400 years ago, a guy who thought rocks could fuck decided that you could read God’s Divine Plan in the way the living world organized itself.
Two weeks ago, a guy with easy access to billionaires and billions tried to sell his company using an excel spreadsheet that contained the label “Hidden, poorly internally labeled “@fiat” account.”
Here’s how the idea of a natural order ended up cratering 1.2B of real people’s money in the 2022 implosion of the Magical Money Machines FTX and Alameda Ventures. It’s just one of the many many ways this idea has fucked us over for centuries, the latest installment in people with power and resources convincing themselves that they not only should have that power, they are morally justified in doing everything they can to retain it.
Carl Linnaeus believed that he could read divine will into the structure of the world, declaring that “the earth is then nothing else but a museum of the all-wise creator’s masterpieces, divided into three chambers.” He also thought rocks might reproduce sexually. Despite Linnaeus’ confident evangelization to his peers about the divine hierarchy of the world, that concept, like rocks that can fuck, did not withstand the test of time. Over the centuries, his classification system was gutted and replaced piecemeal, most recently by Whittaker and then by Woese. The concept of a divinely inspired natural order faded into the background as we found new ways to describe the world.
The idea that the way things are is the way they are supposed to be has never quite left us though, largely because it’s such a useful tool for people in power. If there is a natural order, then there is an inevitable and immutable hierarchy that we cannot help but adhere to. If there is a hierarchy then some things must be better than other things, more valuable, more important. And if humans are a part of this ranked world, well then, some of us must be better than others too.
Bigots of all kinds have leaned on this lazy assumption to justify their prejudices for centuries. An assumption, it bears repeating, that was developed by a man who thought rocks could have sex. Over the last twenty years, the very prosaic idea that some people are worth more than other people has laundered itself into the ‘philosophy’ of Effective Altruism, an uber-utilitarianism that argues the people capable of doing the most good are (conveniently) the rich technologists it caters to, and that the people who most need that good are the future generations of humanity.
Who are these future generations, the people that are so important to the future of humankind that their concerns outweigh any and every concern of humans living on this planet today? According to Effective Altruists, they are largely simulated people, digital persons that exist in servers scattered across the universe. Nick Bostrum, an Effective Altruist focused on what he imagines to be the long-term survival of the human species, has gone so far as to say that helping the poor, solving world hunger, promoting LGBTQ rights and women’s equality are just feel-good vanity projects.
Rocks. Having sex.
Effective Altruism is the philosophy that guided William MacAskill, Silicon Valley’s own Joel Osteen, to tell Sam Bankman-Fried that rather than devote himself to animal welfare, he should “earn to give”, that is, make obscene quantities of money and donate it to maximize his impact. Effective Altruism is the philosophy that connected Sam Bankman-Fried to billionaires convinced of the necessity and right of their own existence, the engine for FTX billion dollar holdings and its sister company, Alameda Ventures, the money printer. Effective Altruism is the philosophy that argues for eugenics, encouraging billionaires to “improve” our population by have as many children as they can, advocating for the killing of disabled infants, and dismissing the Holocaust as “a mere ripple on the great sea of life….that hasn’t significantly affected the total amount of human suffering or happiness.”
Effective Altruism, like racism and sexism and bigotry of all kinds, demands that we separate humans into those who are better and those who are worse, a process that ends up dehumanizing us all. And just like Linnaeus’ hierarchy, Effective Altruism will be hard to uproot. Its ghosts will echo through philanthropic and philosophical circles as long as it remains an appealing fig-leaf for people with money and power, and a convenient fiction for those attempting to justify an unjust world. Rejecting lazy philosophies like these begins by remembering that the world is as we make it, and that there is no “natural order” save the one we create and impose.
Thank you to @xriskology, @timnitgebru, @nathanjrobinson and so many more in conversation on Twitter and other spheres for exposing this sham and arguing against it in every venue available. To the folks in Anil Dash’s tweet here I’d love to hear from you. We can build new systems of innovation that are way less dumb than this particular box of rocks. @Keira_Havens on twitter, @Keira.havens@mastodon.social over there.
