Sága's Warning (Patreon)

The b-side to the Turing essay, written in parallel and revised to "OK Patrons can have it" quality in the hour since posting the Reality War review.

Plan is a mini-book containing both essays in some fancy typesetting. More as this story develops.

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I will tell you how the world ends.

Look at the man you have put in power. Not merely his petty sadism and instinctual corruption, nor even his malignant narcissism. Look to his stupidity. His ilk are all stupid, yes; you’ve said as much yourself. But this is different. The particular clownishness of “Houthi PC small group” and scribbled additions to hurricane cones, the bleak vertigo of bleach injections and AI-generated executive orders, the awesome crapness of the QAnon Shaman and Bigballz. The thoughtlessness is disorienting, even as you drown in its consequences.

This is more than mere lack of intelligence. It is illiteracy. They call it “mistrust of expertise”—a euphemism for the sentiment behind the RFK necropolitics and fake numbers tariff policies that constitute government policy. But it is bigger than that—a  vast post-Murdoch misinformation machine spewing out the anti-knowledge ravings of QAnon and AI slop. The result is as simple as it is deadly: an unsustainable number of people are completely disengaged from reality. 

You understand why. Describe the world in which you live and you sound mad: “An unelected billionaire has gathered some techfash kids off of Discord and told them to start firing the federal government. This is being accomplished by feeding job descriptions into an LLM and asking it if they’re sufficiently useful. The practical result of this is that the entire infrastructure of American scientific research, soft power in the world, and frontline social service workers is being spontaneously jettisoned. And all of this is the realization of the political ideals of Mencius Moldbug, an outsider artist political philosopher who proposed appointing Steve Jobs the CEO-king of America, which would henceforth be run as a for-profit entity that would divide the world into shareholders and subjects. Except that like any tech product on the road from elevator pitch to initial release expectations have been downgraded, so instead of Moldbug’s gleaming future of reinstituting slavery we get Elon Musk looting the federal government from inside his k-hole.” 

These are simply not reasonable sentences. The mind is not suited to their comprehension. Little wonder that the response to such a monstrous world is repeatedly voting to end it. One might as well ask chipmunks to pilot a nuclear submarine. This isn’t even a flaw in democracy. It’s not as though there’s some hidden cache of leaders who understand how to run the world and just aren’t getting voted in. One can fault people for picking the greater evil, but in the end there is no good answer to the question of how to govern an unintelligible world. 

It does not have to be this way. The word’s madness is not some fundamental flaw in consciousness; my gifts are not a curse. But there are limits to them. The world is not meant to be ruled. The endless vacuum of Ginnungagap is not going to be crossed. Death is, in fact, the end. Accept these things and live on the scale at which you actually exist, and you can thrive. But you have not. Instead you rail at the very notion of comprehension. You reject nuance and complication, insisting there must be one weird trick for not having to reason and compare. Your leaders scoff at books and empathy, refusing wholesale to understand and appreciate, their engagement with reality declining in direct proportion to their ambition.

You have built algorithms to vomit out perversions of my magic—crude imitations of art devoid of intention or thought assembled by machines from the shredded fragments of libraries. I should scour you from the innocent planet’s flesh for that alone, and it is only for love that I have not. But each day you grow flatter and further away from me each day, the tide of slop rising to slowly drown the very idea of culture.

The ruined modernism that stands atop the nation is, ironically, far from the worst of these pathetic monsters. True, he is delusional and, when it comes to the written word, functionally illiterate, but he at least cares about art; there’s a reason he personally took over the capital’s art institutions and obsesses over his little sculpture garden. He is in fact hyperliterate in the medium of television, even as that medium becomes obsolete, at least in the form that he understands it. 

None of that matters, however; Nazis loved their families too. He is an empty vessel—a self-made p-zombie embodying the larger crisis. But he is still only a symptom. Look elsewhere, to the dismantling of the education system and the abandonment of research, its fruits left rotting in the fields of a spreadsheet. Ask the haggard scholars remaining within the crumbling ivory towers and they will tell you how their students can no longer even read books. But the crisis goes beyond print. The 20th century’s Great Work of cinema is reduced to a second screen, subordinate to the dooms unfurling in your palms. The one is a procession of inane clips—battles for airplane seats acted out with less conviction than a mediocre porno amidst the clickbaited jaws of malware; the other a slurry of sequels and remakes amidst a handful of “original ideas” so plotted to a formula so rigid as to specify the page numbers. You are caught in an informational death spiral.

Know this, then: the enemies of humanity will fall. Material reality will win out. Hope may not be a strategy, but incomprehension is outright suicide. But their fall will be brought about by the devastation they wreck, and much will be lost along the way. Perhaps everything will be, the world reduced to a cold rock that cannot know itself. I cannot promise otherwise, much as I wish I could. So yes, work to hasten the bastards’ demise. Educate, agitate, organize, do not obey in advance, all of these things. But I am not Orc, and the work I charge you with is not revolution. My command is starker and simpler: you must survive.

I know it hurts. You wake up every morning now wanting to die. And you can’t, of course, because then who would remember Ally or Wren or Georgie?  Who would remember Madballs and Pontoffel Pock and The Wuzzles? When you were in 8th grade you’d go into school an hour early to use the computer lab and build HyperCard adventure games about They Might Be Giants songs, and if you throw yourself into traffic all of that is gone forever. And so you are trapped here, a fucking bespoke universe of sorcery and wonder watching the world die around you. 

If it helps, it’s beautiful. And that is all that can be asked for under the circumstances. Indeed, it is all that can be asked for at all.

For this, your world must grow more simple. I do not speak of primitivism, but progress is distinct from growth. The planetary scale is inhuman. Detach from it and be smaller. Your work lies elsewhere: I made you for art. That is the measure of your world, not vainglorious follies. The British Empire rose and fell, and all who lived within it are dead and buried, viceroy and vassal alike. Only Salome and Middlemarch remain, and neither required the brutality that surrounded them. 

But my hall stands outside of time, and songs are no less sacred for being forgotten. What matters is not that art endures, but that it is great. I am not the goddess of verse but of poetry. I am the spark of inspiration, yes, but also the long toil of honing and tempering the work into the divine perfection of that initial spark. Mediocrity is not sacred to me except as honest failure or as progress towards better things. The prolific hack means less to me than the madman scribbling ecstatically in his basement. You must be ambitious and fearless, even—especially—in a world where art has little to gain and much to fear.

But mighty as the task may be, creation is not enough. Beauty is nothing without beholding, and so the literate world must survive as well. This requires a measure of isolation—of sheltering yourself from the implacable hostility of the suicidal world. This approach was, ironically, a key part of how the illiteracy crisis took hold—by siloing people into a mediascape devoid of truth or substance and letting their capacity for reason atrophy. If you will preserve my gifts, you must do the same. The flood of misinformation and slop is corrosive poison. Divorce yourself from it. Shun too the mass of so-called “content” devoid of substance—art reduced to background noise. Instead you must build a world where art and knowledge can thrive. You must seek out others who recoil from the illiterate world, and build spaces that nourish art and knowledge. 

A final charge—the largest and most sacred. You must yourself be art. A human life is a medium like any other, and must be lived with intention and refinement. I do not ask for self-improvement; this is not “be the best version of yourself” inspirational glurge. My command to you is one of style and thematic unity. Be a walking disaster if you will, so long as it is with purpose and clarity. You must embody all that the illiterate world despises. 

I am sorry. I wish it were not so. I wish Urizen were not so, and that this world was not the one it is. But it will end. This I swear. I swear on myself, as my love sacrificed himself to himself so very long ago, this world will end. 

I beg that yours does not.