Cosmic horror, often belittled
Not a surprise, it is often referring to horror beyond human comprehension
Minor comment: I plan to continue writing weekly and on the same usual topics. However, whenever a month gets 5 entries, I will use one of them to explore other topics, which may become a new usual topic if there is interest in it. Today the topic is cosmic horror, but you will find that it is related to companies and working life purpose.
Most people get introduced to cosmic horror through the novels in the genre, often from the most influential author in it: H. P. Lovecraft. That is not my case, for me it was megacorporations and politics. Only in hindsight I noticed the paralelism with cosmic horror in fiction. As a consequence, my perspective on cosmic horror may be biased or nonstandard, which is why I want to share it.
Cosmic horror focuses on supernatural and extraterrestrial beings that are unknowable and incomprehensible, i.e. beyond the human mind. This on itself may be enough to cause horror1. In addition, they have negative consequences for people or all of life on Earth, like madness and an horrific death. To add to the horror, these beings have a completely different scale to humans in every dimension, including unknown dimensions. Consequently, humans, planets, or universes may be as present in their minds as the bacteria on the floor next to you were for you right before I mentioned them. Similarly, humans may suffer all kinds of agony from the actions of these beings with as much influence and understanding of it as the bacteria on the floor have when you choose to use one or another cleaning product.
In this sense, “Don’t look up” (warning: spoilers ahead) is close to cosmic horror because the comet destroys Earth “accidentally”, or with as much intent as a rock may do anything anyway. It is not cosmic horror in the sense that it is not as unknowable and incomprehensible as it could be2. For a more unknowable and incomprehensible horror story we may consider the gravitational singularity that produced the Big Bang, and how a second singularity could transform our universe and the laws of physics, rearranging not just all of matter and energy in the universe3, but also space-time, instantly. Similarly, if we assume that we live in a simulation, the hardware that runs that simulation could be destroyed at any instant, without any prior warning. Some people may think that those scenarios are unlikely, and maybe they are, but the truth is that we do not have the knowledge to make any kind of guess about their likelihood, much less an educated guess.
We are not aware of extraterrestrial deities capable of destroying everything we know and everything we do not know, as collateral damage of doing something entirely mundane for them, like breathing for us. This unawareness may be something to celebrate on itself. On the other hand, we are creating our own terrestrial entities capable of influencing a government and single-handedly wiping all of life in Earth, e.g. the role of OPEC and the oil lobby in climate change should not be downplayed. Perhaps we should worry about this creation of entities and concentration of power. Possibly we should do something about it. Probably there is very limited awareness of the problem, more so of possible solutions or actions.
In addition to lobbies, there is a handful of companies with employees in the 6 digits range, users in the 9 digits range, and budget in the 10 digits range. With their users as a lever, their budget and workforce is able to move the world, in principle in the direction of the most profit for their shareholders, not necessarily in a good direction for anyone else. Interestingly, the shareholders may be in the 8 digits range, e.g. through pension funds, with a negative “net benefit” all things considered. We can try to ask “why?” 5 times, but we get different answers depending on the person answering4, e.g.: (1) company behavior is orthogonal to goodness ∵ (2) company profit is the priority ∵ (3) shareholder profit is the priority ∵ (4) profit is measured, externalities are not ∵ (5) we are just apes awakening forces we cannot understand ∵ (6) ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
Megacorporations are small when compared with the largest country in the world in terms of population. Having only one party, elections are unnecessary, and control is significant, especially when a population of 1B+ people is used as leverage to gain control of other resources. But direct control is “nothing”5 compared to the what incentives can do, e.g. to relocate production.
Direct control can still be broken by small groups, if it is contrary to incentives. Kings are powerful, but they are still humans after all. However, when incentives create a multipolar trap, we are back to gods territory: Moloch. Multipolar traps are a race to the bottom and are not the result of concentration of power, but in fact the result of lack of regulation, which should set the bottom within the law as far as possible from the real bottom out of the law6. However, regulation brings us back to square zero.
The problem that we see in previous examples is that accountability is either concentrated in psychopaths, or diluted until it is ineffective against the forces of moral hazards. In the end incentives rule, and they are often shortsightedly pursued. If that is so, nobody is truly in charge. Which finally leads us to the other god: Chaos. When incentives are designed, the design follows other incentives that are not designed. There is no regression to infinite, just a few steps take us back to chaos. Companies do not have any incentive for harmful externalities, it is only random collateral damage potentially without any awareness, only by pursuing their incentives. In “Don’t look up” the comet is not the real problem, the chaos7 that impedes effective action against it is the true problem. We may think that “it cannot be that bad”, and in retrospective there were some survivors for every disaster in history so far, but that is not guaranteed to continue.
Cross-posted from the Sigmoid newsletter
