Travelogue 1177 – 5 April
A Fable for Rich Men

Our twitchy CEO, co-Majesty of the Untied States, Elonng Muisk, took to *their* inhouse chatbox to type a message to … no one? *They* wrote, “As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence”

Because I’m quoting the Muisk, I leave out the full stop, the same as *they* do, though I observe the convention of commas, the same as *they* do. That leads to a psychological side note: might one analyse X punctuation to arrive at a profile of Joffreyism, self-righteousness lacking restraint?

The “bootloader” message is a message of caring, of course, and yet it sounds uncannily like scorn, the tone of a scornful person. Humanity might have been evaluated from cool distances and found wanting. Our tale has been found to be one full of sound of fury, and *they* just might be the idiot telling it.

The “bootloader” thought may be entirely unoriginal, as even the Countess Muisk should admit, but it appears smart, and that’s the important thing. Also, it must deliver insouciance. It must be self-consciously disingenuous, a patently false sentiment from the hybrid engineer, waxing dystopian between mainstage appearances at political rallies, where *they* jump around in short Ts and whoop for the crowd, waxing dystopian in a kind of weak-tea homage to Rutger Hauer in “Blade Runner”, lowering *themselves* wistfully to the toilet seat backstage to issue off-handed disdain for the rally crowd, disdain for being mere … humanity.

One might wonder then, who is the Countess’s audience? Mme Muistoinette has already said that the world is inhabited largely by NPCs (nonplayer characters). “If you don’t think there’s at least a tiny chance you’re an NPC … you’re an NPC,” the Countess does “tweet”. One might just ask, “Who the fX is the “you” in *their* sage utterances?” – if one were to question a … genius.

At a Code Conference, some nine or ten years ago, the Countess proclaimed that the likelihood that we are living in “base reality” was just “one in billions”. Meaning, all this is a computer simulation. (Run by a Muskovite teen in an alternate sphere?) It’s a terrible thought that might move a humble NPC to tears, but the Countess is fortified by nothingness. *They* survey all and see glorious Nothing, worlds emptied of soul. (The psychoanalyst of X punctuation might diagnose that void as the experience of pure ego.)

Among the poor suckers (NPCs every one of them) cheering on the Dark-MAGA hero are thousands of evangelical Christians who sit piously among their embroidered pillows reading devotional books like the one penned by the pious Jack Posobiec, entitled “Unhumans”, a book endorsed by Steve Bannon and JD Vance.

“For the last couple centuries,” those Christians read, “we’ve known them as communists. Socialists, with extra steps. And of course, leftists. Radicals and revolutionaries as well. A hundred years ago, Marxist Leninists, then more recently, Cultural Marxists. Even as, without irony and not as a joke, ‘progressives.’ For the purposes of this book, we will call them the unhumans.”

We the obedient are losing track of the ways in which we don’t count. We may require a Venn diagram now, explaining the overlap between NPCs and unhumans. If we have to ask, are we unhuman? Or is that only when we speak openly about “the people”, which, the Countess and Posobiec inform us, doesn’t exist? We must resign ourselves to having become a fable for rich men.