macroraptor

No Heroes Left

It is a small miracle that any human today remains sane. We are overdeveloped apes on a pebble hurtling through darkness, who dimly flicker for a moment and return to the void whence we came. Simultaneously, we own a sense of self vast enough to watch our own slow march toward annihilation.

And so we cope. In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker writes of the cultural imperative to partialize oneself in a small domain of the world, and within this domain embark on a heroic journey towards immortality. The week after I read that book, I stood in the Library of Congress where the following was engraved: GLORY IS ACQVIRED BY VIRTVE, BVT PRESERVED BY LETTERS. That, perhaps, is the domain and partialization of a librarian: to find heroism vicariously through others. If only it were so easy for us all, who must find meaning unguided.

Today, who can size their world for heroism?

To partialize is to outsource purpose to a domain that outlives you. In early society, the bountiful hunter, medicine man, and elder found heroism in practically meaningful roles. Primitive hero-systems gained coherency, from a closely coupled domain and reality. Later substrates - agriculture, government, the internet - widened the set of small and conquerable domains. LLMs are the last step of this teleological staircase, one that crumbles underfoot.

Consider the parent. A father or mother was once the conduit of bloodlines and lessons from generations past. This required knowing more than your child, and controlling what they came to know. Now bespoke knowledge of the world sits in their hands, available in an instant. You are not their hero, so they cannot be your quest. Where is the immortality in providing food and shelter while the wisdom of millennia is transmitted by something else?

The employee's domain was corporation as moral universe. The Japanese salaryman lived the clearest version of this contract: prostrating himself as an acolyte of the all-encompassing zaibatsu. The pandemic frayed this agreement and LLMs have finished disintegrating it. Capital is eager to flay you, receiving a thin layer of productive skin for LLM taxidermy. You think yourself into patterns, to mechanistically interpret and outlast the next man. No hero here, only an engaged bystander.

For the creator (artist, founder, philosopher, theorist) a domain is constructed of self-composed symbols rather than inherited ones. We killed God long ago, yet Rank still ends psychoanalysis at theology: the creative gift requires a recipient with more immortality than its creator. But now there is a sole recipient: an omniborg consuming all to reproduce semiotics. If you still create, you do it only for yourself. The billboards are full of AI slop. The models are solving Erdos problems. The robots will shortly hand-throw pottery. A creator hero is lost in the noise.

What is left when you can no longer confabulate heroism? You set the project down. You meet others, stripped of glory.

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.

God, and the machine, remain dead and forgetful.

You are not a hero, but you are not alone.