260912: Innies and Outies
Sam T. Oates has an interesting post up on his Substack, examining the predictions of Ada Palmer in her Terra Ignota series.
I have not read Terra Ignota, and was impressed by the broad strokes of her world, as Oates lays it out—particularly the clash between expansionist "outies" (physical frontiers, colonization, technology) and introspective "innies" (psychic frontiers, self-knowledge.
Nonetheless I will nitpick.
My impression is that we find not just seeds but full-blown cycles of discourse on the same issues stretching all the way back to the start of the 20th century. There you see people complaining en masse about the pace of society, the effects of new technology on psychology, a populace sedated and propagandized by mass media, ‘feminization’, and so on.
I don't think these are 20th C phenomena. Many of them are hot topics in the 18th and 19th centuries as well. Complaints about mass media go back (at least) to the printing press; the idea of decadent feminization is Roman (but popular in the 19th C; see 1884's À rebours); and technology driving the pace of change is Industrial Revolution-era.
The current innie coalition is broadly left-wing and includes much of the Silicon Valley AI culture. Rationalists, hippies, psychedelic enthusiasts, software engineers, consciousness researchers, neuroscientists, some environmentalists - particularly degrowthers - and the majority of those in the humanities make up the faction.
In some ways, this makes me think Palmer's Gordians are misfactored, or fail to capture a more important current divide. Both the outies and the Gordians are progressive technologists in some way pushing a frontier, pushing for transcendence: the former, the frontier of space; the latter, the frontier of mortality.
But the innie culture we actuallly have today—the culture that focuses on inner growth and psychic exploration, has to be the highly educated, middle-income, liberal therapy and managerial set. Preschool teachers. Buddhist yoga instructors. Jewish psychoanalysts on the Upper West Side. And these people really don't like Silicon Valley! They are very different! And I think, following Clara Collier's comments, that in a post-work relational world, this worldview is going to be very influential and pervasive. If I were Clara Collier, I would have tracked down a study of the kinds of people who have enough time for an hour of analysis five days a week.
I tend to agree with Peter Watts’ vision of a world in which the majority of the population checks out into virtual lotus-eating as soon as it passes a reasonable quality threshold.
I agree with Sam that wireheading will prove attractive, but I take Sarah Perry's line, that humans are first and foremost social animals. The video games people tend to give their lives over to, like WoW and EVE, maybe be simulated environments, but the people are real.