The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture (Tricia Romano)
Saying you miss the Village Voice is as nebulous a statement as saying you miss New York: Which one are you talking about, exactly? In a city that periodically collapses and continuously razes itself only to be reborn in numerous ways, both good and bad, never content to rest on its laurels, always on to the next thing, your favorite NYC is the one that replaced someone else’s favorite. New York got the publication its soul required in the Voice, which was birthed in 1955 for ten grand by three friends—psychologist Ed Fancher, veteran editor Dan Wolf, and that mixed blessing Norman Mailer—and has radically reinvented itself numerous times across seven decades, even if it’s generally thought of as a haven for advocacy reportage conducted by audacious muckrakers and drug takers too unruly for even Rupert Murdoch to tame during his seven-year ownership of the publication. “The Village Voice is an apocalyptic publication,” former staff writer Mark Jacobson tells Tricia Romano in The Freaks Came Out to Write, her flavorful 2024 oral history about the alt-weekly institution. “Every four or five years they have another apocalypse.”
The Voice was at first, during the post-war boom, a local paper of Greenwich Village and its beatnik, bohemian spirit, but it eventually became the edgy outfit that punched above its weight while covering Robert Moses, Andy Warhol, the Black Panthers, the Women’s Liberation Movement, Stonewall, the city’s 1975 financial collapse, Graffiti, CBGBs, Disco, Punk, Hip-Hop, Ed Koch, Donald Trump, HIV-AIDS, the Central Park Five case, the Tompkins Square riots, the crack epidemic, 9/11, and Donald Trump again, even worse this time, so much worse. The Voice was a major player with a micro-budget, and for a while, it was also a significant international publication, popular at overseas newsstands due to its scrappy, keen coverage of the Romanian Revolution, Tiananmen Square, Operation Desert Storm, and the AIDS crisis in Africa. The writers often risked their lives while working for substandard salaries, mostly because the Voice granted them the freedom to write about their passions in their own, yes, voice.
The publication had moments of great timing and audacious good luck, as when the New York newspaper strike of 1961-62 left a gaping hole in the metro-area media landscape that the pre-unionized Voice filled. Readership soared, and it became clear that the paper was to be a going concern for the long haul. It also suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, with most of the damage done by Craig Newmark and his Craigslist, and New Times Media and its batshit. Before the wheels came off, Jules Feiffer, Fred McDarrah, Greg Tate, J. Hoberman, Susan Brownmiller, Jack Newfield, Richard Goldstein, C. Carr, Jill Johnston, Wayne Robbins, James Wolcott, Michael Musto, and so many others fought the good fight—and fought each other—until the Internet subsumed the culture and newsstands vanished, the worst outcomes realized. The Voice was finally laid low, almost definitely permanently, existing today in a zombie state, more dead than alive.
“People like Mailer and Hentoff, they were just ordinary, old-school, male fuckheads.”
Trying to summon all these imps and ghosts from a bygone era is a massive task. Romano, a former Voice nightlife reporter during the paper’s post-peak era, attempts to wrangle the ungovernable, usually keeping the story moving briskly in her nearly 600-page tome. As in any oral history about a raffish subculture, especially one that allowed—even encouraged—intramural combat in its pages, you get regular servings of gossip and the settling of old scores. We learn of the bathroom habits of the talented-though-terrible Nat Hentoff, who “urinated with his hands on his hips, in a Superman- or Wonder Woman-style pose.” Somehow not surprising. Film critic David Edelstein, continually plagued by writer’s block, often brought an emotional support rabbit to work. In the score-settling department, the wonderfully brazen former staff writer Laurie Stone, who spent a quarter-century writing for the Voice, now gleefully dances on the graves of the toxic men who stood in the way of progress. “People like Mailer and Hentoff, they were just ordinary, old-school, male fuckheads,” she explains, “the kind of people who should never have existed, but since they have existed, we can only celebrate their disappearance.” When prompted by a mention of Jack Newfield, whom she’s happily not thought of in years, Stone responds, “Is Jack dead? Good.” Her disses are colorful but also explain the frustrations of working for a paper that was boldly progressive in its pages (usually, though not always) while the office itself was a snake pit of sexism, racism, and homophobia (not always, though usually).
Romano explains how such a ragtag outfit did so much heavy lifting. The blueprint was drawn up, partly out of necessity, by Dan Wolf, the co-founder who served as the inaugural Editor-in-Chief and remained in that position for nearly two decades. Wolf was allergic to J-School grads and had little money to offer, so he collected passionate amateurs he could hone into journalists. He made it his assignment to birth talent rather than poach it. “He hired people who cared about stuff,” is how Eliza Nichols simply states it, explaining how her mother, Mary Nichols, despite not being a writer, used Voice column space to help defeat the almighty Robert Moses when he wanted to tear up Lower Manhattan to accommodate crosstown traffic. Barbara Long was a Linotype shop worker hired to be a boxing reporter. Don McNeill, homeless and a hippie, wrote about homelessness and hippies. It wasn’t exactly what the New York Times was doing.
Newfield had some professional writing experience before his employment at the Voice, but it largely consisted of getting fired from higher-profile publications. He describes himself as a “loser and a misfit.” (Newfield predeceased Romano’s research, and like others no longer alive to sit for an interview, his past on-the-record comments are integrated into the story to fill gaps.) Wolf deserves great credit for his vision, but as is the case with almost everyone in the book who held a leadership position at the paper, he was an anti-hero with some troubling flaws. Wolf’s credo of “amateurism rather than careerism” had a big downside, which was that he never viewed his employees as professionals and couldn’t understand why they expected to be paid and treated as if they were. He swore there’d never be a labor union at the Voice while he was in charge of the newsroom and fought ferociously to make sure his assertion proved true.
One of the most shameful episodes was in 1986 when a group of white, male reporters mutinied after Cynthia Carr wrote a story about the performance artist Karen Finley.
While Newfield, Wayne Barrett, and Tom Robbins aggressively scrutinized Gracie Mansion and other pockets of power, the back-of-the-book arts criticism also gave the Voice credibility. Robert Christgau, who is, by his own admission, really talented, assembled a Murderers’ Row of rock and hip hop writers during his 37 years as the don of music criticism. Greg Tate, Nelson George, Greil Marcus, and Gary Giddins are just a few of the writers who made up the deepest bench in the business. “The music section was suddenly flowering, and people were flocking to it,” Christgau rightly recalls. Off-Broadway theater was just a blip, and not one on the New York Times’ screen, when the Voice began covering it in earnest, even establishing the Obie Awards to celebrate the emerging lights of the scene: Edward Albee, Sam Shepherd, Maria Irene Fornés, etc. When the Voice did the job so well and brought the movement above ground, other publications had to follow suit. That’s a leitmotif in the book, the Voice serving as a pathfinder, leading others into new horizons.
Several conflicts among staffers play like set pieces that are positively operatic—I mean, you actually could compose an opera based on the melodrama. Longtime writer Richard Goldstein explains that “doing battle with your colleagues was part of the paper.” One of the most shameful episodes was in 1986 when a group of white, male reporters mutinied after Cynthia Carr wrote a story about the performance artist Karen Finley, who combined scatological spoken word and overtly graphic physicality that addressed sexuality in one unabashed way or another, often making commentary on sexual abuse or some other disquieting aspect of sex. She covered her naked body in chocolate or lodged yams in orifices. It was a feminist holler, unafraid of how it appeared to men. As Goldstein tells Romano: “It revealed the basis of the most primal fears men have about women.”
Editor-in-Chief Robert I. Friedman, who’d had the gig for under a year, placed the Finley story on the cover and immediately faced a raging rebellion from many of the white men who wrote hard news, believing their work was being undermined by a supposedly disgusting woman pretending to be an artist. It was particularly egregious since the Voice made lots of its money from the ads selling sex work, many so racy that they were entertainments in and of themselves. Worst of all was frequent contributor Pete Hamill, whose buttons were pushed by a woman who didn’t care about being appealing to him or anyone else. He wrote a condescending, demeaning riposte published in the Voice—“I thought the adorable Karen Finley must use very small yams in her performance or have a very large anus”—and played a central role behind the scenes, along with Newfield and Barrett, in pushing Friedman from his post. It was the belittlement of one of the publication’s excellent female journalists and a nadir for the so-called “paper of record for the women’s movement.”
The Voice has soldiered on in various incarnations to this day, but it was all but over by the end of the aughts.
There were innumerable other comedies and tragedies. Crotchety, coked-up jazz critic Stanley Crouch, the self-described “greatest pimp since Duke Ellington,” who hated hip-hop and always seemed to have an issue with younger, talented Black men, punched “media assassin” Harry Allen, then apologized and wept before he was fired, which just led to higher-profile success at other publications. Rudy Langlais, the pub’s first Black editor, was one of many staffers incensed by a Feiffer cartoon that used the N-word, a reaction met by a backlash from Hentoff and Newfield, who accused them of inhibiting free speech. Barrett realized early on that the corrupt Donald Trump had Presidential aspirations that should be taken literally as well as seriously, publishing a book in 1992 about the hideous hotelier, playing the role of a Cassandra to all of those who laughed at the threat. In a hard-to-believe final act, Barrett, a non-smoker, died from lung cancer on the eve of Trump’s 2017 inauguration.
The Village Voice, as we knew it, ended with a series of bangs and whimpers. In 1995, Craig Newmark modestly pressed send on an email distribution list of cool events in the Bay Area, a humble beginning to what would eventually become an industry-killing namesake collection of city-specific classified ads sites. When Craigslist New York went live in 2000, it was instantly a sea change for local publications that relied on classifieds. “Like overnight, a switch flipped,” Judy Miszner, the paper’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing, remembers. There were two more storms incoming that decade: the purchase of the paper by the clueless vulgarians at New Times Media, and the nation’s disastrous 2008 financial meltdown. The Voice has soldiered on in various incarnations to this day, but it was all but over by the end of the aughts.
“It could have gone on forever if it weren’t for the Internet,” Mark Jacobson tells Romano of America's most important alt-weekly. There’s some debate in the book, however, as to whether the Village Voice is even necessary in 2024. New York City is never boring, but it’s too expensive for underground movements to develop, and much of the type of taboo material that was the paper’s bailiwick has been swallowed by the culture. “What’s transgressive about drag now?” Michael Musto wonders, acknowledging that RuPaul had long ago graduated from the pages of the Voice to wide fame. “What was the Voice alternative to at that point? There [are] drag queen TV shows. The mainstream [has] subsumed the underground.”
“We’re in some fucking crazy repeat Gilded Age.”
To an extent, sure. But for as much as drag queens slay on basic cable, they’re still under attack in this MAGA moment by right-wing pundits and politicians all across the nation, as are librarians, doctors, and schoolteachers. Enlightenment has a target on it almost everywhere. NYC is gentrified beyond belief—how could a staff of working-class reporters even live there now?—but it simultaneously has a large-scale homelessness problem. Trump’s trail from tony addresses in Manhattan to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is littered with criminal acts, a trail of deceit that requires constant attention, especially since he’s now angling for a second term in the White House. The city would benefit from a closer perusal of the mayoralty of Eric Adams, whose fundraising practices look crooked as hell. All these and many more topics beg for the type of gonzo reporting the Voice provided. Former Senior Editor Joe Levy is incensed toward the end of the book when asked if the Voice of its heyday could still be useful now. “We’re in some fucking crazy repeat Gilded Age,” he says. “What could the Voice do? Bring bear to history. There’s very little doubt in my mind that the Village Voice could do good and important work on a local level.”
Beyond the local level, it would be great if there was an outfit like the Voice to dissect the machinations of Silicon Valley. From neighborhood news to basic truth, technologists have devised ways to undermine what was not that long ago society’s connective tissue. But social media has concocted means to demonetize lots of writing and art, to make these endeavors seem to have little value. Anyone can do it and barely get paid for it. The worship of over-hyped Artificial Intelligence promises to only make things worse. The Washington Post, a venerable news company owned by the tech titan Jeff Bezos, one of the most obscenely wealthy people to ever walk the earth, just announced a “pivot to AI,” which is the new “pivot to video,” the kind of thing highly paid media execs sell the boss when they lack actual answers for erasing red ink. The idea is that something like ChatGPT, an incredibly overrated AI that instantaneously spits out bland copy rife with errors, is just as good as a bunch of journalists, which shows how low in esteem reporters are now held. Why waste money on these humans? Just let the machines do it. The book’s most scathing figure, Laurie Stone, offers the final word on this new arrangement: “You don’t pay writers now because the culture has determined that intellectual contributions, aesthetic contributions, are something that someone can do on the side, like a hobby. And see what happens to a culture that treats its artists and its intellectuals that way? Not good.”•
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Salman Rushdie)
Hunter S. Thompson referred to Jimmy Carter as one of the three meanest people he ever met—Muhammad Ali and Hells Angels capo Sonny Barger being the others—which runs counter to the lasting image of the 39th President as a helpful and modest man, a peanut farmer from Plains, a carpenter like Jesus’s father, an agent of peace, and the man who, yes, lusted in his heart, but remained married partners and best friends with his wife, Rosalynn, for 77 years. Despite being a one-term occupant of the White House, his Administration not studded with accomplishments, Carter has continued in his post-political life to grow his profile to the point of near-sainthood. Sure, Thompson famously made points through hyperbole, but he was correct to view Carter as a more morally complex figure than his hagiographers would have us believe. The former President, for instance, certainly has an ego.
On Valentine’s Day in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, just three months before his death, declared a fatwa on Salman Rushdie, then 41, after the publication of The Satanic Verses, a novel that mixes Muhammad and magical realism—a literary device perfectly suited to belief systems accepting of miracles. The proclamation instantaneously and drastically altered the course of the Indian-Muslim writer’s life and also led to deaths and diplomatic disasters. Less than a month after the decree, Carter wrote a New York Times op-ed in which he gave aid and comfort to…Khomeini, the same theocrat who haunted the final year of his Presidency a decade earlier by taking 66 hostages from the American embassy, a daily humiliation that was one of the deciding factors in his loss in the 1980 election. While the former President acknowledged the fatwa as “abhorrent,” his piece, entitled “Rushdie’s Book Is an Insult,” primarily worried that Western nations had “become almost exclusively preoccupied with the author's rights,” that not enough attention was being paid to those “whose sacred beliefs [had] been violated” by Rushdie’s profane writings. He even relitigated the previous year’s Last Temptation of Christ cause célèbre in the bargain, asserting that Martin Scorsese “anticipated adverse public reactions and capitalized on them.”
Beyond being just wrong, the opinion piece was profoundly self-seeking. The former President was, eleven years later, still smarting from not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 alongside Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat for his pivotal role in brokering the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement. In all fairness, Carter did deserve the award and was later given a consolation Nobel in 2000, but the oversight animated his puzzling response to the fatwa. He made the situation in part about him and his sense of nobility, while Rushdie was in hiding, hoping not to be murdered for the “crime” of writing a piece of fiction. Carter begins his piece like this: “In preparation for the Middle East negotiations that led up to Camp David and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, I tried to learn as much as possible about the Moslem faith.” It’s all about his virtuousness, the pronoun “I” appearing in each of the first three paragraphs. Carter was so heavily invested in promoting himself that he did something horrible. The impetus for his actions may have been more self-centered than mean, but it was still a huge failing.
Rushdie writes two brief, terrifying sentences pregnant with existential horror, the sort of words whispered in the dark by Kafka, Camus or Robbe-Grillet, which entered his mind as the 73-year-old author realized the sick prayers against him were about to be answered:
“So it’s you. Here you are.”
Carter wasn’t the only one, of course. Cat Stevens explicitly endorsed the fatwa, while others who should have known better, including John le Carré, Roald Dahl, and Pope John Paul, gave some degree of support to its architects. It was like some of Rushdie’s “allies” agreed with Galileo that heliocentrism is true and all but were very concerned about the feelings of the Inquisitors. There was blood enough for many hands on August 22, 2022, in Chautauqua, New York, when the septuagenarian Rushdie, on stage in an amphitheater just before midnight to be interviewed, in the cruelest of ironies, about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, was rushed by a black-clad, would-be assassin who emerged from the audience with a knife, stabbing him 15 times in 27 seconds, the blade entering the author’s face, neck, limbs, liver, abdomen and thigh, leaving his right eye and left hand particularly damaged.
In Knife, his spellbinding 2024 memoir about the terror attack and its excruciating aftermath, Rushdie writes two brief, terrifying sentences pregnant with existential horror, the sort of words whispered in the dark by Kafka, Camus, or Robbe-Grillet, which entered his mind as the 73-year-old author realized the sick prayers against him were about to be answered: “So it’s you. Here you are.” Some part of Rushdie had continued to anticipate that horrible day, to realize that a chilling callback was possible, even though he chose more than a quarter century earlier to boldly live his life in public despite the dangers, shedding his government-supplied security detail in England and relocating to NYC—a “Western rewrite of Bombay” is how he refers to his beloved adopted home—making himself ubiquitous to try to impose normalcy on the aberrant reality.
The calculated risk worked wonderfully for a long time. In America, he became another celebrity, one more blind item, a man familiar with high-profile romances, one often rumored to be a dissolute playboy, even if he was curiously prolific for someone so devoted to partying. Perhaps all the suspect press unintentionally helped, making him seem all too human, even harmless. And maybe the cloud lifted a little further when England leaned heavily on the Iranian government, coercing it to declare the state itself would not try to execute the fatwa. But the threat never fully dissipated, even as Rushdie defiantly lived in public. In 2012, a government-sponsored organization in Iran announced it was working on a video game, “The Stressful Life of Salman Rushdie and Implementation of His Verdict.” A decade later, it was nearly “game over” for Rushdie as the age of decentralized media helped accomplish what mullahs alone had not been able to do, creating an ideal environment for stochastic terrorism, which found its agent when a stupid young man from New Jersey became radicalized by anti-Rushdie YouTube videos.
He writes of the horrific damage to his body, his left eye hanging down “like a large soft-boiled egg,” and the presence of a “long horizontal gash along the neck.”
Rushdie details the daunting aftermath of the attack, recalling some elements and piecing together what he forgot through conversations with his loved ones, friends, and the medical personnel who worked frantically to save his life. “The A.” or “A.”—as he calls his attempted murderer, short for “The Assassin” but also “The Ass”—was somehow neutralized by his host, Henry Reese, a man in his seventies, since there was shockingly nothing in the way of security at the event. It’s insane, of course, but how not to be lulled a little after 33 years? The writer’s blood-soaked Ralph Lauren suit was cut from his body by medics before they airlifted him to the nearest trauma center, the prognosis grim. One of his surgeons later shared with him that they believed he was beyond saving.
The news spread and Rushdie's distraught wife, the writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths, took panicked phone calls from her husband’s adult children who live in Europe, as she desperately tried to arrange quick transportation to Upstate New York. Rushdie writes of the horrific damage to his body, his left eye hanging down “like a large soft-boiled egg,” and the presence of a “long horizontal gash along the neck.” He went in and out of consciousness, believing he would die. The writer asserts that there was no trip toward a light, no floating to the ceiling. It was a very physical sensation. “There was nothing supernatural about it,” Rushdie writes of the matter-of-fact experience of having someone try to stab the life from his body.
Knife is similarly matter-of-fact, a personal work rather than a poetic one. Apart from some gallows humor, the memoir is about the arduous business of surviving a catastrophe, an enterprise attended by numerous hidden fees. Rushdie and Griffiths, who lived in a string of well-appointed safe houses during the next couple of years, faced a succession of unpleasant cliffhangers. Would he regain the use of his right hand? Would surgeons need to remove his now-useless left eye? Would macular degeneration in his right eye leave him fully blind? Were the side effects from his many medications causing mysterious symptoms? Was that goddamned catheter necessary? During his long recovery, Rushdie’s friend Martin Amis died from esophageal cancer, and other dear friends, Hanif Kureishi, Paul Auster, and Bill Buford became seriously ill. (Auster died after the book’s publication.) Death and sickness surrounded him.
“This, now, is the ugly dailyness of the world,” he writes at one point. “How should we respond?”
The writer's life was saved by the amazing medical team that somehow kept him breathing, and Eliza, his fifth wife, a private person who was suddenly forced, after the assassination attempt, to duck paparazzi and be trailed by security. “There is a kind of deep happiness that prefers privacy,” Rushdie writes of the beginnings of their relationship, a calculus erased from the board by that horrible night in Chautauqua. Attempting to similarly expunge his attacker, the novelist decides not to seek a jailhouse interview with “The A.” but instead concocts an extended, strange interlude, a fictional Q&A in which he interrogates him. The discussion is not the rout you might expect considering the fury Rushdie still feels for his pathetic assailant, not a hanging in effigy, but the “dialogue” is a necessary step in his journey to bury the ghastly episode. And the painful episode is still not over. The trial was delayed in January so that the defense team could study Knife, hoping to use the memoir to weaken the prosecution’s case.
Rushdie's tone is, overall, triumphal, though not in a full-throated way, not surprising considering his great, unnecessary loss. The sweetness of life is still palpable, but the cost has been so high. “This, now, is the ugly dailyness of the world,” he writes at one point. “How should we respond?” Not the way many responded in 1989 when the fatwa was initially declared. Not the way we do 25 years later with many on social media trying to activate menaces of all kinds. His eye ruined, his body permanently scarred, Rushdie returned to Chautauqua, this time with his wife, to revisit the place where his life nearly ended. Rushdie stands on the stage with Eliza, having returned in one piece, more or less, to the scene of the crime, though there never was just one scene. The violence happened not only in Chautauqua, not only in Iran, but in the Vatican, in the words of a former President, in the print space of major newspapers, and on the websites of powerful technology companies. The crime scene was everywhere.•
12 Bytes (Jeanette Winterson)
“When AI starts to think for itself, will it think like a Buddhist?” This question is just one of the perplexing examples of magical thinking unloosed in this 2023 book of essays by the wildly inventive English novelist Jeanette Winterson who’s been on an Artificial Intelligence bender for years, having bought into some of the more outré ideas about the near-future landscape and fallen under the influence of some of the sector’s more dubious male techno-optimists. Hers is a puzzling stance because she’s a brilliant autodidact on the subject of tech with a thorough knowledge of the history of machines, one who's particularly aware that women, foundational contributors to ENIAC and the Apollo space program, have been socially engineered out of STEM professions.
What’s driven Winterson to stop worrying and learn to love AI is a loss of hope in her fellow Homo sapiens. “Being this smartest ape hasn’t saved us,” she writes, citing a desperate need to hand the steering wheel over to intelligent machines, to let the cars drive us, if we’re to avoid the worst of climate change and numerous other species-threatening crises. “This is a springboard moment in human history,” she informs us, commenting on what sounds like a new religion of sorts, something not lost on the author who grew up in a Pentecostal community and has eagerly joined a secular choir. Much of her hope for the near-term emergence of an Artificial General Intelligence (when machines handily outdo humans cognitively), a radically expanded lifespan, and driverless vehicles, among other miracles and wonders, are premised on the predictions of some of the tech sector’s most celebrated figures, ones who have the propensity to aggressively exaggerate timelines.
The first of the thinkers she cites is Ray Kurzweil, a clever inventor who grew dissatisfied with mere tinkering. He wanted to own more than just his patents—he wanted to own the future. It might be unfair to focus on the times that Kurzweil’s predictions have proven risible if he wasn’t so frequently billed as a nonpareil oracle with stunningly accurate knowledge of what’s next. Remember when computers disappeared in 2009 because information was written directly onto our retinae by eyeglasses and contact lenses, as he promised? Neither do I. He’s yet to be proven wrong on his most famous prognostication, that humans who live until 2030 have a good chance at being immortal, but give it time. Winterson also references the bleeding-edge gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, whose desperate quest for immortality sometimes provokes him to make ridiculous proclamations. In 2004, de Grey said that “the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.” Yeah, and 20 years later, actuarial tables make it likely that they are now absent a mortal coil. Elon Musk, an anti-Semitic sperm donor, is another of the technologists referenced. It was in 2015 that he first said that Teslas would be driverless within two years. Still waiting.
Winterson herself caught the bug, promising miracles just around the corner.
Even worse, these are all people either supported by the worst of Silicon Valley or are the worst of the industry themselves. Kurzweil is a longtime employee at Google, an international tax cheat that discarded its “Don’t Be Evil” mantra when even company execs couldn't utter the slogan any longer with a straight face. De Grey has received millions in investments from Peter Thiel, who believes in defeating death but not in supporting democracy, and even more money from any number of cryptocurrency confidence men. Musk was widely celebrated for reviving the electric car business before it became apparent that he was also a druggie edgelord with appalling ethics.
Winterson herself caught the bug, promising miracles just around the corner. “Heart transplants using human hearts may be a thing of the past within a decade,” she forecasts in these pages, though the word “may” is doing a lot of work. It will likely happen eventually, especially with the emergence of CRISPR, but why over-sell it when there are sick patients out there waiting for organs? More than just being excessively hopeful about time frames for bionic limbs and uploading consciousness, though, what’s most questionable is the author’s faith that Artificial Intelligence will be magnanimous. She rejects the doom and gloom currently surrounding AI, thinking it wrong to believe it inevitable that silicon will crush carbon, and that machine intelligence will act as Leopold II rather than the Buddha. Since continued development and implementation of AI is inevitable, being constructive is appropriate, but Winterson’s reasons for remaining positive aren’t convincing.
The world’s most powerful tech companies are American, and we know from internal documents that, like cigarette manufacturers, they put profits before consumer safety. Even worse than their Big Tobacco counterparts, most don’t seem to care about preserving democracy if it affects their bottom line. And it’s far less likely Silicon Valley overlords will be brought to heel by Congress as were Phillip Morris and R.J. Reynolds. The citizens have changed and so has their representation; it’s a decentralized society with an infinite number of microphones, everyone speaking over each other. If China were to surpass the U.S. in A.I. progress, there’s no reason to think its authoritarian government would be a humane and responsible custodian of such powerful tools. Winterson has an answer for this challenge, but not a good one: “What we really need, before the Metaverse rolls out, is a global governance body, with legal weight.” While world organizations are a favorite trope of sci-fi enthusiasts, achieving consensus at that scale isn’t realistic, nor is that how technology operates, especially as the tools become cheaper, faster, and more out of control. It’s a competition among individuals, corporations, and states. It’s a skirmish.
“We are self-obsessed with being human. That is both recent—and wrong.”
As the book progresses, Winterson reveals her initially stated reason for embracing AI, to safeguard human existence, isn’t a priority at all. “We are self-obsessed with being human,” she argues. “That is both recent—and wrong.” The author speaks of a none-too-distant past when most people were sure that spirits, angels, and deities dwelled among them, a time she believes to be a richer experience. The mask completely drops toward the end when she writes that “humans aren’t a common ancestor with what comes next.” She asserts that “that’s not a story I want to tell,” but, wow, she really seems to want to tell that story. The future, she believes, isn’t about saving us and the species that now populate the planet but about all of us being willing to be elbowed aside. Intelligence itself, not humanity, is Winterson's concern. She anticipates a time when computing power becomes the central intelligence on Earth and supplants us, or bioengineering allows us to take any shape, to become un-human. “What body would you like?” she asks, hopefully. “We may choose a body that can fly.”
Winterson unsurprisingly works in fun literary analysis when thinking about the future of transhumanism, cryogenics, sexbots, etc. In the chapter, “Coal-Fire Vampire,” she writes of those “keystone texts,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, bookend novels of the 19th century which commented on different spans of the Industrial Age. Frankenstein, obsessed with the potentially transformative powers of electricity, was written by candlelight. The titular scientist releases horror into the world because of curiosity, not malice. It’s a story of innocence. Dracula is a nobleman of a more modern moment, living in a world of trains, telegraphs, and indoor lighting. It’s a tale of experience. Wealthy and predatory, he seeks the blood of victims to remain immortal and steadfastly avoids the sun, which ages all of us and can kill him. He acts out of his obscene self-interest, not curiosity. It might be Winterson’s too polite, but she missed the obvious by not pointing out that Thiel, a disruptor and destroyer who craves immortality and thirsts for the blood of young people, is a perfect Dracula doppelganger. Like many technologists referenced in 12 Bytes, he deserves a stake, not the keys to the future.•