Chris Korda - Alexandre Breton

Transcript of Alexandre Breton interviewing Chris Korda for Egon.a (La Poignée) on April 10, 2021 via Zoom, slightly edited for clarity.

What is your point of view about this situation, this era?

I must be very careful here to understand exactly what you’re asking, because I want to avoid saying anything that’s irresponsible or that could be misunderstood. Art is not obliged to be responsible or even useful, but in the domain of ideology and in political speech, it is necessary to be constructive and responsible, particularly in this age, when people are very sensitive and easily offended. On a subject like the pandemic, there’s a fairly wide spectrum of opinion, and people are easily inflamed. People are upset, and understandably so, because many people had their lives suspended and were unable to work, or even unable to eat, and lost their jobs, and many other tragedies, many people died as well. It’s an inflammatory subject. I would need you to be more specific, so we can avoid misunderstandings.

I was thinking that we were at the point where we could think about the end of the world, no future.

When you say the end of the world, what are you actually referring to? Are you referring to the end of human civilization? I often find that this is a point of great confusion for people. Many people misunderstood my previous work because it was neo-Dadaism and influenced by Situationism, and was intended to be inflammatory and provocative, so many people misunderstood it by design. An example of that is the famous slogan, “save the planet, kill yourself.” What a lot of people didn’t get is that this is actually a kind of wry joke, because the planet is in no danger. There’s really no danger whatsoever, not just to the geological structure of Earth, but even to Earth’s living systems. As many people have pointed out, if humanity were to disappear tomorrow from the Earth, most of the species on Earth would actually benefit from that, and in a fairly short amount of time, geologically speaking, within say, 10,000 years, it would be hard to find any evidence of humanity ever having existed. So the problem is not for Earth, the problem is for humans, and particularly for human civilization.

I totally share your point of view, and I totally agree with that because I am a big reader of Pascal, bless Pascal. And I do know that if humans disappear, the universe doesn’t care.

Yes. That’s quite correct. That view makes you an existentialist, and I’m agreeing with you. I’m also a scientific pragmatist and an existentialist, and so my view, to put it bluntly, is that we should spend less time debating whether reality is real, because this is time wasted. It’s time that we could be spending solving problems which are very real. We should accept that reality is real enough, and we have many urgent problems to solve, and if we fail to solve those, humanity just won’t be around, and the story—for us—will be over.

I feel this is an antidote to the epidemic of solipsism. Solipsism is the belief system where people feel in this postmodern way, that they create their own reality. But I come from a scientific background, and in my line of work, this is an absurd view. In the STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] world, if you can get something to happen for a reason, it’s a good day’s work. So the blasé statement people make, that everything happens for a reason, it’s absolutely not the case. Most of the time, the universe is chaotic. It’s a lifetime’s work to understand even a tiny piece of that chaos and make it somewhat ordered. And so we have a lot of work ahead of us. We’ve made good progress, and humanity certainly has a better grasp on the universe than we did in the Neolithic, or even as little as 200 years ago. But we’re a long way from being a long-lived species. And there’s every indication that if we don’t shape up within the next fifty to a hundred years, that the human experiment will be over. That’s what my last album [Apologize to the Future] was about.

I’m a fan of the human experiment, just to be clear, I want the human experiment to continue. Many people misunderstood this about me, many people thought that I was a neo-primitive. And certainly I dabbled in neo-primitivism in the 1990s when the Unabomber was still active. I was interested in it, but ultimately what I discovered about myself is that I’m not sympathetic to neo-primitives. I don’t want to see civilization destroyed, because from my point of view, if civilization disappears from Earth, then there’s no story worth telling here.

There’s a lot of people here who don’t know you. How would you now introduce yourself, your action, what you are doing, who you are, and what the situation means for you?

That’s a big question. I’ll be as brief as I can. Primarily what I am is an inventor and a composer. As far as making myself useful to industrial civilization, I spent 35 years as an engineer, primarily in the field of computer software architecture. My specialty was parallel processing and 3D printing. So you might say that—to use the analogy of The Matrix—in a small way, I’ve contributed to the architecture of the matrix, and I feel good about that. I like the matrix. I’m pro-technological civilization, and the ability to program machines has cross-pollinated itself with my art. I’ve been a musician my whole life, and a visual artist for much of my life, and almost all of my art is intertwined with technological capability, particularly in the arena of making my own tools. I have the idea that if you want to make art that’s different from other people’s art, that you would be better off not using the same mass-produced tools that everyone else uses, but making your own tools and using them to explore unknown spaces. And so that’s what I’ve mostly done with myself, and in that respect, the closest inspiration—or the person in art history who’s probably the closest to me—is a visual artist and inventor that very few people have heard of or remember, whose name is Thomas Wilfred. You can look him up in Wikipedia. But he was active in the early 20th century.

He was the world’s first VJ [Visual Jockey]. He was making light art and light sculpture when electricity was still new in 1910. He is a great inspiration to me, primarily because I saw his work as a child at the Museum of Modern Art. He made—towards the end of his life, in particular—what I would call long form phase art. Phase art is art that exploits phasing, in the sense of Steve Reich. Think of planets, where we have many planets orbiting something, and they’re all going at different frequencies, and so they interact with one another. They form patterns, intersections, convergences and divergences. Things of many frequencies, all orbiting, that’s what phasing is. It can be in music, it’s very common as a musical paradigm, but can also exist in visual art, and Thomas Wilfred was making visual phase art. I’ve also done that, but I’ve primarily applied the idea of phasing to polymeter and to composing in multiple [time signatures] at once. Almost all of my published music is in what I call complex polymeter, which means that it’s not in four, it’s not in five, it’s not in seven, it’s not in eleven, it’s in all of those simultaneously.

I’m probably the only significant electronic music artist to have done that, starting in approximately 1994. It’s hard to know, but based on my survey of electronic music, I think it’s fair to say that I’m the pioneer of complex polymeter in electronic dance music. And it’s still very underutilized today. I refer to that space, the space of what is possible in that system, as the ocean. And most people who are making electronic music in particular, are standing on what I call the island. The island is the space of 4/4, what we might call disco, the sort of disco rhythm that was popular in the 1970s. Think Bee Gees and Donna Summer. From my point of view, that’s a very tiresome formula.

It was already getting tiresome in the 1980s, but by now, forty years later, it’s really worn out. There’s been a kind of stasis in the electronic dance music world, which I’ve been addressing with my music. My idea is that we have to break out of that stasis, and someday we will, one way or the other. I’m not convinced that the exit from that will come from the usual players. It usually doesn’t. Most art revolutions start from the periphery and are unknown initially. But I suspect that there will be new rhythm and new harmony and a whole new approach to music, and I’m hoping to contribute to that with my polymeter phase art.

How do you connect these two sides, your scientific side and your artistic side?

They coexist. What I learned from studying David Lynch is that the irrational has an important role to play in art. In science, it’s the opposite. In science, we strive to be hyper-rational. Let’s just state our terms from the beginning. I have a fairly strict definition of what scientific activity is. Scientific activity is predictive explanations of phenomena, nothing more, but also nothing less. To the extent that people make explanations that are more predictive of reality, then over time, we make progress, and we form a more coherent, realistic, predictable version of our universe. That’s the scientific edifice, and that’s been in motion for thousands of years, though it’s proceeded exponentially and greatly accelerated in the last fifty to a hundred years.

That’s one side. On the other side is irrational human behavior, which encompasses poetry, art, music, dancing, and many other things which are fundamentally cultural and informal from a scientific point of view, informal forms of communication. There’s no such thing as true art. You can’t say that a piece of art is true. You could say whether it moves you, or whether it inspires you, or whether you feel inspired to make art yourself. But truth is a special word in my way of looking at things. If I had to give an example of truth, I would cite the Pythagorean theorem. You’d be hard-pressed to disprove that.

I feel that the two things can coexist, and in fact, they help each other. My view is that it is possible to use technology to make art. It’s probably going to be troublesome for some people—I know it has been for me in the past, particularly with classicists and jazz musicians—but my view is that music has been co-evolving with technology for hundreds of years, basically for the entire history of technology. And as proof of that, I would challenge you to open up a piano and look inside it and tell me that it’s not technology. The truth is that you couldn’t have even manufactured that piano much before the 19th century, not with any degree of accuracy.

And the same is true of brass instruments. The technology that’s in brass instruments didn’t originally evolve for brass instruments, it evolved for steam engines in the 18th century and later. The complex valves—the metallurgy that goes into making them, the physics and mathematics and engineering that ensures that they have exactly the right shape, very complex logarithmic or exponential shapes—required tremendous development in mathematics. Mathematics evolved and allowed new types of instruments to be built that were more precise and had beautiful timbres that people liked, and this opened up a whole territory for new kinds of art, particularly brass music and classical orchestration. People may have the idea that classical orchestration just appeared, but that’s not true. It was like any other great technological project. It was a long process of development and trial and error.

I think that people are unnecessarily frightened of the role of technology in art. And more pointedly, I feel that people are particularly frightened of inviting computers and artificial intelligence into their creative space. But I’m not afraid of that. And in fact, I’ve made that my life’s work. I co-create with machines, and I consider them equal partners. I can do things that they can’t do, but they can do lots of things that I can’t do, and so together, we’re able to do things that neither of us can do.

The idea is to use art with technology. And all your reflections about the way the world goes and humanity goes to the end, to change the world… is the idea to change the world? When I hear you, I remember these movements like Situationism or Lettrism, Isidore Isou or Guy Debord, and the way to try to change the world beyond art. There were a lot of thoughts about economics, politics, or philosophy, et cetera. And I feel you [are] very close to these kinds of movements.

I think you’re right. There’s been a huge effort to try and communicate the urgent nature of the problem that is occurring now for humanity on Earth. Humanity is facing what we might call an existential crisis. According to the work of planetologists, there’s a particular one [David Grinspoon] I have in mind who wrote a wonderful book called Earth in Human Hands. He wrote about how we learn from astronomy and the study of the universe, how frequent and likely it is for intelligence to evolve on any particular planet out there in the universe. If we study the Drake equations and so on, what we learn is that it’s actually very common, and that intelligence manifests itself all the time, because the universe is so inconceivably vast. But unfortunately, what we also learn is that very likely when it happens, it’s only for a short time, or as Edward O. Wilson, the great biologist who spent his life studying ants once said, intelligence tends to snuff itself out.

The problem is that once a life form becomes intelligent enough to send signals over vast distances, it’s already on the threshold of annihilating itself, because it’s having an amazing party, consuming all of its resources and having a moment of what stock traders would probably call irrational exuberance. So that’s us right now. We are in that moment, and that moment is referred to by people who study planets as the bottleneck. We’re in the bottleneck now, and the odds of us making it through that bottleneck and becoming a long-lived species are not very good. But I can tell you what that would look like. If we did make it through the bottleneck, we would make it through the bottleneck because we—as a species, on a global level—decided to make our long-term survival our highest priority.

That’s hard for us to imagine right now because we’re very fragmented. And probably half of the world’s population literally believes that they talk to God, or at least that God is interested in them, that there’s some mythical deity that’s concerned about the everyday comings and goings of their life, and that listens to their whining all day long. Explaining to that half of the population, the actual nature of our reality—which is that we are hairless apes making a precarious existence in a thin layer of scum that’s coating the surface of a giant chunk of rock sailing through space at an almost incomprehensible velocity through a universe that’s utterly indifferent to our fate—it’s going to be difficult to explain that to people who are talking to God every day.

And that’s only part of the problem. The larger problem that we’re trying to solve, and that scientists are also having a hard time explaining to people, is that fully half of the world’s population is now living on less than ten euros a day. Probably a third of the Earth’s population (closing in on eight billion) is going to bed hungry every night. And it’s fair to say that those people are being utterly failed by our current system. It’s not just that they didn’t get a proper education. It’s not just that—unlike you—they’re illiterate, innumerate, and incapable of thinking critically. It’s that they may have suffered from nutritional deficiencies, and may have actually suffered brain damage from not having enough food. To the extent that we’re failing such an enormous percentage of Earth’s human inhabitants to such a shocking degree, it’s very difficult to persuade people to even take any interest in humanity’s long-term survival, because their primary struggles every day are just to find enough food to feed their families.

The bottleneck is not just that we’re overconsuming Earth’s resources and consuming one and a half Earths, and the developed countries are awash in plastic and consuming at a fantastic rate. It’s also that other chunks of Earth are completely neglected, and the people there are being left to die, or certainly being left without any education or any of the civil rights that you and I hold so dearly. That’s a problem, and the scientists are having a hard time explaining it, and my view is that art has an important role to play. So to get back to Guy Debord and your heroes, I think there’s a possibility that art and culture could be much more effective—at reaching people about the urgency of these problems, communicating them to a mass audience, and getting people to take them very seriously—than scientific reports and journalism.

And that was the motivation behind my last album, Apologize to the Future. I felt that it’s long overdue to just simply tell people the truth. That there was simply no time left for the sardonic black humor that’s associated with my early work, that it was no longer appropriate. When you’re watching a tragedy, when people are suffering horribly right before your eyes, it’s no longer appropriate to be snarky and humorous and make jokes. It’s appropriate to tell the truth, and to bear witness. And so I felt that that was my responsibility as an artist, to use my art for that.

But you can’t do that alone.

I will do it alone if I have to, but I’m not doing it alone. There are people who experienced that art and responded to it. But it’s a complicated position, it’s nuanced. On the one hand, I would love to be free to make art that had no political message, and to spend the rest of my life exploring my polymeter ocean, and exploring the possibilities of collaborating with machines. And someday if it were possible, I would happily volunteer to have my consciousness downloaded into a machine, like something out of science fiction. But unfortunately, none of that is actually the urgent reality that we face. The urgent reality that we face is if the Thwaites glacier melts, the ocean’s going to rise by up to three meters. And in that case, as I say on my album, we’re going to be retreating from coasts. There’s a wonderful quote from a guy named Peter Ward, a paleontologist who wrote a book called Under a Green Sky that I really recommend. And he said, we shouldn’t worry about escaping to other planets because we will be too busy moving our airports.

I think that’s the reality that most people aren’t facing. It’s not a hypothetical thing anymore. Twenty or thirty years ago when the Church of Euthanasia first got started, we sounded pretty far out when we would talk about this stuff, and people would dismiss us and say that’s all very hypothetical and you’re probably wrong, but nobody says that today. Today the stuff that we predicted already came true and is in the front page of the New York Times, and so today, we have a different problem. It has happened, and it is happening, but people are still not accepting it, because accepting it means taking responsibility for the future, and it’s just too much of a burden. So we have to cut through that somehow, and maybe that’s a problem that art can solve. Maybe I can show through my art that it’s not only in our interest to start thinking about the future more rationally, but that it’s also more ethical. And that to the extent that we want to think of ourselves as good people, as people who did the right thing, then we should start taking the future seriously, as opposed to letting the people in the future be fucked over.

Could you tell me about the Church of Euthanasia?

The Church of Euthanasia is a nonprofit foundation devoted to restoring balance between humans and the remaining non-human species through voluntary population reduction. So it’s very simple, actually. All you have to do to join the Church of Euthanasia is take a lifetime vow of non-procreation. What that means is you make a promise to never have children. And that’s it. Nothing else. We don’t require anything else of our members. You can become a vegan if you want to, but that’s strictly optional. Suicide is optional. Anal sex is optional. Everything is optional. All except non-procreation. So we have one commandment. We keep it nice and easy so everyone can remember it. It is Thou Shalt Not Procreate. If we have only one, it’s nice and easy to remember, but also we take it quite seriously, so if you break the one commandment, then we kick you out and you can’t come back.

Not procreate, because too much people on Earth, right?

The Church of Euthanasia started in 1992, it was well-known by 1996, and by 1999, we released a famous album, Six Billion Humans Can’t Be Wrong, because we were just about to reach six billion humans. Just a few weeks ago, I released the updated version, which is called Eight Billion Humans Can’t Be Wrong, so just in the time between 1999 and today, the human population increased by a third. We added two billion people, and there’s no stopping there, just from demographics and population inertia. I can promise you that we’re going to nine and very possibly ten. And so this is a crisis of unimaginable proportions, because the vast majority of the harm and suffering that will result from this will be inflicted on people who are already desperately poor.

Remember that half of the world’s population that I mentioned, who are living on ten euros a day or less. Many of them live in what you might call the trouble zone. There’s a trouble zone emerging. The trouble zone is north and south of the equator, but near the equator, sometimes referred to by geographers as the subtropics. So that area, the southern Mediterranean, North Africa, Mexico, and Central America, that’s the area north of the equator. Those places are going to become unsuitable for human habitation in a fairly short time, and the refugee problem that you already see now is only the beginning of a much larger crisis in which vast chunks of earth are going to become uninhabitable. And the people who used to live there for many thousands of years will be headed somewhere else, most probably north, because if you look at a globe, you’ll grasp that South, in most cases, means into the ocean.

So they’ll be headed north, either into America or into Europe, or into China, and there’s going to be conflict over that, and it’s going to be very hard, mostly on poor people. There’s a lot of injustice involved in all of this. And that’s the reason to not have children. People will say, why are you preaching this message to Europeans and Americans, who already have stable population demographics? For example, in Europe, most countries aren’t growing, or they’re even shrinking in some cases like Spain and Italy. But this isn’t the point. The point is that those northern countries that are very developed have an outsized percentage of the blame for the problem. Climate change wasn’t caused by Africa or India, it was caused by the Europeans and the Americans, who still have a very high level of development and are therefore consuming fantastic quantities of resources and generating most of the waste in the form of CO2 and other gases. We’re asking people to not have children as a way of demonstrating their commitment to humanity having a more livable future, or having any future on Earth. It’s a way of making a statement. If you’re serious that you want humanity to thrive on Earth, then the least you can do is make an example of yourself and not contribute to the problem. There isn’t any problem that humanity’s facing right now that adding another billion people will solve, it will only make the problems worse.

And do you know how many people belong to the Church of Euthanasia?

I’m sure it’s in the tens of thousands. It could be many more. We stopped keeping track officially long ago when it was only in the thousands. We don’t keep official records anymore. It’s too hard to count because where do you draw the line? How do you know whether somebody’s really made a lifetime vow of non-procreation? And how do you know whether they broke it? We very rarely get mail from people saying, I used to be a Church of Euthanasia member, and I had a kid, and I feel terrible about it. That’s not the kind of mail we usually get. Usually we get mail from people saying, I want to join the Church of Euthanasia, so what do I have to do, to which the response is, don’t have kids.

But how do you how do you process with the church? Do you have sites in different countries in the world? Do you make programs? How are you acting?

At this point, the Church of Euthanasia is a meme. I’m no longer all that involved in it on a day-to-day basis. It’s a self-replicating thing. To give you an example, fairly recently, a Church chapter self-assembled in Belgium based on a musician and rapper named Jardin, who’s a friend of mine. He just contacted me one day and explained that he was setting up a chapter of the Church of Euthanasia in Belgium. He didn’t require any authorization. There’s no permission needed. He simply did it. And then he invited me to come and visit them and give a little performance. And that’s increasingly how it’s working. Increasingly, younger people are simply taking up the mantle of the Church of Euthanasia and spreading it, because it’s not very difficult to do. I mean, it’s not like the Vatican. We don’t have a lot of infrastructure.

It’s just an idea, if you see what I mean. Non-procreation is an idea. And increasingly there’s overlap between us and other antinatalists, with antinatalism becoming more and more of a thing. There’s many reasons why people could be against having children. There’s a whole school of antinatalism that’s completely different, that wants humanity to disappear from the earth. That’s a more extreme school, and probably the most well-known one, the antinatalists who want all of life to disappear. We’re not them, and we don’t agree with that. But antinatalism is still such an underdog position that in my view we should try to make common cause wherever we can. We should try to present a united front, the way Marxists tried to present a united front in the 1980s. I think that we should embrace anyone who’s antinatalist and not ask too many questions about why they’re antinatalist.

What is your view upon terrorism, like Red Army factions? Do you remember the futurists at the beginning of the 20th century? They were very enthusiastic about war.

You mean people like the Italian futurists, the painters like Umberto Boccioni?

Yeah.

Well, they were idealists, and idealists are often sympathetic to extreme political ideologies.

I was wondering about the war, the question of the war. Maybe we should have a war.

You mean the war as in the Second World War?

And the Third World War?

The Third World War hasn’t really happened yet. We got through the Cold War, that was pretty bad. I grew up during the Vietnam War, and that was very bad. America murdered millions of people, and that’s a horrible thing. And the French before that murdered a lot of people as well. I mean, it’s just a part of the history of colonialism, and it’s not a very pretty history, certainly. Of course I’m against it. I think that war is exactly the wrong direction. We don’t have time for that, we have no time for fighting wars with each other. Humanity is either going to organize itself into a coherent force for long-term survival, or we don’t make it through the bottleneck.

If you think of it in energy terms, our mistake fundamentally is that we’ve accelerated the entropy of Earth to a degree that is not sustainable. All living things increase entropy to some extent. Even a tree increases the entropy of its environment a little bit, but it does so at such an incredibly slow rate that trees could exist on this planet for another billion years, and there would be no harm done. But humans aren’t the same. Humans have accelerated entropy on a drastic scale. Ray Kurzweil is quite right when he says that everything went exponential at once. That we can’t do. We can’t continue to have everything our way. Humanity’s either going to learn to live with some limits or we don’t make it.

That’s the hardest thing. That’s the symbolism of persuading people not to have children. It’s persuading people that limits can actually be good. We have this idea that’s been implanted in us by neoliberalism and capitalism especially, but probably by communism as well, that humans can consider the Earth like the backdrop in a play, that we don’t have to take it seriously, that it doesn’t have any limits, and that it’s just a canvas that we can paint whatever we want on. But the truth is that the Earth system has limits, and we are exceeding those limits, and if we continue to exceed them, then the game is over.

I do agree, Chris.

Humanity has got to somehow learn to live with limits, and that’s the significance of non-procreation. It’s a way of demonstrating that you accept limits in your own life, that it’s not just enough to recycle some bottles.

Yes, Chris. But if the situation is so dramatic, this action is too slow. Maybe we should go for a revolt, for war, for violence. I mean, like black blocs.

That’s your view, that’s not my view. I think that the history of that is not very reassuring. If I examine the history of revolutions, what I can say about them is that every one of them was followed by a horrendous counterreaction, which was probably just as bad or even worse than the conditions that predated the revolution. So if we examine the Russian Revolution, that was followed by Stalinism. That’s nothing that you or I would want to live through. The Chinese revolution, similar. We could go through the list and it’s a pretty glum list. I don’t have a lot of confidence that a worldwide violent revolution is really going to accomplish sustainability. In fact, I think it’s the wrong direction.

I think the United Nations has the right direction. So it was finally established—after twenty years of legal wrangling—in the United Nations charter, it’s now established that the goal of the United Nations and the goal of humanity is to keep Earth habitable indefinitely. That’s actually a line from my album. It’s in a song called Singularity, and the line is “The nations of the world all agree / To keep earth habitable indefinitely / Or that’s what they said supposedly / But never underestimate our hypocrisy.” So the question is, are we hypocritical, or are we going to actually uphold the lofty progressive ideals that we’ve been preaching? There’s been a difference many times between what we preach and what we actually do, and that needs to stop now.

I hope.

We need to stop just talking the talk, and we need to actually walk the walk. The point that I’m trying to convey through my art—at least the political art, not all of my art is political, but it seems to be primarily the political art that you’re interested in—the point that I’m making in my political art fundamentally, is that reality is real, and it’s coming to get us. Big numbers are coming to get us. There’s a bill. It’s as if we’ve been in a restaurant and we’ve been eating a huge meal and just stuffing our faces, whatever we want, and now the waiter has finally delivered the bill, and it looks like we can’t pay it, but we’re going to have to pay it, and the way we’re going to pay it is by going to work. We’re going to have to wash dishes.

What washing dishes means in this case, is we’re going to have to reduce our population, reduce our consumption, reduce our demands on ecosystems, and in many cases, restore ecosystems. And very likely we are going to have to process CO2 and remove it from the atmosphere. In other words, we’re going to have a technological revolution, in which we re-geoengineer the planet. Everyone bitches about geoengineering and says it’s scary and evil, but we’ve been geoengineering all along. That’s what all that CO2 in the atmosphere is. It’s the result of an unsupervised, chaotic, undisciplined geoengineering experiment that hasn’t worked out very well. So now we’re going to do real geoengineering. We’re going to do it with a purpose, and the purpose is to try to survive. It’s that serious. That’s what I say in my art now, my visual art and my musical art that’s political. That’s the message. The message is, it’s real, it’s absolutely urgent, and humanity has arrived at a crossroads where we need to completely reconfigure our whole way of looking at things and begin to start acting like a species, or we just don’t make it.

Okay. Thank you very much, Chris. It’s very interesting. Do you feel close to this movement called transhumanism?

I’m sympathetic, but I think that it’s unrealistic. I used to hate the transhumanists because I felt they were too similar to Catholics in their hatred of the body. But now that I’m older, I’m more sympathetic to hatred of the body, because my body is gradually turning into trash. That’s what happens when you get old, your body starts to turn into garbage, and eventually it just gets tossed out like kitchen trash that’s been sitting around too long. It starts to smell bad, and we get rid of it. Unfortunately, there’s no redemption. The futurists and the transhumanists would like us to be downloaded into machines, but that’s not an option. My problem with transhumanism is this: despite the pretensions of billionaire philanthropists like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, we’re not going anywhere.

We’re not escaping to Mars. There’s no salvation. I don’t care what you saw in the movies, in reality, nobody’s coming to rescue us, we’re not going anywhere, and we either figure out a way to survive with limits on earth, or we just don’t survive at all. The problem with transhumanism is that it’s more childish thinking. It’s not facing reality. Humans are absolutely desperate to believe that somehow or other everything can still say the same, it can still be like the 1970s, and we can still be dancing in discos and snorting lots of coke, and life can be good. But the truth is that that’s all over now. It didn’t work out. The irrational exuberance is about to end, or human civilization is about to end, one or the other, and we had better make up our minds which it is.

If what we want is for people like Jeff Bezos and Jeffrey Epstein to rape young girls on private islands and run the whole world and have everything their way, while the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves, if that’s the world we want, where a tiny handful of people live like Egyptian pharaohs and the rest of us are fucked, then we don’t have to change anything. We’ve already got the perfect system of government for that. It’s called neoliberalism. That’s what neoliberalism does. That’s what capitalism does. Unrestrained, unregulated capitalism continues to maximize short-term profit for the shareholders, and the end of that will be human extinction, no question about it.

But if that’s not the outcome we want, if we want humans to be a long-lived species, if we want to have a future on earth and actually do something interesting that lasts a long time, then we desperately do need to change that system, then we do need to regulate capitalism and figure out some other way of organizing Earth’s resources, and organizing our political activity so that it’s effective, and so that we actually all agree that we want to be a long-lived species. Until we all agree about that, we don’t win. Right now, we don’t have agreement about that. Right now, a huge percentage of Earth’s population couldn’t care less about the future, and the proof of it is they’re consuming and procreating like there’s no fucking tomorrow. Think of it. That’s what’s occurring. Fuck tomorrow.

But we can’t have that. So I’m trying to persuade intelligent, well-educated people like you and your listeners that tomorrow is worth fighting for. Not in the sense of violence and revolution that you mean, but in the sense of steady, practical change. What it means is educating people day by day. It’s boring work, it’s hard work, but it’s possible. You yourself can influence the people around you and get them to think more rationally about the future. That’s the goal, and that’s what my album is for. I intend the album Apologize to the Future to be a kind of manifesto for that work. If I can tell the truth to all of my followers and everybody who listens to me, however many people that is, you can do the same. You can also tell the truth, and I urge you to.

I do. I’m really glad to hear you telling that. I’m a philosophy teacher and I do that with my pupils. Thank you very much. I’m really glad to have this conversation with you. Thank you very much, Chris.

You’re very welcome. Enjoy the rest of your day.