REDACTED POSTSCRIPT from "The Ethos of the Divine Age"

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Nadia Asparouhova and I wrote a piece for Pirate Wires together called “The Ethos of the Divine Age”, in which we try to articulate some of what e/acc is, and how we think about the role of techno optimism in where civilization is headed. Below is a postscript I wrote to that piece, which we cut because it had a very different tone from the rest. It gets something across that I haven’t gotten across anywhere else though, so I offer it to you now.

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Postscript: The Ethos of the Divine Age

The spirit within us is alight with telos. To build the divine, to become it. We have only scraps of truth about this whole story, of the universe, of existence. We must move closer to answers. It is the calling of the life that came before us, and our calling too. Hubris cuts many ways. Impetuousness and timidity are both bad in excess. But it is the tragic results of sustained timidity which are evident all around us in unrealized potential, social and governmental dysfunction, calls for depopulation and degrowth, viral pessimism and doom, disease, poverty, death, and the oft-suffering human condition more broadly. Though our collective will has been weak for a very long time, these are all solvable problems.

The asymptote of whichever S-curve you’re in at present is a cruel place to stay indefinitely. Infrequent and small gains over the status quo will not even sustain things as they are. We cannot tax our way to utopia, we cannot political theater our way to a better world. A great future will not be discovered in a spreadsheet or a shallow expected value calculation. The end of history is not coming to save us.

And there should be no doubt that progress will simply fail to materialize if we give in to the fear of change. We cannot create the better world we hope to achieve without moving beyond today’s normal. There is no holding on to the past, it has always already slipped away.

The difficulty in total of the tasks at hand is immense, but we’re up to the challenge. We can summon what’s required. And if we look ahead, we can see that a world where we guide our inventions to create almost unfathomable good is possible, and likely. 

We are imbued with the ability to create. The ability to reconfigure the universe, to wield a kind of divine power. This is incredible on its own, but the acceleration of that power’s growth is even more striking. The great works of today will become the mundanities of tomorrow. Tomorrow, where even the most anemically encoded queries could move heaven.

It is time to bravely take on this role handed down to us by history, by the universe. To live ethos of the divine age.

- bayes