably breaks down if you know a lot about polio), but you can feel it, right? Billionaires are not just something that can be eradicated through policy: they must be. Because their disease infects well beyond their economic class. 

And, I mean… it’d be pretty easy to just end things: 100% wealth tax on all assets above $100 million. Boom. Heck, make it lower, but definitely not higher. People will complain that it doesn’t actually raise that much revenue relatively speaking and those people should be thrown out of a helicopter because their brains have already rotted. The problem isn’t the money, it’s the power. Our country is where it is in no small part because individual people can single-handedly shape (destroy) our information ecosystem.

Any reasonable person would agree that Elon Musk having access to $54 billion with which to buy Twitter was bad for society, and the naked corruption with which the Ellisons have used their billions to ruin CBS and soon CNN likewise are again so obviously vile to anyone whose brain has not been rotted from their disease would say “Yeah nah not good.” 

But Jeff Bezos “only” spent $250 million on The Washington Post, once a truly valuable journalistic institution that’s now a husk at best – its only value being a(nother) way to see into the disease-ridden mind of the billionaire who has shaped its coverage in the image of his pet projects. But we have enough of those… and lives are better spent not engaging with them! Unfortunately, we can’t entirely avoid them because that’s the whole damn point, but at least we have people willing to really wade through that misery and helpfulfully walk us through how fucking stupid it all is. Which is precisely what you get from Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, a book that takes some of their biggest ideas to task and systematically deconstructs them in a way that is clear and comprehensible for a more layman audience.

When I saw the title (without knowing the subtitle), I thought it might be more akin to Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up, which takes on the absurdity of the crypto bubble. And that comes up a little bit, of course, especially in context with the Effective Altruists (and Effective Accelerationists) like Sam Bankman Fried who fueled that fire. But I was thinking too small: this isn’t about the absurdity of the stock market riding on Nvidia making enough chips to cover every inch of the earth in order to fuel infinite growth; it’s about the trillions of humans who could (but won’t) exist in the future so people don’t have to resolve the problems going on right now. It’s about, as the subtitle tells you, artificial superintelligence and space colonization… though it becomes clear pretty quickly that these are not different issues and there’s a whole lot of other bullshit wrapped up in them because most versions of the space colonization fantasy require a superintelligence, and many of them imagine a world where the human brain gets digitized and sent across the cosmos for eternity. 

Dumb!

But while I can say it’s dumb because it’s intuitively dumb, I can’t give you concrete reasons. Not that I should need to (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and there is none)... you’d think the utter failure of the VR “Metaverse,” recently/finally abandoned by the company that changed its name to herald its existence, would put even the slightest bit of humility into these fucking people but also that would require them to be capable or rational thought which they obviously aren’t.

Digital humanity is futile because a digital human is not a human. Humanity is so much more than the 1s and 0s a computer can emulate. I have become kind of obsessed with this analogy from Elizabeth Sandifer’s “On Incomputible Language”:

Consider… digestion. Sure, a Turing Machine could model every single molecule of a steak and calculate the precise ways in which it would move through and be broken down by a human digestive system. But all this could ever accomplish would be running a simulation of eating the steak. If you put an actual ribeye in front of a computer there is no amount of computational power that would allow the computer to actually eat and digest it.

If you believe, as I do, that eating (and digesting) is a key piece of the human experience, then what the fuck are we even doing here. 

Adam Becker is good at those kinds of analogies, and he is able to provide the scientific evidence and rationale that I can’t because he is an astrophysicist. His previous (debut) book, What Is Real?, was about quantum theory! But he’s a rarity in that he’s a Science Doctor able to write for a general audience. This means he can bring to the masses the expertise that is sorely lacking in modern executive suites, because the people in those suites genuinely dislike expertise because they hate being told they’re wrong because they’re children in big boy clothes. 

And in a sense, you get why they hate expertise because Becker can indeed explain why the science fiction of their childhoods is fantasy. Why e.g. they are permanently subject to physical laws despite being so rich that they’re not subject to legal laws. And also why no amount of money can stop them from eventually getting old and dying. (Becker is confident that much of the hell we find ourselves in is a direct result of these freaks’ inability to accept their own mortality.)

It’s impossible not to compare More Everything Forever to Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s 2022 book A City on Mars, which is entirely focused on the question of “Can we live on Mars?” coming at the issue from a practical perspective (e.g. no one knows if people can get pregnant in space let alone give birth and also what might happen to a fetus formed in lesser gravity) as well as a legal one (laws exist and various nuclear superpowers likely have their own incompatible views of how space resources should be utilized in some theoretical world where they could be). Kelly Weinersmith is a biologist, while Zach is a cartoonist; together (and with a whole bunch of interviews), they were able to write something that is easy to understand and makes it easy to dismiss anyone whose vision for the future doesn’t account for the fact that the literal dirt on the surface of mars is poison there is nothing on that rock that is hospitable for humans literally at all in any way… which they won’t account for because they can’t. 

Becker’s work holds up easily to the comparison, writing a similarly readable but also densely informative work. Becker cites the Weinersmiths on numerous occasions but extends it with his own astrophysics-y knowledge. And he does that a lot. There are a lot of quotes and citations in this book: 732 separate endnotes, the vast majority of which are citations including from the 24 interviews that he did do (and mention of the 11 (mostly billionaires) who refused his offer). And it makes the work feel like a complete work that you can have read and enjoy and then bring up at parties when someone says “We’re just, like, computers man”... but it’s also an excellent jumping off point for so many different subjects. If scrolling through the Wikipedia citations is Tired, flipping through More Everything Forever’s is Wired as hell. 

We’re in a particularly bleak moment right now. Deciding whether to check the latest headlines this week in particular has felt a little like playing Russian Roulette and it’s awful how hyperbolic that isn’t. If there is even one useful takeaway, it’s “No one knows what the fuck is going to happen” and anyone who claims they can predict where things will be in five years is an idiot and fifty years is a fraud. But people believe them; rich folks are given deference and respect by virtue of being Good At Capitalism as though that is a broadly applicable skill. The United States government is run by people who believe that in their bones, and we all see how that’s ending up.

In the chaos, it’s good to step back from the cycle and dig into something that was given the time to have perspective. I’ve come to increasingly appreciate what books offer moments like this, because even though More Everything Forever was published a year ago (and so was “complete” even longer ago than that), it remains relevant by focusing on the bigger picture, by systematically deconstructing the beliefs of parasites like Elon Musk in a way that even an idiot like Elon Musk could understand.

Shame that he won’t. 

Eight Point Five out of Ten