Greetings from Read Max HQ! In today’s newsletter, two items:

• First, a look at Guy Edward Bartkus, the 25-year-old who blew himself up at a Palm Springs fertility clinic, and the narrow tradition of radical message-board terrorism to which he seems to have belonged; and,

• second, a sort-of defense of Elon Musk and other tech oligarchs’ against-the-grain reading of his favorite sci-fi novels: Iain M. Banks’ Culture series.

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The age of radical utilitarianism

Last Thursday, a 25-year-old named Guy Edward Bartkus posted to a pro-suicide forum that he was going to poison himself in his car, “alongside some extra drama that I probably shouldn’t say.” A few days later, authorities say, he drove a 2010 Ford Fusion packed with explosives to a fertility clinic in Palm Springs and blew it up, injuring four people and killing himself.

According to the F.B.I., Bartkus was motivated by “nihilistic ideations” and the recent suicide of a friend. But based on the trails of posts and an apparent manifesto left online by Bartkus, those “nihilistic ideations” had taken a specific, if unorthodox, ideological shape: “Pro-mortalism” and “efilism,” two names used to describe a tangled network of message-board and YouTube-borne philosophies holding that we should strive to eliminate suffering, and that the simplest, most straightforward, and most rational means of eliminating suffering is for everyone to die.

How, precisely, to categorize violent attacks like this is an interesting question. In all likelihood Bartkus, with his F.B.I.-diagnosed “nihilistic ideation,” will be included in the new classification “Nihilistic Violent Extremists,” adopted by the F.B.I. as an umbrella category to include everything from school shooters to pedophile rings to the arson attack on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s mansion to people vandalizing Teslas.

But is “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” a coherent category? And is Bartkus properly a member? I am sympathetic to the feeling that there is a particular if diverse strain of Weird Online Violence that requires our attention, but I don’t exactly trust the F.B.I. to taxonomize that violence judiciously. And in any event, I’m not sure it’s fair to call Bartkus a “nihilist”: Perhaps he was, in effect, as Martin Amis has argued the 9/11 hijackers were, but he seems to have believed quite strongly in a code of values, and at least according to his own account was seeking something beyond his own immediate self-gratification or self-abnegation.

I wonder if it makes more sense to place Bartkus within a narrower lineage of violent action, into what you might call (until someone comes up with a better name) “radical utilitarians”--suffering people, steeped in heady online debate, whose commitment to a highly “rational,” first-principles utilitarianism backs them into seemingly arbitrary--but often quite elaborately philosophically justified--violence.

As Katherine Dee documents on her Substack, the intellectual genealogy of Bartkus’ “pro-mortalism” can be traced back to the South African philosopher David Benatar, whose idea of “anti-natalism”--the main idea of which is succinctly summarized in the title of his 2006 book Better to Have Never Been Born--piqued the interest of a series of internet cranks:

In 2006 the South African philosopher David Benatar published Better Never to Have Been, arguing that existence itself is harm, because, according to him, the absence of pain is always good while the absence of pleasure matters only to someone forced to miss it. His book supplied the term antinatalism56 and the asymmetrical equation that sustains it: any new birth inevitably adds suffering to the ledger.

Benatar’s argument drifted onto early YouTube—in a swamp of heterodox debating, particularly centered around New Atheism […] Gary Mosher, an irascible vlogger and erstwhile amateur physicist best known as Inmendham, ended up coining efilism—“life” spelled backwards—during this period to insist that every sentient organism is a factory for pain and ought to be snuffed out. […]

The slope steepened again with promortalism: if life is nothing but harm, why endure it? Bartkus claimed he was an efilist and promortalist. In his view, the Palm Springs blast was therefore not an outburst but, in the bomber’s arithmetic, it was another tally in a game of suffering avoided.

Benatar’s anti-natalism and its unwelcome offshoots are themselves species of what’s generally called “negative utilitarianism,” an idea that stands utilitarianism proper on its head: Rather than seeking to maximize happiness and pleasure (as is usually the imperative under utilitarian thought), we should seek to minimize pain and suffering. Readers of the Read Max blog will remember another recent prominent negative utilitarian: The Rationalist cult leader Ziz, whose militant commitment to veganism, rooted in an expansive negative utilitarianism, allegedly underwrote a half-dozen deaths across the country over the last five years.

Bartkus was not, as far as I can tell, a “Rationalist” in the same sense as Ziz--he had no presence on LessWrong, no interest in A.I. Safety or Effective Altruism, and evinced no commitment to the principles of online Rationalism. But the features of his intellectual journey are nonetheless familiar--a kind of endless march down a rabbit-hole of increasingly absurd but seemingly intellectually justifiable positions, argued strenuously and verbosely by shut-ins on blogs and message boards and YouTube videos. What Ziz and Bartkus really seem to have shared was less an ideology than a strong commitment to a rickety (if thoroughly imagined) first-principles utilitarianism, developed in heady debates online and taken to unimaginable extremes.

Depending on how exacting you want to be about your definitions of “utilitarianism” and “terrorism,” you could draw others into this loose network of philosophical terrorists: As Dee points out, Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza was an Inmendham fan who invented his own branch of efilism that he called “eulavism.” And, maybe more controversially given how little we really know about the case, alleged U.H.C. assassin Luigi Mangione’s online footprint is only a few degrees removed from the Rationalist world of Ziz.

It would be wrong, given how isolated each of our examples was, and dissimilar the ultimate forms of their utilitarianism were, to think of this as a “movement” or even as a “philosophy”--it seems to me more to be a kind of pattern of thought, cultivated, exacerbated, and calcified online. (And one that, maybe there’s no need to say, seems extremely attractive to otherwise psychologically distressed people.) One reason Mangione is a controversial inclusion is because his alleged assassination seems much more directly political than the indiscriminate (or self-interested) alleged killings perpetrated by Lanza, Bartkus, and Ziz and her followers. In general one thing that seems to mark this kind of message-board philosophy violence is that it’s only “political” in an extremely abstract way--concerned with effecting change at either extremely large or small scales, rather than seeking shifted balances of power or direct interventions.

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But in some ways this is probably what we should expect from acts of violence in the 21st century. The kinds of organized, militant, ideological groups that committed what might be called “terrorism” or “political violence” in the U.S. from the 1970s onwards have largely been dismantled or infiltrated by the security state. If you are participating in discussions of left-wing, right-wing, Islamist, or environmental violence online you are almost certainly doing so under the close watch (if not at the actual behest) of F.B.I. agents. But the same isn’t necessarily true of, say, LessWrong1. At least, until now.

In defense (?) of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk’s reading of the Culture

Over at Vox, Constance Grady has an interesting essay taking Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg to task for their apparent misreading of the Scottish sci-fi author Iain M. Banks. Banks’ ten-book series depicting “The Culture,” a decentralized anarchist post-scarcity society of “hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism” (as he put it in a 2014 interview), is among the definitive works of 1990s and 2000s science fiction. But the politics of the books--“generally socialist or communitarian,” according to Banks--would seem to stand in strange contrast to the hyper-capitalist (if not deeply reactionary) principles of their most prominent fans. Writes Grady:

Nearly every aspect of the Culture seems to be diametrically opposed to the worldview of the tech right.

Banks takes as his starting principle for the Culture the idea that a space-faring civilization will have to be socialist to be effective. In the hostile environment of the vacuum of space, he argues, you will need to be able to count on the collective. Banks further reasons that each spaceship or planet in the Culture will have to be reasonably self-sufficient to survive.

At the same time, the Culture is stringently non-hierarchical and non-individualistic. There is no money and no want; therefore, there can’t be any billionaires or any economic inequality. There are no laws and almost no crime. This is not a world in which supremely wealthy people who use their power to influence the social fabric make sense.

This argument about--or objection to--tech-billionaire Culture fandom has been ongoing for many years, since even before Musk was so explicit a reactionary. Back in 2018, when Musk declared himself a “utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks,” Stuart Kelly wondered in The Guardian “has Musk actually read any of Banks’s books?” and Cory Doctorow argued with Musk over whether Banks would have supported a Tesla union. More recently, Tobias Carroll pointed on LitHub last month that Musk’s transphobic obsessions stand in direct opposition to the explicitly genderfluid norms of the Culture. Carroll writes: “[I]f Musk’s long-term goal is something like the Culture, he’s made some odd choices as far as getting there is concerned.”

Carroll is absolutely correct that the Culture as it exists in Banks’ books is hard to square with the newfound social conservatism of tech’s leading lights, and I have no doubt that Banks the person would’ve found circa-2025 Musk absolutely odious.2 And yet, as much as I love the Culture novels, I wonder how much Musk--or Bezos, or Zuckerberg--really misunderstand them. In fact, if Musk’s long-term goal is something like the Culture, based on Banks’ own writing you could just as easily argue that he’s done more than anyone else.

Grady suggests that what attracts the “broligarchs” to the Culture is the tech, rather than the politics: The “lovingly describe[d] spaceships and AIs (and lots of spaceships that are also AIs), and artificial planets and gizmos and gadgets.” Musk and company, she writes, see the tech as providing the foundation for the Culture’s utopian “goodness,” when in fact the reverse is true: “They have the best technology because that shows that they are rational, that they value intelligence, that they are motivated to give their citizens the best possible quality of life.”

But I’m not sure the Muskian reading is quite so unfounded. As Banks himself writes in his account of how the Culture was formed (in “A Few Notes on the Culture”), the anarchic-liberal form of society taken by the Culture is the “arguably inevitable” byproduct of space travel, a technology from which the Culture’s utopia naturally and necessarily follows.

There is a quasi-Marxist, “materialist” way to read Banks’ insistence on the primacy of technology over politics, and he does hint at some kind of military engagement between a “hegemony” and a group of “rebellious ships or habitats”--who, notably, and no doubt suggestively to a certain kind of tech billionaire, seceded from “political power structures - principally those of mature nation-states and autonomous commercial concerns.” But he’s also very clear that the “socialism within, anarchy without” structure of the Culture is “independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.”

In other words, the Culture is a utopia brought about by technological development rather than political struggle. As a comparison, take the “ambiguous utopia” of Anarres in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Disposessed: Like the Culture, Anarres is a computer-coordinated, space-faring anarchist society. But unlike the Culture, the Anarresti political structure (or non-structure) wasn’t brought into existence by sci-fi technology, even if such technology does enable it. Instead, the prime mover of the Anarresti “utopia,” such as it is, is the (frequently evoked) violent struggle for freedom and political self-determination.

To big-brained guys like me, it’s easy to cherish (and, sometimes, object to!) both Anarres and the Culture, and both LeGuin and Banks. But you can understand why tech moguls might prefer the latter to the former: The Culture suggests that no billionaires need necessarily be harmed in the creation of a galaxy-spanning layabout casual-sex paradise--and, indeed, by investing billions in the development of space-travel technology, they may be its true heroes and harbingers. And in the end, doesn’t the post-scarcity world of the Culture, devoted to intellectual and philosophical pursuit and shipborne cuddle puddles, sound quite a lot like daily life for the 21st-century oligarchs?

This is, of course, a tendentious reading of Banks, and not necessarily one I’d wholeheartedly endorse. But it’s certainly available to any billionaires who’d like it. In any event my real feeling is that the tug of war over Which Exact Type of Utopian Iain Banks Was tends to miss that the Culture series is not as straightforwardly utopian as the argument often assumes. The best books of the series--which is to say the first five--intermittently reflect real ambivalence toward the Culture and its decadence, arrogance, and narcissism; seemingly underlying the project is an anxiety that the “hippy commie” techno-utopia toward which at least some the left are striving is ultimately torpid, self-indulgent, dead.

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Consider Phlebas, the first Culture book, is no one’s favorite--readers are often warned not to start with it because it’s too dry and ill-paced--but I think it’s a perfect introduction to the series because its main character, a mercenary for an alien race called the Iridians engaged in a galactic war against the Culture, despises the Culture--and the reader is led to agree:

“I don’t care how self-righteous the Culture feels, or how many people the Idirans kill. They’re on the side of life--boring, old-fashioned biological life; smelly, fallible, short-sighted, God knows, but real life. You’re ruled by your machines. You’re an evolutionary dead end.”

Read in 2025, Phlebas, published in 1987, feels less like a vision of the future than a dispatch from its own particular historical moment: On the cusp of the Soviet Union’s collapse and at the beginning of the unipolar, End-of-History interregnum. Indeed, the main concern of most of the Culture books is not the troubles or rewards of utopia, or history of that utopia’s creation, but the problems of military and political intervention into weaker, “backwards” civilizations by a technologically superior society. Given this I’m not sure I would claim it either for the Marxist left or for the tech billionaires--it seems much more a thoroughly, historically liberal project.