LETTERS

Hi Chris,

Can you tell me anything about the content of "Snuff It"? Maybe I would have something relevant to particular articles.

-Lydia

Hi Lydia, The overarching focus will be overpopulation and the singularity, as in everything going exponential at once, our predictions all came true etc.

Another major theme is post-antihumanism: now that we're colliding for real with the spiraling side effects of our accumulated bad decisions, there's no point in hating humans for making the same mistakes that any intelligent planet-wide life-form would be sorely tempted to make, and in most cases presumably does make. This trope is primarily due to the influence on my thinking of David Grinspoon's "Earth in Human Hands," especially the notion that failing to make it through the bottleneck is a tragedy, but only for us, and very likely a commonplace outcome. Grasping that the odds were stacked against us from the start is cold comfort of course, but it does put things in perspective. It's comforting to me in an abstract way that according to astronomy and statistics, somewhere out there in the cosmos, intelligent life has successfully passed through the Great Filter.

Another theme is death and stages of grief: preparing not only for personal death, but the likely destruction of my work along with everything I contributed to and struggled for. The persistence of civilization and its accomplishments are almost certainly a mirage, and this is a very personal tragedy for me, because I invested so much of my time and energy in civilization, and especially because unlike so many people I leave behind no children and have no religious faith to comfort me. The essential theme for me is squarely facing death at both personal and societal scales.

I think you were correct that my focus on and fascination with enormous, even geological time scales in my polymeter music and art is no coincidence, and relates directly to post-antihumanism. It's an obsession with the idea of immortality, driven by fear that all this effort could be for naught, and that we stood on the shoulders of giants for nothing. I feel the word "extinction" in a personal way that I wager most people don't. To me its central meaning is erasure. I used to talk about the horror of species being erased from earth's hard drive, but now it's my own personal information that will be erased, along with that of everyone I was ever inspired by. My heroes and ideological ancestors are all on the chopping block too, physically long dead and achieving quasi-immortality only through the fragile storage systems of civilization. It's the hideous realization that "The Matrix" was actually a best-case scenario, in which civilization's accomplishments were at least preserved, even if only as data, and that the likely outcome is much more prosaic: our entire history reduced to just a thin layer of oily rock, unremembered, unloved, and unknown.

-Chrissy

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