Good

Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

About 4 billion years ago give or take, the planet we live on became enough of a planet to be called a planet, even though we didn’t live on it yet to call it that, and frankly given our timeshare here, the fact that we’ve even named the thing at all is sort of self-centred. Anyway, a whoooooole bunch of crazy shit happened for, like, 3.9 billion more years and at the very, very tail end of that, enough proteiny goo mixed it up with other proteiny goo that something fundamentally changed, and all of a sudden we were in fast-forward to Right Now, re: life.

And then the life on the planet fucked around and found out for hundreds and hundreds of millions of more years, and eventually you got us. But that too is a very “us”-centric way of thinking. I re-read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park novels this summer — and I think the new Jurassic Park movie, Jurassic World Rebirth, mentioned this point as well — and they reminded me that dinosaurs were the Big Magillahs around here for, like, three hundred million years. Which is a pretty easy number for the human psychology to skate past, partly because the only reaon our psychologies work at all — by which I mean, the only reason they’ve been able to escape a fragility that would have killed our species in its crib, evolutionariy speaking — is that we can park really big ideas and “understand” them, without actually having to understand them. We do this because actually understanding them would deny our ability to conceptualize our own Big Magillah status, which is an evolutionary advantage we’d rather not cede to the others on the field.

So for a moment, let’s not skate. Let’s take a look at the number 1,000 — which is a reasonably-scaled number, one which any of us can probably wrap our heads around, because it’s at least possible each of us has seen 1,000 of something, at least once. Now let’s reflect on the fact that dinosaurs were the dominant form of life on this planet for one thousand times longer than the human race has existed.

To slightly retread the above, I think the human mind just shorts out when you actually try to think about that. That for a thousand times longer than anything resembling us has existed at all, dinosaurs (many and various types of them, in such plural diversity that my eyes literally water with rapturous gratitude, but I digress) were walking around bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp doing their dinosaur things, shitting their dinosaur shit, dying their dinosaur deaths and maybe laying down in silted lakebeds to lay the groundwork for too-clever-for-their-own-good apes, tens of millions of dinosaur lifespans later, to peer at their old bones and go, “huh.”

Okay okay okay, it’s the time scale thing, everyone’s got a good version of the time scale thing (or if they don’t, they should). But let me do one more, because for me, the real essence of the time scale thing — by which I mean, the stunning lengths to which we disregard how long time is, and how short we are — is about the (again, roughly) 300,000 years of the human species that I’ve used in my calculation above. Because, yeah sure, you can say that homo sapiens has been here for around that, by some math. Some folks say it’s less, but 300,000 is a good round number, so let’s go with it.

That means for, like, 297,000 of the years that “humans” have been around here, there weren’t even pyramids yet. Whatever the fuck we were doing, it wasn’t that. We weren’t ready to do that. And pyramids are pretty impressive, engineeringwise, but let’s face it, by modern standards they’re big piles of rocks. We built a really, really big pile of rocks 3,000 years ago and that is a big fucking deal, a high-water mark in the evolution of our species. And that was a hundredth of our species’ lifespan ago.

Back to Crichton for a moment. Look, no one knows for sure how the dinosaurs were wiped out, but one of the popular theories is that a big pile of rocks fell out of the sky — “nuked the site from orbit” — and whichever species of dinosaurs were the Big Magillah that day all laid down simultaneously and died. Bullshit, sez Crichton. That’s such a human idea. We’re painfully, hilariously unable to conceive of anything in anything other than our own experience of time: an instantaneous, human-scaled moment — an hour, a day, a year — that did the whole job, rather than what is more likely, which is that the biosphere changed over tens of millions of years — hundreds of entire lifespans of the human species — and things around here moved off in a different direction, lifewise, and the dinosaur was no longer particularly advantageous as a species, so they stopped making ’em.

Look, I’m not saying we couldn’t end human life on earth in a human-scaled perception of time — an hour, a day, a year. We absolutely could. We’re working pretty hard at it, on a number of different vectors; the Project Office down at Human Race Incorporated^TM decided that one Armageddon process wasn’t surefire enough, so they approved like six or seven different ways we could kill ourselves in this century alone. (“It’s the only way to be sure.”) And hey, fuck around and find out: even if we don’t directly cause our own deaths with one or more of those Armageddon processes — the superheating of the atmosphere with the A.I. tools that everyone except you is already gormlessly using in their day jobs; the microplastics in each and everyone one of our nuts that will build up and build up till babies come out of the womb sealed in Evian bottles — if we destabilize enough of the biosphere that the species ecosystem collapses, well, we’re fucked anyway. Life will become plenty inhospitable around here for long enough for three, five, or seven generations of humanity to have a really shitty time of it; they’ll have to have to rebuild how a human species stays alive without most of the tools — none of them man-made — that got us here in the first place. And those generations might not be able to pull it off in enough time to not just wither and die.

What’s funny is, from the planet’s perspective, we’ll be gone like that. Seven generations is a long time to you or me. Seven generations ago, my people were walking ten miles from one farm to the next farm in Cornwall, to get married into a life they’d never leave. To the Earth, though, seven generations is nothing. It’s gonna be like we disappeared in a magic trick. A jump cut to end all jump cuts. Faster than those arrogant assholes who crushed themselves at the bottom of the sea — men who, from the earth’s perspective, were basically never even here.

“It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?”

Something built into the premise of Alien: Earth is that the transhumanist nutjobs in Silicon Valley, a hundred years hence, will have conquered death. At least, they will be on the precipice of doing so. (We don’t, as of this writing, know what’s going to happen with Boy Kavalier’s hybrids, after all.) The idea is this: they’ll dump their Selves into artificially-made, nigh-indestructible bodies, and then live forever. Dame Sylvia, one of the characters working for the fuckboy trillionaire who came up with this scheme, wonders aloud what the outcome is there: consumers who can’t die? Who are there to buy things… in perpetuity?

(In the real world and, I think, also in the show world, it’s probably unlikely that 99.9% of the human race would get access to the permanent body, though. The consumer class would be fucked. The live-forever-as-a-robot thing feels more like endgame for our current crop of wanna-trillionaire idiots, though what they’d do on this planet all alone in permanent bodies, I cannot guess.)

But let’s take the premise as written. Is it better for the economy (or worse for the economy) if the plastic-buying public never has to enter long-term care and eventually shuffle off the coil? If the consumer base is now a fixed part of the capitalist machine, spending their money to keep the wealthy wealthy, forever? More esoterically: if humans live as long as the trees, what would happen to our borked sense of time and reality? Would we eventually catch up to how long things actually are, vs. how quick we (had) always been?

We’re dealing in broad science fiction hypotheticals here, so I’ll just go ahead and say: “dunno.” But stop me if you’ve heard this before: ecosystems tend toward diversity, and markets do the opposite. (That’s a line from a book I finished last month called The Overstory, btw. Ghost doesn’t like footnotes.) The planet we come from has used its 4 billion years to make impossible variety and variation on every thing imaginable and half a billion other, unimaginable things. The economy, though, is converging around single use cases. (Why do you think every app you use eventually enshittifies? It’s because the people who make them don’t want to have to deal with the idea that there’s more than one User, who behaves exactly as they need him to behave.)

What it comes to, I think, is this: everything the planet teaches us about how to be is the opposite of how we’ve ended up behaving. In this regard, I suspect that the human race will prove maladaptive, no matter how long the billionaires let us live, or how long we end up living.

It feels to me like on the road we’re on, even if we solve the climate crisis, we’re all chunnelling down to being One Thing and One Thing Only and that doing so is kind of the exact opposite of every advantage that ever got us here in the first place. We need more words, not less; more choices, not less. More ways of being alive, not less. More tolerance of those ways, not less. Anything else is a kind of denial of the broad-strokes serendipity, the sheer potential, of even being conscious in the first place. It’s staking your position on exceptionalism where none is indicated. Do the math on how many creatures had to have sex with other creatures, at the right time and in the right order, for you to be here alive on Earth at the same time as your cat: we’re not supposed to be here. We’re not supposed to be anything. We’re a crazy wild fluke, each and every one of us, and to try to turn each of those flukes into One Thing is kinda mental, imho.

Or how’s this, on the exceptionalism tip: I used to think “American exceptionalism” was a philosophical term, something professors came up with to describe a thing otherwise unnamed, and maybe at one point it was. Turns out it’s policy now. As a policy: that is a country that is officially about how indisputably excellent that country is. The snake has eaten its own tail and is now halfway up the ass. From just outside its borders, the whole project looks like it’s going to burn down in my lifetime — these short, human spans of time! — purely out of the raw, energetic denialism inherent in trying to be one thing instead of a lot of things. Wouldn’t you rather tend toward diversity?

“His appetite for human self-regard is dead.”

I’m on my bike at College and University and one of those alpha-male douchebags with the machine-gun cars rolls past, and I flash him my pinky finger and grin, wiggling it, because that pinky is his tiny, defective lil’ dickie. Now, to be clear: there’s nothing wrong with having a small, useless penis. But there is something wrong with rolling through the hospital district firing your machine-gun car’s exhaust to disturb and terrify everyone within a four-block radius. I don’t think that’s an “imho.” I think that just is.

I won’t go all the way to “loud cars are rape culture,” not necessarily. But I do take the lady’s point. I do say they are a symptom of the increasing need to display threat, to reinforce power, among people who (I assume) feel like without not only that sense of power, but also that unsassailable display of it to anyone around them, they will feel frightened, less than, and small. They’re all just too-clever-for-their-own-good apes, after all. That limbic system’s still gonna limbic, no matter how many luxury cars we build.

But lordy lordy, am I over it. I don’t give a fuck. I don’t just mean the cars: I mean all of it. I don’t give a fuck about any single person’s — particularly men, but let’s go ahead and say “everybody” — need to brag to everyone around them about how amazing they are, how powerful they are, how impressed they are with themselves, how dangerous they are, how no one should fuck with them, how everyone should fuck them, etc., etc., etc. Self-care and self-love are vital, valid things; but they look inward, not out. If you’re pointing them outward you’re doing it wrong. Believing in yourself isn’t a threat display; it isn’t home decor. It doesn’t earn you merit badges. The only person who can validate whether you feel good enough about yourself and what you’re doing is you. Everything else, everything else, all the other plumage, is just bullshit, a misdirection away from the point.

Something I think about a lot, as regards evil, is how much of my time is spent thinking about whether or not I’m doing it. How frequently I’m questioning my own motives, my own actions, my own dyed-in-the-DNA assumptions, which guide how I relate to other people and to the world I live in.

Now, it’s pretty easy for self-regarding folk like myself to assume that the They-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named among us (you know exactly who I’m referring to, don’t worry) don’t actually have that thing. They might not! The world’s evil-doers might be absent the dimension of self-doubt that puts every one of their choices on an internal spectrum, and never lets them know for sure if they chose right, regardless of outcome. Perhaps the relation to power is reciprocal, or I should say, inversely proportional: you don’t get command of genocidal armies, fascist street cops, or billion-dollar hate funds, if you don’t also have the least possible self-doubt about the use of that power.

But maybe they do have it. Or maybe they — and maybe the loud-car-guys too — are a few steps of evolution removed from needing to have it, meaning that they’ve marinated in a set of conditions around safety and selfhood that have been perpetuating long enough that one no longer even needs to feel that terror of less-than-ness in order to already take action towards its correction, by ensuring that one is Strong, and Tall, and Loud. The Big Magillah around here. This is what I mean when I say I suspect that the human race will prove maladaptive to the world that we’ve made. If the world we’ve made no longer gives us a moment of space to even consider why we’re doing the things we’re doing, let alone whether those things are right… well, in that scenario, time is irrelevant. Eons of it or microseconds, it wouldn’t matter. We’re not even here. We’re just semi-sentient chatbots running out our programs.

Skating past those moments of space is just easier, is the problem. Our psyches are still so fragile; we will always take “easier” over the other thing. I’m no saint: I take “easier” a lot more than I don’t. (Remind me to write you a post about “discipline,” sometime.) For all the degree to which the earth has been here for 4 billion years, we are experiencing a needle-point moment in history that feels like it’s — and genuinely might be — happening in microseconds. You think I’m not self-soothing as hard as I can, in leavening that cognitive burden?

But I am trying, gods truly I am trying, to do the other thing too. Not just measuring whether or not I’m conducting evil at any given moment; the other other thing. The harder thing: sitting with it — whatever “it” is, postive or negative, good or evil or everything beyond — within those moments of space. Doubt is painful; all uncertainties are. Lord give me the strength to accept the things I cannot control, and the wisdom to know the difference. Pain is temporary; all pain is. But that doesn’t make it any more comfortable to sit within, even as it gives structure to our microscopic experience of the longer, richer, gentler expanses of time.

Thanks for reading!

What a summer we’ve had here on the bloobslettog. If you’re still with me at this point, I thank you. Here’s what else has been going on:

• I got to write about Saving Face, one of my favourite movies, newly (and quite deservingly) arrived in the Criterion Collection. (Screen Anarchy)

• Kat mentioned My So-Cast Life in her newsletter about journaling last week and I only wanted to add, I still can’t believe that show is a thing that I did. I think about it a great deal for something I did ten years ago. It was a good ‘un.

• One of my favourite things to do on my YouTube channel, which serves (primarily) white greybeards (like me) who present as cis (like me) and probably are cis (not like me), is let ‘er rip occasionally on just how much I want to fuck Timothy Olyphant (or another, equally opportune, example). Here I am doing it this week. (Giant Green Space Hand)

• And hey, if you ever wondered what kind of material I write for clients, here’s a good example. (Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst)

One more thing: it’s renewal season here at Ghost. I offer a $5/year paid subscription. (That’s right, five dollars per year, not per month. Important distinction!)

A paid sub gets you access to occasional deep-dive posts, like my Andor series and my Pitt series. If everyone currently reading this newsletter for free chipped in their five bucks, my renewal would be well and truly paid for, and I’d appreciate it! You can upgrade your subscription here: