Bums:

Hickman:

"Just as our towns get gentrified, our country homogenized, and our culture turned into one gigantic blaring, blinking, flashing, globalized techno-culture — we find that even our bums have gotten gentrified, standardized, and busted down into bureaucratized form. Or, where they cannot be induced to play by the myriad rules of the welfare office, we find they lately drift to the extremest margins of psychosis, addiction, and madness of the worst variety."

"Or — there is another type, far less often seen in public; often unidentifiable even in public for the fact that they’ve blended in completely. These ‘bums’ dress like normal working people and behave like them too; except where working people work, these others seem to subsist on various social welfare programs as a matter of profession. They are tragic in another kind of way as compared to their strung-out cousins in the wide world of bum-hood — for most often, these layabouts vegetate in their public housing apartments, endlessly scrolling through social media or playing on their Xboxes and iPhones. No longer tinkerers and mumblers; far from the old wisecrackers and town tipplers — they die not the bodily death of overdose but the psychic death imparted on them by a suite of pacifying government programs and digital technologies."

"These two burgeoning archetypes of people who evade all manner of participation in the wide world of work now compose the supermajority of America’s ‘bums’. They are either mired in the lifestyle of the dope-fiend and the psychotic — or they are withdrawn into a digitized, bureauractized world of professional poverty. Gone are the genteel old characters; they’ve fled from our towns like the hermit thrush. They’ve disappeared from the country just the minute that the country seems to have lost not only its characters but its character, too. And I rather wonder if we’re in the grim situation we’re in these days in part because they’re gone — for those old drunks and fools and bums occupied a niche in the collective soul that we didn’t know we needed filled."

"Where once a fellow who didn’t want to work naturally gravitated toward the practices of both survival and its incumbent activities, and towards character, or some sort of social role as a kind of public jester, clown, prophet, or good-time fella — now, our ‘men of lumpen leisure’ seem to be sorted either into addiction and mental illness, or into welfare bureaucracy. There is no longer much of any in-between."

"Yet the few who are still living in this manner are now old. They appear not to have passed the mantle on to subsequent generations of layabouts and terminally unemployed gentlemen. Or — the young fellas just never picked up the mantle to begin with. Perhaps a life of Vicodin, ‘ObamaPhones’, and EBT cards was even easier than the life of a respectable bum. The unholy trinity of the smartphone’s brightly-lit infinite scroll, the soma-like buzz of opioid pills or fentanyl, and the caloric sufficiency of welfare hit all the notes with mechanical precision that cannot be rivaled by the self-starting ne’er-do-well. No amount of regular, natural, organic human effort can produce what they together offer — for while bums of former eras indeed escaped work, they were nevertheless unable to escape reality."

"For many have rightly said that the man who won’t work usually winds up “working more at not working” than a man who accepts regular employment labors. This has always been true — until now. Now, the New World Order has come for this country’s bums; they no longer work at not working — they have escaped every measure of effort, and therefore are not edified by the labors of men who have ever toiled toward the avoidance of labor.

In their supreme idleness (which is really an unprecedented idleness the likes of which men through all of history until now have never known), the glimmering smartphone or video game console captures their gaze; and experiments with “better living through chemistry” seem to divert them further, until years pass during which our society’s bums have not interfaced with anything like reality at all."

"Those who’ve been paying attention, of course, might’ve seen all of this coming. I think of Yuval Noah Harari who, in 2017, wrote a haunting essay entitled The Rise of the Useless Class for the TED Talk online news outlet. In the piece, he said this:

“The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support people even without any effort from their side. But what will keep them occupied and content? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences?” 

...the operative phrase in Harari’s question here is “devouring artificial experiences.” Indeed — the one who “devours” and does not produce something meaningful really is worthless in at least some dimension; and his worthlessness is not only external in nature, but personal to his own sense of self-worth. To be a ‘devourer’ alone is to arc toward nihilism and ultimately — towards death."

"Yet amongst those who, like Harari, make it their ambition to morally tinker with the value of human life after AI — virtually none of them have any personal experience with extreme idleness, chronic indefinite unemployment, homelessness, or addiction. They have not surveyed the landscape of the “useless bum” in any but the most cursory and removed sort of way ..."

"That is to say — they become characters. This term is almost an honorific when applied to any vagrant, dropout, or bum; it is an aspirational title, and it is because the role of the “character” is genuinely literary. I say this without a hint of irony, I am completely serious: the more “useless” one is in terms of real physical labor or productive capacity, the more crucial it becomes that a fellow figures out how to alchemize his uselessness into something of durable literary value."

"For, in the starkest and most dismal economic terms, literature is actually a useless thing. There is no great need for it to exist, at least insofar as caloric needs, GDP, and human reproduction are concerned. Mythopoeic aura, great tales and stories, and the thoughtful (and delightful) refraction of human experience through the lens of a unique perspective are literally worthless things in purely theoretical material and economic terms — and yet they are indeed the thing that is, to the thinking man, of the very greatest value of them all. A proper reader, an art appreciator, one who feels and dreams and could rightfully be considered to be a complete human being knows for a fact that there are circumstances in which the value of a good story exceeds the value of the material trappings of life."

"Were it not for high-tech agricultural machinery and production methods that have granted humanity caloric post-scarcity, these people would have no choice but to engage in useful human labor, likely as farmworkers! But because of the Green Revolution, John Deere, and the US Department of Agriculture’s (frequently bizarre and distressing) advances — they are now redundant in the supply chain, and are consequently on the cutting edge of “human uselessness.” "

"Unless I am gravely mistaken about the nature of these technologies, I have to point out that if one makes a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox, ad infinitum — which is, to my mind, essentially what LLM’s do — something will be lost if the fire that formed the first copy goes out. That fire is the human race — the collective and individual souls of the human species; real (though intangible) things at the center of all human action and artistic impulse. It is a thing that is the source of all that AI “creates.” "

"If you’re going to be “useless,” you had better be a character — there’s no question about it, and frankly, it’s a matter of life and death."