Last Thursday I was honoured to be asked to join a panel celebrating the publication of my great friend Professor Tad Delay’s book on psychoanalysis and the climate emergency, Future of Denial:
This was part of the Historical Materialism conference at SOAS, and it was great to speak alongside Richard Seymour, whose own response to Tad’s opening presentation was excellent.
I thought it might be worth publishing the text of the notes for my contribution here.
Response to Future of Denial
I want to thank Tad for inviting me to join him here.
I first met Tad many years ago in the US, and was so impressed by his ideas and encouraged him to pursue them and get writing – and it’s incredible to be here now all these years later with this fantastic book, and many others behind him too.
Like Tad, I was born and raised in a very religious family, and like Tad a lot of my own writing has been about ‘composting’ that. A particular area of interest for me is how religion and technology intersect, and – in particular – how ‘high’ technologism is functioning as a religious structure.
But my upbringing was also one of pretty intense environmental awareness. My grandfather painted a 20-foot CND sign on the roof of his house, and would spend his evenings etching the same logo into coins with acid. Through my mother this brought environmental issues into our family, with major support for Greenpeace etc… And yet, looking back, we had a gas-burning Aga oven in the kitchen. And right there, in this godly, environmentally conscious house, there’s this disconnect – one that Tad’s book gets to the heart of so well.
When chatting the other day, I heard you say that your working title for the book was ‘Denial Futures’ – playing the idea of ‘oil futures.’ My take on the title had been that it had been a deliberate play on Freud’s ‘Future of an Illusion’, where he builds an argument about religious ideas whose purpose is the fulfilment of urges for security, for escape from feelings of helplessness, for maybe a return to the simplicity of childhood.
One of Freud’s key passages:
“The gods retain the threefold task: they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”
Marx wrote a brilliant scientific text in Capital, but – writing before Freud – perhaps thought that religion would just wither as people understood more ‘facts.’ And what your book brilliantly sets out is that – in an age where we have unparalleled access to knowledge – there remains this religious fervour – explicit in many parts of the US in particular – about ‘exorcising the terrors of nature.’
As you say in the book Tad, “raising consciousness isn’t working”.
Back in March I published ‘God-Like: A 500-Year History of AI in Myths, Machines, Monsters’. I am Associate Director at the Institute for the Future of Work – a research charity exploring how AI and Automation are changing work in the UK – and a lot of the stuff I was reading on AI was trying to predict what the future might hold. What I wanted to do was look back to where in the human heart this thing had come from, and what the ‘illusions’ were that we were suffering as we strove to create it.
The title comes from a piece by Ian Hogarth in the FT back in March 2023 where he argued ‘we must stop the race to god-like AI’ … and I thought… which gods?
What I plot there is that this desire to generate god-like systems has existed for millennia – and has always be intertwined with our tool-making.
So even you see the 11th century monk Hugh St Victor writing about how the development of better tools is all towards “restoring our pre-fall nature…”
But what we see is that the interrelationship between religious narratives and technological development is very strong. And rather than our enlightened, scientific progress leading to an abandonment of religion, what we’ve seen instead is this switch where the technology of religion has moved into the religion of technology. This is what will save us now.
To think about what a technology does, we can imagine a hammer. I can’t push nails into a wall with my bare hands, but the hammer extends my power to act in the world. It amplifies my strength. But it also reaches back through the arm and into the heart and asks: what do you want to do with this new strength, build a cabinet, or smash your way into the Capitol? (and what I love about your book is that it – as a technology itself – performs both acts so well… reaching inside us, but also reaching out with powerful statistics and rock solid argument)
Back to the CND logo on my grandfather’s house… the ultra powerful technology of nuclear weapons precipitates ultra powerful questions within us as a species, like: WTF do you want to do with this power?
In the background of the Trinity test – named by Oppenheimer after the John Donne poem, “batter my heart three-personed god”, was Oppenheimer’s boss, Vannevar Bush. And he was so concerned about this newly-unleashed power that he wrote a piece for Atlantic Magazine just weeks after, arguing that scientists must urgently instead look to build technologies of peace. He proposed what that might be: a ‘Memex’ – a machine for augmenting human memory, with the idea that this extra knowledge would empathise us.
Reading that article, sat on a beach in the pacific was a young US soldier called Doug Engelbart, and he vowed to build that machine. He ended up at Stanford’s Research Centre for Augmenting Human Intellect… and his presentation of his ‘online system’ really is one of the birthing moments of AI. People were so stunned by it that one said he stood ‘god-like, dealing lightening with both hands.’
So what we have now is this new, insanely powerful god-like system of AI. And to return to the climate crisis, this is what is now going to save us. Even though it has bumped up Microsoft’s carbon emissions by 30% last year…
So it seems that illusion has a great future still. But to return to your cry that “raising consciousness isn’t working”, nowhere do we see this more than in the question of AI and the climate crisis, and nowhere do we see better the mechanisms of denial in play.
What the religious structure does is allow us to abdicate responsibility for action to some ‘big other’. And this is what we’re seeing across policy and practice around AI deployment: ‘LET THE AI TELL US WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY.’ When actually, we are in denial about our already-existing knowledge: we know what needs to be done.
And yet, of course, as you so powerfully set out, the religious structure as Freud sets out also has to help us process the fact that we know we’ve messed up… and offer us mirage where everything will be ok.
Your work Tad is a stunning reminder – at this critical moment – that one third of Americans believe that the world will end in the next few decades… one in which in Mike Pompeo, Trump’s Secretary of State back in 2015, we had a man who claimed all of his decisions were informed by the Bible. As you note, ‘a secretary of state who roots policy in the end times is simply an average American.’
So what interests me is this intersection of your work and the development of AI, which is the techno-religious apex of our long history to create systems that we can abdicate our responsibility to.
And as ‘the changes’ grow, so the intensity of this pressure on us as people will grow too. People are already struggling with climate stress and feelings of climate depression. And this gives powerful technology companies a chance to promise big…
So we have this narrative of AI as heralding the end of labour – another trope from the religious sphere about returning to paradise and overcoming the toil imposed on us by the fall. And Marx gets some of this in Capital: foreseeing that machines allow us to work without our own physical power… and yet also lead to work intensification and the extension of the working day.
So there’s this mismatch between the promise of technology to deliver us… and what it often does deliver, which is generally a very narrow benefit for those running the tech.
And in a time of climate stress, we should be clear that technology companies will be hard-selling labour-saving and responsibility-lifting solutions.
So we see ‘smart’ systems being used by the Israeli military to identify militants by cross-referencing datasets. It used algorithmic systems to come up with recommended targets…
“The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier. You don’t care – you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting”
Labour saving. Abdication of responsibility.
In a different sphere entirely, we are about to publish a report on the rise of ‘Affective Computing’ – using biometrics and emotion tracking devices to feed information on workers into algorithmic management systems. The promise is that they will make work safer, will be able to tell if a bus driver is too tired… but the fear is that the automated decision-making HR systems will simply de-allocate work from those who aren’t smiling enough… and this will be done without any human manager having to take responsibility, or express empathy.
And in both of these systems there’s this idea of an unfeeling intelligence at work, a well-behaved god doing our bidding, creating well-behaved occupied Palestinians, and well-behaved workers who keep on smiling, even as the tide rises and famine begins and the heat waves come.
To finish – what intrigues me here is the lack of holistic vision. You raise the most fascinating prospect Tad, that there was a real chance that Marx could have incorporated greenhouse effects into his theory of surplus value. If this work could be done, could we see a sensible corrective to our constant abdication of work to machines – an abdication that, seen perfectly in the petrol driven leaf-blower over the rake, ends up with energy intensity instead of our own hard work?
We are living in a world where machines are allowing us to extract value from the earth – and from the standing resource of people’s minds – with increasing ease.
And as we do that, we are increasing the intensity of our energy use in the religious pursuit of our leisure.
But, beyond that, as Tad’s book so clearly lays out, we are also mired in mechanisms of denial about this process – to the point where we are deluded enough to have created a climate-busting technology that is also going to deliver ‘the answer’ for us.
I wonder if it will come up with the same answer that you conclude with Tad – ‘socialism or barbarism.’
My head would love to say the former.
My heart – heavy right now – worries that we’re already answering with the latter.
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