Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays

by Peter Watts

Back in the old days, my writing might have been suffused in a subtext of Holy shit, people, we’ve got to turn this car around before it goes over the cliff. These days I’m more likely to say Reap the whirlwind, you miserable fuckers. May your children choke on it.

At least I don’t have to worry about the world I’m leaving behind for my children; I got sterilized in 1991.

We’re programmed for delusional optimism. Even facing apocalypse, we fantasize about being Mad Max. Who fantasizes about being one of the skulls piled up in the background?

A whole week later, and most of the world seems to have moved on. We’re frogs, after all; take the stimulus out of our immediate perceptual sphere and we’ll forget it ever existed.

The problem is not that violence doesn’t work; it’s that it works too damn well, and the other side has cornered the market. No matter how many guns any individual might stockpile, next to the state we are as naked as newborns.

Bureaucratic and political organisms are like any other kind; they exist primarily to perpetuate themselves at the expense of other systems. You cannot convince such an organism to act against its own short-term interests.

It’s not really news, but we seem to be living in a soft dictatorship. The only choices we’re allowed to make are those which make no real difference.

The chance that disruption of the little people was, to some extent, the whole point of the exercise. They didn’t just have to show us who was boss, you see. They had to convince themselves.

Bem and Honorton gave me hope that nothing was so crazy-ass that you couldn’t find a peer-reviewed paper to justify it if you looked hard enough.

Pathogens encounter new hosts with no resistance and no time to evolve any. In such a world EIDs are inevitable. They are ongoing. A month scarcely passes without news of some freshly-discovered strain of influenza trading up to a human host.

Of course, upon waking, I have to admit that now Zika is in the spotlight, the medical community will simply fall over itself in the race to find a cure. They will succeed. And we’ll be back where we started—albeit with some new proprietary and lucrative drug in hand, available only from Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson.

Only next time it will be the ideas and not the slang, it’ll be the political statement you have to cut if you want to keep your job, and it’ll be even easier this time because we’ve already taken the first step down that slope. But that’s okay. After a few more iterations the problem will solve itself—because none of us will have the vocabulary to express dissent any more.

And yet, this person has chosen to climb uphill, doing all the heavy lifting herself. She has become Sisyphus, because she believes that something I wrote might matter to people she teaches.

So it is not enough to be a good teacher. It is not enough to be a challenging teacher. It is not even enough to be an accommodating teacher, one so dedicated that she sought me out and enlisted my support for an act we both regard as downright odious—but were willing to commit if it meant that students could be exposed to new ideas and new ways of thinking. It is not enough to hold your nose and slash the prose and spread your cheeks in an attempt to appease these ranting, rabid Dunning-Kruger incarnations made flesh. They will not be appeased. It is not enough to gut a book of its naughty bits. That the book ever had such bits in the first place is offence enough.

The problem is not one outraged parent, or one school, or one county. The problem is the whole fucking country. The problem is people. Naming names in one specific case—even if that did do more good than harm—would be like scraping off a single scab and hoping you’d cured smallpox.

Maybe they’ve discovered something so horrific about the nature of Humanity that they’re afraid to reveal it, for fear of outrage and widespread panic. That would be cool.

Banana developed an uncanny knack for time-keeping; if his bowl hadn’t been kibbled by 0800 he was standing on your chest by 0801, filling the room with the sound of his solicitation purr. If that didn’t work, his claws would hook you through the internasal septum and he’d lead you down the hall to the place where his bowl gaped empty and innocent of food, a profound insult to the very idea of feline decency. (I started calling him “The Tum That Tells Time” about then.)

Such precautions notwithstanding, it began to dawn on me that he no longer resembled anything so skinny as the banana for which he had originally been named. I contemplated changing his name to Potato, which would have been more descriptive of both color and shape (not to mention the nickname potential: Spudnik! Or in tandem with Chip the Fuzzbot, Potato-Chip!)—but although Banana had many fine qualities, a razor-sharp intellect was not among them. I did not want to tax his furry little brain with the demands of learning a whole new name.

somehow he was always in the way, furry and unflappable. I would have killed for that cat.

A few minutes into the spiel he tosses off something about no pupil response. He’s brain dead, I say. The vet nods sadly. Well you might have fucking said so up front; that has a certain central relevance, wouldn’t you say? He agrees.

So many different ways the synapses can wire up, so many different manifestations of that unique wiring. There are a million other fuzzbots, a million other bright-eyed puffy patchy white cats, but there will never be another Chip. That part of the universe is over now, and as always, I can’t help but miss it. Goodbye, you dumb troublesome expensive cat. You were worth every penny, and so very much more.

I went out drinking the other night with someone who punches Nazis. Certainly, ever since Charlottesville, there’s been no shortage of people who advocate Nazi-punching.

Bendell doesn’t think we have twelve years to start, doesn’t give us until mid-century to zero out our emissions. He says widespread societal collapse is inevitable, and it’s going to start in just ten years. (Interestingly, this is about the same time that a variety of pathogens—following warmer temperatures into new environments—are expected to kick off a series of pandemics that hollow out the world’s major cities, according to parasitologist and evolutionary biologist Daniel Brooks.) Bendell says it’s time to give up on futile hopes of saving society as we know it. He coins the term “Deep Adaptation” to describe the processes by which we might deal with the collapse of modern society: ways to prioritize the things we might save, accept the loss of everything else, salvage what we can and hope to build something more sustainable from the wreckage.

Of course, it’s easy to discount one voice. The problem is there might well be a whole chorus backing him up, a chorus we haven’t been allowed to hear thanks to well-intentioned censors who insist facts pass some kind of Hope Test before they’re allowed out in public. The house burns down around us. The fire department was shut down during the latest round of Austerity Cuts. Doesn’t matter. Can’t let people lose hope.

Here’s just one: at our local Earthbound scale of reality DID is classed as a pathology, something to be cured. The patient is healthy only when their alters have been reintegrated. Does this scale up? Is the entire universe, as it currently exists, somehow “sick”? Is the reintegration of fragmented alters the only way to cure it, can the Universe only be restored to health only by resorbing all sentient beings back into some primordial pool of Being? Are we the disease, and our eradication the cure?

We know from the work of Kruger and Dunning2 that not only do people tend to overestimate their own smarts, but that this effect is especially pronounced among the incompetent. Furthermore, incompetent people tend not only to regard themselves as smarter than everyone else, they tend to regard truly smart people as especially stupid, even when shown empirical proof that they are less competent than those they deride.

Logic doesn’t matter to a Jehovah’s Witness. Fossils mean nothing to a creationist. All the data in the world will not change the mind of a true climate-change denier.4 You cannot reason with these people. You cannot take them seriously. It is a waste of energy to even try. All you can really do is mock them. All you can do is subject them to scathing and intense ridicule, publicly if possible. So the next time you see some idiot waving a picture of a fetus in front of an abortion clinic, or pass some bible-thumper screeching that God Hates Fags—don’t engage them, but don’t ignore them, either. Toss them a peanut and make monkey sounds. Take their picture and laugh. Speak amongst yourselves in loud stage whispers, use them to illustrate to your children what inbreeding looks like, mention that you hadn’t realized that research into human-animal hybrids had progressed nearly this far. You will never win them over; but at least you can have some fun at their expense.

(The portrayal of the US as the world’s most pacifist nation is probably the least-plausible element in this whole space-alien saga.)

Most people acquire their beliefs through osmosis and observation, not investigation. We’d rather observe than derive. Raised in a society awash in certain ubiquitous beliefs, you tend to accept those beliefs without thinking. I think most people come to their faith in the same way they come to believe that not wearing a tie is “unprofessional office behavior,” even though ties are a prerequisite for very few office duties.

The most obvious objection involves Moore’s Law: even if robots can’t do something today, there’s a damn good chance they can do it tomorrow. Another problem—one that can bite you in the ass right now, while you’re waiting for tomorrow to happen—is that even people can’t reliably distinguish between friend and foe all the time. North American cops, at least, routinely get a pass when they gun down some innocent civilian under the mistaken impression that their victim was going for a gun instead of a cell phone.

The Christian Church has been an anvil around the neck of scientific progress for centuries. It took the Catholics four hundred years to apologize to Galileo; a hundred fifty for an Anglican middle-management type to admit that they might owe one to Darwin too1 (although his betters immediately slapped him down for it2).

We are not wired for restraint; let us off the leash, and we will devour whatever is available.