The coroner said the manner of death was suicide, with “blunt or injury to the head, trunk and extremities.” The dead man’s coworkers probably heard the crunch of breaking bones as his body hit the floor from stories above in the Amazon warehouse. It’s a strange sound, human bones cracking, hard to place, and it only becomes disgusting once you realize what you’ve heard.
The AI-equipped cameras likely caught the fall. They’re installed in the factories, and in the delivery cars, too, where they monitor the motions of the workers’ eyeballs and mouths. That’s why the roads leading to Amazon depots are littered with plastic bottles of piss: it’s not possible to meet one’s quota if you pull over to urinate.
But I digress. It was great that Jeff Bezos funded the Met Gala this year. His wife, Lauren Sánchez, also looked nice sitting front row at Paris Fashion Week, dressed by Dior and Schiaparelli. The Bezoses fancy themselves Renaissance people, patrons of the classical arts, like so many other billionaires. What could be more humanist than that? Even as ultrawealthy technologists create a deeply antihuman reality for the rest of us, their labor force included, they cannot seem to call off their own search for the sublime through art.
If I were a cynic, I would say this is all just part of an act, chalking up the cultural pursuits of the tech vanguard to another manifestation of the incessant impulse to capitalize: art serves as a reputation-laundering device so that one can sell more shit. “Taste” might be magicked into dollars, distracting from a body lying mangled in a warehouse. The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka calls this “taste-washing” — tactically associating one’s brand with art and high culture to create an illusion of coolness and liberal humanist palatability. For example, OpenAI’s merch arm, Supply Co., is out with another terrible clothing line. And does Mark Zuckerberg hope we will forget about the teen suicides because he commissioned a Roman-style statue of his wife, Priscilla Chan? With luck, margins increase.
But such a view is incomplete. It’s not just about the money. I believe them. They’re earnest in their search for the ineffable. The vanguard wish to be seen as human, cultured, dignified, tasteful. That desire lives in all of us, and they are no exception — they are, to borrow Nietzsche’s words, human, all too human. So they start bad DJ careers, wear avant-garde fashion, and buy their names onto museum wings. They want to transcend all the machinized ugliness they’ve unleashed upon the earth, and they suspect that art might hold the key.
One senses a perverse desperation for the last domain they cannot fully infiltrate. Just as you can pay for sex but never the ecstasies of true love, you can buy a museum’s worth of Rothkos and fail to feel a thing standing before them.
But there’s an uncanny contradiction. They can’t shake the obsession with the sublime essence that animates the humanist worldview and its cultural products, all while claiming to be “transhumanist.” How is it that the architects of a technophilic hellscape are the same ones so obnoxiously performing their reverence for art, the highest of human pursuits — even creating bad art themselves? How could this be possible, when they are the ones destroying the conditions necessary for art to be made or deeply experienced in the first place? Sustained attention. An interior life protected from constant stimulation. The imaginative capacity to encounter another person, or another thing, as something more than a flattened metric. They’re severing the tie that makes them human while grasping for it.
Evil isn’t always banal. Sometimes it dresses itself in Maison Schiaparelli.
There’s something familiar about this strategy. The Church, for example, has long known that to associate with beauty — to vault grand ceilings, to filter morning light through jewel-toned stained glass — is to seem to associate with what is highest, even when doing evil. Italy’s wealthiest Renaissance family, the Medici, were bankers and art lovers. They carried the moral stink of usury — the primitive cousin of the surveillance rent and content platform. With their money, the Medici funded the Italian Renaissance, buying their way into the appearance of humanity, cultured and legitimate before a city that knew exactly where their dirty wealth had come from.
The Medici were patrons of the artist Benozzo Gozzoli, and in his masterwork, The Procession of the Magi, he depicts the Medici family worshipful, painting them as cleaving unto a Christ before them. The Medici faced the prospect that they would burn in a fiery hell for the cruelty they inflicted in this lifetime upon their fellow man, even their lowly subjects. God was a roof.
For the tech accelerationists currently careening toward an AGI future, there’s no such limitation. Innate human worth under a divine steward is a fiction. All that is material is flattened into zeroes and ones, only existing as an extension of their own egos, unable to be touched as it really is. They seek to produce a deity in their image (if they can control it) — and what is more dangerous than a god who makes his own rules and knows nothing of mercy? In a now-famous interview with the New York Times, the Palantir founder and billionaire Peter Thiel was asked if humanity should survive. Thiel paused for an inordinate period of time, staring solemnly off into the distance. When he finally answered, he told the interviewer, Ross Douthat, that there are “so many questions implicit in this. . . .” The answer to one question is clear: there is no Magi proceeding ahead of him. There is no Christ above Peter Thiel.
If denizens of the tech billionaire class, Thiel included, are so eager to turn human beings into mere metrics to be discarded, so committed to attaining the status of immortal gods frozen in cryogenic chambers — or, terrified of the sensuousness of their own living bodies, uploaded into a “cloud” — then why attempt to engage with humanist philosophers (Thiel was raised Evangelical and admires René Girard), with great literature (Thiel also loves Shakespeare), with fine craftsmanship and high culture? If humans are, in Sam Altman’s words, merely the “biological bootloader[s] for digital intelligence,” an evolutionary stepping stone with no intrinsic spiritual worth, then why not drop the act? After all, they’ve already shown their hands. Yet despite his professed philosophy, Sam Altman also blogs about the world’s want for art, extols the virtues of human creativity, and got married to his long-term boyfriend in a beautiful Hawaiian ceremony complete with symbolic orchid boutonnières and the breaking of the glass. Are their children mere bootloaders, too?
The darkest irony, and the potential answer to this paradox, is not merely sentimental. It’s stranger than that. The impulse for beauty and forgiveness existed in the man who killed himself in an Amazon warehouse and in the Kenyan laborer earning less than $2 an hour to help train OpenAI’s LLMs. It exists in each of us. And it exists in the people who have built the machinery to dehumanize us — so much so that they ask that we recognize the sacred in them. Even when they have no need of “taste-washing” and no order of Christ, they still seek their own souls, desperately banging at the door of the high humanist tradition, shut out too long in the bitter cold of their own creation.
This universal desire can’t seem to be programmed out, even as the vanguard salt the soil necessary to give them the fruit they seek. It’s as if they can’t stand to bear the very future they’re building. All the more frustrating for them, then, that for all that capital, they find the thing they’re trying to buy cannot really be purchased, because it’s not a commodity. It’s a mode of being.
Upon occupying the better part of Venice to host their wedding, the Bezoses paid penance by asking guests to forgo gifts in favor of charitable donations to local Venetian institutions, as if to say, Pardon the intrusion, but you see, we are the sort of people who read the great canon, appreciate the Old Masters, and get married before our loved ones at an enduring anchorage for the classical arts. Please recognize us as such, and don’t mind those plastic bottles of piss. There is a person, they insist, underneath the machine. But, they say, such may not be the case for the rest of you, you superfluous biomass, growing your crops where our data centers should whir.
For all their attempts to transcend the reality they’ve built — to obscure it — the tragedy is that the vanguard might be left standing alone in the antihuman world of their own creation. They will still wish to reach out and touch beauty — the mastery of a medieval fresco, a classical sculpture carved into stone countless centuries ago, the joy of raising a child with the person one loves, a unifying ceremony of marital devotion in Italy. But they’ll find such divine, ineffable wonders have become impenetrable at their hands, even if they can buy Hawaii. They’ll own the world but be unable to enter it.
This is the perpetual inconvenience of being made of the same flesh as your laborer — you, too, seek transcendence.
And you, too, will one day die.
Savannah (“Sav”) Huitema is a New York City-based writer, attorney, and fashion model. She serves as Style Critic at The Metropolitan Review.