[Not fiction, but still art. Cross-posted from Grand, Unified, Crazy.]

I.

I am terrified by the idea that one day, I will look back on my life, and realize that I helped create a monster. That my actions and my decisions pushed humanity a little further along the path to suffering and ruin. I step back sometimes from the gears of the technology I am creating, from the web of ideas I am promoting, and from the vision of the future that I am chasing, and I wonder if any of it is good.

Of course I play only the tiniest of roles in the world, and there will be no great reckoning for me. I am a drop in the ocean of the many, many others who are also trying to build the future. But still, I am here. I push, and the levers of the world move, however fractionally. Gears turn. Webs are spun. If I push in a different direction, then the future will be different. I must believe that my actions have meaning, because otherwise they have nothing at all.

No, I do not doubt my ability to shape the future; I doubt my ability to choose it well. The world is dense with opportunity, and we sit at the controls of a society with immense potential and awful power. We have at our disposal a library full of blueprints, each one claiming to be better than the last. I would scream, but in this library I simply whisper, to the blueprints: how do you know? How do you know that the future you propose has been authored by The Goddess of Everything Else, and is not another tendril of Moloch sneaking into our world?

Many people claim to know, to have ascended the mountain and to be pronouncing upon their return the commandments of the one true future: There is a way. Where we are going today, that is not the way. But there is a way. Believe in the way.

I hear these people speak and I am overcome with doubt. I think of butterflies, who flap their wings and create Brownian motion, as unfathomable as any hurricane. I think of fungi, whose simple mushrooms can hide a thousand acres of interwoven root. I think of the human brain, a few pounds of soggy meat whose spark eludes us. The weight of complexity is crushing, and any claim to understanding must be counterbalanced by the collected humility of a thousand generations of ignorance.

And on this complexity, we build our civilization. Synthesizing bold new chemicals, organizing the world’s information, and shaping the future through a patchwork mess of incentives, choices, and paths of least resistance. Visions of the future coalesce around politics of the moment, but there is no vision of the future that can account for our own radical invention. Do not doubt that Russell Marker and Bob Taylor did as much to shape today as any president or dictator. The levers we pull are slow, and their lengths are hidden, but some of them will certainly move the world.

And on these levers, we build our civilization. Invisible hands pull the levers that turn the gears that spin the webs that hold us fast, and those invisible hands belong to us. We pronounce our visions of a gleamingly efficient future, accumulating power in our bid to challenge Moloch, never asking whether Moloch is, simply, us. The institutions of the American experiment were shaped by the wisdom of centuries of political philosophy. That they have so readily crumbled is not an indictment of their authors, but of the radical societal changes none of those authors could foresee. Our new society is being thrown together slapdash by a bare handful of engineers more interested in optimizing behaviour than in guiding it, and the resulting institutions are as sociologically destructive as they are economically productive.

And on these institutions, we build our civilization.

II.

Sometimes, I believe that with a little work and a lot of care, humanity might be able to engineer its way out of its current rough patch and forward, into a stable equilibrium of happy society. Sometimes, if we just run a little faster and work a little harder, we might reach utopia.

There is a pleasant circularity to this dream. Sure, technology has forced disparate parts of our society together in a way that creates polarized echo chambers and threatens to tear society apart. But if we just dream a little bigger we can create new technology to solve that problem. And honestly, we probably can do just that. But a butterfly flaps its wings, and the gears turn, and whatever new technical solution we create will generate a hurricane in some other part of society. Any claims that it won’t must be counterbalanced by the collected humility of a thousand generations of mistakes.

Sometimes, I believe that the future is lying in plain sight, waiting to swallow us when we finally fall. If we just let things take their natural course, then the Amish and the Mennonites and (to a lesser extent) the Mormons will be there with their moral capital and their technological ludditism and their ultimately functional societies to pick up the pieces left by our self-destruction. Natural selection is a bitch if you’re on the wrong end of it, but it still ultimately works.

Or maybe, sometimes, it’s all a wash and we’ll stumble along to weirder and weirder futures with their own fractal echoes of our current problems, as in Greg Daniels’s Upload. But I think of the complexity of this path, and I am overcome with doubt.

III.

I am terrified by the idea that one day, I will look back on my life, and realize that I helped create a monster. Not a grand, societal-collapse kind of monster or an elder-god-sucking-the-good-out-of-everything kind of monster. Just a prosaic, every-day, run-of-the-mill, Frankenstinian monster. I step back sometimes from the gears of the technology I am creating, from the web of ideas I am promoting, and from the vision of the future that I am chasing, and I wonder if it’s the right one.

From the grand library of societal blueprints, I have chosen a set. I have spent my life building the gears to make it go, and spinning the webs that hold it together. But I look up from my labour and I see other people building on other blueprints entirely. I see protests, and essays, and argument, and conflict. I am confident in my epistemology, but epistemology brings me only a method of transportation, not a destination.

I am terrified that it is hubris to claim one blueprint as my own. That I am no better than anyone else, coming down from the mountaintop, proclaiming the way. That society will destroy my monster of a future with pitchforks, or that worse, my monster will grow to devour what would have otherwise been a beautiful idyll.

Frankenstein was not the monster; Frankenstein created the monster.