Subversive Christianity

• AGI, Hope, and the Human Future 2: Alienation, Boredom, and Technology

  So last week we talked about if—and it’s a big IF—AGI becomes something real, we will be looking at ourselves as if in a mirror and that these AGI machine/persons will be looking back at us. What will they see? The best of us, or the worst? So following John Vervaeke, I explored the implications

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• Correlation and Causation (Updated 9/25)

  That being said, I find Hanania’s description of the historical causes of wokeness more persuasive than other right-wing screeds or even the Atlantic contributor Yascha Mounk’s forthcoming book on the topic. Almost all such books blame identity politics on postmodern philosophy and critical race theory, with some pinch-hitting by Tumblr. Although strong overlaps certainly exist

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• A Simulacral Age

  The past decade has been defined by how life, the real thing, so often resembles fiction — the first Black president succeeded by a reality TV star and serial conjurer of failed businesses, the pandemic, the astounding and scary new artificial intelligence marvels monthly. “You can’t make it up,” people say. But for those of

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• What Is After the Future About?

  Note: Every once in a while I revise my About statement at the top of the left column on this site. I thought I'd post my most recent revision here today: After the Future is a public diary that I've been writing for over twenty years. It's what I'd be writing anyway if there were

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• End of History?

  Let’s begin with a more specific account of the discontents expressed by the political right. These center on something very fundamental to liberalism and have been raised repeatedly over the centuries during which liberalism has existed. Classical liberalism deliberately lowered the sights of politics, to aim not at a good life as defined by a

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• Liberation to What?

  The proper pop-culture reference here is not The Handmaid’s Tale or 1984 but The Shawshank Redemption: Americans got a look at what life would be like not in Gilead or Oceania but under Samuel Norton, the corrupt, sadistic, Bible-toting warden, a Pharisaical hypocrite whose scripture needlepoint hid his wall safe. –Tom Nichols Nichols' reference is

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• The Coming Discontinuity

  At the heart of our difficulty predicting the future is our assumption of stability. It is like this today and so it will probably be like this tomorrow, too. What makes this way of thinking seductive is that it is, usually, true. And then, all at once, it’s not. —Ezra Klein What makes discontinuity discontinuous

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• Hip to be Catholic?

  What’s so great about faith is that it doesn’t have to be grounded in rational thought. We are seeing a lot of people return to religion because everything feels so senseless and pointless, so why not be a Catholic?”  From "How Catholicism Became a Meme" in Vox This is from a quote from Dasha Nekrasova,

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• The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

  In fact, if you ask me what really went wrong after 1991, it’s … that there was no recognition among the Soviet elites that they had lost the Cold War and that they had deserved to lose it. Instead, people like Putin and others nursed resentments about betrayal and humiliation—as if the Soviet Union had

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• The Grand Inquisitor and the Alt Right

  ..Essayist Gregory Hood claims that “Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood. It is the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.” A major work of alt-right history concludes: “The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.”  Matthew

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