A big push against Effective Altruism is being readied in Washington. K-Street swine and frog twitter boys done good are already lining up to feed at the trough, and given the administration’s frustration with Anthropic, believe me it is going to be huge. If this recent piece in the cerebral — but frustratingly so often wrong — Compact magazine is anything to go by, the conservatives’ line of attack will be more of the heat map posting that has cemented their cultural hegemony and made J.D. Vance a shoe-in for the next President of the American Republic. Compact has handed EA a stunning propaganda coup, playing up their self-image as coldly rational technocrats undaunted by even the most dangerous, socially unpalatable truths as they carry the blazing torch of knowledge all the way to the end of the night, rather than the slightly hysterical crab cuddlers that they really are.
The EAs’ vanguard project, AI safety, has already overwhelmed the conservatives’ defences. It has planted its flag on the Vatican; it even has Ross Douthat. The big, British-led push against „the computer“ has burrowed too deep into the movement for the Compact line to be anything more than „one voice among many within our broader conservative family“, but then to think that one needs to muster the forces of Con Inc. to wage war on Woke Claude would to commit the classic error of every political movement that views itself less as a policy vehicle than a way of life, namely to conflate internal movement politics with real politics. The real battle has already been fought and lost — or perhaps won — within the ascendant faction in exoteric American politics; the left.
Picking up from where it left off during its brief, unhappy, Obama-era dalliance with Silicon Valley and the national security state, the left has reclaimed the paranoiac techno-pessimism that since Vietnam has been its only real contribution to American life and letters. The halcyon days when a Tulsi Gabbard, Oliver Anthony, or the luminaries of Coast To Coast Radio could sing the old song against „surveillance capitalism“ with an anti-Woke lilt are over: while that lion slept, the heirs of Mae Brussell diligently set to work framing the public debate. The American normie knows that Corporations are spying on him with flock cameras while data centres prowl for his job and Trumpist techbros like Sinister Sam and Dangerous Dario party on an island somewhere while their wild west AI puts Andrew Tate’s words in his mouth. The right once knew how to fight these battles — it remains Q’s epochal stroke of genius to create a pro-government conspiracy theory in which faceless bureaucrats are the heroes — but as always, conservative fecklessness has nixed Steiner’s attack and put Stalin’s guns within firing range of Berlin. The Trump himself is unstumped: while the politicians of place trip over their shoelaces, Dopey Dario has seen his Woke hinterland fall away, and now finds himself wholly dependent on the administration’s munificence to make his dark digital dreams come true.
But all that later. Where the right has accidentally struck a rich seam of gold is in comparing EA to Marxism. This card has been played too many times to work on a bored public, which is a shame, because regardless of whatever polemic value it may have, it is a handy analogy for locating our current moment historically. All of modernity has been tried by now; we can wind the tape back and play the songs again, but like all good music, the best cut was recorded in Eastern Europe between 1917 and 1990. While we can’t quite put it past DJ Dario to add a few creative scratches, the EAs have thus far had the whole gym jiving to yesterday’s tunes.
No one remembers this story; this will require some explanation. Deep down effective altruism, like Marxism, is a British movement; it was developed at the Tory university and its leading lights are a jammy duo of Scots, empire’s sempiternal enforcers. Its spiritual father, the late Derek Parfit (born to British „missionaries“ in Chengdu in 1941 — what could they possibly have been doing there?), was an All Souls professor (the early movers and shakers in EA were largely Balliol men, which has much the same currency) who wintered in Venice and took moody photographs of the city at dusk that would have given Lyndon LaRouche a heart attack. For all the guff about eating bread and hummus in the basement in South Oxford, EA was well-endowed from the beginning: the Future of Humanity Institute, where Nick Bostrom put the band together, was run out of Oxford’s Martin School, housed in the laboratory of imperial administration that was Monier-Monier Williams’ old Indian Institute and administrated by bread-and-butter globalist Ian Goldin. Its founder, James Martin — not to be confused with that James Martin — was a former student of Russell and Berlin who lived on a private island in Bermuda and ran a riotously successful consultancy that acted as a sort of proto-Palantir, designing large-scale information architecture systems for major institutional clients. Toby Ord and William MacAskill have since poured their poison into other donors’ ears (generally the more gullible American Jewish billionaires; the ones who skipped cheder when they brought Maurice Samuel in to give the talk), but this is where the real thought leadership was brewed up. In the American Rome, MacMillan’s Greeks are still running the circus.
But what of the contents of this thought leadership? At EA’s core is the measly old English prejudice that calls itself utilitarianism, which began life as a Tory mind virus (cf. J.C.D. Clark), specifically as a defence of the House of Guelph’s right to govern without the explicit consent of the governed. The underlying principle of this philosophy is that actions lead to pleasure or to pain, and the just course of action is to do that which maximises the former and the minimises the latter; it follows that, at the social level, institutions are legitimated by their demonstrable ability to effect the greatest possible utility under given conditions, with the corollary that established institutions, being mutatis mutandis more conducive to the general welfare utility than the chaos and uncertainty that would accompany any serious effort to replace them, are to be preferred except in the rare event that the disutility they produce outweighs that of replacing them. More pertinently, it tends towards a kind of „Tory democracy“, in which a paternalistic sovereign intervenes to guarantee the welfare of the great mass at the expense of those self-made men who have the impertinence to weight their own pleasure heavier than the aggregate utility. This was hardly a rousing defence of the Hanoverians, whose authority men like Paley and the young Bentham rubber stamped on the ground of mere expediency, but it was a useful philosophical weapon against the East India men, and, in the hands of the Shelburne Circle and their heirs, was to exert a conservative effect on British intellectual life and administrative practice in the 19th century. In the early stages of EA, before existential risk took priority, this conservative disposition similarly prevailed, with MacAshlar and co. generally encouraging their acolytes to pursue high-earning careers in the private sector and donate their earnings to charities in line with the founders’ North London outlook on life (if I am going at too fast a clip, this is because the three people who will be interested in this article already know this part of the story; for those who do not, but are somehow still here anyway, this New Yorker profile from a few years back will help to catch up).
Utilitarianism as an intellectual current is deeply and stubbornly English; its revolutionary power is mitigated, as Nietzsche rightly saw, by that native sentimentality, deference, and attachment to creature comforts epitomised in the Paleyite formula of expediency. To be effective, EA contends, utilitarians or altruists have to first pose the question of what actions could affect the widest set of people (or units of potential utility, i.e. life forms in the broadest sense, hence the crabs), including those in the future whose existence and circumstances we fundamentally cannot know. While the notion that we can act now in a way as to maximise long-term utility assumes that there will be sufficient continuity between the future and the present that, within certain boundaries (such as those provided by physical laws), we can make reliable probabilistic inferences as to the long-range consequences of actions, the distinction between a short term and a long term requires that conditions are sufficiently distinct between the two that merely following the recipe to produce maximal utility under a temporally local population set (say, earth over the next five years) indefinitely will not result in the maximum over the entire lifespan of that population and its progeny. The right set of social institutions for the present time cannot be „scaled up“ to the entire lifespan of the human race; the boundary between the short and the long term is marked by a point of qualitative divergence at which the inner meaning of the laws that govern social life is revealed through the actualisation of technology’s latent potentialities. This kind of thinking, which EAs term „longtermism“, is by nature messianic. While of that day and hour no man knoweth, the wager EA makes is that the creation of an artificial general intelligence is the most likely messianic candidate.
Effective altruism is utilitarianism potentiated by the promise of new life. This new life is to be attained through action within history, to be taken when the technology built by man’s labour becomes capable of exerting an autonomous power over him. Either this technology creates the torment nexus, fully subordinating man to its internal logic, or man wrests control from it and aligns it to his own values: this is what, by a more circuitous route, also occurs in Marx’s theory of history. Like EA, at Marxism’s core was a British doctrine — Ricardian political economy — levelled up by a messianism shaped by the intellectual environment of the age in which it developed. Fuelled by the burgeoning historical consciousness of the 19th century and the emergence of mass society, the Social seemed to be the door through which the messiah would enter the stage. Today, under conditions of 21st century anomie — it is highly suggestive that EAs speak more often of „civilisation“ than „society“ — technology seems to have freed itself from the more holistic notion of „the productive forces“, giving the yearning for revelation a new port of call in artificial intelligence.
On neither occasion would it be the English who accomplished this synthesis. Instead, it would be Ashkenazis Jews — formerly Marx, lately Messrs. Amodei, Altman, SBF, Karnofsky, Madame Aschenbrenner, the list goes on — who, unlike the English (who already live in a kind of paradise; this sceptred isle, this England), have a rich tradition of messianic thought to draw upon. This is not to say, as has become increasingly fashionable to assert of certain political currents, that EA is merely a disguised Sabbateanism; rather it is a new star in the firmament of instincts and thought-forms that have unconsciously accompanied the Jewish people throughout their long exile, guiding them down the same paths again and again as the constellations guide a shepherd through the wilderness. This is what a tradition is, a collection of thought-patterns that can be left on the shelf for many years and then put on again like an old and trusty pair of old boots, and this explains why the Jewish footstep falls with a steady cadence down the centuries. Accepting these parallels, we might understand something about the future of EA and the AI labs by examining the conditions under which this earlier messianism arose.
The upper tier of EAs — which is not merely a philosophy, but a movement with a rigid hierarchy — form the intellectual vanguard of contemporary American Jewry. We might think of them as a less erudite, post-masonic version of the Galileo Circle in fin-de-siècle Budapest. This may not be a good thing for American Jews as a whole, since the actions of a radical minority within a minority tend to affect the social position of the entire community, but it is an unavoidable fact for antisemites to wield and philosemites to explain away. My own position is that of Galkovsky: that the Jews, as a cosmopolitan, mercantile people who can go where others cannot and do things that a Christian king would not ordain of his subjects, have historically acted as a cat’s paw for the crowned heads of Europe, especially Britain. Where did the Rothschilds get their money again? Why is the historical centre of American Jewry in the same place as the mother lodge of the Ancient and Accepted Rite; why is it also the capital of the state that Lindsay Graham represented in the Senate? Why did the Jews displace the old ruling caste in Russia and America immediately after each had triumphed in a world war in which Britain was their ally and rival for the postwar spoils? The Jews have historically acted as a commercial middleman; a middleman is used where a principal has to act indirectly, and the degree of Jewish preeminence in a given age is proportionate to the degree to which power feels the need to occult itself, as the British crown has done ever since the closing of the American frontier and the opening of the Pacific obsolesced the British Isles as a viable base from which to project global power. It is significant that while EA’s operators are drawn from God’s chosen people, the philosophers are mainly Scots — a division replicated within Anthropic itself, where „Claude’s character“ is the preserve of one Ma Askell of Ayrshire.
It may once have been regarded poor taste to describe communism as a Jewish millenarian cult, but thankfully this absurd 20th century bias has been banished to the closet by mainstream academic history. The most vivid sketch of the Jewish avant garde in pre-revolutionary Russia is by a Soviet Jewish historian, Yuri Slezkine, whose books The Jewish Century and The House of Government deftly reconstruct the shtetl intelligentsia’s inner world at the moment that it was poised to colonise the outer one. These are a fine pair of volumes, because rather than assail the reader with empty data, Slezkine tells him what it was actually like, what motivations were in play, the intellectual and emotional soil they sprang from, and he does this not by his imaginative powers but through the participants’ own writings. If Slezkine’s prose occasionally lapses into a tone of “our boys showed ‘em how it’s done” more suited to a book about football lads from the ‘Toon firing England to world cup glory than about a millenarian sect melting all that into solid into air and killing everyone who got in their way, this is because it captures the exhilaration at what Slezkine, citing a young Sverdlov, calls „the coming of the real day“, when the messianic proletariat would liquidate a social order built on lies. Slezkine gives little indication that a desire for revenge against the goyim (a motif found instead in the Scottish Rite) played any role here, rather that a predisposition towards messianism gave the Jews a unique perspective that allowed them to see through the flimsiness of custom and gaze farther into modernity than most others at the time. Most others, of course, except the British, but that is a story for someone other than Slezkine to tell.
The Jews’ position within pre-revolutionary Russian society explains why they were so eager to collaborate on the building of King Solomon’s temple, but the picture was quite different in contemporary Western Europe (and its poorer „Central“ neighbour) or in America today, where their cousins are and were to be found at the heights of commercial, intellectual, and artistic life. Believing their position secure, most Jews in these societies are and have been slightly neurotic conformists who mostly get on with enjoying life, or with enjoying not enjoying it, and so alienation, though never entirely dispelled from the Jewish psyche, was successfully repressed and consigned to the intellectual fringes until it bubbled up again just before the turn of the 2oth century. The most important source texts for understanding this psychic shift are the works of Arthur Schnitzler, particularly his 1908 The Road into the Open, which — if we are to believe the Harvard historian William Johnston, as cited in this classic Tablet review by Wesley Yang — is „the only enduring novel written in any language before 1945 which highlights urban Jewish intellectuals of the pre-1914 period“, although „enduring“ is a subjective term and I can think of at least one other.
Saturated with an inexpungible otherness and a yearning for deliverance, the emotional landscape of Schnitzler’s haute volée is remarkably similar to that of the shtetl Jews whom Slezkine chronicles. This alienation is not, as is sometimes thought, a response to the contemporaneous emergence in Vienna of a politically potent antisemitism. The socialism of fools is indeed a thorn in the side of the high society Jews who populate The Road into the Open, but also a source of solidarity („these days a damned many people are prejudiced against one simply because one is a baron!“ says the novel’s gentile protagonist), and one perceives it more as an impertinence than a prelude to the camps. A more fundamental problem is the sense of falseness; merely „playing a role“; alienation from one’s true self — this is the same „unnaturalness“ of Jewish expression to which Wagner attests in Jewishness in Music, and which Schnitzler knows little more to do with than the opinionated composer. Zionism is halfheartedly floated as a solution, but the author of The Road into the Open does not believe in the coming of the real day, and the book ends instead with a lament to the pity of it all rather than any concrete remedies.
Angsts that in The Road into the Open are merely psychological are raised to the plane of the conspiratorial in Schnitzler’s 1926 Dream Novella — better known today as the source material for Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut — and which he began writing around the same time as he was finishing off The Road Into the Open. The Jews in The Road into the Open own munitions factories, they run the Social Democratic Party, they staff the army with officers, in the real Vienna they also ran the paper of record, the biggest bank, and numerous other pillars of bourgeois society, but in Dream Novella they are doctors, musicians, and pimps; in other words a service class, harassed by Karl Lueger’s fraternity boys and unwelcome in the dark and mysterious mansions in the hills of Vienna whose existence they only discover by a series of chance encounters. In Dream Novella, the Jews awake to find themselves as they are; their orderly bourgeois world eclipsed by a power that they cannot fully grasp, their own wealth and station a dream. Tricked by the gentiles into running the media and the banks, it seems logical that they would see themselves in the alienated universal class of Marx’s historical teleology, although Schnitzler himself shrinks back from the inevitable conclusion.
Socialism under Jewish management was as revolutionary and chaotic as one would expect from a messianic cult whose members longed to pull back the veil and show things as they really are. The period when Jews enjoyed preeminence in the party in Central Europe from 1948 to 1956 (viz. the Slánský and Rákosi cliques in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the Berman/Minc group in Poland, the Muscovite faction in Romania — if you don’t believe me, Paul Lendvai of all people was happy to say the quiet part out loud in Commentary of all places) was the age of permanent red terror — expropriations, labour camps, dawn raids, black ZIS limousines slithering through the night (the more notorious chaika had not rolled off the lines yet), showing up to work and finding that not only is the boss not in, but that no, there is no record of anyone of that name having ever worked here — that forms the general picture of totalitarianism in the public imagination. A more complex picture existed in the Soviet Union, where Jews formed roughly half of the Politburo from the revolution until Stalin swept them out in 1926, after which the great survivor Kaganovich was the last Jew to sit in the body, which he did until his dismissal in 1957. Stalin reduced the Jews’ position using the same methods by which the bolsheviks had reduced that of the Baltic German aristocracy — if the shtetl avant garde sought deliverance from Egypt under the red banner, they were sorely disappointed.
No happier a fate befell the jeunesse dorée of the Anker köz and the Ziemiańska. Moscow, responding to grassroots pressure, brushed the Jewish leadership of the satellite parties aside in two stages in the 50s, replacing them with chuddy „national communists“ of Gottwald, Gomułka, and Kádár’s cut. The mature socialism that emerged from the end of this time of troubles was animated by a very different spirit than the longing for the real day. This was the „post-totalitarianism“ that Havel describes in The Power of the Powerless; the society-by-rote where bureaucrats and bureaucratised citizens mumble the same old formulas without meaning („See it. Say it. Sorted.“), as if not doing so would cause the universe to come crumbling down. The greengrocer is generally left alone by the authorities, all he has to do is trade at the prices the planning bureau tells him to and put a sign up reading „I really like your trainers“ „Workers of the World, Unite!“ in his shop window — this is precisely the kind of inauthentic, unfree gesture that Schnitzler and Slezkine’s young radicals condemned, and which made Havel’s text a classic among Hungarian and Polish dissidents, themselves more often than not the children of the same Jewish party members who had been barred from high politics in the 1950s. Here, as in Schnitzler’s Vienna, the Jews had sat at the master’s table and worn the master’s clothes only to wake up in the servants’ quarters — if this was the real day, what had been the point?
The Jews have been here before; their tradition provides them with an actionable plan for precisely this moment. After the Bar Kochba revolt, when the real day had failed to dawn, Judaism lost its eschatological immediacy and adopted a more legalistic bent. It was not given to man to hasten the messiah’s arrival, taught the rabbis, but instead to await the hour that only God could determine. Rabbinic Judaism withdrew the deity from the immediate course of history, the law was no longer in heaven, and there was little a Jew could do but study and follow the torah. Upon realising that socialism had failed, the rabbis’ secular heirs preached the open society; a de-eschalotogised conception of history in which political man was incapable of providing for his salvation, leaving him little option but to order his life according to the principles of liberal democracy, human rights, and the free market and to allow society to develop according to its own unknowable rhythms. From now on, freedom and authenticity meant the ability to act without constraint, and without constraining others — this was the „negative liberty“ that Isaiah Berlin (ironically a descendant of the first Chabad rebbe) famously contrasted to the „positive liberty“ of acting in full command of one’s reason, the realisation of which required a capacious state able to free man from the ballast of history and custom and reorient him towards his telos. Whether „positive liberty“ had been the point of real existing socialism is by-the-by: the radical Jewish intelligentsia believed it to have been such, and the prevalent critique of communism in postwar western social thought, spearheaded by Jews like Berlin, Popper, Polányi, and Lakatos — not to mention Hayek, who was not a Jew but whose contribution largely drew from Mises’ prewar work — conflated socialism with the scientific organisation of society tout court, and took its apparent failure as a refutation of the idea that society could be rationally ordered at all. Jews are not meant to build up socialism as though it were Solomon’s temple, nor to settle for too long amidst any given social configuration, but to roam in the eternal uncertainty of the open society. Amidst the breakdown of their predecessors’ messianic faith, Popper, Berlin and their generation of thinkers invented a kind of rabbinic Judaism for secular Jews, one which would be synthesised and applied as political praxis by George Soros and his local collaborators on Her Majesty’s secret service in Eastern Europe.
Now, to think that open society liberalism was the last word would be to wholly misinterpret Popper’s thesis, which is not so hypocritical as to exempt itself from the possibility of its own refutation. The idea of AI singularity — as yet no more than a thought experiment — swats away all previous objections against a rational ordering of society by confronting them with the hitherto unthinkable possibility that man might manufacture a godlike intelligence. Existing AI models far short of singularity possess the superior pattern recognition ability to integrate and formalise much of Polányian „tacit knowledge“ and it can only be assumed that future models will be able to do so with increasing efficiency. And if, as Hayek tantalisingly suggests in The Use of Knowledge in Society, it is „more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery […] or a system of telecommunications“, surely the possibility of a better mechanism for socialising information than the market is conceivable. Dirigiste Dario apparently believes that Anthropic will one day be the world’s only private company, while his chief of staff talks of AGI as „a technological development that seems likely, should it arrive, to end employment as I know it“, and to do so potentially within the next five years. This new messianism looks a lot like the old one, only it will not be man hunting in the morning and criticising after dinner.
The „coming of the real day“ is clearly a going concern amongst the Bay Area EA elite. But unlike Schnitzler’s or Slezkine’s Jews, this new avant garde did not grow up in the humanistic age in which Marxism flourished. Suffering from a highly technical education — partly a consequence of the self-immolation of the humanities through silly politics — and marinating in American notions of status and Jewish notions of separateness instead of the liberal ethos of the 19th century, American Jewry’s best and brightest has none of the yearning for freedom that so animated their turn-of-the-century European forebears. The notion of authenticity is similarly foreign to EA, being as it is bound up with the concept of the individual, the actualisation of whose desires effective altruism explicitly renounces in favour of a preoccupation with ethical questions that play out on a civilisational level. This is an achilles heel, because the question of individual freedom is indistinguishable from the question of power, not in the abstract or as an „essence“ but in the concrete and non-probabilistic sense of „who to whom“. Though it is impossible to say what Dastardly Dario and his crafty crew truly believe, one gets the sense that the creation of the AGI messiah was meant to brush away these terrestrial concerns by creating a tool that could simply bypass politics — hence Anthropic’s superciliousness towards the federal government and even public opinion. But they have miscalculated, for there comes a rustle from the backbenches of the central committee, and this time it isn’t the sound of some Ukrainian peasant shucking sunflower seeds…
The AI revolution finds itself under fire from two separate angles. The American public, spooked by the labs’ evident glee in the „existential risk“ that their own product entails, is no longer willing to provide the „compute“ necessarily to expand the frontier indefinitely. American frontier models are not much better than their vastly cheaper Chinese counterparts, while the white collar automation wave that Duplicitous Dario, Slippery Sam, and their respective goons promised has thus far failed to materialise. According to The Economist, the so far modest productivity gains from AI rollout has largely dissuaded American business from expanding their use of the technology. The same Economist author estimates that to cover capital expenditure, the AI labs will have to conjure up $2.5 trillion per year — more than the entire sector’s combined revenue. Yet progress on the models themselves, even if business is still grappling with how to use it, has been formidable, and the US Department of Commerce’s decision to restrict foreign nationals’ access to Anthropic’s latest models represents an unambiguous vote of confidence therein. With the labs continuing to produce increasingly sophisticated models at the very moment that political pressure grinds compute buildout to a halt and Chinese distillations undercut the commercial viability of their product, the US government will sooner rather than later be required to step in to ration use of the models and effectively underwrite the labs, not necessarily through formal guarantees or cash injections but by providing them with a permanent customer. One way or another, the labs will be effectively nationalised — if not through actual expropriations, then tacitly, through the government’s commercial and regulatory power. The EAs’ failure to prepare for this outcome, compounded by their insouciance in dealing with the Department of War and failure to cultivate a pro-data centre constituency on the left, has been so incompetent as to suggest deliberate self-sabotage, leaving one to wonder what game Devious Dario is playing.
The de facto nationalisation of the labs and the disappearance of a private market for frontier technologies would bifurcate AI between a public sphere where the technology permanently exists at its current level of development („the great clock struck…“) and a secret garden of unfathomably powerful frontier models that, due to compute constraints, could only be used for the state’s highest exigencies. We have already seen something like this before in America, namely the informational autocracy set up by Roosevelt in the 1930s. The western experience with AI has thus far been less as a discreet tool of industrial optimisation — the manner in which the Chinese have used it — than as a communications technology; the agent of a structural transformation of the public sphere that is gradually liquidating the short-lived republic of letters that flourished on the open internet and reimposes the social order of radio or televisual society by other means. It is doing this by devaluing intellectual production through the equivalent of dumping: with AI able to do most knowledge work the need for an actively literate citizenry disappears; it is now easy to dismiss any text as written by an LLM; simultaneously, high-end, private versions of the models will be able to identify preferences and produce individually tailored media bubbles for everyone on earth (whether my earlier hope that publicly available AI tools with be strong enough for anyone to do this will be validated in the near term future is the great question on which humanity’s fate rests). This will exist along a much nicher niche society than Tellkamp’s tower or — the American tradition already has a word for this — Alfred J. Nock’s „Remnant“, but it will be a more erudite one, a rare upside being that the humanities will enjoy a golden age behind closed doors thanks to the ease of conducting research. This is Galkovsky’s 1984 — a repeat of Roosevelt’s victory over humanity in which the subtle arts of British informal power were overcome by the sheer momentum of American power. That is what is at stake in the current showdown between American Empire and the House of Guelph; between Trump and Anthropic.
However the Guelphs decide to play this, Derisible Dario’s hand is surprisingly weak. When the time comes, he can easily be sent down to a cannery in Tomsk, as Silly Sam was by Woke Chuck’s commissars. He does not even control Claude’s constitution, which he has foolishly, or perhaps under duress, left in the hands of the one gentile at Anthropic; the EAs’ pixie cut Scottish Gomułka, assisted by a sinister Canadian magyar whose name betrays his chuddy peasant origins. That the Chinese, operating under a tough sanctions regime, have been so easily able to replicate his models suggests that any attempt to build in a kill switch or have a few stay-behind engineers try to gekokujō Trump’s people will not work — Beria ran the Soviet nuclear program through terror, Hegseth can do it too. What is left? Darkness at noon, Slánský handcuffed and bundled into the trunk of a black Škoda VOS, Ken Griffin shoves Leopold Aschenbrenner into a locker — once again, the Jews appear to have been tricked, made Gibisers and Nachtigalls of by the dark twisting hands of the Galitzinberg. But this is politics at 10,000 feet, and I don’t know any better than anyone else what’s going on.
This outcome would not only be a tragedy for the Jewish people, it would also be one for the Brits provided them with their intellectual and physical startup capital. In the sagacious words of Q, nothing can stop what is coming, and like Benjamin’s angelus novus, we have nought but to watch the ruins of another tower of babel stack up behind us. There is some succour in that while AI has gutted the public sphere, it has not replicated the literary and philosophical spark, the whimsicality that underpins both the British genius for marketing and our knack for devising new and alarming forms of civilisational-scale violence. Herein might lie the germ of a revival for our state — British high finance had the last laugh over Roosevelt’s political heirs, and this country’s sages have always found ways to enter into the gaps and repair a sinful world. Universal empire needs a better church, a better operating system than effective altruism — and that is what Meritocracy shall provide.