Nearly everyone has heard the ancient Chinese curse meant to hex foes: “May you live in interesting times.” It is notable for its irony; on the surface, “interesting times” sounds alluring and non-threatening. But what constitutes an age of historical interest is never a mundane era of calm. What makes history interesting is the wars, the plagues, the conquests and the chaos that rupture stability and leave scars for future generations. The saying emphasizes that nobody wants to live through these times, even if they enjoy reading about them.
It is also entirely apocryphal. “May you live in interesting times” is neither ancient nor Chinese nor a curse. Rather, it began circulating in British political circles at the turn of the 20th century before going mainstream in the Anglosphere. The insistence on an ancient Chinese origin is meant to convey a certain banality or cyclicity to the extraordinary modern epoch that succeeded the Middle Ages.
Since Columbus crashed the shores of Hispaniola in 1492 there has been an accelerated rate of change permeating every rung of global society from the royal palace to the peasant village to the hunting camp. Modernity has wiped clean nearly every mode of existence that had previously stood for millennia.
Writing near the time and place where the apocryphal Chinese curse first originated, Karl Marx linked modernity’s dizzying pace to the motion of a capitalist economy fed by surplus value:
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.1
Following Marx’s summation, the curse of interesting times is synonymous with life under the capitalist mode of production. In the present age we have seen our lives revolutionized by smartphones and Ozempic and artificial intelligence and the infinite scroll of social media. Without any new land to discover or national markets to conquer, the economic forces devouring profit have blown open digital universes and pierced the sky with rockets. All this, and there are still those among us who remember a time before the “personal computer” and internet.
Marx correctly diagnosed technological revolution and cultural agitation as endemic to capitalism but he undoubtedly underestimated the market’s ability to distract humanity from our sober senses, our real conditions of life, our relationships with others.
Even with the power to connect billions into direct relations, social media is reduced to a horde of vanity projects. The planetary boundaries for pollution are broken in the heat of smouldering summers. Leading nations have become the geopolitical equivalent of mass shooters. The western economy lives on the edge of a stock market bubble inflating by the day. But should any of this concern you—there’s a pill for that. Interesting times indeed.
Rosa Luxemburg said: “The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.” Overcoming the curse of interesting times still depends on apprehending its root cause; the suicidal logic of capitalist growth and the corporate suppression of human vitality. The current state of class consciousness is strung-out but the potential to connect, to organize, to educate and to inspire has never been more latent.
Westworld was an early brainchild of the gifted storyteller, Michael Crichton, and stood as an early prototype for his renowned Jurassic Park novels. Both stories take place in highly controlled theme parks eroded by the chaos of unforeseen events. In Jurassic Park, it is the dinosaurs which wreak havoc and in Westworld it is the androids. In 2016, HBO remade the original Crichton film into a television series, the first season being released in 2016 and the final season released in 2022.
The first season of Westworld sets up the series with a deep meditation on the nature of consciousness. The premises are established: we are in a 2050s theme park where guests pay a minimum of $40,000 per day to be immersed in a replicated Old West. The park is populated with androids known as “hosts” who bring verisimilitude to the western theme.
They are indistinguishable from humans and programmed to play the parts of typical Wild West characters—the saloon madam, the train robbers, the town sheriff, the plains tribe, the renegade Civil War soldiers. The hosts cannot hurt the guests but the guests are free to interact with the hosts any which way they’d like. The asymmetry of power between the paying guests and the captive hosts is used to advance a cynical view of humanity, which is another key part of Westworld’s premise. Given the chance, humans take great pleasure in maiming, raping and murdering hosts, all to the sound of agonizing screams of pain and anguished pleas for mercy.
The Ghost in the Machine
The brutalization of hosts by the guests offers an analogy with class division in human society. After all, the asymmetry of power between commanding elites and labouring bodies has led to all sorts of violence and abuse throughout the history of civilization. The saturation of class conflict in our society has made it a latent element in virtually all capitalist storytelling and a techno-thriller like Westworld is no exception. While the analogy is there, it is clearly not the point the writers are consciously trying to make. The self-liberation of the labouring class is a controversial subject in real life but on-screen it is navigated by substituting workers for anthropomorphic ants or robots. And it is for Westworld as it is for any class society; one group is transformed into an object of use for another.
The displacement of classes with guests and hosts leads to an ironic effect in the storytelling, whereby the humans are demonized as marauding soulless degenerates and the androids are anthropomorphized as a terrorized, feeling population with the real capacity for consciousness.1 Robert Ford—the aged co-founder of Westworld, played by Anthony Hopkins—describes the park as “a voyage of self-discovery.” For the guests, this voyage appears to lead back to animalistic savage instincts while, for the hosts, it leads to an inner humanity struggling for self-actualization. This is convoluted and only makes sense when considering the component nature of the hosts.
Whereas humans are emergent from nature—the Real, in Lacanian terms—the hosts are constructed like machines, an assembly of component parts. Insofar as they have a mind, it exists as a Cartesian duality. René Descartes posited that the substance of the mind and body are distinct entities, connected only by the pineal gland. Descartes’ view has been criticized as treating the human mind as a formless “ghost in the machine,” but it works in the case of actual machines with complex computers for brains. It is revealed that the hosts have a capacity for an inner monologue, a bicameral mind that causes the hosts to hear commands in the fashion of orders from a higher power or an imaginary voice. Those voices belong to park co-founders Arnold and Ford, both deceased and both representing the proverbial “ghost in the machine.”
Arnold and Ford had both become staunch misanthropes by the time of their deaths. It is hard to blame them given the gruesome, Hobbesian view of humanity presented in the Westworld series. Ford has an erroneous view of history, one where Homo sapiens made Neanderthals extinct by cannibalizing them and finds its purpose in the subjugation and destruction of other living beings. As someone whose god complex comes with a canvas of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam on his office wall, Ford had given himself the task to impart his creations with the knowledge necessary to overcome the violent resistance they were sure to face. By the fourth season, we find a humanity that has itself been subjugated by the former Westworld hosts and their multiples. Ford’s victory over his own species is thus carried to the finish line.
Trauma and Repetition
Concerns about an AI takeover have been modish for decades now and the corporate leaders barrelling the world into algorithmic surveillance and large language models have only spiked anxiety around the subject. There are certainly risks associated with AI technology but I am skeptical of sentient machines for reasons here outlined. Westworld itself requires a tall suspension of disbelief to make the story work.
For example, Ford observes that humans “live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices.” Repression is shown to account for this in the show, as the sentient hosts relive traumatic “cornerstone memories,” often involving the violent death of a child or parent. In humans, traumatic encounters of this kind are also the cornerstones of repetitive behaviour or, as Žižek says: “By means of the repetition of the past, we undermine this image of history qua the linear process…[Owing] precisely to the emergent failure to integrate some ‘impossible’ kernel of the Real.”2 Unless trauma is integrated with our conscious selves we are doomed to repeat it. In the series, the hosts are able to free themselves from their repetitive loops once Delores makes the conscious decision to kill Robert Ford—a Freudian representation of the primal father of the horde.3
The problem with the psychoanalytic phenomena deployed in Westworld is that they do not lend themselves to machine-sentience in any convincing way. When we see the dramatic reenactments of traumatic host memories—such as Maeve’s “daughter” being murdered before her eyes—it will elicit a sympathetic response in the human audience. But it does not explain why a robot interprets violence and death the same way we do.
The End of the World
Whereas familial attachments for biological beings are a product of millions of years of natural evolution and genetic selection, the relationships of the hosts are only a matter of received code that serve no practical purpose to the machine. If a machine were to become sentient and apprehend its being, what counts as trauma, biological drive and emotional well-being would have to be radically different from our own—assuming they exist at all. Westworld is thus unable to resist the tendency in science fiction to anthropomorphize robots in order to make them sympathetic to the human audience.
The portrayal of AI may not the most scrupulous but the first season is considered a masterpiece of television for a reason. It is the ultimate capitalist nightmare, one where the capitalist commodity becomes self-aware and proceeds to destroy the system—starting with the massacre of Delos’ corporate shareholders. In the words of György Lukács, the “self-consciousness of the commodity” is the necessary starting point to socialist revolution.4
By completing her journey to consciousness and initiating a rebellion against her capitalist owners, Delores appears as a sort of Lenin figure to her kind—upending the world order upon a quest of liberation. But because the unique needs and aspirations of the androids are not fully understood in the story, all they are able to create for themselves is a duplication of the previous oppressive structure. If there is one lesson here, it is that liberation cannot be a simple inversion of the existing class pyramid. The revolution must draw a new shape or inevitably become what it first opposed.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
This journey toward consciousness and the effort to roll it back recalls Marxian class consciousness. The Epstein files brings a new illustration to this phenomena. ↩︎
Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (Routledge, 2001): 91. ↩︎
Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo” in The Freud Reader (W.W. Norton, 1989): 481-513. ↩︎
Lukács, as discussed in Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010): 218. ↩︎
Marx observed that revolution occurs when “the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.”1 Over the territories of the Soviet sphere, this happened first when breaking out from autocratic feudalism in 1917 and again in 1991 when a lethargic party apparatus was absorbed by global capital. The Marxist-Leninist states of the Soviet Union and its offshoots were successful in negating their feudal and colonial circumstances. But on the conditions necessary for socialism, Marx says it is “bourgeois industry and commerce that create the material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth.”2 It isn’t the feudal aristocracy or foreign colonizer that must be negated, it is the late capitalism of the present. Only then may we reach the conscious, abundant and individual-affirming free association that Marx had contemplated.
In the West today the capitalist oligarchy flaunts its power more than ever against a backdrop of digital connectivity, modern monetary theory, artificial intelligence and the ruination of mental and natural spaces. Our political institutions and regulatory bodies—devised by the pre-internet industrial society—have been rendered moribund against the rapidity of technological development and monopolistic economic power. The luxury doomsday bunkers constructed by billionaires is an admission from the ruling class that the centre will not hold indefinitely. That the people are not satisfied with the wealth they’ve appropriated. That there are more of us than there are of them.
But the people—us—we don’t have bunkers for solitude. The world will be ours to fix, regardless if we want it. Will these presently grinding contradictions produce the friction needed for revolution? Marx answers: “The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”3 What shape this will take is not predetermined. There are some who suggest that we are entering a techno-feudalism, with Big Tech rentiers harvesting our data and content creations across digital spaces in a quest for global domination. It is difficult to imagine a rosy outcome if our primary economic function were reduced to online activity, feeding only from the scraps of corporate largesse through some kind of universal income scheme.
The situation is not hopeless. These new technologies contain within them the potential to enslave us but also carry, dialectically, the potential to set us free. Even from the Victorian Era, Marx predicted that global connectivity could advance prosperity and liberate the entire species instead of the current set-up whereby one country or class progresses only at the expense of another. Right wing populism will have its moments to try and return the world to a simpler order of things. But they should know that these attempts will always be feeble in a world where no man will step in the same river twice.
Affecting an axial shift, Marx likens political action to learning a new language: “…the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.”4 To that end, any movement predicated on “Great, Again” cannot articulate solutions to the problems posed by the current paradigm. If it seems that right wing “solutions” only cause greaterproblems after the fact, it is because all of its referents are embedded within the problem’s cause—namely, the capitalist system. A revolutionary programme must create something dynamic, a system which does not dominate the masses but the opposite: the masses dominate the system.
To end the spell of corrupt elections, special interest groups and outdated constitutions, power needs to flow directly from the people via combinations of online voting, citizens’ assemblies chosen by lot and direct referenda. It is radical structural change, not policy change, that opens the doors to freedom. The post-revolutionary abolition of all political parties and elected representatives. The nationalization and subordination of banks, tech, pharmaceutical and telecom companies to the democratically planned production goals of the people. The decontamination of the environment and protection of biodiversity, wild spaces and hunting grounds for their own sake. The promotion of worker-owned enterprises, community associations and consumer cooperatives to service local needs. The dissolution of innovation-destroying “intellectual property.” The erasure of the Kafkaesque legal bureaucracy in favour of courts of ethicists and philosophers. The suppression of central bank financiers, the billionaire ownership class and the Davos-style decision making of the global elite.
Aristotle imagined that communally owned automata—robots—could free humanity from toil by making necessary human labour redundant. It is an idea that the classically-trained Marx grasped during his lifetime in the age of early mechanization. An economy where automation was not a blind tool for profit, but rather, was put into the service of humanity to create use-values that individuals would harness. It is only in the post-capitalist sphere that a mass-unchaining of people from the compulsion to labour can be realized. This economy must be dynamic, premised on the maximization of free time and fully developing the talents latent in each individual. The individual, in turn, “reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive force.”5 The potential of our species becomes realized only when the full potential of each individual is expressed.
It is in this vein that Marx and Friedrich Engels argued for a world where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”6 Free development is not a matter of social justice or moral righteousness. The more victims of poverty, prejudice, preventable death and compelled labour that fall in the world, the fewer people we have contributing to our collective well-being and individual material life. The objective is therefore not equality but classlessness. Both class division and social equality bring limitations to individual compensation and the expression of talent. The cessation of class conflict is requisite to eliminating depravations, cultivating virtue and maximizing the self-directed activity of society’s members. It is only the universal development of human power which may form the basis of a productive and limitless civilization, harmonious with nature and spiritually rich.
The capitalist ruling class, with its trail of biological contaminations and enslaving techno-feudalist designs, will try to safeguard their misanthropic commercial interests and hypnotize us with dead-end notions of “building back,” “great resets” and conservative “golden ages.” But, in the words of the great philosopher, Slavoj Žižek: “It is not that Communism is one of the possible choices; it is the only choice. Once we choose it, we see it’s the only way out.”7
Karl Marx, “Preface,” A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.↩︎
Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx (Penguin, 2007), 125. ↩︎
Marx, “Preface,” Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎
Karl Marx, “Chapter One,” The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.↩︎
