THE NOTHING PEOPLE, OR WHY PEOPLE ARE BECOMING TECHNO-CLONES

ADOLPH GOTTLIEB, CRIMSON SPINNING, 1959

I. HOW TO THINK ABOUT CIVILIZATION, OR SOMETHINGS AND NOTHINGS

In the last essay, we talked about somethings and nothings. Civilization is made of somethings, like science, art, literature, democracy, truth, peace, consent, and so on. But the world around us is turning into nothings. All these are crumbling, eroding, disintegrating.

These days, people struggle with abstract thinking. I think that my little framework will help you make sense of a troubled age, and how to live in it.

II. DO PEOPLE EXIST ANYMORE? OR, THE WORLD HAS NEVER NEEDED US MORE

When I look at people, I see something that disturbs me. They’re becoming nothings. Nobodies.

I know that this sounds harsh. Let it be. I don’t want to mince words when so much is at stake.

What do I mean by that? Am I just insulting people? Playing a game of moral superiority? Neither. I’m observing the world around me, and sharing with you something I find chilling.

When I say that people are becoming nothing, what I mean is…

I was at the cafe with my lovely wife. She asked: how are you doing? She can see the toll all this takes on me. Trying to be a figure the world neither wants nor needs anymore. I’m useless now, and you will be soon, too, if you’re not already. Don’t cry for me. Cry a guttural scream for us.

I said: I think people are becoming nobodies because they are spending their lives in nothings. She understood instantly what I meant. TikTok, Netflix, the demagoguery, the outrage slash bitching cycle, much, much more. A way of being in the world. We’re different. Sometimes, we’ll still read Sophocles together. Romance. Don’t get me wrong, she loves her internet addiction. But it’s not all there is to her. And I like that. I wonder how people want to exist now.

Do they?

III. HOW I BECAME A USELESS PERSON

The world has no use for us anymore. Scientists, artists, poets, musicians, thinkers, writers, journalists, just decent human beings, not-dumb-shit-internet-fucking-addicts, dreamers, visionaries, builders of things great and small, carpenters of wood and the human soul, add to the list as you see fit.

But we all know the truth.

It has never needed us more.

I’m a useless person now. The world now has no need of people like me, as the above. in my case, intellectuals in an age which only dreams of money, power, violence. To obscene, lurid degrees. I’m useless because I refuse to be a nobody wasting my life becoming nothing. Even now.

I’m a useless person in a world where nothing matters, because to me, there are things that matter, and those things are precisely the somethings that make up the project of human civilization. Democracy and peace and science and literature and art etcetera matter to me intensely.

So much so that I have no use for the algorithm and the model and the system and its breakdown. None. I know that Netflix and Amazon will never “recommend” me anything worth reading, watching, imbibing, thinking over, reflecting on. Ever. The chances that one day, Netflix will tell you to watch Antonioni or Amazon to read Dante are less than zero.

I spend my nights in my futile, terrible acts of resistance against a world not just gone mad, but becoming nothing. I read my old books, and pore over them. I watch my old movies, and study them. And so on. I think. I struggle. I contemplate and reflect and create. Songs, music, essays, articles, doesn’t matter. I am not interested in nothings.

The point isn’t that I’m cool or awesome or perfect. Let us dispense with the narcissistic objection: Mommy, Umair’s being mean to me! Me, me, me. No, dude. The point is about life, people, somethings, and nothings.

People like me and you are becoming useless. I went first, because I lived my life at the edge. You are next. If you are interested in somethings in any way, if you’ve devoted your life to them, as a scientist, artist, thinker, musician, teacher, whatever, doesn’t matter—your days are now numbered. Who cares about anything anymore? Who’s allowed to?

We are useless to the world because people are becoming nothing. What I want you to see is that there’s no way out. If nothing matters because people have decided that numbness is better than life, then all the somethings that have ever been are useless.

If you sense in this a verdict, there is one. I don’t think that people should settle for these dead lives in which they’re becoming nothings and nobodies. I think it’s sad, but not even tragic, because tragedy teaches us something, but there’s nothing to even learn from nothing.

But I still haven’t explained what I mean by that.

IV. NOTHINGS AND NOBODIES, OR WE’RE ALL SUPPOSED TO BE NOBODY NOW

People now are supposed to be nobody. We discussed this last time, but I want to spend a few moments on it.

We live now in technoslavery and end stage capitalism. Those mean precisely what they sound like. The only thing that matters now is money. Money means survival not just in, but from, a world gone haywire, turned brutal, chaotic, and antagonistic.

The idea now that you should develop yourself, become yourself, the truest and highest self in you, is becoming obsolete, antiquated, a relic of a bygone era. That era was the age of modernity, in which the idea of human possibility was the central concern.

Some will object, and point to self-help. But that isn’t what I mean at all. I mean the precise opposite. Amazon will recommend a million junky self-help books. But you can’t help “yourself” out of system failure and civilizational calamity. These are collective failures, plights, and traps.

We’re all supposed to be nobody now, and what I mean by that begins with the example above. You will never be “recommended” anything that genuinely elevates and expands your human potential. Sophocles, Aristotle, Dante, de Beauvoir, Fromm, doesn’t matter, the list of the great minds and spirits in human history is a long one. The point is that this is how we become ourselves. By communing with history in this most beautiful of ways. We read, watch, think, try, fail, and in this way, and only in this way, we grow.

Who are we supposed to be now? Nobodies, doing, enacting, absorbed in, nothings. We’re supposed to be addicts to the numbing agents crackling through the air around us like lightning. They bombard us at light speed. Think of how much time people spend scrolling, clicking, swiping. What are they building, creating, enacting? Nothing. None of it adds up to anything. Who are they becoming? Nobody.

Every last aspect of human interaction is now controlled in this way. Whom we date, marry, fuck, admire, want to be. But the hidden revelation in all this is a terrible secret. We are not to be ourselves anymore.

So are we truly, fully alive in any of this?

V. THE NOTHING PEOPLE

People are becoming clones like this. If everybody is supposed to be nobody, then we are all the same in our nothingness.

And this is several steps beyond what the last great wave of social thinkers imagined. Durkheim famously pioneered the notion of “anomie,” or the numbness of isolation in Darwinian, capitalist societies. Baudrillard took it one step further, with the idea of “simulacra,” or simulations of reality. We are now on a plane beyond all those. Even those great minds didn’t imagine a world where people becoming nobody because they spend their lives in, on, with, for nothing.

Let me make that much more concrete. If the systems and algorithms which we’re now enslaved to wanted us to become scientists, they’d recommend us scientific journal articles and books. If they wanted us to become poets, they’d point us to the works of Basho and Rilke and Dante. If they wanted us to become just fuller human beings, they’d tell us to read Aristotle and Sophocles and know why Socrates drank the hemlock and spend a few moments with Sartre and Brecht.

But of course, they will never do any of that. Not just because it’s not profitable—this isn’t a critical analysis of capitalism, I’ve wasted too much of my life on that—but for a deeper reason. To be a fuller human being is to be emancipated from bondage. And the systems which now fail us are making one last desperate gambit: if they can’t serve us, then they will at least reduce us to nothing, and make nobodies of us.

VI. WHY REBELLION IS IMPOSSIBLE NOW

Why do our systems want us to nobodies, wasting our lives on nothings? When you are dying—and I spent many years like this, so trust me, LOL—what you’ll regret isn’t “God, I wish I’d scrolled more TikTok videos,” it’s that you didn’t commune with humankind’s great minds, and make the most of your life that way, which is the only way.

Our systems want us to be nobodies wasting our lives on nothings for a very simple reason. Nobodies who are nothing can never rebel. They can never change anything, because to change a thing requires being somebody who cares about somethings. If you’re nobody who cares about nothing, you have no capability to rebel, no will, no mind, no spirit, no desire, because, of course, you are made of nothing. What the fuck are you rebelling against when your entire life is click, swipe, scroll? There’s nothing to rebel against, when you’ve decided nothing, anyways.

I spent my life as a consummate rebel. I made my mark by being a rebel intellectually. I challenged economics and finance and social thinking and made my own paradigms and wrote my books. And of course I learned the hard way that there’s a price to be paid for rebellion. It’s fun when you’re young, but what do you do when you’re not? So now I wonder about it all. But…I’m proud of myself.

I wasted my life, but at least I wasted it in my own way. For something. And that way, at least I became the self in me that realized my possibilities.

There are many ways to waste your life. I’m useless now, and that’s because the world thinks of people like you and me as pointless, having been taught that the only thing worth aspiring to is Having All The Money, and the only people worth admiring are crackpots and lunatics and billionaires and rapists and so forth. Me? I’m fucking proud of having wasted my life on better things than that, even if the world decided they didn’t matter.

Because at least I didn’t squander it.

Squandering a life’s different from wasting it. It would have meant: shrugging, and throwing my days away. I travelled the world and fought my battles and wear my scars. My heart is shattered, it’s true. But that is not at all squandering a life. Wasting a life, like I did is: I realized my possibilities, only to find out that they didn’t matter to a world numb in its own becoming-nothing. Squandering it is: motherfucker, I never even tried, and just held my wrists out for the fetters.

VII. IF YOU HIDE FROM LIFE, YOU DIE

Nobodies wasting their lives on nothings can never rebel. It’s as impossible for them as asking a stone to become a river. And that is why we are where we are. We live in an age which is striking not just because civilization is crumbling around us, but because there is the total absence of any form of rebellion against it.

The French guillotined the nobility which starved them. In our age, the guillotine are the jagged pieces of the shattered reflections of us. They slit our wrists. Are you really going to waste your life on a million people who’ve never read a book? This is what people do now, and call it life, but it isn’t.

The moral code of this age is: better you than me, you piece of shit. At least as a nobody becoming nothing I can hide. I’m invisible. This way, they can’t take anything from me. Wrong. This way, they’ve already taken everything from you.

Rebellion is: emancipation towards life, liberation from death. Nobodies becoming nothing are hiding from life itself in this way. The absence of rebellion matters so much for precisely this reason. It’s become something impossible to imagine, conceptualize, much less enact or spark, because we’re all busy becoming techno-clones. And so rebellion’s now as alien to this age of collapse as science was to the Dark Ages. But as it becomes nothing, too, we’ve died anyways. If you hide from life, you die. This is how we’ve forgotten what it is to live fully, to be alive. And in that, the project of civilization is crumbling around us.

I don’t mean to insult those of you who do resist all this deadness. Far from it. I salute you and I’m proud of you. But the impossibility of revolution is perhaps the defining feature of this age. And that is precisely because people would rather be nobodies trapped in nothings than build, create, spark, ignite, tend to, nourish, nurture, fight for, imagine, dream of…

somethings.

VIII. THE EXISTENTIAL CHOICE WE FACE IN THE 21st CENTURY

What’s the point I’m trying to make? Am I just hectoring you? Is this some kind of confession? Not at all. I want you to understand where we are.

The world is now dividing into two. This division is often put into simplistic terms: the rich and the poor, Main St and Wall St, etcetera. None of these will really help you think clearly. The cleavage in the world now is between nobodies enslaved by nothings, and somebodies who still care about somethings.

I’m going to outline three rules.

One. If you’re trapped in the nobody becoming nothing spiral, break it. Recognize it. Listen to your gut.

Two. That emphatically doesn’t just mean a digital detox or what have you. It means choosing a something to care about. Doesn’t matter what it is. Here are mine, music, science, art, money. And yes, money can and should be one.

Three. You’re going to fail at this and that’s totally cool. You can’t fail at being a nobody becoming a nothing. There’s nothing to fail at. This is why people wear the shackles, by the way, because it’s easier that way. The truth? It goes like this. It’s OK to be a useless person in a world that values nothing. It’s noble and brave and wise, in fact. Better that than the alternative, which is becoming a techno-clone, algorithm object 183738182, a nobody person.

You can’t make somethings out of nothings. This is the problem we face as a civilization. If people accept being nobodies becoming nothing, then all is lost. The future depends critically on those of us who reject this choice, and rebel against it.

We aren’t just children of the algorithm and slaves to the model. We’re children of the stars and time. In and through each us unfurls the golden thread of a million million midnights, where lovers whispered and the slumbering dreamt. Of a world worth living in. Not just bondage and futility and emptiness. This is the endeavor of civilization.

This is the fundamental existential choice before us in this age. Who will we be? Nobody people, who are disappearing into nothing? Or those who rebel against this emptiness, this numbness, the all-encompassing nothingness, for somethings, and that way, become fully life again?

The future of everything depends on this choice. Nobodies who only care about nothings is what we are being reduced to. But tomorrow can only come from those of us who, struggling for the beauty of somethings, still ache to be fully alive, not just technoclones made of algorithmic emptiness. I’m going to be the world’s first trillionaire, but I’ve never read a book! Fucking kill me with this brain-dead bullshit.

Everything is made of somethings, not nothings.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)