Dead Hand Rule - Page Proofs done!

I have a short post for you this week and no post for you at all last week—sorry about that! After a full-court press this week I just sent in the final page proofs of Dead Hand Rule, the last time I’ll touch the main text of the book before it comes out in October. The relief, it fills me. This is a good book, and I’m excited for you to read it.

I had a great event with Adam Becker and Moira Weigel on Monday, thanks to the Harvard Book Store for hosting. I believe the final talk will be posted on the Harvard Book Store’s website but it isn’t live yet—we had a great and far-ranging conversation about various longtermist and effective altruist finger-traps, the difficulty of space exploration, and the intersection between science fiction and the modern tech (and technocrat) imaginary, what you might call the “torment nexus” problem after that tweet where a science fiction author says, “I wrote my book, Don’t Create the Torment Nexus, as a cautionary tale,” and the tech CEO says, “at last we have created the Torment Nexus from famed science fiction novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus'.”

On stage it occurred to me that a key element of playing the science fictional game is the reflexive “why”: okay, space fascinates me, why? I can’t stop thinking about artificial intelligences, what’s going on with that? I keep thinking about some dude who makes another dude out of pieces of more dudes, that’s not exactly a normal thought, what’s happening there? What is it about Mars, about generation ships, about brain uploading? Sure, the first answer to “why” may be “because it’s cool,” but that’s sort of tautological, next you should ask: “why is this cool?” Which gets you to some interesting, fertile, familiar places: I’m—I first wrote ‘thinking’ here but it’s actually closer to feeling, exploring the depth and valences of—death, having kids, *not* having kids, what might happen to my kids or what they’ll become; time or age or my own limits, sex, loss¹, love, the home I’ll never see again, the home I’ll never leave, school, friendships, government power, the power of the crowd, that one thing that happened to me one night in college, the destruction of the individual, the triumph of the individual, etc etc. The what-if crosses into the why-if.

Which doesn’t mean that you have to have a fully intellectualized explanation of your obsessions! That might in fact be bad for the process actually, leave it over-understood. You’ll know when you have something on the end of your hook, because it won’t stop wriggling. And maybe if you go deep enough you’ll find that you’re the one on the end of its hook.

Take care of yourselves, friends. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.

Three notes:

• The r/CraftSequence AMA on Two Serpents Rise led to some great questions and I’m happy to report that we didn’t break Reddit this time! Check out the finished discussion here.

• I’m moving this newsletter off Substack in the very near future. I’ve mentioned this a couple of times and I’ve been trying to find the time to do it for a while, but thanks to a friend’s extremely generous offer of technical expertise, it’s finally happening. Your subscriptions should transfer, and ideally you’ll only notice that the letters are coming from a new email address. Thanks for bearing with me through the transition. Maybe I should find an old “under-construction” gif.

• If you are an Apple user, make sure all your devices updated and consider blocking Airplay on your home network. There’s a scary security exploit out in the wild, which involves zero-click remote code execution via Airplay, & I’m a bit surprised I haven’t seen more discussion of it given the wide range of devices involved—basically, all Apple devices and all Airplay-SDK devices. Discussion here.

And a song: I’ve been really enjoying Valerie Jean’s Endless Tree. Good spring energy. Listen on the best speakers you have, with the windows open.

1. .jpg