Destroy Him, My Robots!

1,401 words

As Valentine’s Day approached, I decided that I should perhaps commit myself to the insane asylum that is modern technological courtship. I knew it would be painful and time-consuming, but this year I decided to devote more effort to finding my own modern-day Brünhilde. I was hoping I could do it without being thrown off an ice flow into the frigid waters of the Rhine and carried off to Valhalla on our first date, however. Figuratively speaking, that has happened to me more than once.

I needed to prepare myself. First, I downloaded all the dating apps I could get my cybernetic hands on. There was Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Match, Plenty of Fish, OkCupid, eharmony, Happn, Kippo, Facebook Dating, and more.

After initially making contact with someone pretty and pleasant on one of these platforms, I anticipated an initial phase of witty repartee about terrible television shows, the weather, Funko Pop figurines, and mediocre but expensive brunch spots before being grilled about my political views and what I really did for a living. My preferred tactic to avoid answering the last two questions is to deflect by talking about The Real Housewives of Silicone Valley, or whatever it’s really called.

After that torture was over, I had to perform my due diligence as a potential boyfriend by bookmarking all of her social media links. She undoubtedly has Snapchat, Instagram, a second backup Instagram, Fansly, OnlyFans, another redundant OnlyFans account, and a Twitch account. She’ll most likely have a Linktree to keep everything organized and in one place. Along with her Twitch account, where she streams video game content on a very irregular basis, she’ll have an accompanying Discord server to organize and sort her devoted Twitch follower fan base.

I’m almost certain that Martin Heidegger wrote something about the Snapchathood of the Snapchat. Or was that the Worldhood of the World?[1] I can’t remember. But I digress. That reminds me, I’ll have to follow her second, backup Snapchat.

After all of that downloading and following, I then organized and cleaned up my own social media presence to make sure that all of my publicly viewable opinions and reposts are run-of-the-mill centrist. Wow, this sexual utopia is turning out to be a technological nightmare.[2] Note to self: I’ll have to employ an artificial intelligence to manage everything. It also might be a good idea to take out another student loan to make sure I have enough digital cash to support her across all these platforms.

There is some good news on the horizon, though, as Elon Musk’s company Neuralink has completed one of the very first human trials of their brain-altering technology. Think of how the future of dating will be improved once we’re all implanted with neurological chips. After initially receiving the first brain implant chip in late January 2024 and going through a period of recovery, things are moving apace. The lucky recipient is now able to move a computer mouse with the power of thought alone. And here I am using a mouse the old-fashioned way, like a dummy.

On another technological front, I’m almost certain that many readers have seen the stories about Apple Vision Pro goggles, which allow users to walk down the street looking like aliens while gesticulating at phantom augmented reality menus. It turns out that some users are getting headaches as their primitive human brains are being bombarded by AI Taylor Swift’s virtual gyrations when they should be paying attention to oncoming traffic.

In some countries, including our own, AI boyfriends and girlfriends are becoming very popular. It turns out that some people prefer to be in a relationship with what amounts to a virtual avatar character. It makes a lot of sense, because many women find most men very underwhelming and disappointing even before we spend the afternoon rewatching Blade Runner for the hundredth time. If women can create a scintillating Edward from Twilight on their phone instead of going out with John Smith from Croydon, they’re going to do it. Many men are going to concede defeat and make their own ideal virtual mates as well.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s Graduate School with Heidegger here

I realized it all of a sudden, like I was shot by a diamond bullet right between my eyes, that all of this wasn’t worth it. I knew then that if I were to truly perform all of this simpering, servile following and liking, I was no better than a soy-drinking sycophant. I knew then that I first had to become an active nihilist to salvage even a modicum of my self-respect. After achieving that, I would then have to overcome my nihilism by overcoming metaphysics. I was therefore convinced that to overcome my dating conundrum, I would have to overcome metaphysics. I would need some more coffee for that.[3]

The technological distance that we experience when interacting with people by way of apps and websites has led to many problems. In many studies, researchers have shown that prolonged use of social media is linked to mental health issues, for instance. Despite an abundance of technological devices and communications tools available for download, people are lonelier than ever. I don’t think that a Ted Kaczynski-like mailing campaign will solve our predicament, but some of his writings may help. It would be most helpful if modernism were taken in another direction, as per Jonathan Bowden: “Let us return to tradition to go forwards with modernity in a different direction” — a future where technology is subordinated to our interests.

Richard Houck acknowledges that for most people, technology’s benefits are outweighed by its negative effects: “A handful of disciplined people will be able to use a smartphone to their advantage, while the majority will see themselves struggling to spend any time away from their phones.” There are pitfalls to being plugged into The Matrix every day.

Although much of this essay has been facetious, I do want to acknowledge the truly dreadful problem faced by contemporary humanity in the modern machine age. I feel that we are being conditioned to welcome being wired into the future Internet of All Things. Our smartphones in particular are just the beginning, the preliminary steps to take us from biological human beings to a hybrid post-human hardwired — or better yet, wirelessly connected — to everything else, and subjected to sorting and control. Dating will be so easy then, right?

Ernst Jünger invoked the figure of the worker, who exemplified technology but would also be the ultimate victim of this demonic technological domination, becoming merely a cog in the machine of a nihilistic industrialized state.[4] Jünger realized that despite technology’s ability to create “cultural goods” for mass consumer society, it would invariably also be used to forge terrible weapons:

Therefore the dismal thought occurs that some sort of secret correspondence causes the pace of our accumulation and preservation of so-called cultural goods to be matched only by the grandiose scale on which we simultaneously create instruments of destruction.[5]

That holds true today as the very same industrial society that technologizes the modern courtship process is also sorting, surveilling, and tracking us, and if we are truly unlucky, bombarding us with cluster munitions.

Even though I began by discussing the absurdity of contemporary dating and its associated technology, it is but one area of life that is being subjected to this technological nihilism. Let us not submit to the mass technological society of the twenty-first century and try our best to remain human.[6]

After all of this, I decided that perhaps I should just dispense with all this techno-wrangling and go outside and meet a real lady in real life. Note to self: Talk to her, she might be nice.

Notes

[1] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 91-145.

[2] F. Roger Devlin, Sexual Utopia in Power (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015).

[3] Greg Johnson, “Nietzsche, Metaphysics, and Nihilism,” in Graduate School with Heidegger (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2020), 95-105.

[4] See explanatory footnote in Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being (New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1958) 33.

[5] Ernst Jünger, “The Worker: Domination and Form,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 375-377; first published in Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Herrshaft und Gestalt (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlags-Anstalt, 1932), 197-2001.

[6] Here I am paraphrasing David C. Durst, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Ernst Jünger, On Pain (New York: Telos Press, 2008), xxxv; Durst cites Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), 23.